Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:29:16 · Marc Andreessen
I mean, the optimistic part of me says, "Yeah, maybe AI is that powerful, and maybe the rest of the economy can actually change to accommodate that, and maybe that'll happen." But the result of that is going to be a much better news story than people think it's going to be. And again, everything I've just described, by the way, is just a very straightforward extrapolation of very basic economics. I'm not making any bold predictions of what I just said. This is just a straightforward mechanical process that plays itself out if you have higher rates of productivity growth, which are necessarily the results of higher rates of technological growth. And so, I think we're looking at... And to be clear, I think we're looking at a world that's not radically transformed the way that, maybe, the utopians think that it will be or the dystopians think it will be. I think it'll be more incremental for reasons we can discuss, but I think that incremental, overwhelmingly, I think that process is going to be a good news process. And then even if it's much faster, it's also going to be a good news process. It'll just be a good news process in the other way that I just described.
00:30:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:30:15] S1: I love hearing optimism and good news. I will also add that you've been... I was researching you ahead of this chat, and you've been right so many times about where the world is heading. That's why I'm especially excited to talk to you. I'll give you a short list. I imagine there are many more things. So one, you were right about the Web and web browsers becoming important. You were right about software eating the world. Check. In 2011, you said that in 10 years, we're going to have 5 billion people using smartphones. And I believe the actual number ended up being six billion. Also, you had this debate with Peter Thiel that I came across, where you were debating whether technologies stop progressing or if new technology will continue to emerge. And you were arguing there's progress. Progress will continue. And he was like, "No, I think we're done with cool technology." You were right. I imagine there are many more things you were right about. So again, I love hearing your predictions because I feel like they're actually going to turn out to be correct. [00:31:16] S0: I was going to start by saying, I've been wrong about tons of things, but I buried those out back behind the shed. [00:31:21] S1: Delete them from the internet. No browser can discount them.
00:31:24 · Marc Andreessen
[00:31:24] S0: Yes. Yes, I have them nuked out of the internet archives so that they're never seen again. So, I'm wrong plenty of times also. But yeah, look, I think some of those, I got right. By the way, I will say on the Peter one, I've come much more around to Peter's point of view. I would probably argue that one quite a bit differently today than I did, and I would give his view, I think, a lot more credit. And it actually goes to the discussion that we did, the conversation we just had, which is the... The real form of what Peter was arguing was we have lots of process in bit, we have lots of progress in bits, but we have very little progress in atoms. And that's the real core of what he was arguing. And I think I was a little bit, I don't know, missing that or glossing that over a little bit because I was so focused on making sure people understood, "No, there actually is still progress happening in bits." But I think a lot of his critiques around the lack of progress in atoms is real. And again, this goes back to this thing of like... And he's talked about this for a long time. In the last 50 years, there has just been very little technological innovation in most of the economy. There's been very little technological innovation, in particular, anything involving atoms. There's been very little real-world technological change. There just hasn't been. The built world is just not that different today than it was 50 years ago. And again, if you contrast that, if you compare and contrast 1870 to 1930, it was a dramatically different world. If you contrast 1930 to 1970, it was a dramatically different world. If you contrast 1970 today, it's not that different. And look, you just see that you could just walk around and it's just like, "Oh yeah, there's a bunch of buildings that were built in 1960, and there's a bridge that was built in 1930, and there's a dam that was built in like 1910, and there's a city that was founded in 1880." And like, "What have we done? Where are our new cities? Where are new dams? Where's the California High-Speed Rail? What's going on here?" And so, I think he is right about a lot of that. Again, this is also why I think that AI is not going to have as rapid... It's not going to be, again, this kind of utopian or dystopian view of everything changes overnight.
