Do AI bosses need to be famous?

0:00In August 2018, Sam Altman gave a presentation for Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that backs growing companies with both funds and advice. At the time, Sam Altman was largely unknown outside of the startup circles. He was the CEO at a small nonprofit called OpenAI, and he spent most of his time working at Y Combinator. But in his 2018 presentation, Sam shared something that I found fairly enlightening. Okay, today I'm going to talk about how to succeed with a startup. Obviously, more than can be said here in 20 minutes, but I will do the best I can. In this presentation, he gives multiple lessons.

0:43Some of them are fairly self-explanatory. If you can't explain in a few words what you do, and if people don't, if at least some people don't say, oh, that's pretty interesting, that's usually a mistake. It's usually a sign of unclear thinking or a need that is not big enough. Some of the points are a little more detailed. The degree to which you're successful approximates the degree to which you build a product that is so good, people spontaneously tell their friends about it. But it's his fifth point, about three minutes, 30 seconds into the video, which really caught my attention. Another thing that startups need, at least one evangelical founder, usually the CEO.

1:18And this requires someone who can infect with enthusiasm the whole world about what the company is trying to do. OpenAI and Sam Altman have spent almost a decade following this strategy, promoting not just the company, not just the company's products, but also the CEO. It's a strange step for a tech company that employs hundreds of people and an AI product that learns off billions of people's work. but the marketing strategy seems to produce pretty reliable results. And I'll explain why in today's episode of Nudge.

1:57Most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data. It's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams. But because it's scattered, no one can use it. That is where HubSpot come in. HubSpot connects it all. every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation, and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from. Because when you know more, you grow more. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. To start the show, let's go back to that presentation from 2018.

2:39It's a recording on a grainy webinar in a stuffy looking lecture hall. Sam Altman looks a little bit more like a PhD student giving a seminar than one of the world's most influential CEOs. In his presentation, Sam details exactly what every startup needs to succeed. Another thing that startups need, at least one evangelical founder, usually the CEO. Someone at the startup has got to be the person that is going to recruit, sell the product, talk to the press, raise money. And this requires someone who can infect with enthusiasm the whole world about what the company is trying to do. And someone who becomes the chief evangelist for the company, it's very hard to succeed wildly without that.

3:28It's very hard to build a team at all without being able to do that. Sam says that startups require an evangelical founder, someone who must infect the world with enthusiasm, saying it is very hard to succeed without that. He made a very similar point five months earlier in March 2018 during a different presentation. Communication skills, I think, are one of the most important founder qualifications that people don't think about enough. So, so much of your job as a founder is about communication. You are, every time you hire someone, every time you go raise money, every time you try to sell the product, every time you try and set a direction for the company.

4:13You do it. Like a huge amount of a founder's job is being an evangelist for the company. And even earlier in 2017, he goes back to the same idea that startups need these evangelical good communicators as founders. He makes this point at a presentation with Waterloo Engineering. Another thing that I did not used to believe was this important, and now I do, is clear communication. Almost all of the best startups that we have ever been involved with, from the very first time we met those founders, they were able to very concisely and clearly communicate what they were doing in like 25 words. And I don't know why this is so important and maybe that you need this to spread the message, but I can certainly say that founders who aren't good at this don't really go on to be successful.

5:00And in May 2019, in a presentation at Strictly VC, He goes even further with this point. And yet to be an effective CEO, like 95 % of your job is effective communication and evangelism and telling the story of the company to people you're trying to hire and retain and sell to and get press from and whatever else. 95 % of the job of a CEO is effective communication and evangelism. This is the point he makes time and time again, that successful companies have prominent CEOs, CEOs that become the figurehead for promoting the company. And he first started making this point way back in 2017, before ChatGPT, before OpenAI's success, before Sam Altman's fame.

5:47Sam clearly already knew all the way back then the value of having a famous founder. time and time again. He mentioned that for a startup to be successful, they need a founder that's not only good at communicating in public, but is also known by the public. And if you trace OpenAI's history, especially when ChatGPT first launched, you'll see that he used this exact playbook, that Sam used this marketing strategy time and time again. ChatGPT. Maybe you've heard If you haven't, then get ready, because this promises to be the viral sensation that could completely reset how we do things. ChatGPT launched on November 30th, 2022, and hit 1 million users within just five days.

