Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:32:18 · Anish Acharya
[00:32:18] S1: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that we believe that people want to be more productive, but they don't. I think more people want to spend time than save time. There's a reason the biggest products in the world are entertainment and social. So, we get at the heart of how do we deliver the value to the consumer? I think for most consumers, sometimes I tease and I say it's like the Instagram AI user versus the X AI user. The X AI user is fearful of being outside of the permanent underclass, is really opinionated on GLM-5.3 versus Kimi K3. They're just so pilled. And then the Instagram person is like, "Oh, this is like a better Google search. Kind of. It's cool." They don't get what all the hype is about. And it's really a product design failure. We have the capabilities to radically transform people's lives. I mean, Lenny, in many ways we spent 40 years building a technology that enables better spreadsheets. We built this technology that extends our intellect, but nothing to extend our soul. And I think that we have a little bit of a spiritual hunger, especially as a lot of these cultural institutions have gone away that fulfilled that, especially in the rest of America where you don't have as many hot yoga classes, and Pilates, and fasting, and Friendsgiving. So, I think that the opportunity for this technology is like, hey, the basics of consumer need, how do we feel more connected, more loved? How do we make progress? How do we have fun? The things that we all aspire to, the basics, how do we apply this technology to those areas? That's what I want to see more of. And again, I don't think it's a model or a capability challenge. It's just a product design challenge.
00:33:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[00:33:50] S0: I love this so much. We talked about this idea of, "Loop, grow my business. Loop, find me more sales. Loop, close support tickets." But the way you're describing here, I think you, the way I had it in my notes here, just like, "Loop, improve my health," or, "Loop, make me a better friend." And there's no reason AI can't just think deeply and hard about all those things and figure out a way to actually do this. [00:34:11] S1: Yeah. And also, look, we have to dial this in, but I think there's a way that AI can challenge you, can push you, can be disagreeable. This is also why I think startups are advantaged over incumbents. The idea those 1,000 Google committees who would roll in their graves at the idea that they're going to release a model that's disagreeable, or God forbid it should be sexually suggestive, but guess what? Those are all parts of human existence. So, I think exploring the kind of uncomfortable parts of our social existence are things that startups are uniquely set up to do. [00:34:42] S0: And I know you spent a lot of time investing in consumer companies. What I'm hearing here is this is a big opportunity for consumer businesses to basically build an app product that is exactly this loop around improve my connections with my friends and family.
00:34:56 · Anish Acharya
[00:34:56] S1: I think that's right. I think the thing that's held back consumer so far a little bit, and it maybe held back is too strong, because if we put this into iPhone terms, we're in iPhone 2010. What is iPhone 2010? I think it's pre-Airbnb, pre-WhatsApp, pre-Uber, pre all the important consumer companies. So it is early days, but what's held us back is I think three things. One is that the models have been expensive, so if you want to do a kind of free to use product, that hasn't been easy. The second is that we've had an interface problem. Chat makes sense if you're the highest agency person in the world, which is Elon and Sam, but for the average consumer, their ideal interface is TikTok. So, we need to find something between Chat and TikTok. And then the fact that the technology has been so much more focused on productivity than things like human connection and entertainment, I think all those things are kind of up for grabs. The open weight models mean things are way cheaper. I think that we're starting to have conversations about things like, "Loop, make me happier." And I think that founders like Eugenia, who you should have on the show, she's tremendous, are thinking really ambitiously about user interfaces. Brian Chesky from Airbnb, I think he started a foundation lab focused on next gen user interfaces. So, I think all those problems will get solved or they're at least in a better position to be solved than they were two years ago.
00:36:15 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:36:15] S0: I want to come back to the whole space of consumer and AI and things like that, but I want to follow this thread a little bit more about just the optimism around where things might go. There's a lot of fear and worry about the future with AI and just generally. Mark Andreessen when he came on the pod had this really interesting take that AI came just in time to save us, because population is declining, productivity's going down, there's all this war, climate change and all these things, and we would be in big trouble if AI wasn't here to fill that gap. Talk about just your bigger picture perspective on why you think maybe people are underestimating the positive and optimism around AI.
00:36:58 · Anish Acharya
[00:36:58] S1: One, I think it's a potential for it to be a sort of emotional spiritual interface on which we can get leverage and explore aspects of ourselves that have been really buried. If you look at the kind of effect of the industrial revolution, it's that there are these scale advantages which are insurmountable. And as much as obviously I'm very pro-capitalism and I love the economy that we live in, I think that centralization, it sort of discourages the individual in some ways and it maybe detracts from their identity. So, I think one of the really magical things is this is a technology that really amplifies our identity, our agency, it kind of unbundles skill from desire. For example, if you want to make music, you can make music now. You don't have to know how to play the piano. If you want to be a programmer and make software, you can make software now. So it really amplifies our individuality, it allows us to explore aspects of our lives that we were never able to explore before. And just in terms of the nuts and bolts, we have been in this sort of morass of 2% GDP growth. Who said that we have to be there? Why can't we be 10 or 15 or 20%? And this is a technology with which not only can we dramatically drive productivity, we can dramatically drive ambition. Maybe this is a caricature, but the 1950s and 1960s we believed that we could do anything. We were coming out of World War II where the entire economy, the entire world mobilized in a way that we didn't think was possible. And one of my theories, Lenny, is that when the stakes are high we are awesome. When the stakes are low we are at our absolute worst. And in a lot of ways, I think the world we lived in five years ago felt like a low stakes world, which is why we collectively had a lot of these side projects as a society which weren't necessarily productive or making any of us happier. And now you've got, it's not just Elon doing everything he's doing, but I think everybody feels like they're climbing the ambition ladder. You ship your bad ideas so you can discover your good ideas. And if you want to build software, great. If you want to build a bridge, you don't have to be a civil architect to know how to do that anymore.
00:38:55 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
So, I really think that we have the makings of a sort of dramatically happier, more fulfilled, more productive society, and yet we're here talking about permanent underclass. [00:39:05] S0: I love all of that, that all feels so right. It's so hard to really believe that. But if you actually look at how things have gone so far with the rise of AI, unemployment's down, people are making a lot of money. Obviously a lot of people are struggling, there's a lot of downsides, data centers causing problems for people, things like that. A lot of issues, but it feels like as an economy and as a country feels like things are going well so far. They just almost cured some kind of cancer the other day.