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Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

A lot of skepticism here, which is understandable given the somewhat unbelievable scope of what they are promising.

I'm a very active user of Magic+, so I'll give my perspective. (and of course I've been working with them from the beginning at YC, so you're also free to discard my opinion as biased)

For me, Magic+ is basically the impossibly good personal assistant, kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, or Emily in The Devil Wears Prada. Unlike a conventional assistant, it's available 24/7, always happy to take on more work, and capable of accomplishing just about anything.

Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy).

For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time. I've used it to plan events for YC founders, answer questions that are hard to Google (they will find the right experts and ask them), and provide unique and memorable gifts to friends, family, and business partners. I'm used to paying a high price for quality professional services such as accountants or lawyers, so $100/hr for the best possible assistant feels completely reasonable and rational.

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>but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service

Call me skeptical, but where exactly is the tech involved? Currently this is just text messages going to people + people doing the things.

One possibility would be through AI (a bit of a weasel word most of the time, honestly), but Google and Apple are both miles ahead on NLP, so by the time you can parse "get me a peperonni pizza", Google will have been doing it for free for the past year , and include a 10% off coupon for the pizza!

Considering your value is based almost entirely on getting things done through an assistant that understands English, it looks like costs are basically how much you pay the assistant themselves... Maybe you can get away with paying them $20/hour (and equipping them with good tools to do the common stuff fast).

The Tesla strategy works (well, in theory) because so much of the cost of the good is based in things that are continuously getting cheaper (batteries).

But here... What's driving down the cost of the assistants? Seems like the solutions are much more about HR-style "innovations" , business partnerships, and the like than anything coming out of MIT.

I sincerely hope the strategy isn't "find the cheapest human labor possible"

It's an interesting idea, but I agree, I don't see how it's a tech company in any way.

This is weird to me. It may not be pushing the bar forward on AI or NLP, but it uses one of the most commonly used interpersonal communications technologies today to put a human experience in front of a seemingly boundless personal assistant.

Look, it may not be Tesla, but there are a couple of unicorns that seem tech savvy now, that weren't so much for the first little while. AirBnB comes to mind - their analytics now are probably amazing, but they started as a website with a database. Doesn't make them any less of a technology company.

Leveraging technology to break down barriers (immediate, constant, on-demand availability and scalability of a personal assistant) is a technology solution to a problem.

It's still not really a tech company, though. Maybe you could call it a "remote company" or "virtual company" due to how they operate, but in my opinion, you can't really call yourself a technology company if you haven't programmed or engineered some sort of software or hardware.

AI is the obvious future for this yeah. I think the tech right now probably just centralizes around building really good customer profiles and excellent tools for assistants so that any assistant can pick up work for any customer.

You don't have to automate the parsing of queries to produce leverage here. Every time they answer a query successfully, I would imagine they add that to an internal repository of information. So the technology play would be less on the "figure out what they want" front and more on the "deliver exactly what they want" front.

Need an on demand helicopter in NYC? Great, Magic knows just who to call for that because they already did it for Justin Kan. Need to rent the Exploratorium? Great, they can do that too.

For more common requests that fit neatly into other on-demand services offering, they could ostensibly partner directly with those folks and integrate with them. That way, Magic could have their own master dashboard to purchase services with minimal effort.

that isn't technology though, you just might use technology to keep track of it (wiki/whatever). Maybe that's what paul meant by "technology" but that isn't a Tesla play by any stretch of the imagination.

Shaving 5 or 10s off average handle time with smarter tooling is absolutely technology. In fact, it's probably the most widely used technology on the planet.

As someone who works in that space, helping people do similar things with greater accurately and quickness delivers a surprising amount of value... when you're talking about deploying that across 250+ desks.

The target isn't to throw technology at 99% of all requests, but to deploy it on the smaller portion of the process it's suited to. The only thing faster than 100% machine is 99% machine + 1% human.

An internal logistics dashboard and automation pipeline is absolutely technology, and it's absolutely a competitive advantage.

People are fairly predictable. Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. Google pizza is a good example, but i doubt google will do pizza, dry cleaning, and travel booking all in one shot. (but they might). It seems like these folks can find a local vendor for service X, have a button on some internal software to send it out, then just leverage that for all customers in that city. presumably the oddball requests get tracked similarly. "i want an elephant" might take a while the first time, but the software should remember contacts and whatnot to make it easy if they ever get the same request.

> Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly.

I'm not the OP, but...

I guess, but again, where's the software? You can entirely reasonably solve that problem with a well-indexed medium-sized binder and a Rolodex.

