Beeper's fight to break Apple's stronghold on messaging with Eric Migicovsky | E1892

0:00It's very hard for a startup to say I'm going to choose not to sell or make my app on an iPhone because I don't agree with them. It's almost like we're, as app makers or creators, we have to build for where the people are. And when more than 50 % of the population is on a particular platform, it's hard to give that up. But at the same time, if we don't speak up, if we don't share our experience, and if we don't explain that creating new products is harder because of the fact that one company controls this ecosystem, it won't change. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Curotech. Are you one of those companies that knows you need to be using AI, but you're not even sure where to start?

0:41Well, then you need Curotech. They are AI experts and they're offering Twist listeners an AI strategy roadmap tailored to your business for$5 ,000. That's 50 % off the normal cost just for telling them we sent you. Check out curotech.com slash twist and get$5 ,000 off. Northwest Registered Agent will form your company fast, give you the documents you'd need to open a business bank account, and more. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist to get a 60 % discount on your next LLC. And ketone IQ is a clean energy boost without sugar or caffeine. get 30 off your first subscription order of ketone iq at hvmn.com slash twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups as you know apple is the most valuable company in the world by their market cap at least over three trillion dollars and it controls access to the world's most valuable consumers via their smartphones and the app store going to war with them even if you're a startup especially it's pretty crazy but the regulatory landscape as you know has shifted over the last couple of years getting a little hawkish on big tech and people are starting to monitor these big companies for when they do things that are anti-competitive uncool and recently both startups and larger companies have started to fight back against apple and they're doing it in public a bunch of examples of this you may have seen the smartwatch company, Massimo.

2:16They just had a huge legal win against Apple, which was forced to disable its blood oxygen functionality in the Series 9 watches due to this patent dispute. This watch right here, you can't buy it anymore. And Epic's CEO, Tim Sweeney, took on both Apple and Google over their app store fees. Spotify issued a formal complaint in the EU against Apple's app store rules a couple years ago, and that complaint turned into a full-on EU investigation. And according to Bloomberg, the EU is expected to ban any abusive app store rules against Apple's music streaming rivals. So we've had this reoccurring theme.

2:51Even 37 Signals, friends of the pod here, Jason Fried and David Handmeyer Hansen, DHH, they've been publicly calling out Apple's app store practices for years as they struggle to get their apps approved. But another example, which I find the most fascinating, if I'm being honest, is Beeper. this is a tiny startup that lets android users do something really cool which is have blue text bubbles when they're uh you know in iMessage which you know can break all of your iMessage groups when somebody from android comes in and uh apple didn't like that so they shut down beeper's app about three days after it launched in december we asked the ceo to come on the show and talk about it and he was nice enough to say yes so welcome back to the program uh eric midzikowski did i get your last thing correct you got it oh thank goodness now last time you were on was uh i guess we talked about pebble your previous startup yeah yeah back in the day back in the day so you've been running this company uh beeper maybe you can just explain to everybody what your mission is with beeper what you're trying to accomplish how what the app is supposed to do for consumers.

3:57And then we'll get into the back and forth dispute with Apple. So what you mentioned earlier is kind of a subset of our overall mission. We're building a universal chat app, one app that lets you chat with anyone on any chat network. The idea came to me actually, you know, while I was at Pebble, I, you know, would look down at my phone and see a folder full of chat apps that all kind of did the exact same thing, except with a slightly different subset of my contact list on each app. I'm a Canadian. I live in the States. I've lived in Europe. I spent a lot of time in Asia during the Pebble days.

4:34And I've just kind of collected friends on basically every single chat app out there. And I was looking down at my phone and seeing all these different apps. And I just figured there's got to be a better way. and we kind of had this technology if you remember like 12 15 years ago there were a bunch of universal chat apps like at em or game or trillion miibo so we had that we had it was in our hands and then it slipped through our fingers during the transition to mobile that's when for people who don't remember that was like yahoo messenger aol instant messenger there were all these desktop im apps icq icq right which was bought by aol and i think aol got dragged kicking and screaming and yahoo everybody but eventually they all decided hey interoperability would be a good thing for everybody that's when xmpp kind of came around and google talk supported it facebook messenger supported it uh iChat actually supported xmpp back in the day and that kind of beautiful period didn't translate into mobile.

