I’m betting on Anthropic

As I hire the first employees at Rendezvu, I keep coming back to one question. How do I want this company to feel from the inside? Not just what we build, but how we think. How we make decisions. How we see ourselves. Culture is not perks. It is not a slide in a deck. It is the set of principles you return to when things get unclear. The job of a founder is to bring people back to those principles over and over again. In marketing meetings. In product debates. In sales conversations. When something feels off. When something feels exciting. You ask the same questions. Does this get more people outside?
Does this help people enjoy the outdoors more?
Are we staying authentic? Those are not slogans. They are filters. If something does not pass through them cleanly, we rethink it. My job is to make those principles so embedded that the team does not have to think about them consciously. They just operate that way. When you have great people, that part is not hard. The right people want clarity. They want standards. They want something to anchor to. The reason I titled this essay “I’m Betting on Anthropic” is because there is another principle that will define how we operate. Rendezvu is an AI company that does not feel like an AI company. To the outside world, we are an outdoor brand. We write about trail running. We follow 100 mile races. We highlight guides. We empower local communities. We care about athletes. We care about culture. Nothing about that should feel robotic or over engineered. On the inside, it is different. Every process we build will be shaped by AI. How we write. How we code. How we analyze data. How we communicate. How we test ideas. We are designing our workflows around AI from day one, not as an add on. And right now, I am betting on Anthropic. Over the last year it would not have made sense to pick a side. The space was moving too fast. It still is. It is important to experiment. To try everything. To stay curious. But at some point, speed requires commitment. You cannot build systems if you are constantly switching foundations. Claude, Claude Code, and the tools Anthropic is building feel different to me. They feel customizable. They feel aligned with how I think. They feel like they are being built for people who want to go deep, not just generate surface level output. In the last year, AI has completely changed how I operate. I taught myself to code faster than I thought was possible. I built systems I would not have attempted before. I move at a pace that would have required a much larger team a few years ago. That shift is not abstract. It is real. It is practical. It changes what a small team can do. Not everyone sees that yet. That is an advantage. Part of my job is to show the team how transformative this technology can be. Not in theory, but in practice. To build workflows that make them faster, sharper, more creative. To remove friction from their day. To raise the ceiling of what they believe they can execute. If we get that right, we will look like a disciplined outdoor company from the outside and operate like a highly leveraged AI company on the inside. That combination matters. The brand stays human. The culture stays authentic. The mission stays clear. But the engine underneath is powerful. Rendezvu is still early. We are just starting to take off. The people coming onboard understand the mission. They care about the outdoors. They care about building something that lasts. And now we are pairing that with tools that amplify our output. I am betting on Anthropic because I am betting on leverage. I am betting on small teams doing big things. I am betting on systems over chaos. If we stay grounded in our principles and disciplined in how we build, the rest will compound. Takeoff has started.