Sam Altman - How to Start a Startup

**Ti Morse** (0:00)
Today, I'm sitting down with Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI. A long time ago, you talked or did a talk at Stanford focused on how to start a startup. What is the biggest thing that has kind of shifted over the past like 10 years since you initially did those talks?

**Sam Altman** (0:14)
Clearly AI.
And what is possible to do now with a small team of people has, and the speed with which you can do it. And also not only was possible, like what you have to do to be competitive, given how much the world has shifted, feels totally different. It is amazing to me what a 10-week-old startup now can look like. And also if you look like a 10-week-old startup from 10 years ago, you sort of are in bad shape.

**Ti Morse** (0:40)
If you think of the 10-week-old startup in your mind today, what is the one that is the best example of a startup that moved extremely quickly?

**Sam Altman** (0:46)
I don't even know what they're called, but I met what will be a startup that is like two weeks old, something like that, that has an entirely redone sort of office productivity suite, whatever, all made for like a world where AI has got to be able to use documents, presentations, spreadsheets, whatever, as a first-class consumer. And I don't know, I felt like it would have been a year's worth of work for a startup pretty recently.

**Ti Morse** (1:12)
I would assume that if the barriers to starting startups and the tools out there become more proliferated and all this stuff, you would assume that harder startups are easier to start.

**Sam Altman** (1:23)
What it means to be a hard startup is changing so incredibly quickly that I don't think I have a perfect mental model for what, over the many years that it takes to build a very successful company, what are going to be the really hard and really valuable things. Like, you know, I've heard a lot of people say, well, anything in the physical world is extra valuable right now because software is going to become free. But, you know, it won't be that long until robots get really good. And a lot of the expectations of, you know, it's really difficult to make rockets or whatever, that may change quite dramatically. I love times like this. I think startups are, they have the biggest edge when the ground is shifting the most.
And when costs are coming down rapidly and cycle times are coming down rapidly, that's when startups really, I think, just have a massive inherent advantage. And that's happening in so many places at once right now, that it seems like a great time to be doing startups. And yet, most startups are like, I'm going to go build AI agents for Enterprise Vertical X. Now, that actually will work in a lot of cases. It'll be very competitive. And it may not be like, in fact, I'd say it probably won't be like the most successful defining startups of that era.
But it will work. But given how much the landscape is in flux, I am surprised there are not more people doing the like, I'm going to go take on the crazy thing with this completely new set of tools. And also being willing to truly internalize the fact that scaling laws are going to continue and planning for the things that are not possible or economical this month, but will be possible in two years, four years, whatever. So it seems like an unbelievable time to be starting startups, and there's very fertile ground. But there's also, and no judgment if this is what people go for, there's this incredible temptation to just like go apply today's agents to the easy wins. And I get it.

**Ti Morse** (3:30)
One thing that you've said throughout the years is you basically try to, whenever you meet someone new, you try to like plot where they are on your mental model of who they are as a person. And then the next time that you meet them, you basically want to figure out how far or how fast have they progressed. Did that sort of thing and like doing this across maybe thousands of people impact your ability to kind of say, okay, the model is this intelligent today, it's this intelligent three months later, suddenly you can like plot this out and it makes it easy to believe in the growth?

**Sam Altman** (3:58)
I think there's like a general thing behind both of those, which is I just like I developed a great trust in exponentials in people or companies or models.