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Bret Taylor

Published podcast speaker

Claims
73
Episodes
3
Shows
3
Named items
2

Books, apps, and tools

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book / recommends

Endurance

“I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but probably if I had to pick one in the area of the topics we talked about, Competing Against Luck, which was the book that produced Jobs to be Done, which is a framework I really believe in. My only critique is I think most of these business books should be like an article. So maybe buy the book and punch it into ChatGPT and get the summary. But buy the book it's Clayton Christensen talked about it, but it's a really good framework for thinking about delivering value with your products. And I think it definitely influenced me. Actually one book I do recommend is Endurance, which is the story of Shackleton's trip to go to the South Pole. Half the book is him starving to death and eating seal meat with his crew of people frozen in their boat. I've never seen a better story of grit in my entire life. It's remarkable that it's a true story and if you're an entrepreneur going through a hard time, read that, you'd be like, okay, it could be worse. It's a great book too. It's just remarkable that it's a true story.”

Lenny's Podcast · 31 Jul 2025

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

book / recommends

Competing Against Luck

“I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but probably if I had to pick one in the area of the topics we talked about, Competing Against Luck, which was the book that produced Jobs to be Done, which is a framework I really believe in. My only critique is I think most of these business books should be like an article. So maybe buy the book and punch it into ChatGPT and get the summary. But buy the book it's Clayton Christensen talked about it, but it's a really good framework for thinking about delivering value with your products. And I think it definitely influenced me. Actually one book I do recommend is Endurance, which is the story of Shackleton's trip to go to the South Pole. Half the book is him starving to death and eating seal meat with his crew of people frozen in their boat. I've never seen a better story of grit in my entire life. It's remarkable that it's a true story and if you're an entrepreneur going through a hard time, read that, you'd be like, okay, it could be worse. It's a great book too. It's just remarkable that it's a true story.”

Lenny's Podcast · 31 Jul 2025

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

Claim ledger

What Bret said.

35 transcript-backed records

05 / belief

I think not only am I somewhat skeptical that there will only be two companies in the world, I actually think one of the main things impeding adoption of AI is the lack of existence of all those other companies.

“I think not only am I somewhat skeptical that there will only be two companies in the world, I actually think one of the main things impeding adoption of AI is the lack of existence of all those other companies.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

06 / belief

All of a sudden, not only can you afford to provide a great customer experience to more people, even less profitable customers or in lower-margin businesses, which I think is very exciting.

“All of a sudden, not only can you afford to provide a great customer experience to more people, even less profitable customers or in lower-margin businesses, which I think is very exciting.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

07 / belief

I think at the end of the day, when you're building a business, especially one that's in hyper growth, which successful businesses in tech tend to be, if you are too clever and austere, and going back to your point about Silicon Valley culture is all being the same, there are examples of companies that really innovated in culture.

“I think at the end of the day, when you're building a business, especially one that's in hyper growth, which successful businesses in tech tend to be, if you are too clever and austere, and going back to your point about Silicon Valley culture is all being the same, there are examples of companies that really innovated in culture.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

08 / belief

The way we think about context and how that context is shared so that the agent that's orchestrating it actually understands what's behind all these APIs and why and the history will maybe look a little bit more like OpenClaw and less like MCP over time.

“The way we think about context and how that context is shared so that the agent that's orchestrating it actually understands what's behind all these APIs and why and the history will maybe look a little bit more like OpenClaw and less like MCP over time.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

11 / belief

Going back to the first thing we were talking about, it's hard for me to not care about the elegance of the source code, which I think is an impediment to my fully realizing being a software engineer in this new world.

“Going back to the first thing we were talking about, it's hard for me to not care about the elegance of the source code, which I think is an impediment to my fully realizing being a software engineer in this new world.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

13 / belief

I think that'll be true for some software, particularly developer platforms and things like that that are already being consumed and purchased by other engineers.

“I think that'll be true for some software, particularly developer platforms and things like that that are already being consumed and purchased by other engineers.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

17 / belief

I think the exciting part in our world is you're taking something that was just so expensive that people literally hid their phone numbers so people couldn't call them, and you're making it inexpensive and delightful.

“I think the exciting part in our world is you're taking something that was just so expensive that people literally hid their phone numbers so people couldn't call them, and you're making it inexpensive and delightful.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

19 / belief

On one hand, I think I actually agree with the principle that one of the powerful parts about AI, with its ability to do text, do audio, and I'll say, I'm not sure how you qualify computer use, but you can call it a form of image recognition and manipulation.

“On one hand, I think I actually agree with the principle that one of the powerful parts about AI, with its ability to do text, do audio, and I'll say, I'm not sure how you qualify computer use, but you can call it a form of image recognition and manipulation.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

20 / belief

Given the progress in math, I'm hopeful we have at least one moment of discovery that is inspiring, because I think a lot of the dialog around AI right now is economic opportunities, but also what could go wrong.

