Episode Transcript
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hide in New York and Eva Loow in San Francisco.
Speaker 2This is Bloomberg Tech coming up, Meta Iron, Google's AI chips.
According to reports, how the market is questioning in Vidia's long term dominance.
Prashujinping brings the issue of sovereignty over chiphub Taiwan back on the agenda with Donald Trump during their phone call.
And Apple eliminates sales roles in a rare layoff to streamline the way it offers products to businesses and governments.
Speaker 3We have the details.
Speaker 2The first, let's check in on these markets that are trying to digest a wall of delayed data at the same time as baking in maybe an eighty percent chance of a FED rate cut.
That's what the market price is in but all eyes on tussle at the top in AI dominance, looking at a five ten percent drop on the Nasdaq one hundred on the upside, some key players on the drownd side, we're seeing a key drag from some of the key chip names.
Speaker 3In particular.
Speaker 2Let's delve into what's moving this particular index, which does lag the SMP and the DOW.
Today we're seeing in video off by five percent.
No wonder then, ASAK one hundred is underwater when the world's most dominant player from a market cap perspective is currently off by five percent.
Big moves for a four trillion dollar company, and in large part it's because of Alphabet that actually is trimming its games but still at a new record high.
This is we understand meta eyeing tpused.
This is all about the dominance of where we get the chips of the future to train our models as well as use our models.
Meta is the key.
Speaker 3Line of questioning.
Speaker 2Here is meta eyeing tpused from Google to put in its own data centers.
They're the reports coming from the information today, let's talk about the market reaction.
Equity reporter around Nostellica is here with us Ryan.
It's monumental move that Alphabet has had since mid October.
It's added a trillion in market capitalization.
Were starting to become aware of its prowess in AI and in chips.
Speaker 4Yeah, absolutely, thanks for having me so.
Yeah, certainly sentiment has really reversed on Alphabet, and I think people are really appreciating how dominant.
It is across every layer of the AI stack.
Of course, it recently released the latest update to Gemini, which was seen as very strong across all the major benchmarks that people used to evaluate AI models.
The chip business is getting a lot of attention lately, between the report with Meta and the deal with Anthropic.
People really see this as a really significant potential competitor to Nvidia, as you were discussing earlier, and beyond that, it has a huge cloud business that is seeing accelerating growth.
It has so much data and users and distribution and talent.
It really has all of the pieces, and that has really helped the stock surge, not just recently but over the past several months.
It is by far the biggest performer or the best performer of the mag seven this year.
Speaker 2I think Counterpoint Research analyst and co founder Nail shar and a story on Blueberg saying it's a sleeping giant in the AI race and is fully awoken.
But many have been trading for the last few days ever since Gemini three release.
Speaker 3Maybe going short open.
Speaker 2AI suppliers and long alphabet suppliers.
Is that still bearing out.
I'm looking at Oracle down once again.
Speaker 4Ryan Oracle has really been under a lot of pressure lately.
I think it's on track for its biggest one month dropped since two thousand and one, so certainly a real reversal there.
It does seem like people are moving towards the Google and Alphabet suppliers, which is companies like Broadcom, while at the same time the companies that are more connected to open Ai.
You mentioned Oracle, also AMD, Microsoft to a certain extent, these companies have really been under a lot of pressure lately.
Speaker 2It's worth reminding though that yes, Alphabet's been on a tear, and actually its valuations have started to trade way higher than we're used to I thinking about twenty six twenty seven times future earnings, but still leap from just mysoft.
Speaker 3Ahead of it in terms of market cap is Apple.
Speaker 2I think it's got another seven percent to go to hit that, but fifteen percent to go to in video.
We're not questioning longer term at this exact moment.
In Vidia's dominance in AI and semiconductors.
Speaker 4Well, NBA right now has I think ninety percent or so share of the data center market.
If there is potential for Alphabet to start eating into that, I think that would change a lot of calculations for people in terms of how much can Alphabet scale this business.
I have talked to someone who thinks that this could potentially be worth more than Alphabet's cloud business, potentially up to nine hundred billion dollars.
So that is a huge potential market there.
And if that means that Nvidia starts losing market share, I think people will start reassessing how to value that company and its growth and its valuation.
Now, I will just simply say that the AI market is growing so rapidly that people do see room for a lot of big players, and even Alphabet remains a major customer to in Vidia just because there is so much demand for compute right now, people don't want to be behold into any single supplier.
It does suggest that there's a lot of room for growth to go around, even if we start seeing some erosion and market share at Navidia.
Speaker 2And I'm pretty sure Jenson Wang will be responding to any concerns about erosion and market share round a SELCA.
Speaker 3We so appreciate you joining.
