Self-Driving's Quiet Boom, Tech's New IPO Window, Worldcoin's Strange Debut — With Sarah Kunst

Sarah Kunst is the managing director at Cleo Capital. She joins Big Technology this week for a recap of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Self-driving cars, Waymo & Cruise 2) Meta's new personalized chatbots 3) Threads' declining usership 4) Sam Altman's Worldcoin 5) DateMe docs 6) What Stripe's IPO means for the broader market. Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Self-driving cars are quietly taking off, Metas building a bunch of new chatbots. What is WorldCoin exactly? And the rise of Datemi docs? We'll break down this week's news on the other side of this break. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format. Sarah Kunst is with us today. She's the Managing Director of KBO Capital, a great voice on technology. You're going to love what she has to say about what's going on in the industry. Welcome, Sarah.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm excited to be here and talk about everything going on.

• 1:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thrilled to have you here. Been watching you a bunch on CNBC lately, so I was like, we gotta get Sarah on the show, talk about some of the things that we're watching. So it's awesome that you're here. Why don't we start with self-driving? Because I'm here in San Francisco. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been hopping in self-driving cars. And we have a podcast with Cal Vogt that's coming up, the CEO of Cruise, that we're going to go deeper into this. But it's just like a watershed week, I think, for self-driving. Waymo just said it's going to Expand into Austin, that's its fourth city. And Cruise today and Big Technology announced that it's going to expand into LA in the coming weeks. That's gonna be the eighth city that it has operations in as it goes toward ride hailing of these AVs.

• 2:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's your take on A, like the state of this? Am I getting over my skis in terms of my belief that this is sort of the most underrated tech story of the year? If not the last few years? And is it gonna be real?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, one thing I'll say before I jump into all of that is it's fascinating that Austin is so early on this. Because I remember until relatively recently, like Uber was banned in Austin. You know, it kind of went back and forth, but there were years where you'd show up at South by and it's like, oh, you have to download this other random app. Because we don't use, we don't use Uber here. And so, you know, it's fascinating to see that change. You know, I live in San Francisco and you kind of get used to self-driving cars. And the way that I think about them day to day is it's a little bit like when you see the cars that are like the, the student driver cars. In that, you know, you kind of roll your eyes, you're like a little bit more patient and you kind of roll your eyes.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Because you know, they're gonna like just not quite drive the way everybody else is. And that doesn't mean by the way, that the way everybody else is driving is good because, you know, city drivers. But there's a lot of like four-way stops where it's just like, dude, you can go. And I would honk, but you're a car with nobody in it. So I'm, everybody's just gonna kind of be vaguely annoyed and cut you off. It's funny how quickly it feels normal.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I think it's the future, I suspect at scale, what we'll see a lot more of in the next like five years is what like Ford is doing. Last summer I was, I was home in Michigan where I'm from and, and got to, to test drive a Ford Lightning. Their, their electric truck and the interesting thing is it has self-driving, right? So, you know, driving a couple hundred miles of just like flat, empty highway. To get to my parents' house from, from, you know, the airport. And you know, my, my then boyfriend now fiance is just like sitting there and he's like, I don't, I have a really funny video where he's just kind of like, I don't know what to do. Cause like, I don't need to touch the wheel and you get in the way of it kind of when you do,

• 4:39Speaker 01

  because it tries to change lanes and everything. Um, and it can do it incredibly well, but like you can't totally reclaim your time because presumably for liability reasons, you still have to like, kind of be looking at the screen. So if you're just like fully on like a laptop or a phone, they'll be like, hey, you know, they'll kind of like beep at you. I think that's the near term future and I think it's already here a lot more than we realize in like ways big and small, like assisted parking on Hondas and stuff. Um, it is still weird though, when you realize that there's a bunch of cars with literally no one in them, um, or everybody's in the backseat and there's no driver.

