Pod Insights a16z Podcast Tesla and the Nature of Disruption About this episode “Disruption” is a word often used in the tech -- and yet, spotting and harnessing truly disruptive technology is much trickier than it looks. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky use the example of Tesla and electric vehicles to dig into the nuances of what disruption looks like in practice, in the tech industry and beyond.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Disruption is a word often used in the technology industry. And it might seem that the path from disruptive technology to market dominance is a fairly simple one. And yet, the nature of disruption and how different innovators and companies harness disruptive technology hardly goes in a straight line. In this episode from September 2018, Benedict Evans and Stephen Sinofsky use the example of Tesla and electric vehicles to dig into the nuances of what disruption looks like in practice in the tech industry and beyond.
0:31 Hanne Tidnam? Hi and welcome to the A16Z Podcast. In another of our hallway conversation episodes, Benedict Evans and Stephen Sinofsky talk about Tesla and more broadly, the nature of disruption overall. How disruptive is Tesla really? What exactly are they disrupting from the dashboard to carmakers to vendors to energy source to autonomy overall? And how much does each innovation matter? Looking back at other examples historically, what kind of disruption matters most for market dominance?
0:58 Steven Sinofsky? Good morning. I'm Stephen Sinofsky. I'm Benedict Evans. What we thought we would talk about today is a little bit about the nature of disruption and in particular about Tesla and the rise of electric vehicles and sort of how disruptive is Tesla? You know, we're in an interesting time, like certainly economically, like if you look at the, you know, the main US car companies, you know, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, GM, all of them are worth less than Tesla in market cap individually. And certainly if you look at the past year, Tesla has been worth twice as much as them at some point. So crazy, interesting world. But, you know, we use disruption a lot in Silicon Valley and in technology in particular.
1:43 Steven Sinofsky? And what's interesting about the, looking at Tesla is, you know, it may or may not really be disruption in the way that the book is written, which is sort of, oh my God, there's a whole new thing and then the old thing just goes away and it's all new players.
1:58 Benedict Evans? Yeah, I thought it was interesting to look at how people think about Tesla here. Because you sort of, on the one hand, you have the narrative, oh my god, they're doing this stuff that the car companies can't do. On the other, you have the narrative, oh my god, they're making the cars in a tent and bits fall off when you drive down the highway, ha, ha, ha, it'll never work. And this reminded me a lot of sort of hearing similar conversations around, for example, the iPhone. This is a terrible phone, will add touch really easily. No one will ever buy a phone for that much money. Sorry, I had to toss that in there. Exactly. On the one hand, people dismiss, people dismiss in both directions. So they dismiss the new thing because it can't do what the old stuff does very well and don't realise that you might be able to learn that.
2:41 Benedict Evans? But on the other hand, you also dismiss the difficulty of the old stuff and dismiss what the barriers to entry might actually be. And so I thought, as I looked at Tesla, I kind of wanted to pull apart, well, what are the different things that are happening here? Are they disruptive? Are they not? Are there barriers to entry? Which bits are their barriers to entry? And barriers to entry to who? Because one of the kind of the historical comparisons I use, where of course Stephen has sort of scars on his back around this, is that if you look at, for example, what Apple did in the PC industry, Apple contributed to creating the PC, we had one of the first popular PCs, but Apple did not win PCs. So you can all talk about whether Apple disrupted IBM, but Apple didn't actually get the benefit from that. And in fact, PC companies didn't really get the benefit from that.
3:26 Benedict Evans? PC companies became low-margin commodity companies, and the people who got the benefit were Microsoft and Intel.
3:30 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah, well, that's what's so interesting about that disruption is sort of, you know, when can companies turn some technical innovation into their, into a competitive advantage? And when is a company's go-to-market or technical innovation itself become like a hindrance to adoption? And our tech industry is littered with examples of the innovator failing to become the dominator, so to speak. My favourite one is just, is replay TV, you know, gave us the DVR and then gave us TiVo and now we all just have DVRs everywhere. Certainly, you know, the mainframe and the mini-computer led to the PC and the revenue numbers all came and dwarfed it. And then, you know, what you know so well on the phone industry is very similar.
4:14 Benedict Evans? Yeah, so there is a question of, is this new thing fundamentally difficult for the incumbents to do? But also, is it important? So there's sort of four things that I talked about in the blog post. So the first is that Tesla kind of has to learn the old stuff. Tesla has to learn how to make cars at scale. And there was a period when people said, oh, my God, they're reinventing manufacturing. Actually, no, they just bought a secondhand robot factory.
4:35 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah, well.
4:36 Benedict Evans? Tesla has to work out how to do cars.
4:38 Steven Sinofsky? This is, but we have to, like, it's almost worth a pause there just to remind people that other people's jobs are really much harder than you think they are. And we tend to, like, even in the software hardware world, I've yet to ever meet a company that makes hardware that thinks software is like really, really hard. And I've never met a hardware company or a software company that thinks they can't just go do hardware and buy it in China. And this notion that like, to innovate in cars, you know, you need to understand like cars more and manufacturing. And to innovate in the software in cars, you need to understand software more if you're living in Detroit.
5:16 Benedict Evans? Well, this is the thing that people in software don't really understand enough about cars and people in cars don't really know enough about software. But so to the point on Tesla, clearly there's this whole conversation now about the production hell. And they're making cars in tents and the panel gaps are terrible and, you know, they're having fires in the paint plant, paint line and so on. Tesla has to learn how to do what Detroit already knows how to do and what Japan already knows how to do, which is to make cars reliably and efficiently.
5:41 Steven Sinofsky? Or at least Germany and Japan.