It might not be necessary but it does help scale cheaply. You could have people pick up the phone and order food for you when requested, but if they can route that through an API 99% of the time it costs a whole lot less time & money.

There are a lot of simple questions that are hard to find answers for if you don't know where to look, and those answers are often unique or only marginally repeatable. Take travel assistance, for example. If all you need to do are basic pre-travel concierge tasks, that's one thing, but what happens when your client tells you something like "I'm going to be driving from Denver to Salina, Kansas today with two young children in the car. I need several energy-releasing entertainment options along the route, as well as a family friendly hotel room in KC that's near the stadium and offers onsite guest laundry (machines, not full service)." None of this is hard, but it requires multiple web searches, probably a few phone calls, and hopefully some local expertise. Once an adequate database is compiled, software can help quickly retrieve viable options and minimize human intervention. Human curation will still be absolutely mandatory and expected in a service with this cost.

Note: I just drove from San Jose to Raleigh with two young kids, including a day from Salina, KS to St Louis. We found the most amazing place to stop, and I highly recommend it to anyone driving E-W or W-E on I70. The Moon Marble Company (https://www.moonmarble.com/) is not just a handmade marble shop. It has the best collection of retro toys I've seen anywhere in my life. We spent 3 hours browsing!

That's a bit naive, as with Facebook M this is tapping into the huge market of AI-like personal assistants.

We may not yet have the technology to create a Jarvis, but we can make a person a lot more efficient at their job with some clever tools.

For example, in the website there's a request that mentions getting a private helicopter booked to LAX in 3 hours. A personal assistant would have to look up private aviation companies that fly out of a base nearby the GPS location of the user, guesstimate the closest one and most likely call to book as the online bookings might not be automatically processed and it's a short notice.

With today's technology, you can parse that request so that the software automatically picks up "Helicopter booking", from: GPS to: LAX. If it's right, the operator accepts it and it creates a checklist: 1) Call "Bob's helicopter co." 2) Enter exact time of booking: [ ] 3) Click to book car for booking_time - travel_time at [current_location|office|home] 4) send nice reply to customer.

Once you've done this a couple times, you write new software that automates the call step by filling in a form online, or sending an email to the receptionist, or both.

More importantly, since you log every action the operators take, you take decisions on what to automate based on data. Are our employees spending 24% of their time on google maps? let's add a database of businesses so they can simply choose from a list.

I'm not sure a binder and rolodex scales very well. I'm willing to be convinced.

Have you ever worked with a really great Grand Budapest Hotel style concierge? They really can do pretty interesting things, if you tip well and are willing to pay. But, you gotta go to that hotel and talk to that one guy. The software scales that person.

> One possibility would be through AI...

Excuse me if this is a bit naive, but I've always had the impression the whole point of Magic is to build the AI side. Maybe not communicating back to the user... perhaps that part's always done by a human, but a human with machine-aided decision making. I would love to see the internal interface that Magic's personal assistants are using today.

Doing every task by hand with people probably doesn't scale. Maybe for $100/hr it does, but that could just be their way of targeting tasks for executives because they have a higher percentage of profit. I expect they're using the data from requests today as training to recognize narrow patterns to be automated tomorrow.

Edit: I found this in their FAQ.

> Q: Do you use AI to fulfill my requests?

> Magic+ is fulfilled through a combination of top-tier executive assistants and concierges, paired with intelligent software. Our unique combination of humans and software is what enables us to consistently deliver an unparalleled level of service.

We are highly focused on software that automates and/or makes parts of Magic and Magic+ more efficient. Most of the founding team are engineers, including myself. At this time we can't say much about our specific technical approach, other than that it is a very difficult problem, we have a novel approach, and we are making progress.

There's a decent amount of innovation that can make the assistants more efficient, so you can improve profitability without driving down wages. But there's also something else:

Since a high percentage of services will likely end in a transaction, there's a huge opportunity to become the Amazon-scale retailer of services. I find I don't even google products I want to buy anymore, I just immediately search Amazon. Amazon is my retail UI. If Magic can do the same thing in this space—become the service UI—I'd imagine it won't be long before more revenue comes form partnerships than directly from consumers.

Personally, Amazon's UI has a long way to go and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.

If you know what you're looking for, it's fine, but as soon as you try to comparison shop it falls apart fairly quickly.

I've gotten into the habit of looking for experts on other sites that do hands-on comparisons for the thing I want to buy (some recent examples: rain jackets and fitness meters). Amazon is honestly a terrible UI for this sort of thing.

I know that they're trying, but at this point they've lost my trust that what they show in search results is relevant unless I'm being extremely precise.

That's exactly the reason I'd use a service like Magic. Finding stuff on Amazon takes dozens of clicks.

