Keep pulling the thread on Matt Murphy.
At the time of Menlo Ventures' initial investment, Anthropic was a pre-revenue company seeking a valuation of over $4 billion.
Prior to its first model launch, Anthropic's internal benchmarks showed performance that was better than or equal to ChatGPT at the time, despite having spent only 1/50th of the capital.
Menlo Ventures later led a subsequent funding round in Anthropic with a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) of over $500 million.
Ownership percentage targets are far less relevant for venture capital investors today because the potential size of outlier company outcomes has dramatically increased.
Amazon and Google made large investments in Anthropic and formed technical and distribution partnerships around AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex.
Lovable grew from zero to approximately $300 million in ARR in one year.
Small, boutique seed funds under $100 million are predicted to be the worst-performing category in the current venture vintage because large multi-stage firms are now highly effective at seed investing.
Anthropic's foundation models are highly specialized and performant, making it difficult for open-source alternatives to displace them for high-value tasks.
Dario Amodei left OpenAI because he believed the company was pursuing too many initiatives and he wanted to focus on the single large opportunity of foundation models.
Menlo Ventures' first investment in Anthropic was a check for slightly over $10 million.
In the current venture market, it is better to have a small percentage in a massive outlier company than a large percentage in a company that exits for $300 to $500 million.
Anthropic is positioned as the multi-cloud alternative to OpenAI, which is closely tied to Microsoft Azure.