78 - Dead On Arrival

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Tech Deciphered. We bring you the entrepreneur and investor views on big tech, VC and startup news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning and add inside knowledge and context. We also share our insights and experience with you with unique nuggets and lessons that we learned the hard way. No smoke and mirrors, no bs. Being nerds, we also discuss gadgets and pop culture news. Hi, I'm your co host Noon Gonsalfspieder, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, co founder and managing partner at Chameleon and Strive Capital.

Speaker B: And I am your co host Bertrand Schmidt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red river west, co founder of App Annie. We have both been in tech for almost 25 years. Nuno is based in Silicon Valley while I am based in the greater Seattle area, having previously worked and lived in Europe and Asia. With Tech Deciphered, discover how the best entrepreneurs pitch, how investors think and what are the deep trends underlying the tech industry. You can check the latest on our website decipheredshow.com you can also connect with us on Twitter Schmidt and gPedro.

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Speaker B: Welcome, um, to TechDeciphered Episode 78 Dead on Arrival Was it just hype or just wrong timing? In this episode we are going to discuss about two different types of businesses that as an investor, as an entrepreneur, you want to think carefully about and looking back, you want to understand better what happened. If we take Dead on Arrival, we're talking about businesses, technologies that maybe the tech worked fine but actually no one cared about it, no one wanted it. So it's really a mismatch in terms of what consumers want versus what you are trying to deliver. So it's a classic example of a solution finding for a problem. On the other hand, will it happen? But not like that. Not now. It's a type of businesses where we were too early. We try, we try to make it work, but actually the technology is simply not ready now, but it might become ready in the future. So as an entrepreneur, as an investor, obviously you want to make sure you are not in one of these two technologies, one of these two categories. But it's really a useful lesson to learn which situation you might be in because it will help you make better decision and pick better industries going forward. You know, what's your take on this tough analysis?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean in hindsight everything looks like oh, of Course this wasn't meant to work, et cetera, but here we're going to take a stab, as you mentioned, at things that are just wrong timing. So they might have failed miserably in the past, but they might work in the future. Sort of have this stick on the ground kind of approach to it, as we've had in previous episodes of defining exactly what we think falls into will happen, but just not like that versus the dead on arrival, which is a little bit more of a hardcore view on it. To your point, we want to really split between those two things because in some ways people are like, well, are we ever going to go and have different ways of interacting with, for example in terms of input and output, like with glasses or things like that that really scale to become pretty pervasive. And we probably would agree that yes, that will happen, maybe not in the way that we've anticipated until now, and certainly it's going to take longer than we've expected. So in some ways the will happen. Not like that is a little bit like Amar's Law or Noonan's Law as referred to in the past. Like, you know, we tend to overestimate the speed at which we get to a revolution, underestimate impact. So the will happens, not like that will probably fit into that. They will have probably bigger than we thought they would, but they will just take longer. And therefore the solutions we've had until now are not great solutions. Whereas the data on arrival, we're sort of saying, hey, we don't think actually this works.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's to your point, not solving a problem that actually needs to be solved or solving it in the wrong way. So yeah, it's basically an attempt to really frame if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a venture capitalist, if you're someone who's an angel investor and is looking at the market right now, what things should you put some um, some real money and real resources, real time behind versus not and really share that with you guys, our audience.

Speaker B: I always like to go back to a company called General Magic, A, uh, company that was legendary in Silicon Valley, spun out of Apple in the 1990s. There was even a movie made about General Magic. It's a, uh, company that tried to basically build the first modern smartphone, uh, with touchscreens, app ecosystem. The only issue was it was years before the technology existed to support it. Nokia at the time was less ambitious and more practical with what the uh, technology was able to do at the time. But what's interesting with this company is that obviously, uh, the smartphone was coming, just took 10 more years, 15 more years. And interestingly enough, some of the people in the team end up being very successful in that exact space. Tony Fadol, for instance, who end up creating the ipod, the iPhone, co create at least. And uh, Andy Rubin, we end up building up Android, selling that to Google and leading the charge with Google Android.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean a very successful team. Tony Fadell obviously later on did Nest as well, and Megan Smith, who was later the Chief Technology officer of the us A lot of people that came out of it that did a lot of important things, to be honest. I think a lot of technology that was developed that was in some way capacity or another reused later on by uh, some of these team members. I'm not saying they were infringing on any ip, but definitely there was a lot of reuse of. But it was too soon, right? They were doing something that was truly ambitious too soon. But a lot of these principles, a lot of these things ended up manifesting themselves in particular in the iPhone later on and in that deployment. Another such example is actually the Metaverse. We did two episodes back in the day, a long time ago on the metaverse, and we sort of debunked it a little bit back then. I think it was a very nuanced debunking, if I recall it correctly. Bertrand. Um, because we were sort of saying, hey, it's going to happen in some ways, but it's an evolution, not a revolution, not in the way that we saw definitionally. We are huge fans of Matthew Ball and his analysis around media, but somehow we disagreed, I remember, with his definition of what the metaverse is and how it will look like. There's no doubt that there's going to be a sort of metaverse in the future, probably metaverses in the future before there's any given unification. And in those metaverses we do believe. But sort of this whole hype cycle around Metaverse and what's happening clearly didn't work out well, as proven also by all the write offs done by Meta on their metaverse stuff. That much must have hurt. And it's related to AR and VR as well, and to the enriched reality, uh, positioning of a lot of these technologies, which we'll talk about later. But again, it was probably something that's going to happen. It's going to happen likely in a different product manifestation as the one that was anticipated by a lot of the pundits that opined on what's happening around Metaverse in the future. But it's going to happen. It's just going to take longer. It's going to probably come from angles of entry that are likely not what people had anticipated earlier on. Maybe it's from gaming, maybe from something else, but definitely it's going to happen.

Speaker B: Yes. And uh, you could argue that Apple did a similar mistake with the Vision Pro. I think the Vision Pro is the worst launch of an Apple product. I mean when we say launch, I mean it's been three years maybe since

Speaker A: the new 10, maybe.

