Big Technology Podcast - Self-Driving's Quiet Boom, Tech's New IPO Window, Worldcoin's Strange Debut — With Sarah Kunst

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Sarah Kunst is the managing director at Cleo Capital. She joins Big Technology this week for a recap of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Self-driving cars, Waymo & Cruise 2) Meta's new personalized chatbots 3) Threads' declining usership 4) Sam Altman's Worldcoin 5) DateMe docs 6) What Stripe's IPO means for the broader market.   Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Self-driving cars are quietly taking off, met us building a bunch of new chat pots. What is WorldCoin exactly? In the rise of Date Me Docs. We'll break down this week's news on the other side of this break. Welcome to Big Technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday where we break down the news

in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Sarah Kust is with us today. She's the managing director of Kuo Capital, a great voice on technology. You're going to love what she has to say about what's going on in the industry. Welcome, Sarah. Hey, I'm excited to be here and talk about everything going on. Thrill to have you here. I've been watching you a bunch on CNBC lately. So I was like, we've got to get Sarah on the show, talk about some of the things that we're watching. So it's

awesome that you're here. Why don't we start with self-driving? Because I'm here in San Francisco over the past couple weeks. I've been hopping in self-driving cars. And we have a podcast with Kyle vote that's coming up, the CEO of Cruz, that we're going to go deeper into this. But it's just like a watershed week, I think, for self-driving. Waymo just said it's going to expand into Austin. That's its fourth city. And Cruz today and big technology announced that it's going to expand into L.A. in the coming weeks.

That's going to be the eighth city that it has operations in as it goes toward ride hailing of these AVs. What's your take on, A, like the state of this? Am I getting over my skis in terms of my belief? that this is sort of the most underrated tech story of the year, if not the last few years. And is it going to be real? Yeah. So, you know, one thing I'll say before I jump into all of that is it's fascinating that Austin is so early on this because I remember until relatively recently, like Uber was banned in Austin.

You know, it kind of went back and forth, but there were years where you'd show up at South By and it's like, oh, you have to download this other random app because we don't use Uber here. And so, you know, it's fascinating to see that change. You know, I live in San Francisco and you kind of get used to self-driving cars. And the way that I think about them day to day is it's a little bit like when you see the cars that are like the student driver cars in that, you know, you kind of roll your eyes. You're like a little bit more patient and you kind of roll your eyes because you know they're going to like just not quite drive the way everybody else is. And that's doesn't mean by the way that the way everybody else is driving is good because, you know, city drivers. But there's a lot of like four-way stops where it's just like, dude, you can go and I would honk, but you're a car with nobody in it. So everybody's just going to kind of be vaguely annoyed and cut you off. It's funny how quickly it feels normal. I think it's the future. I suspect at scale what we'll see a lot more of in the next five years is what like Ford is doing. Last summer, I was home in Michigan where I'm from and got to test drive a Ford Lightning, their electric

truck. And the interesting thing is it has self-driving, right? So, you know, driving a couple hundred miles of just like flat empty highway to get to my parents' house from, you know, the airport. And, you my then-boyfriend now fiancé is just like sitting there and he's like, I don't, I have a really funny video where he's just kind of like, I don't know what to do because like I don't need to touch the wheel and you get in the way of it kind of when you do because it tries to change lanes and everything. And it can do it incredibly well. But like you can't totally reclaim your time because presumably for liability reasons, you still have to like kind of be looking at the screen. So if you're just like fully on like a laptop or a phone, they'll be like, hey, you know, they'll kind of like beep at you. I think that's the near-term future and I think it's already here a lot more than we realize in like ways big and small like assisted parking on hondas and stuff um it is still weird though when you realize that there's a bunch of cars with literally no one in them um or everybody's in the back seat and there's no driver i mean fully autonomous right to me this was sort of my takeaway having spent the past few weeks riding in the cars and speaking with the executives the hardest part

was just to get this working in one or two cities. And what I'm hearing from them and what listeners will hear from Kyle Vote from Cruz in the next couple weeks is that once you get that, a lot of this technology is generalizable. So you can apply it from one city to the other. And then your real issue becomes supply, like how do you make the vehicles?