> Personally, Amazon's UI has a long way to go and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.

Haven't people been dismissing them over their UI since the beginning of time? And yet it works and is successful?

The sad thing is - UIs generally don't matter if there's anything else making your product special. You can make your users as miserable as you want, and they will still use your service. Companies know it and prioritize effort accordingly.

Agreed. See Craigslist.

Craigslist's UI is great! High contrast text. All links are obvious (no iOS style "is that colored text or a button"). It loads quickly. I can find the information I need without hunting around a bunch of ads masquerading as useful content.

As an added bonus, I don't have to relearn how to use it every 6 months when the design team gets bored and decides to redo the whole thing for no good reason.

There are a few additions I'd like to see (PadMapper style apartment search being the big one), but all things considered I like Craigslist a lot more than most websites.

Compare it to Amazon where half of the items are miscategorized, sort by price doesn't actually sort by price, and sort by average customer rating is way too literal. In what world do I want to see something with a single 5 star review over the one with 191 reviews, 94% of which are 5 star, and another 4% are 4 star? But that's tucked away on page 7 of the results after all the items with nothing but a single good review. Amazon's got issues to work out.

So, if the market shows that UI is what causes Amazon dearly, and that the market prefers a magic like messaging interface, how long will it take for Amazon to offer a magic like service at a price point that is affordable to everyone. Compare that with the time and effort required for Magic to become a retailer with Amazon's efficiency. I'll bet on the former.

You can't scale a $100/hour service to the level of Amazon, there simply aren't that many people with that kind of money.

With that kind of attitude, you would obviously not be able to scale anything that would meet even the most minimal resistance.

Whats up with the negative karma here? People don't like the truth? Every day people get business off the ground in the face of serious negative criticism. People telling them they can't do something. Telling them that it isn't going to work. There is no way it would scale etc. Someone who decides that something isn't possible is just one less competitor for me!

I'm pretty sure Amazon would find a way to reduce the price.

You're looking at AI as if it would be their primary product.

They don't need to compete with Google or Apple on the front of AI as a polished product. Not now, anyways. All they need to do is make something that works. They can get away with building something that wouldn't even be beta-worthy for big tech companies to release. To Magic, AI could simply mean more efficient infrastructure, keeping human interaction in place of UX.

The more efficient they get, the more they can lower the price. The more they can lower the price, the more users they'll have. The more users, the more revenue, the more cash to spend on improvement.

AI doesn't have to roll out of MIT looking like Jarvis just to be useful.

The issue with incorporating tech is that it speeds up requests and breaks this billing model. Changing the billing model in the future is of course possible, but in the near-term it strongly disincentives the team from trying to automate requests.

One possibility is being able to classify requests much more accurately, so that they get sent directly to a specialised "magician" that can complete the task very efficiently.

"Get me a pepperoni pizza," is a phrase anyone with some basic nlp chops should be able to understand using freely available code. Here's an example that could get you started but on a different domain. http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnslu.html

Google, Facebook, many other companies (perhaps not Apple) publish many of their research findings and a lot of innovation is coming straight from academia.

To answer your question more directly, the hardware, software and data required to run an effective machine learning platform is getting cheaper and more powerful every year, which should drive down price if they can replace human tasks with AI solutions.

I sincerely hope the strategy isn't "find the cheapest human labor possible"

As evil as it seems, that's probably a sane strategy - as actual automation eats the job market, the number of unemployed, or those seeking multiple/alternate employment, will rise. These will more and more comprise displaced white collar workers. This will make the employment market a buyers market (moreso than it is already) and will result in decreased labour costs.

So - call me cynical, but if that's their plan, it's robust - if potentially evil - at least it'll be providing employment.

I don't think they would want to bring down the price.

Right now Magic is targeting price insensitive users, which provides an ENORMOUS advantage because they can always pick the most expensive options when executing a request. They basically remove one of the variables regular people have to optimize for, and it makes it much easier to make users happy.

If they're dropping the price to where price-sensitive users get involved, they're going to have to make far more complicated decisions about what flowers at what price point make someone happy, or what seat on what airline makes sense.

I agree. Consider an example on their website:

>User: Can you get me an Ipad pro tonight? >M+: Sure. I'm assuming you want the best model - 128GB with LTE in Space gray? >U: Yeah

This process of comparing available options against prices, data plans, and features would have taken at least half an hour for me. Right now, they can just disregard the price completely and offer whatever is the easiest to do/get/access.

Not just that, the guy wants to buy TWO!

This is a purchase normal people would spend hours agonizing over. Should I get the 64GB model or the 128GB? Should I get the latest one, or one generation older? Should I get the slightly more expensive gray/white one, or stick with black?

