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Greg

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Greg

#51

Post by jimmykennedy »

rl3 wrote: post #26

> Greg is a world-class recruiter (he plans every detail of interviews, heavily researches candidate’s backgrounds, sends thoughtful and persistent followups, and so on), and I now believe even more strongly that someone on the founding team has to be an amazing recruiter. I maintain a version-controlled text file of people I want to hire for my startup, should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day. The…

"should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day"

Your low self-esteem is sabotaging you.

Re: Greg

#52

Post by icc97 »

gdb wrote: post #31
onion2k wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greg is the guy you need. Not necessarily the guy you want to be. I don't think that's true. At least at the beginning, a "Greg" will be the person who has all the direct contact with mentors, investors, team, suppliers, and customers. A "Greg" will be the "business face" of things (not necessarily who the public see, but who everyone else sees). That's a very good position to be in when things fail or when the compa…

> Greg is the guy you need. Not necessarily the guy you want to be. (I am Greg, and am reasonably happy to be me.) I think this reply is true. But even that aside, the startup philosophy that guides me is variance maximization. So yes, when starting something new and pouring your heart into it, you have a chance of having nothing concrete to show for yourself in a few years. But if you succeed, the magnitude will be…

> "trying to cover the entire problem surface area"

Could you elaborate on that?

Re: Greg

#53

Post by gcheong »

If all startups need a Greg and there are only so many Gregs to go around, can new Gregs be deliberately created?

Re: Greg

#54

Post by rl3 »

jimmykennedy wrote: post #51
rl3 wrote: post #26

> Greg is a world-class recruiter (he plans every detail of interviews, heavily researches candidate’s backgrounds, sends thoughtful and persistent followups, and so on), and I now believe even more strongly that someone on the founding team has to be an amazing recruiter. I maintain a version-controlled text file of people I want to hire for my startup, should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day. The…

"should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day" Your low self-esteem is sabotaging you.

Ah, it was intended as half tongue-in-cheek. Making light of tough situations is usually for the best.

Sorry for not making that more clear. My smiley face budget had already been reached by the latter portion of that post. Anything exceeding one smiley and you end up looking like you're on something, especially on HN. Heck, even just one can be suspect!

Re: Greg

#55

Post by hobofan »

jimmykennedy wrote: post #51
rl3 wrote: post #26

> Greg is a world-class recruiter (he plans every detail of interviews, heavily researches candidate’s backgrounds, sends thoughtful and persistent followups, and so on), and I now believe even more strongly that someone on the founding team has to be an amazing recruiter. I maintain a version-controlled text file of people I want to hire for my startup, should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day. The…

"should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day" Your low self-esteem is sabotaging you.

Or it's just a healthy portion of self-deprecating humor.

Re: Greg

#56

Post by fhood »

jimmykennedy wrote: post #51
rl3 wrote: post #26

> Greg is a world-class recruiter (he plans every detail of interviews, heavily researches candidate’s backgrounds, sends thoughtful and persistent followups, and so on), and I now believe even more strongly that someone on the founding team has to be an amazing recruiter. I maintain a version-controlled text file of people I want to hire for my startup, should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day. The…

"should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day" Your low self-esteem is sabotaging you.

I like that philosophy. Try hard but have low expectations. Makes it harder to get discouraged, when things inevitably don't pan out.

Re: Greg

#57

Post by zt »

I'm sure that many others could write much better informed or detailed additions to Sama's post.

All I will say is that I worked at Stripe very briefly -- for about three months -- when the company was about thirty people (before I went on to go through YC). Greg was incredibly generous with his time in explaining and working with me as a non-engineer.

I don't think he had been named CTO yet (Stripe was quite title phobic at the start) but it was clear that he was both a technical and non-technical leader of the company. He spent time to explain code and architecture to me, while also chatting through cultural norms and various organizational tensions Stripe was experiencing as it grew.

I think the acculturation to Stripe that he very deliberately supported in me was critical for what (little) success I had with Standard Treasury.

This is all to say that Sama’s post is spot on in my experience. Greg exhibited every one of the mentioned characteristics (except recruiting, I didn’t interacting with him on that) even when working with someone with which he didn’t have to be so generous.

Re: Greg

#58

Post by birken »

gcheong wrote: post #53

If all startups need a Greg and there are only so many Gregs to go around, can new Gregs be deliberately created?

I've only worked at one startup, which was quite successful, and nobody there fit the description of Greg (unless you permute it to be so vague that everybody is Greg). Therefore, you don't need a Greg character for your startup to be successful.

Clearly he is a very impressive person with very impressive results and I'm sure I'd enjoy working at a company with him, or people like him.

I don't like this myth though. Startups are chaos, and pretending that as long as you have this magical person there solving all your problems that your chaos is somehow incorrect. The startup I worked for was full of normal imperfect humans who got offended, had trouble figuring out the direction of the company, were not world-class recruiters, were not always thoughtful and ran into problems big and small all the time. The company didn't die because there was a group of dedicated, imperfect people, who didn't want the company to die, not because there was one "Chief Optimist" holding it all together. If there was a "Chief Optimist" role, it was a very mobile position based on who was feeling best at that particular moment.

This isn't to say you can't and shouldn't actively try to make yourself better [1], you should. But you don't need a perfectly formed person working at your startup for it to succeed. And I want to note, I'm not disputing the existence of superhuman individuals, they exist and I'm sure power a lot of amazing achievements. You just don't need them to succeed, a bunch of normal people can do it too.

1: For whatever definition of better you want, in this context it would probably mean being a better startup founder

Re: Greg

#59

Post by zt »

CPLX wrote: post #36

The moral of the story here, clearly, is that when you're one of a pair of billionaires collectively responsible for some of the most successful entrepreneurship successes in recent history, and you decide to have someone handle logistics for a new venture, make sure they're enthusiastic.

This is reductionist and offensive.

(1) On a practical level, although I don't know Greg's personal financial situation, he was the CTO of Stripe for five years. He's rich enough not to work. He works exactly because he's enthusiastic.

(2) Secondly, to say that Greg merely handles logistics for OpenAI is to willfully ignore the post as written, and the reality on the ground.

Also, I'm not sure Sam is a billionaire, although well on his way.

Re: Greg

#60

Post by loteck »

gdb wrote: post #38
pgroves wrote: post #8

But why does Greg need a cofounder?

(I am Greg.) Starting something new is incredibly hard. The default is that your company never even forms, and it's on you to overcome the activation energy. I don't think I'd have the mental fortitude to stick that out alone. In contrast, there's nothing more motivating than working with great people (and it's hard to do better than Ilya, Sam, and Elon). Everyone brings their own core strengths to the table, and if…

Thanks for chiming in. Would you mind giving your thoughts on an important question here?

Which of your qualities specifically do you feel are actually under discussion here, and how would you recommend others build, enhance or foster those qualities if they wanted to do so?

In other words, assuming someone wanted to, how would they become more "Greg?"

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