Tech Deciphered

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Can you handle the truth? What is the future of news? Are we at a Spotify moment? Do we even care about the truth?Navigation:Intro (01:34)Mainstream vs Niche News (02:09)Are we Close to the Spotify/Netflix moment? (29:30)State or Government Ownership and Influence of Media (46:06)Polarization & The Truth (58:36)Year of Election (1:05:10)Conclusion (1:09:21) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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NunoIn today's episode of Tech Deciphered, we will be discussing the truth. Can you handle the truth and the whole truth? More specifically, we're going to talk about the future of news, where we are today. Obviously, a lot of discussion around fake news, polarization of news.NunoWe will go into a conversation on whether we are close to the Spotify moment of the news space, and whether how we're caring for the truth is still actually true. Do we still care for truth or do we just care about our own opinions and to reinforce them over time?BertrandThat's a big question. I think to start about this topic, we probably want to start from this big debate that has gone pretty big over the past 10 years, but maybe even more the past five years. It's maybe the mainstream versus niche news and all the dramatic changes that have happened in a way, thanks to internet.NunoThere's the mainstream versus niche, there's the mainstream versus speciality. Maybe let's start with mainstream. What is mainstream news? Is it just news or do we get news through mechanisms that sometimes are not news anymore?BertrandIs it still mainstream?NunoClearly, there has been a decrease in viewership of the newscasts, the news programs that we used to watch in our own countries, in the US. Now people can watch whatever they want whenever they want it. In some ways, there's still maybe some flagship national news shows that people listen to. Obviously, there's dedicated news channels like CNN, Fox News, of course, as well.NunoIs it really where we consume our mainstream news? My view is obviously with the decreasing of viewership across the top channels, one would say maybe less so, but clearly still there is mainstream news. Fox News represents a specific side of the spectrum, but it is mainstream. CNN is as well. What's your view, Bertrand?BertrandI was asking this question only jokingly because I don't know many people who still watch some of these mainstream news channels. My impression is that actually, first, the metrics are pretty clear. It's a significant decline in viewership. You talk about TV, but the price is the same. A few managed to, I would say, stay somewhat relevant. Take a New York Times, take a Wall Street Journal, but even that definition of relevant is a very small viewership.BertrandThe numbers are extremely small in terms of who is paying for a subscription to these services. We are talking about millions at best, so that's very small. One thing I noticed, I think that is pretty clear across the board is that, most of what we call mainstream media is more and more watched by the older generations, meaning people who have very long habits of watching their news that way from a TV channel. And two, who have not gone to the internet for their news because they were stuck in their old ways in some ways.BertrandObviously not everyone is like this, but my understanding is that they are all facing growing, older and older generations. Of course, there's a question, what does it mean in term of advertising? Because if you're not able to target 30, 40-year-old mom, that's a problem. That's really, for me, a big question. It's not only becoming less and less relevant and mainstream because of the smaller and smaller viewership, but it's also a different kind of viewership.BertrandThere's, of course, a question of, is this viewership going to stick or actually just going to die? Sorry to be very abrupt, but if your target audience is mostly 70 plus and everyone younger doesn't want or care or consume their news that way, that's a huge trouble for these companies. Obviously, they know that.NunoOn the TV side, I think a couple of things. One, local news, in particular, if you look at the US, still has a bit of a role. If you want to know what's happening, if there's a storm coming, I think weather is a great example of why you check the news. In principle, it should have some directionality. Obviously, national news is a different ball game.NunoI feel there's many ways of consuming news today. In some ways, actually, news channels, the classic mainstream news programs, are competing with things, for example, like social media. A lot of people consume news, shockingly enough. We'll talk about Twitter later, but a lot of people even consume news on TikTok. The latest thing that came out on TikTok, and people will share things, for example, on Instagram, on stories, et cetera.NunoIt's just these tidbits that have very little context. I think TV is It's a bit under attacked with low attention span. To your point, maybe, certain older generations, they have more the appetite to trust certain newscasters in what they say, the George Stephanopoulos at ABC, whoever else at Fox, et cetera. There's this notion of maybe there's a couple of generations that trust the newscaster for presenting news in a way that they think represents either some neutrality or whatever.NunoIf we step back on journalism, journalism was always supposed to be a counterpower. It was the fourth power, the counterpower. It was about keeping the powers in check, the judicial power, the legislative power, et cetera, in check. I think that's changed. It's changed because of the internet. It's changed because of rapid access to information. Radio, for example, in some ways has been totally under attack. Podcasts have taken over on that side.NunoPress has been under attack as well. Who are the publications that are still thriving? The publications that relatively thrive are the big guys, New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economists, where there's either a quality expectation in reading them, or there is a notion of the number of journalists that they can throw at specific articles.NunoA little bit the opinion pieces and the investigative journalism piece of the puzzle is what I think still makes press work, because you have the time to put stuff together, the time to really go under the hood and generate newsworthy things out of it. In some ways, the clickbait thing has changed the world. It's like, can you get my attention or not? If you can't, I'm going to just tune out and go somewhere else, and I'll consume my news in some other way.BertrandTwo good points. One, local versus national. The other one about the clickbait. Local versus national, that's true. I register to my local newspaper to get the local news because I want to know what's happening. Unfortunately, I find it biased, so I'm not always super happy reading that. The other piece that is clear is, I don't care whatever they publish on national news.BertrandFor national news, I have my Wall Street Journal subscription, I have my Bloomberg subscription, and that's what I will use for national or world news, actually. In the past, if we go back a long time ago, when you have to print newspaper and journals and stuff, there was some logic to combine national and local news because it's not efficient to have different newspapers for everything.BertrandI think now it's quite clear that you won't get the best quality, get national-wise, global-wise from your local newspaper. In a way, why bother? That has definitely been my approach. Clickbait, that's a great point.BertrandI also remember reading stories, not just stories, but data analysis about how the news in term of, not just what's in the title, but once in the body of the news, how it has gone downhill in the past 50 years. The language has become worse and worse in terms of making it scary at every level, from car crash to the Earth is dying, the world is burning.BertrandThere was this famous comparison I think it was on German TV where they were showing a weather forecast basically on TV, it looked like everything was burning in Germany. If you take the same news report, weather forecast report five years back with similar temperature, there was certainly not this impression that was shared by making the graphics looks very dangerous.BertrandThere is definitely a change. My take is that, consumers are noticing. People are not as dumb as some of the people in the news seem to think. People might think by themselves, notice a change, notice when it doesn't correlate with the reality they live. We might talk more about this, about the brainwashing that some news organization have been trying to do.BertrandI think it's also part of why mainstream media has been dying because that propaganda part is becoming more and more visible. It probably went overdrive and as a result has become more visible. I think that's totally part of why people are looking for more, there niche source of information, or new internet platform to get access to consumer journalism.NunoIt's a tale that is important. We define our own canons. We define what are the things that we trust and the journalists that we trust and the things that we don't trust. I'm similar to you. I consume my per local news. Actually, I think it's probably the only subscription I have....

Is Technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? In this episode, we will go into the depths of Technology Philosophy & Ethics, what it actually is, its historical developments, the current movements of the present and what the future likely holds. What is e/acc, what is EA? What is Degrowth? We will also discuss spiritual and religious elements, in as much as they relate to Science and Technology.Navigation:Intro (01:34)What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics? (02:33)Historical Developments (04:17)The Present (23:44)Our Views (49:06)Conclusion (54:45)Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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1. Intro

Bertrand Schmitt

Welcome to episode 53 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will be about technology philosophy and ethics. This is a bit far from our usual topics around investment and building companies, but we felt it was an interesting moment in time, especially with the development of AI, to talk about some of this, I would say what's behind some of the reflection in tech around where we should move forward, how much we should accelerate, should we even consider a pause in some developments?

Bertrand Schmitt

Is technology intrinsically good, bad or neutral? We'll try to go into the depths of some of these questions. We'll also talk about e/acc, about EA, about degrowth, and we will also discuss some spiritual and religious elements in so far as to how they relate to science and technology.

2. What is Technology Philosophy & Ethics?

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Wonderful. Let's start with what is technology, philosophy, and ethics? Basically, define the philosophy of technology as a subfield of philosophy. We have a good start there. It's part of philosophy. Let's start there.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

It actually studies the nature of technology and its social effects. It has several branches. Ethics is probably the one that's been most published about recently. What are the ethics of AI, et cetera? Relations between science and technology, human-technology relations, there's been some interesting debates as well around that, in particular in countries like Japan who always seem to be at the forefront of some of the stuff that happens around virtual and digital things and actual humans.

Bertrand Schmitt

Are you thinking about virtual girlfriends?

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Virtual girlfriends, virtual wives. You could get married to virtual wives. Obviously, the political dimensions of technology has also been hotly debated recently. Who owns semiconductors? Who owns AI? Is AI centralised or not? Is this an arms race? Is this going to be a source of geopolitical danger?

