AUTOMATE TASKS

“Because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make very fast decisions that cut across the entire org and execute on them in a unified way. Mission means that teams are willing to make sacrifices that hurt their own goals and their own KRs in service of Anthropic's goals. I've never seen that at a company of our scale.”

“Because it doesn't use AI, it doesn't eat into your token budget.”

“The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one day. We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. We want to make sure every single person on the team feels empowered to take their idea from just an idea to like out in the world in less than a week, sometimes even in a day.”

“We actually, by being broad, could invest in liquidity building mechanisms that no narrow vertical ever could. And so because of that, that sort of aggregate sort of leverage, we could bring in more pros, engage more pros, support those pros, retain those pros more effectively than any of the verticalized players. Even though the experience on the front end may have been less customized, the fulfillment capabilities and the marketplace experience was vastly better.”

“OpenAI is basically saying, yes, Sora melts our GPUs.”

“It's pretty important to build products that don't necessarily work yet, so that you know, okay, what is missing for this product to work? And then with the newest model, you can just swap it in to the prototype you've already made and see, okay, does this new model close that gap? You want to be ready when that model jump happens.”

“Well, I think the magic is that the AI can do the digital interface for these folks in a in a much better way than they've ever done for themselves. Have your website and your social media presences up to date, respond to people quickly, answer questions, submit follow ups, submit estimates. Basically, the, like, admin work that's involved, which is rarely why these people got into the business.”

“The trades and things that interface with the real world, in particular, in ways that are hard to automate, are very durable. OpenAI put out a paper, I think, with ChatGPT-4 that came out about sort of the jobs most at risk and least at risk. And the least at risk was, like, filled with home service jobs. It was, like, oil and gas jobs and, thumbtack jobs, like, things that you gotta be there.”

“If an automation doesn't work 100% of the time, it's not really an automation. I would encourage listeners to put in that time to scope some automation that you really want to get to 100%, put in the elbow grease to teach Claude your preferences and give it feedback so that it can improve its skill. There's just not much value in a 95% there automation.”

“Marketing Automation Software is ripe for tools like Claude Code to take on because it's all the same repetitive stuff.”

“It's pretty important to build products that don't necessarily work yet, so that you know, okay, what is missing for this product to work? And then with the newest model, you can just swap it in to the prototype you've already made and see, okay, does this new model close that gap? You want to be ready when that model jump happens.”

“What it highlights though is that this purchase is mediated by something else. It's not simply about convenience or ease of use. It's much more about certainty and peace of mind. A, because the dollars are much higher here. Two, it's the opposite of a commodity. Right? You're getting the floors done in your house. Like, you walk on them every day. You care about that.”

“Sometimes you'll hear me say a trillion. I just wanna use the t. You know? And from what I understand, like, still less than 10% of it is booked online. It's the same homeowner, it's the same set of thumbs that uses Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb and Amazon. So the laziness and the desire to do things easily and quickly is there, but the purchase is mediated by certainty.”

“People really like that Claude's low ego, and so if you tell it, hey, you did this thing wrong, it's like truly sorry. It's like, oh, shoot, thanks for telling me, let me fix it, let's work together. I think part of what makes a great coworker is this positivity, this bias towards action, and this ability to give you earnest feedback, not just agreeing with every single thing that you say.”

“We actually, by being broad, could invest in liquidity building mechanisms that no narrow vertical ever could. And so because of that, that sort of aggregate sort of leverage, we could bring in more pros, engage more pros, support those pros, retain those pros more effectively than any of the verticalized players. Even though the experience on the front end may have been less customized, the fulfillment capabilities and the marketplace experience was vastly better.”

“If an automation doesn't work 100% of the time, it's not really an automation. I would encourage listeners to put in that time to scope some automation that you really want to get to 100%, put in the elbow grease to teach Claude your preferences and give it feedback so that it can improve its skill. There's just not much value in a 95% there automation.”

“If a software company... does not have an API and a command line tool... they're dead.”

“Building 10 great evals is important for helping the team quantify what the goal is and what their progress towards it is and what they're missing. I think evals is this like underappreciated thing that more PMs and more engineers should be working on. It varies a lot based on the exact feature, but features such as memory benefit a lot from it.”

“We don't yet know any way to use AI in a capacity other than augmenting our work, where we still eventually have to go and review the work in some form. Maybe you don't have to review the tiny little parts of it anymore. You can review a bigger part of the work product that happens. But we haven't removed humans from the loop. We've just changed where they enter the loop. And I think that Jensen has a more pragmatic view of the technology.”

“Google basically came up with this algorithm... that makes data centers... six to eight times more efficient.”

“Building 10 great evals is important for helping the team quantify what the goal is and what their progress towards it is and what they're missing. I think evals is this like underappreciated thing that more PMs and more engineers should be working on. It varies a lot based on the exact feature, but features such as memory benefit a lot from it.”

“Because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make very fast decisions that cut across the entire org and execute on them in a unified way. Mission means that teams are willing to make sacrifices that hurt their own goals and their own KRs in service of Anthropic's goals. I've never seen that at a company of our scale.”

“Sometimes you'll hear me say a trillion. I just wanna use the t. You know? And from what I understand, like, still less than 10% of it is booked online. It's the same homeowner, it's the same set of thumbs that uses Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb and Amazon. So the laziness and the desire to do things easily and quickly is there, but the purchase is mediated by certainty.”

