3 Take-Aways from My Visit to Tencent (Tech Strategy – Podcast 249)

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This week’s podcast is about my visit to Tencent. A complicated digital conglomerate that is becoming much more of an AI story.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

My 3 take-aways:

  1. WeChat Has Way More Functions That I Knew. They Have 26 Years of Experience Messengers.
  2. Tencent Is “All In” on Yuanbao, Hunyuan LLM and AI Cloud.
  3. Merchant and Enterprise Services Are Expanding and Upgrading. Think Microsoft meets OpenAI.

Here are the mentioned photos.

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Related articles:

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

  • n/a

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

  • Tencent

——transcript below

00:06

Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from Techmoat Consulting.  And the topic for today, three takeaways from my visits to Tencent.  And I did kind of a lot. I visited in Beijing.

00:23

WeChat headquarters in Guangzhou, the Shenzhen headquarters, talked with some people in gaming, kind of a lot of discussion around Tencent over the last couple months.  So, I’m going to write up it in pretty good detail, but this is sort of high level, three level, the things I didn’t know that I thought I maybe should pay more attention to.  I’ve been familiar with the company for 15 years, but these are kind of my takeaways. I got to think more about these three topics, and that’ll be the subject for today.

00:53

Let’s see, standard disclaimer, nothing in this podcast, my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information from me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky.  This is not investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research.  And with that, let’s get into the topic.

01:14

Okay, well no real concepts for today. This is just going to be some company information, not concepts.  Ten cents an interesting company and I have it’s…

01:25

It’s a bit strange, but I have not talked about it much over the past 10 years, really.  I wrote about it in my One Hour China book.  I’ve covered a couple things. I’ve gone to the WeChat Open class from time to time.  But I haven’t really talked about it.  I just spoke a couple reasons. Number one, it’s in Shenzhen, and I’ve mostly been based in Beijing. So, okay, no running across town.  And partly because it’s not really copyable.

01:55

And a lot of the stuff you learn from there is not really helpful in other businesses. Like the big engines of Tencent have always been Messenger and gaming. Okay, Messenger started out with QQ, PC based Messenger back in 1999. Then we move on WeChat. Okay, there’s the mobile version. And then they’ve built all that. I mean, that’s an amazing business, but.

02:21

Like there’s usually only one of those in a region. There’s one in China. You got WhatsApp outside of that. You got LINE sort of, know, in South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan. But it’s not like studying that is super helpful for most businesses because it’s kind of a, you know, monopoly situation. So, I haven’t talked about that. Now, if you’re doing business in China,

02:45

Okay, you have to absolutely understand WeChat top to bottom because that’s how you reach people. So that’s useful. So that’s one’s okay, fine.  The other one is gaming.

02:57

Well, again, gaming is its own world. I don’t usually write about gaming just because it’s its own universe. Nothing in gaming applies to anything else. The dynamics of the industry are weird. The publishing studios, the game developers, these strange platforms, Epic Games versus Apple.  Again, not terribly useful. Well, and also almost impossible even if you come up with a gaming studio, you know, a hit game.

03:26

Tencent is sort of the mothership of all gaming in this world.  Well, that’s not possible to recreate that.  It’s just, mean, Garena kind of did it in Southeast Asia, again, so super interesting things as a topic, but neither are terribly useful in sort of stuff you can deploy to your own business. So, I kind of haven’t really done it.  Now that said,

03:52

I think things have changed a little bit this year, at least for me, but I think also for Tencent.  And I thought I’m really going to dig into Tencent this year. So, I set up meetings in Beijing. We looked at Tencent Cloud, which is a big deal.  The WeChat headquarters, which is in Guangzhou, we went out there.  In Shenzhen, they have a bunch of stuff. There’s the stuff you know about, like okay, here’s the content businesses.  But they also have things like healthcare.

