Inside OpenAI | Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations)

**Logan Kilpatrick** (0:00)
Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency. If I was hiring five people today, those are some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people, because you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency. And not needing to get 50 people's different consensus. They hear something from our customers about a challenge that they're having, and they're already pushing on what the solution for them is and not waiting for all the other things to happen, and people just go and do it and solve the problem. And I love that. It's so fun to be able to be a part of those situations.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
Today, my guest is Logan Kilpatrick. Logan is Head of Developer Relations at OpenAI, where he supports developers building on OpenAI's APIs and JAT GPT. Before OpenAI, Logan was a machine learning engineer at Apple and advised NASA on their open source policy. If you can believe it, JAT GPT launched just over a year ago and transformed the way that we think about AI and what it means for our products and our lives.
Logan has been at the front lines of this change and every day is helping developers and companies figure out how to leverage these new AI superpowers. In our conversation, we dig into examples of how people are using JAT GPT and the new GPTs and other OpenAI APIs in their work and their life. Logan shares some really interesting advice on how to get better at prompt engineering. We also get into how OpenAI operates internally, how they ship so quickly, and the two key attributes they look for in the people that they hire. Plus, where Logan sees the biggest opportunities for new products and new startups building on their APIs. We also get a little bit into the very dramatic weekend that OpenAI had with the board and Sam Altman and all of that. And so much more, a huge thank you to Dan Shipper and Dennis Yang for some great question suggestions. With that, I bring you Logan Kilpatrick after a short word from our sponsors.
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Logan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Logan Kilpatrick** (3:55)
Thanks for having me Lenny, I'm super excited.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:57)
I wanna start with the elephant in the room, which I think the elephant is actually leaving the room because I think this is months ago at this point, but I'm still just really curious.
What was it like on the inside of OpenAI during the very dramatic weekend with the board and Sam and all those things? What was it like and is there a story maybe you could share that maybe people haven't heard about what it was like on the inside of what was going on?

**Logan Kilpatrick** (4:20)
Yeah, it was definitely a very stressful Thanksgiving week. I think in broad context, OpenAI had been pushing for a really long time since ChatGBT came out and that was supposed to be one of the first weeks that the whole company had taken time away to actually reset and have a break. So very selfishly, I was super excited, spent time with my family, all that stuff.