Sam Altman is an excellent politician/influencer, which is probably what YC needed. PG gave the impression of not enjoying that role. I think the best way to u

Sam Altman is an excellent politician/influencer, which is probably what YC needed. PG gave the impression of not enjoying that role. I think the best way to understand it is to compare their two respective "request for startups". Paul Graham had 6 concrete tradeable opinions about the world. Sam Altman has 21 non-specific opinions which cover more or less everything ("healthcare", "robots", "hollywood" with no specific opinions within the field), and several of them (11, 19, 14, 21) are not even startup sectors so much as talking points to show the Cathedral that he's one of them.