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Obviously, there's different views around technology. There's obviously the view that technology is autonomous, but it does determine society. It's a human construct. It's co-evolutionary, so it evolves at the same time as we should, and there should be boundary conditions around it and how we evolve.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Basically, this leads to anything between technophobes, people that hate technology, people that are technophilia, I'm not sure that would be the right word, but that have technophilia, that love technology like you and I, Bertrand, we love technology in some ways. Then there's people at the edges of this that go on different angles like technology anarchy and a bunch of other things.

3. Historical Developments

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

That's basically a very broad definition of technology philosophy. But maybe moving to a little bit of more of an understanding how we got here, let's go through history, Bertrand.

Bertrand Schmitt

I must say, first of all, people who really hate technology, I guess they should go back to living in huts with no fire.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Maybe even before huts, maybe before there were huts, there was fire, there wasn't huts. There were caves.

Bertrand Schmitt

Go back to caves or go on trees, I guess, because at the end of the day, the story of humanity is connected with technology. Obviously, we will not be here talking on Zoom about technology and philosophy if we are not believer in some ways of technology. At least, we have to be the children of technology.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

If we go back, the history of technology philosophy actually goes back to the Greeks. Even the Greeks have been talking about this technology thing, about how there are these things that we create, technology, we human, that try to emulate nature. If we go back in time, just the beginnings of technology philosophy are really related to Greeks. The first notion is that technology should in some ways emulate nature, or it's trying to emulate nature.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Then at some point, I think this is around Aristotle, he starts saying, "Wait a second. No, that's not quite accurate. Technology should not be trying to emulate nature. There should be a fundamental distinction." They call it an ontological distinction between what is created by nature and what is created by human beings. Therefore, technology should be what is created by human beings.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Out of that, there's been this fundamental difference that we still have today, what was man-made versus what was not man-made. Today, it's even more complex because there's what's nature-made, what's man-made, and what's machine-made. Just to make life even more complex, we have all these different ontological distinctions.

Bertrand Schmitt

What's inspired by nature, what's a copy of what nature could do, but done automatically by machine. In this [inaudible 00:04:44] from what could be done by nature. It's not as easy as it used to be in some ways.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

For a long time, I think we've had this notion of history where technology in some ways, and I think this is related to something we'll talk in later, which is medieval times and all these, we'll talk about it later as well, the [inaudible 00:05:04] and these fake news from very, very far back of what happened in medieval times. But science and technology has always been alongside us.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

There's this notion that around medieval times that religion and the church hampered the development of technology. That in some ways was promulgated by a late Renaissance. A lot of people that then came much later than that, such as Bertrand Russell and a few others, that in some ways, Catholicism, Christianity, later with Protestantism, hamper the development of science. And that in some ways, men were being held back from all their potential by developing tools that would increase, one, their productivity, but would also increase the classic utilitarian notion of the product itself that we were creating.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Obviously, one of the most famous examples is the famous heresy Declaration on Galileo, that relates to science in particular, to the fact that at some point the church came against science. And this gentleman, Galileo, was wronged.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

We have even this famous sentence that he would have said after his condemnation to heresy. Even people think that he was condemned to heresy and he was killed, and that he would have said, "Eppur si muove", which in Latin would mean, and still it moves.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

This is all related, obviously, to the theory of whether the Earth was the centre of what we now know to be our solar system or not. Obviously, now we know that it's a solar system, so the sun was the centre.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

It relates to Copernicus, who had been one of the first guys to figure it out. I've now heard that actually there was someone before Copernicus who had put forward that theory. The interesting thing about all of this story is it's bullshit. It's all bullshit. He never said "Eppur si muove", he wasn't killed.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

He was actually sent to a farmland house that he had. Think of it as a domiciled prison thing. The reality is he wasn't the guy who came up with it. Copernicus and many others before actually came up with it. Funnily enough, he was Catholic, and he was very close to the Curia at that point, to the Vatican at that point. He was very close to the Pope, effectively.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

The reason why he got condemned for heresy was he basically took up on the theory. This is a very funny story. You guys should look it up. He took up on the theory, and he took it upon himself to say it was his theory. Then he started doing analysis on it. Then he basically came and said, "I've come up with this logic that the sun is the centre. It's not actually Earth. What's happening on Earth is based actually on the movements of the moon and the waves, and there's a relation in that."

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

Anyway, his theory was actually fundamentally totally wrong. He kept being asked by the church of the time, "Can you provide proof?" Because we've heard from... Copernicus, by the way, was religious as well. The guy who came before Copernicus as well was also religious. It was nothing against the church. The church at that point was willing to potentially believe that actually we were not the centre of the universe, as we assumed it at that point. But they were asking for proof. Could you prove it? It was a series of these political things and indrominations with the church that actually led Galileo to be, in the end, condemned by heresy.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro,

He actually did publish a document that was considered a r

The Apple Vision Pro is out and we each got ourselves one… Our first impressions on the early days of the Vision Pro. Will it change the world forever, like the iPhone?Navigation:Intro (01:34)Overall… TL;DRIn-depth analysisCompetition with Meta Quest 3ConclusionOur co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture newsIntro

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Nuno G. PedroIn this episode, episode 52 of Tech Deciphered, we will talk about the Apple Vision Pro. It's now out, and both Bertrand and myself got ourselves one. So what are our first impressions on the early days of the Vision Pro? Will this revolutionise the future of input and output? Is this the new iPhone? Is this finally the product that Tim Cook has developed that shows us that he is the future of Apple? Let's start with the overall impressions, Bertrand. What are your overall impressions?Bertrand SchmittWhat are my overall impressions? It's a mixed bag, that's for sure. It's a very impressive piece of tech. I think my worry is that it has been oversold by Apple, but also by a lot of YouTubers. When you keep looking at these YouTube videos of people using it for eight hours a day, I think it's totally, utterly bullshit. There is no way in hell any normal human being will put that on their head eight hours a day unless forced to do it.Nuno G. PedroUnless you're working on your neck like you're a Formula One driver or something.Bertrand SchmittExactly. You are working on your neck. Yes, it's neck training. No, more seriously, overall, and we will go more in depth later on this episode, I feel it's a great device for maybe two use cases. One is if you want to watch 3D content. To watch 3D content, 3D movies, potentially at some point 3D sports, when we get that, we don't have that yet so far, 3D concert, then I think It's awesome.Bertrand SchmittWatching 90 minutes of 3D movies, it's just an insane experience for me. It's just amazing. It's your best way to consume a Blade Runner 2049, a Dune. It's actually maybe better than in a movie theatre if you combine it with a proper headset because the audio is quite good, the bass are pretty poor. For me today, as a mainstream consumer, that's the best main use case. For businesses, there might be some reason to look at, if you are doing 3D design, to look at 3D objects in the middle of your room, I can see that as well.Bertrand SchmittBeyond that, I think we're talking about very stretch use cases. One of these could be to record a video of what you are doing and sharing that with other for training. I could see that probably for training purposes. But beyond that, at this stage, I'm not sure what's the point to put 2D panels in the middle of a 3D vision with a headset that's very heavy and very uncomfortable.Bertrand SchmittI don't know your experience, wearing the headset, but anyone telling you that this headset is nice to wear, do they have a metal head to wear that comfortably? I have no clue. I mean, I'm hopeful there will be better straps, but for me, it's still a nightmare to wear it.Nuno G. PedroYeah, this has been tested by 007 villains, so they all can send away the thing on their head. Fully agree with your assessment. It's impossible have it on your head, to be honest, even for more than an hour-and-a-half, two hours. An hour-and-a-half and two hours is already a lot. So even watching that movie, you might have to take a little break to watch that movie, in particular if it's over two hours, which many of the Sci-Fi movies actually are, or at least the canonical ones.Nuno G. PedroI agree that for the consumer side, I think the consumption of content will be great. Maybe I would say besides immersive content, immersive communication, we'll get back to that later on the Zoom experience and the FaceTime experience, so I won't unravel that whole discussion right now, but the immersive communication piece, I think, will get finally started at some point.Nuno G. PedroFor me, those two pieces are the pieces that are going to be core to the early use cases of the Vision Pro. Business, agree with you. Some collaboration tools, some consumption also of immersive content for business is quite powerful, but it's $3,500, right? It's so expensive. I mean, it's more expensive than a really good laptop or an iMac.Bertrand SchmittIt's a price range of your high-end MacBook Pro.Nuno G. PedroYeah, it's the price range of the best-in-class laptop that you could use out there from Apple. It's just expensive as hell. I feel, maybe giving it the other angle, I feel it's a platform. The Vision Pro is a platform that they launched where they don't have any killer apps yet, almost. Except maybe for the content, immersive content piece, they have no killer apps day one.Nuno G. PedroAs I said, I think they will have immersive communication day two, day 100, whenever a lot of these bugs are sorted out. But day one, that's it. They launched a platform, which is the Vision Pro. It's really exceptional. As you said at the beginning, it's great technology. It's really incredible. It does show us a glimpse of the future, but it's not the future yet. I agree with you because of the size and how heavy the device is, I'm not sure as a platform, it would stand a test of time, even with software updates, et cetera.Nuno G. PedroI have a bunch of things that I have issues with this on. We were just before recording this episode, trying to sort out My Persona, which is in beta trial, but it needs the optical ID thing, and the optical ID thing for some reason is not working for me, and I don't know why, and maybe I need to clean it better. I'm not sure.Nuno G. PedroIt's just there's still all these little quirks at the core of the experience like optical ID piece that are just like, "Guys, why did you launch it?" Maybe you should have waited a little bit more and have that ecosystem a little bit more prepared.Bertrand SchmittYeah, I think the usual way to launch a product where we present you a bit in advance. We share with you a developer conference the details of the API, you can learn how to compile on your Mac, make it work, but you cannot access the device, and you have to wait so long before you can access the device.Bertrand SchmittBasically, most developers who have developed any app for the Vision Pro probably didn't have any access to the Vision Pro itself. You are guaranteed a few months of horrible bugs trying to just make it work. Surprisingly enough, even as you say, the Apple apps are actually not working so well. You're having issues with Apple ID.Bertrand SchmittMe, I'm facing a contact page that's empty, and everything is actually properly linked on my account and everything, but it's empty by default. I have to manually add everyone so that I can FaceTime them. It's just pretty insane, so it's not a bug per se, it's just horrible design. It's very weird out-of-the-box. I still want to say that out-of-the-box, that media consumption with Apple TV if you're watching 3D content, it's totally insane.Bertrand SchmittFor me, it has replaced my home cinema at home. I'm putting a big high-end headset. I have a really good bass as a result, and the Vision Pro, and it's the best movie theatre experience I ever had. It beats a movie theatre because there is no one around blocking my view. I'm in the perfect spot, and it's better 3D that you can have in a movie theatre. It's better colour. You have an OLED screen versus a projection.Bertrand SchmittFor me, there is one use case, I'm very surprised that they have not pushed hard on it, because a lot of their other use case are simply not there. Another piece I see a lot, I mean, Apple is showing off, you are watching your Apple Vision Pro in a plane. Come on. I mean, this stuff is the size of a backpack. When the box to put your Vision Pro in, it's on backpack. We're seriously going to transport that in a plane? You don't take any other luggage, it's just your Vision Pro with you? I mean, this is nuts.Bertrand SchmittPeople will say, "Oh, yeah, it's great. It's an external screen for my Mac." Come on, you can get an external screen that's a small, slim light and put in your backpack on top of your Mac and everything else. That's not a realistic alternative. At home or at work, of course, you have an external screen if that's what you need. Don't tell me you need a Vision Pro for an external screen. I think this use case just makes zero sense.Bertrand SchmittFor me, at this stage today, makes zero sense. But that media consumption has really shocked me because I'm doing it only once every day at night. The other piece that has shocked me is the quality of the special 3D. If you start watching a 3D object in your home, it can be a Formula One car, it can be a human body, it just sits there perfectly at the right height with the right lighting in a very good pass-through environment in the middle of your living room, for instance, it's awesome. I don't have a real use case for it, but it's super, super awesome. I'm sure some 3D professionals will have use case for it. That is also very, very well nailed. But everything else at this stage, it's like whatever.Nuno G. PedroThere's this video with the Apple Immersive video stuff that has all their nature videos that are available for free. Also the Alicia Keys.Bertrand SchmittYes, the Apple Immersive videos are awesome, awesome.Nuno G. PedroThe Alicia Keys recording thing, whatever. I had a friend of mine test it over the weekend,...

