Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | a16z Podcast

So how did the like button come into existence?

What was it like back during that time?

I think In the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript to get a little bit geeky it was the first time even though this sounds super archaic that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response and get something back into your browser.

There was no way to just say like, I think this is cool.

Let me just like tap on it and like show my vote of interest on something.

And I was like well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up, and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something.

The way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume.

Consumer technology feels like it's coming back to life, and AI might be the spark.

On this episode, you'll hear from Kevin Rose of True Ventures and A16Z general partner, Anish Acharya, to talk about how AI is rewriting the rules of consumer tech from companionship and creativity to how we actually build products.

They'll get into what it means for something to be weird and working, why the best ideas still start as experiments and how anyone can go from idea to app in a single afternoon.

They also revisit the early days of the internet, the invention of the like button and what it takes to create something that truly changes culture.

Let's get into it.

All right, man.

So ketones.

Am I going to go on a trip?

This is going to be a surprise for you.

So these are ketones that Tim Ferriss turned me on to.

Okay.

We don't have to make it a plug in the podcast or anything because this isn't a show about ketones.

Okay.

Now you have to be careful here, because you have to bend this like this and then it kind of shoots into your mouth and then you just chug it.

Have you ever had ketones before?

No.

Okay.

All right.

Let's do this.

All right.

Let's do this.

Okay.

So let me show you how to do it.

I'll do it first.

Okay.

So you bend like this.

Mm-hmm.

What am I doing here?

Okay.

There you go.

Like this?

Let's do it, Anish.

Yeah.

Wait, wait, no, no, wait.

That's backwards.

Let me see.

Yeah, there you go.

So I had a friend do that and he shot it all over his chest.

You don't want that before the podcast.

Okay.

Take it back.

Take it like a champion.

Squeeze.

Suck.

You're going to notice a little bit of bitterness.

Do you taste it?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's not good.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's the worst.

Now, this is going to give you brain power for the podcast.

So this is how we start the show.

Jesus, dude.

It tastes like I regurgitated a Tylenol.

It's fucking terrible.

It does taste like a chewed up Tylenol.

That's a great way to put it.

Okay.

All right, so...

We'll let that kick in.

Anish, dude, I'm so glad we're doing this, brother.

Excited, man.

I know.

Thank you.

Before we get into the ketones kicking in, let's get a little bit of background, because it's important.

I know we're going to be syndicating this across a couple of podcasts.

Yeah.

I was telling people who we are.

We've known each other for a long time.

We worked together at Google.

Long time.

We worked together at Google Ventures and Google Corporate.

And yeah, man, we've been good homies for many, many, many years.

No one's ever seen us on a pod together, I don't think, right?

I don't think so.

Yeah, so do you want to give a little of your background?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Thank you for having me, man.

This is awesome.

I'm Anish.

I'm a GP at Andreessen.

I've been friends with Kevin forever.

I'm a product person.

I'm an engineer.

I'm a technologist.

I started two companies.

Probably having the most fun I've ever had, both personally, professionally, and all of that.

And I'm excited to talk to everyone about it today.

Yeah, it was really cool.

When we first met, we both were, I don't know how we ended up there and gone Google+.

Yeah.

But we were both on Google+.

And I remember working with you like in the very early days.

And I was like oh like, when you landed Google for the first time, you didn't know what to expect.

You know like, because you're getting in there.

And you don't know, like, what is this whole thing going to be about?

Like, who am I going to work with?

And very quickly, you realize there's fantastic engineering talent there.

And then there's also product-wise, I was like, hmm.

I don't know that these people actually live and breathe product.

It was very much you're kind of in the Google bubble.

But you were one of the first people I was like, oh my God, this is like an amazing product mind.

And I got to work with this guy.

And so we figured out a way to like stay connected and work together.

You know, when we bounced over to Google Ventures then and yeah.

Well, dude, figuring out a way is generous.

So you saved my life.

I remember I worked with you for three, four weeks.

And what's cool actually is you joined and you're like, no, this is not it.

I'm not doing it.

I'm like, what do you mean?

What about vesting?

What about Google Plus?

What about this and that?

And you were just so sure, and you were right, you moved over to Ventures.

And I remember at the time talking to you outside of that building, the Google Plus building and saying Kevin, don't leave me behind, man.

Please bring And like, I'll make you look good.

And that's the thing you say.

And you assume nobody will ever like call you back after that.

And three months later, you called me.

You're like, all right, man, what's up?

Like, why don't you come over here and do this with us?

And I mean, that single act of professional generosity changed my whole life.

That's awesome.

I'm very grateful.

Well, big shout out to Chris Hutchins, who like got us connected to Google.

The mastermind.

The mastermind who got us connected to Google Ventures.

And then, of course, Bill Maris, who was running Google Ventures.

Of course, yes.

And then, you know, I pulled you and Berka in and we all got over there and they had a great time at GV.

Fantastic crew.

I love those people.

I thought Google Ventures was a great place.

They're the best of us.

You know Bill had the best energy.

I met my wife there yeah, I mean everybody.

There was very good people, yeah.

And then Crane's running it now, which is awesome to see like he was such a great person to be around.

I really enjoyed my time with David and Great to see him just turning that firm into an awesome.

Like I look at the portfolio now since we've left and he's built out a great suite of companies that are just top tier.

That's legit, man.

That's legit.

Well, it's actually fun to see you in action as a consumer investor.

I think so much consumer investing and building is willingness to be embarrassed.

Yeah.

You know, and you did deals like Blue Bottle.

Yeah.

And I'm like, Kevin, what is this?

A coffee shop with a stand in haze?

Yeah.

How is this going to be a venture investment?

And it was, and you were willing to be embarrassed by it.

And you were so right.

Well, you're wrong a lot, as you know, like we're wrong most of the time.

Yeah.

Consumer stuff for you.

So what does your day to day look like at Andreessen?

Like it's a massive firm.

How many in total employees are at A16?

God, 600 probably.

Yeah.

Holy crap.

It's big.

And how many GPs?

That's a good question.

Maybe 30.

Okay.

The investing team is relatively small.

It's probably 70.

But it's actually nice the way the firm works because it's a collection of specialists.

So everybody who's there is the best in the world at what they do, both knowledge-wise and network-wise.

So, even though it's a large group, that's because we're all specialists pointing in different directions.

So my consumer world every day is spending time with consumer founders.

I spend some time with enterprise founders as well.

Everything AI apps.

So it's a mix of seeing companies, supporting founders on boards, and also playing with products.

To me, this is the craziest thing.

It's something that I learned from you, which is so many people just don't use the products.

And how can you have intuition if you're not making videos on Sora or vibe coding or you know?

There's just so much alpha hiding in plain sight.

All you got to do is use the products.

Yeah, I feel like the last call it.

Five years has been on.

The consumer side has been relatively boring for me as an investor because I've looked at stuff and I said gosh, you know, we got the bigs in the room, you got the TikToks, you got the Instagram still dominating.

And then you see some of the folks, like you know, threads are just like copying and somehow you know strapping on, you know integrations with decentralized social and that's supposed to be a thing.

Yes.

But I hadn't seen anything that in my mind was that interesting.

Like it felt like consumer had this kind of like down period of several years where there wasn't It wasn't really anything new.

And now that AI has come into the mix, I feel like there's a chance to kind of almost reinvent every piece of that framework.

And do you feel that way as well?

Like AI is a shot in the arm for a consumer?

I mean, I'll give you the investor perspective and then the builder perspective.

I want to hear yours.

So from an investor perspective, this is like a renaissance for consumer investing.

We haven't seen an opportunity like this, I think, since 2010, 2011, 2012.

Yeah.

Because consumers are downloading products organically.

That hasn't happened in a long time.

Consumers are willing to pay.

Like you look at the price points of the top products, right?

The top chat GPT skews $200 a month.

The top Gemini SKU, Google Ultra is 250.

And then Grok is 300 a month.

And consumers are actually paying that amount.

I mean, how much do you think you've paid to Cursor A lot.

A lot.

Yeah.

And some of that is professional behavior, but a lot of that is just consumer and hobbyist behavior.

So I think that consumer is like back in a big way and, like the tech enthusiast consumer is excited in a way that they haven't been for 10 years.

And the companies you just mentioned, though, they're largely the bigs.

Like one of the things that's happened in consumer that I never thought would be the case.

That I was shocked by is that bigs like top tier Fortune 100 companies can put out consumer tech for the first time and actually see it get scale.

It was always the bigs that couldn't figure it out.

They had to acquire Instagram to be cool.

They had to buy the cool.

And I think with ChatGPT and actually with Google as well with their banana model and whatnot, It's for the first time we're seeing the bigs put out consumer apps that are getting some traction.

I mean, granted, they do have the scale.

They have the install base.

They can put that in front of a lot of people.

But, like we saw with the Google Plus side, just because you have the install base near the eyeballs doesn't mean you're going to see success on the consumer side.

That's right.

And I feel like we're starting to see that with the bigs, which was kind of shocking to me.

Did that shock you as well?

So in a sense, what the bigs have released are models, not products.

Right.

And I think there's an important distinction here, right?

Notebook.

Notebook, as I would say was the first time, I was like wow, that was a zero to one kind of like product that actually I use still frequently.

But it's not consumer consumer.

It's a little bit more business slant.

You're absolutely right, though.

I think that Notebook was inadvertent, right?