5:42 Benedict Evans? Okay, well, to make cars reliably, well, Detroit doesn't make cars anymore, but make cars reliably and efficiently at scale. That's just a condition of entry. Tesla gets through production hell, that doesn't get them victory, that just gets them to continue to, that just keeps them in the game. What they also have to do is be doing something that the existing car industries can't do or will struggle to do for kind of deep structural reasons that they won't just be able to hire engineers and just add that. And that stuff has to be in some way fundamentally important. It has to be like a profound reason why you would buy a car. And it also has to be something that other tech companies will struggle to do, which is to the Apple versus Microsoft point, or the Apple versus Dell point.
6:23 Benedict Evans? So, Apple did stuff that IBM, for the sake of argument, found it hard to do. But Dell did it better in partnership with Microsoft and Intel. Equally, HTC were the first people to make Android smartphones, or the first people to make Android smartphones. But HTC tend not to have the right positioning in the marketplace to take all the rewards from that. And so you can look at the beautiful product, and you have to unpick, okay, how are they going to make millions of them? What is it in that that is difficult as opposed to easy for other people to do? Which of those things are fundamentally important? And which of those things also will not just BMW? You can't just say, well, BMW isn't going to be able to make software. You also have to say, well, BMW isn't going to be able to buy those
7:08 Benedict Evans? from some combination of Huawei and Shenzhen and Google. In order to get you to, okay, Tesla is going to be the new BMW or the new GM.
7:16 Steven Sinofsky? Right, that's a very important point. Like, in the sense of, instead of looking at this as disruption, another way to look at this is to use an old phrase that existed before disruption, and just refer to it as a secular shift. And that this is a shift, there's just a shift. We're going to all be in electric cars, and electric vehicles, and electric transportation at some point. Which is very different than it's disruptive, because disruptive tends to focus on the micro, like one company versus another company. Whereas if everything is going to move to this, it's not clear that it just means that only the companies that are currently doing something are going to benefit. And going back to the DVR example, it turns out DVRs are like a commodity now. Like, everything that can receive video has the capability of just being a DVR.
8:01 Benedict Evans? So we should probably dig through what those separate components are. I mean, the analogy that I use, I mean, what I try to do is to break it apart. So, there is the electric itself, which is the battery and the motors, and the powertrain and the controlling software for that.
8:17 Steven Sinofsky? Not exactly the most revolutionary technology.
8:19 Benedict Evans? Yeah, lithium ion batteries are not something that got invented by Tesla and Panasonic five years ago. There's that. Then there is the one level up, all the integration of the control systems around the car. And then there is the dashboard on the car and the experience, the broader experience of buying a car, like do you go through a dealer, are there charging stations everywhere? Do you have lots of fiddly little buttons or just one beautiful touchscreen? And we kind of look at those and think, well, what are the, how is, how are the dynamics of each of those going to play out and how hard are they for new people to play in? And if we kind of start with electric, the analogy I thought was kind of interesting here was to look at multi-touch.
9:01 Benedict Evans? So Apple was actually not the first company to sell a mobile phone with a capacity of multi-touch screen. I think there was an LG one a year earlier and maybe a couple of others. But Apple was the company that said, oh, my God, we can actually use this to totally change what it is to be a phone.
9:13 Steven Sinofsky? Well, it's actually an important point is that they, they weren't first at the using technology, but they were the first to integrate the technology and pull it all together.
9:21 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
9:22 Steven Sinofsky? Which, which, you know, as we just, as we go through and discuss each of these, like it's worth saying that I'm fairly optimistic on, on the prospects of being able to do, solve this equation and others are going to be fairly pessimistic. And this is really about just analyzing that conversation, not sort of debating the winner.
9:39 Benedict Evans? Yeah, exactly. So you have this fundamentally, you have this insight into a new piece of technology. Okay, we could use this to make a phone. Lithium ion batteries are going to get cheap enough that you could use them to make a car. This is like the foundational insight of Tesla. But if you go into a store today, there are a thousand phones with capacity of multi-touch screens. And so clearly just using a multi-touch screen of itself didn't get you anything because everyone could buy those. Even BlackBerry was selling phones with capacity of multi-touch screens. And so the, within that, we split that out. On the one hand, the legacy companies, so Nokia, BlackBerry, Palm, struggled to make a phone with a good capacity of multi-touch screen. On the other hand, in partnership with Google, Samsung, a lot of other people found it really
10:24 Benedict Evans? easy to make phones with capacity of multi-touch screens. And so today, the entire industry makes these things.
10:30 Steven Sinofsky? This is also just like, all of a sudden, everybody adds a notch to their phone.
10:33 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
10:34 Steven Sinofsky? Like something that appears like, whoa, that's going to be super tricky. All of a sudden, a supply chain appears, other people with expertise appear, and you have a lot of innovators sort of building the same thing.
10:46 Benedict Evans? Yeah, so this is the thing, if you look at the PC industry works, the way the mobile phone industry works, indeed, the way the car industry works. It's not that there is one company that has to work out how to make this thing. It's not that Bosch is going to have to learn electric. It's that you have a whole ecosystem of hundreds of different companies, hundreds of very big companies, full of good engineers, who have to work out how to make this thing. Many of whom have been making batteries and electric motors for a long time already, just not quite the same kind. And so as you look at electric, it seems pretty clear to me that on a like a five or 10 year view, and bear in mind, cars are on a five to 10 year replacement cycle, so it doesn't have to happen that quickly. The entire car supply chain will have reoriented around electric. And even more than that,
11:30 Benedict Evans? the entire electronics industry that already does electric stuff will reorient around making components for electric cars. So if you look at the kind of the teardowns of, say, a Chevy Volt, an awful lot of the value in that comes from people that were not traditionally car manufacturers, car component suppliers. They're not the traditional tier ones. It's all LG.
