The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Software is What Distinguishes the Hardware Winners

Episode Date: January 15, 2016

Smartphone components have become a kind of Lego kit for all kinds of consumer technology. Cameras, sensors, and batteries all get mixed and matched in different permutations to create different gadgets. It might be something that enables your connected home, offers a video capture system for cops, or powers a remote video chat/treat machine for your dog (I know, we all need that). But since practically every component is now available to everyone -- and the manufacturing expertise to tie it all together as well -- it becomes very hard to distinguish via hardware alone. Software is the key to breaking from the pack, say Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky in this post-2016 CES podcast. What Benedict and Steven saw and learned from this year’s gathering of the consumer electronics industry in this segment of the a16z Podcast. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. Smartphone components have become a kind of Lego kit for all kinds of consumer technology. Cameras, sensors, and batteries all get mixed and matched in different permutations to create different gadgets. It might be something that enables your connected home, offers a video capture system for cops, or powers a remote video chat slash treat machine for your dog. I know, we all need that. but since practically every component is now available to everyone and the manufacturing expertise to tie it altogether as well, it becomes very hard to distinguish via hardware alone.

Software is the key to breaking from the pack, say Benedict Evans and Steven Sinovsky in this post-2016 CES podcast. What Benedict and Stephen saw and learned from this year's gathering of the consumer electronics industry, in this segment of the A16Z podcast. Welcome, gentlemen. Good morning. Hey, so Stephen, I was reading your post, and you're one of those people you've said it out loud, or at least you wrote it out loud.

You love CES. And for me, that's a little bit baffling, but I want to know why you love it. And from your perspective, because I know you go there with a different sort of mindset and a different lens. So what is that?

Well, you know, I do love it. I love the Vegas thing. But what I really do, really do love is just its opportunity to sort of see everything at once. Now, it's not quite everything because a bunch of the big companies don't go. You can't really see a ton of startups. But it really is like a snapshot of a massive amount of activity. Plus, you get to see how they want to sell it and pitch it and talk about it. And by seeing all the parts at once, you sort of can connect the dots.

from like small, like a person making an ingredient technology way over in the faraway boonies, all the way to, you know, like the Samsung people with their monster constructed booth that took three days and a bunch of carpenters and metalworkers to assemble. And that whole chain is super interesting. And the chain, and I think this is something you wrote, is there's from finished products and it's sort of part lab and part like, okay, you can go buy this in a store right now. Yeah. Yeah, like what I always find fascinating is that so many people go there and they think it's like, wow, this is like the post Christmas sales place.

You know, it's like a big giant best buy or something. And then other people go there and they think everybody's just talking about their future and their labs. And it's a little bit of all of those things. But it also just depends on the specific booth or even the part of the booth. You know, like some boots like Samsung will have like future projects and then the TVs you can buy now. And then like the TVs that they're going to probably bring. to market in a little bit. And you just have to know and spend the time.

CES used to be all about TVs, but now it's about cars. It's about drones. It's about all sorts of different things. So let's get into that. Let's get into what you guys saw that was important in the trends that they then sort of imply in the technology industry generally. So I think the sort of the basic thing that you see, the sort of the thing that grounds everything is that this is kind of all about the smart.

supply chain. I mean, not, you know, there's a few things like TVs and so on that aren't, but a huge proportion of what you see is basically being made using smartphone components and being made by people kind of who are from the smartphone industry in some way or who are also making smartphones or contract manufacturers who are making smartphones. And so what's happened is that all of the components that come out of that industry are there of sort of Lego for technology. And so, like, Bosch had this great display where they had like 15 different consumer electronics products from the surface to an iPhone to a drone to a nest and they all had the same botch component sensor sort of tilt sensor switch or something in them and so that's kind of the kind of

the foundation of a lot of what you're seeing that and what that means then is that you have then and then on top of that you have like the whole shenzhen manufacturing ecosystem that can kind of turn on a dime to make this thing or that thing based on those underlying components so like last year there was loads of 3d printing this year there's loads of everything. Everything. Loads of cameras. Yeah,

the thing I was going to mention is this year there were, I think, five booths that were just selling lapel cameras for policemen. Yeah. And they were all like, it's got a new brand name. It's got a new,

it looks like it's clearly the company was making selfie six months ago and they read the news and thought, oh, maybe we should make lapel cameras for policemen. And so the entirely new company just kind of appears, complete with a whole product stack

and everything else and the software all ready to go. And if that doesn't work, then in a six months time, they'll join the guys who are making drones. Yeah, it's worth actually just highlighting for folks like exactly how that works because in the startup world that doesn't often make a lot of sense. You're like, wow, you raise capital, you build a company.

