6 ms·

Garry Tan claims Zoho will be out of business due to vibe coding

53 points by manojlds 11mo ago

da_grift_shift 11mo ago
"NFTs show relatively small groups of tens of thousands of people can work together collectively for a common good" - Garry Tan, 23 March 2022 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 "If you own an NFT..." you are an innovator among innovators. - Garry Tan, 30 September 2021 [quote tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 "airdrops going mainstream could truly upend some % of the centralized ad-based economy of Web2" - Garry Tan, 25 Dec 2021 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448
- nextaccountic 11mo ago
  When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs
- presentation 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC. It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML). All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company. Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result. [0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html [1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/ https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/
  - noobermin 11mo ago
    The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
    - alephnerd 11mo ago
      > who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
    - bgwalter 11mo ago
      It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
      - 11mo ago
- jmathai 11mo ago
  Was it really just 4 years ago that NFTs were "the next big thing"? The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
  - 4er_transform 11mo ago
    NFTs from first principles looked like a bad idea even then. They solved 0 problems. When a technology solves 0 problems, it’s doomed to fail.
    - IshKebab 11mo ago
      They solved the money laundering problem pretty well!
  - nyc_data_geek1 11mo ago
    Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. It demonstrates an inability to differentiate between hype and utility. NFT's for real estate ownership, container tracking etc. could still have some form of utility. But what people think of when they hear NFT's isn't that, it's shitty monkey jpg's. NFT's were never the next big thing, except for a very specific subset of very gullible idiots.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
      > Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.
- jm4 11mo ago
  This guy is the Jim Cramer of tech CEO's. Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.
  - sixtyj 11mo ago
    People vibe code, for sure. But what are the results? Vibe coded apps without maintenance that nobody can repair as the code is such a nice mess…
    - rsynnott 11mo ago
      That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.
    - kamaal 11mo ago
      >>apps without maintenance This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'. This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake. Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
  - palmotea 11mo ago
    > Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development [emphasis mine]. Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.
- BloondAndDoom 11mo ago
  This is impressive in the worst way! There is a stark difference between original YC management and the current one. I just cannot believe someone who has such a limited understanding of the industry & tech can be the CEO of YC. Following a leader like Paul Graham is practically impossible (and rest of the founding team was surely very talented) but this is just horrible. Not sure if it matters whether he's good or bad in the short term, but after 5 years of this kind of management they'll absolutely lose their advantage. It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
- music4airports 11mo ago
  Whoopsie! I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. Hmmmm... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 Looks like the entire thread was bumped down from 17th place to 130th. https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ >We moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tomhow 10mo ago
    Moderators didn't touch (or see) this until later, and the only way we intervened was to turn off the flags and flamewar penalties. HN users flagged it and the flamewar (or signal vs noise) detector pulled it well off the front page before moderators knew anything about it. > I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. As dang wrote years ago [1], "Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through". But the real issue with this post is... there's nothing interesting or scandalous here, is there? Just someone (sure, our president) expressing opinions – which are all consistent with his business and investment activities. What's the issue? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978
joshstrange 11mo ago
[flagged]
- jonners00 11mo ago
  He runs Y combinator. This is his site!
  - joshstrange 11mo ago
    I stand by what I said. To think Zoho or companies like it will be out of business due to vibe coding tools is absurd given what's currently available. I guess this is just yet another YC ceo/whatever that I care little for (See also: Sam Altman).
  - itg 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tpetry 11mo ago
      He is not clueless. He is just pushing a batshit crazy narrative because they are invested in tons of vibe coding startups.
      - rstuart4133 11mo ago
        Ahhh, thanks. The post is one line click bait zinger spruiking his investments. Seems it worked. As for whether he's clueless, lets see how investing in tons of vibe coding startups works out.
  - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    Really everyone thinks of it as Paul Graham (and dang's I suppose...) site I do wonder if the CEO of YC even comes on here much? I assume PG does not come on here much outside of viewing threads here and there.
    - 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
giarc 11mo ago
Will they lose a small customer or two to custom vibe coded solutions, yes. Will they be "competed away" due to vibe coding, definitely not. You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.
- fakedang 11mo ago
  Why would a small customer bother with building their own Zoho solution even? I mean, if an SMB did that, I'd call them morons. Zoho has its flaws, but for small businesses, Zoho is a godsend. If an SMB doesn't want to pay for Zoho, I'd seriously ask them to recheck if they're making any money whatsoever. Moreover Zoho is one of the few platforms out there that's really intuitive. Do this, do this and that, and you're good to go. Compared to setting up something like Zendesk or Freshdesk or Xero or QuickBooks , etc.
  - gboss 11mo ago
    I agree that Zoho is more intuitive than Zendesk and 10-20x cheaper, but that’s a really low bar. However, when we evaluated Zoho this past spring to replace our b2c 60-100 seat month Zendesk contract, we found Zoho to be really disjointed where every app was configured and looked different. The pricing and lack of contract was great but it seemed like different things were tacked together like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app. When our new contract for Customer Service expires I’ll check them out again but I think they need to standardize and simplify the look and feel of there apps and merge some if they want to move up market. For small businesses with a shoestring budget they’re a no brainier though!
    - fakedang 11mo ago
      > like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app. Unfortunately, truth be told, most software is like that. Take Salesforce for instance - same issue. Granted, Zendesk niches at this painpoint you mentioned (and I've seen some enterprises switch from Zendesk to Salesforce and face the exact same issue as above), but their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope. UI-wise, Zendesk is still the best.
hombre_fatal 11mo ago
He will be right at some point. The question is when. I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience. The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia. Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.
- delaminator 11mo ago
  Yeah, likewise. I didn't type this comment. I created my own Alexa-style Voice to text typist, using whisper and Rust. I've never typed a line of Rust in my life. making projects that would have taken months before. I'll do them in an evening, using my iPhone. This morning alone I've created a Auto Green Screen Program for my webcam. so I can put my own effects on it, like in Teams. - while I was at work doing my normal day. just dropping in now and again and giving it another prompt.
  - hombre_fatal 10mo ago
    Funny you say that. Last month I vibe-coded a whisper.cpp setup where I hold super+semicolon, speak, and release, and then it injects a transcription of what I said into whatever has focus. The only reason I looked at the code was curiosity and to impart some aesthetic preferences on it. Before it, I was using https://wisprflow.ai/ https://wisprflow.ai/ for ez transcription since I would never have had the energy to build it myself nor work out the kinks. We really are the last generation of software engineers, aren't we.
    - delaminator 10mo ago
      I disagree with the last generation. I think what is going to change is what we actually do not whether we do it or not. Speaking in metaphors: someone still needs to build the fixings, bricks, wires, pipes and tiles and paint and tools to put them all together someone has to still come up with the building. I used to work in construction and I've watched the sophistication of all the pieces get better and better over time. Insulated floors, heated floors, push fit pipes, RCDs instead of fuses, better materials, resin driveways. I live in a new build house, I'm not nostalgic for a sandstone cave. I've built some crazy things these past few months, I've got a voice control computer with head tracking mouse. Apart from the actual voice transcription model and the neural network model that works out where my face is, I could have built it all by hand. With enough data, I could probably have even made the face position model, but I simply wouldn't have taken these on. They just sound too monumental. And then we've got the perfect is the enemy of the good. As programmers, we want to produce things that are better for everybody else. So when we start building a library we start considering how all the people are going to use it. Now simply don't care. If it's a bit rough around the edges it doesn't matter because it's for me. And if you want one for yourself, you can prompt it into existence. I'm a component builder as well. And now I can build polished components that are great for future use. Not only that, they're fully documented. I just wish I wasn't pushing 60. I'm feeling the joy of being with my new computer - 15 again seeing more possibilities than ever. I've faced serious burnout in this industry. Fed up of another round of read to database, write to database, present data from database. Spending days fiddling with forms, add this box, make this box bigger, that button's got the wrong text. Now I can just say those things out loud into a text box and switch to another text box and build something more complex.
mns 11mo ago
Considering how much money they invested in countless AI VS Code forks and other vibe coding platforms, he needs to hype up the market.
yoavm 11mo ago
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.
- iso1631 11mo ago
  I used to run my own smtp server, but it's far easier to point my MX records and let someone else do it. If zoho go bust I'm sure another company will replace them.
- sd9 11mo ago
  The whole point of money is to pay for problems to go away. No idea how good Zoho is, but if you can pay $X/month and never even think about the problem ever again, then that is compelling, and the value of that depends on the customer.
  - kamaal 11mo ago
    That and of course- If you are using a tool to solve a problem. Your focus should be on the problem. If you are spending more time fixing or inventing the tool, than spending time solving the problem, then you are better off using a paid tool which takes care of all that helping you focus on the problem.
- BloondAndDoom 11mo ago
