A pattern emerges among people who have already made it big. They’re rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing out on AI’s defining moment, and possibly because of its irresistible allure to make even more money — possibly a lot more.
Tom Blomfield, who founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a partner at Y Combinator Group; announced on Monday that he is taking leave to join Anthropic’s computing team — not as an executive, but as a member of the technical staff.
He is not alone in making such a move. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member who went on to lead AI at Tesla and started his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, framing the decision in much the same way Blom will write about in the next few years. to be particularly formative.”
Not everyone walks into someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the ‘SPAC king’ who is mostly stuck in boardrooms and all things”All inSince leaving Facebook in 2011, he’s just taken on his first full-time operational role in a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his business AI coding startup, which he announced a few weeks ago along with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Palihapitiya wrote in X, “I am convinced that now is what we are building even more importantso there was no decision to make but to go all in.”
Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping down in 2023, recently released NavigateAI, an artificial intelligence “copilot” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu told me directly on a recent call about his decision to dive into an AI startup: “I knew that if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something about it, I’d probably regret it.”
The clearest sign of how eager people who have already “made it” are to work on what they see as still early beginnings of artificial intelligence may be the job title itself. “Technical Staff Member” is the deliberately 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 takes.
It’s also the title Peter Bailis took on in March, just months after becoming Workday’s CTO, a role overseeing the AI strategy at the $8 billion revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year ago you market it for a position at Anthropic.
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