his unblinking stare
October 3, 2016 3:30 AM   Subscribe

Portrait of a would-be world-changer Who is Sam Altman, the new head of Y Combinator? What does he want to do/for all of us? New Yorker portrait by Tad Friend. posted by doctornemo (45 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
I always have to wonder how these brilliant, idealistic, dedicated world changer folks would respond to a big opportunity to Change The World that didn't involve feeling like a high-status visionary and getting millions in investor money?

*******

Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy.
I can take a vitamin C pill WHILE I'm typing. Why can't Altman?

Not sure I want to see the world as transformed by this guy.
posted by thelonius at 4:01 AM on October 3, 2016 [12 favorites]


Kings and Queens always have courtiers to tell them and the peasants how great they are. This article even explicitly tells you that Airbnb was just a matter of luck concerning Barry Manilow’s drummer. Yet then there are thousands of words that follow that about how brilliant the rich guys are. Sickening.
posted by Coda Tronca at 4:38 AM on October 3, 2016 [14 favorites]


"... an inexplicable fondness for cargo shorts" was all that really needed to be said.
posted by scruss at 4:43 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


The hacker-news thread about the article is kinda boring.
posted by sammyo at 5:32 AM on October 3, 2016


The pitch: YCombinator is an inefficient way of transferring wealth from venture capitalists to bay-area landlords; there’s a disruptive opportunity here to cut out the middleman with an app that lets VCs just give money directly to the SoCal rentier class for a nominal service fee.

I call my startup "Oligarchr".
posted by mhoye at 5:39 AM on October 3, 2016 [60 favorites]


Sam Altman! I'm so fond of this guy in only a slightly-mean way that it's hilarious. I used to be a big-name Hacker Newser, to the point where my (rejected) YCombinator application got me a personal letter from Big Man Paul Graham himself, and Altman was only just becoming the big name there that he clearly is now.

Graham had such an incredible crush on the dude. He wrote various essays where he called Altman the next Zuckerberg, the next Bill Gates, talked about how all aspiring young white men ought to be like SamA, as he went on HN. All while Altman was building a Foursquare competitor that ultimately gained no traction and got bought by a company that sells prepaid debit cards and is ranked 1 star on Yelp/Consumer Affairs.

Sam Altman is almost even more emblematic of YCombinator than Paul Graham was, and again I say this mostly lovingly and only a little bit cruelly. Graham had these real visionary aims for YC, some of which really did wind up being groundbreaking in the field. But YCombinator is defined as much for its lack of vision, and for its willingness to invest in companies whose "disruptions" are only really impressive if you're the sort of person who has strong opinions about bug trackers and the like (which, for the record, I totally do!). Altman's got all the willingness to focus YC on that kind of plebium, and none of the wannabe-visionary passion. And he's the perfect emblemification of Graham's infamous declaration that he's a sucker for anybody who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.

It's seriously adorable. In, you know, a real damn skeevy way.
posted by rorgy at 6:37 AM on October 3, 2016 [12 favorites]


I thought YCombinator was just a small company that runs Hacker News and occasionally has meetups for young people in San Francisco.
posted by demiurge at 6:40 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


TNY's NY and politics writers are pretty good. Their traveling journalists are second to none. Their West Coast writers are Silicon Valley fanboys with absolutely no sense of perspective whatsoever.
posted by radicalawyer at 7:14 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


HackerNews is just a test bed for the revolutionary "hundred year" computer language invented by Mr Graham.
posted by sammyo at 7:15 AM on October 3, 2016


Kings and Queens always have courtiers to tell them and the peasants how great they are.

Not a Tad Friend fan, are you? LOL

I quite like Friend's writing for the New Yorker.
posted by My Dad at 7:21 AM on October 3, 2016


Incidentally, and you didn't hear this from me, Hacker News is a remarkably easy site to vote brigade, so much so that if you've got about six friends online and bored you can funnel an easy 30,000 readers to basically anything you want them to look at. I might have landed a position at a shitty exploitative start-up by proving this to them in the middle of my job interview.
posted by rorgy at 7:29 AM on October 3, 2016 [27 favorites]


I should add that this is a known bug trait of Hacker News, and that at least one person who's gone on to be a well-known blogging head was a regular on the #hackernews chatroom I participated on who had the same habit of "prepping" people for incoming posts of his, so he could rocket to the top of the site rankings 30 seconds after his post went up.

