From Mark Hard We're Innovation of Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlove.
I'm Caroline Hyde at Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York, and I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.
This is Bloomberg Technology coming up.
Full earnings coverage ahead, and we're going to be kicking off the show with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Plus later this hour we'll turn to ride sharing and sit down with the CEO of Lift, and.
We'll hear from Alphabet CEO so No a pitchy ahead of Google's developer conference. Io will break that down and discuss so much more throughout this hour, But first we turn our attention to what is happening more broadly on the markets. Maybe we look at this risk asset of choice to start bitcoin currently on the downside versus the US dollar, or it really shows risk appetite is waning at the moment. Ed, we've got a stronger dollar though, and more broadly, we've seen kind of lackluster moves on
the benchmarks. More broadly, I wonder if the director can bring up at the moment. What's happening when the Nasdaq more broadly and tex stocks have been underwater a little bit as we've pulled lower on some of the chip names in particular. Look at the Nasdaq basically trading flat. We're off by seven points. There's caution out there ahead of maybe some bond auctions to come.
We've seen the sell off in the bond market.
Yields as we've been seeing on the tenure just up about two three basis points. We've got a big flood of money coming with a supply of tenure debt coming on auction a little bit later.
How will that be taken down supply goes up? Of course, maybe a little bit of a sell off. But I'm showing a light.
And what's happening more broadly with the socks the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. Why is that lower when we've seen some real ramifications from that news that broke yesterday all regarding HUAWEIH once again limitations on the access to chips made here in the United States by Intel by Qualcom. We can dig into that story a little bit later, ed, but I want to show that actually we're bouncing off our loads when it comes to the socks. But what if you've got on the micro perspective.
Well, in the first instance, earnings, there's going to be a lot throughout the hour outside of earnings. But let's start there with the tail of two ride sharing apps, Uber and lyft Okay. Uber has a lot more to it than ride sharing, but in its quarter there was issues of seasonality. Regionally, it was a bit weaker and the stock is down pretty significantly. Then you have the little brother of ride sharing, Lyft, and its stock is higher.
It actually was pretty strong. You know. It wasn't just that gross bookings, which is the industry standard metric, was stronger than expected. They're also seeing kind of some bump in activity for the riders themselves, not just rider growth, but stickiness the amount they're using it. Then you have Rivian. Rivian's a difficult one. It's not really about in the moment,
it's about the future. Later in the hour, we hear again from the CEO Rjscarrange, and what I tried to get from him was a sense of like, is this really going to plan? Then there's Reddit redd its debut earnings. We want to get to that stock and welcome our Bloomberg TV and radio audiences worldwide. Read it out with its first earnings report as a public company, shares markedly
higher seven percent. Let's bring in Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and Steve the quarter gone forty eight cent top line growth. You're doing well. The ad environment seems really good. But I actually want to start with the next big thing, and that seems to be the user economy. That seems to be your focus. Tell me about the user economy strategy.
So, good morning, thanks for having me.
So, the user economy is the family of products and features that we're building to facilitate transactions between users on the platform, so user to user, gifting user to use their subscription, user community, subscriptions, things like that. We think there's a ton of potential here. One of our sayings that Reddit is the only thing that scales with the
users is users. And so look, the ads business is great and can scale pretty much infinitely from our point of view, but we'd love to have another business model to sit alongside it, and that's what the user economy.
Is, Steve alongside.
Also, the ad business that you say can infinitely scale has been AI in the selling of data and licensing to some of those big businesses that are creating large language models based upon the data that you license, Google being.
One of them.
How infinite is that revenue stream? Because once the models are trained, how necessary is it to keep on licensing.
So I think there's a couple of ways to look at this.
First, the potential value here is I think quite large, and between us and other folks in the market, we're actually still developing that. You know, we're finding increasingly folks coming to Reddit. And I think what we're seeing overall big picture is in the AI era, where increasingly content online is written by machines, there's this increasing premium content perspectives, conversation that comes from real humans, and that's what Reddit provides.
So so far we've done one kind of major content licensing deal with Google, but we're talking to others as well. But your question about is is it a one time thing or ongoing? I think what's really important here is folks want real time access to up to date information, conversation perspectives.
Right.
Imagine a search engine that stopped indexing in twenty twenty one.
It wouldn't be very helpful. And so I think that real time feed is really important.
Steve, you took the interesting step to ask redditors and particularly redditors who investors in the IPO, to submit questions, and those some of which you answered on the call and some of which you will follow up in video form. We're showing one of them now, which is what is the justification for having one billion dollars in working capital? I want to take that question and apply it to AI. You know, data licensing is a revenue generation tool for you.
But on the technology side, might we see some m and A that answers that question from your redditor community, but also helps us understand a bit more like what are you guys going to do to increase competence to increase the technology offering on AI?
Sure, we'll look.
Our first priority with the cash is to invest in the business, so to continue to develop the core Reddit product, the user economy, which we discussed, the developer platform, our AI efforts, all of those things.
Our second priority would be M and A.
And so you know, we're always I think looking in the market for teams and technology that can really kind of help advance our initiatives. And right as you allude to, I think there's just a tremendous opportunity in AI in search, both to make our core product better and potentially to expand it as well.
Let's talk about expansion and particularly internationally, Steve, because there's much talk about how you're basically translating able to bring what is all the reviews, the content, the discussion groups, not just to those that are writing and speaking in the English language, but in French and European countries.
How is this.
Likely to be enabled by AI but also add to the scale of international growth.
Well, this is really exciting.
Like, not that long ago, we didn't have the capability of translating our content at human quality, but with today's large language models, we can do that, and so we can translate our what is today our mostly English corpus into just about any language. And so we're doing that in French right now and testing that in France, and it's going very well, and so almost immediately French speakers can see the entire Reddit corpus or consume their entire
redit corpus in English. And a lot of reddits content is universal, right, it's just people talking about life. But even the content that is maybe regionally specific to America, I think it's still really interesting to read and vice versa.
And so I'm really excited.
At this idea that we can fulfill the promise of the Internet, which is allow people around the world, in different countries and different cultures to communicate in their native language.
For our Bloomberg television and radio audience worldwide, we're speaking to the Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and Steve things are going well right now. It seems one of the technology changes at the start of this year and even before that, was that Google started applying its work in large language models and AI to its search engine. And there is a school of thoughts that Reddit was a beneficiary of that that just within search, Reddit becomes more commonplace up
the results that are given. Can you give us any sort of granularity on how that's helping you with growing the redditor base and keeping the redditor base.
Well, let's just take a step up for a second.
Reddit has what people want, right, People have questions.
They often go to Google with questions. Reddit has the best answers on the Internet.
They want advice, they want information, they want a sense of community and belonging. These are the things that Reddit provides and search engines like Google ten years ago, last year, today, tomorrow, help people find that content on Reddit. They're looking for those answers, they're looking for those communities they're looking for.
And so I think I look at this as a natural evolution.
Search engines are getting smarter, they're getting better, they're getting more effective, which means they're getting more effective at helping users find what they're looking for on Reddit, which of course benefits our platform and our business. And so I think these are all I think welcome evolutions. But Reddit it's been a net beneficiary of search for a long time, and I expect that to continue.
How much have you been a net beneficiary of going public, Steve? How much did the IPO help draw people to the platform. How much was it a pr event do you think and actually boosted some of the community there.
Well, look, I'm sure that's an aspect to it.
You know, it's hard to say and that you know, Reddit primarily grows through word of mouth anyway. You know, we don't really do consumer marketing, and so I think anytime we're in the news that helps in the IPO with a lot of news. But look, the reason I was most excited about the IPO is that we are able to.
Include our users as investors.
Our users have this deep sense of ownership over Reddit, right they create the communities, they create the culture, they create all of the content, and for them to have the opportunity to be actual owners. That was our dream and that was one of the main reasons we went public in the first place. So that's actually what I'm most excited about.
Steve is a kind of returning founder. CEO of Date, what's your one personal goal for this year, it's something you want to achieve.
Well, we mapped out two of them.
We got the company public and I had my second kid, and so for the rest of this year, I want to deliver on some of the product initiatives that I've been very excited about, so developer platform, the user economy, the machine translation that we've discussed. These are all things I think in the day to day building of Reddit that I'm very excited about.