11:49 Steven Sinofsky? Right, but in fact, what's super interesting about that too is that the expertise at existing car companies is in acquiring those technologies, building them out, establishing those relationships, negotiating the contracts, and getting all of that to happen. Like, there's not like, for even GM that makes the Bolt and the Volt, it's not like there's this massive lithium ion group at the company.
12:11 Benedict Evans? Yeah, and so what you get to there is you sort of think, okay, the car companies are going to be able to go out and buy these components just the way they buy their existing components. And there's not some fundamental intellectual property here. There's also no disruption story. It's not like they're sitting thinking, oh, this is a terrible idea and we don't understand this, or, you know, it's an integration into their existing manufacturing process. On the other hand, if you're a German company that makes gearboxes for the car industry, you're not going to be able to switch to making lithium ion batteries. It's a totally different business. And so your gearbox business is either going to disappear or you're going to shift to marine engines.
12:49 Steven Sinofsky? And if your auto supply store on the corner, you know, and these cars don't need parts anymore, like... Yeah, that's like a thing to go short right now if you're in the business of speculating about timelines and things like that.
13:00 Benedict Evans? Yeah, if you're in the business of making radiators for cars, that business is going to go away and you're probably not going to replace that with a business making electric batteries or power control systems. So that will go. That's not even disruption, that's just your whole industry just disappears.
13:13 Steven Sinofsky? That's the secular shift.
13:14 Benedict Evans? Exactly.
13:15 Steven Sinofsky? It's like all of a sudden horses are now centered around different set of technologies and different places that you use them.
13:20 Benedict Evans? Exactly, but that's a different layer in the stack to the common factory. I mean, the analogy I used in my blog post was that for the sake of argument, the internet was radically disruptive to travel age and it's not disruptive at all to airline companies. Airlines still sell tickets, they sell them differently through different people, but they still run planes and that actually hasn't changed their business that much.
13:40 Steven Sinofsky? For cars, what an interesting view of this is the way that the change and the focus on safety permeated the car industry. There was an era in the 60s when nobody worked on safety. And then like one manufacturer, particularly like Volvo, picked up on safety and then the Germans picked up on safety. Partially due to regulations in Europe and things like that moving faster. And you know, oh my God, the American companies are not going to be able to have anti-lock brakes, they're not going to be able to have airbags, they're not going to be able to have all these things. And it turns out like now there's dozens of companies that contribute to that supply chain and it's just part of every car. You can't even differentiate on safety anymore because they're able to build that up and that's a car version of multi-touch.
14:17 Benedict Evans? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, there's an interesting kind of question in this, which is there is a new thing as opposed to are there sort of fundamental structural reasons why you're going to struggle to, to struggle to adjust to this. And so again, if you look at, for example, what happened with phones, Nokia had a, was totally oriented around what the handset, what the mobile operators wanted. They were totally oriented around optimization of component cost, around having a huge supply of building blocks that they could use to make 50 or 60 different phones every year.
14:56 Steven Sinofsky? Hundreds of models, like hundreds of, like it's mind boggling how many models they had.
15:00 Benedict Evans? Exactly, and so their whole structure was around.
15:04 Benedict Evans? Was deeply challenged by what the iPhone proposed because the iPhone proposes, okay, one phone, totally different components, presume it lasts a day instead of two weeks, presume it doesn't matter if it drops when you break it, presume it doesn't care at all about bandwidth consumption or memory, presume you're basically indifferent to the component cost because you're selling it for $600 instead of $150. And there are people at Nokia who say you will never be able to sell a phone for more than $150.
15:30 Steven Sinofsky? People at Microsoft would say that too.
15:32 Benedict Evans? Yeah, exactly. And so this is as though, this is more like the shift from ocean liners to aircraft. You know, it's not, it's, it's, the difference would be on the one hand, the shift from ocean liners to aircraft, on the other hand, the shift from propellers to jets. And the shift from propellers to jets is basically all the same companies. The shift from ocean liners to aircraft, it's not the same companies, although QNOD actually bought an airliner, an airline company in the 50s because they could thought maybe that was what they could, but of course it didn't work.
16:00 Steven Sinofsky? Well, and also that's like put cars to jets and Rolls Royce still being a leading jet manufacturer.
16:05 Benedict Evans? Yeah, exactly. So you have that question of is this some fundamental thing that they don't know how to do? Or is it they just haven't done it yet? And I think this is like a kind of a crucial misunderstanding people make, which is they've done it first, no one else is doing it today. Okay. Why is that? Is that because there's some fundamental structural reason they can't do it? Or is it because batteries are still $200 per kilowatt hour? And that's not cost competitive with gasoline, which incidentally is also a big reason why Tesla was still doing money. And they're waiting for the battery prices to come down and then going to do it more slowly.
16:38 Steven Sinofsky? And, and this is where it becomes very sort of in a sense emotional about disruption and like either you're, you're just like a very big bear on how car companies behave and that they're entrenched bureaucracies. And it is important to put car companies in some broader context. Like these are 100 year old companies that have survived many different waves of technology and many different changes. And in all fairness to them, they invented modern management. Like everything that's interesting about management sort of came out of.
17:09 Benedict Evans? Came out of GM.
17:10 Steven Sinofsky? Came out of GM. I mean, just as an ad, like everybody listening to this, please go read My Years at GM by Alfred Sloan. It's just an amazing, amazing book because you're going to recognize many things in that book that companies do today about how they manage brands, how they deal with distribution and networks and. And manufacturing and all of that kind of stuff, even if some of it appears dated to you because there's like labor unions and and things like that.
17:34 Benedict Evans? So the interesting kind of break point when one looks at cars is you kind of go up a level from the electric.
