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Salary: USD 550,000 - 750,000 / annual
Anthropic is seeking a Head of Strategic Startups to own the strategy, organization, and commercial outcomes for relationships with the world's most important AI-native startups building on Claude. This role sits on the GTM leadership team and combines revenue accountability with ecosystem strategy and product influence.
You will lead a team of Account Executives managing Anthropic's most strategic AI-native accounts, with accountability for a revenue line spanning expansion, retention, and net-new wins. Beyond running the business, you will define what "strategic" means for Anthropic in the startup ecosystem: which companies to bet on, how to structure partnerships, how to engage investors and accelerators, and how signals from this segment shape product roadmap and go-to-market decisions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting multi-year strategy for the Strategic Startups business, including segmentation, coverage model, partnership structures, and investment priorities
- Building, leading, and scaling a high-performing team of Account Executives, including hiring, coaching, and establishing operating cadence
- Owning the segment's revenue plan and P&L outcomes, including forecasting, capacity planning, quota design, and resource allocation
- Personally leading relationships with a portfolio of highest-leverage AI-native startups, engaging founders, CEOs, and CTOs on multi-year commercial and technical agreements
- Designing and negotiating novel commercial and partnership structures (credits programs, strategic pricing, co-development, joint go-to-market)
- Serving as the executive voice of the startup segment inside Anthropic, bringing customer and market insight to Product, Engineering, Pricing, and Finance
- Partnering with Enterprise Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, and Customer Success on handoffs and escalation paths as startups scale
- Establishing systems of record for the segment: account planning, customer health, executive business reviews, deal governance, and metrics
- Representing Anthropic externally with founders, investors, and at industry events, articulating the approach to safe, frontier AI
- Supporting Anthropic's presence across the startup ecosystem
Requirements:
- 15+ years of experience in enterprise or technical software sales, with 7+ years leading sales teams
- Founder experience or previous work as a Business Development leader securing large contracts
- Owned a significant revenue line with full accountability for plan, forecast, and results, with a track record of consistently outperforming
- Built or materially scaled a sales or account management organization, including designing coverage models, compensation plans, and operating rhythms
- Deep, first-hand familiarity with the startup ecosystem, including relationships with founders, venture investors, and accelerators, with instinct for identifying which early-stage companies will become category-defining
- Experience selling or leading sales of technical, consumption-based, or platform products (APIs, infrastructure, developer tools, ML/AI), with credibility in conversations with technical founders and CTOs
- Structured and closed complex, non-standard commercial and partnership agreements at the executive level
- Strong cross-functional leader who has influenced product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions beyond own organization
- Analytically rigorous and comfortable making decisions with imperfect data in rapidly evolving markets
- Motivated by Anthropic's mission and care about how frontier AI is deployed
Preferred qualifications:
- Led a startups or emerging-companies segment at a cloud, infrastructure, or AI platform company through hypergrowth
- Founder, operator, or venture experience, understanding pressures and decision-making of high-growth startups
- Built ecosystem programs (startup credits, accelerator partnerships, investor programs) that drove adoption of developer platforms
- Hired and developed leaders who went on to run their own organizations
- Experience leading through markets where product and competitive landscape shifts quarterly
Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience in a field relevant to the role.
