From the heart of where Innovation, Money and power COLLI in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily Jay. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco, and this is Bloomberg Technology coming up in the next hour. And
Alphabet miss CFL. Ruth Pratt tells me the ads business took a hit after suspending service in Russia and that advertisers also put back a bit more broadly in your our chat about the search giant's latest earnings reports coming up, plus what is free speech and how will Elon Musk change Twitter to achieve his version of it? Does he
even know? Will debate with David Sachs and Tim O'Brien and the Ring that tracks your waking and not waking moments, My exclusive interview with Or's new CEO about how he intends to compete in where a Bolt with giants like Apple. That is later in this hour. We'll get to all of that in a moment, But first though, I want to dive deeper into Alphabet and Microsoft results. I want to bring in future ums Dan Newman. Now, Dan, of course you cover and follow both. Let's talk a little
bit about Alphabet. Ruth poor at telling me on the phone that yes, the biggest impact in terms of revenue UH and contribution to this miss was the suspension of the vast majority of commercial activities in Russia. She also said beyond that there was a bit of a pullback on ad spend in Europe. We also saw a pullback UH at SNAP when it came to advertisers and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What's your take on this, well, I think the whole advertising market is starting to bring
some question marks. Is it going to get softer? You have these macro forces, geopolitical forces going on in Ukraine and Russia, Europe, and then of course here we've got a lot of macroeconomic conditions that are looking like we may see a recession. We're definitely seeing a pullback in. This sentiment towards tech as a whole is going is negative. And if Alphabet missed today, I can only imagine what Meta and Twitter might be in for later this week.
It's definitely concerning. But having said that, I thought Alphabet's numbers were really pretty good. They were very close. The growth was good top line growth. This is a company that's performing very well, and I think that stock buy back is an indicator that they believe their value is still there and they're gonna they're gonna spend money to repurchase those shares if people keep selling now. The Cloud, of course, was a contribution to that. But I want
to talk about the ad business first. She was asked on the call whether Netflix and the pullback there is it concerned, and she brought up YouTube and how well YouTube's ad business is doing. Of course, we know Netflix is not an ad supported business, she said. We continue to be pleased with the ongoing innovation at YouTube. It's an ad supported business. Time spent there continues to grow. YouTube Music and premium were ups ubstantially in the quarter.
We're continuing to innovate their across the board. Interestingly, she wouldn't comment. I tried to tried to get her thoughts on Elon Musk buying Twitter and Twitter potentially getting out of the ads business. But do you see, uh, you know, a broader reshuffling here in the ads business, given what's happening at Twitter, the macro economic environment, the Apple ad
changes that seem to be disproportionately impacting Meta and Snap. Yeah, I think I think Alphabet is going to be in pretty good shape and they're going to be able to sustain growth. The changes modifications to YouTube have largely been well received by the marketplace. I think TikTok has been probably its biggest challenge and maybe had a little bit to do with the near miss on YouTube versus what
analysts had expected. But overall, I think the YouTube business, it's been growing, the television service cord cutting, there's a lot of positive tail winds for that particular business, and I think the market is largely appreciating what Google and YouTube are doing there. So I still I'm still positive on the company. The numbers just learn't that bad. I just think the sentiment in the market is just really
really low right now. Now, Google is still trying to close this acquisition of Mandy and the cybersecurity firm five point four billion dollars. We know that the d o J has asked both Google and Mandy and for more information. I asked about the likelihood of the deal closing. She talked about how they believe this will increase competition and help Google Cloud compete more effectively with Amazon, Microsoft and others.
Um let's talk a little bit about the cloud, and of course Microsoft how is Google Cloud doing with respect to Microsoft. I know it's still in third place. Yeah, Google has been competing. Of course, we've also seen Oracle with a big uptake in its business. But Google's growth has been really strong and still came in. Now the concern has been it's still not profitable, but they did narrow losses in the most recent quarter. Um I still feel that the company is willing to make those CAPEX
invest mints. Google understands that its ambitions with the cloud business or not to be in third place. Their ambitions are to compete and to be on par or above the competition with Azure and AWS. So they're gonna have to spend big, and I think the market has to realize it's going to take some time to get there. But some of their key partnerships investments have been made. Expansion and CAPEX spending are all indicators, and of course growth.
