Josh Elman on Apple, AI Agents & Why Startups Can Still Win

Eric Newcomer (0:00)

Are we about to enter a world where everything is recorded, we have a transcript of everything?

Josh Elman (0:03)

You know, I think we are definitely in a world of building new norms, but these are all norms and trusts that have to get built out, and a lot of it's not software, it's humans.

Eric Newcomer (0:12)

Do you think it'll be sort of adversarial where it's like my agent, yours, and like mine spewing lies, and yours is like trying to fair them out?

Josh Elman (0:18)

I mean, I tend to think the truth and authenticity win in the end. It doesn't mean we won't have a lot of gamesmanship in the middle as we're figuring these things out.

Eric Newcomer (0:25)

What's your view on how much this is, you know, OpenAI is to lose?

Josh Elman (0:29)

I look at this not as OpenAI and Anthropic's game to lose or win, it's they have to do an incredible job continuing to build their businesses. But there's so much more that we're all gonna do.

Eric Newcomer (0:40)

Josh Elman, welcome to the Newcomer Podcast.

Josh Elman (0:43)

Eric, thanks so much for having me.

Eric Newcomer (0:44)

Man, we go way back. You were a venture capitalist at Greylock, invested in Discord and Musical.ly, which became TikTok. And then I had a friend who worked at one of your company's operator, which was an early chat bot company. You were also an investor in the zeitgeisty consumer companies of the time in Silicon Valley world, House Party and Meerkat, if people remember those. Then you go to Robinhood, you go to Apple, which Apple, you're not really staying in touch as well, I think, with the reporters. You're sort of like, there's a level of safety. And then now you're back at Andreessen Horowitz, so it feels like, oh, I keep saying, welcome back to my world.

You've come back online and very excited about consumer, which are always fun things to talk about. So great to have you on the podcast.

Josh Elman (1:31)

No, thanks so much. It's great from being here. And look, my whole career has been about trying to make products that people use and bring into their lives. And whether that was in my early career, building products or becoming a VC, but about eight years ago, I was like, man, the best way I want to go make consumer products is just to go work on them again. And so I went and did that. And I mean, Apple was an incredible place to work, but now I see this edge that consumer products can really come back and we can build these little start-ups that are growing to these next wave of great companies. And I just couldn't resist the opportunity to go and be part of this incredible new wave.

Eric Newcomer (2:04)

Yeah, and I might get into the sort of why each decision, but I wanted to just sort of get into the meat of one of the core sort of categories you saw that is now becoming reality, which is just sort of the chat bot. Like what appealed to you about sort of chat based companies? How many years ago was it?

Josh Elman (2:22)

Like 2014, 2015? Right, exactly.

Eric Newcomer (2:24)

More than a decade, which is like, yeah. What was appealing then? Do you think they could have succeeded or it really required LLM or what would, how would you look back at that period now with the technology that we have?

Josh Elman (2:35)

You know, when I think about chat bots, I go almost all the way back to like Eliza, which is like this very old text based system that you could just talk to and it could figure out with very simple, you know, regular expressions to kind of spit back some text, but it was always this sense of we're humans, we speak in language, how can we naturally use our language to communicate with a product and have it respond to us in a way we understand and then can go back and forth and be really interactive. You know, we saw this first wave of AI or the beginnings of sort of what could be these chat bots that were happening in 2014, 2015 with the idea that maybe you could use a little bit of technology and also people on the other side, but simulate a great experience where everything can be done over chat. If you think back to like 2014, 2015, we had moved from a world where SMS was kind of a thing for a long time, but it was like the only way we started communicating. We were so actively communicating. Everyone was like, Messenger was huge. iMessage was huge. WhatsApp was getting very, very big.