The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending?
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
andy99 9 minutes ago [-]
People ask the same question of why YC funds yet another Uber for dogs or a button on the Touch Bar that cost $10/mo to help join a meeting faster.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.
lokimedes 37 minutes ago [-]
I actually have experience with that stuff, “old school” deep learning and ML as well. Is that something worth joining the fray with I wonder? Or is it as you point out really only the richly connected “locals” that are recruited?
buckhx 5 minutes ago [-]
Not to try to grab any pity, but I have pretty deep experience in the GPU optimization space and have not been able to even get an engineering screen even with referrals.
cliglot 46 minutes ago [-]
> I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
Culture. The Uber for Dogs idiots will gulp down the kool-aid like they’re dying in the dessert.
lenerdenator 49 minutes ago [-]
Silicon Valley is not about having specialists or knowledge. It's about having connections and charisma.
Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.
nickysielicki 45 minutes ago [-]
I mean, what are you suggesting “someone” should do about it? The companies can spend their money however they want, and if they want to hire a bunch of product people from YC startups nobody can stop them.
I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
classified 30 minutes ago [-]
> What do they do all day?
Breeding product ideas? ChatGPT, but for dogs?
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
They learned from Elon how to get by with a skeleton crew?
nickysielicki 26 minutes ago [-]
I’m just surprised that the people actually keeping the business operating and the tokens flowing don’t resent these product people for sitting around all day coming up with ideas for the same TC package as the people putting out ops fires and bringing new capacity online all day every day. I feel like the actual engineers are probably getting shortchanged.
pixl97 20 minutes ago [-]
As with anything else, they may resent, but the check still cashes at the end of the week.
Slartie 28 minutes ago [-]
> What do they do all day?
Same as they were doing in their startups: burn mon..., eh, tokens.
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
AI, of course.
scottydelta 3 hours ago [-]
Based on YC's directory, there are approximately 13,000 YC founders since YC started.
105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
consumer451 1 hours ago [-]
What I find more interesting is how many people have left big orgs where they had major leadership roles, to become ICs at Anthropic.
amazingamazing 1 hours ago [-]
Is it interesting? They want to be rich.
consumer451 54 minutes ago [-]
Well yeah, but being a CTO at a major org isn't exactly a low-paying gig.
The interesting thing to me is that the belief that Anthropic is going achieve something like AGI appears to have really spread through SV. If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.
Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.
cliglot 34 minutes ago [-]
> Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.
One thing I’ve noticed more and more is all the “cool” jobs require you to already be an established domain expert.
Another things I’ve noticed, and this is probably mostly just my opinions evolving, but all the “cool” stuff that catches my interest these days is not in software. Software is boring.
fidotron 3 minutes ago [-]
> If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.
I mean, this is happening right now.
I doubt there are few people talking to customers and potential customers that haven't run into the "look what I rolled last week with Claude" only for it to be legitimately impressive. The idea of technical moats is evaporating in front of our eyes.
lacksconfidence 40 minutes ago [-]
I really don't think it's AGI. From living in the valley, it looks a whole lot more like giant piles of cash and "prestige".
bdashdash 39 minutes ago [-]
The biggest AI bubble seems to be forming within the minds of the people working in SV itself, judging by the talk about the inevitability of AGI, the strong language around fomo (permanent underclass and all that) and the close proximity of the whole ecosystem there.
So wether it's belief in AGI or a desire for building cool stuff, as an outsider looking in, it seems to be informed by the same echo chamber of thought.
sesteel 1 hours ago [-]
I think it is more than just money. Having a hand in steering the ship that they think will change the world is pretty attractive. I came out of retirement just to watch the spectacle.
dist-epoch 19 minutes ago [-]
Participating in the creation of the Singleton is going down in the history books. Major leadership role at BigOrg is not.
shimman 1 hours ago [-]
You're surprised that people are trying to capture a bag that could possibly lead to multigenerational wealth in the tune of tens to 100s of millions?
alpha_squared 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not surprised, but what is surprising is we're now in a period in which the mask is slipping and no one seems to care enough to try to put it back on.
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
lacksconfidence 38 minutes ago [-]
It seems like different people? The early tech scene was defined by people who got into tech because they loved it, jobs were paying under six figures. Then it became a gold rush, and the tech scene became defined by the newcomers who were after cash first, tech second. It's not that the old timers gave up on their ideals (well, some did), they were simply supplanted by larger numbers of people following the money.
