The Ledger, every show

“I think that there are businesses that will be built by, you know, a hundred billion revenue, one person.”

“The like single person, a hundred million run rate company is coming, or maybe it's already here.”

“But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto catalytic effects, which just means you're using …”

“Like the line of reasoning for that case is always everything up until now, then something happens that no one can quite articulate and then fast take off. So I don't believe that that's going to happen.”

“In a world where every story gets told, every product story gets told, every feature gets tried, I think a lot of PMs are going to realize they're actually not that good at zero to one. And it's much more fulfilling to work on someone else's good idea than you…”

“Well, I, you know, here's the one thing I would say that here's the hopeful point, which is I always say that nobody has a growth problem these days. They have a product problem.”

“There is a case for a company that raises a hundred million dollars, uses it productively and in a focused way, and is able to deliver a different value proposition than the very same team would be able to do with 20.”

“I think the black pill is I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function.”

“The general story that we're going to vibe code everything is flat wrong, and the whole market is oversold software.”

“For the record, I don't believe we're in that period, but I do think that any time you have this sort of superheated markets, you have some distortion, okay?”

“I've never lost a deal.”

“The way we're going to get there is not by paying for two teachers in every classroom. It's probably some kind of a vision model. That's privacy first. They can observe the social interactions of children and let parents and teachers know what's going on.”

“There are no marketing problems, only product problems because the technology allows you to be so ambitious on behalf of your customer.”

“Do people really want to be friends with an AI and is that good for our society? And I think like yes and yes.”

“I think the other thing that's under discussed Lenny is, you know, how many problems are truly intelligence bound? Like if you add a, you know, a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's pizza, are they going to be like exponentially dominating supply …”

“Anecdotally, I talked to a good friend who's an executive at Google and I said, Hey, have you laid anyone off? And he said, No, we didn't. What we instead do is now rip through our roadmap. So two years of roadmap happens in three months. And we're actually, o…”

“We've seen one thing, Lenny, it's that the Ability for models to do new thinking out of distribution thinking is still really limited, and I don't actually take the point that some of the new thinking in math is actually representative of new thinking in domai…”

“The loop will help you climb to the local maxima, but then it plateaus, and you need some sort of out-of-distribution thinking, you need human intuition, you need somebody to actually help you land at the base of the next hill.”

“I think what we're going to see is a split between job functions that demand kind of mid IQ intelligence, and those will often be open weight, sort of biased with reinforcement learning, you know, things that make the models even cheaper, more performant for a…”

“I think that we believe that people want to be more productive, but they don't. I think more people want to spend time than save time.”

“Chat makes sense if you're the highest agency person in the world, which is Elon and Sam. But for the average consumer, like their ideal interface is TikTok. So we need to find something between chat and TikTok.”

“The sort of concept of the model that's too dangerous to release it kind of conflates marketing inference capacity, and then also economic considerations, like, do you want to externalize your competitive advantage or use it to make yourself better?”

“The majority of people using companion products are women that are in their forties and fifties, actually.”

“Moats are most often discovered, not designed.”

“I think that we would happily take a bet on a product that doesn't have a quote unquote moat or durability story. If it has, you know, a lot of momentum, a lot of craft, a lot of, you know, sort of growing engagement.”

“Gemini, despite all the kind of heavy cross-selling Google has done, nobody would say they're winning.”

“I think today we're almost seeing the opposite problem where, you know, an idea that's too small is not something that we want to engage with, and you can talk about how you put a hundred billion dollars to work in the seed productively.”

“Because price is a measure of product market fit, a really useful product exercise is what is the Birkin bag, 10,000 a month, thousand a month version of our product.”

“And now that people are making music again, I think the music industry is going to be bigger than it's ever been.”

“I'm a many winners guy, and I see I'm in a, yeah, I'm in good company with many of you. I mean, if you look at what's happened in the last two weeks you know, XAI went from not even being a real contender on the model side to being, you know, one of three, so …”

“And if you look at some of the underlying indicators, what they point to is essentially infinite demand and highly constrained supply, you know, things like B 200, which is a non sort of cutting edge GPU prices going up on a per hour basis. That is very strang…”

“There are a couple of moats that are exposed. For me, the integration moat is the most obvious one. You know, SAP is, is so famously complex to integrate into and out of that. It's a sort of existential risk to even migrate from one version of SAP to the next.…”

“We really think that the kind of rational architecture and the one that is emerging is that for jobs that have unlimited upside, like sales or product, you always want to use frontier tokens. And the reason for that is you just don't know what the value of the…”

“If you actually have a problem that you can specialize the model around with your reasoning traces, You can start to create this compounding advantage in your domain for your customer base, where you're able to kind of shape the intelligence to be better than …”

“This is a place where the application layer really shines because labs, of course, are both incentivized and structurally only able to provide their own in-house models. You as an application sort of aggregator can provide the best of breed.”

“There's no app store for AI. So this actual product cycle for consumer looks more like Web two point O, where you have to kind of build the channel alongside the product and less like mobile, where you actually have the central point of distribution for the en…”

“I think if we lived in a world of twenty-twenty-three when it was one model to rule them all, it wouldn't even matter if you had permission, because the labs would just take a hundred percent of your gross margin over time. But now, because you've got many opt…”

“I think there are a set of products that labs are just culturally not set up and big tech not set up to go after. You think about launching, you know, a companion product at Google that may disagree with you, that may have sexual innuendo in it. Like these are…”

“I think we're going to have this luxury software. We're already seeing willingness to pay for it.”

“I don't think we're allowed to believe in luck at Andreessen. We have to see a hundred percent of the deals in our domain, and that we win a hundred percent of the deals that we go after.”

“I looked at the data this morning, and if you look at SaaS, public market SaaS companies, 75% have raised prices since ChatGPT was released.”

“But now with coding agents, the complexity of transitioning from SAP to Oracle is dramatically lower, the speed, the risk. So that is how I think coding agents shows up in enterprise software, especially amongst public names. Decrease switching costs, more cus…”

“If you said something like, you know, software movies or AI movie making or sort of AI assisted movies, that's just not a category in which there is an incumbent, and I'm betting that a native company will actually win that. It probably won't be Adobe.”

“They're all innovating roughly in lockstep. 80% of what they do, I think that they're actually substitutes for, and then there's the open source models, which also do the same things. And then in the 20%, which arguably is where a lot of the value is, they are…”

“Because you live in this world of multi-model, where for some use cases they're substitutes, for some use cases they're actually specialists, there's a lot of value in having an aggregation layer, and that is the apps company.”

“The desire and demand for software, both to make it and to consume it, is dramatically more than the supply that we have today, and I think there is a developer and developer adjacent archetype for whom Cursor is going to be perfect, Codex as an app, Codex as …”

“So I think that there is a pocket that startups can really thrive in, which is building these weird products that really touch on many core aspects of humanity that the models can reflect, but the big corporations are uncomfortable.”

“I think it does the exact opposite. I think people are able to be more self-reflective and explore aspects of themselves And human relationships that they often just don't have another person to explore these things with.”