a16z Podcast - The Self-Improving Company | Kavak's AI Playbook

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez are joined by Alejandro Maza Ayala, Chief Product & AI Officer at Kavak, to unpack how the Latin American used-car marketplace rebuilt itself around AI agents, with ...96% of customer interactions and 95% of transactions now handled by agents. Alejandro explains why Kavak decided that simply giving employees AI tools wasn't enough, and instead redesigned the company's systems, teams, and customer experience around agents. They discuss why Kavak spends as much engineering effort on evals as it does building agents, how its AI sellers outperform its human teams, and an experiment where an AI "CEO" increased profits in one city by 50% in its first month. The conversation also explores what happens to organizational structure when agents do most of the work, why Kavak trains everyone from executives to mechanics to build with AI, and Alejandro's argument that companies looking for incremental AI adoption may be missing the larger opportunity: redesigning the organization itself.   Resources: Follow Alejandro Maza Ayala on X: https://x.com/alehandromz Follow Angela Strange on X: https://x.com/astrange Follow Gabriel Vasquez on X: https://x.com/GEVS94 Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm investing more today in tokens than in knowledge workers. We could build superhuman agents. This means that by every dimension that matters, our agents would outperform the best human we had ever hired. The most ambitious companies listening to this will decide to follow suit, which is you decided to build an agent per customer. Yes. Every day, between 100 and 200,000 agents get instantiated,
Starting point is 00:00:29 specifically for this customer with its own virtual machine. There's a lot of people worried about how the organizations of the future are going to look like and the role that humans are going to play. If you haven't faced fear before, you haven't felt it, then you haven't tried AI. We launched a program inside Kabag that's called the Jedi Academy. From the CEO to like AI engineers to mechanics, we train everyone. And after six weeks, they launch state-of-the-art. agents to production.
Starting point is 00:01:00 What advice do you have to future founders or first-time founders that might be listening? What works right now is... Most companies are asking how to add AI to the organization. Kavak asked a much more radical question. What would we build if we were starting the company from scratch with AI? Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez sit down with Kavak's chief product and AI officer, Alejandro Ayala, to unpack what happened when the company bet on rebuilding itself around agents.
Starting point is 00:01:27 Today, hundreds of thousands of agents. can be instantiated each day, handling everything from selling and financing cars to maintaining long-term customer relationships. They discuss why Kavak tore down an agent architecture that was already working to start again, how Evald became the foundation for moving faster, and what happens when agents don't just work for humans,
Starting point is 00:01:48 but humans sometimes work for agents. Welcome back to the ACC podcast. Today we have Ale Masa, the head of AI at Kabak. We're going to discuss today the transformation that Ali led within Kabak to turn it into an AI-native company. Thank you, Al-D for being with us today. Thanks for having me. Before starting at Kabak, you were running a company called Opi Analytics.
Starting point is 00:02:11 That's right. And you were very much into AI before Chad GPT. You want to tell us a little bit about that journey? Yes, yes, of course. Well, we called it machine learning back then. It was a different family of algorithms. And we founded a company with this very ambitious vision there, that new machine learning models would be so powerful
Starting point is 00:02:30 that they could solve any complex problem. This was pre-transformers, right? This was like 2013. So we started building the company that way, and I think we were like 10 years ahead of time, but we built a great company. We served 14,500 companies around like risk algorithms, logistics, forecasting, marketing,
Starting point is 00:02:53 but really the power of what Transformers And then the chagicity moment when he arrived, make things like very clearly that we could now build a whole new company and way of building companies. And we joined Cavak to encourage Carlos to build that. Amazing. All right. So we're going to spend the bulk of this podcast talking about exactly how you've identified Cavac. But maybe just to start, what does Cavac do and what is your role there? Kavak started out as a used case, as a used car marketplace. So we buy cars, we refurbish them, and then we sell them and finance them. But to do that, we also had to build a fintech and a logistics company and the Carfax
Starting point is 00:03:39 and like basically all the infrastructure for this to work didn't exist in Latam. So we had to build everything vertically so we could serve our customers the right way. I'm going to sort of start with the framing of what the architecture looks like. So a consumer comes in and says, I want to sell my car. Like, how many agents do they touch? What's the harness look like? Groundness in how you design this. Right.
