Andrew Lee: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay. Cool. I guess maybe let's do a zoom out and then we can end with kind of a lightning round of just some like lower level esoterica type stuff that you know, the real ones will want to hear about, but not necessarily as important as the big picture. Where is this all going? I mean, we're in this weird transition point where, and I guess a couple of dimensions, right? You've got like, we've talked about computer use a couple of times, and you've kind of bundled in command line style computer use with, UI based computer, UI mediated computer use. And that feels like its own sort of paradigm shift, you know, happening under one label, right? Where it's like, everything is kind of going headless, but at the same time, the models are getting really good at using UIs. And so like, which is going to win? Are all UIs going to go away? Or are the models just going to be really good at them? And, you know, maybe it's both. And then I I guess similarly, like, you mentioned everybody's kind of competing to build the same thing. And I feel like I've never felt that as strongly as I do right now, where you could probably name, you know, 10,000 companies that are in some, like, not super indirect way competitive, right? Like you're competing with Claude, but you're also competing with like... Ms. Word and you're competing with Zapier and you're competing with like everything under the sun and you're competing with human labor. Yeah, it's endless. So how do you like conceptualize where this is all headed? What's the big vision? You know, where are we 18 months from now just before the singularity hits? So a year ago, right before we started the pivot, One of the, like the big thing that we were seeing was, and for context, for people who maybe don't know, we had a product called Shortwave, which was an AI e-mail client. We still have it actually, but it's not the focus of the company anymore. And we had this really nice embedded agent inside and you can do like really cool e-mail stuff. And we realized that it wasn't gonna be too long before you could take a product like, ChatGPT and you could say, show me my inbox. And it would just like generate a UI for your e-mail on the spot. And once that worked well, you wouldn't need an AI e-mail client, right? Because the whole e-mail part would go away. So our entire concept of differentiation where we're like, hey, we're going to embed the this agent inside a custom-built UI that had a shelf life. And the product is actually still growing. It's still doing reasonably well. But in 10 years, I don't think it's going to be around. Probably much less than 10 years, I don't think it's going to be around, at least not in this form. So we said, man, we can't build a business around an AI agent embedded in the UI. We need to do something else. We said, Hey, we're going to build a very general-purpose agent that isn't relying on this, and we're going to go after doing an agent for a specific type of workflow, or these trigger-based knowledge work workflows. Then we built the thing we launched in October, and the feedback from people was like, Hey, We don't wanna have one tool for workflow automation and another tool for doing our day-to-day work because we want them all to have the same context. So I don't wanna have to maintain two systems where they both have all the stuff from the shared brain. I just wanna have one system. And so we said, okay, I guess we need to do not just the workflow stuff, but we need to do the synchronous stuff as well. And again, When we pivoted out of e-mail, it was like, okay, well, actually there's gonna be some more general product that's gonna encompass this stuff. And then again, it was like, oh, I guess there's gonna be some more general products that's gonna encompass this stuff. And in March, we launched our Instant Apps feature, which is basically a generative UI feature. So the idea is, what if you could generate any UI you want that hooks up to any of the data in any of your connections and just works instantly in a single prompt, you can one-shot anything. Turns out this works really well. This is a super popular feature. Our team just uses the crap out of it. So for example, if we do any sort of data science work, we're no longer going into the BigQuery UI or using dashboard tools. We just go into Tasklet and we're like, Generate an Explorer dashboard to help us analyze how these pricing changes would affect our users. And it'll just make a thing and they'll be toggled and you can tweak thresholds and things. It works. It's amazing. lorer dashboard to help us analyze how these pricing changes would affect our users. And it'll just make a thing and they'll be toggled and you can tweak thresholds and things. It works. It's amazing. And we said, man, that fear that we had a year ago about what would happen with e-mail, that's actually here. You could go into Taskit today and say, Give me an e-mail UI that works. And it will, and it'll work. And you can do your inbox in a UI inside Taskit. It's not as good as shortwave yet, but it's not going to be that long. So I think that the timeline of these things has actually been much faster than we expected. And it's clear that each area where we feel like there can be differentiation has fallen away. I'm looking forward and I see no reason why this isn't going to continue. This trend of basically the general purpose tool continuing.…

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