Anj Midha

speaker

721 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 14 Apr

Anj Midha’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20VC: Anj Midha on Investing $300M into Anthropic | The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Turned it Down | The Four Bottlenecks to Compute | What the China Has Smashed and Why We Should Be Worried · 14 Apr 2026 podcast

And it pains me sometimes to look back at the emails of friends.

So I introduced them to 22 friends up and down Sand Hill Road.

So there's some investors there and we got 21 no's.

And I was like, what are you guys thinking?

And they said, well, this recipe sounds good in theory, but like, where's the proof?

And I said, proof?

These are the guys who invented GPT-3.

How much more proof do you want?

And they said, what's GPT-3?

I said, oh my God, like, how do you go about educating somebody who doesn't even understand the technology and the breakthroughs that are happening in the machine learning community?

Now I was lucky because I had that training from grad school.

I'd started a computer vision company.

So something that was super legible to me just was a completely different world.

And then for those investors, we were pitching, remember, we originally tried to go out and raise 500 million and then had to re-anchor to only raising $100 million seed round.

which at the time felt like a lot, but of course was tiny compared to how much OpenAI had raised, because by then I think OpenAI had already raised a billion dollars.

And so the whole idea of compute multipliers where we could, for every dollar of venture capital raised, produce a unit of intelligence for six times less, like the VCs did not understand it, which is why, you know, over the next 24 months, the people who got it were either people like, you know, some of the folks in the ML community who also had an overlap with the effective altruist community like SPF, but also Amazon.

This was very legible to Amazon because they were watching what was happening with Azure and OpenAI.

And they were like, well, this is super aligned.

If you guys actually can create a bunch of state-of-the-art models that are hosted on Amazon, that's super accretive to the AWS business.

And that's why it resulted in this sort of deep compute and capital for equity partnership with Amazon that was originally $4 billion.

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