Why Did Menlo's Anthropic Check Look Too Small?

Matt Murphy says Menlo's first Anthropic check looked too small to matter to the fund. It did not fit the venture fund or the growth fund. At a $4.5 billion entry, even a double would not be meaningful, and the usual test was that a deal does not move the needle unless it can be a 10x. He puts that 10x at $45 billion, and at the time that sounded crazy.

The reason to do it anyway was the kind of company, not a tidy fund fit. Earlier technology waves were held back by devices, slow internet, or people not trusting their data in the cloud. This one was immediately available to everyone, and it was growing faster than anything the firm had seen. His question for the partnership was how Menlo could call itself a leading AI firm without a stake in the number one or number two model company, because the model is the heart of the AI economy. He thought his partners would call him crazy. They told him to do it.