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0 pointsn2d41y ago0 comments

> all the value of the company can walk away if they don't like it

They really can't, because a majority of their compensation is in now-unreasonable amounts of OpenAI equity (because it was worth much less when it was granted). If employees decided to walk away, rendering their vested equity worthless, they wouldn't get anywhere near the same value of, say, Microsoft equity as a signing bonus to make it worth.

Any senior OpenAI employee with decent amounts of vested equity on low valuations has strong financial incentives to stick with the company, and also strong financial incentives to convince others to stick with the company.

Some more thoughts from back when employees "threatened" to leave: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-employees-did-not-wan...

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jdminhbg1y ago

> They really can't, because a majority of their compensation is in now-unreasonable amounts of OpenAI equity (because it was worth much less when it was granted). If employees decided to walk away, rendering their vested equity worthless, they wouldn't get anywhere near the same value of, say, Microsoft equity as a signing bonus to make it worth.

The problem with this is that the board was basically threatening to also make their equity worthless by taking the position that Sam was moving too fast to commercialize the company. They pretty much burned their leverage everywhere possible.

dcow1y ago

I guess the takeaway is you can’t give equity to employees and also expect them to operate in a way that reflects the charter of a non-for-profit governing board.

n2d4OP1y ago

The board never took that position.

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