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He’s just 37 years old, I’d say his accomplishments are pretty impressive for 37! He dropped out of Stanford in 2005, at 19, to co-found Loopt. Yeah, it ultima
by yashap 4y ago
He’s just 37 years old, I’d say his accomplishments are pretty impressive for 37!
He dropped out of Stanford in 2005, at 19, to co-found Loopt. Yeah, it ultimately failed, but over 7 years they got 5 million users, raised $30 mil in funding, and were acquihired for $43.4 mil.
He was a YC partner at ~25, YC’s president at ~28, and seemed to do a good job leading it for ~5 years. He’s also been pretty personally successful as an Angel investor.
He was an early investor in OpenAI, left YC a few years ago to become their CEO, and they’ve done extremely well under him.
No, he’s not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc., but his accomplishments at 37 are pretty damn good. I’m not really seeing how this is failing upwards?
- stevedewald 4y agoDropping out of school isn't really an accomplishment. Neither is failing at building a company despite raising $30 mil in funding.
- version_five 4y agoYeah, big deal, I could have dropped out of school and raised $30M to build a company when I was a teenager too, I just had other priorities
- throwoutway 4y agoI see your point, but really it's "losing $30M of someone else's money" that OP is probably highlighting. On the other hand, not a lot of people let you gamble with $30M when you're that young. Just two opposite perspectives
- random314 4y agoSam's biggest success seems to be raising 30M USD. Everything else in his career is mediocre.
- DantesKite 4y agoI'd say getting into Stanford is one hell of an accomplishment though.
- GameOfFrowns 4y agoAre people of Jewish descent somehow disadvantaged by Affirmative Action?
- yashap 4y agoFounding a company at 19 that hits some big milestones, and comes close to success despite ultimately failing, is still very impressive to me. Nobody bats 100, especially at the age of 19. Also, from the outside, he seems to have been an impactful/successful leader at YC and now OpenAI. People who know him personally seem to thing he’s an extremely bright and driven person, and his results at YC and OpenAI indicate they’re probably on to something.
- VirusNewbie 4y agoYou are correct, failing upward was the wrong word choice once I realized Loopt didn't crash and burn but actually had a ho hum exit. Definitely not a 'failure'. If I could, I'd rephrase my question of what makes him stand out from all the other thousands of people who have sold companies for ~10m net? From an outside perspective it looks like the biggest success of his career pre-open AI was getting PaulG to like him a lot. Hence why I'm asking if others can vouch for him being brilliant or something.
- FreakLegion 4y ago"Failure" is still a fair description. Companies that raise that much money usually don't collapse outright. Instead the investors engineer an exit, partly because it returns some money but mostly because it looks better and solidifies relationships both with founders and acquirers. sold companies for ~10m net We don't know the exact numbers for this particular case, but you can be sure people lost money. Raising $30m doesn't mean the company was valued at $30m; it means the company was valued at much more. For example if you took $30m in a typical Series A round you'd be valued at $150m. If you then sold for a third of that...
- williamsmj 4y agoTaking seven years to turn $30m into $43m is a worse rate of return than an S&P500 index fund.
- ymolodtsov 4y agoThat's why nobody (except the founders, I guess) puts their entire savings in a single startup and builds a portfolio instead. This comparison is meaningless.
- jacquesm 4y agoTo compare a newly founded startup with an index fund based on the current 500 largest successes is kind of weird.
- typon 4y agoHow is it weird? The point is to compare to a “safe” investment. A successful startup is supposed to have 10x or 100x returns for investors. A 30% return should be considered a failure.
- jacquesm 4y agoNo, the assumption is that you will fail, period.
- williamsmj 4y agoWhy? Anything you (an investor) do with your money should be compared to the lower risk alternatives. If it doesn't at least beat those then it's a failure as an investment. And FWIW, Loopt sold for $43m, but $10m of that went on employee retention. The investors made $3m on their $30m investment. That's an annualized return of 1.3%. It was worse than a zero risk savings account. Sure, there are other ways of measuring success. Clearly from Altman's view, life has worked out pretty well, presumably in part because of experiences he had and people he met while spending seven years making his investors 1.3%. But doing worse than a savings account is not on it's own a sign that you are a great leader, and clearly Loopt was a failure for its investors.
- readonthegoapp 4y agoi tend to see most success stories as luck of the draw. don't know anything really about sam's journey other than what is here, so can't say i know his specific story, and don't really care. a super-rich dude might need to work hard, or not, but your born circumstances largely predict your success, imo, as seems to be pointed out by science/stats. but i figure the key ingredients to getting rich, esp without accomplishing 'much' in a traditional sense, are: * born in america, or able to get there at some point * not poor, higher level incomes/professions/entrepreneur parents better * white * male after that, you've got a real good chance of BIG FINANCIAL SUCCESS, if that's your thing. add Stanford, and now you're virtually guaranteed big/huge financial success -- the only question now is how successful/rich do you want to be, and how quickly? just my take. i just feel like OP was probably looking for a "BUT WHAT DID HE _DO_??"-type of explanation, and i'm like, well, did he meet the prerequisites -- i.e. what were the circumstances of his birth/upbringing? if so, he was born in the top 1% of the top 1% of the global population -- that's a pretty good start. i don't know anything about Sam's particular situation other than what comments said here. i do enjoy learning about people who fail upwards or just do really well after having not done much -- you can see if it fits into your worldview, and if not, learn and change your worldview. ditto the stories of the lower-class-born people who make it big - someone maybe like Mark Cuban (or sam altman? no idea of his bg).
- VirusNewbie 4y agoYour stats are completely off. Whiteness does not predict success as many non white ethnic groups are much more successful.
- readonthegoapp 4y agowhiteness is a little more complicated than the color of your skin. and groups of people with non-white skin -- say, Asian Indian Americans -- being able to overcome racism is great, but it should not be required, and they had some advantages: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-making-of-a-model-minority/617258/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-mak... https://archive.ph/ih2Sa https://archive.ph/ih2Sa The result was an intense form of social engineering, but one that went largely unacknowledged. Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been.
- akudha 4y agoI feel like Zuck is just lucky. While some amount of luck (right time, right place etc) is involved in every bog achievement, Zuck seems pretty pathetic when compared to Gates or Jobs. He is doing one thing well though - keeping Facebook completely in his grip, despite his shortcomings...