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Comment by davej | Hacker News Reader

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.

[0] https://x.com/hlntnr

[1] https://link.chtbl.com/TEDAI

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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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216

[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.

Because she stating it as fact, she’s easily prone to info influence for someone that had a very important role dealing with data

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]

[0] https://archive.is/Vl3VR

Of course theres additional drama and context. PG is retconning it to make himself look less incompetent and absent.

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.

Accusing Graham of being "absent" sounds silly.

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."

And yet here he is talking about how he was making the decisions.

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."

No, we're talking about Jessica Livingston making a decision. It's right there in the statement.

Lol no in the statement he says "we" in the wsj its just his wife. The buck stops...somewhere?

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.

Honestly, I thought her Ted ai interview was balanced and reasonable. I don't recall her mentioning yc, but I might have missed it.

That said, the interviewer tries to sensationalize the upcoming interview as much as possible in the intro, so I didn't love that

But the original post says otherwise, who do I believe?

I would give more credibility to the firsthand account (PG & Jessica) rather than speculations from a fired board member.

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 explicitly states they wanted him to stay.

Firing implies you want somebody gone.

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?"

and a fired board member who didn't have anything to do with YC

Jessica and by extension PG are early investors in OpenAI.

So it's not like they are impartial parties either.

No one, it's all PR game at play here, and there's no reason that anyone is being fully transparent.

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

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