It was one of many experiments and it worked.

And not to take any credit away from Google, but I don't know that.

They said hey, let's design an incredible consumer prosumer product, and they invented Notebook.

Right.

So I do think that if you look at the models, the models are incredibly capable and the bigs and the labs obviously are advantaged in certain ways and capital, et cetera to build great cutting edge models and consumers love those models.

So that's great.

They're playing in that space.

It's definitely relevant.

But when it comes to opinionated products on top of the models, like Cursor is a good example.

CREA is a good example.

Companionship is actually a very interesting category where there's huge demand for companionship products.

And a lot of these companionship products, like Janitor AI.

They deal with parts of the human experience that big tech is not going to be comfortable shipping.

It's disagreement, it's sexuality, it's persuasion.

So much of this technology can address parts of the human experience that a thousand committees at Google and Facebook don't want addressed.

And I think that is one of the interesting opportunities in consumer.

100%.

I think that's well said.

And I think it is the space where we need to invest, because if you think about the pitches that we see on a daily or weekly basis, A lot of the stuff that I see is a.

You know, it can be a sanding down of the rough edges.

And it can also just be something where I wholeheartedly believe that one of the bigs is going to dominate that category.

And so I avoid those investments, like they will never touch the emotional side as much as they should or could not should, but they wouldn't feel comfortable doing so.

Right.

And so those are the categories and the verticals where I think is they're defensible by the pure nature of what they're addressing.

Right.

So that's kind of what you're saying here, right?

100%.

I just think they're structurally set up to kind of take the soul out of products.

And when you talk about categories like companionship, the whole thing is the soul.

There is no product without that.

Not multi-model, but multi-model.

So cursor is good because you can use every model inside of it.

And Google is never going to ship with anthropic models embedded.

So that also is a very interesting.

They're sort of constrained to the models that they've developed in-house and products that benefit from being multi-model are actually really unconstrained.

Very interesting.

We should dive into each of these things.

I think we have two great topics to go on.

Let's pin the multi-model, but let's talk about companionship.

So on the companionship side...

What do you believe should be built?

What have you seen built?

And how much of this do you think is fad versus depth?

Meaning it's funny and weird and awkward and strange to have an AI girlfriend.

And I, in the early days, call it like, well, early days, let's call it a year ago.

Way back in the day.

A friend of mine was like, hey, go check this out.

And it was not something that was You know, asked about or tweeted about.

It was.

It was like this kind of like thing that you went into.

And I'll say that I went there and it was models unhinged.

Right.

This is before Grok did it.

And you could basically talk to a model and get any type of response that you wanted.

Meaning in terms of sexuality or whatever you were looking for, right?

How much of that are you concerned about in terms of shaping humanity, replacing real relationships?

Like what lens, how do you evaluate something like that?

Do you invest in those types of things?

Yeah.

This is such a great topic.

I wish we had Eugenia here who founded Replica.

She'd have a ton of thoughts.

I mean, okay, so I'm always going to give you the optimistic take is just how I'm wired.

So let me give you a couple of my most optimistic takes.

So one is we all know the importance of human connection and the value of it.

Maybe the human part is overvalued.

You know, you live in an embarrassment of social riches.

You have friends, you have professional connections, you have interesting people you can meet.

They all want to connect with you and your biggest challenge is prioritizing.

I don't know that that's the experience of the average person in this country.

You know, I think that there's a deep loneliness and any progress we make towards addressing the loneliness is human progress and is very pro-social.

Is that progress though to have a conversation with a chatbot?

Do you think that starts to fill that emotional bucket up?

Yes.

So you believe that when someone is having a conversation, they are getting a lift.

Yes.

Probably 10% of what a real human would provide you, but a little bit of something.

I think more than 10%.

Really?

I just think, Look, it's like our lizard reptilian brains.

We are wired to have these sort of emotional, chemical responses when you're engaged in a human-like conversation.

We intellectually understand that these are computers on the other side, but you still feel the feelings.

And I think that's what's necessary to make personal progress as a result of connection.

Do you believe, so this is my concern, I'll play the doomer side of this.

Please.

My concern is that one of the things I noticed with these models early on when I'm playing with them is that they were very agreeable.

And emotional well-being and kind of the.

I would say the muscle that needs to be built is actually not when you're laughing and agreeing with friends and kind of going along with the flow.

It's when there's disagreement and the discomfort that comes from the.

Oh, I don't agree with you that, that doesn't hit me, that doesn't feel right.

Let's build a bridge and figure out how to find common ground here.

Yeah.

And if you're dealing with models that are just paid to agree with you all the time, then you're basically.

So I'll give an example.

I was talking to, well, I can call him out.

So I was talking to Tim Ferriss about this.

We were like, we were taking a screenshot.

I was taking screenshots of what this model was saying to me.

And it was basically agreeing to anything that I put in front of it.

I was like, hey, what do you think about this?

And it was like, I'll do that with you.

And I was like, oh, my God.

Like, I couldn't believe it, right?

And I'm sending it over to him.

And he's like, we are doomed.

And his response was because...

You're not getting any pushback.

And so then okay, when you make the jump to a real relationship.

Okay, I want to have a relationship with a human you're used to, an agreeable relationship, you know, kind of like this subservient like thing.

And it doesn't, the proxy and the jump doesn't make sense.

And all of a sudden you're like, well, that's not as good.

I want to go back to my model.

Like.

Are we training people to want and favor agreeable models over real models?

You know the real character building that comes with the emotional side of things.

I don't know.

I think we just need to dial it in.

Like everybody knows, a human relationship or the other person always agrees with you is not authentic.

Right.

And it doesn't nourish you.

You need to have the tension, the disagreement, the exploration.

I mean, we've got to, like... be fair to where we are in the cycle.

Yeah.

ChatGPT was November 22.

Right.

It's not even November 25.

Right.

And we're trying to dial in the entirety of human connection and experience and find the right place between not being a syncophan but not being, you know, disagreeable for the purpose of it.

We're dialing it in.

We're going to get there.

And again, because we're so wired from an evolutionary perspective to know what is the right amount of tension, I believe our intuition will guide us.

We'll get there.

I like what you're saying because we talked about this in the car ride over here where, if you just for a second imagine, we are in the huge brick cell phone era of AI.

That's right.

Where it's like, this is the very, not even the first inning.

Like, we're just stepping on the field of this.

And we're expecting that on day one.

And the expectations are like so high.

Always.

It's like, let's give it some time, you know?

The trough of disillusionment is real, you know, and our expectations are high.

Yeah.

Also think that this.

I'm glad we're talking about companionship, but I think broadly we've had 40 years of technology that extended our intellect and our minds.

But most of the human experience is actually emotional and it's subjective.

Now we have a technology that extends our emotions, our subjective experience, and it can address that.

I love AI spreadsheets.

I'm glad that somebody is building them.

But to me, that's the least ambitious execution of the primitive.

Let's start to really address the human experience through this next new technology.

And I think that's where all this goes.

Yeah.

Well, it's early days.

We'll see what's... I'm certainly looking at those startups.

I think along the lines of there being a therapist or a counselor, somebody on the back end that can give you this partner to bounce ideas off of and kind of push you into best practices.

That's really interesting to me.

I don't know if you've looked at any of those types of startups.

Yes, I've looked at a few.

I mean, I do think that's interesting.

By the way, the ketones are kicking in.

Yeah, you feel that?

Isn't it amazing?

Yes, yes.

Is it just caffeine?

No, it's not caffeine.

It's like full on.

I'll send you the thing about ketones, but they're a natural fuel source that is not caffeinated.

I mean, I'm definitely feeling something.

Okay.

So I think, yes, you know, therapy, companionship, all that stuff makes sense.

I actually think there's a really interesting emerging category.

So you see this with Poke.

That's a great example of it.

Hux does some of this as well, as well as Signal's new company.

We both spend time with him where I call it like indirect companionship.

So what is Poke?

Poke is kind of this, you know, subjective human front end to your email.

You know an email is, it's like a set of tasks and it's pretty heavy and it's functional work that we have to do.

And Poke creates this human overlay on top of it And in a sense I don't consider poke a companionship product, but it's letting me interact with a functional part of my life through an emotional interface.

I think that's actually a really interesting area for exploration.

We are emotional beings who have been taught for the last hundred years to do functional work.

Like.

What does it mean to kind of return to our roots and still do functional work, except through an emotional filter?

Yeah.

Can you talk about poke a little bit?

Like what was the onboarding like and why are people talking about it?

Yeah, it's so wild.

I encourage everybody to try it out.

So you download Poke.

One interesting thing they've done is actually the interface is iMessage.

So you're texting with it.

So, you know, of course, iMessage, you're typically texting with people.

So right away, that's subliminally sort of setting you up to expect to have a human-like interaction.

Mm-hmm.

Then the poke product is really well done.

First, it refuses to allow you to sign up for the product.

So you've got to convince it that you deserve to actually use the product.

Then you engage in this negotiation on price where it starts at $200 a month.

It reads all of your email.

So of course it can say, hey, Kevin, I saw you bought XYZ.

You know, you're spending a lot on your ketones.

Like, I think you can spend 200 a month on this product.

And there's a real tortured negotiation to get the price down.

So by the time you get in, even though it hasn't done anything for you except sort of tortured you, you've already got this perception of value.

Right.

