Clayton, Missouri

the suburb where Sam Altman grew up and where I went to high school

[Reminder: today noon eastern time, Virginia Postrel and I will be discussing The Technological Republic. Coincidentally, Jacob Howland writes about this book near the end of this essay. Here is the link to register for today’s discussion.]

When Tyler mentioned The Optimist, a recently-published biography of Sam Altman authored by Keach Hagey, I had to snap it up. That is because I already knew that Altman grew up where I went to high school, in the Saint Louis suburb of Clayton, Missouri. Note that I am a generation older than Altman, who is the same age as my middle daughter.

The book is filled with stories and personalities from the alien civilization known as Silicon Valley. I found it fast-paced and fun.¹

I was pleased by Hagey’s quote from Greg McAdoo:

You don’t let go of people because they are prima donnas in that world. That’s not a thing. Half of the folks that operate at that level would in some way be considered prima donnas. You need to learn how to harness them.

This resonated with me. Years ago, I wrote,

I’ll let a software developer get away with being a prima donna*, if you’ve got the right combination of ability, conscientiousness, and stamina. Show me you can really get stuff done, in which case I’d rather keep you happy and let other employees get annoyed than the other way around.

*I define a prima donna as someone who thinks that their superior talent demands recognition and special treatment

How you react to those remarks probably tells you whether you belong in the startup world or in a more mature organizational environment.

I imagine that the typical reader of the book will want to skim over the sections that give the Altman family history in order to get to the chapters on Altman himself. My personal focus is the opposite.

The book mentions that one of Altman’s grandparents went to Soldan High School in Saint Louis in the 1930s, where my father also went. Hagey describes Soldan as populated by wealthy Jews. My grandparents were Jewish, but not wealthy. They had a store that went bankrupt during the Roosevelt Recession of 1937, and they lived in poverty thereafter.

Sam’s father, the late Jerry Altman, was dedicated to improving housing in black inner-city neighborhoods. But because Saint Louis was not hospitable to Jerry’s ideas, he ended up traveling extensively to more receptive locations.

Hagey notes that Saint Louis “has a distinctively odious history of segregation.” The Internet tells me that Soldan High School excluded blacks until the late 1950s, but I believe that it was mostly black a decade later. In those days in the Saint Louis area, whole neighborhoods would change from all-white to mostly-black in a matter of months. That includes the neighborhood where I attended elementary school, which was in University City, next door to Clayton. While my old neighborhood transformed to mostly-black in the late 1960s, Clayton remained essentially all-white at least through my high school years.

When I was in high school in Clayton, it was a small, prestigious suburb. The Saint Louis area is one where the question “Where did you go to high school?” can be used to pinpoint the responder’s demographics. Ladue was the suburb for high-end country clubs. Clayton was the suburb for high-end public schools

The only local high schools that were more prestigious than Clayton High School were two private schools, Burroughs and Country Day. But in my day it was quite close. One of my friends, Tom, transferred from the Clayton schools to Country Day for middle school, but then moved back to Clayton for high school with no adverse effects. He got into Yale. By the time Sam Altman was in middle school, apparently a gap had opened up and his parents sent him to Burroughs.

There were a lot of kids at Clayton High who were really smart. When I got to Swarthmore College, I found that my classmates there were not nearly as smart as my high school chums. In high school, my grade-point average was around 3.2, but in college it was closer to 3.9, and I did not have to try as hard.

In my high school crowd, we knew each other’s scores on SAT tests (mostly high 700s, back when high SAT scores were harder to get), achievement tests (mostly 800s), and AP tests (mostly 5’s).

I took AP chemistry and AP calculus, which were the toughest courses that the school offered. Peter Krentz, who eventually became perhaps the most distinguished scholar to emerge from my high school class, took neither, so he was not marked as a superstar. In terms of overall achievement after high school, Nick Adzick probably accomplished the most, and that was expected. He did take AP chem, after all.

Our teachers, including the AP chem teacher, lamented that our class was unimpressive relative to our predecessors. Nick R, who we considered the genius of our class, was overshadowed in school lore by his legendary older brothers.

We were the class of 1971, very much warped by the phenomena of anti-war protests and hippie experimentation with drugs. I was too immature to participate in the hippie crowd, but I was deep in the anti-war clique. Straights, like Krentz and Adzick, stayed out of both.

Tom, the classmate I mentioned earlier, had friends in just about every crowd. He got along with kids in the anti-war crowd and the hippie crowd. And our senior year he had a girlfriend who was a junior and who struck me as very much a straight. Like Krentz, she was smart without having a flashy reputation.

Tom and his girlfriend broke up at some point during college. He went to the West Coast for law school and has stayed out there ever since.

The stereotype of the Bay Area startup founder is part visionary, part con artist. Tom’s former girlfriend is nothing like that. She would be about the last person to claim to have discovered the Next Big Thing and try to sell you on it . She comes across as quietly forceful, practical, realistic, and cautious, carefully balancing work and family. She married another man from Clayton (although when they connected they were in Chicago), who had gone to Country Day. A few years after they were married they moved back to Clayton, to the neighborhood where one of my best friends from high school lived. That is about as unflamboyant as you can get.

It’s not that I knew Tom’s ex-girlfriend well enough to get this insight into her personality. And I did not get it from talking to Tom. I got this impression from the book, which makes her seem in many ways to be the opposite of Sam Altman. She is in the book because she is his mother.

1. But for insight into Altman as a business visionary, I am not sure that you can get more out of it than you can by going back to Tad Friend’s 2016 New Yorker profile of Altman.