From the heart where Innovations, money and power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
I'm Caroline Heinder Bloomberg's weltead quarters.
In New York, and I met Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up Amazon.
It posts a biggest cloud sales growth in a year.
That's all on AI demand details.
The't com plus full.
Chip coverage ahead is AMD falls after its AI chip forecast disappoints.
And we sit down with the CEO of Pinterest for an exclusive interview as that revenue surge is the first let's check in on the rest of these markets and actually a little bit of nervousness, shall we say, ahead of the FAED all important two PM two thirty is when, of course j Powell comes forward with his press conference. So we're down about a ten percent, but bouncing off
of our lows. But of course, more broadly, the technology drag lower by some of those earnings in the chip names and the read across we're down by two point five percent.
Let's call it on the socks.
I know edge you'll be digging into really what are the ultimate names that are pulling down the key chip index.
But I also look at ten year yields actually catching a bid now. Earlier we saw bond sell off.
Now they're catching a bid because we see the US Treasury actually isn't going to be upping its supply in the coming quarter in terms of bond auctions. That notably, we have seen some worrying signs when it comes to economic data today, Manufacturing in particular seeing a slowdown, but the price is paid still.
On the upside. So we've got that issue of inflation.
How much we are actually seeing a cooling or a steadying of the US economy. Remember we actually saw some weaker jobs data today as well. Moving on, have a look at what's happening in terms of you got individual movers and from a crypto perspective, and I'm looking at what's happening on the bitcoin down four point three percent on the day, We're now sub sixt fifty seven thousand dollars is where we currently trade. Maybe that's a macro picture, Maybe that's a risk off feel.
What are you seeing on the.
Micro Let's start with AMD. Actually, this is a big move lower in AMD despite actually upgrading their forecast for sales of AI accelerators from three point five billion to four billion. The problem was high hope, some in the street seeing or hoping for guides of eight billion dollars. We're talking about them three hundred x, which AMD is going to put out into the market to compete against Nvidia principally h two hundred. But they also sing a
slowdown in gaming. Old is new, right, AMD's the name we used to talk about because you built your custom rig with AMD GPU if you want to play high performance games. We'll come back to that in just a moment with our analyst, con Jensabani, and then Amazon Amazon.
Actually it's a kind of muted response.
We're up two point three percent strong first quarter, tep it outlook for sales in the second quarter. But the story is AWS annual revenue run rate of one hundred billion dollars.
But the devil's in the detail.
And it was just one sentence from Brian Zawski, the CFO, that generative AI revenue run rate in the multiple billions of dollars, and that seems to be enough to show that AI is actually starting to show up in the financials.
Let's dig into Amazon's results.
After the company's cloudion, it posted it's strongest sales growth in the year.
We're bloomed by Spencer Sopa.
Spencer, you were on that media call with Brian Ozowski, and I think that's the focus.
Here, isn't it.
It's the AI is a real thing that makes real money sort of.
Yeah, the profitability for AWS and the quarter was huge. You know, it accounts for less than twenty percent of all Amazon revenue, but it's like two thirds of its profit.
So that was big.
And then the question for the investors is, you know, what's the pace of investment going to look like and how are these margins going to look as Amazon continues to invest in new data centers to fuel this boom, and there is a little bit of just some breadcrumbs dropped.
Amazon said it dropped about fourteen billion in the first quarter on data centers, and it said that'll be the low point for the rest of the year, so they're probably looking at about, you know, north of fifty billion in data center investment at least this year.
Nenevertheless, managed to support that operating margin what was it, thirty seven point six percent whyer since they started disclosing what it was and breaking out AWS. But the bread and buffer that we all know Amazon for in many ways is the e commerce play.
And how's the consumer looking for them right now?
Yeah, that's where things were a little soft.
The overall revenue guidance was a little light for the current quarter, and they said that consumers are definitely pinching their pennies there. The average order size is smaller, and so that hurts the margins of the e commerce business because if you're shipping less expensive things, it still costs the same amount to process and ship those items. So the e commerce outlook is good, just not nearly as good as AWS was, and they're definitely seeing some signs of consumer strength.
We've got the Pinterest CEO coming on a little bit later.
We're being asking a lot about advertising, and of course they've got a partnership with Amazon. How is prime ads looking, How is that particular part of this newer part of the business doing.
