I'm an R1T owner and I can't even put into words why the truck is just so much better and differentiated. It's not just that it's an EV Truck... my friend has a Lightning and it has none of the magic of my Rivian. Magic in a vehicle.
How much better it is, is not a measure of time. It may be a hugely improved product, and it may also be replicated in a few years. They also are not making many of them yet. Let's see it scale. (which maybe it will, but they dont deserve credit for something they have not done yet.)
About Grain: We're a 4 year old company with an Elixir/Phoenix backend and React front end, 10 engineers (mostly remote) and raised a $16M Series A from Tiger Global last year. We found ourselves perfectly timed w/ digital conversation shift due to COVID 2 years ago and now find ourselves with a large data set to leverage LLMs to solve important problems for our users (by automating the mundane parts of their workflows and surfacing the useful parts).
Teslas the majority? I always assume Tesla was a more luxury brand of EVs.
Is there any ranking of amount of EVs by brand sold to date?
AFAIR Nissan Leaf was selling quite well some time in Europe. And in 2022 I see BYD sold more vehicles than Tesla, but I can't find data for all the EVs sold in the past.
At least in Los Angeles, Teslas are more of an upgraded Prius. Most people with money have been replacing them with Taycans or E-trons over the last 2-3 years.
Eh depends on what you call equivalent. A base model 2023 Toyota Corolla is $21k, a fully decked out one is $28k or so. A 2022 Nissan Leaf is $27k. So not quite double.
In the US, the vast majority of EVs on the road are Teslas. Even today, they account for over 50% of sales. Other automakers are not shipping in volume to the US.
I can't speak to what's currently available in the US market, but my 2014 Mitsubisht iMiev is blissfully basic. Unfortunately it was so much so that it didn't sell well here and got taken off the market. No central display screen other than a few monochrome characters for the radio. Buttons everywhere. Manual seats. No backup camera. The ~50mi range from a 16 KWh battery pack is suboptimal for long-range driving, but it's perfect for the city. It is smaller than a Civic though.
I get the impression that, for first-world markets, "EV" is synonomous with "Tesla" and that irks me. It's just a different drivetrain, but somehow the focus groups have decided that all EVs have to have the same de-featured tablet-on-wheels look. I'm generalizing here, but I agree with the sentiment behind your question. I wish there were more traditionally designed cars with EV drivetrains becuase when I drive this one into the ground I sure hope there's something similar to replace it with.
Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf are both cars I would consider to be Civic-class cars. Especially the Bolt. They also happen to be two of the cheapest EVs on the road, so it lines up.
That's a bizarre price discrepancy. I wonder if there's some credits in there that I'm not getting in Canada, or that aren't included in the initial price tag.
Those prices are without any incentives, actually. If they actually manage to get the 'made in America' requirement for the batteries, then I believe they'd be eligible for an additional $7500 off that price. Depending on where you live, there may be still state incentives available right now too.
a Chevy bolt is competitive on price with tax incentives factored in. it's actually not bad, but imo the civic is a much better value unless you really want an EV.
IMO it's generally more of a tooling problem than a methodology problem... like trying to build a skyscraper without power tools.
The main challenge with taking notes during meetings is that the tools use were designed for drafting in a non-linear environment. But notes in meetings are directly related to the content of what is being said at a specific moment in time, and the text-only notes usually fail to capture the full essence compared to watching that part of the video.
When building my last start-up, an online school on Zoom, we recorded every lecture so our students could go back and review the content during the working sessions. But they found it hard to correlate their Google Doc notes with the moment in the recording they wanted to go back and watch. But since we pulled over the Zoom chat log with timestamps back to moments in the recording, they started taking notes there so they could keep track of the part they knew they wanted to watch later or reference.
Long story short, when the online school got acquired I started my current start-up https://grain.co to turn that insight into software anyone could use to better capture and share knowledge during any kind of meeting.
Great stuff Jake, thanks for sharing. I watched that pricing change very closely as we have a similar progression from solo to multi-player at [https://grain.co/pricing] but very helpful to hear the reasoning behind it.
Completely agreed that the nuance is critical to this discussion and the absolutism makes the great clickbait but isn't supported by reality.
Most new companies in this space have been using "AI" marketing to pitch a better world of video conferencing and it's been largely a failure. (unless you call getting bought and then shut down by Cisco a win)
But I 100% agree with you that this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI. Innovation is the sum of behavior change and AI is not going to be doing our knowledge work for us anytime soon. Given we're doin the work, we deserve better tools to do it ourselves.
I'm currently building grain.co that layers a new kind of video conferencing on top of Zoom, focused on brokering the recorded information gathered during sync calls into the async tools where knowledge lives and actual work is done after the convo ends.
Our approach is to make it easy to annotate in real-time, clip out those parts you want to save/share, and then push them into async tools where anyone can view them like it were text in a document or a message in Slack.
> [...] this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI
> [...] I'm currently building grain.co [...]
> (From website)
> Instantly record, transcribe, and highlight the best parts of your Zoom video calls.
EDIT: not a criticism, just made me think of a tangentially related thing:
This is so emblematic of how AI is a moving target. Once something becomes an everyday tool it's no longer AI?
Not so long ago, being able to transcribe speech from multiple people in natural conversation would be the hallmark of AI research.
The cited article pulled out a catchy headline from an extrinsically motivated context like Telemarketing. Not surprising that people who fail from a rote task get de-motivated and quit, learning nothing.
I don't believe that study has any relevance to the world of creative work -- like building products or becoming a Jedi ;) -- that is driven by intrinsic motivation to iterate and improve. Success rarely requires the same level of self-evaluation and reflection in creative contexts.
completely agree with this. This is why the idea behind Cagan's "Empowered Product Teams" [https://svpg.com/empowered-product-teams/] is so important. Founders are often too blinded by their initial approach of solving their own pain that they are blinded to superior alternatives that could be more easily seen by fresh eyes. Key is to empower those people to solve the problem, not just implement a solution.
We're big Cagan fans at Kitemaker. In fact, most of our thinking around the product is tied into empowered product teams. Cross-functional, autonomous, self-organizing and impact-focused. We want Kitemaker to be the best tool out there for such teams.
For sure, ideas matter A LOT. But we over-index on product solution ideas by default.
I think ideas that matter most for is for founders are the ones around a strong conviction on the market opportunity and then be flexible about the solution that is built to capture that opportunity.
The latter is where I think process is more important than the product solution idea having seen my product solution ideas fail hundreds of times without changing my market vision ideas.
This doesn't mean our ideas are not more important, just that people have too much confidence in how good their ideas are. Its much harder to have a good idea then to create something to a good quality standard, the latter can be done by any expert which means it only requires capital, good ideas on the other hand can't really be bought and there are no sure methods to come up with them.