But what these people are doing is they're tapping into this whole elaborate ecosystem of manufacturers. And then there's a person who's like sort of like in a positive way like a hustler. They see an opportunity. Hey, if I can just go buy a production run of say 5,000 police lapel cams and then I'll just hustle them out and I'll get them sold to some decisions. distributors, some middle people, and I'm making 10%, and it's a business. And then they'll just do that again for hoverboards or, you know, for whatever. And that's a lot of how it works. And so it doesn't, it's not like they're raising capital to build a factory and develop the circuit board and package it.

They're doing like a fixed size run, getting them out there and moving on. In a funny kind of way, you could almost, it's kind of an imperfect analogy, but you can also almost argue that like the user experience and the injection mold plastic and so on has become software. That is to say, and there's a sort of analogy in here that you've got the sort of the underlying physical components of the chips. But then you wrap them and repurpose them, you know, almost overnight into different things. And so just as you know, you can take a piece of open source software and make this or that

or the other thing out of it and put a new UI on it and it can be a message board or it can be a social network or it can be an consumer insurance platform, but it's the same underlying software. You have the same thing in Shenzhen, which is you take the same basic chips and the basic supply chains and manufacturing, you know, manufacturing lines, and it can be lapel, and it can be lapel mics, it can be hoverboards, it can be drones, it can be a 3D printer, based on where the market's going. And what's interesting is that that Shenzhen supply chain, it used to be kind of shoved over

into a dark hinterland corner of CES. It seems to me that it's getting its place on center stage. Like more and more, that supply chain is what matters. And so what is the implication? If everyone has access to that supply chain, what are you starting to see and what does that mean if I'm thinking about building X, Y, or Z? Well, I think there's an obvious point here, which is that if you're going to take commodity components and put them into an undifferentiated route to market like a shelf in Home Depot, you need to think very carefully about why your product is going to be different from the other 40 that are on the shelf. And so this was the thing that I sort of said on Twitter that I lost count of complete connected home solutions when I'm going to be different. got 40, like 40 different booths showing a complete connected home solution, quote unquote.

Now, some of them are better than others, but you know, you get to that point, like, why is your plastic box in a cardboard box on a shelf in Home Depot with smartphone components and some cloud software better than all of the others? Well, what's super interesting about that is, it has to be better. And then it's interesting you pick the example of Home Depot. Like, what's your week to market? Right, because Home Depot has said, hey, we're a big company. we can go send some folks on a plane to Shenzhen and buy the connected system ourselves and put a Home Depot brand on it and eliminate the whole middle of markup.

And so for me, what it really boils down to is that, you know, if you're not knowledgeable by walking the floor or reading about it and understanding how this chain works, you could get mesmerized by like I could put get on a plane and go to Shenzhen and I could have a Wi-Fi access point with my own brand on it and think like you could pack. package it differently and do all this stuff, and then find that you just, you get plowed over by this machinery. Similarly, you might think you could pick a special part. Like, you could pick the best 4K camera available and think that that will be sustainable, but it'll be sustainable for like 10 minutes, because that camera will be everywhere or the capabilities in that camera. And so you really do have to build a software-based business because software is the part that

can't be easily copied. Like, take cameras. So a camera, you can take the same camera, and it can show up in a doorbell, in a security camera, in a baby monitor, in a lapel camera, in a, in a lapel camera, in a camera, in a mountable action cam, like all... And a drone. And they did in 50 places. But if... Like, anything that can have a camera in it, has a camera in it, and a lot of things that can't have a camera in it, have a camera in it. Or it shouldn't have a camera, yeah. And not just a cruddy camera, but like a really good one.

And also, it doesn't have to be just a camera. Like, it could be a camera plus a thermometer, plus a motion sensor. sensor plus a rotational sensor. But then you look and you see, wow, like this security camera has built like a back-end learning system that understands people and it has a facial recognition system that, like, connects to your Facebook profile and knows your friend. And like all of a sudden you're like, wow, that's a competitive advantage that might be sustainable.

