- What's the future of all computing?
In 1997 Steve Jobs was already talking about the future
that's still becoming true today.
- We were able to take all of our personal data
off of our local machines and put them on a server.
And the software made that completely transparent.
And, because the server had a lot of RAM on it,
in some cases it was actually faster
to get stuff from the server than it was
to get stuff off your local hard disc,
because in some cases it would be cashed
in the RAM of the server if it was in popular use.
But what was really remarkable was that
the organization could hire a professional person
to back up that server every night.
And could afford to spend a little bit more on that server,
so maybe it had redundant disc drives
and redundant power supplies.
And you know, in the last seven years,
you know how many times I have lost any personal data?
Zero.
- Can you believe that was 25 years ago?
The cloud is here, but not yet all the way.
Today we're sitting down with my friend Suhail Doshi
to help me show you
how the future of the internet
is giving us new powers we never had before.
Imagine the computer that you never had to upgrade.
One that never runs out of storage.
What Steve Jobs talked about in 1997
is coming true right before our eyes.
If you want to hear about the future of computing,
be sure to watch all the way to the end.
Let's get started.
(upbeat music)
(intense music)
The future isn't going to be a buzzword.
It tends to be some new capability that you can understand
that's just simply better.
Think about desktop apps.
10 years ago I was sitting in front of Photoshop
doing visual design.
But we have something better now, Figma.
The same thing is true for browsers.
Imagine a smarter, faster web browser
that's actually made for our modern world.
- If you believe that, you know,
these trends are mostly happening
and most things will end up in the browser,
then it doesn't seem crazy that
your computer will largely just be the browser.
And you can probably,
with all these improvements to compression and bandwidth,
you should be able to stream it at low latency
where you wouldn't notice any discernible difference
to typing, drawing, whatever.
You should be able to use the most powerful,
the best computer ever in the cloud.
There should be no reason why you have to go upgrade
or go to Amazon and figure out what you need.
You shouldn't have to think about tech specs anymore.
What's RAM, what's this?
What GPU should I buy?
People shouldn't have to learn or know what that is.
They should be able to just get a computer,
the computer they need for the day that they're having.
- Most people are primarily using browsers for work,
and their phone to scroll the news or social media feeds.
In 2021, there were over 3.2 billion internet users
around the world using Chrome as their main browser.
- Mighty is the browser that streams
from a powerful computer in the cloud
to save you time, make you more productive.
It's great for people that are at just normal jobs.
It's meant to help instantly load a page,
or help you find a Google document faster,
or help you get to that meeting in your calendar
a little bit quicker.
So can we make a browser where, if it were somewhere else,
if we're in a different computer
and it had a great GPU and it had 40 gigs of RAM,
and it had 16 cores of CPU,
and someone really thought about the UI,
and the experience to be geared towards
things that you do with work, you know,
all the tools that you use,
could it be a better experience?
And that's what we're working on.
- Now, a lot of people might say, "What about the internet?"
Don't you need some next level amount of bandwidth
to really make this a good experience?
Well, turns out in 2022,
with hardware acceleration, not anymore.
- You don't even need 10 times better Starlink to do this.
What's interesting is that,
for the internet,
bandwidth has been increasing,
it has been increasing at a linear rate
for the last 10 years, which is great.
The second thing that's happening is that
compression algorithms are actually getting better.
So, for example,
there's this compression algorithm called like H.264,
and then H.265 that encodes a video, it's great.
And if you go watch a Twitch stream
and you're getting it at, whatever, 4K,
it's not going to be like this huge, you know,
you don't need a ton of bandwidth
because of video compression.
And your computers come with ASIC chips
that hardware decode,
hardware accelerate the decoding step of video,
which is great.
And it's very low latency.
And it's just getting better, actually
- The web is the new computer.
But one of the crazier things these days is Apple Safari
could arguably be seen as something
that's holding back our whole world of computing.
- It's a war.
(both laughing)
Well, I think, you know, on the phone, it's kind of funny
because I think a lot of people ask would ask the question
if Apple allowed other people to have
a browser engine of their choice on their phone,
what might happen with the web?
And on your phone you're only allowed to,
I believe, use WebKit.
And so, Apple has virtually completely stifled
any kind of improvement of the web on a phone
for the most part, which is really frustrating.
And the phone is so important.
So largely it will work to stifle the web,
but it will work maybe in the sense that,
in the same way that Microsoft sort of stifled the web
with IE6. (laughing)
There'll be just this dark period of the web for 10 years.
And then one day something will change.
- If the web gets too good,
the App Store mode that drives billions of dollars
for Apple might just go away.
And this is a tension that has existed since the iPhone,
and it's getting worse.
- I feel like it's obvious that web standards
and the browser are probably a threat
to Apple's general App Store ecosystem.
They obviously don't want people to just
find ways to break out of these shells.
I think they're heavily incentivized to do it.
I think in terms of desktop, I mean,
there's still 2 billion plus people,
3 billion people that are running computers,
desktop computers.
And I think that Apple will just...
I mean, year over year, I think,
Apple has grown half a percent market share
since the M1 came out.
So they're not really winning that war.
- Apple just isn't about the mass market.
It's about delivering a premium experience
for a segment of people who are willing to pay
extra, a luxury cost, for their computers.
Everything else is commodity.
- So it seems clear to us, at least at Mighty,
like our bet is that
if everyone is going to use the browser,
and the browser equals an OS,
and 90% of the world uses Windows,
so who cares about Apple?
They probably won't win.
They probably aren't going to go from 8.5% market share
to, like, 80%.
- So what happens if you empower the other 90%
with super fast web computing
that frankly we all want?
Mighty is here for that.
If most people don't have something and they want it,
well that's about as good as it gets
when you're trying to make a consumer app
for a billion people.
I met Suhail when he was just 19 years old
starting his first company, Mixpanel,
a web analytics platform.
This was during what we would call
the golden age of web 2.0.
In San Francisco, we happened to hang out
right as he hopped on the train to go pitch
PG and the rest of the team at Ycombinator.
Spoiler alert, he got in.
Here are some of his tips on how to handle
managing and leading when you
might be the youngest person in the room.
- I think a lot of people may not realize
how hard it might be, especially if you're young.
When you're young you sort of think that
you should be able to have debates with anyone
or discussions with anyone and no ego involved.
And we should all be able to get to a rational point,
and ask questions, and be curious, and say why.
But sometimes it is very hard for a 30 year old
to go work for a 20 year old.
So that was something, in hindsight, that I realized later.
At the time, I remember thinking that
we just didn't have much of a network at the time.
So we ended up just hiring people that were
more closer in age to ourselves.
But that also has some problems,
because then you're just hiring a bunch of people
that are also, it's like the blind leading the blind,
or the blind working with the blind a little bit too.
And so everyone's kind of figuring it out together.
But the nice thing is
is that you're all figuring it out together.
So you're not really that frustrated with each other.
All the problems that might occur
all feel relatively reasonable.
You might all go, well, how would we have known?
So, you know, you try to supplement that
as much as you can with mentors
and talking to other people.
- What about that age old debate?
Do you hire the experienced pro,
or do you hire the hungrier person?
Here's what Suhail's experience taught him.
- If you were on it to be like a head of marketing,
I'd rather hire a director of marketing
instead of the head of marketing, the VP,
that's already been a VP before.
Because the person that's been a VP before
sometimes might not be very excited
to be doing the same things that they were doing.
Like, they're not learning as much.
I can understand that.
But if you hire the director of marketing person,
or someone that's been in that role for a while,
they're deeply curious.
They want to learn about all the other parts of marketing
that they haven't gotten to learn about.
And it makes it really fun for me to work with them
as a result.
- If you're trying to make something
that has never existed before,
you need people who are intellectually curious
and incredibly hungry.
Go with the people who really want it.
(ethereal music)
So, that's it for this week.
If you want to experience what it's like
to have the most powerful best computer ever
in the cloud,
that you never have to upgrade or figure out tech specs,
like what's RAM?
What GPU do you have for that project?
Well, you need Mighty.
Go to mightyapp.com.
Link in the description to download it.
If you got a slower computer
and want to instantly have a web experience
as good as a $5,000 brand new Mac pro,
you're one link away.
Thank you again for watching all the way to the end.
And, as always,
we're trying to bring you what is the future,
what's happening?
Because all the world is changing.
And it's changing because of software.
And you might write a line of code.
What will your line of code be?
I'll see you next week.
(uplifting music)