Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/08 – Tesla Goes Texas; Apple Goes Hollywood

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, October 8th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tech Real Estate Report. Tesla leaves for Texas while Apple rocks up in Hollywood. YouTube is going to stop doing those year-end rewind videos. A developer says Facebook banned him for life because they didn't like

Starting point is 00:00:51 his app. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions where we ask the question, is Google's famous hiring gauntlet broken? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I thought they had already done this, but I guess the move was only Elon's at this point. Tesla now, though, is officially moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, becoming perhaps the most high-profile Silicon Valley Company to Jump Ship, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Chief Executive Elon Musk announced the move from Tesla's Austin Area Factory, which the company began building last year and where it held its annual shareholder meeting Thursday. He added that Tesla plans to expand its activities in California, but that the company's ability

Starting point is 00:01:35 to scale up in the San Francisco Bay Area is limited, quote, you go to our Fremont factory, it's jammed, he said. We're like spam in a can, end quote. Mr. Musk said last year that he had moved to Texas himself personally, where his rocket company space exploration technologies or SpaceX has major operations. He previously likened California to a sports team that had grown complacent after a winning streak. Tesla is following the footsteps of companies including Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, a descendant of what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started in a Palo Alto garage, and Oracle, which moved their corporate headquarters to Texas earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr. Musk nodded to some of the challenges of the Bay Area saying, quote, it's tough for people to afford houses,

Starting point is 00:02:22 and a lot of people have to come in from far away, end quote. Austin, however, isn't without its complications for Mr. Musk and others. In February, swaths of the state, including Austin, lost power in a fluke storm, something Mr. Musk experienced firsthand. Quote, I was actually in Austin for that snowstorm in a house with no lights, no power, no heating, no internet. Couldn't even get to a food store, he said. Another problem? Texas state law bars car companies from selling vehicles directly to consumers, as is Tesla's business model. At the shareholder meeting, Mr. Musk also shared some updates on Tesla's business. While Tesla overcame snarled global supply chains to deliver a record number of vehicles in the third quarter, Mr. Musk indicated that parts shortages have limited the company's

Starting point is 00:03:03 ability to deliver on new long-promise models. This year has been just a constant struggle with parts supply, he said. Tesla is likely to begin producing its cyber truck pickup late next year, with higher volume output coming in 2023, Mr. Musk said. In January, he had been optimistic that the company would be able to begin delivering a few of the pickup trucks to customers by the end of 2021. He said he hoped the company would be producing its long-delayed semi-trailer truck and a revamped version of its roadster sports car in 2023. We should be through our severe supply chain shortages in 23, he said, end quote. But at the same time, Apple is doubling down on California, just not in Silicon Valley so much.

Starting point is 00:03:46 Apple announced it is building two new facilities in Los Angeles, totaling more than 550 square feet, which will serve as its headquarters in the region, because Hollywood is increasingly part of Apple's plans, right. Quoting variety. Apple signaling its major entertainment industry ambitions is significantly boosting its LA footprint. The tech giant said it's building two new facilities along the border of Culver City and the city of Los Angeles that will serve as its headquarters for the region. The complex will encompass more than 550,000 square feet once completed. And Apple Rep said it will be a mixed use facility, but did not have details on what kind of production studio space

Starting point is 00:04:25 will be part of the development. Construction is currently underway. Apple declined to provide an estimate for when the new buildings will be operational. Quote, we're in the early planning stages and will have more to share down the line, the rep said. The new campus is located along National, Venice, and Washington Boulevards. According to Apple, the two facilities will be connected by a shared wall. Apple opened its first offices in Culver City in 2014 and currently has more than 1,500 employees working in the L.A. area. In 2018, Apple leased a 128,000-square-foot office building in Culver City at 8,7. 777 Washington Boulevard, which HBO had previously planned to occupy, that is about two blocks

Starting point is 00:05:04 away from the new complex. Employees working in the Culver City location include members of its Apple TV Plus and Apple Music Teams, engineers, artificial intelligence slash machine learning researchers, and staffers in other divisions, end quote. YouTube says it will stop making year-end rewind videos and plans to look instead toward creators doing it for them, quoting Tube Filter. The decision was made on what would be the 10th anniversary of Rewind. YouTube says it is not abandoning the project because of the widespread criticism it is received on more recent efforts, but because its platform has become so massive that it is impossible to encapsulate the vastness and diversity within a minutes-long compilation. Accordingly, YouTube says it will be passing the baton to creators who have increasingly been producing their own homespun versions of YouTube Rewind in recent years.

