This Week in Startups - Apple launches iCloud Private Relay + Framework’s Nirav Patel on customizable laptops | E1287

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

In a short news segment, Jason describes Apple's new iCloud+ privacy suite (2:18). Then, Framework founder Nirav Patel joins to talk about making laptop customization great again (13:04)! They discuss the difficulty of raising VC for a consumer hardware startup, creating products for the "modding" audience, the environmental benefit of fixing products and more(24:16)!

Hey, everybody, we've got an amazing show for you today. We have Nirov Patel, who is the founder of Frame.org. He previously worked at Apple. He also worked at Oculus. And then he had a great idea, which is, why can't you upgrade your laptops anymore? Well, he built a new laptop called the Framework Laptop. It is brilliant. You can remove pieces of the laptop.

You can change the CPU, the memory, and you can change the expansion cards. These little chicklets that come in and out. And I think this is going to be a revolution. in laptops and the ability for you to repair and update and have a great experience with your laptop for more than two years, which is what happens with your Apple laptop, right? You buy it two years later, it sucks and it's slow and it's grinding, and you get the spinning wheel of death. What if you could have a laptop where you open it up and take the battery out and change it and change the CPU? That's what framework is doing. Also today, I'm going to talk a little bit

about what Apple is doing with iCloud, building private browsing into iOS 15 and the major battle between Apple, Google, and Facebook. One camp, Google, and Facebook wants all your data and they want to sell it to marketers, and they want to give you free experiences or close to free. Free or close to free. And then Apple wants to charge you an arm in a leg for your iPhone and take a massive profit.

It's a really important discussion. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Drata. Don't let requests for SOC2 compliance reports slow down your business. Use Drata to stay ahead of the curve. Go to drata.com slash twist for 15% off. Our Crowd

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of your local grocery store, Walmart or Costco. Okay, ICloud is building a private browser into iOS 15. I just upgraded my iPad and my iPhone to iOS 15. It's got some cool features. One of the features I like is when you share an Apple Music link, when you go to Apple Music and you play the track, it shows you who shared it with you. It's just kind of like a nice little elegant touch of iMessage moving over into apps,

where you can see who forwarded to that. Another interesting piece that's notable is, I believe, FaceTime is now able when you do a FaceTime group call, you're able to get people into that call who are on Android. So lots of interesting, you know, features. And I think actually that when you share a podcast as well, it will say Jason shared this podcast with you. So SMS, all your friends, your This Week in Startups and all in and you get credit for it in their app when they're playing it. It just gives a little notice that this was shared with you by JCal.

Okay. So back episode 1204 on This Week in Startups, we talked about how Apple was introducing app tracking transparency. This forces developers to ask users if they want their data shared. So Apple has been on this mission to protect. your privacy. Not in China, not in Russia, but here in the USA. They obviously have to abide by local laws. And so, um, its privacy is their selling point. They are pitting themselves as the anti-Facebook and the anti-Google. That is Apple's selling point. And you know what? People are buying it. We always said at some point people are going to care about privacy. Well, I think it's actually

happening because Apple, which is just absolutely world class at taking complicated features and making them simple is doing that. You may have seen one feature where when you sign up for an app, it says, hey, would you like to sign up with your email or would you like to mask your email? Just a nice little elegant touch there where you can keep some of your privacy. And Apple enforce that on people. If you want to have your app in the app store, you have to offer Apple login. And so Apple login is becoming a thing. When Facebook does Facebook login, they're doing it to track you around the web. That's why they're doing Facebook Connect login. They want to track you, get data on you, sell it. When Apple does it, right? Apple login is not so Apple can get data on you because they don't

monetize your data. What they do with your data is nothing. They store it on your phone and they will not let anybody have it. As we know from the San Bernardino terrorist shooting case where they wouldn't unlock the phone. I mean, if they won't unlock a terrorist phone, they're not going to unlock yours. So I think that's a pretty reasonable position we can all agree on. So Apple is now created a private relay and it's in beta and the iPad is part of this. So what it does basically is you will not be tracked when you're using Safari. And so it's a really slick feature. You can turn it on as you see here in the video. And when you go search around the web, it's basically like, I guess you could think of it like tour. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing the private relay. But the idea

is whatever you're searching for, it's even better than, say, being an incognito mode. Because even in incognito mode or private mode, they still have your IP address and they might have ways of identifying you. With this, what they're doing is

like a VPN or maybe like the Tor network, when you send your request in Safari, they go and collect the page for you and then serve it to you, and they're like this intermediary. I believe, if somebody thinks it's different, let me know. And as somebody said in the live audience here, part of the Notie Gang,

JECO says, just use the Brave Browser. Brave browser is another great browser for removing tracking. But having it on the phone and having the hardware work towards protecting your privacy is a major, major step in all of our privacy being protected. So in the announcement on the website, normally when you browse the web, information containing your web traffic, such as your DNS records and your IP address, can be seen by your network provider and websites you visit. So network providers will also collect this information about what you visit

and they might be selling it or they might have agreements with the Googles and Facebooks and advertisers of the world. So all your data is being shared in many different ways. And so when that data is shared, you can be identified, located. You get the idea. So the first relay is operated by Apple. It allows your IP address to be seen by your network provider, but your DNS records are encrypted so neither party can.

see web addresses you are accessing. And the second relay is operated by a, quote, third-party content provider. It creates a temporary IP address and decrypts the website's address connecting you to the site you're trying to reach. So just like I said, maybe a little bit like the Tor network, if you're aware of that, which has, you know, multiple hops and all kinds of bad people use that for bad reasons, you know, not just for privacy. So I think it's another huge win for Apple. and I think it's something they're going to be able to keep putting pressure and differentiating themselves versus Android and versus Facebook. And this is really going to impact their businesses. And I think Apple, because they make their profits from selling you hardware that is massively overpriced, you can opt to pay for that.

