a16z GP on Lenny's podcast: the 'permanent underclass' is Silicon Valley's dark fantasy
lennysan · x · 2026-09-07
a16z GP illscience joins Lenny Rachitsky to argue that the 'permanent underclass' narrative is a dark fantasy: radiologist demand keeps rising after 20 years of 'being cooked', open engineering roles hit all-time highs, and every AI layer has 20 strong competitors unlike mobile's winner-take-all era. They cover what's working in consumer (coding agents, personal agents like Town/Instinct/Grok Bots/ChatGPT Work), education and healthcare getting cheap, companies becoming loops, moats being discovered not designed, and coding becoming more like reading than writing.
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