Inside the AI startup frenzy: ‘Everyone’s pivoting, then pivoting again’

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Hey everybody, it's Nelai. So I'm off on friends leave this summer, which is exciting for a lot of reasons. And one of them is I'm handing Decoder over to some really fun guest hosts who've invited some really interesting guests of their own.

This all kicks off starting today. Verge deputy editor and longtime friend of the show Alex Heath is taking over our Thursday episodes for the next few months. Alex has landed a number of pretty big Decoder exclusives for us over the years, including a running annual chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

And as the author of the excellent Command Line newsletter, Alex has super tapped into both the broader tech community and the nonstop breakneck pace of the AI industry. So I'm really excited to see what he's going to bring to the show this summer.

As for our Monday episodes, the interview episodes, stay tuned. We'll have more to share starting next week about who's going to be taking over those episodes while I'm gone. It's an all-star crew, and I'm really excited about it. Okay, that's enough from me. Here's Alex.

Welcome to Decoder. I'm Alex Heath, Deputy Editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. This is the first in a series of Thursday Decoder episodes that I'll be hosting while Neelai is out on parental leave. I've been covering AI a lot at The Verge, and I'm excited to start sharing some of the conversations I regularly have with leaders in the space here. The plan is for each episode to focus on a specific theme from the rise of deep fakes to how AI is reimagining the browser.

This week, I'm focusing on how AI companies talk about what they're building. My guest is Ellis Hamburger. He's the founder of Meaning, a marketing firm that works with a lot of buzzy AI startups. Ellis actually used to work at The Verge shortly after it first launched in 2012, where he covered the early mobile app boom. Now he's in the trenches with a lot of AI startups helping them figure out how to present their products to the world. That gives him a pretty unique perspective.

First, some disclosures. Ellis has a lot of clients that we cover at The Verge, including Nothing, Raycast, Readwise, Daylight, Friend, Mainframe, Tolan, and more. He also previously worked at the browser company and Snap. We recorded this episode together in Los Angeles, and as you'll probably be able to tell, Ellis and I have been friends for a long time. I've always found Ellis to be an original thinker, and I hope you'll find our conversation as interesting as I did. Okay, here we go.

So Ellis, before we get into the heart of this conversation, I would love to go back and go through how you got to where you are, because it's a really fascinating story. And you're a Virgil alum, so that's really cool. almost overlapped at a couple places. Sure. I mean, I've been a tech nerd since the day I was born, as far as I know. And if you recall, the artist known as Walt Mossberg was always my idol growing up.

Also a huge part of Verge history, yeah. Yep, yep. Walt Mossberg was my idol with his personal technology column. I think it was every Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. Obviously, it was great that he had the Steve Jobs exclusives. Those were always good. But what I loved about him is that he really brought it down to earth for the average person. Yeah. Which, you know, you can't always count on reporters to do, right? Maybe you've heard this rumor that reporters write for each other.

and not actually for the audience. That's too frequently true. Yeah. It could be true. It might warrant further investigation. But yeah, I love that Walt and it's funny, you know, Joanna in his footsteps is doing something similar, just making it so friendly and familiar for the average person. So yeah, I'll never forget one day I emailed him asking if he'd chat with me once I decided that I wanted to write.

And he wrote back in like five minutes and I was sweating bullets and it took us a month to get on the phone. I prepped all these questions and it turned out to be one of the most awkward conversations in my life. I don't know if my questions were too good or what, but he kept pausing to be like, is this for the school paper? And I'm like, no, this is just for me, man. I'm just a curious dude.

I think around that time, I realized, you know, that curiosity and that ability to ask really detailed questions is really, you know, a big part of what being a journalist is, retaining that curiosity every day. And so then it was really just a matter of where I was going to begin. I applied to a few places. I think I was far too straight edge for Gizmodo at the time. So they rejected me. I ended up getting a job at Business Insider in the tools section.

So I was a tool for a little while, an intern, and then a full-timer writing about phones, gadgets.

I was at BI for a while, and then, of course, I'd been following Josh Topolsky and his exploits for a while. I don't think Engadget had any internships. That would have been my first choice. So around the time that The Verge launched, I don't know if you know this, I snuck into The Verge launch party. No way.