04:20

And then gaming is sort of scattered all over Shenzhen and some other places. So, I mean, did multiple meetings sort of digging into that.  And the two that really I thought were widely applicable and valuable are the cloud business. I mean, it’s one of the big four cloud businesses of China.  Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Tencent, and you can put Huawei in there on the hardware side.  Okay, that’s becoming an AI business, full stop.

04:50

That’s very, very interesting. And the other one is WeCom, which used to be called WeChat work. It was their sort of version. That’s kind of a funny story.  Like WeChat was the king of messenger, know, C to C, B to C.  And then when Alibaba wanted to get into messenger, they decided, I think, to avoid that fight. Let’s not do messenger.

05:16

for consumers, let’s do messenger for businesses internal, basically like Slack, internal communication, that sort of thing.  And that’s Ding Talk, which is quite good.  So then fast forward, then WeChat says, well, we need to get into that space too, so they create WeChat work.  And the angle they pushed, which was very smart,

05:39

was, okay, not only does it let you do inter-company communications, let’s coordinate our meetings like Slack and, you know, DingTalk, but we can also connect the business to consumers and customers. So, sales agents, point of salepeople like that, you know, they could use their WeChat connection, WeChat work to both do internal communications and connect with customers. And that turned out to be a pretty great idea.  And then if you remember a couple of years ago when…

06:08

President Trump first term was talking about trying to ban TikTok in the US.  Another name that came up at that time was WeChat.

06:18

because it turns out a lot of people outside of China who are living outside of Chinese descent, they use WeChat to communicate with each other, but more to communicate back home.  If you’re going to keep in touch with anyone back in mainland China and you’re living in California, you got to use WeChat because all the rest are blocked. So, WeChat came up as, hey, we’ve got to ban that too.  It was kind of discussed. didn’t go anywhere.  Somewhere in that discussion, WeChat changed its name from WeChat Work to WeCom.

06:48

I don’t know, that’s what I was told. Maybe that’s not true.  anyways, now it’s called WeCom, but it’s just WeChat work.  Okay, WeCom and cloud, AI cloud is really what we’re talking about.  Super interesting. So that’s kind of what I’m thinking about.  All right, so the visits. I’ll write up most of these visits, the WeChat one.

07:12

AI Cloud was in Beijing. That was super useful. talk about that.  But you this time we kind of went into Shenzhen at the big Tencent headquarters. I’ll put a picture in the show notes. If you haven’t seen it, it’s kind of an iconic building.  It’s basically two 50-story towers.  And then between those towers, they have three bridges that connect them. And the whole thing, it looks pretty cool.

07:39

I guess the symbolism is we’re in the interconnections business, messenger, so our building has like interconnections. That’s what people say.  I don’t know if that’s actually true.  Anyways, it’s over in kind of the western, southwestern side of Shenzhen for those of you who are familiar.

07:57

People always say Shenzhen used to be a fishing village. If you ever read a book about China and they talk about Shenzhen, they’ll say 20 years ago Shenzhen was a fishing village. Totally not true. It was never a fishing village. I don’t know why.  You will never see the history of Shenzhen written without the phrase fishing village. Not really true. It was just a town, small town. I put pictures of it in my One Hour China book.  Not a fishing village. Okay, was on the water, but whatever.

08:25

Okay, know, kind of based in Futian and Luohu, which is right across the border from Hong Kong. If you ever cross from Hong Kong there, that’s the route everyone used to take. Luohu was kind of sketchy. Futian was nicer. And it was, that’s where they founded Tencent back in 1999. Five co-founders, but the two everyone talks about are Pony and Tony, which is Pony Ma, who is still…

08:52

the CEO today. He’s who everybody talks about, Pony Ma, Ma Huan Tong. But the other guy people talk about is Tony Zhang, which I think is Ji Dong Zhang, Zhang Ji Dong, yeah. He was the CTO. So, everyone talks Pony and Tony. 1999, Tony was CTO.

