Sam Altman x Garry TanNever a Better Time to Do a Startup · 悦己共读整理

Sam Altman: I think if it were possible to get as far from this moment as I can imagine, it was startups were not cool at all.

Garry Tan: Startups are a lot bigger now than they have ever been.

Sam Altman: I think this is going to be the best time in the world to do a startup.

Sam Altman: I think startups are the coolest thing in all of business.

I think startups are really the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant.

Help put relatively more power in the hands of founders and encourage more people to start them.

Sam Altman: What took three months to build at the time that each company built over the whole YC startup could now be done in seven minutes by a coding agent.

I can go start the world’s most ambitious, crazy company.

I can have experts in every field working together.

I can do these very hard technological things that were just impossible.

Sam Altman: I think startups tend to win
when the technology landscape is moving very quickly,
when costs are coming down
when cycle times are short.

But the great startups tend to cluster when the ecosystem shifts and incumbents lose a lot of their advantage.

Sam Altman: I think you just have to be really open to meeting people and not try to optimize too much for, “Is this person going to be my co-founder?” or “Is this person going to be useful to me?”

Just be interested in interesting people and try to help them.

I think the best networks form when people are just genuinely curious and helpful to each other, not transactional.

Over a long period of time, you end up with this group of people that you really trust and who trust you, and then when the right thing comes along, you can do it together.

Sam Altman: Highest confidence piece of advice here is just find a way to be mildly helpful to a lot of people.

Sam Altman: For all of the negatives of the culture of the Bay Area, this is the kind of loose network and the spirit of helping each other.

And this very long-term outlook has been an awesome thing.

Sam Altman: Someone in this room is going to meet someone else that you’re going to start a company with and you’ll meet somebody that’ll introduce you to your spouse.

In some way one of you will help each other now, which will turn into some amazing new thing.

Sam Altman: You’re going to have material abundance, but you will have no freedom. You will have no agency.

So if we say every year, freedom and agency have got to go up.

People have got to be more in control of their time and do more of the stuff they want and more long-term fulfillment.

Sam Altman: You can now do three months of work in 17 minutes, but you better just go do three months of work in three months of work with whatever the new bar for that is.

Sam Altman: It’s all going to work out.

You can make a lot of mistakes. You can fail at stuff.

I wish I could have told myself to have all the drive and the ambition, but just be a little happier along the way and trust that eventually it was going to be okay because it feels so difficult and scary and painful in the moment.

Sam Altman: And I think we’re going to see much more about taste and agency and understanding of the physics of business, like where you can build up a valuable business, how to think about what a good network effect or a good moat looks like versus a fake one.

Sam Altman: But I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.