The broader point is that I think a lot of successful tech figures get a pretty unfair rap on HN. Few if any of these folks are stirring candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, but Bezos or Mark or Elon or even Gates being uniquely bad?
Altman, with the full weight and backing of YC in its prime and a clear first-mover advantage got bailed out of the Loopt debacle [1] in a deal with Green Dot that maybe scraped above the “fire sale” line and is trivially the most celebrated person in the program to not merit an “I made something people want” shirt. pg helped, Conway helped, they got it sort of cashed out in a way that didn’t exactly fuck anyone sideways (other than Green Dot). He proceeded to fail upwards through preferential access to pre-IPO AirBnB shares and shit, became the leader of YC, and is now busily turning the world into Blade Runner 2023.
Seibel was running Socialcam at a time when anyone working at or near FB knew it was a ranking glitch, pawned it off on Autodesk for 60MM [2] saying with a straight face it was the next YouTube, and promptly started inconsistently replying to emails titled “Where the fuck are you?”. Also ran YC.
Are these guys uniquely bad? Debatable, this is how the game is played apparently. But it would be nice to enjoy your ill-gotten gains without a relentlessly resourceful [3] PR campaign about how we’re dealing with some real humanitarian visionaries.
All I’m proposing is that if we trash Elon, then Altman doesn’t get a free ride.
n.b. A lot of that is me claiming things (that I heard from people in the room) that are merely alluded to in primary and secondary sources, so it’ll be up to you to judge if it has what they call “the ring of truth”.
Altman, with the full weight and backing of YC in its prime and a clear first-mover advantage got bailed out of the Loopt debacle [1] in a deal with Green Dot that maybe scraped above the “fire sale” line and is trivially the most celebrated person in the program to not merit an “I made something people want” shirt. pg helped, Conway helped, they got it sort of cashed out in a way that didn’t exactly fuck anyone sideways (other than Green Dot). He proceeded to fail upwards through preferential access to pre-IPO AirBnB shares and shit, became the leader of YC, and is now busily turning the world into Blade Runner 2023.
Seibel was running Socialcam at a time when anyone working at or near FB knew it was a ranking glitch, pawned it off on Autodesk for 60MM [2] saying with a straight face it was the next YouTube, and promptly started inconsistently replying to emails titled “Where the fuck are you?”. Also ran YC.
Are these guys uniquely bad? Debatable, this is how the game is played apparently. But it would be nice to enjoy your ill-gotten gains without a relentlessly resourceful [3] PR campaign about how we’re dealing with some real humanitarian visionaries.
All I’m proposing is that if we trash Elon, then Altman doesn’t get a free ride.
n.b. A lot of that is me claiming things (that I heard from people in the room) that are merely alluded to in primary and secondary sources, so it’ll be up to you to judge if it has what they call “the ring of truth”.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialcam
[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html