And that's why I think we're really at an inflection point. I mean, having ridden in the Waymo and the cruise vehicles in San Francisco, like, yes, they drive differently from humans, but they are smooth and they it feels like a much better driving experience you can text you can do work in them you can read in them as opposed to your typical experience in san francisco after you go up or down a hill you're ready to puke so this is what i'm saying i think that this is this is a real inflection point and it's an underappreciated story because in last decade everybody was talking about how this was real and it just wasn't but it actually does feel real this time

What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's real, right? Like I, I, when, when you're consistently, uh, uh, mad at something because it's getting in your way, whether or not you like it, you have to admit it's real. And if you live in San Francisco, you know, you don't even notice it anymore. Um, I, I think that, you know, there's a question of scale and that goes to everything from, you know, sort of who's buying these. how are they getting put on the road, you know, I think we're probably a relatively far

way off from individual private people at any scale buying these vehicles, you know, and then like kind of what do they replace? Like I usually take an Uber if I'm driving, it's because I kind of feel like driving usually. There's a lot of these kinds of questions. Are you actually going to put, you know, your senile grandma or your infant child in one to transport them like you know is that even going to be legal to do i don't know in the shorter term so like 10 years from now like this episode is going to be like a meme and we're going to look like you know total like get with the program whatever but i think in the the near term there are a lot of questions and then also just who pays for it right in terms of of um you know who's paying for the insurance

which is a huge piece of it you know car insurance is is really in america health insurance you're pain, not really to replace the car, but to replace anything you damage on people that you might hit. It's not a small cost. So, you know, there's a lot of logistical questions, especially in cities that are pretty flat, pretty grid-like, they don't have a lot of extreme weather, things like that. You know, getting a car to drive itself is not necessarily the hard part. I think it's going to be the sort of soft skills around it that are going to take longer to get to you. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I think after riding in Waymo's for the past week, and I've been in a dozen of these, about a dozen of these Waymo and Cruise rides, I would happily put an infant in there. Maybe I need some more testing data. Maybe I'm a little too credulous. I don't know. Do you have an infant, though? Not yet. And also, I really hope my wife doesn't listen to this part of the episode. So anyway, let's move on. So meta is releasing a series or has under development a series of,

chatbots, they'll take on personas from people in history, including like Abe Lincoln. This is from the Financial Times. They can have human-like discussions with met as nearly four billion users. And these people said, some of the people inside the company said that the chatbots, which staffers have dubbed personas, yeah, will take the form of these different characters to, you know, they will have a new search function, they'll offer recommendations, and they can be a fun product to people, with people to play with. I'm generally, puzzled by how infatuated the tech world is at creating these personas for people to play with. I mean, we have a billion-dollar startup character AI. You can actually put like basically tell Bing

or chat GPT to, you know, please be somebody from history and it will. And I'm sure there's like some limited appeal to that. But why does everybody seem to go to these type of persona bots as like their like number one or number two application of this gender of AI technology? You know, tech is good at building things and usually a little bit less good about sort of thinking about the applications. And I'll take on, you know, stuck in meta a little bit in part because it's just been such whiplash for me to go from being a huge, you know, meta bear last year during the legless Metaverse days to now a little bit of a bull with the stuff they're doing around AI. But, you know, I remember way back in the day, Facebook would be like, hey, we're going to

show you pictures of somebody you haven't talked to in a while. And here's all these old pictures of you with them and them that you're no longer tagged with. And it's like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, that's called an ex-boyfriend. And just because you've been with Priscilla since you're like 19, right, doesn't mean that like you can't like hire people who understand this. Right. And so there's always been a little bit of that uncanny valley sort of human element that that is missing in a lot of these sort of tech conversations. And I think this is another example. Like, her is not a love story.

It is a dystopian, depressing story about, like, a horrible potential future. And the fact that there's going to be lots of people listening to this who totally disagree with me on that says, like, a lot about the industry that we're in. And so I, yeah, there's a lot. I mean, it's already happening. There's a lot of dudes falling in love with their chat pots. You know, I guess anything that helps cure talking. toxic masculinity. The problem is they're probably making chat bots that never interrupt them,

