Network Effects, AI Costs, and the Future of Consumer Investing with Anish Acharya on The Kevin Rose Show

This episode originally aired on The Kevin Rose Show. Kevin Rose speaks with Anish Acharya, general partner at a16z, about how AI is rewriting the rules of consumer software, the defensibility of network effects in a world where anyone can spin up an app in 48 hours, and why the real threat to consumer founders may be the cost of inference, not competition. They also discuss model pricing, the future of the four-day work week, and peptides.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anish Acharya?

  The idea guys are sort of having a moment. In fact, it's funny, like, I'm like looking for new ideas to work on. You know, in the old days, somebody would give you their app idea and you'd be like, "Oh, here we go again." And now I'm like, "Cool, how about I build it for you?"

• 0:11Speaker 01

  What has changed for me is, you know, someone that dropped out of computer science because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else. I always had the creative ideas, but my ADHD was too bad that I just couldn't remember all the syntax and I was like thumbing through manuals back in the day and [BLEEP], like, you know, trying to like, I had like the C++ bible or whatever they called it, you know?

• 0:29Anish Acharya?

  When you're a child, nobody tells you, "Kevin, you're bad at drawing or you're good at painting." The thing that I think we need more than UBI if we ever get to that place is universal basic purpose. And the way you actually get the French Revolution is less that people don't have enough money, that's part of it, and more that people don't have something important to work on. Like, everybody's got to feel like they're on a hero's journey.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I was talking to my wife and I was like, "We're getting into a lot of arguments about X, Y, and Z. What if we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us, that understands what we like, how much we care about certain things, and then we just have our models go and like duke it out?" And she looks at me and she's like, "This is one of the worst ideas ever." Yeah, I'm just like, "Shit."

• 1:08Erik Torenberg?

  This episode originally aired on the Kevin Rose Show. When anyone can build a Slack competitor in a weekend, what actually makes a consumer startup worth back it? For decades, software moats meant engineering effort. When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were hand coding Instagram's filters, copying them cost you months. That window is now 48 hours. But Anish argues the moat was never really the code. When Hipstomatic and a dozen others launched alongside Instagram, it still wasn't obvious which would run away, until it was too late. That pattern may hold, but the cost structure has shifted. One founder told Anish he'd need $25 million just to reach 100,000 monthly actives, because

• 1:53Erik Torenberg?

  AI inference isn't free. So the real tension isn't whether great consumer products get built, it's whether venture economics can survive a world where the best companies skip early rounds altogether. Kevin Rose speaks with Anish Acharya, general partner at A16Z focused on consumer investing.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Anish, we're back.

• 2:15Anish Acharya?

  Nothing has changed at all, so I don't know what we're gonna talk about.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. How long ago did we do that episode together?

• 2:20Anish Acharya?

  Four or five months.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  And everything has changed.

• 2:22Anish Acharya?

  That's so amazing.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Dude, great to have you. Real quick primer for everyone, your partner, general partner Andreessen Horowitz.

• 2:29Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  He focused primarily on consumer investing.

• 2:31Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Anything else to mention on that front?

• 2:34Anish Acharya?

  I mean, I focus on consumer, but I'm a programmer. I mean, I grew up the same way that you grew up.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  We worked at Google together.

• 2:39Anish Acharya?

  We worked at Google together, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've got consumers, my area of investment focus, but I've got a ton of personal interests outside of that.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Love it. All right, we got lots to talk about. I figure this would be like fun little variety show, cover all the things, AI.

• 2:51Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get into this.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Get this out fast, get people, you know, thinking about what's coming. You've got a list, I've got a list. You wanna start first?

• 2:59Anish Acharya?

  Well, I wanna hear more about what you've been working on, because I experienced one of your products this morning. You've been obsessed with the models. You're just like, you can't stop programming.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07Anish Acharya?

  I mean, tell me what you're working on, and then tell me how much you think it's real productivity versus productivity porn.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I'd be curious to see how you define productivity porn, but in terms of... What has changed for me is, you know, someone that dropped out of computer science because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else. I always had the creative ideas, but my ADHD was too bad that I just couldn't remember all the syntax. And I was like thumbing through manuals back in the day and shit, like, you know, trying to like... I had like the C++ Bible or whatever they called it, you know? And so now there's none of that. And I finally realized that six months ago, I was going in manually looking at the code and thinking to myself like, "Oh, I should just at least look at it to make sure I kinda see what it's doing, so I understand best practices." And now I just realize I don't ever have to look at code again.

• 3:56Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Because the next, it doesn't matter what bugs I'm creating right now. If I discover them, I can squash them, and the next model's gonna be better and it'll rewrite any bad functions or anything that I have going on.

• 4:06Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  There is... There is a world that what's so weird right now is you're taking a look at all these companies that are SaaS businesses. And they're realizing that the moat is no longer there. Like I can spin up anything, my own personal CRM app, Slack competitor.

• 4:23Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Anything that is, uh, has definable outcomes for software. You know, I'm not making genie editing software, but anything like a SaaS like business, very easy to replicate. It's easy to say, I want to go build my own workout app, right? And like little things like that. Are those businesses? No. But like the stuff I'm working on is, is personal passionate areas where I believe, uh, I want to put my own time and attention. And for me, I've always cared about social news, you know, starting to dig back in the day. And I believe that we are entering into a really interesting time where information is going to be platform and app agnostic, so that it should be able to traverse and meet you where you're at.

• 5:08Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So if you care about, you know, like the latest AI coding tools, I'm just going to pick that up. If you want it in a podcast form when you're coming into work, custom tailored to you. If you want it in a video form that you tune into Apple TV app and it says, good morning, Anish, and it welcomes you by two hosts that you want.

• 5:25Anish Acharya?

  Yep.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  If you want it in a daily newsletter, if you want it inside of your Claude code experience.

• 5:29Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Or your Claude cowork experience. If you want it in your obsidian, so there's like a little markdown file that you read every day.

• 5:36Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. It is just going to, because all the connective tissue is finally happening. Information can freely flow amongst these different, uh, diverse platforms, which I think is beautiful and I'm super excited about.

• 5:48Anish Acharya?

  You know, it's so interesting. So the Obsidian founder is one of the most interesting people to follow on X.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Nice guy, too.

• 5:53Anish Acharya?

  Oh, really? I haven't met him. Yeah. Kipano, right?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:56Anish Acharya?

  So he's got this whole theory of how apps are ephemeral. Sort of apps and intelligence are these ephemeral things, but files are permanent. And there's something very elegant and beautiful, and it sort of speaks to what you're describing, which is a file is just the basic unit of information. And then can it get expressed as a video, as a pod, as all of these different things?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:14Anish Acharya?

  And the app with which you consume this information may actually change from time to time. So I don't know if that's right, but something about that direction feels spiritually interesting.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, for me, what I'm doing is when I work with coworker or work with any of these apps, I'm always saying, write this in markdown.

• 6:28Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And I want it in markdown because markdowns for me is kind of like the text, basic. Lowest atomic unit of what is possible and portable. You know, and so I know in the future, anything will be able to ingest markdown with ease.

• 6:41Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And so for me, that's, that's kind of how I'm thinking about my file structure of all things.

• 6:45Anish Acharya?

  You know, it's interesting, if you hear Mark talk about a bunch of the design choices they made when they were designing Netscape. One of the most controversial choices they made with HTTP was actually have it be plain text on the wire. Because at the time, it was like, well, that's not secure, that's not safe, that's dangerous. How can you just have plain text on the wire? So all the wire protocols were encrypted and that was considered the best practice. And I think Mark and Ben and the team said, let's actually just make it plain text. It'll be easier to work with, easier to debug. And that turned out to be a brilliant design decision because it drove a ton of HTTP adoption. So there's something that sort of mirrors that in what we're seeing right now.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 7:20Anish Acharya?

