Comment by simonw
8 hours ago
The ex-OpenAI people who started Anthropic are doing pretty great right now.
VC is a hits business. Just one hit pays for 9 that didn't work out.
8 hours ago
The ex-OpenAI people who started Anthropic are doing pretty great right now.
VC is a hits business. Just one hit pays for 9 that didn't work out.
This is a dangerous way of looking at things in a hits business.
The difference in hit rate matters enormously and the existence of a hit tells you nothing about the denominator.
The size of the bet matters too - you could wipe out a hit with one bad pick if that bad pick is big enough!
If you don't have an estimate of the rate that you trust, you're just throwing money at dreams.
But it's WAY harder to get rich by being a pessimist than by being an optimist. And if you're a VC choosing where to invest primarily-other people's money, then you have no particular reason to try to talk them out of the hype.
Anthropic's Series A was $124 million; Typesafe's is 7x that. If Jev becomes a $2bn company it will be a failure to investors.
Anthropic raised their Series A a year and a half before ChatGPT had been released, when LLMs were still unproven technology and most VCs weren't paying attention to the field (they were mostly still chasing crypto).