The idea guys are sort of having a moment.

In fact, it's funny, like, I'm like looking for new ideas to work on.

You know, in the old days, somebody would give you their app idea and you'd be like, oh, here we go again. And now I'm like, cool, how about I build it for you? What has changed for me is, you know, someone that dropped out of computer science because I just couldn't keep up with everyone else. I always had the creative ideas, but my ADHD was too bad that I just couldn't remember all the syntax.

And I was like thumbing through manuals back in the day and like, you know, trying to like, I had like the C++ Bible or whatever they called it, you know. When you're a child, nobody tells you, Kevin, you're bad at drying or you're good at painting. The thing that I think we need more than UBI if we ever get to that place is universal basic purpose.

And the way you actually get the French Revolution is less that people don't have enough money, though that's part of it, and more that people don't have something important to work on. Like everybody's got to feel like they're on a hero's journey. I was talking to my wife and I was like, we're getting a lot of arguments about X, Y, and What if we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us

that understands what we like, we're getting to a lot of arguments about X, Y, and Z. What if we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us that understands what we like, how much we care about certain things, and then we just have our models go and, like, duke it out. And she looks at me and she's like, he's one of the worst ideas for her. Yeah, I'm just like, shit. This episode originally aired on the Kevin Rose show.

When anyone can build a Slack competitor in a weekend, what actually makes a consumer

startup worth back in?

For decades, software moats meant engineering effort.

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were hand-coding Instagram's filters, copying them

cost you months. That window is now

48 hours. But Anish argues the moat was never really the code. When Hipsomatic and a dozen

others launched alongside Instagram, it still wasn't obvious which would run away until it was too late.

That pattern may hold, but the cost structure has shifted.

One founder told a niche he'd need $25 million just to reach 100,000 monthly actives, because

AI inference isn't free.

So the real tension isn't whether great consumer products get built.

It's whether venture economics can survive a world where the best companies skip early

rounds altogether.

Kevin Rose speaks with Anish Acharya, general partner at A16Z, focused on consumer investing.

Anish, we're back.

Nothing has changed at all, so I don't know what we're going to talk about.

...