Everybody Needs a New Hook Up
OpenAI's aspirations reverberate through the Bay. Perfect pairs. We can talk!
POD 135: From Pages to Protocols
The open web as we knew it is being dismantled. In this episode, we dive into how the rise of AI agents and new protocols is replacing browsing with prompting, and pages with machine-readable interfaces. Google and Microsoft are rolling out AI-powered tools that make websites disappear into the background, forcing publishers, marketers, and product teams to rethink how value is surfaced and monetized.. Out Friday AM. Listen.
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: A corporate union that plays as wedding invitation.
A staggering $6.5b acquisition announcement underpinned by no real business and vague product promises. Money is a concept. Dreams for sale. Ive muses with the Oxford monk-like cadence befitting a design mystic: “I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment.” This beautiful moment yielded about $120M for each employee of his emergent hardware studio.
A moment that promises to capture a generational hiccup in the Silicon Valley’s space / time continuum. Google is in the crosshairs. Now Apple is too (glad we wrote about this last week). OpenAI wants to be your interface to AI. Being the interface will ultimately push you to hardware.
The nine-minute video showcases Altman and Ive strolling separately through the streets of San Francisco before converging for coffee at Café Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s historic cafe inside the iconic Sentinel Building. Cinematic PR presented as casual iPhone vérité. Ive is a caricature of Ive, the ghost voice of Apple past. Altman is otherworldly. Butterflies. An awkward first date marketed as destiny.
The homeless have been cleared from the set. Roads emptied. Let’s make it a love letter to San Francisco. Altman: “I think there's something about San Francisco, you don't get to pick and choose freedom. Either you have, like, you let creative freedom be expressed in all of its weirdness, or you don't.” I like that about SF too.
In late breaking news, WSJ reports that “the product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.” It will not be a phone or glasses. Altaman went on to say the acquisition could add $1 trillion in market cap. Ay caramba.
Did you guys take this in? Before you respond… the photo of Ive and Altman struck me. I needed to dig up a few historical reference points of perfect pairs:
Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith (1975), The Painter Otto Dix and His Wife, Martha (1925), Simon & Garfunkel by Don Hunstein (1965), “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” by Nan Goldinn (1986), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in France (1944), Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (1960s), John Lennon and Yoko Ono by Annie Leibovitz (1980), "Notting Hill Couple" by Charlie Phillips (1967) In still more late-breaking news, I effortlessly took this photo of my dog with my Meta glasses on this gusty Thursday afternoon.
Brian: Sam Altman badly wants to inherit the Steve Jobs mantle.
He's not an ideal candidate. Jobs grounded his vision in working products, Altman trades in vibes and possibility.
The IO announcement video -- Altman and Jony Ive wandering a beautified San Francisco before converging for a cappuccino -- was a throwback to corporate imagemaking of Before Times. It was lacking in substance and authenticity. No product. No timeline. No interface mockups. Maybe they brought in Spike Jonze to shoot it.
Altman's image crafting always feels calculated. Maybe IO will produce the first truly post-phone device. Or maybe it will join the Segway in the museum of overmarketed tech. Remember when we were told it would “revolutionize urban design”?
Jobs had a reality distortion field, but he always ended with "you can buy this today." Altman’s version is pure abstraction. He’s asking us to believe in a product-free story about friendship -- they only met a couple years ago, but apparently when it's right, it's just right -- because belief itself is part of the asset.
Between this and Brian Chesky's PR hagiography, I wonder if we're seing a return to more traditional PR and away from looser approaches that fit better with the casualization of media.
Alex: Where is Everything?
I just wish we’d get back to showing finished products instead of all this hand-wavy talk about the future. Maybe this partnership is as momentous as Garfunkel meeting Simon but maybe release a single first?
The future is here. We’ve got incredible capabilities sitting on servers, but they haven’t been turned into real products. It’s a weird moment. Some people seem to wish progress would slow down, while others are overselling a future that might never arrive. Meanwhile, we should be busy making new shit.
Uber and Airbnb were built on top of Google Maps. So why is trip planning still a nightmare in an age where I can I have a conversation with AI? I’d love a tool that starts building itineraries, recommend flights, or whatever it is that real travel agents used to do — but better.
Why don’t we have tools that go beyond asking if they can help write this email? Why are we just fawning over AI video without any real use case beyond making sure underpaid editors get fired?
There are some cool things out there. I know things like Granola exists but we should be seeing an explosion of entirely new behaviors. Instead, we’re being pitched the promise of a fully agentic, conversational, do-everything computer we wear on our faces or whatever. It’s like we’re all in a holding pattern but we can’t even agree on the altitude.
It’s frustrating. This should be the exciting part.
ANONYMOUS BANKER
AI’s Impact on Consumer Marketplaces
Last week, Airbnb rolled out a redesigned app that lets travelers book more than a bed for the night. “Airbnb Services” debuted with ten categories (private chefs, massages, personal trainers, even hair stylists) across 260 cities, layered on top of a relaunched “Experiences” product now live in 650 destinations. The message is clear: once Airbnb has secured the customer, it intends to capture every discretionary dollar of the trip, nudging the platform away from transacting on rooms (+houses) toward a full-stack travel commerce engine.
This trend is apparent in the broader marketplace universe. In well-developed markets like travel, the cost to acquire and service consumers has approached parity with the revenue marketplaces generate from the primary offering. Marketplaces must attach ancillary services to their main offerings to generate a positive contribution margin.
With the impending disruption of content discovery by AI, the margin math becomes even more fraught as purchase journeys begin inside ChatGPT or other large language models. If an AI assistant can assemble a travel itinerary in seconds, the discovery layer is instantly commoditized, and consumers will be tempted to book directly with each supplier. Marketplaces, therefore, need a counter-moat: value-added services that are genuinely easier (or cheaper) to buy in one place, integrated payments, and loyalty programs that reward repeat purchases.
Winning the next decade of online travel and, by extension, any online-to-offline marketplace will require a focus on locking in the consumer and garnering as much wallet share as possible. Platforms must be able to bundle high-margin services, with sticky ecosystems, and surface AI-driven recommendations at the moment of intent.
LINKS FROM GROUP CHAT
Google is feeling the urgency and moving fast.
I/O was an orgy of AI releases. Of note, DeepMind and Veo3 can now do voice and it is pretty nuts. Now we can talk!
Casey Newton recaps Google’s I/O blitz, where every product is now an AI product and “Gemini” is the new Google. LINK
Tina Brown explores Barry Diller’s enduring role as media’s Big Dog and why he remains a player in a transformed industry. LINK
Kara Swisher reclaims the center of the podcasting universe with multiple shows, a Vox deal, and a growing media orbit. LINK
Swisher and Galloway turn down a $40 million guarantee, betting on back-end upside in a new Vox revenue split deal. LINK
YouTube’s Brian Albert pushes creators to court the NFL, signaling how sports and advertiser-safe content are merging on the platform. LINK
Wealth, once a mark of glamour or power, is being rebranded by the ultra-rich as private, prudent, and deliberately boring. LINK
YouTube's embrace of Tony Hinchcliffe and other comedians signals a shift toward monetizing provocative podcast content once considered brand-unsafe. LINK
Ben Thompson traces how AI agents shift power from platforms to users, and why the original sin of the web is being corrected. LINK
Jony Ive takes a leading role at OpenAI, bringing design ethos to the heart of AI hardware ambitions. LINK
Jony Ive and Sam Altman are collaborating on a compact, screen-free AI device—neither a phone nor glasses—designed to serve as a third core device alongside smartphones and laptops. LINK
Microsoft sets out its AI agents vision at Build 2025, positioning itself as steward of the open agentic web. LINK
Eurovision becomes a proxy for Israel–Europe tension, as music collides with geopolitics in a famously apolitical space. LINK
Coinbase’s recent hack exposed old-school vulnerabilities, including bribery, and reignited fears over crypto’s physical-world risks. LINK
Bernie Sanders says the Democrats are “a threat to democracy,” continuing his campaign for economic populism on a new podcast circuit. LINK