The Vergecast - The better, smarter future of messaging

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

In episode two of our connectivity mini series, The Verge's David Pierce chats with Eric Migicovsky co-founder of Beeper. Beeper is a universal messaging app trying to take all your messages from all your apps and put them in one place. Is this the future of chat? Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of interoperable messaging protocols. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the second episode in our mini-series all about connectivity. Last week, we talked to tele CEO Ilya Pozin about how we interact with our TVs, the biggest screens in our house, and how we connect to the content that we care about. This week, we're going to talk about people. I think the best way I can explain the conversation we're about to have is to tell you a story about my wife.

This happened just the other day. I swear this is true. It was the most perfect timing. So I'm in the living room, sitting on the couch watching TV, and my wife, Anna, comes in and is like, I hate so much when somebody makes you download a whole new app just to group chat. Turns out, she joined this mom's group, and the person organizing everything made her download GroupMe,

which you might remember as the messaging app Microsoft bought a bunch of years ago and then, like, forgot about. She had never heard of GroupMe, didn't want to use GroupMe, and now she had to have it on her phone just for this one group chat. She was standing there like, why can't messaging apps just work together so I can talk to everyone in one place? And what I said to her is listen to the Vergecast, because that right there is what today's episode is all about. How did we get to the point where talking to my friends requires a half dozen apps and I have to check 10 inboxes every day? And I have to have this mental map of who I talk to in WhatsApp and who I talk to in I message and who I talk to in

and Instagram DMs and on and on and on. It's awful. And before you message me saying, David, this is because America is dumb. Everyone else in the world is just on WhatsApp. Two things. One, I know. And I'm deeply jealous. And two, I don't think that's actually a good answer either.

We shouldn't all be on one platform. There are lots of these platforms and systems out there. Shouldn't they all work together like the web or like email? I kind of think it should. And the person I'm talking with today, absolutely. thinks it should. My full name is Eric Midgeikovsky. Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Beeper, a newish universal messaging app.

Beeper's big idea is to take all your messages from all of your apps, Twitter, LinkedIn, I message, Slack, a bunch of other places, and put them all in one place. I've been a Beeper user for a couple of years now, and the app is definitely still new and definitely kind of hacky, but this also feels like the way things obviously should work. one place for all your communications that just makes sense. So why doesn't it work like that? And can we get this sprawling, messy chat ecosystem back to a place that makes sense? That's kind of my big question going into this.

The first thing you need to know about Eric is that before he started Beeper, he was the founder of Pebble, one of the early smartwatch companies and one of the more interesting and beloved hardware startups, I think, ever. So I figured, you know, you're making a smart watch, you're thinking about chat and notifications, so suddenly messaging gets stuck in your brain. That's where I assumed this story started. But Eric said no, it actually goes back much, much farther than that. I think that because of my era, like when I started to use chat and when I started to use

the internet, I associated a lot of my experiences of, you know, being online, finding groups of friends, hanging out with my friends. Like we just, we hung out on MSN after school. You'd, you know, fire up the modem or DSA. or whatever you had, and you'd hang out and you'd do homework and you'd wait for, well, actually, it probably even goes back to ICQ, that uh-oh, remember that sound? Of course. It was addictive because it was a reminder that there was someone who was, you know,

pinging you and wanted to chat. Got to the point where my dad could actually emulate the, uh-oh sound and cause me to drop whatever I was doing in the house and just like run back to my computer because I needed to get there before he or anyone else in the family did because, you know, shared computers. Yep. That was back in the days of the computer room. Yeah. And so my experience with chat is kind of foundational to computing. Like every device that I pick up, I use it to chat with friends. And I have, I think like I've benchmarked myself against other folks and I can kind of see how my chat patterns. Like I spent a lot of the day chatting. I have, I grew up in Canada. I've lived in Europe.

I've lived in Asia. I now live in California. I have collected friends. And, family members on every single chat app in existence. And for some crazy reason, each place around the world kind of has a different chat app as their primary means of communication. So I've collected friends, you know, two or three people on every single app. And yeah, this is obviously all leading towards starting beeper. But in the last, you know, 10 years, there really hasn't been a single app that you can use to chat with all of your friends. We were forced to download five to ten different apps, even if you just wanted to message like one person. And every computer you'd have, you'd have to install all these apps.

And it just got to be more annoying. Like it felt like communication, like we live in the future. You know, I just tried out chatGBT for the image recognition one. It's crazy. Like we literally are living in the future. But for some reason, the experience of chatting is still stuck in like 15 years ago. Yeah. Why do you think that is actually? I've spent some time looking into this and I've heard a lot of people blame a lot of things. Like we had that era of adium and Trillian and this idea of messaging that worked kind of like email, right, where you could have an account on a bunch of different platforms, but all these platforms more or less could talk to each other. It wasn't always perfect, but it kind of worked. And you could at least have an app that had all the platforms in one place. Even if they weren't talking to each other, you could at least have them all in one place. And then that broke. And I I've talked to people who blame Facebook.

