The only thing that should be surprising to anyone who knows about the early history of OpenAI is how little of it YC owns, given how much it leveraged YC’s credibility to get started (early employees joined an institution called “YC Research”, operating from YC’s office space). Once that stake is divided up among all the LPs and small unit holders, it’s not a huge outcome.

Also: nothing gets sustained attention on HN unless good hackers find it interesting. Our entire objective is to be the website that attracts the best hackers, serves them the most interesting content and facilitates the most interesting discussions. That can’t happen if we’re nefariously pushing a commercial agenda.

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Rhymes with reddit.com at IPO:

- Sam Altman ~9%

- YCombinator had <5%

- Steve Huffman ~3% Although he had ~4% voting power via Class B shares.

- Alexis Ohanian: Minimal

- Advance Publications: ~30%

- Tencent: ~11%.

The original founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) massively diluted when they sold Reddit to Advance Publications in 2006 for $10 to $20 million.

Numbers above are vaguely accurate. See https://www.untaylored.com/post/who-owns-reddit

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