Where are YC founders now? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
Where YC founders go after their startup is acquired or shut down
Explore 1,841 startup post-mortems. Last updated: July 14, 2026.
Swipe to explore the table:
| Name | Company | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 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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