David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Running through my list of I’ll just say like check next to the ones we’ve really already talked about. But Facebook doesn’t want to get left behind like they did with mobile – check, we already talked about that. Owning the customer relationship, okay. Here’s the one that I really want to posit to you. So Zuckerberg often says that Facebook is going to be or VR is going to be the most social platform. I’m curious, do you think that that’s actually where VR is headed? Or is Zuckerberg saying this because it’s like a mash of Facebook is the company that connects people and it makes the world more open and a connected place. Also, VR is the future, so we therefore must mash these things together because our business must survive in the world where VR is the future. Or do they actually have a good confluence and work together well? This is maybe foreshadowing my grading. I think he is both 100 percent right and Facebook and Oculus have executed poorly on it. I think if you look at the vision that Snap is putting forward of a camera company, which is the closest that I have seen to anything resembling normalcy and a true wave in what we’re talking about because like I said, the wave is not “VR or AR or MR”, it’s glasses or a camera. It’s something that real people everywhere are going to use, people who don’t listen to this podcast. So I think he’s right and I think just look at Snapchat or look at Rec Roo, I mean honestly, that to me is the example of what’s most compelling in this medium is actually being there and playing with people or doing things together with people. So I think he’s right. On the other hand, I think if you look at the product strategy and the history over the last couple of years on what Oculus and Facebook have done, they’re behind because it’s natural hand movements that are so important to that. It’s walking around. It’s types of thing that Valve has done with the Vive but it's also what Snapchat has done which is like to really make this mainstream, you need to get out of the PC entirely. You need to make this something that people are going to be open with in the real world interacting with other people. I think we’ve talked about a bunch of my themes too. The only one I’d say that we just got a brief mention earlier in the episode but really came out for me thinking about this and doing the research is Kickstarter. Like Oculus, the Rift being one of the first, not the first but one of the first really breakout companies/product/ideas to come out of, creative endeavors to come out of the Kickstarter platform. And that reminds me of what I think is a deep theme in technology that anytime you can build a platform that enables other people’s creativity in kind of ways that you would never imagine, that’s a recipe for something special, whether that’s an operating system enabling software developers to create and distribute anything like the app store or like Windows or like Apple, whether that’s Facebook enabling anybody to share anything that they want to write or say, I think Kickstarter is just a really cool example of that, and led to Oculus. I think that's a great point. Should we grade it?…

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