But if you're a startup and you've got 10 people and you put eight of them on like sourcing your camera hardware and spending all of this energy, like putting it in a quick, cool industrial design thing. It's not clear like how good an investment in time and money that will be. Any more because I think the example of Nest and Dropcam, now Nest and even GoPro, there was a period in time and you tell me if this is true still today where you kind of could do that. You could package things. You could have a sort of period of exclusivity. But has that really just shrunk to virtually nothing? I think I mean there's kind of two things in here. One is Nest is kind of different in that there's quite a lot of proprietary hardware

or at least proprietary work around the hardware in Ness to get the colour screen to work on the tiny amount of power and so on. So maybe that's to sort of put that off to one side. Drop cam and something else. There's a point in here around being the first package it to think of a use case, to think of a way of selling it and a way of telling people why they would want this

on top of pure commodity hardware. So both Dropcam and GoPro are basically pure commodity hardware, but they come up with a way of wrapping it and taking it out and selling it to people that makes it look different. But there's a limited window on how long that can last. Because, you know, fundamentally, you know, it's, you know, unless you can build some kind of a network effect

or you can build some kind of unique software on top of that that means that you have to buy that software rather than somebody else's software, then it kind of drops away. And of course, the extension of this is, if you look at what happened to something like Flip, the actual answer was Flip got replaced by Instagram. That is to say you reach a certain point.

we say, well, why are you actually even making hardware? You know, if your point is the cloud and the software, why don't you just put the cloud and the software out there and let people bring their own hardware? For those, if you don't remember, let's remind people what Flipwise. It was the camera. It was the little handheld camera.

It was the little handheld camera just at the point that camera tech had become commoditized, but not at the point that you could get a good one into a smartphone. And so there was a window of like two years where it took better pictures than you got on. And the smartphone was taking kind of crappy pictures and crappy video.

And of course what happened was that the smartphone cameras got better and flip was dead. Well, the software on the cameras is a really good example because if you look at DropCam, like when it first came out, one of the things it did, like it wasn't the first like monitoring security camera. Like you could go up and down the fries aisle and you could see the elaborate packages from Swan, from Netgear, from all of the people who could figure out how to put a camera in and make a DVR box, which was also a commodity. But then what Dropcam did is like you could get to it from the internet. And this whole notion of tunneling, like, was super hard for most people to get right in a chaotic world of home and business networking with, like, these weird firewalls. And they just made it work. But now when you'd walk the floor, like actually getting to a home monitoring camera is itself a – that layer of software has been sort of the expertise for everybody has been raised. And so it wasn't quite the sustainable advantage.

So everything, your ring doorbell, you know, all of the home security cameras can. all like you could see the pictures from your phone everywhere. I saw a picture of you, Stephen, sitting inside, I have to ask, to stay in inside that one person drone, meaning like this thing will lift you into the sky. Now, you were sitting on the floor, but had they said, okay, Stephen, we can fire this thing up for you and fly you around the, I don't know, Las Vegas if you want. Would you have done that? Would I have gotten to see somebody else do it before me?

No, look, I'm biased because I even mentioned in the report, like the, the, the, The CEO of that's ex-Microsoftee. And so I, you know... Is that a good sign or a right side? Well, you know, we have a long history in aviation as Microsoft people. Not really. Well, it was interesting. We had a, you know, it's a fascinating product.

And part of it is, you know, you got to give credit to the China market for letting this thing up in the air and learning to test it. And that's like a huge thing. Because like, I don't even know where you'd have to go to like White Sands, New Mexico to test something like that in the U.S. And that itself is a big deal. But they're very focused on, like, you know, their cities are huge. And getting from one side to another is itself a problem that they want to go solve.

And so they see a world of doing that. It was fascinating. Like, it literally blew me away because I just, I mean, it felt like. Literally they didn't turn. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, I did feel a little bit like I was in a James Bond kind of deal. Oh, no. It's crazy.

I mean, it does look like, you know, it's this scaled up version of something that you could hold in your hand. and now you get to sit in it in it. You think about it for a second, you realize, wow, because it's so expensive now, like to get a helicopter and you need a pilot, and it's not even a easy pilot. It's like a really hard thing, like, you know, and then just to be able to do that to see a tour of giant pandas, which is one of the examples they used or something like that.

So what else did you see that you felt like hit the mark or missed the mark or that we should be paying attention to it? So I thought there was a whole hall that was basically a car show, and I thought that was interesting. And there were a lot of cars that look like giant cough suites and so on, you know, these kind of transparent blue things or something. And every car company has the story that in two years time they will announce their strategy for self-driving cars or something. I thought as a kind of a non-car person, what I saw looking at a lot of these were, A, it was like the same approach to building a concept car that the car industry's had for 75 years. You know, this thing will never actually ship.

