So, how did the like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time?
I think in the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript — to get a little bit geeky — it was the first time, even though this sounds super archaic, that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response, and get something back into your browser. There was no way to just say, like, 'I think this is cool. Let me just tap on it and show my vote of interest on something.' And I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up, and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something? The way I see it is that this is a social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that will eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume.
All right, man. So, ketones. Am I going to go on a trip?
Uh, this is going to be a surprise for you. So, these are ketones that Tim Ferriss turned me on to.
Okay, we don't have to make it a plug in the podcast or anything. This isn't a show about ketones.
But I will tell you that when you hit this — so these are specifically made for, they're supposed to go in your coffee.
Now, you have to be careful here because you have to bend this like this and then it kind of shoots into your mouth and then you just chug it.
Have you ever had ketones before?
Okay. All right. Let's do this. Let's do this. Okay. So, let me show you how to do it. I'll do it first.
So, you bend like this.
What am I doing here? Okay, there you go.
Let's do it. Anish. Yeah. Wait, wait, no. No, wait. That's backwards. Let me see. Yeah, there you go. So, I had a friend do that and he shot it all over his chest. You don't want that before the podcast. Okay, take it back. Take it like a champion. Squeeze. Suck. You're going to notice a little bit of bitterness. Do you taste it?
Yeah. It's the worst. Now, this is going to give you brain power for the podcast. So, this is how we start the show.
Jesus, dude. It tastes like I regurgitated a Tylenol. Terrible.
It does taste like a chewed-up Tylenol. That's a great way to put it.
All right. So, we'll let that kick in. Anish, dude, I'm so glad we're doing this, brother.
Excited, man. Thank you. Thank you.
Before we get into the ketones kicking in, let's get a little bit of background because it's important. I know we're going to be syndicating this across a couple of podcasts. So, yeah, I was telling people who we are. We've known each other for a long time. We worked together at Google, a long time. We worked together at Google Ventures and Google Corporate, and yeah, man, we've been good homies for many, many, many years. No one's ever seen us on a pod together, I don't think, right? Like, we've never done anything. So, do you want to give a little of your background?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Thank you for having me, man. This is awesome. I'm Anish. I'm a GP at Andreessen. I've been friends with Kevin forever. I'm a product person. I'm an engineer. I'm a technologist. I started two companies. Probably having the most fun I've ever had, both personally, professionally, and all of that. And I'm excited to talk to everyone about it today.
Yeah, it was really cool when we first met. We both were — I don't know how we ended up there and got on Google+.
But we were both on Google+, and I remember working with you in the very early days. And I was like, oh, when you land into Google for the first time, you don't know what to expect, you know, because you're getting in there and you don't know, like, what is this whole thing going to be about? Like, who am I going to work with? And very quickly you realize there's fantastic engineering talent there. And then there's also product-wise, I was like, I don't know that these people actually live and breathe product. It was very much you're kind of in the Google bubble. But you were one of the first people I was like, oh my god, this is like an amazing product mind, and I got to work with this guy. And so we figured out a way to stay connected and work together, you know, when we bounced over to Google Ventures then, and yeah.
Well, dude, 'figured out a way' is generous. So, you saved my life. I remember I worked with you for three, four weeks, and what's cool actually is you joined and you're like, 'No, this is not it. I'm not doing it.' I'm like, 'What do you mean? What about vesting? What about Google+? What about this and that?' And you were just so sure, and you were right. You moved over to Ventures. And I remember at the time talking to you outside of that building, the Google+ building, and saying, 'Kevin, don't leave me behind, man. Please bring me with you, and I'll make you look good.' And that's a thing you say and you assume nobody will ever call you back after that. And then three months later you called me. You're like, 'All right, man. What's up? Why don't you come over here and do this with us?' And I mean, that single act of professional generosity changed my whole life.
Well, big shout-out to Chris Hutchins, who got us connected to Google — the mastermind who got us connected to Google Ventures. And then, of course, Bill Maris, who was running Google Ventures. And then, you know, I pulled you and Burka in, and we all got over there and had a great time at GV. Fantastic crew. I love those people. I thought Google Ventures was a great place. They're the best of us, you know. Bill had the best energy. I met my wife there.
I mean, everybody there was very good people.