6:35Within a few months, they had 100 million active users. During this time, amazingly, OpenAI spent absolutely nothing on marketing and advertising. AI chatbot ChatGPT is now the fastest growing consumer app in history. UBS analyst Lloyd Wormsley said it was the fastest consumer application to hit 100 million users. And UBS went on to state, and I quote, that in the 20 years they have been following the internet space, they cannot recall a faster ramp up in a consumer internet app. From 2022 to December 2024, ChatGPT grew at an unprecedented rate. But during this time, OpenAI did not have a chief marketing officer.

7:21They reportedly had spent nothing on marketing. According to CNBC, the company didn't see marketing as a priority. It wasn't until early 2025, when Kate Roach joined from Coinbase, that OpenAI first launched their marketing function. So what did they do up until that point? How did they grow at such a level without any marketing? well, I think they did have a marketing strategy and their marketing strategy was to simply make Sam Altman famous. See, during this period, almost all of the marketing coverage generated for the tool came through him. For example, in March 2023, he announced that he'd be doing what he called a world tour.

8:05Take me into your like mental process for deciding to do this world tour. He visited Toronto, Washington DC, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Madrid, Brussels, Munich, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Dubai, New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo and Melbourne I think we did 28 countries, 35 days I like lived on an airplane, it was a very strange Did you have a bed? I had like a, yeah, I was comfortable But yeah, I had a bed He met heads of state, including the leader of India, Modi, the president of South Korea President Yoon Seogyor sitting down with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that... He met the President of Israel, and he dined with the UK Prime Minister at the time, Rishi Sunak.

8:50Now, all of this might sound quite normal. Sam Altman is an important man. These leaders probably do want to meet with him. But there were other strategies too that suggest that OpenAI were really trying to build Sam's prominence. For example, OpenAI started using Sam's X account, or his Twitter account, which is at Samma, S-A-M-A, and they used this account as really the primary announcement channel for the company. It was from Sam's account, rather than from the official OpenAI channels, that the first announcement of ChatGPT was actually made. It was Sam, on November 30th, 2022, who announced the launch of the product.

9:27He wrote, Today we launched ChatGPT. Try talking with it here. It was Sam who announced that ChatGPT had crossed 1 million users five days later. Again, it was on his X account that he announced image generation in ChatGPT, and he announced the full GPT-5 roadmap in his own tweets, not via an OpenAI blog or via a press release. In addition to using his own profile as a medium to publish updates about the company, he also appeared repeatedly on a number of marquee podcasts. He went on Lex Friedman's podcast in 2023 and again, I think, in 2025. He was on Bill Gates' podcast in 2024 and dozens and dozens of other major shows.

10:08And of course, he also appeared on The Joe Rogan Show. Hello, Sam. What's happening? Not much. Thanks for coming in here. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Now, it is hard to get really accurate data on how much Sam appeared on podcasts compared to other CEOs. but the research I was able to do using Podchaser suggested that he appeared on significantly more podcasts than his AI CEO counterparts. He appeared more than Huang at NVIDIA, more than Benioff, Ellison, Dell, more than Zuckerberg, more than the Anthropic CEO, more than Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, which to me reveals that he is acting on the strategy that he declared so many years ago.

10:48He knows that a successful startup needs an evangelistic, prominently known CEO, which is interesting because it goes against a point he made on that very Joe Rogan show, a point that suggested his role wasn't really important at all. I think this is, you could make the statement from many companies, but none is as true for us OpenAI. It's like the CEO is far from the most important person in the company. Like in our case, there's a large handful of researchers, each of which are individually more critical to the success we've had so far and that we will have in the future than me. But even that, and I bet those people really are like, hmm, this is weird to be them.

11:32but it's certainly weird enough for me that it like ups my simulation hypothesis probability somewhat he's clear that he is not the most important person at the company he believes that there are people more important than him but that's not what an outsider looking in would think because we don't see open ai's researchers going on joe rogan's show or a team of open ai executives meeting with Rishi Sunak, where you see Sam tweeting about new product launches and Sam appearing on stage at the World Economic Forum. He has become the face of OpenAI, and I believe he did so purposefully. I think that all of this is a considered campaign to raise the profile of Sam Altman.