So Their ad business is still strong, still predominantly the sponsored ads things that you see on the actual website. There wasn't a lot of clarity about the contribution from the video ads that they've added. Analyser estimating somewhere in the realm of I think five billion was the last I saw for the year from that business. But it's a yeah, there wasn't a lot of clarity on exactly
what it's adding. An Amazon emphasized, look where we're going to be lighter on the advertising, the most other programming and television and that sort of thing. If you watch Prime Video, you'll see fewer advertisements. So they're definitely, you know, moving delicately on that new revenue source.
Yeah, don't want to put us off of our watching Spencer. It's so nice to have him here in New York. Spencer sofa on all things Amazon. Meanwhile, we are sticking on this earnings. Let's break down AMD. Look, it was giving a disappointing forecast. In particular, there was sluggishness when it came to gaming demand. We want to bring in Bloemberg Intelligence Senior analyst Kunjan Sabani, And it really seems to be Q two. Everyone slightly focusing in on because Q you are not good.
Yeah, exactly, I mean fundamentally the already remains intact. It's that Sentimentally, it didn't beat enough the high lofty investor expectations, especially for the GPU numbers coming into the earnings. A second point is the rest of the non AI business is growing through a persistence slump, which is being heavily on all the AI goodness, so over all at the company level, actually, the EPs numbers for twenty four and
twenty four came down at had bit. That's not what you want to see from a flying AI flying high name.
I was trying to unpick what Lisa Sue is saying. It seemed in the first instance she was saying AMD is supply constrained. In other words, there's great demand for the AI accelerator product, they just can't get enough of them. She data said in the call. Actually that's not the case. The full year guy doesn't factor in any supply constraint. What is the story here with demand versus supply? The mi I three hundred X clarify from.
Our perspective, the demand continues to run higher. Is just supply is not binary the way people think, so they
do the second quarter supply is constrained. There will be more supply coming in in three Q and four Q, and there's only so much they can ship on the second half of the year, and The second point to remember is there's all these high, crazy high expectation numbers coming from the byside, where people are going in and evaluating how much supply is coming in and multiplying that number of by based on how.
Many units the MD can ship.
But that's not how it works.
The supply when it comes in doesn't run one hundred person utilization and yield and et cetera. So it's not a linear equation that you can extrapolate.
You hear that buyside, you've got crazy high expectations. Even so, do we think that AMD gave enough evidence they will take market share from Nvidia, which is so far ahead in the AI accelerator race.
We believe so, like they've showcased enough engagements both at the cloud and the enterprise customer. And the second part is more important because the next wave of increasing capex is going to come from the enterprise customers, especially in the inference where the MI three hundred sort of have a more competitive positioning.
Bloomberg Intelligence Senior analyst Kunjen Sabani check out his research on the Bloomberg terminal. Let's keep a conversation going with Daniel o'reagan, Managing Director, of Global Equities at Missuo Americas.
Let's start with AMD.
Let's set a baseline that expectations were high, and we got a raised forecast, and it doesn't.
Seem to have been good enough.
Yeah, precisely.
I think your previous guests did an incredible job of outlining exactly what went down. Listen results were great, they were tremendous. I think in any other tape this name would be trading a little bit higher. I just think expectations got a little ahead of themselves. So she was very prudent last night, raising GPU guides from three and a half billion to four. Again, we heard that the bus I was looking for closer to six, maybe even seven. Long story short, as we're sticking with it, we like
it down here. There are other levers to pull also too. If you're a massive hyperscaler looking to secure as many chips as possible, you definitely want to diversify your offerings instead of just having all your chips in one basket with Nvidia. You think there should be other people that supply your chips, and I think AMT probably fits that bill.
Can you go into the other levers that you just said that they have to pull What in particular do you want to see pulled, Daniel.
That's a great question.
So the gaming side was actually one lackluster area for next quarter, But I think more importantly going forward, there's potential for an enterprise refresh, especially on the back of COVID. A lot of Fortune one hundred, Fortune five hundred companies have old legacy systems that they.
Have to rip and replace.
That could bode well for them in the second half of twenty twenty five or even earlier twenty twenty five.
Okay, interesting, I want to pivot away therefore, not just well a boy from AMD, but more broadly looking at the cloud and some of those hyper scaleres that you say are going to be the end demand for an AMD.
Amazon today coming out looking really.
Strong when it comes to it's aws, when it comes to its AI focus is more broadly that the level that you want to see continuing to be pulled.
By any Jesse.