Steve, congrats, I'm the second kid. Reddit CEO, Steve Hoffman, I try to have you with us.
Thank you.
Now, coming up, we'll hear from the Alphabet CEO Sin of hitsheie his vision for the future of artificial intelligence as next and.
What are you watching.
We continue with the earning story and we take a look at shares of a firm lower again eight and a half percent. It's really been a season of if you don't beat expectations or your prior guidance, you go down lower. Continued about product differentiation, continue discussion about the rate environment with the firm as well, or continue the earnings coverage. Much more ahead. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Let's talk open AI because it's developing a feature for chatchbt that can search the web and cite sources and its results according to a source.
Now, the future, we would all allow users.
To ask chatchbt a question and receive answers that use details from the web with citations to sources.
Just think Wikipedia entries and blog posts.
Now, this could potentially be competing head on with AI search, Startle Perplexity, and of course Google Search. And speaking of which, Google and Alphabet CEO so on a pitch I sat down exclusively with blubgo Original's host Emily Tang to discuss the future of search and accelerating work on Google's AI models. Here's what he had to say on some of the growing pains of Google searchers adaptation to the AI revolution.
Anytime there's a transition, you get an explosion of new content, and AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as the challenge, and I actually think here there'll be people will struggle to do that right.
So doing that well is what.
Will define a high quality product, and I think it's going to be the heart of what makes so successful.
You make a ton of money on ads next to the links generated by searchers if a chatbot is giving you answers and not links, and maybe more answers in links. Sometimes are we in the midst of an assault on Google's business model.
So we've always found people want choices, including in commercial area, and that's a fundamental need and I think we've always been able to balance it. As we are rolling out Aiovius and Search, we've been experimenting with ads and the data we see shows that those fundamental principles will hold true during the space as well.
The images that Gemini initially generated of Asian Nazis and black Founding fathers, you said that was unacceptable.
If you look at any pictures of the.
Founding fathers, you're seeing old white men. People are calling this Woki and it's not just happening here, It's happening across the industry. How did the model generate something that it never saw.
We are a company which serves products uses around the world, and there are generic questions. For example, people come and say show me images of school teachers or doctors or nurses. We have people asking discovery from Indonesia or the US. How do you get it right for our global user base. Obviously the mistake was that we over applied, including case the spirit should have never applied.
So that was the bug.
And you know, you know, so we got it wrong.
That was alphabet CEO Cunda Pinschai and Bloomberg Original's host Emily Changi. You can catch the full interview from the circuit tonight at six pm Eastern on Bloomberg Television.
Let's just check in on the shares of Shopify because they're down the most on record US after the company forecasts lower profit margins as I can induce to really be boosting the marketing spend now. The comments company also reported a surprise net loss in the first quarter after the sale of its logistics business last year. Joining us
now to break down the results. Harley Finkelstein, Shopify president, and Harley I remember speaking with Toby look At, the CEO of the business once and he said that anytime anyone talks about the share price in the office, while everyone has to be bought donuts, I have a fee that might be some downuts.
To day specific specific.
Yeah, Harley, I mean, what what does it feel like when you see the shares down that hard?
Oh?
I'm I mean we've always managed the business in a long term way. What we actually and what you're seeing at Shopify right now is we got came on the show. Actually, I think it's wo to end about this new shape of Shopify is unlocking our potential. We're helping all different types of merchants take more and more of our products. But let's just kind of break down. You know, how the quarter went. I mean, we generate almost two billion dollars of revenue. That was a twenty three percent year
a year. We had a billion dollars a gross profit and very important in this particular macro environment, Carolyn. We had free cashual of two hundred and thirty two million dollars for the quarter. In fact, free cash margin doubled from Q one of last year, so you're seeing I think one of the best versions of Shopify with a ton of opportunities, whether it's enterprise, physical, retail, international B to B. We are very excited about about what we
did in Q one. We're very excited about the future of this company.
Hally. The anxiety from investors about fitting margins, right, I think we all set that as the baseline. One thing you've been focused on is marketing, right, which accounts for that in part? Give me some specifics. What kind of marketing are you doing? And I think you've also said it's going to pay off in about eighteen months time. How do you know the marketing spend will pay off? Well?
