31
H5N1
Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk. We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens...
Sam Altman
- Popular posts
- 93
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- 33,193
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- #13 personal
Visit blog.samaltman.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2013 – Apr 2026
Tech Industry & Business 79Startups 36Society, Policy & Culture 27Life, Learning & Writing 16Career & Management 14AI & Machine Learning 7
32
Funding for Covid-19 Projects
I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like...
33
Please Fund More Science
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the...
34
Greg
A lot of people ask me what the ideal cofounder looks like. I now have an answer: Greg Brockman. Every successful startup I know has at least one person who provides the force of will to make...
35
Unit Economics
Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley. First they talked about valuations being too high. Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything. ...
36
A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
37
A founder-friendly term sheet
When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet. I’ve tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder. A few people have asked me if I’d share it, so...
38
Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident
Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the...
39
Before Growth
We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy...
40
New RFS – Breakthrough Technologies
We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or...
41
The Worst Part of YC
We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight. The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies. It leaves me feeling down for many...
42
Startup advice
In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard): 1. Make something people want. 2. A great team and a great...
43
The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
44
The US digital service
A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to...
45
Energy
I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of...
46
The Founder Visa (again)
Nearly 5 years ago, Paul Graham first proposed the founder visa. There has been a lot of discussion since, but nothing has happened. Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup...
47
Trump
I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not...
48
Don't Read the Comments
I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning: I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes...
49
China
The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in...
50
Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
51
'We're in a Bubble'
A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10...
52
The Gentle Singularity
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
53
Projects and Companies
In the early days of my startup, I used to get slightly offended when people would refer to it as a “project”. “How’s your project going?” seemed like the asker didn't take us seriously, even...
54
Bubble talk
I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might...
55
Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
56
Researchers and Founders
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these...
57
How to Hire
After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing...
58
Thoughts on Bitcoin
Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity. I don’t know how to weight the probabilities (although I think in the...
59
Value is created by doing
Value is created by doing. It’s easy to forget this. A lot of stuff feels like work—commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies’ funding rounds, grabbing coffee, etc [1]—is not...
60
The Economy
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way...