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Automating Developer Email with MCP and Al Agents
00:44:39
a16z's Yoko Li and Resend's Zeno Rocha discuss how generative AI — powered by agents and, now, MCP — is reshaping the email experience for developers, as well as the overall world of programming.
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- [00:00]
Zen Orocha
When you go to all these different apps, you go to Supabase, the majority of databases you see there were built by humans. You go to Resend, the emails were sent by humans or drafted by humans and then sent programmatically. I think we're going to see a big shift in terms of who is the actor, who is the creator, and I believe it's going to be the majority of the actions will be taken by agents instead of humans. And that's just the reality we're going to live in. So, so we have to rethink the way we're building product to support that reality.
- [00:31]
Derek
Thanks for listening to the A16Z AI podcast. I'm Derek and if you listened to the episode we published yesterday with a 16Z's Joe Schmidt and 11X's Prabhav Jain, I hope you appreciate the double dose of us this week. This one, featuring a 16Z partner Yoko Lee and Resend founder and CEO Zen Orocha, is particularly fun and particularly timely. They also dive into the topic of AI agents, although with a much more developer centric lens, hitting on the growing importance of building for agent experience, the rise of MCP as a connective tissue between AI models and products, and how the generative AI prosumer experience will translate into better designed and more quickly built email templates for everyone. And Zeno shares his harrowing story of hospitalization and laptop theft that resulted in the creation of the popular Dracula theme for code editing tools. It's a great discussion that you'll hear after these disclosures. As a reminder, please note that the content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed to any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com disclosures.
- [01:41]
Yoko Lee
Recently we've been seeing a lot of agent centric applications and then developers kind of utilizing LLMs to build net new experiences. And then what's interesting is that a lot of the developers I met they were like, well nowadays not only do I need to build services for humans, where DX is top of mind, they now need to build experiences for agents. You know, ask a founder in this space who's been building, you know, developer experience for, you know, all spectrum, all across the spectrum. What's your high level thoughts here? What have you seen?
- [02:16]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, I've been obsessed with developer experience, you know, for the past 10 years and now you can see that there's a Shift. And there's a new obsession for me when it comes to agent experience. You know, as a product, as a SaaS provider ourselves, we are thinking about how we can make the product easier for agents to consume. So even like small things like adding recaptcha on the signup to prevent bots, now you have to think, do you really want to prevent bots from signing up? Maybe you don't, right?
- [02:49]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [02:50]
Zen Orocha
And same as an infrastructure provider. So Resend is an email API for developers. It helps people send transaction and marketing emails. So I'm also thinking a lot about, okay, how can we make the experience of these agents sending emails the easiest as possible. So there's a lot to uncover on each spectrum of product when it comes to making it more agent friendly. But it's fascinating. We're all trying to figure out right.
- [03:17]
Yoko Lee
Now, agent experience is such an interesting term because like when I hear the term agent experience, I wonder is this a developer experience but for agents or is this a developer experience that's better for the end human developers to build agents? Or perhaps it's somewhere in the middle. How would you define the term?
- [03:35]
Zen Orocha
I think about developer experience as the sum of all the little details and that's what makes either great developer experience or a bad developer experience, right? So for agents, I believe it's the same. You know, you're trying to build a world where agents are the first class citizens. And when you put that in perspective, then you have to rethink a lot of the different things you do. So as an example, in our industry, you go to SendGrid, you go to Postmark, to Mailgun, you sign up for these services and the first thing you get is a manual verification process that takes two days for you to get approval of your account. Right. In an agent first world, that's simply not possible. An agent will never wait two days to take an action. So recent from day one was all about removing friction, right? So you sign up, you can send an email in the first minute. When we built that, it was all because we thought this is a better product experience overall for users. Turns out this is a huge unlock for agents. So I think it arguments dx. It's not a replacement or anything like that. It's more everything you already do. For example docs, right? The more you invest in docs and knowledge base, the more quality of the LLMs you're going to have in terms of the output there. So the things you do for one already help you for another.
- [05:03]
Yoko Lee
It's so interesting, especially that email is like a service every human developer needs, either personally or as part of what they're building. Because once someone signs up, you want to send them a welcome email, so on and so forth. So when I think about agents, what do agents need in the world of email? Do you think of agents as users of the email? In the future, every agent will have their own email address and they'll process the email forwarder to humans and. Or do you think agents will also kind of require a different level of abstraction when it comes to leveraging the service in a programmatic way?
