YouSaid · the spoken record

Krishna Rao

lines on the record: 59
first: 2026-05-13
most recent: 2026-05-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“After that, and I didn't know any of this at the time, so he ended up going to college in state. He did exceptionally well. It's kind of years later that I kind of had to pull this out of him. But in deciding where to go to college, we were solidly middle class. This was like 25, 30 years ago. The financial aid packages weren't as robust as they are today. A big factor in his decision, I found out, was wanting to give me the opportunity to go wherever I wanted. That was six years out and who knows how it would turn out. A big part of his decision, a big factor in his decision was giving me the opportunity to have choice. I didn't know that 12-year-old me or 13-year-old me would have never understood many years later. I think that's something that was incredibly kind and is something that I still kind of hold with me today. I've done this like 600 times or something. I've never heard an answer of that type. That's awesome. Amazing. Love to meet your brother. Krishna, thanks so much for doing something. Thanks for having me.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have such big implications for the outcomes. AI is perfect for that. What can happen when the labs throughput goes up 10x or 100x? And we can run that many more experiments, probably get better results faster. And that can be something that helps people around the world. And it doesn't have to be limited to a small set of diseases or disorders. It can really go much further down the chain. And so I think that has the potential to greatly alter the way that we live and the way that we interact. And that's really exciting to me. Sure. I hope you're right. It sure seems like we're on that trajectory and it's quite a future to imagine. This is so much fun. I feel like we covered so many interesting aspects of the business. When I do these, I ask the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I have a brother who's five and a half years older than me. We live in California when he went to college and he got into everywhere he applied to and he was going to go to medical school.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside the business before those outside the business see it. With that perspective and in that seat, what are you most excited about? I really think that the biotechnology and healthcare outcomes that can come from this technology are the things that I'm most optimistic about it. We maybe live in a world where you're diagnosed with a disease that is not curable, but in your lifetime that cure can be found much more rapidly and you might not die of that disease. A lot of what we're doing today is helping to speed up the drug development process. A lot of the paperwork and clinical studies reports and things like that that are needed to be done. AI and our solutions in particular are helping to rapidly accelerate that. I'm really most optimistic and excited about when it goes further back into drug development and drug discovery because humans are capable at research. But if you think about these molecules and proteins, they're so complex and such small changes.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The model. Are talking about humans in large organizations with a set of tools and practices and things that they've been doing for a really long time change is hard to the extent that that diffusion hits a wall or slows down or something like that, that could affect the rate of change in terms of revenue growth. The scaling laws slowing down or not holding, we don't see that, but can't say that with 100% certainty. I think that would be silly. We certainly believe in the trajectory, but the model capability is leveling off would be another thing. Third is how we think about being at the frontier. Today we're at the frontier. I think we're defining the frontier of Agentic AI. We need to stay there. It's a competitive market and we're going to continue to invest in the technology and the compute and the go-to-market that's required to be there. But that's not guaranteed either. To finish on an optimistic note, if those are the things that could cause us to go to the low end, what are you most excited about? You have a privileged seat. You sort of get to literally see the future because it's happened.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are today, but I think the commonality of it was that everything is going to happen much quicker than we think. And that both the implications, but also the capabilities of that can change. And then he also had like a really incredible optimism about the future that I think we talk about internally holding light and shade. That's one of the things we say. I came from that conversation with just a bunch of questions, but also a sense of positivity about what could happen in the future. It seems like we've spent most of our time talking about because it's been the reality that we exist at the high end of that cone. What can you imagine that would cause that to change to the low end of that cone? If we were to do like some sort of pre-mortemon a year from now, we're like, wow, actually we didn't need nearly as much computer as we thought or something like that, what can you imagine that would shift us meaningfully in that cone? The capability and the use cases are playing catch up to where”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it is hard to balance everything family and friends, and this job takes a big bite out of all that. But what I do try to do maybe once a week is in a quiet moment, just think, wow, this is really cool. It's an incredible opportunity to work with this group of people on this problem at this company at this moment in time. Maybe it's in a car ride, maybe it's late at night or something like that, having that recognition and that appreciation is really important. So I try to bring that to at least my life for a couple minutes once a week. What did Tom tell you on the walk that sounded most crazy? We talked a lot about the scale of the compute infrastructure, what models could do in a short amount of time. I think he described a world that I would have said is kind of sci-fi. A lot of what we're experiencing here and now have really roots in that conversation. And so there's even more things that he talked about that are probably beyond.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not losing that. I'm not somebody who is comfortable at 50,000 feet. That's just not me. But you can't be at 500 feet at everything in this business. There's too much surface area. And so having people who can be partners in that is really, really critical. And I found we've been able to attract really great people. They've pushed my thinking quite a bit. I think the last piece is to think about how the business evolves over time and where there might be moments or analogs to things that have happened in the past. I helped lead the financing that Airbnb did in the middle of the pandemic. Very different situation, right? The business lost 70% of its revenue in seven weeks and O'Brien did a show with you. That was a harrowing time, but it was also a time kind of without precedent where you had to think about things with a clear perspective when it was rapidly changing and there was not a good template or pattern to match. And then on a personal level,”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people have seen. And it turns out that a lot of what Tom said during that walk has come to fruition. I remember that as like an early formative thing. This walk I took with him and coming home and being like, holy shit, this is going to be totally different and new, really incredible experience, but also really challenging one. And that's what it's been. The other piece of this is just hiring great people. I try to hire people and I tell people during the interview process, I'm like, I'm not really hiring you. It's like a direct report of mine. I'm hiring you as a partner. And I want you to treat it as a partnership, which means that there might be things that you and I disagree on. I want to hear that. I want to whiteboard it. I want to understand we've hired people from some of the best companies in the world. They come to this from a different perspective. They might come to it from a hyperscaler or a large software company or from financial services. In another lifetime, you know, I worked at Blackstone in the private equity group. That training is really valuable. And thinking about things at a granular level.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one example of what I mean. But how have you managed it personally? What have you had to do? What's been the most painful? How do you manage your own ability to scale with this thing that's scaling faster than what we've seen before? It's really hard. I think the important thing is to think in first principles. Everyone has priors when they come to something new. Thinking in first principles and having like intellectual openness. I spent a lot of time with Tom Brown, our chief compute officer. He was actually one of the first people to interview me at the company. And I remember we went on a walk and he started to tell me about his vision for the future of the company. And this is in 2024, early 2024. And I'll be honest, it sounded crazy. You walk me all the way home. I remember I came in and I told my wife, I was like, this is going to be wild if even 10% of that is true. This is going to bend all paradigms of not just things I've seen, but what”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the model capabilities and the products are pushing towards this notion of a virtual collaborator where even our product development today is not done by like one product manager with two engineers shipping something over three months. It's shipping daily and there's a fleet of agents that are working across the company on a specific task. So everyone kind of becomes a manager. I think the implications of that and the productivity gain that can come from that when it's in the right form factor, we're very, very early in that, but the potential for it is incredible. I'm curious how you've had to personally evolve to be able to stay doing this. You hear a lot about these stories. The executives have to scale with the company. They're also getting new executives. The business that you're at prior to this was a great business, but it was a tiny, tiny fraction of the scale. You, like everyone, is in this new unprecedented thing. You talked about the example of getting out of linear into more exponential type thinking.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build on top of it can unlock this virtual collaborator that we think can really accelerate knowledge work. There's something like $40 trillion of knowledge work done annually in the world. We think that productivity and the acceleration of it can happen, but you have to get it in the right form factor. This is where like intelligence is not just a single dimension, but the virtual collaborator kind of combines many of those things, something that's not just generically smart, but is smart for your use cases. What we're seeing in coding is something that we expect to see elsewhere for us. Cloud code has led the way on that as well as much of the business that we have great customers that are pushing the coding frontier as well. But then you also see something like cowork come along and start to unlock that. Cowork is growing faster than cloud code was if you index them to the same point in time. That's kind of remarkable because developers are really fast adopters of this technology. But I think it's...”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think forward as you're having conversations with In building AI in general, everyone is kind of wise to like these things are powerful. Everyone's using them. What feels to you like the frontier from the inside? I think it's this idea. And again, it's because we're focused on enterprise and because we're really trying to change the productivity of knowledge work that's done in the economy. I think it is towards this vision or this goal of like a virtual collaborator. And so think of this as something that has context within your organization that can use all of the tools that are specific to you, whether they be homegrown tools or tools that you purchase that has memory and the ability to effectively learn from mistakes you've made, but also mistakes that it's made over time, the ability to work over a very long time horizon on not just a task, but an actual idea. What that means for us is the model capability has to continue to grow to support that the products we've”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the right way, or there wasn't transparency around how a decision was made, I think that actually really matters because most of our team just wants to do really, really good work. And they're attracted to the company for the mission. The idea of having an impact on a company like ours that is trying to develop this transformative technology, but do it in a responsible way, I think that really matters to the people, not just on the research team, but across the company, and that is a real advantage for us. And it's not something that we take lightly. We have this concept of a race to the top. We don't always have all the right answers. We don't always do everything perfectly, but we want others to look at some of the things we do and maybe emulate some pieces of that and actually have the technology be developed in a better way across the industry. I think people are also really attracted to that as well. Again, not that we have all the answers, but that we can be a part of contributing and leading to how this can go well for humanity.