Victor Riparbelli
speaker
267 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Victor Riparbelli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Because it doesn't actually work or doesn't actually do the thing that you wanted to do. And so that's a problem because the AI startups think they're doing the right thing, they think they're delivering value, but at some point you're going to be hit by that wall of churn where all your 12-month contracts begin to phase out because you're not actually delivering value, right?
Are we seeing that wall of churn moment now? I think a lot of companies are seeing that big time, right? And I think what's very unique about it about AI the last couple of years is that people are extremely willing to part ways with their money. People don't mind like paying on a consumer level, like $30 a month to like try out something that looks cool.
Enterprise level, like sign for 50K pilot to do something. But the real signal is not that you sign a contract. The real signal is renewal. And I think there's too many AI startups who optimize or have optimized too much for like closing new contracts, not for the renewal, right? If you optimize for the new contracts, not the renewals, you
Unless you've hit the right thing, which of course some people do, then you're in for a whole bunch of trouble.
I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's how capitalism works, right? For a lot of money, a lot of products at the world, and you try to do like a million different things at once and you kind of see what sticks. And that's the right way to innovate, right? That's Darwinistic by nature.
But I think there's a lot of money that's going to go up in flames in AI products that either just aren't that valuable or things that eventually become features in some of the big cloud providers.
Buzzwords always take me out. When people say they're building AI agents to do all sorts of different things, that always lights up my bullshit detector a little bit. But I just feel like when you're overly obsessed about the technology and the latest buzzword, that's usually a yellow flag for me. Maybe I'll give you one concrete example. I really, really hate it when people call AI employees.
I think it's so dumb. I think it's not helpful to build useful technologies that people want to adopt. And I just think it's the wrong way of thinking about that you're going to have AI employees doing all sorts of different things for you. These are algorithms. It's a piece of software.
You wouldn't say that Miro or Figma is an AI employee that sits and takes people's design and put it onto something, right? I understand that it's because people think these things are going to be making decisions autonomously, but I just don't think it's that different from software that we already know.
I think in general, in the tech industry, we're very good at setting really high expectations and then not always meeting them. I always try with these hype cycles to stay positive but rational. What does that mean? Well, it means, yeah, sure, probably at some point that will happen.
I care most about what I know to be true today and in the next couple of quarters, and I'll adjust our strategy based off that. I think it's very clear we're going to have very capable AI that can produce software. I also think when I speak to a lot of developers that
I mean, we're not at the point yet where you just sit down and say, hey, build me, get the next social network with these functionalities. It just comes up with it. I think building software is a lot harder than that. And I think what we see a lot with, I have seen the last two years, a lot of cool demos. And that's great. That's a good start. But what we really want to see is this applied.
mass scale in production because you can prompt like a tetris game the browser or something like that that's great but if you look at most software out there today it's very complex and it's not just technology right a lot of humans it's customers it's feedback loops and i don't think we're anywhere near being able to um to automate those things but i definitely think that a great software engineer will be way more productive in the next 6 12 to 18 months but
You know, there's some podcast on point, especially 12 months ago. Also, friend, it's that, right? In the future, it's going to be, you're just going to go on to whatever LLM. You're just going to say, make me a copy of Monday.com. You're going to deploy it. You're going to sell it at one-tenth of the price. It's going to be great. And all the existing companies are dead.
And I think that's a really, really naive view of what it's like to build a business. Technology and lines of code is super important. But as you know, right, you've built your company yourself. It goes way deeper than that. And I think it really... For me, that's things that people who've never built operate a company.
For sure. I think what it'll come back to, as it always does, like distribution is king and great products are king. And of course, there will be new LLMs that'll be better and more powerful as everyone else excited to see what GPT-5 kind of has in store. But I do think we are seeing the commodization of the text generation layer, right?
For most of the use cases that we'll see LLMs transform the world as we know it today, I think the current generation technologies are good enough. It's about, of course, improving the base models, but it's a lot about like building the product, the scaffolding around it. I definitely think we are seeing that, right?
Like if we're seeing like X and Elon Musk catching up like pretty quickly and Frobic has a really great product. A lot of people prefer those models over OpenAI's. OpenAI has a huge distribution mode and I think they've really managed to capture like the consumer version of the world here. And that's definitely going to be really valuable.
But I think it's a lot of distribution of product from now on.
I would do X because I think there's the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. We've all heard of that data center that he built like 10 days or something, right? I think I would just never bet against Elon. And I think the upside potential there is huge. And I also think that the fact that he owns X is really, really powerful.
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