Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya

Kevin Rose 0:00 So how did the like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time? I, I think in the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript, to get a little bit geeky, it was the first time, even though this sounds super archaic, that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response, and get something back into your browser. There was no way to just say like, "I think this is cool. Let me just like tap on it and like show my vote of interest on something." And I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something? The way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that'll eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume.

Anish Acharya 0:40 All right, man, so ketones. Am I gonna go on a

Anish Acharya 0:43 trip?

Kevin Rose 0:43 Uh, this is gonna be, um, a surprise for you.

Anish Acharya 0:48 Okay.

Kevin Rose 0:48 So these are ketones that Tim Ferriss turned me onto.

Anish Acharya 0:51 Okay.

Kevin Rose 0:51 We don't have to make it a plug in the podcast or anything-

Anish Acharya 0:53 [laughs] All right

Kevin Rose 0:53 ... 'cause this, this isn't a show about ketones. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 0:55 Okay.

Kevin Rose 0:55 But I will tell you that when you hit this, so these are specifically made for... They're supposed to go in your coffee.

Anish Acharya 1:01 Okay.

Kevin Rose 1:01 Now, you have to be careful here because you have to bend this like this, and then it kinda shoots into your mouth, and then you just chug it. Have you ever had ketones before?

Anish Acharya 1:09 No. [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:10 Okay.

Anish Acharya 1:10 No.

Kevin Rose 1:10 All right, let's do this.

Anish Acharya 1:11 All right, let's do this.

Kevin Rose 1:11 Okay, so let me show you how to do it. I'll do it first.

Anish Acharya 1:13 Okay.

Kevin Rose 1:13 So you bend like this. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:19 What am I doing here?

Kevin Rose 1:24 Okay. There you go.

Anish Acharya 1:25 Like this?

Kevin Rose 1:26 Let's do it, Anish. Yep. Th- wait, wait. No, no, wait. That's backwards. Let me see. Yeah, there you go. So I had a friend do that, and he shot it all over his, like, chest. You don't want that before-

Anish Acharya 1:33 No

Kevin Rose 1:33 ... the podcast. Okay. Take it back. Take it like a champion. Squeeze, suck. You're gonna notice a little bit of bitterness. Do you taste it?

Anish Acharya 1:40 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:41 Yeah, it's not good.

Anish Acharya 1:41 Oh my God.

Kevin Rose 1:42 Yeah, it's the worst. Now, this is gonna give you brain power for the podcast, so this is how we start the show.

Anish Acharya 1:47 Jesus, dude. It tastes like I regurgitated a Tylenol.

Kevin Rose 1:50 [laughs]

Anish Acharya 1:50 Fucking terrible.

Kevin Rose 1:51 It does taste like a, a chewed-up Tylenol. That's a great way to put it.

Anish Acharya 1:54 [laughs] Okay.

Kevin Rose 1:55 All right. So we'll, uh, let that kick in. Anish, dude, I'm so glad we're doing this, brother.

Anish Acharya 2:00 Excited, man. Thank you.

Kevin Rose 2:02 I know.

Anish Acharya 2:02 Thank you. Thank you.

Kevin Rose 2:02 Before we get into the ketones kicking in, let's get a little bit of background 'cause it's important and I know we're gonna be syndicating this c- across a couple of podcasts,

Kevin Rose 2:10 so-

Anish Acharya 2:10 Yeah

Kevin Rose 2:10 ... I was telling people who we are. We've known each other for a long time. We worked together at Google.

Anish Acharya 2:14 Long time.

Kevin Rose 2:14 We worked together at Google Ventures and Google Corporate, and, uh... Yeah, man, it's been... We've been good homies for many, many, many years. No one's ever seen us on a pod together I don't think, right?

Anish Acharya 2:23 I don't think so.

Kevin Rose 2:23 Like, we've never done anything.

Anish Acharya 2:24 No, no, no.

Kevin Rose 2:24 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 2:24 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 2:24 So do you wanna give a little of your background?

Anish Acharya 2:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me, man. This is awesome.

Kevin Rose 2:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 2:29 I'm Anish. I'm a GP at Andreessen. I've been friends with Kevin forever. I'm a product person. I'm an engineer. I'm a technologist. I started two companies. Um, probably having the most fun I've ever had, both personally and professionally and all of that, and I'm excited to talk to everyone about it today.

Kevin Rose 2:43 Yeah. It's... It was really cool when we first met, um, we both were, uh... I don't know how we ended up there and got on Google Plus. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 2:51 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 2:51 But we were both on Google Plus.

Anish Acharya 2:53 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 2:53 And I remember working with you, like, in the very early days, and I was like, "Oh..." Like, when you landed at Google for the first time, you didn't know what to expect, you know?

Anish Acharya 2:59 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 2:59 Like, 'cause you're getting in there, and you don't know, like, what is this, what is this whole thing gonna be about? Like, who am I gonna work with? And very quickly you realize there's fantastic engineering talent there.

Anish Acharya 3:12 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 3:12 And then there's also, product-wise, I was like, "Mm, I don't know that these people actually live and breathe product." It was very much you're kinda in the Google bubble.

Anish Acharya 3:20 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 3:20 But you were one of the first people where I was like, "Oh my God, this is like an amazing product mind, and I gotta work with this guy."

Anish Acharya 3:27 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 3:27 And so we figured out a way to, like, stay connected and work together, you know, when we bounced over to Google Ventures then, and yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:33 Well, dude, figured out a way is generous, so you saved my life. I remember I worked with you for three, four weeks, and what's cool actually is you joined and you're like, "Nah, this is not it. I'm not doing it." I'm like, "What do you mean? What about vesting? What about Google Plus? What about this and that?"

Kevin Rose 3:46 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 3:46 And you were just so sure, and you were right. You moved over to Ventures. And I remember at the time talking to you outside of that building, the Google Plus building, and saying, "Kevin, don't leave me behind, man. Please. Bring me with you."

Kevin Rose 3:57 Yeah, yeah, totally.

Anish Acharya 3:58 "And, like, I'll make you look good." And that's a thing you say, and you assume nobody will ever, like, call you back after that, and then three months later you called me. You're like, "All right, man, what's up?" Like, "Why don't you come over here and do this with us?" And I mean, that, that single act of professional generosity changed my whole life.

Kevin Rose 4:12 That's awesome, dude.

Anish Acharya 4:13 I'm very grateful.

Kevin Rose 4:13 Well, w- big shout-out to Chris Hutchins, who, like, got us connected to Google.

Anish Acharya 4:17 The mastermind. [laughs]

Kevin Rose 4:17 The mastermind who got us connected to Google Ventures.

Anish Acharya 4:19 Yes.

Kevin Rose 4:19 And then of course Bill Maris, who was running Google Ventures.

Anish Acharya 4:21 Of course, yes.

Kevin Rose 4:21 And then, um, you know, I pulled you and Burka in, and, uh, we all got over there, and then had a, a great time at, at GV. Fantastic crew.

Anish Acharya 4:29 Yes.

Kevin Rose 4:29 I love those people. I thought Google Ventures-

Anish Acharya 4:31 Oh

Kevin Rose 4:31 ... was a great place.

Anish Acharya 4:32 Oh, it's... It's... They're the best of us. You know? Bill had the best energy.

Anish Acharya 4:35 I met my wife there.

Kevin Rose 4:36 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 4:37 I mean, everybody there was very good people.

Kevin Rose 4:39 Yeah, and then Crane's running it now, which is awesome to see. Like, he was such a, a great, uh, just a great person to be around. I really enjoyed my time with, with David, and great to see him just, like, turning that firm into an awesome f- Like, I look at the portfolio now since we've left, and he's built out a great-

Anish Acharya 4:55 Yeah

Kevin Rose 4:55 ... uh, suite of companies that are just top tier.

Anish Acharya 4:58 It's legit, man.

Kevin Rose 4:58 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 4:59 It's legit. Well, it's actually fun to see you in action as a consumer investor. I think a- so much consumer investing and building is willingness to be embarrassed.

Kevin Rose 5:07 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 5:07 You know, and you did deals like Blue Bottle.

Kevin Rose 5:10 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 5:10 And I'm like, Kevin, what is this? A coffee shop with a stand in Hayes?

Kevin Rose 5:15 Yeah. [laughs] Totally.

Anish Acharya 5:15 How is this gonna be a venture investment? And it was, and you, you know, you were willing to be embarrassed by it, and you were so right.

Kevin Rose 5:22 Well, uh, y- you're w- wrong a lot, as you know.

Anish Acharya 5:25 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 5:25 Like, we're wrong most of the time.

Anish Acharya 5:26 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 5:27 Um, s- consumer stuff for you, so what, what do you, what does your day-to-day look like at Andreessen? Like, it's a massive firm. How many in total employees are at a16?

Anish Acharya 5:36 God, 600 probably.

Kevin Rose 5:37 Wow.

Anish Acharya 5:37 Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Rose 5:38 Holy crap.

Anish Acharya 5:38 It's big. It's big.

Kevin Rose 5:39 And how many GPs?

Anish Acharya 5:41 That's a good question. Maybe 30.

Kevin Rose 5:42 Okay.

Anish Acharya 5:43 Um, the investing team's relatively small. It's probably 70. But it's actually nice the way the firm works, 'cause it's a collection of specialists, so everybody who's there is the best in the world at what they do, both knowledge-wise and network-wise. So even though it's a large group, that's because we're all

Anish Acharya 5:58 specialists pointing in different directions. So my consumer world every day is spending time with consumer founders. I spend some time with enterprise founders as well. Everything AI apps, so it's a mix of-Seeing companies, supporting founders on boards, and also playing with products

Kevin Rose 6:12 Yeah

Anish Acharya 6:13 Like, to me, this is the craziest thing. It's something that I learned from you, which is so many people just don't use the products

Kevin Rose 6:18 Yeah

Anish Acharya 6:18 And how can you have intuition if you're not making videos on Sora or Vibe Coding or-

Kevin Rose 6:23 Right

Anish Acharya 6:23 ... you know, there's just so much alpha hiding in plain sight. All you gotta do is use the products.

Kevin Rose 6:27 Yeah. I, I feel like the last, call it, five years has been, on the consumer side, has been relatively boring for me as an investor.

Anish Acharya 6:35 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 6:35 Because I've looked at stuff and I said, "Gosh, you know, we got the bigs in the room. You got the TikToks, you got the Instagram still dominating." And then you see some of the folks, like, you know, Threads are just, like, copying and somehow, you know-

Anish Acharya 6:47 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 6:47 ... strapping on, you know, integrations with decentralized social, and that's supposed to be a thing.

Anish Acharya 6:53 Yes.

Kevin Rose 6:53 But I hadn't seen anything that, in my mind, was that interesting. Like, it felt like consumer had this kind of like down period of several years-

Anish Acharya 7:03 Yeah

Kevin Rose 7:03 ... where there wasn't really anything new. And now that AI has come into the mix, I feel like there's a chance to kinda almost reinvent every piece of that-

Anish Acharya 7:12 Yes

Kevin Rose 7:12 ... framework. And do you feel that way as well, like AI is-

Anish Acharya 7:15 100%

Kevin Rose 7:15 ... a shot in the arm, um, for consumer?

Anish Acharya 7:17 100... I mean, I'll, I'll give you the investor perspective and then the builder perspective.

Kevin Rose 7:20 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:20 I wanna hear is yours. So from an investor perspective, this is like a renaissance for consumer investing. We haven't seen an opportunity like this, I think, in... since 2010, 2011, 2012.

Kevin Rose 7:30 Yeah

Anish Acharya 7:31 Because consumers are downloading products organically. That hasn't happened in a long time.

Kevin Rose 7:36 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 7:36 Consumers are willing to pay. Like, you look at the price points of the top products, right? The top ChatGPT SKU is 200 a month. The top Gemini SKU, Google Ultra, is 250, and then Grok is 300 a month, and consumers are actually

Anish Acharya 7:50 paying that amount. I mean, how much do you think you've paid to Cursor?

Kevin Rose 7:53 A lot.

Anish Acharya 7:54 A lot.

Kevin Rose 7:54 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 7:55 You know? And some of that is professional behavior, but a lot of that is just consumer and hobbyist behavior. So I think that consumer is, like, back in a big way, and, like, the tech enthusiast consumer is excited in a way that they haven't been for 10 years.

Kevin Rose 8:07 And when you, when you... The companies you just mentioned, though, they're largely the bigs. Like, one of the things that has happened in consumer that I never thought would be the case, that I was shocked by, is that bigs, like, you know, top-tier, you know, Fortune 100 companies, can put out consumer tech for the first time and actually see it get scale.

Anish Acharya 8:24 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 8:25 It was always the bigs that, that couldn't figure it out, you know?

Anish Acharya 8:28 Right.

Kevin Rose 8:28 They, they had to acquire Instagram-

Anish Acharya 8:29 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 8:29 ... to be cool.

Anish Acharya 8:30 Right.

Kevin Rose 8:30 They had to buy the, the, the cool. And I think with, with ChatGPT and, and actually with, with Google as well, with, you know, their, their Banana model and whatnot, it's... for the first time, we're seeing the bigs put out consumer apps that are getting some traction. I mean, granted, they do have the scale. They have the install base. They can put that in front of a lot of people.

Anish Acharya 8:48 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 8:48 But like we saw with the Google+ side, just because you have the install base and you have the eyeballs doesn't mean you're gonna see success on the con- consumer side.

Anish Acharya 8:55 That's right.

Kevin Rose 8:55 And I feel like we're starting to see that with the bigs, which was kinda shocking to me. Did that shock you as well?

Anish Acharya 9:00 It... So in a sense, the, what the bigs have released are models, not products.

Kevin Rose 9:05 Right.

Anish Acharya 9:05 And I think there's an important distinction there, right?

Kevin Rose 9:06 Eh, Notebook. Notebook is, I would say, was the first time I was like-

Anish Acharya 9:09 That's fair

Kevin Rose 9:09 ... wow, they... that was a zero to one kind of, like, product that actually I use still frequently. But it's not consumer consumer.

