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Krishna Rao

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2026-05-13
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2026-05-13
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  1. “How do you think about this weird world where you mentioned the talent and the leverage and they're not writing code themselves and cloud code's writing its own code? It seems like the last step of that would be you don't even need the talent to tell the thing what to do. It just figures out what to do on its own. And that's like the ultimate thing than just runs and is only constrained by computer something. Am I being too crazy about that or is that future possible, do you think? The core of our company is still a research lab. I think it's maybe not as well understood. Maybe it's getting more understood from the outside. But we're doing experiments. We are doing things that push the limits of what our models can do. And that research and that engine is upstream of everything else that we've talked about. That is enabled by the models today. It's not entirely done by the models. Over time, we think that the models will get better. They'll be more helpful in that process. But having the best talent to set the direction and to help effectively guide that process.”

    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

  2. “Cone of uncertainty because we want to range towards the top end of these outcomes, but we have to plan for that. And as we go, that's how we think about buying compute in a disciplined way. The most important thing is what happens if you are at one point in the cone of uncertainty but you've only bought compute for a different point, that's where this compute efficiency is something that really has helped us out. Can you bring us into the room for the conversations around the trade-offs between those? I'm so interested by those three buckets of training, research, internal use, broadly speaking, and then serving customer demand. Naively, you might think, okay, it's a third or third, a third allocation or something. How much does that range around? What are the trade-offs? What is that discussion like on an ongoing basis? In addition to meeting about compute procurement, we meet a lot about compute allocation. I think what's important is it starts with a place where our culture is the one that's incredibly collaborative. And that informs how this conversation happens.”

    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

  3. “We're thinking ahead, even with our revenue growth, it's really hard to predict this business. And it's really hard, I think humans mostly think linearly and you think incrementally. I've been at the company for two years. That's something that's paradigm I've had to break for myself, to stop just thinking linearly and think on this exponential. When you're on this exponential, again, the range of outcomes starts to be really, really wide. We look at a range of scenarios and we look at different points in that cone of uncertainty over a one to two year period. And then we kind of work backwards from that. And what we want to do is we want to be at a place where we can obviously still be at the frontier. That's the most important thing to be able to serve customers and then to be able to have enough internal compute to accelerate our employees. It's interesting if we were to say to our employees, you can't use our models anymore. We could serve billions of dollars of revenue with that compute that we allocate to employees internally, but we want to take a long-term view and a long-term perspective on 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

  4. “Team at Amazon to help to influence the roadmap of these chips because we believe what we're doing is really stressing the limits of what these chips are capable of. And that means that like a dollar of compute inside our organization goes further than I think it does anywhere else. Importantly, we basically want to utilize each chip to its best purpose within the company. So that does mean that we're building our own compilers. We're really building things from the chip level up in order to have that customization and that flexibility to use it internally the way we think will generate the most ROI. Can you explain this cone of uncertainty thing? I want to ask about all the component parts of this, but that feels like a really key starting point or overall frame for how to think about both sourcing and the uses of compute. Can you just explain what that concept is? When you're building and growing a business exponentially, really small movements in monthly or weekly growth rates result in compounding very, very different outcomes.”

    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

  5. “I think it was third generation TPUs was the first one we used at scale. People thought, oh, well, you're crazy. Everyone's using GPUs. Why aren't you using GPUs? And we've invested very heavily to be able to use that compute incredibly flexibly. And then we look across the different generations of those chip platforms and use each generation for the best workload internally. And so we really built this orchestration layer that gives us that flexibility to use all different types of compute. And in doing so, we also are able to get the most value out of it. And I might think about this in the right way, that something like CUDA that has been a part of NVIDIA's story for a long time now that allows you to do a lot with the underlying actual hardware that you want to sort of eke your way into being as close to the bare metal as possible. That's part of this flexibility and being able to control as many of the variables as you can. Is that the journey that you've been on? That's part of the journey for sure. But it's also been actually pretty collaborative. So we work really closely with the entrepreneur lab.”

    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

  6. “When the business is growing exponentially, is to use that compute as efficiently as possible. I would say I spend 30 or 40% of my time on compute, even today. What does flexibility mean in that example? It means a couple of different things. Number one, we use three different chip platforms. So we are customers of Amazon's Trainium chip, Google's CPUs, and Nvidia's GPUs. We use these chips fungibly. If you think about the compute we buy, we're using it for model development. We're using it internally to speed up our own product and model development. We're also using it obviously to serve customers across those three chip platforms. We're using Compute for all of those internal and external uses. And that flexibility took us a long time to be able to do that. We've invested in that over multiple years to be what I believe the most efficient users of compute amongst any of the frontier labs. And that's not something that just happened overnight. When we started using TPU,”

    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

  7. “And hardest decisions to make in the entire company. Think of it this way. If you buy too much compute, you go out of business. If you buy too little compute, you can't serve your customers. And you're not at the frontier. Same thing. So we talk a lot about this cone of uncertainty, but the idea of just these purchases that have these real world implications. You can't just go out and buy a gigawatt of compute and have it delivered next week. You have to really think ahead to plan for this. And so we really take a very disciplined approach to how we think about it. So we look bottoms up. We model what we think demand will be. Obviously, we sometimes get that wrong. We think about the compute we need to stay at the frontier. And we really look ahead and try to estimate that. And then as we go out and do these deals to procure compute, flexibility is really important to us. And so we build that flexibility into the deals themselves. We build that flexibility into how we use the compute as well. Because the way in which we bridge from a position we are today to where we want to go.”

    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

  8. “Kristen and I have been so excited for this conversation because you get to see from the inside one of the most interesting businesses and world history at maybe the most interesting time in world history, at least if you're a technologist or care about technology. One of the things that fascinates me most is this question of compute that you have to deal with all day, every day. It's a key part of what you do. It's a key part of what these companies are doing. And there's just this whole revolution happening. I'd love you to just start by explaining what it's like to have to deal with that. I understand at one point you were having like a daily meeting about how to allocate to compute and to who and why. Bring us into that part of your life because I think it's right at the cutting edge of what's going on. The compute that we procure, it's the lifeblood of our business. It is the most important thing in the company. It's like the canvas on which everything else gets built. And so the decisions we make and how much compute to buy are some of the most consequential.”

    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

  9. “My guest today is Krishna Rao, the CFO of Anthropic. The center of our conversation is how he navigates the decision around procuring and allocating compute, which he describes as the canvas on which everything else gets built. We talk about what he calls the cone of uncertainty, the three-chip platforms anthropic uses fungibly across trainium TPUs and GPUs, and the daily meetings they run to allocate compute between model development, internal use, and serving customer demand. He explains where the returns to frontier intelligence keep getting higher, especially in enterprise, and how entropic thinks about the line between platform and application and why they choose to build their own products like Cloud Code. Krishna has such a unique seat watching one of the fastest growing businesses in history, and he is generous in sharing what he has already learned since joining the company two years ago.”

    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