A collection of conversations from Airchat
Find Scaling Knowledge on other platforms
Content
(00:00) Intro
(00:56) Simplicity
(05:34) Design feeling natural
(06:46) Smart Glasses
(14:00) AirPods
(16:06) Humane (hu.ma.ne)
(24:10) Conversational Dunbar number
(25:10) AI Industry and platforms
(29:04) Disrupting Ebay
(34:00) 10x Engineers/Designers
(40:59) Outro
People
Naval
Brian
Kumar
Keith
Tom
Moritz
Kyle Barber
Patryush Sing
Raghav Gulati
Petri Kajander
Some Airchat Links
Conversational Dunbar number
product design simplicity (Naval)
product design simplicityu (Brian)
Transcript
(this is the raw descript export - I’m about to have someone cleaned this up)
[00:00:00]
The following is a collection of conversations of Naval Ravikant, Brian Norgard and others that happened others that happened on Airchat. A new social app that Naval and Brain are building. Of the last few months, I've had the pleasure to be part of an early user group and bookmark many fascinating conversations. I'm excited to share these with the world.
The entirety of the content that I export it from the app ended up being a bit more than one hour. So decided to split. This content into two podcast episodes, the first one being about product and business and the second one being more focused on topics that I had to economics politics and knowledge.
As a heads-up, some of these discussions might feel a bit of context. So I did my best to give a brief introduction to name the group chat or the topics included. I'll also put links to most of the recordings. In the show notes. So it can deep dive into each discussion. If you're interested. The waitlist to join air chat is at getairchat.com.
On product design and simplicity
Moritz: The following is a brief discussion between Naval, Brian, and Kyle. [00:01:00] On product design and simplicity. It also includes a brief recording of Johnny Ives design philosophy, which Kyle posted. Into this conversation and which I then inserted. As a recording into this podcast.
Naval: Every single toggle, every single setting, every single button, every single switch comes at a huge load and a huge cost. Even now. We've rolled out a bunch of features that I'm not sure we're gonna keep around.
We might completely kill tags and get rid of it, for example. So there are lots of things that we work on that are very, very heavyweight, very interesting, very advanced, and very cool things, but we just. Aren't gonna necessarily gonna keep them because simplicity is everything. I got harassed earlier this week for why we're showing one x two x three x instead of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75.
It's to lower the cognitive load on the [00:02:00] user. It's to lower complexity the same way I keep getting asked, Why don't we add more publisher tools, more sniping, this or that? Again, it's to lower the cognitive complexity of the user. The app is already very, very complex. It's introducing a whole new concept of the chi line, of conversations, of stitching, of public and private rooms all in the same app.
So all of that is just like huge, huge cognitive load. You've been around forever in this app. It's obviously intuitive to you. Now we're thinking of the new user.
Brian: A quick story that I've shared with my teammates. In the early days of Tinder, we could not figure out why 4% of the customer base was t trading every single day, new users. And so, you know, we put everybody on it, the full analytics team, and no dice until one day I walked into the office, I said, I'm gonna figure this out.
And what I realized after going through onboarding, some people did not know to swipe, either they couldn't read. They didn't understand the s geomorphic design, but they didn't know to swipe, [00:03:00] and that would be a pretty damn good reason to never come back. Right. It just shows you how utterly simplistic things have to be to be successful.
Jony ive on design
I remember the first time I saw an Apple product. I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I realized when I saw this product, I got a very clear sense of the people that designed it and made it.
A big definition of who you are as a designer. It, it, it's, it's the way that you look at the world and, I guess it's one of the sort of curses of what you do, is that you're constantly looking at something and thinking, why, why, why is it like that? What, why is it like that and not like this? [00:04:00] And so in that sense, you are constantly, designing.
When we are designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product, and some of those attributes will be materials that it's made from and the form that's connected to those materials. So for example, with the first iMac that we made, the primary component of that was the cathode, which was spherical.
We would have an entirely different approach to designing something like that than the current iMac, which is a very thin, flat panel display. Other issues would be, you know, just physically how do you connect to the product. So for example, something like the iPhone, everything defers to the display. A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is actually getting design out the way, and I think [00:05:00] when forms develop, With that sort of reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes.
