20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling the best products and product teams. Now, the real question is who's going to win? Is it Codex? Is it Clawcode? Or is it Cursor? Well, today, joining us in the hot seat, we have Alexander Embiricos, Product Lead for Codex at OpenAI. This is an incredible discussion. Time to get the notebook out. I want your feedback. Let me know what you think. harry at 20vc.com But before we dive into the show today, the early story of Atlassian is probably very similar to your own. Atlassian knows firsthand the challenges that startups face every day and that the right tools are essential to go from MVP to IPO. That's why Atlassian for startups gives eligible companies up to 50 seats free on the premium edition for products like Jira, Confluence, Loom, Jira Product Discovery, Compass and Bitbucket. So your team can use the best in class tools to plan, track and collaborate on work, whatever that work may be. Many of today's most successful startups like Cloudflare, Canva and Rivian relied on Atlassian for their growth trajectory. And Atlassian wants to give that same opportunity to the next generation of builders and investors. We know how important it is to focus on building the right things early. Whether you're in the sticky note stage or well on your journey, teams at any stage can work smarter together. It's never too early to start with Atlassian. Head on over to atlassian.com/startups/harry for more details and eligibility. After Atlassian helps your team build and ship great products, Intercom helps you support the customers using them. If you're looking for a way to transform your customer service, let me introduce you to Finn, baby. Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service, resolving up to 93% of customer queries automatically. There is no other agent that can do that, not 93% of customer queries, okay? No other agent can do that. So why choose Finn? Finn is the best performing AI agent for CS. Finn doesn't just answer questions, it takes actions. It automates the most complex customer queries, like refunds, transaction disputes, technical troubleshooting, with speed and reliability. I wish my team was speedy and reliable. Beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off, completely configurable and code-optional setup. My word. I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation. It works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs. It's trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support and give team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about FIN at fin.ai/20vc.
While FIN scales your support without losing speed, Reforge shows you how to translate that scale into durable product-led growth. Everyone's shipping faster than ever. Cursor, Claw Code, Codex, AI is making code and writing code faster than ever. But here's the problem. Speed means nothing if nobody uses what you ship. That's where Reforge comes in.
Reforge is building the product discovery engine that sits upstream of your coding agents. Not another prototyping tool, research repo or AI interviewer, but a product that will ingest your customer data, generate variations of product solutions, validate the solutions before code is written and hand off winning directions to your team. Reforge kills product debt before it starts because every unused feature you ship isn't just wasted engineering time, it's a maintenance burden, complexity tax and surface area that you cannot shrink. Used by product teams at companies like Toast, Vimeo, Klaviyo and many more, Reforge helps teams ship more features that actually get used. Try Reforge at reforge.com/build and use the code 20VC, that's 20VC for one month free of pro. You have now arrived at your destination. Alex, I'm so excited for this dude. I told you, I've been at a PE conference and all I could think was, thank God I've got Alex next because this is going to be a great one. So thank you so much for joining me, man.

**Alexander Embiricos** (4:20)
So excited to be here. Thank you.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:22)
Now, this is a weird first start, but roll with it. You'll understand my British intricacies. I'm fascinated by people's motivations. Are you motivated more by the fear of losing or like the thrill and excitement of winning?

**Alexander Embiricos** (4:36)
I'm a maximalist. I'm definitely much more motivated by the idea of winning than the fear of losing. But I'll admit to you something. When I was running a startup before joining OpenAI, and one of my darkest moments, and there were many dark moments while I was running the startup, was recognizing that I had spent the fast few months trying to avoid losing. All of a sudden, I was like, Oh my God, that is why I'm so unhappy. And that's probably why this startup isn't going well. You know, I basically, every now and then, I have to re-catch myself and like flip back into this idea of winning. But really what motivates me even more than that is I think I just love building things and building things for people. And man, I am so excited for this year because many amazing things that don't exist yet are going to be built and given to a lot of people.