5:42That's when the big tech companies threw the guards up, through the walls up, and created these siloed chat apps, kind of linking the chat client to the chat network. So for example, only the WhatsApp app can access WhatsApp messages. Only the iMessage app can send and receive iMessages. So we started working on this in 2019. We built it on top of an open chat protocol an open source chat protocol called matrix and over the last three uh three plus years we've been building um beeper uh we support 15 different chat networks including whatsapp imessage telegram instagram like you name it we've got it and we have a desktop app an android app and an ios app and so it's a very simple value proposition for users one app to unite them all you authenticate all of your different apps in beeper and now i don't have to tab between i message signal telegram whatsapp i mean it is it's arduous and painful and annoying to have to do this and uh yeah if people are power users why shouldn't they have the ability to do this what what would be the argument against this that anybody could make credibly.

7:00I think of this, I think of that friction that you're describing as a tax that we pay on top of all communication. By virtue of having so many different channels which we can use to communicate, there's this overhead, there's this extra process that we're always running in our brain to match up a given person with the network, the last network that we use to chat with them on. So that overhead, while it definitely doesn't feel like it's arduous, but it's not like the end of the world, we obviously get through it. But that, you know, three to 5 % extra effort that we have to do to basically do all forms of communication is just this extra friction.

7:40And our goal with Beeper is to eliminate that friction and make it easy for you to chat and communicate with anyone regardless of which network they're on. And there are now some standards, there have been standards for a while but so people understand this you know when you do email yeah there's an email standard and you don't have to if you're an outlook user i'm a superhuman user or you use gmail whatever whatever you use for your email you shouldn't have to create a new email address to talk to another person in another email network that would be insane and deranged and that's what they're asking us to do with these messaging apps and so the one that people are most frustrated with is iMessage.

8:28iMessage lock-in I believe is a major part of why people keep their iPhones. Every time I come off my iPhone and I test and I've done it maybe three or four times since the iPhone came out yeah you know I probably own maybe a half dozen Android phones and the thing that always gets me in trouble with my friend groups in the group chats is oh iMessage they explain to the audience what Apple is doing when they green message versus blue message you in a group thread and why they do that in your mind. So if you have an iPhone, there's actually only one application that you're allowed to use for texting.

9:06It's called messages. And it allows you to send SMS text messages, which are the green bubbles, and iMessage, which are blue bubbles. SMS is a telephony protocol that's used by the carriers. It is an open standard. But Apple has a rule which says that only they can build an SMS app for Android. There's no other alternative SMS apps available on the App Store. You can only use theirs. They've bundled a service called iMessage inside this application. and they've used SMS as a means of bootstrapping their own chat protocol, chat network. So they did this, I think it was starting in 2011. And over time, people became, especially in the US, conditioned to use SMS.

9:56SMS was the backstop for all kind of communication. I think all the Europeans who are listening to this will think like, oh, what are those crazy Americans doing with SMS? Like we have WhatsApp, we have Telegram, you could switch to that. But for some historical reason here in the States, SMS became the de facto standard for kind of text communication for chat. By building iMessage on top of SMS, Apple has made it very easy for people to transition over to using iMessage as their group chat protocol or their DM protocol between two people. That has made it hard for people to leave iPhone for other platforms.

10:39when you put your sim card into an android phone like you decide to switch from iphone to android there's no way to import your chat history over on your android phone and all of the conversations that you've been having with people over the iMessage protocol are not available you know on an android there's no uh apple doesn't make an iMessage app for android you asked another question which is like what are the implications of not having say an android app for iMessage. So you as an iPhone user, by default, when you use the Messages app, if you're chatting with someone who has an Android, your phone will send an unencrypted green bubble SMS message.

11:23It's missing a lot of features that you might have become used to with iMessage. When you chat with someone who has an Android phone, you're sending out an unencrypted message. Usually the photos and video are much lower resolution. You don't get features like being able to unsend a message or edit a message. You can't see when they're typing or whether they've read your message or not. And when you add them to a group chat, if that group chat was a blue bubble iMessage group chat, it downgrades the moment that you introduce or add the first Android person to that group chat. Right. And that's where you get ostracized.

12:03And that's where this like actually results in people saying you got to use an iPhone and the peer pressure starts. Yeah. Okay, you've seen Sunday Night Demo a ton of AI tools, and we've learned that these tools are going to help you do so much more with less. That means more revenue and less overhead. Here's the hard part for a lot of companies. How do you actually integrate your AI into your daily workflow? Well, you got to check out Curatech. Curatech specializes in strategic consulting and product engineering for AI tools. Curatech starts with strategic consulting, and they bring those ideas to life with their expert engineering teams.

