Reacts: Apple Vision Pro - A Masterclass in Product Development and Marketing

Chris: Targeting the high end first understanding the difference between product and technology focusing on the right use cases and building the right features for those use cases. the magical combination of things to make the users experience delightful on and on and on. I think this is a masterclass for all founders out there

 Speaker:

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Yaniv: And I'm Yaniv. And today we react to the Apple Vision Pro. Now, for those of you who haven't been following the news, apple announced a new headset. At a price of 3,500 US dollars. Very expensive. And I think there have been a lot of predictable reactions to this thing. we thought we would go beyond the predictable reactions and actually talk about what this thing is, why it matters, what makes it different from what's already out there.

So, Chris, what even is this thing.

Chris: Yeah, that's right. Yaniv. They released essentially what is an ar vr headset? we know about the Quest, 1, 2, 3. We know about PlayStation vr. We know about the various attempts from various companies to create one of these. magical Leap has famously been working on something for years and years with too much money and too little traction.

And, the rumors of Apple releasing. A headset have been around for years and years and years, the expectation was they would release one last year or the year before that, or the year before that. they've registered patents and bought companies and had job positions open. So everyone knew this was coming, but they weren't really sure what it would be.

what they announced was, if you think about a normal ar vr headset that's kind of your frame of reference, it sits on your head right up against your face. It has two panels, one for each eye has speakers built in. But the particular things that are different and notable here are that it's super, super high resolution.

So it's designed for reading text or for viewing a user interface like Mac style interface where you can be productive, you can read, and it's just super, crisp. It has no controllers. So all of the other headsets have, bundled or optional controllers, and they're really designed to use the controllers in your hands.

more recently some of these headsets have had some kind of gesture based input, but the Apple headset is designed to have no controllers. They will not release controls for it, and they've really perfected that hand gesture. And the way they describe it actually is you control it with your eyes. Your hands and your voice.

it has full, high resolution pass through, meaning it has cameras on the front end that pass the world around you, back through to those, screens, so you can actually see around you in very, very high resolution. This is something that's just started to happen with the Quest three, but the video you get back is Like looking through a potato. So the reviews I've heard from MKBHD and so on, say like you could play table tennis with this thing and, really orient yourself in the world. It has, an old lead screen on the front of the device so that other people can see your eyes.

And that's a really interesting thing. So it looks like you're wearing a ski mask, rather than, a VR headset. It's not opaque. actually, it is opaque, but there's a screen there that makes it look transparent, under certain conditions. and then the last two key differentiators here is that it has an M2 processor, not some Qualcomm snapdragon thing.

It's, as powerful as your iPad or your, MacBook. And it also has an external battery pack. So usually these things have the battery on the front or on the back. this one has a cable coming up the side. And it has a battery pack that's roughly the size of a phone. It's not quite as wide, but it is thicker and it's intended to sit in your pocket, I guess.

but it only lasts two hours, on a charge. And so you can also plug it into USB off the back of that thing. if you think of that ar vr headset you're familiar with and use that as a frame of reference. These are the things that are discreetly obviously different.

Yaniv: Now the interesting thing is whenever Apple announces an entirely new type of product, there's actually a long history of very predictable negative reactions to that thing. the first reaction is people have already been making these things for years, and now Apple's just come in and put their reality distortion field around something else.

so that's reaction number one. reaction number two is it's too expensive. and reaction number three is, I guess a combination of those things. Just this sort of sense of like, It's just not that new or interesting, right? It's just Apple applying a lick of paint to something that's already there.

that most notably happened with the original iPod and the original iPhone when the iPod was released, famously there were plenty of MP3 players, out there. And there was this famous sort of hot take from the administrative slash dot, which at the time was like the big tech forum where it's said no wifi less space than a nomad lame.

That was the quote, right? And the nomad was the sort of leading hard drive-based MP3 player at the time. And of course the iPod revolutionized music and, basically led to the complete reversal in apples fortunes. And then, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. There were other phones with web browsing, with color screens, even with touchscreens.

Microsoft had been doing Windows CE for a long time, and the thinking was, okay, so Apple have released and iPod phone, that's what people are calling it at the time, and what's so new and interesting about it really bloody expensive. It actually wasn't at the cutting edge. And by the way, I think that's sort of the third point, is often the technology isn't at the very cutting edge And yet it created a massive revolution. And so, when I have to say, Chris, I'd be interested in your thoughts. When Apple announced this thing and I looked at the video, my reaction was, damn Apple has done it again.

Chris: Yeah.

Yaniv: and again, obviously I haven't seen this thing The pattern matches too strong to ignore, which is Apple have taken something that we all thought we understood they have applied a strong opinion on how it should work with a very human lens.

And then they have taken the time and the expense to perfect the way of interacting with this thing. and then they've marketed it well. And when I say that, I don't mean in a cynical way, I've, come over the years, you know, in previous episodes I've mentioned this to, really appreciate the value of marketing and so I'll throw back to you in a moment, Chris, because I noticed that what Apple have called this thing is spatial computing, so not.

Virtual reality, not augmented reality, but spatial computing. And of course, like everything Apple does, that was a very deliberate choice of words. That wasn't just a marketing tagline.

Chris: Yeah. you're absolutely right. It's following the exact playbook of the iPhone and in many ways the exact reaction playbook of the iPhone. Right. You mentioned it's late. Well, the iPhone was really, really late and the iPod was really, really late, and the iPad was really, really late. Apple has no interest in being first, none.

  People often talk about this idea of, first mover advantage. It's actually not first mover advantage that gets you to win in startups and in tech It's actually first to network effects. It's first to scale, which is why you and I Yaniv go on, and on and on about scale.

and scale really requires Polish and a quality of execution, which is why we always go on and not about focus.

Yaniv: effects. It's first to value. It's first to nailing the customer experience, whether that requires network effects or not. maybe we'll get to Mark Zuckerberg's reaction email a little bit later.

But the thing that's misunderstood about Apple over and over again is that the little details matter. So, it's not about network effects. They are thinking about what makes this an amazing product that people will actually want to use.

Chris: in many cases with internet-based software or devices that rely on content, value relies on scale and. Marketplaces. You need supply of apps and experiences and, and of demand of people using the thing.

So, in the case of a, new console, a new phone, a new, ar vr headset, scale matters because network effects or two-sided marketplace effects really have to kick in. Apple knows that and they play that game really, really well. And the other, piece of the playbook, which you touched on is premium.

First, getting these things to work. Really well is really expensive. And so they understand that instead of trying to go for the middle of the market to this broad based adoption, first they make the rich people pay for it. and you know, Tesla's doing the same playbook, right? They're starting with the high end, frivolous sports car, and then the really expensive sedans and the expensive SUVs, and they're working their way down to that price point.

And that's something Mark Zuckerberg, in the interviews I've seen with him since, doesn't understand. He's talking about, oh, this isn't really for the masses and it's too expensive. He doesn't get it. You talked about, well this is not new or novel, it's not that interesting. It's just a little bit easier, a little bit more polished or a little bit more this, know, I heard the same things about Uber actually, and I heard the same things about the iPhone probably, if you were alive back then, would've heard the same thing about the Gutenberg printing press.

Yaniv: It's just stamps. It's just a freaking stamp.

Chris: right? And so when something is a hundred times easier, that in and of itself is innovation. is a breakthrough change in the rate and the cost of doing something. And so the fundamental thing here is it works. It actually works.

Again, I was listening to the Waveform podcast from mkbhd and he was saying if you go through the checklist of features, This thing does pretty much the same thing as the Quest does, in terms of paths through and spatial audio and what have you. but the difference is these things actually work on the Apple Vision Pro and that's the big difference.

They work delightfully well, and so the price kind of doesn't matter, is like if you want an ar vr headset, you either buy the vision pro or not at all. Of course, you're buying it for your young kid, or you have a PlayStation and you just want to, entertain them in the, living room.

you buy the cheap one. But this is not really a, it's not in the same league.

Yaniv: I thought what would be good was to read a lightly edited version of Mark Zuckerberg's email, and this was an internal email to Meta's team, which leaked, probably deliberately, about what his thoughts were on the Apple Vision Pro. And I think a really great example of not quite understanding what makes Apple, apple.

