Jony Ive, Meta AR, Visa Monopoly and the Legend of Robert Caro
Jony Ive, Meta AR, Visa Monopoly and the Legend of Robert Caro
PLUS: An incredible tech roast by John Mulaney.
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Today is a round-up of interesting reads:
Jony Ive’s Next Act
Meta AR and a Great Cold Email
The Legend of Robert Caro
DOJ Sues Visa Monopoly
John Mulaney Cooks Oracle
…and them fire memes (including ayahuasca retreats)
PS. Thanks for the follow-up on my 7,000 word deep dive on Francis Ford Coppola’s business career from last week. I plan on watching Megalopolis this weekend and will report back.
Jony Ive’s Next Act
Jony Ive famously worked as Apple’s top designer from the mid-1990s until 2019.
Collaborating closely with Steve Jobs, he played a significant part in creating the most successful run of consumer products in corporate history: iMac (1997), iPod (2001), iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010). The Apple Watch was his last major product at the company and the company has sold over 200 million of them.
Ive’s run was so impressive that we’ve collectively memory-holed the fact that he also decided that this was the best way to charge the Apple Pencil.
He’s worth $900 million and has nothing left to prove to anyone but is still very much in the game as explained in a recent New York Times profile: “After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own”.
So, what is he up to? Five years ago, Ive launched a design firm called LoveFrom and is just doing cool shit that interests him. Airbnb (new review system and experiences), Ferrari (touchscreen and interior design) and Christie’s (an auction stand).
LoveFrom is also raising ~$1B and doing a spin-off startup collaboration with OpenAI on an AI hardware product.
Ive is charging up to $200 million a year to design these new products (my guess is that Ferrari is paying that full stick price).
The company’s name is to honor the memory of Steve Jobs, who said one of the ways to express appreciation for humanity was “the act of making something with a great deal of care and love”.
The most visible LoveFrom product yet is a “reinvented” button for a Moncler jacket.
According to Fast Company, Ive set out to solve a tricky clothing design problem (“How do you connect a hard object to a flexible one?”).
The LoveFrom team created a coin size magnetic button that you press to connect different layers of a Moncler jacket with no threads required (the button has a similar magnetic effect that you’ll find opening and closing your AirPod cases that is assuredly missing one of the pods).
Moncler LoveFrom jackets are out this fall at a price of $2,000 and will also have the LoveFrom logo (a brown bear, which is a shoutout to the animal mascot on California’s flag).
I know that a lot of people are sick and tired of Apple fanboy-type hype. Many of these people are thinking, “dude, we’ve had magnetic buttons for decades”. But after reading about Ive’s post-Apple obsession with buttons, I kind of want to get one:
“This is my button book,” Mr. Ive said, as he flipped open one of the oversized books titled “Garment Fasteners Design Research.” Its pages were filled with images of fasteners and pins from prehistory through the Bronze Age. It was the first of a custom-printed, five-volume series of books with pictures and analysis of mankind’s entire history of making buttons for clothing. “Five years we’ve been working on this, and we absolutely love it.”
On the infinitesimal chance you’re reading this Jony, I have checked out your landing page and have a few suggestions in the post below (side note: I had at least 50 people tell me that if “you have to ask how much LoveFrom costs, you can’t afford it”; thank you for the intel).
***
Meta AR and a Great Cold Email
Meta unveiled a bunch of new products at an event last week including a cheaper VR headsets (starting at $299) and new AI features (real-time translation for Meta RayBans).
However, the main event was a product that we won’t be able to buy for many years: Orion, a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses that currently cost $10,000 a piece to manufacture but look like they might be the future of the form factor.
The Verge’s Alex Heath has a good breakdown on the hardware, which includes the glasses, a neural wristband and a wireless computer puck:
Orion boasts a 70-degree field of view, which is wider than any pair of AR glasses I’ve tried to date. In my experience, a narrower field of view causes AR to feel small and less immersive, like you’re looking through a peephole. With Orion, I had to get pretty close to virtual objects before their edges started to disappear.
At 98 grams, the glasses weigh significantly more than a normal pair but also far less than mixed reality headsets like the Meta Quest or Apple’s Vision Pro. The frames are made of magnesium, which is lighter than aluminum and used for evenly distributing heat.
Seven cameras embedded in the frames are used to anchor virtual objects in real space, assist with eye and hand tracking, and allow Meta’s AI assistant to understand what you’re looking at. You can leave a virtual window open, turn your head and walk away, and as long as the glasses stay on, it’ll still be there when you come back.
The quality of Orion’s display is surprisingly good given the form factor. Video calls look crisp enough to feel engaging, and I had no problem reading text on a webpage that was several feet away. However, I wouldn’t want to watch Avatar in them — I probably couldn’t finish it anyway since the battery only lasts about two hours.