Yeah, So that conference call last night was one of the most polish I've listened to realllly in years, maybe on the back of the Metal one from two quarters ago. She basically said that this opportunity with AI is almost as tremendous as anything he's ever seen.
And they're willing to spend tens of billions of.
Dollars to reap the rewards later on, and they're not afraid to spend. And I wouldn't bet against these guys. We've literally seen it for eighteen years. They identify a massive technology, they invest aggressively.
Profits and margins get hit a little bit, but.
Then later on profitability hockey sticks as everybody comes to realize these guys are ahead of the curve. I think the same thing's going to happen with Amazon. And I also think the spending votes very very well for the supply chain names for example, like the NVIDIAs and the AMDs of the world, because they are the arms.
Providers for this AI race.
So I think the journal was positive for the entire AI ecosystem.
Daniel, I'm interested in that thesis. You said it was the most bullish call from Andy Jesse and Brian Azowski you've heard in some time. Was it light on details though? I mean, think about what you just said. The one thing we didn't hear is any sort of tangible number for CAPEX other than Brian saying will be meaningfully higher in twenty two money full, right.
I think that's a great question, and I don't think they wanted to pigeon and pole themselves with just specifically quantifying it. The fact that they used overwhelming or significant I think that gave them room to kind of fall down later on. At the end of the day, they know that there's a massive opportunity, They're okay to spend
aggressively to take advantage of that. One thing that I think that could be different this time is back in previous investment cycles, they didn't have as much profitability as they do now. Amazon has multiple mature businesses, right, It's not just retail. They have retail, they have AWS now, they have advertising, they have logistics, they have all these other profitable businesses that I hope or think that could blunt the impact of profitability.
And also too.
On the call, they reiterated over and over again that they think they can do both. They think they can be efficient and they think they can drive growth at the same time. Let's see if they can thread the needle. But like I said earlier, I wouldn't bet against these guys.
If AWS is the cash cow and the bright spot for everyone, what's the next best thing in the multifaceted business.
Daniel, that's a great question. I really don't know.
I think it's AWS for now. One area that was weaker last night in terms of guidance, I don't even think really matters. They said that the European consumer was lackluster, which her top line.
I don't really talk.
To any investors that are concerned much about their European consumer business. So again, I think the focus is on AWS, but going a little deeper, the operating profit for their retail business was tremendous, Like this was their bread and butter ten years ago, and it's like they're growing past that now. And to AWS, I think it's just to your dispenser's point earlier, it's just going to continue to drive the bottom line and the entire ecosystem is just going to get better.
And meanwhile, they're not particularly articulating CAPEX when it comes to the amount of spending.
But what we can glean from Microsoft.
From Amazon, from IBM, from anyone that's providing some sort of cloud offering is that they spending in this spending big. What do we therefore worry about or be optimistic about when it comes to video that's coming or the other big chip names that need this sort of exuberance to suspend the market cap that we've continued to see.
You know, that's a great question.
We kind of say that it's the trillion dollar question, right is how many more quarters are these AI spenders going to get the hall pass from investors and tell hey, show me the money, show me the ROI. You spend tens of billions of dollars on this AI buildout, When are we going to get paid back?
The jury is still out right, we.
Don't know exactly what's going to happen Jess yet. How last night Andy Jesse did say a few times that they're already seeing billions of dollars of AI related revenue on AWS, so I don't even want to say it's brings shoots, but already making a good.
Headway in that segment.
And if you remember last week we had amazing az your numbers, is Microsoft ajurre actually accelerated year over year on a big number.
Google Cloud obviously continues to do well.
So we've now heard from three of the major cloud providers through the world's biggest hyperscalers come back with really tremendous results. It's just it gets me pretty biled up on space.
Daniel Reagan, thank you for being built up with us, Managing director and Global Equities over at Azooho America's great to have some time with you.
Here's some news time for talking.
Tech Binance founder Changpeng Jow was ordered to spend four months in prison for failures that allowed cyber criminals and terrorist groups to freely trade on the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.
The sentence was far below.
The three years requested by prosecutors who had sought to make an example out of Joo to a heavily scrutinized industry which is rebounding frankly from a slew of high
profile scandals. Plus, Paramount Global agreed to extend contract renewal talks with Charter Communications, the owner of CBS and MTV, is said to have extended talks with Charter, one of the largest cable TV providers, the head of last night's deadline preventing its channels from going dark on the cable service, and Tesla's pivotal partnership with Buydo in China may amount to a u turn of sorts for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO has long claimed his company can offer self
driving without HD maps, but in order to go to market with FSD in China, he had no choice but to join with a local partner for a mapping license, which was by.