Yeah, and I approached Josh at some point. And I don't know, I guess I made a good impression because a couple months later, he hit me up as The Verge was starting to hire up. You never told me this, that this is how you got in. Yeah, yeah. Pretty much every one of my jobs is through interrogating somebody or DMing them.

And whether that's good or bad, you can be the judge. So then you covered a lot of that early mobile app boom at The Verge for a couple of years. Yeah, it was a special time. I mean, if you remember, there was a really big debate about the future of software. Was it going to be HTML5? Was it going to be native Objective-C? You were seeing the launch of new apps like Path that created an entire... how your user interface paradigm

that could be different, or Paper by 53, that to this day is, you know, one of the finest pieces of software ever made. And then on the flip side, you have all these other apps that are trying to be for everybody on every platform, and it's just a list view or a news feed. or something like that. And so it really was a fascinating time. And I think before the AI boom right now, that was the last time that there was this much VC investment all at one time.

which is just a blast to cover, honestly. I think of it like the VCs are kind of playing roulette in Vegas, but they're trying to bet on every single number. I'm not sure quite how that works out, but I'm told that it does work out.

Okay. So yeah, you're in this boom time and this was early Snapchat era too. You started covering Snap a lot and it's really weird like having this conversation because you and I have like, we've... I don't want to say mirrored each other, but we've had a lot of similar...

epochs in our career like you covered snap a lot when it was just getting started you did some of the first interviews with evan spiegel the ceo on the verge.com then i went on and covered snap for a long time after you went to snap but like talk to me about

that time and like why you honed in on Snap and then how that led to joining Snap very early. I think at the time, Evan was pretty much the youngest founder I'd ever met. when I was at The Verge. And he was just so unbelievably thoughtful about every design decision, which is kind of funny and maybe a little bit sad, right? Because the way the app looks, it looks like a toy and in many ways still does. And I'm not sure, you know. How much Evan really gets.

in public, you know, in terms of mindshare for anything except maybe stories, which in my view was never necessarily the perfect fit for Snapchat anyway as a private messaging platform. But I mean, I remember, you know, when he explained to me that you were going to get a before your friend.

was done typing. Right when they start typing, you're going to get a notification. And I was like, that's insane. There's nothing to look at yet if you go into the chat. And he's like, well, the whole point is to get into the chat together, just like in real life. instead of having this awkward text ping pong of people leaving each other unread. And I was like, holy crap, that's a real insight, just like ephemerality driven by real conversations with friends at a coffee shop, at a bar.

at a restaurant that just makes people feel something different. There are a lot of examples of that through Snap over history. And I think at the time, most reporters were interested in just asking them over and over again if it was a sexting app. I was the one who cared about design.

made us fast friends. And eventually I was not really picturing myself as an editor-in-chief in 50 years. And so I started to think about what I was going to do next. And so I was looking at Facebook. I was looking at some others just because I knew so many folks at Facebook from being... beat reporter at the time. Evan eventually invited me to join and thus began the next chapter of going from wearing all black Brooklyn bro to jeans and white tees LA bro Ellis, I suppose.

Yeah. And on LinkedIn, it looks like you were obviously very early at Snap and marketing and did a lot of things, but I don't think people fully appreciate your impact there. I mean, you used to... You mean putting the poop emoji and notifications and air... messages yes that that's my magnum opus put that on my grave you were at one point that's very good but you were at one point responsible for every word that the company had in the public domain from like the app store description to

the receipts on the Spectacles vending machine from like 2015. What a fun time that was. I don't think you even really appreciate this, but you were kind of a culture bearer at the company for a while, and you would do these new hire orientations and talk about the ethos of the company and its perspective and what makes it unique.

And you did that for a long time. And then when did you decide to leave? Around seven and a half years later. Okay. So you were there through the IPO, through a lot of change. And then you leave to do what? So I left to join the browser company. I hate to say another DM pitch from Ellis to a founder, but I'd known Josh for a pretty long time. I wrote about his startup.

potluck back when I was at The Verge. And then I wrote about his app called Rooms once he got to Facebook. That was kind of like a mini Reddit clone with some Snapchat QR codes in it. There's a pocket of people listening to this. They're going to be like, wow. I feel seen and a bunch of people are going to be like, what the hell are we talking about? But that's okay. Keep going.