It will never actually look like that. you even showing me this? I thought the second thing was a lot of them reminded me of feature phone. This is the point I've made before. A lot of them reminded me of feature phones in like 2006. That is to say you've got to the point that you've added so many things to the product that it's become unusable. So obviously Stephen's talked a lot about this, like one good product decision at a time.

You've added so many features that you can't use a thing. So there's actually a website called My Car Does What, which explains all the different things that your car now does for you. And so you look at these things and you think, okay, There's 45 different buttons. There's two screens. Why are there two screens in the car? And it's like one of them is one of them running the third-party OSS

and one of them running the firmware. And like what's the dividing line between those? And like if you go to a self-driving car, then the self-driving bit needs to be able to see the map to know where you're going. And so it's the map, which bit of the... And it's just like this whole... And even like I was talking to one,

and the car has two 4G modems in it. Because one of them is the one that... car company wants in it to send telemetry of the car and safety. And then the other one is the optional one you might want to do like a Wi-Fi hotspot, a scenario that is odd to me in some level. And so that whole notion, almost it's like the org chart for the supply chain and the car company comes together to make sure that everybody still has their component integrated into the car in the same old way.

And so that lack of simplicity or that complete? Plexity, does that then tell you that? So it tells us that there's going to be a point of collapse into something sort of more coherent. The other thing actually I was reminded of was the, all that wave of kind of content companies doing phones in like 2005, six, seven. There's a famous story about the ESPN phone. And the head of ESPN is first meet Steve Jobs at a Disney board meeting and he comes up

and introduces himself and Steve Jobs looks at it in the service. Your phone is the dumbest idea I've ever. heard in my life. And you can kind of, we haven't got like an ESPN car, but like you can kind of see it's that kind of twisting and turning around, trying to find a way of avoiding the realization that, no, this is going to be software and it's not going to be you. Well, a good example of this to me are just, first, just to put a little context so everybody gets it. Like this is an enormous exhibition space that's this car show within CES. Right. And the cars, again, used to be like outside. I mean, they weren't in the main. Right. And foreign, to its credit, was really the first

car company to really drive itself into the show, which has a number of levels of irony if you might, you know, if you rent a Ford and go to CES, you sort of experience the two computers, the two of everything. But like 95% of what you saw on the floor were just like add in GPS systems and neon lights from Fast and Furious and like traditional car stuff. But when you got to the, to see something like, like I'm fascinated by like the in dash system because my view of it is like I really want an in-dash system from somebody who built my phone and I want that to just be my phone. I don't want it to have like different apps that I have to go download differently or a different, even a different data plan.

I literally want like phone remote desktop. And it turns out that there's three of these that you can get. There's Mirrorlink, which is a sort of a consortium led by VW among others. And then there's Android for cars and then Apple. And then Apple CarPlay. And the car company answer to this is like, just what you'd expect, like a bunch of meetings, and they're like, well, we can't upset everybody. So we're going to support all of them.

Plus, we can't upset our own team that makes $5,000 by upselling a nav system and an entertainment. So we have to have basically four things. And so every phone, like, you start off with, like, so the reason that there's the irony in the Ford is because you get in the rental car. And the whole time you're renting the car, it says, pair your phone, pair your phone, and it's blinking. And then you pair it. And then like the next thing you know, you need an account. on the Ford thing in order to use your phone's maps to use the Ford index. And like, it makes no sense. So do you think then, Benedict, you've just said it, that that car companies aren't going

to be able to make that transition for the reasons and for the things that you describe, Stephen? Well, there's a much, there's a kind of a deeper and much longer term question in here, which is that, you know, what happens to cars is as you go to electric, among other things, is that an awful lot of the things in a car that are discrete systems from discrete vendors or discrete teams get collapsed into software running on just one box or just two boxes or something. And that's the problem for the org charts of those companies

because they've got a whole org chart with little bits on it dedicated to buying boxes that aren't going to exist anymore and which of those bits of that all chart gets to control this. And much as this happened to feature phones, of course. NPC is. And so it will all kind of collapse into many fewer components. And so that's kind of one big kind of cultural organizational challenge for them. There's a second one, which I think, which is do the car manufacturers end up looking a bit like Foxcon?

