80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's Revenue Comes From 1% of Customers

0:00Eric Siu:You know that feeling when the strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is you, and it's due tomorrow. Breeze Assistant can help. It works right inside HubSpot. Drafting campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice. All grounded in your actual customer data. So you don't just create content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Did you know that 80 % of Anthropic and OpenAI's revenues come from 1 % of the customers?

0:36Eric Siu:It's way less than 1%, but yeah. So this is actually new data from Ramp, right? So they have a lot of credit card data. So you can see here, top 1 % of businesses, right? And then you have everyone else. This is the majority of their revenue. And then you have the next 9 % and then everyone else. This is the standard Pareto principle.

0:53Neil Patel:Yeah, but for them, it's even skewed because there's really so many large corporations and there's a lot of people who will give them, I don't know what their fees are, 20 bucks a month. What's the lowest entry? Is it 20? 20 bucks, yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of people that'll pay$20. There's a fraction of 1 % that can spend millions of dollars with them. And that fraction of a percent is where they're making all their revenue.

1:14Eric Siu:And this is really risky if you're one of these companies, right? Because it's like this concentration risk, I've never seen this before, right? The companies in the top 1 % skew heavily towards the tech sector. So you have like Microsoft, for example, right? You have a Meta, for example, you have Amazon, which they're kind of building their own models. Meta has built a model that is already like a 5.6 equivalent from like a chat CBD standpoint. And so here's the thing. If you look at NVIDIA, they just bought Hugging Face for$13 billion. If they're in on Hugging Face, which is an open source company, right?

1:48Eric Siu:They were also one of the investors too. I don't know if you knew that. In what?

1:51Neil Patel:In Hugging Face.

1:52Eric Siu:nvidia is one of the earlier investors nvidia also has money to open and i'm sure in anthropic too but they're gonna just go for everything right and so uh you have meta going open source you have uh nvidia going open source as well so then what happens to these companies right and i still think they're gonna be fine but the question is is anthropic a multi-trillion dollar company right

2:09Neil Patel:now uh they're supposedly trying to go public at over two trillion yeah bigger than space x's yeah

2:14Eric Siu:yeah so i don't know like it's it's risky but hey i still love using these products don't get me wrong. I'm just like, this is kind of a little scary.

2:21Neil Patel:So it's, I agree with you. It's extremely scary, but their client concentration isn't bad. Think of a services business. So flip it around. Don't look at the majority of their revenue coming from 1 % of the customers. The boy bankers will look at this is that 1 % isn't five companies or 10 companies. So when you look at how much of the revenue comes from the majority of the companies that actually they generate revenue from, the concentration isn't as bad. So what Neil's saying

2:49Eric Siu:is it's not that bad. Also, these companies are fairly stable. My thing is as the other models, like if in a year, NVIDIA's models are pretty much up there, right? I think there's always, again, there's always going to be room for frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI, but as Meta is basically catching up, right? All the money they're spending, like first, maybe a year ago, everyone's like, what's Mark Zuckerberg doing, right? Now it's like, oh damn, they're actually catching up.

3:11Neil Patel:Yeah, because the way people look at it, like let's say someone in finance, you yes, 99 % of the revenue comes from people who pay small amounts. All right. Or 1 % of the revenue comes from people who pay, what was it? 80 % of the revenue comes from - 80 % comes from 1%. So they'll look at 20 % of the revenue comes from 99%. They'll be like, okay, here's that 99%. We don't have to worry about that. They'll look at the 80%. And then within that 80%, it's not like one company makes up 20%. It's still a large number because they have millions of customers. and that large number, it's spread out. Yes, you can have some outliers in there, but I bet you it'd be very rare if Anthropic had more than, call it 10 % of the revenue coming from one customer.

3:55Eric Siu:If I had a guess. We'll see how it plays out. But I want to call something, this piece out. So this is AI productivity as it relates to writing. So content generation, for example, okay? So Tomas Tungu is the VC that is still at Redpoint Ventures or Theory VC now. Okay, so he wrote a post, AI productivity doesn't mean what I thought it means. So if you look at this chart over here, Neil, what this is explaining is the post that he's written, he has a blog, he's been writing for a while, right? And so you can see what AI is actually doing is it's helping the weakest posts gain, right? The strongest posts aren't getting that much better, but the weakest posts out there, they're becoming significantly better.

4:33Eric Siu:So it means it's just raising the floor a lot higher. And what he's learning from this is that it actually means that we're doing, it raised the ceiling of the same amount of work, which means it actually still increases human effort. It doesn't shrink human effort. So we're going to be doing more still. Yeah.

4:49Neil Patel:I think we're entering into a new era where people are less of the narrative of AI is going to kill human labor. There's going to be no need for human labor. I don't know what's going to happen 10 years from now, but people were making this bet in the short run, which is like, oh, we're going to have mass unemployment over the next few years. And you have really smart people on both sides and I don't know who's right. I just know I haven't seen it with the companies we work with and we work with a lot of large enterprises. I can't name one off the top of my head. That really is laying off because of AI.

5:20Neil Patel:Even in engineering, most of the companies I know are actually hiring. They're not laying off.

5:25Eric Siu:Did you see the post from Iconic on Headcount? Iconic's a VC firm, right? They were talking about, here, let me just pull this up for you. So basically, if you're a hyperscaler right now, you're adding a lot more headcount, right? So you're adding 133 % more headcount in the first half of 2026. But if you're in the 50 to 100 % of growers, right, in terms of your growth rate, you've cut your hiring by almost in half. And so it just depends on kind of where you're at. If you're a hyperscaler, you're going to be adding a lot more headcount. Cut your hiring or cut your staff by half? Your staff. So they're firing.