Anish Acharya 9:16 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 9:16 It's a little bit more business-

Anish Acharya 9:18 You're-

Kevin Rose 9:18 ... slant.

Anish Acharya 9:19 You're absolutely right, though I think that Notebook was inadvertent, right? It was one of many experiments, and it worked.

Kevin Rose 9:24 Right.

Anish Acharya 9:24 And you know, not to take any credit away from Google, but I don't know that they said, "Hey, let's design an incredible consumer, prosumer product," and they invented Notebook.

Kevin Rose 9:30 Right.

Anish Acharya 9:31 So I do think that if you look at the models, the models are incredibly capable, and the bigs and the labs obviously are advantaged in certain ways, with capital, et cetera, to build great cutting-edge models, and consumers love those models. So that's great. They're playing in that space. It's definitely relevant. But when it comes to opinionated products on top of the models, like Cursor is a good example. Crea is a good example. Companionship is actually a very interesting category-

Kevin Rose 9:55 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 9:56 ... where there's huge demand for companionship products, and a lot of these companionship products, like Janitor AI-

Kevin Rose 10:01 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 10:01 ... you know, they, they deal with parts of the human experience that Big Tech is not gonna be comfortable-

Kevin Rose 10:06 Right

Anish Acharya 10:06 ... shipping, right? It's disagreement. It's sexuality. It's persuasion. So, so much of this technology can address parts of the human experience that 1,000 committees at Google and Facebook-

Kevin Rose 10:16 Right

Anish Acharya 10:17 ... don't want addressed, and I think that is one of the interesting opportunities in consumer.

Kevin Rose 10:20 100%. I think that's well said, and I think it is the space where we need to invest because if you think about w- w- what the pitches that we see on a, on a daily or weekly basis-

Anish Acharya 10:29 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 10:29 ... a lot of the stuff that I see is a... You know, it can be a sanding down of the rough edges, and it can also just be something where I s- wholeheartedly believe that one of the bigs is gonna dominate that category, and so I avoid those investments. Like, they will never touch the emotional side-

Anish Acharya 10:45 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 10:45 ... as much as they should or could. Uh, not should, but the, they wouldn't feel comfortable doing so, right?

Anish Acharya 10:51 Yes. Yes.

Kevin Rose 10:51 And so those are the categories and the verticals where I think is they're defensible by the pure nature of what they're addressing, right?

Anish Acharya 10:59 Yes.

Kevin Rose 10:59 And so that's kind of what you're saying here, right?

Anish Acharya 11:01 100%. I just think they're, they're structurally set up to kind of take the soul out of products. And when you talk about categories like companionship, the whole thing is the soul. There is no product without that. I think the other interesting area where the labs and the bigs are not gonna be successful is products that benefit from being multi-model, right? Not multimodal, but multi-model. So Cursor is good because you can use every model inside of it.

Kevin Rose 11:24 Right.

Anish Acharya 11:24 And Google is never gonna ship with-

Kevin Rose 11:26 Right

Anish Acharya 11:26 ... anthropic models embedded. So that also is a very interesting... They're sort of constrained to the models that they've developed in-house, and products that benefit from being multi-model are actually really unconstrained.

Kevin Rose 11:36 Very interesting. A lot... We should dive into each of these things. I think we, we have two great topics going. Let's, let's, uh, pin the multi-model, but let's talk about companionship. So on the companionship side,

Kevin Rose 11:48 what do you believe should be built? What have you seen built? And how much of this do you think is fad versus depth? Meaning, it's funny and weird and awkward and strange to have an AI girlfriend, and I-

Anish Acharya 12:03 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 12:03 ... in the early days, call it, like... Well, early days. Let's call it a year ago. [laughs] You know?

Anish Acharya 12:07 Yeah. Way back in the day.

Kevin Rose 12:08 Way back in the day.

Anish Acharya 12:09 Prehistoric. Yep. [laughs]

Kevin Rose 12:10 I... A friend of mine was like, "Hey, go check this out," and it was not something that was-You know, X'd about or tweeted about. It was, it was like this kind of like thing that you went into and, and I'll say that I went there, and it was models unhinged, right?

Anish Acharya 12:24 Uh-huh.

Kevin Rose 12:24 This was before Grok did it.

Anish Acharya 12:26 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 12:26 And you could basically talk to a model and get any type of response that you wanted.

Anish Acharya 12:31 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 12:32 Uh, meaning in terms of sexuality-

Anish Acharya 12:34 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 12:34 ... or whatever you were looking for, right? W- how much of that are you concerned about in terms of shaping humanity, replacing real relationships? Like what lends... How do you evaluate something like that? Do you invest in those types of things?

Anish Acharya 12:49 Yeah. This is such a great topic. I wish we had Eugenia here, who founded Replica-

Kevin Rose 12:54 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 12:54 ... 'cause she'd have a ton of thoughts. I mean, okay, so I'm always gonna give you the optimistic take. It's just how I'm wired.

Kevin Rose 13:00 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 13:00 So let me give you a couple of my most optimistic takes. So one is we all know the importance of human connection and the value of it.

Kevin Rose 13:06 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 13:07 Maybe the human part is overvalued. You know, you are, you live in an embarrassment of social riches. You have friends. You have professional connections. You have interesting people you can meet. They all wanna connect with you, and your biggest challenge is prioritizing. I don't know that that's the experience of the average person in this country. You know, I think that there's a deep loneliness, and any progress we make towards addressing the loneliness is human progress and is very pro-social. And I think that-

Kevin Rose 13:31 Is that progress, though, to have a conversation with a chatbot? Do you think that starts to fill that emotional bucket up?

Anish Acharya 13:37 Yes.

Kevin Rose 13:38 You, so you-

Anish Acharya 13:38 Yes

Kevin Rose 13:38 ... believe that when-

Anish Acharya 13:39 Yes

Kevin Rose 13:39 ... someone is having a conversation, they are getting a lift?

Anish Acharya 13:42 Yes.

Kevin Rose 13:43 Probably 10% of what a real human would provide you, but a little bit of something.

Anish Acharya 13:46 I think more than 10%.

Kevin Rose 13:47 Really?

Anish Acharya 13:47 I just think, look, it- it's like our lizard, reptilian brains. We are wired to have these sort of emotional chemical responses when you're engaged in a human-like conversation. We intellectually understand that these are computers on the other side, but you

Anish Acharya 14:01 still feel the feelings, and I think that's what's necessary to make personal progress as a result of connection.

Kevin Rose 14:07 Do you believe... So th- this is my concern. I'll let, I'll play the, the, the do- the doomer side-

Anish Acharya 14:12 Please

Kevin Rose 14:12 ... of this.

Anish Acharya 14:12 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 14:13 Um, my concern is that one of the things I noticed with these models early on when I'm playing with them is that they were very agreeable. And-

Anish Acharya 14:21 Yeah

Kevin Rose 14:21 ... emotional wellbeing and kind of the, um, I would say the muscle that needs to be built is actually not when you're laughing and agreeing with friends and kinda going along with the flow. It's when there's disagreement and the discomfort that comes-

Anish Acharya 14:38 Yes

Kevin Rose 14:38 ... from the, "Oh, I don't agree with you that... That doesn't hit me. That doesn't feel right. Let's build a bridge and figure out how to find common ground here."

Anish Acharya 14:47 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 14:47 And if you're dealing with models that are just paid to agree with you all the time-

Anish Acharya 14:51 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 14:51 ... th- then you're, you're basically... So I'll give an example. I was talking to, well, I, I can call him out. So I was talking to Tim Ferriss about this, and we were like-

Anish Acharya 14:57 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 14:58 ... we were, we were taking a screenshot, I was taking screenshots [laughs] of what this model was saying to me. And it was basically agreeing to anything that I put in front of it. I was like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" And it was like, "I'll do that with you."

Anish Acharya 15:07 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 15:07 And I was like, "Oh my God." Like, I couldn't believe it, right?

Anish Acharya 15:09 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 15:10 And I'm sending it over to him, and he's like, "We are doomed," in his response because y- you- you're not getting any pushback. And so then, okay, when you j- make the jump to a real relationship-

Anish Acharya 15:22 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 15:22 ... okay, I wanna have that relationship with a human, you're used to an agreeable, you know, kind of like this subservient, like, thing, and, and it doesn't, the proxy and the jump doesn't make sense.

Anish Acharya 15:34 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 15:35 And all of a sudden you're like, "Well, that's not as good."

Anish Acharya 15:37 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 15:37 "I wanna go back to my model." Like, are we training people to want and favor agreeable models over real, you know, the real character building that comes with the emotional side of things?

Anish Acharya 15:48 I don't know. I, I think we just need to dial it in. Like, everybody knows a human relationship where the other person always agrees with you is not authentic.

Kevin Rose 15:55 Right.

Anish Acharya 15:55 And it doesn't nourish you. You need to have the tension, the disagreement, the exploration. I mean, we've gotta, like, be fair to where we are in the cycle.

Kevin Rose 16:04 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 16:04 ChatGPT was November '22.

Kevin Rose 16:06 Right.

Anish Acharya 16:07 Right? It's not even November '25.

Kevin Rose 16:09 Right.

Anish Acharya 16:09 And we're trying to dial in the entirety of human connection and experience and find the right place between not being a sycophant-

Kevin Rose 16:15 Mm

Anish Acharya 16:16 ... but not being, you know, disagreeable for the purpose of it. We're dialing it in. We're gonna get there. And again, because we're so wired from an evolutionary perspective to know what is the right amount of tension, I believe our intuition will guide us.

Kevin Rose 16:28 Mm.

Anish Acharya 16:28 We'll get there.

Kevin Rose 16:28 I like what you're saying because we talked about this in the ride, car ride over here, where if, if you just for a second imagine we are in the huge brick cellphone era of AI-

Anish Acharya 16:37 [laughs] That's right

Kevin Rose 16:38 ... where it's like this is the very, not even the first inning.

Anish Acharya 16:40 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 16:40 Like, we're just stepping on the field of this.

Anish Acharya 16:42 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 16:42 'Cause i- if, I mean, imagine 20, 30 years from now, we're gonna have a much deeper understanding of what's going on behind the scenes here-

Anish Acharya 16:49 Yes

Kevin Rose 16:49 ... what is required to make... And we're expecting that on day one, and the expectations are, like, so high.

Anish Acharya 16:54 Always.

Kevin Rose 16:55 It's, it's like let's, let's give it, give it some time, you know?

Anish Acharya 16:57 The trough of disillusionment is real, you know, and our expectations are high.

Kevin Rose 17:01 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:02 I also think that this, I'm glad we're talking about companionship, but I think broadly we've had 40 years of technology that extended our intellect and our minds.

Kevin Rose 17:09 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:09 Right? But most of the human experience is actually emotional, and it's subjective.

Kevin Rose 17:13 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:13 Now we have a technology that extends our emotions, our subjective experience, and it can address that. Like, I love AI spreadsheets. I'm glad that somebody is building them. But to me, that's the least ambitious execution of the primitive. Let's start to really address the human experience through this tech, this next new technology.

Kevin Rose 17:30 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:30 And I think that's where all this goes, you know?

Kevin Rose 17:32 Yeah. Well, it's early days. We'll see where, what, what's, uh...

Kevin Rose 17:36 I- I'm certainly looking at those startups.

Anish Acharya 17:37 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 17:37 I, I think, uh, a- along the lines of, um, there being a therapist or a counselor, somebody on the back end that can, you know, give you this partner to bounce ideas off of and kinda push you into best practices. I- that's really interesting to me. I don't know if you've looked at any of those types of startups.

Anish Acharya 17:54 Yes.

Kevin Rose 17:55 But-

Anish Acharya 17:55 I've looked at a few. I, I mean, I do think that's interesting. By the way, the ketones are kicking in.

Kevin Rose 17:58 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 17:59 And I'm flying.

Kevin Rose 17:59 You feel that?

Anish Acharya 17:59 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 18:00 Isn't it amazing?

Anish Acharya 18:00 Yeah, yes, yes.

Kevin Rose 18:01 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:01 Is it just caffeine?

Kevin Rose 18:02 No, it's not caffeine. It's, like, full on... I'll, I'll send you the thing about ketones.

Anish Acharya 18:05 Wow.

Kevin Rose 18:05 But they're a natural fuel source that is not caffeinated.

Anish Acharya 18:08 I mean, I'm definitely feeling something.

Kevin Rose 18:09 Yeah. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 18:10 [laughs] Okay, so I think, yes, you know, therapy, uh, companionship, all that stuff makes sense. I actually think there's a really interesting emerging category. So you see this with Poke. That's a great example of it.

Kevin Rose 18:20 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 18:21 Hux does some of this as well, as well as, uh, Signal's new company, we both spent time with him, where I call it, like, indirect companionship.So what is Poke? Poke is kind of this, you know, subjective human front end to your email.

Kevin Rose 18:35 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 18:35 You know, and email is... it's like a set of tasks, and it's pretty heavy, and it's functional work that we have to do. And Poke creates this human overlay on top of it.

Kevin Rose 18:45 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 18:45 And in a sense, I don't consider Poke a companionship product, but it's letting me interact with a functional part of my life through an emotional interface. I think that's actually a really interesting area for exploration. We are emotional beings who have been tr- taught for the last 100 years to do functional work.

Kevin Rose 18:59 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 19:00 Like, what does it mean to kind of return to our roots and still do functional work except through an emotional filter?

Kevin Rose 19:04 Yeah. Can you talk about Poke a little bit? Like, what, what is the onboarding like, and why are people talking about it?

Anish Acharya 19:09 Yeah. It's, it's so wild. I encourage everybody to try it out. So you download Poke. One interesting th- thing they've done is actually the interface is iMessage.

Anish Acharya 19:18 So you're texting with it. So, you know, of course, iMessage, you're typically only texting with people.

Kevin Rose 19:22 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 19:22 So right away, that's subliminally sort of setting you up to expect to have a human-like interaction.

