Tech Brew Ride Home - (Spc Cst) The Zoom Platform Road Map With @ross

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Plus, the Hyper fund from Product Hunt, Automattic's acquisition game, and Twitter tests downvotes? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. So welcome, everybody. This is the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Wednesday, July 21st. I can't believe it, that half the year is more than half the year is gone.

I'm not going to think too hard about that. But we have an amazing show today. I'm just, there's so much that happened today. And I kind of hate that this happens every day that we do one of these things, but I don't hate it because there's so much to go over and to discuss. But today in particular, there was just so many things that were lighting up for me. as I was trying to make sense of the news. And anyways, today's going to be great.

It's also, oh, yeah, go. It's another day where half of this I didn't even get to talk about today. So, you know, it's almost like the TechMeme Right Home podcast is almost going to be like twice a day. It's like morning and evening, like news, you know, like an actual commute show. That's been brought up before, but there's only one of you. I know. Yeah. That's how it is.

Well, one thing before, actually, this dropped. After, I believe after you published, if I recall correctly, Clubhouse is now open for everybody. I feel like I have to bring that up. I have to mention that. We got our start. Actually, this show got our start on Clubhouse. So it is a big moment, I suppose, for it finally to be out to the world. I do think that from a product development life cycle perspective, and Ross, you can actually speak to this as well.

You know, the fact that they went from more or less zero product to, you know, a lot of 1.0, well, a year and a half. It's a good amount of time, and the product is pretty consistent with where it was. But obviously, they've scaled it. They've grown it. They've added a lot of moderation features and tools. And now they have removed that invite wall. And so now anybody can get it on iOS or Android, and we'll see.

There's a lot of, I guess, questions about retention and about whether it's going to continue to grow. But maybe it's one of those troughs of disqualify. despair and then it'll rise and rise over the subsequent weeks, months, and years. Anything you want to say about that, Brian? Not really, except for the fact that, yeah, this is where we were exactly a year ago, where you invited me where we were in these sort of audio rooms and there was like 5,000 people in the beta and things like that. And it seemed magical, and it still seems magical.

I suppose, but either that or it's just evolved into an easier way for podcasters to get people in to do podcasting, as opposed to what did I used to do? Well, it was mostly basically Skype that I did all this stuff years ago for. Actually, that's a good point. I do know that for remote podcasters, like there were a few browser-based things that would sort of record locally. and then upload it. There always have been, right, it's just always the thing of, I mean, shit, when did I start?

2014 podcasting. So it was like, oh my God. You had to find a tool that most people could understand or use, and then half the time, all those years ago, you had to even walk people through how Skype worked and things like that.

So, right, you know, if, I know this is being, I'm not trying to, like, belittle what has been achieve in clubhouse. But look, the idea that for an audio medium, you can just be like, hey, open this app on your phone and then let's have a conversation. Hey, this is better than those days. I mean, and I, yeah, I'm going to jump on that point a little bit because for those who have been listening to podcasts for a long time and are in that world and do the production and all that, getting one of these shows together can be, you know, quite an elaborate affair. The fact that I was able to see that Ross had launched these things on productant today. And then I reached out via

Twitter and was able to get him on this show to make this happen. And of course, Ross was able to, you know, check with comms quickly and get the affirmative and come on. I think it's just it's, that is like super magical. And, you know, for me, it's a great way of putting the things in context that we're seeing out the world that used to be happening with these big corporate, you know, orifices, as Steve Jobs, I think said, where you just would get the excrements, you know, from what they produced, and that was it. And if you didn't like it, too bad. But now we're in direct bidirectional conversation with the people who are making these tools that we're using on a daily basis. It's just, for me, that's part of the magic of both this format and the things we talk

about. And it's a little meta, but anyways, I think it is worth pointing out that major shift in difference in access. Okay. So actually, speaking about this to some degree, I guess I'll, I will segue into the launch of Hyper. I am hoping that at some point we can get Josh Buckley, who's the CEO of Product Hunt. He's been in that position, I guess, since the beginning of the year or so. And I've been kind of waiting to see what they'll do and what's going to happen next. And when I had a conversation with Josh, when he joined Product Hunt, he did allude to wanting to do this kind of accelerator program. And Hyper is that.

So Hyper launched. They like Andresen Horowitz, they got a very fancy domain. They got hyper.com. I went and looked in the Wayback Machine, and it was not very well used for a very long time. So I'm sure they got it for a pretty reasonable deal. But I think what they're doing is super interesting. So let me just explain kind of like their model. So their model is it's kind of, I think it's an eight-week program.

They will invite a small number of companies in. They will invest $300,000 in each of those companies. and they will do these programs four times a year. And what I found was the most interesting. So also they said that this was inspired by Product Hunt. It's not like the venture arm of Product Hunt, although the relationship, I'm sure we'll see how that plays out. It probably means that Product Hunt will be top of funnel.

It'll be a source for finding companies and founders, but it also allows them to have the flexibility of going broader outside of the product ton ecosystem without maybe hurting people's feelings. I don't want to speak on their behalf. I don't know anything that isn't public knowledge, but I think that there's a little bit of wiggle room in there, although it's being run by people who run product hunt. It's not product hunt itself.

And the things that they are focusing on, which I think this is, I guess, the thing that I found most interesting, because capital has become something of a commodity, is that they're helping companies with community, distribution, talent, mentorship and fundraising. And so those are the things that, you know, Josh and the team and the folks who are working on that think are the most important and the most strategically, I guess, challenging to accomplish in today's market and environment. It's less about the scaffolding. It's less about cloud. It's not even really about, you know, design and things like that.

Of course, design is important. But building community moats, you know, helping the talent that you attract, to grow, and to become stronger and better participants and contributors, and then getting distribution. And Protent is an angle to that. And actually, that's probably one of things that we could talk about today. I don't know, Brian, if you want to talk any more about hyper. I just thought it was super interesting now that they have that out. It's sort of one of things I've been waiting for to happen from the product end ecosystem because, of course, Angelist had acquired Protent a couple years back, but they never quite made it. it like a one-click button where, okay, I've designed and launched my product-un,

prodotent, and now I want to go raise money. And so let me go over to Angelus to make that happen. I just thought that was the most logical thing, and that didn't happen. So hyper seems like it's not quite exactly that, but it gives people, I guess, a next step. Yeah, I'm not sure, you know, again, we could ask people about like what the ultimate vision is for this. But I mean, like, this is all of the things. things that ever since there was a Y Combinator, ever since, you know, Andresen Horowitz evolved into, it's not just that we're going to give you money and sit on Sand Hill Road and like, you know, pontificate on high. It's, it's more this full service. And it's not even a full

service thing where it's like you give people. Yeah, it's more the community aspect of it. And you see that with Andreson, you see that with initialized, you see that with a whole bunch of places. But what's interesting to me is that taking the product hunt thing and piecing that into what Y Combinator did with this sort of cohort thing, with this sort of community thing. Like that is also on deck. On deck is also in the mix. Right, right, right. So it's like it's not plug and plug. like that's that's kind of reductive but it's more you come with an idea and then we've got the platform we've got the people as you say we've got the moat we've got the distribution we've got whatever you need you don't have to want for anything through the entire life cycle of your company in theory so I don't know that's like it is modern VC but it's also like you know it's it's taken people

people a little while to put all of these pieces together and think of this as the modern form of capital. You know, just to step in. Yeah, please. This is kind of a natural thing, right? Who owns Product Hunt is part of Angelist. Most, there is this long track record of people who started, you know, with blogs, like Mike Arrington and TechCrunch. Yep. Then go become early angels, BCs, etc.

