Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code

22:20And that to me is enough signal to say, okay, we will probably turn over a card at some point that is the magic card that is going to get us that home run or that massive product, right? So I value that almost above all else. Even if the idea isn't the one where I think is going to hit scale, if you have a founder that builds through that framework of, okay, I'm not going to just do this just because everyone else has, or I'm not just going to take the path of least resistance and kind of build a better slack or whatever it may be. Like, to me, that is very rare to find. 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 going to work, that I'd like to back, you know?

23:06That's super interesting because one of our observations is that it's just really hard to predict consumer seed. Yes. And we haven't done a ton of it for that reason. In fact, our stated sort of approach is weird and working. 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. Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. Right. Weird and working. Like I look for weird first. Yeah. 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.

23:37And then, but they still have the weird because that's in their DNA. Yeah. So they'll build the next weird and working, right? And that's what you want because they're going to need several shots on goal. And as long as you can't manufacture the weird, the weird is internal. Yeah. So weird is I just see the world in a different way. And that is the founder that is going to win. Why? Why is weird important? Because in a world where you need attention, well, we've talked about this socially in terms of what draws you in and what draws people into consumer products. Consumer is a finicky category because after a certain amount of time, what was weird and working ends up being boring and stale, right?

24:25It's the reason why, you know, Dig 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, will churn out and become old and stale. And so if you want to find the next thing and consumer is often you play with something and the aha moment is, oh, I hadn't thought of that or I didn't feel this. I've never felt this way before. I'll never forget when, you know, I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day. And the thesis for me was, it was very simple for me to see because we'd had bi-directional relationships for the longest time.

25:07And what I mean by that is the MySpaces and all the social platforms that had come before it had this idea of friendship. And it was, okay, in order for me to get invited into your world, I would friend you. You would get a request and be like, oh, Kevin friended me, then you would have the permit. You would grant me the permission to see what you were up to. Right. And the beautiful thing about what Jack and Ev did and Biz over there is they said, okay, we're going to 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.

25:44And it was that one simple little product tweak that said, okay, it's no longer about bi-directional communication. It's about this idea of broadcast to all, right? And when you see something like that, it unlocks not only a massive product opportunity, a market opportunity, because that's the way that, you know, 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 think that is the weird thing. It seemed odd at the time. Wasn't it weird? I was going to ask, yeah. It was weird. It was like, oh, because I remember signing up for Twitter for the first time and just being like, okay, well, where, what do we do here?

26:22And they have this thing called following. And I'm like, what is the following thing? You know that? Right. And it sounds so obvious now. Yes. But it's weird at the time. And I think that is going to be, that's so important for a consumer because what does seem weird at the time eventually becomes mainstream and then everyone just assumes that that was always the case, right? Yes. And that's what I'm looking for is that weird thing that will eventually become so mainstream that we'll assume that that was always a primitive that existed forever. When in reality, it was like new and novel at that time.

26:56I love that. Does that make sense at all? It makes perfect sense. It's very, very interesting. You know, it's also that founders have to push themselves to the edge of being embarrassed. Yes. Potentially. Yes. To design genuine new things. Otherwise, it's very derivative. You know, it just has to be. And that is what all the X for Y companies typically are. Right. Exactly. When you and I were at GV and we did the Uber investment, how many startups did we say, look, I'm the Uber for this? And you're like, oh, God, another one, right? Right. And then, yes, there are the DoorDashes and some of the others that are built on the same kind of similar primitives, but it's nothing like, it was so weird to get into the back of somebody's car.

27:33Do you know how odd that was? I remember hailing an Uber and being like, okay, someone is pulling up at my house and I'm going to get in the backseat of someone I do not know. every day when we took the ride over here we didn't even bat an eye we didn't even look at the guy and be like are we safe here? it was just a given but it was so awkward at the time so this is what I love about that era we talk about that era as a part of history and we say oh it was early mobile and it was remote control for the world and software's eating the world we have all these 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 they had all been raised being told two things Never get into a stranger's car.

28:13Never sleep on a stranger's couch. Yes, exactly. And then all of a sudden you started doing it and guess what? The strangers are kind of pleasant. Yeah. 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. That was a big change in consumer behavior. Yeah. And that's so exciting because I think we're going to see more and more of that. One of the things that I've done, I'll just be a little bit vulnerable and transparent because that's what's fun about podcasting. 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 chat GVT and be like, am I right here?

28:48What's going on? You know? And I, I, I, but I call and I say, use the framework of Terry Real. I use some of these like professional therapists and say, help me analyze this. The mistake I make is I paste that back into the conversation. But the point being is that's weird, awkward. She didn't, she didn't like it. She's like, Hey, this isn't cool. You're going to this, like you're, you're, she calls it of my bot, you're chatting with your bot about our relationship, blah, blah, blah. 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.

29:19Help me figure out, am I in the wrong here? What am I doing? Blah, blah, blah. I see a world where the bot is in the room with both of us 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 person thing that is sitting there and evaluating this in real time. Is that weird and awkward right now? Absolutely. Yes. 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 healthy thing for our relationship?

29:55I think so. A hundred percent. 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. So there's all this stuff that can just be in the oxygen around us. 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 thing for every school in America to have.

30:27And the way we're going to 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 and let parents and teachers know what's going on. This idea of always on recording, you and I have had a debate about. Do we want to get to the multimodal thing real quick though before we go on there? We should. I also want to get, since we were talking about internet history, I want to get your take, your story that you've told me, I think privately about the dig button, the like button.

30:55Oh, geez. There's a story there. Yeah, we can talk. Where do you want to begin? You want me to talk about that real quick? Let's go into history and tell me, the dig button was a very new and interesting idea. Social news talked about, I think we're sort of in a safe place 20 years later. Yeah. Talk about how it influenced the like button. So how did the like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time? 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.

31:29It used to be a world that we'd have to refresh the page to see anything. 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. And so I had seen 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, I think this is cool.

32:03Let me just tap on it and show my vote of interest on something. And so when Dig launched in late 2004, it was the first time that I had ever seen, just because the Ajax had just been out for a couple months, that anyone had voted on content. And obviously I didn't invent voting, but no one had done it on the web. 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 wisely, just by luck, I just happened to be in contact with enough people to where they were like, hey, you should go out and file a patent on this.

32:37And so I went and filed a patent on it, not because I wanted to enforce our 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 have 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, and Mark and I shared a common investor in Greylock. Um, and we just had a lot of overlapping friends and he was like, Hey, like actually it was David Z from Greylock that was like, Hey, you should meet Mark.

33:16You guys should hang. And so we went out and grabbed dinner. And we hung out a couple of times. We had dinner a couple of times and he came to my office. He drove up and came to the dig office. And I'll never forget because he came into the office and he was so young at the time. And so was I. No gray hair back then. He was sitting on the ground and just like wouldn't sit in a chair. He's like sitting on the ground. We were just talking about what it meant, 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 eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume.

33:50And 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, 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 that was kind of like a big part of what they pushed as a similar thing, like a social signal, the feedback and the algorithm to give you better content. They obviously hit a scale. I mean, we were at the point serving billions of dig buttons per month because we had them integrated into you could actually put a widget in your site back in the day and there used to be dig buttons all over the internet.

34:24But, you know, it was cool. I was never offended by that. I was like, oh, that's awesome. He made it his own, called it like, and 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 an interview that credited Dig for like being a place where they had seen that first, which I thought was really nice, you know? And it's strange because even though Dig, you know, went out of business and failed for that version of the site, when all was said and done, the asset of Dig sold for pennies on the dollar wasn't really worth a whole lot.

34:59But the patents ended up being worth millions of dollars that LinkedIn bought them from us. So LinkedIn bought the most, the thing at the end of the day was the defensibility and patents around the actual social dig button. Wow. Which LinkedIn ended up buying. But yeah, it was a really wild time to sit there and come up with that idea. 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 that actually even bigger than, well, not bigger than dig button, but different than dig button, but equal was I had created with Daniel Burka.

35:35we were sitting there and we were designing the comment system. And then we were like, okay, well, we should apply digging and burying to comments because that makes sense. Like people should be able to vote up and down comments. Never been done before. 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 kind of 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 was hard-coded, after five down votes, it would shrink into a single line.

36:06So you'd just see like who submitted, but you would see we actually color coded it. So it kind of looked like it was like disabled or, you know, a way. 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 down votes or something. 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. Why would it be negative several hundred? We looked at it, couldn't find a bug, couldn't find a bug. And then we realized what had happened. We talked to some users. They're like, they wanted to see the train wreck.

36:40So they exposed the comment. We're like, oh yeah, that guy's an asshole. And then they downvoted it another time. Wow. Because at that time they were like, why are people, that person must have said something crazy. Let's take a look. Oh yeah, 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 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 going to look at that. You know, I always try to have this like rosy glasses on.

37:14I'm like, oh, people just see this as being like a negative thing and move on. But they wanted to see the carnage. I mean, 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 dig button for all of society? We'll never know, but I think it's certainly something. Also love the ethos of you not feeling offended by them being inspired by it, right? Yeah, listen, I have nothing, but I have a lot of respect for Mark and what he's created.