I've talked to people who blame Google. I've talked to people who say, well, it was just never going to work that way forever. What's your sense of what led us down kind of that wrong siloed path we've been on for the last decade? I think there's a couple things at play here. One is the shift to mobile. 2007 the iPhone came out, and that changed everything. Everything that had existed on the internet before was based on long-running socket connections to a central server. or, you know, a P-to-P-P-style torrent, you know, distributed mesh network.

But both of those models required kind of cheap access to the internet. In a way that they were perfectly suited to the like always-on computer room, right? Like that was that, it was exactly right for that device that just sits there in the background kind of on all the time. I had never thought of it like that. IRC doesn't actually have, like when you log into an IRC server, you don't get any history. You have to have your IRC client running 24-7 in order to be able to see what was happening in the scrollback. So that's just like an indicator of how little the world was set up for, or the kind of internet as a whole was set up for this big shift to mobile. And so with the shift to mobile, all the existing chat apps died.

They weren't ready for it. And new apps sprung up to fill the void, WhatsApp, I message, telegram, Snapchat. They were all built mobile first. they had many new features like end-end encryption because you had this device that was you. You know, you have your phone. And it's always with you. And you only have one phone at a time. These new apps or these new systems could afford to have a closer connection to your personal identity,

which allows for things like, you know, you know, you have a pretty good idea of who you're going to message when you message their phone number. Enden encryption. You know, it didn't exist before. There was, you know, a little bit of jabber end-end encryption, but no one really implemented that. So it was a big new innovation that came along with the switch to mobile. And everyone got a phone that allowed so many more people to start chatting. And so while we remembered the golden age of chat being, you know, logging into Adium on our Dell desktop or whatever, most people's first experience with chat is SMS, WhatsApp, I message, Discord, you know, Snapchat, Instagram. You know, all those apps and networks were not built with Federation.

or decentralization in mind. They were built as they should have been, just individual apps that served a great purpose that delivered an excellent experience to people, and they just didn't really care about the past. And that was fine. I don't think that anyone should be blamed for that. Like, we want to have new products.

We want to have the evolution of technology. We don't want things to be stuck stagnant. Sure. But at the same time, Google didn't wall off Gmail from the rest of the email universe just because it switched to how much. mobile works. And I get, I think what you're describing is a much bigger technical change, which makes sense. And there's a moment where it's like, okay, we have to rebuild this anyway.

We're going to rebuild it differently. But part of me still wonders if there wasn't room back then to do it better. And a bunch of companies who had business reasons not to just didn't. Yeah. And I mean, I would actually take Google aside and say that everyone else is net neutral if, you know, they're not maliciously trying to make life worse for people. But Google actually goes an extra step to say, even though it's harder to make something with an API, or even though it's harder to make something that's federated and decentralized, I think Google goes a step in that direction to say, let's at least try. And I think that just goes to the core of, you know, Google's hacker, you know, sensibilities. Yeah. But no one else seems to have that. So that's,

but if you look at the major players like Facebook and Apple and even SMS to a certain degree, No, there's no ability for other apps to interact with those systems easily. I mean, for so many years, Facebook's own apps didn't interact with each other. Like, it was just, it was not even a thing anybody thought about for so, so, so long. Yeah. Now that we're talking about it, like, technically, Facebook Messenger did actually support Jabber back in the day. And so you could message someone on Google Talk from Facebook Messenger. And I think, like, there probably was some moment where you'll have to research.

search the history, but I think either Google shut down their Jabber Bridge or Facebook shut down the Jabber Bridge and then everyone kind of shut them down at the same point. Because that was also the time when everybody realized how valuable these networks are and what you can do if you have people in your space. And it feels like the other thing that happened in that time was everybody in every industry said, we have to build universes inside of our apps, right? Like, that's what Netflix did. It's not that different of behavior in a lot of ways. But what's interesting about that is I think that's the prevailing wisdom. That's what we all assume. But if you look at the actual businesses that have been built on top of chat

or adjacent to chat, chat does not make any of these big companies money. They're not even, it's close to making the money. Take WhatsApp, for example. WhatsApp was acquired in 2013-ish, and it was the biggest acquisition ever. And there was, you know, noise about who's going to get WhatsApp? Is it going to be Google or Facebook? And Facebook paid this outrageous sum because they didn't wanted to go to Google and enrich Google's Google Plus or whatever they were doing at that time. And you'd imagine, like, I think it was probably hundreds of millions, if not a billion users, already when they acquired them. And you'd be like, great, okay, like, how are we going to make money off this? And we are 10 years later. And I don't think WhatsApp is making significant money

for Facebook at all. Yeah, I don't. I think that's true. And I think one of the things, a lot of these services have discovered over the last few years is there's no money in messaging. And if you try to stick money making things into messaging, people will revolt. Like I think back to Google Allo, where they were like, we're going to bring in an AI assistant that's going to help you buy tickets when we understand that you're talking about tickets. Isn't that useful? And everybody went, no, that's horrible. Just let me talk to my friends.