They grow up in the size of their funds, et cetera. And meanwhile, all of the traditional like Series A funds are effectively becoming media companies. Yep. And some of the best sources of content about how to do entrepreneurship where 15 years ago, that content was sparse. Yeah. In fact, we had a conversation with Sonal from Future a couple weeks back and talked to all that. So I think it's it's super interesting like what you're saying, right, where there's almost like this folding over that seems to happen, you know, where you start out as a content creator, you have a

perspective, and then either, you know, money or talent or whatever flows to and through you, because you have a thesis about the future. And so it's like, let's go build that future. And then you become a fund and then you're distributing, you know, money. And then now you need to sort of create a platform to tell the story broader. And then you have a bunch of people in your portfolio. And so you have to get them out there through distribution. And so that, then you need to become more of a media company because you have to have a savvy set of publishers that understand the context and the nuance and the thrust of what you're doing that's different as opposed to, oh, it's like this thing we're already familiar with and I already know about.

And so therefore we're going to talk about it in a reductive way as opposed to maybe a way that's charting a path or course for the future. Chris, let me ask you a real quick question based on the work that you do with people that actually launch things on product and things like that. Do you, have you heard anything, has there been any like sort of kickback about this or something like that where it is sort of like, oh, this is getting professionalized or something like that? Or is the reaction so far just sort of like, okay, great, more tools and things like that? You know, if you go into Productant, and I'll have to pin the tweet actually to the hyper launch,

there were a bunch of questions, but none of them seemed to be too negative. I think a lot of people were excited and interested. Pradotent has a very international and global audience, and there's still not penetration of capital and VC across the world equally. So I think for that audience, this is yet another way for them to connect and to be recognized and to get the resources that they need, you know, to build and to grow. It's also worthwhile to note that Hyper is offering. 300k at, I believe, a 5% cut. And so that's a better deal than what YCs is offering. Yes. Well, or where a lot of even seed investments are offering right now. You know, seeds are looking for like 15, 20 even, you know. Yeah, percent. Exactly. Right. And so that's very founder friendly. And I just think they're also as a result probably going to be a bit more selective, you know, to make sure that they're betting on, you know, great opportunities. Yeah, I just, one more thing, and then we can leave this behind real quick,

because there is this whole idea that you don't, it's more of the professionalizing and the toolkitizing of this sort of early stage of funding startups, where on the other end of it, you have these solo capitalist people that are raising funds that are just doing you know like newsletters or YouTube channels and things like that and like so that that sort of goes in the opposite direction where it's just like

it is sort of more of the personal network thing except it's more of a network that's not like it used to be oh it's a network that's in Boston or in San Francisco or something but it's now more of a network that's across the internet so I don't know I've just

been like trying to I haven't heard anything negative about. I'm just wondering if we'll see anyone, if there's sort of like a, sides will be taken where it's like, well, this isn't how you want to do it. You want to be, you want to be with people you know versus these sort of like plug yourself into a toolkit thing. And maybe I'm anticipating backlash that won't happen. But yeah, I don't know. Like, things are changing in the VC market. You know, I've seen a number of memes and jokes about how, you know, everyone's going to have a venture fund in the future, essentially. And to some degree, that's true. You know, we don't think of it as a venture fund, but everyone who tips and everyone who buys badges

on Instagram is like a mini VC. They're a little mini angel investor. They're providing funding for people to do the things that they want to see in the world. And they're not expecting a return on that investment necessarily. They're just expecting more, you know, that content to be created. I wish I could remember the article, but there was an article that I was seeing recently about, especially the YouTube early stage people, it was like, well,

if you're a YouTube creator that has, I don't know, 100,000, whatever, and somebody comes in with 10 million subscribers or whatever, and they want to invest in you

for a piece of what you're doing, you should take that all day long because they can give you the distribution and things like that. So that's what I'm saying. On one end of the especially early stage round. It is the sort of, well, the solo investor thing.

And then you have things like YC and things like Hyper, where it's like, no, no, no, we have a full service toolkit for you. So it's the professionalization and the democratization that are happening at the same time, at least on this end of startups. Yeah, but it's also narrative or thesis or, you know, where I can follow Pachy McCormick or something or get into like not boring capital. Or some of the other ones that are like launching their own funds because, you know, they have an audience.

They've been writing to that audience. They've been explaining what it is that they're, you know, wanting to do and what they think, you know, where the world is going. And then they're allowing people to invest alongside them without all the, I don't know, like normal pomp and circumstance of typical VCs where there's like whining and dining and going out and like all that, you know, kind of smoke-filled room type of thing. It just feels like, especially with the pandemic, we've learned to maybe establish trust in a different way through these mediums over the last year. And in fact, okay, we've talked enough about hyper for now. Now let's switch over to Ross, because Ross has been working on and building a platform on the very tool that most of us have been establishing that trust through over the last year, which of course is Zoom. Now, I know Ross from a very, very long time ago. In fact, actually, okay, we're going to go all the way back here.

Ross is going to appreciate this. And I'm sure he's going to remember this story. But I cannot not tell this part of the story, which is that the entire, I don't want to take too much credit for anything. But the entire Web 2.0 kind of phenomenon, I feel like started in August of 2005. And again, I'm very biased. But Ross was at a wiki company back then called Social Text. And he had an office or was just about to open an office in Palo Alto. And this was, I got to say, actually around this time, probably in 2005, Tim O'Reilly's

Foo Camp event was coming up. And Tim O'Reilly is the publisher of O'Reilly Books and so on, of the Web Tool Expo and many other developer conferences and events. And he had planned this event for 200 of his friends up in Sebastopol, California. with Larry and Sergey and a lot of like, you know, big shots back then. And I knew about this event, but I, of course, was not invited. I didn't have that many friends. I didn't know anybody out here, really.

And I thought, well, you know, he's an open source guy. What if we just kind of clone his event and fork it and we'll do our own? And that event ended up being called Barcamp. And so I sort of took it upon myself with some friends to, you know, co-produce our own little open source. outpost and originally it was going to be literally camping. He was going to be a vent in the woods and at some lake in Tahoe or whatever and, you know, I of course procrastinated like I always do. And it was six days until food camp was going to happen. And like we had to have this event the same day. Like to me, this was like very important. It was like a spiritual decision that you had to make a decision.

You're either with them or you're with us. You couldn't do both because a lot of people were angry with me because I was like planning it for August 7th, 2005. Anyways. We didn't have a venue. We didn't have anything planned. Nothing was ready to go. There was an app called Places, P-L-A-Z-E-S. It's probably lost in the lower of internet. But it was a location. It's sort of like snap map where you could see where your friends were. And I happened to be working on a social browser at the time called Flock. And in my list of places was Ross Mayfield. And he was like down the street or something. I don't know what it was. And I reached out and I was like, hey, do you have a spot or something like that? Like, I really need a place to go. And he's like, hey, we're about to get this place in Palo Alto. There's nothing in there yet. But, you know, if you guys want to use it, totally, it's fine. And he saved the day. And then, you know, there's been, I don't know, 300, 400 of these events that have happened in the last 15 years, 20 years, or however long it's been.

