In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Paul Graham, co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, denied allegations that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pressured him to step down as president of Y Combinator in 2019 over a potential conflict of interest.
“People are [Y Combinator] “Sam Altman was fired,” Graham wrote. “That is not true.”
Altman became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, initially working part-time, and in February 2014, Graham appointed him president of Y Combinator.
Altman co-founded the nonprofit OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston, and has since raised $1 billion.
For several years, Altman split his time between Y Combinator and OpenAI, effectively running both, but when OpenAI announced in 2019 that it would launch a for-profit subsidiary with Altman as CEO, Graham said, Livingston told Altman he had to choose between OpenAI or Y Combinator.
They told him, and he agreed, that if he was going to work on OpenAI full time, he should find someone else to run YC,” Graham wrote. “If he had said he was going to find someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so he could focus 100% on YC, we would have been fine with that.”
Graham's account of the incident contradicts reports that Altman was forced to resign from Y Combinator after the accelerator's partners alleged he prioritized personal projects, including OpenAI, over his duties as president. A Washington Post article from November last year said Graham cut short an international trip and personally fired Altman.
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member who tried to remove Altman as CEO over alleged misconduct before he reclaimed the CEO role, claimed in an appearance on the Ted AI Show podcast that the real reasons for Altman's departure from Y Combinator were “covered up at the time.”
Some Y Combinator partners reportedly took particular issue with Altman's indirect stake in OpenAI, which he held while he was president of Y Combinator: Y Combinator's later-stage fund invested $10 million in OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary.
However, Graham said the investment was made before Altman started working full-time at OpenAI and that he was unaware of it.
“This was not a very large investment for these funds,” Graham wrote, “and I only found out about this five minutes ago, so it obviously doesn't affect me.”
Graham's post is clearly timed to coincide with an op-ed in The Economist by OpenAI board members Bret Taylor and Larry Summers, which counters claims by Tonner and fellow former OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley that Altman “is not credibly capable of withstanding the pressures of profit motive.”
Toner and McCauley may have a point: The Information reports that Altman is considering turning OpenAI into a for-profit company as investors, particularly Microsoft, pressure the company to prioritize commercial projects.