See where YC founders go after their startup is acquired or shut down
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
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source & further reading
joinedanthropic.com — original article