From Marhard where Innovation, money and power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
I'm Caroline Hyder a Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York, and.
I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up ed full earnings coverage ahead was rake down the results from Qualcom. From Etsy, we push her head to the all important Apple out after the bell.
Plus we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence and talk AI safety, as well as investing with Soundbenture's general partner Ashton Kutcher.
Plus Ali Baba weighing a USIPO for its online commerce business. Could that be valued at thirty nine billion dollars? Will bring you the latest details this hour, but of course we've got so much to discuss, particularly with the world of executives coming up right now. And we welcome bron Chesky of Airbnb and I'm very peace to say Blue Megs, Emily Chang. Emily do take away the conversation.
Hey there, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. Obviously you've got your huge summer release out now, lots of different new features and categories. The one I want to focus on is rooms, which, as I know, the headline here feels a little like Groundhog Day because rooms were where you started.
What do you want?
What's the real pain point you're trying to solve with these new features.
Well, the primary pain point is that people, once again, just like when we started Airbnb in two thousand and eight, want an affordable way to travel, and the most one of the most affordable ways to travel is to stay in a room in someone's house. That's how airbanbe started. The average room on Airbnb is only sixty seven dollars a night, but we talked to a lot of people and a lot of people said they weren't comfortable staying in a room in someone's house. Who's the other person
I'm going to be staying with. So that's why we created this new thing called the host Passport. The host Passport is basically this really robust profile We verify the identity of every host and get you can get to know the host before you book. We also have really cool privacy features, like we show if the bathroom is share a private, and if there's going to be a lock in the bedroom door, So this is I think what we're trying to do. Additionally, we think this is
a really good way to experience a local culture. If you want to go to a new city for the first time, this is a great way because you get to step in the shoes as someone who lives there.
You of course invented Airbnb in the middle of the last recession, and here we are on the verge of another one, which you know, obviously not good for consumers, potentially not good for travel. How much is the economic climate impacting.
This new release.
It's absolutely impacting what people care about. A year ago, what people cared about primarily was flexibility, and so we launch air and B categories which allow you to inspire you to be able to travel beyond any place you can think. Now, I think the equations now people really really are focused on affordability more than the even we're a year ago.
That's our roots.
I mean, our roots are started in affordable travel, being on the share space, So this is what we're really focused on. We're also just really trying to focus on providing a great service. So we've been really obsessed over the feedback we're getting from customers. We've been pouring over millions of pieces of feedback from customer service. We've been talking to guests and hosts, and based on that, we've made over fifty core improvements to the service based on
feedback directly from our community. And so hopefully if people use earing the summer, they'll find it's more affordable and even better level service.
You're seeing that with simpler, more affordable monthly stays, you've got priority customer service, you've got more transparent and upfront pricing. I know you're using AI and machine learning to make a lot of this work on the back end. How are you thinking about the AI hype cycle and is it going to be as big as everyone says it's going to be, and what that means for Airbnb.
It's probably going to be a lot bigger than everyone and says it's going to be. In every few years, there's new AI hypes, there's new technology hype cycle. But the reason why is because there have been technologies that have changed the world and change how we all live, the Internet, the personal computer revolution, Mobile AI will certainly be as big as all of them, maybe bigger than all of them combined. And I think this is just the very beginning. It's going to play out over a
long period of time. It's happening quickly. It's going to change I think how people travel, it's going to change how we learn, It's going to change how we get care for. It's going to change a lot of things in society. What we're trying to do right now is number One, we want to use the tools to make everyone to air and be more productive. I don't think this will replace people initially as much as will augment people and make them more productive. Two, I think it
can help customer service. We have a very complated customer service problem. We have millions of people living together every night from different countries. This will help augment our agents provide better service faster. And finally, AI can be like the ultimate matchmaker. Imagine if your app being almost like the ultimate concierge and they can match you whatever you're looking for. These are the near term things. Beyond that,
it's really up to everyone's imagination. What you could do, kind of like the computer forty years ago.
Call just about matching your talent for this new AI door and you say you want to be at the vanguard. Have you got the right people within the business to be building it for you.