  There isn't much to understand because I don't even think he understands or even thought about it more than 5 seconds. If he did think about more than 5 seconds and still typed this tweet, that's worse.
francisofascii 11mo ago
I kinda hope so. When I started my career companies and orgs had in-house developers to make custom software for the org. The developers understood the business and were part of the culture. Then the labor market got tight, developers left for higher paying jobs, managers became afraid of going custom because they would lose the developers, so they starting buying overpriced SAAS products and contractors. If the job market is flush again with capable devs armed with AI, maybe we can go back to in-house developers again.
antiloper 11mo ago
Obviously not? Accounting software has to work or the IRS (or your local equivalent) will come after you. Zoho "just works".
andsoitis 11mo ago
> competed away by people building their own custom software built by people using @Replit @emergentlabs and @Taskade Why do you need 3 platforms to vibe code a solution? Are each one of them not good enough?
- mlboss 11mo ago
  I bet all are Y Combinator companies.
  - andsoitis 11mo ago
    Which makes it even more damning. Vibe coding platforms are software solutions themselves, which means they are subject to the same logic.
zkmon 11mo ago
Vibe coding can only affect companies that depend on slow-coding.
villosil 11mo ago
Well, then I claim that it will be the companies themselves that try to replace Zoho (or any other CRM for that matter) with a vibe-coded replacement, the ones going out of business. As someone said once: focus on what makes your beer taste better.
jacquesm 11mo ago
It's 'Garry' and besides that guy gets too much airtime already.
- mrweasel 11mo ago
  It's the first I've ever heard of him. Still have no idea who he is, but yes, still to much airtime.
  - Macha 11mo ago
    CEO of the investment firm that owns this site
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
ne8il 11mo ago
Let's say I'm a manufacturer of widgets, and instead of buying an off-the-shelf CRM I decide to have the resident IT whiz on the team vibe-code a custom solution for our needs. Now I'm a manufacturer of widgets AND a CRM SaaS shop, responsible for software maintenance/deployment/reliability/feature roadmap/bug remediation. I guess the idea is that AI agents will take care of all of those things too - to which I guess my perspective is "good luck! I hope that works out."
mlboss 11mo ago
Most probably all VCs will go out of business as the cost of creating software companies approaches zero. The need to create an army of software developers is no longer needed.
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  Not really. In such a hypothetical world, it would actually be much easier for us to fund companies simply because now the only thing we are funding is just sales, demand gen, and projected compute. We provide funding so businesses that are the right fit can scale out the functions that they need. In some cases it's expanding engineering, in other cases it's expanding sales and demand gen, and in other cases is to subsidize a major purchase such as cloud credits or GPUs.
bgwalter 11mo ago
Pichai should be fearing for his position after all the misallocation of capital and the low quality of Google "AI". Of course he endorses slop coding (Pichai's endorsement is criticized by the Zoho founder for those who do not click through to X). Zoho will now be a very interesting company for the vast majority of people who hate "AI". I'll have to check it out.
ZiiS 11mo ago
He said `would be first`; I 100% agree. If vibe coding was going to take over the world, then Zoho going out of business is a very good leading indicator. As soon as that happens, I will invest heavily; till then it is safe to ignore it.
jmathai 11mo ago
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.
kklisura 11mo ago
> ...when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend. These statements are so out of touch with reality, I generally wonder where will YC be in 5-10 years.
alberth 11mo ago
Technology alone rarely wins a market ... success usually comes from marketing, referrals, and network effects. It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.
HardwareLust 11mo ago
This is the guy that said NFTs were the next "big thing"?
andsoitis 11mo ago
> competed away by people building their own custom software built by people using @Replit @emergentlabs and @Taskade Using same logic, why use Replit, EmergentLabs, or Taskade when you can vibe code your own vibe code platform?
ks2048 11mo ago
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? Seems ironic to post that - doesn't that same logic imply that most YC companies are worthless?
almostdeadguy 11mo ago
This going from the front page to effectively buried (cant even find it in the first 10 pages) within minutes is not a great look for HN.
rsynnott 11mo ago
I mean, Gary Tan says a lot of stupid stuff; I wouldn't take it as any particular signal one way or another.
tetrisgm 11mo ago
If this were valid, more people would be making their own meals and their own furniture. And I don’t think the friction in vibe coding is that different.
dzonga 11mo ago
classic case guy of smart guy - but invested too much in x industry - that they drink their own koolaid. as others have pointed out in other comments. the guys at a16z are guilty of this too.
sometimes_all 11mo ago
For Indian companies, a Zoho One yearly subscription is USD 13 a month if you use it for all your employees. That's USD 8000 a year if I have 50 employees, which I can straightaway claim as expenses and get a tax benefit out of it. And this includes CRM, Mail, chat, invoicing, accounting, marketing, advertising, etc. etc. So not just building the app, but also support, interoperatibility and offloading of all work which is not core of my business. I doubt you'll get all this for $8K/year (India) or $22K (USA) even after you vibe-code once (not counting the ridiculous costs of developing with AI - you still need your engineers to do that even before you start running the token counter). Garry somehow gave free publicity to Zoho with this post. Maybe that was his intention?

