Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 07/03 - Why Is Everyone Arguing Over Superhuman?

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Telsa sold a lot more Model 3’s than anyone expected, more signs of tech manufacturing fleeing China, Uber’s new Dine-In service is kinda brilliant, and have you seen the whole tech world arguing over Superhuman? Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Instacart.com Promocode RIDE at checkout. Links: Tesla sold a lot more Model 3’s than anyone expected in latest quarter (Digital Trends) HP, Dell and Microsoft join electronics exodus from China (Nikkei Asian Review) House lawmakers officially ask Facebook to put Libra cryptocurrency project on hold (The Verge) Amazon Alexa keeps your data with no expiration date, and shares it too (CNET) Uber Eats invades restaurants with Dine-In option. (TechCrunch) Superhuman is Spying on You (Mike Industries) 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 ride home for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Tesla sold a lot more Model 3s than anyone expected. More signs of tech manufacturing fleeing China.

Uber's new Dynne-in service is kind of brilliant. And have you seen the whole tech world arguing over superhuman? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Tesla shocked a lot of people yesterday. After a big sales drop at the start of the year, Tesla announced yesterday that it sold a lot more cars than anyone expected in its latest quarter. And what is most crucial, they seem to be selling a lot more Model 3s than anyone anticipated. Quote, with the reporting of the company's sales figures today, it was disclosed that Tesla achieved production of 87,048 vehicles and deliveries of

95,200 vehicles. Both of these figures are new highs for the electric vehicle maker and come in above most analysts' expected numbers for the quarter. In detail, Tesla produced 14,500 and delivered 17,650 Model S and X vehicles. The company combined those two numbers in their reporting and produced 72,531 and delivered 77,550 Model 3 vehicles. As you may have noticed, the Model 3 is outselling the other two Tesla models combined at a rate of more than 4 to 1. The Model 3 has been the best-selling Tesla since the small cars debut, but obviously the extent of the difference between the models sales is. such that Tesla now just combines X and S numbers into one category, end quote. Tesla's next quarterly earnings report is scheduled for the end of this month.

This should probably surprise no one, but sources are telling the Niki Asian review that HP and Dell plan to shift as much as 30% of their respective notebook production out of China. What's more? Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Sony, and Nintendo are all looking at making production shifts of their own. Quote, the industry consensus is to move an average of some 30% of production out of China depending on how important the U.S. market is. Everyone needs to come up with a plan,

a supply chain executive familiar with the plan said. Apple is really the very last and the slowest to start formulating plans while everyone else out there is much more aggressive, end quote. Meanwhile, Amazon, for its Kindle, E-reader and Digital Assistant Echo, and Nintendo are looking at Vietnam as an alternative. Microsoft is eyeing Thailand, as well as Indonesia, several sources said, end quote. Again, as I wondered aloud here recently, whether the trade war hots up or just blows over, I wonder to what degree we will look back in time some years from now and realize that

trade war or no, this was the time when China ceased being the workshop of the world, or at least the tech world. I guess for the rest of the year, we're going to have to have a regular congressional beat, as this sudden regulatory impulse gathers steam or doesn't. The House Financial Services Committee has officially requested that Facebook halt development of Libra until Congress and regulators can investigate the potential risks to the global economy. Quoting a letter from Representative Maxine Waters to Facebook, if products and services like these are left improperly regulated and without sufficient oversight,

they could pose systemic risks that endanger the U.S. and global financial stability. These vulnerabilities could be exploited and obscured by bad actors as other cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and wallets have been in the past, end quote. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge Tuesday, quote, We look forward to working with lawmakers as this process moves forward, including answering their questions at the upcoming House Financial Services Committee hearing, end quote. And in a letter to Senator Chris Coons, Amazon fessed up that it does indeed keep Alexa transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, only removing them from their systems if manually deleted

by users. Coons had given Amazon a deadline of June 30th to outline how long data collected by Alexa is stored and how it is used. Amazon's letter was delivered June 28th. Amazon says it uses the transcripts for training its voice assistant and also so customers can know what Alexa thought it heard for voice commands. Those transcripts aren't anonymized. Amazon explained that there associated with every user's account. Quote, Amazon's response leaves open the possibility that transcripts of user voice interactions with Alexa are not deleted from all of Amazon services even after a user has deleted a recording of his or her voice, Kuhn said in a statement.

