Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)

01:07:32 · Anish AcharyaPlay from here

[01:07:32] S1: They're such extraordinary leaders, founders. I mean, the thing that I actually feel so grateful to be a part of that they really embody to their core, I think is a feeling of stewardship for the technology industry, and for really the country and maybe the Western way of living and thinking. And if you look at a Ron Conway or Brook Byers, Tom Perkins, there was this feeling I think of obligation to leave it better than you found it from an industry perspective. And that sort of aspiration goes way beyond just being the best investor in the world, though we want to do that too. I see them both show up that way over and over again where they want to do hard important things that don't directly benefit the firm, or at least not singularly because they're just sort of important. Ben has done a lot of that in the direction of the industry, and Mark in the direction of the country, though of course both work on both. Another really cool thing is just to see how I think Mark and Ben, but maybe the firm a little bit, has shaped our collective ambition as a founder community. I think if you look at 5 or 7 or 10 years ago, deep tech was deeply unpopular. It wasn't a high status thing to be working on, it was very fringe, and now it's become very popular, high status and mainstream. And I think there's a lot of firms that have of course pulled in that direction, but I think that someone like Mark has been very full-throated in his support of working on sort of capital I important work in the national interest, and all of Silicon Valley has changed as a result.

01:09:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish AcharyaPlay from here

[01:09:10] S0: And you guys have had some big wins in the past couple of weeks investing wise too. [01:09:15] S1: Yeah, thank you. [01:09:16] S0: Congrats. Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. What's your advice to product people who are trying to think about what they might want to shift in how they work, how they think, how they operate to be more successful in the future in their careers and with their companies? [01:09:35] S1: Just make more things. And I know it sounds silly, I know everybody says it, but just please come up with a project. You don't have to tell anyone about it, it can be totally unimportant, but use it as a chassis to use all the new models, ship things, talk about them, build your own intuition. I promise you're one sort of slightly frustrating and then very fulfilling week away from being as pilled as anyone. So, you just got to use the technology. And if not now, then when, right? This is all of us got in the game to build the products we saw in our mind's eye, and now we have a chance to do it. So just please, please use the models and tell me what you built. Text me, tag me. I will reply and respond and engage with you, and so will everyone else because the magic of Silicon Valley is that it's a very positive sum mindset. Everybody's building on each other and vulnerability is really rewarded, so I definitely would encourage people to use the models.

01:09:35 · Anish Acharya, Lenny RachitskyPlay from here

[01:09:35] S1: Just make more things. And I know it sounds silly, I know everybody says it, but just please come up with a project. You don't have to tell anyone about it, it can be totally unimportant, but use it as a chassis to use all the new models, ship things, talk about them, build your own intuition. I promise you're one sort of slightly frustrating and then very fulfilling week away from being as pilled as anyone. So, you just got to use the technology. And if not now, then when, right? This is all of us got in the game to build the products we saw in our mind's eye, and now we have a chance to do it. So just please, please use the models and tell me what you built. Text me, tag me. I will reply and respond and engage with you, and so will everyone else because the magic of Silicon Valley is that it's a very positive sum mindset. Everybody's building on each other and vulnerability is really rewarded, so I definitely would encourage people to use the models. [01:10:33] S0: What's a good heuristic if you're doing this enough? Is it build something once a month? Is it some number of hours per day sitting, talking, building? Anything that you think might help people be like, "Okay, you're doing a good job"?

01:10:33 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish AcharyaPlay from here

[01:10:33] S0: What's a good heuristic if you're doing this enough? Is it build something once a month? Is it some number of hours per day sitting, talking, building? Anything that you think might help people be like, "Okay, you're doing a good job"? [01:10:46] S1: I mean, just ship something once a week, and it doesn't have to be crazy. For example, when I was playing around with Codex I had it build a slide deck for Mother's Day for my wife that pulled from my text messages. It looked at my photo gallery, it set some music to it, created a 20 slide deck of our relationship and pulled some cool old texts from when I first asked her out. It was a really nice Mother's Day. I mean, it wasn't important, it wasn't something that we might come back to, but it was shipping something. So, it can be that small. [01:11:18] S0: I know that you're our mutual friend, Nikhyl Singhal, you worked at Credit Karma with him, he had a really good way of thinking about this. He finds that people flip on AI and how they feel about it once they find some moment of joy that it had created for them, and this Mother's Day idea is such a good example. And so, I think that's kind of a tip I always think about is just what's something that just will bring you joy if this works. [01:11:44] S1: What's something you can do for someone else? Maybe that's a good starting point as well. [01:11:47] S0: I love that. Anish, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share? Anything else you want to double down on before we get into the lightning round?

01:11:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish AcharyaPlay from here

[01:11:47] S0: I love that. Anish, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you want to share? Anything else you want to double down on before we get into the lightning round? [01:11:58] S1: I don't think so, I've loved the conversation so far. [01:12:01] S0: Me too. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:12:06] S1: Okay. [01:12:07] S0: Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

01:12:12 · Anish Acharya, Lenny RachitskyPlay from here

[01:12:12] S1: Yeah, so okay. Conquest and Cultures is my very favorite book. It's Thomas Sowell, and it just talks about how conquests have led to culture change in different societies around the world, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. I think to me, it's just the best historic view of culture as the biggest driver of outcomes, and I've experienced a lot of that as somebody who was born in Canada and moved here to America, which has a very different culture of ambition. There's that word again. So, Conquest and Cultures is great. 7 Powers you mentioned is actually just an awesome book. I think it's a very intellectual distillation about moats and business theory and compounding advantages. I really like it. Maybe the third is the one that Mark ... I actually thought that he was maybe punking me when he sent this to me before I started. I said, "Mark, are there any books that I should read?" And he sent me a couple. And one was a book, a textbook called Increasing Returns to Scale, which I think is Brian Arthur is the author. It's an awesome book. It's a slightly dense study of why things like software have such outlier economic effects, but it really helps put things in perspective, or it helped me in terms of why does our industry work in the way that it does? Why does our culture work in the way that it does? Why are we so positive some? I'd love to say that we're better people, but I think it may be a sort of better system and structure we work with it. [01:13:33] S0: Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?