  All these file formats, all the cloud storage, like it's just too much heaviness. And we're in this moment of beautiful interoperability. You know, mashable, all the things that you guys aspired to in the late 2000s.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:31Anish Acharya?

  It never really came to fruition and now we're getting it.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's something about having this, like if I put something inside the database right now.

• 7:41Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Kind of not locked in there because I could tell any AI agent to go and read the tables and understand the schema and like have it. But for me, I just want ultimate flexibility.

• 7:51Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  And the context windows are big enough and search is decent enough. And we see the compound engineering and some of these other protocols where markdown works just fine for now.

• 7:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  It depends, obviously, if you need to do large data sets, we need to do vector embeddings and you need to actually find similar documents. Like there's other bigger tools and bigger hammers to use in those cases.

• 8:09Anish Acharya?

  Potentially, but I'd say that those are the raw information should be stored in the most interoperable fashion possible. So just, I mean, one of the great things about OpenClaw is that all the memories are just flat files, right? They're markdown files, I believe. So now you've got a memory file per day, plus you've got persistent memory, which is like preferences and things that don't change about you.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:27Anish Acharya?

  And it just means you can use it in a thousand different ways. You can try different memory architectures.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:32Anish Acharya?

  You just, your information is yours in a way that it hasn't been for 15 or 20 years.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you an OpenClaw user?

• 8:39Anish Acharya?

  So I love OpenClaw. It's very, very interesting. I guess I haven't been as at the edge of OpenClaw as others. I'm just spending so much more time in Claude code and Codex.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:48Anish Acharya?

  For some reason, it's just that form of creative direction is so much more satisfying to me than the kind of productivity 10x you get from OpenClaw. It's incredible, incredibly important and really cool architecturally. I'm just not as obsessed with it as, you know, Chris and some of our other friends.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:03Anish Acharya?

  How about you?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I'm in the same boat where I obviously installed it. I got a Mac Mini like everybody else did. I wanted to start playing with it and a little hesitant in the sense that I have sensitive data that I don't want out there. So I created all new accounts and all that.

• 9:15Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, same.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I have yet to see the one use case where someone has come to me and be like, ah, this is the game changer for me. You know, like it does this. And I'm like, wow, I want to do X. Like, that sounds awesome.

• 9:28Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And oftentimes there's little tiny things, little tiny productivity boosts here or there. And then sometimes I got one friend that is calling in with little updates and stuff and he can talk to it on the speakerphone.

• 9:38Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  And those are fantastic demos. They're fun.

• 9:42Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  But I just don't see yet, and granted it's early days, but I like directionally, I think it's right. I think we're going to have a personal assistant likely just built into the larger models.

• 9:52Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That just has their own storage. I mean, we're seeing this now with these agents that Anthropic rolled out. They now have their own storage.

• 9:59Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And own containers where they can keep these things over and make them durable over long periods of time.

• 10:04Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, cloud agents.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, cloud agents, yeah.

• 10:06Anish Acharya?

  I mean, I think a lot of the magic of OpenClaw is just the ergonomics of it. And I'll give you a specific example. So when you use a website or a mobile app, you obviously expect it to be perfectly synchronous. Like you press a button, there's an immediate response. That's your user expectation from 20 years of using apps. When you actually text someone, you don't expect me to reply right away. You're like, oh, Nish might reply in five minutes or it might take him two hours or whatever. The magic of OpenClaw, I think, is because it's in a mobile messaging channel, your sort of subtle expectation is it won't reply right away. So it has to go off and do something more ambitious. It can do it without feeling like this delayed experience. The other way that shows up, if you look at the model switching settings in ChatGPT, for example, It's trying to find this balance between like instant and deep thinking.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:50Anish Acharya?

  Which is a little bit of a user expectation contour that they're trying to meet. Versus just being like, hey, I'm gonna go do some stuff and I'll make the trade offs and I'll let you know when I'm ready.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:00Anish Acharya?

  And Open Cloud does that really well. So I don't know that there's any one thing. It's just the whole way it's put together. I think is very elegant.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Back to that, your original question though, around, you know, this coding, what we're up to, what we're building.

• 11:12Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  You're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs that, and you called it, what would you call something porn?

• 11:17Anish Acharya?

  Productivity porn.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Productivity porn. And it's because everyone, you, me, everyone in this room actually.

• 11:23Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Has produced some type of application now.

• 11:26Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Some of that is trash.

• 11:28Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Some of that it's gonna be awesome.

• 11:30Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I don't know how much of it is defensible.

• 11:33Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So as someone is doing consumer investing.

• 11:36Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Like what scares you?

• 11:39Anish Acharya?

  Well, first of all, I think that we need to, this whole mindset about defensibility and modes, and it all feels so heavy. Like there's this beautiful creative direction in what you described and how you don't have to thumb through manuals. And now the cost of doing something that fails is zero, right?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:55Anish Acharya?

  So you get to try every idea and there's so much information in exploration. So I say productivity porn to be provocative, but I don't actually think it's that. I think that we have this new way of learning, which is just trying things and you know, the idea guys are sort of having a moment. In fact, it's funny, like I'm like looking for new ideas to work on. You know, in the old days, somebody would give you their app idea and you'd be like, oh, here we go again. And now I'm like, cool, how about I build it for you?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:20Anish Acharya?

  So I think there's this beautiful exploration that we're seeing that's never been possible before and there's a lot of value in that. And then when it comes to consumer products, I still think that consumer modes are as good as gold, right? Things like network effects, they're not trivially reproducible by models. Even if you can reproduce a software, this is what like, it's not like Instagram has got like a software mode.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yes, but okay, so that the incumbents are locked down. That's fine.

• 12:43Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm not moving from Instagram anytime soon. But when you're sitting there and you see a new consumer product.

• 12:50Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  You know, five years ago.

• 12:51Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  And you're like, damn, that's a good idea.

• 12:53Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  You write a check for $10 million, you're better than an entrepreneur, you wait for the next five to seven years and you see what happens, right?

• 12:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Now knowing that, damn, that's a good idea, could be replicated by anyone else if it is a good idea.

• 13:05Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Does that freak you out at all?

• 13:07Anish Acharya?

  I don't think so, Kevin, because even in 10 years ago, the good ideas weren't obviously good at the time. Like, what Systrom was up to at Instagram wasn't an obviously good idea until the network really started to take. And then it was too late to reproduce the software. So I don't think that the moat has ever been, it's like really hard to reproduce the software. I think the moat is in part, every consumer idea is embarrassing to work on until it's obvious. You know, it's like, it seems trivial. It doesn't sound important. VCs don't know what you're talking about. Your family doesn't know why you're working on it.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:37Anish Acharya?

  You just feel this pull in a direction. And ideally, when it works, the network runs away before people can replicate it.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  But we live in an information, when in a time where information is propagated like instantaneous, right?

• 13:50Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And so an open clock comes out, or whatever they call it when they first launched, I don't remember now. And you see 30 different clones of it, right? And then all of a sudden, everyone's moving in different directions. And I just feel like that wasn't the case. It wasn't as easy to reproduce something like that.

• 14:07Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  When you see a hit than it is today. The time has shrunk dramatically. Like, for example, if I launched Instagram today.

• 14:14Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I remember when, he goes by Mike now, but back then, they went by Mikey Krieger.

• 14:19Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  And Kevin, we're working on this. And, you know, it took them, I remember talking to them about developing the filters.