53 points by manojlds 11mo ago

"NFTs show relatively small groups of tens of thousands of people can work together collectively for a common good" - Garry Tan, 23 March 2022 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 "If you own an NFT..." you are an innovator among innovators. - Garry Tan, 30 September 2021 [quote tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 "airdrops going mainstream could truly upend some % of the centralized ad-based economy of Web2" - Garry Tan, 25 Dec 2021 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448

nextaccountic 11mo ago
When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs
presentation 11mo ago
[flagged]
alephnerd 11mo ago
One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC. It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML). All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company. Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result. [0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html [1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/ https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/
- noobermin 11mo ago
  The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
  - alephnerd 11mo ago
    > who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
  - bgwalter 11mo ago
    It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
    - 11mo ago
jmathai 11mo ago
Was it really just 4 years ago that NFTs were "the next big thing"? The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
- 4er_transform 11mo ago
  NFTs from first principles looked like a bad idea even then. They solved 0 problems. When a technology solves 0 problems, it’s doomed to fail.
  - IshKebab 11mo ago
    They solved the money laundering problem pretty well!
- nyc_data_geek1 11mo ago
  Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. It demonstrates an inability to differentiate between hype and utility. NFT's for real estate ownership, container tracking etc. could still have some form of utility. But what people think of when they hear NFT's isn't that, it's shitty monkey jpg's. NFT's were never the next big thing, except for a very specific subset of very gullible idiots.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
    > Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.
jm4 11mo ago
This guy is the Jim Cramer of tech CEO's. Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.
- sixtyj 11mo ago
  People vibe code, for sure. But what are the results? Vibe coded apps without maintenance that nobody can repair as the code is such a nice mess…
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.
  - kamaal 11mo ago
    >>apps without maintenance This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'. This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake. Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
- palmotea 11mo ago
  > Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development [emphasis mine]. Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.
BloondAndDoom 11mo ago
This is impressive in the worst way! There is a stark difference between original YC management and the current one. I just cannot believe someone who has such a limited understanding of the industry & tech can be the CEO of YC. Following a leader like Paul Graham is practically impossible (and rest of the founding team was surely very talented) but this is just horrible. Not sure if it matters whether he's good or bad in the short term, but after 5 years of this kind of management they'll absolutely lose their advantage. It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
music4airports 11mo ago
Whoopsie! I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. Hmmmm... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 Looks like the entire thread was bumped down from 17th place to 130th. https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ >We moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)
- deleted 10mo ago
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- tomhow 10mo ago
  Moderators didn't touch (or see) this until later, and the only way we intervened was to turn off the flags and flamewar penalties. HN users flagged it and the flamewar (or signal vs noise) detector pulled it well off the front page before moderators knew anything about it. > I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. As dang wrote years ago [1], "Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through". But the real issue with this post is... there's nothing interesting or scandalous here, is there? Just someone (sure, our president) expressing opinions – which are all consistent with his business and investment activities. What's the issue? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978

