A Precursor Ventures partner says many recent large fundraises are just ads for AI labs. Founders can reasonably take a $100 million offer from Anthropic instead of building their startup, and some raise money mainly to signal their existence to the big labs.
One repeat founder in the piece captures the dynamic bluntly by calling low-risk, high-upside founding opportunities of starting a company and flooding the market, in his own words, as a nice way to get, you know, a job at Anthropic. Has your read on founder commitment changed at all given how accessible and lucrative those outcomes have become?
Even if Anthropic offered me $100 million, what else are you supposed to say as a founder? If you want the money, like, I think some of these fundraisers are advertisements. They're a way to, like, advertise to the labs that you exist and that you're around.
