Sam Alman is the CEO of OpenAI and one of the leading figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence. He went from building startups as a young founder in leading Y Combinator in Silicon Valley to overseeing the development of chat GPT and helping drive [music] one of the most transformative technologies of the modern era. Need motivation?
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Okay, let's kick it off with rule number one. Have conviction. It is hard to have conviction in the face of a lot of other people telling you you're wrong.
And I think people who don't who say it's easy are not being honest. It gets easier over time. Um, but like I remember one time I can say this one because it got publicized.
Um, in early, not early, a few years into OpenAI where Elon sent us this really mean email. We've been working together for a while and said we had a 0% chance of success. Like not 0.
10 that we were totally failing. We had showed him like GPT1 recently. He was like, "This is crap.
It's not going to work. Doesn't make sense. " And I was really a hero of mine at the time.
And I remember going home that night and being like, "What if he's right? Like this sucks. you know, you're working so hard on this thing, like you're pouring your life force into it.
And you have these people who are smart and that you look up to and they say, you are totally wrong. Um, or you know, this is just not never going to work or you don't have defensibility. Someone's going to kill you, this is going to happen, that's going to happen.
And I don't have a magic answer other than it's really tough and it gets significantly easier over time, but it's going to happen to all of you and you just like get knocked down and get back up and brush yourself off and try to keep going. Rule number two is take advantage of AI. >> I think this is probably the most exciting time to be starting out one's career.
Uh maybe ever. I I I think like that 25-year-old in Mumbai can probably do more than any previous 25-year-old in in history could. It's really amazing what you can do with a tool like this.
Uh I felt the same way when I was 25 and you know the tools then were not as amazing as tools we have now. But we had the computer revolution and we could do things you know a 25-year-old then could do things that no 25-year-old in history before would have been able to. And now that's happening in a huge way.
So whether you want to start a company or be a programmer or go work in kind of any other industry, you know, create new media, what what whatever it is, um the ability for one person to use these tools and have great ideas and implement them with what would have taken, you know, decades of experience or teams of people is really quite remarkable. Um in terms of particular industries, I am very excited about what AI is going to mean for science and the amount of science that one person will be able to discover and the rate at which they can do that. Clearly, it's transforming what it means to program computers in a huge way and people will be able to create completely new kinds of software in a at huge new new scale.
Uh definitely for startups, you know, if you have an idea for a new business, the ability for a very tiny team to do a huge amount of work is is great. Um but it feels like this is just now a very open canvas. You know, people people are limited to a degree that they've never been before only by the quality and creativity of their ideas.
And you have these incredible tools to help you realize them. >> Rule number three is seize the opportunities. First of all, assume you all are like starting startups or have started startups, think about starting startups.
This is the best time ever in the history of technology ever, period, to start a company. Um, yeah, this is [applause] uh and but part of the reason it's the best is because like the ground is shaking and it's true there are a lot of these challenges. So on one hand you can look at something like that and say we have been a you know SAS company and now like all of the code can just be generated right in time when someone needs it and what does that mean for us or you can look at it and say wow this is going to happen but it's going to happen to everybody and the way startups win is when they can iterate faster than big companies and they can do it at a much lower cost.
like big companies have a lot of advantages but they iterate very slowly um and they you know if something is like very cheap then a lot of their big advantages go away. So you can look at this all of these problems one way or another. But the way I would recommend looking at them is everybody is going to face the same challenges and opportunities.
But when the clock cycle of the industry changes this much. Startups almost always win and we've probably never seen it change this much. Number four, let competition motivate you.
A lot of other companies will do great too and I'm happy for them. But you know, chatbt is still uh by far by far the dominant uh chatbot in the market and I expect that lead to increase not decrease over time. Um the the models will get good everywhere but a lot of the reasons that people use a product consumer or enterprise uh have much more to do than just with the model.
And we've you know been expecting this for a while. So we try to build the whole cohesive set of things that it takes to make sure that we are, you know, the product that people most want to use. Um, I think competition is good.
It pushes us to be better. Uh, but I think we'll do great in chat. I think we'll do great in enterprise and in the future years, other new categories, I expect we'll do great there, too.
I I think people really want to use one AI platform. People use their phone at their personal life and they want to use the same kind of phone at work. Most of the time we're seeing the same thing with AI.
Uh the strength of chatgbt consumer is really helping us win the enterprise. Uh of course enterprises need different offerings but people think about okay I know this company open and I know how to use this chat GPT interface. Um so the strategy is make the best models build the best product around it and have enough infrastructure to serve it at scale.
Also if you want to take real action after this video I made a free worksheet just for you. covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free.
Just click the link in the description to go grab it. I'll see you there. Win number five is get involved.
The only way I know how to do this is to like be deeply in the trenches exploring ideas, like talking to a lot of people, and I don't have time to do that anymore. I only get to think about one thing now. >> Yeah.
So I I would just be like repeating other people's or saying the obvious things but I think it's a very important like if you are an investor or a founder I think this is the most important question and you don't you you figure it out by like building stuff and playing with technology and talking to people and being out in the world. I have been always enormously disappointed by the willingness of investors to back this kind of stuff even though it's always a thing that works. Rule number six is put the customer first.
Our strategy was always consumer first. Uh there were a few reasons for that. One, the models were not robust and skilled enough uh for most enterprise uses and now now they're they're getting there.