37:46You know, I don't agree with his direction around classes and AR, VR. I never have. I've been anti-AR, VR for years. 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 the impact it has on those around you. That's another topic that we can get into. But I think he's obviously a brilliant man. And it was really fun to have those moments where I'll be able to tell my kids I was in those dinners. I was having these deep product, like sparring around some of the product thinking of what he was building.

38:22And it's very special to be, just even have a seat at that table. not, you know, I feel very lucky 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 Reid Hoffman and just like all the people that I've been able to kind of brainstorm with over the years and sit 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. But you must feel this way with Mark and Ben, like when you get to sit with them.

39:01Mark and Ben were involved in the early dig and helping me through that stuff. And gosh, just sit down with Ben and listen to his stable hand, his sage wisdom. Yes. Like you just learn so much from that dude. Like it's insane. For sure. I mean, there's a sense of seriousness and purposefulness. I mean, also some playfulness, but it's amazing because if you think of the history of when you were involved in tech, Like, you know, we were just weirdos in Silicon Valley 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 and society.

39:36And I don't know that anyone who was building it at the time appreciated that. No, none of us had any idea. It's funny when they, when you hear these stories about the bad sides of social media and what, you know, these platforms they've given the microphone to certain voices and how much, you know, hate and 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 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 going to be the case.

40:09It was not, nothing about this was intentional. It was like, what does this unlock? And it turns out the law unlocks both the good and the bad. 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 either played football or you didn't. And if you didn't, everybody knew what the sort of social hierarchy was. And when I was growing up, they said, everybody's cool in college. Why? Because you'd find your, you know, your sense of, your community of weirdos.

40:40Yeah. But the beauty of the internet now is that you find those weirdos online at any age. So I think that there's acceptance of people's own individuality that didn't exist 20 or 30 years ago. And sure, there's some edges on the internet, but I think the sort of benefit to humanity of people finding their like-minded people early is really significant. And I think the power of micro-communities is only going to 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.

41:14You just need to find the people that are into it, right? And so if you're into Japanese woodworking, if you can find 5 ,000 other people that are also into that, that is a very powerful network, right? Yes. And so 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 launched and sold companies. What are you doing these days? What's your outlook for how products are being built? How's that evolved? And how does that play into your investments as well? Because in some sense, we're entering into a really weird era. 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.

41:56It's deputizing a wider base of people to actually roll out products. It's, I think it's incredible. So 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? 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 want to do. I think there's a set of people or a part of us that will be creative and a part of us that'll want to 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.

42:31Does it worry you that entrepreneurs can go and build a startup, launch it, get product market fit and not have to raise venture? No, it doesn't worry me. I think that there are businesses that will be built by, you know, ever need venture capital? Maybe not. And that's okay. Like we have 1%, 0.1 % 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 nineties, there's this big movement of digital small business owners, right? You can sell shareware online.

43:04You can 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 is 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 going to see this like renaissance of people creating million dollar run rate businesses as individuals.

43:33And that's awesome. Do you think there'll be fatigue around subscriptions? Because, you know, one of the things that I feel personally, maybe more so on the Substack level, but there's like$5 everywhere, right? And if we see micro subscriptions across the board, you're going to be like, okay, wait a second. I wake up to several hundred dollars per month based on all these tiny micro subscriptions. Is that a concern? It's a good question. I mean, we've talked about micropayments for 30 years. It feels like it's never really worked. But maybe it'll work this time. So that feels like part of it. 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.

44:11So 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 parts of my life that are addressed by software are so much more significant. I think we'll be happy to pay them. If you're an entrepreneur or anyone actually, because anyone can do this these days and they say, hey, I want to play, I want to go, I want to build. What do you see? What are the tools that people are using out there? What are you personally using to build?

44:40What does your current stack look like? Yeah, and I'd love to hear yours as well. So I'll tell you my sort of productivity stack, my coding stack, my creative stack. 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. Do you use it for search? Because that does replace your search with Perplexity. I do use it for search where I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

45:09I find for navigation queries, Google is still better. 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? Which was Google search for 20 years. Now maybe it's language models. I use Notion Notes a lot to actually capture meeting notes. I think that's very useful. I love deep research. Same. I started using that recently, by the way, Notion Notes. I was using Granola for a long time. I think it's a great product. Great product. So I'm torn because Granola is freaking awesome. Yes. But Notion Notes are built right in.

45:39And it's like it automatically launches and I'm like, well, then all my notes are in Notion, which is kind of nice. You know, if you're in the Notion ecosystem, I think it makes a lot of sense. If you're not, Granola is a fantastic product. Yeah. But I'm a fan of both. And I just love the capability, like not having to handwrite notes. Right. Deep research is cool. I'm actually a big fan of the Grok deep research feature because it can search X. It's got a very up to date index of X. Tell people how you use it, because I thought this was very interesting around the trend side. Yeah, I mean, even if you have a query like, hey, what were the top AI memes of the last week?

46:10You know, if you go to ChatGPT or Anthropic, the models just aren't trained past a certain date. 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 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. Yeah, I mean, it's more of that real-time nature of what's unfolding. So do you have set queries that you go to to kind of keep up with what was breaking on X?

46:42I mean, I'm always interested in what's breaking culturally, and that's what's breaking technically. So like the memes are the best proxy for culture. 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 Dev Day with AppsKit, with AgentKit and the Apps SDK. Gemini 3, I think, is coming next week. Sora 2 with the Sora 2 app. Like that's two weeks. I know. It is an embarrassment of riches. It's awesome. As an 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.

47:18Like how does Andreessen handle this internally? When you think about, so on your consumer team, how many people are there there? Yeah. Record investors are probably six. With associates and everything. Okay, so six people. What's the process to surface something to you that's interesting? Where are they looking for signal? Yeah. How are they keeping, how, like, for example, let's just say this agent builder on, I played with it for the first time yesterday. That's going to take an hour of your time if you're really going to go deep on it. With something coming out every two to three days or once a week, 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?

48:00Yeah. We just work our asses off. We really do. Like we commit to trying every product. 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 going to sit, I'm going to grab 20 minutes of your time because I want to bring you up to speed on something. Well, it's interesting, 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. You know, or my partner Brian, who looks at a lot of things in social, like anytime there's a weird working new social product, He's there.

48:32Olivia does that for us around productivity and 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. I've just tried them all. So we all commit ourselves to sort of sub areas and we try to cover them very thoroughly. But look, we just hold ourselves to a really high bar of trying everything because our like belief is you cannot have an opinion until you've actually tried the product. 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?

49:06Like how does that, how do you make sure that knowledge gets transferred broadly within the fund and at the GP level? 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 Acts, 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 because as a founder on the outside, I always assumed that VCs knew all these secret things that they don't tell us. And maybe that was even true 10 years ago.

49:36But 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 a great signal for founders. Now, the signal is always a lagging indicator. So for founders to develop a weird, like definitionally, no one's talking about it. But it's great to know that there really aren't that many secrets. It's sort of being published out there. Well, on the coding tool 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 want to start playing, what do you go to on the coding side?

50:07Man, I'd love to hear your stack as well. 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 cost of creating software is collapsing. We have 1 % of the software we need in the world. We're going to build the other 99%. Why do you say that? Dude, because there are so many parts of the world where it wasn't, it's sort of the ROI didn't make sense to create specialized software, right? And so many parts of our lives, by the way, some of those parts of our lives may not be serious.

50:39Like my wife is working on a manifestation app for her and her five friends. Right. Five years ago. I mean, what are you going to do? Go raise venture capital? Is she going to hire an engineer? And now in her free time, she's been using base 44, 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 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.

51:09It's so well said because there's so many times if you think what it would take, like if I want to create an app that does something very niche to me and my friend group. Yes. Five years ago, if someone came to me and said, hey, Kevin, you know, you get these friends all the time. They're like, I got an app idea. I got an app idea. 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. I guess I'm good. Yeah. But now that's no longer the conversation. It's like, oh, here, go play with, you know, whatever, Bolt or you name it, like, you know, Lovable.

51:45and you can deploy this in a day, you know? And that was tough. Even six months ago, it was pretty hard to actually, these services existed. And I was using, you know, Replit or Bolt or whatever. But I was like, ah, it's just not quite there yet. Yes. But now, even the last few weeks, I would say that, you know, with Sonic 4.5 and, you know, Gemini 3 coming, we're getting there to where it's no longer, it used to be, I would spend, going to V0, I'd spend 20 % of my time kind of putting together the scaffolding. And then I would connect to the database and a lot of that was then bug squashing, which was another huge piece of it.

52:26And you'd be like, oh God, still the vast majority of my time is bug squashing. That window is collapsing. It used to be the bulk of the work was just that final 10%. And now that is kind of going away. Tell me about your set, Kevin, because we were together last weekend. I saw the way you were using vZero. It was really, really interesting. Talk a bit about it. Yeah, I think with vZero, this is a product that was largely built to quickly put together 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. I liked it because I could start with a piece of paper.

53:06I 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? It puts together, you know, because it is built in the Vercel ecosystem, it's largely going to build components for Next.js, 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. And so Cursor, for me, being someone that slants more technical, is a better solution because I like to be in the nuts and bolts of how things are being built.

53:38I 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. 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. There are certainly easier ways to do this if you're non-technical. You can go the lovable route, the Bolt, the Replet. There's, you know, probably insert, you know, five or 10 others that are playing in this space.

54:13and that's kind of 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-diagnose this and you're like, why isn't my authentication working for X and you just keep hitting the same model over and over again. And the nice thing about the way the cursor functions is you can install something, you can have multiple models running. One, I will have one model on one side, which is the cursor built in chat, which I'll, you know, tightest on it for five.

54:49And then on the left-hand side, I can have codecs from chat GPT. And if I run into a problem, I then take that problem over to the other side, have them also work on it. And if I put them against each other, you can typically get to a solution pretty quickly. And so I will then kind of break through those walls and march towards something that's actually ready to deploy to production. So I love that point. Talk a bit about how you do the design exploration in V0 of individual components. Yeah. So one of the things that I always like is a good amount of visual kind of flair and touch on things.

55:22And you saw a thing that last night when you came over to my house and we were like showing each other the vibe coding progress. One of the things 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 want to figure out how to select an object and bring it into chat in a very fluid way. And I think, at least in consumer internet, one of my spidey senses that I love is new primitives for how things are going to flow in and out of conversation. And you have to come up, one of the things that you have to figure out is that emotional vibe of does this feel right?

56:03Does 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 want to figure out a way, the best way to collapse and quickly jump in and out of a story. And I'll take that over to V0, give it a screenshot and say, come up with one way. And it'll create something and I'll be like, okay, kind of like this. I'll tweak it a little bit, you know, 10 other times. So I've gone through a bunch of iterations.

56:33I'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 and put them all on a single page and it's turning turning turning turning three four minutes later you have 20 different ways now i click down oh that was a weird interaction go down the next one oh that i like how that kind of zoomed this way and brought it off to the side whoa that would know that's not going to work and you just keep going down and you're like well i like number three and number eight yes give me 10 different ways to do number three and 10 different ways to do number eight.

57:06Yes. And now you're getting deeper and deeper and you, you, you take a little from here, bringing it like, I like the zoom on number three, but I really like the fade on number eight. And this is the conversation you have with the LLM. Yes. And then by the end of the day, you're left with something that is truly unique and different. Yes. And it is through telling the AI to take that idea and give you 20 different versions of it. Yeah. Then you just take that little freaking component and drop it in the next JS and you're off to the races. See, what I love about one, that's such a fascinating workflow, but also you're not thinking about ROI.

57:38You're not thinking about, oh, let me talk to the designer and ask them to come up with 20 variants. That sounds like a lot of work. I better prioritize. You're instead just able to go infinitely deep on something seemingly trivial and have this level of kind of polish and craftsmanship, which just wasn't justified five years ago. That's where we're going with software. Well, what's funny is 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 build. And one of the hard things I wanted to do is I just wanted it to kind of explode and kind of fade out.

58:08And I came up with this way to kind of make it do it at an angle and it's all vector. So it just kind of 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 built. because I think it really gives something, a depth to the product that you can't find anywhere else. Yes. And so I'm always looking for that type of thing. So cool. Very cool. So how are you using it? I've been using a lot of the same products that you've been using.

58:42So 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. Why Base44? Why that one? I think Base44 is an interesting company. So it's a one-man company that was acquired by Wix for$80 million. 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 Supabase is and you don't want to know. 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.

59:17It's like you want to do some complex data processing thing, like this is not the platform for you. You want to do, I have a fun little like Instagram clone for cats called Catstagram for my kids and for me. And it's super fun. It's super easy to build. Base 44 one-shotted it. I deployed it. I bought a URL for it. It works. We can cut this out later, by the way. It's a little embarrassing, but it's fine. Yeah. Dude, it's great. So it's just like, things just work, even though the things that you can do are probably less ambitious. Yeah. So I think there's this sort of spectrum of like how ambitious is it versus how batteries included is it?

59:55Yes. And for simple things, fully batteries included is awesome. And then for really ambitious things, I use Cursor, I use GPT-5 Codex, both the model as well as the CLI. I use Sonic 4.5. All of these products are sort of the things you need to use to be ambitious. Convex was something that you turned me on to, which I think is quite cool. Can you speak to why you chose that database? I mean, I'm speaking sort of outside of my specialization area, but it's a Series A that my partner Martine led. it's a real-time database so it's great for applications like chat and how fast you got chat up and running with Vibecode 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 and you had it like up and running in minutes I mean it's just the nature of the product I believe 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.

