This is Bloomberg business Week inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Hi, everyone, Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week. Carol Masser, along with Matt Miller in for Tim. Earnings kicked into full gear this week. Banks, Airlines, Tesla, Netflix, and a lot more. WW, the company formerly known as Weight Watchers, reports early next month, and investors will be watching out for more on what some say is the company's big gamble. That is our cover story this week.
More in a moment. Also ahead, the gaping hole in the FDA supervision of over the counter medicines that killed Americans and then a buddy of Elon Musks that could have been put out of business thanks to Musk's massive price cuts. And speaking of Elon, we're going to speak with ARC investors, would on, Tesla, Twitter, threads, Coinbase, Bitcoin, and a lot more. All of that to come. We begin with this week's cover story on WW and it's
high hopes for trendy obesity drugs. In fact, the company CEO, Sema Sistani, discussed the move with our Bloomberg TV colleagues this week.
What stood out most is that obesity is a chronic condition. It still hasn't been addressed truly in that matter, when in fact, for over ten years it's been scientifically recognized as a chronic condition, and so we wanted to enter the space and be able to extend our toolkit to not only behavior change and functional but also clinical interventions.
That's the CEO of ww Cimasstani all in on new medications to combat obesity. She's betting that new products such as ozembic and we goo v can help lift the sixty year old company to new heights if they don't kill it first. With more return to the team of Bloomberg News healthcare reporter Emma Court and Startups reporter Ellen Hewitt, also with us Bloomberg Business Week editor Jill Weber.
So, Weight Watchers ended up essentially acquiring this telemedicine company that prescribes these medications. And one of the really interesting things that I think Ellen and I kind of honed in on in our story was the sort of backlash that this sparked among members, right, like weight Watchers has this enviable community, this enviable fan base. Right there are weight Watchers fans who have been on and off this
program for their whole lives. And they were saying, wait a second, this is not what weight Watchers stands for. Weight Watchers stands for making changes to your lifestyle. What's this shot you're talking about? And so we tried to sort of tell this story of, you know, the new CEO, Sema Sistani, who's a sort of classic Silicon Valley type who comes in leads this vague acquisition, and about the way members are responding to it, and some of the big questions too about sort of what does this mean
for this business model? Is this gonna work?
So Ellen bring in a little bit of the Sema backstory. Who is she and what's been her approach?
Yeah, she has a really interesting resume. She's you know, she had worked at CIA, she worked at Tumblr and Yahoo in the time that Yahoo was buying Tumblr, and then she's most known in Silicon Valley. Actually remember meeting her five or six years ago in this role in which she had co founded this very buzzy group video chat app called House Party. It's kind of in the era before group FaceTime that was really popular with college students and gamers who were interested in chatting while they
played games. And so house Party was eventually sold to Epic and its service became integrated and part of Fortnite, and then Epic shut down house Party the service, as you know, a couple of years ago, and Sema had stayed there as an executive at Epic for a while, and then when she left that role, her next role was you know, she kind of phased out at Epic and then it took this job at weight Watchers, and I think what's so interesting about her, and something that
came up when em and I were reporting the story is how much she's angling herself as like taking this very bold bet. Like when they talked about this decision to go into weight loss drugs, they talked about how it pulled very well with people who had never tried weight Watchers and people who had tried weight Watchers but lapsed, but it did not pull well with their current customers, many of whom, as Emma described, were feeling emotionally, I think,
quite betrayed by the move. You know, Joel, as you said, it's weight loss is a really emotional thing. It's very personal, it's very intimate. It's very emotionally hot.
I mean, especially if you go at it the way weight Watchers people do, right, they go to meetings and it works, but you've you have to stay in it for like ever, right, So it's kind of a I don't want to say it's a cult, but it's like you work at it well and you spend right, it's a community. But with ozempic you don't spend time. You don't have a community, and you don't work at it. You just give your shelve a shot every week.
A billionaire named Elon Mustard.
So I don't understand. And this is what Carol and I were talking about. How is that a good business model? There's one hundred places I can get a zepic.
Well, if I'm a health reporter. Here the weight Watchers line, the company line here is Look, these are drugs that are supposed to be used alongside lifestyle change. Like this
doesn't make the weight Watchers model defunct. And they're telling right, you are supposed to take these drugs and change the weight you eat and exercise and do all this stuff because when you lose weight, you can lose muscle, you could run nutritional deficits, like there are other things involved than just weight in your health obviously, So that's the company line. I think, you know, at a philosophical level, though,
you're talking about. The thing that excites people about ozempic is not oh, I want to get on ozempic and change my diet, right, Like, people don't get excited about that. People get excited because it feels like a magic pill or a shot in this case. Right, people are excited because, oh my god, maybe I don't have to like sweat it out and go to my weight watchers meetings and count my points, like maybe I can just lose lose weight magically, you know.
Well, and by the way, people I know who use ozempic, that's exactly how it works. I know people who change their lifestyle zero percent. They use ozepic and they look a million times better. So I'm not saying they're not going to die of cancer twenty years in the future. I have no idea what side effects it's going to have, but it seems like a magic shot.
I was going to say that, you know, Emma had interviewed this woman who who took you know, had been a weight Watcher's customer and actually became a Sequence customer as well. That's the company that weight Watchers are acquired. And she did go on some of these weight loss drugs and what was so interesting and she's the end of our story. She talks about how that sense of community, which as we all know, weight Watchers really managed to
monetize quite well. She was finding that sense of community on TikTok. It was like trading tips with other users who are sharing what it's like to go on ozembic or manjar or goovi. And and she's finding that community elsewhere, which I thought was an interesting like example kind of our digital age.
That's my weight Watchers meeting.
Go back to WeightWatchers. So are they getting rid of all the meetings? Are they shutting down?
Weight Watchers will still have meetings, they're you know, in person meetings, and then they're doing online meetings now, but they have fewer in person meetings now obviously. And then they're also still doing the points thing. And I think they want to get people on ozempic on like a new program that will like help people with ozembic do their like diet and lifestyle thing.
Okay, so let's talk about the money, because there have been really interesting investors in weight Watchers over time. What's been going down? What were the ones that jumped down?
