Rowan Trollope & Cisco Spark brings simple, affordable, supreme quality video conf to everyone

Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, your one-stop solution for all your hiring needs. Post a job to 100+ job sites with one click, rank candidates, set up interviews, and onboard new employees. Visit ziprecruiter.com/twist to sign up for a free trial. And by PagerDuty, serving as the hub of your operations, aggregating all of your infrastructure monitoring tools and alerting the right people and teams at the right time. Sign up today at pagerduty.com/twist Go to www.beauty.com/twist and get a free t-shirt with your first alert.

Hey, everybody! Hey, everybody! What an amazing episode of This Week in Startups we have for you today. It's a little startup known as Cisco, and my friend Rowan Trollope, who works there, is going to debut their new teleconferencing system and their business messaging app, which will remind you just a wee bit of Yammer, Slack, and, uh, HipChat. It's a very interesting episode, because we get to see inside of a large corporation that's bought a bunch of startups, and how they're trying to to be entrepreneurial. We always talk about, hey, never worry about the big companies because they're not moving very fast and they're not going to compete. But in this case, you have a big giant like Cisco, which has made an incredible telepresence product for $1,500 that they've matched with the power of Yammer, Slack, HipChat, etc., IRC. It is a very insightful episode and a very cool product. Stick with us. —Hey everybody, hey everybody. It's Jason Calacanis, and we are here, and I've got a raspy voice because the Warriors beat LeBron James and 4 other players on the Cleveland Cavaliers last night, and I'm wearing my David Lee jersey, represent! Um, and apologies if my voice is a little raspy, but I was screaming my brains out. One more game to go, and the Warriors will be the world champions. We've got two swings at bat. I think they're gonna do it. I think they're gonna get it done in Game 6, and they'll, uh, come back here to a huge celebration on Market Street. So, on the program, it's This Week in Startups, right? We talk about startups all the time, but entrepreneurship is finding its way inside of big companies, and That trend, uh, is something that I think Cisco is probably doing the best job of any major company, uh, out there. And I know this because one of my friends, Rowan Trollope, is now working for them. You previously were with Symantec for two decades. You started at Symantec when you were like 15 years old. I started at Peter Norton when it was a startup. You worked at Peter Norton, which got bought by Symantec.

And then we became, you know, a multi-billion-dollar unicorn from the '90s.

Which is crazy, and it was in Santa Monica, I remember. And you grew up in California, Silicon Valley, in LA. But you were a bit of a child prodigy. I mean, you started working there for Peter Norton at what age? 18. 18. And you didn't go to college?

No. And you started working—

Couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford going to college.

I was like, the hottest startup at the time was Peter Norton Computing, Norton Utilities.

Were you a developer or something at that time? You were an engineer at that time, at 18, self-taught.

Yeah, self-taught. I had been doing it since I was 11.

How many people were at Peter Norton's company at the time?

Uh, I don't know, it was like one floor, like a building like this, about a floor, so 100, 150.

And that became one of the largest companies, my God. Yeah, it blew up.

Symantec bought us. Yeah. And then, uh, the thing that actually blew up with Norton was like Norton Antivirus and Norton Utilities and all that stuff.

Yeah, and people don't remember, Windows was a bit of a disaster for the '90s.

Understatement of the day. Yeah, understatement of the day.

I mean, why did Windows Why did Windows have such security problems? Were they just bad at it?

You know, they chose open versus secure. I don't think anyone knew what was coming with the internet. So Windows was developed before the internet, right? Right. It was sort of like— or really before it took off, '95, right, somewhere in there. So, uh, I don't think they knew what— they weren't ready for that. Um, and companies like ours, us at Norton, we were just really good at closing off all the holes in Windows, whether it was like the disks would crash or you deleted a file and you need to get it back. That's the stuff we —were the experts at, was making Windows really work for people. Yeah. When security became a problem, boom, there we were.

That was really where it went supernova. That's where it went supernova. So you did 20 years there, you put your two decades in. Yep. And then I know you had a lot of different opportunities to maybe become a startup founder. You had a lot of different CEO gigs. I mean, you ran at the peak at Symantec, how many employees?

Uh, we had 20,000 in the company, and, you know, I had about half of those, a quarter of those.

Wow, a quarter of those.

I was the president of the cloud. So when we, when cloud sort of started happening, I took over the— yeah, and said we're gonna go do cloud. So I was president of the cloud SaaS business first on the security side.

And then about a year ago, you were like, hey, or two years ago, you're like, hey Jason, I'm going to Cisco, I've got a really special project, can't talk to you about it, yeah, but I'll talk to you in a year. Yeah. And so I went by last year and I was like, oh my god, this is incredible, you gotta come on the show and show it. Now of course everybody's been in a Cisco conference room at like one of these big VCs or a big company and you see this, the guys with money, the guys with money money, spend a quarter million dollars, half a million dollars building these executive boardrooms that get used for 2 hours a week. Yeah. Or maybe 2 hours a month, but sometimes more, um, where they have these incredible, incredible acoustics and these beautiful teleconferencing systems, which obviously use the cloud, and they're perfect and buttery. Now listen, I used to go to meetings, I'm a huge fan, um, for these things, but there's a totally different level when you set up the gear in the room, but that stuff is not obtainable, right? Right. So you have like conferencing stuff like Google Groups or Google Hangouts. Then you have like GoToMeeting. Yeah. And then you had, you know, which is like maybe $50 a month or $30 a month, I'm not sure what it costs. And then you have over here $250,000 Cisco room. Right, exactly. Nothing in between. Exactly. You built the in-between.

We did. That was my vision. So I came from being extraordinarily frustrated. I remember driving down the 101 one day, like 2009. Yeah. What the heck is going on here? Like, why is it that when I get I go to the office, I have to go backwards in time with my communications technologies, right? And we had deployed like 3 or 4 of those $100,000 rooms or whatever. There was a time it was Halo. And I was— this stuff's like silly. I need something for everyone. Right. So that was my like kind of driving motivation over the last 3 years was bring this stuff to everyone. And to do that, you got to scale a totally different scale, right? You got to have something that you don't need IT for. You got to have something that is super simple. You can plug it in, anyone can figure it out at the right price. You know, I figured the right price for a conference room would be maybe the size of You know, you got these beautiful TVs in here. About the price of one of these TVs, $1,500 to $2,000.

Yeah, nobody ever thinks like, even if a startup only raised a quarter million dollars, if they spent $1,000 or $1,500 on a TV, they would never question it.

In fact, all my friends that run startups, and I do a bunch of stuff with startups on the side, come to me all the time and say, "Oh, you're at Cisco now, do you have something for me?" Right. And they need this big time, like, you know, Chris at Gobbler is constantly on my case about, "Gotta give me something, gotta give me something." Well, here it is.

Let's just take a look at it. What is this device we're looking at here?

So this is our little do-it-yourself telepresence system.

Okay, what's it called?

It's called the Cisco SX10, is the model number. SX10.

So you guys are still doing a great job on branding. Yeah. How do you get the number SX10? Let me ask you a great question.

We don't promote it with that number. Right.

But at a big company like— Small.

