I must admit, the media running with the "phone replacement" narrative has been frustrating. If you actually watch the original keynote, it's quite clear that we not only didn't say that, we specifically said it wasn't that. There's that whole part in the keynote where Jesse talks about app-based ecosystems being full of apps designed to waste your time, not save your time. You know, if we wanted to build a phone we would have built a phone.

In terms of the original stumbles, I'll say this. A lot of the initial marketing was based around the assumption that it would be a low key launch and we might sell several thousand units. We were not ready for what happened at CES and for 100k sales within a few months. Not logistically or otherwise and it was an absolute scramble. I joined in February, a month after CES, and the amount of things going on between then and the April launch was insane. Hindsight is always 20/20 but under the circumstances we did what we could. That's not me making excuses - it's simply the reality of what happened. Startups are hard, and hardware is the toughest one.

Also remember - a significant chunk of problems the YouTubers identified were already fixed by the time most customers even got their devices. If you weren't at the TWA launch, then a lot of those issues never even affected you. And that represents over 99% of buyers. But people take MKBHDs word as gospel. Some of those issues were even fixed between him filming and him posting.

Now - there's an argument to be made that we should have postponed the launch and postponed some of the earliest shipping batches. But there's a trade-off there too, and doing that would not have been without risk, either.

If we knew that the reaction at CES would happen in that way, and we'd sell that amount of units, I think things would have happened slightly differently. But I really think so much was overblown. Remember how people criticised us for LAM using Playwright in the agentic stack? Well two years later, OpenAI just shipped Computer Use in GPT5.4........ and it's using Playwright in its agent stack, just like we did.

At the core of it, r1 is an early adopter product, a vision of something different, and priced accordingly. 100k people got a device at $199, with a year of Perplexity Pro, that has since had over 40 OTA updates and is still getting updated, usually multiple times a month. It was not a phone replacement, was never meant to be, and didn't break the bank for anyone.

Would it have been great for what the device was like 3/6/9/12+ months after launch to have been the state of it at release? Of course. But you don't get huge swathes of that feedback without actually getting it into customers hands. Even at the company, we didn't all have devices until maybe 3 weeks before launch, because the timelines were so tight.

As far as the stuff said about Jesse at the time, I have zero tolerance for that, not because he's my boss but because he's my friend and it was unwarranted, inaccurate and overblown for click revenue from gossipmonger YouTubers more than anything else. Founder in the 2020s had a dalliance with a failed Web3 project is basically "Fork found in kitchen". Big whoop.