Sam Altman on his highest-return year: dozens of textbooks, helping people, planting seeds
a16z · x · 2026-09-23
a16z resurfaces a Nov 2018 Sam Altman conversation with Craig Cannon. Altman calls his jobless exploration period one of his highest-return years: he read dozens of textbooks on nuclear engineering, AI, synthetic biology and investing, and helped interesting people who later taught him or let him invest. Most of it failed, but "the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later."
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