Speaker B: Yes, that's my point. You have to go back a really, really long time to have such, uh, a disastrous launch. Uh, and I think for me it's very interesting because it's really a category where on one side there is a Metaverse on some sort. Uh, you should argue if you are just using Twitter or Facebook, these are some parallel universe, uh, in parallel to your real life. But the full on Metaverse where you need some extra super heavy glasses to make it work, I mean that simply does not work. I mean don't get me wrong, there are some super small narrow cases where your heavy VR glasses makes sense for some training, for some simulation or some light gaming. But given the weight, the disconnection from the real world, I mean it has really never taken fire, uh, even at cheaper price like Meta was able to do at more expensive price, much higher quality like the Vision Pro did. It looks like people have an issue with putting heavy glasses on top of them. So we'll talk later about the other side, AR glasses. But the traditional Metaverse heavy glasses, VR glasses, yes. It's not feeling right and I don't think it will ever um, be right. It needs a different form factor to go at scale.

Speaker A: I mean definitely fundamental shifts on the Metaverse. Just a quick reminder, Meta actually changed our name because of Metaverse. It's not just that they're writing off the investments, it's their name is apparently wrong. It didn't really happen in that way. You are saying that sort of this persistent embodied virtual world, which was the early definitions of what uh, a metaverse was, didn't really happen until now. It might happen at some point, but not in that way. But obviously a lot of the enablement layers are still work in progress, right? Real time, 3D presence avatars, all of these things are moving on. And so a lot of these enablers will be ready once there is a time where these technologies and businesses that are fundamentally anchored around these technologies will emerge. So it's again, um, right components, wrong product kind of alignment but at the same time it sort of will happen,

Speaker B: just not yet again, I think we're going to face a split of a virtual reality light that you can call, uh, ar, with very light glasses that are not a paint, where that are more limited, especially today or the next five years and the VR glasses that will stay on niche products that are uh, useful for some use cases. Do you want to do flight, uh, simulation, you want to do military training? There will be use for that, but beyond that it's more limited. And we forgot to talk about the Google Glass. This one was an early, early AR Glass source. But again, here we go back to the capabilities simply were not there at the time.

Speaker A: So maybe moving to dead on arrival. What things do we think are relatively dead on arrival? We'll be nuanced on a couple of these aspects. Not everything is totally dead on arrival, but maybe let's start with uh, a good one, which is some of the crypto summer promises, particularly uh, around NFTs, non fungible tokens and the decentralization of everything. The tokenization of everything that didn't quite uh, work the way people thought it would. A lot of people were very happy for a period of time that they had some sort of NFT that was worth a ton of money. Good for them. I hope they sold it back then. Some did actually, fortunately for them, but like most of them did not. So as an asset and the tokenization element, we're not questioning that tokenization itself doesn't make any sense. But from my perspective, a lot of the elements of tokenization plus the tokenization of everything don't make necessarily imminent sense. Right. So I think we're going to have a world that not everything is going to be tokenized in. A world where to be honest, having the latest APE token as an NFT is maybe like not something I really need. So it's sort of dead on arrival in some ways. What do you think, Bertrand?

Speaker B: It feels like it's a tale of two worlds. On one side there was clearly exuberance and bullshit. Uh, all these cryptocurrencies that makes no sense have no values. Uh, the NFTs, that they're the same, no values, no sense, no logic in them. At the same time we can see that Bitcoin, Ethereum, um, and few others were significant products, invention that have a current total market value that is significant. I would say we can see that step by step, little by little there is some tokenization happening. But it has been much more narrow than what was initially thought expected. But it's happening step by step. I think there is value in tokenization, but definitely not as much value as people expected. M and I think for one simple reason, it's very expensive to set up in the sense that it doesn't work so well. Actually. It requires a lot of computing power for stuff that might not justify it as simple as that. So why do you want to replace a very efficient, super fast database by something slow, expensive to maintain? Why? You need to have real reason for that. I think in most situations there was not a real justification to make that switch. So I think again, there is a niche for tokenization. It's getting used. Obviously there is stablecoin as well that are working and provide value. But definitely the use cases have narrowed. The success stories have been few and far between. It's definitely a space, but I don't think it has lived up to the expectations. The expectations were quite simply, quite insane in terms of what to expect. And it failed to achieve that. It was not. I don't think it qualifies as a true revolution. It has been successful again in our situation, in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in some tokenization. But beyond that, it was not the dramatic change that people were picturing.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's been successful in. There is, uh, security in this case, a currency of types that links to the value of that specific network and the utility of that specific network. But on this case in particular, the NFT stuff, I think there were two core premises that were very valuable about it. One was the premise of digital collectibles, right? The element itself being collectible and the fact that I have a unique one was only minted one. It's a unique thing out there. I think at some point people forgot that actually digital collectibles, uh, are not as valuable as people think they are. Right? Physical collectibles are more valuable. And the reason for that is just human nature. I want to have something in physicality, I want to have something that I can show people, et cetera, that has a physicality to it. So digital collectibles, I think there was a problem fundamentally in part of the articulation of NFTs that resided in actual the value of digitization of these collectibles in and of themselves. So I think that was part of the problem. The second problem was really the notion of provenance, the notion of certification, the notion of this is what it says it is and nobody can say this is something else. Right? So this notion of provenance and that I think fits more into the point you were making. Which is the point around use cases. Right? This doesn't fit all use cases. The provenance piece and the certification piece doesn't fit for all use cases. And probably it might fit actually even more for actual physical assets. Right where you want to have a certificate, that thing is what it says it is, but it's actually maybe a physical asset rather than a digital asset. And again, lo and behold, it doesn't apply to all the use cases that relate to provenance. I don't think we need to tokenize all the provenance ledgers in the world for this to be working well. Right. So again, it was sort of a little bit of, uh, an overreach. And in some ways all these players were very happy and there was a lot of bullshit. I mean, honestly, there was. To be honest, this is an area that I do think there was actual active fraud. I mean, all due respect, right, to a lot of the players in the market, but there was active fraud. I mean, honestly, there's bullshit.

