A pattern is emerging among people who have already succeeded. They’re rolling up their sleeves again, apparently for fear of missing out on AI’s watershed moment and, presumably, the irresistible lure of making even more money, potentially a lot more.

Tom Blomfield, who co-founded GoCardless and Monzo before spending 4.5 years advising founders as a partner at Y Combinator Group, announced Monday that he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s IT team, not as an executive, but as a member of the technical staff.

He’s not the only one doing that kind of move. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined Anthropic as chief product officer in 2024, and Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who went on to lead AI at Tesla and founded his own company, Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May, framing the decision almost identically to Blomfield’s, writing that “the next few years on the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.”

Not everyone joins someone else’s lab. Chamath Palihapitiya, the “SPAC King” who has mostly stuck to the boardroom and all things “All In” since leaving Facebook in 2011, just took on his first full-time operating role in more than a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, his entrepreneurial AI coding startup, which he announced a couple of weeks ago alongside a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures. Wrote Palihapitiya in X: “I am convinced that what we are building now is even more important, so there was no decision to make except to be fully committed.”

Similarly, Eric Wu, who ran Opendoor for a decade before stepping back in 2023, recently launched NavigateAI, an AI “co-pilot” for construction workers, with $25 million in seed funding. Wu told me directly on a recent call about his decision to dive into an AI startup: “I knew that if I looked back in 10 years and didn’t do something related to it, I would probably regret it.”

The clearest sign of how willing people who have already “made it” are to work on what they consider the early stages of AI might be the job title itself. “Technical staff member” is the deliberately flat, non-hierarchical label that Anthropic and OpenAI use for almost all members of their technical teams, regardless of seniority. It’s the same title Blomfield is taking.

It’s also the title Peter Bailis took on in March, just months after becoming Workday’s CTO, a role that oversees AI strategy at a business with $8 billion in revenue. Bailis lasted less than a year before trading him for a spot at Anthropic.