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Brian Barrett: The irony is my favorite part because I feel like venture capitalists have largely positioned themselves as immune to the effects of AI because they are so special and certainly a machine can do it.
Zoe Schiffer: It is an art, not a science.
Brian Barrett: Yes. It is an art, not a science. Machines can take every job, but not us. The ladder stops right below the VC for them in a fun and entertaining way. So I wonder how many people are actually using this now, especially because venture capitalists themselves are very skeptical of it, it seems. Who is the audience? Do you find real traction there?
Zoe Schiffer: Yes. So the way ADIN works is they have scouts that go out and look for potential deals, and then those scouts can make money from said deals. So I think this will be something where venture capitalists won’t necessarily embrace the network, but people will rally around it and it won’t be necessary or useful. I think there’s another big paradox, which Ariel points out in her article, which is also, if you can start a company with just yourself and a bunch of AI agents, and you’re programming your way to success, do you even need all the venture capital money to get started?
Leah Weiger: I don’t know. There’s a lot to me, there’s a lot of fear about AI taking jobs. I feel like every other article is like, “And these people are stressed out and these people are stressed out.” Brian is right, the funny part is that these are people who have just gotten interested in AI, but I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for AI to take over jobs. Has that happened yet? Will he do it yet?
Zoe Schiffer: Yes. I think there is recent research. I was talking with Will Knight, one of our great AI reporters yesterday, and he was saying, “Look, the evidence isn’t there yet for many, many industries. The hype, as is often the case, has outpaced the actual data here. We don’t know that AI is taking jobs.” But I will say that in San Francisco, I hear a lot of people saying that engineering teams in particular are very bloated right now. Agents can actually do a lot of work, and you definitely need to have humans managing those agents, but you can reduce a significant number of teams by 80 percent, 50 percent, or 60 percent. And so I think we will see more AI-related job losses first in engineering and then in other sectors.
Brian Barrett: Marc Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said this very thing on a recent podcast. Hear how special he thinks his profession is.
Marc Andreessen, archival audio: Every great venture capitalist of the past 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his or her generation. If it were a science, you might eventually find someone who connects with it and gets an 8 out of 10, but in the real world, that’s not the case. It’s just that you’re in the business of luck. Hence there is an intangibility to it. There is the aspect of taste, the aspect of human relations, and psychology. And I don’t want to be specific, but it could be timeless in every sense of the word. And when AI does everything else, this may be one of the last remaining areas that people are still doing.