The New Rules for Founders | Garry Tan on a16z

Anish Acharya is joined by Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, for a conversation about how AI is rewriting the startup playbook, why founders should be more ambitious than ever, and what two decades of Silicon Valley booms, busts, and missed opportunities have taught Garry about building what's next. Garry reflects on turning down an early opportunity to join Palantir, why chasing what's "hot" is often the wrong strategy, and why the best ideas tend to begin with people pursuing strange, earnest obsessions outside the mainstream. They also explore how AI changes the economics of company building, why traditional SaaS may be losing its advantage, and how tiny teams equipped with hundreds of agents can build businesses at a scale that once required entire organizations. The conversation goes deeper into agentic companies, taste and agency, why "a markdown file is an employee," and how AI could remove layers of bureaucracy that have historically limited organizations. Garry and Anish also discuss the future of consumer AI, the coming "harness wars," why AI adoption may take longer than Silicon Valley expects, and what the next generation of founders can build with intelligence that was unimaginable just a few years ago. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:26 - The 2003 Bleak Moment: Passing on Palantir & Chasing What Was Hot 04:45 - The Culture of Silicon Valley: Finding the Fringe & Your People 10:59 - What YC Gets Right: A Birthright for Tech Outsiders 13:54 - Solo Founders, Vibe Coding & Founders Being 400x Themselves 21:05 - Business Loops: Skillifying Every Task Into a Markdown File 23:03 - Token Maxing: How to Live in 2028 Today 28:09 - Constructive Conflict & Pedro's Meeting-Transcript Agent 33:10 - The Torture of the White-Collar Job & Life Above the API Line 39:08 - The Real White Pill: Everything Is Slower Than You Think 41:33 - What the Next Computer Looks Like: Voice, Memory & the Harness Wars 44:44 - Local Politics & Why San Francisco Turned Resources: Follow Garry Tan on X: https://x.com/garrytan Follow Anish Acharya on X: https://x.com/illscience Follow Y Combinator on X: https://x.com/ycombinator Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We may never achieve a utopia, but it is worthy and worth it to attempt. Everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. We had to go over to the Windows team. They wouldn't reply to our emails. They wouldn't fix our bugs. And we had to go over there with a baseball bat. An org like Microsoft can't. Yes. But a startup can. Yes. And every startup must.

• 0:23Erik Torenberg?

  The game has changed for founders. Gary Tan thinks their ambition should change with it. In this episode, Anish Acharya sits down with Y Combinator president and CEO Gary Tan to explore what it means to build a company when one person can suddenly operate like hundreds. They discuss why Gary believes founders should stop chasing what's hot and follow what they uniquely know, how AI is changing everything from coding to company management, and why the startups of the future may look radically smaller, faster, and more ambitious than the companies that came before them. Gary also shares some of the biggest misses of his own career, including turning down an opportunity to join Palantir, and why those mistakes taught him to trust direct experience over consensus.

• 1:11Anish Acharya?

  Gary, so good to have you, brother. Thank you so much for joining us today.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:16Anish Acharya?

  Amazing, dude. Well, we're going to cover a bunch of the basics, then we're going to get into the advanced topics to make sure that we kind of match the curiosity and ambition of our audience.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  That sounds great.

• 1:25Anish Acharya?

  Does that work? Awesome. Well, dude, maybe talk to me a bit about the beginning of your journey, 2003. It feels like what's under discussed is founder psychology and then sort of Silicon Valley culture and how the two are connected. What did it feel like when you first got in the game back in 2003 coming out of Stanford?

• 1:40Speaker 00

  I guess I wanted to work at startups, but 2003 was funny in that Web 1.0 had just ended. The NASDAQ had just crashed. And actually, there were no jobs that I could even find in the Bay Area other than working at Gap IT. And so the two job offers I had were Microsoft for Windows Mobile, which I was pretty excited about, or Expedia. Yeah, I had student loans. And while I wanted to start a company, I just felt like I needed to get a job. And then actually, there were no jobs in the Bay. So it's kind of hard to believe, actually. That moment was so bleak. And then right before Web 2.0.

• 2:18Anish Acharya?

  It felt like it might have been the end of tech, huh?

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Right, a little bit. Yeah, that was the vibe. And then at the end of the day, that's the boom, that's the bust. These things sort of happen over and over again.

• 2:26Anish Acharya?

  So at the time, did it feel high status to work in tech or on startups?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Not at all. I mean, it's sort of lost to the sands of time. But I was still excited about tech, though. I had done a lot of web programming. And then one of my regrets, actually, was I was sort of chasing what was hot instead of what was clearly the thing I knew. Mark Zuckerberg was probably doing Facemash around then, around 2003. And then Facebook didn't even exist yet. And I was getting out of web programming at exactly the wrong time.

• 2:56Anish Acharya?

  Because it felt like that was the smart thing to do.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was smart. And I mean, this is true now. In front of all these people at startup school, I sort of started this "don't LARP."

• 3:07Anish Acharya?

  Right, I saw that.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  But I think that's embedded in this idea that you should just be earnest. And then you shouldn't follow what the crowd is saying, right? At that moment, people said the web was dead. But that was sort of the perfect time to work on web and social and things like that. And I didn't do it. I ran off and said, oh, well, the next hot thing will be mobile. So I wanted to work at Windows Mobile, which was true, but why give up the thing that could have been the next thing?

• 3:35Anish Acharya?

  What I love about what you're saying, though, is often when we hear earnest, we think naive. But actually, what it sounds like you're saying is earnestness is a sort of result of maturity and courage.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Courage is actually, I think, the right thing.

• 3:48Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  If you know something, it's sort of, if someone just comes and contradicts you, or even if like a blog post or someone on Twitter contradicts you, you're like, well, I don't agree with that because I believe my own direct experience.

