Sam Altman tracked how quickly people responded to his texts and emails to distinguish between 'great and mediocre founders'

• Sam Altman tracked how quickly Y Combinator founders responded to his daily emails and texts.
• He considers quick response times "one of the most striking differences between great and mediocre founders."

Take note, those of you who receive messages from Sam Altman — he might be tracking how quickly you respond to him.

That's according to a New York Magazine profile of the 38-year-old CEO and founder of OpenAI, the company behind the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, published Monday.

Altman served as the president of the startup incubator Y Combinator for five years, starting in 2014. During that time, he kept notes on how quickly founders responded to his daily emails and texts, according to New York Magazine's Elizabeth Weil.

That's because he believed quick response times were "one of the most striking differences between great and mediocre founders" — a sentiment he shared in a blog post in January 2014. Neither Altman's blog post nor the New York Magazine profile specified Altman's expected response times to texts and emails.

In the same blog post, he listed 16 other traits of successful companies and their founders, including being "obsessed with the quality of the product/experience."

The topic of speedy response times also came up in 2019, when economist Tyler Cowen asked Altman in his "Conversations with Tyler" podcast how quickly someone should answer his email to count as quick and decisive.

Altman responded that he had written a program to look at how quickly Y Combinator's best founders answer his emails versus the "bad" ones.

"I don't remember the exact data, but it was mind-blowingly different. It was a difference of minutes versus days on average response times," Altman said at the time.

Altman's history with Y Combinator dates back to 2004 while he was still at Stanford University. He had received $6,000 from Y Combinator's Summer Founders Program to work on his startup Loopt, which aimed to geo-locate friends.

Altman told New York Magazine he worked so hard on building Loopt that he got scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency. The tool didn't kick off with users, and Altman sold the company in 2012 for $43.3 million.

While Altman was the president of Y Combinator, the incubator received about 40,000 applications annually from up-and-coming startups. Of these, only about 1,000 got the call to present in-person pitches, and only a few hundred got funding, per New York Magazine.

In 2019, Altman joined OpenAI full-time as its CEO, three years before the release of ChatGPT. OpenAI grew to a valuation of $27 to 29 billion as of April 2023.

Altman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment through OpenAI sent by Insider outside regular business hours.