What I find is remarkable about this as someone who's building a chat app, where, you know, our plan is to actually just charge people money. Chat is so fundamental to what we do. We do it dozens, if not hundreds of times per day. You know, if you look at your screen time across all your devices, it probably doesn't, maybe it adds up to like an hour or two, but the number of interactions that you spend in chat across all the different chat platforms that you have is mind-boggling.

You know, that is the way that we as humans communicate. Like, it's no longer phone calls. It's no longer email. The future is chat. that is how we communicate. And as a product, it has been kind of left by the wayside because of this unclear definition around the business model. So what I mean by that is, I message started in 2011, I think, WhatsApp, just a few years

before that. If you look at roughly how these apps work, you know, there's an inbox and there's a conversation view, a chat view. They haven't changed in the last 10, 15 years. Yep. It's the same view. It's the same functionality. there's been a few other message types.

You can now send emoji reactions. You know, we're literally just added to WhatsApp a year, like a year ago. They're great, by the way. I don't mean to denigrate emoji reactions. Like, I'm a big fan of emoji reactions. It's good, but it's like, I think just to illustrate how slowly these things are moving. And, you know, part of that's a symptom of getting to scale. Like, once you have three billion users, it's harder to steer.

It's harder to steer the ship in different directions. But what I think is missing is an. opportunity for other people to build on top of these communication protocols and expand what we can do with chat, you know, in instant messaging. Just look at email, you know, as a counter example, when you have an open standard for communication or for email, or you have Gmail, which goes out of the way, again, to allow other kind of people to build on top of it, whether it's plugins or alternative clients or just the API. You get an evolution, a very clear timeline over the last 15 years of new productivity software, of new casual fun, you know, entertainment. You get kind of

this work operating system that people now use through Google workspace and all the apps that you can associate with your Google account. That Cambrian explosion of tools built on top of Gmail is just completely and utterly missing from chat because of the fact that there is no API for iMessage or WhatsApp or even SMS to a certain degree. Actually, I guess SMS and Twilio is a kind of good counter example of what happens when there is at least one kind of side door that you could get into and build on top of.

But in the case of iMessage and WhatsApp, there's basically nothing. You can't build on top of those systems. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we'll be back with more from Eric. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning,

with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify www.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify. dot com slash vergecast.

That's Shopify. dot com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built. to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back.

Like Eric was just talking about, part of the challenge with messaging has been, that there's just no way to build on top of these systems. They're often not great products, honestly, and there's not much you can do to help them. You're just stuck with the app that they give you. But at the same time, they're so entrenched in our lives and so often set in their ways, just like people are, that I think most developers would look at this market

and just decide not to even try. I mean, the network effects of messaging are massive. The switching costs are super high. There's really not much reason to think you can make a dent at all, in the messaging world at this point. Many have tried, and frankly, many have failed. But then, here comes Eric and Beeper, trying to do it anyway. So I just asked him, what made you look at this space and think you could hack it?

Our long-term vision is to build the best damn chat app on Earth. It's as simple as that. We think chat is, like I said before, something that we do dozens, if not hundreds of times per day. And it deserves attention. It deserves to have a set of people building an experience that continues to get better, that really pushes the boundary on what's possible with chat. And I don't feel like there's anyone carrying the torch today. If you look at the top companies in chat,

none of them are incentivized to build a better experience. Their only incentive is to keep you locked into their platform so that they make money through some ulterior motive. That's how Apple sells iPhones. The blue bubble thing is just as real as it gets. So our simple thing is we want to build a great chat app and we will charge people money to use it. Not everyone. There's going to be a free option to use people, but we think that there's a, you know, there's three billion people in the world who use chat on a daily basis. Some percentage of them, we could argue about the exact number, will be interested in paying for a better experience. Those are the people that we're intending to capture and, you know, build an increasingly better chat experience.

Was that the kind of original insight that, like, we can do something powerful just by putting all of these things in one place? The original insight, it started to solve a personal problem. Okay. Like I have two friends on Google Talk or Google Chat or whatever it's called today. I have three friends on WeChat. I have two friends on Telegram. And I just got sick and tired of there being 10 different apps on my phone that kind of did exactly the same thing, albeit with a slightly different contact list. I just wanted a single app, a single search box that I could type in anyone's name and instantly start chatting with them.

I didn't want to have to remember, like I basically had this lookup table in my mind that matched each person, each friend, each family member and which app they used. Computers are much better than us at doing that. They can memorize. They're really good at lookup tables. So all I wanted to do was build something that would allow me to just type in someone's name and start chatting with them and not have that cognitive overhead of like, wait, where were we chatting? Was it like LinkedIn chat or was it like the little sidebar chat in a Google Docs? Like I just wanted one single place that I could use to chat with everyone. I had a friend for many years who would every time I would message him, he would message me back on a different platform. I like that.