• 4:03Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I know that I'm not a time traveler, because if I was a time traveler, I would have sent a message back to myself and said, just stay working on web stuff. You literally have five years of experience on top of everyone else. You could do an end run around everyone. Like, you could have built any kind of social software.

• 4:20Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  But instead, I was 22. So I was like being whipped around by whatever I could read in the Wall Street Journal. And the classic question I'm sure you get, that all investors get all the time, is what's hot and what should I work on?

• 4:35Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  And that's the wrong question to ask. Like, the right question is, what are you interested in? What do you know uniquely? And so that's one of a great many mistakes I made in my career. I feel like I'm a little bit doomed to be the first principled storyteller of all the mistakes that I made.

• 4:52Anish Acharya?

  Well, I think that it's very inspiring for founders to hear your own journey and your own mistakes, and then not feel so bad about the ones that we've all made along the way.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:03Anish Acharya?

  I mean, maybe talk about the culture of Silicon Valley today. On one hand, maybe it was despondent 20 years ago. It's crazy to think that was just 23 years ago that you're talking about. Now, you think we would all be incredibly elated, yet there's this undercurrent, maybe it's the LARPing thing that you mentioned, it's being outside of the light cone, the permanent underclass. Where does that come from? Do you think there's any truth in it? Talk through that.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I get it. There's just more competition than ever. And then I think maybe it's just that we're spending too much time in distribution. I think Chris Dixon talks about this all the time, where you're in the IDMAs, but the cool parts of the IDMAs are like the weird fringe parts, actually. It's always, what is a toy? And that's the pattern in Silicon Valley over and over again, that bears repeating, right?

• 5:48Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  The idea that you could have a computer on every desk in every home.

• 5:52Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Today is, of course, that's what's come to pass.

• 5:56Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  But the people who created that thing, they were fringe weirdo punks, actually.

• 6:01Anish Acharya?

  Yes, they were outsiders. I mean, Homebrew Computer Club was not where you were getting laid.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. You just were like following this weird obsession that, actually, I want my own computer.

• 6:13Anish Acharya?

  And I think Chris has said this too. I think a good measure of how interesting the thing is, can you find the edge? And for the most interesting things, you typically can't. Even if you find the edge of the conversation, you can't find the intellectual edge, which I think is a very good sign. I mean, I had this growing up in the 80s. Maybe you had this too. There was sort of one way to be cool in grade school and probably in high school. And maybe when you got to college, you kind of found your people. And now I think one of the miracles of being internet native generation is that people find their people much sooner. You find your people on Reddit, you find your people on X or Insta, or whatever your network is.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the coolest thing today. There's probably a subreddit, there's probably a part of X, some part of Teapot, that is this part of Twitter that is just your set of super weird, but really, really into that thing. And you can find your tribe more or less instantly.

• 7:05Anish Acharya?

  Yeah. Yeah, can you talk a bit about the culture of Silicon Valley? It felt like 10 years ago, it was sort of, you know, it was lower status to work on something like Palantir, either because people were nervous about doing things that were too much in the national interest, or because it was sort of dismissed as a services business. Now it's clearly one of the most important companies in the world with one of the most compelling CEOs. You were early there. What did it feel like? Why did you do it?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I have a worse story than that. I have another mistake story, where Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen were my fraternity brothers at Stanford.

• 7:38Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Okay. And then I had a job. And they were like interns at Peter Thiel's hedge fund.

• 7:44Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  And Peter has this thing where you're supposed to, you know, when you start a thing, you write down on a piece of paper all the smartest people who you need to go and hire and get to join you. And so both of them were like, oh, let's go get Gary. He's up in Seattle. They flew me down to have dinner with him. And Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time.

• 8:08Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year.

• 8:13Anish Acharya?

  Oh, no.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Which I did. But I think it's like, that was like a $2 billion, $2 to $4 billion mistake at this point. And I think about it all the time. Basically, I did the same thing again. It was like the same thing that got me to go work on Windows Mobile instead of just staying on the thing that I knew and loved. It happened again. And I was like, well, I don't know. I was working backwards from the map instead of looking down at the territory and saying, oh, well, these are the smartest people I know. Joe and Stephen were among the smartest people I'd ever met. And if not them, who was I going to be a co-founder with? The universe was saying, this is the thing you need to do. But all I cared about was what was cool, what was hot,

• 8:57Speaker 00

  what would a really good investor say? And the thing is, they're like going off of a map. And you can see, you can look down, you can look around, you can have first principles knowledge of what's going on. And what they were doing is they were going to governments and three-letter agencies. And it was clear that the things that really good computer scientists and Paulo Alto could do and create, DC did not have access to that. And it's funny how much that... Thing that they had identified, like Peter and Joe and Stefan and later Alex Karp identified, that runs through almost everything that we do in Silicon Valley. The future is already here. It's not evenly distributed.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  And then that's where first principles, knowledge, or just viewing the world as a scientist is actually very useful. And what a scientist does is, sure, there's published papers, but you go and you examine all the truths. And what you find is that, once you go down into the experiment, or you go down and talk to the first party people who are experiencing a thing, then you learn secret knowledge, then you have gnosis. And so from Palantir, I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult that starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk, actually.

• 10:21Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes, dude, that's very, Rick Rubin would approve. Yeah, well, actually, what I love about what you're saying is that there's a beautiful truth in the fact that you've talked through some of these, maybe tragic misses, but you know, the lessons are courage, the lessons are earnestness, right? The lessons are when your instincts are pulling you to work with a set of people. So maybe talk a little bit about, you know, we talk a lot about how Silicon Valley and the magic is it takes outsiders and turns them into insiders. And I feel like YC is the ultimate distillation of that. You know, you go from being two founders, perhaps from a foreign country, to two people with YC on their LinkedIn, and everybody now knows what that means.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 10:59Anish Acharya?

  So talk about how that happens. Is it a process? Is it a mindset? And how has it changed over the years?

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I mean, I have to credit Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston and the original founders, including Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. I mean, what Paul and Jessica figured out was that there are lots and lots of really smart people who do not get access to Silicon Valley. I mean, I think in the past, you had to like go to the right schools, you had to know the right people, sort of. And if you didn't, you'd come to Silicon Valley and you'd try to get invited to the right parties. There's like a social network that you had to crack. And then at YC, we have a pejorative for that whole scene, which is like, we call them scenesters, actually. Which is, I mean, it's sort of a nod to like what you used to have to do.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And some people still believe that's like how you do it. All they did was say, you know what, like, here's a, here's a website, here's 12 questions. Later, we added like a one-minute video. And people on the other end who are builders are going to try to give you a fair shake. And so today, we have, you know, 16 equal partners, including myself. And all of us like went through YC and had successful outcomes. And I think there's something valuable to that. They're just, you know, welcome to Silicon Valley. We just celebrated 7,000 people coming to San Francisco, the majority of them, the very first time they came. It's, you know, our startup school every single year.

• 12:31Anish Acharya?

  So incredible.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  We kind of call it like Birthright, but for tech.

• 12:35Anish Acharya?

  It looked like the Roman Colosseum, dude. It was amazing.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, I think that that's the coolest thing about Silicon Valley. Like you sort of, it sort of doesn't matter where you're from or who you are. It just actually matters what your ideas are and can you execute. The only other thing that I'd say, like, YC people get that a lot of people don't get is a community of people who you can be super real with. It's like, if you go to a TechCrunch event, you look to the left, you look to the right. And it's like, are you really going to be able to tell them anything real? Like, you're going to hold your cards pretty close and, you know, you're going to say, how you doing? And they're going to say, killing it. And then they're going to ask back and like, oh, I'm also killing it. I mean, honestly, founders really need that. Like, it's very solitary.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  It's, you know, on the day that you lose your best customer, on the day that your best engineer quits, like, who are you going to call? And if you have no one, like.

• 13:27Anish Acharya?

  The day your co-founder loses hope and you're not allowed to.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:30Anish Acharya?

  That's a tough day. Talk about the historical upside, sort of surprises of like founder types, business types, and the downside surprises. What have you learned through YC?

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I mean, what's, we're sort of in the middle of a big transformation now, I think. For the longest time, we really, really believed that you needed co-founders. And I think that everything else being equal, having co-founders is net really, really good.

• 13:54Anish Acharya?

  Totally.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I think some of this is like the beginning of a cult. Like, you know, a cult where there's only one person and that person can't convince anyone else to join them is like, you know, worse than a cult. It's just like a crazy person, actually.

• 14:08Anish Acharya?

  Right, right, right.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  I think this is like an old Derek Sivers TED Talk, right? Where it's like, yeah, one person dancing in a field is a crazy person.

• 14:16Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  But, you know, it's really the second person who like gets up.

• 14:22Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  And joins that person, like, then what you find is, you know, suddenly 10 people are there all dancing. Then it's a party. Yeah, that's literally the TED Talk.

• 14:31Anish Acharya?

  Love it.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  And I think there's something to that. But, you know, I think what's happening right now with vibe coding and agentic coding, literally, any given person could be 400 of that person. Like, from two years, like even like nine months ago, you can be a multiple of yourself.

• 14:54Anish Acharya?

  This is amazing.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:56Anish Acharya?

  Do you think founders are more ambitious than they've ever been?

• 14:58Speaker 00

  They should be.

• 14:59Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  If anything, like, that's the number one thing that people should do.

• 15:03Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Is realize that, like, don't chase your success or my success. Like, that was, you know, when we were coming up.

• 15:09Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  The game done changed.

• 15:13Anish Acharya?

  Yep.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  You actually, you can't just do a SaaS thing. Like, you know, I was just doing an analysis on like pure SaaS. And I was like, oh, shoot, like, you know, a pure like per-seat SaaS thing, like, not totally clear. It will exist in another five or 10 years. Like, it's perfectly fine as a wedge, but if you're doing that now in 2026, like, you better hope that that's like a leap to some sort of moat around data or network effects or something else, right?

• 15:38Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  And that's like, you know, if you, if we would time travel to like even two years ago, it's like SaaS was God. The 1020x, like next 12 months, revenue multiple was like, you know, iron law.

• 15:53Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  And like, it's hard to believe. It was like, oh yeah, no, that's not true at all now.

• 15:57Anish Acharya?

  Well, you know, a related thing that I love is that code is no longer precious. My God, it's like, the things that we had to go through to get something shipped. And that's why you had to have this like sense that what you were making was important with a capital I. And that actually flies against the kind of beautiful truth we were just talking about. Because often earnestness isn't obviously important with a capital I. So you pursue things that seem important when most of the most important things actually start out seeming actually unimportant.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:25Anish Acharya?

  I know you've been all over this with GStack and G-Brain. And, you know, when you started out to build those things with the intention to like contribute to the community or just explore your interests?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Oh, I was just messing around. Like, you know, what was it? I think Boris Churney came on Lightcone Podcast.

• 16:40Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  And I just felt like the urge to, and a bunch of our mutual friends, like all of them, basically just started coding again. And I was like, oh, something's happening. I better start. And then initially, it was just messing around. It's like, oh, I mean, what would it be like to do and like make an office hours? And then the craziest thing there was like, we had just started, like, recording all of our office hours, actually. And then I could, I had like a few months of data. And there were like very clear things that the YC partners used as like rhetorical devices or ways to like draw out like a step function in your ambition.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  And then what's funny is I have this markdown file that is basically like the perfect script on how to advise founders to like increase their ambition. And then I actually had to go into Claude and I said, reduce this by 90%. Reduce the strength and intensity of this prompt by 90%. And then I open sourced that.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Because some of it is like, you gotta come and do YC.

• 17:49Anish Acharya?

