Video Of The Week: TechCrunch Disrupt Interview
A couple weeks ago, I sat down with Mike Arrington to kick off TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. Everyone reacted to my comments about Apple, which were simply a reaction to a question posted by Arrington. I’m not backing away from those comments, but I was a bit taken aback by the vitriol that came at me in the days after this talk.
We covered some interesting territory, including privacy, valuations, and the NYC tech scene. It’s about 20mins long but you will have to wade through the opening ceremonies (3-4 mins) to get to our talk.
Comments (Archived):
He who does not mince words will attract much vitriol. And much respect.
Yupp
I liked it, but to be honest, that wasn’t the best interview of you and Mike Arrington. You did cover a good medley of issues.Mike could have gotten a lot more out of you if he had stopped trying to be funny and provocative, and he likes to harp on one issue and beat it to death. I guess that’s “being Arrington”.
i agree with that. i thought twice about posting this but decided to go with it.
For some contrast, check out the video from his interview with the Whisper guy, same conference. Wouldn’t let Arrington– or Roelof Botha– get 1 word in edgewise. Wouldn’t relax or stop talking.Back story is that there was a prep call and the Whisper guy got so alarmed he might get clobbered that he used an offensive defense.
thanks. Is there a link?
http://goo.gl/RA4fgGListen especially between 16-17 minutes. You might hear me yelling from the audience, “relax already!!”
Apple’s IPad will soon dominate the education and enterprise markets (can you really see as ad executive walking into a meeting with a nexus tablet) and apple’s iTunes business is approaching 1 billion users with revenue per iTunes user still above $40, just wondering what you see as a weakness in apples business model?
well lets put it this way. why would a school pay $400 to $500 per student for an iPad when they can pay $200 for a Nexus 7. we have iPads and Nexus 7s in our home and the Nexus 7 is just as good.my point is that hardware is going to get cheaper and cheaper and their OS is not that much better, if its better at all
Here is one reason: excitement. I was in grad school in 2000-05 and remember seeing the seeing laptops change from PC to Mac with each successive year. I also remember the day the computer lab switched to macs. There was excitement in the air.
i guess that’s what i don’t get about applei love my nexus 5 and nexus 7s the way apple fanboys love their iPhones and iPads
Fangirls too 🙂
right. i will adjust my vocabularly on that word too.fanpeople?
Fansters.Fanstars if we’re going with your App Constellation theme, :*).
“Man the barricades!” Kill off gender! Oops! Ironic self-contradiction! Ah, there’s no hope — give up.
Haha.The irony is that women buy more iOS products; we just don’t go to WWDC or Droidcon or I/O and do chest-thumping about the merits of iOS vs Android.We just focus on using the tech.Also, women have “outspent men 3 to 2 on technology and influence 57 percent of new technology purchases.”* http://www.trendsight.com/c…Oh and women buy more cars too.
Okay, you really put your foot in it this time, and I’ve got you; no sense in saying I don’t! You gave a nice list of real differences! So, see, see, anyone can see, no more of this ‘just the same, equality’ stuff!”We just don’t … do chest-thumping”. Ouch, that could hurt! I can understand that, and even though this is an ‘adult’ audience I won’t respond to that; “I won’t say a word, not one single word!”.Now will you be willing to smile when a nice man opens a door for you, that is, not call him an MCP and hit him over the head with, say, a lug wrench?Teasing girls is FUN! I wish I’d teased girls this much in high school! :-)!
Ha! Who said women can’t make a sport of observing the foibles of male behavior as much as guys poke fun of ours?We ARE different but equally intelligent in our own ways, is all.The whole lexicon of “you guys”, “fanboys”, “jerks”, “b****”, “bossy boots”, “Masters of the Universe”, “sharks” (another male-biased term, by the way), “star quarterback”, “rockstar” (also male), “precious Princess”, etcetcetc………Actually detracts from what matters: what each gender can DO and contribute to the other, in complement.If a man offers to carry a 20kg bag of rice into the kitchen or to open the door, it would frankly make no sense to be “feminist” and gender-patronized about that.A woman should be gracious and strong enough in themselves to accept consideration when it’s offered.Ditto when a woman offers to nurse her partner when he’s in complete denial about being sick (some men have this complex about not showing weakness of any type), he should have the grace and strength to accept that consideration too.Consideration is human rather than “sexist”.
