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.