So I'll start

from what I've seen initially, I'd say the good news is that there's no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven't already explored and thought of.

Now, Apple have never been in the business of technology breakthroughs. I think this is what's so funny, like this is exactly the iPod, exactly.

The iPhone people complained about the design compromises that were made in the face of Apple. Not coming up with any magical technology. They never have. I don't think they ever will. What they are amazing at is making really great design trade-offs. And so the fact that Mark Zuckerberg thought that they were gonna come up with tech that he hasn't seen before, shows how deeply he misunderstands the threat in a sense that he is facing.

Chris: Yeah, the key word in that sentence is thought of, so they've thought of it, but they have not implemented it. They have not made the right trade-offs and priced it at the right price point and thought of the right use cases to choose those thoughts and to implement them well in the right combination.

So, in my advisory work when I'm working with startups, I'm often fond of saying, look, you. Cry, bleed, sweat, dream about this problem and this startup every day. It is unlikely that I'm gonna give you a new idea. What is gonna happen is I'm gonna help you pick the right idea at the right time and help you execute it well.

I say that line quite often. it precisely what Zuckerberg is pointing to here, right? They've thought about it, but they haven't selected the right use cases or made the right trade offs or implemented them particularly well.

Yaniv: So he goes on,

they went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more. I think that's than the meta quests device. And now requires so much energy that you need a battery and a wire attached to use it.

They've made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they're going for. So there's a slight acknowledgement there. Okay. Might make sense for the cases that they're going for. but again, this reminds me so much of the iPhone announcement when the iPhone had shitty battery life.

And you know what still does to this day? The iPhone fundamentally reset in the negative way, the expectations for a phone's battery life. It used to be that phones lasted a week, two weeks, and then Apple introduced this thing and you had to charge it at least every day, possibly twice a day. there have been incremental improvements since then, but again, to your point Chris, how important is battery life? Are there other things that are worth creating off for it? And they've decided yes, there are. But look, says Zuckerberg. I think that their announcement really showcases the difference and the values and the vision that our companies bring this in a way that I think is important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do, and we have sold tens of millions of quests.

More importantly, vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It's about people interacting in new ways, blah, blah, blah. by contrast, every demo that Apple showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be their vision of the future of computing, but it's not the one I want.

There's a real philosophical difference in terms of how we're approaching this and seeing what they put out there and how they're going to compete just made me even more excited in a lot ways optimistic that what we are doing matters and is going to succeed.

Just fascinating.

Chris: It is fascinating because there, you know, obviously he's, gotta put a positive spin on this. So whether he believes these things or not is a different story. So we should be fair there. But there are two key things in there that jumped out at me. He said, we've sold tens of millions of these things.

The real question is, Active users, and this is another mistake founders make. So I'm loving this episode cause it's actually a case study in how to build a startup and how to think about the right things. Often founders will talk about how many registered users they have and, Zuckerberg's talking about units sold.

But I know for a fact I have people building AR and vr, apps in my life the active user count is vanishingly small? If people buy these things, they stick 'em on a shelf, they don't use them. And I, can tell you from my own experience, when I put one on I immediately wonder, why don't I use this thing more?

It's amazing. It's incredible. Like it's so immersive. And then after 10 or 15 minutes I'm like, overheated. And I'm take it off and I'm like, I'm not gonna use that for a few more months. And then I stop using it again.

Yaniv: Well, at circular, as you know, my startup, we are about, Subscription access to devices. And so we offered Oculus Quest devices, quite early on. and to your point, one of the benefits of subscription is if you have something sitting on a shelf, well, you can just return it and stop paying for it.

and we got all those quests back, after

Chris: Yeah.

Yaniv: subscription period. the demand for these devices is just not very strong.

Chris: And then the other mistake that founders make very often that he's making here is he's saying, it's multiplayer. It's all about multi-player and communication. But here's the thing. Multi-player only works if you have other players in the game and other device holders, right?

And so, very often with a multi-player, Application product solution, you need a killer single player utility first. And so he's talking about the multiplayer aspects, but nobody's using the Don thing or at least nobody. Interesting. And so what they're doing first is they're solving the single player utility.

but believe me, apple understands multi-player better than anyone. They have communication devices, holding the entire company up. they know, about multi-player and they have, FaceTime in there and they have all this other stuff. but they'll get to multi-player when they have critical mass in terms of user base, using the single-player utility.

Yaniv: So I think we're actually finally ready, Chris, to answer the question for real, what is this thing? And then we can explore the design trade-offs. Now, in my opinion, Again, apple have called it spatial computing, and I look at this thing and I don't see a headset.

I see next form factor for computing. We went from desktops to laptops to phones and tablets. I don't think tablets constitute a revolution. Right? They were just like a big phone. and now if you want a computer, this is your computer, like you said, it has an M two chip in it. And I couldn't help but noticing when they looked at the demo, there was so much focus on screens. I walked away with this thing thinking three and a half thousand dollars for unlimited high-definition screens. That's already a bargain, right? I've got a computer with all the screens I want, I can put them where I, like, they can follow me.

I can also, watch movies on gigantic cinema size screens in my living room just for that at the high end. To your point, people who can afford it, that's worth three and a half thousand dollars. This thing a computer that has an M two chip in it, and just as a computer with infinite screens, that's already a pretty good deal.

So that's the wedge to me. It's like, okay. We have a new computer, we have a nice on-ramp to this thing, and I bet you the one accessory they will release is a physical keyboard, an old school keyboard. Cause this thing's a computer. and from there the possibilities of the spatial aspect of it become more and more interesting.

But they don't need to be interesting right now for this to be an incredible premium home entertainment device.

Chris: Yeah, well there already is a keyboard for it. Actually. They showed a demo where you looked at your MacBook and the MacBook screen got absorbed by the thing. then they said, you can pair our Bluetooth. Tooth magic keyboard with it. And so they've got that

already.

Yaniv: There you go.

Chris: You know, I agree with you that it is a computer, but it's ironic since some of the iPad commercials were, this young girl playing with her iPad.

And then, her mom said, put your computer away. And she's like, what's a computer? And it's like, we were trying to make the computer invisible, but I think you're right. This is a new computer. I do wonder though, whether this is the next computing platform, meaning I think it's too cumbersome still.

It's still like the car, phone, version versus the smartphone or iPhone version. is very, very much a first gen thing. I suspect for this to become the new primary computing platform, it would need to become much, much smaller, much, much more socially acceptable. So we have to invent new wave guide technology or

something

Yaniv: I think it comes down to what Mark Zuckerberg said and I think, again, coming back to these design trade-offs, this thing has two hours battery life. That's kind of shit. And people are like, oh, like Google Glass, like all these other things. You look like a dork wearing them.

Yeah, you look like a dork wearing them and then Zuckerberg's like, just showing people sitting around on couches and stuff using these things. I'm like, yeah, no shit. This is not like the next generation of Google Glass. This idea of ubiquitous augmented reality computing. This is a device that you use when you would otherwise be using a different form factor of computer.

And so primarily, At your desk at work where you don't give a shit if you look dorky and secondarily

on your couch

or on a plane watching movies. Right.

That's what it's

for.

Chris: Not even at work, right. This could be your home office setup.

Yaniv: of

Chris: You know, I have, spent, an embarrassing amount of money on my home office and on my theater room, right? And on couple of other big screen TVs and other rooms. $3,500 US device replaces my gigantic 88 inch tv, all that black paint and all that couch and all that stuff I set up in my theater room. It replaces my 3 32 inch monitors on my desk. Right? you just stick it on your face wherever you are, you could sit on your patio and do your work. So guess I agree with you on that.

Yaniv: yeah,

So this thing, it doesn't have to be cool, right? It has to be comfortable. And I noticed that Apple spent an inordinate amount of time in true Apple fashion talking about the weave of the material. they used for the strap. the

Chris: Yes.

Yaniv: it light, I bet you it runs cool.

That's another thing that Apple invests hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D into that no one else seems to give a shit about is how do I make a device that runs cool? And so I bet you

this thing, unlike your Oculus right, is gonna be comfortable to wear for hours.

Chris: Well, the device definitely runs. Cool, right? It's an M two and it has lots of venting and it may have a little fan in there. They didn't say. the question is, does that amazing padding, that amazing material, does that allow your face to breathe? And I suspect if anyone can do that, apple can.

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Chris: So let's talk about then the trade-offs that they made that I think are revolutionary and perhaps subtle enough to miss.

 So like the iPhone, like we've been talking about today, they got a few key things right, that nobody else got. Right? and I think that will prove over the medium to long term to have really mattered.

The first thing is readable resolution. It is actually useful as a computer monitor, and so you can actually use it to replace your MacBook. Or your TV screen and not feel like you're compromising on your comfortable clear. Readable interface that is really important. And they're using foviated rendering as well, which is something that Mark Zuckerberg and, John Carmack have been going on and on and on about this idea of foviated rendering.

Which is basically prioritizing the rendering of what you're actually looking at and then deprioritizing the rendering of everything else They're doing it and they're doing it really well, they've got the idea of no controllers really, right?

This, gesture-based interface and I gaze based interface being the primary interface now. I think of the things that made the iPhone so incredibly magical when it first came out was, I don't know if you remember your PDA and your smartphone, the monitor was liquid crystals and you, pressed it and it went all rainbow colors and you needed stylist, they called what now?

Apple calls the Apple pencil and Steve Jobs was famous for saying, We all have stylists on our body. We have 10 stylists on our body. They're called our fingers, right? you don't need a stylist. And in fact, he railed against that, even up, till his death. And the apple pencil was a controversial thing for them to make.

And so the same thing is true here. they're like, you don't need a controller. You've got your hands, you've got your voice, got your eyes. And again, hearing the people who've played with it, they say the eye tracking is magical, like absolutely magical. And they mentioned this in the keynote.

Each new breakthrough device and form factor has a breakthrough interaction model. get it right. This is the breakthrough interaction model, voice, eye tracking, and hands. And so where other devices have this as a secondary concern, merged those three things into a delightfully, natural and intuitive interface.

Big, Big win.

Yaniv: And as always, the critic, the cynic would say, Eye tracking hands voice, not new interaction models. Other folks have been doing it for a while. Difference is they haven't got it right, and yet I haven't played with one of these things. But as you say, Chris, early reviews from very reputable people, very thoughtful.

People are like, this thing is kind of magical. And the magic, again, going back to Zuckerberg's. Email. Cause I think it's so funny, he said the good news is there's no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics, right? The magic that comes from what Apple does isn't about breaching the laws of physics.

It's about bringing everything together in a really thoughtful way such that it feels magical. it's no more magical than any other technology device, but it sure feels more magical.

Chris: Right. they haven't defined the laws of physics. The magic is in the combination and the polish.

Right, this is another lesson that I really want to draw out for startup founders, which is the classic mistake he's making is he's conflating technology with product. Technology is, does it work?

Product is, does it do the right things in the right combination? Well, really, really well for the specific use cases you have in mind, and I can't tell you the amount of founders that I work with or have interacted with or coached, where they're like, well, we have all of these amazing features, or no, yeah, it does that, or, yeah, we're about to ship that.

But when you look at it, when you pressure test it, it does not do the use case stated at all, much less well, because it's a Swiss cheese. You've fall into this hole and that hole and that rough patch and there's a cognitive gap, which like where, how do I get from here to there?

And so different. The difference between product and technology is night and day. There is almost no correlation except that technology is an input. Into the productization process. It's so, so vastly different things. and yet to this day, I meet a lot of founders outside of Silicon Valley who talk about their tech worse.

They talk about their it, which in Silicon Valley is like printers and modems and networks. It's not the thing you're building. now there are two other big things that they got, right. The first is it's ar first, not VR first. So, when you put on an Oculus Rift, or an Oculus quest.

The first thing it does is it immerses you in a completely different world. It makes the real-world invisible to you. there's a feature called The Guardian, which will show you a grid, when you're about to run into the edges of your play space, it does not want to take you out of that virtual reality world, and there is potato quality pass through in some of the latest devices.

This is the opposite. This. Keeps you in the real world. It has super high resolution passed through, and it is very quick to drop any screen of immersion when someone comes into your field of view. It doesn't show you a grid. It shows you the real world and you can dial the, apple crown.

To dial up the immersion, but that's not the default. And good defaults are everything. And so going to AR first is a radical shift, radical, radical shift and is, really a breakthrough. And the last big thing is related to this passthrough, but it's showing your eyes on the outside of the device and showing your state of immersion.

So, as you go more immersive, your eyes glaze over with some kind of like Siri style clouds, and that makes it. Possible for you to be in the same room with your children, with your spouse, without there having to guess at what state you're in so you can maintain social cohesion with the world around you.

That kind of pass-through state management of your availability to the world is. A game changer. It's a game changer. People are making jokes about how it looks weird and awkward, and it is way less awkward than wearing a pair of opaque goggles on your face and the people around you not knowing how to interact with you.

Yaniv: I was with you until that last one. It's not that I disagree. I think it's cute. disagree with you on the magnitude. I would, not consider this. A game changer. And the reason for that is exactly the use cases that I think are going to dominate. Like I said, it's like I'm at my desk working from home, I'm watching tv.

The eye thing is nice I'm glad they did it, and it will probably become more important over time. I actually think for this first generation, they could have gotten away without it. but as it improves, I think it will become more important. but again, Chris, I, come back and maybe I'm oversimplifying because I watched the whole demo.

And there was all sorts of amazing shit. But when it boils down to me, I'm like, the things that really I can see most people using day-to-day is just like screens, screens everywhere. But that's enough,

Chris: The OED screen on the outside for your eyes, not only does it give you this social cohesion, it also allows you to keep the device on. and allows people to see your eyes and make eye contact, and I think the ability to use the device without taking it on and off to interact with the people around you is, I think, a subtle but important feature, and I say this as someone who's fairly recently had a child a year and a half ago, he runs into my office all the time and just demands my attention in the most beautiful and delightful way. And I love, I love his distractions. Like, I just immediately, see him and it brightens my day and.

I can now have that interaction while wearing the goggles. I can imagine him being utterly thrown off and I have to take the glasses off for me to interact with him. It wouldn't be the same.

Yaniv: Yep.

Chris: Let's talk just very quickly about why Apple is uniquely qualified to just blow by the competition, other than the things we talked about, right? their ability to build the right use cases, polish things into a magical level and, so on, but, As a company with the resources they have, how is it possible that they're able to build this so quickly, so well, and to blow by the competition?

And I would argue it's at least three or four things. They have an incredible ecosystem of and technology. So imagine the, iPhone, the. Mac, the headphones and so on that all play really, really nicely with this device. So it fits really elegantly into your lifestyle.

But they also have ecosystem of internal first party technology, which I don't think is accident, That actually all ladders up to an incredible AR device. Think of AR kit, which they've been putting on the iPhone with lidar and so on, to get their developers to practice building. AR applications.

They have spatial audio. They have Apple TV plus content. They have airplay and handoff continuity. All of these things create an incredible immersive experience in a headset. they tested all of this stuff out in the field. With their existing devices, and then they've combined it and coalesced into a new device.

So that's the first reason they've tested ecosystem of devices and technologies that coalesce into this new thing. The second thing they have is apps and app developers. They've developed it in such a way that it'll run a lot of the existing apps as panes of glass floating in space.

And so the migration path is relatively easy for all of their iPhone and iPad developers to migrate over. If you listen to the Oculus Quest announcement from just a couple of weeks ago, they said they had 500 apps, 500 after all of these years, 500 apps, Apple is gonna blow by that number you know, on day one.

Yaniv: And again, if, I may make that analogy back to the iPhone because it's nearly too perfect. Right. The iPhone offered web browsing. It had all the content on the web to bootstrap its ecosystem, and now the Apple Vision Pro has all the apps from the iPhone to bootstrap its ecosystem. in the same way that the iPhone then built up, its app ecosystem and kind of took it away from depending on the web. over time, the Vision Pro will have its own fully immersive apps that will take it away from basically emulating iPhone apps. But it's just such a beautiful migration path and these are the sorts of real world things that Apple understands and commits to, that very few other companies, if any, are really willing to commit to in the same way.

 Right now the use cases being shown are fairly constrained, but that over time it's going to become this entirely new paradigm in the same way that the app store and apps were for phones. I think we should talk about what you should be thinking. If you are a startup founder or a developer and you're looking at this thing and thinking, what does this mean for me? How should I be approaching this new computing paradigm this thing doesn't even come out for six months it may not work, but you don't bet against Apple.

How should I be thinking about this and maybe starting to factor it into my plans?

Chris: Yeah, so as a startup founder, I think the first thing to take away here is exactly what we've been talking about peppered throughout this episode, which is to use this as a case study, a masterclass in what to build, how to build, and how to launch something fundamentally new.

And this is the way I grew up. Before I had a real career building real startups. I would watch Microsoft and, other companies and try to reverse engineer why they made the choices they made and what made them successful. I was like, I remember I was, 10 or 12, or 14 doing this and trying to learn from them.

And I think this is a, masterclass for all founders out there in all the ways we've just described, targeting the high end first understanding the difference between product and technology focusing on the right use cases and building the right features for those use cases. the magical combination of things to make the users experience delightful on and on and on.

So that's the first thing I would do as a founder is learn, learn, learn. Learn. I think the second takeaway for me is, we've said this a few times on the show in particular about ai. Every new computing platform is an opportunity to reshuffle the deck in terms of winners and losers, right?

the photo app that was successful pre-iPhone not the photo app that was successful after iPhone with, you know, flicker and Instagram. this is true of almost every category of product. At every major platform shift, new winners emerge. And so this is a new platform. Now the question is, is it a platform that will hit critical mass?

Will it succeed? we've talked about all the reasons why it's fantastic in its category. Will it succeed? Will it succeed in the short term? Is now the time to place that bet? I don't know that we can speak to that with any kind of definitive authority, but if this spatial computing category now thanks to Apple's involvement becomes validated and accelerated, then this is your opportunity to get in early and get a running start to build the next photo app for the next computing platform 

Yaniv: And I was gonna say that, actually is the answer, Chris. It is a high risk, high reward strategy, but then again, we go on and on ad nauseum about the fact that if you are a venture funded startup founder, then you are in the game of high risk, high reward. You are making a bet that this platform will actually succeed.

I think it's a smart bet because Apple doesn't often fail, with changes of this magnitude. And if you make that bet and if you execute competently, you could  be riding a wave. and Chris, exactly as you say. these opportunities come along rarely with ai, llm reaching that peak of maturity.

And then now, with Apple Vision Pro, I think we've had two potential. Or likely, I'll say likely paradigm shifts in one year. That is exceptionally rare. Now, we haven't had one for over a decade, and now we've got two in one year. it's a scary but also very exciting time to be a founder. And it's nearly like the discipline here is to decide which bets to make.

We wanna invest in, Apple Vision Pro? Do we wanna invest in AI and LLMs? Do I have some non-con, contrived way of combining the two? Or do I just stay the course of the product that I'm building? Right? These are really tough questions

Chris: I was gonna say, actually, is there some, incredible combination of the two? And I don't mean shoehorning one into the other, but, if you could find something at the intersection of those two, that would be truly magical.

You talked about the two happening in the same year.

we are, I think, rapidly approaching the singularity on everywhere. Our rate of game changing events is gonna be, only increasing.

But I would founders to. Carefully hedge their bet, perhaps and I wanna be careful about that phrase, hedge your bet. Cuz we talk a lot about not hedging, but there are, as I touched on, iPhone has AR kit and iPad and other devices have AR capabilities.

So I would ask myself the question, is there a way to build an app that works on iPhone, iPad, and, vision Pro so that it has a larger install base That's something worth thinking about. but I think Yaniv, you talked about high risk, high reward and, is this something you should Chase?

would say continue to focus on the problem. This is the same advice we give to every founder everywhere, any time of the year. you need to be solving real problems for real people, and you need to be very, very precise, embarrassingly narrow about what problem that is you're solving at the very beginning.

