From @mmurph on bending the rules to back Anthropic pre-launch at $4 billion: "I know a lot of people today it's like, oh, $4 billion, isn't that kinda common? But if you roll the clocks back to '22, '23, there were no companies like that. Exiting at $4B was literally a spectacular exit in the entire history of venture. And now that was the entry point. Then you've got issues like, well, what fund does that go in? How does a venture fund do that? And because it's pre-revenue and pre-launch, how does a growth fund do that? So we were caught in the middle. I'm glad we had a partnership that was all in on AI. This was at least the second best company in the category, with the best technical team. The models were benchmarking really well, and it was a massive market. So we bent the rules a little bit to say, 'Let's participate in this round with a goal to lead the next round.' That worked out fabulously. As soon as we invested, we had a different type of relationship with the company. We worked with them on recruiting, talking to customers, and a lot of strategic issues that come up early in a company. Then we saw them put together the deals with AWS and Google, and the revenue flywheel started to spin. The company went from zero when they launched in April to, it's been reported, something like $85 million at the end of the year. We saw that happening in September, October, and jumped on it to lead the round. Unless we had made that small initial investment, we wouldn't have had the relationship to see all of this. Or earned the trust with the team to lead that round."