What's the So What? The Talent Food Chain in 2024

What’s the So What in 100 Words?

In the marine life food chain, bigger is better: larger fish such as great white sharks eat smaller fish such as squid and tuna.

In the Talent Food Chain, this dynamic reverses: smaller, higher-flying "It Companies" feast on talent from prior generations of (now larger) It Companies.

Entering this century, Microsoft wore the It Company Crown. Then, in roughly 5-year cycles, the Crown transferred hands: it passed to Google in ~2003, then to Facebook in ~2008; then to Uber & Airbnb in ~2013; and finally, to Stripe in ~2018.

Using 2023 hiring data from across LinkedIn 's membership, OpenAI and Anthropic are the clear It Company Crown-holders as we now begin 2024. Both are devouring talent from their predecessors Stripe , Google , and Meta .

And who are the next It Companies? We don't know yet, but the talent flows data will tell us. Let's stay closely tuned for who starts to eat OpenAI and Anthropic talent as the Talent Food Chain evolution rolls on.

So What’s the Talent Food Chain?

We’re all familiar with the marine food chain: Big fish eat smaller ones. Large great white sharks eat smaller sharks, who eat tuna, who eat smaller fish, who eat zooplankton, who eat phytoplankton etc. There’s a clear size-driven hierarchy of who eats who, where bigger is almost always better.

The tech world also has a food chain - the Talent Food Chain - and its hierarchy is also size-driven.

But with the Talent Food Chain, the hierarchy works in exactly the opposite direction.

Newer, smaller, higher-flying It Companies eat the prior generation of older, larger It Companies. Who eat the prior generation. And so on.

Smaller, higher-flying It Companies eat talent from prior generations of now larger It Companies.

There are many ways to measure competition between two companies - e.g., comparing market shares/caps or user/revenue size and growth - but I love the simplicity of looking at the direction of talent flows: It Companies hire far more than they lose vs. their top competitors, period.

As my LinkedIn tenure evolved from 2010 to 2022, our hiring data showed an evolution of It Companies. At the turn of the 21st century, Microsoft was the defining It Company; who then started getting eaten by Google ; who got eaten by Facebook ; who got eaten by Uber and Airbnb (FYI, they're the least clear-cut Crown-Holders here); who got eaten by Stripe .

Several folks have built their careers by following this exact Talent Food Chain, vaulting every 4 or 5 years. Using rough years, they joined Microsoft in the late 90s, then Google in ~2003, then Facebook in ~2008, then Uber or Airbnb in ~2013, and finally they joined Stripe in ~2018.

So What's our 2024 Talent Food Chain?

Let’s start with Stripe, our most recent It Company

Using talent flows data from LinkedIn Talent Insights - a powerful product our Business Analytics/Insights team conceived back in 2011 - the best place to start exploring is with Stripe , the defining It Company starting roughly five years ago.

Using data across the full 12 months of 2023 - sorted by who is eating Stripe the most - Stripe's talent flows are pasted below. Hires are the number of new employees they hired from each company; Departures are the number of existing employees who departed. To pick a specific example from the third row below as an explainer, Stripe hired 24 employees from Google and lost 18 employees to Google in 2023; they’re winning 4 new hires for every 3 hires they lose, a pretty close competition.

Stripe Talent Flows 2023

Perhaps to nobody's surprise, the data shows OpenAI and Anthropic are eating Stripe the most, making them the new It Company Crown-holders.

This makes sense given the explosion of Gen AI and LLM since OpenAI's ChatGPT launched publicly in late November 2022. In addition, Stripe is losing some talent to Google (we’ll come back to this one below), Notion (reinventing productivity, and my favourite product in the world), Snowflake (the data cloud disruptor), Meta (although Stripe is still winning talent almost 3:1), and 3 FinTech companies in Mercury , Square , and Airwallex . As a quick Note here, "Stealth Startup" isn't a single company, it's a composite term used by start-ups whose names are not yet publicly available.

Let’s now turn to OpenAI and Anthropic, our new It Companies

We know they’re both eating Stripe; let’s now see who else they’re eating; starting with OpenAI , our #1 2024 It Company.

OpenAI Talent Flows 2023

OpenAI is primarily eating from 3 of the prior It Companies - Google , Stripe , and Meta - with zero 2023 losses against any of them.

