A pattern is emerging among people who have already achieved significant success in the tech industry: they are returning to hands-on work, seemingly driven by a fear of missing out on AI's defining moment and the allure of making even more money. Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo, announced he is taking a leave of absence from his role as a Y Combinator Group Partner to join Anthropic's compute team as a member of technical staff. He joins other notable figures who have made similar moves, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May. Not everyone is joining an existing lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the "SPAC King," took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which he announced alongside a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI "copilot" for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu stated that he knew he would regret not doing something related to AI if he looked back in 10 years. The clearest sign of this trend may be the job title itself: "member of technical staff," the deliberately flat label used by Anthropic and OpenAI for nearly everyone on their technical teams, which is the same title Blomfield and Peter Bailis—who left his role as Workday's CTO—have taken.
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