Sam Altman Was Bending the World to His Will Long Before OpenAI
From founding a startup at 19 to running Y Combinator at 29, the CEO behind ChatGPT is the most Silicon Valley man alive. An exclusive story and podcast.
Altman in 2009.
Photo illustration: 731; photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg
Lowell Winer was at his office in Irvine, California, when he got a phone call: Sam Altman wanted a meeting. It was 2005, and Winer had no idea who Altman was. Altman told Winer, who was head of business development for Boost Mobile, that he’d been referred by a representative of the wireless brand’s parent company, Sprint.
Altman was the chief executive officer of a tiny, struggling startup called Loopt, which he founded earlier that year at the age of 19. The idea was to use a cellphone’s GPS coordinates to connect users with friends nearby. The problem was the iPhone didn’t exist yet, and the devices of the time had no access to Loopt’s service.