Yeah. And then Krause is running it now, which is awesome to see. Like, he was such a great person to be around. I really enjoyed my time with David, and great to see him just turning that firm into an awesome — like, I look at the portfolio now since we've left, and he's built out a great suite of companies that are just top-tier.
It's legit, man. It's legit. Well, it's actually fun to see you in action as a consumer investor. I think so much of consumer investing and building is willingness to be embarrassed.
You know, and you did deals like Blue Bottle.
And I'm like, 'Kevin, what is this? A coffee shop with a stand in Hayes?'
How is this going to be a venture investment? And it was. And you were willing to be embarrassed by it. And you were so right.
Well, you're wrong a lot, as you know. Like, we're wrong most of the time.
Consumer stuff for you. So, what does your day-to-day look like at Andreessen? Like, it's a massive firm. How many total employees are at a16z?
That's a good question. Maybe 30.
The investing team's relatively small. It's probably 70. But it's actually nice the way the firm works because it's a collection of specialists. So, everybody who's there is the best in the world at what they do, both knowledge-wise and network-wise. So even though it's a large group, that's because we're all specialists pointing in different directions. So my consumer world every day is spending time with consumer founders. I spend some time with enterprise founders as well. Everything AI apps. So it's a mix of seeing companies, supporting founders on boards, and also playing with products.
Like, to me, this is the craziest thing. It's something that I learned from you, which is so many people just don't use the products. And how can you have intuition if you're not making videos on Sora or vibe coding? You know, there's just so much alpha hiding in plain sight. All you got to do is use the products.
Yeah. I feel like the last, call it five years on the consumer side has been relatively boring for me as an investor because I've looked at stuff and I said, gosh, you know, we got the bigs in the room. You got the TikToks, you got Instagram still dominating, and then you see some of the folks like Threads that are just like copying and somehow strapping on integrations with decentralized social, and that's supposed to be a thing.
But I hadn't seen anything that in my mind was that interesting. Like, it felt like consumer had this kind of down period of several years where there wasn't really anything new. And now that AI has come into the mix, I feel like there's a chance to kind of almost reinvent every piece of that framework. And do you feel that way as well? Like, AI is a shot in the arm for consumer?
100%. I mean, I'll give you the investor perspective and then the builder perspective. I want to hear yours. So from an investor perspective, this is like a renaissance for consumer investing. We haven't seen an opportunity like this, I think, since 2010, 2011, 2012, because consumers are downloading products organically. That hasn't happened in a long time. Consumers are willing to pay. Like, you look at the price points of the top products, right? The top ChatGPT SKU is $200 a month. The top Gemini SKU, Google Ultra, is $250, and then Grok is $300 a month. And consumers are actually paying that amount. I mean, how much do you think you've paid to Cursor?
A lot. Yeah. And some of that is professional behavior, but a lot of that is just consumer and hobbyist behavior.
So, I think that consumer is like back in a big way. And like the tech enthusiast consumer is excited in a way that they haven't been for 10 years. And when you look at the companies you just mentioned, though, they're largely the bigs. Like, one of the things that's happened in consumer that I never thought would be the case, that I was shocked by, is that bigs — like, you know, top-tier Fortune 100 companies — can put out consumer tech for the first time and actually see it get scale. It was always the bigs that couldn't figure it out. You know, they had to acquire Instagram to be cool. They had to buy the cool.
And I think with ChatGPT and actually with Google as well, with their Gemini model and whatnot, it's for the first time we're seeing the bigs put out consumer apps that are getting some traction. I mean, granted, they do have the scale, they have the install base, they can put that in front of a lot of people. But like we saw with the Google+ side, just because you have the install base and you have the eyeballs doesn't mean you're going to see success on the consumer side. That's right. And I feel like we're starting to see that with the bigs, which was kind of shocking to me. Did that shock you as well?
So in a sense, what the bigs have released are models, not products. And I think there's an important distinction here.
Notebook — Notebook, I would say, was the first time I was like, 'Wow, that was a zero-to-one kind of product that I actually still use frequently.' But it's not consumer-consumer. That's a little bit more business-slanted.
