[Highlight] Why Henry Shi Chose Anthropic Over Starting Another Company

Hey. Ben Kesnoka here, cofounder and general partner of Village Global, a network native venture firm. What you're about to hear is a clip from a longer conversation. If you'd like to listen to the full length version, find the link in the description. Of course, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Enjoy. Let's talk about your journey again. So you're out there. You're doing your crash course. You're building in public. You think about the Lean AI leaderboard, and then you say, today, it's either entrepreneurship, VC, or a Frontier Lab. So walk us through the three options and what you chose to do. Yeah. I think, historically, as a, repeat exited more successful founder, I think many people felt compelled or maybe even trapped to the two path of either being another founder or being an investor. Right? And those and they feel like those two are the only two, options available to them. And whether that's because of opportunity cost or lifestyle choices or preference or even pride in some cases, I think the the common, path are these two. And I think it's often very hard for founders to say, hey, I want to work for someone again. I want to be caught by the entrepreneurial bug. I and I can certainly relate relate to that. However, as I was exploring, I realized that there's a third path which I wrote about in my post and and and our content, which is a Frontier Lab, which is actually quite a little bit different and I'll explain why. Well, I'll explain the three options and I'll explain why the third. So on the venture path, I spent a lot of time, on the other side of the table. I mean, I have a lot of experience as a founder, pitching investors, getting rejected a 144 times. So very much an experience in the founder side. They're a loss. Yeah. And and and I I can't say that it's been and and I think it's not the most founders, you know, it's one of the things they like least about starting a company. Right. It's very much song and dance. And but what I didn't appreciate or maybe I appreciate more on the other side now as I spent time on the other side of the table as a venture partner or, sitting in certain meetings, meeting hundreds of investors, and then, having entrepreneurs pitch me, is that it's also, very much a sales job on the other side. This is some of the stats really surprised me, but once you kind of see it, it kind of makes sense, which is most investors are certainly the top ones. The partners might make two or three investments a year. Right? So that's that's they have to be super selective and it's really they are about picking. And when you're super selective, you kinda have to go for deals that you feel like can return the fund, …