The Latest in Tech: The Digital Lifestyle Brand

For those who embodied it but just didn't realize? JL

Farhad Manjoo reports in the New York Times:

Display a new kind of tech brand: physical products that aren’t so much dominated by new technology, but instead informed by the theories and practices that have ruled the tech business. No one is looking for another photo-sharing app.

I got to South by Southwest late over the weekend, well after President Obama addressed the throngs of bearded engineers and other enthusiasts who flock to this annual festival of tech, music, film, barbecue and tacos.

But despite the late arrival, I was quickly immersed in the scene. I was hopped up on Go Cubes, the caffeine-infused gummy snacks that have been compared to candied nuggets of cocaine, which took the conference by storm this year. I was dressed in a suit made by Ministry of Supply, a men’s clothing company that makes business wear with the performance characteristics of athletic clothes. These were not accidental product choices; they are signifiers of a newly influential cultural class.

This year SXSW, as the festival is known, feels like a story of how the tech ethos has escaped the bounds of hardware and software. Tech is turning into a culture and a style, one that has spread into new foods and clothing, and all other kinds of nonelectronic goods. Tech has become a lifestyle brand.

The metamorphosis fits the scene at SXSW, which has always stood apart from other tech conferences. For one thing, the show isn’t dull; even if some of the conversations here ooze with self-parody, they are often more entertaining than the parade of stuffed shirts that characterize most other tech confabs. Because it draws a critical mass of tech-conversant people to a small space, SXSW has also made a reputation as a catalyst for new social networking ideas. Twitter famously got big here in 2007, and a succession of other apps have tried to replicate that magic since, often in vain.

Yet now, after a few go-go years, there is a sense of ennui in the world of tech conferences. What is the purpose of a conference in an age of instant online collaboration?

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Geoffrey Woo, left, and Michael Brandt of Nootrobox. Credit Gavin Banks/Nootrobox

One answer might be to display a new kind of tech brand: physical products that aren’t so much dominated by new technology, but instead informed by the theories and practices that have ruled the tech business.

“In a lot of ways apps seem played out,” said Michael Brandt, a founder of Nootrobox, the start-up that makes Go Cubes. “No one is looking for another photo-sharing app. People here are really interested in what we’re doing because we’re innovating on something we haven’t seen innovated on before.”At first blush Nootrobox sounds a bit crazy, because what it’s innovating on is food and the human body. The start-up, which recently received $2 million in funding from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, makes “nootropics,” supplements that the founders say enhance human cognitive capabilities.

The company grew out of an online movement of “biohackers” — people who congregate on sites like Reddit to discuss how a variety of foods and other chemicals, from caffeine to street drugs to Alzheimer’s medicine from Russia, alter their focus, memory and other cognitive abilities. Nootrobox aims to find the most effective of these compounds — and only the ones deemed legal and safe for use in the United States — and turn them into consumer products.

What exactly is technically innovative about chewable coffee? Mr. Brandt and his co-founder, Geoffrey Woo, are computer scientists by training who have worked in the tech industry for several years, and they say they have applied an engineering mind-set to creating ingestible items. Traditional coffee is an inconsistent product, they argue — each cup may have significantly more or less caffeine than the last — and it can have undesirable side effects, like jitteriness.

Go Cubes, which the pair developed after a long prototyping process involving many different ingredients, are meant to address these shortcomings. The cubes are more portable than coffee, they offer a precise measure of caffeine, and because they include some ingredients meant to modulate caffeine’s sharpest effects, they produce a more focused high.

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From Nootrobox: Chewable coffee cubes.

The cubes run about $1.70 for the price of two that are meant to equate to a cup of coffee. I found them to be quite handy in navigating the late nights and early mornings of SXSW. Though they taste a bit strange, they were indeed more convenient than coffee, even if I found the high to be exactly the same. (I don’t usually get jitters from coffee, one of my primary sources of nutrition.)

But it doesn’t matter if you believe Nootrobox’s claim to have improved coffee; what matters is that there’s an audience for it in tech land.

“I really think of my colleagues who are engineers at Uber and other companies to be mental athletes,” said

Mr. Woo, Nootrobox’s chief executive. Though Nootrobox wants to reach a mainstream audience, the company sees techies as an influential initial beachhead — win the engineers today and you’ll get the rest of the world tomorrow.

In this way, Nootrobox’s strategy mirrors that of other recent start-ups that have tried to re-engineer everyday products in a way that appeals to the tech set. Ministry of Supply, an apparel company started by entrepreneurs who were unsatisfied with business clothing that couldn’t take the punishment that we ladle on athletic clothes, uses engineering techniques to create its products.

For the company’s first product, a dress shirt that was a hit on Kickstarter, “we spent a year prototyping fabrics and A/B testing versions,” said Gihan Amarasiriwardena, one of the company’s founders. “We operate very much like a web-tech firm.”

Or consider Soylent, the meal replacement drink that earned loads of skepticism from old-school commentators, including yours truly, when it was introduced two years ago. Despite the skeptics, Soylent has become a hit with a small but loyal and growing set of tech types. The company, which sells its drink on a subscription plan, is cash-flow positive, an unusual feat for a young start-up.

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Some of Nootrobox’s so-called cognitive-enhancing supplements.

Chris Dixon, the Andreessen Horowitz partner who led the venture firm’s investments in Soylent and Nootrobox, said Soylent’s rise suggested that tech people have acquired growing clout in the world — clout that not only leads to success in tech companies, but also in far-flung industries like food.

“My broader theory is that as the world shifts from TV, movies, magazines and newspapers to the Internet, one of the secondary effects of that is that cultural influence shifts from places like New York and L.A. to the Bay Area,” Mr. Dixon said.

People outside the tech industry might worry about this trend. One fear is that of exclusivity; as I argued last year, a lot of the ideas that start in tech are now priced out of the range of mainstream consumers.

That’s not really true of Nootrobox’s Go Cubes, which are cheaper than Starbucks’ drip coffee. Instead of price concerns, the company raises a more salient fear that nontechies may harbor about the growing cultural dominance of tech people: To put it plainly, techies can be a bit strange.

Nootrobox’s founders, for instance, take biohacking pretty far. To test the idea that caloric restriction can lead to better neural function, Mr. Woo, Mr. Brandt and many of their friends refrain from eating for 36 hours once a week. When they break their fast, they do so in a communal Slack channel, a group chat that is meant to create a sense of community.

“We call them biohacker breakfasts,” Mr. Woo said.

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