12:17Whether it's led by the company or whether it's led by him, I'm not so sure, but he is the face of OpenAI, and thus the face of ChatGPT. And his prominence, his fame, is far greater than I think most of his counterparts. Now there is a counterpoint to this which is of course Elon Musk and Grok. Musk is an AI leader as well, Grok is an AI tool and Musk of course is incredibly well known. He goes out of his way to build his fame but I think Musk is an outlier. He was well known well before AI came along and he developed his fame for decades. Sam Altman's rise to fame has been rather quick. Over the space of five years he's gone from being almost entirely unknown from outside his industry to a regular on the front page of newspapers and a regular on the news.

13:02And he is different from those running Claude, Gemini and Copilot. Most of you probably can't picture, let alone even name the leaders working on those products. Some of you will be able to, but most I don't believe can. And I think most companies making a similar product don't try to make their founder famous. They use different channels to promote their products. they don't push their CEO to appear on numerous podcasts on a monthly basis. I also doubt you'd be able to name the CEO of Walmart or the CEO of Volkswagen, CVS, Shell, Toyota, Microsoft or Costco. I don't think you'd know who heads up JP Morgan, Chevron, Samsung, Bank of America, Cargill.

13:39And yet all of those companies which I've listed, they all make significantly more than OpenAI. Which begs the question, why? Why has Sam Altman gone to such efforts to bolster his prominence? Imagine, for example, if Sam Altman wasn't well known, if he was just like most other CEOs, known within his industry but unknown to the rest of the world. Imagine if you thought of open AI as you'd think of Coca-Cola. With Coca-Cola, when I drink Coca-Cola, I never think about an individual behind the drink. I never think about the CEO leading the company. I just think about the drink. Well, in that world, where Sam Altman isn't famous, would that world change how I viewed the products?

14:20Would it change my perception of ChachiPT? Well strangely this is exactly what two researchers aimed to answer way back in 2014 with a rather interesting study. The researchers Smith and Newman showed 222 people this incredible sculpture. It's a real sculpture made by a real artist and it's made of 500 ,000 stacked plastic cups spread out across the floor of undulating heights. The sculpture is called Untitled Plastic Cups and I think it's breathtaking. You can google this sculpture, it's really impressive because up close it just looks like stacked plastic cups on the floor, it looks like a bit of trash.

14:58But when you take a few steps back you realise that this sculpture resembles a sort of bird's eye view of a snow-covered valley. It has peaks and troughs and valleys and mountains and it's really quite impressive. Now the 202 people who are shown this sculpture all of them are told that the sculpture took 30 hours to build but different groups were told different things. One group was told that only one person built the sculpture while other groups were told independently that two three or five artists helped to make the sculpture. So I might see the sculpture and be told that it's made by one artist called Jane but you might be told that it's made by a consortium of three artists.

15:37Then each participant is asked to rate the quality of the sculpture out of seven and it's here where Smith and Newman found something quite surprising. Those ratings dropped in tandem with the number of artists. With just one artist the piece was rated at 5.87 out of seven. With two it drops to 5.51, three it drops to 5.39 and at five artists the rating drops by 11.3 % to 5.24%. All participants looked at the same art, but believing it was made by a solo creator made that art appear better in their minds. This study suggests that a creation, whether it's a piece of work, a piece of art, or product or service, could appear higher quality if people associate that creation with an individual rather than a group.

16:29Now obviously this is something that almost every organisation struggles to grapple with, because organisations have hundreds of people working for them. For example, it is impossible to claim that McDonald's Big Macs are a creation of one individual when 1.7 million people work for that chain. And yet, many companies go to great lengths to overplay the impact of loan creators. Apple idolises Steve Jobs, Virgin parades itself as Branson's brainchild, Dyson do the same with Dyson, and even McDonald's permitted the creation of The Founder, a film profiling the man who laid the foundations for their fast food empire.

