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At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic
- hdjdjdjdjdjdjd 3mo ago[dead]
- adithyassekhar 3mo agoThe 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)
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThat 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 3mo agoMost 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.
- RetroTechie 3mo agoIt'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".
- throwaw12 3mo agoI 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
- maelito 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoBased on typical announcements, they only get acquired to serve their customers even better. The selfless unsung heroes of our time...
- koolba 3mo agoThe 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.
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- reticulates 3mo agoYC 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?
- vanuatu 3mo agoThis. the comments here talk as if YC is this secret cabal of upper elites when they're probably one of the least selective good accelerators
- kubb 3mo agoEffectively, 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.
- timr 3mo agoThis 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.
- fra 3mo agoI’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. 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-know-how-to-start-a-business-when-launching-nvidia.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...
- threatofrain 3mo agoNobody 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.
- motbus3 3mo agothey are totally focusing on making those their internal products so they dont need sell ai to customers anymore. that's the future
- Closi 3mo agoThis 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 3mo ago[dead]
- looking-for-job 3mo ago[dead]
- scottydelta 3mo agoBased 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.
- interstice 3mo agoI wonder what the income distribution is like
- b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago90% of the wealth at the top 1%.
- consumer451 3mo agoWhat I find more interesting is how many people have left big orgs where they had major leadership roles, to become ICs at Anthropic.
- shimman 3mo agoYou'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 3mo agoI'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.
- muzani 3mo agoA 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.
- neuroelectron 3mo agoThey abandoned the dream of democratizing sectors of the market by ignoring regulations to democratizing knowledge by ignoring copyright.
- mynegation 3mo ago“Emmet Shear, Twitch, OpenAI - former”. I would not be surprised if the whole site was made for this punchline.
- deadbabe 3mo agoIMO 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.
- worldthruword 3mo agoIf Product-Market fit for small companies take 3-4 years and AI can streamroll you by coming from behind, it makes sense to join the big boys rather than trying to finetune your creation in the hope of making something big.
- deadbabe 3mo agoYup. Capitalism is a dark forest now. If you try to do anything really interesting, big players will take you out fast and take over the market. Any business that relies on loudly marketing itself to wide audiences is at risk. The only viable business path now is niche domains with limited visibility, B2B sales. No social media presence, no website, just quiet business deals being done in exchange for goods or services that is all under the radar of megacorps. In tech this is now virtually impossible as all useful services that could be provided have already been provided in some form by now. There are no low or mid hanging fruit, everything is now very high up.
- nimishpatel19 2mo ago[flagged]
- llmslave 3mo agoBootstrapped companies make more sense now
- hsaliak 3mo agoThis graph biases outcomes (A| O) it would be interessting to have an others.. so we can view the whole picture
- low_tech_punk 3mo agoAccording to the stats in this article https://www.ycombinator.com/investors https://www.ycombinator.com/investors, we can estimate 98.5% of the founders are not in OpenAI or Anthropic.
- whitelimetea 3mo ago[dead]
- dominotw 3mo agoalternate title: Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
- nickysielicki 3mo agoThe 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.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoSilicon 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
- greggh 3mo agoThe wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round...
- sochowski 3mo agothis has got to be one of the most unclear and misleading sankeys i've ever seen
- sochowski 3mo agothis has gotta be one of the most unclear and misleading sankey diagrams i've ever seen
- tptacek 3mo agoThe word "mostly" doesn't belong in this title, because YC has funded over 5,000 companies, and this page accounts for 100 founders.
- dgellow 3mo agoWhatever 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
- palmotea 3mo 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. It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).
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- dgellow 3mo agoInvestment from VC and wealth funds is going pretty much only to AI projects. The massive capital expenditure we are currently seeing is going to AI infrastructure (HBM has pretty much no use case outside of LLMs and a few niche industries). It’s real money being allocated to a single bet
- randusername 3mo agoWell estimates claim AI may contribute 50-75% of US GDP growth. Which is confusing because we're spending 2% of US GDP on AI. I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore. I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.
- low_tech_punk 3mo agoIs there a selection bias? 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 https://www.ycombinator.com/investors
- kingkawn 3mo agoI bet this easy cash coke binge will last forever!
- cliglot 3mo agoI’ve been in a bit of creative/intellectual rut the last few years, but before that there were a handful of things that intrigued me in the last 5-10 years. Most recently, I became interested in the field of photonics/optics, particularly in the field of novel optical communications research. I’ve had mild interests in things like Biology and History since I was a child. The latter particularly hooked me a few years back. Neuroscience is a pretty cool one as well. The human brain is of course one of the most fascinating pieces of hardware in existence and understanding it (to whatever level we currently can) is incredibly interesting to me. At one point I thought about going into security research, but now that everyone and their mother is headed that direction, it’s become less feasible. Unfortunately I don’t even have a bachelors degree, and most of the fields are research heavy and not very accessible to hobbyists, so my actual interaction with these things remains relegated to reading papers/pop sci articles/etc.
- dieselgate 3mo agoDon't forget the study of neuroscience is much larger than just the human brain. Many other target organisms are studied e.g. fruit fly and are much more thoroughly understood on a fundamental level. Respectfully, when people want to understand the human brain they usually intend to study sociology or psychology rather than neuroscience. Although, of course, neuroscience is applicable to human brains as well.
- asdff 3mo agoEvery neuron in the fly brain has been mapped recently. It is an amazing model system to work with. A couple weeks generation time (imagine implications for crossing and growing up mutants). Not just in neuro either. Better than working on mice too. IRB doesn't care about how you decapitate your flies.
- riazrizvi 3mo agoIt speaks to me of these fascinating Jungian shadows, where a thing/person has a front claiming to do their thing and in some non-obvious way they facilitate the opposite. YC mints companies, founders, it disrupts. Its shadow feeds your disruptive moves into SV's establishment tier, and selectively shuts down efforts, and moves people into its favored buckets of enterprise.
- ZiiS 3mo agoAny way to see the full context; i.e. the founders who didn't end up on OpenAI/Anthropic?
- ZiiS 3mo ago"Mostly" means less then 1% now?
- laidoffamazon 3mo agoI’ve always been fascinated (and angry) at people that just don’t have trouble passing or getting interviews
- georgehotz 3mo agoThings from YC never really were independent companies, I think it's more clear to view all of YC as one company. The separate entity thing is mostly a trick so they can book revenue to themselves as real revenue. Look, we have 37 other YC companies paying for our product it's so popular and successful. Hits different if you view it as a single company, imagine AT&T promoting their internal customer service software, used by 37 divisions of AT&T it must be good!
- eaenki 3mo agothe only high iq kid in this comment section basides me is right
- tantalor 3mo agoCherry picking data and poor choices in presentation.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]