First of all, we think about marketing and the same way we think about building products, build the best solutions, build the best internal tools to drive decision through data, and the results are evident.
I'll go with them in a second.
But one of the things that we really believe is that shopi line needs to be agile and at times countercyclical. When we see opportunities for us to take advantage and gain more market share across any of our core products, We're going to do that. But the key for us is striking a balance between top line growth, operational leverage,
and profitability. And I think what differentiates Shopify from a growth perspective or marketing perspective to user words is that the way we interpret data, the way we experiment, actually helps us to win.
And we have multiple drivers of this growth.
But the best proof I can give you is we drove a nearly one hundred and thirty percent increase immersion ADS within one of our key marketing channels, sure you know, the one from Q four to Q one, while still remaining squarely within our payback Guardrails. So when we see the people that other companies are pulling back and we think we can get a return on our AD spend, that again is within Guardrails has the right CAC to L two ratios that in twenty twenty five you will
see the growth from these efforts. We're going to take those and back to sort of the question Caroline open with, that's the reason why we don't really care about the day to day stock fluctuation. We care about over the long run, does a stock price reflect the real value of the company. And Shopify is becoming the global retail company.
Next month, you're going to have a big event, and I think I'm right in saying it's the first in person event at least since before the pandemic twenty eighteen. That is a marketing expense, but there must be a reason for doing.
It, certainly.
I mean, we are thriving in this remote first environment and we see immense value in getting people together as well. So some at SHOPIAY Summit is accommodation of multiple events that brings together our team, our partners, our top one thousand developers from all all over the world. And you know, we think that it's this remote first philosophy and working model allows us to recruit the best of the brands
from all over the world. But a key component of this digital bide design approach is also supplementing it with a few real life events, and we have not done We've not brought the entire company together in person, and since like twenty eighteen, we think it's important to do so, especially because we can also get our developers, our third party developers in the room, explain to them all the
opportunities of how they should be building on Shopify. Then they go back home and they and they continue their businesses as well. So it's an important event for us, and we're excited by the Shopfy summit, and.
I can imagine that it's important for morale, particularly after layoffs.
Holly, are layoffs done now?
We have no plans to do any additional layoffs at this point. What you are seeing, Caroline is this new shape of Shopify. We have been able to grow top line, We've been able to grow bottom line. We're making serious investments in the future of our business now we're doing so with a relatively flat headcount. In fact, if you go back three quarters, headcount has not grown that much.
What matters to us is the talent density of the company, and this is the best talent team, the best version of Shopify I've seen in my fifteen years of being here.
And you've talked about how this is. You're being countercyclical right now. Just tell us how countercyclical. How many headwinds are you experiencing in the world of the consumer right now?
How reticent are they to shop?
Yeah, I mean it's really important, obviously because the state of the consumers as obviously, and the whole macro trend is something that everyone's thinking about. First of all, we see the consumer actually remaining quite resilient. What we do see, in particular is that these consumers are buying from brands they love and feel ineffinity to. And all those brands think of the brands you love are all on Shopify.
But a new area of business are those less discretionary brands like Nesley or Hines or bark Box or Figs whose scrubs are in hospitals all over the country.
Those are also using Shopify as well.
And when you combine in our enterprise offering, Shopify point a cell, which is the physical retail product we have, plus B to B plus all these new merchant solutions like audiences to help with ads, shop off a capital Shoppey, which is the best can run accelerated check out. You're beginning to see that all these on raps are going to lead to serious growth in our future. And that's the reason why the sentiment inside of Shopify right now is incredibly optimistic.
Shop five President Harley Finkelstein, thank you, welcome back to Bloomber Technology ed Lovelow in San Francisco.
Aline hid right here in New Or let's check in on these market said, because we're basically flat when you're looking at the big benchmarks. I'm looking the na's that one hundred on the day and a.
Little bit of a cautious tone. And look, we've had four straight days of games. That has been a good run.
But we're also trying to digest a macro picture that's not giving us much. We're still looking at the FED and some of the speakers coming from the federals.
EV, but more some of the microheadwinds.