You're absolutely right, though. I think that Notebook was inadvertent, right? It was one of many experiments, and it worked. And, you know, not to take any credit away from Google, but I don't know that they said, 'Hey, let's design an incredible consumer product,' and they invented Notebook, right? So I do think that if you look at the models, the models are incredibly capable, and the bigs and the labs obviously are advantaged in certain ways with capital, etc., to build great cutting-edge models, and consumers love those models. So that's great. They're playing in that space. It's definitely relevant. But when it comes to opinionated products on top of the models — like Cursor is a good example, Character is a good example — companionship is actually a very interesting category where there's huge demand for companionship products. And a lot of these companionship products, like Janitor AI, you know, they deal with parts of the human experience that big tech is not going to be comfortable shipping, right? It's disagreement, it's sexuality, it's persuasion. So so much of this technology can address parts of the human experience that a thousand committees at Google and Facebook don't want addressed, and I think that is one of the interesting opportunities.
100%. I think that's well said, and I think it is the space where we need to invest because if you think about the pitches that we see on a daily or weekly basis, a lot of the stuff that I see can be a sanding down of the rough edges, and it can also just be something where I wholeheartedly believe that one of the bigs is going to dominate that category, and so I avoid those investments. Like, they will never touch the emotional side as much as they should or could — not 'should,' but that they wouldn't feel comfortable doing so, right? And so those are the categories and the verticals where I think they're defensible by the pure nature of what they're addressing, right? And so that's kind of what you're saying here, right?
100%. I just think they're structurally set up to kind of take the soul out of products. And when you talk about categories like companionship, the whole thing is the soul. There is no product without that. I think the other interesting area where the labs and the bigs are not going to be successful is products that benefit from being multi-model, right? Not multimodal, but multi-model. So Cursor is good because you can use every model inside of it, and Google is never going to ship with Anthropic models embedded. So that also is very interesting. They're sort of constrained to the models that they've developed in-house, and products that benefit from being multi-model are actually really unconstrained.
Very interesting. We should dive into each of these things. I think we have two great topics to go on. Let's pin the multi-model, but let's talk about companionship. So, on the companionship side, what do you believe should be built? What have you seen built? And how much of this do you think is fad versus depth? Meaning, it's funny and weird and awkward and strange to have an AI girlfriend. And I, in the early days — call it, well, early days, let's call it a year ago, you know, way back in the day.
Way back in the day. Yep.
A friend of mine was like, 'Hey, go check this out.' And it was not something that was, you know, X'd about or tweeted about. It was like this kind of thing that you went into. And I'll say that I went there and it was models unhinged, right? This is before Grok did it, and you could basically talk to a model and get any type of response that you wanted.
Meaning in terms of sexuality or whatever you were looking for, right?
How much of that are you concerned about in terms of shaping humanity, replacing real relationships? Like, what lens — how do you evaluate something like that? Do you invest in those types of things?
Yeah, this is such a great topic. I wish we had Eugenia here, who founded Replika, because she'd have a ton of thoughts. I mean, okay, so I'm always going to give you the optimistic take; it's just how I'm wired. So, let me give you a couple of my most optimistic takes. So one is, we all know the importance of human connection and the value of it. Maybe the human part is overvalued. You know, you live in an embarrassment of social riches. You have friends, you have professional connections, you have interesting people you can meet. They all want to connect with you, and your biggest challenge is prioritizing. I don't know that that's the experience of the average person in this country. You know, I think that there's a deep loneliness, and any progress we make towards addressing the loneliness is human progress and is very pro-social.
And I think progress, though — to have a conversation with a chatbot, do you think that starts to fill that emotional bucket up?
So you believe that when someone is having a conversation, they are getting a lift?
Probably 10% of what a real human would provide you, but a little bit of something.
I think more than 10%. I just think — look, it's like our lizard, reptilian brains. We are wired to have these sort of emotional chemical responses when you're engaged in a human-like conversation. We intellectually understand that these are computers on the other side, but you still feel the feelings, and I think that's what's necessary to make personal progress as a result of connection.