• 5:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, fully autonomous, right? To me, this was sort of my takeaway, having spent the past few weeks riding in the cars and speaking with the executives. The hardest part was just to get this working in one or two cities. And what I'm hearing from them and what, what listeners will hear from Kyle Vogt, from Cruise in the next couple of weeks is that, once you get that, a lot of this technology is generalizable, so you can apply it from one city to the other. And then your real issue becomes supply, like how do you make the vehicles? And that's why I think we're really at an inflection point. I mean, having ridden in the Waymo and the Cruise vehicles in San Francisco, like, yes, they drive differently from humans, but they are smooth. And they, it feels like a much better driving experience.

• 6:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can text, you can do work in them, you can read in them as opposed to your typical experience in San Francisco, where after you go up or down a hill, you're ready to puke. So this is what I'm saying. I'm, I think that this is, this is a real inflection point and it's an underappreciated story because in last decade, everybody was talking about how this was real and it just wasn't, but it actually does feel real this time. What do you think?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I it's real, right? Like I I when when you're consistently mad at something because it's getting in your way, whether or not you like it, you have to admit it's real. And if you live in San Francisco, you know, you don't even notice it anymore. I I think that, you know, there's a question of scale, and that goes to everything from, you know, sort of who's buying these? How are they getting put on the road? You know, I I think we're probably a relatively far way off from individual private people at any scale buying these vehicles. You know, and and then like, kind of what do they replace? Like, I usually take an Uber if I'm

• 7:10Speaker 01

  driving, it's because I kind of feel like driving usually. There's there's a lot of these kinds of questions. Are you actually going to put, you know, your senile grandma or your infant child in one to transport them? Like, you know, is that even going to be legal to do? I don't know in the shorter term. So like 10 years from now, like this episode is going to be like a meme and we're going to look like, you know, total like get with the program, whatever. But I think in the the near term, there are a lot of questions. And then also just who pays for it, right? In terms of of, you know, who's paying for the insurance, which is a huge piece of it, you know, car insurance is is really an American health insurance. You're paying not really to replace the car, but to replace anything you damage on people that you might hit.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And it's not a small cost. So, you know, it it there's a lot of logistical questions, especially in cities that are pretty flat, pretty grid like they don't have a lot of extreme weather, things like that. You know, getting a car to to drive itself is not necessarily the hard part. I think it's going to be the sort of soft skills around it that are going to take longer to get to ubiquity.

• 8:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting. I think after riding in Waymos for the past week, and I've been in a dozen of these, about a dozen of these Waymo and cruise rides, I would happily put an infant in there. Maybe I need some more testing data. Maybe I'm a little too credulous.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. Do you have an infant, though?

• 8:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not yet. And also, I really hope my wife doesn't listen to this part of the episode. So. Anyway, let's move on. So Meta is releasing a series or has under development a series of chatbots. They'll take on personas from people in history, including like Abe Lincoln. This is from the Financial Times. They can have human-like discussions with Meta's nearly four billion users. And these people said, some of the people inside the company said that the chatbots, which staffers have dubbed personas, yeah, will take the form of these different characters to, you know, they will have a new search function. They'll offer recommendations and they can be a fun product to people with people to play with.

• 9:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  I, I'm generally puzzled by how infatuated the tech world is at creating these personas for people to play with. I mean, we have a billion dollar startup character AI. You can actually put like basically tell Bing or ChatGPT to, you know, please be somebody from history and it will. And I'm sure there's like some limited appeal to that. But why does everybody seem to go to these type of persona bots as like they're like number one or number two application of this generative AI technology?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  You know, tech is good at building things and usually a little bit less good about sort of thinking about the applications. And I'll, I'll pick on, you know, stock in Meta a little bit in part because it's just been such whiplash for me to go from being a huge, you know, Meta bear last year during the legless metaverse days to now a little bit of a bull with, with the stuff they're doing around AI. But, you know, I remember way back in the day, Facebook would be like, hey, we're going to show you pictures of somebody you haven't talked to in a while. And here's all these old pictures of you with them and that you're no longer tagged with. And it's like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, that's called an ex-boyfriend. And just because you've been with Priscilla since you're like 19, right?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Doesn't mean that like you can't, you can't like hire people who understand this, right? And so there's always been a little bit of that uncanny valley sort of human element that, that is missing in a lot of these sort of tech conversations. And I think this is another example, like her is not a love story. It is a dystopian, depressing story about like a horrible potential future. And the fact that there's going to be lots of people listening to this who totally disagree with me on that says like a lot about the industry that we're in. And so I

