Sam Altman's Secret Recipe | Disrupt SF 2017

so Sam I'm so thankful that you're here today and you're not really nice to talk to some students we have backstage which we also really appreciate there are tens of things we could talk about and not a whole lot of time so I thought we could kind of talk first a little bit about Y Combinator and get a little bit of a progress report and dive into some of the very meaningful interests that you have sounds great great so we were just talking backstage about this tad friend article in The New Yorker which I found very charming in many ways that makes exactly one of us so one of the nuggets that I thought was interesting and it was the fact that you put together a sort of a list of goals every year and there are two goals on there that you've listed last year that I thought we could talk about one of them was expanding into China so I just wondered did you make a decision on whether or not that's gonna happen we don't have anything ready to share yet but it remains important to us I think many of the most talented entrepreneurs that I've met recently have been operating in China it is logistically super complex but it's something that we really want to figure out and we're actively working on are you cording start us from China to come to Y Combinator actively or yeah we have been doing that for some time quietly we'd like to do a lot more though and if you do move ahead do you sort of see partnering with an accelerator program there or just recreating YC from um I mean there may be some way to do both I'm not I'm not totally sure yet okay well toward that end another objective or I don't know if it was a like consideration was expanding YC by 2x so I wondered if yeah we've gotten I mean that's significantly more ambitious there okay in the last year you know we were able to work with 3,000 startups at once when this thing we did on the called startup school which is like an online version of YC and I didn't think that was gonna work and then it worked and now I think it can be a lot bigger and I think we can figure out ways to you know make a whole lot more startups happen and really help them so now I think we were sort of like being not nearly ambitious enough and I think you know I think startups really are a super effective vehicle to make important things happen in the world today and I think we are nowhere near the limit of how many we can help do you have any sort of like specific plans in place to grow YC the yuca chair yes but it really is just you know it's at this point it's just an operational grind we have this model it works really well and it's just you know how much can we scale it up and you know every every time you scale it up even a little bit new things have to go wrong hmm so we always warn the founders in the batch you know YC is always slightly broken because we're always trying to grow we're always trying to do new things and when you do that you don't you don't find the problems until you experience them like a good lesson from computer science that has really applied to YC is that you can always optimize things more than you think and the bottlenecks are always super hard to predict so we just try to keep growing and keep delivering a great experience new things always break and we find new ways to address them that's great well well so many people love YC and I've heard many of your talks and I I love the idea that you know especially with this fellowship program the idea was it's better to put $1,000 into I'm sorry $12,000 into a thousand companies then you know make a sure bet on a you know super hot ride hailing company at the same time I think you know people in Silicon Valley are a little bit you know taken aback by what you've done in your near four-year tenure I think they wonder is entrepreneurship that scalable I just wondered you know how hard it is to vet these entrepreneurs and if you sometimes worry that not all of them are you know out to change the world and in fact you you know want to be founders I mean you know part of the thing about our model is and I understand that it's difficult to it doesn't sit well with other people's models but part of our model is make the cost of mistakes really low and then make a lot of mistakes so we'll fund a lot of people doing stuff that sounds really dumb most of the time it will be and some of the time it will sound like a bad idea and be jaw-droppingly brilliant and really what you're looking for you know the very best startup ideas are the things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of sounds like a bad idea is in fact a good idea and you're shooting for that little overlap and so if you're shooting for that you're gonna head do a lot of things that sound like a bad idea and are in fact bad ideas and that's okay you know I think the like the we'd rather make mistakes in that direction then make the errors where we Pat we say no to this company that will cure cancer or develop nuclear fusion or whatever so we will do a lot of foolish stuff and that's okay because we'll do some jaw-droppingly brilliant stuff and and the payoffs are such and this is all was there always the thing that was hard for me to wrap my head around that we can make a lot of mistakes we can fund a lot of terrible companies as long as we do fund the most important ones and so the model is such that you've just got to be willing to make that error and so yes there are people who say that well as Y Combinator getting too big and I always like I always stop and think like if everybody else is saying this thing that YC is you know way too big and I think like I'm that's what they're wringing their hands about and my big worry is that we're not nearly big enough you know we're off by like a factor of 10 or something from where we should be like maybe everybody else is right but I don't think so and at least so far that would have been really the wrong thing for us to do you know it's already been able to scale much more than I thought I always like to think about you know is any kind of company including YC is this something that gets better or worse as it gets bigger and given our particular Network effect given how important our alumni community as to what we do I think we really do get better the bigger we get because the network has just become extremely powerful now well I wasn't wondering about that you know if there is it doesn't