Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It works. Three years. I remember just feeling that, man, these guys have no chance. OpenAI is so far ahead. They're just like, what are they thinking? How is this possible? OpenAI is one. It's too late. Things are very different now. The latest number I saw was Anthropic was making, I don't know, $50 billion in ARR. That's what companies used to go public at. Very successful companies went public at 50 billion in valuation. Anthropic reportedly is making that every single year. You joined as one of the earliest PMs. There were something like five engineers when you joined. The model hadn't even launched when you joined. What was it like in those early days of Anthropic? What's something that might surprise people about what it was like at the beginning? I think a big part of what's made Anthropic today actually has been very much the core of even the early days. So I joined in 2023. Like you said, we had five product engineers. There was one engineer for the entirety of our API business, if you believe. And I think a big portion of it was the culture was really strong. And I think this is something I emphasize for folks who are interested in the company, really do walk the walk of the mission and the culture and the values. And the energy was very much like a startup. I think you're right, we were very much trying to find our identity in the early years. I think there's one piece around the technology, but how does that technology bring value to users, bring value to society, and what could it possibly be? And I think the early years were us exploring that in different ways. We did start with Claude.ai, another chatbot, chat assistant, and evolving into things like tool use. I think one of the moments where really we started to get into our groove was shipping things like Golden Gate Claude. I don't know if you remember that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.