sgoel9/sam_altman_essays huggingface dataset:
The United Slate
2017-07-12

I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also to find someone to run a ballot initiative focused on affordable housing in the state. A team of aligned people has a chance to make a real change.

I believe in creating prosperity through technology, economic fairness, and maintaining personal liberty.

We are in the middle of a massive technological shift—the automation revolution will be as big as the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. We need to figure out a new social contract, and to ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes.

Today, we have massive wealth inequality, little economic growth, a system that works for people born lucky, and a cost of living that is spiraling out of control. What we've been trying for the past few decades hasn't been working—I think it's time to consider some new ideas.

More information about the principles and policies I believe in is at the link below.

http://unitedslate.samaltman.com
Join the YC Software Team
2017-05-19

If you want to get funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team is a great hack to get there.

The YC software team is a small group of hackers in SF that write the software that makes all the parts of YC work.

As a member of the software team, you'll get full access to the YC program, just like founders do. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to follow and learn from hundreds of companies. You'll meet the best people in the startup world and get exposed to the best startup ideas.

Software is how we can scale YC, and the limits of that are probably further out than most people think.

You can apply here: http://bit.ly/1Od0T2l.
Quora
2017-04-21

I'm a strong believer in the importance of the internet in helping people to share knowledge and learn from each other. So I’m delighted to share, on behalf of YC Continuity, that we’re investing alongside Collaborative Fund in Quora.

Quora is doing extremely well. They now have more than 190 million monthly unique visitors, almost doubling from a year ago. The combination of their ever-improving machine learning and the increasing amount of knowledge shared means the product gets better as it gets bigger. The content I see from Quora constantly gets more personalized for me.

I also believe they have some of the highest-quality user-generated content on the internet, and a real chance at being one of the few places that contain all human knowledge. The engineering challenges between here and there are great, but if there’s a team and product to bet on, this is one we're backing with confidence.

Adam is one of the few names that people consistently mention when discussing the smartest CEOs in Silicon Valley. And he has a very long-term focus, which has become a rare commodity in tech companies these days.

My relationship with Quora goes back to May 2014 when the company participated in YC. Funding an already successful company was an unusual experiment for us. At that point we didn't have any specific thoughts on how YC might invest in graduates from our program and help them scale. In a way, Quora was the inspiration for deciding we needed to figure out how to do that, and we launched YC Continuity in October 2015.

As an early admirer of Quora and returning investor, I’m thrilled to see the progress they've made and excited to be part of what they do next.
Tech Workers' Values
2017-03-31

For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives.

As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights.

We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures. We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.

Tech companies are very receptive to their employees' influence. We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn't the perfect metaphor for this, but it's not far off.

We are planning to hold a meeting on the evening of April 9th in the Bay Area. Please sign up here or message us at 415 569-2751 on Signal if you'd like to come.

We're going try to keep this first group smaller than 50 people so that everyone can actually participate. If more people than that want to attend, we'll try to select a diverse group of people from a large set of companies. If this event seems to go well, we expect to host similar meetings in the future.

--Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff
Keep the Internet Open
2017-03-14

The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon.

The internet is a public good, and I believe access should be a basic right. We've seen such great innovation in software because the internet has been a level playing field. People have been able to succeed by merit, not the regulatory weight of incumbency.

It seems best to keep it regulated like a common carrier. [1] Doing this allows the government to ensure a level playing field, impose privacy regulations, and subsidize access for people who can't afford it.

But this idea is under attack, and I'm surprised the tech community isn't speaking out more forcefully. Although many leading tech companies are now the incumbents, I hope we'll all remember that openness helped them achieve their great success. It could be disastrous for future startups if this were to change--openness is what made the recent wave of innovation happen.

We need to make our voices heard. We won this fight once before, and we can win it again. I really hope an activist or tech leader will step up and organize this fight (and I'm happy to help!). It's important for our future.

[1] There's an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge a metered rate based on usage. I'm not sure whether I agree with this, but in principle it seems ok. That's how we pay for public utilities.

What's clearly not OK is taking it further--charging different services different rates based on their relationships with ISPs. You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances.

Emailed comment from Alan Kay:

Yes -- in fact, the original notion about all this was to be in the same spirit as the 1936 Electrical and Telephone Federal Act which was specifically aimed at rural areas that the utilities didn't want to spend money to reach, so the fed mandated "power and phone" as a kind of universal right. This has also been a theme of the EFF. The basic impulse was also one of the drivers behind Carnegie's huge support of the free library system in the US (the whole story there is interesting, including some of the high minded stipulations in the Carnegie bequests, which I've on occasion tried to get the Internet communities to buy off on).

Every Carnegie library had to have two special rooms -- one just for children, and the other where people could be taught to read. Part of the Carnegie money for the libraries supported the reading teachers and sessions. Carnegie was an immigrant and child laborer who could read a little. One of his earliest bosses would open his home library to his workers on Saturdays. Carnegie used this to raise himself up, and never forgot how it happened. (He was also one of the few truly rich people ever who said he was going to give it all away to benefit the civilization around him, and actually did it.)