That's chaotic good. Honestly, it was great. It was the funniest thing. And so every one of our conversations just made absolutely no sense because it was one out of every like 12 messages of our conversation. But it really was you could go an alarmingly long time without ever repeating. chat apps. It was kind of incredible. It still happens. Like, you know, you start something on Instagram because you're responding to their story and then you see a funny tweet and you send them

a Twitter DM. Yeah. And then someone asks for an intro in LinkedIn. Like, it adds up. I like to think of it as currently this tax on top of every sort of communication. It's not a big tax. It's, you know, a couple percent of overhead to think about how am I going to communicate with this person. But think of how many times you communicate. And if we can eliminate that tax, Beeper has the potential to actually make the entire world output of communication, you know, a couple percent better. Yeah. And that's a pretty big opportunity. Were you even aware that it was technically possible to do that at the beginning? I mean, you just described that shift when we went to mobile where we went from having relatively intelligible protocols and platforms to a bunch of

totally siloed different systems. Were you even sure that the thing you wanted could exist in the world we live in now? No. And I think that's kind of a good thing. You know, I started a company before called Pebble. We built smartwatches. I was 23. I knew nothing about building hardware.

And it was a good thing because if I did, I probably wouldn't have done it. And I think some of the best companies are started because the founders are too naive to really understand how crazy the journey that they're about to embark on is. I think about that with Beeper as well. Like we spent the last two and a half years understanding how each of these different protocols work, creating what we call a bridge between Beeper and 15 different chat networks and perfecting them and making them work reliably. That was very hard. That was incredibly hard. It still is hard. But it works and there's no going back. There's no way that I could switch from using Beeper and being able to just seamlessly chat with anyone, to going back to having to remember, like,

which app I'm on, each person is on. I would think that along the way, especially at the beginning of this process, you would think to really do what we want to do. Not only do we have to connect all of these systems, we have to build a new one that's right and better, and that Bieber becomes sort of the gateway drug into this better thing, right? It's like come talk to your Twitter DM friends in beeper. But we all know Twitter DMs is a bad product for messaging. It always has been.

And ultimately, we're going to train you to use this better system that is our system. And that's how it's going to work. Is that the idea? Was that the idea to bring people? Because you talk about the API and all this stuff you want to do. You would need to build the whole thing yourself at some point to do that, right? So you raise a good point. and it's the same one that, you know, the SKCD guy wrote up, you know, 10, 15 years ago, right?

There's a classic XKCD for everything, and this included. And it is, you know, a couple panels. And, you know, hey, there's 10 standards. Let's make a new app that incorporates all these 10 standards. Oh, and now we have 11 standards. Uh-huh. And so we didn't want to be part of the problem. We didn't want to go and create yet another messaging standard.

And so we looked at what was out there. And the best open source protocol that kind of checks all the boxes is one called Matrix. Matrix is a protocol. Similar to, you can kind of think of it as a spiritual successor to Jabber or XMPP. Using no code from XMPP, it's just a brand new implementation. It's not perfect. You know, no open standard is, but we decided to adopt it because it represents the best way for us to be part of a broader network without creating yet another closed siloed standard and contributing back to the problem.

So we chose to use an open standard called Matrix. It is federated, which means that if you run your own server or if your account is on a different matrix server, you can still talk to someone who's on Beeper. It's very similar to email in that regard. Like you have an account on Beeper, you have an account on Gmail. You can still send messages to people who have different email servers. But Beeper is a private company. It's a not open source application.

And we were designed to be, you know, just an excellent experience on top of this open source standard. And similar to Gmail, you probably don't understand the intricacies of IMAP or pop or whatever, you know. And God help you if you do at this point. Yeah, you don't have to. You just, you know, you can just chat with your friends. From a product perspective, you come into this. And on the one hand, messaging is this incredibly entrenched thing that we've been doing roughly the same way for a very long time. You know, you mentioned you have the list on the left side and the conversation on the right.

that goes back not just to how we message, but like decades of email, right? Like everybody's inbox is the same thing and has been forever. Yeah, all the way back to the beginning of the internet, that is what conversation has looked like. I think you could make a very compelling case that that is not the only or best answer, but it is the answer right now. And so I'm curious, even at the very beginning of deciding how do we want this thing to work and what do we want it to look like? You have to decide between reinventing the wheel. in potentially very cool, but really kind of jarring ways for people, or doing the deeply boring,

old, same thing that everybody does, that is fundamentally how people expect to message all the time. How do you make that decision? So there's a couple competing veins here. One is that we have muscle memory for chat. Whether we like it or not, we've been using the same software for the last 10, 15 years. And that muscle memory is very strong. Like you have a physical, like picking up and unlocking your phone is a physical. Twitch that we all have.

Totally. It's like the example of, in the most recent iOS, when they moved the hang up button from the middle to the right, everybody freaked out because you just, you know where the buttons are.

