YouSaid · the spoken record

Anj Midha

lines on the record: 69
first: 2026-04-14
most recent: 2026-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No problem, man. Thank you for doing the consistency with which you've kept up this. I mean, you're an institution now, right? Like the hard thing is you've been at this, we've gotten old together, right? When you were doing this, like you said, you were a kid. I was much younger.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it'd be crazy to not let them have access to social media, but I think it has to be done in moderation. And most parents have a really hard time moderating it with their kids. And then it's really hard to moderate. With Rishi Valley, I had access to a computer once a week. And so you need to enforce something like that where you don't take it for granted. It's within a structured sort of environment. And then you develop good habits and protocols and practices to not be dependent on it. But I would plan my Wikipedia sessions. Like I had to plan my, like you got one hour a week in the computer room in Rishi Valley. So you really got to plan the highest use of that time. And so you're not dependent on it, but you just use it as a high leverage strategic asset. That's how I think technology should be viewed. You shouldn't take it for granted. The problem is, you know, people keep saying we're going to have the singularity. So now like, have you realized we've been at this for like 10 years? Half of you outsourced your brain and thinking to this device anyway.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the future, let's go get his take. I went to this boarding school in India called Rishi Valley, and it was founded.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Viv asks me this like three years ago at a party. We were like, I think it was at our anniversary or something, we were with like 10 of our friends, closest friends, including some of the co-founders of Anthropic. It was one of these classic San Francisco kind of like dinner parties. And she puts me on the spot. And I just blurted out, I think what she had asked was like, what do you want it to say on your tombstone? And I blurted out, he was right. And the room just went dead quiet. And they were like, yep. And it's because I have this obsessive desire and need to try to learn where the future is going and then tell everybody about it. And then everybody thinks I'm like some snake oil salesman or whatever. And then now that's changed because now it turns out I was so right. I made LP so much money that they're now asking me Anch, can you, you know, people like I was invited back to teach this class this Stanford, right? And so people are fine. I guess have realized, okay, Ange might know a thing or two.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I was very lucky. I went to Singapore on a government scholarship and Li Kuan Yu, who is the founding father of Singapore. I'm a big Liquan Yuist, realized that they didn't have many resources.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever, you just take for granted the one thing we all don't know how much we have, which is time with each other. I just start valuing my time more, my relationships with people. You know, there's so many people. I mean, my parents, you know, I left my parents behind in India to move to college at Stanford. And I have gone weeks of my life not calling them or texting them. And now they're in their 60s.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the biggest one is health. I've had some health experiences between both the family members and myself have had health experiences that made me realize we all just don't know how much time we have on earth. And that makes you stop taking for granted how much time we have. And so I started taking time much more seriously. But I would say, and this was my kind of, you know, every lecture I do at Stanford, we talk a lot about scaling laws and technical stuff, but I also give the kids like an aunt's life scaling laws lesson at every, I'm very inspired by Richard Feynman. Feynman's lectures, you know, always kind of combine technical education with a little bit of life coaching for them. My like number one scaling law for them for the students was take life seriously, but don't take it so seriously that you forget what makes it worth living, which is have fun with friends, work on interesting projects with people you love, don't take relationships for granted. It's humans that make the world go around. And if you're so focused on your next fund or your next raise.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A ruthless desire to stay focused on the mission. And that results in hard trade-offs and priorities. And if you're not aligned on that mission, then you'll just think he's crazy or he's evil or whatever. It's crazy how much ad hoc minimum attacks people have seen against him. But he's caught that clarity of mission.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things one sheer scientific brilliance truly like world class technical ability in his domain an obsessive desire for truth seeking to keep reasoning reasoning reasoning to keep doing experiments he's a physicist at heart right like I think Dario is a physicist at the end of the day he's not actually a computer scientist and so a physicist a world class physicist tries to derive laws general laws of reality by looking at data and running empirical experiments he's an empiricist and he has an obsessive desire to be a good empiricist and the third is mission alignment culture he said this is our focus this is our mission no drift we won't take shortcuts we are willing to make huge trade-offs to hit this mission and that attracts the best talent incredible talent in the face of criticism of people saying you're a mercenary you're blah blah blah you're just doing this for profit no actually it turns out there's”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me co host them at our house in SF you know a few weeks ago and I'm very lucky Viv, I don't deserve Viv, I'll tell you that, but she's very, very she's mission aligned and we both believe that the best thing we could be doing with our time is educating at scale.