Alexander Stolz @Alexander_Stolz - Twitter Profile

over 2 years ago

Dear Mira and Ilya - congratulations on your coup at OpenAI. Since both of you have together never raised a penny as entrepreneurs, let me explain what happens. Oh, and you *will* need to raise since your venture’s unit economics don’t make sense. Remember, you pay $0.30 every time someone asks a doofus question to ChatGPT. Heck, I sometimes ask the same thing 5 times. Also, the last deal at $80 billion valuation - is as dead as the Egyptian pharaohs. Glorious to write about and visualize. But super dead, under the sand, not coming back. Not only that - but you sideswiped your biggest partner, Microsoft. Of course publicly they will say the right thing, but you know and they know it and a random fellow like me knows it - they must be seething mad about it. Few of your top researchers have already quit, and if there is one thing Sam Altman is especially good at, it is raising and deploying capital. Before the sign with your name and title as “CEO” and “Defacto CEO” gets emblazoned in the OpenAI offices, Sam would have a new company, $1 billion investment and offers out to all your, soon to be ex, top product people and researchers. So you head into next week having lost your top dealmaker, top researchers, top product visionary, top partner and top investor, and with a business which has terrible unit economics. And let’s not forget - the two of you are not entrepreneurs. Most people in your board have never held a proper tech job ever. You have never had to face the abject rejection which follows from pitching many investors, going through the process, and getting to close. Getting to close is the toughest. Sometimes investors say yes, but they don’t actually mean it. Sometimes they even sign, and still don’t wire the funds. You will need to live through all of it, the pain and rejection, and feel intense amount of pressure of having to provide for your team members - who pays their mortgages, car loans, kids school tuition - the ones whom you played with at the last company picnic. After you are exhausted with the realities of the market - you will sell out OpenAI to Microsoft entirely, and be housed as Global Principal Product Managers in building 4 in Seattle, where it rains non-stop. Microsoft will never fire you, Satya will always say the right thing about you - because he is an honorable person. But deep down in your heart, as you are watching the Netflix movie on OpenAI and Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s wife plays herself as a board member who fired Sam Altman over Google Meet, you will think and realize that you had it all - you could have been at the helm of a $1 trillion company. History will forget you. Sam and Greg and everyone else would have moved on and forgotten about you. e/acc would have built out fundamental OpenAI alternatives in anycase..

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