The General anecdotes he gives later in the thread line up with their stated reasons for firing him: he hired another person to do the same project (presumably without telling them), and he gave two different board members different opinions of the same person.

Those sound like good reasons to dislike him and not trust him. But ultimately we are right back where we started: they still aren't good enough reasons to suddenly fire him the way they did.

It's possible that what we have here is one of those situations where people happily rely on oral reports and assurances for a long time, then realise later that they really, really should have been asking for and keeping receipts from the beginning.

Not sure if you’re referring to Sam, the board, or everybody trying to deal with them. But either way, yeah.

Here's another anecdote, posted in 2011 but about something even earlier:

> "We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.

> We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.

> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944

Call me unscrupulous, but I’m tolerant of stuff like that. It’s the willingness to do things like that that makes the difference between somebody reaching the position of CEO of a multibillion dollar company, or not. I’d say virtually everybody who has reached his level of success in business has done at least a few things like that in their past.

If you do that kind of thing internally though or against the org with an outside interest it isn't surprising that it wouldn't go over well. Though that isn't confirmed yet as they never made a concrete allegation.