- [05:40]
Zen Orocha
Using the analogy of autonomous cars. Right. Waymo, they couldn't build new roads. They had to figure out a way to use the existing roads to make sure their product would work. So I think the same for this. We already have APIs, we already have these established SDKs and protocols, so we're going to have to figure out a way to leverage those instead of creating everything from scratch. But I do believe there are fundamental differences and limitations as well. Right. So there's a reason why LLMs txt exists as a format because it's so much easier for LLMs to consume just plain text versus all the different HTML and react code together with docs. Right. All you want is the content same on the email world. Like whenever you're sending an email, you only have two formats you can send. You have HTML and you have plain text as well. And the plain text is like the old school format that, you know, people don't really care as much today.
- [06:43]
Yoko Lee
Right.
- [06:44]
Zen Orocha
Turns out in today's world, that's actually better than the HTML version because it's easier to parse, you're using less tokens, it's cheaper. So I do think there's a fundamental difference. And even the way you think about API keys and permissioning, is it a user or it's a service account? I think there's a lot of challenges in, but you have to figure out a way to leverage the existing product surface.
- [07:10]
Yoko Lee
The LLMs txt is such an interesting example because the fact that it exists is because LLMs just do better with this kind of information and that as a human, if I want to copy paste entirety of a site, I wouldn't, you know, write a scraper to go copy it. It's very hard. I'll go to LLMs txt and copy paste it and put it in my chatgpt. I guess in the case of email, because historically people have been sending a lot of like very pretty marketing emails to humans and humans react to that because we're very visual animals. How would it change now if we're sending emails to agents?
- [07:45]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, content remains the king. I guess the difference now is that we're going to be living in a world where agents are talking to other agents and these agents are sending emails, but also receiving and parsing and sending to another inbox that is also powered by agents. That's parsing, taking action and sending. So the more content focused these emails are, the less markup the fact that if they have a plain text version of it, I think this is more important than ever.
- [08:18]
Yoko Lee
Yeah, that is so interesting. I've been thinking about generating applications, generating even like a CLI tool. I'm a huge fan of cursor, so I use it every single day. I at the same time I keep wondering what does it look like if I can incorporate other long tail toolings I already used as a consumer or to generate other interesting experiences. What's your view here in when it comes to like forsumers or consumers generating like net new contents using AI?
- [08:47]
Zen Orocha
I think my view changed drastically two months ago when I was answering users who were signing up to recent and I always ask them like oh, like where'd you come from? What are you doing? And this one day people are just saying oh, I came from Lovable, I came from Bolt, I came from V0. ChatGPT recommended you, Claude recommended you. So I saw that happening like more and more every single day and it was just so clear that you know, there's a new world happening in front of us. And these prosumer apps, those, those text to apps applications, they're very interesting because they focus on the this one vertical. They help this type of user build this type of website for example. I think we're going to see that across the board for every single industry there's going to be one of those. The output might be a little bit different, but you're always going to need something that is tailored to that industry. So when I think about these apps, you almost see the same ui. You have chat on the left, the preview on the right. But what really matters is what's the thing on the top right corner like that button, the, the call to action. And for bolt lovable, v0, it's publishing, it's going live with the website. That's the aha moment. It's not generating the code or building the to do app, it's actually putting it live. And I think you know there's going to be apps for each one and that's the main part of each one.
- [10:15]
Yoko Lee
What'S a new call to action? If we think about the email world, I guess like when I think about email, I'll think about I'm either on the receiving end or on the sending end. On the sending end, if I'm a non technical user, I want to make sure that things are, you know, structured correctly, sent to the right, you know, set of people and I want to make sure they open the email. If I'm on receiving end, I want to make sure that I get the information I want quickly or this is a joy to read, I guess in the AI world, how would you think about it? Does it change? Is it like the same set of abstractions? We're kind of playing with just how that makes it more efficient.
- [10:51]
Zen Orocha
The challenge is always like sending the right message to the right person at the right time. So customization is more important than ever. You see all these AI SDR tools and you know, it's great that we're seeing a revolution there, but just customizing based on your last LinkedIn message, it's not going to be enough. When you're sending email, you have all these different challenges around rendering. So for an email to render the same on Outlook and Gmail and Yahoo Mail, you still have a lot of challenges. So that's one part that needs to be figured out. And then the other part on the receiving end is, yeah, do I really care about this? And if I do, is this email on the primary inbox and on this PAM folder?
