“I think the notion of robots will buy our Friday night outfits is misguided. We want to know what we look like long before the robot delivers it to your door.” Max Levchin · a16z Podcast
Startups & Venture · September 2026
Levchin had just drawn a line between agentic payments, which he is bullish on, and agentic shopping, which he is not. His example is his own habit of spending too long comparing two nearly identical bike parts, because he wants to participate in the choice. It is a live disagreement rather than a settled one: minutes later Alex Rampell argues the opposite for cases where you already know the exact SKU you want.
Transcript
I'm probably less optimistic about agentic shopping. And I'm very trusty about agentic payments.
Yeah.
I think the notion of robots will buy our Friday night outfits is misguided. We want to know what we look like long before the robot delivers it to your door. But I think the friction, this notion of sort of the best user interface ever created is the credit card. This may actually be finally up for renegotiation because agents are, in fact, smarter than pieces of plastic and even pieces of plastic with rewritable chips. And so I think that's a lot of conversation around Agentic Commerce is probably looking 20 degrees off where, you know, how can I convince you to just trust a robot to buy the right thing? Like, I don't want to. Like, I love buying bike parts and I spend way too much time looking at two slightly different bike parts because I just, you know, have to participate in the purchase. But the parts where like, okay, that one, the end. Right now, that one is the beginning where you pull out your wallet. And so I think we're about to see some interesting innovation in payments user interface.
So can I ask a question on that? So I mostly agree, but I think it depends on there's like the, I need to research what to buy, where AI is just yet another tool at your disposal. Like you ask your friends, that's one. It's a bike part. I'm asking you. I'm also asking AI. I'm asking both of you. But now I have the SKU that I want. And I don't actually care which one of the 19 different places that I get it from. And I kind of think about the world, like you have people that care more about money than time. You have people that care more about time than money. The way that I kind of think about Agentic Commerce, yeah, none of this is happening right now. So it's trying to prognosticate what's going to happen is here is the UPC, here's the SKU that I actually want. Go buy it for me at the lowest cost. It's kind of the thing that people that have a lot more time than money do right now anyway. And like, that's why I always point to Camel Camel Camel as like my favorite example of this, because it's one of the top 100 websites in America that probably nobody with over $100,000 a year of income has ever heard of. But it's a way of saying, I know what I want. You're not helping. The robot's not telling me what bike part to buy, telling me what soda to buy. I know. Just give it to me at the lowest price, but it takes way too much time. And sometimes you can just observe one group of humans that already have something as table steaks and then porting that to another group of humans. I guess, do you think that that form of agentic commerce because it's actually related to agentic payments as well?
I
have nine different cards. I don't remember the Amazon Chase issued by Chase card terms for a non-restaurant purchase of something under $500. And if I've used my whatever, like it's the same thing. Like people that care more about money than time, they will figure that out. People that care more about time than money, they probably won't.
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