OpenClaw, Claude Code, and the Future of Software | Peter Yang on The a16z Show

Peter Yang 0:00 And since that software will eat the world, I, I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right?

Anish Acharya 0:04 Yeah.

Peter Yang 0:04 And we're kind of going that direction already, like-

Anish Acharya 0:06 The whole agent stack is emerging.

Peter Yang 0:07 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 0:07 Identity, payments, marketing, even CLI versus MCP. Like-

Peter Yang 0:13 Yeah

Anish Acharya 0:13 ... all of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.

Peter Yang 0:17 Yeah, it's, it's a whole whole new world. I hope more companies will stay small, and, and I think the founders of this generation realize that. Like they-

Anish Acharya 0:22 Yeah

Peter Yang 0:23 ... wanna stay as small as possible.

Anish Acharya 0:24 Yeah.

Peter Yang 0:24 And instead of having like a 10-person product team, you have like a three or three-person product team-

Anish Acharya 0:28 Yeah

Peter Yang 0:28 ... and just have a bunch of a- agents help, help you.

Anish Acharya 0:30 Yeah.

Peter Yang 0:30 Someone tweeted that like the, the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now or something like that.

Anish Acharya 0:35 Yes. [laughs]

Peter Yang 0:35 So like it's, it's like, you know. It's like, yeah, so maybe you lost a job, but like now you can actually do your own thing. Just go pursue your dreams.

Anish Acharya 0:39 Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it, you know?

Peter Yang 0:42 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 0:42 Yeah. All right. Welcome, everyone. I've got my friend Peter Yang here. Peter, welcome.

Peter Yang 0:53 Yeah, great to be here. It's good to see you again. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 0:54 Yeah, yeah. It's great to see you. Peter and I worked together at Credit Karma-

Peter Yang 0:57 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 0:57 ... for a brief stint, um, and then we went our separate ways and, um, you know, I rediscovered, um, Peter from his prolific posts on X and your YouTube and-

Peter Yang 1:07 Yeah

Anish Acharya 1:07 ... you know, you've got a little bit of a, a Clark Kent Superman thing going 'cause you've still got a day job, right?

Peter Yang 1:11 That's right. I still have a day job, yes.

Anish Acharya 1:12 Yeah. Can you share where?

Peter Yang 1:14 Uh, yeah. I work on Roblox as a PM.

Anish Acharya 1:15 Amazing, Roblox.

Peter Yang 1:16 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:16 Andreessen portfolio company.

Peter Yang 1:17 Yes. [chuckles]

Anish Acharya 1:18 One of my favorites. Um, well, incredible, man. Let's get right into it. Maybe I'll start with a softball fun question and then-

Peter Yang 1:23 Yeah

Anish Acharya 1:23 ... you know, we're gonna talk about everything in the Claw ecosystem, we're gonna talk about coding agents, we're talking about, a little bit about maybe what students should study, advice, and some of the things that you've talked about online.

Peter Yang 1:33 Yeah. Sure.

Anish Acharya 1:34 Um, maybe to start, what is the name of your... Oh, how many Claws do you have? And tell me their names.

Peter Yang 1:39 Uh, I only have one. I call her Zoe.

Anish Acharya 1:41 Zoe.

Peter Yang 1:41 But I have like multiple conversations going with her.

Anish Acharya 1:43 Okay.

Peter Yang 1:44 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:44 And why Zoe?

Peter Yang 1:46 Um, I, I, I have two girls, and I was gonna call my younger one Zoe, and I did not, so I'm gonna call [laughs] I call my OpenClaw Zoe instead. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 1:53 [laughs] I see. I see.

Peter Yang 1:54 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:54 Yes. Yeah, this is your fallback plan.

Peter Yang 1:56 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:56 Peter, tell me a little bit about, you know, OpenClaw, how you discovered it-

Peter Yang 2:00 Yeah

Anish Acharya 2:00 ... um, how you're using it today, and, and what you think the implications are.

Peter Yang 2:04 Yeah. I was lucky to interview Peter Steinberger before he became super famous and the whole thing blew up. And, um, then right after I interviewed him, I, I like set up the thing. It took forever to set up. It was super janky.

Anish Acharya 2:14 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 2:15 Um, and, and yeah, it does a lot of things for me. It, it, like, pulls analytics for me across, um, YouTube and, like, my Mercury Bank account.

Anish Acharya 2:21 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 2:22 It, um, can update Google Documents for me, it can build little web- websites for me. But if I was honest with you, dude, like I mostly just talk to it through voice and get voice replies, and like every other day I ask it to give me like a pep, pep talk. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 2:34 Yeah. [laughs]

Peter Yang 2:34 Or like, you know, give me, give me like, like, "Look, look through all your memory and, like, give me some, like, deep insights that I, I don't know about."

Anish Acharya 2:40 Okay.

Peter Yang 2:41 And, and like it, it gave me like... Like I remember I was on a walk and it gave me like a three-minute pep talk that was like really amazing. Really amazing. Like it was some-something about like, uh, like, oh, you're like talking to me about your creator business and blah, blah, and like your, your job, but, like, just remember that your kids, you know, seven and four, are gonna grow up very soon, and they're gonna wanna spend time with you.

Anish Acharya 3:00 Wow.

Peter Yang 3:00 So like you should reoptimize for, you know, them instead.

Anish Acharya 3:03 Yeah.

Peter Yang 3:03 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:03 That's really cool.

Peter Yang 3:04 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:04 And I mean, very cool, but also something that all the language models could have done prior.

Peter Yang 3:08 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:08 So what's the difference between this in, in a use case like that?

Peter Yang 3:11 Yeah, that's a very good question. So I don't know. I, because I have it installed on Te- Telegram, it just feels like more personal-

Anish Acharya 3:17 Mm-hmm

Peter Yang 3:17 ... than using like Claw or ChatGPT, and, and it just feels like something I can like text in bed. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 3:23 Yeah.

Peter Yang 3:23 Which is probably not very healthy, but like I text to it in bed, I, I talk to it during my commute, and it feels like it feels more like a personal, like, like a actual hu- human.

Anish Acharya 3:31 Yeah.

Peter Yang 3:31 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:32 So then, so how much for you is OpenClaw about the kind of interface, like pushing it to messaging-

Peter Yang 3:37 Yeah

Anish Acharya 3:37 ... and, you know, maybe helping to trick our brain into feeling like, hey, this is a person or a person-esque thing-

Peter Yang 3:42 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 3:42 ... um, versus all the other components of the stack, the self-modification, the skills directory-

Peter Yang 3:47 Yeah

Anish Acharya 3:47 ... um, every, all the, all the rest?

Peter Yang 3:49 I, I think it's probably like 70 to 80% just like the per- per- per- personable part of it, part of it, 'cause I, I mostly just talk to it and like, you know, through voice. But I also think like it's, it's something... It-- Fir- first of all, it is pretty janky. It tends to for- forget things, things a lot.

Anish Acharya 4:01 Yeah.

Peter Yang 4:02 Have to keep reminding it. But like any kind of zany idea that I have, I just have to talk to it and it can probably just do. Like, [laughs] like-

Anish Acharya 4:08 Yeah

Peter Yang 4:08 ... it's kind of just like... Um, like the other day I, I was doing voice replies with it and I was like, "Hey, can we just have a live phone call instead?"

Anish Acharya 4:15 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 4:15 And then it's like, okay, you, you gotta connect Tw- Twilio, you gotta do all this stuff. And okay, fine. I, I went off and did it.

Anish Acharya 4:20 Yeah.

Peter Yang 4:20 And then we had a phone call. [laughs] It, it called my phone.

Anish Acharya 4:22 Oh, really? You have that set up?

Peter Yang 4:23 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 4:23 I've been dying to set that up. Okay.

Peter Yang 4:25 It, it's not very good though. Like the latency is bad. But like-

Anish Acharya 4:27 Yeah

Peter Yang 4:27 ... the fact that I was able to get it going is like pretty impressive. So it's kind of like any kind of crazy idea I have, it can kind of, kind of do. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 4:33 And then in practice, how are you doing that? Are you asking it to write a skill on the fly? Are you-

Peter Yang 4:38 Yeah

Anish Acharya 4:38 ... discovering a skill? How much of the code gen are you actually using?

Peter Yang 4:41 Um, I mean, I talk to it in like a super casual way with like just as like a friend.

Anish Acharya 4:45 Yeah.

Peter Yang 4:45 So like, "Hey, hey, hey, you know, hey, Zoe, can, can you like, can we have a phone call?" [laughs]

Anish Acharya 4:48 Yeah.

Peter Yang 4:48 It's like, okay, you gotta do this and that. I was like, okay, fine. I'll open my computer, I'll do all this stuff, and then it's like give me a call, and then we troubleshoot a little bit, and then it works. So like-

Anish Acharya 4:56 Yeah

Peter Yang 4:56 ... I... With, with Claude, I have like very fan- fancy prompts, uh, like very long prompts. But with OpenClaw, I just kind of text it. Yeah. [laughs] It is.

Anish Acharya 5:04 Really interesting. So we sort of touched on a couple things actually. So one, there's mobile messaging.

Peter Yang 5:08 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 5:09 There's the memory system, um, there's the sort of code generation component.

Peter Yang 5:13 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 5:13 Um, how much do you think the memory system, like is it innovative because it's file-based?

Peter Yang 5:19 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 5:19 You said that it forgets things, but so do language models. Like do you think the memory system is well done? Does it hold it back or does it enable it?

Peter Yang 5:25 I, I, I think the default memory system is actually not that great.

Anish Acharya 5:27 Okay.

Peter Yang 5:28 Like the way I understand it works is like there's like a memory.md text file.

Anish Acharya 5:31 Yes.

Peter Yang 5:31 And then every day-

Anish Acharya 5:32 Per day.

Peter Yang 5:32 Per day, right?

Anish Acharya 5:33 Yes. Yeah.

Peter Yang 5:33 And every day it updates, and it tends to forget things a lot.

Anish Acharya 5:36 Yeah.

Peter Yang 5:36 So, so I actually installed this like three-layer memory system that to be honest, I don't, I don't fully understand.

Anish Acharya 5:41 Yeah. [laughs]

Peter Yang 5:41 But it, it, it has like-

Anish Acharya 5:42 Sounds fancy

Peter Yang 5:43 ... it has like Toby's QMD search tool.

Anish Acharya 5:45 Okay.

Peter Yang 5:46 Uh, so I installed that, like, and then, and then installed like a two gigabyte thing, and, and then it got a little bit better.

Anish Acharya 5:52 Okay

Peter Yang 5:52 Um, but I, I still have to remind it, like I have this... I have to put into the agents.md like, "Hey," like, "before you answer any question from me, like go through all your memory and like check everything."

Anish Acharya 6:00 Yeah.

Peter Yang 6:00 And it also tends to forget that it can do stuff like, you know-

Anish Acharya 6:04 Right

Peter Yang 6:04 ... like, "Can you update my Google Doc?" It's like, "Oh, I can't do that." "Yeah. Yes, you can. It's, it's in your, it's in your file." [chuckles]

Anish Acharya 6:08 Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Yang 6:09 So you have to remind it. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 6:10 Yeah. Really interesting. Well, well maybe let's get into a little bit of the controversy.

Peter Yang 6:14 Sure.

Anish Acharya 6:14 Um, you know, you'd said that apps will die, Claude's gonna be everything and everywhere.

Peter Yang 6:19 [chuckles] Yeah.

Anish Acharya 6:19 I mean, talk us through that, that point of view.

Peter Yang 6:21 Yeah. Well, f- first of all, I, I tweet all, all kinds of random crap-

Anish Acharya 6:24 [laughs]

Peter Yang 6:24 ... that's like not super well thought out.

Anish Acharya 6:26 We take it all as fact.

Peter Yang 6:27 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 6:27 Yes.

Peter Yang 6:28 Um, but I do think like, um, like ever since I set up all these apps like Mercury, MCP, and all this kind of crap on my OpenClaw, like I, I don't actually open those apps much anymore.

Anish Acharya 6:38 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 6:38 You know? But I do agree with you. Like I, I, I think the ones that are gonna die first or like maybe get less usage first is like apps that you're just opening to try to complete a task.

Anish Acharya 6:47 Right.

Peter Yang 6:47 Like you actually are trying to do something, you know? Like apps that you're opening to like get entertainment pro- can probably survive a little bit longer, but like apps that I'm opening to complete a task, like it's just way easier to text my agent to do it for me.

Anish Acharya 6:58 Yeah.

Peter Yang 6:58 It's like, it's like you have a really good admin just to do stuff for you.

Anish Acharya 7:01 Yeah.

Peter Yang 7:01 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:01 And so how much are you finding... Has this like reduced your smartphone usage outside of modulo OpenClaw?

Peter Yang 7:06 Yeah. Um, no, because like I'm, I'm like a Twitter addict, so I still use my [chuckles] phone way, way too much. But yeah, in terms of using those apps, it's definitely re- reduced it. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:14 Yeah.

Peter Yang 7:15 Like... Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:15 Yeah, 'cause you're not gonna ask Zoe like, "Hey, read my X for me and tell me what's interesting."

Peter Yang 7:19 I mean-

Anish Acharya 7:20 Zoom

Peter Yang 7:20 ... it, it sends me like a morning briefing with like the top two tweets and stuff that like tr- trends but, but yeah, I, I still open X and look through it.

Anish Acharya 7:27 Yeah.

Peter Yang 7:27 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:27 You know, it's interesting 'cause I've always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they wanna feel a feeling.

