Sam Altman says he was 'peer-pressured and tricked' into an internship at Goldman Sachs — then turned it down anyway

OpenAI's billionaire CEO Sam Altman is 1 of the apical leaders successful Silicon Valley, but 20 years ago, helium had his ain "Sliding Doors" infinitesimal that could've precise good led him down a way connected Wall Street instead. Altman, 41, told a country afloat of interns successful Big Tech past period that, aft his sophomore twelvemonth astatine Stanford, he'd gone aft an internship astatine Goldman Sachs, chiefly due to the fact that everyone astir him wanted one. He adjacent got the gig, but yet turned it down.

"I had accepted an connection to enactment astatine Goldman Sachs aft sophomore year, which — I mean, it sounds unbelievably unspeakable now," Altman said during an onstage interrogation astatine Internapalooza, the yearly San Francisco gathering for tech interns, connected July 27. "But astatine the time, that was the chill thing. That was what everybody wanted to do. And truthful I got adjacent pressured and benignant of tricked into it."

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Altman said helium "dutifully applied," and got the job. "I thought, truly cool," Altman told Cory Levy. "And past I didn't bash it, to bash a startup."

That startup was Loopt, a location-sharing app Altman co-founded successful 2005 and ran arsenic CEO. It landed a spot successful Y Combinator's inaugural summertime batch that aforesaid year, alongside Reddit. Seven years later, Green Dot Corp. acquired it for $43.4 cardinal successful cash, and adjacent acceptable $9.8 cardinal speech conscionable to clasp Altman's unit astatine Loopt, according to the announcement Green Dot filed with the SEC.

When asked what his parents had to accidental astir his decision, Altman said helium really caught much flak for his determination to driblet retired of Stanford than helium did for turning down the Goldman Sachs internship. "Internships are a precise debased stakes thing," helium said. "I deliberation they were a small upset erstwhile I dropped retired of college, but they didn't attraction astir the internship."

Why Goldman Sachs internships are truthful prized

Altman walked distant from Goldman Sachs erstwhile it was having a large woody of success. The institution went nationalist six years earlier, and its yearly study for fiscal 2005 shows nett revenues of $24.78 cardinal and grounds net per stock for the 2nd consecutive year. Henry Paulson was inactive serving arsenic CEO; small did anyone know, successful astir a year, helium would go Treasury Secretary of the United States, nominted by then-President George W. Bush.