Kevin Rose 19:27 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 19:27 Then the Poke product is really well done. First, it refuses to allow you to sign up for the product. So you've gotta convince it that you deserve to actually use the product. Then you engage in this negotiation on price-

Kevin Rose 19:39 Right

Anish Acharya 19:39 ... where it starts at 200 a month. It reads all of your email, so of course it can say, "Hey, Kevin, I saw you bought XYZ. You know, you're spending a lot on your ketones." Like-

Kevin Rose 19:48 Right

Anish Acharya 19:48 ... "I think you can spend 200 a month-

Kevin Rose 19:50 Right

Anish Acharya 19:50 ... on this product." And there's a real tortured negotiation to get the price down. So by the time you get in, even though it hasn't done anything for you except sort of tortured you-

Kevin Rose 19:59 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 19:59 ... you've already got this perception of value.

Kevin Rose 20:02 Right.

Anish Acharya 20:02 And it's just... it's a very interesting experiment in onboarding. And I think they're gonna... if you extrapolate it, it's an experiment in product design in an era where we have emotional primitives.

Kevin Rose 20:11 Yeah. It is, it is fascinating. Like, I, I love people, product builders that consider every step of the process from sign-up all the way through onboarding to you name it, and they rethink the entire stack.

Anish Acharya 20:23 Right.

Kevin Rose 20:23 And this is an example of just something that I don't know if that's the long-term best strategy for a product like that, to negotiate kind of SaaS software in real time.

Anish Acharya 20:32 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 20:33 But, you know, that alone, that little tiny feature is a great example of something that went, you know, kind of viral within a small subset of, of... and I'm sure led to tens of thousands of signups-

Anish Acharya 20:43 Yes. Yeah

Kevin Rose 20:44 ... just from people talking about that feature.

Anish Acharya 20:46 And when we're talking about it now.

Kevin Rose 20:47 Right. Exactly.

Anish Acharya 20:48 [laughs] That's right.

Kevin Rose 20:48 But I think that is, like, such a, a, a, a... just for the product builders out there, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a great little way to wedge yourself into the conversation by rethinking part of that step, you know?

Anish Acharya 20:59 Yes. Um, I've got actually a related question for you. So you've both designed, you've done a lot of new product thinking,

Anish Acharya 21:05 and you've spotted a lot of new product thinking. Like, how do you do it? What are the patterns? How did you sort of see it all of these times?

Kevin Rose 21:12 I, I think that on the, on the product side, what I've always been drawn to is the, for, for better or worse, the novelty of original thought in certain areas. Um, if it's something that is... We've talked about this kind of sand- sanding down of the rough edges, like, that to me is not that interesting.

Anish Acharya 21:31 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 21:32 But I really respect people that are building something like this price negotiation where I just haven't seen it done before.

Anish Acharya 21:39 Right.

Kevin Rose 21:39 It doesn't mean that it's going to, you know, be a top 10 app and, and it's gonna be a multi-billion dollar company, but if you find that signal in someone, in a builder's brain, that means that they're gonna apply that signal to other parts of the product that they're building.

Anish Acharya 21:54 Interesting.

Kevin Rose 21:54 Meaning that they will continue to reinvent and reimagine things through a lens that nobody else has. And that, to me, is enough signal to say, "Okay, we will probably turn over a card at some point that is the magic, you know, card that is gonna get us that, that home run or that massive product," right? So-

Anish Acharya 22:13 Interesting

Kevin Rose 22:14 ... I value that almost above all else. Like, even if the, the, the idea isn't the one where I think is going to hit scale-

Anish Acharya 22:21 Yeah

Kevin Rose 22:21 ... if you have a founder that builds w- through that framework of, "Okay, I'm not gonna just do this just because every else- everyone else has," or, "I'm not just going to take the path of least resistance and kind of, you know, build a better Slack," or whatever it may be.

Anish Acharya 22:35 [laughs] That's right.

Kevin Rose 22:35 Like, to me, that is very rare to find.

Anish Acharya 22:39 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 22:39 And when you find it, that's the type of person that I want to, especially at the seed stage when you don't know what's gonna work, that I'd like to back, you know?

Anish Acharya 22:46 That's super interesting 'cause one of our observations is that it's just really hard to predict consumer seed.

Kevin Rose 22:51 Yes.

Anish Acharya 22:51 And we haven't done a ton of it for that reason. In fact, our stated sort of approach is weird and working.

Kevin Rose 22:56 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 22:57 That's how we've tried to invest in consumer, yet you have been consistently right at consumer seed investing. It's interesting that that's what you look for.

Kevin Rose 23:03 Yeah, I mean, I think that's, like, exactly right. Weird and working. Like, I, I look for weird first.

Anish Acharya 23:07 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 23:07 And then if it starts to have a little bit of smoke, like, that's a very interesting signal. And then oftentimes, I've seen founders do this a handful of times, where weird and working, working ends up failing, and then, but they still have the weird because that's in their DNA.

Anish Acharya 23:20 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 23:20 So they'll build the next weird and working.

Anish Acharya 23:22 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 23:22 Right? And that's what you want because they're gonna need to... several shots on goal. And as long as... You can't manufacture the weird. The weird is internal.

Anish Acharya 23:30 Yes.

Kevin Rose 23:31 The weird is I just see the world in a different way.

Anish Acharya 23:34 Yes.

Kevin Rose 23:34 And that is the founder that is going to win.

Anish Acharya 23:36 Why? Why is weird important?

Kevin Rose 23:39 Because i- in a world where you need attention... Well, it- we've t- we've talked about this socially in terms of y- what, what is... what draws you in, and, and what, what draws people into consumer products. Um, consumer is a finicky category because after a certain amount of time, what was weird and working ends up to, ends up being bored, boring and stale, right?

Anish Acharya 24:05 Right.

Kevin Rose 24:05 It's the reason why, you know, Digg is no longer here. It's the reason why there's a thousand startups that have, you know, MySpace or you name it, or Snap, or whatever the next one is-

Anish Acharya 24:16 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 24:16 ... will churn out and become old and stale.

Anish Acharya 24:19 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 24:19 And so if you want to find the, the next thing, and in consumer is often, um, you play with something and the aha moment isOh, I hadn't thought of that, or I didn't feel this- I've never felt this way before.

Anish Acharya 24:33 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 24:34 I'll, I'll never forget when, um, you know, I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day, and the, the thesis for me was w- it was very simple for me to see because we'd had bidirectional relationships for the longest time. And what I mean by that is the MySpaces and all the social platforms that had come before it had this idea of friendship.

Anish Acharya 24:54 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 24:54 And it was, okay, in order for me to get invited into your world, I would friend you.

Anish Acharya 24:59 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 24:59 You would get a request and be like, "Oh, Kevin friended me."

Anish Acharya 25:01 Mm.

Kevin Rose 25:01 Then you would have the permit- you would grant me the permission to see what you were up to.

Anish Acharya 25:06 Right.

Kevin Rose 25:07 And the beautiful thing about what, what Jack and Ev did in, in biz over there is they said, "Okay, we're gonna take that and just open it up," and say, "Actually, you can just broadcast out and say, 'I have something important to tell the world.'" And everyone can follow it whether they know you or not.

Anish Acharya 25:24 Interesting.

Kevin Rose 25:24 And it was that one simple little product tweak that said, okay, it's no longer about bidirectional communication. It's, it's about this idea of

Kevin Rose 25:32 broadcast to m- to all, right?

Anish Acharya 25:33 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 25:34 And when you see something like that, it, it un- unlocks not only a massive product opportunity and market opportunity because that's the way that, you know, um, you'll, you'll never become friends with the celebrity, but you can sign up for their broadcast, right? And so that was very interesting, but I, I think that is the weird thing. It seemed odd at the time.

Anish Acharya 25:53 Was it weird? I was gonna ask, yeah.

Kevin Rose 25:54 It was weird.

Anish Acharya 25:55 Interesting.

Kevin Rose 25:55 It was like, oh, 'cause I remember signing up for Twitter for the first time and just being like, "Okay, well where... What do we do here?" And they had this thing called following, and I'm like, "What is the f- following thing?" You know?

Anish Acharya 26:06 [laughs] Right. Right.

Kevin Rose 26:07 And it sounds so obvious now.

Anish Acharya 26:09 Yes.

Kevin Rose 26:09 But I- it's weird at the time. And I think that is going to be, um, that's so important for, for a consumer because what does seem weird at the time eventually becomes mainstream, and then everyone just take, assumes that that was always the case, right?

Anish Acharya 26:24 Yes.

Kevin Rose 26:25 And that's what I'm looking for, is that, that weird thing that will eventually become so mainstream that we'll assume that that was always a, a primitive that existed forever-

Anish Acharya 26:34 Right

Kevin Rose 26:34 ... when in reality it was, like, new and novel at that time.

Anish Acharya 26:36 I love that.

Kevin Rose 26:37 Does that make sense at all?

Anish Acharya 26:38 It makes perfect sense. It's very, very interesting. You know? It's, it's also that founders have to push themselves to the edge of being embarrassed-

Kevin Rose 26:44 Yes

Anish Acharya 26:44 ... potentially-

Kevin Rose 26:45 Yes

Anish Acharya 26:45 ... to design genuine new things.

Kevin Rose 26:47 Right.

Anish Acharya 26:47 Otherwise, it's very derivative, you know? It just has to be, and that is what all the X for Y companies typically are.

Kevin Rose 26:52 Right. Exactly. Like, when we, you and I were at GV and we did the Uber investment, how many startups did we say that, that were, "I'm the Uber for this."

Anish Acharya 27:00 Yes.

Kevin Rose 27:00 And you're like, "Oh, God, another one," right?

Anish Acharya 27:02 Right.

Kevin Rose 27:02 And then, yes, there are the, the DoorDashes and some of the others that are built on the same kinda similar primitives, but, uh, it's nothing like... It was so weird to get into the back of somebody's car.

Anish Acharya 27:13 [laughs] Strange.

Kevin Rose 27:13 Do you know how odd that was? I remember hailing an Uber and being like, "Okay, someone is pulling up at my house-

Anish Acharya 27:20 Yes

Kevin Rose 27:20 ... and I'm gonna get in the backseat of someone I do not know."

Anish Acharya 27:23 Yes. Yes.

Kevin Rose 27:24 Every day when we took the ride over here, we didn't even bat an eye.

Anish Acharya 27:27 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 27:27 We didn't even, like, look at the guy-

Anish Acharya 27:28 Yes

Kevin Rose 27:28 ... and be like, "Are you, are we safe here?"

Anish Acharya 27:29 Yes.

Kevin Rose 27:29 It was just a, a, a given, right?

Anish Acharya 27:31 Totally.

Kevin Rose 27:31 But it was so awkward at the time.

Anish Acharya 27:33 Well, so this is what I love about that era is we talk about that era as a part of history and we say, oh, it was early mobile, and it was, you know, remote control for the world-

Kevin Rose 27:41 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 27:41 ... and software is eating the world. We have all these

Anish Acharya 27:43 things, and they're all true and they're all valid. The most interesting part of both Airbnb and Uber were there were these dramatic changes in human behavior.

Kevin Rose 27:49 Yes. Yes.

Anish Acharya 27:50 We had all been raised being told two things: Never get into a stranger's car.

Kevin Rose 27:53 Never sleep on a stranger's couch. [laughs] Yes.

Anish Acharya 27:55 Yes, yes, exactly, you know? And then all of a sudden you started doing it, and guess what? The strangers were kinda pleasant.

Kevin Rose 28:00 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 28:01 And it was just this incredible unlock for the world, and this sort of like, I don't know, this sort of positive view of human trust in strangers.

Kevin Rose 28:07 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 28:08 That was a big change in consumer behavior.

Kevin Rose 28:10 Yeah. And, and that, that's, that's so exciting because I, I think we're gonna see more and more of that. One of the things that I've done, I'll just be a little bit vulnerable and transparent 'cause that's what's fun about podcasting.

Anish Acharya 28:20 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 28:20 One of the things that I get in a lot of trouble for is if I get in a disagreement with my wife, I will take some of that shit to ChatGPT and be like, "Am I right here? What's going on?" You know?

Anish Acharya 28:29 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 28:29 And I, I, I, but I call and I say, "Use the framework or, of Ter- Terry Real." I use some of these, like, pro- professional therapists-

Anish Acharya 28:35 Cool

Kevin Rose 28:35 ... and say, "Help me analyze this." The mistake I make is I paste that back into the conversation. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 28:41 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 28:41 But the point being is that's weird, awkward. She d- she didn't like it. She's like-

Anish Acharya 28:45 Yeah

Kevin Rose 28:45 ... "Hey, this isn't cool. You're going to this, like, you're, you're..." She calls it my bot. "You're chatting with your bot about our relationship," blah, blah, blah.

Anish Acharya 28:50 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 28:50 But I've talked to enough people now where I know this is a trend. People are looking to AI as a validation of a, you know, help me through this level of thinking here. Help me figure out am I in the wrong here? What am I doing? Blah, blah. I see a world where the bot is in the room with both of us-

Anish Acharya 29:07 Yes

Kevin Rose 29:07 ... as we're having a chat conversation or as we're on video or as we're debating out something. We're like, "Oh, this is heated. Let's turn it on. Let's let it watch us, and then give us feedback on how we're doing," as a third party kind of like, you know, hopefully unbiased pers- thing that is sitting there and evaluating this in real time. Is that weird and awkward right now? Absolutely.

Anish Acharya 29:27 Yes. Yes.

Kevin Rose 29:28 To your point about how these things evolve over time, 10 years from now, will that tech be good enough to where we'll consider that to be not, like, just, like, a, a healthy thing for our relationship? I think so.

Anish Acharya 29:36 100%. I think that's coming. I mean, ideally, the Alexa in your kitchen is passively observing your family, and then perhaps is just letting you know, like, "Hey, you know, your daughter was trying to talk to you about something. You weren't really paying attention."

Kevin Rose 29:48 Mm.

Anish Acharya 29:49 So there's all this stuff that can just be in the oxygen around us-

Kevin Rose 29:52 Mm

Anish Acharya 29:52 ... and today that seems unusual. What about a kid's classroom? My son goes to an amazing school, I'm very grateful for it, where they have two teachers. One teacher is focused on academics, one on SEL, social emotional learning. Like, what an amazing

Anish Acharya 30:05 thing for every school in America to have. And the way we're gonna get there is not by paying for two teachers in every classroom. It's probably some kind of a vision model that's privacy first, that can observe the social interactions of children-

Kevin Rose 30:16 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 30:16 ... and let parents and teachers know what's going on.

Kevin Rose 30:19 The, this idea of always-on recording, you and I have had a debate about.

Anish Acharya 30:23 [laughs] Yes.

Kevin Rose 30:23 Uh, do we wanna get to the mu- multimodal thing real quick though before we go in there? Let's, let's-

Anish Acharya 30:27 We, we should also wanna get, since we were talking about internet history, I wanna-

Kevin Rose 30:30 Yeah

Anish Acharya 30:30 ... get your take, your story that you've told me, I think privately, about the Dig button, the Like button-

Kevin Rose 30:35 Oh, geez

Anish Acharya 30:36 ... and the story there. Yeah.

Kevin Rose 30:37 Yeah. We can talk... W- where do you wanna begin? You want me to talk about that real quick?

Anish Acharya 30:39 Well, let's go internet history, and, like, tell me, you know, the Dig button was a very new and interesting idea, social news. Talked about... I think we're, we're sort of in a safe place 20 years later.

Kevin Rose 30:48 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 30:48 Talk about how it influenced the Like button.

Kevin Rose 30:50 So how did the Like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time? I, I think in the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript, to get a little bit geeky, it was the first time, even though this sounds super archaic, that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response, and get something back into your browser. It used to be a world that we'd have to refresh the page to see anything.

Anish Acharya 31:12 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 31:12 And so this idea that content could talk to a server and come back to you and display something new was just completely exciting and novel at the time.

Anish Acharya 31:22 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 31:22 And so I had seen, um, a bunch of sites that were allowing for user submissions, like Slashdot, but they wouldn't show you what content had been submitted. So it was, like, user-generated content in some sense, but there was still a gatekeeper to that. There were social bookmarking sites, like Delicious and others, that would count the number of people that had bookmarked things. But there was no way to just say, like, "I think this is cool. Let me just, like, tap on it, and, like, show my vote of interest on something." And so when Digg launched in late 2004, it was the first time that I had ever seen, just 'cause the Ajax had just been out for a couple months, that anyone had voted on content. And obviously, I didn't invote, i- i- invent voting, but no one had done it on the web.

Anish Acharya 32:01 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 32:01 And I was like, "Well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up, and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something?" So, uh, wisely, uh, just by luck, I just happened to be, uh, in contact with enough people to where they were like, "Hey, you should go out and file a patent on this."

Anish Acharya 32:16 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 32:17 And so I went and filed a, a patent on it, not because I wanted to enforce or own liking, but I was told and advised to do that because you want it as a defensive practice so that no one can say, like, go out and patent it, one of the bigs go out and patent and say, "No, you can no longer do this," even though I had, you know, first use rights, and so I would've been able to do it. But I went and did it, which was great, and, um, that was started off, and it became really big. And at that time, we were larger than Facebook, and so, traffic-wise.

Anish Acharya 32:44 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 32:45 And Mark and I shared a common investor in Greylock, um, and we just had a lot of overlapping friends. And w- he was like, "Hey," like, y- actually, it was David Sze from Greylock that was like, "Hey, you should meet Mark. You guys should hang." And so we went out and, um, grabbed dinner, and, uh, we hung out a couple times. We had dinner a couple times, and, and he came to my office. He drove up and came to the Digg office. And I'll never forget because he came into the office, and he was so young at the time, and so was I [laughs] no gray hair back then. He was sitting on the ground and just, like, wouldn't sit in his chair. He was, like, sitting on the ground, and he... We was, we were just talking about what it meant to, what, what liking was all about, what digging was all about. And I was like, "Well, the way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that'll eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume," and that was kind of the patent that I had gone and filed. And Mark didn't have this at the time. There was, I think there was a way to poke someone on their profile,

Kevin Rose 33:38 but that wasn't really a like. It was just to say, "What's up?" And then a few months later, they had rolled out the Like button, and, and that was kind of like a, a big part of what they pushed as a, as a similar thing, like a social signal to feed back into the algorithm to give you better content. Uh, they obviously hit a scale. I mean, we were s- we were at the point serving billions of, of Dig buttons per month, uh, because we had them integrated into... You could actually put a widget into your site back in the day, and there used to be b- Dig buttons all over the internet. But, um, you know, it was cool. I was never offended by that. I was like, "Oh, that's awesome." He made it his own.

Anish Acharya 34:10 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 34:10 Called it Like, and it, it made sense to apply that to what he was doing. I know there were other people at Facebook that worked on that. Actually, it was interesting because somebody, one of the engineers that worked on it, I saw in an interview accredited Digg for, like, being a place where they had seen that first-

Anish Acharya 34:24 Hmm

Kevin Rose 34:24 ... which I thought was really nice, you know? Um, and it's strange because even though Digg, you know, went out of business and failed, uh, for that version of the, the site, um, when all was said and done, the asset of Digg sold for pennies on the dollar. It wasn't really worth a whole lot, but the patents ended up being worth millions of dollars that LinkedIn bought them from us.

Anish Acharya 34:44 [laughs] Really?

Kevin Rose 34:44 So LinkedIn bought the most... The, the thing at the end of the day was the defensibility and patents around the actual social Dig button-

Anish Acharya 34:51 Wow

Kevin Rose 34:52 ... um, which, which LinkedIn ended up buying. But yeah, it was, it was a really wild time to sit there and come up with that idea. N- not that voting was novel, but no, I just hadn't seen it applied, and then we applied that to comments as well. I'll never forget the... Actually, even bigger than the... Well, not bigger than the Dig button, but different than Dig button, but e- equal, was I had created with Daniel Burka, we were sitting there, and we were designing the, the comment system.

Anish Acharya 35:18 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 35:18 And then we were like, "Okay, well, we should a- a- apply digging and burying to comments 'cause that makes sense. Like, people should be able to vote up and down comments." Never been done before.

Anish Acharya 35:25 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 35:25 And that was very strange, so we were like, "Okay, this makes sense." And I was like... Daniel and I were, like, designing. I was like, "What if Daniel, after a certain number of buries, it kinda shrinks down?" He's like, "Oh, that's cool," and then we riffed on that, and we built the design. And then we deployed it and rolled it out, and we had it so that after five buries, it was hard-coded.

Anish Acharya 35:43 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 35:43 After five downvotes-

Anish Acharya 35:44 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 35:44 ... it would shrink into a single line, so you'd just see, like, the, like, who submitted, but you would see... We actually color-coded it, and so it kind of looked like it was, like, disabled or, you know, away.

Anish Acharya 35:52 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 35:53 And we rolled it out there, and three hours later, we looked at that, and I noticed one of them had negative, like, 200 and some downvotes or something.

Anish Acharya 36:02 Okay.

Kevin Rose 36:03 And I was like, "The product's broken. Something is not... We have a bug in the code because it is meant to shrink after five."

Anish Acharya 36:09 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 36:10 Why would it be negative several hundred?

Anish Acharya 36:13 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 36:13 We looked at it, couldn't find a bug, couldn't find a bug, and then we realized what had happened. [laughs] We talked to some users. They're like... They wanted to see the train wreck, so they exposed the comment, were like, "Oh, yeah, that guy's an asshole," and then they [laughs] downvoted it another time.

Anish Acharya 36:25 Wow.

Kevin Rose 36:26 Because at that time, they, they were like, "Why are people... That person must have said something crazy."

Anish Acharya 36:30 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 36:31 "Let's take a look. Oh, yeah. Ooh, that was horrible," and they downvoted it. But it just, it immediately showed me that people are attracted to the carnage. You know, they want to see-The destruction and the, the, the kind of bad side of the internet. I was like, "Oh, God." Like, I would have thought as a product builder at that time, people say, "Oh, negative 10 votes, I'm not gonna look at that," you know?

Anish Acharya 36:53 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 36:53 I always try... I have these, like, rosy glasses on of like-

Anish Acharya 36:55 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 36:55 ... "Oh, people just see this as being, like, a negative thing and move on," but they wanted to see the carnage.

Anish Acharya 36:59 I mean, it... Let's... There's so many interesting things there. So, one, the story of your connection to the like button is fascinating. That's a piece of internet history. That's sort of a piece of human history, right? Like, what are the implications of the like button as inspired by the Digg button for all of society? We'll never know, but I think it's, it's certainly something. Also, love the ethos of you not feeling offended by them being inspired by it, right? Like, it's-

Kevin Rose 37:21 Yeah. I... Listen, I have nothing but... I have a lot of respect for, for Mark and, and what he's created, you know. Uh, I don't agree with his direction around classes and AR/VR. I never have. I've been anti-AR/VR for years. Um, never made an investment in the space, always avoided it altogether because I think that we're not considering the social side of things enough, like, like the impact it has on those around you. That's another topic that we could get into, but, um, I think he's, he's a, obviously a brilliant man. And it was really fun to h- have those moments where I'll be able to tell my kids I was in those dinners. I was having these-

Anish Acharya 37:58 Yeah

Kevin Rose 37:58 ... these deep product... like sparring around some of the product thinking of what he was building. And, um, it's very special to be... just even have a seat at that table, not... You know, I feel very lucky-

Anish Acharya 38:09 Incredible

Kevin Rose 38:09 ... as someone that came from nothing to just be able to sit with some of the great product thinkers of our time. You know, I would put a bunch of people in that camp, like, you know, the Systroms, and, uh, Reid Hoffman, and just, like, all the people that I've been able to kind of brainstorm with over the years and, and sit and, and hear great minds kind of, like, dissecting all the things that we build and the social impact they have, and it's just fascinating stuff. It's so fun.

Anish Acharya 38:36 It's just amazing.

Kevin Rose 38:36 You must play... feel this way with Mark and Ben, like, and, and, like, that when you get to sit with them. Like-

Anish Acharya 38:40 Oh

Kevin Rose 38:41 ... I... Mark and Ben were, were, like, involved in the early Digg and helping me through that stuff. And gosh, to sit down with Ben and listen to his stable hand, his sage wisdom-

Anish Acharya 38:52 Yes

Kevin Rose 38:53 ... like, you just learn so much from that dude.

Anish Acharya 38:55 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 38:55 Like, it's, it's insane.

Anish Acharya 38:57 For sure. I mean, there's a sense of seriousness and purposefulness. I mean, also some playfulness, but it's amazing 'cause if you think of the history of when you were involved in tech, you know, we were just weirdos in Silicon Valley-

Kevin Rose 39:07 Yeah

Anish Acharya 39:07 ... back then, you know? It was like the sort of dog chasing the car, and now we've caught the car. We are the car, you know? Like, technology is something that's really important for humanity-

Kevin Rose 39:15 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 39:15 ... and society, and, and I don't know that anyone who was building it at the time appreciated that.

Kevin Rose 39:19 No. Uh, none of us had any idea. It's funny, when they... when you hear these stories about the bad sides of social media and, and what, you know, these platforms, they've given the microphone to certain voices, and how much, you know, hate, and, and, and... I, I agree with that wholeheartedly. Like, there's a lot of things that we need to fix or try to attempt to fix, and... But I can tell you, as someone w- that was sitting around watching all these builders, you know, whether it be the Twitters or the Facebooks or you name it, no one knew this was gonna be the case. It was not... Nothing about this was intentional. It was like, "What does this unlock?" And it turns out that it unlocks both the good and the bad.

Anish Acharya 39:57 And I'll tell you the good. You know, when I was growing up, maybe you had the same experience, there was one way to be cool. Like, I was born in '79, I grew up in the '80s, and there was... You know, I went... I grew up in a small town in Canada. And, you know, you either played football

Anish Acharya 40:08 or you didn't, and if you didn't, everybody knew what the sort of social hierarchy was.

Kevin Rose 40:12 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 40:12 And when I was growing up, they said everybody's cool in college. Why? Because you'd find your, you know, your sense of... y- y- your community of weirdos.

Kevin Rose 40:20 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 40:21 Um, but the beauty of the internet now is that you find those weirdos online-

Kevin Rose 40:26 Yes

Anish Acharya 40:26 ... at any age. So I think that there's acceptance of people's own individuality that didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago.

Kevin Rose 40:32 Right.

Anish Acharya 40:33 And sure, there are some edges on the internet, but I think the sort of benefit to humanity of people finding their, their like-minded people early is really significant.

Kevin Rose 40:40 And I think the power of micro-communities is only gonna be more important over time. Like, these very small kind of, in some sense, hopefully walled gardens where you can go and have private discussion. Like, if you're in... Your weird isn't so weird. You just need to find the people that are into it, right?

Anish Acharya 40:56 That's it, yeah.

Kevin Rose 40:56 And so if you're into Japanese woodworking, if you can find five oth- 5,000 other people that are also into that-

Anish Acharya 41:01 Yeah

Kevin Rose 41:01 ... that is a very powerful network, right?

Anish Acharya 41:04 Yes.

Kevin Rose 41:04 And so that's, that's, that's the exciting side of all this. You know, you're a product builder. You've been a builder for a long time. You've l- launched and sold companies.

Anish Acharya 41:11 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 41:12 Um, what are you doing these days? What is your... What, what's your outlook for how products are being built? How has that evolved, and, and how does that play into your investments as well? Because in some sense, we're entering into a, a really weird era.

Anish Acharya 41:26 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 41:27 Um, and not weird, but it's just new, where someone, even a designer that has no experience on the engineering side, can go prototype, build, launch. It, it's deputizing a wider base of people to actually roll out products.

Anish Acharya 41:41 It's... I think it's incredible. So I, I'm so fired up. I haven't felt this way since, you know, I was on my computer working on my BBS. My mom was yelling at me to, like, "What are you doing down there?"

Kevin Rose 41:51 Oh, yeah.

