Bret Taylor: prediction

Transcript context

…There is a canonical way to build a Silicon Valley company. You have engineering and product and design, you have this number of ratios of engineers to product managers and engineering managers. Then you have your go-to-market organization, and you have these pipeline coverage ratios, and you have the product marketers, and all this stuff. But I find it interesting how similar so many Silicon Valley companies are to each other because they've all learned from each other. There's a shared recipe and a shared playbook as to how to build a company. It gets tweaked, but ultimately, I think it's a pretty good IP. Certainly, companies are much better off with it than without. How is that canonical template for building a company different post-AI than before? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. One is, I've always believed in the primacy of tech leads over engineering managers. Both Google and Facebook, where I spent some of my early career both did this well, where in a product review, you weren't just talking to a manager. You were talking to the tech lead and PM who were product manager who were building the product. Whereas if you went to companies that produced worse software, I'd notice you move up the chain of the command, like the military. I think that we will end up with individual tech leads who, because of the existence of AI agents, will become even more important, where if you are a, I'll say, product engineer, I'm trying to find the right word for it—we might invent one—who has taste but didn't necessarily know CSS, who has infrastructure ability, meaning that you understand the basics of distributed systems and debugging, and you understand your customer very deeply. With the presence of Codex, you can produce amazing results. Those people are truly worth a thousand X other people because it's relatively easy to find someone who's a great infrastructure engineer. Not easy, easy, but relatively. Finding someone with good taste, that's relatively easy. Finding someone who also understands your customers extremely well, the nuances of the problem they're solving. Those people who can combine that will, I think, end up being able to actually produce products like, capital P, valuable products with relative autonomy. I wonder if it will change our view on generalists broadly. I've always identified myself as a generalist just because I've been both a software engineer in a suit, basically, and I've gone back and forth in that world. As companies grow, you tend towards more specialization just because the person who's the Jack or Jill of all trades ends up not fitting in. There's not really a place for them because, okay, well, you're not really the deepest engineer, you're not really the best designer, you're not really product manager. If you've been at the company for a while, we'll give you an honorary something to do, and you have to lead through influence, and da, da, da, da, da. Could that person actually endure as one of the most valuable people at these companies? I don't know whether it's naive optimism or true, but I actually think those people who often exist in early-stage startups are often the people who get sidelined, but in a way that actually really harms the company. I'm hopeful that in a world of AI agents, those generalists who, again, I think the most important part is understanding the customer need with agency, no pun intended, and empowerment can end up more powerful in the Silicon Valley company in the future. I've noticed the exact same thing at Stripe. The exact same thing, which is high agency, really caring about customers, just really caring generally. High work ethic people who maybe weren't the best engineers previously or now, those people are massively ascendant, as far as I can tell, because they suddenly got the exoskeleton. They always have the ideas as to what we should be doing, and this is the better way to serve the customers and everything like that. But now they have the way to make all their schemes real. I've really noticed that at Stripe.…

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