S is for small. Got it.

But when you're at a company like, a big company like that, is there somebody whose job it is to name everything? Is there somebody who comes up with the names? Or is there like a whole department or floor that names stuff?

There's probably like a whole, like, organization of people.

That is like, by the way, we've, uh, we've looked at your device, Rowan, and it's now being called —called the SX10, and here's why. The legacy systems— I call it DIY video conferencing.

DIY video conferencing.

Super simple. So this thing is $1,500. Yep. And it's a computer in there. It's an Android operating system or something. Yep. Basically. And you plug it in and it just—

Yeah. So I mean, I brought it in today. So you brought it into the studio here at WeWork. Your studio doesn't have video in it for this purpose. No. So I brought it in. I plugged, you know, two cables, HDMI, and I used the TV that was already here. Yep. So we got it right here.

Easy peasy. So that's just some LG TV that was already sitting —right—

in your studio. There's another one over there, but yeah. And, uh, you had an Ethernet jack, so we plugged it in there, and that was it. And then I turned it on, and, uh, there's no remote. You actually use our app in the App Store to control it. Okay, so let's go to that.

So $1,500, you get beautiful video conferencing in your room, you get that little device, it's in reach of everybody. So now what does the app look like, and what's the interface? Yeah, that's the other thing that's like, once you get into one of these Cisco systems, everybody's bit— or any of these conference room systems, like every time I go into a conference room, there's like 3 different controls, there's 5 different pages of documents, and nobody can figure out how to do it. They —when you call the reception, she doesn't know, or he doesn't know. Then they call IT, that person— IT comes, it's not working, there's a cable, they're under the desk, and the meeting's over. Exactly. It's a disaster.

So the way I look at it is there's like 7 minutes that happen at the beginning of every meeting where people try and fiddle around. So one thing we wanted to do is there's no dialing. There's no telephone numbers. You don't dial telephone numbers with this thing. Okay.

But that's how it used to work. You had to dial the Cisco number.

Yeah, and if you walked into this room and you had never been in the room, and someone said, well, let's do a video, how would they call you? You'd have to find the number. Well, we wanted to do away with all of that complexity, literally zero touch. Okay.

So the first thing we had to do— And wait, there's a secret here of how it does that. Yeah, we're gonna show you. The secret of how it pairs your phone to the device, to the SX10, I think is probably the hottest piece of this technology. I'm gonna tell you about it when we get back on commercial break. There we go. Hey everybody, your company is only as good as the people you hire, and that is obvious. We all know that. And posting jobs in one place won't find you quality candidates. No, you need a one-stop solution for your hiring needs. You need to post to 100 job sites with a single click and instantly be matched with candidates from 4 million resumes, and that is ZipRecruiter. It has been used by 400,000 businesses, and they rank the candidates, set up interviews, and they onboard your new employmees— employees with no placement fees. Pricing is based on how many jobs are posted by the hiring manager, and we've used it here at Launch, and we just actually, with our first gig, received 6 high-quality candidates in the first day for our designer. And ranking and managing candidates was painless and easy with their interface. Um, it's a 4-day trial for you at ZipRecruiter.com. Twist. So go to ZipRecruiter.com/twist and get a 4-day free trial. ZipRecruiter.com/twist, 4-day free trial. It is an amazing product, and like I said, we've had a great response from using it in the first— first with the first job. I mean, the first day we got 6 great candidates. So that was amazing. Thanks again to ZipRecruiter for sponsoring independent media like This Week in Startups. And go ahead and give it a shot. It's an amazing product that will help you with all of your recruiting needs. Thanks again at ZipRecruiter. Go to ZipRecruiter.com/twist. OK. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey everybody! Hey everybody! Welcome back to This Week in Startups. My guest today is Rowan Trollope. You can follow him on Twitter @RowanTrollope, two L's, one P. And he is, uh, some Senior Vice President of yada yada yada at Cisco. I don't even know. What's your title? Collaboration technology. I run the collaboration stuff at Cisco. Gotcha. SVP. That's very— that means super very important.

Yeah, not really.

SVP is as high as it goes, or EVP is the next one? Uh, EVP. EVP. All right. So there's another— yet another level for you to attain. Yeah. Even beyond this. Um, and he's been working on Cisco's new SX10, $1,500, pretty cool. Um, but there's no phone number for it. Uh, and this is really brand new, like this isn't in the market yet. No. When does it go to market, by the way? When can I buy one? Soon. Shortly. Imminently. So we're sitting here in the midway part of 2015. Yeah. Took you what, a year to develop this? Year and a half?

Uh, it took us basically 2 years to do the backend cloud service. Mm-hmm. OK. Uh, and then to do the iPhone app, which is actually a business message. So we, we combined video conferencing and business, that's sort of this hot new category, business messaging.

Which started with Yammer. Originally not. HitChat. Mm-hmm. Slack. IRC.

Yeah, it really started with WeChat, uh, with, um, with like, uh, people using WhatsApp. I would say WhatsApp kind of was the first kind of like messaging app platform.

And people started using it for business.

And they started using it for business, and we saw that. I saw that and said, said, "Hey, this is awesome. Why can't I do this at work?" So we built one of those. But when we built it, we built it in two parts. A core platform to power it, and then the app itself.

Okay, let's see here. So we'll pull up the app now.

So it's free. You can download Cisco Spark from the App Store.

Yeah, so ciscospark.com on the web, by the way. And so you just type in Cisco Spark into your app store.

So here, I'm just going to open the app, and you will see this looks super— there it is. It's super familiar in terms of what it looks like here, right? Yeah.

Uh, you've got all of my apps. It looks like WhatsApp or Slack or HipChat.

Exactly. And so— so here's the room we created just before— just before— here we go. There it is. And you can see we've got support for, you know, PowerPoint files, you know, super simple.

Scroll around. You can dump in images. Yeah, whatever. So this just looks like any other business chat room, right?

But where it becomes really much more powerful is I'm gonna pick Matt here, for example. So Matt is one of the guys. Now, what we wanted to do— I had to think about How to bring startup innovation into a big company. I bought 3 startups. OK. And we had one that we just bought when I got acquired. That's the team that makes up the core of this innovation team.

Ah, got it.

4 startups that actually we, we plopped here in San Francisco, and we've been working on these.

Down in Mission Bay? Yeah, Mission Bay. Nice area down there, right?

It's beautiful. So all I have to do now is I've opened the app, and you can see at the very top of this list, see that SFO-12? Yeah. That's this guy. Got it. Okay, it's got a weird name because it's for our lab, but that's this guy right here.

You just took that out of the San Francisco Building 12, Meeting Room 3 or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So you have some naming configuration there.

So, but in order to call Matt, I don't even know what—

In my startup, that could just be Conference Room A or Conference Room B. Yeah, yeah.

Now, what's beautiful about this is I didn't have to pair these two devices. It used high-frequency audio tones. Okay. So as soon as this guy turns on, he starts emitting a code in high frequency. and this guy turns on the mic and listens for it. The app. So the app is listening, the device is emitting, they then both pair through the cloud, and now that becomes an extra— this is now an extra screen, microphone, sort of audio, and connected to your phone. It's actually not connected to the phone, it's connected to the cloud.

