> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation
Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed.
I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news might have played into how this Zulip news is being handled.
To be clear, excited for Tim & team.
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aidenn0
I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.
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conorbergin
I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
phoenixy1
The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!
I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success.
(I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)
gm678
Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?
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nightski
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
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iloveoof
This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone.
It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.
xiaoyu2006
> I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.
csb6
> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs.
The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning.
Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.
> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation
Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed.
I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news might have played into how this Zulip news is being handled.
To be clear, excited for Tim & team.
I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.
I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!
For those looking for more context on Zulip, we did a major release a couple weeks ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/.
Congrats to Tim and the rest of the team!
I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success.
(I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)
Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone.
It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.
> I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.
> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs.
The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning.
Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.