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Sam Altman explains why “the great wave” is the most important concept for good startup ideas “This idea of the great wave - I think this is the most important concept to find good ideas out there. People wonder why startups cluster in small periods of time… The reason... is that there are these great waves.” He gives the example of the internet giving rise to a number of massive companies in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then smartphones gave rise to another group of companies in the 2009-2011 period. “All of a sudden, new things are possible that were never possible before. And when that happens - because startups can move so quickly - you can do things that otherwise would never happen. Or that a big company would otherwise win on. You want to think about what the next great wave is.” In this lecture that was given in 2017, Sam predicts that the next great wave will be “machine learning applied to every vertical.” He continues: “You want to identify this - What is the big tectonic shift that’s going to happen in the next couple of years? And do something that’s enabled by that and built on that platform.” Video source: Stanford Online (2017)show more

Startup Archive

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32,091 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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Startup Archive1 year ago

Watch the full @StanfordOnline lecture with Sam Altman here:

Startup Archive1 year ago

Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read our free newsletter here:

Michael Anton Fischer1 year ago

Struggling with economic concepts? Bitcoin Nation simplifies the foundations of money and explains how Bitcoin can address issues like hyperinflation and economic instability. This accessible guide is perfect for beginners looking to understand the potential of sound money.

Lewis Joel Horne e/acc1 year ago

Time perch push notifications with startup archive posts = 🤤👌

Ankit Rathod1 year ago

We’re in the middle of "The Greatest Wave". Most founders will chase it. BUT Founder-mode operators will become the dam the wave crashes into. They don’t surf trends—they harness force. That’s how generational companies get built.

Coop🚨1 year ago

AI wave happening now

SaaS Growth Strategies1 year ago

Predicting that 'great wave' much before it has arrived and working on it from the get-go requires a lot of research, knowledge, and most importantly, self-belief. Right now, AI is the new 'great wave' and we can see plenty of start-ups emerging.

Chile Invest1 year ago

He forgets about the many fake waves in between.

Nonye Okonkwo1 year ago

You have been generating the waves for some time now. It’s time to ride the wave now, @sama. The plates are spinning now. Radiohead will see you now. We need to hear this voice more than ever.

Shawn Chauhan1 year ago

Great waves really shape entire startup ecosystems

Lucas Franco1 year ago

this is why timing is so crucial for startups. catching the right wave at the right moment can be the difference between unicorn status and irrelevance.

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Startup Archive

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SMX 🇺🇸

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Sam Altman: “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined” “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined. This is more important than being smart. This is more important than having a network. This is more important than a great idea.” As Sam explains: “The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and frequency of bad stuff that happens to you… So much of being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up. We have funded people who had a great idea, perfect background on paper, a great product, and still failed—and it has usually been that they’re insufficiently determined.” He continues: “Of course you need a good product and a good market and to be smart, but that’s really obvious. The degree to which being a 3- or 4-standard deviation outlier on determination as a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started.”

Sam Altman: “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined” “The most underrated quality of all is being really determined. This is more important than being smart. This is more important than having a network. This is more important than a great idea.” As Sam explains: “The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and frequency of bad stuff that happens to you… So much of being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up. We have funded people who had a great idea, perfect background on paper, a great product, and still failed—and it has usually been that they’re insufficiently determined.” He continues: “Of course you need a good product and a good market and to be smart, but that’s really obvious. The degree to which being a 3- or 4-standard deviation outlier on determination as a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started.”

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Startup Archive

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Mark Zuckerberg: “I don’t believe in delegating” “There’s this theory that a lot of people have which is that the job of a leader is to hire people and delegate things to them. My theory is there is so much going on across the company that I can’t possibly be involved in all of it, so all these people are going to have a ton of stuff they’re going to do. But fundamentally, if there’s a decision that I want to be involved with, I’m going to be involved in it… I think that’s generally a good way for founders to operate.” Mark continues: “If you’re running the company and there’s something important — at whatever level of detail in the organization — I don’t get the logic of saying, ‘I’m not going to be involved in that.’” Of course you want to have humility that you may not have the most context immediately, but in Mark’s view, the CEO must take ownership of the company’s most important problems. To ensure that his time is constantly spent on the most important priority for the company, Mark has very few recurring meetings and tries to keep his schedule as open as possible: “II generally keep a bunch of time open so that stuff is pretty dynamic — I can wake up in the morning and be like, ‘OK, I need to work on these three things today, and I want to make sure I have a block of time where I can go do that.’” Video source: Stripe (2025)

