A pattern is emerging among the people who have already raised him. They are probably rolling up their sleeves for fear of missing the defining moment of AI and possibly the irresistible lure of making more money.
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday he’s taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s computing team—as a technical staff member, not an executive.
He’s not the only one doing this. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic in 2024 as Chief Product Officer, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and founded his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-prep team in May and framed his decision in much the same way: especially formative.”
Not everyone joins someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the ‘SPAC King’, is more attached to boardrooms and everything.”All In” After leaving Facebook in 2011, he took on his first full-time operational role in more than a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs. a few weeks ago Along with a $135 million Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures. Palihapitiya wrote in X: “I’m sure that’s what we’re building now even more importantso no decision was made but to be all in.”
Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping down in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “copilot” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. “I knew that if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something about it, I’d probably regret it,” Wu told me in a recent call about his decision to go straight for the AI startup.
The job title itself may be the clearest sign of how eager people who have already “made it” are to work on what they see as still early shots of AI. “Technical staff member” is an intentionally flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for almost everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It is the same title that Blomfield received.
It’s also the title Peter Bailis took on this March, just months after becoming CTO of Workday, a role overseeing AI strategy at the $8 billion business. Bailis lasted less than a year is trading For a spot on Anthropic.
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