That is to say, you buy components and you bolt them together. Because someone has got to like make bits of big bits of steel and bolt them to other bits of steel or carbon fiber or whatever it is. Someone's got to put these things together. And somebody else probably will be making this smart. bit. And so does that mean that the car companies end up looking a teeny bit like Foxcon? And it's the component guys who have got a deep problem. Or alternatively, does this enable fundamentally new people to make new kinds of cars? And which of the car companies, some of the car companies may be able to make that transition? Yeah. Well, there's a fascinating

article in Wired about GM and the battle that they're having with Tesla. And you got to give them credit for like really trying to do an end-to-end electric car to compete. And the question is, like, really fundamentally, like, are they going to build their own software? Are they going to just go and approach Delphi or Bosch or the traditional vendors and then try to outsource it? And then how does their dealer network going to handle it? Because, you know, the Bolt is an amazing looking vehicle. Like, I want to go get on the wait list for the Bolt. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. But the Volt, like, it's like legendary in a film documentary about like how the company conspired to the company and its whole ecosystem sort of conspired to make it fail. And this disruption is a very real thing. All of these companies, the Detroit companies in particular in North America, three quarters of their cars are light SUVs and or light trucks. And so that's a whole different business than transportation in a sense. And like how does that, how does that really, really fit in? And you just, you really do. When you go systematically up and down the aisles at the show, you see this like viscerally.

Like you can literally have a conversation with a person who works at the company who can talk. to you and then be too candid and tell you bad things about the other part of the company or tell you the meeting that they were just at trying to get something done. So I had to remember when I worked in the media business that I had a colleague who would say that Nokia, we'd have meetings with Nokia and the N-series people at Nokia would say, what are those ourselves in the E-Series unit up to and vice versa? And this is a sort of the similar point about, you know, that you can look at a car dashboard and you can see the augustructure of the company.

What you can also see is that the steering wheel guy really hates a deistate guy. Or you could flip side, you could see the sales channel that loves the navigation system. Yes. Like, they're like, wow, it's $5,000. And like, we, the spiffs and the marketing and like, we can't just lose that. Like, that's our negotiating power with that customer. Right.

So the common theme in all of this is it's the software that matters, whether we're talking about drones or cars. It's a software and a company that's predicated on hardware and on different bits of hardware is in deep trouble. because the hardware is going to go and those different bits of hardware are going to turn into one piece of hardware made by somebody else. Yeah, this is, you know, in a global economy, like when you used to make physical things, like, you know, your geography, your supply chain, your distribution channel, those used to be sort of almost physically constrained, which led to a sustainable advantage. But if everybody can get on a plane and fly to southern China and every customer can search the web and order any product from Amazon from any place on Earth and not know, those. limitations just aren't there anymore. So you need the one thing that that takes intellectual

horsepower to make, which of course the hardware does, but is also really, really hard to duplicate and singular in its existence, which is the software side of it. Do we see that from the large, you know, traditional consumer electronics companies? I mean, is Samsung out there like with something that you feel like breaks that mold, or are they running down the same path? I think they're in the same situation as anyone else in hardware. I mean, this is kind of the narrative that we've seen with the Japanese consumer electronic companies and I think they've got a whole other world of her but I think Samsung is kind of in an analogous situation

in that they have a great component business they make great screens, they make great chips, they make great cellular radios and so on but they are stuck in the same situation that the PC companies were in that the components are a commodity, the operating system is a commodity, it's not their place to differentiate the software

and so they've been unable to create any value there. And so they're squeezed between Apple, which does actually control the components and the software. And doesn't go to CES. And builds on the scale of the whole mobile ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. Which is something they learn from the original Macs.

Yeah, so they're using this supply chain just like everybody else and picking and choosing the best bits of it. Samsung is kind of squeezed because they don't control the operating system, they can't create that differentiation. I mean, we've had long conversations around this and around Xiaomi as well, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens to Xiaomi in this coming year as well, whether they can sustain their advantage.

And so Samsung has squeezed out. Panasonic's getting out of consumer electronics. Sony has been failing in this for 20 years. Sony actually had a nice line of stuff. I mean, I kind of miss Sony and I miss Nokia. Yeah. Sony is very, you know, spending years in Japan, like Sony is always like the emotion that I have and I go to the booth.

But you can see how they're actually trying to play to their strengths. Yes. Like they have imaging, which they make the sensors in the highest end DSLRs. and they package it up in a consumer line, which is very popular. And it was actually the first thing you see is their breadth of their consumer imaging line. Yeah, I thought what they're trying to do is to take the brand and the design and the manufacturing quality and create clear blue water between that and the software. So that in a sense it doesn't matter that they're not producing the software.

