Where are YC founders now? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
Mirrored from Hacker News — AI on Front Page for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
See where YC founders go after their startup is acquired or shut down
Explore 1,841 startup post-mortemsWhere are YC founders now?
Who they are & what they built
Last updated: July 14, 2026.
Swipe to explore the table
 Sam Altman | OpenAI | Still running OpenAI as CEO. | |
|---|---|---|---|
 Emmett Shear | OpenAI former | Steered OpenAI for one extraordinary weekend in 2023. | |
 Brian Fioca | OpenAI | Applied evaluations | |
 Gabor Cselle | OpenAI former | Worked on strategy, then moved to Google Workspace GenAI. | |
EPElfred Pagan | OpenAI | Member of Technical Staff | |
 Peter Lai | Anthropic | MTS on prototyping team | |
 Brian Krausz | Anthropic | Product engineer building Claude APIs/SDKs & platform | |
 Joe Gershenson | OpenAI | Moved from startup operations into OpenAI in 2026. | |
 Eric Zhang | OpenAI | Member of Technical Staff | |
 Sridatta Thatipamala | OpenAI | MTS on search evals, RAG & agentic AI | |
 Tom Blomfield | Anthropic | Working on Anthropic's compute team with Tom Brown. | |
 Sean Grove | OpenAI former | Worked on post-training and alignment, then founded Linzumi. | |
 Christopher Berner | OpenAI | Distinguished Engineer leading robotics & next-gen consumer hardware | |
 Michael Petrov | OpenAI | Led technical work on the GPT-3 API and Applied AI. | |
TBTom Brown | Anthropic | Co-founder, Chief Compute Officer. | |
 Igor Kofman | Anthropic | Claude Code TL / Member of Technical Staff | |
 Alex Karpenko | OpenAI | Research Engineer; core contributor to o1 and GPT-4V | |
 Alexei Karpenko | OpenAI | MTS on core products | |
 Chris Lloyd | Anthropic | TUI rendering for Claude Code | |
 Kevin Kelley | Anthropic | Member of Technical Staff |
Showing 20 of 105 founders
Roles Then & Now
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Once CEOs & CTOs, everyone is a Member of Technical Staff now.
- Member of Technical Staff63· 60%
- Other / undisclosed11· 10%
- Research & Safety10· 10%
- Go-to-Market & Partnerships8· 8%
- Leadership7· 7%
- Data, Product & Design6· 6%
YC batches
Which batches fed the labs
Counting each YC chapter by batch year shows when these founders came through. A founder with two YC startups appears in both years.
- 20051
- 20060
- 20071
- 20081
- 20092
- 20103
- 20114
- 201211
- 20135
- 20142
- 20153
- 20165
- 20177
- 20188
- 20198
- 202013
- 20218
- 20227
- 20236
- 202414
- 20251
Startups.RIP
Find your next big idea
Startups don't work for a range of reasons, including timing. Explore the database to find already validated ideas that are ready for another shot.
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.