I ran a multi-million dollar a year non-profit and had a full-time job. It's not unusual to chair or "run" a non-profit and have a regular job, non-profits are actually set up to make this easy to do. If that non-profit somehow mystically turned into a for-profit enterprise, for a multitude of reasons (some less obvious) I would have clearly had to pick one or the other. If said non-profit had commercialized transformer as a service, I'd have quit DigitalOcean (double so if I was well vested).
Just to make it fair with the situation: I honestly don't know if I would have proactively quit one or the other. Depending on the workloads, I may very well have tried to moonlight both for a while, I'm unsure.
At 24 I ended up as the chair of a not for profit that stood on top of $30 million of real estate _because no one else wanted to_. Getting quorum was impossible because we needed three out of five board members to show up to a meeting.
People have this idea it's mustache twirling villains running these things. It's usually the idiot thats about to burn out.
No, we have a view of people who are over-stretched failing to meet their obligations while still taking those spots for clout and resume. Your example fits that perfectly. No one wants to be the chair of a non-profit that isn't doing anything because lazy people have packed the board and refuse to work. We can't help but wonder how much better those resources could be used if not restricted to the in-group.
Genuine question: Why did you include "about to burn out" in the description?
Is it because the chairing the non-profit is enough work/burden that it causes folks to burn out, or does this role tend to attract people who are already on the path to burning out, or some other thing?
I thought that was a really interesting detail to include but couldn't quite figure it out on my own. :)
Not sure if it's what was meant, but an HOA board isn't too far off of that description. In my experience, the job is necessary but relatively thankless and uncompensated. No one wanted to volunteer their time, and I was interested in cash flow and a building improvement so I served for a year. The only other board members ran uncontested and also had very demanding jobs outside of the association. Everyone else was happy to let us take care of all the minutiae of coordinating maintenance, budget, property management, etc. It was a lot of work.
So to answer your question, I've observed that it attracts people who are already ambitious in other aspects of their life (and maybe a little too generous with their own time), and the extra work it entails compounds with their other commitments which can lead to burnout.
It's often people who have a hard time saying no who end up spread thin over a number of gigs - this leads to burn out. Or not showing up to meetings... The 3/5 of the board who can't be rounded up are also signed up for too many things.
When I was chair of a small non-profit (currently still a board member after a hiatus for a few years), I'm not sure I'd have described it as burnout but increased lack of engagement and interest definitely became a problem over time. When we did require in-person votes/quorums, that did become a problem because it usually required traveling for most board members 2 or 3 weekends a year.
At some point, while I was on hiatus, the board did change its rules to allow telephone and, later, Zoom attendance which has been IMO something of a mixed bag but probably inevitable especially post-COVID. I'd like people to get together in person more but it's harder than when the board skewed younger; people have more family responsibilities at this point and, of course at this point, a lot of people just have less patience about getting together physically when business can mostly be taken care of over a couple hour Zoom call.
Fortunately, the non-profit's regular activities and finances have been on a pretty even keel so the board mostly just keeps an eye out for problems.
IME: because the people who are ok with abandoning things are gone, and people who are not ok with abandoning things are stuck there due to some kind of fucked-upness (in the grandparent, lack of quorum) that makes it impossible to 'properly' depart until they just can't do it any more. I chaired an organization for four years (in a planned term of two years) and had nobody interested in being my successor. Finally I said "I can't be involved in this any more" and basically disappeared on them.
Non-profit boards have so many varied issues it's a little silly, but since the pay is low or non-existent you end up with a lot of them run by the only person willing to be nominated.
I have seen the only person nominated to positions get elected scores of times because the depth of potential candidates is like 100 max and 99 of them have jobs and families or just don't feel like being responsible for it. A non-profit requires someone to deal with taxes and tax-status forms and real estate maybe and certainly insurance, someone has to be on the hook for it being correct. I don't know how to get insurance for a non-profit and would need advice on what even is necessary, if I don't know that I'd be a fool to take the role and put my entire family at potential legal risk.
It's a stretch to get someone to be on the hook for that unless there's an existing healthy board. Plus no one wants to volunteer for a position where they have responsibilities but no control or ability to make decisions, so if the leadership are control freaks it's an absolute depressing nightmare.
I was treasurer of a small sports club non profit. Thankless job with monetary liability. Also tried to get the board to manage a small GDrive for group documents.
Question: It's 2 am, a dead opossum is stuck in the main drain for the property and the water is rising during a once in a decade storm. What do you do?
Answer: Wade neck deep into the water, with a stoner tripping on mushroom holding a light, then stab it with a crowbar until the water pressure flushes it down.
Glad to know you didn't get sucked down too, neck deep water draining has some crazy strength. I'm sure that was quite a magical experience for Flashlight Stoner as well!
That crowbar was basically my badge of office. So many uses. Removing asbestos, evicting crackheads, opening windows, finding a hidden room behind a fake wall.