But that's when Ross and I met. And so we've both been on sort of parallel journeys since then. But Ross, if you'd love to, like, you know, give us a little bit more background, you know, what you've been up to and how you arrived at Zoom, that would be great kind of context for what you're working on now. Yeah, you know, so Chris, back in 2005 when we had that event, which was a, you know, open source, open space methodology, simple rules, anybody who shows up can give a talk. We organize the entire grid of what occurred that day in less than a half an hour.

And, you know, so I'm going to, I'm going to quiz you. So what were the startups that launched at the first bar? of which has been 15,000 or so Pandora launched, TechCrunch launched, flock launched, let's see, what else? I don't know social text was ready to go. We were around. I think you got the big ones, right? But these were people who, they didn't have a launch plan. Yeah, yeah. They just showed up and they're like, oh my God, like there's so many people here. Let me just give a demo and give a talk, right? And so the other part of Back to the Future was you were working on a social browser with Flock.

Zoom apps is we embedded a browser into Zoom. Comes full circle. Exactly. So all of these apps essentially are web apps. So we're building on the shoulders of the giants of web. And then also a set of Rest APIs and web books that have been around for a while. and as well as a JS SDKK to let that web app talk to the client. Okay.

So it's kind of, anyway, it's interesting at least to me. Today we launched Zoom apps. It's 50 apps plus that you can go and use if you upgrade to the latest version on Mac and Windows. And it's a way of running apps in Zoom. These apps range from collaboration apps, which is where my background is, kind of collaboration, productivity, whiteboards, meeting management tools that let you track the agenda and meeting notes and take action items, integrating with your existing workflows like,

you know, your task or project management tools like Asana as an example. A lot of ways to kind of get your team on the same page, stay focused, make the meeting more productive. but then because Zoom is so funny. Like it, you know, everybody knows it as this SaaS darling before the pandemic, right? A startup to aspire to in both like just nailing an incredibly hard product problem that just worked

and keeping it still simple, as well as, and then the pandemic hit, right? And I think it's from December to April, growing from 10 million users to 300 million daily meeting participants. It's crazy. It was like unprecedented, right? So all of a sudden, Zoom went from this thing that was a very serious great work tool, a thing that people have tried to solve as a problem.

I even tried solving it as a problem once. And then all of a sudden we're running the education system, we're running the health care system, and we're keeping families and friends connect. while they're cordoned off in their apartments and homes and stuff, right? So what's been interesting about this is who uses Zoom is, well, a lot of people for a lot of reasons. And so it's interesting about the 50 apps that we have. And like literally, I just came from a launch party that was organized by four or five of the startups

that are in our program and have launched their apps today. apps like pledge to be able to take donations for nonprofits in the meetings, Fathom for doing really great recordings and sharing clips in an automated way so you don't have to take meeting notes. Warmly, which is like a reportive for Zoom or more people would think of it as like, how do I know the profiles of all the different people and express my identity through a different virtual background that says who I am? glimpse, kind of a consumer social, like a whole range. But then what we just did was for an hour and a half, trade a bunch of demos of video games. So literally it's like time to put the video back into video games. So all casual games genres or casual game genres, right? Icebreakers, trivia, you know, charades.

board games, card games, you know, etc. Right? Well, because I think I tried to make this point today that like the Zoom marketplace already existed, but that was totally different. Integrating Zoom with other applications, whereas this is bringing apps into Zoom as an experience.

Right. Go ahead. That's absolutely right. So there's 1,500 apps that have been built in the marketplace. astounding growth over the last little bit for obvious reasons. A lot of it is about like creating different kinds of client experiences for Zoom or workflow connectors and doing things like, you know, how do I connect, you know, my Google Calendar with Zoom as an example, right? But this is a way of making meetings like more engaging, making meetings more productive, and making meetings more fun.

And so it's just, it's been amazing over the last few months, like, like working with startups and big companies. You know, in a program that's basically been run through a series of chat channels on Zoom chat, which people don't know about, but it's effectively Slack. And we've had this really tight connection as a community where we do Zoom meetings twice a week,

once for developers, once for more business folks, and try to keep it really, open, all kinds of crazy feedback is possible, right? And that's how we wanted it. It's been tough on some of the partners because things have changed on up. We kind of are trying to create a very big new thing, but they stuck with us and we launched something, I think, that's going to be a pretty substantial platform shift. So just while you're saying that, I found a few tweets that I put up in the nest, specifically, you know, ones that are listing the app. so people can actually go check them out.

I'm super impressed by both like the quality. Like I took a look through them. I watched a bunch of the videos. And this, you know, like you said, when I was building flock, which was meant to be a social browser, which was meant to treat people as a first class citizen, you know, in the, you know, web architecture. I think you're right.

Like in many ways, Zoom is oriented around conversations and around people. And the things that have been built that layer on top, of video and those interactions, you know, are about enhancing communication. They are so much in the vein of the mother of all demos all the way back in the, you know, mid-40s and 50s, that we are finally realizing, you know, whether it is like simple things like whiteboarding, but persistence across sessions or the ability to have simultaneous cursors moving across the screen and pointing at the same thing and being able to say this is what I'm talking about as opposed to like just the awkward like screen sharing thing where only you know one person is sort of

presenting and taking over everything and I just I do think that there's sort of a I don't know like a moment in what has been launched relative to I don't know like I even whether it's like Google Meet or other video platforms Zoom has a certain I don't know robustness in the platform and expressiveness like the number of features that you guys have is insane I don't know how you guys like as a product person, um, I don't know how you deal with all the ifs or statements that have to be in there based on all the different permissions and privacy rules and administrative settings that organizations have. Like it just, it's, it's, it seems sprawling. But this thing that you launched today, uh, is, is really awesome and really great. So if you want to check it out,

it's there. One thing that I do want to say, if you scroll through the nest, you will find a photo, not from the first bar camp, but from bar. can't block, which was in 2007 of me and Ross hanging out together. So there's just some proof on the internet that we did. We were in person with each other at one point. I love how you called that Doug Engelbart because basically everything we're doing is still trying to implement his vision, right? Right.

Exactly. And I'll speak to that thing about we do have a gazillion settings and configurations. And that's all driven by the culture, which is really crazy, obsessed about customers and listening to them and feedback. It's kind of what we have to do next now that we've launched this thing. And somehow as a product team, being able to pull that off, while keeping the core simplicity of the product is the most admirable thing. I mean, just run us through, I don't know, like, if it's like a product meeting or what the org structure is like, you know, like I don't even have a sense for how big Zoom is. I know you guys have raised a bunch of money.

So that's not, you know, a bottleneck issue. You know, having worked at Google. Let me jump in real quick. because let's let's I want to put something in context here, which is Zoom only went public. It's funny to think about this because it feels like a different world. Zoom only went public two years ago at like a $9 billion valuation, and they just, was it this week?

