Pod Insights Decoder Inside the AI startup frenzy: ‘Everyone’s pivoting, then pivoting again’ About this episode On this episode of Decoder, Ellis Hamburger — former journalist at The Verge, early Snap employee, and founder of the brand strategy studio Meaning — joins guest host Alex Heath to share why many AI founders are missing the bigger picture.
Links:
Meaning | Ellis Hamburger
Social media is doomed to die | Verge
I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything | Verge
Hideo Kojima sees Death Stranding 2 as a cautionary tale | Verge
Apple heard your complaints about the Liquid Glass | Verge
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 9,386 words · 12 speakers
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0:26 Speaker 01 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
0:36 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
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1:27 Speaker 04 Hey, everybody. It's Neil I. So I'm off on parental leave this summer, which is exciting for a lot of reasons. And one of them is I'm handing Decoder over to some really fun guest hosts, who've invited some really interesting guests of their own. This all kicks off starting today. Verge Deputy Editor and longtime friend of the show, Alex Heath, is taking over our Thursday episodes for the next few months. Alex has landed a number of pretty big Decoder exclusives for us over the years, including a running annual chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And as the author of the excellent Command Line Newsletter, Alex is super tapped into both the broader tech community and the nonstop breakneck pace of the AI industry. So I'm really excited to see what he's going to bring to the show this summer. Just for our Monday episodes, the interview episodes, stay tuned. We'll have more to share starting next week about who's going to be taking over those episodes while I'm gone.
2:11 Speaker 04 It's an all-star crew, and I'm really excited about it. Okay, that's enough for me. Here's Alex.
2:18 Speaker 05 Welcome to Decoder. I'm Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. This is the first in a series of Thursday Decoder episodes that I'll be hosting while Neelai is out on parental leave. I've been covering AI a lot at The Verge, and I'm excited to start sharing some of the conversations I regularly have with leaders in the space here. The plan is for each episode to focus on a specific theme, from the rise of deepfakes to how AI is reimagining the browser. This week, I'm focusing on how AI companies talk about what they're building. My guest is Ellis Hamburger. He's the founder of Meaning, a marketing firm that works with a lot of buzzy AI startups. Ellis actually used to work at The Verge shortly after it first launched in 2012,
3:03 Speaker 05 where he covered the early mobile app boom. Now, he's in the trenches with a lot of AI startups, helping them figure out how to present their products to the world. That gives him a pretty unique perspective. First, some disclosures. Ellis has a lot of clients that we cover at The Verge, including Nothing, Raycast, Readwise, Daylight, Friend, Mainframe, Tolan, and more. He also previously worked at the browser company and Snap. We recorded this episode together in Los Angeles, and as you'll probably be able to tell, Ellis and I have been friends for a long time. I've always found Ellis to be an original thinker, and I hope you'll find our conversation as interesting as I did. Okay, here we go.
3:55 Speaker 05 So Ellis, before we get into the heart of this conversation, I would love to go back and go through how you got to where you are, because it's a really fascinating story. And you're a Verge alum, so that's really cool. And we've almost overlapped at a couple places.
4:10 Speaker 06 Sure. I mean, I've been a tech nerd since the day I was born, as far as I know. And if you recall, the artist known as Walt Mossberg was always my idol growing up. And
4:22 Speaker 05 Also a huge part of Verge history, yeah.
4:24 Speaker 06 Yep, yep. Walt Mossberg was my idol with his personal technology column. I think it was every Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and obviously it was great that he had the Steve Jobs exclusives. Those were always good, but what I loved about him is that he really brought it down to earth for the average person.
4:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:40 Speaker 06 Which, you know, you can't always count on reporters to do, right? Maybe you've heard this rumor that reporters write for each other and not actually for the audience.
4:47 Speaker 05 That's too frequently true. Yeah.
4:49 Speaker 06 It could, it could be true. It might, might warrant further investigation, but um, yeah, I love that Walt, and it's funny, you know, Joanna in his footsteps is, is doing something similar, just making it so friendly and familiar for the average person. And so, yeah, I'll never forget one day, um, I emailed him asking if he'd chat with me once I decided that I wanted to write. And he wrote back in like five minutes and I was sweating bullets and it took us a month to get on the phone. I prepped all these questions and it turned out to be one of the most awkward conversations of my life because I don't know if my questions were too good or what, but he kept pausing to be like, is this for the school paper? And I'm like, no, this is just for me, man. I'm just a curious dude. I think around that
5:33 Speaker 06 time I realized, you know, that curiosity and that ability to ask really detailed questions is, is really, you know, a big part of what being a journalist is, retaining that curiosity every day. And so then it was really just a matter of where I was going to begin. I applied to a few places. I think I was far too straight edge for Gizmodo at the time. So they, they rejected me. I ended up getting a job at Business Insider.
5:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:56 Speaker 06 Tools section. So I was a tool for a little while, an intern, and then a full-timer writing about phones, gadgets. I was at BI for a while and then, of course, I'd been following Josh Topolsky and his exploits for a while. I don't think Engadget had any internships. That would have been my first choice. So around the time that The Verge launched, I don't know if you know this, I snuck into The Verge launch party.
6:19 Speaker 05 No way.
6:20 Speaker 06 Yeah. And I approached Josh at some point and I don't know, I guess I made a good impression because a couple of months later he hit me up as The Verge was starting to hire up.
6:28 Speaker 05 You never told me this, that this is how you got in.
6:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. Pretty much every one of my jobs is through interrogating somebody or DMing them. Whether that's good or bad, you can be the judge.
6:38 Speaker 05 So then you covered a lot of that early mobile app boom at The Verge for a couple of years.
6:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, it was a special time. I mean, if you remember, there was a really big debate about the future of software. Was it going to be HTML5? Was it going to be native Objective C? You were seeing the launch of new apps like Path that created an entire user interface paradigm that could be different, or Paper by 53 that to this day is, you know, one of the finest pieces of software ever made. And then on the flip side, you have all these other apps that are trying to be for everybody on every platform, and it's just a list view or a news feed or something like that. And so it really was a fascinating time. And I think before the AI boom right now, that was the last time that there was this much VC investment all at one time.
7:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
7:25 Speaker 06 Which is just a blast to cover, honestly.
7:27 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
7:28 Speaker 06 I think of it like the VCs are kind of playing roulette in Vegas, but they're trying to bet on every single number. I'm not sure quite how that works out, but I'm told that it does work out.
7:37 Speaker 05 Okay, so yeah, you're in this boom time, and this was early Snapchat era, too. You started covering Snap a lot. And it's really weird, like, having this conversation because you and I have, like, we've, I don't want to say mirrored each other, but we've had a lot of similar epochs in our career. Like, you covered Snap a lot when it was just getting started. You did some of the first interviews with Evan Spiegel, the CEO on theverge.com. Then I went on and covered Snap for a long time after you went to Snap. But like, talk to me about that time and like, why you honed in on Snap and then how that led to joining Snap very early.
8:14 Speaker 06 I think at the time Evan was pretty much the youngest founder I'd ever met when I was at The Verge. And he was just so unbelievably thoughtful about every design decision, which is kind of funny and maybe a little bit sad, right? Because the way the app looks, it looks like a toy, and in many ways still does. And I'm not sure, you know, how much Evan really gets in public, you know, in terms of mind share for anything except maybe stories, which in my view was never necessarily the perfect fit for Snapchat anyway, as a private messaging platform. But, I mean, I remember, you know, when he Explain to me that you were going to get a notification before your friend was done typing. Like, right when they start typing, you're going to get a notification.
8:56 Speaker 06 And I was like, that's insane. Like, there's nothing to look at yet if you go into the chat. And he's like, well, the whole point is to get into the chat together, just like in real life, instead of having this awkward text ping pong of people leaving each other unread. And I was like, holy crap, like, that's a real insight, just like ephemerality driven by real conversations with friends at a coffee shop, at a bar, at a restaurant, that just makes people feel something different. There are a lot of examples of that through Snap over history. And I think at the time, most reporters were interested in just asking him over and over again, if it was a sexting app. I was the one who cared about design, so that made us fast friends. And eventually, I was not really picturing myself as an editor in chief in 50 years.
9:40 Speaker 06 And so I started to think about what I was going to do next. And so I was looking at Facebook, I was looking at some others, just because I knew so many folks at Facebook from being a beat reporter at the time. Evan eventually invited me to join, and thus began the next chapter of going from all, wearing all black Brooklyn bro to jeans and white tees LA bro, LS, I suppose.
10:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, and on LinkedIn, it looks like you were obviously very early at Snap and marketing and did a lot of things, but I don't think people fully appreciate your impact there. I mean, you used to-
10:11 Speaker 06 You mean putting the poop emoji in notifications and error messages?
10:14 Speaker 05 Yes, that.
10:15 Speaker 06 Because that's my magnum opus, put that on my grave.
10:17 Speaker 05 But you were at one point, that's very good. But you were at one point responsible for every word that the company had in the public domain, from like the App Store description to the receipts on the Spectacles vending machine from like 2015, what a fun time that was. I don't think you even really appreciate this, but you were kind of a culture bearer at the company for a while, and you would do these new higher orientations and talk about the ethos of the company and its perspective and what makes it unique. And you did that for a long time, and then, when did you decide to leave?
10:51 Speaker 06 Around seven and a half years later.
10:54 Speaker 05 Okay, so you were there for, through the IPO, through a lot of change, and then you leave to do what?
