Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/15 – Bezos’ Farewell To Amazon Investors

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Jeff Bezos pens his farewell to the troops, and also, the shareholders. A big Google Earth update. Some thoughts on yesterday’s Coinbase debut. DJI updates its mid-level workhorse drone. And Ford is taking baby steps to that sort of super cruise control that I really want while we’re wait for full autonomy. Sponsors: AirMedCareNetwork.com/tech offer code TECH AwayTravel.com/techmeme Links: Jeff Bezos says Amazon needs to do a better job for employees in his final shareholder letter as CEO (CNBC) Google Earth’s historical 3D time lapses show the ravages of climate change (The Verge) Apple announces $200 million investment fund for forest restoration projects (9 to 5 Mac) Parallels 16.5 with native Apple Silicon support now available, up 30% faster VM performance than Intel (9 to 5 Mac) I funded Coinbase in 2012. Making 6000x on my best startup investment yet (Gary Tan) DJI’s new Mavic Air 2S comes with one big upgrade (The Verge) Ford’s hands-free BlueCruise driving feature coming soon to the F-150 and Mustang Mach-E (The Verge) 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. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Thursday, April 15th, 2021. I'm Brian McKele. Today, Jeff Bezos pens his farewell to the troops and also the shareholders. A big Google Earth update. Some thoughts on yesterday's Coinbase debut. DJI updates its mid-level workhorse drone. And Ford is taking baby steps to that sort of super cruise control that I really want while we're waiting on full autonomy to arrive. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As we know, Jeff Bezos is relinquishing his CEO title later this year, and so this morning, he released his final letter to shareholders as Amazon CEO.

And it's interesting. He directly addressed one of the elephants in the room and suggested that Amazon should extend its famous obsession with customer experience to cover care for Amazon's own employees as well, quoting CNBC. Bezos pointed to the recent union election outcome at one of Amazon's Alabama warehouses as an example of why the company needs to address challenges within its workforce. Last week, Amazon secured enough votes to defeat a historic unionization drive at its Bessemer Alabama warehouse, which, if successful, would have represented the first union at a U.S.

Amazon facility. Quote, while the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it's clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employers. employees, a vision for their success, Bezos wrote. Amazon has famously held a core set of leadership principles, chief among them, being customer-obsessed. In the future, Bezos said he wants Amazon to do the same for its employees, quote, despite what we've accomplished, it's clear to me that we need a better vision for our employee's success, Bezos said. We have always wanted to be Earth's most customer-centric company. We won't change that. It's what got us here,

but I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth's best employer and Earth's safest place to work, end quote. In his new role as executive chairman, Bezos said he plans to focus on how to make Amazon's warehouses safer. Roughly 40% of work-related injuries are sprains or strains, mostly due to repeating the same motions, and are common among new employees, he added. Bezos also took steps to ease shareholders' fears about what a reimagined focus for the company might mean for Amazon's future. He reiterated that it, quote, remains day one and, quote,

if any, share owners are concerned that Earth's best employer and Earth's safest place to work might dilute our focus on Earth's most customer-centric company. Let me set your mind at ease, Bezos said. Think of it this way. If we can operate two businesses as different as consumer e-commerce and AWS and do both at the highest level, we can certainly do the same with these two vision statements. In fact, I'm confident they will reinforce each other, end quote. Other details in Bezos's letter include the fact that Amazon Prime now has more than 200 million subscribers up 50 million from the beginning of 2020, and Amazon's net profit in 2020 was $21.3 billion. Bezos also took pains to remind investors of this, quote,

Along the way, we've created $1.6 trillion of wealth for share owners. Who are they? Your chair is one, and my Amazon shares have made me wealthy. But more than seven-eighths of the shares, representing $1.4 trillion of wealth creation are owned by others, end quote. I.e., I've made you rich to Amazon shareholders. You're welcome. A couple of environmentally related segments here. Google Earth has gotten a big update, including an historical 3D-touch. time-lapse feature that is designed to show the effects of climate change using satellite photos from the last 37 years, quoting the verge. The feature which Google calls time lapse, one word, will be available in Google Earth starting Thursday to access it, launch Google Earth,

and then click or tap on the Voyager tab, which has an icon that looks like a ship's wheel. You can search for a place of interest or check out one of Google's five guided tours about forest change, urban growth, warming temperatures, mining, and renewable energy sources, and quote, the Earth's fragile beauty, end quote. To create the 3D time lapse imagery for Google Earth, the company says it used more than 24 million satellite images taken from 1984 to 2020 to create one 4.4 terapixel-sized video mosaic. To give you a sense of the scale there, one terapixel is one million megapixels. The company worked with NASA, the U.S. Geological, survey, the European Commission, and the European Space Agency to collect the data used in the

