> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Small customers do weird things. I had a tiny Saas company and we had approached a local business with a few locations. Our software was in daycare management and would have automated a bunch of their processes. The owner loved the product but didn't want to "rent" our software (ie. pay a monthly fee). She wanted to pay us once and install the software on her computers. Literally if we had said "here's a CD-ROM to install" she would have paid us money. This isn't an example of a customer that might vibe code their solution, but simply to show that customers do weird things and have weird requests.
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!
> 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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
I feel like I've seen his name a few times but I don't know much about him at all but I can tell you from that 1 tweet he has no clue what he is talking about.
Bozo bit flipped.
I don't use Zoho but I've played with it before, the thought that you can vibe code up something like that (which is reliable) is laughable.
From the title I thought they were saying that /using/ vibe coding at Zoho would lead to them going out of business (something much more plausible).
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.
If I think about who's "site" HN is then PG or Dang are front of mind. I know Dang is /just/ a mod but he is who is visible. I've never once cared who actually ran YC, I didn't care when Sam Altman ran it and I don't care about Gary Tan either, they are 100% immaterial to the discussions that happen on this site IMHO.
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).
So what? PG made this, Sam Altman futzed around with it, Geoff was ok (looking from a distance, obviously) and Tan is at best a caretaker. Note Tan is ex Palantir and as such good buddies with Thiel and a lot of other despicables. That they're wealthy is no reason to look up to them.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
One doesn't even need to vibe code. Zoho type apps e.g. mail/smtp already exist there are ton's of free open source options. You can one-click deploy them on AWS/Azure already. To be clear I understand reducing friction is also a 'feature' that users would be willing to pay for.
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.
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.
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/ 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.
I use Claude Code on a daily basis, I've never got anything for "free" from it. So yeah, there is still a lot of coding involved, maybe just less typing.
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.
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.
No no, NFTs were ridiculously stupid, that's why it was so controversial, that's why there was so much backlash.
Tan having been bullish on NFTs is a very good indicator that he isn't hyping $TRENDING_THING based on technological merit
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.
> 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.
That's a good point. I've had the same: I lost a bet on HN for a hundred bucks that Facebook would never break a billion in revenues. I - mistakenly - thought people would not be so stupid as to hand over their private lives to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. But they did.
NFTs are just as stupid, if not more so and this time at least it looks like sanity prevailed. But the problem is more complex than just boolean 'made' or 'fail', and I think that's where the investment angle comes in. Investors bet on 'the next wave' all the time. And NFTs looked to the clueless as much as 'the next wave' as mobile phones or the transistor did at some point in time. The big differentiator to me is whether or not a thing like that requires a belief system or not. If it does then I don't give it much chance. But then we have all of crypto as a counterexample and quite a few people got stupidly rich peddling that.
NFTs followed the exact same path as crypto, which many predicted would happen. Crypto became a speculative asset traded on exchanges because it was too volatile and transaction-cost heavy to ever be used as a medium of exchange. NFTs being crypto-based were soon descended upon by finance bros and scammers who saw the opportunity for a quick buck, eliminating any possibility to develop it for utilitarian things like house deeds and concert tickets or whatever.
Yes. Blockchains in general, then 'metaverse', then NFTs, now AI. The hype-ier bits of the tech industry always need _something_ to be over-excited about.
(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.
Why are we pretending like his comments about any of these things are as a neutral observer instead of as an investor cheerleading his investments? Why should anyone take Gary Tan seriously as a futurist?
Well, that's a good question but the answer isn't going to be to anybody's liking. Because he's got money. People equate having money with wisdom rather than with intelligence and intelligence is dual use, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad just as easily. It may lead to wisdom but that's fairly rare. Most of the time it just leads to money.
So people will follow those with money (or that they perceive to have money) without much critical thought about where that is going to lead them, they're hoping for wisdom but may end up being misled. That's why all of these ultra wealthy folk turned on a dime when the political weather changed, they don't really have principles, they just want more zeros.
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.
> 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.
The point I was making was VB was never considered a tool "for hackers to be much more productive," only a tool "for less technical people to create software."
I knew some hackers who used it back in the day. They were the types who were good with computers and could write shell scripts, but they were not professional programmers. They knew how to do what they needed done. The people I know today who are into vibe coding kind of fit that same mold. They want something done and they do it themselves, but they aren't necessarily good at coding or enjoy doing it.
Ehh, I dunno, it was really, really popular back then. I would bet that a non-trivial number of apps were built using VB by actual software engineers. Couldn't find concrete numbers but this article claims at its peak, 2/3rds of all business apps on Windows PCs were in VB: https://retool.com/visual-basic
I recall seeing inventory management systems, airline booking apps for travel agents, custom CRMs, internal LoB apps, check-in kiosks, vending machines, etc. with the tell-tale VB UI, especially the typical VB error dialog after a crash!
I messed around with several other UI toolkits of that era -- AWT, Swing, Qt, Flex/ActionScript -- and none was as productive as VB for simple apps. It was just the right amount of simplicity and development velocity for the myriad simple use-cases that were perfectly happy with rigid layouts.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
LPs. Your LPs want to hear about how you are using their capital for A.I. If A.I fails 2 years down the line you will get to hide out in the crowd. Contrarianism in an institutional setting is actually very hard to do.
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.
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.
> 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
The comparison is from a business perspective, and I absolutely stand by the comparison with the early generation of Internet companies with the early generation of AI companies.
Anyhow, the general public doesn't matter. It's capital (private and public) along with business cycles that create markets, and most of the public doesn't have the knowledge or the capital to make a difference.
It's capital that can force markets to exist but without the public to consume it's just wasted capital if value doesn't materialise.
The crux of the whole AI boom is exactly how much value it can materialise given the capital expenditure being absurdly astronomical, if it doesn't become the next trillion+ US$ market it will be a huge misallocation of capital.
The AI/ML products that are FCF positive and seeing significant traction are those that are complementing workflows in some shape or form by reducing
AI is now a loose used term that is encompassing 3 loosely connected markets that have now fallen under the same umbrella:
1. Construction/Land Speculation: a large portion of the AI story you hear about is a DC construction story
2. Hardware: a large portion of the AI story is just a rebranding around GPU fab and design, especially due to issues around subsidy disbursement under the CHIPS act
3. SaaS/Applications: a lot of products being derisively called as "LLM wrappers" are not cool from a technical perspective, but from an RoI perspective are good enough - $30k for data entry automation that is 80% right is cheaper than hiring a data entry team of 4 who cost $60k each.
Much of the bubble is due to 1, but 2 and 3 are somewhat insulated because of FCF and adjacent markets and narratives to pivot to (eg. For 2 it was "Chip Wars" 2-3 years ago and before that it was "ML" for 1-2 years and before that it was "Precision Medicine"...)
> without the public to consume...
The AI story really isn't a B2C story no matter how much people try to shoehorn it. The Cs are perpetually broke and margins are shit. The value that arises from automation like AI is around workflow and workforce augmentation in some shape or form, which makes it a B2B play.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Small customers do weird things. I had a tiny Saas company and we had approached a local business with a few locations. Our software was in daycare management and would have automated a bunch of their processes. The owner loved the product but didn't want to "rent" our software (ie. pay a monthly fee). She wanted to pay us once and install the software on her computers. Literally if we had said "here's a CD-ROM to install" she would have paid us money. This isn't an example of a customer that might vibe code their solution, but simply to show that customers do weird things and have weird requests.
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!
> 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.
> ...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.
> 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?
I bet all are Y Combinator companies.
Which makes it even more damning. Vibe coding platforms are software solutions themselves, which means they are subject to the same logic.
> 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?
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?
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."
Considering how much money they invested in countless AI VS Code forks and other vibe coding platforms, he needs to hype up the market.
Obviously not? Accounting software has to work or the IRS (or your local equivalent) will come after you. Zoho "just works".
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.
It's 'Garry' and besides that guy gets too much airtime already.
It's the first I've ever heard of him. Still have no idea who he is, but yes, still to much airtime.
CEO of the investment firm that owns this site
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.
I feel like I've seen his name a few times but I don't know much about him at all but I can tell you from that 1 tweet he has no clue what he is talking about.
Bozo bit flipped.
I don't use Zoho but I've played with it before, the thought that you can vibe code up something like that (which is reliable) is laughable.
From the title I thought they were saying that /using/ vibe coding at Zoho would lead to them going out of business (something much more plausible).
He runs Y combinator. This is his site!
Amazing how someone so clueless can be in a such an influential position.
He is not clueless. He is just pushing a batshit crazy narrative because they are invested in tons of vibe coding startups.
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.
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.
This.
If I think about who's "site" HN is then PG or Dang are front of mind. I know Dang is /just/ a mod but he is who is visible. I've never once cared who actually ran YC, I didn't care when Sam Altman ran it and I don't care about Gary Tan either, they are 100% immaterial to the discussions that happen on this site IMHO.
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).
So what? PG made this, Sam Altman futzed around with it, Geoff was ok (looking from a distance, obviously) and Tan is at best a caretaker. Note Tan is ex Palantir and as such good buddies with Thiel and a lot of other despicables. That they're wealthy is no reason to look up to them.
And I'm here to clown on him and his kind.
Aha.
Explains a lot.
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.
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.
> 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?
This is the guy that said NFTs were the next "big thing"?
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.
> 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.
Vibe coding can only affect companies that depend on slow-coding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One doesn't even need to vibe code. Zoho type apps e.g. mail/smtp already exist there are ton's of free open source options. You can one-click deploy them on AWS/Azure already. To be clear I understand reducing friction is also a 'feature' that users would be willing to pay for.
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.
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.
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/ 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.
I use Claude Code on a daily basis, I've never got anything for "free" from it. So yeah, there is still a lot of coding involved, maybe just less typing.
Where am I going to host my mail server? And handle the backups?
Surely AWS's overpriced lockin stuff will be "vide coded" away far faster than smaller companies
I mean, Gary Tan says a lot of stupid stuff; I wouldn't take it as any particular signal one way or another.
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.
"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
"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
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448
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.
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.
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.
They solved the money laundering problem pretty well!
No no, NFTs were ridiculously stupid, that's why it was so controversial, that's why there was so much backlash. Tan having been bullish on NFTs is a very good indicator that he isn't hyping $TRENDING_THING based on technological merit
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.
> 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.
That's a good point. I've had the same: I lost a bet on HN for a hundred bucks that Facebook would never break a billion in revenues. I - mistakenly - thought people would not be so stupid as to hand over their private lives to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. But they did.
NFTs are just as stupid, if not more so and this time at least it looks like sanity prevailed. But the problem is more complex than just boolean 'made' or 'fail', and I think that's where the investment angle comes in. Investors bet on 'the next wave' all the time. And NFTs looked to the clueless as much as 'the next wave' as mobile phones or the transistor did at some point in time. The big differentiator to me is whether or not a thing like that requires a belief system or not. If it does then I don't give it much chance. But then we have all of crypto as a counterexample and quite a few people got stupidly rich peddling that.
NFTs followed the exact same path as crypto, which many predicted would happen. Crypto became a speculative asset traded on exchanges because it was too volatile and transaction-cost heavy to ever be used as a medium of exchange. NFTs being crypto-based were soon descended upon by finance bros and scammers who saw the opportunity for a quick buck, eliminating any possibility to develop it for utilitarian things like house deeds and concert tickets or whatever.
Yes. Blockchains in general, then 'metaverse', then NFTs, now AI. The hype-ier bits of the tech industry always need _something_ to be over-excited about.
(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.
NFT was never a good idea. Popularity of NFT was top down, not bottom up.
