Sam Altman’s Anti-Coworking Spaces Rant How early judgment can smother breakthrough thinking

Before becoming CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman led Y Combinator, one of the world’s most well-known startup accelerators. He joined YC in 2011 and became its president in 2014, helping hundreds of startups get off the ground.

In a 2019 interview, he shared a blunt view on coworking spaces and why they might be the worst place to build truly bold ideas.

“Coworking spaces have two big classes of problems. Number one, they are a band-pass filter. Good ideas  –  actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage  – all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you’re in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It’s true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too.

The other thing is the average level of ambition and willingness to work hard at a coworking space is incredibly low. There’s this reversion to the mean that is not what you want in your life.”

Source: Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent