Pod Insights The Vergecast The better, smarter future of messaging About this episode In episode two of our connectivity mini series, The Verge's David Pierce chats with Eric Migicovsky co-founder of Beeper. Beeper is a universal messaging app trying to take all your messages from all your apps and put them in one place. Is this the future of chat?
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Transcript 10,707 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
0:30 Speaker 01 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out, in. Dashboard, confessions.
0:39 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.
0:47 Speaker 01 Cut the bullspend. 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.
1:02 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of interoperable messaging protocols. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the second episode in our mini-series all about connectivity. Last week, we talked to Telly CEO Ilya Posin about how we interact with our TVs, the biggest screens in our house, and how we connect to the content that we care about. This week, we're going to talk about people. I think the best way I can explain the conversation we're about to have is to tell you a story about my wife. This happened just the other day. I swear this is true. It was the most perfect timing. So I'm in the living room, sitting on the couch watching TV, and my wife Anna comes in and is like, "I hate so much when somebody makes you download a whole new app just to group chat." Turns out, she joined this mom's group,
1:47 David Pierce? and the person organizing everything made her download GroupMe, which you might remember as the messaging app Microsoft bought a bunch of years ago and then like, forgot about. She had never heard of GroupMe, didn't want to use GroupMe, and now she had to have it on her phone just for this one group chat. She was standing there like, "Why can't messaging apps just work together so I can talk to everyone in one place?" And what I said to her is, "Listen to the Vergecast," because that right there is what today's episode is all about. How did we get to the point where talking to my friends requires a half dozen apps and I have to check 10 inboxes every day and I have to have this mental map of who I talk to in WhatsApp and who I talk to in iMessage and who I talk to
2:28 David Pierce? in Instagram DMs and on and on and on. It's awful. And before you message me saying, "David, this is because America is dumb. Everyone else in the world is just on WhatsApp," two things. One, I know, and I'm deeply jealous. And two, I don't think that's actually a good answer either. We shouldn't all be on one platform. There are lots of these platforms and systems out there. Shouldn't they all work together like the web or like email? I kind of think it should, and the person I'm talking with today absolutely thinks it should.
2:59 Speaker 04 My full name is Eric Michakovsky.
3:02 David Pierce? Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Beeper, a new-ish, universal messaging app. Beeper's big idea is to take all your messages from all of your apps, Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, Slack, a bunch of other places, and put them all in one place. I've been a Beeper user for a couple of years now, and the app is definitely still new and definitely kind of hacky, but this also feels like the way things obviously should work. One place for all your communications that just makes sense. So why doesn't it work like that? And can we get this sprawling, messy chat ecosystem back to a place that makes sense? That's kind of my big question going into this.
3:42 David Pierce? The first thing you need to know about Eric is that before he started Beeper, he was the founder of Pebble, one of the early smartwatch companies and one of the more interesting and beloved hardware startups, I think, ever. So I figured, you know, you're making a smartwatch, you're thinking about chat notifications, so suddenly messaging gets stuck in your brain. That's where I assumed this story started. But Eric said, "No, it actually goes back much, much farther than that."
4:07 Speaker 04 I think that because of my era, like when I started to use chat and when I started to use the internet, I associated a lot of my experiences of, you know, being online, finding groups of friends, hanging out with my friends. Like, we just, we hung out on MSN after school. You'd, you know, fire up the modem or DSL or whatever you had, and you'd hang out, you'd do homework, and you'd wait for... Well, actually, it probably even goes back to ICQ. That, that uh-oh. Remember that sound? Yeah, of course. It was addictive because it was a reminder that there was someone who was, you know, pinging you and wanted to chat. Got to the point where my dad could actually emulate the uh oh sound and cause me to drop whatever I was doing in the house and just like run, run back to my computer because
4:52 Speaker 04 I needed to get there before he or anyone else in the family did because, you know, shared computers. Yep, that was back in the days of the computer room. Yeah, and so my experience with chat is kind of foundational to computing. Like every device that I pick up, I use it to chat with friends. And I have, I think like I've benchmarked myself against other folks and I can kind of see how my chat patterns like I, I spend a lot of the day chatting. I have, I, I grew up in Canada, I've lived in Europe, I've lived in Asia, I now live in California. I have collected friends and family members on every single chat app in existence. And for some crazy reason, each place around the world kind of has a different chat app
5:37 Speaker 04 as their primary means of communication. So I've collected friends, you know, two or three people on every single app. And yeah, this is obviously all leading towards starting Beeper, but in the last, you know, 10 years, there really hasn't been a single app that you can use to chat with all of your friends. We were forced to download five to 10 different apps, even if you just wanted to message like one person. And every computer you'd have, you'd have to install all these, all these apps. And it just got to be more annoying. Like it felt like communication, like we live in the future, you know? I just tried out ChatGPT for the image recognition one. It's, it's crazy.
6:18 Speaker 04 Like we literally are living in the future, but for some reason, the experience of chatting is still stuck in like 15 years ago.
6:27 David Pierce? Yeah. Why do you think that is? Actually, I've spent some time looking into this and I've heard a lot of people blame a lot of things. Like, we had that era of Adium and Trillian and this idea of messaging that worked kind of like email, right? Where you could have an account on a bunch of different platforms, but all these platforms more or less could talk to each other. It wasn't always perfect, but it kind of worked and you could at least have an app that had all the platforms in one place. Even if they weren't talking to each other, you could at least have them all in one place. And then that broke. And I've talked to people who blame Facebook. I've talked to people who blame Google. I've talked to people who say, "Well, it was just never gonna work that way forever." What's your sense of what led us down kind of that wrong siloed path we've been on for the last decade?