The reason you're getting downvoted is because we avoid reddit-esque cookie cutter jokes like that on here. They don't add much to the discussion and lower the signal to noise ratio.
99 times out of 100 it's that idiot. The only time it's not is when it is someone that has figured out how to truly benefit themselves from the appointment. Whether ethically or no.
For what it's worth, the above comments are talking about serving on the board of directors of a foundation -- which is most often part-time and not paid.
Yes, but for what it's worth, I was reading the above comment as being about the large compensation package that Baker received as the CEO of Mozilla Foundation.
Assuming you are a man, I'm not sure you would say the same thing if the arbitrary lingual fact was opposite, and on your door it would be written in bold chairwoman, or if you were been introduced as a policewoman.
I'm not sure I'm for changing the language all over, but I don't think dismissing issues that disturb a group that you don't belong to is a manner that fits a gentleman.
The tweet specifically says "if he was going to run OpenAI full-time ..". Sounds like they were fine with him moonlighting other projects, Worldcoin, OpenAI as a non-profit, but if YC wasn't going to be his primary "full-time" focus then he would need to choose.
> Sounds like they were fine with him moonlighting other projects
Even that’s not quite right. OpenAI had been a research project inside YC. So there was no “moonlighting” about it (and Worldcoin started around the same time Sam left YC).
It seems everyone accepted that things qualitatively changed when OpenAI stopped being a non-profit research project inside YC to becoming a for-profit venture, and they just had an adult conversation about it.
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
I haven’t ever heard of worldcoin but ChatGPT has actually made it to the average person’s lexicon, and been covered in the NYTimes repeatedly. Surely some non jobs take more effort than others…
Right, so, no evidence that they had no problem with him running Worldcoin. It could all have been part of the “Sam now has too much on his plate to adequately focus on YC” conversation.
A lot of people here bending over backwards to try to interpret this maximally negatively.
Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
What you call "maximal negativity" is what I would call skepticism about spin. Giving Sam an ultimatum, forcing him to choose one or the other, is a very forceful move. PG is not universally opposed to people running multiple organizations. He's fine with Musk being in charge of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Starlink. I don't think pg was unhappy about Dorsey running both Square and Twitter[1]. OpenAI leadership was fine with Sam in both roles. But Sam had to either quit OpenAI or quit YC, and would get fired from YC if he refused to choose.
Fired means or at least connotes a specific thing, I.e., is against the will of the departing employee. Leaving the organisation by mutual agreement after an adult conversation to focus on exciting new project is a very different thing to fired.
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?" Sure, in some sense the departing individual chooses to go one way rather than the other.
Or the adult conversation was: you need to pick one thing to focus on, we’d prefer it was YC but obviously we can’t force you to choose YC.
PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version.
Many people here want to imagine that it was vastly more dramatic than this, or need to reinterpret the word “fired” to support the narrative that Sam is bad. I understand it can be fun to think that way.
For the record I’m no great fan of OpenAI and I think people who are convinced they are about to achieve AGI are, er, mistaken. I mostly just care about correct definitions of words and avoiding sensationalism.
My point is mainly that PG's telling isn't trustworthy, because that's what you agree to say when the person you're "firing" chooses to go quietly. Obviously I have no specific insight into the situation, but given what I have observed about how career changes happen for people who've reached a certain level of power, I have no faith that the people involved have any interest in accurately describing the situation to the public.
All you have to do is look at the fact that PG has been consistently effusive about Sam in his public comments and essays since the mid 00s through till the present day, for it to be clear that Sam wasn’t simply fired.
Of course these situations are always complex behind the scenes, with many factors and considerations at play.
But the no he must really just have been fired against his will claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test to anyone paying attention.
I wonder how much of the impulse to believe (in the face of the evidence) that Altman parted ways with YC/PG on bad terms is really rooted in an impulse to believe that YC/PG couldn't be complicit in enabling the kind of person that it now increasingly appears that Altman is.
If Altman truly is as bad a person as it appears that he might be, that doesn't reflect well on the people who have praised him through the last few decades. If you like those people, then cognitive dissonance forces you to either believe that Altman is being unduly villainized or to believe that the people that you like secretly hate him but just can't say so openly.
Virtually all info that reaches outsiders has a strong PR component, and often is entirely PR. We're left to "read the tea leaves" from our own experience with such statements.
You're not just saying that PG isn't trustworthy. You're making a claim beyond that:
The adult conversation in question being, in a nutshell: "We've decided it's time for you to move on. Would you like the public perception of this event to be that it was a mutual decision, or would you prefer to burn some bridges on your way out?"
