The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:30:46 · Harry Stebbings, Harrison Chase
[00:30:46] S1: in With respect, is that not quite obvious? [00:30:48] S0: I think the fact that memory will have an impact is quite obvious, and that's why you see so many people interested in it and have... Having it be interested in it for for the past few years. I still think it's non obvious what the answer is. I still think it's incredibly non obvious what the answer is. I don't think anyone knows what the answer for memory is. [00:31:03] S1: Why did you kill the commercial solution for it, given the obviousness of it and the clear need for it in in almost everything? [00:31:11] S0: We killed it because we didn't find product market fit. Why didn't we find product market fit? I think we actually tried to be too general. I think memory so early that I think a lot of the solutions that you wanna build are actually very, like, domain or agent specific. [00:31:23] S1: And so you would build vertically specific memory solutions? What would you do differently?
00:31:23 · Harry Stebbings, Harrison Chase
[00:31:23] S1: And so you would build vertically specific memory solutions? What would you do differently? [00:31:28] S0: So, again, going back to what the hard part of memory is, I think the hard part of memory is that process for learning from facts about what to remember and that agent that that that does that remembering. As I said, I'm I'm massively bullish in kind of, like, vertical agents. I think having those agents be good at learning things specific to their domain is is a key part of of that. And so I do think these kind of like learning agents, at least to start, probably have to be domain specific. And I don't know if there's like a general... Like, what what does the what does the harness for these learning agents look like? It probably looks pretty similar to a lot of the harnesses we have now. It probably looks pretty... We build deep agents. Deep agents is an agent harness. Probably looks similar to that, and, oh, I'm running the loop. But it's got specific instructions and specific tools, and maybe there's some specific sub agents that are really good at navigating existing memory structures or or distilling kind of like facts. And so I think you'll have you'll have agents for memory things. I just think they'll be domain specific. [00:32:20] S1: Do you think you will have vertical agents for consumer applications? I understand, and I agree with you when you look at finance, accounting, sales, marketing, legal. You mentioned muse and instinct. They would be horizontal agents. Do you think we'll have vertical consumer agents?
00:32:20 · Harry Stebbings, Harrison Chase
[00:32:20] S1: Do you think you will have vertical agents for consumer applications? I understand, and I agree with you when you look at finance, accounting, sales, marketing, legal. You mentioned muse and instinct. They would be horizontal agents. Do you think we'll have vertical consumer agents? [00:32:35] S0: I think my take on the consumer space is that you'll both. You'll have both horizontal and vertical agents, and the horizontal agents will interact with the vertical agents. [00:32:43] S1: Where does it make sense to have a vertical agent versus not?
00:32:43 · Harry Stebbings, Harrison Chase
[00:32:43] S1: Where does it make sense to have a vertical agent versus not? [00:32:46] S0: I think for most apps, it probably makes sense to have a vertical agent. And I think the reason that having vertical agents makes sense at all is is probably twofold, maybe more, but two that jump to mind. One, a lot of these apps have knowledge about you and can learn things about how you interact with that app better than a general horizontal agent could. So back to the point about domain specificity, how how you interact with music for, say, like Spotify is very different than how you might interact with Strava. And so those apps are actually probably best at learning things about you. And I think the best way to expose those learnings is probably through an agent. The other thing is a lot of these apps have a ton of APIs. And so you could say, hey, Spotify, don't build an agent. Just expose a bunch of APIs. I actually think it's better for... It's a better experience if there is an agent that kind of like wraps those APIs and exposes a single or maybe multiple, but like probably a single, like, natural language interface for a horizontal agent to interact with that vertical agent.
00:33:43 · Harry Stebbings, Harrison Chase
[00:33:43] S1: How does the infrastructure change when agents are the fundamental interface with sites? And what I mean by that is, I wanted tickets to a specific concert, and I said check every five minutes and buy any seat that comes available, da da da da. And for three days, it checked every single five minutes. The volume of queries was a thousand times what it would have been with humans. How does the infrastructure require change in a world of interaction or human interaction? [00:34:13] S0: When agents are interacting, it makes the number of requests go way up. I think I think you saw a story about how... I think it was Resi that blocked a user's account because they were using Instinct to to pull it, I don't know how frequently, but pretty frequently. And so I think there's just way more strain on the infrastructure. How how does that percolate down to lower layers? I I don't know if I have an opinion on that yet. I think you have to build systems that can be much more bursty, that can scale way way broader. I don't I don't know if I have more specifics on Do you [00:34:40] S1: think providers will allow agent usage or not? [00:34:44] S0: I think the future is providers exposing their own agent and having people either interact with that agent or having people's horizontal agents interact with that agent. [00:34:53] S1: So my horizontal agents, sorry, just to understand this, would interact with Resy's vertical agent. [00:34:59] S0: I think that's exactly right.
00:34:59 · Harrison Chase, Harry Stebbings
[00:34:59] S0: I think that's exactly right. [00:35:00] S1: Why would that work? Because that still doesn't solve the two core problems of advertising for a lot of these businesses. They lose their ads model and then upsell. They lose the, like, anything else you might like also on the side. You get reduced basket size. Why why would agent to agent work? [00:35:14] S0: I think you could include some of those things in the agent response. So you could do advertising for specific things on on Resi or Etsy or whatever and include that in the agent's response. Like, hey, I found these three things. You might also want to consider this other thing. That's now a natural language response that goes back to kind of like the the main agent. I think also to the point around the strain on the systems, if you have a vertical agent, it's gonna be better and more efficient at interacting with the underlying systems than a third party agent will. So I think it will make it a lot more efficient for for them to do that. [00:35:44] S1: When we look at the amount of queries and the volume that changes with agents, It takes a lot of tokens to do all of this work. How does the cost of tokens and cost of that intelligence change over time? Because we always thought it would get cheaper. Hasn't gotten much cheaper. How do we actually think about that?