The Vergecast builds a tech company

Today on the flagship podcast of corporate infighting: The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz roleplay as CEOs of Vergecast Inc., tasked with creating a tech company by acquiring product lines from various industry giants. They select established products ranging from smartphones and PCs to messaging and audio solutions, sourced from companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Meta, and others. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of corporate infighting. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting on my back patio getting the grill ready because it is July 4th weekend and that's just what you do. This is America, it's July 4th, it's also my birthday on July 4th and so we sit outside and we grill, even though it's very hot and there's mosquitoes everywhere. And would I rather be inside in the air conditioning looking at my television? Yes, but it's July 4th, so we're grilling stuff. Anyway, we have an awesome episode coming up for you today. We are going to basically start a tech company together. Neil Ipatel, Alex Cranz and I are going to, as a group of CEOs, which couldn't possibly go poorly, figure out how we would build a tech company out of the tech industry as it exists now.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  It sounds a little complicated, but I'll explain the rules when we get into it. It'll all make sense. But basically, I wanted to see if you were to start from scratch and say, okay, what are the best products in tech? What can I take? What can I put together? What could we build that would be cool and different and that we could make awesome? How would we do that? We had a lot of fun putting this together and figured this would be a fun time to do it. It's July, the news is a little bit slow, we're about to get into crazy gadget season again, but it felt like a fun way to take a different kind of look at the tech industry. I should also say, some credit for this whole concept goes to a podcast I really like called The Big Picture, really good show about movies and they did one recently where the two of them started their own studios together and they kind of did a draft and picked actors and writers and it was a very fun episode.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  And so I just kind of stole that concept and we're gonna take it and turn it and do something similar on the show today. So we're gonna start a tech company. I'm very curious what you think as you listen to it. If you think we made bad decisions, if you think we made good decisions, if you think we're monsters, I want to hear everything. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11, email us [email protected]. Tell us how you'd start a tech company and maybe between us, we're gonna take over the tech industry. It's gonna be awesome. Anyway, all of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just noticed that I turned the grill on without actually turning the propane on. So, this is how good I am at grilling. I'm gonna go fix that problem. This is The Vergecast, we'll be right back.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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• 3:13David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's go. Neel Patel, hello.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  Hello.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  Alex Krantz, hello.

• 3:19Alex Cranz?

  Hello, I'm excited to be a CEO today, right?

• 3:21David Pierce?

  Thank you both for coming to maybe the most convoluted insane game I have yet devised. But I'm very excited about this. So the structure of this is basically as follows. We, the three hosts, are now co-CEOs of a tech company. Because I would say historically speaking, companies with three CEOs tend to be the most successful.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like BlackBerry, but a little bit more.

• 3:44David Pierce?

  What if you added one more person who had some weird ideas and wanted to own a hockey team? It could be great. And we are going to build our own company out of parts of other companies. Is essentially how this is going to work. So I have, I think it's either 10 or 11 categories here that we as a tech company are going to enter by taking that product from another company. There are several rules. Again, this is very convoluted, but it's going to work. It's going to be fine once we get into it. Everything we take from a tech company, we get as it exists right now. Whatever it's selling, whoever it is that makes it, all the factory deals, all the marketing stuff, everything, we can, we can change it as we like, but We don't get the idea of it. We get the thing as it is right now. We only care about things up to 2030.

• 4:28David Pierce?

  After that, who knows? We're all going to live on Mars. So we're playing like a six-year-long game here. And frankly, if we, as the triumvirate of CEOs, last until 2030, we will have been wildly successful.

• 4:38Alex Cranz?

  I'm banking out really fast.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Alex Cranz?

  As soon as we IPO, I'm gone.

• 4:42David Pierce?

  Alex is resting investing from like day one here. It's gonna be great. We can spend as much money as we want, but making money is not the point. We're actually not gonna talk about money at all on this show.

• 4:53Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 4:54David Pierce?

  We don't want to go out of business, but our main goal is just to build the greatest tech company in the history of the universe. Like, that is what we're after here. Because this is like, if we start talking about the money side of things, it just gets weird and complicated in ways that we don't have time for.

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  That's what we're gonna tell our investors. We're just gonna be like, look, guys, if we talk about money, this is gonna get weird and complicated. So you just relax.

• 5:15Alex Cranz?

  We're just out to make an AGI. Don't worry about it.

• 5:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, like for 20 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I can make money whenever I feel like it. For now, I'm just gonna like make cool stuff. Like, that's the vibe at our tech company. And I would say the two most important things as we pick here are, we can only take one product from each company. So, once we have used something from Apple, we cannot use anything else from Apple, or Samsung, or Google, or whoever else. One product per company, which I think is going to be very complicated. That product also cannot be the whole company. So if there is a company that makes a single product with its name, like I originally had Figma in one of our categories as like a thing we might want to take. But if you take Figma from Figma, there is no Figma anymore, so that doesn't count.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, what about FigJam?

• 6:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  Moving right along.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Sure. That's actually, I'll give you that. Another one I had is like, oh, here's a good example. Like, we can't take Salesforce from Salesforce, but we could take Slack from Salesforce.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see. So if Apple had a product called Apple, you would just be like, no.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  That accounted for, you know, 98% of its revenue. Yeah. So sure, I guess under that rule, we can take FigJam. I'll let Fig Jam back to the list. And most importantly, this is not competitive. We are three CEOs. We are doing this together. And so we have to agree on everything that we're going to take, which I assume means this is going to take 12 hours.

• 6:36Alex Cranz?

  Is there such thing as a hung jury in this situation?

• 6:39David Pierce?

  No, because there are three of us. And if it comes to it, we will vote and two to one will win. This is why we have three CEOs. This is, it's a perfect, I can't believe no one has thought of this before.

• 6:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, why, why are people doing one and two?

• 6:50David Pierce?

  Odd number CEOs solves all your problems. Yeah.

• 6:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:54David Pierce?

  Okay, here are the categories. We're going to do smartphones, tablets and PCs. Then we're going to take a break. We're going to do wearables, headphones, app platforms, which is not specific apps, but think of like app businesses, like Microsoft Office is one of the options in that category. Uh, and then we're going to do what I have called boring B to B money faucets, which is the thing that makes you all the money that nobody ever wants to talk about. Then we're going to take another break. And then we're going to do messaging, streaming service, wildcard gadgets and wildcard, everything else. And then we're going to get out of here and we're going to go be filthy rich. Sound good?

• 7:25Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited to be rich.

• 7:26David Pierce?

  All right. Category number one is smartphones. This to me is maybe the easiest, but also maybe the most difficult one to do first, which is why I wanted it to do it first.

• 7:35Alex Cranz?

  See, I, I also agree with you because I think we're probably along the same lines for what the phone should be.

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, the, the only thing that makes it different is David told us not to worry about money.

• 7:43David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:44Alex Cranz?

  We don't worry about money?

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you give one wit about money, you take the iPhone.

• 7:48David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because then you, that now you funded whatever other boondoggles you want to get on. Like, yeah. Then we can pick the Kobo for tablets and it's fine.

• 7:55Alex Cranz?

  That's what we should do. Exactly. You're, you're right on the same wavelength.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  But if you don't care about money, then you might have a substantive discussion about what phone you want.

• 8:04David Pierce?

  Well, so, okay, let me, let me frame this slightly differently. We don't care. We are not spending our time thinking about quarterly earnings and shareholder value, but we do want to win, right? In like big picture win.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Then we're taking the iPhone.

• 8:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  I've already, I've crushed you.

• 8:16Alex Cranz?

  We're taking the iPhone, we win.

• 8:18David Pierce?

  I think that's right. I think the only reason for me that the iPhone is challenging is that there are a lot of categories here in which Apple is also very good and some in which it has a lot less competition.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, no, I can, every other category I can, I can defeat everyone else with the power of the iPhone's lock in.

• 8:33David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  You trust me. You just wait. And I'm allowed to change stuff? Yeah, we're good. We nailed it. It's fine.

• 8:41David Pierce?

  Oh my God. I just realized we're going to speed run building an app tax.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's going to go so fast. You think I don't care about money, David? Forty-five percent. Let's go.