They're almost, I mean, obviously Steve Jobs wanted to copy Sony. Yeah. It's almost like what Sony are trying to do is to turn back and say, okay, the components are a commodity, fine. but how can we create something beautiful that people will want to buy that will still be different. Yeah, and some of it, they still have like these amazing labs. Like we both, we ran into each other and we both like the zero throw length projector. I mean, the thing is a tiny little cube like four by four that's a speaker. And it's literally you push it up against the wall and it shows a 40 inch image.

Oh, wow. On the wall above it. And an HD image at that, I bet. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And a brilliant laser skew corrected, color corrected. And then they had a giant one, which was like $50,000. But it's like a foot away and it does a hundred inch image, the same kind of technology. And I bought this Pico projector, which was the one thing I bought from the show.

And it's sort of the size of like a big deck of cards, if there was such a thing. And it has a two-hour battery. And it does an HD image. And it's also, by the way, a backup phone battery. Like it's about the size of one of those things. But you just pop it on the table and you've got, you know, a three-to-one throw ratio image on any. wall. So I was going to ask you, it sounds to me like for you, Stephen, the bolt, you bought this pico projector, some of these projectors were kind of, you know, objects of

gadget lust. Benedict, did you walk out of there with a new lapel camera or like, was there anything you're like, wow, I can't wait for that to come out? Every now and then you see a kind of a piece of genius. So the piece of genius that I saw was the nine-volt battery that you put in a smoke detector, that form factor, but inside you've got a lithium ion rechargeable battery and a Wi-Fi chip and a microphone. And so you put it in your smoke detector, and then it pins your smartphone as the smoke detector goes off. Ah! It was a brilliant hack.

It was actually a totally brilliant hack. I loved, I definitely love that one. I want to, let me add one more, which was a camera. And this was actually, I want to add this because there's a whole wing of the show floor that was new this year that was featured basically Indiegogo and Kickstarter and new companies. Right. That some of them hadn't brought their products to market yet. But nlapse.io, which is listed in the post of mine, is a time lapse of camera, which is another camera. But it's two HD cameras in a box that has a solar panel charger and a battery and a phone, basically.

And what it does is it does time lapse photography, which like forever because it's solar powered. So you just say you're building a giant building, digging a giant hole, building, building a bridge. You just put this thing up. Raising a kid. Yeah. Well, you just put this thing up and it forever will do a time lapse. But what's so cool about is literally means forever because you don't ever need to go to it. Like it streams the time lapse to your mobile phone.

So it's like this mind-blowing combination of things. You know, it's not like a problem everybody has. But if you've had it and you've tried to solve it, it's impossibly hard. Like you could go read about how National Geographic does the pictures of the tigers and the jungle. and like it requires solar panels and big giant cages and boxes and people to visit it every day and satellites and all sorts of stuff to go deal with it. And basically, in fact, the funny part is the CES show itself. Tons of time lapse happens because all the big companies that build their boots out actually do time lapse of building these boots because they're basically these mini cities that get built over the first three days of the pre-show. Benedict, anything else that struck you as a bit of genius and or a bit of just like, oh, my.

God, what is that person or those people thinking? Will you always see like the kind of the crazy, funny bits of innovation, like the pair of headphones that have another pair of speakers on the top of the headband pointing forward so other people can hear what you're listening to? I thought that was kind of a good moment. And, you know, the company that's got four little kind of actuators that you put under the legs of your sofa so that your sofa will walk as you're playing a computer game. And there's always this, you know...

I liked there was a doggy FaceTime thing where you basically put this little paw button on the ground, and then there's a camera, and the dog can come over and push the paw button, and then it calls you the owner on your mobile phone, and then you can send, like, smells back to the dog. If you buy that, you do not deserve to own a dog. Right, or you could have a treat come out. So it's sort of like a mobile and able Pavlovian experiment for your home. Pavlov's experiment for your phone.

I like that. Yeah. But, you know, again, that's the kind of thing that would have taken, like, five years of hardcore technology development. And not worked on behind a firewall. And now it costs $10,000. And now it's, you know, it's $50 and it's just smartphone chips inside. So you can make all kinds of kind of ways.

It's like a stocking stuffer of things. You know, like it's crazy. Wow, for your dog. Well, if you guys own dogs, I expect to see that your homes now and pictures of you sending your dog's treats from your phone. Benedict, Stephen. Thank you guys so much. Thank you.