I think you're falling into the classic reasoning trap:
1. I have realized someone has an incentive to portray the truth in a specific way.
2. They are portraying it to me in that way.
3. Therefore, they are lying.
But 3 isn't necessarily the case! All you can say is "3. Therefore, I can't tell what the truth is." I think that's what people are reacting to in terms of negativity. You actually don't know that PG is lying. You just know that, if Sam was actually fired, PG would have an incentive to portray it as mutually amicable. You really don't have evidence whether or not it happened.
Except that isn't at all what Paul is claiming here—he says YC offered him the choice between running YC and running OpenAI but not both at once. Altman chose OpenAI. That might have been the obvious choice in the circumstances (it certainly appears so in retrospect), but that doesn't turn the conversation into the kind you're claiming.
History being different than it has been. Like the statements Paul has made to date have been in agreement with the common perception of it being a firing, not very consistent with this newer counter narrative. Obviously just imo and ymmv.
This is Sam being given an ultimatum and making a choice before being fired. Is it effectively the same thing? Yes. But technically, he left to pursue OpenAI. YC never said “You’rrrrrrrrrrrre Firedddd!!!” (In my best Spacely Sprockets voice); it just politely asked him to leave if he couldn’t give 100%.
Someone doing something bad, like financial fraud or significant lying to the company is much different than a situation where someone is working 2 jobs and is asked to focus on one.
To describe the 2nd situation as being "fired" is dishonest. As it attempt to imply that there is some crazy hidden drama going on.
Admit that those 2 situations are significantly different.
> Why would you assume that "fired" likely means some form of gross misconduct
Since you seem to have not been following this story, it is because that is the accusation that lots of people are making against Sam Altman.
The rumor, for years, was that he was fired for some sort of significant dishonestly or misconduct.
Furthermore, there is other context in which Sam Altman was temporarily removed as CEO from OpenAI, for the stated/claimed reason of not being consistently candid with the board.
The obvious comparison that everyone is making would go something like "Well, there is this rumor that Sam got fired for dishonestly in the past, therefore it makes sense why he got fired again at OpenAI for dishonesty".
Paul G's tweet is a refutation of and in response to this context that is clear and obvious to anyone who has been following this story.
It doesn't matter what the reason was. The rumor could have been that he was "fired" for no fault of his own; it would still be false. When you are asked to stay on and concentrate full time on being the CEO of YC, you are not being fired as the CEO of YC.
The thing here is, a lot of people have (for reasons I cannot really fathom) invested some of their identities in the idea that they have worked out the bones of the whole Sam Altman story, and the First Commandment of Message Boards is "I'm not wrong".
> The thing here is, a lot of people have (for reasons I cannot really fathom)
Is it that hard to fathom? The internet likes to play teams with these personalities, it does it with Musk and Lisa Su and it did it with Marissa Meyer, etc. It's just waves of hating / hyping.
Giving Sam an ultimatum, forcing him to choose one or the other, is a very forceful move.
Sure, but is that what happened? Or, did they sit down and have a chat and mutually agree that on what was best? I guess we will never know with certainty (and I frankly don't care).
I don't know what happened either and I wouldn't even be surprised if the parties have internalized it in ways that aren't 100% consistent. I do know that situations arise where it becomes mutually apparent that a parting of the ways is best for everyone concerned even if not explicitly stated. And, in those circumstances, there's a public story that is often not untrue but isn't the whole backstory either because it's simpler for everyone involved that way.
"Secret reason" = Paul knows it looks bad for him to fire the guy. So he comes up with justifications why it's not really firing. Maybe he even believes them.
You seem to have an axe to grind with @sama. This deep-rooted bias does not make for an honest discourse; as you are just expressing your opinions. If you have some facts to back up your claims, please put them out.
Otherwise, I would urge just stepping away and taking a few deep breaths.
Agree, people need to chill. The thread says they would have been happy if Sam stayed, they just wanted him to choose one or the other which he agreed with. It seems like a very amicable parting of ways when the parties involved were being pulled in different directions.
"The thread says they would have been happy if Sam stayed"
No, he said they would have been fine with it. That has a different quality and honestly, I am quite sure they knew sama was so invested in OpenAI that he would not have choosen to step away from it.
So everybody could save face and no one was "fired".
I see. That is, now I do - without an X account, I could just see the single top post. (Which uses a bitmap for text, so people can read the whole statement. This whole thing represents everything I cannot stand about Twitter)
Have you ever seen Sam Altman with his palms pointing at the camera? You can clearly see from the intersection of his life and fate lines that he is a supervillain in the making.
No, what you are seeing is people refusing to be spun up into rumor-mongering, which is good because you don't want all the air going to spurious claims and counterclaims when there are factual and uncontroversial observations to be angry about instead
I should’ve phrased it better. It seems like many people think those in power are entitled to some moral leniency when they should face higher scrutiny.
Does he forget that it is known that Sam posted to YC's site that he was now Chairman in the day or so prior to him leaving? So... what... they asked him to choose, he decided to promote himself and make a post about it, and then they hurriedly deleted that post and then Same "chose" to leave YC?
> Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me”, he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct.…To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090) scrubbed from the post…For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure.
No whoopsie there, Sam figured he could do whatever he wanted.
> Probably because the "Sam Altman is an amoral, power hungry mastermind who was run out of all his previous gigs" is a more interesting narrative than whatever is actually happening.
It's not either or. The above can be true and also the reason pg wanted him to run YC.
Between the weird exit agreements OpenAI had departing employees sign and the Scarlett Johansson voice incident, people are wondering if there's a pattern to Altman's behavior.
I mean, so what, this still has no bearing on what happened between pg and sama. I may think sama has done some sketchy things but why would that lead anyone to believe pg is lying? It's not like he had to make this statement or anything - it appears much more likely that it was just characterized in a way pg thought was not true.
Isn't it interesting that Altman cries for government regulation of "AI" sellers but not for requiring a permit to use "AI" for their potential customers?
I mean, if he were concerned about our safety he'd want restricted access, not universal...
Yeah, this is about the most positive and amiable way to solve the real problem of Sam Altman not having enough time to lead YC. It is a testament to Sam's own marketing skills that even banal stuff is driving mad speculation.
> It is a testament to Sam's own marketing skills that even banal stuff is driving mad speculation.
That’s beginning to enter “he’s playing 5D chess and making you think exactly what he wants” territory. Would you say that it’s a testament to tobacco companies’ marketing skills that everyone talks about cigarettes being cancerous?
The mad speculation is due to him being CEO of a highly talked about company but also the creator of dubious exploitative ventures[1][2] and rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, many of which talk in vague terms instead of being specific from the start.
I wish I could appraise someone’s skill at something without that being considered as a general endorsement but I guess not.
I don’t think Sam Altman is probably that great at most of what he would like ppl to think he is great at. But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
> I wish I could appraise someone’s skill at something without that being considered as a general endorsement but I guess not.
Ironic[1] that that you’re lamenting a misunderstanding of your comment while misunderstanding mine. I don’t think you were generally endorsing him, my claim is that you’re giving him credit for a skill based on faulty assumptions.
> But he must be alright at marketing and getting into the right places because we are talking about him.
That’s what I disagree with. Would you say that Justine Sacco[2] was great at marketing too? For a while there everyone was talking about her, which she did not intend and didn’t end particularly well for her. Being talked about and being good at marketing don’t automatically correlate. Barbara Streisand knows that very well[3].
This is such a tired and wrong argument. People are allowed to disagree with, dislike, and distrust others without being jealous of them. Think of anyone you don’t like. Pick a specific politician you abhor. Now imagine someone saying you dislike them because you’re jealous. Does that make sense to you? If it does, you have a very warped view of the world.
Getting fired usually implies they did something wrong. Sam was always going to have a lot going on in his life so it was a given there would be competing priorities when he joined YC.
It’s like not he was some random full time employee at YC and concealing his busy life.
So when a smaller AI project he started (with PGs involvement) rapidly turned into a monster overnight and started demanding the bulk of his attention, it’s not a big deal to ask him if he has enough time for both, and to make a decision early on before it becomes overwhelming (note: he still gave him the choice to decide).
Like a lot of entrepreneurs they take on a lot of responsibilities and think they can swing a lot more stuff than they really can, and PG’s whole thing is guiding entrepreneurs to make the best decisions.
> "Got fired" may be a tad ambiguous, but being told "stop working on that other thing or leave" is not too far off.
It's very different.
When employees begin working at my company, they're told a list of things they're not allowed to do. And, they're told if they do these things, they will be shown the door.
By your definition of "not too far off", we're basically firing people on day one. Absurd.
The weirdest part for me in how this is worded is that Paul G learned about OpenAI’s for-profit arm through an announcement and wasn’t something that Sam sought his or Jessica’s advice on. For what it’s worth that alines pretty closely with Helen Toner’s narrative that he kept the board in the dark and they (or she) learned about things through announcements.
Is it? They state they've funded 5000 companies since 2005[1], and if that was evenly spread per year, that's about a company a day. Maybe pg only pays attention to the ones that other people bring to his attention given that amount, and maybe he "knew" about OpenAI in that it was in some report he skimmed or was mentioned but maybe it was seen as entirely handled since it was a project for someone else there. It could entirely have been out of mind within a week or two of him "knowing" it and then it's quickly forgotten, and may seem like new information when it comes up years later.
That is weird. Although OpenAI isn't even listed in their startup directory, so maybe the investment was done differently, and not through their normal channels. Or maybe they divested their share after a short period. Whether that means pg would have been more likely or less likely to know about it I have no idea.
PG didn't know that the CEO of YCombinator was investing YC funds into a separate company that he was also CEO of? I'm not sure who that reflects worse on, PG or SA.