Your being reasonable is much less fun!Sorry about the lexicon: To me “Precious princess” doesn’t mean dependent, helpless, useless, or incompetent. Instead one ‘precious princess’ I know is a niece, and she made PBK, Harvard Law, and Cravath-Swain; I wouldn’t want to pay a lawyer to fight her on a legal case.The ‘precious princess’ I married, and I did so regard her, for six years starting in grade school played piano to accompany operettas, won prizes in cooking, sewing, and raising chickens (made somewhat easier since her father usually had about 40,000 in the back yard), starred in the senior class play, as Mama in ‘I Remember Mama’ as a junior, as a senior directed the senior class play and edited the Annual, was Valedictorian, made PBK, ‘Summa Cum Laude’, Woodrow Wilson, two years of NSF to grad school in one award, got her Ph.D. in, say, mathematical sociology, from two short lectures from me learned expert system ‘artificial intelligence’ and wrote two excellent first programs, etc. Those accomplishments were real and significant and showed extreme talent, determination, and competence. Still I regarded her as my ‘precious princess’.”Star quarterback”? F’get about it! If he is dumb enough to play football and suffer the brain damage from all the hard ‘hitting’, let him but don’t honor or envy him.Some of the best athletes on the planet are ballerinas, and men are not intimidated by them, just think that watching ‘Swan Lake’, ‘Coppelia’, etc. is good art.Can’t think of any more ways to tease you; no fun now!
An example of male-female partnerships building intelligent system…IBM Watson just acquired Cognea:* http://techcrunch.com/2014/…
Fans? Fanatics?
“FANS” GENDER NEUTRAL, AND NOT COME WITH “AND IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ME YOU ARE DUMB” TAINT.
Apple has a cool “brand” and the products are elegant and well designed – both hardware and software. When the functionality gap is huge and the brand is better, the price different is tolerable. As the functionality gap closes, it’s hard to imagine the price difference remaining; even if the brand retains its cachet.
There’s also the issue of “cost of ownership”. Businesses or schools that buy products in quantities will look at that factor as well. I don’t have the data, but I’m willing to bet the iPad’s cost of ownership is lower than an equivalent Android over 5-7 years.
IPAD 1: CAN STILL USE ITOLD ANDROID: GOOD FOR HOLD SHELF DOWN IN CLOSET.
EXACTOMONDO. I still have an iPad1 and it works great.
That assume there is little evolutionary headroom to maintain that functional integration gap.But we have just begun to scratching the iceberg on this networked hardware revolution so why is everyone so ready to dismiss the hardware evolution side go the equation.
The brand isn’t ‘nexus’. The brand is ‘android’. When people say ‘android’ I can’t tell if they’re talking about something good or not. When they say ‘apple’ I know exactly what they’re talking about.
Most people in society these days are tangled in the flow of everything instead of being more with themselves, processing and understanding their reactions and feelings – self-awareness of matters – and not looking at the practicality of it all. Most people react instead of respond. I’m not excluding myself from either group, though awareness of such helps with understanding the why.
Business Insider has an article about issues users face when switching from iPhone to Android which is causing users to sue Apple for not delivering msgs post-switch:* http://www.businessinsider….Meanwhile, Apple and Google are dropping their patent lawsuits against each other:* http://gigaom.com/2014/05/1…Gigaom observes: “The patent fights…have failed to make a material difference in the smartphone market.”Will be interesting to watch how Apple and Google defend their competitive positions thereafter…
Once the tablet wars settle, don’t you think the issue will be, at least for education, the way content is delivered on the devices? So the issue is going to be more who has the most useful Learning Management System? And which universe has the better content? Google’s new Classroom has the earmarks of being a great LMS. But, in the Android vs. iOS side of things, iOS is certainly easier for content creation…
Because it’s usually not their money. Either parents pay or taxpayers.