• 8:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, somewhere Lena Khan just started listening to this and she's like, this is.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  She's like, this isn't the tech company I would have built.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  We're not even gonna be allowed to make a company. Lena Khan's like, nope, nope.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Your fake company is illegal, sir.

• 9:04David Pierce?

  Uh, okay, but just for this, for the sake of argument, the other nominees that I had here were Samsung, which I think is probably the only other reasonable competitor here, the Google Pixel, if you're, you know, feeling good about yourself, the Nothing Phone, which is a fun, like, dark horse. If you wanna like bet on doing something weird and cool in the next six years until 2030. Interesting bet. Huawei, OnePlus, Asus, Motorola, like, it gets bleak pretty fast.

• 9:28Alex Cranz?

  Real fast.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Were you hoping that one of us would be like Motorola?

• 9:31David Pierce?

  I was hoping one of you would fight for Samsung, to be honest, just because I think it's possible to maybe wanna pick an Apple product in another one, because we've now ruled out every other Apple product.

• 9:41Alex Cranz?

  No, because I'm looking at through the rest and I'm like, I'm like, there's other really good competitors in these other places, but like, the iPhone, if you're, if, if the phone is like the engine of the business, which it feels like probably is true, then we want the iPhone.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, alternatively, the, the one that I would have argued for would have been the Pixel, because then the one thing you would change about it would be caring, and then, and then it would be good.

• 10:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but with the iPhone, we've got like the people who are making the good processors on the iPhone, whereas the Pixel, we've got not that.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but yeah, a little, a little caring goes a long way.

• 10:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, also trying to market the phone would be, uh, useful.

• 10:19David Pierce?

  I mean, yeah, like, in terms of raw upside, the ROI, I think, for the Pixel would be huge, whereas the iPhone, I have a hard time imagining making the iPhone more successful, but it's also very successful. I think the answer is just the iPhone. I don't know that we need to talk about this much longer.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna solve every other problem on this list.

• 10:35David Pierce?

  So, again, I would, I would remind you that one of the things we are not trying to do here is build a services business or a monopoly.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Wait, we're not trying to build a monopoly?

• 10:45David Pierce?

  We want to win.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying this collection of three CEOs has to have some values?

• 10:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, we want to like be cool. Our main value is like be cool.

• 10:54Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  I want to have a monopoly in a cool way.

• 10:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, fair. Okay, we can move on.

• 10:59David Pierce?

  All right, so the iPhone, next up, tablets, which is ironically a very similar set of companies. But I would say that we can't pick the iPad, so the iPad is out, which leaves us with the four nominees I picked so far were the Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the Google Pixel tablet, such as it is, Amazon's whole Kindle lineup, which I think counts as a tablet, Kobo, you could do OnePlus, there's a lot of tablets out there. We could argue about the Microsoft Surface as a tablet line, but I think I won't count that. We'll get to that in a minute. What do you guys think? Who's favorite here?

• 11:30Alex Cranz?

  I think we go with the books and then we have the Apple, the iPhone team make the operating system good.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is that, can you, can you make that choice? Can I pick the Galaxy, but it runs iPadOS?

• 11:41David Pierce?

  No, but it, but if we don't take the iPad, we don't get iPadOS.

• 11:44Alex Cranz?

  We're going to use iOS to put, put that on the books.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and then I didn't, we didn't take macOS, which would have been the real move. We can't, huh?

• 11:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, see?

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  So, wait, it was a wait, hold on, to wind this week-

• 11:56David Pierce?

  You put a retcon all of this to get an iPad running macOS?

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  I have to like take the Pixel, so I can take the MacBook, so I can take the Samsung Galaxy and make it run macOS? To get to a Galaxy Pad running macOS, I have to take the Pixel and then a MacBook?

• 12:12David Pierce?

  That would be the way. I'm gonna be honest, I don't hate that strategy.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this board of directors meeting will be very confusing. No, I'm with, I'm with Krantz. I think you take the Kindle lineup, you jazz up the software a little bit, people are happy.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  I wanted to go books to get, escape the lock-in, because I feel like we save some money with that acquisition.

• 12:32David Pierce?

  But we can solve the lock-in. Remember, Android is open source, so Android is fair game, no matter what we do. We can just have Android.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  We can undRMR the books, is what you're saying.

• 12:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think so then the real question is like, who, who is better at making the hardware that we can take and have a pretty solid lead on? And I feel like, I feel like it's Amazon. Like, Books does cool stuff, but I feel like if we, we just steal the Amazon team and we're like, what if we did a good job again?

• 12:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because we get, we get Panos.

• 12:56David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, we get Panos.

• 12:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're doing the Kindle, that's right.

• 12:59David Pierce?

  I feel good about that.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Alex Cranz?

  We're doing the Kindle. We're gonna make it good now.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  It's a real culture hire right there.

• 13:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:04David Pierce?

  Do we immediately kill the whole Kindle Fire line? And we just focus on e-ink?

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. That's good for kids.

• 13:10David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  So actually, I would say we take the tablet thing we're taking is like the extended Kindle.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  The Kindle Universe we get.

• 13:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  All this class of tablets is accomplishing for anyone is playing Disney Plus for your children. So we're just like the Kindle Fire kids is the centerpiece of our tablet strategy.

• 13:29Alex Cranz?

  And then we also just make a nice e-reader on the side that runs iOS.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then I can go to various state capitals and be like, you want, you want to make laws protecting kids? Make a law saying you have to buy a Kindle Fire for kids?

• 13:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there we go. I mean, I love how we're like making a really good culturally important company that also doesn't break laws.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm not trying to break the laws. I'm trying to make the laws.

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:49David Pierce?

  I'm trying to be the laws.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  You understand? If you don't buy a Kindle Fire, you will be arrested.

• 13:55David Pierce?

  Here is my question is do we reboot the Fire Phone with our iPhone team?

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, which part are we like?

• 14:03Alex Cranz?

  The 3D display.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  We've already added 50 cameras to the phone. What if we add four more to make it 3D?

• 14:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it's one of them is just for barcodes.

• 14:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  Amazon Kindle, easy choice. Next up is PCs. And I think the list of folks is fairly familiar here. Alex, what do you got?

• 14:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so the list is, it's, we can't do Apple. We've got Microsoft, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, HP, Razer, Dell. I think we should go Lenovo because if you get rid of all of the spamware that they like automatically install, you have some really nice laptops.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  You've got really nice hardware.

• 14:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you got really nice hardware. And then we make the iOS team, they're gonna be working nights. But they're gonna have to basically like reinvent macOS. Like they can figure it out.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  You're back into it. You start, iOS started with macOS. You know, like go the other way.

• 14:52Alex Cranz?

  Go the other way. I fully believe in them. If we can make PC clones, we can do this too.

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  But we don't have the chips. I guess we do because we have the iPhone. So now we're just, now we just put a hinge and a lid on an iPhone. Like that's a laptop.

• 15:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Which is more or less the iPad. I just want to be very clear about what we're discussing. We're like, we make iPads now.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  But it's also got the little, it's got the little, the dot.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, the little, the trackpad guy?

• 15:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  I see. I was gonna say Microsoft because you, I want control of the operating system.

• 15:19David Pierce?

  That's where I go to.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I want the Surface line.

• 15:23Alex Cranz?

  I don't.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  Now I've pulled the tablet ecosystem bigger, right? I've got my Kindles and my Kindle Fires and I've got the Surface Pro and I've got a whole range of products.

• 15:32Alex Cranz?

  Tell us about all of the really good laptops and all in ones that, that we're gonna get with our Microsoft acquisition.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  So here, again, a lot of my strategy is just try hard.

• 15:42Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? Just to be clear. So they had the Surface Studio, but like, what if you put a real chip in it?

• 15:47Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  And that's just me in meetings. Like, what if circle this on the whiteboard and then write try hard? And then like three exclamation points and that's my whole Surface strategy.

• 15:58Alex Cranz?

  We can make it all run Risk V.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  The power of one Raspberry Pi 4. Yeah, my vote, we, David, you're the tiebreaker here. It's between Microsoft and Lenovo. I agree. Lenovo makes some of the, the better hardware here.

• 16:11Alex Cranz?

  You make a compelling point about being able to have Windows and make it good.