11:01 Speaker 06 So I left to join the browser company. I hate to say another DM pitch from Ellis to a founder, but I'd known Josh for a pretty long time. I wrote about his startup Potluck back when I was at The Verge. And then I wrote about his app called Rooms. Once he got to Facebook, that was kind of like a mini Reddit clone with some Snapchat QR codes in it.
11:21 Speaker 05 There's a pocket of people listening to this that are gonna be like, wow, I feel seen. And a bunch of people are gonna be like, what the hell are we talking about? But that's okay. Keep going.
11:30 Speaker 06 It certainly feels a certain way that I have a space in my brain for the Facebook Rooms app. I'll tell you that. But yeah, it's funny. I didn't give Potluck or Facebook Rooms particularly good reviews, but I guess Josh appreciated it nonetheless. And yeah, I mean, he just tweeted one day that Arc was going into beta and I DM'd him like, let me beta test this thing. I mean, that was one of the reasons I wanted to go work for Snapchat in the first place is that one of my favorite parts about being a reporter was not strong-arming people into scoops, but just testing these apps for a few weeks before they launched and being on the cutting edge of, you know, in my view, software is the tools that we all use every day. The forks, the knives, the chairs, the TVs, these are things that really have a profound power to affect us.
12:13 Speaker 06 They're not just little 99 cent widgets and gimmicks. And testing those products is really, is really always been something that I love to do. And so, yeah, I wrote Josh a whole page of feedback and he was like, come join us. And so, yeah, then I was there for the very eventful first two years of Arc, which is now, I guess, in the dust as far as a lot of things are concerned. But it was a really nice moment. We tried to portray that, you know, there could be a more transparent tech company. I think there's so many ivory towers, I mean, especially Facebook. I mean, I just, as well as I got to know the people at Facebook over the years, you know, arguably, I was their favorite reporter for a while, but I never felt like they could just be honest with me, you know?
12:55 Speaker 06 And I think it's been interesting to see the cycle that Facebook has gone through over the years. And even if Zuck is polarizing today, as he always has been, the more he shares about himself, the more you're forced to reckon with the fact that he is a real person, even if you think he's annoying. And I think that's better than not being a real person. Better than just being like a PR person who doesn't let any interesting thing that wasn't pre-planned slip through. And I think as we've seen, you know, even if you make some mistakes, that's natural. I mean, honestly, that was one of the insights with ephemerality. Something Evan used to say to convince parents. He's like, listen, do kids make mistakes? And they're like, yeah, I guess my kid does make mistakes. And he's like, would you rather than be saying some swear words and dumb shit on Snapchat where it's ephemeral?
13:40 Speaker 06 Or on Facebook or LinkedIn to every future employer? And they're like, huh, yeah, I guess so.
13:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:47 Speaker 06 Teens do dumb shit.
13:49 Speaker 05 They still.
13:49 Speaker 06 Where would you like them to do it?
13:51 Speaker 05 What did you learn from Snap and Browser from a high level? They're very different experiences, but I imagine there's a three line.
13:58 Speaker 06 There's a funny duality there going from Evan, who I think was very much the Steve Jobs playbook.
14:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
14:06 Speaker 06 Probably a little bit, you know, adversarial with media. Very precious about surprises and keynotes and not letting a single thing leak. And what was interesting about that to me is that he is either a really young millennial or really old Gen Z-er, but this is a group that is by far the number one audience on Snapchat. And every brand report you read is that all Gen Z cares about is authenticity. And, you know, brands that show you their true colors and talk to you and develop a parasocial relationship with you and build in public. But for whatever reason, Evan just thought social media was so lame. Which I mean, in some ways it was, a lot of brands posing as some character on social media.
14:50 Speaker 06 But as a result, for a long time, he really didn't say almost anything to the world outside of the Morgan Stanley conferences he attended every so often. Or a highly polished TV commercial-esque ad that was not really the format de jour that Gen Z was, was, you know, expecting and enjoyed. And then going to the browser company, Josh, someone who is deeply steeped in online media, addicted to Twitter, just like the rest of us. Not really precious about how he sounds or how he's going to come off because he has that confidence in himself as a wholesome person. And so going from, yeah, having one brand campaign that gets pretty diluted after a year and a half at Snap to doing one every two weeks was definitely a really big shift. And I think
15:36 Speaker 06 as a result, you saw Arc and Browser Company developed one of the biggest, most enthusiastic audiences in the whole space over a course of a year and a half. And but here's like, you know, people ask me all the time, like, how do I do what you did?
15:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, part of it is getting out there with your voice, but you still have to be interesting. You still have to be thoughtful. You still have to be opinionated.
15:57 Speaker 05 The product can't suck either.
15:59 Speaker 06 Product can't suck either. Of course it can't.
16:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:01 Speaker 06 There's always been that spectrum, I think, of brand filling in the gaps for product and being the whole product, you know, with a lot of consumer packaged goods, if you will.
16:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:10 Speaker 06 So yeah, a pretty big difference, I would say, in the communication style. And, you know, what's interesting, last thing I'll say about that is that you also see how that can bite you in the butt. Right? For a long time, it looked like Josh Miller couldn't stop winning when he just spoke to you as he does every day. And I think a lot of times that was true. But then, you know, I think some people critique the way that the arc kind of sunset-ish happened, then going completely off the grid for a few months. And it's like, wait, I thought you were my buddy. Where'd you go? So yeah, being more transparent and more out there also creates a lot higher expectations.
16:47 Speaker 05 We'll be right back.
16:57 Speaker 01 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
17:07 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand", when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
17:15 Speaker 01 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
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18:17 Speaker 05 We're back with Ellis Hamburger. So let's go to what you did after Browser and what you're doing now. You are, I jokingly tell you that I think you're like the Rick Rubin for AI startups, but you probably cringe at that and that's okay. But explain, explain what you're doing, what the company is and yeah.
18:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's funny. The Rick Rubin comparison is interesting to me because I do think of myself, and I think he probably does think of himself as a bit of a therapist. But he doesn't know how to work the knobs and seems to be a little bit proud of that. I would like to believe I know how to work the knobs, whether that knob is a quippy social bio or your Super Bowl video script. So yeah, maybe a little bit like him, a little bit not. But yeah, after being at the browser company for a couple of years, I started Meaning, which really was a leap of faith, based on a gap I saw in the market, which is that most early-stage companies don't yet have a head of marketing. They don't have a head of comms. They certainly don't have a UX writer, something I did at Snap that I always thought
19:22 Speaker 06 was really underappreciated, part of the product experience. And I said, what if I kind of do all those things for founders? And what I realized is that they saw something different in me, someone more like them that could speak founder in a very multidisciplinary way. And honestly, I think Evan and Josh thought of me at that same way, early on, at both Snap and Browser. The difference is, the bigger companies get, whether it's Snap or Browser, inevitably, people who wear a lot of hats get put in silos just because there's that much work to do. You know, a browser company, there are that many tweets to write, that many release notes to do, that many reporters to ping. And I think packaging it all in one, trying to create a blueprint for them that really
20:06 Speaker 06 works for every audience, is what I try to do today. And, you know, I still do do some writing, like website copy, video scripts, et cetera, some of which we can talk about if you want. But at its core, I think it's about positioning. And it's funny, that brings me back to reporting. You know, I'm so grateful that, it's funny, I think Business Insider wanted me to write five or six articles per day, which sounds like a lot until you remember that Joe Weisenthal used to do 20 a day. And so what that was, was turning my college essay, in JR's words, into hopefully practicing all-day-long positioning.
20:43 Speaker 06 How do I frame a new app or a new company to my audience in a way that's interesting? It could be the founder, it could be their background, it could be the product, it could be the innovation. I learned early on what we all know today, which is that everything is content. Everything has to be thought of as content because no matter what you do, you're going to appear in the same feed as everybody else with Kim Kardashian and Sam Altman and whatever else is going on. Or whatever bombs are being dropped in whatever corner of the world today. So, you know, there are more ways than just your product, I think, to stand out. One of my favorite stories, I interviewed a guy who was making a contacts app. And I think he was a little disappointed when my whole article instead was about how he beamed me into the interview
21:28 Speaker 06 and a telepresence robot pretended like it was completely normal.
21:33 Speaker 06 So, yeah, the headline was about the telepresence robot. I beamed, I did that for the first time, I beamed into their office. I was in their lobby and their receptionist is like, oh, hey, what's up? I'm like, what?
21:48 Speaker 06 I'm using my keyboard to maneuver around their office and everybody has been trained to just kind of give me a little wave.
21:53 Speaker 05 Wow.
21:54 Speaker 06 Or that Midwestern upside down smile when they see you.
21:57 Speaker 05 I've had a lot of bizarre interview situations, but never that, that's up there.
22:01 Speaker 06 And guess what? That probably did get more eyeballs on them than a new type of contacts app.
22:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:07 Speaker 06 So, I don't regret it.
22:09 Speaker 05 And you work with a lot of companies now that we cover at The Verge. I'm just going to list a few so people have a sense. There's Nothing, Raycast, Readwise, Delphi, Daylight, Friend, Mainframe, it goes on. So you've built quite this roster now. And where I'm really curious to know more about what you're seeing is, you know, when I look at all these AI companies, they're all starting to blend together. There's just a lot of the same. Everyone's doing an agent, everyone's trying to do their own version of ChatGPT. And aside from a few, you know, things and some of them you've actually worked on, but just there's very few that tend to break out and be like, oh, I haven't actually thought of like
22:52 Speaker 05 that as a way that AI can be used and that being an actual product. So, yeah, if you were to just kind of survey what's going on right now in AI startup land and how people are either amalgamating together or standing out, like, what are you seeing and what's interesting?
23:10 Speaker 06 I think what's interesting to me is the debate about the interface. You know, I've always someone who's really cared about software design. And I think people want to feel things when they use products, when they wear clothing, when they go places. They don't always necessarily want the most streamlined, minimal experience, which is San Francisco design. You know, iOS seven up till now with, what is it called, Liquid Ass? Your words, not mine. I'm the guest, yeah, I can say it. And so what's interesting to me is that every time there's a really big software shift, people want to know, oh, everything's going to be voice now. All right, my app's going to be voice. And it's like, dude, like, people like pictures and videos a whole lot. It's not all going to be voice.
23:56 Speaker 06 And then AI comes out and everybody's like, oh, everything's going to be a chatbot conversation. And it's like, dude, like, do you want to make music inside of a chatbot experience? And I think this is the nature of tech. Everybody tends to overcompensate on these different user interface trends, in part because those are the kind of things that VCs like to bet on, right? I guess you've been doing this long enough to remember like the original chatbot wave that was just driven by so much FOMO. And it is, man, it is FOMO in fast motion right now. Companies that I'm working with are pivoting during our process and then pivoting again. The technology is moving so quickly that it's very, very difficult to lay out a vision. And so I think, you know, you could talk about the different vertical use cases, different industries, this and that.
24:41 Speaker 06 But one of the things that's interested me is, you know, if you look at mainframe client that's working on agents, they're kind of thinking about working with agents almost as like a to-do list and delegating things to agents. And if you look at another one I recently worked with called Strawberry, which is an AI browser, they're framing the different ways to work with agents as friendly little companions. Or if you look at Dia, the newest browser company evolution, and disclosure, I am still a shareholder in Browser Co., they're framing them as skills that you access through a slash command. I'm very interested in how that's going to evolve and how people do want to interact with it. I'm definitely a believer that chat nor voice is really the best way to do a whole
25:25 Speaker 06 lot of things, especially if you've ever been on a New York subway.
25:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:28 Speaker 06 There is definitely a lot less privacy when you're speaking all of your search queries out loud, right? But I do think ChatGPT has become just so powerful that in the same way that Google was able to adopt so many use cases across images and shopping and maps and reviews, that the intent layer, if it succeeds, as I think ChatGPT is trying to do today, to become an OS, whether that's hardware, software, some combination, that intent, capturing that intent, is everything. And even if the OS isn't perfect, if that's what people get used to, they're willing to put up with some cruff and jump over some hurdles in order to get to the solution.
26:10 Speaker 06 So, yeah, I think that's, that's an area of experimentation that's been interesting to me.
26:15 Speaker 05 When you're talking to founders who are trying to figure out how to communicate what they're doing with AI, what do they say behind the scenes that's different from how they portray it publicly? How do they actually feel about AI?
26:29 Speaker 06 I think no one wants to think that they're the one destroying the world. And there's part of that that's just like, oh, it can't be me. I'm just doing a little AI calendar app over here, right? But collectively, we are all absolutely accelerating this revolution that honestly keeps me up at night. And so I see as part of what I do to help me rationalize my job is try and push founders toward documenting goals for society and for people, not just efficiency, saving time and money. Anybody can do that. There's no ethic or morality in that. You know, I'll give you an example.
27:11 Speaker 06 One of my very first clients, I worked with AMO, the former Zenly folks from Snap, Antoine Martin and the crew over there. One of the things I was proud of is that after all those years at Snap, you know, it was with AMO that I was able to document. This source of truth manifesto with them with some principles, one of which was friendship is a feeling. And we elaborated below that to being about how it isn't about metrics. It isn't about this or that. And I really do believe that as companies grow, you need those principles about your goals for society embedded in the company culture or else without it. PMs are just going to default to incremental gains, which we all know are incredibly easy to get. Right? And so, I mean, if you look at the news this week,
27:56 Speaker 06 I think I saw on the verge yesterday, people were upset about Apple's push notification for F1.
28:01 Speaker 05 Yeah. And when this comes out, it will have been a little bit after that. But yeah, that that is something recently for sure that people are talking about.
28:09 Speaker 06 So I happen to view notifications as one of the worst things ever invented in the history of technology. And, you know, Apple, as the boss of the notifications paradigm and system, yes, they've evolved it. Yes, they've, you know, added do not disturb modes and AI based priority notifications and all this and that. But do they have a principle internally that says never interrupt the user unless this is something that is truly urgent right now? And who knows? Maybe that notification was sent silently and not with a buzz. But I view that as very disrespectful. And I was happy to see that there was a little bit of an uproar about it
28:51 Speaker 06 because if Apple's doing it, then, you know, the cat's out of the bag and it becomes the new norm, just in the same way that we all accept ads. It's endemic to so many of our daily experiences. Instead of paying for them, Apple's starting to do that too. And before you know it, our spaces and our ability to have a direct relationship with products and companies starts to get eroded and the norms change.
29:15 Speaker 05 I think most AI startup founders are seeing the gold rush. They're seeing how adding AI to what they're doing can triple their valuation or whatever and help them get buzz. And I don't see a ton of morality in any of it, to be honest. And I'm. You're right, like that gives cause for concern. I mean, luckily, I guess for humanity, most startups fail. So like, the fact that that is so prevalent doesn't necessarily mean that this is going to be the world we live in. But at the same time, it's also indicative of the culture, right? The culture is very much like, yes, AI is really cool. There's a lot of really cool applications of it. It's also kind of like the new Wall Street.
30:00 Speaker 05 I'm curious, like, can you figure that out pretty quickly when you're meeting a founder? Like, where are their motivations actually aligned? Does that affect how you work with them? Or don't?
30:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's funny, working with all the B2B SaaS companies that tend to be a bit more objective and money-driven has definitely made me B2B sassier of a person, I would say. Just thought of that on the spot. I could tell as a reporter, man.
30:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:27 Speaker 06 When you get an email, and it's the fresh Wharton grad MBA who's trying to work something out, but VCs see through it, too.
30:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:37 Speaker 06 And so I think I've been fortunate to be in a space and get referrals from people who care about design. I mean, people ask me how I've gotten this or that great client. And it's like, all the people who care know each other.
30:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:52 Speaker 06 And I'm someone who cares. I want to talk about how product decisions affect people, make them feel better or worse about their lives. And frankly, I mean, this is kind of my, the beef that I've had with Facebook all this time, is that it's a whole lot of very nice, smart people who just refuse to really have a take on what a better society looks like. You know, for a very long time, their MO was about connecting the world. And one of my favorite artists and creators, Hideo Kojima, who has a new game out called Death Stranding 2, he is known for being very prophetic with his tech ideas as predicting COVID and delivery culture and whatnot. The tagline of his new game is, should we have
31:36 Speaker 06 connected? And I mean, I don't know if that's a direct aim at Facebook, or just... Connecting as an idea, but I think Facebook certainly was flying that flag for a very long time. As far as I can tell, the only thing they care about is giving people more of what they click and what they engage with, which leads to a very different Instagram explore page than if you have a different set of principles. And there is no doubt that if you have ethics or morals or opinions, they isolate one audience after another. But I'm sure you would agree, it's pretty impossible to be apolitical these days.
32:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:15 Speaker 06 And I hope they can start to have some ideas about what makes life worth living and how to help support it.
32:25 Speaker 05 We need to take another quick break.
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33:55 Speaker 05 We're back with Ellis Hamburger.
33:58 Speaker 05 There is one startup in the space that I feel like is actually saying the quiet part out loud that I've been thinking about a lot. It's Clouly, which if people have not seen it, it's only a few months old at this point, but it started with this 21-year-old founder who built this AI tool to help him cheat on a coding interview for Amazon. He posted it online. It went super viral. Amazon actually rejected it's or rescinded its job offer. And then he turned it into a company and it's a company that's also this like, you know, creator thing. It's more than just like a AI software thing like he.
34:39 Speaker 06 It's like a creator house.
34:40 Speaker 05 And they're all super young and they're all just like super AI native. And essentially what it is, is it's this kind of semi-translucent interface that runs in the background on your Mac and listens and observes everything that you're doing and hides itself from screen sharing and can recommend things based on the context. And that sounds kind of cool. I'm haven't installed it. I'm frankly terrified to install it, but I probably still will at some point. But, you know, they could say it's this new kind of assistant, right? Which is like, sure, everyone's doing an assistant. And instead, their whole branding is like, this is to help you cheat on life. This is to help you cheat on everything. And like, it may not always work, but like that framing to me was really interesting because it actually
35:24 Speaker 05 just spoke to how people are quietly actually using this stuff. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you could objectively look at how people are interacting with AI at scale. Most of it is probably developing what look like unhealthy parasocial relationships for emotional support or replacing relationships. And then stuff like this, like cheating, cheating on homework, cheating a job, stuff, whatever. And I'm curious, like, when you see something like Clouly, and then they raise millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, of course, like, right after all this, what does that say? What does that say to you? And like, does that change anything about how you approach your other work?
36:05 Speaker 06 There's a side of me, you know, that comes back to being a reporter that is kind of like, you do know that the more sensational headline is probably going to get more clicks or do better. And. I remember being a business insider and just looking at Chartbeat and looking at the clicks you get on your headlines and it's addictive, right? And I think we all need to hold ourselves to a standard of trying to balance that cynical part of ourselves with, you know, the more honest, noble altruistic side of ourselves. And I definitely see them more toward the cynical side of the spectrum, but I maybe have a contrarian take here, which is that I kind of think it's pretty clearly a tongue in cheek thing.
