SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, we've got an amazing show for you today. We have Nirav Patel, who is the founder of Frame.Work. He previously worked at Apple. He also worked at Oculus. And then he had a great idea, which is why can't you upgrade your laptops anymore? Well, he built a new laptop called the Framework Laptop. It is brilliant. You can remove pieces of the laptop. You can change the CPU, the memory, and you can change the expansion cards. These little chicklets that come in and out. And I think this is going to be a revolution in laptops and the ability for you to repair and update and have a great experience with your laptop for more than two years, which is what happens with your Apple laptop, right? You buy it two years later, it sucks and it's slow and it's grinding. You get the spinning wheel of death. What if you could have a laptop where you open it up and take the battery out and change it and change the CPU? That's what Framework is doing. Also today, I'm going to talk a little bit about what Apple is doing with iCloud, building private browsing into iOS 15 and the major battle between Apple, Google, and Facebook. One camp, Google, and Facebook wants all your data and they want to sell it to marketers and they want to give you free experiences or close to free, free or close to free. And then Apple wants to charge you an arm and a leg for your iPhone and take a massive profit. It's a really important discussion. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_00: Okay, iCloud is building a private browser into iOS 15. I just upgraded my iPad and my iPhone to iOS 15. It's got some cool features. One of the features I like is when you share an Apple Music link, when you go to Apple Music and you play the track, it shows you who shared it with you. It's just kind of like a nice little elegant touch of iMessage moving over into apps, right? Where you can see who forwarded to that. Another interesting piece that's notable is I believe FaceTime is now able when you do a FaceTime group call, you're able to get people into that call who are on Android. So, lots of interesting, you know, features. And I think actually that when you share a podcast as well, it will say, Jason shared this podcast with you. So, SMS all your friends, your This Week in Startups and all in, and you get credit for it in their app when they're playing it. It just gives a little notice that this was shared with you by Jcow. Okay, so back episode 1204 on This Week in Startups, we talked about how Apple was introducing app tracking transparency. This forces developers to ask users if they want their data shared. So, Apple has been on this mission to protect your privacy, not in China, not in Russia, but here in the USA. You know, they obviously have to abide by local laws. And so, privacy is their selling point. They are pitting themselves as the anti-Facebook and the anti-Google. That is Apple's selling point, and you know what? People are buying it. We always said at some point people are going to care about privacy. Well, I think it's actually happening because Apple, which is just absolutely world-class at taking complicated features and making them simple, is doing that. You may have seen one feature where when you sign up for an app, it says, Hey, would you like to sign up with your email or would you like to mask your email? Just a nice little elegant touch there where you can keep some of your privacy. And Apple enforced that on people. If you want to have your app in the app store, you have to offer Apple login. And so, Apple login is becoming a thing. When Facebook does Facebook login, they're doing it to track you around the web. That's why they're doing Facebook Connect login. They want to track you, get data on you, and then sell it. When Apple does it, right, Apple login is not so Apple can get data on you because they don't monetize your data. What they do with your data is nothing. They store it on your phone and they will not let anybody have it. As we know from the San Bernardino terrorist shooting case where they wouldn't unlock the phone. I mean, if they won't unlock a terrorist phone, they're not going to unlock yours. So I think that's a pretty reasonable position we can all agree on. So Apple is now created a private relay. And it's in beta. And the iPad is part of this. So what it does basically is you will not be tracked when you're using Safari. And so it's a really slick feature. You can turn it on as you see here in the video. And when you go search around the web, it's basically like, I guess you could think of it like tour. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing the private relay. But the idea is, whatever you're searching for, it's even better than, say, being an incognito mode. Because even in incognito mode or private mode, they still have your IP address and they might have ways of identifying you. With this, what they're doing is, like a VPN or, you know, maybe like the tour network, when you send your request in Safari, they go and collect the page for you and then serve it to you. And they're like this intermediary. I believe if somebody thinks it's different, let me know. And as somebody said in the live audience here, part of the Noti gang, Jekko says, just use the Brave browser. Brave browser is another great browser for removing tracking. But having it on the phone and having the hardware work towards protecting your privacy is a major, major step in all of our privacy being protected. So in the announcement on the website, normally when you browse the web, information containing your web traffic, such as your DNS records and your IP address, can be seen by your network provider and websites you visit. So network providers will also collect this information about what you visit and they might be selling it or they might have agreements with the Googles and Facebooks and advertisers of the world. So all your data is being shared in many different ways. And so when that data is shared, you can be identified, located, you get the idea. So the first relay is operated by Apple. It allows your IP address to be seen by your network provider, but your DNS records are encrypted. So neither party can see web addresses you are accessing. And the second relay is operated by a, quote, third party content provider. It creates a temporary IP address and decrypts the website's address, connecting you to the site you're trying to reach. So just like I said, maybe a little bit like the tour network, if you're aware of that, which has, you know, multiple hops and all kinds of bad people use that for bad reasons, you know, not, not just for privacy. So I think it's another huge win for Apple. And I think it's something they're going to be able to keep putting pressure and differentiating themselves versus Android and versus Facebook. And this is really going to impact their businesses. And I think Apple, because they make their profits from selling you hardware that is massively overpriced, you can opt to pay for that. What would I do if I was Facebook? I would come up with Facebook VIP. I would come up with Android or Google VIP. Where? If you pay Google $100 a year, $10 a month, you get an ad free experience and no tracking. Both of those companies should do that now. Because that would then give them the high road when they get pulled in front of Congress, senators, and legislators and people who want to break up big tech. Just very simple. All you have to do is say, period, end of story. If you want to have a free service, you pay with advertising and we sell your data in an anonymous way to advertisers and you see target advertising. Or you can pay 10 bucks a month, you're paying 15 bucks a month for Netflix, pay 10 bucks a month for our services. You know, arguably, you get more from YouTube and Google than you do from Netflix, right?