joshstrange 11mo ago

[flagged]

jonners00 11mo ago
He runs Y combinator. This is his site!
- joshstrange 11mo ago
  I stand by what I said. To think Zoho or companies like it will be out of business due to vibe coding tools is absurd given what's currently available. I guess this is just yet another YC ceo/whatever that I care little for (See also: Sam Altman).
- itg 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tpetry 11mo ago
    He is not clueless. He is just pushing a batshit crazy narrative because they are invested in tons of vibe coding startups.
    - rstuart4133 11mo ago
      Ahhh, thanks. The post is one line click bait zinger spruiking his investments. Seems it worked. As for whether he's clueless, lets see how investing in tons of vibe coding startups works out.
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  Really everyone thinks of it as Paul Graham (and dang's I suppose...) site I do wonder if the CEO of YC even comes on here much? I assume PG does not come on here much outside of viewing threads here and there.
  - 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

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giarc 11mo ago

Will they lose a small customer or two to custom vibe coded solutions, yes. Will they be "competed away" due to vibe coding, definitely not. You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.

fakedang 11mo ago
Why would a small customer bother with building their own Zoho solution even? I mean, if an SMB did that, I'd call them morons. Zoho has its flaws, but for small businesses, Zoho is a godsend. If an SMB doesn't want to pay for Zoho, I'd seriously ask them to recheck if they're making any money whatsoever. Moreover Zoho is one of the few platforms out there that's really intuitive. Do this, do this and that, and you're good to go. Compared to setting up something like Zendesk or Freshdesk or Xero or QuickBooks , etc.
- gboss 11mo ago
  I agree that Zoho is more intuitive than Zendesk and 10-20x cheaper, but that’s a really low bar. However, when we evaluated Zoho this past spring to replace our b2c 60-100 seat month Zendesk contract, we found Zoho to be really disjointed where every app was configured and looked different. The pricing and lack of contract was great but it seemed like different things were tacked together like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app. When our new contract for Customer Service expires I’ll check them out again but I think they need to standardize and simplify the look and feel of there apps and merge some if they want to move up market. For small businesses with a shoestring budget they’re a no brainier though!
  - fakedang 11mo ago
    > like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app. Unfortunately, truth be told, most software is like that. Take Salesforce for instance - same issue. Granted, Zendesk niches at this painpoint you mentioned (and I've seen some enterprises switch from Zendesk to Salesforce and face the exact same issue as above), but their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope. UI-wise, Zendesk is still the best.

hombre_fatal 11mo ago

He will be right at some point. The question is when. I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience. The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia. Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.

