Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:42:33 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
[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. [01:43:19] S1: That sounds extremely delightful. You guys should open source and release that. Marc, like I said, I could talk to you for hours, well, you've got things to do. Anything you want to leave listeners with before we wrap up? Anything you want to double-down on or just leave listeners with?
01:43:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[01:43:19] S1: That sounds extremely delightful. You guys should open source and release that. Marc, like I said, I could talk to you for hours, well, you've got things to do. Anything you want to leave listeners with before we wrap up? Anything you want to double-down on or just leave listeners with? [01:43:33] S0: Yeah, so a couple things. So one is, we got super lucky last week, Packy McCormick wrote the best piece ever written about us, actually, which he released. And so it's the best explanation of what we do, and how we think. And so I would definitely recommend that. And then we're putting a lot, we have a great team of folks now, we're putting a lot of effort ourselves into video and content. And so I'd definitely recommend our YouTube channel, which I think has a lot of great stuff and is going to be very exciting in the next year. [01:43:59] S1: Awesome. Well link to that, I think it's just youtube.com/a16z, something like that. And you guys have great stuff. [01:44:04] S0: Okay. [01:44:04] S1: Marc, thank you so much for being here. [01:44:06] S0: Awesome, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. [01:44:08] S1: Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.