In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.
59 minutes ago [-]
mschuster91 1 hours ago [-]
Probably because of stock options. Assuming the bubble bursts after the vesting period, they stand to make a looooooot of money on paper.
interstice 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder what the income distribution is like
b40d-48b2-979e 47 minutes ago [-]
90% of the wealth at the top 1%.
dgellow 4 minutes ago [-]
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in
kubb 3 hours ago [-]
Effectively, industry roles are a tiered system which determines access to the cashflow. Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder. The whole thing resembles a kind of mini class system, with high tiers granting access to generational wealth, and low tiers being better off than the average non-industry Joe. Once you're in the high tier, there's no way to fall anymore, you just move wherever the cash is being pumped in, collecting it.
fra 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve seen many people climb the SWE ladder or build a YC company (having done both myself), and trust me the founder route is not the most efficient. You only believe this because you didn’t see the 2 failed startups and 10 year journey grinding 80h weeks almost running out of cash a few times.
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
bix6 54 minutes ago [-]
Except that he did start a company so his comment is really saying you have to be crazy enough to start a company
56 minutes ago [-]
threatofrain 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody in their right mind should start a company up to some equilibrium. As a society we should fund the appetite of experimental founders to put more pressure on quality than what natural conditions might allow.
gloryjulio 2 hours ago [-]
This. I saw way more people build a few millions of retirement nest egg reliably in 10-20 years, by working on a boring good swe job and manage their investment a bit better. It's a much safer route.
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
survivorship bias
RetroTechie 1 hours ago [-]
What part of "start a company" requires "grinding 80h weeks"?
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
mschuster91 59 minutes ago [-]
> Companies can grow organically.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong.
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
ElProlactin 2 hours ago [-]
> Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
timr 3 hours ago [-]
This is a very hot take. Being a founder might confer you some career advantage [1] if you're one of the few to make it to series A and you grow a large team, but if you're like the vast majority of founders and never make it past seed (or realistically, to seed), your network is the alpha and omega of any subsequent job search. It's a bit like saying that being an NBA starter is a good way to get a job as a basketball coach.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
hdjdjdjdjdjdjd 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Closi 3 hours ago [-]
This analysis doesn't actually prove the title, as it only considers founders that have gone to OpenAI or Anthropic, however even if it did it isn't particularly suprising.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
sieabahlpark 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
reticulates 3 hours ago [-]
YC has tens of thousands of founders, more are probably at Google and Facebook than Anthropic and OpenAI. I’m not sure a sample of 105 founders shows… anything?
maelito 4 hours ago [-]
I hope some people remain to build the services that we still use more every day than LLMs.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
dude250711 3 hours ago [-]
Based on typical announcements, they only get acquired to serve their customers even better. The selfless unsung heroes of our time...
muzani 2 hours ago [-]
A successful unicorn founder once said a billion dollar company is just made up of a bunch of people who could each have started a $10m company by themselves.
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
tptacek 25 minutes ago [-]
The word "mostly" doesn't belong in this title, because YC has funded over 5,000 companies, and this page accounts for 100 founders.
throwaw12 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder what they do, are they joining as engineers or leadership? because Anthropic has Member of Technical Staff role only.
Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers
koolba 3 hours ago [-]
The site infers that 105 people are working at the two companies. What’s the denominator though?
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
3 hours ago [-]
greggh 41 minutes ago [-]
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round...
sochowski 28 minutes ago [-]
this has gotta be one of the most unclear and misleading sankey diagrams i've ever seen
sochowski 29 minutes ago [-]
this has got to be one of the most unclear and misleading sankeys i've ever seen
whitelimetea 1 hours ago [-]
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it
hsaliak 2 hours ago [-]
This graph biases outcomes (A| O) it would be interessting to have an others.. so we can view the whole picture
mynegation 2 hours ago [-]
“Emmet Shear, Twitch, OpenAI - former”. I would not be surprised if the whole site was made for this punchline.
motbus3 3 hours ago [-]
they are totally focusing on making those their internal products so they dont need sell ai to customers anymore. that's the future
neuroelectron 2 hours ago [-]
They abandoned the dream of democratizing sectors of the market by ignoring regulations to democratizing knowledge by ignoring copyright.
deadbabe 2 hours ago [-]
IMO we are in the era of “Final Companies” and the appeal of being a founder these days just isn’t great compared to the entrepreneurial boom of the 2010s and 2000s. The risk to reward ratio has never been worse.
dominotw 1 hours ago [-]
alternate title:
Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
adithyassekhar 4 hours ago [-]
The fonts the layouts it all screams claude at me.