- [11:38]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [11:38]
Zen Orocha
Right?
- [11:38]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [11:39]
Zen Orocha
So there's a lot of challenges on both sides.
- [11:42]
Yoko Lee
Yeah. And then there are so many interesting experiences one can build with email, whether it's from a developer or a consumer. So as an example, like my husband and I, we built this app that sends emails to us and texts us when our cat jumps on the kitchen counter. And then it was like a lot of it was not much code to be written, but it's just a lot of joy to build because everyone needs to be notified of something. And I guess like in this example, from all the text to app kind of side of applications, what kind of fun experiences can you imagine that we can better empower consumers and consumers to do that's better incorporated with emails? What would they be able to do that they may have discovered or what can they do that they haven't discovered?
- [12:30]
Zen Orocha
So in our case, we started this open source project called React Email two years ago. And that project, the whole vision around it was, you know what, we need to figure out a way to modernize the way emails are built. So it was all about like, how can we bring typescript and tailwind and all these modern technologies react. Let's bring all that together to, you know, this industry that feels like it's not moving forward or not innovating as much. So we did that and it was great. A lot of people using that every single day. But now that we have LLMs, there's a new unlock. So this process that used to take days now takes hours or minutes. But with LLMs, it can take seconds. Right. And it can enable not only developers that needed how to code, but these folks that can be just like, I'm a marketer, I'm a designer, I'm a product manager, and I need to send an email, so how can I do that? So we built this thing called New Email that really helps, like you go from zero from like an idea to an email template in seconds. Right. I just see that happening across the board. So whatever the the industry is, I think they will have a variation of.
- [13:46]
Yoko Lee
That in a way that's so interesting. In a way. Like what would be a great way for say, if I'm a marketer or designer, I want to send an email. What's the best way to leverage the existing tools like New email or others to kind of send high quality emails?
- [14:01]
Zen Orocha
I remember this conversation I had with a friend of mine. This is a designer that works at Uber and he was telling me how for the past two weeks he didn't open figma, he was just building all these prototypes using cursor, using V0, using these tools that are now available for folks. And for me, that's incredible. That's so amazing because, because it redefines what a developer is. I think that's exactly the same for email. Before you needed to maybe hire an agency and you would build this beautiful email template and then you hand off the Figma file to them and then a week later they come with this super ugly markup. The email looks good, but you know, behind the scenes, like they had to do a lot of magic to make it happen. We can give that to LLMs now and empower the actual creator, the person who's thinking about the copy, thinking about the angle. Because as a builder yourself, you know that when we're building things like the first version, it's not always the best, it's just the beginning. So you see that thing working and you're like, okay, now that's working. What else can I do? And that back and forth, you know, between agencies and non technical Users, you know, it just, it's just like wasted time that it could be just focus on that creative person that's just keep iterating on that until they have something they like and then they can just.
- [15:30]
Yoko Lee
You know, I love that. It really shortens the creative, creative loop. It just reminds me that, you know, back in the days, obviously, like for oil painting, people like to throw some paint on the canvas before they get started because a blank canvas is super scary.
- [15:45]
Zen Orocha
Yeah.
- [15:45]
Yoko Lee
I don't know what to draw. Yeah. So a lot of painters, what they will actually do is to throw gray colored paint on the canvas and then I will use like a little bit of cloth to spread it. And then they were like, okay, now there's a bit of color. I'm like less scared to actually make an action. This actually feels a lot about that. Yeah, yeah.
- [16:04]
Zen Orocha
You know, it's funny. Yes. This is something that happened yesterday. So we gave this product, the new email product to, to a couple of friends and then one friend was like, you know what? I'm trying to build something very creative, you know, but it takes me like a couple of prompts until I get something that feels different. Like the beginning is always. It feels the same. Like this tool is always generating the same kind of emails.
- [16:29]
Yoko Lee
Right.
- [16:29]
Zen Orocha
And that's because on the system prompt we told, you know, the LLM to build Apple like emails with curved borders and black and white vibes versus, you know, go crazy. And we thought we were doing a favor to include that because then the first version is good, but that also it's a constraint on the creative person that's trying to build something way more creative, you know, so it's fascinating. Yes. You need the first version to be there and then you keep iterating. But if it takes too long for you to iterate, that's also not good. Right. There's a balance there that's so interesting.
- [17:10]
Yoko Lee
It really reminds me of in the image generation world, there are different loras. Train a lora on specific style, say impressionism, and then the end user can select any one of these loras and then create first generation of a image that's like these kind of styles they predefined and then they can iterate from there. And then the rest of it is just the editing process. You know, need to have a lasso tool somewhere. There's AI versions of all of these now. Right. And then the question is like, how can you morph that into something you like, kind of like a sculpture. So yeah, this is so interesting. Email templates as very artistic expression. Because before it was so hard for people to do this themselves. Last time I looked at email templates it was all vanilla HTML. And I just remember thinking, this can't be because this is 2025 now. Remember when I first got into the industry, it was like that. It just hasn't evolved much. So it's been really great that you guys are, you know, creating a new experience, a different level of abstraction too, for a new audience.
- [18:11]
Zen Orocha
Yeah. You think about how much the web evolved as a platform and it's, you know, the problems that we used to have 10, 12 years ago around browsers rendering different websites, you know, that's gone like Ajax, you know ajax and like IE6 would render different than Opera and Firefox. That's solved. But with email it's still a big pain. Outlook still doesn't render the same as superhuman as notion mail. Like you have new email clients, you know, being created right now.
- [18:44]
Yoko Lee
Right.
- [18:45]
Zen Orocha
So it's still an open problem. Like people are still trying to figure this out.
- [18:50]
Yoko Lee
Yeah. Speaking of generating things, do you see the generation experience as a agentic workflow? How do you view that? Do you think you're building an agent?
- [19:01]
Zen Orocha
In many ways I think yes. And then in other ways I'm like, is this really an agent?
- [19:06]
Yoko Lee
What's your definition of agent?
- [19:08]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, I think it's a. Yeah. And I don't know if it's the right one.
- [19:12]
Yoko Lee
There's no right definition. No one knows exactly.
- [19:17]
Zen Orocha
But I think it's just like a set of tools that are being executed and they're trying to accomplish a specific, specific task. Right. So it might take a few steps to get to that final result, but it's still like very focused on doing one thing. So I think like in the case of new email, for example, we have one agent to build the email template and then there's another one to actually send it or schedule it. So you can have like multiple agents running at the same time.
- [19:46]
Yoko Lee
Right.
- [19:46]
Zen Orocha
But they are still very focused on doing one task. Just, you know, in a company you would have one person that does marketing, one person that does design and you're like assigning tasks to these people. What is your definition?
- [20:01]
Yoko Lee
So my definition of agent is kind of like very similar to yours. I think of it as a multi step LLM execution process. It's almost like a process in the systems level. The difference is that you have LLM in the middle to make the decisions and then the rest of it is very much technical detail on the one spectrum. You can have a one step generation process. You could call it an agent because that's what co pilots are. On the other spectrum you could call AGI an agent. That's like agent that reads and writes everything for you. Maybe manage your bank account one day and email and auth and so on and so forth. So for me, I've been just, you know, as a fellow developer kind of developing this space. There are so many different ways to build agents. You know, if you're a platform you're thinking about, how can I make it easy for agents to visit us? How can I make it easy for other people to build tools around it? And then if you're like a developer trying out certain tools to kind of work with one of the platforms, the question becomes like, how do I easily integrate the long tails? I don't want to rewrite all the API calls all over again, I guess. What's your view, what's your advice to developers who want to start building agents like yourself? Is there a standard today? Like how do you think about this?
- [21:17]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, I think the emerging standard is definitely mcp. There's still like the question of is MCP going to be adopted by other AI models? And if that's the case, that will be an even bigger unlock than it already is. You know, MCP is on fire now. Everybody's talking about it. Imagine if OpenAI adopts that, then it's over. You know, like that will be the de facto protocol. But there's a lot still to be explored in terms of the different interfaces. So as a API provider myself, like I want to make sure we have an MCP for recent. So other agents can use that and send emails, they can look at their contact lists and take action, add people to the contact list, remove, you know, see the performance of the emails they're sending and based on that they can then decide, oh, this email is being clicked more than this other one. So let me optimize for that. So there's definitely things to explore around that. But it's an ever evolving ecosystem, right? There's no right answer yet. Yeah, and you see some, like some people trying to build galleries of MCP servers and trying to create the marketplace for mcp. Yep. That's also interesting. Like the same way that when APIs came out, people were like rapid API. They were like, oh, let's build a marketplace of APIs. I think it's good to a certain extent. At the end of the day I have a problem. I'm going to find whatever the solution is. So If I'm thinking about billing, I'm going to go to the Stripe API. If I think about email, go to the recent email API. But the MCP format, it's extremely interesting, but we have to see what are the other interfaces that this is going to expand to. Just cursor and cloud desktop is not enough. And that's what we have today. Right. And Windsurf like these other editors. But what else? And I think if we get to the consumer layer then it can be very interesting.
