Greg Brockman's Stripe Exit
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A story about how Sam Altman recruited Greg Brockman, CTO of Stripe, to join OpenAI during its founding.
Sam Altman hosted a dinner in Palo Alto with Elon Musk and other key people, including Greg Brockman who was CTO of Stripe at the time. After the dinner, Sam offered Greg a ride back to San Francisco. During the hour-long drive, Greg spent the first 30 minutes asking Sam rapid-fire questions - about 150 of them. At the 30-minute mark, Greg simply said "I've decided I'm going to do this. I'll quit Stripe and join OpenAI." They spent the remaining 30 minutes planning their next steps.
After joining, Greg showed incredible dedication to learning and building OpenAI. He worked from his apartment with the early team, and despite not knowing machine learning, he approached it systematically. He asked Ilya (their lead researcher) for the best machine learning textbook, bought it, and studied it religiously. While the researchers were setting up, Greg did everything else - from getting pillows for uncomfortable chairs to staying up all night doing engineering work to unblock the researchers. He built the infrastructure that allowed the researchers to work faster.
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.