  Well, we'll take your Fable 5. Okay, thank you.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. We can't give away the crown jewels like for free. This, just a taste. The first one's free, you know?

• 17:59Anish Acharya?

  Well, dude, Kevin caught this. I think it was at GStack or G-Brain, where deep in the open source, you'd said, please apply to YC.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But only if you're a top 10% user of Claude code.

• 18:09Anish Acharya?

  Incredible.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Like, based on whether you're thinking about users, like thoughtful about your product and your design. Like, it's not, not everyone gets that message, actually.

• 18:19Anish Acharya?

  Yes. Well, dude, I love that you're doing it. I love that you're doing it so publicly, because I think this comes back to the earnestness point, which is the whole thing about building intuition at this moment is just using the technology.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:29Anish Acharya?

  You know, and I think that there's this feeling like, oh, how can I possibly catch up? Or there's so much seriousness around it. It's like, no, just use every model and build completely trivial things for no other reason to have a chassis with which to learn the new technology.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  I think the most exciting thing is like, you can just have ideas. And then in the past, it's like, oh, well, I had to be the PM, let me write the spec. Like, let me make sure I have, you know, one or two engineers, like, oh, how are we going to do QA? Like, there's just all this stuff that you used to have to worry about. And then now it's like, no, slash QA, like, it's done. But, you know, yeah, we tested it. It's good. Like, we have unit tests, like 90% test coverage, you know?

• 19:08Anish Acharya?

  Totally. You know, it's like arranging your Zen Rock Garden. It's just fun to do it. And the, like, the output doesn't matter that much, which is why everybody talks about coding agents, but very few people are showing their work.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:18Anish Acharya?

  Because a lot of it is sort of low stakes work, and I think that's beautiful and okay.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I mean, and then I think it's crazy to what degree, like, suddenly, agency and taste, like, off the charts important now.

• 19:30Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  And then the hard part is like. Helping people realize like just by the act of doing it and exercising it like that's how you get better. It's I don't actually think that like those things are innate or inborn. Like some people have more of it coming out of the womb per se, but you know, it's you just it's like a practice, you know?

• 19:49Anish Acharya?

  Well, let me challenge you on this because Nikita said this a couple, maybe a year ago, and I thought it was interesting, which is, hey, we were told that the like highest form of art in business was, you know, film and software. And now anyone can make films and anybody can make software, yet the same 20% who are originally doing it are still the ones who are doing it. Is there kind of this like, is agency something that you can, you know, embrace? Or are there just people that are naturally high agency and many that are not?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Hmm. I mean, if I look at my own career, like I would easily say that I'm a late bloomer. And, you know, I had to make these like ridiculous mistakes, like saying no to Palantir or like leaving web programming to like learn. And so I feel like my life is somewhat like a testament to no, no, like I can make mistakes and then I can introspect, I can reason about them and then make different choices.

• 20:42Anish Acharya?

  Amazing.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  That's the hope, anyway.

• 20:44Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, that is the hope. Talk a little bit about loops. I think there are kind of coding loops, which are well discussed. And now the graphs thing, which is sort of, you know, both funny and also real. But it feels like the most interesting loops are business loops.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:59Anish Acharya?

  Like, how can you actually have a loop where the output is changing the way the business itself operates? I know that Tom gave this great talk about how to organize your company in that way. Talk about how YC is organizing around loops and how you're advising your companies to.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mess around with OpenClaw. I created G-Brain, which is kind of like soda retrieval. I basically distilled I earlier this year, I created garyslist.org, which is sort of like actually an agentic newsroom. And then I had to create like really, really good rag around like, you know, personal deep research, just to be able to put together some of those articles. And then all I did was like, I had OpenClaw look at that repo, extract out like the agentic rag part, especially around like, like after the fact, graph generation. And then it just ended up being soda even against like Memory Palace and a bunch of other open source.

• 21:52Anish Acharya?

  Incredible.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  And then what I realized is that just allows the agent to know what million tokens to keep in its head for any given task.

• 22:01Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And so what's interesting is like, I think there are a couple of things at work right now, like the frontier model labs that are, you know, letting you use ChatGPT or Claude. I think that they're still pretty constrained on cost and pretty constrained on amount of compute they want to give you. And so if you really want to token max, you actually have to use something like Hermes Agent or OpenClaw. And then you have to like tune it all the way up. Like you're just like, give me like, let me load a million tokens or 800,000 tokens in to any given request and like have that be in your like soul.md. But when you do that, like, I think that you basically get to live in 2028. Like, you

• 22:46Speaker 00

  know, it costs, I don't know, $50,000 or $100,000 a year to like use the agents at full strength, like full 150.

• 22:55Anish Acharya?

  For every request, for every interaction.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  But you'll feel it more or less immediately.

• 23:00Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  It just costs like a crazy amount. But for a CEO or for a founder, it actually makes a lot of sense to do that. And you have to give yourself permission to token max in that way. But, you know, and then what you get is like, I get you get to live in 2028 today.

• 23:17Anish Acharya?

  Amazing.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  But I think like going back to what founders can do, if you live that way, not only do you want to do that task, you want to like skillify it. Like you do some like feat of strength, and then you turn it into a markdown file plus code plus tests that can be reused and like put into a cron job.

• 23:39Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  And so I think we're just seeing like across the board, a markdown file is an employee.

• 23:48Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  And it's an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time.

• 23:52Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  And it'll do it like as many times as you want.

• 23:55Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  And then, you know, at that point, all you're doing is like, take any business process that you need in your company, and you just do it once perfectly. And the first time you try to do it, it's going to be bad.

• 24:05Anish Acharya?

  Expensive.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:06Anish Acharya?

  Yes, many iterations.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. But then at the end, you can, you, as long as you can tell very, very quickly and in very simple ways, like, hey, agent, fix this, fix that, like this was wrong. The actual trace and the actual history out of that agent working with you, it'll actually turn that into a skill file that's perfect, actually.

• 24:31Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  And anytime it screws up in like a future case, it's just a bug fix and then it's there forever.

• 24:36Anish Acharya?

  And this loop you would apply to sales, to marketing, to customer support, to everything.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, to everything.

• 24:41Anish Acharya?

  Really interesting.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  I mean, G-Stack was basically that for engineering, right?

• 24:44Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  It's like, there's a QA loop. I had to build something that works with browsers to go and because that's what I found like early with G-Stack, I found myself, you know, automating how I thought about PM. And then, you know, I had an engineering skill that was like an Eng manager that made sure that there was a unit test and end to end test coverage.

• 25:05Anish Acharya?

  Yep.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  But then in the end, I found myself like, I automated all the other things so much that all I was doing at the end was black box testing to verify. And it's like, oh, no, no, okay. Like even that part, like, it's interesting, like, building these agentic systems today, I think that's all you're doing is you're seeing where the bottlenecks are. And then, you know, almost every single time, it's like, how do I just instruct the agent to create a piece of software or a markdown file that blows away that roadblock?

• 25:38Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And then when you take a step back and you've done that for the whole task, it's like, I mean, we, there are companies now today that, you know, we were talking about earlier, it's like, literally, you can go from zero to 15 mil ARR in about four months with like two or three people and like hundreds of agent, like, you know, a few hundred skill files.

• 25:59Anish Acharya?

  It's amazing. So there's this like recursive self-improvement, there's this hill climbing that happens. Like, at what point does it start to fall over? Is there like, do you need error correction? Does the errors compound? Does it get constrained by exception handling, human relationships? Because otherwise, these companies should just be able to grow and run forever.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I guess my experience, once you get a lot of markdown files or anytime you have like some large amount of data, that's where like providence matters, that's where conflict management sort of, you know, when you have two facts.

• 26:35Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  If you have providence, then you're like, well, this is the more recent one. Like this is the one that wins. You need a cron job that's sort of sweeping through that and making sure that things are accurate and from the right places. But these are things that I think as you use the systems, you just know that you need to build these things. Like anyone who's, I mean, this is actually one of the interesting things I think is an advantage for founders in their 30s and 40s now.

• 27:03Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Like, I mean, I think that there are going to be as many Patrick Collisons as ever.

• 27:09Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  But one mega trend that we're seeing is like 35, 40, 45 year old founder who like been around the block.

• 27:19Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Built a lot of entities. I mean, I think, yeah, Peter Steinfeld is like a perfect example of that, where it's like, he's been around the block, like he knows what to build.

• 27:29Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And then if you take that person, like suddenly there's 400 of those people, like you can outperform an entire department of like any mag7.

• 27:39Anish Acharya?

  I also think that if you've had some experience in the enterprise, there are these dynamics that, you know, you can seek to kind of mirror and explore. So one of the things I'm really interested in is conflict, right? Most people at an enterprise would say conflict is a bad thing, but actually think that there's this sort of productive, constructive conflict that at its best is the search for truth.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:59Anish Acharya?

  These systems allow us to do things like explore conflicting approaches and totally unbundle it from the human emotion.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:06Anish Acharya?

  And I think that's actually very important because this is why the sort of the decentralization in an organization or an economy works well, because every idea gets tried, you know?

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you know Pedro from Brex is like the most aggressive person I've met who does this with his exec team?

• 28:23Anish Acharya?

  No.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  So which is cool. Like he uses, like, he actually was one of the people who like really got me into OpenClaw.

• 28:28Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Because he just came in and, you know, he had lunch with us at YC.

• 28:33Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  And he just walked us through, you know, the vibe around OpenClaw was that it was too unsafe and dangerous and like delete your whole computer and stuff like that. What he ended up doing was like building an entire open source layer, which he actually has open source called Crap Trap, that is like an agent that watches all the network traffic and all the things that OpenClaw does.

• 28:55Anish Acharya?

  Nice.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  And then that's how he squares the circle. Like Brex is one of the most regulated, you know, fintechs.

• 29:01Anish Acharya?

  Of course, of course.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  And then the upshot of what he got is that he has his agent look at the meeting transcripts from like all of his direct reports. And he like can see that like two levels down.

• 29:15Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  And then the thing that really jumped out at me is like, he can use meetings that he's not in to figure out like what's broken, what's in conflict, like who's, who's in conflict with who.

• 29:28Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  And then sometimes he can show up at a meeting, he has perfect context from like the last three weeks of like that one compliance team.

• 29:36Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  And then he can walk in and he's like, actually, you're right. We're doing it your way. And then he can leave.

• 29:41Anish Acharya?

  That's so badass.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's like, can you imagine like, that is actually one of the defining reasons why startups or businesses fail.

• 29:50Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  It's like, it's actually like a management challenge.

• 29:54Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  The business becomes too big to fit in one person's head. And then this is like the most profound form of you have agents, you have memory, you have retrieval, you like zap the rocks more, the rocks give you like raw intelligence about like what's happening. And it can actually introspect not just on the opinion of like someone two levels down in your organization.

• 30:16Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  But it can actually look at the ground truth from the data.

• 30:20Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  And it's like that, you know, that's clairvoyance, right? Like, I mean, if you, once you have that in your brain, like actually every business in the world is available for you to take their business.

• 30:35Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Like, the world is basically built on things that are built around human beings. And human beings can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.

• 30:44Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  At any given time.

• 30:45Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, guess what? You plus an agent can keep basically three Harry Potter books in your head. You can like rifle shot.

• 30:54Anish Acharya?

  More to come.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, and more to come, right? Like, this is as, this is as bad, there are so many cryptoisms that like applied like 10 times more to AI, which is like, this is the worst it will ever be, actually.

• 31:06Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And so the whole world, like all business, all things that people rely on, government especially, is basically still built on a world that is predicated by human beings, limited human beings that can only keep seven plus or minus two things in their head.

