David's Notes
David's Notes
Conversations With Tyler: Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent
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Conversations With Tyler: Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent

  • I have become so convinced that the only thing that my firm has to do is find the smartest, most talented people in the world, and make bets on them as people. We need to trust that they will figure out the right ideas and businesses. 

  • Our greatest differentiator is that we run YC in the way we tell our startups to run. Almost every VC gives advice they never follow themselves. They don’t build differentiated products. They are not network affected businesses. They don’t try to build a community.

  • You can always scale systems more than you think. But you can never predict where the choke points will be. 

  • I think the most important invention of the industrial revolution was the joint stock corporation. This allowed for large groups of people to coordinate towards a common goal. And aligned their incentives. 

  • I’ve met many people smarter than me, but only a small handful of people that are more curious than me. 

  • One of the most important traits in an entrepreneur is relentless resourcefulness. [Read Relentlessly Resourceful by Paul Graham]

  • Example of what relentless resourcefulness feels looks like: The thing you are working on is so important to you that you are going to figure out to get it done. Whatever it takes. Whatever you need to learn. Whoever you need to convince. It will get done.

  • It is important is to be internally driven. Compete with yourself. Don’t compete with other people. If you compete with other people you wind up in this mimetic trap. You play a tournament where if you win, you lose. If you compete to be the best possible person you can, there is no limit to how far that can drive you. 

  • I strongly believe that momentum [at all levels of organization: a person, a company, a city, a country] is so important. 

  • People are more convinced by imagery than facts. 

  • One thing that has gone badly wrong in the United States, is we have pursued a policy where housing is an investment, and not a consumption asset. This causes housing prices to grow faster than the rate of inflation. A few decades of this and you get the predictable disaster we are in now. You basically steal the future from young people.

  • If I could do one thing that would encourage economic opportunity, I would reduce the cost of housing near high quality jobs.

  • Why does weightlifting correlate with successful founders? It is a proxy for driven people. It is fun to have numbers that go up and to the right.

  • Internalize that most things in life are not as risky as they seem. Most things are two way doors. You can come back. People may call you an idiot. It doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. 

  • I would encourage people to avoid doing something that somebody else has done. Shoot for something that no one has done yet.

  • One problem with really smart people is they tend to be mimetic. They all have the same aspirations. They all want to work on the same problems. Find problems no one else is working on. 

  • Why startups are counterintuitive: All the best ideas, when I first heard them, sound bad. 

  • I taught a class at Stanford in 2014. It was called How To Start A Startup. Without Stanford’s permission I put the entire class online. I still get dozens of emails per week from people around the world who watched the videos and learned something new. This taught me that we need to put everything we know about startups out there. We try to open source everything we know. 

  • Full podcast here.