Having said that, as you're still growing it over as well, so all that spending isn't necessarily accelerating Google's achievement of parity with Azure. And we'll see what AWS later this week, which brings us to Microsoft earnings and it to be And I wonder if you think Microsoft is better insulated from some of these macroeconomic headwinds and this macro economic uncertainty that we're feeling right now in other big dot companies. Yeah, I like the enterprise play. I feel like enterprise tech
is a little more deflationary. Companies are going to spend on cloud, data center AI, other data analytics and software that are going to create more scale and lower costs. You've got you know, high call us related to worker right now into finding employees. You've got other costs growing through inflation, and you know, if you can add automation, AI, m L technologies, and Microsoft is really well positioned there. And we also saw IBHIM do really well this quarter.
Some of these companies that have more consumer oriented businesses are going to have to deal with UM, you know, some of the discretionary spending potentially going down as the economic climate gets tighter. So I do think Microsoft is more insulated, it's more diversified. It's got that large enterprise business, the commercial business UM, and I think it puts them in a good position to not be as hurt quite as much by all the things that are going on
outside of the company's control. All Right, Dan Newman Future and Research. We're going to continue to follow the calls as the Alphabet and Microsoft call progressed. Dan, thank you as always for joining us. As the deal was being sealed for Elon Musk to bite Twitter, he tweeted he hopes even his worst critics remain on the service because that is what free speech means. But what changes will he actually make to create his version of the global
town square? Doesn't even know yet to debate. I'm joined by David Sachs, co founder of Craft Ventures and co host on the All In podcast, along with Bloomberg Opinions Tim O'Brien. Looking forward to a spirited conversation for both of you here. David, I want to start with you, and that is a simple question. What does free speech mean to you? Well, what it means to me is that we don't have arbitrary censorship rules on the platform.
That Twitter will act as an open town square. It will be an honest referee of the debate, but it will not try to choose winners and losers in the debate. And what we've seen over the past few years is a growing movement towards censorship. Where it started with is sayd individuals who are sort of unpopular provocateurs like a Mile Annapolis or Alex Jones, they were d platform. Then you had to sitting president and states being d platform. Then during of it we saw entire categories of thought
being d platform. You couldn't criticize various aspects of where the virus came from, or mass mandates or vaccine policies. And now more recently we're seeing that same sort of idea of banning entire categories of thought being applied to more and more platforms, for example, opinion, the sending opinion on climate change. So I think basically the censorship has gone way too far and Elon wants to roll it back.
And I think that tweet you showed up on the screen really indicates pretty well where I think he wants to take it, which he does not want to go far beyond what the law allows. So he's not saying that anything goes the law does not protect the first moment, does not protect many kinds of speech, but he doesn't want to go far beyond that in terms of restricting speech, and that is I think a healthy correction that's long overdue. We're actually getting some headlines from Twitter's a k which
was just filed. Getting some more terms of the deal here. I'll read those out as we have them. The first headline that Twitter required to pay apparent termination fee of one billion dollars. Presumably if the deal doesn't go through. That's the same as a reverse termination feet, Tim, I'll throw it back to you. What is your definition of free speech and do you think that Elon Musk can and will protect it? Well? You know, I think free speech is being used as a proxy for unfettered speech,
and I'm actually not a fan of unfettered speech. I don't think propaganda should be allowed to run rampant and misinformation be allowed to run rampant on social media platforms and it has um. I I don't think um, calling someone like Alex Jones a a provocateur really captures the totality of of how he's used media platforms. I don't think, um uh we there are already a lot of categories of speech that that aren't permitted on Twitter. Would David