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going on. I'm not letting the ministers who are taking this class with me, I'm not letting them graduate until they build and deploy agents. I've told them that they're not getting their graduate certification.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely agree. I mean, there's a sovereign country that came to me at the end of last year and said, we want to bring 26 of our ministers to your house and do a one-year program where we educate, it's a frontier program where we learn what's going on in AI from lectures and so on. And then we want to do a deployment project where each of our ministers actually build AI agents. And I said, you know what? If you take Stanford CS153, it's a microcosm of this course I'm doing with this country, the sovereign fund that we partnered with. And you have to do the work to read the literature, understand what's going on in research, and then deploy yourself, like build tools, the class project, the Stanford CS 153 class project is the one person frontier lab. Because I do believe that what would have taken 50 people to do four years ago now with the right AI tools, you can do with one person. And as a leader, if you haven't played with these tools and deployed yourself and built your own agent, I don't think you understand what's going on.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Educate yourself, take the class, do all the readings, do the readings. Don't skip the hard work. Too many LPs are outsourcing their hard work, the work they're supposed to be doing as capital allocators, which is like understanding what's actually going on and then decide which venture managers and allocators you think have a unique defensible advantage of the bottlenecks. I would be investing in the bottleneck”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had the privilege to invest many hundreds of millions of dollars into anthropic across several rounds from the first to the most recent one. So I consider that lucky I intend to give most of that away to public benefit causes public benefit education programs. I think we're at the very beginning part of Anthropics journey on commercial progress.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer for you, and that's happening again and again and again, there's a huge misallocation of public capital into venture managers who are not capturing enough value in Frontier AI. Instead, they're investing a bunch of stuff that's not going to exist. And the public's going to be mad.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, go back to history, right? I think there will be a few people like Arthur Rock and Bob Swanson and Mike Markula who turned their practice into institutions. And there'll be others who don't. And I think if they don't evolve themselves for what entrepreneurs of this era need, then I think they should get out of the venture capital business because we don't need more bankers. We don't need more like, you know, one of the beautiful things my friend Vlad who runs Robin Hood floated recently this like venture fund thing on Robin Hood.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As long as the capabilities frontier keep moving and we want a healthy independent ecosystem, we'll just keep raising more capital. There's no end to that. I don't really, the day machine learning stops working as a systematic way to give humanity more capabilities. That's when I'll say we have enough, Harry. But that's so far out. I don't even know how to reason about that.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for the gigawatt, 1.3 gigawatt, which was kind of our proof of concept, that capital is not a problem. I think the question is if we want to scale beyond that, yeah, we need way more capital to be deployed across the Western Front, in the United States and US allied countries.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That end up winning the entire category. That's what frontier technology is. So foundation models have been a deeply, and this is part of why I started the class four years ago. I just thought security at scale was going through a bunch of reinvention. And then we reinvented the class to be infrastructure at scale last year. And this year it's frontier systems because not enough people realize that to keep the capabilities frontier moving, you need to think about these projects, these companies as frontier systems projects, not foundation model projects. Does that make sense?”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the plan all along. Of course, you need to have a bear programmer interface for a model. Why would you assume otherwise? Oh, because you just weren't paying attention and you had your neat market maps that your associates were giving you and you thought that was truth. The commercial community has forgotten how to build businesses and they've forgotten the difference between first principles and marketing. That's the problem. That's one of the other misalignment problems. The ground truth of these businesses, machine learning systems businesses, they've always been frontier systems businesses. They were never just foundation model businesses. Now, okay, if you had to backage that up and tell your LPs that because that was legible to them, then I can't blame you, I guess, but the LPs I work with, I'm very upfront with them. I say, look, these categories are going through huge reinventions. And when you partner with me, what you get is a full stack partner. And I will tell you the first principles of what's going on and these first principles, insights will change over time. But you got to be comfortable with huge capex outlays in businesses.