The Gen Z job crisis isn’t stopping Sam Altman from being jealous of today’s college dropouts.
“I’m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,” the OpenAI CEO said in an interview with Rowan Cheung at the DevDay conference on Monday. “Because the amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide.”
He added: “I have not had, like, a real chunk of free mental space in a couple of years to think hard about what I would build, but I know that there would be a lot of cool stuff to build.”
Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005, after two years of studying computer science. He left the university at 19 to cofound Loopt, a location-sharing social media app, and went through startup accelerator Y Combinator. After the app was acquired, he became the president of YC and later cofounded OpenAI.
In the Cheung interview, Altman said he has a hard time giving advice about unique advantages founders should leverage. He said the advantages should be customized to the startup’s product, technology, and time and place in the industry.
In general, startups should figure it out as they go, he said.
“If you had asked me when we started ChatGPT what our enduring advantages were going to be. I would have said, ‘I have no idea,‘” he said.
“So you start building features and then sometimes something emerges that’s like, ‘Oh, this can be a really durable advantage for us,'” Altman said, referring to ChatGPT’s memory feature, which was not planned at first.
College dropouts have long been revered in Silicon Valley, thanks to a decadeslong string of success stories, including Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Two factors are driving the push to leave early or skip college completely.
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First, higher education has become much more expensive. All-in costs for some four-year degrees have crossed half a million dollars.
And the pace of AI development, along with an abundance of vibe coding tools, is making it even easier to launch a company with minimal technical skills.
In April, defense tech giant Palantir launched the Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month, paid internship for recent high school grads not enrolled in college.
In a March blog post, Andreessen Horowitz investors wrote: “The playing field has leveled for younger founders, making it the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company.”
Last year, YC partner Jared Friedman wrote on X: “2 years ago, only 10% of the YC batch was college students or new grads. The last batch was 30%.”
“Because of AI, it’s the best time in a decade for college students to start startups,” he added.
