Acquired - Siri

0:00All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

0:30So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review where you.

0:49drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

1:09And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

2:01Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Hey Siri, were you a good acquisition by Apple? Interesting question. Who got the truth?

2:31Welcome to episode 5 of acquired. This episode is about Siri and Apple's acquisition. Are we starting? Yeah. We're starting. So, welcome back to all of our listeners. As usual, you can give us any feedback or anything at Acquired FM on Twitter. It's been a fun last few episodes. I think this is our last one before the new year. Yeah, happy holidays, everybody. Yeah, yeah. In the meantime, though, we've got a special one for you here. We're doing Hey Siri. We are. We are. We are.

3:26David, do you want to start us off with the acquisition history and facts? As always. So Siri, a super interesting history, a spin out from SRI International, which itself is a fascinating organization. Many people are probably familiar with based in Menlo Park.

3:46It itself was actually started in 1946 by the trustees of Stanford and was originally called the Stanford Research Institute. And the purpose of it was to commercialize, to research and then potentially spin out and commercialize basic technology.

4:12and has been funded by the government, Stanford itself, and many other sources over the years, done a lot of great work. And in the mid-2000s, started working on this project called Kalo, which was funded by DARPA, and that SRI was a major participant of. And the goal of that was to develop an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant for the government and the military.

4:42And SRI thought that the potential was there to spin this out and commercialize it, and put it on smartphones. So in 2008, they spun out what would become Siri. And there's a really cool story about how they decided to name it, actually, on Kora. Adam Cayer, one of the co-founders and the VP of engineering at Siri, talks about how they came up with the name, and obviously it echoes SRI that the company spun out of. But Dag kitless who was the CEO of Siri had apparently once considered it as the name for his daughter when his daughter was born. Just think of that every time you say hey Siri. Every time you say hey Siri.

5:38in Norse, Dag is Norwegian American. In Norse, it means beautiful woman who leads you to victory. And then apparently in Swahili, it means secret, which this is my favorite part, as Adam writes on Korra, a tip of the hat to their pre-named days of the project when they began as stealth-company.com.

6:06which still exists if you go to Stealth-Company.com. There is this really old-school-looking website saying, Stealth, get in early, we are forming Silicon Valley's next great company. We aim to fundamentally redesign the face of consumer internet. And then in news and events, they have Office Location finalized on February 1st. In January 18th, money raised from top VCs in parentheses, lots.

6:33That's that's the key to success. That's my understanding. Those are the those are the biggies. Hey, you got what office? You got funding? You're gonna revolutionize consumer internet. All right, so fast forward. So it's spun out. It's its own independent company.

6:49It becomes a consumer offering. There's an app you can download in the store where if you look at some some screenshots of it, I was just googling around earlier today. I remember having it on my phone, but I don't remember how bad that UI used to be. Oh, so bad. But it was early days. So it's hard to know at this point looking back if like that was sort of table stakes or if they were actually just like, yeah, way, way, way form before function. Sorry, function before form. I mean, this was back in the days of.

7:14iOS 3, I believe, and the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS super old school. And what was interesting, I remember using Siri 2 before Apple acquired it. And my favorite feature actually was the ability to type into it. You didn't have to use your voice. And I'm so bummed that Apple ditched that over the years. Yeah. And well, yeah, I mean, it's it manifests in so many other parts of the US. But the The main thing that they basically did was they took out a massive license with nuance and used nuance for all the speech recognition. Neuance itself being an SRI spin out from the past. I did not know that. But still an independent company that over the years has licensed their speech recognition technology to all the major players.

8:05They kind of combined that with partnering with a bunch of the independent functions that that Siri was going to serve. So looking up restaurants, open tables, making reservations, whether kind of all the APIs that you had to express. Yeah. Yeah. And they kind of went from there. So it became an app where it was theoretically easier to use your voice to look up all those specific functions. And quite honestly, probably a lot of if then state men's a lot of regular expressions, like kind of just parsing whatever you were saying. Building my induct tape behind the scenes. What's interesting though is like, I remember this being super cool as an app, getting a lot of press, downloading it, using it occasionally, but it was actually way harder to do anything on it versus just opening up the open table app.

8:57yourself. Yeah, and it's and thinking about that too. I mean, that was before there was proper dictation on the iPhone. So I remember, you know, walking around and opening the nuance app, the dragon dictation app to talk into my phone and then copying and pasting out of that into other things where I wanted to use it. So at the time, you know, now we're looking back at like, well, I don't really use Siri that much. I use dictation a lot more than I use Siri. And that all kind of has been bundled together in Apple as sort of one big thing.

9:26Yep. So the company spins out. They raise two rounds of venture capital from Morgan Thaller and Menlo Ventures, 24 million in total. The company, the apps in the App Store, for just about a year, maybe less, I believe. And then in April 2010, and it was only on iOS, they'd announced that they were working on Android versions and Blackberry versions at the time. Remember Blackberry, Ben? It's been a long time. So far away.

9:55And then in April of 2010 Apple announces that they're acquiring the company for they've never disclosed the price but rumors are around $200 million. And then fast forward another year and a half after that to the launch of the iPhone 4s in October 2011.

10:16and Siri relaunches as a baked-in feature exclusive to the iPhone 4S. As one of the most intense beta's of all time, I mean, I think for a year or maybe was it a full release or two full releases, Siri was technically beta. And, you know, any ridiculous things that happened with Siri, ah, it's the Gmail thing. Perpetual beta. And interestingly, in a very Apple-like move, when the iPhone 4s came out. They removed the Siri app from the app store. So if you wanted to use Siri, you had to have an Apple iPhone 4s. And you know what, there's a variety of reasons they did that I'm sure. One of which, I bet people get confused. I mean, I bet you hear Siri comes out, you see it advertised. And where do you go to check out the thing that you're seeing everybody talk about on the new Apple phone, you're going to the app store. And that could be enormously confusing. Not to mention, I think it helps sell a lot of iPhones that Christmas.

11:14Yeah, yeah, I want to get into that. So that's the history. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now.

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13:07So Apple acquired Siri for for $200 million ish. Yeah, I heard a variety of figures, but I think we'll kind of lock on that on what we look at the acquisition price this episode. And that was sort of a pet project of Scott Forrestall. And if you guys remember, you know, he he was sort of the second Steve Jobs of the company and people talk about Johnny in the design design aesthetic and kind of that.

13:37that focus on making beautiful things, but Scott was kind of the product person that was like second only to Steve. And I remember, I think I'm remembering right, but in the time when Jobs' health was declining, a lot of people were talking about Forstall as potentially being the next CEO of Apple.

13:56Yeah, yeah, it's true. And I mean, I think a lot of people now know Scott as the guy that kind of took on Apple Maps. Just like Siri was going to be his baby that Apple Maps was kind of his. Not sure which is the guy infamous for skew amorphic design and iOS. I think that's after the fact assignment and really easy way to say that was his little fiefdom. History is written by the victors Ben.

14:21True. Scott's actually, I think he produced the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical this year. Talk about quite a different departure. No, maybe his last year. This is worth looking up, actually, because it is totally crazy when I heard about it. Let's see. So Scott Forrestall was a producer of Fun Home. Broadway musical that follows the story of a lesbian cartoonist looking back on her childhood with a secretly gay father.

14:48And so interesting to see after he leaves Apple total media silence not doing anything else then We find out this is what he's been up to and that they're really funny part. I remember I think it was totally coincidence But it was during the wwc DC keynote that He tweeted that he was I think it was like his first tweet or his first tweet in a very long time so excited to have produced the Tony award when a musical this year thanks to all the amazing people that worked on something like that, and I remember thinking this is unbelievable right in the middle of the keynote. Wow. Anyway, so the acquisition was kind of done by Scott Forestall and that kicked off a long chain of things happening in Apple acquisitions. Siri, you know, as it sort of turns out looking back,

15:37There's a lot of really intense research that has gone on since then in architecting these kind of voice and, you know, I guess for lack of a better word, AI systems. And, you know, we see a lot of them, I...

15:51Not sure if series or not, but I know that the Googles is in Cortana is architected as a neural network and Siri at the time of acquisition the company that was Siri was definitely not that and I think it's important to start at this point going forward thinking about Siri as two things No longer as the product that Apple acquired but as both an organization at Apple that is responsible for dictation, for voice search for a variety of those things, and the product that is shipped on iOS devices that we now today know as Siri. And that product is a ton of things all in one. I mean, I think that the impetus for Apple to actually create this group and to focus on shipping this product in every version of iOS going forward

16:37that would not have happened without this acquisition, but the theoretical success that Siri has today as a product is attributed to so much more than that. Apple got extremely serious about hiring great people. They hired a senior director, he's not the senior director of Siri, Alex Acero, who is ex-Microsoft research. They made a ton of acquisitions, including but not limited to top C.