But that's okay. It's not meant for everyone, and that's perfectly fine with me

Ok, so why is this so unbelievably interesting to everyone here? I mean, seriously, its been ten hours and this thing is still at the top of the page, and that is very long time for a HN story. For something that doesn't seem particularly innovative nor useful for a typical person, it has a huge amount of support here. Which is especially confusing because this indicates that somehow there is a massive number of price insensitive people people on this site that somehow do consider this useful, a fact that doesn't seem born out at all by the usual activity. It seems like this is a massive attempt to make an enormously overpriced service seem reasonable to people that can afford it but normally wouldn't even consider it.

As another commenter pointed out, HN has a lot of young people making $150k+ and this is just a way for them to "optimize" their time and be more "productive".

In reality, this is just a way for them to pretend that they have the same luxuries as the actual rich who came from money.

Services like this will last only as long as the bubble in the valley.

It sounds like it's targeted at people earning hell of a lot more than 150k.

$100/hr is $200K/yr or $350K to get you $200K after taxes.

Plus inefficiency or loss of fidelity to intent from the delegation, which adds a cost.

I'd think $450K - $600K income before this makes sense.

// Also note the contact and meeting management class of tasks require always on engagement. At that point, you're better off with your own company-supplied EA who is in the flow and can carry your personal prioritization prefs so you don't think about any part of that process.

You don't have to use them all the time, though... there's plenty of things I couldn't afford to do all the time but sometimes it's worth paying extra for, a service like this could be one of them. If something urgent comes up that Magic+ could fix in 15minutes and that I don't have 15 minutes to use and it can't wait, a $25 fee could easily be justifiable, even if my salary was only $50k. The same way as most people wouldn't have a chauffer, but that doesn't mean taxis aren't sometimes worth paying for.

But how do you know how long a request will take? Maybe I think a request will take 15 minutes, but in reality it takes 3 hours. I make less than $100k/year. There's a big difference to me between $25 and $300. What if I start the request, decide it's taking too long, and ask that it's cancelled? Can it even be cancelled? And then am I charged for the time used and get nothing in return?

To use your taxi analogy, I can get in a cab and ask "About how much will it be to get from A to B?" and probably get a good estimate (or not even have to ask with Uber and the like). Does that exist for this service? Maybe public transportation would be better for me depending on the answer.

It sounds to me like, at least from their perspective, they wouldn't want a poorer customer like me.

Hey Paul, this value proposition resonates with me (especially the comparison with lawyers and accountants) and I'm the target customer... But I enthusiastically tried Magic when they first launched and it was full of fail (big promise from Magic, no delivery on a keg of beer from the East Bay). I certainly would have paid a lot for it. Skeptical that it'd be any different this time around? [Edit: typo]

Hi, this is Mike, one of the founders of Magic. Really sorry to hear about your experience here. Did you get a refund? If not, please text in to 83489 and mention this post, and we'll be sure to get it to you.

I can absolutely admit that when Magic first launched, we were over capacity and a certain percentage of orders went awry. I hate that this happened, but we really did not predict that the website would go viral so quickly. In fact, today, we still have such high demand for the service that there is a long waitlist for the regular service, and our $100/hr service is getting a lot of signups very quickly as well.

This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to make sure that people who had a very high bar for service quality would be able to use the service right away and be guaranteed to have the absolute highest level of service, no matter what.

I completely understand that given your past experience with Magic, you might not want to try Magic+. However, I can confidently say that if you try it, you will find that it feels very different from the Magic that you tried. Your keg will be there.

Mike,

As you know I had a very bad experience with Magic as well.

I worked for you for free for a week and on boarded 63 new customers for you. You guys arbitrarily deleted my account, and abruptly shut off my autopay donations to numerous charities we had set up together.

Then you went silent and wouldn't return any of the ten messages I sent to you asking for access to my personal records and information regarding my numerous charity donations.

How can I encourage others to use your service if I was shown such an unprofessional and disrespectful experience?

Thanks for posting that.

Thank you

For the curious, looks like more info here: http://www.davecraige.com/magic/

Yes, thank you. That is the whole story. You can read it if you want.

I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf

I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My account was deleted. I contacted all 4 of the founders. Not one would respond. They went dark.

I would hope that no one else gets treated as poorly as I was and experience this type of disrespect.

> I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

That might be where you went wrong.

At the time, Magic was one of the hottest startups in the Valley. I was willing to hustle hard to get my foot in the door.

But I agree with you, I need to be more judicial with my time in the future.