Speaker 2Let's dig in to further analysis here with Stephanie Anagai to the conversation which has global market strategist Japing Morgan Asset Management and has four trillion dollars in assets under management, four trillion, rather similar to the market capitalizations in some of these companies, And I'm interested, Stephanie, does it matter to you from a market sentiment perspective if there's scribbling at the top of the US domiciled companies.
Speaker 3Is it a.
Speaker 2Worry that we'll see perhaps in Vidia being questioned in terms of its dominance.
Speaker 3I think it's quite healthy.
Speaker 5We've seen the AI trade has delivered enormous returns for markets over the last two years, and we're I think all kind of experiencing the sire of relief with this exhale.
I guess in a way, we've moved from a rise tied lifting all boats or more choppier waters, and investors are being far more scrutinizing when it comes to how much is being spent, the quality of those investments.
We're seeing as this AI trade continues to grow in its enormity, the investment being made, and the moat in such big questions and shifting.
So I think it's quite healthy that we're focusing on selectivity.
I mean, this is what you want to see to prevent a dot com bubble, and we're looking at valuations today, we don't really see a big risk of that happening amongst the big tech firms.
Speaker 2So even these worries about debt in particular, and you are coming to us with a viewpoint that is cross asset.
In many ways, we have seen a real desire to get into AI related debts.
Some of the bond sales that come from the likes of Alphabet and the likes of Meta and an Oracle.
Speaker 3Have been scooped up.
Speaker 2But there's been this worry that in the longer term it might start to maybe pull back on overall demand.
We might see some of these big hyper scales coming to market so often that it drives up prices for others.
Speaker 3It's possible.
Speaker 5I mean, I think first just looking at the magnitude of how much AI investment is needed or being spent already by any way that you cut it, the amount of spending right now is enormous.
But just like Cardia, isn't that expensive for a billionaire.
When looking at these capex relative to the sales from these companies, relative to their current revenue growth, which has also grown significantly, it's actually not that extreme.
So we're seeing this increasing move to.
Speaker 3Tap into debt markets.
Speaker 5But for us, it's not so much these companies getting overextended, but actually more so a reflection of a better sorry, a better capital structure.
You know, there's some investments like these data centers that are going to be invested over multiple years.
It might make more sense to tap debt markets for some of these deals or an off balancing structure.
Speaker 2So for example, we're going to be looking not only at AI investment surging, but at credit default swaps of Oracle surging.
Has that just been acting as a bell weather and the necessary bell weather to stop reflecting some of the risks that maybe people been ignoring for the.
Speaker 3Past few months.
Speaker 5I think it's it's very apt, and not all of these companies have the establishments, you know, they differ in many different ways and also in their sources of revenue.
And I think it makes sense that you know, Oracle is one of the more you know, risk your companies that is tapping these bum markets and you're seeing that being reflective in CDs spreads.
But that also can't be extrapolated to the entire shift right now towards debt markets to help finance these data center bills, and I'll also add, look, when it comes to cloud services, that business model is one of the most cash generative business models.
Speaker 3In the world.
Speaker 5So at the end of the day, these bonds are also being tied to services business operations that have tended to do quite well for these companies.
Speaker 2It's interesting, of course, deciding where the margin a cruise.
We're going to have l HP after the bell, Many feeding that margin is being eroded because of the cost of memory.
Meanwhile, we'll getting Micron next week with its Sennings and Many anticipating they're strong because.
Speaker 3Of the memory demand there.
Speaker 2From your perspective, is there still room to run in just the tech trade more broadly, or has that shift into more value names and certainly with the context of the FED change things longer term into the end of the year.
Speaker 5We still think we're quite early in this AI wave, but we've seen a chapter or two, and moving forward, I think the focus is not going to only be on compute needs and capacity needs, but also on AI utilization and what companies are really critical for that, whether it's in software, what companies are leading the way in financials and entertainment, in adopting AI, and then also how once we learn more about the end user demand for AI and the pricing power of these AI services, that's going to give us a lot of clarity around the ROI around these AI investments.
Speaker 3So is that what we need?
Speaker 2Is it ultimately the revenues of companies outside of the world of tech to vindicate that?
What pushes us higher in terms of real contextview?
Is it December when we get the FED decision?
What is the catalyst do you think for us to reassess where we are in valuation?
Speaker 5I'd say it's less of the kind of macro back job early here and much more of the proof point around the monetization of AI.
I think the more that you see businesses ramping up their IT budgets, the stickiness that you see in those investment spending and then also AI delivering and we've seen some proof cases of that so far.
Coding has been a huge factor of that.
But once you see more companies, particularly outside of tech maybe tech adjacent, coming at their earnings calls and talking about their AI generated savings, I think that's going to be a really important next lever for the AI trade.
Speaker 2And then one about the Leva FERRATUALI the companies that are adulting the clients that are cooling you on a daily basis, are they saying do I double down more in tech?
Are they saying I need to double out outside of the world of tech.
Speaker 5I think it's it's diversifying that tech exposure.