“As a PM, there should be less emphasis on making sure that you're aligning your multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on, okay, how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door? I think the PMs who do the best on AI native products are the ones who can figure out how can I shorten the time from having this idea to actually getting the product in the hands of users.”

“What the breakthroughs of Cloud Code or Codex or others are doing is it's making it so those companies now can actually do the same kind of engineering that Silicon Valley has been able to do. And so we are myopic because we think that tech is the only use of engineers. And tech is only 8, 10, 12, 15 percent of GDP in the economy. What happens when 85 percent of the economy now gets access to engineering tech has always had? That is what will happen.”

“We will. Everybody is so myopic about this. I want to just like shake the industry. We are so myopic and self-interested and we think that the entire industry is the tech industry. And when you go around the country or world and you go and talk to a tractor company and a bank and a pharma company and you ask them, do you think you have enough engineers to go and automate what is going to happen in your industry going forward? They absolutely unequivocally, universally always say no.”

“I would take the other side. I'd rather like there are going to be more lawyers in the next five years than we have today because we've made it easy to generate legal content. But it has not gotten any easier to actually get any of that approved by any court system or file a patent or any of the things that law actually ends up relating to. So again, this is where I just differ from the rest of the industry.”

“What the breakthroughs of Cloud Code or Codex or others are doing is it's making it so those companies now can actually do the same kind of engineering that Silicon Valley has been able to do. And so we are myopic because we think that tech is the only use of engineers. And tech is only 8, 10, 12, 15 percent of GDP in the economy. What happens when 85 percent of the economy now gets access to engineering tech has always had? That is what will happen.”

“The idea that we're in some kind of existential race where a month or two of advantage is going to change the total outcome of AI progress and what everybody does between us and China, I just don't agree with. I think what we are in is a commercial and economic race. Obviously, with safety built into that, there's no question. And I think we actually have a lot more power globally if it's our technology stack that's powering AI.”

“We don't yet know any way to use AI in a capacity other than augmenting our work, where we still eventually have to go and review the work in some form. Maybe you don't have to review the tiny little parts of it anymore. You can review a bigger part of the work product that happens. But we haven't removed humans from the loop. We've just changed where they enter the loop. And I think that Jensen has a more pragmatic view of the technology.”

“What it highlights though is that this purchase is mediated by something else. It's not simply about convenience or ease of use. It's much more about certainty and peace of mind. A, because the dollars are much higher here. Two, it's the opposite of a commodity. Right? You're getting the floors done in your house. Like, you walk on them every day. You care about that.”

“The trades and things that interface with the real world, in particular, in ways that are hard to automate, are very durable. OpenAI put out a paper, I think, with ChatGPT-4 that came out about sort of the jobs most at risk and least at risk. And the least at risk was, like, filled with home service jobs. It was, like, oil and gas jobs and, thumbtack jobs, like, things that you gotta be there.”

“The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one day. We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. We want to make sure every single person on the team feels empowered to take their idea from just an idea to like out in the world in less than a week, sometimes even in a day.”

“I would take the other side. I'd rather like there are going to be more lawyers in the next five years than we have today because we've made it easy to generate legal content. But it has not gotten any easier to actually get any of that approved by any court system or file a patent or any of the things that law actually ends up relating to. So again, this is where I just differ from the rest of the industry.”

“People really like that Claude's low ego, and so if you tell it, hey, you did this thing wrong, it's like truly sorry. It's like, oh, shoot, thanks for telling me, let me fix it, let's work together. I think part of what makes a great coworker is this positivity, this bias towards action, and this ability to give you earnest feedback, not just agreeing with every single thing that you say.”

“We will. Everybody is so myopic about this. I want to just like shake the industry. We are so myopic and self-interested and we think that the entire industry is the tech industry. And when you go around the country or world and you go and talk to a tractor company and a bank and a pharma company and you ask them, do you think you have enough engineers to go and automate what is going to happen in your industry going forward? They absolutely unequivocally, universally always say no.”

“As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write. Like what is the right UX for this feature? What is the most delightful way that a user can experience it? It takes a lot of care and taste to figure out, okay, which of these is worth building and what is the right way to build it? That skill set can come from any background, but I think that's the most important thing.”

“As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write. Like what is the right UX for this feature? What is the most delightful way that a user can experience it? It takes a lot of care and taste to figure out, okay, which of these is worth building and what is the right way to build it? That skill set can come from any background, but I think that's the most important thing.”

“As a PM, there should be less emphasis on making sure that you're aligning your multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on, okay, how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door? I think the PMs who do the best on AI native products are the ones who can figure out how can I shorten the time from having this idea to actually getting the product in the hands of users.”

“Well, I think the magic is that the AI can do the digital interface for these folks in a in a much better way than they've ever done for themselves. Have your website and your social media presences up to date, respond to people quickly, answer questions, submit follow ups, submit estimates. Basically, the, like, admin work that's involved, which is rarely why these people got into the business.”

“The idea that we're in some kind of existential race where a month or two of advantage is going to change the total outcome of AI progress and what everybody does between us and China, I just don't agree with. I think what we are in is a commercial and economic race. Obviously, with safety built into that, there's no question. And I think we actually have a lot more power globally if it's our technology stack that's powering AI.”