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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 Bloomberg Business Week Weekend Podcast. Big focal point this week, I mean massive focal point. Let's be fair earnings from Nvidia, you know, the giant chip maker at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution that has powered the bullmarket in stocks. More on that in just a moment.
Man speaking of Nvidia, Jensen Wang, Satynadella of Microsoft, and Michael Dell. A lot of big names in the tech space this past week talking about AI and their plans and their partnerships. Our take on what is going on from the head of AI over at Qualcom, who weighed in on on device artificial intelligence, including so called aipcs.
You're going to hear a lot about that in the coming months, that's for sure. Venture Capital crossed into a few topics for us this week as well, including a conversation with the author of the Venture mindset how to make smarter bets and achieve extraordinary growth.
And speaking of VC bets, joe Ane corkran over at Golden Seeds joins us on investing in early stage women led businesses, and then the Business Week cover story It's about twenty three and meters once the recipient of millions of dollars from vcs and investors facing a big problem today.
All of that to come. We begin with Nvidia, which gave another bullish forecast, shattering estimates showing that spending on AI computing remained strong and reinforcing its stats as the biggest beneficiary of AI spending.
The company's so called AI accelerators, These are chips that help data centers develop chatbots and other cutting edge tools have become a hot commodity. For more on the quarter and the business, we caught up with the Bloomberg News at US semiconductor reporter Ian King.
Were looking for doubling year of a year in this current quarter. In video, said yeah, we can do that, and we can do a bit more. So, even though there were lofty expectations, they managed to set expectations even higher. The data center business is already bigger than Intel an AMD, and it's getting bigger quicker than people had projected more than four hundred percent a year on year increase in
that particular business. So all of the fundamental numbers that in Nvidia need to show we're heading in the right direction. It was able to deliver on.
I was a little struck, and Carol mentioned this by a couple of the things that they also announced the ten to one stock split coming next month, and then increasing the dividend. Curious if you have any thoughts on either of those things.
Well, I mean, you know, as you were just discussing with Bailey, I believe that the stock split is something that's aimed at retail investors, but it's also aimed at their internal audience as well. A certain percentage of the shares get bought by individuals. You know, they get like a discount slash, you know, allowance that they can buy at a certain point. So you know they want to
to keep their employees happily, right. You need those engineers, you need those that staff that's that's you know, so invested in what you're doing, So that might be part of it as well.
Can I ask you though, because I did scratch my head a little bit about it.
I don't know.
I was going back and forth with a brother of mine who has been in an Nvidia for years, and we're going back and.
Got to get it. Your brother on the show.
Yea, yeah, he's pretty smart, just really well read. But about the dividend, because I always feel like companies do that when maybe growth is slowing or something to kind of keep investors happy. Is there something, though, connected with that stock split that they raise the dividends so much?
I mean, for some of you conductor companies, which are massively capital intensive, even when they don't own their own manufacturing, that the question is how much are they spending as a percentage of their revenue on R and D, on design, on making sure that the next product's coming along? And you look, you know, Nvidia is one of the highest, one of the biggest spenders by any measure in the chip industry. So as long as I'm doing that, I would say that most in video watchers don't care. It's
just something nice to have. On the other side of things.
Well, you talk about the R and D spend and it really, you know, certainly seems to be paying off for Nvidia. Having said that, talk to us about the development cycle, and I bring it up because I was listening to Bloomberg Intelligence man Deep seeing about how for Nvidia it's kind of a shorter time like almost every year, and that that is going to require companies who want to have the latest and greatest from Nvidia and in the AI chip world, that they're going to be adjusting
their CAPEX spend to include that every year. So maybe you know, different from Moore's law. Right.
Basically what Jensen lang to CEO said, he said, Look, we were bringing new product market for this market roughly sort of every eighteen months or so. Now we're going to do.
It every year.
We're going to do it every year for a number of he you know, put that the salesman routine. Look, we're helping our customers. This market is changing rapidly, so we need to bring soft and market much much quicker than we were doing to help support this, to help bring these new capabilities, everybody wins everything, you know, the
pace of innovation increases. Flip side of that is, you remember earlier this year we were talking about what AMD's doing, what Intel's doing, you know, how are they going to get into the market and what Jensen Wang has basically said to them, is like that moving train that you are trying to catch is going even faster.
Good look.
So that's what's really going on on a competitive basis there as well.
And Moore's law I meant doubling every two years, so forgive me, yeah, much faster here.
Ian Ian, I want to to that end of this of jumping on that train. I want to talk a little bit about margins, because the company said that margins for the gross margins will be seventy five point seven five percent in the current quarter. As you noted, this is more like a software company rather than a chip comp And you yesterday talked about Intel being in the low sixties at its height when it really owned the
server market. What can history tell us about the duration and durability of margins like this for a chip company.
Yeah, I mean, right now, their margins are what they want them to be because it's just really a case of, well, our prices a sky high were sold out. We can essentially charge what we want, so obviously the pricing is very good for margins. On the flip side of that, as we just discussed, they can spend what they want. It's you know, how much do we want to spend on R and D, how well do we want to reward our employees. So the margins are sky high, but
they could make them artificially higher. The fact that they're spending heavily, the fact that they're able to charge a lot, that's something that's going to probably persist. So they're setting very high targets, but they could be even higher. So, you know, as a measure of their health, it's pretty good.
Stay.
Do you agree with Jensen's comment that the freight train is moving faster and these companies will have a more difficult time, The AMDs and the like will have a more difficult time catching up with Nvidia.
I mean Jensen's racing. I mean this one of the things that comes across in pretty much any time he says something, he's constantly aware of the tension that exists in his business and his market, and he's consciously trying to shape post what his company does, and his understanding of the relationships where we are in the cycle, where we are relative to the competition, what the customers want.
He's trying to shape his narrative to fit that. He's very clever, and he's showing people that he understands what's going on and what he has to do to stay ahead, and that kind of institutional paranoia, that history of being the little guy still very much present in what he's doing.
Unbelievable and just a fascinating story. Ian. Thank you. I know it's been a busy twenty four hours for you,
so we really appreciate it. Ian King are US Semiconductor and Networking reporter at Bloomberg News, joining us from our San Francisco bureau, as we mentioned, and Vida shares continuing to trade higher, still up about ten percent in today's session, and again you're now looking at a two point five almost two point six trillion dollar market cap company, so it is in the league of some of the largest market cap companies in the world.
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This past week, the CEOs of Dell's Service nown and Video all at the Dell Technology World event in Las Vegas, talking about working together and on premise AI That conversation, by the way, can be found on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg dot com. Dell unveiled a new line of personal computers optimized for AI tasks, with Michael Dell saying AIPCS will be quote pretty standard. In twenty twenty five.
Meantime, Microsoft introduced a version of its Copilot assistant to help teams collaborate, extending a company wide push to infuse products with AI. Microsoft presenting new computers with the new AI focused features, powered by chips from Qualcomm, a maker of smartphone components that's been trying to grab a foothold in laptops for years.
A lot going on, folks, as you can tell well, so we felt pretty lucky when earlier this month we got our own take on all of this with Durga Malatti, head of AI over Qualcom.
There's a lot of things that are going on in the space of AI as it runs on devices that you and I usually use, whether it's handsets or phones, whether it is tablets or PCs and so on. So let me spend a little bit of time in terms of explaining what's really going on out there. So in the last two years or so ever, since generative AI started making waves in terms of its capabilities, pretty spectacular capabilities, and in terms of the kinds of use cases that
it can unleash. As Falcom, we've been focused on trying to bring that technology into devices that you and I can use. You know, usually one of the questions that comes in is why why do you want to run this on a device? Why can't you just run it on the cloud? I mean, we do use the cloud for so many different things, and what's wrong actually, So it's kind of important to understand what are the benefits that you actually have when you run these amazing generative
AI models directly on devices. The very first one is related to privacy and security. A lot of the times when you actually go through generative AI use cases, you might be wondering, maybe it's just a chat pot. Maybe I ask a question, I get a response, But it doesn't have to be just a chat pot. It could be. These days, we use a lot more of both voice based interaction with devices in addition to using camera and something else to bring in additional context to the question
that you're asking. For example, you could be holding up your phone and pointing in a certain direction and saying what am I looking at and that information you want to actually do process it locally. You might not be fully comfortable actually dealing with all of this in the cloud.