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326,115 views • 7 months ago

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Chamath's CDS Bet: Outlining Major Corporate Debt Default Risks "With all of the tariffs, the one thing that we haven't sufficiently talked about is there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today." "And you would say, 'Well, if long-term rates go down, there's no real risk.'" "But the tariff picture actually impacts revenues." "And the problem with that is that there's a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA." "And so this is what I spoke about at the beginning of January, which is, the one risk that is uncontrollable, is what happens to corporate debt and could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action?" On our 2025 predictions show in January, Chamath Palihapitiya picked credit default swaps as his best-performing asset this year, calling it a long-shot with major upside: " I would be long CDS. I'm buying insurance using credit default swaps. I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope that this trade loses money. But if it hits, it will be the best-performing asset of 2025." Fast-forward to April: " It has hit. For every billion dollars of risk you would've put on, would have cost you ~$1M, and that million dollars would've made you ~$7M in about three months." "Why is this important? The CDS actually represents the structural risk in the United States corporate economy." "So when you see these spreads blowing out, this is actually a very important warning sign." "This is what was the canary in the coal mine for the Great Financial Crisis." "The tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart." "And I think it's something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to."

The All-In Podcast

1,102,601 views • 1 year ago

Peter Thiel on how to build the next billion-dollar startup: "Every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking site. The next Bill Gates won't start an operating system. The next Elon Musk won't start a Tesla electric car company." Peter's entire thesis rejects the idea of formulas in business. As he puts it: "Science starts with things that are experimentally repeatable, but great businesses are zero to one; they're always one-of-a-kind. There is always this anti-formulaic quality." So what's the one theme he keeps coming back to? "This need for differentiation. What are you doing that nobody else is doing? What ideas do you have that nobody else has? What great business are you working on that no one else is working on?" He continues: "If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly where you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing. There really are only two kinds of businesses in this world: businesses that are in crazy competition and one-of-a-kind businesses that are monopolies." On why you shouldn't just iterate your way to success: "The core thing is to have a great product, and then you can always improve and iterate on that. If you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a great product, that rarely works." His advice? Think 5 to 10 years ahead: "Why will this be a really valuable business in 5 to 10 years? How's the competitive landscape going to develop? These are hard questions to answer, but the great entrepreneurs I know always have some perspective on it. When I was playing chess, one of the early lessons I learned was, a bad plan is still always better than no plan at all." On what makes work meaningful: "It's great to be working on problems where if you weren't working on them, nobody else would do them. If we weren't doing this, this problem would absolutely not be tackled. That's what's meaningful. Whereas when you're competing, you're already, by definition, number two at least in a category." Build something only you can build.

Peter Thiel on how to build the next billion-dollar startup: "Every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking site. The next Bill Gates won't start an operating system. The next Elon Musk won't start a Tesla electric car company." Peter's entire thesis rejects the idea of formulas in business. As he puts it: "Science starts with things that are experimentally repeatable, but great businesses are zero to one; they're always one-of-a-kind. There is always this anti-formulaic quality." So what's the one theme he keeps coming back to? "This need for differentiation. What are you doing that nobody else is doing? What ideas do you have that nobody else has? What great business are you working on that no one else is working on?" He continues: "If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly where you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing. There really are only two kinds of businesses in this world: businesses that are in crazy competition and one-of-a-kind businesses that are monopolies." On why you shouldn't just iterate your way to success: "The core thing is to have a great product, and then you can always improve and iterate on that. If you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a great product, that rarely works." His advice? Think 5 to 10 years ahead: "Why will this be a really valuable business in 5 to 10 years? How's the competitive landscape going to develop? These are hard questions to answer, but the great entrepreneurs I know always have some perspective on it. When I was playing chess, one of the early lessons I learned was, a bad plan is still always better than no plan at all." On what makes work meaningful: "It's great to be working on problems where if you weren't working on them, nobody else would do them. If we weren't doing this, this problem would absolutely not be tackled. That's what's meaningful. Whereas when you're competing, you're already, by definition, number two at least in a category." Build something only you can build.