Connected to the cloud. So your phone has control over it through the cloud. So that means when we go into a conference room, 4 or 5 people, and we all take the app out, we can all access it. So you don't have to like— you don't have to log in or get a code or a passcode or anything.

The basic idea is —In fact, if you tried it in this building, you know what it's like, because they have some other technology here. I also have an office in this building. It's hard to do. You have to—

I think they have Crestron or something. Crestron is like what rich people put in their homes, when they want to frustrate themselves. It's like always so impressive when I go to like Sky Dayton's house or Chamath's house, and they're like, "Check out my Crestron system," or whatever. Yeah, and I'm like, "Yeah, okay, can we put the game on?" And they're like, "Yeah, no, totally. Let me just hold on. I gotta call Steve. I gotta get Steve on the phone." I'm trying to get DirecTV, they're like, "Oh yeah, patch AV1." —to TV 2, to remote control 3.

It never works. But Sky and Chamath are keeping all those AV employees. It's unbelievable.

And then, like, Sonos. I have Sonos in my house, and Sonos, like, my audio always works. They're like, "I can't play Spotify." I'm like, "Really? I can play radio, Spotify, or Rhapsody." Exactly.

In 10 seconds. So, um, okay, so let's show you how this is. This is basically video for everyone. So what we've done, we've taken video, we've taken mobile messaging, yeah, and integrated natively voice and video conferencing. So all I have to do is hit one button. I went into the room with Matt Cutler. There it is.

And there's a little camera on the top right.

Hit the call button. And then what you're going to see is here, it is using— says at the very top, calling using SFO 12-3 Tong Qiang. Okay. Right. And it's going to actually initiate a call. You can see behind me.

Oh, it's ringing.

It's ringing, but I've actually just dialed him on my phone. Right.

And you're calling him not through your phone, but through this device on the cloud. Exactly. And his device in that conference room, because he's in that phone. So this idea that nobody knows how to use the conference bedroom system ends. Boom! Done. You basically just got rid of the manual, you got rid of the receptionist's job, the IT guy's job, everybody's done. Yep. So you just eliminated all these positions. Haha. No, that's basically it.

And we're gonna have lots of these. Now all of a sudden, we're gonna get amazing video everywhere.

Right. So you took the price of it down from— what was it down to already? Because it wasn't a quarter million dollars, but— No, we— $50,000?

I, on average, reduced the prices by 85% across the lineup. Wow. Yeah. And I reduced the number of we had like 65. So we did a billion and a half in video. We had 65 different systems. I reduced it down to 17 systems. Got it. By the way, last year on those systems, we won 8 Red Dot Awards.

I don't know what a Red Dot Award—

Red Dot Award is like the, the Oscars for product design. Oh wow. Okay, Apple last year won 6. Wow. Okay, we won 8. Cisco, in the history of Cisco, in 25 years of submitting products, has won 6 awards. Wow. For this product lineup, we won 8 awards, which is more of just a reflection of that we built something that anyone can use. Right. Like, you know who votes on it is people like that shoe designer Jimmy Choo. Right. Like, just random people who are really, really super smart, design-oriented.

So the rooms are down to $25K or $50K or whatever.

We got that now. We have one— so this one's $1,500.

Right.

We have one for $7,000. Right. And then maybe $5,000 even. Yeah.

On up from there. Got it. But this is the real revolution. You've now got it within, like, reaching distance. Within reaching distance. A 5-person or 10-person company can get one. No big deal. And no infrastructure setup needed.

That's the key, right?

You don't need to have an IT sysadmin to set this up. It's all through the cloud.

I did this myself.

Is there a subscription you have to pay, like a monthly fee to use all the video, or by hour? How does it work?

By megabit? We haven't figured out the commercials on it yet, but there's gonna be a subscription fee. So the way it works right now, Slack— Spark, you can get for, um, for free, up to 3 users, right? Okay. And then if you want to get 25-user video, or you want to get all the enterprise features, all that stuff, then you, you can buy the messaging, or the messaging and meeting capabilities. Got it. And that's like $15 and $25 a user a month. —Got it.

So if you have a small company, it's going to be similar to the price of Slack. Or actually, maybe Slack and HipChat are maybe half that price.

—We're competitive.

—Competitive, yeah. Because I think what you need to do is make this— make it scale. Like, maybe I would make it under 25 people is just free. Boom. And then go from there. So what I really appreciate about this—

It is free for unlimited number of users. It's for simultaneous users in a video call.

Oh, I see. So if you're only going to have —4 or 5 people in the conference call and you have 20 people in your company, you're only paying for that. Exactly.

Got it. Just the simultaneous video users. So right now we have users, we have organizations with thousands of users, but it's using it for free. They just don't get all the sort of— in a similar way to what everyone else is doing in the freemium model. Yeah. You don't get all the enterprise features.

But now, what I notice about this is that the quality is vastly superior to like using the camera in— Your Mac. The Mac. Now is that because of the cloud or is that because of the actual optics in the camera? Both, actually. It's all of them working together.

Working in concert. So number one, we have our own— first of all, we have a way bigger camera here.

So if you see— yeah, when you look at the camera, I mean, it looks big, like a big wide and long camera. And the point there is Matt's sitting—

if you see Matt on the screen, he's sitting in a regular conference room.

This is silent Matt.

Hey Matt, what's up, dude?

Hey guys, what's going on? Yeah, yeah. So he's not like in a super— this is a regular internet connection. And over the top. Yeah. Yeah. Just through the regular internet. Yeah.

Whatever they have here in this building. We didn't know. We just plugged it in and it's work. That's amazing.

I mean, it just looks so beautiful. And these are low-light cameras too, I guess.

Yeah. They work super well. You don't need to have any custom lighting. Again, the idea was like, has to work everywhere. Has to work everywhere and anywhere.

Now, if I'm in the same chat room here, which I am, I could click on mine and just turn my camera on.

Well, you're where I'm right now in a room just with Matt. But if I leave this room, I'll jump in a room with you. So Matt, I'm going to just jump in the room with, uh, with Jason.

I think I'm in the Twist room. I'm in the Twist room, I think. So I just clicked on my camera in the Twist room and there I am. I got to make sure I don't like double echoing in here since we got everybody in the same room.

So now I've got my thing here and I can join with this. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. What happens is— there you go, you're going to get your image now. Make sure you—

oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got to mute myself. Mute. There we go. I muted myself in time.

There you go. Yeah. So now we've got a 3-person call. —me.

And if I talk, I take over the big screen, just like anything else. And you can see really the fidelity of the camera that comes with a Mac is just garbage. It's like the cheapest one they could ever put into it. And the fidelity of yours is just extraordinary.

Yeah. So then the idea is we control the hardware, the software, the network, and the cloud.

But it's not as complicated as these previous products have been. Not at all. Yeah, I did it. All right, so we get back from the next commercial break. I want to talk— and it's pretty impressive. I mean, I'm just— I'm thinking about it, like, even when we have a remote guest, you know, it's like, it's always hard to have a remote guest because it's very hard to get the quality right. And GoToMeeting is really solid. Skype isn't very solid. Google Hangouts is terrible. Although it seems to be Google Hangouts is pretty good for groups, right? Uh, you know, they're okay. It's okay, but they don't have like the bandwidth, the private bandwidth, so you're just like subject to whatever the bandwidth is at that time.

