Anish, dude, I'm so glad we're doing this, brother.

Excited, man. Thank you. Thank you.

Before we get into the ketones kicking in. Let's get a little bit of background because it's important. I know we're going to be syndicating this across a couple of podcasts. So, I was telling people who we are. We've known each other for a long time. We worked together at Google, long time. We work together at Google Ventures and Google Corporate and yeah man it's been we've been good homies for many many many years. No one's ever seen us on a pod together I don't think right like we've never done anything. Yeah. So do you want to give a little your background?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Thank you for having me man. This is awesome. I'm Anish. I'm a GP at Andreessen. I've been friends with Kevin forever. I'm a product person. I'm an engineer. I'm a technologist. I started two companies. Um probably having the most fun I've ever had both personally, professionally, and all of that. And I'm excited to talk to everyone about it today.

Yeah, it's it was really cool when we first met. We both were uh I don't know how we ended up there and got on Google+. Yeah. But we were both on Google+ and I remember working with you like in the very early days and I was like oh like when you land into Google for the first time, you don't know what to expect, you know, like cuz you're getting in there and you don't know like what is this what is this whole thing going to be about? Like who am I going to work with? And very quickly you realize there's fantastic engineering talent there. And then there's also productwise I was like I don't know that these people actually live and breathe product. It was very much you're kind of in the Google bubble but you were one of the first people I was like oh my god this is like an amazing product mind and I got to work with this guy and so we figured out a way to like stay connected and work together you know when we bounced over to Google Ventures then and yeah.

Well dude figured out a way is generous. So, you saved my life. I remember I worked with you for 3-4 weeks and what's cool actually is you joined and you're like, "No, this is not it. I'm not doing it." I'm like, "What do you mean? What about vesting? What about Google+? What about this and that?" And you were just so sure and you were right. You moved over to Ventures. And I remember at the time talking to you outside of that building, the Google+ building, and saying, "Kevin, don't leave me behind, man. Please bring me with you, and like I'll make you look good." And that's a thing you say and you assume nobody will ever like call you back after that. And then 3 months later you called me. You're like, "All right, man. What's up?" Like, "Why don't you come over here and do this with us?" And I mean, that that single act of professional generosity changed my whole life.

Yeah. I feel like the last call it 5 years has been on the consumer side has been relatively boring for me as an investor because I've looked at stuff and I said gosh you know we got the bigs in the room. You got the Tik Toks. got the Instagram still dominating and then you see some of the folks like you know threads that are just like copying and somehow you know strapping on you know integrations with decentralized social and that's supposed to be a thing. Yes. But I hadn't seen anything that in my mind was that interesting. Like it felt like consumer had this kind of like down period of several years where there wasn't really anything new. And now that AI has come into the mix, I feel like there's a chance to kind of almost reinvent every piece of that framework. And do you feel that way as well? Like AI is a shot in the arm for consumer.

100%. I mean, I'll give you the investor perspective and then the builder perspective. I want to hear yours. So from an investor perspective, this is like a renaissance for consumer investing. We haven't seen an opportunity like this. I think in since 2010, 2011, 2012 because consumers are downloading products organically. That hasn't happened in a long time. Consumers are willing to pay like you look at the price points of the top products, right? The top chat GPT skew is 200 a month. The top Gemini skew Google Ultra is 250 and then Grock is 300 a month. And consumers are actually paying that amount. I mean, how much do you think you've paid to cursor? A lot. A lot. Yeah. And some of that is professional behavior, but a lot of that is just consumer and hobbyist behavior. So, I think that consumer is like back in a big way. And like the tech enthusiast consumer is excited in a way that they haven't been for 10 years.

And when you the companies you just mentioned though, they're largely the bigs. Like one of the things that that's happened in consumer that I never thought would be the case that I was shocked by is that bigs like you know top tier you know fortune 100 companies can put out consumer tech for the first time and actually see it get scale. It was always the bigs that that couldn't figure it out, you know, they had to acquire Instagram to be cool. They had to buy the the cool. And I think with with Chat GBT and actually with with Google as well with, you know, their their banana model and whatnot. It's for the first time we're seeing the bigs put out consumer apps that are getting some traction. I mean, granted, they do have the scale. They have the install base. they can put that in front of a lot of people. But like we saw with the Google+ side, just because you have the install base and you have the eyeballs doesn't mean you're going to see success on the consumer side. That's right. And I feel like we're starting to see that with the bigs, which was kind of shocking to me. Did that shock you as well?