I absolutely think so. I mean, of course we're still hiring. If people are really great at this area, we certainly want to talk to them, But we have one of the we have a great team. I mean, we have people that have been working in this area for quite a long period of time. And the other thing I just want to say is there's many different layers the stack of AI. You have Open Ai or Google that are working on the base models. And we're not going
to be a research lab building base models. That's like building bridges infrastructure. We'll build the cars on the bridge, so to speak, the applications. So what we're going to be really good at, I hope is building personalized layers on top of AI. We can tune the models and ultimately I want airbe to feel like the kind of company that it knows you, it understands you, it learns about your preferences, and I think that's what we can use AI for.
What's interesting, We've got one of early back is coming on. Who's all about AI today? Ashton Kutch Show.
Oh yeah.
Also, we're thinking about how it can lead to more productivity, more profitability. Go back to your announcements that you're making in this economic environment, we are thinking about how you can be more profitable. You're saying how you can be more affordable, reducing fees. Does that ultimately impact your bottom line?
In the longer term, I think the AI is going to affect everything. AI is going to make people significantly more productive. AI is going to be able to also allow things to happen that you could never have done without that technology. Again, it's a little hard to know exactly what it's going to affect. I think it's going to reduce the cost of our service. I think it's
going to make the product significantly more efficient. It's going to allow engineers to be at least thirty percent more productive, eventually twice as productive. So that is the equivalent of reduction at fists costs or a lot more throughput. So those are the near term things we'll have. But beyond that,
I think we're just getting started. I think we're at the beginning of something that we're probably many years from now, going to look back in this period of time and remember alive at this period and being in a seminal moment in history. That's what I think we're going to think about this period in Ai.
Brian, You've been hosting guests in your own home for the first time and act, yeah, so excited. I got to take a peek. You're going to see that on my new show. I don't want to give too much away, but there were some Cheskey's chips involved. What are you learning from, you know, your own experience hosting, and how you want to integrate that back into Airbnb. You know, given you know what you've been hearing from hosts and guests, whether it comes to fees or affordability or privacy.
I mean, you know, I always feel like companies that create great products create them for themselves because then you have total empathy. You understand what the data means. And I wanted to be a host again now. I was one of the first hosts of my roommate fifteen years ago in Airbnb, and as I started hosting again, I have people my house with me. They stay in the guest room, I'm there with them, and it really helped
me understand Number one, trust and safety is paramount. You know, now verify the identity of every guest booking around the world on Airbnb. But it also helped me understand that we need to make hosting easy, and as we make the product easier for hosts, it will become a better experience for guests. I'll give you one example. A lot of people have complained about fees on Airbnb and host charging cleaning fees.
Well, as I started hosting.
I noticed that it was kind of complicated to figure out how much to charge, and we weren't doing a great job coaching hosts about how to provide a great value to guest. And as you use the product, you start to see these things and posting this actually helped lead some of the innovations that we announced yesterday.
Brad Chesky, we thank you of Airbnb and of course our own Emily Chang.
Let's go to AI. Earlier this week at Milky and actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said that companies not investing in AI will go out of business. But does that mean that all Way I startups are equally good investments. Here's what Cosla Ventures found of in our Cosla told us yesterday.
Have a listen.
I would say there's many more bad AI startups than good startups, and it's very hard to differentiate if you're not experienced with AI, so I do think lots of bad investments will be made, but overall more money will be made than lost, even if ninety percent of the startups fail, which they.
Will sound ventures Ashton Kutscher joins us now for more and on his firm recently closing a day I fund oversubscribed about two hundred and forty million dollars. It's interesting action because you're really focusing on foundational models. That's what jumped out at me from the announcement. That's where a lot of people are putting their activity. Why so focused there?
So we have multiple vehicles.
Our core vehicle will be focusing on the application layer, and that's where there's going to be an absolute boom of innovation from business models that are being unleashed that were never possible before.
But our core.
AI fund that we basically we saw in November when GPT was launched. We've been investing in AI for the last seven years, several companies that are narrow AI companies that are application based. But when we saw GBT be launched, we realized that this was an absolute breakthrough and these foundational models are going to be the underpinning of the
next absolute transformation for technology. When we first started investing in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, it was right around the mobile revolution, and companies that didn't didn't embrace that in a forward basis really struggled. But it also unleashed extraordinary new business models that never could
have existed before. When you had a GPS in your pocket, when you had a camera in your pocket, when you had a radio in your pocket, when you had all of that capability in your pocket, unleashed these business models that were never possible before. And what's about to happen because of these large transform of models that have so such extraordinary output, We're going to see innovation of business models that were never capable before that are that are
about to be launched. Yes, and and and and that's that that is just going to be an absolute And what I said at Milken was that if you were a commerce company ten years ago and you didn't embrace e commerce, you're probably not in business anymore.