It certainly feels a certain way that I have a space in my brain for the Facebook Rooms app. I'll tell you that. But yeah, it's funny. I didn't give Potluck or Facebook Rooms particularly good reviews, but I guess Josh appreciated it nonetheless. And yeah, I mean, he just tweeted one day that...

Arc was going into beta and I DM'd him like, let me beta test this thing. I mean, that was one of the reasons I wanted to go work for Snapchat in the first place is that one of my favorite parts about being a reporter. was not strong arming people into into scoops but just testing these apps for a few weeks before they launched and being on the cutting edge of

In my view, software is the tools that we all use every day, the forks, the knives, the chairs, the TVs. These are things that really have a profound power to affect us. They're not just little 99-cent widgets and gimmicks.

And testing those products is really always been something that I love to do. And so, yeah, I wrote Josh a whole page of feedback and he was like, come join us. And so, yeah, then I was there for the... very eventful first two years of ARK, which is now, I guess, in the dust as far as a lot of things are concerned. But it was a really nice moment. We tried to portray that there could be a more transparent tech company.

I think there's so many ivory towers. I mean, especially Facebook. I mean, I just, as well as I got to know the people at Facebook over the years, you know, arguably I was their favorite reporter for a while, but I never felt like they could just be honest with me.

And I think it's been interesting to see the cycle that Facebook has gone through over the years. And even if Zuck is polarizing today, as he always has been, the more he shares about himself, the more you're forced to reckon with the fact that he is a real person, even if you think he's annoying. And I think that's better than not being a real person, better than just being like a PR person who doesn't let any interesting thing that wasn't preplanned slip through.

And I think as we've seen, you know, even if you make some mistakes, that's natural. I mean, honestly, that was one of the insights with ephemerality. Something Evan used to say to convince parents. He's like, listen, do kids make mistakes?

And they're like, yeah, I guess my kid does make mistakes. And he's like, would you rather them be saying some swear words and dumb shit on Snapchat where it's ephemeral or on Facebook or LinkedIn to every future employer? And they're like, huh, yeah, I guess so.

Yeah. Teens do dumb shit. Where would you like them to do it? What did you learn from Snap and Browser from a high level? There are very different experiences, but I imagine there's a through line. There's a funny duality there. going from Evan, who I think was very much the Steve Jobs playbook. Probably a little bit, you know, adversarial with media.

very precious about surprises and keynotes and not letting a single thing leak. And what was interesting about that to me is that he is either a really young millennial or really old Gen Zer, but this is a group... that is by far the number one audience on Snapchat. And every brand report you read is that all Gen Z cares about is authenticity. And, you know, brands that show you their true colors and talk to you and develop a parasocial relationship with you and build in public.

But for whatever reason, Evan just thought social media was so lame, which I mean, in some ways it was. A lot of brands posing as some character on social media. But as a result, for a long time, he really didn't say almost anything to the world outside of the Morgan Stanley conferences he attended every so often, or a highly polished TV commercial-esque ad that...

was not really the format du jour that Gen Z was expecting and enjoyed. And then going to the browser company, Josh, someone who is deeply steeped in online media, addicted to Twitter, just like the rest of us. not really precious about how he sounds or how he's going to come off because he has that confidence in himself as a wholesome person. And so going from, yeah, having one brand campaign that...

gets pretty diluted after a year and a half at Snap to doing one every two weeks was definitely a really big shift. And I think as a result, you saw Arc and Browser Company developed one of the biggest, most enthusiastic audiences in the whole space. over a course of a year and a half. But here's like, you know, people ask me all the time, like, how do I do what you did? And yeah, part of it is getting out there with your voice, but you still have to be interesting.

You still have to be thoughtful. You still have to be opinionated. The product can't suck either. The product can't suck either. Of course it can't. Yeah. There's always been that spectrum, I think, of brand filling in the gaps for product and being the whole product, you know, with a lot of consumer packaged goods, if you will. So, yeah, pretty big difference, I would say, in the communication style. And, you know, it's interesting, last thing I'll say about that is that...

you also see how that can bite you in the butt, right? For a long time, it looked like Josh Miller couldn't stop winning when he just... spoke to you as he does every day. And I think a lot of times that was true. But then, you know, I think some people critique the way that the arc kind of sunset-ish happened, then going completely off the grid for a few months. And it's like...

wait, I thought you were my buddy. Where'd you go? So yeah, being more transparent and more out there also creates a lot higher expectations. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from OpenPhone. All of us know how frustrating it can be when you need to get in touch with a company for some reason and can't get through.

