Bed Bath and Beyond Drops, Better and Palantir Team Up

against multi family housing coming to their neighborhood, including Mark Andreason. Yes, the investor who just gave controversial we Work founder Adam Newman a huge check to re envision well rental housing and last year was the most lavish on record for executive chex by almost any measure. More than thirty public company executives were paid a hundred million dollars according to the Bloomberg Pay Index. We will dig in well, let's get back to that bed Bath and Beyond stock, the

latest meme stock target sliding. Activist investor Ryan Cohen first sparked this frenzy when his firm r C Ventures disclosed a nine percent stake back in March and called for a sale of the company shares have plunged now that Cohen has officially taken a steak to zero. I want to bring in Bloomberg's John Edwards for more on this. John, what sort of intel do we have on why Ryan Cohen sold out here? Well, we haven't heard from him directly yet, but it looks like he's just lost patients

with this, uh, this struggling retailer. You know, he came in uh you know back in the spring, uh in March, thinking that he could really affect a turnaround here. Uh, and it looks like he has lost patients with that and bailed out. You know. He uh, he made a lot of changes. You know, he brought in three independent directors. Then in June, um, you know, as that patients started wearing thin, Uh, he uh sort of backed the outster

of the CEO, Mark Tritton. Uh. And um, you know they thought then, was that Cohen thought that, you know, Bed Bath and Beyond should sell it's uh, either sell it self entirely or sell it's bye bye baby unit, which is doing better than the rest of the chain.

But it looks like he is just run out of patients, and bed Bath and Beyond is run out of time with him at least welcome through the timeline because obviously earlier in the day there was this filing from our c ventures they might sell then we learn, uh, they have officially sold out. Is there any potential for regulatory scrutiny? He uh, you know, some uh, some shareholders have made some noise about you know, filing complaint. It's about the

way that that Cohen has handled this, you know. He uh again came into the stock with a lot of fanfare, and then uh, you know, there was that filing that was made officially on on Tuesday, but disclosed yesterday that they were thinking about getting out of their entire steak, and then of course the new filing that they have

indeed taking their steak down to zero. So a lot of these retail investors who piled into the stock are certainly upset with Cohen at this point, and some might be looking to take action, but it's unclear if if he's actually done anything you know wrong, per sect. All right, we will keep following that blue bus. John Edwards, thank you for that update. Meantime, billionaires living in one of the wealthiest hip codes in the world are pushing back

on plans for more housing. Top investors and executives from Apple, Facebook, Google and more. I want to stop all Fornia from allowing businesses and multi family housing in Atherton. One of the most vocal is none other than Mark and Reason, Bloomberg's Ellen here. He wrote about the pushback in Bloomberg Business Week, So talk to us about what's going on here.

So there was just this interesting moment where public comment in the town of Atherton was put online and people discovered that, um, you know, even though Mark and Reason has been very vocal publicly about the need for states like California to build more in order to fix its housing shortage, turns out when people propose um changes in the town of Atherton that would allow for multi family housing,

the neighbors get very upset. And Atherton is the richest place in America, and that's why the people who are upset tend to be some of the biggest names in tex So. As you mentioned exacts and vcs. So let's we actually have the letter from Mark and Reason. He says he's writing to communicate his immense objection to the creation of multifamily housing in Atherton. Please immediately remove all

multi family housing. This is in all caps overlay zoning projects. Um, they will massively decrease our home values and immensely increase the noise, pollution and traffic. And you referenced a blog post that he wrote a couple of years ago that it's time to build, uh, indicating you know it was it was you know, pretty big picture, not a lot of details about what he was saying, it was time

to build and how um. But this, of course on the back of a very big check he wrote to the controversial founder of We Work, Adam Newman, to re envision housing. There's some irony. I think it's just the classic Nimby mentality, which stands for, as you probably know, not in my backyard. Of course we want housing, but as soon as it's proposed an Atherton, which many people you know, Atherton is just a strange town. It's extremely wealthy.

All the big names lived there, and they like it because it's private, it because it's really not dense, and um, you know, they're surrounded by other very rich neighbors and so there's a strong um, well, of course we like housing, but not you know, not where I live. Um. And I think that's just a very common attitude, and it's funny to see it show up here. And it's not just Mark Andreason you know, a number of different folks

posting here. You you singled head to quote from Anthony Nodo, the CEO so FI, talking about how his family has had to get private security because crime is on the rise. Can we substantiate that? No? I mean, I think it's just it's bringing up all these fears that people have about increased housing, which honestly, in my opinion or you tend to be fear around change like they like the

town the way it is. You know, one of the quotes in the story is you know Atherton as we know it will come to an end, and only you are to blame for that speaking to the town council's given that you reported so heavily on we Work and

Adam Newman, what's your take on this? Andreason check. I think that they want to send a really strong, a little trollish signal saying like, hey, we're not afraid to back founders who have had um you know a lot of bad press around some of their back their past examples, and that we really believe in kind of the iconoclastic, brash person at the head of a company. Um, whether that's going to end up being a smart check or not,

I guess we'll see. You know, if you look at we work, the people who really got screwed as investors are the ones who came in later, not the ones who wrote some the earliest checks. So Andrews and may have actually made a pretty smart move here back in Newman early, but it all remains to be seen. We shall see, maybe fought or for another very long podcast someday. Okay, Ellen Hwitt, thank you. The U s housing market is

quickly changing. Homes are more unaffordable than they've been in forty years, and home sales have fallen for six month straight. The home buyer Affordability Index is at its lowest point since, which means, in theory, more than half of families can get on the property ladder. Still, the online housing business is growing, and better dot Com wants a leg up on that ladder, partnering with Palenteer to create a new mortgage platform that will into leverage data to help borrowers

qualify for better loans. Here to discuss better CEO Vishall Guard Vishall, thank you so much for joining us. So how will this marketplace work exactly? Well, thank you so much, Emily.

We have thirty two major institutional investors that are on our platform today that actively buy loans, and what this will prolibrate them to do is to use far more granular data to UH make loans to UH c r A eligible loans, UH Low moderate income eligible loans, loans for homes with solar things that have traditionally been very difficult for mortgage investors to provide discounts on or to make more affordable. Yeah, we're heading into what could be

a very prolonged economic downturn. We're already in it. You know, this is never a good time for the housing market. Why do you think now is the right time to launch this? I think affordability matters more than ever before. And we've got three trillion dollars of capital that's been raised for e s G funds and most of it

never makes its way into the mortgage market. So by creating Bloomberg for Loans effectively working with Palenteer, what we're going to be able to do is help families that are in sectors that are favored by E s G investors actively connect with those investors and effectively be able

to lower their cost of home ownership. Now, what are the challenges that you think you're going to face in trying to build out a home mortgage business at a time when the housing market is slumping, if not crashing. I think the demand for houses is down, but there's still millions of homes being bought and sold every year in the United States today, and better dot Com has

grown fairly rapidly. We've grown from nothing to doing almost a hundred billion of mortgages UH this year and um so while the market is down, we are still less than one percent market share, and we hope that we can continue to grow and by making housing more equitable, we can actually grow addressing one of the issues that most homeowners face today. You've got a huge capital infusion from soft Bank. Is this you putting that capital to work? And how else should we see you putting the money

to work? Yeah, we we did get a huge capital infusion from soft Bank, and making homeownership more equitable while driving our business is the most wonderful type of innovation that we can hope for. And so this is at the cutting edge. By partnering with Palentteer what we were going to do in five to ten years. We've been able to leverage our soft bank capital to actually make live this year. Now I have to ask you about this. The macro picture, of course, has been challenging for a

lot of companies. In the last year, you've had layoffs, laid off nine of the company, nine people you laid off via Zoom than an additional three thousand. I know you've got a lot of heat for that. When you look back on that, what would you have done differently? What do you think went wrong? I think we did a lot of things that were very wrong. Um, I should have handled the layoffs with more care and more empathy.

We were very lucky that because of the fact that we're a digital mortgage company and a digital home ownership platform, we were actually able to see the downturn in the market that is evidence today and that you see many many other mortgage originators laying off thousands of people. We were able to see that as early as late last year, and so we've been able to get ahead of it.

We've been able to downsize to a burn. We've taken over a billion dollars in expense line items out of the company's cost structure, and we're using that savings to now innovate and continue to serve customers. So what are you doing differently now to manage costs, to manage hiring, to make sure you've learned from those lessons and something

like that doesn't happen again. I think managing the up and down cycle of the cyclicality of the mortgage industry is something that's new to us, where again only a six year old company, and there are companies in the mortgage space that have been able to manage that far

superior to us. So what we're keeping our pulse on is uh customer demand, customer demands specifically for new products, and legging into growing those new ducts, not at the rate that we did in two thousand twenty, where we grew almost but slowly, legging into customer demand, rather than what in startup whend you get taught to do with just a blitzcale. You're also being sued by one of your former executives, Sarah Pierce, alleging you misled investors in

the process of trying to go public Vias back. She's also alleging retaliation. The SEC is now looking into this what's your response to all of this. I think it's very hard for me to comment on matters that are an active litigation or subject of an SEC inquiry. All I can say is every day we wake up and we find gratification in helping make homeownership cheaper, faster and better for more and more American families. And the more we can keep on doing that, the better the world

will be. You're also trying to take the company public. I've leaves still Vias back and I know there's a deadline coming up for that. Is that still the plan? And um, you know, especially given that this back market has fizzled, how are you thinking about whether now is really the right time. We're evaluating all of our opportunities,

and again I can't comment publicly on it. All I can say is that we remain committed to achieving greater capitalization so that we can have the funding to serve our customers, and we're open to all the different options out there uh than enable us to continue to be really well capitalized. So I'm curious for your thoughts on this.

We've been talking a lot about the funding that Adam Newman, the founder of we Work, just received the biggest check ever from Andres and Horowitz to you know, potentially revolutionize residential real estate, or at least that's what Mark and Reason seems to be hoping for according to his blog post, What do you make of that funding? I am so happy that the venture capital community and entrepreneurs are still

interested in revolutionizing the residential real estate market. Here we have a forty trillion dollar industry where consumers still pay six percent to buy or sell a home, where consumers spend over ten percent of the value of their home just transacting, where it takes sixty days to transact, and so there are so many aspects of the residential real estate market that need to be optimized and made work

for consumers rather than brokers or transactional intermediaries. And uh, we really welcome the fact that there's going to be more innovation and more capital and more innovation in the space, even if it's going to Adam Newman, who at the very least is a very controversial founder. Adam Newman is a controversial founder, but he did revolutionize the idea of office space. Many of our offices are in we Work space.

And so while I can't speak to any and all of the opinions that are out there in the market about him. We are delighted users of the product that he helped create, and so if he can do the same for residential real estate, good luck. All right, Ballgard, CEO of Better, We'll be watching your marketplace and following this new partnership with Palenteer. Thank you for joining us. Much more coming up right after this break, This is Bloomberg.

Qualcom is taking another run at the market for server chips in an effort to decrease its reliance on smartphones. The company taking customers for a product standing from last year's purchase of the chip startup Nuvia This according to Bloomberg sources. They also say Amazon's a WS is one of the biggest server chip buyers and has agreed to

take a look at what Qualcom has to offer. China is lashing out at a fifty two billion dollar program to expand American manufacturing of semiconductors and industry associations, as it contains elements that violate fair market principles and targets China's own efforts to build a chipmaking industry. The legislation prohibits companies that receive funding from expanding production of advanced chips in China, and it's the biggest annual television deal

ever for a college sports conference. The Big Ten has reached an agreement on a seven year contract with Fox, CBS, and NBC. According to The Wall Street Journal, this is worth about seven and a half billion dollars. The price of college football broadcast rights has soared, and no one's cashed in more than the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference, both of which are expanding to sixteen teams. Welcome back

to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. Incredible Health, a career marketplace for permanent healthcare workers, announced eighty million dollars in series be funding the company's valuation now one point six five billion Unicorn status. This at a time when the nursing shortage is still a huge problem in the United States, a recent report from McKenzie estimating the US will be short at least two thousand registered nurses.