Do carroc Oh.
Boy, let's stick with Tesla because there is so much news which ed you and team have been breaking. The company actually eliminating almost its entire supercharger organization, which is built, you know, a vast network of public charging stations that basically every major automaker is in the process of trying to tap into in the United States. We've then had breaking news that well, the head of HR is now stepping down me most Crowdrudell is with us and Craig.
Let's just start on the supercharger element of this, because this has got a lot of well the auto industry worried.
I'm not sure of course whether internally at Tesla they're warned too.
I think it's incredible in part because to Tesla's credit, this was a fantastic business that they built over more than a decade. I think, you know, you can sort of quibble with, you know, some of the promises made and promises not necessarily kept that Musk has offered over the years. But what this company has done is built a really solid and extensive, fast, reliable charging network. And you hear that, you know, from Tesla customers all over the place, you know, when they talk about why they
love their car so much. This is one of the sort of main you know, positives that that is often pointed to is that you know, when you're in need of a top up, Tesla has, you know, the charging
network to support you. And so for them to you know, make this sudden decision to get rid of, as you know, roughly five hundred people, including the head of this business, who they just put forward in front of investors a little over a year ago, as you know, an example of the deep bench they have behind me as really is leading to a lot of people scratching their heads.
Craig, I want to bring you some breaking news that's happened since you've set in the chair. What I'm hearing and what I've reported just now with Donna Hole Bloomberg's DNA Howe, is that Tesla's most senior HR executive, the senior director, Ali Araballo, has actually left the company. My suspicion issue was fired, but this is another example of a high profile exec departure alongside a really big wave of layoffs.
So I know that you're aware of this story, just give us your reaction.
I think it's it is very interesting that this makes it, you know, two and two days of major you know, departures of senior women within this organization. I think it's a company that you know, for the most part, when you do tune into these events that Tesla puts on, it is very much male dominated. And I mentioned that Investor Day in March of last year, there were sixteen executives who were trotted out along with Elon Musk. Only
two of those executives were women. I also just think that, you know, this latest sort of drumbeat of news just really sort of speaks to this idea of you know, as you reported ed just last week, of chaos, right, it really seems like a chaotic moment for this company where you know, they're trying to sort of fix problems that they don't have and not addressing problems that they do have.
And there are many out there that would know Elon Musk, to their mind, knows what he's doing and that the testa will come through the other side. All we can do is report what's happening inside Bloomberg's created ol. Thank you very much. Now coming out, Microsoft reveals it invested in open Ai and it fears of falling behind Google in the race for AI dominance. We're bringing that Bloomberg reporting next.
Stick with us. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with open Ai came from a sense of falling badly behind Google. That's according to an internal email released them in the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant.
Joining us as Bloombergs.
Mike Shephard out of DC leads the coverage of politics and tech. I love these investigations because I love the paper trail, and this was a pretty juicy one to get some details on.
Yes, this really was, and it provides yet another window, actually specifically into the battle between the biggest tech companies over artificial intelligence. This is such an important and emerging area for them, and such a potentially lucrative one too. We saw it show up in the earnings reports that tumbled in last week. Cloud revenue was up for Microsoft and Google in part on AI services and that helped their shares, So this is an area where they want
to maintain and edge an advantage. However, it's also an area of focus for regulators and prosecutors here. It did happen to be mentioned in this antitrust case against Google, and this is where the Microsoft internal email emerged.
And interestingly that it was news organizations that really pushed for this document in its reductive form to be published. Mike, we now have Thursday Friday upon us. They're going to be the closing remarks right of this overall DOJ case against alphabet Yes.
That's right, Carolina.
My colleague Leah Nylam will be covering that very closely to see how this is going to end up. We won't have a ruling right away in the case, probably not until the summertime here, but this is one that we're watching very closely because it is part of a series of moves by the FTC and the Justice Department, which is handling this case against the largest tech companies, questioning whether they are engaging in anti competitive practices, and
they're looking at them on a series of fronts. When it comes to artificial intelligence specifically, they're concerned that they're trying to hoover up or get involved with, or lock in relationships with these startups like open Ai, like deep Mind in a way that preserves their market dominance. And they're also worried about these interlocking directorships too among these AI startups as well.
UK CMA Key and I to Mike Shepard just so on the nose when it comes to Washington, we thank you so much.
Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology, Ed Lovelow here in San Francisco, Alan Hid.
In New York. And let's just quick check on these markets because it's.
A macro day, it's a FED day, and we are therefore perhaps a little bit of cautious trading ahead of that all important two pm then two thirty pm press conference FED chair.
Power're looking at the NASA currently down some six.
Tenths of a percent now, and in large part is the chips that continue to fall. We'll dig into moment why I'm looking at a ten year yield that actually catches a bid.
That's as the US Treasury.
Says, Look, we're not going to be increasing the pace of our auctions in the following quarters. So we're seeing supply side playing to that. We're down some two basis points. Even though we are still looking at the FED, I'm looking at what's happening on bitcoin. Look, some of this anxiety, some of this risk coming off the table, some of the ETF slowing in terms of their inflows. It's just
pulling us down by almost five percent. We're below that six well now below fifty seven thousand dollars mark when it comes to bitcoin.
Move on some of the individual movers.
Now, I talked and I pushed ahead to the fact that the chip stocks are really underwater today. Why AMD. Look, we did see that tepid forecast. The market wanted to see more when it comes to the MI three hundreds in terms of their AI focus, and well, it's hitting across some of the other big chip names. So we're off by almost nine percent, let's call it on AMD. I'm looking at Amazon, though, managing to post what is strongest quarter for adlars growth that we've seen in several years,
or at least in a year. We're seeing twenty five billion dollars being brought in. We're seeing overall still the growth of one point seven percent, managing to be a relief when it comes to Amazon and strong AI focus multi billion dollar revenue run rate, and then we have Pinterest. We're up twenty one percent on the day. Ed, this is the best day since October twenty twenty for this social media name, and we've finally got back to this
revenue run rate in excess of twenty percent growth. We're seeing focus on gen Z. We're seeing a focus on shoppability. We're seeing a management managing to build momentum, so say the analysts, and we're going to be digging into it in a moment.
I mean that is a big move.
I did not have Pinterest on my earnings BINGO cards. So let's dive deeper into Pinterest and those first quarter sales user growth with Pinterest. CEO Bill ready a bill, terrific to have you on the program.
The story seems quite clear.
Pinterest pushing into shopping and Pinterest focusing on gen Z users.
Right.
My question to start what is the relationship in the activity between the shopping and the gen Z uses.
Yeah, so you know we're finding our best product market fit in years. We've hit an all time high with users more than half a billion users and as you noted, gen Z is our largest demographic. It's now more than forty percent of our platform, and it's our fastest growing demographic as well. And at the core that growth with gen Z has been the rising actionability in the platform.
Pinterest is where gen Z goes to shop, and as we've made Pinterest more actionable, so the people who can get to more of the things they're finding on Pinterest. We're seeing that work really well for users, where we've accelerated user growth for seven straight quarters now. But it's also cutting through for advertisers, where as you noted revenue grow twenty three percent this quarter, nearly doubling our revenue
growth rate from last quarter. And so we're really seeing this be quite synergistic between users finding the things that they love on Pinterest and then advertisers finding this is a great place for them to meet users that are in market looking to shop and buy.
And that's just some of the synergies that you've managed to bring to bear with Amazon, with Google, with.
Those ad partnerships.
Bill, how much of that advertising optic is thanks to these third parties.
Well, you know, on the shop ability front, you know, historically Pintress has solved digital window shopping. It was hard to get to the things that you found on Pinterest. We have opened the stores, and in doing that, we're seeing that retailers broadly are finding great performance on Pinterest. At the core of our revenue acceleration has been our strength in low funnel actionability users that are clicking and buying.
We more than double the number of clicks we sent to advertisers in Q four, and we did it again in Q one. That is broad based, but we are seeing our best strength with the largest, most sophisticated retailers that provide really.
Great buying experiences.
We're quite pleased with that, and we also see that the third party demand that we've brought onto the platform is doing exactly what it was intended to do, which is rounding out gaps in our auction and bringing more great, shoppable, biable content onto Pinterest so that when users find what they're looking for on Pinterest, they can easily click and buy it.
This was a milestone quarter in the sense that global monthly uses past half a billion for the first time. You've put a lot of emphasis on gen z So look forward, what is the arc of user growth and what drives it, what brings in you users to your platform?