@fredwilson:disqus “Nexus 7 is just as good”…. you see everything being commoditized and don’t seem to value the extras. This is where the Apple fans disagree. I think Apple mostly targets the segment of the market where people are willing to pay more for a better experience. Better experience includes things like a better connector on the phone: lighting vs micro USB, metal instead of plastic, mag safe connectors, beautiful apps, polish, etc. Given how much we use our electronics for work and play, it seems reasonable to spend more for the better overall experience.
All Apple products come with built in free support. An minimal quite excellent in country phone support.This is a big deal.
Prices in Android hardware continue coming down, yes. But there continues to be this “app gap” between iOS and Android. Most startups as well as larger companies, regardless of their vertical, start with iOS and come out with an Android version much later, if at all. More iOS users download apps and iOS apps typically have higher ARPU than Android. So it’s a perpetual feedback loop between Apple, its developers and ultimately, its users who want the best quality apps and experiences. Same in education as every other vertical: if the apps schools need/want aren’t available on Android, I don’t think the fact that it’s cheaper makes much of a difference.What Google and other Android OEMs need to do is make it more enticing for developers to come out with an Android app out of the box. It’s difficult though because the ecosystem is so balkanized with respect to handset sizes etc.
Fun thing, as commoditized as cars are, when I look around at all the cars out there, from the high end models to the most utilitarian models, almost no one buys the base stripped versions.Key devices that are central to people’s lives, comfort and utility have enough emotional SubstrateUndertow to sustain premium pricing.As we all begin to assemble our own personally-managed array of distributed sensors/data/actuators, all orchestrated via our own mobile processor/communicator hub-devices, the value we place on a well integrated and trustworthy eco-system vendor may, like cars, be able to sustain a high premium appeal.We don’t yet know whether Apple has the sustaining cultural DNA required to keep executing on that premium sweet-spot but maybe it is just a little too early to declare their hardware/software integration edge a commoditized also ran ?Sure, the history of computing is the history of software cannibalizing hardware but disruptive new sensing/action tentacles must ultimately touch the world via hardware.
SAVE $200 MINUS NO BUDGET FOR TECH SUPPORT, THAT WHY.
Common argument about Apple but cheaper product alternatives really haven’t hurt Apple’s profits or overall customer base. Sales, units and the overall ecosystem are all growing. You ask why schools would pay more per device, the same reason students/parents pay more for education – it’s perceived worth more – product leadership and reputation.
If you mean Apple’s iPad will soon dominate in market share, hard trends favor Android in devices sold (http://techcrunch.com/2014/…. If you mean domination in profit share, I anticipate Apple will gradually dilute it’s premium over time. 5C is a harbinger for this.I don’t expect an ad exec to walk into a meeting with anything but the priciest and trendiest gadgets, however, that doesn’t translate to broad based domination in education and enterprise. Education and enterprise purchase decisions are largely driven by TCO and ROI, so the “excitement” claim is a hard sell in those markets, and really anywhere outside consumer.
That’s the old paradigm
I agree if you mean the old paradigm in which technology companies could differentiate themselves on hardware. I disagree if you mean the way different markets approach hardware purchases, with the caveat that BYOD is starting to blur the lines between enterprise and consumer in mobile and tablet.
In 1977 I had a job installing/servicing Micom word processors that cost $17K plus $250 a month service fee. They had no OS just word-processing written in assembler. This was a high premium over the IBM Selectrics most offices were still using.37 years later Apple sells millions of iPads as at premium price point.A lot of premium priced hardware products have passed under the bridge during those intervening 37 years. So why is it so popular to think we’ve reached the end of history on innovative premium priced hardware.With the tablet/smartphone have we somehow reached the ultimate terminus at the end of hardware innovation ?
