7 ms·

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 me

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.

interstice 3mo ago
I wonder what the income distribution is like
- b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago
  90% of the wealth at the top 1%.
consumer451 3mo 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.
- shimman 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
      - shimman 3mo ago
        Nah, we knew back in the 90s that the tech industry had open disdain against American workers (pressuring congress to expand immigration to depress wages) and children (supporting charter schools while attacking children (yes when you attack public schools you're attacking the only people that benefit from it: children)). Not too mention all the horrid, extremely hostile business pursuits we saw from companies like Oracle + MSFT + Apple. SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.
        lacksconfidence 3mo ago
        Having been there i have to respectfully disagree. Probably because, as far as i can tell, you are warping their intentions to be what your intentions would be if you did what they did.
    - worldthruword 3mo ago
      I sometimes think, speeding up the Red Queen hypothesis to accelerate Cambrian Explosion by printing money from the top so that high-agency people would develop new products and services to capture more of the newly created money is a good thing?
    - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
      I just don't understand how to connect this analysis to what's happening. What OpenAI and Anthropic both say, loudly and repeatedly, is that they're working on one of the most impactful technical problems in the history of humanity. The reason they have lots of money is that lots of investors believe they're right. Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.
- amazingamazing 3mo ago
  Is it interesting? They want to be rich.
  - consumer451 3mo 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. edit: not just CTOs and CPOs, I mean John freakin Jumper, who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC at Anthropic. I find this whole trend extremely interesting.
    - lacksconfidence 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - cliglot 3mo 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.
      - 3mo ago
- sesteel 3mo 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.
  - consumer451 3mo ago
    > I came out of retirement just to watch the spectacle. While I certainly have no hand in steering the ship, agentic building brought me out of hibernation/mild depression. I am neither young, nor rich. However, I still had lots of product ideas, and now I am able to create and test them in days. And yes, I am actually making sales now. I got into this early at Sonnet 3.5 release time, so I went through initial AI psychosis almost two years ago, but still today, I am more excited to wake up and work than I’ve ever been in my life.
- mschuster91 3mo ago
  Probably because of stock options. Assuming the bubble bursts after the vesting period, they stand to make a looooooot of money on paper.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- dist-epoch 3mo ago
  Participating in the creation of the Singleton is going down in the history books. Major leadership role at BigOrg is not.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  I would do that in a heartbeat if I was in that situation. Having a major leadership role at a big company is kind of a slog. Getting a chance to go back to a fast growing startup as an IC in a way that will only benefit their career (ex-Anthropic or ex-OpenAI makes your resume gold plated) is an easy choice. They can go back to any job they want after this. I think this might only be shocking to some people who have forgotten that many people in these positions actually enjoy working on hard things and being surrounded by other like minded people. If you’ve only worked in po-dunk startups or other companies where leadership looks like a Game of Thrones style fiefdom building game it’s harder to imagine executives who are smart, capable, and enjoy working hard. It’s pretty common in Silicon Valley despite all of the sneering here.
  - PaulRobinson 3mo ago
    I disagree. I'd immediately have a ton of questions for most ex-OpenAI and ex-Anthropic people as my default position would be "poor business/economics judgement in role, chose to ride a hype cycle, now sat in front of me for a reason". I'm not saying it's toxic to have it on your work history, but it's far from gold plated. They'd have work to do for me, and for many, many people in the industry, to prove that I'd want to work with them.
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      You are not in a position to hire them, let alone at a big interesting company. Forgive my bluntness, but your opinion doesn’t matter to their situation. When I say their resumes are gold-plated I mean at the companies they want to work at.
      - ryandrake 3mo ago
        I'm always skeptical about claims that working at any particular company "gold plates" your resume. They once said that about top FAANG companies, too, but today there are a lot of laid off FAANG employees today still underemployed or unable to find work.
      - PaulRobinson 3mo ago
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
  Do you have examples? Because besides the other reasons mentioned about huge earning potential and being part of an important moment in history, the not-so-hidden secret is that any management position below C-level and above small team manager is usually extremely shitty. You are responsible for cat herding but rarely get to make the decisions in the first place. There are very few people IMO who desire or excel at "mid-high level" management positions (again, levels from director to anything below CTO) - I've seen people who enjoy and are good at leading small teams, but people at the director level are either there because it's lucrative or with the hope to get to CTO level ASAP, but otherwise it's one of the worst jobs in the "stress to moments of enjoyment" ratio. So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.
- boshalfoshal 3mo ago
  I think most of HN can't logically arrive at this conclusion because they don't exactly buy into the premise that (1) (digital) AGI is a real concept, and will be achieved imminently (2) AGI will be world (and possibly more) changing. (3) Anthropic will be the one to do that, or at least capture a large part of it If you buy into all of these, which I'm assuming a lot of SV does at this point, then its kind of a no brainer to go to OpenAI or Anthropic. And optics wise it seems like Anthropic is "winning" right now, so thats the lab with the talent flow. If Anthropic actually creates a singleton, contributing to that is way more impactful than being CTO at some random company (though I may disagree that said singleton would treat equity holders any differently).
  - icepush 3mo ago
    Creation of a singleton seems at odds with point (3) you listed.
  - consumer451 3mo ago
    Agreed. We are like the myth(?) of the Central American natives, who supposedly could not "see" the conquistador ships... similar to the fact that most people appear to unable to visually comprehend what this means: elon-salute.gif. It is so hard to logically accept either possibility. I am there with everyone else. I wish I lived in boring times.
jgbuddy 3mo ago
Right, at this point its ~150 person cohorts, 4x a year. 105 is a drop in the bucket.
nerevarthelame 3mo ago
To reframe the silliness of this analysis, ~1% of the study population is Sam Altman founding OpenAI.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
What if out of 13000 there are no other cases where close to 100+ worked at the same company
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  Or, rather, the same two companies

