From $200 Million Revenue Founder to Frontier Lab with Henry Shi

Hey, everybody. This is Ben Kesnoka, cofounder and partner at Village Global, a network driven venture firm. And this is our podcast where we go deep on all things business and technology with world leading experts. If you don't know Henry Shih, you should. So in 2016, Henry started super.com, the savings and fintech app, and he scaled it to 1,000,000,000 in GMV, 200,000,000 in revenue, 50,000,000 users, and profitable. And then when things were going great at the 2024, it was after all super. He decided, he intuited that there was an inflection point going on. So he stepped back from operating and took some time to learn out loud and to really think about what might be working in AI. And he created artifacts, which we'll link in the show notes, which are really actionable today. And that's the AI crash course with 5,000 GitHub stars, plus the lean AI leaderboard, and then the lean AI company playbook, and we're gonna talk about all of those. But then, after about nine months, Henry came to us. He messaged us and he said, I know my next chapter. And there are a few things that spark joy for early stage investors more than a very talented founder saying, I'm thinking about my starting something new. But Henry surprised us, and he used the f word, FrontierLab. And he ended up joining Anthropic. And today, we're gonna talk about all of that. What he saw, what he learned, what it's like at Anthropic, and what this means for all of us, whether founders, investors, or anyone building their career in the age of AI. So welcome, Henry. Thanks for having me. Wow. That was a very great and kind intro. So thanks so much. And, yeah, happy to be here. Happy to share everything I learned building the company, exploring the future, building AI, learning about AI, and how this new how company is gonna be in this AI native era. So happy to have this conversation. Great. Great. Well, I think you always have lived in the future. So let's take a step back to 2016. And can you share the origin story of super..com? Yeah. Sure. That's great. So that was actually exactly ten years ago in 10/20/2035. I quit my job at Google. I went to Waterloo, studied computer science. Been an entrepreneur for ten, fifteen years. Always loved building companies. I worked at Google for a year after graduating. Everyone I guess I thought it was the dream job when you were a kid. Like, wow, if I work at Google. In many ways, it was great. A lot of smart people, a lot of talented people, but also, just a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape. Like, it was a massive company back then. And I realized that a big company just wasn't for me. It was hard to get stuff done. I had four different managers within a year. It took me …