When you think of well chip maker is trying to sell into geopolitical headwinds. That's more of what we're boiling down to on the day. When it comes to tech stocks, I'm looking at the tenure yield. Though this is a macro picture. This is one of sales. This is an auction of tenure debt coming. I'm currently off by about two basis points. When you're thinking of yields going higher,
prices falling. Bitcoin also on the lower side, resentiment a little bit dower there or off by one point four percent. Maybe that's also to do with a stronger US dollor on the day, but also whether those ETF flows just cooling down a little bit. Let's look at some of the micro pictures that we want to shine a light on though, and we just referenced it just before we went to break. Tesla currently off by one point six percent.
Now we know that US prosecutors have been looking in the way in which Tesla and Eilon Musk have discussed self driving. Did they mislead investors? Do they mislead consumers? But now the nuance is coming from a router's report saying that maybe they're looking at them for securities fraud, wire fraud. Potentially that's a router's report. We're off by one point six percenters, we're just reminded of the US
prosecutor's investigation. Armholdings up by quarter of a percent. Now, remember this is a company we were looking at this. Its current valuation is ninety times future earnings. At the moment, many wondering how they live up to this valuation on the market. How we baked in too much from euphoria
around AI for this chip designer. Their earnings come after the bell so tooos the Airbnb and look, we're looking for bookings ultimately to be slowing, in fact flowing bookings growth for Airbnb that will likely to have seen since twenty twenty. That's what the market braces itself for or a more than a percentage point ed.
But what are you looking at.
Well, let's head out to DC and talk about TikTok, after its China based parent, byte Dance made it clear it won't comply with the new US law requiring it to sell the video sharing app, saying quote that for the first time in history, Congress is an acted a law that subjects a single named speech platform to a permanent nationwide band and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than one billion people worldwide.
I want to bring in Bloombergs Chris Strome to break it all down. It is not a surprise, right Chris. The legal challenge, but the question to be considered by the courts is whether or not this is an outright ban, And I think the academic consensus is that that will be something the court looks at closely.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean TikTok is making a few different arguments here. They're saying that, you know, the the law that was signed in fringes on on on the first Amendment, it represents an illegal taking, and uh, you know, TikTok is saying that it's not feasible for them to separate you know, TikTok us from the rest
of the TikTok you know global community. And so really what TikTok has done here is they've just bought a lot of time by filing this lawsuit, because there's no way this is going to be resolved by next January. There's going to be a long court battle, you know, regardless of what happens, There's going to be appeals. It's most likely going to go to the Supreme Court.
Okay, And this sort of time frame many feeling that an expedited ruling isn't gonna come until say the fourth quarter, then you have to look ahead to January when it ultimately it might be then at least banned or at.
Least has to be sold.
It feels as though the sentiment very much is is that this isn't going to be a sales process, right.
Bike Dances making it clear at this point that they have no intention of divesting TikTok. They are gonna you know, they're digging in for a prolonged legal battle and also probably with the hopes of you know, a Trump administration that might be more friendly to them, and so the law says that they need to divest by next January or there's going to be a ban in the United States.
The legal process won't be resolved by then. If they get up to the point where the band is supposed to go into effect, they'll most likely seek an emergency in junction to prevent that band from going to and going going to effect, and it'll most likely be granted. And so, you know, we're long ways away from this being resolved.
Chris, who are the players here? You just outline brilliant the kind of short term and long term process. But if Bike Dance has filed a legal challenge, who are they challenging. Who's on the other side of the table.
Yeah, it's interesting because they actually filed their lawsuit against the Attorney General Meryrick Garland. And part of the reason for that is because according to the law, DJs and is charged with enforcing the law. And so you know, in order to bring a legal lawsuit, they needed to find, you know, a defendant that they were gonna that they
were going to sue, so they chose Meyork Garland. But really, you know, they're they're challenging the law that Congress passed that Biden signed and saying it's unconstitutional.
Amidst all of this, we have players weighing in whether it's Steve monusan previous Treasury Sextuori sat down in David Weston yesterday talking about how he's still hoping that he might be able to get his hands on TikTok, perhaps without the algorithm he'd rebuild it. Had Eric Schmid on the show yesterday who had been interested in buying the US.
Version of TikTok.
