Sam Altman Berkeley Connection
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A story about how Jess Mah met Sam Altman while running Berkeley's computer science club.
"When I was a senior at Berkeley, I was running the computer science club and I brought in these speakers. One of the speakers I brought in was this kid named Sam Altman - he was building a company called Loopt. I asked him, 'Hey Sam, what should I do after college?' and he said 'Oh you should do YC' and he helped review my application. Then the rest is history.
Later, I had a one-on-one with Paul Graham and I asked him who he thought would be the most successful people 30 years from now. Sam was on that list. I asked Paul what these people had in common - it wasn't about intelligence actually. It was about grit and being willing to be unconventional, to try different approaches, and to collect ideas from multiple spaces and merge them together to come up with something even better than what a domain expert in any one field would be able to come up with on their own."
Jess Mah
Founder of Indinero, a company providing financial services and tools for businesses. Jess Mah built her first 6-figure business while still in middle school and has since co-founded 10+ companies that are collectively valued at over a billion dollars. Today, she oversees Mahway which is her investment company that supports the companies she has either co-founded or acquired. Mahway has 20 full-time professionals and is headquartered in Los Angeles.