Yeah, and we also work similarly over the top, so just using whatever is available, but it's all about like the ability to recover when the network degrades. So the quality of the codec, the compression/decompression algorithm is super important.

All right. When we get back from commercial break, I want to talk about, you know, Cisco now going heads up against HipChat, which is a large company, Slack, which is a smaller but now larger company, and, you know, how to be— how can Cisco be nimble versus these competitors, and then how do you plan on working with startups, because this is a kind of like a very interesting thing where Cisco is buying a bunch of startups and creating a startup culture inside a big company. How did you get Chambers, or whoever, to buy into this vision, when we get back on This Week in Startups? Hey everybody! Let me take a moment to tell you about PagerDuty. If you don't know what PagerDuty is, it's the thing that developers hate most in their lives. It's when they are at their kid's soccer game or recital. It's when they're at the movies. It's when they're at the gym, they're running a half marathon, and the pager goes off, and something's wrong with the servers. Now, there is a solution for this. one, you gotta build great systems that are redundant, of course, but still, somebody needs to be on call, because it's not always your fault. Sometimes, like, some fiber optic line goes down, or your hosting company screws up, or hardware gets borked. Anything can happen. You know that. And being on call is really brutal, because you get these constant alerts. And PagerDuty aggregates all of those monitoring tools. You have all these different monitoring tools. It puts it all into one place, and it pays for itself by keeping developers happy, because it sends only the alerts that are necessary to only the people who are on duty, and you can roll —You don't want to roll your own monitoring system like this. You want to use a professional system like PagerDuty. They've done all the work. It would take you literally years of development time to build this awesome system they've built, and consumers love the apps. They have iOS and Android apps, because a lot of your developers are going to be on Android, obviously. Um, and this lets them be on the go and receive alerts. And all the top PagerDuty clients, um, are obvious. Atlassian with HipChat, Pinterest, New Relic, Airbnb, Panasonic, Slack, Path. All these great companies use PagerDuty, because they want to keep their developers happy, and make sure that their systems are up and running. running. In fact, Chartbeat, which is one of the companies I've invested in, uses PagerDuty. And PagerDuty gives Chartbeat one central place to send critical alerts. "We now have a simple, easy process for on-call scheduling," says Justin Linz, who is a senior operations engineer at Chartbeat. So here's your call to action, everybody. Go ahead and sign up for a 14-day trial at pagerduty.com/twist. pagerduty.com/twist. Get a free t-shirt when you sign up for your first alert. And thank you so much to our friends at PagerDuty, because they built a great product that keeps developers engaged and loving their jobs. Thanks again, @pagerduty. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. My guest is Rowan Trollope, and he's with a little startup called Cisco, run by a founder named John Chambers. Now, is John still running the place?

He has named his successor. Oh, he did name a successor? Chuck Robbins. Yeah. And so John's stepping down.

Chuck's been with the company forever.

17 years. 17 years. Enterprise sales.

Enterprise sales person. And what's the main business at Cisco still? Is it the routers, these huge routers that move data around the internet?

Yeah, the infrastructure that powers the internet, it's like half of the business or more. Data center is another big piece of it. So even like the stuff that, you know, a lot of the big cloud providers actually use in the backend is Cisco hardware.

Yeah, like these crazy routers that can move so much data, and it's like it never ends.

Like, yeah, well, the internet's just— I mean, Internet of Things now is kind of cranking up the volumes on the internet.

Cisco is like a really important company, because these competitors out of China, like, there's real security concerns about, like, making sure that we don't bring in these Chinese competitors. Was it Huawei? Huawei. Huawei. That, like, it was amazing, like, Huawei is, like, literally, I mean, you can't comment on this, but I can, like, they were literally, like, copying all the intellectual property from Cisco, and then, like, putting backdoors in it for the Chinese government. Like, yeah, go ahead, here, take these routers and put them in American companies, while meanwhile we're being hacked relentlessly by the Chinese, and Google is like, and we're trying to figure out how we censor the Chinese hackers who nobody knows, and people want to bring in Huawei's routers. I'm like, are you guys think this is wise?

I suggest they buy Cisco routers.

It's definitely like, we really have to think about it as a country, like, who are we gonna give our infrastructure to? Because the attacks are nonstop. But now here's an interesting question. Slack is a —really fast-growing company. Obviously, they're not gonna sell to Cisco. I'm assuming you guys tried to buy them. No, actually. No, you didn't try to buy them, uh, but you bought a bunch of other companies. You have HipChat, Atlassian's great product. We use that. Um, although I have a HipChat room now for This Week in Startups and one for Atlassian. Now you're going into the category. Has Cisco's customers even heard of Yammer or, you know, HipChat? Are they using it, or is it like not a phenomenon for big corporate America?

I would say not yet, although if you think about the evolution of the category, I mean, we're the leaders in messaging today. Right. So with, uh, we have Jabber. We've had that for quite a few years, but that's premise-based messaging. And so we've evolved that to business messaging, basically similar product.

What do you mean, like location-based or?

So Jabber is, you know, a desktop and mobile-based client, but the enterprise IT racks and stacks the server. Ah. As opposed to a cloud-based mobile-first, which is what we've now built. So this was the natural successor to that. Um, but we— but more importantly, we combined all the modalities, so voice, video, conferencing, all into one place. And you've—

you're moving fast. You feel like you're moving as fast as, like, these startup companies? And what's it been like? I mean, how did you get John Chambers to sign off on starting a startup inside of Cisco? Yeah, so credit to him.

So when I started, I said, I'm gonna take this business to the cloud, right? That's what I've been doing. I'm not coming here to manage a premise business. And he's like, if anyone's gonna disrupt this business, it should be us. So go for it. So I— for my first hire was a CTO from Skype, Jonathan Rosenberg, you know, a luminary in the industry. And I said, we're gonna take this baby to the cloud, and we're gonna make this available to everyone. And so he was on board. We hired a bunch of software people from different software companies and Apple and everywhere else. And we just— and then what we did is we bought, like, in succession, we had 4 startups that we bought. We bought— well, Versely was just before I started, but Collaborate.com we talked to earlier, Matt, the CEO. Uh, we bought, uh, Assemblage, which is a WebRTC startup out of Denmark. And then we just recently completed the acquisition of Tropo. And so I had to bring basically startup DNA into the company and, and create that kind of innovation culture within the organization to go build this thing.

And does an organization like Cisco try to expel the startup culture? Does it try to slow it down in all honesty? Do you have to protect it, or do people go, "Oh my God, look, they're going fast over there. What lessons can we learn?" And are you having an impact on the rest of the organization, which is going faster and lighter?