It feels almost inevitable. It feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like, well, of course it's that way. I mean, you know, why wouldn't it be any other way?
Naval: That is an incredible video, one of the best videos I've ever seen in design. It also goes to show how top-down centralized planning never works in individual creativity. Highly motivated, self-interested is necessary to create great things.
About design feeling natural
True in theories of physics too. David Deutscha often says, once a good theory arrives, we say, well, how could it have been otherwise? Of course, it's obvious.
Designing and mobile is fantastic because it forces you to save screen, real estate, battery bandwidth, all of those things. And those constraints make you a better designer. It makes us that you only do each thing one way. There's one way of doing each thing, and it's the most natural one.
I [00:06:00] also really resonated with his point about how when it's not being used, it disappears. So many par products are arrogant, dying to show you the latest feature is shoving it in your face. Things should be invisible until they're needed, then visible, then disappear again. My number one bugaboo at home is laundry machines, refrigerators, internet connected systems, alarm panels that are constantly beeping at you, flashing at you, reminding you they exist.
They have the slightest problem. They'll wake up the house in the middle of the night and they'll keep beeping at you until you jump through their Byzantine menus to solve their Byzantine problems. This is why Apple is the most valuable company in the world because they're obsessed with design and they built the best product possible for themselves and then made it available to others.
Smart Glasses
Moritz: The following discussion happened in a room called cognitive augmentation that I created. And it's about smart glasses and then the following. Section it's about airports. It includes people like Naval, Tom Howard, who work with the [00:07:00] inventor of the Google glasses. Ryan Lackey, Aaron Stupple and me.
How do you guys think about smart glasses?
I think there could be especially interesting in combination with headphones where when I listen to an audio book or a podcast or a chit chat, I would love to have visual information as well, sort of in my peripheral vision about what I'm listening to. So for example, when I'm listening to an audio book, I want to re see the drawings, the, the charts, the the figures, In my preferation or wanna be able to slide them in if there's not the danger of me getting distracted from something and have this additional visual information, visual input.
I am very excited for this revolution of AR glasses. I think this will become something like us wearing Apple watches or like smart watches.
Skeuomorphism design mistake on smart devices
Naval: I think Apple will do a really good job when it ship to smart glasses, and I think the games for it [00:08:00] will be incredible. That said, I think people exaggerate how much of an effect these secondary devices have.
What I mean by that is that people make the skew amorphic mistake of thinking that because there's something called an iPhone, that there must be also a smart watch and smart glasses and all the other smart things, smart versions of the things that you carry in your body. But that's because iPhone is a misnomer in the first place.
The iPhone would be better off being called the pocket computer. It's not important because it's a smartphone. It's important because it's the first portable supercomputer in your pocket, and then the question becomes, do you need a second and a third?
The Apple watch I think was supposed to be much bigger because people figured, oh, you have a smartphone, well then you're gonna need a smart watch. No, the correct question was, you have one smart supercomputer. Do you need a second supercomputer?
And the answer to that is, hmm, just barely and only because of the sensors and maybe a slightly more convenient [00:09:00] screen, but for most people, the answer is no. Most people who have an iPhone still do not have an Apple watch because it's too much effort to buy another thing and keep it charged and keep it synced.
So the, the load on that is quite high.
So now the question is, do you want a third screen, a third thing to keep charge and a third thing to keep synced? And what are the advantages of that? Well, you already have sensors now in the watch and you already have all the compute power and a great screen on the phone. So do you need a third device?
And what's the convenience factor for the third device? It's not headphones, cause you've already got AirPods. So really what you're getting is a screen strapped to your head.
And you're not getting any more compute power. You already have all the compute power you could possibly want. What you're getting is battery, that you have to keep up to date, and literally you're getting a headache inducing thing that you're wearing on your head that's weighing it down.
So the first question is, will Apple be able to ship something that is lightweight enough that it won't bother you, but yet have a high enough battery life and connectivity that it [00:10:00] can stay in sync with your phone all day long and run on a full day charge?