7:10 Speaker 04 I think there's a couple of things at play here. One is the shift to mobile. 2007, the iPhone came out and that changed everything. Everything that had existed on the internet before was based on long-running socket connections to a central server. Or, you know, a P2P-style torrent, you know, distributed mesh network. But both of those models required kind of cheap access to the internet.
7:37 David Pierce? In a way that they were perfectly suited to the like always-on computer room, right? Like, that was that. It was exactly right for that device that just sits there in the background kind of on all the time. I had never thought of it like that.
7:49 Speaker 04 IRC doesn't actually have, like, when you log into an IRC server, you don't get any history. You have to have your IRC client running 24/7 in order to be able to see what was happening in the scroll back. So that's just like an indicator of how little the world was set up for, or the kind of internet as a whole was set up for this big shift to mobile. And so with the shift to mobile, all the existing chat apps died. They weren't ready for it. And new apps sprung up to fill the void. WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Snapchat. They were all built mobile first. They had many new features like end-to-end encryption. Because you had this device that was you. You know, you have your phone and it's always with you and you only have one phone at a time.
8:34 Speaker 04 These new apps or these new systems could afford to have a closer connection to your personal identity, which allows for things like, you know, you have a pretty good idea of who you're gonna message when you message their phone number. End-to-end encryption, you know, didn't exist before. There was, you know, a little bit of jabber end-to-end encryption, but no one really implemented that. So it was a big new innovation that came along with the switch to mobile. And everyone got a phone that allowed so many more people to start chatting. And so while we remember the golden age of chat being, you know, logging into Adium on our Dell desktop or whatever, most people's first experience with chat is SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, you know, Snapchat.
9:17 David Pierce? Yeah.
9:17 Speaker 04 Instagram, you know, all those apps and networks were not built with federation or decentralization in mind. They were built as they should have been, just individual apps that served a great purpose, that delivered an excellent experience to people. And they just didn't really care about the past. And that was fine. I don't think that anyone should be blamed for that. Like, we want to have new products. We want to have the evolution of, you know, technology. We don't want things to be stuck stagnant.
9:44 David Pierce? Sure. But at the same time, Google didn't wall off Gmail from the rest of the email universe just because it switched to how mobile works. And I get, I think what you're describing is a much bigger technical change, which makes sense. And, and there's a moment where it's like, okay, we have to rebuild this anyway. We're going to rebuild it differently. But part of me still wonders if, if there wasn't room back then to do it better. And a bunch of companies who had business reasons not to just didn't.
10:11 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I mean, I would actually take Google aside and say that everyone else is net neutral. If, you know, they're not maliciously trying to make life worse for people. But Google actually goes an extra step to say, I want to, even though it's harder to make something with an API, or even though it's harder to make something that's federated and decentralized, I think Google goes a step in that direction to say, look, let's at least try. And I think that just goes to the core of, you know, Google's hacker, you know, sensibilities.
10:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
10:40 Speaker 04 But no one else seems to have that. So that's.
10:44 Speaker 04 But if you look at the major players like Facebook and Apple and even SMS to a certain degree, no, there is no ability for other apps to interact with those or those systems easily.
10:55 David Pierce? I mean, for so many years, Facebook's own apps didn't interact with each other. Like, it was just, it was not even a thing anybody thought about for so, so, so long.
11:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. Now that you, now that we're talking about it, like technically Facebook Messenger did actually support Jabber back in the day. And so you could message someone on Google Talk from Facebook Messenger. And I think like, there probably was some. Moment where you'll have to research the history, but I think either Google shut down their Javab Bridge or Facebook shut down their Javab Bridge and then everyone kind of shut them down at the same point.
11:26 David Pierce? Because that was also the time when everybody realized how valuable these networks are and what you can do if you have people in your space. And it feels like the other thing that happened in that time was everybody in every industry said, we have to build universes inside of our apps, right? Like, that's what Netflix did. It's not that different a behavior in a lot of ways.
11:44 Speaker 04 But what's interesting about that is I think that's the prevailing wisdom. That's what we all assume. But if you look at the actual businesses that have been built on top of chat or adjacent to chat, chat does not make any of these big companies money.
11:58 David Pierce? Right.
11:59 Speaker 04 They're not even close to making the money. Take WhatsApp, for example. WhatsApp was acquired in 2013-ish and it was the biggest acquisition ever. And there was, you know, noise about who's going to get WhatsApp? Was it going to be Google or Facebook? And Facebook paid this outrageous sum because they didn't want it to go to Google and enrich Google's Google Plus or whatever they were doing at that time. And you'd imagine, like, I think it was probably hundreds of millions, if not a billion users already when they acquired them. And you'd be like, great, okay, like, how are we going to make money off this? And we are 10 years later. And I don't think WhatsApp is making significant money for Facebook at all.
12:40 David Pierce? Yeah, I don't, I think that's true. And I think one of the things a lot of these services have discovered over the last few years is there's no money in messaging. And if you try to stick money making things into messaging, people will revolt. Like, I think back to Google ALO, where they were like, we're going to bring in an AI assistant that's going to help you buy tickets when we understand that you're talking about tickets. Isn't that useful? And everybody went, no, that's horrible. Just let me talk to my friends.
