Sam Altman: belief

Transcript context

…Your conceptual model of venture capital — what do you take to be its origins? Is it the early voyages of discovery, finding the New World? Is it whaling ships? Is it Silicon Valley in the last 50 years? Is it Hollywood movies? Where does it start for you? When I studied the Industrial Revolution as a kid, it was all about technology and that you had this great idea, you invent this great thing, and now you can make this new thing. The way I would have explained the Industrial Revolution as a kid was there was this handful of inventions, and they were really important, and the world changed in a short period of time. When I went back and studied it again as an adult, with the benefit of hindsight in my career, it was very clear to me that the most important invention of the entire Industrial Revolution was the joint stock corporation. You had governments say, “You know what? We have a second-order mini sovereignty, and although the world has historically been limited to family businesses and small groups of businesses and small groups of trust, now we’re going to allow big groups of people to coordinate. We’re going to figure out how to align their incentives for capital providers and risk takers and labor and everything else. We’re going to let these big groups of people work towards a common goal and a common vision with all the elements you need to make that work, and we, the government, are going to enforce that and protect that and let that happen.” That, I think, was the fundamental root. You once said, “Growth masks all problems.” Are there exceptions to that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.