We need to understand that society only values who moves first. The early bird gets the worm. If they want to play the game, they need to raise funds from people who truly understand power and money, regardless of the human cost.
/s
You shouldn't put your trust in founders period. Or companies. Or famous people. Or anyone that you don't actually know. They're people or run by people with goals that greatly differ from your personal goals.
What you're asking is that they put on a veneer of morality and then once you're really convinced they're on your side they'll stab you in the back. Like with the old poster child Google.
And if I had told anyone five years ago that there would be eyeball scanners building a privately-held biometrics database at a level recently considered extreme for violent criminals? What letter anon would that have sounded like? I would have been like easy there mom, no one is doing that.
Are we allowed to talk about Loopt and Greenpoint and OpenAI and Autodesk and Siebel taking a year in Thailand while Socialcam flew into the side of a mountain on HN?
Or do they get a pass?
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