• 11:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, it's already happening. There's a lot of dudes falling in love with their chatbots.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  You know, I guess anything that helps cure toxic masculinity. The problem is they're probably making chatbots that never interrupt them, never talk back and always tell them what they need for dinner. So, you know, it's, it's weird and I don't know if it's the most useful thing. I also don't know, to be totally honest, if it's the smartest thing. I, I have done a lot in crypto for a long time. And to some extent, I think that, that, that generative AI should feel a little bit like, you know, what I think some of the smartest people in crypto have broadly always felt, which is you shouldn't have to know you're using it. If you're, you know, using the

• 11:52Speaker 01

  blockchain to settle some contract in some like middle layer of whatever, like, you know, if Plaid ends up like embedding blockchain at some point to like keep an immutable ledger of whatever, you probably don't want Plaid to rebrand as a blockchain company, at least in 23, maybe in 21. I, I think AI is kind of the same way, which is that like, we use AI constantly in, you know, technologies from driving cars to, you know, using like, almost any social media platform, like any, you know, things like this, we're on a streaming platform right now. There's tons of AI that's built into things because it makes it easier to use the technology. And for the most part, you don't know about it or need to know about it.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  I suspect that for Facebook, for Meta, the killer applications around AI are going to be, you know, really smart kind of workarounds with ad targeting and like finding new products you want or content you want to see, not necessarily a bot. And to some extent, that bot is probably mainly there to train you and get your data consensually so that they don't run into some of the problems that OpenAI has right now around getting sued by like the Sarah Silvermans of the world for taking that.

• 13:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, one of the most interesting things last week that came out of Snap's earnings call that I don't think people are fully appreciating was that they are using the data from their MyAI bot to target ads. And you have to, I think, oh, no, no, it's now rolled out to everyone. It used to be that if you paid, you got access to it. But it is an interesting ad targeting tool. And those things that you're talking about, whether it's better recommendations or workarounds for Apple's ad system, like they're already in production with Meta using their artificial intelligence. Not a deeply told story, but that stuff is absolutely in production. And I'm with you on that. And what do you think about their open sourcing? I mean, I think you called the year, you called this like the year of Lama, talking about how Lama, Meta's open source

• 13:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  large language model is like the biggest power play that this company has made. Where do you see the potential there?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So it's been interesting to watch AI, how companies talk about AI and who talks about it publicly and who doesn't. It's, to me, like a really rough estimation of this is that the companies that have and have, you know, the companies that like five years ago were hiring really smart AI engineers that have always sort of had this as a focus internally and that are kind of thought of as having like of needing a lot of tech scrutiny. So the Googles, the Metas of the world, they're talking about it kind of less. And the companies that are like, wow, you know, we really wouldn't mind feeling relevant and getting a shot in the arm for our stock price, like the Intels and the Microsoft, they're talking about it a lot.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  It's also notable that Microsoft talks about it a lot, but chose to do a lot of their AI development through OpenAI, which is, you know, an investment of theirs, which gives them some arms length deniability when Elizabeth Warren calls them in front of, you know, Congress. So it's fascinating the way people have approached it. All of that being said, I think Llama, which is the, Llama 2 now, which is the, the large language model, you know, open source that, that Meta is using to, to, you know, sort of build the base of what will then, you know, be all their different AI applications. I think it's smart. I think open source is smart in this space. I think that you get often, you know, bigger data sets, better results, you know, you get interesting things that other people build

• 15:27Speaker 01

  that you wouldn't otherwise know or see, and you don't have to pay them. I think it gives you a little bit of plausible deniability and arms lengthness, um, you know, when, when things inevitably, you know, Gary Gensler started talking about AI, so, so somebody's head's gonna roll eventually. You know, and, and so I think that, that that's all good. And I also think that it shows that like,

• 15:49Speaker 01

  there was a moment, I can't imagine,

• 15:53Speaker 01

  like Mark Zuckerberg's basically our age, right? Like, I think he's still not 40. And so he's like in his 30s, he has like, you know, happy family, like all the thing, like he has, you know, he's literally richer than God. Like, I've seen God's bank balance. He is richer. Like, but he still like shows up at work every day and keeps working and like, you know, and is like treating it like a company that he needs to have a job at. And so there was, and he has so much control over the board and all of that. For a moment, there is, there was a time during the legless metaverse days where it's like, huh, he really might kind of run this thing into the ground, right? In the ground means like being like, you know, a $10 billion company, but it's like, he actually might do this because he can and he, you know,

• 16:36Speaker 01

  he can stay irrational far longer than, uh, the markets, you know, can, can stay solvent on him. And I thought he might do it. There was no sort of pulling out of that death spiral other than him deciding like, hey, this is a terrible idea. I'm gonna go back to like building stuff people actually want that will actually make me money and shareholders money. So like, props to them for doing that. And I think Llama is a huge part of it.

• 17:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, what do you think about Threads then? I mean, Threads is part of this revitalization of Meta, but there was just some data from Sensor Tower that CNN reported. Sensor Tower is like a third-party service that monitors traffic and usage of apps that Threads' daily active users fell to 8 million on July 31st, down 82% from launch. And the daily average time spent fell to 2.9 minutes a day on August 1st, down from 19 at launch. So. Clearly, that app is having some retention issues. Do you think it's just a blip? Or is this, you know, speaking of death spirals, when I read those numbers, that's where I go, even though I have, like I've said it before, I have a pretty active community on threads, but it does not seem to be a good sign for the app if it's losing that many users that quickly.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Twitter became sort of this town square, political front page, media thing. And, and it wasn't always that, but it became that. And, you know, you can, you can port that interface, but the Instagram community definitely is a little bit different than, than the Twitter community. And, and I also think that like the use case right now, right, is a little bit different. Um, to some extent, I think threads would have maybe had a more seamless transition to a real like solid Twitter actual sort of replacement if they had launched sooner.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Um, I think, you know, I saw some data point the other day that like 60% of, of American adults who use Twitter had like taken a break in the past year. And like, I know, I mean, you had asked me to come on the show earlier and I missed it because I don't check Twitter anymore, right? Um, and, and so I like log on every couple of weeks, retweet a bunch of stuff and that's it. And so like, I think that part of it is that people got exhausted by Twitter and all the changes, you know, especially around just knowing who's who. I don't have to agree with you on Twitter, but I want to know who I'm talking to. That was stripped, you know, with the verification changes, all of that.

• 19:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But even still threads is like I said, like this, the data does not look good.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I guess my deeply meandering point on that is just that, that I think that it's gonna, threads is not an, an one-to-one Twitter replacement. I think it's going to become a different thing. I would argue that you should flip the data, which is that the initial bump in like downloads was unprecedented and didn't ever seem like it was going to be sustainable because nobody knew what they were doing there. Social media networks functionally never start out with a giant bang. Um, is it hard to come back from a dip? Yes. But you have to remember that they haven't done much to like force it into your other sort of.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Meta touchpoints, right? It's not in your WhatsApp feed or it's not in WhatsApp, you know, as a status message. It's not in, you can import it to Instagram, but it's not super seamless. It's not on Facebook like, so as those things become more integrated, I'm far from counting it out.

• 20:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  The other thing to keep in mind is that advertisers are going to love it because advertisers are very comfortable with Instagram.

• 20:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we just had a story on that. They're just dying to advertise with threads. So.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So I wouldn't count them out, but I don't think it was ever going to be, you know, the day one downloads were ever going to stay consistent.

• 20:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to talk about your perspective on what the IPO market is going to look like in the next few months to a year. There's a story that you brought up that you wanted to chat about, which is that Stripe named Stefan Tomlinson, who is the formerly of Confluent as its new CFO. And maybe that's a signal that the IPO market is about to heat up. And that would obviously bode well for you as an investor because, well, there's, you know, a chance for exits again, at least to the public market. So what do you think that signals?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think that Stripe is in an interesting position and, and it's fascinating. The best way to have a bellwether is to have a company that is truly indicative of the larger market it sits in. And all of the, the sort of short-term IPO bellwethers are not that right. So, so, you know, Stripe has a massive valuation. The early employees haven't had a ton of liquidity. You know, the early investors haven't had a ton of liquidity. This is a company that a lot of people have held. You know, they waited a little too long to go public, you know, in, in the, and then sort of the market, you

• 21:49Speaker 01

  know, slowed and shut down. And so, and then, you know, fintech has been, as a category, has had a really hard time in public markets. And even though Stripe and Affirm have nothing in common, they, you know, if they end up grouped in that same category, then that's a hard comp. And so there's just a bunch of weird quirks, like IPOs that are like 100 million, like these huge IPOs, like the Ubers or Facebooks typically don't. You know, pop on day one and then just keep climbing. There's usually sort of a dip. Um, there's a lockup. There's all these, you know, now we're going into an election year and, and you know, that like the credit ratings of America aren't great. Like all of these things are sort of

• 22:30Speaker 01

  externalities and it doesn't change the fact that Stripe has investors who want liquidity. Stripe has early employees who want liquidity. Stripe has, you know, Stripe probably wants liquidity. So at some point they have to go and it's looks like they're gearing up to do that in the next six months, certainly next 12 months, whether or not it's an ideal time.

• 22:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if they IPO, does that sort of open the floodgates for the bunch of other private tech companies to say, all right, we're going in?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  I mean, that'll be the question, right? There are a couple others, you know, that we were talking about, uh, like ARM, which used to be a public company and then, you know, was taken private by SoftBank and, and they're in AI. So they're an obvious one to go public. Just the fact that SoftBank owns them is massively boosted. You know, SoftBank's stock over the last six months. Um, and, and so they probably want to get out sooner rather than later because AI is hot now and it may not stay hot. Um, you know, but that's also a little bit of a different question. And then you have companies, uh, you know, like, like potentially Starlink or SpaceX, where, you know, to some extent those IPOs could be driven by, you know, Elon's need for liquidity

• 23:36Speaker 01

  because he just burnt 56 billion or whatever on Twitter. And so, so they're not a monolith, but I do think we're going to start seeing more IPOs and the bankers are dying for them because that's, that's how they make money.

• 23:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  And how could that change the way that we see companies like yours invest in startups?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Um, I do really early stage, so I do pre-seed. Um, I'm pretty immune to the vagaries of the IPO market for another three or four years.

• 24:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  The rest of your counterparts.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  For later Sage Venture Funds, I think that there's two questions. You know, the secondaries market is definitely heating up a little bit more. I'm seeing more names, you know, kind of get passed around and a lot of them are still discounts or flat to the last rounds they did in like 2021, but you're starting to see a little bit more of that. A lot of that is, is, you know, small, early employees and early angel investors selling to family offices. But, you know, I think that a lot of these big tech, a lot of these big funds would like liquidity, but they don't need it right away. Sequoia is not going to go out of business because the IPO market shut down for a year or two. The midsize funds have a bit of a quandary on their hands because they can't raise more

• 24:51Speaker 01

  money and often until they've returned money if they're an earlier fund. And if they Yolo'd a bunch of it and, you know, crypto and tokens and I like whatever, then it's going to be harder for them to do that. But a lot of those midsize sort of 21 vintage year funds are also just kind of dead in the water and the founders are like enjoying their fees while they last for the next handful of years and they know they're going to have to do something else.