• 14:26Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  The basic filters for Instagram. That was real work.

• 14:29Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Real engineering effort, right?

• 14:30Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And so even if you saw Instagram started to hit escape velocity, if you were a startup, you had to go try and copy them and catch up to them.

• 14:38Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  It was a few months of work.

• 14:40Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Now it might be 48 hours of work, you know?

• 14:43Anish Acharya?

  Yes, though even at the time, there was so much noise in the ecosystem, right? There was Bourbon, later Instagram, there was Hipstamatic, there was a dozen apps that all did roughly the same thing. And it wasn't clear why Insta was special until it was clear in retrospect. So I don't know. I think that if you were to build Insta today, it would still be non-obvious until it was. Obvious in a way that it was too late.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Right. That's fair, because there's lots of things, lots of examples today of like Wordle, for example.

• 15:11Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  You and I could clone that within 20 minutes.

• 15:13Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It's like, but it's not, we're not going to take over Wordle because they have that built in base.

• 15:17Anish Acharya?

  Even OpenClaw, right, which was originally called Quad, Quadbot, I think.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Quadbot, yeah.

• 15:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, Quadbot. So even though there's been a thousand forks of it, it's literally open source. OpenClaw itself still dominates conversation.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:29Anish Acharya?

  Right? We're not talking about the 10 OpenClaws that have equal market share. We're talking about OpenClaw.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:34Anish Acharya?

  So there are these compounding effects that are sometimes, you know, less intellectually satisfying than network effects, software modes, whatever.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Anish Acharya?

  The thing I worry the most about with consumer software is that the costs are too high to have a free model, really for very long. Right? I was talking to Signal, who's launching a product in the next couple of weeks, a consumer product, and he was saying, hey dude, I need to raise like $25 million if I want to have 100,000 Mous. You know, and by the way, the money will go quickly. So the fact that you don't have this sort of zero marginal cost of distribution benefit, which has really advantaged consumer founders in the past, I think is a major drag on the ability of consumers to scale, consumer founders to scale things to a lot of people.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So let's talk about some of the actual models and how people are building these things. It seems, and you guys are investors in pretty much all the bigs, right? Like Anthropic and OpenAI. Are you in all the major model providers?

• 16:28Anish Acharya?

  We're not in all of them, but we're in Mistral, we're in OpenAI.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Anthropic or no?

• 16:33Anish Acharya?

  We're not in Anthropic.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:34Anish Acharya?

  No.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  So when you think about what's happening with the moment that Anthropic is happening right now.

• 16:39Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And you have OpenAI, which has been largely, I mean, not totally quiet, but they're cooking.

• 16:45Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 16:45Anish Acharya?

  Definitely cooking.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  What's, what, obviously this isn't winner take all, or is it? If someone hits escape velocity?

• 16:51Anish Acharya?

  Yeah. Well, I think it's, you know, it's easy to over rotate on some of the conversations on X. If you sort of zoom out and you look at OpenAI, first of all, they've got, I don't know, 950 million weekly actives. Like it's the biggest AI consumer product by many orders of magnitude. It really is. And it's the first product to hit that kind of scale in that short of a time period in the history of technology.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:14Anish Acharya?

  So they've got a sort of unassailable advantage in consumer. I think that's one.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:18Anish Acharya?

  And then if you just look at the model quality, I think we both experienced this, like the Codex models are excellent. I think the Codex harness is a little behind Claude code.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:27Anish Acharya?

  And I hope they'll fix that. But I think that that's like, that's like a hill climb that they can do. On model quality, they're right there. And we're hearing that the new OpenAI model, which is going to hopefully come in the next few weeks, will be just as good as the sort of super-secret, you know, Mipos model that's too dangerous to release.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Do you buy that, too dangerous to release?

• 17:45Anish Acharya?

  I don't buy it. I mean, maybe, but look, I think that if you actually have a model like that, there's like four independent things that I think about. So first of all, let's even assume that it's six months ahead of our geopolitical rivals. The first thing you probably do is use it for offensive capabilities, right? To hack others. The second thing you do is to lock down all your defenses.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Anish Acharya?

  Exactly. I think the third question, which Mark pointed out, and I think Strategory wrote about this first, is, do they even have the compute for it? Like, it might just be that they have a GPU shortage, which is also why they sort of nerfed Opus 4.6. I don't know if you followed this. They chucked down the default thinking level from high to medium. And people are complaining that it's nerfed. It's nerfed because they may be trying to free up GPU capacity. So it may be an infrared problem. And the last bit is just like the aura farming of them having a model that's too dangerous for the world to handle.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 18:34Anish Acharya?

  Like, how can you have better marketing than that?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  There's no better marketing than that.

• 18:36Anish Acharya?

  So it's unclear to me that it's actually too dangerous. There are a lot of other reasons why they might actually be holding it back.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  There are rumors that they haven't coded anything internally in like, since January, I believe.

• 18:46Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Do you buy that?

• 18:48Anish Acharya?

  I don't, I mean, Boris has said it a few times. Like, we don't write any code on Claude Code. Like, Claude Code writes Claude Code.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:53Anish Acharya?

  So I do buy it, and like, how can that not be true? It's your and I lived experience as well, right?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I wonder if you have a model of that capabilities, if you aren't, like, one of the things I've been really impressed about with Anthropic is just their, the rate of shipping. It's like, every freaking week, something new drops.

• 19:08Anish Acharya?

  Every day, dude, multiple things, yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And so you have to imagine, if you're the first one to have the model that is, let's just call it 30, 40% better than what's out there today.

• 19:16Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  You have to be like, okay, let's make our tools like dope as hell, as fast as possible.

• 19:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, of course, yes.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  So you turn it internally.

• 19:23Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  And get all that tooling and just ship. It feels like that's what's happening because of the rate of shipping.

• 19:30Anish Acharya?

  You're an OpenAI investor. I think you're an Anthropic investor as well. Okay, so what's your kind of view? I guess you're the most even-handed, having been in both.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that OpenAI, listen, they have the, it's hard to count anyone out at this point. Because, you know, even Google, they've got their, they've got their tensor processing units, their self-training model. They've been eerily quiet and like, those folks are just sharp as hell. Like, don't fuck with Google. Like, they're gonna come back and get you. So I just, I have a hard time believing there's gonna be, at least from someone that's doing software engineering with the models, an allegiance to anyone. Like, I will go to ChatGPT tomorrow or Gemini if it's a better model. I don't care. Like, my credit card just transfers to whatever model and then it starts working again, right?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  So on the consumer side, you know, when I talk to family members and people that aren't deep in tech like we are, it's all ChatGPT. Because that is the household name.

• 20:27Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And I think it does everything that they want it to do. And it's not like they're seeing anything where like, oh, the, you know, that cowork feature from Claude is so good. Like, they don't realize that yet.

• 20:39Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You mean, they're not using remote control on code?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. They're not connecting their phone and leaving their laptop open.

• 20:46Anish Acharya?

  It's so, Karpati talked about this this week and it's so funny because he's like, look, the people who have used ChatGPT in a somewhat cursory way, they're like, I don't know about this AI thing. Maybe it's overhyped. Like, you know, maybe the Instagram audience.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:59Anish Acharya?

  They sort of don't quite get it. So I think it's like, and for the ones of us who are really deep and we're using it to make software and we're seeing all the model progress.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:07Anish Acharya?

  And we're not talking to each other.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:09Anish Acharya?

  You know?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, every time I talk to someone that's not in this space, I try to like red pill them and I sit them down. And I said, let me show you what this can do for you.

