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.
Sam was given an option to continue with YC but he chose a bigger project.
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.
If you don't stop spitting in the food, we're going to have to part ways.
Sam didn't want to leave but had to leave.
It seems pretty clear that PG thought Sam was distracted from his YC job and forced him to choose.
That would imply that Sam was adding negative value to YC, and PG replaced him as a result.
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.
Correct.
> thus firing him
Not correct, because he was free to keep the YC job by leaving OpenAI.
Firing is when you aren't given a choice.
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.
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.
Actually, that's not what it is.
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
The example is in the headline.
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.
However, it can be fairly common at larger companies, especially in specific segments.