11/9/2023 0 Comments Active boot disk no sam foundof the electronic-payments company Stripe, likened Altman’s brain to the claw machine on a carnival midway: “It roams around but has the ability to plunge very deep when necessary.”Ī blogger recently asked Altman, “How has having Asperger’s helped and hurt you?” Altman told me, “I was, like, ‘Fuck you, I don’t have Asperger’s!’ But then I thought, I can see why he thinks I do. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion. Though he is given to gee-whizzery about anything “super awesome”- Small amounts of radiation are actually good for you! It’s called radiation hormesis!-he has scant interest in the specifics of the apps that many YC companies produce what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. Even in a Valley that worships productivity, he is an outlier, plowing through e-mails and meetings as if strapped to a time bomb, his unblinking stare speeding up colleagues until they sound like chipmunks. Altman declared, “The best idea seems to be just to support Hillary.”Īt a hundred and thirty pounds, Altman is poised as a clothespin, fierce as a horned owl. At Graham’s table, he and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump, then decided to reach out to an affiliated expert: Chris Lehane, a former White House lawyer now at the YC company Airbnb. But, where Graham proposes, Altman disposes. The two men share a close friendship, a religious zeal for YC, and an inexplicable fondness for cargo shorts. When founders came over to talk, he’d train his green eyes on them, listen to their propositions, then crisply observe, “What everyone gets wrong about that is . . .” In 2014, Graham chose Altman-who, at thirty-one, is twenty years his junior-to succeed him as Y Combinator’s president. At the quiet end, Sam Altman was absorbed in private calculations. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power-and the peculiarities-of an island nation.Īt the noisy end of the room, Graham was cheerfully encouraging improbable schemes. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, “This is Silicon Valley, right here.” All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup “accelerator” that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a “unicorn”-Valleyspeak for a billion-dollar company. One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Altman says, “Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy.” Illustration by R.
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