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AI is moving fast. So fast, it's hard to keep up. In fact, in ServiceNow's latest AI maturity index, scores dipped 20% from last year. But that's okay, because AI isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. You may be behind today, but tomorrow you could be a pace setter. Dive into ServiceNow's AI Maturity Index and see how you can innovate as fast as your ambitions. Visit servicenow.com slash AI maturity. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn.

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72% of SMBs using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash partner. That's linkedin.com slash partner. to post your job for free terms and conditions apply we're back with ellis hamburger so let's go to what you did after a browser and what you're doing now you are

I jokingly tell you that I think you're like the Rick Rubin for AI startups, but you probably cringe at that and that's okay. But explain what you're doing, what the company is, and yeah. Yeah, it's funny. The Rick Rubin comparison is interesting to me because I do think of myself, and I think he probably does think of himself as a bit of a therapist, but he doesn't know how to work the knobs.

and seems to be a little bit proud of that. I would like to believe I know how to work the knobs, whether that knob is a... quippy social bio or your Super Bowl video script. So yeah, maybe a little bit like him, a little bit not. But yeah, after being at the browser company for a couple years, I started meaning, which really was a leap of faith. based on a gap I saw in the market.

which is that most early stage companies don't yet have a head of marketing. They don't have a head of comms. They certainly don't have a UX writer, something I did at Snap that I always thought was really underappreciated part of the product experience. And I said, what if I kind of do all those things for founders?

They saw something different in me, someone more like them that could speak founder in a very multidisciplinary way. And honestly, I think Evan and Josh thought of me at that same way early on. at both Snap and Browser, the difference is the bigger companies get, whether it's Snap or Browser, inevitably people who wear a lot of hats get put in silos just because there's that much work to do.

A browser company, there are that many tweets to write, that many release notes to do, that many reporters to ping. And I think packaging it all in one, trying to create a blueprint for them that really works for every audience is what I try to do today. And I still do do...

some writing, like website copy, video scripts, etc., some of which we can talk about if you want. But at its core, I think it's about positioning. And it's funny, that brings me back to reporting. You know, I'm so grateful that...

It's funny, I think Business Insider wanted me to write five or six articles per day, which sounds like a lot until you remember that Joe Weisenthal used to do 20 a day. And so what that was... was turning my college essay, in J.R.'s words, into hopefully practicing all day long positioning.

how do i frame a new app or a new company to my audience in a way that's interesting it could be the founder it could be their background it could be the product it could be the innovation I learned early on what we all know today, which is that everything is content.

Everything has to be thought of as content because no matter what you do, you're going to appear in the same feed as everybody else with Kim Kardashian and Sam Altman and whatever else is going on or whatever bombs are being dropped in whatever corner of the world today. So, you know...

There are more ways than just your product, I think, to stand out. One of my favorite stories, I interviewed a guy who was making a contacts app, and I think he was a little disappointed when my whole article instead was about how he beamed me into the interview in a telepresence. robot and pretended like it was completely normal. So yeah, the headline was about the telepresence robot. I did that for the first time. I beamed into their office. I was in their lobby.

And their receptionist is like, oh, hey, Ellis, what's up? I'm like, what? I'm using my keyboard to maneuver around their office and everybody has been trained to just kind of give me a little wave. Wow. Or that Midwestern upside down smile when they see you. I've had a lot of bizarre interview situations, but never that. Yeah. That's up there.

And guess what? That probably did get more eyeballs on them than a new type of context app. Yeah. So I don't regret it. And you work with a lot of companies now that we cover at The Verge. I'm just going to list a few so people have a sense. There's nothing. raycast readwise delphi daylight friend mainframe it goes on so you've built quite this roster now and where i'm really curious to know more about what you're seeing is

When I look at all these AI companies, they're all starting to blend together. There's just a lot of the same. Everyone's doing an agent. Everyone's trying to do their own version of ChatGPT. And aside from a few things, and some of them you've actually worked on, but there's very few that...

tend to break out and be like, oh, I haven't actually thought of like that as a way that AI can be used and that being an actual product. So yeah, if you were to just kind of survey what's going on right now in AI startup land and how people are. either amalgamating together or standing out? Like, what are you saying and what's interesting? I think what's interesting to me is the debate about the interface.