17:42 Benedict Evans? And so, I mean, a kind of a great kind of vignette of this is Tesla discovered the Model Three had a problem with the brakes. They pushed down over the air foamware update that fixes the problem with the brakes. And so if you look at like the way that a conventional car you would buy today is put together, there are dozens and dozens of separate subsystems in there, all of which come from from kind of separate vendors. So the ABS is a system, the backup camera is a system, the airbags are a system, and they all come from separate vendors. They're all integrated, as we were saying earlier, by the car manufacturer, and they want all of those systems to be commodities so they can get the best price on them. And the only place, if they if they have a user interface, obviously some of them have no user interface, if they have a user interface, that manifests as a button on the dashboard.
18:25 Benedict Evans? There's this old joke that you can see the org chart of a car company in the dashboard, and you can like see that the HVAC people hate the steering wheel people or something.
18:31 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah.
18:31 Benedict Evans? And so what you have is like an org structure that's set up to deal with these parts as components and not integrate them at all. And you want them to be not integrated because then you can just swap out Bosch for Lucas and it doesn't matter. And you then look at the way Tesla have built their car, and it's one central computer running an operating system as opposed to a real time operating system running like a real operating system on some Linux fork or something. And the way that this has been described is you go from basically complex cars with very simple software to actually very simple hardware but with complex software. So you actually have a computer controlling the car.
19:04 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah.
19:05 Benedict Evans? Which is also sort of an analogy of what happens with with with feature phones because there's the camera and there's the phone app and there's the SMS and they're not integrated except on the on the screen. And then you go to a smartphone where suddenly you've got a piece of software that's controlling all of these.
19:19 Steven Sinofsky? Well, and that's very similar, you know, the PC industry actually had this exact, the reason that there are none of the PC makers, other than Apple in a sense, are successful phone makers, is because they were exactly like Detroit. They they had a graphics group, they had a peripheral group, they had an I/O group, they had a storage.
19:36 Benedict Evans? Yes, I used to describe Dell as being like. A very being a very specialized version of FedEx.
19:40 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah, oh, yeah.
19:41 Benedict Evans? That they buy the parts and kind of put them together on the way to getting them to you. They're a logistics business as much as they are a technology business.
19:47 Steven Sinofsky? Well, and very.
19:48 Benedict Evans? There's lots of cool technology inside Dell as well, but basically they're an assembly business and which is also what Detroit was and what Apple isn't.
19:54 Steven Sinofsky? And if you look at the literally look at the headcount of those companies, like the number of mechanical engineers relative to the number of supply chain managers, procurement people. And, you know, QA people, it's sort of out of whack like relative to what you would see at Apple.
20:09 Benedict Evans? So this gets but this gets you to kind of an interesting point like we've kind of we're kind of setting aside electric. It seems pretty clear electric is a commodity over time. You go up one level. This stuff is stuff that's a bit kind of institutionally harder for car companies to think about. Because they've got a whole org chart that says, well, I've got an ABS man and I've got a backup camera person and I've got a brake light person. And no Tesla doesn't have a backup light person backup Tesla has a software team.
20:35 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah, well, and it it's and now speaking as a manager like this is a very, very real thing like you're you're building your new electric car at big exec existing car company. And it's going to have ABS brakes in it. So you're going to go to your brake expert.
20:50 Benedict Evans? Yes.
20:50 Steven Sinofsky? Like you're not going to go to the software team and say, make me some brakes.
20:54 Benedict Evans? Yes, it's not the software teams job. It's not that the software team make a device driver for the brakes. It's the brake people give you the brakes.
21:00 Steven Sinofsky? Right. And so the brake people are the brake people and they're going to look at this problem and they're going to go, okay, first job, go to Bosch. And go get the brakes that I'm going to use for this. And in fact, some of this actually manifests itself in my Chevy Bolt. Because like it's very clear that they went like they for climate for the heater and the and the AC. They went to the existing heater and AC people and said, I need a heater and an AC. Because one of the things that's super weird is like it's not really integrated with the battery powertrain that's in the car. And all and it's basically an old school kind of heater.
21:34 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
21:34 Steven Sinofsky? And the same with the dashboard. It's like like the Chevy Bolt dashboard looks like a GM dashboard from all the other cars.
21:41 Benedict Evans? Yes.
21:42 Steven Sinofsky? And you and you see this through through the whole experience. And so that's an interesting.
21:47 Benedict Evans? Well, it's an interesting locus for disruption because it's easier. It's a lot easier to argue that this is difficult for car companies to adjust to than it is for electric per se. I think and you see that manifest in things like, you know, the Tesla software update and in. To some extent Tesla's ability to add new capabilities or new features to the car kind of over the, never mind autonomy, which we may come to later, but you can do this, you can do that, it can do this thing or that cool thing and you can just decide to add it as opposed to your conventional car, which as I've got a BMW three series, it will get new features. When I buy a new BMW, I will not get new features.
22:23 Steven Sinofsky? Well, you don't expect them, you don't want them. But that really does speak to it. It is quite conceivable that there's a bunch of stuff that Tesla as a company is going to do that is in fact very, very difficult for car companies to do.
22:40 Benedict Evans? The question I think is how this kind of gets to one of the kind of the four things we talked about earlier. How much does that change the competitive advantage of the car? And I think we had a conversation about this a few weeks ago where you were comparing this with laptops and phones. Does Tesla's approach produce a better car or does it produce a different car?
23:00 Steven Sinofsky? And this notion of better and different, like this is why I think too, it's such an emotional debate for people when they sit in a Tesla versus sitting in a Chevy Bolt or sitting in a gas combustion car is like it feels like the Tesla experience is it's a very different kind of car.
23:20 Benedict Evans? And you also have, you have to, of course, a lot, when people talk about the Tesla experience, a lot of what they're actually saying is stuff that's generic to electric. So they say, oh my God, have you felt the acceleration? You do understand in 10 years, the crappiest GM car you can buy will have the same acceleration because that's just electric.
