Automating Developer Email with MCP and Al Agents

**Zeno Rocha** (0:00)
When you go to all these different apps, you go to SuperBase, the majority of databases you see there were built by humans. You go to Resend, the emails were sent by humans or drafted by humans and then sent programmatically. I think we're going to see a big shift in terms of who is the actor, who is the creator. And I believe it's going to be the majority of the actions will be taken by agents instead of humans. And that's just the reality we're going to live in. So we have to rethink the way we're building product to support that reality.

**Derek** (0:30)
Thanks for listening to the a16z AI Podcast. I'm Derek. And if you listen to the episode we published yesterday with a16z's Joe Schmidt and 11x's Prabhav Jain, I hope you appreciate the double dose of us this week. This one, featuring a16z partner Yoko Li and Resend founder and CEO Zeno Rocha, is particularly fun and particularly timely. They also dive into the topic of AI agents, although with a much more developer centric lens. Hitting on the growing importance of building for agent experience, the rise of MCP as a connective tissue between AI models and products, and how the generative AI prosumer experience will translate into better designed and more quickly built email templates for everyone. And Zeno shares his harrowing story of hospitalization and laptop theft that resulted in the creation of the popular Dracula theme for code editing tools. It's a great discussion that you'll hear after these disclosures. As a reminder, please note that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice. Or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Yoko Li** (1:40)
Recently, we've been seeing a lot of agent-centric applications, and then developers kind of utilizing LLMs to build new experiences. And then what's interesting is that a lot of the developers I met, they were like, well, nowadays, not only do I need to build services for humans, where DX is top of mind, they now need to build experiences for agents. You know, as a founder in this space, who's been building, you know, developer experience for, you know, all spectrum, all across the spectrum. What's your high level thoughts here? What have you seen?

**Zeno Rocha** (2:16)
Yeah, I've been obsessed with developer experience, you know, for the past 10 years. And now, you can see that there's a shift, and there's a new obsession for me when it comes to agent experience, you know. As a product, as a SaaS provider ourselves, we are thinking about how we can make the product easier for agents to consume. So even like small things like adding reCAPTCHA on the sign up to prevent bots, now you have to think, do you really want to prevent bots from signing up? Maybe you don't, right?

**Yoko Li** (2:49)
Yeah.

**Zeno Rocha** (2:49)
And same as an infrastructure provider. So Resend is an email API for developers. It helps people send transaction and marketing emails. So I'm also thinking a lot about, okay, how can we make the experience of these agents sending emails the easiest as possible? So there's a lot to uncover on each spectrum of product when it comes to making it more agent friendly, but it's fascinating. We're all trying to figure out right now.

**Yoko Li** (3:17)
Agent experience is such an interesting term. Because when I hear the term agent experience, I wonder, is this a developer experience but for agents, or is this a developer experience that's better for the end human developers to build agents, or perhaps it's somewhere in the middle? How would you define the term?

**Zeno Rocha** (3:34)
I think about developer experience as the sum of all the little details, and that's what makes either great developer experience or a bad developer experience, right? So, for agents, I believe it's the same, you know, you're trying to build a world where agents are the first class citizens, and when you put that in perspective, then you have to rethink a lot of the different things you do. So, as an example, in our industry, you go to SendGrid, you go to Postmark, to Mailgun, you sign up for these services, and the first thing you get is a manual verification process that takes two days for you to get approval of your account, right? In an agent-first world, that's simply not possible. An agent will never wait two days to take an action. So, Resend from day one was all about removing friction, right? So, you sign up, you can send an email in the first minute. When we built that, it was all because we thought this is a better product experience overall for users. Turns out this is a huge unlock for agents.