We found that with Beeper, even though there are improvements that we're making to the chat experience, people still have that need to have something familiar. Let me put a pin in that for a sec to kind of describe what our intention is. For the last 10 years, the app that you use to chat

on a particular chat network is a one-to-one mapping to that network. You can only use the WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp. You can only use the iMessage app to chat on iMessage. There has never been a delinking between the network and the software that's used to chat on that. Now,

I don't want to give the crypto people too much credit, but one of the ideas in the crypto world is this idea of separating the protocol from the application. And I think that's what we're doing with Beeper. We are for the first time separating the UI that you use to interact with a particular chat network

from that chat network's first-party software, which gives us the ability to experiment in a way that these first-party chat apps basically can't do because they have 3 billion users and you can't experiment too much with, you know, an app that has that large and install base. Give me an example of something you could have done that might have been better, but you couldn't do because it's just not how it works. A very small example is over the summer, we had an intern build a widget framework for beeper that lets you install widgets on the side panel of your chat,

similar to how Gmail has, you know, plugins, and, you know, you could download a Chrome extension. Never been possible. Like, no amount of money could have given you a widget on the side of your iMessage chat. Right. And we did it. He did it in, you know, a couple weeks

because we had already separated the protocol from the application. And some of the fun widgets that we made were like a summarization widget that used chat chbt or Anthropic to summarize what the, you know, you log in the morning to Slack and you see a bunch of unread messages and you're just like, what happened? What did I miss? And here it's just a button in the side panel that you just press it and it just tells you what you missed. That took like two days to build. And it's only possible because we've separated that protocol from the application layer. So that's the same example. Like we're still early.

I think we've worked really hard to get the foundation to work, to make sure that Beeper is reliable, to make sure that it sends in to seize messages. Remarkably hard. It took longer than expected. But we dedicated all of our effort just to doing that. And it's still taking quite a bit of our effort. So over time, we'll begin to use the fact that we have this kind of separation. But honestly, like some of the basics hadn't been done in messaging. Like, for example, Gmail over the last.

10 years has evolved to have archive states and tabs and all of these tools that let you kind of manage the overflowing amount of email that you get. That overflow is shifting to chat. You know, we are getting not just spam and junk messages, but we're just getting more and more of our daily communication flowing through these tools that haven't changed. And so a lot of what we did at Beaver was just add kind of basic inbox management stuff that emails had forever that make it a bit easier for you to deal with your inbox. And we've added things like being able to archive messages. You can move chats from your main inbox to other folders.

You can mark things as low priority. And those have been just incredibly helpful for people that are using chat as their primary means of communication. Okay, we've got to take one more break. And then we're going to get into where beeper goes from here. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn. to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis, with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.

org.aI slash vergecast. That's Claude.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Let's get back to talking about Beeper, which I really do continue to think

is one of the most interesting messaging apps on the planet. And that's in part because its strategy is to, like, invade the messaging app ecosystem as it already exists. I've been using people for a long time, like I said earlier, and I've kind of watched the company lose connections to services and get them back and support new stuff and drop support and re-ad support. And in general, I just can't imagine that the messaging apps, which, like we've been talking about, don't have APIs or developer platforms

and really want you to stay in their walled gardens, are psyched that Beeper exists at all. So I just asked Eric, is this app a series of elaborate hacks designed to get around messaging apps that would rather you not do all these things? How much do these companies know or care what you're doing to their systems? You know, at the end of the day, these are your chats. These are your friends. These are your connections.

This is your life. Like our life is illustrated by the messages that we send to our friends and family and our colleagues. You know, a lot of the kind of AI one-offs that you've seen are people like training and AI on their chat messages. That's because, you know, your messages are you. Like, they are an embodiment of kind of your relationships and your connections. I think what we're doing is saying, like, you should be in control of your own messages. And it's remarkable how we take that for granted on other things like email or calls or Google Docs or whatever. Like all of the other forms of, you know, communication are your own. They're owned by you. But chat, we kind of

have accepted this, this world where, like, there's these silos and those chats are stuck in the silo and we're going to be okay with it. I think what we're doing is saying, like, no, actually, you should be in control of who you're chatting with and you should have access to your message history, and you should be able to decide, you know, which client you use to send messages on each of these different networks. And that's all we're doing. Like, you can kind of think of it as a browser. You know, when you open up Instagram.com in Chrome or in ARC or in Brave, you're still just, you know, sending and receiving messages on Instagram. That's basically how Bieber works. Okay. I believe you that you believe that. I am less convinced

that Apple thinks all of my I messages belong to me and our mind to do with as I please. I think you're right. I'm just not sure that's a super popular opinion in the messaging world. I think honestly like it kind of doesn't matter what Apple thinks. There's three billion people who use chat in the world. There's a lot more of us than them at this point. And it matters what you think is right. And so it is to a certain degree up to us as users of chat protocols and chat networks to say, this is what I expect. This is my minimum bar. Part of the reason why these companies can get away with it is it's practically impossible to change. There is no free market right now. now in messaging. Yeah, that's true. If you have an Android phone, you can't send a message to someone on IMessage. If you are on WhatsApp, you can't send a message to someone who is on Telegram. And these companies exploit that kind of social dynamic to make it harder for you to actually

harder for companies like Beeper or other chat providers to actually compete in terms of features or capabilities. The lock in effect is real. Yeah. And so what we're doing is like giving people a choice for the first time, giving, you know, Americans, giving Europeans, giving people around the world a chance to actually choose which software they think offers them a better experience without having to worry about the lock-in effect. And if you look at the kind of winds of change in Europe with the Digital Markets Act or in the U.S. with the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, there are a few movements that are taking shape to say, actually, you know, for the good of us, for the good of, you know, the world, we need to be able to have the freedom to choose. And that's, you know, slowly happening.