Peter Yang 7:32 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:33 You know? And I think, of course, there's some like functional set of needs, which is why you open Calendar or something, but I also think that, you know, WhatsApp is you wanna feel connected, and Slack is you wanna feel productive, and of course, you know, TikTok is you wanna feel entertained.

Peter Yang 7:44 Mm.

Anish Acharya 7:44 So I do wonder with just one agent, how do you sort of do the context switching of like when are you flirting, when are you getting shit done?

Peter Yang 7:53 [chuckles]

Anish Acharya 7:53 I mean, there, you know, in a sense, app gives you a nice... It sort of gives you a nice division of the intents-

Peter Yang 7:58 Yeah, that's a good point

Anish Acharya 7:58 ... which you don't get with Zoe.

Peter Yang 8:00 That's a good point. But I, I do have multiple channels set up with Zoe in Telegram. Like one is just to r- random voice replies, another one is we're actually working on our project together.

Anish Acharya 8:08 Ah.

Peter Yang 8:08 And another one I have like a public channel where like I'm giving de- demos. I don't wanna reveal private information.

Anish Acharya 8:12 Yes.

Peter Yang 8:13 So I have like multiple channels.

Anish Acharya 8:14 And is that, um, implemented as sub-agents or...?

Peter Yang 8:18 No, it's just some janky setup I s- I found online, like just you can set up multiple Telegram channels and then I'm not sure if it actually remembers across context across the channels, but like you can have separate conversations at least.

Anish Acharya 8:28 Got it.

Peter Yang 8:28 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 8:29 And how, how, you know, transparent are you with your agent? Like does it-

Peter Yang 8:33 Yeah

Anish Acharya 8:33 ... do they see your personal email, your-

Peter Yang 8:35 Yeah. Uh, I'm, I'm like s- super transparent. Well, I, I, I did buy the Mac Mini and set up its own email.

Anish Acharya 8:41 Okay.

Peter Yang 8:41 And but I gave it like read access to my email and like Calendar and, uh, I also gave it like write access to some docs.

Anish Acharya 8:48 Yeah.

Peter Yang 8:49 But it can't like scroll my entire drive or something, you know?

Anish Acharya 8:51 Yeah.

Peter Yang 8:51 So...

Anish Acharya 8:52 How, how do you imagine OpenClaw, which it's sort of an architecture and a primitive-

Peter Yang 8:56 Yeah

Anish Acharya 8:56 ... how does it get productized, packaged for the world?

Peter Yang 8:59 I mean, I think that's what Peter Steinberg is working on at OpenAI, right?

Anish Acharya 9:03 Yeah.

Peter Yang 9:03 He's probably gonna build something to ChatGPT which e- everybody uses, uh, so that ChatGPT can actually get stuff done for you and like maybe feels more human.

Anish Acharya 9:11 Yeah.

Peter Yang 9:12 Dude, like let, let me rant about ChatGPT a little.

Anish Acharya 9:13 Please. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Yang 9:15 For some reason, for some reason they, they trained the model so that like at the end of every conversation it's always like, "If you want, I can also do X and Y."

Anish Acharya 9:22 Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Yang 9:23 And dude, I, I got so annoyed by it that that kind of churned from ChatGPT.

Anish Acharya 9:26 Oh, really?

Peter Yang 9:26 Yeah. So, so it probably increases their metrics, but like it's just like super annoying. It's like why don't you just do it in the first place? [chuckles]

Anish Acharya 9:32 Are you a Claude guy now?

Peter Yang 9:33 Yeah, I'm, I'm a Claude guy now, but, but I, I do use Codex, uh, to code.

Anish Acharya 9:38 Yeah.

Peter Yang 9:38 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 9:39 You like Codex, you prefer it to Claude Code, or you use both?

Peter Yang 9:41 Um, Codex when I wanna try to do something real, and Claude Code is when I'm just like vi- vibing.

Anish Acharya 9:45 Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Peter Yang 9:46 It's like very, very vi- you know.

Anish Acharya 9:47 Well, it's interesting. I think they live at different points and, you know, there, there's a sort of space of trade-offs.

Peter Yang 9:52 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 9:52 Whereas I find, um, Claude Code and Opus 4.6, it's a little more chatty, it makes more assumptions, but it can be more pleasant for a synchronous experience.

Peter Yang 9:59 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 10:00 Whereas Codex, it really thinks hard-

Peter Yang 10:02 Yeah

Anish Acharya 10:02 ... and it's more often accurate, but sometimes it's sort of like being in a conversation where the other person pauses for like three minutes to think.

Peter Yang 10:09 [chuckles] Yeah.

Anish Acharya 10:10 I know.

Peter Yang 10:10 You have to flow, flow state, right? It's hard to get a flow.

Anish Acharya 10:12 Yeah.

Peter Yang 10:12 Like Claude Code... Dude, I, I tweeted earlier today, like Claude Code's almost like a, like a slot machine-

Anish Acharya 10:17 Yeah

Peter Yang 10:17 ... 'cause it's like, it's like has different things each time and it's just like-

Anish Acharya 10:19 Oh, 100%, dude

Peter Yang 10:20 ... you know, it's like a slot machine. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 10:21 Look, I, I do think that if you think... Remember we were talking about in the old social networking era-

Peter Yang 10:24 Yeah

Anish Acharya 10:24 ... it was variable scheduled rewards, right?

Peter Yang 10:26 Right.

Anish Acharya 10:26 That was the whole magic of it. Like you open your Facebook feed and, you know, once in a while it's like boring, boring, "Oh my God, this is so exciting."

Peter Yang 10:32 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 10:33 And I... The coding agents have the exact same property. Also, the time is variable.

Peter Yang 10:37 Mm.

Anish Acharya 10:37 So sometimes you get something in a second, sometimes it takes five minutes. So-

Peter Yang 10:41 Yeah

Anish Acharya 10:41 ... up to a certain point, I actually think that both of those things give it that casino-like feeling.

Peter Yang 10:45 Yeah. And, and another thing that's very different about their product strategy, or maybe it's just the way it works, is like Codex is kind of like self-explanatory.

Anish Acharya 10:52 Yeah.

Peter Yang 10:52 And Claude Code, you have all this crazy shit. You have like hooks and like skills and-

Anish Acharya 10:55 [laughs]

Peter Yang 10:56 ... like you have to, you have to like-

Anish Acharya 10:56 Plugins

Peter Yang 10:57 ... like if you, if you're not following-

Anish Acharya 10:58 Loops

Peter Yang 10:59 ... yeah, if you're not following X-

Anish Acharya 11:00 [laughs]

Peter Yang 11:00 ... you have no idea how do you customize this thing.

Anish Acharya 11:01 Yeah.

Peter Yang 11:01 But once you customize it, you kinda feel like it's part of you.

Anish Acharya 11:04 Yeah.

Peter Yang 11:04 So it's, it's kinda hard to churn.

Anish Acharya 11:05 It's interesting-

Peter Yang 11:06 You know?