be comfortable with pornography being on Twitter? Or enough films or Russian propaganda or Chinese propaganda? Um? I don't. I think the idea of conflating the notion of free speech with political arguments about left right censorship is a is a is a strong man that's being used to describe a problem um that actually doesn't exist in the same
extent as misinformation does. And I don't think that Elon Musk has much of interest interest at all in in solving the misinformation problem on Twitter and putting things in place that would allow for responsible vetting, not sensoring the left or the right, but actually monitoring the platform so
it's a better form for factual exchanges. David, I want to let you respond to that you tweeted that the Berlin Wall of censorship fell in your words, but what what are you okay with some of the examples that Tim outlined there? No, I'm not. I'm not okay with, for example, bots being on the platform, which there the platform is absolutely rife with bots, and I think Ellen has already promises he's gonna crack down on bots, and he has expertise at his disposal, the premier AI engineers
who he can deploy to solve that problem. I actually think that anyone's going to make this speech free speech to off it's fake, not if it's fake speech. So the first hold on a second, then let me finish, let me finish. Okay, So, first of all, the biggest misnomer this characterization about free speech in general is that
it means anything goes it doesn't. The Streame Court has basically defined nine major categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment because they're considered to be harmful speech. So, for example, uh, the First amoment is not a defense to fraud. If you want to defraud somebody, you can't claim that your speech was protected by the First Amendment. When you put bots on Twitter and pretend
to be someone you're not. When you pretend, when you basically violate the authenticity requirement, you are basically perpetrating and kind of fraud that is not free speech, that's fake speech. Is perfectly fair game under any kind of free speech policy to take out those kinds of bots, and I fully expect that Ellen will be far more effective at doing that than the current management of Twitter because they've been unable to do that. There are many other kinds
of students. Tell me, tell me what's the mechanism for achieving that? In your view, what's the mechanism for making sure um that um categories of expression that you think are problematic don't service on Twitter. Well, it's not about what I think is problematic. There are tried and true categories speech. What are the what are what's the what is the methodology for going after any category of of of expression on the platform that may be problematic. Well,
I'm trying to explain it. I mean, so basically, we have two or thirty years or stream court case law in which the stream court has wrestled with these issues over decades, not like you know, some content moderation h employees at Twitter are just figuring this out right now. Stream coursemen wrestling with this for hundreds of years, and they've defined nine categories of speech that are not permitted
and not protected in the First Amendment. For example, fighting words under the Choplinsky decision, any type of ethnic or racial slur that people can make on Twitter. Hold on a second. You could define, you could define understand oversight of speech. We're talking about a private platform here exactly at point then that that you'll take categories of speech to the government monitors and essentially graph goes onto a
private platform. I would take categories of speech that the Stream Court has already set are not protected because in their opinion, those categories of speech can be dangerous. And I would then apply similar rules to content moderation. I think that's what Ellen is hinting with when he says, you will not go far beyond what the law prohibits. So in other words, look, stream court already prohibits fighting
words or doesn't protect them. Okay, so you know, if you're worried about Twitter being assess pool of ethnic or racial slurs, so it can clearly be prohibited under the Chaplinsky decision. If you're worried about harassment or stalking, that can clearly be prohibited. If you're worried about fraud, that can be prohibited. If you're worried about incitement to commit a crime, to commit imminent lawless action, that can be prohibited.
