The owner of a three-bedroom in Healdsburg is hoping to exchange the property for Anthropic stock.
Courtesy of Bruington Hargreaves Real Estate
Marin County tech entrepreneur Vijay Chattha had been watching from the sidelines as artificial intelligence startup Anthropic’s value soared. The San Francisco company has been minting fortunes for insiders, while, as a private company, its equity remained off-limits to everyone else.
Then he realized he had a potential bargaining chip: A freshly remodeled three-bedroom estate in Wine Country with a bocce court, new pool and coveted vacation rental status.
He put his Healdsburg-area home on the market for a listing price of $2.5 million, but with an unusual alternative: He’d accept $2 million worth of Anthropic stock instead. His real estate agent blasted out the pitch in a press release: “Healdsburg Vacation Rental Offered for Anthropic Stock at a $500,000 Discount.”
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“The regular rest of us are training (artificial intelligence), but generally we can’t benefit from the upside yet — none of these companies are public,” Chattha told the Chronicle.
Anthropic is the creator of the wildly popular Claude chatbot and developer tool Claude Code, and the company is in an arms race among major firms like OpenAi, Google and others to dominate the artificial intelligence boom.
The owner of a three-bedroom in Healdsburg is hoping to exchange the property for Anthropic stock.
Courtesy of Bruington Hargreaves Real Estate
Chattha said he is courting Anthropic because he switched from using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Claude earlier this year and felt the system was far more effective and transformative.
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“When was the last time a company changed the way you live and work? Uber? That was ten years ago. The iPhone? We’re talking about one company per decade,” Chattha said.
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Anthropic’s value had already reached heights few companies achieve when, last September, its valuation hit $183 billion. By May, Anthropic was worth an estimated $900 billion with no end in sight, and its chief executive has bragged that the company would grow by 80 times before the end of the year.
But unlike public companies with equity traded on the stock market, private firms like Anthropic generally limit ownership to founders, employees, venture capital and accredited wealthy investors.
Chattha said he was inspired by news stories last month about an investment banker courting Anthropic stock holders by offering to exchange his 13-acre Mill Valley estate, featuring an infinity pool and panoramic views of the bay, for Anthropic equity.
It’s unclear whether the banker was successful (he couldn’t immediately be reached late Wednesday or early Thursday). Zillow shows the Inez Place property was listed for $8 million on March 29, and the listing was removed on April 15.
Chattha said he believes average people should be able to buy a stake in the largest companies and reap rewards from this exponential growth. Companies like Anthropic are building empires by extracting valuable data from vast numbers of regular people, Chattha said, but the wealth it is generating is off limits to most.
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Chattha, who founded San Francisco-based technology public relations firm VSC, this week launched a startup, Powerlaw Funds, aimed at helping more investors access equity in high-profile private companies — like Anthropic. Investors can buy shares of a fund that owns stakes acquired through secondary market details with private company shareholders, he said.
About 10 private companies “are growing fastest, and they’re using you and me. We’re training the model and we don’t get the upside. That’s wrong, in my opinion,” he said.
David Hargreaves, Chattha’s real estate agent and cofounder at Bruington Hargreaves, said he had not encountered such a sale request before, and believed it to be a first for Sonoma and Napa county real estate, and maybe anywhere.
“The deal is built for the Bay Area buyer whose net worth sits in private-company stock that is hard to spend,” Hargreaves wrote in the property listing.
The pitch continued: “Rather than sell shares and trigger a taxable event to fund a second home, that buyer can put the equity directly toward a Wine Country property that earns income when it is not in personal use.”
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Chattha bought the Healdsburg property about a decade ago, and had used it as a vacation respite, then as a long term rental for refugees from the devastating Wine Country wildfires.
Ten minutes from Healdsburg Plaza, the property is a rare opportunity as it is eligible for a vacation rental permit, which doesn’t always carry after a sale due to local restrictions, which is worth an estimated $178,000 in annual rental income.
Chattha said that, if he found an interested Anthropic buyer, he wasn’t worried that the artificial intelligence would burst. Taking cash from a real estate sale and investing it in the stock market also involves risk, and he’s confident the industry will continue to soar.
“Maybe I’m a risk taker — that’s what I do,” he said.
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