SPEAKER_13: If you could only have one Google and YouTube or Netflix, which would you pick? I mean, it's a pretty obvious choice. You would go with Google and YouTube. So I pay for YouTube to turn the ads off.

SPEAKER_00: I would pay for Google to turn the ads off. So there have been some app tracking transparency features that are rippling through the advertising space. I'm seeing it in some startups who are worried about this where you used to be able to target people a little bit more aggressively. And actually, Casper Mattress recently announced they were laying off their CMO, CTO and COO. And an anonymous founder in the DT space told TechCrunch's layers were likely due to Casper's difficulty selling product since the changes made retargeting much less effective, you know, to find valuable customers, iPhone users. So let me explain that and unpack what they're saying there. It could be that Casper is just a company that has had its best day and companies like Eight Sleep are a better product. And full disclosure, I'm a modest investor in Eight Sleep and a fan of the product. I use it every night, in fact. But putting that aside, what's happening here is you used to be able to do something called lookalike and retargeted audiences. What that means is you say, hey, here's the customers who bought Casper mattresses. And then the algorithm at Facebook and Google says, okay, here's more people like that. And they use any number of data sources and algorithms to figure that out. Well, Apple is saying, yeah, you can't do that anymore. We're not going to let you track people on their phones. And what that means is those lookalike audiences and that retargeting is much less effective. Now you're just maybe targeting an audience by geolocation or just Americans or just iPhone users, right? And iPhone users, you know, they may be a small percentage of all phone users, but they happen to skew as the most profitable customers in the world. So what Apple is really doing is they're just really decimating Google and Facebook's ability to target the best, most elite users. And that makes this a very entertaining thing to watch. The way for people to obviously combat this would be for Facebook to come up with their own phone or Facebook and Google to come up with a phone together and to make a phone so cheap and affordable that it would actually challenge Apple's ecosystem supremacy. And that's exactly what you're seeing Google do. You're not seeing Facebook do it. They're basically betting on the future with Oculus. But what Google has done very clearly with the purchase of Android and making that a free operating system and a low cost one with all of the vendors racing to the bottom in terms of cost. They also have Chrome and then Chrome OS and then Android OS. So they're really trying to create, you know, a larger group of people who go for the free option. They could keep pursuing that. Right. And Facebook did look at making a phone back in the day. So if, you know, a majority of the revenue that Apple has is from things like phones or iPads and computers flooding the market with a cheap alternative like Chrome OS, which I'm addicted to. But I stopped using because when I started doing more video, it's just not up to the task yet.

SPEAKER_15: I think they'll maybe get there in two or three more revisions, but it is a very interesting time for the big tech battles.

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SPEAKER_13: Okay, everybody, you know I am obsessed with hardware and gadgets. And one of the things I've always been concerned about is the lack of upgrade ability in today's electronics. You buy an iPhone, you can't change the battery yourself. But when I had my BlackBerry, I used to carry three extra batteries with me, swap them out anytime I want. And it had a memory card in it. So if I wanted to have extra memory, I could just pop it in there. And of course, laptops, desktops, you could open them up, you could change them. Apple has decided that we consumers are too stupid and don't deserve the right to upgrade our own hardware. This is why I hate Apple products despite loving them because of their elegance and software. Well, there has to be a better way. And one of the concepts that's been bouncing around the internet and the technology space has been the ability to have a modular design for various hardware devices, various gadgets from laptops, desktops, and all the way up to smartphones. In fact, there was a project called Aura at Google where they were going to make Android phones where you could swap out with little chicklets. Imagine little circuit boards where you could pop in your memory, take out your CPU, put a new CPU in. Maybe you want a wide angle lens and you could change your lenses. It was a brilliant project. It didn't actually work. And so we still have non upgradable phones and they all wind up in the trash and it's terrible for society. And the environment. Well, I was shocked to find, I think I may have seen it on Slashdot or Reddit, a new laptop that's coming out. It's called Frame. And you can visit the website right now, frame.work. And I'm actually ordering one today. And the reason this is so notable is another founder apparently feels the same way I do, that people should be able to upgrade their machines.

SPEAKER_20: And it's got a very clever design. Welcome to the program, the founder of frame.work. Narif Toh. Thanks, Jason.

SPEAKER_21: It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_19: You heard my little introduction there. You obviously are a hardware junkie.

SPEAKER_24: I can see in the background for those of you watching on the YouTube. You have an original Mac. You have a one laptop per child crank. Let's see the one laptop per child crank there.

SPEAKER_27: That's right. Yeah, this is our museum of influential PCs that we like to refer back to.

SPEAKER_13: Well, describe that one for the audience listening.

SPEAKER_28: It's green and white and it's a laptop. That's right. What was so unique about this project, if you know the history? Because I know a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, that's right. Actually, I worked with the team at One Laptop Per Child for a summer over a decade ago at this point. But the concept was basically that, you know, ultimately it was an educational mission that there must be a way to deliver high quality education. I think it's called constructivist education into the developing world and to actually do that with minimal infrastructure. And the definition coming out of the MIT Media Lab of that was like, let's actually just design a purpose built machine for education. And the result was this very strange looking, as you mentioned, green with like these, you know, goofy antennas machine for kids with the one laptop or child laptop. And it was conceptually very interesting. And, you know, I think, you know, like our actually conceptually very interesting and flawed in execution, like many of these initiatives tend to be. And, you know, I think you can argue one way or another, whether it was whether it was a success and that, you know, did actually drive the PC industry towards a lower cost path very rapidly.

