Everyone wants to build the thing you wear, the thing you carry, the thing that sits on your desk glowing. I get the appeal. Hardware is tangible, ownable, demoable. But it's the wrong layer to bet on, and here's why.
Conversations don't live in one place
The value isn't in the device. It's in the conversations. And conversations don't live in one place. They happen in your meetings, your calls, your Slack threads, your voice notes, your dinners, your hallway run-ins. The last unstructured data source at scale isn't trapped in a gadget. It's distributed across every surface where humans actually talk to each other.
So the moment you ship hardware, you've drawn a box. The assistant only knows what the box can hear. It's blind to everything that happens when the box isn't in the room. You're not building an intelligence layer anymore. You're building an accessory, and accessories get forgotten on nightstands.
Coverage beats proximity
A platform inverts this. It connects to everything that captures human interaction instead of asking humans to carry one more object. Your phone, your laptop, your calendar, your existing meeting tools, whatever comes next. The assistant doesn't need to be present. It needs to be plugged in. Coverage beats proximity.
Hardware ages, platforms compound
From first principles: a hardware product is a snapshot. You pick a chip, a mic array, a battery, a form factor, and you freeze them in plastic. The moment it ships, it starts depreciating. Every device you sell is locked to the silicon of the year you shipped it.
A platform is the opposite. It's a set of connections, and connections can be added without a hardware refresh cycle. Every new surface it plugs into makes the whole system more valuable. Hardware ages linearly. Platforms compound.
Connective tissue
The companies that win the assistant era won't be the ones with the cleverest object. They'll be the ones that became the connective tissue across all the places conversations already happen. You don't wear connective tissue. You build on top of it.
And the interface? Interchangeable. A WhatsApp message, a Slack thread, a tap on your watch, eventually a conversation with your humanoid robot, all asking about yesterday's meetings. It doesn't matter. The platform underneath is the same. You just use whichever interface is most convenient in the moment.
That's the decision. Not a thing you carry. A layer that talks to everything else, everywhere conversations already happen.