Aarush Gupta

How to Succeed: Lessons from Sam Altman

Jul 08, 2023

This is an escape from my usual stream of posts, for I wanted to attempt to expand the horizons of my routine writing.

Sam Altman is a polarizing figure in Silicon Valley, being the co-founder of Loopt, ex-president of Y Combinator, ex-CEO of Reddit, and current CEO of OpenAI. Therefore, it is trivial to assume that he is a revered person in the startup space.

This post is based upon the one by Altman, titled “How To Be Successful,” a title that drives views, which details 13 points to note to achieve what he calls “outlier success.” He notes that his points are geared toward founders but can be applied to anyone — my takeaways are for the former, and success in this sense relates to startups and startup success. I’ve often wondered what it takes to be a founder, much less a successful one. There’s a certain elusiveness to the idea of success itself, for it rests nearly entirely upon what you constitute as succeeding. As Altman details, most startup founders begin with the prospect of riches but ultimately desire importance and impact. However, since it is imperative we define the parameters from which to judge success, we will consider impact. The following sections analyze Altman’s points and explain how the average person can attempt to implement these into their life.

1. Compound yourself

Altman begins with the notion of being exponential rather than linear. Of course, that is what we desire, to greatly improve year-over-year. He details that we, in careers, should be compounding in relativity to effectiveness. Essentially, one with two years of industry experience should not be as effective as those with twenty; however, it seems rather apparent that it is increasingly becoming the case. The root of the problem appears to lie in the rate of learning. A general example is those working in the software engineering space: most engineers learn and stick to the frameworks, tools, languages, and technologies learned during their undergrad or early career. There is no exponential growth here — it is barely linear, for knowledge in one niche domain can only grow so much. This results in more curious and passionate developers being able to compete with minimal experience. Simply put, the value for a unit of work should increase in value and output as time passes and experience grows. Current work should be done in the hopes of reducing previous work to a footnote.

2. Have almost too much self-belief

Self-belief is a powerf