I enjoyed this post. Specifically, the storytelling at the beginning was engaging and made me curious to see where the story goes. I wonder if you could share more about what the “most important” questions were? Do you have an idea how Sam was able to jump to the main issues, what might be his mental model for that? (If I were to guess, I’d pick his reasoning about market that your startup was in and its potential for 10-100x growth)
I would like to read more about the interview itself and your conclusions afterwards. How did you apply the experience from that startup to your next project?
Those are perfectly reasonable questions to ask but I’d rather not go into the details. Starting a startup requires you to bet hard on complex chaotic uncertain situations. I don’t want to paint anyone in a bad light unfairly.
When I look back at this interview and read Sam Altman’s blog the common themes which keep appearing are speed, scale and leverage. In our situation, he wasn’t just looking for exponential growth. He was looking for exponential growth that was fast even by the standards of exponential growth. The general impression I got (these are my words, not his) was “can you add another zero in a year” followed by “why can’t you do it in three months”.
Thank you for the explanation and sharing more context.
The “why can’t you do it in three months” reminds me of similar strategy/challenge in Thiel’s Zero to one, where you ask yourself what you want to achieve in 10 years and then question/challenge that with “how can I do this in 6 months?” (paraphrasing). Definitely and interesting and potentially valuable perspective but also very demanding and sometimes with unacceptable tradeoffs (e.g. long term health sacrifice after working too hard for too long). The other interpretation is that it’s a good filter/test to show whether one thought deeply about strategy and constraints—if that’s the case, you’ll have a clear answer and increase the signal that you really considered the solution space.
I enjoyed this post. Specifically, the storytelling at the beginning was engaging and made me curious to see where the story goes. I wonder if you could share more about what the “most important” questions were? Do you have an idea how Sam was able to jump to the main issues, what might be his mental model for that? (If I were to guess, I’d pick his reasoning about market that your startup was in and its potential for 10-100x growth)
I would like to read more about the interview itself and your conclusions afterwards. How did you apply the experience from that startup to your next project?
Those are perfectly reasonable questions to ask but I’d rather not go into the details. Starting a startup requires you to bet hard on complex chaotic uncertain situations. I don’t want to paint anyone in a bad light unfairly.
When I look back at this interview and read Sam Altman’s blog the common themes which keep appearing are speed, scale and leverage. In our situation, he wasn’t just looking for exponential growth. He was looking for exponential growth that was fast even by the standards of exponential growth. The general impression I got (these are my words, not his) was “can you add another zero in a year” followed by “why can’t you do it in three months”.
Thank you for the explanation and sharing more context.
The “why can’t you do it in three months” reminds me of similar strategy/challenge in Thiel’s Zero to one, where you ask yourself what you want to achieve in 10 years and then question/challenge that with “how can I do this in 6 months?” (paraphrasing). Definitely and interesting and potentially valuable perspective but also very demanding and sometimes with unacceptable tradeoffs (e.g. long term health sacrifice after working too hard for too long). The other interpretation is that it’s a good filter/test to show whether one thought deeply about strategy and constraints—if that’s the case, you’ll have a clear answer and increase the signal that you really considered the solution space.