09:14

and Pony was CEO. Tony stepped down in about 2014 I believe.  You he’s a billionaire, they’re all billionaires.  Interesting, they both basically went to Shenzhen University.  They were both computer science majors in the same class.  They were out in Nanshan, which is sort of the southwest.

09:34

a good 30 minutes away from Futian and Luohu. That’s where Shenzhen University is based. So, they graduate computer science, they go and they found Tencent about five years later.  They found it in Futian, but then very quickly moved it back to Nanshan. So, their big, towering headquarters is literally right next door to Shenzhen University.

10:01

which I’m thinking as an alumnus, that’s got to be pretty awesome.  Like when you are kind of the biggest thing in the town that your university’s based in and you’re right next door and you can probably, I bet he can see it from his office.  I don’t know for sure, but I bet he can.  That’s got to be pretty cool as an alumnus.  Anyways, for those of you who don’t know the history, they started out with QQ, which is…

10:27

messenger that you put on your PC and for those of you who are old enough you remember back in the 1990s PC based messenger, know AOL messenger things like that was super popular and the rumor the story the company lore which may or may not be true who knows is that Pony Ma was at a presentation of ICQ

10:52

which was an Israeli messenger of some kind. saw it, thought it was a good idea. He created his own version called QQ.

10:59

Is that true? I don’t know. It probably is true because everyone was copying everyone back then and Messenger was a big deal. And we saw copies of Messenger pop up all over the world in 1988, 1999, 2000 and that period. So probably true. I don’t think he thought it up on his own. I think it was a big deal and they copied it. So that’s where you start. You start with QQ, which becomes a Messenger.

11:25

You know, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, know, Messenger has like an unbelievable customer use case and an unbelievably powerful business model. It might be the most powerful. Messenger, you’re the front door to the internet. You know, it’s like AT &T creating phones back in 1910.

11:48

It is just everybody uses it all day long, super high frequency, and it turns out the business model has direct network effects. It’s highly scalable. The service is by and large undifferentiated. So, it really naturally leads into a winner-take-all monopoly situation, which AT &T had for almost 80 years.

12:13

Messenger is the single greatest thing since that probably. It’s pretty much the same business. Anyway, so they do Messenger.  From there, they do a bunch of stuff, but the big one that came next was gaming.  And those things kind of naturally go together, because if you’re doing multiplayer gaming, can chat with your friends, things like that. So those go right together.  Back then, if you actually look at the internet usage numbers of China of 2000, 2001,

12:43

2002 which is when Alibaba and these companies were going public It was tiny 10 million 20 million people it made all of China Online usage was tiny because people didn’t have phones obviously and most people didn’t have Computers and even if you had computers you didn’t have a landline that wasn’t around so it was all internet cafes

13:08

And so QQ and gaming, these things came out of the internet cafe, the Wangba of China.  And I actually met someone once who had, there used to be, think, nine licenses for internet cafes in China. He had one of the licenses back then.  That’s what he told me, maybe not totally true.  So anyways, then you go right into gaming.  Gaming turns out to be an unbelievable cash engine.

13:38

The twist they did on this was back then there was no digital advertising in China and even 10 years later it was pretty minimal.  So, they came up with this idea of we’ll do micro transactions.  We’ll get lots and lots of people online to play games and we’ll do tiny little transactions like buying skims and buying weapons for your character and all of that.  And yeah that turned out to be an unbelievably good idea.  And that was kind of the cash machine that became gaming.

14:07

company evolves from there. WeChat comes you know 2012-2013 which is basically the mobile version of QQ. Even QQ today is still quite big. QQ today which has something called QQ coins which you can use sort of for money and things. You 500 million plus monthly users on QQ today. It’s still pretty big. Anyways that’s just a little history.

14:33

That’s mostly off the top of my head, but I think I’m 90 % right on that stuff. Okay, so we’re out in Nanshan. We’re staying down the street. Get up, we go to the big 10 cent building.