What would I do if I was Facebook? I would come up with Facebook VIP. I would come up with Android or Google VIP, where if you pay Google, 100%. $100 a year, $10 a month, you get an ad-free experience and no tracking. Both of those companies should do that now, because that would then give them the high road when they get pulled in front of Congress, senators, and legislators, and people who want to break up big tech, just very simple. All you have to do is say, period, end of story. If you want to have a free service, you pay with advertising and we sell your data in an anonymous way to advertisers and you see

target advertising or you can pay 10 bucks a month. You're paying 15 bucks a month for Netflix, pay 10 bucks a month for our services. You know, arguably you get more from YouTube and Google than you do from Netflix, right? If you could only have one, Google and YouTube, or Netflix, which would you pick? I mean, it's a pretty obvious choice. You would go with Google and YouTube. So I pay for YouTube to turn the ads off. I would pay for Google to turn the ads off. So there have been some app tracking, transparency features that are rippling through the advertising space. I'm seeing it in some startups who are worried about this, where you used to be able to target people a little bit more aggressively. And actually Casper Matros recently

announced they were laying off their CMO, CTO, and CMO. And an anonymous founder in the DT space told TechCrunch these layers were likely due to Casper's difficulty selling product since the change is made retargeting much less effective, you know, to find valuable customers, iPhone users. So let me explain that and unpack what they're saying. there. It could be that Casper is just a company that has had its best day and companies like 8 Sleep are a better product. And full disclosure, I'm a modest investor in 8 Sleep and a fan of the product. I use it every night. In fact, but putting that aside, what's happening here is you used to be able to do something called look-alike and retargeted audiences. What that means is you say,

hey, here's the customers who bought Casper mattresses. And then the algorithm at Facebook and Google says, okay, here's more people like that. And they use any number of data sources and algorithms to figure that out. Well, Apple is saying, yeah, you can't do that anymore. We're not going to let you track people on their phones. And what that means is those lookalike audiences and that retargeting is much less effective. Now you're just maybe targeting an audience by geolocation or just Americans or just iPhone users, right? And iPhone users, you know, they may be a small percentage of all phone users, but they happen to skew as the most profitable customers in the world. So what Apple is really doing is they're just really decimating Google and Facebook's ability

to target the best most elite users. And that makes us a very entertaining thing to watch. The way for people to obviously combat this would be for Facebook to come up with their own phone, or Facebook and Google to come up with a phone together, and to make a phone. so cheap and affordable that it would actually challenge Apple's ecosystem supremacy. And that's exactly what you're seeing Google do. You're not seeing Facebook do it. They're basically betting on the future with Oculus. But what Google has done very clearly with the purchase of Android and making that a free

operating system and a low-cost one with all of the vendors racing to the bottom in terms of cost, they also have Chrome and then Chrome OS and then Android OS. So they're really trying to create a larger group of people who go for the free option. They could keep pursuing that, right? And Facebook did look at making a phone back in the day. So if, you know, a majority of the revenue that Apple has is from things like phones or iPads and computers flooding the market with a cheap alternative like Chrome OS, which I'm addicted to, but I stopped using because when I started doing more video, it's just not up to the

task yet. I think they'll maybe get there in two or three more revisions, but it is a very interesting time for the big tech battles. In today's startup landscape, committing to security and compliance is vital for growth. And proof of your company's security posture

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You buy an iPhone, you can't change the battery yourself. But when I had my BlackBerry, I used to carry three extra batteries at me, swap them out any time I want. And it had a memory card in it. So if I wanted to have extra memory, I could just pop it in there. And of course, laptops, desktops, you could open them up, you could change them. Apple has decided that we, consumers, are too stupid and don't deserve the right to up. upgrade our own hardware. This is why I hate Apple products despite loving them because of their elegance and software. Well, there has to be a better way. And one of the concepts that's been

bouncing around the internet and the technology space has been the ability to have a modular design for various hardware devices, various gadgets from laptops, desktops, and all the way up to smartphones. In fact, there was a project called Aura at Google where they were going to make Android phones where you could swap out with little chicklets. Imagine little circuit boards where you could pop in your memory, take out your CPU, put a new CPU in. Maybe you want a wide angle lens and you can change your lenses. It was a brilliant project. It didn't actually work. And so we still have non-upgradable phones and they all wind up in the trash and it's terrible for society and the environment. Well, I was shocked to find. I think I may have seen it on

slash dot or Reddit. A new laptop that's coming out. It's called Frame. And you can visit the website right now, frame.work. And I'm actually ordering one today. And the reason this is so notable is another founder apparently feels the same way I do that people should be able to upgrade their machines. And it's got a very clever design.