You know, after a long run in these AI names, you don't want all your ex in one basket because it is.
Speaker 3Probably not.
Speaker 5At least you want to right size some of that exposure bill to top of all of those games that we've experienced in position for how this AI wave is going to evolve, there will undoubtedly be losers and winners, but we also don't want to be out of the market.
Speaker 3And that's another thing that we're trying.
Speaker 5To talk to clients about because even when you call a bubble correctly, if you weren't in the market from nineteen ninety five to nineteen ninety nine, you would have missed out on over four hundred percent in total return in the Nasdaq.
You were right, but you've locked in years of underperformance.
So when it comes to us f Wing Marcus today, we don't see that real risk of a systemic bubble, but we do see a real opportunity to just make sure that portfolios are built for resiliency and they're also built to take advantage of how this ai wave continues.
Speaker 2To evolve, well, hopefully keep having you on a zimbubble or indeed the narrative does evolve.
We so appreciate Stephanie Aliaga JPM Wollngan asset management can cross tech for us.
Mean while coming out with China, Shijin paying revives talks to the sovereignty of a Taiwan and a phone call with President Trump.
Speaker 3More on that next, This is boom Bag Tech.
Speaker 2Chinese President Xijingping well has revived the topic of China's sovereignty over Taiwan in a phone call with President Trump yesterday, discussion that didn't come up during their face to face meeting last month in Beijing.
From Magxinia, tech editor Mike Sheppard joined us for the latest and Mike remind us from a tech perspective, Taiwan, we know its dominance and chips, We understand its integral nature to the tech ecosystem.
What is happening between Xijiping and Trump on.
Speaker 6This Well, what was interesting yesterday, Carr is that we get two very different versions of this phone call between the leaders of the world's two largest economies.
The first version came from Beijing.
The official state news agency SHINOA put out its version of the conversation, presenting it really as one centered on the question of Taiwan.
And then a few hours later we heard from President Donald Trump himself on truth social posting that they had had a great conversation about issues including soybeans and other matters, rare earths, and other key topics that were deared to the US president, but he made no mention of Taiwan there Now, while he did not bring it up, several hours later, he did call the new Prime Minister of Japan, Sanai Takaichi, who had enraged Beijing with comments a few weeks ago.
You'll remember Caro saying that Japan would consider leaping to Taiwan's defense in the event that China.
Speaker 7Were to try to take it.
Speaker 6Now, all of this is huge implications for the supply chain of semiconductors, as you noted, especially Taiwan semiconductor.
It's one of the world's largest producers of AI chips, and they are moving some of their production, as we know, to the US they've pledged one hundred and sixty five billion dollars in investment implants here in the United States, but they would still retain a significant amount of their capacity on the island.
Therefore, any question of Taiwan really does bring up tech issues for US.
Speaker 2And talking of tech issues, the administration once again trying to signal its commitment seeing the ai infrastructure build out akin to the Apollo Mission or to the Manhattan Project, Mike.
Speaker 6Now they are talking about a Manhattan Project like effort in this Executive Order to call Genesis that President Donald Trump signed yesterday, But it was really more a call to action for various agencies to start working together more closely, and that includes the Department of Energy and its National Research laboratories.
But when we talk about Manhattan Project, though, we do need to remember that that effort took thirty six billion dollars in real dollars today from back then in the nineteen forties, as the United States was in the race to develop a nuclear weapon ahead of the Access Powers.
This is a very different time.
We are not seeing new money being pledged towards this effort.
It's important to remember, Caro, though, that the US already has put a significant investment in production of chips that would be needed for artificial intelligence, and that is the Chips and Science Act of twenty twenty two that put tens of billions of dollars in loans and grants and other support, including tax incentives, to support the development of a chip industry domestically that would help artificial intelligence take hold and gain ground and lead the world, as President Biden and President Donald Trump now say they would like the US to do.
Speaker 7Now, we are.
Speaker 6Seeing companies like open ai push for further investment to support data centers, and that would include extending some of those tax credits to data centers.
So it'll be interesting to see how this develops and whether more of those tax credits will go to some of those AI projects.
Just Caro, as we are wrestling with those questions of whether we are seeing too much money going into this space.
Speaker 2Max make Shepard all the context from Washington, We appreciate it.
Speaker 3Meanwhile, it's time for talking tech now.
Speaker 2First up, Ali Baba reported thirty four percent growth in its cloud unit during the September quarter.
Despite the gain, though spending on consumer subsidies data centers that's eaten into its profits the company's ADRs, as you can currently see, just training.
Speaker 3Off by some two percent day.
Speaker 2Meanwhile, Anthropic it's got a new model, claud Opens four point five that the company says it's better at coding and office tasks such as financial analysis and creating presentations or spreadsheets.
Speaker 3It's part of anthropics efforts.
Speaker 2To compete with open Ai with Google business customers.
