When the Smartest People Start Leaving, This Might Be WhyVIEW IN BROWSER
A few years ago, I started noticing something strange most investors would have missed. Engineers I’d known for years – people who had spent their careers at Qualcomm, General Atomics, and other legacy defense contractors – were quietly disappearing from their jobs. These engineers weren’t retiring. They were moving into artificial intelligence. To companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and Oura. The people leaving were among the best in their fields – the engineers other engineers wanted to work with. I didn’t have access to their offer letters. I couldn’t see their stock options. But I could see movement. Within months, the announcements hit: massive funding rounds, major defense contracts, and valuations that made national news. The capital followed the talent. If you know how to spot that shift early, you can get positioned before the market catches on…
Talent Moves FirstI call these early signals “observable surfaces”– places where real behavior reveals what’s coming before Wall Street models it. Consumer behavior is a big one. And where the best people choose to work is an observable surface hiding in plain sight. Employees at tech firms—especially top engineers and executives—see reality long before it shows up in SEC filings:
- They know whether the technology actually works.
- They know if leadership has a real plan.
- They know when the company culture starts to rot.
Nondisclosure agreements keep them quiet. But they can leave. And when they do, they’re telling you everything. What I watched happen locally in San Diego has played out on a massive scale in the AI space. Notably, it happened with ChatGPT creator OpenAI… and almost no one noticed at the time. Back in December 2020, Dario Amodei was OpenAI’s vice president of research. He had helped build GPT-2 and GPT-3 – the models that made OpenAI famous. His sister, Daniela Amodei, ran safety and policy. Then they left. And they didn’t leave alone. A cluster of senior researchers – the very people who had built the ChatGPT technology – walked out the door. Together, they founded a new startup… They called it Anthropic. At the time, most people didn’t notice. OpenAI was raising billions. ChatGPT was about to change everything. Why pay attention to a handful of quiet departures? Those departures were the signal. The people closest to the technology had already seen where things were going. Today, Anthropic has emerged as one of OpenAI’s most serious competitors, attracting billions in funding and partnerships with major tech players. And according to SignalFire’s 2025 State of Tech Talent report, OpenAI employees are now far more likely to leave for Anthropic than the other way around. The best people vote with their careers. Right now, they’re voting decisively. In AI, capital follows the people who matter most. You don’t pay “war prices” for talent unless you believe you’re fighting for the future. In May 2024, Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI to launch a new venture called Safe Superintelligence. By April 2025, it was reportedly valued at $32 billion. No product. No revenue. Just Sutskever and a small group of researchers who had worked at the frontier. That’s what talent is worth when it has already seen the future. The same pattern showed up at upstart defense contractor Anduril. When this company set out to challenge legacy players, it recruited Tom Keane – who had spent 20 years at Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) building Office 365 and Azure – along with leaders from Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR), SpaceX, and Splunk. The result? Anduril grew from 700 employees to more than 4,000. Its valuation climbed from $1 billion to over $30 billion… and it’s now winning contracts once reserved for companies that have dominated the industry for decades. The pattern is always the same: The talent moves first. The capital follows. Your EdgeHere’s an uncomfortable truth: The best employees always have options. When a once-booming company changes trajectory, the most talented people see it first. And because they’re the most in-demand, they’re the first to find better opportunities. By the time an exodus is obvious to outsiders, the top talent is long gone. You don’t need insider access to track talent movement. The signals are public, if you know where to look:
LinkedIn: This career-networking app shows job changes in real time. If you notice five engineers from the same team moving to the same startup… that’s no coincidence. Glassdoor: This site’s workplace reviews reveal sentiment before it becomes news. Rising complaints about leadership or sudden silence from a once-active company are early warnings. Hiring patterns: These trends speak volumes. Freezes mean trouble. Unexpected surges mean urgency. Quiet executive departures: This is often what matters most. A CEO leaving makes headlines… but a chief product officer slipping out the backdoor is often a bigger signal that most folks miss. Institutions can’t act on this information. They won’t green-light trades based on Glassdoor reviews. And you can’t plug “top five engineers quit” into a financial model. But as an individual investor, you don’t have those constraints. You can check LinkedIn in minutes. You can notice when the people building the future start clustering in one place. The observable surfaces show you what’s coming, before it shows up in the numbers. When engineers leave, they know something. The only question is whether you act before everyone else sees it. In my brand-new Market Tremors 2026 presentation , I show how I track these signals — along with other forms of “shadow data” — to identify companies gaining real momentum before it shows up in the numbers. I also walk through how this system works step by step… and share a current opportunity it’s flagging right now. It’s one of the clearest signals I’m seeing today. You can watch the full presentation here and see how to apply it yourself. Good investing, Josh Baylin
Senior Analyst, Stansberry Research |
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