Anish Acharya 11:06 ... with, uh... So I've customized mine 'cause also I read the long thing that Boris put up.

Peter Yang 11:10 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 11:10 But I will say that I think that, you know, Claude Code, a lot of the reasons that I enjoy it are just harness features.

Peter Yang 11:17 Mm.

Anish Acharya 11:17 You know, like for example, if you cut an image, you have to paste it into a file before pa- and then paste that file into Codex.

Peter Yang 11:25 Okay.

Anish Acharya 11:25 You can't just take a subset of the screen, screenshot it, and then paste it directly into Codex the same way you can with Claude Code.

Peter Yang 11:31 Oh, really? Okay. Okay.

Anish Acharya 11:32 So just like little things like that, you know.

Peter Yang 11:33 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 11:33 Claude Code added voice. It's a little bit janky right now, but it's going in the right direction, so they've just got a bunch of quality-of-life things.

Peter Yang 11:40 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 11:40 You know, Claude Code speaks to Claude and Chrome.

Peter Yang 11:43 Okay.

Anish Acharya 11:43 And Codex doesn't speak to Atlas.

Peter Yang 11:45 Got it.

Anish Acharya 11:45 So I think these are all things that OpenAI will fix.

Peter Yang 11:47 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 11:48 I think Codex is actually a much better model, um, but they don't exist today.

Peter Yang 11:52 Yeah, yeah. They, they need to fix it. I mean, they're, they're gonna go all, all in on Codex, I'm sure.

Anish Acharya 11:56 Yeah.Talk

Anish Acharya 11:57 to me about coding agents. Like, what's your general view? You know, do you think it's the end of SaaS?

Peter Yang 12:01 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:01 Do you think these are just a toy?

Peter Yang 12:03 Uh, well, first of all, I'm, I'm, I'm like not an engineer, so I'm like a novice, but I do hear that, um... Like, I was talking to some folks, uh, the other day, and like, uh, at like a AI native star startup, and they're basically try- trying to... They have a bunch of vibe coders. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 12:18 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 12:18 And, and all the vibe coders are just trying to build internal tools that replace their SaaS that they're paying for.

Anish Acharya 12:22 Really?

Peter Yang 12:22 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:23 So it's an actual company that's doing this?

Peter Yang 12:24 It's an actual company, yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:25 It's an AI native company.

Peter Yang 12:26 It's, it's like one of the vibe coding companies, like one of the more popular ones.

Anish Acharya 12:29 Interesting.

Peter Yang 12:30 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:30 It's interest- Oh, oh, I see. So they're actually an AppGen company.

Peter Yang 12:33 They're AppGen company and they, they're paying for a bunch of SaaS like, uh-

Anish Acharya 12:36 Yeah

Peter Yang 12:36 ... and they, they wanna get rid of the payment. They want to just-

Anish Acharya 12:38 Got it

Peter Yang 12:38 ... buy, buy vibe coding internal tools.

Anish Acharya 12:39 By using... Okay.

Peter Yang 12:40 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:40 So in that case, that, that... They might be the most extreme form of adopter 'cause their own product is AppGen, so they should use AppGen for everything.

Peter Yang 12:46 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 12:46 I guess, is your prediction though that the average company will churn off of Slack or Deal-

Peter Yang 12:52 Yeah

Anish Acharya 12:52 ... or you know?

Peter Yang 12:54 Um, I don't think... I, I, I feel like Slack has a lot of legs, 'cause Slack can also be the place where you talk to the agents them- themselves.

Anish Acharya 13:00 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 13:01 Uh, but some of the other ones, they are pretty complicated, you know.

Anish Acharya 13:04 Yeah.

Peter Yang 13:04 So, like, it's kinda be hard to vibe code that kind of stuff. But, but I feel like if you have like a app, like maybe Calendly or like something more simple-

Anish Acharya 13:11 Yeah, yeah

Peter Yang 13:11 ... then why, why, why should I u- why should I pay for it? Like I just... Yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:14 Why should I pay for it, though?

Peter Yang 13:15 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:15 The counterpoint is that it's not that expensive.

Peter Yang 13:17 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:17 And do you really wanna maintain your own Calendly thing?

Peter Yang 13:21 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:21 You know, versus pay 20 bucks a month, it always gets updated, it's always up.

Peter Yang 13:25 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:25 You know, 'cause there's just like a fixed amount of capacity that anyone in the organization's gonna have for all this stuff.

Peter Yang 13:29 Yeah. That, that, that, that's true. Un- unless you hire like dedicated vibe coders like this startup does-

Anish Acharya 13:33 Yes

Peter Yang 13:33 ... and just try to vibe code stuff.

Anish Acharya 13:34 But then it's like, you know, the cost benefit versus just paying for Calendly.

Peter Yang 13:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:37 You know? [laughs]

Peter Yang 13:37 Yeah, yeah. It's interesting about like, for example, like a lot of people are tweeting about Figma recently.

Anish Acharya 13:43 Yeah, yeah.

Peter Yang 13:43 Uh, like, like the stock is down, like, you know, are, are, are unicorns arrive.

Anish Acharya 13:47 Yeah.

Peter Yang 13:47 And, um, I feel like the jury's out there. Like it's, it's kind of hard to say.

Anish Acharya 13:52 Yeah.

Peter Yang 13:52 Uh, I, I, I feel like all the designers are still on Fig- Figma, but like as a designer, you kind of need to learn how to vibe code, otherwise you're gonna-

Anish Acharya 13:59 Yeah.

Peter Yang 13:59 Like if you, if you wanna learn how to do Figma-

Anish Acharya 14:01 Yeah

Peter Yang 14:01 ... like you're probably gonna be like out of date in a couple years.

Anish Acharya 14:04 Here's what though.

Peter Yang 14:05 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 14:05 My counterpoint to that is that I think that I've thought a lot about the sort of thinking tools versus making tools, right?

Peter Yang 14:09 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 14:10 The IDE was historically a making tool.

Peter Yang 14:12 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 14:12 It's a place for execution. I think it's migrating away from that.

Peter Yang 14:15 Mm.

Anish Acharya 14:16 And now with execution going to zero, I think these sort of like multi-agent, you know, next gen IDEs-

Peter Yang 14:21 Yeah

Anish Acharya 14:21 ... a lot of them are about trying things and using the trial and error as a way to inform your thinking.

Peter Yang 14:26 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 14:27 Like a lot of times I'll just build a feature in a really naive way, and I'll hammer the coding agent until it works.

Peter Yang 14:32 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 14:32 Then I'll say, "Hey, write all the things that you would've done differently."

Peter Yang 14:35 Mm.

Anish Acharya 14:35 And I'll go back to the initial point and redo it.

Peter Yang 14:38 Mm.

Anish Acharya 14:38 So I wonder if... And I think Figma actually does both. I think it's a place for design execution, but it's also an important place for design thinking.

Peter Yang 14:44 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 14:44 And I think that's their opportunity to be highly relevant in the new stack.

