Alex Kehr
@alexkehr
ceo, @superlocalmaps (acq by foursquare), founder @machineofideas (product/growth studio) • i love maps
4.1K Following 33.5K Followers
I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents… optimizing entirely for the outcome and forgetting that, for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of experience.
Travel is the obvious example. People will almost always never want “book me a trip.” They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends, and eventually book.
And the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think.
That’s why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category.
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the default AI personal agent thesis seems to be that less human involvement = better product.
i think this is the completely wrong thesis.
in a lot of consumer categories, choosing is a major part of the experience.
i want AI to eliminate the work around choosing, not the choice itself.
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one thing i’ve noticed with a growing number of younger gen z founders is the extreme overuse of AI.
every product decision is generated by AI. every opinion comes from AI, rather than the founder.
i wonder if that’s why so many of the biggest recent wins seem to be coming from 30+ builders…
people who developed product judgment before AI now have a huge a big advantage right now. people who outsource what seems like all of their thinking to AI will basically never develop that judgment at all.
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one of my hot takes is that nyc is one of the worst places to build consumer apps.
founders there tend to overfit to extremely specific nyc behaviors: making lists of places to go, restaurant reservations, coordinating plans, etc.
sf is substantially better, and the outcomes prove it. nyc has produced surprisingly few (zero?) generational consumer software companies. sf has produced so many that many individual companies are worth more than all of nyc consumer tech combined.
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One thing nobody is really talking about - that is super fascinating…
The bike industry is quietly having its “BYD moment.”
For years, Chinese companies manufactured bikes for Western brands.
Now the Chinese manufacturers are building world-class bikes under their own brands and selling for dramatically less.
Feels very similar to what happened in the EV industry.
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