Pod Insights a16z Podcast OpenClaw, Claude Code, and the Future of Software | Peter Yang on The a16z Show About this episode Anish Acharya speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox, about how personal AI agents are replacing the apps we open every day, why coding agents feel like slot machines, and what happens when the cost of building software drops to near zero. They discuss why future companies will stay radically small, how the IDE is becoming a thinking tool rather than a making tool, and why human ambition will always create more jobs than AI eliminates.
Timestamps:
0:00—Intro
1:56—Using OpenClaw for voice, memory & daily life
6:14—Will agents kill apps & SaaS?
11:57—Coding agents: Claude Code vs. Codex
17:00—Future of work: small teams, agents & company culture
24:00—How agents change consumer products & the economy
Read the full transcript here: https://www.a16z.news/s/podcast
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Interesting that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? And we're kind of going in that direction already.
0:05 Anish Acharya? The whole agent stack is emerging. Identity, payments, marketing, even CLI versus MCP. Like, all of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.
0:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a whole new world. I hope more companies will stay small. And I think the founders of this generation realize that, like, they want to stay as small as possible.
0:24 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
0:24 Speaker 00 And instead of having like a 10-person product team, you have like a 2 or 3-person product team, and you have a bunch of agents help you.
0:30 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
0:30 Speaker 00 Someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, something like that. So like, it's like, you know, it's like, yeah, so maybe you lost your job, but like now you have to do your own thing.
0:39 Anish Acharya? Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it, you know?
0:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
0:45 Erik Torenberg? Most people open their phone to feel something: connected, productive, entertained. Each app is a door to a different emotional state. In 2007, the iPhone gave us the app grid. 19 years later, billions of people still tap the same colored squares dozens of times a day. The interface became so familiar, it stopped feeling like technology. It became reflex. Now, a generation of builders is collapsing that entire grid into a single conversation. One agent that checks your analytics, updates your documents, runs your errands, and gives you a pep talk on your morning walk. Not because the apps failed, but because talking is faster than tapping.
1:30 Erik Torenberg? The question is, what happens to products, companies, and careers when building software costs almost nothing? A16Z general partner Anish Acharya speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox.
1:48 Anish Acharya? All right, welcome, everyone. I've got my friend Peter Yang here. Peter, welcome.
1:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, good to be here. It's good to see you again.
1:53 Anish Acharya? Yeah, it's great to see you. Peter and I worked together at Credit Karma for a brief stint, and then we went our separate ways. And I rediscovered Peter from his prolific posts on X and your YouTube. And you've got a little bit of a Clark Kent Superman thing going, because you've still got a day job, right?
2:08 Speaker 00 That's what I said, a day job.
2:10 Anish Acharya? Yeah. Can you share where?
2:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, I work at Roblox as a PM.
2:13 Anish Acharya? Amazing, Roblox and recent portfolio company.
2:15 Speaker 00 Yes.
2:15 Anish Acharya? One of my favorites. Well, incredible, man. Let's get right into it. Maybe I'll start with a softball fun question and then we're going to talk about everything in the claw ecosystem. We're going to talk about coding agents. We're talking about a little bit about maybe what students should study, advice, and some of the things that you've talked about online.
2:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, sure.
2:30 Anish Acharya? Maybe to start, what is the name of your, oh, how many claws do you have? And tell me their names.
2:34 Speaker 00 I only have one. I call her Zoe.
2:36 Anish Acharya? Zoe?
2:37 Speaker 00 But I have like multiple conversations going with her.
2:39 Anish Acharya? Okay.
2:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:40 Anish Acharya? And why Zoe?
2:41 Speaker 00 I have two girls and I was going to call my younger one Zoe and I did not. So I'm like, I call my open claw Zoe instead.
2:48 Anish Acharya? I see. Yes. Yeah, this is your fallback plan.
2:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:50 Anish Acharya? Peter, tell me a little bit about Open Claw, how you discovered it, how you're using it today, and what you think the implications are.
2:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was lucky to interview Peter Steinberger before he became super famous and the whole thing blew up. And then right after I interviewed him, I like set up the thing. It took forever to set up. It was super janky. And yeah, it does a lot of things for me. It like pulls analytics for me across YouTube and like my Mercury bank account. It can update Google documents for me. It can build a little website for me. But if I was honest with you, dude, like I mostly just talk to it through voice and get voice replies. And like every other day I said, give me like a pep talk. Like look through all your memory and like give me some like deep insights that I don't know about.
3:29 Anish Acharya? Okay.