And I firmly.
Believe that if you're a company today and you're not embracing the changes that are taking place with AI, you're going to be behind and you're going to have a hard time catching up Ashton.
I'm really interested in how quickly you moved on this thematic fund as well. Who are the LPs and how quickly did it come together?
Uh?
We we pulled the fund together in about five weeks.
Wow.
And we have an extraordinary We have a base of LPs that have been with us for years on end.
So we have about a billion dollars.
Under management at Sound Ventures and have been working with some really extraordinary LPs over the years, and so we reached out to them and said, hey, this is happening now. These large transformer models a lot of them. You look at open Ai, you look at Anthropic, you look at Stability. They didn't they didn't start yesterday. They've been around for
a while. They've been building this. You look at what Google has been doing with deep Mind and Barred and those those companies have been in development for a while. What we've just seen is an extraordinary breakthrough where you can take a massive corpus of data and be able to index through it and again create statistical, highly likely outputs that are beneficial to humans. And these utilities are really really valuable. It's it is going to exponentially change.
I agree with everything that Brian saying before I came on. This is going to change business forever, and we need to embrace it because right now this AI can be used to improve humanity.
I actually look at.
It as an equity and an inclusion play, where you know, as we commoditize things like legal advice, in medical advice and education and personalize those things down to the individual consumer, all of a sudden, people that can't get a doctor on the phone, or can't get a lawyer on the phone, or can't get a pediatrician on the phone, they're going to have access to these services and access to these
services at an affordable price. Yeah, and I think that's extraordinary for humanity and extraordinary for all of us.
It augments you mentioned education there, and I think about your exited portfolio company, cheg, which lost about half of its market value over the course of the week because already chat GPT is upending its own business model. What are you doing with your current portfolio, Ashton, to see around this corner to ensure that they are augmented rather then completely disrupted.
So that was the very first thing that we did before we even thought about putting a vehicle together to invest in these things. Is we reached out to every one of our portfolio companies and said, how are you embracing this technology?
How are you implementing this technology?
And I think, I think maybe from my perspective, the what happened with CHEG the other day is somewhat short sighted. CHEG is implementing GPT four into their product they announced check Mate, and and I think a lot of the value is going to fall to the incumbents. So if you have an extraordinary product, you have consumers and you're implementing this, I think there, I think value is going to fall to some of those incumbents, and as it should.
And don't dismiss the fact that a lot of these companies have extraordinary data sets that are their own proprietary data sets, and they'll tune their own models on top of these large transformer models, which will will create unique value propositions for consumers.
Actually, the word that keeps coming up Timing time again is hype cycle and being able to see wood for the trees, but also being able to understand that this isn't kind of like crypto, where yes, there's still ultimate value. We see it with the OG's at Bitcoin but we have seen in up ending in valuations of NFTs an area that you were playing heavily in. How do you worry about some of the similarities there and how do you ensure that the same mistakes aren't remade.
Well, I think the biggest mistake that was made in crypto was is and still is, just the absolute lack of clear cut regulations so people know what the rules are that they should be playing by. I think that there were a lot of companies that were assuming that blockchain technology could be used for a lot of different things that it really shouldn't have been used for. Look, it's a public ledger database, so it's really that blockchain is super valuable for any of transaction between two parties
that don't trust one another. So if two parties don't trust one another, they want to transact, they want to transact out in the open, so everybody could see what that transaction is and have a consistent, constant, historic ledger
of those transactions. It's really valuable for that. I actually think for artists that want to have enduring art out in the market and be able to timestamp this new piece of art as hey, I made this at this date and everything else that comes after that is derivative of that's it's extraordinarily valuable to have a public ledger for that. I think some of the tokenization that was
taking place was really short sighted and pretty manipulative. But the biggest problem was there was there's been no clear regulation and there's.
No clear regulation for AI either. Is that needed?
