Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#471

Post by ompogUe » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #453

ethbr1 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006) Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo. It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to constru…

I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#472

Post by ethbr1 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:21 AM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #470

ethbr1 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...

Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.

That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.

It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#473

Post by elzbardico » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

Getting ready for the wework deja-vu when this S-1 becomes public.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#474

Post by elzbardico » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

Myself, I am preparing to bet on the short of my lifetime.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#475

Post by elzbardico » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #256

ifwinterco wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's really doom and gloom, that's mostly on here. The normies are all still excited/scared and the valuation based on secondary trading is going up and up. Maybe not quite as crazy as the dot com boom but I'd say the current environment for AI and related equities is a lot closer to the mid/late 90s than 2004

Normies are on fire for SpaceX, where the economics are horrible and the hype is off the charts. Normies have never heard of Anthropic, where the economics are incredible and doom vibes are pervasive.

I don't buy Anthropics narrative around their "incredible" economics, actually, I feel a lot of wework vibes from them.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#476

Post by radicalbyte » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:36 PM UTC

BryantD wrote: post #365

bsder wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha…

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spid…

Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress.

We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.

I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.