Starting point is 00:05:59 Quote, since Rewind started in 2011, we have seen creators from Mr. Beast, 54 million views, El Rubius OMG, and SlayPoint, and so many more, create their own end-of-year videos uniquely capturing the year from each of their perspectives. A YouTube spokesperson tells Tube Filter, it'll continue to be inspiring to see the myriad of ways, the most creative content producers in the world, our YouTube creators, encapsulate the end of the year in their video recaps as YouTube retires its own rewind video, and quote. While acknowledging that creators are the best way for rewind to move forward, YouTube won't be funding any of these efforts, though it will be promoting them on its social channels, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:45 A developer claims that Facebook banned him for life and threatened to sue him after he made Unfollow Everything a browser extension to help people use Facebook less, quoting the developer Louis Barclay in a piece he wrote in Slate, quote, I had the idea for unfollow everything a few years ago when I realized you don't actually need to have a news feed. If you unfollow everything, all of your friends, groups, and pages, your newsfeed ends up empty. This isn't the same as unfriending. If you unfollow your friends and groups, you're still connected to them and you can look up their profiles if you want. But by unfollowing everything, you eliminate your news feed.

Starting point is 00:07:25 This leaves you free to use Facebook without the feed or to more actively curate it by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts you really want to see. I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically. Overnight, my Facebook addiction became manageable. When I unfollowed everything for the first time, I did it manually. I spent hours using a Facebook provided feature to click unfollow on each of my friends, groups, and pages. I quickly realized that very few people would go to the same trouble, so I coded a simple tool that would automate the process. In July 2020, I published it to the Chrome Store where people could download it for free. Unfollow everything started taking off. People loved it. Thousands of people got rid of their news feed using it. Reviews included comments like, I am officially not addicted to Facebook thanks to you. I received emails from people telling me that using the tool had changed their lives.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Then, a few months ago, Facebook sent me a cease and desist letter. The company demanded that I take down the tool. It also told me that it had permanently disabled my Facebook account, an account that I'd had for more than 15 years, and that was my primary way of staying in touch with family and friends around the world. Pointing to a provision in its terms of service that purports to bind even former users of Facebook, Facebook also demanded that I never again create a tool that interacts with Facebook or its many other services in any way. These demands seemed outrageous to me. They seemed outrageous to lawyers, I consulted from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and in the UK. But my options were limited. I'm a UK resident, so a lawsuit against Facebook would probably have played out in a UK court where I would have been personally on the hook for Facebook's litigation costs if I lost.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Facebook is a trillion-dollar company. I couldn't afford that risk, so unfollow everything no longer exists, end quote. Didn't Facebook promise a clear history feature a few years ago? Zuck himself announced it, saying, quote, you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. Well, as best as I can determine when that feature actually came out, it was just basically a clear your cookies for ad tracking purposes feature. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And if you can remember all the way back to the start of this week, you'll remember that big news was the global outage of basically all of Facebook's properties. We joked here in the States about how Facebook and Instagram were down and maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't,

Starting point is 00:10:10 and maybe it was just annoying. But overseas, WhatsApp is the main thing. And I know that people were finding it a more serious thing than maybe we were in the States, especially in the global south, the outage through lives and businesses into turmoil. So Gizmodo has a piece that's timely because it looks at how WhatsApp is really the Facebook property that took over the world. In 2004, the same year, Skype introduced the ability to call people's cell phones and landlines. International carrier traffic started tanking, and that traffic kept on tanking as more entrance came into the mobile messaging space, including WhatsApp in 2009 and Facebook Messenger in 2011. For the first time in recent memory, residents in many of the regions around the world

Starting point is 00:10:54 finally had a reliable and affordable way to keep in touch locally with family living abroad. All they needed was a cheap device and some sort of internet connection. Naturally, telecoms were scared S-less over all of this. After a few years of realizing that there was no way to compete with free, they begrudgingly opened up to lucrative partnerships with these app providers. Based on those deals, some telecos stopped counting apps like WhatsApp and Skype as part of their customer's data usage, or by offering these customers' access to a slew of apps known as a bundle for a set price every month. These sorts of partnerships

Starting point is 00:11:30 have kept on thriving in the year since, in some cases overtaking typical SMS services as people's preferred way to chat. And because WhatsApp had a two-year head start on Facebook Messenger, not to mention compatibility with a ton of different mobile hardware, WhatsApp was getting more partnerships and going further with them. So Facebook being Facebook did what it usually does in these sorts of situations. It bought WhatsApp in 2014 for a solid $16 billion plus $3 billion in stock for founders and employees and kept striking up those partnerships in the years since. And with that, it bought into a user base that consists of much of the global South, end quote. Bloomberg takes a look at how, and I did not know this, Brazil's central bank built one of those

Starting point is 00:12:14 mobile payments super apps that were always talking about startups trying to emulate. But again, this wasn't done by a startup, it was done by the Brazilian Central Bank. This app, Pix, now has 110 million users and it didn't even exist a year ago. Quote, Pix, a system which allows fast money transfers over smartphones, has become ubiquitous in the 11 months since it was launched by Brazil's central bank. All that's needed to send cash to someone is a simple key they've set up, such as an email address or phone number. Similar to the privately owned Zell in the U.S., Pix works through multiple apps from banks and other digital wallet services. It's already been used at least once by 110 million Brazilians, and about $89 billion has moved through the network.

