r/siliconvalley

Meta and “big tech” used to be the gold standard. Now I just read that Meta laid off employees then had existing employees signup to me monitored by ai to “train” ai…kinda weird now

Sam Altman got removed from his first startup for lying to the board. Then he got pushed out of Y Combinator over trust issues. Then his own OpenAI board fired him with a memo that literally said "Lying" at the top.

Former board members accused him of psychological abuse. His co-founder Dario Amodei reportedly wrote that "the problem with OpenAI is Sam himself." And yet here we are, treating him like some visionary hero because OpenAI prints money.

I'm in the middle of a fundraising round right now and watching VCs fall over themselves to praise this guy. The same VCs who would blacklist any of us for a single integrity issue. The double standard is insane.

This isn't about cancel culture or whatever. It's about how Silicon Valley has completely different rules for charismatic founders who deliver returns. We preach culture and values and "mission-driven" companies in every deck, but when someone builds a multi-billion dollar company, suddenly none of that matters anymore.

The message this sends to young founders is crystal clear: ethics are optional if you're successful enough. Ship fast and break things, including trust, because redemption is always one unicorn exit away.

I'm not saying people can't change or deserve second chances. But three separate organizations removing you for similar reasons? At what point do we admit there's a pattern here that matters more than the product roadmap?

Am I crazy for thinking this should disqualify someone from leading one of the most important companies in tech history, or do results really trump everything else?

Amazing for motivation:
“Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives,” an Instagram employee told WIRED”

That is just where we want Meta ;)

Buiding shit from 4+yrs, 23, based in India. Been building since 16. Looking to join an early stage EU/US startup or MNC as a founding PM or PM.

Please Note: Using the power of this god-tier subreddit for something slightly unconventional today. hoping the YC internet council allows it. (Pls don't take my post down )

Experience

- Current: PM at an AI startup. Joined a month ago, the role turned out to be sales heavy with 0 product surface. Moving on.

- Prior: Frontend engineer at an enterprise AI company for \~1.5 years. Owned the agentic AI module end to end, built workflow configurators for business users, wrote an internal frontend framework that lifted team velocity.

- Before that: Consultant. Took ambiguous client requirements to delivered product. Scoping, timelines, demos, dev team management.

- Before that: Co-founded a hyperlocal commerce startup. Bootstrapped, ran for \~2 years, team of 20+ across product, eng, design, ops. Shipped two mobile apps (consumer + merchant), did 50+ customer interviews on the ground. Shut it down. Took the lessons.

First gig: dev intern out of college.

Products I have built (happy to walk through any of these on a call, keeping names off public posts)

- A restaurant review tool was live at 2 resturants with in Bangalore. Catches unhappy diners before they leave public reviews.

- A people discovery platform for my city. mutual-interest unlock model, no ads. This now has live users

- A zero-commission marketplace for real estate brokers. Dual-sided, broker tools + consumer property app.

- An automation tool for a financial services client. Cut a manual workflow from 2-3 hours to 10 seconds.

- A newsletter SaaS with AI writing, email infra, subscriber management, tiered pricing.

- An aviation community I built on Instagram at the age of 17. 0 to 12K followers organically, partnered with flight schools in India and the US.

Btw i was feeling alone in my city then i ran club nights and offline events in my city, pulled most of the crowd from Reddit. I write my own copy so distribution is part of the build for me, not a separate function.

Looking for:

- Founding PM or early PM, even at MNC works.

- Real product to own.

- Equity/ESOPS

- Decent compensation

- Async-friendly, no daily target chasing.

- Founders who want to build to sell or scale, and the - product has depth.

Open to wearing other hats too. Project mgmt, Hiring, ops, whatever the stage needs. I cannot sit idle, that is the only real requirement on my end.

DM me. Happy to share resume, portfolio, references, and walk through any of the products in detail.

I look at many of the people high up in silicone valley and they often seem to have very alternate views to the mainstream. I was just wondering why this might be and if they are odd or it is just them making themselves different so they stand out in a crowded market place.

I’m generally a free-market kind of guy. I’ve worked in tech and I’ve done pretty well all things considered. I’ve invested in public tech stocks for almost all of my professional life and have also done well.

I know the trend that companies have been staying private longer and I understand that VCs take all the risk. I know there are secondary shares that are sometimes available but honestly for any company that’s really sought after they are hard to come by.

But here’s the thing. By staying private for so long, the VCs have really captured all this massive upside. The public comes in late.

Now maybe this isn’t such a big deal — the rich get richer. They take the risk. I heard an interview today about how Ron Baron loaded up on SpaceX because he had access to secondary shares.

The thing is that if your retail investor isn’t sharing in this kind of upside — if they don’t feel like they too can benefit in investing in American tech — then that really is going to sour public support.

Take a look at historical tech companies. The Apples and the Microsoft. Even Tesla. You have long time investors who’ve not just invested their money but also their belief in these companies. Your average American shares in the upside of American capitalism. That’s generally been true of tech in the 90s, 2000s and even 2010s.

I’m not a “f the billionaires” kind of guy and I respect company builders. And I’ve generally respected investors like Andreessen and Brad Gerstner. But the looming IPOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and heck even SpaceX are beginning to feel sick to me.

Am I jealous? 100%.

But I also think it’s true that this creates even more popular tension between average Americans and those on the cutting edge of tech.

The expectation is that these IPOs are minting so many new wealthy people in SF that housing prices are going to skyrocket from already high prices. This isn’t the 1% or even the 0.1%. This is the 0.001%.

Maybe I’m short sighted here. Maybe these companies can still 3 or 4x from $1T which would be absolutely insane.

A video about this that triggered me: https://x.com/matthewberman/status/2054300901708562482