He backs away from that and actually says that this is just more broadly should be regulated in the US rather than banned. But Chris, I'm interested from a legal perspective, can we read anything across from what happened in Montana? Can we feel that sentiment will be on the side from a First Amendment perspective, even if though we're hearing from TikTok that they couldn't legally actually separate the businesses anyhow.
Uh, there's gonna be a lot of support for TikTok's It's already it's already coming, and it's gonna it's gonna h span the political spectrum, the economic spectrum. You have you know, people who advocate for free speech uh saying that TikTok shouldn't be banned. You have people who are saying that the government hasn't made u, you know, a
legitimate national security argument to try to ban TikTok. I would expect that there's gonna be a lot of amicus filings in this case, and then you have this statecases that are playing out like you mentioned, and so you know, for the foreseeable future, there's going to just be a lot of litigation over this issue.
Blimbers Kristrom, thank you very much. Former US Treasury Secretary Steve maninschen As Caroenline says, says he's still interested in buying TikTok's US operations from its Chinese owner, Byte Dance, but believes the social media app's critical video recommendation technology could be replicated. Listen to this.
Still very interested in buying it, and to the extent they want to sell it or spin it off, we very much want to pursue that. I support that Congress passed the bill and it's now been signed into law.
I will say this is had just.
Incredible overwhelming support with the Republicans and Democrats. This may be the only thing that everybody agrees on the fact that it's on.
One hundred and sixty million phones.
I do think it's a security issue now.
One of the other people who are at one point reported to be interested in getting in on buying with minution was Google or former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. We spoke with him yesterday and he's actually non interested anymore.
Just take a listen.
My personal view on this is you're better off regulating than banning or a judicial action. All the big tech companies are now in the hands of.
The DOJ in various legal fights.
I would prefer to see.
A regulatory regime that it sort of has the right incentives and the right prohibitions for all of these things. My own view of TikTok is that TikTok is not really social media, it's really television, and that you can regulate television by the equivalent of the equal time rule. But somehow we're not having that conversation.
Let's get back to earnings and Rivian posting a wider than expected adjusted loss in the first quarter. A break down the results Rivian CEO R J. Scaringe.
The challenge with this number is it's a false metric and it just causes It just caused a lot of noise, and so we'd like to rather focus on the product. We're tears out from launch, and our goal is to pete ramping production as quickly as possible so that people don't have to wait as long as they had to wait in the case of our R one products.
Oh, Jay, something I noticed is interesting in your filings is the proportion of the R one generation that at least versus ball seems to be going up. Could you give us that proportion and is it a good thing for Rivian right now in this environment where you're between the two growth phases if more are one generations at.
Least, Yeah, we don't disclose the split between sales and lease. We now we've expanded least to offer that on R one s as well, and we've added a number of states that we offer leasing. Believe it's not thirty two states.
Now.
The key to recognize is leasing does have an advantage for electric vehicles and that any lease qualifies for the seven thousand and five fron dollar attack credit, and so that leads to disproportionately large number of leases relative to an internal combustion engine vehicle given the benefits of that of that credit.
And I do want to talk a little bit about what's going on with the factories because you shut down some of the assembly lines to make component upgrades. If you could just walk us through the math and sort of the path board on how that gets through to positive gross profit by the fourth quarter, that.
Would be helpful.
Yeah, we.
Started production in late twenty twenty one, and this was the first time, you know, walking through the plant that there had been no vehicles on the lines. At the
start of April, the plant was really empty. We drained out everything that we were producing with the largely original supply chain and component design, made a large number of changes to the plant, and then also had a number of new suppliers come on board replacing existing suppliers and the park designs and component designs, and that's going to lead to a step change improvement in our structure, both at the bill of materials level, but importantly also at
the what we call the conversion costs level, allowing the plant to run more efficiently. And we did a similar shutdown with our ED program, and that was something we did at the beginning of twenty twenty three. We took about thirty five percent bill of material cost out of the vehicle with that shutdown, and the scale of change we've made with our one here is very similar to that.
Great interview ed the Rivian CEO R J. Scarrange along with Kitiger.
I felt too.
Now coming up will be joined by Logitech CEO. I like a favor about consumer tech and gaining on AI so much more. That conversation you don't want to miss as a blue meg technology.
Let's talk Logitech.
It's linking its products to guess what artificial intelligence in a whole number of ways, like with new AI Promptu software which will turn your Logitech keyboard your mouse. It's basically a shortcut to chat YOUBT a priest and welcome here in New York.
Ha a favor. Now for more.
She's just finished our firste hundred days at Logitech, new ceo coming via here and interested to hear about how much how quickly you've had to evolve with AI. Was it something that you already had in the locker, you were already look.
In this direction, or something that you were able to be nimble on. Yeah, I think we have a very nimble team. So a lot has happened, even in my first one hundred days there, which has been fun. But AI is definitely wanted a tailwinds so that we see for our business going forward, along with some other things. Hybrid work clearly is a tailwind for us as well as gaming really mainstreaming and continuing to grow. But if I
look at AI, there's really three things we're doing. First of all, like everyone else, it's helping internal productivity and we're seeing, especially with our software engineers, some really good productivity gains from using some of the new AI tools. Then when we look at our products, two things into software you just mentioned it. We just launched the new Logy AI prompt builder, which is a shortcut to chat GPT.
You know, if you're a big user of chat GPT, you have to go in and out, you're toggling between what you're doing and chat GPT. This is a shortcut so that you can stay in the flow, which is really important for our heavy users again, the coders, and only.
Open a eyes chat GPT. What about the others?
Okay for now, but I'm sure more will follow. We're a company who really partners with everyone, so more will follow. Yeah, And then what I'm probably most excited about is actually in the video and audio space, where we've for actually for quite a while, have been using these large data models to really step change the quality of audio and videos. So maybe two quick examples. In headphones, our latest generation
of headphones does two way noise cancelations. So let's say we're on the phone, I'm at an airport, You're wearing the headphone, and of course it's super annoying because you know you're hearing not just my voice, but every announcement at that airport. New headphones, our new headphones do two
way noise cancelation on both sides. So now it's smart enough things to the model to recognize my voice, but to tune out everything else that's going on around me, which really really step changes audio quality.
We love that.
On the video side, we just launched this new video conferencing tool for offices called Site. It's a camera that you set in a large meeting room. I'm sure you've been in meetings. There's twelve of you on one side, one poor guy on the other side on the screen. He's of course left out. This acts like a intelligent producer in the room. It swivels around to focus on
the right person. But again also audio, it swivels to you when you're speaking, but not when you're opening a packet of crisps, which is quite important.
I'm afraid I did go away.
No, really, I think we run out of time. But what I was just going to say is like, gaming still a thirty year business and as we reflected on, it's really hard out there. Just ten seconds sum up the environment.
Yeah, we think gaming is a real tailwind for US. Gaming was up eight percent for US in the last quarter. We think the future of gaming is really great.
Log Tech CEO had like a favor. We wish I had more time with you. Thank you for stopping by while you're on your In New.
York, ride sharing company Lift reported first quarter results and guidance. The beat investors expectations really send me the shares of the company higher. Joining us now is the Lift CEO David Rischer on set in San Francisco. There was something interesting that you said, which is you made improvement in both rider retention and new riders, and you've made some progress in Canada. But actually I wanted more specifics on what you did to achieve that.
Yeah, so I'd break it down like this. First of all, it's good to be here. The second of all, I break it down like this. First you got to get the basics. Rate we call it ride shair perfection. That's all a pricing rate, paying drivers right, picking you up fast, our ETA is that's what we call how fast we pick you up are faster they've been in four years. So those are the basics. Once you do that, then you can build on top of that. Then you can do things like innovations around how fast can.
We pick you up for the airport, for example.
One of my favorite example, I think last time you and I talked, we had just rolled out this on time pickup promise, and now less than one point five percent of people are being picked up so late that we have to give them the one hundred bucks. So after the basics, then you innovate, and then you partner with other people. We've got great partnerships with Chase, with Delta and others. You put all those things together and it's a great combination. It's work really well.
Oh, let's go in on the B to B partnerships, David, Because I know that you are mobility first, but you look at Uber and instacart yesterday.
What other partnerships do you have in mind?
So I probably won't be able to speculate on new partnerships, but I can tell you this. You know, I spent in my prior career a lot of time in Africa. And now you're asking where's this going, But the answer is in a lot of countries in Africa, there's this great expression, if you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together.