Do you remember that company that raised at $1 billion valuation and sold for $15 million? How about that one that was the “hottest thing” ever, is still around, but never really became huge. This episode is about these companies… and about why some founders and investors can make a lot of money, while their companies fail miserably.Navigation:Intro (01:34)Why “ka-ching” isn’t necessarily related to success (or failure)?The nasty onesThe ones that are still alive, but not doing greatThe ones that did ok/well, but… should they have gotten that outcome?Why don’t all companies exit?ConclusionOur co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Tech DECIPHERED episode 51. We are going to talk about companies that ultimately became too big to succeed. What do we mean by too big? We mean that, in most situations, they probably raised too much to end up having some level of good success. The weight of their financing weighed on them, and what could be opportunities for the right exits.Bertrand SchmittSo, Nuno, let's start about this and obviously we will talk about some pretty big companies that went under, some smaller ones that also didn't go well, and some are still alive, just absolutely not where we would have expected them a few years ago, and not enough to make everyone happy in these companies. Maybe we start by explaining a bit more what is success or failure?Nuno Goncalves PedroLet's start with the punchline today instead of... Hopefully you guys will stay for the examples because they're pretty cool. But let's start with a punchline and why cashing isn't necessarily related to success or failure. Why success sometimes on paper isn't success in the end. It ain't over until the fat lady sings. Probably not a very appropriate expression any more, but it really ain't over until the company actually liquidates and everyone's made their money, et cetera.Nuno Goncalves PedroLet's start with first principles: the first thing is a valuation on paper, a company is raising a private round of funding, a series B, a series C, a series D from venture capital investing, investors, even IPO ing, even going public into the stock market.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe valuation before any liquidation and an IPO would be an effective liquidation. Any valuation before a liquidation is on paper. It means what it means. It means that someone is willing to pay a certain price per share for the company at that valuation of the company. It doesn't mean the company is actually worth that. It means there are certain actors that think that the company is worth that.Nuno Goncalves PedroWhat it means is you can raise a ton of money, and in particular, you can raise a ton of money at a lot of valuation. You can be a unicorn on paper, so worth over a billion dollars. You can be a decacorn worth over $10 billion on paper. But that's all on paper until there's liquidation, be it an IPO, a full on trade sales where someone buys you out, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, it ain't done yet.Nuno Goncalves PedroNow, why isn't cashing necessarily related to success? Why do people still make money? Well, people still make money because other things happen in the life of the company. When a company is raising, potentially series b or series c, it might be that certain investors or certain executives or founders of the company do what is called a secondary transaction.Nuno Goncalves PedroWhat that means is they sell some of their stock to a third party that's willing to buy their stock and gives them liquidity. It's effectively a mini liquidation. They get some liquidity out of the stock that they have, and we'll discuss some stories today of people that made a killing and their company failed miserably. People that made hundreds of million and their company failed in the end, investors that made a killing, that the company, in the end, also failed.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe correlation between the company failing or not, and you making no money is actually not necessarily there. You might have made money along the way. It might be, for example, that the company IPO'ed after your lock-up is done, which classically is after six months. Investors sold their stock, or they sold all of their stock. A lot of founders sold some of their stock, et cetera, et cetera, that they made a lot of money, and that the company dropped dramatically as a stock.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt might be the company's nearly worthless now, but it was worth a lot at some point where people may have exited some of their positions. Again, money doesn't correlate necessarily to success or failure. Success needs to be seen in a different light, which is the light of liquidation, not the light of "on paper valuation".Bertrand SchmittYes. One thing I like to remind people, there is a big difference between the private and public markets. If you look at the private market, when we talk about valuation, valuation is set by really typically one lead investor. It's not as if you're in the public market. You have transactions every day happening, and you need a lot of investors to have a strong belief about the valuation of your business at the moment in time. Because if the valuation is too high, it will go down, the valuation is too low, it will gradually go up. There is some rationality in the market, at least step by step, and over the mid to long run.Bertrand SchmittIn the private market, it's very different. As long as you keep finding that one investor that value your company where you want it to be, you are good enough. As long as this investor can bring the money or convince a few more to participate to that round, and that's about it. We will see I guess, in many of these stories, you often end up having one investor that is willing to make a big leap in faith in term of valuation, in term of prospect for the company, in term of how much money to put to work.Bertrand SchmittBasically, this has this ability to keep increasing price when technically a true market with multiple participants would not have come up with the same price. There is really a difference in pricing and therefore valuation. Another piece of the puzzle is a lot of private equity investors have to have a strategy to put a certain amount of money to work for each one of their investments. In some situations, that's forcing a typical investment that might be too big versus what that company at this stage of the game should be really willing to take.Bertrand SchmittUltimately, valuations are connected to how much you put in a run. Typically it could be early on, 20%, later on, more 10% of your run, because you don't fundraise for one or 2%, and you typically, hopefully don't fundraise for 50% at once. It has also another impact. If you are a really big fund, you might force companies to fit your strategy by accepting big amount of money that might be too big for that company at this stage of the business. Let's not forget, venture capital should be around investing step by step in a relatively, in some ways prudent manner, where at each level of new financing, you do that because you have reached new milestones and there is some agreement about what this milestone could be at different stage of different type of businesses.Nuno Goncalves PedroWe mentioned this in previous episodes. For those who haven't listened to the those episodes, you should go back and listen to them. But valuation is a little bit like baggage. It's like things that you're carrying with you. It feels like, great, I'm worth a billion, you're not worth a billion. Someone's willing to give you money at a billion valuation, but there is an expectation that you're going to reach at least that valuation and go well beyond it. That creates baggage. It creates like a bag of rocks that you're carrying. You're now carrying a whole lot of rocks. If you're worth a billion, right, you really need to hit a lot more than a billion to be worthwhile for the last investor that valued you at a billion as a lead investor.Nuno Goncalves PedroShall we move to the nasty ones? Let's go to examples. There are some fantastic examples here. I would make just one caveat before we go into the examples, which is there's no investment advice in here. There never was in any of our podcasts. More importantly, we're not dissing on anyone. I'm personally friends with some of the people we're going to talk about today, so I just might flag some of them. I might not flag others. I don't want to piss them off. It's just things that happened, and we want to be showing you that.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe second piece is, we will mention a few things today that might be factually correct, but they are coming from different sources. It would be important at some point to put a grain of salt in some of the things we might say. We'll try to qualify them when we say it, but just to put that in question, but let's go with the first one. Quibi great, great company, huh?Bertrand SchmittQuibi, I think everyone in tech is probably not want to say smiling when talking about Quibi, but I think this one is very odd company where a lot of people in tech, myself included, were expecting this company to fail from the get go. Let me explain to you why it was a company that was, and you might not know about it. It was a company started by Jeffrey Kastenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman.Bertrand SchmittBoth of them are really stars in their space....

