The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 295 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Altman: Startup investing resembles addictive slot machines with rare 1000x returns
“Most of the time you lose one extra money, but occasionally you do get to make a hundred or a thousand X, and that for the same reason slot machines are so satisfying, is incredibly addictive.”
Altman: 80% of investors outsource 80% of decisions to other investors
“I would say 80% of investors outsource 80% of their decision making to what other people think about an investment opportunity, but the problem is everyone does that, and so there's this weird schooling effect where a company gets hot for no discernible reason…”
Altman: Open network access is among the top secrets of YC's success
“This idea that we're available and we're open I think this was in the two or three most important secrets of YC. This was something that we did that was really different. Other people hadn't done it before.”
Altman: Investor leverage over founders is gone and won't return soon
“The network has gotten big enough that the asymmetry that used to exist Where investors had a lot of leverage is gone, and I don't think it will come back anytime soon.”
Altman: Best investments either lacked other investors or felt incredibly expensive
“The very best investments I've made have either been a ridiculous deal because no one else wanted to invest, or a deal that felt incredibly expensive. The more I was willing to sort of overpay in my mind to invest in a company, often the better it did.”
Altman: It is easier today to start a hard company than an easy company
“Speaking of the really big companies, I think, I don't know if this was always true, I suspect it may have been, but I think today, it is easier to start a hard company than an easy company.”
Altman: Every expected YC success that failed lacked a mission-driven founder
“If we look at our own success and failures in our portfolio of YC, ah, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn't the company, the founder, did not have this deep sense of mission.”
Altman in 2018: Virtual reality isn't a trend because headsets sit unused
“If you contrast that to virtual reality, everyone talks about it as the next trend. It may be in the future. But today, if you talk to people who have VR headsets they don't use them every hour. They don't use them every day. Most of them don't use them every …”
Altman: Studies show investors should always exercise pro-rata in top-VC uprounds
“Several venture firms have done very sophisticated studies of this, and they've all come to the following conclusion, which is if the company is raising an upround led by a good VC, say a top quartile VC, you should always exercise prorata. And if you do that …”
Altman: Crowdfunded token raises will prove why securities laws exist
“I think this idea that, like, everyone is going to just raise money from the crowd, like, I think we'll find out that we have securities laws for a reason, and that we want some level of that”
Altman: YC strongly prefers multi-founder teams with a technical founder
“Where I've seen that go wrong the most often is then the ability to attract, evaluate, and retain technical talent. And so, we have a strong, strong preference. For founding teams that have at least one technical founder. We also have a strong preference for t…”
Altman: The Best Companies Start with a TAM of Nearly Zero
“Yeah, I think, ah, you know, the most interesting companies start with a TAM of nearly zero, and it's like, ah, very bad investors are the ones that are super focused on the TAM of today. Very good investors are focused on the TAM of 10 years from now.”
Altman: VR in 2018 Is in the Palm Pilot Era, Not iPhone
“Doesn't mean that VR will not be big someday, but this is, you know, I don't think you can make a high conviction bet on starting a VR company today, at least that the, or at least that the TAM will be huge. It still feels like we're at the Palm Pilot, not the…”
Altman: YC faced zero competition investing in early hard tech startups
“We were able to just go pick out in the world the best quantum computing company, the best self-driving company, Which recently got acquired by GM. The best nuclear fusion company, the best synthetic biology company, just all the way down the list. And no one …”
Altman: Successful blitzscaling requires perfecting product quality before scaling demand
“The number one most important insight about how to blitz scale is that the good kind of blitz scaling is when you are not having to generate demand as you go, but that you first got the product right.”
Altman: YC prevented founders from making Silicon Valley's biggest premature scaling errors
“We try to beat that idea out of people during YC and thus, most of the people, mistakes in Silicon Valley of that sort in the last decade have not been ours.”
Altman: Overstretched VCs no longer mentor founders one-on-one on culture
“The model used to be that you would go through YC, And then you get a board member who would only take, you know, eight boards and would spend a couple days a month with you and do things like help you build the culture as the company scales, but just the dyna…”
Altman: Nothing replaces the combination of working smart and long hours
“I, you know, you can, people talk about working smarter all they want. There's nothing that makes up for, like, working smarter and a lot of hours.”
Altman: Silicon Valley's startup dominance will weaken relatively quickly
“And if I disagree with anything, it would be how quickly that will spread outside of Silicon Valley. I think it may happen relatively quickly. So there's still a question of how long, there's still a question of how long does Silicon Valley Remain the absolute…”
Altman: Leaders who eliminate all chaos never build great companies
“People that run these perfectly non-chiotic organizations somehow never build great companies. So, so the trade-off is we're going to accept a little bit of chaos in exchange for a shot at one of these massive great companies, and founders just have to sell th…”
Altman: Scaleups must hire for values first, aptitude second, skills third
“My version of this is you want to hire for values first, aptitude second, and skills third. And I think the problem with most executive recruiters is that they reverse that order.”