And Meanwhile, open ais a new tool to generate personalized shopping guides.
The company trained a version of GBT five Mini.
Speaker 3Model to ask follow up questions.
Speaker 2Draw answers from reviews published on what the company considers higher quality websites.
Now, let's talk Apple, because, in a rare mood for the company, the tech giant has eliminated dozens of sales roles in an effort to streamline the way it offers its products to businesses, schools, and governments.
For more on this breaking story, Mark German joins us, it's not one hundreds, We're.
Speaker 3Talking tens of people.
Speaker 2But still it's notable because we don't often see layofs of that one.
Speaker 8Yeah, to your point, it was several dozen people across Apple sales division, and this sales division they partner with carriers across the world to sell iPhones, but they also partner with enterprises, large scale businesses, government organizations, schools, educational institutions, major universities across the world to sell products like iPhones, iPads, max and you name it.
And over the course of this month, there was a big streamlining rounds of layoffs, including, like I said, several dozen people.
There were account managers, they are called account executives for specific government agencies, for specific university systems, people who partner in pitch companies on buying Apple products.
There are these tiny Apple store like fixtures called briefing centers at Apple offices in California and Texas, and the people managing that, for the most part, we're laid off as well.
And so this is going to change how Apple sells products to these different organizations.
The majority of products are bought through what's called the channel, so third party retailers, and so those products are still going to sell, but quite a bit of a shake up here for Apple sells products and delivers these devices to the major customers.
And of course, as you said, a rare layoff for Apple.
Speaker 2Apple did respond to your reporting and saying we're continuing to hire, and those employees can.
Speaker 3Apply for new roles.
Speaker 2Mark, But what do you think this signifies more broadly about how Apple is trying to streamline, trying to become more efficient, trying to ensure that it doesn't seem like it's a lagged in this age of AI.
Speaker 8Yeah, you know, I don't think this has much to do with AI.
I think this has to do with cutting roles internally to lower costs because they realize most of these sales are happening from the channel and there's a lot of duplicate efforts internally with the channel, so the third party retailers.
So I think it's just one of your classic layoffs to create more efficiency and cost cutting, rather than having much to do with artificial intelligence.
In terms of layoffs related to AI at Apple, I guess the only thing you've seen related to AI from Apple that has to touch a layoff was the self Drenking Car project job cuts of one thousand people in the beginning of twenty twenty four, and that was actually to do more AI rather than because of AI.
So they moved a lot of those folks over to the Generative AI division.
But I haven't seen any job cuts at Apple to date because of AI.
That doesn't mean they're not going to happen, but so far they haven't.
Speaker 3Well that's far.
Speaker 2We started to still see some job cuts across technology and Mark Gurman, you've been at the front of that reporting.
Speaker 3We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2Now coming up, Michael Barry stands by his in video criticisms as after calling out the company for stop by gap facts for compensation dilusion, but in video itself responded to analysts.
Speaker 3More on that next.
As a Bloomberg Tech.
Speaker 2As we've been reporting in video shares, they are under pressure today, Competition fierce when it.
Speaker 3Comes from Alphabet and TPUs.
Speaker 2We understand reporting that Meta is eyeing potentially turning to Google for its chips in its data centers in the future.
But there's also Michael Burry there isn't there standing by his criticism of the company after a video pushed back on his earlier analysis of stock based compensation of share buybacks for more Bluemberg equity supporter com and Ryanikey reminds us of what the Cassandra as he dubs himself, has been saying.
Michael Burry laid on issues about the circularity of tech deals, worries about the interoperability of what big tech are currently doing in the world of generator AI.
What did he take issue though, within video when it comes to share buybacks and stock compensation.
Speaker 9Yeah, so, I think most basically his argument is that the amount of stock based compensation is diluting you know, owner's power, that if you hold the stock, it's being diluted by the stock based compensation.
And so it really is just another thing and sort of a myriad of things that he has called out within Vidia in recent weeks.
And yeah, we saw the company, you know, push back.
There was a memo that they sent to some Wall Street analysis is according to a Baron's report that said, you know, we think his math is wrong.
Kind of explained the situation a little bit better and also very latantly stated, you know, we're not Enron.
We're not you know, there's no fraud here.
But but Bury really said, you know, I stand by my analysis that you know about the stock based compensation, dilution share buybacks.
And he also said, you know, I'm not comparing Nvidia to Enron, I'm comparing it too Cisco, which I thought was really interesting thinking about Cisco, you know, in the dot com era, it had this huge run up, but it was really associated with the over build in fiber optic cable.
So he's you know, comparing that to what's happening now, I guess with the video with data centers, and these are really some of the biggest you know, concerns or pain points that we're seeing in this debate over if AI is a bubble, and you know, in video shares are down.
I think they were down as much as six percent today.