Welcome to the program, the founder of Frame.org, Nerif Tell. Thanks, Jason. It's great to be here. You heard my little introduction there. You obviously are a hardware junkie. I can see in the background for those of you watching on the YouTube. You have a original Mac. You have a one laptop per child crank. Let's see the one laptop for child crank there.

That's right. Yeah, this is our museum of influential PCs that we like to refer back to. Well, describe that one for the audience listening. It's green and white and it's a laptop. That's right. What was so unique about this project if you know the history? Because I know a little bit about it. Actually, yeah, I worked with the team at one laptop for a summer,

but over a decade ago at this point. But the concept was basically that, you know, ultimately it was an educational mission, that there must be a way to deliver high-quality education. I think it's called constructivist education into the developing world. And to actually do that with minimal infrastructure. And the definition coming out of the MIT Media Lab of that was like, let's actually just design a purpose-built machine for education.

And the result was this very strange looking, as you mentioned, green with like, these goofy antennas machine for kids, with the one laptop or child laptop. And it was conceptually very interesting. And I think, you know, like ARA, actually, conceptually very interesting and flawed in execution, like many of these initiatives tend to be. And, you know, I think you could argue one way or another,

whether it was a success in that, you know, it did actually drive the PC industry towards a lower cost path very rapidly. But whether or not it delivered on the educational mission, you know, it's arguable. Well, I mean, it was OLPC, the one laptop per child program. What's interesting about it was they did have this interesting idea that there would be a mesh network. So each one of them, when they popped up, would share their internet connection with the other

and that the battery could be charged with a crank because electricity didn't exist in all places. And like you're saying, I don't know what the costs were, but I think it was $200 or $300, which at the time in 2005 to 10 period was just unheard of. This is long before Android, Chromebooks, etc. But their goal was eventually to get it to $100, if I remember correctly. That's right. Yeah, the goal was $100. I think it went out at around $200.

Yeah, I wonder now of the cheapest laptop you can buy on Google, a new one, cheapest laptop on Amazon. I'll ask my producers to tell us what that is today. But you obviously have worked in hardware for a while. tell us what was your inspiration for the, and how do you refer to it, the frame laptop? The framework laptop. The framework laptop. Got it.

So what was your inspiration for the framework laptop? It ultimately was that there must be a better way. You know, across a decade plus in consumer electronics building things at Apple and then at Oculus as part of the founding team there and again as part of Facebook, it was increasingly clear that the consumer electronics industry was heading in a pretty bad direction, bad for consumers bad for the environment, even actually not that amazing as a business model either, that, you know, unless you're a platform owner like a Google or an Apple or Facebook, you're effectively in this constant race to the bottom, you know, margins collapsing,

trying to make it up in volume and basically just pushing out, increasing numbers of disposable products out into the world that people, you know, borrow on the way to the landfill. And the result, of course, was, you know, unhappy consumers, pretty bad business model and e-waste piling up around the world. And ultimately, you know, the question was, you know, is there a better way? There must be a better way. Yeah. And so what is the better way?

Sure. And where are you at with the project? And I want to get to the funding of this because, you know, based on my knowledge of venture capital, saying you're going to create a laptop company in 2021, it's a quick way to get your ass kicked out of a venture capitalist office. So I want to know, like, we'll get to that a bit of a bit of it. Tell me about how this manifests itself in the real world and where you're at with the project. because I saw today you're taking pre-orders.

That's right. Of 10 to 100 bucks, depending on which version you get. Yeah, so we started the company in January of 2020. It's been a little over 18 months, and we've shipped a product. You know, the middle of a pandemic and the worst silicon crunch in decades, we have brought the framework laptop out into market. It's beautiful. It's minimalist.

It looks like, you know, a Dell XPS or a MacBook Pro. why would I buy this over those two other outstanding products? Right. So this is the interesting thing that, you know, people's first conception on the here it's a repairable, upgradable product is that it must be a monstrosity. It must be, you know, an inch thick and weigh, you know, five pounds and be goofy looking.

And so from the outset, that was, you know, this very core lesson for us was let's not take that compromise. Let's make sure that it stacks up to the products that people would otherwise be buying in every way in terms of size and weight and performance and relax. liability and price that across like all these very like table stakes things that people evaluate when they're buying, you know, very expensive, important product to them that we actually measure up well to the competition. And then within those constraints, we made the product as repairable and upgradable and customizable as we possibly could. And we've, we've achieved it.

You know, it's as it's as thin and as late as a 13 inch MacBook Pro, but every part of the machine is replaceable and upgradable and repairable by the end user. Now, the key feature, which you didn't mention there is that there are four slots that are about the size of, gosh, a half of a pack of cigarettes. Yeah, like a one and a half. A box of tick, take. Yeah, like a nice little, uh, you know, somewhere between like a starbursts and a box of tick tax, I guess.

Yeah, I would say it's like a double-sized starburst, which for the people who work at Starburst, there's your killer idea of the century. Starburst Jumbo would be a best-selling product. But essentially two of them, and what is that, about an inch and a half by an inch and a half? Yeah, it's about 30 by 32 millimeters for gone metric. So those little cards, show on the laptop there if you're watching the YouTube for folks. They slide in and out. There's four slots.

