The decision can be read in the larger political context. There was some controversy a while back on certain directions the Foundation took like the project on sanitation (aka the toilet challenge) and the backing of charter schools. Regardless of one's opinion of those, he is taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand.

Interesting that some people here are advocating for fewer investments and board seats when angel investing. It's rather the opposite: you need more investments and less time spent on companies.

Angle investors are vital to the startup community as they take a lot of risk and are able to fund ideas that sound too crazy to get regular funding. In this case though given a hit rate of let's say 1% for argument's sake, 54 investments in 15 years is too low. You need hundred of investments to make the math work. Also doing it for fun and to learn is laudable but in the end hitting an Uber or an Airbnb is all that matters. It sounds like the job became full time consulting which is great if you're wealthy and want to give back to the community but can become unsustainable otherwise.

OpenAI has a massive brand advantage because the general public equates their products with AI.

Even if they don't 100% figure out agents they are now big enough that they can acquire those that do.

If the future is mostly about the app layer then they'll be very aggressive in consolidating the same way Facebook did with social media, see for example Windsurf.