- Sam Altman recently talked about the importance of companies staying focused.
- Altman also emphasized saying no, echoing Steve Jobs' leadership philosophy.
- Warren Buffett has also highlighted the importance of saying no for success.
The leadership traits that Sam Altman values may sound familiar to those who have studied Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett.
When asked about OpenAI's chief product officer, Kevin Weil, during a recent episode of the "20VC" podcast, Altman said the executive is an example of an "amazing" product leader.
"Discipline was the first word that came to mind," he said. "Focus, what we're going to say no to, like really trying to speak on behalf of the user about why we would do something or not do something."
Altman said the team tries to be "rigorous" about straying away from "fantastical dreams" or goals — a strategy reminiscent of the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.
"The main thing I stressed was focus," Jobs had said about his visit to Larry Page, biographer Walter Isaacson wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
He added, "What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down."
After returning to the CEO job years after being ousted by Apple's board, Jobs famously narrowed the company's objectives to just one goal each year.
When asked by then-Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang for advice in 2007 to help save the sinking internet company, Jobs explained a key difference between "smart companies" and others, Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson wrote in his book, "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!"
While many companies made a list of 10 goals they wanted to achieve in a year, smart companies would shrink that list to "three or four items."
"This is how I do it," Jobs said. "I take a sheet of paper, and I say, 'If my company can only do one thing next year, what is it?' Literally, we shut everything else down."
Altman echoed the sentiment in his 2014 lecture series "How to Start a Startup" at Stanford University, where he said that "focus is critical," particularly as a founder.
"The founder really does set the focus," he said. "Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals — that's going to be what the whole company focuses on."
And to stay focused on certain goals means saying no — a lot. Altman said that many founders have to make a "very conscious effort" to not always say yes.
"You know, you're saying no 97 times out of 100," he said.
Jobs once said that "focusing is about saying no" during the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, and the art of saying no is a skill endorsed by other top execs, including Warren Buffett.
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything," the Berkshire Hathaway CEO once said.
The list of products that Alman has said "yes" to has grown in recent years as the company moves toward a more traditional for-profit model, with OpenAI recently rolling out real-time search to paid users, shopping a text-to-video AI tool Sora to Hollywood, and launching its Advanced Voice Mode, among others.