Paying For Social, RIP IPOs & Voice Computing, Four Day Work Weeks

The Information's Sr. Reporter Cory Weinberg joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz for our weekly news recap show. We cover 1) Paying for social media 2) What's next for the struggling IPO market 3) Whether private tech companies like Stripe can keep compensating through RSUs 4) DOJ moves to block Figma sale 5) What happened to voice computing? 6) The prospects of the four-day workweek. --- 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?

  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. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access,

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are back here on Friday with two great guests. Ron John Roy joins us always on Fridays, and he's here today with a fresh new piece, and we're going to talk about it. Ron John, welcome to the show. Hello.

• 1:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Cory Weinberg is here. He's a senior reporter at The Information. He has some great reporting on the IPO market, Stripe in particular, but also what's going to happen to employees restricted stock units as their companies just prolong going public forever. Corey, welcome to the show. Hello, hello. Great to have you. So today, we're going to cover those two topics for sure, voice computing. IPO market and we're also going to hit on a bunch of different news items that have broke during the week. Of course, as always, your questions are welcome. If you're here with us live again, we do these live every week on LinkedIn and you're welcome to join. Just go to my page, Alex Cantor, and sign up or follow me and I'll be, I will make sure to send you the latest in

• 2:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  terms of our scheduling and when we go live on Fridays and we're live right now. And thanks, everybody who's with us and joining. So let's start with the kind of big, interesting, controversial story of the week, which is that Meta is now going to charge people somewhere around, or at least it's testing, charging people somewhere around $11.99 a month to have direct customer service verification. And also, there's some hints that maybe your posts are going to be seen more often if you pay for this type of service. Obviously, it follows what Twitter is doing with Twitter Blue. Would either of you guys pay for this?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  The first thing I have to apologize, Alex, is because right before we started recording, we were discussing whether increased reach or visibility are one of the benefits. And I said, I don't think so, because I thought that is impossible that they would ever say that. I was wrong. I just opened up the original post from Meta and increased visibility and reach with prominence in some areas of the platform, like search comments and recommendations, is explicitly stated there. So I'm shocked that they just say that. In terms of whether I would pay, I remember the fact that Facebook, even when I was running a startup and we were advertising

• 3:31Speaker 01

  a bit on Facebook in the, let's say, tens of thousands, you know, we had no access to a human being. We were not at the threshold that we could ever get an account manager. And the like random stuff would happen. Our page would just be taken down and we had no recourse and it would take three to five days, maybe sometimes to come back up. So I feel that having customer service is important and maybe it could be worth $10 a month or $12 a month, but I think almost on principle, no, I would not pay.

• 4:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I think we have this comment from friend Yosef Shrep here on LinkedIn. And he mentions that increased visibility is huge. It feels dangerous, though, as the creator economy has become less equitable with this type of pay to play. Now, this sparks kind of an interesting question, which is maybe what these platforms are acknowledging is that they no longer are common areas or town squares for everybody to post. Obviously, that's been the case for a long time. That's where it's trending. Look at the TikTok feed. You're mostly getting professional content. Look at the Instagram feed. You're mostly getting professional content. Look at the Facebook feed. It's probably empty, or maybe there's some groups there.

• 4:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  And what might be happening, and that's what this comment sparks, is perhaps there's a recognition now that these are media platforms and the customer are the content producers who are trying to make money by bringing their product to the biggest audience possible. And that might be what we're seeing. Corey, I see you nodding your head. What do you think about that?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  No, I think that's a really smart comment. It's certainly an acknowledgement that the creator economy is like what's driving a lot of our feeds right now. And that means it's a different kind of economic proposition on these platforms. Yeah, I think that's pretty sharp.

• 5:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's actually touch on the performance, though, of what happens when this is implemented. Luckily, we have a case with Twitter where actually Elon Musk has put in Twitter Blue, where you pay and you get the verified badge. And some of these other benefits, increased visibility is part of that. How's it performing? It's actually performing, I think, terribly. So Corey, one of your colleagues, Aaron Wu, says that Twitter only had around 180,000 paid subscribers in the US and around 290,000 paying subscribers globally. So that would imply just 28 million in annual revenue, which is 1% of Twitter's total. So now we're seeing this stuff off the ground. Is the Twitter Blue example evidence that what's happening at Facebook and Snapchat