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Majority of the first 20 to 30 employees are still at the company, the culture underpins the reason why we've been able to attract and retain some of the best talent in the industry. Because we don't always pay people the most. We have very competitive compensation packages. But when Meta and others were out with these huge packages for some of the technical talent across the large language labs, I think we lost two people and other labs lost dozens. What parts of the business and the culture specifically for researchers? Why do you think that is true? It really is underpinned by the culture. That's not just something we feel. It's like empirically when you talk to people, it's, I want to have the most impact possible. I want to work in a place where, again, this idea of talent density mattering more than talent mass. And I want to work in a place that is actually collaborative versus I have to like fight for this one thing. And I feel like it wasn't discussed and debated.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People might have different perspectives on how to allocate that compute. They will engage in a thoughtful discussion about where the returns are the highest or the best. And when they do that, you know, when we come to a decision, then there's alignment on it. There's not second guessing. There's not politics or fiefdom. The other piece of it is it's remarkably transparent. Dario gets up in front of the company every two weeks, usually writes a short document, and he talks about usually three or four topics, and then takes open questions from the company. These are not softballs. They're not planted questions. They're just real questions that are on people's mind. And he answers them the best that he can. It's not a decision-making forum, but it is a way for the company to get a window into how leadership is thinking, how he's thinking. And there's debate and dialogue in that. That is something that people really value. It is a transparent culture. It is one where all seven of the co-founders are still at the company.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like that frame. How would you describe it to your parents? Is it one incredibly collaborative? And this means that we don't really tolerate thiefdoms or the sharp elbows or the, I need to take credit for this. It's incredibly humble. We have this sticker on their laptops internally. Our competitors are incredibly capable and success is far from guaranteed. And I think that's part of how the company operates. If we reach a milestone in something good happens, there's not confetti on the floor. It's like what's next? And I think it's just that focus on the mission and the alignment that is imbued throughout the culture of the company. The other thing I would say is there's rigorous debate in intellectual openness and intellectual honesty that happens where people question things. People will express a point of view. But then there's dialogue around it that's productive. And then we'll decide on a path forward. And then after that happens, there's real alignment. So in something like compute allocation, we were talking about before.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be in, and what makes it the most distinctive from other companies, maybe that you've worked at, or from other companies that are trying to do the same thing? What's your sense of the differences and the distinctiveness? The culture is a real unique aspect of Anthropic, and it is something that we do talk about externally, but it's different when you're in there living it. And I can tell you a little bit about some of my observations. First of all, we have seven co-founders that shouldn't work on paper, but it really does in practice. And I think they've really set the example for the culture and the things that really matter to the company. We take culture extremely seriously. We do a culture interview, and it's not some pro forma thing we do just to check a box. It is a real part of the evaluation process. So somebody could be flying colors on everything else. And really, really, the smartest person you've met in this role, we won't hire them if they don't pass the cultural bar. And the way I would describe it.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want the technology to support the US as well as democratic countries around the world. And that's one of the reasons why we've been working closely with the administration. I do think that there's a balance, right? You want to be able to have innovation happen really quickly and have that not be slowed down, but you also want to have this responsibility framework for how these things are deployed because we've long said that this technology has implications and we should have an honest conversation about them. And that includes what the government. And so I think the mythos process is a good example of that. Can you teach us a bit more about how you would describe their cultural tenets to your parents or something like this? What feels like it really drives most of the culture? I'm especially curious about the writing. You hear often that Dario publishes these long essays every so often externally. My understanding is he does that way more frequently and there's a lot of writing culture internally. I'm trying to get a sense of what the culture is like.