never talk back and always tell them what they make for dinner. So, you know, it's, it's weird. And I don't know if it's the most useful thing. I also don't know, to be totally honest, if it's the smartest thing. I have done a lot in crypto for a long time. And to some extent, I think that the generative AI should feel a little bit like, you know, what I think some of the smartest people in crypto have broadly always felt, which is you shouldn't have to know you're using it. If you're, you know, using the blockchain to settle some contract and some like middle layer of whatever, like, you know, if Plaid ends up like embedding blockchain at some point to like keep an immutable ledger of whatever, you probably don't want Plaid to rebrand as a blockchain

company, at least in 23, maybe in 21. I think AI is kind of the same way, which is that like we use AI constantly in technologies from driving cars to, you know, using like almost any social media platform, like any, you know, things like this. We're on a streaming platform right now. There's tons of AI that's built into things because it makes it easier to use the technology. And for the most part, you don't know about it or need to know about it. I suspect that for Facebook, for meta, the killer applications around AI are going to be, you know, really smart kind of workarounds with ad targeting and like finding new products you want or content you want to see, not necessarily a bot. And to some extent that bot is probably mainly there to train you and get your data

consensually so that they don't run into some of the problems that Open AI has right now around getting sued by like the Sarah Silvermans of the world for taking that. You know, one of the most interesting things last week that came out of SNAP's earnings call that I don't think people are fully appreciating was that they are using the data from their my AI bot to target ads. And you have to, I think, oh, no, no, it's now rolled out to everyone. It used to be that if you paid, you got access to it. But it is an interesting ad targeting tool.

And those things that you're talking about, whether it's better recommendations or workarounds for Apple's ad system, like they're already in production. with meta using their artificial intelligence, not a deeply told story, but that stuff is absolutely in production. And I'm with you on that. And what do you think about their open sourcing? I mean, I think you called this like the year of Lama talking about how Lama meta's open source large language model is like the biggest power play that this company has made. Where do you see the potential there? So it's been interesting to watch AI how companies talk about AI and who talks about it publicly and who doesn't. It's, to me, like a really rough estimation of this

is that the companies that have and have, you know, the companies that like five years ago were hiring really smart AI engineers that have always sort of had this as a focus internally and that are kind of thought of as having like a, of needing a lot of tech scrutiny, so the Google's, the metas of the world, they're talking about it kind of less. And the companies that are like, wow, you know, we really wouldn't mind feeling relevant and getting a shot in the arm for a stock price, like the Intel's in the Microsoft. They're talking about it a lot. It's also notable that Microsoft talks about it a lot, but chose to do a lot of their AI development through Open AI, which is, you know, an investment of theirs, which gives them some arm's length,

deniability when Elizabeth Warren calls them in front of, you know, Congress. So it's fascinating the way people have approached it. All of that being said, I think Lama, which is the Lama 2 now, which is the large language model, you know, open source that Meta's using to, you know, sort of build the base of what will then, you know, be all their different AI applications. I think it's smart. I think open source is smart in this space. I think that you get often, you know, bigger data sets, better results, you know, you get interesting things that other people build that you wouldn't otherwise know or see and you don't have to pay them. I think it gives you a little bit plausible deniability and arm's lengthness, you know, when, when things inevitably, you know,

Gary Gensler started talking about AI. So somebody's heads going to roll eventually, you know. And so I think that that's all good. And I also think that it shows that like there was a moment. I can't imagine like Mark Zuckerberg's basically our age, right? Like I think he's still not 40. And so he's like, and his 30s, he has like, you know, happy. family like all the things like he has you know he's literally richer than god like i've seen god's bank balance he is richer like but he still like shows up at work every day and keeps working and like you know it's like treating it like a company that he needs to have a job at and so there was a and he has so much control over the board and all of that for a moment there is there was a time

during the legless metaverse days where he really might kind of run this thing into the ground, right? In the ground means like being like, you know, a $10 billion company, but it's like he actually might do this because he can and he, you know, he can stay irrational far longer than the markets, you know, can stay solvent on him. And I thought he might do it. There was no sort of pulling out of that death spiral other than him deciding like, hey, this is a terrible idea. I'm going to go back to like building stuff people actually want that will actually make me money and shareholders' money. So, like, props to them for doing that, and I think Lama is a huge part of it. Well, what do you think about Threads then? I mean, Threads is part of this revitalization

