Geoff Ralston for President

by Sam Altman5/20/2019

I’m delighted to announce that Geoff Ralston is taking over for me as President of YC.

I’ve known Geoff for almost ten years, he’s been a YC partner for eight, and I think he’s one of the most thoughtful, helpful, and kind investors in Silicon Valley. One of my earliest memories of Geoff is him laying on the floor of the first Stripe office helping the founders redline a contract for hours.

Geoff manages to combine a broad background of knowledge, expansive thinking about the future, and being a coworker that everyone likes in a way that is very rare (usually people have at most two out of the three).

He cares a lot about YC and understands what makes it work. I feel a deeply shared vision with him for what YC should be. In my conversations with Geoff about whether or not we should fund a particular company (we often did interviews together), I can’t remember a single major disagreement.

When I took over from PG, one of the things we talked most about was how to make YC last for a very long time. I’ve worked hard to build the organization in that direction, and I feel confident that Geoff is the best choice to really cement it.

It’s been a true pleasure to work with the entire YC partnership–in different ways, every YC partner is immensely talented, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They collectively operate at a scale and level that I don’t think the industry has seen before.

Working on OpenAI has been more exciting (and more complex) than I ever imagined, and I’m excited to be able to focus on it more fully. And I’m very thankful that YC will be in such good hands with Geoff–I care about YC more than I thought I’d care about any organization. I will, of course, remain an advisor to YC, and will be around to help Geoff as he takes on his new role.

Author

  • Sam Altman

    Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.