YouSaid · the spoken record

George Fraser

lines on the record: 72
first: 2026-06-05
most recent: 2026-06-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is so much greater now than ever before. I think that there's a whole set of tools that people are going to need on the other side of that data platform. And I think we, and especially we and DBT, are perfectly positioned to provide them”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the thing I most worry about is just that at some point, the coding agents will get so good at writing connectors that people will just shift to DIY. I think that's a real threat to FiveTran. I think some different businesses are more and less threatened by maybe the customers will just vibe code it themselves. That is a thing I worry about with FiveTrain. We will find a way to thrive in that world if we get there. We will provide the tools that you use to do that if that indeed becomes possible, even if it comes at a short-term cost to ourselves. But I do worry a lot about that. And then the biggest opportunity, I think, is that AI is just a whole new set of things to do with data. The need for getting all your data in one place, organizing it.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many things that's an exercise I do regularly. I'm trying to think of a recent example. I think those have been successful. They were painful for the company because they mostly cut prices for small customers. Another exercise I do is I ask myself what should other CEOs do? It's hard, it's a trick to get yourself to do things that are big and scary So, in the DBT merger, when I was reflecting on that, on whether that was a thing we should seriously consider, one of the tricks I use is I ask myself, what should Serdar do? Sur is the CEO of Snowplay. Who we've worked with for a long time is a good metal expert. Oh, yeah. And then I just go do that. And that was like a clear answer in my mind was.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think about that a lot. And I make sure you got to keep it at bay because it is like, There's a danger of claude psychosis, which is a term that I love, but you can just get sucked in. But you know, I have a lot of time. I don't have any kids, so I have a lot of People with children will say having a whole nother self Yes. You don't. Trust me.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to digress on this. There's a million questions, but I will say, just like this conversation, you ever find this becomes a bit of a distraction. It is so dazzling and so fun and so interesting to work on these things. And you're like, oh, you know, I should be like doing that one on one, but instead I'm here in my. No, I think about that a lot.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Postgres is bad, actually. I should also say In many respects, the storage engine that you would write as an undergraduate in a database course is better than Postgres's heap storage engine. Postgres' storage engine, I don't think the creators of the people who promote it today would admit it is not a good design. It's been patched up in a lot of ways, but the Postgres story engine.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very old technology. It is not a good database. Undergraduates writing class projects write better databases than Postgres. Not because the people who built Postgres were not smart, but simply because it was written a long time ago. It has a lot of technical debt. And I really think the world should create a new operational database rather than just endlessly repackaging Postgres.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't. I don't. But if you want to work on this, come talk to me and maybe you can come do this at 5Train. You don't even have to use my proof of concept. I think there's actually a real opportunity at this moment. I really lament that we're sort of stuck with Postgres forever. Postgres, contrary to popular belief.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For it. Because when you build AI workflows, you have this need for zillions of tiny. Databases. And it's a proof of concept. It's mostly an exploration of like, could you, with sufficient AI coding just take on something absolutely ridiculous? If you're hearing this and you want to work on this and you are an expert in database.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I have things I am just doing as hobbies, like the system for managing my tennis team. I'm working on a little on a tennis statistics machine vision app. But then I have many things at 5Tran. They're all experimental proof of concepts that I share with people and we talk about there's a A potential like nano data lake catalog that I have going that attempts to, if you, when you use data lakes, you have to adopt this additional service called a catalog. And it's the answer to the question, could we make the catalog invisible? So that's an example. I'm working on Just for the hell of it, a from scratch classic OLTP SQL database”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know if it's a good idea. I just can't resist. And coding agents are great for CEOs who want to write code on the side because they work sort of asynchronously. So you can have a lot of things spinning in the background. I have a lot of projects going right now.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That computer code should be seen as a means of communication between humans and only incidentally as an execution format for computers. And nowhere is that more true than in SQL queries in DBT projects. It is a great way to express these are the rules of data at my company”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should feel like it's for these unique reasons, and it feels like it's the last one you're ever going to do. And it's not going to be the last one you ever do, but the reasons to do it should be really, really strong. You shouldn't go looking for this. Nonetheless, we have found these strong reasons several times. I think the DBT one is a great fit. These are two products that have historically almost always been used together. And they kind of go together. FiveTrain is the tool that gets all your data in one place. DBT is the tool that you use to organize it and turn it into a model that reflects the particular details of your business. And then that is what feeds into all of the data consumers.