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so many, but they're not foundation model companies. I would call them frontier systems companies. This is the problem. Every time I kept trying to educate people four years ago where they'd be like, Anj, but Anthropic is a foundation model company and Mistral is a foundation model company. No, guys, that's just one part of what they do. Maybe they're starting there because that's a very core competence. But there's a reason why Anthropic also has a thing called Cloud Code. There's a reason why Mistral has something called Mistral Compute. There's a reason why Microsoft, who's a cloud, also has a co-pilot business. You know, these labels and categories of foundation model need to be viewed, I think, with more suspicion than they are. Like what matters is the system's co-design, the systems, the full stack like frontier research loop that you need to run with customers. And then later, when that happens, when you say, oh my God, Anj, Anthropic is now, they were a model company and now they're launching a product called Cloud Code. And I was like, what do you mean?”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ministers, presidents, and I, and students all use the same iPhone. Because inherently, you can raise the most money and invest the most product budget dollars for general product and amortize the cost of that across everybody. But if you have specialized models, yeah, I don't think they're going to be accessible to everybody and they don't need to be. I think this open and closed access thing is somewhat overblown. I think it just empirically, from a systems perspective, if you look at the history of technology, if you have general products, they're distributed to the masses. If you have custom products, they have enterprise segmentation, some are accessible to the enterprise, others are not.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The embedded assumption there, right, what we have learned over the years, like empirically over the history of technology, is that if you have a general purpose product like the iPhone that works for everybody, then the natural incentive is to amortize the cost of product development of this over the largest number of users. So if you have a general model that's good for everybody, it will be available to everyone. If you have specialized models that are good for some people, there will be product segmentation. And I think what this is telling us is that if there are many custom models, they will, some of them will be accessible, others will not be. And so if anything, I think we should see the fact that there are frontier model labs saying, hey, here's a new model we have. It only makes sense for some large enterprises to access this. As vindication of the ecosystem truth that there's going to be an ecosystem of different models, of different types, there's no one large God model. Because if there was, I think there would be the market desire to have prime.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, compute supply. If you don't have compute, how do you do inference, man? What are you selling? You need a product to sell. If you're making a steam engine, you need coal.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we are right now is the best inference teams are calling me up. Actually, all inference teams are calling me up and saying, Anj, do you have compute for us? Because that's their product is reselling compute, but it's been hoarded. It's been hoarded by the hyperscalers. It's been hoarded by people who are not innovating but are sitting on compute. And it's so obvious to me now that I've left A16Z, I'm an independent ecosystem public benefit corporation, that the existential threat to innovation in this category is lack of compute. Now, that's why AM started procuring compute for the independent ecosystem a while ago. And so we are trying to find a way to get these teams enough compute that they need to keep innovating.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit of a self destructive mechanism because if you have 50 different companies all competing for scarce compute resources, then the folks who are actually innovating can't get it. And so they can't do their next round of product innovation and so on. And that's the problem when you have that like this.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we need to transition to the optimal competition in frontier technology. And I think we need leaders, stewards, venture capitalists, politicians, educators to remind the world that we have already lived through this era of boom and bust and so on. And so these companies, like what's going to happen, right? Like you said, Anj, Baystan, and inference all these companies, inference is an extraordinary growth curve ahead, but it's not going to be an extraordinary growth curve if there are 50 inference companies all competing with each other on a race to the bottom, which is kind of what's happening right now. Like, it is not clear to me that we need 50 inference companies. And it's not clear to me that VCs are smart enough to realize that they're just lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire in a category where having four or five really good inference trusted providers is net good.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means that if you have 10 different, like 50 companies all doing LLM training or doing coding models, that's a losing proposition. It's like perfect competition is like restaurants. There's no defensibility. That's why restaurants go out of business all the time. It's very hard for them to differentiate. On the other hand, monopolies are mafias. If once you have a monopoly at one part of the stack, they stop innovating and instead they try to go upward or down by using the balance sheet to acquire. They start hoarding resources. They start saying, you give me this and I will force you to basically subsume yourself to me and I'm seeing that kind of behavior up and down the stack. And mafias are not good for innovation. I think we're in an era of what we need is optimal competition. The optimal competition setup is you have three or four teams in every frontier that are making extraordinary progress. And so if you invest in them, you get extraordinary returns, but they're not so comfortable to be a monopoly such that they can stop innovating. And that's important because when they stop innovating, as humanity, we're fucked.