Letter #139: Sam Altman (2017)
Founder of Something New | Greg
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Yesterday, Sam Altman was unceremoniously fired from OpenAI. Greg Brockman announced his departure shortly thereafter. Today, I’d like to share with you the essay Sam wrote in 2017 detailing why Greg is the ideal cofounder. I hope they start something new together.
Today’s letter is an essay Sam Altman wrote about what the ideal cofounder looks like: Greg. While he had previously cofounded his own company and evaluated thousands of cofounders as a Partner and later President of Y Combinator, he didn’t actually have an answer until he met Greg Brockman, who he founded OpenAI with. In this essay, Sam uses Greg to describe the ideal cofounder, who commits quickly and fully, always kept moving things forward, is a world class recruiter, is incredibly open to feedback, took on non-technical roles despite being an engineer, served as Chief Optimist, and is dedicated to finding a solution to all problems, no matter how difficult. And as we found out yesterday, when Sam was unceremoniously fired from OpenAI, Greg quit in solidarity with Sam despite the Board asking him to stay.
Beyond the recent news, this essay is fascinating because rarely do we get an opportunity to see how a how an investor evaluates a founder. Almost every VC talks about the importance of team and founder, but essentially no venture investment memo ever has more than three lines on team/founder. But here, we have a seasoned investor in Sam Altman laying out exactly what he values, qualitatively, in a founder (at the time of this essay’s writing, Sam had not yet joined OpenAI full-time as CEO).
Sam Altman is the founder of Something New. Probably in AI. Hopefully with Greg. Most recently, he was the CEO of OpenAI, which he served as a founding board member of, helped grow into a $90bn company, and catalyzed the revolution and reacceleration of an industry with. Prior to OpenAI, Sam was at Y Combinator, which he joined as a part-time partner in 2011 and went on to become President of, before expanding his role to President of YC Group and then transitioning to Chairman of the Board. In 2014, while at YC, he served as CEO of Reddit for eight days. Before joining YC, Sam had founded Loopt, a location-based social networking application that was part of the first YC batch in 2005 and acquired in 2012. In 2009, YC Founder Paul Graham identified a 24 year old Sam Altman as one of the five most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years alongside Steve Jobs, TJ Rodgers, Larry & Sergey, and Paul Buchheit.
On a personal note, Sam is one of the IFOs I’m featuring that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. And while our meeting was brief and he won’t remember me, he helped me think through one of the biggest decisions of my life. I’m excited to see what he and Greg do next.
I hope you enjoy this letter as much as I did!
Related Resources
Sam Altman Compilation (1,008 pages)
Y Combinator
OpenAI
PG’s Five Founders
Letter
A lot of people ask me what the ideal cofounder looks like. I now have an answer: Greg Brockman.
Every successful startup I know has at least one person who provides the force of will to make the startup happen. I’d thought a lot about this in the abstract while advising YC startups, but until OpenAI I hadn’t observed up close someone else drive the formation of a startup.
OpenAI wouldn’t have happened without Greg. He commits quickly and fully to things. I organized a group dinner early on to talk about what such an organization might look like, and drove him home afterwards. Greg asked me questions for the first half of the drive back to San Francisco, then declared he was in, and started planning logistics for the rest of the drive.
From then on he was fully in, with an average email response time of about 5 minutes to anything. Elon and I were both busy with day jobs, but Greg kept everything moving forward with imperfect information and a very high-latency connection.
He recruited the founding team. Greg is a world-class recruiter (he plans every detail of interviews, heavily researches candidate’s backgrounds, sends thoughtful and persistent followups, and so on), and I now believe even more strongly that someone on the founding team has to be an amazing recruiter.
He’s incredibly open to feedback. Large or small, he’s always willing to hear it, never gets offended, and processes it very quickly. I once suggested to him that he wasn't communicating a bold enough vision for the organization, and the next time I heard him talk about it (and every time since) it was a perfectly calibrated explanation of how we were going to succeed at something that really mattered. Even on non-traditional ideas, like when I suggested he co-lead the organization with Ilya, he was always open-minded and thoughtful.
Greg also played the role of ‘non-technical cofounder’, which is a misnomer because most people who know him will say something like “Greg is the most productive engineer I know”. But he took on all the non-technical roles at the beginning, defining the culture, making offers, organizing offsites, letting everyone work out of his apartment, ordering supplies, cleaning up after meals, etc. It's important to have someone great in this role at a small startup—many people gloss over it.
Without someone dedicated to finding a solution to all problems, no matter how difficult, eventually a large problem will come along and kill you while you’re still weak. Founding teams need a Chief Optimist to rally everyone to press on despite the difficulties, and it’s always hard on that person because they can’t really lean on anyone else in the hardest times.
You for sure need great technical talent on a founding team, but make sure you also have someone like Greg. If they’re the same person, then you’ve hit the jackpot.
Wrap-up
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