Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today, I'm pleased to welcome audience favorite Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, back for his fourth appearance on the podcast.
Andrew has always been extremely transparent and candid – his belief that "Speed is the only moat" has made him comfortable sharing intimate details of Tasklet's agent architecture, and as you'll hear, in the 6 months since we last spoke, Tasklet has indeed once again entirely re-written their stack.
Today, there's much more use of file system context and agentic search to leverage available information while conserving tokens, and a huge emphasis on summarization at several levels of resolution.
This time around, we also dig into the delicate strategic situation that Andrew and Tasklet face. While their product strategy of "always betting on the models" has proven correct and his choice of Claude has been rewarded, Andrew observes that these days "everyone is building the same thing", and today his most intense competition is actually coming from his critical supplier, Anthropic, which with Claude Max accounts, gives their direct customers an estimated 5 times as many tokens as Tasklet can purchase at the same price via the API.
In micro terms, the relatively high cost of tokens has caused Tasklet to stick with Opus 4.6 rather than moving to the new 4.7, and in macro terms, it's pushing Andrew and team to become a horizontal platform that's capable of harnessing – or, as Andrew describes it … outfitting with a mecha suit, frontier models from any provider.
This evolution, which I do think Andrew has played about as well as possible, is critical, because horizontal platforms are 1 of only 3 types of software company Andrew believes will survive the AI transition, the others being API-first companies like Stripe, and companies that develop solutions and sell outcomes – best exemplified, perhaps, by Fin's model of "99 cents per customer service ticket resolved."
We get into lots more besides, including Tasklet's instant apps feature, how they are thinking about deep personal and shared organizational context, the cloud container company Andrew endorses, Tasklet's token-to-labor cost ratio, and whether Zuckerberg has come calling after his Manus acquisition was cancelled by the Chinese government.
It's a fun one, with lots of valuable details, from somebody who's in the arena, competing to become one of the few general purpose AI agent platforms winners, and actually willing to tell us all about it.
Please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Tasklet.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz