OpenAI’s Sam Altman says Paul Graham’s Y Combinator taught him how to govern, not rule: ‘We won’t get every decision right’

Sam Altman may be one of the most powerful people in artificial intelligence.

Still, he says an early lesson from Silicon Valley taught him there’s a limit to what being in charge really means.

Long before Altman made decisions at the helm of OpenAI, he ran Y Combinator , the influential startup accelerator that has backed thousands of young companies.

Unlike running a traditional company, however, Altman couldn’t simply tell the startups YC invested in what to do.

“At best you can govern—you don’t get to, like, rule,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in the latest episode of Titans and Disruptors .

Altman says learning how to navigate different stakeholders as he did at YC has become particularly useful at OpenAI, where he now faces pressure from governments, competitors, investors, and the broader AI ecosystem over how quickly the technology should advance—and whose interests should win when they conflict.

“We have all kinds of crazy pressure on us and people who really want one thing or another thing,” Altman told Shontell.

“We have to negotiate tense things with governments and with our ecosystem.” Altman said the experience taught him the importance of being “reliable partners to the world”—acting in a way where people can understand what OpenAI will do while taking “a lot of very different interests and equities into account.” “We won’t get every decision right,” Altman said, “But we will make ones that benefit not just us directly but this entire ecosystem and world around us.” From Y Combinator to OpenAI Altman first learned of stakeholder management during his tenure at Y Combinator.

He first came through YC as a founder before becoming its president in 2014 , a position he held until 2019, and he said because he wasn’t in charge of every company, but rather, was an investor in them, he had to learn how to approach each company differently.

“You can say, ‘Hey, you’re, like, making a big mistake.

We’re a small shareholder of yours.

You’re hurting the community,’” Altman said.

“We need new norms.” Because those companies were independent and YC was simply an investor, Altman said that taught him “how to govern versus run as an executive,” an experience he now considers “a very important lesson” for navigating OpenAI.

And there, that approach can mean making decisions that conflict with the interests of the people who have money riding on the company.