• 16:16David Pierce?

  The one wrench I would like to throw in is that if we get Dell, we just instantly have the best lineup of Windows PCs that exists.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  But we don't have Windows.

• 16:25David Pierce?

  We don't have Windows. Do we want Windows?

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, for example, like, I would like to walk up to the box that says, like, security and write try hard.

• 16:33David Pierce?

  I will say though, under the rules of this game though, I don't, we, I think what we're getting is like a perpetual license to Windows. I don't think we're getting.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Even inside Mike, that's probably how the Surface.

• 16:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think we get to run Windows.

• 16:43Nilay Patel?

  But so when we took the iPhone, we don't get to run iOS?

• 16:45Alex Cranz?

  No, we do. That one counts.

• 16:47David Pierce?

  It does. It feels different. I can't describe to you why. No, it's because it's, it's one device to one operating system. This is not one device to one operating system. We are a partner to the operating system, not the only venue for the operating system.

• 16:59Nilay Patel?

  Even if we're Microsoft?

• 17:00David Pierce?

  We're not, but we're the Surface team. We aren't Microsoft. We're Vergecast Incorporated. We're not taking Windows from Microsoft. I still think it's Microsoft, just because I think we're, we're clearly building a luxury thing here. And I think getting there with Lenovo is gonna be challenging. Like, I don't, I don't know how we're gonna convince everybody that Lenovo is like kick ass cool again. I think we can get there with Surface.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  We're not, we're not Lenovo. We're just, we're just taking the product. We're doing a little rebrand.

• 17:27Alex Cranz?

  We got the ThinkPad.

• 17:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  A little coat of paint on there.

• 17:30David Pierce?

  Get the yogas. You guys want some yogas?

• 17:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:33David Pierce?

  They do the flippy things.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna make tent mode happen for America.

• 17:36David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm, I'm going Lenovo because I think we're gonna want Microsoft later. I think there are other things in this list that are going to be more useful to have for Microsoft. So I think we should pick Lenovo.

• 17:46Alex Cranz?

  You're right. That's true.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know what you think those things are, but we'll come back to it.

• 17:51David Pierce?

  Think of all the boring things that make you the most valuable company on planet Earth. And that's, that's what Microsoft does so well.

• 17:59Alex Cranz?

  It's not the surface team.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think, all right, so we're, we're picking, we're picking Lenovo. Welcome to the team, the little nub. It's very exciting. What's that thing called? The track point? Is that what that's called?

• 18:09Alex Cranz?

  Track point, track point.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Love that.

• 18:10Alex Cranz?

  We just call it a nub. That's, we're rebranding it immediately. Just immediately. That's the first thing we do. Day one.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, I love this. All right. So just to recap so far, we're gonna take a quick break. We have, as Vergecast Incorporated, we now make the Apple iPhone, the Amazon Kindle, and Lenovo's set of PCs. I feel like we're doing very well so far. I'm excited about this. We're doing well. All right. We're gonna take a really quick break. We're gonna come back, do some more stuff.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 19:10Speaker 02

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• 19:19Speaker 03

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.

• 19:27Speaker 02

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• 19:40Speaker 06

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• 20:12David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Vergecast Incorporated. We haven't talked about our pay structure, by the way, as co-CEOs, but we'll come back to that. It's going to be very lucrative for us. Because again, we're only going to be in this job for six years. So we gotta, we gotta do it and get out.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:27David Pierce?

  Next category. I think this might be the richest and sort of most evenly competitive category of all the ones we're about to do, is wearables. And I'm defining wearables deliberately broadly. Anything that you wear on your body counts. We can't do things like the Apple Watch or the Vision Pro. We can't do all of Amazon's weird Alexa wearable stuff. But I would say mostly, we're still pretty wide open.

• 20:50Alex Cranz?

  You have X-Real on here.

• 20:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do have X-Real on here. I'm not saying we should pick it. I'm just saying it's a company I thought of when I said wearable out loud to myself. What do you guys think? Any, any jump out to you that we should definitely get into? I have a clear favorite here.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Out the gate, I'm going bold and taking Meta for the Ray-Bans.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, okay. Oh, that's a good play. I wasn't even, I was thinking of the headset. I forgot about the glasses.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:14David Pierce?

  Okay, on that front, do we get one or the other, or do we get both? Like if we, if we say Quest, we get all the quests in one product. But I feel like the smart glasses are a different thing.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  Get your face computers away from me. You know what I mean? Just adding, no, no, no. Other, what are three bands?

• 21:30David Pierce?

  You just want the smart glasses.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  I just want the glasses.

• 21:32David Pierce?

  Even if we get the whole team, we're immediately killing the Quest line and we're just going smart glasses.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  That's what they just did. I just want to, that's what Meta just did.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Just reorganize that team. So I'm saying the glasses are the future. And we're putting, we're putting our excess iPhone profits into the glasses.

• 21:48Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I mean, if the glasses, like... Ran a really good AI. Well, no, we don't have one of those. We have Siri.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Although on a six-year time horizon, it's like, hmm, maybe I just want to take Samsung's watches and do lock-in.

• 22:02David Pierce?

  I mean, that is, that is actually an interesting question, right? Like, are we betting that smart glasses are going to be sufficiently huge by 2030 that this is like worth it for us? Or are we just taking like a nerd gadget for the next six years?

• 22:16Alex Cranz?

  No, this makes sense for us because we're like, we're, we're cool. We're luxury. What's this luxury? Like a pair of Ray-Bans.

• 22:22David Pierce?

  Fair. Okay. I have two others I'd like to throw at you.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  An Aura ring.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  That is one of the things I was going to throw at you. I think Aura is like a sneakily fascinating company and they're way ahead in smart rings. Smart rings are, a lot of people think, including our own V-Song, about to be a real thing. I think especially if you're betting that this like health and fitness thing is going to keep growing really fast, that's a place to go. I also think Garmin for kind of the same reasons. Like, what if we can redesign Garmin's watches so that they don't look dumb? But they have all the cool stuff that Garmin already has that people really like. I feel like you could make something out of Garmin. I also, my immediate reaction when we did this was snap because I want the spectacles line. But I think we go, we go Ray-Ban meta smart glasses and that gets us everywhere we're going probably significantly faster.

• 23:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's basically, do we want to go watch, ring or glasses?

• 23:10David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 23:11Alex Cranz?

  But if we go Samsung, we do watch and ring, right?

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the, the thing that this I think makes very clear is you can take any of the watches and you can do iPhone lock-in. And now you have a realistic competitor to the Apple Watch, right? Like,

• 23:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing that actually holds a bunch of these companies back is they cannot communicate with the iPhone.

• 23:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that be cool, Neelai. It's written, it's written at the top of the building of our headquarters. It just says be cool.

• 23:39Alex Cranz?

  What's cooler than lock-in?

• 23:40David Pierce?

  What's cooler than lock-in?

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the change I'm making is being like, all right, whoop, you're in. Like, let's go, you know?

• 23:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  Like you can, you can now more directly figure out Apple integrations.

• 23:50David Pierce?

  Buy a ThinkPad, get a whoop, let's go.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  But I'm saying that on a six-year time horizon, maybe that is a better move than take the Meta Ray-Bans and figure out how glasses work, which by the way, glasses also held back because they cannot properly integrate with your phone.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  This is like a real problem for all these products.

• 24:11Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, that's why like the glasses, we get them properly integrating with the phone, then we also have like an additional audio solution.

• 24:20Nilay Patel?

  When you say an additional audio solution, that means some headphones.

• 24:23Alex Cranz?

  Well, you know, headphones is headphones coming up next, so.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  You've been a CEO for 20 minutes. You are already super corporate.

• 24:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we need, we need more than one audio solution for our company, guys.

• 24:34David Pierce?

  I've prepared a deck to talk about this.

• 24:35Alex Cranz?

  We would, we need to be diversified in our audio.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It happens to everybody.

• 24:40Alex Cranz?

  It happens immediately. Yeah. But the Garmin, like the Garmin has so much cool stuff in it. They just look so ugly. And we've got the Apple team now, right? They can like make it look good. We're that team, that poor team in Panos Panay just chained to their desk.

• 24:55David Pierce?