• 21:18Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And then within 20 minutes, they're like, oh, my God, I need to be spending more time here.

• 21:23Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  But it is a lift to get people up to that. I think it's a multi-year lift. We live in a world where we're trying everything, but the average consumer is gonna try a couple new things per year, you know?

• 21:33Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  So it's interesting. What about model pricing? Like, the max, that we're seeing these max plans for $200 and we eat all the credits and all of a sudden we're out of credits and people are complaining about that, like.

• 21:46Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Do we see a $10,000 plan? Do we see a $5,000 plan?

• 21:51Anish Acharya?

  I think at Barbell, so I think I'd love your view on this, but it feels like the most powerful models are going to be more expensive than ever. And yet, the price of a token on GPT-4O is down 100x since the model was released. And what was that, 18 months ago? And when GPT-4O was released, it was this incredibly cutting edge. It had this beautiful personality. Like, it seemed inconceivable that it would be cheap. And now, it's very inexpensive on a per-token basis. Plus, you have open source, right? So it feels like there'll be inflationary effects on the edge models, and maybe they'll even be unavailable as APIs. And there'll be huge deflationary effects on everything that's not cutting edge.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:26Anish Acharya?

  What do you think?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's, listen, like, even when Google announced these models that now run on phones, on-device, there are so many instances where a lighter-weight model will do most of what you need done.

• 22:40Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  And so, I love that that exists, because there is a ton of things that I'm building right now, which are kind of like backfill and data kind of fetching, and like, just very non-reasoning tasks.

• 22:52Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  That six months ago, a year ago, would have cost me thousands of dollars to do what I'm doing. And now, I'm like, oh, that was $12, you know? So I do love that that is happening. I think that the API pricing makes sense. The weird thing for me is, I believe there will be a higher tier, we're already starting to see this, where you can pay per pull request and pay Anthropic to review it with a better, more finely tuned model.

• 23:20Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  For those bug squashing. It is a little bit weird. It is a little bit that Spider-Man point in Spider-Man situation, where like, I coded it for you, but I'm also gonna fix the bugs for you.

• 23:29Anish Acharya?

  For like $12 a bug?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the, so is the, um, OpenAI is, security stuff is actually quite good as well. It's kind of a bunch of vulnerabilities I would have never found.

• 23:38Anish Acharya?

  Amazing.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So, um, yeah, I don't know. But what's, uh, what's up on your?

• 23:42Anish Acharya?

  Well, so actually, let me ask you a related question, though. When you think about your budget, I'm assuming that you don't have, like, a ceiling on how much you spend on the models.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:49Anish Acharya?

  But how much if you had to make a trade-off, would you trade off against, say, your entertainment budget? Like, would you skip a movie or a bottle of wine because you wanted to spend the money on tokens?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. Well, but I'm building towards something.

• 24:00Anish Acharya?

  Are you, though? How many of your things are important and have to be durable versus are satisfying to work on?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Uh, 80% are important and durable.

• 24:08Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  And the other 20% are just for fun, just cause like I just wanna see it exist.

• 24:12Anish Acharya?

  Do you know which is which at the outset?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:13Anish Acharya?

  Okay, okay.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Well, largely because like, you know, I stepped back from my venture role at three ventures or my investing role there and cause it's too fun to build right now.

• 24:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Like, why not build? And so when I'm tackling a bigger idea, the, the, the hope is that hundreds of thousands of people will use said product at the end of the day.

• 24:30Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  And if it is not that, then it's just gonna be a little tiny thing that I think should exist and I'll put a little bit of time and effort into it. And if there's a thousand people that love it, like, God bless. Like, at the end of the day, I think we, we, I don't wanna optimize for just financial outcome or usage.

• 24:47Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I wanna optimize for would I, do I enjoy doing this? Do I enjoy building this product? You know, I've seen some of your vibe coded stuff. It is largely because you enjoy doing that, right?

• 24:58Anish Acharya?

  It is fun to work on. And that's why I think your language is interesting. You didn't say it's too important of a time. You said it's too fun of a time.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:04Anish Acharya?

  Right? So there's so much beauty in the process right now. And I, and that's why I think that it will eat into what would otherwise be called entertainment budgets. Because there's just, we're discovering this part of ourselves that has been asleep.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:15Anish Acharya?

  Both as technologists, but even as humans, right? Like, when you're a child, nobody tells you, Kevin, you're bad at drawing or you're good at painting.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:22Anish Acharya?

  Whatever. You're actually just good at anything you're interested in. And we're able to get back to that place again for the first time in a long time.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  I know. And it meets you where you're at, too, which is so awesome. Like, there's the number of things that I now know versus a year ago in terms of like, how to fix like faucets and shit. And like the stuff where I'm pointing, oh, a chat GPT at, I turn on video mode. I'm like, hey, how do I do this? What does this mean?

• 25:43Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And like, I'm up leveling my knowledge across an entire spectrum of different things.

• 25:47Anish Acharya?

  I've gotta tell you this crazy story. So there's a guy that we met, came in and presented to us yesterday named Mike. So Mike is a personal injury attorney who won the Global Anthropic Claude Code Hackathon, okay?

• 25:58Anish Acharya?

  So he started using Claude code to solve a bunch of his problems because he's running, he's like a startup guy, sort of running a startup law firm, and he couldn't afford a paralegal. So he used Claude code to basically start coding a bunch of, you know, things that would otherwise he'd have to hire someone for. And then he went so deep in the tooling. He came in, he showed us the software he's built. It's extraordinary. It's like what a whole venture-backed SaaS company would otherwise do. He's so deep in it. He's using Whisperflow. He's talking about slash commands. He's like, okay, I've got a slash loop that's always looking for security fixes. And this is not the guy you'd expect.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 26:32Anish Acharya?

  He's like a jujitsu, square jawed, sort of personal injury attorney.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:36Anish Acharya?

  So I think there's just, this is my white pill. There's gonna be so many beautiful stories of like, digital homesteading or something, where these unexpected people build these really incredible things based on personal need or interest.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think this is where, I had a company in a similar vein where they were spending, uh, something like 80K a month on SaaS subscriptions. And the founder was like, well, I'm good enough to where I can build this in-house. Kind of what I want, a little bit more custom tailored to me. Took him about a month and a half, and then he just complete that, cut that entire SaaS budget out.

• 27:10Anish Acharya?

  So here's my only counterpoint on the kind of SaaS is over thing, which is, yes, conceptually, maybe you could build a CRM, but have you built a CRM?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  I have, actually.

• 27:18Anish Acharya?

  Really? Jesus, alright, fine. Well, I guess SaaS is over then. I was going to say, it's so fucking boring to work on all that software. Like, does anyone really wanna build?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I wanted a really simple personal CRM, so I just built it.

• 27:30Anish Acharya?

  That was a bad example. Okay, fine, fine, fine. Okay, how about payroll? Have you built payroll?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  No, no. Richard has over there. He just built some tax accounting software the other day.

• 27:39Anish Acharya?

  Richard, come on, man.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I know. Alright, so what else is on your list? Cause I know you had some really spicy, fun topics to get into.

• 27:47Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, dude, well, I wanted to actually get your take on, you know, obviously, there's this stuff that happened with Sam's house. There was a bunch of attacks on his house, which is, you know, super tragic, cause whatever you think of AI politically, like, you know, he's a human running a company who has the best of intentions. What's your kind of view on the conversation we're having as a society about this new technology?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  I like how OpenAI came out and said, we're gonna have to heavily tax us and provide some type of safety net fund. And we have to work that into the legislation at some point so that when we do displace all these jobs, which it is coming, in my belief, you know, maybe five, seven, 10 years from now, but I believe that we're gonna have to have some of that flow back to the public in some way.