We're seeing you know, more than two hundred billion dollars in market value just wiped off, and we're also watching the sort of twenty percent level and videas nearing twenty percent draw down from it's high at the end of October, which was a significant level.
Speaker 3For the shares technical band market.
Extraordinary.
Thank you very much, comment and Rhanick.
Speaker 2He always has some of the most read stories across all of the technology moves.
Speaker 3You've got to keep them up to date with it.
Speaker 2Meanwhile, coming up Google's potential chip deal with Meta's raising questions about in Vidia's dominance and the erase for AI leadership.
Speaker 3More on that take next.
This is boom Bag Tech Welcome back.
Speaker 2To Bloomberg Tech, let's take a check on these markets, because we have seen some sell off continuing.
Speaker 3In the world of technology.
Speaker 2Unlike SMP, unlike the Dow, the Moon music remains resolutely in the red.
Speaker 3We're off by four tenths of percent.
Speaker 2We're seeing some of the big tech names, namely in video.
Speaker 3On the downside.
Speaker 2We're still questioning valuations as we get that myriad of data that comes late to the party when it comes to certainly our own consumer sentiment seems to be on the low side.
But we're seeing retail sales maybe pointing towards whether or not we've got some resiliency in the overall macroeconomic picture.
But in Vidia is more a story of its resiliency versus competition.
Speaker 3We're down by four percent.
Speaker 2Once again, we're wondering if other chips will be created by other players, like Alphabet for example.
It's TPUs maybe being eyed by Meta.
That story we're going to delve into.
We're seeing both shares trade higher.
Oracle and any name really in the open Ai ecosystem has been a typical short for the last week or so, as people question open AI's dominance versus Gemini.
Three for example, so Oracle once again off by another two percent.
Let's really dig in them into the story of the day of alphabet really giving m video a run for its money, certainly a market capitalization front at least Mandy saying, you're here, senior techanalyst a roomag intelligence.
Speaker 3You have for months, if not years, been reminding me and.
Speaker 2Our viewers of the power of the ecosystem of Google and TPUs.
Speaker 3Why now are we only just getting it?
Speaker 7Wow?
Speaker 10Because Gemini three showed that you could use the TPUs both for training the model and for inferencing.
I mean, so far the story was all these secondary providers could be used for inferencing.
The fact that TPUs were used for training Gemini three and most likely for Entropics Frontier model as well.
So two of your three frontier models are using TPUs, And I think there is an acknowledgement now from the market that TPUs are comparable to in video in terms of functionality, and they are a lot cheaper, which is why I'm not surprised to see Meta do that.
I mean, they will raise CAPEX and you know, going to the secondary provider who is a much cheaper option makes sense.
And I think a market will like it when they raise the capex and say that we'll be using Google as a secondary provider.
Speaker 2These are thus just reports as it stands, Mandy.
Speaker 3But what's interesting has.
Speaker 2Been looking at Jensen Wang's reaction when Alphabet or others have made inroads into some of their key clients, Anthropic for example, getting a load of gtpus from Google, and then we see more of a deal done between in Video and Anthropic.
Speaker 3We know that in Videos double down on open AI with.
Speaker 2One hundred billion dollars being offered in return for GPUs being considered in their future training.
So what do you think the response mechanism could be of Nvidia.
Speaker 10I mean, right now, in Video's problem is no one wants to pay the you know, the high costs they have for their chips, and that gets reflected in in Video's margin.
Seventy five percent gross margin is something we have never seen with a semiconductor company.
So from that perspective that you know, the providers who are doing inferencing are offering their products below costs.
Even an open AI when it's deploying you know it's chatbot at scale, I would argue, you know, their gross margins are negative because they're offering their product at below their costs.
In the case of Google, they're deploying you know, generative AI at scale on search and across their family of apps, and they're able to do it without really hurting their margins because their cost phase is much lower.
They're running their infrastructure a lot more efficiently, and so that is where the problem lies is you can't just keep subsidizing the inferencing because the cost of your chips is so high.
With Nvidia, and you've got to find a way to bring down the cost.
Everyone wants more inferencing.
You just have to bring down the cost so that you know they can do it profitaboud.
Speaker 2Well, see how the response does indeed turn out, and how they compare the software offerings as well as the hardware.
Man keep seeing a BlueBag intelligence always across the story.
Speaker 3We so appreciate it.
Speaker 2More insight into AI and indeed margins is set to come after the Bell, Dell HP they report Bluebag's DNA.
Speaker 3Bass gives us the preview.
Speaker 2We're just hearing about the very healthy margins that Nvidia has, and in many ways it's because the margins of Dell and HP and server offerers are much thinner.
Speaker 3Sure, Yeah, Dell.
Speaker 11The most watched part of Dell's business for the last couple of quarters has been its AI server.
Speaker 3Business, many most all running in media.
Speaker 11GPUs, and they have some a really marque list of customers.