Let's bring in Dr emmon abo zid Now for more on this year's the CEO and co founder of Incredible Health. Doctor obviously great to have you back here on the show. You talked about the nursing short shortage right here earlier in the pandemic, what's that shortage like now? So the big difference has happened in the last twelve months is that this is a this is a workforce that is overworked,

burnt out, and experiencing excessive streuss. Our most recent third annual report on nurses in the US showed that one third nurses are considering leaving the profession permanently by the end of the year. So how has the pandemic changed, you know, potentially this industry for the longer term. I mean, are we expecting the impact of the pandemic to impact

the availability of nurses for years to come? Absolutely? I mean even before the pandemic, our demand for healthcare as a country kept was increasing because our population is aging. But pandemics are certainly demand shocks on the system that put more constraints on the more strain on the health care system, and and the need for even more healthcare

workers to to fill that demand. The CDC just announced a huge overhaul of the agency, acknowledging mistakes they made during the pandemic, acknowledging a need to be more nimble and respond more quickly. What do you think went wrong there.

I mean, there was certainly some challenges with how the CDC collaborated and and the way the community they communicated with the public, which you know, they have some responsibility in terms of of how intense and challenging COVID became in the US, and that you know, in effect had affected the healthcare workforce as well. They were massively overworked.

Uh and uh and hopefully with these changes when there, when and if there is a future pandemic, uh, you know, it won't affect or decimate the work the healthcare workforce as much as this last pandemic. To what are the implications for the doctor in hospital marketplace? What are you

seeing on your platform? Um? You know what what we're seeing is, you know, you know, we now work with over six hundred hospitals and health systems across twenty five states, including very large ones like Kaiser, Permanente and hc A Healthcare and academic medical centers as well like Johns Hopkins and Cedar Sinai and others. And uh, you know, every single one of these hospital executives that we're working with

is dealing with this problem. Uh. They are, uh, they are tackling you know, shortages and and understaffing on on all their nursing units. There's even thirty of the employers on our platform are now using US for new graduate nurses, which was not the case before the pandemic. So this, this challenge is continuing to increase and labor expenses and labor costs is negatively impacting hospital financials as well. How do you hope Incredible Health will help bridge some of

these gaps? So you know, our our focus is on ensuring that nurses are able to get the best permanent roles, but we also invest heavily in features and tools for nurses that are completely free. We offer free continuing education

for nurses, free salary estimators. We even have an advice platform for nurses built into our apps, and we want to continue investing in that, including skill growth, educational scholarships, relocation support in order to make sure that the Incredible Health is a place where nurses can manage their careers instead of only the place where they find their permanent job. Meantime, the US is dealing with another some would call it a crisis, the ROVERSUS Way decision from the Supreme Court. Um,

is this at all impacting your platform? And the workers on your platform, especially those working in states where abortion is restricted. So it's not affecting the incredible health platform, but that it does affect the nursing workforce in a couple of different ways. First, there's going to be an increase in volume of patients because when you restrict you know that that care, you know you're gonna have more topic and more more life threatening pregnancies. Um. So that

that increases the workload on the healthcare workers. Secondly, you know, they have to consider the legal ramifications when they are supporting and counseling patients, and so they have to be very aware of their code of ethics as well as the legal regulations that they have to follow in their state and in their hospital. Uh. And then finally, you know it will continue. You know, the vaccine band mandates were extremely um uh controversial, and so is Rob Wade,

even among healthcare workers. So that you'll have healthcare workers that are going to be on both sides of this of this discussion, which creates more you know, angst than and the debate and discussion and intensity in the workplace. So how are you expecting this to play out over the next several years? Where you know, this could potentially happen in more states, you know, talking about a bottleneck potentially already. You know where are we three years from now?

I mean we are. Every report we read, every projection shows that the shortage of workers is projected to continue unless we can do more to support this workforce and grow this workforce. The one positive that came out of the pandemic, and and you know the ce CE changes even will be great, Wade. Is it put more emphasis on the importance of the healthcare workforce and how we need it to deliver care? All right? M on opposide,

incredible health CEO and co founder. Good to have you back here on the show, Um, and appreciate all your insights there. Meantime, tech stocks are staging a comeback, generally after a brutal start to the year. The NASTAC one hundred was down a month go. Now it sounds se year to date. Joining me now, Miriam rivera co founder and CEO and managing director of OH Ventures, a seed

stage firm with two million dollars in assets under management. Um, how cautious Miriam, would you say you are right now

in this investing environment? Well, I've been in Silicon Valley since so, I've gone through many cycles here, and one of the things that tends to happen is that there's a bit of overreaction oftentimes when we have uh these big dips in the public stock markets as well as UM financings that have kind of become so large and have promoted growth at all costs, including profitability, and eventually the pendulum swings in the other direction, but it tends

