Sam Altman on hiring for slope, not y-intercept

July 31, 2025

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan asks Sam Altman about the hardest lessons he’s learned about hiring. Sam responds:

“Hiring really smart people who are driven, productive, and can work as part of the team gets you 90% of the way there. And the degree to which people focus on other things to hire for always surprises me.”

Sam generally looks for a strong record of accomplishment as evidence for those traits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of experience:

“Experience is valuable, and there are times when you really need that. But I haven’t had much success — and YC [startups] have not had much success — trying to hire a very senior administrator as the first hire in a startup. I would take the young, scrappy person who gets stuff done over the person with the extremely polished track record.”

When Sam reviewed YC applications, he never looked at prestigious resume items like working Google or attending an elite university:

“I never cared. I would always go right to: What’s the most impressive stuff you’ve done? And then sometimes I would not be convinced by that and go look at the resume, but that was always a backup for me.”

You want to look at what they’ve actually built or done. Sam recalls a quote from Paul Buchheit who said, “Hire for slope, not y-intercept.”

“I think that’s just unbelievably great advice,” Sam says.