> 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.
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.