Why because the first amoment does not protect those categories of speech. And this whole argument see basically, what's happened about as we're going through this list, what about Chinese and Russian propaganda? And let's talk about before you answered, David Jeff Bezos tweeted proposed that the Chinese government just gained some leverage over the global down town Square. Given the strong relationship between Tesla and China, what do you
think about that, David Well? Twitter Twitter has already been allowing the Wolf Warrior of Beijing and the Aetola Kimany to post on Twitter. They don't seem to have a problem with various governments around the world posting what they think. The problem is when those governments pretend to be someone else. So if the FSB is conducting an operation and created a bunch of phony accounts, that's a form of fraud and you're clearly prohibit them. That's not the only problem
that exists with government sponsored disinformation and propaganda. UH is doing it through bots. Let's get back to the idea if you have an account. Hold on a second, If you have an account, you comfortable? Are you comfortable with the idea of Russian or Chinese propaganda flourishing on social media platforms Twitter? Twitter already allows them to publish on the platform. You're comfortable with that? Well, Look, I think that if a foreign government foreign no, Hold on a second,
it's more complicated than that. If a foreign government wants to have a Twitter account, is it up to David Sachs to say no, they can't have an account. Let them have an account. It will be close second on a seconds relevant whether it's a government account. I think what's relevant is what the account does know. What's what's relevant. There's if it's a legitimate government account, is spreading misinformation or propaganda and who's in whose view? Look, let me
just finish my point. Okay, it matters a lot what who people purport to be on these platforms. Okay, if the Russian government wants to post a tweet, or the Chinese government or the Atlas they want to publish a tweet, obviously I probably don't agree with it. It's probably part of their you know, of their government propaganda. Sure, but as long as it's correctly labeled, I don't think anyone's gonna be fooled by it. That's really the point. The
problem is. Where you actually have a problem is when you have a disinformation operation conducted by a foreign government where they're posting things under accounts from people that appear to be in Iowa or something, and they are signal boosting with a bunch of bots and fake accounts. Elon will do a better job wiping that out that he'll get rid of those bots better than the current Twitter management, but staence not able to do it for the last
ten years. It's not just about in a signal boosting problem. You're just that's oversimplifying the nature of the problem. Well, look, I'm sorry that there are people. I'm sorry there's people in the world who post things that you disagree with. Okay, let's let's let's let's uh, let's talk about Donald Trump before we at to the end of the segment. Tim, obviously you wrote the book on Trump. He has said he's not going to come back to the platform even
if he's allowed. But how significant would it be if Elon Musk and his management team decided to unblock and unbann the president. Well, I think I think we have to say, what are we doing when when anyone is banned and anyone whose banned is brought back in, what are the standards around that? And I think that that has to be clarified. I don't think Facebook or YouTube
or Twitter has done a very good job of that. Um. I think historically newspapers have tried to address that problem and have found mechanisms for doing that in a in a real time basis around categories of expression that involved lying and propaganda and manipulation. It is never going to be perfect, but something has to be in place. It's ridiculous to think that this is the left versus right argument.
This is an argument about preserving high quality information in the service of media platforms doing a better job of informing the public. It is no more complex than that. Day all the problem, David, do you think President Trump should be unbanned even if he is spreading misinformation? Okay? Here, here's the basic problem. There's no such thing as a truth api. I know you'd like to be able to say, well, oh, that tweet, in my opinion, is false, and therefore we
should expand it. The problem is when you do that, you empower a special class of people. You're empowering these basic mandarins and the content moderation department of these companies to decide what are the boundaries of free speech for all of us. And they should not be in the position to do that. If somebody is willing to sign their name to a tweet, okay, and they are who they purport to be, and it's not in a category of speech that the stream Court has already ruled to
be harmful. They should be allowed to say it. But let's sen Streme Court, Stream Court professions. But we're running into a hard break. UM, so I'm gonna let you guys continue this debate offline. David Sacks of Craft Venture
is always going to have you on the show. Tim O'Brien of our very own Bloomberg Opinions so much to continue to talk about famous started Bolt being sued by its most prominent customer, Authentic Brands Group, which owns Forever, says Bolt not only failed to deliver promise technology, but during its integration with Forever, the company lost out on
more than a D fifty million in online sales. The complete also says Bolt race funding at an increasingly high valuation by quote consistently overstating the nature of its integration with a b G Brands. Bolt responding saying the claims are without merit. Coming up Roger McNamee here to talk all things Twitter and Elon Musk and how Jack Dorsey fits into this dramatic takeover that is next. This is Bloomberg. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology and Emily Chang in San Francisco.
