Skills
topic on 6 shows · 11 statements across 11 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
Startups For the Rest of Us 
Latent Space 
Lenny's Podcast 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 
20VC
11 statements about Skills, every show
Isenberg: Poor AI output stems from lacking tight skills and SOPs
“A lot of people use AI. And they get slop, and a big reason is they don't have tight skills.”
Howie Liu: Skills are the core primitive for frontier AI agents
“Skills are, I think, like, the most important concept or primitive in the frontier agents world.
Meaning, the models are generally intelligent enough.”
Rieseberg: Anthropic's skills feature originated from a simple markdown API prompt
“The thing that ultimately led to skills is that we wanted to connect this little prototype to our data warehouse. And the team very quickly discovered that like, instead of building a custom tool for the thing to talk to our data warehouse, They just, like, ma…”
Skills supply vertical domain expertise while MCP provides horizontal system connectivity
“What skills do, they like, they give you the domain knowledge for like a specific Set of tasks, like how you are, how you behave, how should the model behave as a data scientist, or how should the model this behave as an accountant or whatever. But MCP gives y…”
Isenberg defines skills, sub-agents, and MCPs in agent architecture
“A skill is like a written guide that tells, you know, Claude or You know, Codex or ChatGPT exactly how to do a specific task. For example, analyze spreadsheets this way, or write emails in this voice, or design you know, design the interface like this. So you …”
Chollet: Displaying skill across tasks does not demonstrate intelligence
“Intelligence is a process, and skill is the output of that process. The skill itself is not intelligence, and displaying skill at any number of tasks does not show intelligence.”
Seibel: VC skill is winning competitive deals, not theoretical thesis picking
“The skill is often getting the thing taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet and having feces about why one's going to do better than the other.”
Srinivasan: LinkedIn primarily infers user skills rather than relying on listings
“Certainly there's ways and the majority of ways that skills work is we infer skills”
Tristan Handy: Luck gets you in the game, but skill drives success
“I think that you need some amount of luck to kind of be in the game. Whatever it is, like, You need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's probably skill.”
Helen Ryles: Side project skills snowball to make idea validation easier
“The skills that you learn from one definitely snowball into the next one, and it gets easier to spot ideas and trends and patterns and pick up on ideas and collect evidence for a project that you think has a better chance of succeeding.”