17:05uh, no various technologies, AutoCAT, QS, bots that are vocal IQ pretty recently, and perceptio. And these things, particularly topsy, are really kind of the academic rigor around the, the search and the, um, the methodologies that Siri uses today. And I mean, I think topsy, topsy was another, uh, $200 million acquisition. That one is, ish. Yeah. I think actually that one might be, it might be probably. Yeah, but, but topsy, is effectively the backbone of how the search works within Siri and how the kind of deeply technical part of it works. And I think a lot of really good people came with Topsy, whereas you look at the actual Siri acquisition, all three of those founders are gone. They've started, I think, Viv, I think is how it's pronounced, but effectively newer, better, next generation of Siri. And

18:02they had a lot of people at RIT from that acquisition. Topsy, a lot of those people stayed with the company, and from talking to some friends that are kind of in the know, really, really top people. And Dave and I were talking earlier thought about kind of doing this episode, this is a dual episode on Topsy and the Siri company, because that's sort of how important Topsy is to the product that Siri is today. Yeah, I think a couple really interesting notes of it has been mentioned.

18:31fascinating that this acquisition has led to the creation of this whole organization within Apple that AI, search, and those types of that type of platform technology was so not in Apple's DNA prior to the serious acquisition. Yeah, I truly believe that we wouldn't have this product shipped if not for, wow, we just unloaded a bunch of cash acquiring this thing. We got to be serious about it. Yep.

18:59What's doubly interesting about that is that the actual people at Siri that Apple acquired, like they're gone. It was acquiring this company and bringing this product and this feature into iOS that was the first foundation of a platform that Apple started building and all the great people that they've acquired and hired since then. And you can argue, I think, probably very justified.

19:25justifiably so that Google is still ahead of Apple in a lot of these areas, AI, search, voice search, speech recognition. But certainly Apple is not nearly as far behind as they would have been had, they continued along the path they were before this acquisition. No. And I think that in kind of thinking about any acquisition, you can use the framework of Builder Buy.

19:54What's you know if you're thinking about it before you make the acquisition you're a leader at that company and you've decided that You know this is something we needed to pursue and it's gonna cost us two hundred million dollars to buy or we could build and I Don't think that that is the case here. I don't think that Apple could they even have built like would they've been able to hire the Really top people that they would have needed to in machine learning AI speech recognition Yeah, to make this happen. Yeah, I don't it's interesting. It would have been a tall order and still was I mean, I think that even after they they did the Siri acquisition They they had a long long road ahead of them to turn it into the product it is today and the the question is sort of begs to me is You know would have a different name and it would it would have started off in a different place, but

20:43What if they didn't acquire Siri at all and they just made all these other acquisitions and these other key hires because they've hired a lot of the really great people away from nuance. They've actually architected the whole kind of speech recognition pipeline that they were licensing from nuance internally. They've rewritten and thrown away all the code that they've acquired from Siri. So there's no Siri people. There's no Siri technology. There's merely a Siri brand and basically with that original product did there but A lot of the success of what Siri the product in iOS is today is not attributed to what they actually acquired. Yeah, and it's interesting a little bit of an aside, but on nuance. Most of the major mobile companies, mobile platform companies, Microsoft, Google, Apple, I believe most or all of them have moved away from nuance at this point. Yeah, I think that's true.

21:39Got me some really upset account reps at nuance. Yeah. So I love the discussion we've been having in a way, you know, we're sitting here at the end of 2015 talking about this. It's been almost six years since this acquisition happened. We haven't really talked about Siri, the product slash feature yet. And I think, you know, I would argue as with a lot of people, It really hasn't lived up to its promise so far. Nope. I don't know about you, Ben, but I use Siri for one thing, setting alarms. I would love to see the histogram of this at Apple because I think I just don't think Siri has gotten that far. Well, they have two problems. One, I don't think they've gotten that far from actually being able to...

22:34You know do things that are like quote unquote learning, right? Like I know I have these very specific functions much like the original Siri where I go hey Siri look up the best breakfast restaurant around me or something like that and The sort of second problem around that is if they have fixed that or they they do in the future kind of roll out something that's much more technically sophisticated That's truly like a deep systems approach to search and understanding and you know all these deeply technical things How am I supposed to know about it? Because I think that like there are some of us that, you know, we'll watch the WWDC keynote and that's super cool. But it's a really sort of dangerous thing with these voice-based interfaces that don't have a layout of all the possible functions in front of your face that you can use. If it falls on its face a couple times for you.

