It was a brutally sunny Tuesday morning when Trent McNelly, a self-described “solo founder” of an AI-powered advertising service called Ad+Verb Labs, arrived at a nondescript warehouse on the corner of Harrison and First Streets, just off the I-80 on-ramp. He was there to check out the Claude Founder House, a three-day activation Anthropic is running at 511 Harrison St. as part of San Francisco Tech Week. McNelly planned to hang out, get some work done, and mingle with other founders and potential investors.
For much of the day, what he did instead was wait in the line outside.
“I was in the line for three, maybe three and a half hours,” said McNelly, who was in town from San Jose. “But it wasn’t too bad. I’m a happy guy, and the whole point of this is connecting with people.”
The gigantic line outside the Claude Founder House, McNelly said, became an extension of the event itself. The hundreds of hopeful attendees, all of whom had pre-registered online, chatted, took selfies, and pitched their startups at one another.
Some pulled out their selfie sticks and started streaming. Photos and videos of the spectacle made the rounds on social media, which only added to the hype. As the day wore on, a few representatives from Anthropic walked up and down the line with a QR code that gave the line-standers $100 in API credits (the in-game currency for AI programs, essentially), presumably for their troubles. At one point, representatives of another enterprising startup came by and gave out free coffee to the founders-in-waiting, several attendees told me. (No one could remember the startup’s name.) “I even got a few girls’ numbers,” McNelly said, grinning.
At its longest, the line snaked from the entrance to the event down the street, up into the parking lot next to the building and back out the driveway gate, further down the block, and into the street. “It basically went into the freeway,” said Camilo Barcenas, the co-founder of an environmental safety app called GOES, who estimated he waited for an hour.
Sometime in the afternoon, one security guard told me, a fire marshal arrived and told Anthropic’s security team they had to cap attendance at 500 people, even though they had originally planned to let in 1,000.
Across the city, thousands of corporate events and activations like the Claude Founder House are happening as part of SF Tech Week, the annual, decentralized six-day bonanza sponsored by Andreessen Horowitz and other industry giants. Beyond the hoards of local tech workers who attend Tech Week events, thousands of founders and investors come in from elsewhere; long lines are not uncommon.
Maggie Yun, the founder of Lumira, an AI-powered job hunting platform, is in town from Toronto. This is her first Tech Week ever. Yesterday morning, she planned to attend a Google event but left after seeing how long the line outside was. “So I came here and ended up waiting an hour and a half,” Yun said, laughing.
Like McNelly, Yun is a solo founder, meaning she works on her startup in a more or less isolated environment. She said she uses Claude so much she thinks of it like another executive at her company. (McNelly went one step further, calling Claude his “co-founder.”) Yun also said she considers herself a “fan” of Anthropic in the same way one might be a fan of one’s favorite childhood movie franchise.
“It’s like Disneyland,” she said of the Claude Founder House. “You use the product all the time and you want to know where it comes from. Then you get here and you’re like, ‘Oh my god! This is the place!’ Everyone is just so excited.” (The Claude Founder House is not being hosted at Anthropic’s headquarters: That’s about a 10-minute walk away on Howard Street.)
Temitope Sobodu, the Boston-based founder of biotech startup Attention Labs, called the Claude Founder House “the hottest place to be” this week, even though he wasn’t sure the actual event was worth the hour he spent in line. Inside, he found nothing special: a handsomely-appointed coworking space with free food, coffee, and some extra offerings like panels and yoga classes. “You get to talk to Anthropic engineers, schedule one-on-ones and office hours with them. I think that makes it really interesting,” he said.
Several other line-standers I talked to agreed that, right now, just being around Anthropic felt exciting. “People want to get close to the richest company in the world,” Barcenas said. (Presumably, he was referring to a cultural richness; for the actual richest company, he’d have to go to Santa Clara to visit NVIDIA.)
The last time McNelly was in San Francisco for Tech Week was in 2017, when Uber and Lyft were the two opposing titans in town. Now, Anthropic and OpenAI are the rivals in the ring. “We’ll see what happens with their valuations,” McNelly said, but considering how much fanfare events like the Claude House can drum up, he thinks that “Anthropic is winning the culture war.”
The Claude House is the only Tech Week event McNelly plans to attend this week. On Wednesday morning, he got in line bright and early, around 9:30 a.m., 90 minutes before the doors opened. Standing next to him was another founder, a software engineer named Sean Devine, who had also spent several hours in the raucous line on Tuesday afternoon.
Devine said he was “pretty hyped” to get in yesterday, but “it was pretty disappointing to be honest.”
“I thought Anthropic would be cooler. But I guess anything would feel below-average if you wait three hours to get in,” he said.
Devine came back Wednesday mostly for the free food, and he made sure to line up early. “I have to, or else I get fucked,” he said, glancing back as several people filed into the line behind him.