Starting point is 00:04:00 So we bet the company in transforming to a company run by agents. The questions we ask ourselves is, how would we build Quebec in 2035 with Fabled 10 or GPT-10-level intelligence? And actually, that company looks very different than what we had built or what we had back then. So when a customer comes in right now, agent will get spawned specific. specifically for this customer with its own virtual machine. It will remember years of interaction of these customers with Quebec, what they visited in the web page or a call they had two years ago, remember everything in its memory,
Starting point is 00:04:39 come up with a strategy and set a long-term goal to maximize the lifetime value of this customer and do whatever it takes to make the customer happy and convert them into all or different products across time. And this is a completely new and groundbreaking architecture at scale, I think, because people are still building multi-agent system with experts, and we realize to bet that long-running agents with hard goals, not just workflows, could maximize our customer's satisfaction and obviously their lifetime value. Okay, so we're going to jump to the nuances that.
Starting point is 00:05:17 But maybe versus many companies that say, hey, we want to be agenic and they try some workflows. Yes. You guys took the just rip. We had to make this work. You had to downsize dramatically. It didn't work for a year. Right.
Starting point is 00:05:32 So do you want to talk through? Obviously, you had to tune a lot of things to make that work. Like describe the harness at that time and what models you were using and sort of specifically. So there were like three main decisions that we had to make. The first, and this is where I think many companies are stuck right now, is the first instinct is, okay, let's adopt AI. And you basically leave your structure as it is and just give chat GPT or cloud to your team. And then there's no efficiencies.
Starting point is 00:06:01 Your customers have the same problems and nothing happens, right? And so you need to redesign your whole company around the agents and around the future capabilities. And this means really rebuilding most of your APIs, rebuilding your system so the agents can use them to perform. Then you need to start generating the data and the feedback to. to fine-tune these agents. The only way to really make them work
Starting point is 00:06:26 is if you teach them, and how do you teach them? You put them out in the open, you put them in front of customers, you get that data, you get those evils, and then you train your agents. And this is a second bet that we made,
Starting point is 00:06:38 that we could build superhuman agents. This means that by every dimension that matters, like conversion, life and value, customer experience, our agents would outperform the best human we had ever hired. And we put them in front of them. front of the hardest problems. And finally, you start to change how you measure the success of the company. Cavagua's transactional company, we used to measure how many cars we bought, how many cars we sold, how many brake pads we needed to buy, and we moved to a relational company
Starting point is 00:07:09 where now I have 10 million customers in my database, and I have agents assigned to most of them with the task of maximizing their lifetime value. Now, we're selling cars and personal loans and very high ticket items. So just activating 1% of this customer base, it's hundreds of millions of dollars if we do it the right way. So it's a bet that made sense for us because of our industry,
Starting point is 00:07:36 because of the ticket, and because at the end of the day, customers need to build trust with a company because they're buying a used car. And the way to build trust is to know them and to plan and nurture a long-term relationship. Ale, I just wanted to double-click on something evils over agent demos.
Starting point is 00:07:54 Yeah. You probably get pitched a lot of agents, and it's never been easier to build things like before. But one of the questions is, like, how do you guys go about evaluating this? Because not everybody tests them across 90% of the customer interactions to see they're really working. And you guys, I believe it's about 98% of the interactions
Starting point is 00:08:12 or something like that are not handled by agents. Yes, totally. So to give you a sense of the scale, like 96% of all interactions are handled by agents. so no humans there. 95% of all transactions are completely handled by agents. Obviously, you meet a human
Starting point is 00:08:29 when you pick up your car, like there's someone physically there to give you their keys, but the rest of the experience of the journey is handled by an agent. Every day, between 100 and 200,000 agents get instantiated in a date. They wake up, they work sometimes
Starting point is 00:08:46 for three minutes, sometimes for eight hours, sometimes for three days, and they set an alarm clock for their next task and go back to sleep. So the scale of this is just amazing and it's working. Now, how do you get this to work at scale? And the answer you mentioned it is evals. I like to move extremely fast, but in order to move fast, you need to have brakes, right? Imagine a car, you'll hit on the gas just if you have the right brakes. And AI is super powerful. And I've seen many companies get this wrong because they try to go slow because they don't have the right brakes.
Starting point is 00:09:22 So I thought about the other way around. Like how fast can we go? Well, it depends on the quality of our e-vals. So a good rule of thumb here is we spend about the same amount of time, engineer time, tokens, and money on building the evos than building the agents. And this is how you get better and better and better, not letting evos as an afterthought. So what do we measure? First and foremost, the results for the business. Like, if my customer is happy, they'll buy a car, they'll get their loan approved, they'll sell a car to us.
Starting point is 00:09:58 And that's the first check. Did it convert? And that's where most things break. I see companies measuring number of calls or minutes during the call or some superficial KPIs that give you some information, but that doesn't really work. The important thing is that this customer convert is bringing value to the customer. Is the customer happy to reengage with us after a while? And once you get those evals connected, then it's just optimizing the right agentic architecture
Starting point is 00:10:30 and giving the agent skills to scale this and cater to millions of customers. It's really amazing. And related to this is like, okay, so you create the right eVals, you know, it's working. You know, some people, some companies still feel a little bit risk-averse and putting them in front of the customer. and being able to perform the highest leverage tasks,
Starting point is 00:10:55 which in your case would be selling. Do your agents really sell to customers? Yes. So we never built customer support or customer service agents. We built like sales agents. It's extremely hard to sell a car in Latin America. So imagine someone wanting to buy a car. They can choose like amongst like 20,000 SKUs.
Starting point is 00:11:17 Then they need to pick like financing and go through the financing. process, insurance and coverage, and then they're probably trading in their car. So we need to quote that car. So it's a process that if someone does it or the way Kavak did it back in 2020, 2020, you need to be extremely good at 15 different things and have 15 different experts in 15 different teams. And usually the person would go and speak with the expert in financing, the expert in car advisory,
Starting point is 00:11:49 the expert in buying. the expert in insurance, and they'll build a package and buy a car. That's extremely hard to do. But the first thing we did it was, okay, can we get an agent to be better than the expert in each of these things, and then put it together and have like a mega expert that's an expert in insurance, financing, et cetera, and that's who we put in front of the customer. So the experience for the customer is amazing. We tripled NPS and customer satisfaction scored by putting the agent in front of the customer.
Starting point is 00:12:27 And at first it converted like 50% more than our human team. And now it's converting over that like 2.1X more. So it's a completely different company. So your agents are better sellers. Totally better. And you get this, right? Because they're experts and they're infinitely patient. and they know all your history,
Starting point is 00:12:49 and they can plan for the long term, and they never get tired. And if they make a mistake, they learn it, and the next day, not just them, but the other 200,000 agents, will have learned from that mistake. So that's the feedback loop that we engaged, and that's showing in the growth and results
Starting point is 00:13:09 and satisfaction of our customers. Yeah. One of the, two of the very cool things I think about Quebec is I think the world has gotten comfortable, with AI can do customer service. It's still very hard to do well. But, you know, as Gabe said, there's still a view that, well,
Starting point is 00:13:25 customers aren't going to want to buy expensive things from AI. And you are proving them wrong. Yes. The next layer on that is, well, you're not actually going to be able to do regulated financial services end to end with AI. But if you walk through what you're doing, you are underwriting a thin or no-file customer.
Starting point is 00:13:42 Yes. Pricing them correctly. Yes. Doing servicing. So maybe talk, through how did you write the evals to get comfortable with that? And then versus, I don't know, going to a bank branch or even a fintech, sort of how is that experience that much better? So the first financial product that we launched was a car loan. And usually in Mexico and in
Starting point is 00:14:05 some emerging markets, it'll get like two months or more to get a car loan approved. We usually approve it in under three minutes. which is like pretty cool because we have all these data around the customer and the car. And if the customer can't pay for the car anymore, they'll just return it to us and we can give them a cheaper car and then they pay a smaller amount each month and they like get out of water,
Starting point is 00:14:36 which is amazing about the vertical integration of the business. But then like when we started launching all the financial products, we realized that this is a very important. important decision for the customer, right? Like, they usually take three to four months to make up their mind and buying a car and and getting a loan or getting a personal loan, like a large personal loan that we also do. So if you get to know your customer throughout this process and make the process easy for them, then just your conversion and retention metrics start going through the roof.
Starting point is 00:15:16 It's not just the transaction, is understanding each customer personally and get them to convert when they're ready with a very deep personalization of the interest rate, the risk, the max amount of the loan in a way that makes sense for the portfolio as a whole, obviously, but that's optimized to the risk level and probably the other offers that the customer is getting. And then maybe give us just to be, you know, e-vals are always a very hot topic. You kind of led with that. What is an example of maybe a hard-to-design area for e-vails or one where you had to spend an extra amount of time? What's just given the fact that there's real money, PII at risk? Right. Yeah. So when we decided to redesign the company around AI, you asked the question, okay, is AI going to be able to do this job?
Starting point is 00:16:13 like even the CEO job or jobs where the leadership is. And the answer, honestly, is probably yes. Like in 2035 with a rate of improvement, it will be able to do. So we said, okay, let's try it now. Let's try and build an AI CEO. So we carved out a city in Mexico, it's Guernabaca. And we put like an agent in one of our harnesses as a CEO. And it starts learning and it starts making decisions
Starting point is 00:16:42 and evaluating on those decisions. And it's only been running for six weeks now. The goal of the first month was to double the profits of Guadavacan. It didn't reach it, but it was 1.5x, like 50% more profits, just by managing the city, which is crazy, right? It's amazing. And it's the CEO. Like, people were, like, that was the last job I was supposed to take.
Starting point is 00:17:11 And no, it isn't, really. And how did this happen? And it's like a very smart person, like Fields Metal Levels more, like going into every single number, every single customer, making the perfor forecast and going to micromanage every single things that needs to be executed every day to reach a plan. So he'll literally send messages to all the physical workers in Kornavaka, with their plans for the day
Starting point is 00:17:42 and ask them to send voice notes back to know their progress. So customer satisfaction grew, we got a better inventory, we rotated better, better financing penetration, like every KPI started to improve. So it's super cool,
Starting point is 00:18:00 it's super exciting. Now, what are the jobs where we think we're still like training and hiring humans? Those are related to the physical world. So when we talk about mechanics,
Starting point is 00:18:15 Cadac has around, I think in Mexico, around 800 mechanics. There's lots of dexterity and senses that's super hard to substitute. So there, we also build these agents
Starting point is 00:18:26 with the exact same harness that's scaling. And the mechanics have the psychic. I was telling you guys earlier, it's like the movie Ratatoui, like the mouse that's actually a chef
Starting point is 00:18:40 collaborating with with a human. It's kind of like that. So it's a sidekick. We call it El Mike. And it tells them how to inspect a car and gives them tips and shows them the way to do it. And the quality of inspections, again, went through the roof. We're inspecting faster.
Starting point is 00:19:00 We're repairing faster. It's cheaper. But most importantly, we're delivering higher quality cars. Warranties came down around like 26%. since we launched, and customer satisfaction again went up. So it's about this. Like, how would you design your organization from scratch with abundant superintelligence that's cheap and just go build that?
