Already Rich, Already Successful: Why the Last Wave of Tech Winners Is Grinding Again
Several wealthy and accomplished tech founders and executives are returning to active work, joining AI companies or launching new AI startups, driven by a fear of missing out on the defining moment of artificial intelligence and the potential for even greater wealth.
A pattern is emerging among people who have already made it big: they are rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI's defining moment and the irresistible allure of making even more money.
Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo who spent 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced 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. He is not alone. 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 Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May, writing that "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."
Not everyone is joining someone else's lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the "SPAC King" who has mostly stuck to boardrooms 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, which he announced along with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. He 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."
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 said, "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 these people are to work on 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. It is the same title Blomfield is taking, and also the title that 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.