Speaker B: I agree with you. I was going to say that it's one of the rare place, one of the rare sector in technology where I think fraud scams were prevalent. And yes, you might have some shitty startups in general and stuff and you might, there might be fraud, but it's. I think it's uh, true fraud is rare, true scam is rare. But here, for NFTs, for cryptocurrencies, I mean that was the majority you could argue. Yeah, so that's the part that I never really liked in all that industry. And if you look at nft, personally, I never understood the concept. For me it made simply no sense because yes, you can say, oh, I have created this rare digital token, but sure, so what? Who cares? Who cares? I mean you can have hundreds, thousands, millions of unique digital tokens and how does it matter? What's the use case? What's the connection? You can show it on your screen. But then how is it unique anymore? It's not like people have to come to your house and check stuff on site or something like physical art. No, not at all. So I don't know, I think it was surprisingly true. Bullshit again, I'm still a believer in Bitcoin. I think there is true logic to have a separate virtual digital currency. But you don't need hundreds, um, of them, you just need one, maybe two for, for some variation and the same for tokenization. It doesn't need to happen everywhere, just need to happen where there is really strong real logical value and beyond that there is no point.

Speaker A: Yeah, Makes sense. Maybe moving to our next one. I think we discussed this in a previous episode which was the whole 3D TV stuff. We just don't think that's the product. Right. It's not going to be a 3D TV. I believe when we discussed this in the episode. I don't want to lie too much, but I believe that's what we sort of came up with. It looks a bit more holographic or the manifestation comes through other mechanisms like glasses, et cetera. But we thought it was just dead on arrival. It's sort of uh. Nobody wanted to have glasses on the couch to watch the 3D TV. But also the 3D TVs themselves then they tried to develop that were very holographic, were super clunky and very heavy. I mean. So in some ways I think the TV manifestation somehow is not a great manifestation for this. So I put it on the dead on arrival pile and I have one. Just to be clear, I still have one.

Speaker B: Yeah, but it's a weird one because if you remember it suddenly happened. I remember being shocked as a consumer, like suddenly everyone talks about 3d tv like in a. As 3d 3vs are all out everywhere. And then after a few years. Yeah, no one bothered to keep adding that because consumer didn't care. And I think one issue was I think it has only worked with Blu Rays. I don't think any streaming service supported that. So with the rise of streaming that was certainly a pretty big issue in the first place. Interestingly, in the movie theaters, do we still have movies being shown in 3Ds? I think we still have a few, but it's really few and far between. The movie theater.

Speaker A: Yeah, IMAX 1 on that format, the high end format. IMAX 1, not the 3D thing.

Speaker B: But yeah, if you're on the TV at home, you don't want to bother. Maybe if you're in the movie theater, uh, more high end experience, you are willing to wear special glasses. I think it made sense. I think, I guess at home you were just too busy doing multiple things at once, rarely sitting all around two hours for movies. So you watch your phone, you check on something else. You don't want to have these glasses on top of that block you from the rest of what's happening at home.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it just didn't work. I'm not sure it will work in any case. So we'll see. But definitely I don't think that's the right form factor.

Speaker B: It technically worked, but practically it was not accepted by consumers.

Speaker A: Let me Rephrase. I think it was a solution to a problem nobody thought they had and the execution of the product was sort of the wrong one. Right. So it's like that's not what people wanted, right? So maybe we do want some sort of 3D immersive experience, but that's not the 3D immersive experience that we want. Not manifested like that in effect with its limitations, et cetera.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I want to say that we are m not denigrating some of this experience. I mean me, I still remember putting a Vision Pro and watching some content that is natively created by Apple for the Vision Pro. And it's an amazing magical experience. I mean truly. But at the same time I'm always worried to have to think I'm going to spend 30 minutes putting my vision prone my head, it's heavy, it's painful. And I'm also again we go back to. I'm disconnected from everything else and I don't like that.

Speaker A: And when there was real technological development, like the case of 3D TVs, that technology development may have served other purposes, right? So again we applaud those that put the money where their mouth was. The companies, the individuals that wanted to move forward, some of these technology stacks, maybe less so the people that just decided to create NFTs for the sake of it with apes. No attack on those guys specifically but just to create a specific view on that. But like there's a lot of stuff we're talking about today which is actually great technological development, right? There's stuff that came out of it that is very, very valuable technological development. Maybe to our next one, uh, on mobility, physical mobility, the segue. I mean everyone's like, oh, this is going to change how we sort of move around the world in particular for shorter distances, etc etc. Well apparently, no, apparently it's not super intuitive. There's still segues out there for use by police forces, tours and all that stuff. So people say uh, oh, it's sort of. No, well it never scaled, it wasn't changed. It didn't change how relatively short local mobility was going to be done. I think part of it is actually the problem with the product. Right. The product is not as intuitive as people thought it would be and it has other issues around it. Right. In terms of security and safety. And if you're going to have a device or something that moves you around, what's sort of the minimum accepted level of security that you would have, the fact that you have to incline to move it is actually not super as initially some probably people thought it's actually not as intuitive as some might have thought it was. So I think it's a dead on arrival kind of play. I mean the vehicles of the future, I'm not sure look like that at all. Happy to meet my words down the road, but I don't think so.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I remember the massive hype at the start of this product. They were uh, hiding it but still telling you we have seen it. That's true. It's going to totally change how cities are planned. I mean the level of hype and bullshit was insane before the launch of the product and before anyone outside of a few knew what it looked like. And then we saw what it looked like and it was like on one side and engineering marvel. The self stabilization, uh, system was new. I mean very few people had saw something like this before. And at the same time, as you said, the issue was what happened if it's losing battery, what happens if you fall from it? And quite frankly, if you look at today, the modern, um, electric scooter, you have 95% of the value of a Segway without any of the downside. You don't need to learn a new way to do things. If you lose battery, it still kind of work, I guess. You can still push it. It's not too expensive. You don't have massive computers to just make it work. You don't have massive robotics. So it's clearly an uh, impressive engineering solution, but the exact example of a solution to a problem people didn't have when ultimately a much more simple and elegant solution was there for people who care. And to be clear, you still could use a regular bike. Huh. So the alternative was still your regular bike, but now you have electric scooters that are a closer alternative, I guess in spirit to what was supposed to be the Segway. So sometimes let's be careful over engineering might not be the answer.