I totally get it why this makes sense to have on device, whether that's a smartphone or a PC. We'll talk about PCs in just a minute. You said you've been working on this a Qualcomm. Why hasn't it happened yet?
So, actually, if you take a look at it, at least on the smartphone segment, if you take a look at some of the premium tier smartphones, whether it's a Samsung Galaxy S twenty four or a pixel device or something that we are seeing in China with Shaomi and Honor and some of the other devices, all these devices now are capable of based upon keeping aside the pixel part, but everything else based upon Snapdragon platforms from Pollcom, running very large language models directly on the device, up to
seven billion parameters, and these devices are now capable of a lot more things than you're used to. I do admit that the use cases are still gradually waking up to what are the capabilities in the smartphones, because that is something that takes a little bit of time. But if you've kind of taken a look at some of the live translate features or AI based voice assistance, the capability to run very large models directly on device starts today.
It's already exists today in smartphones, and the use cases are gradually coming up, and we're doing our part on the use cases as well as I kind of go through the rest of the discussion.
You guys have you know, you've been talking about phones specifically, but I'm assuming that you're thinking also PCs as well, And I'm just curious if that's the case, and you know, you guys have been trying for years to get into the PC market, Why though, hasn't it happened so far, and why maybe is it different this time around? If that's also on your radar in your mission.
Absolutely right, there is a massive disruption that's coming to
this specific segment in the context of aipcs. Now, the definition of AIPC is it is a PC in which not only do you have like the equivalent of everyone has heard about copilots, in which you are constantly using something else that is running with which you interact with quite frequently and use it for productivity, whether it's in creation of documents, edition of the editing documents are taking one kind of a document and translating into another, and
so on and so forth. This is what we would call as like a on demand AIK so a little bit like a chladbot. You ask a question, you get an answer. It is more, it is more to it.
Well, okay, so if there's more to this and we can why do we need an AI PC to do this? Why can't we just do this on the powerful machines that we already have. Why do they need to be AI specific?
So one thing that I mean these productivity tools are they make it significantly more simpler to actually not just interact with your device, but actually make it a lot a lot of the things that you end up doing tend to be far more richer in terms of the
capabilities in itself. Let me give an example of that, by the way, imagine that you're actually on a chat session with your colleague and you're actually talking about a specific meeting that you just had, and the next thing you know, something pops up saying okay, you already share the meeting notes with the person and you just lick use and that it immediately goes in. Just think through exactly all the things that happened in that whole process.
First of all, this is now the equivalent of what we have been calling as pervasive AI AI, which is constantly running inside your PC. It's actually kind of trying to encapsulate you as the end user and the PC into like one single state, and you're constantly predicting, You're thinking on itslf. You know, the PC is actually kind of almost thinking and anticipating the next move from the user and then being very proactively help in that whole process.
So we've all got a couple of minutes though, So is that why we need an AI PC?
Specifically combination the two of the productivity tools plus this along with a few other things associated with UH you know, as a as a as a code generator, or as a content creator. It is something that's constantly running in the background. Now, keep in mind that we use our PCs regardless of whether we are connected somewhere to the
cloud or not. I mean, the simplest example is you might be on like a long flight and you want to actually get some work done during the flight, but all you have is just you and the laptop at that point in time regardless of what the connectivity is, and you still want to have the same kind of productivity.
So it does actually really start growing on you. Quite a few of us insight Qualcom have been dog footing exactly that experience with our own internal reference designs on these aipcs, and trust me, it does change the user.
Exped So what does an AIPC do for the consumer? What do they get out of this? The regular consumer?
A regular consumer? I mean, if you categorize between we talked about productivity tools, let's talk about content creation. Content creation is also kind of a productivity in its own way,
So that part is actually quite clear. But if you start thinking about all the other things, even when it comes to the social interactions and emails and documents, it's on a regular user at the end of the day, goes through a mix and match of these different kinds of use cases, and we believe that it's actually a pretty big differentiator between the before and after. Now, is it like a big bang moment that happens. That is
something that remains to be seen. But we are on the cusp of all these launchers that are coming up over the next few weeks and let's see how that plays out.
Do you want me to be replaced Carol by an AI PC? Is that where you're hinting at?
Come on, No, not gonna happen.
No, no, not gonna happen this year. Avatar Avatar to prepare for the show, and then the real life Carol and Tim get to do that.
Avatar is can to all the work and h and then we just step in. Yeah, I'm down with that, tiger. Thank you so much. Really appreciate getting some time with you. Malati. He's head of AI over at Qualkam, joining us from San Diego.
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As we mentioned, this past week, we heard from the CEOs of some very well known companies you know, Microsoft, Dell, and Vidia to name a few. And yes they are household names today, but they weren't when they got their start many years ago, when they asked for the help of venture capitalists and their venture money.
So what was it that made a venture capitalist or a group of them, or a VC firm decide to invest and make a financial bet on them over others? What were they thinking? And how can their thinking help you even if you don't work in venture capital.
Which brought us to Iliustrebulaev. He's Professor of Private Equity and Finance at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and founder and director of the Venture Capital Initiative. His new book, The Venture Mindset, How to make Smarter bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth.
The first principle to follow is why home runs matter and strikeouts don't. Because you talked about success, which is home runs for vcs, and failure which is about strikeouts. And the venture mindset is could be described as the new mental mindset that you should follow in the innovation driven world where you face a lot of uncertainty, a lot of unpredictability, and vcs had been facing this hostile
environment for more than fifty years. Do you know that if you look at all the companies that became public in the United States in the last fifty years, every second one of them was ventchebaced do you know that six or seven or eight companies out of top ten by market cap today were venture backed when there were small companies and moreover, as my research shows, are stempered, there's causality, which means that had there been no bench
capital industry, likely there would have been no many many of those companies that changed our lives, such as Apple, Netflix, bb Microsoft and Nvidia and so on.
Well, what do you make though of the venture mindset back in the nineteen ninety nine two thousand era when it seems like money was just thrown at anything with a dot com after it.
That is a great question. First of all, what we the Skatna book is for more fomo, which is fear of missing out. But what is really interesting is that smart vices are trying to avoid for more as much as possible. And one way to avoid it is what a friend of mine, Alex drampeldfrom andrsent FORRVIS calls it conviction must beat consensus, which means that if everybody is trying to invest in something, maybe that is time to
invest in something else. So if we look in the late nineteen nineties, or indeed, if we look at a crypto, or if we look at some other bubbles in the last ten to fifteen years, many of them were driven, in fact by investors that were not following the Benure minds at principles. In fact, in the nineteen nineties there were also a lot of amazing companies born and a lot of investors made great investment decisions.
I'm wondering about the idea of saying no more often than you say yes.