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you could argue that whenever the consumption layer is up for grabs, which also happened with the internet, right? Like you kind of went to different places to go do things. Like it changed the UI. It changes a bunch of stuff. But like the core infrastructure stays in place, right? Like you still have operating systems, you still have chips, you still have databases. And like you did, they kind of evolve over time rather than they get.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is quite good at navigating slightly more complicated infrastructure. So if you have an AI agent, maybe you don't really need that very Most user friendly layer. You can drop down to the next one and use that.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one knows how powerful it will get over time. I mean, the nice thing about that is that if it gets sufficiently powerful, all these questions become sort of moot because we'll just be living in a post-scarcity world. But I think if we look at the present day, I think it is mostly true that AIs are just creating more demand for infrastructure and not commoditizing it at all. You can think of infrastructure as having layers and at the bottom or like data centers and then You go to cloud vendors like AWS, and then you have systems like Convex sort of serverless platforms that try to make the cloud vendors. Easier and then you even have systems that. Databricks. A lot of their business is hosting notebooks, right? I think that last layer is the one that is threatened by AI. AI is”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building rock solid software that you can operate for long periods of time is just not what AI is best at, and you're probably better spent focusing it on other things. But is my view blinkered in how powerful it's going to get over time?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There used to be this idea, and again, we've touched on in the context of FiveTram, but more broadly, there was this idea that AI commoditizes infrastructure broadly, right? And so the idea was like, well, it can write anything. The opposite seems to be true. More software is being written than ever before. The software is actually pretty buggy. It needs kind of stable infrastructure below it, you know. And so most infrastructure companies have seen a lift as a result of this. In your sense, is this transitory? the eventual AI consumer infrastructure is coming or do you actually i mean let me just give you my my quick view on this which is um”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So their data platforms look very typical. And I think this is a very important message if you are thinking about data foundations for AI. Do not make the mistake of thinking you need to build some exotic new system as a data foundation for AI. The right data foundation for AI is probably the one you already have. If you have a reasonably modern data platform, something like Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery or maybe even you have transitioned to an iceberg data lake with those compute systems running on top, that is a great foundation for your context for AI as well.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use cases are very typical. They use FiveTran to replicate data from lots of different systems of record into a centralized data lake. And they do analytics with that. They feed that as contexts into their own internal AI workflows. So they have built data foundations that look very much like the data foundations of many other companies. The systems ad anthropic, one of the people who helped set them up was a consultant who had set up FiveTran and DBT and many other companies.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the details of putting that into practice turn out to be quite tricky. But we've really, especially the last couple months, started to see it work and started to see improvements at scale, many, many, many small improvements. We've seen the flood start to come. And I think you'll see The quality and reliability of 5Tran to yet another leap this year because of that.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have it is, but it's. The breadth of it is much larger for us because we have 750 connectors to different systems of record, everything from Oracle to SAP to Qualtrics to you name it. They all have different idiosyncrasies. And you only discover these idiosyncrasies when real customers bump into them. They show up as performance problems, correctness problems, and failures. And, you know, the way we have always solved it is I always like to say the trick is there's no trick. It's just a lot of effort behind the scenes and it's kind of an economic trick. We only have to fix every bug once. And then every customer who uses that connector benefits from it. But you can imagine how you can use AI coding agents, which are basically an infinite supply of junior engineers. That is a particularly valuable tool for this kind of problem.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think in addition to the sort of the AI threat, it is getting closer, but it's still, I think, a ways away from what we do. We're actually starting to see the opportunity pull us forward. So we're starting to get better at our own core business by leveraging AI internally in extremely non-obvious ways that I don't think Anyone else has discovered yet.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For years since GPT 3. And they continue to improve in terms of what they can put out. They still do not discover this long tale of complexity. It really surprises people how difficult it is just to make an accurate copy of a system and keep it up to date. And so, and now we are actually starting to see new capabilities inside FiveTran to push the bounds of quality, particularly quality even further, like completeness of coverage of the sources and the correctness of replication. You can imagine how you can use AIs to do that more comprehensively than you ever could with human beings.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to give credit to the public markets, I think that they are accurately, I mean, whether the magnitude is right, I cannot say, but the direction is right. There's a lot more uncertainty embedded in all these SaaS companies, including my own than there was a year ago. And that's reflected in the declined prices. But I don't think it's for this, I don't really buy into this reason. That all the SaaS categories are going to disappear and be replaced with Vibecoded software. I think there will be some, but I think the bigger threat is simply new companies coming along. It is just so much easier to write software.