Investors aren’t just funding ideas anymore. They’re staking bets on people.
Indeed, the AI talent wars are abound. In the last few months, we’ve seen Meta try to poach Mira Murati’s team with billion-dollar comp packages. We’ve seen entire companies — like Scale AI — funded as talent plays. And while Microsoft has scooped up more than 20 AI engineers from Google’s DeepMind research lab, Google is paying “garden leave” for former AI employees to spend a year out of the workforce, preventing them from being lured away by competing firms.
In the AI race, the founder and the team they’ve carefully curated are the moat. And it makes sense, to a point — losing your technical lead could cost fortunes in long-term advantage.
This begs the question: Are we in the midst of a shift from startup investing to pedigree investing?
A widely cited statistic — the origins of which are ambiguous — is that 90% of startups fail. Often, this failure is the result of bad product-market fit, not enough cash, fierce competition, or simply the wrong team. Interestingly, a CB Insights report from 2014 found “not the right team” to be among the top three reasons of startup failure; by 2021, perhaps as founders grew to understand the make-or-break of a killer team, this reason was demoted to seventh place.
Enter, question two: Is investing in good talent, who will make it work one way or another, really so bad?
Maybe not. In a field where the underlying tech is evolving faster than business models can keep up, it’s not unreasonable to prioritize executional horsepower over go-to-market precision. Especially when the product might need to be reimagined every six months to keep pace.
Of course, a carte blanche raises risks of its own — whether those risks are any greater than the usual startup gamble is still up for debate.
Thinking Machines’ closure of $2 billion with no disclosed product, no financials, and a board structure that gives Mira Murati unilateral control is just one hallmark of the new normal for raising capital in AI.
But what happens when the founder is the company, and the company doesn’t work? For some critics, this moonshot check might be reminiscent of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s and Meg Whitman’s Quibi, which raised $1.75B before ever acquiring users. At that scale, investment becomes less about due diligence and more about faith.
At the same time, there are myriad examples of fail-then-fly: Evan Williams’ Odeo fizzled, but he co-founded Twitter (X); Reid Hoffman’s Social Net flopped, and then he built LinkedIn; Sam Altman’s YC-funded Loopt failed to gain user traction, but we all know how that story ends (wild success with OpenAI). Even Elon Musk’s first attempt at branding a company as X.com failed.
Ergo… in founders we trust?
—The Editors