of meta, but there was just some data from Censor Tower that CNN reported. Sensor Towers like a third-party service that monitors traffic and usage of apps, that Threads daily active users fell to $8 million on July 31st, down 82% from launch. And the daily average time spent fell to 2.9 minutes a day on August 1st, down from 19 at launch. So clearly that app is having some retention issues. Do you think it's just a blip or is this, you know, speaking of death spirals, when I read those numbers, that's where I go. Even though I have, like I've said it before, I have a pretty active community on

threads, but it does not seem to be a good sign for the app if it's losing that many users that quickly. Twitter became sort of this town square political front page. media thing. And it wasn't always that, but it became that. And, you know, you can, you can port that interface, but the Instagram community definitely is a little bit different than the Twitter community. And I also think that like the use case right now, right, is a little bit different. To some extent, I think threads would have maybe had a more seamless transition to a real, like, solid Twitter actual sort of replacement.

If they had launched sooner, I think, you know, I saw some data point the other day that, like, 60% of American adults who use Twitter had, like, taken a break in the past year. And, like, I know, I mean, you had asked me to come on the show earlier, and I missed it because I don't check Twitter anymore, right? And so I, like, log on every couple of weeks, retweet a bunch of stuff, and that's it. And so, like, I think that part of it is that people got exhausted by Twitter and all the changes, you know, especially around just knowing who's who. I don't have to agree with you on Twitter, but I want to know who I'm talking to. That was stripped, you know, with the verification changes, all of that.

Right. But even still threads, like I said, like this, the data does not look good. Yeah. And I guess my deeply meandering point on that is just that. I think that it's going to threads is not an one-to-one Twitter replacement. I think it's going to become a different thing. I would argue that you should flip the data, which is that the initial bump in like downloads was unprecedented and didn't ever seem like it was going to be sustainable because nobody knew what they were doing there. Social media networks functionally never start out

with a giant bang, is it hard to come back from a dip? Yes, but you have to remember that they haven't done much to like force it into your other sort of meta touch points, right? It's not in your WhatsApp feed or it's not in WhatsApp, you know, as a status message. It's not in, you can import it to Instagram, but it's not super seamless. It's not on Facebook. So as those things become more integrated, I'm far from counting it out. The other thing, thing we keep in mind is that advertisers are going to love it because advertisers are very comfortable with Instagram. Yeah. We just had a story on that. They're just dying to advertise with threads. Exactly. So I wouldn't count them out, but I don't think it was ever going to be, you know, the day one

downloads, we're ever going to stay consistent. I want to talk about your perspective on what the IPO market's going to look like in the next few months to a year. There's a story that you brought up that you wanted to chat about, which is that Stripe named Stefan Tomlinson, who is the formerly of confluent as its new CFO. And maybe that's a signal that the IPO market is about to heat up. And that would obviously bode well for you as an investor because, well, there's, you know, a chance for exits again, at least to the public market. So what do you think that signals? Yeah, I mean, I think that Stripe is in an interesting position. And it's fascinating. The best way to have a bellwether is to have a company that is truly indicative of the larger market it sits in.

And all of the sort of short-term IPO bellwethers are not that right. So, you know, Stripe has a massive valuation. The early employees haven't had a ton of liquidity. You know, the early investors haven't had a ton of liquidity. This is a company that a lot of people have held. You know, they waited a little too long to go public, you know, in the, and then sort of the market, you know, slowed and shut down. And so, and then, you know, FinTech has been, as a category, has had a really hard time in public markets. And even though Stripe and a firm have nothing in common, they, you know, if they end up grouped in that same category, then that's a hard comp.

And so there's just a bunch of weird quirks, like IPOs that are like 100 million, like these huge IPOs, like the Uber's, the Facebooks, typically don't, you know, pop on day one and then just keep climbing. There's usually sort of a dip. There's a lockup. There's all these, you know, now we're going into an election year. And, and, you know, that, like, the credit ratings of America aren't great. Like, all of these things are sort of externalities. And it doesn't change the fact that Stripe has investors who want liquidity. Stripe has early employees who want liquidity.

Stripe has, you know, Stripe probably wants liquidity. So at some point they have to go. And it looks like they're gearing up to do that in the next six months, certainly next 12 months, whether or not it's an idea of time. So if they IPO, does that sort of open the floodgates for the bunch of other private tech companies to say, all right, we're going in? I mean, that'll be the question, right?