It is just out and we are getting new details on the deal and Elon Musk's agreement to buy it. Roger McNamee, who knows a thing or two about social media. He's the author of Zucked. Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe in a long time tech investor, Roger, I know you were listening to our conversation earlier with Tim O'Brien and David Sacks, and you don't think this is about free speech at all. Why well, I just think that
the free speech conversation is off target. That fundamentally, when you introduce algorithms and the amplification of content for attention, as Twitter does, what happens is that the algorithms are going to seek out the content that produces the greatest reaction, which is generally speaking, going to be the most extreme content. Let's put not just political content, but all extreme content,
and it's going to give that disproportionate weight. And so the real conversation we need to be having is not you know, in my opinion, everybody should be allowed on a platform like Twitter, but no one should have the benefit of being able to have their stuff amplified proportionately to crowd out other voices, because I think that's incredibly interous. Let's use the example of Donald Trump. Should Donald Trump be kept on Twitter even if he is spreading wise
and misinformation? Well, to be clear, I think that Twitter has a responsibility. All these Internet platforms have a responsibility to try to protect democracy, something that they have done a truly horrific job at And as Twitter is currently constructed, you know it, It's not just Trump, it's all kinds of extreme voices across the entire spectrum are drowning out the thoughtful and factual things that might also be there.
And at the end of the day, by framing it in political terms like that, I think we really do a disservice to this conversation. Okay, but it is a common, free example. It is a concrete example that I think helps to broader point. Right, as I would not allow him back on, I would not allow on many of the incredibly harmful people are there. I mean. The problem with Twitter, there's two core problems, and they both represent
an opportunities for free line musket. The first is that, even though it started with one of the best ideas ever in the history of the Internet, Twitter is never successfully monetized itself. The company I believes still has a huge net loss cumulatively since it was started, and given its influence with politicians, celebrities, and journalists, Twitter should have been able to find a path to much greater profitability
than its head. It's so influential. The second part of the problem here is that they have a set of terms and of service that are designed to protect people on the platform, and they have done a horrible job of moderation and a horrible job of enforcing the terms. I actually give them credit for trying, particularly in to do a better job of that, but I think they really have not done a good job. And COVID disinformation is a great example of something that just ran ramp.
But there's also an enormous amount of abuse of groups that are, shall we say, out of power, right, so particularly people of color, women and others who use Twitter in order to have a voice. I mean, it's one of the great things that Twitter does is it gives those who are out of power of voice. The problem is that the algorithm also allowed those who want to suppress those voices to do that suppression very effectively. So Roger, there's a lot we don't know about Elon Musk's intentions
for Twitter. He may not know exactly what he wants to change. I'd love to hear your prediction. How does Twitter look different under Elon Musk and let's say two years. Yeah, I am I I don't honestly know. Because here's what's really weird about this deal. So Musk came to Twitter's board a little bit more than a week ago with a proposal to buy the company. Yet he had no financing, no plan, and he had not filed the proper paperwork with the Security Exchange Commission. So the board reacted as
one would expect. It engaged to poison pill and it said slow down. And then a few days later, all of that gets reversed and the deal is suddenly accepted and there is financing now, but as far as I know, no plan has been shared with shareholders, and the filing issues with the SEC have not been resolved to my acknowledge.
And so you have a situation where a serial violator of securities laws is being allowed to do one of the largest go private transactions in history without any scrutiny, which is disappointing, but I think not surprising this environment, And you know, I just think of this as shareholders. The problem with going private transactions is that the people doing the buying know what they're going to do, and
they have a plan to create value. The people doing the selling are not party to that, and there's something fundamentally unfair. You know. I do believe there's a lot of opportunity on Twitter to create value, and I really believe the public shareholders would go along with if somebody told them what the plan was and did someone in convincing way, the same way Jeff Bezos system repeatedly at Amazon and the way they read Hastings and repeatedly at Netflix.
Now what's interesting is this could never have happened at Facebook this way, given the dual class shares structure, the power that Mark Zuckerberg still wields there. And I wonder if you think that's a good or bad thing, given how much you have critiqued Facebook. Well, to be clear, I think dual class equity is a terrible idea and should not be permitted, you know. I just think it's
totally contrary to the shareholder interest. And again, in the case of Twitter, I believe the company has been very badly managed. I mean, this board allowed the company to operate with a c yellow who had a full time job at another company. It's now accepting a transaction from somebody who I think is the CEO of what for other companies? You know, I just look at this as a massive policy failure at every level. And again, this is nothing to deprecate Elon Musk. He may have a
great plan. In fact, I hope he makes Twitter a lot better. But at the same time, the things he talks about most are actually the areas in which Twitter is most flawed, and the proposals he's offered for fixing those things are not obviously fixes in a world where Twitter monetizes through advertising, using algorithms to amplify the most extreme speech. Interesting you mentioned Jack Dorsey and his role.