13:10 Speaker 04 What I find is remarkable about this, as someone who's building a chat app, where, you know, our plan is to actually just charge people money. Chat is so fundamental to what we do. We do it dozens, if not hundreds of times per day. You know, if you look at your screen time across all your devices, it probably doesn't, maybe it adds up to like an hour or two, but the number of interactions that you spend in chat across all the different chat platforms that you have is mind boggling. You know, that is the way that we as humans communicate. Like, it's no longer phone calls, it's no longer email. The future is chat. Like, that is how we communicate. And as a product, it has been kind of left by the wayside because of this unclear
13:52 Speaker 04 definition around the business model. So what I mean by that is iMessage started in 2011, I think, WhatsApp, just a few years before that. If you look at roughly how these apps work, you know, there's an inbox and there's a conversation view, a chat view. They haven't changed in the last 10, 15 years.
14:09 David Pierce? Yep.
14:09 Speaker 04 It's the same view, it's the same functionality. There's been a few other message types. You can now send emoji reactions. You know, we're literally just added to WhatsApp a year, a year, like a year ago.
14:20 David Pierce? They're great, by the way. I don't mean to denigrate emoji reactions. Like, I'm a big fan of emoji reactions.
14:26 Speaker 04 It's good, but it's like, I think that just to illustrate how slowly these things are moving. And, you know, part of that symptom of getting to scale, like, once you have 3 billion users, it's harder to steer, it's harder to steer the ship in different directions. But what I think is missing is an opportunity for other people to build on top of these communication protocols and expand what we can do with chat, you know, and in instant messaging. Just look at email, you know, as a counter example, when you have an open standard for communication or for email, or you have Gmail, which goes out of the way, again, to allow other kind of people to build on top of it, whether it's plugins
15:08 Speaker 04 or alternative clients or just the API. You get an evolution, a very clear timeline over the last 15 years of new productivity software, of new casual fun, you know, entertainment. You get kind of this work operating system that people now use through Google Workspace and all the apps that you can associate with your Google account. That Cambrian explosion of tools built on top of Gmail is just completely and utterly missing from chat because of the fact that there is no API for iMessage or WhatsApp, or even SMS to a certain degree. You know, actually, I guess SMS and Twilio is a kind of good counter example of what
15:50 Speaker 04 happens when there is at least one kind of side door that you could get into and build on top of. But in the case of iMessage and WhatsApp, like, there's basically nothing. You can't build on top of those systems.
16:01 David Pierce? All right. We got to take a break, and then we'll be back with more from Eric.
16:10 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
16:39 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.
16:48 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand", when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
16:56 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.
17:14 David Pierce? Welcome back. Like Eric was just talking about, part of the challenge with messaging has been that there's just no way to build on top of these systems. They're often not great products, honestly, and there's not much you can do to help them. You're just stuck with the app that they give you. But at the same time, they're so entrenched in our lives, and so often set in their ways, just like people are, that I think most developers would look at this market and just decide not to even try. I mean, the network effects of messaging are massive. The switching costs are super high. There's really not much reason to think you can make a dent at all in the messaging world at this point. Many have tried, and frankly, many have failed. But then, here comes Eric and Beeper, trying to do it anyway. So I just asked him,
17:57 David Pierce? "What made you look at this space and think you could hack it?"
18:01 Speaker 04 Our long-term vision is to build the best damn chat app on earth. It's as simple as that. We think chat is, like I said before, something that we do dozens, if not hundreds of times per day, and it deserves attention. It deserves to have a set of people building an experience that continues to get better, that really pushes the boundary on what's possible with chat. And I don't feel like there's anyone carrying the torch today. If you look at the top companies in chat, none of them are incentivized to build a better experience. Their only incentive is to keep you locked into their platform so that they make money through some ulterior motive.
18:35 David Pierce? That's how Apple sells iPhones. The blue bubble thing is just as real as it gets.
18:40 Speaker 04 So our simple thing is we want to build a great chat app and we will charge people money to use it. Not everyone, there's going to be a free option to use Beeper, but we think that there's, you know, there's 3 billion people in the world who use chat on a daily basis. Some percentage of them, we could argue about the exact number, will be interested in paying for a better experience. Those are the people that we're intending to capture and, you know, build an increasingly better chat experience.
19:07 David Pierce? Was that the kind of original insight that like we can do something powerful just by putting all of these things in one place?
19:14 Speaker 04 The original insight, it started to solve a personal problem.
19:17 David Pierce? Okay.
19:18 Speaker 04 Like I have two friends on Google Talk or Google Chat or whatever it's called today. I have three friends on WeChat. I have two friends on Telegram. And I just got sick and tired of there being 10 different apps on my phone that kind of did exactly the same thing, albeit with a slightly different contact list. I just wanted a single app, a single search box that I could type in anyone's name and instantly start chatting with them. I didn't want to have to remember, like I basically had this lookup table in my mind that matched each person, each friend, each family member and which app they used. Computers are much better than us at doing that. They can memorize, they're really good at lookup tables. So all I wanted to do was build
20:01 Speaker 04 Something that would allow me to just type in someone's name and start chatting with them and not have that cognitive overhead of like, wait, where were we chatting? Was it like LinkedIn chat? Or was it like the little sidebar chat in a Google Docs? Like, I just wanted one single place that I could use to chat with everyone.
20:17 David Pierce? I had a friend for many years who would, every time I would message him, he would message me back on a different platform.
20:23 Speaker 04 I like that. That's chaotic good.
20:26 David Pierce? Honestly, it was great. He, it was the funniest thing. And so every one of our conversations just made absolutely no sense because it was one out of every like 12 messages of our conversation. But it really was, you could go an alarmingly long time without ever repeating chat apps. It was kind of incredible.
20:40 Speaker 04 Still happens like, you know, you start something on Instagram because you're responding to their story. And then you see a funny tweet and you send them a Twitter DM.
20:49 David Pierce? Yeah.
