Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm pleased to welcome audience favorite Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, back for his fourth appearance on the podcast. Andrew has always been extremely transparent and candid. His belief that speed is the only moat has made him comfortable sharing intimate details of Tasklet's agent architecture. And as you'll hear in the six months since we last spoke, Tasklet has indeed once again entirely rewritten their stack. Today, there's much more use of file system context and agentic search to leverage available information while conserving tokens. Plus, a huge new emphasis on summarization at several levels of resolution.
This time around, we also dig in to the delicate strategic situation that Andrew and Tasklet face. While their product strategy of always betting on the models has proven correct, and Andrew's choice of Claude has been rewarded, Andrew observes that these days everyone is fundamentally building the same thing. And today, his most intense competition is actually coming from his critical supplier, Anthropic, which, with Claude Max accounts, gives their direct customers an estimated five times as many tokens as Tasklet can purchase at the same price via the API.
In micro terms, this relatively high cost of tokens has caused Tasklet to stick with Opus 4.6 rather than moving to the new 4.7. And in macro terms, it's pushing Andrew and team to become a horizontal platform, capable of harnessing, or as Andrew describes it, outfitting with a mecha suit, frontier models from any provider. This evolution, which I do think Andrew has played and timed about as well as anyone possibly could, is critical, because horizontal platforms are one of only three types of software company that Andrew believes will survive the AI transition. The others being API-first companies like Stripe, and companies that develop solutions and sell outcomes. Best exemplified perhaps by Finns model of 99 cents per customer service ticket resolved.
We get into lots more besides including Tasklet's new instant apps feature, how they're thinking about deep personal and shared organizational context, the Cloud Container Company that Andrew endorses, Tasklet's token to labor cost ratio, and whether or not Zuckerberg has come along after his Manus acquisition was canceled by the Chinese government. This is a fun one with lots of valuable detail from somebody who's in the arena, competing to become one of the few general purpose AI agent platform winners, and still actually willing to tell us all about it. Please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Tasklet. Andrew Lee, returning champion and CEO of Tasklet. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Andrew Lee** (2:49)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:52)
You are a fan favorite and I'm going to just try to pepper you with a bunch of questions and make sure we get as much alpha for all the builders in the audience, myself included, as we can.
First question, it's been about six months since we last spoke. You have rung in my head probably weekly with your speed is the only mantra. I guess my first question is, what have you rebuilt in the last six months since we talked? Or maybe more to the point, what have you not rebuilt in the last six months since we talked?

**Andrew Lee** (3:24)
Yeah, I think the mantra has stayed the same, and we've rebuilt basically everything.
I was thinking about this earlier and even the pieces where I'm like, oh, this has stayed the same. Actually, no, I've been totally rebuilt. So from a product perspective, the product is actually very different now. When we launched this thing in October, it was all focused on workflow automation. We thought, hey, it would be really cool if people could come in, describe a workflow, and we'd run the workflow for you. But basically, the feedback that we got right out of the gate was, hey, once I'm given this agent, all of my context and hook set up to all my stuff, I don't want it just running my workflows. I also just want to be able to talk to it synchronously too. And so it's not just a workflow automation tool anymore. Now it is a very general purpose agent. It's great for doing workflows, but it's also great for doing other types of stuff.
So that required basically a total rebuild of the product experience, and as a result, a lot of technology behind it. So as an example, in a workflow automation tool in the previous iteration of the product, you basically had a main agent that you'd talk to for a brief period to set up your workflow. And then once you're done setting up your workflow, you basically stop talking to that agent. So the chats were relatively short. And then our system would kick off runs of what we call the task agent on a periodic basis when events happened. And so every agent one was a pretty short thing. And you could do pretty simple context engineering to make that work. In a world where you want this general purpose agent that you can talk to synchronously and run these automations, the product experience people want is just one big linear chat where everything is in one chat.