So, first of all, this is the principle called say no one hundred times. When we think about how bench cabins make decisions. For each investment they make, they say no more than one hundred times. Okay, Now, if you think about this, if you spend a lot of time trying to decide how to make this nose, how to say this nos in fact, you will have no time to presider with a good due diligence. So what bench
cabins do to make it more efficient. But I've discovered is that they use two different decision making modes at the beginning and at the end of their journey with each deal. At the beginning or at the top of their deal funnel, they use what I call the fast lane approach, and at the bottom they use the slow lane approach, and I think all of us can benefit
from this. So what is a fast lane approach? You are approaching the potential investment opportunity or indeed any potential decision by asking why should I not proceed with even thinking about this investment decision? So this not is critical. If you're ask instead why should I do it? Then you will go down a completely different path. They're asking themselves a question why we should not do it and
then try to identify a red flag. So the use red flags and red flax could be different for different types of investments. But once they heat a red flag, they will stop thinking about investing in this opportunity and we'll move on. Here's a quick example for you. Let me take back you to two thousand and seven when the first iPhone was released and file sharing was in the air, but was not yet possible because there's no
Wi Fi, there were no smartphones. One investor of Sequa Capital at the time, his name was Sambur Gundhi, was very interested in this and with his partners, he tried to prepare his mind. He tried to meet with a lot of startups. He I think met with like more than fifty teams that were developing file sharing, and he decided not to invest in any He said no to every single one of them. Why because they hit his
rad lack. What is his red lack, Well, it turns out to be his red lack was I wanted to meet. He told me a team from whom I could learn how to do it. You know, nobody was doing this, but I spent all the time trying to identify what that was. And I was meeting with those teams, and then I was not learning anything. And then he met with two guys who didn't have any money. I actually think they didn't have the money to flight was the country. They took a great coount, so they didn't have a prototype.
And then they met with the Sequoia partners. I think in about half an hour there was a decision to proceed with the investment. Why because even though those two guys do not know it, did not could not do anything. They in fact thought through all cranes and looks about how they're going to implement everything, how they're going to execute everything, and so to go ended up investing in what turned out to be drum Box. But that is the power of saying no one hundred times. Otherwise you
would not end up in drum box. It would end up with with another failure, another strikeout.
It's like when I shot go on no no, no, no, no, no, no, okay do it. No, I'm having fun with you. But I do wonder if you have some thoughts though on artificial intelligence and how it might help a venture capitalists go through deals. I think you know, last year we were having conversations about how that it could help a VC investor who might not look at some smaller deals
because it just wasn't worth their time. But if you use some kind of AI screening, who can kind of go through some of it, It might bring some deals that they might have said no on before, might bring it to their attention. But any smart kind of thought about that in terms of how that might help venture capitalists still kind of stick to their red flags and their mindset, but also provide maybe some new opportunities.
AI is going to be very helpful for vcs. And the reason behind this is because one of the principles of the venture mindset is getting outside for boss, which means that you are trying to diversify where your sources come from For example, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist in San Francisco. His name is Paul Arnold. He is the founder of a switch VBC. So he
and his team develop an algorithm. They go through LinkedIn and other websites every single day, and the moment there is a founder who is looking on some kind of stealth startup or studying anything new, that founder will go into the algorithm, and then the algorithm churns, and some of the founders going to some critic will kind of bubble up, so that sometimes Paul will identify founders far away from Silicon Valley, faraway from California, that I'm working
on something interesting but that is getting more sources. H So then to identify which of those sources are going to be good, you have to go back to the venture minds principles of saying no one hundred times. So I think AI is mostly working at the beginning of the funnel or expanding the funnel, not at the final process of the funnel. So here the venture capitalists still make the decisions themselves.
Elliot, you know you talk about red flags by venture capitalists, and I do wonder about here we are once again talking about black entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs still struggling to kind of get seen and get that VC money. It just doesn't flow like it does to white men. It's just you know, you know the numbers, you know the data. I don't need to explain it to you. So is it because for a venture capitalist that comes up as a red flag? What is that about?
That is a great question, and I think that is a very important problem these days. First of all, let me go back and tell you about one of my research studies. What we did is we created with a miphd student, fifty fake startups. We had a lot of fun creating those stubs with fake website, fake profiles and so on. And then we created two hundred fake founders. Why two hundred because each startup had four fake founders either it had a white man founder, a white woman,
an Asian man, or an Asian woman. And then we sent we created blurbs, decks and whatnot, and we sent the emails from this fake founders about these fake startups to actual venture capitalists also to actual active angel investors. We sent in total about eighty thousand emails, and we checked the responses and when I said the response, what we say is a positive response. For example, can we meet on zoom for a chat, can you send us the pitch deck, can you go and meet my partner
who is interested in this deal, and so on. First of all, what we really found interesting is that the response rate was very high. You know, when I started this project, every single BC whom I talked to told me not to do it because they don't respond to call calls. We got between eight percent and fifteen percent, like every twelfth to every six and angel investor responded. In fact, most successful vices were more likely to respond.
And we also found out that venture capitalists and most successful ones tend to respond more to female entrepreneurs and to Asian entrepreneurs as well. So the conclusion here is is that it is not at the beginning of the process where the problem lies. Its typically lies towards the end of the process. And here's something that is very important and just.
Got about thirty maybe left, yeah, forgive me go ahead.
Many BC films make decisions by consensus. You know what consensus is. It's like six people together in the same room have to make decisions. And I think this is where the problem lies. As my research shows. So to resolve this problem, to diversify the founders, we need to change how we make decisions in groups. And again, this is the part of the Venture Mindset principles, agree to disagree.
Interesting, really interesting.
Oh my gosh, what a great way to wrap up. Really enjoy this conversation. Thank you so much for stopping by and spending some time with us. That is, of course, Professor Ilias trebulaev his new books, The Venture Mindset, How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth. He's Professor of Private Equity and Finance at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and the founder and director of the Venture
Capital Initiative. We didn't really get into private equity, which would be a whole other It's got to come back, conversation.
Got to come back and visit us.
Bettius thoughts on private credit too.
I bet he does, all.
Right, maybe when it comes out softcover.
Okay, well we'll go to California and do something on it.
We've done.
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Last year, in the US, startups founded exclusively by women accounted for only two percent of all funding that was invested in VC backed startups. This is according to the World Economic Forum. In Europe, the numbers even worse, only one point eight percent of the capital raised. What to female founded startups?
As we heard in our last segment, the most successful venture capitalists tend to respond more to women entrepreneurs, which raises the question why hasn't that led to significant gains in funding for women led startups?
Yeah? Why hasn't it?
All?
Right?
Well, that is the world of Joe Anne Corcoran, co chief executive officer and managing partner at Golden Sea's, a network of angel investors that exclusively invests in early stage women led companies.
Some good things have happened for women in the angel markets. Okay, I mean the last twenty years since Golden Seeds started has been phenomenally good for women in the angel markets. You know, twenty years ago women got three percent of the capital. Now women founders and co founders get about
forty percent of the angel capital. And the most important thing is that the yield the percentage of companies that seek funding that actually get it is it's just about comparable for male and female entrepreneurs in the angel market. So that's really great progress in the angel markets. And you know why did that happen? I think a lot of the reason for that is that angels in the US, you know, individuals who invest in startup companies, about forty
percent of those people are now women. And that's about I don't know, more than ten times since when we started in two thousand and four. So that's really great.
I would imagine somebody listening right now might have the question from a returns perspective, if you're trying to maximize returns, why would you restrict yourself in any way by the types of companies you can invest in.
There's equity issues are one thing, but there is research that say that women are better stewards of capital. I mean, there was a big study put together in twenty and twenty and nineteen by Boston Consulting and Mass Challenge that said that that's a huge data set. It said that women entrepreneurs generate two times the revenue per dollar of capital invested. So there is research. Let's say that you want to look at diverse founders.
One thing I do think about when it comes to angel investing, right, you know, you can throw a little bit of money at a business, right, and it really can kind of get going, especially in this environment where technology and you know, social and so on and so forth, there's so much a part of sometimes a business getting going.
Having said that, how many of the angel investments that get made in your world, how many of them actually turn into something that either gets sold or is fairly profitable.
And the angel business and the venture business, we know that about thirty five percent of companies don't return all the capital. We know that in venture I've seen studies that said it's you know, half In our twenty years of experience, we've had just about thirty percent of companies who haven't returned capital. But the rest of our companies, in fact, I looked at it just the other day. Of all the money that we've invested, one hundred percent of it has come back in aggregate to our investors.
And there's unrealized gains in the existing operating companies of about another seventy nine percent. And on average, our companies are still only a couple of years old.
Our thanks to Joe Anne Corcoran, co chief executive officer and managing partner over at Golden Seeds.