So you know, as I say.
Delta Amazon as a partner, we pick up some of the folks at distribution centers linked in as a partner, we actually they overran their parking lot when people came back to work, and so we help people get back to work. Delta sky Miles, of course you can get sky miles, but also we help move their flight crews around, particularly in early morning hours. These are partnerships that they're
Chase with Sapphire. They're really deep partnerships. And when you really go deep with someone, you know, it's almost like a relationship. You can find all sorts of amazing things to do.
Those are the groups of people you're moving And as you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how people move from me to be I want to go back to ROBOTAXI. Tesla will show us a robo tax in August, and your competitor Uber has this relationship with Weimo. I don't think you have a formal relationship. But if Tesla comes to market, you must be thinking about that long term.
Yes, but so first robotaxis or let's just say a time of his vehicles are going to happen.
There's no question here in San Francisco. They're happening. You see them on the street. But we have to think about it this way.
For someone's got to make the tech, then someone's got to build the car, then someone's got to own the car, and someone's got to run the network. Right, these are four different pieces of business that people have to do. We run the network and it's a very expensive, very expansive network that we run every single day, two million.
Rides a day.
Now, if we need to incorporate and of course we will autonomous vehicles into that, that's great, that's fantastic. It'll increase, you know, supply, and increase the number of different ways. But I don't really look at an initiative like theirs and think it words me. I think that's really interesting. It's going to maybe help expand the market. And I would say for them, gosh, that's a lot to take on at once, and so you know, we'll see, we'll see how that goes.
David, innovation was what you're just talking about. Would you ever reconsider innovation in taking more than just people but food but groceries.
You know, our real focus is on moving people around and in specific getting them out of their house. And this is where I get a little philosophical. If you read any of this of articles about kind of the health of our nation. We talk a lot about sort of political divide, but there's also just a tremendous amount of loneliness and people staying at home too much and being disconnected from their friends and their family.
And so forth.
So I'd say that really is going to be our focus. It doesn't mean that, of course, we also get people out on bikes, you know.
I were just talking.
You've got a great bike system in New York among other places, so that's important as well. But I really think getting people out and about is really our focus, and then we can partner for other things to the extent that is important to customers.
David Our Bloomberg Intelligence, and this man Deep Singing and I were going through your numbers and trying to see if it proved you'd taken market share from Uber. Dara kosh Rashahi is coming up next after we've gone off on the next program with Bloomberg's Emily Chang. What's your message for Dara in terms of whether he should be looking over his shoulder in the progress you are making.
You know, it's so funny.
People love, of course, to talk about this sort of head to head thing. I think our competition is people staying at home. That's our competition. I want more people out, I want them connecting.
With other folks.
I think it's just a much more interesting way to run of business than to sort of always focus on your competitor.
You know.
Look, they'll go through their ups and downs in their quarters. So he's got a loom in his mind. It's fine ask him about all the different things he's got in his mind, and we're just going to focus on our riders and drivers.
On your mind.
Gen Z, women, corporate travelers, who's getting in your cars, who's riding your bike?
David, Well, so a lot of women are I'm glad you brought that up. Of course, we have women plus Connect, which I'm so so proud of. One of the great quotes I heard from a friend recently is when he said he was actually talking to his girlfriend and he said, why do you like this women plus connect rider driver connection on Lift and she said, look, I can finally take a nap in Ride Shair. I can finally take
a nap, which I think is so profound. We've had something like twenty thousand new women joined the platform on the driver side just since we've started the program.
So super important. I'll tell you another thing that's really interesting. We're seeing.
Of course, commute is happening, but also party time. People really are getting out. It's after nine or after five o'clock and it's going great.
I am here for party time.
David Richer, CEO, thank you so much for your time today.
We appreciate it. Meanwhile, that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology Ed. We've got a party tomorrow, a.
Big party for Bloomberg Technology Live, but a big show to recap. Check out the pod, putting it on Apple, Spotify. iHeart and of course all the Bloomberg platform's big thank you to everyone that listens to their podcast and the way to work maybe in a lift or Reneuber from San Francisco, New York. This is Bloomberg