First, let me say I enjoy this kind of engagement. Thank you for the reply.The way I frame this view is that from the moment of digital hardware invention, better hardware translated into increased usefulness to an average user. There’s some degree of elasticity at play as well here, but that’s too complex for now. If we view usefulness as the desired computing outcome, with factor set = {hardware, software} we understand that one factor will always be the limiting factor. From hardware inception until now, hardware has clearly been the limiting factor. At some point, hardware will become so functional that software becomes the limiting factor for average user computing usefulness. I believe that we’ve already reached that point. I believe further advancements in computing usefulness to an average user now come from software as opposed to hardware. This software improvement can happen at any level of the stack, whether it’s a better application, better software defined delivery of that application, or better management of hardware resources.Think about it this way: if you could double either the hardware or software capability of a smartphone, tablet, or computer, which do you think would yield more utility to a user? Ask the same question for the year 2000.
the old pardigm is “Education and enterprise purchase decisions are largely driven by TCO and ROI, so the “excitement” claim is a hard sell in those markets”. Why? ROI is f(excitement)
ROI here is utility/cost. Excitement is only one part of utility, and it’s fleeting. The bulk of utility is derived from system capabilities, which are more or less equal across iPad/android(/win?) as compared with the price difference. An educator buying iPads is signaling a view that tablet design trumps additional educators on staff or extra-curricular program funding. Likewise managers of non-byod firms need to justify the premium cost at a time when hardware is increasingly commoditized. [delta]productivity is more or less the same across vendors but cost is not.
I’m an Apple guy; been drinking their Kool-aid for many years and to even consider a change at this stage just isn’t practical. Apple also is one of my largest holdings (bought it when the stock tanked).That said, Apple inexplicably blew music streaming and their download biz will soon resemble AOL’s dial-up biz, serving primarily (very) late adaptors. The potential Beats acquisition is a head scratcher. Their headphones suck and they are barely a player in the music streaming biz. The industry also doesn’t need another parity product. Here’s the caveat: Jimmy Lovine, who’s a bit of a PR hound, is all about music quality, the alleged impetus for starting Beats to begin with. My hunch is if this deal goes through they’re gonna jointly build a high res streaming hardware/software platform that creates a sig pt of diff vs. Pandora, Spotify, etc. Pono is attempting to do the same, but they’re way too expensive and they don’t have marketing muscle, their Kickstarter star-laden promo video notwithstanding.
ONE THING APPLE KNOW?DIFFERENTIATE ON QUALITY.CLOUD STRATEGIES NOT GO WELL SO FAR BECAUSE THEM NOT FIND WAY TO DIFFERENTIATE ON QUALITY.MUSIC? THAT THING THEM CAN DO.
I was surprised by your answer about New York vs other places.
leaving out Silicon Valley, the number of high quality startups in NYC each year vs the rest of the world is no contest. there might be 5-10 in NYC and there might be 20-40 in the non SV rest of world. there is probably 20-40 in SV too.
Your comment on Apple not being a Top 3 techco by 2020 was interesting. Given the speculation about the Beats’ acquisition, how does that change your views?My reading on the rationale of the deal is different from the market commentators so far.It seems Apple would be gaining some Contextual Intelligence in their recommendations algorithm (please see attached image 1) that could help their iTunes and App Store search and discovery features beyond their current keywords and 5-star reviews.There was also this observation I found on the Economist.com: “Beats Music has a much-lauded music-recommendation algorithm that is converting free users to paid users at a rapid rate.”* http://www.economist.com/bl…One of the Holy Grails in eCommerce is for brands to understand consumer emotions and Apple GETS emotions — as can be seen in their marketing of iPhone 5 (please see image 2).Moreover, no techco so far has mastered Contextual Intelligence that is not about the Who, What, When, Where and How — which Facebook, Linkedin, Google, Baidu, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Maps, Paypal-eBay, Skype and Amazon are solving.The WHY we buy is what I built my system for.Google, as most commentators observe, doesn’t get social . The bulk of its revenues remain in keyword advertising.Facebook has a lot of social data but can’t connect that, unlike Amazon, to actual purchase which is why they’re now trying a shopping button.With the Beats’ acquisition, Apple gains a bit of Contextual Intelligence neither Google nor FB with their recent AI activity (acquisitions and investment in AI Labs) have. If/when it proceeds its a signal to the market of the value of that contextual intelligence: emotion and situational-based.The third company no one has ever heard of is likely to be a software one that solves the hardest problem in AI: how to make a machine make sense and think like us.Interestingly, Andrew Ng of Stanford who created “Google Brain” that led to its Knowledge Graph has just joined Baidu to head up their AI efforts so maybe the thirdco could come out of that.
