00:00:00 · Rahul Patil, Ankit Chowdhary
[00:00:00] S0: We are happy to walk away from revenue if it means that we'll do the right thing and the safe thing. Anything that you think is barely viable right now is definitely viable in three to six months. I ask myself every day, was I lucky or was I good? Was I unlucky or was I bad? [00:00:16] S1: Hi. I'm Ankit Chowdhary. I'm a partner here at South Park Commons. Welcome to the Minus One Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking to Rahul Patil, is the CTO of Anthropic. Anthropic is probably one of the most important companies in the world today. And while we'll talk about the company, we're gonna start with his beginnings. Right here in Bangalore. How he grew up, how he got into computers, his journey from there to The US to becoming CTO of Stripe, and now Anthropic. It's gonna be a fun, exciting chat. So let's get started. Rahul, thanks for being here. [00:00:50] S0: Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. As I said, I just absolutely love the energy. [00:00:55] S1: Awesome. So Rahul, I think let's start with maybe a little bit about your background. You grew up here. Tell us about your journey on what led you to finally want to do computer sciences in the first place. Right? I know, ma'am, was there an influence of maybe just your interest or maybe a bit of her? Tell us about your kind of early days. Why did you choose this path?
00:01:18 · Rahul Patil
[00:01:18] S0: Oh, fun fact. My mom actually wanted me to be a doctor. Actually, the fun story is I fell in love with computer science. I'm very blessed that I knew what I wanted to do very early in life. It takes time to stumble upon what is it that you're really curious about, what are you passionate about. And somehow I fell in love with it in sixth grade. The fun story is that I have an older brother and then I had an older cousin brother living with us. And so for all practical purposes I had two older brothers. They were better than me at all the computer games so the only solution I had was to hack the basic games the games in basic so that I could win so that's how I fell in love with computer science in sixth grade so that's when I haven't looked back since And I used to get one hour quota per week on programming because electricity was expensive back then. And so I had to take permission, so I used to write all the programs and everything I wanted to do. And so I would get that one hour to try it out on the computer. I haven't looked back since and I haven't thought about any other field since then. Computer science itself has evolved so much and I'm just absolutely grateful and blessed for such a beautiful field.
00:02:28 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:02:28] S1: What happened after that was you went to PS and, you know, our college is not necessarily put in the same band as IITs. And there's this narrative, right, about IITs and usually a lot of the founders, tech leaders come from there. But you broke through. And I'm sure you meet people you mentioned right you also kind of help mentor kids so you meet people all the time who are not from these institutes so what is your advice to them you know that what should they do in that stage of their kind of career minus one right to figure out what to do next so that they can compete with the global elites?
00:03:07 · Rahul Patil
[00:03:07] S0: Yeah look you know competing with global elites one, it's a moving target. Second, it's like a very weird framing. So let's say you even beat the global elites, then you're only as good as the global elites or just like you better. None of that really inspires me. I've never been thinking about that as much. I think the only competition there's a quote the only competition for me is me from yesterday. So am I better than what I was yesterday? And that matters. I carry that into work. I carry that into everyday life. There's this equation 1.01 times exponential of three sixty five is 38. So just even if you can compound your personal skills by just 1% every day or even every month, I think just being consistent about that is super crucial. The way I think about that Minus One journey is actually thinking about what is it that I wake up being most curious about. Like, what really captures my attention? What do I... Why am I curious about that? In what way do I want to have any sort of scaled impact based on that curiosity? I'm lucky that computer science is interesting and is also in demand, but the number one advice I have is like, What is it that really wakes you off? And as soon as you wake up, you can't stop thinking about that thing. And then how do you become good at it it takes time to become good at it and only after you're good at it you actually start to enjoy it a little bit right and so you have to give yourself that time the patience and the mindset to be able to grow into it
00:04:50 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:04:50] S1: I love that you know something that we also at SPC focus on is curiosity we over index actually on that and we call that you know phase of minus one and the way to get out of it is you know is pull on threads you're curious about yeah And it'll lead you to whatever the next ten years of your life will look like. How did that lead to being curious about wanting to maybe go to The US start there, study there and then of course get into what you called the plumbing of the Internet.
00:05:24 · Rahul Patil
[00:05:24] S0: Yeah. Look, always wanted to learn more. I always wanted to study more. And so even throughout college, when I was reading some of the things that excited me, this only course is, you're like, Oh, this person was locked up in this room for two years with his friends or her friends. And they came up with this crazy invention. And the theme there is that they spend time with like minded people doing nothing but ideating some cool stuff. And so I always had this that I want to be where some of this learning and advanced research happens, and that's what took me to The U. S. In 2003. Again, very grateful for my experience here and in The U. S. Now, you know, kind of half and half now exactly of my life in Bangalore and in The U. S. And I've learned just as much here, as much as I've learned there. And one of the attractive things for me to be there was, like, I want to be in the thick of where some of the cutting edge technology is happening. And for me, it's always been about scaled impact. So I became a manager very early on in my life because I feel like I could scale my impact even more. I feel like want to help other people build. And so the reason I chose plumbing infrastructures, building platforms, is so that everybody can have the scaled impact. And so that's what really drives me. I yearn for some sort of a scaled impact. Not that I spend an hour, I get one hour's output, but if I spend an hour, how can everybody around get, like, scaled input for a longer time? So that's what drew me to, like, be thinking about the hearts and guts of what makes computer science tick.