17:08And I think OpenAI are doing the same with Sam Altman. By building the profile of the individual behind the brand, they hope to change the perception of the product. There's a very good chance I'm wrong, by the way. It might be that Sam Altman likes the limelight for other reasons. It might be that the clear push to raise Sam's profile isn't causing any benefit for the company whatsoever. But making your founder famous or making your CEO famous tends to be a pretty good marketing strategy. It boosts the perception of your services and products while increasing your attention. However, if you run a company or you work at a company, you probably won't have an invitation to appear on the Joe Rogan show, or your boss won't be invited to dine with the British Prime Minister.

17:51So how can you and your company benefit from this effect? We'll find out after the break. The Ross Simmons Show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I've been following Ross for a while. His podcast is great and an episode I'd highly recommend is called Mastering Time, Prioritisation Over Productivity. He gives some really well thought out tips on how to prioritise your time, including something I care a lot about, which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results. So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts.

18:31Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. I've tried to make the point in this episode that Sam Altman's rise in prominence was partly purposeful. I reckon he knew that being well known could change the perception of his work, of his company, of his brand, and ultimately make his product appear better quality than it really was. This might be completely wrong, but the basic idea here is that knowing or thinking that there's a solo individual behind a product or service is likely to make that product or service seem higher quality. We saw an example of that in the Smith and Newman study.

19:04But how can you apply this? You can't go on a world tour for 30 days visiting 16 world leaders, but fortunately there are other strategies that you could copy from other brands. A more realistic example to follow is from Lush. Lush are a British cosmetic brand. They actually invented the bath bomb. Now, rather than idolise their seven founders, Lush highlights individual employees. Each product Lush sells comes with a sticker declaring exactly which employee made the product. For example, the sticker on my wife's shower gel tells me that it was made by Eileen back in December, and it even includes a cartoon drawing of Eileen's face.

19:44Or there's an example from Japan that I learnt about recently. If you enter a Japanese grocery store, you will see beneath the boxes of tomatoes and strawberries, a photo of the farmer's face, the farmer who picked the tomatoes or grew the strawberries. Now this is called Kao no Miru Kankai, and I've butchered that translation I'm sure, but that translates to a relationship where you can see face to face. In Japan, they show a photo of the farmer beneath the farmer's food, and I think that almost certainly lifts the perceived value of the food. Lush and the Japanese greengrocers are betting that creators don't have to be CEO billionaires to influence us.

20:21The creator can be anyone. The creator doesn't have to be famous. Now this was also something that Smith and Newman tried to prove in their study. They showed a different group of 229 people a number of haikus. One of the haikus read, glistening body that sparkles in bright sun, water is just that. When readers thought that poem was written by a solo poet. They rated it at 3.73 out of 7 but when they were told it was created by a group just like in the previous study ratings dropped by 9.5 % to 3.39. Remember the only thing about this poem that has changed is who they believe made it on how many people they believe made it.

21:01Nothing about the actual content of the poem changes and yet just knowing it's made by a group drops the perceived rating. Now the poem wasn't seen as particularly good and readers didn't think the poet or poets were talented, but that didn't matter. Simply knowing that one person wrote the poem bolstered perception. Birkin bags are another example. They typically sell for£10 ,000, and we are told by Birkin's advertising that each bag is made by a single craftsman, usually in one of Hermes' French factories, and they require between 15 to 20 hours work. Knowing that the bag is painstakingly built by just one individual increases its perceived worth.

21:40Knowing that Eileen has personally packed our shower gel makes it appear better quality than the same gel from the faceless brand. And perhaps knowing the person behind ChatGPT, the CEO who's pioneering and evangelising about the company, perhaps that is one of the reasons why ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer app of all time.

22:05That is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. I hope you enjoyed today's episode as always if you did enjoy today's show please do subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts and think about leaving the show a review that's really appreciated those of you who have done that also if you'd like more Nudge before next week's episode please do sign up to my weekly Nudge newsletter every Friday I send out one of the best behavioral science tips or pieces of advice or insights that I've come across that week it's totally free to sign up and you can unsubscribe at any time. There's never any spam in there or anything like that.

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