Speaker A: And even scooters, which are, to be honest, I would argue, a much easier philosophical view of mobility should be done and much easier form factor, so to speak, in terms of mobility, even those won't have wide adoption to everyone. Right? So it's not like everyone's going to use a scooter. And the bar for a scooter is much less than a bar for a segue. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes. I think in a way the electric scooter, uh, is showing us in some ways the limit of the dream is that even well executed, even cheap, even easy to use, even low risk, in a way there is still only so much that people are willing to use that because it's a pain to bring with you everywhere. Actually in some ways you could argue it has only worked with this distributed platform like Klim and others that let you take one and drop it when you are done using it. But that was not a model that was workable for the segue. So yeah, I totally agree. And you could argue that bikes are still the gold standard or now electric bikes are still the gold standard for who wants that level of mobility.

Speaker A: Uh, well, the next one is a favorite of I guess everyone that didn't invest in them, which is Juicero, which was the machine that basically created juices out of squeezing a bag. I'm going to be nice here too. There's a bunch of well known investors, they raised I think 120 million or something like that.

Speaker B: That's insane.

Speaker A: It is insane. But maybe the vision was not that vision. It was something grandiose and the complexity around dealing with liquids and whatever. So I'm not really sure we didn't pass or invest on the company.

Speaker B: Big Girl Juice Bikes.

Speaker A: Maybe you're being facetious, but anyway, so I'm not trying to attack the guys who actually invested in this, the investors that put money into this, but it was basically one of these examples that were trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. Right? So it's like a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. I mean I can just squeeze a bag of concentrated thing and make a juice, right? I can do something around the juice. As I said, maybe the big vision was well beyond that. And I'm not sure many of us will ever know what the big vision actually was. But yeah, it was a Solution, a uh, $400 machine to a problem that nobody really had. So that doesn't work.

Speaker B: And I think the most crazy part of the story is that the business exploded when there was this Bloomberg reporter uh, that showed that you could squeeze the bag with your hands without a machine and get the same juice. That's pretty insane. That's just so unbelievable.

Speaker A: The funny part of the story is mischief. This company that does all their on point, slightly artistic, whatever one off drops, et cetera, et cetera, shout out to Gabriel. Gabe Wiley was the founder there. They actually, this is funny, they actually did a collectible series of figurines of that startup, toys of which Juicera was one of them, Jibo, which I don't think you'd appreciate. Berton and the Theranos mini lab. So someone is also making money on top of that, which is funny. So well done Ms. Chief.

Speaker B: Why not? Why not? Maybe we can go quickly over um. Lytro. This one was uh, I would say brilliant technology. It was a camera able to capture light in different ways. You could actually dynamically change focus after the picture was taken. So something quite impressive. And uh, I still remember looking at their products and thinking, should I get one at the same time where it didn't work, it was too limited in terms of image quality versus shooting a real picture. It was very tough to sell as an independent device because uh, either you are in the phone or you are on dslr, but there was no spot in between. And in some ways phone solved the issue. Not directly, but they kept adding cameras. So at some point you ah, had not one, but two, but three, but four, but five cameras in your phone. So you had kind of a specific mode for anything you need and, and that's it. And phone manufacturers manage to convince people they should pay for all these cameras or uh, provide a low end version if you don't want to pay for these cameras. But yeah, very interesting technology did not manage to find a go to market.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's falling in love with a technology solution that as you said was incredible and not falling in love with what problem are you actually trying to solve. Right? Because a lot of the elements of the problem that you're trying to solve, either you take another picture, all due respect, like instead of me trying to change the field of view etc. And the focus post picture taken, I take another picture. And to be honest you can take thousands of pictures now with different setups. Also ignoring the fact that this was pre, this whole AI boom. So obviously that one I will be kind on. Right? But with the AI boom you can do lots of things to pictures and change it and stuff like that. So all of that changes the game in and of itself. Obviously Lytrof or Litrov, not sure how you spell them or how you say their name, but they failed before that. So again this was super, super great tech, great investors, they had good investors on board, but just nobody wanted the device. I mean why would I want this thing? Sort of total failure on arrival. I think one also other aspect of it that may have been misinterpreted and misunderestimated by some of the early investors certainly in the company is the value chain, right? There is a value chain for cameras, for SLRs, DSLRs, et cetera, et cetera. And they sort of know what they're doing and they're doing their own level of innovation in some ways that fits squarely into that value chain, which I'm sure is a complex value chain to manage in and of itself. Right. So maybe that's created its own dynamics as well.

Speaker B: I think they tried to insert themselves in the value chain, but I'm not sure first that they managed to get technology as small as it should have been. And I mean they simply didn't convince anyone, the Sony or Nikon of the world or uh, the Apple or Google, uh, of the world to use their technology in their phones because no one saw really the value per se. And one thing to keep in mind, using that technology means you had a big trade off in terms of megapixels. So actually you will benefit from that great effect around the focus that can move anywhere after the fact that. But in exchange you had to lose dramatically the number of megapixels. And at the time all the rage was about how do I get more megapixel for my phone with good image quality. So that was all that you were selling to consumers. If consumers will not have bought 10 times less megapixels for a weird benefit that at the time no one cared about. And I think you are very right to introduce the fact that. And of course they could not have guessed at the time, but today you can get for free this refocusing effect with AI actually.

Speaker A: But that's exactly the point I was making on Value Chain. They went into a value chain that has a lot of players in it and they got kicked in the butt anyway. Right. Because people were like, why would I adopt that? So they didn't serve the purpose of the use case or the user flow. They didn't anticipate competitive dynamics to it. And then they actually went straight up into a technology plus IP logic on a value chain that would be like, hey, goods, just get out of here. Right. So what would be the incentive for people to bring them on board? So it's sort of like they, in some ways they did all the mistakes under the book in that sense. And again, I'm not trying to diss the company, the uh, founders, the investors, but it feels that is the problem in the end.

Speaker B: Yes, yes.

Speaker A: Shall we do some rapid fire dead on arrivals?