That is a huge engineering feat, even if they manage to pull that off. And I have some doubts around the weight of the device compared, traded off against the battery life of the device. My guess is it will only be for specific applications like gaming. And the problem is that if these things don't hit critical mass, if there aren't enough of these people running around with them on their heads, then these Pokemon ST style games won't work.
On the AR side, the apps that always come up like, oh, I walk into a party and I see who the different people are. Or I can do maps sort of, you know, more conveniently and get turned by turn directions, or I can see ads or things on top of stores. These remind me of like the. Old at and t, FaceTime video style video phones from, you know, phone ads and they make for good demoware.
But in reality, I don't think people care that much.
You can already get turned by turn directions on your smartphone [00:11:00] or on your Apple Watch, yet most people rarely use it for walking. You can already have the technology for face ID scanning, but you know, as a society we've decided that it's not really something that we want to give to consumers. So it's still kind of hard to find.
I just don't see these apps as being super compelling, which is not to say that super compelling apps won't emerge. I just don't think these are it.
Just like the Apple Watch struggled for years before its found its use case, and even then it didn't hit anywhere near the saturation that an iPhone did. I expect the AR glasses to land closer to that category, than into a category where they're suddenly as ubiquitous as the iPhone.
Even the Apple watch, I don't expect it to go ubiquitous until the FDA gets out of the way and we finally get true medical grade sensor enabled on the app, on the Apple Watch. Things that normally you have to go into the doctor for and sit through a long procedure or process. A lot of that stuff is doable on the watch today, but it's restricted by regulatory agencies.
Then the Apple [00:12:00] Watch will be a sensor platform, and that makes sense. The phone in your pocket can't be a sensor platform because it's just literally not connected to your wrist and measuring you all the time.
In the same way, I think the glasses take off when they become an incredible display platform, but that would require an extremely high resolution display that's very, very lightweight and very quickly in sync with your phone. And I just don't think that's just around the corner. That's several generations to many generations away.
In the meantime, I think the glasses get used mainly for gaming, and that's a more limited market because they're huge trade offs. These are, this is more solo gaming than multiplayer gaming today. And having a thing strapped to your head just isn't that comfortable. So we haven't even seen VR glasses taken off in gaming yet, at least not in mainstream gaming.
Tom: Also, the culture has shifted a lot since Google Glass, was, was launched and it is much more acceptable these days to, have, you know, AirPods in your ear, be using your phone while you're [00:13:00] talking to somebody. All these things that were considered rude before, like technology has actually bled in and, Become more culturally acceptable.
So, I don't think that the, transparent screen glasses will be considered rude. I think, I think they'll, I think they'll actually seamlessly just like fit right in.
Naval: I think it all boils down to weight and battery life and speed, and I just don't know where they're on those curves. And my guess is that they're still pretty far out judging by the current crop of VR glasses, but that could be wrong. Apple may have special technology that makes everything extra lightweight and maybe AR makes it a lot easier, but, If they can build something that is truly lightweight, gets a day on a battery charge, looks aesthetically pleasing and has very high bandwidth sync to your phone, then it starts becoming very interesting as an always on, always available display that you're looking through.
Naval: If it falls even slightly short of that, then I think we're just gonna be waiting until it hits those thresholds, and that's gonna be a while.
Tom: I don't remember the exact metrics, but the amount of weight that you could rest on, on the bridge of a nose [00:14:00] was, much higher than one would expect.
On Airpods
Aaron: Like the AirPods really seem to have succeeded in, augmentation. And, I mean maybe it's just because the step from having a wire to not having a wire seems kind of natural. But I think that was a huge, huge leap. And I mean, I feel like these things are just part of my head now. I, I often can't tell if it's in my ear or not, cuz I just, it's in my ear so often.
Naval: I think you're absolutely right, Aaron. I think the AirPods were the biggest Apple breakthrough since the iPhone and I, apple does not get enough credit for them. You could also argue the iPad was a big deal, but really that's just a bigger iPhone, so I think they get less credit on that one. But the AirPods sort of were the first time that I looked at something coming outta Apple since Steve Jobs is passing and said, well, they still have something.