Do you believe — so, this is my concern. I'll play the doomer side of this. My concern is that one of the things I noticed with these models early on, while I'm playing with them, is that they were very agreeable. And emotional well-being and kind of the, I would say, the muscle that needs to be built is actually not when you're laughing and agreeing with friends and kind of going along with the flow. It's when there's disagreement and the discomfort that comes from the, 'Oh, I don't agree with you. That doesn't hit me. That doesn't feel right. Let's build a bridge and figure out how to find common ground here.' And if you're dealing with models that are just paid to agree with you all the time, then you're basically — so I'll give an example. I was talking to — well, I can call him out. So I was talking to Tim Ferriss about this. We were taking screenshots — I was taking screenshots of what this model was saying to me, and it was basically agreeing to anything that I put in front of it. I was like, 'Hey, what do you think about this?' And it was like, 'I'll do that with you.' And I was like, oh my god. Like, I couldn't believe it, right? And I'm sending it over to him, and he's like, 'We are doomed.' And his response, because you're not getting any pushback. And so then, okay, when you make the jump to a real relationship — okay, I want to have a relationship with a human — you're used to an agreeable, you know, kind of like this subservient thing, and the proxy and the jump doesn't make sense. And all of a sudden you're like, 'Well, that's not as good. I want to go back to my model.' Like, are we training people to want and favor agreeable models over real, you know, the real character-building that comes with the emotional side of things?
I don't know. I think we just need to dial it in. Like, everybody knows a human relationship where the other person always agrees with you is not authentic and it doesn't nourish you. You need to have the tension, the disagreement, the exploration. I mean, we've got to be fair to where we are in the cycle.
Yeah, ChatGPT was November 22, right?
Right. It's not even November 25. And we're trying to dial in the entirety of human connection and experience and find the right place between not being a sycophant but not being, you know, disagreeable for the purpose of it. We're dialing it in. We're going to get there. And again, because we're so wired from an evolutionary perspective to know what is the right amount of tension, I believe our intuition will guide us. We'll get there.
I like what you're saying because we've talked about this on the car ride over here, where if you just for a second imagine we are in the huge brick cell phone era of AI, where it's like this is the very — not even the first inning, like we're just stepping on the field of this. Because if I mean, imagine 20, 30 years from now, we're going to have a much deeper understanding of what's going on behind the scenes here, what is required to make — and we're expecting that on day one, and the expectations are like so high. It's like, let's give it some time, you know.
The trough of disillusionment is real, you know, and our expectations are high.
I also think that this — I'm glad we're talking about companionship, but I think broadly we've had 40 years of technology that extended our intellect and our minds.
Right. But most of the human experience is actually emotional and it's subjective. Now we have a technology that extends our emotions, our subjective experience, and it can address that. Like, I love AI spreadsheets. I'm glad that somebody is building them, but to me that's the least ambitious execution of the primitive. Let's start to really address the human experience through this next new technology. And I think that's where all this goes, you know.
Yeah. Well, it's early days. We'll see what's — I'm certainly looking at those startups. I think along the lines of there being a therapist or a counselor, somebody on the back end that can, you know, give you this partner to bounce ideas off of and kind of push you into best practices. That's really interesting to me. I don't know if you've looked at any of those types of startups.
Yes, I've looked at a few. I mean, I do think that's interesting. By the way, the ketones are kicking in.
You feel that? Isn't it amazing?
Yes. Yes. Is it just caffeine?
No, it's not caffeine. It's like full-on — I'll send you the thing about ketones, but they're a natural fuel source that is not caffeinated.
I mean, I'm definitely feeling something.
Yeah. Well, okay. So, I think yes, you know, therapy, companionship, all that stuff makes sense. I actually think there's a really interesting emerging category. So, you see this with Poke — that's a great example of it. Hux does some of this as well, as well as Sina's new company. We both spent time with him. Where I call it like indirect companionship. So what is Poke? Poke is kind of this, you know, subjective human front end to your email. You know, email is like a set of tasks, and it's pretty heavy, and it's functional work that we have to do. And Poke creates this human overlay on top of it. And in a sense, I don't consider Poke a companionship product, but it's letting me interact with a functional part of my life through an emotional interface. I think that's actually a really interesting area for exploration. We are emotional beings who have been taught for the last hundred years to do functional work. Like, what does it mean to kind of return to our roots and still do functional work, except through an emotional filter?
Yeah. Can you talk about Poke a little bit? Like, what's the onboarding like, and why are people talking about it?
