Where are YC founders now? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
Life after the startup
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.
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 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. | |
Elfred 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. | |
Tom 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
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Source: hackernews