Reflections

Sam Altman’s January 2025 retrospective, written from the other side of the November 2023 board crisis. Most of the post is personal, but one number anchors the ChatGPT PMF story:

We grew from about 100 million weekly active users to more than 300 million.

That’s a 3x in roughly a year — after the supposed honeymoon was over, after the board crisis, after every “ChatGPT growth has stalled” thinkpiece. The lesson: when a product has real PMF in a real market, it doesn’t matter that easy-growth channels have been nerfed (end-of-billion-user-startup). The market just keeps pulling.

Why it matters here

Andreessen’s “the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly” claim (only-thing-that-matters) gets a real test case here. OpenAI lost half its leadership for 96 hours. The product kept growing. The market didn’t care about the org chart.

See chatgpt-pmf for the full case, product-market-fit for the framework.