Anthropic found its product identity not through a grand strategy, but through small, bottoms-up experiments like Golden Gate Claude that showcased research in an authentic, differentiated way.

4:22startup. And I think you're right. We were very much trying to find our identity in the early years. Like I think there's one piece around the technology, but how does that technology bring value to users, bring value to society, and what could it possibly be? And I think the early years were us exploring that in different ways. Like we did start with like cloud.ai I like another chat chat assistant and evolving

4:50into things like tool use. Um I think one of the moments where really we started to get into our groove was shipping things like Golden Gate Claude. I don't know if you like remember that. No. >> Um so this this was actually up for about 24 hours or so. Uh we had just published one of our um early interpretability research in early 2024. And one of the examples was essentially

5:17you could have what's called like features of the model within the layers which uh express certain types of uh thematics. So one of the one of the themes that the researchers was able to identify was uh let's say bullet point writing. Another one was people and places. And one that really came up frequently that uh resonated was the Golden Gate Bridge. And so when you actually uh essentially dialed up that

5:45feature, Claude would obsess about the Golden Gate Bridge. So meaning in every one of its responses, it would come back and talk about the Golden Gate Bridge. So if you said like, "Give me a recipe for making spaghetti." Uh it would say, "Here is a recipe, and the orange color is just like international red that the Golden Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge looked like." Um, and so it was like really

6:10quirky and we we we very much wanted to in that situation just bring that user bring bring it to the masses and bring it to people who are starting to use claude and uh so the entire uh experience actually we spun up on our cloud.ai I website within 24 hours and that took like engineering, product, design, uh our like research teams all working together and we were really

6:38really proud of it. I think it maybe reach only 2,000 people to [laughter] be honest. Uh but it it made us feel like oh we can actually bring new user experiences, showcase our research in a way that's different and authentic to us and in a very startupy like pace. That to me was like one of those like maybe hidden inflection points of we were starting to find our identity that we

7:02could build products, build experiences that were different for what our competitors had seen, what was already out there. And I think that obviously labs, clog code, etc. Like we then started to identify ourselves as what we actually think the world uh how to think about AI, how to bring that closer to the public. Um but it was a very bottoms up culture. And so that entire experience was very bottoms up. I see

7:30engineers, I see uh designers donating time to work on. Um, and so I I like to always use that as example of like what the day early days were like, but the culture and and and the values have very much I think stayed the same since those early days. >> This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor work OS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor,