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] by Tad Friend @newyorker.com - an indepth profile on the CEO of one of silicon valley's premier startup accelorator companies, ycombinator. Friend describes the man and how he is putting his mark on the company, the industry and the future.
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">Sam Altman Manifest Destiny</h1> <h2>[WHAT]</h2> <ol> <li>] by Tad friend @newyorker.com -an indepth profile on the CEO of one of silicon valley's premier startup accelorator companies, ycombinator. Friend describes the man and how he is putting his mark on the company, the industry and the future.</li> </ol> <h2>[WHY]</h2> <ol> <li>] </li> </ol> <h2>[WHERE]</h2> <ol> <li><strong>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</strong></li> <ol> <li>] <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny" target="_blank">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny</a></li> </ol></ol> <h2>[WHEN]</h2> <ol> <li>] 2016-10-14</li> </ol> <h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2> <ol> <li><strong>] YC numbers and ...</strong></li> <ol> <li>] most recent batch(w 17) applications = 13K/funded = 240 accepted, your harvard application has a > chance of being accepted</li> <li>] 1000+ companies to date</li> <li>] YC companies are worth eighty billion dollars, </li> <li>] a valuation that has grown seventeenfold in the past five years</li> <li>] Chris Dixon “They created the greatest business model of all time. For basically no money”— YC gives each company just a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, to cover expenses—“they get seven per cent of a lot of the best startups in Silicon Valley!” </li> <li>] partners - # = ?18? - list = Michael Seibel, Geoff Ralston, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Paul Buchheit, Peter Theil*</li> <li>] ethos - ] make something people want, ] all you should be doing is talking to your customers and building stuff.” ] be nice, ] become ramen profitable, ] “Being lean forces you to focus. </li> </ol> <li><strong>] startups, accelorators, YC</strong></li> <ol> <li>] launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist. </li> <li>] accelerators have sprung up everywhere to help transform startups from a skein of code into a bona-fide company. In exchange for five to seven per cent of a startup’s equity, an accelerator usually provides between fifteen thousand and a hundred thousand dollars, advice for an intensive three-month period, introductions to mentors, and a Demo Day, when investors assess the finished product. The U.S. has a hundred and sixty accelerators—three in Chattanooga alone—and there are thousands more around the world, including Brainnovations, outside Tel Aviv, and the Startup Sauna, in locations from Minsk to Dar es Salaam. </li> <li>] Paul Graham, a gifted programmer who’d sold his own startup to Yahoo for fifty million dollars, was one of the first people to harness these trends. His 2005 essay “How to Start a Startup”—together with Steven Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup”—helped to codify the modern entrepreneur’s ethos: bootstrap; begin with a “minimum viable product” and iterate rapidly; prefer ten people loving what you make to ten thousand liking it. </li> <li>] In a class that Altman taught at Stanford in 2014, he remarked that the formula for estimating a startup’s chance of success is “something like Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck, where Luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand </li> <li>] A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding. While a few accelerators, such as Tech Stars and 500 Startups, have a handful of alumni worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Y Combinator has graduates worth at least a billion—and it has eleven of them</li> <li>] Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding. But the YC credential, and the promise that it will turn you into a juggernaut, can be hard to resist.</li> <li>] YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague, who is usually a white man. </li> </ol> <li><strong>] name dropping - YC companies you've heard about</strong></li> <ol> <li>] stripe - </li> <li>] airbnb - 30B</li> <li>] reddit - 600M</li> <li>] dropbox - 10B</li> <li>] docker - </li> <li>] instacart - </li> <li>] doordash - </li> <li>] cruise - </li> </ol> <li><strong>] name dropping - YC companies you will/may be hearing about, S16 batch</strong></li> <ol> <li>] Varden Labs - a Canadian self-driving-vehicle company</li> <li>] Konsus - https://www.konsus.com/freelance-services/web-design - ] connects businesses to freelancers who perform tasks such as ] data entry, ]writing or ]Web design, on demand (quote within 30 minutes), founders = Fredrik Thomassen, Sondre Rasch, ] the quality of our freelancers’ work is our differentiator. We need a metric to measure it, somehow.” Altman replied, “Repeat use or customer retention will track that. You don’t need to invent some complicated new metric, so don’t.” </li> <li>] Triplebyte - which matches coders’ applications with YC companies, o</li> <li>] Restocks - is a messaging service for young “super-consumers” who want to know, five minutes ahead of everyone else, when small shipments of Supreme T-shirts and Yeezy Boost 350 shoes go on sale. Luke Miles (18 yo founder) was accepted to YC after excelling in YC Fellowship, the new program for embryonic startups, in which they