What I saw in the AirPods when they first came out was that firstly they connected right away. I think because Apple's proprietary W one or W2 chip, and so they connected and disconnected much [00:15:00] faster than normal Bluetooth devices. And secondly, that the case itself was a battery, so you got very extensible battery life and just kind of a convenient inform factor and package with the battery powered case.
So I think those are the two main things that I saw in the AirPods. Which made them a game changer, and now I have like multiple pairs floating around at all times.
By the way, if you want a little bit of historical trivia, this app exists because of AirPods. Brian and his team built this app three, four years ago, which was a peer-to-peer messenger with AirPods in your ears because they saw the AirPods and they were so excited. They thought that everyone would be wearing AirPods all the time, and so you would want a walkie-talkie in your ears that you could fire off, voice controlled, or, you know, easily tap control to just send voice messages to each other.
Then I came along late last year and convinced him to turn it into a public social network rather than just a peer-to-peer messenger. And so that's how Chit Chat was born.
So the whole asynchronous messaging infrastructure that underlies this app and makes it possible in the whole chi [00:16:00] line design come from when it was a peer-to-peer messenger that assumed that all of its users would be wearing AirPods all the time.
On humane, Kyle, Brian, Naval
Moritz: the following discussion happened in the future of consumer group by Brian. And it's about humane a company that is building a type off wearable smart device includes people like Naval, Brian, Karl Barber, Patryush Sing, and Keith.
Brian: My first disclosure is that I haven't used this device nor have, experienced it. I'm only going off. What I see on the stage at Ted, first order of business is that any company that publicly discloses itself at Ted immediately sends off very odd signals in my brain, and it's not the good type of odd.
The second thing is looking at this experience, it feels, extremely adjacent to the Apple ecosystem. Make no mistake, these people are from Apple, so that's not a surprise. But, with the coming, AI revolution that's about to explode on device, I'm somewhat [00:17:00] skeptical that, this is a lane that a startup can swim in.
I'm spending a little bit of time trying to think about. Other use cases, one of which people are talking about online right now, which is this concept of it scanning your plate and then feeding back the nutritional composition of said plate. And I can't help but think that this is behaviorally competing with the hardware itself of the phone.
And for 15 years, consumers have become, Obsessed, essentially slaves to this device in our hands. And to break that is almost impossible. There is a constellation of hardware that exists outside the phone, fitness trackers, cameras like GoPros and whatnot that you strap onto your head of your chest.
But very few things have, pierced that bubble because it's almost impossible to pierce. You have the hardware, software services, and you have a phone that does. So many different things. I'm skeptical when I see hardware encroaching [00:18:00] on this territory. It's hard to process how amazing the mobile phone is.
The screens are great. They're durable. It has all your personal information. It's networked. Pretty soon it will have AI on device. It is basically a magic wand and if you are going to introduce a new H C I a new way of experiencing and interacting with data in the physical world, it better be 10 x.
Whatever is it's competing with. And so I think you have to ask yourself the fundamental question of, is this experience 10 x pulling out my phone? I don't think it's a controversial statement that wearable computing has been a failure. And why is that humans, for whatever reason, don't want things attached to their body, especially to their face.
And will there be a point where wearable computing crosses some chasm and becomes, status quo? Sure. But the juice has to be worth the squeeze. And putting a device onto your body [00:19:00] that's projecting outward to me, feels like a pretty aggressive experience.
Kyle: So my hot take here is that they're on step one of the Ironman, hud, and essentially what that means is something that appears and disappears in front of my face.
And is intelligent enough to know what I want. And I think by putting a projector like in your top pocket or whatever, they're starting to train this behavior. Obviously I think the hand implementation is awful. I don't think people will be sitting there with their hand. But when technology exists, it allows you to project a screen in front of your face, on demand.
I think that would be the one thing that would actually break a phone outta my hand is just having something directly in front of me with potentially like eye tracking software.
Brian: Something that makes it really easy to do what I want without, breaking what I'm doing to pull phone out, understand the projection thesis, but doesn't that have to be coupled with visor.
And is this the purview of a startup? I'm gonna make you uncomfortable here, Kyle. I don't think that's a hot take. It is an observation about where the technology might go, but it's not a hot take. What's the take here?