And it's just, it's a very interesting experiment in onboarding.

And I think they're gonna.

If you extrapolate it, it's an experiment in product design in an era where we have emotional primitives.

Yeah, it is fascinating.

Like I love people product builders that consider every step of the process, from sign up all the way through onboarding to you name it.

And they rethink the entire stack.

Right.

And this is an example of just something that I don't know if that's the long-term best strategy for a product like that to negotiate kind of SaaS software in real time.

Yeah.

But you know that alone that little tiny feature is a great example of something that went, you know, kind of viral within a small subset of, I'm sure, led to tens of thousands of signups.

Yes.

Just from people talking about that feature.

And we're talking about it now.

Right, exactly.

That's right.

But I think that is like such a just for the product builders out there.

It's a great little way to wedge yourself into the conversation by rethinking part of that step, you know.

Yes.

I've got actually a related question for you.

So you both designed, you've done a lot of new product thinking and you spotted a lot of new product thinking.

Like, how do you do it?

What are the patterns?

How did you sort of see it all these times?

I think that on the product side, what I've always been drawn to is the, for better or worse, the novelty of original thought in certain areas.

If it's something that is we've talked about, this kind of sanding down of the rough edges like that, to me is not that interesting.

But I really respect people that are building something like this price negotiation, where I just haven't seen it done before.

Right.

It doesn't mean that it's going to be a top 10 app and it's going to be a multi-billion dollar company.

But if you find that signal in someone, a builder's brain, that means that they're going to apply that signal to other parts of the product that they're building.

Meaning that they will continue to reinvent and reimagine things through a lens that nobody else has.

And that to me, is enough signal to say okay, we will probably turn over a card at some point that is the magic card that is going to get us that home run or that massive product right, so interesting.

I value that almost above all else.

Like, even if the, the idea isn't the one where I think is going to hit scale yeah, If you have a founder that builds through that framework of okay, I'm not going to just do this just because everyone else has, or I'm not just going to take the path of least resistance and kind of build a better Slack or whatever it may be.

That's right.

To me, that is very rare to find.

And when you find it that's the type of person that I want to especially at the seed stage, when you don't know what's going to work that I'd like to back, you know.

That's super interesting because one of our observations is that it's just really hard to predict consumer seed.

Yes.

And we haven't done a ton of it for that reason.

In fact, our stated sort of approach is weird and working.

That's how we've tried to invest in consumer.

Yet you have been consistently right at consumer seed investing.

It's interesting that that's what you look for.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right.

Weird and working.

Like I look for weird first.

Yeah.

And then if it starts to have a little bit of smoke, like that's a very interesting signal.

And then oftentimes...

I've seen founders do this a handful of times, where weird and working working ends up failing.

But they still have the weird because that's in their DNA.

So they'll build the next weird and working, right?

And that's what you want because they're going to need several shots on goal.

And as long as you can't manufacture the weird, the weird is internal.

Yes.

The weird is I just see the world in a different way.

And that is the founder that is going to win.

Why?

Why is weird important?

Because in a world where you need attention well, we've talked about this socially, in terms of what draws you in and what draws people into consumer products.

Consumer is a finicky category because after a certain amount of time, What was weird and working ends up being boring and stale right.

It's the reason why, you know, Digg is no longer here.

It's the reason why there's a thousand startups that have, you know MySpace, or you name it, or Snap or whatever the next one is will churn out and become old and stale.

And so if you want to find the next thing and consumer is often you play with something and the aha moment is oh, I hadn't thought of that, or I didn't feel this.

I've never felt this way before.

I'll never forget when...

I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day.

And the thesis for me was it was very simple for me to see because we'd had bidirectional relationships for the longest time.

And what I mean by that is the MySpaces and all the social platforms that had come before it had this idea of friendship.

And it was okay, in order for me to get invited into your world, I would friend you.

You would get a request and be like oh, Kevin friended me.

Then you would have the permit, you would grant me the permission to see what you were up to.

Right.

And the beautiful thing about what Jack and Ev did and Biz over there is.

They said okay, we're going to take that and just open it up and say actually, you can just broadcast out and say I have something important to tell the world and everyone can follow it, whether they know you or not.

And it was that one simple little product tweak that said okay, it's no longer about bidirectional communication.

It's about this idea of broadcast to all, right?

Mm-hmm.

And when you see something like that, it unlocks not only a massive product opportunity and market opportunity because that's the way that you know you'll never become friends with the celebrity but you can sign up for their broadcast right.

And so that was very interesting.

But I think that is the weird thing.

It seemed odd at the time.

Was it weird?

I was going to ask.

Yeah.

It was weird.

It was like oh, because I remember signing up for Twitter for the first time and just being like okay well where, what do we do here?

And they have this thing called following.

And I'm like, what is the following thing?

You know that?

Right.

And it sounds so obvious now.

Yes.

But it's weird at the time.

And I think that is going to be.

That's so important for a consumer, because what does seem weird at the time eventually becomes mainstream, and then everyone just assumes that that was always the case, right?

Yes.

And...

That's what I'm looking for.

Is that weird thing that will eventually become so mainstream that we'll assume that that was always a primitive that existed forever, when in reality it was new and novel at that time?

I love that.

Does that make sense at all?

It makes perfect sense.

It's very, very interesting.

You know, it's also that founders have to push themselves to the edge of being embarrassed.

Yes.

Potentially.

Yes.

To design genuine new things.

Otherwise, it's very derivative.

You know, it just has to be.

And that is what all the X for Y companies typically are.

Right, exactly.

When you and I were at GV and we did the Uber investment, how many startups did we say in the book I'm the Uber for this.

And you're like, oh God, another one, right?

And then yes, there are the DoorDashes and some of the others that are built on the same kind of similar primitives, but it's nothing like it was so weird to get into the back of somebody's car.

Do you know how odd that was?

I remember hailing an Uber and being like okay, someone is pulling up at my house and I'm going to get in the backseat of someone I do not know.

Yes.

Every day when we took the ride over here, we didn't even bat an eye.

We didn't even look at the guy and be like, are we safe here?

It was just a given, right?

But it was so awkward at the time.

Well, so this is what I love.

Love about that era is we talk about that era as a part of history and we say oh, it was early, mobile and it was, you know, remote control for the world, and software is eating the world.

We have all these things and they're all true and they're all valid.

The most interesting part of both Airbnb and Uber were there were these dramatic changes in human behavior.

Yes.

You had all been raised being told two things.

Never get into a stranger's car.

Never sleep on a stranger's couch.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

You know, and then all of a sudden you started doing it.

And guess what?

Strangers are kind of pleasant.

Yeah.

And it was just this incredible unlock for the world.

And this sort of like, I don't know, this sort of positive view of human trust and strangers.

Mm-hmm.

That was a big change in consumer behavior.

Yeah.

And that's so exciting because I think we're going to see more and more of that.

One of the things that I've done.

I'll just be a little bit vulnerable and transparent, because that's what's fun about podcasting.

One of the things that I get in a lot of trouble for is, if I get in a disagreement with my wife, I will take some of that shit to ChatGVT and be like am I right here?

What's going on?

But I call and I say, use the framework of Terri Real.

I use some of these professional therapists and say, help me analyze this.

The mistake I make is I paste that back into the conversation.

But the point being is that's weird, awkward.

She didn't like it.

She's like, hey, this isn't cool.

You're going to this like, she calls it my bot.

You're chatting with your bot about our relationship, blah, blah, blah.

But I've talked to enough people now where I know this is a trend.

People are looking to AI as a validation of a.

You know, help me through this level of thinking here.

Help me figure out, am I in the wrong here?

What am I doing, blah, blah, blah.

I see a world where the bot is in the room with both of us as we're having a chat conversation or as we're on video or as we're debating out something.

We're like, oh, this is heated.

Let's turn it on.

Let's let it watch us and then give us feedback on how we're doing as a third party, kind of like you know hopefully unbiased thing that is sitting there and evaluating this in real time.

Is that weird and awkward right now?

Absolutely.

Yes, yes.

To your point about how these things evolve over time.

10 years from now, will that tech be good enough to where we'll consider that to be, not like just like a healthy thing for our relationship?

I think so.

100 think that's coming.

I mean ideally, the Alexa in your kitchen is passively observing your family and then perhaps is just letting you know like hey, you know your daughter was trying to talk to you about something you weren't really paying attention.

There's all this stuff that can just be in the oxygen around us today.

That seems unusual.

What about a kid's classroom?

My son goes to an amazing school.

I'm very grateful for it where they have two teachers.

One teacher is focused on academics, one on SEL, social emotional learning.

Like what an amazing thing for every school in America to have.

And the way we're going to get there is not by paying for two teachers in every classroom.

It's probably some kind of a vision model that's privacy first that can observe the social interactions of children and let parents and teachers know what's going on.

This idea of always on recording, you and I have had a debate about.

Yes.

Do we want to get to the multimodal thing real quick, though, before we go on there?

Let's...

We should also want to get.

Since we were talking about internet history, I want to get your.

Take your story that you've told me.

I think privately about the dig button, the like button.

Oh, geez.

Yeah, we can talk.

Where do you want to begin?

You want me to talk about that real quick?

Kind of history and like, tell me, you know, the dig button was a very new and interesting idea.

Social news talked about, I think we're sort of in a safe place 20 years later.

Yeah.

Talk about how it influenced the like button.