- [23:16]
Yoko Lee
Yeah. So there's obviously MCP servers. It's kind of a philosophical question now, are you an MCP server? Are you an MCP client? Because you can be, you don't have to pick.
- [23:27]
Zen Orocha
Right.
- [23:28]
Yoko Lee
What's your view on that? Do you think you'll build it's new email or recent? Both or one or.
- [23:35]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, yeah, I think we'll be both. I can definitely see a world where we are the MCP client where you can come in and say, you know what, get my the top 10 linear feature requests and then draft an email based on that and then send. So you have three different services running to execute that task or go to Notion. Like we are running all of our all hands meetings on resend now. So it's like one email that we all write.
- [24:06]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [24:06]
Zen Orocha
In a multiplayer approach. And then by the end of the call we just send the email. So it's just super fun.
- [24:12]
Yoko Lee
That's amazing.
- [24:14]
Zen Orocha
And yeah, like I see that kind of like workflow where I'm like, oh yeah, just go to Linear, grab the tickets we closed last week and then let's use that as a reporting mechanism or from Notion or from whatever. So yeah, I think we're going to be both.
- [24:29]
Yoko Lee
So most of the use cases I've actually seen MCP today, it's very local. First, because of the nature of how the MCP clients are implemented first SSE is kind of a pain to implement. So most of people kind of default to implement MCP as a command. So as a client, the client basically just execute that command locally and then that process can call into other third party APIs. What do you think is missing to make MCP more of an ecosystem? I mean obviously now it's an ecosystem, but what's missing from pushing it forward even more?
- [25:06]
Zen Orocha
I think it's adoption by the other models. I think that's the biggest one. There's so many different frontiers that MCP is getting to now that I love. For example, access to your file system, you know, to Apple APIs that are running on your desktop. I've just seen like the latest release from Raycast where you're building all these AI extensions and you're integrating all these different workflows that run on your desktop layer, not in the browser. As we keep like exploring that, I think that's fascinating because we keep going down, you know, these different abstraction layers and having more access to do more things. So go to Apple Notes, grab my notes and then do this other thing. I think that's fascinating and I hope that people continue to adopt.
- [25:53]
Yoko Lee
What's your prediction on the kind of MCP workflows that will take off? Obviously there's a very productivity focused like getting Notion notes, put it in the email, send an email or send emails from cursor. It's everyday like kind of workflow. Do you think there are runtime workflows? By that I mean like when a Surface is running and CP server will step in and do something. I actually haven't seen that happen in production but just curious what your thoughts are there.
- [26:24]
Zen Orocha
I think all of the system of records type of applications, they will be front and center at this, you know, new revolution because all of your issues are already on linear, all of your emails are already on Gmail, all of your notes are ready on Notion or Apple Notes. So they're going to be in a very good position to then, you know, based on that information do this other task.
- [26:49]
Yoko Lee
Interesting. So there's definitely a data gravity.
- [26:52]
Zen Orocha
I think so, yes.
- [26:54]
Yoko Lee
That's so interesting. Do you see most of the MCP related like clients or server run their own databases.
- [27:02]
Zen Orocha
Wow, that's a good one. Because you need to store state, right?
- [27:08]
Yoko Lee
Exactly.
- [27:09]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, yeah, I haven't thought about that but I think that would be a pretty interesting approach. I think when you look at even we're talking about this tax to apps applications, right? So you have lovable V0 and these apps they're using different databases. So for lovable in Bolt, Supabase for Rapplet and Create xyz, it's neon. And I think the race with those is going to be around who can reduce friction the most who can spin up a new postgres database faster. So I think in a world where MCP is at the front and center then yeah, like how can we have these databases? There's you know, they spin up so quickly we can save state and then maybe we'll need a new kind of database.
