Thomas Laffont, Coatue - Anthropic, Citrini Paper, AI Volatility & Next Mag 7

**Thomas Laffont** (0:00)
In three or four years, if Claude Code can rewrite their entire business, that's harder for companies to control. It's one of those companies where, depending on which day you're picking, you're going to have a different metric. You're going to want to outperform the index over a long period of time. You're going to need exposure to these companies. Some of them will probably go public in the next 12 to 24 months. It is unbelievable the amount of innovation that is now coming from this group of companies. Most companies are now reporting back to their boards the adoption of these tools inside of their organizations. They all want to make sure that they're using the best tools, that they're being the most AI for. They don't want to be outcompeted by someone who's using those tools. And so there was a slide in one of the board meetings that said, look, we're spending X on this tool and we think it's way too low. We want it to be much bigger. We expect the spend to at least triple. I read the Centrini paper. I don't think that screaming fire in a crowded room is obviously productive or safe or frankly something you should do. And some people have kind of made that analogy to that report and I don't share that.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:00)
You and your brother, Philippe, run the firm. I promised not to make a brother joke, but why does he have a French accent and you don't?
First, before we start, a big thank you to Mark and Carrie. That was a very lovely introduction. I'm quite flattered. I'm so excited to be back at the upfront summit this year. There's clearly lots of volatility in the market and a lot of fun, exciting things happening in AI. We have someone here who knows a lot about that and studies both the private and the public side of things. So today we have Thomas Laffont, partner at Coatue. They manage around $70 billion on the private side. They manage around $30 billion and most recently, I think this is your first interview since leading Anthropic's $30 billion round. So let's start there. Did you expect when you invested into Anthropic that every Claude release would break the market?

**Thomas Laffont** (2:05)
It's been amazing to watch the evolution of the company even from when we first started discussing this fundraise that just got announced to eventually when it did get announced, which usually in most of these processes takes about two or two to three months before a company announces the fundraising kind of formally. What was interesting about this one is the projections and the scale of the business grew materially in between the fundraising kind of being discussed to eventually kind of being announced. And I think that speaks to just the incredible adoption of Claude Code in particular, which we can dive into. No, I don't think we predicted that Claude Code would take off as quickly as it did. I think it's indicative of a very kind of powerful trend that it's underlying that we can discuss. I'm actually really proud that the inventor of Claude Code, Boris, who's a friend, worked at Coatue for two and a half years developing software for us. He's been on an incredible trajectory.
So, it's funny, I was in a board meeting yesterday, and so I'm just off the cycle of maybe having done six or seven board meetings in the past few weeks. And most companies are now reporting back to their boards the adoption of these tools inside of their organizations. And I think it's a, they all want to make sure that they're using the best tools, that they're being the most AI for, they don't want to be outcompeted by someone who's using those tools. And so there was a slide in one of the board meetings that said, look, we're spending X on this tool, and we think it's way too low. We want it to be much bigger. We expect the spend to at least triple kind of next year on these tools. So, you know, when you see, you know, board decks are such a treasure trove of information, right? And insights. And so when you see the same kind of pattern repeating itself across companies, you know that you're on to something big. And I think all of them, by the way, whether it's Cortex or Claude Code or others are benefiting from that.

**Molly O'Shea** (4:15)
There are some quite viral charts about their growth. So when you invested, what were those metrics like?

**Thomas Laffont** (4:21)
I mean, it's one of those companies where you can't even pin, depending on which day you're picking, you're going to kind of have a different metric, right? But they publicly released as kind of part of the, as part of this announcement, kind of where the revenue was, right? And I think they disclosed like in excess of 13 or 14 billion or something like that. I mean, it was definitely materially lowered when we started.