The AI Talent War Is Over. Founders Won.

From 2023 to early 2025, the AI talent market was insane. Google was paying researchers $5-10 million per year to stay. OpenAI was offering equity packages worth tens of millions. Meta was acqui-hiring entire teams just to prevent competitors from getting them.

The result was a market where AI startups could not compete for talent. If you were a founder trying to hire an ML engineer, you were bidding against companies with unlimited budgets. Many founders told us talent was their single biggest bottleneck.

That dynamic has shifted dramatically in 2025.

What Changed

Big tech started cutting. Google, Meta, and Amazon all went through significant restructuring in their AI divisions. Not because AI was less important, but because the massive hiring spree of 2023-2024 created bloated teams with unclear mandates. Thousands of highly skilled AI engineers suddenly found themselves on the market.

Equity packages lost their shine. Many of the massive equity packages offered in 2023-2024 were tied to valuations that have since come down. Engineers who joined for a $10M equity package found it was worth $3M or less. The golden handcuffs loosened.

The work at startups got more interesting. The most capable AI engineers want to work on hard problems with direct impact. At a large company, you might optimize one feature that affects 0.1% of the product. At a startup, you build the entire AI system and see customers use it the next week.

What This Means for Founders

If you are hiring AI talent right now, you have more leverage than at any point in the past three years. The best candidates are still expensive, but they are available. And many of them are actively looking for startup opportunities after experiencing the politics and bureaucracy of big tech AI teams.

How to win talent as a startup: Offer meaningful equity, not competitive with big tech cash compensation, but real ownership in something that could matter. Offer interesting problems, the chance to build something from zero, not optimize an existing system. Offer speed, the ability to ship something and see it used by customers within days, not months.

The founders in our portfolio who have hired aggressively in the past six months are building teams that would have been impossible to assemble 18 months ago. The talent window is open. It will not stay open forever.