  We need that team to keep making iPhones, though. I don't know.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  It's not like they're doing a lot. They're like, take the buttons off it.

• 25:00David Pierce?

  That's true. It's thinner next time. We did it.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  I think you're the tiebreaker. I think it's between Garmin and Meta. Once again, David, you have to, you have to pull apart this corporate battle.

• 25:13David Pierce?

  I think we should pick Meta.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 25:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:15David Pierce?

  Because I think, I think the Ray-Ban Meta partnership is cool. I think the glasses are awesome and people really like them. And I think our ability to like integrate them a little and make them way better for people, instant victory. Like, I think with the other picks that we have here, we have a chance to like immediately make these things much cooler in a way that I feel like we're gonna have to basically like tear down the Garmin hardware team and build it back up. And I feel like that's gonna take us a while.

• 25:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's gonna be more than six years.

• 25:46David Pierce?

  Garmin, please know that I love you and you make cool things, just like make them cooler.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  Garmin, if you'd like to integrate with Veritas Incorporated's iPhone, you can pass 55%.

• 25:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you.

• 25:57Alex Cranz?

  We've got some really good audio solutions for you.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  The developer program is open and it will only be slightly more than half of your revenue.

• 26:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. Also, the smart glasses are just like cool and I love using them and I want to have them. So we're going with that. I feel good about it. I don't love that we just hired a hardware team out of Meta, which makes me feel a lot of feelings in general, but it's okay. We're doing it.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  We now know everything about you.

• 26:24David Pierce?

  Our privacy policy, by the way, is dope. Like, let's just take that for granted. In case you're wondering about our privacy policy, it is sick.

• 26:31Alex Cranz?

  The EU never gets mad at us.

• 26:33David Pierce?

  No, it's like not a problem at all. I should have said at the beginning, by the way, by picking the iPhone, we did just bring ourselves a delightful antitrust case that I'm not super psyched about. But I feel like it's, it's one of those that's coming anyway, right?

• 26:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Lena, call us.

• 26:47David Pierce?

  Neelai has been begging to fight an antitrust case, so like it's time.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  From this side. That's really what I've been after this whole time is let me be the monopolist.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  It's perfect.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, we're raising rents. If we're going down, we're going down rich.

• 27:00David Pierce?

  Yeah. And by the time any of this comes out, it'll be past 2030. We'll be out anyway. It's fine. I'm not worried about it. All right. Next category is headphones. And here again, we're pretty wide open. Apple is off the board, but I'm going to allow Beats to stay on the board because it is different enough that I think we'll allow it.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  Because they don't care about it.

• 27:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, pretty much. Like, I don't know if Apple knows that it owns Beats, so we're just going to let it ride. But there's also obvious players here, Bose and Sony and Sonos is a new one.

• 27:26Alex Cranz?

  Just headphones, though.

• 27:27David Pierce?

  Well, no, we'll make this headphones slash speakers. We'll go audio solutions.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:31David Pierce?

  In Alex Cranz's.

• 27:32Alex Cranz?

  I think you know exactly where we're going with this.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  Neelai is going to advocate for the party speaker.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm taking Sony. Now that it's audio solutions.

• 27:42Alex Cranz?

  We got a lot, a wider range.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  It's the ULT era. I mean, you want luxury. What screams luxury more than the words "mega bass"?

• 27:50David Pierce?

  A seven foot tall speaker.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  By the way, shout out to the Vergecast listeners who just send me pictures of it in the wild.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  It's like they're birding, you know, but like only one person cares about birds and it's me.

• 28:02David Pierce?

  How does it feel to be known for the Cybertruck wiper and Sony party speakers? Like, is this a good legacy that you're happy about?

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Is that on the list? Cybertruck wiper? On the wildcard gadgets? Cybertruck wiper?

• 28:13David Pierce?

  We have two wildcard options, so don't worry. For me, it's Sonos on this one.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 28:18David Pierce?

  I want Sonos real bad, because again, we're in this like, we want to build cool stuff that's integrated. Sonos makes good products, they know how to make good audio products. I feel like we could take Sonos and be like, just learn how to make software, everything's gonna be fine.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  Just learn the easy part.

• 28:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, have you heard of apps? What if we did that? This could be fun.

• 28:36Nilay Patel?

  So again, I would actually take Sony here. Not just because of the party speaker situation. I think their headphones are really good.

• 28:42David Pierce?

  They are.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Sony noise cancelers are really good. I think they compete with Bose to be the top of the market. Then they've got an actual audio solutions catalog, like, an actual array of speakers. Like, what is one product I want desperately from Sonos that they won't sell? Is like, a receiver, right?

• 28:57David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  There's a huge array of those audio products that you can ruthlessly integrate with a phone, in a way that even Sonos can't right now. That's why they have the software problems. Like, their app platform has to support a bunch of stuff, because it can't just put it on your phone directly. And also, Megabase, I would just get it.

• 29:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  I would have it.

• 29:15David Pierce?

  Alex, what do you think?

• 29:16Alex Cranz?

  I just really like the Sony headphones.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 29:19Alex Cranz?

  They just have such a nice wider range. Like, Sonos just got into headphones, they don't have any in-ear monitors, they don't have any buds.

• 29:26David Pierce?

  Also, tough time to be taking over Sonos. Like, real, real kind of reputation hit.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you know what you don't have on here?

• 29:32David Pierce?

  What's that?

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Again, I'm just gonna point this out for everyone. I think the age of televisions is coming to an end, because David made a list of gadgets and didn't put TVs on them.

• 29:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't care. No part of me wants to build televisions.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll just remind everyone that I asked the CEO of Netflix about the Samsung Frame TV, and he was like, "What? Stop talking to me." I was like, "Do you think this is a harbinger of doom?" And he was like, "I don't know what you're saying. I own one." But I'm just saying, you made an entire list of gadgets and you didn't put TVs on here. It's a prophecy.

• 30:02Alex Cranz?

  Cause he knew you were gonna say the Samsung, we're gonna acquire the Samsung Frame and fix it.

• 30:05David Pierce?

  To be clear, not an oversight. We are not getting in the television business. What if we made no money and everything was impossible and we had to spy on our users?

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is, if TVs were on here anywhere, then I would change my headphones pack. If you're giving me audio solutions but not TVs, then it's Sony. If TVs are back on the list, then I have to, I'm required by like blood and heritage to take Sony televisions.

• 30:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  And then I would change my headphones back.

• 30:32David Pierce?

  So we do have a wild card round coming later. And if you, if you think you can win the fight for us to get Sony TVs, you can, you can hold your fire for them.

• 30:40Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna fight for TCL so hard.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think you're gonna win the Sony TVs, but I just don't think we wanna be in the TV business.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, if I take him off the board here, it's a big, it's a big decision. How do I get Mac OS in the tablet?

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  You know, I gotta play three moves ahead.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  I will be down with Sony here. By the way, tough beat for Bose that none of us are even attempting to take Bose.

• 31:00Alex Cranz?

  They're fine.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, you made it audio solutions.

• 31:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  If it was just headphones, I would immediately go Bose so I could win the Sony fight later.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  Interesting. Okay. Yeah, and I don't, it's just like a bunch of weird scientists in Massachusetts. It's like, we don't, we don't need that. I'll go Sony under one stipulation, which is that we immediately rename every single product they make to something not stupid.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  No, with more letters. Twice as many letters.

• 31:24David Pierce?

  And another dash in the middle for no reason.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Just get in there.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  Okay. I think it's Sony.

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:33David Pierce?

  I feel good about this. I think we're, I think we're aligned.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  I can figure something out for TVs.

• 31:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:37David Pierce?

  I feel now obligated to take something from Samsung just so that you can't argue for the Frame TV, because I don't need this in my life.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  That's not what I was gonna take. Again, I believe it's a harbinger of doom.

• 31:48David Pierce?

  Okay, so the next two things on here are, I would say, the sneaky places we're gonna make a lot of money. This is what pays for everything else that the shareholders are gonna love, and we're probably never gonna talk about again. The first one is app platforms, which I suppose could be a single app, if we wanted a single app, but I'm thinking more along the lines of like, big groups of things. So like, I had Adobe Creative Cloud as an option here, and Microsoft Office, and Google Workspace. This is like, probably B2B software that is going to make us just a tremendous amount of money. What do we think?

