Calvin French-Owen only worked at OpenAI for a year, but he saw more in twelve months than most engineers do in a lifetime. As a successful founder turned employee, he joined the world’s leading artificial intelligence company in May 2024 and left in June 2025. What he walked into was not a typical corporate tech job. It was a startup strapped to a rocket ship, powered by GPUs, Slack notifications, and a culture of secrecy that makes Apple look like an open book.
“The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it’s grown,” French-Owen writes in a long, revealing blog post published on July 15. “When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure.”
That kind of explosive growth, known in Silicon Valley as hypergrowth, breaks everything: communication, team structures, hiring, and product planning. And yet, OpenAI keeps shipping groundbreaking tools like ChatGPT and its AI coding assistant, Codex. How?
According to French-Owen, the company functions as a chaotic, bottom up meritocracy, valuing speed over structure and individual initiative over rigid planning. The entire operation, he reveals, runs on a single communication tool.
“Everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email,” he wrote. “I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there.”
This means that critical decisions, technical documentation, debates, and even leadership directives all happen in fast moving, ephemeral chat threads. If you miss a key message, you might miss a product launch.
Building Without a Blueprint
While outsiders might assume OpenAI operates with meticulous, long term planning, French-Owen says the truth is far messier and more improvisational.
“When I first showed up, I started asking questions about the roadmap for the next quarter. The answer I got was: ‘this doesn’t exist’,” he wrote. Instead of a top down master plan, ideas bubble up from individual researchers and engineers who are encouraged to act on their own initiative.
“There’s a strong bias to action (you can just do things),” he explained. “These efforts are usually taken by a small handful of individuals without asking permission. Teams tend to quickly form around them as they show promise.”
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