SPEAKER_31: But whether or not it delivered on the educational mission, you know, it's a it's arguable.

SPEAKER_34: Well, I mean, the yeah, it was OLPC, the one laptop per child program.

SPEAKER_13: It was interesting about it was they did have this interesting idea that there would be a mesh network. So each one of them, when they popped up, would share their internet connection with the other and that the battery could be charged with a crank because electricity didn't exist in all places.

SPEAKER_28: And like you're saying, I don't know what the costs were, but I think it was 200 or $300, which at the time in 2005 to 10 period was just unheard of.

SPEAKER_19: This is long before Android Chromebooks, etc. But their goal was eventually to get it to 100 bucks, if I remember correctly. And that's right.

David Friedberg: Yeah, the goal is 100. I think it went out at around 200.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I wonder now of the cheapest laptop you can buy on Google, a new one cheapest laptop on Amazon, I'll ask my producers to tell us what that is today. But you obviously have worked in hardware for a while. Tell us what was your inspiration for the and how do you refer to it the frame laptop, the framework laptop, the framework laptop, got it. So what was your inspiration for the framework laptop?

SPEAKER_29: It ultimately was that there must be a better way, you know, across a decade plus in consumer electronics, building things at Apple and then at Oculus as part of the founding team there. And again, as part of Facebook, it was increasingly clear that the consumer electronics industry was heading in a pretty bad direction, bad for consumers, bad for the environment, even actually not that amazing as a business model either. That, you know, unless you're a platform owner like a Google or an Apple or Facebook, you're effectively in this constant race to the bottom, you know, margins collapsing, trying to make it up. In volume and basically just pushing out increasing numbers of disposable products out into the world that people, you know, borrow on the way to the landfill. And the result, of course, was, you know, unhappy consumers, pretty bad business model and e-waste piling up around the world. And ultimately, you know, the question was, you know, is there a better way?

SPEAKER_47: There must be a better way.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah. And so what is the better way? Sure. And where are you at with the project?

SPEAKER_24: And I want to get to the funding of this because, you know, based on my knowledge of venture capital, saying you're going to create a laptop company in 2021 is a quick way to get your ass kicked out of a venture capitalist office.

SPEAKER_51: So I want to know, like, we'll get to that in a minute.

SPEAKER_28: Tell me about how this manifests itself in the real world and where you're at with the project, because I saw today, you're taking pre orders.

SPEAKER_13: That's right.

SPEAKER_20: Of 10 to 100 bucks, depending on which version you get.

David Friedberg: Yeah, so we started the company in January of 2020.

SPEAKER_29: It's been, you know, a little over 18 months, and we've shipped a product in the middle of a pandemic and the worst silicon crunch in decades. We have brought the framework laptop out into market. Oh, great. It's beautiful.

SPEAKER_19: It's minimalist. It's looks like, you know, a Dell XPS or a MacBook Pro.

SPEAKER_13: Why would I buy this over those two other outstanding products?

David Friedberg: Right.

SPEAKER_29: So this is the interesting thing that, you know, people's first conception when they hear it's a repairable, upgradeable product is that it, you know, must be a monstrosity, must be, you know, an in- inch thick and weigh five pounds and be goofy looking. Yeah. And so from the outset, that was, you know, this very core lesson for us was let's not take that compromise. Let's make sure that it stacks up to the products that people would otherwise be buying in every way in terms of size and weight and performance and reliability and price that across like all these very like table stakes, things that people evaluate when they're buying, you know, very expensive, important product to them that we actually measure up well to the competition. And then within those constraints, we made the product as repairable and upgradeable and customizable as we possibly could. And we've we've achieved it.

SPEAKER_31: You know, it's as it's as thin and as light as a 13 inch MacBook Pro, but every part of the machine is replaceable and upgradeable and repairable by the end user.

SPEAKER_24: Now, the key feature, which you didn't mention there, is that there are four slots that are about the size of, gosh, a half of a pack of cigarettes.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah, like a box of Tic Tacs, give or take. Yeah, like a nice little, you know, somewhere between like a Starburst and a box of Tic Tacs, I guess.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, I would say it's like it would be like a double sized Starburst, which for the people who work at Starburst, there's your killer idea of the century.

SPEAKER_13: Starburst Jumbo would be a best selling product, but essentially two of them. And what is that about an inch and a half by an inch?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, it's about 30 by 32 millimeters for gun metric. Got it.

SPEAKER_19: So those little cards show on the laptop there. If you're watching for the YouTube for folks, they slide in and out. There's four slots. And it looks like when you snap them in, it's snapping in with a USB C. Is that correct?

David Friedberg: So that one? Yeah. So it's just a USB C physical connector that we use for that interface, which just makes it really easy to develop new cards. And it looks very rugged. Right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: And I was on the website today. So when you buy your laptop, you can say I want a USB C.

SPEAKER_13: I want a USB A. Is that what the original ones were called that we were also used to doing? So I looked at and said, you know what, give me a USB C. Give me a USB A. And then I said, Oh, what do I use the other two for? And one of them was, uh, I don't know what type of memory it is, but I can put a one terabyte little chicklet in there. What do you call those? Are they called?

SPEAKER_29: That's right. Yeah, expansion cards.

SPEAKER_13: Expansion cards. Okay, we got to come up with a better name for that. That's the expansion card.

SPEAKER_19: You can get a terabyte of storage, 250 gigs of storage for a pretty reasonable price. Right.

SPEAKER_28: And the USB C and the USB A, they cost like nine bucks.

SPEAKER_78: That's right.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. It's essentially free. And then I'm, I'm thinking when I have my laptop, oh, and you can get one for, you know, like an AK monitor.

SPEAKER_13: I don't know what they call it. DVI.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. Display port or HDMI. We've got both of those.

