Cruise's $3M to $1B

A story about Sam Altman's early investment conviction in Cruise, a self-driving car company, when others wouldn't invest.

"He goes to Cruise, which was a self-driving car company that eventually got bought by GM for $1 billion. At the time nobody was funding Cruise, nobody was funding self-driving cars - it just seemed too hard. He puts $3 million directly into that one company.

When reflecting on it later, he looked at his 5 biggest winners from his early portfolio. 4 of the 5 nobody wanted to fund, they were not oversubscribed. People generally thought they were bad ideas. In fact, he almost got talked out of doing them because smart people were telling him why these were bad ideas. Only one, Optimizely, was an idea everybody thought was a good idea that turned out to be a good idea."