20:49 Speaker 04 And then someone asks for an intro in LinkedIn. Like, it adds up. I like to think of it as currently this tax on top of every sort of communication. It's not a big tax. It's, you know, a couple percent of overhead to think about, how am I going to communicate with this person? But think of how many times you communicate. And if we can eliminate that tax, Beeper has the potential to actually make the entire world output of communication, you know, a couple percent better.
21:20 David Pierce? Yeah.
21:20 Speaker 04 And that's a pretty big opportunity.
21:23 David Pierce? Were you even aware that it was technically possible to do that at the beginning? I mean, you just described that shift when we went to mobile, where we went from having relatively intelligible protocols and platforms to a bunch of totally siloed different systems. Were you even sure that the thing you wanted could exist in the world we live in now?
21:43 Speaker 04 Um, no.
21:45 David Pierce? Okay.
21:46 Speaker 04 And I think that's kind of a good thing. You know, I started a company before called Pebble. We built smartwatches. I was 23. I knew nothing about building hardware. And it was a good thing because if I did, I probably wouldn't have done it. And I think some of the best companies are started because the founders are too naive to really understand how crazy the journey that they're about to embark on is. I think about that with Beeper as well, like we Spent the last two and a half years understanding how each of these different protocols work, creating what we call a bridge between Beeper and 15 different chat networks and perfecting them, making them work reliably. That was very hard. That was incredibly hard. It still is hard. But it works and there's no going back.
22:30 Speaker 04 There's no way that I could switch from using Beeper and being able to just seamlessly chat with anyone to going back to having to remember which app I'm on, each person is on.
22:42 David Pierce? I would think that along the way, especially at the beginning of this process, you would think to really do what we want to do, not only do we have to connect all of these systems, we have to build a new one that's right and better. And that Beeper becomes sort of the gateway drug into this better thing, right? It's like, come talk to your Twitter DM friends in Beeper. But we all know Twitter DMs is a bad product for messaging. It always has been. And ultimately, we're going to train you to use this better system that is our system, and that's how it's going to work. Is that the idea? Was that the idea? To bring people, because you talk about the API and all this stuff you want to do. You would need to build the whole thing yourself at some point to do that, right?
23:26 Speaker 04 So you raise a good point. And it's the same one that the X K C D guy wrote, you know, 10, 15 years ago, right? There's a classic X K C D for everything, and this included. And it is a couple of panels and, hey, there's 10 standards. Let's make a new app that incorporates all these 10 standards. Oh, now we have 11 standards. And so we didn't want to be part of the problem. We didn't want to go and create yet another messaging standard. And so we looked at what was out there. And the best open source protocol that kind of checks all the boxes is one called Matrix. Matrix is a protocol similar to, you can kind of think of it as a spiritual successor to Jabber or XMPP.
24:10 Speaker 04 Using no code from XMPP, it's just a brand new implementation. It's not perfect. No open standard is. But we decided to adopt it because it represents the best way for us to be part of a broader network without creating yet another closed siloed standard and contributing back to the problem. So we chose to use an open standard called Matrix. It is federated, which means that if you run your own server or if your account is on a different Matrix server, you can still talk to someone who's on Beeper. It's very similar to email in that regard. Like you have an account on Beeper, you have an account on Gmail. You can still send messages to people who have different email servers. But Beeper is a private company. It's a not open source application.
24:53 Speaker 04 And we're designed to be, you know, just an excellent experience on top of this open source standard. And similar to Gmail, you probably don't understand the intricacies of IMAP or POP or whatever, you know?
25:03 David Pierce? And God help you if you do at this point.
25:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, you don't have to. You just, you know, you could just chat with your friends.
25:09 David Pierce? From a product perspective, you come into this and on the one hand, messaging is this incredibly entrenched thing that we've been doing roughly the same way for a very long time. You know, you mentioned you have the list on the left side and the conversation on the right. That goes back not just to how we message, but like decades of email, right? Like everybody's inbox is the same thing and has been forever. Yeah, all the way back to the beginning of the internet. That is what conversation has looked like. I think you could make a very compelling case that that is not the only or best answer, but it is the answer right now. And so I I'm curious, even at the very beginning of deciding, how do we want this thing to work? And what do we want it to look like? You have to decide between reinventing the wheel in potentially very cool,
25:52 David Pierce? but really kind of jarring ways for people or doing the deeply boring old same thing that everybody does, that is fundamentally how people expect to message all the time. How do you make that decision?
26:04 Speaker 04 So there's a couple of competing veins here. One is that we have muscle memory for chat. Whether we like it or not, we've been using the same software for the last 10, 15 years. And that muscle memory is very strong. Like you have a physical, like picking up and unlocking your phone is a physical twitch that we all, that we all have.
26:24 David Pierce? Totally. There's like the example of in the most recent iOS, when they moved the hang up button from the middle to the right, everybody freaked out because you just, you know where the buttons are.
26:33 Speaker 04 We found that with Beeper, even though there are improvements that we're making to the chat experience, people still have that need to have something familiar. Let me put a pin in that for a sec to kind of describe what our intention is. For the last 10 years, the app that you use To chat on a particular chat network is a one to one mapping to that network. Like you can only use the WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp. You can only use the iMessage app to chat on iMessage. There has never been a delinking between the network and the the software that's used to chat on that. Now, I don't want to give the crypto people too much credit. But one of the ideas in the in the crypto world is this idea of separating the protocol from the application.
27:16 Speaker 04 And I think that's what we're doing with Beeper. We are, for the first time, separating the UI that you use to interact with a particular chat network from that chat network's first party software, which gives us the ability to experiment in a way that these first party, you know, chat apps basically can't do because they have three billion users and you can't experiment too much with, you know, an app that that has that large an install base.