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we think that's a template that could be used for the future, but because of this one particular area, we wanted to be cognizant of that in like how we released it. You're so big now that you run into everything and everyone. And one example of this is the government just a couple days ago said maybe there'd be this new system where you have to sort of pre-approve the release of a new model with the government before it was released to the public. Obviously you had the crazy experience with the Department of War, which I'm really curious what that was like as you went through it. Now everyone cares about this company and this technology and a couple other companies that are building it. How do you navigate that stuff? Some of it's just, I guess, beyond your control, but I'm sure you're trying to work with people as best you can. Maybe talk about those two examples of the government now as a very relevant partner player, overseer, et cetera. We prioritize having a strong relationship on this because we do think that regulation has a role to play. We've been pretty vocal about that. We are very America first in our approach.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continued to hold. One of the things about Mythos is that. What we found was that cyber in particular was a place where it spiked. This was the first model that we decided to release in a different way. The way in which we did that, again, is consistent with our mission, our principles. We wanted to do it in that way. We have this phased approach to it because we think that when a model is as capable, and again, cyber is the thing that people focused on, but there are other things as well. We think it can be used in a positive way to patch code bases. You've seen these examples where we had an open source code base that a prior model found 22 security vulnerabilities in and mythos then found 250. That is kind of scary, but that informed the way in which we released it. We said, let's do it in a phased way. Let's do it to, you know, group that will expand over time where we can focus on this one cyber capability and how can actually be used positively in a defensive way as opposed to in an offensive way.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come up with it. We don't have this blueprint that's going to solve everything, but to at least have that dialogue about some of the risks and downsides and what we can do to address it. And then I think it's being transparent about both of those things when we talk about it. I do think that over the long term, the opportunity is going to be significantly higher and greater than some of the risks and the downsides that will happen. But that doesn't mean it's going to be perfectly smooth on the curve. The release of mythos was such an interesting moment. It was the first time many people, friends of mine that are careful watchers of this stuff, said something like, this one kind of makes me scared. So it relates back to the safety question. It's also the first example of you coming out and saying, we want to make sure this isn't used for bad and it's maybe the first one that we are worried could be used for bad. I'm curious what that discussion was like internally before the world heard about it. The decision making process around it. And just using that as an example to talk about the things that do scare you as we continue to advance and the scaling along.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of those things are part of the promise and the potential of AI. We could probably do a better job of painting that picture and we want to show more tangible results for that over time. I think that is coming. And that's one of the things I'm most optimistic about. I think on the other side, though, we do want to articulate the risks. I don't think we should just tell everyone everything's going to be great. There are likely to be bumps on the road. And so I think people generally gravitate towards more honest and balanced assessments. If I feel like somebody's just telling me all the good news and none of the bad news, then I'm like, okay, do I really trust this perspective? That's where there's a need for balance. Look, these are some of the things that happen when change is compressed over a short amount of time. How do we work across commercial and government to actually come up with some of the solution sets? So I think it's about a clear articulation of the opportunities. It's about thinking about what those solutions may be. And that's not any one company that can”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all happening so quickly. You can have years or decades of progress that are being compressed into months. Going back to humans thinking in terms of exponentials versus linear, that can be jarring. We are very optimistic generally about the potential for this technology. We as an industry can continue to do a better job of articulating your Dario wrote this essay, Machines of Love and Grace. It's all about the potential for this technology to transform the way that we live, whether that be in drug development and curing diseases that are more mainstream, but also rare diseases, the ability to accelerate that biological progress. Number two, in healthcare and how healthcare is delivered to raise our standard of living in the developing world and in places where resources are not as plentiful, how do we actually make sure that the economic gains are also accruing to not just a small number of people in the world, but across the world? I think that”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where does it come from? Because obviously, some of the places that we buy compute from, they sell the compute to others, they may use the compute internally. What is the balance of that over time? So your philosophy there is be involved with great players and have flexibility. That's right. There's this crazy stat about AI, just the generic concept being less popular than Congress amongst like the general populace. And it's kind of funny when you first hear it, but when you really think about it, you're like, this is kind of fucked. We need to solve this problem. It doesn't seem like the general world that isn't in technology doesn't live in the Bay Area or New York does not yet feel or understand why this is good for them, just as measured by their opinion of it. What do you think we need to do as an industry about that problem? If we think about the transformation that's happening, there's been other transformative ways before all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, the internet, cloud, et cetera. One of the things that's different about AI.