The second was we had this like clear opportunity to win in consumer and those are rare and hard to come by and I think if you win in consumer it makes it massively easier to win in enterprise and we are we are seeing that now. Um but as I mentioned earlier this was a year where we enterprise growth outpaced consumer growth. Uh and given where the models are today where they will get to next year we think this is the time where we can build a really significant enterprise business quite rapidly.
I mean I think and we already have one but it can it can grow much more. Rule number seven is do the crazy thing. If you say we're going to like do this crazy thing and it's and it's exciting and it's important if it works and other people aren't doing it, you can actually like get a lot of people together.
Um, and so we were we said, "Okay, we're going to go for AGI. " 99% of the world thought we were crazy. 1% of the world it really resonated with.
Turned out there were a lot of smart people in that 1% and you could get like there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. So we were able to really concentrate the talent and it was a mission that people cared about. So even though it seemed unlikely, if it worked, it it seems super valuable.
And we've observed this many times with startups. If you are doing the same thing as everyone else, it is very hard to concentrate talent. And it's very hard to get people to like really believe in a mission.
And if you're doing like a oneofone thing, uh you you have a really nice tailwinder. >> Rule number eight is embrace uncertainty. >> I think it's very hard to predict exactly how something evolves.
Um I or predict exactly the jobs of the future going to be like the you know not that long ago it would have been very hard to predict either of our jobs if you go back 100 years the idea of like this CEO of an AI company or a podcaster like you know probably would have been things that didn't seem to be the most obvious evolutions of the things people were doing at the time. >> Yeah. you just seemed almost probably crazy even in trying to explain those to someone.
>> You would. And now, in fact, two of the job I heard that the job that young people most want is some version of your job. >> The job that young people most want is to be a, you know, podcast influencer, uh, YouTube, they want a YouTube channel, like whatever it is, they they like six, seven year olds, they don't know how to describe it, but that's what they want.
>> And a lot of people also want my job. They want to do like a startup or they want to work on AI. And these just didn't exist.
>> Yeah. So like the rate with which the new things come along is is fast and also trying to predict what they are. I don't know.
The thing I say all the time is no one knows what happens next. It's like we're going to figure this out. It's this weird emergent thing.
Does the current job of a historian exist in the same way? I would bet not quite. But another thing I believe is that humans are obsessed with other people.
Like we are so deeply wired to care about other people, to care about stories and history, our own history is extremely interesting to us. So I would say somehow or other we're still going to care about that. There's going to be some kind of job doing that.
>> Number nine is invest in what you love. >> How many investments do you have large? You know like altogether active.
>> I'm trying to get a sense for >> I mean counting all the YC ones like a few thousand personal ones. I would guess 400. >> Wow.
Really >> something. Well I've been doing this for a long time. >> Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean and every once in a while I see like a really gigantic deal. What what makes a Sam Alman deal?
>> Um I I try to just do things that I'm interested in at this point. One of the things I have realized is all of the companies I think I have added a lot of value to or the ones that I sort of like think about in my free time on a hike or whatever and then text the founder say, "Hey, I have this idea for you. " And I have learned kind of like what those are and the ones that are not.
I think like every founder deserves an investor who is like going to think about them while they're hiking. And so I've tried to like hold myself to the stuff that I really love which tends to be like the hard tech years of R&D capital intensive or like sort of like risky like risky research and then but if it works it really works. >> And rule number 10 the last one before a very special bonus clip is be [music] optimistic.
>> So would you say that you're still optimistic about the future? >> Of course. um like progress is not it's it's not a perfectly exponential curve.
It's not it's not even a straight line. Um and you know we are clearly in a challenging period now. Um but I think if you look back at the last few hundred and then few thousand years um if you zoom out enough that the squiggles on the curve kind of disappear um the world's getting so much better and I think that's going to keep happening.
Um and I am you know even with everything going on right now um I'm delighted to be alive right now and not 100 years ago and certainly not you know 200 or 2,000 years ago. Um and I think we do have technology to thank for a lot and we have better governance system like the number of people living in a democracy uh you know 200 years ago was very low the percentage and as horrible as things are the fact that we get to stand up uh and speak our minds without fear of you know being thrown in jail for political opposition and the fact that we get to vote again in three and a half more years um I think that's amazing and I think it's easy to take that for granted but uh Uh yeah, I think the future is going to be a lot better. I remain very optimistic.
>> How do you advise people to select sort of who they're working on things with? >> Um this is this is really hard. Uh finding your tribe, finding the sort of people that you end up working with on and off for the rest of your career is is really hard.
Uh, I think I'll tell you some things I've learned and I will admit that I don't have a perfect answer to this yet, but I think one thing is you should be willing to move. Um, for whatever you're doing, there are tend to be pockets of it around the world where there are similar people uh that are doing great work in whatever field you care about. And it's really worth trying to go be be near them.
Um and so you know we get criticized sometimes at YC for having people move to the Bay Area but bringing people together that are interested in this similar thing of startups I think has been really valuable for for a lot of people. I think another thing that I have learned is that um whenever I've helped people for for no immediate benefit uh and with no intention of ever getting a benefit at all uh time and again in my career it has really later benefited me a lot. So I think uh you at some point often get to a point in your career where you're you're limited by how many good people you know and and how many of those you can work with or get to do things that uh uh together and so find just helping a lot of people and spending a lot of time with a lot of people uh has benefited me you know years after I've really helped someone for no reason I get to invest in their startup and it goes on to be a huge success uh or we're able to like work on open AI together any number of things um I think just trying to help a lot of people and out of that scene who is really impressive and who gets things done uh is helpful.
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>> Determination and commitment versus stubbornness. And that that that line is fuzzy.
