Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"

**Garry Tan** (0:07)
Sam, thanks for joining us.

**Sam Altman** (0:10)
This is something.
This is like a lot bigger than the earlier startup schools. Yeah.

**Garry Tan** (0:14)
I mean, startups are a lot bigger now than they have ever been. For sure.
I mean, they're bigger than they've ever been because of the vision that you had for AGI, which is NIE.

**Sam Altman** (0:28)
I think this is going to be the best time in the world to do a startup, and it's going to be quite amazing to see.

**Garry Tan** (0:33)
So I want to start with a time and place, which is you were in the very first batch of Y Combinator in 2005 with a location sharing company called Looped. What do you remember about that, and what was your best PG, Paul Graham story?

**Sam Altman** (0:52)
I think if it were possible to get as far from this moment as I can imagine, it was startups are not cool at all. We were hiding out in this little building in Cambridge. PG was making us dinner.
What took three months to build at the time that we each company built over the whole YC Startup could now be done in like seven minutes by a coding agent. And it was only 20 years ago.
And I think the difference in what's possible for a startup now, what a startup can take on... I think you could either be sad and be like, oh man, a codex prompt is a whole startup, or you could be like, I can go start the world's most ambitious, crazy company. I can have experts in every field working together. I can do these very hard technological things that were just impossible. And it's going to be amazing. But at the time, it felt nothing like that. And it was very difficult to get anything to work. I think Paul Graham is probably the most important force in startups of the last few decades.

**Garry Tan** (2:04)
Without question. Yes.

**Sam Altman** (2:05)
No question.
And my kind of Paul Graham memory is we would all, every week, come, I think it was on Tuesdays, and he himself would cook us dinner, and we would all walk in feeling very hopeless and very dejected. And there were eight companies, and then we would all go home at the end of it. And he had convinced each of us that our startups were about to take over the world, and we're going to be like the next Google or whatever, Facebook maybe at the time. And that ability to create optimism and momentum and belief out of nothing, was like a real PG special. And in the early days when YC seemed like a terrible idea, and startups seemed like a bad idea, and certainly startups that were like young technical founders with no business people seemed like a terrible idea, PG just sort of like wielded into existence.

**Garry Tan** (3:02)
But it also takes someone who actually, I mean, you're sort of famously par excellence, an agentic person, like even before we thought about agents, period. I mean, you just, I remember Paul wrote, I mean, it's making the rounds on X today even, that Paul wrote in the late 2000s that you would be, you were one of the top five entrepreneurs he'd ever met.

**Sam Altman** (3:27)
That's very nice of him to say.
I think like many 20 year olds, I had like a lot of energy and a lot of ambition, but it was sort of very not directed and I wasn't sure what to do. Paul had this thing he used to say of like the job of being a good startup investor is a teacher, but it's a kind of teacher we don't usually use. Like we usually think a teacher is someone who like gives a lecture, and you can't help someone that much by like giving a lecture about a startup. There's another kind of teacher which is like a flight instructor, the person who like sits next to you saying like, do this, don't do this, that work, this isn't it, you missed that thing or you're making these mistakes and I'm just going to talk to you about this one. That very like hands-on kind of, here's where to like direct this sort of like Brownian motion energy, that was very important to me.

**Garry Tan** (4:17)
I guess later you came on to become president of YC, and you sort of brought exactly the same energy to a great many YC founders over the years. Did you have anything, like did anything jump out at you from that time around taking this raw energy of someone really, really smart and maybe a little undirected and then driving them more towards agency?