Voluntary Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Silicon Valley Outsider: For startup and tech lovers outside the SF Bay Area
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🤯 Airbnb in 2008 = [???]
Airbnb announced this week that it will soon IPO to become $ABNB, a $30 billion public company. But back in 2008, it was just AirBed And Breakfast — a seemingly ridiculous idea that would only work is strangers allowed other strangers to sleep in their homes.
Today, Silicon Valley is supposedly full of superfluous apps and derivative inventions — but someone forgot to tell these three teams, who are building companies that sound as crazy today as Airbnb sounded in 2008.
🥉 Bronze Medal: Headphone-less audio
The Noveto SoundBeamer is a speaker that beams music directly into your brain without headphones. How? Ultrasonic waves, aka magic.
“I was thinking, ‘Yeah, but is it the same with headphones?’ No, because I have the freedom and it’s like I have the freedom of doing what I want to do. And I have these sounds playing in my head as there would be something happening here, which is difficult to explain because we have no reference for that.”
🥈 Silver Medal: Hypnotherapy-on-demand
Mindset Health is a new kind of medical services provider — they have two apps, one to help with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and one for improving mental health, both enabled by daily hypnotherapy recordings.
I’ll be honest: I’ve never understood hypnosis. I understand even less how an app could hypnotize someone, or how doing so would improve their bowel health. But apparently it works, with 70% of users reporting a clinical improvement in their symptoms after following a six-week program. (Joke’s on me and other non-believers!)
🥇 Gold Medal: Voluntary invasion of the body snatchers
Second Body is impossible to describe, except by example. Just imagine that you’re sitting across the table from a stranger, but the words they’re speaking are coming from your girlfriend. And in another room, another stranger is sitting with your girlfriend, feeding her your words.
The basic idea is to disintermediate a conversation between two people by hiring two body doubles, one for each person. Why? Because “how we see someone changes how we hear them.” It sounds crazy, and maybe it is, but as anyone who has seen Sarah Cooper’s TikTok Trump impersonations can attest, the medium of a person’s body can noticeably alter how we perceive their message.
The founder of Second Body calls it a “therapeutic” experience that can help you hear the words of your significant others in a totally new way (and, of course, to help them hear you in a new way as well). I call it mind-bendingly interesting — and an unforgettable date night.
(h/t Suhail Doshi for starting this conversation; see below!)
😱 If these ideas freak you out, you’re not alone.
But if they freak you out and you want to try them anyways, welcome to the club!
✨What’s (not-so) new in the Valley
Hackers > Hustlers: Jake Singer, an NYU Stern MBA and former Amazon employee, wrote an article this week on why “business school is not really school.” As an MBA myself, I am contractually obliged to disagree with him — more words due on that later, perhaps — but his article captures the Silicon Valley distaste for traditional business credentials (e.g., job titles, liberal arts degrees). It reminds me of a post-interview evaluation for a previous job in Silicon Valley, when one reviewer said: “Yes, he’s a great talker, but so are all businesspeople. What has he actually built?”
All Businesses are FinTech, Eventually: Uber announced its plans this week to release financial services products — think wallets, credit/debit cards, and cashback rewards. Sounds wild, but it’s not surprising. A central tenet of Silicon Valley wisdom is that all sufficiently mature companies become Financial Technology (FinTech) companies.
Quantified Self: One notable trend in Silicon Valley is optimizing human performance. Folks track their sleep, count their calories, and can now monitor their metabolic health with Levels, a glucose data tracking product that raised a $12 million seed round this week. That announcement genuinely surprised me — I’ve seen tons of tweets like the following, and I figured that Levels was far beyond seed stage financing.
👨🏾 Someone to know: Suhail Doshi
Suhail Doshi emerged on the Silicon Valley scene as the founder of Mixpanel, an app analytics startup originally funded in the Summer 2009 class of Y Combinator. Suhail grew Mixpanel from zero to a $865 million valuation (using this pitch deck) before hiring a new CEO and transitioning to a Chairman role. He’s now back at it again with a new startup — Mighty, a faster web browser — and he’s worth highlighting here because he’s an amazing Twitter follow.
Suhail started a thread this week that I blatantly ripped off to create the top section of this newsletter (😅), and he has a lot more where that came from.
Start with the thread below, where Suhail confronts the ways that he messed up as a young CEO. If you like open, honest contemplation, you’ll love following Suhail.
Catch you on the outside,
Christian