And it looks like when you snap them in, it's snapping in with a USBC. Is that correct? So that one, yeah, so it's just a USBC physical connector that we use for that interface, which just makes it really easy to develop new cards. And it looks very rugged. right yeah and i was on the website today so when you buy your laptop you can say i want a USBc i want a USB a is that what the original ones were called that we were also used to doing so i looked at and said you know what give me a USBC give me a USBA and then i said oh what do i use the other two for

and one of them was uh i don't know what type of memory it is but i can put a one terabyte little chicklet in there what do you call those are they called that's right yeah expansion cards expansion cards okay we got to come up with a better name for that. I'm going to go with chicklets. The expansion card, you can get a terabyte of storage, 250 gigs of storage, for a pretty reasonable price. And the USBC and the USBA, they cost like

nine bucks. That's right, yeah. So it's essentially free. And then I'm thinking, when I have my laptop, oh, and you could get one for, you know, like an AK monitor, I don't think what they call that DVI. Yeah, display port or HTML. We've got both of those. You can do HDMI. So I would, I use HDMI like

once in a blue moon. I'm, uh, you know, I'm going skiing for the weekend with my kids. I bring a USBC cable with me at the Airbnb. I can plug it in to go directly into it. So I wouldn't want that plugged in all the time. Are they hot swappable? Like, could I be running windows and then unplug it and have no problem? That's right.

Yeah, you can pop them in and out and swap them live. Got it. Now, no Ethernet because Ethernet is too fat to fit in that format, correct? That's right. We're actually developing an Ethernet expansion card. It's just going to be oversized. It'll hang off with a laptop a little bit. But it is a popular request, especially for the audiences that are, you know, adopting this at the start.

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I never knew who sent it to me. I don't know if it was PR or Sergei or Larry, but it just showed up in my office one day. It had the most amazing feature, which was built in 4G at the time. And I think they used AT&T of Verizon and I turned it on. What an amazing experience to open your laptop

and just have it connected. Do you have a chicklet expansion card that allows me to put my Google Phi sim in there, my data sim in there yet? Right. That's not something we have today, but that is absolutely the type of expansion card that we had in mind as we built this. It really is that every individual user has a different set of needs, and there's no way to build a one-size-fits-all machine. You've got to be able to allow for that end-user customization. Now, why not put six of those chicklet expansion cards into the laptop? Sure. I mean, ultimately there's design trade-ups that you take any time you build a hardware product.

In this case, like, going from four, we're actually all four of these have exactly equal capabilities. You can do video output, power in and out on any of these ports. We went to six, we would have had to start to make some of those things behave differently. We would have had to compromise on things like maybe battery capacity or speaker quality. And just as we mentioned before, you can get an HP Chromebook for $89 on Amazon. Now, that's on sale. It's usually 190, but the idea of one laptop per child, they did push the market to come up with that same solution. So mission accomplished there.

Now, okay, somebody's listening to this saying, okay, these expansion ports, I can do that with a dongle. I could just have dongle life, which is brutal. I carry like a little purse with me. Right. Now, wherever I go, I got a man purse, I got a merse with dongles in it and all my little things, which is quite nice when, you know, I'm on. on a vacation and somebody's like, I need to, and I'm like, oh, and I pull out my little MERS and I'm like, what do you need? You need lightning to

USBC, you need USBC to Ethernet. I got everything. But there are other features here. What else can I change about my laptop if I choose to go with framework? Sure, yeah. So in addition to the expansion

cards, there are parts of that are actually just cosmetically customizable. And so like the display bezel, for example, instead of being glued on, is just magnet attach. And part of the reason for that was to make it easy to replace the display, like not needing to replace, you know, half the laptop if you've, you know, cracked your display somehow. But it also just enables this really simple cosmetic customization. So I've got, you know, if folks can see it, but I've got a gray bezel on this one. We've got, you know, an orange one

and some other colors in development. Wow. So the bezel comes off and it's magnetized. What a brilliant innovation. So I have an iPad. I cracked a screen. Something goes wrong. I bring it to Apple. They're like, yeah, you cracked your screen. I'm like, no shit. And I'm like, well, can you fix it? They're like, yeah, it's $800 to fix it. I'm like, it's a $400 iPad and it's three years old. And they're like, yeah. I'm like, well, I could buy a new iPad for that.

They're like, yeah, buy a new one right there. And you can't repair anything. So what you're selling me here is, hey, if I break this, I can fix it, no problem. Right. Yeah, or Apple says, okay, yeah, come back in three weeks. Right, that's right. You can also, I see when you order it, it comes with a screwdriver. That's right.

Send people a screwdriver. You can look for it if you want. Yeah, I think I brought one in. I think we know what a screwdriver looks like. What does the screwdriver do? It lets you open it up and see the motherboard. And then what can I change about the motherboard? That's right. So you can actually change.