Anish Acharya 41:51 "Come up for dinner," you know? Like, that's the level of enthusiasm I have right now because it just feels like everybody is unlocked to do what they wanna do. I think there's a set of people or s- a part of us that will be creative, and a part of us that'll wanna be productive and emotional, and all of it is getting meshed together. So it's the best time that I've ever experienced in my career, hands down.

Kevin Rose 42:11 Does it worry you that entrepreneurs can go and build a startup, launch it, get product market fit, and not have to raise venture?

Anish Acharya 42:18 No, it doesn't worry me. I think that there are businesses that will be built by, you know, 100 million revenue, one person. That's awesome.

Kevin Rose 42:24 Will they ever need venture capital?

Anish Acharya 42:25 Maybe not, and that's okay. Like, we have 1%, .1% of the software that we need in the world that we're going to have. You know, we're just getting started. And of course, there are going to be businesses that don't need venture, and that is fantastic. For example, in the '90s, there was this big movement of digital small business owners, right?

Kevin Rose 42:42 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 42:43 You could sell shareware online.

Kevin Rose 42:44 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 42:44 You could do all of these things to have these sort of corner stores on the internet that actually worked.What happened in the 2010s was everything moved to networks that were centralized, and all the economic value was extracted by the networks. You couldn't really... Maybe you could be a creator. That was probably the most ambitious form of digital small business that you could have in that era. And now, because consumers are paying for software, because anybody can make software, I think we're gonna see this, like, renaissance of people creating million-dollar run rate businesses as individuals, and that's awesome.

Kevin Rose 43:14 Do you think there'll be fatigue around subscriptions? Because, you know, one of the things that I- I feel personally on, m- maybe more so on the Substack level, but there's, like, uh, $5 everywhere, right? And if we see micro subscriptions across the board, you're gonna be like, "Okay, wait a second. I- I wake up to, uh, several hundred dollars per month-

Anish Acharya 43:31 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 43:31 ... based on all these tiny micro subscriptions." Is that, is that a concern?

Anish Acharya 43:36 It's a good question. I mean, we've talked about micro payments for 30 years. It feels like it's never really worked.

Kevin Rose 43:41 Never.

Anish Acharya 43:41 Um, but, but maybe it'll work this time, so that feels like part of it, 'cause I think there's a... I'm not an expert in crypto or Web3, but I understand that there are new protocols where payments can be directly embedded in API calls.

Kevin Rose 43:51 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 43:52 So I think there are potentially new models for monetization. And then, look, I think the second thing is software can do so much more for us than it could five years ago. Like, it's incredibly ambitious, so sure, maybe I'll have more subscriptions, but the th- parts of my life that are addressed by software are so much more significant, I think we'll be happy to pay them.

Kevin Rose 44:08 If you're, if you're an entrepreneur or anyone actually, 'cause anyone can do this these days, and they say, "Hey, I wanna play. I wanna go. I wanna build," what do you see... What are the tools that people are using out there?

Anish Acharya 44:19 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 44:19 What are you personally using to build? What does your current stack look like?

Anish Acharya 44:22 Yeah, and I'd love to hear yours as well. So I'll tell you my, um, my sort of productivity stack, my coding stack, my creative stack.

Kevin Rose 44:28 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 44:28 So productivity, it's actually pretty simple. I love the Perplexity Comet browser. It's really well done. It's got this consumer RPA feature called Assistant that's built in that's actually... It's just very useful day to day. So that's really important to me. I use that all the time. I-

Kevin Rose 44:42 Do you use it for search? 'Cause that does replace your search with Perplexity.

Anish Acharya 44:46 I do use it for search where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. I find for navigation queries, Google's still better.

Kevin Rose 44:52 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 44:52 So, but I do. I definitely do use it for search, and that's an interesting topic. You know, what are the implications of a new front door for the internet-

Kevin Rose 44:58 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 44:58 ... which was Google Search for 20 years. Now maybe it's language models.

Kevin Rose 45:02 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 45:02 Um, I use Notion Notes a lot to actually capture meeting notes. I think that's very useful. I love Deep Research.

Kevin Rose 45:08 Same. I started using that recently, by the way, Notion Notes.

Anish Acharya 45:10 Did you?

Kevin Rose 45:11 I, I was using Granola for a long time.

Anish Acharya 45:12 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 45:12 I think it's a great product.

Anish Acharya 45:13 Great product.

Kevin Rose 45:14 Um, so I'm torn, because Granola's freaking awesome-

Anish Acharya 45:17 Yes

Kevin Rose 45:17 ... but Notion Notes are built right in.

Anish Acharya 45:19 Yes.

Kevin Rose 45:20 And it's like it automatically launches, and I'm like, "Well, then all my notes are in Notion," which is kinda nice, you know?

Anish Acharya 45:25 If you're in the Notion ecosystem, I think it makes a lot of sense. If you're not, Granola's a fantastic product.

Kevin Rose 45:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 45:30 Um, but I'm a fan of both, and I just love the capability, like not having to hand write notes.

Kevin Rose 45:34 Right.

Anish Acharya 45:34 Deep Research is cool. I'm actually a big fan of the Grok Deep Research feature-

Kevin Rose 45:38 Mm

Anish Acharya 45:38 ... because it can search X. It's got a very up-to-date index of X.

Kevin Rose 45:42 Tell people how you use that, 'cause I thought this was very interesting around the trends side.

Anish Acharya 45:46 Yeah, I mean, if you're... E- even if you have a query like, "Hey, what were the top AI memes of the last week?" You know, if you go to ChatGPT or Anthropic, the models just aren't trained past a certain date.

Kevin Rose 45:56 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 45:56 And they can use the web search tool, so they're a little... They can do some of this, but Grok is hyper up-to-date with what's happening on X beyond just the web search tool. So I just find it's very, very good for timely information. And, and look, let's be honest, most of the interesting things that are happening in our industry, and often in the world, are happening on X.

Kevin Rose 46:13 Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's more of that real-time nature of what's, what's unfolding. So do you have set queries that you go to to kinda keep up with what was breaking on X, or...?

Anish Acharya 46:23 I, I mean, I'm always interested in what's breaking culturally, and that's what's breaking technically.

Kevin Rose 46:27 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 46:27 So, like, the memes are the best proxy for culture.

Kevin Rose 46:29 Mm.

Anish Acharya 46:29 That's often what I look for. And then, you know, technically, I mean, think of what's happened just in the last two weeks, right? Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI DevDay with AppsKit, with AgentKit and the Apps SDK.

Kevin Rose 46:40 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 46:41 Gemini 3 I think is coming next week. Sora 2 with the Sora 2 app. Like, that's two weeks.

Kevin Rose 46:46 I know.

Anish Acharya 46:47 It is an embarrassment of riches. It's awesome.

Kevin Rose 46:49 As a entrepreneur and as an investor, I find it just insanely daunting to try and keep pace with the amount of releases that are coming out.

Anish Acharya 46:58 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 46:58 Like, how does Andreessen handle this internally? When you think about... So on your consumer team, how many people are there there?

Anish Acharya 47:04 Yeah, um-

Kevin Rose 47:05 Is it 10?

Anish Acharya 47:05 ... for core investors, we're probably six.

Kevin Rose 47:07 With associates and everything, that's-

Anish Acharya 47:09 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 47:09 Okay, so six people. What's the process to surface something to you that's interesting? Where are they looking for signal?

Anish Acharya 47:17 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 47:17 How are they keeping... How... Like, for example, um, let's just say, uh, this agent builder on, on-

Anish Acharya 47:24 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 47:24 ... I played

Kevin Rose 47:25 with it for the first time yesterday.

Anish Acharya 47:26 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 47:27 That's gonna take an hour of your time if you're really gonna go deep on it.

Anish Acharya 47:30 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 47:30 With something coming out every two to three days or once a week-

Anish Acharya 47:33 Yeah

Kevin Rose 47:33 ... how do you work with your team to stay up to date with what is going on, given the pace in which things are rolling out?

Anish Acharya 47:40 Yeah. We just work our asses off. We really do. Like, we commit to trying every product.

Kevin Rose 47:44 But what does that look like? Do you have an associate that comes to you and says, "Hey, I played with this. Take a look. I'm gonna sit... I'm gonna grab 20 minutes of your time-

Anish Acharya 47:50 Yeah

Kevin Rose 47:50 ... because I wanna bring you up to speed on something"?

Anish Acharya 47:52 Well, it's interesting you, you know, the sort of associate GP, like we're pretty egalitarian actually. So people cover different areas. So my partner Justine has a real specialization around creative tools. Like, she's gone to the edge of the internet on creative tools.

Kevin Rose 48:06 Mm.

Anish Acharya 48:06 You know, or my partner Brian, who looks at a lot of things in social. Like, any time there's a weird working new social product, he's there. Olivia does that for us around productivity in areas like voice. I've been spending a lot of time in AI code. Like, I think I've, you know, I've probably got 50 subscriptions for app builders.

Kevin Rose 48:21 Wow.

Anish Acharya 48:22 I've just tried them all. So we all commit ourselves to sort of sub-areas, and we try to cover them very thoroughly.

Kevin Rose 48:29 Mm.

Anish Acharya 48:29 But look, we, we just hold ourselves to a really high bar of trying everything, 'cause our, like, belief is you cannot have an opinion until you've actually tried the product.

Kevin Rose 48:37 I think that's so wise, because there's just too much for any one person to try and wrap their heads around. So do you have briefings, like, where you share learnings? Like, how does that...

Anish Acharya 48:47 Yeah

Kevin Rose 48:47 ... how do you make sure that knowledge gets transferred broadly within the fund and at, at the GP level?

Anish Acharya 48:53 W- we definitely have a lot of active conversations about it, but the truth is, so much of our best thinking we publish. We really do. So if you read the essays, if you follow us on X, like, we're talking very transparently about what we're thinking, what we're learning, what we believe to be true, what we've changed our minds on.You know, it's interesting 'cause as a founder on the outside, I always assume that VCs knew all these secret things that they don't tell us, and maybe that was even true 10 years ago.

Kevin Rose 49:16 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 49:16 But now I think we've, in a very good way, moved to a world where investors are talking very actively about what they're seeing, and I think that's great signal for founders. Now, the signal's always a lagging indicator, so for founders to develop a weird, like definitionally no one's talking about it-

Kevin Rose 49:31 Right

Anish Acharya 49:31 ... but it's great to know that there really aren't that many secrets. It's sort of being published out there.

Kevin Rose 49:36 Well, on the coding tools side, you said you're seeing a lot, you have so many active subscriptions. What is your preferred stack these days? If someone was getting involved in coding for the first time and they wanna start playing, what, what, what do you go to on the coding side?

Anish Acharya 49:47 Oh, man. And it- I'd love to hear your stack as well. I- look, there's so many tools, and they're all pointed in different directions. My view on AI code and software is, like, this is not a market, it's an industry, okay? The whole software supply chain is changing. The s- cost of creating software is collapsing. We have 1% of the software we need in the world. We're gonna build the other 99%.

Kevin Rose 50:05 Why do you say that?

Anish Acharya 50:07 Dude, because there are so many parts of the world where it wasn't... Sort of the ROI didn't make sense to create specialized software.

Kevin Rose 50:15 Mm.

Anish Acharya 50:15 Right? In so many parts of our lives. By the way, some of those parts of our lives may not be serious. Like, my wife is working on a manifestation app for her and her five friends.

Kevin Rose 50:23 Right.

Anish Acharya 50:23 Five years ago, I mean, that... What are you gonna do? Go raise venture capital? Is she gonna hire an engineer? And now in her free time she's been using base44, but there are a lot of these other products that are sort of for mass market consumers. Replit's another great one where you can just make a product because you want to. You could make a product that's disposable. You could make a product for a fun bachelor party weekend. Like-

Kevin Rose 50:43 Mm

Anish Acharya 50:43 ... you can do things that aren't justified by the five-years-ago ROI, and now it's just typing a prompt into a box.

Kevin Rose 50:49 It's, it's so well said because there's so many times, if you, if you think what it would take... Like if, if I wanna create an app that, that does something very niche to me and my friend group-

Anish Acharya 51:00 Yes

Kevin Rose 51:00 ... that, y- five years ago, if someone came to me and said, "Hey, Kevin," you know, like you get these friends all the time-

Anish Acharya 51:05 Exactly

Kevin Rose 51:06 ... they're like, "I got, I got an app idea."

Anish Acharya 51:07 [laughs] Yes.

Kevin Rose 51:07 "I got an app idea."

Anish Acharya 51:08 Right.

Kevin Rose 51:08 I'm like, "All right." And the best way to shoot them down back then, it was always like, "Well, that'll cost you about 75K to get off the ground." They're like, "Oh, well, it's not that big a deal."

Anish Acharya 51:16 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 51:16 Like, "I guess I'm good." Yeah.

Anish Acharya 51:17 Uh-huh.

Kevin Rose 51:18 But now that's no longer the conversation. It's like, oh, here, go play with, you know, whatever, Bolt or you name it.

Anish Acharya 51:24 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 51:24 Like, you know, uh, Lovable, and you can deploy this in a day.

Anish Acharya 51:29 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 51:29 You know? And those... That was tough. Even six months ago, that was pretty hard to actually... These services existed, and I was using, you know, Replit or Bolt or whatever and... But I was like, "Ah, it's just not q- not quite there yet."

Anish Acharya 51:42 Yes.

Kevin Rose 51:42 But now, even the last few weeks, I would say that, you know, with Sonnet 4.5 and, and, you know, Gemini 3 coming, we're getting there to where-

Anish Acharya 51:50 Yes

Kevin Rose 51:51 ... it's, it's no longer... It used to be I would spend, uh... yeah, going v0, I'd spend 20% of my time kind of putting together the scaffolding and then I would, you know, connect to the database and I would... A lot of that was then bug squashing-

Anish Acharya 52:05 Yes

Kevin Rose 52:05 ... which was another huge piece of it.

Anish Acharya 52:06 Yes.

Kevin Rose 52:07 And you'd be like, "Ah, God," like still the vast majority of my time is bug squashing. That window is collapsing. That, that used to be-

Anish Acharya 52:14 Yes

Kevin Rose 52:14 ... the bulk of the work was just that final 10%.

