on product

Friday art, дорогие коллеги: https://t.me/anotheroffice

😭😭😭

> When I started Dropbox, I started because I kept forgetting my thumb drive, emailing myself files, (...) under this bigger problem I had of: “My stuff is everywhere; I can’t find it.” (...) What used to be 100 files on my desktop is now 100 tabs in my browser or actually both. (...) When you go to work, you have 10 search boxes, not one. > What was great about the file system, in the beginning, was that it was where all your stuff was. It was like a single source of truth. (...) When you think about the web world, it just evolved without really a container concept and just bizarre because files have folders, songs have playlists, links have... There’s not really an answer to that. > I think we can do better from a UX standpoint. (...) You can still use Spotify as an iTunes-style catalog and manually curate everything. You can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and be like, “AI DJ, just press play.” But then, a lot of stuff in between. (...) We see that as a huge opportunity for Dropbox to rethink this. > If you think about questions like “When does my lease expire?” or “Where’s the slide from last year’s product launch where we talked about that?” ChatGPT can’t answer these questions because it’s not connected to your stuff. But that’s what we do at Dropbox. We’ve always been platform-agnostic and trusted. > We were invited to come down and meet Steve [Jobs in 2009]. (...) He’s like, “You’re a feature, not a product. You don’t have distribution. (...) You don’t control the operating system.” I was like, “Alright, agree to disagree.” Because every pair of companies has its issues, too. Apple controls Apple stuff, but they don’t control Google [or] Microsoft stuff. > Dropbox has about 18 million subscribers, two and a half billion in revenue. (...) For big files, video production, and the creative community, Dropbox has long been standard because we handle big file syncing and that volume of data better than anyone else. We’re uncomplicated in that we’re not trying to advertise against your data. https://www.theverge.com/24128606/dropbox-drew-houston-ai-remote-work-virtual-organization

https://youtu.be/NTsU-rC2PyQ vibes are 💯

> I’ve spent over 1,000 hours playing the video game DOTA 2, but I remember almost zero of that time. (...) I once went to a DOTA 2 International tournament with a friend, though, and [significant] parts, [like waiting in line], were unfun. (...) [Yet] there’s something more fun about complex fun, even if the individual moments might score lower. > Life and fitness used to be deeply intertwined. (...) Now they are separate: fitness is a cute thing rich people do in their Lululemon after work. (...) Biking was something you did outside, often with friends. (...) Then the exercise element was captured in stationary bikes, placed in a gym. (...) Then we got Peloton. (...) The richness of biking is gone. > Atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element. (...) If you looked at an Italian neighborhood dinner and said “wow what a waste, don’t they know they could just drink a Huel and get back to work?” then, well, oof. > We separate “I’m working” and “I’m playing.” We want to make everything extremely efficient. (...) Could you make your workout less perfectly optimized so you can do it with friends? Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead? (…) De-atomization is the secret to happiness. https://blog.nateliason.com/p/de-atomization-is-the-secret-to-happiness 🤝

> It's safe to say the Ai Pin deserves an exhibit alongside Juicero and Clinkle in the museum of Silicon Valley misfires. (...) Humane might have worked out if it followed a traditional VC startup formula. Instead, they tried to follow The Apple Way, where 1.0 products need to be so insanely polished as to blow people away. > The Apple Watch wasn't a flop, but it did struggle a bit. (...) After a launch, [they found that] the best pitch for Apple Watch wasn't "The Rolex of Tech," but rather, "A very fancy FitBit." (…) Humane spent five years developing their product in a vacuum. They lacked a FitBit to prove their concept. They had little evidence people want to ditch their phones. > When interest rates went up in 2022, startups suddenly found it harder to raise money. (...) At this point Humane had raised $130m. (...) I'll guess they were burning $30m per year in salaries alone. (...) So Humane needed to ship something to look like a later stage company. (...) They decided to latch on to AI. > I thought, "Maybe they found a solution to projecting in daylight without getting really hot and egregiously depleting the battery." They didn't. They patched over it. Short battery life? Battery swaps! Doesn't work in daylight? Uh… don't use it in daylight! (...) Maybe they did build prototypes but convinced themselves it would be solved. > It's that funding that will be Humane's undoing. (…) Before the Ai Pin launch, they convinced investors the company is worth $850 million. When they go back for their next round, they need to argue with a straight face that the company is now worth $1.7 Billion. (…) Good luck with that. > For all of Humane's talk about freeing users from technology, they shipped technology in search of a purpose. I blame the team's nostalgia. They clearly want to recreate the Apple from 2007, but that's impossible under venture capital constraints and without the momentum of Apple. https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/

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