Sam Altman's Quotes

"the value of a network grows as a function of the square of the number of nodes"

— Sam Altman

"If some users really love what you’re building, engage with the service or product as an important part of their daily lives, and interesting new behaviors keep emerging as you grow, keep working on it."

— Sam Altman

"There are two time-tested strategies to change the world with technology. One is to build something that some people love but most people think is a toy; the other is to be hyperambitious and start an electric car company or a rocket company."

— Sam Altman

"One, don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it. Two, ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves."

— Sam Altman

"1. Compound yourself"

— Sam Altman

"A medium-sized business that grows 50% in value every year becomes huge in a very short amount of time. Few businesses in the world have true network effects and extreme scalability."

— Sam Altman

"You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory."

— Sam Altman

"As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people."

— Sam Altman

"It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever."

— Sam Altman

"Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes."

— Sam Altman

"I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together."

— Sam Altman

"2. Have almost too much self-belief"

— Sam Altman

"The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion."

— Sam Altman

"If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created."

— Sam Altman

"Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavors."

— Sam Altman

"Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it’s true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not."

— Sam Altman

"3. Learn to think independently"

— Sam Altman

"Entrepreneurship is very difficult to teach because original thinking is very difficult to teach. School is not set up to teach this—in fact, it generally rewards the opposite."

— Sam Altman

"Thinking from first principles and trying to generate new ideas is fun, and finding people to exchange them with is a great way to get better at this."

— Sam Altman

"One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution."

— Sam Altman

"4. Get good at “sales”"

— Sam Altman

"All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc."

— Sam Altman

"This requires an inspiring vision, strong communication skills, some degree of charisma, and evidence of execution ability."

— Sam Altman

"Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making."

— Sam Altman

"The best way to be good at sales is to genuinely believe in what you’re selling."

— Sam Altman

"My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important."

— Sam Altman

"5. Make it easy to take risks"

— Sam Altman

"Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more."

— Sam Altman

"Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works."

— Sam Altman

"At YC, we’ve often noticed a problem with founders that have spent a lot of time working at Google or Facebook. When people get used to a comfortable life, a predictable job, and a reputation of succeeding at whatever they do, it gets very hard to leave that behind (and people have an incredible ability to always match their lifestyle to next year’s salary)."

— Sam Altman

"6. Focus"

— Sam Altman

"Focus is a force multiplier on work."

— Sam Altman

"Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on."

— Sam Altman

"7. Work hard"

— Sam Altman

"You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot."

— Sam Altman

"And it’s often really fun. One of the great joys in life is finding your purpose, excelling at it, and discovering that your impact matters to something larger than yourself."

— Sam Altman

"People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with."

— Sam Altman

"In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success."

— Sam Altman

"do it at the beginning of your career. Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off."

— Sam Altman

"8. Be bold"

— Sam Altman

"Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too."

— Sam Altman

"If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you."

— Sam Altman

"9. Be willful"

— Sam Altman

"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are."

— Sam Altman

"Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out”, and mean it, go on to succeed."

— Sam Altman

"Airbnb is my benchmark for this."

— Sam Altman

"There are so many stories they tell that I wouldn’t recommend trying to reproduce (keeping maxed-out credit cards in those nine-slot three-ring binder pages kids use for baseball cards, eating dollar store cereal for every meal, battle after battle with powerful entrenched interest, and on and on) but they managed to survive long enough for luck to go their way."

— Sam Altman

"To be willful, you have to be optimistic—hopefully this is a personality trait that can be improved with practice."

— Sam Altman

"10. Be hard to compete with"

— Sam Altman

"The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields."

— Sam Altman

"Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with."

— Sam Altman

"11. Build a network"

— Sam Altman

"Great work requires teams. Developing a network of talented people to work with—sometimes closely, sometimes loosely—is an essential part of a great career."

— Sam Altman

"The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish."

— Sam Altman

"An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments."

— Sam Altman

"One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you."

— Sam Altman

"Also, learn how to evaluate what people are great at, and put them in those roles."

— Sam Altman

"You want to have a reputation for pushing people hard enough that they accomplish more than they thought they could, but not so hard they burn out."

