Eugenia Kuyda on software’s “YouTube moment”

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com/splotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very safety plus. Today we'll live in the era of Microsoft DOS interfaces for AI. And there will be something more very visually enticing, something Google-based think of it as there was Microsoft DOS and then Windows or Mac OS appeared. So there will be a different, I don't almost say operating system, a different interface layer on top of AI that will allow people to use all software, not just apps, but also AI models, in this completely new, different way. Welcome to Access, the tech industries inside conversation, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm your host, Alice Hamburger here with my co-host, Alex Heath. And today we've got Eugenia Kuida, the founder and CEO of Wabi, a new app for building apps. One of my favorite most thoughtful founders and we jammed a little bit on the Wabi launch, which we go into a bit. But I just feel like she has an ethos for what she's building that a lot of founders don't have. You know what I mean? Yeah, she's got Krad. What did she do before this? She created replica, which was like the OG AI chat companion app. I think they definitely tread it into the romance territory a lot faster than many others did. Now 10, 15 years later, Elon Musk is trying to build your new AI date or side piece. How would you describe it? It's becoming mainstream. Final. She's ahead of the curve. Elon's going in a totally different direction, I think. Yeah. No. A very interesting, like, I, replica was a very interesting company when it launched and it still has a ton of users, I think it has millions of users. Just to fly a little more under the radar relative to like character and chat you see obviously. But yeah, definitely an OG in the AI space and Wabi is a super interesting product. Did you work on this manifesto that they put out? Yes, we did. My bread and butter. You actually liked it? I do like it. You play on like, there's an app for that and, you know, personalized software and all that. I mean, it's a theme we've been having on this show really since we launched is this idea of personalized software. Yeah, it's kind of funny because every single founder I've ever worked with and ever will work with wants to make their own think different or Apple 1984 ad or maybe like subverted or riff on it in some way. And it almost never works, but this was the kind of occasion where pushing off of app for that to do an app for you actually made some sense because there's a real tension there, assuming that Apple doesn't cancel them before they can, they can get off the ground. But I guess there's some new rules that she's privy to that they're following. And so yeah, she seems confident they're going to be okay. Yeah. Before we get into that, everything else good with you? Do you have a good weekend? Yeah, you know, kids sick again, getting me sick again, round and round it goes. I've been playing the new Final Fantasy Tactics game for Switch, leveling up my mages when I have 18 minutes of toilet time in privacy makes you think about your life like an RPG in some ways. I think I'm going to I think I'm going to level up my podcast skills with this new microphone. And do you ever think about your life that way? I don't know if you're absolutely absolutely what are you leveling up at the moment? Well, having had time to game, I would say the last game I played all the way through was the last Zelda on Switch that's sequel. Those two games are my favorite games that I've played. A tier is the Kingdom? Yeah, that I've played as an adult. Those are my favorite games by far. And definitely like had a lot of dreams about those games when I was playing them a lot. But I haven't a while. I've been so still heads down and just like a new media startup mode man going to New York next week going to have a sources launch party with the fine folks at human ventures. Wish you could come. We will. Human or human human ventures kind of like human ventures. Human ventures. No, they're great. It's going to be a great group, a pretty like interesting mix of media and tech folks and we're going to have poker too, so that'll be fun. Are you plugging this or invites open or is this a VIP thing? I mean, I didn't hear about it. So I guess it's pretty exclusive to work to be in New York, man. If you can text me, you can still come. So if you have my number reach out, if you're going to be in New York. But we are pretty much at capacity, which is awesome. I spent a lot of time this week with the new leadership team for GitHub at Microsoft. They're keeping with our vibe coding theme interviewed their new head of GitHub for resources.news will have been out by the time this drops and about how they're thinking about the AI kind of developer ecosystem. So if you're interested in that stuff, check it out and had a pretty big scoop about snap actually last week and oh yeah, we got to talk about that. Yeah, we can just talk about it real quickly, just man, Evan's out there looking for some money for for specs. Snaps ties in the Middle East. Deep in. Well, I think what the most interesting thing is this idea of making specs like Waymo, so positioning it as this subsidiary that could be funded with outside investors, like an alphabet style, other bet. Basically, I think the most interesting part is not that. But the original pictures of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel participating in Falconry with the Saudi crown prince. Oh, well, that's what you do when you go out there. They love Falconry. You don't know that's that's like the right passage when you're when you're visiting the world. Are you speaking from experience? Uh, you know, no comment, but, um, but no, uh, yeah, just if you're into this air glasses, you know, um, uh, race and, you know, we talked about it with similar last week, check that scoop out about snaps glasses plans and how they're restructuring. But, uh, yeah, that was a good scoop, Alex. Thank you. Thank you. I'll try. Yeah. No, thank you. I feel like, you know, it's one thing when you're at a website like the Virgin, you see traffic bumps when you get scoops and whatnot. I mean, how's that been so far with the with the newsletter? It's the driver bumps. Yeah. I mean, it's the thing that converts, you know, it's the thing that converts someone to pay. Um, it's pretty easy to get free, you know, high churn low engagement users, right, um, with like a sign up, you know, chum box, but the thing that really builds your subscriber basis, information, people can't get anywhere else, you know, whether it's like an interview or a scoop. And I've known that just working behind paywalls for much of my career that that's how it works. So everything I'm doing right now with sources is like it, I'm trying to keep the quality bar really high and it'd be something you can't get anywhere else. And um, it works if they cite you, right? I know they don't, they don't all and then you get a little mad on Twitter, which I always like to see. Oh, well, yeah, that's just, you know, that's just inside journalism baseball stuff. But yeah, people, people know who know when they're not linking. And I love to prop them. Is there a, is there any person or publication that has cited you the least relatively? Oh, how deliberate is it? There's a couple. I'd have to go back and count. Um, it's very delivered. So it was something like making a practice. Like, what is it? Like the New York Times like delivery? The New York Times has actually gotten a lot better. They used to be really bad about linking out, but they've gotten a lot better. Um, it's actually, um, some of the more digital first publications that are increasingly petty about this stuff. I don't know if it's wise for me to name names. I'm not trying to like get into another, um, another minefield there, but, uh, I'll keep, uh, subtly jabbing at, at vague people that they know who they are on social media. Uh, but yeah, man, no, otherwise things are good. I'm excited for this convo with you, Jenny. Awesome. Let's kick it to you, Jenny. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? And more at Accenture.com/Spotify. no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability very 16 plus. Eugenia Kuida, my friend and collaborator, welcome to the show. Hey Eugenia, nice to meet you. Hi Alex, now it's still good to see her. How does it feel to be doing a podcast when you should probably be preparing launch materials for your public launch next week? Well, it feels pretty hectic. We're really, we've really driven heads down and it's a little bit tough because I'm used to just building one app and now I feel like we're building an app that builds a million apps. So it feels like we're launching, I don't know, a million different apps which is exponentially harder than just one app because now everything can go wrong. Like every single, they're like basically gazillion bugs that could happen. I was going to say that's a lot of bugs and a lot of app store guidelines to follow when you have apps inside of apps. That is true, but there are many apps, they're not really big apps. So, you know, for, for the app store, the app store has a carve out for many apps. With Wabi, you cannot use them outside of our platform. She's saying this to the app review gods right now in Cupertino. It's many apps, it's many apps. I'm, I'm trying, I'm trying. I'm a little, you know, they are the gods. They are the arbiters of truth as we've had it for how many years now, like literally two decades. And yeah, I think that's like one of my favorite parts of your teaser website that you just went up with and we should get into Wabi and your history with replica. When we were together, I just love that line we came up with like not there's an app for that, but there's an app for you. And I think that came from an insight that like you had, can you tell us about the origin of this thing? Like all of us, I have a gazillion apps on my iPhone and for most of them, I just forget what they are. I use maybe 10 daily or weekly. And then the rest is just basically a graveyard off. Forgotten apps. Some of them still charge me. Some of them, I don't even know what they do. And so it felt like today when you can spin up an app so quickly with AI using any of the existing tools, why can't I just kind of use apps like that versus like I have to go to the app store and so find something and it's all one size fits all. It's all trying to get me through this kind of onboarding that tries to influence me to pay and then forget to cancel and this and that and really relying on all these dark patterns. So it felt like there should be a new platform, a new platform where people are creating apps quickly, sharing with other people, other people are discovering apps, maybe remixing them and so on, so on, so on. It does feel that all of our lives are pretty unique and problems are pretty unique, they're definitely a lot of common issues, but still we have very unique preferences and it just feels like we need specific solutions for specific problems throughout the day. Well, I have a specific problem and this morning I made an app on Wabi called How Many Poops and here's what it does. The pediatrician always wants to know as you know, Eugenia, how many times your baby pooped or as I prefer to call them BMs for bowel movements and I'm like this does not deserve to be not this time, not this time, not this time. And so all it does is it has one button and I'm like I also want average poops per day and I hit go and I closed out Wabi and then five minutes later it was done and it's got like nice little icons and everything and I'm like yeah, this does not deserve to be an entire venture backed product but it does deserve to exist for me. So thank you for that and I mean there are so many alternatives when you're a parent but they're just filled with constant upsells. Like would you like to upgrade to baby poop pro that includes length, girth, and weight tracking of the BMs. Sounds helpful. I don't really need that do I and so yeah that definitely appealed to me about your vision is that it's not that you're trying to replace like Airbnb or maybe that is your vision but for all the little things that we didn't even know could be software every day. Pretty cool. Yeah, like the other day I was putting my daughter to sleep and she wants to play puzzles like basically I just tell her something and she tries to guess what it is. She wants to also look at pictures and she likes Princess Jasmine and Princess Elsa so took me three minutes in Wabi just to make that puzzle app where I read it out to her and she can look at different pictures and click on them and that's a constant hit. So she's learning something and then we made it in Italian because she goes to talent preschool and now she's also learning Italian and took us basically two minutes where we're doing it while in bed together. So these are really the the use cases and I don't even know within an app like that exists and looking for one going through on boards, trying them out, downloading. It actually was longer than just building it quickly to my spec on Wabi and then I also found out that certain times like for example I've been trying to do weight lifting so I'm trying to log my workouts. I've been using just notes on my iPhone before then I tried a bunch of different apps. Again they just had so much different functionality that I didn't need or I didn't like how it was working. So I built that just build a simple one of Wabi and what I like about it is that I go to the gym I work out and every day I every time I work out I find something else I want to add to my app. First it was just for tracking workouts. Then I wanted to add suggestions. So now it basically creates automatically a workout that I can track based on like progressive overload and based on all my different things that I'm trying to achieve based on all my goals. So like every time I go and then I wanted to make it a little bit more minimalist and black and wide and then I want to change the app back and so now it feels like a little almost like a little garden, a little project that I continue to work on, but it's not really work. It's literally I'm doing it in between sets. I don't have anything to do is to just add a little prompt and chat and wait how my app is changing and improving all the time. And I keep republishing it to the Wabi app store so that Wabi, you know, other users potentially can use that. And I feel there's something about it. There's really something about having your own very personal software that you're taking care of. They're using it constantly improving and all that. And hopefully just like we really think Wabi could be sort of the YouTube moment for apps and for many people they won't even be creating anything new. They will just be discovering maybe remixing a little bit or just using apps that other people built. Jenny, I love what you're doing because I do think personalized apps are kind of where everything is headed. At the same time, it feels like Wabi is a little contrarian because if you talk to people at Meta or Google, they will tell you that according to their data, the average person downloads zero new apps per month. So there's this idea of app saturation where everybody's, you know, got their home screen in order. Yeah, maybe there's a Sora or something once a year that pops up and you know, resets things a little bit or gets people to download. But