00:17:54 · Ankit Chowdhary, Rahul Patil
[00:17:54] S1: I think you're good. You're not just lucky. [00:17:57] S0: All too lucky. [00:17:58] S1: All too lucky. Talk to me about Anthropic. You know, think you said a few things which seemed to kind of answer this question, but what made you make the big move? You said it's one of the most important works you want to do in your life today. Why? You know, what is it about this that really drew you? Yeah. So I was on the other end of using AI like all of you. ChatGPT blew our imagination in some ways. There was a moment.
00:18:26 · Rahul Patil
[00:18:26] S0: And then, know, I think AlphaGo had its moment. And then I was like, there is something about this that is growing on me. One, it's growing the fastest I've ever seen. Like, I've never seen a technology improve this quickly and also capture so much imagination. Second is that every three months, it would unlock something new I could be doing. So then I go, Okay, that is really awesome. What is this? And so I spent a lot of time learning about it. I did something called engineerication. So you take a vacation, and you become an engineer at heart again. And so I wanted to ship something in my org. I wanted to ship a bug in five days, and that was what I gave myself. Ended up shipping five things in five days. And I'm like, Wow, this AI thing is really, really good. And so something started to turn in my head. And then I'm like, Okay, this is going to be the most monumental thing that's going to last for about one hundred years. I've seen many tech revolutions. This feels unlike pretty much anything else. Then I'm like, I want to be part of it. Like, I'm a plumber. The infrastructure in me. It's like, I want to be in the guts of this. I want to be in the core of what makes this happen. There was a second part to this, which is there's enormous impact. Whether this thing succeeds or fails, like AI as a concept, there's enormous impact at the society level. And I wanted to be part of something that also thought about it very responsibly. And the company that I found to be like the most integral at heart, I met the co founders, like extremely humble people. They're so brilliant, but they're so humble. And the entire organization was like that. I'm like, what is this? Like, everyone is like just so mission oriented and so selfless about everything that they do and very consistent every action that they took. So even now, I make decisions every day. I was on a very tough call just before this. It's like, hey, do we slow down research because we think we need to go do more safety work right now. It doesn't matter what as I said, I don't want to spend time thinking about competition. I want to think about, Are we better than yesterday? And so this entire week, I've been thinking a lot about safety, as an example. So this company lives up to that value and mission.
00:20:46 · Rahul Patil, Ankit Chowdhary
So that drew me, and I can't think of a better calling and a better place, better way for me to be spending my time right now. [00:20:54] S1: You made a very interesting point because SAM is now, I think, moving on to the science side of things. And there will be this push and pull between science and engineering or safety, right, where you will have to decide at every given point in time what do we prioritize. So how will you and how does Anthropic look at that kind of value clash?
00:21:15 · Rahul Patil
[00:21:15] S0: Great. No. First of all, Sam, I absolutely love that guy. He is brilliant. Like, he's very soft spoken, absolutely brilliant. He's like part of the reason why Anthropic is very, very successful. There's so much to learn from him every day. And then the course threads that I have, like the infrastructure side, but also on the product side and so on. And so we're two in a box in many ways. And absolutely, every time we hang out... So I spent the most time with Sam before joining Anthropic, actually. And so it's just like thinking about what is the right way for us to be the most effective. So I don't know exactly where the line gets drawn between research and science and engineering and product and all of that stuff. So we are very much like we're tightly aligned at the mission. We're loosely coupled at the execution. And the whole organization is like that. So as much as we want to think that somehow us execs are doing a bunch of amazing work, most of the important work at Anthropic is happening at the front line. That is because they are the closest to the emergent behaviors of AI. Most of the products are being dreamt of by the people on the ground. Most are engineers, yes. But some of the products, the finance plugin and all of that stuff, came from the finance hub. So we, as a culture, have inverted. It's like whoever is closest to the work and understanding how AI is emerging and how we can help them, you are the ones helping us build the product and edge and so on. And there's a very tight feedback loop across science, edge, product, PM, finance, and everything else. We spend most of our time we're a research lab at heart finding the wonder. Like, we're in pursuit of wonder. It's like, what makes us wonder about the technology? We spend all our time. It doesn't matter what your discipline is. We spend most of our time searching for that wonder. We find it, we tell everyone about it, and then we all swarm and say, What else can we do with it? Right? And so that is how mostly we operate. It's more like, What is the most important thing for the mission? What do our customers want? How can we get it as fast as possible?
00:23:37 · Ankit Chowdhary
[00:23:37] S1: It's a very interesting way to frame this. And, you know, some of what you said seems to also reflect in the stuff we keep hearing, right? Like some of the other big labs, we keep hearing about like people leaving and stuff like that. We don't hear much of that Anthropic. Why is that? What is it about the culture, right, which makes people maybe just want to stay, keep building, right? And I'm sure there's a lot of lessons also from Thrive on building teams, building culture, which people here can benefit from.
00:24:08 · Rahul Patil
[00:24:08] S0: Good question. One, I won't take anything for granted. So the first thing that a founder always starts is culture. I know all of you as founders worry a lot about culture, but it is something important that's not a lip service that you live and breathe every day. It's extremely important. So my review process when I was trying to figure out, okay, you know, is this a good thing for both of us? I spent like almost two or three weeks with Sam. We spent three weeks thinking about all the reasons why I should be worried about coming to Anthropic, why I should like You know, what scares me about Anthro... Like, we spend most of the time... Like, most of you on your recruiting calls, you all spend time, Come and join us. Spend most of the time as like, Don't join us because, like, you know, things are going to be very hard. And we won't be free of criticism whether we succeed or not, because we are going to be very mission oriented. We believe these are the types of future we're building towards. So we spend actually, at the exact level, spend a lot of time telling, Please don't come here. Right? And so because unless you're culturally aligned and the mission is very strong, like you're aligned to the mission, it's not worth going. And so we spent so much time on that. We walked away from some of the best 10x developers because, you know, you have to not be in it for you, but you have to be in it for the company. So tomorrow, the company tells me to do something else. Go become an IC because that is the best way for me to contribute to the mission. Or if I feel that that is the best way, I will do it. No ego. 100% of our peers will do it. Like, the CPO just decided, I'm seeing this in emergent behavior. I will go be an IC in the labs, the Chief Product Officer. That is the level of humility that people have, and that is the level of mission alignment that they have. And yeah, there's something about living in the exponential where you're like, the mission about where we're going to go is very important. But I will never take anything for granted. It is a hard thing to preserve. Think about the best colleague you've ever had. What are they good at? They want to make you successful, and they're very transparent, and they don't just agree with you. They push back. They want you to be effective, not happy. Not just happy. Right?