One of the features traits of Hacker News is that there are upvotes but no downvotes, which means that once something receives popular attention, it either has to be manually removed from the listings by a moderator or it will continue to benefit from every innocent upvote it receives from that point on. And, as far as I can tell, HN never bothered to put a "check for crappy behavior" moderation system in place. That most of the people who understood the implications of this were the sort of privileged elite who knew to check chatrooms for the main community definitely felt like another deliberate feature trait that defined the site's method of operation.

posted by rorgy at 7:35 AM on October 3, 2016 [10 favorites]


I never understood the elevation and worship of Sam Altman, when his startup (Loopt) failed and had to be mercy-bought-out by some shady prepaid debit card company.
posted by PenDevil at 7:36 AM on October 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


One of the features traits of Hacker News is that there are upvotes but no downvotes,

... and yet somehow, articles discussing racism, sexism and harassment in tech consistently get downranked or simply disappeared. Who can say why? It's all very mysterious.
posted by mhoye at 7:44 AM on October 3, 2016 [7 favorites]


Who can say why? It's all very mysterious.

"Let's discuss only things that are germane to the interests of the Hacker News community" was definitely one of those things that must've seemed like a good idea at the time, because nobody involved assumed that Hacker News would ever need to have an uncomfortable discussion about anything at any time going forward. The same, magically, holds true of YCombinator as an organization!

I never understood the elevation and worship of Sam Altman, when his startup (Loopt) failed and had to be mercy-bought-out by some shady prepaid debit card company.


Because he looks like Mark Zuckerberg. This is literally the answer that you're looking for. He dropped out of an Ivy League college, he wears t-shirts, and he learned how to structure his thoughts into little "insight blurbs" from Paul Graham himself, so Paul Graham listens to him and thinks, "Good God, this boy is brilliant."

Take this, from the second paragraph of the article in the FPP (which is as far as I can read through this bilge, I'm so sorry):
At Graham’s table, he and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump, then decided to reach out to an affiliated expert: Chris Lehane, a former White House lawyer now at the YC company Airbnb. Altman declared, “The best idea seems to be just to support Hillary.”
Assertiveness in the form of saying the most straightforwardly obvious thing imaginable. When you're working in a market that'll reward you for assertive action and that's easy enough to understand that a bright 19-year-old can do it, being dumbly obvious reaps enormous rewards. And then you can write essays about how what matters most is being so concise that your thought can be reduced to a single sentence.

(FWIW, I think the author of that article is a really smart guy and one of the less-scuzzy people in the scene. But he definitely succumbs to some thinking which, if not inherently problematic, definitely falls in line with some more problematic ways of thinking about the world.)

A generation of tech writers grew up thinking that Paul Graham should be considered as great an essayist as, I dunno, take your pick of great essayists. Don't know any? Perfect! Read Paul Graham. He'll teach you what good writing ought to be like: assertive, concise, and as logically parseable as a page worth of LISP.
posted by rorgy at 7:56 AM on October 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


sama is also very charmingly intense, in a confident, soft-spoken aspie way. i wouldn't doubt the sincerity of his goals.
posted by pmv at 8:35 AM on October 3, 2016


There are at least comment downvotes in HN, my friend has them and I don't. He has more "points" than I do. It's not clear how many points you need to get them.

I think the consequence of this is that only really devoted people can downvote, and let's be honest those are almost all white men like my friend.
posted by melissam at 8:48 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]



The pitch: YCombinator is an inefficient way of transferring wealth from venture capitalists to bay-area landlords; there’s a disruptive opportunity here to cut out the middleman with an app that lets VCs just give money directly to the SoCal rentier class for a nominal service fee.


The VCs have been looking at startup hubs around other cities for some time now. They may be evil, but they're not stupid.
posted by ocschwar at 9:10 AM on October 3, 2016


“Consumers decide, ultimately, but enough people view YC as important that if we say, ‘We’re super excited about virtual reality,’ college students will start studying it.”

The thing is that college students (read: academia) have being doing VR for a couple decades now, and have been taking it as far as the technology would allow. This has been a focus of research programs working in concert with private industry for a long time, and the recent consumer explosion has coincided with the availability of the physical technology catching up with what's required to make it an experience that's affordable and not stomach-churning.