There are a couple others, you know, that we were talking about like Arm, which used to be a public company and then, you know, was taken private by soft. and they're in AI, so they're an obvious one to go public. Just the fact that SoftBank owns them is massively boosted, you know, SoftBank stock over the last six months. And so they probably want to get out sooner rather than later because AI is hot now and it may not stay hot, you know, but that's also a little bit of a different question. And then you have companies, you know, like potentially Starlink or SpaceX,

where, you know, to some extent those IPOs could be driven by, you know, Elon's need for liquidity because you just burnt $56 billion or whatever on Twitter. And so they're not a monolith, but I do think we're going to start seeing more IPOs. And the bankers are dying for them because that's how they make money. And how could that change the way that we see companies like yours invest in startups? I do really early stage. So I do precede. I'm pretty immune to the vagaries of the IPO market for another three or four years.

Right. The rest of your counterparts. For later stage venture funds, I think that there's two questions. You know, the secondaries market is definitely heating up a little bit more. I'm seeing more names, you know, kind of get passed around. And a lot of them are still discounts or flat to the last rounds they did in like 20, 21. But you're starting to see a little bit more of that. A lot of that is, you know, early employees and early angel investors selling to family offices. but, you know, I think that a lot of these big tech, a lot of these big funds would like

liquidity, but they don't need it right away. Sequoia is not going to go out of business because the IPO market shut down for a year or two. The mid-sized funds have a bit of a quandary on their hands because they can't raise more money often until they've returned money if they're an earlier fund and if they yolo'd a bunch of it and, you know, crypto and tokens and I, like, whatever, then it's going to be harder for them to do that. But a lot of those, those mid-size sort of 21 vintage year funds are also just kind of dead in the water. And the founders are like enjoying their fees while they last for the next handful of years. And they know they're going to have to do something else.

Sarah Kustis here with us. She's the managing director of Cleo Capital. And the other side of this break, we're going to talk about World Coin, which I have so many questions about and then date me docs. Are Google Docs going to end up displacing the dating apps? Sarah is someone who's had some experience in this area working with the companies and I can't wait to ask her about this. All that and more coming up right after this.

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So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Sarah Koontz, the managing director of Cleo Capital. Sarah, got to get your perspective on World Coin. I mean, you know, I have a sort of cursory understanding of what's happening. People are like going up and scanning their retinas and getting tokens. I mean, this is from rest of world this week.

Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious projects to emerge from the blockchain boom using a combination of cryptocurrency and biometric registration to create a new kind of global identity service. You said you've touched crypto in the past. And this is obviously something that Sam Altman is doing so it's worth paying attention to. But what's happening here? I feel like it's a company that also is sort of of like a subplot in an Austin Powers movie and like a bad thing. But come on, it's like it's being done by Sam Altman. Like it has to be somewhat something, I don't know.

Maybe I shouldn't say it, but it has to be something serious. Right. It's being done by Sam Altman. So it's highly unlikely that it's like, you know, a Russia trying to double feature. Right. That'll give you. They hack it. Well, I don't know.

Right. So I'm not, I will tell you this. I am not a big retina person. And that sounds like literally the dumbest phrase anyone's ever said. But what I mean by that is that I don't love. So the idea behind retina scanning, right? And you can do it with things like clear, all of that, you know, at the airport is that it's like this really secure sort of completely immutable thing that's only you. The problem is that like social security number, somebody steals it.

It's a pain. You can get a new one. I don't want a new retina. I like my retinas. I mean, I don't love them. I just had LASIC. But, like, I don't want a new one, right? So for me, the ease with which we've gotten used to giving away our biometric data is a little bit creepy.

I don't use a lot of biometric data, like logins and stuff. I think that we're a little bit flipping about that. Why? Although it does remind me of the thing in men in black where they have to, like, wipe their fingerprints on that ball and it, like, burns their fingerprints off or, like, one of those Will Smith actually. But, like, a lot of this stuff is super convenient. Like you look at your iPhone, it opens or you put, I have like the MacBook where I put my fingerprint on and it unlocks. And I mean, I hope like no one else is getting access to that. So what is the risk?

