Sam Altman tells high schoolers dropping out of college wasn't a big deal

Fortune

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at his Alma Mater, John Burroughs School, explaining that dropping out of Stanford to launch his startup, Loopt, wasn’t as risky as it might have seemed.

Transcript

00:00I think the traditional path is like, I won't say falling apart, but it's quite challenged and AI

00:06will probably disrupt things even more. And I think there are all these things that seem very

00:11risky because they weren't the thing that worked two decades ago or one decade ago or three decades

00:18ago. So I was in college. I liked college. I was having a great time, but I kind of, and I hadn't,

00:23this was not like my life plan, but this other opportunity came up. It seemed like a really fun

00:28thing to try. And importantly, like I realized that I could go back. And I think that's like

00:34the key to most risk is most, most things are not a one-way door. You can try something. It doesn't

00:40work out. You can undo it. You can do something else. And so I think in a very, in what is now

00:46a very dynamic world, the risky thing is to not go try the things that might really work out.

00:52And then you kind of look back at your career 10, 20, 30 years later and say, man, I wish I

00:57had tried the thing I really wanted to try.

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