27:43 David Pierce? Give me an example of something you could have done that might have been better, but you couldn't do because it's just not how it works.
27:50 Speaker 04 A very small example is, over the summer, we had an intern build a widget framework for Beeper that lets you install widgets on the side panel of your chat, similar to how Gmail has, you know, plugins and, you know, you could download a Chrome extension. Never been possible, like no amount of money could have given you a widget on the side of your iMessage chat. And we did it. He did it in, you know, a couple of weeks because we had already separated the protocol from the application. And some of the fun widgets that we made were like a summarization widget that used ChatGPT or Anthropic to summarize what the, you know, you log in in the morning to Slack and you see a bunch of unread messages and you're just like, what, what happened? What did I miss?
28:33 Speaker 04 And here it's just a button in the side panel that you just press it and it just tells you what you missed. That took like two days to build. And it's only possible because we've separated that, the the protocol from the the application layer. So that's the example. Like, we're still early. I think we've worked really hard to get the foundation to work, to make sure that Beeper is reliable, to make sure that it sends and receives messages. Remarkably hard, took longer than expected, but we dedicated all of our effort just to doing that, and it's still taking quite a bit of our effort. So over time, we'll begin to use the fact that we have this kind of separation. But honestly, like, some of the basics hadn't been done in messaging. Like, for example,
29:14 Speaker 04 Gmail, over the last 10 years, has evolved to have archive states and tabs and all of these tools that let you kind of manage the overflowing amount of email that you get. That overflow is shifting to chat. You know, we are getting not just spam and junk messages, but we're just getting more and more of our daily communication flowing through these tools that haven't changed. And so a lot of what we did at Beeper was just add kind of basic inbox management stuff that email has had forever, that make it a bit easier for you to deal with, you know, your inbox. And we've added things like being able to archive messages. You can move chats from your main inbox to other folders. You can
29:55 Speaker 04 mark things as low priority. And those have been just incredibly helpful for people that are using chat as their primary means of communication.
30:06 David Pierce? Okay, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna get into where Beeper goes from here.
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30:54 Speaker 02 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.
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31:17 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's get back to talking about Beeper, which I really do continue to think is one of the most interesting messaging apps on the planet. And that's in part because its strategy is to invade the messaging app ecosystem as it already exists. I've been using Beeper for a long time, like I said earlier, and I've kind of watched the company lose connections to services and get them back and support new stuff and drop support and re-add support. And in general, I just can't imagine that the messaging apps, which like we've been talking about, don't have APIs or developer platforms and really want you to stay in their walled gardens, are psyched that Beeper exists at all. So I just asked Eric, is this app a series of elaborate hacks designed to get around messaging apps that would rather you not do all these things?
32:02 David Pierce? How much do these companies know or care what you're doing to their systems?
32:07 Speaker 04 You know, at the end of the day, these are your chats. These are your friends. These are your connections. This is your life. Like, our life is illustrated by the messages that we send to our friends and family and our colleagues. You know, a lot of the kind of AI one-offs that you've seen are people like training an AI on their chat messages. That's because, you know, your messages are you. Like, they are an embodiment of your relationships and your connections. I think what we're doing is saying like... You should be in control of your own messages. And it's remarkable how we take that for granted on other things like email or calls or Google Docs or whatever, like all of the other forms of, you know, communication are your own, they're owned by you.
32:52 Speaker 04 But chat, we kind of have accepted this, this world where like there's these silos and those chats are stuck in the silo and we're going to be okay with it. I think what we're doing is saying like, no, actually you should be in control of who you're chatting with and you should have access to your message history and you should be able to decide, you know, which, which client you use to send messages on each of these different networks. And that's all we're doing. Like you can kind of think of it as a browser, you know? When you open up instagram.com in Chrome or in Arc or in Brave, you're still just, you know, sending and receiving messages on Instagram. That's basically how Beeper works.
33:31 David Pierce? Okay. I believe you that you believe that. I am less convinced that Apple thinks all of my iMessages belong to me and are mine to do with as I please. I think you're right. I'm just not sure that's a super popular opinion in the messaging world.
33:46 Speaker 04 I think honestly, like, it kind of doesn't matter what Apple thinks. There's three billion people who use chat in the world. There's a lot more of us than, than them at this point. And it matters what you think is right. And so it is to a certain degree up to us as users of chat protocols and chat networks to say, this is what I expect. This is my minimum bar. Part of the reason why these companies can get away with it is it's practically impossible to change. There is no free market right now in messaging.
34:17 David Pierce? Yeah, that's true.
34:18 Speaker 04 If you have, you know, an Android phone, you can't send a message to someone on iMessage. If you are on WhatsApp, you can't send a message to someone who is on Telegram. And these companies exploit that kind of social dynamic to make it harder for you to actually, harder for companies like Beeper or other chat providers to actually compete on terms of features or capabilities. The lock-in effect is, is real.
34:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
34:43 Speaker 04 And so what, what we're doing is like giving people A choice for the first time, giving, you know, Americans, giving Europeans, giving people around the world a chance to actually choose which software they think offers them a better experience without having to worry about the lock-in effect. And if you look at the kind of winds of change in Europe with the Digital Markets Act, or in the US with the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, there are a few movements that are taking shape to say, actually, you know, for the good of us, for the good of, you know, the world, we need to be able to have the freedom to choose. And that's, you know, slowly happening. And I think it's going to be harder for these large companies to come out with anti, you
35:28 Speaker 04 know, free market, anti-competitive products like the current suite of chat apps in the future.
35:33 David Pierce? Yeah, I was gonna ask this question later, but since you brought it up, I'll just ask it now. The thing about the regulatory stuff, especially this idea in the EU that chat apps essentially have to interoperate, that is, that is the road we are headed down.
35:45 Speaker 04 It's the law.
35:46 David Pierce? I've wondered for a long time whether that essentially obviates Beeper over time, because these apps you already use are going to be forced to integrate with one another, or if it gives you an actually level playing field to be on, because instead of having your own-
36:00 Speaker 04 It's fantastic.
36:01 David Pierce? It's fantastic. You're psyched about this.
36:02 Speaker 04 It's fantastic. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yeah. The world needs to have the ability to communicate.
36:06 David Pierce? But no, I agree with that. Give me the like ruthless capitalist case for why this is good for Beeper.
36:12 Speaker 04 In terms of building a better chat experience, are you gonna bet on the product management team at Apple who builds iMessage and makes small changes to the UI every year that don't really have too much impact on how you use it? Or are you gonna bet on a company whose entire life is chat and our entire goal is to build the best chat experience? Some of my favorite chat apps today are Telegram and Discord, you know, besides Beeper. I think, you know, Telegram has a 30-person team theoretically, I think, you know, building what's arguably a much better chat experience than any of these, you know, larger, more well-used apps. And so, given the freedom to message and interoperate, yeah, you know, Beeper's gonna take off because we offer a better experience.
36:56 Speaker 04 And the other ones and people can't switch because you know they're currently locked in.
37:00 David Pierce? One other thing I have, I don't know if struggled is the wrong word, but I've I've thought about this a lot as I've been a beeper user over the years. One thing I keep doing all the time is turning on and off LinkedIn. And and there's this thing that happens, it's made me realize like, yes, all these apps are chat, but they have very different norms and they have very different systems. And I have really different rules in different places for who's allowed to contact me. And when, like, if I got as many messages on WhatsApp every day as I do on Slack, my phone would explode, which is not like a brag, people talk too much on Slack, right? But is it doable, do you think, to have all of those systems and all of those norms and all of those unwritten rules about how we talk to each other?
37:42 David Pierce? And about what, like, to some extent, you're doing this, like, context collapse of all of these different places into one thing. In a way that's really useful, but also really mind bending for me. And sometimes like I go from one chat window when I'm talking with my friends to another identical looking chat window, where I'm talking to like the random person who just added me on LinkedIn. And that's really useful, but also kind of mind bending in a way. Is it possible to do all that?
38:08 Speaker 04 What I've discovered through chatting with, you know, users of Beeper and people who who chat a lot, is that we all have this internal heuristic that we've developed that helps us assign a priority to messages that we receive. LinkedIn, sounds like it might not be a giant priority for you.
38:26 David Pierce? Not super high, no.
38:27 Speaker 04 Slack, probably, you know, medium, maybe iMessage is your top. Like, if you get a ping on iMessage, you're much more likely to to read it. You hold you hold this heuristic and you use that daily to to kind of prioritize incoming messages. You are unique. No one else prioritizes messages in the exact same way that you do.
38:47 David Pierce? They should, I'm right.
38:48 Speaker 04 There's 15 different networks and everyone is unique, everyone is a butterfly. And what's interesting is that we all think everyone else has the exact same heuristic. And so this this manifests itself in some complicated ways. When you send someone a message on iMessage and they're in Europe, you think that you're now trying Trying to be like the most important like you think that because you assign a higher weight to iMessage. If you send someone iMessage, this means like, hey, you should, you know, respond to this because, you know, this is an important message. But that's not necessarily their heuristic. Take salespeople, for example. I'm not a salesperson, thankfully, but they love LinkedIn. Salespeople love LinkedIn. Recruiters love LinkedIn. And so if they get a ping on LinkedIn, wow, like this might be like move over rest of the day.
39:32 Speaker 04 Like this is the most important thing that came across my desk. Think of demographics differences. Think of the difference between Snapchat and Instagram. Think of the like subtle differences between friend groups that are gamers on Discord versus, you know, open source hackers on IRC. Everyone has a slightly different way of balancing that priority. And this is one of the biggest challenges that we face at Beeper. We pull in messages from all of your different networks. And that's great for all the reasons that I outlined around, you know, having one search box, having one single app to install on each of your devices. It does sacrifice right now some of the metadata that's associated with the, it's like the game behind the game, right?
40:16 Speaker 04 When you get a ping on Instagram, or you might not even have notifications set up for Instagram, right? You might not assign any weight to Instagram. We miss that. And that's something that we are looking at how we can actually reintegrate that into, into our system. So it's, it's on the, it's on the to do list. It's something that we're working on. But I would hazard a guess to say that those network-based heuristics that you've developed are only an approximation of the actual priority. They're good rules of thumb, but not a hundred percent. Like, for example, LinkedIn, I get a lot of spam on LinkedIn, but it's one of the only open inboxes that I have on the internet. Like I have my Twitter DMs open, but for most people, LinkedIn is the only way that friends from high school could contact them.
41:01 Speaker 04 Because your LinkedIn probably shows up at the top of, you know, the Google search for your, for your name. And occasionally I get really heartfelt and interesting messages sent to me via LinkedIn because that's the only way that people who don't have my phone number or email address can contact. And I think about that a lot, that the best system for relative priority ranking is one based on the person that's trying to contact you, the type of message, you know, and the meta kind of relationship that you have with that person. And all of that data is in Beeper. And so one of the things that we're working on is how we can use that metadata. How frequently do you talk to this person? Have you talked to them in the past, but you haven't talked to them in years?