You'll get an ozempic, you get an yeah, I would I would really kill to know what Oprah thinks about the ozembic, but we didn't get very far on that.
Unfortunately, she's still an investor though, right, Oprah, if you're out there, call me.
But she still owns shares.
She's still owns shares, though she's reduced her steak in the recent years, and she is still on the board as of now. But yeah, So, way Watchers has gone through all kinds of iterations over the years. It was owned at one point by the ketchup making company Hines. It was taken private by a group called Artel that
was until recently its largest shareholder. They actually exited earlier this year, which kind of raises some questions too about you know, a company, a stakeholder that's been in the game since nineteen eighty nine exiting when you have this big acquisition.
They also.
They yeah, so that's that's been kind of a series of different weight Watchers chapters and of course, Oprah came on board in about twenty fifteen and purchased a ten percent.
Steak Hallmark BusinessWeek story under Joel Weber. In my opinion, because look, you have a story brand that is being disrupted by some force, right, what's the brand going to do about it? And you know, say what you want, Matt, but like there's this force out there and you can either stay with the ways that you've always been doing it or you can attempt to find a way to address it. And if you don't address it, what do you got then?
And you know, look, look like she makes that point as well, talking about one business that definitely saw another one coming right in the story.
And look like Kodak had digital cameras. You know, like this is an example of a type of story. And usually we talk about this in a world where there's a technology company. But what interests me, especially about this category of drug now is you know, this is pharma and like pharma, we have loved to villainize pharma, like Zima will tell you. I mean, like this is an industry that, like pre covid, it was like everybody's least favorite, and they've got a little momentum here post COVID, saving
a bunch of lives. And now it's like, hey, by the way, there's this thing that might make you, you know, lose that beer belly.
But it only there a month.
That's for the dollars a month.
Well, and look click, there are people here with obesity and we have not as a society really talked about that. And this is a wonder drug.
Our thanks to Bloomberg News healthcare reporter Emma Cord and startups reporter Ellen Hewitt. They co wrote this week's cover story, Joe Weber sticking around for our next segment Coming up, our magazine team investigates how a deadly antibiotic resistant superbug slip past the FDA inside small fials of generic eye drops.
Two brands of artificial tiers have been linked by the CDC to the superbug, drug resistant superbug that's.
Never been seen before in the US.
That FDA miss led to blindness and deaths, and you likely pass the product on a store shelf. More on this story when we come back. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us Live Weekday afternoons from three six Eastern Listen.
On Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
All right, everybody, wait until you hear this next story. You may never go into a drugstore again. It's about the untested bacteria tainted eye drops that blinded and killed Americans, and it all happened to slip by the FDA. The story was among our most read this past week. It was also a Bloomberg Big Take. It is also featured in this week's issue at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, available now on newstands, online at Bloomberg dot com, Slash BusinessWeek, and of course
always on the Bloomberg terminal. Bloomberg News Projects and Investigations reporter Peter Robison co wrote the piece. He and Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Joel Weber joined me and Matt Miller with more.
So little of the stuff that comes from abroad and ends up being sold as medicine is actually no one's actually checking anything. So Peter, walk us through what you learned about this particular instance, which is incredibly frightening.
Well you summed it up really well.
What's happened is that a system that the FDA designed fifty years ago for the domestic market hasn't kept pace with an international market where really all comers can enter. And what we found is that the FDA's requirements through the OTC system are generally very broad. They really are just a recipe book that says, you know, these are the.
Improved ingredients you can use.
And the assumption has been that OTC products are generally safe. Even if those don't meet the requirements, they probably won't kill anyone. But but what happened in this case is that a very small manufacturer in India that had never sold sterile medicines before in the US produced an eye drop that contained bacterial contamination that hasn't been definitively identified by the FDA as pseudamonis.
But it has been tied.
Two brands of artificial tiers have been linked by the CDC to the superbug drug the superbug that's never been seen before in the US.
So what was the problem. I mean, I see that these eye drops were marketed as preservative free, and for some reason, I guess people want their eye drops not to have preservatives. I don't get that, But is that what allowed this bug to survive.
The manufacturers I've talked to say that preservative free is actually a trend in eye drops because if people are using them consistently, the preservative is actually a toxin. So the established manufacturers have come up with a couple of ways to sell preservative free drops. One is to use single use files and the other is these, you know, specially produced bottles that have a valve to prevent contamination.
But those both cost a lot more.
And in this case, these eye drops were marketed as preservative free, but they came in in regular bottles, and that was something, as we explained in the story, was not caught during the listing process by the FDA because it is this the largely automated system that conforms to a recipe book set down decades ago.
I wonder also about the country of origin. There was a big take story about poisoned cough syrup that was killing kids in Africa, and the cough syrup was made in an Indian factory where oversight was virtually nil. In fact, when whistleblowers you know, called officials to other factories that were making medicines there, they decided not even to look this. These eye drops were also made in India. Is that part of the problem.
It is in India just causes self pharmacy to the world. It's it's producing, you know, one fifth of the world's shnari drugs, adding increasing share of manufacturing is based there. But at the same time, India has had repeated problems with quality and there have been multiple, multiple inspection reports showing very hair raising problems. And when the FDA did finally get to this factory after the eye drops were recalled,
the list of deficiencies ran fourteen pages. And it was you know, not testing the filters to ensure that they could sterilize you know, these eye drops. It was workers wearing you know, sort of dirty re used booties, the clean room, you know, having nail holes and sealant when it's supposed to be this incredibly sterile room where even the airflow is unidirectional. So that is a problem, and that's another thing that the FDA has to wrestle with.
But Peter, this is where I have a hard time. I mean, and in your story that these over the counter medicines are sold on the outer system, what does that even mean? And I'm thinking baby aspirin cold medicines, all kinds of air, you know, eye care, stomach ailments. Is all of this stuff not? Is there no oversight or what is the oversight?
The oversight is, as the FDA describes it, risk based, and it's often after problems are found. So in our reporting it's it's not just this company in India. There was a there's a manufacturer in Phoenix that the f D a of eydrops that the FDA went into and this manufacturer said that they weren't aware that eye drops.
Were supposed to be produced sterile.
So, as it's been described by some people we talked to, the FDA has strayed from his fundamental emission of guaranteeing that that what's supposed to be in.
The bottle is actually in the bottle.
That if if we wanted to be assured, we should be testing lots of drugs as they enter the country.
Peter, I'm curious, since you started working on this story, which is thorough, and you've been been working on this for months, what's it like to go to the drug store.
I that's a really good question, and I have I look more carefully at the box and I don't go for deals, you know, I think that you just have to be very careful in this environment. And so I do look very carefully and if someone hands me and I drop at it anyway says try this.
I'm gonna do my due diligence to give you.
A sense of of how scary this can get. Peter like, walk us through. You talked to a couple of people in the story who are also alarmed at what they've found on shelves and talk to us about what they've done.
Yeah.
This this is it's a nonprofit based out here in Seattle, and it's called the Dry Eye Foundation.
And they had because there were.
So many like us, Matt with dry eyes, there's a foundation for us.
I mean, sometimes my eyes get red, so I need a different foundation.
It is National dry Eye Awareness Month this month also. But so this this foundation had been getting concerned because they had found drops that were listed through the OTC system that they found did not they were not what they claimed to be that they claimed, you know, all sorts of miraculous benefits, but they seemed to just contain glycerine and who knows what else. And they were also
not packaged in any of these specially designed bottles. So they really started trying to engage with the FDA, and just as we laid out in this story that this nonprofit became concerned about how easy it is to gain the electronic listing system, so they made up their own
eye drops. They created a company, an LLC, They got a business identifier that the FDA requires to list drugs, and they created a listing for something called Mermaid Tears, which they said would on the label, which looks like a very official label, seems to conform to all the FDA's guidelines, but it says it will like to see like a mermaid underwater if you swallow. It has an aquarium for help, and also declares very clearly, this is a non preserved eye drop in an improperly designed bottle.
Do not allow this to touch your eyes approof.
And that's listing right. That listing sailed directly through the FDA system.
That was Bloomberg News Projects and Investigations reporter Peter Robison along with the editor Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Joel Weber. More of that conversation available on our podcast feed Still Ahead on Bloomberg Business Week. Luckheed Martin making news this past week relating to its massive and much delayed F thirty five fighter jet program. We have the inside story of the so called lightning tube.
So they not only did was it moving into the spelt regime, it was also moving into the highly integrated sensors and the information the information age in the battle space, so to speak.
The promise and the problems with one of the world's most advanced aircraft. That's next. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Lucky Martin reporting earnings this past week, raising its full year outlook, signaling a return to sales growth after battling supplier disruptions at crimped deliveries of some of its biggest weapons programs. That includes delays on the F thirty five fighter jet due to problems with a critical software upgrade.
As a result, Bloomberg reported the Pentagon will withhold back ten percent of the jets price until the contractor demonstrates that the new software works properly, potentially delaying more than four hundred million dollars in payments through December. There is a new book out about the massive fighter jet program entitled F thirty five, The Inside Story of the Lightning Two.
Its lead authors are Tom Burbage and Betsy Clark. Betsy's a director at the Independent Project Review Institute, and she participated in a US Department of Defense review of the F thirty five program. Tom he is a former general manager at Lockheed. They joined us to shed some light on the most expensive weapon in history.
It was one that reshaped the aerospace industry. If you recalled back about twenty years ago, there was a number of major prime contractors and they were all teamed and competing for the project, and the winners was clearly realigned the industry going forward. And that's exactly what happened.
So, how difficult was this to work with so many different countries, so many different you know, cooks in the kitchen. Was that something that caused major delays and you know, made the project more expensive?
No, Actually, the concept was quite simple. You know, in the past, we'd had single service initiatives to develop airplanes that were unique to the single service missions. But the reality was that we don't fight wars that way, and the joint Command structure was set up and we basically fight as a three service entity. Unfortunately, none of the three services operated interoperably or with the same type of aircraft.
And then we went to the you know, the nine one one activity where we formed the Coalition of the Willing and we were fighting with our allies. So we had the US, all three services and allies all combined as a group, but a wide variety of aircrafts and capabilities that were difficult to operate as a unit. So
the concept sort of emerged out of that. It was that could we in fact develop the platform where the service requirements for operational capability were independent of the capabilities of the platform and the allies could join with us those that fly and fight with our aircraft in the past.
So that was the concept behind the five and that's a huge leveraging opportunity if you think about it, because it doesn't matter where you come from, whether it's one of the Allied countries or a long runway or a ship at sea. Once you get together, you're all in the same airplane.
Tell us about this vehicle though, this fighter jet, what it's like. I mean, there's a lot of technology, there's a lot of mechanics. It's like pretty incredible. Talk to us about it. You're a pilot as well.
Well. The point you Raptor was designed basically ten years The designed Bridgeon was ten years prior to the F thirty five, and in that ten year evolution, a lot of technologies were developed, a lot of computer processing capability was advanced, and we were able to put a whole different set of requirements into the F thirty five. Government establishes the requirements by looking at what they think the
future is going to require need. And basically, if you were in an F thirty five and you were looking at the screen in front of you, you would be looking at a at a movie of what's going on around you. You wouldn't be looking at a bunch of individual dials
and trying to integrate them in your head. So one of the great advantages from a software standpoint was the ability to fuse all the various sensors in the F thirty five and present one coherent fixture to the pilot and the information that comes from that can be shared
across multiple domains, not just aircraft but others. So they not only did was it moving into the stealth regime, it was also moving into the highly integrated sensors and the information it's the information age in the battlespace, so to speak.
Let's go to Betsy Clark and ask her for her take.
Betsy, we should just point out she's director at the Independent Project Review Institute. They participated in a US Department Defense review of the F thirty five program.
As I understand it, Betsy, what you came up with the idea because this project was highly criticized to document the whole process, and initially didn't you want to just put out a paper that turned into a book?
Yes, yes, that's right. So actually my first review of the thirty five program was for the US Department of Defense. I did several of those, and then I've done a number of reviews for Australia. And what I noticed over time, if you read the headlines on the program, it sounded like a disaster. All you would hear about is cost, overruns,
trouble plague programs. And yet I did eight different reviews over time, and I could see what was happening on the program in Fort Worth, and I just felt that there's not, first of all, an understanding of the extreme complexity of this program in terms of the technology, in terms of the stakeholder management. There were nine partner countries, and so I just felt there needed to be a book that really went into how complex this program is
and the amazing accomplishments that were being done. Was it done perfectly? No, there were missteps. There was you know, whenever you have a lot of new technologies, et cetera, they're going to be But it just seemed like a basic unfairness to me, and so that is how the book started.