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Add things to Nanobot because it couldn't differentiate WhatsApp group messages from DMs. And I think I actually have a PR against Nanobot because of that. So I sort of ended up back in the same place a little bit. But I take your point. Like if they get smart enough.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. At some point, I spent enough time debugging Nanoclaw that I was like, I want something that has more separation of concerns where there's sort of an agent over here that has an API and it works the way it works. And then I just write like skills and stuff on top of that. Ironically, even when I did that, I ended up having to.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, Nanoclaw, for those who don't know, is a personal AI agent, sort of like OpenClaw, except the way it works is you fork the repo when you start up. And then you just sort of vibe code it into whatever you want. Yeah, it was.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, exactly how it works right now. But you could argue that there's so much money being poured into these foundation models, like tens of billions of dollars, maybe become hundreds of billions. So the most intelligent thing at any point on the planet is one of these models. So why would you use an old tool if it could build a better tool?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that I find so strange about this is even the tool use itself you could argue that as smarter models come out they could build better tools anyways and so sometimes I wonder if like Like an agent should just be the most minimal thing ever. Like it manages durable state, it manages compute. And then you run whatever, like the Anthropic SDK or the OpenISDK, and then you just tell it to build its own tool. Build your connection to this. Well, that's how nano.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and there's just also a lot of little affordances in the AI tools that are built around MCP granting authorization for specific tasks are done at the tool level in MCPs. And that's just a rule that's been baked into the harnesses that ends up working well for a lot of situations, so it also works badly in some situations. But the tools on the consuming side have started to grow around MCP. And thus, even if maybe theoretically you don't need it, I think in practice it's taken hold.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in theory, it seems like they're an unnecessary layer because these agents are great at calling APIs and calling command line tools. So why bother having this other layer? In practice, when you sit down and actually try to build systems, MCPs do solve important problems, particularly authentication and just like discoverability of what's available. So, even though you can say kind of from first principles that maybe they shouldn't exist, when you actually sit down and write a real system that's accessing context, you almost always end up sticking in MCP server into it.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, can I do a $1 bet with you when we're on this podcast in five years? So I think the majority of you use for agents. In five years is going to be the same interfaces that humans are using just because it's the long tail of integration has already been solved in like all the protections and all the sharing and everything else. And would you say the majority would be through APIs that are more of a traditional computer software?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are working right now on a Salesforce administration agent to To integrate, to basically do continuous integration of small changes into our Salesforce, which is very labor intensive right now. And it also does not use browser automation because the Salesforce CLI we found does everything we need to do. We'll use browser automation if we need to. If we come to something that can't be done with a Salesforce CLI, but to their credit, the Salesforce CLI is quite comprehensive, pretty much anything you can do in the UI, you can do with a CLI command. And the agents seem to already know how to use it”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. The systems that I've worked on, browser use has never been necessary. Browser use has a big cost, which is very slow. And it consumes a lot of tokens. And I have found that in my tennis example, the USCA website does not have any anti-scraping provisions.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there may be, but let me give the argument for the multiple. So, why do I use a Mac Mini for my agent? There's a couple reasons. One of them is so it connects iMessage because there's no programmatic way to access iMessage. And so it has a desktop. Another one is like everybody's moving headless, like Salesforce is doing their headless thing and there's a headless browsers. But it turns out let's just talk about browsers. Like if you have a headless browser, all of the anti-scraping software kicks in and then like it's not as functional. So it's actually much better to just give it a fully functional version of Safari. So you could argue that the interfaces that have evolved over the last 30 years to deal with unpredictable users that know how to use computers is the UIs we have today. And actually the simplest thing to do rather than try to rewrite all of that stuff is just to give these agents that have been trained on.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To find out what is going on with this customer, what might be the solution to this problem, and it drafts responses. And right now it slots into the system a lot like a person would, but we are working on making the whole thing just a closed loop, pure AI system where it will only have one identity. There will just be the connector troubleshooter Borg hive mind.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is an intermediate form. I think the reason this works well is because you can slot it into the existing workflows without having to refactor the whole universe So, in my example of my agent that manages my USCA tennis team, it can email with the players, it can go to the USTA website, check the schedule, make lineups, check availability. And it works well having its own identity because it can slot into all of these existing workflows that were designed for humans. At 5Tran, we have an AI agent that helps respond to support tickets that goes and inspects the logs, inspects the code. It uses all the context that we centralize with Vivetran.