• 28:32Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I think when traditionally, and of course, correct people, I'm not answering your question correctly, but traditionally, when we talked about, you know, 10 years ago, universal basic income, I was like, well, how are they gonna fund that? Like, are we just gonna like print money to give people money? And now, it's clear to me that if the bigs continue to dominate and disrupt and just crush jobs across every single vertical.

• 28:57Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  We're gonna need some way for those profits to flow back into everyday consumers so they are just everyday humans, so that they can live and thrive in a world where they might have been displaced from a job loss.

• 29:11Anish Acharya?

  You know, it's interesting. So, one of my good friends is an executive at Google, and, you know, I talked to him about this and said, hey, how much are you guys actually laying off people? Because you're obviously, you know, you're at the edge of the new models, plus you have all the TPUs, so presumably they have all the tokens that they want and need internally. And he said, look, we actually haven't laid off anyone, we're just ripping through our backlog. So, we're doing like 100x more than we ever did before. So, it's interesting, the kind of point, a lot of people have made this point on like, hey, where are all the jobs gonna be? But I think there's no ceiling on human desire, there's no ceiling on company ambition, and so far, we're seeing it as like companies doing more versus, hey, let's do the same amount with less people.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:50Anish Acharya?

  So, we'll have to see. I also think on the UBI point, like, the thing that I think we need more than UBI, if we ever get to that place, is universal basic purpose. And the way you actually get the French Revolution is less that people don't have enough money, that's a part of it, and more that people don't have something important to work on. Like, everybody's gotta feel like they're on a hero's journey.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:09Anish Acharya?

  And even if it's a little, I mean, look, arguably, we both have fake jobs right now, so even if it's a little bit contrived, I think that we have to make sure people have a sense of purpose in addition to the means to kind of go achieve it.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Where do you think that's gonna come from?

• 30:21Anish Acharya?

  Again, I think there's no ceiling on human desire. I think people are gonna want vacation homes on Mars. I think people are going to like, you know, companies are gonna be doing more ambitious things. We're gonna have 100x more skyscrapers. Like, the history of all technology is it increases productivity and it also increases human desire. You've heard this thing of like luxuries become commodities, right? Therapy was considered a weird luxury 50 years ago.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:43Anish Acharya?

  Now, therapy is an expectation.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:46Anish Acharya?

  Right? With Instagram culture, so many, bottle service used to be something that was unheard of 20 years ago.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:50Anish Acharya?

  And now, it's only bottle service. Nobody wants to go to the club unless they're getting bottle service. So, I just think we're underestimating how much human desire will continue to grow.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, flying was a great example of like, people used to get dressed up and put ties on and suits on just for their flight because it was such a luxurious thing to have happen.

• 31:05Anish Acharya?

  I wouldn't mind if we went back to that.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:07Anish Acharya?

  I'm big on manners. But yes, exactly. So, I don't know that, uh, I don't know that it's like the end of jobs. And, you know, the other, the other thing, I'd love your take on this, since I know you're big in meditation and sort of self-awareness, is it feels like this technology is a tool to explore our emotional, spiritual self in a way that no technology ever has been. Like, the fact that you can talk to it like a human and you can explore things and you can get into flow state when you're programming. It has all of these attributes that are just so different from, you know, spreadsheets and word processors and even the creative tools of the past, which were very point and click.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:42Anish Acharya?

  Do you think that's overstating the case? I mean, what's your take as a Zen practitioner?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I, I, listen, I think that, um, the one thing that's exciting to me, well, two things. I, I, certainly, human connection, real friendships, spending time together. If we can have more time to do those types of activities.

• 32:00Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And, and we do lean into that versus just being hooked on our phones.

• 32:03Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I think it will lead to better and stronger emotional states, better family units at home, like a whole slew of benefits from, from that side. There are certain pieces that, you know, I'm not gonna want a digital meditation instructor in terms of like, you know, I want a real human teaching me. It might come in digital form.

• 32:22Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  But I want a real human that's behind that, not just some AI. Therapy, maybe not so much. Maybe I do like the idea of having a digital therapist. We'll, we'll see. Um, so, it's not all doom and gloom. I hope that we start to shift to celebrating craft and finding, uh, and celebrating that...

• 32:45Speaker 01

  If you find a niche that you are into,

• 32:47Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Then, then, and you're the best at that particular thing, that we can hopefully, you know, put some value behind that. And Japan is quite good at this.

• 32:56Anish Acharya?

  I mean, they've done it for 700 years, right?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  You find these small little artisans.

• 33:00Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  That are the best. And there are people, like I've gone to coffee shops in Tokyo where it's like one guy doing aged coffee beans. And there's like a line down the street to get in.

• 33:09Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  And it's just like, he doesn't want to become a billionaire.

• 33:12Anish Acharya?

  Isn't that beautiful?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  He's just happy to do this thing that he's, found this very small little niche that people love.

• 33:17Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  You know, I hope there's more of that.

• 33:19Anish Acharya?

  What's your version of that?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Oh, probably Japanese woodworking, a little bit more meditation.

• 33:25Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  More time with friends and family.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Getting off of technology, I found that like I need breaks. Like it's, we mentioned how it is so fun to do coding right now.

• 33:37Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And because it is so fun, I can literally wake up and kind of like out of my trance of coding and be like, wow, I've been on the computer for 11 hours today.

• 33:46Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel like 11 hours.

• 33:47Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  But that can't be healthy, right? So I just need to figure out what is that balance? Am I really truly finding the time to hit the gym?

• 33:54Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Finally, it's time to do the things that are going to benefit my body over the long term.

• 33:58Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Am I staying connected with my kids, my family?

• 34:01Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  You know, I think those are very important questions to ask. And I, I worry a little bit that AI makes it more of a trap to get, kind of get sucked in and avoid.

• 34:10Anish Acharya?

  I don't know, like maybe it's barbell, you know? So maybe you spend these really productive, satisfying, fulfilling time on your computer.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:18Anish Acharya?

  And then you don't have any of the overhead that you typically had, right? All the meetings, you don't go to meetings, your agent goes to meetings for you, right? And makes decisions and handles conflict and sells customers and all this other stuff. And the rest of the time, you're, you know, practicing meditation, hanging with your kids, touching grass.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:34Anish Acharya?

  So I think there's a potential to have this like really productive, satisfying technology time. And it's really. Productive, maybe, or satisfying, sort of fulfilling, human connection time? Why can't that be the shape of our life going forward?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  No, I hear you. And also, I've danced around the edges of this in a dangerous way.

• 34:53Anish Acharya?

  Oh, God.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  So I thought about, so I was talking to my wife and I was like, okay, listen, we're getting into a lot of arguments about X, Y, and Z. And what if we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us? That understands what we like, how much we care about certain things? And then we just have our models go and like duke it out and be like, ah, actually, tonight, we go out to dinner because historically, Daria has had the right to go out to dinner. I'm just making this up.

• 35:20Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And she's like, and I explained this whole thing, and I'm super proud of the idea. And I think it's gonna like save us a ton of time and effort. And she looks at me and she's like, this is one of the worst ideas ever. I'm just like, shit, you know? But so I worry about outsourcing too much of that.

• 35:36Anish Acharya?

  That's fair.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  That negotiation and conversation and just, you know, saying like, oh, the agents are just gonna handle it. That said, around certain things like policy or conflict resolution between nations and things like that, there might be a little bit more of a steady hand to have two agents discussing their, and getting to a resolution faster. I don't know.

• 35:54Anish Acharya?

  It's interesting. So, well, I'm not sure about the family setting. But if you think of the corporate setting, you know, there's this old saying, like, the best way to compete with an incumbent is to pick a product area that lives between two VPs. Because the idea is the VPs hate each other so much. They won't possibly be able to collaborate to actually like handle the competition in this area of crossover.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:13Anish Acharya?

  And that's like an area in which I think, look, if each VP had an agent that went in, I mean, we'll have to see, and I guess there'll be agent politics, corporate politics. But you would just imagine conflict resolution feeling so much less personal.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:24Anish Acharya?

  I think so many issues at work come from this like misattribution of professional decisions to personal feelings. Where it's like, hey, the boss went against me because they don't like me. It's not because they just had a professional judgment that was in a different direction.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 36:39Anish Acharya?

  And I hope that this technology helps to lessen that.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. What is the coolest thing you've seen in the last few weeks? Because you must see so much stuff in terms of pitches. And what has you excited to be an investor still? Because for me, early stage seems like, I'm not saying that you're squarely in early stage.

• 36:57Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Because obviously, your fund does the whole gamut.

• 36:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Early stage seems pretty dead to me.

• 37:02Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Just because it's like people entrepreneurs are just gonna skip that round altogether.

• 37:07Anish Acharya?

  Well, I think that there's venture exciting and then there's sort of like human exciting.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:11Anish Acharya?

  And when I tell you a story like the one I told you about this guy Mike, who built this incredible software and he's like, you know, clod pilled and all this other stuff. That's one of the most hopeful things I've seen in a long time. I mean, we should put Mike on billboards. I actually pair that with a lot of the stuff that Elon's doing. Like when you see the, you know, the effort to get to the moon, when you see SpaceX, when you see Waymo, like, oh my God, that's what we meant when we said technology.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 37:36Anish Acharya?

  You know? How about you? I mean, what do you think?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  No, I'm in the same boat. I worry that the kind of early stage, like sassy world, the like little bite sized pieces of consumer stuff is just gonna be largely dead. Hardware is still very capital intensive to get off the ground. I'm very bullish on actually devices that encourage us to kind of disconnect. And have more shared reality together. Have you seen Tin Can at all?

• 38:06Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, my son has one.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:07Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my.

• 38:09Anish Acharya?

  You should describe a Tin Can to everyone.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  So people that don't know, Tin Can is this little device that is a phone, like an old school phone, that you plug in the USB C and it connects to the wifi. And then you could, as the parent, you can tell the app which kids they can call.

• 38:26Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And so it was so funny because my daughter picks up, she goes, she listens to it, she goes, "Someone's calling us." And she hands me the phone and it's a dial tone. And she'd never heard a dial tone before in her life.

• 38:37Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, why would you?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  And she was like, "Someone's calling, it's ringing, it's ringing." And I'm just like, no, that's what you had to listen for before you could dial the numbers, you know?

• 38:45Anish Acharya?

  Incredible.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  But now when that rings across the room, they get so excited, they don't know who's calling.

• 38:50Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And they go running to go pick it up as fast as they possibly can. But I want 10 can for grownups. Like, it would be so cool to have like a little phone that is only with your friends.

• 38:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And you don't know who's gonna call, but you're gonna pick it up because you know it's a trusted friend.

• 39:03Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  So it's little bits of technology like that, that I think are just gonna provide these little moments of delight and real connection.

• 39:10Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  That I'm excited for.

• 39:11Anish Acharya?

  It's very funny. So my son has one as well. And when he, so he gets, he geeks out when he gets a call, right?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:17Anish Acharya?

  Races, darts over to the phone, he picks it up. And it's his bro calling and they'll be like, what's up, what's up? And they'll talk for maybe 20 seconds and then they won't know what to talk about.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:26Anish Acharya?

  And I don't know if that's like, the kids don't know how to use this technology, or that's just how men talk to each other.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:30Anish Acharya?

  So they'll just be on the phone for like 10 minutes, just sort of like, uh, just grunting a little bit.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:35Anish Acharya?

  And then they'll hang up and how was your call? It was great. It was really good.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  It's amazing. Yeah, but he's still young though, too. Like, it's not like they have like.

• 39:42Anish Acharya?

  A ton to talk about, I know. It's just, it's such a funny little microcosm of like male relationships, you know?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Are you looking at more hardware these days?

• 39:49Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, we're, we're open to everything actually right now. One of the most interesting, coolest pieces of hardware I saw recently, we're not an investor, is this company Pocket. You know, a bunch of companies are doing things like this, these sort of like passive recorder devices. I know you, Sandbar, I think you guys have invested in one that you're excited about.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:04Anish Acharya?

  It's just, it's really elegant hardware design and also just love that founders are being ambitious enough to try hardware again.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:10Anish Acharya?

  Hardware has all of these like, you know, it's just a challenging place to operate, but founder ambition is higher than it's ever been. So, yeah, we're definitely open to hardware.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I've been looking at the, the always on recording stuff for me has been a little bit like, eh, I don't know if I want that in my life.

• 40:25Anish Acharya?

  I know, I know.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:27Anish Acharya?

  Still, it's just cool that people are building things in those directions, you know?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:30Anish Acharya?

  And I also think that you're too skeptical on consumer. Like, consumer feels like dead, dead, dead, dead. Oh my God, it's on fire.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I guess the, the question is, I, I think what the reason I am a little bit skeptical on it is, I, I think it'll be dead, dead, dead, oh my God, it's on fire. And then when it's on fire, it's on fire with three engineers. And they've, you know, hit something and all of a sudden the first round is done at a $500 million pre.

• 40:54Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  And I'm just, I worry that what we're gonna see is just a decimation of all the early stage funds because they won't, they'll skip all those rounds altogether and go straight to B or C.

• 41:04Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  In which case, Andre's will do fine, but like, all of these other funds are just gonna be completely wiped out.

• 41:10Anish Acharya?

  So I have a history question for you. When you started DIG, what did the environment feel like in terms of consumer? Like, does it feel like a good or a bad time?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  It was dead.

• 41:18Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was largely dead because we were coming out of the dot com burst.

• 41:22Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And then the thing that was a technology enabler, which was Ajax, that allowed for dynamic content to be refreshed that enabled a new wave of kind of consumer apps to be built on top of that.

• 41:32Anish Acharya?

  But it wasn't obvious at the time when you guys started tinkering?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:35Anish Acharya?

  That it was going to be like a global social media, like, you know? I mean, it would be regulated, it would like potentially influence elections. Did you have any sense of how important it would be?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  No, there was none of that. And I don't think it was just, it was a very, it was a time where people said, what if? And then they tried it. Like Flickr came out and it was the first time people actually shared their photos publicly.

• 41:58Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Because that was a weird thing. You're like, oh, there's a picture with my family. Why would I ever want to put that online?

• 42:03Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Someone might see that. Those are my private photos. Photos were always kept in albums in your house.

• 42:08Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  You know, and like some family would come or look at them, you know?

• 42:11Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  And so there was a lot of that going on, like, you know, Foursquare was like, oh, I'm checking in somewhere. Is it weird to tell people where I am right now?

• 42:20Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  You know, like Twitter was like, what am I up to? You know, like, there was a lot of strange things.

• 42:26Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And we're seeing kind of very similar experiments happening right now. And I do believe we'll see, you know, multi-billion dollar companies on the consumer side come out of this wave.

• 42:37Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I just, I have a feeling it's going to be structured very differently than it was in the past.

• 42:42Anish Acharya?