You know, I've always someone who's really cared about software design. I think people want to feel things when they use products, when they wear clothing, when they go places. They don't always necessarily want the most streamlined, minimal experience, which is San Francisco design. you know, iOS 7 up till now with, what is it called? Liquid Ass? Your words, not mine. I'm the guest. Yeah, I can say it. And so what's interesting to me is that every time there's a really big software shift,

People want to know, oh, everything's going to be voice now. All right, my app's going to be voice. And it's like, dude, like people like pictures and videos a whole lot. It's not all going to be voice. And then AI comes out and everybody's like, oh, everything's going to be a chatbot conversation. And it's like, dude, like, do you want to make music inside of a chatbot experience? And I think this is the nature of tech. Everybody tends to overcompensate on these different.

user interface trends, in part because those are the kind of things that VCs like to bet on, right? I guess you've been doing this long enough to remember the original chatbot wave that was just driven by so much FOMO. And it is FOMO and fast motion right now. Companies that I'm working with are pivoting during our process and then pivoting again. The technology is moving so quickly that...

it's very, very difficult to lay out a vision. And so I think you could talk about the different vertical use cases, different industries, this and that. But one of the things that's interested me is if you look at mainframe. client that's working on agents, they're kind of thinking about working with agents almost as like a to-do list and delegating things to agents.

And if you look at another one I recently worked with called Strawberry, which is an AI browser, they're framing the different ways to work with agents as friendly little companions. Or if you look at Dia, the newest browser company evolution, and disclosure, I am still a shareholder in BrowserCo, they're framing them as skills that you access through a slash command. I'm very interested in how that's going to work.

evolve and how people do want to interact with it. I'm definitely a believer that chat nor voice is really the best way to do a whole lot of things, especially if you've ever been on a New York subway. Yeah.

There's definitely a lot less privacy when you're speaking all of your search queries out loud, right? But... I do think ChatGPT has become just so powerful that in the same way that Google was able to adopt so many use cases across images and shopping and maps and reviews, that the intent layer If it succeeds, as I think ChatGPT is trying to do today to become an OS, whether that's hardware, software, some combination, that intent, capturing that intent is everything.

And even if the OS isn't perfect, if that's what people get used to, they're willing to put up with some cruft and jump over some hurdles in order to get to the solution. So yeah, I think that's an area of experimentation that's been interesting to me.

When you're talking to founders who are trying to figure out how to communicate what they're doing with AI, what do they say behind the scenes that's different from how they portray it publicly? How do they actually feel about AI? I think no one wants to think that they're the one destroying the world. And there's part of that that's just like, oh, it can't be me. I'm just doing a little AI calendar app over here, right? But...

collectively, we are all absolutely accelerating this revolution that honestly keeps me up at night. And so I see as part of what I do to help me rationalize my job is try and push founders toward documenting goals for society and for people, not just efficiency, saving time and money. Anybody can do that. There's no ethic or morality in that.

You know, I'll give you an example. One of my very first clients, I worked with Amo, the former Zenly folks from Snap, Antoine Martine and the crew over there. One of the things I was proud of is that after all those years at Snap, it was with Amo that I was able to document this source of truth manifesto with them with some principles. one of which was friendship is a feeling. And we elaborated below that to being about how it isn't about metrics, it isn't about this or that.

And I really do believe that as companies grow, you need those principles about your goals for society embedded in the company culture, or else without it, PMs are just going to default to incremental gains, which we all know are incredibly easy to get.

right? And so, I mean, if you look at the news this week, I think I saw on The Verge yesterday, people were upset about Apple's push notification for F1. Yeah. And when this comes out, it will have been a little bit after that. But yeah, that is something recently for sure that people are...

we're talking about. So I happen to view notifications as one of the worst things ever invented in the history of technology. And, you know, Apple as the boss of the notifications paradigm and system, yes, they've evolved it. Yes, they've added do not disturb modes and AI-based priority notifications and all this and that. But do they have a...

principle internally that says never interrupt the user unless this is something that is truly urgent right now. And who knows, maybe that notification was sent silently and not with a buzz. But I view that as very disrespectful, and I was happy to see that there was a little bit of an uproar about it, because if Apple's doing it, then, you know, the cat's out of the bag, and it becomes the new norm.

Just in the same way that we all accept ads as endemic to so many of our daily experiences instead of paying for them, Apple's starting to do that too. And before you know it... our spaces and our ability to have a direct relationship with products and companies starts to get eroded and the norms change. I think most AI startup founders are seeing the gold rush. They're seeing how adding AI to what they're doing can triple their valuation or whatever and help them get buzz.

And I don't see a ton of morality in any of it, to be honest. And you're right, like that gives cause for concern. I mean, luckily, I guess for humanity, most startups fail. The fact that that is so prevalent doesn't necessarily mean that this is going to be the world we live in. But at the same time, it's also indicative of the culture, right? The culture is very much like...

Yes, AI is really cool. There's a lot of really cool applications of it. It's also kind of like the new Wall Street. I'm curious, can you figure that out pretty quickly when you're meeting a founder? Where their motivations actually lie and does that affect... how you work with them or don't? Yeah, it's funny. Working with all the B2B SaaS companies that tend to be a bit more objective and money-driven has definitely made me B2B sassier of a person.

I would say. Just thought of that on the spot. I could tell as a reporter, man. Yeah. When you get an email and it's the fresh Wharton grad MBA who's trying to work something out. But VCs see through it too. And so I think I've been fortunate to be in a space and get referrals from people who care about design. I mean, people ask me how I've gotten...

this or that great client. And it's like, all the people who care know each other. And I'm someone who cares. I want to talk about how product decisions affect people, make them feel better or worse about their lives. And frankly, I mean, this is kind of the beef that I've had with Facebook all this time, is that it's a whole lot of very nice, smart people who just refuse to really have a take.

on what a better society looks like. You know, for a very long time, their MO was about connecting the world. And one of my favorite artists and creators, Hideo Kojima, who has a new game out called Death Stranding 2. He is known for being very prophetic with his tech ideas as predicting COVID and delivery culture and whatnot. The tagline of his new game is, should we have connected?

And I mean, I don't know if that's a direct aim at Facebook or just connecting as an idea, but I think Facebook certainly was flying that flag for a very long time. As far as I can tell, the only... thing they care about is giving people more of what they click and what they engage with, which leads to a very different Instagram explore page than if you have a different set of principles. And there is no doubt.

that if you have ethics or morals or opinions, they isolate one audience after another. But I'm sure you would agree it's, you know, it's pretty impossible to be apolitical these days. And, you know. I hope they can start to have some ideas about what makes life worth living and how to help support it. We need to take another quick break.

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We're back with Ellis Hamburger. There is one startup in the space that I feel like is actually saying the quiet part out loud that I've been thinking about a lot. It's Cluelay, which if people...

Have not seen it. It's only a few months old at this point. But it started with this 21-year-old founder who... built this ai tool to help him cheat on a coding interview for amazon he posted it online it went super viral amazon actually rejected its rescinded its job offer And then he turned it into a company and it's a company that's also this like, you know, creator.

thing. It's more than just like a AI software thing. Like he was like a crater house and they're all super young and they're all just like super AI native. And essentially what it is, is it's this kind of semi-translucent interface that runs in the background on your Mac and listens in.

observes everything that you're doing and hides itself from screen sharing and can recommend things based on the context. And that sounds kind of cool. I haven't installed it. I'm frankly terrified to install it, but I probably still will at some point. But, you know, they could say it's this new kind of assistant, right? Which is like, sure, everyone's doing an assistant. And instead, their whole branding is like, this is to help you cheat on life.

This is help you cheat on everything. And like, it may not always work, but like that framing to me was really interesting because it actually just spoke to how people are quietly actually using this stuff. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you. could objectively look at how people are interacting with AI at scale. Most of it is probably developing. what look like unhealthy parasocial relationships for emotional support or replacing relationships.

And then stuff like this, like cheating, cheating on homework, cheating a job, stuff, whatever. And I'm curious, like when you see something like Cluey and then they raise millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, of course, like right after all this, what does that say? What does that say to you?

Does that change anything about how you approach your other work? There's a side of me, you know, that comes back to being a reporter that is kind of like, you do know that the more sensational headline... is probably going to get more clicks or do better. And I remember being a business insider and just looking at chart beat and looking at the clicks you get on your headlines and it's addictive, right?

