What took each of those eight YC companies three months of nonstop work to build in 2005 can now be done by a coding agent in seven minutes, and most founders are reading that as their death sentence.
Sam Altman, who was a Stanford sophomore in that first batch building a location-sharing company called Loopt, closed Startup School 2026 by arguing the exact opposite: that this is the greatest moment in history to start a company.
We pulled a recent exclusive conversation of Sam with Garry Tan apart into the specific moves Altman says convert collapsing build costs into trillion-dollar outcomes, so you do not have to watch it.
In this guide you’ll find:
Why a 7-minute agent task means you should build a MORE ambitious company, not a smaller one
Why hard tech jumped from 5% to 25% of YC, and the timing signal that says build now
The conviction test: only 50 people believed AGI was possible, and 45 worked at OpenAI
How Altman met his OpenAI co-founder 8 years early, and the network strategy behind it
Why founding a startup is how you fight AI power concentration (and the underclass meme is wrong)
The demand numbers that prove the runway: inference growing 10x a year and a permanent compute shortage
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1. Why a 7-minute agent task means you should build a MORE ambitious company, not a smaller one
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