Devolver

SignalWire is a client of mine. They shipped POM in April.

We noticed that Microsoft released the POML (Prompt Orchestration Markup Language) yesterday.

SignalWire's version complies to markdown or XML.

The very close parallels may be pure coincidence, but it may not be.

If a clone job...not a good look to rip off OSS software without even a link to the inspiration.

If a coincidence: the co-founders at SignalWire have a lot of foresight (they hacked a tool use framework within two weeks of GPT-4, before OpenAI introduced tool calling).

Their AI toolset is worth a deeper look.

Surprised not to see Bento on the consideration list. Maybe not (yet) well known, but gives Customer.io a run for its money and pricing is great.

A "ChatGPT app designed by Apple" scenario would be the safest, simplest, and lowest-risk partnership for both companies.

It would also be the least imaginative.

The wilder, more interesting scenarios:

- "SiriGPT" - GPT in Apple data centers, running on Apple Silicon - Why not both?

In all three, Apple partners with OpenAI to iterate Apple Silicon towards performance parity with NVIDIA...but with much better performance-per-watt.

Totally agree with you.

The essay is less about the regulation and more about why Google needs HubSpot more than HubSpot needs Google.

As generative AI matures, HubSpot’s “all-in-one” software for marketing, sales, and customer support has an opportunity to evolve into AI-powered flywheel that accelerates (and eventually automates) every aspect of a business’s relationship with its prospects and customers.

Given the mixed history of large acquisitions and the growing field of AI models that aren’t Google’s, HubSpot seems more likely to actualize its biggest opportunities if it does not accept tempting acquisition offers from Google (or anyone else).

Unrelated..except for the one small fact they they are all large scale social systems built on foundations of technologies and philosophies from the 18-20th centuries.

And yes, crypto hype IS 100% in full effect and there is a plurality of nonsense in and amidst all the hype.

And yet, from the railroads to the automobile to the stock exchange to the internet, groundbreaking technologies seem to develop via a massive wave of speculation that brings with it the full battery of scammers, hypers, and snake oil peddlers but also the funding and expertise that actually builds new infrastructure...

Then all the get-rich-quickers lose their shirts, some of the scammers go to jail, and what's left behind is a completely new way of doing things.

Nope! While your skepticism is totally reasonable, this is not a lead up to anything basic like a social network on the blockchain or any ICO/Coin pitch at all.

That blockchain wind up was only a foreshadowing of another piece of content..an essay that attempts to actually define what the blockchain is (in historical context) AND how it can be applied over the next generation to solve huge problems in energy, food production, transportation, municipal government, civic engineering, education, etc.

Chose to use this grammatically broken slang very consciously.

I’d be lying if I said that reaching an audience and seeing my post generate (mostly) positive, thoughtful discussion didn’t feel good.

But that feeling (for me, at least) is closer to gratitude and hopefulness than it is to ego gratification.

The claps and notifications of retweets are, however, quite addicting, in the truest sense of the word.

I find myself checking twitter more than is reasonable to see where it’s going.

And while there is some upside there (connecting with and engaging in conversation with like-minded peeps), the frequency of my checking is highly disproportionate to that Value.

Ugh.

I agree. There is a contradiction here. And I am nearly as uncomfortable with centralized publishing platforms as I am with mass scale behavior design for profit.

And yet.

I originally published on my own site and it didn’t get much traction.

But when I edited it substantially and published as a direct response to Nir’s post, it reached 30,000 people, 6000 of whom finished the whole thing...in less than 24 hours.

Since the goal for me is spreading the message and fueling the converstion, I gotta go where distribution follows.

Me too. But you know what they say about the pen and the sword?

Maybe we need to update the saying: “the keyboard and a content database can be mightier than the predator drone”

?

If my writing makes it less likely that some would-be Facebook competitor can use mass-scale psychological manipulation to get an edge, I can live with that.