to swing too far. And that's what we're seeing now as I understand it. Your firm actually made a record number of investments in the last quarter twenty investment I believe why is that, Well, we look at risk adjusted return, and while we have seen the risk go up the and we account for that in terms of how we make investment decisions and in our financial models that we

use to um power our process. What we see is that a lot of folks don't um They overreact to the news, They don't know where to actually um look at increasing the risk in their models, and oftentimes that generates uh re fear, just fear and makes people hold back capital at a time when actually it's a good

time to be investing. Because many people are sitting on the sidelines and not sure how to price, and our financial process really allows us to price at the seed stage very well and to encompass that additional risk in still trying to achieve the same technets probability weighted multiple that we look for in each investment. Well, let's talk about that pricing because it seems investors would be at an advantage right now. You know, we're hearing about flat rounds,

down rounds. You know obviously that we're seeing layoffs, there's talk of more laps. What's actually happening behind the scenes, um, you know, as these investments are continuing to be made. Those are many of the things that are actually happening You've described very well. But a lot of that is really happening at the later stages and venture where the pricing impact of what happens in the public capital markets

have a larger impact. What tends to happen UM in the earlier stages, such as seed, is that you don't see such large fluctuations and valuations UM as you have seen recently. Kind of towards the end of these cycles, where people are doing growth at all costs, you tend to have higher pricing at the seed stage, but not as much as at later stages, and so we do

see people doing more flat rounds um. We haven't seen a lot of down rounds um yet in our portfolio, but I do think that that is not an uncommon thing to happen. And these kind of holding the price constant right now often does help entrepreneurs to get additional

capital so they can weather these cycles. And these cycles tend to be, you know, less than a couple of years for the most part, so as long as they're well situated, it's not your price today, it's kind of where you think you can be two years from now in terms of the metrics and outcomes that your investors are going to be looking for at that stage. That's really important. Now. Very successful companies were founded during downturns.

The most recent downturn Airbnb, Slack, Instagram, Square, you go back to the eighties, Microsoft was founded during a downturn. How optimistic are you that you know one of these world changing companies is being founded right now. Well, I'd say that there are more of these world changing companies being founded today than ever before, and across more technology

sectors than ever before. So I'm very optimistic. I am a very long term investor and believe that technology stocks are a place where both individual investors and institutional investors should be because the wave of technology that is occurring now. In terms of the market sizes that are possible on the Internet, there are five billion users on the Internet. When I first started UM in as counsel on an I p O for an Internet company, there were thirty

nine million users. So these markets are vast. They've never been possible to access in this way before, and they're going to continue to be a dominant force in the economy moving forward. So curious, Miriam, what your thoughts are on Andrews and Harrows recently writing its biggest check ever to Adam Newman, obviously troversial founder of We Work. You know, there's been a lot of criticism of this. We also spoke to a founder earlier in the show who praised UM.

The decision by UM Andrews and Horowitz, what's your take. I'm always of two minds. One is I believe that people make mistakes, and I don't believe in canceling people. I also believe that we have really benefited UM as

a technology sector from some of the work of we work. Before, companies used to have fixed costs in terms of real estate space, and now more and more companies have a much more variable approach to what was really once a very large part of their cost curve, so that these kinds of innovations, UM, they do come with good and bad.

I remember in your book you talked about um kind of the pro topia and the culture of venture, and also entrepreneurship and Lolcan Valley, and I definitely have a lot of issues with that as well, but I also recognize when innovation has really changed how work gets done and where it gets done. Mary mrivera Ventures co founder and CEO, appreciate you stopping by. Okay, Next up, the Ethere merch finally coming. We've got all the details. Next, this is Bloombird time now for our crypto report, and

let's talk about the merge. The core developers working on the software upgrade of the Ethere and blockchain have now firmed up September as the likely official date. I want to bring in Bloomberg's Olga career for more on this. So, Olga, is this the last likely date? How likely is it it's actually gonna happen? On this date. I know there has been a bunch of dates thrown around in the past week or so. Last week we knew it would happen probably in September, but now we know it's going

