“If you look at LinkedIn data or talent data, a couple of years ago you saw that Anthropic was probably on average attracting more interesting talent than OpenAI. And if you look at churn, Anthropic is churning engineers at a lot lower rate than OpenAI. And it is a combination of the people and who they're able to attract and what they're able to build, but it's also a reflection of the company and the culture.”
sputnikintelligence.com
David Weisburd asked whether talent magnets win because engineers pick winners or because top engineers build them. Jerry Ye says both, using early Anthropic versus OpenAI hiring and retention data to show how talent data can reveal a company's culture.
…to venture, like who's on your cap table, right? If you have a top-tier venture fund, there's a signal there. And it's also the same as if you're able to attract someone that has already had an IPO at Facebook and then decided to go to OpenAI and now they join your startup. That's saying something.
…talent, arguably even more important than venture capital. Do you think that it's the fact that these engineers are making the best choices on the companies that's driving that? Or do you think that the engineers themselves, the top engineers, are the ones that are building these amazing companies?
A little bit of both, right? So the team definitely makes a huge difference, but the company itself, culture-wise, also matters too, right? Like you could have a company that's attracting top engineers or top product people, and they're churning employees like crazy, right? So that's actually another signal that you might want to look at as well. And another example of this is, I think, if you just looked at LinkedIn data or talent data, that a couple of years ago, you saw that Anthropic was probably on average attracting more interesting talent than OpenAI, right? And if you look at it from a churn perspective, and it might be a reflection of their valuation increases now, but if you look at churn, Anthropic is churning engineers at a lot lower rate than OpenAI. And so it is a combination of the people and who they're able to attract and what they're able to build, but it's also a reflection of the company and the culture, what they're able to accomplish.
Take me back to this because you noticed this signal, this Anthropic signal before Anthropic became Anthropic today. Tell me about that. What exactly were you seeing in the data?
So I think anyone that was looking at talent signal a couple years ago would have seen that on average, Anthropic was hiring people with more, in terms of like a pedigree type signals, like better schools, better experience. And on average, that actually had them surpassing OpenAI at some point. So…
you're aware of this inflection with Anthropic having better talent before OpenAI. Maybe you could double click on that. Quantify what exactly does that mean?