Speaker 3There's corewe there's XCAI.
Speaker 11We reported the other week there they just got a deal for the first Armenian AI data center.
Speaker 3The problem is, in order.
Speaker 11To win some of those deals and to execute on them, Dell has.
Speaker 3Had to put up with some pretty.
Speaker 11Narrow margins over at eachp.
The margin pressure is now coming from memory, so HP, the memory chips that they need to use for their personal computers are also rising in price, and so there's a concern for the future numbers from HP about how they're going to handle that march an impact on the PC side.
Speaker 2I mean it as well for Micron, who's earning has come the week after.
But what's interesting more broadly is have they from a stock perspective, from an investor perspective, ridden the AI wave?
How much have people been looking to HP more broadly for AI to be the real winning staff for it?
Speaker 11So there for them, it's more on the aipcs, so an increasing percentage of their personal computers are these aipcs which have a different special chip, not an in video one, in order to run AI functions natively in the personal computer.
They're also really riding an upgrade wave with Windows ten going out of support, people are needing to upgrade to Windows eleven.
Speaker 3So that's been helping them.
But having that comme.
Speaker 11At a time where they're going to have to potentially incur higher cost for the memory going into those machines is a concern.
Speaker 2Well, you're going to be busy after the earning spell tonight in most then of us across all things l NHP, we keep an eye out.
Meanwhile, coming up, we go to the private markets.
Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan is going to be with us and how you.
Speaker 3Model for a desirable founder and CEO that has changed for venture investors.
That's sex the su Blomberg Tech Look.
Speaker 2We've spent the show, perhaps the last week of shows, with ourselves and investors questioning in videas valuation and the prospect of a so called AI bubble in their public markets.
Our next guest says, it's actually a private market issue if you think about AI bubbles.
Brian Halligan is with US, partner at Sequoia Capital, professor at.
Speaker 3MIT, co founder of HubSpot.
Speaker 2That just goes on, Brian, what are you seeing in the private markets in certain isolated instances that maybe reflect some anxiety that we're getting in the public markets.
Speaker 12Well, I'm old enough that I lived through the last bubble, Caroline, and history doesn't repeat itself.
But at rhymes, yeah, and there's definitely some rhyming going on.
Like man, the evaluations are high, and they're high early.
The thing that's different is, my goodness, is their galactic level growth in these startups.
The demand is amazing and it sort of started at the model level and then went to infrastructure.
The app level companies are absolutely ripping now and so it's an interesting time.
Speaker 7It's different than ninety nine.
Speaker 2How are you therefore setting up as you're helping CEOs become.
Speaker 3From startup to scale up.
Speaker 2Mindset and eleven Labs, for example, which I heard time and time again getting adopted, even Jensen Wang saying how much he's loving that particular product.
That's a CEO you're helping navigate.
What do you say to them in these moments?
Speaker 12So if I were a founder and I were warried it were a bubble, I would do a couple of things.
First thing I would do is in my next round, I would take a little bit of money off the table.
Speaker 6Oh.
Speaker 12The second thing I would do is that would raise a lot more than a planned because if it is a bubble and it dips and it eventually comes back, you want enough to last through.
Speaker 7Those would be the two places.
Speaker 3Twenty twenty one mindset A little bit, A little bit.
Speaker 12Yeah, A lot of those companies twenty twenty on, a lot of great companies just didn't kind of make it out.
They didn't raise enough, they didn't make it through.
And if you look at ninety nine or the bubble era, you know, some good companies came out of there.
Google came out of there, Amazon came out of their sales, short dot Com came out of there.
And so even if the valuations are really inflated, if you can find some amazing founders, I mean, there's there's going to be a lot more than three that come out of this one.
Speaker 2There's a lot more than three companies trying to get it on each other's space as well.
And this is where kind of marketing comes in.
And I want your brain space as someone who's helped led HubSpot founded it.
But also you've got this great new book out.
I'm no deadhead, but I know many people are.
You are a quintessential dead head and loved all things about the Grateful Dead.
But you think we should look at the Great Dead as a marketing model as well.
Speaker 3What is it about community?
Speaker 2What is it about I'm sure it's not about bootlegging music that you think is the thing to repeat.
Speaker 12Absolutely, there's so much founders can learn from Jerry Garcia in the Grave of Dead.
First of all, Garcia was like the ultimate and original Silicon Valley founder founded in Palo Alto, built an amazing company.
He did a lot of interesting marketing things that all the founders I coach are trying to do.
Speaker 7First thing he.
Speaker 12Did was he kind of created a whole category around this thing called jam bands that lots of people following around.
Hard to do.
Second thing he did is he didn't use traditional ways to market his product, like radio stations and albums.
He'd let people come in with all their equipment and record the concerts in trade tapes.
Speaker 7He went.
Speaker 12He was like the first viral marketer in Silicon Valley.