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's one. A second one is how do your customers see ROI? I get asked this question a lot as well. Like, are people just using this for testing? Are they actually deploying this at meaningful scale for our business? We're seeing that in spades, our net dollar retention rate is over 500% on an annualized basis. Nine out of the Fortune 10, these are real customers making significant buying decisions pilots anymore. Exactly. On the way here, I was in Anuber and I signed two double digit million dollar commits when the car ride, which was like 20 minutes. So from that perspective, we're seeing it and we're now being judged by some of the biggest companies in the world, the most sophisticated buyers. And startups, they have choice in the market and they're choosing us. But I think one question I get a lot is, or I would ask from the investor seat, the skeptical investor seat, is how are your customers getting return from this? Maybe a third one is how do you think about compute in the future?”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very self reinforcing. And that flexibility is actually what helps to drive revenue short term and long term. If I was to force you out of your role and into an investor seat at a great big investing firm, and then I said your job is to go grill these companies and invest in the best ones. What questions would you be asking of the labs or companies that are building models to really get at the heart of the points of uncertainty, of skepticism, of things that might not make these the best businesses of all time? curious from that angle how you would approach it. First, what is the ROI on compute all up? How are you utilizing it? What return are you seeing today? And how is that coming over time? That's certainly a question I get asked a lot by investors, but I think it's a really important question. These are the massive unprecedented investments that companies like us are making. What's the return that you're generating on that? And when does it come and what is the shape of it?”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is this paradigm of how compute is used, thinking of it as not just something that is a variable cost over some time period, but really this resource that's so fungibly utilized. We run workloads on one day in the morning on a chip for inference and in the afternoon or evening, we use it for model development. That paradigm does not exist in a company like a software company or a factory. You can't repurpose if you have a bunch of people doing R&D and that's your R&D expense, they can't go and become cogs and vice versa in most traditional companies. Here, you really have that fungibility that's possible. And I think that's where the return on compute is so important. And I think people are beginning to understand that. But there's still a tendency towards treating it like, oh, I have to separate these two costs when in actuality they're”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I joined the business, it had about 250 million of run rate revenue. And the plan was to get to a billion. And I said, great, in what year? That was linear thinking, consistently. Dario has been a much better predictor of the revenue than I have. I think we're going to close the gap over time as we get better at forecasting and understanding the business. But definitely the first time I saw it”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've raised $75 billion since I joined the company. We have another $50 billion that'll come into the future from the Amazon and Google deals that we in class month. And so that's a tremendous amount of capital, but it's a capital intensive business and we need this capital to support that growth. It all goes to the fact that the business is running very efficiently. And so the reason we raise this capital is more because of that cone of uncertainty than it is to fund losses in the business.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the last linkage, if you're selling to enterprises, we now sell to nine of the Fortune 10. All of those enterprises are entrusting us with customer information, their data, they're interacting with their employees, sometimes even interacting with their customers as well. Those are the most sensitive workloads. More and more of these businesses are running on Cloud and our Cloud platform. When you have this investment that we've made and will continue to make in safety, interpretability alignment, that actually inures to the benefit of the enterprise customers as well and all of our customers because they want that if they're going to entrust us with all that access and all that data and the ability to work in the most sensitive workflows within their company. They want a company that they can trust. That's not why we invested in it, but it did have this downstream effect that we've really seen prove out again and again to be a company that is both at the frontier but one that is investing in safety and that you can trust.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build this transformative technology, but to do it in the right way and do it responsibly, that had this really interesting interlink with our business that most people didn't really understand or really believe, which was that we invest in research, not just in model development, but also in AI safety research. We pioneered interpretability, which is think of it as like an MRI for the model to see inside the neural network how it works. We pioneered alignment science, which is you want the model to do what you tell it to and how often does it do that and how often does it stray from that? Those things are important for our mission and that's why we did them. They had these downstream effects where it turns out if you can look inside the model, you're better at building them.