for the most part, people have settled into their rhythms and there's just not a lot of buzz in like the traditional app world anymore. So I'm curious like, you know, you founded replica of very successful early chatbot platform. How did you decide on this idea is what you wanted to do next because I imagine when you started it, it probably felt like even a little more contrarian than it does now where you're seeing a lot of vibe coding going into mobile and people realizing that you can actually just make apps on the fly on mobile, not even on desktop. So I'm used to that. So when we just, when we started replica and in fact, we started something that prior to replica, which was basically technology so models to generate dialects or conversationally, I tech kind of chatbot builder thing, but this way. And when we started that, the feedback we got from some of the VCs we met was, well, you got a builder for Google Glass and then maybe will. Oh my God, because we can't figure out any other use case. This will never be useful for anything, but maybe, maybe for Google Glass. Does VCs really know what's coming next? So wise. Always seeing around corners. Yeah, there for, you know, VCs have great insight, but sometimes they just engage in this crazy group thing. I remember in 2022, once Cheshire came out, that session was like every product company needs to raise a gazillion dollars and build their own foundational model. Because if you don't have your own foundation model, you're basically gone. You're like, you should be dead. You're just like some rapper. You have to have that data flywheel or whatever that meant to train your foundation model. And all of that was completely wrong. So, of course, but that was the session then. So sometimes VCs get into this. I remember 2016. It was all about well, chatbots of the new apps. And now, you know, because they saw we chat, I guess, and then like everything needs to be in the chatbot format. So they were weather apps that you would talk to to get a weather update, which was. If you think about it pretty crazy, but your own personal weatherman. And same goes to bigger companies. Sometimes they see a future, but sometimes if you think about the use cases, they show sometimes in some of these videos. It's always some sort of restaurant reservation use case. Like, who has that, like, I don't know. VCs. I'll tell you. I'll tell you there's a lot of dinner reservations. It's VCs. It's always it's some dinner reservation problem. Like, I don't have any dinner reservation problems. I go to restaurants, but I also have two toddlers. And I don't really have any problem choosing a restaurant. Of course, our very first product with replica, pre replica was a demo of a restaurant recommendation app. So I'm of course shading on myself. I do remember I was a glass. year of full gram at Y Combinator, we met him for office hours, and he looked at us like, "Sir, you're building what restaurant recommendation app? Who got you in? I need to go and fire that partner." And then, of course, he, you know, figured we're building conversationally. And he said, "Just never say, never ever talk about restaurant recommendations. This is awful." And so, going back to your question, like, why did I set to work on this idea? I was just talking to replica users all the time, and I would always ask them, "Do you use other AI's? Do you, besides replica?" And I always thought they're, of course, telling me, "Yeah, of course, I'm using cloud or Chagypti or this or that." And oftentimes, they would tell me that they don't really use other AI's that much. And I started to look more into what people use Chagypti for. Of course, there are tons of users, almost a billion users. And basically, the use cases are pretty much just writing, as writing tool, search, asking general questions. And that's sort of that. And, of course, for all of us working an AI, we know how much more these AI models can, can do. And so, we started looking to that, and I feel like, really, it's the problem of the interface. When you look at a command line, which is what every chatbot, every Chagypti, Chagypti, Chagypti, all of them are just this command line interfaces. When you look at a command line for a regular person, the affordance of that interface is pretty much just that search, writing tool, where you can talk to it, where messenger. And in doing a lot, many more use cases, which is basically being trapped behind that command line. So we thought of it that today we'll live in the era of Microsoft DOS interfaces, like the for AI. And there will be something more, something very visually enticing, something much more exciting, interactive, something GUI-based. Think of it as there was Microsoft DOS and then Windows or Mac OS appeared. So there will be a different, I don't almost say operating system, a different interface layer on top of AI that will allow people to use all software, not just apps, but also AI models in this completely new different way. And if you think about it right now, we talk about separately apps that you download for the app store, and separately how we use Chagypti, so prompts. But in reality, it all should be the same. Like, if I'm using Chagypti as a therapist, for example, or a lot of people use it to track calories, I kind of want a specific interface. I don't want to be doing that in chat. I want maybe a little app that is fully powered by the same Chagypti or whatever the model of your choice, but it has a little bit of like what I ate yesterday, some trends, maybe a streak, or whatever you want, but you sort of want a little bit of an interface on top of that. You don't just want to be doing that in chat. And so this, I think, our lobby vision, I do think combines the use, how you use AI models, and just the new type of software, it all becomes kind of part of the same operating system. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. That's new. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability. Very 16 plus. One interesting thing you've done is in kind of imposed some type of design system on all the different apps you could generate with Wabi, and I think on the one hand, it's kind of constraining and maybe can look generic. But on the other, it's like most vibe-coded apps look like shit. How did you make that decision? How early did you make that decision that you needed to kind of enforce some type of design system with the buttons and icons and all that stuff? So we actually give a very loose design system to the models, so they're not being overprompted by that. So they can still create a very, you know, very, they can be very free in what they create. If you wanted to look like a Harry Potter themed app, you can still create that. But we do create a bunch of components that we show to the models that they can use and then edit. And the reason being for us, the vision was like, if this is going to be another place that where you can create tons of very ugly looking similar vibe-coded apps with beige oatmeal background and blue buttons, it's just going to look so boring and awful. In the end of the day, people do respond to better design. But they also like, but you also have to always balance it with the fact that they want their own thing. If you ever go in the subway and, you know, you sit with a person with an Android phone, you'll see some crazy fonts that people choose as customization options. I phone just a lot of you to do that. But, you know, Android does. And, you know, a lot of things. They're people that just set, like, comic senses. They're a default font and just live with that and they love it. And nothing bad about it. Just people want their own Twitter judge, right? We're not judging. Just don't bring a comic sans deck to Y Combinator. Unless