Storm Duncan, founder and managing partner of boutique tech investment bank Ignatious, has gone public with an unusual offer: he will swap his $4.8 million Mill Valley estate for shares in Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude. Duncan posted the proposal on LinkedIn earlier this week and has since fielded multiple inquiries from Anthropic shareholders, including employees and early investors. He described the prospective deals as credible but complicated.
The property, listed at 114 Inez Place in Marin County, is a ranch-style home on roughly 13 acres with four bedrooms, five bathrooms, an infinity-edge pool, a spa, and a putting green, with views toward San Francisco Bay, Mount Tamalpais, and the city skyline. Duncan purchased it in 2019 for $4.75 million. The home is currently occupied by a venture capitalist he declined to name. Duncan now lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but said the Mill Valley property was a deliberate choice of bait for Anthropic staff. “It’s a 20-minute commute to the Anthropic offices in the city,” he told Business Insider. “No one from Anthropic probably wants my Miami or Jackson Hole place.”
The arrangement is structured to keep the exchange off public markets, meaning a seller would transfer shares without triggering an outright sale. Duncan has committed to covering closing costs and has pledged to let the counterparty retain 20% of any appreciation on the exchanged shares through any applicable lockup period. His interest in Anthropic is not new — he acquired shares during the company’s 2024 fundraising round — but said his recent experience deploying Claude Code at Ignatious pushed him to seek more exposure. “It’s probably going to triple our throughput and reduce our costs by 50%,” he said.
The logic behind the offer, Duncan argues, is straightforward. Anthropic insiders may be sitting on substantial paper wealth that remains locked up until an IPO, while he wants AI exposure he can no longer easily obtain through conventional channels. Secondary market trades have pushed Anthropic’s implied valuation toward $1 trillion, and Duncan said the company only engages directly with parties capable of deploying $100 million or more in a single transaction. “This gives them an opportunity to diversify,” he said of potential Anthropic seller counterparties, pointing to engineers earning $400,000 salaries who are technically worth $100 million on paper but cannot access their holdings.
The LinkedIn post has attracted its share of skeptics, with commenters variously calling it a bubble-top signal or a bid for publicity. Duncan maintains he is entirely serious.
