A pattern is emerging among people who have already achieved great success. They’re rolling up their sleeves again, both out of fear of missing AI’s defining moment and perhaps because of 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 Monday that he will take time off to join Anthropic’s computing team as a non-executive member of its technical staff.
He’s not alone in making such moves. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as chief product officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who led AI at Tesla and started his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, making a decision virtually identical to Blomfield’s. “The next few years on the LLM frontier will be particularly formative.”
Not everyone joins someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the “SPAC king” who has mostly been “all in” with the boardroom since leaving Facebook in 2011, has taken on his first full-time operational role in a decade as CEO of his own enterprise AI coding startup, 8090 Labs. He announced the company a few weeks ago with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. On X Palihapitiya wrote: “I’m convinced that what we’re building now is much more important, so I couldn’t make a decision other than to go all in.”
Likewise, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for 10 years before stepping down in 2023, recently raised $25 million in seed funding to launch NavigateAI, an AI “co-pilot” for construction workers. Wu spoke directly to me about his decision to jump into AI startups during a recent phone call. “When I look back in 10 years, I think I will regret not doing something related to that.”
The most obvious sign of how passionate those who are already ‘successful’ are working on what many consider to be still nascent work in AI may be their job titles themselves. “Technical staff member” is an intentionally flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for almost everyone on the technical team, regardless of rank. It is the same title Blomfield is taking.
It’s also a title Peter Bailis has taken on just months after becoming Workday’s CTO in March of this year, overseeing AI strategy across the $8 billion revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading for a position at Anthropic.
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