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13:22So go check out curatech.com slash twist and get$5 ,000 off. That's C-U-R-O-T-E-C.com slash twist. C-U-R-O-T-E-C.com slash twist. So that's kind of the state of the world before we launched an app called Beeper Mini. So Beeper has two apps. We have one main app that we call Beeper Cloud that supports 15 different chat networks in one app. And that's the one that has a desktop app and iOS app and Android app. And it's still up and running. You know, we have over 100 ,000 people that are using Beeper Cloud. But at the beginning of December, we decided to launch a new app called Beeper Mini. Beeper Mini was an Android app dedicated to being a great iMessage client for Android.

14:10We did two things that had never been done before. We reverse engineered the iMessage protocol down to the over-the-wire kind of protocol and implemented that in the Android app, which meant that we had full end-to-end encryption between the Beeper Mini app and the iMessage servers. And the second thing that we did that no one had done before was we figured out a way of associating your Android phone number with iMessage so that if an iPhone friend typed in your phone number or tapped on your name in the contact list, your number would actually come up as a blue bubble. we launched the app on december 5th and within three days had over 100 000 users it was a paid app so you know two dollars a month pretty uh significant three days yeah yeah millions of dollars in revenue show up immediately so you know hey for 25 bucks a year no problem with a couple million a couple hundred thousand people a couple million dollars in revenue immediately you've unlocked product market fit.

15:12People want to have this product. And why shouldn't they have it? And then what happens after that? So a lot of people ask, like, what were we expecting would happen? And here's what I expected. I believe that Beeper Mini actually increases the quality of experience for iPhone users. So you have an iPhone, you send a message to an Android user. Before Beeper Mini, it was unencrypted, it was a green bubble, it was a pretty crappy experience. Beeper Mini comes onto the scene, that Android friend of yours can now download the app, upgrade your existing chat to a blue bubble, now it's encrypted, you could add them to group chats, no problem, no problems anymore.

15:55That was the state of the world that we thought would be kind of great for both iPhone users as well as Android users. Again, you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, like, who would argue with that uh only somebody who was trying to protect their monopoly yeah but even so i feel like apple stands for privacy and security like that's what they put on their ads and our app actually increased the level of security and privacy between iphone and android chats and the logic says it should exist right and uh exactly there's no way of getting around that logic and apple's got a long history of claiming that they would support open standards and then not ultimately supporting them i think you're referencing the facetime announcement so yeah i mean yeah that was back in the steve jobs era right maybe you could explain to the stage and he said that facetime was going to be an open standard and uh well we're 13 years later and it's it's not yeah you know this is the tragedy i think of apple post steve jobs is that they they really could be bringing a lot more people into their ecosystem net net i believe if they made an i message app for android windows desktops etc and and they did that for itunes if you remember when itunes came out you could have an ipod on a windows machine as but one example of they are capable of doing this and they have done it in places where they feel they don't have a choice right if they felt they didn't have a choice because they're up against spotify or whoever it is, they they did it.

17:30With iMessage, they don't have an app for Android users or Windows users, or, you know, people who are not iPhone users, which is bizarre. They should have that. Yeah. So Apple took action to block Beeper Mini users from being able to send and receive iMessages. And they even came out with a public statement a couple days after explaining or trying to use the argument that they it was something around protecting users security and privacy by blocking you know third-party yeah services from sending i messages which to me felt like double speak like 1984 double speak where they were actually making the experience worse for iphone customers by blocking people many and people don't know this but they are the majority of smartphone users here in the united states now they they've got essentially they're part of a duopoly and um yeah this is i think the perfect place for the government to get involved and maybe say you know what you should give users a bit more choice and apple has backed down at times they originally wouldn't let anybody use a third-party media player like vlc and open source one on phones and on their ipads they wouldn't allow people to use other browsers than safari and they currently won't let you use things like beeper or they won't let you use other third-party app stores and they put up all these roadblocks but i think the developer community now is standing up to them so maybe you could speak to why you chose i don't want to say to pick this fight but to not back down why you chose to do this and kind of hold your ground and where is this you know um stalemate at with apple and are you going to keep being able to produce this and this cat and mouse kind of uh back and forth to to make the technology work while they're trying to stop it so our our vision for the future is it kind of stems from my love of science fiction so i love reading sci-fi and you know i'm actually just rereading the um uh the three-body problem series oh yeah it's a great series excellent you know epic space adventure and it said in the future you know you know what doesn't happen in the future people never have to discuss which protocol they're using for communication they just use the technology to communicate it and so when i look at kind of the state of the world here in 2024 it doesn't feel like so many elements of today feel futuristic like the the ai kind of the llm you know revolution feels like we are getting a taste of what's what's to come.