Bill Yeah, so you know, as I mentioned, this is our seventh consecutive core of accelerating user growth. We've accelerated in every geography and with every generation that we track. Gen zs are fastest growing in our largest but you have millennials right behind that. So our improvement in the product has been broad based, and it is that actionability at the core. But I would say we are just
getting going with that. We see much more building momentum in that as we look forward, and it's both the actionability as well as the positivity that.
We're bringing into it.
We've made tremendous strides with AI, and AI is bringing more relevant recommendations for users so they can take action on more of what they find. But it's also the case that we're tuning AI for positivity. We're tuning it to help users feel better not just in finding what they're looking to shop and buy, but in making sure
that we're bringing inspirational content to them. So we've done things like inclusive AI, where we have skin tone filters so people can filter for things that will reflect them and including diversity by default in our feeds. We introduce body type AI where people can select body types so that they can find more things that fit well for them, and so we want to make it so that every person on Pinterest can see themselves on Pinterest. And so that's really leading to great strides.
In both the.
Relevance, the representation, and just people feeling positive when they spend time on Pinterest.
So last night on the Amazon Media called, Brian Osowski was asked about Tmu and she in the context of competition with you guys at pinterest a little bit different, would you talk about Timu and Shean as potential partners? Are you seeing any uplift from Chinese advertisers?
So apac cross border has been a contributor to our growth, but it's a nice contributor. You know, it's not overwhelming, but it's a nice contributor. But as I mentioned before, our strength and retail has been broad based. Retailers of all sizes are finding strength on Pinterest, and it's because they're seeing that doubling of clicks that we sent to advertisers a year on year in Q four and again
in Q one. And it's also because they're able to meet hard to find shoppers like gen Z on Pinterest, and they're meeting those shoppers in a really unique moment because users come to Pinterest when they have clear intent. More than half the users on the platform, we're here to shop, but they haven't yet decided what to buy, so they're not necessarily searching for a specific brand or
a specific item where maybe the decisions already made. They're coming here with much more general thoughts like cool outfits for spring, what to wear to Coachella, and those are great moments for advertisers to meet users because the user has clear intent but hasn't decided yet what to buy. And again we're seeing that broad based across retailers. China cross border is a contributor, but it's broad based strength for retailers.
Focusing a little bit more on China for a moment, Bill, I mean, this is a unique time in social media more broadly, because it looks as though one of a key social media player might be falling away.
Do you think more gen Z will come to.
You because of TikTok potentially being banned completely no longer existing in the US.
Well, when you look at why we are doing so well with gen Z, it is because we are doing something very different than the rest of social media. For gen Z, most of social media has the user in a lean back entertainment mode. We have the user in a lean forward mode with intent and purpose. And I mentioned tuning for positivity. You know, gen Z sees Pinterest as an oasis away from the toxicity they experience on much of the rest of social media. They know that
social media has largely become comparative and performative. And if you go talk to gen Z about why they spend time on Pinterest, they'll say they go to other places on social media and see what others want them to be, what others expect them to be, and then go to Pinterest to discover what they want to be and invest in themselves with a small circle of friends. So that's already winning with gen Z. And we're not sitting around
hoping for the demise of other platforms. We're just busy building something that makes people feel more positive, is going to give them a great experience, and that's winning, particularly of gen Z.
Okay, so no clear ambition to capitalize in the uncertainty, but clearly seeing the flow of gen Z. What really always interests me, Bill is when you break down your numbers in terms of average users and where they are you're so dominant in the rest of the world, do you see US as the area of growth do you see internationally more the area of growth.
Where do you see the expansion?
So that's a great question. As you noted, we have approximately eighty percent of our eighty percent or more of our use outside the US, but only approximately twenty percent of our revenue outside the US. So the improvements we've made from the user perspective have been broad based. As
I mentioned, we've accelerated users across every geography. On the modernization side, we are much further along in the US, and we are now starting to deploy those things internationally, and so we see international as a huge growth vector for us, both in terms of what we will bring to advertisers directly where we do first party selling, as well as where we're bringing in new sources of demand, either through third party demand like what we're doing with
our Google partnership in international markets or what we're now doing with resellers in international markets where they can bring more local demand, which is going to be great for those advertisers, but also great for users that will find more shoppable content as more of those advertisers those international markets come onto our platform.
Bill, great to catch up with you thanks to spending some time with USKS. Very money Pindras CEO Bill ready there. Meanwhile coming up that we're going to be joined by Renegade Partners co founder Rosanne Winsec about the.
Firm's new fun They raise a lot where they're spending it.