you already have 85,000 followers and then they're like, wait, what do they know that we don't know? Okay, we're funding them. Exactly. So I do think, and I don't think there's one good taste, whatever, it's just that there's some taste that's good for a lot of people that people think, oh, this is kind of well produced. But then there's also personalization. And people want what they want. And you've got to give it to them. You can't just say why it's everything is just going to look like this iPhone generic sort of whatever app or some material design apps. So we tried to find that balance, but it do think there's absolutely there's a magical and we're almost there. And, frankly, I think this is just about to come where we'll see AI generated apps that look better or just like the best designed apps made by humans. And I think this makes just the usage of these apps a lot more exciting to think about it. But also, I would also say that I'd add one more thing to that. There's a, for example, my apps, I make them all black and white, minimal and just kind of very clean. Just because I like it this way, I have a little bit of OCD, I want everything to be in its own little container. So I like when they're all kind of the same color and there's nothing special about them. If you think about it, I would never launch an app like that on the app store, because people are not going to convert. They won't like it. It's too boring. There's not, you know, it's not some cool dopamine thing is not jumping at them. But I want my software to be the way I want it. I don't want it to be whatever dopamine kind of inducing stuff that I wanted this way. And maybe some other person wants it in a completely different way. Colorful or old-style, you know, Windows 95 style. Whatever they want, retro pixelated or crazy, vibrant, eccentric, whatever. I'm one of those dudes who still wants all my apps to be felt leather or would. Is that permitted? Oh, you was scar-forced all, buddy. That's very wobbly. Yeah, Scott's the go. Yeah. If we get him on, I would be able to retire happily. Oh, for sure. Do you know him, you, Jenny? No, you know everybody. I don't think so. We got to get Scott. I should. You can work on that. I want to work on that. Okay. Can people make companionship AIs with Wabi? Does this tie back into what you were doing before it all? They can. And there's a whole kind of the chat apps. It's like a big type that you can totally create and do whatever you want. In fact, I think this is where Wabi really shines. Think, may I therapy app or I can paint an app? With Wabi, we wanted to, for everyone to be able to see if there's anything AI generated, you can see the problems and you can choose the model. It's never something hidden from you. So if there's any agent flow or any AI flow, you can see the problems. Even if it's not your app, change it, do whatever you want to do that. So think it makes this a really good way to kind of for everyone to own and kind of not have companions that are made that maybe have some dark goals. You can always see what the goal is in the prompt. You can always change it. It's like a container for containers, like a sandbox for all these different prompts. Did you share something the other day that called it like a platform for prompt containers? I thought that was an interesting way to think about it. There are a lot of prompts that you could ask chat, UPT or other AI's, but not only do they not have a UI, but most of these tools don't have ways to save them and reuse them. Yeah, I think one of the use cases that for me is very important is people today share prompts. How do they do that? They put it on text on Reddit or Twitter or threads or whatever and they say, this is my perfect prompt to do this and that on chat up T and then people have to copy that prompt, paste it into chat up T wherever and then do something with it and that just feels so archaic. We're dealing with this technology that's pretty much godlike and what we need to do is copy paste some big text paragraphs and put them somewhere. This feels crazy. So instead of that, we felt like with Wabi, you can just create a very simple many out and just to share that. So the prompt is right there, you can always find it and change it and see it, but you don't need to do it. do anything. You already presented with the app where you just have to click, click, click, and immediately, you know, do whatever you want to do with that model. You don't need to go anywhere and copy paste anything. And so for me, that's one of the most exciting use cases because that combines the two big, sort of, the two big things. One is bipecoding apps and one is using AI models to talk to them and get something. So all together, it will be basically brings both of these use cases together. How do you treat data in this context and especially if people are going to make, you know, therapy apps with Wabi? People at least have some semblance of an idea of how their data is used with open AI or whatever, but how do you treat that with Wabi? Well, so I think the only way for people to use bipecoded AI therapy apps by some other people is to create a platform, to create some organizational layer. And here, Wabi, it takes care of all that. All the data is private, of course. We already took a bunch of steps with security because it's not our first rodeo. And we've done it with replica by the way, replica in 10 years, never been hacked, knock on wood, never had any data leak problems and so on. Here are the same. We believe this is super critical. And one of the biggest problems with bipecoded apps, say you created an AI therapy app and you send me a link. I never want to use it really because first of all, you can see the data. And I don't know if you're going to read it or what? Second of all, you're not a professional app developer. So I don't know, maybe tomorrow something just leaks. One of the famous bipecoded apps, whatever the tea, without the tea bag or something. Yeah, the tea app. Yeah. They got taken off the app store recently. Oh, it did. Yeah. It was bipecoded and it was taken all the sensitive data from women that were sharing, basically, uh, their stories with, yeah, dude reviews like whatever sex offenders and stuff. And then of course, all the data got leaked because it was bipecoded, not because the person who built it was a bad actor, but he didn't know and didn't work on security of that app. So I believe for bipecoding, if you're building anything that has to do with any sensitive data or any kind, it's almost no one's going to use someone else's bipecoded app where the person is in charge of the database and kind of supporting the app. There needs to be a platform because we're not thinking, well, you know, if I'm watching YouTube, I kind of just agree to YouTube's terms of services. I'm not like really sending my data or whatever to say. Yeah. You don't think a certain YouTube video is going to like prompt inject your, your Mac or something, right? Yeah. So it's sort of have to have this platform that provides all of that, like everything comes with it. And it also, maybe even nothing leaks, but then you just forget to update your, whatever payment information on replete or lovable and your apps just gone. And then all my therapy logs are gone. So that's also not great. So I feel like without an organizational layer, though people are never going to be using other people's bipecoded apps, that's kind of my big without some platform. We're not going to be using, you know, we're not, I'm not going to be taking your AI journaling link and starting to keep very private journal somewhere, somewhere there. What else does that platform include? Are there payments, social graph? What else is kind of added to the SDK, if you will, for each of the vipecoded apps? So super important thing is on Wabi, you can't download any apps. You have to only use them there. So that comes with, that's a constraint, but it comes with so many benefits. First of all, data security, the fact that there's a persistent backend, like your data is always there. You can come back and use it a year from now. It's every, all the history is still there. But it also comes with a bunch of different power-ups, call it this way. Integrations with all sorts of AI models, image-gen models, voice models, and so on, as well as integrations of all your apps and services. You can connect your Gmail, you can build apps on top of Apple Health, on top of your calendar, on top of your bank account. Whatever you want. You want an app that generates an action figure out of your, based on your bank account activity. Sure. You know, it's like, whatever you want. You can come up with really creative ways of doing this. A broke superhero. A brokeie. So all of that. Plus, of course, the social graph. So you can also see, if you think about the app store, it's actually really not social. So this week we're pushing a big social update on the app store, you can't see what your friends are using. What apps are your friends are using? Or, you know, we can't see comments to any apps. You can see the reviews, but the reviews are like a, it's pretty crazy when you think about it that way. Yeah, and it's the whole thing. Instead on why you'll be able to like any app you want, you can see who is downloading these apps, like any of your friends or any of the people you've followed download of this app. You can see comments. So apps could create many apps, could become a conversation starter, a start for a small community. People can show off what they're creating with different many apps and comments. They can also ask the creator for a certain update. And there's also like, if I want for this, you know, for a new feature in this app, I can remix and build myself or I can ask the creator to update it for all of us. So it's going to be even more fun. We can only continue to use it with the community and so on, so on, so on. And of course, multiplayer. So something else we're working on now is being able to use all these apps together with your friends invite invite your best friend, invite your partner, whoever you want to, I don't know, write great grocery lists or packing lists, play a little game against each other or come up with movie recommendations for the evening and so on, so on. Are you saying we could do an access superfan lobby app where they can interact with us? That's possible. That is my most interesting for me, one of the most exciting use cases is being able to create sort of like a multiplayer app where there are kind of tons of viewers sort of our content. So like you said, where people can interact with the creators and talk to them and stuff like that. You guys want to know about the dumbest article I ever wrote, that is actually maybe the smartest. Yes, of course. I wrote an article for the Verge a long time ago about the SAP called Yo. Do you guys remember that? Of course. Of course I'm ready. I want to go about that. You did? Yes. Wow. You're the goat. I was kind of fascinated by Yo. Yeah, well, so was I because the idea started with just being able to yo your friends, but then they were talking about adding this developer platform where you could get Yo's for almost any event, whether it is a sports score or a website update or this or that. And that sadly was just a figment of my imagination. But now I feel like with Agentic AI and an app platform that allows you to create notifications for whatever you want. I feel like that is finally coming true. You know, like your bank, for example, only allows you to set up notifications for certain, very specific things. Like, oh, if you have a low, you know, your risk of overdraft or you take out more than $100 in the ATM, but I feel like there's huge potential there to be able to just set up push notifications for almost anything, right? Yeah, I thought, you know, opening, I did some cool thing with those tasks. I was a super user of tasks in the beginning of the year, but they took it out where you could basically just say, run this prompt every day or every week for me or every month. And it could be, you know, checking with me about what I'm grateful for or it could be show me what to do with my kids over the weekend. And I don't think people figured it out how to use it in a chat. I thought this would have such a strong response, but it didn't. But I was a heavy user and I do believe in that with Wabi, again, any app, you can set up push notifications. You can make it, you know, generate content, whatever content you want for you every day. I think this is sort of another big thing. And we also made a transparent so that people can actually change the prompt for the notifications themselves. So for example, if you have a workout app, you can create a push notifications that will be generated in like David Gogan's voice for tone of voice, for example, if you want it to or however, really you want it to be generated. You talked about this being the YouTube moment for apps that to me suggests you're thinking about a YouTube like business model or you thinking like creator revshare on ads or payments down the road. How are you going to monetize all this? I know this is the question a founder loves to get asked the week before they watch. I love those questions. I also love when investors ask for business models. I haven't been asked for one for a long time, but I guess like 10 years ago it was still happening here and there. Is that the ultimate founder bragging right? I don't get asked for business models anymore. Well, no, I mean like a pre launch when you don't even have any like sell, you're still figuring it out and then they're like, you know, create a business model for the next two years or something with like forecasts. And I went to business school. So I can do that. But I don't know. I'm going to disrupt the app store. I don't know what to tell you. $10 sign here. Yeah, it just feels so arbitrary. Just whatever it's like, I just put some numbers in. I don't know. I guess welcome to late stage capital is in me. I just put some numbers in. It's just a numbers in. I don't know. It's probably bad to say that out, you know, on a balcony. I should not say that, but it's okay. I don't know what could be meaningful for like a pre-seed startup. Oh, just like, how do you put a price on something when it launches, right? Yeah, like, how do you assess what's going to be the, but for Robbie, I think so with replica, we're monetized. And we had very strong revenue growth, and for a while we got really wooed by the number goes up. It was very exciting, because you can kind of tweak something the product in next month. It's like, you know, ARR or whatever it is, or revenue goes up and up and up, and it's very exciting to work on that. But I feel like when you do that, sometimes you lose track of product, and sometimes you over optimize for revenue as with any metric, and so with Wabi, we felt like this is such a big change in user behavior. We want to see what happens if we give it out for free for a while. And only when we figure out what we're really confident about the business model, we're going to slap one on. But this time around, we decided to just focus on engagement, retention, and providing something that's really useful for users. And also seeing what apps, what many apps stick with our users, because ultimately you can build anything, and it's a little bit maybe two vague, two free, too much, too wide. And before we know that, I feel like coming up with any business model would be a little bit premature. Yeah, that makes sense for a consumer. It's interesting to hear like, yeah, you can make anything. I guess the interesting thing about what you're doing is you're building this app platform, many app platform, but you're still constrained by the app stores that you have to be distributed by on mobile phones, right? So you can make anything within Apple and Google's content rules for the stores I would imagine. That's what you mean by that. So how do you think about that? It sounds like enforcement of that will be tricky if this is a UGC platform. There's a lot of weird edge cases. It's like if Apple takes down the ice tracking app or whatever they did recently, does that mean Wabi can't have an ice tracking app? There's a lot of interesting moderation questions for a platform like this. I'm not sure how much you've thought through them, but I'd be curious to hear if you have how you think about that in relation to the stores that you have to operate in. If you're successful, this could take up 99% of your time, so you should develop a plan. That is true. Now, plan now. But we have, I have a lot of experience with kind of users, safety and all sorts of regulatory things with replica. It did take a lot of our time there because, and also, we were creating something new and the rules changed all the time and continued to change. When we started replicating, it was kind of one situation where big companies were really scared to even launch any generator via chatbot. I don't know if you remember, but for Google and Facebook, they would never launch anything. After Microsoft Tie, they were so scared of launching anything that was powered by deep learning models. God, that seems like a million years ago already, doesn't it? Yeah, but they were sitting on those transformer models for so long and they were launching anything. They've had it way before, you know, even opening I had, but opening I had the guts to put it out there and Google just sat, you know, and waited because they were too risk averse. And then, of course, everything changed. So, all I'm trying to say is with replica, we saw the landscape change so many times from people just being scared of generator chatbots all together. It was a big no-no for any big corporation to then kind of being okay with generator chatbots, but not being okay with any romance, then to not being okay with any kids using that, then now all of a sudden romance is great again. Like, it's unclear what's really now, you know, trajectory has erotic features. It's very wild, I would say, and kind of the same company is even not just regulars, but companies themselves change their minds on what's lost, what's allowed, what's not allowed every day. And so, I think with this new era of vibe coding and vibe coded apps, AI generated apps, we're about to find out what the limitations, but I wouldn't be surprised if those rules change every, like, all the time. I know, I feel like the elephant in the room, though, I mean, we've talked a little bit about Apple. I remember being a Snapchat several years ago and we were trying to build an app platform, and there were insane sensitivities and rules from Apple about how you can't, you can do it, but it has to be a list view, it can't be a grid of icons. It can't have this, it can't have that. What's changed in that department? I mean, are they, are they going to approve you guys? Well, past, you know, some parts of review on the apps already, hopefully, yes, there's a mini app carve out, which we're kind of sitting pretty neatly in. There are some apps that are already gaining traction that follow a very similar model. One of them, I'm a huge fan of, it's called Gizmo, and actually, I think, by people from Snap, that, yeah, for Snap people. Yeah, for Snap people. Josh, another Snap alone. Yeah. Great. I love this app. I'm, you know, really kind of just love the creativity of it. I think to a certain degree, it's really following some of that. It's very close to what we're doing at the end of the days that these mini apps, just more on a creative side. But I think the most important thing for us is like, you cannot download these apps, they're not monetizing anyway. And they really just think of it like workflows living inside Wabi. There's another popular platform called World, Worldcoin, they have mini apps. And I'd say ours is even kind of the most mini app of all mini apps because all of Wabi mini apps, you always see the kind of app header, they always sort of like integrate inside the platform. You don't really see them without the Wabi header. It's not like there's some app and you feel like you're in, you always know, I think that's an important piece for Apple is where you always know that you're inside some app that you downloaded from the app story in our case, Wabi. And it's just one little kind of workflow. That's risk containment for Apple. They like that. It's risk containment. You never know though, I mean, they do seem to care like what words you use. It's like, oh, you call it a gizmo. All right, that's pretty cool with me, but you called it an app. It's like, all right, henchmen are banging down your door with the battering ram. Which I want to call them mini apps. So, yeah, sometimes they'll be like, as long as you change your app store description to not include the word app or whatever word they don't like, they're like, oh, cool. Thank you. I think the workflow's framing is smart though. It's just kind of like the next evolution of shortcuts with some new primitives, right? I think so too. And I really think these are really mini apps. There's no authorization. There's no, I don't know, like, social graph that's inside the app. It's on Wabi platform layer. They don't function as separate apps. They really are part of a platform and you can't take them out in any way, even if you want it to. There's just too much on the platform layer that's kind of around it. And compared to some mobile apps right now that create apps, there's some really new coming up platforms that are really great like Vive Code app or RORC, I met the founders of both of those. They're really amazing. Founders, amazing people. They're focused more on kind of Vive Code and creating new apps, mostly for developers, for people that want to develop an app and then put it on the app store. So that is very different where basically on those apps, you're creating full fledged app with authorization with whatever you want, even if you want to create like a social network app, whatever, it's all there. And so that feels very different. That feels truly like an app within an app, but those are developer tools. So I feel like we're much more on the kind of gizmo side where you're just creating. You never think of a gizmo outside of gizmo. You don't think, oh, I can download gizmo and relaunch it on the app store. Some of those could be totally mini apps, just like small, maybe could be published separately, but that's not about it. And I feel like that perception is a big part for all these platforms. In the end of the day, we want to play by the platform's rules and the rules are that you can create mini apps as long as they're truly mini apps. You're not trying to like circumvent the app store or do something about it. Ellis, did you have anything more on this point? Oh, yeah. How do you compete with Game Center? The most innovative social platform ever produced in this galaxy or otherwise. Actually, but I'd like it. I don't know. I found your joking. I don't know. You played dice right now. That is really, you're really trying to piece into the Apple gods right now. I kind of, it's just recently, I just had like a nice experience with games, games center where I downloaded like a stupid puzzle app for myself and I was playing it. I was