Yeah, we are having an impact in that people are looking at that as— and John Chambers has been holding this up as the example, what we've done with Spark, to say, "Look what we've done there. We need to do that in other places." And my boss, who's the Chief Development Officer, also has been sort of like really using this as the example. So, um, yeah, so I think there is definitely recognition of the need to transform the business through these kinds of small, fast-moving teams. And it's a small team. It's not a huge team. Yeah. Under 500 people. Oh yeah. Like under 200. Wow. Yeah.

Because a big company, like, to do a project at this scale, they would be like, yeah, you're going to need to have 1,000 people. You can't really do it. That would be the normal way.

Yeah. Yeah. We started with 40 and then we're very selective about adding anyone additional.

Did they have like a bunch of like, you have to fill out these TPS reports, you got to fill out this product spec before you do anything, you got to get approval from the board. You got to do all this. No. Or did they just say away with the paperwork?

Uh, they didn't have any of that and I didn't deal with any of that. I just said, this is what we're doing. And, you know, I'm at a senior enough level that I just, by, by also by moving it into a different facility, I just kind of like went, I just ran as fast as I could, uh, and built everything before anyone could say no.

It's critical to be in a different physical location.

It does. It does help. It does help, especially when you're trying to do internal transformation. Right. Um, and then also being in San Francisco where a lot of the talent is, for all of our acquisitions that we did, uh, mandatory that they relocate to San Francisco. We literally moved everyone here to San Francisco. Wow. Um, it's not cheap. No. It wasn't cheap for them.

But I mean, how many of these things would a company like Cisco wind up selling? I mean, it would be not thousands, tens of thousands of these units you expect will be, you know, more.

No, no, no, more. We already sell hundreds of thousands, millions, millions of these units.

Millions. Wow. Yeah, because they do billions of dollars.

Well, think about it. Okay, so here's a stat for you. 5% of conference rooms today have video stuff in them. And most of that, as you know, doesn't work. It's like you go in, where's the device? How do I connect it? Everyone wastes time. So that number is going to be— and so like Project 4 forward. And you can say, well, eventually 100% of rooms will be natively enabled with this magical technology, right? That's what I want to create. I want to have 100% of the rooms, they're all backed by this awesome cloud service. You don't even have to think, you literally say who you want to talk to, you tap the button, and boom, that person just shows up. Now, will these be built into Monitor soon?

Or will they like— what's the next rev from this? Because that's $1,500. And I just started thinking about that, like, wow, I wonder if like—

we have an all-in-one package. So we have a package where we've integrated the audio, the video, everything all into one nice beautiful screen. You can hang it on a wall and it's like $5,000, right? So that— when you monitor— yeah, and when you add up like your current— and look, I'm buying panels from the same two factories everyone else buys them from, right? Okay, so you've got my include in my enclosure. The question I think you could ask is, is there some point where this just gets built into a Samsung or whatever? But they have a fundamentally different model where they're looking for the lowest-cost flat-screen possible. And so spending, you know, $500 on a piece of glass is not something that they're interested in doing, but it is something I'm interested doing.

Now, do you see this going down to the individual desktop level? Because if the cameras really suck in the laptops— like, I used to carry actually like that Logitech, they had a really nice Logitech 1080p camera. I always tell when we had guests on the show, like, hey, let's go to a meeting, put this 1080p camera, and all of a sudden it looks 10 times better. Yeah. Do you see this becoming like a desktop version?

We have one already. So this exact camera that you see right here, we have— it's exactly that that with a little USB out, a little cable right out. So you can actually buy that today from us. Oh, really? Yeah, it's awesome. But the difference is that uses the processor on your computer, which may not be as good. Right.

So if your computer starts to have problems, or you're loading a PowerPoint, or you're doing something in the background, that's where I think there's a lot of problems with doing, like, the Google Hangouts and all this stuff, is that if somebody's computer is downloading BitTorrent in the background, or their Dropbox decides to sync, or whatever else they have going on on their desktop, Evernote syncs, like all of a sudden the fidelity of the call goes crazy. Like, I think you need to have like dedicated hardware to do this properly.

Yeah, for now. Eventually they're going to get better and then we want to— everybody keeps saying that.

I know, right? You know why? Because I think that everybody keeps making things that are much more, um, uh, that take over so much of your bandwidth and processing and it tries to do it faster. So it's like, oh, Evernote needs to sync. Well, let's just do it as fast as possible and take as much bandwidth and circuitry as we can. And then all of a sudden it degrades. What I like the idea of is, I don't know why they don't build in like multiprocessor, multiple independent operating systems.

Mm-hmm. That would be, that would be an interesting way of going. Yeah, we actually did that recently. We built a desktop unit. Yeah, it's called the, the, I call it the telepresence.

Yeah, you show this to me. Yeah, yeah.

And that thing has a dedicated processor just for the video and audio. Yeah. And then you plug in your laptop as your main compute device. And so that way we, it's like a coprocessor for video. We totally offloaded it. It can never go wrong ever.

—right, your computer could crash and you'd still be on the call.

No problem.

I think that's the future of this. So how are you going to get this out to the startup community? And then what about the integrations? Because, you know, anybody can rebuild, you know, HipChat, Slack, or whatever, but really the value in these companies is the level of integration. So like, exactly, you know, can you put GitHub, can you put Zapier, If This Then That?

I mean, in fact, yeah, we're—

the list of people who have integrated with HipChat, Slack is so impressive.

It's impressive.

Hundreds, if not thousands of integrations.

Yeah, so absolutely, we're going— so we bought, uh, we just recently acquired Tropo, who have 200,000 developers. They understand how to build web-scale platforms for developers, okay? So they are the core, sort of the nucleus of the team that's gonna build the next generation, this platform. We're actually launching webhooks imminently, which will give us a bunch of the integrations. We already have a bunch of those integrations working internally. But the more important thing is not us, like, whether you can use this or HipChat or Slack or what have you, okay? That's interesting, but what's more interesting to me is, We've built a platform where fundamentally, uh, anyone can integrate real-time communications like we've just shown into your app. So I actually want to power— I can do all the plumbing for these large enterprises, you know, with the internet, with the cloud, and getting all the security stuff right, so that I actually want to build a community of startups on top of this platform to usher those companies into the enterprise. Like I said earlier, enterprise is hard. It's generally hostile to startups. Okay, we don't like that. Cisco gets it. Yeah. So we're using that Cisco DNA, but building an open platform that other startups can build on top of. If you want to bring communications apps into the enterprise, that's going to be fundamentally powered by our platform.

So if I wanted to do like a podcasting app and use these for my podcasting app— No problem. —as the recording device, and, you know, Cisco's never going to make like, okay, we're all going to have these Cisco QX10s do a podcast, and we're not going to— you're never going to stitch it together or make RSS feed, you know, and—

Yeah, we're going to make an open platform for you to build that, and make it really, really, really easy to integrate communications directly into your app, whether that's messaging, voice, video, 100 people on video, 1,000. In fact, you know, you're talking about, you know, using this in your, in your show. So, uh, I don't know if you watch Jimmy Kimmel ever, but he's got this— he actually has using the variant of this technology called, um, uh, Wall of America. That Wall of America is a giant wall, and he has like people call in from all over the world. That's using our technology. Oh, that's Cisco. Yeah.

Oh, it's powered by Cisco.