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like a related bottleneck, which is that I just think there's when I was at Stanford many years ago as a kid, I took this class that Peter taught called Turn Into this book called Zero to One. This is Peter Thiel. I used to be, I was an editor for the Stanford Review, and he had this quote, right, which is competition is for losers. Having done this now for 15 years, I've kind of updated my theory of business. And I think he was not wrong, but he was insufficiently precise, which is that I think perfect competition is for losers. I also think monopolistic competition.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we keep scaling capabilities, that will definitely happen. The problem is there are a couple bottlenecks on scaling capabilities that are quite existential. The four core bottlenecks on capabilities progress we've talked about, right? It's context, compute, capital, and culture. And I think capital allocation, huge problem. We've got to educate people on why these capabilities are extraordinary. This is like the biggest financial bonanza of all time if you know where to allocate. I mean, there's a reason why I invest in Anthropic in the seed round. And now, as you pointed out, the returns of all the body of work I've done over the last four years are attracting LPs at the highest levels, but we're just getting started. I think some of these projections you see are correct if we unblock the bottlenecks along the way. And in compute infrastructure, secure compute infrastructure that's fungible, that's standardized, that's the biggest bottleneck. I think if there's any reason why OpenAI and Tropic Gemini and so on don't hit their revenue targets over the next few years, it's because they won't have access to enough compute.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means that all inference is served no matter which company is serving it, is served through a shared proxy that can tell each other when there's an attack happening on one part of the frontier. Think of it as an iron dome across the entire Western Front. And just because you're here, you're in one company, you can't see that your model being served through this other company is being distilled. So it's a deployment coordination protocol. It's basically my group chat that I've got with a bunch of different founders, but scaled where people go, we're seeing this attack today and others go, we are too. Let's coordinate on defensive response.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should know that there are insider threats. We should know that there's distillation happening across the US and Europe that is taking advantage of us all not being united, that distillation is taking advantage of our political systems, that our mission-critical infrastructure is quite vulnerable, especially data centers that are serving workloads that are being used by enterprises from a business standpoint. If we don't secure frontier model inference or what I call state-of-the-art inference behind a coordinated iron dome, I don't think we have a sustainable shot at staying at the frontier over the next decade.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you kidding? Absolutely. That's why I think what we need is a Western grid where all inference, frontier inference is served through an iron dome, where if there's any adversarial distillation attacks on any one of our teams, we coordinate together. Because I'm on seven boards, I'm in group chats where I get texted by one founder saying, is anyone else noticing today that there's a huge spike in distillation from this region? And then I put them in a group chat we coordinate. It's very informal right now.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you do the next round and the next run, and then you catch up. And at the point you catch up, you say, Wait a minute, we're starting to be at the frontier. Why do we need to open source anymore? This is good enough for our local domestic needs. It's beautiful. And that has actually, by the way, resulted in innovation. They're innovating in every step part of the cycle. And that's why Huawei chips are able to produce capabilities improvements today in China that rival some of the best chips here when integrated up and down the stack. In a sense, it's the Google strategy, right? Google is integrated land power shell, TPUs, Borg, Xbox, GQM, Gemini, then the deployment, I mean, the systems co-design there up and down results in efficiency that gives you huge performance gains at the end of the day. China is replicated that strategy using open source as sort of a bootstrapping mechanism to catch up. It's extraordinary.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much cheaper. I mean, the engineering execution right now up and down the stack in China is extremely here's what's happening, right? What they realized is that the AI scaling race is not a chip race. It's a full stack systems co-design race, where if you can't compete head-to-head on chips for now, what do you do? You compete on systems design. You say, okay, we don't have leading edge chips here, right? Yet. So let's try to compete on systems. You co-design the chip that you have might be Huawei with the compute infrastructure, with the training run. And then you design that to have a bunch of performance improvements at every layer of the stack. And then what you do is you do adversarial distillation at scale where you take Western models and then you, from various different endpoints, you distill the state of the art, and then you try to get as many performance gains as possible on that data. And then you release that back out to the world as open models, and then you see what people react to. And then you get feedback.