Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei says entrepreneurs should go on vacation to road test potential cofounders—if they’re a drain, they’re ‘the wrong choice’

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, the cofounder and president of Anthropic, knows this more than most—in 2021, she launched the wildly successful AI company alongside her brother, CEO Dario Amodei, and five other cofounders. And for entrepreneurs looking to replicate that kind of chemistry, Amodei has a trick to find compatible partners. “Instead of starting a company together, go on vacation together,” Amodei recently said during a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Share a room with them. Be like, ‘How did that go?’ And if you’re like, ‘Man, all I wanna do is spend more time with you,’ great.” “If you’re like, ‘Really, I’m gonna need a vacation to recover from my vacation,’ it might be the wrong choice,” Amodei continued. The AI magnate says she got “extremely lucky” 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’s 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. The Anthropic entrepreneurs thrived off an established framework of how to give each other feedback—and importantly, she says they knew “who we were as people.” The only other key component is having a consensus of what the business is trying to do. Amodei said that Anthropic’s 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. When launching Anthropic, the Claude creators were “in the same zone already,” Amodei says. “If you locked yourself and your co-founder in another room, and you wrote down or drew a picture of what it is