Kyle: I mean, the take is that the current experience is bad, but I believe it's a stepping stone [00:20:00] for something that's gonna be greater.
Like obviously if you look to the first iteration, the iPhone, you would think that was a piece of shape compared to where we're at now. So I think they're making steps to either Pfizer or an ocular implant or something allows you to project in front of your face.
Naval: All of you're correct. Humane is not gonna replace the phone. The phone is too embedded and too convenient, and you don't need a second computer on your lapel unless it's gonna do something radically different. I also think Kyle, that's correct in that long term advisor are always on display that hovers in front of your face, ideally without needing.
An actual physical advisor would be ideal and could have a chance of joining the Pantheon or constellation of devices. Apple Watch only works because it's a series of sensors that, on a are on your wrist that can't go on your phone in the pocket. And finally, I think the translation idea is a great one.
Like, as a Star Trek communicator, translator, gateway to ai, something that other people wanna be able to hear. You weren't always on, it'll work. But those are a very small set of applications. So today, I think this device is. Counting on [00:21:00] AI interface to save it like G P T four is hooked up to it full-time and always listening and can translate and speak back and can handle a lot of your needs.
Then it may be a really interesting adjunct to the iPhone. But if the AI experience is not magical or if you don't need language translation services or services that need always on interacting with other humans, then yes, it's not gonna hit the bar.
Keith: It is kind of crazy that we call it a phone, just cuz it does so much more.
I mean, it's just a computer. Even holding the thing right now, you know the thing I'm holding, it's the screen, right? So all the compute and wireless connect connectivity, modems and all that, like that's not to me, like the screen interface is kind of a dumb piece of hardware and it's abstracting away, like just all the compute.
And that's always been the association for a reason. But at a certain point, I think the wearables are gonna. Be really successful. Successful as like elements of more [00:22:00] distributed sensing and feedback mechanisms and input mechanisms. And maybe like, the one thing I can see about that lapel is that would it be like always on recording?
Patryush Sing: What is the desire that is not being fulfilled, or what is the desire that can be fulfilled in a better way? Using any of this, any of these new variables, visors, shades, it doesn't matter. But that's the question I keep thinking about.
Moritz: I think the biggest desire Humane is trying to tackle is to make a humane. Interface, which is this term for having something that is very low in distraction and dopamine and is a very natural kind of interface. And it seems that desire is somewhat reflected in society, as we saw with recent Netflix documentaries that detail.
The psychological problems that spring from excessive phone and social media or performative social media use. I personally like to use [00:23:00] less screens, especially because they're somewhat ICE training and. I'd like to go more outside, look at nature, look at trees, while still being able to operate my computer or Mindy computer via guest search or voice commands.
Naval: I think you're right about that in that if you look at sci-fi, for example, star Trek style, Episodes you'll see the computers that they use. The portable ones are essentially just operated by voice and will project things on a screen in front of them when needed, and then disappear outta the way when needed.
And that is probably the ideal human computer interface. Still a little far away. But AI definitely makes that more of a possibility with natural language interfaces. So humane, where you have to sort of do a projector on your hand and understand exactly what apps are available and what aren't as difficult, and probably not ready for prime time.
However, a version of Humane where it can throw up a projection on your retina. Or on the open air in front of you and where it uses G P T 4 [00:24:00] 5 6 to do natural language processing and get you all of your data through speech in both directions. Something like that could really work. Or to summarize your point, good technology is invisible.
Collaboration and communication
Moritz: What follows is what i’d summarize as Neval on Discord and the idea of a conversational dunbar number
Naval: I would guess that there's some kind of a conversational at Dunbar number where if you get over that number, the conversation breaks down and it's obviously dependent on which format and medium you're using. So text may be able to handle more or less than voice, for example. That said, I think the incentives and discord are to build the largest community possible.
Because generally these communities are being built by people who want a lot of users or wanna monetize a lot of people or something like that. And once you put several hundred people talking, then you're right. It's too raucous, too intense. The right number, at least from what we're seeing in Air Chatt, seems to be, I don't know, I'd call it like seven to 20 people, [00:25:00] like anything less than seven, and the updates are too infrequent.
Naval: Unless it's a private channel where everybody knows they're everyone and really, really wants to talk to them. And above 20, it probably becomes a mess.
AI business models
Moritz: What follows is a brief chat between Nevada and me in the group called AI open chat. About AI business models and defensibility.
Gary Marcus published a subject post a few days ago, hypothesizing that Sam Altman might be trying to unload the shares and sort of, yeah, exit the business because essentially there isn't that much intellectual property despite the whole chat, G P T hype, which Google or Microsoft for that matter, wouldn't be able to replicate.
And there's a bunch of open source stuff happening, I found, found that a pretty convincing take. But yeah. Any insiders here has anyone a deeper understanding of how much intellectual property there is [00:26:00] in the collective brains of all these researchers that are now on payroll at open ai.
I'm, I'm curious to, to learn more about sort of the, the competitive nature of these.
Naval: AI A, as far as I can tell, the. Implementation of chat. G P T and g p T three are really based on the Google Transformer paper and open AI knows which tricks in the research work and which ones don't, but they don't necessarily have a lot of strong IP just yet. Most of the advantage seems to be in compute and scale and having productized it, stable diffusion slash stability.
Ai, of course, is the open source player, kind of the rebel alliance. And historically alliances work pretty. Poorly, except in this case it's open source. And so it sort of captures everyone's imagination. I don't know what the exact advantage you get out of being open is. Maybe you get better user feedback, maybe you get better training of your models through direct [00:27:00] user data.
Perhaps there are other data sets that are comfortable dumping into an open source model and not into a proprietary model. But we shall see. In any case, I hope that there will be other players also, because this is too important of a space to be owned by any single player. And the more open source, more infrastructure, like more Linux like this is the better for everybody.
There's plenty of business opportunity because there are lots of people who will want custom models with their custom data sets or tweaked in a custom way. And 99% of companies that want to use AI are not gonna build their own AI models. So having other people who are experts at tweaking existing models or building new models for them, or using their training set properly, it's gonna be a lucrative field for quite a while.
It may resemble a little bit more services business than platform business, but I'm sure people will figure out platform plays as well. It's just too big of a space for it not to have platform place. Usually you can't tell the proper businesses and [00:28:00] implementations until a few years after. Remember, Google was something like the sixth or seventh search engine after the Yahoo directory model had been tried and not really failed, but not really blown up either.
The successful apps on, the iPhone really were built about three or four years after the iPhone launched iPhone launch in 2007, and Uber was formed in 2010, just as an example. And so the, the apps that are thinking natively going to be AI first and use AI to build defensible network effects and advantages, and proprietary technology.
If histories, any guide are likely to, to still come. But the current crops should be able to extract value too, although it'll probably go through its hype and boom and bus cycle.
Disrupting Ebay
Moritz: The following two conversations happen in a group that I created called venture and company building. And the first chat is about disrupting eBay. And the second one. Is about 10 X engineers and techs designers. This is a chat with Naval, [00:29:00] Me, and Kumar.
I'm curious what you guys think about disrupting eBay. It feels very ripe at this point, especially with the whole large model AI technology coming out where I could imagine a platform where you pull out your phone, you have this thing in your room, maybe a skateboard, a bike, or maybe the car in front of your house and you check a picture.
It automatically creates a very detailed auction. Maybe there's a chat bot that asks you for more details, like, how long have you had this card? And so on. And then you could also use AI to make the connection, the recommendation better on the buyer side, there's, there's so much potential, but I guess it's just extremely hard to disrupt because of these network effects and lock in effects.
But yeah, curious how you think about it. What do you guys think are the challenges here?
Naval: Lots of people have tried [00:30:00] this over the years. They thought mobile phone and cameras would, disrupt eBay. It's happened a little bit in verticals, like for example, Poshmark in clothing.
And there are people trying to do it just purely focused on like trading cards and so on, where you can build a much better user experience for a specific kind of product, which has an obsessive community. But the problem is that these marketplaces te tend to run more on. Buyers than sellers. The sellers will always show up where the buyers are.