I love ambitious visions of the future, but the main problem with the YC view is it's so purposefully naive. They have no expert knowledge of these different fields, and in many cases, no way to vet whether the people pitching ideas are any better informed. If you're tossing $120k to a handful of companies with no expert vetting, you're doing no better than gambling, and they know it.

VR's just a handy example, but with a recent pitch for medical technology and agriculture projects (which used some really vague terms making me think they know nothing other than "agriculture is huge"), there's going to be a lot more of the same.
posted by mikeh at 9:52 AM on October 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


I don't actually think they are 'evil' - I even admire what they do, providing access to opportunity to young would-be startup founders. I just have an aversion to the techno-libertarian utopia that they seem to think they gifting us, and I think it's egomania to congratulate yourself about "changing the world" when you've brought about something like AirBnB, while war and racism and disease rage on.
posted by thelonius at 9:53 AM on October 3, 2016


Their West Coast writers are Silicon Valley fanboys with absolutely no sense of perspective whatsoever.

Try George Packer.
posted by Lyme Drop at 10:19 AM on October 3, 2016


I worked closely for a person who got a startup to the 10 million investment stage (series A), which then later crashed. The most noticeable absence in this article is how hard these guys work to ensure that the people around them, working their 25 year-old butts off, will definitely get excluded from any remotely possible big bucks. Years ago there were a couple of startups that seemed to catch capitalism almost by surprise, with one of the results being that people like the company chef found themselves getting a bit rich. Now, founders and investors slap their thighs laughing as they ensure that's never happening again.
posted by Coda Tronca at 11:04 AM on October 3, 2016 [9 favorites]


I don't actually think they are 'evil'

"Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups" -pg.

Nope. Evil.
posted by ennui.bz at 11:08 AM on October 3, 2016 [9 favorites]


"If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand."

Jesus fuck no!
posted by maupuia at 11:12 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Presumably, during any real pandemic, any plane coming out of a hot zone into an uncontaminated one would be shot down over the ocean. So there's that.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 11:23 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Hacker News is a remarkably easy site to vote brigade

There's some nuance these days. In particular they have somewhat sophisticated voting ring detection so it's difficult to repeatedly pull off.
posted by zrail at 11:54 AM on October 3, 2016


I'm for anything that leads to Peter Thiel dying in a fireball.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:59 AM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


The VCs have been looking at startup hubs around other cities for some time now. They may be evil, but they're not stupid.

¿Por qué no los dos?
posted by tclark at 12:15 PM on October 3, 2016


¿Por qué no los dos?


Two words: Cue cat.
posted by ocschwar at 12:19 PM on October 3, 2016


I think this is a decently well-reported article with some interesting tidbits but I take issue with its studied faux-apolitical posture. And in fact, the apolitical guise is what bothers me about the whole "saving the world through startups" movement/PR campaign.

There is no analysis here of the labor of the people who work for the startups. There is almost no analysis here of privilege, though it is mentioned that white men dominate the VC boys-club network. There is no real effort to disentangle "the things that Sam Altman thinks are neat" from "actual priorities for improving the world for less-advantaged people."

There is also no real acknowledgment that most of the tricky problems that cause the most suffering in the world are not technological problems but political ones - we could live in a world where everyone had enough to eat and got a good education, but we don't, not because the industries need "disruption" but because capitalists, Peter Thiel chief among them, put profits before all else and the system allows them to do so.

Put another way - libertarianism is a (highly problematic) political philosophy, not god's invisible hand bringing his benevolent will through the marketplace.
posted by mai at 12:30 PM on October 3, 2016 [5 favorites]


(highly problematic)

At some point we have to dispose of polite weasel words like "problematic" and just straight say the truth; dangerous, nasty, destructive to humanity.
posted by Jimbob at 12:33 PM on October 3, 2016 [8 favorites]




Y Combinator under Sam's leadership has moved from a near-total focus on democratizing VC for apps and websites. They are now, as mentioned in the article, funding various "hard tech" such as fusion energy, as well as trying to dramatically expand the pool of founders who can start a company. They have never provided, nor made, most of the money, other VCs do that. Realistically, they could be making a lot more than they are, but believe in using leverage (in the abstract, not financial sense) to expand their impact. I think it's really hard to argue that Sam has been bad for humanity. Full disclosure, I'm a longtime reader of Paul Graham, since before there was a Hacker News.
posted by wnissen at 3:09 PM on October 3, 2016