— Sam Altman

"“I can’t do X because I’m not good at Y” is something I hear from entrepreneurs surprisingly often, and almost always reflects a lack of creativity."

— Sam Altman

"The best way to make up for your weaknesses is to hire complementary team members instead of just hiring people who are good at the same things you are."

— Sam Altman

"A particularly valuable part of building a network is to get good at discovering undiscovered talent."

— Sam Altman

"Quickly spotting intelligence, drive, and creativity gets much easier with practice. The easiest way to learn is just to meet a lot of people, and keep track of who goes on to impress you and who doesn’t."

— Sam Altman

"I try to always ask myself when I meet someone new “is this person a force of nature?” It’s a pretty good heuristic for finding people who are likely to accomplish great things."

— Sam Altman

"A special case of developing a network is finding someone eminent to take a bet on you, ideally early in your career. The best way to do this, no surprise, is to go out of your way to be helpful. (And remember that you have to pay this forward at some point later!)"

— Sam Altman

"12. You get rich by owning things"

— Sam Altman

"You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value."

— Sam Altman

"But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly."

— Sam Altman

"13. Be internally driven"

— Sam Altman

"First, you will work on consensus ideas and on consensus career tracks. You will care a lot—much more than you realize—if other people think you’re doing the right thing."

— Sam Altman

"Second, you will usually get risk calculations wrong. You’ll be very focused on keeping up with other people and not falling behind in competitive games, even in the short term."

— Sam Altman

"Being aware of it helps, but only a little—you will likely have to work super-hard to not fall in the mimetic trap."

— Sam Altman

"The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world."

— Sam Altman

"This is why the question of a person’s motivation is so important. It’s the first thing I try to understand about someone. The right motivations are hard to define a set of rules for, but you know it when you see it."

— Sam Altman

"Eventually, you will define your success by performing excellent work in areas that are important to you."

— Sam Altman

"It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with."

— Sam Altman

"One of the biggest reasons I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks."

— Sam Altman

"It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible."

— Sam Altman

"I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky."

— Sam Altman

"“Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want. It sounds utopian, but it’s something technology can deliver (and in some cases already has)."

— Sam Altman

"Even more power will shift from labor to capital."

— Sam Altman

"We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth."

— Sam Altman

"In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice."

— Sam Altman

"And in the decades after that, they will do almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of “everything.”"

— Sam Altman

"And a recursive loop of innovation, as these smart machines themselves help us make smarter machines, will accelerate the revolution’s pace."

— Sam Altman

"This revolution will create phenomenal wealth. The price of many kinds of labor (which drives the costs of goods and services) will fall toward zero once sufficiently powerful AI “joins the workforce.”"

— Sam Altman

"The world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want."

— Sam Altman

"The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason."

— Sam Altman

"To the three great technological revolutions–the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational–we will add a fourth: the AI revolution."

— Sam Altman

"Broadly speaking, there are two paths to affording a good life: an individual acquires more money (which makes that person wealthier), or prices fall (which makes everyone wealthier)."

— Sam Altman

"Wealth is buying power: how much we can get with the resources we have."

— Sam Altman

"The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods, from food to video games. Technology will rapidly drive that decline in many categories."

— Sam Altman

"AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain."

— Sam Altman

"A stable economic system requires two components: growth and inclusivity. Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year."

— Sam Altman

"Economic inclusivity means everyone having a reasonable opportunity to get the resources they need to live the life they want. Economic inclusivity matters because it’s fair, produces a stable society, and can create the largest slices of pie for the most people. As a side benefit, it produces more growth."

— Sam Altman

"Capitalism is a powerful engine of economic growth because it rewards people for investing in assets that generate value over time, which is an effective incentive system for creating and distributing technological gains."

— Sam Altman

"But the price of progress in capitalism is inequality."

— Sam Altman

"Some inequality is ok–in fact, it’s critical, as shown by all systems that have tried to be perfectly equal–but a society that does not offer sufficient equality of opportunity for everyone to advance is not a society that will last."

