Tech founders joining Anthropic and a clutch of well-funded AI startups has become the defining career move of 2025 and 2026, as people who already built billion-dollar companies conclude that sitting out this moment would be the biggest mistake of their lives.
The latest is Tom Blomfield, who co-founded both GoCardless and Monzo and has spent time as a general partner at Y Combinator since 2023. He announced this week he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team, not as an executive but as a member of technical staff. He will work alongside Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder who serves as its chief compute officer.
The title is a deliberate signal. ‘Member of technical staff’ is the flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. Blomfield is choosing to get his hands dirty rather than sit in a strategic advisory role above the fray.
His reasoning, as reported by Business Insider, was direct: ‘Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve.’
Tech Founders Joining Anthropic: A Pattern Takes Shape
Blomfield is not the first high-profile operator to make this particular trade. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and then start Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, writing that ‘the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.’ Peter Bailis lasted less than a year as Workday’s CTO, a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business, before trading it for a member of technical staff position at Anthropic this March.
The pattern is clear enough: the job title and the pay cut are almost beside the point. What these people are buying is proximity to whatever comes next.
Going It Alone: The Founders Building Their Own AI Bets
Not everyone is volunteering for someone else’s mission. Chamath Palihapitiya, better known in recent years as the SPAC King and a co-host of the All In podcast, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade. He is now CEO of 8090 Labs, the enterprise AI coding startup he founded in January 2024, after the company closed a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures.
The round drew a notably well-connected set of backers: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, David Friedberg of The Production Board, Jason Calacanis of Launch, and angel investors including Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, according to TechCrunch. The proceeds will fund hiring, compute, and infrastructure.
8090 Labs’ product, described by Tech in Asia as Software Factory, is pitched as an AI-native platform for regulated enterprises, bringing software teams and AI agents into one system with control, visibility, and an audit trail. The target market, in other words, is the part of corporate America that moves slowly by necessity and needs someone to hold its hand through the transition.
Palihapitiya on X was characteristically unambiguous: ‘I am convinced that what we are building now is even more important, so there was no decision to make except to be all in.’
Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, is taking a similar swing in a more physical direction. His new company, NavigateAI, founded in 2025, is building AI software that runs on smartphones and Meta Glasses to provide real-time guidance for workers in construction and property maintenance. The company raised a $25 million seed round led by Elad Gil, with Khosla Ventures, Lennar, Tishman Speyer, Helix Electric, and Fifth Wall also participating, per The SaaS News.
The market framing is hard to dismiss. Investing.com reports that the company cited US construction spending of $2.2 trillion annually and a shortage of hundreds of thousands of construction workers each year as the problem NavigateAI is positioned to address.
Wu told the original reporter: ‘I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.’ It is the clearest articulation of the logic driving all of these moves. The fear is not failure. The fear is watching from the sidelines.
The real test arrives when the early-innings framing has to meet actual product timelines. Watch whether 8090 Labs ships Software Factory to enterprise clients at scale before the next funding cycle, and whether NavigateAI’s field-worker bet holds up once construction firms have to actually train their crews on it.