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  So I have to go with Office.

• 32:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Only for one small reason, and I can't believe you didn't think of it first, David. We cannot run this company without Microsoft Excel.

• 32:27David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  No company can be run without Microsoft Excel. Like, just for our own survival.

• 32:33Alex Cranz?

  You know, you can just like, pay for a license. We'll have so much money. We can just pay for a license for Excel.

• 32:39David Pierce?

  But what if other people paid us for licenses?

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just saying, you want a, you want a dog food, you know, you're, you're in work.

• 32:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but we can have Adobe Creative Cloud and just have a stranglehold on the entire industry.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  You want people to hate us?

• 32:54Alex Cranz?

  We could just, like, I love a monopoly. I'm, I'm on this side of things now.

• 32:58David Pierce?

  Another antitrust fight that I'm really excited about, yeah.

• 33:01Alex Cranz?

  We're only gonna be there six years. By the time that stuff all hits, we'll be long gone.

• 33:05David Pierce?

  So I think the upside of Creative Cloud is, we take Creative Cloud, we make the pricing better, and we're legends. Right? Like, instantly, best possible PR win is we just like, give away Premiere. We're just like, here, you can have it.

• 33:19Alex Cranz?

  No, we, we sell like, rather than the cloud license, we're like, okay, you can just buy Premiere, but it'll cost a thousand dollars.

• 33:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Alex Cranz?

  Then we make a lot of money, and people are happy because they can just own it.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  For six years.

• 33:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, for six years. And then it's gone. And then, and then, you know, whoever follows us, Panos, I'm sorry, you're taking over the company from us. Good luck.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  A lot of our ideas are like, what if we made slightly less money?

• 33:42David Pierce?

  But that's fine.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Whereas my ideas are, what if we made a lot more money?

• 33:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, this, this says a lot about the, the distinct vibes of the Vergecast Incorporated team, I would say. It's either Office or it's Creative Cloud, right? I feel like there's nothing else. You like, we could go try to get like Oracle's weird business or like IBM's consulting arm or whatever, but we haven't picked a Google thing. Do we not want Google Workspace? Do we just take Google Workspace and go kill Office?

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  So my, my idea here, again, you know, the, our, our company's mission is try hard.

• 34:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  And Workspace is a ripe target for trying hard.

• 34:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  This is also where you could do messaging. You could, you know, you could walk in the room and be like, make a list of all the messaging products and then walk out and six months later, come back in and look at the list and like circle one, like this one, we're just doing this one.

• 34:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  And we're going to name it G Chat. That's a real, that's a thing you could do here.

• 34:31David Pierce?

  It is, it is. Messaging, I would point out, is a separate category. So we're, we're going to get to messaging. But if we, whatever company we pick here, we can't pick there.

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  Which is a case for and against some folks here.

• 34:41Alex Cranz?

  And if we pick Microsoft Office, we can't pick Azure. If we pick Google Workspace, we can't pick Google Cloud.

• 34:48David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  No one was picking Google Cloud.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, okay, I'll, I'll, I will concede and say we should pick Creative Cloud and our mission here is to make people not, not hate us.

• 34:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think, I think this is where we win over all the people to use our hardware because they're going to love, this is how we sell Lenovo ThinkPads.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Because of 55% lock-in. You can run Creative Cloud on someone else's laptop. It'll just cost four times as much money. I, I don't make the rules.

• 35:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  Except for that one.

• 35:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, you just say the more your company makes, we charge you more. Like it's just a scale, a sliding scale.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  Oh, I like that. You pay per YouTube subscriber instead of per.

• 35:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  Exactly. Oh, you're just getting out in this industry. You basically get it for free.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  I love this.

• 35:32Alex Cranz?

  The minute you start making success, that we, we come for our, our cut.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  And if you're wearing our wearable, we can track your general burnout level as a creator and we start bringing the price back down.

• 35:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:42David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 35:43Alex Cranz?

  See? Oh my God. Synergy.

• 35:45David Pierce?

  We actually turn the app off when you need a rest day. And then, and then we'll get it back.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  Calm down, Jimmy.

• 35:53David Pierce?

  All right, so we're good on Creative Cloud?

• 35:55Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, sure.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  I think it's the right answer.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  That's okay. I know I'm the one who has to deal with like whatever terms of service conflagration. It's like, I'm fine. I'll do it.

• 36:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Alex Cranz?

  David and I work four days a year.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Cranz and I are the ones who like go to canned lions and like meet with advertisers. You have to actually like do the things.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  I have to write the blog post. It's like, all right, we changed our terms of service. It's true that we're gonna take your firstborn child. We're doing this for the good of all humanity.

• 36:24David Pierce?

  This is beautiful. I love this for you. All right. Next category is the boring B2B money faucets. This is where we get to, we get to pick our cloud provider. We can make B2B chips that we sell. I was gonna put ARM in here, but we can't have ARM because ARM's only thing is ARM, so that doesn't really work. We can, this is, this is where we make all of our money, but we try to never talk about in public because no one cares.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Can we take TSMC?

• 36:48David Pierce?

  What would you want to take from TSMC?

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  Making the chips for everybody?

• 36:52David Pierce?

  No, that's their whole thing.

• 36:54Nilay Patel?

  But they don't make a product called TSMC.

• 36:56David Pierce?

  No.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  They don't ship TSMCs around the world.

• 36:59David Pierce?

  That would be then just buying the company, which is not what we're doing. We're taking products.

• 37:02Alex Cranz?

  You get like one TSMC factory.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  This is like an expansion draft in sports, right? We get to like pick from your roster, but we can't have your team.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  What about that one company in Europe that actually makes the lithography machine?

• 37:13David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  The TSMC relies on?

• 37:15David Pierce?

  That like $23 million machine?

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's only, what's the name of that company? ASML. I think we should take ASML. I think we should take the machine that makes the fabs.

• 37:23David Pierce?

  The machine that makes the fabs. Okay.

• 37:25Alex Cranz?

  Not like Azure?

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, you know, I'm already defending Creative Cloud. Like, I'm not trying to be out of here.

• 37:32Alex Cranz?

  I just want to print all the money. Like, this is, this is, this is our money printer. Who gets mad at Azure lately?

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  No one, but it's also in second place, right? You have to, you have to go make the AI case. You gotta do the AI CRM thing to make, to grow Azure. I guess we're just milking it for profits and walking away, right?

• 37:50Alex Cranz?

  Right. Yeah, we're only here for six years.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  And we can't take AWS because we took the Kindle.

• 37:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 37:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:54David Pierce?

  Which is a very funny trade to have made.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  You're trying to build a business.

• 37:59Alex Cranz?

  I mean, oh, we could take Whisper from OpenAI.

• 38:03David Pierce?

  Whisper's open source. We're good there.

• 38:05Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  Also, OpenAI, it's on this list as a money faucet, but it is not. It's like a reverse. It's a drain.

• 38:12David Pierce?

  Oh, true. I meant to write this as basically like, if we want, we can take like GPT-4O from OpenAI.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Which, which still, which they are now in a stunning business judo move are giving away for free to Apple.

• 38:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I'm not. I don't think that's the winner, but I just, I wanted to have an AI option here.

• 38:31Alex Cranz?

  Let's take Nvidia GeForce now.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. So this is the thing. How do we get something from Nvidia? This is, this is my question. What do we take from Nvidia? Is it just the H100 business? Do we just, we just take Nvidia's whole AI chip situation?

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, do you, do you buy ASML? And then you're like, if you use these machines to make H100s, 55%.

• 38:57Alex Cranz?

  That is a pretty good funny faucet. I feel like we will be ripe for disruption there.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think taking the Nvidia AI chip business is like a strong move because now you're selling to Google Cloud and Azure. And on a six-year horizon, they all want to disrupt you, but they won't be able to.

• 39:14David Pierce?

  So I was about to say, do we worry that every other chip maker on earth is going to start making these? And this becomes a bad bet pretty soon.

• 39:21Alex Cranz?

  That's Panos's problem in six years.

• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, not in six years, baby.