Yes, it is needed, And I think that the most promising thing because by the way, it's not just needed, it's needed badly. And I think that we've seen some extraordinarily intelligent people that have come out and it said it's needed and we need to really focus on this. I think the companies that are building this recognize that regulation is needed.
And I think, and what.
I'm seeing is really promising is the founders of these companies, the founders of Stability, the founders of Entropic, the founders of open Ai, Google and otherwise are really forward thinking about what regulation should be because I don't think anybody wants this to be an unfettered market. And I think there are data privacy implications. I think there are data there's what is the value of the data? I think there's misinformation issues. I work really heavily in eliminating child
sexual abuse material from the Internet. I think that's an issue that needs to be considered. I think biases need to be considered. I think that the traceability of this data needs to be considered. All of these things need to be considered. The good news is is that the founders these companies and the people that are building this technology,
they're cognizant of it, they're proactive about it. They're considering what needs to be done and what good regulation would look like, because it's really hard if you don't understand how this technology works to understand how to regulate it.
And the truth, there's a lot.
Of people that are fear mongering on general artificial intelligence, and we're not there. We do not have general artificial intelligence yet. It's closer, and we need to be really considering what the implications of that are. But the benefits to society for the utilization of this technology are going
to be extraordinary. And what we don't want to do is have it regulated in a way that puts it inside of a box in box and doesn't allow us to continue to innovate, because this isn't just happening domestically. This is happening all around the world, and the push towards general order official intelligence is going to happen. If not here, it's going to happen in China, it's going to happen all over the world, and the implications of it are.
Going to be massive.
So we don't amstring ourselves in a way where we are now behind and we're underneath the rock of somebody else's general AI. And so it needs to be done in an intelligent, thoughtful, proactive way. And the good news is that the founders of these companies recognize that, realize that, and are being proactive about it.
Ashton Koscher, thanks for being proactive on the subject with us, Sam Venture's co founder general partner. And we're going to stick so much more with what's happening in the private markets, also what's happening in the public market. It's Etsy earnings out last night, first calling on revenue beating analyst estimates. Joining us now ever Core II analyst Shwedder Kajuria she has an outperform rating on the Etsy stop with one
hundred and twenty dollars price target. But ultimately we're just talking about how AI is going to OpenD everything, and if you weren't an e commerce player back in the day that managed to pivot. How are you seeing Etsy navigate these current macro conditions?
A Hi, thanks for having me well in terms of the In terms of Etsy platform, I first of all, just lay the land. We do have an outperform rating, but we also had a tactical underperform rating into the print into the year, which we don't have right now.
Because we remain near from cautious on et Sea.
And the biggest reason really is that the macro environment is very unclear. There is a lot of volatility and there is a lot of choppy waters that creates cloudiness in terms of lack of visibility of.
What's to come and so ETS.
Actually the management team did comment on discretionary spend being pressured. There's a mix shift of spend away from goods into services, and the lower household income folks are actually watching their spend even more closely and so they're feeling the pressure. And some two of their biggest categories are moment living in crafts and those are seeing pricing pressures as people are shifting away from higher priced items to low price items.
All this put together and you.
See pressure on ETS stop line growth and we did see that. So in the first quarter they did beat all the estimates. But the guidance for the second quarter suggests.
Fairly muted trends.
And most importantly, it is unclear what the back half of this year will bring, especially if we head into a deeper recession. So near term I remain cautious, but long term I'm bullish.
On the platform, Sweer, good morning to you. I mean, a lot of your cell side colleagues complemented ETS on its execution in that tough macro environment. They complemented ETS on how they communicated guidance. But the stocks down significantly. Why are they not being rewarded for that?
Well, because the execution has been good. This is a stellar management team.
They've done a fantastic job in terms of turning around at Sea over the past several years.
Now.
The challenge is that there's not a ton of clarity on the back half.
If we just take what the guidance calls for in the second quarter, it is calling for a.
Europear decline, meaningful decline at the low end of their guide, and then some some growth at the high end of their guide.
And so what that tells us is that the back half we could potentially see low single digit growth rate in GMS grow and then what does that tell us about next year? And I think that's that's what's creating uncertainty among among investors.
And then just one more point, there are definitely great things to call out, and that's what probably some of the other other folks were talking about. His new buyer growth came in strong, they reactivated a lot of new other buyers as well.
