Gabor Cselle, former CEO and co-founder of Pebble (a competitor to X), has joined OpenAI to work on a confidential project.
According to LinkedIn, Cselle has been at OpenAI since October, though he only announced the news yesterday in a post on X. “Will share more about what I’m working on in due time,” he wrote. “Learning a lot already.”
Cselle is an experienced entrepreneur, having sold his first company, a Y Combinator-backed mobile email startup called reMail, to Google. His second company, a native advertising startup called Namo Media, was acquired by Twitter before Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X.
Around a decade ago, Cselle worked at Twitter as a group product manager, focusing on areas such as the home timeline, user onboarding, and experiences for logged-out users. He left Twitter in 2016 to join Google, where he served as a director in Google’s Area 120 incubator, supporting early-stage projects and spin-offs.
Cselle started Pebble (originally called T2) in 2022 with Michael Greer, former head of engineering at Discord. Pebble emphasized safety and moderation in its community, attracting a small but dedicated user base and funding from investors, including Android co-founder Rich Miner. However, Pebble struggled to grow and eventually shut down in October. It later re-emerged as a Mastodon instance in November.
In May, Cselle joined the South Park Commons accelerator, where he explored several generative AI prototypes, including a project inspired by the popular HQ Trivia game.
Cselle’s announcement comes on the same weekend that OpenAI’s competitor, Anthropic, made a notable hire: Embark founder Alex Rodrigues. Rodrigues, who led the autonomous trucking company Embark through a SPAC merger in 2021, announced on Friday that he would be joining Anthropic as an AI safety researcher. Embark was later sold to Applied Intuition in 2023.
Reported by TechCrunch
