A cohort of people who built fortunes in the last technology cycle are making a quieter, stranger move: tech founders return to AI not as investors or advisers, but as working practitioners, willingly trading executive titles for the deliberately flat label of ‘member of technical staff.’ The pattern is gathering pace.
Tom Blomfield, who co-founded Monzo in 2015 and served as its chief executive until 2020 before leaving the company the following year, then spent time as a general partner at Y Combinator from April 2023, announced this week that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team. His title: member of technical staff. He will work directly with Tom Brown, Anthropic’s co-founder and chief compute officer, according to Sahm Capital.
Blomfield explained his reasoning plainly. Business Insider reported his statement on X: ‘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.’
Why Tech Founders Return to AI Labs
Blomfield is joining a small but growing roster of people who could easily be spending this phase of their careers on a cap table rather than a compute cluster. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024. Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who subsequently led AI at Tesla, 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 offers perhaps the sharpest illustration of the pull. He became Workday’s chief technology officer, a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business, only to leave less than a year later for a member of technical staff position at Anthropic. A senior title at a large software company, it turns out, competes poorly with proximity to the model.
The destination is itself part of the story. Yahoo Finance reports that Anthropic has recently overtaken OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI company, making it both the most credible and the most competitive address for anyone serious about the technology.
From Boardrooms to Build Teams
Not everyone choosing to grind again is signing up to someone else’s venture. Chamath Palihapitiya, who departed Facebook in 2011 and built a reputation through SPACs and the All In podcast, took his first full-time operating role in over a decade when he became chief executive of 8090 Labs, the enterprise AI coding startup he founded in January 2024.
The company describes its core product, Software Factory, as an AI-native platform that brings software teams and AI agents into a single system with control, visibility, and an audit trail, aimed specifically at regulated enterprises. The Series A funding of $135 million, led by Salesforce Ventures, will support hiring and investment in compute and infrastructure.
The round attracted a notable collection of technology figures. Yahoo Finance reported that investors included Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, David Friedberg of The Production Board, Jason Calacanis of Launch, Palo Alto Networks chief executive Nikesh Arora, and Quora chief executive Adam D’Angelo. Palihapitiya’s own framing on X was 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, has taken a different path into the AI moment, one aimed at the physical rather than the digital economy. Wu recently launched NavigateAI, founded in 2025, which is developing AI software that runs on smartphones and Meta Glasses to provide real-time guidance for construction and property maintenance workers. The company raised $25 million in seed funding led by Elad Gil at a post-money valuation of $225 million, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lennar, Tishman Speyer, Helix Electric, and angels including Tony Xu of DoorDash and Zach Frankel of Ramp, according to the company’s launch announcement. Ventureburn independently confirmed the valuation figure.
The market context NavigateAI is targeting is large. Investing.com reported the company cites annual US construction spending of $2.2 trillion and a shortage of hundreds of thousands of construction workers each year as its core opportunity.
Wu told the original reporter directly: ‘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 kind of thing people say at the start of a cycle they believe in. The question, for all of them, is whether the frontier they are rushing toward holds its shape long enough to reward the bet.
