# Tech Bros Inventing Things That Already Exist

An episode of [Patrick Boyle On Finance](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1547740313), 12 Sep 2024, 26 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO2603651673.mp3

Send us a textIt seems like every day the tech industry comes out with a "brilliant new idea” that turns out to be merely a reinvention of a mundane product that already existed. Tech bros keep reinventing the bus, but they have also taken to reinventing the tea pot, the toothbrush, the lunchbreak and the public park. In today's video we look at the tech products that either already existed or should never have existed.Patrick's BooksStatistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn....

## Transcript

[0:00] Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick
[0:03] Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from
[0:06] quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets
[0:10] right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken
[0:14] away, including interviews with some of the most interesting
[0:17] people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast,
[0:20] visit on finance.org. A few days ago, someone added me
[0:29] on Twitter with this headline from the FT about how
[0:33] Masayoshi's son compared himself to both Jesus Christ and The
[0:37] Beatles. Now, I don't know why anyone
[0:40] would send me an article like this, as this is neither a
[0:43] theology channel nor is it an entomology channel.
[0:47] I've no way of judging the accuracy of either of these
[0:50] claims. I'm going to guess that they're
[0:53] true, as there's no reason that Masayoshi's son would lie about
[0:56] something like like this. He possibly is a lot like Jesus
[1:01] Christ, but maybe instead of making the comparison himself,
[1:05] he should just grow a beard, get some sandals, dress all in
[1:08] white, and then let other people bring it up.
[1:11] That's what I would do in such a situation.
[1:14] His name is Son, so who knows. Definitely not me.
[1:20] I read the article anyway, which I'm fairly sure was meant for
[1:23] some other Patrick Boyle. I googled and there are a few
[1:27] priests and at least one entomologist with the same name
[1:30] as me. It seems that Sun said that
[1:33] Jesus and The Beatles, who I have since learned were a band.
[1:37] It's not the kind of music that I cover here, but he said that
[1:41] Jesus was also misunderstood and criticized and went on to say
[1:46] that The Beatles weren't initially popular either.
[1:50] Now, like I said, I'm not a theologist, nor am I Rick Biato.
[1:54] It's not for me to decide if The Beatles were initially popular.
[1:58] I hadn't even heard of them till a few minutes ago when I googled
[2:02] them. So I'm sure that Sun is right.
[2:04] They're probably an underground band, never much appreciated in
[2:08] their time, much like SoftBank. Sun did tell the FT that the
[2:13] SoftBank Vision Fund would tackle the biggest challenges
[2:17] and risks facing humanity today, which strikes me as being
[2:21] extremely noble. I think that Jesus would
[2:24] probably do the exact same thing if he was running a large
[2:27] venture capital fund. And that really is the great
[2:31] thing about venture capital and tech Bros in general.
[2:34] There are other people out there who make fun of them, but
[2:37] without them who would be looking out for humanity.
[2:41] The kind of people who do make fun of tech Bros often forget
[2:45] the historical context around some of the big innovations that
[2:48] were backed by VC firms like SoftBank.
[2:51] Naysayers will say, for example, that shared office spaces have
[2:56] been around forever. But many people my age will
[2:59] remember that pre 2010, the biggest challenge and risk
[3:03] facing humanity was the lack of IKEA furniture and free beer
[3:07] available in the shared office spaces.
[3:10] When Adam Newman and his firm Wework arrived on the scene
[3:13] dressed all in white and barefoot, Masayoshi saw the
[3:17] light and funded this remarkable tech startup.
[3:20] I think there was also an app, but that might not have worked.
[3:25] Sure, sometimes technology looks like 2 bicycle mechanics
[3:29] building the first airplane in a shed, but other times it looks
[3:33] like a beer tap in the office and an app on your phone so that
[3:37] you can complain when the beer is run out.
[3:40] The path of innovation is often not clear.
[3:43] Sometimes we can come up with ideas only to learn that someone
[3:47] else came up with that idea already, like when David Bowie
[3:51] accidentally ripped off the main riff of Ice Ice Baby.