Starting point is 00:12:59 Brazil now registers more instant transfers than the U.S. The launch of PICS turned out to be well-timed. With businesses closed during the pandemic, the use of cash at points of sale decreased by 25% in 2020, according to a report from Technology Consultants FIS. Informal work boomed, accounting for 80, percent of the new jobs added in Latin America's largest economy in the first three months of 2021, and Picks made paying people digitally almost as easy as using paper money. We expected considerable acceptance from individuals, and we knew companies would come later on, says Carlos Eduardo Brandt, the chief of management and operations for PICS, but in terms of magnitude, it surprised us, end quote. Next, the substack ramp recap has an interview with one of the dudes who

Starting point is 00:13:47 literally wrote the book on WeWork, the cult of we, the book is called, and they talk about something that I had been hearing about obliquely. WeWork is apparently coming back, we back, if you will, via a SPAC. It turns out that since we last talked about, WeWRQ, they apparently have right-sized their business into possibly the sort of business it should have been all along. Question. We-Work just announced recently, if approved, they are planning to go public via SPAC. has their business model changed enough to excite investors the second time around? Answer. Certainly their marketing has changed, so we no longer see them saying their mission is to

Starting point is 00:14:26 elevate the world's consciousness, and they've done a ton of cost-cutting. In terms of the basic business model, it's largely the same lease arbitrage, sans surf pools and elementary schools, but without the unsustainable growth. Long-term, they say they want to do more management deals, which means we work wouldn't take on the risk of a lease. they'd be paid to operate a space like Marriott is paid to run some landlord's hotel. Question, how do you think their public debut will be viewed or welcomed by investors? Answer, everything works at some valuation. It's really hard to say. The uncertainty over the

Starting point is 00:15:00 future of the office isn't ideal for them. Perhaps there will be more clarity about office demand once people's kids are vaccinated and vaccinated parents have few health reasons to say we shouldn't return, end quote. Then remember Google's notoriously difficult hiring process, all those mind puzzles round after round of interviews, well, some people inside Google are coming to believe that the whole process, its vaunted recruiting system, is broken. It's too much, quoting protocol. No one interviewed for this piece, and almost no one in the many Twitter and Reddit threads discussing issues with Google interviews at great length, blamed specific recruiters or

Starting point is 00:15:40 interviewers for any of their particular issues with the process. None of the people I felt had an agenda or were kind of aware of how the whole thing behaved. They kind of became cogs as part of the machine and nobody knows how the whole thing works, Watt said. The Google process can take many months for some people and demand months of prep work beforehand, making it sometimes inaccessible for people in dire financial need, recently unemployed or working another demanding job at the time. This inaccessibility could eliminate the types of people from the process who would be otherwise qualified for the job. And these candidates may also provide the diversity in experience and socioeconomic background that Google professes to seek, end quote. Siri turns 10 years old this month and The Verge looks at, well, looks at why Siri seems to feel like a completely stagnant project at this point.

Starting point is 00:16:35 A decade later, the sheen has worn off Siri's star. It is such a letdown was how Phil Schiller described the promise of voice interfaces in the past when Siri was launched, and such a description could easily be applied to Apple's contribution to the genre today. Everyone who uses Siri has their own tales of frustration, times when they've been surprised not by the intelligence, but by the stupidity of Apple's assistant, when it fails to carry out a simple command or mishears a clear instruction. And while voice interfaces have indeed become widespread, Apple, despite being first to market, longer leads. Its humble personal assistant, as it called it, remains humble indeed, inferior to Google Assistant on mobile and outmaneuvered by Amazon's Alexa in the home.

Starting point is 00:17:20 Looking back on a decade of development for Apple's personal assistant, there's one question that seems worth asking. Hey, Siri, what happened? End quote. And finally, if you're not at least sampling Squid Game on Netflix by this point, you're really missing out on what has become possibly Netflix's biggest ever hit. Vulture looks at how the show has become a global phenomenon and how it fits into Netflix's overall global strategy. Quote, local language Netflix originals thriving globally may not be a new concept in 2021, but the speed and scale with which Squid Game has expanded suggests that the platform's capacity to create its own franchises from content grown anywhere is getting exponentially

Starting point is 00:18:04 stronger, vindicating a strategy that execs at the streamer started shaping years ago. When I spoke to Ted Sarandos in 2018 for a series of stories about how Netflix operated, he told me that, as happy as he was with the early success of non-English shows such as dark and money heist, he was shooting for something bigger, quote, the exciting thing for me would be if the next stranger things came from outside America, he said. Right now, historically, nothing of that scale has ever come from anywhere but Hollywood, end quote. Serendos and other execs believed that would become more likely as the streamer's base of subscribers in non-English-speaking countries expanded and even surpassed its core membership

Starting point is 00:18:44 in the States. When that happened, they theorized the language of a production would become almost irrelevant to its prospects for success. It turned out to be a pretty smart theory, one that paved the way for Squid Game to become a whale of a hit, end quote. That's all for today and for this week. No bonus episodes at all this weekend. But if you haven't caught up on the World Cup of Entrepreneur episodes, check the back catalog for those. I will be back on Monday, despite the U.S. holiday. So talk to you then.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/08 – Tesla Goes Texas; Apple Goes Hollywood

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