• 39:25David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  In six years, I'm on a boat.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  I mean, the other, the other problem here is that if we, if we take that, the bubble bursts and we become the poster child of the AI bubble that just burst. And that's going to happen in less than six years.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  That's true. This is why I'm saying we should take ASML, the chip company.

• 39:41David Pierce?

  That is like the least sexy business you could possibly imagine in that. I doubt there's as much money in it because I don't think they can make all that many of those.

• 39:50Alex Cranz?

  It's like Samsung and their battery business. Actually, maybe this is a good idea. Where Samsung just makes a bunch of random stuff that makes them a ton of money.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, we could take LG Display, right?

• 40:00David Pierce?

  Oh, that's good.

• 40:01Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, you want, you want to put an OLED in your phone? Come talk to Lucky Gold Star, you know?

• 40:07David Pierce?

  Wait, I like that a lot.

• 40:08Alex Cranz?

  I was like, LG Display, that, that feels like it. The way we all were just like.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it, that feels, that feels sticky. They're gonna make screens for a long time. I feel like we're in, and that's like, that's easy. It runs itself. We're good. All right. I love this.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  And, and we love talking about it.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  We do.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  You know?

• 40:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  You want to talk about dual-layer OLEDs? Let's go.

• 40:25David Pierce?

  Do you feel like this gets you close enough to the TV business that you're happy now, Eli?

• 40:30Alex Cranz?

  They make the panels that go in your Sony.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  That's true. They do make the panels.

• 40:33David Pierce?

  That's where like, we're.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Fine. I got my, I got myself a monitor and TV business.

• 40:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take LG Display and we're gonna, we're, we're gonna make TVs.

• 40:41Alex Cranz?

  And then we're just gonna bolt two Sony Party speakers to it. Boom.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  You think we want to sell these tomorrow? Come on.

• 40:48Alex Cranz?

  Some little pulsing lights at the bottom.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:51David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  That's good. LG Display. This is great. I'm in. All right. We're gonna take one more break and then we're gonna go back. We got four more to do. We're gonna build Virg casting. We'll be right back.

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• 42:36David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Next up for the triumvirate at Vergecast Incorporated is messaging. We can, we can take, again, not a company, so we can't take Signal from Signal or Telegram from Telegram, but we can, we can take and reinvent any messaging app or platform or ecosystem that we want. We can't take from Meta, which I just realized because we took the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, which I now slightly regret because I would like to have taken WhatsApp.

• 43:03Alex Cranz?

  So we can take all of the different Google chats that have existed and finally make one?

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is our opportunity.

• 43:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can make Gchat.

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  Done. Done. I can solve, I can find, I can solve this.

• 43:17David Pierce?

  I mean, again, on the list of like do it and be legends, finally making Gchat is, is way up there.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Just making Gchat and then I, you know, I got the phone. So your blue bubble problems are solved.

• 43:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah, we don't have to worry about messaging.

• 43:30David Pierce?

  We just put blue bubbles on the iPhone.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, super done. This isn't even, why are we even, Gchat, baby. I met my wife in there. That's a real story, by the way. That's not just a case in you.

• 43:39David Pierce?

  That is a real thing.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Back then, I spent years of our, our early relationship in Gchat and nowhere else.

• 43:44David Pierce?

  Do you ever randomly find like the transcripts of those chats when you're searching for something in your Gmail? This is a thing that happens to me occasionally. I'll search for like pizza in my Gmail and it'll be like, did you mean this conversation you had with your ex 11 years ago that we saved to Gmail?

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, I haven't thought about that and now I'm worried about looking.

• 44:03Alex Cranz?

  Don't look, don't look.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna set that aside.

• 44:06Alex Cranz?

  Don't look.

• 44:06David Pierce?

  It's probably for the best.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  All of those G chat conversations were before we were dating. So they were just conversations about the things we had gotten up to at night, which is a lot of things.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 44:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  That's very good.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:19David Pierce?

  All right. The only other one I would throw in is Slack, which I think is like a forever unrealized potential that.

• 44:26Alex Cranz?

  Or Discord.

• 44:26David Pierce?

  So, but we can't take Discord because Discord is Discord, right? Like, that's, that's, it's off the.

• 44:31Alex Cranz?

  I thought somebody else on Discord now.

• 44:33David Pierce?

  No, they almost sold, but it's still just Discord. Microsoft was gonna, but then they were like, this seems like a disaster, which probably reasonable call.

• 44:41Alex Cranz?

  G chat being good, like, we're gonna kind of win people over with, with Adobe. But eventually we will jack up the prices on them and having like, yeah, just having G chat there is like instant win.

• 44:55David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. All right. I feel good about this. It's G chat. And we're, we're agreed that we're scrapping all the other nonsense and we're calling it G chat, right?

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, without.

• 45:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  Easily.

• 45:04David Pierce?

  We are building the G chat that always should have existed. Next one is streaming service, uh, which is actually fun because again, we can't steal a company. So like Netflix is out.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh shit, we just traded G chat for YouTube.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Oh no.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  No, no, can we go back?

• 45:19Alex Cranz?

  No, we can take TikTok.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we can take TikTok.

• 45:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're right. We can take TikTok.

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  For now, it's on.

• 45:25David Pierce?

  So.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we can buy, we are it. We're gonna save America.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we, we buy it. Yeah. There we, oh my God.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, dude, the wildcard round here is amazing. We're gonna, we're gonna be heroes with G chat and we're gonna save America's youth.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  Oh, wow. We just did it. This is, this is, we're now the coolest company on earth. Okay.

• 45:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:45David Pierce?

  And the good news is this one isn't even gonna be very expensive because they're desperately trying to get rid of it.

• 45:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, eat your heart out, Oracle.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  We do have to fight the Chinese government and Larry Ellison.

• 45:54Alex Cranz?

  It'll be fine.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Do you think at the end to buy TikTok, you have to win a boat race against Larry Ellison? He's like, I'll do this if you can beat me in the Americas Cup.

• 46:02David Pierce?

  Let's yacht about it.

• 46:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:05David Pierce?

  Okay, so I will just say there's a bunch of Disney streaming services that are interesting. ESPN would make us an awful lot of money for a pretty long time. Hulu exists, Disney Plus exists, we could have Apple TV Plus and have all the good shows.

• 46:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but those are also dependent on external licenses that we might not acquire.

• 46:25David Pierce?

  True.

• 46:26Alex Cranz?

  With our streaming service acquisition, right? We're not getting the rights to Star Wars.

• 46:30David Pierce?

  We get, we get all the existing contracts.

• 46:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:33David Pierce?

  But I think you're right. If we get Disney Plus, we get, we don't get to own Star Wars. You're right.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  The economics of streaming are very simple. There's a handful of companies who think the Samsung Frame TV will continue to exist. Their business model is they pay a lot of money for content and then try to pay, make people pay money for it. The other model is TikTok gets free content from America's teenagers and then sells ads against it. And, not for nothing, an infinite array of pirated movies from the idiots who are paying for content.

• 47:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's gotta be TikTok. You're just sort of, the economics of the business, like, do you want to have costs or not costs?

• 47:08David Pierce?

  But again, TikTok not famously making a ton of money right now.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, because they're, they're, you know, we're, we'll fix that. 55%.

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  No, no, it's, it's, we, we do something like deal with Adobe Creative Cloud where we somehow charge our own creators.

• 47:20David Pierce?

  Well, we're gonna have to, because if we get TikTok, we don't get CapCut. So we're gonna have to immediately put the Creative Cloud team on building CapCut so that people lose.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  But the TikTok video editor is CapCut, so we just spin it out.

• 47:31David Pierce?

  It's good enough. Yeah, like, it'll work.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  And we call it CutCap.

• 47:33David Pierce?

  We can probably, CutCap. There we go. All right. TikTok and CutCap. We've done it. All right. I, I think that's right. I feel good about it. I like briefly wanted to fight for Prime Video just because it is like, it's another one that is like, try harder. Uh, oh no, we took Kindle. God.

• 47:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we took Kindle.

• 47:48David Pierce?

  The amount of money that costs, that taking Kindle has cost us. Good lord.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it is very funny that we took Kindle and Google Chat.

• 47:57Alex Cranz?