3:29 Speaker 00 And it gave me like, like I remember I was on a walk and it gave me like a three minute pep talk that was like really amazing, really amazing. It was something about, oh, you're like talking to me about your career business and blah, blah, and like your job. But just remember that your kids, seven or four, are going to grow up very soon and they're going to want to spend time with you. So you should re-optimize for them instead.
3:48 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
3:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:49 Anish Acharya? That's really cool.
3:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:50 Anish Acharya? And I mean, very cool, but also something that all the language models could have done prior.
3:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:54 Anish Acharya? So what's the difference between this in a use case like that?
3:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a really good question. So I don't know, because I think installed on Telegram, it just feels like more personal than using like Cloud or ChatGPT and just feels like something I can like text in bed. This is probably not very healthy, but like I text to it in bed. I've talked to it during my commute. And it feels like it feels more like a personal, like actual human.
4:15 Anish Acharya? Yeah. Yeah. So how much for you is OpenClaw about the kind of interface, like pushing it to messaging? And maybe helping to trick our brain into feeling like, hey, this is a person or a person-esque thing? Versus all the other components of the stack, the self-modification, the skills directory, every, all the rest.
4:32 Speaker 00 I think it's probably eighty percent just the personal part of it. Cause I mostly just talk to it and like, you know, through voice. But I also think like, is something, first of all, it is pretty janky. It tends to forget things a lot.
4:43 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
4:43 Speaker 00 To keep reminding you. But like, any kind of zany idea that I have, I just have to talk to it and it can probably just do. It's kind of like, like the other day, I was doing voice surprise with it. I was like, hey, can we just have a live phone call instead? And then it's like, okay, you gotta connect Twitter, Twitter, or you gotta do all the stuff. And then, okay, fine. I went off and did it.
4:59 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
4:59 Speaker 00 And then we had a phone call. It caught my phone.
5:01 Anish Acharya? Oh, really? You have that set up? I've been dying to set that up. Okay.
5:04 Speaker 00 It's not very good though. Like the latency is bad. But the fact that I was able to get it going is like pretty impressive. So it's kind of like any kind of crazy idea I have, it can kind of do.
5:12 Anish Acharya? And then in practice, how are you doing that? Are you asking it to write a skill on the fly? Are you discovering a skill? How much of the code gen are you actually using?
5:20 Speaker 00 I mean, I talk to you in a super casual way with like, just like a friend. So like, hey, hey, hey, Zoy, can like, can you have a phone call? And it's like, okay, you gotta do that. I was like, okay, fine. I'll open my computer. I'll do all this stuff. And then it's like, give me a call and it would trouble you a little bit and then it works. So with Claude, I have like very fancy prompts, like very long prompts. But with OpenClaw, I just kind of text it. Yeah. It is.
5:40 Anish Acharya? Really interesting. So we sort of touched on a couple of things actually. So one, there's mobile messaging. There's the memory system. There's the sort of code generation component. How much do you think the memory system, like, is it innovative because it's file-based? You say that it forgets things, but so do language models. Do you think the memory system is well done? Does it hold it back or does it enable it?
5:59 Speaker 00 I think the default memory system is actually not that great.
6:01 Anish Acharya? Okay.
6:02 Speaker 00 Like the way I understand it works is just like a memory dot M D text file.
6:05 Anish Acharya? Yes.
6:05 Speaker 00 And then every day. Per day, right? And every day it updates. And it tends to forget things a lot.
6:10 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
6:10 Speaker 00 So, so I actually installed this like three layer memory system that to me, I was like, I don't fully understand, but it has like. It has Toby's QMD search tool.
6:19 Anish Acharya? Okay.
6:19 Speaker 00 So I installed that and then it's like a two gigabyte thing. And then it got a little bit better.
6:24 Anish Acharya? Okay.
6:24 Speaker 00 But I said to remind it, I had to put it into the agents like MD. Hey, like before you answer any question from me, go through all your memory and check everything.
6:31 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
6:31 Speaker 00 And it also tends to forget that it can do stuff like, can you update my Google Doc? It's all I can do that. Yeah, yes, you can. It's in your file.
6:38 Anish Acharya? Yes.
6:39 Speaker 00 So you have to remind it. Yeah.
6:40 Anish Acharya? Yeah. Really interesting. Well, maybe let's get into a little bit of the controversy. You'd said that apps will die, Claw is going to be everything and everywhere. I mean, talk us through that point of view.
6:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, first of all, I tweeted all kinds of random crap that's out for well thought out.
6:54 Anish Acharya? We take it all as fact.
6:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:55 Anish Acharya? Yes.