Snap went from an incredible growth rate to a terrible growth rate because of a few simple (and sadly, quite common) strategic mistakes:

1. Underestimating the competition.

Evan Spiegel clearly believed that Zuckerberg would never figure out how to beat him. He seems to have concluded that he was smarter, more creative, and more agile than Zuck. He profoundly miscalculated Zuck's relentlessness and is now losing badly as a result.

Takeaway Lesson: Hubris kills.

2. Attacking a market where you have few/zero major advantages.

Evan seems to have concluded that the only scaleable way to monetize a social app is with digital advertising.

The problem?

With <10% of Facebook/Instagram's user base, a tiny fraction of Facebook's ad targeting data, and a set of ad products that were 4-5 years behind Facebooks, why would any advertiser ever dedicate more than their 1-5% "experimental" budget to Snapchat?

Answer: They wouldn't, and likely never will.

Takeaway lesson: Don't take a juggernaut head on. You will get crushed every time.

3. Misunderstanding your own advantages.

Snapchat originally took off because it offered an underserved segment of the market (young people) something Facebook and Instagram did not: a relatively safe, low-judgment place to express themselves.

By focusing on the advertising market (and inevitably turning to privacy-destroying data aggregators like Experian to buy ad targeting data on its users), Evan threw that away.

Takeaway lesson: Never lose sight of the needs and desires that led your users to choose you.

More here: https://exponents.co/snap-facebook-key-competitive-strategy/

Extremely well said. Yours is a more in depth and eloquent version of what I wrote in the first section of this essay:

"This is an essay about go-to-market strategy and market development. It’s also an essay about company culture.

Specifically, it’s about how the market focus and culture that helped a company reach significant heights can rapidly transform from critical assets into potential liabilities…and what to do about it.

While Twilio is the focus of this essay, this essay is not just about Twilio. It could be about about ANY potentially disruptive company with brilliant founders, venture-scale ambitions, great products, a top-notch team, and traction to die for."

Trying to understand why this is happening and deal with it

Good question!

I don't mean to say that Snap won't cross the chasm, just that it hasn't yet.

If it had, its position against Facebook would have been strong enough that Facebook would not have been able to clone its core feature into Instagram and cause Snap's growth to stall.

Twitter is a more interesting question.

Twitter's product and position are unique, yes, but IMHO, the company pursued a market (advertising) where they had no clear advantages over Google or Facebook.

The result of that mistake has been stagnation. Barely evolving product, flat user growth, declining revenue growth, and no clear path to long term profitability.

In other words, Twitter not only did not cross the chasm...they fell into it and got stuck.

Hey Steve! Love what you're doing with the bank APIs!

Not being well-versed in such matters, I'd appreciate any insight you can offer into why the Nav hijacking happens and what I might do about it.

I created the article using a WP plugin (Aesop Story Builder) which integrates with the WP theme I'm using (Journalist from UpThemes).

I did not insist anything about "doing traditional enterprise sales."

I said that when a company successfully crosses the chasm, it has established a leading positition in a mainstream market.

What that mainstream market is or the channels the company uses to win it is entirely dependent on its products and the landscape of products it either must displace (in an exiting market) or pre-empt (in a new market).

For example, Facebook crossed the chasm after it opened up beyond .edu and pushed MySpace into complete irrelevance.

Salesforce, when it closed a huge deal with Merrill Lynch (I think), made "the cloud" safe for everyone.

And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm, despite a $25b IPO.

And arguably, neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.

I had no idea it did that! Thanks for letting me know. Will look into.

I'm the author, and am not even the least bit bitter. I love Twilio. I wrote this because I want them to succeed.

A successful IPO has no necessary correlation to having crossed the chasm.

You've successfully crossed the chasm when you are the clear market leader in the a "mainstream market" segment.

In Twilio's case, that would be Being at the center of communications infrastructure for Fortune 500-1000 companies.

They've made some inroads (ING, etc). But most larger enterprises are still using Cisco/MSFT/Avaya and other on-premise tech for call centers, conferencing, video chat, collaboration, etc.

Also: Twilio is not profitable and it just lost one of its highest volume customers (Uber) who had been using it for "point solution" use cases, mostly around automated SMS and voice.