Yeah. It's so wild. I encourage everybody to try it out. So you download Poke. One interesting thing they've done is actually the interface is iMessage. So you're texting with it. So, of course, in iMessage you're typically only texting with people, subliminally setting you up to expect the Poke product. First, it refuses to allow you to sign up for the product. So, you've got to convince it that you deserve to actually use the product. Then, you engage in this negotiation on price where it starts at $200 a month. It reads all of your email. So, of course, it can say, 'Hey, Kevin, I saw you bought XYZ. You know, you're spending a lot on your ketones. Like, I think you can spend $200 a month on this product.' And there's a real tortured negotiation to get the price down. So by the time you get in, even though it hasn't done anything for you except sort of torture you, you've already got this perception of value, right? And it's just a very interesting experiment in onboarding. And I think if you extrapolate it, it's an experiment in product design in an era where we have emotional primitives.
Yeah, it is fascinating. Like, I love product builders that consider every step of the process from sign-up all the way through onboarding to you name it, and they rethink the entire stack.
Right. And this is an example of just something that I don't know if that's the long-term best strategy for a product like that, and to negotiate kind of SaaS software in real time. Yeah. But, you know, that alone, that little tiny feature is a great example of something that went, you know, kind of viral within a small subset, and I'm sure led to tens of thousands of signups.
Just from people talking about that feature.
And we're talking about it now.
Right. Exactly. That's right.
But I think that is like such a — just for the product builders out there, it's such a great little way to wedge yourself into the conversation by rethinking part of that step, you know.
I've got actually a related question for you. So you've both designed, you've done a lot of new product thinking, and you've spotted a lot of new product thinking. Like, how do you do it? What are the patterns? How did you sort of see it all of these times?
I think that on the product side, what I've always been drawn to is, for better or worse, the novelty of original thought in certain areas. If it's something that — we've talked about this kind of sanding down of the rough edges, like that to me is not that interesting. But I really respect people that are building something like this price negotiation, where I just haven't seen it done before, right? It doesn't mean that it's going to, you know, be a top-10 app and it's going to be a multi-billion-dollar company. But if you find that signal in someone, a builder's brain, that means that they're going to apply that signal to other parts of the product that they're building.
Interesting, meaning that they will continue to reinvent and reimagine things through a lens that nobody else has.
And that to me is enough signal to say, okay, we will probably turn over a card at some point that is the magic card that is going to get us that home run or that massive product, right? So I value that almost above all else. Like, even if the idea isn't the one where I think is going to hit scale.
Yeah. If you have a founder that builds through that framework of, okay, I'm not going to just do this just because everyone else has, or I'm not just going to take the path of least resistance and kind of, you know, build a better Slack or whatever it may be. Like, to me that is very rare to find, and when you find it, that's the type of person that I want to — especially at the seed stage when you don't know what's going to work — that I'd like to back.
You know, that's super interesting because one of our observations is that it's just really hard to predict consumer seed.
And we haven't done a ton of it for that reason. In fact, our stated sort of approach is weird and working. That's how we've tried to invest in consumer. Yet you have been consistently right at consumer seed investing. It's interesting that that's what you look for.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's exactly right. Weird and working. Like, I look for weird first.
And then if it starts to have a little bit of smoke, like that's a very interesting signal. And then oftentimes I've seen founders do this a handful of times where weird and working ends up failing, but they still have the weird because that's in their DNA. So they'll build the next weird and working, right? And that's what you want because they're going to need several shots on goal. And as long as you can't manufacture the weird — the weird is internal. The weird is 'I just see the world in a different way,' and that is the founder that is going to win.
Why is weird important? Because in a world where you need attention, well, we've talked about this socially in terms of what draws you in and what draws people into consumer products. Consumer is a finicky category because after a certain amount of time, what was weird and working ends up being boring and stale, right? It's the reason why Digg is no longer here. It's the reason why there's a thousand startups that have — you know, MySpace or you name it, or Snap, or whatever the next one is — will turn out and become old and stale. And so if you want to find the next thing, and consumer is often — you play with something and the aha moment is, 'Oh, I hadn't thought of that,' or 'I didn't feel this. I've never felt this way before.' I'll never forget when, you know, I did the investment in Twitter way back in the day, and the thesis for me was very simple for me to see because we had had bidirectional relationships for the longest time. And what I mean by that is the MySpaces and all the social platforms that had come before it had this idea of friendship, and it was, okay, in order for me to get invited into your world, I would friend you, you would get a request and be like, 'Oh, Kevin friended me,' then you would grant me the permission to see what you were up to, right? And the beautiful thing about what Jack and Ev did, and Biz over there, is they said, 'Okay, we're going to take that and just open it up and say actually you can just broadcast out and say I have something important to tell the world, and everyone can follow it whether they know you or not.'
