Keith Rabois
speaker
686 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jul 2025
Keith Rabois’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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that were encrypted under an old paradigm that would be vulnerable. And every year that goes by, the embarrassment level or the threatening level of old historical communications will probably have some decay function or some half-life. So if it takes another 10 years, communications that were drafted 20 years ago, yeah, there'll be some embarrassing things and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the more time it takes, the more safe private communications and exchanges will be. So I think that's positive. Third, is there's a question of order of magnitude here. You mentioned you need like three orders of magnitude sort of improvement. Is each step function, you know, incrementally easier and faster or is each step function, you know, 10 years?
And I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that.
Not yet. We have looked at KB, talking about technology forward VCs. Over the years, I've sat through partner presentations, and we've never really pulled the trigger. There's other reasons, including even if you have quantum computing, you have to rewrite software on top of it. It's a completely different world.
So you're starting from scratch. So you have an application layer, which might be actually an interesting business opportunity.
Yeah. Who's going to write the basic? Who's going to write like the Microsoft basic?
There's an advantage of Monday partner meetings is I get to watch the science fiction stuff every week, even if I don't really understand it. But like a decade of watching science fiction, you pick up some tricks.
Actually, so I don't play chess at all. Okay. The reason why is if I do something, I want to be really proficient at it. I don't have the time.
So the most important thing about Apple is to remember it's vertically integrated. And vertically integrated companies, when you construct them properly, have a competitive advantage that really cannot be assaulted for a decade, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And so chips, classic illustration, go all the way down to the metal.
and build a chip that's perfect for your desired interface, your desired use cases, your desired UI, and nobody's going to be able to compete with you. And if you have the resources, because you need balance sheet resources to go in the chip direction, it just gives you another five-inch hang your sort of competitive advantage. And so I love vertically integrated companies.
I posted a pinned tweet, I think it's still my pinned tweet, about vertically integrate is the solution to the best possible companies. But it's very difficult. You need different teams with different skill sets, and you need probably more money, truthfully, more capital. But Apple is just going to keep going down the vertical integration, software, hardware, all day long.
And there's nobody else who does hardware and software together in the planet, which is kind of shocking in some ways. Is there a world-class company, a company that's world-class in both software and hardware other than Apple?
Yeah, maybe. NVIDIA? Google? Well, not really. Could they do a world-class UI? Maybe. Maybe there's a foundation, but you have to have a different vision, maybe a different team. Not clear. Tesla's close, I guess. I'd say the software's good.
Apple has a lot of competitive advantages that they've been actually leveraging for about 15 years now. And even back then, Steve, there's some old great Steve videos. I'll see if I can find you a clip where he talks about this very intentionally from the 1990s. He came back to Apple.
He said, we're doing vertical integration, basically using those words of software and hardware, and there's going to be nobody else that can compete with us. I think it's in an interview he did, and it's published in the company of giants, I believe. And he's perfect on point. He just followed that strategy for the next 25 years.
Now, you're seeing some of the manifestations, though, of a competitive strategy that gives you incredible advantages is you get very sloppy in other places, especially over time. Because you have such great competitive modes that you don't have to compete at the cutting edge of this. The Photos app is completely unusable. I'm the biggest Apple fanboy in the world.
I remember interviewing once with a job for Tim Cook. And I walked in and he's like, why are you interested? And I said, well, you know, I own every SKU of every product you've ever produced, except I don't have every color of each iPod. And he was like blown away. And but now like my photos app is completely unusable. So I totally understand, you know, the frustration.
And they are showing like the decay function, you know, culturally and otherwise, that eventually somebody will figure out an angle to rip them out.
Yeah. Let me pause, double click on that for a second. So I think taste is great if you have it, but there's only so many people on the planet that are going to have cutting edge taste and be right. If you don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data.
data is something that's approachable and leverageable because Apple has like the antibodies to using data to measure success with the user experience to measure whatever success. If you subtract taste even by a bit, you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use. And so you see the worst of both worlds.
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