In a related story, twenty three and Me co founder and CEO and Jiski once had to make the rounds of investors and venture capitalists. That was nearly twenty years ago. Today, the company seems to be facing an ex exstential threat after.
Years of mass market genetic testing that was designed to read a person's DNA code to address the risk for future diseases and live to one hundred years old. As it turns out, it's a lot more complicated than just spitting in a tube for twenty three and meters. It's become more geno hype than geno promise, and that's.
Affecting the company's bottom line. This is the cover story of the current issue at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, reported by Bloomberg News healthcare reporter Kristin V. Brown.
They're trying to, for some of these things, do what's called a polygenic risk gore and say, based on all of these genes, you might have a risk, but it winds up being more like you're slightly more elevated to risk, not an actual roadmap for what do you do to stay healthy and live to one hundred.
Well, in a small portion of the folks who do the test, it does come back with some sort of result that says, okay, you do have the characteristics of this sort of genetic variant. But then treatment for that, as you note in your story, can be incredibly expensive.
Right.
Monogenic diseases, there's a lot of them. That's a single gene that causes a disease. There's a lot of them, but they're usually very very rare, and because they're rare, and the therapies are also very complicated, you know, fancy high tech things, they're expensive, small pots population, small market. So we have gotten a few of these therapies so far, but definitely not the therapies that we expected for very
common diseases like Alzheimer's, like cancer. So we've gotten therapies that have a small market and so therefore they're really really pricey.
We talked about people spitting in a tube. I'm not going to ask for show of hands in the control room. We're here, but you did it. I did it. Yeah, I did not do it.
I have spit in so many tubes in the course of my journalism career. But I did for this particular story too.
And it wasn't the typical twenty three and me twenty dollars thing, right, This is a.
Very high test. Yeah, so twenty three meters. Latest offering is it's doing sequencing, not genotyping, which is a fancier. They're literally decoding every little bit of all of the protein coding regions of your genome, which are the ones that we think cause disease. In doing that, they really hope to get this really holistic, nuanced picture of the genome for me, and the sequencing they actually didn't find anything.
And then in the genotyping, which is a sort of more low budget option, they found that I might be at risk risk or Celiac disease. But I can tell you I had avocado toast this morning for breakfast. I went fine, it went fine, So so for me at least, this is almost a thousand dollars test, and I learned that I might have a disease that I don't have. So I don't know, well.
Did you do anything about that? Like I'm curious. Did it cause you to say, well, maybe I'll have a doctor look into this.
Well, you know, usually if you have Celiac disease, you know, you have a violent reaction you eat gluten. So I was I felt pretty confident. Also said I might one day develop glaucoma.
I have a.
Slightly increased risk, but you can't actually do anything about that. So it's I don't know what to do with that knowledge. I felt like I sort of spent that thousand dollars on some shoes instead. Maybe I don't know, preach.
Into the choir. Well, the medical community right has been to some extent they haven't embraced this idea. Yeah, So I mean, is that part of the problem. Is it just a case that it's complicated and maybe it is the right idea or what's the kind of feedback on this.
I wrote this story because I started wondering, for the decade I have covered this topic, people have told me, you know, this is the year genetics is going to catch on, this is the year, this is finally the year. No, this year, and it just it just never happened. And so I started asking some of my longtime sources, you know, is this happening? You know, what's the status here, guys? And I was surprised to hear from many people who had been boosters for the genome who are now saying,
we're not sure it's ever going to happen. And yeah, and you know, with science, you never you never know. Maybe we'll turn a corner, we'll find something that will suddenly unlock everything. But based on what we know now, it does feel like it's just so complicated that for the average healthy person, there won't be value really in
getting a genetic street. Now, if you have a history of cancer in your family, if you want to become a parent and you want to make sure you don't have any genetic conditions lurking in your genome, you could pass on that stuff all worth it. But if you're just an average healthy person trying to live their best life, it just really seems like there's not going to be value in these tests.
It raises the question about what the future is for twenty three and me, And that's a big part of your cover story for Bloomberg Business Week, the idea that the stock has been under pressure over the last few years, down more than ninety four percent over that period of time. Richard Branson lost over one hundred million dollars on it going public. What is the future for twenty three In me as.
A business, they're in a real tough spot. They just got an extension to try and get their stock back up over a dollar. They have until I believe November.
Concerns that they'll be delisted.
Yeah, the concern is that they will be delisted, and I think and a move to prevent that from happening. CEO and Wajiski has filed an intent to take the company private herself, to buy it back basically, so that could be one thing we see. But I think that you know, it's a really rocky road ahead for them.
Well, you know, it's interesting and I don't know, is this a company that might benefit being private in terms of having the time, the luxury, maybe the money, you know, to kind of figure this.
Out based on what this doc did when she filed that eight k I, let's say that the market things that would benefit from from going private. It's it's it's a hard company because it's part consumer, part drug development, and the investors in those two different kinds of companies, and has said this herself, they kind of have different expectations.
So it's a weird blend of things, and that has created an additional challenge on top of, you know, having a consumer product that a lot of consumers maybe don't want anymore.
So what about the data and the data breaches that we've heard about the security of this information. I mean years ago, years ago, I'm going to say, my mom was right. She was like, why would I want to give a company this type of information once it's out there? And I was actually defended. I was saying, no, you know these you know this type of stuff says stay fast forward a few years, there's a big data breach.
Anne has said that she thinks that privacy concerns has been one of the reasons K sales have slowed. She said that in the past, and you know, that could definitely be what's going on. One analyst joke to me that twenty three and meters would probably do better to just give the kit away for free in exchange for getting people's data, because that is the most valuable asseting of.
How much we've talked about generative AI, and you think about the more data that comes into the pool, whether or not that can help kind of be a turning point, like more information.
I mean, they have fifteen million genomes. That is one of the biggest genetic databases on par with ancestry and the country of China.
So that's that's really valuable.
And so if they can keep growing that asset, that could be big.
And to be clear, there was a data breach of people's personal information.
Yes, there was a data breach, not personal, and it did contain some genetic information.
Any questions that you still have, you've reported this story out, you're thinking about it. Question are still kind of top of mind for you. Yeah.
I mean I think for me, you know, having covered this field for a decade, it was sort of an existential crisis to actually do this story and be you know, questioning whether the thing that I have covered for a
decade really doesn't matter. So I think that I just want to see how this science unfolds and what value we will wind up getting from the genome, because I don't think that it's going to wind up having been for or not that we sequenced the human genome twenty years ago, but I think what we're going to get isn't what we expected, so that's still to be written.
It's fascinating. I remember kind of early on in my career, like you know, they'd map something and we'd do a story and then when they finally completed it like it was just like whay, you know, now we have all the information and what we can do with it. But here, we are here, we are here, we are more to come.
That means more stories from you, more cover stories. Bloomberg News healthcare reporter Kristin V. Brown on this week's Bloomberg Business Week cover story, which you can get online on the Bloomberg and to catch it also on the newsstand.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting a two pm Eastern tout applecar Play and Androyd Auto with the Bloomberg Business Ad. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty plenty ahead.
In our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including the Active were apparel brand that's been focused on men for years now, embracing the better sex. I can kind of say that, don't you think.
I think you can?
I might get some mail.
I'm not going to push back, all.
Right, anyway, I've been hammering them for years about this we check it with Nate check It's I've Rown in just a minute.
Plus homing in on the UK, including its answer to the hit a Netflix series selling Sunset Mayfair Anyone. We get into the buying and selling of London's most expensive homes.
As well as where to go for more affordable weekend getaways outside of London, and a favorite conversation of mine about sailing alone on the I sees it's all in a new book on the surprising history of isolation and survival at sea.
First up this hour, a look at the athletic wear space Roan, the active wear apparel brand backed by Blackstone executive David Blitzer, former Hedgehront manager Gabe Plotkin, an ex football star Tim Tebow and more. It was founded back in twenty fourteen as a men's only brand. It's a private company and it's been profitable for the past three years, eclipsing one hundred million dollars in annual run rate, and.