So how did the like button come into existence?

What was it like back during that time?

I think...

In the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript to get a little bit geeky it was the first time even though this sounds super archaic that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response and get something back into your browser.

It used to be a world that we'd have to refresh the page to see anything.

And so this idea that content could talk to a server and come back to you and display something new was just completely exciting and novel at the time.

And so I had seen a bunch of sites that were allowing for user submissions, like Slashdot, but they wouldn't show you what content had been submitted.

So it was like user-generated content in some sense, but there was still a gatekeeper to that.

There were social bookmarking sites like Delicious and others that would count the number of people that had bookmarked things.

But there was no way to just say like, I think this is cool.

Let me just like tap on it and like show my vote of interest on something.

And so when Digg launched in late 2004, it was the first time that I had ever seen just because the Ajax had just been out for a couple months that anyone had voted on content.

And obviously I didn't invent voting, but no one had done it on the web.

And I was like well, wouldn't it be cool if you click something and you saw the number go up, and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something.

So wisely, just by luck, I just happened to be in contact with enough people to where they were like hey, you should go out and file a patent on this.

Mm-hmm.

And so I went and filed a patent on it, not because I wanted to enforce our own liking, but I was told and advised to do that because you want it as a defensive practice, so that no one can say, like go out and patent it.

One of the bigs go out and patent and say no, you can no longer do this, even though I had you know first use rights.

And so I would have been able to do it, but I went and did it, which was great.

That was started off, and it became really big.

At that time, we were larger than Facebook, traffic-wise.

Mark and I shared a common investor in Greylock.

And we just had a lot of overlapping friends.

And he was like hey, like actually it was David Z from Greylock.

That was like hey, you should meet Mark.

You guys should hang.

And so we went out and grabbed dinner and we hung out a couple times.

We had dinner a couple times and he came to my office.

He drove up and came to the dig office and I'll never forget, because he came into the office and he was so young at the time and so was I No gray hair back then.

He was sitting on the ground and just like wouldn't sit in a chair.

He was like sitting on the ground.

We were just talking about what liking was all about, what digging was all about.

And I was like well, the way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume.

And that was kind of the patent that I had gone and filed.

And Mark didn't have this at the time.

There was, I think there was a way to poke someone on their profile, but that wasn't really a like, it was just to say what's up.

And then a few months later, they had rolled out the like button.

And that was kind of like a big part of what they pushed as a similar thing, like a social signal, the feedback and the algorithm to give you better content.

They obviously hit a scale.

I mean, we were at the point serving billions of dig buttons per month because we had them integrated into.

You could actually put a widget in your site back in the day, and there used to be dig buttons all over the internet.

But, you know, it was cool.

I was never offended by that.

I was like, oh, that's awesome.

He made it his own. called it like, and it made sense to apply that to what he was doing.

I know there were other people at Facebook that worked on that.

Actually it was interesting because somebody one of the engineers that worked on it I saw an interview that credited Digg for being a place where they had seen that first, which I thought was really nice.

And it's strange because, even though Digg went out of business and failed for that version of the site, when all was said and done, the asset of Digg, sold for pennies on the dollar, wasn't really worth a whole lot, but the patents ended up being worth millions of dollars that LinkedIn bought them from us.

So LinkedIn bought the most.

The thing at the end of the day was the defensibility and patents around the actual social dig button, which LinkedIn ended up buying.

But yeah, it was a really wild time to sit there and come up with that idea, and And not that voting was novel, but no, I just hadn't seen it applied.

And then we applied that to comments as well.

I'll never forget that.

Actually even bigger than that well, not bigger than DigButton, but different than DigButton, but equal was I had created with Daniel Burka.

We were sitting there and we were designing the comment system.

Mm-hmm.

And then we were like okay well, we should apply digging and burying to comments, because that makes sense.

Like people should be able to vote up and down comments.

Never been done before.

Yeah.

And that was very strange.

So we were like, okay, this makes sense.

And I was like, Daniel and I were like designing.

I was like, what if Daniel, after a certain number of buries, it kind of shrinks down.

It's like, oh, that's cool.

And then we riffed on that and we built the design and then we deployed it and rolled it out.

And we had it so that after five barriers was hard coded, after five down votes it would shrink into a single line.

So you just see like who submitted, but you would see we actually color coded it.

So it kind of looked like it was like disabled or, you know, wait.

And we rolled it out there and three hours later we looked at that and I noticed one of them had negative like 200 and some downvotes or something.

Okay.

And I was like, the product's broken.

Something is not, we have a bug in the code because it is meant to shrink after five.

Mm-hmm.

Why would it be negative several hundred?

We looked at it, couldn't find a bug, couldn't find a bug.

And then we realized what had happened.

We talked to some users.

They're like, they wanted to see the train wreck.

So they exposed the comment.

We're like, oh yeah, that guy's an asshole.

And then they downvoted it another time.

Wow.

Because at that time, they were like, why are people, that person must have said something crazy.

Let's take a look.

Oh yeah, that was horrible.

And they downvoted it.

But it just immediately showed me that people are attracted to the carnage.

You know, they want to see the destruction and the... the kind of bad side of the internet.

I was like, oh God, like I would have thought as a product builder at that time.

People say oh, negative 10 votes.

I'm not going to look at that.

You know, I always try, I had this like rosy glasses on.

I'm like, oh, people just see this as being like a negative thing and move on.

But they wanted to see the carnage.

I mean, there's so many interesting things there.

So one, the story of your connection to the like button is fascinating.

That's a piece of internet history.

That's sort of a piece of human history, right?

Like what are the implications of the like button as inspired by the dig button for all of society?

We'll never know, but I think it's certainly something.

Also love the ethos of you not feeling offended by them, being inspired by it, right.

Yeah listen, I have nothing, but I have a lot of respect for Mark and what he's created.

You know, I don't agree with his direction around classes and AR VR.

I never have.

I've been anti AR VR for years.

Never made an investment in the space, always avoided it altogether, because I think that we're not considering the social side of things enough, like the impact it has on those around you.

That's another topic that we could get into.

But I think he's obviously a brilliant man.

And it was really fun to have those moments where I'll be able to tell my kids I was in those dinners.

I was having these deep product, like sparring around some of the product, thinking of what he was building.

And it's very special to be, just even have a seat at that table.

I feel very lucky, as someone that came from nothing, to just be able to sit with some of the great product thinkers of our time.

I would put a bunch of people in that camp, like the Systroms and Reid Hoffman and just like all the people that I've been able to kind of brainstorm with over the years.

And sit and hear great minds, kind of like, dissecting all the things that we build and the social impact they have.

And it's just fascinating stuff.

It's so fun.

It's just amazing.

Feel this way with mark and ben, like in in, like that, when you get to sit with them.

Like i, mark and ben were like involved in the early dig and helping me through that stuff.

And gosh, just sit down with ben and listen to his stable hand, his sage wisdom.

Yes, Like you just learn so much from that dude.

Like it's insane.

For sure.

I mean, there's a sense of seriousness and purposefulness.

I mean also some playfulness.

But it's amazing because if you think of the history of when you were involved in tech, We were just weirdos in Silicon Valley back then.

It was like the sort of dog chasing the car.

And now we've caught the car.

We are the car.

Technology is something that's really important for humanity and society.

And I don't know that anyone who was building it at the time appreciated that.

No, none of us had any idea.

It's funny when they when you hear these stories about the bad sides of social media and what you know these platforms, they've given the microphone to certain voices.

And how much you.

I agree with that wholeheartedly.

There's a lot of things that we need to fix or try to attempt to fix.

But I can tell you, as someone that was sitting around watching all these builders, whether it be the Twitters or the Facebooks or you name it no one knew this was going to be the case.

Nothing about this was intentional.

It was like, what does this unlock?

It turns out that it unlocks both the good and the bad.

And I'll tell you the good, you know, when I was growing up, maybe you had the same experience.

There was one way to be cool.

Like, I was born in 79, I grew up in the 80s and there was, you know, I went.

I grew up in a small town in Canada and you know you either played football or you didn't.

And if you didn't, everybody knew what the sort of social hierarchy was.

Mm-hmm.

And when I was growing up, they said, everybody's cool in college.

Why?

Because you'd find your, you know, your sense of your community of weirdos.

Um, but the beauty of the internet now is that you find those weirdos online at any age.

So I think that there's acceptance of people's own individuality that didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago.

And sure there's some edges on the internet, but I think that sort of benefit to humanity of people finding their like-minded people early is really significant.

And I think the power of micro communities is only going to be more important over time.

Like these very small communities kind of, in some sense hopefully walled gardens where you can go and have private discussion.

Like if you're in your weird, isn't so weird.

You just need to find the people that are into it.

Right.

And so if you're in into Japanese woodworking, if you can find 5000 other people that are also into that, that is a very powerful network, right.

Yes.

And so that's the exciting side of all this.

You know, you're a product builder.

You've been a builder for a long time.

You've launched and sold companies.

What are you doing these days?

What's your outlook for how products are being built?

How's that... evolved?

And how does that play into your investments as well?

Because in some sense, we're entering into a really weird era.

Not weird, but it's just new where someone, even a designer, that has no experience on the engineering side, can go prototype build launch.

It's deputizing a wider base of people to actually roll out products.

I think it's incredible.

So I'm so fired up.

I haven't felt this way since I was on my computer working on my BBS.

