> Recently, Tom Blomfield, co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless and former YC partner
> Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram
> Andrej Karpathy, founding OpenAI member
> Peter Bailis, CTO of Workday
I am mostly curious because they could presumably have raised money for another startup, invested, or retired. Instead, they chose to become employees with deliberately ordinary titles.
If this is not a biased view, what really explains it? Confidence in Anthropic’s leadership, It's research direction, equity ahead of a possible IPO, or somthing else?
I’d especially like to hear from people who have considered joining a frontier lab after founding a company.
colesantiago•1h ago
Until Anthropic and OpenAI IPO, it is no brainer to join and it is almost risk free to get equity and make a huge amount of money before they IPO.
Just wait until the IPO is done and the lockup period is over, and you will see lots of star employees leaving, some making their own VC firms, some retiring or some just making huge expensive purchases.
Nothing wrong with this, but it is a huge reason why they these "well known" tech execs are joining now.
onion2k•1h ago
It's probably just the most interesting and challenging tech company right now (that's hiring high profile roles?). There's lots of other companies doing interesting things but if your expertise is software applied to a complex domain, Anthropic probably comes out on top.
colesantiago•1h ago
Maybe they want the highest likelihood be even more richer and Anthropic gives them this.
Equity in a $1TN company pre IPO is very attractive than investing in startups and waiting 10 years for an exit.