As you can see from the photo below, the Orion glasses are much more palatable to put on your face for long stretches as compared to the Apple Vision Pro. Meta could have a monster hit on its hand if the company can manufacture at scale and get the price down to $1000.
That’s a huge “if” but the potential suddenly makes Zuck’s $50B+ investment in the metaverse and wearables look not so bad (Apple is reported to have spent $30B+ developing Apple Vision Pro so far while Amazon spent $10B+ on Alexa…so there’s that).
In the early-2010s, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings quipped that the streaming company was trying to “become HBO before HBO could become Netflix.” Basically, could Netflix figure out how to make high-quality content before HBO could out how to create streaming infrastructure.
There are echoes of that theme in Meta and Apple in terms of mixed reality eyewear.
The social media giant has sold 700,000 Meta Ray Bans and 20m+ Quest headsets. It has millions of users and an active developer ecosystem. Apple is lacking both of these things. Meta has also partnered with EssilorLuxottica, the $100B French-Italian eyeglass maker. However, Apple remains the king of consumer tech hardware and knows that it needs to make a much cheaper version of the Apple Vision Pro ($3,499).
It will be a fascinating battle for the next computing platform.
Speaking of the Meta Ray-Bans, that unit is headed by Li-Chen Miller. Miller spent 18 years at Microsoft before joining Meta in 2021. According to Bloomberg, Meta hired her after she sent a cold email to the company roasting a pair of their glasses:
Li-Chen Miller wasn’t even a Meta Platforms Inc. employee when she started working to fix the company’s video-recording sunglasses.Miller was working at Microsoft Corp. in late 2021 when she purchased a pair of Ray-Ban Stories, the first version of Meta’s souped-up sunglasses. But her excitement about the novel idea was quickly overshadowed by all the ways she thought they could be improved. So she dashed off a detailed — and unsolicited — list of suggested fixes to Alex Himel, Meta’s head of wearables.
“She wrote me an email that articulated what she thought was good about the device and what was promising, and then a longer list of things that she would improve,” Himel said, recalling that he agreed with most of the ideas.
Miller’s email and her meticulous attention to detail landed her a job the following year at Meta, where she now oversees products for the entire wearables division, including a full line of the Ray-Ban glasses she previously critiqued.
This is one of my favourite job hiring stories ever.
While Miller obviously went deep on her analysis, more companies need to read one-star reviews of their products on Amazon and hire whoever wrote the most thoughtful — or funniest — takedown.
***
The Legend of Robert Caro
It’s the 50th anniversary of “The Power Broker”, Robert Caro’s 1,344 page masterpiece on Robert Moses and how the controversial urban planner wielded power to shape the building of New York in the mid-20th century.
While “The Power Broker” won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for a Biography, that award is a footnote in the lore of Caro and his book-writing process.
Starting the project in 1967 at the age of 32, Caro spent 7 years on research and ended up writing over 1 million words with this process as explained in a recent Curbed profile:
Handwrite the first draft
Type it up on a Smith-Corona Electra 210
Triple-space and then edit with a pencil
Repeat
Caro kept a daily word count and has used the same process over the past 40+ years on his incredible Lyndon B. Johnson book series (the 5th book in the series is hopefully done soon). Caro says he’s a fast writer — now targeting ~900 words a day — but it is the research that takes long. An editor he worked for told him to “turn every page” while investigating documents and that became his professional philosophy (Caro would spend weeks doing research to write a single sentence).
This meticulous approach meant he ran down “The Power Broker” book advance way before he was done writing. To finance the shortfall, he and his wife Ina sold their home and moved into a small New York apartment (Ina is also an author and has done research on all of Robert’s books).
An editor for “The Power Broker” cut 350,000 words (equal to 2 full books) to fit the print and Caro says it was so painful he’s never looked at that text again. “The Power Broker” came out in 1974 and sales were slow. But the work eventually picked up steam — it’s now on the 74th print and still sells 40,000 copies a year — and has become the defining book for urban plan in and New York’s history.
I would say “you have to read it” but I’ve only read a ~500 page after picking away at it for a decade. I might be able to finish it now that Caro has finally greenlit a Kindle option after previously saying “no” to digital because he felt the sprawling book was meant for paper. Separately, it’s worth reading his ~200 page book on his research and writing process (Working). And I’m working backwards on the Lyndon B. John series (The Passage of Power and Master of the Senate are insanely good).
One of the most high-profile Caro fans in the world is Conan O’Brien. In December 2023, the comedian went on the 99% Invisible Podcast — which has the past year breaking down each chapter of “The Power Broker” — and explained why Caro is such a stud, particularly in the 21st century media environment:
“I like to contrast Robert Caro with the times that we’re in now. If you think about it, everything’s so quick. Everything feels so temporary. I mean, the internet didn’t exist when Robert Caro started–clearly–The Power Broker but then on to his Lyndon Johnson books. And now we live in this world where everything’s so ephemeral and fast. Series come and go. Television comes and goes. Entertainment–almost like a magician that has flash powder–things explode and there’s a big spark and we all go, “Whoa!” And–puff–and then it’s gone.