This is the perfect representation of the Talent Food Chain at work.

Today's It Company does much of its hiring from It Company predecessors.

OpenAI gets to bring in folks with recent relevant experience; who bring in even more folks; and so on and so on as the cycle continues.

Open AI is also hiring at a reasonable scale from Twitter and Retool , more surprising news to me. Not shown in the graphic, the next few companies include 6 hires from both Microsoft and Apple (the two most valuable companies in the world at the time of publishing this piece).

At the end of this article, we'll come back to who OpenAI is losing talent to.

Anthropic Talent Flows 2023

Anthropic REALLY likes to hire from Stripe ; which isn't surprising since their Head of Product, Head of Engineering, and Head of Sales are all from Stripe.

Given Anthropic spun out of OpenAI in 2021, I'm surprised to see it's not hiring more from its larger "parent": lower down than the graphic above shows, LinkedIn data shows 1 hire and 1 departure each in 2023. Perhaps that's a positive sign for OpenAI that they're not being eaten at scale by Anthropic (yet)?

And now let’s turn back to Stripe to see who they’re eating

OpenAI and Anthropic both like to eat from Stripe , the previous It Company Crown-holder. So who does Stripe like to eat from?

Stripe Talent Flows 2023

In the iconic film "Wall Street," Blue Horseshoe loves Annacott Steel.

In today's tech world, Stripe loves Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) .

And still likes Google and Meta a lot too.

The Talent Food Chain where one It Company eats prior It Companies continues.

So What’s up with Google and Meta, prior holders of the It Company Championship Crown?

So Stripe is eating Google and Meta - two prior It Companies. Now let's see how Google and Meta have been dining in 2023.

Google Talent Flows 2023

Meta Talent Flows 2023

They're competing actively with each other*, as well as with Microsoft ; the first three It Company Crown-holders from 2000 through the mid-2010s are all still duking it out with each other entering 2024!

And, unfortunately for Meta, some of the historical Talent Food Chain sequencing is now being reversed.

• Meta is losing badly to Google (for every hire from Google, they're losing 2.1 employees) and is also losing to Microsoft (for every hire from Microsoft, they're losing 1.1 employees). In Facebook 's heyday of 2008-16 - roughly the Obama Administration - the flows would have been massively the other way around, so it's worth noting the reversal over time.
• Meta is also losing heavily against TikTok : they've lost 358 employees in the past 12 months and hired only 39 (almost a 10:1 ratio).
• Meta is losing against Apple too - to a surprising degree - losing >150 employees at an almost 6:1 departures:hires ratio.
• Throw in just slightly losing to the Amazon / Amazon Web Services (AWS) combo as well, and Meta's talent flows invovle more being eaten than doing the eating with regard to their top tech competitors.

Google's news is more encouraging, although is not all rosy.

• In addition to beating both Meta and Microsoft , they're hiring 4.5 new employees for every departure with Amazon Web Services (AWS) , and 2.4 with Amazon . And about 2:1 against Salesforce too.
• However, they're losing to Apple , with 2.2 departures for every hire they make.
• And TikTok is also (b)eating them, hiring almost 7 Google employees for every employee they lose.

[*Note for the eagle-eyed: you'll see the Google and Meta numbers on each other's screenshots are not identical: it has to do with whether to include Subsidiaries (e.g., YouTube and Instagram/WhatsApp, etc.). The "So What" doesn't change so I haven't spent any time data sleuthing the precise differences]

Before we get to explore who are the next It Companies, what are other noteworthy talent flow stories?

In Big Tech:

• Apple is winning talent by a wide margin against Microsoft , Google , Meta , and Amazon , but losing more than 2:1 to both Tesla and NVIDIA . They've also hired >140 people from Intel Corporation and >120 people from Qualcomm in the past 12 months, highlighting the scale of their proprietary chip investments.
• Sticking with chips, NVIDIA has hired >230 employees from Intel Corporation (against only 2 departures), almost 70 from Qualcomm (7 departures), and almost 40 from AMD (5 departures).
• Moving to cars, Tesla is losing about 1.6 employees to Rivian for every employee they hire (121 departures, 75 hires), and about 1.2 employees to Lucid Motors (60 departures, 48 hires). They're also losing talent to Fisker, with 47 departures to only 2 hires. And are even with Ford Motor Company (24 departures, 23 hires) and winning against General Motors (27 hires, 6 departures).
• Microsoft is beating Amazon in the battle for Seattle supremacy, besting both AWS by a 1.9:1 ratio and Amazon by a 1.3:1 ratio.
• TikTok is beating all the big US tech companies in a BIG WAY: they hired >900 employees from the combo of Meta , Amazon , and Google alone in 2023 while losing <100 folks in the other direction.