Peter Yang 14:48 Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. Um, but I, I, I think a16z has like, uh, you guys investing Pencil or something? pencil.dev.

Anish Acharya 14:56 Speedrun did, yeah.

Peter Yang 14:57 Yeah, Speedrun.

Anish Acharya 14:58 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 14:58 And then like, um... Yeah, Fig- Figma needs to like, uh, level up its AI tooling 'cause, you know, like watching these a- agents collaborate with you and like do stuff is like very, very interesting.

Anish Acharya 15:08 I know it's top of mind for them. Um-

Peter Yang 15:09 Yeah

Anish Acharya 15:10 ... what do you think are the most underdiscussed capabilities of coding agents? You know, what's, what's underhyped and maybe what's overhyped as well?

Peter Yang 15:16 This is probably not underhyped, but like, but like, you know, like, you know, I, I, I feel like an- entrances that software will eat the world. I, I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right?

Anish Acharya 15:24 Yeah.

Peter Yang 15:24 And we're kind of going that direction already. Like I, I think Lovable recently launched like today-

Anish Acharya 15:28 Yeah

Peter Yang 15:28 ... that they can support everything-

Anish Acharya 15:30 Yeah

Peter Yang 15:30 ... and Replit can make decks.

Anish Acharya 15:31 Yeah.

Peter Yang 15:32 So, so yeah, so I... And I feel like everyone's cha- chasing this. Like, and, and Anthropic is probably in the lead.

Anish Acharya 15:38 Yeah.

Peter Yang 15:38 But like, you know, like I, I don't wanna use PowerPoint anymore. I don't wanna like write a Go-

Anish Acharya 15:41 Yeah.

Peter Yang 15:41 Like I hate writing Google Docs, dude. Like [laughs] across my entire life.

Anish Acharya 15:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too.

Peter Yang 15:45 So, so like-

Anish Acharya 15:46 Yeah

Peter Yang 15:46 ... but, but for re- for... The other day I was writing my blog post and instead of just like typing it out-

Anish Acharya 15:51 Yeah

Peter Yang 15:51 ... I was like, "Hey, let's, let me just use Claude Code and like, you know, let me give you a bunch of feedback, and you, you write it for me."

Anish Acharya 15:56 Yeah.

Peter Yang 15:56 And you just keep checking the-

Anish Acharya 15:58 How did it turn out?

Peter Yang 15:58 Um, it, it did the first 80%. The last 20% I still had to manually like go in there and like tweak, tweak-

Anish Acharya 16:03 Yeah

Peter Yang 16:03 ... tweak stuff.

Anish Acharya 16:04 Yeah.

Peter Yang 16:04 But like that, that's the way I work now. I, I never start from zero. Like I always get the first 80% from AI.

Anish Acharya 16:10 Right.

Peter Yang 16:11 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:11 Yeah.

Peter Yang 16:11 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:11 It's interesting, you know, if you look at... There, there are also like historical analogs of this. I think Satya said this, um, which is that Excel is the most powerful or most popular programming language in the world.

Peter Yang 16:21 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:21 And that it's sort of a programming language that millions and millions, I mean, 100 billion plus people must know-

Peter Yang 16:26 Yeah

Anish Acharya 16:26 ... maybe even more. Um, and yet we don't think of it that way. It's a way to sort of describe and solve problems.

Peter Yang 16:33 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:34 And I think coding agents are going to be that, of course, times a thousand.

Peter Yang 16:37 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:37 Where even things that feel subjective, like writing Google Docs, can be represented in the coding domain in such a way that it's more satisfying, more productive, more high leverage to use agents to do it.

Peter Yang 16:47 Yeah, 'cause E- Excel was like popular because it's super appro- approachable, right?

Anish Acharya 16:50 Yes.

Peter Yang 16:51 And, and like coding agents, the code is basically gone. Like it's like apps right away. You're just talking to some, some a- agent and getting it do, do stuff, so.

Anish Acharya 16:57 Yeah.

Peter Yang 16:57 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:57 Yeah. Exactly.

Peter Yang 16:58 It's, it's gonna be hu- huge. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:00 What do you think the future company looks like? Is it just a bunch of agents with a CEO? Is the CEO an agent? I mean, what is-

Peter Yang 17:06 Yeah

Anish Acharya 17:06 ... the role for people in a company in the future?

Peter Yang 17:08 Okay. Well, I have some hot takes. So we, we both worked at, uh, some companies together and, um-

Anish Acharya 17:12 Uh-huh. [laughs]

Peter Yang 17:13 Uh, let, let me give you a hot take, man. Maybe we cut this out.

Anish Acharya 17:15 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:15 But like I feel like as a company gets bigger, it tends to get shit... It tends to become like a shittier, shittier place to work, dude.

Anish Acharya 17:21 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:21 Like, like because there's like a lot of people you have to align.

Anish Acharya 17:23 I think that's axiomatic, yeah.

Peter Yang 17:24 Right?

Anish Acharya 17:24 Yeah, yeah.

Peter Yang 17:24 And, and I re- I remember at, uh, you know, maybe we shouldn't mention this company, but I remember in our company [laughs]

Anish Acharya 17:28 Yes

Peter Yang 17:28 ... we used to have all these like OKR meetings and like-

Anish Acharya 17:30 Yeah

Peter Yang 17:30 ... I remember sitting in a room for like three hours talking about OKRs. I'm just like, "Dude, this is like wasting my life."

Anish Acharya 17:34 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:35 So where, where I'm going with this is I hope more companies will stay small. And, and I think the founders of this generation realize that. Like they wanna-

Anish Acharya 17:41 Yeah

Peter Yang 17:41 ... stay as small as possible.

Anish Acharya 17:42 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:43 Um, and instead of having like a 10-person product team, you have like a two or three-person product team.

Anish Acharya 17:47 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:47 And you just have a bunch of a- agents to help, help you.

Anish Acharya 17:49 Yeah.

Peter Yang 17:49 You know? 'Cause I, I, I think it's way easier to cross-functionally align with the agents than with, with humans. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 17:54 Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, in a fi- in a sense, the agents actually, because it takes the emotion out of it too-

Peter Yang 17:58 Yeah

Anish Acharya 17:59 ... like you can imagine if I sent my agent, you sent your agent to go negotiate something-

Peter Yang 18:03 Yeah

Anish Acharya 18:03 ... and they came out with some conclusion, it's not emotional.

Peter Yang 18:06 It's not.

Anish Acharya 18:07 For either of us, you know?

Peter Yang 18:07 It's, it's very objective, yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:08 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Peter Yang 18:10 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:10 Yeah, it's funny, you know, one of the things that we've been talking a bunch about is like-What is the pro case for AI at work in terms of employee experience? And I think it's what you're describing, right?

Peter Yang 18:18 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:18 Like how do you increase the NPS of work?