Why are we pretending like his comments about any of these things are as a neutral observer instead of as an investor cheerleading his investments? Why should anyone take Gary Tan seriously as a futurist?
Well, that's a good question but the answer isn't going to be to anybody's liking. Because he's got money. People equate having money with wisdom rather than with intelligence and intelligence is dual use, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad just as easily. It may lead to wisdom but that's fairly rare. Most of the time it just leads to money.
So people will follow those with money (or that they perceive to have money) without much critical thought about where that is going to lead them, they're hoping for wisdom but may end up being misled. That's why all of these ultra wealthy folk turned on a dime when the political weather changed, they don't really have principles, they just want more zeros.
> Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
This is true for some technologies but not for NFTs.
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.
> 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.
I think that's the point they were making.
The point I was making was VB was never considered a tool "for hackers to be much more productive," only a tool "for less technical people to create software."
I knew some hackers who used it back in the day. They were the types who were good with computers and could write shell scripts, but they were not professional programmers. They knew how to do what they needed done. The people I know today who are into vibe coding kind of fit that same mold. They want something done and they do it themselves, but they aren't necessarily good at coding or enjoy doing it.
Ehh, I dunno, it was really, really popular back then. I would bet that a non-trivial number of apps were built using VB by actual software engineers. Couldn't find concrete numbers but this article claims at its peak, 2/3rds of all business apps on Windows PCs were in VB: https://retool.com/visual-basic
I recall seeing inventory management systems, airline booking apps for travel agents, custom CRMs, internal LoB apps, check-in kiosks, vending machines, etc. with the tell-tale VB UI, especially the typical VB error dialog after a crash!
I messed around with several other UI toolkits of that era -- AWT, Swing, Qt, Flex/ActionScript -- and none was as productive as VB for simple apps. It was just the right amount of simplicity and development velocity for the myriad simple use-cases that were perfectly happy with rigid layouts.
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…
That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.
>>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.
When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs
Whoopsie! I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved.
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...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)
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
[1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/
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.
>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?
LPs. Your LPs want to hear about how you are using their capital for A.I. If A.I fails 2 years down the line you will get to hide out in the crowd. Contrarianism in an institutional setting is actually very hard to do.
> 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.
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.
> 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
The comparison is from a business perspective, and I absolutely stand by the comparison with the early generation of Internet companies with the early generation of AI companies.
Anyhow, the general public doesn't matter. It's capital (private and public) along with business cycles that create markets, and most of the public doesn't have the knowledge or the capital to make a difference.
It's capital that can force markets to exist but without the public to consume it's just wasted capital if value doesn't materialise.
The crux of the whole AI boom is exactly how much value it can materialise given the capital expenditure being absurdly astronomical, if it doesn't become the next trillion+ US$ market it will be a huge misallocation of capital.
The AI/ML products that are FCF positive and seeing significant traction are those that are complementing workflows in some shape or form by reducing
AI is now a loose used term that is encompassing 3 loosely connected markets that have now fallen under the same umbrella:
1. Construction/Land Speculation: a large portion of the AI story you hear about is a DC construction story
2. Hardware: a large portion of the AI story is just a rebranding around GPU fab and design, especially due to issues around subsidy disbursement under the CHIPS act
3. SaaS/Applications: a lot of products being derisively called as "LLM wrappers" are not cool from a technical perspective, but from an RoI perspective are good enough - $30k for data entry automation that is 80% right is cheaper than hiring a data entry team of 4 who cost $60k each.
Much of the bubble is due to 1, but 2 and 3 are somewhat insulated because of FCF and adjacent markets and narratives to pivot to (eg. For 2 it was "Chip Wars" 2-3 years ago and before that it was "ML" for 1-2 years and before that it was "Precision Medicine"...)
> without the public to consume...
The AI story really isn't a B2C story no matter how much people try to shoehorn it. The Cs are perpetually broke and margins are shit. The value that arises from automation like AI is around workflow and workforce augmentation in some shape or form, which makes it a B2B play.
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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.