#61 - Sam Altman on Masters of Scale

**Sam Altman** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. So today, we have an uncut interview from the Masters of Scale podcast. And in it, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, interviews Sam Altman.
All right, here we go.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:15)
So I'm here with Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, who is a good friend and has been involved in many scaling things. Let's start with your entrepreneurial, like what got you into entrepreneurship?
How you started Lube, why you started Lube?

**Sam Altman** (0:34)
Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me here.
I fell into it accidentally. I went to college to be a computer programmer. I knew that was what I wanted to do. And I started college after the.com bubble had bust. And so startups were not something on anyone's mind. In fact, it was, I remember one of the things I was surprised by as a freshman in college was that I thought people would still be excited about startups, and if you said you were working on a startup, people sort of laughed at you in a not nice way. And I actually didn't want to work on a startup.
I worked my summer after my freshman year in the Stanford CS department as a researcher, and I loved that. And out of that grew a project which eventually developed into Looped, but it started as just a project that we worked on sort of like after class and at night. And it was not, it would not have been a startup if it were not for Y Combinator. So it kind of had got to the point where we had worked on it during a spring quarter.
And it was really fun. I'm very ashamed to say that I had been planning to go be an intern at Goldman Sachs that summer. I accepted a job offer.
And I realized that it was much more fun. There were three of us working on this project. And we all kind of knew who Paul Graham was. We had followed him online. And he posted this thing saying, like, hey, not excited about your summer job? Like, come hack on your project and you can make a startup. And it seemed like it would be more fun than being an investment banker. So we applied to YC and flew out and interviewed and got funded. We were actually the first company ever funded by YC. And that was how, then it just kept going.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:26)
And is there anything that, even this is the very beginning, is there anything from now having done Looped and a bunch of things we're going to get into that if you could call that younger self of yours going into YC, that you would tell yourself to do differently? Like key things?

**Sam Altman** (2:47)
Well, I think one general thing that I didn't understand then and learned pretty quickly, but would have saved me quite a bit of heartache is about how to calibrate risk. I think most people worry way too much about risk. You know, when you're young and you have nothing to lose is absolutely the time to take risk. And it's the time, unfortunately, that most people have most risk covers in their lives. They want to work for a few years, build up savings, then they're going to do a startup, they want to do what their parents want, whatever.
And I ended up in the right place, but it could have gone either way, and I was very, totally stupidly nervous about the risk. And so this idea that most things are not nearly as risky as they seem is a powerful one, and one that I always try to tell people in that position. You know, you're like a poor college student with no money and no reputation, and if you do a startup and fail, you're like two years older with no money and no reputation, and it's fine. It's actually much harder to wait and let your life ramp up and then do it. So that's one thing. I think another thing is, well, I don't even think I'm super easy to work with today, but I was sort of infamously difficult to work with when I was 18 or 19
And I would have put more effort into trying to be better about that.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:08)
And what specifically would you have done to be easier to work with?

**Sam Altman** (4:16)
I think a lot of it is how you set and communicate expectations with others and also realizing that if you're the founder of the company and you want to work 100 hours a week and be super focused and productive, that's cool, but most other people you hire, especially as you get bigger, have other lives, and you need to understand that.