It so in a sense what the bigs have released are models, not products. And I think there's an important distinction here. So I do think that if you look at the models, the models are incredibly capable and the bigs and the labs obviously are advantaged in certain ways with capital, etc. to build great cutting edge models and consumers love those models. So that's great. They're playing in that space. It's definitely relevant. But when it comes to opinionated products on top of the models, like cursor is a good example. Companionship is actually a very interesting category where there's huge demand for companionship products. And a lot of these companionship products like janitor AI, you know, they they deal with parts of the human experience that big tech is not going to be comfortable shipping, right? It's disagreement, it's sexuality, it's persuasion. So so much of this technology can address parts of the human experience that a thousand committees at Google and Facebook don't want addressed and I think that is one of the interesting opportunities.

100% I think that's well said and I think it is the space where we need to invest because if you think about what the pitches that we see on a on a daily or weekly basis a lot of the stuff that I see is a you know it can be a sanding down of the rough edges and it can also just be something where I wholeheartedly believe that one of the bigs is going to dominate that category and so I avoid those investments like they will never touch the emotional side as much as they should or could uh not should but that they wouldn't feel comfortable doing so right and so those are the categories and the verticals where I think is they're defensible by the pure nature of what they're addressing right.

100% I just think they're they're structurally set up to kind of take the soul out of products and when you talk about categories like companionship the whole thing is the soul there is no product without that. I think the other interesting area where the labs and the bigs are not going to be successful is products that benefit from being multimodel, right? Not multimodal but multimodel. So cursor is good because you can use every model inside of it and Google is never going to ship with anthropic models embedded. So that also is a very interesting they're sort of constrained to the models that they've developed in house and products that benefit from being multimodel are actually really unconstrained.

Let's talk about companionship. So, on the companionship side, what do you believe should be built? What have you seen built? And how much of this do you think is fad versus depth? Meaning, it's funny and weird and awkward and strange to have an AI girlfriend. And I in the early days call it like, well, early days, let's call it a year ago, you know, way back in the day. I a friend of mine was like, "Hey, go check this out." And it was not something that was, you know, exed about or tweeted about. It was it was like this kind of like thing that you went into. And and I'll say that I went there and it was models unhinged, right? This is before Grock did it and you could basically talk to a model and get any type of response that you wanted. Uh meaning in terms of sexuality or whatever you were looking for, right? How much of that are you concerned about in terms of shaping humanity, replacing real relationships? Like what lens, how do you evaluate something like that? Do you invest in those types of things?

This is such a great topic. I wish we had Eugenia here who founded Replica because she'd have a ton of thoughts. I mean, okay, so I'm always going to give you the optimistic take is just how I'm wired. So, let me give you a couple of my most optimistic takes. So one is we all know the importance of human connection and the value of it. Maybe the human part is overvalued. You know you are you live in an embarrassment of social riches. You have friends, you have professional connections, you have interesting people you can meet. They all want to connect with you and your biggest challenge is prioritizing. I don't know that that's the experience of the average person in this country. You know, I think that there's a deep loneliness and any progress we make towards addressing the loneliness is human progress and is very pro-social.

And I think progress though to have a conversation with a chatbot. Do you think that starts to fill that emotional bucket up?

Yes. I think more than 10%. I just think I look it it's like our lizard reptilian brains. We are wired to have these sort of emotional chemical responses when you're engaged in a humanlike conversation. We intellectually understand that these are computers on the other side, but you still feel the feelings and I think that's what's necessary to make personal progress as a result of connection.

So, this is my concern. I'll I'll play the the the doomer side of this. Um, my concern is that one of the things I noticed with these models early on while I'm playing with them is that they were very agreeable. And emotional well-being and kind of the um I would say the muscle that needs to be built is actually not when you're laughing and agreeing with friends and kind of going along with the flow. It's when there's disagreement and the discomfort that comes from the, "Oh, I don't agree with you. That that doesn't hit me. that doesn't feel right. Let's build a bridge and figure out how to find common ground here. And if you're dealing with models that are just paid to agree with you all the time, that then you're you're basically so I'll give an example. I was talking to Tim Ferris about this. We were like we we're taking screenshot I was taking screenshots of what this model was saying to me and it was basically agreeing to anything that I put in front of it... And his response because you you're not getting any push back. And so then, okay, when you make the jump to a real relationship... you're used to an agreeable, you know, kind of like this subservient like thing and and it doesn't the proxy and the jump doesn't make sense. And all of a sudden you're like, "Well, that's not as good. I want to go back to my model." Like, are we training people to want and favor agreeable models over real, you know, the real character building that comes with the emotional side of things?

