Gabor Cele, former CEO and co-founder of X (formerly Twitter) challenger Pebble, has joined OpenAI to work on a secretive project.
Cselle, who has been with OpenAI since October, according to LinkedIn, announced the news in a post on X yesterday. He said: “I will share more about what I am working on in due course.” wrote . “I’m already learning a lot.”
Sell is a repeat entrepreneur who sold his first company, Y Combinator-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. The second company, native advertising startup Namo Media, sold to Twitter before Elon Musk acquired the social network and rebranded it as X.
Almost 10 years ago, Cselle worked as a Group Product Manager at Twitter, where she focused on the home timeline, user onboarding, and logout experiences. Cselle left Twitter in 2016 for Google, where he served as director at the tech giant’s Area 120 incubator for spinoffs.
Cselle began working at Pebble, originally called T2, in 2022 with Michael Greer, Discord’s former head of engineering. Pebble, which provides a microblogging service that emphasizes safety and moderation, has grown into a small but engaged community and has raised funds from a variety of angles, including Android co-founder Rich Miner.
But ultimately, Pebble struggled to sustain meaningful growth. The company shut down in October of last year, only to resurface in November as an instance of Mastodon.
In May, Sell joined accelerator South Park Commons to work on a variety of generative AI prototypes, including an homage to the viral HQ Trivia.
Csell’s job posting was released on the same weekend that OpenAI rival Anthropic brought in a high-profile new hire of its own. This is Alex Rodrigues, founder of Embark. Rodrigues, who led self-driving truck company Embark through a SPAC merger in 2021 (and a bargain sale to Applied Intuition in 2023), said Friday that he will join Anthropic as an AI safety researcher.