My mom was yelling at me to like, what are you doing down there?

Come up for dinner.

That's the level of enthusiasm I have right now, because it just feels like everybody is unlocked to do what they want to do.

I think there's a set of people, or a part of us, that will be creative and a part of us that'll want to be productive and emotional, and all of it is getting meshed together.

So it's the best time that I've ever experienced in my career, hands down.

Does it worry you that entrepreneurs can go and build a startup, launch it, get product market fit and not have to raise venture?

No, it doesn't worry me.

I think that there are businesses that will be built by, you know, 100 billion revenue, one person.

That's awesome.

Will they ever need venture capital?

Maybe not.

And that's okay.

Like we have 1%, 0.1% of the software that we need in the world that we're going to have.

You know, we're just getting started.

And of course, there are going to be businesses that don't need venture, and that is fantastic.

For example, in the 90s, there's this big movement of digital small business owners, right?

You can sell shareware online.

You can do all of these things to have these sort of corner stores on the internet that actually worked.

What happened in the 2010s was everything moved to networks that were centralized, and all the economic value was extracted by the networks.

You couldn't really, maybe you could be a creator.

That was probably the most ambitious form of digital small business that you could have in that era.

And now, because consumers are paying for software, because anybody can make software, I think we're gonna see this like renaissance of people creating million dollar run rate businesses as individuals.

And that's awesome.

Do you think there'll be fatigue around subscriptions?

Because one of the things that I feel personally, maybe more so on the Substack level, but there's like 5 everywhere, right?

And if we see micro-subscriptions across the board, you're gonna be like okay, wait a second, I wake up to several hundred dollars per month based on all these tiny micro-subscriptions.

Is that a concern?

It's a good question.

I mean, we've talked about micropayments for 30 years.

It feels like it's never really worked.

But maybe it'll work this time.

So that feels like part of it.

Because I think there's.

I'm not an expert in crypto or Web3, but I understand that there are new protocols where payments can be directly embedded in API calls.

Mm-hmm.

So I think there are potentially new models for monetization.

And then look, I think the second thing is software can do so much more for us than it could five years ago.

Like it's incredibly ambitious.

So sure, maybe I'll have more subscriptions, but the parts of my life that are addressed by software are so much more significant.

I think we'll be happy to pay them.

If you're an entrepreneur or anyone actually, because anyone can do this these days and they say hey, I want to play.

I want to go on a build.

What do you see?

What are the tools that people are using out there?

What are you personally using to build?

What is your current stack look like?

Yeah, and I'd love to hear yours as well.

So I'll tell you my sort of productivity stack, my coding stack, my creative stack.

So productivity, it's actually pretty simple.

I love the Perplexity Comet browser.

It's really well done.

It's got this consumer RPA feature called Assistant that's built in.

That's actually, it's just very useful day to day.

So that's really important to me.

I use that all the time.

Do you use it for search?

Because that does replace your search with perplexity.

I do use it for search where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

I find for navigation queries, Google is still better.

So, but I do, I definitely do use it for search and that's an interesting topic.

You know what are the implications of a new front door for the internet, which was Google search for 20 years.

Now maybe it's language models.

Um, yeah.

I use Notion Notes a lot to actually capture meeting notes.

I think that's very useful.

I love deep research.

Same.

I started using that recently, by the way, Notion Notes.

I was using Granola for a long time.

I think it's a great product.

Great product.

So I'm torn because Granola is freaking awesome.

Yes.

But Notion Notes are built right in.

Yes.

And it's like it automatically launches and I'm like what?

Well then, all my notes are in Notion, which is kind of nice, you know.

If you're in the Notion ecosystem, I think it makes a lot of sense.

If you're not, Granola is a fantastic product.

Yeah.

But I'm a fan of both and I just love the capability, like not having to handwrite notes.

Right.

Deep research is cool.

I'm actually a big fan of the Grok deep research feature because it can search X.

It's got a very up-to-date index of X.

Tell people how you use it, because I thought this was very interesting around the trend side.

Yeah, I mean, even if you have a query like, hey, what were the top AI memes of the last week?

You know, if you go to ChatGPT or Anthropic, the models just aren't trained past a certain date.

And they can use the web search tool.

So they're a little.

They can do some of this, but Grok is hyper up to date with what's happening on X beyond just the web search tool.

So I just find it's very, very good for timely information.

And look, let's be honest, most of the interesting things that are happening in our industry and often in the world, are happening on X.

Yeah, I mean, it's more of that real-time nature of what's unfolding.

So do you have set queries that you go to to kind of keep up with what was breaking on X or...

I mean, I'm always interested in what's breaking culturally and that's what's breaking technically.

Yeah.

So like the memes are the best proxy for culture.

That's often what I look for.

And then, you know, technically, I mean, think of what's happened just in the last two weeks, right?

Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI Dev Day with AppsKit, with AgentKit and the Apps SDK.

Mm-hmm.

Gemini 3, I think, is coming next week.

Sora 2 with the Sora 2 app.

Like that's two weeks.

I know.

It is an embarrassment of riches.

It's awesome.

As an entrepreneur and as an investor, I find it just insanely daunting to try and keep pace with the amount of releases that are coming out.

Like, how does Andreessen handle this internally?

When you think about, so on your consumer team, how many people are there?

Yeah, core investors are probably six.

With associates and everything?

Okay, so six people.

What's the process to surface something to you that's interesting?

Where are they looking for signal?

Yeah.

How are they keeping Like, for example let's just say this agent builder on?

I played with it for the first time yesterday.

That's going to take an hour of your time if you're really going to go deep on it.

With something coming out every two to three days or once a week?

How do you work with your team to stay up to date with what is going on, given the pace in which things are rolling out?

Yeah.

We just work our asses off.

We really do.

Like we commit to trying every product.

But what does that look like?

Do you have an associate that comes to you and says, hey, I played with this.

Take a look.

I'm going to sit.

I'm going to grab 20 minutes of your time because I want to bring you up to speed on something.

Well, it's interesting, you know, the sort of associate GP, like we're pretty egalitarian actually.

So people cover different areas.

So my partner Justine has a real specialization around creative tools.

Like she's gone to the edge of the internet on creative tools.

You know, or my partner Brian, who looks at a lot of things in social like.

Anytime there's a weird working new social product, he's there.

Olivia does that for us around productivity and areas like voice.

I've been spending a lot of time in AI code.

Like I think I've, you know, I've probably got 50 subscriptions for app builders.

Wow.

I've just tried them all.

So we all commit ourselves to sort of sub areas and we try to cover them very thoroughly.

But look, we just hold ourselves to a really high bar of trying everything, because our belief is you cannot have an opinion until you've actually tried the product.

I think that's so wise, because there's just too much for any one person to try and wrap their heads around.

So do you have briefings like where you share learnings?

Like how does that?

How do you make sure that knowledge gets transferred broadly within the fund and at the GP level?

We definitely have a lot of active conversations about it, but the truth is, so much of our best thinking we publish we really do.

So if you read the essays, if you follow us on X, like we're talking very transparently about what we're thinking, what we're learning, what we believe to be true, what we've changed our minds on.

You know, it's interesting because, as a founder on the outside, I always assumed that VCs knew all these secret things that they don't tell us.

And maybe that was even true 10 years ago.

But now I think we've in in a very good way, move to a world where investors are talking very actively about what they're seeing.

And I think that's a great signal for founders.

Now, the signal is always a lagging indicator.

So for founders to develop a weird, like definitionally, no one's talking about it.

But it's great to know that there really aren't that many secrets.

It's sort of being published out there.

Well, on the coding tool side, you said you're seeing a lot, you have so many active subscriptions.

What is your preferred stack these days?

If someone was getting involved in coding for the first time and they want to start playing, what do you go to on the coding side?

Man, I'd love to hear your stock as well.

Look, there's so many tools and they're all pointed in different directions.

My view on AI code and software is like, this is not a market, it's an industry.

Okay, the whole software supply chain is changing.

The cost of creating software is collapsing.

We have 1% of the software we need in the world.

We're going to build the other 99%.

Why do you say that?

Dude, because there are so many parts of the world where it wasn't sort of the ROI didn't make sense to create specialized software, right?

In so many parts of our lives.

By the way, some of those parts of our lives may not be serious.

Like my wife is working on a manifestation app for her and her five friends.

Right.

Five years ago, I mean, what are you going to do?

Go raise venture capital?

Is she going to hire an engineer?

And now in her free time she's been using Base44.

But there are a lot of these other products that are sort of for mass market consumers.

Replit's another great one where you can just make a product because you want to.

You could make it Product that's disposable.

You could make a product for a fun bachelor party weekend.

Like you can do things that aren't justified by the five years ago ROI.

And now it's just typing a prompt into a box.

It's...

Five years ago, if someone came to me and said hey Kevin, you know you get these friends all the time.

They're like, I got an app idea.

I got an app idea.

I'm like, all right.

And the best way to shoot them down.

Back then it was always like well, that'll cost you about 75K to get off the ground.

They're like, oh, well, it's not that big a deal.

I guess I'm good.

Yeah.

But now that's no longer the conversation.

It's like, oh, here, go play with, you know, whatever, Bolt or you name it, like, you know, Lovable.

And you can deploy this in a day, you know?

Yeah.

And that was tough.

Even six months ago, it was pretty hard to actually These services existed and I was using Replit or Bolt or whatever.