So Betsy get into some of the struggles, the cyber attacks. I mean, I can only imagine the cyber attax on a program like this.
Yeah, certainly you would have the Russians, you would have the Chinese, I think the North Koreans. They've all worked on trying to hack into the program. So that was certainly, you know, it's very classified secure, so that that was all going on because they all really want to know more about it. So yeah, that was that was certainly.
How do you keep them from doing that? I mean, when you've got nine partner countries. You know, surely somebody has a week attache.
Tom, What was that like?
Tom?
What was that like? You guys working on this project. I can only imagine the clearance.
Well, there's classified areas on their project and some very classified in some unclassified, so there's quite a spectrum, and the international partners are all closest allies, at least the first batch were, and then the second batch are now occurring through the foreign military sales process. But the fundamental initial partners all flying fight with the United States as a joint coalition force. They've operated our airplanes and the best of our airplanes for a long time, so joining
the project was part of their national objective. They all participated in funding the development of the program, so in return for that, they were allowed to participate industrially where they could compete on the best avalue basis. You know, it's all taking place with several different layers of security. The very classified areas are of course closed to US only and are very compartmented and protected from any kind
of cyber activity. And then it goes down to building metal parks for the airplane, which all the different countries can certainly participate in.
Betsy, who gets to use these? Which countries?
Is?
Do all members of NATO get some who put in orders? And have we lost to other yet?
Yeah? No, no. So the way this is Turkey is the only one that was basically outed of the program because when they bought the Russian I think it was the s S four four hundred your defense system that became a whole State Department thing. But the others have stayed in and so right from the beginning, this plane was set up for Allied joint warfare, so it was
to fight with our partners. So a big part of it is sharing information across our allied partners and then also across our services, so the US Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy, and I'm sure Tom we talked about the different variants they can do that. And that's really the power of it because we have not fought any
combat alone since I believe World War One. You know, it's the way that we do combat now and to share information and everything, and this aircraft was designed right from the beginning to be able to do that, and that is so so powerful and so we have not I believe right now, there's nineteen different countries that have signed up to get the F thirty five. So it's the NATO countries, it is the Asia Pacific countries, very strong coalitions. It's really changing the way we do combat now.
Our thanks to Tom Burbage and Betsy Clark for catching up with me and Matt Miller. Head over to our podcast feed for the comp conversation, and you can check out the book again. The title F thirty five The Inside Story of the Lightning Tube. It is out now. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Up next, how a slew of price cuts among electric vehicle makers nearly put a friend of Elon Musk's out of business.
This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen.
On Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Another story that was recently a most read on the terminal comes to us from Bloomberg News EV reporter Sean o'caine. The story profiled a friend of Elon Musk's. He's named Scott Painter, well known in the auto industry. The serial entrepreneur, founded the auto fintech startup Fair, the auto pricing service
True Car, and the auto shopping portal Cars Direct. Painter is also the founder of Autonomy, a subscription car service offering up Tesla's and Chevy Bolts, and he himself got a jolt when Elon started slashing the prices of Tesla's. Matt Miller and I asked Scott what the EV market's fast changing dynamics mean for his business.
In reality, this shift didn't represent a real change in the value of the assets that we owned, but it did represent a real shock to how our lenders thought about it. And today, on the other side of that, we're much more prepared. We're a much more durable business. We do anticipate that Tesla is not going to be the only one that's going to be discounting and up and until this time, everybody who's entered the EV market
has enjoyed wait lists. It's clear that consumers want to drive electric cars, but up and until now, most OEMs felt they would never have to entertain a discounting type strategy. And given that Tesla's gone there, what we're seeing with all of the other new entrants from Rivian, Lucid, Fisker, Polestar, even new foreign entrants like VinFast and BYD are all thinking about what is their fleet policy going to look
like and what is their discounting strategy. But we're also really confronted with this new sort of reality with the Inflation Reduction Act. The federal government is offering seven five hundred dollars of additional tax credit, which as a commercial buyer we qualify for on every single car. That's not the case for traditional consumers.
So Scott, how do you pass that on to consumers? Is it something that you do pass on or is it something that you just get to keep as the business owner.
We're about flexible term access, so we're not a rental. Rentals typically cost about one hundred dollars a day for a Model three. That's three thousand dollars a month. Our typical monthly payment is somewhere between five hundred and one thousand dollars a month. We are focused on making sure that out of pocket we are cheaper than a Tesla Model three lease, and we do not come with that commitment.
We do pass on all of those savings because the less we pay for a car, the less we have to charge our customers, and so we are not just being faced with the Tesla discount, which turns what was a forty nine, four hundred dollars car for us to buy today, that same vehicle can be purchased for just under forty thousand dollars from Tesla. You add to that the Inflation Reduction Act tax credit of seven five hundred dollars. You're all of a sudden looking at the low thirties.
The sort of takeaway here is that the name of the game is what is our total out of pocket capital? Because we buy these cars, we run them for between four and eight years, and so if we have less money out of pocket, it's a much more efficient business. We have a much lower cost of capital, and we pay less interest expense, and we can pass all of that along.
Did you have a conversation with Elon though after he made his moves? I know you're explaining the dynamics more broadly, but have you talked with you about this.
I've been a long time advisor to Tesla. I've known Elon since he first evaluated investing in Tesla and really building this business, and so I've been a long time proponent of affordability being the key to scaling, And obviously it's not just what you pay for the car, it's also the monthly payment because because most people who get a Tesla do not pay cash for that car, they
finance that car. Right now, auto lending is almost shut down entirely because with rising interest rates, paying ten percent interest on a car loan doesn't make any sense, So subscriptions and leasings are really going to be the name of the game. I believe that Elon does agree with the affordability angle, and really the Tesla discounting strategy has
not been driven by companies like US at all. Of course, Tesla made their decision based on wanting to make sure that every trim level of the Tesla Model three and Model Y qualified for every available incentive, credit, discount or rebate available just to make that car more affordable. And
they've done a brilliant job at doing that. So it does represent some headwinds for US, but it also represents a real tailwind because it does result in a discount and it's created an environment where other OEMs are willing to do the same.