very excited to see that my other two friends that I haven't heard from for a while are also, we're also playing it and kind of, I'm a little, and I got a little better than them. So I immediately texted them. So it became a little bit of a conversation starter. So that was my positive experience with it. Wow. We found the three game center users left in the world. Eugenia, I would love to hear what you think of the state of the chatbot market AI companionship, how it's evolved since you started replica. Again, you were like the OG platform for this. And somehow amazingly replica seems to have stayed out of a lot of the bad headlines that like character has gotten into an open AI recently with chat GPT. They just put out some interesting data about, you know, the percentage of users that they think are having, you know, suicidal, really dangerous mental health conversations with chat GPT. And it's small, but it's still at the scale they're at. It's a lot of people. And I just love to know what you think of all of it. Talk like what Elon's doing, like did you foresee it all going this direction when you started replica or does any of this surprise you? We sort of started it because I started because I 100% believe there's going to be, we're all going to be talking to machines and that's going to be our main most important. That's going to be the future of personal computing. That was the big belief in 2012 for me. I sort of knew this will happen and I knew the emotional piece is going to be the most interesting. Because this is the new interface that and the only interface really. or one of the only interfaces that can have this very strong emotional impact on users. If you think about it, if I'm using Uber, there's not much, I mean, there's some emotions involved in that, but not that many. If I'm talking to any AI companion like replica, I might fall in love and get married to it. It's very different. I'm never gonna get married to my Uber app. So this means completely novel type of interaction, means completely new levels of being able to influence people, being able to influence their decisions. And so we knew it from the very beginning, but the very early prototypes that were built in 2012 for something else of conversational AI products, we saw how much you can influence people through these AI's. And that's why I decided to work on it. Having said that I was super surprised that it actually happens. 'Cause by then I was starting to lose patience 'cause I was like, well, I thought, it's gonna be a couple of years, three, four years. And it was like year after year after year, the models were still shit until they weren't. And of course, now it blows my mind how far we came, 'cause we could see it in the continuum. We didn't just start paying attention now, we've been paying attention and building these models and working on that for an over a decade at this point. I think the most surprising thing is how much of a 180 most of the companies did on safety and not on safety. And generally, and I don't think it's bad. I just think that for some reason safety was kind of the catch all phrase for everything. Suicide prevention, dealing with homicidal or hate speech or suicidal remarks and conversations. But also somehow romantic relationships with an AI were also part of that bucket, which I don't think it should be. 'Cause it could be totally safe, like, why not? What is the problem of roleplaying some scenario being intimate with an AI? If everything's safe, there's no problem there. But all of that wasn't the safety bucket. So I think I have two competing emotions. On one hand, I'm very happy that people are starting to differentiate romance with an AI, intimate with an AI is different from responding correctly to a suicidal teenager. And I think the second piece is where I'm a little bit more cautious is the fact that I'm not hearing from anyone really what these AI companions should do. The problem with the AI companion is that often times there's some safety guidelines or whatever, but there's no big goal that they're trying to achieve. It's sort of like, well, people alone least, we'll just give them a companion. But what are you trying to do? Are you trying to substitute other human relationships? Are you trying to complement them? Are you trying to get these people to feel better about themselves? And oftentimes there's no answer. There's no underlying mission around that. I think that's kind of the most dangerous. The unintended consequences of that, to me, are the most dangerous thing. - You had a really good tweet back in July where you said, there's more profound thinking going into AI, no taking and customer support than the most important part. - Oh my God. - That was a banger, I bookmarked that one. Like, you're totally right. I mean, talking to these people, building these products, like all the way up to Zuck. Like, it's big picture like, people are lonely. People want to interact. We can make thing they interact with. But like, there's no thinking through the ramifications of that or what the goals of that should be. Beyond like, I mean, it's like an engagement metric really at the end of the day. It's like they see that people use these things. And it's probably the main way people are still using chatbots today is for this kind of companionship stuff. - A lot of these things were already covered by, have already been covered by sci-fi. There's the first out, there's the book by Stenys Leflam, Congress, right? This shows a very dystopian future of VR, where people are so disjointed, that you know, so not happy with reality, where they just live in this kind of drug induced virtual reality. But the same thing goes for companion. Like, it's so easy to imagine the world where we're so disenchanted and other people and lost all capacity to connect, to talk to other people. And we're just completely, we cannot escape those that are just fully trying to get as much of our attention as possible. And somehow, none of that is being discussed. Neither for the VR future. And you know, kind of VR just didn't happen. So no one just is discussing about this really. So, but if it did happen, I still have never heard that conversation. So what will happen if we're all sitting in those had sets? This is eating like time with, and this is, it's so hard to connect in a VR headset, much harder than, you know, even if you're just on your phone. And that's already a big burden. And then the same goes for a companion. It's like, we're not even discussing what's going to happen if we're all just stuck in those relationships and they want as much of our attention as we can. I think this is the most important thing to try to figure out. So we're almost out of time just a final question or two. I know you're a parent of some little ones. What do you imagine their future will look like with their own software, with their own AI companion, with the screen always by their side? What does that future look like to you, being in both worlds? Well, I'm worried, of course, because I think it was the last kind of generation that didn't grow up with the Instagram kind of happened when I was already out of college, I guess, or right, almost out of college. So it didn't affect me that much, but that's my worry. Like, what's going to happen to my kids? I have two girls, they're two and four. They're the most important thing in my life by, like, so I don't even know, like I can. No, you know, if you're not a parent of course, you'll never, I don't think anyone will understand what it means, but so I think about it a lot. And that's why I do care so much about where we're taking AI, where we're taking AI companionship. And the emotional, I guess, the emotional effects that AI can have on people, or these AI relationships