Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. We're here today with Benedict Evans and Steven Sinovsky in another of their hallway style conversations.

They share takeaways from the recent annual Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2018. More broadly, they consider, what's the future of the smart home and who are the key players, especially given the rush to bundle smart devices together under a single system?

And then, on the

design side of things, when is simpler better, and which devices require more complex or simpler

UI? So the two of us separately went to CES in Las Vegas with another 180,000, we didn't even see

each other, which is sort of funny. I did bump into like 10 people that I knew at random places around the show, but we didn't

bump into each other.

And we each walked for about 10 miles.

And we saw a bunch of stuff.

And we saw a bunch of press releases and we saw a bunch of news coverage.

And now that we are a week and a half on, we're sitting and thinking, okay, have you

digested this? How do you think about what was actually important

as opposed to what were the 300 press releases and the exciting coverage? And so I think,

you know, there's just, there's so much there. And I think the first thing that's kind of

interesting is a lot of people go and they want to see the grand master plan for every big

company. And so the question is, can you really discern the grand master plan for

every, every big company? Yeah, I mean, so you see, clearly there's a whole Alexa story,

and then you've got people going around saying, well, Alexa and voices a new platform, and this is

going to replace smartphones, and Amazon's got off to a great start, and Google's coming up behind,

and it starts sounding like kind of NASCAR commentary as to who's in front. Right, right.

And of course, oh, Apple are completely screwed because the home pond is Christmas and all of these.

And Cortana is like doing press releases the whole time.

...