105 YC founders whose startups ended are now building at OpenAI or Anthropic
A new tracker, Startups.RIP, counts 70 former Y Combinator founders at OpenAI and 35 at Anthropic, most as individual contributors rather than executives, mapping where founder level talent goes after a startup ends.
105 founders whose startups got acquired or shut down are now building at OpenAI or Anthropic instead.
A new tracker called Startups.RIP counts at least 105 former Y Combinator backed founders now working at OpenAI or Anthropic: 70 at OpenAI, 35 at Anthropic, most of them after their own startup was acquired or shut down.
What the tracker actually shows
Built by two people, Oscar and Javokhir, as what they call a Startups.RIP production, the site catalogs each founder's YC startup, their current role, and what they work on now, drawing mostly from YC batches between 2012 and 2024, with corrections invited via social media. About 60 percent of the tracked founders now hold the title Member of Technical Staff, not an executive role, which is itself the data point: these are people choosing to go build inside a lab rather than run something themselves again.
The names attached to it
The list includes Sam Altman, whose startup Loopt preceded his run at OpenAI, Tom Brown, Grouper's founder and now an Anthropic co-founder, and Emmett Shear, Twitch's co-founder and briefly OpenAI's interim CEO. Most entries are far less famous: individual engineers whose startups did not make it, now doing technical work at one of the two labs.
Why a build studio cares
We build on Claude and compete in the same technical talent market as everyone hiring for AI adjacent work. A concrete count of where experienced, startup tested engineers are actually going, not a survey or a vibe, is a useful signal for where the depth of AI talent is concentrating right now, and it is concentrating harder at these two labs than the headlines about AI talent wars usually make explicit.
Next step: browse the full tracker at joinedanthropic.com for the individual founder histories. If you are hiring into AI adjacent roles and want to talk through where the talent actually is, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.