P.S. I wanted to put the above comment on your blog but there was no button to allow this ...
Greg
2017-03-07

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.
$1 Million VotePlz Sweepstakes
2016-09-26

The 2016 US Presidential election feels like the most important one so far in my lifetime. No one able to vote in the US should be sitting this one out—we have a major choice to make.

With some friends, I helped start VotePlz to make it easier for young people to participate—technology has moved forward but registration has not (for example, young people generally don’t have printers or stamps, and many states still don’t have online registration).

A lot of people are working hard to get their friends registered to vote, and we wanted to do something for them.

So today, we’re announcing a VotePlz sweepstakes with a million dollars in prizes.

Some of the prizes are $50,000 in student loan payoffs or scholarship.

After you check your registration, you get a referral link. For each person you get to check their registration, you’ll get one entry into the sweepstakes (up to 25).

You can see how you’re doing here and how your school is doing here.

Also we just launched an iOS app that lets you register just by taking a photo of your Driver’s License, and easily share VotePlz with your contacts.

We need your help. Please check your registration (https://plz.vote) and share this with your friends and family!
Don't Read The Comments
2016-08-23

I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning:

I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes the general form of "ugh, all these new startups suck, everything good has already been started."

It sucks to have haters, but every founder who now runs a huge company faced this for a long time. Please don't let it get you down (some criticism is useful, and that you should pay attention to, but that's not normally what gets people down). The sooner you can develop a thick skin for this, the better.

Unless the world ends soon, the most valuable company the world will ever see has not yet been started. 
 Most startups will fail, so you can say everything sucks and be right most of the time. Although you never lose money with that strategy, you never make any either. 
 The best startups take a long time to be recognized as good. Go read the things people wrote about Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc in their first few years of existence. Overnight success usually takes a decade of uphill work. 
 YC itself faced this for a long time. We turned out to do ok. 
 A friend of mine likes to say "there are two kinds of people in the world--the people that build the future, and the people who write posts on the internet about why they'll fail". Keep trying to be in former category.

Unless the world ends soon, the most valuable company the world will ever see has not yet been started.

Most startups will fail, so you can say everything sucks and be right most of the time. Although you never lose money with that strategy, you never make any either.

The best startups take a long time to be recognized as good. Go read the things people wrote about Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc in their first few years of existence. Overnight success usually takes a decade of uphill work.

YC itself faced this for a long time. We turned out to do ok.

A friend of mine likes to say "there are two kinds of people in the world--the people that build the future, and the people who write posts on the internet about why they'll fail". Keep trying to be in former category.

The people who have said there is nothing new left to do in the world have been wrong every time. Don't let their lack of imagination hold you back.
'We're in a Bubble'
2016-06-15

A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10 years:

2007, Coding Horror -- Welcome to Dot-Com Bubble 2.0. “You might argue that the new bubble has been in effect since mid-2006, but the signs are absolutely unmistakable now.”

2008, Gigaom -- Is Linkedin worth $1B? “The valuation of $1 billion – not as insane as the [$15 billion] valuation placed by Microsoft on Facebook – was jaw dropping.”

2009, Wall Street Journal -- The Bursting of the Silicon Valley Bubble (2009 Edition). “Some think that this round of Silicon Valley blowups might be more damaging than the last.”

2010, Daily Beast -- Facebook's $56 Billion Valuation and More Signs of the Tech Apocalypse. “One analyst predicts Facebook will easily be worth $200 billion by 2015. Right on! And by 2020 it could be the first company with a $1 zillion market value, so buy-buy-buy, everybody!”

and, famously, Signal v. Noise, Facebook is not worth $33,000,000,000. "But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop."

2011, The Economist -- The New Tech Bubble (cover story). “Some time after the dotcom boom turned into a spectacular bust in 2000, bumper stickers began appearing in Silicon Valley imploring: ‘Please God, just one more bubble.’ That wish has now been granted.”

2012, The Guardian -- Facebook’s IPO and the new tech bubble. “So yes, the collapse is beginning even as the bubble is filling. Some of us call this fun.”

2013, Gawker / ValleyWag -- The $4 Billion Secret: Don’t Bother Making any Money. “[Pinterest and Snapchat] were both recently, insanely valued by investors at around $4 billion . . . how is this not a bubble, and why aren't more people saying this is crazy?”

2014, Wall Street Journal -- David Einhorn: ‘We Are Witnessing Our Second Tech Bubble in 15 Years’. “ ‘There is a clear consensus that we are witnessing our second tech bubble in 15 years,’ said Mr. Einhorn.”