• 25:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sarah Kust is here with us. She's the Managing Director of Clio Capital. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about WorldCoin, which I have so many questions about, and then Date Me Docs. Are Google Docs going to end up displacing the dating apps? Sarah is someone who's had some experience in this area, working with the companies, and I can't wait to ask her about this. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AppPoint does.

• 25:58Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 27:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 27:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Sarah Kuntz, the Managing Director of Clio Capital. Sarah, got to get your perspective on WorldCoin. I mean, you know, I have a sort of cursory understanding of what's happening. People are like going up and scanning their retinas and getting tokens. I mean, this is from Rest of World this week. WorldCoin is one of the most ambitious projects to emerge from the blockchain boom, using a combination of cryptocurrency and biometric registration to create a new kind of global identity service. What, what you, I mean, you've said you've touched crypto in the past. What, and this is obviously something that Sam Altman is doing. So it's worth paying attention to, but what's happening here?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Um, I feel like it's a company that also is sort of like a subplot in an Austin Powers movie and like a bad.

• 28:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  But come on, it's like, it's being done by Sam Altman, like, it has to be somewhat something I don't know, maybe I shouldn't say, but it has to be something serious.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Right, it's being done by Sam Altman, so it's highly unlikely that it's like, you know, a Russia-China double feature, right? That'll give you, um, they hack it, well, I don't know, right? So, I'm not, I will tell you this, I am not a big retina person, and that sounds like literally the dumbest phrase anyone's ever said, but what I mean by that is that I don't love, so the idea behind retina scanning, right, and you can do it with things like clear all of that, you know, at the airport, is that it's like this really secure, sort of completely immutable thing that's only you. The problem is that like, social security numbers, somebody steals it, it's a pain, you can get a new one. I don't want a new retina, I like my retinas, I mean, I don't love them, I just had Lasik,

• 29:25Speaker 01

  but like, I don't want a new one, right? So for me, the ease with which we've gotten used to giving away our biometric data is a little bit creepy, I don't use a lot of biometric data, like logins and stuff, I think that we're a little bit flippant about that.

• 29:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Although it does remind me of the thing in Men in Black where they have to like, wipe their fingerprints on that ball and it like burns their fingerprints off, or like one of those Will Smith action movies.

• 29:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  But like, a lot of this stuff is super convenient, like, you look at your iPhone, it opens, or you put, I have like, the MacBook where I put my fingerprint on and it unlocks, and I mean, I hope like, no one else is getting access to that, so, what is the, what is the risk?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  You have to watch Poker Face, it's this like, amazing Emmy nominated, Natasha, what's her name, anyway, there's an episode in it that's all about this, and like, the lengths that people will go to like, get your biometric data, even like, after you're dead or gone, to be able to log into your things, it's totally creepy, but, but fun and cool, so watch it. The risk is obvious, right? The risk is like, you know, well, the risk is obvious, which is losing control of your biometric data. Biometric data, unlike a password, is incredibly hard to reset, right? And once people have it, they have it forever. And I don't actually know with retinas, but there are some things where you could also

• 30:51Speaker 01

  question, like even like your descendants, right? So like, like your fake baby in the, in the cruise thing from like 25 hours ago, right?

• 30:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Has survived that ride, which is great news.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Survived that ride. We love that, right? So maybe, I don't know, right? Because this has never mattered before. Maybe you have a really similar retina print as your parent, right? And then now all of a sudden, like, you know, if you have, like, where does this go, right? And, and, and the risk is obvious, which is like, your identity is often tied to, I mean, one, it's your identity and like, whatever. Two, it's often tied to, you know, your finances, everything else, your, your ability to work, travel, like, all of those things. That's not great. Two, it also is a very Gattaca vibe, and like, that movie was dark. Two, although actually, everybody does the leg lengthening stuff now, too. So

• 31:40Speaker 01

  maybe we just live in Gattaca. However, I'll get to two, which is that the reward is so unclear right now, right? So if somebody comes to me and says, Sarah, I will give you $100 million for your retina scan, and I can use it however I want in the future, I promise that I won't, you know, frame you for any crimes.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Okay, like, that might make it harder to travel. I don't know, this, that, but $100 million. People are doing this for free. People think that they're gonna get like 20 bucks, and then they find out they're not, and they're like, well, okay, I used ChatGPT once, here you go, Sam Altman.