I don't know. I I think we just need to dial it in. Like everybody knows a human relationship where the other person always agrees with you is not authentic and it doesn't nourish you. You need to have the tension, the disagreement, the exploration. I mean, we've got to like be fair to where we are in the cycle. Yeah, chat GBT was November 22, right? Right. It's not even November 25. And we're trying to dial in the entirety of human connection and experience and find the right place between not being a sink fan but not being, you know, disagreeable for the purpose of it. We're dialing it in. We're going to get there. And again, because we're so wired from an evolutionary perspective to know what is the right amount of tension, I believe our intuition will guide us. We'll get there.

I like what you're saying because we've talked about this on the ride car ride over here where if if you just for a second imagine we are in the huge brick cell phone era of AI where it's like this is the very not even the first inning like we're just stepping on the field of this cuz if I mean imagine 20 30 years from now we're going to have a much deeper understanding of what's going on behind the scenes here what is required to make and we're expecting that on day one and the expectations are like so high it's like let's let's give it give it some time you know.

Also think that this I'm glad we're talking about companionship, but I think broadly we've had 40 years of technology that extended our intellect and our minds. Right. But most of the human experience is actually emotional and it's subjective. Now we have a technology that extends our emotions, our subjective experience, and it can address that. Like I love AI spreadsheets. I'm glad that somebody is building them, but to me that's the least ambitious execution of the primitive. let's start to really address the human experience through this next new technology. And I think that's where all this goes, you know.

I've got actually a related question for you. So you've both designed, you've done a lot of new product thinking and you've spotted a lot of new product thinking. Like how do you do it? What are the patterns? How did you sort of see it all of these times?

I I think that on the on the product side, what I've always been drawn to is the for for better or worse, the novelty of original thought in certain areas. um if it's something that is we've talked about this kind of sand sanding down of the rough edges like that to me is not that interesting but I really respect people that are building something like this price negotiation where I just haven't seen it done before. it doesn't mean that it's going to you know be a top 10 app and and it's going to be a multi-billion dollar company but if you find that signal in someone a builder's brain that means that they're going to apply that signal to other parts of the product that are building interesting, meaning that they will continue to reinvent and reimagine things through a lens that nobody else has. And that to me is enough signal to say, okay, we will probably turn over a card at some point that is the magic, you know, card that is going to get us that that home run or that massive product, right?

That's super interesting because one of our observations is that it's just really hard to predict consumer seed. Yes. And we haven't done a ton of it for that reason. In fact, our stated sort of approach is weird and working. That's how we've tried to invest in consumer yet. You have been consistently right at consumer seed investing. It's interesting that that's what you look for.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's exactly right. Weird and working. Like I I look for weird first. Yeah. And then if it starts to have a little bit of smoke, like that's a very interesting signal. And then often times I've seen founders do this a handful of times where weird and working working ends up failing and then but they still have the weird because that's in their DNA. So they'll build the next weird and working right and that's what you want because they're going to need a several shots on goal and as long as you can't manufacture the weird. The weird is internal. The weird is I just see the world in a different way and that is the founder that is going to win.

Why why is weird important?

Because in a world where you need attention, well, we've we've talked about this socially in terms of what what is what draws you in and what what draws people into consumer products. Um, consumer is a finicky category because after a certain amount of time, what was weird and working ends up to ends up being bored boring and stale, right? It's the reason why, you know, DIG is no longer here... And so if you want to find the the next thing and and consumer is often um you play with something and the aha moment is, oh, I hadn't thought of that or I didn't feel this. I've never felt this way before. I I'll never forget when um you know I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day and the the thesis for me was it was very simple for me to see because we had had birectional relationships for the longest time and what I mean by that is the MySpaces and all the social platforms that had come before it had this idea of friendship. And the beautiful thing about what what Jack and E did and and Biz over there is they said, "Okay, we're going to take that and just open it up and say actually you can just broadcast out and say I have something important to tell the world and everyone can follow it whether they know you or not." And it was that one simple little product tweak that said, "Okay, it's no longer about birectional communication. It's it's about this idea of broadcast to to all, right? And when you see something like that, it it unlocks not only a massive product opportunity, a market opportunity... But I I think that is the weird thing. It seemed odd at the time.

Tell me, you know, the dig button was a very new and interesting idea. Social news talked about I think we're we're sort of in a safe place 20 years later. Yeah. Talk about how it influenced the like button.

So, how did the like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time? I think in the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript to get a little bit geeky. It was the first time, even though this sounds super archaic, that you could actually click a button, send out for a a server response, and get something back into your browser. It used to be a world that we'd have to refresh the page to see anything. There was no way to just say like, I think this is cool. Let me just like tap on it and like show my vote of interest on something. And so when DIG launched in late 2004, it was the first time that I had ever seen just because the Ajax had just been out for a couple months that anyone had voted on content. And obviously I didn't invent voting, but no one had done it on the web. And I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something.

So, uh, wisely, just by luck, I just happened to be in contact with enough people to where they were like, "Hey, you should go out and file a patent on this." And so, I went and filed a patent on it, not because I wanted to enforce our own liking, but I was told and advised to do that because you want as a defensive practice. At that time we were larger than Facebook and so traffic-wise and Mark and I shared a common investor in Greylock. And we just had a lot of overlapping friends and he was like hey like... you should meet Mark you guys should hang. And so we went out and um grabbed dinner... and he came to my office. He drove up and came to the dig office... He was sitting on the ground and just like wouldn't sit in a chair. He was like sitting on the ground. He was we were just talking about what it meant to what what liking was all about, what digging was all about. And I was like, well, the way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume. And that was kind of the patent that I had gone and filed. And Mark didn't have this at the time... And then a few months later, they had rolled out the like button and and that was kind of like a big part of what they pushed as a as a similar thing like a social signal to feedback into the algorithm to give you better content. Uh they obviously hit a scale... it was cool. I was never offended by that. I was like, "Oh, that's awesome." He made it his own, called it like, and it made sense to apply that to what he was doing.

what are you doing these days what is your what what's your outlook for how products are being built? How's that evolved and and how does that play into your investments as well? Because in some sense, we're entering into a a really weird era. Um not weird, but it's just new where someone even a designer that has no experience on the engineering side can go prototype, build, launch. It it's deputizing a wider base of people to actually roll out products.

It's I think it's incredible. So, I I'm so fired up. I haven't felt this way since, you know, I was on my computer working on my BBS. My mom was yelling at me to like, "What are you doing down there? Come up for dinner." You know, like that's the level of enthusiasm I have right now because it just feels like everybody is unlocked to do what they want to do.

What are you personally using to build? What does your current stack look like?

Yeah, I think with Vzero, you know, this is a a product that was largely built to um you know, quickly put together uh a beautiful design, very simple design and kind of framework for any new app. So, you can go in there and discuss what you want to have built. Uh I liked it because I could start with a piece of paper. I could draw a prototype of how I think something should function and then I would take a picture with my phone. I would attach that as an image and say, can you build something like this that does X? It puts together, you know, because it is built in in the Verscell ecosystem, it's largely going to build components for Nex.js, uh, which is a fancy way of saying that's the server that serves all that stuff up. And then you can then take those components, download them, and then drop them into Cursor. And so cursor for me being someone that's slants more technical is uh a better solution because I like to be in the nuts and bolts of thing how things are being built. Yeah. I would drop those components in there and then basically I could say okay put together this and actually create a real app behind the scenes here... I can connect up superbase and you know have a postcrest database tied to it and then I'm deploying everything out to GitHub which automatically gets deployed to versel which means I have an active app that's up and running.

And now the big unlock is you say that's great give me 20 other ways to do it that are completely novel unique and don't have anything to do with the first way and put them all on a single page and it's turnurning churning churning turnurning 3 4 minutes later you have 20 different ways now I click down that was a weird interaction go down the next Oo, that I like how that kind of zoomed this way and brought it off to the side. Whoa, that would No, that's not going to work. And you just keep going down and you're like, "Oh, I like number three and number eight." Yes. Give me 10 different ways to do number three and 10 different ways to do number eight. And now you're getting deeper and deeper. And you you you you take a little from here. We're going to like I like the zoom on number three, but I really like the fade on number eight. And this is the conversation you have with the LLM. And then by the end of the day, you're left with something that is truly unique and different.

