He joins a proven unicorn at its inflection point and then leaves mere days after hitting his vesting cliff. All of this "learning" and "experience" talk is sopping wet with cynicism.
He co-founded and sold Segment. You think he was just at OpenAI to collect a check? He lays out exactly why he joined OpenAI and why he's leaving. If you think everyone does things only for cynical reasons, it might be a reflection more of your personal impulses than others.
Just because someone claims they are speaking in good faith doesn’t mean we have to take their word for it. Most people in tech dealing with big money are doing it for cynical reasons. The talk of changing the world or “doing something hard” is just marketing typically.
Calvin works incredibly hard and has very little ego. I was surprised he joined OpenAI since he's loaded from the Segment acquisition, but if anyone it makes sense he would do this. He's always looking to find the hardest problem and work on it.
That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.
Newborns need constantly mom, not dad. Moms need husbands or their moms to help. The way it works is you agree what to do as a family (to do it or not to do it) and everybody is happy with their lives. You can be a great dad and husband and still do all of it when it makes sense and your wife supports it etc. Not having kids in the first place could be considered ego driven, not this.
I appreciate the edit, but "sopping wet with cynicism" still breaks the site guidelines, especially this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Understood, in the future I will refrain from questioning motives in featured articles. I can no longer edit my post but you may delete or flag it so that others will not be exposed to it.
Given that he leaves OpenAI almost immediately after hitting his 25% vesting cliff, it seems like his employment at OpenAI and this blog post (which makes him and OpenAI look good while making the reader feel good) were done cynically. I.e. primarily in his self-interest. What makes it even worse is his stated reason for leaving:
> It's hard to go from being a founder of your own thing to an employee at a 3,000-person organization. Right now I'm craving a fresh start.
This is just wholly irrational for someone whose credentials indicate someone who is capable of applying critical thinking towards accomplishing their goals. People who operate at that level don't often act on impulse or suddenly realize they want to do something different. It seems much more likely he intentionally planned to give himself a year of vacation at OpenAI, which allows him to hedge a bit while taking a breather before jumping back into being a founder.
Is this essentially speculation? Yes. Is it cynical to assume he's acting cynically? Yes. Speculation on his true motives is necessary because otherwise we'll never get confirmation, short of him openly admitting to it (which is still fraught). We have to look at behaviors and actions and assess likelihoods from there.
There's nothing cynical about leaving a job after cliffing. If a company wants a longer commitment than a year before issuing equity, it can set a longer cliff. We're all adults here.
I don't see anything interesting about that detail; you keep trying to make something out of it, but there's nothing there to talk about.
There might be some marginal drama to scrape up here if the post was negative about OpenAI (I'd still be complaining about trying to whip up drama where there isn't any), but it's kind of glowing about them.
Well now the goalpost has shifted from "it's not cynical" to "even if it is cynical it doesn't matter" and dang has already warned me so I'm hesitant to continue this thread. I'll just say that once you recognize that a lot of the fluff in this article is cynically motivated, it reduces your risk of giving the information presented more meaning than is really there.