And so if AI helps you solve that problem, if AR or VR helps you solve that problem, or if AR and VR reshuffles the deck in terms of how you would solve a problem using first principles, because it's new technology then that is a fair and reasonable bet to make.

Don't just pick up AR and VR and crypto and whatever, and just like, well, it's the trend right now. Let's go see what we can do.

Yaniv: absolutely must focus on the problem. What these new paradigms do is open up a, vast new space of solutions, and in some cases, also a new set of problems. Right? There will be problems that are unique to using an Apple Vision pro that someone's going to need to solve, but also for an existing problem, you're like, okay, we now have an entirely.

New paradigm, a new platform that we could use to explore the solution space. Although, companies that focus on the problem are the only ones that succeed. Many companies that focus on the problem fail to succeed because they cannot cut through the noise.

you are entering a greenfield, a white space, whatever color noun combination you want, and. That's a rare opportunity to come up with a great solution to a real problem in an uncrowded area. And so I think that's the opportunity that you see. But if you just create a gimmick, I remember all those joke apps that first came out when smartphone apps happened.

And of course, made their found as a bit of money for a while. I know some of the people who had the, top joke app on Android, but that's not a durable, advantage. But if you solve real problems in a way they've never been solved before and. I know Chris, you like to talk about Uber, as the poster child of, a business that was enabled by the existence of mobile devices.

Like that is the opportunity that is for all of you there.

Chris: Yeah. and to put this in terms that we've used before, just to kind of trigger people's memories. We've often spoken about this in terms of big opportunities for new innovation and disruption occur at the advent of new technologies, new cultural norms, and new regulatory shifts. And so this is clearly a new technology, a new technology platform, or at least a breakthrough implementation of a new technology paradigm.

And so whenever some combination of those three things occur, the deck gets reshuffled, new winners and losers can occur can solve existing problems and new problems in new ways. Using first principles now that we have this new spatial computing, what is the best way to order a taxi?

What is the best way to order food? What is the best way to evaluate and purchase a couch? Right? And the answer obviously on that last one is, well, I wanna see my couch in my living room. can we enable that to occur? and so you're solving the e-commerce problem. In a new way. that's what we're really talking about.

And so go think about those first principles, think about those problems are new, and figure out how AR and VR genuinely, genuinely changes the way that that paradigm works. So it's exciting times now's the time to jump in if you've been listening To our AI episode.

And to this episode and you have not jumped off the couch excited, then maybe you're not a founder. Maybe you should, uh, you should stick to your nine to five job.

Yaniv: Oh, maybe you weren't on the couch. okay. So Chris, you know, we've talked about the fact that in these times of change of paradigm, Time shift. There is incredible opportunity. But to grasp it, you need to have really thoughtful ways of approaching your business and your vision. And so if you want a little bit of help from an experienced person in navigating your way through this, Chris, I believe you do some work with startups to help them with this.

So how can people contact you?

Chris: Yeah, that's right. I have carved out time in my day to work with a handful of companies on these various topics. How do you take the trends of the day, the new technology breakthroughs and, create disruptive change? And so if you wanna learn more about that, feel free to visit me on chris sar.com/advisory, and you can reach out to me from there.

Yaniv: Now the final thing we need to talk about is the startup podcast pact. we believe we are the apple of founder focused startup podcast.

Chris: Oh, here we go.

Yaniv: But if we wanna be as big as Apple, we need your help. And so if you are a regular listener, if you've listened to more than a few episodes and gotten value from it, We need something from you.

And the thing that we need from you is to subscribe to us in your listening app and on YouTube to write a review, leave a rating, and ideally give us a shout out on LinkedIn or your favorite social media platform. Please honor the pact. That is how we become the apple of startup podcasts together, and thank you so much to all of you in the community who have already helped out.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It's been so heartening to see those reviews. so thanks for that, guys, and keep it coming. Really appreciate it.

Yaniv: Okay. That was actually a heap of fun, Chris. Tim Cook, if you're listening, if you could release a few more of these amazing products that would make our lives a lot easier. these episodes are really a lot of fun to record.

Chris: They absolutely are. All right, Yaniv. Talk to you soon.

Yaniv: Cheers mate.