36:48 Speaker 06 It is certainly going to press liberal buttons, I will tell you that. Certainly going to press, press the buttons of the people who like to opine about this stuff in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, or maybe even at The Verge. But, um, you know, there was a specific line of their manifesto that struck with me, which is, "The world will call it cheating, but so is the calculator." And this is something Sam Altman said as well, "So was spell check, so was Google." What's funny about that is that they're saying it's cheating, but that it isn't going to be cheating for long.
37:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:17 Speaker 06 And so to that extent, I think it's kind of an interesting hook. And I would honestly much rather have companies be straight.
37:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:24 Speaker 06 About where they think we are heading. And here's the thing, here's my challenge to every company, is to know what's coming and know the human tendencies to, you know, want junk food, want things that are short term gratification instead of long term, and try and deliver something great that outweighs that stuff, right? I think you could argue that even Apple's aesthetic, where so many little pieces of craft are hidden within it that are very hard to justify at any other public company or any other startup, are a great model for this, which I think is why we all hold them to such a high standard, is that they show that you can still be good and still win.
38:09 Speaker 05 Do you think Apple still shows that?
38:10 Speaker 06 Less and less, I hate to say, which is, I think, one of the things with having a founder CEO. Only the founder CEO with their crazy advantageous share structure can make the long-term decisions in today's stock market, in today's, in today's financial environment. And I don't think that's necessarily super debatable. And so I think I saw a stat the other day that like founder-led Fortune 500 companies are just dramatically more successful in terms of the returns over the long term, though, right? And so I think that's the... The challenge that we all face in today's society, do we give in to the short term? Do we try and bet on the long term? And I do think storytelling is one of the only levers you have to sell the long term
38:55 Speaker 06 as a company or as a leader. I mean, I am just so seriously concerned that today's politics are all about just reacting to what's happening in the moment, instead of laying down the foundations for the long term.
39:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:08 Speaker 06 I mean, who in the world is building bridges or fixing bridges? That's not really a hot topic, is it? Right? Then when a bridge finally breaks and there's a big catastrophe, then it becomes a hot topic. And man, that just sucks if civilization has come all this way to only give in to whatever's on Twitter.
39:24 Speaker 05 People don't have the attention spans. That's the thing. You have an attention span for a catastrophe or a controversy.
39:30 Speaker 06 Right.
39:31 Speaker 05 You don't usually have an attention span for like, hey, this thing is important, but like not going to directly change your life or fire up your nervous system right now. The society is just not set up for that and increasingly less so, it feels like.
39:44 Speaker 06 That is really what I hope to do with every manifesto I write for a company, which is, you know, a big part of my bread and butter, is to try and paint a very desirable, but also specific vision of the future that is bigger than yourself. I think if it's only about you, it just feels like marketing. But, you know, if you're a robotics company, what vision do you literally see for our daily lives? I think if there's one thing we've seen with all the technology that we have, it's not that I am appreciative of my dishwasher and have another hour of leisure time each day, is that it just inevitably gets filled with something else, in part because of our culture and the guilt we all feel for not always being productive.
40:27 Speaker 06 And so that is really the value of visionary storytelling, I think, whether it's in tech or politics, is to try and reveal what's down the path and, and, you know, shine the light on, on what can be better and, and how to get there.
40:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's this thing with AI where I feel like everyone is saying it's going to free you up to do more. It's going to give you your time back, right? That's agents, right? It's like, I was just at a podcast, a live podcast taping where Sam Altman was talking about like, I can't wait to wake up one day and have my AI have triaged my entire day for me, pre-written emails, like all that stuff and just me be able to go yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And like, that's my morning. And like, sure, that sounds good on its face. What I feel when I'm using more AI stuff is that I just, it makes me busier. It doesn't actually like give me free time.
41:19 Speaker 05 It just makes me go like, oh, if I now have something, listening to all my notes and all my calls and making nice summaries for me, like, I'm just gonna have more meetings and I'm just gonna do more because I can and because I know I've got this fallback. I have this crutch where all my meetings are there. And I just don't know what that does to us. Like, I feel like it probably is gonna lead to more burnout, not less. I'm curious if you agree or how you think about that.
41:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, I bet Neil I would have a good answer to this question. Is there any evidence through the different technological revolutions that the leisure time has ever panned out?
41:54 Speaker 05 No.
41:56 Speaker 06 Like, I was asking ChatGPT about it earlier today, actually, and it was coming up a little empty. And I think you're right. And I mean, this isn't a surprise, but I was watching the new Johnny Harris YouTube. And, you know, just, just more examples than, than ever than we need to know that most people's real wages have not really changed all that much in decades. And more and more of what we create, the profits, the earnings are going toward the top 10 to 1%. This is the thing with tech, right? Is that we all think we're doing God's work when it's like, man, you could really have a far greater impact on people's quality of life,
42:35 Speaker 06 not by giving them a meeting note taker, but by trying to affect change so that people have more, more money in their pockets. Like, that is a far bigger lever for living the good life than trying to automate all these little things, I would say.