That episode… the 50th, the big 50. We go back to the past and look into the future: was 2023 as bad as it gets? Is there some good or silver lining in front of us in 2024? These and more questions answered in our recap and looking forward episode. Navigation:Intro (01:34)Looking Back to 2023 (02:00)Looking Ahead into 2024 (32:05)Conclusion (48:20) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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NunoWelcome to episode 50 of Tech DECIPHERED, the big 50, 5-0. Today, we will do a recap of 2023 and what to look forward to in 2024. Although this is actually not really our 50th episode, because of how we've done the numbering scheme over time and we've changed it back and forth. Let's just call it our 50th episode and celebrate and take advantage of that. 2023, what a hell of a year, Bertrand. BertrandYes, indeed. What a hell of a year. Maybe we can start about the positives of 2023. NunoYes, that would be fast. No, I'm kidding. BertrandGood news is that I'm not sure if it's fully behind us, but definitely COVID-19 is mostly under control. It feels less in the news these days, either mainstream media or Twitter. It looks like people are back to a more normal life, back to getting the flu or whatever cold you might get, but at least it feels like a cancer-distant memory, but less impacting our daily lives. NunoWe put COVID-19 behind us. I was just watching or catching up on a TV series, The Good Fight. They did this funky thing starting, it's season five maybe, which is literally the whole episode is like a previously on, but we never saw that. They basically did a whole year into 50 minutes of an episode, and they presented it as previously on, as if we'd watched it before, which we have never watched it, which is very funny. It was actually scary. We were scared for our lives and what was going to happen next. That was 2020. NunoThen 2021, we started rebalancing and things started looking a bit better. Last year was like, "Oh, let's just go back to the normal world." This year, we're full throttle. It's the big vindication. Everyone's travelling a lot. I'm sure it's going to be a mess over Thanksgiving. We're close to Thanksgiving right now. Everyone's back to travelling. COVID is a little bit behind us. Some people are taking booster shots. Have you taken your booster shot yet, Bertrand? BertrandI have. NunoI have as well. BertrandFlu shot. NunoFlu as well. Yes, cool stuff. Some may have not, I'm pretty sure. Some people are getting COVID again, but things do seem to be under control. That's a big, heavy burden that we're not really inside anymore. We'll see what happens in the next few years. Fingers crossed. I'm knock-on-wood type stuff because honestly, we can't declare victory. NunoThe second very positive thing is, besides we did talk about recession. We talked about economy imploding. It really did not. It's been an up-and-down year, but the economy did not implode. If something economic activity has now picked up again and there's no signals of recession, and again, fingers crossed on that, which I guess is good and bad. We'll come back to the bad in a bit, but it's mostly good. BertrandYeah, it's good news. The question is why, obviously, and can it still happen? Definitely, I came in this year with a more negative outlook, at least for the US. Because if we talk about some other countries, some other countries might have a pretty bad year, actually. At least in the US, it has been surprisingly good so far, at least on the surface. NunoOverall, pretty positive. We'll see the numbers by the time this is launched. You guys will know the numbers for Black Friday. We don't know them yet, but I'm assuming they'll be great. In some ways, we're back to consumer is one-on-one. We'll see if inflation is really under control or not into the new year. Definitely, it was a positive year in that respect. We didn't really have a huge crisis. Us, as consumers, have come back to the table, travelling, consuming like the good old American way. The rest of the world is following suit. Everyone's doing that. NunoThen maybe the last third big thing is, it's been the year of AI. Obviously, we've had a couple of episodes on generative AI, and we've demystified a bit, so we won't spend a ton of time on it today. Recently, we've also had the whole OpenAI debacle. As you were saying, Bertrand, the whole Steve Jobs done in five days instead of years. [crosstalk 00:04:01]. The Gen Z version or millennial version of, "I'm out, I'm not out, I'm out, I'm not out." BertrandIt's definitely raising a very strong question of governance. What went wrong in a surprising way, given the talent of the people involved, and maybe in an unsurprising way when you know that trying very untested new type of structure that didn't really make sense in the first place indeed don't really make sense in the first place. NunoYeah, I've been in a structure like that before, like a non-profit on top that owns a for-profit that is significant. It's very difficult. You have high dependencies on a very well-functioning board on top. If that doesn't work out, it's not great. I'm sure there's other reasons behind it. We don't know probably the story or the whole story yet, if it's just the board, if there were other dynamics around it that we're not fully aware of. It seemed amateur hour throughout the five days of social media back and forth, and it was live news. They might have well streamed it. I saw someone making the comment on Twitter, on X saying, You should have just streamed it on Twitch. It would have been easier. We could have just followed it. It would have probably been the most watched show recently. BertrandYou could do a TV show where every season is one day. NunoExactly. BertrandOf what happened in real life. A new version of 24, I guess. NunoA new version of 24, like a real-life version of 24. Back to the positive AI has changed everything. It's been the year of AI. Despite the market in general around startups having cooled down quite a bit, the AI market is still continue going through the roof. A lot of interesting things happening, a lot of noise as well, a lot of things that are maybe not as great as all of that, but certainly very, very positive. We've hit our first year of AI is here. It's here to stay and there's going to be a tremendous amount of innovation going forward. Incredibly positive. BertrandWe just saw, the results from Nvidia and it's clearly amazing. They are firing on all cylinders. I've never seen a company that size exploding like this in terms of revenues year on year. We're talking about 200%. It's just amazing. NunoOverall, may be the last positive in our world of startups and venture capital. Obviously, it's been a cooler year dramatically in terms of fundraising for funds, startups as well. It's not fully imploded. It's not nuclear winter. It doesn't feel like end of 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, there's still activity. You guys are investing and startups are still raising money. It's been overall positive. It really hasn't been nuclear winter. BertrandI think that if 2022 might have been more a nuclear winter, it didn't feel that way in 2023. I don't know if I would call it positive or maybe it's more neutral that business is done. NunoIt's positive versus what we expected. Certainly, I expected, for example, valuations to come down a lot more. Maybe it's negative to us as investors. Maybe valuations should have come down a lot more. Maybe they still will. It wasn't that bad, certainly for entrepreneurs and startups, and that's great. BertrandYes, in a surprising way. Maybe should we go to the negatives or the neutral next? NunoYes, we're going to spend a bit of time there. BertrandIf we go on the negatives, maybe we go from the bigger picture, some of our macro picture as well. We still have a war in Ukraine, in Europe, and a new one in Israel. It's pretty scary to have this. If you are pretty young, you might feel the world coming to an end. The older you are, the more you feel back to what you used to know. A world more full of uncertainty from a macro perspective and some lack of control. BertrandObviously, very sad just to be clear what happened. It's beyond belief that you could have terrorist activities of that level. From Hamas, I am in full support of Israel about what's happening. We hope and pray for the best possible outcome for everyone involved. Israel, of course, with the right to defend and people of Qatar. NunoA war of the scale of Ukraine, obviously with the Russian invasion or attempted invasion, we'll see where that ends up, was already a total tragedy and the loss of lives. What's happening in Israel has even taken this to the next level and it's just tremendously sad. I do think the situation with Israel, Palestine, Hamas, the way you position it and everything that's happening is much more complex. The good guys, the bad guys. Who are the good guys at what point in time? Who are the bad guys at what point in time? NunoIt's certainly much more complex, much more nuanced. A lot of fake information as well being circulated, a lot of things that are not accurate being circulated. The only comment I would make on it at this stage is, that we do hope that this comes to a peaceful resolution that is sustainable, at least for the immediate future. This would be my wish. We didn't need a second large kill war for sure. BertrandTo your point on Ukraine,...

What is an exit? You need to sell your company or sell some of your shares? How is the market for that, right now? All things M&A, IPO, Secondaries, etc. 

Navigation:

Intro (01:34)

What is an exit? (02:17)

Stats on M&A and IPOs (17:50)

What’s ahead? (42:02)

Conclusion (59:48)

Our co-hosts:

Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt

Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro

Our show:

 

Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Tech DECIPHERED Episode 49. This will be our Exit episode. What do we mean by exit? Exit, it's really when you need to provide liquidity to your shareholders. It's when you sell your company as a whole. You sell some shares in a public market, meaning that ultimately that will provide not as fast liquidity as getting acquired, but will provide liquidity for those that want to leave the business as shareholders in a gradual way. In this episode, we are going to talk about all things M&A, IPO, secondaries. But let's start with more details about what is an exit. Nuno Goncalves PedroMore generically, an exit is on the eye of the beholder. An exit for a company, as you mentioned rightfully so, is the sale of normally most of its stock. It could be not all of the stock; sometimes it is all of the stock. It could be a sale of most of its stock or the taking that stock public in some way. Nuno Goncalves PedroWe'll come back to this notion of what selling stock means, but in general, selling stock, even when you go IPO, there is a selling of stock. There is a transformation of stock in some way. But it could be for an investor. What is an exit for an investor? Or what is an exit for a founder of a company? In that case, I would say an exit is, again, when you sell the majority of your stock that you have for that specific entity. Nuno Goncalves PedroFor a founder, it would be, "I'm selling most of my stock in that company." For an investor, "I'm selling most of my stock in that company." We could then basically say, is it a full exit or not? But it's an active element of liquidation at scale. For me, takes into account majority. It takes into account that the majority of what you put or that you have, you've sold. A liquidation means you've liquidated part of your position. It could be actually a very small amount of stock. That is the definition of exit and the definition of liquidation. Nuno Goncalves PedroThere's different types of exits and elements of liquidation. There's mergers and acquisitions whereby two companies—normally it's two companies—come together as a merger. We always talk about this notion of mergers of equals. There is rarely mergers of equals. There is always one party that is slightly bigger than the other. Even in the case of a merger, there is one party that in some ways is acquiring the other. Then there's straight-up acquisitions, the ability for a company to acquire another company and take over that company. That's M&A. Nuno Goncalves PedroIn M&A, normally the majority of stock is taken by the acquirer or by the entity that is merging that is slightly larger than the other one. There's what we call a change of control. The entity that got sold is now taken by the new entity or by the entity that bought it. That's a change of control. A lot of people know the sexier type of exits, which is IPOs. Nuno Goncalves PedroAn IPO stands for initial public offering. It's an offering of stock to the retail market, to the public market. Why it's the public market? Because people like you and me and people that necessarily are not accredited investors can actually invest in public markets. It's what we call retail markets. Anyone can invest in it in effect. There is no limitation for me to invest in that market. Whereas in private markets, we have the notion of accredited investors. We won't go a lot into that, but we can explain that at some later episode. Nuno Goncalves PedroIn public markets, it's retail, so the public can buy. What that means is there's a portion of the company that is so-called floated onto the public market so that the retail investors—anyone really—can buy stock in those companies. It ends up happening when there is an IPO that there are large players that take large amounts of stock in the companies, institutional investors, for example, other types of players in the market, hedge funds, and other such entities. But it's again, a market that is open to the public. Anyone in the public can buy stock in that market and in what is floated. Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe one or nuance, and we can go back and forth on different types of approaches to the exit, is secondary transactions. This is particularly true in private market. Secondary transactions as opposed to primary transactions. A primary transaction is when, for example, a venture capital firm is leading a new round in the company. What ends up happening is there's issuance of new stock in that company. There's issuance of stock that gets purchased at a certain price by these new investors that come onto the company. That's a primary transaction. I'm getting stock in the company, but that the stock is effectively being issued. Nuno Goncalves PedroA secondary transaction is that there's stock that's already been in the hands of someone. It could be an investor, it could be a founder, it could be someone inside the company, and that person or that entity decides to sell that stock to a third party. That person or that entity owns stock and decides to sell that stock to a third party. Nuno Goncalves PedroWe normally mention secondaries only, again, in private markets. It's basically, let's say, I have 5% in this startup, I'm a founder, an early founder, maybe not the founder-CEO, but one of the early founders and I want to sell 1% of my stock or 1% out of the 5%, so basically 20% of my stock holdings to a third party, and I'm allowed to do that. There's a party that comes in and acquires that stock for me. They take that percentage from me and they take the rights that I have in that stock with that. That's called a secondary transaction. Nuno Goncalves PedroWhy is secondary transaction is becoming more interesting? Because of what I just said. Because entities or individuals at a certain point in time want to generate liquidity, but they don't want to necessarily generate liquidity on all of their stock. Or if you are a venture capital investor, by definition, normally you're a minority investor in the company, you want to sell a part or all of your stock but the company is not necessarily entering into a M&A transaction or IPO-ing or getting into public market. It's another vehicle for you to actually effectively sell your stock, liquidate it, get money in return without necessarily the company having to go through a change of control type scenario, be it an IPO or be it an M&A transaction. Nuno Goncalves PedroThat's why secondaries are so popular. They're popular for investors. They're very popular, obviously, for founders who get some liquidity for them to buy their homes or buy a car or get married or do whatever they need and they need cash. Because in many cases, founders are very badly paid. They don't want to sell all their stock holdings in the company. They want to ride that wave, but they do want to have a little bit extra liquidity to live a daily life. Secondaries have become quite popular. Bertrand SchmittMaybe to add to this, one reason secondaries became popular is because it has been taking longer and longer to go public. We have seen that the average age of a business to become a public company is around 10-12 years to IPO from funding the business. It means it can take a while that you get some liquidity for your shares. Again, once you're IPOed, it's easy to just sell a portion. You might not want to sell everything as a founder, but if it takes a long time before you get to this liquidity option, then secondaries can be a great stop bit not just for founders. It can be a great stop bit for execs, for team members, for employees. Bertrand SchmittThe bigger the business, the more everybody could end up being involved in a secondary. Each time a private company is a huge success, you will see actually pretty significant secondary offering programs because the need is there to sell and there is also market to buy if you are already successful company. Bertrand SchmittMaybe another point to touch quickly as well is concerning IPO. It's considered the graph for a lot of companies, founders to go through that because it's a way to provide liquidity to your investors. Typically in a startup, VC business, you have to provide that liquidity. You get money in exchange of, at some point, the ability to get your money back and hopefully more than what you put. Bertrand SchmittBut with an IPO, it's a way to provide liquidity to your investors. But it doesn't mean that you end up being forced to yourself, liquidate your investment and sell to somebody else. With IPO, you can keep going your own way, your own path. Usually, that's also typically the most rewarding path if you are a great company. Most of the great technologies companies end up being public companies and went through an IPO process. Bertrand SchmittMaybe one more step is that at the same time, the IPO process has become more and more complex, more and more expensive, probably more difficult to go through, especially during this period, 2022, 2023. It's a pretty highly random process. Sometimes the IPO window itself is closed and might be closed for two,...

So you’re starting a company? You’re now officially a founder. What should you do first? In episode 48, we will share our views on culture and why it “eats strategy for breakfast”, our thoughts on structure and legal framework for your new baby/start-up and on what 2nd+ time founders do differently.Navigation:Intro (01:34)“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” (01:54)Structure / Legal (16:27)2nd time founders, what do they do differently? (29:37)Conclusion (35:35) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

