Ask HN: Why are so many accomplished founders joining Anthropic?

1 points by guru3s 2d ago ↗ HN

A striking number of people who had already built successful companies or held unusually high-status roles are choosing to work at Anthropic.

> 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.

3 comments

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colesantiago 2d ago ↗

pre ipo money.

onion2k 2d ago ↗

These people are already massively rich and likely have opportunities to join any tech org that's growing, and any of those opportunities could make them even richer. It doesn't really explain why Anthropic is their apparent best option.

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.

> These people are already massively rich...

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.