You are not too big for a job

There's a weird stigma in tech that once you've founded something, going back to being an employee is some kind of downgrade. Tell that to the co-founders of Instagram and Monzo, both of whom now work at Anthropic in roles that don't come with a founder title attached.

Mike Krieger, who built Instagram before Facebook bought it for a billion dollars back in 2012, is now Anthropic's Chief Product Officer. Tom Blomfield, who started Monzo and turned it into one of the UK's biggest digital banks, joined as an advisor and has been doing hands-on product work rather than sitting in some advisory-board sinecure collecting equity and staying out of the way.

What's notable here isn't the career move itself, it's the mindset behind it. Both of these guys have already proven they can build companies from nothing. They don't need the validation of a title, and they clearly don't need the money in the way a first-time founder might. So the fact that they chose to embed themselves in someone else's org chart says something about what they actually wanted next: proximity to interesting problems, not a corner office.

Anthropic, for its part, gets to absorb a decade of hard-won product instincts without having to acquire a company or negotiate an earnout. That's a pretty good deal when the alternative is hiring a career product manager who's never had to make payroll or watch a growth curve die. The lesson for other former founders drifting between advisory roles and vague 'stealth mode' isn't subtle: sometimes the most useful thing you can do is show up and do the job.