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.

interstice 3mo ago

I wonder what the income distribution is like

b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago
90% of the wealth at the top 1%.

consumer451 3mo 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.

shimman 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - shimman 3mo ago
      Nah, we knew back in the 90s that the tech industry had open disdain against American workers (pressuring congress to expand immigration to depress wages) and children (supporting charter schools while attacking children (yes when you attack public schools you're attacking the only people that benefit from it: children)). Not too mention all the horrid, extremely hostile business pursuits we saw from companies like Oracle + MSFT + Apple. SV has always operated on exploitation of their workers, they just hid it well from the public.
      - lacksconfidence 3mo ago
        Having been there i have to respectfully disagree. Probably because, as far as i can tell, you are warping their intentions to be what your intentions would be if you did what they did.
  - worldthruword 3mo ago
    I sometimes think, speeding up the Red Queen hypothesis to accelerate Cambrian Explosion by printing money from the top so that high-agency people would develop new products and services to capture more of the newly created money is a good thing?
  - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
    I just don't understand how to connect this analysis to what's happening. What OpenAI and Anthropic both say, loudly and repeatedly, is that they're working on one of the most impactful technical problems in the history of humanity. The reason they have lots of money is that lots of investors believe they're right. Perhaps you've seen under their mask, and you know they're scamming the investors. After the NFT bubble it's a plausible hypothesis. But I don't know what it means to say that the mask just isn't there and it's naked pursuit of wealth.
amazingamazing 3mo ago
Is it interesting? They want to be rich.
- consumer451 3mo 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. edit: not just CTOs and CPOs, I mean John freakin Jumper, who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC at Anthropic. I find this whole trend extremely interesting.
  - lacksconfidence 3mo 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 3mo 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.
  - cliglot 3mo 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.
    - 3mo ago
sesteel 3mo 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.
- consumer451 3mo ago
  > I came out of retirement just to watch the spectacle. While I certainly have no hand in steering the ship, agentic building brought me out of hibernation/mild depression. I am neither young, nor rich. However, I still had lots of product ideas, and now I am able to create and test them in days. And yes, I am actually making sales now. I got into this early at Sonnet 3.5 release time, so I went through initial AI psychosis almost two years ago, but still today, I am more excited to wake up and work than I’ve ever been in my life.
mschuster91 3mo ago
Probably because of stock options. Assuming the bubble bursts after the vesting period, they stand to make a looooooot of money on paper.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dist-epoch 3mo ago
Participating in the creation of the Singleton is going down in the history books. Major leadership role at BigOrg is not.
Aurornis 3mo ago
I would do that in a heartbeat if I was in that situation. Having a major leadership role at a big company is kind of a slog. Getting a chance to go back to a fast growing startup as an IC in a way that will only benefit their career (ex-Anthropic or ex-OpenAI makes your resume gold plated) is an easy choice. They can go back to any job they want after this. I think this might only be shocking to some people who have forgotten that many people in these positions actually enjoy working on hard things and being surrounded by other like minded people. If you’ve only worked in po-dunk startups or other companies where leadership looks like a Game of Thrones style fiefdom building game it’s harder to imagine executives who are smart, capable, and enjoy working hard. It’s pretty common in Silicon Valley despite all of the sneering here.
