TBPN's Run of Show: The Death of the Tech Conference
News from CES, the Reddit-DoorDash saga takes a turn, and more
Happy Tuesday.
We’re live right now on YouTube and 𝕏.
The current thing is the Reddit-DoorDash AI enabled hoax.
Let’s get to it.
Today’s lineup
Center for Industrial Progress Founder Alex Epstein at 12:30 PM
Ring Founder and Chief Inventor Jamie Siminoff at 1:00 PM
Anti Fund Founder and GP Geoffrey Woo and Co-Founder and Managing Partner Jake Paul at 1:30 PM
Doctronic Co-Founder and CEO Matt Pavelle at 1:50 PM
Rostra Founder Lulu Meservey at 2:00 PM
Daily Op-Ed, by John Coogan
The Death of the Tech Conference
It’s CES. They call it “The Most Powerful Tech Event in the World,” but tech events are sort of dead. CES is really, really old. The first one happened in 1967 and it was pretty huge considering there was not much precedent. Over 17k people attended and 200 companies put on consumer technology exhibitions.
I love consumer technology. I also think it’s a particularly interesting time for consumer technology because, unlike Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and IoT, I think there are actually some pretty interesting ways to bake AI features into random hardware products. Most will be terrible though, and over the holidays I saw a TV that claimed to be “powered with AI” and was instantly confused, or at least not optimistic for what that integration might look like. The long tail of consumer hardware companies has had a rough go. The bigger tech companies have such dominant supply chains, network effects, and monetization flows that they really can offer the best products by a wide margin, and interestingly they don’t usually debut these products at company-agnostic tech conferences like CES.
The tech conference is not dying a quick death, and it might be entirely overstated. CES 2024 had over 130k attendees. It’s still a massive event, but big tech companies have been able to cut through independently with their own self-hosted shows for years and this all started with Steve Jobs.
The iPhone is probably the biggest consumer electronics product in history. It should have been launched at CES, but Jobs wanted more control over how the presentation would go, so he chose to debut it at Macworld San Francisco on January 9, 2007. Macworld was technically independent from Apple, the conference was created by IDG (International Data Group), but Apple was the cornerstone of the event. Third-party Mac developers would come to exhibit as well, but Apple was given the keynote slot and a huge presence on the floor.
Launching the iPhone at Macworld instead of CES allowed Jobs to control everything about the big reveal, the lighting, the pacing, the demos that happened before and after. It also had the benefit of creating more space between the iPhone and other competing products. At CES, journalists would go around from booth to booth and compare spec sheets, create rankings, and try to cluster similar products together. Jobs didn’t want the iPhone to be compared to anything. On paper, the iPhone was way behind the Nokia N95. The Nokia was 3G already, had GPS, allowed for copying and pasting of text, it had a front-facing camera, it could record videos, it even had an FM radio. If you built a side-by-side comparison, the iPhone only beat Nokia on screen size, having a touchscreen (which consumers didn’t really know they wanted at the time), and some other unique Apple innovations like a full-featured Safari web browser.
Allowing the iPhone to stand alone created a much clearer story around the new device, and eventually every tech company wanted to follow suit. Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Meta Connect, Samsung Unpacked. They all follow the Jobs playbook and have been remarkably successful. The older trade show format still works for lots of companies and big tech companies do still have presences (Nvidia just launched Vera Rubin at CES for example), but in terms of key moments in tech history, I don’t expect them to happen at independent trade shows any more (and truthfully they haven’t happened there for decades). The last truly iconic CES launch in my opinion was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson introducing the original Xbox alongside Bill Gates.
Still there’s plenty to get from a show like CES. It’s a fantastic place to meet suppliers and other business partners if you’re in the industry, and the long tail of announcements will be very interesting (Lego launched a “smart” brick that I know I’m going to own a ton of soon). Plenty to dig into if you look hard enough, or maybe are just shopping for a new TV.
Headlines
Casey Newton: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit…
The Verge: Lego announces Smart Brick at CES, “the ‘most significant evolution’ in 50 years”…
Boston Dynamics announces new humanoid Atlas robot to deploy into Hyundai factories at CES…
WSJ CES liveblog: Nvidia, AMD, Uber: AI Chips and Self-Driving Cars in Focus at CES 2026…
WSJ: Inside Elon Musk’s Optimus Robot Project…
NYT: Dimon’s $770 Million Windfall Shows How Banking Is Great Again…
Fabian Stelzer posts “‘Dark Leisure’ theory of any potential productivity paradox in AI”…
WSJ: Ph.D.s Can’t Find Work as Boston’s Biotech Engine Sputters…
Val AI pits LLMs against college students in poker games…
WSJ: How Meta’s Reels Became a $50 Billion Business…
Holographic AI “Razer Project AVA” unveiled at CES…
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