Anthropic S1财报拆解：5年IPO与高算力壁垒

As crazy as this may sound, I think folks are almost underestimating Anthropic.

There is one story that matters more than any other this week. Anthropic. They finally dropped their S1. This show we break down what you need to know, what you don't need to know, the questions that really come from it, and what we can expect when it comes to day one. And will there be the mega pop of all pops? This and so much more in the show today with Jason and Rory.

I think that the Chinese openweight models are pretty much over in the US. How much money is there for Instincts of the world? It feels infinite now. I think we should put 20% of the fund into Open AI at the $1.25 billion round. Ready to go. Boys, we are back. It is my favorite time of the week. And we have some big news to start with. Anthropic Files. It's S1. It's the moment that we've been waiting for. 16.3 billion of first half revenue.

I just want to hand over to you, Rory, cuz whatever metric I give, you're going to say it was the wrong one to site.

No, I'm not.

So, so which ones were you drawn to and what is the takeaways for us from this?

It was a great ass one. And you know, um, all all frankly, all the haters and the worriers at least for now have to go pound sand. I mean the burden of proof is most definitely you know on the side of the naysayers. In other words the these guys the S1 was great on almost every dimension and you know it'll be wildly wellreceived. I mean it was yeah you know it addressed I mean some pending open question still they didn't give the Q3 revenue number but you know it was great on C I mean on the overall revenue numbers unknown but they were amazing.

It was great, better than expected on margins, op income, even op income after stockbased comp. It was grace on customer concentration. It was great on compute efficiency. It was stunningly great on cash and cash balance sheet, you know. I mean, it's just on every dimension. Um, it looked really good. I mean, you have to struggle to find questions and there are questions. We can come to those in a second, but it read, you know, it was it was it was a really top tier performance,

you know. I think I think um as crazy as this may sound, I think folks are almost underestimating anthropic because um 5 years to IPO versus 24 for SpaceX. It's not just something we've never seen before. We'll see hints of it with OpenAI's IPO, right? It might be worse, it might be better, probably slightly worse, right? Based on what we know, right? Less capital efficient, slightly slower. But JFC to get here in 5 years from uh from um from a spite startup I it's just uh it's it's it's it's beyond unprecedented time value to liquidity still matters.

I mean it's markups are fun man but getting out of the greatest IPO in our lifetimes and less than six years of distributions. I mean goodness gra I mean you you I I know Rory will will roast me for it but you got to think why would I do anything else? Why would I wait like these seed deals are like

18 years to full distributions, right? Um why I could get to 6 years in full liquidity anthropic and and why why would I waste my time with anything that's 10 to 12 years to IPO? Um but I still but but you know it's just one deal in the fund, another two years to distribute, you know. Um you know I it just versus five years.

I I no I won't ask you Jason. I mean I think that you know I saw a tweet that basically said the same thing is you every founder and every investor is looking why am I bothering with anything else you know right these are such stunning numbers in terms of size scale and speed that you're right I mean it's going to dominate the results for you know for a long time to come and everything else just seems a lot more work for a lot less return compared to it and you know all credit to the the founding team all credit to the investors who got in early it's just a great way to make money things going up and to the Right.

Faster than anything else in human history for 5 years to add up to a trillion dollars. That's that's as good as it get in venture.

Yeah. It was funny watching Byron deer from Bessemer on uh on on the TV shows saying this is the greatest investment in the history of Bessemer. I think Bessemer was founded in the 19th century or something like that. I don't know when the fun was. Right.

Yeah.

And their greatest investment and their largest checks. Right. So to see that all happen now after a hundred years. I think that's the end of that's that's the whole story. Right. I mean, greatest greatest investment, biggest check, fastest time to to liquidity. Why are we doing anything else?

Rory, you said about questions there. There are always cynics in the audience. There are always people throwing peanuts. If you were to to present the alternate view of, oh, here was a striking number or two. Is there any that the interesting one, you know, 80% of the revenue comes from models that are less than 6 months old, right? And then separately, they you'll note they didn't give you a gross margin, an actual gross margin calculation.

They just didn't lay it out that way because what you can do that in accounting, you can just put all the compute costs into one place. And then they kind of gave a a footnote breakout that kind of 70 80% of the compute costs are for training, not for inference. In other words, serve once you've built the models are wildly expensive to build. Once you build them, they're fairly widely profitable to serve and you only get to serve them for six months and then you got to invent another one.

It's just kind of it's not like it's so not like software where you're on this kind of you know you build something and maybe you can sell it for 10 15 years. In this case, you invent something, you get most of the revenue from it in six, 12 months, and then you have to continue to invent masses of money to build the next one. And you know, then your question is, so what do you make of that? You know, cuz the funny thing is that that's the facts.

And you could look at it one way and say, oh my god, that's totally scary. If you miss even once, you're screwed. And on the other hand, you can say to yourself, that might actually be great for Anthropic because they're best in the position to build new stuff and they want to build new stuff. And they said that very clearly. We want to build new stuff, right? And if all the time you very few people are going to be able to compete with this, right?

Very few people like if the next turn of the crank on the model I mean they spend 8 billion on compute um you know year to date June 26 and they're going to spend I don't know 16 billion next there's very few people who can write a 101 12 billion compute check. So they can continue to invent these new models get masses of revenue from them and then you know yeah maybe at the back end other folks have it. So even though that statistic was kind of weird and scary.

Oh my god, the shelf life of your amazing product is 6 months, it's actually I would argue a an advantage if you're the kind of leader and you're willing to just be aggressive on it, right? But it does point to the So therefore what looked like a negative isn't it just points to the incredibly dynamic and scary nature of the game, right? This is a game where you have to spend like billions and billions and billions of dollars just to play.

Yeah, that was Elon's point that most of these NEO labs are just going to die after this, right? They just can't. It's not possible to raise the capital to survive, right? Um I thought there was one bad metric that wasn't in the S1. I thought the worst metric wasn't in the S1.

Go for it.

The worst metric was that Broadcom had to bail out this this debt issue so that Anthropic could buy its chips. That the market was saying it doesn't get much it doesn't get any better than Enthropic. We just read the S1, right? It doesn't get any better. But