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue, but the day of our first close was the day the deepseake news came out. We got the clothes done, but certainly a ton of volatility is people then said, wait a minute, should I just totally re-underwrite how I think about AI in the total? That was a series E obviously we brought on great investors across all of these, but people still had some of those questions, but they looked at our forecasts and they thought, I get it, you've grown to a billion dollars of revenue so quickly, but there's no way you're going to be able to keep Yeah, that's just not possible. There's laws of physics. You're an enterprise, which is great, but the adoption is going to take so much longer. I mean, look at how long it took with cloud and how many people are still on-prem. The business continued to prove out the thesis that the return to frontier intelligence is really high. We are really focused on what's really happened is model-led growth enabled byproducts and our go-to-market team and our distribution. What they also saw was that this thesis of, hey, it's really important to”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I joined the company about two years ago. We were closing our series D at the time. That was not a straightforward fundraising. The company really only had a frontier model in the middle of that fundraising towards the tail end of it, the FTX transaction was happening, which was liquidating a bunch of anthropic shares. That was kind of the starting point. And at that point, the questions were around why do you need to have a frontier model? What's the returns to this? They're also around our mission and how we approach things. People said, well, AI safety and building a really big business aren't those things at odds? And there are also a lot of other misconceptions on your Salesforce is really small. Don't you need to scale it like all these enterprise software companies? There was just a bit of a paradigm around trying to fit us into a particular mold that had existed before. Over time, it's evolved at the end of 2024, we raised the series E, the business at scale to close to a billion dollars of run.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you have a slightly different view on it in that I think we've been able to hire great people at the company, but it has made even those incredibly talented people so much more productive. There's a little bit of this, I think of it again, like Jevin's paradox, but for labor, which is that we have people who've become incredibly more productive. We've hired a lot more people because of that because there's no shortage of work to do. And now with the assistance of Claude, people are spending less time in that MFR trying to reconcile some number, but they're actually thinking, oh, how do we reinvest this in the business? How do we think about dynamically allocating resources? Whereas before I'm working to tie out a number or I'm in that accounting example taking a long time to close the books. So I actually think of it as even more optimistically that it is an accelerant to our productivity. And that actually means that we can get a lot more done and that even as we grow the team, those people are more productive as well as they come up the curve on how to use cloud.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we don't compensate people on it. No one's trying to token max for that. But it's really interesting because some of the most senior people within the finance team are actually the biggest users of tokens. So it is not just the 22-year-old who joined and has a coding background and was doing that on the weekends and brought it to work. It's also people using the tools to change how they're working. Like I think our number one user is our head of tax and he's focused on tax policy engines and automating large parts of the workloads that are happening within the team. So I love seeing that. I tell people if we're not super users of this, if we're not pushing the limits of it, how can you expect customers to do that?”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sift through all the data, get to conclusions, write a memo about it, or publish a regular report on what's happening over the course of the day, what's driving it. We now have a library of skills for Claude that are specific to finance. Last I checked, there were over 70 of them that everyone can kind of access through this common repository. And on top of that, we built an MFR, a monthly financial review skill. And it can produce our monthly financial review. It's 90 to 95% ready. And then all of our discussion becomes about what do we do? What are the implications? Not what exactly happened because Claude is not just reporting the weather. It's also helping to think about drivers. Why did the number change in the way it did? And that gives you tremendous insight into the business, both in terms of this MFR that we do, but also on a daily basis. And so what used to take hours to produce a weekly report for what's driving revenue or what's driving our compute utilization.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the finance team at Anthropic. This is really interesting because we were using cloud code about a year ago. And I started asking people like, is everyone just kind of taking up vibe coding or what is it? And we started to use Cloud Code as almost like an assistant, a digital coworker, not just for coding tasks. And that actually was early in what eventually became cowork. That was kind of an extension of cloud code to say what it's done for Agentic software development it should do for all of knowledge work. But then we started to productionize that. And I'm actually really proud we spent a lot of time with our product team too. They kind of see how we use it and get input and feedback from that. But today, all of our legal entities, we can produce the statutory financial statements using Cloud. And yes, a human checks it, but all of those financial statements are produced with Claude. We also have a more real-time platform called AntStats. And it used to take a lot of time.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And energy and work closely with the team and internally. And that's something where we plan capacity together. We do that with the other hyperscalers as well. If you think about the three clouds, they're a great distribution engines for us too. We have a really, really robust first-party business as well. But these are multifaceted partnerships, whether it be on developing the chips themselves, landing that capacity, serving it, and then ultimately distributing it to the customers. Each one of them has that element to it. They're different and each of them has relative strengths, but we've been able to work really well across those clouds. And then obviously across Broadcom and Nvidia as well. I'm thinking about your function, like the finance team. I'm picturing this ROI on compute thing on different horizons with all these complex variables, which makes me wonder, how do you use these powerful tools yourself internally to run your group and the business? What is the deployment of cloud code and cloud in general?”