How 'the Anthropic story' resembles Amazon's AWS bet

I would love to hear your thoughts on Anthropic. This is a special moment.

It's very interesting. It reminds me of a couple of things. I worked with Jeff Bezos for a long time, and he always said that we were willing to be misunderstood for long periods.

I was in the boardroom when we kept having to approve capital spending for AWS. There was little profit in the short term, but we were spending a lot of money. One year, we realized that capital spending had reached $75 billion. That amount would have made it one of the world's ten largest countries by this measure.

The board was very worried in the early days because we weren't showing free cash flow. We were investing in the future.

Anthropic's story is similar: invest in the future. The market is usually not very good at working out what returns an investment will bring three or four years later.

The bet is that this capital spending will pay off over three or four years, just as it did with AWS.

How did Jeff and his team persuade Amazon's board to approve such huge spending when it was an amount that few people had seen before?

Well, in any boardroom, Jeff always asks the best and toughest questions. At some point, you either trust your CEO or you don't.

We had a discussion, and he has a principle called "disagree and commit."

But he also listens to every piece of feedback. So we had a long discussion, then another long discussion, and then another. In the end, we believed AWS would become a business that generated a lot of cash and would keep growing. At the time, the markets did not have all the details about its revenue and spending.

This was a long time ago, when people looked at Amazon and said, "Oh my God, it's losing cash. It will never be profitable."

Oh, there are still books.

It's always a matter of faith that you can turn an investment into a profit by carrying out your plans successfully.