#100 - Sam Altman

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Sam Altman. Sam's the president of YC Group and co-chairman of OpenAI. You can find him on Twitter at Sam A.
So for episode 100, I wanted to try something new. Sam and I met up at OpenAI, and we ended up discussing themes across several of his essays.
We specifically covered choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose.
All right, here we go. All right, the return of Sam Altman. How's it going?

**Sam Altman** (0:32)
It's nice to be back, Craig.

**Craig Cannon** (0:34)
How are things?

**Sam Altman** (0:35)
Good, busy, good. You know, YC is gonna be a huge next batch.

**Craig Cannon** (0:38)
Yeah.

**Sam Altman** (0:39)
Interviewed like more than a thousand companies. OpenAI is going really well. Excited about that.
Yeah, I'm ready for this year to be winding down, but it's been a good one.

**Craig Cannon** (0:49)
Excellent. So I wanted to do something a little bit different for this episode, and just break apart a lot of your essays. So I went back in time. I went back in time.
We'll see.

**Sam Altman** (0:58)
All right.

**Craig Cannon** (1:00)
I have a rough outline with a few general topics that you seem to have written about a few times, and I figure we can kind of just go into each one. So it seems like there are several categories from observing your thoughts and then choosing what to work on and then creating actual value once you've chosen a thing, and then pass that kind of purpose in general, like purpose in your work.
The first one, the first quote that I liked was from your essay, The Days Are Long, But The Decades Are Short. And that quote was, minimize your cognitive load from distracting things that don't really matter. It's hard to overstate how important this is and how bad most people are at it.

**Sam Altman** (1:46)
I think it's very easy to spend a decade being incredibly busy and incredibly stressed every day and feeling like you're working incredibly hard and creating a ton of movement, but not moving forward. And I think this is like a big trap and it's so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant. Or it is so easy to get caught up in like the trifles of office politics and playing status and power games that don't matter, but feel so fun and so important. Or just like random other like bullshit that piles up in life.
And I've at least found for myself, I have like a fixed budget of cognitive output per day. And I can spend that on whatever. But if I let it go on unimportant stuff, then I never have time to get to the really important stuff. And it's so easy to get heads down and focused and sort of miss like what am I actually accomplishing? The number of people who have said to me like, man, I thought for 10 years, I was doing incredible work because I felt like I was creating a huge amount of output, but in retrospect, it was in the wrong direction, is always depressing. You do need to focus and do stuff, but I think it's like really good to like focus for some period of time and then step back and think like, am I doing the right thing? You also don't wanna make the mistake that sort of like the stereotypical Silicon Valley 22-year-old or 21-year-old college dropout says of, you know, I'm gonna solve all the world's problems in three months, and if I haven't done it in three months, I failed, so I'm gonna give up and do the next thing, and then they like jump on to some other project. That's bad too, so balancing this is hard.
But I think like checking in to make sure you're working on things that matter and working on an appropriate time scale, time horizon is really important.

**Craig Cannon** (3:41)
Yeah, because I kinda wanted to address broadly, how do you even frame that? You have a certain amount of like detachment that you need, and so when you, how do you step back when you need to?

**Sam Altman** (3:53)
How do I do that? I am pretty good about like in my downtime. I naturally just think about like, do I feel like I am being maximally useful and working on the right things, or are there like, you know, should YC be doing something totally different than we are today? Like should we be willing to throw everything out and rethink about it, or is it going well? Do we need to scale?