Yeah, so every part of the machine is upgradable or replaceable using that single tool that we ship in the box. And so you basically unscrew the five fasteners at the bottom, pull off the input cover, and then everything's just a single layer. You know, nothing's buried under anything else. And part of the reason for this as well was that, you know, if you've got, a flaky key on your keyboard or you know, you spilled something, or you can want to, like, change your keyboard language. You can do that just by swapping out either the keyboard itself that screws into the back of this or this cover piece, which is, you know, much simpler to replace.

What would it cost to replace a keyboard? So something like a keyboard, you know, it was like $40 or $50. We're actually just about to start making replacement ones available through our web store later in a swap. And does this all mean that if, let's say, some maniac wants to create a keyboard that's a little more clicky for writers and coders, they could make one for the framework laptop without your permission or they have to come to you and get your permission. How are you thinking about the extensibility of this with other partners? Right. So, I mean, as we look at things like expansion cards,

we've actually already released the design files openly on, actually on GitHub, just under an open license. So anyone, including like an individual hobbyist can go pull down the reference designs, pull down the CAD, develop their own card and prototype it and even resell it out to additional folks if there's interest in the community. We've seen some really interesting designs coming up already. But then as we look at the rest of the machine, that is actually the goal here. We want every part of this to be something that we can develop an ecosystem around and not be, you know, not be asking users just rely on us at framework to cover the entire broad range of needs that are out there. Wow. So the first thing I thought of when I saw your chicklet and expansion slots was

wouldn't it be interesting if somebody made one where I tap it and it slides out a thumb reader like a biometric. Now, you may not be in the biometric business, but there's got to be a hundred companies who already have built biometrics who would build this for you for 30 bucks and then I could use my thumb to unlock

everything and authenticate. You're saying you are giving that business away for free to the rest of the world to innovate on this platform. Yeah, that's right. Actually, we do have fingerprint reader built into the power bind on the laptop. Oh, you do already. Okay. Yeah, definitely, you know, things like biometrics are things that you can develop an expansion

card around. Well, I mean, the other one is for people who really care about security, I've always wondered why GPS is not included and 5G. So if you had 5G and GPS, now your laptop, which is, you know, a very important piece of equipment. If it was stolen, like find your iPad, you could have it when it's in loss mode, you know, or every 15 minutes, just turn on the 5G connection and say it's location. So if somebody were to steal it and you could put a dead man switch on it, people don't know that is, a dead man switches. If you're driving a train and you push down to make the train go, if you have a heart attack, you fall down,

your hand is no longer pushing down the throttle, it stops. So you can have a dead man switch, which if I don't use my laptop for 24 hours, it starts beckoning every minute. That's right, yeah. You know, the location covertly, and then turns on the camera and the microphone and starts recording and sending you clips.

Sure, yeah. It's all like whoever stole it. Yeah, or, you know, on security, things like two-factor authentication or NFC or other things like that, that's all possible as an expansion card. We all know how hard it is to eat healthy when you're grinding on product sprints and trying to meet crazy deadlines. Well, now there's an innovative food company trying to help. Real Good Foods is one of the fastest growing frozen food brands in the U.S.

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Talk to me about CPUs because, you know, you watch what Apple's doing, and they were very proud of the new iMacs, which I buy my mom a new one every three, four, five years. And the old one goes right in the garbage. They won't take them back anymore. They won't even take them back. I think they take them back to recycle them, but they won't even give you a 20 bucks for them.

And it's such a waste of like, the monitors are perfectly good. The keyboard is perfectly good. The ports are perfectly good. What sucks is the memory is welded into, in a lot of these computers and can't be changed. and the CPU can't be changed, but if you changed,

if you upgraded those two things, they would have a new lease on life, correct? Yeah, that's right. And that was also like one of the core design and architecture choices that we made. So you can see that, you know, we pulled off the keyboard cover

and everything is a single layer. The memory is socketed, storage is socketed, Wi-Fi. And actually, you can just pop it out. Yeah, so like, you know, I can just pop out the memory right here and, you know, put in another stick.

And actually the entire main board as well. So, you know, memory is something that, historically has typically been accessible in notebooks. Increasingly is not accessible. It is soldered down, especially from Apple, but from PCOMs as well. But being able to replace the entire main board to do a CPU upgrade is not something that's been available in notebooks. Now, am I being cynical when I say the reason they do this at Apple is specifically to make you upgrade more often?

because if they knew you could go from 8 gigs to 16 gigs or 16 gigs to 32 gigs, it would solve 50% of your slowdown problems when you get the spinning wheel at death. They're doing this to get you to upgrade faster. So it's an interesting one. I mean, I think at Apple, a lot of it is, you know, the supremacy of industrial design and this idea that the Apple product that arrived on your doorstep is, you know, perfect form and you should never attempt to, you know, adjust it or open it or modify in any way that it's done.

It's apples. It's not yours. Don't touch it. And I think, you know, oftentimes. in the PC industry where, you know, historically has been a lot more open and modular just as an ecosystem, has been, you know, looking at Apple and kind of taking the cargo cult mentality of, you know, it's working for Apple. They're so successful. They're making, you know, boatloads of money. Let's just go and follow their design philosophy and we'll do the same. And, you know, the practical result is often

that, you know, the devices are, you know, not quite at the quality standards of what Apple delivers, but are equally locked down. And so, you know, across the industry as a whole, we have notebooks that where the expectation is basically that everything's soldered down. You can't replace any part of it. And it goes into the landfill when you're done with it. And you worked at Apple for a couple of years, am I correct? That's right. Yeah.

