Erika Beras
speaker
1,065 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Sep
Erika Beras’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
In Silicon Valley for a decade or more.
Yeah, they ran into a very econ 101 problem.
When customers press and everybody looked at it and they go, what is this?
It is not enough to have supply.
You gotta have demand.
Less than 3,000 magic links were sold, mostly to family and friends of the magicians.
And within a few years, this company that was going to change the world became a distant Silicon Valley memory.
How did that happen?
How did this visionary idea become a nothing product?
Well, that whole story you just heard, that whole story was the reason it became a nothing product.
At least that's the theory of one guy who spent years researching what happens when people have too much freedom.
David Epstein is a journalist, and he says years later, when he got his hands on the thing General Magic built, this iPhone before the iPhone was actually pretty fun.
A phone book, essentially.
We first learned about general magic from a book David wrote called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.
David studied what made Dr. Seuss and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and Isabel Allende and NASA and Pixar successful.
And his big theory that cuts across all of them is that to be creative, to be successfully creative, you need limits.
David says what happened at General Magic is a great example of why people need constraints.
And you can basically distill his takeaways into three lessons.
Number one, they didn't have a clear customer in mind.
Showing 781–800 of 1,065 · page 40 of 54
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