Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with the man who had the hardest sales job in Silicon Valley history: Zack Kass.

Before ChatGPT was a household name, it was just a research lab.

Zack was Head of Go-To-Market. He joined when OpenAI was around a hundred people doing two million in revenue.

His job? Sell human-level intelligence to Fortune 500 executives who didn't even know what a token was.

He built the playbook for Microsoft. For Coca-Cola. He turned a nonprofit lab into an eighty billion dollar superpower.

Then he walked away.

Zack, thanks a lot for being here!

TIMELINE

00:00:00 - 00:06:34 : Joining OpenAI as the first sales person

00:06:34 - 00:09:47 : The early GPT-3 wrapper ecosystem

00:09:47 - 00:11:03 : Strategy behind ChatGPT's development

00:11:03 - 00:16:45 : The chat interface decision and market response

00:16:45 - 00:21:04 : ChatGPT's explosive growth and company atmosphere

00:21:04 - 00:26:45 : Lessons from viral growth and Microsoft partnership

00:26:45 - 00:30:21 : Scaling challenges and the "bigger boat" moment

00:30:21 - 00:33:44 : Personal burnout and health crisis

00:33:44 - 00:37:29 : AI as humanity's last invention

00:37:29 - 00:45:21 : Technology, inequality, and policy failures

00:45:21 - 00:48:35 : Global AI competition and geopolitics

00:48:35 - 00:50:18 : AI's potential to solve major problems

00:50:18 - 00:54:33 : The next renaissance and education transformation

REFERENCES

- Sam Altman