I was working at dunkin donuts when i was a teenager.
20 yr age gap in a relationship is still frowned upon in our society unfortunately.
Also I guess you were tracking sam's legal age closer than Sam himself because he mentioned that he was a teenager when he met PG in an interview. SV is creepier than anyone could ever imagine.
I'm not sure how it's relevant that you worked in a donut shop? Surely you're aware that isn't the peak of over-achievement at the age of 20? God, watch the Olympics if you want to see a bunch of very determined young people. Or go to an Open Source conference. Or, as it were, YC. Sam was only slightly younger than normal there. Some 20 year olds have accomplished a lot.
You seem to really want to create a villain out of the situation, which is kind of weird. Mentors and investors are usually older, and 20 years isn't rare. That's hardly Silicon Valley specific.
You also repeated the false thing about him getting a stake in Stripe as a teenager again. Again, Stripe came into existence when Sam was 25. There's just no version of that story that works. I don't know about Sam's Stripe investment, but at that point he was already around YC a lot, even though Loopt was still going. He probably just got in with other angel investors. But at that point he was in his mid-20s and running a Sequoia-backed company, so that's not especially weird.
(There's genuine stuff to be critical of in the trajectory of OpenAI, but this seems like a really weird spot to latch onto.)
It is quite likely they knew the latter as relatively low risk expected outcome .
Even at 100M exit, which by valley standards (even in 2010s) is not a lot, 1-2% (after further rounds of dilution) would have yielded 1-2M return . A 200x return for very little downside i.e. a gift .
There is a reason why there is FOMO and little due diligence for really hot startups amongst VCs , most times it is about access to the round which is difficult rather than risk of returns, we only read about the spectacular failures like FTX . We don’t hear about the Stripe, AirBnb, or Figma, OpenAI or spaceX funding rounds .
I guess being michael jordan of listening does't help with imagination