The third thing he did that I think is quite remarkable is he didn't like that ticket Master in the scalpers made all the money and inflated the prices for his customers.
So he disintimated those two layers.
And so we're going to start a ticketing company and we're going to sell tickets directly to customers.
We're going to cut out Ticketmaster and all this scalfer.
So he fought in a very original way.
He was He was a radically first Principles founder.
He rhymes a lot with Jensen Hwang, rhymes a lot with Sam Almon, rams a lot with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2What's interesting, And I'm going to keep going with this grateful dead analogy because I love it.
Disbanded in nineteen ninety five after the passing of Jerry Garcia, and there's been different combinations since that, and co we see some artistic differences.
Dare I say there's a few artistic differences at Sequoia at the moment and invention Will Broady, You've been at Sequoia for a year, There's been a lot of change at the top.
How are you seeing the venture community set up for this moment?
What can they learn from grateful dead and from entrepreneurialism at this moment.
Speaker 12I think Sequoia is particularly well set up at the moment.
The two new leaders were fantastic that have been there a long time.
They have amazing track records, and like I think of the stack as like the hardware, the labs, infrastrate, the apps is well positioned with amazing investments across all of them, particularly at the app level, and particularly you're in New York City.
Last night I had dinner with the CEO of profound terrific company that does not SEO but like SEO for Chetchubt and Gemini in the founder of Rogo, fantastic CEO.
Rogo is like AI for investment bankers.
I think this is emble manic of what's going on.
The app layer is starting to pop and Sequoya is in a lot of these things.
Other great companies in New York basis is selling to accountants.
You've got Crosby in Harvey's selling to lawyers.
New York is actually having a moment in AI, and it's kind of at that app level.
Speaker 2The app level is where perhaps the productivity really starts to rain in.
That is what the proof point is needed many would say for the market, when actually you and I are not just using it for our own personal life.
But see productivity go up into the right and companies start doubling down on the purchase.
Speaker 3Of these applications.
Speaker 2What does that show up when don't we stop even talking about an AI bubble because we see the.
Speaker 12Productivity, Well, there's just giant demand and galactic growth.
One of the interesting things about all these founders is I'm like, well, you're certainly going to grow with less people, right, and they say, well, actually no, we're hiring, really hiring aggressively, and so like this.
Some people are like AI is going to make humans unnecessary.
They're like, now, we're going to make users unstoppable.
And that's sort of the mindset across most of these AI startups.
So they're pressing hard, hiring hard, growing hard, and I think you'll start seeing over the next couple of years big productivity advantages like HubSpot uses AI across the enterprise and customers support in R and D, massive productivity benefits across a couple of big parts.
Speaker 7Of the enterprise.
Speaker 2I mean, we're using juice box, which helps with hiring in the world of AI as well.
Speaker 12One of my favorite founders of companies on fire.
Speaker 3Yes, it's been wonderful having you here.
You're on far too.
Speaker 2Enjoy the rest of your thanksgiving.
Grian Halligan in the house Aquoia Capital partner that.
Speaker 3We thank him.
Meanwhile, coming up, robots housekeepers?
Are they close to a reality?
Speaker 2To the CEO behind memo the robot trained on and for your housework, bring bag text.
Let's return to our key story of the day.
Shares Alphabet another record high.
They're rising as the company is said to be in talks potentially with Meta over a deal to provide AI chips TPUs Google Zone in house chips to Meta for the future.
It's all according to a report by The Information.
Let's go more on this and other trends in AI.
Want not to be using generative haarheng models for this holiday, Davey Alba, you're with us and just first to the bread and buster of Alphabet.
How much has caught you off guard?
People working at Alphabet off guard that finally we get the understanding of the vertical model integration.
Speaker 13You know, I don't know that I was necessarily caught off guard by that.
I think that this has been creeping up for a while, but it does seem like the rest of the industry is catching up to this idea that GPUs have enormous value and are really could be a really valuable part of you know, people's AI mixes that you know in video is not the only game in town when it comes to chips.
Speaker 2Certainly, we've heard Da Davidson, you've heard Bernstein, You've had a lot of analysts saying this could be a really individual way of selling it.
And interestingly, now maybe not just for Google Cloud, but TPUs in and of themselves, but aside from Alphabet, what they're doing in terms of the chip stack, their models, how are people going to be using them this holiday You've got a great story out about the anxiety perhaps this is going to create in the kitchen.
Speaker 13Yeah, we published a story this morning about how food bloggers are warning consumers about AI recipe slop ahead of Thanksgiving.
We talked to twenty two food bloggers ahead of the holiday season, and all of them report, you know, traffic declines and AI Frankenstein recipes that remix their recipes and pull in bits and pieces of other recipes to create content that is not accurate.
That where if you follow the actual recipe steps that are generated by these AI models.
You could come out with literal slab, you know, inedible food.