Jaynit

77,758 views • 6 months ago

I have a friend who doesn't read anything published in the past 50 years, and the more I think about it, the more I think he's onto something. The reason is that time is the best filter we have for quality. People are bad at judging quality in the moment but very good at getting rid of junk over time. — — "History is not very good at capturing all that is great in art. It is not good at that. There are many great symphonies that have been lost permanently, there are many great painters that died unknown and their paintings are gone, there's novels that have been written that no one will ever read. So history is not good at capturing all this great art. But history is very good at discarding all that is mediocre. And the amount of time that that takes, it's something like 50 years. So over the course of 50 years, what will happen is a lot of stuff that was prominent will be re-filtered and re-filtered and re-filtered, and you'll end up with a smaller group of things which have survived that test of time. So if you think about it right now, if you go back and look at the bestseller lists for 1974, 1973, there's a lot of that that would have been highly regarded at the time, which people do not read anymore for a variety of reasons, and there's some that has survived, and that's a very telling distinction. So in a world where I'm turning 60 this year, you have a limited amount of time, all four of us have active lives, we want to make sure that if we're going to sit down, we're going to read carefully, we're going to meet and we're going to discuss it in detail, we want to make sure that the work is rewarding. And the best way to ensure that is by drawing from the past." amor towles

I have a friend who doesn't read anything published in the past 50 years, and the more I think about it, the more I think he's onto something. The reason is that time is the best filter we have for quality. People are bad at judging quality in the moment but very good at getting rid of junk over time. — — "History is not very good at capturing all that is great in art. It is not good at that. There are many great symphonies that have been lost permanently, there are many great painters that died unknown and their paintings are gone, there's novels that have been written that no one will ever read. So history is not good at capturing all this great art. But history is very good at discarding all that is mediocre. And the amount of time that that takes, it's something like 50 years. So over the course of 50 years, what will happen is a lot of stuff that was prominent will be re-filtered and re-filtered and re-filtered, and you'll end up with a smaller group of things which have survived that test of time. So if you think about it right now, if you go back and look at the bestseller lists for 1974, 1973, there's a lot of that that would have been highly regarded at the time, which people do not read anymore for a variety of reasons, and there's some that has survived, and that's a very telling distinction. So in a world where I'm turning 60 this year, you have a limited amount of time, all four of us have active lives, we want to make sure that if we're going to sit down, we're going to read carefully, we're going to meet and we're going to discuss it in detail, we want to make sure that the work is rewarding. And the best way to ensure that is by drawing from the past." amor towles

David Perell

86,741 views • 1 year ago

Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company. But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was: “You can build a great company, but it’s hard.” He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups: “If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.” He continues: “Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.” Video source: This Week in Startups @jason (2015)

Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company. But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was: “You can build a great company, but it’s hard.” He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups: “If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.” He continues: “Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.” Video source: This Week in Startups @jason (2015)

Startup Archive

105,347 views • 9 months ago

Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator

Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator

Startup Archive

133,596 views • 1 year ago

Sam Altman on the next big moment to come in AI. Sam Altman was asked “what do you think will be the next domain that subjectively feels like it has this big unlock after coding? Like is it going to be spreadsheets, will it be performance reviews?” “The next kind of coding-like thing that I think will happen is not any specific domain, but the realization of how much time people waste trying to use a computer. The idea that you can do a huge percentage of your day in a very different way.” He pointed out that the friction of moving between apps, copy pasting, and managing basic digital chores is a massive drain on productivity and flow state. “The degree to which most people will realize they can like, sit back and watch an AI do most of their drudgery, is going to surprise people.” Altman (my x mutual / friend and fellow death star enthusiast) explained that in his own experience, working this way has given him much more enjoyment, because it removes the “little stuff” that drags him out of a happy flow state.

Sam Altman on the next big moment to come in AI. Sam Altman was asked “what do you think will be the next domain that subjectively feels like it has this big unlock after coding? Like is it going to be spreadsheets, will it be performance reviews?” “The next kind of coding-like thing that I think will happen is not any specific domain, but the realization of how much time people waste trying to use a computer. The idea that you can do a huge percentage of your day in a very different way.” He pointed out that the friction of moving between apps, copy pasting, and managing basic digital chores is a massive drain on productivity and flow state. “The degree to which most people will realize they can like, sit back and watch an AI do most of their drudgery, is going to surprise people.” Altman (my x mutual / friend and fellow death star enthusiast) explained that in his own experience, working this way has given him much more enjoyment, because it removes the “little stuff” that drags him out of a happy flow state.

