The former CEO of YC is going to start a startup. This time, he wants to create a utopia

YC's investment is the best endorsement of a start-up company. YC's ideas are considered bible by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The temple of entrepreneurs receives more than 10,000 applications every six months, and only 1.5% to 2% of applicants are accepted, a rate that is lower than the success rate for applicants to Stanford University.

YC has incubated more than 3,000 enterprises. In their investment map, there are 110 companies with a valuation of more than 100 million dollars and 25 companies with a valuation of more than 1 billion dollars. Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, Reddit, Twitch and other top Internet companies. All endorsed by YC.

Sam Altman was at the helm of the startup carrier, and now he's off again. Recently, Sam joined Worldcoin as one of the three founders. This isn't Sam's first bet on blockchain, but it's the first blockchain company he co-founded himself.

Worldcoin raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase's venture capital arm, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Day One Ventures, among others. Worldcoin aims to create a cryptocurrency that belongs to everyone in the world. It hopes to build a personal identity system by scanning the iris and promote universal basic income currency based on that.

This time, Sam wanted to create a utopia.

Dropping out of school to start a business is a common starting point for Silicon Valley bosses.

"Looking at the larger time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Let's recall that the world had no smartphones 15 years ago, no internal combustion engine, no home appliances 150 years ago, no industrial machinery 1,500 years ago, and no agriculture 15,000 years ago. We will have advanced more in technology than we have in the long time since man first controlled fire and created the wheel."

Sam has made such predictions about the future technological progress in his personal blog. He is extremely optimistic about the technological progress and believes that technology can create a better world.

Sam grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother was a doctor and his family environment gave him early exposure to advanced technology. Sam got his first personal computer at the age of eight, which allowed him to enter the computer world. Perhaps because of this, Sam became so interested in programming that he was eventually accepted as a computer science major at Stanford University, where he worked in the AI lab during his time there.

At the age of 19, Sam started his entrepreneurial career. In the spring of 2005, Sam, a sophomore, was walking out of class when he suddenly turned to his friends and had a novel question. "Wouldn't it be great if I turned on my phone and I could see a map showing where all my friends were?"

He asked this question to one of his classmates, who was also very amused. Eventually, that classmate, Nick Seaver, became his co-founder, and Loopt, Sam's first company, was born. Loopt is a location-based social App. That summer, Sam and Nick got start-up money from Y Combinator to start their company, which was Sam's first bond with Y Combinator.

By the next summer, after more than a year of growth and growing users, Loopt's team of Stanford, M.I.T. and other college students had made a deliberate decision, in line with their Silicon Valley foreboders, to drop out and start their own business. Since then, Loopt has received funding from a number of well-known companies and institutions, including Sequoia, Google, Yahoo, and PayPal.

Over the course of its life, Loopt has raised more than $30 million in venture capital. But the competition in the social space was too fierce for young Sam to lead Loopt into the next generation of social giants. Loopt was eventually acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million in 2012.

  At the age of 28, I led YC and invested more than one thousand projects in total.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Sam's brother Jack said: "When we were kids, Sam won every samurai game I played. He would always declare himself the leader of the samurai: I had to win, I was in charge."

Maybe it's because he has to win that drives him forward. This led him further down the road in technology and business, eventually gaining the acceptance of YC and allowing him to join the organization. Sam has been a part-time partner at Y Combinator since 2011. In February 2014, Sam was named president of Y Combinator by his co-founder Paul Graham. When he was appointed, the news sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley.

Y Combinator didn't have a president position until founder Paul Graham picked Sam. Sam was only 28 years old at the time. "I'm not much of a manager, but Sam Altman is," a remarkable 20-year age difference between the two men. "And I haven't been president of YC, but we're going to give him one."

Sam is surprisingly ambitious. He has said he wants to expand YC's portfolio to fund more than 1,000 new companies a year.

Time has proved Graham right, and after Sam took the helm for just a few short years, YC has become a Silicon Valley cult. Thousands of incubated enterprises, including multiple unicorns, investment business covering multiple rounds of investment from seed round, and close collaboration among YC alumni. If an entrepreneur is lucky enough to be selected to YC, it means that he or she has access to mainstream VCs and a large alumni network.

Or perhaps it's also because of this want-to-win personality that Sam's management style is very strict. It also led to complaints from older employees when he took the helm at YC.

"He was a bit too focused on glory -- he put his personal brand first. Once under PG [founder Paul Graham], we had a family feel. Now it's all institutional and hard."

Sam, perhaps aware of the problem himself, argues that being mean and strict does not make a business successful. "Being mean will make you stupid," which doesn't pay off in startups. "People who want to improve the world have a natural advantage."

Investment for the Future & NBSP;

Sam's interest in blockchain has been apparent since his time at YC. "It's a positive catalyst for the tech world today, and we're trying to find solutions to leverage cryptocurrency networks and blockchain to help more and more people invest in Y Combinator incubated startups." Sam said at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2017.