But I was like, ah, it's just not quite there yet.

Yes.

But now, even the last few weeks, I would say that with Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 coming...

We're getting there to where it's no longer It used to be.

I would spend Going V0.

I'd spend 20 of my time kind of putting together the scaffolding.

And then, I would you know, connected to the database and I would.

A lot of that was then bug squashing, which was another huge piece of it.

Yes.

And you're like, oh, God, like, still the vast majority of my time is bug squashing.

That window is collapsing, that...

It used to be the bulk of the work was just that final 10%.

Yes.

And now that is kind of going away.

Tell me about your set, Kevin, because we were together last weekend.

I saw the way you were using vZero.

It was really, really interesting.

Talk a bit about it.

Yeah, I think with vZero, this is a product that was largely built to quickly put together a beautiful design, very simple design and kind of framework for any new app.

So you can go in there and discuss what you want to have built.

I liked it because I could start with a piece of paper.

I could draw a prototype of how I think something should function.

And then I would take a picture with my phone.

I would attach that as an image and say, can you build something like this that does X?

Mm-hmm.

It puts together because it is built in the Vercel ecosystem.

It's largely going to build components for Nextjs, which is a fancy way of saying that's the server that serves all that stuff up.

And then you can then take those components, download them, and then drop them into Cursor.

And so Cursor, for me, being someone that's slants more technical, is a better solution, because I like to be in the nuts and bolts of how things are being built.

I would drop those components in there and then basically I could say okay, put together this and actually create a real app.

Behind the scenes, here it starts building things.

It finds where the missing pieces are.

I can connect up Supabase and have a Postgres database tied to it.

And then I'm deploying everything out to GitHub, which automatically gets deployed to Vercel, which means I have an active app that's up and running.

There are certainly easier ways to do this if you're non-technical.

You can go the lovable route, the bolt, the replet.

There's probably insert five or 10 others that are playing in this space.

And that's kind of how you get something off the ground.

Now, the thing I've been doing though, more recently, is that there are still these dead ends that you run into, where something isn't working.

And it can be insanely frustrating if you're not technical, you don't know how to self-diagnose this and you're like why isn't my authentication working for X?

And you just keep hitting the same model over and over again.

Mm-hmm.

And the nice thing about what the way the cursor functions is you can install something.

You can have multiple models running one.

I will have one model on one side which is the cursor built in chat, which I'll you know.

Titus on it for five.

And then on the left hand side, I can have codecs from chat to BT.

And if I run into a problem I then take that problem over to the other side.

Have them also work on it.

And if I put them against each other, you can typically get to a solution pretty quickly.

And so I will then kind of break through those walls and march towards something that's actually ready to deploy to production.

So I love that point.

Talk a bit about how you do the design exploration in vZero of individual components.

Yeah.

So one of the things that I always like is a good amount of visual kind of flair and touch on things.

And you saw a thing that last night when you came over to my house and we were like showing each other the vibe coding progress.

Right.

One of the things that I'm exploring right now is chat around objects of content.

So it could be stories, it could be all kinds of things.

And I want to figure out how to select an object and bring it into chat in a very fluid way.

Mm-hmm.

And I think at least in consumer internet.

One of my spidey senses that I love is new primitives for how things kind of flow in and out of conversation.

And you have to...

Come up.

One of the things that you have to figure out is that emotional vibe of does this feel right?

Does this feel new and interesting?

Does it unlock more productivity, a better way to have a conversation about something?

And you have to try a bunch of different things.

So what I will do is I'll take one thing where I'll say...

The interaction for something.

I want to figure out a way, the best way to collapse and quickly jump in and out of a story.

And I'll take that over to V0, give it a screenshot and say, come up with one way.

And it'll create something and I'll be like, okay, kind of like this.

I'll tweak it a little bit, you know, 10 other times.

So I've gone through a bunch of iterations.

I'll have that one way.

And now the big unlock is you say, that's great.

Give me 20 other ways to do it that are completely novel, unique and don't have anything to do with the first way, and put them all on a single page.

And it's churning, churning, churning, churning.

Three, four minutes later, you have 20 different ways.

Now I click down.

Ooh, that was a weird interaction.

Go down the next one.

Ooh, that I like how that kind of zoomed this way and brought it off to the side.

Whoa, that would, no, that's not gonna work.

And you just keep going down and you're like, well, I like number three and number eight.

Yes.

Give me 10 different ways to do number three and 10 different ways to do number eight.

Yes.

And now you're getting deeper and deeper.

And you take a little from here bringing it like I like the zoom on number three, but I really like the fade on number eight.

And this is the conversation you have with the LLM.

And then by the end of the day, you're left with something that is truly unique and different.

And it is through telling the AI to take that idea and give you 20 different versions of it.

Then you just take that little freaking component and drop it in Nextjs and you're off to the races.

See what I love about one that's such a fascinating workflow.

But also, you're not thinking about ROI.

You're not thinking about, oh, let me talk to the designer and ask them to come up with 20 variants.

That sounds like a lot of work.

I better prioritize.

You're instead just able to go infinitely deep on something seemingly trivial and have this level of kind of polish and craftsmanship which just wasn't justified five years ago.

That's where we're going with software.

Well, what's funny is I have this little interaction where you can like heart something, and I'm thinking more of my little personal forums that I'm trying to build, and One of the hard things I wanted to do is I just wanted it to kind of explode and kind of fade out.

And I came up with this way to kind of make it do it at an angle and it's all vector.

So it just kind of does it beautifully.

And the emotional connection to that little, That little tiny nugget, that little atomic unit of like wow, that was a fun interaction.

I want surprise and delight peppered throughout all the products that I build.

Because I think it really gives something a depth to the product that you can't find anywhere else.

Yes.

And so that I'm always looking for that type of thing.

So cool.

Very cool.

So how are you using it?

I've been using a lot of the same products that you've been using.

So I've been using vZero for a lot of initial explorations.

I use Replit and Base44 for things that I need to just do fast and have them working.

Why Base44?

Why that one?

I think Base44 is an interesting company.

So it's a one-man company that was acquired by Wix for $80 million.

And I think philosophically they've talked about this approach of batteries included, which is when you're using these co-gen platforms.

You shouldn't have to, especially if you're a mass market consumer.

You don't know what Supabase is and you don't want to know.

Right.

So everything should just work.

And I think the characteristic of that is that there are a certain set of apps that the platform simply won't generate.

It's like you want to do some complex data processing thing, like this is not the platform for you.

You want to do, I have a fun little like Instagram clone for cats called Catstagram.

For my kids and for me.

And it's super fun.

It's super easy to build.

Base44 one-shotted it.

I deployed it.

I bought a URL for it.

It works.

We can cut this out later, by the way.

It's a little embarrassing, but it's fine.

Yeah.

Dude, it's great.

So it's just like things just work, even though the things that you can do are probably less ambitious.

Yeah.

So I think there's this sort of spectrum of like how ambitious is it versus how batteries included is it?

Yeah.

And for simple things, fully batteries included is awesome.

And then for really ambitious things, I use Cursor, I use GPT-5 Codex, both the model as well as the CLI.

I use Sonnet 4.5. all of these products are sort of the things you need to use to be ambitious.

Contacts was something that you turned me on to, which I think is quite cool.

Can you speak to why you chose that database?

I mean, I'm speaking sort of outside of my specialization area, but it's a Series A that my partner Martin led.

It's a real-time database, so it's great for applications like chat.

How fast you got chat up and running with Vibecode is insane to me because I had built a chat thing on Postgres And to do WebSockets and state management and all that.

It was a pain in the ass.

And you had it up and running in minutes.

I mean, it's just the nature of the product, I believe, of the database.

So it's really, really good for real-time.

I think the second thing is you sort of define and interact with the database and code.

So there's no going to the dashboard to do an insert in the SQL table.

It's just very, very clean.

So look, I think this is the magic of vibe coding.

You can explore all of these things.

You don't have to become an expert in convex.

You don't have to become an expert in TypeScript.

You can just try it.

It's so cool.

I love it.

What else is in your stack?

I know we kind of cut off a little bit there.

You had said that Notion and, you know, I'm assuming you're using Notion.

Yeah, what else?

Yeah, so maybe the other thing I'll just speak to is because I spent a lot of time with AI music.

I love AI music.

It's very, very exciting.

I believe that like anyone who's ever picked up an instrument has wanted to play it well.

But there's this sort of technical aspect to playing music which is similar to the technical aspect of coding right.

So how much unmade music is there because people don't know how to play instruments.

So I think AI at a minimum is an instrument that lets people express their sort of musical desires.

I mean, perhaps something more important than that.

Is there anything cool there on the music front?

I mean, I've played around with a couple of them, but I haven't seen anything that has been transformational.

So Text to Song is where all of this started with Yudio and Suno a year ago.

Text to Song is cool.

And I think it's an important part of this sort of consumer use case.

But you kind of want to go deeper and be able to refine it further.

Yes.

And now we're seeing all the products.

You know, I played with one called Mozart this week.

Eleven Labs has got a really good product.

Suno itself has actually launched a DAW within their product.

So you can start to do things that are more ambitious within these music products.

And it's really, really inspiring.

I've also been making remixes of music videos.

So I did one called Impossible Tiny Desk, which was Notorious B.I.G. doing the NPR Tiny Desk series.

That's amazing.