That was Scott Painter, serial entrepreneur and founder of the ev subscription service Autonomy. That wraps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Ahead in our next hour, Hallijin Ventures founder Jesse Draper on smashing through the glass ceiling in the VC space, and Kathy Wood on Crypto elon Musk's plans for a super app and AI's potential impact on the labor market. This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I'm Carol Masser. Stay with us.
Today's top stories in global business. Headlines are coming up right now.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Welcome back Carol Masser along with Matt Miller in for tim plenty Ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including an interview with venture capitalist Jesse Draper on her unusual entry into the business and how she's finding value in women led and women focused startups. In fact, she's sold several of them to some very well known companies. First up this hour, another investor seeking out the disruptors and innovators of this world.
We're talking about the founder, CEO, and CIO of ARC invest Kathy Wood. Her Arc Innovation ETF is up around sixty percent year to date, still down nearly seventy percent from a peak back in February twenty twenty one. Matt Miller and I caught up with Kathy ahead of Tesla's latest earnings to find out where she is putting her money and whether the market may be getting a bit too exuberant.
You know, what's interesting is to see funds having nice moves and flows not follow I think there's a wall of worry up out there. It is about further interest rate increases. What's going to break next, It's about a hard landing in the context of now China and Europe really struggling, and how will that reverberate. So we actually think that, and we've been saying this for some time, that deflation is the bigger risk out here. And I
do believe. I just heard your conversation about autos. I think we're going to see an unwinding of auto prices. That the Ford f one point fifty lightnings price decline is going to be the first of many, many auto cuts that we'll see. And if you remember, during the early stage of COVID and the supply shocks, at one point the combination of used cars and new cars accounted
for a third of the increase in inflation. I think you'll see that on the downside here, and we're going to get to two percent inflation, I think, much faster than many people think, with perhaps a harder landing, more for corporate margins than anything else, because if you see these discounting and you see consumers respond to discounts, maybe real growth kind of. I still think we'll have a harder landing, but maybe with price declines will stave that off that hard landing.
For a while, well, we were hearing investors today say that inflation is no longer concern number one. Growth is really what the market is concerned about now. And so you think we're going to have a recession, Kathy.
Yeah, If you look at real corporate revenue growth, it's down one point one percent your over year as of that was as of the first quarter. That is consistent with gross domestic income down one point one percent. This is real gross domestic income down one point one percent. You're over year gross domestic income and gross domestic product over time equal one another. It's an identity, but the information flows are different. And income you get a lot
from the IRS, a lot of income data. The product data, product and service data is a little bit more sampled and erratic, but over time, so we could already be in that downturn. And the GDP numbers we'll just catch up later on.
What about the inflation numbers. I mean, we come down over the last year from nine point one percent CPI to three that's pretty quick. And you know, I've talked to you a couple of times in the last couple of years and you've mentioned a concern about deflation rather than inflation. Do you think we're going to start to see that coming as we see it in other major economies, most notably China.
Yes, it's very interesting. The Chinese deflation prices are down according to the PPI five point four percent year over year, and I do believe they are going to export it over time. So yes, we do think we're going to see price deflation. But there are two flavors of deflation.
There's good and there's bad. The good deflation has to do with innovation, and we have centered our research around five major platforms, all of which are technologically enabled and deflationtionary, and they're becoming a bigger part of the pie electric vehicle sales. For example, Tesla's making sure that it's passing along the cost declines from its drive electric drive trains to consumers so that it can sustain demand. Anything having to do with innovation, the best companies are going to
pass those costs along to the consumers. And so I think you're going to see much broader based deflation in not only the transportation sector, but perhaps everywhere because artificial intelligence training costs AI training costs are dropping. Get this, seventy percent per year. Seventy percent per year. Now, that's the good deflation is causing booms in activity. But we do know that disruptive innovation will disturb or disintermediate the
traditional world order electric vehicles and gas powered vehicles. You know, these auto companies ninety to ninety five percent of their revenues are still tied to the internal combustion engine.
So, Kathy, when people talk about AI. Do you think it's going to upend the labor market substantially?
The history of technology over time is that it's a net job creator. In the short term, you'll see some displacement, You'll need some retraining. But I like to remind people about the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, when we were trying to figure out what it was and how it was going to work, we had no idea about Uber or Airbnb businesses that could not exist without the Internet. And I think the same is going
to be true in the AI world as well. I think it's going to be a tremendous boon to productivity. It is the equivalent for college workers of the assembly line in the industrial age. This is the new assembly line. And you know what happened because of the original assembly line, Well, a lot of people left the farms. There are a lot of farmers then and moved into businesses and activities that they didn't dream were possible before that. And I think the same will prove true now.
Heye it love it, little Henry Ford henory there.
I like it.
Love love, love No, But it's like this big picture. One thing I want to ask you kind of whittling it down a little bit. You know, one of the things in the in the headlines today has to do about Dad Jones. You did an interview and you talked about Twitter and writing down your stake in Twitter by I think about forty seven percent since Elon took it over. You're still bullish long term, So help me understand that right down against a long term bullish view.
Sure that we have no choice in this. This is we have a pricing committee. We calculate our net asset value for the ARC Venture Fund every day and we get a lot of markers. There's trading on the secondary market less. So with Twitter, we are trying to find some Twitter. We love to buy some at this level.
But while a Fidelity has marked it down in some of the other large managers have marked their positions down dramatically based on Yes, we are still getting information about advertising sales not picking up dramatically yet, but they're in very early stage. With Linda joining the team, we'd love to buy it. We think longer term. We think that Elon understands what a super app is. After all, he did get started in the payment space and sold his
company to PayPal in the last week. Twitter has gotten money transmitter licenses from three or four states and they're going to cover the land and we chat pay taught us a lot about what a super app is in terms of not only information flow, but financial activities and commerce. So we think Elon has grand plans, and you know, it's also been interesting. I think some of these markdowns may be a result of Threads. I don't know. I don't get involved in that decision making, but if you
look at Threads already, the engagement activity is plummeting. I think people know that Threads is no Twitter.
