Sam Altman: Customer love is all you need
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 November 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
The true seed of scale is customer love, which you can’t buy, hack, or game. Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator, scaled countless start-ups by focusing on this one idea: Finding 100 users who love you is better than 1 million who kinda like you. As CEO of OpenAI, Sam leads the creation of genuinely useful AI products. He shares timeless insights in his interview from 2018 on how to build on the love of passionate customers to create world-shifting tools.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Is your AI built for everyone, or is it built to work with your businesses' data? |
| 0:06.1 | IBM helps you integrate and govern unstructured data wherever it lives, |
| 0:10.6 | so your business can have more accurate AI instead of just more of it. |
| 0:14.9 | Get your data ready for AI at IBM.com, the AI built for business, IBM. |
| 0:21.9 | My friend, Sam Altman, is a bit of a geek. |
| 0:25.4 | And he's okay with me saying that, I asked. |
| 0:28.7 | To talk about my nerdy qualities, I approve of that. |
| 0:31.4 | Yes, I thought you did. |
| 0:32.9 | Many people have noted you have affinity for cargo shorts. |
| 0:35.7 | Honestly, I don't think they're that ugly, and I find them incredibly convenient. You can, like, put a lot of stuff. Like, I'd still read paperback books. I like to carry on around with me. I carry, like, computer chargers, cables. They're just, like, you know, efficient. It's somewhat your Batman utility belt. Yeah, you just can carry a lot of stuff. people don't often ask Sam directly about his cargo shorts, or its geekiness for that matter. |
| 0:59.0 | Sam's the president of Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious startup accelerators. |
| 1:04.0 | He's incredibly respected, and founders everywhere know he can make or break their fledgling company. |
| 1:10.0 | But if you really want to understand Sam, you've got to understand what species of geekdom he |
| 1:15.3 | falls under. |
| 1:16.5 | Sam is not just your garden variety geek. |
| 1:18.9 | He's a student of the history of geeks. |
| 1:23.6 | An aspiring student. |
| 1:25.1 | Aspiring student with a fascination for an entire range of tech. |
| 1:32.3 | So one of the pieces of tech that you ended up getting was a bronze sword. |
| 1:38.1 | I'm not sure exactly which sword you're referring to. |
| 1:40.9 | Turns out, Sam has a whole collection of swords and battle axes. |
| 1:45.1 | And this fascination with ancient weaponry has put him in some uncomfortable situations. |
... |
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