Network Effects, AI Costs, and the Future of Consumer Investing with Anish Acharya on The Kevin Rose Show
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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?
What has changed for me is, you know, someone that dropped out of computer science because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else. I always had the creative ideas, but my ADHD was too bad that I just couldn't remember all the syntax, and I was, like, like, thumbing through manuals back in the day, like, you know, trying to, like I had, like, the c plus plus bible or whatever they called it. You know?
When you're a child, nobody tells you, Kevin, you're bad at drawing or you're good at painting. The thing that I think we need more than UBI if we ever get to that place is universal basic purpose. And the way you actually get the French Revolution is less that people don't have enough money, that's part of it, and more that people don't have something important to work on. Like, everybody's gotta feel like they're on a hero's journey.
I was talking to my wife, and I was like, we're getting a lot of arguments about x, y, and z. What if I we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us, that understands what we like, how much we care about certain things, and then we just have our models go and, like, duke it out? And she looks at me, she's like, this is one of the worst ideas I've heard. Yeah. I'm just like
This episode originally aired on The Kevin Rose Show. When anyone can build a Slack competitor in a weekend, what actually makes a consumer startup worth backing? For decades, software moats meant engineering effort. When Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreger were hand coding Instagram's filters, copying them cost you months. That window is now forty eight hours. But Anish argues the moat was never really the code. When Hipstamatic and a dozen others launched alongside Instagram, it still wasn't obvious which would run away until it was too late. That pattern may hold, but the cost structure has shift
Anish, we're back. Nothing has changed at all, so I don't know what we're gonna talk Exactly.
How long ago did we do that episode together?
Four or five months?
And everything has changed.
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