As a well-known incubator, YC pays far more attention to this track than other traditional VCs. Among the blockchain projects YC has invested in are some well-known projects in the industry, including Protocol Labs, which developed IPFS, OpenSea, a popular NFT marketplace, and BitAccess, a Bitcoin ATM machine. There are also dozens of blockchain projects such as Blockstack, Nucyper, Axoni, Dharma, Cointracker, Quantstamp and so on.

While he was at YC, he had a series of what might be called crazy ideas that also made YC more willing to invest in future-oriented companies. Although he has invested in countless well-known companies, there are only a handful of "hard tech" companies where he has been able to put his energy into personally managing them. For example, Sam himself became the CEO of OpenAI after YC incubated the AI company. Not only AI, but he's also chairman of the board of directors of Helion and Oklo, two nuclear energy development companies with a vision for fusion.

"I remember when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, I wondered: Why does anyone care about chess?" After AlphaGo defeated the human champion, Sam once said, "I feel very sad that humans lost to AlphaGo. The things that humans are better at than machines are getting fewer and fewer."

"Merging has already begun -- the craziest version is when we upload the brain's consciousness into the cloud." But he was satisfied with it. "I'll love it. Humans need to upgrade. Our descendants will conquer the galaxy."

It's not just AI and human consciousness, he has a much crazier vision for society as a whole. Back in 2015, Sam announced the formation of Y Combinator Research, a nonprofit Research lab. From YC Research, we learn about his ambition to change the world. Under his leadership, YC Research proposed what some considered a crazy "basic income plan."

Universal Basic Income (UBI) -- A plan that gives people enough money to live on, with no strings attached, and gives them the freedom to do what they want to do without having to feed themselves. Underlying all this is the high productivity and low cost of the technology boom. Sam has predicted that "in just 10 years, the wealth created by artificial intelligence will be enough to pay every adult $13,500 per year."

"With the development of AI, the cost of labor is going down. If the cost of labor goes to zero, the cost of the good life will go down a lot. If nuclear fusion is realized, electricity will be nearly free, which will lower all the costs of society.

When revolutionary technology appears, people's living cost will be greatly reduced. "The standard American family needs $70,000 right now to have a good life. In 10, 20 years [with revolutionary technology], it will be an order of magnitude cheaper. A family, not including housing costs, will have a really good life for $3,500 to $14,000."

He even laid out a utopia for it all. While at YC, he planned an entire city: "Imagine a city of 50,000 to 100,000 people on 100,000 acres. Crowdfunding infrastructure to build a new way of life that everyone can afford around the idea that no one can make money off real estate."

Crypto Utopia & NBSP;

This crazy idea, built on low production costs and high production efficiency, fits right into his investment map -- AI and nuclear fusion. And now he's putting the last piece of the puzzle to that post-human utopia -- cryptocurrency.

Perhaps YC's platform can no longer support his ambitious vision of changing the whole society. Sam found a new technology -- blockchain. His company, Worldcoin, aims to take a novel approach to helping the economy transition to cryptocurrency and plans to issue a global digital currency to everyone on the planet.

Worldcoin builds a digital identity by scanning the iris to build a unique personal identification number for each person. Through the application of blockchain technology, individual privacy and overall transparency of the blockchain can be protected while confirming the unique identity of each person. Currently, the device costs as much as $5,000 to build, but Worldcoin believes that costs will eventually come down quickly as the process improves. Currently, Worldcoin is recruiting volunteers to test it. Volunteering is paid for and is paid for in Bitcoin.

Sam believes it is important to provide a fair financial infrastructure for the poor. Cryptocurrencies could provide the infrastructure for the "basic income plan" he has long envisioned. "I can imagine such a crypto system -- more powerful than any government on the planet. By giving money to every person on the planet, a vast network can be built. It will be a redistribution of wealth that everyone believes can be done outside the control of any government."

Yes, this is beyond the business that YC can support. Sam is really talking about the new economic order. Decentralized cryptocurrencies with blockchain technology are making this possible, and Sam believes it could eventually happen.

"It's going to be the most powerful network effect the world economy has ever had, and I think that's pretty cool."

We can imagine Sam's city of the future, a vast city run on artificial intelligence that produces cheap goods and helps humans do their tedious work, while consuming only about the same amount of free electricity -- electricity generated by nuclear fusion. Here, each resident has a unique digital ID and uses it to use cryptocurrency. In fact, because of the wealth generated by the AI's production activities, the city administration will give you an unconditional monthly gift of cryptocurrency that can meet your basic needs.

This is the model post-human city-state, the Athens of the 21st century, a futuristic utopia driven by a technological boom. "The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. Sam puts it this way, "Each of us has a duty to act as if the destiny of the world is in our hands. We must live for the future, not for our own comfort or success."

"As a result, every citizen will increasingly enjoy the freedom, power, autonomy and opportunities that come with economic self-determination, poverty will be greatly reduced, and more people will have the opportunity to live the life they want."