And it was that one simple little product tweak that said, 'Okay, it's no longer about bidirectional communication. It's about this idea of broadcast to all,' right? And when you see something like that, it unlocks not only a massive product opportunity, a market opportunity, because that's the way that, you know, you'll never become friends with the celebrity, but you can sign up for their broadcast, right? And so that was very interesting. But I think that is the weird thing. It seemed odd at the time.
Was it weird? I was going to ask.
Yeah, it was weird. It was like, oh, because I remember signing up for Twitter for the first time and just being like, okay, well, what do we do here? And they have this thing called following. And I'm like, what is the following thing? You know, that — and it sounds so obvious now, but it was weird at the time. And I think that is going to be so important for consumer because what does seem weird at the time eventually becomes mainstream, and then everyone just assumes that that was always the case, right?
Yes. And that's what I'm looking for is that weird thing that will eventually become so mainstream that we'll assume that that was always a primitive that existed forever, when in reality it was like new and novel at that time.
Does that make sense at all?
It makes perfect sense. It's very, very interesting. You know, it's also that founders have to push themselves to the edge of being embarrassed, potentially.
To design genuine new things. Otherwise, it's very derivative. You know, it just has to be. And that is what all the X-for-Y companies typically are.
Right. Exactly. Like when you and I were at GV and we did the Uber investment, how many startups would we say that, like, 'I'm the Uber for this,' and you're like, oh god, another one, right?
And then yes, there are the DoorDashes and some of the others that are built on similar primitives, but it's nothing like it. It was so weird to get into the back of somebody's car. Do you know how odd that was? I remember hailing an Uber and being like, 'Okay, someone is pulling up at my house, and I'm going to get in the backseat of someone I do not know.'
Every day when we took the ride over here, we didn't even bat an eye. We didn't even look at the guy and be like, 'Are we safe here?' It was just a given, right? But it was so awkward at the time.
Well, so this is what I love about that era. We talk about that era as a part of...
history and we say, 'Oh, it was early mobile and it was, you know, remote control for the world and software was eating the...' We have all these things and they're all true and they're all valid. The most interesting part of both Airbnb and Uber were there were these dramatic changes in human behavior.
We had all been raised being told two things: never get into a stranger's car, never sleep on a stranger's couch.
Yes. Yes. Exactly. You know, and then all of a sudden you started doing it and guess what? The strangers were kind of pleasant.
Yeah. And it was just this incredible unlock for the world and this sort of like, I don't know, this sort of positive view of human trust and strangers.
That was a big change in consumer behavior.
Yeah. And that's so exciting because I think we're going to see more and more of that. One of the things that I've done — I'll just be a little bit vulnerable and transparent because that's what's fun about podcasting. One of the things that I get in a lot of trouble for is if I get in a disagreement with my wife, I will take some of that to ChatGPT and be like, 'Am I right here? What's going on?' You know, and I call and I say, 'Use the framework of Terry Real.' I use some of these like professional therapists and say, 'Help me analyze this.'
The mistake I make is I paste that back into the conversation. But the point being is that's weird, awkward. She didn't like it. She's like, 'Hey, this isn't cool. You're going to this like — you're — she calls it my bot. You're chatting with your bot about our relationship, blah blah blah.'
But I've talked to enough people now where I know this is a trend. People are looking to AI as a validation of a, you know, help me through this level of thinking here. Help me figure out, am I in the wrong here? What am I doing? Blah, blah, blah. I see a world where the bot is in the room with both of us as we're having a chat conversation or as we're on video or as we're debating out something, we're like, 'Oh, this is heated. Let's turn it on. Let's let it watch us.' And then give us feedback on how we're doing as a third party kind of like, you know, hopefully unbiased person thing that is sitting there and evaluating this in real time. Is that weird and awkward right now? Absolutely.
