Where YC Founders Went Next: OpenAI and Anthropic
Where are YC founders now? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
I tracked 105 YC founders who left their startups to join OpenAI or Anthropic. From Sam Altman to Tom Blomfield, these entrepreneurs are now driving the AI revolution. The data reveals a massive shift where former CEOs and CTOs are now primarily working as Members of Technical Staff, proving that the AI wave is pulling talent from every YC batch.
Once CEOs & CTOs, everyone is a Member of Technical Staff now.
- scottydelta
Based on YC's directory, there are approximately 13,000 YC founders since YC started.
105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
- Closi
This analysis doesn't actually prove the title, as it only considers founders that have gone to OpenAI or Anthropic, however even if it did it isn't particularly suprising.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
- dgellow
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in
- reticulates
YC has tens of thousands of founders, more are probably at Google and Facebook than Anthropic and OpenAI. I’m not sure a sample of 105 founders shows… anything?
- kubb
Effectively, industry roles are a tiered system which determines access to the cashflow. Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder. The whole thing resembles a kind of mini class system, with high tiers granting access to generational wealth, and low tiers being better off than the average non-industry Joe. Once you're in the high tier, there's no way to fall anymore, you just move wherever the cash is being pumped in, collecting it.
- nickysielicki
The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
- maelito
I hope some people remain to build the services that we still use more every day than LLMs.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
- low_tech_punk
Is there a selection bias?
SELECT *
FROM yc_founders
WHERE employer IN ('OpenAI', 'Anthropic');
If there are 7k founders [1], the graph only shows 1.5% of the people from YC.