To call 2023 a crazy year for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would be an understatement. Following 12 months of explosive growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Altman was abruptly fired in December by the company’s board and then quickly reinstated but stripped of his board seat. Within a week, OpenAI had three different CEOs—the company named two Altman replacements, Mira Murati and Emmett Shear, before his return—and an entirely new board.
Reflecting on some of these dramatic changes, Altman yesterday published a blog post listing out 17 career and leadership lessons he said he “wished someone had told me.”
“I am slowly making peace with being a public figure, which can be painful,” Altman wrote in an X post yesterday. “I assume it will get more intense as our systems become much powerful and that’s ok. On the positive side, I have learned a lot this year.”
On managing people
- Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
- Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
- It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
- Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.
- Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.
On building a product
- Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
- Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.
- Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
- Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
- Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
- Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
On running an organization
- Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
- Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
- Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
- Communicate clearly and concisely.
- Get back up and keep going.
- Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
