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: It’s art, not science.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s art, not science. Machines can take every job, but not us. The ladder stops just below VC for them in a way that is entertaining and fun. So I wonder how many people are actually using this now, especially because venture capitalists themselves are so skeptical of it, it seems like. Who’s the audience? Is it finding real traction out there?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So the way that ADIN works is they have scouts that go out and look for potential deals, and then those scouts can make money on said deals. So I think this would be something where VCs wouldn’t necessarily be adopting the network, but people would be going around them and they wouldn’t be as necessary, as useful. I think there was another great irony, which Arielle pulled out in her piece, which is that also, if you can start a company with just yourself and a bunch of AI agents, you’re vibe coding your way to success, do you even need all of that venture capital money to begin with?
Leah Feiger: I don’t know. There’s so much to me, there’s so much fear about AI taking jobs. I feel like every other article that is like, “And these people are nervous and these people are nervous.” Brian’s right, the part that is funny is these are the folks that have just gone all in on AI, but I’m still waiting. I’m still waiting for AI to take the jobs. Has it yet? Will it yet?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I think that there’s recent research. I was talking to Will Knight, one of our fantastic AI reporters about this yesterday, and he was saying, “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.” But I will say being in San Francisco, I am hearing a lot of people say engineering teams in particular are very bloated right now. Agents can actually do a lot of the work and you definitely need humans on top managing those agents, but you could cut a lot of teams by 80 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent. And so I think that we are going to see more AI-related job loss first in engineering and then in other sectors.
Brian Barrett: Marc Andreessen, famous venture capitalist, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, said this very thing in a recent podcast. Listen to how special he thinks his own profession is.
Marc Andreessen, archival audio: Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation. If it was a science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials it in and gets 8 out of 10, but in the real world, it’s not like that. It’s just you’re in the fluke business. And so there’s an intangibility to it. There’s a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology. And I don’t want to be definitive, but it’s possible that that is quite literally timeless. And when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.