I think we all need to hold ourselves to a standard of trying to balance that cynical part of ourselves. with, you know, the more honest, noble, altruistic side of ourselves. And I definitely see them more toward the cynical side of the spectrum. I maybe have a contrarian take here, which is that I kind of think it's pretty clearly a tongue-in-cheek thing. It is certainly going to press liberal buttons, I will tell you that. Certainly going to press the buttons of the people who like to opine.

about this stuff in the New Yorker or the Atlantic or maybe even at The Verge. But there was a specific line of their manifesto that struck with me, which is, the world will call it cheating, but so is the calculator. And this is something Sam Altman said as well. So was Spellcheck. So was Google. What's funny about that is that they're saying it's cheating, but that it isn't going to be cheating for long.

And so to that extent, I think it's kind of an interesting hook. And I would honestly much rather have companies be straight about where they think we are heading. And here's the thing. Here's my challenge to every company. is to know what's coming and know the human tendencies to, you know, want junk food, want things that are short-term gratification instead of long-term, and try and deliver something great that...

outweighs that stuff. I think you could argue that even Apple's aesthetic... where so many little pieces of craft are hidden within it that are very hard to justify at any other public company or any other startup are... A great model for this, which I think is why we all hold them to such a high standard, is that they show that you can still be good and still win. Do you think Apple still shows that? Less and less, I hate to say.

which is, I think, one of the things with having a founder CEO, only the founder CEO with their crazy advantageous share structure can make the long-term decisions in today's stock market. in today's financial environment. And I don't think that's necessarily super debatable. And so I think I saw a stat the other day that founder-led Fortune 500 companies are just dramatically more successful in terms of the returns over the long term, though, right? And so I think that's the...

the challenge that we all face in today's society. Do we give in to the short term? Do we try and bet on the long term? And I do think storytelling is one of the only levers you have to sell the long term. as a company or as a leader. I mean, I am just so seriously concerned that today's politics are all about...

just reacting to what's happening in the moment instead of laying down the foundations for the long term. I mean, who in the world is building bridges or fixing bridges? That's not really a hot topic, is it, right? Then when a bridge finally breaks and there's a big catastrophe, then it becomes a hot topic.

And man, that just sucks if civilization has come all this way to only give in to whatever's on Twitter. People don't have the attention spans. That's the thing. You have an attention span for a catastrophe. or a controversy, you don't usually have an attention span for like, hey, this thing is important, but like not going to directly change your life or fire up your nervous system right now. The society is just not set up for that and increasingly less so it feels like.

That is really what I hope to do with every manifesto I write for a company, which is, you know, a big part of my bread and butter, is to try and paint a very desirable but also specific vision of the future that is bigger than yourself. I think if it's only about you, it just feels like marketing. But if you're a robotics company, what vision do you literally see for our daily lives? I think if there's one thing we've seen with all the technology that we have...

It's not that I am appreciative of my dishwasher and have another hour of leisure time each day. is that it just inevitably gets filled with something else, in part because of our culture and the guilt we all feel for not always being productive. And so that is really the value of visionary storytelling, I think, whether it's in tech or politics. to try and reveal what's down the path and shine the light on.

what can be better and how to get there. Yeah, there's this thing with AI where I feel like everyone is saying it's going to free you up to do more. It's going to give you your time back, right? That's agents, right? It's like I was just at a... a podcast, a live podcast taping where Sam Altman was talking about like, I can't wait to wake up one day and have my AI have triaged my entire day for me.

pre-written emails, like all that stuff. And just me be able to go, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And like, that's my morning. And like, sure, that sounds good on its face. What I feel when I'm using more AI stuff is that I just, it makes me busier. It doesn't actually like give me free time. It just makes me go like, oh, if I now have something listening to all my notes and all my calls and making nice summaries for me, like.

I'm just going to have more meetings and I'm just going to do more because I can. And because I know I've got this fallback, I have this crutch where all my meetings are there. And I just don't know what that does to us. Like, I feel like it.

probably is going to lead to more burnout, not less. I'm curious if you agree or how you think about that. Yeah, I bet Neil, I would have a good answer to this question. Is there any evidence through the different technological revolutions that the leisure time has ever panned out?