delaminator 11mo ago
Yeah, likewise. I didn't type this comment. I created my own Alexa-style Voice to text typist, using whisper and Rust. I've never typed a line of Rust in my life. making projects that would have taken months before. I'll do them in an evening, using my iPhone. This morning alone I've created a Auto Green Screen Program for my webcam. so I can put my own effects on it, like in Teams. - while I was at work doing my normal day. just dropping in now and again and giving it another prompt.
- hombre_fatal 10mo ago
  Funny you say that. Last month I vibe-coded a whisper.cpp setup where I hold super+semicolon, speak, and release, and then it injects a transcription of what I said into whatever has focus. The only reason I looked at the code was curiosity and to impart some aesthetic preferences on it. Before it, I was using https://wisprflow.ai/ https://wisprflow.ai/ for ez transcription since I would never have had the energy to build it myself nor work out the kinks. We really are the last generation of software engineers, aren't we.
  - delaminator 10mo ago
    I disagree with the last generation. I think what is going to change is what we actually do not whether we do it or not. Speaking in metaphors: someone still needs to build the fixings, bricks, wires, pipes and tiles and paint and tools to put them all together someone has to still come up with the building. I used to work in construction and I've watched the sophistication of all the pieces get better and better over time. Insulated floors, heated floors, push fit pipes, RCDs instead of fuses, better materials, resin driveways. I live in a new build house, I'm not nostalgic for a sandstone cave. I've built some crazy things these past few months, I've got a voice control computer with head tracking mouse. Apart from the actual voice transcription model and the neural network model that works out where my face is, I could have built it all by hand. With enough data, I could probably have even made the face position model, but I simply wouldn't have taken these on. They just sound too monumental. And then we've got the perfect is the enemy of the good. As programmers, we want to produce things that are better for everybody else. So when we start building a library we start considering how all the people are going to use it. Now simply don't care. If it's a bit rough around the edges it doesn't matter because it's for me. And if you want one for yourself, you can prompt it into existence. I'm a component builder as well. And now I can build polished components that are great for future use. Not only that, they're fully documented. I just wish I wasn't pushing 60. I'm feeling the joy of being with my new computer - 15 again seeing more possibilities than ever. I've faced serious burnout in this industry. Fed up of another round of read to database, write to database, present data from database. Spending days fiddling with forms, add this box, make this box bigger, that button's got the wrong text. Now I can just say those things out loud into a text box and switch to another text box and build something more complex.

mns 11mo ago

Considering how much money they invested in countless AI VS Code forks and other vibe coding platforms, he needs to hype up the market.

yoavm 11mo ago

> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.

iso1631 11mo ago
I used to run my own smtp server, but it's far easier to point my MX records and let someone else do it. If zoho go bust I'm sure another company will replace them.
sd9 11mo ago
The whole point of money is to pay for problems to go away. No idea how good Zoho is, but if you can pay $X/month and never even think about the problem ever again, then that is compelling, and the value of that depends on the customer.
- kamaal 11mo ago
  That and of course- If you are using a tool to solve a problem. Your focus should be on the problem. If you are spending more time fixing or inventing the tool, than spending time solving the problem, then you are better off using a paid tool which takes care of all that helping you focus on the problem.
BloondAndDoom 11mo ago
There isn't much to understand because I don't even think he understands or even thought about it more than 5 seconds. If he did think about more than 5 seconds and still typed this tweet, that's worse.

francisofascii 11mo ago

I kinda hope so. When I started my career companies and orgs had in-house developers to make custom software for the org. The developers understood the business and were part of the culture. Then the labor market got tight, developers left for higher paying jobs, managers became afraid of going custom because they would lose the developers, so they starting buying overpriced SAAS products and contractors. If the job market is flush again with capable devs armed with AI, maybe we can go back to in-house developers again.

antiloper 11mo ago

Obviously not? Accounting software has to work or the IRS (or your local equivalent) will come after you. Zoho "just works".

andsoitis 11mo ago

> competed away by people building their own custom software built by people using @Replit @emergentlabs and @Taskade Why do you need 3 platforms to vibe code a solution? Are each one of them not good enough?

mlboss 11mo ago
I bet all are Y Combinator companies.
- andsoitis 11mo ago
  Which makes it even more damning. Vibe coding platforms are software solutions themselves, which means they are subject to the same logic.

zkmon 11mo ago

Vibe coding can only affect companies that depend on slow-coding.