See what I love about one, that's such a fascinating workflow, but also you're not thinking about ROI. You're not thinking about, oh, let me talk to the designer and ask them to come up with 20 variants. That sounds like a lot of work. I better prioritize. is you're instead just able to go infinitely deep on something seemingly trivial and have this level of kind of polish and craftsmanship which just wasn't justified 5 years ago. That's where we're going with software.

I will tell you that there are a Couple things I know to be true. One, I think engineering is over. I think we're going to be orchestrators of information, not engineers. I I think those will be solved problems. Anything where there is a non-subjective outcome, AI will tackle that and solve that problem. Like engineering is a solvable problem. Like if I want to fan out a million stories to a social network, that is not a subjective thing. There is a way to do that at scale, efficiently, and with the end result that we're all looking for. AI will figure that out. You won't need a team of 10 engineers to figure that out. It those will be solved problems. So, you know, I think there are certain things like that that I look to and like, oh, the world just hasn't woken up to this yet.

I want to quibble with your point about a CS degree. But first, I want to say that like so many good things in life are downstream of authentic curiosity. And I love that that's the way that you've done this, you know, cuz it's not some big brain sort of galaxy mind predicting the future thing. just like what gives me energy. ... I want to quibble about your point around CS degree because I actually think this is a really really important point. Um, if you're somebody that goes to Stanford or maybe Harvard or MIT, like those people are leaning into CS degrees in a big way. And unfortunately, I think this story has gotten out into broader society that CS is over, engineering is over. Like, sure, being able to write a certain kind of algorithm may be less value than it was 10 years ago, but being able to think technically is more important than ever. And I think it would be a real tragedy if especially kids that go to, you know, nonvy league schools decide not to do CS because CS is over. I think the value of being technical is higher than it's ever been. And while the future technologists may not be programming in the way that we are, like they're going to do something that needs that skill set.

I Well, I will say I think it's over. The reason I think it's over is because I would argue that creativity in the future is going to be more important than technical ability. And it's it's the we don't need to teach people SQL or or no one needs to learn these things in school. Like what I'm curious, let's crack that open a bit. What do you believe that a technical degree gives you that will be useful a decade from now?

a lot of it was systems thinking and I think the systems thinking is actually really important.

well that's really interesting because I think that's different than a classic CS3 one of the things that I like about some of these and they're largely kind of more the on the vocational school side of things when you hear about these programs and how they've evolved it is like training you to become an entrepreneur which is full stack. Building it, designing it, coding it, shipping it that depth of knowledge across the full stack which impacts marketing, creativity, you know, hiring, firing, like that full suite. Essential like it will of course be very important in the future. I think that just singular technical focus around, you know, the code piece of it, that's where I would like to see the degrees like loosen up a little bit and kind of be a little bit more holistic and overarching because I don't think and and don't get me wrong, there will be technical challenges that we have in the future, but I think if you get to scale as an entrepreneur, you will have plenty of everything to go solve those challenges, right?

The I I worry that um I worry about this trend of of always recording and and I I just feel like it Do you believe that this is going to be ubiquitous? Like do you feel like we're always going to be recorded like the future is one where you can't I mean there will be safe spaces but you can't largely find a safe space because every meeting you go to every dinner you go to like it it's always on.

Look I think that technology and social norms sort of adapt to each other in lock step. So yes I think there'll be more things recorded and I also think that we'll develop new social norms so that it can fit into our world. Right? Technology is downstream of what we need as a species in society and we've always adjusted. You know, we've always adjusted and I believe we will again. And right now we're in this awkward sort of transitionary period where, you know, if you're in a bar in New York, you're definitely getting punched in the face for recording. At an SF, like everyone's recording. So, it's it's just a moment of transition where society is not caught up with technology. But I do think we're going more in that direction than less.

it has to go there. I think the lossy nature of it in for people that don't know what we're talking about like a lossless would be every word verbatim record in a a diary somewhere that is you know one hack away from our personal conversation in the Uber being exposed to everyone that bothers me because you know as friendships and depth evolves you're like hey this was a tough thing I was going through or whatever it may be and like the fact that that is somewhere in the cloud is just bad I think it's bad for for all sorts of reasons but the idea of lossy is interesting because you pick up broader themes and if you can pull emotional context along for the ride where he says like hey we noticed that Anishh was feeling down about this. And I'm like, "Oh, let me send him a little something to like cheer him up because that was a great like call back to our conversation, you know." Totally.

I think it will. I think this is the interplay between social dynamics and technology. It's going to go there.