Founder moves
Who's joining, leaving, starting up.
- Lee McIntire takes Fermi CEO role as Texas AI power campus moves to buildout
Lee McIntire inherits Fermi's binding TensorWave lease, 17-gigawatt Project Matador plan and unresolved board dispute.
- Nikita Bier steps back after 400 days; Zuckerberg and Bosworth keep shipping
Bier called his 400-day X tenure a "24/7 job." Zuckerberg and Bosworth have spent nearly two decades shipping through Meta's technical failures, political crises and regulatory punishment.
- Atoms hires Gautam Gupta as CFO after $1.7B funding round
Gupta is leaving venture firm A* to oversee finances across Travis Kalanick's food, mining and transportation automation businesses.
- Nikita Bier steps back from leading product at X
The founder of tbh and Gas will remain an adviser after spending just over 13 months directing product at Elon Musk's social platform.
- Naomi Bashkansky left OpenAI for Conduit's telepathy bet
The former alignment researcher joined a San Francisco team training models on thousands of hours of non-invasive neural recordings.
- Yann LeCun joins 224 Ventures as AI investment firm launches with $100M-plus
The AI-focused investment operation is launching with more than $100 million in assets under management, according to Bloomberg.
- Anthropic appoints Tino Cuellar as chief global affairs officer
Anthropic says the former California Supreme Court justice will lead policy, strategic international engagement and government relationships worldwide.
- OpenAI hires reverse-engineering veteran Halvar Flake for cyber and efficiency work
The incoming OpenAI researcher previously founded security startup zynamics and profiling-software maker Optimyze, selling both companies.
- Adi Prasad brings Tesla and CloudKitchens lessons to Matter's AI factories
The Tesla, Apple, CloudKitchens and Rivian veteran is applying first-principles engineering and zero-based budgeting inside a Sunnyvale plant.
- Andi Peng leaves humans& six months after its $480 million seed
The former Anthropic researcher was one of five founders behind the frontier AI lab's bet on collaboration-focused models.
- Scale AI appoints Francis deSouza CEO for enterprise AI push
The former Google Cloud COO takes over on August 10th as Scale AI expands its applications business across enterprises and governments.
- Anthropic backs petition for tools to pace automated AI development
CEO Dario Amodei and several co-founders joined 1,132 AI workers seeking a U.S.-supported international coordination effort.
- Rob Witoff returns to Coinbase as chief technology officer
The Bitcoin veteran who first joined Coinbase in 2014 when the platform ran on Heroku now leads its technology organization.
- Kurt Mackey steps down as Fly.io CEO in agent-compute reset
Former Docker CEO Scott Johnston takes over as Fly.io raises $25 million and makes its Sprites infrastructure the center of the business.
- ChatGPT wrote her “resignation.” She says she never meant to quit.
Run The World cofounder Xuan Jiang testified that she asked ChatGPT to reject a roughly $380,000 buyout, but the AI‑generated email said she was stepping down, which the company now cites in its summary‑judgment motion.
- Merrill Lutsky leaves Cursor after 6.5 years building Graphite
Lutsky says he's taking an extended break to travel and pursue non‑tech passions after a decade of nonstop startup work.
- Amnon Shashua plans to step down as Mobileye CEO after successor search
The founder would remain a director and has been offered the chair role as Mobileye expands into robotaxis and humanoid robotics.
- Skyfall plans to buy a small business for an AI CEO test
Maluuba founders Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman plan to spend up to $1 million and publish the experiment's wins and failures.
- Stripe and Advent bid $53 billion for PayPal during Lores turnaround
PayPal's new CEO must weigh a months-old operating reset against a $60.50-a-share bid that directors already view as inadequate.
- Toni Schneider takes Bluesky CEO job for the long haul
The former Automattic CEO says Bluesky's next phase is smaller, more private spaces across the AT Protocol network.
- Sebastian Jimenez is paying Rilla employees $18,000 to live near the office
The Rilla CEO ties the stipend to a 72-hour, in-office culture built around speed, sales coaching and physical proximity.
- VulcanForms hires Matthew Rose to take its manufacturing pitch deeper into national security
The Snowflake public-sector veteran joins weeks after a CTO hire and months after VulcanForms closed $220 million in new financing.
- Ohalo Hires Syngenta Seeds Veteran Justin Wolfe to Commercialize True Potato Seed
Wolfe will run commercialization as David Friedberg's plant-breeding company pushes Boosted Potato hybrids into farmer adoption.
- David Holz's Midjourney scanner video shows the machine, not the proof
Midjourney's new hardware tour makes the ultrasound spa feel real while leaving its regulatory and clinical claims unresolved.