I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.
Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)
RetroTechie 1 hours ago [-]
It's a set of properties/attributes commonly referred to as "style" (generic, not the CSS one). Or call it look & feel.
So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".
applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago [-]
The sepia-tinted color scheme and the way LLMs overuse rounded corner tiles to the absolute death is part of it. Really what it comes down to, is that these LLMs have a design vocabulary of like 15 traits. None of the websites they generate have every single trait, but they are composed of some subset of 10 such traits, so it's still overwhelmingly obvious the moment you open the page, even though each one is slightly different. Humans might use 1~5 of those traits, but they'll also be mixed in with a much wider set of traits with more individuality to them.
tao_oat 3 hours ago [-]
I tried to list all the traits I could think of:
- Orange/beige-ish colors
- Rounded corners
- Cards with a thin border
- A thicker colored border on the left of cards
- Serif font for headings
- Monospace fonts for small text
- Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading
- Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left
- Obviously LLM-generated text / language
I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!
techpression 3 hours ago [-]
That left side border is a plague…
The copy is usually a bit of a giveaway too, ”explore your future path to greatness and experience the defining divider between those who can and those who can’t” or as most humans would write the header ”plans”.
sph 3 hours ago [-]
Most AI-generated sites have coopted the Inter font, and usually they go for a dark colour scheme, the rounded tiles, a container representing a macOS-styled terminal with code, and, the thing that annoys me the most, divs that fade is as you scroll.
SELECT * FROM yc_founders WHERE employer IN ('OpenAI', 'Anthropic');
If there are 7k founders [1], the graph only shows 1.5% of the people from YC.
[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/investors
It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance estimation or measurement, CUDA or ROCM or any kind of GPGPU/accelerated computing. But that is the core business of both of these companies.
I’m not surprised that these companies are well funded and hiring a lot of people. I’m surprised that they chose to hire the people who were previously making “Uber but for dogs” gimmick apps and not just hollowing out the HPC specialists from national labs.
They invest in people more than ideas, so you’ve got, at least in many cases, people with good pedigree and skills (age adjusted anyway) building on stupid ideas, but that are eminently employable.
Obviously there are other factors, I’m not really trying to defend anything but just point out that there are legit reasons why someone impressive enough to get into YC would also be impressive enough to get a good job. It’s not like it’s random founders off the street.
Culture. The Uber for Dogs idiots will gulp down the kool-aid like they’re dying in the dessert.
Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.
I’m just surprised they need this many of them. What do they do all day? And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
Breeding product ideas? ChatGPT, but for dogs?
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
They learned from Elon how to get by with a skeleton crew?
Same as they were doing in their startups: burn mon..., eh, tokens.
> And who is left to manage their hundreds of thousands of servers?
AI, of course.
105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
The interesting thing to me is that the belief that Anthropic is going achieve something like AGI appears to have really spread through SV. If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.
Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.
One thing I’ve noticed more and more is all the “cool” jobs require you to already be an established domain expert.
Another things I’ve noticed, and this is probably mostly just my opinions evolving, but all the “cool” stuff that catches my interest these days is not in software. Software is boring.
I mean, this is happening right now.
I doubt there are few people talking to customers and potential customers that haven't run into the "look what I rolled last week with Claude" only for it to be legitimately impressive. The idea of technical moats is evaporating in front of our eyes.
So wether it's belief in AGI or a desire for building cool stuff, as an outsider looking in, it seems to be informed by the same echo chamber of thought.
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
In my opinion there is no "slipping mask", merely a changing of the guard that always happens when massive piles of generational wealth are at stake.
Jensen Huang himself says nobody in their right mind should start a company https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong.
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.
Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)
So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".
- Orange/beige-ish colors - Rounded corners - Cards with a thin border - A thicker colored border on the left of cards - Serif font for headings - Monospace fonts for small text - Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading - Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left - Obviously LLM-generated text / language
I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!
The copy is usually a bit of a giveaway too, ”explore your future path to greatness and experience the defining divider between those who can and those who can’t” or as most humans would write the header ”plans”.