• 6:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  is just not going to work as well?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I mean, when I saw the Facebook announcement, I definitely did not think, whoa, we have here, we have the future business model of this tech titan. It seemed more on the margins to me to not to run down here. But I feel like these platforms just have not been able to communicate yet what the kind of broad mass sort of use case would be to subscribing to these products. Like they're kind of targeting like a more, you know, folks that want to feel like they are part of an elite club, it seems like. And so I think you're going to have small numbers, at least to begin with.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  I guess the bull case is that you have these huge platforms, Meta in particular, where if you just convert a tiny percentage of of customers to, you know, sort of be paying subscribers, generating recurring revenue, then that's like a meaning that could, you know, end up being a meaningful part of their business. But right now, I feel like we're just not even close to there yet. And you're right, it's more pressing for Twitter, I think, like this, it's like existential for Twitter to solve this problem because they've always been a lot worse at advertising than Facebook is.

• 7:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Elon Musk has said that he wants to take Twitter private, which he has, and then one day take it public again. Here's the question, what kind of IPO market is he going to end up going into? Because there's a moment here where just everybody forgot about IPOs. I can't remember the last IPO I've paid attention to and

• 7:47Speaker 02

  You weren't paying attention to the Mobileye IPO last fall?

• 7:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, the Mobileye, that was big. Yes, we definitely had a small little party here to celebrate Mobileye.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Or the Grindr SPAC? A Grindr SPAC?

• 7:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, I was on the, I was on the floor of the stock market for the Grindr SPAC. No, no doubt.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Sure, that's, yeah, you were there just for reporting, Alex.

• 8:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I was, no, I was, I think I was there for CNBC closing bell, but I do remember it was actually, they did a very nice job decorating decorating the stock market. So clearly that's happened. But Corey, I'm curious if you can, you've done a lot of reporting on this. I'd love to hear your perspective on why we're seeing such a dearth in IPOs and why it's so troubling right now for companies that have been private for so long.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if that is the question on Twitter, you know, in terms of just how many years it's going to take for them to potentially see a decent public market. I mean, we're a long way from Elon, I think, taking Twitter public again. He's got a lot of cleaning up to do. But generally, I mean, the IPO market has been dead for more than a year. And, you know, this, this kind of, you know, essentially, the gravy train in tech, where you had a ton of IPOs in 2020 and 2021, has really, you know, the fact that we've had no IPOs, basically, for a major venture-backed firm over the past year and change, has, you know, really

• 9:16Speaker 02

  created a difficult economic environment across the valley. Like, VCs are not getting the returns that they expected on some of their later-stage companies. Later-stage growth companies have nowhere really to turn for cash unless they want to take a pretty severe valuation cut. And you see that kind of ripple, have like plenty of ripple effects in terms of hiring, firing, and, and just kind of generally like how people are feeling. I mean, obviously, it's all happening largely because we're in, you know, sort of a risk-off market. Across the stock market, generally, there's essentially not a ton of appetite

• 10:00Speaker 02

  for, you know, stocks that are losing a ton of money in hopes of sort of a ton of growth in the future. And that's usually what we see with like these late-stage startups that would be going public, is they would be growth stories. And, you know, the funds that are looking to invest in those things, the mutual funds, the, you know, sort of long-only hedge funds, like, those are not buying IPOs right now.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cory, I've been loving your reporting. I want to, because like Foursquare, can you talk about, and it's like my favorite star, I still actually use Foursquare as a New Yorker. I still think they give you good recommendations on like coffee shop with wifi. But, but to me, it's one of the most undercover stories in tech is what happens to employees of late-stage companies, either that go public and then the valuation had dropped. So that whole 2021 vintage of wild IPOs that just, you know, where they went out at a certain level and then the stock dropped 80 to 90%, whose tax liabilities were higher than their actual proceeds from the IPO. But then everyone who's just sitting on

• 11:08Speaker 01

  options, and I thought it was really interesting if you could walk through what happened, that Foursquare actually, I guess, let their options just expire?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is like the sleeper issue across Silicon Valley that I think is going to be, people are going to be kvetching about it, if they're not already, on blind, in blue bottle, you know, wherever people do their kvetching these days. Basically, you have this, this interesting issue, and it's a little wonky, but I'll bear with me a little bit. You know, so generally startups issue their employees' stock options, where you have to pay a sort of strike price to actually buy that option, but it has like a huge amount of upside, you know, when the, you know, hopefully when the company goes public and the early employees get rich. Like, the valley sort of runs on that,