to be probably September fifteenth. But this date could still change because Ethereum developers are basically looking to see how many computers are supporting the network. If the number of these computers declines rapidly, they might pull forward the date. So could still change. And what will change once the merge happens. So basically what will change is the power consumption of the Ethereum network. It will decline by more

than so. Today transactions from the network are ordered by computers cold miners that take up a lot of energy, and after this upgrade, it's going to be done differently, in a much more energy efficient way. What are the implications for other block chains. I think some of the older block chains that still use minors, still use this power hungry computers, might feel more pressure to switch to

something more environmentally friendly as well. But the fact is a lot of the newer block chains already use a sort of similar technologies to what Ethereum is moving to. So um I think we'll see more investments into this type of block chains. All right, well, uh, lots to continue to watch air. We will hone in on September.

Bloomberg's ago Curry thank you nine figure paychecks, once a rarity, are now proliferating, despite critics on Capitol Hill and beyond as the US was still grappling with the pandemic and new variants. One was in fact the most lavish year on record for executive compensation by almost any measure, which paid deals of more than a hundred million dollars in value according to the Bloomberg Pay Index, and the pack

is being led once again by Elon Musk. I want to bring in Bloomberg's Honors Melon for more on this. So Honors tell us who is getting these paychecks? Ellen and who else? It's Ellen, It's Tim Cook, It's the CEO Subibvian and Lucid. You have a couple of finance guys in there, Sprinkling, Brian Armstrong, a coin Base and um. The list looks quite similar as it has in past years. It's it's a lot of men and most of them tend to be white. There are a few women. This year.

There was one woman up there from Coti the Beauty. You know, I remember the days when Steve Jobs paid himself a dollar or something, but obviously I had a ton of equity in Apple. How on accedented is this? Well, it's interesting. I thought when I started covering executive pay a few years ago that you would almost we would start to see more of a shift to the one dollar CEO, because you have a lot of CEOs out there that are quite wealthy, especially with the ballmarket that

ran for so long. But instead it's almost been a shift in the opposite direction. And a lot of that really harks back to Elon Musk, who got the biggest pay package that has ever been granted to a company executive, in which he would earn tens of billions of dollars over the course of about a decade through a generous grant of stock options with very audacious goals attached to them.

What many companies did was to say, this looks really interesting, and they went out and they constructed similar pay packages for their CEOs. And that's what we're now seeing popping up here. And they're across corporate America, not just in tech, but also another another places too, and that's what's really driving this trend. It's interesting to see some of the names on this list. R J Scourge for example, the seeo of Rivian. I mean Rivian just got a car

on the road. Just how are companies justifying these numbers? So I should caveat these figures with saying that this is the figures that we published today, is what these pay packages were worth at the end of fiscale, when as we know, equity markets look quite differently than they do today. However, um we know that historically things have have tend to pan out pretty well for company executives or companies say with these packages, is that this is what we need to motivate our top guy or gal.

But it's most often a guy, and this is reflective of his or her skills and what other CEOs out there get paid. So a lot of it has to do really with what does the rest of the landscape look like. And that's why you get these sort of butterfly effects from Ellen gets a grant, then somebody else gets a grant, and then all of a sudden you have the domino effect. Whereas if you saw more a dollar CEOs, especially high profile CEOs, just taken back and not nothing more than I think you would see that

proliferate to to a different extent too. You just wrote a piece that crossed about Ryan Cohen that he made sixty eight million dollars on the sale of his bed, bath and beyond stake this week. Some people are not happy about it. We were talking about the potential for regulatory issues earlier. Um, you know, what do we know about kind of the timeline, um and why he did this. We don't know so much about why he did it.

We know that he started acquiring the stake back in January, he held it for about seven months, and then he he offloaded it this week, and it came on the heels of a bit of a rally in the stock after it was disclosed earlier this week that he had in fact held onto the mistake for for that long and that let's some talking twitter. Um, We're not really sure about the motives, but we do know that an quite a nice profit. All right, Well, I'm sure someone's

looking into that. Bloomberg Saunder's Melon, thank you as always for joining us. And that does it for this edition. Bloomberg Technology coming up tomorrow, we're gonna hear from Eric Fistria, Benchmark Capital, why he thinks Apple is skirting regulators busy with Amazon and Facebook. This is Bloomberg