Enough they're acquiring $5.9 at like a $15 billion valuation. So if you just think about those terms, like you go from being like, oh, we're one of the pack of, I don't know, video chat and to now being basically how work was done around the globe for the last year or so. It's got to be insane and it's got to blow your hair back if you're on the Zoom team.

This is what's happened over two years. Right. And I joined a year ago because I knew that this was, the Center of Gravity for Collaboration tools shifted from group messaging to video. And it was going to be video first innovation that was going to be able to create the category winner. And I'm talking about a very broad category. And I was very lucky to have very direct support to try to work on this project. But I'll say in some ways, like the company's size in terms of employees has doubled.

since I've joined, right? I was not one of the people who did that crazy work of being able to go through that scaling, right? And bolstering security and all these amazing feats that those guys did, right? As a product culture, it still feels like a startup. And maybe that's just because of the pace of growth, right? But it's like, you know, Eric built the culture

around having this company focus on two things. It's employees and it's customers and being obsessed about doing things right for both of them. Right. To me, now we're learning how to be just as obsessed with developers. So, okay, let's see. I eventually want to get to like the product on collab. I want to know a little bit more.

I want to dig into the developer story a little bit because it has not been my sense that Zoom was a very sort of developer or platform oriented company, at least conventionally, in terms of how I think about, you know, the Facebook developer platform or Twitter developer platform and things like that. So how much of that has been a shift? How much, you know, have you been driving that? Like, what are your thoughts about just Zoom as a developer platform in general in terms of both its ambitions and its growth from perhaps where it started?

When I got here, I was astounded to figure out, like, how there's like four or five hundred rest APIs and web hooks. And you have to think of Zoom as not just meetings, but. Zoom meetings, Zoom webinars, Zoom phone, Zoom chat, Zoom rooms, conference room devices, right? And the way that it is truly opened in a way where you can kind of pick and choose from a menu. And they've been really governing things in a fair, you know, engaging way. With Zoom apps, we've had this wonderful opportunity to take a little bit more product thinking into what we're trying to create. do it with the community.

But the other part is, so my last startup, which actually, Chris, you product hunted. Again, close circle. I was trying to build an app on the Slack platform, essentially a bot with a web app that was a hybrid of a Trello and a wiki, something like that. And the thing, a lot of, when we started in this,

we said, okay, well, what are the two things that are most important for a developer, beyond the platform? that's treating them fairly, right? And it really is, number one, designing for distribution, right? So we placed an app store right in the client where 300 million people spend, you know, daily meeting participants spend their attention today. You'll see in the features, one click to screen share, the word of mouth properties when people are sharing an app in a meeting

and how software is adopted in the context of conversation is going to be really interesting to watch. And then also the viral hook of being able to send an app, whether it's in a meeting to the participants or outside the meeting, Zoom apps also runs in the desktop client, the part that you use before and after meetings to support like asynchronous use cases, right? Yep. So now we have to fulfill this. Today is like a launch is a milestone that is the beginning of a thing. It's not the end of a thing, right? And we have to fulfill distribution for our partners. But that was the first goal. The second was flexible, right?

The ability to allow a web canvas to render within a meeting and not have the constraints of, let's say, a kit or other constructs, right? That not only meant people could adapt things into the platform faster, but it allows them to be more expressive and creative in the interaction. they were creating. Got it. Hmm. Hmm.

I just had a thought and I've lost it. But, oh, that was my thought. So what about mobile? Like, mobile is so big for this. Now, I imagine, I have no idea. Actually, maybe you can shed some light on this. Like, in terms of adoption usage, I imagine Zoom is super popular on desktop,

but it also, you know, mobile video is incredibly important. And so what happens when it comes to these apps for mobile users? We weren't able to launch with Zoom apps for mobile, but it's an important part of the overall experience. And is that coming soon? Because one of the things I guess that I'm wondering about is like the App Store aspect. Like you can do that on the Mac. You can embed your own app store inside of the app, but Apple's not going to be so happy about you having an app store inside of your Zoom app on mobile. It's kind of wades into like forward-looking statements areas.

I don't want to get into. Fair enough. Yeah. Exactly. Well, okay. It doesn't work today, but it's a thought. Since we're on touchy subjects, this maybe isn't that touchy. But what about things like mm-hmm or other services that want to build on top of Zoom

that maybe are like, I'm not saying they're trying to do Zoom better or something like that. But what would you say your relationship is to developers like an mm-hmm or somebody like that it's fantastic and they're integrated with zoom already um whether it be to and this is more like leveraging the SDK part of our business on our platform you know it's very there's you know apps like and some in some cases as an example docket started by building a client for a different kind of experience on top of the SDK and today they launched a zoom app right yeah so It's natural to assume some of these partners that are building off of the SDK to be able to create experiences. And you can do this in two ways, by the way.

You can build effectively a different kind of experience or client that's based on a meeting using the meeting SDK. We have a new thing called the video SDK, which gives you video as a service, audio as a service. You know, if I was going to build a video clubhouse or even an audio clubhouse, I'd be looking at something like that. So it's competitive with Agora. You can say that. Okay. By the way, I did pin the tweet to your previous product that I hunted, PinkPad, if anybody wants to go check that out. It's an embarrassment, please.

The whole point is that it's a journey, you know? There's a personal evolution. I did want to ask about that, which is, you know, given when you started with social text and working on essentially like very early versions of social software and collaboration. I mean, I remember going to those meetups and having those conversations about where this is going to go. And for you to be at this place now or you're building this, you know, platform, how much of your past, you know, history, wounds and bruises and all that, you know, kind of come into what you're building now? Or do you need to take a kind of, I don't know, just different attitude and mindset to be building these things because the medium is now different.

We're talking about video, real-time, synchronous, collaboration versus, I guess, the way that you would think about building things in the past, where it was asynchronous and it was kind of, you know, read, write, architectures and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, a lot's changed in social software collaboration in the last, we're on 18, 20 years, right? The things that, there's some patterns, I think, that remain the same. A lot of the innovation first occurs in the consumer side and can be adapted for the enterprise. The patterns of the practices of how people work are constantly evolving. People are searching for different kinds of tools all the time. We're at an interesting time where you have a lot of the best.

best-breed collaboration apps like Zoom, unlike, let's say, 20 years ago or so, have grown up to be very large publicly traded companies, right? Integrations are a lot more important than they were, right? You can't just build an app as a total standalone. You have to support the broader context of whatever the users are that you're trying to serve. distribution is constantly a moving target and just compoundingly is more difficult. Like the conversation you guys were having earlier, Brian and Chris, talking about, you know, for a venture firm, how you were trying to bring an asset of media and distribution for them, right? There's just so much noise, so much choice.

Markets are so much larger, right? And figuring out, you know, it is at this point really common knowledge. Like, if you don't have a distribution angle, there's no point in having a product strategy. Right, right. Unless you're building for yourself, you know, and it's like a little open source weekend app or something. Yeah. And then you could get lucky. Well, maybe.

