Anthropic, Glean & OpenRouter: How AI Moats Are Built with Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures

**Alessio** (0:00)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swigs, editor of Latent Space.

**Swigs** (0:06)
Hello, hello. And today, we're finally joined by the epic return of Deedy Das. Welcome back.

**Deedy Das** (0:12)
Thank you for having me, guys. Again. I'm so glad to see you. All of us have different jobs now.

**Swigs** (0:19)
All different jobs. Classic Bay Area, you know, it's been two years, right? Last time, it was April 2023 You joined us remote and you were still at Glean back then. I was actually even also looking at the Claude timeline. So Claude 1 was March 2023 and Claude 2 was July 2023 It just feels like so long ago.

**Deedy Das** (0:39)
And I remember the time when I don't know when your first experience using Claude was, but mine was, I remember early Glean, there was somebody from the company was like, hey, there's this interesting new LLM that's not OpenAI. And the only way you can talk to it is by tagging Claude in a Slack channel. And I had some bizarre interaction model for a whole new product.

**Swigs** (1:02)
It's the best model.

**Deedy Das** (1:04)
And now fast forward to now, and I'm like, okay. We've come quite a way.

**Swigs** (1:08)
Yeah, I think actually they only recently introduced Claude in Slack, right? Or like publicly.

**Deedy Das** (1:15)
Come back, the come back.

**Swigs** (1:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Deedy Das** (1:16)
Like how it started and now Claude is back in Slack.

**Swigs** (1:18)
Yeah, it's charging between Slack, Claude and Slack. And so since then, I wanted to start with Glean, obviously, because we're going to cover a lot of startups in this episode. So Glean has, Glean was like a billion dollars, I think, based on my research. And now it's at $7 billion. So your options are good. What's your take on like how Glean's going in the market in general?

**Deedy Das** (1:38)
I would say that now being on venture side, I have a bit of a different take than I would have had at Glean. But broadly, one of the things that I love about Glean is it's such a boring, unsexy company that became sexy later. So from 2019, I remember going to parties in the Bay Area, and I would say enterprise search, and it's shutting down the conversation right there. Nobody would ever ask a counter question if you said enterprise search. They're like, that sounds boring as hell. Leave me alone. And fast forward to 2022, enterprise search got more conversations. It was like, interesting. Tell me how you're doing this search. I think what was nice about that observation is in those three years, we did a lot of work and didn't take shortcuts on a lot of things that ended up generating a lot of value for us now. And I can go into what all of those things are, but if you look at Glean from a high level business, it is top down enterprise sales. It's very hard to rip and replace. We have, we expand contracts very easily because the TAM is so large. It's every knowledge worker could use a version of enterprise search and then the AI on top. I still call it search, but information retrieval in the enterprise. And we've solved a lot of critical problems and I can go into that too in order to get there. Then comes December 2022, the ChatGPT moment and everything that's happened since. And now when I look at Glean, it's a different world. We were very quick and correctly prioritized LLMs earlier on. It did a lot of good for our business and the company. But now there's fire from a lot of angles. Everyone wants to be a part of the enterprise search story and it makes sense. I mean, it's a large, unconstrained TAM. LLMs are particularly useful for gathering information. Obviously, consumers are interesting and enterprises, therefore interesting. How do you do this in the enterprise? Well, gather all the knowledge and then put an LLM on top. So that being said, I'm still very happy with Glean stock. You know, Glean's also valued at $7 billion, not $100 billion. So I think the company has a lot of growth. I think it's done a lot of the hard work that nobody's willing to do.
And I also think, you know, VCs have a tendency, including myself now, to trivialize a problem into a one-sentence sort of narrative. And with Glean, that narrative was often, oh, well, you guys built this enterprise search thing which never worked, and then AI came along and it started becoming a thing. Which I think is not the story at all. I really think we did all the hard work to build search, and AI happened to accelerate our go-to-market motion at the right time. And now I see companies trying to tack on search, it's not easy. I know the kind of like last mile stuff we did for some of our customers, and I just know that when I think about other companies, I'm like, would you really go all that distance? It's not a moat. The moat is just we did the hard work. And so I'm pretty happy. I mean, things can go any direction, but I'm pretty happy with the way Glean's going right now.