well the vitriol that came at me post that interview was largely “he doesn’t get apple”i guess that is truebecause i don’t get Apple Beats in the least
I’m not an “Apple fanboy” and I don’t own a pair of Beats. However, I can see Apple strengthening their algorithms via this acquisition because of my context.Beats’ emotion & situational music recommendations is HARD to do.There is a big music company that had spent 2 years and $ millions to pay the research arm of a very large advertising agency to collect data on why people prefer one piece of music over another.That data set had over 1 million data points. The Data Scientists got to work on that dataset to try and make sense of it. The winning solution ended up being a Random Forest one but the root mean squared error was still >>> 10 which is not at all great for probabilistic accuracy.Big music co invited me in because I was the only Data Scientist who tried to solve the emotions part of the dataset.
Ah and Stanford (under Andrew Ng’s supervision) released their Sentiment Treebank solution in October 2014:* http://gigaom.com/2013/10/0…Let’s just say my system is different from theirs and also from every other emotion-based scale and algorithm out there (BuzzFeed, Yelp, AirBnB et al).
Beats are like Diesel Jeans. It’s not that they are better, its just that for a small premium you are in the club.
one explanation is that Apple and Beats share a key demographic: consumers who overpay for image. have they ever dominated any product category for more than a few years? smartphones, for a few years (now <15%). tablets, for a few years (now <30%). computers, never. mp3 players might be the one area where their near-monopoly persists, though the category seems largely subsumed by phones. the company is peerless in product/category definition, no question. but it’s a hard strategy to sustain over the long term. thus your concerns make a lot of sense
If a car is a car is a car…. there’d be no market for a $100,000 car. While I’ve enjoyed the experience of renting a luxury car… I’d never buy one.I feel the same about Apple, I want a functional experience at a base price… and these days that comes with a darn good experience for the money as well (i.e., Samsung, Nexus, etc).Apple has a foothold in the luxury market where design, simplicity & esthetics matter… if they screw that up they fall out of the top 3. But if they don’t they get to keep their margins and cash war chest while everyone else competes for the “works fine for me at this price” market (of which I am a member).The next few years will be interesting. How do you compete when hardware is “free?” To date, design, service, and brand have been Apple’s strong suits. Will that be enough going forward?
I was kind of astonished at his take on Kickstarter and USV’s investment in it.You totally owned this one.And, your hair looked great that morning 😉
I found the implication that Kickstarter was somehow a hardware company odd also. That’s like saying SAP is an auto manufacturer because Porsche uses it.I didn’t notice the hair. I’ll have to go back and watch the video again.
I thought the conversation on NY vs SV was interesting. As someone who grew up in SV, but has been living in NY for the past 6 years, I think NY holds many distinct advantages that will translate into more and more companies rivaling those in SV – especially companies built on top of the application layer that does not depend on a concentration of deep technical talent.I was re-watching David Karp’s interview with Arrington from a couple years ago and he mentioned how it’s much better to build a startup in NY because you do not have to deal with the distraction of other startups in SV. Curious to hear your thoughts on whether you think NY is a better environment to build a startup and whether we will see an acceleration of successful companies out of NY in the next couple years.
i don’t think its a better place to build a startupbut i don’t think its a worse one eitheryou can build great companies all over the world these days
IBM Watson and FB are both building their AI centers a block from NYU so those will act as magnets for deep technical talent.The quality of the database talks in NY is also high so a lot of great knowhow is being cross-pollinated.Having said that, I’m basing myself in SF for now because IBM Watson is holding its Innovation seminars here and even AI people I spoke to in NY, who’d worked in the ecosystem for over a decade, said I should head for SF because of the higher concentration of knowhow (AI, enterprise sales, etc.).And I always listen to the wisdom of others!
Good description of “founder” at the very end.
Yup I felt too that it was good to watch Fred’s comment at very end. Thanks for the video.
Sometimes I wish I was more popular in my blog writing and Twitter feed. Then I see the hate spewed at you and others and remind myself that anonymity is a good thing.
IF NO ONE HATE YOU YET, TRY HARDER.
