Sam Altman reveals investment lesson behind OpenAI's biggest bets

Sam Altman says the best investment decisions rarely look smart in the moment, and he's crediting two of Silicon Valley's most polarising figures for teaching him that.

During an interview for the "Invest Like The Best" podcast, the CEO of OpenAI stated that Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, in different ways, showed him that companies and investments that have the most potential usually never seem popular when they start.

It is quite possible to go with the flow and achieve good results, according to Altman, but to become spectacular, you need to bet on those things that other people ignore or criticise.

Moreover, Altman used the experience he gained while managing Y Combinator, founded by Paul Graham in 2005. He said that good startup investing is more like learning how to fly than lectures.

Altman tied the philosophy straight into OpenAI’s history. After GPT-4 came out, Altman knew they were “on this exponential of model improvement", and they started reaching out to cloud service providers, chip manufacturers and energy firms in order to book future capacity. The reaction, according to Altman, was almost unanimous cynicism: there’s just no way an industry can move at that speed.

Altman likened the experience to raising money for an early-stage startup, where most doors close but only one or two need to open. That mindset, he suggested, is the throughline between his investing philosophy and OpenAI's compute strategy: betting against consensus when the underlying signal looks strong enough to justify it.