Altman knew that what he believed wouldn’t always come to pass. But he also knew that most people underestimated what time and rapid expansion could bring to seemingly small ideas. In the Valley, this was called “scale.” When Altman decided an idea would scale, he was not afraid to bet big on its progress. He might be wrong time and again, but when he was right, he wanted to be breathtakingly right. For him, this attitude was encapsulated by an oft-repeated quote from Machiavelli: “Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.”