6:56 Speaker 00 But I do think like ever since I set up all these apps like Mercury, MCP and all this kind of crap on my open call. Like I don't actually open those apps much anymore. But I do agree with you. Like I think the ones that are going to die first or like maybe get less usage first is like apps that you're just opening to try to complete a task. Like you actually try to do something, you know, like apps that you're only to get entertainment can probably survive a little bit longer. But like apps that I want to complete a task, like it's just ways to text my agent to do it for me.
7:23 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
7:23 Speaker 00 It's like you have a really good admin to do stuff for you.
7:26 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
7:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:26 Anish Acharya? And so how much are you finding, has this reduced your smartphone usage outside of Modulo Open Call?
7:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, because I'm like a Twitter addict, so I still use my smartphone way, way too much. But yeah, in terms of using those apps, it's definitely reduced it. Yeah.
7:39 Anish Acharya? Yeah, because you're not going to ask Zoe, hey, read my X for me and tell me what's interesting.
7:43 Speaker 00 I mean, it sends me like a morning briefing with the top two tweets and stuff that like trends. But yeah, I still open X. I look through it.
7:49 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
7:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:50 Anish Acharya? It's interesting because I've always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling.
7:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:55 Anish Acharya? And I think of course there's some like functional set of needs, which is why you open calendar or something. But I also think that WhatsApp is you want to feel connected and Slack is you want to feel productive. And of course TikTok is you want to feel entertained. So I do wonder with just one agent, how do you sort of do the context switching of like, when are you flirting? When are you getting shit done? I mean, in a sense, app gives you a nice, it sort of gives you a nice division of the intent.
8:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:19 Anish Acharya? That you don't get with Zoe.
8:21 Speaker 00 That's a good point, but I do have multiple channels set up with Zoe in Telegram. Like one is just to write random voice replies. And otherwise, we're actually working on our project together.
8:29 Anish Acharya? Ah.
8:29 Speaker 00 And then I want to have a public channel where like I'm giving dead demos. I don't want to reveal private information. Yes. So I like multiple channels.
8:35 Anish Acharya? And is that implemented as subagents or?
8:38 Speaker 00 No, is this some janky setup I found online? Like you can set up a multiple Telegram channels and then I'm not sure if it actually remembers across context across the channels, but like you can have separate conversations at least.
8:48 Anish Acharya? Got it. Yeah. And how transparent are you with your agent? Does it do this to your personal email or?
8:54 Speaker 00 I'm like super transparent. Well, I did buy the Mac mini and set up its own email.
8:58 Anish Acharya? Okay.
8:59 Speaker 00 And but I gave it like read access to my email and like calendar. And I also gave it like write access to some docs.
9:05 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:06 Speaker 00 But it kind of screwed my entire drive or something.
9:08 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:08 Speaker 00 So.
9:09 Anish Acharya? How do you imagine OpenClaw, which is sort of an architecture and primitive?
9:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:13 Anish Acharya? How does it get productized, packaged for the world?
9:16 Speaker 00 I mean, I think that's what Peter Steinberg is working on at OpenAI, right?
9:20 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:20 Speaker 00 He's probably going to build something to ChatGPT, which every uses. So that ChatGPT can actually get stuff done for you and like maybe feels more human.
9:28 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:29 Speaker 00 Dude, let me rant about ChatGPT.
9:30 Anish Acharya? Please, yeah, yeah.
9:31 Speaker 00 For some reason, they they trained the model so that at the end of every conversation is always, if you want, I can also do X and Y.
9:37 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:37 Speaker 00 And dude, I I got so annoyed by it that that kind of churn from ChatGPT.
9:40 Anish Acharya? Oh, really?
9:41 Speaker 00 Yeah. So so it probably increases their metrics, but it's just like super annoying. It's like, why don't you just do it in the first place?
9:46 Anish Acharya? That's right. Are you a Claude guy now?
9:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm a Claude guy now. But I I do use Codex to code.
9:51 Anish Acharya? Yeah, yeah. You like Codex? You prefer to cod code or you use both?
9:54 Speaker 00 Codex is when I want to try to do something real and Claude code is when I'm just like vibing.
9:58 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
9:58 Speaker 00 It's very vibe.
9:58 Anish Acharya? Well, it's interesting. I think they live at different points and there's a sort of space of trade offs.
10:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:03 Anish Acharya? Whereas I find Claude code and Opus four six, it's a little more chatty. It makes more assumptions, but it can be more pleasant for asynchronous experience.
10:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:10 Anish Acharya? Whereas Codex, it really thinks hard and it's more often accurate. But sometimes it's sort of like being in a conversation where the other person pauses for three minutes to think.
