I have no connection to YC (except for reading HN daily) and I don't know Sam personally. These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based o

I have no connection to YC (except for reading HN daily) and I don't know Sam personally. These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base. My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad. This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now. I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it. I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him... Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while... I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life. These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career. I wish him a lot of success and happiness.