• 11:57Speaker 02

  that mentality. Where, within the past decade, later-stage companies, as they got a little bit more mature, their valuations grew, they started issuing their employees what's called restricted stock units. And these were essentially a promise for future shares. Employees would not have to pay a strike price, they were protected from any kind of like valuation crunch hurting, essentially pushing those options underwater. And so companies said like, okay, these RSUs are a good, you know, opportunity for us to attract employees. The catch, because there's no, there's no free lunch, there's no like, you don't get just like a little gift. Without any potential consequence is that these RSUs expired after seven years,

• 12:42Speaker 02

  which at the time, no one thought, and they only expired unless the company went public or was sold. So if you were still private and you had RSUs after seven years, they were going to disappear. And at the time, no one thought that this was a potential outcome. Like, of course, the company, like, these private companies are going to go public or they're going to be sold within seven years. Seven years is a long time. Well, it turns out that is like what's driving Stripe to try to raise billions of dollars in private capital so they don't have to go public, but so that they can eventually avoid their, their employees RSUs expiring. This is why-

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Sorry, how does the capital raise? I think I missed that. Prevent-

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  RSU from expiry. Like, do you have to buy them back or-

• 13:26Speaker 02

  So the wonkiness here is that essentially, it's, it's because of, of taxes, which is, which is like why it gets wonky because no one likes to talk about taxes. But essentially, what, what the company would do is they would modify that RSU grant so that they don't expire, but this would trigger a big like tax withholding bill that Stripe would pay on, on behalf of employees. And so that's, that's kind of like the, the mechanics there. But I found a company that basically let these RSUs expire this year, which is Foursquare, which nobody has been talking about, obviously.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Most interesting company in tech, Foursquare.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  They, I mean, they, they have had this wild history. I mean, they were like the, you know, the bell of the 2009 South by Southwest and got backing from Andreessen, et cetera. Anyway, they've been kind of in stasis for, for a little while. They're still private. And essentially, between 100 and 150 employees who worked there this year are facing their RSUs just expiring because Foursquare is not going to go public. They're not a candidate to be sold. And essentially, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential wealth that employees were maybe not banking on by this point, but at least were still hopeful still might exist. That, that's going to be totally disappear.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Is uh

• 14:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Go ahead, Ranjan.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  From the investor's perspective, though, I mean, this is where I guess when Andreessen, probably their four square investment is not top of mind, so they can just let it run forever. But why aren't investors pushing on some kind of liquidity themselves? Or I guess the death of the IPO market? I'm trying to think like, who, who's, is anyone a winner in this? Or is everyone losing?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Everyone is, I mean, the people who, who buy the IPO on the first day and then see the values sink, you know, which happened a lot, you know, a couple of years ago, like those people are winners. But, um, no, I mean, like the VCs don't want to essentially have to like mark down the value of their companies right now, which would happen if they were to go public. Like that stock would be publicly traded and would collapse. And when you're still private, you could still pretend like, you know, maybe it's worth what you put money in at.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Do you think investor, when they sit around together, private dinners, are people looking at Stripe and saying 95 billion? Or what is it now?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  A little bit, right? But.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're trying to raise money at 55 right now.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Okay, alright, so everyone's recognizing.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  It's a big haircut from 95. Yeah, that's where they, Stripe was at 95 in like 2021. Everyone was writing glowing stories about how much they were growing and saying, you know, the church of the Collison brothers was fully attended. Everyone was in their pews. And now like, you know, look, the company hit a kind of growth. You know, they, the growth stalled, they, they started burning a ton of cash, they became unprofitable. And that's happened to a lot of companies in 2022. And 2023 is like, you know, now not a great time to be raising money. And, you know, they're taking a pretty big valuation haircut. For that, and people still don't think that 55 is a fair price either. They think it should be

• 17:02Speaker 02

  lower than that. And maybe it's more like 40 or 45. So, you know, as we all know, the valuations of these companies are not always what they appear to be, at least in a bull market.

