Ex-Pebble CEO Gabor Cselle Joins OpenAI for a Confidential New Project
Gabor Cselle, who used to be CEO and co-founder of Pebble, a company that competed with Twitter, joins OpenAI for a secret project.
Gabor Cselle, who used to be CEO and co-founder of Pebble, a company that competed with Twitter, has joined OpenAI to work on a secret project. Cselle, who has been employed at OpenAI since October, shared the news on X yesterday, according to LinkedIn. “When the time is right, I will reveal more about my current projects.” “I am already learning a lot.”
Cselle has started more than one business. He sold his first one, reMail, a mobile email startup based in Y Combinator, to Google. He sold his second business, Namo Media, a native advertising startup, to Twitter before Elon Musk bought the social network and changed its name to X.
Cselle worked at Twitter as a group product manager for almost ten years, where he was in charge of the home timeline, user onboarding, and logged-out experiences. For Google, Cselle was in charge of the tech giant’s Area 120 incubator for spin-offs after leaving Twitter in 2016.
In 2022, Cselle and Michael Greer, the former head of engineering at Discord, began developing Pebble, initially known as T2. Pebble’s microblogging service puts a lot of emphasis on safety and moderation. It grew to a small but active community and received funding from various sources, including Rich Miner, the co-founder of Android.
Pebble’s Struggles and New Leadership Moves in AI
In the end, though, Pebble had a difficult time keeping up real growth. The business shut down in October of last year and came back as a Mastodon instance in November. Cselle joined the accelerator South Park Commons in May, where he worked on several generative AI prototypes, including one inspired by the viral game HQ Trivia.
The news of Csell’s hiring comes at the same time that OpenAI competitor Anthropic hires Alex Rodrigues, the founder of Embark. Rodrigues led the self-driving truck company Embark through a SPAC merger in 2021 and a fire sale to Applied Intuition in 2023. On Friday, he announced that he would be joining Anthropic as a safety researcher for AI.