Chris

88,982 views • 2 months ago

Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Sam Altman: “The good founders are people who have ideas all the time” “You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week. You have to come up with crazy new ideas and big changes all the time.” When Sam was at Y Combinator, they tried an experiment where they funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. “What we learned is that the good founders are people who have ideas all the time. There’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There’s an ability to think independent thoughts component to this. But whatever you want to call this - this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist but should - you’ve got to have that in a founder.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

93,460 views • 1 year ago

Chamath’s 2026 IPO Advice: Get Public Fast or Get Left Behind Jason: “ What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs?” Chamath: “I think that we have a bit of a risk problem. If you think about appetite as equivalent to a person at a Thanksgiving dinner, when you first come in and you see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. And I think in a moment like that, you want to be the one that is consumed first. And I think the risk increases when you are at the tail end because the risk is that the diners will run out of space.” Jason: “Plate fills up. Yeah.” Chamath: “And if you use that analogy, I think the reason why people's plates will get full is probably twofold and maybe threefold. The first and most important thing is there's enough tactical event risk that people generally want to be risk off and have more margin of safety. We have a lot of these really important financial moments tied to this concept of AGI, ASI. We have a real pricing problem. If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none. If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are now raising hundreds of billions of dollars needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly. History will sort out which one is right, but both cannot be right. So in that vein, I don't think we're going to have this “blockbuster” stream of IPOs. I think what happens is SpaceX is going to get out. They're going to do great, and then maybe the next one does good to great, then the next one will do good, and then the appetite runs out because you just can't absorb, incrementally, trillions of dollars of new demand. And if you think about it, where is it going to come from? Is it going to come from the sidelines? I don't know, I think it's more of a reallocation exercise. But if you look at the S&P, well, most people are now defensively moving away from these kinds of things, towards the things that are more protected, what the industry calls HALO, right? Those things trade for zero today. You could buy hundreds of millions of dollars a year of cashflow for 2-5x right now in the stock market. And so why are you going to go way out on the risk curve and buy something at 200x revenue, let alone earnings? I'm more in the camp of, I think it's good to be first, it’s pretty decent to be second, but if I were you, I would get the heck out, and get public, and get your money, and fortify your balance sheet ASAP, because I think the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you're in.”

Chamath’s 2026 IPO Advice: Get Public Fast or Get Left Behind Jason: “ What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs?” Chamath: “I think that we have a bit of a risk problem. If you think about appetite as equivalent to a person at a Thanksgiving dinner, when you first come in and you see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. And I think in a moment like that, you want to be the one that is consumed first. And I think the risk increases when you are at the tail end because the risk is that the diners will run out of space.” Jason: “Plate fills up. Yeah.” Chamath: “And if you use that analogy, I think the reason why people's plates will get full is probably twofold and maybe threefold. The first and most important thing is there's enough tactical event risk that people generally want to be risk off and have more margin of safety. We have a lot of these really important financial moments tied to this concept of AGI, ASI. We have a real pricing problem. If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none. If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are now raising hundreds of billions of dollars needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly. History will sort out which one is right, but both cannot be right. So in that vein, I don't think we're going to have this “blockbuster” stream of IPOs. I think what happens is SpaceX is going to get out. They're going to do great, and then maybe the next one does good to great, then the next one will do good, and then the appetite runs out because you just can't absorb, incrementally, trillions of dollars of new demand. And if you think about it, where is it going to come from? Is it going to come from the sidelines? I don't know, I think it's more of a reallocation exercise. But if you look at the S&P, well, most people are now defensively moving away from these kinds of things, towards the things that are more protected, what the industry calls HALO, right? Those things trade for zero today. You could buy hundreds of millions of dollars a year of cashflow for 2-5x right now in the stock market. And so why are you going to go way out on the risk curve and buy something at 200x revenue, let alone earnings? I'm more in the camp of, I think it's good to be first, it’s pretty decent to be second, but if I were you, I would get the heck out, and get public, and get your money, and fortify your balance sheet ASAP, because I think the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you're in.”

The All-In Podcast

61,917 views • 3 months ago