23:24You basically assume it can't do things in the future and you never try again. Yeah, and you definitely fall into that uncanny valley and then you just reject it. And that's why I said, it's super interesting. We're sitting here at the end of 2015 talking about this because I think it's non-controversial to say Siri as a product has been a failure. All these like even just basic, basic stuff. Like, you know, my wife's name is Jenny, J-E-N-N-I-E. That's her given name. Every time I talk to Siri about my wife, it says J-E-N-N-Y.

23:54And she has a different last name than me. She didn't change her name. Siri doesn't like figure that out. It's so annoying, super basic stuff. But we're sitting here right now, you know, Amazon came out with the Echo and Alexa this year. They're investing heavily in that. Definitely Amazon believes that voice and voice interfaces are going to be a huge part of technology going forward as does Google, as does Apple.

24:22In a lot of ways I think this the full story on this acquisition hasn't been written yet because there's gonna be so much more to come Yeah, and then there needs to be I mean the interesting thing You know, we say this show is about technology acquisitions that actually went well and if you look at kind of the app we can do this this episode of this show because Apple needed to do this I mean, it's it's effectively table stakes to have a personal assistant baked into your mobile operating system. It would be embarrassing. As you're saying that, as you're saying that, I had my left hand twisted back and I accidentally activated Siri on my Apple watch. Oh, do you have Hey Siri on? No, it was holding the digital crown. That's your fault. But it's so fundamentally like this needs to be a part, especially as you move into

25:18watches, and televisions, and connected speakers, and being able to say, hey, Siri, to your phone, a critical part of any platform. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. In trying to think of examples of things that Siri can't do, the thought exercise of it is actually difficult because your mind is trapped in the things that you can do. Like I'm pulling up my phone thinking of like, you know, Hey Siri, am I going to have time to go for a run tomorrow before work based on when my first meeting is and the fact that I want to walk to work not knowing what the weather will be right now. Hi, Ben. That's a mispronounciation of Lechaim because it's Hanukkah. Right. There's a long way to go. Long way to go. All right, listeners.

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27:50So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. So let's move into the next segment of the show where we categorize this acquisition. I'm not looking at it right now, but I think we've got people, technology, product, business line and other. For me, you know, our audience is craving disagreement here, but I just don't think, well, Ben, what's your category?

28:22So I think if you like didn't do your research it's technology and you think you're acquiring this super academic I guess it is partly technology and we've just come a long way since since Siri was started but I mean what it ultimately became for Apple is a product because the shares hell don't have the people and they don't have the technology that it was originally built on. And the world is moved in a direction. And Apple is, to their credit, really kept up with this and put some serious muscle behind this and hired some of the top people in the field to build out the direction of the technology that's actually moving in. So I'm calling it a product acquisition. Boom. I'm disagreeing. All right. Maybe I didn't do my research. I think it's a technology acquisition. I mean,

29:15As we were just saying, like Siri as a product sucks. Yeah, I didn't say they acquired a good one. Fair point. Fair point. Yeah, I mean, I think, like we've already talked about all of this, but I think for me, it's a technology acquisition because I don't view Siri as a...

29:42product, like A, it sucks, but I don't think it is even really, especially going forward, will be a product or a feature. I think it's just going to be so fundamentally baked into the platform, voice and voice interface and the...

30:00predictive assistant parts of it that I think that is just gonna be a fundamental technology piece is a fundamental technology piece and will be more so over time and yes that's not exactly what they acquired but that was the kernel of it that they built over time yeah I mean I have no doubt that voice will be more central to the way that human beings compute in the future and interact with machines I don't think screens are going to go way. I think we'll become much less reliant on them and much more conversational with machines. But the question is, is Apple doing this and building what they're doing today? Actually moving in the right direction so they're going to be the ones to create that future? Or is it going to be someone that fundamentally kind of takes a new approach to what is a computer? How do you interact with it? Can you do it all over voice and not be...

30:58hammered with the legacy of let's try and tie this future of computing into the way that people interact with this screen. Yeah, that's great point. I guess that's me cheating and preemptively launching into technology trends. The next part of our show is what trends does this illustrate for you in technology right now?

31:22That's absolutely one. I mean every time I have someone talk to me about something that they're working on that's more about a natural interface or screenless computing or thinking about the movie her. I've had probably three conversations in the last few months with different entrepreneurs working on this, people at Microsoft at Apple. There are so many AI companies right now doing everything from just like we are an AI research company platform that is building to be acquired by Facebook or Google or Apple. I think Love that theme and is so true in technology like you can't bring old world thinking into the future It's like it's like it's like the Henry Ford analogy of a faster horse Yeah, and you know we'll eat these words if in ten years apples the the leader in this category and everyone's interacting with their their voice device but I Don't know it's hard for me to see Siri today evolving into what

32:21I think is clearly the future of computing. Yeah, but I also, I don't think screens are going away. I think visual interaction with computers is not going to stop and is only going to continue to rise with computing. But you don't always want to do that. Sometimes you want a voice-based interaction, like in the kitchen, which is the primary use case for the echo. It reminds me of a similar trend. So thinking about the fact that you've got this massive spike in tablet sales since they came out. For so many people, you know, the tablet is not as successful as the phone, but for so many people, the tablet is the computer that they actually need it. And ever since personal computers came out, people have been buying them, people have been using them for a variety of purposes, but it was really the device that we could build at the time.

33:18that was over applied to a variety of use cases that were outside of the specific thing that they were actually good at. And a perfect story. At my grandma's house, over Thanksgiving, helping her move some stuff around, she needs to unplug her computer because someone's gonna be doing, they're gonna be putting new carpet in in that room and they're moving into the other room. And I'm like, oh, well, I'll plug it back in and we'll set it up in this other room for now. She goes, oh, you don't need to. I haven't been on it in a month. I was like, what?

33:47because she really does a lot on her computer. It's not like she's on her iPad. Well, she's very proficient with her computer. She's been fully reliant on her iPad and her iPhone. And I didn't realize this. I mean, I've been emailing with her and I actually don't think she does her spreadsheets on the iPad. But I think she could. She could. She totally could. And it's just me explaining the new input mechanism to her. But for so many people, The point I'm getting at is that the computer was doing a lot of jobs, and it had a very specific job, and then when the tablet came out, it revealed that the tablet is actually a better thing to do a lot of those jobs around consumption, around lightweight email, things like that, than the computer was. So, then people are actually using tablets, a better thing for that purpose, for its intended purpose.

34:36I think screens right now are oversaturated the same way that PCs were oversaturated we've got screens doing a lot of job screens don't need to be doing and sure screens will be doing things where there's a heavy display of information yeah great point heavy display of information things where you need to reference multiple things in parallel and not just have a single track things where you have modal interfaces where you need to understand context with new context on top but there sure is a lot that does not need to be on a screen that we use screens for yep Another theme that I throw in that I think this illustrates is that consumer generally and specifically building great consumer products is really hard. I mean, I feel like Siri is a classic example that a lot of companies and products have a trap they fall into which is, I've got this awesome technology. We can do these amazing things. Look at these really cool shiny demos. And then you get it out in the real world with like

35:36edge cases and delivering actual value on a consistent basis, solving people's real problems, doing that without friction, and it's really, really hard to live up to those promises in the demo. And when you think about most consumer products, many are most consumer products that end up being really successful, they're really simple, and it's very clear what their value is.

36:06like Airbnb, you know, which I've been on an Airbnb kick lately. My wife and I, my wife and I just signed up to be hosts in the last six months. And it pays half our mortgage. And that's amazing. And that's like, as a host, that's what Airbnb does for me. And we get to meet these really cool people who are coming through. And we're traveling for the holidays to a whole bunch of places to see family. And we're staying in, I believe, three different Airbnb's.

36:33this month. So what you're getting at is you you very much understand the intended purpose of that product. Absolutely. It's so simple. It's so elegant and it perfectly solves my problem. Siri, I don't even know what it's supposed to do. It looks cool. I watch the keynotes and I'm like, that's awesome. And then I never use it. Yeah, I mean, to take it to another sitting there trying to, so I have the new Apple TV. And I was looking for some videos on YouTube laying there on the couch that are night and it's It is the worst to type into just like one row of characters swiping around trying to tap individual care It's like being on ps2 again, and I was using the keyword anyway, so I'm like oh wait seary this is supposed to be like a really conversational UI. I'll you seary and I'm like hey seary look for the Aziz Ansari standup on YouTube

37:26At first I said the Azizansari stand up and it brought up like movies with Azizansari and they were like, you know, theatrical releases and I was like, oh, I should probably specify. And I'm like, look up the Azizansari stand up on YouTube. Exact same search results. And I was like, oh my god, it's not even plugged into YouTube. And like every time I have this brilliant idea where I'm like, I should use Siri for that. It doesn't really work. And I think we're weirdos, like we're tech people.

37:54I am the kind of person that walks down the street and it's raining, so I'm not typing on my phone, and what do I do? I like, hold down Siri, and I'm like, Siri, text back, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, because you're not worried about the social stigma of talking to nobody, walking down the street. Total weirdo. And I'm fine with that, but I fully recognize that other people aren't doing that. And I have to imagine if you could see the numbers at Apple of the people that are actually using Siri on an hourly or daily basis, it's probably very disappointing.

38:24I'm curious as you're listening to this if you disagree with us you should totally let us know That you use Siri and what you use it for that God I'd like to know I would love to know At Gilbert at DJ Rosentine at acquired FM find us yeah The other thing I want to I want to add on that before before we move on you know This is also you know building consumer companies consumer products super hard This is one of the reason why as VCs we really focus when we're looking at consumer companies on cohort and retention data because just like straight up acquisition data, user acquisition data isn't enough. Like the question is, are people coming back month after month, after month, day after day, after day? Are they continuing to see value from your products? And it's really hard. Yeah, I wonder. So in February 2015, one of the founders of Siri,

39:20was remarking in an interview to TechCrunch that more than 200 million people use it monthly and more than 100 million people use it every day. So it's one in five people with access to Siri actually are a daily active user. It's a little shocking. Like I wonder how wide the purview of that is. And I also wonder, I mean every single person out there is gonna laugh but like...

39:46You're sitting in a meeting, you hold the button, it goes into Siri mode, you're super embarrassed. I can't tell you how many times a day I accidentally open Siri. I mean, I'm just glad they turned off the little doo-doo so that I don't look like a total idiot in meetings. That must have been the number one use case for Siri. Was that accidental embarrassing meeting doo-doo? Yep. Alright, so we wrap this one up in. Yeah, so I think it's time to give it a grade.

40:14You know, I think that if they didn't do this, Apple might not have moved in this direction and might have tried to follow after Google and Microsoft did it. I don't think it's really in their DNA to start this without going on an acquisition spree to start acquiring a lot of talent and hiring people from other companies. These days it sort of table stakes to have it, but Apple definitely does not sell a single, like one single more iPhone.

40:40Because it has Siri versus it doesn't I bet they sold a lot more iPhone 4s is because it had Siri sure once Yeah, once I don't think anything they're doing to Siri now sells a single additional iPhone agree or like when they you know add Siri to another market I think that there's an interesting thing like maybe we'll see in China Maybe we'll see it pick up a little bit since in China It's so much more difficult to type and it's so much easier to enter characters. Yeah, it's got got to be much nicer over there and if actually you have any experience as a Chinese person or someone who has used the iPhone in China would love to get your feedback on that too but you know I think to this point it's hard to point to ROI other than it was something they sort of needed to do long-term and I don't know that actually acquiring the company Siri was the best way to do it. I'm gonna give this one a C.

41:36Yep, so I think this acquisition was just like so classically Apple or at least Apple of the last few years spend South of 500 million dollars to acquire a Technology company that you then use to build into part of your platform and your whole product platform I'm thinking about you know authentic and the fingerprint Great acquisition great acquisition. We should do that in the future episode The company, I'm blanking on the name that they bought that was the semiconductor company. P.A. S. M.I. Yeah, P.A. S. M.I. And God has that paid dividends. Oh man. I mean, are they the highest yield? I think that the highest yield producing arm chip manufacturer in the world now.

42:25And not to mention like now Apple designs their own chips. Yeah, and the fact that they can do their own system on a chip and the fact that they tie it directly into their operating system, they're able to do things like touch ID where they have that secure enclave that sits separately in the processor and talk. I mean, we'll do PSMI to its point. So much good stuff. Yeah, but and when you stack rank those like unfortunately Siri falls pretty far down the list. So I think I'd give it a I'm gonna give it a B because I think it is I'm giving it a B because Future importance of voice and AI is Going to be huge for Apple and if they hadn't done this if they hadn't started when they did there's just like Google and Facebook and and maybe even Microsoft would be so far beyond them at this point They could never catch up no matter how much they would spend sounds like who they would buy yeah

43:23Although I just saw a stat the other day that like maps is getting better and getting more usage. Well, yeah, it's getting more usage. It ships with the OS. Well, right. I haven't tried it in a while. I didn't had a back experience. I keep hearing it's getting better though. But we still don't use it. Same with Siri. All right. Be for me. Be for you. See for me. I think that's so we got. That's all we got.

43:51Happy holidays, everybody. We will see you in 2016. Siri, do you need to say to the listeners? I'm sorry, Ben. I'm afraid I can't answer that. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

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