Head of Strategic Startups

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As Head of Strategic Startups at Anthropic, you will own the strategy, organization, and commercial outcomes for Anthropic's relationships with the world's most important AI-native startups. This is the segment where the next generation of category-defining companies is being built on Claude, and where Anthropic's commercial, product, and partnership decisions compound fastest.

What it asks for · 10

• Have 15+ years of experience in enterprise or technical software sales, with 7+ years leading sales teams
• Have been a founder or have worked previously as a Business Development leader securing large contracts.
• Have owned a significant revenue line with full accountability for plan, forecast, and results, and have a track record of consistently outperforming it
• Have built or materially scaled a sales or account management organization, including designing coverage models, compensation plans, and operating rhythms
• Bring deep, first-hand familiarity with the startup ecosystem, including relationships with founders, venture investors, and accelerators, and an instinct for identifying which early-stage companies will become the ones that matter
• Have sold or led sales of technical, consumption-based, or platform products (APIs, infrastructure, developer tools, ML/AI), and are credible in conversations with technical founders and CTOs
• Have structured and closed complex, non-standard commercial and partnership agreements at the executive level
• Are a strong cross-functional leader who has influenced product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions well beyond your own organization
• Are analytically rigorous and comfortable making decisions with imperfect data in a rapidly evolving market
• Are motivated by Anthropic's mission and care about how frontier AI is deployed, not just how fast it grows

Also a plus

• Have led a startups or emerging-companies segment at a cloud, infrastructure, or AI platform company through a period of hypergrowth
• Have founder, operator, or venture experience, and understand the pressures and decision-making of a high-growth startup from the inside
• Have built ecosystem programs (startup credits, accelerator partnerships, investor programs) that meaningfully drove adoption of a developer platform
• Have hired and developed leaders who went on to run their own organizations
• Have experience leading through a market where the product and competitive landscape shifts quarterly

What the job covers

• Set the multi-year strategy for Anthropic's Strategic Startups business, including segmentation, coverage model, partnership structures, and investment priorities, and secure executive alignment on it
• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing team of Account Executives, including hiring, coaching, and developing sellers and establishing a strong operating cadence across the team
• Own the segment's revenue plan and P&L-level outcomes, including forecasting, capacity planning, quota design, and resource allocation, with direct accountability to GTM and company leadership
• Personally lead Anthropic's relationships with a portfolio of the highest-leverage AI-native startups, engaging founders, CEOs, and CTOs on multi-year commercial, technical, and partnership agreements
• Design and negotiate novel commercial and partnership structures (credits programs, strategic pricing, co-development, joint go-to-market) that create durable, mutually beneficial relationships with breakout companies
• Serve as the executive voice of the startup segment inside Anthropic, bringing structured customer and market insight to Product, Engineering, Pricing, and Finance and influencing roadmap and packaging decisions accordingly
• Partner with Enterprise Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, and Customer Success leadership to define handoffs, shared accounts, and escalation paths as startups scale into enterprise customers
• Establish the systems of record for the segment: account planning, customer health, executive business reviews, deal governance, and the metrics leadership uses to run the business
• Represent Anthropic externally with founders, investors, and at industry events, articulating our approach to safe, frontier AI and why it matters for companies building on it
• Lean in to support building Anthropic's presence across the startup ecosystem.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• startup22×
• partnership14×
• founders12×
• executive11×
• account10×
• product10×
• sales10×
• segment10×
• business9×
• commercial8×
• customer8×
• strategic8×
• technical8×
• decisions7×
• investors7×
• leadership7×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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