42:50 Speaker 05 I think people, founders that I've talked to in robotics, for example, I think they do, whether they really believe it in their soul or whether they really just care about money. I think some of them at least ascribe to believe that that is going to be a net positive. That when there are humanoids among us, you know, OpenAI is working on this, Meta is working on this, everyone's working on this. There's Figure, physical intelligence, the list goes on and on. In the next few years, there's this theory that robots will be walking among us and doing our laundry and, you know, cleaning up our houses and running our errands. And this is going to be a future that's just marvelous and frees people up.
43:29 Speaker 05 And like, yeah, like, was the car in that aggregate good in the long run? Sure. Like, did it create a lot of problems in the short term when it first came out? When like automobiles first came out? Yeah. And I don't, I don't see a lot of thinking about that from the founders I talked to. And I'm wondering if you do or if you see anything differently.
43:54 Speaker 06 Well, you know what can make the future better a lot of times is a great story. And
44:01 Speaker 05 If it's, if you believe it, as long as it's not just a story.
44:04 Speaker 06 Oh, you don't know where I'm going with this.
44:05 Speaker 05 Okay.
44:07 Speaker 06 You know, if you look at the pretty narrow number of reference points in culture and art and entertainment that we in the tech industry have. I mean, I remember back when I was at The Verge, everybody was like, oh, the future of interfaces is going to be just like Minority Report. And today, everybody talks about the movie Her and the type of companion that it can be.
44:30 Speaker 05 I think Sam Altman is literally trying to create her.
44:33 Speaker 06 Right. And so I saw Spike Jonze get interviewed last year at Config. And, you know, he wasn't trying to necessarily make a great product or better technology or whatever. He was just trying to tell a great story. But then, before you know it, it's literally the Bible for all these tech companies for what they want to build.
44:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
44:55 Speaker 06 As a science fiction reader, I think it gives us the opportunity to play out these scenarios. If you look at, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, someone who deeply cares about the hard science of it all. That's why I think that type of work, especially in film as well, is so important because it paints a picture of a future that we can all see. And I think it's just in people's nature to build toward it. I've always believed that designers and maybe even entertainers and creatives ahead of them are better at visualizing the future than, you know, a lot of folks who are traditionally in tech, like engineers, I would say. And so I think maybe there's more of that we can do, either within companies or outside of them. I mean, there have been some interesting vision videos over the years.
45:39 Speaker 06 There was this Microsoft one that went viral like a decade or two ago, but then that one was more positive. But then on the flip side, there was the negative one that was like AR reality filled with ads.
45:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:53 Speaker 06 Remember that one from several years ago?
45:54 Speaker 05 That was like a Vimeo thing or something? That was Microsoft?
45:58 Speaker 06 No, no, that one wasn't Microsoft. But, but guess what happens? That video gets shared with everybody at Snap, the world's biggest AR company. And now we say, all right, let's not do that. You know what I'm saying?
46:10 Speaker 05 Oh, so you all saw that and said?
46:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, of course.
46:12 Speaker 05 Opposite of that?
46:13 Speaker 06 Of course.
46:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:13 Speaker 06 And when you have something that is as emotional as a story, or, or even as something as small as like an evocative manifesto, people want to do the right thing. They just need some alternatives. Without alternative goals from leadership, it's just going to be incremental gains and 3% higher ad load all the way down.
46:35 Speaker 05 I don't know, man. I think there are some very powerful founders right now who actually not want to see the world burn, but have views of where all this is headed that are not good for most people.
46:49 Speaker 06 So can we do a tier ranking list, but only two tiers? We'll categorize all the founders, whether they are Batman or Ra's al Ghul.
46:58 Speaker 05 God.
46:59 Speaker 06 The head of the League of Shadows. They're both trying to do the right thing, but very different methods, right?
47:04 Speaker 05 You can do that.
47:05 Speaker 06 Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at a lot of the libertarian VCs and all that, I mean, they are so in the clouds that they don't really think much about the collateral damage in the short term, which I don't know, maybe there's an argument for if this is going to create a far better world in the, in the, the long term. But yeah, certainly Ra's al Ghul took it too far.
47:28 Speaker 05 Well, Ellis, this has been great. I feel like we could end it on that very strangely dark, but interesting note. I appreciate you doing this, man. Good to chat with you.
47:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
47:41 Speaker 05 Thanks to Ellis for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] or hit me up directly. You can follow us on TikTok and Instagram as well. We are at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to The Verge, which gets you access to command line and a bunch of other great stuff. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stat, our editor is Ursar Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.
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