And it's really confusing people these days sort of where to find quality content on food recipes this this holiday season.
Speaker 2Maybe stick to the source for now at least.
Davey Alba punning all puns.
I thank you.
Meanwhile, let's talk about what else you need helping you in your kitchen.
Maybe it's robots.
Well, they've been busy dancing, they've been boxing, they've been running marathons, so why are they not doing more of your chores?
This is memo from AI startup Sunday Robotics.
The company says it's robot is purpose built for housework, trained on millions of episodes of everyday household routines.
Sunday's co founder and CEO, Tony Jao joins us, now you're.
Speaker 3Robot.
Speaker 2It's kind of humanoid like a little but not totally.
How does it differ from other robotics.
Speaker 14Yeah, I think we just think about safety as a really high priority item, and we define it as being like passively safe.
And what it means is that you can put the robot into any configuration and you can cut power and the robot will still be stable.
So this is why we build this whole mobile base as opposed to lex.
Speaker 2Where did you ultimately come to decide that this was the way in which you should think about robotics, Maybe not in a humanoid manner, maybe just with real safety.
First, you've got a stellar background, you're a Google Deep Mind, Tesla Auto Power at Google X.
You're also, of course just coming out of stealth with a call thirty million to put to work.
Speaker 7Yeah.
Speaker 14I think the the biggest way we think very differently is actually on how to train these robots, not just the design, but.
Speaker 7How it obtained its intelligence.
Speaker 14So normally people train their robot through tally operation, which essentially means that you kind of lock into the robot and.
Speaker 7Control how it moves.
Speaker 14But the way we learn is actually very very different that we learn from humans directly.
That's essentially we design these device a glove that captures how human do their chores, and we're able to transfer those data directly into the robots, and that's how the robot is able to learn from like hundreds of humans simultaneously.
Speaker 2These robots don't come cheap, but interestingly, Tony you're not looking to sell immediately, you're.
Speaker 3Looking to beta test.
Speaker 2Now, how are you finding the right people to bring these robots into their home?
Speaker 14Yeah, so if you look at our website, we actually have a huge signup doc for people who are interested, and we're ready to get more than a few thousand of these applications.
Speaker 7So what we're going to work on.
Speaker 14Next is to like very carefully sit through all these applications and find people who what we call like founding families, who'll be there to give us feedback, will be there to kind of shape what a product will look like in the future.
Speaker 3What do you think the hardest element for these robots.
Speaker 7Is the hardest element?
Speaker 14I think it will be how people will react to this like big robot in their homes.
And again, this is the first time that anyone has put a mobile manipulator like a robot with arms into real living homes, and this is something that we're incredibly excited about.
I think will be people will be pleasantly surprised by how useful it is.
Speaker 3Why do you.
Speaker 2Think so many tech companies do end up turning to humanoids, to turning to the physical form of a human rather than a more stable basis you have.
Speaker 14Yeah, I think if you're working on environments that with a lot of stairs, or you're working on environments with like you know, like hills, I think having lux will be helpful in that case and for us in our first we decide to go for a veal base just for the simplicity, for lowering costs and to allow us to move faster.
Speaker 3Talk to us about costs.
Speaker 2You have managed to raise seed funding from Sarah Gao a conviction.
You've now got money coming in led by Benchmark.
Speaker 3What is the key cost for you?
Is it the talent?
Is it the hardware?
What is it?
Speaker 7Yeah?
Speaker 14So our hardware is actually quite differentiated from a lot of humanoids.
Even at quantity zero when we prototype it these days, it costs around twenty five K to make, and at quantity around like five thousand, we're able to get a cost to below ten K.
So I think we'll be ending up selling it around to five to ten K in the final price.
And this is we're thinking.
Speaker 7About robots, not like another car.
Speaker 14Like purchase, but more like a fancy smartphone or a laptop.
Speaker 2How does American ingenuity when it comes to robotics stack up to that of Asia in China and how you seeing your own supply chain develop Yeah.
Speaker 14This is a great question.
I think American has incredible mechanical engineers, software engineers, but we are lacking in terms of some of the supply chain infrastructures.
So I think we're at the point that we need to leverage some of the growing supply chains the humanoids in China and we actually share a lot of components with them so that we can have the economy of scale before us shipping like millions of robots.
Speaker 2Any Ja, CEO of robotic startup Sunday, fascinating to have you on.
Speaker 3Thank you very much.
Speaker 2Indeed, that does it for this edition at Blueberg Tech, we do want to remind you of the market moves today in video under significant pressure off of its lows, still down by four percent.
As we question is dominance in the world of chips to train as.
Speaker 3Well as use your models.
Speaker 2That competition coming maybe from Alphabet TPUs, maybe Meta Eyeing buying some for its data centers of the future as Information is currently reporting Oracle once again off by one point nine percent from New York.
Speaker 3This is Bloomberg Tech.
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