Conflict of interest aside, it also paints SA's whole "I just love the work, I have no equity in OpenAI" in a completely different light.
I don't think this investment is like the rest, there was a clear conflict of interest in the OpenAI investment given that the CEO of YC was also the founder and one of the directors (?) of OpeanAI. And not only Sam, Jessica Livingston is also one of the founders of OpenAI.
This is not a comment on whether PG should have been informed or not, I don't know how YC operates.
That doesn't really seem too hard to stay on top of. Might not be able to rattle them off later, but even spending 10 minutes looking into the investment of the day should be able to expose really obvious conflicts of interest.
Eh, it's an average of one a day, but it could be rolled up in a report once a month and there's 20-40 to look through, and depending how hands on he is (he might have delegated some of this work) that may or may not be something he looks closely into. I imagine there's an order of magnitude more companies that apply that don't get funded. Where does he spend his time? Mentoring companies that have been accepted, and if so, all of them or ones that align with some prior interest, or in vetting and looking for unicorns in the applications?
I don't know how any of their stuff works, but I'm sure most people can appreciate that the stuff that gets lost between the cracks is the stuff that doesn't come in and get tracked through the normal channels, and an OpenAI investment where one of the main people in the company is heading it might be something that wasn't through normal channels. Maybe that was on purpose so pg didn't see it, or maybe that stuff is mostly handled by someone else. Or maybe pg knew about it and decided to lie about it on twitter. /shrug
It's not weird that he didn't know about it the day (or week) that it happened. It IS weird that nobody at YC was talking about OpenAI when it was exploding.
It means "twitter.com" plus "my frustration with twitter.com".
> If you're signed in you'd see threads, right?
I shouldn't have to sign in to see threads.
> Do you think it's bad or unreasonable
Yes. I don't buy that bots are the reason for hiding threads. It reminds me of pinterest and linkedin: show a teaser and then turn the screws on the user until they do what you want. It's greedy and crude.
Why? Do you pay them towards their the CPU, bandwidth, and other operation costs?
> "Yes. I don't buy that bots are the reason for hiding threads. It reminds me of pinterest and linkedin: show a teaser and then turn the screws on the user until they do what you want. It's greedy and crude."
Why can't it be both? I guess you should try to create a competitor of Twitter-X and take on all those costs yourself, so you can see for yourself if scraping-bots (and the purposes for that occurring) are a sustainable business model or a sustainable way to moderate a massive network of people communicating in public - where maximizing for real conversation is seemingly necessary, especially now with AI being able to simply flood threads with realistic long-form conversation - which on its own could be used as an attack vector to agitate or waste people's time and attention on non-real people who aren't influenceable to help open their eyes to perhaps not believing propaganda they've been indoctrinated with.
I'm an active Twitter user since 2009 so I have pretty good first hand experience. You can report the bots all you want it's not going to make a dent. And it's so common that "P * S S Y I N T H E B I O" is a running gag there now.
He never had a problem with the bots, he was desperately grasping at straws to pull out of the hastily-made ironclad deal that bound him to buy twitter.
Whether true or not, thank God that Elon took Twitter as one of the core pillars that the establishment had as part of their censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus, e.g. the Twitter Files showing the US government engaging in illegal behaviour to censor Americans et al who weren't toeing the acceptable narrative talking points.
I'm not sure what this "god" of yours had to do with it, I'm pretty sure that was the doing of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Musk proves to be a censorious bastard whenever the whim suits him, and your claims about the twitter files is just fake news; lay off it.
You obviously haven't watched any of the US senate hearings, nor read any of Matt Taibbi's investigative work - where Elon gave Matt and other journalists access to Twitter's data like email interactions between Twitter employees, the FBI and other government agencies.
I won't bother describing the understanding I've come to on God since you don't seem like a deep person to even investigate thoroughly enough, whatever propaganda bubbles you get your news from - makes you thinks it's "fake news" tells me you're lost.
Here's Matt's Substack, to make it super easy for you to start reading/learning yourself: https://www.racket.news/
Maybe if you start developing your self-awareness, and your self-regulation skills, you'll develop the patience to read more, critically think better - and then that would be a good starting point to contemplate the universe and extrapolate from first principles as to how much of a chance that a God exists.
Maybe don't be so confident in your arrogance either; or "lay off it", as you'd say - you're not the super aware person you think you are.
90-minute Bikram hot yoga classes are a good place to start to kick your ass and get your body and mind healthier.
Yes! I think Sam was always Paul and Jessica’s goodest boy and if they found this out by announcement it was likely quite hurtful and explains how rumors spread that he was fired for it.
> and explains how rumors spread that he was fired for it.
And maybe why PG apparently put no effort into dispelling those rumors for months despite being asked to comment on them by places like the Washington Post and there being plenty of discussion about them here and on Twitter.