receive as much as twenty thousand dollars and the opportunity to consult with a partner over Skype. </li> <li>] Secful and Castle - security company </li> <li>] Shypmate - an app that links you to airline passengers who will cheaply carry your package to Ghana or Nigeria,</li> <li>] elucify - </li> </ol> <li><strong>] about, altman</strong></li> <ol> <li>] <strong>specs</strong> - 31 y/o (2016), 130#, gay, </li> <li>] he has scant <strong>interest</strong> in the specifics of the apps that many YC companies produce; what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. ] I have narrow interests in technology, I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people. </li> <li>] Altman’s great <strong>strengths</strong> are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. His great weakness is his utter lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us. I found his assiduousness alarming at first, then gradually endearing. </li> <li>] <strong>hobbies</strong> = racing cars, flying planes, survivalist (my friends talk about the way the world will end - After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” ) </li> <li>] makes a list of <strong>goals</strong> each year, and he looks at it every few weeks. It always includes a taxing physical objective—a hundred-mile bike ride each week; fifty consecutive pull-ups—and an array of work targets. This year, for YC, those included “Better partnership dynamic; decision on [expanding to] China; figure out how to scale another 2x.” The latest list also contains a reminder to fund videos that demonstrate counterintuitive concepts in physics and quantum mechanics (“QM experiment/physics explainers”) and a prompt to reread a Huffington Post article about the regrets of the dying (“I wish that I had let myself be happier”).</li> </ol> <li><strong>[bio]</strong></li> <ol> <li>] grew up in St. Louis, learned to program Mac (his lifeline to the world)</li> <li>] hyochondriatic tendencys - </li> <li><strong>] siblings</strong> (2 younger brothers, Max,Jack ), live together in SF, brother() works at startup, Max was working at the Y Combinator company Zenefits; Jack co-founded a performance-management company, Lattice, which had just gone through YC. YC funded competitor Asana</li> <li>] attend <strong>Stanford</strong> - computer science - dropped out after 2 years</li> <li>] <strong>co founded</strong> <strong>loopt</strong> - mobile app that ... , ] with 2 college buddies(nick sivo, ), ] attended YC batch# 1, ] “We had the optimistic view that location would be all-important,” Altman said. “The pessimistic view was that people would lie on their couches and just consume content—and that is what happened. I learned you can’t make humans do something they don’t want to do.” </li> <li>] <strong>sold loopt</strong> -I n 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s.</li> <li>] <strong>relationships</strong> - co founder was BF - relationship ended - after 9 years</li> <li>] launched a small venture fund, <strong>Hydrazine Capital</strong>. investment from Peter Theil, his 5M share of Loopt sale, invested seventy-five per cent of the fund in YC companies. He had a knack for finding opportunity in chaos. Hydrazine has grown tenfold in value in just four years, but, despite its success, Altman recoiled from venture capital. “You’re trying to find a company that will be successful with or without you, then convince them to take your money instead of somebody else’s, and at a lower price,” he said. “I didn’t like being oppositional to the entrepreneur.” </li> <li>] Altman wanted to create a trillion-dollar conglomerate and to move the world forward. And, he realized, “you couldn’t have a trillion-dollar enterprise without major scientific advances.” So he opened the batches to hard tech, studied the science and engineering problems such companies faced, and recruited the most promising ones. Altman helped to persuade Kyle Vogt, the C.E.O. of the self-driving-car company Cruise, to do YC in 2014; afterward, when Cruise had trouble finding funding, he invested three million dollars in the company. In March, General Motors bought Cruise for $1.25 billion. </li> <li>] had YC fund the best fission and fusion startups he could find. Then he personally invested in both companies and chaired their boards. Thousands of startups are devoted to social interaction, and fewer than twenty to fission and fusion, but, Altman said, “hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it’s interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space.”</li> </ol> <li><strong>] quote</strong></li> <ol> <li>] <a href="/view/person?id=239" target="_blank">Altman, Sam</a> <strong>ON startups -</strong> “the founders who do best are very paranoid, very full of existential crises.” He told them, “Founders by definition like to start new things. But starting a business means grinding away for ten years.” He continued, without irony, “Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.” </li> <li>] Much of his advice follows YC’s standard imperative to transparency: if you’re worried about investors’ responses to a setback, “just tell them”; if you’re mystified by what a potential customer’s silence portends, “just ask them.” It’s the knottier questions that elicit his cleaving judgments. “Don’t worry about a competitor until they’re beating you in the market,” </li> <li><strong>] ON ai - </strong>“there’s absolutely no reason to believe that in about thirteen years we won’t have hardware capable of replicating my brain. Yes, certain things still feel particularly human—creativity, flashes of inspiration from nowhere, the ability to feel happy and sad at the same time—but computers will have their own desires and goal systems. When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought.” He stared off. “There are certain advantages to being a machine. We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost. </li> <li>] <a href="/view/person?id=292" target="_blank">Andreessen, Marc</a> (venture capitalist ) <strong>ON Altman</strong> - said, “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.”