And while this is all happening, you contrast it with this man who has dedicated his whole life essentially to writing about these two people and really most of his life writing about one man and doing it his way, without compromise, very quietly, in a very small office. I haven’t been there, but I imagine it’s not huge. And cranking away on a Smith Corona typewriter that was built in 1969. And he has this dedication to what he’s doing that almost feels like it’s akin to Egyptians building a pyramid. You know, most people that were working on a pyramid never even lived to see it half built, let alone completed. What this man’s doing doesn’t feel like it’s part of the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s completely out of time.
You know, Robert Caro and his work makes me feel trivial the way looking at a mesa in a desert makes me feel trivial. You know? I just look at it, and I go, “Oh, my God, this thing is so much bigger than me. And it’s made of granite.” Robert Caro is the closest thing to, like, a geological formation. His work–his body of work–feels like we’re watching this eruption of lava and moving of tectonic plates that’s going to build something. And it’s going to last as long as civilization lasts, which is at least another 40 years.”
On the same podcast, Conan shared a genius TV show idea: put a camera in Caro’s room and watch him work. Sure, kind of creepy. But wouldn’t you want to see second-by-second footage of the pyramids being built?
***
Visa Monopoly
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued Visa for “illegal monopoly” practices.
This lawsuit is targeting Visa’s debit business, which is significantly larger than Visa’s credit card business. The key distinction is that debit is essentially moving money between bank accounts while credit is borrowing money from a card issuer (usually a bank).
Visa’s dominant position in debit and credit is built on its massive network created over decades including:
4 billion account holders
over 130 million merchants
~14,500 financial institutions and governments in more than 200 countries and territories
In the US, Visa’s debit business processed 60% of all transactions and pulled in over $7 billion of fees on literally the dumbest operating margin— and by “dumbest”, I mean “insanely juicy” — of 83%. It’s global revenue is $32B.
Matt Stoller’s Big Newsletter has a great breakdown of the DOJ’s case but the main point is that the US government believes Visa is using its scale to block out competitors.
It does so by using its monopoly-type fees to pay off competitors or entice merchants. On net, the DOJ says these arrangement is costly for customers and prevents innovation.
One striking part of the lawsuit is Apple: Visa has long viewed Apple Pay as an “existential threat” to its payments business.
So, the company has been paying Apple “hundreds of millions of dollars” a year so the iPhone maker doesn’t deploy competing functionality.
Similar to how Google is paying Apple $20B a year to be the default search engine for Safari browser. Apple caught a stray in the Google monopoly case and now it’s catching another one in the Visa monopoly case.
It legit might lose both these distribution payments (Visa, Google) even though it’s not the subject of either lawsuit (it does have separate cases around its app store, though).
While the DOJ makes a strong case that Visa — and also Google — are abusing their market dominance, it’s indisputable that the companies have created two of the three most profitable business models ever created: Visa payments, Google search ads and gas stations selling a single banana at checkout counter for $0.99
***
John Mulaney Cooks Oracle
Stand-up comedian John Mulaney was invited to SalesForce’s annual Dreamforce conference.
He proceeded to go scorched earth on every tech-related topic. Before getting into his best jokes, I want to give a shout-out to Mulaney for marrying into a Vietnamese family (his wife Olivia Munn is half-Vietnamese and Mulaney has done a few bits about Vietnamese uncles which are solid). Here were his best zingers courtesy of SF Standard:
“Let me get this straight. You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?”
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘this is the future’.”
“You’re a VP of customer success? Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago.”
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days. The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
[Thank you] for the world that you’re creating for my son…where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
Somehow, there hasn’t been a leaked video of the event.
Either way, Mulaney said afterwards local comedy club that he did Dreamforce for the cash grab and couldn’t stop laughing at how much cash he was grabbing to roast the company.
Honestly, incredible. Mulaney should just do an Eras tour of Big Tech firms. Grab a bag from each of them and roast every feature and API. A set for Linkedin could easily sell out a 100,000 person stadium. Easily.
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Memes
…and there them fire posts (including this one I made that combined Meta’s new VR glasses with a viral trend last week about how some VCs said that they invested in founders who ended up quitting their startups after taking ayahuasca (and presumably discovering their real calling in life).
Finally, one of my favourite episodes The Simpsons is when the family goes to New York on a tourist trip. Homer parks in an illegal spot and gets one of those boot devices put on the tire so the car can’t move. Homer drives it anyway and destroys the car. This is a long way of saying that The Simpsons need to update that episode with this “Barnacles” device.
