Sam Altman
Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.
“The way that big companies go wrong is there's too many people with not enough to do, and they fight each other over fake levels of work. If everybody is really busy with real impact, then you can fight the slow drag and politics of a big company.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · September 2026
Context
A host asked what advice Altman would give public-company CEOs who want to keep a startup culture at scale. Altman passes on a remark from a recent OpenAI hire who came from a large public company: the work and expectations per person should go up over time.
Transcript
Yeah.
…a startup at scale. Like it's actually like that. It's like incredibly scrappy. It's very small groups of people trying to do the impossible on impossible timelines. And something that something that you're doing is is working because it allows us like incredible velocity. It's not just the models.
Someone said to me a few days ago that joined OpenAI somewhat recently and had been at a big kind of slow ish public company before, was that the key is to have the work and expectations per person go up over time. And the way that big companies go wrong is there's too many people with not enough to do and they kind of like fight each other over like fake levels of work. If everybody is really busy with real impact and there's the the amount of work per person and stuff to do per person keeps increasing, then you can fight the like slow drag and politics of a big company.
On the flip side of that, I feel like there's a lot of companies that are going through sort of a slopification and they're fighting slop grenades. I've I've wondered if the like, the correct KPI is maybe we should all be producing the same amount of words in our emails.
Yeah.
And it's okay if if AI is involved, but you don't just wanna take every text message and turn it into a 20 page document. No. Right?
More from TBPN