SPEAKER_13: You can do HDMI. I would, I use HDMI like once in a blue moon. I'm a, you know, I'm going skiing for the weekend with my kids. I bring a USB C cable with me at the Airbnb. I can plug it into, to go directly into it. So I wouldn't want that plugged in all the time. Are they hot swappable?

SPEAKER_81: Like could I be running windows and then unplug it and have no problem? That's right. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You can pop them in or now swap them live. Got it. Now no ethernet because ethernet is too fat to fit in that format.

SPEAKER_34: Correct?

David Friedberg: That's right. We're actually developing an ethernet expansion card. It's just going to be oversized.

SPEAKER_38: It'll hang out for the laptop a little bit, but it is a popular request, especially for the audiences that are, you know, adopting this at the start.

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SPEAKER_13: My favorite feature of the amazing pixel book, the first one that Google came out with, they sent me one for free. I never knew who sent it to me.

SPEAKER_28: You know, I don't know if it was PR or Sergey or Larry, but it just showed up in my office one day. It had the most amazing feature, which was built in 4G at the time.

SPEAKER_13: And I think they used AT&T or Verizon and I turned it on. What an amazing experience to open your laptop and just have it connected.

SPEAKER_19: Do you have a, a chiclet expansion card that allows me to put my Google Fi sim in there, my data sim in there yet?

SPEAKER_66: Right. That's not something we have today, but that is absolutely the type of expansion card that we had in mind as we built this.

SPEAKER_38: Like, you know, really is that every individual user has a different set of needs and there's no way to build a one size fits all machine.

SPEAKER_93: You've got to be able to allow for that end user customization.

SPEAKER_33: Now, why not put six of those chiclet expansion cards into the laptop?

David Friedberg: Sure. I mean, ultimately there's, you know, design trade offs that you take anytime you build a hardware product.

SPEAKER_29: In this case, like going from, from four, we're actually all four of these have exactly equal capabilities. You can do video output power in and out on any of these ports. We went to six, we would have had to start to make some of those things behave differently.

SPEAKER_95: We would have had to compromise on things like maybe battery capacity or speaker quality.

SPEAKER_97: Uh, and just as we mentioned before, you can get an HP Chromebook, uh, for $89 on Amazon.

SPEAKER_34: Right. Uh, now that's on sale. It's usually 190.

SPEAKER_13: But the idea of one laptop for child, they did push the market to come up with that same solution. So mission accomplished there. Now, okay, if somebody is listening to this saying, okay, these expansion ports, I can do that with a dongle. I could just have dongle life, which is brutal. I carry like a little purse with me. Right. Now, wherever I go, I got a man purse. I got a Merce with dongles in it and all my little things, which is quite nice when, you know, I'm on a vacation and somebody is like, I need to. And I'm like, oh, and I pull out my little Merce and I'm like, what do you need? You need lightning to USB C. You need USB C to ethernet. I got everything. But, um, there are other features here. What else can I change about my laptop if I choose to go with framework? Sure. Yeah.

David Friedberg: So in addition to the expansion cards, uh, there are parts that are actually just cosmetically customizable.

SPEAKER_29: And so like the display bezel, for example, instead of being glued on is just magnet attached. And part of the reason for that was to make it easy to replace the display. Like not needing to replace, you know, half the laptop if you've, you know, cracked your display somehow. Um, but it also just enables this really simple cosmetic customization.

SPEAKER_95: So I've got, I don't know if folks can see it, but I've got a gray bezel on this one. We've got an orange one and some other colors in development. Wow.

SPEAKER_13: So the bezel comes off and it's magnetized. What a brilliant innovation. So I have an iPad. I cracked the screen. Something goes wrong. I bring it to Apple. They're like, yeah, you cracked your screen. I'm like, no. And I'm like, well, can you fix it? They're like, yeah, it's $800 to fix it. I'm like, it's a $400 iPad and it's three years old. And they're like, yeah. I'm like, well, I could buy a new iPad for that. They're like, yeah, buy a new one right there. And you can't repair anything. So what you're selling me here is, hey, if I break this, I can fix it. No problem. Right. Yeah. Or Apple says, okay, yeah. Come back in three weeks. Right. That's right. Um, you can also, I see when you order it, it comes with a screwdriver. That's right.

SPEAKER_111: Send people a screwdriver.

SPEAKER_110: You can look for it if you want, but I think we know what a screwdriver looks like. Um, what, what does the screwdriver do? It lets you open it up and see the motherboard. And then what can I change about that? That's right. So you can actually change.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. So every part of the machine is, is upgradable or replaceable using that single tool that we ship in the box. And so you basically unscrew the five fasteners at the bottom, pull off the input cover. And then everything's just a single layer, you know, nothing's buried under anything else. And part of the reason for this as well was that, you know, if you've got, you know, flaky key on your keyboard or, you know, you spilled something, or you can want to like change your keyboard language, you can do that just by swapping out either the keyboard itself that screws into the back of this or this cover piece, which is, you know, much simpler to replace. What would it cost to replace a keyboard? Uh, so something like a keyboard, you know, it's like 40 or $50. We're actually just about to start making replacement ones available through our web store.

SPEAKER_19: Wow. And does this all mean that if let's say some maniac wants to create a keyboard, that's

SPEAKER_13: a little more clicky for writers and coders, they could make one for the framework laptop without your permission, or they have to come to you and get your permission. How are you thinking about the extensibility of this with other partners?

David Friedberg: Right. So, I mean, as we look at things like expansion cards, we've actually already released the design files openly on actually on GitHub and just under an open license.