- [27:55]
Yoko Lee
Yeah, that is very true. Obviously I've been playing it's recent, it's always recommended by agents and LLMs because the distribution of the training data I guess is. There's just so much of that. Every time I ask ChatGPT, oh, I want to draft this email and it just gave me a react email template right away I'm like, how did you know this? Where did it come come from? When you think about more creative use cases developers can do either with agents, without agents, or some other LLM driven processes with recent what comes to mind?
- [28:27]
Zen Orocha
You know what, there's just a lot of systems that developers rely every single day like GitHub. You know they are storing their pull requests in one place, but they also have branches that are running locally on their machines that they haven't pushed to a remote system yet. The combination of desktop and web, I think that's beautiful. There's so many fascinating angles that you could do. I saw a demo last week where someone was using like a Raycast extension that was not powered by mcp but very similar in a way when you look at the implementation and it was integrated with Bob like an HR system. So it would go to this HR tool and you would only ask, oh yeah, who is celebrating a birthday this month. So based on those four people, let's draft a message that's unique about each one of them.
- [29:23]
Yoko Lee
Wow.
- [29:23]
Zen Orocha
Or look at the different interests from these people based on their Slack messages on top of, you know, this HR data.
- [29:32]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [29:33]
Zen Orocha
So you can go, you know, there's so many interesting use cases where you can just pipe data from one place to the other and then you can get something that's extremely tailored on the other end.
- [29:44]
Yoko Lee
I guess in the past few weeks to past couple of months, what is the craziest use case you have seen that developers or AI developers use recent for?
- [29:55]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, there's some really interesting AI generated newsletters that are being triggered for resend. I saw one last week where every single day they generate a new one and they send just the content is so interesting because you can fetch from so many different places. You get like the latest news from X and latest news from like different publications and then you put all together and then here you have newsletter that's tailored for you versus you know, this big pull that you're trying to almost please everyone and you ended up not pleasing like anyone. So there's something about that that I really love. There are people with thousands of domains in one recent account and they're spinning up new domains as new applications are built. So there's just very different.
- [30:44]
Yoko Lee
Spinning up new domains.
- [30:46]
Zen Orocha
Yeah.
- [30:46]
Yoko Lee
Can you do that on recent?
- [30:47]
Zen Orocha
You can no Programmatically, that's amazing.
- [30:52]
Yoko Lee
I think pre warming domains or getting new domains.
- [30:55]
Zen Orocha
Yeah. So for example, payload cms every time you sign up for one of their cloud product, so they have like this, it's like a WordPress alternative and you can just create a cloud version of it instead of deploying your own server. Every time they provision one of those, they provision a new domain powered by Resend. And then email sending is already done for you. Like all the configuration, all the SMTP setup, the domain is there, already verified. You don't have to add a dkim or split PDF record. It's all there. So from day one you have email sending capabilities, which is something that traditionally was very hard to do.
- [31:34]
Yoko Lee
I can't wait for the day when agents can have their own domain. Just thinking about how many agents side projects there will be that they don't utilize way more than humans.
- [31:43]
Zen Orocha
Maybe they will come up with like new project ideas and they'll be like, oh, let me see if the domain is free. Oh yeah, it is. Buy. And then totally.
- [31:54]
Yoko Lee
Yeah. As a human developer, this is just like something that I always love doing even though I don't use. I probably spent hundreds of dollars every year just paying for domains I don't use. The other day, a friend of mine, he sent me a text, he was like, did you know.li is a top level domain? I didn't know that. It happens to be my last name. And then Yoko is not a very common name. So I was able to, you know, get the domain right away. So now it redirects to my website or something.
- [32:23]
Zen Orocha
I tried to get the DOT no, which is the Norwegian plg. Yeah, I couldn't Z. No, I couldn't get. But I'm still trying.
- [32:33]
Yoko Lee
Was it because someone took it?
- [32:34]
Zen Orocha
Someone took it.
- [32:35]
Yoko Lee
I see, interesting. Well, we can write an agent to get domains.
- [32:38]
Zen Orocha
Yes. Just check every day if the domain is free and then let me know when it's. And then just buy. Yeah.
- [32:45]
Yoko Lee
Do you have advice for developers who are now navigating this whole AI landscape, who are building either app for the agents or app using the agents or just, you know, entering the AI domain? What would you tell them? Like they should focus on what matters the most nowadays.
