Tom Blomfield has left his role mentoring founders at Y Combinator to join Anthropic as a member of technical staff.
The former co-founder of GoCardless and Monyo announced the move on Monday. He is taking a leave of absence to work within the compute team. He is not taking an executive position.
Blomfield is not the only former tech leader making this switch. Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who previously led AI at Tesla and started Eureka Labs, joined the pre-training team in May. Karpathy described the decision as framing the next few years at the frontier of large language models as especially formative.
Some are not joining existing labs but starting their own operations. Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the SPAC King, has mostly stayed in boardrooms since leaving Facebook in 2011. He recently took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs. This is an enterprise AI coding startup. He announced the launch a couple of weeks ago alongside a $135 million Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures. Palihapitiya wrote on X that he was convinced what they were building was even more important, meaning there was no decision to make except to be all in.
Eric Wu ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023. He recently launched NavigateAI, an AI copilot for construction workers. The project has $25 million in seed funding. Wu told me directly on a recent call that he knew if he looked back in 10 years and did not do something related to it, he would probably regret it.
Job titles
The clearest sign of how keen people who have already made it are to work on what they view as the still-early innings of AI might be the job title itself. Member of technical staff is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It is the same title Blomfield is taking.
It is also the title that Peter Bailis took this March, just months after becoming Workday’s CTO. That role oversaw AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading it for a spot at Anthropic.
What it means
People who have already built wealth and status are returning to the build phase. They are choosing roles that require heavy technical work rather than management titles. This suggests a belief that the current wave of AI development offers unique opportunities that standard executive roles cannot capture.
