He dropped out of Stanford in 2005, at 19, to co-found Loopt. Yeah, it ultimately failed, but over 7 years they got 5 million users, raised $30 mil in funding, and were acquihired for $43.4 mil.
He was a YC partner at ~25, YC’s president at ~28, and seemed to do a good job leading it for ~5 years. He’s also been pretty personally successful as an Angel investor.
He was an early investor in OpenAI, left YC a few years ago to become their CEO, and they’ve done extremely well under him.
No, he’s not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc., but his accomplishments at 37 are pretty damn good. I’m not really seeing how this is failing upwards?
If I could, I'd rephrase my question of what makes him stand out from all the other thousands of people who have sold companies for ~10m net? From an outside perspective it looks like the biggest success of his career pre-open AI was getting PaulG to like him a lot.
Hence why I'm asking if others can vouch for him being brilliant or something.
Also, from the outside, he seems to have been an impactful/successful leader at YC and now OpenAI. People who know him personally seem to thing he’s an extremely bright and driven person, and his results at YC and OpenAI indicate they’re probably on to something.
a super-rich dude might need to work hard, or not, but your born circumstances largely predict your success, imo, as seems to be pointed out by science/stats.
but i figure the key ingredients to getting rich, esp without accomplishing 'much' in a traditional sense, are:
* born in america, or able to get there at some point
* not poor, higher level incomes/professions/entrepreneur parents better
* white
* male
add Stanford, and now you're virtually guaranteed big/huge financial success -- the only question now is how successful/rich do you want to be, and how quickly?
just my take.
i just feel like OP was probably looking for a "BUT WHAT DID HE _DO_??"-type of explanation, and i'm like, well, did he meet the prerequisites -- i.e. what were the circumstances of his birth/upbringing? if so, he was born in the top 1% of the top 1% of the global population -- that's a pretty good start.
i don't know anything about Sam's particular situation other than what comments said here.
i do enjoy learning about people who fail upwards or just do really well after having not done much -- you can see if it fits into your worldview, and if not, learn and change your worldview.
ditto the stories of the lower-class-born people who make it big - someone maybe like Mark Cuban (or sam altman? no idea of his bg).
How does your own age 19 to 26 compare to starting a company, raising $30MM, gaining 5 million users, and eventually selling for a profit? I know I don't compare at all.
And FWIW, Loopt sold for $43m, but $10m of that went on employee retention. The investors made $3m on their $30m investment. That's an annualized return of 1.3%. It was worse than a zero risk savings account.
Sure, there are other ways of measuring success. Clearly from Altman's view, life has worked out pretty well, presumably in part because of experiences he had and people he met while spending seven years making his investors 1.3%. But doing worse than a savings account is not on it's own a sign that you are a great leader, and clearly Loopt was a failure for its investors.
sold companies for ~10m net
We don't know the exact numbers for this particular case, but you can be sure people lost money. Raising $30m doesn't mean the company was valued at $30m; it means the company was valued at much more. For example if you took $30m in a typical Series A round you'd be valued at $150m. If you then sold for a third of that...
If you want bigger returns you will have to accept higher risks.
A single starting company is never an alternative investment compared to a much larger spread across a series of established companies.
Investors work with risk by having certain portions of their available capital earmarked for investments in particular risk segments. Typically a large chunk will be allocated in 'safe' (for want of a better word) investments, which may indeed be index funds, real estate or other such. Another portion may be invested in more risky but higher yield such as larger investments in a single blue chip stock that the investors feel good about. And finally there is the bucket 'gambles'. These are considered very high risk and are either huge wins or huge losses, rarely mid range returns, in fact (for the investors, not the founders) they'd rather the company gambles big than to end up playing it safe.
But if such a company is in a spot where it will likely lose it all and then a plan to end up returning the investors just their outlay is already a huge plus, and if they manage to make the investors look good by posting a return, however slim then that will be a much larger win: investors, especially those with LPs do not like to post write-offs not because of their own book (they pocket their management fees regardless) but because it will impact their ability to raise again.
I should probably write a blog post on this one of these days.
He is doing one thing well though - keeping Facebook completely in his grip, despite his shortcomings...
and groups of people with non-white skin -- say, Asian Indian Americans -- being able to overcome racism is great, but it should not be required, and they had some advantages:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-mak...
The result was an intense form of social engineering, but one that went largely unacknowledged. Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been.On top of that, you roll out a quote to trivialize a group’s success due to hard work and determination as “social engineering”.
If we had been talking about the Jewish community and you had used that quote, I think many would consider you a bigot, but currently it’s more socially acceptable to attack Indian Americans
Only in a perfectly spherical economic market. In an efficient market rewards are a function of risk. Lots of founders talk about their secret sauce: information they knew that other competitors did not. Information is not equally known, and economic rents exist, so there are areas where bigger returns are available for less risk. And there are definitely lots of examples where high risks do not have expected high returns!
I've come across this a couple of times but in 15 years and 200+ companies not often enough to see it as the big differentiator for success or something that negates the usual risk/reward trade off.
As an Asian American you absolutely can attribute our success to "social engineering", we went from rail road workers to laundry mat owners to Harvard graduates. You can't have these kind of change on the societal perception level without some kind of engineering.