• 32:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, that is what, yeah, that's what's happening with WorldCoin. They're getting, like, actual coins that have, like, a value of $50.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but they're not, right? So people were, but then in the US and stuff, there's one, like, right now in New York or something that I read about, and, and they're actually not. So people show up, some people showed up thinking that, and it's not false advertising, I'm not saying that. People thought that because they had heard that in other places, and then they found out, oh, actually, you know, this one today, we're not doing that. And they're still doing it. So it's like, you know, it's, it's...

• 32:51Speaker 01

  It's weird and creepy.

• 32:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sarah, what is this?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Even if you don't get a firm, you're getting paid.

• 32:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is this stuff even meant to do? So let's say you register in the WorldCoin database. You've given the scan of your retina. What do you do with it?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I think it'd be a great question to ask all the people who are giving them the scans of their retinas. Um, you know, in theory, it becomes just like, you know, sort of an Apple Pay or, or, you know, all the things we're talking about, you go through Clear or whatever. It becomes just sort of this like super seamless way to get around the world, to pay for things, to, you know, log into things, to all of that. Because, you know, think about how fast it'd be to board a plane if you don't have to scan a boarding pass because they're scanning your...

• 33:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this is like the global database of your retina that you could use to interplay with all these different services.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And who has it, right? And what are they monetizing it for? And what rights did you give up by agreeing to do it? And I feel like nobody knows the answer to that. They're just kind of doing it.

• 33:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Jeez, okay. All right, I'm not getting my retina scanned. And after having this conversation, I'm not doing it anytime soon. At least not for a fake $20.

• 33:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, okay, last story I want to talk to you about. You've worked with Bumble before. There's a great story in the New York Times this week about how people are getting sick of dating apps. And they're creating these things called "date me docs." And the docs are basically like, they're Google Docs where they list like who they are. And, um, you know, they basically put it online and send it out. And the Times has this example of this one person who created a "date me doc" and has gone on 15 dates with men that reached out after reading it. I'm curious, like, what you think, like, what do you think about the rise of these, of these documents? And, I mean, I can understand people getting fed up with the dating apps, so, and trying to do something else. So what's your thought about it?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you have to put your retina scan in there so people can decide if they really want to date you.

• 34:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  That should be table stakes for sure.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  We will say, you know, I think that, one, don't put in your dog's name and your mom's maiden name or they really will steal your identity. But, you know, I think that it, there's two sort of competing impulses here. Um, one is the impulse to be seen and known and look, I want you to know more about me. I want you to not just judge me based on my looks or my, you know, my job or my alma mater or whatever, right? My age, whatever it is, um, I get that, right? You want people to know you, see you and kind of say like, hey, you know, is this, or is this, is there a potential fit here? Right? The, and that is a good impulse.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  The not so great impulse is it's like a very kind of internet-y like, you know, kind of bypassing of like, oh, I don't want to sit down with you or go up to you at a park or at a party or a workout class or in an office and like talk to you and get to know you and maybe face rejection and maybe have an awkward conversation or have to politely tell you no thanks. And obviously for women, saying no to men can be incredibly, you know, scary because the world's a scary place. But, you know, instead of doing all of that, instead of sort of dealing with you as a person, um, I'm going to give you this thing and then ideally you like it and then you send me your thing back.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  And then, you know, we can sort of meet up and, and, you know, we'll just, we're perfect for each other on paper, right? And like, one, it's sort of a throwback to how dating apps or dating sites historically were, the like plenty of fish and stuff. Questions. I don't, I, I think to the extent that it shows a real interest and appetite for people to have meaningful relationships, that is great. I think to the extent that it shows that people really want to kind of bypass the messiness of getting to know somebody, um, that's probably not going to help them long-term achieve that first goal.

