Anish Acharya

So I say productivity porn to be provocative, but I don't actually think it's that.

i think that we have this new way of learning which is just trying things and you know the idea guys are sort of having a moment in fact it's funny like i'm like looking for new ideas to work on you know in the old days somebody would give you their app idea and you'd be like oh here we go again and now i'm like cool how about i build it for you right so i think there's this beautiful exploration that we're seeing that's never been possible before and there's a lot of value in that and then when it comes to consumer products i still think that consumer modes are as good as gold right things like network effects

They're not trivially reproducible by models.

Even if you can reproduce a software, it's not like Instagram has got software mode.

In 10 years ago, the good ideas weren't obviously good at the time.

Like what Systrom was up to at Instagram wasn't an obviously good idea until the network really started to take.

And then it was too late to reproduce the software.

So I don't think that the moat has ever been, it's like really hard to reproduce the software.

I think the moat is in part, every consumer idea is embarrassing to work on until it's obvious.

You know, it's like, it seems trivial.

It doesn't sound important.

VCs don't know what you're talking about.

Your family doesn't know why you're working on it.

You just feel this pull in a direction.

And ideally, when it works, the network runs away before people can replicate it.

Even at the time, there was so much noise in the ecosystem, right?

There was Bourbon, later Instagram, there was Hipstamatic, there was a dozen apps that all did roughly the same thing.

And it wasn't clear why Insta was special until it was clear in retrospect.

So I don't know.

I think that if you were to build Insta today, it would still be non-obvious until it was...