It’s not really random when it was clear on account of the caliber of people working there that it was going to be a generational company whether the AI boom took longer or not. The writing was on the wall by the time Opus 3 came out, after it was just a matter of who was worthy for a ticket on the arc.
replyI felt the same way when I was actively being recruited by Runway ML years ago. It feels like if I had half the knowledge I do now, I would've been the second QA hire (and I had heard that the person they hired instead of me had left with some controversy). My biggest flub was asking an EM about their CI/CD and she took this to mean 'explain CI/CD to me as a basic concept' - something I didn't realize until after the interview.
replyThey got a 300 million Series E about a year after that flub ;_;
Same thing could be said of dot com era. Sure the Internet changed everything, but not every company was a winner, quite the contrary.
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