Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday that...
Key points
- Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team — not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff.
- Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield’s, writing that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.” Not everyone is joining someone else’s lab.
- Wrote Palihapitiya on X, “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.” Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “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 if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.” The clearest sign of how keen people who’ve already “made it” are to work on what they view as the still-early-innings of AI might be the job title itself.
What happened
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team — not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield’s, writing that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.” Not everyone is joining someone else’s lab. Wrote Palihapitiya on X, “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.” Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “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 if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something...