Sam Altman, 37, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old.

Source: The New Yorker

He told The New Yorker that having a Mac helped him with his sexuality. Altman came out to his parents when he was 16.

“Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing,” he told The New Yorker. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re eleven or twelve.”

Source: The New Yorker

He attended John Burroughs School, a private, non-sectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.

Altman came out as gay to the whole community after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.

“What Sam did changed the school,” his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. “It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”

Source: The New Yorker

Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit.

Source: The New Yorker, The Business of Business

After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million. That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies, and led Reddit’s Series B fundraising round.

He told The New Yorker, “you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced.”

At 31, Altman was chosen by Paul Graham, who founded Y Combinator in 2005, to succeed him as president in 2014.

While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called “How to Start a Startup,” in the fall of 2014.

Source: How to Start a Startup

In 2015, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at age 29.

Source: Forbes

After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch, and chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.

Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said, “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.”

Source: The New Yorker

Altman once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. He also said he likes renting planes and flying them all over California.

Source: The New Yorker

Altman told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, “I prep for survival,” and warned of either a “lethal synthetic virus,” AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.

“I try not to think about it too much,” Altman told the founders in 2016. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Source: The New Yorker

Altman’s mom is a dermatologist, and told The New Yorker, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.”

Source: The New Yorker

Altman has a brother, Jack, who is also a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform. Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding “moonshot” companies.