71–80 of 115 posts
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I think it's common among many founders who became very successful for them to assume they have a special and deeper insight into how the universe works.
How would you check whether someone has special and deep insight into how the universe works? Making a lot of correct predictions seems like some of the best evidence available.
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How would you check whether someone has special and deep insight into how the universe works? Making a lot of correct predictions seems like some of the best evidence available.
Being the CEO of Ycombinator, the business consulting firm, would give him very special insights into the industry, as many new companies would come straight to Ycombinator, looking for advice. Altman was in a good position to study the whole industry.
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I think it's common among many founders who became very successful for them to assume they have a special and deeper insight into how the universe works.
VCs, too. Interesting how researchers are a bit more humble or realistic about achievements.
This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).
Right? Feels like an absurdly low-effort attempt at "thought leadership" with easily made connections to recently popular topics like Hamming and that ML guide. As a researcher, I have also thought about the similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial analysis.
Yeah, academic research labs are strikingly similar to seed-stage start-ups (mid six/low seven annual burn for 3-20 employees laser focused on a particular vision). It's not at all surprising that the two career tracks attract similar types of people.
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Being the CEO of Ycombinator, the business consulting firm, would give him very special insights into the industry, as many new companies would come straight to Ycombinator, looking for advice. Altman was in a good position to study the whole industry.
You're saying he has special access to data, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he has special insight based on that data. That said, Sam is a smart guy, so he probably does have some special insight - but it's not immediately obvious and this is hardly an evidence-based argument.
This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).
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On the blog I can't even properly query who the author is! Clicking on the Twitter button triggers a weird referral that requires me to login? I'm inclined to submit this as a dark pattern [0]. [0] https://www.darkpatterns.org/
Sam’s name is the heading of the page, in the title and the domain name. The blog doesn’t have an about page. Twitter is asking you to login because you clicked the “tweet” button to post a tweet linking the article and tweeting requires a twitter account. Sam Altman is the former president of YC.
The Tweet button says "Follow @sama" which isn't about tweeting. The convention is to link to https://twitter.com/sama and not to ask you to log in.
I'm happy to know who he is now.