Earlier this year, I ran into Adam D’Angelo at an AI conference in San Francisco’s “Cerebral Valley” neighborhood. 

He was there to talk about Poe, the AI bot platform that is his pet project as the CEO of Quora. But I was more interested in his role as a board member of OpenAI, which had just lost two other directors in a matter of a few weeks: Reid Hoffman and Shivon Zilis. Was the board actively looking to fill their spots? I cornered D’Angelo in the halls of the conference venue to ask. He said yes and declined to elaborate. 

I couldn’t have expected that D’Angelo would try to oust Altman just eight months later and that D’Angelo would be the only OpenAI board member to survive one of the most dramatic power struggles in Silicon Valley history. Along with Bret Taylor and Larry Summers, he’s now tasked with rebuilding OpenAI’s nonprofit board and bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an internal investigation into Altman’s firing.