AI & Models
Anthropic hires tech veterans as flat-hierarchy technical staff
Successful tech founders and executives are joining Anthropic and launching startups, seemingly driven by the fear of missing out on AI's defining moment.
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. His move fits a pattern that seems to be emerging among people who have already made it big: presumably driven by fear of missing AI’s defining moment, and potentially by the allure of making even more money, they are returning to hands-on work.
Blomfield joins a wave of high-profile hires at Anthropic. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger became the company’s Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy — the former lead of AI at Tesla and founder of 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.” Peter Bailis made a similar move this March, leaving his post as chief technology officer at Workday, an enterprise software company with $8 billion in revenue, after less than a year in the role, to join Anthropic as a member of technical staff — the same deliberately flat, non-hierarchical title that Anthropic and OpenAI use for technical employees regardless of seniority.
Not everyone is joining an existing lab. Chamath Palihapitiya took a full-time operating role as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which raised 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.
Eric Wu, who stepped back from running Opendoor in 2023, launched NavigateAI, an AI copilot for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Explaining his decision, Wu said: “I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.”
Why it matters
The pattern suggests that founders and executives who have already built and sold successful companies are, seemingly out of fear of missing AI’s defining moment, choosing to return to hands-on technical or operating roles — presumably, and potentially, chasing outsized financial upside as much as intellectual purpose.