And rather than investing in systems and processes to provide a fallback in case our managers are found wanting, it’s far better to invest in helping our team leaders do what we need them to, by 1) getting rid of ratings of “potential,” 2) teaching team leaders what we know about human growth, and 3) prompting them to discuss careers with their people in terms of momentum—in terms of who each team member is, and in terms of how fast each is moving through the world. This is harder, of course, than buying the latest piece of enterprise software and then imploring our people to use it, but it’s the right hard thing to do.

When Larry told me during acquisition that Google would marshal the team and align their priorities with ours, he was 100 percent telling the truth. But what that looked like at Google was giving the team the skeleton of a plan and letting them fill in the rest as they went. Then they’d have a meeting every so often to ask how things were going.

But I had interpreted his words through an Apple lens. If Steve Jobs said he was going to marshal the team, that meant he was going to be there every step of the way—weekly, sometimes daily. He’d assemble everyone, tell them where to go, make sure they were marching together, and drag any stragglers back in place by sheer force of will.

Both his media savvy and dealmaking, two pillars of his rise, rest on his remarkable ability to tell a good story. In this Altman is a natural. Even knowing as you watch him that his company would ultimately fail, you can’t help but be compelled by what he’s saying. He speaks with a casual ease about the singular positioning of his company. His startup is part of the grand, unstoppable trajectory of technology. Consumers and advertisers are clamoring for the service. Don’t bet against him—his success is inevitable.

Early in his career, Altman observed that new CEOs only succeeded if they “refounded” the company. He did this with conviction at YC when he inherited the presidency. He created new programs, including a new fund, to expand the accelerator’s support for startups at different stages. He moved into hard technologies—those that required ambitious scientific innovation, including nuclear fusion, quantum computing, and self-driving cars. Already a prestigious name brand, YC’s sphere of influence grew from a couple hundred companies to thousands a year, turning it into a center of gravity in Silicon Valley. “The thing that I’m most proud of is we really built an empire,” Altman said after stepping down as president.

As OpenAI concentrated its bets, Altman was applying the same strategy to his other projects and investments. Over the years, as he’d shifted toward more hard-tech innovation, he had developed a belief in betting big and long on the most important projects.

“If you could wave a wand, change anything about the tech, startup, entrepreneurship ecosystem, what would you change?” his brother Jack had asked him at an event as he’d stepped down from YC. “It would be to get everyone in the ecosystem to take a much longer time horizon,” Altman had said. “This world where people start a company and plan to run it for four or five years, join a company and only plan to stay for one or two—that’s not how important shit gets done.”

Along those lines, 2021 seemed to mark a major shift in Altman’s personal investment strategy away from taking a large number of small bets toward taking a small number of really large ones. That year a startup he’d cofounded in 2019 called Tools for Humanity that had remained largely quiet saw an influx of funding and media coverage and a concerted ramp-up in its operations, as Altman directed more external attention to the company. The venture was a dedicated effort to develop a working mechanism for universal basic income, or UBI, a popular Silicon Valley idea to give everyone a regular minimum distribution of income. Altman often passionately discussed UBI as the possible antidote to a future world where AI could create mass economic fallout. At YC he had started the largest pilot in the US to study the concept, spinning out a nonprofit in the process called OpenResearch that administered the program. Over three years, OpenResearch gave a $1,000 monthly stipend to a randomly selected group of one thousand out of three thousand low-income people, with the rest getting fifty dollars a month as a control. In July 2024, OpenResearch would release its findings, showing that the unconditional cash helped people meet their basic needs, assist others, and have more economic leeway.