OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

The Constitution directly grants very few individual rights. It’s mostly a document about what the government can’t do.

> Theoretically states could stop it at any time

Sure. That’s not “at the pleasure of.” Driver’s licenses are not issued “at the pleasure of” a state. Neither are marriage certificates. They’re issued as a matter of process that binds both the issuer and recipient to a predictable set of rules.

Note, PG is the founder of YC, Sam's former boss, and the one who removed Sam from the position of President of YC after first appointing Sam to succeed him as President of YC. (Sama was more focused on OpenAI than on YC at the time, which doesn't work when you're supposed to be leading YC.)

2008 Essay "A Fundraising Survival Guide" https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.

2009 Essay "5 Founders" https://paulgraham.com/5founders.html

5. Sam Altman I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be. ... What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.

That's PG's take on Sama.

I would say, looking at a wide range of Sam Altman's more investments https://observer.com/2025/06/sam-altman-startup-investments/

from OpenAI to Helion energy (Fusion), to Retro Biosciences (longevity), Neuralink (brain computer interface), to Reddit

Sama really wants to "build the future," and when some of those investments "hit", like OpenAI did - basically become the first new company with a clear path to a $1T valuation since Facebook or TikTok), you gain immense credibility for "betting the future will happen and getting your organization there first."

If YC's motto is "build something people want," and OpenAI is now serving 800M active users while delivering incredible revenue growth (and investors want to see both). Sama gains power by giving investors what they want, by giving users what they want, and basically authoring an entire new type of software company and a new part of the economy.

A thing to note here is that, being a YC partner and top angel investor from 2011 to 2020, you can argue that Sam himself is "the most successful YC graduate." He saw thousands of companies go through YC. He saw hundreds of 'hard tech companies' go through YC. And in that decade, he could only have learned an immense amount about how VCs/successful CEOs think and make decisions. Certainly, we see the learnings of those experiences in what he's been able to pull off since.

> Rather than, the natural state is that they exist unless they do something bad enough to be shut down.

JFC, come on. Corporations are legal entities and have no existence separate from the law. If they even have a natural state, that natural state is non-existence.

He's not really comparable with Jobs. This guy is a politician and Jobs was a product guy.