OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Most People Should Not Start a Business

In the first lecture of "How to Start a Startup" at Stanford in Fall 2014, Sam Altman, along with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, told a room full of aspiring entrepreneurs: one should never start a business just for the sake of starting one; there are easier ways to get rich. You should only take action when you are compelled by a specific problem and believe that starting a company is the best way to solve it; passion comes first, the company comes second.

He broke down success into four controllable components—idea, product, team, execution—plus the uncontrollable element of luck. Luck can change the outcome, but these four components determine whether you can stay in the game until luck plays its part. He admitted that he once believed ideas were not that important, but is now very certain that this is wrong; perfect execution on a bad idea will still lead nowhere.

He cited counterexamples of companies that seemed foolish at the time: Google emerged when it seemed like search was already done, Facebook appeared when MySpace was winning, and Airbnb launched when sleeping at strangers' homes sounded like a bad product. Good ideas often appear bad at first, precisely because the obvious paths are already crowded. What he advocates is unpopular but correct: first capture a small market before expanding; the speed of growth is more important than the current size, and the question should be why now.

On products, he condensed it into one sentence: create something that a small group of people love deeply, not something that a large group finds just okay. A hundred obsessed users can grow, while a hundred thousand indifferent users often go nowhere. Early Google, Facebook, and the iPhone were all extremely simple, focusing on doing one important thing exceptionally well; true love will grow organically through word of mouth. PR, conferences, consultants, partnerships, and fundraising are almost meaningless when the product is weak. Ben Silbermann manually grew Pinterest users in cafes and even modified browsers for demos in Apple stores.

Moskovitz dismantled the glamor: entrepreneurship is mostly about overtime work, customer issues, engineering, sales, fundraising, and immense responsibility. During the early years of Facebook, he experienced anxiety and health issues; founders are not free, always on call, and the team follows your energy, often for years. Joining the right company early can sometimes yield greater wealth and influence. Bret Taylor contributed to Google Maps, and Justin Rosenstein worked on the Facebook Like button, neither of whom were founders. Asana was born from two people working at Facebook by day and tirelessly building internal tools at night until it became its own entity.

In terms of market mechanisms, buyers are students who see entrepreneurship as a shortcut to wealth and status, while sellers are the accelerator presidents and social network founders most qualified to promote entrepreneurship. The event driving this is a publicly recorded lecture, not a funding round. Capital flows to those who can persist at the "almost impossible not to do" threshold for ten years, and to platform companies that can turn early employee positions into massive wealth. Builders are the ones pressured by problems; those who come for money, freedom, status, and "to work for themselves" face the drama of entrepreneurship. Once it becomes easier to create, it becomes harder to answer whether it’s worth betting ten years on it.

Source: Public Information