Anthropic’s meteoric rise is rewriting the playbook for startup pay.
Just 14 months ago, a senior software engineer accepted a $571,000 package that included roughly $250,000 in stock options, according to tech industry compensation platform Levels.fyi.
That equity award was worth about $1 million on paper at the time. Now, it would be valued at an eye-popping $23 million, according to estimates from Hakeem Shibly, a data guru at Levels.fyi.
That’s because Anthropic has seen its valuation soar from about $12.5 billion in early 2024 to a staggering $183 billion.
Anthropic is cementing itself as one of the fastest-growing startups ever, and its engineers are seeing truly generational wealth.
This is why very few are leaving.
Levels.fyi gets tech workers to submit their compensation offers and then crunches the numbers so folks can weigh how their pay compares to others across the industry.
The Anthropic job offer featured by Shibly is real. However, he noted that his estimate on how the value of the equity award has grown is just that: an estimate.
“These are illustrative, ‘paper’ calculations” using pricing from the startup’s financing rounds, which include preferred stock, Shibly wrote on LinkedIn. The value of common stock and other types of equity may be different. And the estimate also doesn’t account for potential dilution through things like option pool refreshes, secondary share sales, and stock splits.
Still, this is a potent illustration of the AI-powered wealth being created right now in Silicon Valley.
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