Who is Sam Altman? A look into the life of a tech entrepreneur and investor

By 2016, Altman had become the president of the newly expanded YC Group, encompassing YC and its subsidiaries, including growth-stage equity fund YC Continuity and YC Research, a non-profit research lab partially funded by a $10 million donation from Altman, and the accelerator’s new online class. He stepped down as President of YC Group in 2019.

Sam Altman relinquished his position as YC Group President in 2019 and was announced by YC as a chairman at YC.

By early 2020, Altman was no longer associated with YC.

OpenAI

After transitioning from his role at Y Combinator, Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with a group of renowned tech entrepreneurs and researchers, including Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Pamela Vagata, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. 

OpenAI is a prominent research and deployment organization in artificial intelligence (AI). Its core mission revolves around ensuring that the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. 

OpenAI’s mission statement highlights its commitment to creating highly autonomous systems, “to ensure that artificial general intelligence – highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work – benefits all of humanity.” 

Nuclear Energy

Altman held board positions at energy firms Helion, UPower, and Oklo.

WorldCoin

WorldCoin is a project co-founded by Sam Altman in 2020 to create a global cryptocurrency that can be fairly distributed to everyone. The company’s mission is to create a global ID, a global currency, and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers using its own token.

Angel Investments

Beyond his work with Y Combinator, Altman has also been an active angel investor, backing a variety of successful startups such as Instacart, Reddit, Pinterest, Clever, Asana, Optimizely, Airbnb, Stripe, Teespring, Zenefits, FarmLogs, TrueNorth, Rescale, Alt, Helion Energy, BRINC, TrialSpark, Roboflow, Wave Mobile Money, Humane, Coco, Kami, LeadGenius, Soylent, and Wevorce.

In 2014, Altman became the CEO of Reddit for eight days after the previous CEO resigned. 

Altman has also invested as a partner in companies such as Beacon AI, Apollo Projects, Cadoo, Boom Supersonic, Titan, Rescale, Reddit, Lob, Change.org, Fibo, and Quora.

Some of his prominent exits include Virool, URX, Swiftype, Quill, PlanGrid, Oyster, Optimizely, Nervana, Kimono Labs, and Exec.