In this fantastic podcast, Sam Altman talks about founders with ‘deferred life plans’. Founders who want to do X, and then do the Y they’ve always wanted to do.
“A common criticism of people in Silicon Valley, who I think have great futures in their past, are people who say some version of the following sentence. My life’s work is to build rockets, so I’m going to make a hundred million dollars in the next four years, trading crypto currency with my crypto hedge fund, because I don’t want to think about the money problem anymore, and then I’m going to build rockets.”
His advice essentially boils down to- know what you really want to do. And then do it. If what you really want to do is make a boatload of money, do that. If you want to make a rocket company, don’t wait to make $100 million, just make a rocket company.
This applies to all areas of life. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they truly want to do is impossible. They assume that there is some insurmountable step they must achieve before finally working on what they know is right. This thinking is dangerous. Of the set of things we think are impossible, there’s a large subset of things that we’ve merely convinced ourselves are impossible.
And why startups? The world is sustained by the majority but created by the early movers. You get the highest leverage to change things from fields where the potential for growth is the highest. Startups are right at the intersection of early movers and rapid growth. If something needs to be changed in the world, it's more likely to get improve faster in a startup than a government office, or worse, by just waiting for it to change.
And when considering this, when I was 14, I realised I'd have to wait a long time to get started with startups. I'd have to
But after questioning my assumptions, I realised that perhaps I won't have to wait so long. I had assumed startups would only accept people trained for several years in university, but that wasn't completely true. Even as a teenager, there was surely some marginal value I could provide. And in exchange for this marginal value, I could get to understand how startups actually worked.
All the greatest composers took at least a decade to create their best work. This is what made me even more convinced I had to start early. It takes a long time to fully internalise the subtleties of a field. By starting early, I could make all the usual mistakes before others made their first. And made mistakes I did. I've seen or personally experienced all of: