Apple Should Buy People

Happy 4th of July week. Normal issue today. I have been spending the entire day trying to rebuild a low fidelity version of the product I work on in order to build AI Prototypes in the future.

I then learned that I really didn’t have to do this, but I did get to spend two days in Cursor which is always great experience.

250 to 60 to 4

Because it is a holiday week, I am just writing a normal issue. I will also be skipping the $250m issue. This is because you normally don’t deploy $250m in capital every 3 weeks. So back on schedule next week with $4m.

Today’s Issue

Two big topics I have on my brain today that I want to write about so it’ll be a short but efficient issue.

Apple is losing its touch

So I saw this article today and it made me a little sad. Apple is not making magic anymore, they are borrowing it. Instead of building in-house technology for AI, they will use third-party AI services to power Siri. Beyond this, all of Apple’s recent product release have been “meh”. The last IOS, the recent IPhone, IPad, etc. Nothing has shocked the world, and Apple’s only AI push Apple Intelligence fell flat on it’s back.

People don’t give a shit if their products have AI them or not, they just want life to become easier and tasks to get done quicker. The best part about AI is that you don’t need to scream it in people’s faces, you just need to integrate it into technology and that technology instantly becomes magical. You can do this at all levels.

For example, when I want to call my Dad and say “Hey Siri, call Andrew”, it should say internally “Hmm well Andrew Lombardozzi he has called 30x in the past 3 months, this is probably who he means”. Instead, it will call Andrew, a random contact from a 10th grade social studies project that I haven’t talked to since 2016. Do you see where we lose some of the magic and where AI can easily pick up the slack?

Again, you don’t have to tell people this is AI. You have the biggest customer base in the world, and they just want a delightful user experience every time they are on their phone. There are certain cases where you will have to tell users, “hey by the way your phone can do xyz”, but that adoption comes with time.

So this get’s to the clickbait title. Apple should buy people. Not the AI researchers that Meta just paid hundreds of millions of dollars for, but product managers, developers, and designers that are obsessed with making users lives using Apple products delightful. These aren’t you run in the mill technology employees, these people are artists. They see technology as a delivery method for joy and happiness to the end user. They live and die by the detail and obsess over the smallest little things, like Steve Jobs obsessed over font options. Steve Jobs was one of the most impactful artists in our lifetime. It’s time for Apple to find those people again.

Robinhood is on a tear

I think every 3 months now Robinhood is doing some insane press conference announcing another generational financial product. At the end of March they had a press conference at the San Francisco Mint called the Lost City of Gold.

Here they announced a wealth management product, a banking product, and an artificial intelligence product. Three mind blowing features fit into one event. Then, only 3 months later, they announced To Catch A Token.

On a set that looked like a mix between the next season of White Lotus and the new James Bond movie, Vlad Tenev stood up in a pinstriped white linen suit (this may be a purchase I make when I am in Europe next) and delivered some of the most important financial product updates in the last few years.

The main announcement was Stock Tokens. The short of it is, using blockchain technology, Robinhood can tokenize shares of stocks that have a 1=1 value of the underlying asset. This means that US and European customers can have access to cheaper trading, 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

My thoughts here? This is just the plane taxing to the runway and hasn’t even taken off yet. Tokenizing assets will revolutionize the financial system and you may not even know it. Like AI, the beautiful thing about blockchain technology is that is can be hidden behind-the-scenes. The next step here, is tokenizing private companies, like OpenAi, and allowing users to buy and sell those just like individual stocks. Best part is they have already starting doing this work slowly but surely.

Oh also, they have another press conference in September.