23:34 Steven Sinofsky? Like I came from a Prius to my Bolt and like the thing that I'm like, oh my God, this is the fastest car I've ever owned. And this is very, very similar. This is one of the things that happened with the original tablet PC that we made at Microsoft, which was in around 2000. All of a sudden, like we did these internal surveys. Do you love your new tablet PC? We had like gotten like a hundred units and deployed them for a test. And everybody was like, this is the greatest PC I ever owned. And like, all of a sudden we're like, oh my God, we're onto something. It's really big. And then we dug into the research a little bit and we realized that, well, the thing is that these new tablet PCs that we had just made, like these one offs were actually made to be super, super good
24:16 Steven Sinofsky? PCs. They actually weighed like three pounds and they were super thin and they had really great screens on them because of the pen screen was made really well. And so we realized nobody was actually using ink at all. They just love the fact that it was compared to their seven and a half pound ThinkPad.
24:34 Benedict Evans? This, yeah, this is a sampling problem, isn't it?
24:35 Steven Sinofsky? It was the smallest, lightest laptop they'd ever used.
24:38 Benedict Evans? But I think the thing about the lap, the thing about the sort of the Tesla integration is, you know, the first point is we sort of, a big part of the experience is the acceleration. All cars will have that. That's not Tesla. That's just electric.
24:50 Steven Sinofsky? And all cars will have no maintenance. They won't have oil changes.
24:52 Benedict Evans? They won't have oil changes.
24:53 Steven Sinofsky? They will be quiet.
24:54 Benedict Evans? This will just, this is just electric. This is not Tesla.
24:56 Steven Sinofsky? And in all fairness, I think most of them are gonna like end up with a similar like miles per kilowatt hour kind of range. Cause the physics is sort of, everybody shares these physics. And there's not all this leakage that you might experience with choices you make and horsepower and gas combustion engines and stuff. There'll be a variance, of course, but even if you look today, like they're really pretty clustered around the same sets of of measurements.
25:20 Benedict Evans? Exactly. So the electric stuff is a commodity. The then when you get to kind of the integration of these components, you can argue, well, it's going to be a lot more difficult for legacy car companies to do this.
25:29 Steven Sinofsky? Structurally, like by the org chart.
25:31 Benedict Evans? Yeah, they actually have actual reasons.
25:32 Steven Sinofsky? Shipping the org chart in the car.
25:33 Benedict Evans? They have actual reasons why it's difficult for them to do this. What's not quite so clear to me is whether that translates into a reason why you would or wouldn't buy the device, by why you wouldn't or wouldn't buy the car. And I think the analogy, what you, I think what you were talking about a couple of weeks ago, was sort of the difference between an Apple laptop, where they use, there's no choice of any of the components and it's super, super optimized and the case is made out of machined aluminium to fit each component. And so the laptop is really, really thin and has really good battery life and so on. As opposed to a Dell laptop where you've got a choice of 45 different components and you can swap and you can have this or you can have that. And that means there's more empty space inside the laptop because they've got room for the bits you didn't choose and it's got to fit four different components.
26:13 Steven Sinofsky? Right, right.
26:14 Benedict Evans? And it might have 10% worth battery life because it's not super optimized. The difference is, okay, it's also you have the choice of all the components. And I think that sort of the Tesla versus GM conversation, that is it super, super optimized and hyper designed around one specific configuration? Or is it, you know, okay, we're running, making five different cars on this line and we'll, we'll mix and match and we'll get this and we'll get that. I mean, the example I saw that Mercedes have just announced an SUV, an electric SUV, and they're putting the, the electric motors in the front, under the hood. Instead of kind of down on the chassis level next to the axles, which is what Tesla is doing. And if you're only making electric cars, it's better to do it the way Tesla is doing. Of course, Mercedes is making on this on a line, which is also making like the three
26:58 Benedict Evans? series and the C and whatever it is. And therefore, it's more efficient if they actually have sort of some overlap in the mechanical processes there. And you can argue, well, maybe they'll lose 5% battery life by doing it like that, or the weight distribution won't be quite so good. On the other hand, they might save 10% on the cost of the amount of making the thing, which means it's $5,000 cheaper.
27:16 Steven Sinofsky? This is, this is, it's so important to really hammer this point home because this is, this is in a sense disruption, but it's disruption at a, at a very micro level within an organization. When we were building Surface and ARM PCs at Microsoft, like one of the things that happened is we showed up and we said, look, when you use ARM chips, the graphics card is like right next to the CPU and they're all part of the same thing. You can't buy an ARM chip from one vendor and a graphics chip from another and mix and match them. And like most of the people who traditionally make PCs, they, I was looking at across the table from the graphics person and from the CPU person, and they didn't know who-
27:54 Benedict Evans? Okay, which of us is getting fired?
27:56 Steven Sinofsky? They thought literally one of them was gonna not get to do their job. And, and then it went another level where they're like, well, we, we actually need to leave room in order to be able to swap out like a new CPU because if we get a different one in the middle of the production run, we want to save all of that upfront engineering cost on the chassis and on the assembly line. And we're like, well, the thing is they all just come soldered to a board at manufacture time, so there's no, you can't switch them. And the dimensions, the CPU could just move around a whole bunch, like it'll all change. And they literally couldn't, they just weren't interested in making it because like they didn't know what their job would be if they weren't optimizing that particular thing.
28:37 Steven Sinofsky? And, and more importantly, they didn't know what their job would be if they couldn't change around the parts because their whole economics of what they were building was based on optimizing the inbound supply chain for switching different things. Plus, the tech enthusiast side of it, the purchasers who were like- We need to have a bunch of graphics on this this device, so we're going to up the graphics level, or we need this device to have longer battery life, so we're going to lower that. And the marketing people who want to have like good, better, best for every single PC, they couldn't imagine just having like good, better, best be defined like Apple does by amount of storage or screen size.