“Given the progress in math, I'm hopeful we have at least one moment of discovery that is inspiring, because I think a lot of the dialog around AI right now is economic opportunities, but also what could go wrong.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

21 / belief

I don't think mobile phones are great in school or great for kids and I personally advocate for waiting a long time. But I think that ChatGPT is more like Google search and it's one thing to have a device in your pocket that's addictive and has push notifications, but it's another thing to use AI to learn.

“I don't think mobile phones are great in school or great for kids and I personally advocate for waiting a long time. But I think that ChatGPT is more like Google search and it's one thing to have a device in your pocket that's addictive and has push notifications, but it's another thing to use AI to learn.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

22 / belief

I do still think studying computer science is a different answer than learning to code, but I would say I still think it's extremely valuable to study computer science. I say that because I think computer science is more than coding.

“I do still think studying computer science is a different answer than learning to code, but I would say I still think it's extremely valuable to study computer science. I say that because I think computer science is more than coding.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / belief

I think a lot companies use that, which is great, that motion produces great products, but if PLG means that you aren't actually engaging with the buyer of your software, you're not going to grow. And so, I've actually seen more recently, with a lot of AI companies, direct sales come a little bit more back into fashion because I think so many of the opportunities in AI actually meet that qualification where the buyer and the user are not necessarily the same person and it really requires that go-to-market motion.

“I think a lot companies use that, which is great, that motion produces great products, but if PLG means that you aren't actually engaging with the buyer of your software, you're not going to grow. And so, I've actually seen more recently, with a lot of AI companies, direct sales come a little bit more back into fashion because I think so many of the opportunities in AI actually meet that qualification where the buyer and the user are not necessarily the same person and it really requires that go-to-market motion.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / belief

All of the companies that were startups that tried to do this have already been consolidated or almost all of them, inflection, adapt, character and others. And I think there doesn't appear to be a viable business model for a startup because of the amount of CapEx required and there's just not enough fundraising runway to get to escape velocity.

“All of the companies that were startups that tried to do this have already been consolidated or almost all of them, inflection, adapt, character and others. And I think there doesn't appear to be a viable business model for a startup because of the amount of CapEx required and there's just not enough fundraising runway to get to escape velocity.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

26 / belief

If you want to go from a 65% automated resolution rate to 75%, we have a billion tools to let AI help you do that, identify opportunities for improvement, figure out why people are frustrated, what new capabilities can we add to our agent to improve the resolution rate? And you let AI put the needles at the top of the haystack on your behalf and I think that's really the way to optimize these systems.

“If you want to go from a 65% automated resolution rate to 75%, we have a billion tools to let AI help you do that, identify opportunities for improvement, figure out why people are frustrated, what new capabilities can we add to our agent to improve the resolution rate? And you let AI put the needles at the top of the haystack on your behalf and I think that's really the way to optimize these systems.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

27 / belief

I think agents will truly start to bend the curve again like we did in the very early days of computing because software is going from helping an individual be slightly more productive to actually accomplishing a job autonomously.

“I think agents will truly start to bend the curve again like we did in the very early days of computing because software is going from helping an individual be slightly more productive to actually accomplishing a job autonomously.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

28 / belief

I think there's a huge difference between outcomes-based pricing and usage based pricing because especially in AI, they're not necessarily even correlated and you could have a long phone call and not solve the customer's problem and they give you a negative review online and call the call center again, all that effort was for nothing.

“I think there's a huge difference between outcomes-based pricing and usage based pricing because especially in AI, they're not necessarily even correlated and you could have a long phone call and not solve the customer's problem and they give you a negative review online and call the call center again, all that effort was for nothing.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

29 / belief

I was looking at a website for the top 50 software companies in the stock market and obviously, the top five are the big, big boom ones like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all that, but the next 50 are all SaaS companies and some of them are very exciting, some of them are super boring, but this is how the software market has evolved and I think we're going to see something similar with agents.

“I was looking at a website for the top 50 software companies in the stock market and obviously, the top five are the big, big boom ones like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all that, but the next 50 are all SaaS companies and some of them are very exciting, some of them are super boring, but this is how the software market has evolved and I think we're going to see something similar with agents.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

30 / belief

I'm probably out of my depth here, but it's essentially MCP because that's how you provide context to Cursor. And I think that almost always when you have a model making a poor decision, if it's a good model, it's lack of context.

“I'm probably out of my depth here, but it's essentially MCP because that's how you provide context to Cursor. And I think that almost always when you have a model making a poor decision, if it's a good model, it's lack of context.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

33 / belief

By the way, I would love to talk about the future of software, too, because despite the fact it didn't pick coding, I have a lot of that, but I can talk to I can answer your question, though, you know I think when a technology is as [00:29:00] cool as large language models.

“By the way, I would love to talk about the future of software, too, because despite the fact it didn't pick coding, I have a lot of that, but I can talk to I can answer your question, though, you know I think when a technology is as [00:29:00] cool as large language models.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Latent Space

35 / belief

People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously. And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth.

“People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously. And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth.”
Speaker
Bret Taylor
Publisher
Latent Space
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