I watched this interview with Dario and Daniella on Bloomberg this week and honestly I didn't realize what a character Dario is.
He's like that liberal professor you had in high school or college who's really smart but also a little eccentric
this type of guy has never been put in charge of a trillion dollar company. the culture of anthropic makes so much more sense after just listening to Dario speak for a while.
One idea I'm playing with, and maybe I have this wrong, is that the race to create super intelligence has made the "researchers" — the few people in this world who understand these models and have ideas about how to improve them — the most sought after employees in the world. They have an enormous amount of power and leverage. We've all heard whispers of the kinds of compensation packages that have been thrown around.
Anthropic really feels like a lab run by the researchers. And the researchers have so much leverage and power right now that if they don't want to work for a Larry Page, a Sam Altman or an Elon Musk they don't have to. Rather than working for someone else with their own goals and motivations, the researchers had the option of trying to run a company themselves. That's basically what happened when Dario decided he didn't want to work for Sam Altman anymore.
That's probably why talent density and talent retention are so high at Anthropic. They still have all their co-founders working at the company, which is very unusual for a company of that size. In tech, when you put a bunch of smart people together and let them work together magic happens. Dario seems like kind of a strange guy, and he's definitely not your typical Mag 7 CEO. But he seems to have created a culture that's led to strong execution.
It's possible that as Anthropic grows, especially as they face the scrutiny of Wall Street ahead of their IPO, it may outgrow Dario and investors might start calling for another CEO. The other AI companies have leaders — Musk, Altman, the Google guys — who are well versed in dealing with investors and Wall Street. There will inevitably be pressure, especially after going public, for Anthropic to be lead by someone who will please investors. But if Dario goes, the company risks killing the culture that has given its models a technical edge.