What's more, the extent to which this data is shared with third parties and how those third parties use and control that information is still unclear, end quote. It continues to amaze me the degree to which food is becoming important to Uber. Uber Eats has launched a new service called Dine-In, which lets users order food before going to a restaurant and then eat it there. Sort of a mixture of Uber Eats and Open Table. But also, wouldn't you anticipate that you could also order an Uber to take you to the restaurant? It's kind of brilliant, really. Quoting Josh Constine, adding Dine-in lets Uber Eats insert itself into more food transactions,

expand to restaurants that care about presentation, and don't do delivery, and avoid paying drivers while earning low overhead revenue. Uber's dine-in option is now available in some cities, including Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego, where it could save diners, time, and fees while helping restaurants fill empty tables and waiters earn tips. But it could also coerce more restaurants to play ball with Uber Eats if their competitors do. We verified there are no delivery or service fees, and restaurants get 100% of tips left in app by users. However, we found some items were silently marked up. from restaurants listed prices in both Uber Eats delivery and Dine-in options,

which could help it make some money directly from these purchases. Dine-in appears next to the delivery and pickup options across the top of the Uber Eats app in select cities. You order from the menu and can choose to go eat ASAP or in some cases schedule when you want to arrive and sit down. You'll be shown how long the food will take to prep, distance to the restaurant, your price, and the restaurant's rating. You'll then be notified as the order is prepared and approaches readiness. then you just deliver yourself to the restaurant and the food is ready to be served as soon as you sit down. You can add a tip in app or on the table, end quote. Again, Constine is saying that

this is a way to earn money for Uber without having an actual ride hailed. But again, I don't see why this isn't complementary. Why wouldn't I also take an Uber to get to the restaurant? So I didn't go with this as a story yesterday because I thought it was minor, but then it got so much chatter that the algorithms floated it to the top of tech meme where it's been hovering around all morning today as well. And it was in seeing that chatter that I found the story interesting. On his personal blog called Mike Industries, former VP of Design at Twitter, Mike Davidson, put up a piece about that $30 a month email app we spoke about recently, Superhuman. noting that one of the key functionalities of Superhuman is that it adds read receipts and tracking pixels to outgoing mail and doesn't allow users to stop image loading on incoming mail, thus preventing them from opting out of this sort of digital surveillance.

Not only does it share whether you open to the email or not with the sender, it also shares your location by default, and this feature cannot be turned off. In short, Davidson titled the piece, Superhuman is spying on you. Davidson didn't just write the piece to complain about this feature. Read receipts are the very concept that makes email marketing effective, so they're not new, though this implementation of it is slightly new. Instead, he's making a larger point about ethical choices made early on in a company's history and how they shape culture and how they shape products, etc. Quote, what I see in Superhuman is a company that has mistaken taking advantage of people for good design.

They've identified a feature that provides value to some of their customers, i.e. seeing if someone has opened your email, and they've trampled the privacy of every single person they send email to in order to achieve that. Superhuman never asks the person on the other end if they are okay with sending a read receipt, complete with a timestamp and geolocation. Superhuman never offers a way to opt out. Just as troublingly, superhuman teaches its user to surveil by default. I imagine many users sign up for this, see the feature, and say to themselves, cool, read receipts. I guess that's one of the things my $30 a month buys me, end quote. Again, you really should read the piece because it's well thought out and nuanced.

All of the chatter that has popped up around this, Davidson actually addresses in the piece. Email clients have done this for years. Yes, Apple does this with iMessage, yes, MailChimp, Send Grid, all the email marketing firms do this to some degree. And yes, lots of people were like, hey, why wouldn't you want read receipts? Everyone should want them. Sounds like an innovation to make email better. To which Davidson responds, quote, you the sender, do not get to decide how I, the receiver, respond to you. Not returning your email right away is not passive aggressive. It's often just being busy or prioritizing. Darya Obasanjo said, quote, an email recipient, I get nothing in return for superhuman tracking if I read the email you sent me.

So you're not trading your privacy away for features. You're trading mine, end quote. And Casey Newton snarked, I will never avoid the tracking pixels in your emails. I want you to know that I opened it and I'm not responding. Come at me, end quote. Again, all of the VC and founder types, who, as I've said, seem to love superhuman and swear by it, were vociferous and immediate in their defense, here's Austin Alred. Quote, it's really disappointing to watch everyone turn on startups and declare them the bad guys as soon as they become moderately successful. Really sad how predictable it all is, end quote. But again, read the piece.

