{"id":36272,"date":"2026-05-12T16:11:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/36272\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T16:11:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:11:30","slug":"anthropics-daniela-amodei-says-entrepreneurs-should-go-on-vacation-to-road-test-potential-cofounders-if-theyre-a-drain-theyre-the-wrong-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/36272\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic\u2019s Daniela Amodei says entrepreneurs should go on vacation to road test potential cofounders\u2014if they\u2019re a drain, they\u2019re \u2018the wrong choice\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scaling a start-up to a titan of industry requires founders to be in lockstep on fundraising, company structure, and the overall mission at hand. Daniela Amodei<\/a>, the cofounder and president of Anthropic<\/a>, knows this more than most\u2014in 2021, she launched the wildly successful AI company alongside her brother, CEO Dario Amodei<\/a>, and five other cofounders. And for entrepreneurs looking to replicate that kind of chemistry, Amodei has a trick to find compatible partners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of starting a company together, go on vacation together,\u201d Amodei recently said during a talk at<\/a> the Stanford Graduate School of Business. \u201cShare a room with them. Be like, \u2018How did that go?\u2019 And if you\u2019re like, \u2018Man, all I wanna do is spend more time with you,\u2019 great.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re like, \u2018Really, I\u2019m gonna need a vacation to recover from my vacation,\u2019 it might be the wrong choice,\u201d Amodei continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The AI magnate says she got \u201cextremely lucky\u201d with her cohort of fellow founders at Anthropic. And when it comes to picking the best right-hand man, Amodei looks for strong interpersonal relationships. She\u2019s known her brother Dario Amodei her entire life, and some of the other cofounders have been in her orbit for 15 years. Plus, the majority had also already reported to her or her brother while they were all working at OpenAI<\/a>. The Anthropic entrepreneurs thrived off an established framework of how to give each other feedback\u2014and importantly, she says they knew \u201cwho we were as people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only other key component is having a consensus of what the business is trying to do. Amodei said that Anthropic\u2019s cofounders were all united on wanting to achieve something else; the core group had all previously at OpenAI, but broke off for various reasons, including differing views on company vision<\/a>. When launching Anthropic, the Claude creators were \u201cin the same zone already,\u201d Amodei says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you locked yourself and your co-founder in another room, and you wrote down or drew a picture of what it is you\u2019re trying to build, you\u2019re not gonna walk out and one has drawn a unicorn and the other has drawn a platypus,\u201d the cofounder continued. \u201cThat\u2019s the type of situation where you think you\u2019re doing the same thing, but I think it just doesn\u2019t end well.\u201d<\/p>\n

How entrepreneurs pick their cofounders\u2014from stress tests to writing exercises<\/p>\n

Paul Graham<\/a>, the cofounder of Silicon Valley start-up accelerator Y Combinator, has warned entrepreneurs to be careful who they pick as a cofounder. Just like Amodei, he agrees that good character is immensely important in a partnership\u2014it\u2019s tested \u201cseverely\u201d when times get tough.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat people wished they\u2019d paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability. This was particularly true with startups that failed,\u201d Graham wrote in a<\/a> 2009 essay. \u201cThe lesson: don\u2019t pick cofounders who will flake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andy Dunn, the cofounder and former CEO of Bonobos, laid out five specific tests<\/a> entrepreneurs should complete with a prospective partner before entering \u201cthe intense commitment of starting a company together.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, the stress test, by practicing having difficult conversations; next, they should administer the time test, spending lots of time together to bond as business parents. Partners should also engage in the role exercise, ironing out who will do what, and how decisions change at scale; and the \u201cwhen things go south\u201d test will set up a gameplan for their inevitable departures. Finally, Dunn recommended examining their differences to make sure they\u2019re not too alike\u2014\u201dvery divergent skill sets\u201d are key.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to spend enough time with each other socially, getting to know each other\u2019s friends and loved ones, and treating it like a marriage,\u201d Dunn wrote<\/a> for Fortune in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

VC cofounder Jeff Rosenthal and his business partner, Patrick Maloney, both handed each other an exam before jumping into the deep end.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before creating CIV, an investment platform that invests in and scales tech companies, the duo sat down and tested their dynamics through a written exercise. They each outlined their company vision in writing\u2014from their office schedules, to their outlook for the business\u2014exchanging notes \u201clike pen pals\u201d to ensure \u201cnothing was lost in translation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to make sure that we were aligned in our vision for the type of business we would build, the type of culture we wanted, our expectations of each other,\u201d Rosenthal told<\/a> Business Insider last year. \u201cAnd we didn\u2019t wanna leave anything unsaid.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scaling a start-up to a titan of industry requires founders to be in lockstep on fundraising, company structure,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[16638,53,309,2106,2105,955,743,3261,6573,802,6321,6323,382,157,781],"class_list":["post-36272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-advice","tag-anthropic","tag-business","tag-career-advice","tag-careers","tag-chatbots","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-dario-amodei","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-executives","tag-founders","tag-jobs","tag-openai","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}