Why Tech’s Wealthiest Winners Are Grinding Again
▼ Summary
– Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, is taking a leave of absence from Y Combinator to join Anthropic’s compute team as a member of technical staff.
– Other high-profile figures like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy have also joined Anthropic in technical roles.
– Chamath Palihapitiya, former “SPAC King,” has taken his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of his AI coding startup 8090 Labs.
– Eric Wu, former Opendoor CEO, launched NavigateAI, an AI “copilot” for construction workers, citing fear of future regret if he didn’t pursue AI.
– The title “member of technical staff,” used by Anthropic and OpenAI for flat organizational structure, is attracting senior talent like Peter Bailis, who left Workday’s CTO role for it.
A clear shift is underway among tech’s most successful founders and executives. Even after building billion-dollar companies, they are returning to the trenches, driven by a fear of missing out on AI’s defining moment and the undeniable draw of building something even bigger.
Tom Blomfield, the co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo who spent the last four and a half years mentoring startups as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced Monday that he is stepping away from that role. He is joining Anthropic’s compute team not as a director or executive, but as a member of technical staff.
His move mirrors a growing trend. Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who later led AI efforts at Tesla and launched his own venture, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. He framed his decision in nearly identical terms, writing that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.”
Not everyone is signing on with an established lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the “SPAC King” who had largely stayed in boardrooms and podcast studios since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade. He is now CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup. He announced the move alongside a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. On X, Palihapitiya wrote, “I am convinced that what we are building now is even more important, so there was no decision to make except to be all in.”
Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI copilot for construction workers, backed by $25 million in seed funding. In a recent call, Wu told me directly about his decision to jump into an AI startup, saying, “I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.”
Perhaps the strongest signal of how seriously these already-successful people view the current AI moment is the job title they are willing to accept. “Member of technical staff” is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label used by Anthropic and OpenAI for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of experience. It is the same title Blomfield is taking.
It is also the title Peter Bailis accepted this March, just months after becoming Workday’s CTO, a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading that executive position for a spot at Anthropic.
(Source: TechCrunch)