Does prior professional experience predict success in a genuinely new technology category like AI, or does it fail to transfer?

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

When a field is brand new, nobody has an experience advantage, so the only thing required to win is to learn faster than everyone else

In a new domain everyone shares the same baseline of knowledge — no one has thirty years of accumulated advantage

Scope: applies to genuinely new domains

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Harry Stebbings · Nov 27, 2023

The decay rate on operating experience has never been greater, so operating lessons from five years ago no longer transfer

The environment has changed with COVID and the arrival of OpenAI and ChatGPT

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Shyam Sankar · Jan 17, 2024

The recurring hiring error is assuming outside knowledge transfers without a massive retranslation function — candidates who say 'I've solved this before, I know the answer' are worse bets than those betting on their talent to find the answer

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Brad Lightcap · Apr 15, 2024

In many areas of OpenAI's business, twenty years of prior experience doesn't help, because the technology is a categorically new category with no existing playbooks for how to bring it into the world

The way people engage with, consume, use and talk about this technology is different, so the go-to-market playbooks don't transfer

Scope: at least in his part of the company

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David Vélez · Sep 11, 2023

He should have brought in people with more experience sooner instead of being dogmatic about hiring people whose heads were full of questions

It is also important to have people who come with some answers — the mix should have been better balanced

55:14 Should have hired more experienced people sooner not just curious ones

Sam Altman · Apr 15, 2024

Experience matters a lot in some roles and is neutral or a big negative in others; the right question is 'is this the person', not whether the company wants more or less experience

There are amazing people with tons of experience and amazing people with almost none, and whatever OpenAI is doing seems to be working

40:14 The right question is is this the person not experience level

Harry Stebbings · Apr 15, 2024

New industries level the playing field between young and experienced people, as seen in crypto where 19-year-olds were as impactful as 45-year-olds

In a genuinely new field prior experience doesn't matter

41:40 New industries level the playing field between young and experienced

Sam Altman · Apr 15, 2024

If you sampled any given person at OpenAI against their role, responsibility and impact, you would have expected or even hoped they were more experienced than they are

41:50 Openai staff are less experienced than their roles would suggest

Harry Stebbings · Jan 22, 2024 · hedged

Technical operating experience from before cloud and AI transfers poorly to today, but the people skills — detecting, hiring and retaining talent — transfer fully

The infrastructure and stack have changed completely, but people always stay the same

36:55 Technical experience fails to transfer but people skills transfer fully