The Operating System
02 Conviction Play

Be Bold: Do the Hard Thing

Hard, important problems turn out easier to execute, because they attract talent, capital and attention that easy problems can't.

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that.

Altman’s counterintuitive claim in How To Be Successful: “I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup.” Ambition works as a recruiting and fundraising strategy as well as a personality trait. The best people want to work on things that matter at scale, and grand problems pull in resources a modest one never could.

OpenAI is the tactic applied to itself. Framing the mission as “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” let the lab recruit top researchers and raise at valuations no ordinary product story could justify, starting with a $1B pledge in 2015.

Doesn’t transfer when you can’t fund the hard thing. The talent-magnet effect assumes you can raise what a hard problem costs. Altman could staff and fund an AGI lab because of who he already was: a former Y Combinator president with the network to match. A first-time founder who picks the single hardest problem available usually runs out of money before the magnet kicks in.