Sam Altman x Cory Levy at Internapalooza从 YC 的三个月到不外包判断 · 主题式共读笔记

Sam Altman: The big thing that has changed is what we expected people to do in three months at YC with great effort and five people is now like 17 minutes and Codex.

If you can make a whole startup in 17 minutes, the rate at which you can test ideas and make small incremental progress and get feedback is just very different.

There’s a very different feedback loop people should get going.

Sam Altman: The easiest way to market something is to make something that’s so good or so new that people spontaneously tell all their friends and it becomes a ChatGPT moment.

I don’t think you can make that a strategy you depend on.

What worked the most often is a very hands-on, almost all sales-driven, very little marketing-driven approach to getting the first few hundred users, and then listening to them about what they like about it, how they talk about it, and building a marketing thing around that.

This is the YC advice: do things that don’t scale.

Sam Altman: Whatever the right answer to that question is, it’s not going to be told to you by anyone at a chat at an event like this.

By the time it is obvious enough to say with some degree of confidence to a room of hundreds of people, you’re not going to have a unique lens on it.

When we were doing OpenAI, no one would have told us to start OpenAI. There’s a 0% chance whoever was speaking would have said you should start an AGI effort.

Don’t take startup ideas from other people.

Sam Altman: You can have a descendant of ChatGPT watch your computer screen, watch every meeting, record every call, and have perfect context of your whole life.

You choose what information you want it to have, but you can connect it to your texts or email or docs or Slack or whatever.

And then you kind of have this thing that is not making decisions for you.

It’ll say, “Maybe here’s another idea,” or “I think you’re making a mistake here; you should consider this,” or “I can do this thing for you to help.”

Sam Altman: A lot of young people try to work on 17 projects at the same time, and then other people say, “You can’t do that. You’ve got to focus. You’ve got to go all in on one thing.”

I think that’s bad advice. I think it’s fine to work on multiple projects for a little while because you don’t really know what’s going to work.

You don’t really know what you’re going to be interested in. You don’t really know what’s going to be a good fit.

As soon as you figure out what your highest conviction thing is, that is when you’re supposed to do the painful work of getting free from the other stuff and going all in.

Sam Altman: For the last decade and a half, the highest confidence piece of advice for that question is: move to the Bay Area. I’m not sure if that’s still the case.

I always have thought the internet should decentralize that somehow, but it has definitely been the case that you just want to put yourself in a high collision environment and meet a lot of people.

Sam Altman: Doing things that are unpopular, but you have some reason to understand that they’re correct.

It’s not just dumb belief. These are the highest leverage moments, and you have to take them when they come.

We understood in 2016 that deep learning was working and getting better with scale.

Sam Altman: Surprisingly often across many different kinds of systems in the world, there are unusually interesting emergent properties with scale.

YC is an example of this. You scale up the YC batch and there’s a strong network effect. Weird stuff happens, like good stuff.

Companies themselves have very strange returns to scale that people often underestimate. And it turns out that neural networks also have surprising properties at scale.

Sam Altman: I am a huge believer that if the single thing you do in your career is identify and bet on young, unproven talent, you’ll be wildly successful.

This was true at YC. This is a big part of how we succeed at OpenAI.

Sam Altman: One of the surprising things to me about running YC was just how much of a numbers game that is.

The reason that YC partners get so good at picking founders is we just see more data points than anybody else, and it is like a practice game.

I look for high energy, quick thinkers, quick doers, very smart, strongly held opinions, and a high degree of determination. But there’s a lot of people like that.

There’s something else about, “This person has a very unique perspective on the world, and I’m going to bet on that,” and that feels easier to learn with practice.