I mean, if you're solving your own itch, it's not a big deal. But, I mean, I think the other thing that this leads me into is a question of funding and finance and what the ultimate economic model is going to look like. Because, you know, for the whole SaaS world, more and more companies of, you know, of course, both moving to the cloud, living the cloud, and they're using apps that are like SaaS within SaaS within SaaS. And so I'm paying for a premium Zoom subscription. And then for each of the apps that you launched, you know, I don't, I feel like it's not going to be the way it was like, like Chrome extensions where you just like, No, had like this whole plethora of things you can just choose from.

And, you know, it's all free. It's amazing. You know, that's not going to be the way the world's going to go. So out of the apps that launched today of the 50, how many of them are free? How many of them are paid? And what are the rates of, I guess, you know, payments for each or the subscription rates for each? And do you think that that's going to be challenging for the market? Or do you think that we're at a place where we're ready to spend a good amount of money

on SaaS. So what we guided the entrepreneurs, the companies to do, was to try to align with the platform's own business model, which is, you know, we're a premium SaaS darling, right? And it also happens in the social construct of a meeting, a meeting owner, the host, is the person that owns the meeting and is maybe the person that's paying to have a meeting more than 40 minutes or have the ability to record

or whatever it may be, right? And so think about, you know, when for starting point in any premium is, you know, what is the usage limit and what is the feature limit? So try to have maybe both because that catches different kinds of behavior and also prevents certain kinds. I'm sorry. It just like occurs to me like I could be in a really really important meeting using four or five apps. And they've all set a different expiry amount. So, you know, one of them gives me five minutes and I'm like drawing, you know, a cat. and it's like an AI powered cat drawing tool.

And so suddenly I'm drawing like ears and it sort of like fills it in for me. And then like the timeout stops. And I have like put in quarters to like keep it going while the, I don't know, the audio enhancing tool is like meowing or roaring because it's not sure if it's a lion or anyways. Who is listening to that and thinking it's a really good idea. But the, but I think so all of the apps have, have usage for free. nothing like time limited, right?

And then they have an option to subscribe or to buy or, you know, there's some like, Well, I've had those moments where my Zoom call, you know, back when I was a cheap skate and I didn't pay for Zoom, you know, I'd be coming up at like the 39 minute mark and I'd get the warning like, oh, your call is about to expire. I felt like, you know, I'm in not like jail prison, but like, you know, oh, my call is about to expire and like, do you want to accept the call charges kind of thing? And it was a really great motivator to like convert because I'm like, this is embarrassing. Like 40 minutes? Who was a 40 minute meeting? Yeah, totally. But so I guess like you're, maybe I'll ask you that question.

Let me go for that part, right? Okay. So in the end, if you're going to do a platform venture, you're, you have to be able to, it's going to be judged in the end about are we helping, you know, other companies' partners make money and is it going to make money for Zoom? Right. Yeah. It's not just let's go freely, really, really and see what happens, right?

So we're at the beginning of that part of the adventure. Okay. I mean, that's fair. I mean, we also don't know. And, you know, I guess I don't know. I'm probably one of the people who would, you know, install 40 different apps and maybe that'll like hurt everyone else's experience. I don't really know.

But I think it's going to be fun. I think this is a really, really great moment. And it's super interesting to think about social video as a kind of operating system for these new experiences and apps and taking for granted that everyone's going to have, you know, a video connection and then video becomes a native medium through which all sorts of app experiences are delivered. I think it took me a while to sort of understand that, you know, video is this, I don't know, it's a conduit for delivering meaning and then you can embellish both the meaning in the channel itself. In other words, like the content of the video or you can layer on, you know, widgets and components or you can put them side by side, et cetera. And, you know,

WebRTC might be one of the enabling technologies that kind of, you know, unblocking. that thought for me, but you guys clearly have now built on that and you've been building on it for quite a while, and it's super exciting to see it come to market. It's like, you know, we finally have the ability to make people a first-class feature in a product. Right. Oh, let me also, I have to plug one or mention another thing, and it kind of relates to how the conversation started. Yeah. We did start a $100 million Zoom Apps Fund.

Ah. That's focused on seed and series A stage. And so, anyway, that's part of, again, a part of the overall economic model of it. And what are the requirements for participating in that? Like, you know, if I'm building video apps and I work with multiple parties, is that okay? Or do I need to be exclusive to Zoom? Or how does that work? I don't think we think that way.

I think it's you should be building on the platform. And you, and we should. should believe in you as a company. And that's really about it. Do you have a range of investment size, or is it just? Yeah. Yeah. 250K to 2.5 mil.

Cool. Got it. Great. OK, so the thing that I really wanted to ask you about is this Pratitan launch. Like, you know, I've obviously I've been with Pratat Hunt for a while. I hunt a lot of things. I coach a lot of people on what I call is bringing their product on launch to life. But you did something that I've never seen before.

And so I want to dig into this a bit. You know, I want to understand one, like, where did this start? You know, was this your brainchild? Like, where did it come from? Why productant? And I will describe. Can you describe like the contours of this? Yes.

Yes. Which as I experienced it, it was sort of this unfolding realization. And I've seen this happen with other, you know, let's say developer event days where a bunch of, you know, products will land or like an Apple event and you've got like the new iPad and the new iPhone and they're both hunted. But those are done by the community. This was different for a number of reasons. First of all, Ross wrote a story on the product hunt stories platform. So it's sort of like their mini version of medium. So this is kind of like native content advertising.

In addition, he launched the Zoom Apps platform as like a top level thing. And within that, he had maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 different app makers. And I think, I don't know if you got to invite any of the folks here to join the conversation. But if they're here, we can bring them up. And put them in the gallery. So you've got, you know, six or seven or eight different videos of the Zoom apps from the makers describing what they built. And then you had each of them at a comment. to describe the thing that they'd built.

And so that top level post is this just rich kind of collection of a bunch of things that launched. And then there was another 10 individual products that launched on Productant today also. And so just the breadth and the coordination of getting all these makers to, you know, agree to launch on this day on Productant on a different platform was the thing that I saw and was just super. impressed by. So tell me if I got that right and if I'm leaving anything out, but that was my sense of it, you know, and cool. You got it. You got it. The part of it was, okay, we did reach out to the product on the team and because it was from Zoom, they took a call, right? Right. And that the only part of what happened that was dependent upon that cooperation was the guest blog post, right?

Yeah. And, you know, but the rest of it was because we had this community engaged in a collection of chat channels, we basically laid out the plan that, hey, we're going to be putting up a product on page about this launch. We'd love when we post it for you to, or we were already collecting videos from all the partners who wanted to contribute them. Yep. So we had those ready in like a with the list.

Are those also in the app store, in the Zoom app store inside the app? They're in the, they're in the, some of them are the same ones in the Zoom app store. Yeah. Right. Or Zoom Marketplace. Yeah. So that a lot of them were already doing their production work already. Because we had those as assets, all that it literally was was posting, you know, description and an icon and, you know, in a first post on the page.

and then using the chat channel to drive everybody's attention to that. Now, we did say, you know, we're going to put the focus on at launch on this one page and ask for people to engage with it, right? Which gave it some good advantage in Lyft. And, you know, most people very quickly figured out that I could add comments promoting the Zoom app that I just launched, right? Yep. Then, but we also left it open if somebody wanted to launch their own product on page and not everybody did. It's only like 10 out of the 50 or so that chose to do so.