20:04But when you look at communication, and the, you know, the absolute, like mess that's on our hands in terms of the number of networks and the number of apps and how every, you know, every month, there seems to be more fragmentation, it doesn't feel like the future. And so our number one goal, our mission is to help people migrate to an open source chat protocol that doesn't force you to kind of align yourself with one of these big tech companies. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, with Beeper, we didn't build yet another closed source chat protocol, we decided to adopt an open source chat protocol.

20:45So over time, we really do think that people will be able to move to something more like email for chat and maintain these connections, these legacy connections to existing chat networks. While, you know, we go through this kind of messy stage of having to migrate to an open standard. Because in the future, I really do think that if we do our jobs at Beeper, we'll be able to live in a world where it looks a lot more like email, you'll have multiple clients, you'll have multiple vendors, and you'll be able to carry and take your friendship and your kind of chat list, your connections to other platforms, regardless of, you know, which place you started at.

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22:09Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today that's northwest registered agent.com slash twist today listen regulators are noticing this fight um you have investors for your company i take it um your venture back or did you fund it yourself this on your venture back so i guess you know we're on this week in startups how do you manage this with your investors and say hey we want to fight this fight against apple this is a big uh deal to take on um they could file a lawsuit against you they haven't taken legal action against you which i think is i think strategic on their part they don't want to be seen as attacking a startup but they have been blocking you but then you know i read the justice department met with you i know you can't comment on that but the fade the federal trade commission has now commented on this the antitrust committee in um the senate yeah the senate amy uh klobuchar i know is involved in that and mike lee um and so that's bipartisan they are pushing the justice department to take action here they wrote a letter and apple is you know uh maybe seems a little vulnerable at this point to more regulation so maybe you could speak to where you think this is all going to head you think there is an outcome here where apple is forced uh to provide interoperability or to use some standards?

23:31So in some ways, I feel like this all started a little bit with Cambridge Analytica in 2016. You know, we were riding high on mobile apps. And there, you know, were so many big tech companies that could basically do no wrong. You know, we believed that they had our best interests in mind, that they were continuing to build new products that would like, you know, dazzle us each year. And the combined data that we had stored in these systems were only being used to create a better experience for us. I think Cambridge Analytica was one of the first moments where we realized that that wasn't totally true.

24:09The data that we had, you know, uploaded and produced and created for all these big tech companies could also be used for really, you know, negative things that we did not intend. And that started, that kind of kicked off some efforts in government as well as kind of in the popular culture to think that, you know, maybe we need to start thinking about our own rights and, you know, freedoms with our data. And we're still kind of on the forefront of that wave. It hasn't crested, It hasn't broke yet. But there's little symbol signs that this is actually starting to take a toehold. So in Europe, the European Commission recently passed a kind of GDPR-esque piece of legislation called the Digital Markets Act that defines your rights and freedoms on the internet, including a provision that mandates that the largest tech companies open interoperable interfaces for their networks.

25:13this was groundbreaking it was the first time that really anyone had come out and said we need open interfaces for these siloed chat networks the law got passed just over a year ago and it's actually coming into force in europe on april 1st of this year so expect to see some big changes just today or yesterday i saw that facebook was allowing european customers to unlink their their um their meta accounts so their messenger whatsapp and instagram accounts which previously were kind of involved together in one in one uh kind of rat's nest they've now been forced to let people press a button and untangle these um these accounts i think that you know the u.s hasn't passed any legislation to kind of affirm this this right that we have to managing our own data but we have been you know trying to make the case that this is something that not only is good for us as as users of this technology but also it sets a level playing field for startups to be able to build new technology new products new new interfaces on top of you know your own personal data like your contact list and your message history yeah and for people who aren't following it the justice department according to the new york times and other folks is in the late stages of uh and i'm quoting from the new york times here of an investigation into apple and could file sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company's strategies to protect the dominance of the iphone as soon as the first half of this year said three people had knowledge of the matter and i think i message is you know uh here it's one of those components yeah specifically investigators have examined how the apple watch works better with the iphone than other brands as well as how apple locks competitors out of its i message service they have also scrutinized apple's payment system for the iphone which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services people said yeah just last week uh you mentioned you know at the top there um uh that apple took a feature out of the apple watch just because they lost a lawsuit rather than paying you know a royalty fee or something and i think there's just so many of these little pieces of the puzzle that are falling into place yeah that at some point you know there's going to be a straw that breaks the camel's back.