1:00:52It's just very, very clean. So look, I think this is the magic of Vibe coding. You can explore all of these things. You don't have to become an expert in Convex. You don't have to become an expert in TypeScript. You can just try it. It's so cool. I love it. What else is in your stack? I know we kind of cut off a little bit there. You had said that Notion and, you know, I'm assuming you're using those. Yeah, what else? Yeah, so 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.

1:01:24But 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 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. I mean, perhaps something more important than that. Is there anything cool there on the music front? I mean, I've played around with a couple of them, but I haven't seen anything that has been transformational. So Text-A-Song is where all this started with Udeo and Suno a year ago. Text-A-Song is cool.

1:01:55And I think it's an important part of the sort of consumer use case. But you kind of want to go deeper and be able to refine it further. Yes. And now we're seeing all the products. You know, I played with one called Mozart this week. Eleven Labs 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. And it's really, really inspiring. I've also been making remixes of music videos. So I did one called Impossible Tiny Desk, which was Notorious B.I.G. doing the NPR Tiny Desk series.

1:02:27Oh, that's amazing. I used Hydra for it. I used DMUX 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 I did a little remix of Nirvana Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I generated all the video in VO3. it's so satisfying. And you know how many people saw it? 10. But it doesn't matter because I felt fulfilled making it. I saw that there was a video that went around probably two or three months ago where someone, a music producer and it was a couple of people they went from prompt to album artwork to publish song like on Spotify like in like a few hours.

1:03:07And they made a completely fake person. The song sounded pretty awesome. Yeah. And it was, God, I have to imagine there is a massive opportunity here to unlock creativity if they get the right tool, you know? Yeah. And 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. Can you change X? And it should be able to go in and with a scalpel, like fix that song and kind of hone it to your own personal taste via your prompt. Is that where you see things going? I do. And I'm very, I'm very, there's, I think a lot of the conversation, unfortunately, has been about slop, slop, slop.

1:03:43Yeah. But I think if you look at music, music is a sort of adaptive system that changes because of culture. 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. 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 going to make. like our lived experiences are what informs the next genre of music. And that's why I'm so bullish on it.

1:04:15Yeah. I don't know that AI would build brain rot if it just, my kids are so into that crap. I'm just like, oh my God, I don't know. No one should listen to this. I'm pro. You're pro brain rot? All right. 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 impact. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the corner, trend spotting. Okay, whatever. You start first. 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.

1:04:47So 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? I mean, please. Well, some of it is this idea of saying no to things that you don't think are going to have any traction. I did a lot of that. Like when everyone was going heavy in VR and AR, I kind of avoided that.

1:05:21It'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. You know, at the end of the day, I really like what Ryan Hoover did in creating the weekend fund because it was actually based on a Chris Dixon quote where he said, I'm paraphrasing, but what the geeks are playing on the weekends will become mainstream. And I thought that was a brilliant quote from Chris because he also is very prescient. He's so good at predicting the future and seeing things before anyone else.

1:05:56The only way to find this stuff is to have this inherent childlike drive that says, I must play. I must play. And 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 feels good to you, that feels like something that doesn't feel like work, like it does for me, then I think you will naturally be led into the next big thing. But it can't be a job. 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.

1:06:36God, 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? Okay, there was a TV show. And all it was, was it would just tell you for a half hour. And it's probably wrong like 99 % of the time because they talk about flying cars and shit. But they would just tell you where they think things are going. And they would try and predict the next 20 years out. And I was just enamored by that. I would sit there and be like, wow, we're gonna have flying cars. This is crazy. But it was always like every episode was just a different vertical of what the future could look like.

1:07:06And that has never left me. Like this idea of wanting to see what's about to happen and live at that edge of things. Even if I wasn't investing, if I decided to call it up and I'd never turn on another camera, I would be held up in a little room somewhere, 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, 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 hundred best albums of all time and meaning music albums of all time and not based on downloads, but cultural impact on their impact on other genres springing up to your point from that.

1:07:55And I'm going to have them duke it out. I'm going to put it against all the bigs. I'm going to select the most expensive option to do. I'll probably burn a half lake worth of water or whatever the hell is going to come. I'm joking, but it's pretty bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad. So they're going to go and they're going to give me a stack rank those and 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 albums at 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.

