I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exception…

Sam Altman·19 June 2020

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—fo…

Sam Altman·16 June 2020

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common quest…

Sam Altman·28 May 2020

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to re…

Sam Altman·30 March 2020

I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that c…

Sam Altman·15 March 2020

Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global traged…

Sam Altman·7 March 2020

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy on…

Sam Altman·26 February 2020

There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startu…

Sam Altman·13 January 2020

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create so…

Sam Altman·24 January 2019

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an…

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·19 August 2018

Today, OpenAI released a new result . We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algor…

Sam Altman·25 June 2018

If the craft of Product Management is often mired in ambiguity, managing product managers is ambiguity². When you start …

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·1 June 2018

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case w…

Sam Altman·10 May 2018

I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I dec…

Sam Altman·10 April 2018

Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles. A first principle is a “basic, foundational …

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·9 January 2018

I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it. I didn’t mea…

Sam Altman·16 December 2017

Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing …

Sam Altman·14 December 2017

A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year human…

Sam Altman·7 December 2017

I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I…

Sam Altman·27 November 2017

A sea of information at a public library in Toronto, c/o burst.shopify.com While product managers may not build the actu…

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·11 July 2017

giphy.com For as long as I’ve been working in tech I’ve heard this oscillating debate about the use of deadlines in proj…

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·12 April 2017

sorting.at All high functioning teams must prioritize. Not once a month, not once a week — but rigorously, and ruthlessl…

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·11 April 2017

I get every new PM I manage to read (or re-read) High Output Management by Andy Grove within the first month of joining …

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·29 November 2016

We just enabled 325,000 merchants to sell in messaging, without building a bot. Our team at Shopify has been working on …

The Black Box of Product Management - Medium·16 October 2016