[3:55] Here's a clip of David explaining.
[3:57] Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding,
[4:00] Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding. That's the way there's ghosts.
[4:03] Ours goes. Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding,
[4:05] Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding.
[4:07] That little bitty change, it's not the same.
[4:10] Silicon Valley tech Bros have occasionally, not unlike David
[4:14] Bowie, come up with ideas that already existed.
[4:18] They're well known for repeatedly inventing the bath.
[4:21] Famous examples are Lyft, who announced a service they called
[4:25] Lyft Shuttle, which would be cheaper than a taxi and run on
[4:29] pre designated routes, picking passengers up and dropping them
[4:32] off at regular stops like a bath.
[4:35] Uber even launched the service, which allowed riders to save
[4:39] money by waiting for their Uber at a prearranged stop, share it
[4:43] with strangers, and get dropped off at any point along a
[4:47] predetermined route. That was a bus, too.
[4:50] Elon Musk announced his idea for a bus on Twitter.
[4:54] He called it the Boring Company Urban Loop System, saying that
[4:58] it would have thousands of small stations the size of a single
[5:01] parking space that would take you very close to your
[5:05] destination and blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city,
[5:09] rather than a small number of big stations like a subway.
[5:13] Later the Boring Company went on to build the Las Vegas Loop,
[5:17] which was not really as good as a bus and possibly the most
[5:21] disappointing transportation innovation in history, where it
[5:25] was just Tesla's being driven slowly in an unnecessarily small
[5:29] tunnel. I'm trying to raise VC funding
[5:32] right now to add one of those miniature trains to the loop,
[5:36] which would massively increase its capacity and make it more
[5:39] fun. The fact that it runs on rails
[5:42] would additionally make it a full self driving supervised
[5:45] system, which would be amazing. So let's look at the things tech
[5:50] Bros invented that already existed and some of the things
[5:54] that they invented that should never have existed.
[5:57] It seems that the worst Silicon Valley inventions are the ones
[6:00] that are pitched as being tech products when there's no real
[6:04] technology involved, or if there is technology, it just wasn't
[6:08] needed for some reason. A lot of these products are food
[6:12] and beverage innovations. A good example of this type of
[6:15] innovation is when tech Bros reinvented the water bottle with
[6:19] the Hydrate Spark, which is pitched as has a connected water
[6:24] bottle that tracks your water intake and glows to make sure
[6:28] that you don't forget to drink. There is of course an Internet
[6:31] connected smartphone app so that your hydration records can be
[6:36] stored in the cloud. In the top review on Amazon, a
[6:39] guy named Daniel says that he loves how it integrates with his
[6:43] phone so it recalculates his daily water needs.
[6:47] He says that he honestly can't think of anything wrong with it,
[6:51] and as a testament to its durable ability, he writes that
[6:54] it survived Burning Man. Of course it did.
[6:57] I imagine that it's a disaster if you have one of these bottles
[7:01] and you accidentally drink out of a different container, as
[7:05] then how will the bottle know how hydrated you are?
[7:08] Maybe that's what the app is for.
[7:10] You can hopefully let your bottle know that you cheated on
[7:14] it and maybe then it'll glow in a different colour to indicate
[7:17] it's disappointment. I should really design these
[7:20] products. It seems like about 15 or 20
[7:23] years ago that otherwise healthy people started saying that they
[7:27] felt hypoglycemic and dehydrated instead of hungry and thirsty.
[7:32] Now we have people charging bottles overnight and connecting
[7:35] them to their phones so that they no longer have to rely on
[7:39] their hypothalamus for basic physiological functions.
[7:43] I suppose I'll put an Amazon affiliate link to the Hydrate
[7:46] Spark bottle in the video description, but I will be
[7:49] disappointed if you actually buy it.
[7:52] Soylent is another tech bro invention taught up by a
[7:56] software engineer named Rob Reinhart who says that he used
[8:01] to view food as a time consuming hassle.
[8:04] He says that he resolved to treat it as an engineering
[8:07] problem and came up with a meal replacement shake.
[8:11] That's how Rob invented Slim Fast.
[8:13] But for tech Bros, I'm not sure how wise it is to have someone
[8:18] who views food as a time consuming hassle preparing meals
[8:22] for you. But this is the high tech world
[8:24] that we live in today. So stop your complaining and
[8:28] drink your lunch, Rob wrote on his blog a few years ago about
[8:33] getting rid of his kitchen. This home manufacturing center
[8:37] has been by far the most liberating to eliminate, he
[8:41] said. A New York Times review
[8:43] describes Soylent as a punishingly boring, joyless
[8:47] product that causes flatulence as a side effect.
[8:51] So yeah, why not drink that at the office?
[8:54] It's inventor Rob responded saying that this side effect was
[8:58] likely to be temporary and was just the result of adjusting to
[9:03] the government recommended amount of dietary fiber.
[9:07] Once again, Amazon link in the description.
[9:11] One of the most amusing non tech tech products in recent years
[9:15] was the Juice Arrow, which Bloomberg described a few years
[9:18] ago as an unlikely investment for the top technology
[9:22] investors. Nonetheless, Juicero raised $120
[9:27] million in venture capital funding from firms like Google
[9:30] Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. A reporter at Vox wrote that
[9:35] Juicero's business plan reads like a pitch perfect parody of
[9:39] contemporary startup culture. It's inventor compared himself
[9:43] to Steve Jobs and explained that the Juicero squeezed Juice with
[9:48] the force of two Teslas. I'm told that Teslas have now
[9:52] become the standards of weights and measures used in Silicon
[9:56] Valley. Each juice arrow pouch I believe
[9:58] contains 1 Pico Tesla of chopped fruit.
[10:02] One investor told the press that they were drawn to the idea of
[10:06] an Internet connected device that transforms single serving
[10:10] packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and
[10:14] healthy beverage. Another said that Juicero was
[10:18] building a platform for a new model of food delivery and that
[10:22] the subscription based model is reminiscent of other food
[10:26] delivery startups like Blue Apron and Nature Box.
[10:30] A Bloomberg reporter noted that squeezing the fruit bags by hand
[10:35] yielded nearly the same amount of juice as the $400.00 device
[10:39] and was often quicker. Juicero responded that most
[10:43] people would prefer to use the machine because the process is
[10:47] more consistent and less messy. It turns out that people didn't
[10:51] want to use the machine and the company went bankrupt.
[10:55] The founder of Juicero was last seen promoting $40 jugs of what
[11:00] he calls raw water, which I believe is text speak for dirty
[11:05] water that he found. He told a reporter that he will
[11:08] sometimes trespass across private property under the cover
[11:12] of night to collect this raw water.
[11:15] He has recently written a book on the mind blowing nutritional
[11:18] benefit of Sprouts. LinkedIn the description Now
[11:23] Teforia was another technology innovation from Mountain View,
[11:28] whose pitch was that their device elegantly blends the rich
[11:32] tradition of tea with technology to create the perfect modern tea
[11:37] experience. So yeah, it was a $1500 teapot
[11:42] with an app. This Internet connected tea
[11:45] infuser used machine learning and advanced algorithms to
[11:49] produce the perfect cup of tea. Sadly, Teforia is gone.
[11:54] You can't buy one anymore. But in a five star review a
[11:58] fellow named Robert writes, I love this machine.
[12:01] He goes on to say you don't need the pods because you have the
[12:05] app. You can throw any loose leaf tea
[12:08] in it. That sounds great.
[12:10] Wait till Robert learns that he doesn't need the app either.
[12:13] It'll blow his mind, another fellow said.
[12:17] It's always guys, isn't it? Wrote a review having bought a
[12:21] tephoria, hopefully at a discount, after the company had
[12:25] gone bankrupt. He only gave it a four-star
[12:28] review. He seems to love the teapot, but
[12:31] then realized that no one was updating the app now that the
[12:35] company was bankrupt, and by the time he wrote his review, this
[12:39] seemed to be driving him over the edge.
[12:42] He writes in all caps. You can't use the Tephoria if
[12:46] you don't have a smartphone. He goes on to say, yes, you can
[12:50] use the little cups without your phone.
[12:53] Yes, that. That's the great thing about
[12:55] cups. But he then says the true
[12:58] usability comes from the Teforia app.
[13:02] He says on the surface, it's the best tea maker money can buy.
[13:06] And he says it's changing the way I drink and make tea for the
[13:09] better. But underneath is a ticking time
[13:13] bomb of uncertainty. If the app isn't updated, I will
[13:17] eventually lose the ability to use my Teforia.
[13:22] Yeah, that that sounds awfully stressful to me.
[13:28] We'll be back after a quick break.
[13:31] It's like our brains have a mind of their own when it comes to
[13:33] money, right? Yeah.
[13:34] It's crazy. We're diving into that today,
[13:36] how our brains really deal with money.
[13:39] We're going deep on this one, looking at money and how we
[13:42] decide behavioral research. This stuff is like eye opening.
[13:46] Seriously, it turns out our brains aren't always rational,
[13:49] especially with money. No kidding.
[13:52] So what's the deal with that? Why are we so bad at making, you
[13:55] know, sensible financial decisions?
[13:56] Well, our brains are kind of lazy in a way.
[13:59] They love taking shortcuts. Look, tech Bros are obviously
[14:07] not big fans of food, and that's OK.
[14:10] As long as they're getting their government recommended amount of
[14:13] dietary fibre and not sitting next to me, I'm fine with that.
[14:18] One of the giveaways that food isn't a big deal for tech
[14:21] workers came a few years ago when Myra, the chief people
[14:25] officer at the food delivery app at Just Eat, posted on LinkedIn
[14:31] that Just Eat had invented the Power Hour.
[14:34] What's that, you might wonder? Well, it was an hour during the
[14:38] work day when you could take a break from meetings, go for a
[14:41] walk, even have lunch. She finished up her post by
[14:45] saying another way. We continue to brilliantly
[14:48] enhance the lives of just eaters everywhere.
[14:52] Yes, that's right, Mira had invented the lunch break.
[14:56] The LinkedIn post was quickly deleted after people cruelly
[15:00] made fun of it, and Justine told the press that the general
[15:04] public had humorously brought to their attention that they didn't
[15:07] do a very good job of explaining their intention to remind their
[15:12] staff to prioritize their own well-being and get away from
[15:15] their laptops. Another great invention was the
[15:18] Pause pod, which was pitched as a private pop up space free from
[15:24] stressful moments, designed by a team of inventors and
[15:27] advertisers based in Sweden. Here's a picture.
[15:32] That's a tent. A tent in your office?
[15:35] The inventor of the PAWS pod told the press that in the
[15:39] initial crowdfunding round, the team had set out to raise
[15:43] $10,000, but instead brought in over $100,000 with pre-orders.
[15:49] That amount grew to about $140,000 with nearly 2000 PAWS
[15:54] pods ordered, he said. You'll get it if you're familiar
[15:58] with feeling stressed and doing meditation or mindfulness.
[16:02] After people made fun of it on Twitter, the founder said that
[16:06] he had never claimed that it wasn't a tent, which is true.
[16:10] I'll put a link to a tent in the video description if you need
[16:15] one of those. There's some really great gift
[16:18] ideas in this video. In truth, tech Bros in recent
[16:22] years have invented roommates, calling it the trend of Co
[16:26] living where people live together, each having their own
[16:29] spaces but with some shared rooms.
[16:32] With Bodega, they invented the vending machine, raising two and
[16:36] a half $1,000,000 in funding for what was described as smart
[16:40] store kiosks powered by AI that you can operate using your
[16:45] phone. You don't even have to work in
[16:48] tech to come up with these ideas.
[16:50] Back in 2020, a Canadian reporter pitched her start up
[16:54] idea on Twitter. Private backyards for people who
[16:57] don't have private backyards. She said I would pay $5 to rent
[17:02] a fenced area for an hour so I could safely play fetch with my
[17:07] dog while doing an outdoor summer workout.
[17:10] If it works for bikes and office space, why not land?
[17:14] Lauren made the mistake of pitching this idea to the public
[17:18] on Twitter rather than to venture capitalists.
[17:21] And instead of raising money, people just made fun of her for
[17:25] inventing public parks. With the current excitement
[17:29] around AI, we're seeing a bunch of AI products that are just
[17:33] worst versions of things that we already have.
[17:36] Amazon has become inundated with AI generated books.
[17:40] Apparently it's become such an issue that to combat it, they've
[17:44] started restricting authors to self-publishing a maximum of
[17:48] three books per day on their platform, which I imagine is
[17:52] unfairly holding back some of the more productive authors out
[17:56] there. There are all sorts of start-ups
[17:59] pitching AI therapy where a chat bot helps you with your
[18:03] problems. It's hard to think of anything
[18:05] more depressing than that. Spotify announced earlier this
[18:10] year an AIDJ feature which will pick music for you to listen to.
[18:15] Isn't that what Spotify already does?
[18:19] Microsoft has been forcing AI features into all of their
[18:22] products whether users want them or not.
[18:25] I guess they have to justify how much they've been spending.
[18:29] Oral-B has an AI powered toothbrush, which of course
[18:32] connects to an app on your phone.
[18:35] They say that they've trained the toothbrush on thousands of
[18:38] different users to assess the different brushing styles.
[18:42] It seems you brush your teeth while looking at your phone and
[18:45] the app tells you if you missed the spot.
[18:48] It doesn't actually learn from your toothbrushing look.
[18:52] I don't really know what it does, but link in the
[18:56] description. It's hard to know if we've
[18:59] reached peak AI yet, but I saw in the news this morning that
[19:03] you can now buy a purse that's made out of an NVIDIA GPU, so
[19:08] maybe that's it. I've already made a whole video
[19:11] about Adam Newman who picked short term office rentals as
[19:15] being technology, and I've talked about Peloton who sold
[19:18] expensive exercise bikes with a $40 a month subscription fee.
[19:23] The bike wouldn't work if your Internet went down.
[19:26] There were also tech pro companies like Washboard, which
[19:30] charge subscribers $27.00 to send them $20 worth of laundry
[19:35] quarters every month. Sometimes Silicon Valley doesn't
[19:39] just invent physical products that already exist, they invent
[19:43] websites that already exist. The kind of websites that they
[19:46] should probably have heard of. A few years ago, the founder of
[19:51] the dating app Bumble launched Bumble Biz, bringing the
[19:55] company's women first angle to professional networking.
[19:59] She invented a strange version of LinkedIn where you couldn't
[20:03] just search for someone in your industry, you instead had to
[20:06] swipe left or right on whoever else was also logged into the
[20:10] app. I don't believe it worked out.
[20:14] Tech Bros reinvented the space race, too.
[20:17] Here's a clip of Elon Musk announcing his plan to land the
[20:21] man on the moon. I believe that this nation
[20:23] should commit itself to achieving the goal before this
[20:27] decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him
[20:31] safely to the Earth. The tech bro space race really
[20:35] heated up during the pandemic as all sorts of space businesses
[20:40] were taken public as SPAC's. While listing as a SPAC provided
[20:44] a shortcut to the stock market without the rigors of the IPO
[20:47] process, these newly listed companies were still subject to
[20:51] the regulatory and public scrutiny that comes with being a
[20:54] publicly traded firm. It's only so surprising that a
[20:58] large number of space Spacs have since been delisted after stock
[21:03] price declines and missed regulatory filings over the last
[21:07] few years. According to Space News, nearly
[21:10] half of the space SPAC companies have announced significant
[21:15] workforce reductions. Many have since been sold off on
[21:19] the cheap, taken private, given up on space, or even shut down.
[21:24] There've been numerous failed launches, and the one bright
[21:27] spot on the horizon is that Elon Musk announced over the weekend
[21:32] that SpaceX will start flying Mars missions in just two years
[21:36] time. So that will definitely happen.
[21:40] Tech Bros have been busy in recent years disrupting the
[21:43] world of finance, too. They've reinvented money and
[21:47] payments with crypto currencies and reinvented markets and
[21:51] financial transactions with Web Three.
[21:53] They even reinvented the receipt with NFTS.
[21:57] Some of this reinvention made certain payments faster and
[22:01] cheaper by ignoring the law and industry best practices.
[22:05] Things like anti money laundering regulations and know
[22:08] your customer rules can add significant costs for financial
[22:12] firms. Web 3 was supposed to somehow
[22:15] make transactions free or extremely cheap while making a
[22:19] large sums of money for the people who invested in it, and
[22:23] it's hard to understand how these goals could be achieved
[22:26] simultaneously. The conflict at the heart of
[22:29] fintech is the tech companies focus on product and user
[22:34] experience with the aim of reducing friction to ensure
[22:37] seamlessness. This focus often takes
[22:40] precedence over compliance matters.
[22:43] According to the ABA, 93% of fintech struggle to meet
[22:48] compliance requirements, and over 60% of fintech companies
[22:52] paid at least $250,000 in compliance fines in 2023 alone,
[22:59] stemming from a lack of transaction monitoring,
[23:02] insufficient customer due diligence, and a failure to
[23:05] report suspicious actions. Traditional finance firms often
[23:10] manage to have compliance problems, but without a focus on
[23:13] user experience, which is also a thing that you can do.
[23:18] More and more, we're reading news about how people who used
[23:21] to love their smartphones now hate them.
[23:24] Some argue that the reason behind this is that in recent
[23:27] years, apps have been optimized not to make a user's life
[23:31] easier, but instead to maximize the time spent on the app and to
[23:36] maximize user engagement. Why does a water bottle, a
[23:40] teapot, or a toothbrush come with an app?
[23:42] No one was asking for this. Social media no longer shows a
[23:47] user the photos or tweets that their friends uploaded, instead
[23:51] showing them content created by total strangers that might anger
[23:55] them enough to respond or to scroll through the responses
[23:59] looking for comments that agree with their point of view.
[24:02] This is how you keep an audience scrolling.
[24:05] We're seeing a strong push to ban smartphones at schools
[24:09] because of how they affect young children.
[24:12] Studies show a relationship between high smartphone use and
[24:16] mental health disorders, even amongst adults.
[24:19] To be clear, I'm not anti tech, I love technology.
[24:23] Without it, my career in finance would not have been possible and
[24:26] I wouldn't be able to make videos like these, which I love
[24:29] making. You'll probably have noticed
[24:31] that none of the products I've made fun of are really all that
[24:35] high tech. They're mostly non tech products
[24:38] pitched as if they were tech to achieve a higher valuation.
[24:42] It's no surprise that people like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam
[24:46] Bankman Freed pitched their non tech products to tech investors.
[24:50] A specialist in their industries would have and did spot the
[24:54] flaws in what was being sold. And by no means saying that all
[24:58] new technology is junk. The tech industry has hugely
[25:02] improved the way that we live. But it's important not to be
[25:06] tricked by marketing. Thanks for tuning in again to
[25:09] this week's podcast. The podcast is listener funded
[25:12] by supporters on Patreon, and if you want to sign up for that,
[25:16] there's a link in the show notes.
[25:18] Have a great week and talk to you again soon.
[25:20] Bye. If you enjoyed this episode, be
[25:23] sure to subscribe so you're notified when a new episode is
[25:26] posted. Thank you to everyone who is
[25:28] supporting this content on Patreon.
[25:31] If you enjoyed this content, you can find more like it on
[25:34] YouTube, on the Patrick Boyle on Finance channel, or follow us on
[25:38] Twitter at Patrick E Boyle. Thanks for listening.
[25:41] Bye.

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