SPEAKER_95: So anyone including like an individual hobbyist can go pull down the reference designs, pull down the CAD, develop their own card and prototype it and even resell it out to additional folks

SPEAKER_29: if there's interest in the community. We've seen some like really interesting designs coming up already. But then as we look at the rest of the machine, that is actually the goal here. We want every part of this to be something that we can develop an ecosystem around and not

SPEAKER_95: be, you know, not be asking users just rely on us at framework to cover the entire broad range of needs that are out there.

SPEAKER_34: Wow. So, the first thing I thought of when I saw your chiclet and expansion slots was, wouldn't

SPEAKER_13: it be interesting if somebody made one where I tap it and it slides out a thumb reader, like a biometric? Sure. Now, you may not be in the biometric business, but there's got to be 100 companies who already have built biometrics, who would build this for you for 30 bucks. And then I could use my thumb to unlock everything and authenticate. Right.

SPEAKER_19: You're saying you are giving that business away for free to the rest of the world to innovate on this platform.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, that's right. Actually, we do have a fingerprint reader built into the power bind on the laptop. Oh, you do already?

SPEAKER_38: Yeah, definitely. You know, things like biometrics are things that you can develop an expansion card around.

SPEAKER_28: Well, I mean, the other one is for people who really care about security. I've always wondered why GPS is not included. Right. And 5G. So, if you had 5G and GPS, now your laptop, which is, you know, a very important piece of equipment, if it was stolen, like find your iPad, you could have it when it's in loss

SPEAKER_13: mode, you know, or every 15 minutes, just turn on the 5G connection and say its location. Yeah, absolutely. So, if somebody were to steal it, and you could put a dead man switch on it. People don't know what that is. A dead man switch is if you're driving a train and you push down to make the train go. If you have a heart attack, you fall down. Right. Your hand is no longer pushing down the throttle. It stops. So, you can have a dead man switch, which if I don't use my laptop for 24 hours, it starts beaconing every minute. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: You know, the location covertly and then turns on the camera and the microphone and starts recording and sending you clips. Sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_31: It's all possible. Like whoever stole it. Yeah. Or, you know, on security, things like two factor authentication or NFC or, you know, other things like that. That's all possible as an expansion card.

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SPEAKER_13: Talk to me about CPUs because, you know, you watch what Apple's doing and they were very proud of the new iMacs, which, you know, I buy my mom a new one every three, four or five years. And the old one goes right in the garbage. You know, they won't take them back anymore. They won't even take them back. I think they take them back to recycle them, but they won't even give you a 20 bucks for them. And it's such a waste of like, the monitors are perfectly good. The keyboard is perfectly good. The ports are perfectly good. What sucks is the memory is welded into in a lot of these computers and can't be changed. And the CPU can't be changed.

SPEAKER_28: But if you changed, if you upgraded those two things, they would have a new lease on life. Correct?

David Friedberg: Yeah, that's right. And that was also like one of the core design and architecture choices that we made.

SPEAKER_29: So you can see that, you know, we pulled off the keyboard cover and everything is a single layer. The memory is socketed, storage is socketed, Wi Fi, and actually, you can just pop it out. Yeah, so like, you know, I can just pop out the memory right here. And, you know, put in another stack. And actually the entire main board as well. So, you know, memory is something that, you know, historically has typically been accessible in notebooks, increasingly is not accessible as soldered down, especially from Apple, but from PCOMs as well. But being able to replace the entire main board to do a CPU upgrade is not something that's

SPEAKER_95: been available in notebooks.

SPEAKER_13: Now, am I being cynical when I say the reason they do this at Apple is specifically to make you upgrade more often, because if they knew you could go from eight gigs to 16 gigs or 16 gigs to 32 gigs, it would solve 50% of your slowdown problems when you get the spinning wheel of death. They're doing this to get you to upgrade faster.

David Friedberg: So it's an interesting one. I mean, I think at Apple, a lot of it is, you know, the supremacy of industrial design and

SPEAKER_29: this idea that the Apple product that arrived on your doorstep is, you know, perfect form, and you should never attempt to, you know, adjust it or open it or modify in any way that it's, it's done. It's Apple's. It's not yours. Don't touch it. And I think, you know, oftentimes in the PC industry where, you know, historically has been a lot more open and modular just as an ecosystem has been, you know, looking at

David Friedberg: Apple and kind of taking the cargo cult mentality of, you know, it's, it's working for Apple. They're so successful. They're making, you know, boatloads of money. Let's just go and follow their design philosophy and we'll do the same. And, you know, the practical result is often that, you know, the devices are, you know, not quite at the quality standards of what Apple delivers, but are equally locked down. And so, you know, across the industry as a whole, we have notebooks that where the expectation is basically that everything's soldered down, you can't replace any part of it.

SPEAKER_31: And it goes into the landfill when you're done with it.

SPEAKER_140: And you worked at Apple for a couple of years, am I correct? That's right. Yeah. So you, without breaking your non-disclosures, you know of that which you speak.

SPEAKER_28: If people were able to upgrade their CPU and memory, just those two things, you know,

SPEAKER_13: and then on the margins, add the USB-C, which is a nice to have because you can get a dongle that goes from USB-A to C if you needed it.

SPEAKER_20: But, you know, the CPU and the memory specifically, how much longer would the average laptop last a consumer?

David Friedberg: Right. So our goal generally is to double the number of years that a consumer can use a product.

SPEAKER_29: But actually the core of this is not just the length of time, but the number of happy years. So, you know, when you buy, you know, your new MacBook, you get like one or two years where

SPEAKER_95: you're like so happy and everything's fast and it's working great. And then your battery starts to wear down and you've got a key that's flaky. And, you know, maybe you dropped it and bent the corner of it at one point or you got a little crack on the screen. And then, you know, you're suffering through another couple of years before you decide, okay, I've got to go buy another one. I can't keep suffering through this. Now with the framework laptop, the goal is that the entire period of time you're using the product should be a happy period of time. You know, if your battery is running down because you've worn through a number of cycles, you should be able to get in there, replace that battery and get great battery life again. If you, you know, pulled a key off your keyboard somehow, you can get a new keyboard and keep going or you, you know, dropped it down a flight of stairs and your screen's broken, you can replace the screen.

