Sam Altman knows how to play the startup game. Beyond founding two of his own companies—social network Loopt, which he created at just 20 years old, and OpenAI, which now stands as of the highest valued unicorns of all time—he’s helped launch dozens of other startups as the former president of Y Combinator.
That background has led Altman to his view of the current startup landscape: “chronic disappointment.”
In an interview for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business , Altman sounded off on how he feels prospective founders are falling behind in the era of artificial intelligence .
“My chronic disappointment with MBA students is that they always want to go do the thing that was cool five years ago rather than try something new,” Altman said. “I think this is a great time to go do the new thing.”
What would succumbing to the cool factor look like? Altman says now would be a bad time to “start another copy of OpenAI,” but that “there are many companies that can be built on top of technology that OpenAI has put out into the world that will be much, I hope, bigger and more important than OpenAI.”
Dodging the doomerism
Though Altman has admitted that AI could lead to the apocalypse , he’s quick to shut down a different kind of doomsday: that AI will decimate the job market.
“I don’t think there’s going to be like a job apocalypse in the way that many people talk about,” Altman said. As with finding success starting a new tech company, he simply encourages job seekers to adapt, rather than staying stuck in the past.
“It is totally true that huge numbers of tasks that are done today by people will be done better, cheaper, faster, completely differently by AI. And it’s also true that wide swaths of current jobs—the way they’re done today, at least—will be entirely done by AI,” Altman said.
But that degree of change in any given position’s day-to-day operations is an opportunity, he argues, not a setback.
“If you are heading into the world right now to go work on something, I think you want to be starting your career at a time of the highest degree of change, and you want the most open playing field,” Altman said. “I think people with high potential and drive and ideas and sort of a new way of looking at things and new skills do relatively the best when the ground is shaking the most.”
The school of startups
Altman may have hot takes on MBAs, but he never received a degree himself, having dropped out of Stanford University after two years studying computer science to found Loopt. But that didn’t stop him from getting what he considers to be an MBA’s worth of education.
“I was sad to drop out of school because I loved school, and I was also worried I just was not going to keep learning stuff,” Altman said. “And one of the coolest things for me about doing a startup is, it was—and still is—the highest rate of learning environment I had ever been in.”
Addressing the room of Stanford students, Altman passed on a piece of wisdom he received as a young startup founder: “You will get an entire MBA in one month of doing a startup.”
“I don’t have an MBA, so I can’t say whether or not that’s true, but I did learn a lot very quickly about business and product and customers and sales and all of this other stuff that has been very important to the rest of my career that I think I just wouldn’t have been able to learn in school,” he added.