Speaker B: Yes. A, uh, fan favorite. Have you tried a keyboard project on, you know.

Speaker A: Yes, I think I mentioned that a previous episode. I did have one of the early ones and whatever. Yeah, somehow we forgot that there's other best, better ways of input. Maybe voice would be a better way of input. If that's the problem.

Speaker B: But anyway, this one is interesting because you just use it one minute and you discover it's horrible.

Speaker A: It's a horrible experience.

Speaker B: You have to type on it so you don't see exactly where you type. And each time you type you are hurting your fingers because it's not a smooth keeper, uh, feeling. But you're typing a uh, solid surface that's amazing that it went to manufacturing and basically no one gave feedback. There is no way it's working. I mean no way technically working, but practically no one would want to use that.

Speaker A: It's bad on all aspects. The fingers touching it needs to be a very over engineered experience for it to actually detect the keystroke and all that stuff. So it's an over engineered solution. By default it's not private because once you have the keyboard projector you're like, where am I keyboard? Projecting on something that others can see. And there's other alternatives that are better. Like the keyboard on our phones are pretty good these days with auto correction in most cases. I wouldn't say all cases. Voice can be also an interesting replacement to that if that's what you're going for. And voice recognition has improved dramatically over the last few years. So again it's sort of one of these. Yeah. Cool.

Speaker B: It's clear that the first touch has replaced a physical keyboard where you need one and two. Now voice recognition is getting better for sure.

Speaker A: Well, the opposite side is that voice assistants were going to take over everything. Right. That everything was going to be voice assistant led. Right. Alexa is going to run your life. You're going to have games for voice. I actually have a good friend of mine who did a startup in that space actually, uh, the company got acquired that everything's going to be voice, which as we know it's also not true.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: We need to visualize sometimes. Sometimes we still want to write because we want either the added value of privacy or of expression in that send point. So there's a lot of things that are happening around Voice that are exciting. Like we just mentioned voice recognition. But not everything is going to be voice. Certainly not for the foreseeable future. And so that doesn't work also as the ultimate platform. We also want some visuals. We also want to have other kinds of interactions. There are limitations to voice assistants, for example. So voice assistants were not quite the next platform that people said they were going to be. I would say they're a channel, but they're definitely not a platform. That's how at least I see them.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, a channel versus a platform. I will agree with you. I must say I start to feel that we could be close to the future we have seen in her this movie her. I guess you saw it, you know, as well and where these guys keep talking to his personal assistants and is becoming his friend, uh, maybe even his love. I start to feel we are getting close enough with AI that this become a possibility. But again, it's not your only way to interact. You want to type, you want to see stuff. So there are many situations where you don't want to be seen talking with someone. It's more a channel versus a platform. And yes, Alexa, it's quite amazing how went to the roof and crash burn move up very quickly. Amazon invested billions, hired thousands of people, which was a right move. I mean you have something that seems to work well enough and could be game changer, why not? But it was quite impressive as a crash and burn. It's pretty rare to move that fast up and down.

Speaker A: I agree. A lot of money put into this stuff. I mean Google went after it as well. I think Google probably executed better. Their tools and their hub tools, et cetera, were better in their devices. But to be honest, it was the beginning of something. It wasn't really the. And it's shocking because a lot of people have Alexis at home and Google hubs at home and whatever at home, but it's really not that powerful. I mean I have a bunch of Google stuff at home and I still use it for very basic information. So it's not really doing much for me. And it's not like magically now with AI it's going to be much better. It's not right. So it's not. It's a legacy device now. Um, so maybe in the future we'll have some stuff that will be cool, but definitely not the voice assistant manifestation that we saw in the past. I know the next one is exciting to you, so I'll let you go for it.

Speaker B: Bertha Netbooks. If you remember Netbooks, these were this horribly underpowered PC device. And I kept uh, buying one after the other, hoping that the next one will be fast enough. Trying to be a small, lightweight, portable PC. They were quite called Netbooks. Usually they had also a small screen, like 1012 inch, 9 inch. And each time it was horrible. Very poor battery life, two, three hours, um, super, super, super slow. And they were equipped typically with a full Windows OS and they were killed overnight by the iPad. After two years of iPad, no more Netbooks. Oh yeah. And they had this Typically they would be equipped with what was this name of the cpu? It was an Intel Atom CPU or Celeron. And it was again that the root cause why it was so slow. It was horribly slow.

Speaker A: So Netbox didn't work. We didn't want to go back to that in the uh, iPad one and all that stink. Fun.

Speaker B: I think it kind of been proven at this stage and there are some small mini PCs, uh, these days you have the, for instance the ROG Ally for gaming. There has been some revival with some Chinese manufacturers making some small PCs. I have to admit I bought some so I kept trying. It's much more powerful, no question, better battery life also. But we go back to the fact that if you have a very limited screen size 7, 8, 10 inch, it's just tough to put a full desktop operating system to good use. You need something more simplified, more touch friendly for it to be really practical. Yes, you can run the full desktop Excel on it, but will you do it on an 8 inch screen? Probably not. Probably not.

Speaker A: So netbooks and maybe we'll end with Google Glass. I mean obviously we're going to talk about AR and VR in just a bit. I think it's a good segue to our next section but and we're not necessarily saying AR VR is dead on arrival, we actually think they're going to be out there for us in the future. But Google Glass, in the way that a lot of the first wave wearables were developed was like cool, but not enough. And I think even the recent ones, the Meta Ray bands, I see a lot of friends of mine are now wearing Meta Ray bands and they're like, oh, this is so cool. It's like how is that different from the Google Glass but now a little bit nicer? I mean it still feels to me that's the wrong way to approach it. Either we go with a more comprehensive solution for glasses or a solution for glasses that's a little bit more easily integrated into existing frames, etc. For those of us like the two of us that have actual eyeglasses or I don't see it quite happening this way. So I think just as a formality in how it was deployed, it seems to me it's sort of been the wrong angle a couple of times even to be honest, beyond the first wave of wearables, it's been a little bit the wrong way to approach this, the wrong paradigm.