And eBay has a little bit of a lock on the buyers cause it is a strong brand. Buyers show up, they buy and they leave. So making things a little easier for the seller doesn't get you much. You have to figure out how to aggregate the eyeballs of all the buyers, which is why sort of these. Mobile social shopping networks that are popping up in China, I think are more interesting.
But yeah, the core eBay monopoly is gonna be incredibly hard to displace. It's just gonna sort of have to die out or completely orthogonal or vertical models will disrupt it. I don't think a change in user interface posting through AI models is [00:31:00] enough, unfortunately.
Keith: eBay is interesting. To me they, they actually seem like a fairly mature tech player in that it's not so much about the sellers, it's more about the buyers.
There's just a certain generation that's always gonna go to eBay and that's where they're gonna do their things. Now, forward from that. For younger people, there are other services that like, are coming in and taking, like either little spaces that are product specific or little spaces that are, niche or user specific and sexing it up, but, eBay itself, we're probably just, you know, kind of sailing to the sunset and eventually, you know, like be replaced by other things slowly.
But in the meantime, they have a good moat, decent business, and they'll just kinda, I mean, I'll have to look, but I, like, for instance, I would value eBay on a different multiple, ie. Higher earnings than, I don't know, like a Poshmark or something like that. So But yeah, eBay's interesting. They are like the, the GE a little bit of tech and they, they're like that also.
Cause they go way back to the, I think they started in the late [00:32:00] nineties. So, so is your point that all these improvements are mainly geared towards the seller rather than the buyer?
Moritz: I also can see how you can enhance the buyer experience significantly. For example, right now, when I go on Craigslist, It's a very bad experience.
I need to message like 10 people such that I get the item to the price I want or an eBay I need to maybe bid on like three auctions. Such like that I get the item I want. It's a lot of time. It's a huge time investment. So you could have an AI agent that you instruct about your preferences, your pre sensitivity, and then it goes out to bid on the items you want or.
There might be some other schemes to Yeah, get you to the item, to the price you want incorporate into the algorithm sort of what is on the market and. How? How [00:33:00] rare is the item?
Naval: An AI agent forbidding is a good idea because it can follow your preferences. Natural language, no complicated interface, and it can keep things secret or hold back.
That said, I don't think it's enough to break a network effect. I think you would have to also pick a specific vertical within eBay that would be tremendously enhanced by a new kind of listing and a new kind of purchasing or selling experience. I don't think these are enough. Breaking Exi existing network effects is almost never worthwhile.
What's better is to create a new way of doing something that is so fundamentally different that people just gradually shift towards that. And I don't think this is it. Have you ever seen briga trailer.com? I think they do a really good job of unbundling how, you know, classic cars and exotic cars should be bought and listed and sold.
And I think, I think they're better than eBay in a lot of ways. I don't know if they exceed the volume, but certainly they have the eyeballs of a lot of car buyers. I know.
on 10 x engineers
[00:34:00] I've always believed that. I think micro optimizations are kind of useless. I don't think Satoshi Nakamoto was a particularly good coder or did a lot more work than anybody else, but he just did the right things, which probably came from a lifetime of building intuition and obsessing overall problem.
So it's really more about how deeply you implement the youth. You think about the problem than it is about how quickly you implement a solution.
Moritz: It sounds very much like a product engineer being able to take entire features and groups of features and execute on them with little to no input from a product manager.
That, that seems powerful. Is that distinct from Nutanix engineer or, yeah. How, how, how do you describe Nutanix engineer and how do you discern them? From just like very good senior engineer.
Naval: See, I just don't like these terms. Product engineer, backend engineer, senior engineer, smart people who can code.
How about that? Sta I wouldn't put them into buckets like that. A great person who can code can do [00:35:00] anything, and that's the kind of people I like to work with. I have some brilliant engineers that I work with who can do everything from design to implementation. There are others who check in for a fair bit of feedback, and there are others who will just crank through bugs like workhorses, but prefer them to be detailed out.
None of them need very detailed specs. If they do, they don't fit into our organization and work style. But, I don't like the distinction between junior and senior or front end or backend or product or non-product. Good people can just do anything. And 10 x is of course, just a random moniker. Might be two x three x five x, 10 x, 20 x, a hundred x thousand x.