14:46

Pretty spectacular. 7,000 FTEs, employees of about 16,000-ish globally. So, about half the workforce, more or less, is in this building. 50 floors. It’s pretty awesome looking. It was just opened in 2018, so it’s pretty new.

15:05

What’s cool is they have these two towers and then they have the three bridges and the three bridges each have sort of a symbolic meaning.  So, you know, one bridge is about culture. And if you go to that bridge, which I went and had some coffee with someone, it’s a canteen. You go to the second bridge and it’s about health. So, the bridge that connects the two towers has a gym. And then the third one is for knowledge and it has games and stuff like those skills. OK, so.

15:33

You know, fun.  I went into the exhibition hall and it’s a pretty good one.  Some exhibition halls, a lot of these tech companies have them. Some of them are great, some of them are mediocre.  The best ones probably I think is Ant Financial in Hangzhou has the greatest exhibition. It’s like a museum.  It’s like a high class, incredibly well-done museum you would see in London or something like that.  Anyways, but this one’s pretty good.

16:03

and they’ve got things like the first server they ever used. I’ll put a picture of it in the show notes.  It’s basically just a PC.  It’s a stand-up PC.  And it’s kind of a dirty cheap one too. So, 10 cents for a server.

16:17

the first sketches they used to come up with their cute character because if you’re a Chinese company you have to obviously have a cute character for everything. So, they have the little penguin but they have their original sketches they came up with for different types of penguins and things like that. That was basically QQ. One thing that was pretty cool was they have a huge number of patents filed in China. They have one of the first ones which is actually filed by Pony Ma.

16:46

and you can actually see it. I’ll put it in there. You can actually see his name in there. It’s pretty cool.  That was March 2001. Yeah, there it is, Ma Huatong. That was pretty cool. So, I’ll put those in there. They’re pretty neat.  Anyways, let me get to sort of the takeaways. This is going to be pretty short podcast today.  Number one, WeChat is way bigger and has way more features and functions than I knew.

17:13

Like I’ve been using WeChat every day for 15 years, something like that, 12 years. It’s got so many features I had no idea. It’s ridiculous. And in retrospect, it kind of makes sense.

17:27

You know, this company, what is Tencent? They are a messenger company. They have been doing messenger since 1999. They’ve got 26 years of history building messengers. Well, WeChat has functions everywhere.  They had a big keyboard in the exhibition hall with every key being a unique function like translation.

17:53

Save your money check your weather send a note share your money split the bill and It’s stunning how many there are like I had no I’m going to literally go back and start learning more about WeChat because it does far more than I ever thought it did pretty spectacular health care Yeah, anyways, I’ll put that in there. It’s amazing music record music Pick up your money pay your bill whatever and that’s not even

18:23

counting mini programs. That’s just features within WeChat itself.  As mentioned, I did go up to Guangzhou and saw the WeChat headquarters.  know, Alan Zhang and his team, they’re up there.  That was pretty interesting actually because it’s a spectacular product. It didn’t strike me as a terribly driven business.

18:50

It struck me, and this is just vibe, it struck me as a very comfortable, casual business, like where they’re making so much money and they’re so widely used, but there wasn’t, it struck me as too relaxed, in contrast to say I was in Xiaomi the day before, and the contrast was really stunning.

19:13

Xiaomi was moving so fast and so innovative and this was the opposite. It was like, hey, everyone’s having a cup of coffee.  Now that’s just an impression, so it might be wrong.  yeah, so Guangzhou was all right about the visit there. That was interesting. But WeChat, yeah. Weixin, you probably know these numbers, 1.3 billion monthly active users.  That’s insane.

19:39

The only company up at that level is WhatsApp and Instagram. know, the two billion we get at, know, some of Meta’s businesses. But 1.3, yeah, that’s pretty spectacular. And then you put in mini programs on top of all these endless features.  Five billion, I’m sorry, five million developers in the WeChat ecosystem. You know, it’s just crazy how many companies, if you’re a business in China.

20:09

you might have a webpage, you might have an app, but you are going to have a mini program, a mini app for sure, you have to. That’s where all the customers are. So that was kind of a, yeah, it surprised me. It’s far more robust than I thought it was.

20:27

and I already thought it was pretty great.  Walk down the hallway they have QQ, pretty interesting. They have a little mock-up of a wangba, an internet cafe, which is really where QQ comes out of.  524 million monthly active users still on QQ.  One of the reasons, I if you look at the history of WeChat, it was not successful.

20:49

There’s this, the story is that Alan Zhang came up with the idea. He emailed Pony Ma like late at night. Pony Ma gave him the approval to build a team and start deploying this.  And there was already competing messengers built for the mobile phone coming out of Hong Kong.

21:08

And then it became successful. Not really true. Well, the first part is probably true, but it didn’t really get great traction.  The first six months, it was not a success. And then somehow they leveraged QQ.

21:23

to feed into this and they probably leveraged it in their gaming.  They basically pushed in from their other businesses and then it took off.  So, it wasn’t the case of, it was a spectacular product and it took off like a rocket ship, which kind of what happened with WhatsApp.  No, no, it was a bit of a struggle and it’s more of a story of we copied a really good app that we saw and we used our effort, other businesses to leverage into it.  And that combination of that and the other businesses is why it was successful.

21:53

Anyways, that was kind of takeaway number one.  Interesting company. I don’t spend a huge amount of time studying it for lessons. I kind of should study more how to use it and how to sell with it, but you know, it’s almost impossible to copy and replicate what they’ve done.  So takeaway number two is Tencent is going all in on basically AI cloud, which means Tencent cloud, Yuan Bao and Hun Yuan.

22:23

So, their big, large language model, their version of GPT is Hanyuan.  So, they’re building large language models like crazy.  Same thing we saw at Alibaba Cloud, same thing we saw at Baidu Cloud, something we saw at Huawei Cloud.  They’re playing across the board.  Large models, small models, reasoning models.

22:47

video generation models, text generation models, multimodal, I mean they’re doing the whole playbook and very aggressively and they have the talent and the money to do that and then you know obviously the first thing you do is you deploy it into your current products and services and then from there you build.  So Hunyuan, they’re all in. Now what’s interesting is their version, if that’s GPT, their version of chat GPT is Yuan Bao.

23:15

which is just an app you can download it anywhere in China. It’s pretty good.  I don’t use it that much. I tend to use the Alibaba one more and I tend to use, actually ByteDance has one that’s better.  I think it’s better.  okay, Yuan Bao is their sort of version. What’s interesting on Yuan Bao, you download it, it’s your chat GPT on your phone. You can choose which model you want it to run on.  And they just added DeepSeek.

23:41

So, when you go into Yuan Bao, you can choose, do I want it to run on Hun Yuan or do I want to run on DeepSeek?  That’s really interesting. Like, how did DeepSeek get that deal to happen so quickly? How can you be one of the two models offered by Tencent? I mean, if you want to…

23:59

if you want to really accelerate your usage, be one of the two things offered on Tencent.  Like that’s amazing.  So, I don’t, that was just announced a month or so ago.  I’m not quite sure what that deal was, but pretty interesting.  Now that’s actually pretty consistent with how Tencent operates.  They always seem to have one external partner and one internal project.  So, when you do search, they will have WeChat search, but then they’ll also

24:29

have an external one that they use, that you can use.  And they’ve done that for a lot of things. They’ll do internal e-commerce, but then they also have stakes in Pinduoduo, JD, Meituan.  So, them doing sort of both sides, an internal and an external solution, I think that’s their modus operandi. They like to create a level of competition for their internal projects.

24:54

Anyways, that’s my number one priority to dig into is to get more into Tencent Cloud. And I’ve talked with them about this that I want to really start writing a lot more about what they’re doing, which seems like they’re open to.  So, I’m going to start doing a lot of that, which is pretty much what I’m doing with all the three majors, the three to four majors.  So that’s takeaway number two. That’s a huge subject, makes them very interesting.  Takeaway number three, merchant services are really interesting and they seem to be…

25:23

expanding pretty rapidly. So merchant services, know, for brands, merchants, really businesses, you know, that sort of begins with WeChat. Every business wants to have an official account on WeChat and it wants to start putting out all its content and gathering traffic and all of that and doing just advertising, right? So, there’s official accounts within WeChat, but then there’s just advertising across the board, right?

25:51

Everything Tencent does the TV shows all the gaming all the movies all the literature the music Messenger all of it, you know, they’re generating attention and then they monetize by advertising and Payment and other things but you know, that’s their big engine. So, okay fine lots of merchant services in that area but they’ve started expanded there, which is interesting.  The one that got my attention was WeCom

26:18

So, you know, that starts out as enterprise services, kind of like Microsoft Teams, kind of like Slack.  Yeah, that’s what they’re building out.  And most of these companies in China, Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu, they all have internal communication and collaboration tools, which they have since turned into external services.

26:40

So, ByteDance, they’ve taken their internal collaboration tools like Documents, Messenger, Group Chat, Meetings.  They’ve turned that into Lark, which they sell as a service.  So, they’ve all done this. So, they did this with WeCom, and they’ve done this with Tencent Meeting and Tencent Docs, Document Collaboration, things like that.

27:05

That was pretty interesting, much more interesting than I thought. So, they call it there, you know, collaborative workspace. And they talk about how it’s like, we have WeCom, we have Tencent meeting, we have Tencent docs, and all of this is powered by Hunyuan, the language model. They call it the AI plus workspace upgrade. So that intersection of AI and all their sort of merchant and enterprise services is pretty interesting.

27:34

The WeCom numbers, they say that they connect 12 million businesses and organizations.  They say they have 500 million WeChat users a day accessing through WeCom.  So, it’s huge.  Pretty interesting.  The two services I kind of looked into were meetings, which is,

28:00

video meetings, it was pretty cool hardware actually.  They say they have 400 million users in 200 regions.  10 cent documents, 200 million users.  They say five billion documents, I don’t know what that is.  But they’ve got some pretty interesting things. The one that I thought was cool, they have a little video conferencing booth.

28:23

that you can go in and they call it glasses free 3D video conferencing.

28:30

And yeah, tried it out. You basically stand in front of a screen and you talk and the camera follows you. So, if I walk around the table while we’re doing a conference call, yeah, it tracks me automatically.  And apparently you can get 3D without using glasses.  Anyways, I’m going to look a lot more into that because I think the intersection of all of that plus AI tools is really pretty compelling. It reminds me of Microsoft to tell you the truth.

28:56

like this enterprise services business that they’re aggressively combining with AI. I that’s Microsoft meets OpenAI.  It looks to me like that. So anyways, I’m going to dig into that.

29:09

They also have a couple other enterprise merchant tools that are kind of cool.  XiaoDian, little store, small store.  If you’re on WeChat, you can open up a tiny little store now very easily.  That was kind of interesting as well.  They have video accounts where you can just create accounts that are only for video communication, things like that.  So, there’s a lot going on in that space.  So those are kind of my three general takeaways.

29:35

The Messenger business is far more robust and complicated than I had appreciated.  They are all in on AI meets cloud.  That’s going to be a big deal. And then this third one is they’re starting to look a little bit like Microsoft with one foot in enterprise and merchant services and one in AI.  That’s pretty interesting. So those are my three.  Other stuff, I’ll kind of finish up here.

30:00

There was a lot of cool stuff they’re doing that I didn’t really, I kind of knew but I didn’t know.  They basically have cool projects all over the place. I mean, I didn’t even talk about any of the content businesses.  WeTV, their music business, their movie business, they’re obviously gaming, they have their literature business, you know, they create literature, they own the IP, they turn it into movies, all that stuff. I they got cool projects.

30:28

all over the place.  A couple of them which I didn’t know about till I saw it; they have a bunch of industrial projects.  you know, putting software into industrial vehicles and doing 5G remote control, know, tractors, construction equipment, kind of the stuff that Huawei does a lot of. They got some of that.  They got some presence in autonomous vehicles.

30:52

They’ve got deals to put charging stations around China. I didn’t even know they were in EVs and such. Finance tech is pretty cool, actually. They’ve been in that business for a long time. Pay by your palm scanning, which is a little strange, but you can basically walk up to a turnstile and flash your palm over the sensor and it charges you and goes through. Privacy is a problem there, obviously, but it is what it is.

31:20

They have one aviation training set up where when you’re learning to fly large, large planes, commercial airlines, they have training simulators they do and people train on those. Like I had no idea they were in that business.

31:32

sensors for cars to detect what’s around you.  Oh, here it is. Palm print scanning.  Let your palm be your card and your code.  And you can put it on a turnstile walking into your office or maybe the subway. I don’t know. You just scan it, it opens up. So, they got cool stuff all over the place.  Not surprising given the size of the company, I suppose.

31:55

Anyways, that’s pretty much it for the content for today. Pretty kind of light high level, which I don’t know, maybe that’s better.  Often I can kind of go down the rabbit hole on some of this stuff. But yeah, it’s interesting visit. I’m going to dig more into the WeCom and the cloud AI part.  I think that’s kind of going to be a big area going forward. I probably won’t go into the gaming or messenger too much. It’s interesting, it’s just not.

32:22

not as directly usable. So anyways, we’ll see.  But that’s it for me.  As for me, I’m doing pretty well.  It’s been a nice, just productive week, which puts me in a good mood.  No real recommendations for Netflix for this week.  Actually, you what we did, which was kind of a random thing, which turned out to be surprisingly great?

32:47

me and the girlfriend, we were noticing like we were sitting on our phones too much. You know, sitting on the sofa, sitting on the table, the phones. kind of see, we both noticed it. We both brought it up. Like, we spending a lot of time staring at our phones now? And I had noticed it too. And so, we came up with a random rule on the moment. Like, all phones have to stay in the kitchen drawer as soon as you come in. So, you walk in, throw the phone in the drawer, that’s it.

33:15

And if you want to check your mail, fine, you got to go to the kitchen, open the drawer, and you can check your mail, but you can’t hang out there often.  So, you can still use it, but by and large, it’s out of reach.  I’m surprised at what a difference it’s made.  It’s almost like you’re living with greater awareness.  I find my mind is much sharper.  I find that I’m thinking more.

33:37

We’re talking a lot more.  I guess what surprises me is what a big impact it had. It’s so noticeable. We talked about it like a week later. We’re like, this is crazy.  It’s like when you haven’t been to the gym in a long time and you start going to the gym and you just feel dramatically different.  It’s kind of like that. It’s like, has my brain been like lazy on the sofa for these last couple months and now it’s kind of forcing it to be not so lazy? I think kind of, yeah.

34:05

Anyways, we did that and that was our little experiment. It’s shocking.  Something about human beings staring at these screens doing passive consumption. There’s something really addictive and not good about that. I kind of already thought that, to feel it and see it, it was a little spooky actually.  Anyways, that was our discovery of the last couple of weeks. Now we do it all the time. Walk in, phone in the drawer. That’s it.

34:34

or we take a walk, again, leave the phones at home.  Yeah, we’re doing that and it really makes a difference.  Anyways, that was a little discovery of this month.  Okay, that is it for me. I hope everyone’s doing well. I’ll talk to you next week.  Bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

My book series Moats and Marathons is one-of-a-kind framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.

This content (articles, podcasts, website info) is not investment, legal or tax advice. The information and opinions from me and any guests may be incorrect. The numbers and information may be wrong. The views expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. This is not investment advice. Investing is risky. Do your own research.

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