This weekend, Tesla's FSD saved me from an accident.
I was driving on a busy road with FSD activated, and a car swung out in front of me from a parking lot. I don't know if they didn't see me, but there was NOT room.
Before I could react, FSD swerved to safety. I didn't even have time to beep before FSD had pulled me away from potential disaster. I consider myself a good, safe driver, but I can't say for certain that I would have been able to avoid the accident if I'd been in control of the car.
I finished my drive to pick up my daughter from robotics club, shaken, but grateful to be safe.
People often bring up concerns around FSD versus human driving. Incidents like mine won't show up in any data set, but they're exactly why I'm grateful this feature exists.
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One of the things I'm always doing, and I coauthored a book about this so consider the source, is looking at experiments in early stage tech and asking whether they map onto business somewhere else.
Been thinking about StonkBrokers a lot lately.
Short version on StonkBrokers if a non-crypto person happens to read this...4,444 brokers on Robinhood Chain, each one a 6551 token bound account, so the NFT "owns" a wallet. Marketplace fees pool up, a % buy stock tokens or ETH, and drop them pro rata into brokers that have been "activated" at one of multiple tiers for a fee. Higher tier, bigger share. Sell the NFT and the contents travel with it (unless you claim them before sale), but the activation clears, so the new owner has to turn it back on.
Traditional finance has nothing that works like this.
Your brokerage account is a contract. Your name is on it, you can't sell it, other entities can't seamlessly add to it, there's no community behind it, and there's no aligned incentives with the company issuing it.
Imagine you run a program like this at Fidelity. TBD # of seats. Each seat is an account with a permanent identity, seeded with a starter basket of stocks, and it's yours to sell, gift, or borrow against. Fidelity implements some sort of flywheel (ex. a % of fees or revenue) that brings yield to the account, higher based on larger AUM.
Why would Fidelity ever do this? Three reasons I can think of.
First, they sell the seats. Whatever amount they choose, priced at whatever the market says a permanent position at Fidelity is worth. That's a new revenue line that didn't exist, and it's paid up front by exactly the customers they most want to keep. Plus, you can have a royalty on the sale of each seat, and the bigger the contents, the more it'll go for.
Second, it opens up a cleaner rewards mechanic for people who want to reach your customers. You could have people opt-in to categories for these - airline, tickets, TCGs, etc. The stock rewards are baseline, but this levels it up. This is like Amex Offers except it works better. Amex Offers is a coupon buried in an app that you have to remember to go clip, and the merchant never really knows if you saw it.
Here a brand drops Masters tickets or an allocated wine case or a graded card into the 400 seats that opted into that category, your phone buzzes, and the thing is already sitting in your account. Provable delivery, provable redemption, and targeting that Amex can't touch because the seat knows what you asked to receive. Fidelity stops paying for its own rewards program and starts charging for it. And they could issue THOSE rewards as NFTs which, if sold, provide a royalty for both companies.
And this is BEFORE third party rewards unrelated to the program...like a NYC Wall Street bar gives a discount to anyone who holds one.
Lastly, and traditional business severely underrates this - community. Very few people have an identity formed around Fidelity, let alone a community, but this deepens brand loyalty and lets them "sell" something besides the accounts. They sell belonging. And when people do sell their accounts, you don't lose customers, they just sell their seat (with or without rewards) to someone else.
I don't think it ships anytime soon. But it could transform an account to something you own instead of something you opened.
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