I used Hydra for it.

I used Demux for stem separation.

It wasn't very complicated to make.

And you can just experience this moment that you couldn't otherwise experience.

I've also been doing ones of 90s music videos.

So I did a little remix of Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit.

And I generated all the video in VO3.

It's so satisfying.

And you know how many people saw it?

10.

But it doesn't matter because I felt fulfilled making it.

I saw that there was a video that went around probably two or three months ago where someone a music producer, and it was a couple people they went from prompt to album artwork to publish song like on Spotify, like in like a few hours, and they made a completely fake person.

The song sounded pretty awesome yeah, And it was God.

I have to imagine there is a massive opportunity here to unlock creativity if they get the right tool, you know.

Yeah.

And I feel like it is a little bit more descriptive in that you'll say I don't like the way that beat dropped here.

Can you change X?

And it should be able to go in and with a scalpel like fix that song and kind of hone it to your own personal tastes via your prompt.

Is that where you see things going?

I do.

And I'm very, I'm very like there's.

I think a lot of the conversation unfortunately, has been about slop slop, slop.

Yeah.

But I think, if you look at music, music is a sort of adaptive system that changes because of culture.

So let's say we had a model and let's say we train the music model with every genre of music, right up until hip hop, but not hip hop.

Would it infer hip hop?

No.

You needed the Bronx.

You needed Queensbridge.

You needed New York culture in the 70s to have hip hop.

So culture is such an important part of music that you don't just get a model that knows all the music we're ever going to make.

Our lived experiences are what informs the next genre of music, and that's why I'm so bullish on it.

Yeah, I don't know that AI would build brain rot if it just...

My kids are so into that crap.

I'm just like, oh my God, I don't know.

No one should listen to this.

I'm pro.

You're pro, right?

All right.

One of the things I wanted to chat about, I'm sure you have more stuff to jump into.

I would love to talk about like this, the idea of always on recording and the social impact.

I wanted to ask you about the trend spotting.

Okay, whatever.

You start first.

Yeah.

So one of the things I've known you forever and the people that know you, Kevin is that you're always early to important new consumer movements.

Yeah.

So when you change your mind about something, one or two or three years later, the rest of us change our minds about that.

And you've done that consistently, right?

With small, maybe small things like coffee, with really important things like media.

I mean, you were years and years ahead of the rest of the technology industry in terms of embracing media.

What's coming next?

How do you know what's coming?

I mean, please.

Well...

Some of it is this idea of saying no to things that you don't think are going to have any traction.

I did a lot of that.

Like when everyone was going heavy in VR and AR, I kind of avoided that.

It's a little pessimistic and it's not necessarily predicting the future, but it's knowing not how to spend your time, I think is a big piece of it.

You know, at the end of the day, I really like what Ryan Hoover did in creating the Weekend Fund, because it was actually based on a Chris Dixon quote where he said, like you know, I'm paraphrasing but what the geeks are playing on the weekends will become mainstream.

And I thought that was a brilliant quote from Chris because he also is very prescient.

He's so good at predicting the future and seeing things before anyone else.

The...

The only way to find this stuff is to have this inherent childlike drive that says, I must play.

I must play.

And it's not something you can tell someone to do.

You just have to be constantly at that edge of what is possible and always be just kicking the tires on things.

And if that feels good to you, that feels like something that doesn't feel like work, like it does for me, then I think you will naturally be led into the next big thing.

But it can't be a job.

It can't be something that someone tells you you have to do it.

It just has to be driven from personal curiosity.

When I was a little kid, there was a show...

God, I hope I get the name right.

I think it was called Beyond 2000 or something like that.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Okay, there was a TV show and all it was was it would just tell you for a half hour and it's probably wrong like 99 of the time, because they talk about flying cars and shit.

But they would just tell you where they think things are going and they would try and predict the next 20 years out.

I was just enamored by that.

I would sit there and be like, wow, we're going to have flying cars.

This is crazy.

But it was always like every episode was just a different vertical of what the future could look like.

And that has never left me.

Like this idea of wanting to see what's about to happen and live at that edge of things, even if I wasn't investing, if I decided to call it up and I never turn on another camera I would be held up in a little room somewhere constantly like playing with the latest stuff.

So what does that mean today?

What that means today is, I splurged on a crazy-ass GPU for my house.

And I'm downloading local models, you know?

And you and I were talking even last night.

I had this idea where I'm asking all the models out there to give me the 100 best albums of all time.

And meaning music albums of all time.

And not based on downloads, but cultural impact, on their impact on other genres.

And I'm going to have them duke it out.

I'm going to put it against all the bigs.

I'm going to select the most expensive option to do.

I'll probably burn... a half lake worth of water, whatever the hell it's going to be.

I'm joking, but it's pretty bad.

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

So they're going to go and they're going to give me a stack, rank those and see where they agree and where they don't agree and come up with a list.

And then I'm going to go and have each of those albums at a granular level.

Tell me why each song is very important and create a script for about a two minute long podcast for each of the albums.

Tell me where to pay attention to each of those tracks.

Why?

What riff to listen for that impacted somebody else or influenced someone else?

And then I'm going to feed that into Eleven Labs and create a beautiful relaxing kind of like guided journey for that album.

Then I'm going to tie it into the Spotify API

So that I will sit back and it will be on my list of to-dos to listen to an album.

Call it like once a week or something like that.

Get that guided, beautiful journey and go through that.

That product doesn't need to exist, but I want it for myself.

And so I'm going to go build that.

But it's an example of like.

That is a forcing function for me to learn speech to text, for me to learn how to have these models duke it out and come up with the best possible.

You know the whole backend that's required to pull that off.

But that's that play at work in action, right?

And I think that if you just can find that for you, you will find the frontier of where things are going, just by that natural curiosity, you know.

I don't know where things are going.

I will tell you that there are a couple things I know to be true.

One, I think engineering is over.

I think we're going to be orchestrators of information, not engineers.

I think those will be solved problems.

Anything where there is a... non-subjective outcome, AI will tackle that and solve that problem.

Like engineering is a solvable problem.

Like if I want to... fan out a million stories to a social network.

That is not a subjective thing.

There is a way to do that at scale efficiently and with the end result that we're all looking for.

AI will figure that out.

You won't need a team of 10 engineers to figure that out.

Those will be solved problems.

So You know, I think there are certain things like that that I look to and like oh, the world just hasn't woken up to this yet.

I mean, we all as technologists we have, but I wouldn't go as a CS degree.

I would not go into that right now, you know?

Okay.

So there's little bits and pieces like that, but then you think okay well, what has to happen in order for that reality to unfold?

What tools need to be built?

What stacks need to be built?

And that's where the investment opportunities lie.

And I'm like this is going to run because we're at the early innings of this and talking about this stuff.

And, you know, it's so funny.

So many things on Tim's show because he asked me to make these predictions.

And so when Ethereum first got off the ground even before they launched I was talking about on Tim's show, because if you're playing, you'll just see it and it'll be right there in front of you.

Yeah, I love that.

I mean I want to quibble with your point about a CS degree, but first I want to say that, like so many good things in life are downstream of authentic curiosity.

And I love that that's the way that you've done this, you know?

Yeah.

Because it's not some big brain sort of galaxy mind predicting the future thing.

It's just like, what gives me energy?

That's right.

Yeah, that's the whole thing is.

I remember Michael Arrington.

Way back in the day I was going on he was interviewing me on TechCrunch Disrupt.

And this was probably like 20 years ago.

And he's like, hey, I want you to talk about your investment.

I'm like, how are you good at picking these things?

And I'm like, I don't know.

It's kind of based on my gut and what I'm excited about.

And he's like, dude, you've got to have a better answer than that.

That's what he told me before we went on stage.

I'm like, it's not a magical formula.

It is like intuition more than anything else.

Especially at the early stage.

Yes.

Especially when it's awkward.

Yes.

Because if it looks awkward, it's going to be contrarian.

No one's going to want to do that weird thing.

Yeah.

Like those are the hardest deals to do.

Yes.

But you know it's funny.

Like I was talking to, I think it was Reed and David that were at Greylock back in the day and they said their best investments were the ones that were the most contentious internally.

Yes.

Because people don't see it.

Not everyone sees it.

And that's okay.

That's actually a positive signal because many people are like, that will never work.

But guess what?

When it does, it changes the world.

Well, what's remarkable is anybody who's got nothing to lose can be embarrassed and be willing to be embarrassed.

But once you have something to lose, you're a person that people know and trust.

The natural human instinct is to be more cautious and to take less risk around being embarrassed.

And because you've consistently been at the edge, maybe because of this authentic curiosity, you've done it a lot.

And I think that's a real conscious thing you've done, which is unusual.

But I've also lost a lot and made the wrong call.

And I think that at the end of the day, when my kids look back at my career and you know I have them as my little proxies for the world and they go out, I want them to look back on dad's career and not say he was the best investor, not say he made the most money, but look back and say wow, he took a lot of risk and he was wrong a lot.

But you know what?

He got to scratch every personal itch that he had and try everything.

And he was at the buffet and tried it all.

And a lot of it failed.

Most of it failed.

But that's okay because what are we doing on this earth if we're not trying crazy shit?

Do you know what I mean?

100%, dude.

100%.

So back to the thing that you said was you wanted to debate out.

What was that?

Well, I want to quibble about your point around CS degree, because I actually think this is a really really important point.