So without breaking your non-disclosures, you know of that which you speak. If people were able to upgrade their CPU in memory, just those two things, you know, and then on the margins, add the USBC, which is a nice to have because you can get a dongle that goes from USBA to see if you needed it. but the CPU and the memory specifically,

how much longer would the average laptop last a consumer? Right. So our goal generally is to double the number of years that a consumer can use a product, but actually the core of this is not just the length of time, but the number of happy years. So when you buy your new MacBook, you get like one or two years where you're like so happy and everything's fast and it's working great,

and then your battery starts to wear down and you've got a key that's flaky, and maybe you dropped it and bent the corner of it at one point or you got a little crack on the screen, and then you're suffering through another couple of years before you decide, okay, I've got to go buy another one. I can't keep suffering through this. With the framework laptop, the goal is that the entire period of time

you're using the product should be a happy period of time. If your battery is running down because you've worn through a number of cycles, you should be able to get in there, replace that battery and get great battery life again. If you, you know, pulled a key off your keyboard somehow, you can get a new keyboard and keep going, or you, you know, dropped it down to flight of stairs and your screen's broken, you can replace the screen.

and that entire length of time is productive. Like, that's really the goal in the differentiator here. So how many years you've been at this? So we just started at the beginning of 2020. In January 2020, we kicked off. Tell me about fundraising for a hardware company. Sure. In the pandemic.

Yeah, so I wouldn't even say that the pandemic is the issue. I mean, you know, if anything, you know, both direct-to-consumer e-commerce and, you know, notebooks especially, actually, have gotten an enormous boost from... Actually, I just had Michael Dell on the program. That episode's coming out in a couple weeks, but he had the best year ever, I think, Adele. The idea that the desktop was dead or the laptop was dead is just farcical. People are buying more than ever. Yeah, that's right.

So the challenge for us is not the pandemic. The challenge for us is, you know, all the million other things that make starting a hardware startup challenging. You know, probably the greatest of which is that venture capital just doesn't believe in consumer hardware. And, you know, perhaps justifiably given the long string of high-profile failures in the space. But, you know, we look at those failures, we can see, you know, the very obvious reasons that many of them failed. And, you know, we're not going to make the obvious mistakes. We'll make any mistakes. Yeah.

And you were able to raise $9 million? That's right. Yes. We closed a seed round earlier this year. That's giving us the capital. Yeah. Yeah. It's enough to get us, you know, into market on the product that we have.

And NORAC ventures did that. Oh, they participated. Oh, they weren't the lead? Who was the lead? So I actually personally led the round. Oh, really? Wow, that is baller. So you worked at Apple, you made some cash there, but you also worked at Oculus.

You were the head of hardware and Oculus before it was sold to Facebook? Yeah, so as part of the founding team, I think it was the eighth person in. And, you know, obviously we were very successful there, both in our mission of actually being able to make consumer VR work. But also, you know, the Facebook acquisition obviously worked out well for folks who were there early in the company. Yeah, I mean, if you were there in your first eight, you had to have two. percent of the company, two percent, three billion dollars, you know, it adds up, right? Sure, yep.

Directionally correct. Directionally, I'm not going to give exact numbers. I'll say maybe that's a little optimistic. No, I'm just doing it in my mind. So you had the gall, the gumption to put in millions of dollars of your own money to back this company. Yeah, I believe in the necessity of it. I believe that consumers want this, that the consumers want a company that can make products actually respect their needs.

Now, what about the smartphone? You're starting here with the laptop. I got a thing that if you make this work, the laptop's such a layup because everybody needs a laptop and you have all these gaming folks, you have all these, you know, for some reason, the desktop and the laptop still have a group of people who want to upgrade it, right?

They still feel, why do you think that is? Why do you think the desktop space, is it because of gaming? Is it because of the history of it? It's a combination of things. Part of it's a history of it, But a lot of it comes down to this combination of utility and enjoyment. For the people who like to tinker with their desktops and laptops,

it's not just that they need more performance and they get the utility and the performance there. It's actually fun. It's fun to dig in there and mess around with your machine and get it to do exactly the thing that you wanted to do. Yeah, see, I think it's like muscle cars. Exactly, yes. When I owned a 1973 Mustang Grande in gold with a vinyl roof, I was just constantly like, let's put the two bad. What can I do?

Like, right. How much money you have? I'm like, I got 500 bucks. Like, okay, we can take a two-barrel carbure and make it a four-barl, and you'll go from nine miles to the gallon to six. I was like, let's do it. And it's going to make a bigger noise. Sure.

So you have to be thinking, well, if we make these chicklets and expansion ports work and having seen Project Aria, is it Aria or Aura? Aria is a project now at Facebook. That's right. to do something else. I can't remember what that product. Oh, that's a, it's an AR glasses. Yeah.