- [33:03]
Zen Orocha
I think in my case it's interesting because I'm both a developer and a founder and I have like many different hats that I have to wear every single day. And for the past two years I've been ignoring AI to a certain extent. Like I knew the power. I was a user, power user. But I was never building with AI because we didn't have time. We had to like build the company. Right. So I had to like just one day stop and be like, okay, let me look into this thing. And I think it's around, like changing your tool set in a way. Like, okay, I'm used to VS code. I have to switch to cursor even for a little bit, you know, even if it hurts. In the beginning, like, I remember my extensions were not ready and I was like, I hate this cursor thing. Like, it broke my whole workflow. Now I can't live without it. Same with Raycast and the AI on the desktop level, you know, and same with so many other tools. So I think it starts from there just looking at your tool chain and thinking, how can I add AI enabled apps? And then the second part is just like trying to figure out the use case.
- [34:14]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [34:14]
Zen Orocha
So I remember a conversation I had with the Stripe team and they were building the MCP server and I asked them, like, how are you approaching it? Like, the Stripe API is so big, there's so many endpoints.
- [34:26]
Yoko Lee
Does the Stripe MCP server give agent.
- [34:29]
Zen Orocha
Access to their two accounts? Wow, that's very cool. You can create invoices, payment links, and with Stripe, there's a lot of different things. If you want to create an invoice, you need a customer object, you need a subscription object. So there's a lot of chaining that you have to do. And I remember them telling me, don't start via the API. Just grabbing your open API spec and generating an MCP server. No, start from the use case. What are people actually doing with your product? And then you build like, you don't need full coverage of your API, just the most important things. I think about that for as a traditional software engineer that have been doing this for the past 15 years now, trying to convert to an AI engineer in a way. Right. Like, yeah, I have to be building with those tools and I have to start from the use case. So what is something I can optimize or, you know, make my life a little bit easier? Like the app you built for yourself, you know, that's fascinating. Like, it's a real pain or like you're really curious about something. And that's always the best when you're really curious about something.
- [35:40]
Yoko Lee
I guess that led me to the other question, which I love asking founders. I know you probably don't have time to work on side projects, but if you did have time, what are the side projects you wanted to work on?
- [35:53]
Zen Orocha
Wow. I actually do have a lot of side projects. I love that I have a theme called Dracula that I built and I just like solving problems that I'm facing every day. So with that theme was like, you know what? I hated the fact that I had a theme on my code editor and a different theme on my browser and a different theme elsewhere. I wanted to reduce my cognitive load when I move from different tools. So let me just build one that works everywhere. The same for resend was just solving my own pain. So, yeah, today I just have a lot of different pains. For example, I don't like dealing with personal life things like going to the DMV and renewing my car registration or whatever, or dealing with insurance. I would love to automate all of those things.
- [36:47]
Yoko Lee
I can't wait for someone to build an agent for dmv.
- [36:52]
Zen Orocha
That'll be amazing. I will be a customer, like, day one. If you're watching this, please build it and let us know.
- [37:00]
Yoko Lee
But the Dracula theme is so cool. I remember when I first met you, I couldn't believe you are the person who made the Dracula theme. Like, when you open up the iTerm2, like, color theme and that's like one of the top themes you can add to. I know it probably will take the entire episode to talk about the theme too, because it has an incredible story. But, like, if you want to briefly talk about, like, how the theme came.
- [37:23]
Zen Orocha
To be and yeah, yeah, it's an insane story. Yeah. Dracula has now 9 million users. And it's a side project. Right. Recent is my main project. This is only a side project. And it started because I was traveling. I was. I was in Germany. I was in. Yeah, Germany. And I was traveling to Spain and I got sick in the plane. I was like, feeling so sick. I was like, oh, my gosh, what's happening? I was alone and I've never been to Spain before. So I'm like, okay. I was so. I was feeling so much pain to the point that I had to call the flight attendant. I was like, hey, I need help. So they landed in Madrid. They took me out of the plane in an ambulance. And I was like, okay, this is bad, right? They take me to the hospital and they're starting to give me, like, some medicine. I'm feeling great. I'm like, okay, I'm ready to leave this place. Thank you for the help, but I'm ready to go to the hotel or something. And they're like, no, you're not leaving. You gotta stay. Turns out I stayed there for Three weeks, it was like that bad. But in the first few days, I was already feeling a little bit better. So I asked my co workers in Madrid. I was like, hey, can you bring me my computer? Because it got stuck in the airplane or something. I just left in an ambulance, so my whole luggage was there. So they bring my computer and I'm like coding in the hospital. I'm like super happy. I have my computer there and then one day I leave the room just to get some water, and then someone comes in and steals my computer.
