{"id":23187,"date":"2026-07-14T11:59:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T11:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/already-rich-already-successful-why-the-last-wave-of-tech-winners-is-grinding-again\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T11:59:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T11:59:32","slug":"already-rich-already-successful-why-the-last-wave-of-tech-winners-is-grinding-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/already-rich-already-successful-why-the-last-wave-of-tech-winners-is-grinding-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div readability=\"87.095943837754\">\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A pattern is emerging among people who&rsquo;ve already made it big. They&rsquo;re rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI&rsquo;s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money &mdash; potentially a lot more.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced on Monday that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic&rsquo;s compute team &mdash; not as an executive, but as a member of technical staff.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He&rsquo;s not alone in making that kind of move. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic&rsquo;s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield&rsquo;s, writing that &ldquo;the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not everyone is joining someone else&rsquo;s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the &ldquo;SPAC King&rdquo; who has mostly stuck to boardrooms and all things &ldquo;All In&rdquo; since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which he announced a couple of weeks ago along with a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Wrote Palihapitiya on X,  &ldquo;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.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI &ldquo;copilot&rdquo; for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu told me directly on a recent call about his decision to dive into an AI startup, &ldquo;I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn&rsquo;t do something related to it, I would probably regret that.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The clearest sign of how keen people who&rsquo;ve already &ldquo;made it&rdquo; are to work on what they view as the still-early-innings of AI might be the job title itself. &ldquo;Member of technical staff&rdquo; is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It&rsquo;s the same title Blomfield is taking. <\/p>\n<div class=\"internal-linking-related-contents\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/12-weeks-jail-for-school-it-support-technician-who-took-upskirt-videos-of-teachers\/\" class=\"template-1\"><span class=\"cta\">News :<\/span><span class=\"postTitle\">&lt;div&gt;12 weeks' jail for school IT support technician who took upskirt videos of teachers&lt;\/div&gt;<\/span><\/a><\/div><p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&rsquo;s also the title that Peter Bailis took this March, just months after becoming Workday&rsquo;s CTO, a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading it for a spot at Anthropic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn&rsquo;t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><sub>Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A pattern is emerging among people who&rsquo;ve already made it big. They&rsquo;re rolling up their sleeves again, seemingly out of fear of missing AI&rsquo;s defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money &mdash; potentially a lot more. Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years mentoring founders as&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-wrap\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/already-rich-already-successful-why-the-last-wave-of-tech-winners-is-grinding-again\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;Already rich, already successful, why the last wave of tech winners is grinding again&rdquo;<\/span> &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23188,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}