Inside one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies, employees can openly challenge the CEO — even on Slack.
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On an episode of “Lenny’s” podcast released on Sunday, Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, said employees all have a personal Slack “notebook” that is open to others. Staff, including CEO Dario Amodei, use it like a “Twitter feed” to discuss their thoughts and what they are working on.
“You can go and join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research, and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you want,” Avasare said.
He added that the company culture encourages people to “just argue with Dario.”
Avasare, who joined the company in 2024, shared an incident from an all-hands meeting in which Amodei said something an employee didn’t agree with.
“The person goes onto Dario’s notebook channel and just says: ‘Hey, I didn’t appreciate how you said this or that.’ And then it sparked a whole big debate,” he said. “It’s encouraged to go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly, and I think that just leads to a level of trust.”
In February, the frontier lab announced it raised $30 billion in a Series G round, led by GIC and Coatue. Anthropic was last valued at $380 billion.
Anthropic is among the tech companies that dismiss hierarchies and encourage airing concerns quickly.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings are known for building company cultures in which employees are encouraged to speak up early and challenge decisions, even when they come from top leadership.
In a 2018 letter to Tesla employees, Elon Musk asked workers to communicate openly.
“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the ‘chain of command,'” he wrote. “Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”