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“propose a set of standards for how procurement for this should work, and then we need standards people in DC. We have this thing called NIST. We have various bodies in the government that should get together and say, thank you guys for proposing the standard. This is where it makes sense. This is where it doesn't. This is called an RFC process. And we're going to standardize on this definition of procurement. This is what happened with TCPIP, with the internet. It happened with ACDC and electricity. We have not done that yet for the model era. These are called open standards. The standardization process is being confused with marketing. Now, President Trump is actually, I think, trying to do his best from what I can tell in at least giving America enough freedom to innovate that these standards can even be discovered in our labs here. Because first, you need somebody to actually pioneer and figure out what the standards even should look like. I think that there's just a lot of noise.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For one, I don't think we have standardized on whether AI should be regulated, treated, procured as just as good old fashioned software or like a new kind of system. Again, I went to grad school for machine learning. And what you learn in machine learning 101 is models are statistical. They're not deterministic, right? So when you have a statistical system, there are some properties of a statistical system that are different from a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is deterministic software and a statistical model today is not. And so should the procurement of a spreadsheet be the same from an IT perspective as a statistical model? Open debate. The core debate. That's the problem. AI alignment. Don't get me wrong is hard, but not the hardest problem. Human misalignment. Human alignment is really the problem right now we have in the world. We need technologists who understand the difference between deterministic software and statistical systems.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In infrastructure wastage crisis right now. And it's because there are no open standards, there's no open protocol for how flops from one data center can flow to somebody else who needs it across chip types, across secure boundaries. And it's resulting in a lot of pain for the ecosystem. People are just”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. The problem we're articulating is that compute is not fungible. There are no standards for fungibility and there are no institutions enforcing standardization of compute enough. So we are in the pre-standardization era of compute today, which was the pre-standardization era of electricity in 1885. I hope we can self-regulate, self-standardize, and self-enforce standardization so that we can skip the boom and bust cycles that happen with electricity over the next 50 years. And this happens with every infrastructure cycle in the pre-standardization era. It happened with electricity in 1885. It happened with steel. It happened with railroads. And every time you have this boom and bust cycle, what happens is wars are fought, companies backstab each other. It's super painful. It's annoying. We are in that era. And my view is that compute not being fungible is what's resulting in the all this talk about AI, the AI bubble, but what people forget is that we don't have AI capabilities bubble. The capabilities are extraordinary in every domain.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bound by H100 chips, you can't unlock the benefits of the Blackwell chip without basically just like buying a new cluster. And so now suddenly you have this H100 cluster that you don't want to do training on anymore because it's old school. The chip doesn't have the right memory properties to train your frontier models. And it's very hard for any individual company to see all of this stuff. But when you're on seven or eight boards like I am and you've been doing this 15 years and you start to see patterns emerge, you're going, wait a minute, why is there all this unutilized compute sitting here and there? This is lose for everybody.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a couple of different reasons. One is their compute is not fungible. So, unlike electricity, which had to go through a process of standardization, ACDC, where megawatts or megawatts or megawatts, computer is not fungible today. So forget fungibility of compute across different manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD within a manufacturer. Nvidia chips, for example, H100s, the GB200s, the GB300s, these are all completely different chip types. So if you have one cluster where you're doing a training run on H100s, and then you want to do continued post training of that, do a distributed training run of that training workload on GB200s doesn't work. So they're just like stranded pools of compute because the atomic unit of computation is flops. I wish flops were fungible, but not all flops are born equal today. And so if you provisioned a cluster two, three years ago with H100s and now you actually want to run some of those workloads for the newer generation models, your memory...”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are deeply underinvested in security compute. Okay, let me put this. We are not an AI crisis. We're not in an AI bubble for sure. I'll tell you that. We are definitely in a GPU wastage bubble where they are stranded pockets of compute, like billions of dollars of compute that are sitting unutilized. And if we could pull them together on a grid across the independent ecosystem.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the biggest challenge has been figuring out the right aligned financial structure across both in a way that's legible to capital allocators at scale took me about a year to really get all the pieces right. But there are very large equity pools. Let me put this a lot of balance sheets, long-term mission line balance sheets in the world who are mission aligned at wanting to help frontier scientists, researchers, university labs get access to the compute they want, but they don't have OPEX. They don't have cash to spend on the compute. So if you can find a way to align equity, debt, balance sheets in a way that's de-risked, the fundraising is not a problem. It's actually a systems design problem, which took me, again, a year, it probably took me four years to get right. But now that we've figured it out, it's not been a problem.