The guy “refounding” Y Combinator: The New Yorker’s Tad Friend profiled the new-ish CEO of YC, the leading startup accelerator, Sam Altman in a lengthy piece. What’s so special about Y Combinator? “A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding. While a few accelerators, such as Tech Stars and 500 Startups, have a handful of alumni worth hundreds of [mns of USD], Y Combinator has graduates worth at least a [bn]—and it has eleven of them.” Altman’s ambition hasn’t gone unnoticed, with venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz saying “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.” YC’s cofounder Paul Graham took it a step further, saying Altman is trying to comprehensively revise the way we live: “I think his goal is to make the whole future.” (Startup Kool-Aid is particularly sweet, folks — rainbow flavoured.) Altman dropped out of Stanford University after two years to form a company called Loopt, which made it into YC’s first batch because “Altman in particular passed what would become known at YC as the young founders’ test: Can this stripling manage adults?” Loopt ended up being sold for USD 43 mn in 2012, a negative return for its VCs. When Paul Graham and his partner Jessica Livingston were looking for successors at YC, “There wasn’t a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top. It was just: Sam.”

For change at the CEO level to succeed, Altman said, the new leader has to “refound” the company and he “very intentionally did that with YC.” He shifted the strategy of the accelerator “to support startups even earlier in their life span, and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow. YC would no longer waft explorers out to sea in rickety ships but launch ironclad armadas to claim an empire. And it would mold not a few hundred companies a year but a thousand, then ten thousand.” Altman’s “terse prescience led one YC founder to call him ‘startup Yoda.’ Entrepreneurs trudge in to see him burdened by half an hour’s worth of calamities and bounce out after fifteen minutes, springy with resolve. Much of his advice follows YC’s standard imperative to transparency: if you’re worried about investors’ responses to a setback, ‘just tell them’; if you’re mystified by what a potential customer’s silence portends, ‘just ask them.’ It’s the knottier questions that elicit his cleaving judgments. ‘Don’t worry about a competitor until they’re beating you in the market,’ Altman told the founders of Elucify at his dining table one afternoon. ‘Competitors are one of the last monsters that haunt your dreams.’”

He’s right on that last one: To heck with competition, and long-live the monopoly. One of the best business books we’ve ever read (as we’ve mentioned before) is Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Futureby Peter Thiel. (Yes, that Thiel — the Republican, Trump-loving gay libertarian.) Don’t set out to compete with an existing business. Set out to do something completely new.