Speaker B: And if you remember the Google Glass initially they were launched and uh, again overhyped. You couldn't even buy Them but still it was overhyped and you could see a marketing department going crazy when they were showcasing, you know, models wearing Google Glass, that sort of stuff. Uh, fashion shows. I mean that was insane. I mean how is it connected to the value proposition of the Google Glass? Absolutely not. But you remember what killed the Google Glass.

Speaker A: This is the Robert Scoble, uh, in the shower thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: The whole lack of privacy thing.

Speaker B: You try to have this vision of the Google Glass that models are wearing and stuff in fashion shows and. And you have this guy Robert Scoble taking his picture with his Google Glass on the show ash naked and oh well that, that quickly dropped and he intimidated.

Speaker A: Robert's a good guy for the most so we'll let him get away with. But yeah, it was, it was not a good moment.

Speaker B: Of course it's a good for the

Speaker A: use of Google Glass. But to your point was overhyped. I don't even recall but I had to do so many things to actually get access to one. I still have it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and then in the end it was just totally underwhelming. I do think the meta, uh, Ray ban solutions, et cetera, et cetera, now they're doing it with other brands as well are more elegant because it's around voice activation and stuff like that. But still it's not this. I think these kinds of solutions are dead on arrival which maybe is a good segue to the resurrection pile, so to speak. The will happen just not like that pile that we have to share today.

Speaker B: Yes. So that's the question. Are uh, we in resurrection mode? We say our glasses do the ray ban. Oakley glasses are the way to. There is also some other brands like xreal for instance that is a different approach. It's more to watch movies that personally I like a lot and use a lot and I know quite a few fans for this. There is a business there ah is a market for either the xreal for movies meta, uh, ribbon for light information on top of your glasses. There are niches. I don't know if it's full resurrection mode yet, but I can see again we say all right that there is ability to do more and more. Will it be connected to your phone? Will it be independent from a phone? That's also stuff to see. I guess at this stage connection to a phone has some value. It's making a comeback.

Speaker A: I think it's suffering from being overhyped. It makes sense that the category comes back the use of glasses. A lot of people actually have eyeglasses. The Use of different mechanisms that really expand your view. I mean, we've seen that with the, uh, advent of foldables in mobile phones, people want bigger screens, right? They want to get as close as they can to sort of the tablet experience without necessarily having to go for laptops, et cetera. So definitely, I think the use cases make sense. It's just how do you deploy it and who's going to deploy it best? Uh, I don't think we've seen anyone that's been particularly enlightened about doing it. So all the great developments with Android XR from Google, Samsung doing a bunch of things in terms of deployment out there as well. At the same time, I mean, are these guys going to redefine this category and create the first ever kind of wearable, at least AR kind of great experience or VR cargo experience, or, or are we going to have much of the same? Because in some ways it took several years for the smartphone category to be recategorized as a smartphone category under the iPhone. And that was the category redefining moment. Right? It was sort of the vision of a bunch of people, obviously led by Steve, but like a bunch of people that went to market and said this is how we view the market to be. And they just nailed it. And so we haven't seen the guys who've nailed it, I think is the issue thus far either on the VR side or the AR side. We just haven't seen it.

Speaker B: Definitely we have not seen that. There are of course rumors that Apple is ending their Vision Pro program and at the same time is full on an AR glasses, an alternative to the meta ray ban. So we will see. I start to think I have trouble to see Apple pull this off because it starts to feel that, yes, they are great at making, uh, more efficient, uh, supply chain these days, uh, but I feel after 10 years plus of Tim Cook leading the business, that's all there is to Apple these days. Thinner fonts, pink colors for your latest device variations, more efficient chips. For sure, they have great chips, but beyond that, I mean, they cancel their car program. The Vision Pro was not successful in the marketplace. I mean, they have trouble to find the next story and to execute on the next story, quite frankly. I mean, you could, uh, argue that, uh, the most successful recent launch has been the airport.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's absolutely spot on and we've discussed it in previous episodes how much it's taken much longer than I thought it would. I always said after Steve's passing that it would take maybe five to 10 years for the beginning of the demise of Apple and it is taking longer. So there was definitely uh, some gravity created. I mean Steve passed away in 2011.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So they've been yelling to their time. So it's now 15 years and it seems that only now Apple's really suffering in terms of product lines. Probably they started one or two years ago. They have a new CEO coming in September. So we'll see if John will do a better job if he's really a product guy and that's how he's going to go for it. He's going to go for a few products really nicely done that have great experiences which is sort of Steve's hallmark instead of what you said was the milking of the cow, so to speak under Tim Cook. Um, there's nothing wrong with it. It created a hugely valuable company with a huge amount of still innovations around the edges. But it's like now they need real products and innovation, a new category definition, uh, play. And is John going to be the guy for that or not?

Speaker B: Yes. And positively Tim increased market cap of Apple. Uh, he didn't destroy the business. We are not trying to tell that Tim Cook was a failure but definitely it was not Steve Jobs. It was more a caretaker optimizer type of CEO. But to go to the next level you need another type of CEO and quite frankly it's hard to find when it's not a uh, founder CEO.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it will be difficult to find but we'll give John a chance once this time comes. In September 2026 as one would moving to another topic that we've discussed in the past. Self driving. It's going to happen. We all are uh, waiting for it to happen. Self driving cars, self driving vehicles that we don't need to drive in this mess of traffic. In particular spending a lot of my time in Southern California where traffic is incessant and the driving is, how can I put it in a nice way, Awful. People don't seem to know what they're doing. I think we all want to have self driving cars. It's taking longer than we thought it would but I do think it's going to happen. I wouldn't put a mark on the sand on how long we're going to have this world, how long to get this world of self driving cars. It's going to coexist with non self driving driving cars for sure for a period of time. But I for one know deeply that it will happen and I look forward to it. Right. I love driving but not in horrible traffic with horrible drivers.

Speaker B: We are for sure very close. I mean, now Tesla self driving is extremely good. I have taken Waymo many times with great experience. Um, it's not going too fast, it's not going on the highway. So there are some limits. But I will say really impressive all in all. So I think we are pretty close. I don't know if you know, but Waymo M is working on expanding to many, many more cities actually. So I think we might be at a tipping point there. And quite frankly, I expect that teenager in 10 years from now are not going to bother to learn driving. I mean, we'll see, but I think many won't.

