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
Anj Midha is the founder of AMP, and a founding investor in Anthropic. Most recently, Anj was General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, leading frontier AI investments. He serves on the boards of Mistral, Black Forest Labs, Sesame, LMArena, OpenRouter, Luma AI and Periodic Labs and is an early angel in ElevenLabs among others. Prior to that, Anj was the cofounder/CEO of Ubiquity6 (acquired by Discord) and a partner at Kleiner Perkins. AGENDA: 04:00 Why the "Scaling Laws are Dead" rumor is dangerously wrong 05:30 The 4 bottlenecks stopping us from reaching Super Intelligence 11:30 Where will the actual value accrue in an AI-dominated world? 12:00 Why Europe is building a "Sovereign Stack" to escape US dominance 15:00 Inside the brutal early days of Anthropic and the 21 VCs who said "No" 19:30 Why the most successful AI startups are ditching the "Profit-First" motive 34:30 The 1885 Industrial Revolution: Why we have a "GPU Wastage" bubble 38:00 Is the CCP actually winning the full-stack AI systems race? 43:30 Monopoly Mafias: Will model providers eventually kill the App Layer?