• 17:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So Corey, what happens to these companies? Because you have like, you know, they stayed private forever. A company like Stripe, right? I mean, this, the fact that you could even be talking about a 45, 55 billion dollar valuation means that this company is worth more than many companies on the public market. And they stayed private in a good economy. They stayed private in an explosive economy. They stay, now they're staying private in a bad economy. What is the end state for these companies? Where do they go?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  No, yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, there is certainly, you know, there's legal reasons, there's like changes to securities law that's happened over the years that has allowed companies to stay private for longer. And the amount of private capital that's available has allowed companies to stay private for longer. You know, so much money in the world has shifted from going into the public stock markets to, oh, maybe the real returns are in these private companies. So, you know, all of these factors have allowed companies to stay private. But also, I think the like underrated one, or at least like the one that stands out to me is like, for a CEO, you know, like Patrick Collison and his brother John

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Collison, who's the president, you know, it's much more fun to be running a private company. And if you've had, if you've had years of, of strategy meetings and dreams about turning your payments company into this all encompassing kind of fintech giant that's going to become the next Amazon and JP Morgan combined, like, you're going to try to like, stay under, you know, a little bit of cover, which the private markets provide. You know, the public markets comes with threats of, you know, potential activist investors.

• 19:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  But how long can you do that, though?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  That's ripe is testing that right now. I mean, like, that's why they're raising billions of dollars.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  I mean, but it is fascinating. Where is there any remaining pockets of money like the Saudi Public Investment Fund? Or, you know, like that showed up in the last 10 years and just brought tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. SoftBank, obviously. Are there any, are there any more pockets out there with a couple of hundred billion dollars sitting around?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, yeah, like, yes, I think like, like, like the Middle East, like usually when times are tough, go to the Middle East. Young startups, that's the, that's the, you know.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Or if you're a soccer, a British.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I mean, the oil revenues have been good, but no, like the typical buckets of money that flowed to startups over the last several years were, you know, SoftBank and Tiger Global, as Rochelle is kind of pointing out in the comments. And yeah, those, those guys have pulled back an incredible amount. The, no one wants to invest in private startups at the valuations that they invested in in 21. So scrounging up this money is, is tough. I think like what's going to crack open the IPO market later, you know, maybe later this year or next year is just companies are eventually going to need money and are just going to say, screw it.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  You know, let's just do it. Maybe it's a company that has, you know, a more mature CEO, like some, but CEO has been around for a while. It's just like, you know what? Screw it. I can be a public company CEO. And that's how.

• 20:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Corey, I think we should wrap this, wrap this one up. Just with Corey, I want to ask you the big picture question. Of course, we think about one of these companies going to go to the public market, but also with these exits not available to the investors or sort of less enticing the investors, how do you think this changes the private market? You know, how do you think this changes the way that investors think about investing in startups? Obviously there's a pullback now, but do you think it has an impact on the money that startups get? And the innovation that we end up seeing coming out of the tech industry because the money might not be there? Like, is this what's ultimately driving up the freezing of private investment?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  I mean, the optimistic take is that real winners are created in, you know, sort of a tougher market. It forces you as a startup to really build with like unit economics and profitability in mind. And like I do think that generally creates some stronger innovation. Cause the reality is like money is not as free anymore. And if you're a later stage company, good luck trying to raise money. If you're an early stage company, like I think the money is still out there. It's just like, once you get up to like a certain valuation level, you know, investors don't really think that they should keep growing that valuation unless you have proven

• 22:09Speaker 02

  that you have strong unit economics and like incredible revenue growth.

• 22:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, the underrated factor here, cause usually when you get hit on one side, you always have another side to go to, right? So if you don't have the public markets to let you get your exit, you could always potentially go to the private market. But here's the thing, these private market companies are getting so big that when they do say, we're not going to IPO, we are going to take a acquisition path. They get blocked by the DOJ or the FTC. And that's exactly what's happening with Figma. We had Carmel Damesis a couple of months ago talking about how Figma brought Adobe to its heels and was and ended up deciding that its best path was to get acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. But this week we saw the Department of Justice move to block that sale.

• 23:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it might still go through, but it's going to take even longer for any of that money to get out. So two paths available to these companies. Go public, get acquired to get private, get acquired and, and, and take that path to an exit. Both of them shut off. What are the, what are the, I mean, what are the ramifications here? Do people start to get desperate in terms of what? Direction they go.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  I think this is a reminder that just build a good business like that actually makes sense. And you can go to the public markets and there is endless appetite for good businesses. Everyone is looking to still invest money. They just are looking for a good place to invest. I think I I am proud to have called that the Figma sale would at least be attempted to be blocked. And I think it's a genuinely good thing because if we remember it's the fact that this lawsuit is filed, the fact that this process will take place will prevent or at least make other companies take pause on making major anti-competitive acquisitions.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I mean, when this went through, from a user perspective, everyone I know in the user experience or more designer space was complaining. They're like, okay, the Figma is basically going to be killed off or it's going to be, you know, destroyed in the Adobe ecosystem. Now I'm going to have to pay a lot more money for stuff I don't want from Adobe. It was almost the definition of anti-competitive. So, so I think this is a good thing. And, and you also, these moves like, think about how a few years ago, you know, the assumption was like almost the most logical place for a fast-growing startup to go was to be acquired and subsumed into some big tech company. And now

• 24:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  And inevitably shut down.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and inevitably shut down. Now it's like, okay, you got to figure out how to turn this into a business and grow it and just do well, I think. And I think, I think that's a good thing.

• 24:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Corey, are the investors and, and startup entrepreneurs, startup employees that you speak with, what's their, how's the morale over there? Like, are they a little depressed?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know, depressed. A lot of them got so rich in 2021, at least the investors, and I think they're, they're fine. But it's always like, you know, it's always like, what have you done for me lately? You know, you know how these people are. Um, you know, look, I do think there, you know, in the M and A market.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  That is going to be, despite the DOJ pressure, not everything's going to be as big as Adobe and Figma and generate this kind of scrutiny. There's going to be a lot of deals. I think that do happen later this year. And the other bucket of money that's out there, that is like unusual for tech startups or public tech companies to like, kind of be thrown into sometimes is private equity. Private equity firms have a ton of cash and they love software businesses, particularly ones that can show some profits. And so you're going to have an interesting dynamic, I think, where a lot of tech employees are suddenly going to find their new owners are private equity firms. And that's going to be a whole nice, interesting little culture shock.

• 26:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  That will be interesting. Now, yeah, the thing that could actually help turn this around is a more forgiving, a more positive public market. But every moment, we seem to think that we're going to get out of the morass that we're in right now. There's another set of bad news, and we've certainly had that this week and today. Inflation on Friday today came in a little bit hot, personal consumption expenditures, the price index for that was up 0.6% versus 0.4% expected, which is, you know, it seems small, but it's when your inflation numbers come in higher than expected, that just leads to fears the Fed is going to raise rates more and the market tanks. And so it has. And then S and P 500 is down 1.36 today

• 26:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  alone, just as we record and close to 3% on the week. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Ron John's piece about voice computing and maybe the four day work week if we can fit it in. Stay tuned, we'll be back right after this on Big Technology Podcast. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, 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 App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most Demanding data now extended across your entire AI estate,

• 27:41Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ron John Roy, who writes margins on Substack. Definitely head over there. There's a good story that we're about to talk about that you can dig into. And Corey Weinberg, senior reporter at The Information, just ran us through the IPO market and. Corey, you're gonna have a lot of work cut out for you. There's gonna be a lot of stuff that you're gonna have to report on. So, great to have you both here. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on with voice computing. We have this big moment in generative AI, Ron, John, and everyone seems to say that chatbots are the future. Well, we already had that in voice computing. So, what, maybe we can learn some lessons from the past as we look to the future. Why did that go wrong?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so for anyone who has, do either of you have Amazon Echos or any Alexa devices?

• 30:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  I have three.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  I see.

• 30:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Corey, you have three?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  I used to have an Alexa. Now I have a Google Home.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Google Home, okay. So Alexa, we had, we have four in our house. Lights are all controlled by them, weather, and I have two toddlers, I have a three and a six-year-old. So, for anyone who has Alexa, you'll notice the follow-on questions or unprompted questions. Alexa, what's the weather? It's 34 degrees and windy. By the way, did you know I could do X or Y? And they've been increasing because Alexa, as a business, within Amazon in the context that they want it to be, has been failing and they've been laying off thousands of employees in the devices division. So they have to try to juice engagement metrics. So they do these things and try to insert and inject these little, it's both incredibly

• 30:55Speaker 01

  annoying, but it's also kind of dystopian and terrifying because it's this moment that you cannot control the AI in your house that you've like essentially lit, let in there. So it's, to me, it was a perfect example of right now how voice is getting more and more problematic and just degrading as a platform. But it also made me think, I was like the most happy, bullish, excited person in 2016 about Alexa and the Echo. I wrote about in the piece, I just had a kid, my first kid at the time, and I remember like, you know, like an infant cradling them and being able to turn off the lights and then call for white noise and put them, I mean, this stuff was emotional.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And then it didn't work. And I think it got hyped out of existence. I think rather than just making smart speakers that were pretty smart, that did certain functions really well, and then evolving from there, Amazon and everyone else tried to promise voice as a platform, and that we would all be querying data and talking to our computers throughout the day. And, you know, like, the way our primary interaction with computing would be with your spoken voice. Not only has that not happened at all, that entire platform has actually gotten worse over the last few years. So, so I think it was like a perfect sign that the technology was there. But why didn't it work? It was the exogenous factors.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  It was the way Amazon was structured, what their goals were. Everyone had to make these big ambitious claims. Obviously, Zerp and over capitalizing startups were trying to actually build smart innovative businesses. I think it was all these factors that remind us that tech is just part of the overall innovation process.

• 32:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Ron, okay, so I hear you loud and clear. And your piece definitely was like the piece that I was looking for that sort of explained why voice computing hasn't taken off in the way that a lot of people said it would. But I also wonder, are we just early? Like, for instance, is this conversational technology just not there yet? And maybe one day, I'm not going to say early days. Okay, I've heard that enough.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Internet in 1992.

• 33:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, but on a serious note.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Is that a bull in the screen coming, coming up on the screen?

• 33:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  It is. And now, listen, but I'm saying, we could just be early. We've seen the advance that even written chatbots have made over the past six months. And Ron, you referenced generative AI at the bottom. And maybe you also, you know, you put the answer at the bottom of the test, right? Which is that maybe this stuff is going to get better as AI continues to do a better job at parsing the environment and answering effectively.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think it, and I put it in there, the generative AI can, I mean, it takes large amounts of information and condenses it into one answer, which is what was essentially missing in voice computing. So I agree, it could be promising, but I still think that maybe people aren't going to actually ask really information-heavy questions on voice. It's just make my lights work well, maybe like involve that into something slightly more complicated and you take the whole jobs-to-be-done framework and try to, you know, actually figure out what are people using this for. And I think, but I, and what I tried to make clear in the piece is, I would apply this to like, remember IOT was going

• 34:26Speaker 01

  to change everything? I mean, long before Mark Zuckerberg, ARVR was going to change everything. It's like every new innovation circa 2015, 16, 17 had to be a platform.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I think, I was thinking about this while I was reading your piece, and as like all the, you know, sort of chat GPT hubbub has occurred, I've been thinking about the movie Her, as a lot of people have been, you know, the Joaquin Phoenix early 2010s movie, you know, where he's talking to his, and falls in love with his voice assistant in his ear. And that real, that future requires like a pretty big shift in human behavior, where they are talking out loud on the streets, you know, to a voice in their head. And I

• 35:19Speaker 02

  think also talking to sort of a computer in your home is a, is a pretty big behavioral shift. I think chat GPT is not a behavioral shift. It is like typing something into essentially a search box. Like, that's something we, we do. And so I do feel like, yes, maybe it's early, but I do think the bigger the difference in sort of human behavior change that your technology requires, the farther out you're going to be from it. And maybe that's also where we're at with, with voice.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  That's a great point. And Ron John's been harping a lot about how.

• 35:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  This generative AI stuff, it's not exactly the demos, but what you can build on top of them. And that this is going to be more distributed once OpenAI and Microsoft and Amazon and Google released their APIs and we see what people build on on top of them. And I think that's interesting. I wrote about it this week in Big Technology that that's where we're going. We're not about the demos. We're about what you can build on top of them. With the big tech companies, all this has been concentrated inside companies that have the ability to lose that money on the hardware. Talking about zero interest rate policy, right? That's exactly it. If you can, if you're in an investment environment where you're encouraged to lose money on R and D, you can actually build the hardware. And it's no secret or no surprise that we have Amazon and Apple and Meta that have all

• 36:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  built these devices. And they're the ones, and is there a single independent company that has built a voice computing device that people actually would use en masse? It hasn't, and it's been, it's been hampered, in fact, by a lot of the development preferences. That thing that you're talking about with Alexa, I have the same exact thing. You know, you write in the top of your piece that it continued talking after you asked the weather and everybody in your apartment told it to shut up. And I have the same thing. I yell at it because I'm like, what are you doing? And Apple, I mean, you've spent a long time talking about Apple, about how this company is so intent on pushing Apple products that it's, it hasn't or it's struggled to, or

