Six Months @ OpenAI

I told myself that I would never work at a big company, then I joined OpenAI. Before OpenAI I had started a company that I shut down, and then was a founding engineer at another. Startups were always fascinating to me. Since I was in middle school I’d been coding and making things. I started a business selling Madden Mobile coins when I was 13 that paid for my first car. After dropping out of college to start my first company, I told myself I was going to keep going, startup after startup until one worked out. Last summer, I got a call from my friend at OpenAI to start a small new team with a very specific goal. If you would have asked me 2 years ago if I would’ve ever joined a company of this size, I would have laughed in your face. But there I was shipping off to Mission Bay. I've always heard "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room." I understood it conceptually. Then I got here, and felt it on my first day. The bar is just insanely high, and I've worked with the smartest people I've ever met. Not just technically, but thoughtful in a way that's hard to describe until you're around it. The thing I like most are the random conversations in the office. People just know a lot of things. Teams move extremely quickly, and you can just ship things. There's very little barrier, and no one is going to stand in your way. It’s usually really hard to pair break neck speed with obsessive care over details. Most places the bar is just "shippable”, but it doesn’t work like that here. The culture around feedback is the same. Everyone is responsive. Slack an exec and you'll hear back that day. There's an amazing culture of being able to call out failures openly, and equally, of getting genuinely praised for successes. It really changes how you think about making things when you know it’s going to go out to millions of people immediately. It rewires your relationship to the small parts of polish that often get overlooked. There's a sense of importance to every piece of work that's unrivaled anywhere I've been. Working on things that touch millions of people every day is just more rewarding than grinding at a startup no one uses. I always felt like I was skating on the potential of something big. I’m happy I’m finally getting to do it.