Anish Acharya 52:17 Yes.

Kevin Rose 52:17 And now that is kinda going away.

Anish Acharya 52:20 Tell me about your stack, Kevin, 'cause we were together last weekend.

Kevin Rose 52:22 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 52:22 I saw the way you were using v0. It was really, really interesting. Talk a bit about it.

Kevin Rose 52:27 Yeah. I think with v0, you know, this is a, a, a product that was largely built to, um, you know, quickly put together a, a beautiful design, very simple design and kind of framework for any new app. So you can go in there and discuss what you want to have built.

Anish Acharya 52:43 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 52:43 Uh, I liked it because I could start with a piece of paper, I could draw a prototype of how I think something should function, and then I would take a picture with my phone, I would attach that as an image, and say, "Can you build something like this that does X?"

Anish Acharya 52:55 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 52:56 It puts together... You know, because it is built in ver- in the Vercel ecosystem, it's largely gonna build components for Next.js-

Anish Acharya 53:02 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 53:02 ... uh, which is a fancy way of saying that's the server that serves all that stuff up, and then you can then take those components, download them, and then drop them into Cursor.

Anish Acharya 53:10 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 53:10 And so Cursor, for me, being someone that's, uh, slants more technical, is a, a better solution because I like to be in the nuts and bolts of thing, how things are being built.

Anish Acharya 53:18 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 53:19 I would drop those components in there, and then basically I could say, "Okay, put together this," and actually create a real app behind the scenes here. Um, it starts, you know, building things. It finds where the missing pieces are. I can connect up Supabase and, you know, have a Postgres database tied to it, and then I'm deploying everything out to GitHub, which automatically gets deployed to Vercel, which means I have an active app that's up and running.

Anish Acharya 53:41 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 53:42 There are certainly easier ways to do this if you're non-technical.

Anish Acharya 53:45 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 53:45 You can go the Lovable route, the Bolt, the Replit. There's, you know, probably insert, you know,

Kevin Rose 53:50 five or s- 10 others that are playing in this space.

Anish Acharya 53:52 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 53:53 Um, and that's kinda how you get something off the ground. Now, the thing I've been doing though more recently is that there are still these dead ends that you run into where something isn't working, and it can be insanely frustrating if you're not technical. You don't know how to self-diagnosis, and you're like, "Why isn't, you know, my authentication working for X?" And you, you just keep hitting the same model over and over again.

Anish Acharya 54:14 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 54:15 And the nice thing about what, um, the way that Cursor functions is you can install something, uh... You can have multiple models running, one.

Anish Acharya 54:23 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 54:24 Uh, I will have one model on one side which is the Cursor built-in chat, which I'll, you know, tie to Sonnet 4.5, and then on the left-hand side I can have Codex from ChatGPT.

Anish Acharya 54:32 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 54:32 And if I run into a problem, I then take that problem over to the other side, have them also work on it.

Anish Acharya 54:38 Interesting.

Kevin Rose 54:39 And if I put them against each other, you can typically get to a solution pretty quickly.

Anish Acharya 54:43 That's incredible.

Kevin Rose 54:43 And so I will then kinda break through those walls and march towards something that's actually ready to deploy to production.

Anish Acharya 54:50 So I love that point. Talk a bit about how you do the design exploration in v0 of individual components.

Kevin Rose 54:55 Yeah. So one of the things that I always like is a, a good amount of visual kind of flair and touch on things, and you, you saw a thing that w- last night when you came over to my house and we were, like, showing each other the vibe coding progress.

Anish Acharya 55:08 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 55:08 Uh, one of the things that, that I'm exploring right now is chat around objects of content. So it could be stories, it could be all kinds of things, and I, I want to figure out how to select an object, uh, and, and bring it into chat in a very fluid way.

Anish Acharya 55:24 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 55:24 And I think in, at least in consumer internet, one of my spidey senses that I love is new primitives for how things are, are, kinda flow in and out of conversation.

Anish Acharya 55:35 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 55:35 And you have to-Come up- the- one of the things that you have to figure out is that emotional vibe of does this feel right? Does this feel new and interesting? Does it unlock more productivity, a better way to have a conversation about something? And you have to try a bunch of different things. So what I will do is I'll take one thing where I'll say, "The interaction for something, I wanna figure out a way, the best way to collapse and in- quickly jump in and out of a story."

Anish Acharya 56:02 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 56:03 And I'll take that over to v0, give it the screenshot, and say, "Come up with one way." And it'll create something, and I'll be like, "Okay, I kinda like this." I'll tweak it a little bit, you know, 10 other times so I've gone through a bunch of iterations.

Anish Acharya 56:13 Yes.

Kevin Rose 56:13 And I'll have that one way. And now the big unlock is you say, "That's great. Give me 20 other ways to do it that are completely novel, unique, and don't have anything to do with the first way-

Anish Acharya 56:25 Mm

Kevin Rose 56:25 ... and put them all on a single page." And it's churning, churning, churning, churning. Three, four minutes later, you have 20 different ways. Now I click down. Ooh, that was a weird interaction. Go down to the next one. Ooh, that- I like how that kinda zoomed this way and brought it off to the side. Whoa, that w- no, that's not gonna work. And you just keep going down, and you're like, "Well, I like number three and number eight."

Anish Acharya 56:42 Yes.

Kevin Rose 56:43 "Give me 10 different ways to do number three and 10 different ways to do number eight."

Anish Acharya 56:46 Yes.

Kevin Rose 56:47 And now you're getting deeper and deeper, and you, you, you take a little from here-

Anish Acharya 56:52 Yeah

Kevin Rose 56:52 ... bring it, like, I like the zoom on number three, but I really like the fade on number eight.

Anish Acharya 56:56 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 56:56 And this is the conversation-

Anish Acharya 56:57 Yes

Kevin Rose 56:57 ... you have with the LLM.

Anish Acharya 56:59 Yes.

Kevin Rose 56:59 And then by the end of the day, you're left with something that is truly unique and different.

Anish Acharya 57:03 Yes.

Kevin Rose 57:04 And it is through telling the AI to take that idea and give you 20 different versions of it.

Anish Acharya 57:09 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 57:09 Then you just take that little freaking component and drop it into Next.js, and you're off to the races.

Anish Acharya 57:14 See, what I love about, one, that's such a fascinating workflow, but also you're not thinking about ROI. You're not thinking about, oh, let me talk to the designer and ask them to come up with 20 variants.

Kevin Rose 57:22 Right.

Anish Acharya 57:22 That sounds like a lot of work.

Kevin Rose 57:23 Right.

Anish Acharya 57:23 I better prioritize. You're instead just able to go infinitely deep on something seemingly trivial-

Kevin Rose 57:29 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 57:29 ... and have this level of kind of polish and craftsmanship, which just wasn't justified five years ago.

Kevin Rose 57:34 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 57:35 That's where we're going with software.

Kevin Rose 57:36 Well, what's funny is I, the, I have this little interaction where you can, like, heart something, and I'm thinking more of my little personal forums that I'm trying to, to build. And one of the heart things I wanted to do is I just wanted it to kind of explode and kind of fade out, and I came up with this way to kinda make it do it at a angle, and it's all vector, so it just kinda does it beautifully. And the emotional connection to that little, that little tiny nugget, that little atomic unit of like, wow, that was a fun interaction. I want surprise and delight peppered throughout all the products that I build because I think it really gives something a, a depth to the product that you can't find anywhere else.

Anish Acharya 58:14 Yes.

Kevin Rose 58:14 And so that... I'm always looking for that type of thing.

Anish Acharya 58:17 So cool. Very cool.

Kevin Rose 58:18 So how are you using it?

Anish Acharya 58:20 I've been using a lot of the same products that you've been using. So I've been using v0 for a lot of initial explorations. I use Replit and Base44 for things that I need to just do fast and have them working. And then-

Kevin Rose 58:30 What, what's Ba- why Base44? Why, why that one?

Anish Acharya 58:33 I, I think Base44 is an interesting company. So they're, it's a one-man company that was acquired by Wix for $80 million. Um, and I think philosophically, they've talked about this approach of batteries included, which is when you're using these code gen platforms, you shouldn't have to, especially if you're a mass market consumer, you don't know what superbase is-

Kevin Rose 58:49 Right

Anish Acharya 58:49 ... and you don't wanna know.

Kevin Rose 58:50 Right.

Anish Acharya 58:50 So everything should just work, and I think the characteristic of that is that there are a certain set of apps that the platform simply won't generate. It's like you wanna do some complex data processing thing, like, this is not the platform for you.

Kevin Rose 59:02 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 59:03 You wanna do... I have a, a fun, um, little, like, Instagram clone for cats called Catstagram for my kids and for me, and, you know, um, and it's, it's super fun. It's super easy to build. Base44 one-shotted it. I deployed it. I bought a URL for it. It works. It's not that serious.

Kevin Rose 59:17 We can cut this out later, by the way. It's a little embarrassing-

Anish Acharya 59:19 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 59:20 ... but it's, it's fine. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 59:22 Dude, it's great. So I, I-

Kevin Rose 59:24 [laughs]

Anish Acharya 59:24 It's just like it- things just work even though the things that you can do are probably less ambitious.

Kevin Rose 59:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 59:29 So I think there's this sort of spectrum of, like, how ambitious is it versus how batteries included is it.

Kevin Rose 59:35 Yes.

Anish Acharya 59:35 And for simple things, fully batteries included is awesome, and then for really ambitious things, I use Cursor, I use GPT-5 Codex, um, both the model as well as the CLI. I use Sonnet 405. Um, all, all of these products are sort of the things you need to use to be ambitious.

Kevin Rose 59:51 Convex was something that you turned me on to-

Anish Acharya 59:53 Yeah

Kevin Rose 59:53 ... which I think is quite cool. Can you speak to why you chose that database?

Anish Acharya 59:56 I mean, I'm speaking sort of outside of my specialization area, but it's a Series A that my partner Martine led. Um, it's a real-time database, so it's great for applications like chat and-

Kevin Rose 1:00:06 How fast you got chat up and running with Vibe Code-

Anish Acharya 1:00:09 Yes

Kevin Rose 1:00:09 ... is insane to me because I had built a chat thing on Postgres, and to do WebSockets and state management and all that, it was a pain in the ass.

Anish Acharya 1:00:16 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:00:17 And you had it, like, r- up and running in minutes.

Anish Acharya 1:00:19 I mean, it's just the nature of the product, I believe-

Kevin Rose 1:00:21 Yeah

Anish Acharya 1:00:21 ... of the database, so it's really, really good for real time. I think the second thing is you sort of define and interact with the database and code, so there's no going to the dashboard to do, you know, an insert in the SQL table. It's just very, very clean. So look, I think this is the magic of vibe coding. You can explore all of these-

Kevin Rose 1:00:38 Right

Anish Acharya 1:00:38 ... things. You don't have to become an expert in Convex. You don't have to become an expert in TypeScript.

Kevin Rose 1:00:43 Right.

Anish Acharya 1:00:43 You can just try it, you know?

Kevin Rose 1:00:44 It's so cool.

Anish Acharya 1:00:44 I love it.

Kevin Rose 1:00:45 What else is in your stack? I know we, we kinda cut off a little bit there. You had said that Notion and, you know-

Anish Acharya 1:00:51 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:00:51 ... I'm assuming you're using those-

Anish Acharya 1:00:52 Deep research

Kevin Rose 1:00:52 ... yeah, what else?

Anish Acharya 1:00:54 Yeah, so the, the, maybe the other thing I'll just speak to is because I've spent a lot of time with AI music, I love AI music. It's very, very exciting. I believe that, like, anyone who's ever picked up an instrument has wanted to play it well.

Kevin Rose 1:01:04 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:01:04 But there's this sort of technical aspect to playing music, which is similar to the technical aspect of coding, right? So how much unmade music is there-

Kevin Rose 1:01:12 Mm-hmm

Anish Acharya 1:01:12 ... because people don't know how to play instruments? So I think AI at a minimum is an instrument that lets people express their sort of musical desires, and perhaps something more important than that.

Kevin Rose 1:01:21 Is there anything cool there on the music front?

Anish Acharya 1:01:23 So many products.

Kevin Rose 1:01:23 I mean, I've played around with a couple of them, but I haven't seen anything that is, has been transformational.

Anish Acharya 1:01:28 So Text to Song is where all this started with Udio and Suno a year ago.

Kevin Rose 1:01:33 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:01:33 Text to Song is cool, um, and I think it's an important part of the sort of consumer use case, but you, you kinda wanna go deeper and be able to refine it further.

Kevin Rose 1:01:41 Yes.

Anish Acharya 1:01:42 And now we're seeing all the products. You know, I played with, um, one called Mozart this week. ElevenLabs has got a really good product. Suno itself has actually launched a DAW within their product. So you can start to do things that are more ambitious within these music products.Um, and it's, it's really, really inspiring. I've also been making, um, remixes of music videos. So I did, um, I did one called Impossible Tiny Desk, which was Notorious BIG doing the NPR Tiny Desk series.

Kevin Rose 1:02:07 Oh, that's amazing.

Anish Acharya 1:02:08 I used Hedra for it, I used Demucs for stem separation. It wasn't very complicated to make, and you can just experience this moment that you couldn't otherwise experience. I've also been doing ones of '90s music videos, so did a little remix of, uh, Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I generated all the video in V- uh, Veo 3. It's so satisfying.

Kevin Rose 1:02:27 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:02:28 And you know how many people saw it? 10.

Kevin Rose 1:02:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:02:29 But it doesn't matter because I felt fulfilled making it.

Kevin Rose 1:02:32 I saw that, um, there was a, a, a video that went around probably two or three months ago where someone, a music producer, and, uh, it was a couple people, they went from prompt to album artwork to published song, like, on Spotify, like, in, like, a few hours.

Anish Acharya 1:02:47 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:02:47 And they made a completely fake person. The song sounded pretty awesome.

Anish Acharya 1:02:51 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:02:51 And it was just... God, I, I have to imagine there is a massive opportunity here to unlock creativity-

Anish Acharya 1:02:59 Yes

Kevin Rose 1:02:59 ... if they get the right tool, you know?