1:08:27Tell me where to pay attention to each of those tracks. Why? What riff to listen for that impacted somebody else or influenced someone else? And then I'm going to feed that into Eleven Labs and create a beautiful, relaxing, kind of like guided journey for that album. Then I'm going to tie it into the Spotify API 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 going to 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 and a whole the whole back end that's required to pull that off but that's that play at work in action right 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.

1:09:30I don't know where things are going. I will tell you that there are a couple of things I know to be true. One, I think engineering is over. I think we're going to be orchestrators of information, not engineers. 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, that is not a subjective thing. There is a way to do that at scale, efficiently, and with the end result that we're all looking for. AI will figure that out.

1:10:09You won't need a team of 10 engineers to figure that out. Those will be solved problems. So, you know, I think there are certain things like that that I look to and like, oh, the world just hasn't woken up to this yet. I mean, we all as technologists, we have, but I wouldn't go as a CS degree. I would not go into that right now. You know? So there's little bits and pieces like that. But then you think, okay, well, what has to happen 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 while I was on the Tim Ferriss show talking about when, you know, when NVIDIA was hitting their kind of$1 trillion market, I'm like, this is going to run because we're at the early innings of this.

1:10:50and talking about this stuff. And, you know, it's so funny, so many things on Tim's show because he asked me to make these predictions. And so when Ethereum first got off the ground, even before they launched, I was talking about on Tim's show because if you're playing, you'll just see it and it'll be right there in front of you. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I want to quibble with your point about a CS degree, but first I want to say that like so many good things in life are downstream of authentic curiosity. And I love that that's the way that you've done this, you know, because it's not some big brain, sort of galaxy mind predicting the future thing.

1:11:20It's just like, what gives me energy? That's right. Yeah, that's the whole thing is, I remember Michael Arrington way back in the day, I was 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, how are you good at picking these things? And I was like, I don't know. It's like kind of based on my gut and what I'm excited about. And he's like, dude, you got to have a better answer than that. Like, that's what he told me before we went on stage. I'm like, it's not a magical formula.

1:11:47It is like intuition more than anything else, especially at the early stage, especially when it's awkward. Because if it looks awkward, it's going to be contrarian. No one's going to want to do that weird thing. Like those are the hardest deals to do. But you know, it's funny, like I was talking to, I think it was Reed and David that were at Greylock back in the day and they said their best investments were the ones that were the most contentious internally. Because people don't see it. Not everyone sees it and that's okay. That's actually a positive signal because many people are like, that will never work.

1:12:16But guess what? But when it does, it changes the world. 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 authentic curiosity, you've done it a lot. And I think that's a real conscious thing you've done, which is unusual. But I've also lost a lot 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, 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.

1:13:03but you know what? He got to scratch every personal itch that he had and try everything. And he was at the buffet and tried it all. And a lot of it failed. Most of it failed. But that's okay because what are we doing on this earth if we're not trying crazy shit? Do you know what I mean? A hundred percent, dude. A hundred percent. So back to the thing that you said was you wanted to debate out. What was that? Well, I want to quibble about your point around CS degree because I actually think this is a really, really important point. 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.

1:13:38And unfortunately, I think this 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 especially kids that go to, you know, non-Ivy League schools decide not to do CS because CS is over. 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 going to do something that needs that skill set.

1:14:09Well, I will say, I think it's over. The reason I think it's over is because I would argue that creativity in the future is going to be more important than technical ability. And it's, we don't need to teach people SQL or no one needs to learn these things in school. Like what, I'm curious, let's crack that open a bit. What do you believe that a technical degree gives you that will be useful a decade from now? Well, look, I think one, it's just fluency, right? What is a distributed system? What does that mean? Will you need to know that? Perhaps, yeah. I think it's useful to understand that as a mental model for systems thinking, right?

1:14:47I 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 in design space? 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 fact, none of the things that we typically studied was a programming language, right? A lot of it was systems thinking. And I think the systems thinking is actually really important. Well, that's really interesting because I think that's different than a classic CS3.

1:15:20One of the things that I like about some of these, and they're largely kind of more on the vocational school side of things. when you hear about these programs and how they've evolved, it is like training you to become an entrepreneur, which is full stack, building it, designing it, coding it, shipping it. That depth of knowledge across the full stack, which impacts marketing, creativity, hiring, firing, that full suite. Yes. Essential. It will, of course, be very important in the future. I think that 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 and kind of be a little bit more holistic and overarching.

1:16:03Yeah. Because I don't think, 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, you will have plenty of everything to go solve those challenges, right? 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 discussed, which is I think he typically has technical people in every role. Right. Marketing, comms, you know, you name it, there's a technical person there.

