Three weeks ago, an engineer named Calvin French-Owen, who worked on one of OpenAI’s most promising new products, resigned from the company.
He just published a fascinating blog post on what it was like to work there for a year, including the sleepless sprint to build Codex. That’s OpenAI’s new coding agent that competes with tools like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code.
French-Owen said he didn’t leave because of any “drama,” but because he wants to get back to being a startup founder. He was a co-founder of customer data startup Segment, which was bought by Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion.
Some of what he revealed about the OpenAI culture would surprise no one, but other observations combat some misconceptions about the company. (He could not be immediately reached for comment.)
Fast growth: OpenAI grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people in the year he was there, he wrote.
The LLM model maker certainly has reasons for such hiring. It is the fastest-growing consumer product ever, and its competitors are also growing fast. In March, it said that ChatGPT had over 500 million active users and climbing quickly.
Chaos: “Everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc.,” French-Owen wrote.
