Gabor Cselle, the former CEO and co-founder of Twitter challenger Pebble, has recently joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. According to his LinkedIn profile, Cselle has been with OpenAI since October and announced the move on X (formerly Twitter), stating that he would share more details about his work in due course, adding, "I've learned a lot already."
Cselle is an experienced entrepreneur. His first company, the mobile email startup reMail, which was based on Y Combinator, was acquired by Google. Subsequently, he founded the native advertising startup Namo Media, which was acquired by Twitter and later renamed X following Elon Musk's acquisition.
Before joining OpenAI, Cselle served as a group product manager at Twitter, overseeing the home timeline and user experience, and left Twitter in 2016. He then worked at Google as the head of an Area120 incubator spinoff project. In 2022, he collaborated with former Discord engineering lead Michael Greer to develop Pebble (initially named T2), a social platform that emphasized security and moderation. Although it built a highly engaged small community, it failed to achieve sustainable growth, and Pebble shut down last October, relaunching as a Mastodon instance in November.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's competitor Anthropic has also welcomed a new employee. Alex Rodrigues, the founder of autonomous trucking company Embark, took the company public via a SPAC merger in 2021 and sold it at a low price to Applied Intuition in 2023. He recently announced that he would be joining Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.
