Sam Altman's little notepad

The thing that Wade Foster (CEO of Zapier) remembered most about Sam Altman during his time in YC together back in 2012 was that Sam was an efficiency beast

A lot of folks are intrigued by Sam Altman now that he’s shot to fame as the CEO of OpenAI (ie. the creator of ChatGPT). And considered by many as one of the most influential people in tech, and in the world.

But he was known as being a ‘machine’ well before he ever joined OpenAI.

In fact when he joined Y-Combinator as a Partner in 2011 and then named its CEO later in 2014… he’d already gained quite the reputation for being a beast of efficiency.

I recently watched this interview of Zapier CEO, Wade Foster, who at one point is asked what his impression of Sam Altman was. And note that Zapier was in the YC batch of Summer 2012.

The thing that Wade remembered most about Sam was his notebook

So Wade talks in this interview how he remembered Sam always carried a notebook around everywhere. And he’d be scribbling stuff on it.

He would generally have a separate page for each day of the week and he’d be writing stuff all throughout the day and then scratching it off. His goal seemed to be to scratch off everything planned for the day before leaving that day.

And the general impression of YC founders was that the guy was an absolute machine. He seemed to magically retain tons of information and not forget to do anything he committed to.

When asked whether he was surprised that Sam got to where he is today…. Wade’s response was “not at all. It was obvious this guy was gonna be massive.”

Sam is also very known for this public blog post from 2018 on “Productivity”

You can find Sam’s post on productivity here. And its probably one of the most cited to and linked to posts of all time in tech.

I’ve literally seen it referred to at least 5 times in the past year or so.

In it he talks about how small productivity gains, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot.

And so its “worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. Because if you get 10% more done and 1% better every day compared to someone else, the compounded difference is massive”.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been a productivity nut my entire career… piecing together best practices from various folks over the years.

And have seen how with time… this leads to large productivity advantages over others that don’t have this philosophy.

Being ‘efficient’ is not enough however… you need to be going in the right direction

Sam also points out that productivity is not enough. “It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction.”

And so picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity.

This is the part that I cannot claim to be best-in-class in. And rather for me it has been more of an evolution over my career.

But I definitely see his point. And Warren Buffet has talked about the same thing many times.

Are you rowing in the right direction? And if so, how do you get at least 10% better each year? Interesting things to reflect on.