A curious pattern is emerging among people who've already made it big: they're rolling up their sleeves again, apparently out of fear of missing AI's defining moment and, presumably, the irresistible allure of making even more money - potentially a lot more.

Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo who spent 4.5 years mentoring founders as a Y Combinator Group Partner, announced Monday he's taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic's compute team - not as an executive, but as a lowly member of technical staff. He's not alone: Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding OpenAI member who went on to lead AI at Tesla and start Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically: "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."

Not everyone is joining someone else's lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the "SPAC King" who has mostly stuck to boardrooms and "All In" podcasts since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his enterprise AI coding startup, which he announced alongside a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. "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," Palihapitiya wrote on X.

Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI "copilot" for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. "I knew if I looked back in 10 years and didn't do something related to it, I would probably regret that," Wu told TechCrunch directly.

The clearest sign of how keen the already-successful are to work on what they view as the still-early-innings of AI might be the job title itself. "Member of technical staff" is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for nearly everyone on their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It's the same title Blomfield is taking. It's also the title Peter Bailis took this March, just months after becoming Workday's CTO - a role overseeing AI strategy across an $8 billion-revenue business. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading it for a spot at Anthropic.