• 36:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was some data in the New York Times story that said that the use of dating apps is declining in some areas. So do you, do you, I mean, obviously it seems like a reaction to what's going on on the, on the dating apps. So I'm curious, like, what you think the state of dating apps is right now. And, you know, I mean, I guess like, like I said earlier, I understand the, the, um, The reticence for some people to get on those things and sort of this makes sense like the me docs makes sense in some way as an answer because it you know it it requires people to do a little bit more work to discover and read and so it makes the person on the other end feel less disposable than you would as like a card in the stack of Tinder.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I actually have a sort of alternate, you know, I think a lot of the dating app decline is actually coincided with, you know, me no longer being single and I do apologize to the big dating, no.

• 37:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, congratulations to you. So you just got engaged. Did you, uh, did you meet your fiance on a dating app or a real life or?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  I did not, although in in very bumble fashion, I made the first move, but we were actually at a at a party at one of my investors' houses and I was like chatting with somebody in the kitchen, like an older guy. And I was like, oh, you know, do you do you know anybody here who's single? Because I run a venture fund and time I was single. So I everybody I met, I would ask them, you know, tell them, hey, I need to raise money for my fund and I need a husband, right? Everybody go help me with the fund. Um, you know, he said, actually, my my son's over there and, you know, he's six five, has a PhD from MIT. And I was like, okay, like literally say less and walked walked up to him and introduced myself and and now, you know, a little bit over a year and a half later, we're engaged. So, you

• 38:31Speaker 01

  know, but but the there are two kind of important parts about that, right? And neither of them is his height. Um, one, like, I was putting myself out there, right? I was talking to a complete stranger and just asking him, you know, do you happen to know anybody at this party who's single? And and I highly recommend that because even if he didn't, it's a great icebreaker, you know, conversation that like it's just I like doing I liked doing that, right? Two, I also knew what I was looking for. And so I'm five six. I don't care about height. What I did care about. Was I'm, as you know, if you've hung in with us this long on this podcast, I talk a lot. I have a lot of opinions like I'm, you know, often a mile wide and an inch deep on things.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  I like somebody who's the opposite of me. I need somebody who's like grounded and thoughtful and smart and like having a PhD from MIT doesn't guarantee any of those things. But it does probably mean that you don't spend your time like yelling into your ring light and your Zoom podcasts and TV.

• 39:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  And that's not a bad start, right? So he had said, oh yeah, my son's great. He's a, you know, surfer and influencer with like a YouTube show. That's probably not a fit for me, although I have friends that I would have been like, oh, maybe I can set them up, right? So the thing I do love about these docs, and I'll go back in the dating apps is like knowing yourself and knowing what you're looking for, I think is super important. And then also understanding that like every date is a bad date until it's a good date. Literally every single first date that you went on, until you're with the person that you feel like, oh, wow, this is really good for a really long time, is going to feel like not.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  If you're, you know, fatigued about dating apps, about telling people like, you know, even in the profile, like, you know, would love to, you know, jump on a video call or would love to do a phone call, would love to exchange numbers sooner rather than later and just be clear about what you need and setting that boundary so that you enjoy the dating app experience. But like ask strangers if they know anybody who's single, go to random parties you get invited to, like join a sports league, go to a workout class, whatever it is. And if you know what you're looking for, you, it's a lot faster to like sort through the like four to six billion people on earth who might be, you know, potentially a fit for you.

• 41:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, Sarah Kuntz, thanks so much for joining us.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 41:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. Great having you here as always on our Friday News Recaps. Schedule for next week, David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, joins us on Wednesday for his first podcast interview as CEO. And then next week on Friday, Julia Boersting will be here to break down the news. Great CNBC correspondent. I can't wait to speak with her. Thanks again for listening. Thank you to Sarah. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 41:38Speaker 02

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