Peter Yang 18:21 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:21 So if we like go all the way back, or e- even broadly, the NPS of the human experience, right? Like think of the NPS of the day-to-day human in 10,000 BC-

Peter Yang 18:28 Yeah

Anish Acharya 18:28 ... when it's like just don't get eaten by the lion.

Peter Yang 18:30 [laughs] Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:30 And that's like a good day, right? Or, you know, maybe 100 years ago, it's like, okay, don't get killed at the factory.

Peter Yang 18:35 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 18:36 Um, crushed by the, the steam press or whatever else. And, um, and now a lot of it is like, ugh, like just don't get sucked into some high emotion-

Peter Yang 18:44 Yeah

Anish Acharya 18:45 ... you know, sort of negotiation with another VP's s- subordinate, um-

Peter Yang 18:49 Yeah, like a 50 message Slack thread going back and forth.

Anish Acharya 18:51 Yeah, which... Exactly.

Peter Yang 18:52 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:52 And then eventually everyone's like, "I don't want to tell the CEO," and eventually it goes there, and it's just terrible. Um-

Peter Yang 18:56 Yeah

Anish Acharya 18:56 ... so maybe the future of this is that a lot of that emotional subjective work gets handled.

Peter Yang 19:01 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 19:02 And we're sort of guiding the process, but not in the middle of it in a way that just doesn't suit us as humans.

Peter Yang 19:07 Yeah. Like, uh, you know, I, I, I lead a double life as a PM creator, and like I feel like all the PMs actually just wanna create products.

Anish Acharya 19:13 Yeah.

Peter Yang 19:13 Just wanna create products and, and-

Anish Acharya 19:15 Well, that's why we all got into it, you know?

Peter Yang 19:16 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 19:16 It's, it's, uh, so interesting. I mean, Nick Cowell talks about this all the time, that like every PM's sort of view, view of the ideal PM is the innovator, you know?

Peter Yang 19:24 Yeah. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 19:24 Like I came up with the new thing-

Peter Yang 19:26 Yeah

Anish Acharya 19:26 ... and it's like I sort of like had the big insight and it unlocked the product.

Peter Yang 19:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 19:30 I, I think the black pill is I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function.

Peter Yang 19:38 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 19:38 So nonetheless, I think PMs aspire to be able to do that, and they should either do it and either be successful or maybe not successful and move to a different function.

Peter Yang 19:47 I, I also feel like my hot take is like, uh, like ba- basically all the PMs I know are trying to live code at night and weekends.

Anish Acharya 19:53 Yeah.

Peter Yang 19:53 And I feel like my hot take is that like I feel like if you're actually unemployed, like you probably have more time to be a builder and like to be innovative.

Anish Acharya 19:59 Yeah.

Peter Yang 19:59 'Cause you can actually like play all this stuff and like learn all this stuff. A lot of PMs are trying to-

Anish Acharya 20:03 Or do... Or maybe being an engineer on the team, you know?

Peter Yang 20:05 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 20:05 I used to be an engineer, and I got sort of... I don't know if I got forced to be a PM, uh, maybe I also perceived PM as like being a little more high status-

Peter Yang 20:11 Yeah, yeah

Anish Acharya 20:12 ... when I joined Google.

Peter Yang 20:13 [laughs] Yeah.

Anish Acharya 20:13 But then eventually you come around the other side, you're like, "This is terrible," you know?

Peter Yang 20:16 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 20:16 Like you never really get the satisfaction-

Peter Yang 20:19 Yeah

Anish Acharya 20:19 ... of actually shipping other than like, you know, once a quarter when you ship.

Peter Yang 20:22 Um, I mean, the PM skills of like talking to users and like trying to figure out what to build, like what the problem to solve-

Anish Acharya 20:26 Yeah

Peter Yang 20:26 ... like those are very important still.

Anish Acharya 20:28 Yeah.

Peter Yang 20:28 And, and like, but yeah, you gotta wear multiple hats, dude. You gotta, you gotta like go, go build a thing yourself, go prototype it and get some feedback, and then maybe bring an engineer along. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 20:36 How much do you think that everyone has to go as fast as... You know, I mean, like-

Peter Yang 20:40 Yeah

Anish Acharya 20:40 ... Gary was talking about stimmies and skipping sleep-

Peter Yang 20:42 Gary. [laughs] He's funny

Anish Acharya 20:43 ... and Gary Tan like, you know, GStack.

Peter Yang 20:45 Funny guy.

Anish Acharya 20:45 I mean, is... Hey, I mean, is that like the default way that we all need to work, or do you think there's a trade-off for thoughtfulness?

Peter Yang 20:52 Yeah. I, I, I think it's very easy now with all these AI tools just going like 10 different directions at once.

Anish Acharya 20:56 Yeah.

Peter Yang 20:57 So sometimes you do have to slow down and try to figure out where you wanna go.

Anish Acharya 21:00 Yeah.

Peter Yang 21:00 But I also believe that like, um, the traditional process where you like do annual planning and like do all this bull- bullshit-

Anish Acharya 21:05 Yeah

Peter Yang 21:05 ... like I, I just feel like that doesn't really work anymore, you know?

Anish Acharya 21:08 Yeah. Yeah. And for the record, I love Gary-

Peter Yang 21:10 Yeah

Anish Acharya 21:10 ... and I like think the world of him.

Peter Yang 21:11 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 21:12 So h- here's my view on that, 'cause I thought a bunch about it. You know who asked me this the other day? Hiten, um, who's really, really impressed-

Peter Yang 21:17 Hiten from a16z. Yeah

Anish Acharya 21:18 ... in chat. Yeah. So we're talking about this like sort of productivity porn, and everybody's got 20 agents running and 20 monitors and blah, blah, blah.

Peter Yang 21:24 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 21:24 And like I do think when it comes to, um, fully realizing a local, a sort of local maxima-

Peter Yang 21:32 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 21:33 ... you should go very fast, right?

Peter Yang 21:34 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 21:34 So let's say you kinda hill climb, you get to the bottom of a new local maxima.

Peter Yang 21:38 Mm.

Anish Acharya 21:38 I think with agents you should be able to get to the top of that hill extremely fast, right?

Peter Yang 21:42 Yes. Yes.

Anish Acharya 21:42 Give a new insight, build everything around the insight so it's fully expressed. But then I think to get to the next, you know, the next sort of hill-

Peter Yang 21:50 Mm

Anish Acharya 21:50 ... you've gotta probably slow down and almost stop and go touch grass and do whatever.

Peter Yang 21:54 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 21:54 So I think there's this combination of like fast and slow that's probably the future way.

Peter Yang 21:58 Yeah, I think so. And, and like you gotta go on that random walk trying to find product market fit, which take- takes a while, right?

Anish Acharya 22:03 Yes.

Peter Yang 22:03 So it's not like... Yeah.

Anish Acharya 22:05 So we were talking before we started recording about some of the business in a box platforms.

Peter Yang 22:09 Mm.

Anish Acharya 22:10 Have you looked at them? Do you have a view?