29:16 Steven Sinofsky? Like, the Mac all-in-one desktop was always just small, medium, and large. And like, they were basically the same, except for the screen size, which turns out to be a very consumer-oriented way. And what's going to happen with cars is going to be very interesting, because it's not just that offering, it's the whole purchase process, supply process, advertising, dealer compensation process, all of these things.
29:41 Benedict Evans? There's a whole kind of interesting question around what electric does to the car industry, which is that if you can imagine like a $15,000 car that does nought to 60 in three seconds. And so, all of the questions.
29:54 Steven Sinofsky? And is super safe, like by default? Low maintenance?
29:57 Benedict Evans? That said, of course, a Porsche still drives, well, electric Porsche will drive an awful lot better than an electric Tesla, because just because it goes fast in a straight line, there's more to being a good car than that. But it does remove like layers of like you buy the bigger engine. I mean, again, I've got like a, I have like a seven or eight-year-old BMW that I bought secondhand, and it's, I don't even know what the engine is. But you look at the badges on the back, and it's, is it the 328, or the 330, or the 335, or the 335i? And like, that will not mean anything. There will be, there will be one gearbox, and it will be, you know, so those differentiations within the car will go away. There will not be different gearboxes.
30:31 Steven Sinofsky? So how do you, so one last thing we have to talk about, though, is the really the big one for, you know, the sense of his software-eating transportation is, you know, the very long-term vision of like where autonomy fits into all of this.
30:43 Benedict Evans? So this is the thing, I mean, if we kind of go back to our four layers, so there was the electric, there is the kind of the integrations, which we've just kind of been kind of musing about, there is the driver experience, and then there was, you know, the driver and the dealers, and the updates, and the on-screen dashboard, and then there was the autonomous part. And if you kind of go through those, the electric's a commodity. The integration stuff is a bunch of interesting internal questions in the supply chain of the car manufacturers, but it's not terribly clear that translates into a different car, or a car with strong competitive advantage. There's the dashboard experience, and then there's the autonomous part. And there's the dashboard, and the dealers, and everything else. And then I find-
31:20 Steven Sinofsky? The experience, the car experience.
31:22 Benedict Evans? So I kind of- Talk briefly on the dashboard and then kind of talk about autonomy. I think it's much the easiest place to locate or disruption is in the dashboard. Because of all the things we've been talking about about the org chart. It's really hard for a traditional car company to say, we're not going to have any manual controls in the car. Except for like a few.
31:40 Steven Sinofsky? Well, BMW tried it with the seven series like 20 years ago.
31:43 Benedict Evans? We're only given up, but this is like literally none like there was, there was, there were the, there were the sticks on the, on the steering wheel. And then there's a screen.
31:49 Steven Sinofsky? Yep.
31:49 Benedict Evans? And I think there's a bunch of reasons why it's really hard for legacy car companies to do that. The question is, is this like iPhone hard? Or is this when you buy an iPhone, it activates with AT&T over the.
32:03 Steven Sinofsky? Right, right.
32:04 Benedict Evans? That's the.
32:04 Steven Sinofsky? Is it channel hard or is, is it like physics hard?
32:07 Benedict Evans? Yeah. And is it, does it make a fundamental difference to people's willingness to buy the car? I mean, I did a totally unscientific Twitter poll. My question was, if BMW and Tesla and BMW Mercedes Tesla are all selling a car with exactly the same, same drivetrain. Like the same acceleration, same electric, everything is exactly the same. The only difference is that you have the big screen dashboard as opposed to the Mercedes or BMW dashboard. How excited would we be about Tesla as a company? And it's like, well, would this really be a $50 billion company?
32:37 Steven Sinofsky? Well, and that was what it was. Two things on that. One is that, of course, you, you have to factor into that kind of choice. All of the like the, the negative selling that will happen from, from car companies without that. They will talk about safety, driver distraction. They will literally go to the government and try to get dashboards like that banned. Like this is exactly what Detroit did, has been doing for decades over electric.
33:01 Benedict Evans? Yep.
33:01 Steven Sinofsky? The phrase range anxiety was not dreamed up by the physicists at GM. It was dreamed up by the marketing people selling against electric vehicles.
33:11 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
33:11 Steven Sinofsky? And then the other half of that is just going to be like the, the, the fans of gas combustion engines and the fans of existing companies. Like, well, if company XYZ that I love doesn't have an all in one dash, that means that they're bad.
33:25 Benedict Evans? Yep.
33:26 Steven Sinofsky? And but it doesn't. The thing about it is is that these lining up brands like this. This is again, go back and read my years at GM because Detroit mastered the art of selling the same thing to different people at different prices.
33:40 Benedict Evans? With slightly different.
33:40 Steven Sinofsky? With slightly, slightly different things. I mean, we had a Camaro type LT and I remember that when I was little because it had this LT right on the door where I would open it. And I always asked my mom, what does LT mean? My mom had no idea. She just knew it was a Camaro, which was not the same as a Firebird or as a Trans Am, even though they all looked like very, like Burt Reynolds sort of drove the same car.
34:03 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
34:03 Steven Sinofsky? As we had, but it didn't have an Eagle on it.
34:05 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
34:05 Steven Sinofsky? Like mom's like, oh, the Eagle is really expensive. I'm like, for the sticker?
34:09 Benedict Evans? They gave him one.
34:10 Steven Sinofsky? Right, right. Well, that's a different thing. So, okay, but the autonomy is the software play.
34:15 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
34:15 Steven Sinofsky? So like now.
34:16 Benedict Evans? It's not, it's not the dashboard. I think what we're getting at is the dashboard is fine. This is not the wealth of nations. This is not the hundred billion dollar change.
34:24 Steven Sinofsky? Right, right.
