Joining Anthropic

Hi Personal Board,

I just signed my offer to join Anthropic as "Member of Technical Staff". Very excited!

[REDACTED - PERSONAL INFO]

Note: This personal board update has a different structure than others - more of a reflection than the typical metrics and sections. If it feels slow, just skim through "The Medium" section. Total reading time is around 5 minutes, I trimmed what I could!

Mini Existential Crisis

I decided to join Anthropic after a year-long (not actually serious) existential crisis that began when I sold Intros AI last summer.

I've spent the past decade, even before Intros AI, focused on building products that enable more human connection. From hosting concerts in high school to side projects, bringing people together has been the one recurring theme.

While I can't imagine fully stepping away, I've started to consider a world where connecting people is not my all-consuming mission.

In order to narrow down how I wanted to spend my next 5-10 years, I began more intentionally considering:

• The medium of my work.
• The direction my work shifts the world.
• The magnitude my work shifts the world.

The Medium (or craft)

I think of medium as what I'm doing day to day, or my "craft". In the broader tech world these could include writing, product, sales, marketing, etc.

The questions I've thought through when determining my medium are:

• What I enjoy.
• What I'm good at.
• What mediums have (increasingly) high demand.

I've tried some different approaches for gaining clarity on these.

What I enjoy and what I'm good at has largely come from trial and error. Determining What mediums have increasingly high demand has come from talking with many of you.

In the last board of advisors update, I asked: Between product skills (e.g. design, coding) and growth skills (e.g. building a brand, sales, etc.) which will become more important within the next 5 years?

To see the range of perspectives from my personal board, here are everyone's takes [REDACTED - PERSONAL INFO].

The general categories of opinions were:

• Product's more important.
• Growth's more important.
• You're asking the wrong question - product and growth are deeply coupled.
• You're asking the wrong question - neither will be important.

Your replies helped me realize:

• I'll never cleanly fit into one of these buckets.
• I generally enjoy product work more than growth work.
• I'll have to consistently reevaluate this question - the world's moving fast and asking how to spend my time between the two may just not be the right question to ask.

It's easy when you're a founder, you're forced to do everything. But when you have to pick a specific role, it requires more thought.

All that said, it eventually became clear that customer-facing product work was going to be where I wanted to double down.

Although narrowing down my "medium" was only part of the equation... direction is far more important.

Direction of the Medium

I'm sure there are better ways to communicate what I mean by direction, but it's essentially trying to answer the question: "What value does my work instill in the world?"

Some values are how you do things (with diligence, kindness, integrity, etc.).

Other values are more like what you stand for (accessibility, safety, etc.). When I say "The direction my work shifts the world", I mean this one.

For most of my career, the direction I've at least tried to push the world towards is one that values human connection. If I build products and gather resources to help others connect more seamlessly, that generally leads to a more connected world.

Unfortunately, I did a mediocre job. While I'm proud of my work (Over 1,000 communities used my product to create over 1M connections), Intros AI never achieved the magnitude I was hoping for.

Magnitude of that Direction

There are a lot of meaningful directions to shift the world. But how much those shifts matter depends on the magnitude.

I want to avoid the association with venture capital's "how big of a company can this be" and instead focus on "to what extent does this work push a value (i.e., direction) into the world".

Archimedes famously said:

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

I think the highest point of leverage is shifting someone's identity, which itself has a lot of downstream effects. If someone sees themselves as a generous person rather than a selfish one, they're going to make thousands of different (hopefully positive) decisions within a lifetime. If you somehow make 10 million people more generous, then you start to shift culture.

While identity is one point of leverage, another is the tools we use which constrain and enable actions that have values "baked in".

My "master plan" for starting Intros AI was essentially to create a product that would engineer more human connection, which would (in theory) have a lot of 2nd, 3rd, etc. order effects.

Introduction between two people -> leads to a meaningful conversation -> leads to friendship -> leads to being less lonely -> leads to people considering other people when making decisions.

If you consider others when making decisions, you're more likely to:

• Not harm yourself.
• Not harm others
• Long list of other net-benefit things.

I was trying to build something to instill a value in the world.

And while I've failed to reach the scale I wanted to, I know I'll have more opportunities to instill my values… although maybe in a different direction.

Magnitude of a new direction

To be clear, I think the loneliness problem, especially with young men today, is upstream from many of the most important problems facing society. And I think there's a lot of economic and societal value to be created in enabling community and connection.

While I anticipate returning to work on problems around loneliness, at this point in my career, I'm shifting my energy toward a new set of problems.

Over the past 5 years (especially last 9 months during my mini existential crisis), I've started to form deeper perspectives on the direction of AI. AI feels upstream of both the biggest risks facing the world and the most promising solutions to them.

Personal missions need to change when there are existential risks at play.

And I've needed to shift my mindset from one of abundance, trying to make the world more connected, to one of caution. I'm worried about all that could go wrong these coming years, from unemployment, to a broader societal lack of meaning, to using AI in dangerous ways.

While AI growth is inevitable (because of the market demand) the outcome is unclear.

Of all the companies out there, it seems like Anthropic is approaching AI in the most thoughtful, responsible way. And if I had to think of what a doomsday scenario would be, it would be a less careful player or government getting ahead.

So, while I won't be able to tell Dario (Anthropic CEO) what to do directly, I think the way I can best contribute is:

• Guiding companies I work with to more responsibly implement AI.
• Try to steer companies away from laying off employees (this will be difficult, and does conflict with me building agents).
• Keep an eye out for opportunities to shift Anthropic, the people I meet, and the broader space in the right direction.

I'll likely change my focus as I learn more, but it's clear there's a lot of important work to be done. Ensuring Anthropic stays at the forefront, and that customers are deploying agents in the most intentional way possible, feels like a good starting point.

With that, I want to thank you again for supporting me along the way. I'm here if you're ever free to chat!

David