10:19 Speaker 00 Yeah. So you don't have to flow state, right? It's hard to get a flow. Like Claude, dude, I tweeted the other day, Claude almost like a slot machine. It has different things. He's timed as.
10:27 Anish Acharya? A hundred percent, dude. Like, look, I do think that if you think, remember we were talking about in the old social networking era?
10:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:32 Anish Acharya? It was variable scheduled rewards, right? That was the whole magic of it. Like you open your Facebook feed and. Once in a while, it's like boring, boring. Oh, my God, this is so exciting.
10:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
10:40 Anish Acharya? And the coding agents have the exact same property. Also, the time is variable. So sometimes you get something in a second, sometimes it takes five minutes. So
10:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:48 Anish Acharya? Up to a certain point, I actually think that both of those things give it that casino-like feeling.
10:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. And the other thing that's very different about the product strategy, or maybe it's just the way it works, is like, coding is kind of like self-explanatory.
10:59 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
10:59 Speaker 00 And Claude Code, you have all this crazy shit. You have like hooks and like skills and
11:03 Anish Acharya? Plugins.
11:03 Speaker 00 If you're not following Twitter, yeah, if you're not following X, you have no idea how to customize this thing.
11:07 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
11:07 Speaker 00 But once you customize it, you kind of feel like it's part of you. So it's kind of hard to churn.
11:11 Anish Acharya? It's interesting with, so I've customized mine because also I read the long thing that Boris put out.
11:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:16 Anish Acharya? But I will say that I think that Claude Code, a lot of the reasons that I enjoy it are just harness features. Like, for example, if you cut an image, you have to paste it into a file before, and then paste that file into Codex.
11:30 Speaker 00 Okay.
11:30 Anish Acharya? You can't just take a subset of the screen, screenshot it, and then paste it directly into Codex the same way you can with Claude Code.
11:36 Speaker 00 Already? Okay, okay.
11:37 Anish Acharya? So just like little things like that. Claude Code added voice. It's a little bit janky right now, but it's going in the right direction. So they've just got a bunch of quality of life things.
11:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:45 Anish Acharya? Claude Code speaks to Claude and Chrome.
11:48 Speaker 00 Okay.
11:48 Anish Acharya? And Codex doesn't speak to Atlas.
11:50 Speaker 00 Got it.
11:50 Anish Acharya? So I think these are all things that OpenAI will fix.
11:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:52 Anish Acharya? I think Codex is actually a much better model, but they don't exist today.
11:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, they need to fix it. I mean, they're gonna go all in on Codex, I'm sure. Yeah.
12:00 Anish Acharya? Talk to me about coding agents. What's your general view? Do you think it's the end of SaaS? Do you think they're just a toy?
12:06 Speaker 00 Well, first of all, I'm like not an engineer, so I'm like a novice. But I do hear that, like I was talking to some folks the other day, and AI native startup. And they're basically trying to, they have a bunch of Vibe coders. And all of Vipers are just trying to build internal tools that replace their SaaS that they're paying for.
12:21 Anish Acharya? Really? So it's an actual company that's doing this?
12:23 Speaker 00 It's an actual company, yeah.
12:24 Anish Acharya? It's an AI-native company?
12:25 Speaker 00 It's like one of the Vibe coding companies, one of the more powerful ones.
12:28 Anish Acharya? Interesting.
12:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:29 Anish Acharya? It's interesting. Oh, I see. So they're actually an app gen company?
12:32 Speaker 00 They're an app gen company and they're paying for a bunch of SaaS and they want to get rid of the payment. They want to just buy app coding internal tools.
12:37 Anish Acharya? By using, okay. So in that case, they might be the most extreme form of adopter because their own product is app gen, so they should use app gen for everything.
12:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:44 Anish Acharya? I guess, is your prediction, though, that the average company will? churn off of Slack or deal or
12:50 Speaker 00 I don't think I feel like Slack has a lot of legs because Slack can also be the place where you talk to the agents themselves. But some of the other ones, they are pretty complicated. So it's kind of be hard to buy like that kind of stuff. But I feel if you have an app like maybe Calendly or something more simple.
13:05 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
13:05 Speaker 00 Then why should I pay for it? I just.
13:07 Anish Acharya? Why should I pay for it? Though the counterpoint is it's not that expensive.
13:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:10 Anish Acharya? And do you really want to maintain your own Calendly thing?
13:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:14 Anish Acharya? Versus pay 20 bucks a month, it always gets updated, it's always up.
13:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:18 Anish Acharya? Because you're just like a fixed amount of capacity that anyone in the organization is going to have for all this stuff.
13:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's true. Unless you hire like dedicated vibe cord, like the startup does, and it's just kind of vibe cool stuff.
13:26 Anish Acharya? But then it's the cost benefit versus just paying for Calendly.
13:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. It's interesting about, for example, like a lot of people are tweeting about Figma recently.
13:34 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
13:35 Speaker 00 It'll stock us down and like, you know, our audience arrive.
13:37 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
13:38 Speaker 00 And I feel like the jury's out there. It's kind of hard to say.
13:42 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
13:42 Speaker 00 I feel like all the designers are still on Figma, but as a designer, you kind of need to learn how to vibe call it. Otherwise, you're gonna, if you want to do Figma.
13:49 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
13:50 Speaker 00 You're probably gonna be like outdated in a couple of years. Yeah.
13:53 Anish Acharya? My counterpoint to that is that I think that I've thought a lot about the sort of thinking tools versus making tools, right? The IDE was historically a making tool. It's a place for execution. I think it's migrating away from that. And now with execution going to zero, I think these sort of like multi-agent next gen IDEs, a lot of them are about trying things. And using the trial and error as a way to inform your thinking. Like a lot of times I'll just build a feature in a really naive way and I'll hammer the coding agent until it works. Then I'll say, hey, write all the things that you would have done differently. And I'll go back to the initial point and redo it. So I wonder if, and I think Figma actually does both. I think it's a place for design execution, but it's also an important place for design thinking.
14:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:32 Anish Acharya? And I think that's their opportunity to be highly relevant in the new stack.
14:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. But I think A60Z has like a you guys investing pencil. Or something pencil dev.
14:42 Anish Acharya? Speedrun did, yeah.
14:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, speedrun and yeah, Figma needs to like level up this AI tooling. Cause like watching these agents collaborate with you and do stuff is like very interesting.
14:50 Anish Acharya? I know it's top of mind for them.
14:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:52 Anish Acharya? What do you think are the most under discussed capabilities of coding agents?
14:56 Speaker 00 Oh, what's under hyped and maybe what's overhyped as well? This is probably not under hyped, but like, you know, I feel like and interested in that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? And we're kind of going that direction already. Like I think Lovable recently launched like today.
15:09 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 00 They can support everything and can make decks.
15:12 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
15:12 Speaker 00 So, so yeah, so I, and I feel like everyone's chasing this. And Lovable is probably in the lead.
15:18 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
15:18 Speaker 00 I, I don't want to use PowerPoint anymore. I don't want to write a, I hate writing Google Docs, dude.
15:22 Anish Acharya? Cost my entire life.
15:23 Speaker 00 So, so like for, for the other day I was writing my blog post and instead of just like typing out, I was like, hey, let's, let me just use call code and let me give you a bunch of feedback and you write it for me.
15:32 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
15:32 Speaker 00 And then you just keep upping the, it, it did the first 80%. The last 20% I said had to manually go in there like to take, take stuff.
15:38 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
15:39 Speaker 00 But like, that's the way I work now. I, I never start from zero. Like I always get the first 80% from AI.
15:44 Anish Acharya? Right?
15:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:45 Anish Acharya? Yeah, it's interesting. If you look at, there, there are also like historical analogues of this. I think Satya said this, which is that Excel is the most powerful or most popular programming language in the world.
15:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:55 Anish Acharya? And that it's sort of a programming language that millions and millions, I mean, a hundred billion plus people must know, maybe even more. And yet we don't think of it that way. It's a way to sort of describe and solve problems.
16:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:06 Anish Acharya? And I think coding agents are going to be that, of course, times a thousand.
16:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
16:10 Anish Acharya? Where even things that feel subjective, like writing Google Docs can be represented in the coding domain in such a way that it's more satisfying, more productive, more high leverage to use agents to do it.
16:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, cause Excel was like popular because it's super approachable, right?
16:23 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
16:23 Speaker 00 And like coding agents, the code is basically gone. Like it's like app shut away, just talking to some agent and getting to do stuff.
16:28 Anish Acharya? So, yeah.
16:29 Speaker 00 Yeah. Exactly. It's gonna be huge.
16:31 Anish Acharya? Yeah. What do you think the future company looks like? Is it just a bunch of agents with a CEO? Is the CEO an agent? I mean, what is the role for people in a company in the future?
16:39 Speaker 00 Okay, well, I have some hot takes. So we both worked at some companies together and let me give you a hot take, man. Maybe we cut this out. But like, I feel like as a company gets bigger, it tends to get shit, it tends to become like a shitty, shitty place to work, dude.