Speaker A: I mean, Waymo is now doing also stuff in freeways, certainly in the Bay Area. I had a friend of mine who took one recently and he was scared. He was scared shitless. I think that would be the right way to put it, because the car wasn't going that fast. You know, people are aggressive on the freeway around your car. But to your point, I've used it in city and city. It's great and it's aggressive enough. That's uh, one of the things I was a bit afraid about Waymo, that it wasn't going to be aggressive enough in city driving. It is pretty aggressive. So yeah, maybe we're closer than we think. Maybe it's a couple of years rather than a decade, which is sort of normally where we put the stick on the ground. But it's definitely going to happen. I think there was an overhype too soon. There were great movements around level three and level four autonomy that in some ways were misconstrued early on as full autonomy. But now we will likely get what we ask for. And then at some point someone's saying, hey, but why don't we just have the flying objects instead? We'll get back to that, the flying car stuff, the EVTOLs and all that stuff. We'll see.

Speaker B: Ten years ago, I remember the overhyping was very, very strong with self driving. And I nearly believe the bullshit. I mean it was so strong in 2015, 2016 that not everyone thought it's here in the next 12 months. Basically. I think that was a lesson for quite a lot of people. Don't trust the Silicon Valley bullshit machine, uh, hype machine. It can go way too strong, way too fast. You absolutely need to spend time to understand realistically where we truly are. You cannot just buy the premise moving

Speaker A: maybe to robotics and humanoids. Again, it's going to happen both for consumer and for industrial and the humanoid form, I think at some point will be important, just not yet. I think we're behind now the big buzz sentence embedded or embodied rather AI, where you have physical AI manifestations, right? So AI manifested through robots and other kinds of devices. It's going to start happening in certain beachheads. But hey, we've had this offer for a long time and I know you still have your frustrations, Bertrand, with a Sony aibo, so I won't traumatize you more than that. But definitely will happen, right? We will have humanoids at some point. We'll have different specialty kind of devices that will help us in activities that we do both as consumers and Also in the B2B and enterprise space, even in the industrial space. So it's sort of, um, the writings on the wall, that definitely is going to happen.

Speaker B: Yes. And I think the question, as always, is how do you get there? And I think the intermediate steps of your optimized robot, a physically optimized robot like a Roomba to clean your home or some other robots to mow your grass, a good example. I think initially you have to start a small, practical, not too technology advanced, and progress your way. Truly humanoid robots are very disruptive because technically if they work, they can do everything a human could do. But practically I don't think it's that true because there are a lot of constraints. You have to, to have enough weight, you have to have enough force, you have to have enough vision, you have to have enough AI to just, you know, understand commands and move, uh, around. But again, with all the progress in AI, the progress in electric motors, I am optimistic that there is a chance for the humanoid robot. But it's not three years, it's probably not even five, it's probably more like 10. And let's not forget that a lot of demos with humanoid robots today are, ah, fake. It's a remote operator, uh, remotely controlling a robot. It's not a robot working by himself in many, many, many situations. And that I think is another thing hurting the reputation of some of these companies because these fake demos, they look great, but once you dig a bit, you realize it was a fake demo because it certainly didn't come with a warning that it's remotely operated, moving maybe

Speaker A: to the next one, that it will happen, but not exactly like that. Quantum computing. I think for the most it's been in many cases a uh, solution looking for problems. It's beautiful, but it's like what's the problems we're trying to solve? I think we're going to start having beachheads into problem solution and apps. I'm sure a lot of people out there would say, well there's already killer apps for this, like a lot of the scientific modulation, cryptography, breaking all that stuff. But I'm like, yeah, cool. But it still feels very much like a bunch of pieces and hardware in effect that is trying to solve a problem that needs to be very much defined into several problems, several areas of problem solution. Going forward. Will it happen? For sure. I mean I've been hearing about quantum computing since I was in college, since I was 17 and I got into college. So I'm sure it will happen. It will have manifestations. There's a lot of stuff probably already residing on some of these instances. But like a full mainstream view of what quantum computing can do for us is still uh, quite ways out.

Speaker B: Yes, I mean there has been some reports that some key steps in the technology starts to be working and that potentially the technology could start to deliver results in the coming two, three years. And what I mean by results are results that will dramatically change how you, you need to encrypt. Because a lot about quantum computing is actually trying to decrypt the current technologies that are used to protect your information online. And this one is big. I mean if we manage to have a limited use of quantum computing, that kind of work in a few years, that will have a dramatic impact on how we encrypt data. Uh, so here that the one piece I'm looking for. Do we really manage to solve encryption with quantum computing? And if yes, then we need to make a lot of changes how we encrypt things.

Speaker A: Fusion energy, the gift that keeps on giving but this uh, somehow doesn't fully happen. I know you're a big fan,

Speaker B: I would say practically I'm a big fan of nuclear uh, fusion energy because in a way it's working, it solves in terms of safety. Let us Gen 5 reactors are ultra safe. They cannot go out of control anymore. China as a working reactor. So in some ways part of me will say why bother with fusion when we are fission that is working extremely well and we know how to make and if we are efficient about the process, we could make for really cheap. And having a better source of energy today will already be great for the world. I would like to see scale with fission. I mean it's great to research fusion. Fusion is kind of near limitless form of energy. So this is exciting. I think what's interesting with fusion these days, it's not just the big governments working, uh, on spending billions before seeing any potential returns. But there is a lot of startups that are working on it. So the bar went lower in term of researching fusion. So that part gets me excited. But again, I think we should go fission first and parallel with some fusion investment. Fusion research and hopefully fusion come at some point. But we should not wait for fusion would be my big take.

