Anthropic Co-founder: Building Claude Code, Lessons From GPT-3 & LLM System Design

**Tom Brown** (0:00)
When we started out, we didn't seem like we were gonna be successful at all. OpenAI had a billion dollars and like all of these, all of the star power, and we had seven co-founders in COVID like trying to build something, and we didn't know if we were necessarily gonna make a product or what the products would look like. One thing that's interesting to look at is just that humanity is on track for like the largest infrastructure build out of all time.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Tell us about the early days of Anthropic. So you had a general idea of this sort of like long-term mission that you wanted to do to you know, not destroy humanity. But like, what did you actually work on for the first year? How did that convert on an actual product?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:45)
Welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. Today, we've got a real treat, co-founder of Anthropic, Tom Brown.

**Tom Brown** (0:52)
Excited to be here.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
So Tom, one of the things that a lot of the people watching would love to figure out is you got started in tech at the age of 21, fresh from MIT. How does someone go from that in 2009 to literally co-founding something as important as Anthropic?

**Tom Brown** (1:12)
Summer 2009, linked language, two of my friends had started that out. I think they had seen one of our other friends, Kyle Vogt, kind of do a YC company. And so it was in the water that that's a thing that we could try to do. They started out, I was the first employee. Back then, yeah, you guys let me join for all the dinners and stuff like that too. I could have instead gone to like a big tech company or something like that. And I think probably just as a software engineer, I might have learned more software engineering skills.
But I think by being there with the other co-founders without anyone telling us what to do, basically we had to figure out how to live. The company would die by default. I think in school, there was a lot of a feeling of people would give me tasks and I would do the tasks. It's kind of like a dog waiting for food to be fed to them in their bowl or something like that. And I think for that company, it was more like wolves and we have to like hunt our food, otherwise our kids are going to starve or something like that. I think that mindset has been the most valuable mindset that shift that I've had for trying to do bigger, more exciting things.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:17)
Yeah, Big Tech just teaches you to work at a Big Tech company, whereas it's much more fun to be a wolf.

**Tom Brown** (2:24)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:25)
How did you go from like, so working at a friend startup to then you started your own one?

**Tom Brown** (2:30)
So, Linked was, we ran the company for a bit. I ended up going back to school afterwards. And then when I left school, I went to this company, Mopup.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:41)
The mobile advertising thing, right?

**SPEAKER_5** (2:42)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Tom Brown** (2:43)
I was like the first engineer there. I was like, okay, I want to be a wolf, but I was really bad at programming also. I was very, very struggling as a software engineer. I know I want to do more, but I don't know how to do it yet. And so I think that was kind of like an experience getting to scale something. Winter 2012, one of my friends who was my smartest friend from college pitched me on, let's go and start a YC company. We did, at the time, Solid Stage. This was before Docker existed. And so the idea was try to make it easier to do DevOps, but Docker doesn't exist. So it's going to be a more flexible Heroku, which basically meant a more complicated, like Heroku. And so I remember we interviewed with you guys. I think folks didn't really understand what we were trying to build. I think we didn't really understand what we were trying to build that much.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:30)
When you're trying to do something new, that's actually sometimes common.

**Tom Brown** (3:33)
Yeah, I think we were an outlier there because we did our interviews, and then we got called back, driving back to San Francisco, and TLB had written on the board an angry, frowny face, and what are you actually going to build? So he wanted us to explain that. I guess we explained it enough, or he was just like, these guys still don't know what they're doing, but maybe they'll figure it out. Halfway through, I felt I still didn't actually understand what we were going to build, and how we would attach a mission to it, that I wanted to work on for my whole life. So I left, PG actually introed me to Michael Waxman, who is the Grupper founder.