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Anjney Midha

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59
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2026-06-13
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2026-06-13
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1
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  1. “And we, it was all angels in that first round, a bunch of cats and dogs, all of us who believed in the mission. And then over the next 18 months, Dario Tom and team put together a plan that we kind of workshopped on getting an Amazon involved as a strategic, and that resulted in a $4 billion compute and capital partnership that made me realize infrastructure, especially compute infrastructure was just a key requirement to create any kind of modern AI lab. And so since then, I've spent the past five, six years figuring out how to unblock that compute bottleneck for research teams.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “We went and talked to a bunch of venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, especially some of the ones who were involved in the biggest hits of the last decade before that, they would get it. These are the creators of GPT-3. And they were like, we just don't get this. We've heard the whole AI story before, this whole general intelligence thing is a pipe dream. And it was painful. We tried to raise $500 million. We couldn't. We instead scraped together about $100 million, which I know sounds like a lot better at the time was a rounding error compared to how much Google had spent on the same kind of systems.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, nobody really paid attention. They were like, nobody cares, but we think it's the best thing since sliced bread. And we want to leave and turn this into a standalone business. But it'd be helpful to get some of your advice on how to do that. And I couldn't really come on board full time at the time with them because I had to integrate my company into the acquirer. But I came on as their angel and nights and weekends. I worked with them on the business plan and who we should raise from. That company is anthropic. Dario and Tom and I started doing these weekly working sessions in early 2021. And yeah, I assumed that.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, about a month after I sold the business, I got a call from some friends who were running research at OpenAI, and we'd all been friends in the machine learning community.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I got the beat out of me because we built this incredible technology, which was this AI system that could map any location in 3D, and then the pandemic hit. And so location-based mapping, 3D mapping. The only thing you can control is how you react to what happens. And so I did feel for a moment like it was bad luck and then you just have to pick up the pieces and make the best of it. So I did with my co-founder. We figured it out. It was a tough few years where we had to pivot the business, but we landed the plane. We essentially, a lot of the distributed systems we'd built on the back end side ended up being quite valuable. We sold that to a company called Discord. Which is a chat up for gamers.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so I went into sort of machine, I got swept up in that moment and started studying a lot of my coursework was in machine learning. My primary department at Stanford was in bioinformatics, which was machine learning applied to healthcare. I got sidetracked to a venture firm called Kleiner Perkins for about four and a half years where I got the chance to work for. Some of the great investors like John Doore and Mary Meeker. And then I left and started my own company. And as is the case in Silicon Valley, when you start, I mean, I was 25, I went and raised about $47 or so million dollars from some of the usual suspects like benchmark and index and so on. I thought I was the coolest kid in town.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Late twenty twenty I had just sold my last business. It was called Ubiquity 6. It was a 3D mapping business. It was an AI business that we had founded in 2017. And I felt like a failure at the time because in San Francisco, I was in San Francisco. My life stories, I was born in India. I went to high school in Singapore and I came over to college to the United States at Stanford for my undergraduate degree. And then when I arrived at campus in 2011, deep learning had just started taking over the world in Silicon Valley. Andre Karpathi was a computer science DA to Andrew Ng, who was one of the, I would say, modern sort of founding fathers of deep learning, this idea that you can teach machines to think without having to give them prescriptive rules.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Was a little bit of the other way around. I said yes, then we tried to get another 25 BCs to say yes, and I failed. It was a harrowing experience. It was a bit of a wake-up call.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Governed by a public benefit charter, which means everything we do has to follow our mission. We have a public charter mission. We are for-profit in the same way Ben and Jerry's or REI and Enthropic are public benefits. So we aim to make a healthy, modest amount of profits that can sustain our mission, but we have the flexibility to choose what that margin is.”

    2026-06-13 · Odd Lots · Anjney Midha's Plan to Radically Lower the Price of Compute · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source