timelapses. This isn't the Google Earth team's first time lapse feature. In May 2013, the team released a time lapse feature displaying 2D images of Earth from 1984 to 2012, and it made a big update to that in November 2016. The feature announced Thursday, however, offers a 3D time lapse of the Earth's geological changes, allowing you to look at the changes in the Earth in more detail, end quote. And Apple this morning announced a $200 million investment fund just for forest restoration projects that will develop financially viable initiatives to restore woodland areas. This is all part of Apple's overall carbon neutral and carbon reduction plans, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The fund aims to generate meaningful financial returns on the investments. Apple hopes that will

convince other companies to follow its lead and start up other forest restoration projects. Apple has set a goal for the entire business to be 100% carbon neutral by 2030, including any carbon generated by the creation, use, and eventual disposal of its products. The company has been carbon neutral for its own operations since 2018. Apple says it will remove 75% of carbon emissions in its supply chain by 2030. The forestry fund will contribute to the remaining 25%. Nature provides some of the the best tools to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Forests, wetlands, and grasslands, draw carbon from the atmosphere and store it away permanently in their soils, roots, and branches, said Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of Environment Policy and Social Initiatives. Through creating a fund that generates

both a financial return as well as real and measurable carbon impacts, we aim to drive broader change in the future, encouraging investment in carbon removal around the globe. Our hope is that others share our goals and contribute their resources to support and protect critical ecosystems, end quote. The Restore Fund will use internationally standardized measures to precisely track the amount of carbon being removed from the atmosphere. Apple's partners in the fund include Conservation International and Goldman Sachs. The fund will announce new projects later in the year, end quote. News you can use. Parallels has released Parallels Desktop 16.5, which includes native Apple Silicon support, letting users run Windows 10 Arm Insider preview on M1 Macs,

and also touting some improved performance, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Parallels says over 100,000 M1 Mac users tested the technical preview of Parallels' desktop 16.5 using Microsoft's Windows 10 on Arm Insider previews. These beta testers also tested tens of thousands of different Intel-based applications in virtualization. Parallels VP of Engineering and support, Nick Dobroglinsky said, quote, we received enthusiastic feedback about the remarkable performance of both the technical preview of Parallels Desktop 16 for M1 Mac and Windows 10 on Arm Insider preview as well as X86 applications and games, including Rocket League, Among Us, Roblox, the Elder Scrolls 5, Skyrim, Sam and Max

Save the World, and many others. Tessers loved Parallels Desktop easy-to-use features and seamless integration of Windows with MacOS Big Sur, which increased productivity, said Drabolisky, end quote. Parallels is touting some pretty significant performance and efficiency benefits on M1MX as well. Most notably, you can expect a 30% boost in performance compared to running a Windows 10 VM on an Intel Core I-9 processor. Also, according to parallels, 250% less energy used, up to 60% better DirectX11 performance,

and up to 30% better virtual machine performance. But let me underline this in case it wasn't clear. Microsoft does not currently sell an ARM version of Windows until they do. You can only make use of this with the Windows 10 Arm Insider preview, which you can download from the Microsoft website. Coinbase made its debut on public markets yesterday, closing at $328.28 a share, valuing the company at $85.78 billion. That was actually down from the open of $381 a share and its day high of $429 a share, at which point Coinbase was briefly valued at around $100 billion.

Twitter was basically all Coinbase all the time yesterday with people congratulating, people gloating, some doing a little of both, including friend of the show Gary Tan, who posted this video on YouTube in case you want to hear about the whole story of investing in Coinbase, link in the show notes. Eight years ago, I met a founder and invested $300,000 into his company. Those shares are now worth over $2.4 billion. That company was Coinbase, which investors have now valued at more than $100 billion. It's the best investment I've ever made. You might have heard of my $200 million mistake. I said no to being a co-founding engineer at a $40 billion company.

Don't feel too bad for me. I did say yes to being one of the first checks in a $100 billion startup. Silicon Valley is crazy. This is my story of my $2 billion success. Let's get into it. I think I've told you before that people keep saying this Coinbase debut is analogous to the Netscape IPO back in 1995. I know this because people keep tagging me when they make the point and pointing to episodes of the internet history podcast I did about that debut or my book, which I wrote about this at length. Netscape's debut was such a success that it validated the entire internet space in some people's minds. So folks are suggesting a similar validation moment for crypto.

Though it's funny to consider that Netscape's market cap after that first day of trading in 1995 was around $3 billion, and of course, Coinbase's is $85 billion. But I think we also talked about on that Twitter space last weekend how I keep finding it odd that Coinbase is the most successful startup yet in the crypto space and yet it's completely anathetical to the whole crypto project, the whole crypto ethos. Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Crypto was designed to be decentralized against the idea of middlemen and exchanges. Coinbase is a marketplace no different than any other marketplace in history, except that instead of trading oranges, or stocks or whatever, it's trading crypto. It struck me in the shower this morning, and maybe it's neither here nor there, but the most app analogy to the dot-com era vis-vis Coinbase is this.