villosil 11mo ago

Well, then I claim that it will be the companies themselves that try to replace Zoho (or any other CRM for that matter) with a vibe-coded replacement, the ones going out of business. As someone said once: focus on what makes your beer taste better.

jacquesm 11mo ago

It's 'Garry' and besides that guy gets too much airtime already.

mrweasel 11mo ago
It's the first I've ever heard of him. Still have no idea who he is, but yes, still to much airtime.
- Macha 11mo ago
  CEO of the investment firm that owns this site

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

ne8il 11mo ago

Let's say I'm a manufacturer of widgets, and instead of buying an off-the-shelf CRM I decide to have the resident IT whiz on the team vibe-code a custom solution for our needs. Now I'm a manufacturer of widgets AND a CRM SaaS shop, responsible for software maintenance/deployment/reliability/feature roadmap/bug remediation. I guess the idea is that AI agents will take care of all of those things too - to which I guess my perspective is "good luck! I hope that works out."

mlboss 11mo ago

Most probably all VCs will go out of business as the cost of creating software companies approaches zero. The need to create an army of software developers is no longer needed.

alephnerd 11mo ago
Not really. In such a hypothetical world, it would actually be much easier for us to fund companies simply because now the only thing we are funding is just sales, demand gen, and projected compute. We provide funding so businesses that are the right fit can scale out the functions that they need. In some cases it's expanding engineering, in other cases it's expanding sales and demand gen, and in other cases is to subsidize a major purchase such as cloud credits or GPUs.

bgwalter 11mo ago

Pichai should be fearing for his position after all the misallocation of capital and the low quality of Google "AI". Of course he endorses slop coding (Pichai's endorsement is criticized by the Zoho founder for those who do not click through to X). Zoho will now be a very interesting company for the vast majority of people who hate "AI". I'll have to check it out.

ZiiS 11mo ago

He said `would be first`; I 100% agree. If vibe coding was going to take over the world, then Zoho going out of business is a very good leading indicator. As soon as that happens, I will invest heavily; till then it is safe to ignore it.

jmathai 11mo ago

> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.

kklisura 11mo ago

> ...when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend. These statements are so out of touch with reality, I generally wonder where will YC be in 5-10 years.

alberth 11mo ago

Technology alone rarely wins a market ... success usually comes from marketing, referrals, and network effects. It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.

HardwareLust 11mo ago

This is the guy that said NFTs were the next "big thing"?

andsoitis 11mo ago

> competed away by people building their own custom software built by people using @Replit @emergentlabs and @Taskade Using same logic, why use Replit, EmergentLabs, or Taskade when you can vibe code your own vibe code platform?

ks2048 11mo ago

> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend? Seems ironic to post that - doesn't that same logic imply that most YC companies are worthless?

almostdeadguy 11mo ago

This going from the front page to effectively buried (cant even find it in the first 10 pages) within minutes is not a great look for HN.

rsynnott 11mo ago

I mean, Gary Tan says a lot of stupid stuff; I wouldn't take it as any particular signal one way or another.

tetrisgm 11mo ago

If this were valid, more people would be making their own meals and their own furniture. And I don’t think the friction in vibe coding is that different.

dzonga 11mo ago

classic case guy of smart guy - but invested too much in x industry - that they drink their own koolaid. as others have pointed out in other comments. the guys at a16z are guilty of this too.

sometimes_all 11mo ago

For Indian companies, a Zoho One yearly subscription is USD 13 a month if you use it for all your employees. That's USD 8000 a year if I have 50 employees, which I can straightaway claim as expenses and get a tax benefit out of it. And this includes CRM, Mail, chat, invoicing, accounting, marketing, advertising, etc. etc. So not just building the app, but also support, interoperatibility and offloading of all work which is not core of my business. I doubt you'll get all this for $8K/year (India) or $22K (USA) even after you vibe-code once (not counting the ridiculous costs of developing with AI - you still need your engineers to do that even before you start running the token counter). Garry somehow gave free publicity to Zoho with this post. Maybe that was his intention?