Sam Altman
CEO, Loopt

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Sam Altman, 22, is the co-founder and CEO of Loopt, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup that has built a revolutionary “social mapping” service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with their friends. Sam founded Loopt while he was still a student at Stanford University to find his friends on campus and to improve the way friends communicate. His primary responsibility within Loopt is driving the product vision, assembling a passionate team to realize that vision and making sure people have fun while they’re at it.

At Stanford University, Sam focused on computer security and machine learning. He also helped develop a patented system for navigation for one of the world’s first autonomous helicopter navigation systems, a task for which his experience as a pilot of small aircraft was good training. Sam raised seed financing from Paul Graham’s prestigious incubator called Y-Combinator to pay for a summer of development of the Loopt product, and soon thereafter raised $5M from Sequoia and NEA, two of the most prestigious and successful venture capital firms in the world. He is currently on leave from the computer science program