Tech veterans pivot to AI labs as 'member of technical staff' trend grows
A wave of established entrepreneurs and executives is leaving lucrative, senior roles to take non-hierarchical positions at artificial intelligence startups, driven by the potential for significant financial gain and the desire to shape the technology’s future.
A growing cohort of successful technology entrepreneurs and executives is departing established roles to join or launch artificial intelligence ventures. Figures including Tom Blomfield, Mike Krieger, Andrej Karpathy, Chamath Palihapitiya, Eric Wu, and Peter Bailis are moving to companies such as Anthropic, 8090 Labs, and NavigateAI. This migration is motivated by a fear of missing out on the defining AI moment and the potential for substantial financial gain.
Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, announced on Monday that he is taking a leave of absence from his role as a Y Combinator Group Partner to join Anthropic’s compute team. He will serve as a 'member of technical staff', a deliberate, non-hierarchical label used by Anthropic and OpenAI for technical team members regardless of seniority. This title is not unique to Blomfield; Peter Bailis, recently appointed Workday’s CTO, left the role after less than a year to join Anthropic in March, also accepting the title of 'member of technical staff'.
Bailis’s departure from Workday, an $8 billion-revenue business, highlights the intensity of the shift. Similarly, Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who led AI at Tesla and founded Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, describing the next few years at the frontier of large language models as especially formative.
Not all movers are joining existing labs. Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the “SPAC King”, has taken his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup. The company announced a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Palihapitiya stated he was convinced the work was important enough to be all in.
Eric Wu, former head of Opendoor, launched NavigateAI, an AI copilot for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu, who stepped back from Opendoor in 2023, indicated that he would regret not participating in the sector if he looked back in ten years. The trend underscores a broader movement among those who have already achieved wealth and success to re-engage with the technology sector.
