Loopt was a social network that used location tracking to notify users when they were close to friends or to recommend nearby restaurants. He worked so hard that summer and ate so much instant ramen, he gave himself scurvy. He didn’t regret it. “Work really hard in the beginning of your career,” he would later say to young founders. “It pays off like compound interest.” Altman never returned to Stanford. By late 2005, he and his cofounders were already in talks with VC firms New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia to give them $5 million in funding. Altman took his chances and dropped out of
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