Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:34:04 · Marc Andreessen
[01:34:04] S0: Yeah. Somebody said, "Silicon Valley is a company town, but they company is Silicon Valley." Right? And again, at the loneliest coast, again, is one of these great n equals one. If the level of n equals one is somebody, and I've run startups before, I've run companies before, if the level of n equals one of, like, running a company, that's just a giant pain in the fucking butt. Because your secrets are walking out the door, and your employees are walking out the door, and the whole thing sucks. But the other side of it is you also benefit from that, right? Because you get to hire people with all these skills and experiences, right, and you're in this ecosystem that adapts and channels talents and skill and knowledge and people into the new fields. So there's kind of the push and pull of that at the level of just being an individual CEO. At the level of just being in the ecosystem to your point, yeah, it's an absolutely magical phenomenon. And by the way, for all of the issues in Silicon Valley, I did the count once, I think AI is the ninth major technology platform in the history of Silicon Valley. Right? Silicon Valley is still called Silicon Valley, we haven't made Silicon here in decades. Right? We used to actually... You know it's called Silicon Valley because they used to make chips, right? They used to have the actual fabs were in Silicon Valley. And then they designed them and they made the chips. And so, and that was wave one starting in the 19... No, that was actually, no, that was more wave three or whatever. But that was when the area was named in the 1950s. But now we're on wave nine. Right? And the company town phenomenon where the company is, the industry, again, the indeterminate optimism, nobody had to sit and plan and say, "Okay, in the 1990s Silicon Valley's going to do the internet, in the 2000s they're going to do the smartphone, in the 2010s they're going to do the cloud, in the 2020s they're going to do AI." It's just, right, the indeterminate optimism of ecosystem flexibility of the ecosystem that they Silicon Valley could morph into all these categories, and again, maybe a testimony to indeterminate optimism.
01:35:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:35:58] S1: This reminds me of the meme of how we're all just wrappers over sand, everything we're building is just wrapper over wrapper, wrapper, wrapper. [01:36:03] S0: The wrapper thing is hysterical, yeah, yeah. I'm a software company and I'm a chip wrapper, right? [01:36:07] S1: Yeah. [01:36:08] S0: Yeah. I'm a business application, I'm a database wrapper. Yeah, exactly. I'm a sand... I mean, you and I, we're all now sand wrappers. [01:36:15] S1: Sand wrappers. [01:36:17] S0: Perfect. [01:36:17] S1: Okay. One more question along the media diet, I asked your partner Ben Horowitz what to talk to you about. This is a16z if people don't know him. And he said you're really into movies these days. [01:36:27] S0: Yeah. [01:36:28] S1: And so I don't know, any movies? Any movies you're really into these days, any movies you've absolutely loved recently? [01:36:33] S0: Yeah, so the movies that blew my socks off last year, which I think is the best movie of the decade for sure and maybe of the last, like, 15 years, is this movie. Unfortunately it's one of these things, not a lot of people have seen it, but I would encourage it. It's called Eddington. [01:36:48] S1: I've not heard of it.
01:36:48 · Marc Andreessen
[01:36:48] S0: Have you not heard of it? Okay, so you're going to really enjoy it. So, I won't spoil too much of it, so at the surface level the following spoils nothing. So at the surface level, it's set in a small town in New Mexico called Eddington which is a small town about 600 people. And there's a sheriff who's played by Joaquin Phoenix who's like an old, crusty, basically right-winger, and then there's a mayor played by Pedro Pascal who's basically a young, hip, progressive. And then the movie starts I think in March of 2020. And so it starts when COVID first hits. And then it sort of as it plays out over the next few months, it intersects, and it sort of extends into the summer of 2020. So, kind of the George Floyd moment and then protests and riots and kind of everything. So sort of the convergence of COVID and then all the BLM stuff. And then there's a third kind of element to it which is there's a company which is basically a loosely-disguised version of Meta if you read the backstory of it, which is building an AI data center on the outskirts of town. So they kind of pull that in as sort of a thing that looms larger and larger over time. And then the thing it really is great at is it really shows, you know, this is a small town in New Mexico. And so, everybody in the town gets full wrapped up in all the COVID stuff, and they get fully wrapped up in all the BLM stuff, and they get fully wrapped up in all the tech anxiety stuff. But they're all experiencing it basically through the internet, right? Which is what actually happened, right? So the reason I love the movie so much is one is it's the first movie that directly grapples with 2020, of what happened in 2020, and it just, like, fully, fully engages and grapples with all the dynamics that were playing out in the country. But the other reason is it's the first movie that does a really good job of showing what it was like especially in that area to live in a world in which there were things happening in the real world, and people were kind of experiencing events online, like in a way that was very central in their lives. Right? And so it does a really good job of pulling in smartphones and social media in a way that movies really, really, really struggle with, and then the whole thing comes together in an incredibly entertaining way.