6:02Eric Siu:Yeah. Okay. So no, sorry, sorry. This is headcount growth. This is headcount growth.

6:06Neil Patel:So they're cutting how many new jobs they're looking for. So instead of looking for 100 jobs, if they're only growing at 40 % a year, they're now only looking for 50 jobs. So they've slowed down hiring.

6:15Eric Siu:Can you see - Or open roles. So I'll explain because it's probably a little hard to see. So I'm showing a chart over here. And basically the hyperscales are at the very top in the red. So you can see in 2023, 2024, it actually went down. The growth rate went from 119 % to 65%. People are like, oh my God, AI is going to destroy a bunch of jobs, right? 2025, it shoots back up to 112%. And then 2026, first half is 133%. This is the hyperscalers up top. Now, if you're in the 50 to 100 % growth rate band, you're in the yellow over here. Am I making sense so far? Yes. Okay. 2023, 2022, 2023. So 47%.

6:53Eric Siu:Then in 2024, it goes to 35%. And then 2025, it goes to 46%. And the first half of 2026, 25%. So you can see these lower bands over here are actually hiring less. And it kind of maps to some of these conversations I've been having with other entrepreneurs where they're talking about the language they're using is like not hiring as quickly, right? But when you look at the news from all the big companies out there, they're hiring a lot more.

7:15Neil Patel:As Benioff put it on TV, he was with Dario, the Anthropics CEO. And I think it was on Kramer. He was talking about, hey, AI is crushing all this stuff and staff and all that. He's like, everyone, they were talking about how they're hiring like crazy. All of them are on Slack. All of them are using Salesforce. And he's just like, they're all a few blocks and they're adding more seats and increasing usage year over year, not decreasing it.

7:40Eric Siu:Yeah. And Salesforce has good free cashflow. By the way, the SaaSpocalypse, man, is going up.

7:47Neil Patel:Yeah, see, it's a good bet. But anyway, so - I still think it's not over. I think it'll take like another six months to six months for things to adjust to a year.

7:56Eric Siu:We had said this is a year trade. Yeah. So, okay. But I want to go a little deeper into this and we can continue on. So if you look at, if you're growing at less than 25%, your headcount growth is 3%. So minus one point. Okay. If you're 25 to 50%, your headcount growth is 5%. Wait, sorry to interrupt.

8:11Neil Patel:What do you mean minus one point? Because you're still growing at 3%. I don't understand the minus one.

8:16Eric Siu:No, because the year before the growth rate was 4%. And then this year so far, year to date is 3%.

8:21Neil Patel:Okay. So it shrunk down. You're still growing, but you're only growing at 3 % instead of 4%. Yes, correct. Correct.

8:27Eric Siu:And so like mostly they're not adding as much. Right. And so this one over here, by the way, you look at it went from 16 percent. What's the percentages?

8:33Neil Patel:Sorry. This one.

8:34Eric Siu:Sorry. This one's if you're growing at 25 to 50 percent as a company, you went from 16 percent last year. And in this year to date so far, you're at 10 percent. So you drop six points, which is pretty significant. You're growing your headcount by 10 percent. Correct. But it's 10 percent on a bigger number as well. That's correct. Well, I mean, we don't know what the whole sample size looks like. Yeah. Yeah.

8:52Neil Patel:OK. Read the rest.

8:54Eric Siu:And then if you're growing at 50 to 100 percent, You were 46 % last year and now it's 25%. So down 21 points.

9:01Neil Patel:Were they growing at 25 % the year before? Because I'm assuming their growth is slowing down and that's also causing - We don't know that data.

9:07Eric Siu:But we have to pull the iconic report. This is like Sastor did this, but you can see that the hyperscalers are more or less continuing to push more. But I just think it's interesting that when we talk to friends that have, maybe companies that are growing at a decent rate, the language is still very much, we're not looking to add as much, but they are looking to add more AI-filled talent. I'll tell you that much. Everybody is. So yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's that. So let's move back over here. So if you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network.

9:42Eric Siu:They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Real quick, if you wanna acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com.

10:16Eric Siu:Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. Let me show you this, Neil. What do you think is the one X factor to getting to product market fit? And do you want to define what product market fit is? And then I'm going to show you some data.

10:33Neil Patel:So Eric Ries and the Lean Startup and Sean Ellis back in the day, they had this thing where it came to product market fit. You would look at how many people, how many of your customers were extremely satisfied and couldn't live without your product and they would run a survey. It's probably a terrible way of defining it, but based on the data, depending on how many of your people really love it and can't live without your product, you tend to have something called product market fit. And in essence, what they're really looking at is if a product has really high usage and people keep needing to use it, you're more likely to have product market fit than if you don't have that.

11:09Eric Siu:In essence, really product market fit is just people find your product useful. Yes. And the majority of people find your product useful. And Y Combinator has this batch outcome data. So Y Combinator, they backed Airbnb, they backed Dropbox, other companies. A lot of them. Yeah. So when you think about this, companies that entered a batch, so a batch is like a class, okay, for startups joining, right? So companies that entered a batch with 10 plus user conversations per week found product market fit within six months on average, okay? Now, on the flip side, companies with fewer than two user conversations per week took 18 plus months or never found it.

11:46Eric Siu:So it's the frequency of user conversations, it's the most predictable variable for PMF, product market fit timeline. And this is interesting because there's a company that I backed called Levels. They do the continuous glucose monitor. When I talked to the CEO, I can tell he was doing a customer call with me, right? Just the way he was asking me questions. I was like, how many of these have you done? He said 4 ,000, right? Now, did they necessarily hit rocket ship growth? Not necessarily, but I do think they found product market fit, but that's the amount it takes. And this is one thing I'm training our engineers on right now.