You still have to love meta though, right you were buying, right, you were buying some Meta, yes, and not for Threads at all.
We have bought, you know, as Tesla went up two and a half fold in six to seven months. As we always do, we take profits. It's still the largest stock in our portfolio. We have our wish list out there, what companies are doing better than we expected. So Meta Platforms, you know, was disintermediated to some extent by TikTok. We had expected that, and we pulled away and avoided all
of that loss. Now that doesn't mean we avoided losses in innovation because innovation was trounced broadly in twenty one and twenty two. But what we are intrigued by is the shift in focus and priorities from metaverse to artificial intelligence. That's the first thing. And what has also been quite astonishing to us is the engagement levels among all of their properties, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. They're pretty astonishing, very sticky, and so we can see why advertisers are coming back.
That's kind of a say play. They're leaving linear TV and finding other ways to advertise, and so we do think meta is now back again gaining more share in advertising.
That's Kathy Wood of our invest more of our conversation straight ahead, including her unwavering belief in bitcoin. Following a couple of key legal winds for Coinbase.
It's going to be we think, a major institutional on ramp into the DeFi space.
And they're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg.
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Let's pick up with our conversation with Kathy Wood, Matt Miller, and I speaking with the founder's CEO and CIO of our co invest She overseed about fifteen point one billion in equity holdings at least at the end of June. That is way down from a peak of about sixty billion a few years ago. Her Arc Innovation ETF has been on a tear though this year, as have some of her investments in digital assets, including bitcoin.
I wonder about crypto in terms of things still to materialize. It seems like a lot more people are getting on board with you. Who was Larry Fink was on Fox Business and he was saying, you know, basically everything's going to be tokenized. This is going to help the finance be more frictionless, and it was I think a fascinating to hear, you know, someone who controls the biggest firm in the financial industry globally to say things like that.
We know that you're in coinbase, that's one of the stocks has done so well for you this year, But where else do you see good opportunities here? Given the regulatory scrutiny it's had under Gary Gensler.
Well, I think what's happening first with crypto that is wonderful in terms of the United State. While we were very unhappy with Chairman Gensler's direction, we're very happy that the judicial and legislative branches of our government are questioning the power that he seems to have seized and are questioning whether he should have a right to do and say some of the things that he's doing. So that's good. I think the Ripple ruling last week was a big
win for crypto. Another juditial branch weighing in. So we own coinbase, as you know. We bought it when we saw the Wells notice and the sec suit because we believed and it turned out to be correct, that the judicial and legislative branches would start to weigh into this discussion. We also own Square, which has a business dedicated to bitcoin, and it's going to be the trojan horse to get into other other economies, especially emerging markets. This is cash
app to get into those markets. So those two names. But one of the reasons you are I think hearing Larry I think whacks more eloquently on the crypto space when at one point he I think was calling bitcoin ponzi scheme, is that there are now Bitcoin filings at the SEC and we have one Blackrock as one. So I think that's another reason we're hearing more from these
more traditional players. You know, defied decentralized financial services is a risk for these centralized players, so they're trying to play ball and actually use the technology to lower their own cost base. But they as a centralized institution, do not have the DNA we think will take to really succeed in a decentralized financial services.
So, Kathy, does coinbase in your view, become kind of a bridge between traditional finance and the DeFi worlds.
Yes, it is. It's developing something called base and definitely understands both worlds. It's going to be, we think, a major institutional on ramp into the DeFi space. And you know, we're hearing more and more where there's smoke, there's fire. Sometimes certainly was true with Ta Luna and FTX, but you know we're hearing more turmoil when it comes to binance as well, with Australia and the Netherlands basically banning it as effectively we have done here in the United States.
So think about the share gains that as an on ramp that Coinbase will enjoy if anything do ntoward does happen to binance.
So when you sell coinbase, like, is it just again taking some money off the table because of the incredible run.
Yes, this is its portfolio management. You know, when something is up fourfold from you know where we had been buying it, we will take some profits. It's now the number two position in the flagship strategy ARKK, it's number
one in ar K f our FinTechs fintech strategy. So we are we become opportunistic at those moments in time, and very often you'll see us buy something as you saw we talked about Meta that is also up a lot, but in which our conviction has increased because again in the case of Meta, change in priorities.
So don't you think that's what investors are doing with the flows as well, Kathy, because you know last year ARKK came down a lot in terms of its price action, but the flows were just piling in. Investors were still buying, buying, buying, And so this year your funds have done very well. They're up fifty sixty, seventy percent depending on which one you look at. And I get that people would take money off the table.
And so do we, so do we, and they're taking money off the table, you know, in many, many of the funds that we're compared against and that we measure ourselves against. And yet the focus on ARC alone is interesting. It's it's a phenomenon, and it makes sense. Yes, have
had a big run. Now, one thing that's happened recently for us is we had seen a basing we'll use arkk but it's true of all of our strategies, a basing inner range mid thirties to mid forties, mid thirties, and so we saw, you know, profit taking a forty five and moving back into mid thirties. Well, we just
broke out of that forty five range. So actually, in the last it seems like a lot of I don't know if they're technicians or investors who use technical analysis, basically are saying, oh, it broke out of the range. And I do think that's why our flows are now back in in July.
So, Kathy, you know the reporting, We've done it, Dad Jones has done it others about outflows in your fund since October. So you're saying that money's coming in at this point turn around.
Yeah, and you can see you can see our ETFs. We report them every day. The flows are reported every day. So I think for the flagship it's around two hundred and fifty million dollars just thus far in July. So yes, and before that we understood people were taking profits just like we take profits in our stocks. As you were saying, Matt,
this is nothing new. However, there's there's another There's something else that could be going on here, and that is, if you look at the Nasdaq and the cues, they're not too far from their all time highs, whereas our strategies and let's take the flagship ARKK, the all time high was close to one sixty, and we're still below fifty. And sure, maybe the one sixty was a bit too far, but I think our funds were disadvantaged because they don't
look like the Nasdaq or the Nasdaq one hundred. And as the markets were selling off last year, more people, more investors, tried to get closer to their benchmarks, and they were selling our stocks and buying the big megacap texts and so forth. I think that might be changing.
