Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, disclosed that during his sophomore year, he was "peer-pressured and tricked" into taking an internship in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. However, he ultimately declined the opportunity and chose to pursue the startup path instead, saying the conventional corporate ladder now sounds far less appealing to him.
Speaking at the Internapalooza Conference last month, Altman said taking up an investment banking internship was largely the trend everyone wanted to follow at the time.
“I got peer-pressured and kind of tricked into it,” Altman said. “I dutifully applied and got in and felt really cool.”
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However, Altman ultimately declined the offer. “And then I didn't do it,” he added. Instead, he focused on his startup, Loopt, before joining the first class of Y Combinator and eventually becoming its president. He later founded OpenAI, which recently completed a $7 billion share sale and is reportedly eyeing a potential trillion-dollar IPO as soon as the second half of 2026. Goldman Sachs is among the investment banks working with OpenAI on its potential public-market plans, according to Fortune.
Altman said starting a company can be a better alternative to simply "doing stuff" and moving up the corporate ladder. He argued that it is now easier for people to turn down coveted banking internships and pursue startups, partly because of the opportunities created by AI.
According to Altman, working at a firm such as Goldman Sachs involves being around "people [who] put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously." He argued that the hierarchical nature of banking leaves less room for young professionals to create, unlike startups.
“I think this is much more true now than ever before,” Altman said. “You don't need anyone to take you seriously to build an entire startup, sort of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens but not much else.”
Altman also said people can get far in their careers simply by "doing stuff". He said OpenAI seeks to identify and back young, unproven talent by giving young employees responsibility for major projects.
The irony is that OpenAI is now hiring Wall Street talent, years after Altman turned down the Goldman Sachs opportunity. The company's recent hires include both junior investment bankers and experienced banking professionals, including former Morgan Stanley managing director Alisha Lehr, who joined OpenAI last month.
More than 100 former investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have been hired to train AI models to build financial models and automate work traditionally handled by junior bankers. OpenAI is reportedly planning to increase its workforce to 8,000 by the end of the year, potentially creating further opportunities for finance professionals.
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OpenAI is also increasingly expecting finance professionals to be AI-native. In June, CFO Sarah Friar said she probably would not hire a finance professional who did not know how to use a product such as Codex, comparing it with the importance of knowing Excel.
“I would never hire a finance person who didn't know how to use Excel, and I probably wouldn't hire a finance person today who didn't know how to use a tool like Codex,” she said.
Meanwhile, finance is becoming a battleground for enterprise AI companies, with Claude already in production at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citi. Anthropic has also launched roughly 10 pre-built AI agents for financial workflows, including pitchbooks, earnings analysis, credit memos and underwriting.
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