Samuel Altman: The man behind OpenTable and ChatGPT - Sam Altman
Tech
Samuel Altman: The Techno-optimist behind ChatGPT
Samuel Altman, born October 23, 1975, is an American entrepreneur, investor, computer scientist and former Wall Street executive. He was founded April 2010 as an information aggregator to generate the world's first "ChatGPT". The search results it produces can give users quick links to their preferred websites, blogs, or apps. His goal with the site was to eliminate the confusion and frustration of people having trouble finding what they want when searching online. It uses natural language processing to analyze user queries and find answers by searching other web sites that best fit the question.
Thus far, TechCrunch has covered the story behind the chatbots; but there's much more to it than just that.
It's amazing that he started off a small project called Twitter, making it a worldwide movement, and later bought it for $40 million. Through this platform, Sam took the company public for $1 billion and continued to turn it into one of the leading social media platforms.
In 2010, Altman founded OpenTable, an app allowing customers to book restaurant reservations from their smartphones.
However, the success of his enterprises did not stop at that. His acquisitions continued to be numerous. In 2012, he acquired the mobile messaging app Zendesk Messenger to help improve customer support services. A few years later in 2014, he acquired 8tracks to become a digital music streaming service. Then in 2015, he acquired Spotify to form Spotify Technology SAS. This gave him full ownership over the music streaming market, including all royalties and record sales.
But here's what may make Sam an even more exciting tech investor: He is already thinking ahead to the next trends, such as virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. The recent announcement of the first-ever VR game - which is called "Song of the Dodo" - was made by Sam and his partner Ananda Krishnamurthy who are investors in GV (formerly Google Ventures). And to think that these two pioneers of entrepreneurs had been previously working for Google before they decided to dabble in the whole tech venture capital industry.
Therefore, it can be said that Samuel Altman has played an integral part in shaping some of the technological evolution of our world and that he continues to remain one of the most innovative and forward-thinking tech entrepreneurs today.