And I think it's going to be harder for these large companies to come out with anti, you know, free market, anti-competitive products like the current suite of chat apps in the future. Yeah, I was going to ask this question later, but since you brought it up, I'll just ask it now. The thing about the regulatory stuff, especially this idea in the EU that chat apps essentially have to. to interoperate. That is the road we are headed down. It's the law. I've wondered for a long time whether that essentially obviates Beeper over time because these apps you already use are going to be forced to integrate with one another or if it gives you an actually level playing field to be on because instead of having your... It's fantastic. It's fantastic. You're psyched about this. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah. The world needs to have the ability to communicate. But no, I agree with

that. Give me the like ruthless capitalist case for why this is good for Beeper. In terms of building a better chat experience. Are you going to bet on the product management team at Apple who builds iMessage and makes small changes to the UI every year that don't really have too much impact on how you use it? Or are you going to bet on a company whose entire life is chat, and our entire goal is to build the best chat experience? Some of my favorite chat apps today are Telegram and Discord, you know, besides Beeper. I think, you know, the Telegram has a 30-person team theoretically, I think, you know, building what's arguably a much better chat experience than any of these, you know, larger, more well-used apps. And so given the freedom to message

and interoperate, yeah, you know, beeper's going to take off because we offer a better experience than the other ones. And people can't switch because, you know, they're currently locked in. One other thing I have, I don't know, I've struggled is the wrong word, but I've thought about this a lot as I've been a beeper user over the years. One thing I keep doing all the time is turning on and off LinkedIn. And there's this thing that happens. It's made me realize, like, yes, all these apps are chat, but they have very different norms and they have very different systems. And I have really different rules in different places for who's allowed to contact me and when. Like, if I got as many messages on WhatsApp every day as I do on Slack, my phone would explode,

which is not like a brag. People talk too much on Slack, right? But is it doable, do you think, to have all of those systems and all of those norms and all of those unwritten rules about how we talk to each other and about what, like, to some extent you're doing this like context collapse of all of these different places into one thing in a way that's really useful, but also really mind bending for me. And sometimes, like I go from one chat window and I'm talking with my friends to another identical looking chat window where I'm talking to like the random person who just added me on LinkedIn.

And that's really useful, but also kind of mind bending in a way. Is it possible to do all that? What I've discovered through chatting with, you know, users of beeper and people who chat a lot is that we all have this internal heuristic that we've developed that helps us assign a priority to messages that we receive. LinkedIn sounds like it might not be a giant priority for you. Not super high, no. Slack, probably, you know, medium.

Maybe IMessage is your top. Like if you get a ping on IMessage, you're much more likely to read it. you hold this heuristic and you use that daily to kind of prioritize incoming messages. You are unique. No one else prioritizes messages in the exact same way that you do. They should. I'm right. There's 15 different networks and everyone is unique. Everyone is a butterfly. And what's interesting is that we all think everyone else has the exact same heuristic. And so this manifests itself in some complicated ways. When you send someone a message on I message and they're in Europe, you think that you're now trying to be like the most important like you think that because you assign a higher way to iMessage if you send someone to iMessage this means like hey you should you know respond to this because you know this is an important message but that's not necessarily their heuristic take salespeople for example i'm not a salesperson thankfully but they love lincoln salespeople love LinkedIn and so if they get a ping on LinkedIn wow like this might be like move over the rest of the day like this is the most important thing that came across my desk.

Think of demographics differences. Think of the difference between Snapchat and Instagram. Think of the subtle differences between friend groups that are gamers on Discord versus, you know, open source hackers on IRC. Everyone has a slightly different way of balancing that priority. And this is one of the biggest challenges that we face at Beeper. We pull in messages from all of your different networks. And that's great for all the reasons that I outlined around, you know, having one search box, having one single app to install on each of your devices, it does sacrifice

right now some of the metadata that's associated with the, it's like the game behind the game, right? When you get up paying on Instagram, or you might not even have notifications set up for Instagram, right? You might not assign any weight to Instagram. We miss that. And that's something that we are looking at how we can actually reintegrate that into our system. So it's on the, it's on the to-do list. It's something that we're working on. But I would hazard a guess to say that those network-based heuristics that you've developed are only an approximation of the actual priority. They're good rules of thumb, but not 100%. Like, for example, LinkedIn. I get a lot of spam on LinkedIn, but it's one of the only open inboxes that I have on the internet. Like,

I have my Twitter DMs open, but for most people, LinkedIn is the only way that friends from high school could contact them because your LinkedIn probably shows up at the top of, you know, the Google search for your name. And occasionally, I get really heartfelt and interesting messages sent to me via LinkedIn because that's the only way that people who don't have my phone number or email address can contact. And I think about that a lot, that the best system for relative priority ranking is one based on the person that's trying to contact you, the type of message, you know, and the

meta kind of relationship that you have with that person. And all of that data is in Beeper. And so one of the things that we're working on is how we can use that metadata. How frequently do you talk to this person? Have you talked to them in the past, but you haven't talked to them in years? Have they sent their 30th message to you today? Like, how quickly do you respond to them? Do you respond to them on multiple platforms?