— Sam Altman

"The traditional way to address inequality has been by progressively taxing income."

— Sam Altman

"As AI produces most of the world’s basic goods and services, people will be freed up to spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good."

— Sam Altman

"We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens."

— Sam Altman

"In other words, the best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner."

— Sam Altman

"This is not a new idea, but it will be newly feasible as AI grows more powerful, because there will be dramatically more wealth to go around."

— Sam Altman

"The two dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply."

— Sam Altman

"We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars."

— Sam Altman

"As long as the country keeps doing better, every citizen would get more money from the Fund every year (on average; there will still be economic cycles). Every citizen would therefore increasingly partake of the freedoms, powers, autonomies, and opportunities that come with economic self-determination."

— Sam Altman

"A tax payable in company shares will align incentives between companies, investors, and citizens, whereas a tax on profits does not–incentives are superpowers, and this is a critical difference."

— Sam Altman

"Corporate profits can be disguised or deferred or offshored, and are often disconnected from share price."

— Sam Altman

"Henry George, an American political economist, proposed the idea of a land-value tax in the late 1800s."

— Sam Altman

"The value of land appreciates because of the work society does around it: the network effects of the companies operating around a piece of land, the public transportation that makes it accessible, and the nearby restaurants, coffeeshops, and access to nature that makes it desirable. Because the landowner didn’t do all that work, it’s fair for that value to be shared with the larger society that did."

— Sam Altman

"If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives."

— Sam Altman

"In a world where everyone benefits from capitalism as an owner, the collective focus will be on making the world “more good” instead of “less bad.”"

— Sam Altman

"Simply put, more good means optimizing for making the pie as large as possible, and less bad means dividing the pie up as fairly as possible."

— Sam Altman

"Both can increase people’s standard of living once, but continuous growth only happens when the pie grows."

— Sam Altman

"There is about $50 trillion worth of value, as measured by market capitalization, in US companies alone."

— Sam Altman

"There is also about $30 trillion worth of privately-held land in the US (not counting improvements on top of the land)."

— Sam Altman

"A larger problem with this idea is the incentive for companies to return value to shareholders instead of reinvesting it in growth."

— Sam Altman

"If we tax only public companies, there would also be an incentive for companies to stay private. For private companies that have annual revenue in excess of $1 billion, we could let their tax in equity accrue for a certain (limited) number of years until they go public. If they remain private for a long time, we could let them settle the tax in cash."

— Sam Altman

"We’d also need a robust system for quantifying the actual value of land."

— Sam Altman

"One way would be with a corps of powerful federal assessors. Another would be to let local governments do the assessing, as they now do to determine property taxes."

— Sam Altman

"A great future isn’t complicated: we need technology to create more wealth, and policy to fairly distribute it."

— Sam Altman

"A politically feasible way to launch the American Equity Fund, and one that would reduce the transitional shock, would be with legislation that transitions us gradually to the 2.5% rates."

— Sam Altman

"on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are"

— Sam Altman

"The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—""what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”"

— Sam Altman

"In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of learning to think independently, reason about the future, and identify attack vectors."

— Sam Altman

"They are extremely persistent and willing to work hard. As far as I can tell, there is no high-probability way to be very successful without this,"

— Sam Altman

"They have a bias towards action and trying things, and they’re clear-eyed and honest about what is working and what isn’t"

— Sam Altman

"I’m amazed by how many people will see something working and then not pursue it"

— Sam Altman

"Their motivations are often more complex than they seem—specifically, they are frequently very driven by genuine curiosity."

— Sam Altman

"But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter, and so it’s a very bad mistake to dismiss everything that looks trivial."

— Sam Altman

"There are two time-tested strategies to change the world with technology."

— Sam Altman

"One is to build something that some people love but most people think is a toy"

— Sam Altman

"the other is to be hyperambitious and start an electric car company or a rocket company."

— Sam Altman

"I have two pieces of advice for the “arrogant fucks” who make the world go round."

— Sam Altman

"One, don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it."

— Sam Altman

"Two, ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting."

— Sam Altman