sound like you think so but a breaking point where the alums are like yeah I don't want another startup from YC reaching out to me to be a customer or to ask me for funding advice yes that is a concern and we have had to kind of change the the software we have we've had to change the way we work but but at this point you know the alumni network is is basically a self-sustaining ecosystem and people really like that so more people in the alumni network are more customers more users no more products that you can buy it hopefully some kind of discount and so you know we will continually have to evolve as we get bigger and bigger but you know University alumni networks are far far bigger than we are today and still managed to work okay right and we have this huge advantage of we are ourselves a software company hmm so we were able to write really good software that makes the whole network work okay so you obviously are very much a trend setter but there are other trends that are sort of sweeping through Silicon Valley right now one that I'm very interested in your thoughts on are I SEOs yeah is you know we're seeing andreessen horowitz and Union Square Ventures and some of these other top firms investing in like hedge funds and creating funds to fund other ico companies what is your sort of thinking here um you know like the question everyone wants to talk about her is this real or is this a bubble and that was the question everyone to talk about about startups two or three years ago or 12 years AIT's is this and the cycle and and the thing about bubbles is there is something fundamentally real and people get too excited about it at a moment in time because otherwise smart people don't get tripped I mean occasionally they do like the tulip bubble was there was nothing underlying there but you know like Newton very very smart guy still fell for the South Seas bubble and and again there was something real people just got ahead of it the Internet bubble there was something real people just got ahead of it and and that is what I feel about you know the current the I cos I think it's definitely a bubble right now but there's something real underlying it which is why smart people are so fascinated by this so you know like do I think a lot of I SEOs that are happening right now are ridiculously silly bordering on scams yes a lot of individual ones are sometimes outright scams but I think there will be a few that are really important and I think this idea of the blockchain in general is more likely to be really important than not however this you know I was not around in the 2000 bubble I was still kid the only experience I have the only memory I have of it is I was trying to convince my mom to buy Yahoo stock in 1999 because I read about it and thought I was gonna keep going up but I don't I didn't have this visceral sense of what it was like to live through a bubble and and I and this is the first time where I felt like I've understood it I've understood this driver where the thing that's happening is people are watching their friends get ridiculously rich and that's driving them just it's making them like I'm gonna do that too so they're buying and then more people are buying and you know this bubble is a little bit different than others because there is no underlying asset of a Bitcoin it really is just how big the collective delusion is that this is the thing we all care about and this is a bubble that can sort of like become it can by force of will it can perpetuate itself into actual existence but you know this quote I don't know heard it attributed to a bunch of people but something like there is no amount of warning or logic that can save someone who is determined to get rich quickly I feel like this is the first time I dis really understood that so I think there's something real I think like people have been overcome a little bit by irrational exuberance but that's why it's really hard to say do you welcome regulation in this area I mean it seems to me that if you know regulators at least said you have to have lockup periods or six months to a year or something I mean I seems a little bit too much like the Wild West I definitely think it needs to be regulated I think I think one of the interesting things that has shown here though is how much white space there is between what people runt want and the current regulation and so I think you see this especially in the desire of non-accredited investors to be able to invest small amounts of money in startups which is something I personally think should be allowed but you know then there's this like I don't obviously don't think fraud should be allowed and I think we really do need need regulation I'm interested though in like how companies like YC can use the blockchain to sort of democratize access to the ability to invest in startups I think that's cool I think we should try to figure that out I think other people so try to figure that out we need regulation for that we need clarity for that but you know the promise of this is a really good thing one of the trends that bothers me about Silicon Valley is more and more of the wealth creation that is happening here is not available to most people and I think that's very bad in a society with already such wealth inequality and if there is a way that new technology can make it practical and possible to democratize this and I think that'd be great well maybe we can segue now into a little bit of politics sure which is obviously another interest of yours including because of this concern of this growing wealth disparity so I know it has been said that you are not interested in running as governor of California roots but I wondered if you were maybe a little bit interested in running I have such a good I mean it's sad for me because I think there are a lot of really important things to do in the world and we get one life and we get you know some number of hours in day and I and I am interested in politics but I love my current job and I think there's such important things I can do here that have a you know positive impact on the world so sure if there were no opportunity cost I'd be interested in trying it because I do think there's a lot of really good things one could do but I think I can do really good things where I am right now ok so you're staying put no little office you've talked about getting behind some candidate that I want to do anything ok so