Sounds like you got hustled. But it's a lesson learned, so at least there's some value there.

yea Mark, you are right. I did learn an expensive lesson.

One of my main frustrations though was that this was a very highly regarded YC company. Should consumers expect this disrespectful behavior to be accepted from other YC companies as well?

Should YC founders be expected to be able to simply pick and choose which customers they want to arbitrarily delete?

I can completely understand if this was a fly by night operation. But YC is basically the Harvard of startups and this was completely out of left field for me.

I'd be interested in seeing the founders respond to this.

We have stories like this every now and then with various companies, and here's something that makes me wonder: assuming that both parties are neither evil nor stupid (which I think is fair assumption in most cases), how exactly such situations happen? There's a lesson for every founder and manager hiding here.

I was screwed over by some startup founders that tricked me into working for free under the guise of "demonstrating mastery of Rails" and "proving my culture fit," but I wouldn't call those guys evil, just jerks.

So how does a situation like that happen? You justify it to yourself to cut corners in order to succeed, and because you're a job creator in America, you're entitled to respect in the end.

I would definitely like to hear the response to this before I signed up for their service!

UPDATE: I reached out to the founders Mike and David on January 7th about this thread.

I received no response yet, but my twitter account was promptly blocked by David. http://f.cl.ly/items/1x3Y1h2n0i1Q1F3e1H1f/Screen%20Shot%2020...

I will be reaching back out to Mike in a week and will update you guys. Thx.

UPDATE 2 : I have reached out to Mike three times now. Still haven't heard anything back. Possible stonewalling.

Wouldn't it be more price effective for you to hire a personal assistant; through one of your companies?

I actually have a personal assistant, but for many tasks, Magic+ is simply better (and completely responsive 24/7, which I would never demand of an employee).

Can you give some specific examples of things that Magic+ does better than a local personal assistant, besides being available around the clock?

Well, for one, it is ubiquitous, you can ask for task in NYC or SF without paying fly tickets or waiting for it to land.

They are exceptionally good at getting things done. A regular person could spend hours or days researching the best way to get something done, Magic already knows. There are real scale effects here.

I never heard of this before but it sounds it scales better to big and small jobs, and is more efficient use of available manpower.

Say you have a huge job, or many small jobs, that one personal assistant couldn't do at once alone. Or if you don't have enough jobs at all times of the day to keep your personal assistant busy. etc..

Its kindof analogous to renting time on a server farm vs owning a pc.

Or analogous to renting time from from a fleet of at-will drivers vs owning a car. ;)

>>Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy)

What tech?

Tesla's strategy is working because they are using the high prices of their luxury cars to pay for serious technological innovation and build infrastructure for economies of scale on the expensive components (batteries).

Without knowing what type of technology (beyond SMS) powers Magic/Magic+, and why it can't be easily replicated by competitors, it's difficult to buy into your optimism.

How would you compare it to concierge services of Platinum+ cards? Especially when it comes to dining and travel accomodation? Do they have also access to reserved slots in concerts or restaurants?

I think that knowing them personally makes a big difference on your decision to use their service, regardless of if you are an investor or not.

People tend to give their business to people they trust (or to people recommended by people they trust).

Just like I think I'd be wary to contract a faceless lawyer to handle my next divorce, I think I'd be wary to contract a faceless personal assistant to handle any important aspects of my personal or business life unless I'm really desperate.

So if my rationale were applicable to many others, Magic+ main challenge would be solving how they can overcome the trust roadblock.

Can you give some examples where Magic+ was useful?

Do you have an idea for facebook competitor, but better? Text it them.

Sounds like this is the epitome of "you get what you pay for."

> For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time.

Also, because you can afford it.

If you only need assistance a few hours a month, I can understand the need for such a service, but why not just hire a virtual assistant that speaks perfect English, and works 40 hours a week for around $2000 a month (or less!). Multiple companies, including Zylun.com offer access to such talent.

> Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people

$100/hr for competent assistants 24/7/anywhere is a steal for any kind of organization like investment banks, enterprise sales, consulting firms, that send their people into the field to do high pressure, deadline-driven work.

Anything work related will be subject to confidentiality and is therefore utterly useless for all the examples you give.

Another potential revenue generator for Magic, partner with large organisations so they can offer the service to their employees. If the global corporation where I work can trust files of thousands of employees to a third party cloud sync service, I'm sure this can be done.

I really think this is entering into the land of pure fantasy.

that's exactly what most business ventures are.

last minute accommodations, car rentals, plane tickets, restaurant reservations, location scouting, ballroom rentals, all these things can be outsourced.

companies are already paying amex, travel agencies, and junior associates for this kind of thing. not to mention actual assistants that make 75k+

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