Amol Avasare: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think it's a foundational part of the company. I think it's been there from the very, very early days. And it really comes from leadership and I think they've just done a phenomenal job of distilling that. I saw this doc come up recently. I don't know where it was shared. It was something that Ben Mann, as one of our founders that you had on the podcast, had written. It's dated in 2021, I think a few months after they started the company. And it was like, "Here's why we should just focus on AI coding." And this was like, five years ago. This was long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this. And I think this is just like a deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. I think there's two lenses to it. It's like maybe a view of, "Okay, that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle, and then also, the side of it around accelerating research." So I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now. I've now heard people from various labs talking about this, the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that has just been a very firm view that we have been laser focused on internally of, "Okay, if you have the best models, that's going to accelerate your researches and that's going to accelerate the research loop." And I think that's something that Dario has seen very clearly for a number of years. So I would say that that's probably one of a lot. I think a lot comes from Dario. I think a lot comes from leadership and just our DNA. I think the second though is probably just necessity, where it's now changed. We're a more well-known company, raised lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But historically, we're very much the smallest, least well-funded player in this space. In many ways, it's a complete miracle that I think, we've gotten to the stage that we have. We didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of a Meta or Google. We didn't have the first mover advantage of an OpenAI. And so what do you do? I think there's this broader principle I have just around life of like, the freedom through constraints, that when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you, whether that's in personal life or at work, I think that it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice. So you're like, "Okay, this is clearly the path." And I think for us, it's like, "Okay, you don't have a ton of funding, you're a small player, you don't have distribution." You just have to really pick a very narrow focus, and even for a very generalizable technology, to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity. And I think that that's also just related to how history played out, right? So it was well before my time, but Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched. And we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off effectively like an AI global arms race. laude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched. And we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off effectively like an AI global arms race. And ChatGPT launched and they got insane traction and that just naturally sort of pulled them towards consumer. There's another world where if Anthropic had launched Claude first, maybe did the other way around even with all that focused stuff. So who knows? It's always hard to say, looking back at some of these things. Wow, I didn't know that. I think also, people just don't realize how far behind Anthropic was. Right now, it's like, of course, they're amazing. But like, I just remember when people were talking about Anthropic, we were raising money. I was like, "There's no way they're going to compete with OpenAI at this point. It's so over." Just like, "They're so far ahead." And it shows the power of focus and just, I guess, I don't know, all the things you all did. It is absurd how far you all have come and how successful and how things have changed so quickly.…

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