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Sam Altman

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"Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions." I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. In general, the big companies don't come from pivots, and I think this is most of the reason why. TL;DR Without economic growth, democracy doesn’t work because voters occupy a zero-sum system. The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was “increasing your sales will fix all problems”. This turns out to be another way of phrasing Paul Graham’s point that growth is critical, which is true for all sorts of reasons—for example, justifying high valuations to raise large amounts of capital in the early days, attracting the best people and paying them with equity, providin

There is a recent trend in Silicon Valley towards party rounds—in early financing rounds, instead of raising large amounts of money from a few large investors, companies are instead raising small amounts of money from many small investors. The number of investors in such a round is commonly between 10 and 20, but I’ve seen rounds with over 50 investors. I think the rising popularity of party rounds is bad for companies. Ask some startups how useful their investors are, and you’ll get a variety of responses, but some commonalities emerge. It turns out that investors are generally about as invol

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