The point is coding is in the intellectual domain. What you choose to code, how you code it, how you implement it, how quickly you do it. These things are all idea based for the most part, and how they interact with each other. How you architect, how you structure. You can't think of it as anything [00:36:00] linear.
It's an idea space. If I make the right trade as an investor, I'm literally a million times infinite times better than investor who made the wrong trade and lost a lot of money. So the same thing is true of software engineering. The person who built the right feature and built it the right way might have built something that can scale to a hundred million users while the next guy, the server crashes after 10 uses.
Petri Kajander: For some people, why is enough? You explain what needs to be done. For others, you need to tell what to do. And third level is then how to do it. But for the brilliant people, they just come up with all those amazing ideas. So they implicitly already have the white and, and they just come up with the new stuff.
It's like, Hey, I just did this. If you check in the engineering, how good is the code, how simple it is in a sense that everybody else can understand it as well. So there's less, box and stuff, but also that does it scale [00:37:00] how deep and void and all the access they have already considered the issues.
So are they looking forward? Do they really understand what we. Building what's hap, what's gonna happen next. I'm not talking about building something for too long when you went to early stages, but keeping all these things in mind while building, that's something which. Exceptional people have,
Kumar: I think, tend to think of not all software development as being engineering and as not all software developers tend to be engineers.
In fact, I don't refer to most software developers as engineers. Some of 'em take deep offense at this, but. It is what it is.
Moritz: What is a 10 x designer for you?
Naval: I think even the question is hard to ask because design is art, but art constrained by the patterns of usage, the real world, making things simple, staying within the patterns laid out by the platform, staying within the patterns that the users are used to.
Keeping things simple, as [00:38:00] simple as possible to do, but no simpler while the still time making them unique and recognizable. It is pure art. This is not even a domain where we're talking about one X at 10 x. We're talking about one X to Infinity X, and it's no coincidence that some of the greatest companies on earth are now have been founded essentially by designers or people who have incredible design taste.
Apple is the obvious one, but Airbnb is right up there. As are actually quite a few of the other social networking winners. TikTok is obviously designed with someone who knows their, what they're doing. Instagram is another one of those. YouTube's design at the time was incredible for what it was.
So design, engineering, all of these also combined. Great designers are not just designers. They understand the engineering trade-offs. Just like great engineers aren't just engineers, they understand the design trade-offs. So I think these. The question is evocative and good to ask, but I'm afraid the answer is infinitely variable.
Brian: I've had the [00:39:00] privilege of working with a variety of world-class designers and though they're all different and idiosyncratic in their ways, generally it goes something like this. You hand them a problem set and what you get back as a world so dramatically reimagined and re-envisioned that it almost.
Attacks the core problem set itself, and very few people have the capacity to do this. If it wasn't the year 2023 or whatnot, these people would've been working on canvases. These people would've been, you know, designing giant rock structures. But we're in the air of the microprocessor, so they're in front of a computer now.
I don't know how to define 10 x. As Naval mentioned, this feels awfully. Subjective. But what I do know is that people that can take a problem and turn it into art, and it makes you feel sort of like Gumby because you think you see the problem, but when you see their solution, you see [00:40:00] another problem, a different problem, potentially even a better problem or a bigger problem or something that was even more visceral to the end user.
And so what I've realized about working with great designers is expect the unexpected and allow them to lead you to that path of truth.
Raghav Gulati: I haven't worked with many world-class designers, but in my limited experience, the few that I have worked with that meet that level all had been incredibly clear thinkers with the uncanny ability to compress complexity and simplify, you know, unimaginable complex, chaotic problem spaces into something that's elegant, and beautiful.
Naval: That's as good of a definition of great design, as I've heard anywhere. The ability to compress chaos and complexity into elegance and beauty.
Moritz: [00:41:00] That's it for this first episode, make sure subscribe. If you're interested in getting notified about the second part of this series, which will cover topics such as economics politics. Knowledge. Zone of genius. Curiosity fun. The great scientists and others.
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Naval and others on Product Design, Smart Glasses, the AI Industry, 10x Designers, and more [Airchat Part 1]