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its own email. So I got an phone number. His own email address. And then, you know, now as we think about A616, we're actually thinking about like, you know, why don't we just treat all these agents like this? Like we'll actually have an HR, that HR team will onboard AIs as they come. They will train them. They will show them the access to the documents that you need. They'll be part of teams that will join the Slack, you know, just like humans do. And in that world, and we touched on this a little bit before, but in that world, these aren't software that's actually more seats, more consumption of software. And so do you think that for enterprise agents, we're moving more to these, you treat them like humans, or do you think that that's too far?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we've all come to this conclusion, which is like, I don't want it having access to my email. I want it. So I also, I also have the Mac Mini. I run the Axi now. I'm working with somebody like Build a Harness. But, like, They're all the same, right?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to talk a little bit about agents now. So I feel like we've kind of gone through multiple phases already in agents. So, the first one is they're just purely treated as software. They're like, it was almost like search plus. Like take all your data, put it into a data lake, and then you have an LLM that has access to it. And then we go to that. And it's like enterprise search all over again. And then we went to the agents like open claw. And then that model was like a personal agent, but it kind of was part of you. So you'd give it access to your email and you would give it access to like your API keys and give it access to your accounts. So it was like part of you, an extension of you. Now we're seeing.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we recommend that you incorporate into your MSAs. And even if you don't get it just by asking for it, you are sending a signal. So, you know, if it's a $10,000 contract, don't do it. But if you're...”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think number one, you should insist on having a copy of all of your own company data in a data lake that you control. Don't let go of that for any vendor. You have a lot of leverage. These vendors actually have a lot of obligations to let you do that. The reason why they get away with blocking people is simply because people don't fight. So pick fights. And write it into your, if you have big contracts with vendors and your redlining your MSAs, write language, guaranteeing your own data access.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is what happens when people roll their own data pipelines they fall back on these patterns that are easy to get right, like that pattern I just described. It's extremely easy to get a correct replica just by copying it all over and over, but very expensive to operate in the long run.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That people wrote where they would copy their entire company's data sets. Out of their database every day, once a day, at midnight. And so they just had this crazy read amplification. You know, they were just repeatedly copying the same data over and over, and it gave them the impression that they had so much data, but they really don't.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Aber's. The term data gravity does get used to mean multiple things. This is one particular. Incarnation of the idea of data gravity. And this is the one that I am saying is Vic that egress charges are so important. And if you want to see evidence against this, come look at the networking dashboard of five trans various AWS and GCP accounts. You will be astonished despite replicating huge data sets for thousands of companies. We have 7,000 customers of size and thousands more little ones. The amount of data being moved at any given time is tiny. And the reason is that we're doing change data capture. Can have a huge data But if you just replicate the changes, the changes are always much smaller than people think. And I think that a lot of this idea of data gravity came from dumb data pipelines.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And saying, oh, if you want to do anything with data, you have to come use my tools inside my walled garden, which never works because all the rest of your data is not in that walled garden. And it's not going to be. And you can never create enough tools to support all the different things customers want to do with data.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it will be the same. That's my prediction. It will be the same path as mentors will discover that they cannot provide inside their own platform a solution to every data problem that their customers have because they are simply so diverse. And instead, they simply create a mechanism for the customers to replicate it to their data platform of choice and do with it what they will. And even if they charge fees for that, it's not the end of the world. On open data infrastructure.com, you really get yellow. Charging fees, so you know it's only red when you try to actually block it. At the end of the day, if you want to have a little toll, that's not the end of the world. The problem is when you start actually blocking”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just answered my next question what I'm asking, anyways, which is like do you feel like this is just like a repeat of the Open Data API? It'll resolve quickly. Like, you know, we always kind of go through this soul searching and then we'll resolve back to where we were, which is like open data is the right thing. Do you think that's the path or do you think it's different?”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know, but they've started to get squirrely. About this. So it's a moving target. I am hopeful that this is merely a brief flirtation with closed data by most of these vendors, and they will realize this is not a good idea that they are at war with their own customers and it's not even going to work anyway. And we will go back to the trend towards ever more openness.”
2026-06-05 · a16z Podcast · AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source