Starting point is 00:19:32 Now, this is a good segue segue. where there's a lot of people worried about how the organizations of the future are going to look like. and the role that humans are going to play. Yes. And I think you touch a little bit on that. So we love to hear, yeah, like how you guys are thinking about that. Yes.
Starting point is 00:19:52 And the organizations, yeah. Totally. So we took that question very seriously three years ago. And the truth is that everyone's job will change. So and what we were doing a couple of years ago will probably be, be performed better by an AI agent, right? So what does this mean? We need to train everyone.
Starting point is 00:20:21 So we launched a program inside Quebec that's called the Jedi Academy, where anyone from Quebec, like from the CEO to... Yeah, and it says to them. Like, from the CEO to like AI engineers to mechanics, like going to the academy, it's super hard. Like I've led to you... that myself. You design the program.
Starting point is 00:20:45 I designed the program. But constantly. Constantly. Because you need to be upgrading the program because everything's changing so fast. And there's like you can't send these people like outside to Stanford to learn this because like it's new stuff. Right. So we train everyone. And after six weeks, they launch state of the art agents, agents to production.
Starting point is 00:21:10 And it's mechanics. and finance guys and engineers, like everyone can do it. And what this generated is, maybe this person won't become an AI engineer. Some of them have, but they know how to collaborate with this new technology, right?
Starting point is 00:21:27 So the way we looked about it was, guys, there's no way back. Like, this is the way Kabaki is going. This is the way the company will look like. These are the changes for the engineering team, the finance team, the product team. Like, this is what's going to change. change, you have the choice to, like, train and get the skills to perform in this new reality,
Starting point is 00:21:50 in this new world, or maybe leave Kavak if this is not for you, but this is where we're going. And we're great. Like, we strengthen the culture. And we were super excited. People really know how to build this agentic systems. And then if you look at Kavak now, any process, it's really a collaboration of, you agents and humans, and sometimes agents are the bosses of humans, and sometimes humans are designing the agents.
Starting point is 00:22:20 But I think we managed to really build this and change this. And it's through this idea that we need to be learning every day and things will continue to change. And the only way to continue being relevant is to upgrade your skills every month or every couple of months. But you do have, or did have, you know, thousands of people. Now agents do most things. Yes.
Starting point is 00:22:48 So, like, what is the org structure of Quebec? Like, does the middle management concept even exist anymore? Like, what does your org look like? Right. So the way it looks like now is very flat teams, very senior teams, super empowered. If you look at a team, you'll have engineering, AI, like, operations, like everything. And they're either building the agents. working for the agents or being in the physical world in front of the customer.
Starting point is 00:23:16 Like most of our organization looks like that. So it's really built around the idea of how organizations will look like in the future and around AI and really harnessing this new technology. Obviously, this required lots of retraining because in 2023 or 2022, no one was building agents. no one was helping agents or taking orders from agents. And the way you cater to the physical world or the customers was in a different way than if an agent's telling you what to do or helping you make your job better. So it's a completely different structure than we had just two years ago. Explain, we talked about this before, what working for the agents look like.
Starting point is 00:24:00 I think the way you described it was an eugenic system. And then sometimes when it fails, it's like, oh, that's kicked out to kind of a human cue. Right. But then that's lost. And so how have you brought that together? So like the least human in the loops and most of this agentic systems in production right now, like large-scale agentic systems, usually if an agent hit a wall or can't perform anymore, it'll send this case or this customer to a tier two support and forget about it.
Starting point is 00:24:28 That doesn't really work because you don't close the loops so you don't generate the data to train the agent to do this better. What works right now is we have an agent that's obsessed with each of the customers, like millions of this. They have access to every single API, every single skill, and we have agents building those, humans building those skills for them. And then if an agent hits a wall or cancel something, it'll call this API saying, I need help. And on the other side, it's not an agent or software, it's a human helping them out. But if you met this out in an org chart, it's really human teams that have an agent. I'm getting better results.