Peter Yang 22:12 I've looked at Po- Posea that we talked about.

Anish Acharya 22:14 Uh-huh.

Peter Yang 22:14 Like I don't know if the guy like, uh, in- intentionally made it the opposite of AI slob or, or is it kind of a-

Anish Acharya 22:19 Yes

Peter Yang 22:19 ... he intentionally did it?

Anish Acharya 22:19 I think so. Yes, yes.

Peter Yang 22:21 [laughs]

Anish Acharya 22:21 Yes. Yeah.

Peter Yang 22:21 That's funny. Well, I mean, I, I have a pretty big public presence, right? So I connect all my shit to, to it, and then, um... I mean, it's, it's definitely gives a good peek into what's possible-

Anish Acharya 22:30 Yeah

Peter Yang 22:30 ... but like right now it's probably still pretty like ear- early stage.

Anish Acharya 22:33 Yeah.

Peter Yang 22:33 Like it's telling me to run like Fa- Facebook Ads.

Anish Acharya 22:35 Yeah.

Peter Yang 22:36 Like [laughs] why am I running Facebook Ads?

Anish Acharya 22:37 Yeah.

Peter Yang 22:38 You know? So...

Anish Acharya 22:39 I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Yang 22:40 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 22:40 I, I mean, I, I'm very excited about it 'cause it does feel like it's a path for more people to build companies.

Peter Yang 22:45 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 22:45 Even if they're single one-person companies. You know, like-

Peter Yang 22:48 Yeah

Anish Acharya 22:48 ... if you think about how competitive it is to build a billion-dollar business, like the markets that support it, the number of people trying-

Peter Yang 22:53 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 22:53 ... versus 100 million versus 10 million versus $100,000 TAM.

Peter Yang 22:58 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 22:58 Like maybe there are these pockets all over the country, all over the world, where there are opportunities for $100,000 TAM products.

Peter Yang 23:05 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:06 And that would change somebody's life. Now, that's not an enterprise venture-backed company, but that's okay.

Peter Yang 23:10 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:10 So I hope that whole thesis works, 'cause I do think it's a way to get more people to participate, you know?

Peter Yang 23:15 Yeah, that, that, that's my plan for my kids, dude. Like I, I want them to just build like, um, bootstrap businesses in high, high school.

Anish Acharya 23:21 Yeah.

Peter Yang 23:21 And they can skip the whole college and like, uh, cor- corporate life.

Anish Acharya 23:24 Yeah.

Peter Yang 23:24 [laughs]

Anish Acharya 23:25 Well, dude, I think this is like-

Peter Yang 23:26 Yeah

Anish Acharya 23:26 ... you know, for 10 years there was this moral panic about the kids wanna be YouTubers.

Peter Yang 23:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:29 You know, you're a YouTuber.

Peter Yang 23:31 Yeah, yeah. I'm a YouTuber.

Anish Acharya 23:31 Um, [laughs] you know? You know, in the, in the vein of MrBeast. And, and I think the like pro case for that actually is that the kids wanted to be entrepreneurs-

Peter Yang 23:40 Yeah

Anish Acharya 23:40 ... or have agency, and the only channel for people if they weren't programmers was creating YouTube videos, at least online.

Peter Yang 23:45 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:45 So if you're like an online native generation, you wanna create something, you're not a programmer, you make a YouTube show.

Peter Yang 23:50 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 23:50 Now you can make a lot more than that.

Peter Yang 23:52 Yeah, you can, you can build whatever you want. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:53 Exactly.

Peter Yang 23:53 So-

Anish Acharya 23:54 Exactly

Peter Yang 23:54 ... it'd be very exciting. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 23:55 Yeah. Any other hot takes for us?

Peter Yang 23:57 I'm curious about your thoughts about this, actually. Like, so

Peter Yang 24:00 I feel like, uh, a lot of people are saying like agents will interact with your product first, right?

Anish Acharya 24:05 Yeah.

Peter Yang 24:05 And, and then you see all these great companies like, uh, building like APIs and MCPs.

Anish Acharya 24:09 Mm-hmm.

Peter Yang 24:10 But like how do, how do you think about like, you know... You've been in consumer for a while, so like-The consumer is like, you gotta get the user to come back and use your product, right? [laughs]

Anish Acharya 24:18 Yeah.

Peter Yang 24:18 But, but now, like the user's just like, "Hey, go send the agent to use it." So how do you think about retention and all this like basic stuff? Like how do you... You know, or even like brand equity, 'cause the agent's just like pulling some API, like-

Anish Acharya 24:27 Yeah

Peter Yang 24:27 ... you know? How do you...

Anish Acharya 24:28 Yeah, I don't... Okay.

Peter Yang 24:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 24:29 So I, I think one of... So I don't know is the-

Peter Yang 24:32 Yeah

Anish Acharya 24:32 ... is the truth, but, um, there's... I have a few thoughts. So one, I think that a lot of the sophistication, sophistication that happened in consumer happened because we had to have indirect monetization.

Peter Yang 24:43 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 24:44 Okay? Like we just con- we're never charging consumers directly for these products, which is why you got-

Peter Yang 24:48 Got ads and stuff

Anish Acharya 24:49 ... ads, and just large scale networks, and we all obsessed with retention and engagement, and whales and-

Peter Yang 24:55 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 24:55 ... all of these things really, really mattered because we didn't simply charge people for products.

Peter Yang 24:59 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 24:59 So I think one big thing that's actually really helped in the AI era with that is that consumers are now excited to try new things, they're willing to pay, they're willing to pay a really high price point.

Peter Yang 25:07 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 25:07 Um, there's also consumption revenue in consumer for the first time.

Peter Yang 25:10 Like token and stuff?

Anish Acharya 25:11 Yeah, yeah, for like tokens. You have your subscription plus your token. So and then the actual like, the, the sort of blessing in disguise is that there are real costs as well.

Peter Yang 25:19 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 25:19 You have these inference costs.

Peter Yang 25:20 Yep.

Anish Acharya 25:21 So you're like, "Wow, we have to charge our customer on day one."

Peter Yang 25:23 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 25:24 So I think one thing is that like the business model simplification I think will really help with a lot of what you're describing.

Peter Yang 25:29 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 25:30 Two, I think that a lot of the products will have a sort of, you know, it'll have an API interface for your agents to interact with or for, you know, for transactional sort of rote things.

Peter Yang 25:39 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 25:39 And then it'll have like a consumption based interface as well.

Peter Yang 25:42 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 25:42 So you can also imagine a m- like a mobile app where there's like the feed, but then you can kind of turn it over to where the wires are.

Peter Yang 25:48 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 25:49 And you can just ask for things to get done or you can just see the log of the things that got done.

Peter Yang 25:53 Yeah, maybe people will do both, right? Yeah.

Anish Acharya 25:54 I mean, you could imagine Credit Karma where we worked, you know?