AOL was considered the biggest winner of the early internet era in early 2000 because it was the way most Americans were introduced to the internet for the first time. Is Coinbase, the AOL of this era, because it's how most normal people are getting introduced to own. and trading crypto. I mean, Coinbase's financials prove that being a crypto marketplace is a much better business than being a glorified ISP like AOL, but Coinbase as AOL is maybe the analogy that fits the moment better than Coinbase as Netscape. Again, I don't know that there's an overall point to be made here by pointing this out, but I thought I'd put that out there anyway.

DJI has upgraded its year-old mid-tier Mavik Air 2 drone. Say hello. to the $999 Mavik Air 2S. The Verge has had one long enough to do a review, and they say this is a great drone for beginners, though it is still a tad expensive. Quote, yes, it's $200 more than the prior model, but it comes with some notable new features and upgrades,

including a much larger image sensor. The new one-inch sensor is capable of shooting 20 megapixel photos, 5.4K video, and 4K, up to 60 frames per second. but hold your horses or wallets, there are a few caveats to those impressive capabilities. The Mavic Air 2S's camera sensor is the same size as what you'd get in the higher end Mavoc 2 Pro. It's much larger than the half-inch sensor used in last year's Air 2. The Air 2S should shoot almost equally good photos and better video as the Mavik 2 Pro, at least on paper. The Air 2S's maximum video resolution is 5.4K versus 4K on the Mavc 2 Pro, and the Air 2,

Air 2S's 4K video has even higher bit rate, 150mbPS compared to 100mbps, and lastly, the Air 2S's 4K video also has a higher frame rate. All of those are nice upgrades over what you get in the more expensive model, not to mention the benefits of the smaller Air 2. Once you switch to 4K 60 frames per second, though, the highest 4K frame rate you can capture, there will be some significant cropping because it isn't using the full. one-inch sensor in that mode. It looks roughly like a 1.3x crop to my eyes, but DJI wouldn't confirm exactly how much crop there is. That shouldn't discourage you from using 4K-slash-60 frames per second.

The video quality still holds up, and the image looks great in the final result, but if you're just comparing spec sheets, you won't see that there's a crop in this mode. That also might explain why the Air 2S has a slightly wider focal length than others in the Mavik lineup when using the full one-inch sensor, the focal length is 22 millimeters. Typically, DJI drones are either 24 or 28 millimeters. I personally like the slightly wider look, but if you prefer a tighter composition, you can use the built-in digital zoom or crop in edit, end quote. The review ends thusly, quote. Despite some odd limitations in its features, the Mavic Air 2S is still a fantastic drone, especially for beginners who want something more capable than a DJI Mini 2.

There are a few tradeoffs compared to the MAVIC 2 Pro, but frankly, most people will be okay with them. I recently wrote about how the underestimated Mini 2 became my favorite drone due to its unmatched portability and better than expected image quality. The Air 2S nearly took away that title. If you prioritize image quality, it's an obvious choice provided you can stomach the extra hit to your wallet. The MAVIC Air 2S now has the perfect balance between a compact, size and great image quality despite all of the asterisks and caveats it may have, end quote. Finally today, I want to just mention that Ford has unveiled what it calls Blue Cruise. It's so-called hands-free, advanced driver assist system, limited for use on about 100,000

miles of highways coming to 2021 F-150s and Mach-E's in 2021. quote, according to Ford, Blue Cruise will allow hands-free driving on, quote, pre-qualified sections of divided highways called Hands Free Blue Zones that make up more than 100,000 miles of North American roads, end quote. Yes, Ford is even branding the highway. Blue Cruise is Ford's answer to General Motors' Super Cruise, which is considered the gold standard for Level 2 advanced driver assist systems. These systems work in concert with a number of distinct features like adaptive cruise control,

automatic emergency braking, lane keep assist, blind spot detection, pedestrian monitoring, and stop sign detection. What makes these systems stand apart, though, is the inclusion of an active driver monitoring system in the form of an infrared sensor on the steering column that tracks the driver's eyes to make sure they are keeping them on the road, end quote. Not every F-150 and Mach-E will be automatically eligible for the software update, F-150 owners who opt for the $1,59-4 Ford Pilot 360 Active 2.0 package can purchase Blue Cruise for an additional $600. For Mustang Mach-E owners, Blue Cruise will come standard on the CA Route 1 premium and first addition variants as part of the $3,200 comfort and technology package.

Ford says it expects to sell more than 100,000 vehicles equipped with Blue Cruise in the first year based on company sales and take rate projections, end quote. I squeeze this in today to make a point that I've made before. while we're waiting on full autonomy to show up, I'd be more than happy for some sort of super cruise control to become available just on highways that would allow me to read a book or something while driving interstates down to Florida to visit the grandparents or something. This is not that, I realize, but can't we handle this autonomy thing in both directions, sort of like a temporal pincer movement from the movie Tenet?

Like, if I can't read a book during the winding complicated streets of Brooklyn from my house to my office for several years yet, but I could read a book on the comparatively easier sections of highway around the country, even if just occasionally, I would definitely take that as soon as you can give it to me and be more than happy. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.