SPEAKER_31: And that entire length of time is productive. Like that's, that's really the goal and the differentiator here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So how many years you've been at this? So we just started at the beginning of 2020. In January 2020, we kicked off. Tell me about fundraising for a hardware company. Sure. In the pandemic.

David Friedberg: Yeah. So I wouldn't even say that the pandemic is the issue. I mean, you know, if anything, you know, both direct-to-consumer e-commerce and, you know, notebooks,

SPEAKER_31: especially actually have gotten an enormous boost from...

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, actually, I just had Michael Dell on the program. That episode's coming out in a couple of weeks, but he had the best year ever, I think, at Dell. Like the idea that the desktop was dead or the laptop was dead is just farcical.

SPEAKER_82: People are buying more than ever. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_29: So the challenge for us is not the pandemic. The challenge for us is, you know, all the million other things that make starting a hardware startup challenging. You know, probably the greatest of which is that venture capital just doesn't believe in consumer hardware. And, you know, perhaps justifiably given the long string of high-profile failures in the space. But, you know, we look at those failures and we can see, you know, the very obvious reasons that many of them failed.

SPEAKER_95: And, you know, we're not going to make the obvious mistakes. We'll make new mistakes.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. And you were able to raise 9 million? That's right. Yes. We closed a seed round earlier this year that's given us the capital.

David Friedberg: Big seed. Yeah, it's enough to get us, you know, into market on the product that we have.

SPEAKER_97: And Norak Ventures did that.

SPEAKER_81: They participated, yeah. Oh, they weren't the lead? Who was the lead? So I actually personally led the round. Oh, really? Wow. That is baller.

SPEAKER_28: So you worked at Apple, you made some cash there, but you also worked at Oculus. You were the head of hardware at Oculus before it was sold to Facebook?

David Friedberg: Yeah, so as part of the founding team, I think it was the eighth person. And, you know, obviously we were very successful there, both in our mission of actually being able to make consumer VR work.

SPEAKER_95: But also, you know, the Facebook acquisition obviously worked out well for folks who were there early in the company. Yeah.

SPEAKER_158: I mean, if you were there in your first date, you had to have 2% of the company, 2%, $3 billion, you know, it adds up, right?

SPEAKER_34: Sure. Yep. Directionally correct. Directionally. Directionally correct.

SPEAKER_161: Yeah.

SPEAKER_163: Oh, can you give us your back statement? No, I'm just doing it in my mind. So you had the gall, the gumption to put in millions of dollars of your own money to back this company.

David Friedberg: Yeah, I believe in the necessity of it. And I believe that consumers want this, that the consumers want a company that can make products actually respect their needs.

SPEAKER_93: Hmm.

SPEAKER_34: Now, what about the smartphone? You're starting here with the laptop.

SPEAKER_13: I got a thing that when, if you make this work, the laptop's such a layup because everybody needs a laptop and there's, you have all these gaming folks, you have all these, you know, for some reason, the desktop and the laptop still have a group of people who want to upgrade it, right? They still feel, what, why do you think that is? Why do you think the desktop space, is it because of gaming? Is it because of the history of it?

David Friedberg: It's a combination of things. Part of it's the history of it, but a lot of it comes down to this combination of utility and enjoyment. That like for the people who like to tinker with their desktops and laptops, it's not just that they need more performance and they get the utility and the performance there. It's actually fun.

SPEAKER_29: It's fun to dig in there and mess around with your machine and like get it to do exactly the thing that you want it to do.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, see, I think it's like muscle cars, you know? Exactly. Yes. When I owned a 1973 Mustang Grande in gold with a vinyl roof, I was just constantly like, let's put the two back, what can I do? And they're like, right. How much money you have? I'm like, I got 500 bucks.

SPEAKER_28: Like, okay, we can take a two barrel car and make it a four barrel and you'll go from nine miles to the gallon to six. I was like, let's do it.

SPEAKER_161: It's gonna make a bigger noise. Sure.

SPEAKER_19: I think that's an expansion ports work and having seen project Aria.

SPEAKER_28: Is it Aria? Aria. Aria. Aria. Aria is a project now at Facebook. That's right. To do something else. I can't remember what that. Oh, that's a, it's a AR glasses. Yeah. They have an open source AR glasses kind of project.

SPEAKER_177: You must be thinking about either glasses or mobile. Would this not work for mobile phones?

David Friedberg: Yes. I mean, the same problems exist across all consumer electronics.

SPEAKER_29: This idea that, you know, you buy this product. It's not really your product. It's the company that made its products. You can't do what you like with it. You know, you're just sort of borrowing it. And so like that, that same problem, that same opportunity definitely exists.

David Friedberg: And for us, it was just very, very obvious that notebooks were such a low hanging entry point that the audience is there.

SPEAKER_29: You know, there are people who just from a single image or a few lines of text about what we're doing, it clicks and they get why we're doing it, why it's important and why they want it. And we see that that's just a great place to go and bootstrap this sort of philosophy and the business around.

SPEAKER_95: But really, it's just a starting point. We see, you know, every category in consumer electronics has this opportunity.

SPEAKER_182: So, yeah, you could see it working for Android if you get this working.

David Friedberg: Yeah, and there's a company in Europe called Fairphone that's actually taking an interesting approach on this as well. They have a very ethical tech. Fairphone?

SPEAKER_29: Fairphone. It's a very ethical tech. Oh, Fairphone. Yeah, it's this great mission that they have and great philosophy.

SPEAKER_95: They're not quite approaching from like customization and upgrade standpoint, really from just an environmental harm reduction standpoint, but it's a great company. And, you know, we wish them success.

SPEAKER_34: And what are they doing?

Chamath Palihapitiya: They just, you can upgrade your screen or fix your screen kind of thing? It's, yeah, it's highly repairable.

SPEAKER_95: It's, you know, sourced and manufactured in an ethical way, you know, uses sustainable materials. It's a good mission.

SPEAKER_105: Wow, that is such a, I'm looking at their website right now.

SPEAKER_13: And, yeah, looks like, looks like, you know, like a Motorola phone from, you know, whatever, period ago, like, it looks a little dated. But look at that, you can swap out, you know, your batteries, and I'm assuming other stuff.

SPEAKER_165: Yeah, it's just, on an environmental basis, if you succeed, what would the world look like? Right.

David Friedberg: And that's part of it for us that, you know, enthusiasts are like, you know, this great entry point as an early adopter audience.

SPEAKER_29: But ultimately, like the mission that we have and the environmental impact that we can have by making products last longer, we do think that's extremely appealing for people who think about the environmental impact of the purchase decisions.

SPEAKER_95: You know, the person who gets, you know, that Beyond Burger instead of a, you know, a beef burger, or, you know, gets, you know, fair trade coffee, or buys Patagonia clothing, like when they buy electronics products, which are, you know, perhaps among the most environmentally damaging purchases that they'll make in their lifetimes, they just don't have a good set of options in front of them.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, see, it's interesting you bring that up, because I passed on that, those investments in the mock meat space.

SPEAKER_13: And it was a big mistake for me because the, I thought, well, who in their right mind is going to pay 50 because they explained to me like, it's going to be 15 bucks for one of these burgers at a restaurant. And I'm like, so I can go to In-N-Out, or I can go to Shake Shack. And for, you know, four bucks to eight bucks, I can get an amazing burger, but I'm going to pay you four times as much or double or triple to eat it.

SPEAKER_28: And it's not going to taste as good. That makes no sense. And then here we are, we all know people who will spend three times or four times as much to eat something that's better for the planet.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, and the interesting thing there is that like, it's really a question of audience sequencing.

David Friedberg: Like this is honestly, this is like the core lesson in hardware startups, really real or even like food tech startups really deeply think about your audience sequencing because like, What does it mean audience sequencing? It's about finding that first set of audiences that really deeply cares about what you're doing. To the point that even if they are trade offs or risks that they care so much that, that the trade offs way in the favor of them going and diving in and doing it, you know, buying that expensive burger.

SPEAKER_29: And, and from there, you really have to think about what the sequence of audiences after that is.

David Friedberg: And, you know, if you look at impossible and beyond sure, like, you know, their, their products, when they started out, they were a lot more expensive, and maybe they didn't taste quite as good. And, you know, the audiences maybe were limited, but they actually did do that audience sequencing really well. And if you look at it now, you know, that the costs are, I think, actually quite close to a traditional burger and the flavor they continue to improve over time.

SPEAKER_29: And that's a lesson that really you need to apply throughout it's find that audience and then find the next one as you can improve your product and find the next one after that until you are, you know, the big company that is capturing that market share.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, this is why I'm an idiot because I knew what you're saying sequencing because I saw it up close and personal with Uber and Tesla. I bought the roadster for 150 dimes. Um, and Elon said very specifically, like, if you buy this Jason, you're helping pay for the next version.

SPEAKER_28: So then I bought the next version, the model S and, you know, Elon's position was the same. If you buy this, you're eventually we're going to have a $50,000 version and sure enough to have the model three and supposedly the model four, which is not going to be its name. Will be a $30,000 version. And you felt really great being part of that sequencing again with Uber. They didn't start with Uber pool. They started with, uh, Uber black and it was only, you know, $80, $40 rides, not $4 and $8 rides. So you start at the high margin business and then you make your way downstream. And, um, it's just such a great idea.

SPEAKER_06: Um, what, what's the most challenging thing about what you're doing?

David Friedberg: What is the most challenging thing? I mean, honestly, the, the most challenging thing probably right now is just, is just scaling.

SPEAKER_29: You know, we're in, in, uh, it's, I mean, it's a good problem to have thing. It's we're selling product faster than we can build it. And so it's, how do we scale up our, like hundreds of units, thousands of units?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: So we're, we're, we're happy with the sales trajectory. And, you know, right now, if you go on our website to say over thousands of units.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah.

SPEAKER_95: So if you, if you go on your website now, I think we're out in October or November, which is, you know, a month or two for a pre-order to be able to, to ship it out there. And those are times that we're continuing to try to pull in by, um, you know, increasing our supply chain capacity. And, you know, of course our, you know, our head of supply chain was just a brilliant operations person that always says, you know, I want to turn this into, you know, the, the e-commerce teams problem. I don't want to be the, um, and so we're, we're going to get out of that.

SPEAKER_29: Um, but you know, it's, it's sort of a good problem to have of how do we scale as a, as

SPEAKER_69: a small team building a, you know, an expensive and difficult product. Are you doing any marketing right now? Or is it all word of mouth?

David Friedberg: Um, it's basically, it's almost entirely, uh, PR and, and word of mouth.

SPEAKER_29: And it's, you know, it's, it's the notebook industry. It's, it's a big, enormous industry with a, a very mature set of press and influences around it.

SPEAKER_95: And they're reporting on things that are frankly, not very interesting. You know, it's the same notebooks every year from Dell and HP and Lenovo. And so for us to come out there, like genuinely doing something new and interesting gets people, I think, rightfully excited. Yeah.

SPEAKER_202: It's so exciting to me. And I think you're going to be incredibly successful at it.

SPEAKER_34: I mean, it's so such a great, obvious idea that, you know, if you're thinking about buying a new laptop and you're like, huh, I wonder if it's going to support 5g, you know, you've

SPEAKER_13: already answered that question, which is if there's demand for it, somebody is going to go to GitHub, get the spec and just build it. And, you know, people forget this, but there was something called PCM CIA. Yeah, PCM CIA.

SPEAKER_205: Yeah. That's right.

SPEAKER_144: And these were PC cards. They, they were about the size of a pack of playing cards. That's right. A little bit.

SPEAKER_13: They were, I don't know how the quarter inch maybe. And you when you bought your ThinkPad, your IBM ThinkPad, it had two PCM CIA slots and you'd slide them in. And you could have back then a 3g connection or 2g connection, you could have, you know, a card reader, you know, and you can't even get these in. Those, does PCM CIA still even exist? It doesn't.

SPEAKER_69: There was a successor called Express card that also died off.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, really to a large extent, what we're doing is returning PCs back to their form where, you know, modularity and upgradeability and ecosystems were just part of the entire experience.

SPEAKER_95: But we're doing it with, you know, the best technology that 2021 has available. Amazing.

SPEAKER_20: With your memory cards, just as we wrap up here, are the, what are you using for storage there? Is it flash storage and fast? Is it slow and like?

SPEAKER_29: Yes. Yeah, it's high speed storage. It's actually fast enough that you can install an operating system onto like Linux.

SPEAKER_95: And, you know, actually, you know, you can take a, you know, privacy focused OS, install it on an expansion card, and then pop it out and lock it in a safe or whatever you'd like to do.

SPEAKER_13: Oh, wow, you know, it's really interesting about that. I wonder if you could have two of those different terabytes, I could have Chrome OS on one, Windows on another, and then whichever one I swap in to, you know, port number one, would be the primary boot, and I could just boot up a different instance. Is that possible?

SPEAKER_69: Yeah, that's possible. With Windows, it's a little harder. But definitely with any Linux distro, it's actually relatively straightforward to do.

SPEAKER_215: What about Chrome OS? Have you been playing with Chrome OS?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, we have. Well, so there's actually, actually a company that Google just acquired called Cloud Ready

SPEAKER_95: that, that basically enables Chrome OS on, you know, any typical, you know, Windows notebook, basically. And so we've been able to... Oh, I know this.

SPEAKER_29: This is Neverware. Neverware. That's right. Yeah, Neverware Cloud Ready. That got bought by Google? I believe it did. I hope I didn't get that wrong.

SPEAKER_13: I believe they got acquired. I mean, it's really interesting because you can, you can with, I remember with that, I was taking my old iMacs. You can take an old iMac and load Chrome on it. And just to show how bloated, you know, Mac OS has gotten, Chrome OS, perfectly functional. A seven year old iMac will work brilliantly with Chrome OS. Right. And so you just donate it to school with Chrome OS on it. It's just so amazing. All right, listen, continued success. We are both in the peninsula. Maybe I can take you for some ramen and see if I can sneak my way onto your, onto your, um, cap table because I am enamored with what you're doing. Uh, I'm ordering a machine today. And I, uh, hope everybody considers this frame.work. Take a look at it. You know, it might be something for you to take advantage of.

SPEAKER_28: I also think for IT companies, if you were gonna, if you have a thousand employees and you're in the IT department, you gotta be thinking about piloting this, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, absolutely. We've got a ton of inbound interest, actually.

SPEAKER_29: And like the core to that is it's not even that, um, you know, that, that you can potentially save money by making products last longer. It's actually just reducing employee downtime, especially in a remote first world, getting

SPEAKER_95: someone, their machine repaired, you know, a day faster is worth more than the cost of that machine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_129: And then you think about recycling machines, like somebody needs a new machine. It's faster.

SPEAKER_13: You're like, okay, hey, we just sent you a new terabyte. Just slide it in. As opposed, and it's like, okay, I'm done, right? And remote hardware support, all that stuff is getting pretty robust now. All right, listen, continued success.

SPEAKER_15: Maybe we'll go get some ramen at some point in the peninsula. And, uh, we'll, we'll go check out, uh, Tai Shoken. Have you been to Tai Shoken in San Mateo yet?

SPEAKER_205: No, that sounds good though.

SPEAKER_15: Tai Shoken, T-A-I Shoken, um, is, uh, buckwheat noodles that they make there.

SPEAKER_13: And you dip them in the, this like broth and it's called dipping noodles. And it's like the number one thing in Japan. And they, this place Tai Shoken, which is like, you wait in line for a day in Japan to go there, decided to open in the U S and they decided to open their first location in San Mateo. And it is bonkers how good Tai Shoken is. Like I was never into ramen and now I'm a ramen addict. Okay.

SPEAKER_226: Maybe you and I can go grab some ramen.

SPEAKER_24: I'm up for it. Uh, thanks for coming on the pod. Everybody go check it out at frame.work. Are you hiring? Are you hiring?

SPEAKER_150: Sure. We're hiring for marketing most crucially of all, actually, as we look at this audience sequencing.

SPEAKER_95: Um, but also for a number of engineering positions, actually, as we start to develop our next products.

SPEAKER_13: Great. We have a lot of marketers who listen. So if you are a hardware geek who cares about the environment and people's right to upgrade their own products and you want to see a better world for the environment.

SPEAKER_15: Hey, just type in framework jobs and, uh, you'll, you'll go right to their jobs page. All right. See you next time on This Week in Star Wars. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.