Threat of Meta XR Devices is to Google not Apple

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Now to the weekly programming.

1/ Go Big or Go Home — Altman’s Strategy To Dominate Tech & What Can You Take Away From It.

If you have to pin down top 3 big things to bet on for the next 100 years — AI, Nuclear — will be in that list. Sam has invested in both of them. He took a nuclear company public via SPAC and obviously working on AI with Open AI. From analyzing his career overtime its pretty clear that he takes big swings. He started with launching a company by dropping out, then working at YC and then launching Open AI while investing in long term ideas.

One thing to take away from Sam’s career is he was betting on things that are worth betting on and if they work out they will be big wins both for the world and himself. Most people often miss that your career trajectory lacks variance, the ability to change things up.

There is a saying “luck favors the bold”. Luck favors the bold because they keep doing different stuff and eventually somethings work out.

But in most careers there is no variance, which means even if luck wants to hit you, you have to be doing things that attract luck. You have to increase your surface area of luck. If you take more bets you increase your surface area for luck, if you meet more interesting people you increase your surface area of luck. If you create more side projects you increase your surface area of luck.

Big take away - evaluate more ways to increase your surface area of luck.

2/ Threat of Meta XR Devices Is to Google Not Apple

Apple is the dominant religion in all the developed tech world while Android dominates the non-developed world. The choice of Android (Google) vs IOS (Apple) is an important decision in your daily life that is driven by technology.

The narrative around Meta’s hardware and metaverse ambitions have always portrayed as Meta is taking its revenge against Apple. But the truth is Meta’s pursual of hardware in XR (AR & VR) is a threat to Google more than it is to Apple. Apple is the luxury brand of tech, every one aspires to use Apple just like they aspire to use Louis Vuitton. This made Apple impervious to rapid technology shifts, in any rapid technology move while every player has to scramble and cater and adopt as soon as possible Apple can take a breather and do what they think is right slowly at their own pace. Apple’s religous customers are ignorant of what features Android ecosystem has and don’t care about the pace in which that ecosystem delivers new features. But as long as Apple delivers them and doesn’t lag for 5 years the users are happy and so are the shareholders. The religion is inescapable & omnipresent. So really Meta’s goal to takeover next generation computing devices is going hurt Google. Google even though is a pioneer in XR with Noanitc (company created by ex-google maps team and spun out of Google) and launched Google Glass (way ahead of its time), has been slow on the front on VR and AR hardware or atleast behind Meta.

Takeaway - Meta is not competing with Apple, it is competing with Google.

3/ Did Alexa Devices Found a Saviour?

It looks like Amazon finally notices that Alexa & devices around need re0thinking and they hired Panos Panoy from Microsoft to do so. Panos led the Surface category inside Microsoft and I think he led it well. Surface uniquely filled a gap that existed inspite of OEMs like HP, Lenovo existed. Surface created hybrid touch devices that were not created before and showed the market how Windows can be used to innovate on Hardware. Mac users still don’t know that in the world of Windows laptops bend, they can be touched and can act both as a laptop or a tablet. I attribute that to Panos and I hope this will change Alexa for the better.