Yo is the app we deserve
Yo über alles.
I don’t want to spend too much time here recapping Yo, which you’re probably sick to all holy hell of hearing about by now. But just in case, it’s an app that lets you send a push notification that says “Yo” to your friends. And it raised $1 million this week. Nobody is sure if it’s a joke or a serious business. That brings you up to speed.
When Yo first launched, I thought it was funny as hell: It’s a single-serving app that was obviously — at least obviously to me — a parody of overblown, slick, colorful messaging apps that never go anywhere. I saw it as a parody of Snapchat, of Facebook Messenger, of Twitter, of emoji, and of everything in between. I thought it was hilarious and encouraged many of my friends to join me in joyfully Yo-ing. When one friend asked me what Yo was for, I insisted, in all caps, that it was the FUTURE OF MESSAGING. My Twitter timeline was divided between the Yos and the Yo-Nots.
Then I found out about the funding.
“This is supposed to be a serious business?” I thought to myself, as many have before and since.
That investment raised a ton of ire: $1 million may be small potatoes for Silicon Valley, where every single day, tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars get poured into startups that do anything from develop mobile email clients for salespeople to deliver groceries to, yes, send notifications that just say “Yo.” But for people who are actually trying to solve the big problems — hunger, disease, racism, sexism, education, you name it — $1 million is an amount that they can only dream of.
But that doesn’t matter to Silicon Valley, which is increasingly behaving as “Wall Street’s evil twin,” as my colleague Galen Gruman put it this week. Sam Biddle of Valleywag conducted an exceptional interview with an investor in Yo, who contributed $200,000 of his own money and completely balked at the suggestion that it could be better spent going to charity or an actual worthy cause. Instead, that investor actually literally likened it to his hobby of buying lottery tickets.
Which is exactly it: Silicon Valley is a gold rush where growth is king. I remember not long after I arrived in San Francisco three years ago, I overheard a conversation between three software engineers who were in agreement that eight months was probably the maximum time you should spend at a startup — if they didn’t IPO or get purchased in that timeframe, it was time to move on. They call it the startup lottery.
Which brings us back to Yo. The more I thought about Yo, the more sense the venture capital interest made.
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I mean, let’s think about the history of messaging apps as a whole. We started with the open IRC, which later gave way to things like AIM and ICQ. Mobile brought us text messaging, which is gradually giving way to richer platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Hangouts. It seems like the inexorable march of progress means that we move from open, vendor-neutral messaging standards to ones owned by a single company.
This has been coincidental with the rise of ephemeral photo sharing apps like Snapchat, Slingshot, and probably a million others I’m forgetting. The next version of Apple’s iMessage will even include photo self-destruct functionality built-in. Ephemerality may not be as ephemeral as we may want to believe, but it’s a lot of fun.
To take the broader view, the major trend here is that we, as citizens of the Internet, have a habit of adopting new technologies without thinking of what we’re giving up. We’re so addicted to novelty, convenience, and shininess that we don’t consider the consequences in either the long or the short term.
Cab service and Silicon Valley golden child Uber has a problem with vetting drivers and negotiating with its unions. Snapchat’s CEO is an arrogant misogynist. Peter Shih wrote a long, rambling screed about how much he hates the homeless and looks down on women and still managed to find funding for a new venture.
Startups act like they’re solving challenges that are really and truly going to save the world, while San Francisco’s own homeless go ignored and abused. An app that says “Yo” raises $1 million while every nonprofit in San Francisco has to consider leaving the city because rents are skyrocketing.
I’m complicit. If you’re reading this, it’s probably on a device that makes you complicit, too. This is a platform of collaborators in a system that rewards quick adoption and unsustainable business models in favor of instant gratification and obscenely high returns on investment.
Yo is the purest, most raw example yet of this idea: It was hacked together by one Israeli coder, Or Arbel, in three days, is provably insecure, and is — let’s face it — dumb. And yet, it raised $1 million, and Arbel moved from his home in Israel to San Francisco to build a team and pursue the platform. Now, even super-VCs like Marc Andreessen are bullish on Yo’s potential as a lightweight messaging app.
I don’t want to hate on Yo itself too hard. It’s still fun, and anecdotally, friends of mine are finding legitimate uses for it. But it seems pretty obvious that whether Arbel meant it or not, Yo is such a perfect encapsulation of the Silicon Valley spirit — what shiny thing can we convince people we can sell THIS time? — that it approaches pure art. And true to form, he got $1 million for it.
I prefer to think that Arbel is somewhere between showman and entrepreneur, making Yo the first sign of self-awareness in Silicon Valley in a long, long time. As Nietschze predicted, we gazed into the abyss, and Yo is the abyss gazing back. In that sense, I love it and despair.
In short, Yo is the app we told Silicon Valley that we wanted. Its business plan is based on the idea that this place’s intelligencia will always manage to find profound acts of genius in the insipid and the insane, as long as it’s shiny and there’s money involved.
Silicon Valley would prefer to believe that Yo has hidden depths and unplumbed riches rather than consider that maybe venture capitalists are throwing money at things that don’t deserve it. So what about the consequences? So what about the future of the business, or even what else that money could have bought?
If those are the assumptions it hinges on, hell, I would have invested, too.
