Attended a fun session at a16z with @illscience and @joshelman yesterday. As usual they were dropping knowledge bombs:
1. There are three economic miracles. The old one is zero marginal cost software distribution. But recently there have been two more: 1) Coding going from the most precious asset in the world to one of the cheapest and 2) zero marginal cost digital labor with agents.
2. It's hard to appreciate what it feels like to be on the exponential. Just 10 to 20 million people account for $150 to 200 billion of token spend. "Some of the best companies that we work with have higher token spend than payroll." We are still early.
3. The AI workspace, like ChatGPT and the Claude desktop app, is going to be the container for all kinds of AI interactions and it's going to subsume the browser. Personally, these apps are already the browser for me. Chrome is just the middle layer.
4. The way to tell if you're an AI-native company is to ask: If the model gets twice as good, do your customers get twice as much value? Are you happy or sad that the model got better? If you're sad, you're probably on the wrong side of the exponential.
5. "I would much rather have AI be the boss of me than vice versa." For example, Anish's agent is responsible for a 30 minute block in his calendar every week to pick someone he should reconnect with.
6. Improving individual productivity does not always improve a team's productivity. Coding has taught us the wrong lesson on this. For many functions, having individuals be 10x more productive doesn't mean the team will be 10x. e.g., If everyone goes in a different direction.
7. It's actually easier to start a hard company than an easy company... because they're all hard. At least the hard companies are interesting to work on and people want to work with you on them.
Excited to do a podcast recording with Josh next week to go deeper on some of this.