1:16:32So I really do think there's something in the training that sets you up to be successful in a lot of vocations, which is totally distinct from programming. Yeah. What I look for in a founder is someone that is kind of multidisciplined in some way, because if you're too technical, then you don't understand. Like I met a founder yesterday that is building a device that can kind of listen to everything, another one of these types of devices. And the kind of angle of what they were going after missed out on a lot of the social side of it, like what it means to be listened to, the invasion of privacy and how to potentially sidestep that.

1:17:11They were all technical, all device focused. And I feel like the future, you have to have that kind of full suite. You know, it's not just any one discipline. It's probably going to be a handful of them. The orchestrator role, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 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, 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 were 6 million iPhones in distribution, right?

1:17:45Not a lot. Today, ChatGPT has 800 million actives, right? 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. Like that was the most ambitious thing anyone could think of would happen with mobile. And of course, much more ambitious things happened. But one of the big predictions around location was, wow, people don't want to share their location. It's an invasion of privacy. like there was a lot of certainty amongst the pundits about that.

1:18:18Fast 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 can't speak specifically to what's going to happen around, you know, being transcribed, but I do think ignoring the social conventions can be a really good instinct for founders. Yeah, I worry that, I worry about this trend of always recording and I just feel like it, do you believe that this is going to be ubiquitous? Like, do you feel like we're always going to be recorded?

1:18:54Like 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's always on. 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.

1:19:30Right, right. And in SF, like everyone's recording. So it's just a moment of transition where society is not caught up with technology. But I do think we're going more in that direction than less. Yeah, that's going to be a hard one to overcome. I'm telling you, I've gotten, well, certainly on the personal side, if you wear one of those devices, it's always recording with a partner, it's going to fly. 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 just, but also I have to imagine, at least for me, I enjoy the rawness of an unrecorded conversation because you will push your toe and say things that are probably more real that I would rather have that conversation happen than something that is just like, oh, let me reference my notes and make sure that I got that right.

1:20:15You know? 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 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 you can take with the ideas. Yes. That I think actually - It has to go there. 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 diary somewhere that is, you know, one hack away from our personal conversation and the Uber being exposed to everyone.

1:20:58That 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 is just bad. I think it's bad for all sorts of reasons. But the idea of lossy is interesting because you pick up broader themes. And if you can pull emotional context along for the ride, where he says like, hey, we noticed that Anish was feeling down about this. I'm like, oh, let me send him a little something to like cheer him up because that was a great like callback to our conversation, you know?

1:21:33That 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. Yes. We 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, but it is getting the emotional tone that is surfaced back in a sentence that cannot be connected directly to what I was saying. Yes. Love that idea. Yeah. I hope it goes there. I think it will. I think this is the interplay between social dynamics and technology. It's going to go there. The Limitless device, I had it.

1:22:06And, you know, my dream feature is they have a little LED on the outside. And there has been any number of times when I had it on and people were like, turn that thing off. 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, right? If it's green, it's recording, but it's theme based. 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. But then I know where I stand with you, right?

1:22:43Because I think that's so important to know like, oh, what we're having is going to remain largely confidential. It might pick up some themes, but it's never going to be damning to me. That's so interesting. I mean, and that's exactly it, right? A visual cue. Right, has to be visual cue. Different mental model. Yes. And that's not a technology problem. That's a product design problem. Right. I think we're going to solve it. Yeah, well, that's exciting. Yeah. Because I certainly believe that, especially with our brains as we get older, having that additional, you know, being able to jump back in context and finding some of the information.

1:23:10Although I did use it, I used it with Dario one time where she told me she had said something and I pulled up the transcript. Oh, no. I keep shooting myself in the foot. That is a no-win scenario. There's no-win because you pull it up and you paste it and that's the last time you wear the device. There is no-win. That's when you just go limp and take the pain. Well, brother, this has been great. It is so great to have you. Anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap things up? No, I absolutely had a blast. Let's keep talking. Yeah, let's keep doing this. It's good to get together every so often, hash out these things, talk about the future.

1:23:40Where can people find you online socially? I'm on Twitter at IllScience. We can talk about that another time, the genesis of that name. And you can always get me at Anishad A16Z. Awesome. So hit me. I want to 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. Best way, by far. But generally, I'm just, I'm excited to be out there and thrilled to be here with you, Kev. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah, at Kevin Rose on Twitter, X. I still get confused when I call it Twitter. On X. And yeah, awesome. Let's do this again soon. Thanks for the fun session.

1:24:13Yeah. All right, man. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

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1:25:14Thank you.