Sam Altman, one of the most powerful leaders in Silicon Valley, is jealous of Gen Z college dropouts.
“I’m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,” the OpenAI CEO told Rowan Cheung during an interview at the DevDay conference. “Because the amount of stuff you can build… the opportunity space is so incredibly wide.”
Altman said in the past couple of years he has not had a “real chunk of free mental space” to think about what he’d build now. “But I know that there would be a lot of cool stuff to build,” he said.
Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 after two years of studying computer science. An “unexpected opportunity arose” for 19-year-old Altman, who left Stanford to cofound the location-sharing app Loopt.
As CEO of the company, Altman helped bring in more than $30 million in funding including from notable VC firms like Sequoia Capital. Loopt went through startup accelerator Y Combinator, and after the app was acquired, he became the president of YC. He later cofounded OpenAI in December 2015 with a slew of people, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