27:31Technology can change. Nothing is constant in this world. And if you look at the history of kind of computing over the last 30, 40 years, you know, there are waves and there are waves that crash. And I really do hope that, you know, as an Apple user myself, I'm sitting in front of my MacBook, you know, a happy MacBook customer. I really do hope that they, you know, see the light on this issue and allow their own users to be able to have more power over how their you know technology works yeah and so what is it like when the regulators come to you and and want you to be involved in all this it's got to be a bit of a distraction yeah it's pretty different so i went through kind of my first startup which was pebble you mentioned yeah uh just over 10 years ago we it was a crazy ride right we couple was amazing it was a kickstarter project if i remember correctly um and uh first watch on kickstarter it went viral and we ended up selling you know over two million units over the span of three years and um i i posted a kind of uh 10-year retrospective blog post uh a couple years ago about what that experience was like and especially towards the end as we lost sight of kind of the long term like i i wrote i wrote a much longer blog post about this and so if you're interested please check it out well no no tell us what did you learn yeah i'm actually it's a great topic yeah you know i was i was thinking about like towards the end before we sold the company to um to fitbit like what what could we have improved what could we have changed and the primary thing that kind of caused us to lose uh lose control of our destiny is we over uh we over manufactured we We had one year where we miscalculated and we built more inventory than we could sell.

29:16So that was the kind of primary cause that caused us to kind of enter that kind of, I kind of likened it to trying to pull the airplane up as we were heading down. We were trying our best to pull it up and to pull out of that tailspin. But that's only the, that was only the like factor that caused us to get into that. There was an underlying kind of broader problem, which was that I didn't present a strong vision for the future of where I wanted to take the company and the technology. Like we had a really strong vision coming out of our first Kickstarter campaign. We, you know, introduced this new piece of technology that hadn't existed, but that lasted for, you know, two or three years.

29:57That initial vision kind of powered us through, but I didn't present that next generation that, you know, where is this going in the long term? And I stand by that. I think that that was, you know, one of the biggest problems that that I had at Pebble. I didn't kind of positively speak about what the future could be. But now with, you know, with hindsight, there definitely were elements that made it harder for us to compete. And I'm very careful because I think that, you know, at the end of the day, we were in control of most of our own destiny. But the fact is, is we were building a product, 50 % of our users were iPhone users.

30:38And as we thought of every new feature that we wanted to add to Pebble, we had to consider what it would be like to integrate that feature into an iPhone platform. Like we were building an app that was distributed through the App Store. We were competing with a watch, the Apple Watch that was deeply integrated into the operating system. through API endpoints that we couldn't access ourselves, like we didn't have the ability to send and receive text messages, for example, on iPhones. And that turns out to be the killer app of watches after maybe, you know, you know, being able to track your steps does feel like when I see most people use their watch is to look at a message without taking their phone out.

31:24Yeah. And so again, like, I think with you asked, like, what is it like to kind of have interactions with these regulators during the pebble days it didn't even cross my mind and i looking back there probably could have been some opportunities where we could have said uh similar to what tile is doing now um saying that look hey this is this is like 50 more than 50 percent of the phones in the states are our iphones they uh the company that makes them apple not only makes iphones but they also make the store that you know the um the software is distributed on they make a lot of the services that are bundled into the phone and they uh yeah they have this kind of stranglehold on how other people build products that work with their um with their phone um i was a major i was a major tile users for a for a long time and then you know just because air tags are integrated like you're saying i had kind of no choice but to go with air tags because they're built into the operating system and nobody's using or i shouldn't say nobody's in the tile network but the tile network has been deprecated because now you have everybody using iphones and then tiles i think get penalized as like a tracker in a way air tags don't yeah yeah and actually i remember a quote from another yc partner and he said that most startups don't live long enough to be able to have an impact in Washington, to be able to actually take action that could benefit them or positively impact the startup ecosystem.