He obviously knew about the rumors and he had plenty of time and opportunity to clarify things previously. But it wasn't until some other external party starts criticizing Altman in the press and we seemingly get an "only I can pick on my little brother" type response.
Because that timing is the weirdest thing to me. If PG really cares and respects Altman as much as he always seems to claim, why allow these rumors to persist for so long and suddenly choose this moment to dispute them?
Not commenting on topics is fine (and arguably even the default) response.
Don’t allow yourself to feel (or be) obligated to answers questions about a past employee, portfolio company, or similar. If you choose to you can, but the answerer chooses, not the questioner.
But he made an initial decision to not comment only to now comment after several months of rumors, so there was clearly a recent change in PG's thinking on the right way to handle this. That raises the question of "what caused that change?"
This isn't really incompatible with the rumor mill of "Sam got fired for putting his interest above YC's." The situation described - where you are CEO of two different for-profit companies and one may have investments (and inside knowledge and advice) into firms that potentially compete with or buy from the other - is a textbook conflict of interest. It's reasonable for the board of one enterprise to ask the CEO to pick one or the other, and fire him if he refuses. Same situation that led to Eric Schmidt stepping down off the Apple board c. 2010.
The white-glove treatment that PG describes is probably much closer to the rumors that PG flew back from London to fire Sam on the spot. At the exec level, things are usually done civilly, because you know that you'll have to deal with these people again. But the CEO knows that the board and shareholders are his boss, the law is on their side, and so if they want him gone, he will be gone. That motivates the CEO to amicably part ways rather than force the issue.
Fired generally implies that the employee was removed because they were not needed or they were adding negative value. It does not appear to be the case here.
Sam was given an option to continue with YC but he chose a bigger project.
I was given an option to improve my performance, but I chose a different path.
Look if this was dave from some no name company, there would be no real debate about what happened.
Altman isn't special, he's just rich and well connected.
Altman was booted from YC because he shouldn't have been making money from his side gigs. He broke the rules, and had some level of consequence.
Now that he's rich, and famous, he's not going to get much consequence, unless he vaporises a lot of money from the wrong people. But then he might be WeWork cult leader good and get away with it.
In risk capital businesses making money from side deals/gigs has long been acceptable, but there has always been a line and Sam danced right over even the most generous conception of it and was duly removed.
Agreed. Hard to say he was "fired" when he had a chance to stay if he decided to leave his other project. Like, "You are fired -- but you can stay if you want."
No you’re twisting meanings here. If it was just “stay if you want” that wouldn’t be firing but saying “if you want to remain here you have to stop doing X” is firing someone full stop
Fired means forced to quit employment. It's not illegal to have two jobs, they made him choose, thus firing him. I don't know why Paul is so defensive about this.
Easy to understand why he would want to make it look smooth Sam has now generated an incredible amount of power since being at YC. Also most people when they part ways with an organization want to smooth any differences in case there is some way to work together in the future.
Also FWIW it just sounds like PG needed someone full time at YC - Sam couldn't and thus he went elsewhere. The length of discussion on this thread is quite long given the banality of the content. Yes I realize by commenting I am adding to that length.
Your boss can be like, "Hey, you can continue working here but you will need to take a 50% paycut." You say, "Uh, no." So, you end up leaving the place.
Were you fired? Yes, that's being fired. They were renegotiating the terms of your employment - just like they were with Sam. The terms of his employment now became contingent on not working at another company - which weren't the terms of his employment before.
No, it's not. It's getting a (horrific and generally unrealistic) pay cut. In more realistic terms, things like 10% pay cuts sometimes do happen when a company is struggling, and nobody calls those "firings". Because they're not.
Words have meaning. Being fired has a specific meaning, which is a different meaning from being laid off, and is a different meaning from quitting/resigning when you don't like how your job has changed.
(Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause. So the terms didn't necessarily change at all -- what changed was Sam became CEO of another for-profit company. That was his choice.)
Oh cool. I'm not firing any of my employees then. I'm just saying, "Hey, you can continue working here as long as you work for free! No benefits either, haha! You're totally not fired though - just gotta work for free! Definitely don't try to file anything with the unemployment office because it won't work! You're totally not fired!"
> Also, terms of full-time employment often are contingent on not working full-time at another company -- this is a pretty standard clause
This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed and I've been in SV for a decade.
Your example is nonsensical. There are minimum wage laws. And if somebody is not getting paid at all, then of course they are fired. You've completely changed the example to where they clearly are fired, so I don't know what you're trying to argue.
> This is also not in any contract that I've ever signed
Are you sure you've looked? It can also be implicit in standard clauses such as the company owns all rights to all of your work. In which case starting a second job would be fraudulent.
