Alexia Tsotsis

The Unbearable Softness Of Softbank

Japanese telecom company Softbank has been making headlines recently for the mountain of capital it has raised and is now deploying in the tech sector. Fortune’s Polina Marinova gives some insight into Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s strategy beyond making it rain billions on struggling unicorns, by analyzing a Softbank “Next 30 Years Vision” deck from 2010. 

On a conceptual level, the deck posits an eventual “information revolution” catalyzed by sensors and data, and argues that computing power (which is defined as ‘cell’ versus ‘transistor’ count) will surpass human brain power in 2018. As far as I can tell, that prediction will not pan out.

On a deeper level, it would seem like the person who designed this deck was a closet Existentialist, painstakingly questioning the very meaning of life through liberal use of the PowerPoint Clip Art library. 

As the dystopian future the deck predicts seems ever more plausible in 2017, the poignancy of the deck’s image and text juxtapositions make the heart ache with ontological angst. “Why are we here?” “Are we in control of our lives?” “Why is Donald Trump president?” “Why is it called Softbank if it’s not a bank?”

Because the universe is absurd, and we make our own meanings in life, here are the most wistful slides in the Softbank deck, paired with a quote from some of the greatest Existentialist thinkers of our time. Philosophical wax on, philosophical wax off. 

1. “What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence?” John Paul Sartre

2. “The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests.” Friedrich Nietzche 

3. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman–a rope over an abyss.” Frederich Nietzche

4. “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Albert Camus

5. “After awhile you could get used to anything.” Albert Camus

6. “Hell is other people.” Jean Paul Sartre

7. “The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.” Carl Sagan

8. “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.” Charles Bukowski

9. “Did she love you?”
“Only as an extension of herself.”
“What else can love be?” Charles Bukowski

10. “There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.” Charles Bukowski

11. “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” Martin Heidegger

Snapchat Bought The Next Snapchat

Last week someone casually asked me what I thought the next Snapchat would be. As there is a lot of volatility among social apps (note the current migration from Twitter to Snapchat in the +30 age group), the real answer is that the next Snapchat will probably look nothing like Snapchat, just like Snapchat looked nothing like Facebook.  

If I had to guess, I would guess that the next Snapchat will actually look something Bitmoji, the ‘make your own avatar’ product launched last year by Bitstrips. Bitstrips, a custom comic strip startup, was founded in 2007, while Evan Spiegel was still in high school.

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Lighthearted and quirky, the relatively simple Bitmoji avatars are taking over the world: There has been a proliferation of Bitmojis in my messaging apps and texts this quarter, especially around holidays and birthdays, which have up until now been Facebook’s bread and butter.  

I have little insight into Bitmoji’s actual traction – SensorTower estimates it at 750k downloads in March 2016, which seems low to me. But I have watched its usage increase in frequency among my peers in the first three months of the year, as it climbs the ranks of the iOS app store. As a Bitmoji would say, it’s “trending up!”

The Bitmoji product itself, much like Snapchat’s ridiculous filters, is delightful – on any given day, you can be a character from Zoolander or the singer Sia or a human burrito who hates Mondays. You can dress your Bitmoji in DVF. You can use it ironically with friends, all of you in on the joke (that cartoon of you holding a bleeding heart is so creepy!). Or you can drill deep with verisimilitude and meaning in your messages – one of my friends, who happens to be a fighter pilot, uses a ‘Happy Birthday!’ Bitmoji with a plane skywriting the ‘Happy Birthday’ part. 

Bitmoji plays so well into one of the key user stickiness factors of social apps: Vanity. We keep marveling when our Bitmojis look like us and our friends – even though that’s what they’re supposed to do exactly. 

Products that galvanize communication and social interaction through humor and playfulness will continue to spread, by definition, no matter how rudimentary they are. 

I can only imagine what Bitmoji’s independent trajectory as a fleshed-out (pun intended) platform would look like, had it not been acquired by Snapchat in March – AR? VR? I’d settle for the ability to include multiple people in avatars, a solid viral hook. We’ll never know. 

Which brings us to another 🔑 lesson: If you’re looking for the next Snapchat, so is Snapchat. 

Top image via: Pla Siriviriyakul

Smashing The Award Show Glass Ceiling

Every awards show is a bit of bullshit and a bit of a mess. At their messiest, you get Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars, and on an average night you may get an interruption by Kanye, a streaker, or this “Face Off” between me and my fellow Women 2.0 Award winner, Ina Fried.

The 2014 Crunchies were definitely on messiest end of the spectrum. This is the eighth time we’ve hosted the annual awards ceremony, and we’re having growing pains.

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A Note On Tinder

Yesterday an investigative piece on the Tinder lawsuit was published on TechCrunch. The piece took quite a bit of reporting, and in the process of researching, our writer, Jordan Crook, spoke to more than 15 people involved in the case.

While there is always room for tighter edits, the story went through multiple editors at TechCrunch and multiple passes from our legal team. However, this work was called into question by an Events post that went up an hour later, unbeknownst to me and my co-editor Matthew Panzarino.

That post announced that Tinder CEO Sean Rad would be speaking at Disrupt SF, which was a decision made a month ago. Unfortunately, the timing of that post made it look like this event was tied into the just-published story.

Since those two posts went out, we have had to deal with unfair accusations that we traded TechCrunch coverage for a Disrupt spot for Rad. I cannot be more clear: That is not what happened.

What did happen? Some incredibly bad blog timing coupled with an issue as incendiary as gender in tech. I apologize for the mistake, and the mistaken perception of our editorial mission and team.