Emerging Tech Add-Ons

In this memo, we discuss the different approaches companies are taking to incorporate emerging tech solutions (AR, AI, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain) into their existing businesses and products.

Do you start from the perspective of Bitcoin and then add AI? Do you start from the perspective of enterprise SAAS and then add AI? Do you start from user experience with 2D and 3D interfaces and then plug in Bitcoin and AI?

These approaches, as we've seen when new technological disruptions emerge, provide incremental value but not 100x value.

When the iPhone was released, porting web pages to the iPhone wasn't what ultimately delivered the most value. Instead, it was the rise of always-on social networking and work. Media creation, sharing, and consumption.

Similarly, we need to view the convergence from the perspective of multiple inventions, commercialized at scale, coming together to create something altogether new and different.

We have a thesis, user experience requirements, technical architecture documents, brand, team, and partners identified that are likely to result in realizing this product vision spec. However, it's proprietary intellectual property, and as such, we cannot give it away in this forum. It will also take time to integrate all the existing tools, teams, and technologies together. Which means it's not as fast as bolting on AI to the existing product.

We believe much of the world will approach this from an "add-on" perspective. They have invested time, money, and reputation into the existing product and service and are wrestling sunk costs, and how to do the lowest effort, highest impact thing. It will look like:

• I have an enterprise SAAS app that is earning recurring revenue, solid EBITDA, and high customer retention. I want to integrate generative AI to keep my company in the game while other companies race to integrate AI features into their products. The question on everyone's lips is: What's the use case? We've done the customer development and the integration in multiple scenarios.
• I am sending payments back and forth globally, have credit card chargeback problems, am dealing with FX issues, and have a treasury primarily stored in cash that's not earning the cost of capital but needs to show shareholder returns. Perhaps we adopt Bitcoin to reduce transaction fees, enable faster payments, and earn a higher return on their retained earnings. Multiple public companies and many private companies have done this. See MicroStrategy and Block (formerly Square) as case studies in the public company world, and us in the private company world.
• I have an Entertainment, Media, or eCommerce brand and need a way to stand out in a sea of social media noise. Experiential activations in the real world and digital world are converging. Web and Augmented Reality experiences are converging, along with whimsical robotics experiences wrapped in your brand's skin. We have case studies and prior work in the space as evidence of this.

It's not the end-game, it's the next step.

--Sean