Is this a person that you talk to on Instagram, I message, and Slack? Is this a work contact? Do they talk to you mostly during work hours? Are you part of groups with them? There's so much metadata that can be used to assign or help, like, gauge priority. And I'm really excited that we are the first platform ever that has clear visibility into all of these different signals. And one of our big initiatives is figuring out how we can integrate these signals in a simple enough way to help you make better prioritization decisions so that you don't have to use a hard and fast rule, a clunky rule. Like, LinkedIn is not useful to me.

It might work most of the time, but I want to figure out a way that we can actually get that nugget of gold, that one old friend that sent you a LinkedIn message that you would not have actually read for years if you don't go to your LinkedIn inbox like I used to, and bubble that up. And at the same time, you know, the heuristic that you've set up, which is iMessage is king, right? That is, you know, the main network. It's not as good as a high signal to noise ratio as you think it is. No. There's two-factor off codes.

There's DoorDash. There's Uber receipts. There's spam, there's SMS, there's all this crap. Yeah. There's groups that people add you to that you don't really want to see at the top of your inbox, but you don't really want to leave. Yeah. So again, this all goes back to the idea that like we want to make the best chat app on earth.

And part of that means highlighting the people that matter, highlighting the relationships, the conversations that matter and bubbling those to the top. Yeah. And that totally attracts me and also brings up, I think, one of these sort of great tensions of building an app like beeper. I can't prove this, but one of the theories that I have that I think is right based on talking to people for a long time about this is that one of the reasons it's very hard to do things in chat apps is that it reminds people that you're reading their messages. When Google's assistant shows up and is like, oh, would you like to buy movie tickets? Part of that is annoying. Part of it is a reminder that there is a Google system that is aware of what I'm saying to my friend.

And that feels bad. And so I think these companies go way out of their way to say, no, no, no, no, no. We're not looking. We don't care. We don't have to ads against it. No, no, no, we're not, we're not even going to touch it. Your chats are your chats. But do you believe that? I mean, all of your Instagram messages are on their servers and you're getting increasingly more targeted messages in your stories. Oh, yeah, to be clear. I don't, I don't think that's actually true in many cases. I actually think ironically there was this thing recently with Elon Musk and X. They said, we're going to use your posts, including your DMs to train AI.

And a bunch of people freaked out. And our overarching conversation pretty quickly got to like, well yeah of course this is that everybody's doing like how do you not think that's what's happening on all of these services that's a separate problem i agree that's a problem i think it's a problem worth solving but i think the challenge is to say we're going to give you lots of things on top of your chats we're going to do all kinds of cool things based on who we know you care about what you're talking about the summarization stuff you're talking about without making it feel like we're intruding on your private life which is what my chats are and again i i believe there are lots of good reasons to not talk in all the places that we talk, but we do. And I think any

reminder of that is always going to feel bad to people. Yeah. How do you get people to make that trade or at least kind of agree to go along that ride with you over time? I don't think it's a trade. I think that most of the things that we're doing are bog simple things that should have been done 10 years ago, like archapping, right? You know, that's just a simple button in beeper that says, I don't want to see this chat in my inbox anymore. Sure. Simple as that. But the thing where you're describing, like,

I want to be able to bubble up the most important thing on your LinkedIn to the top, like objectively good, useful feature requires knowing things about me. It does, but the beauty of Beeper is that we're giving you access to your own messages locally on your device. Beeper is fully encrypted. We don't have a copy of your messages on our servers. We couldn't read your messages on our service if we wanted to. Like, your history is encrypted with a key that only.

you know. Did you set it up that way on purpose? Like, was it obvious to you that that was the way to do it? Okay. Absolutely. 100%. And what's cool is that everyone has a phone. These phones have tons of storage. We can store a copy of your entire communication history on your phone. It takes a couple gigs. That's our plan. Store a copy of your messages locally on your device. We don't even upload your contact list. You know, your contact, like we're the only chat up in the world that doesn't upload your contact list. We use the contact list locally to be able to match like this person's phone numbers associated with this person's name. So eventually you'll be able to say this person on LinkedIn is the same as this person over here in iMessage. And those links will strengthen kind of the relationship in in Beeper's eyes.

And again, this is like we're not planning to do rocket science here of like creating complicated AI models, you know, trained. it's like basic stuff. Like, is this name the same on IMessage as in LinkedIn? When was the last time I talked to them on Instagram? Like, how many stories have I liked of theirs? It's all local. It's all just in your message history. And it doesn't need to be uploaded anywhere.

It could be all done inside the beeper app. Are phone numbers, the like universal username at this point? Mostly-ish, but not entirely. Are we good with phone numbers as? as the universal username? No, I think it's, it's pragmatic. It's the best option that we have. But Beeper is not built on top of a phone number.