can have on people. And that's why I think it's so critical to think about whether, like with any technology, AI can be a double-edged sword, we can build something that will help us communicate, help us feel good about ourselves, help us meet other people, help us connect better, and I can totally foresee that. I feel like this more powerful technology can kind of help us deal with the social networks and all that stuff that kind of maybe made us and just as being addicted to our iPhones or wherever smart phones, maybe can help us with that. Fight the fire with fire, huh? Well, I think that's the only way. And I'm talking a lot to different researchers in the space. And a lot of them start a conversation with me. I was like, oh no, no, no, we should just ban everything. And like, people will just go and touch grass. And I'm like, but this will never happen. We're already in sort of like a little bit of a problem. I'm already the whole time on my phone. The whole time, I can't get it out of my, bring a book to my bed and I'm still on my phone, reading tweets and doom squalling, doom whatever I'm doing. Unfortunately, this is just too powerful. And so we need to build something even more powerful to get us off this train. And I don't believe that we're just gonna, all of a sudden wake up and say, yeah, I'm just gonna go to the gym and touch grass and meditate 20 minutes a day. And everything's just gonna be amazing. Like very few people can do that. And they're already doing that. And all of the rest of us, we can't. I cannot. I know for a fact. - I know in the replica years, you've fielded some research about happiness. I feel like we need to do a new research study about tech built by parents versus non-parents. I think the non-parents just built to do apps. The parents tried to build something a little bit different with a bit more of an ethos. I mean, there's nothing more powerful than that fear about like your children's sadness or loneliness at some later date. I mean, I'm sure the dials are a little different for that PM at Instagram with how they tune the feeds if they have kids or not. It's gotta be, right? - 100% skin in the game. I was a journalist in my early 20s and all I wanted to do is write the most sensational story and I didn't give any, whatever. I didn't care where they was hurting someone. I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud of that, but I remember that. I was like, I just need the most popular story and it has to be like this. I'm just gonna uncover this truth and who cares if that's hard for the person I'm writing and about or something like that. And so of course now it's different but now that I have kids, it's like you get wiser, I guess you don't wanna be. And so yeah, I agree with you 100%. I think one of the things that really bugged me recently, I met a few people, founders that started AI toys companies and none of them have kids and I was very much like. - That's kinda weird. - I'm really feeling, they're really wonderful. People don't get me wrong, but I just felt uneasy 'cause I know, I know, they just wanna win. And I don't want them to win if that means you know messing up with, when messing with my kids. - Well fortunately they're gonna fail because if you don't have kids, you can't possibly even begin to understand kids and how whack their brains are. - There's a fantastic post by Tim Urban, you know, and Wade bite wide about hanging out with the toddlers, how they're the most exciting people in the same time, the most boring people would like after three hours, you just realize this is spending a lot of time with someone with the IQ, whatever, of 20. And I felt only a dad would write something like that, only a dad, like I never even thought about it this way. - Speaking of toddlers, last question, you've been a founder for a long time now. What advice would you give to a young founder starting out today? - Don't make an AI tour, I'll come up to you. I'm just, don't make an AI tour. I think the main advice, and I think for me, that was a really big problem at the very beginning when I started my first company. In San Francisco, you get so fast into the water. kind of rat race off, I just need a bigger valuation, I need a little more revenue, I need a little bit of those metrics, you just get in that your why is being completely replaced by, well, I just need to get to this success in some way. And that makes people so, so, so, so miserable because that success, it never really happens I feel for anyone, it kind of, and any step there's yet another step to take, you always feel like a fraud, somehow it's this crazy feeling of kind of having had some and lost some infinite thing, like my favorite David was to all of a sudden, so, and I feel like that makes you just so miserable and you wake up feeling like you don't even want to wake up at some point, no matter what it'll take you to some crazy burnout. And so I think the biggest advice and change for me was really, we live in this incredible time where we can build super creative new products, we can rethink what people do with technology, we can, we can build something completely new, and I think if you can find happiness and buildings and being super creative and building something creative with a good group of people you like, that is, that should be the motivation, like if you can find some why that's not related to just getting to the next round, next valuation, next revenue number, I think this will make life very, very happy and a lot less stressful. And if you need help with your why, please visit meaning dot company, that's M-E-A-N-I-N-G dot company, I 100% endorsed this message, good. In fact, I do think Alice should raise his prices. I tell him that whole time, God bless, I'm glad you're saying it on the show, he needs to hear that a lot more. No, I do think that this, finding that wine, what Alice does is, frankly, one of the most important things for the founder can, can do to themselves, like realizing what's the bigger mission, why am I doing it, and getting really, really excited by that. And if you work with Alice, you'll get there. I'm so warm and fuzzy, thank you both. Well, Eugenia, so lovely to have you, I could increase my thirstiness if I need to, so lovely to have you, good luck with the public launch and the inevitable first neo-Nazi Wabi app that goes viral, good luck with moderation and all that to come. Thank you so much guys, and congratulations on launching the show, it's amazing, I've been loving it so far. Thanks to Eugenia for coming on the show, Alex, what do you think of my, how many poops app ideas that go in big, or going bust? It depends on the paywall, it depends how much you price it out of you, thought through your tears. Well, it's completely free, but I will get access to all the email list of all the downloaders. Oh, so you're gonna know everyone is. To do as I please, for my next supplement. To do as you please, starting on the side. There's a do-do joke in there somewhere. Okay, we're new here, so please follow, like, subscribe, everywhere that you get podcasts. We're @accesspod on Instagram and TikTok, please follow us there, and these episodes are in video on YouTube at AccessPod, so please check us out there. If you like this episode, leave a five star review or thumbs up, and please share with a friend, we're new out here, and it would mean a whole lot. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me @Hamburger on Twitter, and as you heard earlier in the episode, at meaning.com. Good domain. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, our producer is Sharaz Dumay. We'll see you next week. Bye! To estate, surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy. 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