So if you disagree, that's fine. I'd find it much more productive to know what you disagree with and why than the ad hominem accusation that I'm a "bitter former employee" which is a. Not useful and b. False.

This post tries to look beyond the schadenfreude and extract unexpected insights from the epic fiasco that was Fyre Festival.

There are a fair number of companies (and governments) who would pay a LOT of money ($$ hundreds of millions/year) for an accurate picture the real time state of the world every day.

Disruption (REAL disruption) happens when janky, poorly-featured products come along and do one key, valuable thing much better than their established, mature, full-featured competitors.

The janky upstart uses that small edge (and its much lower costs, price points, or other efficincies) to get a foothold, then steadily builds out a complete solution that is more compelling than the status quo...which then finds itself disrupted.

With that context in mind, here's the opening line of Bloomberg's Terminal Info page:

"The Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on every market, unparalleled news and research, powerful analytics, communications tools and world-class execution capabilities — in one fully integrated solution."

I'd like to draw your attention to that first two parts: "real time data on every market, unparalleled news.."

To gather and process that data and unparalleled news, Bloomberg employs an army of human news gatherers. The company is private, so I don't know their financials, but I'd be willing to wager that its news gathering organization is one of the top contributors to Bloomberg's COGS.

Meanwhile, how many trades (and how much $$$) in equities, currencies, and commodities happen every day based on information about something that just happened in the world?

How much of an advantage does having that information first confer to the person who gets it?

Is it not conceivable that, had Twitter had focused 100% on turning the one billion-plus everyday humans with smartphones into news gatherers and leveraged a mix of software and professional analysis to turn it into data and info that traders would love to pay for...that it could have beaten Bloomberg at the "real time data and unparalleled news" game with a MUCH lower cost structure?

And then...

Absolutely, you're right. The argument is just a hypothesis and unfortunately, the known laws of physics don't allow us the time travel capabilities necessary to actually test it.

However, what you're saying fits in quite nicely with the thesis of the argument: If Twitter had seen itself as a platform for capturing and analyzing "the real-time state of the world" instead of a "social network" or a "media company," its opaque product would likely have been less of an issue.

Well said.

+1000%. Dick did what he was brought in to do. The way it panned out is another strong datapoint for the argument that consumer internet companies should be led by product/visionary types while detail/implementation types run the operation of the business.

Like Zuckerberg/Sandberg or Jobs/Cook or...

Again, not sure you read the article closely.

I think I made it clear that it's a case of "Yes, and..." not "either/or"

The bias is not the only source of the problem. As you point out correctly, the marketing staff falls short, too.

The real problem I define is the never-ending feedback loop between Silicon Valley's bias against marketing and the relatively low quality of marketers in the talent pool that results.

Hard to say whether the chicken or the egg came first, but it doesn't really matter.

As for the framework vs the "laundry list of stuff" I don't like...

This is just the opening salvo. IMHO, great marketing and great products often (not always) arise from a deep understanding of and insight into big unsolved problems, unmet needs, and unfulfilled desires.

This post is my articulation of a very big unsolved problem and all of its consequences.

More on the solution soon.

Also, as Steve Blank points out (perhaps a bit too harshly), Tim Cook is a brilliant operator and optimizer, but very far from a visionary or brilliant product/marketing mind. So far, he's taken the foundation that Jobs built and made it sing.

https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...

But so far, the products Apple has launched under his leadership haven't actually been all that well conceived.

V1 of the Apple Watch was a confusing mess that didn't have a real, concrete purpose or place in anyone's lives.

With v2, they stepped back and focused a bit (on the active/athletic market), but it's hardly a breakthrough device yet.

Meanwhile, the iPad is (so far) falling far short of its potential to revolutionize computing.

All of this could change. But for me, despite the stock price, the jury on the Era of Cook is still out.

Also a great point. In my mind, Steve Jobs was a genius marketer AND a genius product person.

His keynote speeches "One More Thing..." were the pure essence of great showmanship.

An amazingly designed and engineered product, marketed brilliantly is the platonic idea. To be "insanely great," you usually need both.