He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.
Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.
The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.