But of course it's also one of those things that's so common sense it doesn't need to be written into a contract in at-will employment countries (although it often is). There's the expectation in a full-time salaried professional job that the employer is getting all your productive professional work. It's mentally impossible to give 100% to two full-time jobs simultaneously. There's no reasonable expectation that anyone should be able to hold a second full-time CEO job. Nobody is "changing the terms" when the terms are commonly understood. If you start showing up to work shirtless and it wasn't in your employment contract that you're required to wear a top, complaining that they're "changing the terms" is missing the point entirely.
Considering a shit ton of employees in SV are working on their own projects in their spare time, start their own companies, and moonlight - I don't think this is as common in contracts as you're making it out to be.
No, a great deal of that is explicitly prohibited.
If you work for Google, they own anything you develop on the side. They're actually nice in that they have a review process where they will give you your rights back if they decide it isn't competitive with any of their lines of business.
A lot of other companies don't even provide that. If you start a business on the side, they own all of its IP. Period.
This is extremely common. Both with large corporations as well as with startups. You just might not be aware of it.
I’ve done startups myself and it’s not common in any contracts I’ve signed nor have my coworkers. If it was, we all wouldn’t be able to start our own companies.
Why are you trying to make this argument with a hyperbolic and/or inapplicable definition? Working for free would mean no job or slavery. It's not an effective way to make an argument in this case.
So if I go to my boss and say I have another job X, they say choose, and I say no thanks I'll keep both. What's going to happen? They essentially fired him, but with different paperwork. Paul is being pedantic.
No, you still had the choice of quitting the job at X and keeping the one with your boss.
Therefore it's not firing.
Words meaning things isn't being pedantic. It's that words actually have meaning and you can't just change them to mean what you want -- not if you want to be understood when you communicate.
It's no different from if your office moves to a different building 5 minutes away and your boss says you have to show up at the new address and you say no thanks I'll only go to the old address. You're not "essentially fired but with different paperwork". You're being unreasonable and choosing to quit.
Expecting to keep a full-time position at one company while also being a full-time CEO somewhere else is being unreasonable and Sam chose to quit.
Two things: first, you could choose to prioritize the first job whereas firings are unilateral, second, consider yourself in a similar situation making a similar choice and then someone describes you leaving as being fired. You would likely feel badmouthed because of the specific connotations that word has.
Oh probably worth considering that we can describe the last position you voluntarily left as being fired - you weren't going to show up anymore, so what was going to happen? You got fired but with different paperwork.
This story was discussed last November, by the title "Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was fired from Y Combinator by his mentor" with +1k points and +700 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216).
For context, Helen Tonor [0] was a board member of OpenAI before they tried to fire Sam Altman. She claimed that Sam was fired by YC in a recent interview [1]. In the interview, she implied that Sam's firing at YC was kept quiet and that there was something underhanded about it.
To be fair to Helen Toner, she was probably was going off the Washington Post/WSJ articles that were discussed here 6 months ago.[0] And pg has been trying to de-sensationalize the issue ever since, and often doing a pretty terrible job at it by complimenting Altman without directly denying certain statements.
The WP article implied that there was a drop in Altman's performance and hands-on presence due to multi-tasking of his other interests including OpenAI, whereas pg seems to imply that jl gave the ultimatum to Altman before there were any performance complaints.
It's also a little strange that pg doesn't mention the for-profit Worldcoin at all, which announced a 4 mil seed round a few months prior to Altman exiting YC and for which Altman was already CEO.
I'm not sure pg is aware how much he's risking, or how much he's putting Jessica's reputation at risk. He often posts touting Jessica as being a great judge of character.[1] The world is witnessing in real time just how great a character his prince really is. But at least he had the courtesy to mention that Jessica was the one that gave Altman the ultimatum.
There was something missing in his post though. He forgot to add "Sam and Paul" at the end of his statement.
[1] To be fair, it's usually for determining whether the person has characteristics that make a good startup founder, like resilience or co-founder compatibility. "Having moral fiber" might be at the bottom of the list in terms of priority.
“To be fair Helen was going off of “articles” from WaPo” is some kind of defence. What kind of competence did she have if she just forwards stuff without thinking or investigating first? I would say this solidifies why she wasn’t fit for the job
The WaPo article states unambiguously that Altman was fired from YC for dropping the ball. It apparently cites three anonymous sources from YC, not pg. Why would she bother investigating whether that was true or not when she was already fired from OpenAI? You would only know that was disputed if you were actively following pg's twitter account, or somebody quoting pg's tweets.
I read there was additional drama related to Sam leaving YC; unilaterally declaring himself Chairman of YC, including a YC blog announcement that was quickly deleted. [0]
Paul Graham would have been officially retired from YC at the time. Jessica Livingston still worked full-time at YC for some years after Paul Graham hired Sam Altman to replace him as president and hired Dan Gackle to replace him as moderator. If Paul Graham had not been retired, this entire conversation wouldn't exist. His retirement is why Altman was president of YC.
