Where are YC founders now? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly

A new database tracking Y Combinator founders shows that after their startups are acquired or shut down, many join AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic. The list includes 105 founders, with notable names like Sam Altman at OpenAI and Tom Brown at Anthropic, highlighting the talent flow from YC startups to leading AI companies.

See where YC founders go after their startup is acquired or shut down 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. | | 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 Startups.RIP 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.