Sam Altman: recommendation

Transcript context

…How useful is personality psychology, in the classic five-factor sense, for judging potential founders? I’ve heard the five factors. I could pick them out of a list, but I can’t sit here and name them. Paul Graham, who started my company, used to talk about people being relentlessly resourceful. It became this mantra of ours, and it’s one of the most important traits in a founder. I think a vision that someone feels compelled to make happen in the world is probably the most important of a super successful founder. Then this idea of relentless resourcefulness: “That thing is so important to me that I’m going to figure out how to get it done, whatever it takes. Whatever I need to learn. Whoever I need to convince.” That’s really important. You need to be a great communicator, which I think is a very underappreciated skill, because you have to convince so many people to join you on this quest. Your job as a founder ends up as sort of a chief evangelist for the company, and most people aren’t good at that. It’s not something that we teach in school. We don’t teach vision either. Actually, none of these skills we teach, but those are the kind of things we look for. Do you think of yourself — in terms of personality — as more of a CEO type or more of a founder type?…

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