- [38:56]
Yoko Lee
No, in the hospital.
- [38:57]
Zen Orocha
In the hospital. So I came to my room, I was like, what's going on?
- [39:03]
Yoko Lee
Maybe they really want to program too.
- [39:07]
Zen Orocha
No, it was so bad. I felt it was like the worst day. And then, you know, the next day I called my co workers again. I tell them what happened and they're like, don't worry about it. We're bringing you a new computer. So they bring me a new computer. And as a developer, you do that thing with a new machine, you're like, start to configure all your hotkeys and shortcuts and themes. So that's what Dracula came about. I just wanted a theme that worked everywhere. So I built the first version in the hospital and then it just took off after that.
- [39:38]
Yoko Lee
Were there already other themes when you built Dracula? What's the most popular theme before Dracula?
- [39:44]
Zen Orocha
There was Monokai. There was another one that's like creamy color. I forgot the name now.
- [39:51]
Yoko Lee
Why did you name the theme Dracula?
- [39:52]
Zen Orocha
I don't know. Like, I completely blanked on that. I don't know.
- [39:58]
Yoko Lee
I was like, is it related to Germany? I don't remember if Dracula was, I.
- [40:01]
Zen Orocha
Think just because it was a dark theme. But it really helped me on my entrepreneurial journey because at some point I built a pro version and then I sold like $300,000 with a theme. It's just like six colors. So I would never imagine that you could sell colors online, you know, and people would buy. But that gave me the confidence to then be like, you know what, let me build my own company. If this works, maybe something else will.
- [40:28]
Yoko Lee
I love that because there are people who are selling email templates too out there.
- [40:33]
Zen Orocha
Yeah.
- [40:33]
Yoko Lee
And now what you're building is basically empowering a new type of audience to be able to build their own Dracula not for coming online, but for emails. And they can go sell it if it turns out to be very good looking and people want to adopt it because emails are hard to implement if it converts. Have you seen actually users of a Recent selling React email templates?
- [40:55]
Zen Orocha
Not yet, but there's a lot of libraries that are being built around that.
- [41:00]
Yoko Lee
Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, so I guess, last question. If you have a crystal ball and you can predict the future, what do you think the future of email and future of AI will look like?
- [41:12]
Zen Orocha
I believe today there's a lot of actions that we take as humans and that's the majority of the work. When you go to all these different apps, you go to Supabase. The most databases you see there were built by humans. You go to resend. The emails were sent by humans or drafted by humans and then sent programmatically. I think we're gonna see a big shift in terms of who is the actor, who is the creator. And I believe it's gonna be the majority of the actions will be taken by agents instead of humans. And that's just the reality we're gonna live in. So we have to rethink the way we're building products to support that reality.
- [41:52]
Yoko Lee
Do you want to add more on how to rethink how to build product? Yeah, because it's such a great point.
- [41:58]
Zen Orocha
Yeah. And to rethink these products, you really have to, you know, go down the whole journey of the user. It starts from the onboarding. You cannot have 10 steps or you cannot wait two days to get access to your account. You cannot, you know, wait for the account manager to schedule a call with you or to book a demo. From that point. You need to experience the aha moment as soon as possible. And the agent should be able to take action as soon as possible. And you have to rethink role based access control. You have to rethink permissioning and authentication for these agents. So every single layer of the product you have to rethink. Even the way you store the activities. You know, like every SaaS has this activity space there. They can record everything you did as a human.
- [42:52]
Yoko Lee
Yeah.
- [42:53]
Zen Orocha
Like actually recording what every agent is doing is more important than ever because if they screw up, which they will in the beginning, then you need to know what happened. If they take a destructive action, you need to know. So there's just a lot that will change in terms of how we build products. And we have to take that in consideration because here, humans are not going to be the only user anymore.
- [43:15]
Yoko Lee
That's powerful and amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming. This is a lot of fun.
- [43:19]
Zen Orocha
Yeah, thank you.
- [43:21]
Derek
And that's all for this episode. I told you it was fun and I don't think I misled you. If you enjoyed, please do remember to rate, review and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues and keep listening for more great discussions about the nexus of AI programming and more.
- [43:37]
Yoko Lee
SA.