I think real active management is starting to evolve here or have more of an impact because even though we don't own most of the megacap techs in terms of the magnificent seven, really Tesla's are major holding, and we do have twenty five percent exposure to healthcare, which is negative you're to date for the sector, but for us, it's somewhere in the twenty five to thirty percent appreciation range.
This is active management at work as well as smid We're much more tilted towards smidcap smaller and cap stocks, and those have underperformed the mega cap texts, but our strategies are outperforming the Nasdaq one hundred. So it's saying something to us about true active management beginning to make a difference. Again.
That was our convest founder, CEO and CIO, Kathy Wood. Even more from Kathy available at our Bloomberg Business Week podcast feed. Head there to find out what she thinks Crypto offers investors that no other asset can and which company she believes will be the next source of market shifting innovation. It's kind of her newest big bet still
to come on Bloomberg BusinessWeek. A different sort of female entrepreneur who's looking to leave her mark on the venture capital business Halojen Venture's founding partner Jesse Draper, joins us on the other side, and if her name sounds familiar, it should well.
When we come back, This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Bloomberg News recently reporting on the venture capital space, noting that climate tech, which has been an investing bright spot since twenty twenty one, is not so hot anymore. In fact, the first half of twenty twenty three so a decrease in climate venture funding, according to a new report from Climate Tech VC. That change, though, really reflects an overall broader slow down in VC investments, driven by larger macroeconomic forces such as higher interest rates as well as sector
specific issues. Well, our next guest is making her own early stage investments. We're talking about La based Halogen Ventures founding partner and fourth generation venture capitalist, Jesse Draper. Some of her investments have already been acquired by the likes of P and G, Twitter, and Walmart. She sat down in studio with me and her childhood friend, my co host, Matt Miller.
I've also always admired her dad, not just because I know him from growing up, because he's because the whole family is so deep into venture capital. But Tim and Jesse's brother Adam got deep into bitcoin right when I started covering it, so about ten years ago.
I guess it is what's that what's that environment like growing up that way? Or just do you guys like get together and just talk about opportunities, like what's it like you pitch each other?
Oh?
Yeah, of course. I mean my mom calls it like our dinners are board of directors meetings. You know, we're talking about deals. And I'm the oldest of four, and I have two brothers and a sister. There is an incredible artist l But my two brothers run venture funds, and then my dad has an active venture fund as well, and so we do we share deals. I have great advisors around me all the time, you know, I have great people to call. We've all had very different experiences.
We all have very separate venture capital funds focused on different things, but I think in terms of what I'm focused on growing up there, my dad was always super supportive of women, and he made me feel like I could do absolutely anything. But my mom would say things like, Okay, you're going on another business trip, Tim, well, you need to.
Take a kid.
And I was the oldest. So I traveled around the world with my dad. It was this amazing thing, and I got to go to China and all these Ukraine and all of these incredible countries and see what their kind of startup world was like. But what I realized was that I was different because I was female, and so being a fourth generation venture capitalist comes with a lot of preconceived notions, and so I used to kind
of shy away from that. But now I'm like, no, you know, that's a really huge part of my story. And I didn't think I could be in these rooms. I'd be in China meeting with diplomats and I'd be sort of shunned outside of the room. And I kept trying to explain to my dad, you know, like they just don't want me here. I really feel like it's because I'm a woman, and he just no, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about and so I was just like, so it was so important to me
to support women in whatever I did. I ended up going after a career in entertainment, like any young girl. I looked to Hollywood because my aunt, Polly Draper is a fairly successful actress, a very successful actress actually, and she is currently on a show called The Company You Keep Shameless plug for my aunt, who's awesome, and she ran on thirty seven and she always really inspired me. So I said, oh, well, this is what women do.
This is a traditional job for a woman. As a young girl, you know, they say you can be what you can see. So I kind of went after her. My mom worked incredibly hard raising four children and went into entertainment. I had so many I had a lot of great success. Was on a Nickelodeon show. I was in a bunch of movies, NA The Naked Brothers Man. But it was also I had so many cattle calls.
And there was this very memorable one where I was in Los Angeles, somewhere on Sunset Boulevard going to a cattle call, where you know, there's five hundred women much more beautiful, much more talented than I am. I wait five hours. It was for like Transporter two or something,
and Jason Staveum, I get in the room. I have my little sides prepared and I'm like, Hi, I'm Jesse either like no, don't speak, turn around, turn around, and I and like click click, and I leave, and I just felt like gross, you know, And then I realized I'd been sent to this thing called it through an organization called Charlie's Bodies, so they were literally just looking
for bodies. And I walked out of there. And because I was a zealous celebrity who was like on a Nickelodeon show, I had been invited to the first Twitter conference and it was the very first one two thousand and eight something like that at the Skirball Center, and I went and I was like, you know, I'm one of the only women in this room. But it's a reminder that this is where, like I know this business, and there's something really cool happening here with social media.
And so I ended up combining these two kind of worlds created one of the first tech talk shows, if you guys can believe it, back in two thousand and eight. And I know it was the first because I had elon Musk and the former CEO of Google, Eric schmid On, and nobody cared because they.
Want to have I will say that I watched it.
It was It was a terrible show. When I look back, I'm like horrified, But I thought my career started. It was called The Valley Girls Show, took it to TV, we were nominated for an Emmy. We built out a whole tech news blog around it, and through that show, I realized I was only interviewing men in technology. So I made an initiative to interview fifty percent women in tech, and they came. I still today called the Batwoman's signal.
I started getting pitched all of these incredible deals. I had Sheryl Sandberg on the show before she'd written Lean In and Jessica album when she was just starting on his company, and then wanted to help women in tech by giving them media exposure. And then I made that initiative, and then realized they also needed funding. So first I was sourcing deals like paperless posts, finding them their first investors in numerous others, and then started writing tiny angel checks.
Sold my first company for twenty six x return on the secondary market. Benchmark had come in marked it up significantly. I had this great opportunity to sell, and then everyone else lost their money, so I had this nice little track record. I feel badly, but I was really happy I sold and then not that badly, and then I had a track record, went and raised my first fund
from a lot of the guests on my show. And now we're going out for our third right now, which I can legally say because we're a five o six.