Anish Acharya 1:03:01 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:03:01 And I, I feel like it is a little bit more descriptive in that you'll say, "I don't like the way that beat dropped here."

Anish Acharya 1:03:07 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:03:07 "Can you change X?" And it should be able to go in and with a scalpel, like, fix that song, and kinda hone it to your own personal taste via your prompt. Is-

Anish Acharya 1:03:17 Yes

Kevin Rose 1:03:17 ... is that where you see things going?

Anish Acharya 1:03:18 I, I do, and I'm very, I'm very... Like, there's, I think a lot of the conversation unfortunately has been about slop, slop, slop.

Kevin Rose 1:03:23 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:03:23 But I think if you look at music, music is a sort of adaptive system that changes because of culture.

Kevin Rose 1:03:29 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:03:29 So let's say we had a model, and let's say we train the music model with every genre of music right up until hip-hop, but not hip-hop. Would it infer hip-hop? No.

Kevin Rose 1:03:38 Mm.

Anish Acharya 1:03:38 You needed the Bronx. You needed Queensbridge. You needed New York culture in the '70s to have hip-hop. So culture is such an important part of music that you don't just get a model that knows all the music we're ever gonna make. Like, our lived experiences are what informs the next genre of music, and that's why I'm so bullish on it.

Kevin Rose 1:03:55 Yeah. I don't know that AI would build brain rot if- if it just-

Anish Acharya 1:03:59 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:03:59 My kids are so into that crap. I'm just like, "Oh, my God, I don't know. No one should listen to this."

Anish Acharya 1:04:04 I'm pro. I'm pro brain rot. [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:04:06 You're pro brain rot? Um, all right.

Anish Acharya 1:04:07 Um-

Kevin Rose 1:04:07 One of the things I wanted to chat about, I'm sure... Do you have more stuff to jump into? I would love to talk about, like, this, the idea of always-on recording and the social impacts of that.

Anish Acharya 1:04:15 Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the corner trend spotting.

Kevin Rose 1:04:18 Okay. Whatever.

Anish Acharya 1:04:19 Can we do that?

Kevin Rose 1:04:19 Let's, you start first. Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:04:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things, I've known you forever, and the people that know you, Kevin, is that you're always early to important new consumer movements. So when you change your mind about something, one or two or three years later, the rest of us change our minds about that. And you've done that consistently, right? With small, maybe small things like coffee, with really important things like media. I mean, you were years and years ahead of the rest of the technology industry in terms of embracing media. What's coming next? How do you know what's coming?

Kevin Rose 1:04:47 Oh, boy.

Anish Acharya 1:04:47 I mean, please.

Kevin Rose 1:04:48 Well, some of it is, is this idea of saying no to things that you don't think are gonna have any traction.

Anish Acharya 1:04:55 Okay.

Kevin Rose 1:04:56 Uh, I did a lot of that. Like, when everyone was going heavy in, in VR and AR, I, I kind of avoided that. It, it's a little pessimistic, and it's not necessarily predicting the future, but it's knowing not how to spend your time, I think is a big, big piece of it. Um,

Kevin Rose 1:05:11 you know, at the end of the day, I, I really like, uh, what Ryan Hoover did in creating the Weekend Fund because it, it was actually based on a Chris Dixon quote where he said, like, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but what pe- "What the geeks are playing on the weekends will become mainstream."

Anish Acharya 1:05:24 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:05:24 And I thought that was a, a, a brilliant, um, quote from Chris because he also is very prescient. Like, he's so, so good at predicting the future and seeing things before anyone else.

Anish Acharya 1:05:33 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:05:34 Uh, the o- the only way to find this stuff is to have this inherent childlike drive that says, "I must play. I must play," and, and it ha- it's not something you can tell someone to do. You just have to be constantly at that edge of what is possible and always be just kicking the tires on things. And if that f- if that feels good to you, that feels like something that doesn't feel like work, like it does for me-

Anish Acharya 1:06:03 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:06:03 ... then I think you will naturally be led into the next big thing. But it, it can't be a job.

Anish Acharya 1:06:08 Mm.

Kevin Rose 1:06:09 It can't be something that someone tells you you have to do it. It just has to be driven from personal curiosity. When I was a little kid, there was a show, oh, God, I hope I get the name right. I think it was called Beyond 2000 or something like that. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Anish Acharya 1:06:21 I don't, but go on.

Kevin Rose 1:06:21 Okay. There was a TV show, and all it was was it would just tell you for a half hour, and it was probably wrong, like, 99% of the time-

Anish Acharya 1:06:28 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:06:28 ... 'cause they'd talk about flying cars and shit.

Anish Acharya 1:06:30 Uh-huh.

Kevin Rose 1:06:30 But they would just tell you what, where they think things are going, and they would try and predict the next 20 years out.

Anish Acharya 1:06:35 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:06:35 And I was just enamored by that. I would sit there and be like, "Wow, we're gonna have flying cars. This is crazy."

Anish Acharya 1:06:41 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:06:41 But it was always, like, every episode was just a different vertical of what the future could look like.

Anish Acharya 1:06:46 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:06:47 And that has never left me. Like, this idea of wanting to see what's about to happen a- and, and live at that edge of things. Even if I wasn't investing, if I had decided to, to call it up and I never turn on another camera, I would be held up in a little room somewhere-

Anish Acharya 1:07:04 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:07:05 ... constantly, like, playing with the latest stuff. So what does that mean today? What that means today is I splurged on a crazy-ass GPU for my house, and I'm downloading local models, you know?

Anish Acharya 1:07:15 Uh-huh.

Kevin Rose 1:07:15 And you and I were talking even last night, I had this idea where I'm asking all the models out there to give me the 100 best albums of all time, and, meaning music or albums of all time, and not based on downloads, but cultural impact on their, uh, impact on other genres, springing up to your point, from that, and I'm gonna have them duke it out. I'm gonna put it against all the biggest... I'm gonna select the most expensive option to do, and I'll probably burn a half lake worth of water. Whatever the hell it's gonna... [laughs]

Anish Acharya 1:07:44 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:07:44 I'm joking, but it's like-

Anish Acharya 1:07:45 A thimble. A thimble

Kevin Rose 1:07:45 ... it's pretty bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

Anish Acharya 1:07:47 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:07:47 So they're gonna go, and they're gonna give me, and they're gonna, they're gonna stack rank those, and gonna see where they agree and where they don't agree, and come up with a list. And then I'm going to go and have each of those, um, albumsAt a granular level, tell me why each song is very important and create a script for about a two-minute-long podcast for each of the albums. Tell me where to pay attention to each of those tracks, why, what riff to listen for that imp- impacted somebody else or influenced someone else.

Anish Acharya 1:08:15 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:08:15 And then I'm gonna feed that into ElevenLabs and create a beautiful, relaxing kind of like guided journey for that album.

Anish Acharya 1:08:24 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:08:25 Then I'm gonna tie it into s- the, the Spotify API-

Anish Acharya 1:08:28 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:08:28 ... so that I will sit back, and it will be on my list of to-dos to listen to an album, call it, like, once a week or something like that, get that guided beautiful journey, and go through that. That product doesn't need to exist, but I want it for myself, and so I'm gonna go build that. But it's an example of, like, that is a forcing function for me to learn speech-to-text, for me to learn how to have these models duke it out and come up with the best possible, you know... a- and a whole, the whole back end that's required to pull that off. But that's that play at work in action, right?

Anish Acharya 1:09:01 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:09:01 And I think that if you just can find that for you, you will find the frontier of where things are going just by that natural curiosity, you know? I don't know where things are going. I will tell you that there are a couple things I know to be true. One, I think engineering is over. I think we're gonna be orchestrators of information, not engineers. I, I think those will be solved problems. Anything where there is a non-subjective outcome, AI will tackle that and solve that problem. Like, engineering is a solvable problem. Like, if I want to fan out a million stories to a social network-

Anish Acharya 1:09:39 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:09:39 ... that is not a subjective thing. There is a way to do that at scale efficiently and with a end result that we're all looking for. AI will figure that out. You won't need a team of 10 engineers to figure that out.

Anish Acharya 1:09:52 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:09:52 It... Those will be solved problems. So, you know, I think that there are certain things like that that I look to and be like, "Oh, the world just hasn't woken up to this yet." I mean, we all, as technologists, we have. But i- yeah, I wouldn't go... As a CS degree, I would not go into that right now.

Anish Acharya 1:10:05 Hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:10:05 You know?

Anish Acharya 1:10:06 Okay.

Kevin Rose 1:10:06 So i- there's little bits and pieces like that. But then you think, "Okay, well, what has to happen to... in order for that reality to unfold? What tools need to be built? What stacks need to be built?" And that's where the investment opportunities lie. And, you know, if you see this stuff, like when I was on Tim Ferriss' show talking about when, you know, um, when, when NVIDIA was hitting their kinda $1 trillion mark, and I'm like, "This is gonna run-"

Anish Acharya 1:10:28 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:10:28 ... 'cause we're at the early innings of this-

Anish Acharya 1:10:30 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:10:30 ... and talking about this stuff. And, you know, b- it's so funny. So many things on Tim's show, 'cause I was... I... He asked me to make these predictions.

Anish Acharya 1:10:36 [laughs] Uh-huh.

Kevin Rose 1:10:37 And so when Ethereum first got off the ground, even before they launched, I was talking about it on Tim's show. Because if you're playing, you'll just see it.

Anish Acharya 1:10:42 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:10:42 And it'll be right there in front of you.

Anish Acharya 1:10:44 Yeah. I love that. I mean, I wanna quibble with your point about a CS degree. But first I wanna say that, like, so many good things in life are downstream of authentic curiosity.

Kevin Rose 1:10:53 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:10:53 And I love that that's the way that you've done this, you know?

Kevin Rose 1:10:55 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:10:55 'Cause it's not some big-brained sort of galaxy mind predicting the future thing.

Kevin Rose 1:11:00 Right.

Anish Acharya 1:11:00 It's just, like, what gives me energy.

Kevin Rose 1:11:01 That's right. Yeah, that's, that's the whole thing is, um... I remember M- Michael Arrington way back in the day, I was, uh, going on... He was interviewing me on TechCrunch Disrupt, and this was probably, like, 20 years ago. And he's like, "Hey, I want you to, like, talk about your investment." I'm like, "Why? How are you good at picking these things?" And I'm just like, "I don't know. It's, like, kinda based on my gut and what I'm excited about."

Anish Acharya 1:11:21 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:11:21 And he's like, "Dude, you gotta have a better answer than that."

Anish Acharya 1:11:23 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:11:23 Like, that's what he told me before we went on stage. And I'm like, it's not a magical formula.

Anish Acharya 1:11:27 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:11:27 It is, like, intuition more than anything else, especially at the early stage.

Anish Acharya 1:11:31 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:11:31 Especially when it's awkward.

Anish Acharya 1:11:33 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:11:33 'Cause if it looks awkward, it's gonna be contrarian. No one's gonna wanna do that weird thing.

Anish Acharya 1:11:37 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:11:37 Like, those are the hardest deals to do.

Anish Acharya 1:11:39 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:11:39 But, you know, it's funny, like, I was talking to, I think it was Reid and, and David over at Greylock back in the day, and they said their best investments were the ones that were the most contentious internally.

Anish Acharya 1:11:48 Yes, yes.

Kevin Rose 1:11:49 Because people don't see it. Not everyone sees it.

Anish Acharya 1:11:51 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:11:51 And that's okay. That's actually a positive signal, because many people are like, "That will never work." But guess what? When it does, it changes the world.

Anish Acharya 1:11:59 Well, what's remarkable is anybody who's got nothing to lose can be embarrassed and be willing to be embarrassed. But once you have something to lose, you know, you're a person that people know and trust, the natural human instinct is to be more cautious and to take less risk around being embarrassed. And because you've consistently been at the edge, maybe because of this, you know, uh, authentic curiosity, you've done it a lot, and I think that's a real conscious thing you've done, which is unusual.

Kevin Rose 1:12:22 But I've also lost a lot-

Anish Acharya 1:12:24 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:12:24 ... and, and made the wrong call. And I think that at the end of the day, when I... when my kids look back at my career, and, you know, I have them as my little proxies for the world, and they go out-

Anish Acharya 1:12:34 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:12:34 ... I want them to look back on Dad's career and not say he was the best investor, not say he made the most money, but look back and say, "Wow, he took a lot of risk, and he was wrong a lot. But you know what? He got to scratch every personal itch that he had-

Anish Acharya 1:12:47 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:12:47 ... and try everything, and he was at the buffet and tried it all." B- because-

Anish Acharya 1:12:51 That's-

Kevin Rose 1:12:51 ... and, and, and a lot of it failed.

Anish Acharya 1:12:53 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:12:54 Most of it failed. But that's okay, because what are we doing on this earth if we're not trying crazy shit?

Anish Acharya 1:12:59 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:12:59 Do you know what I mean?

Anish Acharya 1:13:00 100%, dude. 100%.

Kevin Rose 1:13:01 Um, so back to the thing that you said was, uh, you wanted to debate out. What was that?

Anish Acharya 1:13:05 Well, I wanna quibble about your point around CS degree, 'cause I actually think this is a-

Kevin Rose 1:13:08 Yeah, it's over

Anish Acharya 1:13:08 ... really, really important point. Um, if you're somebody that goes to Stanford or maybe Harvard or MIT, like, those people are leaning into CS degrees in a big way. And unfortunately, I think the story has gotten out into broader society that CS is over, engineering is over. Like, sure, being able to write a certain kind of algorithm may be less value than it was 10 years ago. But being able to think technically is more important than ever. And I think it would be a real tragedy if es- especially kids that go to, you know, non-Ivy League schools decide not to do CS because CS is over. Like, I think the value of being technical is higher than it's ever been. And while the future technologists may not be programming in the way that we are, like, they're gonna do something that needs that skill set.

Kevin Rose 1:13:49 I, I... Well, I will say I think it's over. [laughs]

Anish Acharya 1:13:52 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:13:52 The reason I think it's over is because I would argue that creativity in the future is gonna be more important than technical ability.

