Sam Altman reveals why he's jealous of 20-year-old dropouts: 'Opportunity in this space is...'

Sam Altman said startups rarely know their enduring advantage at the start.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of Silicon Valley’s most influential voices, says he’s jealous of today’s 20-year-old college dropouts — because they have unprecedented opportunities to build transformative products.

“I’m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,” Altman said during an interview with Rowan Cheung at OpenAI’s DevDay conference, Business Insider reported. “The amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide.”

Altman, who dropped out of Stanford in 2005 after two years of studying computer science, co-founded location-sharing app Loopt before leading OpenAI. Reflecting on his own journey, he admitted he hasn’t had “a real chunk of free mental space in a couple of years to think hard about what I would build,” but added, “I know there would be a lot of cool stuff to build.”

Why now is different

Two factors are fueling this wave of early entrepreneurship: skyrocketing education costs and the rise of AI-powered tools that make building products easier than ever. Some US degrees now cost over half a million dollars, while AI coding platforms like Replit and Cursor allow anyone to create apps without deep technical expertise, Business Insider reported.

Venture capital firms agree. Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote that “the playing field has leveled for younger founders,” calling this “the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company.” Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman echoed the sentiment, noting that 30 percent of YC’s latest batch were college students or new grads, up from 10 percent two years ago.

Altman said startups rarely know their enduring advantage at the start. “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. Features like ChatGPT’s memory, he added, emerged later.