What does it mean to be officially retired in the YC firm world view anyway... if you have a significant ownership stake are you actually ever really retired? Are major decisions not vetted by the stakeholders? YC was founded by JL and PG (I'd assume equally). And this decision is now described as a JL decision.
Anyway, there's a Hollywood movie in this drama... maybe I'll write a script using ChatGPT... :)
As a guess: It means he got to see his kids grow up instead of working 100 hours a week.
He handed off a lot of the day-to-day scut work. He didn't go "I'm just a shareholder who reads the annual report and counts my pennies from the DRIP."
He was still one of the two main founders and married to the other main founder. He wasn't totally uninvolved with the company.
He still did Office Hours, at least for a time. He described that as "ten percent of what he did" and hired at least two people to divide up the other 90 percent.
I imagine he and Livingston discussed the company over breakfast/dinner and a lot of decisions were likely joint decisions privately hashed out. It's a company founded by a dating couple who later married. There is probably no clear, bright dividing line between "her" decisions and "his."
Well, if you want to read it tendentiously, I guess your choices are the buck stopping with Jessica, with Paul, or with Jessica and Paul. Seems straightforward to reason about.
I think that the split seems amicable, but from a 10k view “we had a convo telling Sam he couldn’t do both at once” leading to him leaving rhymes with a firing. Sometimes this stuff can be amicable!
He had a choice to either go to work the next day or not as he preferred. That isn't a firing in the usual sense of the word. As described it is an amicable end to his time at YC that was agreed on by both parties.
If people really want to describe that as "fired" there is no stopping them. But it isn't. PG is more correct than that quadrant of the backseat managers.
Paul said they'd have "been fine" with Sam staying, which is different than wanting him to stay:
> For several years [Sam] was running both YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it was going to have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI, we should find someone else to run YC, and he agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other.
It's interesting that YC had to raise the issue, rather than Sam saying to YC, "Hey, I've found this other thing I want to do full-time, can we start looking for my replacement?"
I was fired from Taco Bell as a kid and I would talk trash about the management and the company to anyone who asked.
I can't imaging being fired from a company like OpenAI and being asked my thoughts about the people responsible and the company and people taking it seriously! LOL
> Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me”, he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct.…To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384090) scrubbed from the post…For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure.
That's what offering someone an ultimatum is. "You either change your behavior or you stop working here." The encoded threat is that if you do not comply we will simply remove you.
It's somewhat mealy mouthed. "We didn't fire him. We just reached the penultimate step before having to fire him."
Depending on the circumstances, it could be construed as constructive dismissal. Creating unfavorable ultimatums allows companies to 'lay off' people without having to pay severance.
Well if the employer is suddenly requiring previously remote workers to come back to the office, they are in a sense firing them. Or perhaps more accurately "laying them off" because it isn't an individualized thing.
If your boss has to come to you and explain to you that you can't actually work two full time jobs at once, then yes, you were fired very politely.
If you understood the morals and knew enough to offer your resignation when you accepted the other job, then no, you just took a new job very ethically.
In the same mealy mouthed way, sure. Typically only doing the moral thing once prompted removes you from being described as "doing the moral thing."
The place to make the choice is when you accepted the new job. That you had to be prompted indicates that you are not the type of person who recognizes obvious conflicts, or you are and you hope that might be able to avoid responsibility for them by lying through omission.
The point is, as a "defense," this is absurdly hollow. I'm not sure PG did him any favors by clarifying this point.
Basically it could be that he's not "lying" by speaking a half-truth, e.g. if he didn't resign then the writing was on the wall that he would have otherwise been fired.
Some people's memories aren't very reliable, people who develop lying as a habit, who weave webs of lies - "the lies we weave when we learn to deceive" - are especially not going to be reliable with their recall; and you can get signs of this based on how they respond or react to questions or engagement.
Lots of comments saying "it was still a firing", which makes no sense to me. Firing is not normally used to include situations where the outcome is totally under control of the person who is "fired".
And you say "Paul is clever like that", which just comes off as ridiculous shade to me. Paul may be clever, but he outlined some factual info that, if not true, would just be outright lying, which I don't think he would do. He fundamentally said the decision was always Altman's to make.
Also, I hate how this has become yet another case of using semantics disingenuously. Say what you will about the true meaning of "firing", but nearly everyone would interpret that as Altman got canned and YC didn't want him back. That's not what happened apparently. So all the people saying "it's still a firing" feels like the "I'm not touching you" game that 5-year-old siblings play.
Honestly, I am shocked Altman has made it as far as he has and lasted this long.
He comes across to me as very creepy and unsettling in interviews. I cannot imagine he is any better in person. How anybody can talk to someone like that for more than a minute is beyond me.
Just to make it fair with the situation: I honestly don't know if I would have proactively quit one or the other. Depending on the workloads, I may very well have tried to moonlight both for a while, I'm unsure.
I don't think this tweet by Paul is weird at all.