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

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.