I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.

But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.

Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.

A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.

This comes out in small ways:

1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.

2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."

3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "

Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.

> “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “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.”

Hahaha, that's so awesome.

I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.

I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."

In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.

    Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy.

I don't need to be rich that badly.

This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC.

Innovation is exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.

It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!

The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm.

The last 3 paras of that article are worrisome.

Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.

I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.

These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base.

My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad.

This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now.

I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it.

I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him...

Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while...

I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life.

These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career.

I wish him a lot of success and happiness.

I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.

Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.

But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches.

To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges.

Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.

However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)

OTOH, a few memorable quotes:

> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)

> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.

"At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean."

I find this oddly reassuring.

This right here amounts to false equivalence. Suffice it to say that it is relatively easier to launch a start-up today, this doesn't change the fact that it is just as hard to keep one alive. The risks associated with launching a startup are all too real and I think they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Call it conformist, I call it hard and as such, not for everyone.

Has there been a New Yorker piece on PG? I googled and didn't find anything. He's the one that put all this together and seems far more deserving of such a thing.

> It’s all about founders. Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg, and MySpace had a bunch of monkeys.

The kind of ubermensch/Ayn Rand rhetoric that makes me cringe.

Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out-the-vote" for a favored candidate?

> After conferring with the accelerator’s sixteen other partners, Altman launched an initiative to support startups even earlier in their life span, and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow.

> “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ”

Badass. Reminded me of "Drop the 'The'".

> A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding.

It's very much a "me-too" endeavor, almost political at the universities local to where I live, aimed at appearing to "foster innovation" and justifying huge continued government loans for their "customers".

> YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague, who is usually a white man.

Yes the meritocratic aspect of networking is far overblown. Intros or bust in my experience, unless someone gives you a lucky break. If they do, be grateful and be damn sure to impress that person.

> All the early arrivals at the party were men; the batch’s female founders were attending a presentation on the challenges of being a female founder.

Anyone else find this kind of ironic and counterproductive?

> “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.”

This is funny, he almost sounds like one of those awful Trump supporters! :P

> In 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s.

This isn't as bad as it sounds. Losing a few million dollars vs. around $50M is a huge difference. In fact I'd say it's harder to salvage a failing company that exit a successful one.

> “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.”

Value investing, absolutely. I tend to apply this principle on a smaller scale, to individual people. For example, I've had the opportunity to hire and work with extremely intelligent and hardworking people who simply lacked some basic English skills, and had shit cover letters. But who cares if they can program a robotic system the way I need.

> “hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it’s interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space.”

So incredibly true. I have a startup with very few resources but no problem recruiting because the field is exciting hard tech.

> “Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.”

The best advice for life success, hands down.

> “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”

Well I find this response - which someone in the domain would tell you isn't even correct - to be unsettling. Yes, we can see what lots of neural networks are doing, and understand it [but you often need a PhD].

> “Sam’s program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people,” Peter Thiel said. “And that’s what makes it powerful—because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.”

But "Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?"

> Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, “we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones.”

This would make me a little unsettled as an external investor but I understand the incentives and dynamics at play.

> So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story.”

Yeah this never made too much sense to me. As an investor I'd be wary of a startup using alumni connections to secure a large portion of their customers, because that eventually runs out - meaning the acquistion strategy is still essentially untested. As a founder though, I really like this strategy and would readily replicate it.

> The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers.

I forgot exactly where I learned this, but I like the story of "multiple S curves" over a single "J" curve. Businesses innovate and attach new markets, launch new product lines, secure new customer segments, etc.

> Peter Thiel, the forty-eight-year-old libertarian who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, secretly funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and has sought to extend his life span by taking human growth hormone.

Damn so is Thiel gonna get jacked? This makes me feel less bad about wanting to do a steroid cycle when I'm older.

> The fear is that YC will soon provide cradle-to-I.P.O. funding for so many top startups that it will put a lot of V.C.s out of business.

Well this is why I find them remarkably pro-founder: they are creating competition at the VC level even if the later stages.

> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.

Who knew, even billionaires get high and watch The Matrix.

> recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote.

Encouraging youth voting will absolutely be partisan, let's not kid ourselves here. Why not just pay people to vote, or give them deals at retail stores? I'm sure these things will happen.

> As I considered this, he said that he’d sacrifice a hundred thousand. I told him that my own tally would be even larger. “It’s a bug,” he declared, unconsoled.

It's a feature.

> the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food.

Here's my controversial theory: a "great life" only exists relative to others. Once all needs are provided for and people don't need each other (and here's the real controversial idea: most women won't need most men, something that I would understandably expect Altman to miss), they won't be incentivized to create and maintain strong family units. We won't love like we used to. But maybe they see this as a "bug" too.

Maybe I'm wrong and a few centuries of tech will solve the problems of human nature created by a few million years of evolution.

> More generally, he observed, “The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.”

A gift and a curse that I wrestle with constantly.

> “At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s something worth thinking about in there.”

This was a great read and it made me think a lot, it was a pleasure.

There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible.

It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.

> “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.

I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.

> If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel

Is this true? How does it work?

Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe.

Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.