Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
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There's a lot of fear and worry about the future with AI. I want to talk about this idea that if you fall behind, you're going to become part of this permanent class. It's a funny dark fantasy that we seem to have as Silicon Valley collectively. Like, things have never been better by almost every measure. This is a technology that really amplifies our agency. It kind of unbundles skill from desire. Not only can we dramatically drive productivity, we can dramatically drive ambition. Can you get too ambitious? Is there like a limit? In the old days, three years ago, we would see a company and if what they were trying to do was too ambitious, we would, you know, not engage. Today, we're almost seeing the opposite problem. An idea that's too small is not something that we want to engage with. Do you have this interesting take that company building more and more is going to become this kind of series of creating loops? We're going to see this sort of cascading set of everything from a loop per person to loops that can run large parts of the company. With that said, I think humans are a critical ingredient. The loop will help you climb to the local maxima, but then it plateaus. You need human intuition. You need somebody to actually help you land at the base of the next hill. We have this take that the big opportunity is this idea of loop make me happier. We believe that people want to be more productive, but they don't. I think more people want to spend time than save time. So I think that the opportunity for this technology is the basics of consumer need. How do we feel more connected, more loved? That we make progress? How do we have fun? I don't think it's a model or a capability challenge. It's just a product design challenge. Today, my guest is Anish Acharya. Anish is general partner at A16Z, where he focuses on consumer investing. He is one of the most insightful, thought-provoking, mind-expanding, in-the-weeds product investors I've met. He's been at A16Z for over seven years now, and unlike a lot of ECs, and why I loved having Anish on the podcast is that he is a longtime product builder and founder. He founded a company called Social Deck, which he sold to Google, and then ended up leading a number of efforts within Google. Then he started a new company called Snowball, which he then again sold, this time to Credit Karma, where he moved to VPR product and then GM of the broader consumer product, and the entire credit card business. This conversation will get your mind buzzing. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Anish Acharya.
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