And others are probably going to launch theirs after the fact or in some other way, right? That's up to the baton. Maybe you could go hunt them all, Chris. My schedule's a little full, but sure, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. But that was really it. It's actually relatively easy as long as you already have the community in conversation with you and you can point him towards a goal. Yeah, yeah.

I just, well, I want to commend you. I want to commend the community stewardship that was clearly at work here. I just never seen something quite like that. And it's so smart, you know, especially if you're a platform provider to really lead with community, to lead with coherence and cohesion. And so when I saw that, I just, I don't know, I'm really glad, one, we were able to get you on and have this conversation and to, you know, kind of acknowledge the work that you guys all did to bring this together and to put it out there.

Because unlike, you know, some other, you know, I would say Facebook's F8 this year was weird, right? At least, you know, I think for Brian and I, we were like, what was that? And so you didn't do or choose to do a developer or like an outward facing developer event. Now, maybe it's too early in the life cycle. But maybe talk me through a little bit of that, like how you think about the launch process and whether it would make sense to do a big developer event or why. you didn't and you did like six months ago I thought I remember covering it but go on sorry yeah six months ago we announced that we were building Zoom apps yeah

right that's right and and had demos of what people conceptually were going to build yeah right and then from there we've been working in this program through a series of Zoom chat channels there's a the community is a lot bigger than the 50 apps there's more underway and in the pipeline a big thing I can see Arun, who's the lead product manager on Zoom Maps as one of the listeners here. Arun and the team are doing is trying to figure out how do we get this to the point where we can open it up, have an open platform where anybody can just come read documentation, submit an app for review and potentially publish. Right.

One day, you know, we already have Zoom developer events. One day I look forward to engaging very openly with everyone. It's something that we just need to, you know, get some more platform features, get, you know, our processes in order. Make sure that we're really ready to skip. Cool. Yeah. I mean, that totally makes sense. It's just like, I think it's been interesting, you know, in this remote era to think about what things do you do is like, you know, kind of a big press style event where you're really trying to like build this big narrative and story and it either hits or it doesn't.

You know, obviously Apple does these enormously elaborate, you know, beautiful. full, totally choreographed kind of experiences. You know, with Facebook's event, I was left kind of confused. Like, what is that? And then Google, of course, had their lawn chairs. And, you know, that's Google being Google. They're not really worried about anything. So anyways, I thought that was interesting.

Is there anything else that we didn't ask about or, Brian, anything else that you wanted to cover with Ross? No, we should graciously allow Ross to leave if he wants. I do want to hit one more thing for our show tonight, which Ross can join in on if you want. But Ross, thank you so much. Congratulations for the launch. If you want to stick around. Yeah, by all means. The one more thing that I want to talk about is automatic and Tumblr, which feels like a weird sort of segue.

No, actually, I can segue this for you. Because I actually reached out to Matt Mullenweg, to. today, who is the founder and creator of WordPress. And he and I have been friends, you know, for many, many years. And in fact, he was a co-organizer of that first bar camp. So Matt was there. Matt was, you know, he and I were big proponents of open source. And so he wasn't able to join today, but he did say that he would be able to join us

at a future event. And so, you know, I'm sure Ross actually has some exposure or familiarity with not only like, you know, the open source roots, but WordPress and the whole automatic Family, Jetpack, like all that stuff. So I think actually, Ross, you know, feel free, of course, to stick around what I'm interested in. And, you know, I don't know how much you've been watching what they've been doing. But Automatic has made a series of acquisitions this year, which to me are about positioning

them and placing them, or at least maintaining some relevance, perhaps, in the creator economy. And they, I'm probably going to get my chronology a little bit wrong, but they... Well, I actually, I just brought up the tech meme. search for this year. So they started out by acquiring parsley, which is an analytic service, but what we're

probably going to talk about is day one, which is that journaling app for Mac. I think it's an iOS. Right, right, right. Apple stuff. That was in June, June 14th. Then two days later, they bought Pocketcast. And actually two days later, that was

last week. And then they bought Tumblr. I can't even remember when they bought Tumblr. This is 2015 from Yahoo. Yeah. So Tumblr is testing what they're calling Post Plus. I didn't get to talk about this today, which is why I'm giving a little more background.

Yeah, go for it. Which essentially allows users to charge followers a monthly fee in exchange for access to exclusive content. Tumblr is taking a 5% cut. So my top of the line thing about this is, is holy shit like Tumblr is perfect for this like in this

universe of you could rebuild only fans on Tumblr and it's like game over for only fans think about what Tumblr has always been is like sort of like a link blog thing right or you know what I mean like so it's it's like if it's porniness but yeah and by the way I was wrong about

I automatic acquired it from Verizon in 2019 that's right that's right that's right it wasn't that long ago right exactly no Tumblr right sold to probably Yahoo that long ago or whatever. So my number one point is that Tumblr is perfect for this because you're saying the porny thing, which I get. I understand that. But let's be broader.

We'll set aside. Let's be broader in the sense that it's the creative thing where it's like, what I always followed people on Tumblr for was your personality and your vision about what was cool. And that was a lot of like, poodles. You know? And images. Deviant art.

Right. And link blogging. Like, look, this is something that I found. Like review, actually, which Twitter acquired. Exactly. So, as opposed to, oh, I've got to start a substack and I've got to write 1,500 words every single day or whatever. No, no, no. No, Tumblr is perfect for this sort of creator style.

And when I saw that come across the Transom today, I was like, oh, my God, that's perfect. This is so perfect. Okay, this is my larger point. I'm sorry, I'm rambling on. But, like, is it weird? What if we're seeing certain platforms and companies that couldn't survive in a universe where social media was all ad-supported, where all of a sudden, like, they're given new life if it is a creator-first economy? Do you know what I mean?

And I'm not saying that, yeah, go ahead. Well, I think one sort of maybe answer to your prompter question is, yes, every platform, well, let me think if I really mean this. I will make a bold statement and then I'll decide if I agree with it. But every platform basically needs to migrate from the ad only model for many, many reasons. You know, whether it's the ad tracking transparency that's making ads less effective, whether it's consumer choice and preference, whether it's payments coming to the web. And now it's so easy to pay five bucks for this or five bucks for that that you don't need to be subsidized by this crappy content that degrades your experience overall.

And I think the bigger piece of this, which I guess is my thesis, is that you're not going to be able to sustain your, the users that produce your content. The crowdsourced content where users used to be just so happy to have a free blog or website that they would just create content for you for years for free, like me like an idiot on Twitter. without charging for it because you were taking care of my hosting. You were taking care of my image hosting. You were taking care of all the stuff that I used to have to pay for. And so you're giving me a service for free. But it turns out I was powering your business model with my free labor. And now that labor has realized that the things that they're creating,

at least those who create interesting content, are worthwhile. And there's a lot of people that need those people that are creating the good stuff or else the users are going to leave. And so unless Tumblr, let me finish my thought, unless Tumblr is able to pay or find some way to remunerate the people that are creating the good content as opposed to bots or the porny stuff or whatever, then they're not going to have good content and they're not going to exist because the ad market could just fall out tomorrow. Well, but so this is why I was like, oh my God, this is perfect. And it's kind of sad. And also, this might not work out for Tumblr or whatever.