- PaulRobinson 3mo ago
  I disagree. I'd immediately have a ton of questions for most ex-OpenAI and ex-Anthropic people as my default position would be "poor business/economics judgement in role, chose to ride a hype cycle, now sat in front of me for a reason". I'm not saying it's toxic to have it on your work history, but it's far from gold plated. They'd have work to do for me, and for many, many people in the industry, to prove that I'd want to work with them.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    You are not in a position to hire them, let alone at a big interesting company. Forgive my bluntness, but your opinion doesn’t matter to their situation. When I say their resumes are gold-plated I mean at the companies they want to work at.
    - ryandrake 3mo ago
      I'm always skeptical about claims that working at any particular company "gold plates" your resume. They once said that about top FAANG companies, too, but today there are a lot of laid off FAANG employees today still underemployed or unable to find work.
    - PaulRobinson 3mo ago
hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
Do you have examples? Because besides the other reasons mentioned about huge earning potential and being part of an important moment in history, the not-so-hidden secret is that any management position below C-level and above small team manager is usually extremely shitty. You are responsible for cat herding but rarely get to make the decisions in the first place. There are very few people IMO who desire or excel at "mid-high level" management positions (again, levels from director to anything below CTO) - I've seen people who enjoy and are good at leading small teams, but people at the director level are either there because it's lucrative or with the hope to get to CTO level ASAP, but otherwise it's one of the worst jobs in the "stress to moments of enjoyment" ratio. So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.
boshalfoshal 3mo ago
I think most of HN can't logically arrive at this conclusion because they don't exactly buy into the premise that (1) (digital) AGI is a real concept, and will be achieved imminently (2) AGI will be world (and possibly more) changing. (3) Anthropic will be the one to do that, or at least capture a large part of it If you buy into all of these, which I'm assuming a lot of SV does at this point, then its kind of a no brainer to go to OpenAI or Anthropic. And optics wise it seems like Anthropic is "winning" right now, so thats the lab with the talent flow. If Anthropic actually creates a singleton, contributing to that is way more impactful than being CTO at some random company (though I may disagree that said singleton would treat equity holders any differently).
- icepush 3mo ago
  Creation of a singleton seems at odds with point (3) you listed.
- consumer451 3mo ago
  Agreed. We are like the myth(?) of the Central American natives, who supposedly could not "see" the conquistador ships... similar to the fact that most people appear to unable to visually comprehend what this means: elon-salute.gif. It is so hard to logically accept either possibility. I am there with everyone else. I wish I lived in boring times.

jgbuddy 3mo ago

Right, at this point its ~150 person cohorts, 4x a year. 105 is a drop in the bucket.

nerevarthelame 3mo ago

To reframe the silliness of this analysis, ~1% of the study population is Sam Altman founding OpenAI.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

What if out of 13000 there are no other cases where close to 100+ worked at the same company

1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
Or, rather, the same two companies