He's the only one in the world that has it today. We started with him to kind of prove that it works. So the way it works, you go to his website and you log in and you're, boom, you're live HD on his, on his show. And there's—

from your camera though?

From whatever camera you have on your laptop.

So he probably sends good cameras to all those people.

Nope, he doesn't. He doesn't? No. What he does is he has producers that make sure that the people who are dialing in have good computers.

Ah, and then they go through it and they're like, okay, make sure you turn off your drop. We do that too. Yeah. And it never works because then we have some —person on, like Robert Scoble or somebody, and they're just like, we tell them to do all this stuff, and they're like, "Yeah, no, no, I turned everything off." And you're like, "No, you didn't. Have you ever rebooted your computer in 2015?" "No." "You have memory leaks everywhere." See what I like—

Go watch Kimmel. It's actually, it's amazing, the quality.

Yeah. See, what I would like to see is, I wonder if you could give those away to any company, or like every 5 employees that you have paying at $125 a month, you get one of those, you know, if you have a 2-year contract, whatever, like that bundle selling so that more of these can get out on the wild.

Exactly. I want as many of these and our other devices out there at the low, at low prices, at affordable prices. Yeah. With this like attention to detail and quality.

Is it meant to be thrown on the desk like that? Because I see that the Cisco logo is upside down. Yeah. So it's a good, it's a good point.

So for example, if I put, let's get the self view up here. Yeah. Just to show you that.

So you have a nice, wow, look how beautiful that is. My God.

So here's you. —part of the thing is like—

when you move it, it doesn't blur at all. It's just incredible. The image— like, this looks as good as our studio camera. It's incredible.

So, so part of this was no matter how you set this thing up, it just works. No IT person necessary. So if I flip it over— you said Cisco logo is upside down, we can fix that.

Oh wow, so it's got accelerometer. Yeah, we just saw it.

And that was a few pennies, but yeah, the point is, of course, think about that.

Yeah, right. It's just like what you're basically doing is you're taking those systems Systems, um, that all had problems in, you know, like you basically went in there and you Uber-fied the Cisco product line, which is to say what sucks, fix it. Exactly. Right. And like, that's what big companies don't do well. We were talking before about Microsoft with Windows. They don't, they're not like, what's the list of all the complaints? And like the list of the complaints of all these conference room systems was how do I log in? What's the phone number of it? But you know, how do I pair it? How do I get somebody on the other end? Like, I mean, this went down and we're like, how do we just make this dead simple?

And it just works. Well, I had the benefit of not having any background in the technology side and communications. So I just said, here's the experience I want, guys. Yeah.

Go figure it out. And then this mounts on the wall. You have all kinds of mounting kits.

So this mounts on the back of the TV. So right above the TV, or just put it on a desk. No, simple little, uh, we have a VESA mount that you can buy.

Oh, there's a VESA mount, right? Yeah. And you just, which is like a standard, Right?

Yeah, standard, kind of like any mount on a TV. And then it has basically just HDMI out for audio and video. And that's what this is coming on. This right here is HDMI.

It's just gorgeous, man. It's really like, I really want to like see a world in which like, everybody has these things and video conferencing. Like, it's just more efficient because right now it's like I do a lot of video conferencing. And I use GoToMeeting, which is fantastic. I really think it's a great product. You could use WebEx, but WebEx is a competitor to that. I don't even know. I've just been using GoToMeeting for a time. But so maybe WebEx is just as good. But, um, you know, the hardware has always been the issue. And like the conference rooms have always been the issue.

So we tied them like this.

Yeah. It's really tight.

WebEx integration into this natively. So the whole idea is you could join a WebEx and you could join a Teleprompter. It's the same thing. So this is one another problem in this industry is, and it's kind of just a historical thing. You had a video conferencing industry emerge and a web conferencing industry emerge and you had to choose.

And you had also audio bridging, audio bridging, and then you also had these chat rooms, right? So again, back to the business message. I just call them chat rooms.

Yeah. Yeah. So my thing was like, I think from the user's perspective, you think if you're a user and you sit there and go, let's have a meeting. Oh, what kind of meeting are we going to have? I got to be video conference. Oh, you've got one of those. I have one too. Oh, you only have GoTo. Okay. Let me use that. Oh, you only have Webex.

Oh, now let me ask you a tough question.

We made them all, all those things. Literally that has to all go away.

In terms of the open stuff, would you allow Slack and HipChat to integrate calling into these? Like, so let's say my company doesn't want to give up Slack or HipChat because we have special integration we built. Would you allow us to connect and use those routers eventually? Is it that open?

Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, we're— we're—

so I think that's super cool.

Yeah, I haven't like finalized on that front, but I definitely want the ability to have anyone write an app that can, can do this. So You know, in this case, we have an app that competes with HipChat and Slack, uh, but I would like to enable them with video. So the number one requested feature on Slack—

That's the number one thing to do.

The number one thing on Slack right now that they're asking for is video.

Yeah, HipChat's got video and audio. I'd love to power it. I'd love to power it. See, that's, I think, will be the key, is if you guys can convince the, you know, the brass, as it were, at Cisco, like, to think— That's me. That's you, right? So you're all the brass.

I just have to convince myself that there's a business case.

And I think there is a business case, which is you make some margin on those, and then there's some fee for using that, right? Yeah. So, because you have so many— you have such— so many people loyal to Slack. I have a group of people loyal to HipChat. Like, people don't want to give those up. You're going to be competing with them. So, like, it's almost like—

My strategy is not to make every single collab app in the whole world. I want to just enable all these startups to build on my platform. Right.

Because if you think about, like, how Apple has done it with iOS, I think Apple is really the gold standard now for how to have an ecosystem that, yeah, sure, you compete with them to a certain extent, but you let the best of breed grow. So nobody— anybody who buys an iPhone can use their contact manager, they can use their calendar, they can use their stock app, they can use their mail client. But everybody also knows that Mailbox, now owned by Dropbox, Sunrise, now owned by Microsoft, you know, right down the line, Instagram, whatever, are better than the native apps on the phone. Exactly. And Apple, it almost seems like, builds their native apps to like this point, and then they're like, okay, up to you guys and gals to go take this to the next level. Right. We're gonna, you know—

But where they haven't done that is where it goes real-time, because it's hard. FaceTime, for example. You can't just embed FaceTime in your app. Hello? That's what I'm building. I want you to be able to embed that right into your app.

Yeah, you know what would be a really good acquisition for you guys is TalkBox. I don't know if you've seen that startup, but TalkBox is really—

Yeah, they've done some interesting things with it.

Yeah, it's a Sequoia-backed company. They started just trying to be like— they could never get the consumer version to work, where they're like, "Hey, it's gonna be free Skype in a browser window." But they really made it work, and now all these startups that I see that are doing video conferencing or doing video stuff, I'm like, "Is that TalkBox?" "Yeah, I'm using TalkBox." So it's sort of like the Twilio of video, back and forth.

But you already kind of already had that. We bought Tropo, right, who had the— they had voice and SMS APIs, have voice and SMS. So like Twilio. Yeah, and then we have all the video. All the stuff I just showed you, those are our APIs. So we have now actually the full complement. —opening and publishing it, which will happen this year.

All right, well, this has been amazing. Um, really appreciate Cisco coming on the program and being honest. It's nice to see, like, the big companies working nicely with the small companies. Yeah. What do you— what do you think is the key to good M&A? Um, you know, having been at, like, big companies for two decades and having seen a lot of stuff bought, I'm sure you've seen things get bought and killed. I've sort of seen things bought and thrive. Most of them fail. Yeah, yeah. But why— so why do they keep happening if most fail? Like, what's your theory on that? Because I have a theory, but I want to hear yours.

Uh, they're hard to do. First of all, you know, there's a great quote from— there's a great quote that I love from Jony Ive, where somebody said, why don't you do more acquisitions? He says, it's a lot easier to design a product than to design a team, right? And when you are acquiring a company, you're, you're basically just getting a team, right? It's like, here you go. So it's really hard to do, which is why I focused on teeny tiny little acquisitions where I spent most of my time thinking about the cultural fit. I care less about the technology and more about how are these people going to work with my team. —right— so each of my acquisitions were 10 people, except for Tropo, was the biggest one at 40. Wow. I'm not a fan of big, large acquisitions. I'm not a fan of big companies in general. I think, as you've seen, the trend is kind of moving to smaller companies. I have a theory.

This is my theory, though, with M&A, why it keeps happening. Because when it does work, it can be so transformative that it pays for the misses. It's almost implied odds, like poker.

Venture.

Yeah, it's like venture or poker, where like like, well, yeah, I shouldn't be playing 5-7 of spades against 3 people who raised, right? But if the board comes like 4, you know, 6 and an ace, uh, oh my God, and I can hit a flush or a straight or whatever, like, this could be a disproportionate win where nobody would ever expect I have this straight. Yeah. And everybody's got an ace-king or an ace-queen or—

this is why— this is why playing poker at your house is difficult.

Yeah, because you guys have a mania for everything. No, I just— I, I think I live for But if you think about it, like, you know, so many things didn't work at Google, and then they hit Android and YouTube, and it's like, "Marone, this is incredible." Then like Facebook hits WhatsApp and Instagram, and Twitter hits Vine and Periscope. Like, it could be totally transformative. And everybody obsesses over like, "Oh, these, you know, 9 didn't work," or "These 90 didn't work." If the one works, like if this product line works, you know, Cisco could go from being this like something that when your company hits 200 people, you sort of start engaging Cisco. But most companies are small. I mean, you can have mom-and-pop shops, and this could be a consumer-level product at some point, I think. Do you think this could be like a consumer thing? Like, if I lived, you know, because I got my Samsung TV, and then it's like a little camera popped out of the top, and you can Skype with it. Not very good, but it does show that like video conferencing for families could be something.

There's nothing— you could take this home and use it, and it would work just fine with everything that you already have now. I mean, you downloaded it at the beginning of the show.

See, that's, I think, would be a very interesting thing when like VCs go on vacation —takeaway—to Italy for a month, or like your startup is working remote, or one of your— like, let's say you have— we have, I don't know, 7 or 8 remote developers. And so it seems like a lot initially to think, oh my god, $1,500 each. But then when you start thinking about it, if it made people use it for 1 hour more a month, right, each, and you got another 50 hours, or let's say 100 hours of collaboration— 100 hours of collaboration are worth at least $200 each, or $100 each. So it pays for itself. Yeah. If you value collaboration, if you—

and if you don't, then you're an idiot. Yeah. You're gonna get your ass kicked in this— in the world we live in today. It's just a fact.

I mean, I think that might be like the case.

See, people are always trying to justify this stuff on the basis of efficiency. And my argument is efficiency is not relevant in an exponential world. What's relevant is agility. How quickly can you adapt to the changing world? And, and, and you— when you hit product-market fit, —yeah— you get outsized returns, right? Then you can care about efficiency. Like, like, WhatsApp had 35 developers and 500 million users. Like, then you can like sit back and go, does efficiency matter? Like, look how efficient we are, it's crazy. But what was important in the early days is they could move super, super fast. And that's where collaboration, particularly— I mean, like, so we live here in San Francisco, uh, where it's getting harder and harder to get great talent because the competition is insane. So when you start—

and the real estate cost—

exactly. Around here, I mean, you know, this building, even this building is crazy.

I mean, we're in the Twitter line, and it's like, in the Twitter line, it's $600 a desk. Desk, or $700 a desk. Like, it's the worst area I've ever— yeah, it's not— it's the worst area I have ever been in my life, and I'm from New York. Yeah, like, I've seen some bad areas. And I—

this is horrible. I mean, yeah, but I believe that, that the next generation of the internet is going to be all about building this stuff into everyday life. Actually, Steve Case has that kind of— yeah, he wrote something about that. But, um, getting it embedded into everyday life means that the innovation has to spread beyond Silicon —Valley. It has to go— it like, do you think the next oil and gas startup is gonna come from Silicon Valley? Probably not. It's probably gonna come from Houston. Like, yeah, like retail, oil and gas, like all these verticals where they're gonna want to integrate all this stuff together. Yeah, they're gonna have to come from all over the world.

Then again, transportation was something that we didn't think would come from here, and that's kind of worked out for Uber. And then you have like the hotel industry, yeah, kind of working out for Airbnb. Yeah, I'm trying to get Brian Chesney on the program, get him to a fireside chat. It's literally been —like 5 years of trying. Brian, come on the show. Somebody's got to be friends with Brian Chesney. Like, I really respect the guy, and I really love Airbnb. I'm like trying to get him on the program. Somebody send a message to Brian who's friends with him. I just asked him 7 times.

Maybe the 8th time will be the charm. I know you're not going to give up.

I wrote in the subject line to him today, "7th time the charm." And then I wrote at the end, "I really want to have you come to the SCaLE conference." It's like, you know, you want to interview somebody because you're just so fascinated by what they've built. I'm so fascinated by what he's built. like, how did they ever think that sleeping on somebody's couch would become a $20 billion business? Did they have any conception when they started that Couchsurfing insanity— it's amazing— that it would actually— you know what's amazing to me about Airbnb, and it's very Uber-like in that way, which is people didn't anticipate Uber. They're like, Uber will compete with taxis. They never anticipated, you know, with cars, compete with owning a car. Yeah. And now Airbnb is like, it's not only competing with hotels, it's competing with how often people travel and how long they go away for, because people are now like, "I can afford to go on vacation longer." Right. "I can afford to take more vacation. Therefore, I could maybe work less, or maybe I'll try to be an on-demand worker." Yeah. So the on-demand Airbnb hosting, where people make extra money, is driving people to take less full-time employment, maybe be an Uber driver or whatever, and then Airbnb their home home and then have a better lifestyle. So this— all this efficiency and like Airbnbs and Ubers of the world, it's mind-blowing. Like, these are things that weren't considered when they started the companies.

Yeah, yeah. Who thought companies would think about employees differently? Yeah, the employees have to think about, well, great, so now I can make my living a lot of different ways. It's amazing, you see that in the city. I like— when I jump in Ubers, I'm always talking to the drivers like, what do you do? And like, I'm a software engineer. —Really? Like, it's amazing, like, the diversity of the kinds of workers they have.

Well, and then it's like, push a button, work, push another button, stop work. Exactly. Like, whoa, that's kind of a dream. Yep. You know, like, and whether it's for Lyft or Uber or for the food delivery services, you know, or for Airbnb, like, push a button, rent your house.

I just used Lux the other day.

Lux is insane.

Oh my god, I went to Lafayette Park with my kids. Yeah, it's always impossible because, like, Uber doesn't have family yet. By the way, we need Uber family. Yeah.

—yeah, they have them in New York.

—to my two kids. So I showed up at the park, the guy was there, I got out, like, I literally left my house, hit the Lux button, 10 blocks later I get to Lafayette Park, and it's impossible to park there. Get out, he takes my car, you know, I'm done an hour later, my kids are like, "Let's go to McDonald's." Press the button, the car is there. Boom! Amazing.

Yeah, I don't know how the Lux— I looked at investing in it, and I liked it, the valuation, it kind of, like things tend to do here in this town, got ahead of itself, itself. In my estimation, I could be wrong, I probably lose a lot of money on it. But what I noticed was like, there's no way for this to be profitable. Like, I did the analysis. But now that they're doing surge pricing, and maybe if people become addicted to it, like, at $15 capped out for the day, I was like, this is impossible, including tip. Yeah. Then they added the tip, right, is on top of it. So now it's more like $17.50 or $18. And then I was like, oh, it's surge pricing at 1.5 or 1.2. Okay, now we're at another $3.20 I think it's a $25 a day service if you use it. Right. Not a $15 service. So I think they're just edging their way up there. But it's quite addicting to have somebody waiting for you to take your car, and they just arbitrage because they buy these spots on a monthly basis. I don't know where they park the cars.

You must know.

I do, because I have a Tesla. It tells you where it's parked. Oh yeah. When you park in the financial district, they go to the piers, and on the piers, the piers have really cheap parking. They don't just rent the spot for the $10 for the day, they rent it for $100 for the month. So they go rent 10 spots or 20 spots at each of these parking lots, smart, for maybe 50% of what we would normally rent them for. So if they— if a lot across the street here and the tenderloin is $10 a day, and that's $200 a month, they rent that same spot for $100, right? But it's not utilized all the time, right? Therefore they're getting it for more like $5 per park or whatever. So that's pretty sad.

So they have a window as long as we still own cars in San Francisco.

Well, that's the other thing is like, I'm like, why do I own this car? Because, you know, I do some days where I just do Uber only. Like, today's an Uber only day. And I'm like, you know, if you just put your travel cost at $20 a day for an executive, or $30 a day for an executive, it's kind of nice to be in an Uber and be working.

I started doing Uber Pool. It's even better. Did you really?

Oh yeah, you're rich, dude. You don't have to do Uber Pool.

You know why I like it? Why do you do it? Well, number one, I actually meet people. It's amazing. You like that?

I'm an extrovert.

I met someone who works in the same building as me and who lives on the same block as me.

So you guys are now Uberpooling. So Uber is actually working.

I haven't stayed in touch with any of these people, but like, you know, it is kind of nice to be able to do that. Number one. And the second thing is half the price. It's like $15, okay, from one way to my office. That's $30 a day.

What's the longest it's, um, taken you out of the way? Maybe 5 minutes. 5 minutes.

And what I do a lot of times if I'm the second person, I'll cancel it. Oh, you know. Yeah.

Oh, so there's a little gamesmanship going on here.

Uh-oh. They might clean that up. And then maybe a little—

that's a little—

they got to fix that. But I wait and then I do it again if I'm the first person, because then—

how do you know if it's the first or second? It tells you. It tells you.

It tells you who you're matched with. Oh, I see. Yeah.

And so, you know, here's the thing, Rowan. I'm very famous. And, you know, I have a podcast that's on the internet. Yes. And so it would be very hard for me to be—

it would be difficult for you to have to rub elbows with—

no, I do it all the time. I love it. It's like Literally, the—

You're from New York, man.

You should be used to this. I love it. I have to say, like, moving up here, like, since I've been living up here, we knew each other in LA, it's just so delightful for me. And people are like, "Oh, I hate to stop you." I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" Yeah, it's awesome, right? Stop me, take a selfie, let's talk about what episode you like best. Exactly. I can't believe that anybody even watches the show.

Everyone, stop Jason and ask him to take selfies.

You know what I do? I do the power move now. When people stop me, I give everybody on the show explicit instructions on Twitter Twitter. If you see me, please say hi. It makes me feel good. And please tell me which episode you like and why. It makes me feel good. For my benefit, please tell me you're a fan of the show. And then whoever I'm with, especially if it's my wife, so I can impress her, right? That, like, look, people will actually watch the show. And then I do the preemptive selfie, which is I say to people when they come up, I say— no, I don't say, do you want a photo? I say, can I— may I— can I take a photo? Nice. And they're like, uh, yeah. and I'm like, "OK, great." I take the selfie, I tweet it, I blow them up to 200,000 people. Nice. And I'm like, "My God, I love being a celebrity." That's awesome. I love being a micro-celebrity.

How are these people who complain?

We know all these celebrities in LA. They complain about— they fight their whole life to get any kind of notoriety, and then when they get it, they complain. I know. I am so happy to be a micro-celebrity.

Yeah, you should be. I love it. Yeah. You're a good micro-celebrity. I'm a— I am. Taking your own selfies.

I take selfies. Promoting people. I'll return an email. Uh, you know, whatever it takes.

Yeah, it's funny.

These other people, like, they're not even—

I know, it's— and it's a little weird. We're in a little bit of a bubble here in San Francisco. I love you. If you went to, uh, no, in LA nobody knew who I was. Michigan. Yeah, in LA, right? No, in LA it was fantastic.

People were like, what do you do?

I'm like, ah, I have a podcast. Yeah.

And then they'd be like, oh, you have a podcast? Oh, you're a loser. Cool.

I used to be the tech guy and be like, hey, what do you do? And I'd be like, you know, we'd be at these celebrity parties, like, what do you— oh, you know, I work tech.

Yeah, okay, that's nice. No, it's amazing. They're just like, how quickly can I get away from you?

So when I tell people, like, really, I've been having a problem with my printer. That's interesting.

Which in your case is not too far off. It was like, yeah, if you want to defrag your hard drive. Back in the days when you couldn't defrag a hard drive with the operating system, it just didn't know how to do that.

Yeah, take me back. Defrag my hard drive. Yeah. All right.

Listen, everybody, um, go check out CiscoSpark.com. CiscoSpark.com. Very cool product. I got to get myself a couple of— send me one of those. I want to play with that. Um, and And thanks to the sponsors, and thanks to Jackie, and thanks to Jacob Teardrop. Jacob's going. Mmm, I'm gonna miss you, Jacob. And thanks to Ashley, and Bryce, and John, and Luke, and Matt, and Michelle, and everybody on the team. Probably left somebody out there. Brycey Poo, and everybody. We will see you next time on This Week in Star Wars. Bye-bye!