An Open Note to Anthropic Employees, Who Are About to Get Rich

Last week, Anthropic, PBC filed an amended S-1 to list as "ANT" on the Nasdaq — an offering of 825 million shares, priced between $70 and $78 apiece. The financials read like a different planet: $41 million of revenue in 2023 became $386 million in 2024, then $4.6 billion in 2025, then $33.2 billion in just the first nine months of 2026, with run-rate revenue crossing $81 billion by the end of October. All of it is in the filing, if you want to see it for yourself.

This isn't another take on Anthropic the company. The hot takes are covered. This is about the roughly 5,300 of you.

Because at some point in the months after the listing, a very large amount of money is going to stop being theoretical and start being real — and it's going to land in the accounts of people who are world-class at building AI and, on average, brand new at managing a windfall. Not because you're careless with money. Because nothing in your training set covered this.

The gap between building it and keeping it

The skills that built Anthropic don't automatically transfer to the part that comes next. You know how to train a model, ship a feature, and operate a system at scale. A liquidity event is a different kind of problem — one with a clock, a tax code, and a crowd of people who want a piece of it.

Equity that lived in a spreadsheet for years is about to become dollars you can actually spend. And the decisions you make in the first year after that happens matter more than the decisions you make in the next decade. That's not a scare tactic; it's how concentration and taxes compound.

Three things are about to happen to you

1. Your phone is going to start ringing

Private bankers, wealth managers, and "family offices" will suddenly find you very interesting. Some of them are good people. But most are showing up for the same reason they always do: a newly liquid employee with seven figures of equity is the most profitable client a financial advisor can find.

The pitch will sound warm and the fee will sound small — 1% a year. It isn't small. On a $2 million portfolio, 1% is $20,000 a year, every year, whether the advisor adds anything or not. We did the math on the whole thing: the $12,000 handshake.

2. Your portfolio is about to become one ticker

Right now your money is probably spread out: a salary, some savings, maybe an index fund, and a pile of equity in the company you work for. After the lockup, that equity becomes public stock — and all of a sudden your paycheck, your unvested grants, and your savings are all pointing at the same three letters: ANT.

That's concentration risk, and it's the single most common way tech wealth quietly gets destroyed. People who are brilliant at their jobs hold the stock because they believe in the company. Belief is fine. Having the majority of your net worth in one ticker — the same ticker that signs your checks — is a different thing entirely.

3. The tax bill stops being theoretical

RSUs are taxed as ordinary income the day they vest, whether you sell them or not. If you hold and the stock drops, you still owe tax on the value at vest. Add a lockup that stops you from selling when you want to, a federal supplemental withholding rate that may not match your actual marginal rate, and a state tax bill that can top 13% if you're in California, and "free equity" starts to look like a planning problem.

None of this is impossible to handle. It's just specific, and it rewards people who run the numbers before the money moves.

What we'd actually tell a friend

If one of the 5,300 asked us what to do, here's the honest version — no product pitch attached:

Don't rush. You don't have to make every decision the day the lockup opens. The worst moves in a liquidity event are almost always made in the first six months, under pressure.

Measure the concentration before you fix it. What percentage of your net worth is in ANT? If the honest answer makes you wince, that's the signal.

Model the sell decisions with real tax math. "Sell immediately," "hold everything," and "sell half" produce wildly different outcomes once state tax and withholding are in the picture. Guess at it and you can leave six figures on the table. (We built a tool that runs this exact math, because it's the question every vesting employee eventually asks.)

Have a plan for the cash. The day money lands in your checking account, the default is for it to sit there doing nothing or drift into a house you didn't plan to buy. Know what the dollars are for before they arrive.

Ignore anyone who needs a decision this week. Genuinely good advice can wait a month. Urgency is a sales tactic.

The part where we admit we built a thing

Here's the honest framing: you're probably not the target customer for the traditional financial advice industry — and you shouldn't be.

You already understand the core argument better than any wealth manager will give you credit for. Software scales. A human advisor's 1% fee isn't buying you more expertise; it's buying you a person's time, and that time doesn't scale with your money. You'd never ship a feature that charged per-token with no ceiling and called it a deal. You shouldn't pay for your money the same way.

So, yes, we built Alistair — an AI wealth coach that talks to you like an advisor, links your accounts read-only, remembers everything you tell it, and never charges a percentage of your assets. It handles the cross-domain stuff a single human can't: investing, taxes, retirement, and estate planning in the same conversation. And when your RSUs vest, it runs the sell-vs-hold math for you instead of handing you a brochure and a referral.

That's the pitch. It's a short one, and we'll stop here.

If you're one of the 5,300 — congratulations. You built something genuinely rare. Now go make sure the money you just earned sticks around long enough to matter.