
21 segments available
Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Wabi and AI pioneer behind Replika, joins Erik, Anish, and Justine to reveal how personal software will transform from a developer monopoly to a creative medium for all. She exposes why command-line AI interfaces are the new MS-DOS, explains how mini-apps will become as shareable as TikToks, and details her decade-long journey from training language models in 2012 to building the platform where your mom can create custom apps in minutes. Plus: untold stories from OpenAI's apartment days and why voice-only devices completely miss the point. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - From AI Companions to Personal Software 02:55 - “It must be an interface problem” 03:43 - The Mac Moment for AI Interfaces 04:50 - When Apps Become Like YouTube Videos 05:54 - Ephemeral vs Durable Software 07:55 - Replacing Paid Apps with Wabi Creatiosn 10:04 - Who Will Create? Who Will Consume? 11:37 - Investing in “Software as Content” 14:17 - Mini-Apps as Community Catalysts 16:41 - The “Organization Layer” for Vibe Coding 19:07 - Wabi as a Framework for Memory, Context, and Expression 20:22 - Software 3.0: Deep Personalization through Shared Context 23:11 - Prompt Sharing as an Emergent User Behavior 28:11 - 100x’ing the World’s Meaningful Software 30:21 - The Creator Economy on Wabi 33:55 - How AI Evolved Since 2012 39:25 - Working From the OpenAI Office 42:01 - “You gotta be right, but also execute” 43:31 - Predicting Consumer Behavior 46:26 - Future AI Hardware: The Trap of Voice-First Resources: Follow Eugenia on X: https://x.com/ekuyda Follow Anish on X: https://x.com/illscience Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
"Right now AI is just an app on your phone. Uh it should not be that way. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home. Not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, you c..."
">> So Jenna excited to get into everything you're doing with Wabby. First, let's contextualize this a little bit. When you look back at sort of the arc of of your career, perhaps the last decade, how ..."
"all of the use was around writing um or writing help. Um and so that gave us an idea that there should be some next interface. There should be something else on top of this. there should be something ..."
"and that there will be some sort of a Windows Mac OS moment. Um, and I think the confusing part for for most people is that there is so much traction with chatbots anyway. Um, almost a billion people ..."
"developed by professional developers. Um and then eventually of course we're going to move on to this new world where apps are built by all of us for all of us and maybe so and maybe sometimes by AI f..."
"personalized, too niche. They don't have, you know, 20,000 features. Like someone built um a a motivational quote app that's only pulling from like one particular show that I didn't even know anything..."
"some cases paid for that I just totally didn't need anymore because I had built better versions of it on hobby. Everything from like migraine tracking to like tracking restaurant recommendations to li..."
">> I hope that more people will at least tweak but I'd say like fully kind of original creators probably still under 10%. And what we're working on right now this week we're releasing we're pushing so..."
"Some people create for a business, but many create and post just because it's fulfilling to themselves. And software has just been so restrictive because there's only 20 million developers in the worl..."
"mentioned was that apps, many apps could become kind of community starters. So, if today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for obvio..."
"the concept of an organizational layer like to a degree >> um the app store is the organizational layer for um you know the the mobile and um the browser the organizational layer for internet and so s..."
"websites into an app format or just kind of toy apps like I beer or there was my favorite one I am rich that was $999.99 and it didn't it didn't do anything. Um, and then of course people figure out, ..."
"the context of a Wabi mini app, how can you personalize it? First of all, you can personalize the features, the looks, um, you know, where I've skinned the app in a a certain way. But then on top of t..."
"unoptimized ways today like I've been following a lot um as you know very well like teen girls and college age girls are often early adopters of stuff and they have been making all these like nano ban..."
">> On the investment team, you we've said that there's, you know, the world has 1% of the software that that it needs and that the rest is going to be built in the next 5 years. So, let's give an exam..."
"make their own professional content, they can make videos, they can make shows, they can write, but they still cannot create software. It's still really not happening. But any anyone and especially sm..."
"recently just talking to um one of the early employees of Replica that we had a very strong belief that it would happen, but we still were so surprised when it actually happened. I guess this was just..."
"UBI, one on AI, some other ones. And so because we were YC company and um they let us come, they were very uh uh generous with their time and they would let us come to back then Greg's apartment where..."
"that for so long at that point we just got really into just revenue maxim maximization at some point because we a little bit got maybe scared we're like well >> we didn't have the balls to say okay we..."
"you've been so early to a number of these things and I think just every time we talk to you, you seem to have an eye on not only like what's going on today, but like what the next thing should be. Is ..."
"these applications? Um, I do have a few ideas around hardware and I'm not a hardware person at all, but I'm a hardware user like all of us. So, I get to have opinions. I think I think where there's a ..."