34:25 Benedict Evans? It's the autonomy because electric is a commodity. The dash, the integration is a commodity. The dashboard is fine. It's autonomy is the question. And here we, well, there's an autonomy question and there's a disruption conversation. And the disruption conversation in this is Tesla is not, who are the people who are competing here? It's not Silicon Valley Software Company versus dumb Detroit guys.
34:47 Steven Sinofsky? Right.
34:47 Benedict Evans? It's Silicon Valley Software Company versus 20 other Silicon Valley Software Companies, plus Silicon Valley Software Companies.
34:52 Steven Sinofsky? And China.
34:53 Benedict Evans? That's plus China, plus Silicon Valley Software Company that got bought by the dumb Detroit guys. Sorry, Detroit, but you know what I mean.
35:00 Steven Sinofsky? That's what they, that's, believe me, that's what they said when that happened.
35:03 Benedict Evans? Yeah, who the Detroit guys or the Silicon Valley guys?
35:05 Steven Sinofsky? Either way.
35:05 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
35:06 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah.
35:06 Benedict Evans? So the question here is, there's clearly, this is a fundamental, profound new technology. You can, we can have a whole other conversation about how long away. We've done a lot of other podcasts about when will autonomy come.
35:18 Steven Sinofsky? Right, right.
35:18 Benedict Evans? What will happen as a result of that?
35:19 Steven Sinofsky? And that, and the cities and towns will change and lives will change and everything changes.
35:23 Benedict Evans? Exactly. Everything changes. But who is trying to build this right now? Google, all the big Chinese tech companies, Cruise, several dozen smaller companies trying to build component Of this, all of which at some point will be available for sale to anybody who gets any of this working.
35:41 Steven Sinofsky? Plus, like, people who make components all have projects going on.
35:44 Benedict Evans? Exactly.
35:45 Steven Sinofsky? If you make LiDAR, you you are affiliated with projects.
35:48 Benedict Evans? Yeah, so there's LiDAR companies, there's mapping companies, there's, you know, all radar companies, there's all sorts of people, there's simulation companies.
35:54 Steven Sinofsky? All the delivery companies, all the trucking companies.
35:56 Benedict Evans? But also there's people building all the sort of disaggregated, building all of these components. So you've got Waymo building their own LiDAR, building their own camera systems, building their own databases, building their own mapping systems and their own simulation tools. On the other hand, Voyage will buy the simulation tool from Applied Intuition and they'll buy the mapping from Deep Maps both. But the point is there is a whole ecosystem that's trying to create autonomy. And so within that ecosystem, Tesla is one company trying to build this as well. Now, and there's a conversation about where we think Tesla is positioned within the kind of the battle to build autonomy. From a disruption conversation, it's not they're all disruptive or they're all innovative companies or they're all new companies.
36:33 Steven Sinofsky? Well, they're all participating in this giant transformation.
36:36 Benedict Evans? Exactly.
36:36 Steven Sinofsky? A whole new scenario, all at the same time.
36:38 Benedict Evans? Exactly. So there is no sort of the new people are doing something that the old people will want, won't want to do. It's there's 50 new people competing against each other.
36:45 Steven Sinofsky? And and and also, depending on where they are, these people are all coming out of the same universities, studying the same kinds of machine learning.
36:54 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
36:55 Steven Sinofsky? And and then they're all ending up these companies and they're not, and they're all spinning off from those companies and they're all changing jobs. Like, there's, this is a whole community of knowledge that's being built at this at one time.
37:05 Benedict Evans? So there's a, there's another point in here, which has sort of been implicit in several of the sort of previous things we've talked about, which is you have the sense that there is an entire ecosystem. So there is a whole ecosystem making gasoline car engine components and supply chain. There's a whole ecosystem making, part of the reason that Apple ran into such difficulty in the eighties and nineties was Apple was trying to compete with the entire ecosystem. They weren't just trying to compete with Microsoft. They were also trying to compete with all the people who were selling component. And they weren't trying to compete with Dell. They were trying to compete with Microsoft and Dell and the 300 companies.
37:36 Steven Sinofsky? And Intel.
37:37 Benedict Evans? And Intel and the 300 people who sold.
37:39 Steven Sinofsky? And Seagate and everybody.
37:40 Benedict Evans? And everybody who sold stuff to Dell. They were trying to out compete the entire ecosystem.
37:45 Steven Sinofsky? So yeah, you have to really understand what was going on. Not that that wasn't, but to what this means is that there was, Apple had to make one decision for every component that made a Mac. And that was the only one they could make. So when they picked like a hard drive, they had to pick the brand of hard drive, write all the firmware, integrate it into the operating system and do all that. And then they were done. And if like the industry went a different direction, they would just get left behind.
38:11 Benedict Evans? Yeah. And if Dell decided, hey, we've got a better return on that drive versus this. So if they could just stop shipping Seagate and start shipping Macs.
38:19 Steven Sinofsky? And it's super important because of the maturity of the industry. You, you actually needed that flexibility then because you just didn't know where things were going to go. Like famously, Apple like dragged out like their Apple talk for a very, very long time, even though networking had all moved on to TCP IP. And, and then, and then.
38:37 Benedict Evans? And then they were on SCUSI.
38:38 Steven Sinofsky? And then they were on SCUSI and then they were on Firewire and they were all, that whole era, they seemed almost like a generation behind, if they were even behind at all. Like sometimes they picked Firewire and it just never made it to the PC ecosystem.
38:51 Benedict Evans? Yeah. And I think, I, I hear that, think about this when I see Tesla making their own this or making their own that. And you think, okay, set aside the fact that you have a major cash flow problem and why are you spending money to do this rather than just buying?
39:03 Steven Sinofsky? Yeah, don't worry about that.
