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Life after the startup

See where YC founders go after their startup is acquired or shut down

Explore 1,841 startup post-mortems→

105

unique founder journeys

OpenAIAnthropic

Where are YC founders now?

STARTUP FOUNDEDWHERE THEY ARE NOW20052010201520202025OpenAI · 70Anthropic · 35
Each ribbon is one founder's journey. Hover over to see what they built and where they went. Did we get something wrong?

Who they are & what they built

Inclusive historical scope: current and former lab roles, acquisitions, team hires, one interim CEO, and one OpenAI-controlled affiliate. Public evidence checked through July 14, 2026.

Swipe to explore the table

YC founders who later joined OpenAI or Anthropic. Sortable by every column. Activate a column header to sort; activate it again to reverse the direction.
Abe Fetterman
Nomiku W15
OpenAI
current

Member of Technical Staff

LinkedIn ↗
Abhijeet Dwivedi
ZeroDown W19
OpenAI
current

Strategic deployment and special projects

Bio ↗
AMAdam Michalski
Partnered W21
OpenAI
current

Go-to-market

Profile ↗
Alex Karpenko
Midnox W12
OpenAI
current

Research Engineer; core contributor to o1 and GPT-4V

LinkedIn ↗
Alexei Karpenko
Midnox W12
OpenAI
current

MTS on core products

OpenAI announcement + LinkedIn ↗
Amey Chaugule
Denormalized S22
OpenAI
current

Member of Technical Staff

LinkedIn ↗
Andrew Ambrosino
Catch W19
OpenAI
current

Leads product/engineering for Codex desktop app

Bio ↗
Andrew Chen
Satchel S18
OpenAI
current

Leads technical work across Search, Answers, and Capabilities.

Bio ↗
Andrew Duberstein
Mercator S22
OpenAI
current

Data scientist

Profile ↗
Andrew Gibiansky
Voicery W18
Anthropic
current

Member of Technical Staff, Speech (audio/speech models)

LinkedIn ↗
Anish Agrawal
Chatter S23
OpenAI
current

io and agents (Member of Technical Staff)

Bio ↗
AHAnthony Humay
Raycaster F24
Anthropic
current

Joined in 2026 after leaving Raycaster.

Personal bio ↗
Arun Vijayvergiya
Fabric S16
OpenAI
current

Member of technical staff

Role profile ↗@arunv30 ↗
Axel Delafosse
Goosebump S17
OpenAI
current

Joined the Codex team in July 2026.

First-day post ↗@axeldelafosse ↗
Ben Firshman
Replicate W20
Anthropic
current

MTS on the Labs team

Personal X announcement + LinkedIn ↗
Benjamin Bolte
K-Scale Labs W24
OpenAI
current

MTS on midtraining & multimodal RL

Bio ↗@benjamin_bolte ↗
Bill Chen
RiskAngle S24
OpenAI
current

OpenAI startups/applied AI team on coding agents

Forbes Councils profile + TheOrg ↗
Bobby Meelu
Prompt S19
OpenAI
current

MTS on Codex

OpenAI GitHub (kmeelu-oai commits to codex) ↗
Brad Murray
Beeper S21
OpenAI
current

MTS on ChatGPT Engineering

LinkedIn announcement post ↗
Brian Brunner
Cheddar S14DataShare S23
OpenAI
current

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI

LinkedIn ↗

Showing 20 of 105 founders

Roles at the lab

What they do once they’re inside

OpenAI70Anthropic35

Each founder’s current or last-known role at the lab, normalized into functions. “Member of Technical Staff” includes engineering and the labs’ broad individual-contributor titles.

  • Member of Technical Staff63· 60%
  • Other / undisclosed11· 10%
  • Research & Safety10· 10%
  • Go-to-Market & Partnerships8· 8%
  • Leadership7· 7%
  • Product & Design4· 4%
  • Data & Analytics2· 2%

YC batches

Which batches fed the labs

Counting each YC chapter by batch year shows when these founders came through. A founder with two YC startups appears in both years.

  • 20051
  • 20060
  • 20071
  • 20081
  • 20092
  • 20103
  • 20114
  • 201211
  • 20135
  • 20142
  • 20153
  • 20165
  • 20177
  • 20188
  • 20198
  • 202013
  • 20218
  • 20227
  • 20236
  • 202414
  • 20251

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