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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Right now, AI has been so much about productivity, job replacement, work replacement. And I think we have a moment to shift that, which is how does these new tools help you get more out of your own day and your own life and the things you want to do? So it sounds like you're saying retention is still the most important metric. Is that true?
I mean, I think it's always been.
Chapter 2: How does AI impact productivity and daily life?
But you've been a part of really every product cycle, the big ones and the small ones, and now most recently leading product marketing for a lot of the AI efforts at Apple.
But one of the things I learned a lot at Apple was how do we tell a compelling story to regular people? One of those things that the moment you use it, you're like, oh my God, I can never go back to the old way. We forget that like technology is no longer the underdog. The parts of the products we've made are running the world.
You know, we used to say real life, but like online life is real life now. ChatGPT was amazing for a whole bunch of searches that we thought were totally solved through Google.
Chapter 3: What role does retention play in consumer technology?
And all of a sudden you start putting those searches into ChatGPT, you're like, this answer is more than 10 times better. This experience is more than 10 times better than Google links back and forth. And I think that's why ChatGPT pooled.
One topic that we discuss a lot is, are the labs just going to win it all? Should we all just go home? And I know it feels like we have a version of this conversation every time there's a new product cycle. What's your view? So I think a funny way to think about it is,
For more than two decades, Josh Ellman has been at the center of some of the most important consumer technology platforms in the world. From LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, to Robinhood, Discord, Musical.ly, TikTok, and Apple, he has spent his career studying how products grow, how people connect online, and why some technologies become part of everyday life.
Today, as AI reshapes the technology landscape once again, many of the biggest questions are consumer questions. How will people discover products? What new behaviors emerge? And what does the next generation of consumer companies look like?
In this conversation, Anish Acharya speaks with Josh Allman about consumer AI, network effects, product design, and why he believes we're entering a new era of consumer innovation.
Welcome back to the Andreessen Horowitz podcast. I'm here with a person that I've been friends with for a long time, I admire for a long time, was my investor for a brief time, and now I'm proud to call him partner, Josh Hellman. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this. It's going to be awesome, yeah.
So Josh, everybody sort of probably already knows him, but you've been a part of every important consumer story. I don't know if that's because you've been the catalyzing force behind them, or perhaps you're a good picker.
I like to think sometimes it's like just Forrest Gump showing up at the right place at the right time and being on the journeys. But it's been really incredible to get to be part of creating technology that we all use every day in our lives.
Yeah, I was reading some of the background. It sounds like you sort of set an intention at Stanford to be a part of the intersection of culture and technology, and you've kind of done that.
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Chapter 4: How can technology enhance human connection?
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I think my resume had this objective. It was like to create great technology that changes people's lives. As I think back on that, I'm like, I wish it was even more like benefits people's lives, that makes people's lives even better. Because I think changes lives, technology is kind of neutral.
But there's so much that we've done that's just tried to like make the world better, more connected, more human. Yes. And give us all these new tools and powers that we never could have had before.
But it's interesting because you came from a time, you know, when you graduated, technology was this sort of these weirdos in the back of the classroom. You know, it always felt like a toy. Yeah. And now it's something that is sort of some of the most important conversations in our society are about technology.
Yeah, they're about technology. They're happening through technology. Yes. I mean, we used to joke that if you got to like 10 million users, you were... impacting so many people in the world. And then it became a hundred million and then it became a billion and then it became billions every hour. And we forget though, technology is no longer the underdog.
Like the parts of the products we've made are running the world. It's like we used to say real life, but online life is real life now. I think it is sort of default. I think the pandemic proved that for us. Most of all, we kind of maxed out on how much you could actually do in the online life.
And there were so many things where we would meet over zoom and we would all have these conversations, even with like family reunions, birthdays and dinners, totally maxed out what that was. And I think what's been really cool as we've come out of that is so much of that has lasted and has made a lot of things more natural. And we still like to sometimes even connect over video.
But now we also are getting much more back in the real world, and technology can do a lot more, I think, to bring that together.
So before we get too deep into it, let me make sure I kind of frame up the background. So you've been a part of really every product cycle, the big ones and the small ones. So Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, now known as X, in varying roles there, which we should talk through, TikTok or Musical.ly. Yeah.
Discord, Robinhood, and now most recently leading product marketing for a lot of the AI efforts at Apple.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of discovery in consumer AI?
It's been a very interesting roller coaster. Yeah. But I'm so proud with what was just announced two weeks ago. Yeah. At WWDC, I mean, the story of what Siri AI is, and I'm using it every day and it's fantastic.
Yeah. So we've had a lot of intelligence over the last three years, but arguably less personal intelligence. Talk about the personal part. What does that uniquely unlock for you?
Yeah, and I think what's really special with these assistants is not just what they can help you do or navigate in the world and kind of bring world knowledge to place, but what they can understand about you. And it's not just what you ask it over time, but having access to all your information.
And when you trust it, your device has your mail, your messages, your calendar, notes, anything that you save. Being able to just Have an assistant that can tap into that and answer questions. I had this experience about a month ago when I was beta testing this and I was driving to a dinner.
Chapter 6: How do creators influence product discovery?
And I all of a sudden freaked out and I was like, oh my God, am I going to the right place? And I hadn't added it to my calendar. I just knew I was meeting a friend for dinner. We texted about it. I just said, navigate me to dinner. And it found that message and got me right there. And I was a few blocks off. I would have gone to the wrong restaurant because I just remembered it wrong.
This morning, I was trying to figure out where to park. And someone had texted me a whole bunch of different parking locations. I'm around and I just was able to go, hey, where should I park? And it just goes and finds the information that you know is there and pulls it together. And that's what you want from an assistant.