No. I was asking ChatGPT about it earlier today, actually. It was coming up a little empty. And I think you're right. And I mean, this isn't a surprise, but I was watching the new Johnny Harris YouTube. And, you know, just... more examples than ever than we need to know that most people's real wages have not really changed all that much in decades and more and more of what we create.

The profits, the earnings are going toward the top 10 to 1%. This is the thing with tech, right? Is that we all think we're doing God's work when it's like, man, you could really have a far greater impact on people's quality of life. not by giving them a meeting note taker, but by trying to affect change so that people have more money in their pockets. That is a far bigger lever for living the good life than trying to automate all these little things, I would say.

I think people, founders that I've talked to in robotics, for example, I think they do whether they really believe it in their soul or whether they really just care about money. I think some of them at least. Ascribe to believe that that is going to be a net positive that when there are humanoids among us, you know, open AI is working on this. Matt is working on this. Everyone's working on this. There's figure, physical intelligence. The list goes on and on.

In the next few years, there's this theory that robots will be walking among us and doing our laundry and cleaning up our houses.

running our errands and this is going to be a future that's just marvelous and frees people up and like yeah like was the car in net aggregate good in the long run sure like did it create a lot of problems in the short term when it first came out when like automobiles first came out yeah and i don't i don't see a lot of thinking about that from the founders i talked to and i'm wondering if if you do or if you see anything

Well, you know what can make the future better a lot of times is a great story. If you believe it, as long as it's not just a story. Oh, well, you don't know where I'm going with this. Okay. If you look at the... Pretty narrow number of reference points in culture and art and entertainment that we in the tech industry have. I mean, I remember back when I was at The Verge, everybody was like, oh, the future of interfaces is going to be just like Minority Report.

And today everybody talks about the movie Her and the type of companion that it can be. I think Sam Altman is literally trying to create Her. Right. And so... I saw Spike Jonze get interviewed last year at Config, and, you know, he wasn't trying to necessarily make a great product or better technology or whatever. He was just trying to tell a great story.

then before you know it, it's literally the Bible for all these tech companies for what they want to build. As a science fiction reader, I think it gives us the opportunity to... play out these scenarios. If you look at Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, someone who deeply cares about the hard science of it all, that's why I think that type of work, especially in film as well, is so important because...

It paints a picture of a future that we can all see. And I think it's just in people's nature to build toward it. I've always believed that designers and maybe even entertainers and creators ahead of them are better at visualizing the future than, you know, a lot of folks who are traditionally in tech like engineers, I would say. And so I think maybe there's more of that we can do.

either within companies or outside of them. I mean, there have been some interesting vision videos over the years. There was this Microsoft one that went viral like a decade or two ago, but then that one was more positive. But then on the flip side, there was the negative one that was like AR reality filled with ads. Yeah. Remember that one from several years ago? That was like a Vimeo thing or something. That was Microsoft? No, no, that one wasn't Microsoft. But guess what happens?

That video gets shared with everybody at Snap, the world's biggest AR company. And now we say, all right, let's not do that. You know what I'm saying? Oh, so you all saw that and said opposite of that. Of course. And when you have something that is as emotional as a story or even as something as small as like an evocative manifesto, people want to do the right thing.

They just need some alternatives. Without alternative goals from leadership, it's just going to be incremental gains and 3% higher ad load all the way down.

I don't know, man. I think there are some very powerful founders right now who actually not want to see the world burn but have views of where all this is headed that are not good for most people. So can we do a... tier ranking list, but only two tiers. We'll categorize all the founders, whether they are Batman or Ra's al Ghul, the head of the League of Shadows. They're both trying to do the right thing, but very different methods, right? You can do that. Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, if you look at a lot of the libertarian VCs and all that. I mean, they are so in the clouds that they don't really think much about the collateral damage in the short term, which I don't know, maybe there's an argument for if this is going to create a far better world in the long term. But yeah, certainly Raz El Ghul took it too far.

Well, Ellis, this has been great. I feel like we could end it on that very strangely dark but interesting note. I appreciate you doing this, man. Good to chat with you. Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Ellis for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge.com or hit me up directly. You can follow us on Tik TOK and Instagram as well. We are at decoder pod.

If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to The Verge, which gets you access to Command Line and a bunch of other great stuff. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stat. Our editors, Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.