32:59Because a startup can live, breathe, and die in the span of months. In Washington, things take much, much longer. I know some people that have been working on their particular fight for decades now. And that means that there's this impedance mismatch between companies in Silicon Valley and startups in general, and the regulators and the lawmakers that are trying to, you know, honestly do something that improves the world. I've had a much larger chance this go-around with Beeper to be able to learn about how the DC kind of ecosystem works. And I think what I've realized is that startups can play a role, but it's not going to produce results in the same timeframe that, you know, your, your next sprint or your next product releases on your runway, let's be candid, like your runway might be 18 months.

33:54If you're a startup, if you're lucky, sometimes 24 or 36, you know, if you're really lucky, you got a ton of runway, but these things take five or 10 years to settle if you're lucky. And so you're right. There's two different timelines going on here. And, um, these, these companies can bully you into submission. Yeah. The place where startups can have the most impact is making decisions about what products they build and the platform and ecosystem that they work with. And it's hard to look at the app store, the iOS app store and the market that comes with it and say, I don't agree with their kind of decisions or I don't agree with Apple, the way that Apple does business with developers.

34:31And it's very hard for a startup to say, I'm gonna choose not to sell or make my app on an iPhone because I don't agree with them. It's almost like we're as app makers or creators, we have to build for where the people are. And when more than 50 % of the population is on a particular platform, it's hard to give that up. But at the same time, like if we don't speak up, if we don't share our experience, and if we don't explain that, you know, creating new products is harder because of the fact that one company controls this ecosystem, it won't change. When you're in the startup business, you should always be looking for a performance edge.

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35:43I have been on it for a couple of months now, and my energy level has gone up, up, up, and my focus as well. I love taking these shots. I take it in the morning before I work out. I take it when I'm skiing. And man, it makes you feel like a superhero. So here's the call to action. Get 30 % off your first subscription to Ketone IQ at hvmn.com slash twist. That's hvmn.com slash twist for 30 % off. or you can easily find ketone-iq at your local sprouts market comes in little bottles and you just take this little shot boom you're off to the races do the companies try to pay you off in your experience did they try to like buy your silence the apples of the world the googles of the world when they you know kind of feel you're in this or do you hear stories about that or they're just like silent and they just let you die look at what happened last week right apple lost a lawsuit or lost a ruling in the epic v apple uh kind of saga and they were forced to allow um developers to link out of their apps to their website in order to process payment and they could have abided by the letter of the agreement uh that the judge forced them to instead they did the polar opposite they said that if you want to link off to your other platform to the web to process payment sure you could do that you know by all means but we're going to throw up a disgusting pop-up that warns people of you know losing their firstborn child to uh to the website that they're about to click through and that website's forced to track their users um and send apple a bill for 27 percent of whatever payment they make within seven days on on the web platform yeah the 27 percent is their fee for the running the app store and so this is where the ftc and like regulation even if you're libertarian or you believe in free markets when somebody has a monopoly or they're part of a duopoly in this case uh which by the way i do up please essentially just two monopolies it's not like it's a competitive landscape they're just when one monopoly when one player pays 18 billion dollars to the other player uh like google does to apple like there's no conflict there yeah yeah Yeah, there's a lot of commingling happening.

37:55Absolutely. But I think your question was like, you know, do they, does Apple, you know, or these other players, do they try to take individual action? I don't think so. I think like that action with the 27 % pop-up, like they don't give a s***. Like they'll do what they want to do. And that those kind of actions are the outcome of that. And I think the cherry on top is that that happened during the same week that Apple created or launched their new computing platform, their first new computing platform in over a decade. And they're trying to position this as a platform that developers are supposed to go out and either translate their iPhone mobile apps to or create new experiences, create new things that didn't exist.