39:04 Benedict Evans? Never mind the cash flow question. Why are you competing? Why do you, do you want to compete with the entire ecosystem? Or should you be riding on top of that ecosystem and finding the unique thing that you alone can do? And should you bet that you will be the only person doing X when there's a whole ecosystem that's trying to do X?
39:20 Steven Sinofsky? And also, this is where it has a lot of parallels to the early Mac because it's not just that they have to do all that, which is almost insurmountable, the way that at least we described it, but they have to do it at a fairly low volume. Yeah, like so and the low volume in many of these things is what sort of makes it really, really difficult because then you can't even get the attention of manufacturers to help you, even if they're like sort of white labeled parts of it.
39:45 Benedict Evans? Yeah, so this is I've heard sort of gossip about this with the in the car supply chain that, of course, Tesla, a lot of the bits of inside a Tesla are bought from the car supply chain. Like, most of the bits inside a Tesla come from the like they're not making.
39:56 Steven Sinofsky? He did not do a Henry Ford and go to go and buy tires starting from rubber.
40:00 Benedict Evans? They're not making their own glass for the windows, right like that. They're not making their own motors to wind the seats backwards and forwards. And of course, the problem is the volume is so low that they can't get the best deals for the best manufacturers, which is sort of a it's part of that whole ecosystem question. And so we kind of come back to the autonomy question again, like with the electric piece. So let me sort of think about another way of putting this. So the kind of the bull case here would be Tesla is competing with car companies at doing software. Like they'll win and then in autonomy, they're competing with software companies at doing cars. They'll win. The bare case is, no, no, no, no, Tesla is competing in cars. Tesla is competing with car companies at doing cars and they're competing with software companies at doing software.
40:42 Benedict Evans? And so that sort of gets you back to the kind of the autonomy, kind of, is it disruption is only one of the strands through this. But like, where are your, what's your competitive positioning? Is it that you've done something no one else can do? Is it that you've or are you just trying to compete with a whole industry at doing something that industry knows how to do? And where do you want to kind of put yourself within that? I mean, I think this is part of the kind of the genius of the turn of the Tim Crook era at Apple is no, we're not going to make all the phones ourselves. Why would we make our phones the phones themselves? No, we're not going to make the chips ourselves. No, we're not going to design this. We will pick a certain number of kind of key points of leverage and make those ourselves. But we're not designing the own gyroscope.
41:19 Steven Sinofsky? Which is these are these incredible lessons from the Mac era.
41:24 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
41:24 Steven Sinofsky? And and they're putting them to work. And this notion of of a learning company is what's incredibly important. And that's one of the things I would like to raise is this is a great car company example, which is we talked about my years at GM and the early days. Well, also another famous GM experiment was the GM Saturn brand, which was this experiment in the eighties that where GM was looking at Japan and they were losing everywhere. They couldn't make small cars, they couldn't make fuel efficiency, labor costs were too high, the dealer experience was hard. You know, back when in the eighties, when you wanted to buy a Toyota, you would just go in and they would say, do you want a red one? A black one or a white one? And if you went to go buy an American car, it was all the stereotypes of the worst. They would sweat you in a small room forever.
42:07 Steven Sinofsky? You would have to like option packages number T four, three, or a QR seven, and you would have to figure out, and they overlapped, and it was a horrible experience. So what GM did is they did Clay Christensen before the book existed, which is they started a whole brand. They hired all different people. They relaxed every constraint imaginable. And they said, go do it. Except to your point, what they were trying to do was have this one badge of GM compete with all of Japan. And it turns out like it's very, very hard to do that. And it ended up costing billions of dollars and they shut the whole thing down as a failure. And books have been written. It's another great book. It's about the history of Saturn. And so like, did they really? Did they fail because they couldn't make all the changes? Or they couldn't recognize the changes?
42:51 Steven Sinofsky? Or they misunderstood what was really going on?
42:55 Benedict Evans? Yes, I mean, I suppose you could argue that the kind of the Saturn thesis would have been that we'll shut down all of GM and Saturn will become GM. And at that point, maybe it would work. But as long as you're going to kind of continue running it as a separate thing, well, what about the rest of GM?
43:08 Steven Sinofsky? And that's where like so much of this becomes very, very interesting because ultimately, like your framework for thinking about Tesla, it just, it really raises so many very interesting questions. And I think it all comes back to what our founders are always needing to make sure that they think about, which is it's never just the product. It's never just the price. It's never just the way you promote it and use channel management. And it's never just about the pricing structure.
43:35 Benedict Evans? Yeah.
43:35 Steven Sinofsky? Like you have to really consider all of these elements.
43:38 Benedict Evans? The thing I was thinking about this recently was like one of the sort of, if I'd like, the accumulated learning over my career is I'm always a sucker for a beautiful product.
43:47 Steven Sinofsky? Right.
43:47 Benedict Evans? And the thing that I've learned over time is okay, yes, but what's the route to market? Yes, but what's your differentiation? Yes, but how are you getting the components? Yes, but what's your sales process? Yes, but.
43:58 Steven Sinofsky? Yes, but.
43:59 Benedict Evans? And.
44:00 Steven Sinofsky? Really, our final thought on this is, I think, is that the beautiful product can really get you in front of a customer, but it takes a lot of things to get you in front of all of the customers. Or you can get in front of all of the customers, but it's going to take a lot more to fully meet their needs in a differentiated way and get the price and the margins that you need. And all of those things are really coming together. And I think where we're seeing things now is that you have to start to consider all of those and not just any one. And that's what's so interesting about this. Right. Thank you. Thank you.
44:31 Speaker 04 We hope you enjoyed this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about all things tech, innovation, and how to build the next generation of companies, be sure to visit future.com where you'll find essays, explainers, and more from those on the front lines of the future. You can also sign up for our newsletter, which curates the best of what's published on future and beyond. Just go to future.com/newsletter. Thanks again for listening.
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