Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup"
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Sam, thanks for joining us. This is something.
This is like a lot bigger than the earlier startup schools.
Yeah, I mean, startups are a lot bigger now than they've ever been. I mean, they're bigger than they've ever been because of the vision that you had for AGI, which is Nye.
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.
So I wanted 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 Lubed. What do you remember about that? And what was your best PG Paul Graham story?
I think if it were possible to get as far from this moment as I can imagine, it was, you know, startups are not cool at all. We were hiding out in this little building in Cambridge. PG was making us dinner. And, you know, what took... three months to build at the time that each company built over the whole YC startup could now be done in like seven minutes by a coding agent. And it was only, I mean, only 20 years ago. And I think the difference in what's possible for a startup now, what a startup can take on, you know, I think you could either be sad and be like, oh man, like 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. Without question. Yes. No question. And my kind of Paul Graham memory is we would all, every week, come, I think it was on Tuesdays, and he would, like, cook us, he himself would cook us dinner, and we would all walk in feeling, like, very hopeless and very dejected. And we would, there were eight companies, and then we would all go home at the end of it, and he had convinced, like, each of us that our startups were about to, like, take over the world, and we're going to be, like, you know, the next Google or whatever, Facebook maybe at the time.
And that... ability to sort of like create optimism and momentum and belief out of nothing was like a real PG special.
What memories does Sam Altman share about being in YC’s first batch in 2005?
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 willed it into existence.
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.
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 of teachers as 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 worked, 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.
And that very, like, hands-on kind of, you know, here's where to, like, direct this sort of, like, brownie in motion energy, that was very important to me.
Now, 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, you know, taking this raw energy of someone really, really smart and maybe a little undirected and then driving them more towards agency?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:07–2:48
2
What memories does Sam Altman share about being in YC’s first batch in 2005?
2:48–7:29
3
Why does Sam Altman say this is the best time to start a startup with AI agents?
7:29–12:07
4
How did Paul Graham influence early founders and YC’s culture?
12:07–38:56