• 31:23Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  And it's not ready, like, it's not ready for the world where agents can think at the speed of light, like you have unlimited amounts of it, like unlimited amounts of data. And then, you know, my hope is that like basically products are going to be 10 or 100 times better, like, they should be a thousand times better.

• 31:43Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Like services should be a thousand times better.

• 31:46Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Right? Like, you know, the invisible hand of capitalism at that point, like properly done, it's not about lowering the cost of something.

• 31:55Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  It should actually be creating these like sort of magical things that I was like on Wall Street Journal podcast recently.

• 32:03Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  And the reporter like kept trying to like gotcha me. He kept saying like, are you, you know, you guys in tech, are you trying to make a utopia? And I was like, this is a trap. Like, I don't, I would not go so far to say, you know, but as I went through like a bunch of examples from like a bunch of the startups that you and I have like worked on and funded and things like that, I was like, actually like, maybe, right? Like, you know, we may never achieve a utopia, but it is worthy and worth it to attempt.

• 32:35Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And that, you know, I would not say that Silicon Valley or tech will achieve a utopia. I will very earnestly say that we are trying to bring about a better world.

• 32:47Anish Acharya?

  Maybe another way to say this is just, this is the least happy you'll ever be.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:51Anish Acharya?

  You know, because I think like, one of the other implications of what you're describing is just the ergonomics of the sort of white collar job today. You know, you think about, you've worked at big companies, like you think of just the kind of morass that you have to get through.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Torture.

• 33:05Anish Acharya?

  You think of how lossy the communication is, like the entire management science sort of managerial class, like maybe that was a hundred year distraction from what was founder mode, you know, in the industrial revolution, all the way through Henry Ford, all the way through some of the early Silicon Valley founders, and then everybody just kind of hit this tidal wave of management.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:27Anish Acharya?

  Now we have this new model that can lead to dramatic productivity improvements, like three days a week of really intentional work, maybe one day.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:36Anish Acharya?

  And the other days you're touching grass. And I think the time that you do spend is just so much less burdened by this stuff that you always felt like you had to wade through.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you look at the typical mag seven day to day, it's insane. Like, I remember when I was 22, working on Windows Mobile, we were working on, you know, these crazy devices that were like years before the iPhone.

• 33:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  And we needed integration, for instance, from the Windows team, which was like, you know, on the other side of the highway in Redmond.

• 34:07Anish Acharya?

  Right.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  And then I remember, you know, me and my sort of PM mentor, we had to go over to the, to the Windows team and like, they wouldn't reply to our emails, they wouldn't fix our bugs, they wouldn't even like mark it as won't fix, they just ignored us.

• 34:21Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  And we had to go over there with a baseball bat.

• 34:24Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Like, I don't know why he brought one, like, it wasn't like he was gonna like rough anyone up, it was just like this vague threat or something.

• 34:31Anish Acharya?

  Incredible.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  It was actually hilarious. And I think about that all the time. It's like, what kind of like bureaucratic hell is it where like two perfectly smart people who are making like good tech money.

• 34:44Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  You know, are put into a situation where like there's a fiefdom over here, like literally there's like seven levels between us and that person.

• 34:54Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  And this person doesn't even know that we spent like four hours trying to get like a P3 bug fix that was like a blocker for a thousand of our users or something.

• 35:05Anish Acharya?

  It's like, and how much humanity is just wasted.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:08Anish Acharya?

  How many 2:00 AM sort of anxious wakeups were there?

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:11Anish Acharya?

  Because somebody wanted to not have a hard conversation, like it's, you know, it's a really, it's a waste of the way we should be spending our time and working.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's a profound version of like the seven plus or minus two. Like, I don't think that like the, you know, product unit manager, wherever the heck their, you know, their title was, like, I don't think that they wanted us to waste our time like that.

• 35:32Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Uh, I think it's just that, you know, your day, like, you just don't have enough hours in the day.

• 35:38Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  And we're like incredibly limited human beings, but, you know, yeah, it's funny. Like, I think that, you know, I think about my time at Microsoft and it's like, I remember getting an iPod and like doing competitive research for Windows Mobile versus the iPod. I could imagine today at Microsoft, you could imagine a markdown file and a skill.

• 35:59Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  That is run on a cron.

• 36:01Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  And it's like, how are, how are all the people working on this team? Like, are they blocked? Who are they blocked by? What are the external dependencies? Like, suddenly there is a graph.

• 36:10Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  There's a loop.

• 36:11Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  And then suddenly like, you know, the products can actually just move that, like, you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months.

• 36:20Anish Acharya?

  It's incredible.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  And if you could like multiply that out across like, the thing is like, probably an org like Microsoft can't.

• 36:27Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  But like a startup can.

• 36:29Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  And every startup must.

• 36:31Anish Acharya?

  Yes, they must be organized this way. I also love what you said, it's almost like the mid level of bureaucracy should be agents.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:37Anish Acharya?

  Because I actually think that, you know, being in charge is somewhat overstated. Like, I'd love to actually have at least the mid level organize the work, you know, resolve the conflicts that it can somewhat programmatically, probabilistically programmatically. Of course, the executive team maybe sets direction, the individual sort of decides on execution, but just the whole organization layer, which a lot of product managers historically did, should not be human.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  I mean, the great thing is, it doesn't have to be, do you know how Venkatesh Rao has this thing where it's like, you need to be above the API line? Like, if Uber came out, like, if you're an Uber driver, you're below the API line, like, you should be fighting to be above the API line. I actually think AI erases the API line.

• 37:17Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Like, one of the funniest things I saw recently is there's a API company that we funded called Clawvisor, and they released a, a bug report endpoint that is not for humans to use, it's for agents who use their software to use. And there's an LLM where it's like, if there's a bug in the software, it, like, the bug report goes, but then it replies real time.

• 37:42Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  And it's like, actually, like, that's a good bug, we filed it, we're gonna fix it next week, but also like try this workaround.