Peter Yang 25:56 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 25:56 Like once in a while you wanna just take a look at your score history and a few other maybe credit card offers. I don't know. I mean... [laughs]

Peter Yang 26:01 Yeah, yeah. If I can get my score with all kind of credit card offers, I'll definitely do that, dude.

Anish Acharya 26:04 Yeah, 100%, exactly.

Peter Yang 26:06 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:06 On the other hand, like sometimes you wanna just be like, "Yo, like can you just fix all my stuff?" Or like, "What stuff did you fix this week? How much money did I save?"

Peter Yang 26:12 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:12 You know? Um...

Peter Yang 26:12 Got it. Got it.

Anish Acharya 26:13 Yeah.

Peter Yang 26:14 It's definitely interesting, yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:15 But look, I also just think the whole agent stack is emerging.

Peter Yang 26:18 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:18 Identity, payments, marketing. We don't even... Even CLI versus MCP, like-

Peter Yang 26:24 Yeah

Anish Acharya 26:24 ... all of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.

Peter Yang 26:28 Yeah, it's, it's a whole whole new world. And like in 2025 I thought agents was over-hyped, but now I think it's really kind of coming. Like-

Anish Acharya 26:34 Me too.

Peter Yang 26:35 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:35 I know. It's just the word is frustrating 'cause it gets so overloaded.

Peter Yang 26:38 Yeah, there's like workflows, like all this kind of shit.

Anish Acharya 26:40 Totally. I've been trying-

Peter Yang 26:41 Yeah

Anish Acharya 26:41 ... to just say like, can we just say like model in a loop?

Peter Yang 26:43 Yeah, exactly.

Anish Acharya 26:44 [laughs]

Peter Yang 26:44 Model that use code in a loop. That's the best definition.

Anish Acharya 26:46 That's what I want. [laughs]

Peter Yang 26:46 Yeah, yeah.

Anish Acharya 26:46 But nobody likes to hear that. It's a, agents is much flashier, you know?

Peter Yang 26:49 Yeah, it's flashier.

Anish Acharya 26:50 [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Yang 26:51 My, my hope is that, um, all, all this stuff's... Like a lot of people think like we're gonna lose our jobs, was probably what will happen at some point, but like [laughs] I hope all this stuff-

Anish Acharya 26:58 No

Peter Yang 26:59 ... makes, just makes like, uh, human work more fun. Like make our jobs more fun. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 27:03 Dude, I don't think we're all gonna lose our jobs.

Peter Yang 27:05 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 27:05 Like I really think the d- And we see this a lot of companies, you know? So we look at a ton of companies-

Peter Yang 27:08 Yeah

Anish Acharya 27:08 ... and we've seen two different buckets. So one bucket is, hey, we dramatically increase productivity for a person or a team.

Peter Yang 27:15 Uh-huh.

Anish Acharya 27:15 We see this in like recruiting.

Peter Yang 27:17 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 27:17 But we couldn't do 100% of the job.

Peter Yang 27:19 Mm.

Anish Acharya 27:19 So we could do the phone screen, but we couldn't obviously, you know, show the candidate around the office. Or we could do the phone screen, and we could like answer all the questions about the company, and we could even do the like comp negotiation, but we couldn't do the onboarding.

Peter Yang 27:30 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 27:32 The other style of company which we see, which is maybe a Decagon, right, or a Happy Robot, is, hey, we did 100% of a job like customer support.

Peter Yang 27:39 Okay.

Anish Acharya 27:39 You know, the cu- the customer called in, they had a question, we hopefully resolved their query, and then that's it.

Peter Yang 27:43 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 27:44 And that is 100% automated. I'd say that that second group where you have 100% automation of a job function is really rare.

Peter Yang 27:50 Mm.

Anish Acharya 27:50 Almost every AI product, AI native X or Y we see is able to provide dramatic lift, but it's not able to do 100%. And because-

Peter Yang 27:58 So the last 10% still needs humans to-

Anish Acharya 27:59 Yeah, it's still-

Peter Yang 27:59 Yeah

Anish Acharya 28:00 ... it's, today anyway, it's still humans that do that stuff. And it's interesting too 'cause the buyer looks at that as software-

Peter Yang 28:06 Mm

Anish Acharya 28:06 ... as expensive software, whereas in the case of something like a Happy Robot, Decagon, Sierra, they look at it as like cheap labor.

Peter Yang 28:12 Mm.

Anish Acharya 28:12 So I do think there's a different buyer mindset, but because there's been this difficulty of getting to 100% automation, I think a lot of the efficiency gain shows up-

Peter Yang 28:20 Yeah

Anish Acharya 28:20 ... in just a different way. Probably not less jobs. Maybe we get like the European style four-day work week. Maybe companies get-

Peter Yang 28:26 That'd be nice

Anish Acharya 28:26 ... like twice as productive. I have no idea.

Peter Yang 28:28 Yeah. But, but you don't think that like a... I, I, I feel like there's gonna be a transition from like these like 10,000 plus people companies-

Anish Acharya 28:35 Yeah

Peter Yang 28:35 ... laying a lot of people off to hopefully like more smaller companies, like solopreneurs and stuff like that. Yeah?

Anish Acharya 28:40 I, I think, yes, I think that they'll, the, the sort of shape of the economy is gonna change.

Peter Yang 28:44 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 28:45 Like the amount of concentration, but I, I just don't think there's gonna be less jobs. I think human-

Peter Yang 28:48 Yeah

Anish Acharya 28:48 ... ambition has no ceiling.

Peter Yang 28:49 That's true.

Anish Acharya 28:49 You know, human desire has no ceiling.

Peter Yang 28:51 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 28:51 And just read any mildly interesting science fiction book. Like there's no way this is the peak expression of all the stuff that we want, and we need-

Peter Yang 28:57 Yeah, yeah

Anish Acharya 28:57 ... and we're gonna convince ourselves and, you know, all the new things that you read about every day is these luxuries, peptides, and-

Peter Yang 29:02 Yeah

Anish Acharya 29:03 ... you know, everybody's gonna have all of that stuff and then want even more.

Peter Yang 29:07 You know, dude, I, I, I saw a really good tweet ab- about this. Like someone tweeted that like, um, the, the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, or something like that.

Anish Acharya 29:15 Yes. [laughs]

Peter Yang 29:15 So like, it's, it's like, you know, it's like... Yeah. So maybe you lost your job, but like now you can actually do your own thing. Just go pursue your dreams.

Anish Acharya 29:20 Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it, you know?

Peter Yang 29:22 Yeah. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 29:23 Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Yang 29:23 Cool.

Anish Acharya 29:23 Well, awesome, man. Maybe that's a good, uh, positive note to end on.

Peter Yang 29:26 Yeah. That's a good note. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 29:27 Cool.

Peter Yang 29:27 Good seeing you, dude. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 29:28 Thanks, Peter. Yeah.

Peter Yang 29:29 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 29:29 Thanks for having me. [upbeat music]