tell us who you would back well I will tell about the kind of people rather than specific ok I am can also provide specifics that's why I am really interested like one of the things I've learned about the political process is it is basically all about how much other people think you can raise and it is controlled by a small number of donors and you know like these very powerful but I think horribly run large political entities and I have met a lot of really promising more junior officeholders who I think would be great they've got great ideas they work super hard they have really good values but they just have no chance because they're not chosen by you know the existing system and I think in the same way that Y Combinator found out there was a huge amount of value to unlock by finding unknown people that are really talented but don't have a network and giving them resources I think there's something cool to do there politically and I think I think a lot of people are thinking about that that's something I want to try it's gonna be a small experiment for us next year but if it works I think it's something we could really scale up and I think unfortunately right now the the left is pretty disorganized doesn't really have a great economic plan and it would be really good to get you know a new team of people that really believe in some of these things are you so so you've got these candidates that you'd like to support or not candidates but people you'd like to know as we turn into candidates are they from the tech world or necessarily I don't I think some of them should be most shouldn't know I was gonna ask I mean I just wondered sort of tie you know talking on the presidential level if for example you know having a billionaire businessman right now has paved the way for another one or completely blown up the past I mean I think very little about this current situation generalizes to anything else for so many reasons but I do think that you know the way this government system was supposed to work was that people are not career politicians but have a career and then you do service to your country and you do it for some period of time and you you know you may go through a few different levels and then you may go back to a career you may run again later but I worry that we instead of this kind of participatory democracy we have this what I think is a fairly broken kind of career politician track and it's in control of that track is in the hands of a few rich powerful people and I think trying to say hey let's get a lot more people in the door would be a good thing to try right okay so we're almost out of time I wanted to talk about basic income I don't think we're gonna have time but I would love to get your thoughts on AI and if there's any update you can give us about open a I know we had a senior VP here from Google earlier who said you know tech leaders talking about this the dangers of AI is you know I think he said borderline irresponsible remind me Brooks who founded rethink robotics and is considered the father of modern robotics and I interviewed last month it said the same thing said anybody who works in AI knows it's dumb so look I think you all took two general comments I think you the most important thing when someone is giving you advice or a statement like that is trying to understand like their biases and where they come from and like why they will say something that is either not true or not really what they believe and you know certainly it's possible to imagine why people who run maybe the most advanced AI company in the world would say oh you don't worry about it I don't think we need to panic about it I do think we should be thoughtful about it I think it I think already at the level of AI technology we have today there is huge reward and huge risk and you know you see examples of this all of the time you know there have been a number of examples just with the most basic machine learning we've had about bias inherent in these systems you know autonomous cars crashing I think autonomous weapons are already something to be to be concerned about and this is moving really fast if you if you study the history of Technology there are many examples of very smart people saying you know two years before something is invented that it's never going to happen in fact there are some examples where the people who invented themselves say that one of the Wright brothers I forget which one two years before Kitty Hawk said you know that he thought that human flight was at least fifty years away and then after that happened he real he was never gonna make negative technology predictions again and exponential curves are always hard if you look you stand on exponential curve you look backwards it looks flat you look forward to looking vertical no matter where you on the curve that's what happens so that that's really hard and I think we evolved not to be good at understanding exponential trends and there are many Exponential's here we have exponentially increasing hardware we have exponentially increasing algorithms we have an exponentially number increasing number of brilliant people entering the field so the thing that I think is weird about the whole conversation about is AGI gonna come and do we need to be worried about it is almost no one is arguing that AGI is never going to happen it's is it five years or ten years or twenty years of thirty years away and all of that compared to like the long arc of human history is an absolute blink of an eye and so whether it's five years or thirty years or 100 years I believe it is going to happen I believe it will be the most important development yet in the history of technology probably the history of humanity and I think a wide conversation about how we want that to work how that's gonna change society how we make sure that benefits all of us how we make sure that happens safely I'd rather be a little bit too earlier than a little bit too late on that conversation and in my own work at open AI I have generally found that the milestones have come faster than I expected I would love me to come back soon and tell us more about it open a that'd be fun thank you Sam thank you thanks for having me [Music]

Channel: TechCrunch

Views: 25,565

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: tech, y combinator, yc, silicon valley

Id: UqszUNk_vQU

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017