Yeah, very, very cool. Well, I'm on the product. I think it's fabulous. And it feels like it lives in a unique part of the consumer ecosystem, something that doesn't feel directly overlapping with the startup today.
No, I think that's right. And I think we've always kind of expected Siri to be great and understand you and understand everything. And I'm so glad I can't wait for everyone to get to play with it. Because I'm so glad of what it can do. But it also reminded me just how many more opportunities there are in the world.
Yeah, so maybe diving right in, there's been obviously a lot happening in the product cycle around AI, machine intelligence broadly. I'd say a lot of it, at least for startups, has been more B2B oriented than consumer oriented. What do you think is the sort of state of consumer today?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a really interesting spot. I mean, Chattoputhi in many ways is a consumer app and it's one of the biggest consumer apps that's come on like a storm just in three and a half short years. Yes. Because I think it's how do we navigate the world, the information that we have access to, things we want to do, places that we want to go spend our time and our energy.
How do we connect with other people? I think right now AI has been so much about productivity, job replacement, work replacement. And I think we have a moment to shift that, which is how does these new tools help you get more out of your own day and your own life and the things you want to do? And it's a massive paradigm shift in interface.
We haven't even all processed what it's going to mean when everything can start with natural language. When you get options and you're able to explore across
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Chapter 7: What opportunities exist for startups in the AI landscape?
a variety of options right there in a really dynamic interface that gets generated for you. You have an idea and you just want to create a little app or a website or an experience that's very personal to you and you can just express what you want. And every day I think they're talking about how you can create something from scratch. It's amazing. You can code in ways you never could before. But
Even if something's already coded and is working, you can tinker with it and ask it to be customized in a way that you want. And I don't think we've unpacked much of this for a consumer yet. I think most of the hard work and effort has gone into all these productivity tools. And I think there's a massive set of opportunities.
So maybe to wind it back to the social era, we had a lot of entertainment apps. We had a lot of social apps. We had a lot of connection apps. We're not seeing that today with AI. Is that like an ecosystem problem? Are founders just not interested in those problems? Why?
I think one part of it is some of us think a lot of those problems have been solved. We had to find ways in the early days of social networking with LinkedIn and with Facebook and then with Twitter, people didn't have a way to even connect. LinkedIn was like, you're going to put your resume online. We're like, what? I would never put where I've worked online. That's only if I'm looking for a job.
Facebook was like, connect to everybody you've met in high school and college and throughout your life. And we did. And then we figured out how best much more fluid that makes the world how you can get information that isn't just brokered through a few channels, but through the people you care about and the people you learn about and the people you're interested in.
We've seen a lot of the negative implications of that too. But I think on the positive side, we're so much more kind of connected to who we are and what we're interested in and what we can discover about the world. And so when you think of AI right now, you think of AI as just like short circuiting things you already do.
And that's a lot of people are building, but they're not exposing us to new ways to connect, new ways to get out in the world, new ways to solve problems that we're trying to solve in our lives, whether it's how to or everything else. And we're going to have to figure out those 10x things that replace some of those habits that we've already formed.
Yeah, it's interesting. I think a bunch about this sort of, you know, great man, great woman theory of history. And it feels like at least the intersection of technology and, you know, us as people has mostly been intermediated through groups, as you said, in social. And now we have a chance to kind of be that great man, great woman via this technology. It's a very different shape of it.
And that's not necessarily even just a comment on productivity. It's a different shape of entertainment and exploration as well. Like, what are the sides of yourself that are just totally undiscovered still?
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Chapter 8: How will AI shape the future of consumer products?
So, okay, so let me challenge you on this a little bit because there's something intellectually dissatisfying about creators being the next-gen channel versus the traditional networks. You know, in the old days, the old days, I mean, the value of the Insta network or the, you know, Facebook network or the X network is so powerful.
And you could argue that the ones who own those networks have sort of maybe abused their powers or used them in ways that benefited them more than the ecosystem. Creators just feels like a weaker form of that.
I find that they're the, like, the biggest form of that because actually most creators have earned their reputation based on trust and based on a trusted relationship. Now I remember in the olden days, you know, it'd be a very famous athlete that would then get up and go, I endorse this cereal. And you're like, there's no way that that athlete is eating that cereal every day.
Like they're just getting paid to endorse it in the commercial. But now when a creator says, here's my health routine, Or here's my travel routine, and I went here, here, here, and these two I liked, and this one wasn't as good. Like, you're actually, if you learn to trust them and build that relationship and follow them along, you actually believe it much more.
And yet, it scales all the way down. There are influencers in college, the ones who actually influence our college, the ones in high school, and they're always that. And so it's not, it is still about community. It is still about influencing your friends. But it is in there. I mean, Discord, for another good example, grew exponentially. all through influence, all through this kind of influence.
But it wasn't like these mass influencers. Sometimes it was streamers going, hey, we're playing on Discord now. But most of it was the person who gathers everybody for games would go, hey, I'm trying this new tool. It's way better than what we've been using before. Everybody jump on it. And that one person would bring everybody in their group that they played games with.
And then a few people would go, that was really cool. And I also play games with this group. I'm going to get this group on and then they'll do that. So that's even, you know, it's not a micro-influencer. It's a word of mouth. Word of mouth. Yeah, that's pure word of mouth. Yeah, I think it scales all the way down to that.
Yeah, interesting. So do you think then that that's the channel sort of for the AI native consumer products? Or are they going to is it going to be something like chat GPT apps directory or codecs? Or is there some other thing that's going to happen?
Well, I mean, I kind of brushed over this, but we always talk about virality and search and search was sort of the single purpose tool. I think we're going to be back in the same world where people are going to need this sort of spread, this word of mouth, whether that's accelerated through creators or just through individuals being so excited.
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