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Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah
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Everyone has a theory about who builds the next great AI company.

Ex-OpenAI researchers. Ex-Stripe engineers. Two undergrads from Waterloo. Nobody agrees on the pattern — but LinkedIn actually knows.

Looked at the fastest-growing AI startups and the résumés stacked behind them. The pattern was not what I expected.

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1
Real
Across Anthropic and OpenAI, 1,823 employees previously worked at Google. Meta + Facebook combined: 1,681. But Anthropic's #2 feeder is Stripe (263) — not a Big Tech giant.
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2
Illustrative
Most frontier-lab hires come from 500–5,000-person companies — not tiny startups, not FAANG. The sweet spot for AI talent is the company that scaled once already.
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3
Illustrative
Ex-Stripe, ex-Airbnb, and ex-pre-IPO-Meta employees are founding or joining AI startups at ~6x the rate of peers from legacy Big Tech. The next Mafia is already visible.
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