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’re very special and surely a machine can—
Zoë Schiffer: Art is not science.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Not science, but art. We can’t be replaced by machines. In a fun and entertaining way, the ladder ends just below VC. It makes me wonder, then, how many venture capitalists are using it now. Who are the intended audience? Does it have real success?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. ADIN has scouts who go and find potential deals. The scouts then make money from the deals. This would mean that VCs would not necessarily adopt the network. Instead, people would go around it, making them less useful. Arielle’s article also brought out another irony: if you are able to start a business with only yourself and some AI agents, then you will be able to vibe code your way into success. You may not need the venture capital to start with.
Leah Feiger: It’s not clear. AI taking away jobs is a huge concern for me. Every other article is just like this one. “And these people are nervous, and these people are nervous.” Brian is correct, it’s funny that they’re the ones who have gone in for AI. I’m waiting. I still wait for AI to replace people. It hasn’t happened yet. Has it happened yet?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. There’s some recent research, I believe. Will Knight, our AI reporter, was telling me yesterday that there was recent research. “Look, the evidence just isn’t there yet for many, many industries. The hype has, as it often does, gone way out ahead of the actual data here. We don’t know that AI is taking jobs.” In San Francisco I have heard a number of people complain that engineering teams, in particular, are overstaffed. You can cut down a number of teams, even though agents are capable of doing a great deal of work. So I believe that AI will lead to more job losses, initially in the engineering sector and then across other industries.
Brian Barrett: Marc Andreessen is a famous venture capitalist and cofounder of Andreessen-Horowitz. He said the same thing on a podcast. Take a listen to his description of how unique he believes that his career is.
Marc Andreessen, archival audio: In the past 70 years, every great venture capitalist has missed the majority of great companies in his generation. It would be possible to have a person who could dial it in, and get 8/10, but that’s just not the case in real life. You’re just in the luck business. It’s intangible. It has a psychological aspect as well as a human relation aspect. This is a field that may be timeless. When AIs take over, this may be the only field that humans are left to do.