And we should come back to the idea of what is automatic doing with all of these acquisitions. that's also sort of a perfect thing. But what would you say the golden era of Tumblr was like 2000? Okay, I would even go earlier than that. Okay.

Like 12 or something. Like I feel like there was an entire generation that was brought up on Tumblr. Maybe you're right. A certain type of person was like people. Tumblr, and maybe this is because you're in New York and I'm in the West Coast.

and I've been on the West Coast, and Ross and I have been on the West Coast. But you're in New York, and Tumblr and Vimeo were always these East Coast kind of weird media ad kind of things. Sort of like Myspace was always like L.A., like Snapchat is L.A. They're very different products as a result of the community and the environment from which they originate. And Tumblr was one of those that was East Coast social media. Well, the point that I'm trying to make is if in 2012 the people that had... He was founded in 2007, the same year as the hashtag. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I knew it was, so I feel like the golden age might have been like 2010 to 2014. And I'm sure there are people screaming right now being like, yes, when I was a freshman in high school, this is my point. In those golden eras, there were people that had sort of like, you know, your favorite emo band. Like people would have bled for these creators on Tumblr before you use the term. I mean, many of them actually did bleed. You know, it was kind of a... Yes. And so this is my point is that it's almost a too soon thing.

Like, this is, I hope automatic can do it because I always, I love the spirit of Tumblr and I believe the embers are still burning there. But God, man, if you could have allowed the people that made those great tumblogs back in the day to earn money from it, like it's just, I'm just like, oh, my God, this was, you were too soon. This is the perfect business model for that. And, you know, again, hopefully automatic can do it and resurrect that thing. And I don't know, maybe they'll buy GeoCities next or something. I don't know. I think this has been gutted, right? May I look at the domain?

Yes, yes. Go ahead, Russ. No, I think you guys are both on this kind of both the same thing. It's like you see patterns where the web goes through centralization and decentralization. And the decentralization starts with creatives, like the people just expressing for free like Chris was saying he was, right? And then at a certain point,

if like right now, there is a way in a more like Shopify style of an alternative decentralized model to make money. And with Web at the scale of audience that it has now, that's possible now where it wasn't before. And maybe we're in a night, like at least the way I think about it, from, you know, a platform standpoint is I want to be able to try to strike a balance between

centralization, particularly for things like discovery and decentralization for the ability for people to create and be paid. And I believe the sweet spot, there is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Chris, what do you think Automatic is doing? Because to keep going down that list, they just bought pocket casts from NPR. So it's like, I, I, I, I, I was looking for the tweet, but somebody tweeted that it's like, Automatic is carving out this stake of like these accumulating this tool belt of not just tools, but also platforms for creators and things like that. So like maybe automatic is coming into its own in terms of like in a creator economy.

They're the maybe not dark horse of like bringing this to fruition or something? The one thing that I would wonder, and of course, you know, I have no insider knowledge, and that's why I invited Matt on here. But, like, what are the conversations inside of automatic? And is this offensive or defensive? Are they seeing where everyone else is going? And so they're like, oh, shit, we got to catch up. Or, you know, have they been actually in conversation with their creators for a while and they're making the shift? Like, one thing that I'm really having a hard time squaring because I haven't been following WordPress that closely for that long. Like, one of the big narratives for WordPress for quite some time was that it covers,

I don't know, like 60% of the web or something like that. A lot of of that content, you know, is perhaps of dubious value and it's, you know, there's lots of link farms and bots and all stuff are like gaming Google. But one of, I guess, WordPress's and automatics like business models was around selling corporate hosting to, you know, big companies like CNET or tech crunch. Other ones have custom WordPress installations and it's this, you know, de facto CMS content management system. Now, in the mobile area, And I should actually add that one of the value props for WordPress for so long has been about it being open source. Open source seems to not be or to be a different value proposition today than it used to be. It represents a different kind of freedom, a different kind of choice because of the nature of moving to the cloud. And, you know, it's all kind of APIs now more than it is about, you know, I want to like download WordPress and run it on my own hosting infra or something. And so I actually, I downloaded the WordPress iOS app today. And I noticed that there is a way. to add and upload audio content to WordPress blogs using the WordPress iOS app.

Now, I don't know if you need Jetpack. I don't know if you need to like add in plugins to make that happen. But the fact that WordPress already has a bunch of the components of the creator economy built in, what I don't know is if the creators that are publishing that kind of content are, one, able to monetize through paywalls or other types of tipping and stuff like that. And two, who are the people who are the audiences of that, I feel like, you know, in a way, if you're saying that automatic might be this, you know, dark horse in the race, just as Pinterest is sort of not well observed by tech press and tech media, you know, there's a story every now and then. But I'm redesigning like my living room. I'm moving in with my partner. And we're trying to figure out what is our taste that, you know, we have in common. And I started using Pinterest again. And it's a completely different experience. It's like, it's like TikTok meets this creative tool, meets like, like, you know, Like, it's still at the core, Pinterest, but the suggestions and the search experience is so much better than like Google images like hands down.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while we take our eye off the ball of Pinterest and automatic, do they have these vibrant communities that are actually asking for these things and they're figuring out, you know, commerce and payments unto themselves? Or is automatic responding to where the people that we pay attention to, where I pay attention to, like Twitter? Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are going, and so therefore they have to follow suit. Well, you know, one of the things that people have said for years, investors have said for years, is that, like, there was always this universe of small e-commerce players, and that's essentially what Shopify has sort of provided the platform for. There were tons of people, I'm one of them, that, you know, have been making, you know, small numbers,

small M millions of dollars a year in various e-commerce companies or whatever and they came in and did a platform for it. So like, what if what Tumblr, or not Tumblr but Automatic is representing is that whereas all these other platforms are like, oh my God, creators exist, let's

give a platform and tools for creators to do stuff. But what Automatic recognizes is there have been creators all along and they're sort of like picking up the pieces and helping those people as opposed to inventing the wheel, which is what I feel like other platforms feel like they're doing. Yeah, I mean, it could be.

I mean, but I guess I also look at like what Instagram is doing, you know, and adding the ability to, you know, create a shop or sell products, like moving more towards commerce. So there's just a commercialization in general of the web. There's a socialization aspect of the web. And, you know, one thing that we haven't talked about, and I'm sure, you know, Ross, this might be maybe interesting, is whether or not people are going to be building in like shopping style experiences into Zoom apps or if you're mostly focused on like enterprise clients and business, you know, use cases. Because I would think that Zoom at some point becomes somewhat competitive with Instagram and, you know, especially as Instagram moves more towards video. If video is everywhere,

then people are going to want to be able to do the things that they can do in other platforms on whatever video platform they happen to be using. So help me understand maybe that dynamic. Well, one of the things, like one of the apps I mentioned, Pledge allows you to take donations. So there's, which is great. Like they brought in somebody from, I think it's called a plant a tree foundation in this, you know, community meeting we had. And all of a sudden in the span of three, four minutes, they raised a thousand bucks to plant a tree. Every dollar plants a tree, right? And so there was definitely a social commerce experience that was created at that moment.