The decline of Apple prediction is based on the following assumptions:1. History will repeat, and apple will not adjust when it’s innovative premium priced hardware is matched by good enough cheaper competition2. Apple will fail to bring to market a new shiny, innovative product. The ipad/iphone will be like gasoline cars, iterating the same basic engine for a century3. Apple will not be able to penetrate new markets after their traditional segments are saturatedNot sure any of these assumptions is actually true.
They will not because they do not have the type of visionary leader to recognize and create category defining products.
Until now, for years, everybody “knew” what the right product was, the competition was “Who will get there first”, and Apple won many times. But now, for the first time in decades of computing, nobody knows what the next product is (Google glass is a trial in that direction).
Healthcare sensor-array/data integration !Everyone of us has serious skin in that game and the potential disruptive savings for individuals and the state are astronomical.All the technological/market prerequisite forces seem near at hand for any company with the financial resource and a sustained organizational focus on transparent hardware/software/UI integration.Is that company more likely to be Apple – Google – Samsung ?
NOT YET.
Fred, do you find that a founder’s ‘charisma’ (or general outlook) changes based upon the geographical location that their company operates in? For instance, would you find that a founder based in London, say, is more pessimistic/optimistic in their approach to business than those who operate in NYC?
It’s worth reading Robin Klein of Index Ventures views on UK-based founders and why their reserve shouldn’t be misinterpreted:* http://techcrunch.com/2014/…
I have all of the charisma and passion in the world, I just use it to my fullest so my energy is diminished at times – especially when I don’t have the resources to pass off some of the different types of tasks so my brain can focus and specialize on something more specific. I do enjoy and value going through each task type, though I know there are people who are better than I at maintaining those. Sustained outreach isn’t my forte I have discovered – even though I enjoy connecting and helping others – I need some certainty of future stability at least for a period of time to have the energy. To be fair to myself I have been going non-stop for awhile now. Because of this current cycle I’m also not great at on-command charisma in-person, maybe that is the problem. I prefer to write high-level thinking though I can articulate my vision and path in regular conversation that can take a natural flow.Not sure what pieces I am missing. Whatever attempts I keep making, nothing has hit and held yet. Some interesting and inspirational people I have been introduced too, though it takes time for relationships and those values to start flowering into their possibilities. I am not good at simple and basic tasks though, maybe that will be my flaw that leads to my overall failure to succeed. I can do full on when I have available resources needed to accomplish a task, have learned enough so far as to what those are for what I currently want to achieve. Perhaps failure to get in front of enough of the right people is the problem. Perhaps things are running their course and time is nearing up. For now I am trying to figure out how I will pay rent next month.It sounds like I need a management team to help.
I completely predicted this.I can’t think of 1 company in history that carries with it such a dedication– even Jihadist at times– as Apple. Go through most any discussion forums re iOS or Android products, and if anyone makes even remotely negative iPhone comments, trolls get violent.(uhoh- they’re coming for me!)
Most of those discussion forums tend to be “equal opportunity” trolling operations with both being equally annoying !
i don’t agree. I’m claiming that if you compare most any Apple discussion to most any Google discussion, you will get a hugely disparate vibe (Apple fans being disproportionately dogmatic).
EVERYONE YOU DISAGREE WITH ALWAYS UNREASONABLE AND STUPID.
I liked this interview. The snippiness, the disjointedness. But the concepts and points are clear. Love Fred’s point about valuation. He’s dead on.One thing I wondered is How big (physical presence) is Michael Arrington? Looked as big as Hodor.
My thesis is different from yours on Apple, but it’s a very reasonable thesis. Not sure why vitriol is called for.
Is it just me or has Arrington becoming a less-effective and engaging interviewer? He seems so bored lately…
impressive interview I liked it a lot
a necktie?
Fred, I found your comment about valuations more interesting than the Apple comment. I understand why entrepreneurs would rather partner with USV for less money than another VC since you might add other value as well, and I can obviously understand why an entrepreneur would want less dilution, but why do you think a firm raising money when valuations are high is a bad thing? If I think valuations are going lower, I’d rather raise more money now than later, and at the very least, if I know I am going to raise $100mm, why wouldn’t I want it at the highest possible valuation?