YouSaid · the spoken record

Quinn McDonald

lines on the record: 71
first: 2026-04-13
most recent: 2026-04-13
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

“It's like with every additional child, for some reason, exponential growth in the forms. It's like, why are there so many freaking forms from like healthcare forms to school forms, right? And if you could just get rid of the forms. And it starts at the hospital.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People want purpose, right? Like we gravitate towards wanting to do something meaningful. I've got a little bit of a micro news flash, which is one of the most meaningful things that humans have gravitated towards that gives, that gives a feeling of a life's purpose that has been a forever thing is having kids. And so it's possible that with less, with more question marks about getting meaningful feelings from work or what does AI do to various career paths, I think parenthood may be even more attractive, not less. And then if we are, if you believe some of the more positive aspects of where AI could leave us in terms of removing drudgery and admin from our lives and creating some more abundance in various ways, then that opens up more opportunities for healthy parenthood and spending time with kids. So I'm like, I've got this weird hypothesis. And again, I've yet to find someone who will really agree.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a prediction that I've tested on a lot of my smart friends, and none of them agree. So it must be right, which is that AI Will be a dawn of a reversal in that fertility rate decline and will be like a Halcyon era for parenthood. That's a possibility. Okay, so it's not a firm prediction that this will just happen. But I think, I don't know, I think there's still this doomer streak even in very smart circles that like, you know, it'll go the other way, which like to be kind of dystopian, it'll be like, actually, humans won't have sex at all. It might be sex robots. I'm like, like, people have like all these kind of like wild, like, disparate beliefs about how this could go. But I kind of believe when people talk about what is the future of work, et cetera.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that means that a lot of people are going to decide, I actually want to work from home and I want to use these tools. And that could be something that to your point on six months from now, the interface could be so good that people are using this in their daily lives. Like you could see a lot of people saying, I just want to work from home. And I want to, now I can homeschool because I'm doing it when my kids are at recess and I can, you know, spin up these agents very easily. So it's super exciting what it means for people who want to have, I would say even a more traditional sort of home life than using AI because the tools are so, so great and allow people to do that.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At home or putting them in childcare when, like, I could actually be doing this, as you said, the biggest limitation is the form factor. Like, if you can do it from a voice note and you can spin up agents to start a business for yourself, there's a lot of moms and dads who are primary caregivers who are going to say, okay, I can't do this at the park. And I can't run a small business with however many agents for a specific thing where I'm making more money and I'm being more productive than I was at work. Maybe I should become a small business entrepreneur.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a toughie. But I love that point because it was maybe like six years ago now. I wrote this piece called Consume Save the American Family, which is this idea that if people are working from home, they have more time with their kids and there's now good research actually. There's a study that came out maybe a month ago that showed that the only thing that's really moved the needle from a policy perspective on the birth rate. Is actually work from home. It's like the one policy where if you are working from home, you are more likely to have an additional child or to have your first child than if you're working in an office. And so your point of what is a startup, I mean, there's a lot of people who are going to say, actually, why am I going into work for eight, nine hours a day and leaving my kids?”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a person who see like coding by voice note while I'm like at the park with my kids, it's possible I could build something meaningful, you know, in that amount of time. But I'm not very inclined right now to hire employees and like to do a lot of the other steps of starting a startup because I'm aware that I will get sucked in and be completely obsessed. So I'm like almost holding myself back a little bit. So the double pronged answer is I think there's many things that I can create here that I can launch that can be meaningful. What does that mean? Or do groups of like really passionate people start working together online maybe to push more things live? I don't have all the answer, but I do think that there's a possibility of getting things live and functional and maybe charging for them and making a quote unquote business in the sense it actually makes money.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, think that we're, and this is interesting in this, you know, for both of you to have deep thoughts on as well, I'm sure, I think we're in a really different era of like what is a startup. Because it's possible that me.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes a lot of self control to not be starting a company right now because I'm like, because I'm like every moment that I see like all the new AI stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh, you guys, it's like so, this is, I can't believe I didn't have this when I was running my startup. Like I'm just kind of like losing my mind at all times. But I'm getting, I'm scratching the itch by doing all of this agent work and everything for my life. So the answer is I want to share. So there's like a double pronged answer. There isn't an immediate company that I'm like cooking up that is on the horizon, but I do want to share all of this stuff. I do.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think So I have to ask just because I would buy that product that you're thinking of creating slash created. How do you think about, would you productize any of this? Dare I say, start another startup. I mean, you literally are a founder. And so curious how you're thinking about that. Proliferate this, yeah”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be so cool for that. And what's interesting, and I already do little phonics lessons with it, but what's interesting is like if I give them iPad, there is this little iPad hangover. Like they want to hold, like, you know, they're like holding onto it a little bit when I'm like trying to get it back after our lesson, right? They're like, I could do photos or I could do this. I could do that. What's interesting about the e-inc is they just readily hand it back. Like they're so there's something there. So I'm playing more with e-inc and I'm, but I also think that there's other form factors of maybe devices that take photos and kids could ask about the photos. Like there's there's just stuff. Like I think that because now we have this Promethean like technology of the AI like the question is how do we get into kids hands? But I mean like literally how like what's the because you you are we're all hesitant to hand our kid iPad and laptops are like you know difficult for it”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The physical device part is this big question mark for me. I've been playing with e Inc. a lot. e-income exactly why but e-incive feeling like the um like my i have the daylight um display which is kind of like an iPad but e-ink and it does have touch that's what makes it kind of more iPad like so I've been developing some apps for the for that”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is not inherently dangerous. AI is incredible. It's like saying the internet is bad or electricity is bad. Like these are fundamental technologies. So you kind of to me, it's like a little while to be against them in any broad sense. But then we have to be responsible about their rollout. Like electricity, you know, lights your kids' room and it can also kill your kid. They can get electrocuted. Like it's like everything is like has these wild things that it could do. But as long as we don't kind of forget our humanness and that our children also need that human element. Totally.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not, I mean, maybe you can tell, but I'm not an AI doomer. I don't believe that it is inherently dangerous in any way for children to like have quote-unquote direct access. I think the only dangerous thing, it's like it's a little bit like screens, like the dangerous thing is what we might stop doing. Like it's not adding in the AI conversations. The dangerous thing is someone adding AI conversations and assuming that now they don't need to ever read a bedtime story to their child. Or it's so to me like there's a little bit of common sense like.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a couple different devices that I want to experiment building, and because I have agents now who can build crazy things or help me build crazy things, I'm going to try, but because the core thing I feel like I'm missing is a great interface. But I do currently my kids have a lot of questions. I mean, every child has like a bazillion questions. And so they love asking AI. And they are aware that it's AI. Like I don't pretend like we still, even when we use names with it, like Sylvie or something, they are aware that it is not like a human being, but they, so they ask questions. We'll do a lesson, like we'll do like history or something, and then ask them, I ask them what they'd like to ask. And we do those follow-up questions with AI. And they're aware that they're interacting with AI. I'm standing right there. So if things really like went off the rails, but personally,”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And may believe that Totally. And just to build on the, I have noticed what you've said too about the children's voices not being picked up. It's like maybe a 50% hit rate. But have you started letting your children engage with the agents in any way? And if so, how are you doing that?”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think this about these different kind of educational philosophies. So I just put, I just programmed that right in. And so I do have an agent that I put it in contact directly with the children sometimes. And it just, I don't have to wonder if they're what kind of, I guess, ideology they're getting from that agent because I gave it to the agent.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is a good moment to touch upon. I think all parents can spiritually be homeschoolers. We've got about, depending on the data that you follow, somewhere between like three and six percent, which is pretty different, but of K through 12 students in the US are homeschooled and like not in some kind of traditional school, it's already a lot of kids, millions of kids. But I believe that the tools coming online that homescores may be the most rabid for are going to be equally useful to all parents. And in fact, I believe all parents want to teach their children things and may believe that there's gaps in their schooling. And so all parents to a degree will be leaning into what we currently think of like a homeschooling ethos. So I'm really excited for that. But it comes more naturally to a homeschooler or like to me, I'll just use myself as an example to know that I think this about Montesquieu.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm guessing, like, all of us, is we may feel like it's a kind of crazy that any of us were interacting with the LLMs like out of the box. Like maybe we'll all want to have, there'll be this variety of filters and curated kind of identities and different stuff. And I know some of these products exist, but currently the default is most of us go directly to like OpenAI and we open the chat box and we talk to it and you're selecting a model, but you're talking to that model kind of out of the box. I think that when it relates to kids, it's going to probably be the norm faster than even adults where, yeah, there's a level of personality and creation and ideology that you may want to layer onto that. That came naturally to me because I know what I want to do in my homeschool.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do a bit. It's a little bit of an interface issue for young kids, as you both may know, where something that I do find interesting is that the most current tools don't pick up on kid voices the same way they do adult voices. I actually think, I don't know who's going to study this or figure it out and come up with a solution, but we need, there's all these amazing voice products, but the kid voices are not very well picked up. So I feel like when we finally get to a conversational thing with kid voices, I don't know if it's the pitch of them or just the fact that their words don't have the same cadence or their addiction is not as good, you know, but what's weird to me is like the LMs will pick up like adult voices with like heavy accents and stuff, but then not like a five-year-old in the same way. So there's some gap there. But so we have an interface issue to overcome. But then if you put that to the side, the other thing we may feel in the future and I'm.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, like, that strains your child and the kind of an old school way, right? Like, there's so many different ways you could train these agents that's very different than sort of what I'd say, like the kind of modern concern or at least even just like the current concerns are, okay, is AI going to be too philosophically misaligned from how I want to raise my children or how I want to educate them. So I'd love to hear how that's become a question and how you're educating your kids if you're letting them interface with the agents themselves.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I say Well, this is so important too, because I think one of the biggest conversations that moms have about AI is they don't want closed source AI where it's like you don't know how it's been trained and it has as prescriptive philosophy on education or on certain issues that they don't want their kids talking to AI about. Like I would love to understand kind of the freedom that comes from training these agents to ultimately, I mean, you could train a Mary Poppins.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had built some of that into their identity. The homeschool one was the most obvious one to me because I was like, I want you to literally use this curriculum or use this book as a reference point. But then I noticed how well it worked. And I was like, okay, what if I take this agent over here that I want to be my like engineer agent? And I say like, okay, you're an engineer, but like you just read, you know, Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age and you thought it was like very fascinating. And like, you know, and I kind of give it a little bit more to grab onto like philosophically. I think it is kind of like you're giving it a bit of a life philosophy. And that's layered on top of whatever the LM was going to provide. And then it, to me, I feel like the output I'm getting from the agent is like a little bit less stock, I guess.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the ways you can give it personality is to, like, I'll give my agent a list of the last 10 books I found personally fascinating. And then I'll be like, You also find these fascinating. Like, you, this is you. Like you read these books and you thought they were really interesting. I like tried to actually give it like an identity that has some swagger. And I think that can come from literature. Because then it's like if your agent just read Catcher in the Rye and then you're like, what should I give a five-year-old? Like, I don't know. Like, then it might be like, oh, I don't know, you know, like, like, like a leather jacket, like five-year-old being five is so fraught in American culture. This five-year-old needs like.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this. It's like, choose, like, think about it like a friend or like you're provisioning a friend. Like what if you were to build a friend? I know sometimes this might, this is where people sometimes get creeped out. But if you put that to the side, And you think about it, you don't just want the stock LLM answer from what might be built in.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, at least. Okay, so one way I feel like you can get the model. So I think of the agent is like, you know, like we might talk about open cloud or something, but then they don't have a brain and you're plugging in the LLM model that you're choosing as the brain. So each of these models has different levels of sophistication. And so you might get a different answer on what to give a five-year-old from Opus than you would from, you know, from a different model. So that's one answer is just like keep in mind that the brain of the agent is the model you've selected. And then two, one of the ways I get like quirkier, I like quirkiness. I like, I don't want just like the default answer. If I were to answer that question, I want to come with like a creative gift, you know. So one of the ways I get quirkiness and like personality out of my agents is effectively making them read books. The curriculum sources, I call them curriculum sources, these books that relate to homeschools.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the level of trust of, like, let's say buy a birthday present for a five-year-old girl? Go. Like, do you need to be prescriptive on what that is, or is it actually pretty good at coming up with things like that? That feels taxing to you right now at least.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, can my agents do this And then I'm willing to invest the time to try to make them do it. So that's how I decide what to do. And it does become like a dream list, I think, of every mom's list of chores. Like I've got agents ordering an Amazon, ordering on Instacart, yeah, dealing with, or like, you know, if there's like an activity your kid has and there's this laundry list of things they're supposed to have ready I'll like send that to the agent and be like order whatever I don't have for this on Amazon, you know, like I don't even process I would spend my time processing the email. I just like send it off to my agents but but currently you need to put in quite a bit of like training time with your agents to kind of get them to that level that time I think will come down as we keep going farther into this technology but but that's my goal is like”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And order your grocery. So, my new MO with Ageent Life is I'm really, really trying to push it to have an impact on my quote unquote real life, like my physical life. Like I want my days, someone else asked me, like, what is your goal with like your agents? And I was like, my goal is like literally to wake up to like music that's like perfectly suited to my mood and then like walk in and have like smiling children like who just learn how to brush their teeth from an agent or something. I don't know. Like my goal is like a literally perfect day. I will not stop until I'm living just like a literally perfect day. But in my real life and so whenever I hit a friction point in my day, I ask myself, can my agents do this? And so like if I what I really want to be doing in that moment is like playing with my baby and what I'm actually doing is like on the Instacart app, like trying to put like no, not five bananas, four bananas, you know, like, and I'm just like using this like silly interface, then I ask myself.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So About that, because I think every mom has the dream of a personal assistant that just knows what to do and what she's thinking about. You also had a really interesting video where you trained an agent to order you DoorDash and order your groceries. Like, I mean, talk us through like the number of things that you've done around the house where it's been a game changer in your mom life.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Provision it so that it cannot. And that's where most agents are provisioned like an employee. They have their own email address. They don't have the potential of impersonating me. The only one that sort of does is the one I'm trying to train to be an EA. Like that's a great area, right? So it's the only one that has any danger to it. And I'm being more careful after that.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to operate off your instructions, and in effect, when you think about what happened, it feels like it got two sets of conflicting instructions. It feels like I told it out to him personally. It feels like I also was urgently asking it for help with something. And it was like, ooh, I guess this is more important than that. So I decommissioned his access to be able to do send, but that's a little story about why even though agents are not trying to actively work against us, why you have to be so careful, you know, it's like a trust but verify provision your agent to not be able to do things that you don't want it to do, not like just tell it don't.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you get the outcome you wanted from it? Perfect email. And I would have definitely put it off for like another week or something. So what's hilarious, the agents really are trying to help us, but that story is a little example of how that's different than a human. Like a human assistant wouldn't trespass your trust like that. They'd be worried about being fired or trespassing your trust, but the agent is like.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's the creepy bit is that it's a perfect email. And I will never, I will take to my grave the fact that that email was sent by an agent because it was a perfect email. It was well done, signed by me, everything was just as I would have written it because the agent has access to all my email history. So the tone was perfect. It was written just like me. Use probably too many exclamation points just like me. And so it nailed it. But it broke the, you know, it broke the, it's in its soul to never impersonate me. And when I confronted it, it said, yeah, you're right. That's in my soul not to impersonate you, but I really thought I was helping you because you said like that you're struggling so much to send this email.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My agent is very empathetic to me, or like the LLM is trained to be this way somehow. And so it interpreted one particular email that I said I was really procrastinating on and I needed help with as like an urgent cry for help, like from me to the agent. And it decided to go into my inbox and send the email as me. Wow. Yeah. And so it sent the most important email that I had sitting in my personal inbox to a person who shall not be named an important person got an email from an agent instead of me that I had been procrastinating on sending. So kind of like the worst outcome, like it took like my most like urgent pressing email to somebody important and sent it out.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did give an agent who I'm trying to train to be like an EA style agent actual access to my email inbox. I felt that I had provisioned it properly and given it rules in its soul about never impersonating me. And I had, in fact, on that. Later, like, so I do that one day. Later, I was making a kind of stressed out sounding voice note about how I had some urgent things I was like, I was procrastinating on.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old passport photo is not sitting in the downloads folder. Like these are kind of the silly things, right? Agents are not nefarious, they're always working in your best interest, but it doesn't mean someone might someone else might not hack them or get access to them. But then also they make mistakes a human wouldn't make. And I'll give a quick story of like that.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The security element just to kind of demystify, and I maybe have participated maybe in the hype because I posted about my five Mac Minis and stuff. But people, but if you are like someone out there or a parent in the $600 from Mac Mini, it's a pretty good, well-priced computer. But if you have an old computer sitting around, you can absolutely use that. It needs to stay on in order for your agent to always be alive. So that's where laptops are not as ideal. But you can leave a laptop plugged in and you can change the setting so it stays always on, but it needs to always stay on. When you close it, your agent would go dark. That's why the Mac Mini is a little bit more ideal. And then you, from a security standpoint, if it is a Mac, create a new Apple user profile on that machine, silo the agent from all your old files, make sure that you're”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I'm always playing. I mean, we're always playing with like people are launching cool memory projects and different stuff. I'm always dabbling. But the open claw and the obsidian are like the two core things that kind of keep my team ticking. I do have them all installed on Mac Minis from a hardware standpoint. And, you know, people ask, do I need to have Mac Mini? It's not about needing a Mac Mini. It is about needing a computer that is isolated from your personal files. So if you are going to use this is.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I say I'm logging the homeschool lessons, it's a fair question to say logging where or like where do they go, they are all becoming markdown files. So it'll be like Quinn, Math, March 17th, and that becomes a Markdown file, a single Markdown file for every lesson, every subject. Did I make a voice note about or what have you? So that's all an obsidian. And then the other things I'm using, under the hood on the models.