[State of Evals] LMArena's $1.7B Vision — Anastasios Angelopoulos, LMArena

**Latent.Space** (0:12)
We're here with Anastasios from Arena. I actually don't actually know you. Star 7A is like very-

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:17)
Angelopoulos.

**Latent.Space** (0:18)
Yeah.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:18)
Yeah.

**Latent.Space** (0:19)
There you go. Congrats on all the success. You got the Arena handle.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:22)
Yeah, we did. We got the Arena handle. Thank you. Big branding moment.

**Latent.Space** (0:27)
I think X is like being more commercial, so obviously you bought it, but at least you have a place to go to where you can be like, hey, we really like this. But I do think dropping LM has changed the feel of it. I don't know how you feel.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:43)
I don't know. I mean, the reason we kept the LM at the beginning is because we were like, we started as LM Sys, out of the LM Sys conglomerate at Berkeley.

**Latent.Space** (0:54)
So we decided to- Language models, yeah.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:56)
Exactly. So we wanted to maybe broaden a little bit. Yeah. And we were the first arena. So we feel like let's kind of try to own that.

**Latent.Space** (1:02)
Yeah. Last time we had you guys on, you hadn't really spun out yet. And I did a call with Alessio and I was like, these guys are going to start accompanying. And I didn't know, I think you actually were already started at the time.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:15)
I don't remember.

**Latent.Space** (1:16)
Maybe. Because Anj, I had a, I chatted with Anj and he said he was your founding CEO.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:23)
He was, indeed.

**Latent.Space** (1:25)
Which people don't know. Yeah. Anj is a very interesting character. We have a podcast schedule with him.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:30)
Yeah.

**Latent.Space** (1:31)
He does a lot more than normal VCs.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:33)
He does. He's been incredible to us.

**Latent.Space** (1:34)
You want to shout out some stuff?

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (1:36)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the way the company started was as an incubation by Anj. Yeah. So, what he did is he kind of like found us at Berkeley and picked us out of the basement and was like, hey, these guys seem like they're on to something and started working with us really early, gave us some grants. He was not, you know, A16 was not the only one to do this. We also had a great grant from Sequoia, but Anj was in particular quite supportive of us and, you know, gave us some resources in order to continue building out arena before we even were committed to starting a business. And in that capacity, he sort of like, you know, formed an entity for us and this and that. And, you know, he was like, hey, you guys can walk away at any time if you guys don't want to start a business. I mean, it was really incredible, very aggressive investment move by him, right? Because of course, any money that he spent at the end of the day, like we could walk away and give and leave him with nothing. But I think he knew wisely that the right thing for arena was to start a company out of it. It was the only way that we could scale on that, you know, Waylon, Jon and I would ultimately see that and be excited about doing it ourselves, which ended up being the case.

**Latent.Space** (2:42)
Was there a moment for you where you were, I'm sure you were debating it yourself, you had other opportunities. What was the deciding factor for you?

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (2:49)
It became clear that the only way to scale what we were building was to build a company out of it. That the world really needed something like arena. Arena being really a place to sort of measure, understand and advance the frontier AI capabilities on real world users, on real world usage based on organic feedback. And that in order to achieve the scale and distribution necessary and the quality of course of the platform necessary to do this effectively, we would need to start a company out of it. We considered other options. Are we going to keep doing this as an academic project? Are we going to do it as a non-profit? Blah, blah, blah. But ultimately under those constructs, we didn't feel like we'd have the resources necessary to accomplish our mission.

**Latent.Space** (3:36)
So you raised a hundred million or 80? A hundred. A hundred million dollars. That's a lot of resources.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (3:41)
It's great.

**Latent.Space** (3:42)
What's it for?

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (3:43)
Well, obviously...

**Latent.Space** (3:45)
On behalf of everyone who is like, dude, it's an arena.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (3:48)
How are you going to spend your money?