Those were those were pretty strong metrics.
But at the same time, habitual buyers, which down for about forty three percent of their GMS, came in lighter than we thought. And that's that's something not to miss as well.
Schwideck, cojerior of Evical Things, Etsy, thank you so much. Now, coming out the Biden administration meeting with CEOs from the top AI names pressuring them to implement safeguards for the emerging technology, We're going to talk to Adam wensch Or, co founder CEO of Arthur about the tools necessary to navigate the risks in artificial intelligence. From San Francisco and from New York. This is Bloomberg.
Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline hired in New.
York and I'm ed Ludlow in San Francisco. Let's turn to Qualcom learnings, where the largest maker of smartphone process is offered a disappointing outlook on demand for mobile phones. Joining us here in San Francisco, Cunjan Sabani of Bloomberg Intelligence. I look at the forecast eight point one billion dollars to eight point nine billion dollars for the fiscal third What does that tell us about the recovery for qua COM's end markets?
And my mentor al is used to tell me, the longer the party, the bigger the hangover. And that's what exactly is happening here. Smartphone makers are not drawing down in inventry as fast as the company expected, and it's driven by lack of visible signs of demand coming back. So you have this combination of high inventories and low demand that's causing really the pain.
Longer the party, bigger the hangover. Remember that one.
I guess that our expectations at the beginning of this year were the inventories would clear up in the second quarter. What do we now think is going to happen in the rest of the year for the smartphone market, but also Quowcomm in particular.
So we expected the first half to be the bottom, which now looks to be kind of pushed out, and we don't think the recovery will come until the fourth quarter. There is no current trigger for the demand. The next trigger will be in September when Apple launches his flagship device and then going into December in the holiday season that generally spurs up demand. So until then, there is no clear trigger for demand to come back.
The CFO mentioned their modem only customer, which is code for like Apple wink wink, and I think the idea is they've done a big order earlier in the year. Bloomberg Intelligence, you also spotted something about China. What are we learning about quowcom in China?
So China is a big market for them. It's over fifty percent exposure for them. So like China had was the last to go in lockdowns, and that's where the demand has not come back yet. So when we look at China data, we were expecting that coming second quarter calendar, second quarter demand will start picking up, but we're not
seeing the signals for it to come back. And again it's that we are no longer in the supply constraint environment, so smartphone manufacturers don't have the incentive to overorder ahead in anticipating demand ahead.
Let's go back to Apple really quick that that commentary around modemon only ordering earlier. How did that impact the guide going forward?
So typically they would start ordering up for the September launch, but because they had ordered over ordered ahead, they have enough inventory and they're trying to order in time looking at near term demand instead of overordering.
Conjen Sabani new to the team here at Bloomberg Intelligence, Caroline.
Great conversation, and let's well go back to artificial intelligence again, shall we, because look, it's important on Capital Health President Kamala Harris of course, well meet with leaders of major AI companies including Google, Microsoft, Open Ai to address the risks that can mitigate from their systems. QAI company Arthur
launching its new service called Arthur Shield Look. It acts as a firewall to protect firms against the risks posed from large language models like chatchipt afur CEO Anam Winschel joins us now to discuss in the news day in, day out, is the opportunity around artificial intelligence, but the nerves around it too is Kamala Harris is currently discussing what worries are you seeing with your clients. You serve some of the biggest banks, you serve some of the
key companies department defense. How is chat ChiPT becoming a risk for them?
Absolutely?
So, I think you know, the first thing is they see the opportunity. Right there's you know, studies that have shown that in certain job families they can get up to a fifty percent increase in productivity, which is just a game changer. But in the rush to kind of adopt it and take advantage of those those benefits, they
run into a lot of walls. And those things include the fact that it makes things up with some people term hallution and nations, the fact that it can leak back sensitive data that it was trained on or that it was asked about. The fact that sometimes it can return toxic or responses that aren't value aligned with your organization. And so, you know, we're helping our customers solve these problems so that they can take advantage of this game changing technology.
Describe how that happens, because there are rivals to open Aiyes, chat GPT looking at at least showing you where the information has come from. How do you ensure that when we get incorrect information or indeed we're worried about data leaks, we're flagged.