What a cool story.
That is pretty amazing. That's great, that's a book. But talk to us, make sense, talk to us about what guides you in terms of where you want to invest.
So right now, we So we were more generalists when we started because we were consumer tech early stage and kind of there had to be a female in the founding team of five. And uh, it's funny when you say that to people. You get a lot of questions like, well, what if a guy works there? And I'm like, oh, so lots of men work at our companies, and so I always like to say, we have seventy two companies and we have three male CEOs, So we love men. It's about everybody. We just want to make sure there's
a female in the founding team. But I think right now, when I'm supers.
Women, if the whole idea is the research there's diversity is good, we have to also be ye all in on diversity is it is a little.
Bit are okay?
Men are good. Men are good, but it is frustrating. I get a lot of questions about that, like there's a lot of technicalities, like it'll be thirty I'll pitch my fund and be like, yeah, I have this company, baby List doing a billion GMV you know, And then they're like, okay, but.
What if a guy works there.
Okay, but what if he's you know, the co founder, you still will invest. But what if I'm like, we're building billion dollar businesses, if not trillion dollar businesses. So yes, but our companies are doing so incredibly well. We're looking right now at this category Future of Families, which we went out for childcare, and I said, I want this third fund to be like the childcare Fund because we have these incredible companies like Hop Skip Drive, which is
tackling getting kids too and from school. We have week Care, which is the largest childcare network a technology in the country. They oversee sixty six thousand in home vetted childcare locations, this is the largest childcare network and the most affordable childcare opportunity for families of children under the age of six. And then you know a company called Binti that's putting adoption online. And so we realized these companies were doing really,
really well, and we had such an op opportunity. It's such an underinvested market and it's been broken for so many years. Agreed, and so I said, I want this to be the Childcare Fund. And a lot of people said, well, is that a big enough market? And I said, well, it's five hundred and twenty billion. But you know, challenge accepted. I love a good challenge.
Yep. It is commonly known, at least on this show, because we talk about it all the time, that very little money in VC goes to women funded businesses. I think two percent is the number we're working with that, which, on the one hand is horrible. You know, we should be investing more on women obviously. On the other hand, it's a great opportunity for you. I mean, there's just a huge green field where you can go out and
grow money. So what are to you the most exciting businesses that you run or that you invest in?
I should say, I guess you heard it.
Do your favorite many, Matt, There's so many, but you're right. There's only two percent of venture capital funding is going towards women, and actually last year it was less, it was one point nine percent. And I'm so happy you're talking about it. I'm so happy you talk about it regularly. I've realized in VC we talk about it. In female
focused VC, we talk about it all the time. And we actually just did this big campaign and featured a bunch of our portfolio companies to raise awareness about this because we want people to realize that women are starting companies in every industry.
That's Halogen Ventures founding partner Jesse Draper. More of our discussion on the VC landscape is straight Ahead, including her expectations for deal flow in the near term. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
So with Matt Miller and me is Jesse Draper. She's the founding partner of Vallet based Halogen Ventures and a fourth generation venture capitalist. Here, Jesse is explaining the hurdles facing many female led early stage companies. Jesse says they often have trouble securing investments due to an over concentration of venture funding among a small handful of firms, which are often hesitant to get in on the ground floor.
They follow on later once you prove yourself. But I think it's the early stage capital is really where we have to make change. Like men have passed the pocketbooks down for generation to generation, so you're dealing.
With that also.
But women are starting great companies and we do. You know, I saw ten thousand deals last year. I was just telling you because you were asking, you know, well, do you even see enough deals? And I can't tell you how often I get that question. And because I'm a female looking for women led deals, I see more deals than traditional venture capitalists because women are looking for women, and I'm innundated. I don't even know how to get
through it all. You know, it's we will eventually have billions of dollars to invest in all of these incredible women. But I see so many deals that I can't do because you know, we don't get enough funding just as an entire eco system of female led managers. And then also I think there's something around the female partners at the larger funds have trouble getting a deal across the table. I think you need more than one woman at the table.
Well, and we did the stories of at a Silicon valley that even women venture capitalists at prominent firms, we're not investing in women led companies.
It was just like they can't always get them across the table. They'll tell me exactly.
But that's more opportunity for you, So totally. Yeah. So, I mean it's, as I say, it's message.
Changing, but we're changing it.
We are changing it.
So currently, what are exits like right now?
It's such a good question, Matt. You know, right now I sit on quite a few boards and we're all talking about M and A. I mean, I think any good board is constantly talking about M and A as an option at some point or IPO or just some sort of liquidity event down the road. But I'd say your company in the next six to nine months, if you have to sell, it is not a time people are just freaking out about liquidity about the markets. They feel like in stable and they're just kind of scared
right now. All the consumer businesses I'm seeing the ones that are selling. We're selling one business right now. Everything's for about half of what it should be worth, unfortunately, and so you're only selling if you're really in a jam. So if you have businesses that you want liquidity from, I would not sell it right now. I would wait, start getting to know some acquirers or you know, just
build the business. But also the coolest thing about investing in women is the majority of our companies are profitable. And that's like this unheard of term in the past ten years. So you know, get profitable, like create, take this time to build a much better business, and your exit down the road will be much better.
We wanted to ask you just real quick, like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Did you feel an impact of that?
Oh my god, yes, yeah, that was the scariest weekend of my life. Over fifty percent of my portfolio banked there. I banked there. I couldn't even support my companies who couldn't make payroll because of it. While I'm super sensitive to the people who lost their jobs and all our friends at Silicon Valley Bank. This is a great time to invest in fintech. We're going to see new banks, We're going to see new products, insurance products that protect
your money. Crypto's going to be on the rise. I mean, it's a really exciting time. But I mean, yes, I think we're going to see some more of those, unfortunately our.
Thanks to Jesse Draper of Hallijen Ventures. You can listen to the full conversation find it under podcast feed. And that wraps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Monday through Friday starting at three pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Radio and on Series XM Channel one nineteen. You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube just search Bloomberg
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it's hot out there. I'm Carol Masser along with Matt Miller. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
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