16:51 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
16:51 Speaker 00 A lot of people, you have to align.
16:52 Anish Acharya? I think that's axiomatic, yeah.
16:53 Speaker 00 Right? And I remember, maybe she mentioned this comment, but I remember our company used to have all these like OKR meetings. I'm ever sitting in a room for three hours talking about OKRs. I'm just like, dude, this is like wasting my life.
17:03 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
17:03 Speaker 00 So where I'm going with this is I hope more companies will stay small. And I think the founders of this generation realize that, like, they want to stay as small as possible.
17:10 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
17:11 Speaker 00 And instead of having a 10-person product team, you have a two or three-person product team and just have a bunch of agents help you.
17:16 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
17:16 Speaker 00 I think it's way easier to cross a bunch of your line with the agents than with humans.
17:20 Anish Acharya? Yeah, well, actually, in a sense, the agents, actually, because it takes the emotion out of it, too. Like, you can imagine if I sent my agent, you sent your agent to go negotiate something.
17:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:29 Anish Acharya? And they came out with some conclusion, it's not emotional.
17:32 Speaker 00 It's not.
17:32 Anish Acharya? For either of us.
17:33 Speaker 00 It's very objective.
17:34 Anish Acharya? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things that we've been talking a bunch about is what is the pro case for AI at work in terms of employee experience? And I think it's what you're describing, right? Like, how do you increase the NPS of work?
17:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:45 Anish Acharya? So if we like go all the way back, or even broadly, the NPS of the human experience, right? Think of the NPS of the day-to-day human in 10,000 B.C., when it just don't get eaten by the lion.
17:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
17:54 Anish Acharya? And that's a good day, right? Or maybe 100 years ago, it's, okay, don't get killed at the factory, crushed by the steam press or whatever else. And now a lot of it is, ah, like, just don't get sucked into some high emotion, sort of negotiation with another VP's subordinate.
18:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, like a 50 message Slack thread going back and forth.
18:12 Anish Acharya? Yeah, which, exactly. And then eventually everyone's like, I don't want to tell the CEO. And eventually it goes there and it's just terrible. So maybe the future of this is that a lot of that emotional subjective work gets handled.
18:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:22 Anish Acharya? And we're sort of guiding the process, but not in the middle of it in a way that just doesn't suit us as humans.
18:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, at least at Double Life, as a PM creator, and like, I feel like all the PMs actually just want to create products, they just want to create products and then.
18:34 Anish Acharya? Well, that's why we all got into it. It's so interesting. I mean, Nikal talks about it all the time, but like, every PM's sort of view of the ideal PM is the innovator. Like, I came up with a new thing and I had the big insight and it unlocked the product.
18:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:47 Anish Acharya? I think the black pill is, I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function.
18:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:56 Anish Acharya? So nonetheless, I think PMs aspire to be able to do that and they should either do it and either be. Successful or maybe not successful and move to a different function.
19:04 Speaker 00 I also feel like my hot take is like basically all the PMs I know are trying to live code at nights and weekends.
19:09 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
19:10 Speaker 00 And I feel like my hot take is that I feel like if you're actually unemployed, like you probably have more time to be a builder and like to be innovative.
19:15 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
19:16 Speaker 00 You guys like play all this stuff and learn all this stuff. A lot of PMs are trying.
19:19 Anish Acharya? Or maybe being an engineer in the team.
19:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:21 Anish Acharya? I used to be an engineer and I got sort of, I don't know if I got forced to be a PM. Maybe I also perceived PM as like being a little more high status.
19:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
19:27 Anish Acharya? When I joined Google, but then eventually you come around the other side. You're like, this is terrible.
19:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
19:32 Anish Acharya? Like you never really get the satisfaction.
19:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:34 Anish Acharya? Of actually shipping, other than once a quarter when you ship.
19:37 Speaker 00 I mean, the PM skills of talking to users and like trying to figure out what to do, like what's the problem to solve, like those are very important still.
19:42 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
19:42 Speaker 00 And but yeah, you gotta wear multiple hats to it. You gotta go build a thing yourself, go prototype it and get some feedback and then maybe brand engineer along.
19:49 Anish Acharya? How much do you think that everyone has to go as fast as, I mean, like Gary was talking about stimmys and skipping sleep and Gary Tan G stack. I mean, is hey, I mean, is that like the default way that we all need to work? Or do you think there's a trade off for thoughtfulness?
20:04 Speaker 00 I think it's very easy now with all these AI tools, just going like 10 different directions at once.
20:08 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
20:08 Speaker 00 So sometimes you do have to slow down and try to figure out where you want to go.