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I would try to go about it from a top-downs approach and bottoms up sizing approach. For us at AMP, when I look at the grid, we are building out, which is sort of a reasoning by analogy, we've started securing about 1.3 gigawatts of computer infrastructure.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, obviously, in the world of infrastructure, I think we need something like the grid in the compute infrastructure. So that's what I've spent most of my days on, which is a coordinating mechanism that allowed this, not the commoditization necessarily, but the transition of coal and electricity from being these resources that were being hoarded to being stable, reliable commodities that the best engineering teams, the best factories had access to. That's what I think about a lot. Since you're so talented at media and you're so talented at storytelling, I think I would, and your mission is to push the European continent. I think one of the things, if I was you, I would be trying to figure out how do we educate the leading capital allocators and infrastructure allocators in Europe about the coming era and get them to understand their role in unblocking the bottlenecks for the best scientists and engineers in Europe.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the safest way to predict the future is to invent it. So do the hard work, come up with your point of view on if we're an industrial revolution, England, what happened next, and what were the emerging properties of the businesses that became valuable in institutions over the next 50 years after 1885, and then figure out which figure from history of that era do you look up to the most? You know, go read about their lives and the businesses they ran and the tensions that emerged in the practice of their business later in life because then they made mistakes when they were young and try to learn from their mistakes and then go and execute.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to hold two things in conflict that can seem paradoxical. This is the most important thing I learned from Mark and Ben. The future is not determined. And so anyone who tells you that they can predict the future with certainty should be taken with a healthy dose of suspicion. And instead, I try to approach things like a scientist and go, what are the biggest bottlenecks? Let's come up with a hypothesis on how these bottlenecks will be solved and let's run multiple experiments in parallel. And then whichever one emerges, you just have to be very truth-seeking and be willing to claim, like say you're wrong. I would say as an investor, your job is to come up with a hypothesis for where the future is going and be willing to make multiple different experiments that are aligned with your mission in parallel and be willing to be wrong and be honest with your LPs that some of them may be wrong. What do you say?”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's very hard for them to coexist inside of one person. And it's very hard to coexist sometimes inside of even one firm because there's a reason I'm sitting here at periodic labs. I work here three days a week. Every day from 8 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. for the last year, Liam Doge and I have had a standup every morning where we go through the priorities of the company. We make them, we prioritize, we go and execute. I mean, the compute team of AMP is sitting upstairs procuring compute for the periodic guys. My role models have always been the Arthur Rocks and the Bob Swansons and the Mike Markula, personal computing. Actually, effectively the first CEO for the first year of Apple was Mike Markula. He was an angel investor. And he was the one doing all the CapEx, you know, supply chain and capital and all of that stuff that allowed Steve and Jobs and Waz to focus on the product and the engineering. And that kind of deep partnership is what I get really excited about.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He used to run all hands at the company every week. If you look at Gentech, which was incubated in the basement of Kleiner, it was co-founders were Herb Boyer, professor at UCSF, and Bob Swanson, who was an associate at Kleiner. And I got apprentice in that mode of venture capital because when I got to Kleiner, you know, I was 20, wrapping up grad school at Stanford Med School, but I was working nights and weekends at Kleiner on the investing team. And Brooke Byers, who was the KPCB&B, had an office next to me. And he had some free time, so I would go to him and be like, Brooke, you know, teach me your ways. And he regaled me with all the stories of how Gentech was being founded. And I was like, wait. So you're saying basically, Bob, like co-founded Genentech here in the basement at Kleiner? And he's like, yeah, that's what it meant to be a partner. And I said, but that's not what happens here anymore. Like, we write a bunch of checks to SaaS companies, and then they go off and do stuff. And he was like, different times.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not at all how we make the deal. The deal is I incubate new companies like periodic labs one at a time. I can only do this one at a time because I like to team up with scientists or engineers who are at the forefront of their field. It takes a lot of work to create these new companies from scratch. In many ways, I had the privilege to realize that we are entering a back to the future era of venture capital. If you think about the birth of modern industries, let's talk about semiconductors, gene editing, the biotech industry, or self-driving cars, Silicon Valley in the early days of the founding of what I call these frontier industries, the way you start the most iconic companies is very different from how companies were funded for the last 10 years in the ZERP era. Intel, for example, right, was a very close partnership between a couple of scientists and an investor called Arthur Rock, who was a founding investor and was at the office every day. Arthur literally used to, Arthur wrote this stock incentive plan.”
2026-04-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source