Samuel Altman is an American programmer, blogger, entrepreneur, and investor known as the former president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI.
Early years and education
Samuel Altman was born on April 22, 1985 in Chicago, Illinois and later grew up in St. Louise Missouri. He got his first personal computer when he was 8 years old. Altman went to John Burroughs School for high school and studied computer science at Stanford University while he worked in the AI Lab, he eventually dropped out in 2005. Altman received an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo in 2017.
Career
In 2005, Altman co-founded a social-networking mobile app called Loopt, he was 19 at the time. The mobile app was sold to Green Dot Corporation for more than $43.4 million when it was shut down in 2012. Altman has also been a part of Y Combinator’s initially funded companies in 2005 before he was elected as its president in 2014. According to him, the total valuation of Y Combinator companies had exceeded $65 billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits and Stripe.
In October 2015, Sam Altman announced YC Continuity, a $700 million growth-stage equity fund that invests in YC companies. Within the same month, he also announced Y Combinator Research, which is a non-profit research lab, and donated $10 million to the group.
In September 2016, Altman declared that he would become president of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator and other units. He hopes to grow Y Combinator to fund 1000 new companies each year.
Forbes named Sam Altman as the top investor under 30 in 2015, one of the “Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology” by BusinessWeek in 2008, and was also listed as one of the five most interesting startup founders between 1979 and 2009 by his colleague Paul Graham.