  Maybe. I mean, I don't know about venture economics, but I feel like if there's a big new consumer, set of consumer categories, venture will be fine and consumers will benefit. And I love that you talked about the photo sharing thing because I feel like anytime you have new culture and new technology and they both happen at the same time, it's amazing. Like, think of the photos thing. Photos went from hyper-private to being public, to being public and seeming so important that you would never want to delete them, to Snap coming around and being like, no, now they're disappearing.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:08Anish Acharya?

  Which felt like, whoa, why would I want it to disappear?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:10Anish Acharya?

  10 years after, you're like, whoa, why would I want to share it?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Right. But then it went back to Instagram saying, I actually want my photos to look cooler and stick around.

• 43:18Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  And so it was kind of all...

• 43:20Anish Acharya?

  And now, if you actually, if I shared an AI-generated photo of myself with you, you'd be like, this is slop, right? So it's just, there's so, these cycles, there's, location is another fascinating one. There's this whole moral panic around privacy and security and will people share location? And location-based ads, like this whole topic. Now, if you look at it, Gen Z's, they share their location with friends, family, exes, like everyone, right? They have zero expectation of location privacy. There's no more like sort of distorting effect on culture than AI right now, right? Think of even AI companions and friendships and psychosis and productivity porn. And there's so many topics here that are going to drive culture, not just technology. How can that not result in interesting new consumer products?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. So let's wrap things up. I have one final question, but if you have anything we want to touch on before you go, let me know. I know you've got a hard out soon.

• 44:09Anish Acharya?

  I've got a little bit of time. I mean, I.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  You've got a good one, let's hear it.

• 44:15Anish Acharya?

  Okay, so let's like explore this and we can cut it if it ends up not being interesting. But we were sitting here getting ready for the pod and we were sort of trying to get our mics on the right way. And you were saying, oh, you've got to wrap the cord around the mic in a certain way. So there's this sort of knack for getting things done, small things and big things in this world. And it's just in people's heads, right? Nobody has sort of written that kind of thing down. You've called that dark data, right? So what's your kind of view on that type of information? Does that have value? Does that have more or less value than traditional information that's written down? And how does that show up in the future?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there is, I think that is a huge opportunity. I don't know how you monetize that, but it's an opportunity to unearth it, save it, and then work it into the models that we're doing. You had a great example off mic where we were talking about, you know, the one person that knows how to adjust a carburetor in a certain way for a certain model of car.

• 45:11Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And if that person dies, that knowledge is then lost, right?

• 45:15Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And so I believe that this exists kind of all around us in terms of little tiny micro things of dark data that we just have yet to work in and record and little tiny preferences and nuances that just never make it their way into these models.

• 45:32Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  So, you know, for example, this, this, this table right here.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Um, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to get a very Charlie Rose-esque table, which was an old, he was, uh, basically was very famous for doing these interviews where he could like lean in and talk to someone.

• 45:48Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  And I actually had, there was no stats or dimensions for his table anywhere in the models.

• 45:56Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And so I provided the model with like five different screenshots.

• 46:01Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And then set it on the heaviest working mode and then it calculated the size of the coffee cup.

• 46:06Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  And then estimated the dimensions of the actual table.

• 46:09Anish Acharya?

  Wow.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And so I could actually buy a similar table in terms of size, so I could fit up the four guests sitting around this table.

• 46:15Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  As Charlie did.

• 46:16Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And that was an example of something that the, the data was not in the model.

• 46:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  But I had to back my way into it, right?

• 46:23Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  And so I, I just think there's a lot of that proprietary data sets, I think are really interesting.

• 46:29Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  In some sense, there's, um, there's probably a market to go raise a fund just to acquire proprietary data.

• 46:36Anish Acharya?

  I mean, in a sense, this is what Merck or others are doing, you know? They're getting human data generation, some of which is like coding and math and all that. But I imagine in the future, some of which will be this type of tacit knowledge you're describing.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:47Anish Acharya?

  You know?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that to me is very interesting. It's not a business I would want to go build, but it's certainly, I think we're going to get a lot more of that unearthed as robotics and other sensors come online.

• 46:58Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, I think Google Maps was probably the earliest.

• 47:01Anish Acharya?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Going and mapping this kind of dark data.

• 47:03Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, it's a, it's, it's, models will, this is where I think when you talk about the layoffs, you're like, oh, none of my buddies are getting laid off at Google. If anything, they're just accelerating, but that doesn't account for the models getting better.

• 47:15Anish Acharya?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Because when the models are, you know, three times as performant as they are today, or five times or 10 times.

• 47:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Then you, you really don't need as many humans. Your backlog quickly dries up.

• 47:26Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  And you don't, you know, one person can orchestrate, you know, 20 projects or 100.

• 47:31Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, but dude, then Sundar says like, I want to be the first hundred trillion dollar company. You know, like what is, Sundar is not going to say, you know what? We should like keep our market cap, but just like be more profitable. No CEO thinks that way.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:42Anish Acharya?

  They want to shoot for the moon. So I think Sundar's ambition will grow at least or faster, as fast or faster than model progress.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Do you think government regulation steps in there and says you can't run everything? Because there is, there is a world where just it's OpenAI, Anthropic and Google and they're kind of just everything to everyone.

• 48:01Anish Acharya?

  But we just, it's just not the world we're living in, right? Like meanwhile, here on Earth, there's hundreds of open source models. There's all kinds of distilled models. The model price, token prices for what we're cutting edge models three months ago are going down.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:14Anish Acharya?

  There's edge devices actually having models embedded in them. So that could happen, but I think the case for sort of outlier, you know, N of one outcomes was much stronger in social networks than it is in foundation models. We just don't see foundation. Yeah, you said yourself, right? I've got my credit card, I'll use Opus one day and Codex the next day.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Yeah, that's fair. All right. Any predictions for the next six months? Let's hear the craziest, wildest prediction that you have.

• 48:44Anish Acharya?

  I mean, weirder, better, faster, man.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Weirder, better, faster.

• 48:47Anish Acharya?

  So, okay, so here.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Give me a hard prediction, the OpenAI IPO.

• 48:52Anish Acharya?

  I mean, I'm not supposed to talk. Look, I think all these, fuck, look, I think all the, all the big model companies are going to go public.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:58Anish Acharya?

  I think that's like pretty well known. I mean, I don't know exactly, but I think that it's going to happen in the next 12 months. If I, with no inside information, that, that would be my prediction.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 49:08Anish Acharya?

  I think that, look, I, okay, so maybe like my strangest prediction is that I think we're going to get to the four day work week in a uniquely American way. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story. So if you think back to the conversation we were having about diet and nutrition 30 or 40 years ago, there's two schools of thought, right? There is the European school of thought, which is we should eat less sugar. There is the American school of thought, which is we should eat less fat. And, you know, maybe they were sort of influenced by industrial lobbies and whatever else. So we ran the experiment for 40 years and Europeans stayed pretty slim and Americans got really fat, right? Now, probably what Americans should have done, and a lot of people tried to make this better, is said, hey, we need to just change our habits as a society and, you know, moderate a little bit in sugar intake and all these. Of course, that didn't happen.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:52Anish Acharya?

  Instead, Americans did this uniquely American thing, which is we invented Ozempic, GLP-1s. We're like, with this breakthrough new technology to solve this problem that we really should have just solved with like, perhaps different choices as a society and as individuals. I think the same way the Europeans have aspired to the four day work week. And they're like, this is better for human flourishing and families. And I think that's right. But Americans have to do it the American way, which is we create this incredible new technology that makes us so much more productive that we can actually reduce our workload from five days to four days and maybe even three and a half days. So there's this some, there's some sort of a parallel here. And I think we're heading to a four day work week. That is how the 20% productivity increase is going to show up in my view. And that's my strangest prediction.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Okay. My strangest prediction is that in the next three years, we will probably discover and produce and create and get into humans another 50 to 100 peptides that alter our longevity in a meaningful way.