There's a rumot technology, so Pallenteer CEO Alex cart Sequoia's leader that of Boda venture capitalist Vinod Kozla, that among the Silicon Valley heavyweights, you're traveling to Washington this week for a summit on the role of AI and escalating competition between.
The US and China.
Now the Hill and the Valley Forum, as it's called, is sponsored by a group of vcs including Peter tielback to Founders Fund that seems to be the second iteration head and still gets.
I've got some deja vu. I'm pretty sure we've done that one before. Let's stick in the world of private markets and vents capital. Renegade Partners, an early stage venture firm, just announced the close of it's fun Too with one hundred and twenty eight million dollars, bringing the total assets under management to two hundred and twenty eight million dollars. It's like to say, we're joined by Renegade Partners co founder and managing director Razan win Sec.
Welcome. You are going to.
Invest in what you're calling durable technology companies. What is a durable technology company?
Hied?
Thank you so much for having me. So when we think about what is a durable company, we're actually looking at, you know, what are markets that actually really matter here? What are markets that are large and still relatively untouched
by technology that can support really large outcomes? You know, I think over the past few years, we've seen a lot of you know, software selling to software software selling to startups, and those companies have frankly like evaporated in this market turn And so one thing that we thought about a lot in our fund one, and we're thinking
even more about in Fund two. Or what are those markets that actually really drive like meaningful parts of GDP and can actually move beyond you know, trends in venture capital and become lasting companies.
So what is the secret source?
So speak like, how is it that your position to identify a company that fits that profile? And you can go to your LPs and say, we're pretty confident that this fits the thesis.
Yeah, you know, so we're generalists. We're very like sector agnostic, stage specific, but we like to kind of look at the market very broadly. So for instance, in our find one, we have companies like Aerospace Intelligence that sells into aerospace and defense, COPA Automation selling into PLC right into factories. So thinking about you know, on shoring and digital transformation.
There companies like Auxiliar selling into biotech FP and A a great way to get beta access to the beta of that market without actually investing in a molecular a therapeutic.
So we really try to.
Think kind of big tops down and look for great companies that are going after big problems in those faces.
Relatively competitive still in the earliest stages of VC. What do you do that makes you stand out? Rozan, how do you manage to be supporting some of these founders which increasingly to to us about bun out about worries about mental health issues.
I know it is, Caroline, You're completely right, Like it is still very competitive there, even though the market feels softer than it did a couple of years ago. I mean, as we think about Renegade and like what we can offer, I always think about like, you know, you can't beat somebody else at their own games, So how do you play a game that they can't play? Right Like, we like to focus ourselves on being like a very bespoke boutique firm where founders get to work directly with the
founders themselves. Right Like, if you are a founder led business and you're sitting on your board, you don't want an employee sitting next to you, you want another founder sitting next to you.
Uh.
We have really great alignment that way, right Like, we don't have a story about job security or you know around partnership dynamics because we all in the firm as well. We only make twenty investments per fund. That means, you know, only six or seven deals per year, and so we're really spending a lot of time with each and every company and you know, helping them where they need help and getting out of the way where they don't. We also have a great operating practice where we focus on
you know, people and team. It's led by our incredible operating partner, a woman named Susan Albyn and and she really helps our companies think about team organs, team organ design, structure, compensation, building the hiring and firing machine. And often those are the things that are keeping early stage CEOs up at night because we kind of assume that they know how to build and run a team when often this is their first time.
Yeah, we assume that they can be leaders and they get go.
I'm interested those as to how you're helping those leaders and others within those startups to be able to pivot if they on an AI first business right now?
Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I think there's a blessing and a curse today today you're being an
AI first business. We've seen a lot of companies that are just frankly a thin wrapper on type of open AI and those businesses are not defensible, you know, I think really first and foremost, like you have to be thinking about what is actually driving value for your customer, what's actually driving OURI, what they're actually going to pay for after like you know, the AI innovation budgets dry up, and so frankly, you know, every company is going to
be an AI company. It's just like every company today is a cloud company. We don't invest in companies because theyre cloud companies. Every company is a cloud company. AI is going to be the same way, right, So what are those products and services that AI can actually supercharge, that can do you know, different things than just a great SaaS business that's putting.
AI into their product.
You heard the story reported at the top of the segment. Yeah, some of your industry colleagues Pizza Teel then d Coosa going to d C. Do you think it's the job of vcs to do that?