Starting point is 00:25:09 It's super clear, like, it makes sense. That's actually a perfect segue. I know you get lots of leaders at larger institutions inbounding to you. So maybe this will save you many phone calls. But I think rationally, many leaders of companies intuitively understand this. It is very hard still to deploy AI through their organization. Like, the models are going to.
Starting point is 00:25:32 good enough. You know that. It's an org problem. It's a psychology problem. Like, what advice do you have or what have you seen? I think it's two things. The first is it has to be top down because of this. Like if you just get adoption, it won't go anywhere because it's hard to generate this taste or strategy for people to bottom up, decide what to build and whatnot and come up with something that works for the company. So the transformation has to be top down and leaders need to adopt and leaders have to have a very clear plan on what to build. I've seen so many companies that's just like, oh, like we're doing a hackathon, people are coming up with use cases, we're sponsoring some of these use cases.
Starting point is 00:26:15 That doesn't work. It's like, be very clear on what the company will look like in three or five years and then start building that and be like very vertical in guiding your troops towards that. Like an army doesn't really work if everyone comes up with ideas on the strategy and tactics and goes to the battlefield and does whatever they want. Like you need a very clear strategy. And that's what we need now. It's a like transformation stage. The second one is you need to measure what really matters.
Starting point is 00:26:46 And it's evils, but it's also the right evils. So I see a lot of companies spending now huge amounts and they say, okay, I got adoption. I'm just spending like hundreds of millions of dollars in tokens now. What about that? Like, there's quality in the tokens. So have a framework here that's also useful. Like, Tier 3 tokens, the most valuable are this agents where you can get the ROI of each specific token. And I can do that now.
Starting point is 00:27:17 That's great news for me because I'm growing and because I know the ROI of each token, because it goes to agents that are performing the job of the organization, right? These are the best tokens. Tier two tokens are things that you can measure indirectly. Do I see deaths in the code base? And I can evaluate the value of these tokens, at least indirectly, and then push those to productions. Tier one, when most companies are,
Starting point is 00:27:43 is people are just using plug code or chatypT or co-work or whatever. What happened with those? I have no idea. So it's not just about adoption. It's really about having a very clear vision and then measuring that each token you spend, is bringing you those benefits and just iterate, iterate, iterate from there. And I want to, and we touch on this a little bit, but I think it's worth a dive as maybe the most
Starting point is 00:28:09 ambitious companies listening to this will decide to follow suit, which is you decided to build an agent per customer versus per task, and then discovered along the way that each one of those agents needs its own, kind of micro virtual machine. So it made me kind of walk us through those decisions inside architecture. And I think we're seeing these results now, but it was a really risky bet because people usually go from workflows, like if I could advise everyone, don't build agentic workflows,
Starting point is 00:28:43 to graphs or functions or objectives. And we built that. These are multi-agent systems that can perform a whole function for a complex goals. Like the ones I told you that to sell a car, you need to do financing, purchasing, like recommendations, et cetera. And we had thousands, like tens of thousands of these agents working at scale running the business back in December.
Starting point is 00:29:06 But then Opus 4.5 came out, and I realized like this isn't the right paradigm anymore. Like the intelligence now doesn't need like the graph and the multi-agent lattice work and harness because it will constrain this level of intelligence. So we decided to like destroy everything we had been building for for two years that was working, that brought us to profitability, that brought us amazing growth, and started over with a harness that we thought would be robust and scalable
Starting point is 00:29:42 and leverage recursive self-improvement or new models, more intelligent models coming out every month. So the way this looks like it's a virtual machine with an agent, with access to memory and e-bals and the CLI where they can access every tool and every API in my company and the long-term goal. And I instantiate hundreds of thousands of these each day with long-term goals, like maximizing the lifetime value. Yeah. The self-improving organization.
