This makes the old twitter look like the Wehrmacht in comparison.

The old twitter did not decide to randomly detonate themselves when they were worth $80 billion. In fact they found a sucker to sell to, right before the market crashed on perpetually loss-making companies like twitter.

The benefit of having incentive-aligned board, founders, and execs.

Even the clown car isn't this bad.

That's a confused heuristic. It could just as easily mean they keep their heads down and do good work for the kind of people whose attention actually matters for their future employment prospects.

I often hear that about the OpenAI board, but in general are people here know most board members of some big/darling tech companies? Outside of some of the co-founders I don't know anyone.

I don't mean I know them personally, but they don't seem to be major names in the manner of (as you see down thread) the Google Founders bringing in Eric Schmidt.

They seem more like the sort of people you'd see running wikimedia.

I meant "know" in the sense you used "heard".

Perhaps we can stop pretending that some of these people who are top-level managers or who sit on boards are prodigies. Dig deeper and there is very little there - just someone who can afford to fail until they drive the clown car into that gold mine. Most of us who have to put food on the table and pay rent have much less room for error.

You know, this makes early Google's moves around its IPO look like genius in retrospect. In that case, brilliant but inexperienced founders majorly lucked out with the thing created... but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech industry business experience for "adult supervision" exactly in order to deal with this kind of thing. And they gave tutelage to L&S to help them establish sane corporate practices while still sticking to the original (at the time unorthodox) values that L&S had in mind.

For OpenAI... Altman (and formerly Musk) were not that adult supervision. Nor is the board they ended up with. They needed some people on that board and in the company to keep things sane while cherishing the (supposed) original vision.

(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)

>but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech >industry business experience for "adult supervision"

>(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth >have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)

Those two things happening one after another is not coincidence.

I'm not sure I agree. Having worked there through this transition I'd say this: L&S just seem to have lost interest in running a mature company, so their "vision" just meant nothing, Eric Schmidt basically moved on, and then after flailing about for a bit (the G+ stuff being the worst of it) they just handed the reigns to Ruth&Sundar to basically turn into a giant stock price pumping machine.

G+ was handled so poorly, and the worst of it was that they already had both Google Wave (in the US) and Orkut (mostly outside US) which both had significant traction and could’ve easily been massaged into something to rival Facebook.

Easily…anywhere except at a megacorp where a privacy review takes months and you can expect to make about a quarter worth of progress a year.

All successful companies succeed despite themselves.

Working in consultancies/agencies for the last 15 years, I see this time and time again. Fucking dart-throwing monkeys making money hand over fist despite their best intentions to lose it all.