Speaker A: Good point. And last but not the least, we have dedicated episodes on this. So maybe today we'll just do the little teaser. If you guys haven't heard our episodes on AI and the bubble and all those things. The last big one that's just not like that it will happen is AI itself and in particular AGI. Right. So generalized AI that will be just like a human. You know, obviously it's happening. We've discussed in previous episodes there's a lot of, uh, breakthroughs in terms of methodological approach beyond the GPT curse of actual hallucinations, uh, that doesn't seem to be solvable. There's a lot of things happening around reinforcement, learning, evolutionary computation and other methodological approaches to AI that we think will create tremendous breakthroughs. There's definitely a lot of funding going into it. Uh, we qualified it, rather quantified it recently, I think 63, the number probably has changed in the last couple of weeks, but 63 new AI labs that have raised significant rounds upfront just getting into the market, some of them as high as hundreds of millions or even over $1 billion for the first round of funding. So obviously there's a lot of dramatic things happening in that space. There's a lot of capital going to that space. It's going to happen. It's going to take much longer than we, I think we think it's going to take. I just saw, I think Mark Andreessen recently saying AGI is already upon us. Maybe it is. Maybe, you know, something we don't know. But I suspect we're still ways to go in a lot of, uh, the developments on AI for now, it will continue having its complications and its limitations, but definitely it will untap a lot of great productivity enhancements, technological enhancements, even in the short term that, uh, at least I'm very excited about. And then the AGI story I think will be a story that will be told later.

Speaker B: So I might actually disagree on this one. I actually believe, like Mark Andreessen, that We are at AGI. We reached AGI a few months ago with the latest ChatGPT 5.5 with CloudEntropy 4 7, 4, 6 even. I mean for me, in some, uh, specific space, let's say, uh, coding, for instance, I truly believe we have reached AGI. It is totally replacing people for development, testing, specific writing, specifications, writing, doing design. Yes, there are some use case where it's not working as well, but for at least the coding side, I think AGI is truly there. Is it better than the best human experts at every piece of the puzzle? No, I think if you go to some very specialized development stuff like CUDA development for instance, or some uh, kernel development, it might not be at the level of the top human experts. But as we can hear about stories around security to the new versions that are unreleased yet of Anthropic and others seem to be at the level of the best human experts at cybersecurity. So I think we are actually there. I think that's there is an acceleration the past six months in term of investments in data centers. There was a big question in 2023, 24, 25, are we investing too much? Is it a bubble? And so on. And that was true because revenues were increasing, but not that fast. I mean, the increase in the growth in revenues for Anthropic is insane. I mean, no one has ever seen that in the history of technology. What happened to them the past six months? I mean, going so fast at such a scale. No one has seen that. And I think that's truly because I've stumbled upon AGI for coding. And coding is such a huge large market that even if we are just solving coding, even if we never solve more than that, I think it's already kind of one of the biggest market in the world, full stop.

Speaker A: But that for me, I think maybe is a definitional theory that for me is still narrow AI. AGI as defined is a type of AI that can match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and intellectual tasks. Coding is just one of them. Right? So I think there's a lot of narrow AI that are right there, to your point, that can replace humans. Maybe today. Encoding may be a great example of that. But I don't think we are at AGI. I haven't seen any agents out there that can replace fully human beings where I would not understand that they're actually AI. So anyway, again, maybe you guys have seen stuff that I haven't seen. I just feel there's a lot of overhype on what AGI actually is. But like the ability to surpass us as human beings, I haven't seen it yet across the board, right? Not like On a specific domain.

Speaker B: Yes. I think my point is that I have seen it on a few domains and I mean, if you look at mathematics, for instance, and there are more and more examples of people who are using AI to solve mass problems that only the very top people in the world who are able to solve that are now being solved by AI. I start to feel that we are getting a few examples in different fields where AI is matching the absolute best experts in the world. I would just go back in term of market size already. What we got today and today is not the limit, but what we got today, and especially AI combined with all these agents, harness agents, that's also that specific combo that makes a difference. This is, for me, at this stage, huge market. Uh, so. So does it solve everything? Does it replace a human for everything? No, you still need a human in the loop. You don't let your AI go wild for weeks and just check once in a while. But you could argue very few humans are able to do that, quite frankly, to run by themselves for weeks without control.

Speaker A: I feel there's still a great deal of confusion because there's dramatic impact on narrow AI domains where things are being done that weren't done before, where there's these great mathematical proofing, coding stuff is being done very easily, et cetera, et cetera. But still, that for me is not the definition of AGI. AGI is a human being. Right. It's like someone who can really be a human being, ideally become sort of top end of what a human being will look like intellectually across domains. And I don't think that's where we are. I mean, again, maybe definitional, maybe that's what Mark means. But like, I mean, yeah, the question

Speaker B: is, what does it mean? I will argue it's beating 80% of humanity today pretty easily. Most of humanity doesn't know how to code. It would be unable to do coding at the level AI is doing. We'll be unable to do math at the level AI is doing. I mean, use ChatGPT to check for medical issues and stuff. I mean, it's not perfect for sure, but again, it still beats most humans. So I don't know, I feel that we are reaching a level where it's truly beating most of humans. Many experts in many fields. I feel the definition of hate has reached a level of an average human being. I will say past that one. I mean, is it the same as a human being? No, but reaching the level of your average human being. I think we are there in a

Speaker A: lot of fields well, in Conclusion, in episode 78 of Tech Deciphered, we went into two piles. The pile of debt on arrival products, technologies, businesses and the pile of it will happen, but not like that or not yet. Pile of technologies business out there as well. So we went into a bunch of topics today that were of extreme importance back in the past where we thought the world was going to change anywhere from self driving to fusion in the nuclear space. We also went into some traumatic, dramatic mistakes like Juicero and other deployments like Segway that seemed to be really very much dead on arrival. With that, I would ask you if you're excited and you want to share with us some of your agreements or disagreements on today's episode as well as your own dead on arrival versus merely early examples. Feel free to do so on LinkedIn X or via email. Thank you Bertrand.

Speaker B: Thank you Nino.

Speaker A: You can check the latest on our website decipheredshow.com you can connect with us on on Twitter Schmidt and GPEDRO. As a disclaimer, these are our own opinions. We're not representing the views of any company.

Speaker B: If you enjoyed the show, subscribe, give us 5 stars or leave a review on Apple Podcast app or your favorite app which will help other people to discover Tech Decipher. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

Speaker A: Sam.