Founders quit profitable YC startup, went salary-less for 2 years to warn on AI risk
jeremiecharris · x · 2026-11-11
Jeremie Harris recounts how he and Edouard Harris quit a profitable YC-backed startup — the world's largest income share agreement marketplace — in 2020 after reading the scaling laws and GPT-3 papers, convinced AI would become history's most important national security problem. They went nearly two years without salary, declined external funding to stay independent for 6 years, turned down frontier lab offers, and spun up a for-profit business just to fund their efforts warning the U.S. government. Posted as a rebuttal to Ed Zitron's skepticism.
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