Hacker News Reader

Comment by omeze | Hacker News Reader

Yea, this turned out to be the simplest explanation… try to undermine board, get fired, win anyway (lol)

Lesson here is… the next time a startup CEO gets fired they should try the social media spam gambit…? Depends on how much $ is on the line but worked at least once!

View on HN

I think the lesson is that after firing your CEO and 80% of the organization threatens to quit, then maybe don't do that. Though if MSFT wasn't there for a soft landing ($), not sure the number would be as high as that.

The lesson is if you're going to fire your CEO for alleged unethical behaviour, make sure you're willing to actually argue why you fired him, to convince people it was a reasonable decision.

Agreed. The board's public note about all this basically read as, "Sam is not able to do his job." They made this public note during a time of generally high praise for OpenAI's success, so nobody believed it. I hate to side in either direction here, but the board really showed incompetence with public relations here. Having said that, I'm sure there's some poor PR person at OpenAI sweating over exactly this, and to them I say, it's not your fault, every single person in the board should have been involved in that public notice, and everyone apparently agreed this was a sufficient explanation for a bunch of people with no internal context.

I really think the board and the whole organization would've come out of this just fine (minus a handful of resignations) if they'd just outlined their reasons to employees. Of course you can't keep a CEO who you can't trust.

Really bizarre that they didn't do that.

The lesson is if your relatively unknown little nonprofit startup stumbles into a giant pile of gold, it doesn't matter how pure and ethical your intentions are.

And the irony is, that's the main plot and lesson of like half of fables, legends, fantasy and sci-fi stories ever made.

Or if you’re fired, convince 80% of the org that you’re taking their big payday with you.

I think Matt Levine covered it well. Having technical control is all fine and dandy, but having the backing of money usually matters more than anything. Microsoft was firmly behind Sam, which made all the difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com