Sam Altman: The Unpopular Path to Great Investments

Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, said the best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look popular. He learned this from two Silicon Valley figures: Paul Graham and Peter Thiel.

Altman said following the crowd can work to a point. The real upside comes from picking companies that seem unpopular in the moment.

Altman also reflected on his time at Y Combinator, the startup incubator Graham cofounded. Graham taught him that being a startup investor is like being a flight instructor. Founders need hands-on guidance, not lectures.

Altman said the lesson came back to him after OpenAI's GPT-4 release. The company realized it was on an exponential improvement path and started calling cloud providers and chip fabs for compute. Most said no.

The experience reminded him of fundraising for an early-stage startup.