I don't see that in Davidson's post at all. It really is a thoughtful dissertation on the choices a company makes and a product, and again, the notion of ethical design. Here's the key graph, I think, quote, It's kind of like if you walked by someone's window at night and you saw them naked, you could do one of two things. A, look away and get out of there, realizing you saw something that person wouldn't want you to see, or B, keep staring because if they really didn't want you to see them, they would have closed their blinds. It's two ways of looking at the world, and superhuman is not just allowing for option B, but actively causing it to happen, end quote. So I wanted to share the debate around this because I found it fascinating.

and it's still going on today. It basically comes down to two camps. One side saying, you shouldn't design products like this anymore. And the other side saying, why can't we design products like this anymore? You hate innovation. Now, I don't want to weigh in on the back and forth entirely. But what I will weigh in on is something that has come up a lot recently. I might even have made this point before on this show.

I know that I made this point on the A16Z podcast, when I spoke to Chris Dixon, and I know that it came up at the talks I gave recently at Google and PayPal. Basically, how I would come down on the back and forth is this. If you actually care about innovation, you shouldn't want to design products like this anymore. Here's what I mean. I think there's a generational or even a secular shift happening right now in what people expect from products, and thus there should be one in product development. When you're conceiving of a product today, you need to think of a third dimension.

You need to think of how it will feel to people. And in this modern era, blame Google, blame Facebook. For all the ways that people don't stop using services like Google and Facebook, people have been conditioned by the past product decisions of companies like that to be more defensive about things like data and privacy and surveillance as a business model. So if you're a product designer today, you don't get to a billion users by creating something that is useful, but feels icky. Facebook and Google already made people feel icky, so you don't get to anymore.

Sucks, I know, but their past poor choices constrain your own choices developing product going forward. You never want to fight the last war. You never want to design a product the way that the successful products of the previous generation were designed. In fact, and this is the point that I've made in those talks, I think the era of low-hanging fruit is over. The era of just turning something on and achieving a billion users is over. I think the lazy business model of, well, we have this many users, so the easiest way to make money is to clear cut and strip mine their data is over. I don't think you succeed in a new generation of product cycles

by copying the success of previous generations. You succeed in a new generation by fixing the mistakes and zagging in the opposite direction of what previous generations did. Why can't it work for me? it worked for Facebook, engagement at all costs, scale at all costs, get away with whatever data aggressiveness you want while you can. People might complain now, but they won't care later once you've hooked them. Why can't I just pool the same levers? Boo-hoo, people are too sensitive now. Well, there, actually, if you can see, it is your chance to differentiate and find success

in this new era by recognizing the new expectations and new realities of the market before the incumbents do. What I see in this debate, at least on one side of it, is a weird defensiveness, a sense that an old startup playbook, an old way of doing business might be outmoded, might no longer be efficacious and good. Learn that lesson. Like it or not, people's expectations around data and privacy and surveillance as a business model, their expectations and their preferences and their tastes have changed. You can bemoan that that has happened or you can be the first to learn that that has happened and lean into the fact that that has happened and gain a reputation in the market for delivering the new things that people want. I don't have an opinion

on if Reed receipts and Superhuman was a good product decision or a bad one. What I am saying is if Superhuman couldn't anticipate that that choice could be an issue for a lot of people, then that was their biggest mistake. There is a new reality. in tech markets and tech products from a lot of different angles, not just this area of ickiness. The winners of this new generation will be the ones who sense this new dimension, this new change in taste, not just can it get traction, not just can it scale, but also how does it make people feel? Is this in good taste? Not just creation, but thoughtful curation, maybe even ethical design as a differentiating feature that helps you achieve product market fit.

There once was a company whose motto was, frankly, really good advice. Think different. That's all for today. In case you were wondering, no show tomorrow, because I'm taking July 4th off. But I will be back on Friday for a regular weekday show. And I told you last week, I've got some special weekend bonus episodes plan that might be as close to a fully produced, straight-up entertainment offering you'll ever get from this podcast, something that can occupy you for the better part of two hours when it's Sunday,

and you're driving or flying or sadly trudging your way back to the real world to get ready for work on Monday. Enjoy your fourth, everybody.