You have to watch poker face. It's this like amazing Emmy nominated, Natasha, what's your name? Anyway, there's an episode in it that's all about this. And like the lengths that people will go to like get your biometric data, even like, after you're dead or gone to be able to log into your things. It's totally creepy, but fun and cool. So watch it. The risk is obvious, right? The risk is like, you know, well, the risk is obvious,

which is losing control of your biometric data. Biometric data unlike a password is incredibly hard to reset, right? And once people have it, they have it forever. And I don't actually know what's retinas, but there are some things where you could also question, like even like your descendants, right? So like your fake, baby in the cruise thing from like 25 hours ago, right?

Has survived that ride, which is great news. Survive that ride. We love that, right? So maybe, I don't know, right, because this has never mattered before. Maybe you have a really similar retina print as your parent, right? And then now all of a sudden, like, you know, if you have, like, where does this go, right? And the risk is obvious, which is like your identity is often tied to, I mean, one, it's your identity and like, whatever.

Two, it's often tied to, you know, your finances, everything else, your ability to work, travel, like all of those things. That's not great. Two, it also is a very Gattaca vibe. And like that movie was dark. Two, although actually everybody does the leg lengthening stuff now too. So maybe we just live in Gattaca. However, I'll get to two, which is that the reward is so unclear right now. Right. So if somebody comes to me and says, Sarah, I will give you a hundred million dollars. for your retina scan and I can use it however I want in the future. I promise that I won't, you know, frame you for any crimes. Okay, like that might make it harder to travel. I don't know, this, that, but $100 million. People are doing this for free. People think that they're going to get like $20 and then they find out they're not. And they're like, well, okay, I used chat GPT once.

Here you go, Sam Altman. Well, that is what happened. Yeah, that's what's happening with World Coin. They're getting like actual coins that have like a value of $50. No, no, no, no, but they're not, right? So people were, but then in the U.S. and stuff, there's one, like, right now in New York or something that I read about, and they're actually not. So people show up, some people showed up thinking that. And it's not false advertising.

I'm not saying that. People thought that because they had heard that in other places. And then they found out, oh, actually, you know, this one today, we're not doing that. And they're still doing it. So it's like, you know, it's, it's weird and creepy. And like, when you don't have firm, you're getting paid. What is this stuff even meant to do? So let's say you register in the World Coin database, you've given the scan of your retina.

What do you do with it? That's a great question. I think it'd be a great question to ask all the people who are giving them the scans of their retinas. You know, in theory, it becomes just like, you know, sort of an Apple pay or, you know, all the things we're talking about. You go through clear or whatever. It becomes just sort of this like super seamless way to get around the world to pay. for things to, you know, log into things to all of that because, you know, think about how fast to be to board a plane if you don't have to scan a boarding pass because they're scanning your

right. So this is like the global database of your retina that you could use to interplay with all these different services. And who has it, right? And what are they monetizing it for? And what rights did you give up by agreeing to do it? And I feel like nobody knows the answer to that. They're just kind of doing it. Jeez. Okay. All right. I'm not getting my retina scan. After having this conversation, I'm not doing it any time soon. least not for a fake $20. So, okay, last story I want to talk to you about, you've worked with Bumble before. There's a great story in the New York Times this week about how people are getting sick of dating

apps. And they're creating these things called Date Me Docs. And the Docs are basically like they're Google Docs where they list like who they are and, you know, they basically put it online and send it out. And The Times has this example of this one person who created a Date Me Doc. doc and has gone on 15 dates with men that reached out after reading it. I'm curious, like, what do you think about the rise of these documents? And, I mean, I can understand people getting fed up with the dating apps and trying to do

something else. So what's your thought about it? Yeah. I mean, you have to put your retina scan in there so people can decide if they really want to date you. That should be table stakes for sure. People's sake. You know, I think that, one, don't put in your dog's name and your mom. made a name or they really will steal your identity but you know it there's two sort of competing

impulses here um one is the impulse to be seen and known and look i want you to know more about me i want you to not just judge me based on my looks or my you know my job or my alma mater or whatever right my age whatever it is um i get that right you want people to know you see you and kind of say like hey you know Is this their potential fit here, right? And that is a good impulse. The not so great impulse is it's like a very kind of internety, like, you know, kind of bypassing of like, oh, I don't want to sit down with you or go up to you at a park or at a party or a workout class or in an office and like talk to you and get to know you and maybe face rejection and maybe have an awkward conversation or have to politely tell you no thanks. And obviously for women, saying no to men can be incredibly, you know, scary because the world's a scary place. But, you know, instead of doing all of that, instead of sort of dealing with you as a person, I'm going to give you this thing.