• 37:49Anish Acharya?

  Wow.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  And then, like, I can't get that out of my head because you could imagine that could be how companies work, right? Like, instead of being below the API line and having to do what, like, I don't know, the API tells you to do, like, this can be a back and forth, actually. And then I always think about, you know, the reason why cars in the eighties got so good in Japan was, it was actually a management technique, like, they realized the Toyota production system.

• 38:20Anish Acharya?

  That's right.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Meant that like, if you are the person doing the work on the line, you should be allowed to change the line because you are the person with the most amount of context to be able to improve your own working situation. And that's why American cars really started sucking and why Japanese cars became absolutely incredible. It's like this very subtle, simple way that actually empowers the worker. And so there's a sort of like mix that I.

• 38:45Anish Acharya?

  Which is so interesting, because what's traditionally seen as a hierarchical society came up with this very bottoms up way of working, which led to like arguably a 40 year generational run because of process power.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is beautiful.

• 38:58Anish Acharya?

  How, how many, as you think about kind of our evolution towards this vision, how many of these problems do you think are intelligence bound? Like, we need smarter models versus there will be other attributes of models that will unlock success?

• 39:11Speaker 00

  I mean, honestly, it's all human, humans are the ones who are gonna like slow this down. And then, actually, I'm realizing this might be a white pill.

• 39:21Anish Acharya?

  Okay.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  So if you look at like the tenor of what's going on just broadly in the discourse about AI, it's all like this sort of doom and gloom, like all white collar jobs are gonna go away, there's gonna be a permanent underclass.

• 39:34Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  And then. Funny enough, what I think is all of the bureaucracy and the slowness and the seven plus or minus two of like every company, every institution, every organization, all the middle managers in the world.

• 39:50Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  That is actually the white pill.

• 39:53Anish Acharya?

  Hundred percent.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  So, you know, these things are gonna be slower than you think.

• 39:58Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Right? I looked at, you know, we had 7,000 people, most of them were 18 to 22 years old.

• 40:05Anish Acharya?

  Amazing.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  And I looked in their faces and like, they're all AI native, like they were born more or less like, you know, they became adults in the time of ChatGPT.

• 40:14Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  And it's gonna, you know, and for us, it's like, now we, you know, run shit, which is nice.

• 40:20Anish Acharya?

  That's great.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  All right, but you know, imagine us like 20 years ago, like, you know, we were the ones who were native to the web. We were the ones who were native to mobile.

• 40:28Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  And then now we run shit, so then all of society runs on the things that we expected from when we were 18 to 22. So I think that, you know, the white pill to me is like, it's gonna be 20 years and that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing.

• 40:43Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Like, society is way slower than you think, government is way slower than you think, every company in the world is way slower than you think.

• 40:51Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  And there are real notes to these things, like there are structural reasons why Microsoft isn't going anywhere.

• 40:57Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  And then I guess this is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say like, I want to start up to replace all of them.

• 41:07Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  And the reality is like, they won't, you know?

• 41:11Anish Acharya?

  They won't. I love it. Okay, I have two more questions for you. You know, one on this kind of sort of trying to envision the near future. What do you think the next computer looks like? What does a new computer look like?

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Oh, man. I think in the short term, it'll probably keep looking like the way it is, but it seems inconceivable that it'll stay that form factor, like it's pretty clearly going to be voice.

• 41:35Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  I think there's a lot around memory. It's gonna take a while to, you know, we're at this moment where everyone's sort of happy with ChatGPT or Claude Co-Work or whatever it is.

• 41:46Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  But I don't think they will be in the long term, like, I think you're gonna want a lot more context and you're gonna want like, all watched over by machines of love and grace.

• 41:57Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  You're gonna want this thing that is benevolent, knows about like your hopes, fears and desires, and then is sort of like relentlessly searching to help you in that way. And that's actually gonna be really exciting. And, you know, the path through that will probably be like computer use, memory, like diarization, like ingestion, like.

• 42:18Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's gonna be a lot there. And, you know, the cool thing is, it's actually gonna take longer. Like, this isn't a, like, I don't think people are even talking about this now. My guess is like, next year, 2027, will be like the harness wars.

• 42:35Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  You know, and then, but it's really a cost thing, like it's just too expensive right now.

• 42:39Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  You know? But it won't be, like, there will be a war for a billion consumers.

• 42:45Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Right when like, the frontier model compute of today

• 42:50Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  will be like maybe 50 or 100 bucks in like two or three years.

• 42:55Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  And that will be when like the most few, the browser wars will be back on.

• 43:00Anish Acharya?

  Yes, yes. Well, we're already seeing it, like, the price per token of Frontier is going to infinity, like, Mithos is infinity dollars a token, you can't have it. And the price per token of the model that was Frontier a week ago is collapsing to zero.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:12Anish Acharya?

  And I actually think, to me, that is a huge white pill for a lot of reasons. You know, one of the most important of which is just, we need more consumer AI software. And in a world where most consumer products are free to try, you just can't do that when you have really high costs of incremental distribution. The magic of software is zero cost incremental distribution. We have these magical primitives, like we have computers that are emotive and have emotional texture for the first time in 40 or 50 years. What a tragedy that we haven't built more ambitious consumer products yet.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:41Anish Acharya?

  So I'm really excited for this sort of changing economics of models to unlock these new categories.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, and we're so early, like, I was convinced that, like, being, becoming a convert to OpenClaw made me very, very convinced that it was gonna happen right away. And then at this point, I'm like, that's not correct at all, like, you know?

• 43:58Anish Acharya?

  Well, you should try, the new ChatGPT desktop app actually has got a voice mode and it's sort of, it's an operator or concierge that can see all your threads.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 44:06Anish Acharya?

  And you can access it from your phone. It's very OpenClaw-ish, and I'm sure Peter had his hands all over it. To me, it's the closest thing we've seen yet to a true consumer assistant.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Oh, I could see that.

