OpenGTM Podcast

Episode 1: Kate Earle Jensen on Building GTM at Anthropic

Kate Jensen, Head of Americas at Anthropic, joins Ben Salzman at Anthropic's San Francisco office, almost exactly three years after she joined the company when it had no revenue and a GTM machine still to be built.

Kate and Ben go back to their days working together at Stripe, when Dogpatch helped her team turn data into hyper-personalized outreach. Kate's take is that the principles haven't changed: 

Everyone still wants to be spoken to by someone who understands them. What has changed is the cost. A campaign that once had 10 profiles can now have a thousand, each one updated as new information arrives.

From there, the conversation moves into how Anthropic runs its own GTM. Kate explains why the bar is higher when your customers know the outreach was written by Claude, why most failures of a model call are really context and prompting failures, and how she helps leadership teams match token spend to the return they are betting on. 

She also shares how Anthropic hires and enables a team that keeps pace with a company shipping faster than ever, why every role there is a builder role, and where forward deployed engineers and partners fit.

• Why Kate left Stripe for Anthropic, and what it took to build GTM from zero revenue

• Slices: the Stripe-era work on personalized outreach at scale, then and now

• Probabilistic vs. deterministic GTM, and when a model call is the wrong tool

• Token maxing: how to match AI spend to the outcome you want

• Keeping a fast-moving team on top of the news cycle and a constant stream of launches

• New roles, enablement, and the hardest hires in GTM right now

• Forward deployed engineers, Ode, and when to bring in a partner

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• 00:00 Intro

• 02:38 The road to Anthropic

• 06:05 Slices, then and now

• 09:15 Deterministic vs. runtime GTM

• 20:02 Building the GTM team

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• Full episode, clips, and transcript: https://opengtm.com/podcast/1-kate-earle-jensen/

• All episodes: https://opengtm.com/podcast

• Kate Earle Jensen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kateearle/

• Ben Salzman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensalzman/

• Follow OpenGTM on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opengotomarket/