‍👉 Background: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. In September 2021, Meta announced its first partnership with the iconic sunglass company, Ray-Ban when they launched the first version of Ray Ban Stories smart glasses.

‍👉 What happened: At the annual Meta Connect conference, Zuck showed off the new Ray-Ban Display glasses on stage. These come with a “neural band” worn on your wrist that reads nerve signals so you can control the glasses with tiny finger movements. In fact, he managed to type at 30 words per minute using the neural band and no keyboard, and also did live translations.

‍👉 What else: But, answering a WhatsApp video call on stage failed… not once, or twice... but four times... Zuck then blamed the Wi-Fi. Of course, it couldn't be the product!

‍What's the key learning?

‍💡Live demos are now part of the theatre of big tech product launches. These new features can sometimes live and die by the success of these demos — a smooth demo can create buzz, while a glitch can cast doubt on whether the product is really ready.

💡This happened when Google announced its AI launch of Bard in February 2023. As part of the demo, Bard suggested that the James Webb Space Telescope took “the very first pictures of a planet outside of our solar system”... except that was false. Next minute: $140 billion was wiped from Alphabet’s market cap... and 15 months later, Google re-branded Bard into Gemini.

💡Thankfully for Meta, the stakes are a little different as the smart glasses are an exciting experiment, but they’re not yet core to Meta’s current or future business model.