Yeah, absolutely so, I mean these models fundamentally, they don't contain all the data they were trained on. They contain sort of some like really efficient summaries of it, right, and so they don't really know what's true and what's not true.
What they know is what is.
Probably could be likely to be true. And as they're making these determinations, there are certain flags and signals which you can key off of to Jenet to decide like what are the how confident are we that this model knows what it's talking about. And that's what our research team has developed is the way to to really kind of set threshold and block things that you know you
really shouldn't be confident are correct. Because these are getting deployed into legal and medical contexts and you know, business people and uh, you know when you're when you're deploying them in this way and people are actioning off them, there's real consequences to having misinformation out there.
How many of your clients just want to now add out bad of open ais chat GIPT within the four walls of their businesses or virtual four walls, because we just saw it was Samsung for example.
Yeah, the majority of them absolutely there. You can't use the public open AI. They're starting to be able to stand it up with inside of Microsoft Azure Security Zone.
But even that, there's there's a number of problems that come with that because ultimately, what these firms want to do is be able to take something like a chat GPT, but then train it on augment it with training it on their own data so that they can ask it questions that are you know, more informed by their their business knowledge, and that's one of the areas where you know, leaking that data back in the wrong context can be really harmful and really damaging.
What ED seems to be in every part of our conversation is the pros and the cons here we just heard it from Ashton Kutsher. We're now talking about really cyber can be helped and hindered by.
This, right, Yeah, Adam, I'm interesting for your take on this. So as at RSA conference last week and everyone's talking about generative AI balance between how useful it's going to be in making data secure and tracking attacks versus how dangerous it is in the hands of bad actors, author sits at the kind of the intersection of that.
What's your view, Yeah, absolutely, I think Look, the risks around it are just beginning to be understood as it's rolled out in some of these large applications, and so I think we're sort of in the early days of really figuring out how to effectively operationalize lms and the benefits they bring. But even in the early days, we've seen lots of examples of all sorts of problems that, you know, just just make it prevent people from putting it into production without the appropriate safeguards.
So Vice President Harris is welcoming all these great names across Open AI Microsoft today to have a conversation about artificial intelligence. When industry participants like you see something like that, what do you actually expect to come out of it?
Yeah, Look, I think it's a it's a great first step, and there's a lot of value in convening that and certainly there's a really important role for the government to play in this, and so I'm glad the conversation is getting started. My hope is that they also, you know, solicit the opinions of not just the people making the technology, but those who.
Are part of the process.
Of actually deploying it in the world and making sure that it works properly and that it and that it you know, serves its purpose in a credible and unharmful way.
All right, thanks to Adam Wench or Arthur co founder, and see.
That.
We keep talking about the macro, We keep talking about the banking fallout as it continues to be a crisis, how that's impacting startups general to AI apparently seems to be some sort of green shoot for the venture capitalists out there and in terms of the industry, but there's perhaps a broader area higher growth potential the female economy, from women's health, tech to e commerce and much more.
That's the topic of Monique Woodard's white paper out today and it's called Finding Alpha the Trillion Dollar Female Economy. Kate Lynch's founding partner and managing director Money wood joins us right now and great to welcome you back. Many talk to us about sort of the focus you have, What problems do you want to solve for women that you think is so highly advantageous for investment too.
Absolutely so, investors are always looking for these growth markets, and I think that women are an emerging consumer that's emerged for quite some time. Women are now now control eighty five percent of consumer spending, they control a significant amount of assets, and that number is expected to triple over the next decade. And that points to a few different things. It points to opportunities in consumer retail and e commerce, of course, but also things like women help,
women's health, semtech, and the care economy. We have to figure out how both care and work get done as more women enter the workforce and start to move up the ladder.
You name check some companies Maven Health of course, which has been proven, and Unicorn and Resilient in this headwind macro headwind kind of environment. You mentioned him in hers carot fertility. I'm interested, though, like why write this white paper? We talk a lot about well, the need to invest in women, the need for female investors, people who look like you managing the money, and yet ultimately things don't really change. What did you need to spell out here that was different?
So the problem is twofold. You do have the problem of not enough investors investing in companies led by women founders and CEOs. But I also think there is an opportunity to show people that, look, there is a massive consumer market here that is being underinvested in, and we are under investing in companies and products that solve the problems and meet the needs of female consumers. And I think that is a really interesting opportunity to try to solve.