38:47and they did it on the exact same week yeah that they published that you know new pop-up and you notice some developers are maybe well and developers are like you know what i think netflix spotify a number of folks like yeah you know what we're in no rush to develop and help you with your next platform sorry um we're just not going to participate uh which i thought was pretty telling i don't know if they'll eventually have to crack when it hits critical mass if it ever does i don't know you think that's you think this ar glasses are gonna as a technologist ever gonna click with people or is it so the problem is i'm an incorrigible hardware person at heart yeah i can't i have to i just love i love hardware i love all right so you ordered it for sure i haven't ordered one i haven't convinced myself to do that oh but i do i do believe that you know we should be experimenting and trying new you know platforms i but do you think spatial computing do the people want to wear something on their faces like this or i is it a form factor issue or is it like i'm trying to want the technology i had the original oculus i had every generation i've tried i've tried literally everything and of course at some point i'm gonna try it and i probably will be blown away and and love love that experience i haven't found something that clicks into say you know that's been a habit like the last i think really mind-bogglingly cool new piece of technology was the airpods like it it yeah was a uh it was a moment like i haven't left the house you know really without air without airpods in the last seven years they're super compelling yeah i think i just had the um i just had the founder of the rabbit um which you know took over cs i don't know if you you must have seen it right so you're a hardware guy actually a yc founder yeah he's a former yc founder yeah he's really cool and um he was speculating as like what he wanted to do next he was kind of riffing and you know just started vibing on the pod and i was like you know what do you think of airpods he's like yeah you know i think i could put the rabbit in airpods and i was like whoa okay now that's mind-blowing imagine the case of airpods if he if he made rabbit airpods uh or you know in buds and he was like i can make it right now by the way and i was like well why don't you make it well i have to make it like over the ear um headphones and i was like wow can you imagine if you had over-the-ear headphones and inside of it was like a raspberry pi or whatever circuit board and an lte connection and so when you said hey play this music or order me an uber or get my doordash or uber eats it just did it um and you didn't have to have anything with you that'd be like a pretty dope device that we would all pay for and i'm like that must exist in the world it doesn't really exist now somewhere in shenzhen or akihabara in japan maybe somebody's built built it but man that could be a mind-blowing vision if you think about it and i don't know we actually uh we had that vision at pebble back in the day um during the uh the waning years in 2016 we uh created a product called the pebble core which was a headless a screenless android phone that was roughly the same size as uh the airpods case and it was designed to be a kind of wireless tether for your pebble so we couldn't fit uh an lte modem into the pebble at the time but we could fit it into this kind of like basically the exact same size as an airpods case ah so that was like your that little core was a little thing is putting your pocket that is your lte connection basically yeah yeah and so i i'm a firm believer that technology is cyclical you know we can you know have an idea like just like beeper you know we had universal messaging um at one point and it kind of fell out of fashion or or technologically wasn't available but good ideas come back and they do uh i think that'll happen on um on wearables and uh some people for now they can just use pebble consolidate all of their messages with the exception of i message and stay tuned because you know uh this is david and goliath um but it's happened before that the goliats have gotten hit with the rock in just the right place and then they have to back down and they got to open stuff up and so you know on behalf of the startup community we appreciate you fighting this fight and i think everybody should speak up now everybody in the community developers and startups when big tech is acting anti-competitively just stand up to them and just say like this is bs and you know if you're if they try to crush your company then be vocal about hey they're trying to crush my company and let's just amplify those discussions there's no reason if you buy a piece of hardware like an iphone that you shouldn't have the right to pick your browser pick your goddamn media player and if you want to use a different app store or if you want to buy books you know ebooks from amazon instead of apple books like you paid i mean i this last phone was like 1400 it's bonkers i bought this phone eric the controller was like did you buy another laptop and i was like no like so we just got an 1800 charge from apple and i was like 1800 and like i was like oh that's my iphone 15 was 1800 with tax and everything i mean i listen i bought the one with the highest memory and the highest storage but that was bonkers when you think about it if we're paying all this amount and then they want us to put four thousand dollar goggles on our head man come on give us a break here apple it's just how much do you need to win that's the thing i don't to understand you know you squeeze so tightly the galaxy is going to slip through your fingers here and i think apple if you're going to if you want developers to participate with you then be reasonable with them you know i don't think apple's being particularly reasonable here i think it's like a giant mistake for them to to do this um we'll continue to success eric and keep fighting the good fight how do you make money uh with your startup now pretty simple so we sell so we have a uh beeper you know worked with 14 other chat networks um pretty simple model we sell a subscription uh we think that that creates you know a very clean relationship between the vendor and the customer uh what's interesting is that every other chat network except for telegram telegram actually has a very kind of nebulous business model like in the case of iMessage you know they sell phones by locking you into the uh platform whatsapp no one's really sure how they make money like there's you know maybe the enterprise stuff yeah the business to business stuff is what i heard yeah i think at the end of the day like we want to make it very clear that your data is your own there's end-to-end encryption and you're in full control and that's why we've just decided to make it simple and we charge a subscription for using beeper eric thanks for coming on the program good luck with everything if can people help you in any way in this fight maybe just tweet some support.