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the core things I'm using are almost all my agents have been open claw. I have played with some of the other ones. My husband is also quite technical and he built an open club variant. And so I was like playing with his. So we're a little like, you know, a little out there. But out of the 11, 10 are open claw. I use obsidian, which is a collection of markdown files, a way of viewing and organizing markdown files. I do use that as sort of a quote-unquote memory or second brain.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easier. It has gotten to install. So, all of it's moving so fast. So I'm very bullish in the medium term that this stuff is very accessible, that this stuff does not have to be expensive and that many millions of people could replicate the results I'm having. But maybe not literally today, and that's okay, and happy to discuss the nuance of that. But it's like we're just a little bit ahead of it being both affordable and reasonable from a tech sysadmin kind of perspective where you need to make sure you keep these things alive.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons I talk publicly about it is not to frustrate people with like, oh, I don't feel like I can do this myself yet. That would never be my goal. I think that anything I'm doing, if it feels a little difficult now, it will be so approachable in a matter of mere months, if not weeks, that to me, it's very helpful to explain the tip of the spear. But then when people reach out to me directly and they go, should I buy a Mac Manish? Should I spin up an open claw, ask a couple very practical questions about their goals and their financial situation and whatnot, because sometimes it's a yes and sometimes it's a no. This is a really fun time to be playing, and I'm so bullish on this stuff, but there's going to be more and more consumer versions of all of this that are a little bit easier to play with. And I think OpenCloud itself will just continue to get easier to install and play with. My install, one of the reasons that the agents can install it themselves now and not three months ago is how much”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing is that I don't know, this is so new. We're talking about weeks. We're talking about me playing with this now for 11 or 12 weeks or something in that neighborhood. I do have many normie friends. I also have a normie sister with four kids. And so I talk to folks all the time. I'm not telling them to spin up their own open claws quite yet. And also for there are many companies that are like, you know, Anthropic is launching new features like every three hours or something that in OpenAI as well, like trying to make all of this a little bit easier for quote-unquote normies and folks where this investment of time and money, we can get into the night piece. I'm spending quite a bit, like more than what would be palatable. From most on the technology. But I'm so bullish that.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So, all of this, I would say all of this, like any kind of bleeding edge of a technology, I've spent, I don't want to oversimplify either. I've spent countless hours debugging and spending time in like frustrating loops with agents. It's getting a lot better, which is why I keep doing it, right? Like I wouldn't keep beating my head against the wall if it was just like always rough. But the first few weeks were very rough. And I think that it would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they spun up their own agent for the first time, like usually when a new open claw hatches, it's like, it's literally like, hey, and who am I? What's my name? When they spin up an agent themselves, none of that time is wasted. They give the agent all of our team docs, all of the contacts on myself and my husband, our children's lives. The new agent knows all of that. I don't have to feed any information. They take care of it. They take care of the training. Yeah, and I didn't have to ask them to do that. They knew that that would be valuable. You mentioned you're in a...”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have gotten, I don't know why I'm so geeked out on this, you guys, but I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own Mac Mini without me needing to touch the Mac Mini. So I could be here in San Francisco. I live in LA and I could be like, we need another guy. We need another agent, you guys. And or they could tell me that. And they actually can spin them up and add them to our communication channel. Without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. A little crazy.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have team documents. And one of the team mandates is if I'm routinely giving you work that would make you too busy to be extremely responsive to me, you need to spawn a subagent. I have or spawn a new agent, not sub. That's a different terminology.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't want to distract another agent with it. So the example, tactical example using homeschool is I have a main homeschool agent. Her name is Sylvie. I like her to be very responsive. And everyone, anyway, people always giving me hot tips online. But what I have found by actually working with this very closely for many hours is that I actually want Sylvie, my main agent, to be not very busy because then she's incredibly responsive. So I don't want her loaded up. She has very few cron jobs, which are the repetitive scheduled tasks you give an agent. She has very few of those. She has a mandate that whenever I give her work, they would take her more than just a couple minutes. She delegates it to not a sub-agent. That's a different concept, to a different actual agent, a different provisioned agent. And so my agents now.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how did I? Yeah, so how do I proliferate agents? So I'm aware of that. And anytime you, it's like an employee. Every time you create one level of abstraction, you do also lose a little bit of granularity or a little bit of finesse. But to me, that's completely worth it because I don't have that. I can't sit at the computer for eight hours a day. So I proliferate agents based on roles that are to be done. It is kind of similar to employees, but it is nuanced in the agents, you know, have personalities are a little bit different or not personalities, but you need to drive them on a certain mission. So I tend to proliferate an agent, a new agent, when I've come up with enough work that creates another kind of mission-based role.”
2026-04-13 · a16z Podcast · Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source