People don't, especially investors, don't change their behavior based on things that are nice to do. They change their behavior based on the movement of capital markets and discovery of new growth markets.
On that note, Manie, how actively have you discussed your thesis with your LPs, with other vench capital piers to try and make this into something more substantive in terms of deploying capital extremely active.
It's the second layer of the cake ventures thesis, So cake ventures investing companies that touch areas of demographic change that are changing technology. The second layer of the cake is the increased spending power of women, and I have been very open about that with both my pis the companies that I invest in, and I think that's why founders want to work with me. They know that I
understand that this is not just a niche. It is moving women are moving into you know, a majority position in a lot of in a lot of ways, and that presents a really compelling opportunity for both my investors in the fund and founders who are building businesses.
Monique, how is the ongoing regional banks crisis impacting you your firm but also your portfolio companies?
Yeah, it's it's you know, candidly, First Republic is my bank. I also have portfolio companies who banked with Silicon Valley Bank. But looking broadly at the challenges that we've seen with Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic and now potentially path West, you know, I think the public has has started to see these as very high dollar venture capital problems. When regional banks are are, you know, providers to small and medium sized businesses all over America and these are their customers.
I think it's become a challenging position that startups and small businesses and venture capitalists are all in and I think that we need regional banks.
We need We.
Don't need more consolidation. But I am very excited that JP Morgan is now taking over the First Republic. But we do need those regional banks to exist. You also worry about carry on, Sorry, I also worry about you know, how it will affect underrepresented founders, women founders, women who lead venture capital funds and the like.
Yeah, access equality basically, and the worry that we revert to pass behavior. I'm interested in how you're finding those portfolio companies that you have back that are led by minorities. Are they getting follow on checks or indeed are they having to trim more than most? Are they well savvy with cash in this current environment to be able to weather this macro headwindstorm.
I find women led companies and companies led by underrepresented founders to be really resilient in times of crisis, and I think that we are in a time of crisis, and I think those companies are proving themselves to be incredibly resilient. Unfortunately, many of them never had the kind of access to capital that their peers did and so learn to do more with left and so I think that is created extremely strong companies that will weather the storm.
But you know, they are still firmed out here like myself and like Cake Ventures, that are actively investing in women and founders entrepreneurs of all types.
Mynie, what I could always talk longer for you. Thank you. Kate bench, A's founding partner and managing director, such a great conversation. Mean while coming up ed so much more to do with you from Weimo says it's ready to expand right giving riders in San Francisco and Phoenix area what options to get around town. We're going to talk a bit about dating too with a Waymochief Product.
Officer ed, Yeah, that's saswap panigrah. We're going to talk about that. Keeping our eyes though right now in Ali barber Is, its international online shopping unit, is looking at a US initial public offering is it weighs its options to spur growth for that business, and that includes major e commerce brands LAZARDA and Ali Express, the firms in the early stages of consideration around the IPO size, which is yet to be determined.
This is Bloomberg, the biggest US IPO since twenty twenty one, and shares are popping as they start trading. Health company ken View has begun its trading as a independent company from J and Jay and shares run the Rise tailan old band aid all the sexy stuff ed current up for grabs and it looks as though there's some interest in this particular stock after what has been kind of a drought in the overall world of initial public offerings. It was upsized.
Yeah.
Look, the shares opened at twenty five dollars fifty three cents to share. They're kind of floating around that level. Three point eight billion dollars raised from the IPO, biggest since twenty twenty one. As you say, care, remember this was Johnson and Johnson's consumer health business. They're essentially spinning it off. But this is one that we've been waiting for a little bit of activity in the IPO market.
Yeah, gold Mas, Sachs, JP, Morgan Bank of America are leading this particular charge on the IPO front. I remember this is a company that still perhaps has some overhanging concerns, legal concerns. Ken You already has been sued over TALC injury claims. In caution, it might be subject to claims arising outside the US and Canada. But I got to say it, I unfortunately was dosing up my kid with taalanol last night. I was usering listery in this morning.
These things are pretty pretty resilient in the face of economic headwinds.
Yeah.