01:38:51 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
And so I wouldn't even say I completely agree with the movie or whatever, and I think the director of the movie and I would probably disagree about a lot, but he really tries hard to really grapple with what it's actually like to live like a human being in the 2020s in America in a way that I think many other filmmakers who are very talented have just been very scared of touching. And this guy, for some reason he's just like, "Yeah, I'm just going find all the third rails and I'm just going to fucking grab them." [01:39:19] S1: I can see why that's your favorite movie of the year. [01:39:22] S0: It's great, it's great, it's great. Everybody should see it. [01:39:24] S1: Oh man. Okay, final question, I want to ask about your product diet. Are there any products you use that maybe are less known that you love, that you want to recommend? You can mention products you're investors in if you use them constantly. [01:39:38] S0: We have so many that it's really hard to, you know, I always feel it's who's your favorite shoulder? And so it's really hard to pull out specific ones. But I'll talk about a few. I mean they're all just observations. So one is my 10-year-old, I have, my 10-year-old is 100% obsessed with Replit. And by the way, it was not from me. Do you have kids? [01:40:00] S1: I do, I have one two-and-a-half year old.
01:40:02 · Marc Andreessen
[01:40:02] S0: Two-and-a-half. Okay, so you haven't run into what I'm running into now, which is whatever it is that you do is not cool. Right? Like, it's two-and-a-half, whatever daddy does is like the coolest thing in the fucking world. I can tell you, by the time he's 10, whatever you do is, like, deeply uncool. Right? And I'm highly aware of that. And so, like, if I mention, "Oh yeah, we work on XYZ," he's like, "Okay." But when he discovers something, then it's cool, or when his friends tell him about it it's cool. And so he through no interference on my part discovered Replit about three months ago, and discovered Vibe coding, and is completely obsessed with Vibe coding games, and all kinds of things and literally will sit and do it for hours. And so I'm seeing that phenomenon play out, which is super fun. That's one. Two is, I am just completely in love with all the AI stuff. I think it's just absolutely amazing, hysterical. My favorite party trick at dinner parties now is to pull out Grok with Bad Rudy, which is, if you've seen, it's a foul-mouthed raccoon avatar in the OS Grok app. So, I think that's super fun. We have this company, Sesame, that they went viral last year for these just incredibly, like, intimate emotional kind of voice experiences. So I think the voice stuff is fantastic. But I'm also a super fascinated by all the voice input stuff. And so Limitless Suite, yeah, Limitless recently, the company recently sold, but all the... I think the pendants, the wearables, all that stuff is going to be big, the Meta glasses. I think there's going to be a whole wearables revolution here. I love the voice input stuff. There's this app on my phone now called Wispr Flow, which is voice transcription, which works like staggeringly well. It's incredible, it's like a voice transcription function, but you can actually talk to the AI model while you're doing voice transcription. So it kind of understands when you're telling it, "No, no, I want bullet points over there and I want this and that." And it understands that you're not telling it to type in the words "I want bullet points," it just actually understands that you want bullet points. And so that's a great example of a super useful thing. And so, I think the voice mode stuff is going to be really great.
01:42:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:42:10] S1: Subscribers of my newsletter get a year free of Replit and Wispr Flow, so there we go. What's the most memorable thing your son's built with Replit? [01:42:19] S0: Oh, well so, he's gotten super into Star Trek. And so, so far he's writing, like, Star Trek simulators. So like all the, you know, all the... By The Next Generation, they actually have a- [01:42:29] S1: Next Generation, okay, I was going to ask which- [01:42:30] S0: Well actually, we like them all. We watched the new Starfleet Academy last night- [01:42:33] S1: Hm. [01:42:33] S0: ... which actually is quite good. But we watched the original, we watched them all. But it was in Next Generation where they actually developed an actual design language for the computers. If you watch the original series, they just had, like, basically knobs with lights. And they didn't really, they just were, like, fucking around on set, and trying to pretend they were doing it. But by Next Generation, they actually had designed, they actually had a UI design language. And so one of the fun things you can do with Vibe coding is you can say, "Give me a Star Trek Next Generation user interface for whatever, this, that," or whatever. And it actually uses the, they called it... I'm just having a nerd-out... They called it LCARS design language. And it'll actually build you like Star Trek Next Generation bridge consoles using that design language, but with your choice of a Star Trek name, for example. And so he's going crazy for that kind of thing.