What’s Next for Consumer AI? | Josh Elman Joins a16z

**Josh Elman** (0:00)
Right now, AI has been so much about productivity, job replacement, work replacement. And I think we have a moment to shift that, which is, how does these new tools help you get more out of your own day, in your own life, and the things you want to do?

**Anish Acharya** (0:12)
So it sounds like you're saying retention is still the most important metric. Is that true?

**Josh Elman** (0:16)
I mean, I think it's always been.

**Anish Acharya** (0:18)
But you've been a part of really every product cycle, the big ones and the small ones, and now most recently leading product marketing for a lot of the AI efforts at Apple.

**Josh Elman** (0:26)
One of the things I learned a lot at Apple was how do we tell a compelling story to regular people? One of those things that the moment you use it, you're like, oh my god, I can never go back to the old way. We forget that technology is no longer the underdog. The parts of the products we've made are running the world.

**Anish Acharya** (0:39)
You know, we used to say real life, but online life is real life now.

**Josh Elman** (0:43)
Chat2BT was amazing for a whole bunch of searches that we thought were totally solved through Google. And all of a sudden, you start putting those searches into Chat2BT, like this answer is more than 10 times better. This experience is more than 10 times better than Google links back and forth. And I think that's why Chat2BT pulled it.

**Anish Acharya** (0:59)
One topic that we discuss a lot is, are the labs just going to win it all? Should we all just go home? And I know it feels like we have a version of this conversation every time there's a new product cycle. What's your view?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:07)
So I think a funny way to think about it is, for more than two decades, Josh Elman has been at the center of some of the most important consumer technology platforms in the world. From LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to Robinhood, Discord, Musical.ly, TikTok and Apple, he has spent his career studying how products grow, how people connect online, and why some technologies become part of everyday life.
Today, as AI reshapes the technology landscape once again, many of the biggest questions are consumer questions. How will people discover products? What new behaviors emerge? And what does the next generation of consumer companies look like? In this conversation, Anish Acharya speaks with Josh Elman about consumer AI, network effects, product design, and why he believes we're entering a new era of consumer innovation.

**Anish Acharya** (1:59)
Welcome back to the Andreessen Horowitz podcast. I'm here with a person that I've been friends with for a long time, I admire for a long time, was my investor for a brief time. And now I'm proud to call him partner, Josh Elman. Welcome.

**Josh Elman** (2:12)
Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this.

**Anish Acharya** (2:14)
It's going to be awesome. Yeah. So Josh, everybody sort of probably already knows him, but you've been a part of every important consumer story. I don't know if that's because you've been the catalyzing force behind them or perhaps you're a good picker.

**Josh Elman** (2:25)
I like the thing is sometimes it's like just Forrest Gump showing up at the right place at the right time and being on the journeys, but it's been really incredible to get to be part of creating technology that we all use every day in our lives.

**Anish Acharya** (2:36)
Yeah. I was reading some of the background. It sounds like you sort of set an intention at Stanford to be a part of the intersection of culture and technology, and you've kind of done that.

**Josh Elman** (2:44)
Yeah. It's kind of crazy. I think my resume had this objective. It was like to create great technology that changes people's lives. As I think back on that, I'm like, I wish it was even more like benefits people's lives, that makes people's lives even better, because I think change is lives. Technology is kind of neutral, but there's so much that we've done that's just tried to make the world better, more connected, more human, and give us all these new tools and powers that we never could have had before.

**Anish Acharya** (3:07)
But it's interesting because you came from a time, when you graduated, technology was this sort of these weirdos in the back of the classroom. It always felt like a toy, and now it's something that is some of the most important conversations in our society are about technology.

**Josh Elman** (3:20)