Alexander Embiricos: preference

Transcript context

…Bullish on vertical AI startups is what I'm hearing. Yeah, I completely agree. There's the general thing that can solve a lot of problems and then there's like, "We're going to solve presentations incredibly well and we're going to understand the presentation problem better than anyone and we're going to plug into your workflows and all these other things that matter for a very specific problem." Okay, incredible. When you think about progress on Codex, I imagine you have a bunch of evals and there's all these public benchmarks. What's something you look at to tell you, "Okay, we're making really good progress," I imagine it's not going to be the one thing, but what do you focus on? What's something you're trying to push? What's a KPI or two? One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool like Codex naturally is a tool that you would become a power user of. So we can accidentally spend a lot of our time thinking about features that are very deep in the user adoption journey. And so we can kind of end up oversolving for that. And so I think it's just critically important to go look at your D7 retention. Just go try the product, sign up from scratch again. I have a few too many ChatGPT Pro accounts that I've, in order to maximally correctly dogfood, signed up for on my Gmail and they charge me 200 bucks a month. I need to expense those. But I think just the feeling of being end user and the early retention stats are still super important for us because as much as this category is taking off, I think we're still in the very early days of people using them. Another thing that we do that I think we might be the most user feedback/social media pilled team out there in this space is like a few of us are constantly on Reddit and Twitter, and there's praise up there and there's a lot of complaints, but we take the complaints very seriously and look at them. And I think that, again, because you can use a coding agent for so many different things, it often is kind of broken in many sort of ways for specific behaviors. So we actually monitor a lot just what the vibes are on social media pretty often, especially I think for Twitter/X, it's a little bit more hypey and then Reddit is a little more negative but real actually. So I've started increasingly paying attention to how people are talking about using Codex on Reddit actually. This is important for people to know. Which of the subreddits do you check most? Is there like an r/Codex or?…

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