They have an open source AR glasses kind of project. You must be thinking about either glasses or mobile. Would this not work for mobile and Android phones? Yeah, I mean, the same problems exist across all consumer electronics, this idea that, you know, you buy this product, and it's not really your product. It's the company that made its product because you can't do what you'd like with it. You know, you're just sort of borrowing it. And so, like, that same problem, that same opportunity definitely exists.

And for us, it was just very, very obvious that notebooks were such a low-hanging entry point, that the audience is there. You know, there are people who, just from a single image or a few lines of text about what we're doing, it clicks. And they get why we're doing it, why it's important and why they want it. And we see that, that's just a great place to go and bootstrap this sort of philosophy and the business around. But really, it's just a starting point.

We see, you know, every category in consumer electronics has this opportunity. So, yeah, you could see it work. for Android if you get this working? Yeah, and there is a company in Europe called Fairphone that's actually taking an interesting approach on this as well. They have a very ethical tech. Fairphone. It's a very ethical tech.

Yeah, it's this great mission that they have and the great philosophy. They're not quite approaching from like customization and upgrade standpoint, really from just an environmental harm reduction standpoint, but it is a great company. And yeah, we hope we wish them success. And where are they doing? They just, you can you could upgrade your screen. or fixture screen kind of thing.

It's, yeah, it's highly repairable. It's, you know, sourced and manufactured in an ethical way, you know, uses sustainable materials. It's a good mission. Wow, that is such a... I'm looking at their website right now. And, yeah, it looks like... It looks like a Motorola phone from, you know, whatever period ago.

Like, it looks a little dated. But look at that. You can swap out, you know, your batteries. and I'm assuming other stuff. Yeah, it's just, on an environmental basis, if you succeed, what would the world look like? Right, and that's part of it for us. You know, enthusiasts are like this great entry point

as an early adopter audience, but ultimately, like, the mission that we have and the environmental impact that we can have by making products last longer, we do think that's extremely appealing for people who think about the environmental impact of their purchases decisions. You know, the person who gets, you know,

that Beyond Burger instead of a, you know, a beef burger or, you know, gets, you know, fair trade coffee or buys Patagonia clothing. Like when they buy electronics products, which are, you know, perhaps among the most environmentally damaging purchases that they'll make in their lifetimes, they just don't have a good set of options in front of them. Yeah, see, it's interesting you bring that up because I passed on that, those investments in the mock meat space. And it was a big mistake for me because I thought, well, who in their right mind is going to pay 50? Because they explained to me, like, it's going to be 15 bucks for one of these burgers at a restaurant. And I'm like, so I can go to in and out or I can go to

shake shack and for, you know, four bucks to eight bucks, I can get an amazing burger, but I'm going to pay you four times as much or double or triple to eat it and it's not going to taste as good? It makes no sense. And then here we are. We all know people who will spend three times or four times as much to eat something that's better for the planet. Yeah, and the interesting thing there is that like it's really a question of audience sequencing. Like, this is honestly, this is like the core lesson in hardware startups, really real, or even like food tech startups, really deeply think about your audience sequencing. Because like, what does it mean?

Audience sequencing. It's about finding that first set of audiences that really deeply cares about what you're doing to the point that, even if they are tradeoffs or risks, that they care so much that that the tradeoffs weigh in the favor of them going and diving in and doing it, you know, buying that expensive burger. And from there, you really have to think about what the sequence of audiences after that is. And, you know, if you look at impossible and beyond, sure, like, you know, their products, when they started out, they were a lot more expensive. And maybe they didn't taste quite as good. And, you know, the audiences maybe were limited.

But they actually did do that audience sequencing really well. And if you look at it now, you know, the costs are, I think, actually quite close to a traditional burger and the flavor they continue to improve over time. And that's a lesson that really you need to apply throughout. It's find that audience and then find the next one as you can improve your product and find the next one after that until you are, you know, the big company that is capturing that market share. Yeah, this is why I'm an idiot because I knew what you're saying, sequencing, because I saw it up close and personal with Uber and Tesla. I bought the Roadster for 150 dimes.

And Elon said very specifically, like if you buy this, Jason, you're helping pay for the next version. So then I bought the next version, the Model S. And Elon's position was the same. If you buy this, you're eventually we're going to have a $50,000 version. And sure enough, they have the Model 3. and supposedly the model 4, which is not going to be its name, will be a $30,000 version, and you felt really great being part of that sequencing.

Again, with Uber. They didn't start with Uber Pool. They started with Uber Black. And it was only $80, $40 rides, not $4 and $8 rides. So you start at the high margin business and then you make your way downstream. And it's just such a great idea. what's the most challenging thing about what you're doing? What is the most challenging thing?

I mean, honestly, the most challenging thing probably right now is just scaling. You know, we're in, it's a good problem to have things. We're selling product faster than we can build it. And so it's how do we scale?

Oh, really? Like hundreds of units? Thousands of units? Yeah. So we're happy with the sales trajectory. And, you know, right now if you go on our website. So you have to say over thousands of units.

Yeah. So if you go on your website now, I think we're out in October or November. which is a month or two for a pre-order to be able to ship it out there. And those are times that we're continuing to try to pull in by increasing our supply chain capacity. And, of course, our head of supply chain was just a brilliant operations person, always says, I want to turn this into the e-commerce team's problem. I don't want to be the whole night.