00:33:29 · Marc Andreessen
I think it just can't happen because of the reasons that Peter articulates, which is there's so much about how the world works that's basically just like wrapped up in red tape: like bureaucratic process, rules, restrictions, the politics. By the way, unions, cartels, oligopolies, there's all these structures in the world that are economic or political or regulatory structures that basically prevent things from changing. And so let's take a great example: AI's impact on the healthcare system. By rights, AI is going to have a dramatic impact on the healthcare system, and in very positive ways. But large parts of the medical system today, they are cartels. And so the doctors are a cartel, and nurses are a cartel, hospitals are a cartel. Then there's this push to nationalize all the healthcare systems, and then you've got a government monopoly. And guess what cartels of monopolies don't like, is they don't like rapid change. And so you show up as a kid and you're like, "Wow, I've got this new technology to do AI medicine." And they're like, "Oh, does it threaten doctor jobs? In that case, we're going to block it." And I think a lot of consumers, by the way... I see this in my life, and you'll probably see this in your life also, which is ChatGPT is almost certainly a better doctor than your doctor today, but ChatGPT can't get a license to practice medicine. So, it can't substitute for a doctor. It can't prescribe medications. It can't perform procedures. And so, there are these... Anyway. So Peter, I think, was very articulate, and has been for a long time on like, "No, there are actually real structural impediments in the economy and in the political system that we have, that actually prevent..." The rates of change, that are anywhere near the rates of change that people have in the past. And you can maybe say, optimistically, maybe the presence of the new magic technology of AI, maybe it causes us to revisit a lot of these assumptions for the first time in decades, to really say, "Okay, is this really the world we want to live in? Don't we actually want to get to the future faster?" So maybe, that would be the optimistic view.
00:35:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:35:26] S1: "It's time to build," somebody famously said. In my calendar, I actually have that as my... When I start to work, "It's time to build." [00:35:26] S0: Yes. [00:35:33] S1: That's my block in the morning of the day. Thank you for that. Okay. I love the way you go from just macro to just like N-of-1, and I want to go to N-of-1. A lot of the listeners of this podcast are product managers, they're engineers, they're designers. There's a lot of founders, but there's also a lot of non-founders. There's a lot of people building product that aren't founders. And obviously, a lot of people are worried about where their career is going. "Is one of these roles going to disappear?" "Is one of these roles are going to do really well?" " How do I stay up to date?" You're close with a lot of teams, a lot of product teams. What's your sense of just the future of these three very specific roles: product manager, engineer, designer? [00:36:10] S0: This, I think, is a really funny question. These three roles in particular, obviously, are the central roles for building for tech companies. So, the way I've been describing it is... You know the concept of the Mexican standoff, right? Which is the movie scene where the two guys have guns point at each other's heads? [00:36:23] S1: Mm-hmm.
00:36:24 · Marc Andreessen
[00:36:24] S0: And then there's... If you watch John Woo movies, he loves to have... He does the three-way Mexican standoff, where you've got like a triangle, people. And of course, John Woo movies, they've got guns in both hands. So, each is aiming at the other two and you've got this kind of standoff situation. And so the way I've been describing this is there's like a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles: between product manager, designer, and coder. Specifically, the following, which is every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer because they have AI, every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer, and then every designer knows they can be a product manager and a coder. And so, people in each of those roles now know or believe that with AI, they don't need the other two roles anymore. They can do that because they can have AI do that. And then of course, there's the real irony, which is all three of them are going to realize that AI can also be a better manager. So, they're going to be aiming the guns up the org chart, but that's the next phase. And what I think is so fascinating about this Mexican standoff is they're actually all kind of correct, I think. Which is, AI is actually a pretty good... It's actually now a really good coder, it's actually now a really good designer, and it's also a really good product manager. It's actually good at doing all three of those things, or at least doing a lot of the tasks involved in those three jobs. And so again, this goes back to this idea of the super-empowered individual. Where if I'm a coder, step one is I need to make sure that I really understand AI coding, and what that means, and how coding is going to change in the future. I need to understand specifically how to go from being a coder who writes code entirely by hand to being a coder who orchestrates a dozen instances of coding bots. There's a change in the actual job of coding itself, which is happening right now. But the other part of it is, "Okay, how do I become that super-empowered individual? How do I become a coder that also then harnesses AI so that I can also be a great product manager, and I can also be a great designer?" And then the same thing for the product manager, which is, "How do I make sure that I can now use coding tools?