Starting point is 00:30:13 Exactly. The self-improving organization. And I think people are super obsessed with RSI now, and this will improve the model. But if you look at it this way, economic value in humanity for the past 4,000 years, has been delivered by organization, not by individuals. So what you want to self-improve and to engage in that loop is the organization that can deliver more economic value. Right? So that's a loop that I think companies will start to focus on because if you get that loop working
Starting point is 00:30:50 and it's an organization that is really self-improving, and harnessing the newer models and the better intelligence that we're getting every couple of days now, then you hit the exponential, not just in intelligence, but in the value that you can generate as a company. So that's really exciting.
Starting point is 00:31:10 That's what we're working on. You mentioned that because of all the challenges in adopting AI, you saw the biggest opportunity on net new companies being formed working on this new way and then disrupting markets. You want to talk a little bit about that?
Starting point is 00:31:25 Yes. There's this concept in economics about creative destruction from Joseph Schumpeter. And what it says is that the way innovation hits the economy is sent by companies adopting the new technology, but by companies remaining the way they were and incumbents with the new technology destroying the old companies. So this destroys value in the short. term in the economy, but in the long term it's better for everyone because this new, more efficient, more effective companies will provide better products and services for the economy's hope. And this has happened in the past industrial revolutions, and this has always happened.
Starting point is 00:32:09 And it's a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and people today because it's hard to adopt AI deeply. It's really hard for a CEO today, especially of a large, company or public company to go and say, hey, like, I'm betting everything on AI. The company has to look this way. I'll, like, destroy and rebuild everything I've been building for the past 40 years to become an AI native company. Like, how many CEOs will do that in a company at scale? So while they adopt, new companies can be formed that are built around the strength of
Starting point is 00:32:52 of AI and take over and bring new products and services to, to, to the messes. And this has happened before. Like, this happened with electricity. This is a story I always tell my team. The technologies for Ford's production line were developed in 1879 and 1881. Edison started commercializing electricity in New York and then London. And he invented a dynamo that was extremely. efficient. So you could have built
Starting point is 00:33:25 Ford's factory 40 years before Ford. The technology was there. Everything was there. But the way people adopted electricity and Forge Dynamo was, okay, I'm going to leave my factory like four floors, shafts and belts. I just change my coal
Starting point is 00:33:42 engine for an electric engine. And this will bring you benefits, yes, but like 6% efficiency. What needed to be done was to destroy that factory. build it in a flat surface, not in the center of New York, but in Connecticut or New Jersey, and redesign your whole factory around small dynamos and electricity. And then you get like the 3x improvement productivity that powered the U.S. during the 20th century.
Starting point is 00:34:16 And the same happened again with the computer and the same is happening again today. People want to adopt it, but they're not willing to redesign the whole. whole company and they just adopted superficially. And in the end, that'll give you a 6% or a 10% improvement, not a 10x improvement. And it's like the innovator's dilemma at an industrial scale again. I think you've just made an amazing case for any future founders out there that it's time to build. It's time to build. And maybe a great place to end is you know, you've built and scaled your own company, you've now turned Kabak, fully agentic. Like, what advice do you have to future founders or first-time founders that might be listening?
Starting point is 00:34:59 So this is the most exciting time in human history. I believe that. Like, we're living in the most exciting time in human history. And it's the most exciting time to be a founder because it's the first time that anyone has access to the most powerful tools and intelligence in the world. the world, like for almost for free or for $20 a month. So literally the democratization of the tools for people to build has never been this way in human history.
Starting point is 00:35:34 And there's so much problems to be solved and a new reality to be built around this new paradigm. So say, like, just go for it, but go for it deep. Like imagine what the future around the AI will look like. It's just a, it's not even an exponential. Just map a trend. It's linear. If things keeps getting, like AI keeps getting better at a linear scale and just build for that.
Starting point is 00:36:01 And you'll come up with wonderful ideas that will, like, bring a lot of value to the world. Amazing. Allie, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A60s podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes,
Starting point is 00:36:26 go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X and A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.