In another universe, Sam Altman could have been an investment banker.
Before he dropped out of college and later went on to found OpenAI, Altman said he was “peer pressured and tricked” into accepting an internship at Goldman Sachs during his sophomore year.
“At the time, that was the cool thing. That was what everybody wanted to do,” Altman told the audience at the Internapalooza Conference last month.
“I got peer pressured and kind of tricked into it,” Altman said. “I dutifully applied and got in and felt really cool.”
But Altman ended up turning down the offer. “And then I didn’t do it,” he said, and instead, he worked on his startup Loopt before joining Y Combinator’s first batch and eventually became YC’s president. He then went on to start frontier AI company OpenAI, which just wrapped a $7 billion share sale as it eyes a potential trillion-dollar IPO as soon as the second half of 2026. Goldman is one of OpenAI’s underwriters for its IPO.