20:12 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
20:12 Speaker 00 But I also believe that the traditional process where like do annual planning and do all this bullshit, I just feel like that is.
20:17 Anish Acharya? Fully realizing a local, a sort of local maxima. You should go very fast, right? So let's say you kind of hill climb, you get to the bottom of a new local maxima. I think with agents, you should be able to get to the top of that hill extremely fast, right? You have a new insight, build everything around the insight. So it's fully expressed. But then I think to get to the next, the next sort of hill.
20:41 Anish Acharya? Should have like fast and slow. That's probably the future way.
20:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think so. And like you gotta go that random walk, trying to find market fit, which take, takes a while, right?
20:49 Anish Acharya? So this is not, yeah. So we were talking before we started recording about some of the business in a box platforms. Have you looked at them? Do you have a view?
20:57 Speaker 00 I've looked at post, post here that we talked about. I don't know the guy like intentionally.
21:11 Speaker 00 The opposite of AI slot or is it kind of a
21:14 Anish Acharya? I think so. Yes, yes, yes.
21:16 Speaker 00 That's funny. Well, I mean, I have a pretty big public presence, right? So I collect all my shit to it and then, I mean, it definitely gives a good peek into what's possible. But like right now is probably still pretty like early stage. Like it's time to run like see Facebook ads.
21:28 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
21:29 Speaker 00 Why am I running Facebook ads?
21:30 Anish Acharya? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm very excited about it. It does feel like it's a path for more people to build companies.
21:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:37 Anish Acharya? Even if they're single, one person companies. If you think about how competitive it is to build a billion dollar business, like the markets that support it, the number of people trying versus hundred million versus 10 million versus $100,000 TAM.
21:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:49 Anish Acharya? Like maybe there are these pockets all over the country, all over the world, where there are opportunities for $100,000 TAM products.
21:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:57 Anish Acharya? And that would change somebody's life. Now, that's not an enterprise venture backed company, but that's okay.
22:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:01 Anish Acharya? So I hope that whole thesis works because I do think it's a way to get more people to participate.
22:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's my plan for my kids, dude. Like I want them to just build like a bootshot businesses in high school.
22:11 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
22:11 Speaker 00 And they can skip the whole college and corporate life.
22:13 Anish Acharya? Yeah. Well, dude, I think this is for 10 years, there's this moral panic about the kids want to be YouTubers.
22:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:18 Anish Acharya? You're a YouTuber.
22:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:19 Anish Acharya? And in the vein of Mr. Beast, I think the pro case for that actually is that the kids wanted to be entrepreneurs or have agency. And the only channel for people, if they weren't programmers, was creating YouTube videos, at least online.
22:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:31 Anish Acharya? So if you're like an online native generation, you want to create something, you're not a programmer, you make a YouTube show. Now you can make a lot more than that.
22:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, you can build wherever you want.
22:38 Anish Acharya? Exactly.
22:39 Speaker 00 So exactly.
22:40 Anish Acharya? It'd be very exciting.
22:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:41 Anish Acharya? Any other hot takes for us?
22:43 Speaker 00 I'm curious about your thoughts about this, actually. So I feel like a lot of people are saying like agents will interact with your product first, right? And then you see all these great companies like building like APIs and MCPs. But like, how do you think about you being a consumer for a while? So like the consumers, you gotta get the user to come back and use your product, right?
23:02 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
23:02 Speaker 00 But now the user is like, hey, go send the agent to use it. So how do you think about retention and all this basic stuff like how do you or even like brand equity? Because the agent is just like pointing some API.
23:09 Anish Acharya? Yeah, I don't. Okay.
23:20 Anish Acharya? We had to have indirect monetization. Okay, like we just were never charging consumers directly for these products, which is why you got ads and stuff.
23:28 Speaker 00 Ads.
23:30 Anish Acharya? Then just large scale networks and we all obsessed with retention and engagement and whales. And all of these things really mattered because we didn't simply charge people for products. So I think one big thing that's actually really helped in the AI era with that is that consumers are now excited to try new things. They're willing to pay, they're willing to pay a really high price point. There's also consumption revenue in consumer for the first time.
23:50 Speaker 00 Like tokens and stuff.
23:50 Anish Acharya? Yeah, like tokens, your subscription plus your token. So and then the actual like the sort of blessing in disguise is that there are real costs as well. You have these inference costs. So you're like, wow, we have to charge our customer on day one. So I think one thing is that like the business model simplification, I think, will really help with a lot of what you're describing. Two, I think that a lot of the products will have a sort of, it'll have an API interface for your agency to interact with or for transactional sort of rote things.
24:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:18 Anish Acharya? And then it'll have a consumption based interface as well. So you can also imagine like a mobile app where there's like the feed, but then you can kind of turn it over to where the wires are. And you can just ask for things to get done, or you can just see the log of the things that got done.
24:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, maybe people will do both, right?
24:32 Anish Acharya? I mean, you could imagine Credit Karma where we work. Like once in a while, you want to just take a look at your score history and a few other maybe credit card offers. I don't know. I mean.
24:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, if I can get my score with all the kind of credit card offers, I'll definitely do that.
24:42 Anish Acharya? Yeah, 100%, exactly. On the other hand, like sometimes you want to just be like, yo, can you just fix all my stuff? Or what stuff did you fix this week? How much money did I save?
24:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, I got it.
24:50 Anish Acharya? Yeah.
24:50 Speaker 00 It's definitely interesting. Yeah.
24:52 Anish Acharya? But look, I also just think the whole agent stack is emerging. Identity, payments, marketing. We don't even see a live versus MCP. And like, all of these are really new things. And I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.
25:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a whole new world. And like in 2025, I thought agents was overhyped, but now I think it's really kind of coming.
25:11 Anish Acharya? Me too. I know. It's just the word is frustrating because it gets so overloaded.
25:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's like workflows, like all this kind of shit.
25:16 Anish Acharya? Totally. I've been trying to just say, can we just say like model in a loop?
25:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Model that you're closing a loop. That's the best definition. Yeah, yeah.
25:23 Anish Acharya? But nobody likes to hear that. It's agents is much flashier.
25:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's flashier. My, my hope is that all this stuff's like, a lot of people think we're going to lose our jobs. It was probably what would happen at some point, but I hope all this stuff makes, just makes the human work more fun. Like your job's more fun.
25:37 Anish Acharya? Dude, I don't think we're all going to lose our jobs. Like, I really think that, and we see this a lot of companies. So we look at a ton of companies and we've seen two different buckets. So one bucket is, hey, we dramatically increased productivity for a person or a team. We see this in like recruiting, but we couldn't do 100% of the job. So we could do the phone screen, but we couldn't obviously show the candidate around the office. Or we could do the phone screen and we could answer all the questions about the company. And we could even do the like comp negotiation, but we couldn't do the onboarding.
26:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:05 Anish Acharya? The other style of company, which we see, which is maybe a Decagon, right? Or a Happy Robot is, hey, we did 100% of a job like customer support. The customer called in, they had a question, we hopefully resolved their query and then that's it. And that is 100% automated. I'd say that second group where you have 100% automation of a job function is really rare. Almost every AI product, AI native X or Y we see is able to provide dramatic lift, but it's not able to do 100%.
26:30 Speaker 00 So the last 10% is still these humans.
26:32 Anish Acharya? Yeah, it's still, it's today, anyway, it's still humans that do that stuff. And it's interesting too, because the buyer looks at that as software, as expensive software. Whereas in the case of something like a Happy Robot, DocuGon Sierra, they look at it as like cheap labor. So I do think there's a different buyer mindset, but because there's been this difficulty of getting to 100% automation, I think a lot of the efficiency gain shows up in just a different way, probably not less jobs. Maybe we get like the European style four day work week, maybe companies get like twice as productive. I have no idea.
27:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, but you don't think that, I feel like there is going to be a transition from like these like 10,000 plus people companies, laying a lot of people off to hopefully like more smaller companies like solopreneurs and stuff like that.
27:11 Anish Acharya? I think, yes, I think that the sort of shape of the economy is going to change, like the amount of concentration, but I just don't think there's going to be less jobs. I think human ambition has no ceiling. Human desire has no ceiling. And just read any mildly interesting science fiction book, there's no way this is the peak expression of all the stuff that we want and we need, and we're going to convince ourselves and all the new things that you read about every day is these luxuries, peptides. And everybody's going to have all of that stuff and then want even more.
27:37 Speaker 00 You know, dude, I saw Riga tweet about this, like someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now or something like that. Yeah, so maybe you lost your job, but like now you have to do your own thing.
27:46 Anish Acharya? Yeah, 100% and have a shot at actually achieving it.
27:48 Speaker 00 Cool.
27:49 Anish Acharya? Well, awesome, man. Maybe that's a good positive note to end on.
27:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a good note.
27:53 Anish Acharya? Cool.
27:53 Speaker 00 Good seeing you, dude.
27:53 Anish Acharya? Thanks, Peter.
27:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, thanks for having me.
27:57 Erik Torenberg? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
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