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Veteran investor Paul Graham breaks down why Sam Altman left Y Combinator

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6 months ago

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Veteran investor Paul Graham breaks down why Sam Altman left Y Combinator

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been hit with a bout of bad press in the past few weeks, which has cast a shadow over his once-squeaky-clean image. 

Amid these swirling dramas, legendary tech investor Paul Graham defended Altman by putting an old rumor to rest. 

Altman wasn’t fired from his post as president of the famed startup accelerator, Y Combinator, Graham wrote in a post on X on Thursday. Graham cofounded the accelerator in 2005, and Altman served as its president from 2014 to 2019. 

According to Graham, Altman was simultaneously running OpenAI and Y Combinator until OpenAI announced the creation of a new for-profit entity in 2019 and selected Altman as president. Graham said he and his wife, Y Combinator’s cofounder Jessica Livingston, told Atlman that if he wanted to work at OpenAI, they’d find another person to run Y Combinator.

“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,” Graham wrote. “We didn’t want him to leave, just to choose one or the other.

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