At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

adithyassekhar

The fonts the layouts it all screams claude at me. I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original. Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)

throwaw12

I wonder what they do, are they joining as engineers or leadership? because Anthropic has Member of Technical Staff role only. Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers

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.

koolba

The site infers that 105 people are working at the two companies. What’s the denominator though? After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.

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.

motbus3

they are totally focusing on making those their internal products so they dont need sell ai to customers anymore. that's the future

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.

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.

muzani

A successful unicorn founder once said a billion dollar company is just made up of a bunch of people who could each have started a $10m company by themselves. I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.

neuroelectron

They abandoned the dream of democratizing sectors of the market by ignoring regulations to democratizing knowledge by ignoring copyright.

mynegation

“Emmet Shear, Twitch, OpenAI - former”. I would not be surprised if the whole site was made for this punchline.

deadbabe

IMO we are in the era of “Final Companies” and the appeal of being a founder these days just isn’t great compared to the entrepreneurial boom of the 2010s and 2000s. The risk to reward ratio has never been worse.

hsaliak

This graph biases outcomes (A| O) it would be interessting to have an others.. so we can view the whole picture

dominotw

alternate title: Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly

whitelimetea

It’s a big club and you ain’t in 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.

greggh

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round...

sochowski

this has got to be one of the most unclear and misleading sankeys i've ever seen

sochowski

this has gotta be one of the most unclear and misleading sankey diagrams i've ever seen