He may not have known it at the time, but in 2005 Sam Altman took a risk that changed the trajectory of his career.
That’s when Altman dropped out of Stanford to build Loopt, a location-based social networking app — the first of his projects before co-founding OpenAI, the game-changing artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT.
It “seemed like a really fun thing to try,” Altman, 39, told students during an interview at his alma mater, the St. Louis-area John Burroughs School. More importantly, he added, leaving college was a decision he could go back on if entrepreneurship didn’t work out.
“That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door,” he said. “You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else.”
That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door.
Altman isn’t the only business titan to weigh risks this way: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos …