Snap's leap of faith
It's hard to see the case for Specs. Also: Notes from YC Demo Day, Cursor's new model, OpenAI's spending leaks, and more.
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The stakes going into Tuesday were about as high as they get for Snap.
Evan Spiegel has spent more than a decade and billions of dollars chasing augmented reality glasses. He’s called this year’s Specs glasses launch a crucible moment, and he’s making the bet during the roughest stretch of the company’s life as a public company.
At the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Long Beach, the AR industry’s biggest annual gathering, Spiegel partly unveiled a consumer version of Specs and opened pre-orders for the $2,195 device. By Tuesday’s stock market close, Snap’s stock had fallen almost 10%.
The fully standalone AR glasses Spiegel showed represent the same vision he’s chased for a decade. But the rest of the industry has moved in the opposite direction, and that bet is the one that's working. Meta and soon Google are shipping lightweight, normal-looking glasses built around cameras, speakers, and AI-powered voice assistants.
Spiegel waved that approach off to me when we spoke on Monday, calling it “a phone accessory.” Onstage at AWE, he took a more direct swing that, depending on how you look at the situation, could also be seen as a self-own: “Those copycats up north aren’t going to be stealing this one.”