• 50:53Anish Acharya?

  Can you tell me about the peptides thing? Give me the quick take.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  So peptides are just small chain amino acids. They're very easy to produce in the lab. And they're kind of like, think of them as upstream regulators that can then trickle down and cause other things to happen in the body. So they're not as powerful as like a straight up hormone. And they're not, so they're not as heavy as a hammer. They just kind of like cause things to happen.

• 51:15Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And so the most famous peptide is insulin. The GLP-1s are peptides. But there are, you know, 20 other candidates that are out there that I've seen people experimenting with that are producing wild results. There's one called the Wolverine stack.

• 51:34Anish Acharya?

  Oh, God.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Where literally I have had friends that had back injuries and knee pain and elbow pain. I had tennis elbow really bad in my, which I don't even play tennis, which fucking kills me. But I had tennis elbow in my right arm really bad. And I took the Wolverine protocol for like two weeks and I don't, I feel amazing.

• 51:51Anish Acharya?

  Really?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:52Anish Acharya?

  Literally?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yes. And so. I believe, and there's a lot of people working in the space, that they're going to identify these peptides. We'll be able to easily compound them and create them. And the FDA has backed off a little bit. They were banning them for a while and now they actually have approved quite a few.

• 52:12Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  One for muscle mass in AIDS patients. And so they can do that, give them this peptide and they'll like gain more muscle mass.

• 52:21Anish Acharya?

  Wow.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  There's another one that actually, I believe it's Eli Lilly, that is this three agonist GLP-1 that you don't lose muscle with now, which is really interesting. That's in the pipeline. It's phase three trials right now.

• 52:34Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  So as AI allows us to do a lot of this modeling in more real time and hopefully candidate discovery, I think peptides is just going to be a fascinating space to watch.

• 52:47Anish Acharya?

  So, okay, so I have two questions. One is what's the basic stack for somebody playing with peptides? Like what would you recommend? What's safe? What's the right amount of risk to take?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I would say go listen to Huberman's two podcasts. He has two podcasts on peptides.

• 52:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  And they go in-depth about each one. Some of them are for sleep. Some of them are, you know, they really increase your deep sleep and you sleep better. I have one buddy that says he sleeps like he's 18 again, where he's like wakes up like fully rested. I'm doing these peptides. I have one buddy that's removed all of his visceral fat and is done by a DEXA scan, which we know visceral fat is like really the bad type of fat that you don't want to have around your organs. And yeah, there's almost a peptide for everything now, which is just really insane. And these are largely, you gotta be very careful though, because as Huberman will talk about, there's gray markets, there's contaminants that can get in there. You gotta work with a, like a high-quality company when you're thinking about this stuff.

• 53:38Anish Acharya?

  So my second follow-up question is, you know, if we radically extend human life, do you think we're sort of emotionally, spiritually, societally prepared for people to live to 120, 150, 200?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  I don't think so, no. Sadly, not in America. We just don't have the support infrastructure for the elderly, nor the care, which is a huge bummer.

• 53:55Anish Acharya?

  But what if we controlled for that and said people live, you know, their full most flourishing 25-year-old lives?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I agree. The thing you don't want to do is have Extend dementia for an extra 20 years because we're taking peptides. It's like, so that's, that's the, uh, the tricky part. But, you know, there are candidates like Clotho and some of these other, that's a protein that looks like it's, it's in the pipelines for a potential treatment for a lot of dementia. So it's a very exciting time on the science front.

• 54:23Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  So that, that to me is, and then I would say my other prediction by the end of the year is that, uh, I just don't think we'll ever look at sort of code again.

• 54:30Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I think that Elon talked about how why are we actually writing languages?

• 54:36Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Like writing code in languages is you just, if the AI is smart enough to understand the inner workings of every single CPU, GPU and every piece of silicon that it's going to touch.

• 54:45Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  It can just compile directly to binary and just work. Which is wild because then that rewrites all of how we think about infrastructure in general. You don't have to pick databases anymore. You don't have to like, think about any of these things. It's that, that I believe is going to be in the next five years. There won't be weird questions like, should I be using a graph database for this? Or, you know, it'll just kind of be solved, which is.

• 55:09Anish Acharya?

  I think it'll, it'll be interesting to see what happens when agents make these choices on our behalf.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:14Anish Acharya?

  Cause there'll be technology with trade offs.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:16Anish Acharya?

  Presumably there'll be marketing, but not to humans, to agents. Because ultimately it's going to be Codex that chooses the database. So how does that marketing show up? What are the, I mean, it's very wild.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it'll have to be marketing.

• 55:27Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  I think it'll just go spin up an instance, run it, benchmark it for its use case.

• 55:32Anish Acharya?

  Maybe.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Come back and be like, yeah, just test that out. This is the best one. And then, and then actually Chamath had a really interesting point about it that a lot of people were calling bullshit on, but I kind of believe, which is he said that these agents will just shop around.

• 55:43Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  They'll go and they'll be like, okay, that graph database that was serving us well six months ago is now more performant on this type of database and this infrastructure for this cost.

• 55:53Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  I'm just going to do the migration.

• 55:54Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And so you have to imagine that just happens like seamlessly at some point.

• 55:57Anish Acharya?

  Dude, it's so cool. So when I worked at Amazon when I was a kid, which was 2003.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Delivering packages?

• 56:02Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Were you?

• 56:04Anish Acharya?

  Going door to door? No, hell no. He was a programmer.

• 56:08Anish Acharya?

  I was a programmer. So Jeff used to say this thing. He said a lot of things which are, you know, forward looking, but one was, um, we should assume that we're going to live in a world where our buyers have perfect information, right? And if you think of like, how much of industry and commerce is based on either buyer laziness, apathy, or this asymmetric sort of information between sellers and buyers? What if that goes away?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:29Anish Acharya?

  What if like, you have to win by product quality, always 100%? There's zero value in brand. There's zero value in marketing. Like, isn't that just a better world to be in?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 56:39Anish Acharya?

  And so many of these areas, I think financial services is another big one. We were talking about Hero before the show, right? Which is a company that was acquired by OpenAI yesterday. Really talented founder, Ethan, who started Digits prior with this sort of consumer fintech mission that many of us had, which is like, hey, why can't we just make this system efficient? And work for the everyday consumer, right? And it's like, why should they have to know how the credit system works and how to play the game and how to do all of these things? And I think with agents, a lot of that just goes away. Your agent goes and makes great financial choices on your behalf, given your constraints.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:11Anish Acharya?

  And I think that's going to happen in a lot of product categories and it'll be a much better sort of world and society as a result.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Well said. Awesome. Well, always a pleasure to have you on the show.

• 57:19Anish Acharya?

  Thank you so much, Kevin.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Glad we did this. Come back. Uh, let's just keep doing these, man. I love these little roundtables.

• 57:24Anish Acharya?

  It's so fun.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Especially because every four to five weeks, everything changes all over again.

• 57:29Anish Acharya?

  I mean, we could do this once a week.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 57:31Anish Acharya?

  We run out of time.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Brand new topics to talk about. Awesome.

• 57:34Anish Acharya?

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Good seeing you, brother.

• 57:35Anish Acharya?

  Super fun. Cool.

• 57:38Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 58:04Erik Torenberg?

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.