“Sam Altman Forced Out Of OpenAI § Some Tidbits to Highlight”, 2023-11-17 ():
This isn’t Altman’s first awkward departure. From a June 2021 story in Newcomer about Y Combinator:
YC has been pretty successful at keeping its drama inside the tent. That’s been to YC’s benefit for sure.
Here’s a telling case study: It’s stunning how little scrutiny Sam Altman’s various title changes at Y Combinator received in the big business publications.2 This is someone who was profiled in the New Yorker and who ran the most powerful startup manufacturer in the world.
Altman went from president, to chairman, to being an advisor, to having no affiliation with Y Combinator without much detailed reporting from the press. YC successfully swept, what seems to be a real schism, under the rug.3
First YC announced that Altman would become chairman. On March 8, 2019, the firm wrote, “Sam is transitioning to Chairman of YC.”4
Then that same month, YC announced that Geoff Ralston would become president of YC. Altman wrote at the time, “I will, of course, remain an advisor to YC, and will be around to help Geoff as he takes on his new role.” It seems that was YC’s way of saying that Altman would not in fact be the chairman of YC, despite headlines all around the web that had run earlier that month saying that he would be.5
But Altman wouldn’t become a formal advisor either.
On January 27, 2020, Wikipedia user Opazazzyzen updated Altman’s Wikipedia to say that Altman is “no longer affiliated with YC.”
If you Google “Opazazzyzen”, an Instagram account for Lindsay Amos is the first result. She is the director of communications for Y Combinator. Based on my internet sleuthing, Amos seemed to have quietly announced Altman’s role change on Wikipedia. Her update didn’t include a citation (and still doesn’t).
I emailed Amos about the weird Wikipedia post. She wrote, “In May 2019, we shared that Geoff Ralston would take over as President of YC from Sam Altman. Sam noted he would be an advisor to YC and would be transitioning to CEO of OpenAI. There was every intention for Sam to become an advisor but the plans never moved forward. So, the title/role never happened. I updated the information on our end (ie. Wikipedia, Crunchbase, etc.) to combat confusion.”
A source tells me that Altman was asked to leave YC because he was too absentee.
…The whispered narrative among Altman’s skeptics always went like this: he’d led a failed startup. Paul Graham adored him and Altman was tapped as Graham’s successor. Altman leveraged the YC role to amass great personal fame and fortune. But it wasn’t clear if Altman was extremely talented or if YC was such a powerful institution that he was benefiting from its aura. Then when OpenAI became a success even Altman’s private critics had to accept that it wasn’t just the YC title that made Altman great. Altman ran one of the most important startups of the moment that released truly groundbreaking technology. But maybe Altman’s private skeptics were too quick to change their tune. I will say that while the public support for Altman appears all but unanimous, there are some people in private who are more mixed…My understanding is that some members of the board genuinely felt Altman was dishonest and unreliable in his communications with them, sources tell me. Some members of the board believe that they couldn’t oversee the company because they couldn’t believe what Altman was saying.