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.
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.
If zoho go bust I'm sure another company will replace them.
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.
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.
These statements are so out of touch with reality, I generally wonder where will YC be in 5-10 years.
Why do you need 3 platforms to vibe code a solution? Are each one of them not good enough?
Using same logic, why use Replit, EmergentLabs, or Taskade when you can vibe code your own vibe code platform?
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?
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.
Seems ironic to post that - doesn't that same logic imply that most YC companies are worthless?
And I don’t think the friction in vibe coding is that different.
I guess this is just yet another YC ceo/whatever that I care little for (See also: Sam Altman).
Explains a lot.
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.
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.
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.
Longer term AI platforms such as Replit could offer easily deployment of ready made app templates e.g. a CRM. However you still need to pay for them much the same as paying Zoho, prices could be lower. But you still need to pay for them and on a monthly basis too. Vibe coding platforms will still be a SaaS business.
Before it, I was using 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.
Surely AWS's overpriced lockin stuff will be "vide coded" away far faster than smaller companies
as others have pointed out in other comments. the guys at a16z are guilty of this too.
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
Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet]
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
It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
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.
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.
(There was actually a short gap between the final collapse of the NFTs and ChatGPT; it's a wonder VCs were able to get out of bed in the morning)
> Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
It makes a good argument that he is inclined to be overly impressed by whatever old nonsense people are currently pushing on twitter.
This is true for some technologies but not for NFTs.
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.
Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.
Hmmmm... 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/
>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&qu...
> 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. 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.
I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
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.
