20VC: Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms with Harrison Chase, LangChain

Harrison Chase (0:00)

I think absolutely it's worth taking it to start for Sequoia and Benchmark. We spend probably roughly 30% of our engineering salary on coding tools. It's actually gone down the last two months, while tokens, the number of tokens that we've used has actually gone up. I think I really underestimated the demand for inference. Everything just works. This market is so big. There's just so much demand for it, and I don't know if it's gonna get less anytime soon.

Harry Stebbings (0:21)

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I remember sitting down with my friend, Miles Grimshaw, when he was at Benchmark, and he said about this incredible founder he met, Harrison, the founder of LangChain. It's since become a multi-billion dollar company. It is a leader in the ability to create and monitor your agents. And today, we welcomed him to the hot seat to discuss why it is so hard to build agents today, what no one knows that everyone should know about what is coming with agents. And then, my favorite, some really kooky predictions, which no one else believes will happen, but he knows will definitely happen. This and so much more in the show today with Harrison. But before we dive into the show today, what do Uber, Cursor and Harvey have in common? Well, they made the really wise decision to build on Fireworks. Fireworks is the specialized intelligence platform behind many of the world's leading AI products. Companies use Fireworks to deploy the latest open models, specialize them with their own data, and run them in production with the speed and reliability modern AI applications demand. But getting models into production is only the beginning. As AI usage scales, the best model for one request isn't always the best model for the next. Well, that's where Fireworks Nexus comes in. Nexus connects to the AI coding tools and harnesses your engineers already use, and intelligently routes each request to the best model for the job, helping you optimize for quality, latency and cost without changing how your engineers work. To see intelligent model routing in practice, visit fireworks.ai/20vc to create a free account and use the promo code 20VC50 to claim $50 in credits for 20VC50. While Fireworks powers AI, Louridan helps you measure its impact. Every company now runs two workforces, humans and AI agents. Louridan is the first unified dashboard across both workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Louridan answers four questions. Who's using AI? Which tools? What is it costing? And was it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AI ROI stops being a guess and becomes a number that you can consistently and confidently measure. Gainsight, Vertiv, SurveyMonkey and many other enterprise organizations run their AI programs on Louridan. Thousands of AI tools and millions of dollars of AI spend are measured. You bet on AI, Louridan proves that it's working. Visit louridan.com to learn more. That's larridin.com.

While Louridan tracks AI impact, Superhuman helps you move faster. Can I be honest with you for a second? Here's what my week actually looks like. Back to back meetings all day and the real pressure builds up in the gaps between them. I'll come out of six founder meetings with a whole stack of follow ups waiting. And my inbox, it's hundreds of messages. And somewhere in there is the one thing that really matters, which I always tell my mother is her.

I've tried AI tools for this, but they always lived in another tab. I'd have to stop, go find it, paste in the context, write the perfect prompt. It was just enough friction that it never really stuck. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly, totally different. It's right there where you need it, when you need it, in the doc, when I'm reading, the email I'm writing. When a thread gets dense, I highlight it and ask Go to pull out what matters without losing my place. And after a run of back to backs, I ask what was actually decided and Go turns it into clear action items or drafts, the reply I need to send. It's already up to speed and I'm always the one in control. Try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly and find out more at superhuman.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Harrison, dude, I'm so looking forward to this. I've been looking forward to it for a while because I remember Miles telling me about you when he was at Benchmark and just singing your praises. I wanted to make it happen for a while, so thank you for joining me.

Harrison Chase (4:23)

I'm excited to be here.

Harry Stebbings (4:24)

For those that don't know, 60 seconds, what is LangChain and where do you sit in the stack?