And then ideally, you like it and then you send me your thing back. And then, you know, we can sort of meet up and, you know, we're perfect for each other on paper. right and like one it's sort of a throwback to how dating apps or dating sites historically were the like funny efficient stuff for your questions i don't i think to the extent that it shows a real interest and appetite for people to have meaningful relationships that is great i think to the extent that it shows that people really want to kind of bypass the messiness of getting to know somebody um that's probably not going to help them long-term achieve that first goal. There was some data in the New York Times story that said that the use of dating apps is declining in some areas.

So do you, do you, I mean, obviously it seems like a reaction to what's going on on the dating apps. So I'm curious, like what you think the state of dating apps is right now. And, you know, I mean, I guess like, like I said earlier, I understand the, the, the reticence for some people to get on those things. and sort of this makes sense like the date me docs make sense in some way as an answer because it you know it it requires people to do a little bit more work to discover and read and so it makes the person on the other end feel less disposable than you would as like a card in the stack of Tinder yeah so I actually have a sort of alternate you know I think a lot of the dating app decline is actually coincided with you know me no longer being single and I I do apologize to the big

dating no i i think congratulations to you so you you just got engaged did you uh did you meet your fiance on a dating app or a real life or i did not although in in very bumble fashion i made the first move but we were actually uh at a at a party at one of my investors houses uh and i was like chatting with somebody uh in the kitchen like an older guy and i was like oh you know do you do you know anybody here who's single because i run a venture fund and time i was single so i everybody i met I would ask them, you know, tell them, hey, I need to raise money for my fund and I need a husband, right? Everybody goes, help me with the fund. You know, he said actually my, my son's over there and, you know, he's six five has a PhD from MIT and I was like, okay, like literally say less

and walked up to him and introduced myself. And now, you know, a little bit over a year and a half later, we're engaged. So, you know, but there are two kind of important parts about that, right? And neither of them is his height. One, like, I, I was putting myself out there, right? I was talking to a complete stranger and just asking him, you know, do you happen to know anybody at this party who's single? And I highly recommend that because even if he didn't, it's a great icebreaker, you know, conversation. Like, it's just, I like doing, I liked doing that, right? Two, I also knew what I was looking for. And so I'm five, six. I don't care about height. What I did care about was I'm, as you know, if you've hung in with us this long on this podcast, I talk

a lot. I have a lot of opinions. Like, I'm, you know, often a mile wide and an inch deep on things. I like somebody who's the opposite of me. I need somebody who's, like, grounded and thoughtful and smart. And, like, having a PhD from MIT doesn't guarantee any of those things, but it does probably mean that you don't spend your time, like, yelling into your ringlight and your Zoom on podcast and TV. And that's, like, not a bad start, right? So he had said, oh, yeah, my son's great. He's a, you know, surfer and influencer with like a YouTube show. That's probably not a fit for me, although I have friends that I would have been like, oh, maybe I can set them up. Right. So the thing you do love about these docs and I'll go back in the dating apps is like

knowing yourself and knowing what you're looking for, I think is super important. And then also understanding that like every date is a bad date until it's a good date. Literally every single first date that you went on until you're with the person that you feel like, oh, well, this is really good for a really long time is going to feel like not if you're you know fatigued about dating apps about telling people like you know even in the profile like you know would love to you know jump on a video call or would love to do a phone call we'd love to exchange numbers sooner rather than later and just be clear about what you need and setting that boundary so that you enjoy the dating up experience. But like, ask strangers if they know anybody who's single, go to random parties you get invited

to, like, join a sports league, go to a workout class, whatever it is. And if you know what you're looking for, it's a lot faster to like sort through the like four to six billion people on earth who might be, you know, potentially a fit for you. All right. Sarah Kuntz, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks everybody for listening. you here as always on our Friday news recaps. Schedule for next week, David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, joins us on Wednesday for his first podcast interview as CEO. And then next week on Friday,

Julia Borstein will be here to break down the news. Great CNBC correspondent. I can't wait to speak with her. Thanks again for listening. Thank you to Sarah. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you.