Sam Altman on the importance of surrounding yourself with people who don’t shoot down your ideas “Good ideas are not a solo endeavor. You want to find a group of smart people that you can start bouncing things off of… You don’t just sit in a room and write on the window with the whiteboard pen and have the good ideas come to you. Good ideas come because you talk to people.” But Sam stresses that this comes with an important caveat: surround yourself with people who build on your ideas rather than shoot them down: “Ideas are very fragile. So when you find this set of people to start talking about ideas with, you want people who don’t immediately shoot down a bad, half-baked idea… You want people who will say, ‘Well, that sounds crazy unlikely to work, but think how big it could be if it did work.’.. And then you can figure out how to make it work if you want.” Video source: @StanfordOnline (2017)