Samuel H. Altman ( ; born April 22, 1985) is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

investor An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital most of the time the investor purchases some species of property. Type ...

, programmer, and

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

ger. He is the CEO of

OpenAI OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company conducts research in the field of AI with the stated goal of promo ...

and the former president of

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

Early life and education

Altman grew up in

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...

; his mother is a dermatologist. He received his first computer at the age of 8. He was raised Jewish. He attended

John Burroughs School John Burroughs School (JBS) is a private, non-sectarian college-preparatory school with 631 students in grades 7– 12. Its 49-acre () campus is located in Ladue, Missouri (US), a suburb of St. Louis. Founded in 1923, it is named for U.S. natu ...

for high school and studied computer science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

until dropping out in 2005. In 2017, he received an honorary degree from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

. Altman is

gay ''Gay'' is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'. While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late 1 ...

, and has been out since his youth.

Career

Loopt

In 2005, at age 19, Altman co-founded and became CEO of

Loopt Loopt was a company based in Mountain View, California, United States which provided a service for smartphone users to share their location selectively with other people (see location-based service). The service supported iPhone, BlackBerry, Andr ...

, a location-based social networking

mobile application A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on des ...

. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. It was acquired by the

Green Dot Corporation The Green Dot Corporation is an American financial technology and bank holding company headquartered in Austin. It is the world's largest prepaid debit card company by market capitalization. Green Dot is also a payments platform company and i ...

for $43.4 million.

Y Combinator

Altman began as a part-time partner at

in 2011. In February 2014, Altman was named president of Y Combinator by its cofounder Paul Graham. His first batch of investments included Loopt. In a 2014 blog post, Altman said that the total valuation of Y Combinator companies had surpassed $65 billion, including well-known companies like

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 ...

Zenefits TriNet Zenefits (legal name: YourPeople, Inc., previously known as Zenefits) is a technology company based in San Francisco, that offers cloud-based software as a service to companies for managing their human resources, with a particular focus o ...

and Stripe. In September 2016, Altman announced that he would become president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator and other units. Altman said that he hoped to expand Y Combinator to fund 1,000 new companies per year. He also tried to expand the types of companies funded by YC, especially 'hard technology' companies. In October 2015, Altman announced YC Continuity, a $700 million growth-stage

equity fund A stock fund, or equity fund, is a fund that invests in stocks, also called equity securities. Stock funds can be contrasted with bond funds and money funds. Fund assets are typically mainly in stock, with some amount of cash, which is genera ...

that invests in YC companies. Also in October 2015, Altman announced Y Combinator Research, a non-profit research lab, and donated $10 million to the group. YC Research has thus far announced research on basic income, the future of computing, education, and building new cities. Altman was named the top investor under 30 by ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

'' in 2015, one of the "Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology" by ''

BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'' in 2008 and listed as one of the five most interesting startup founders between 1979 and 2009 by his colleague Paul Graham. In March 2019, YC announced Altman's transitioning into a Chairman position to focus more on

. This decision came shortly after YC announced it would be moving its headquarters to San Francisco. As of early 2020, he is no longer affiliated with YC.

Angel investing

He is an investor in many companies, including

, Stripe,

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

, Asana,

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

, Teespring,

, FarmLogs, True North, Shoptiques,

Instacart Instacart is an American company that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service in the United States and Canada. The company offers its services via a website and mobile app. The service allows customers to order groceries from participatin ...

Optimizely Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing in marketing, multivariate testing tools, Personalization#Web pages, website personalization ...

Verbling Verbling is an online language learning platform that pairs individuals with language teachers via video chat. The company was created at Y Combinator (company), Y Combinator in 2011. In 2015, Verbling raised $2.7 million in series A round funding ...

, Soylent, Reserve, Vicarious, Clever, Notable PDF (now Kami) and

Change.org Change.org is a worldwide nonprofit petition website, based in California, US, operated by the San Francisco-based company of the same name, which has over 400 million users and offers the public the ability to promote the petitions they care abo ...

. He was the CEO of

for eight days in 2014 after CEO

Yishan Wong Yishan Wong () is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices, and an advisor ...

resigned. He announced the return of

Steve Huffman Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez (), is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co ...

as CEO on July 10, 2015.

Nuclear energy

He is chairman of the board for Helion and Oklo, two nuclear energy companies. He has said that nuclear energy is one of the most important areas of technological development.

OpenAI

Altman is the CEO of

. OpenAI is a for-profit research company whose goal is to advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, rather than cause harm. The organization was initially funded by Altman, Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research. In total, when the company launched in 2015, they had raised $1 billion from outside funders.

Worldcoin

Altman co-founded Worldcoin in 2020. Worldcoin aims to give its new digital money to every human on Earth for free by using privacy-preserving

iris recognition Iris recognition is an automated method of biometric identification that uses mathematical pattern-recognition techniques on video images of one or both of the irises of an individual's eyes, whose complex patterns are unique, stable, and can ...

to ensure that its users do not claim their free share more than once. Worldcoin paused its work in multiple countries after local contractors departed or regulations made doing business impossible.

Philanthropy

During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

Altman helped fund and create Project Covalence which aimed to help researchers rapidly launch clinical trials in partnership with TrialSpark, a clinical trial startup.

Politics

In 2019 Altman held a fundraiser at his house in San Francisco for Democratic presidential candidate

Andrew Yang Andrew Yang (born January 13, 1975) is an American businessman, attorney, lobbyist, and politician. Yang was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. He is the co-c ...

. In May 2020 Altman donated $250k to

American Bridge 21st century American Bridge 21st Century or AB PAC is a liberal American Super PAC that supports Democratic candidates and opposes Republican candidates. It was founded by David Brock in 2010 and is associated with Media Matters for America. It is an opp ...

, a Super-PAC supporting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Personal life

Altman has been

vegetarian Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slaughter. Vegetariani ...

since childhood.

References

External links

Altman's blog
(2010 to date) {{DEFAULTSORT:Altman, Sam 21st-century American businesspeople American computer programmers 20th-century American Jews Businesspeople in information technology Living people Stanford University alumni 1985 births LGBT people from Missouri Y Combinator people Businesspeople from St. Louis Gay men 21st-century American Jews