41:45 Speaker 04 Have they sent their 30th message to you today? Like, how quickly do you respond to them? Do you respond to them on multiple platforms? Is this a person that you talk to on Instagram, iMessage, and Slack? Is this a work contact? Do they talk to you mostly during work hours? Are you part of groups with them? There's so much metadata that can be used to assign or help like gauge priority. And I'm really excited that we are the first platform ever that has clear visibility into all of these different signals. And one of our big initiatives is figuring out how we can integrate these signals in a simple enough way to help you make better prioritization decisions so that you don't
42:26 Speaker 04 have to use a hard and fast rule, a clunky rule, like LinkedIn is not useful to me. It might work most of the time, but I want to figure out a way that we can actually get that nugget of gold, that one old friend that sent you a LinkedIn message that you would not have actually read for years if you don't go to your LinkedIn inbox like I used to. And bubble that up. And at the same time, you know, the heuristic that you've set up, which is iMessage is king, right? That is, you know, the main network. It's not as good as a high signal to noise ratio as you think it is. No. There's two factor offcodes, there's DoorDash, there's Uber receipts, there's spam, there's SMS, there's all this crap. Yeah. There's groups that people add you to that you don't really want to see at the top of your inbox, but you don't really want to leave. Yeah.
43:10 Speaker 04 So again, this all goes back to the idea that like, We want to make the best chat app on earth. And part of that means highlighting the people that matter, highlighting the relationships, the conversations that that matter and bubbling those to the top.
43:24 David Pierce? Yeah, and that totally attracts me and also brings up, I think, one of these sort of great tensions of building an app like Beeper. I can't prove this, but one of the theories that I have that I think is right, based on talking to people for a long time about this, is that one of the reasons it's very hard to do things in chat apps is that it reminds people that you're reading their messages. When Google's assistant shows up and is like, oh, would you like to buy movie tickets? Part of that is annoying. Part of it is a reminder that there is a Google system that is aware of what I'm saying to my friend. And that feels bad. And so I think these these companies go way out of their way to say, no, no, no, no, we're not looking, we don't care, we don't tell ads against it. Like, no, no, no, we're not, we're not even gonna touch it. Your chats are your chats.
44:06 Speaker 04 But do you believe that?
44:07 David Pierce? I mean, No.
44:07 Speaker 04 all of your Instagram messages are on their servers and you're getting increasingly more targeted messages in your stories, like.
44:14 David Pierce? Oh, yeah, to be clear, I don't, I don't think that's actually true in many cases. I actually think ironically, there was this thing recently with Elon Musk and X. They said, we're gonna use your posts, including your DMs, to train AI. And a bunch of people freaked out and our overarching conversation pretty quickly got to like, well, yeah, of course, that's what everybody's doing. Like, how do you not think that's what's happening on all of these services? That's a separate problem. I agree, that's a problem. I think it's a problem worth solving. But I think the challenge is to say, we're going to give you lots of things on top of your chats. We're gonna do all kinds of cool things based on who we know you care about, what you're talking about, the summarization stuff you're talking about, without making it feel like we're intruding on your private life, which is what my chats are. And again, I believe there are lots of good reasons to not talk in all the places that
44:59 David Pierce? we talk, but we do. And I think any reminder of that is always gonna feel bad to people.
45:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:06 David Pierce? How do you get people to make that trade or at least kind of agree to go along that ride with you over time?
45:12 Speaker 04 I don't think it's a trade. I think that most of the things that we're doing are bog, simple things that should have been done 10 years ago, like our traffic, right? You know, that's just a simple button in Beeper that says, I don't want to see this chat in my inbox anymore.
45:26 David Pierce? Sure.
45:27 Speaker 04 Simple as that.
45:28 David Pierce? But the thing where you're describing like, I want to be able to bubble up the most important thing on your LinkedIn to the top, like objectively good, useful feature, requires knowing things about me.
45:37 Speaker 04 It does, but the beauty of Beeper is that we're giving you access to your own messages locally on your device. Beeper is fully encrypted. We don't have a copy of your messages on our servers. We couldn't read your messages on our servers if we wanted to, like your history is encrypted with a key that only you know.
45:55 David Pierce? Did you set it up that way on purpose? Like, was it obvious to you that that was the way to do it?
45:58 Speaker 04 Okay. Absolutely, 100%. And what's cool is that everyone has a phone. These phones have tons of storage. We can store a copy of your entire communication history on your phone. It takes a couple gigs. That's our plan. Store a copy of your messages locally on your device. We don't even upload your contact list. You know, your contact, like we're the only chat app in the world that doesn't upload your contact list. Right? Like, we use the contact list locally to be able to match like this person's phone number is associated with this person's name. So eventually you'll be able to say this person on LinkedIn is the same as this person over here in iMessage. And those links will strengthen kind of the relationship in Beeper's eyes.
46:42 Speaker 04 And again, this is like, we're not planning to do rocket science here of like creating complicated AI models, you know, trained. It's like basic stuff. Like, is this name the same on iMessage as in LinkedIn? When was the last time I talked to them on Instagram? Like, how many stories have I liked of theirs? It's all local. It's all just in your message history and it doesn't need to be uploaded anywhere. It could be all done inside the Beeper app.
47:12 David Pierce? Are phone numbers the like universal username at this point?
47:16 Speaker 04 Mostly ish, but not exactly, not entirely.
47:20 David Pierce? Are we good with phone numbers as as the universal username?
47:23 Speaker 04 No, I think it's it's pragmatic. It's the best option that we have.
47:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
47:28 Speaker 04 But Beeper is not built on top of a phone number. It's built on top of more like an email address handle.
47:32 David Pierce? But yeah, it's it's it is interesting because it does seem like I'm just trying to think of what is the one piece of information that all of these services know about me and it's probably my phone number.
47:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, unfortunately for some networks like Instagram and Facebook, that's not actually exposed. So Facebook and Instagram know for damn sure. They know everything about you. But that's not even exposed to you as a user. You can't, you have to upload your entire contact list in order to see which of your friends are on Instagram. There's no way to say like, is this phone number also on Instagram?
48:00 David Pierce? How broad do you think this goes? I think if I were to look at people right now, I would say you're in a place of sort of what I would call relatively synchronous chat. If the, I don't know if you have a better term for it than I do, but it's like, it's relatively fast moving. It's not.
48:14 Speaker 04 I call it consumer chat versus something like enterprise or kind of community based chat. It's like DMs, small group chats.
48:22 David Pierce? Yeah.
48:22 Speaker 04 That's our core kind of bread and butter right now.
48:25 David Pierce? That makes sense, but I also think a lot of the stuff we've been talking about in chat also exists in places like, I don't know, video chat, you know, speaking of things with a million different standards that all compete with each other. You could talk yourself into being an email client in a way that's useful without trying super hard. Like, how far out from consumer chat do you think Beeper goes over time or it's useful to think about?
48:46 Speaker 04 What I love about chat and what gets me so excited about working on on building this product is it's an ever-present well. We can always come back to it because it's such an innate human tendency. We want to communicate. We are social beings. And so whenever we need things to work on, we just go back to the well and we say, how could we make this aspect of communication better? I think we're definitely focused on chat. There's so many problems with chat that we have not, you know, even scratched the surface in terms of improvements and things that we can do. But if you extend this out five, 10, 20 years, there is no other company, you know, besides us that is entirely focused on building an amazing communication experience and that is our entire goal.
49:32 Speaker 04 Like, we will continue to build things that we think make it easier for people to communicate, make it more seamless, make it lower friction. And then, you know, after we get kind of a handle on what we have today, what are different modalities that we could use for communication? You know, hardware dies hard with a hardware person like me. If you look at every computing platform, the killer app has always been chat, if not, you know, communication to a certain degree. And, you know, playing the clock forward a little bit, we are, you know, I am floored by the fact that I have seven Google Homes in my house and I can't send a damn text message from them. Or I can't send a message to my wife who has an Android phone
50:16 Speaker 04 and like, you know, seamlessly start voice chatting with her. Like, maybe if she had Duo, we might be able to. It's just like, there's no way for us to do kind of simple communication. There's, there's all these different apps and there's all these different devices, but there's no one way to communicate. And I think that one of the things that, again, going back to this idea that we have of separating the protocol from the application, from the experience, we have this unique ability to say, we can communicate to anyone on any chat network. Could we build an app for AirPods? You know, that lets you just, you're, you're driving and instead of having to mediate things through CarPlay or through Android Auto or something like that. Like, what if we could just override that and become your earpiece?
51:01 Speaker 04 That, you know, connects you to other people through beeper. Same thing with around the home. But that's kind of boring and, you know, you could already predict that. Like, I'm excited to think like in five years, what will we be doing? You know, what, what new devices will we have? And how will we communicate on them?
51:18 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And it also sounds like the road we're headed down, which I think is the right one, but it's going to be a really tricky one to pull off, is to separate the person from the app, right? Like, you're talking about the lookup table. It seems like the end result is just that if I want to call you, I just call you and I actually don't have to think about how it's calling you. It can call you on any number of platforms and ultimately I don't have to care. Is that where we go?
51:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, we're like, I mean, the end result here is telepathy. Like, how can I send a message to you as a person rather than you as an inbox in, you know, Facebook or iMessage or whatever?
51:55 David Pierce? And you can do that without building yet another standard on top of all the other standards?
51:59 Speaker 04 I mean, I hope so. And I think that, you know, once this gains steam or gains momentum, I think that other people will realize that as well and hopefully join in the fun. Because the real, the real ticket here is building a better experience rather than a network that just locks you in.
52:16 David Pierce? How is it going convincing people to pay for this? This is the kind of thing people have never paid for, except for like email sickos who pay 30 bucks a month for Superhuman. But this is not, consumer chat is not a thing people are used to paying money for. And I grant that you're offering, you know, different kinds of features and power user stuff that people are willing to pay for. But ultimately, long run, can a paid chat thing work?
52:39 Speaker 04 I would say that people do pay for communication. We pay for tools that help us communicate. We pay $80 a month for our phone plans.
52:48 David Pierce? Sure.
52:48 Speaker 04 We pay for any number of video chat pieces of software, you know, that we use. It's a smaller budget than it was in the 90s where we all had long distance plans as well. But there is a chunk of money that people will put towards improving their communication. That's what we're going after, but we're also looking to grow the pie.
53:07 David Pierce? Fair enough. All right. Well, we're gonna have to come back and do this again because this, like you said, this stuff is not done changing. It's gonna keep getting weird and in fun ways. But thank you for doing this. I really appreciate this. This is really fun.
53:17 Speaker 04 No, anytime. It was good to chat.
53:22 David Pierce? All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks so much to Eric for being on, and thank you as always for listening. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will be back with episodes on Wednesday and Friday. There's lots of news to cover this week, more gadgets to talk about, believe it or not, and we're gonna have the long awaited meta Vergecast episode coming really soon. And we'll be back next Monday with the third in our four-episode series, All About Connectivity. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
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