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Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time”

Name: Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time”
Uploaded: 2025-01-22T17:00:40+00:00
Duration: 48 s
Channel: Lorenzo
Description: A short spoken excerpt from Sam Altman arguing that successful founders constantly generate ideas. He recounts a Y Combinator experiment where YC funded…

22 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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0:48

A short spoken excerpt from Sam Altman arguing that successful founders constantly generate ideas. He recounts a Y Combinator experiment where YC funded 20 strong teams that lacked original ideas; they all failed, leading Altman to conclude that a specific kind of creativity/independent thinking (idea-generation intelligence) is essential in founders.

Questions this video answers

20 teams

Y Combinator (YC)

Chapters

You can give a founder an idea, and they can start a company. The problem is, they need to come up with new ideas for a company. Basically, like every week, you have to come up with crazy new ideas, big changes all the time. We tried an experiment once at YC, where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn't have ideas but were otherwise really good. And what we learned, they all failed. And what we learned is that the good founders are the people that have ideas all the time. So there's an intelligence component to this. There's a creativity component to this. There is an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this, this idea of this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don't yet exist but should, you got to have that in a founder.