Snap controls hardware where it can shape the customer experience

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 59:10

   about your company. Why is it so important to you, though, to control so much of the hardware that you're making? Control of the hardware is necessary to deliver an extraordinary customer experience in this space. And the intersection between the hardware and the software to deliver that customer experience is essential. So as we look at how other people are approaching this space, trying to cobble together components from a ton of different manufacturers and get them to all work really well in a super small, lightweight form factor that's incredibly performant is just really, really hard to do. And so I think for us, if we want to really deliver, you know, this cutting edge computing experience, doing that requires us to have a...

2. 1:00:00

   very high degree of control of the areas we can really differentiate so for example for us that you know the display components are an area where we really differentiate we have an incredibly performant waveguide which is like the glasses part of the the lens right basically the lens of the glasses uh and we've developed our own projector that's incredibly small that you know beams light into this this waveguide that's a big strategic advantage for us because the display components draw a lot of power right they're really important in terms of having that immersion and being able to have a very wide field of view when you're using the glasses, you can interact with the world.

3. 1:00:35

   And then, of course, like the resolution, the sharpness, like those are the things that really, really matter. And so for us, in order to push those boundaries, there's no one that comes close to our ability to deliver on that product experience. So by doing it ourselves, I think we've created a competitive advantage that will show up in the product that the consumers will experience. Say more about that line where you said it's important to control the parts that you can differentiate on.

4. 1:00:58

   Essentially, like you're going to burn yourself out if you try to control everything, right? So it's really important to identify very early on, like where are the strategic points where you can create a totally unique customer experience by really investing in doing things differently? And for us, we've really thoughtfully picked out where can we play and do something that's really hard and do it differently that creates a sustained competitive advantage because it delivers such an awesome customer experience.

5. 1:01:22

   So the display components are one. I can talk about that because it's public. But like later this year, people will see a lot of these areas where we've invested and invented, you know, fundamentally invented new ways of doing things that I think consumers are going to love. Another thing that like Edwin, like, again, people should study Edwin Land. They should study all these histories because entrepreneurs because you just realize they can come up with ideas too.

6. 1:01:42

   We were talking earlier. It's like he wanted, he realized like if he did not have control, because he started, he wanted to be an inventor, not an entrepreneur. He had to learn to be an entrepreneur just so he could actually make money on his invention. So therefore he only wanted to make money so he could invent more things. He was not after, you know, just having piles of money. And any time he tried to outsource, one, he let other companies get in between him and the end consumer, which he fixed that when he did Polaroid and the cameras.

7. 1:02:11

   But when the manufacturing, the factories were in Massachusetts, for God's sake. He was manufacturing high-end technology in America. And his whole point was just like he didn't want to be a manufacturer, but he needed to control the things. So not only like to get the cost down, but to be able to influence the end unit of the product. Yeah, people, you know, I think would be stunned to learn that we manufacture core components in the U.S. and the U.K., right, in our own facilities, which allow us to do this really advanced R&D that push the boundaries of what's, you know, what's possible with these components.