Subscribe To Our Podcast

Nuno Goncalves PedroWelcome to Episode 48, the second and last episode on day zero as a founder. What should I do? In this episode, we'll discuss how culture eats strategy for breakfast, how you should think through the structure of your entity and the legality of your entity. And finally, we'll land on second-time founders. What do they do differently? Nuno Goncalves PedroLet us start with culture eats strategy for breakfast. This is actually a quote that has to be attributed to one of my professors at Stanford, Robert Pilgarman, one of the great professors of strategy in academia. He always used to say it. I'm probably paraphrasing him wrong but, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." And his point was you can define the best strategy ever, but your company culture, if it's going in a very different direction that doesn't allow you to align the execution with a strategy you have set forth, that culture will win and the strategy will never work. Bertrand SchmittI totally agree. I don't see it either way. You have to build your strategy in the constraints of what your team can achieve. Obviously, you can always arrange things a bit. You can hire more people, you can bring different types of people on board. But culture is typically very hard to change, and hopefully you have the right culture. If it's way beyond what your culture is able to achieve, that will be a problem. Let's take some examples. If you have a culture of being very careful about your spend, think about Amazon in the early days. Nuno Goncalves PedroStill today? Bertrand SchmittStill today. I remember earlier, I don't think they still do it today, but they would use, I think, some doors that they buy on the cheap and that they use as a desk, as a surface for your desk. That's a very distinct type of culture where you try to optimize cost everywhere. Bertrand SchmittThere are other ways to optimize cost, by the way. If you look at how they pay employees, stock options the first two years, for instance, they won't invest much. It will be on year three, year four. That's not typical, to be clear. But the analysis was most people stay two years or less. We better don't give too much in term of stock because it's valuable. We will only give stock to people who are staying for the long run with us. Bertrand SchmittMy point here is if you have that culture, you won't be going, for instance, in the luxury business. Good luck trying to go to sell luxury products with a culture of optimizing cost to the bones. My point is you have to align the two together. You have to understand what type of products we're willing to deliver, and you have to have a culture that match it. Hopefully, early on, you need to have a good instinct about your type of product, your type of market, and therefore, the type of culture that's necessary and hire the people who would be a good match with this culture. Step by step, be more clear, be more transparent about what is this culture so that people can self-select in it or not. Nuno Goncalves PedroThere's a couple of exercises that I recommend founders do. The top-down exercise is define your values, define what's your value system. Values are a very good way of edifying and effectively creating the notion of culture. This is what we stand for. They're not enough. We'll come back to that in a second, but they are definitely a good way to start. If you can't articulate it early on, articulate a few principles. Maybe it's not a big value system. Chameleon, we actually wrote down a value system. Some people might not want to do that. They might just edify a few principles. There are a couple of principles they start edifying and then start editing it like it's almost a laundry list of things. Then over time, maybe at some point, you get some consultants or someone particularly talented in the team to restructure it and put it under a couple of buckets, and that's your value system. Nuno Goncalves PedroOne thing I always recommend, think through that. Think through value systems. It's not a McKinsey engagement. It's not something you should spend three months doing. But sit down. Sit down with your co-founder. Sit down, what's your stand for? Write it down as principles, write it down as values. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe second part is culture is always manifested in action. It's not manifested in ideas. It's manifested in how people behave and do. I'm always reminded of this by my team. As good writer as I can be, it's like, "Well, are you really living by your values?" You need to. You need to live by your values and everyone will be looking at you. This is manifested in big decisions and big execution, big operations, but also, and more importantly, on small things. Nuno Goncalves PedroWhere do you spend your money as a firm? If you're the CEO, where are you deciding to spend the money? And what are you not spending the money on? How do you acknowledge the rest of the team in terms of seniority? Is your door open or not? How are you actually including people in your decision-making process? How are you making decisions? Everything leads to culture. This is the shocking piece. It's literally everything. It might be on how you react to bad news on something. It might be how you react to good news on something. Everything defines culture. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe part that's very complex about this is in the early days, it is really the founder, CEO that sets the stage. There's nowhere to hide. You don't have 200 people. You have 10 at max, 15 maybe. Bertrand SchmittThe founder, the co-founder, the first exec, they definitely set the tone. Some stuff that are very clear in terms of tone-setting, obviously, are hiring, firing, and promoting. If you hire, fire, promote based on the values of your business, then things will be very clear. If you don't, then your values are just bullshit at the end of the day. Bertrand SchmittJust to be clear, that's pretty bad because when you have bullshit values, there is a lack of trust. There is a lack of insight of the company. It's very important to get this right. I totally agree with you on the small things. I think the small things have to be representative if also it would create a bad atmosphere. Oh, these guys, he's saying this on one side, but he's doing this on the other side, and everyone knows about it and no one does a thing. It's really important to really make sure that you enforce that. Yourself, as a founder, you are the embodiment of this approach. Nuno Goncalves PedroVery specifically, if you are a founder, CEO, that says, "I want speed, I want everyone to work fast," for example, and you start becoming the bottleneck, acknowledge it. Discuss with the team how you can solve it, how you can become better at that. This will have a huge impact on the culture of the company. Huge impact. Because people will be like, "This is the CEO, and he's apologizing for being the bottleneck. This is how he wants us to behave. He wants us to actually stand for stuff, but at the same time, acknowledge when we have flaws and we need help and we need to go to the next level." Nuno Goncalves PedroFor example, that's great for teamwork. It might be that you're actually really fast and you want to manifest that speed, you reply to emails whenever you need to reply to emails. It might be on weekends you're replying to emails because you said everyone is going to work really fast and everyone is everyone. That also sets the stage. People are like, "Okay, it's not acceptable then that I don't reply to emails within 24 hours of me receiving the email. Maybe weekends is an exception, we'll figure it out. Maybe it's only for emergencies, but maybe that's the rule." Everything defines it. Nuno Goncalves PedroIf you have a problem with someone on the team and you take them to the side, and this again could be the CEO, could be another co-founder, and have a one-on-one discussion with that person and try and illustrate what's the problem, it's very different than you call them out in front of everyone else. That sets culture as well because guess what? This is going to keep happening. Managers are going to continue doing that to other people on their team if they see that from their leader, from their CEO. You always have to be careful. We always have impetus. Nuno Goncalves PedroI'll put my mea culpa here. Everyone thinks that… Doesn't think, actually, that I'm really good at this thing. I'm super flawed like everyone else. I'm an emotional guy. Emotional people sometimes are great because they can get others to believe in things that are still not proven at all. That's incredible. They can get the most out of people sometimes because they excite them. They want to work with that exciting other person. But emotional people sometimes can be emotional. When they are emotional, they can sometimes overreact to small things and manifest themselves not in an ideal

So you’re starting a company? You’re now officially a founder. What should you do first? In episode 47, we will frame the landscape, share when it is a good time to start a company, how validate your start-up idea and the 3 key things to take into account: product, market and team.Navigation:IntroFirst Things, FirstWhen is a good time to start?How to validate a startup idea - vitamin vs painkillerThe 3 key things: product, market, teamConclusionOur co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Episode 47 of Tech DECIPHERED. This will be the first episode in a series of two episodes about Day zero as a founder. Basically, we will talk in Episode 47 about what is Day zero as a founder? We will talk about when is it a good time to start a business, how to validate? Your startup IDs. Of course, we'll go around three key things: product, market, and team. That will be all for episode 47. You will hear more in our episode 48 about culture, about structure, legal, and about second-time funders. Nuno.Nuno Gonçalves PedroFirst things first.Bertrand SchmittFirst things first.Nuno Gonçalves PedroFirst things first, what is day zero? Day zero is basically to us when you're really starting your company. You have an idea, you may have done a little bit of market research. You've sought through a few things, but you're about to go and embark on this journey of having a startup or a company of some sort.Nuno Gonçalves PedroThe first important thing is, what are you doing? What is it you're going to do the company on? Is it a services company? Is it a product company? Is it something that you've done before? We're going to start a little bit today in this episode talking about first-time founders. Later on, we'll talk about the differences between second-time founders and first-time founders. Most of the episode today and then part of the episode next time will focus a lot on first time founders.Nuno Gonçalves PedroBut at least you have to have a notion of product or service. What is it that I'm supplying to the market? Second, what is the market? What market am I going to operate in? Third, what is the team? Normally, the team at day zero is you and potentially co-founders. It might be you by yourself, if you're a single founder or a solopreneur, as we call it.Nuno Gonçalves PedroWhat do you do first? The first things you need to do is to understand what markets are you going to act on, what products or services are you going to manifest in that market, and what's the ongoing team into this problem, into this company? That's your effective day zero start. If you don't have these things and you're like, "Oh, I just have an idea for a startup," that's cool, but it's not something you can go and raise money on. It's not something you can go and do anything on. You have to at least go to a stage where you have a plan, where you have a potential co-founding team, where you have a market that you're going to operate on.Bertrand SchmittBy the way, not all businesses are venture-backable or not, and that might be something we come back to. I would say another point is also around, are you still working another job? Are you doing this part-time during your nights and weekends? Or have you resigned from your previous job and moved full-time on this idea? That's always a big question.Bertrand SchmittI would say a lot of people, you wonder if they are serious enough when they have been something for many, many months or years and they are still not full-time on it. They still have their previous job. Day zero for me often come when you have made that real-life decision to stop what you are doing and be really focused on this new venture. What's your take? Do you need to have taken a career break?Nuno Gonçalves PedroI understand what you mean by it. If you aren't about to create a company itself, an entity will come back to structure later on. If you're not really putting any resources at the table that are significant, that for me is the bar. Day zero, you have to put some resources at the table, some cash, your time allocation, about to create that entity or you are creating that entity. I'm not so strong about the full-time or not, but there has to be a significant part of your time focused on this.Nuno Gonçalves PedroTo your point, if you're not just full-time, then if that's been going for a while, if you've been not full-time for a long time, then there's something wrong. Either you think you're doing a venture backable business, but actually nobody's giving you money, or you're not fully in and you're not all hands on the project and people don't recognise that type of focus on the startup. There's something then fundamentally wrong.Nuno Gonçalves PedroIn general, it would be good that people are full-time. In general, it's good that at least the main founder of the firm says, "I am full-time. I am working on this full-time." The other co-founders might not all be full-time, but at least one person, the CEO ideally, would be full-time. As I said, I'm not as specific on that for the day zero definition, but probably would be a good manifestation at least a couple of months in, that the person is full-time.Bertrand SchmittI think because we all might have ideas, we all might try some stuff on the side, look into something. But I just feel that's pre-day zero, and the day zero is more clear mark that something different is happening right now. I think even at this one person that is either full-time or spending an incredible amount of time is a clear necessity. Starting an entity is another one, and starting to have a clear idea about the product on the market.Bertrand SchmittYou might change over time, just to be clear. That is always true. You might decide to pivot three months, six months, 12 months to three years, four years after the fact, that happens. But having a clear starting point helps you clarify things and try to move toward this goal. I think another thing I like to see is a clear timetable. I think in the past, it has helped me when I started businesses to give myself clear timetable.Bertrand SchmittI give myself six months, 12 months, 18 months to reach specific milestones so that I can reassess. I think it's quite critical because you can get lost pretty easily in your ideas and exploring stuff and never-ending quest of digging some market or optimising a product and never launching it. I think having a clear timetable is a very important thing. Probably also starting to get visibility on, are you going to do this alone or are you bringing co-founders for the ride?Nuno Gonçalves PedroWhat is it not? I think if you're at the idea stage, very high level, you haven't done much research in any specific market or product, if you don't have at least this notion that you're going to create an entity and that you're going to create a growing concern, a company, then I don't think it's day zero. This could apply not only to first-time founders, but also to second or third-time founders.Nuno Gonçalves PedroSome people, when they're about to go on their second or third journey, they take some time to look at a bunch of things, talk to people, pick their brains, etc. They're not the day zero of anything. They'll only be at day zero the day they say, "I'm going to do this. Now I'm going to do this. I've decided this is the space I want to act in." There still might be some pieces to flesh out, but that decision of, "This is now going to be my pursuit," is for me, a core characteristic of the day zero.Nuno Gonçalves PedroWe see a lot of people that prepare pitch decks and they're like, "Oh, I'm a first-time founder. I've prepared this pitch deck. This is an idea I have." That's also not day zero. It's like, "Okay, do you have an entity you're about to create? Do you have a clarity? Have you done proper research on the market sizing, or is this just a very high-level pitch deck with some bullet points that you put together because you so fancy?"Nuno Gonçalves PedroTo the final point I would say on what is it and what it's not, not everything is venture-backable. Not everything is tech. Not everything is a company that necessarily scales and is product-led. You could have an idea for a restaurant or you could have an idea for a services company, which by the way, normally are not super mega venture-investable businesses, but the process is still the same. The process of defining what is my market, what is the product I'm going to offer to that market, or what is the service line that I'm going to offer to this market? What am I supplying for? What is the team that's going to be involved in building this up? It's exactly the same. It just happens to happen in a world that may not be a fundamentally tech-enabled product.Bertrand SchmittYeah. One of the big difference would be how much money you need to start the business and you need to keep investing from especially external sources to keep the business growing, that would be a big difference, obviously, between the service business as well as a product business. Now, of course, you can also have product businesses that are not VC-backable or yourself make a decision that you don't want to keep looking for additional external financing during the journey of your business.Bertrand SchmittTypically, one thing I've learnt is that it really depends on your market and industry. If it's extremely fast-moving,...

