Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:00:14 · Marc Andreessen
[01:00:14] S0: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, look, on that first one, and again, this is what I'm doing with my 10-year-old. Yeah, look, if you ask me, yeah, this is a really good point. So if you ask an AI, "Write me this code," and then it does it and it comes back and it doesn't work right, if all you know is single function, I asked it and it gave me back something that's not good, what do you even do with that? You don't understand why it gave you that result. Do you even understand what to tell it to try to get it to do something different? But to your point, if you actually watch what it's doing and then you have the grounding, kind of that leg of your E or your F, if you have that grounding, then you can be like, "Oh, I see what it's doing. I see where it made the mistake. I see where it went sideways." And then you're all of a sudden able to intervene and be able to say, "No, no, that's not what I meant. Do this other thing." And again, this is a big part of having the actual kind of synergistic relationship is that you understand. And by the way, look, I mean, like everything I'm saying is... everything that we're saying right now also is the same as if you're working with human beings. If you and I are colleagues and I would ask you to do something, you'd come back with something completely different, I do need to understand what was happening in your head in order to be able to give you feedback. If I just tell you, "Oh, that's wrong," nothing happens. I need to actually understand. I need to have theory of mind. I need to understand what you were thinking in order to really give you the right feedback. And again, the great thing with AI is AI will happily sit there and explain all day long why it's doing what it's doing. It'll happily critique itself. By the way, this is a very fun thing where you can have one AI critique the other AI which is another thing which is you have one AI write the code, you have another AI debunk the code. And so you can actually, you can play the AIs off against each other and get them to argue with each other. And yeah, these are all the kinds of skills that are going to become, I think, incredibly valuable.
01:02:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:02:01] S1: I think people call those LLM councils- [01:02:03] S0: Yes. [01:02:03] S1: ... where they're talking to each other. [01:02:05] S0: Yeah, that's right. That's right. [01:02:07] S1: I do feel like if I were... I have no design background. I've always wanted to design. I've always wanted to be a great designer. It feels like that's the hardest one to learn of all these three by just watching and talking because there's a lot of exposure hours as folks have used this term, just like how do you learn to be a great designer. That feels like that's going to be really hard and valuable. [01:02:25] S0: So my true confession is I've always kind of wanted to be a cartoonist, but I have no art skills. But as we're talking, I'm like, "Hmm, it might be time." [01:02:35] S1: The time has come, Marc. [01:02:37] S0: Yes. [01:02:38] S1: I want to pivot to founders, maybe your bread and butter. You spend a lot of time with the most cutting edge, AI-forward founders. I'm curious what you see them do, how you see them, some way they operate that's maybe blowing your mind about how the future of starting a company looks, how the future of AI-forward companies look.
01:02:57 · Marc Andreessen
[01:02:57] S0: Yeah. So this is a great and very topical topic that's all playing out in real time right now on the leading edge. So I think there's like three layers of it and see if this makes sense. I think there's like three layers of it. I think layer one is they're thinking, "All right, how does AI redefine the products themselves?" And this is kind of the time-honored kind of thing that happens with technology transitions, and this is kind of what a lot of venture capital is based on which is, okay, there's a new technology that comes out. Maybe it's the personal computer or the iPhone or the internet or now it's AI, and it's like, all right, is this a new capability that gets added to existing products. So all of a sudden you've got, I don't know, an existing software business and now you've got your PC version of it and now you got your iPhone version of it and you just keep on going and the new technology kind of gets added into the mix with another ingredient to an existing formula, and of course, a lot of new technologies are like that. I don't know when flash storage came out or something, it didn't really redefine the software industry because people just went from using hard disk using flash storage or something. But when the internet came out, like basically old school on-prem software for the most part, not entirely, but a lot of it died and it just got replaced by web software. And so sometimes you get the kind of, it's additive to an existing thing. Sometimes you get the actually it redefines an entire product category, redefines an industry. In many cases, the companies themselves turn over it. So there's sort of this question, and an example you just mentioned, Nano Banana. So a great example is there are these businesses, like just take Adobe. Photoshop is built a, whatever, 40-year franchise in image editing. Okay, is AI a sort of a feature now that gets added to Photoshop to be able to do AI-based image editing, or do you just stop editing images entirely because you're using Nano Banana and all images are just being generated and it's just easier to just have AI generate a new image than it is to try to edit an old one? And so I think there's many areas of tech in which that question is being asked and the answers I think will vary by domain.
01:05:03 · Marc Andreessen
But obviously as a venture firm, we're betting hard on many of these categories being totally reinvented, and a lot of the best founders are trying to figure out how to do that. So that's kind of AI changing the definition of the product. I think the next layer is actually a lot of what we've already talked about which is AI changing the jobs. And so it's a lot of what we already talked about, but, okay, if I'm a founder of a company and if I have room in my budget for 100 coders, how do I get those coders to be super-empowered AI coders, not the kind of coders I used to have, and if they're super-empowered AI coders, then does that mean, do I still need the 100? Maybe now I only need 10. Or does that mean I still want 100 but now they're doing 10 times more? And so, as you know, a lot of the best founders are working on that right now. And then I think the third shoe to drop hasn't quite dropped yet, but it's kind of the big one which is, all right, the basic idea of having a company, does that change. And again, here you've got this concept of the super-powered individual which is, okay, can you have entire companies where you have basically the founder does everything. Because what the founder's doing is overseeing an army of AI bots. There's kind of this holy grail in our industry that's been running for a long time which is can you have the one-person billion-dollar outcome. We've had a few of those over the years. Bitcoin is probably the most spectacular example with Ethereum right behind it which wasn't quite one person but a very small team. You had Instagram and WhatsApp that had very big outcomes with very small teams. Every once in a while you get one of these things where you just, something hits, and you just have a very small number of people associated with it. But that said, most software companies obviously end up with huge numbers of employees. And so I think the most leading-edge founders are thinking of, okay, how do I reconstitute the actual very definition or idea of having a company and can you have a company that's literally basically just all AI. If you're doing anything in the real world, that's hard, but if you're doing software, that seems like it might be feasible in some cases.
01:07:08 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
And then there's the ultimate example of that which is can you have like autonomous AI economy stuff happening where you have AI bots on the blockchain or something that are basically out there functioning as a business and making money and just literally where the AI does all the work itself and just issues me dividends. Maybe that's the final outlier result. We have a few founders who are chasing that kind of thing. So I would describe that as kind of the latter that the best founders are on. [01:07:36] S1: Super interesting. This whole idea of a one-person billion-dollar company, I think it depends on your definition of what this is, like an outcome I could see. Running my newsletter as one person with some contractors, there's so many little annoying things that I have to deal with, with just support tickets and issues and bugs. It's hard for me to imagine actually a one-person billion-dollar company, even if AI is handling so much of your support because there's just so many random-edge cases that I'm just... like filling out forms. And so I guess depends on, do you have contractors, does that count, what does it mean to be a one person. But I'm just like, "I can't see that happening." [01:08:12] S0: Yeah. I mean, look, Bitcoin, Satoshi pulled it off. [01:08:16] S1: But the open source community now, does that count? I don't know. [01:08:19] S0: Yeah. [01:08:20] S1: I guess it counts. Okay.
01:08:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:08:20] S1: I guess it counts. Okay. [01:08:21] S0: Yeah, exactly. Right? So yeah, I would say I don't propose to have answers here, but more just like the smartest people I know or many of the smartest people I know are thinking hard about this. [01:08:33] S1: Yeah. What do you think about moats? A big question constantly in AI, the fact that everything's changing, just what's your guys' thesis on moats in AI? Is that even a thing? Do you care?