In the arena
It’s rare that I get through a whole podcast these days, either because I don’t have the time or because it doesn’t keep my interest, but last night I listened to the entire a16z podcast about bots.
I thought it was a healthy discussion about bots that did not ponder too heavily on the promise, but more on the reality of the problems they face today and the road ahead. I think Chris Messina got beat up a bit by the other two on the podcast, but Connie Chan and Benedict Evans are both incredibly sharp and had great points that I think people really need to think about when building bots. Connie is one of the very few that can talk about WeChat without sounding like a cliché and Benedict is a totally brainy fast talking nerd with an English accent to boot. If Stephen Hawking could actually talk, he’d probably sound like Benedict.
But I could not get over this gut reaction I had when listening to them talk. I just wanted to tell them, “stop talking and just go build something! show me a demo of what you are talking about!”. It was nothing against them, but it showed me that I personally cannot just sit on the side lines, I *have* to be in the arena building stuff. I don’t think I’d make it as a journalist or an investor, both of whom have important roles to play in the ecosystem, but my role is definitely not those two. It was a distinct reaffirmation of something I’ve known all along. I don’t mind being judged and criticized by the peanut gallery because the joy of building is so immense for me.
The closing statement that Connie made stuck with me. She gives caution to developers to really think whether building a bot is the right thing to do and to examine whether it is truly additive. I think it was a wise statement, probably true for many things in life, but what struck me was the progression that it was placed within. Benedict presented it at the very beginning, where bots are being examined as this progression from websites to apps and now possibly to bots. If you ask that same question about bots to the first two steps, does your business need a website? does it need an app? and finally does it need a bot? I’d say given that progression, most everybody needs a website, less need an app, and even less need a bot.
But if you change that progression to be less application focused, which I think websites have become and apps inherently are, and instead center it around communication, you get a very different progression. If you look at the dominant form of communication over the years, you could reasonably say the progression has been mail, telephone, email, and now likely messaging. If you ask the same question again in that context, should your business have a mailing address (yes), a phone number (yes), an email address (yes), and finally messaging, I’d say in the not too distant future it is a likely yes. If all of your customers are communicating via messaging, you must use messaging to reach them, and if you have any reasonable number of customers, you will need new tools to help you scale in communicating with them via messaging, just like every other communication medium in the past. And I don’t think it’s just customer support, but it’s your overall relationship with your customers. It can be very generic like mass marketing emails or it could be incredibly personal like the owner of a restaurant coming to your table to see how your evening was going. Messaging with the help of bots can make it more like the latter, which is a future I would actually look forward to.