Is work-life balance attainable or is it a “mythical creature”? What can one do to extract top professional performance while not endangering one’s personal life and hers/his/theirs physical and mental health? We will discuss how much is too much, the big axes of “life”, whether work-life balance is possible, differences between geographies and will, as always, share our own “hacks” and key “systems”.Navigation:Intro (01:34)How much is too much? (01:59)The big axis: family (21:35)The other axis: friends, hobbies, spirituality, etc (30:27)Is work-life balance possible? (39:05)Differences between geographies (56:24)Bring it all together (61:57)Conclusion (63:43) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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Nuno Goncalves PedroWelcome to Episode 46 of Tech DECIPHERED. In this episode, we will discuss the lifelong exercise of work-life balance and whether it is possible. We will discuss mental health, physical health, how much is too much, whether it's actually possible to attain work-life balance, and as always, we will share some of our own hacks and principles. Bertrand, how much is too much?Bertrand SchmittThat's the question. I'm a serious believer that it depends also of which stage are you in your life. Which period in your life are you? Are you still quite young with a lot of energy? Are you a single parent with kids? I think depending on the stage in life, you won't physically have the same time available to devote to work. That will have an impact on your ability to work and how much you can execute and that can put pressure, obviously, to your capacity to endure.Bertrand SchmittAt the same time, obviously, if you're in your 20s, you should probably have way more time to do a lot, to learn a lot, to try to achieve a lot. You might be able to endure it much more easily than if you were in your 40s, for instance.Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe we start with a disclaimer. Obviously, all opinions we're going to share today—we're not psychologists, we're not trained psychiatrists, we're not MDs—it's our views and based on experience we've had from managing people, our own lives, interacting with many different players at various different levels of seniority. Hopefully, it is not just anecdotal, but again, we are not trained physicians, MDs, et cetera, so take this obviously with a grain of salt.Nuno Goncalves PedroTo your point, I fully agree. There is a stage of life, and it's a bit more granular, I believe, than that. It might be that once you're joining a specific company, specific organisation at a specific time, you're going very aggressively to fit into the organisation, to understand how everything works, to balance yourself and how you interact with other people and learn a new set of skills. It might be two years in that your role and job might be a bit different if you're more in corporate life.Nuno Goncalves PedroIn startup life, as you know, it doesn't seem to go away, certainly in the first four or five years of the company. Venture capital is also an activity that classically, I think, if done properly, if done with love and with gusto and with passion, it's an activity that is very encompassing. I always make the joke, I don't suffer from ADHD, I enjoy every minute of it, which probably makes sense.Nuno Goncalves PedroI fully agree with you. How much is too much? How do you know? There's the obvious warning signs, and normally the obvious warning signs are actually not internal. We're very poor at taking our own internal signals; sleeping badly and a few other things that we'll come back in a second.Nuno Goncalves PedroPay attention to people around you, in particular people that you respect and that have your best interests at heart. It might be family members, might be friends, it might be colleagues, it might be your boss.Nuno Goncalves PedroIf you have a boss that is thoughtful about your time, listen to them. If they're saying, "It seems that you're not taking enough vacation. It seems like you're not really taking time during the week to do other things. It seems like you have no other hobbies. You seem a bit glum, or a little bit depressed, or a little bit sad," take it to heart. If someone has told you that, always remember they've probably been thinking about it for a long time. For them to tell you this, it's already served something that's been going on. Then meditate on it, think about it, and step a little bit back. The external warning signs for me would be the first way to start.Bertrand SchmittYes, that's a fair point. What you can see from outside typically could be sign of being tired. People can see you are tired, you are barely awake, or you are too stressed out and you might be lashing out at people as a result. There are a lot of signs that others can see that you might not see that are signs that something is going wrong.Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. Then to your point, Bertrand, there are some internal signals. If you're tired, you know you're tired. If you're sighing during the day in the middle of a meeting that should otherwise be hopefully fun… Maybe not all meetings are fun, we know that for a fact. But if you're sighing at the wrong moment of the day, maybe you should get more sleep. It might be a one-off, it might be it happened that week and you're on a business trip and you're just very tired. But take those signals to heart if they start happening very, very repeatedly.Nuno Goncalves PedroSleep deprivation is a big, big thing. Sleeping well, making sure that you align yourself with your own clocks. I know some magical human beings who can sleep 4-5 hours a day. I'm not that person. I need 7-8 hours. Every single time that I'm a long period of time sleeping below 7 hours, I notice it and I can withstand it. I could do a week of 4-5 hours, but immediately I know by the end of the week I'm really, really tired. I've really not been able to create the space for my brain to fully rest, et cetera.Nuno Goncalves PedroAlthough this will depend from person to person, take attention to your sleep. That's the beginning and end of almost everything. If you sleep poorly, we'll share some hacks later on. But maybe it's time to do a sleep study to think through how do you get better sleep, go to bed earlier, eliminate all these inputs from things around you. Again, we'll go back to hacks later. I don't want to dive too much into it right now, but there's definitely a lot of things around it. When we talked about being tired, not sleeping enough, you mentioned being snappy and aggressive.Bertrand SchmittMaybe on the sleeping part, I noticed clearly, at least these days, less than 6 hours in a row, it's definitely not good for me. I know that 7 hours, safe bet, but less than six, definitely danger zone.Bertrand SchmittI always point back people to a study from the US Navy a long time ago. Basically, they were trying to assess how pilots were effective and how much sleep they needed to be effective. In that study, there was a very clear line that 4 hours and a half of sleep was the absolute bare minimum for a human being to basically be able to do his activity in a proper way. I'm always highlighting that to people. Never go there. Never go there because you cannot sustain it and it's proven.Nuno Goncalves PedroWe've had all these experiences probably in college when we were doing all-nighters to study for stuff, et cetera. Your brain isn't quite as capable afterwards. I remember when I was at McKinsey, I think I was relatively beloved as a leader because of that, because I always made a point of making sure that people…Nuno Goncalves PedroWe work very hard, we work very long hours. But working 90-100-hour weeks, the whole banking thing, some of the top-end management consulting when projects are very short or engagements are very short, doesn't work. We all know this for a fact. Your brain isn't as capable. Halfway through the week, your brain isn't as capable the next day. Creating space for people to actually rest and do other things that are not work is vital. It's actually a characteristic of performance. Ninety to 100 hours generates worse performance.Bertrand SchmittYes, you can do so much with just only 80 hours a week.Nuno Goncalves PedroYou're joking, but some people think like that.Bertrand SchmittI'm joking. But I know I had period in my life where I had to be 80 to potentially 90 plus hours a week. I think it can be sustainable over a one month period if you really have no other choice. But my point would be that it better be worth it. I would say a lot of engagements from my perspective don't qualify. It has to be for more important reason, and I think at 80 should probably be the limit.Nuno Goncalves PedroMy extreme, this was back in my days at Deloitte Consulting, I think we pulled… There was one particular project where we were probably three to three months-and-a-half in hardcore 90-100 hours modes-Bertrand SchmittOh wow.Nuno Goncalves Pedro-and that was just very telling. It was telling to me. It was telling about the whole team. There were stupid mistakes happening all the time, issues in the modeling. The project, in the end, went extremely well and it turned into a project that was a little bit calmer after that. This ended up being a one-year project. But those first three to three-and-a-half months just illustrated to me how incompetent we may become once we really don't have sleep, rest, good food,...

Augmented Reality, VR, XR… what is all this? Shouldn’t we all be using these devices by now? Is Apple going to change everything? Or is it Meta? In this episode, we go in into the arenas of AR, VR and MR, explain what these different technologies are, the developments thus far, whether (or not) we are an inflection point on devices, software, applications and content, as well as on what the (hopefully non sci-fi) future holds.Navigation:Intro (01:34)What is it and how does it work? (02:09)The last (lost?) decade (11:15)The inflection point for devices? (19:10)The inflection point for Software and Applications? Developer is king… (36:47)A non sci-fi future? (49:04)Conclusion (56:09) Our co-hosts:Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmittNuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedroOur show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news

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IntroBertrand SchmittHello. Welcome to episode 45 of Tech Deciphered. Today, we are going to talk about VR, AR, MR; mixed reality, in the context of the announcement of the Apple Vision Pro, their first spatial computer. Obviously, already talking about VR, AR, MR is old school, we should be talking about spatial computer. Apple has been very careful about not employing the world VR or AR. Maybe let's start about what is all of this and how do they work?Section 1 - What is it and how does it work?Nuno G. PedroLet's start with an easy one, which is extended reality. Extended reality is everything. Extended reality encompasses augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality. When you see XR, that means extended reality. It's the encompassing word for all these forms that we're going to talk about today. Nuno G. PedroAugmented reality is probably the simplest form. It's a view of the real world with some pieces of digital. But normally the definition for augmented reality is it's a non interactive domain. We'll come back to that when we talked about mixed reality. It's you basically seeing things that are on a plane, for example, using your mobile phone, your iPhone, an android device, and looking around you and seeing things that appear that are digital, but they appear in the real world. That would be augmented reality. There's almost no interaction involved, etc, etc. Nuno G. PedroMixed reality brings in the element of interaction. You still see the real world, but you also see these digital objects and these virtual objects and you can interact and make them interact and you can interact with that world. To be very honest with you guys, I'm still an old-school guy. So for me, augmented reality and mixed reality are effectively the same. Nuno G. PedroI think at some point, someone decided to do this distinction, maybe because of the devices that are linked to it and to really separate in particular what was happening in mobile augmented reality, what was happening with mobile phones. But ultimately, for me, they're very similar. Obviously, for me they're almost indistinguishable anyway. The people out there, that like distinguishing them, that's the difference between AR and MR; mixed reality. Nuno G. PedroFinally, there's virtual reality, which is a fully immersive virtual world experience, the one that normally uses things like in the past look like helmets, things that basically take over most of your head because you want to be fully immersed. It can't be just full, a simple goggle experience. It needs to be a more immersive experience. That's basically what defines virtual reality or VR. Nuno G. PedroAgain, XR; extended reality, AR and MR, very similar. The distinguishable pieces, they're both using real-world and virtual-world elements. What normally makes the distinction between AR and MR is that MR is more interactive, AR is more static type of experiences. Finally, you have virtual reality VR, which is the fully immersive piece. Bertrand SchmittYes, Nuno. I think I'm a bit with you, I'm a bit old school in term of AR versus MR versus XR. I certainly make a big difference with Zeus and virtual reality in the context of for me virtuality is you don't see the rest of the world, you don't interact with it, you don't care, you are fully immersed. That for me is clear and I will say everything else is probably packed together in my mind. Bertrand SchmittI think it might have come originally from, as you say, some devices that were able to do just very basic AR, adding some stuff on your regular glasses and that was it. But I guess pretty early on people realized there was not a lot of use for that. On top of this, a few distinctions we can make between a lot of these devices. Some of them require a PC to work or sometimes a smartphone and some others are fully independent, wireless typically as well and basically don't require anything else to work. Bertrand SchmittObviously, that create typically some issues because a PC can be made very powerful if we want. But if you have to wear this device on your head and it includes CPU, GPU and the like, it won't have the same ability in term of graphics. I guess you can argue that's where Apple's magic to reuse the CPU and the Vision Pro might make a difference. Bertrand SchmittBut typically, there is a big difference in terms of computing power in all this independent headset and that has been well exemplified. We'll talk more about it with the Quest from Facebook that has cute graphics but definitely not too advanced graphics. Nuno G. PedroBefore we move further into this realm of AR, VR, MR, XR, etc. Maybe just a quick reminder, why does it matter? It matters because this is part of the domain of input and output. The domain of input and output, some people might have heard of it as I/O. Many will know because of Windows errors, right? Nuno G. PedroI remember there were I/O device errors all the time on Windows in the good old days that we would see in those beautiful green screens and before that on DOS and all that stuff. I/O is, as the name indicates, input and output. Output is what you see. So it's like your screen, it's a manifestation, it could be your goggles. It's something that you see basically that you are observing. It's an output of what's happening. Nuno G. PedroA printer is also output because it prints, there's something coming out of it that then you can actually observe or take a look at or do whatever you want with it. That's the output side and then the input side are things like your keyboard, like your mouse, like a trackpad, etc. The reason why AR, VR mixed reality matter dramatically is that they are leading or they will eventually lead when they have a lot of adoption. They will lead to a fundamental shift on how input and output is done. Nuno G. PedroInput and output today is done on the move. In particular, it's done through your smartphone. The input is done on the screen of your smartphone, it's done through voice, it's done through other mechanisms and then the output is what shows on your screen and a variety of other things that you can link to that screen. Nuno G. PedroThe limitation today is you have these devices that sometimes look maybe way too big, but the limitation is still on the device. Actually, if you look, for example, at battery consumption on smartphones today, most of that battery consumption is on the screen, on the screen usage. So wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have that limitation defined like that? Nuno G. PedroWouldn't it be wonderful if people like myself and others that basically use glasses so Bertom myself, for example, would fit into that, could do something with our glasses that is not just see through them so that we see better the world, but could we add other things to it? Could the output be more interesting? Nuno G. PedroThe reason why this fundamentally is important is if AR, VR, mixed reality takes off and before we talk about it taking off in terms of content, it needs to take off in terms of devices. If those devices take off, the world changes. The way we interact changes as it did when smartphones took off. That's why this is interesting, that's why this is super exciting. Bertrand SchmittYeah, the world changes or we create a new world, a separate world. Some will call it the metaverse. Going back in a way to input output, in term of devices, we talk about the difference where you have independent device headset or you need a PC. There is also the big question of outside-in tracking or not. Outside-in tracking means like you track it from the outside world. Bertrand SchmittTypically early on, as it was used, there were base stations that were required in order to find where you are in the virtual world in your room, trying to position you in the virtual world and step by step, starting with the Oculus Quest, I guess, to have the first inside out tracking. So tracking done from your headset itself, so your headset having its own cameras and from these cameras trying to create a picture of the world and a position in that world. Bertrand SchmittSo that has been the approach used by basically most independent from the PC headsets and the Apple Vision Pro will be also an example of that. So the benefit of this approach, obviously, is that you don't need to set up your room. Having done that, I must say it's a hassle. When you have to start installing stuff either on your desk or in your room, you start to run wires, you have to have additional stuff you probably already kill how it's going to spread as a device, pretty big time. The more cables and stuff you need. Nuno G. PedroYes....