Quoth thelonius:
I just have an aversion to the techno-libertarian utopia that they seem to think they gifting us, and I think it's egomania to congratulate yourself about "changing the world" when you've brought about something like AirBnB, while war and racism and disease rage on.
I mean, I agree, but they're not 'gifting' us anything: they're selling it. And then they seem to think that they can turn round and sell the fact that they've gathered all our personal information to other sociopathic techno-libertarians so that they can sell us more sub-minimum-wage jobs delivering things that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pizza.
posted by prismatic7 at 4:27 PM on October 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


Burn it down
posted by quite unimportant at 4:34 PM on October 3, 2016


they're not 'gifting' us anything: they're selling it.

Sure. I just have the feeling that they expect humanity's gratitude for it.
posted by thelonius at 5:00 PM on October 3, 2016


democratizing VC for apps and websites.

Could you explain a little bit about what this means, and how it actually works in practice?
posted by cell divide at 5:34 PM on October 3, 2016


they're not 'gifting' us anything: they're selling it.

Sure. I just have the feeling that they expect humanity's gratitude for it.


I'm thankful for a lot of the things I have to pay money for. It's the ones I can't afford that get no gratitude from me.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:16 PM on October 3, 2016


The hacker-news thread about the article is kinda boring.

Hacker News has become increasingly skeptical of the startup scene/economically leftist than one would think the community could be.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:18 PM on October 3, 2016


A generation of tech writers grew up thinking that Paul Graham should be considered as great an essayist as, I dunno, take your pick of great essayists. Don't know any? Perfect!

Ahem, way to forget Joel Spolsky. Or Jeff Atwood.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:21 PM on October 3, 2016


I never understood the elevation and worship of Sam Altman, when his startup (Loopt) failed and had to be mercy-bought-out by some shady prepaid debit card company.

Because he looks like Mark Zuckerberg. This is literally the answer that you're looking for. He dropped out of an Ivy League college, he wears t-shirts, and he learned how to structure his thoughts into little "insight blurbs" from Paul Graham himself, so Paul Graham listens to him and thinks, "Good God, this boy is brilliant."


It is interesting that successful YCombinator applicants can be modeled as AIs having cracked a very specific instance of the Turing test, where PG (or his avatar) can mistake them for hybridized clones of PG +Mark Zuckerberg. On the other hand, the entire Silicon Valley accelerator and VC scene can be modeled as a living neural network trained on a dataset consisting of 1M iterations of Mark Zuckerberg. Occasionally an Adora Cheung or Michael Seibel is hand-placed into the simulation, like a special loot drop in a Skyrim mod. Pretty soon the NN model will be mature enough to use for everything everywhere forever!
posted by Svejk at 4:57 AM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is an article to be written about how machine learning/weak AI provides a technological and pseudo-empirical veneer on what is ultimately an incredibly biased process.
Y Combinator has even begun using an A.I. bot, Hal9000, to help it sift admission applications: the bot’s neural net trains itself by assessing previous applications and those companies’ outcomes. “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”
If you're training it from past successes, a huge majority of those people will be white men who went to Stanford and MIT because that who the early partners chose to fund. Does that mean that those people are actually the best founders, or have you just taken those biases and replicated them with your AI? My guess is the latter, but now, because that decision is coming from the AI and not you, it's suddenly has this air of scientism around it.

This is the really the ultimate sin of using AI in domains like this: if we don't want the future to look like the past, then we can't use data from the past to predict what will work in the future.
posted by daniel striped tiger at 6:43 AM on October 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


I knew someone had to have written about this:
Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem
posted by daniel striped tiger at 6:45 AM on October 4, 2016


Maciej Cegłowski also has your back on the machine learning as "money laundering for bias" front:

http://idlewords.com/talks/deep_fried_data.htm
posted by mr_stru at 1:21 AM on October 5, 2016


He'll teach you what good writing ought to be like: assertive, concise, and as logically parseable as a page worth of LISP.

I see what you did there.
posted by pseudocode at 4:09 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


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