Mar 10, 2026 · 1 hr 41 min · 15 segments
Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and Chair of the OpenAI board, joins John for a pint to discuss the rapid shift toward an agentic future. In this episode, Bret explains why outcome-based pricing is…
Bret TaylorGuest
John CollisonHost
Okay, the thing that seems to me is funny is if you look at the landscape, still in 2026, if you open a new Gemini chat or if you open a new ChatGPG chat, it's basically a blank slate.
I mean, people talk about the WhatsApp and Telegram integrations and things like that.
But it feels to me a big part of the value is not only can it do stuff proactively, but it has memory.
Like it didn't always write down the exact right things to remember and stuff like that.
But isn't it funny that like you can get super polished mainstream consumer apps that have no memory at all, or this like wildly insecure three name changes project that kind of almost remembers things by scribbling notes in the margin.
Like the difference between if we were here in October versus now, our conversation about the future of software engineering would be materially different.
And how often can you say that about a technology? And people always, in my circles anyway, you look at a coding agent and you extrapolate to other domains.
You're like, could all digital tasks be like this? And the answer is obviously yes, over some period of time, but it's really interesting because I think sometimes like, I think the hard part of engineering is in the details and code repos have very specific qualities.
One is all the context is in one place, in files that are largely textual, not binary.
Like when you were writing your annual letter, my guess is the sources of information were in so many different systems, data warehouses.
But the idea that you can like straight line from coding agents to writing the Stripe annual letter, I don't totally buy.
And then similarly, when the agents actually perform and work on a code base, there's feedback.
Okay, the thing that seems to me is funny is if you look at the landscape, still in 2026, if you open a new Gemini chat or if you open a new ChatGPG chat, it's basically a blank slate.
I mean, people talk about the WhatsApp and Telegram integrations and things like that.
But it feels to me a big part of the value is not only can it do stuff proactively, but it has memory.
Like it didn't always write down the exact right things to remember and stuff like that.
But isn't it funny that like you can get super polished mainstream consumer apps that have no memory at all, or this like wildly insecure three name changes project that kind of almost remembers things by scribbling notes in the margin.
Like the difference between if we were here in October versus now, our conversation about the future of software engineering would be materially different.
And how often can you say that about a technology? And people always, in my circles anyway, you look at a coding agent and you extrapolate to other domains.
You're like, could all digital tasks be like this? And the answer is obviously yes, over some period of time, but it's really interesting because I think sometimes like, I think the hard part of engineering is in the details and code repos have very specific qualities.
One is all the context is in one place, in files that are largely textual, not binary.
Like when you were writing your annual letter, my guess is the sources of information were in so many different systems, data warehouses.
But the idea that you can like straight line from coding agents to writing the Stripe annual letter, I don't totally buy.
And then similarly, when the agents actually perform and work on a code base, there's feedback.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.