BitcoinWorld Already rich, already successful: Why tech’s biggest winners are grinding again in AI A pattern is emerging among people who have already made it big in tech. They are rolling up
BitcoinWorld
Already rich, already successful: Why tech’s biggest winners are grinding again in AI
A pattern is emerging among people who have already made it big in tech. They are rolling up their sleeves again — not for a comfortable board seat or advisory role, but for hands-on, often grueling work at the frontier of artificial intelligence. The driving force appears to be a combination of FOMO (fear of missing out) on what many consider the defining technological moment of a generation, and the undeniable allure of building something that could reshape the global economy.
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced Monday he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team — not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff. He is not alone in making that kind of move. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. 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: ‘the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.’
Not everyone is joining someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook executive and SPAC king who has mostly stuck to boardrooms and the All In podcast since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup. He announced the move alongside a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. ‘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,’ Palihapitiya wrote on X.
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: ‘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 have already made it are to work on what they view as the still-early innings of AI might be the job title itself. ‘Member of technical staff’ is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It is the same title Blomfield is taking. It is also the title Peter Bailis took 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 it for a spot at Anthropic.
This migration of proven talent from executive suites to technical benches signals something deeper than individual career moves. It suggests that the most experienced builders in tech believe the AI industry is still in its early stages — and that the most impactful work remains to be done. For investors and startups, it validates the thesis that frontier AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are attracting the kind of talent that typically builds and runs billion-dollar companies. For the broader tech ecosystem, it raises questions about whether traditional career paths — founder to executive to board — are losing their appeal compared to the allure of building at the cutting edge.
The trend of successful tech founders and executives returning to hands-on work in AI is not about money — most of them already have plenty. It is about the conviction that artificial intelligence represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build something transformative. Whether they join an existing lab like Anthropic or start their own company, these veterans are betting that the next few years will define the future of technology. And they do not want to watch from the sidelines.
Q1: Why are successful tech founders joining AI companies as individual contributors?A1: Many believe the AI industry is still in its early stages and want to be directly involved in building foundational technology rather than overseeing it from executive roles. The flat ‘member of technical staff’ title at companies like Anthropic allows them to focus on technical work without hierarchical distractions.
Q2: Which major AI companies are attracting this talent?A2: Anthropic has been the most prominent destination, attracting figures like Tom Blomfield, Mike Krieger, Andrej Karpathy, and Peter Bailis. OpenAI also maintains a flat technical structure. Some founders, like Chamath Palihapitiya and Eric Wu, are starting their own AI-focused companies instead.
Q3: Is this trend limited to AI, or is it happening in other tech sectors?A3: While the pattern is most pronounced in AI, similar dynamics have occurred during previous platform shifts like cloud computing and mobile. However, the scale and speed of AI adoption, combined with the relatively small number of frontier labs, makes this migration particularly notable.
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