In Enterprise:

• Salesforce , one of the original SaaS OGs, is losing by a lot to newer SaaS superstars ServiceNow (164 departures to 25 hires, so a 6:1 ratio) and Workday (102 departures to 8 hires, so an almost 13:1 ratio). Interestingly, Workday is beating pretty much all its major competitors, including ServiceNow (15 hires vs 10 departures).
• Finally, Snowflake and Databricks are hiring magnitudes more from Big Tech than from each other: in 2023, only 13 Databrickers joined Snowflake, and only 18 Snowflakers joined Databricks.

In others high-up in the It Company rankings:

• From our It Companies Crown-holders that preceded Stripe, Uber is winning - often by a wide margin - against all the major tech players, including more than 2:1 against DoorDash (I haven't dug in to understand how many are full-time employees vs. drivers).
• The same pattern is playing out with Airbnb - a convincing winning record against all major tech companies - and they even squeak out a winning record against Uber too (7 hires to 6 departures).
• Notion has 11 new hires each from Stripe, Slack, and Airtable.
• Figma's top 3 sources of hire are Meta, Google, and Stripe, all with 10+ hires in 2023. After an understandable 2023 hiatus, I expect to see Adobe higher up on the list in 2024 ;)

So Who’s shaping up to be the next It Company?

OpenAI and Anthropic are the clear It Companies right now.

They're the biggest and baddest great white sharks, gobbling up pretty much whichever fish they want right now.

But can we research who's beginning to nibble away at them? As a way to predict who'll start to bite larger chunks from them over time, discovering the next It Company(ies) to supplant OpenAI and Anthropic over the next 2-4 years.

The short answer is not really. At least, not yet.

OpenAI Talent Flows 2023

These flows are sorted by Departures. After Google DeepMind - where OpenAI is winning 3:1, Neural Forge AI LLC is a consulting firm so doesn't count. And losing 2 hires in a year to TraceSurfer (I think it's a data anomaly), xAI (X and Elon Musk's LLM), or Cohere (perhaps the most legit of these threats) isn't enough data to feel like a trend.

Anthropic has lost 2 employees to Google DeepMind and otherwise, it's all onesies (one departure to any given company), so it's not even worth pasting their visual.

Finally, who is competing for talent with OpenAI & Anthropic?

Given how few folks are leaving OpenAI and Anthropic right now, a better proxy than talent flows would be to know which companies are interviewing a lot of overlapping candidates with both these companies. And, even more useful, which companies are consistently closing candidates who also have OpenAI and Anthropic offers.

We'd all love to know who they are! Feel free to add comments or DM me directly if you're seeing this happen at your company or companies you know (or tell your VC friends, I'm sure they'd LOVE to know these companies!).

The only company I'm aware of is Speak , a startup inventing the new way we learn via an AI tutor. I know from spending some time with Connor Zwick (Co-founder & CEO) and Colton Gyulay (COO) that several of their most recent hires have turned down OpenAI and/or Anthropic offers. I don't know nearly enough to predict whether Speak will take the It Company Crown in a few years, but I love what they're doing and am confident they'll continue to (hyper)grow and thrive. Glean is another AI-driven company building clear momentum - already hiring from several It Companies - although I don't have any data on candidate overlap and hiring wins compared to OpenAI and Anthropic .

In Closing

The Talent Food Chain has evolved in the opposite direction of the bigger-is-badder marine life food chain.

In the Talent Food Chain, smaller is-badder as each It Company Crown-holder feeds off its larger It Company predecessors.

Today, the It Company Crown or Championship belt currently sits with OpenAI and Anthropic, following in the esteemed lineage of Stripe, Uber and Airbnb, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (in reverse chronological order).

Time will tell who's next in line. But, thanks to LinkedIn 's powerful talent flows data, we'll be able to easily track who's eating larger and larger chunks of OpenAI and Anthropic talent. And then we'll be able to crown our next-generation It Company!