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In the high-octane world of Silicon Valley startups, there exists a nearly sacred playbook: build fast, launch quickly, iterate rapidly based on user feedback. This gospel of "move fast and break things" has launched countless unicorns and defined an era of technological innovation.
But what happens when one of the very architects of this playbook decides to throw it out the window and take the exact opposite approach? The result might just be one of the most transformative companies of our generation.
The Oracle of Y Combinator Breaks His Own Rules
Sam Altman, now known globally as the CEO of OpenAI, spent years as the president of Y Combinator (YC), Silicon Valley's premier startup accelerator that has launched over 3,000 companies including giants like Airbnb, Stripe, and DoorDash. During his tenure, Altman was relentless about one core philosophy:
"We were all about, you have to have a minimal product quickly, you know, in weeks, you have to get a few users within like a couple of weeks after that. And you have to like talk to them every day and move faster and faster."
This wasn’t just advice—it was a strict methodology. The formula was clear:
Build an MVP in weeks—not months or years.
Get early users fast—and learn from them.
Iterate based on feedback—speed is everything.
The underlying premise: startups die from moving too slowly far more often than from moving too quickly. Thousands of founders absorbed this wisdom as they passed through YC's hallowed program.
Then Altman did something remarkable. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and proceeded to ignore virtually every principle he had spent years preaching.
The Anti-YC Startup
The contrast between YC philosophy and OpenAI's approach couldn't be starker:
"OpenAI then did none of those things."
With striking candor, Altman acknowledges this fundamental contradiction:
"So one takeaway you could say is that Y Combinator gives bad advice. Another you could say is like all startups are a little bit strange in some way."
OpenAI's founding approach read like an anti-YC manifesto:
No minimal viable product for years
No early users providing feedback
No clear path to commercialization
No assurance the core technology was even possible
Instead, the company embarked on fundamental research with no guaranteed outcome. The timeline? Years, not weeks. The business model? To be determined. The product? Unknown.
"When we started OpenAI, uh, it took us four and a half years till we had our first product."
Imagine pitching this approach to investors:
"We have no product. No timeline. No clue if this will even work. But we’re going to spend years trying."
Most startups would be laughed out of the room. But OpenAI had one thing on its side: a problem so big, it was worth the gamble.
The Moonshot Mindset
OpenAI wasn’t trying to build just another software company. They were tackling Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—the holy grail of AI research. If successful, AGI could change everything about how the world operates.
"We told people upfront, we had no idea what a product, what product we might make, how, or if we were ever going to make money. Um, or if we even knew how to get the technology to work. But we thought that this was like a valuable technology if we could make it work."
This represents the moonshot mindset in its purest form. The Apollo program didn't start with a minimum viable rocket ship. It began with a seemingly impossible goal and worked backward from there, investing years and immense resources before achieving anything concrete.
Photo: Todd Spoth for The New York Times
Stripe, ironically a YC company, exhibited elements of this approach. Founders Patrick and John Collison spent years building their payment infrastructure before achieving significant traction. While faster than OpenAI, Stripe recognized that some problems require deep foundational work before a viable product emerges.
Photo: How They Grow
The Long Game of Deep Tech
OpenAI's approach is characteristic of "deep tech" companies where fundamental technological breakthroughs, not incremental improvements, drive value creation.
🚀 SpaceX: Betting on Reusable Rockets
When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, the idea of a private company launching rockets was absurd. The first three launches failed. They burned hundreds of millions before proving it was possible.
Now? SpaceX is worth over $350 billion and has redefined space travel.
🧬 Moderna: A Decade Before a Breakthrough
Moderna, the biotech company behind one of the first COVID-19 vaccines, was founded in 2010. For nearly a decade, they had no product—only research. Investors doubted them.
Critics called mRNA technology unproven.
Then the pandemic hit, and Moderna’s years of research enabled them to create a life-saving vaccine in record time.
These companies share a common thread with OpenAI—they're solving problems that, by their very nature, can't be addressed with a two-week MVP.
When to Break the Rules
The genius in Altman's apparent contradiction is the recognition that different problems demand different approaches. The lean startup methodology that Y Combinator evangelized works brilliantly for many businesses—perhaps most businesses. But not all.
When founders are working on:
Fundamental technological breakthroughs
Deep scientific research
Completely novel capabilities
Transformative rather than incremental innovation
...the rules change.
DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, followed a similar path to OpenAI. Founded in 2010, the company spent years on AI research before demonstrating dramatic breakthroughs like AlphaGo in 2016 and AlphaFold in 2020. The latter solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem—something inconceivable through a traditional startup approach.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
Altman's closing observation is perhaps the most insightful:
"Um, but yeah, I, it was a strange experience. It's not how these usually go."
This acknowledgment is crucial. OpenAI's approach is exceptional precisely because it defies conventional wisdom. The standard startup playbook exists because it works for most companies most of the time. For every OpenAI or SpaceX, thousands of startups benefit from rapid iteration and user feedback.
The lean startup methodology isn't wrong—it's just incomplete. It's optimized for certain types of innovation but not for all innovation. When founders are working on deep technological breakthroughs, the rules change dramatically.
The Hidden Pattern of Revolutionary Companies
Looking broadly at history's most transformative companies reveals a hidden pattern: many broke the conventions of their time.
Amazon lost money for years while building infrastructure that would eventually dominate global retail. Early investors watched Jeff Bezos pour money into warehouses and technology with minimal profit to show for it. Yet this long-term infrastructure investment created insurmountable advantages over competitors.
Similarly, Tesla ignored conventional automotive wisdom by vertically integrating battery production, software development, and even sales through company-owned showrooms rather than dealerships. These decisions created massive short-term inefficiencies but long-term strategic advantages.
OpenAI follows this tradition of strategic unconventionality. By ignoring the startup playbook, Altman and his co-founders created space for fundamental innovation impossible under traditional constraints.
The Startup Playbook Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
The genius of Sam Altman’s approach isn’t that he contradicted himself. It’s that he understood when the rules apply and when they don’t.
For most startups, moving fast is essential. But when the problem is big enough, complex enough, and transformative enough, sometimes the only way forward is to bet everything on the long game.
OpenAI didn’t just build a company. They redefined how startups could think about innovation.
For founders today, the real lesson isn’t about following a single playbook. It’s about understanding which game you’re playing.
Are you building a faster, better version of something that exists? Move fast.
Are you trying to change the world with technology that doesn’t exist yet? Be patient. Take the long shot.
The key is knowing the difference. In a world fixated on formulas for success, the greatest innovations may come from those with the courage to break the rules—even their own.
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