Anish Acharya 1:13:58 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:13:59 I- and it's, it's-That we don't need to teach people SQL or, or no one needs to learn these things in school. Like, what... I- I'm curious. Let, let's crack that open a bit. What do you believe that a technical, technical degree gives you-

Anish Acharya 1:14:14 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:14:14 ... that will be useful a decade from now?

Anish Acharya 1:14:16 Well, look, I think, one, it's just fluency, right? What is a distributed system? What does that mean? What does that certification-

Kevin Rose 1:14:21 Will you need to know that?

Anish Acharya 1:14:22 Perhaps. Yeah. I think it's, it's useful to understand that as a mental model for systems thinking, right? I think the second thing is just general problem-solving. Like, how do you go step by step and solve a problem? How do you understand how to explore a sort of problem and design space?

Kevin Rose 1:14:37 Mm-hmm.

Anish Acharya 1:14:37 Where to sort of take risk or be ambitious, where not to. Like, a lot of it is downstream of mathematics, and if you look at, I went to computer engineering in Waterloo. Like, none of the stuff I took away, in sec- in fact, none of the things that we typically studied was a programming language, right? A lot of it was systems thinking.

Kevin Rose 1:14:53 Mm.

Anish Acharya 1:14:54 And I think the systems thinking is actually really important.

Kevin Rose 1:14:56 Well, that's really interesting because I think that's different than a s- classic CS

Kevin Rose 1:15:00 degree. One of the things that I like about some of these, and they're largely kind of more the, on the vocational school side of things. When you hear about these programs and how they've evolved-

Anish Acharya 1:15:08 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:15:08 ... it is like training you to become an entrepreneur, which is full stack. Building it, designing it-

Anish Acharya 1:15:15 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:15:15 ... coding it, shipping it. That depth of knowledge across the full stack, which impacts marketing, creativity, you know, hiring, firing, like that full suite-

Anish Acharya 1:15:25 Yes

Kevin Rose 1:15:25 ... essential. Like, it will of course be very important in the future. I think the just singular technical focus around, you know, the code piece of it, that's where I would like to see the degrees, like, loosen up a little bit-

Anish Acharya 1:15:40 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:15:40 ... and kinda be a little bit more holistic and overarching.

Anish Acharya 1:15:43 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:15:43 Because I don't think... And, and don't get me wrong, there will be technical challenges that we have in the future, but I think if you get to scale as an entrepreneur-

Anish Acharya 1:15:49 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:15:50 ... you will have plenty of everything to go f- solve those challenges, right?

Anish Acharya 1:15:54 I think that's right. I mean, I think being a technologist and broadly technology thinking sets you up to be a good founder. I... Actually, Elon's probably run the most ambitious experiment on this that is totally under- under-discussed, which is I think he typically has technical people in every role.

Kevin Rose 1:16:08 Right.

Anish Acharya 1:16:08 Like marketing, comms, you know, you name it, there's a technical person there. So I, I really do think there's something in the training that sets you up to be successful in a lot of vac- vocations, which is totally distinct from programming.

Kevin Rose 1:16:20 Yeah. It... What I look for in a founder is someone that is kinda multi-disciplined in some way, 'cause if you're too technical, then you don't understand... Like, I met a founder yesterday that, um, is building a device that can kind of listen to everything, another one of these types of devices. And the, the kind of angle of what they were going after missed out on a lot of the, the social side of it, like what it-

Anish Acharya 1:16:45 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:16:45 ... means to be listened to, the invasion of privacy, and w- how to potentially sidestep that. They, they were all technical-

Anish Acharya 1:16:53 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:16:53 ... all device-focused, and y- I feel like the future you have to have that kind of full suite, you know?

Anish Acharya 1:16:59 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:16:59 It's, it's, it's not just any one discipline. It's probably gonna be a handful. The, the orchestrator role, you know?

Anish Acharya 1:17:04 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'll, it'll be interesting to see. You know, I also think that there's value in ignoring... I don't know why I'm just arguing with you here.

Kevin Rose 1:17:10 No.

Anish Acharya 1:17:10 But there's value in ignoring the social norms. You know, a great example of this is 10 years ago, it's so funny looking at the mobile transition, so I remember it so distinctly. iPhone 2007, App Store in 2008. When the App Store came out, there was 6 million iPhones in distribution, right?

Kevin Rose 1:17:25 Mm.

Anish Acharya 1:17:25 Not a lot. Today, ChatGPT has 800 million actives, right?

Kevin Rose 1:17:29 It's insane.

Anish Acharya 1:17:29 We're not even three years in. So it's crazy the scale at which these things grow. If you look at the predictions from 2009, you can go read the blog posts. Like, no one knew what to do with the technology, and the most consistent prediction was location-based ads.

Kevin Rose 1:17:42 Mm.

Anish Acharya 1:17:42 Like, that was the most ambitious thing anyone could think of would happen with mobile.

Kevin Rose 1:17:46 Yes.

Anish Acharya 1:17:46 And of course, much more ambitious things happened. But one of the big predictions around location was, wow, people don't wanna share their location. It's an invasion of privacy. Like, there was a lot of certainty amongst the pundits about that. Fast-forward 10 years, and every Gen Z, you know, Zoomer, shares their location with all their friends and their exes and who knows who. Like, that moment of, like, consumers feeling one way about location to the sort of tipping point happened very rapidly. So I, I can't speak specifically to what's gonna happen around, you know, being transcribed, but I do think ignoring the social conventions can be a really good instinct for founders.

Kevin Rose 1:18:21 Yeah. The... I, I worry that, um, the... I worry about this trend of, of always recording, and, and I, I just feel like it... Do you believe that this is gonna be ubiquitous? Like, do you feel like the- we're always gonna be recorded, like the future is one where you can't... I mean, there will be safe spaces, but you can't largely find a safe space because every meeting you go to, every dinner you go to, like, it w-

Anish Acharya 1:18:43 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:18:43 ... it's always on.

Anish Acharya 1:18:45 Look, I think that technology and social norms sort of adapt to each other in lockstep. So yes, I think there'll be more things recorded, and I also think that we'll develop new social norms so that it can fit into our world, right? Technology is downstream of what we need as a species in society, and we've always adjusted, you know? We've always adjusted. I believe we will again. And right now we're in this awkward sort of transitionary period where, you know, if you're in a bar in New York, you're definitely getting punched in the face for recording.

Kevin Rose 1:19:10 Right. Right.

Anish Acharya 1:19:11 And in SF, like, everyone's recording. So it's, it's just a moment of transition where society has not caught up with technology, but I do think we're going more in that direction than less.

Kevin Rose 1:19:19 Yeah. That's... It's gonna be a, a hard one to overcome.

Anish Acharya 1:19:21 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:19:22 I'm telling you, I've, I've, I've gotten... Well, certainly on the personal side, if you wear one of those devices that's always recording with a partner, the, the, it don't fly.

Anish Acharya 1:19:30 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:19:31 Um, on the professional side, I've seen a lot of people ask you to take it off, to put it away, you know? And I, I just, uh... But also I, I have to imagine, at least for me, I, I enjoy the rawness of a unrecorded conversation because you will put your toe and say things that are-

Anish Acharya 1:19:47 You're right

Kevin Rose 1:19:47 ... are probably more real, that I would rather have that conversation happen-

Anish Acharya 1:19:51 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:19:52 ... than something that is just like, "Oh, let me reference my notes and make sure that I got that right," you know?

Anish Acharya 1:19:56 So we're talking a lot about the kind of, you know, how it changes things for the negative. We've got an amazing portfolio company called Limitless. They do this. And, like, the benefit of having a lot of those things, like sometimes you'll find yourself saying things you didn't expect to say.And they just get lost in the ether. So the, the benefit of having that signal and having it less maybe transcription-focused and maybe ideas-focused, maybe vibes-focused, like there's a form of kind of lossy compression-

Kevin Rose 1:20:21 Yes

Anish Acharya 1:20:21 ... you can take with the ideas-

Kevin Rose 1:20:22 Yes

Anish Acharya 1:20:23 ... that I think actually-

Kevin Rose 1:20:23 It has to go there.

Anish Acharya 1:20:25 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:20:25 I think the lossy nature of it, and for people who don't know what we're talking about, like a lossless would be every word verbatim recorded in a, a diary somewhere that is, you know, one hack away from our personal conversation-

Anish Acharya 1:20:36 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:20:36 ... in the Uber being exposed to everyone.

Anish Acharya 1:20:38 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:20:38 That bothers me because, you know, as friendships and depth evolves, you're like, "Hey, this was a tough thing I was going through," or whatever it may be, and like the fact that that is somewhere in the cloud-

Anish Acharya 1:20:49 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:20:49 ... is just bad. I think it's bad for-

Anish Acharya 1:20:51 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:20:51 ... for all sorts of reasons. But the idea of lossy is interesting because you pick up broader themes.

Anish Acharya 1:20:58 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:20:59 And if you can pull emotional context in along for the ride-

Anish Acharya 1:21:02 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:21:02 ... where it says like, "Hey, we noticed that Anish was feeling down about this," and I'm like, "Oh, let me send him a little something to like cheer him up," because that was a great like call back to our conversation, you know?

Anish Acharya 1:21:12 Totally.

Kevin Rose 1:21:13 That side of it is fascinating because then I don't feel awkward having the conversation, especially if we can do that on-prem, on device.

Anish Acharya 1:21:20 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:21:21 Where you have a small model running on device. It doesn't pick up the fact that, you know, I said this one thing that would be hurtful out in a broader context.

Anish Acharya 1:21:30 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:21:30 But it is getting the emotional tone that is surfaced back in a sentence that cannot be connected directly to what I was saying.

Anish Acharya 1:21:36 Yes.

Kevin Rose 1:21:37 Love that idea.

Anish Acharya 1:21:38 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:21:38 I hope it goes there.

Anish Acharya 1:21:39 I think it will. I think this is the interplay between social dynamics and technology.

Kevin Rose 1:21:43 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:21:43 It's going to go there.

Kevin Rose 1:21:44 Uh, the Limitless device, I had it, and I, you know, I'm... My dream feature-

Anish Acharya 1:21:50 Mm-hmm

Kevin Rose 1:21:50 ... is they have a little LED on the outside.

Anish Acharya 1:21:52 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:21:53 And there has been any number of times when I had it on, and people were like, "Turn that thing off."

Anish Acharya 1:21:57 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:21:57 And fine, that's fair, right? Turn it off, whatever. I want a mode where if it's red, it's doing verbatim recording, because there are meetings where I want that to happen.

Anish Acharya 1:22:08 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:22:08 Right? If it's green, it's recording, but it's theme-based.

Anish Acharya 1:22:12 Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rose 1:22:12 So now I can have that personal, intimate conversation. I know it's happening on device. I'll never... Those, you know, more intimate words will never be leaked online.

Anish Acharya 1:22:20 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:22:20 But then I know where I stand with you.

Anish Acharya 1:22:22 Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:22:22 Right? Because... And I think that's so important to know like, oh, what we're having is gonna remain largely confidential. It might pick up some themes, but it's never gonna be damning to me.

Anish Acharya 1:22:31 That's so interesting. I mean, a- and that's exactly it, right? A visual cue-

Kevin Rose 1:22:35 Right, has to be a visual cue

Anish Acharya 1:22:36 ... differential model.

Kevin Rose 1:22:36 Yes.

Anish Acharya 1:22:36 You know, and that's not a technology problem. That's a product design problem.

Kevin Rose 1:22:39 Right.

Anish Acharya 1:22:40 I think we're gonna solve it.

Kevin Rose 1:22:41 Yeah. Well, that's exciting.

Anish Acharya 1:22:42 Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:22:43 Um, 'cause I certainly believe that especially with our brains as we get older, having that additional, you know, being able to jump back in context-

Anish Acharya 1:22:49 Yeah

Kevin Rose 1:22:49 ... and finding some of the information. Although I did use it, did I tell you I used it with Dario one time where she told me she had said something, and I pulled up the transcript?

Anish Acharya 1:22:55 [laughs] Oh, no.

Kevin Rose 1:22:56 Dude, I kinda... I keep shooting myself in the foot.

Anish Acharya 1:22:58 That's a no-win, dude. That is a no-win scenario.

Kevin Rose 1:22:59 It's no-win 'cause you- you can pull it up and you paste it, and it's the last time you wear the device.

Anish Acharya 1:23:02 You- you... There is no win.

Kevin Rose 1:23:03 [laughs]

Anish Acharya 1:23:03 That's when you just go limp and take the pain. [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:23:05 Well, brother, this has been great. It is so great to have you. Anything else that you wanted to touch on before we wrap things up?

Anish Acharya 1:23:10 No, I absolutely had a blast. Let's keep talking.

Kevin Rose 1:23:13 Yeah, let's keep doing this.

Anish Acharya 1:23:14 Do it again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rose 1:23:14 It's good to get together every so often, hash out these things, talk about the future. Um, what, what's, uh... Where can people find you online socially?

Anish Acharya 1:23:23 I'm at, um, on Twitter @illscience. Um, we can talk about that another time, the genesis of that name.

Kevin Rose 1:23:29 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:23:29 Um, and you can always get me at anish@a16z.

Kevin Rose 1:23:32 Awesome.

Anish Acharya 1:23:32 Um, so hit me. I wanna know what you're working on. You know, send me things that you actually have made. That's always the best way to engage with us.

Kevin Rose 1:23:39 Best way by far.

Anish Acharya 1:23:40 Um, but generally I'm just... I'm excited to be out there and, and thrilled to be here with you, Kev. Thank you.

Kevin Rose 1:23:44 Awesome. Yeah, @kevinrose on Twitter, X. I was... still get confused-

Anish Acharya 1:23:48 [laughs]

Kevin Rose 1:23:48 ... 'cause they call it Twitter. On X, and, uh, yeah. Awesome. Let's do this again soon.

Anish Acharya 1:23:52 Thanks for a fun sesh.

Kevin Rose 1:23:53 Yeah.

Anish Acharya 1:23:54 All right, man. [outro music]