• 37:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  it very reluctantly will let you use even, even use Spotify on those devices. And that, that's a, you know, core issue is that we've had these tech companies that have been so used to self-preferencing, these big tech companies that have been so used to self-preferencing, they've been the only ones that can make the devices. And that's, that's been in some ways a fatal flaw.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe, maybe they have to learn from their mistakes. Or maybe this new wave of generative AI allows somebody else to go in and build something even better because it's going to be platformatized or whatever the word, the word is.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  No, no, but, but that, that's where I almost worry. So what, what I'd written about also was that big tech companies, the way they built, again, Amazon essentially has monopoly over e-commerce in the United States or even, you know, large parts of the world. So they're able to funnel money and lose a lot of money in voice. And it only makes sense if it turns into a hundred billion dollar business. Otherwise, what's the point? So they come up with this big promise of a platform. That does worry me with, uh, worry me around generative AI because it's the same companies. And again, they're taking the same, because I'm making so much money over in this other place.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  I'm willing to lose tons and tons of money on the computing power around generative AI. Every chat GPT, we don't know exactly what it costs. Every query costs some amount of money that's not, you know, completely trivial. They're losing tons of money. It's great marketing, but. And at that point, do we end up in another cycle and that I, I am very bullish on generative AI. And I feel, say this every week, but I'm worried it's going to be, go through this same meat grinder of, uh, like inflated expectations and overhype and inability to actually build a solid, smart business that makes money. And who knows, maybe we'll lose out on another, uh, another potential good innovation.

• 39:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you can't just think that the hype, like a bad hype cycle can kill the technology. Like you said, it's not just about the tech.

• 39:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  But come on, if the tech is there, it's not like the, you know, overhype is going to end up killing it.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  But it does. I mean, like the, the problem is so much money has gone in to startups. That it is all like technology and hype and, um, expectations of future value are really tied together in a way that did not really happen before the internet, I think, really existed as well. Like crypto, um, and generative AI, both were incredibly overhyped. Not just because like in crypto, people thought that, you know, if you hype it, people, you end up sort of, making sure other people hold the bag, but also because like no secrets, no investment opportunities are secret anymore. Like everything is on social media. It's driving a lot of venture capital hype.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  People are sharing their generative AI interactions and all of that kind of leads to these like really increased, I think hype cycles than what we've seen like in the past. They're like much more polarized and extreme now, and that does affect, I think, innovation in some way.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and think about if you are, if the entire crop of startups built around that innovation, that technological advancement are overcapitalized, they are going to make the wrong decisions. They're going to be irresponsible. They're going to not actually build the technology around sustainable business in the way that they should. If the big tech companies themselves are also, because of their own kind of like golden goose monopoly, are able to lose a ton of money, they're not going to do it in the right way. I mean, maybe, maybe IOT would have changed the world, or whatever the other, maybe blockchain could have worked. Maybe blockchain was the future that we never got.

• 41:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  You guys both had me up until that last comment. But no, these are, these are good arguments. Let's close this week talking about the four day work week. There's been a lot of press this week about the four day work week, how it could work. The Wall Street Journal has a story about how in England, there are some companies that are trying this and are quite happy with it, and many who've tested it will continue to test it. It's one of the largest studies on this stuff ever done. Now, I understand there's some irony. We're talking about on a Friday. But do either of you believe in the four day work week, you know, both as a, as a participant, but also analyst of business?

• 41:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Corey, why don't you go? I feel like Corey, you're always sharing your perspectives on a, on a smarter workplace. So go ahead.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I, I do get distorted in terms of journal, like journalism is like this, you know, all encompassing job where it's like, yeah, sometimes you're working a little less on a Friday, but sometimes you're working really hard on a Sunday. I don't know. Like, like, it, it can be, it can be challenging. I mean, like, like, I feel like in this economic environment, you know, in the US in particular, like, that certainly, I think it pushes the can, you know, kicks a can down the road for a lot of these sort of more hybrid work environments, Like remote work, like four day work week, like I just feel like every company is sort of

• 42:41Speaker 02

  just like facing a ton more pressure from shareholders and you know, there's a lot of people in the capital allocation world that are gonna raise their eyebrow at a four day work week. I mean, look at like, it's like Salesforce is being sworn by activist investors and like in part because they have this reputation of being pretty like relaxed in terms of like employee culture. So I don't know, I, I don't, I can't see it taking hold in, in the US in the near term.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but I think the big thing to remember about how work has changed and maybe it does make sense is I was trying to explain to a much younger colleague that back in the 2000s, even when I worked in finance, when I went home, I actually couldn't work because like we weren't allowed to access any of the systems off, like especially if you're a junior, you, you weren't allowed to and you didn't even have a laptop and there's in the long ago days. So you actually disconnected for that brief period of time. Whereas now no one disconnects and everyone I know, and it, it's not just more demanding jobs, even fairly like jobs you would never think. My wife works in education. She's checking