It's built on top of more like an email address handle. But yeah, it is interesting because it's just seem like I'm just trying to think of what is the one piece of information that all of these services know about me? And it's probably my phone number. Yeah, unfortunately for some networks like Instagram and Facebook, that's not actually exposed. So Facebook and Instagram, though, for damn sure, they know everything about you. Oh, yes. But that's not even exposed to you.

as a user, you can't, you have to upload your entire contact list in order to see which of your friends are on Instagram. There's no way to say, like, is this phone number also on Instagram? How broad do you think this goes? I think if I were to look at people right now, I would say you're in a place of sort of what I would call relatively synchronous chat. I don't know if you have a better term for it than I do, but it's like it's relatively fast moving. It's not. I call it consumer chat versus something like enterprise or kind of community-based chat. It's like DMs, small group chats. Yeah.

That's our core kind of bread and butter right now. That makes sense. But I also think a lot of the stuff we've been talking about in chat also exists in places like, I don't know, video chat. You know, speaking of things with a million different standards that all compete with each other. You could talk yourself into being an email client in a way that's useful without trying super hard. Like how far out from consumer chat do you think beeper goes over time or it's useful to think about? What I love about chat and what gets me so excited about working. on building this product is it's an ever-present well. We can always come back to it because

it's such an innate human tendency. We want to communicate. We are social beings. And so whenever we need things to work on, we just go back to the well and we say, how could we make this aspect of communication better? I think we're definitely focused on chat. There's so many problems with chat that we have not even scratched the surface in terms of improvements and things that we can do. but if you extend this out five, 10, 20 years, there is no other company, you know, besides us that is entirely focused on building an amazing communication experience and that is our entire goal. Like we will continue to build things that we think make it easier for people to communicate, make it more seamless, make it lower friction.

And then, you know, after we get kind of a handle on what we have today, what are different modalities that we could use for communication, you know, hardwereux? dies hard with a hardware person like me. If you look at every computing platform, the killer app has always been chat, if not communication to a certain degree. And, you know, playing the clock forward a little bit, we are, you know, I am floored

by the fact that I have seven Google homes in my house and I can't send a damn text message from them. Or I can't send a message to my wife who has an Android phone and like, you know, seamlessly start voice chatting with her. Like maybe if she had duo, we might be able to. It's just like there's no way for us to do kind of simple communication. There's all these different apps and there's all these different devices, but there's no one way to communicate.

And I think that one of the things that, again, going back to this idea that we have of separating the protocol from the application from the experience, we have this unique ability to say, we can communicate. to anyone on any chat network. Could we build an app for AirPods, you know, that lets you just, you're driving and instead of having to mediate things through CarPlay or through Android Auto or something like that, like what if we could just override that and become your earpiece that, you know, connects you to other people through beeper.

Same thing with around the home. But that's kind of boring and, you know, you could already predict that. Like, I'm excited to think, like, in five years, what will we be doing, you know, what, what new devices will we have and how will we communicate on them? Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And it also sounds like the road we're headed down, which I think is the right one, but it's going to be a really tricky one to pull off,

is to separate the person from the app, right? Like you're talking about the lookup table. It seems like the end result is just that if I want to call you, I just call you and I actually don't have to think about how it's calling you. It can call you on any number of platforms, and ultimately I don't have to care. Is that where we go? Yeah.

Yeah, like, I mean, the end result here is telepathy. Like, how can I send a message to you as a person rather than you as an inbox in, you know, Facebook or I message or whatever? And you can do that without building yet another standard on top of all the other standards? I mean, I hope so. And I think that, you know, once this gains steam or gains momentum, I think that other people will realize that as well and hopefully join in the fun. because the real ticket here is building a better experience rather than a network that just locks you in. How is it going convincing people to pay for this? This is the kind of thing people have never paid for, except for like email sickos who pay 30 bucks a month for superhuman. But this is not,

consumer chat is not a thing people are used to paying money for. And I grant that you're offering, you know, different kinds of features and power user stuff that people are willing to pay for. But ultimately, long run, can a paid chat thing work? I would say that people do pay for communication. We pay for tools that help us communicate. We pay $80 a month for our phone plans. Sure. We pay for any number of video chat, pieces of software that we use.

It's a smaller budget than it was in the 90s where we all had long distance plans as well. But there is a chunk of money that people will put towards improving their communication. That's what we're going after, but we're also looking to grow the pie. Fair enough. All right, well, we're going to have to come back and do this again because this, like you said, this stuff is not done changing. It's going to keep getting weird and in fun ways. But thank you for doing this. I really appreciate this.

It was really fun. No, anytime. It was good to chat. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks so much to Eric for being on. And thank you, as always, for listening. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. We will be back with episodes on Wednesday and Friday. There's lots of news to cover this week. More gadgets to talk about. Believe it or not, and we're going to have the long-awaited MetaVorgecast episode coming really soon. And we'll be back next Monday with the third in our four-episode series, All About Connectivity. We'll see you then. Rock and Roll.