  That's what we took from those companies.

• 47:59David Pierce?

  I will say, if we want to go back and take Slack and YouTube, we have a chance.

• 48:03Alex Cranz?

  No, we're committed.

• 48:05David Pierce?

  Is there anything cooler than fixing Gchat? Like, that might be the single most important thing we do at this company. I feel really good about it.

• 48:12Alex Cranz?

  I mean, the teens will prefer us for TikTok.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  That's true. Okay, so we have, we have two more categories, one of which I just changed two minutes ago, and I'm very excited about it. So far, we have the iPhone business from Apple. We have the Kindle business from Amazon. The PC business from Lenovo. We're doing all of Meta's wearables. We haven't decided yet if we're killing the Quest, but we're probably killing the Quest. We're all in on the smart glasses. We're taking Sony's audio solutions. We're taking Adobe Creative Cloud. We're taking LG Display. And we're taking Gchat. Well, we're taking the mess of Google's messaging systems, which I think actually probably means we hire most of Google, because everybody's working on messaging and one another. And we're making Gchat. And then we are saving America and taking over TikTok. How do we feel so far? Feel good?

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  Just how many rules?

• 48:58Alex Cranz?

  I'm feeling great.

• 48:58David Pierce?

  I really feel like it does. Lenovo is still very much the, like, weird one out, but we're gonna make Lenovo cool again. It's gonna be great.

• 49:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we'll fix it.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  Okay, so we have, we have two left, which one is wildcard gadgets, which is, I think the rules still apply, so we can't take from a company we've already taken from, but we can take from any category, including categories we have not talked about. So it's some other product that Vergecast Inc. is going to make that is not off limits, because we've already taken from another company. We can, we can do TVs. This is where we take the Cybertruck, if we want to take the Cybertruck. Anything you guys want? Any initial thoughts? Anything you're excited about?

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this is where I was gonna back into taking LG's TVs.

• 49:37David Pierce?

  Okay, too late.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  But then we already have LG Display.

• 49:40David Pierce?

  I think this is better. We have the part of the business that's like, good, and not the part of the business that is WebOS. I feel really good about LG Display and not LG TVs.

• 49:48Alex Cranz?

  Have you guys heard of a company called Stores and Bickle?

• 49:51David Pierce?

  Is this how we get into like bespoke whiskey?

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  No, this is how we get in. We just get the volcano. They make a whole bunch of different vapes. We just get the volcano business.

• 49:59David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 49:59Alex Cranz?

  And then we like, we make one that looks really, really cool. We put a big screen on it. We put some big speakers on the side, just a whole one stop party business.

• 50:09David Pierce?

  Just for Alex Cranz.

• 50:11Alex Cranz?

  It was just, you know, legalization is coming for this country. We gotta, we gotta be there at the start.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  I'm not feeling that. I gotta tell you. I just feel like if we were in this till 2040.

• 50:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 50:22David Pierce?

  I'd be down. 2030 feels iffy and that's just like a lot of legislation stuff.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm just, I'm throwing this out there. The Nvidia Shield.

• 50:31Alex Cranz?

  We, we, oh yeah, we didn't do Nvidia, did we?

• 50:33Nilay Patel?

  We took LG Display over Nvidia's GPU business. We're doing really well.

• 50:38Alex Cranz?

  This gets us the Tegra.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:40David Pierce?

  Why this?

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Cause I, I think between Krantz and I, we can communicate with an audience of TV. We can, we can bring the Shield back to prominence.

• 50:48David Pierce?

  This is a try harder move.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  Look, if you look, if you look on the forums right now, people are like, the Shield isn't it anymore.

• 50:54David Pierce?

  That's true. And it was for a long time.

• 50:56Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of people who are like, what you want to do is run Infuse on Apple TV. And I think that's, that's a shame.

• 51:01David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're not getting Infuse.

• 51:03David Pierce?

  Do we want to get into the car business is my big question here.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  No, cause we, to be a successful carmaker, you gotta, you gotta make a shoe. You gotta make a midsize crossover and I, that's just not for us.

• 51:12David Pierce?

  Okay. But again, we, we would take all the infrastructure required to do it. So we'd, we'd be up and running making Kia Fortes tomorrow.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  We're not buying Kia.

• 51:20David Pierce?

  We're not, we're, we're just taking the Forte.

• 51:24Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I don't want any part of the Kia Hyundai business. They keep that.

• 51:28David Pierce?

  Neel, you don't want the Mustang Mach-E? This is your moment. Take the Mach-E, man.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  It's a shoe. I'm just telling you, I'm just not, I'm not making a midsize crossover.

• 51:35David Pierce?

  All right.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you. Like if you're gonna let me be like crazy about it, you know, let's get nuts. But I don't, that business is too, too wackadoo. I, I talked to a lot of car CEOs. They're all insane. Like, that's what will tear us apart.

• 51:50David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 51:51Alex Cranz?

  Wait, I thought of it.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  Samsung's barely alive digital camera business.

• 51:57David Pierce?

  Oh, I like getting into the camera business.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and then we can actually make them smartphones, right?

• 52:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  We actually take you do the thing where you make the smartphone mirrorless camera.

• 52:05Alex Cranz?

  Exactly.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 52:07Alex Cranz?

  Does Samsung still make cameras?

• 52:08David Pierce?

  Do we want Samsung's, though, or do we want, like Fuji's X100 business?

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then the solution is you just make them.

• 52:16David Pierce?

  Right, make more of them. Let people buy them who would like them.

• 52:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  I like that. I like taking a camera. That's actually a great idea.

• 52:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and then we fix the software so that it like doesn't take you 12 hours just to change a setting?

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Sony cameras, but with menus that humans beings can navigate.

• 52:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  But I do think Fuji is like a good, in terms of wildcard gadget for our brand especially.

• 52:39Alex Cranz?

  And then we do like a limited release of the iPhone and the Fuji and they have like the same look to them. We'd sell a lot of money.

• 52:46David Pierce?

  That's pretty good. All right, so we're taking Fuji's X100. All right.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:51David Pierce?

  I like it. And then last category, the one I just added a minute ago. I had another non gadget wildcard, but I think that's boring. So what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna buy a startup.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know my answer right away.

• 53:03David Pierce?

  Really?

• 53:04Alex Cranz?

  I really hope it's the same one.

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  It's Rivian.

• 53:06David Pierce?

  Oh, so you want to get into the car business?

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was, uh, cuz they don't make a shoe.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  They also famously lose all the money in the world.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but 55%. I can fix it.

• 53:19David Pierce?

  If you want a Rivian, you have to buy an iPhone. Rivians are now in-app purchases on iPhones.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  55%.

• 53:28Alex Cranz?

  What about like, we could get SSI. We could have like just the AI guy.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Just one guy.

• 53:33Alex Cranz?

  We're all ready.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, in that case, is OpenAI still a startup? Because that would be another.

• 53:38David Pierce?

  I was just about to say, I think OpenAI counts.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  But you want something, you want like a startup, you want like an earthy.

• 53:43David Pierce?

  So my vote, if we're buying an AI company, I want to buy Anthropic.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:48David Pierce?

  Which is, I would say, less valued, but also way less problematic.

• 53:53Alex Cranz?

  And they're actually making products, right?

• 53:55David Pierce?

  Their product is moving along fast. They're like kind of right in the mix with Google and OpenAI. I don't know that I want to deal with the like Sam Altman of it all, if I'm being honest.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  And a CEO is notoriously difficult here.

• 54:08David Pierce?

  Exactly. So if we're going AI, and that was one of my instincts, my vote would be Anthropic. I also think like a company like Notion would be an interesting one for us to buy, potentially a lot of money there.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  Is Notion a startup? They've been around for a long time. This gets us into like, what is a startup zone?

• 54:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, like is Stripe still a startup? They're doing pretty well.

• 54:27Alex Cranz?

  I like the idea of Anthropic, though. Like, that is firmly a startup.

• 54:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, Anthropic counts, I think.

• 54:33Alex Cranz?

  Like Rivian has factories. Is that a startup when it has factories?

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  Fair.

• 54:39David Pierce?

  It is just a pretty much a car company.

• 54:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:42David Pierce?