It's just a perfect natural fit. You know, let's wait and see what other examples unfold. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, we've been going for quite a bit. You know, I want to just open up. If anybody has, you know, thoughts or questions, feel free to raise your hand now and we'll bring you up. You know, otherwise, I think we've hit a lot of. the topics. Brian, anything else? No, except for the fact that this is the second week in a row

where almost everything we've talked about I didn't even get to on the show today. So either we're doing it perfectly on Wednesday evenings or we're doing something wrong. Or just like a lot happening. Yeah, no. Yeah, weirdly because usually summers are, but summers sometimes I really have to. But I feel like that's maybe a result of the remote era, right? Like, you just keep launching, like, all the time. And, you know? You know, it's funny. I, we all, have I ever talked about this before?

I don't know. But the weekend long reads as a segment. Yep. Was created partially because, you know, there are so many stories that I read in a week where it's like, well, this isn't something that's news, but it's interesting to me. And so, like, it gave me a place to put that. But also, it's because Fridays are slow. Sometimes if there's only three stories that happen,

that's why I do the long reads or whatever. But yeah, this summer is not a case. There's been some times where it's like I have to scrape around for stuff like that. I reached out to the other thing that I missed today that hopefully I'll get to tomorrow is I want to do this week. There's been a couple stories about how like, and we've talked about this before about how AI or self-driving cars, maybe has hit a dead end or whatever. And there's been some stories that I'm probably going to share on Friday about how, well, maybe we've been going about it the wrong way.

Maybe we don't need autonomous taxis. But today, Argo AI says it's going to launch a thousand of its cars in the Lyft network. And we almost got the CEO of Argo because he's been on the show before to talk about it. So yeah, hopefully we'll talk about that tomorrow. So maybe it's like Schrodinger's cat, like, you know, self-driving cars either always are right around the corner or are never going to be around the corner. I feel like you've had an ongoing bet and we already passed.

It was by 2020, so we already missed that one. You have to have a new bet now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's the only other thing that was in my notes was the Argo News, but I'll hit that tomorrow. Okay, well, I brought up Steve real quick of the tape drive. Steve, what's going on? What's you got to say? Yeah, just real quick on all the lift things.

I thought that was really interesting. I imagine the news happening today. It's going to happen sooner than later. I saw something about in their app, digging into the code about they're going to allow you to choose an anonymous vehicle that has three seats in the back or two seats in the back. I imagine the two seats in the back are all these new vehicles that they're announcing for that. But more to the point for about Zoom,

I was kind of curious your perspective on kind of the same struggles that Slack has with having integrations and plugins and apps for everything versus kind of a monolith approach that Microsoft is doing with teams. And do you feel that tension there with organizations that you're trying to break into with trying to provide this product with integrations and apps versus Microsoft's approach of just everything being built in together? So I think by monolith, I think you mean monoculture, right? Potato potato. Yeah. Well, all I can do is to comment on the approach that we're taking. Yeah, of course. And, you know, for that is we are taking advantage of the fact that we're a best-of-breed app,

which allows us to have other best-of-breed apps on the platform, right? And I think one of the interesting things that you see that differentiates us at the very launch also is this real, like the diverse set of use cases, as I mentioned earlier, Enterprise to Consumer and Games. But then also, you know, native startups that have been built 100% on this platform because I see that opportunity. Yeah, it just feels, it feels different. I have to admit my ignorance. I've actually still never used Microsoft team. but maybe I will skirt away and never actually have that experience. I did also, yeah, what's up? Chris, real quick before we go, I thought of one more thing. I'm totally jumping to another thing, but downvoting on Twitter.

Oh, yes. In two minutes. Yeah. Thoughts. One, you know, Twitter continues to try to change a bunch of things. And to me, this is a, as they said, this is a research project. they are trying to see how to get better signal about good and bad behavior. My understanding is that if you downvote something, that downvote is not seen by anybody else,

but it is a signal that Twitter can use to decide whether to show or hide different comments, whereas an upvote is counted as a like, and so there's no difference with kind of, you know, current behavior. I think that that's, it's, I don't know, it's interesting. I think they're playing with social dynamics. I don't know. Well, okay, one thing that could happen as a result of this, and Facebook has done this for a while, is a better job of kind of collapsing large, you know, common threats.

Like, you know, for me, maybe I'm lucky if I get like four or five kind of, you know, back and forths or whatever in a conversation. But for people that have like thousands of comments, that up and vote, up and down vote experience can be very helpful for, for automatically hiding low-quality content versus showing stuff that's good. And if you only have likes, people like things for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it's to endorse it. Sometimes it's to say, hey, I see this.

Thank you. Sometimes bookmarks and stars, like back that we had those a while ago. But you know what I mean? Like it's a little bit ambiguous, whereas a downvote is pretty clear. The fact that it's not a social signifier, in other words, no one else can see it, means that it can't really be used for abuse in the same way. I mean, of course, you can have your bot army, downvote, everything I say. But for the most part, I think they're just trying things out.

And yeah, like... I shared with you, you can put in the thing. Yeah, Alexis O'Hanney, I was talking about how you haven't really created a product until someone else copies it. And he's talking about how all the way back in 2005, he spent so many hours designing the upvote and downvote on Reddit. one more real quick, and then let's get out of here. How come it's always been binary?

I always thought, and I'm talking about going back to 2005, I assume that things like this would evolve into you could do a plus three or a plus five or a down seven. Well, medium has that. Medium has that. And so you can clap as many times as you want to up into a certain point. And I think, you know, I don't know if like the first five or. I always thought that was going to be the natural evolution of things. And it never really went to it.

So if you remember, I believe YouTube had five stars, right? And what they found was that the majority of ratings, you know, were either like on one end of the spectrum or the other. And so it basically, you know, the only useful thing was binary ratings. Now, Amazon, I think, has the one that's persisted because having a four star rating on a product actually is useful. You know, it's good. It may not be the best. It may not be universally loved by everyone. but it's still a product that you might buy.

You get down to like the three-star range and below, and you're like, maybe not. But if it's like super cheap, maybe it's okay. So I think it comes down to what is being conveyed by the rating system and how much precision is necessary to understand like the, I don't know, I guess the wisdom of the crowds. So there have actually, there were some sliders and there were some other UIs that were offered that provided a greater range of reaction. response, but users just didn't really, you know, again, it's either you want to smash it one way or smash it the other, and it's either great or you hate it and it should die. So I think that's what happens. All right. Well, let's smash it and end it. Smash the follow button. That's what we want to say? Yeah, anyways. But let's thank Ross. Let's smash Ross with likes. Yes, yes, yes.

Chris, it was awesome catching up with you. Brian. I'm a lot. Long time listener, first time caller. It was really so much. Thank you, sir. Love it. Well, thank you, everyone, for showing up again today. This was the TechMeme, Rite Home Experience. Please follow, like, and subscribe, or whatever the verbs are that you do to podcast content.

This should be out on the Spacecast Pod tomorrow. And if you want to find Ross, obviously you can on Twitter. He's just at Ross. So he is another mononym. What's up? Mononym, my brother, my friend. I, anyways, I can't say anything else beyond that. Okay, anyways, thanks everybody.

We'll talk to you next week. Thank you all. Later.