Reflections on Sam Altman's "What I Wish Someone Had Told Me"

On Dec 21, Sam Altman wrote a blog post titled "What I Wish Someone Had Told Me." He lists 17 points with relevance as a guide to not only starting but also successfully running a venture. What is interesting about the post is that this is not the normal internet clickbait list of "Top 10 Ideas to Start a Business." You can tell these are ideas that he has been thinking about a lot lately.

Here is his list:

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
3. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
4. Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.
5. Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
6. Communicate clearly and concisely.
7. Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
8. Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.
9. Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
10. Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
11. Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
12. Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
13. Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
14. Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
15. Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
16. Get back up and keep going.
17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.

Let's dive deeper into some key takeaways and explore their implications.

The Genesis of Great Ventures: Optimism and Obsession

Altman begins with the foundational elements of any successful venture: optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower, and personal connections. This combination is potent. Optimism fuels the journey, obsession drives the focus, and self-belief acts as a shield against naysayers. You have to be a "true believer" and surround yourself with others who are committed to that vision. Because, if you don't believe in the vision, then no one else will.

From Start to Finish: Cohesion, Commitment, and Long-Term Orientation

While starting is about energy and vision, finishing is about execution. Altman emphasizes the importance of cohesive teams, the right mix of calmness and urgency, and an "unreasonable" commitment to the cause. Importantly, he advises a long-term orientation, advocating for a focus on the big picture and not getting bogged down by short-term opinions.

The Power of Audacious Goals and Incentives

I love this. Do hard stuff. Stuff that everyone else thinks is impossible. That's motivating. Altman highlights that teams are more motivated by these challenging yet meaningful tasks rather than by easy, insignificant ones. He also touches upon the superpower of incentives, advising careful consideration in their setup. This aligns with the idea that what gets measured and rewarded gets done.

Resource Allocation and Communication

Stressing the importance of concentrating resources on high-conviction bets, Altman suggests that it's possible to achieve more by doing less but doing it well. He also underscores the importance of clear and concise communication, a vital skill in any leader's toolkit.

Fighting Bureaucracy and Focusing on Outcomes

Yes! In a call to resist bureaucracy and inefficiency, Altman encourages a culture of fighting against these elements. He reminds us that in the end, outcomes are what count, and good processes shouldn't be used to excuse poor results. Good ideas should not follow a chain of command. Everyone has the potential to generate great ideas.

The Importance of Recruitment and Valuing Superstars

Altman places a high emphasis on recruitment, urging leaders to take risks on high-potential individuals and to value evidence of accomplishment as much as intelligence. He also notes the significant impact superstars can have on an organization, provided their net impact is positive.

The Magic of Fast Iteration and the Laws of Business Physics

I would like to hear more about this - what particular experiences he is alluding to here. But I think he is continuing on with his points about the ability to iterate quickly as presented as a crucial business skill, with Altman advising that short-term execution should be swift, even if plans are laid out over decades. I don't know if he's exaggerating here with "decades" - but let's say having plans that have a long term focus. He also cautions against fighting the fundamental principles of business, likening them to the laws of physics. I think these fundamental principles he's referring to here are situations where businesses follow paths of doing things out of a sense of inertia and are not being adaptive.

The Power of Compounding and Perseverance

Again I would like to hear more from his personal experiences here with examples, but Altman is touching on the magical properties of compounding exponentials, especially in business growth, and emphasizes the importance of building a business that gains a compounding advantage with scale. The next part isn't particularly unique, but he ends with a reminder of the importance of resilience, urging readers to get back up and keep going.

Working with Great People

Finally, Altman concludes by stating that one of the best parts of life is working with great people. This not only enhances the quality of work but also enriches the journey.

Conclusion

Sam Altman's post moves beyond the initial steps of starting a business, going through the nuances of nurturing and leading a venture. Altman's advice, while rooted in his extensive experience at Y Combinator and OpenAI resonates, providing a balanced mix of strategy and personal growth. I think it's particularly insightful for those on the entrepreneurial path, offering guidance that is both reflective and grounded in practicality.

I tend to follow what Sam Altman follows fairly closely along with others at OpenAI in order to read the tea leaves about the direction that they believe AI is heading towards. Also, you have to respect a guy who has been able to head up one of the most widely successful software launches in history with a staff that is a fraction of the size of other tech giants. And also a person who has helped create such an innovative environment and an environment of true believers where so many people were willing to quit in the failed attempt to force him out

So that is my interpretation about the post and hopefully he will give more in depth explanations in one of his many speaking engagements or interviews, But suffice it to say, Sam Altman's blog post offers a thoughtful and pragmatic perspective on entrepreneurship.

AI Book Club

I have a new post in my podcast/YouTube channel here. 

I started this podcast almost three years ago, which was significantly before the release of ChatGPT. At the time, there were some open source models out that could be used and Web interfaces like GPT-J and GPT NEO, so there was work being done from Hugging Face, Eleuther.AI and others, but the latest version version from OpenAI was 3.0.

The aim of the podcast was twofold:

1) Measure the progress in large language models 

2) Have some fun with LLMs by using them to have a "discussion" such as people might have in discussing books.

I used different LLMs and did some fine tuning to try and give the AIs unique personalities. I created two different AIs, Marie and Charles, interacting with the program I built - none of which was scripted out other than me having an idea of the topics and questions I wanted to ask. I then ran the text of our conversations through Google's text to voice and video synching Python code that created deep fake renditions for the two video avatars.

All of these versions performed fairly well (at least I thought so at the time), but they did have their shortcomings - many of which I outlined in this video in March of 2022. One of the biggest issues was them making up their own facts about the book we were discussing. At that time, I don't remember anyone using the term "hallucinating" as everyone commonly uses the term now with LLMs, but that's what they were doing.

However, they did create some very original and often times surprising discussion.

In this newest podcast, where we discuss Alice in Wonderland, I added a third AI that I called Beth. LLMs are much better now than when I first started out. Even though everyone likes to talk now about LLM hallucinations. they are much more factually oriented now than what they were two years ago.

Before I was very hesitant to ask them about details about the plot, because they might make up parts of the story that didn't happen, so I would steer the conversation to talking about ideas from the plot, because them being creative about their "interpretation" of what I described works, but it doesn't work if they were creating, for example, characters that never existed in the story.

However, now with the newest LLMs they know the story, they can repeat plot points and comment on them and what they create is not the plot but their "ideas" about the plot and the characters. So it's a much better conversation.

In addition, I'm now taking all of the conversations and creating vector based databases and am working on using MemGPT to give them long term memory so that they can have some continuity over the episodes. This will not only give them consistency I hope, but also because they are making up their own back stories when I ask them what they have been up to, they won't contradict themselves in a current video with something they said they were doing in a previous video.

You can view the latest video or any of the videos here.