Down Round

We are joined once again, for our sins, by the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano. A freewheeling episode on everything from smartphones to AI girlfriends, where we all perform some ruthless self-critique and ultimately come out happier, more self assured and about 10 IQ points dumber.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here. We're putting on our hazmat suits and going back into the world of crypto. Or, at least, one promising part of it. Stripe recently bought Bridge, a startup which built a stablecoin issuance and settlements API. That sounds boring, and perhaps it is. But one day, it could play a serious role in helping pay the person or bot who replaces you. In this ep, we talk about why one of the biggest payments providers in the world is suddenly enamoured by stablecoins.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Halloween this week, and we've got an appropriately spooky episode for you. We're looking back at a random selection of some of our favourite dead and/or zombified companies, platforms and products of the past couple of decades. From instant delivery and Google Reader to Adobe Flash and the Microsoft Zune, prepare to be utterly terrified by these terrifying spirits from tech's past.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's ep is the first and last edition of the Down Round Book club. We're talking about Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier. It documents the story of Blizzard Entertainment, the developer behind WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft which is as of last year a subsidiary of Microsoft. James read it last week and felt it hit on some interesting Down Round areas, namely: The evolution of monetisation Why eSports was never going to work The tension between art and commerce in creative businesses Laundry powder, which we discuss for at least 5 minutes See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're lauching a bonus episode this week to officially welcome in the silly season (commences mid October). We're joined by James Chin Moody, CEO of Sendle, a virtual courier service who is quite likely responsible for some proportion of the treats you receive via mail. We discuss the Australia Post monopoly, the funding environment and the future of ecommerce.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's another Tesla event, folks. At the tail end of last week, Elon Musk got up on stage and showed off the CyberCab, the company's attempt at a robotaxi. He also gave us some updates on Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, and even had some of these evil computer men walking around the event and serving beers. But there was some digital trickery afoot, and not everything was as it seemed. In this episode, we discuss.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here. Fun times create happy people, happy people create lovely times, lovely times create fun people. It's another loose, shot from the hip premium ep, folks. ChatGPT’s voice mode is finally here, while OpenAI itself s going through more weird palace intrigue for us to pick through.  A digression into AI podcasts. Meanwhile, all the VCs and founders are arguing about drugs. So we will too.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In last week's premium episode, we sounded off about the state of VR and smart glasses. In true Down Round fashion, Meta had already announced its concept product, a pair of AR-enabled smart glasses named Orion, by the time the ep aired. We will never admit we were wrong. Instead, we press forward. In this ep, we talk about Orion, Meta's plans, and why it seems like everyone is now locked in on the idea that smart glasses are the smartphone successor.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Intel may have more or less invented modern digital computing, but it hasn't been going so crash hot lately. Following decades of strategic missteps and blunders, it's now experiencing weakening earnings and stock price declines as it attempts to engage in the mother of all turnaround jobs with a little help from the US government. Now, the sharks are circling, with Qualcomm popping up as a potential acquirer. In this ep, we discuss what brought Intel to this point, what might happen next, and some general microchip chatter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here. After 2 months of cringe-posting references to strawberries, OpenAI have released their latest model: o1. And AI heads are losing their minds. Ostensibly, it's intended for the kind of thorny math and reasoning problems that LLMs tend to struggle with. The guts aren't public, but it seems to use chain-of-reasoning prompts to really force itself to 'think'.  So, is it any good? Is this a huge step change on the path to AGI. We investigate.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We didn't cover the Apple iPhone keynote last week because it wasn't particularly exciting and there were virtually no surprises. But, having been given a week to ruminate on it, we have thoughts. In this ep, we talk about why analysts have been obsessed with an AI-driven iPhone supercycle, why Apple has backed itself into a corner by overcharging for RAM, and the slow death of the smartphone.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here. Social media. Is it too dank for the malleable and developing mind? The Australian government seems to think so. Labor has joined the ranks of a number parties and bodies in various jurisdictions in attempting to set a lower age limit for social media.  We consider the following questions: Why? How would it work? Who is to blame for society crumbling?  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For decades, technologists have fantasised about the ultimate prize: a humanoid robot, available to consumers and industry, which can perform a range of humanlike tasks. The recent AI moment has reignited those aspirations, with everyone from Tesla to Apple – and a handful of ambitious startups – either openly or secretly working on humanoid robot projects. In this ep we round up the rumour mill, and talk about what these things could actually be useful for, and why they're suddenly everywhere. (In spirit, if not actuality.)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here. The tech world has been ablaze over the past week or so, both ironically and unironically, about the concept of Founder Mode. Inspired by a short essay by Paul Graham, 'founder mode' vaguely posits that there's a natural point in a startup's existence where it gives up being led by a single founder with a ton of agency, and instead becomes led by professional managers via delegation. Graham, and others, suggest that you don't need to do that, and can keep running even very big tech businesses as a lethal operator calling all the shots. In this freewheeling ep, we discuss.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brazil has slapped a ban on X, as the culmination of a dispute between the platform and the country’s judiciary over censorship. It’s weird, because Elon Musk’s platform has complied with government requests from other countries, like Turkey and India. So what’s the deal? In this ep, we talk about Musk's free speech crusade, the Brazilification of the web, and the general vibes around the X business right now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested over the weekend in France, with prosecutors  accusing him of violations discovered as part of an investigation into child exploitation material, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions on the platform. It’s more than plausible that stuff like that is happening on Telegram. But there’s certainly something unusual going on here too. Telegram has evolved from a messaging app into a full-blown social media platform – and one that is relatively uncensored and pretty wild. And despite the discourse over the past few days being focused on end-to-end encryption, that’s not really what people use Telegram for. In this ep, we dive into the weird world of Telegram, and engage in some healthy, baseless speculation about Durov's arrest.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Apple's profit from "Services" is set to surpass profits from iPhones within a couple of years, which is pretty crazy, really. Of the ~$80-90b Apple make a year in "Services", around 25% of that comes from Google handing over north of $20 billion per year to be the default search engine in Safari. For years, Google has been freaked out by the prospect of Apple building their own search engine, as outlined in Raph's piece here. A judge has now ruled this is ILLEGAL. What will come of this? What's the deal with seach? Links Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case – The Verge Raph's piece on Apple Maps and its role. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nike: The brand of brands. When it comes to brands, they're top dog. When it comes to returning money to shareholders, less so. At least this year. As Nike have pursued the quest to become as close as an apparel company can be to a tech business, their share price has tanked – this year by over 30%. A former executive's LinkedIn post went about as viral as a LinkedIn post can go, lamenting Nike's turn to e-commerce and performance marketing thanks to their current CEO, the former head of ServiceNow, and advice from McKinsey. Very Down Round areas. Links: Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction - Massimo Giunco See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's quarterly earnings season, and some of our favourite tech companies are looking a bit shaky. Not because they're not making money – they are – but because they're spending it on new data centres and AI research.  In this episode, we take stock of the current earnings reports, and touch on a few interesting tidbits like Amazon's softness in e-commerce and Intel's moment of reckoning. Also, when we recorded this, markets were teetering on the edge of meltdown. So get ready for some adjacent chat there.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meta this week released the latest update to their LLM, Llama 3.1. It is ostensibly a "frontier model" on par with its OpenAI, Anthropic and Google rivals. The difference i: anyone can download the model and the weights and run it, and build on it wherever and however they want, without paying Meta a cent. Why?  Glowed up Mark Zuckerberg wrote an article to explain his reasoning; the boys dissect: what the hell is going on? Links Open Source AI Is the Path Forward – Mark Zuckerberg See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.