And so we're going to get out of that. But it's sort of a good problem to have of how do we scale as a small team building an expensive and difficult product. Are you doing any marketing right now? it all word of mouth. It's almost entirely PR and word of mouth. And it's the notebook industry. It's a big, enormous industry with a very mature set of press and influences around it.

And they're reporting on things that are frankly not very interesting. You know, it's the same notebooks every year from Dell and HP and Lenovo. And so for us to come out there, like genuinely doing something new and interesting, gets people, I think, rightfully excited. Yeah, it's so exciting to me. And I think you're going to be incredibly. successful at it. I mean, it's such a great obvious idea.

You know, if you're thinking about buying a new laptop and you're like, huh, I wonder if it's going to support 5G, you know, you've already answered that question, which is if there's demand for it, somebody's going to go to GitHub, get the spec, and just build it. And, you know, people forget this, but there was something called PCM

CIA. Yeah, PCMCA. Yeah, that's right. And these were PC cards. They were about the size of a pack of playing cards. That's right. They were, I don't know how the quarter inch may be. And when you bought your ThinkPad, your IBM ThinkPad, it had two PCM CIA slots. And you'd slide them in.

And you could have back then a 3G connection or a 2G connection. You could have, you know, a card reader, you know, and you can't even get these. Does PCM CIA still even exist? It doesn't. There was a successor called Express card that also died off. I mean, really, to a large extent, what we're doing is returning PCs back to their form where, you know, modularity and upgradeability and ecosystems were just part of the entire experience. But we're doing it with, you know, the best technology that 2021 has available.

Amazing. With your memory cards, just as we wrap up here, what are you using for storage there? Is it flash storage and fast? Is it slow and, like, yes. Yeah, it's high-speed storage. It's actually fast enough that you can install an operating system onto, like Linux. And, you know, actually, you know, you can take a, you know, privacy-focused OS. install it on an expansion card and then pop it out and lock it in a safe or whatever you'd like to do.

Oh, wow. You know what's really interesting about that? I wonder if you could have two of those different terabytes. I could have Chrome OS on one, Windows on another, and then whichever one I swap in to, you know, port number one would be the primary boot, and I could just boot up a different instance. Is that possible? Yeah, that's possible. With Windows, it's a little harder, but definitely with any Linux to a stroke.

It's actually relatively straightforward to do. What about Chrome OS? Have you been playing with ChromeOS or swimming Chrome? Yeah, we have. So there's actually a company that Google just acquired called Cloud Ready that basically enables Chrome OS on any typical Windows notebook basically. And so we've been able to know this. This is Neverware. Neverware. That's right. Yeah. Neverware. That got bought by Google? I believe it did. I hope I didn't get that wrong. I believe they got acquired. I mean, it's really interesting because you can, you can with, I remember with that, I was taking my old. iMacs, you can take an old iMac and load Chrome on it.

And just to show how bloated, you know, Mac OS has gotten, Chrome OS perfectly functional. A seven-year-old iMac will work brilliantly with ChromeOS. Right. And so you just donate it to school with ChromeOS on it. It's just so amazing. All right, listen, continued success. We are both in the peninsula. Maybe I can take you for some ramen and see if I sneak my way onto your, onto your,

onto your cap table because I am enamored with what you're doing. I'm ordering a machine today and I hope everybody considers this. Frame. Take a look at it. It might be something for you to take advantage of. I also think for IT companies, if you have a thousand employees and you're in the IT department, you've got to be thinking about piloting this, right? Yeah, absolutely.

We've got a ton of inbound interest, actually. And the core of that is it's not even that, you know, that you can, potentially save money by making products last longer. It's actually just reducing employee downtime, especially in a remote first world. Getting someone, their machine repaired, you know,

a day faster is worth more than the cost of that machine. Yeah. And then you think about recycling a machine. It's like, somebody needs a new machine. It's faster. You're like, okay, hey,

we just sent you a new terabyte, just slide it in as opposed, and it's like, okay, I'm done, right? And remote hardware support, all that stuff is getting pretty robust now. All right, listen, continue success.

Maybe we'll go get some ramen at some point in the peninsula. and we'll go check out Tai Shokin. Have you been to Tai Shokin in San Mateo yet? No, that sounds good though. Tai Shokin, T-A-I Shokin, is buckwheat noodles that they make there and you dip them in this like broth

and it's called dipping noodles. And it's like the number one thing in Japan and they, this place Tai Shokin, which is like you wait in line for a day in Japan to go there, decided to open in the U.S. And they decided to open their first location in San Mateo. and it is bonkers how good Tyshokin is. I was never into ramen and now I'm a ramen addict.

Maybe you and I can go grab some ramen. I'm up for you. Thanks for coming on the pod. Everybody go check it out at frame.org. Are you hiring? Are you hiring? We're hiring for marketing most crucially of all, actually, as we look at this audience sequencing.

Also for a number of engineering positions, actually, as we start to develop our next products. Great. We have a lot of marketers who listen. So if you are a hardware geek who cares about the environment and people's right to upgrade their own products and you want to see a better world for the environment,

hey, just type in framework jobs and you'll go right to their jobs page. All right, we'll see you all next time on this week and Starves. Bye-bye.