Now with a big announcement, they are out with a women's line. And it's really fun because I've been pressuring like, what are you going to do it? What are you going to do it? Guess we've been talking to him for years. It launched earlier this month. We got more with Nate Checketz. He's the co founder and CEO of Ron.
We did a capsule collection back in twenty nineteen on International Women's Day and the thought was, Okay, this will be a little test. We'll see how the market reacts to it. And it went well, and then of course we have a global pandemic the next year, so we decided not to anniversary it. We pulled back and then really we made the decision two and a half years ago, Okay, we need to do this, but let's do it the
right way. Let's think through every aspect. And it impacts everything from store layout to mannequins to models, to the brand marketing. How are you shifting the message? So we really brought invest in class talent across every aspect of the business and starting most importantly with the product. And it just takes a while to do it right.
Is it hard from a communications perspective because you've been known for a decade as being a place for men, and perhaps customers might walk by a store and say, well, I'm not going to go in there because they don't have product necessarily for me.
Yeah, I think that has been the brand marketing challenge, and I think if you look at the industry, there are certainly brands who have done this very well, shifted from men's to women's or women's into men's, But then there have been brands who have taken some big missteps in that. And one of the things that we were adamant about from the beginning is this is not taking
our men's product and creating women's product. This is creating take in our customer, putting her at the center of the journey, and making product uniquely for her, unique fabrications, unique fits, unique cuts, and that the lines can be complementary, but they're not meant to be symmetrical.
Is it more difficult in terms of creating a women's line versus a men's line.
There's certainly a lot more competition, and I think there's more pressure to have newness and be on trend in fashion. We joke in the men's space, it's like, well, make sure you have black, navy and gray, and you're fine. But even the men's space has evolved over the last several years, and men are are more kind of fashion forward and leaning into trend and style. So we brought in really a best in class team on the merchandising and the styling and the design side, and we're really
seeing it on the initial reaction. We launched an early access yesterday and in the first day we started breaking on a couple of styles, meaning we were selling out of a few key sizes, which we had not anticipated to happen for the first four weeks. So the reaction has been just unbelievable.
What's the ultimate goal for revenue mix for this is it? Do you want this to be fifty to fifty? Do you want women to be sixty forty.
We've done a three year model and we see a path to getting the brand to a fifty to fifty mix. Women are obviously more prolific shoppers than men. They're just better at it. They know, they stop that, I hear that at home. They know what they want and they you know, they're willing to lean in and try new things. I think the challenge is if you can get a male customer, you can keep him generally a lot longer. He tends to go back to what he knows and likes.
He's harder to get. That's the men are lazy, yep. Yep, that's a good, good interpretation.
You tend to like what you like exactly right.
But women, you have to earn that next purchase every single time, and we take that seriously. So to us, it starts at the fabric level, the quality of what we do, and I think as we put hands you know, everything from our fit model to our actual fashion models. They've said, you know, they work with every brand in the market and they're like, this is the softest best fabric I've ever felt. So we think we're doing something right.
How do you go after getting the female customer? Women customers versus men, Like, I'm curious, what was your approach?
Well, we have a slight advantage here versus a new brand, which is we already have a big database of women. Thirty percent of our men's product was being purchased by women, which is about the inverse of some of the big public, more female led brands. It's usually like the opposite of that.
But we had a database of active female shoppers, and then we've just been very strategic about going out targeting who we think she is on social building up some anticipation, some great pr We've had a lot of incredible press and this is not a one month thing. This is a we've learned in ten years. You've got to keep consistent. I think one of the things that we have really prided ourselves on as we've built this line is almost every Active brand is based on the West Coasts, and
there is definitely a West Coast aesthetic. And what I've said internally is, since when was New York not the capital fashion capital of the world. So we try and bring a New York aesthetic and trend and focus into Active. But we start with a root of performance at the center of what we do, versus taking kind of a ready to wear and then trying to use active fabrics. We combine the best of both worlds to kind of
bring that to the market. And I think the other big focus for us is how do we make her powerful, strong, independent. We think a lot of these brands look the same because it's all yoga, endless hours of yoga loops. But we think our customer is maybe she's sneaking yoga in in fifteen twenty minutes and she's working hard, she's taking care of people, she's strong, she's independent, and we want to position her that way. Versus you've got two hours in a yoga studio to do whatever you want, because
none of our customers live that way. Ath Leisure is obviously a term that has gained a lot of importance in the market. The way we think about ath leisure is it's made to look athletic, but you can't actually work out in it. Yeah, so we call it performance lifestyle, which is, you can do anything in our clothes. You know, you know, I've run a marathon in our dress shirt. You can literally do anything, but you're going to look professional when you wear it.
When it comes to the women's line, I mean the more active formal line that you had that you developed for men's came a little later than that first active were stuff. Are you following a similar timeline? Are you going to kind of release everything right now?
Now?
We're following a very similar flow, which is let's root ourselves in performance. So the initial line you'll see is very active focused a lot of course to court. You may have heard we signed the LPGA, were the official Encourse apparel partner there, so you'll see us on a lot of green grass accounts, tennis courts, pickleball courts, and then a lot of the lifestyle will start to be added in afterwards.
Do you still have fun doing this?
Oh, my gosh, I'm having the most fun I've ever had right now. It's ten years, and certainly I've had periods of founder burnout. But I think since we took back full control of the business and we really kind of started to chart our own destiny, it just changed the way we feel about it.
You took back full control eighteen months ago, roughly didn't make it public though, until just last fall. Give an update on the business since taking full control.
Well, last year was our biggest absolute growth here ever, and the business is growing almost twice as fast this year. Yeah, so we feel really encouraged about that decision and the team that we've put into place and the investment in people. We have big growth goals, so we still feel like we're in the early innings of where this can go. But it's been a journey ten years.
So expanding into women, you still talk about growth going forward ten years in what's the next ten years? Like, how do you think about it?
Yeah?
Well, sorry, no pressure.
I think the thing that I am most excited about is we have from the beginning of our customer journey we have focused on what we call mental fitness, which is really just an emphasis on mental health, taking care
of yourself both physically and mentally. When we came into the active market, you would see all of these marketing messages of you're an athlete, lift more weight, run faster, jump higher, and we think there's such a missing aspect of recovery and taking care of yourself and the space between your ears, and that is a very unique problem in the men's market. So it was an easy area to focus on. But everybody needs to talk about this. And what's great is the female customer is already naturally
so much better at talking about it. So doing this together with our team has been really really helpful and powerful. So what I'm most excited about for the next ten years is to be able to supercharge that. And so we've got some big exciting plans in terms of how we're going to do that, how we're going to bring that to the market, and some of the unique things that we think about about being a wellness company. First, that just happens to sell clothes.
Wow, was that.
In your ethos from the very beginning or did that kind of transition happen over the pandemic.
Yeah, it has been part of the DNA from the beginning. I think during the pandemic we were able to crystallize what that mission was and part of it was having my own crisis going through some of that with a pandemic. But we have always believed that wellness is much more than esthetic physical fitness, which is really where I think most of these brands focus on with a hyper level
of focus on professional athlete endorsements. We just love this idea that teaching people how to take care of themselves is the best way to feel good, and part of that is having a uniform that you feel excited and energized, but also enabling and empowering the conversation. We've hosted hundreds of these events that we call minded Muscle events, which are twenty five minute body weight workouts followed by a
group discussion. Is really like a group therapy conversation, and that format exists in alcoholics anonymous, It exists in a number of different formats, but it's been so successful in men's and we've had like groundbreaking moments with so many guys and it just enables them to feel comfortable talking about these things. It's my passion, Like that's the thing that gets me the most excited. And yes, I think we make the best clothes in our category and the
best close in our market. That enables us to have a megaphone. And so we've got to grow the size of our megaphone to have the level of impact that we want. But our growth goal is to be a billion dollar revenue business and impact one hundred million lives through our education.