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're really generating a robust return on that compute. And that's our measuring stick. I think it's something where we think of the compute envelope that we have as the thing that is able to govern how much we're able to drive revenue both over the short term and the long term. If you're this great customer of the compute providers, what does that group need to do to be a great provider to you to help you drive that return? We're fortunate in that we have really great partners in Amazon, in Google, in Microsoft, but also with Broadcom and Nvidia as well. Our ecosystem, we are the only model that's on all three clouds today. We're the only model that has large language lab that's using all three of these chip platforms. These collaborations are much deeper than just procurement. I think that's something that's often lost. If you think about our relationship with Amazon, our teams are deeply embedded with the Annapurna Labs team. We are good users of training. We've spent a lot of time.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unlocks TAN that drives revenue six months from now. And everything in between. If I do internal acceleration to launch a new product, all of these things are in support of that. Our returns on that compute expense today are robust. We think of it as what is the return on that full envelope of compute. We feel really good about where we are from that perspective and we're balancing delivering value to customers with also seeing a really, really strong return on that compute ourselves. If you think about when revenue grows, as we mentioned kind of in Q1, it's not like we onboarded a bunch of new compute in that time period. We talked about compute comes based on a ramp that might have been determined 12 months ago. This idea of variable cost that's like on the incremental to serve a customer, it doesn't really fit our business. It tries to maybe fit our business into like a software paradigm. That's not the case. In actuality compute is supporting all of these activities.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think pricing stability is important, and we also think that pricing to get that value and to see that kind of Jevins paradox happen is really important. The other component of this is margins and how you think about margins as a business. Again, because this is so unbelievably capital intensive to build these frontier labs, you've got the levers we talked about, which is efficiency, price, both those things relate to margin. Given how much capital you need, why not just say we want to have a healthy margin and set the price accordingly? maybe that price can come down if efficiency is better or whatever. And I'm just curious how you think about margins as a relates to pricing and the business. We think about what is the return on our compute spend, writ large. So that is all of the different workloads that we've talked about, whether it's serving customers. If you think of all of those are kind of in support of revenue over different timescales, if I serve inference, it's in support of revenue today. If I do model development, it might help for a capability that”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a lot of value from it and they're generating a ton of ROI from our models today. We want that to just continue because our goal is to proliferate this throughout the ecosystem. We think we're in the very, very early innings on all of these use cases. The best way to do that is get this intelligence in the hands of as many businesses from startups to digitally native businesses to the largest companies in the world. Some of that means that you have to make it in a price point that's accessible and that allows them to get a lot of value from it. Changing the pricing for Opus, you see this Jevins paradox. We lowered the price of it, but the consumption went up way, way more than what you would have expected. And so because we hit that sweet spot for customers, they were able to use it a lot more. We had the efficiency to be able to serve it to customers at scale. And then they were able to build that into their workload such that when we released Opus 4.6, it's a model improvement. They can slot it in. We didn't change the price.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The company is only a little over five years old. This past March was the third anniversary of the first dollar revenue into the business. And we only had a frontier model for real for the first time in March of 2024. So the time scale of these things, it's an important backdrop as I think about it. Our pricing has been relatively stable across haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, and now Mythos is obviously newer. We've made very few pricing changes. The biggest pricing change we made was to bring down the price of the Opus family when we launched Opus 4.5. If we thought about why did we do that? It's really because we found that Opus class models were underutilized relative to their capability. People were trying to often fit an Opus problem into a sonnet. We were able to serve that very efficiently from our perspective, but actually bring down the price, which made it more accessible to customers. We want our customers to generate.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medium to long term compute, but the things we're assessing are largely the same. What is different is just the time horizon. What about the trade-off use of price performance, trade-off between like cost per token or something throughput and speed? Both are important, of course. From the customer perspective, they care about both speed probably unlocks some capability and use cases that are really interesting that we don't know about yet as these things get faster. Can you talk a little bit about that trade-off in compute as you're assessing it? As we look across three different chip platforms, we also opt multiple generations of chips within it. It could be TPU, V5E, and V6 and V7 and training.