</li> <li>] Paul Graham (yc cofounder) - by precipitating progress in “curing cancer, fusion, supersonic airliners, A.I.,” was trying to comprehensively revise the way we live: “I think his goal is to make the whole future.”</li> <li>] Paul Graham - “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.”</li> <li>] Jessica Livingston (yc cofounder)- “There wasn’t a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top. It was just: Sam.” </li> </ol> <li><strong>] sams yc projects include - </strong></li> <ol> <li><strong>] yc research</strong> - funding science, </li> <li><strong>] open ai</strong> - collaboration with Elon Musk to oversee AI from harming humanity, "a kind of strategic-defense initiative to protect us from our own creations." OpenAI was particularly concerned that Google’s DeepMind Technologies division was seeking a supreme A.I. that could monitor the world for competitors. Musk told me, “If the A.I. that they develop goes awry, we risk having an immortal and superpowerful dictator forever.” He went on, “Murdering all competing A.I. researchers as its first move strikes me as a bit of a character flaw.” In May, Dario Amodei, a leading A.I. researcher then at Google Brain, came to visit the office, and told Altman and Greg Brockman, the C.T.O., that no one understood their mission. They’d raised a billion dollars and hired an impressive team of thirty researchers—but what for? Brockman said, “Our goal right now . . . is to do the best thing there is to do. It’s a little vague.”</li> <li>] Musk told me, “just because you don’t see killer robots marching down the street doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned.” Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana serve millions as aides-de-camp, and simultaneous-translation and self-driving technologies are now taken for granted. Y Combinator has even begun using an A.I. bot, Hal9000, to help it sift admission applications: the bot’s neural net trains itself by assessing previous applications and those companies’ outcomes. “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”</li> <li>] OpenAI’s immediate goals, announced in June, include a household robot able to set and clear a table. One longer-term goal is to build a general A.I. system that can pass the Turing test—can convince people, by the way it reasons and reacts, that it is human. Yet Altman believes that a true general A.I. should do more than deceive; it should create, discovering a property of quantum physics or devising a new art form simply to gratify its own itch to know and to make. </li> <li><strong>] YC Fellowship</strong> - the new program for embryonic startups, in which they receive as much as twenty thousand dollars and the opportunity to consult with a partner over Skype. </li> <li><strong>] ubi experiment</strong>, </li> <li><strong>] epanded RFP</strong> - </li> <li><strong>] DOD -</strong> This spring, Altman met Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense, in a private room at a San Francisco trade show.CARTER “Look, a lot of people out here think we’re big and clunky. And there’s the Snowden overhang thing, too,” he said, referring to the government’s treatment of Edward Snowden. “But we want to work with you in the Valley, tap the expertise.” ALTMAN You’re probably the biggest customer in the world.” The Defense Department’s proposed research-and-development spending next year is more than double that of Apple, Google, and Intel combined. “But a lot of startups are frustrated that it takes a year to get a response from you.” “If you could set up a single point of contact, and make decisions on initiating pilot programs with YC companies within two weeks, that would help a lot.” Chris Lynch, a former Microsoft executive who heads Carter’s digital division, told Altman, “It would have been good to talk about OpenAI.” Altman nodded noncommittally. The 2017 U.S. military budget allocates three billion dollars for human-machine collaborations known as Centaur Warfighting, and a long-range missile that will make autonomous targeting decisions is in the pipeline for the following year.