Garry Tan claims Zoho will be out of business due to vibe coding

https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1995664097007091818

by manojlds • 8 months ago

53 89 8 months ago

"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

alephnerd5• 8 months ago

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/

noobermin• 8 months ago

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.

nextaccountic• 8 months ago

When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs

jmathai2• 8 months ago

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.

nyc_data_geek1• 8 months ago

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.

almostdeadguy2• 8 months ago

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?

4er_transform• 8 months ago

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.

_bent• 8 months ago

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

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

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.

mvdtnz• 8 months ago

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.

jinushaun• 8 months ago

NFT was never a good idea. Popularity of NFT was top down, not bottom up.

jm42• 8 months ago

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.

sixtyj• 8 months ago

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…

palmotea2• 8 months ago

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.

BloondAndDoom2• 8 months ago

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.

music4airports• 8 months ago

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)

tomhow• 8 months ago

Moderators didn't touch (or see) this until later, and the only way we intervened was to turn off the flags and flamewar penalties. HN users flagged it and the flamewar (or signal vs noise) detector pulled it well off the front page before moderators knew anything about it.

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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978

joshstrange3• 8 months ago

[flagged]

jonners00• 8 months ago

He runs Y combinator. This is his site!

joshstrange3• 8 months ago

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).

itg• 8 months ago

[flagged]

giancarlostoro• 8 months ago

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.

SanjayMehta• 8 months ago

Aha.

Explains a lot.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

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.

giarc2• 8 months ago

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.

fakedang2• 8 months ago

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.

gboss• 8 months ago

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!

giarc2• 8 months ago

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.

hombre_fatal2• 8 months ago

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.

delaminator2• 8 months ago

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.

hombre_fatal2• 8 months ago

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.

iso16312• 8 months ago

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

bamboozled• 8 months ago

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.

encyclopedism• 8 months ago

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.

mns• 8 months ago

Considering how much money they invested in countless AI VS Code forks and other vibe coding platforms, he needs to hype up the market.

yoavm• 8 months ago

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.

iso16312• 8 months ago

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.

sd9• 8 months ago

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.

kamaal2• 8 months ago

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.

BloondAndDoom2• 8 months ago

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.

francisofascii• 8 months ago

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.

antiloper• 8 months ago

Obviously not? Accounting software has to work or the IRS (or your local equivalent) will come after you. Zoho "just works".

andsoitis3• 8 months ago

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?

mlboss2• 8 months ago

I bet all are Y Combinator companies.

andsoitis3• 8 months ago

Which makes it even more damning. Vibe coding platforms are software solutions themselves, which means they are subject to the same logic.

zkmon• 8 months ago

Vibe coding can only affect companies that depend on slow-coding.

villosil• 8 months ago

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.

jacquesm4• 8 months ago

It's 'Garry' and besides that guy gets too much airtime already.

mrweasel• 8 months ago

It's the first I've ever heard of him. Still have no idea who he is, but yes, still to much airtime.

Macha• 8 months ago

CEO of the investment firm that owns this site

ne8il• 8 months ago

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."

mlboss2• 8 months ago

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.

alephnerd5• 8 months ago

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.

bgwalter2• 8 months ago

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.

ZiiS• 8 months ago

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.

jmathai2• 8 months ago

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.

kklisura• 8 months ago

...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.

alberth• 8 months ago

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.

HardwareLust• 8 months ago

This is the guy that said NFTs were the next "big thing"?

andsoitis3• 8 months ago

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?

ks2048• 8 months ago

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?

almostdeadguy2• 8 months ago

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.

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

I mean, Gary Tan says a lot of stupid stuff; I wouldn't take it as any particular signal one way or another.

tetrisgm• 8 months ago

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.

dzonga• 8 months ago

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.

sometimes_all• 8 months ago

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?

Garry Tan claims Zoho will be out of business due to vibe coding

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