It's fascinating to hear you say, like thinking of yourself. I mean, like you said, it's from the beginning, but as a wellness company kind of with clothes attached, if you will, I mean, how else do you I mean, is it a case that there are other offerings Nate, that you eventually offered to your customers.
Even more so, that's the goal. From the beginning, we had an online journal that we called The Pursuit, which focused a lot on this bringing world class experts to the table sharing that content. But what we found is that this idea of you guys are in the content business, you know how hard it is, and so we were competing against advertised driven content engines and this was like
something that we were doing on the site. So now we've taken that back in house and figured out how to do this in a way that we think is sustainable and meeting the customer where they're at in the form of video content and social first content versus written content, and then also live events and leaning more into that that I think will be really powerful.
Can you give us an update on retail locations, because one thing that we talked about with you last time you were here was growth of retail in a time when we're seeing other companies pull back. Yeah, and I'm wondering how aggressive you're being this year when it comes to that retail footprint and what portion right now comes from e commerce versus those brick and mortar.
Retail has been our fastest growing channel the last two years on a percent basis, and I think it's a channel we certainly believe in. We are slowing that down this year because of the women's launch. As you can imagine, it changes the layout of the store, the size of the store, the mannequins, the hangars, the training of the staff, the selection of the staff, like, there's just so many considerations, so we kind of want to absorb and.
Because every store has to have a retrofit.
Right exactly, So we're retrofitting all fifteen stores. We've kind of done that work, brought in the right people from a visual merchandising standpoint, but our store plan going forward is as aggressive as it was in twenty twenty three, and we think that these stores are really important, especially for our brand message, because you have to meet people where they are and meeting people in person and physically.
We've all learned the importance of that over the last several years, so we're leaning into that and doing the right way. We're going to be highly selective. There are certainly a lot of brands in our space that, because of their capital stack and what they need to achieve, they're juicing their revenue numbers by opening as many stores as possible and in some cases over pain for real estate, which is going to be tough in three to five years when those those rates, you know, don't justify the
sales figures. We're not taking that tactic. We're being really thoughtful, but we're going to you know, our store account will be more than two x by twenty twenty six.
Forgive me, and I should know this wholesale You guys don't want.
We do have some wholesale here. Yeah, We've got some great partners in the market. We have a high focus on specialty accounts, green grass accounts. You know, we're in some of the best golf and country clubs.
Productive for you guys or is.
It absolutely Yeah. I think it's a great business model. You can get carried away when you're driven when your wholesale account is driven by majors. For us, it's been about twenty percent of the business the last two years, so it's small.
Equinox was an early partner, a.
Partner still a partner and uh, and you know, we love that type of account because generally if you walk into an Equinox and you buy shorts, it's because you forgot. Nobody's like, hey, you know what, I'm going to go have that be my retail experience or I would say that's the minority, but you just do it. It's perfect and it's a great way for people to discover the brand and the product.
You want to use the gym loner shorts all.
Right, So here kids, Yeah, I won't say never. My wife's been begging for that from the beginning, but I think she'll I think she'll give me a minute, because just.
To clarify, you have kids already, you're talking about a kid's.
Yeh, kid's line.
Yeah fair, thanks Tom, Yeah, but but yeah, so you never know. But I surprised my wife on the day that we launched, and I had just flown in from Asia. I arrived at three am. I set up a room in our house with every single one of the products for her, and then I brought her in a surprise her. And so I think she'll give me. I think she'll give me a year off before bothering that kids.
Again, Well done, well done you Nate, always great to check in with.
Good good luck with it, Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me.
Nate check it is. He's co founder and CEO of Rown, joining us here in studio. All right, everybody, you've been listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week Carol Masser, Tim Stenovic, and this is Booberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple car Play and then brought auto with a Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube.
Takes me, all right, So my husband and I are sailors. You guys probably know that. I talk about it a lot. I know, but we have been for over thirty years and some of our favorite moments are being out on the water. No one's around us for what seems like miles, however, coastlines and land is often still in sight. Neither of us have done serious offshore sailing or crossed an ocean alone, something that many others have done. Not yet, Yeah, that's right,
we still have time. It is those solo sailors, both men and women, who have ventured out single handed, that really know what it's like to be truly alone out on the ocean and often for days.
Tim our next guest, has crossed the Atlantic In his twenty eight foot sloop Fox. Richard King writes about it, weaving his journey through those of other sailors who have sailed out of sight of land and alone. It's all Carol in his new book Sailing Alone, A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea.
All right, Richard, needless to say, this has been fun thing, and I've been looking forward to My producer, Paul Brandon Lake was like, you gave me the book a while ago, so it's been fun. We've been counting down the days to you. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome. Tell us about First of all, you are a sailor. You've gone at it alone on a boat across the ocean. But tell us why you wanted to kind of put this together. Tell your story, but also tell the story of many other sailors who've done that as well.
Sure, and thanks a lot, Carole, tim for having me on and can look forward to hearing about your adventures. I sailed by myself in two thousand and seven across the Atlantic, and I definitely don't see myself as a super sailor. You know, it was a little bit of a bungling affair, and in some ways, going out ofside of land, you know, off the coast is easier, right, you know, there's there's less to hit and less to take keep track of.
But I did it for a couple of.
Different reasons, and that was one of the things that I explore in this book. You know, I'm really telling the history of people that have gone to see by themselves and crossed ocean by themselves since at least the early seventeen hundreds and all the way up to today. And so I was trying to explore like why did
people go, why would they go? And then also what they saw out there, just like you did in that intro Carob, like what is it like to be out at sea by yourself on a quiet boat, really close to the surface, day after day and really getting that connection to the ocean world.
Well, I love that the book about you know, why they go, what they see? So when you took your trip across the Atlantic on Fox, your twenty eight foot sloop, what did you or what why did you go specifically and what did you see?
Yeah? I went.
I was in graduate school at the time, and I studied literature at sea. I'm actually more of a scholar than you know, a sailor, and I'd spent so much time reading about these experiences and I was like, you know, maybe maybe I could do that, and so I put I'm really proud of sort of the logistics of the boys, not necessarily the execution, but I didn't make it. And you know, some of the things that I saw out there was just a really close connection with some of
the seabirds, particularly storm petrels. I had one moment which I you know, many of the listeners will sort of connect with where I was fishing off the back of the boat and I saw a fin coming behind me, a really large dorsal fin, and I kind of freaked out. I was like, oh, my gosh, Jaws is going to like leap right on top of the boat and.
You know, eat me up.
And you know, I quickly went down below and I took pictures and I grabbed my boat hook as if I was going to you know, stab it in the eye or something like that. And then later when I look at the pictures, I realized it was this tiny little fin.
It probably wasn't even the shark.
It might have been like a pilot whale or something.
But you know, you just really get that sort of intense connection, particularly the nights at sea and the sunrises and sunsets, and it's, you know, it's a rare, privileged experience.
Really, maybe because I'm an anxious New Yorker. I'm just wondering about the anxiety of being out there.
It's so it's soom.
I know it's am but well, there's this feeling that I have. I'm not a sailor. I've sailed before, but I would not consider myself a sailor. Of not being in control of when you can get back on land, and that part of this totally freaks me out here. Were there any moments out there that you just found yourself terrified.
Like when the engine died on that trip across the Atlantic?
Yeah, Tim, totally. I would say ninety percent of the time I was an anxious wreck and my people are.
Also from New York.
I have that stream.
Okay, you know, I think, and that's really the book is really about some of these great sailors who have gotten over that first anxious experience. I kind of never did.
I did my first trip across the Atletic, and then afterwards I was like, Okay, I think, I think I'm good, but I do kind of wish that I had continued on because you look at some of the really extraordinary historical sailors Bernardo Martissier, Robin Knox, Johnson, Ellen MacArthur, even you know the early ones like Joshua Slocum, who got over those initial and anxious moments and then were able to carry on and really be calm and really enjoy
themselves at sea. And often that's when you know these sailors really got these experiences in the natural world where they could finally relax and not have to worry so much about you know, this thing breaking or.