You know, I think it's important that are like the Silicon Valley is well represented on the Hill because frankly, what happens here has a massive impact in the US and in the world, you know, the world in total, and you know, I do think there is a role for it. You know, we have to remember like incentives drive behavior, so you have to think about what is everyone's incentive as you know, regardless of what they're doing.
But I think it's important that we're thinking about AI, you know, at the cutting edge at the federal level.
Renegay Partners co founder managing director as Sam Winset.
Great to have you on the program. Thank you.
It's the latest episode of The Circuit and Bloomberg Originals hosts and executive producer em Andy Chang. She sat down with the GM CEO Mary Burrow to discuss well why she's continuing to bet.
Big on electric vehicles and autonomous driving particulous.
We're still as an industry, we're in the early days. I think what we're still seeing is battery, battery chemistry, battery technology is still expensive, and because the vehicle's already a very expensive purchase for consumers, you know, it's getting continuing to get costs down while we continue to improve the technology. It almost feels like hype is slowing down. Do you feel like you're battling that like a sentiment?
You know shift as well. I think it was overhyped and now it's probably under hyped and the truth is somewhere in the middle. But you know, again, yes growth has slowed, but it's still growing. You scaled back some other EV targets, mainly because of the battery manufacturing issues,
Like why is that still such a challenge. We were making something new and I grew up in manufacturing, so I feel like we do have a lot of manufacturing expertise, but I think we took for granted some of the newer processes and we will not do that again.
Yeah.
Elon Musk has mocked traditional automakers for how long it took come to get into Eb's Was he right about that? You know, if I had a do over, I would have even though we were moving, I would have accelerated the pace. You know, Hindsight's twenty twenty Tesla stock is up more than thirteen hundred percent in the last ten years. GM is up like twelve thirteen percent. You have met or beat expectations thirty five out of last thirty six quarters.
So when you look at the stock, does it ever piss you off?
Yeah?
It does, I mean because I but but again, I can get mad about it, and I can be upset and up frustrated, and believe me, I have those moments. You know, at the end, it's our responsibility. You can't go home and have a pity party.
Watch The Circuit with Emily Chang tonight at six pm easton in New York on Bloomberg Television, or stream at eight pm E.
On Bloomberg Originals. Let's stick with.
GM, The company's eyeing billions in digital revenues with an alternative to Apple's car Play, which has become the default home screen of the center console and vehicles ranging from Ford's to Ferrari's GM's platform called Altifi was rolled out, but not without a few hiccups. Joining us now is the author of that terrific deep dive Bloomberg's Dave as well, which out of Detroit. You paint the picture of Michael Wardrum who's picked up this beautiful sixty two thousand dollars
Chevy Blazer EV. He's so proud of it, and he sits in the cockpit, in the driver's seat, no Apple car play, And therein lies the strategy from GM.
That's right. They want to pull people into their cars. And actually, I've driven the Blazer Rev. It is quite a good vehicle. Waldron's assessment is right. But they're making this gamble that people will like the cars get in, and that they can overcome this consumer inertia and just pull people away from CarPlay, and they're better Bely, this CarPlay will project what your phone does, which is music, messaging, podcasts, that sort of thing. But they can do so much
more with their own internal system. I like how the head software guy in an interview with me put it from Rivian said, we don't want our infotainment system in a arriva and to be the same thing that's in every rental car, and GM is taking the same approach with this, but that still means you have to execute a better system than Apple has, and so far GM's
had a tough time with that. The new system since they brought it back, has had no issues since they started selling it again in March, but it was a very rough start for them. And even after that, if they can build it well, if they can keep the software from being buggy, they're still going to have to get consumers to decide that they don't need CarPlay, and that can be a tough marketing challenge.
Tough marketing challenge, but a lot to be rewarded for when it comes to digital revenue in the future. We can see why they're trying to tussele it out with Apple. David Welch, it's a great deep dive. Please go read it. GMI billions in digital revenue with CarPlay alternative.
Meanwhile, look, that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology.
We've had CEO conversations, we've deep dived into the earnings, and there's.
More to come in Yeah, and you forget that we have more CEOs coming up twenty four hours time in the show cloudcom reports tonight, then you've got Apple Thursday. There is so much more still to come recap.
This show, though, is a good one.
On the podcast, Apple, Spotify, and iHeart and of course the pod goes onto all the Bloomberg platforms as well. Thanks everyone for tuning in from San Francisco and New York City.
This is Bloomberg Technology.