• 43:50Speaker 01

  email till 10:30, 11 every night. No one disconnects throughout the week. So I think there's actually something where everyone's kind of working Monday to Thursday, the whole time. And then maybe Fridays are off, or at least you're not in the office, even if you are returning to work, returning to the office. I think there's something that, that I'm not someone who was like hybrid is going to change everything. Remote is the only future, but I do think work is completely changed with all these technologies that we, we should recognize.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I feel like Friday work from home is like probably where we're at right now, where it's like, you know, the people that are really want to keep working hard are gonna like work hard on Fridays from home. But it's like, it's like assumed that the people who aren't like are sort of like working a couple hours and whatever. I am working, I am working very hard if my boss.

• 44:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, you're here live.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  You're here, you're here.

• 44:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Big technology podcast. I do think that what was interesting about this study. So I read through the article and what was interesting about this study was that it said something about the four day work week, but also about how inefficient we are in the office in general. And Let me just read to you a couple of things that they were talking about. So they said, it said that they made workdays more efficient with hacks such as cutting back on meetings and ensuring employees had more time to focus on completing tasks. And let's see, there's about this one employee who it says before starting, she and her staff tracked and analyzed their work week,

• 45:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  week, work week and concluded that 20% of it was wasted in, in, in unessential meetings, business travel and other inefficiencies. And anyone who's worked in an office, this is going to sound super familiar because we end up spending so much of our time on just complete crap. And we let it go. Why do we let it go? Oh, because we have this five days. We have that fifth day that we can get to the stuff that we need to. But in the meantime, sit in this meeting. Yeah, you don't really need to be here, but it would be good for you to see. And more often than not, that just leads to wasted time and pressure and deadlines and hurry up and, and wait type of situations in the office. And maybe that four day work week can actually be a creative constraint that says, we're doing this all in four days.

• 46:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  So let's cut the crap and actually focus on the stuff that matters and not spend our entire days working on stuff that's garbage and is not meaningful for the business.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 46:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I like, I like this commentary from a man who doesn't have a boss. No boss. And I have to say like, look, as a solo entrepreneur, I definitely have a impetus to just work all the time. And one of the things I promised myself when I started doing this was that, look, there's going to be a temptation to work and work always. And it's going to be crucial to make time for myself to actually live life. And I, I've taken definitely my fair share of, of Fridays off since starting this. I'm two and a half years in. The business is doing okay. I do, I mean, I'm crunching from Monday to Monday to Thursday. And now, you know, Lord almighty, I've added the Friday podcast.

• 47:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, that sort of stuff. That's on you. That's on me. But then, then take a Monday off. And I do think that, that it can be productive. It can work in certain circumstances. And if anything, hopefully the discussion spurs more companies to take a look at the practices they have in the five day work week, or in the normal work day and say, What are we doing here? Because oftentimes they're just completely wasting their time, wasting their company time, wasting their employee time. And where's it leading?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I think I think I definitely agree with that because anyone who's ever had their Friday off knows how you crunch, as you said, to get there so you don't have to work over the weekend. You work extra hard and work for it. So I think that's a good place to end on a Friday, getting it as it's clocks about to strike noon on the East Coast.

• 47:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's call it the four and a half day work week. We'll end it here. Ron John Roy, Cory Weinberg, thank you so much for joining. What a great time.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 48:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. We will be back next Wednesday with another flagship interview show, then Ron John and I will be back on Friday, maybe with a special guest, maybe just one on one. We'll see. We got seven days till then and we'll work maybe three or four of them. So until then, I want to thank you for listening. Thank you for watching if you're here with us live. It's always great to do these Friday shows. We had a very lively audience today. Thanks to everybody who participated. Awesome to see you there. Again, we do them on LinkedIn, so you can jump to my page, Alex Kantrowitz on LinkedIn. And I will update you with when these events are going to be, but usually we do them Fridays at 11 Pacific time and 2 PM Eastern. That'll do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thanks again for LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network, and we will

• 48:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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