Well, it will continue to monitor Chem shares throughout the hour as they begin trading here on Bloomberg Television now Alphabet's waymos as it plans to expand its self driving taxi service in its two main markets. Customers in the Greater Phoenix area of Scottsdale and other neighboring cities will be able to hail Rise from waymost driverless cars. Service will also offer trips in new neighborhoods here in San Francisco. Joining us now with the details is Saswat Panagrahi, Weaymo's
chief product officer. Welcome to the program, Saswat. That's the expansion. Okay, so how do we now start measuring progress for WEIMO?
Yeah, hey, Ed, great to be with you.
Yeah, it's an exciting time.
You know.
We have been the first company to open up in the first right healing service to the public, now expanding it to the largest contiguous service area on the planet with av access, the first to serve airports and we're expanding that and in San Francisco, as you did, we're
expanding that as well. So what you can expect from us is we cross ten thousand trips are fully outumum strips to riders and we were going to tenext that over the course of the next year, roughly by about next summer, so more cities, more occasions, more riders the same way MO Rider.
Have you set a date or a target for full commercial deployment in any of these markets?
Ed, I would say in Phoenix we are in a full commercial deployment. You just download the app and ride. There's no wait lists, there's no NDA, there's no approvals, you just download the app and ride. So to give you an idea, during Super Bowl, we work with the host committee to deal with all the riders and visitors
to Super Bowl. So that's pretty massive scale already. And now that if you look at it, we're covering most of major metro Phoenix and anybody can download an app and rider, and we're seeing pretty healthy ridership as well as engagement as well as retention. So I would say it's pretty commercial in Phoenix already full commercial deployment.
No sorry, SATISFI continue.
Yeah.
And in San Francisco we have done of thousands of riders in our waitlist. We're waiting for a paid permit to be able to begin charging them, but we're still offering almost the entirety of the city and today have opened up North Beach as well as fishermen's work some of the busiest locations of San Francisco to trust testers as well.
There's a lot of discussion at the moment around ours fisheral intelligence. My first exposure to that field was talking about machine learning in the context of training the perception side and the compute side of self driving. So what are you doing in the field of AI. How are you ramping up? Are you using lllms to improve your existing technology?
Yeah, Ed, I mean we have been focusing on machine learning for a very very long time and it's in every part of our stack. Everything from perception, like you mentioned on how we perceive the world, how we predict other people's behavior, being able to distinguish when a pedestrians is standing by a curb but not intending to cross versus crossing. Also in how we plan how we drive through in every part of it that are deep learned
models all across our stack. We're also in simulation as well as in validation, for example simulating rain, fog and those things. There's a tremendous amount of machine learning and we're staying at the cutting edge of it with our research and have published some of it as well.
All right, thank you, disessat panagra he Weimo's chief product office. We'll get both of us in a Weymo car very seeing Caroline.
Excited for it. Meanwhile, while we always talk about cars with Apple, but then it seems to be quite on the horizon, let's talk about the here and the now. The earnings are out after the ball for a preview, let's go to mark Gum and then we're likely to see sales drop again.
Yeah, there will be no Apple car announced today during earnings Like you said, in terms of Apple earnings today, yeah, we're likely looking at another five percent sales decline. Don't take my word for it. That's what Apple said would be the case when it provided its color on the current quarter during its last earnings call.
Right.
Traditionally they like to go a little bit under to show more of a beat. But it does seem likely based on everything that Wall Street is saying, combined with what Apple is saying, that we are likely in for revenue around ninety two billion, which would be a decline from around ninety seven point three billion reported in the year ago quarter. This will be the second quarter in a rower Apple's going to show an annual decline. So
that's something that's obviously concerning. Last quarter around they had a bit of an explanation, right, the iPhone fourteen pro had major supply chain constraints. They were just not able to produce produce them because of the COVID zero policies at the time in China. Now I'm curious to see what they're going to say the reason for this decline is whether that's the economy. Maybe they're supply chain issues we don't know about. So we'll be interested to see how that goes later today.
I'll wait to see you on the blog, Mark German, We thank you. Meanwhile, well we've got some action in the IPO market, don't we add finally the popping of Kenvy.
Yeah.
Look, we're still trading around that twenty five dollars fifty cents mark, but eagerly anticipates we finally got a big ipo, the biggest since twenty twenty one.
That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology Ed.
Yep, don't forget recap the podcast. Wherever you get yours. This is Bloomberg