There's something always breaking on a boat. You know that it's always breaking. Well, what's the joke? They say, it's like hours and hours of boredom broken up by you know, minutes or seconds of just sheer, terror and chaos. And that's kind of sailing, right, because it's really quiet out there, and then you have to go into harbor and you have to dock, and it's like there's always something that's going to go wrong.
That's right, and you know, for a big part for solo sailers, trying to steer the boat and trying to get rest is a big part of it. And so one of the things I talked about in the book is sort of the development of various technologies that have made it a little bit easier for solo sailers. Whether it's GPS or fiberglass or the marine engine, but self steering mechanisms, whether they're wind based or electrical, have made a huge difference.
You had a wind, but even in my kid, did you have a wind vane? That's what you used right to go across That's right.
I had two different types of steering. I had a wind vane self steering, which you know doesn't require any power or any fuel, and that is about the most magical device on the planet. I was developed sort of, you know, in the nineteen fifties and sixties for recreational boats, and that was just amazing. But that requires that's based on relative winds. So if you want to sleep for two hours and you got up, the boat is adjusting itself based on an angle of the wind. So if
the wind shifts, your boat is going to change. And then I also had a little electrical tiller pilot. Okay, you could say to a compass point.
I'm curious about the reasons behind this and how not necessarily yours, which I want to get to, but the way that they've shifted over time, because, as you mentioned in the seventeen hundreds, a lot of this was exploration. It was in search of riches, it was in search of you know, at that point, not necessarily new lands, but sort of right, the great exploration of the seas
of the of the earth. But these days a lot of it is about recreation, and it's about sort of personal challenges, and I'm wondering how you can characterize the evolution of why someone would do this.
Yeah, yeah, No, that's a great point, and that's it's only something I sort of traced through going over time, because you know that the whole idea that going sailing by yourself across an ocean, that that isn't completely just a bit nan is idiotic kind of thing. That this idea that over time people start to respect that is a sort of interesting transition.
And you do see sort of blips.
You know, everybody is different, and everybody's complex about whether they're escaping a family situation, or they are trying to make money, or they're trying to make fame for themselves. But you do see sort of these sort of blips of where there's more recreational sailing and then even more solo sailing.
One of these.
Blips is right after World War Two, and I focus the book a lot, sort of frame it on Ann Davidson, who's the first woman that we know of to sail alone across an ocean, and she sales in nineteen fifty two, and she's part of this whole surge of people from Europe, from North America, from all around the world, that really are going out to the ocean and seeking that sort of respite, that sort of perception that the ocean is a clean, unhampered space, particularly after the trauma of World War Two.
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating right to kind of hear what they sought out right to help them through it. I want to go back to something you said earlier, and that was I think the first solo circumnavigator or who was actually let me let you pick the story that you just were really drawn to. Because there's older folks, folks a long time ago. There's teenagers, which I'm always blown away by someone who's a teenager who gets in a book and their parents are in a boat and
their parents are like, yeah, go for it. I think about there's a Netflix movie just on Jessica Watson, an Australian teenager, and it's kind of wild.
Yeah, Jessica Watson is fantastic. And I think one of the things that I talk a lot about in the book is this relationship between being a writer, because going to see you, maybe even for you caroly the when you go out just for an afternoon or for a day,
it's a literary endeavor you're keeping a log book. Maybe you're writing a note, you're writing a letter, you're reading about other sailors, and so it's this very sort of almost all of these people that are going selling alone are also thinking about it, and some of them are thinking about writing a book even before they've they've left.
And so someone like Bernard Martissier, who in the nineteen sixties was the first to sail solo NonStop around the world one and a half times around the world in the late sixties, and he for him from the very start, it was about making a book about crafting this work of nature writing, not even as much about the expedition itself. It was like as if throw you know, was climbing Everest.
Just got about a minute left here, I mean, thirty years of sailing. We saw our first whale play with us in a boat off of Rhode Island just this past summer, and my husband I looked at us, maybe it's time to sell the boat because it was just so unbelievable. But you have about a minute left here? Is there a moment in time where you just, I don't know, a little story before we go unfortunately?
Sure?
Yeah, I think one interesting story is you know if you're watching in the news, you're seeing orcas that are damaging boats off Gibraltar. They're actually seemed to be knocking into recreational boats. And one thing that you learned from
the history is that's been happening for a while. And one former New Yorker, Teddy Seymour born in Yonkers, the first black sailor to sail alone around the world, and he was knocked by an orca off the Red Sea for about a half a day, but luckily just kind of banged into a self steering gear.
But he tells a great story. I got to tell you, we watched the orc of videos, and we watch all these people, whether it's the YouTuber's project Atticus or Vagabond or you know, my husband and I are obsessed with it, and you get to get a feel of what it's like to be out on the ocean.
Professor, just fifteen seconds left. Would you do it again?
I think I do it with friends.
Yeah, that's what I you know, that's what most of them do. And some of them have a couple of kids and they're going around the world, but they eventually, on some of those big crossings, bring friends on. This was so much fun. I hope we get a chance to talk again and maybe you will buy. Do you have a boat now.
Yef any would like to donate one?
Well said, Well said Richard King. His book is Sailing Alone, A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea, joining us from Santa Cruz, California. A great place to go sailing, no doubt about.
That, Richard Visiting Professor of Maritime History and Literature with the c Education Association.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern. Listen on Apple car Play and then Brout Auto with a Bloomberg Business act or want us live on YouTube.
We're all in on the UK this week, including a new show out from Netflix, which has swapped the Hollywood Hills for the manicured squares of Mayfair in its new real estate show Buying London, the UK's answer to the popular selling Sunset reality program.
More on the new Netflix real estate show Buying London in just a minute. Thanks to Bloomberg Pursuits, the British take this week everything from London's most expensive homes to the beachside breaks and cozy countryside stays outside the city of London that are yes, kind of affordable.
It's all relative, all right. Also the best shows and musicals to see on London's West End. Let's get to it with us. The editor of Bloomberg Pursuits Chris Rouser along with Sarah Rappaport. She is Bloomberg News Luxury reporter. She is based in London. Chris, I feel like you guys are doing a lot on London this year. Are Europe in general?
Yeah, we've been looking a lot at Europe for the summer. Particularly. I think people are thinking about Europe because the Paris Olympics, and then people are like, math, I don't want to go deal with all that, And so we have been publishing lots of stories about alternatives and where places that you may not think of going, places that may not
be so expensive. And Sarah is based in London and she is does a great job, has a great luxury When you said the luxury reporter, I was like, yeah, that does sound really.
Good, not a bad.
Yeah. And she specializes in real estate and travel and also something that's very close to her in my heart, theater. So she's got a lot of fun stuff for this summer.
Okay, I want to start with travel before we get to real estate and then theater. So, Sarah, you wrote about the best to affordable new weekend getaways from London that are ready to book right now, and before we get into all of them, I want to just tell you what's stuck out to me is an American who struggles with public transportation in the United States. All of these are so accessible by train and then an easy cab ride. This is amazing.
They're all under three hours away from London on a train, you know, bring a book, you know, pop on a train in or.
There, so you're not sitting in traffic like all New Yorkers do trying to get somewhere.
Like that's a luxury Carol, I know it sounds, it sounds.
It's incredible, bless in Mahampton's drive right exactly.
Well, so talk to us a little bit about of kind of where that led you to and how you thought about kind of what you wanted to highlight.
Yeah, well, I think London right now can be quite expensive. We have a trend of rooms going for like one thousand pounds a night, which is like twelve hundred bucks but there are some really nice hotels you can get to outside of London that are more expensive than they were previously, but still affordable luxury. So three hundred pounds, which is like five hundred dollars is the top year. So there's a really cool new place in Oxford called this Store, and it was in the first department store
actually in Oxford, and it's outside all the colleges. From the rooftop you can actually see all the famous spires and fancy buildings and all the people going to take their exams or have a drink in the bar and wash the students going around. And that's really special because I love Oxford. It's a very special place in the UK and it's only an hour away from London.