Altman: Evaluate hires by their net effect on total organizational output
“The general framework That I think about when building, when adding people to a team, which is I think what defines culture, is what is going to be this person's net effect on the output vector of the organization? And there are people who are brilliant and ca…”
Altman: Losing inner-circle information access drives most early startup employee departures
“Certainly when you get to the stage where people that were used to knowing everything don't know everything, ah, that,
I think more early employees leave over that than anything else, and it's really tough to say what to do about that.
it's people that have…”
Altman: Doubling salaries to hire faster is impossible to reverse later
“The one mistake that I think companies really make in this is they decide that they need a lot of people, they can't get them, and so they're going to just, like, double salaries or triple salaries. They're just gonna, like, start way overpaying for people, an…”
Altman: YC's top-performing startups consistently grant heavy employee equity
“But we've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies, and the ones where the investors do the best, end up giving a lot of stock out to employees year after year after year.”
Altman: Seed Founders Seeking Personal Liquidity Usually Fail
“Founders that were obsessed with their own personal liquidity when the company had nothing turned out to like fail most of the time. And so investors learned that if founders pushed on this in the seed round,
It was a very, very bad sign.”
Altman: Never start M&A talks unless willing to sell low
“As a general rule, don't start any acquisition conversation, unless you're willing to sell, ah, for a pretty low number.”
Altman: A bad hire among the first three employees kills the company
“In fact, a lot of the companies that I've been very involved with that have had a very bad first hire in the first three or so employees never recover from it. It just kills the company.”
Altman: Chesky asked if candidates would work with one year to live
“He used to ask people before he hired them at Airbnb if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they had one year left to live.”
Altman: Candidates weighing McKinsey against an early-stage startup rarely work out
“If someone's choosing between like McKinsey and joining your startup very unlikely that that person's going to work out at the startup.”
Altman: Investors rarely do much despite big promises
“Investors sort of like write the check. And then despite a lot of big promises don't usually do that much, sometimes they do. But your employees are really the ones that build the company over years and years.”
Altman: Boards rarely add strategic value beyond serving as milestone forcing functions
“Boards add value to business strategy only rarely. But very frequently you can use them as a forcing function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones.”
Altman: Evaluate nascent hardware platforms by daily engagement, not shipments
“And so I would ignore total shipments for VR and AR, and I would wait until it gets to the point where someone builds a device or software that once people get it, they use it a lot of every day.”
Altman: Incumbents struggle more to hire tech talent than vice versa
“It is harder for existing companies to get good technology people than it is for good technology people to learn about other industries.”
Altman: Working hard early in your career to compound gains is underrated
“I do think that working hard early in your career to get the leverage and the compounding effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I never got.”
Altman: Founders should quit only after running out of ideas
“And a framework that I have for when to give up and when to keep working is it should be an internal, not an external decision. If people aren't Using it or if people are saying it's bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to…”
Altman: Burnout is caused by failure and lack of momentum, not overwork
“At least in my own experience, what I found is that burnout actually comes from failing and things not working. Momentum is really energizing. The lack of momentum is super draining.”
Sam Altman: History belongs to builders, not thought leadership conference attendees
“I think history belongs to the doers, and I think you should Take a risk. Actually do something. Don't just sit around and talk and organize and bring together groups and go to thought leadership conferences and whatever it is these people spend their time on …”
Altman: Really big markets are bad for startups
“You know, really big markets are bad for startups, not good.”
Altman: The Bay Area remains the best place to find co-founders
“Like, I think, I don't know if this is still gonna be true for the next 10 years. I suspect it will be, but the best thing you could do if you wanted to, like, find your people to do a startup with was to move to the Bay Area. You just, like, magic happened. Y…”
Altman: OpenAI's open-source model will run locally and surprise people
“I think it will be, like, much better than you're hoping for, and the ability to, like, use it to run incredibly powerful models locally is gonna, like, really, really surprise people on what's possible.”
Altman predicts AI will shift from turn-based chat to proactive persistent companions
“You will have this, like, entity that gets to know you, that connects to all your stuff, and that is, like, proactively helping you. It'll, it won't just be like you send a message and it sends you one back, but it'll, like, be running all the time. It'll be l…”
Altman: GPT-5 will lack complete reasoning and real-time video integration
“We won't get all the way here with GPT-V, but eventually we do want one integrated model that can, like, reason really hard when it needs to and generate, like, real-time video when it needs to do that.”
Altman: OpenAI is focused on making ChatGPT the best super-assistant
“We are going to try to make the best super assistant out of ChatGPT that we can. We're going to Add the things that we think we need to add to that but that is, like, one small part of the opportunity in front of us, and it makes us sad when people are like, I…”
Altman: OpenAI had no defensibility strategy for ChatGPT in its early days
“It took us a long time to figure out how to answer the defensibility question for ChatGPT. We had built this thing, and for a long time, the only defensibility was, like, we had the only product out in the market. And then we kind of, like, a brand that starte…”
Altman: AI enables the third major computing interface revolution, led by Jony Ive
“I think we've only had kind of two big revolutions in computer interfaces, really, in the last, like, 50 years. We had the, you know, keyboard and mouse and screen, and then we had touch and phones, and the opportunity to do a new one doesn't come along that o…”
Altman predicts small teams will achieve step-function productivity gains from AI
“One of the things that will feel most different about
These next 10 years versus these last 10 years is how much a single person or a small group of people with a lot of agency can get done, and that is a bigger deal than it sounds like because coordination co…”
Altman: Never Looked at Colleges or Big-Tech Resumes for YC Applications
“When I was, like, reading YC applications, I would, like, never look at the resume items. You know, you worked at, like, Google, or went to this college, or I never cared. I would always go right to, like, what's the most impressive stuff you've done, and then…”