• 44:16Anish Acharya?

  It's awesome.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, ChatGPT always had like basically the best memory, so.

• 44:20Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  I gotta try it again.

• 44:22Anish Acharya?

  They've done a great job.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:23Anish Acharya?

  Okay, last question. You know, we talked a lot about kind of utopian visions for the world and problems that are maybe intelligence bound. You've also put a lot of energy into sort of local politics and doing things I think are very pro-social, but it seems like more of those problems are human coordination bound.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely.

• 44:40Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, how do you get energy to do that work? You know, is there a white pill for that aspect of our society? Maybe talk a bit about that.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  I mean, the white pill is just believing that America still has rule of law and that people in government are trying to help and like somewhat earnest, like it's not perfect. I think the white pill for me recently was even just doing jury duty in San Francisco and to see like this orderly process of really a cross-section of San Francisco. One thing I realized was like, actually, we are a big part of the city, like we're 10, 20% of the people are like directly working in tech.

• 45:19Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  And so, to see something that was, I mean, the judge was really good, I mean, it was a horrible case, but like, you know, government is not here to like ruin people, like.

• 45:32Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  And so, and then at that point, we can vote.

• 45:37Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Like, we actually have a say. And then I think everything is downstream of media at that point. Like, I think the San Francisco moment that got me very engaged was realizing, you know, Asian Americans are 25% of the voting populace, about 30% of the population. But during COVID, like, we had a district attorney who was turning a blind eye to some of the most heinous crimes against our elders. And simultaneous to that, we had a school board that was openly hostile against Asian American kids who just wanted to learn algebra in public middle school, which hit me because I was that public school kid in Fremont in the East Bay. Like, if I couldn't have taken algebra in middle school, I couldn't take calculus by

• 46:21Speaker 00

  senior year, I wouldn't have been able to study engineering at Stanford, and I wouldn't be here doing any of the things I get to do today. And I'm like, oh, okay, now, now they've made it personal.

• 46:31Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  And like, let me understand. And it turned out to be like, sort of all the same people, the same people who want to destroy all data centers, the same people who, you know, don't want to build any housing

• 46:42Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  in, anywhere in California or the world. Like, it's sort of NIMBYs who want to virtue signal, who sort of have these ideologies that like don't square with mine. I mean, as a builder, you're like, well, the, you know, words have meaning, like, supply and demand exists, markets exist, like incentives exist. And then, you know, I think that government is, you know, when people like us don't speak up, when we don't like pay attention and like hold our media accountable, not just the government.

• 47:16Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Then things get very deranged. And that's what San Francisco was, I think, around COVID. And then just by sheer organization, like, you know, this is, I think that like, the Chinese of the West Side organizing around algebra and, you know, the deaths of our elders, going to farmers markets and like literally physically like telling each other, they're killing us, they're killing us, right?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  ABC News, you know, literally the mainstream media, TV channel of San Francisco and the Bay Area would not cover anti-Chinese and anti-Asian crime.

• 48:00Anish Acharya?

  Wow.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's like unconscionable, right? Like, our institutions failed us. And the great thing is like, when the system becomes so odious, you've got to put your body on it. I think that was Mario Savio. And it's kind of, I mean, it's ironic almost to like say that, but on the other hand, like, that's what I believe, like, they can't do this to us and we're gonna stop it. And even at like personal peril, even at, you know, reputational cost, like, we should be willing to take that cost because that's our covenant with our fellow man and our fellow citizen, you know? And if we don't do it, who's gonna do it? Like, nobody does it. And I'm super proud of what we're doing in San Francisco because we have beat back

• 48:46Speaker 00

  that ideological set of people who like created this mess.

• 48:50Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's not perfect in San Francisco, but it's getting better.

• 48:55Anish Acharya?

  It's amazing right now.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:56Anish Acharya?

  I mean, I think, I saw that Lurie might be the most popular mayor or politician in the entire country.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:02Anish Acharya?

  Things have gotten so much better, everybody sees it, feels it in the vibes. Some people say, I wonder why. But I think for those of us who know, we see that your sort of stewardship, not just of the industry, of the startup community, of sort of technology, but also of the community is one of the big catalysts. So thank you for doing that work.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, yeah. So, and I think San Francisco should be the beacon for pushing this back in every blue city in America as, you know, that's what Gary'sList.org is basically, like, how do we take the lessons that we learned here? And like, LA needs this, New York needs this, Minneapolis needs this, Seattle needs this.

• 49:39Anish Acharya?

  Well, and also, let's find, you know, to connect the two, the sort of, you know, culture, society and technology, like, let's find very local ways for the ambition that this technology unlocks to show up. You know, I was in London last week and we were talking a little about what's possible. It's like, hey, you don't have to have an American vision for how AI impacts your society. If you want the NHS to be incredible, then like you could do that with this technology. So the kind of, the opportunity for ambition to be very localized in our communities, I think is something really interesting.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, yeah, act local, like, take care of the people right next to you, like, you know, I, I think it's funny, so many people get very, very obsessed with national, I mean, I want to look at national generally right now. It's like, you know what, like, I care about San Francisco, I care about housing, I care about crime, I care about, you know, treatment and recovery.

• 50:29Anish Acharya?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  And if we do that, like, we can have the society we want to live in. And then, you know, if we fix local, like, state and national will fix itself. Cause like, on a five or 10-year basis, like, the people who win up there, like, they, they will come up through a system that's functional and about saying no to things that don't make sense, about saying yes to the things that are awesome for the people.

• 50:52Anish Acharya?

  I love it. All right, Gary, first and any.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Thanks, brother.

• 50:55Anish Acharya?

  Thanks, bro.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  This is great.

• 50:56Anish Acharya?

  Cool.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:59Erik 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 a 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. 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.

• 51:43Erik Torenberg?

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.