Massa argues that the real opportunity is in creating self-improving organizations that leverage AI, drawing parallels to historical industrial revolutions and creative destruction. ✦ AI generated
Ali Massa · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-10 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 28:33
“You decided to build an agent per customer versus per task. And then discovered along the way that each one of those agents needs its own kind of micro virtual machine. So, maybe kind of walk us through those decisions that architecture.”
And I think the the we're seeing these results now, but it was a really risky bet because people usually go from workflows. And like, if I could advise everyone, don't build agent workflows to graphs or or functions or or objectives. And we built that that these are multi-agent systems that can perform a whole function for a complex goals. Like the ones I told you that to sell a car you need to do financing, purchasing, like recommendations, etc. And we had thousands, like tens of thousands of these agents working at scale running the business back in December. But then Opus 4.5 came out. And I realized like this isn't the right paradigm anymore. Like the the intelligence now doesn't need like the graph and the multi-agent lattice work and harness because it will constrain this level of intelligence. So we decided to like destroy everything we had been building for for two years that was working, that brought us to profitability, that brought us amazing growth. And start over with a harness that we thought would be robust and scalable and and leverage recursive self-improvement. And or new models, more intelligent models coming out every month. So the way this looks like it's it's a virtual machine with an agent with access to memory and evals and a CLI where they can access every tool and every API in my company and the long-term goal. And I instantiate hundreds of thousands of these each day with long-term goals. Like maximizing the the lifetime value. Yeah. The self-improving organization. Exactly. The self-improving organization. And I think people are super obsessed with with RSI now and this will improve the the the models, but if you look at it this way, economic value in humanity for the past 4,000 years has been delivered by organizations, not by individuals. So, what you want to self-improve and to engage in that loop is the organization that can deliver more economic value. Right? So, that's the loop that I think companies will start to to focus on because if you get that loop working and it's an organization that is really self-improving and harnessing the the newer models and the better intelligence that we're getting every couple of days now, then like you hit the exponential not just in intelligence, but in the value that you can generate as a company.
verbatim transcript · starts at 28:33
28:33>> And and I think the the we're seeing these results now, but it was a really risky bet because people usually go from workflows. >> Mhm. >> And like, if I could advise everyone, don't build agent workflows to graphs or or functions or or objectives. And we built that that these are multi-agent systems that can perform a whole function for a complex goals. Like the ones I told you that to sell a
29:00car you need to do financing, purchasing, like recommendations, etc. And we had thousands, like tens of thousands of these agents working at scale running the business back in December. But then Opus 4.5 came out. And I realized like this isn't the right paradigm anymore. Like the the intelligence now doesn't need like the graph and the multi-agent lattice work and harness because it will constrain this level of intelligence.
29:31So we decided to like destroy everything we had been building for for two years that was working, that brought us to profitability, that brought us amazing growth. And start over with a harness that we thought would be robust and scalable and and leverage recursive self-improvement. And or new models, more intelligent models coming out every month. So the way this looks like it's it's a virtual machine with an agent with access to memory and
30:01evals and a CLI where they can access every tool and every API in my company and the long-term goal. And I instantiate hundreds of thousands of these each day with long-term goals. Like maximizing the the lifetime value. >> Yeah. The self-improving organization. >> Exactly. The self-improving organization. And I think people are super obsessed with with RSI now and this will improve the the the models, but if you look at it this
30:31way, economic value in humanity for the past 4,000 years has been delivered by organizations, not by individuals. So, what you want to self-improve and to engage in that loop is the organization that can deliver more economic value. Right? So, that's the loop that I think companies will start to to focus on because if you get that loop working and it's an organization that is really self-improving and harnessing the the newer models and
31:02the better intelligence that we're getting every couple of days now, uh then like you hit the exponential not just in intelligence, but in the value uh that you can generate as a company. So, so that's really exciting. That's what we're working on. >> You mentioned that because of all the challenges on adopting AI, you saw the biggest opportunity on net new companies being formed working on this new way and then
31:26disrupting markets. Like you want to talk a little bit about that? >> Yes, um there's this concept in economics about creative destruction from from from Joseph Schumpeter. And what it says is that the the the way innovation hits the economy isn't by companies adopting the the the new technology, but by companies remaining the way they they were and incumbents with the new technology destroying the old companies. So, this destroys