  But Neelai, the problem is if we buy Rivian, they're gonna, we have six years to convince you to make a shoe. We will convince you to make a shoe.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  Look, the R3X is very close to a shoe, but it's a cool shoe. That's all I got for you.

• 54:55David Pierce?

  So, okay, the other Anthropic question is, do we want to be in the AI game? Like, are we?

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 54:59David Pierce?

  We don't need a move.

• 55:01Alex Cranz?

  Not really, because then we have to deal with copyright stuff. Neelai's got a lot of blogs he's gonna have to write already, like apology blogs. I don't, we don't need more.

• 55:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, Neelai is definitely the one testifying in Congress, right? We're all, we're all on the same page about that.

• 55:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  I have, I have several other options for you. Can I throw some options at you?

• 55:17Alex Cranz?

  I love an option.

• 55:18David Pierce?

  We could buy DJI, another company that might need some saving in America, that does some interesting stuff.

• 55:23Nilay Patel?

  But not a startup. So you, this is not just companies we could buy.

• 55:27David Pierce?

  Is it not a startup?

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Super not a startup.

• 55:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, fine. That doesn't count. There's the like canvases and figmas of the world that also are kind of iffy on whether they're startups, but like if we're in the creator world with Creative Cloud, we fold that in. The FTC won't allow it.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  These aren't the rules.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  Canva is 10 years old and has a $26 billion value. Like, it's just like not a startup.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, you want to go, you, you need some installer shit. Like, what's some like weird two-person app?

• 55:56David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 55:56Alex Cranz?

  Let's get Carrot.

• 55:57David Pierce?

  Does Discord count?

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 55:59Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  Not a startup. Like, if Rivian isn't a startup, none of these other things are startups that you're mentioning.

• 56:04David Pierce?

  Okay. Fair enough. I think Anthropic is the best idea I have.

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Anthropic is good.

• 56:09David Pierce?

  I think I'm buying Anthropic.

• 56:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:10David Pierce?

  It's like, we're gonna like run them off to the side, though. There, we're gonna sort of Instagram Anthropic, where it's like, you do your thing, and if you become really successful, we'll ruin it for you eventually.

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:20David Pierce?

  But until then, like, you're kind of, this is like your, your problem. And like, if you get in trouble, that's your problem and not ours. We're gonna call them like the moonshot factory or whatever.

• 56:30Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think just having them collab on making Siri not suck would be like huge.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, because we do need Siri to not suck. That's pretty important.

• 56:38Alex Cranz?

  Big, big change for us.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  Okay, all right. Anthropic it is. Welcome to the team, Anthropic people.

• 56:45Alex Cranz?

  How do you feel about party speakers, Anthropic? How can you make AI accelerated?

• 56:50Nilay Patel?

  Make these LEDs blink smarter than ever.

• 56:53David Pierce?

  We have a lot of audio solutions that are ready for you. Okay, I feel like we've done this. Can I, can I recap for you?

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:00David Pierce?

  At Vergecast Incorporated, here are the things that we make now. We have the iPhone business. We have the Kindle business and all that that entails. Lenovo PCs are now Vergecast PCs. Meta's whole wearables thing, the Quest and the Ray-Ban smart glasses, that's us now. Sony's audio solutions, headphones, party speakers, the whole jam, that's ours now.

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 57:22David Pierce?

  Adobe Creative Cloud is our big software app platform play. LG Display is now ours. We are, we are just fabbing it up for everybody. If you want a TV, hit up the Vergecast. I love this.

• 57:34Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  Right. We are taking over all of Google's messaging shenanigans and turning them into Gchat, which might be the single hardest thing we signed ourselves up for.

• 57:42Nilay Patel?

  This is what kills us. I want to be clear.

• 57:44David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  It's like the guitarist and the singer start arguing a little bit and then Oasis breaks up. That's messaging.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  Joe Biden just gave us TikTok. Congrats to us, big day. We now have Fujifilm's X100 business, and Anthropic is now part of Vergecast Incorporated. How do we feel?

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  This feels good. This feels great. This is the right combo of things. We're doing a little bit of good. We're doing a little bit more evil. We're making some money and then we're gonna fix messages.

• 58:14David Pierce?

  We are incredibly deep into hardware. Like, my only worry is like, should we not have done LG Display and pick something that is more like cloud, software, AIE?

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  No, no, no. Because if we own the hardware, then they all have to do. We got AI. We got Anthropic.

• 58:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Alex Cranz?

  We got Anthropic in the iPhone. We have all the power.

• 58:32David Pierce?

  And Anthropic is like, their whole thing is they want to be like a B2B thing. So that's, that could eventually pay dividends for us.

• 58:39Alex Cranz?

  And we have most of Google because we acquired all of Google messaging.

• 58:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  And we're, we're just printing money on increasing Creative Cloud fees.

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear.

• 58:48Alex Cranz?

  Right. Microsoft is gonna be paying so much money for their Creative Cloud.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  I think there's money to be had. Again, TikTok's business model is they pirate content.

• 58:57David Pierce?

  What are we gonna do at the TikTok shop? What's our first move with the TikTok shop?

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we are 55%.

• 59:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  Straight up. You wanna transact in the TikTok shop? We're taking the fees.

• 59:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We just charge outrageous fees there, except for our own products, in which case we give them, we don't charge a fee at all.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. The self-preferencing is going to be out of control on all of these. Like, do you want good Photoshop? You have to use RX 100 camera. Otherwise, you get bad Photoshop. Really, sorry.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  This is actually great. It's like, why do these companies act like this? And like, we're pretending we run the company. And we're like, we are gonna be so evil.

• 59:29David Pierce?

  We started out trying to do a good job, and now we're doing this.

• 59:32Alex Cranz?

  We're just the most evil. Lena Kahn just waiting behind us all right now.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:38David Pierce?

  All right. Well, I think we've solved it. I feel like there's, we're easily a trillion-dollar company right off the bat here.

• 59:42Alex Cranz?

  Immediately.

• 59:43David Pierce?

  Our website is gonna be sick, by the way.

• 59:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:45David Pierce?

  That's very important to me. We're gonna give all our products cool names, and our website is gonna be so tight with like, a good, understandable URL scheme. These are the things I care about. I'm gonna run the naming of everything. You guys can run the company, but I'm in charge of names.

• 1:00:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. The speakers will like, have real names.

• 1:00:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. More letters.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Continue to say this. There's only one solution.

• 1:00:07David Pierce?

  But it's, but it's, I think it's right. It's no more numbers. It's just all letters and you have to guess what the letters mean because they're in no order. It's just consonants and you have to guess. That's all of our products from now on. I love it.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited. And I promise the people, MegaBase is coming back.

• 1:00:22David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely. MegaBase is coming to many new products. We have new places to put MegaBase.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone is going to have a hardware MegaBase button.

• 1:00:29David Pierce?

  We're going to rattle your head off with the smart glasses with MegaBase. We will give you and solve your migraines all at once.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  Gchat MegaBase.

• 1:00:39Alex Cranz?

  Every time you type, just a.

• 1:00:41David Pierce?

  All right. Well, it's been an honor. Thank you for joining this company with me.

• 1:00:45Alex Cranz?

  This is wonderful.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  This is going to be a wild six years.

• 1:00:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're going to make so much money. Panos, have fun.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  And then go to jail.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  No, Panos goes to jail. We're out. We're out.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  Lena Khan, you know how to reach us.

• 1:00:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57David Pierce?

  All right. Thank you, guys. We'll do this again soon.

• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:02David Pierce?

  All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Eli and Alex for doing this weird thing with me. And thank you, as always, for listening. As you can tell, we have a lot of thoughts on all this, but I want to hear yours, too. We're going to put some links in the show notes to coverage we've done of these companies. But I really want to know what you think. What did we pick wrong? What did we pick right? What would you have picked differently? How would you build your tech company? You can always email us at [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Tell us all your thoughts on Vergecast, Inc. If you have thoughts on anything else, hit up the hotline, send us an email. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Eli, Alex, and I will be

• 1:01:43David Pierce?

  back on Friday to talk about all of the upcoming news. There's a lot of gadgets about to come, plus some more weirdness in the AI world, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:02:05Speaker 07

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