Startups.RIP/Where are YC founders now?
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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
Where are YC founders now?
Who they are & what they built
Last updated: July 14, 2026.
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Still running OpenAI as CEO.
Steered OpenAI for one extraordinary weekend in 2023.
Applied evaluations
Worked on strategy, then moved to Google Workspace GenAI.
Member of Technical Staff
MTS on prototyping team
Product engineer building Claude APIs/SDKs & platform
LinkedIn post + Anthropic/Stainless acq blogs ↗
Moved from startup operations into OpenAI in 2026.
Member of Technical Staff
MTS on search evals, RAG & agentic AI
Working on Anthropic's compute team with Tom Brown.
Worked on post-training and alignment, then founded Linzumi.
Distinguished Engineer leading robotics & next-gen consumer hardware
Led technical work on the GPT-3 API and Applied AI.
Co-founder, Chief Compute Officer.
Claude Code TL / Member of Technical Staff
Research Engineer; core contributor to o1 and GPT-4V
MTS on core products
OpenAI announcement + LinkedIn ↗
TUI rendering for Claude Code
HN self-comment + attribution ↗
Member of Technical Staff
Showing 20 of 105 founders
Roles Then & Now
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Once CEOs & CTOs, everyone is a Member of Technical Staff now.
Member of Technical Staff63· 60%
Other / undisclosed11· 10%
Research & Safety10· 10%
Go-to-Market & Partnerships8· 8%
Leadership7· 7%
Data, Product & Design6· 6%
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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