From Stanford Dropout to Married Tech Titan: the Complete Sam Altman Personal Timeline

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Altman enrolled at Stanford University in 2003 to study computer science. He immersed himself in coursework and the emerging world of mobile applications. Yet campus life moved too slowly for him. By 2005, Altman and his classmate Nick Sivo dropped out of Stanford to launch Loopt, an early location-sharing mobile application that predated both Foursquare and mainstream smartphones.

Sivo was Altman’s co-founder and romantic partner. Together, they secured acceptance into the inaugural summer 2005 cohort of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator founded by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Tappan Morris. The young couple lived and worked together out of rental apartments and small offices, pushing 80-hour workweeks to build the business.

Loopt struggled to achieve mass consumer traction, despite partnerships with major wireless carriers like Sprint and Verizon. In 2012, Green Dot Corporation acquired Loopt for $43.4 million. The sale yielded Altman roughly $5 million in personal capital, which served as his launchpad into angel investing. The acquisition coincided with the end of his nine-year relationship with Sivo. Friends and colleagues from that era noted that the breakup weighed heavily on Altman, marking the close of a formative chapter that bridged his collegiate ambitions and his subsequent entry into venture capital.