I don’t know of Sam Altman, so maybe this criticism is wrong, but the quote:
“If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person.”
Absent any guides on how to identify breakout trajectory companies, this advice seems unhelpful. It feels like: “Didn’t work for you? You must not have been a smart young person or you would have picked the right company.”
Paired with the paragraph below on not letting salary be a factor, I am left with the suspicion that Sam runs what he believes to be a company with a ‘breakout trajectory’ and pays noncompetitive salaries.
I have read something like this on a rationalist blog somewhere. Basically it was a type of advice like “you want to win the race? well, just run fast! just put one foot in front of the other quicker than others do, d’uh!”
I think the way to look for a company on a breakout trajectory is to find a company that is growing fast and getting a lot of buzz but has not become established and is not thoroughly proven yet. Even better might be to find a company that’s growing fast but not getting a lot of buzz, but that’s probably trickier.
As the president of YC, he doesn’t really hire anyone, but he does fund lots of companies, and his advice could be interpreted as: work for a YC company.
The more precise cynical interpretation would be “work for a promising early stage YC company”. Note that he also could have told you to work for a late stage one or apply to YC in order to start one. But it’s probably true that working at a promising early-stage YC company is what would most benefit YC on the margin. (Although if what benefits YC most on the margin is what generates the most value, then generating more value for YC also seems like a good way to generate enough value that you capture a significant chunk.)
These types of advices are really not honest enough, I think. Let me try a honest one:
1) Move to America if you don’t already live there. Bluff your way through immigration officers and whatnot.
2) Move to the Silicon Valley if you don’t already live there. Deal with the costs of living there / outside your parents house anyhow.
3) Acquire enough money, lump sum or regular income that you can can focus on chasing shiny things for years without pay. Consider getting reincarnated in a well-to-do family, that helps.
4) Above is still true if you intend to join a company. Unless you want to join the kind of company where you are okay with HR drones keyword-buggering and credential-combing your resume and requiring 3 years of experience in technologies 2 years old, which is not really what the truly ambitious like to, those years will be spent on getting to know excellent founders, and making the kind of stuff on your own that convinces them to let you join them. I.e. chasing shiny things without pay before you can join the right kind of company.
5) Be a programmer, because there are very few professions where you can just casually build things as you see fit. As a programmer you get away with not having access to anything but your brain, the net, and a laptop. If you are e.g. a sculptor and your dream is to build a 50m tall Darth Vader statue out of bronze, well that is going to require some harder to acquire stuff as well. If you took all these building a bit too literally and you graduated in civil engineering, your chances of starting out on your own after graduating are nil, these kinds of startups don’t exist, and you will probably work 10 years at the construction equivalent of Microsoft before you can try to start out on your own and finally do something interesting. So be a programmer. Don’t like programming and computer technology so much? Still be a programmer or at the very least figure out real hard how to graduate in something that 1) can be made without really expensive inputs 2) scales up readily to serving many customers simply by gradually renting more stuff and hiring more people, staying ahead of cash-flow. (John, this MealSquares is an excellent example of a non-programming activity that satisfies these criteria. But imagine if your knack was for designing dams. People must invest a ton of money into building them so they will not hire a young nobody, and you can only design one dam at a time, it does not scale up to serving many customers simultaneously.) Have no idea what could be like this, beside programming? Be a programmer. Or a musician.
6) After all these preconditions are done, then you are ready to read Sam Altman and similar folks (Graham etc.)
Sam Altman’s advice for ambitious 19 year olds.
I don’t know of Sam Altman, so maybe this criticism is wrong, but the quote: “If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person.” Absent any guides on how to identify breakout trajectory companies, this advice seems unhelpful. It feels like: “Didn’t work for you? You must not have been a smart young person or you would have picked the right company.”
Paired with the paragraph below on not letting salary be a factor, I am left with the suspicion that Sam runs what he believes to be a company with a ‘breakout trajectory’ and pays noncompetitive salaries.
Now to find a way to test that suspicion.
I have read something like this on a rationalist blog somewhere. Basically it was a type of advice like “you want to win the race? well, just run fast! just put one foot in front of the other quicker than others do, d’uh!”
Maybe we need a name for this.
Sam Altman is the president of Y Combinator.
I think the way to look for a company on a breakout trajectory is to find a company that is growing fast and getting a lot of buzz but has not become established and is not thoroughly proven yet. Even better might be to find a company that’s growing fast but not getting a lot of buzz, but that’s probably trickier.
As the president of YC, he doesn’t really hire anyone, but he does fund lots of companies, and his advice could be interpreted as: work for a YC company.
The more precise cynical interpretation would be “work for a promising early stage YC company”. Note that he also could have told you to work for a late stage one or apply to YC in order to start one. But it’s probably true that working at a promising early-stage YC company is what would most benefit YC on the margin. (Although if what benefits YC most on the margin is what generates the most value, then generating more value for YC also seems like a good way to generate enough value that you capture a significant chunk.)
These types of advices are really not honest enough, I think. Let me try a honest one:
1) Move to America if you don’t already live there. Bluff your way through immigration officers and whatnot.
2) Move to the Silicon Valley if you don’t already live there. Deal with the costs of living there / outside your parents house anyhow.
3) Acquire enough money, lump sum or regular income that you can can focus on chasing shiny things for years without pay. Consider getting reincarnated in a well-to-do family, that helps.
4) Above is still true if you intend to join a company. Unless you want to join the kind of company where you are okay with HR drones keyword-buggering and credential-combing your resume and requiring 3 years of experience in technologies 2 years old, which is not really what the truly ambitious like to, those years will be spent on getting to know excellent founders, and making the kind of stuff on your own that convinces them to let you join them. I.e. chasing shiny things without pay before you can join the right kind of company.
5) Be a programmer, because there are very few professions where you can just casually build things as you see fit. As a programmer you get away with not having access to anything but your brain, the net, and a laptop. If you are e.g. a sculptor and your dream is to build a 50m tall Darth Vader statue out of bronze, well that is going to require some harder to acquire stuff as well. If you took all these building a bit too literally and you graduated in civil engineering, your chances of starting out on your own after graduating are nil, these kinds of startups don’t exist, and you will probably work 10 years at the construction equivalent of Microsoft before you can try to start out on your own and finally do something interesting. So be a programmer. Don’t like programming and computer technology so much? Still be a programmer or at the very least figure out real hard how to graduate in something that 1) can be made without really expensive inputs 2) scales up readily to serving many customers simply by gradually renting more stuff and hiring more people, staying ahead of cash-flow. (John, this MealSquares is an excellent example of a non-programming activity that satisfies these criteria. But imagine if your knack was for designing dams. People must invest a ton of money into building them so they will not hire a young nobody, and you can only design one dam at a time, it does not scale up to serving many customers simultaneously.) Have no idea what could be like this, beside programming? Be a programmer. Or a musician.
6) After all these preconditions are done, then you are ready to read Sam Altman and similar folks (Graham etc.)