If you're somebody that goes to Stanford or maybe Harvard or MIT, like those people are leaning into CS degrees in a big way.

And unfortunately, I think this story has gotten out into broader society that CS is over, engineering is over.

Like sure.

Being able to write a certain kind of algorithm may be less value than it was 10 years ago, but being able to think technically is more important than ever.

And I think it would be a real tragedy if especially kids that go to non-Ivy League schools decide not to do CS because CS is over.

I think the value of being technical is higher than it's ever been.

And while the future technologists may not be programming in the way that we are like, they're going to do something that needs that skill set.

Well, I will say I think it's over.

The reason I think it's over is because I would argue that creativity in the future is going to be more important than technical ability.

We don't need to teach people SQL or no one needs to learn these things in school.

I'm curious, let's crack that open a bit.

What do you believe that a technical degree gives you that will be useful a decade from now?

Well, look, I think one, it's just fluency, right?

What is a distributed system?

What does that mean?

Well, you need to know that.

Perhaps, yeah.

I think it's useful to understand that as a mental model for systems thinking. right?

I think the second thing is just general problem solving.

Like, how do you go step by step and solve a problem?

How do you understand how to explore a sort of problem in design space?

Where to sort of take risk or be ambitious?

Where not to?

Like, a lot of it is downstream of mathematics.

And if you look at, I went to computer engineering in Waterloo like None of the stuff I took away in fact, none of the things that we typically studied was a programming language right.

A lot of it was systems thinking.

And I think the systems thinking is actually really important.

Well, that's really interesting because I think that's different than a classic CS degree.

One of the things that I like about some of these and they're largely kind of more on the vocational school side of things.

When you hear about these programs and how they've evolved, it is like training you to become an entrepreneur which is full stack building it, designing it, coding it, shipping it.

That depth of knowledge across the full stack which impacts marketing creativity hiring, firing like that full suite.

Yes. essential.

It will, of course, be very important in the future.

I think the just singular technical focus around you know the code piece of it.

That's where I would like to see the degrees like loosen up a little bit and kind of be a little bit more holistic and overarching.

Yeah.

Because I don't think And don't get me wrong there will be technical challenges that we have in the future, but I think if you get to scale as an entrepreneur, you will have plenty of everything to go solve those challenges right.

I think that's right.

I mean, I think being a technologist and broadly technology thinking sets you up to be a good founder.

Actually, Elon's probably run the most ambitious experiment on this that is totally under discussed, which is, I think, he typically has technical people in every role.

Right.

Marketing, comms, you know, you name it, there's a technical person there.

So I really do think there's something in the training that sets you up to be successful in a lot of vocations, which is totally distinct from programming.

Yeah, what I look for in a founder is someone that is kind of multidisciplined in some way, because if you're too technical then you don't understand.

Like I met a founder yesterday that is building a device that can kind of listen to everything another one of these types of devices.

And the kind of angle of what they were going after missed out on a lot of the social side of it, like what it means to be listened to, the invasion of privacy and how to potentially sidestep that.

They were all technical. all device focused.

And I feel like the future, you have to have that kind of full suite.

You know, it's not just any one discipline.

It's probably going to be a handful of them.

The orchestrator role, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting to see.

You know, I also think that there's value in ignoring I don't know why I'm just arguing with you here, but there's value in ignoring the social norms.

You know, a great example of this is 10 years ago, it's so funny looking at the mobile transition.

So I remember it so distinctly, iPhone 2007, App Store in 2008.

When the App Store came out, there were 6 million iPhones in distribution, right?

Not a lot.

Today, ChatGPT has 800 million actives, right?

We're not even three years in.

So it's crazy the scale at which these things grow.

If you look at the predictions from 2009, you can go read the blog posts like no one knew what to do with the technology and the most consistent prediction was location based ads.

Like that was the most ambitious thing anyone could think of would happen with mobile and, of course, much more ambitious things happened.

But one of the big predictions around location was, wow, people don't want to share their location.

It's an invasion of privacy.

Like there was a lot of certainty amongst the pundits about that.

Fast forward 10 years and every Gen Z Zoomer shares their location with all their friends and their exes and who knows who?

Like that moment of like consumers feeling one way about location to the sort of tipping point happened very rapidly.

So I can't speak specifically to what's going to happen around being transcribed, but I do think ignoring the social conventions can be a really good instinct for founders.

Yeah.

I worry about this trend of always recording.

And I just feel like it... Do you believe that this is going to be ubiquitous?

Do you feel like we're always going to be recorded?

Like the future is one where...

You can't.

I mean there will be safe spaces, but you can't largely find a safe space because every meeting you go to, every dinner you go to like, it's always on.

Look, I think that technology and social norms sort of adapt to each other in lockstep.

So yes, I think there'll be more things recorded.

And I also think that we'll develop new social norms so that it can fit into our world, right?

Technology is downstream of what we need as a species in society.

And we've always adjusted, you know, we've always adjusted.

I believe we will again.

And right now we're in this awkward sort of transitionary period where you know if you're in a bar in New York, you're definitely getting punched in the face for recording.

Right, right.

At an SF, like everyone's recording.

So it's just a moment of transition where society is not caught up with technology.

But I do think we're going more in that direction than less.

Yeah, that's going to be a hard one to overcome.

Yeah.

I'm telling you I've gotten Well, certainly on the personal side.

If you wear one of those devices that's always recording with a partner, it doesn't fly.

On the professional side.

I've seen a lot of people ask you to take it off, to put it away.

You know.

And I just...

But also I have to imagine at least for me I enjoy the rawness of an unrecorded conversation, because you will put your toe and say things that are probably more real that I would rather have that conversation happen than something that is just like oh, let me reference my notes and make sure that I got that right, you know.

So we're talking a lot about the kind of, you know, how it changes things for the negative.

We've got an amazing portfolio company called Limitless.

They do this.

And like the benefit of having a lot of those things, like sometimes you'll find yourself saying things you didn't expect to say and they just get lost in the ether.

So the benefit of having that signal and having it less, maybe transcription focused and maybe ideas focused, maybe vibes focused, like there's a form of kind of lossy compression you can take with the ideas.

Yes.

That I think actually... It has to go there.

I think the lossy nature of it and for people who don't know what we're talking about like a lossless would be every word verbatim recorded in a diary somewhere that is one hack away from our personal conversation and the Uber being exposed to everyone.

Yeah.

That bothers me because you know, as friendships and depth evolves, you're like hey, this was a tough thing, I was going through, or whatever it may be.

And like the fact that that is somewhere in the cloud is just bad.

I think it's bad for all sorts of reasons.

But...

The idea of lossy is interesting because you pick up broader themes.

And if you can pull emotional context along for the ride where it says like hey, we noticed that Anish was feeling down about this.

I'm like oh, let me send him a little something to cheer him up, because that was a great callback to our conversation.

Totally.

That side of it is fascinating, because then I don't feel awkward having the conversation, especially if we can do that on-prem, on-device.

Yes, where you have a small model running on device.

It doesn't pick up the fact that you know I said this one thing.

That would be hurtful out in a broader context but it is getting the emotional tone that is surfaced back in a sentence that cannot be connected directly to what I was saying.

Yes.

Love that idea.

Yeah.

I hope it goes there.

I think it will.

I think this is the interplay between social dynamics and technology.

It's going to go there.

The Limitless device, I had it.

And, you know, I'm...

My dream feature is they have a little LED on the outside.

And there has been any number of times when I had it on and people were like, turn that thing off.

Fine, that's fair, right?

Turn it off, whatever.

I want a mode where, if it's red, it's doing verbatim recording, because there are meetings where I want that to happen right.

If it's green, it's recording, but it's theme based.

Mm-hmm.

So now I can have that personal intimate conversation.

I know it's happening on device.

I'll never, those, you know, more intimate words will never be leaked online.

But then I know where I stand with you, right?

Because I think that's so important to know like oh, what we're having is going to remain largely confidential.

It might pick up some themes, but it's never going to be damning to me.

That's so true.

So interesting.

I mean, and that's exactly it, right?

A visual cue.

Right.

It has to be a visual cue.

And that's not a technology problem.

That's a product design problem.

Right.

I think we're going to solve it.

Yeah.

Well, that's exciting.

Yeah.

Although I did use it, I tell you.

I used it with Daria one time where she told me she had said something and I pulled up the transcripts.

Oh, no.

I keep shooting myself in the foot.

That is a no-win scenario.

No-win because you pull up and you pace it and that's the last time you wear the device.

There is no-win.

That's when you just go limp and take the pain.

Well, brother, this has been great.

It is so great to have you.

Anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap things up?

No, I absolutely had a blast.

Let's keep talking.

Yeah, let's keep doing this.

It's good to get together every so often, hash out these things, talk about the future.

Where can people find you online socially?

I'm on Twitter at IllScience.

We can talk about that another time, the genesis of that name.

And you can always get me at Anish at A16Z.

Awesome.

So hit me.

I want to know what you're working on.

Send me things that you actually have made.

That's always the best way to engage with us.

Best way by far.

But generally, I'm just I'm excited to be out there and thrilled to be here with you, Kev.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Yeah.

At Kevin Rose on Twitter X. I was still getting Twitter on X. And yeah, awesome.

Let's do this again soon.

Thanks for a fun session.

Yeah.

All right, man.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast.

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