To your point about how these things evolve over time — 10 years from now, will that tech be good enough to where we'll consider that to be not like just like a healthier thing for our relationship? I think so.
100%. I think that's coming. I mean, ideally, the Alexa in your kitchen is passively observing your family and then perhaps is just letting you know like, hey, you know, your daughter was trying to talk to you about something you weren't really paying attention.
So, there's all of this stuff that can just be in the oxygen around us and today that seems unusual. What about a kid's classroom? My son goes to an amazing school, I'm very grateful for it, where they have two teachers. One teacher is focused on academics, one on SEL, social emotional learning. Like, what an amazing thing for every school in America to have. And the way we're going to get there is not by paying for two teachers in every classroom. It's probably some kind of a vision model that's privacy first that can observe the social interactions of children and let parents and teachers know what's going on.
This idea of always on recording — you and I have had a debate about — do we want to get to the multimodal thing real quick though before we go in there? Let's, let's...
We should. I also want to get, since we were talking about internet history, I want to get your take, your story that you've told me I think privately about the dig button, the like button and the story there.
Yeah, we can talk. Where do you want to begin? You want me to talk about that?
We're in a history and like tell me, you know, the dig button was a very new and interesting idea. Social news talked about — I think we're sort of in a safe place 20 years later. Yeah. Talk about how it influenced the like button.
So, how did the like button come into existence? What was it like back during that time? I think in the early days when we first had something called asynchronous JavaScript — to get a little bit geeky — it was the first time, even though this sounds super archaic, that you could actually click a button, send out for a server response and get something back into your browser. It used to be a world that we'd have to refresh the page to see anything.
And so this idea that content could talk to a server and come back to you and display something new was just completely exciting and novel at the time.
And so I had seen a bunch of sites that were allowing for user submissions like Slashdot, but they wouldn't show you what content had been submitted. So it was like user generated content in some sense, but there was still a gatekeeper to that. There were social bookmarking sites like Delicious and others that would count the number of people that had bookmarked things, but there was no way to just say like, I think this is cool. Let me just tap on it and show my vote of interest on something. And so when Digg launched in late 2004, it was the first time that I had ever seen — just because the Ajax had just been out for a couple months — that anyone had voted on content. And obviously I didn't invent voting, but no one had done it on the web. And I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if you clicked something and you saw the number go up and that number was the number of humans that actually had clicked on something. So, wisely, just by luck, I just happened to be in contact with enough people to where they were like, 'Hey, you should go out and file a patent on this.'
And so, I went and filed a patent on it, not because I wanted to enforce our own liking, but I was told and advised to do that because you want as a defensive practice so that no one can say like go out and patent it — one of the bigs — go out and patent and say, 'No, you can no longer do this.' Even though I had, you know, first use rights and so I would have been able to do it, but I went and did it, which was great. And that started off and it became really big and at that time we were larger than Facebook and so traffic-wise.
And Mark and I shared a common investor in Greylock. And we just had a lot of overlapping friends and he was like, hey — like actually it was David Z from Greylock that was like, hey, you should meet Mark, you guys should hang. And so we went out and grabbed dinner and we hung out a couple times. We had dinner a couple times and he came to my office. He drove up and came to the Digg office and I'll never forget because he came into the office and he was so young at the time and so was I. No gray hair back then. He was sitting on the ground and just like wouldn't sit in a chair. He was like sitting on the ground. We were just talking about what it meant to — what liking was all about, what digging was all about. And I was like, well, the way I see it is that this is social signal that will feed back into an algorithm that eventually give you more stuff that you would like to consume. And that was kind of the patent that I had gone and filed. And Mark didn't have this at the time. There was I think there was a way to poke someone on their profile, but that wasn't really a like. It was just to say what's up. And then a few months later, they had rolled out the like button and that was kind of like a big part of what they pushed as a similar thing, like a social signal to feedback into the algorithm to give you better content. They obviously hit a scale. I mean, we were at the point serving billions of dig buttons per month, because we had them integrated into — you could actually put a widget into your site back in the day and there used to be dig buttons all over the internet. But, you know, it was cool. I was never offended by that. I was like, 'Oh, that's awesome.' He made it his own, called it like, and it made sense to apply that to what he was doing.