2015, TechCrunch -- The Tech Industry is in Denial, but the Bubble is About to Burst. “The fact that we are in a tech bubble is in no doubt. . . The tech startup space at the moment resembles the story of the emperor with no clothes.”
Housing in the Bay Area
2016-05-26

Jerry Brown has proposed legislation that would allow a lot more housing to be built in the Bay Area, and hopefully significantly reduce the cost of housing here. More supply should lead to lower prices.

I believe that lowering the cost of housing is one of the most important things we can do to help people increase their quality of life and to reduce wealth inequality.

A huge part of the problem has been that building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion; even when developments comply with local zoning, they can still be vetoed or stalled by local planning commissions, lawsuits, or ballot measures.

This type of discretionary approval isn't common in most of the US, and Governor Brown's legislation helps align California with most states. His bill would make it so multi-family buildings are automatically approved by right as long as they comply with local zoning, and have 5-20% affordable units--the percentage depending on location and subsidy offered.

The bill is currently being debated in California's State Legislature as part of the upcoming annual budget, which will be voted on on June 15. If you'd like to help pass this bill, consider calling the members below, as well as the Governor, in support of the Budget Trailer Bill--it only takes a few minutes [1], and it will likely hinge on their support.

Assemblyman Phil Ting (SF): (916) 319-2019

Senator Mark Leno (SF): (916) 651-4011

Senator Kevin de León (Los Angeles): (916) 651-4024

Assemblyman Rendon (Los Angeles): (916) 319-2063

Governor Jerry Brown: (916) 445-2841
Asana
2016-03-30

I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

One of the things I’ve learned about companies is that 1) clear tasks and goals, 2) clearly communicated, and 3) with clear and frequent measurement are very important to success. Most companies fail at all 3 of these, and they become more important as companies get bigger. Asana is the best way to excel in these 3 areas.

“You make what you measure” is really true, and most companies don’t measure well at all. I spend a lot of time talking to people who work at startups, and most employees feel like they don’t have a good sense of what specifically the company needs to get done and how all the tasks are going. Better work tracking leads to better collaboration and better decision-making.

Another thing I’ve learned investing in startups is how important it is to have some users that really love a product (instead of liking it pretty much). Asana has the level of product love that all great companies have in common. As a small example, their recurring revenue has been incredibly sticky and more than doubled every year.

Asana is the kind of lever that could someday massively increase the productivity of hundreds of millions of people around the world. There’s not only an opportunity for Asana to be a huge company, but also for Asana to materially increase the output for the planet—somewhat amazingly, software has not yet eaten this important part of the world.

Finally, Asana has an incredible team that, as far as I can tell as an outsider, really believes in the mission and loves the work environment (the Glassdoor reviews, something I check before every late-stage investment, are among the best I’ve ever seen).

These are all the ingredients that go into the development of an incredibly impactful and valuable company. I’m very happy to be along for the ride.
Hard Tech is Back
2016-03-11

First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future.

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”. While we disagree with this premise—many of the most important companies start out looking trivial—we want to be clear that we’re actively looking to fund more hard tech companies, and would love to see more get started.

At YC, we started funding these sorts of companies in earnest in 2014, to widespread commentary that this was a silly waste of time. Cruise, which we funded that winter, is getting acquired by GM. From the Summer 2014 batch, 3 of the 4 companies who have raised the most money since graduating YC are “hard tech” companies.

We expect many more big wins. The YC model works much better for these sorts of companies ﻿than most people, including ourselves, thought.

So, if you’re thinking about starting one, we’d like to talk. And we think we can help. (You’ll probably find a lot of other people willing to help too, although unfortunately you’ll still face major fundraising challenges. But in many ways, it’s easier to start a hard company than an easy company—more people want to join the mission.)

Leave the Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash and the effect it’s going to have on the fundraising environment to other people—it’s boring, and history will forget those people anyway.  There has never been a better time to take a long-term view and use technology to solve major problems, and we’ve never needed the solutions more than we do right now.

Different YC partners have different interests, but I’m particularly excited about AI (both general AI and narrow AI applied to specific industries, which seems like the most obvious win in all of startups right now), biotech, and energy.

We hope to hear from you.
Before Growth
2016-01-15

We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme—startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any strong idea about what they want to build.

In the first few weeks of a startup’s life, the founders really need to figure out what they’re doing and why. Then they need to build a product some users really love. Only after that they should focus on growth above all else.

A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with ‘growth hacking’. That sort of works—at least, it will fool investors for awhile until they start digging into retention numbers—but eventually the music stops.

I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.

The very best technology companies sometimes take awhile to figure out exactly what they’re doing, but when they do, they usually pass that binary test before turning all their energy to growth. It’s the critical ingredient for companies that do really well [1], and if you don’t figure it out, no amount of growth hacking will make you into a great company.

As a side note, startups that don’t first figure out a product some users love also seem to rarely develop the sense of mission that the best companies have.

[1] The other thing that these companies have, and that also usually gets figured out early, is some sort of a monopoly.