</li> </ol> <li><strong>] his personal "cutbacks" - </strong></li> <ol> <li>] ONLY has 10M in cash, </li> <li>] his "racing" cars (5, including 2 mclarens, an old Tesla, ), </li> <li>] a house in SF and </li> <li>] land in big sur</li> <li>] “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”</li> </ol> <li><strong>] sams ambitions </strong></li> <ol> <li>] Altman is rapidly building out an economy within Silicon Valley that seems intended to essentially supplant Silicon Valley—a guild of hyper-capitalist entrepreneurs who will help one another fix the broken world. Everyone has cautioned him against it. The Valley prizes overweening ambition but expects it to be “rifle-focussed” on making the world’s best houseboat-rental platform or Cognac-delivery service</li> <li>] It’s a measure of Altman’s ambition that he compares YC to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which is also composed of independent units that collaborate, and likewise has a moon-shot division, the X research group. He recently tweeted that YC’s empire had reached fourteen per cent of the value of Alphabet—whose market cap is among the world’s largest—adding, “Long way to go. . . .” It’s a blatantly unfair comparison: YC’s average ownership of its companies, diluted by subsequent venture funding, is just three per cent. Yet Altman told me that, “unlike Google, we grow faster as we get bigger. We could catch them in ten years.”</li> <li>] getting a bigger piece of the startups pie (future financing rounds), </li> <li>] getting into the VC business, conflict with current VC's that </li> <li>] president USA ?</li> </ol> <li><strong>] founders, complaints - about YC ( from participants), </strong></li> <ol> <li>] The venture capitalist Chris Dixon, who admires YC, said, “The founders are so well coached that they know exactly how to reverse-engineer us, down to demonstrating domain expertise and telling anecdotes about their backgrounds that show perseverance and courage.” In the winter batch, the pitches followed an invariable narrative of imminent magnitude: link yourself to a name-brand unicorn (“We’re Uber for babysitting . . . Stripe for Africa . . . Slack for health care”), or, if there’s no apt analogue, say, “X is broken. In the future, Y will fix X. We’re already doing Y.” Then express your premise as a chewy buzzword sandwich: We “leverage technology to achieve personalization in a fully automated way” (translation: individuated shampoo). Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, “we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones.”</li> <li>] YC actually does make its companies better, by teaching them to focus on growth above all, thereby eliminating distractions such as talking to the tech press or speaking at conferences or making cosmetic coding tweaks. YC’s gold standard for revenue growth is ten per cent a week, which compounds to 142x a year. Failing that, well, tell a story of some other kind of growth. On Demo Day, one company announced that it had enjoyed “fifty-per-cent word-of-mouth growth,” whatever that might be. Sebastian Wallin told me that his security company, Castle, raised $1.8 million because “we managed to find a good metric to show growth. We tried tracking installations of our product, but it didn’t look good. So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story.” </li> <li>] The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers. </li> <li>] LINK article=benefits of yc @techcrunch - ] Perhaps the most dispositive theory about YC is that the power of its network obviates other theories. Alumni view themselves as a kind of keiretsu, a network of interlocking companies that help one another succeed. “YC is its own economy,” Harj Taggar, the co-founder of Triplebyte, which matches coders’ applications with YC companies, said. Each spring, founders gather at Camp YC, in a redwood forest north of San Francisco, just to network—tech’s version of the Bohemian Grove, only with more vigorous outdoor urination. When Altman first approached Kyle Vogt, the C.E.O. of Cruise, Vogt had been through YC with an earlier company, so he already knew its lessons. He told me, “I talked to five of my friends who had done YC more than once and said, ‘Was it worth it the second time? Are you likely to receive higher valuations because of the brand, and because you’re plugging into the network?’ Across the board, they said yes.”</li> <li>] There really is no counter-theory. “The knock on YC,” Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, told me, “is that on Demo Day their users are just YC companies, which entirely explains why they’re all growing so fast. But how great to have more than a thousand companies willing to use your product!” It’s not just that YC startups can get Airbnb and Stripe to use their apps; it’s that the network’s alumni honeycomb the Valley’s largest companies. Many of the hundred and twenty-one YC startups that have been acquired over the years have been absorbed by Facebook, Apple, and Google.</li> <li> ]</li> <li><strong>] complaints -</strong> too impersonal, </li> </ol></ol> <h2>[HOW-TO]</h2> <ol> <li>] says something along the lines of a new CEO needs to re found the company, </li> <li>] To keep your employees aligned, he wrote, it’s vital to have definite tasks and goals, to communicate them clearly, and to measure them frequently, and “Asana is the best way to excel in these 3 areas.” When Jack Altman read the post, he texted Sam, “Ouch!” Lattice was pitching itself as the best way to excel in those areas. </li> <li>] “I still think of Nick as an eighteen-year-old frozen in time, and I think he thinks of me the same way.” Sivo said, “I don’t really know what you mean.” “Like a college kid nobody knows or cares about,” Altman said, wistfully.</li> </ol> <h2>[REFERENCE]</h2> <ol> <li>] ,SRC=hn(486)/<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642" target="_blank">comments</a>(302) -</li> <li>] # 6483 - <a href="/view/task?id=6483" target="_blank">CREATE-article# 5312</a> - (this)</li> <li>] # 239 - <a href="/view/person?id=239" target="_blank">Altman, Sam</a> - </li> </ol> <h1 style="text-align: center;"> </h1>