You are 25 years old. Six years ago, you dropped out of Stanford to start your first official company. Six years later, you still haven’t built a truly successful product. Yet you still sit down in a restaurant with a stranger and pitch your new idea. You pull out your phone and introduce Loopt. You’re the co-founder and CEO of the company, and Loopt aims to help people see where their friends are, discover nearby people, places, and events. You talk to the stranger about location sharing and privacy. You believe that over time, people will grow more comfortable sharing their location—and that the convenience and social value it brings will eventually outweigh privacy concerns. Later, Loopt was acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million, and the original product was eventually shut down. Your first startup ended there. Today, few people remember Loopt. But to you, it was never just another app that shut down. This experience taught you how to sell—and showed you that markets aren’t created by a founder’s passion alone. At the time, you had no idea these seemingly irrelevant lessons would follow you for years to come. You couldn’t have known that one day, people around the world would wait to hear you speak about artificial intelligence, work, and the future of humanity. You are Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.