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how efficiently we can run it. So we have kind of a process to assess. And that same process, by the way, we used to assess longer-term deals as well. So last month, we signed a five gigawatt deal with Google and with Broadcom for TPUs starting in 2027. We also signed a deal with Amazon for trainium for up to five gigawatts as well. It was an over $100 billion commitment. And a lot of that compute is actually already landing and will land in the rest of this year into next year. And so if you think about it, it's a bit of this layer cake of compute that's starting at different times with different capabilities. And we're very dynamically comparing that compute. It's price performance over time. That's really, really important to us when it lands and what we think we can do with it internally in the business. And so there's so many different variables you have to optimize for around what compute it is at what cost and over what time horizon. But we have a pretty dynamic way of looking at near-term compute and then”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tennessee facility, but it makes me curious about how you are canvassing the world. That is an opportunity you decided to do. I'm sure there's a universe of things that you've explored. What is the strategy for trying to get more in creative ways? Bring us a little bit more into that. We announced a partnership with SpaceX for their Colossus facility in Memphis. Really excited about that. It's going to allow us to continue to expand, especially on the consumer and prosumer side. But that's just one example of us just, as you said, looking for near-term compute wherever we can get it. As the compute base grows, that near-term compute becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of what's available and what's out there. We look at it as can we deploy that compute that's available productively, sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it's no. But if we can, then we look at the economic return on it based on what its price, what duration we have it for, where it's located, what type of computed it is.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or your current perspective because it could be the case that something a month ago was true that's just not true today and that breaks your model. And you have to go back and update it. And so this old like, well, we'll forecast once a quarter and we'll revisit this in three months at the next board meeting. That doesn't work for our business. It's so dynamic that we have to always think about, oh, our models couldn't do this before and they could do this now. What does that mean for the TAM? We've seen this in coding first. Starting with around Sonnet 3536, we started to see this really remarkable jump in capability, which was then followed by adoption and usage and revenue. It was a little hard to predict that, but now we can use coding as an analog for a lot of what's happening elsewhere in the economy and elsewhere in our business. We kind of look at pattern recognition in our own business to try to predict what's going to happen in the future. Literally 15 minutes before you got here, the news came out about your partnership with XAI or the...”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feels like there's just no slowdown in the scaling laws themselves. Is that a fair characterization? For us, that's a fair characterization. Obviously, a bunch of the authors of the scaling laws papers are amongst our founders, notwithstanding that, we can be a bit of a skeptical bunch. We hold ourselves to a really high standard. It's very kind of scientific method and people are constantly challenging previously held assumptions. But from what we see, the scaling laws are not slowing down. So if that's true, you said before it's hard for humans to be exponential in their thinking and not linear, that continues to be true for however many more turns of the crank here. How do you do that thing of not thinking linear and thinking exponential yourself in your job and for the business? The implications are really hard to reason through. Exponential growth rate is one thing, but exponential growth of capability. I like don't even know how to get my head around it. How do you get your head around it? We think about the world as scenarios. It's very hard to have a point estimate in this business and then having a very low bar for updating your current priors basically.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we did on these kind of loss curves. And that gives us a sense for model capability. You can do the same thing as you think about RL, probably as importantly as when customers get their hands on it. What are they seeing? Where are they identifying pain points? And those pain points become like training targets for us. We don't train on customer data in the enterprise side, on the prosumer side. It's only a few opt-in. But customers tell us things like, hey, I wish the model were better at this. Or I had this particular place where it got stuck and I could build this other product, but the capability needs to be further than that. What we usually tell them is build your product for that because we're going to, on the R&D side, improve that over time. And so there is this connected loop. But internally, we're always looking at different models that are being trained, different snapshots that we have and comparing them internally and to a lesser extent externally against our own measure and then ultimately how our customers view them as well.”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just the priorities, but some of the new areas of discovery, it just actually makes that research talent even better. I think of it as accentuating and accelerating the talent that we already have. We talk a lot about how talent density beats talent mass. And I think that's true here. Like we want the densest collection of AI research talent and inference engineering talent. And that enabled with the best models is a really winning combination. How are scaling laws talked about internally? the sort of consensus has been you've got different components of them you've got pre-training you've got post training you've got reasoning and that all these are kind of moving at different paces and to hit a true wall they would all need to fall down that's sort of like how the world is now conceptualizing scaling laws how are they talked about internally how do you think about them we look at models at various points in their development so we can see during a pre-training run how does this model compare to a prior model”
2026-05-13 · Invest Like the Best · Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.472] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source