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DS Dharmesh Shah Dharmesh Shah Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, and creator of Agent.ai, a network for AI agents, and WordPlay.com.

“Those are the ideas that make me nervous… if you can just append the word 'yet' to it and it still holds water, that's a problem. It's like, oh, ChatGPT can't do that yet. Does that ring true? If it sort of does, it's like, okay, well, that's a problem.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“Those are the ideas that make me nervous… if you can just append the word 'yet' to it and it still holds water, that's a problem. It's like, oh, ChatGPT can't do that yet. Does that ring true? If it sort of does, it's like, okay, well, that's a problem.” — Dharmesh Shah, a16z Podcast

Context

Asked what worries him about startups building where the AI labs are heading, Dharmesh Shah offers a simple test for whether a product is built on a gap the labs will soon close.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 21:07 into the episode
Dharmesh Shah

…joy for a developer. How fast can someone get to, oh, I got something working with the HubSpot APIs to the, oh, I made my first dollar, you know, working with the HubSpot within the HubSpot ecosystem. Whatever that is, can we compress that? Can we reduce the time to joy for that class of customer?

Joe Schmidt

…going after. And of course, there's many things inside of the HubSpot experience I think that those horizontal products are trying to pull in. And how you think about the area by which you want to defend and where you can kind of build the most durable value. So would love your commentary on that.

Dharmesh Shah

…the trillion dollar valuations and soon to be market caps. But there's so much opportunity outside of that. And so here's like a, I'm a framework kind of guy. Like here's a mistake I think entrepreneurs make on both sides of it. One, when they dismiss it, they say, oh, well, ChatGPT doesn't do this or Cloud Core doesn't do that. Well, we're going to do this. We're going to fill this gap. And those are the ideas that make me nervous, right? Because there's two things sort of, I think, misguided about that thinking. One is if you can just append the word yet to it and it still holds water, that's a problem. It's like, oh, ChatGPT can't do that yet. Does that ring true? If it sort of does, it's like, okay, well, that's a problem. That's thing number one. Thing number two is what I think of as measuring the product versus the…

Joe Schmidt

totally. And I think that the other piece of this, which you kind of touch on, it's like, okay, of course, with enough focus, but it's also just that the advances or the advantages you're going to build as a startup or as a HubSpot or whoever it is, if you're not building a foundation model, you're…

Dharmesh Shah

it's compounding loops all the way down, Joe. Of course. That's the entire name of the game before AI, after AI. But a couple of things I'll say. So I'm going to rewind. I pushed one idea on the stack. I'm going to pop it off and talk through it. Is that so? One of the questions we get back on the…

Joe Schmidt

said we're dating the recording for the audience. So you now know timestamped.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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