I love that they have posters from the former department store that are still kind of hanging on their walls and just kind of incorporating to the design. It just kind of sounds very unique.
Cool, like we had nineteen twenties outfits. They actually found them during the Renno.
Sarah tell us about Boys Hall sounds like the place for me and Tim.
It's where we've lost.
Yeah, there's a removated manor house from the sixteen hundreds. Charles the First actually stayed there. You can get a room for under two hundred pounds. There's no spot and there's only nine rooms, but you can have a glass of wine in the gardens watch the world go by. It's in a very cool posteria clad manor house like thing of dark woods everywhere, like it's allegedly haunted. I stayed there. I hadn't see a ghost. Side, just had
a nice time. But I love the history of all the old English manor houses.
I think that's especially for like Americans and we want to go to the English countryside. That's what we want to say. In an old house, it feels very old. Definitely see a ghost and.
Have a last one much older than America. And it's only like less than an hour away as well.
Okay, so let's say, Sarah, if you're not necessarily into the interested in the idea of the countryside, what about the seaside? What are the options for that?
I mean, like, heads up, it might be cold and rainy.
You're not exactly South Florida vibes.
Yeah, there's this place I like called number forty two in Margate that's a five minutes away from the Turner Art Museum and it's absolutely gorgeous. They have free snacks from a little retrofitted ticket booths. You can get popcorn ice cream at midnight, which I'm into. And it's like, yeah, beach side vibes, like open terraces, just a really chill experience less than an hour and a half from London.
I want to go back to London for a minute if we can. Because we before we kicked off, we highlighted a little bit of this Netflix, Netflix's new real estate show Buying London. Chris. First of all, I mean, I got to tell you I kind of love these high end real estate shows. I just love watching them wherever the heck they are.
I do too, I really. I mean there's there's one in New York that's really just called open House New York, which are just like nice houses and then selling Sunset and shows like that out of Hollywood are like really more about the drama and the outfits, and that can be fun.
It can always made up and everybody's manicured perfect.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They show up. It's for the office like that at yeah at nine am, just like me, but not you know that isn't like a thing that has really translated into the London like UK and Europe versions of that of that show. It can it's a little more like peaceful. And so Sarah has a story about a new show that's kind of trying to combine the drama with the high end real estate.
Okay, so Sarah, let's talk a little bit about that, and let's start with just who this guy, Daniel Daggers is, because if there's somebody with a perfect name for high powered real estate, ate up. But yeah, Daniel Daggers was literally born for this job.
He was.
Yeah, it was actually delightful in person though he got maybe a little bit of a villain edit on TV, but a very nice guy in person. And I met him at his offices which were not the ones that you saw on Netflix. Actually Netflix got another office with better light to film in.
Of course, some secrets, some secrets from the show shocking, it's not really tho, Yeah, I thought.
It was reality TV.
Yeah, so what kind of range of houses are they selling? Like, what are we talking about?
He called himself mister super Prime, which in London means ten million pounds and above. So the upper achealons of love in real estate. Thank you know Mayfair mansions kind of sprawling, notting Hill manors. On the show, they're selling one that you used to belong to Samahayak because she's not on the show. But I guess she stayed there or lived in it once. Wait certainly didn't have enough closet real estate for her. She needed a bigger closets, which is why she sold it.
I totally get that.
Totally get that.
Wait. He has sold more than five and a half billion dollars of real estate, including what one hundred and twenty million dollar mansion two.
Yes, that was one of the biggest real estate transactions of the year a few years ago, that one.
Do you talk a little bit about how he ended up having his own firm, because there's a little bit of story there.
There is a little bit of a story there, and this is under NDA, so he wouldn't give me details.
About it, but it means, you know, it's good.
He worked at Night Frank which Perch twelve years, being a partner there in their super prime division, and allegedly posted a picture of a client's house that was publicly available on Instagram, where he has thousands and thousands of followers and this personally wasn't happy about it, so he departed Night Frank. But his social media superstardom has made him, you know, a Nutflix star, so it all paid off in the end, so he started his own firm after leaving Night Frank.
And that range of real estate though, hasn't been doing super well lately, right.
No, it hasn't. It's a bit of a slowdown. People with the mega mansions have been having to cut up to thirty percent in order to get a sale, even in the spring, which is traditionally a very busy time in London. It's been called a little lackluster. Big deal aren't really happening at the same pace they used to be.
Yeah, it's pretty shocking. I feel like some of the I mean, this is a fun story and a you know personality, no doubt about it, and a reality show on you know, super Lux real Estate, but it's also talking about some of the prices when you come to London properties. You say, in January, Prime Central London properties still below ninety percent of their asking price for the first time since early twenty nineteen. That's some data from
lun Rest. But I mean, tim, we've talked about this, right, some of the high end luxury markets around the world, especially like in London, have really it's quite a market correction.
You know, it's different depending on the market you're talking about. We certainly are still seeing some pretty high end stuff go in other.
Parts of the world.
But Sarah, I'm curious if that matters to the audience that's intended for this, Like, does do they care what's going on in the real estate market or is that reflected in the show? Does it make the show different?
You know what?
I'm not sure they do. I mean I asked Santel Daggers of Alpus and he said, you know, maybe it's great time for buyers. Now people will watch the show and get in contact with him, you know, super rich in other places who want a London how So, I'm not sure it matters to the audience who were also there for you know, all the fun outfits, the drama, the scripted tours inside houses they might never see.
Hey listen, Chris, if we're in London, we got to go to the West End?
Yes you do? And Sarah sees, I mean, I love to go to London, And Sarah tells me what shows to see. And you know, every season she does a preview of what showed, not just in the West End, but every kind of show that you should see. And she did a spring preview a little while ago, and she's going to do a summer preview coming up. And last week she saw one of the big shows, which was Romeo and Juliette.
Yeah, starring Spider Man himself, Tom Holland. It was his first time on the stage as an adult. He did Billy Elliott as a kid, but it was his first time back as a grown up.
And the tickets sold out how.
Fast two hours.
Yeah, it's a limited run, but it was a very, very hot commodity. And it's this director, Jamie Lloyd, who did Sunset Boulevard, who has this kind of like very stark modern approach to theater where they use camera work and stuff, and that his huge production of Sunset Boulevard is coming to New York with Nicole Scherzinger from The Pussycadult, So you guys should all see it.
Kind of it's incredible. One of the best things I've seen sin is a Boulevard.
Speaking of a hot commodity, we got to talk about the picture of Dorian Gray because this sounds amazing, especially for fans of Succession.
God, yeah, Sarah Snook is incredible coming to Broadway next year, and that's a one woman show and I don't know how she does it, Like it's really a tour de force and just like pure athleticism for an actor, and that uses a lot of camera work too to show basically every angle of her face as the portrait age is, and she plays everyone in the play in the book.
Is she going to be on Broadway?
Yes, yeah, twenty twenty five.
I know, I got to get tickets throughout Apples thing.
Yeah, like do it now? Yeah, twenty six rolls right, one woman's show. It's unbelievable and she's won awards for it. Just one last thought in terms of any other shows that you want to highlight from that's going on in London right now.
Wow, Operation Mints me to still on for big fans of it's actually a quite funny musical comedy about a World War two intelligence operation, which doesn't sound like it would make for a good comedy. You're like, okay, right, but it's mostly the funniest thing I've ever seen.
Well, like yeah, and I can't see that. It did win right a New Musical.
Best Musical at Olivia. This is the British Tonys.
Sarah, if you ever want to do like a job switch, just come here Coinker Bloomberg Business Week. I'll be luxury reporter.
It sounds pretty Sarah did do a job switch. She was a TV producer that wrote for us in her spare time, and she was so good at it that they transferred her to our team. So, Tim, if you start writing for pursuits, I'm just saying you know where I live.
All right, that's going to leave it. Hey, listen, guys, thank you so much, really appreciate it.
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