He tweeted earlier that thanking Ellen for taking Twitter out of a quote unquote impossible situation, which is certainly interesting commentary given that he was the one in charge for so many years. Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners. Always great to have you, Roger. We could continue this conversation for hours, We'll have to leave it here. Time now for our Crypto Report and our crypto contributor Sanale Boss Sectionale micro Strategy recently turned to a bank to borrow against its
own bitcoin to buy more bitcoin. And that bank that it turned to with silver Gate, you've got a special guest who knows a thing or two about that. Yeah, absolutely, Emily. I want to bring in silver Gate CEO Alan Lane now because he's been really facilitating this and a lot more in the cryptocurrency space when it comes to loans. Alan, thank you so much for joining us. Why are you comfortable lending against bitcoin to this degree and how have
regulators become comfortable with it? Yeah, I appreciate the question and the opportunity you got to talk a little bit about silvergateing and what we do here. We've actually we've been banking the bitcoin and broader cryptocurrency ecosystem since early so we've been doing this now for you know, for several years. And um, when we first started, it was
bitcoin only. It was before our theoryum and all the other tokens and um, you know, as you're aware of, bitcoin is a digital bearer asset and it trades twenty four hours a day, seven days a week around the world, and so um, that really gets to the heart of your question, which is when we're lending against bitcoin, we
take the private keys as collateral for our loan. We have possession of those keys, and we have the ability if our borrower doesn't pay us back, or if we need to satisfy a margin deficiency, we can actually liquidate the bitcoin. And we can we can sell up twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You know, bitcoin is so volatile though, I mean, how does that work for you when one day it's forty six dollars and then that stay it's thirty eight thousand dollars in
such a short amount of time, within weeks. Does that create a create complications for you in terms of taking it as collateral, Well, it certainly could. Um and that gets to some of the design features of our Send Leverage products, So we call the products send leverage. SEND is actually an acronym and it stands for the silver Gate Exchange Network, which is the seven access to fiat banking rails that we provide to the digital currency industry.
And we bank companies such as coin Basin, Square and coin and Gemini and crack In and um It's you know, etcetera, and um we enable them to move US dollars twenty four hours a day, seventies a week across our platform. UM. And then that gets to the heart of our ability then to also sell bitcoin quickly if we need to. Now, so far we've been doing this lending now for a little over two years. We've not had to liquidate anybody's bitcoin because of of the fact that we start in
a very overcollateralized position. So um, someone has to pledge more bitcoin to us than what we're willing to lend to them. So we build in some pushion up front. So let's switch gears here and talk about d M because you guys had bought the assets when that the project really started here by Facebook look to sell. What does this mean for you? And you're pushing to stable coins and doesn't mean that you'll be a much bigger player moving forward working with regulators sure well as as
to how big will be, that's all to be determined. UM. You know, our goal isn't to be a specific size, but rather to help our customers solve the problems that they're trying to solve in these ecosystem And a stable coin, as you know, is meant to be. It's a tokenized dollars UM and UM different from Bitcoin, which we were just discussing, which can be very volatile because it's price
is really set by mark at factors. It's really just supply and demand, whereas with a stable coin, what we're trying to do is we're trying to keep the value of that token at a stable price UM, and in the case of a dollar back stable coin, it would be one dollar would equal one one silver Gate issued
stable coin token UM. Now we currently bank all of the existing regulated stable coin issuers in the United States that would be CIRCLE with their USDC token US as well as the Geini Dollar, the Patch Dollar, and True USD. They all use our platform, the silver Gate Exchange Network and our a p I s to facilitate minting and
burning of their stable coins. And what we're trying to do is bringing so those existing stable coins, by the way, they're primarily primarily used for for defy, for cryptocurrency trading UM. What we're trying to do is bring a stable coin into the market that would primarily be used for commerce and cross border remittance and and the d M protocol was purpose built for payments, and that's why it was
attractive for us UM. And we're excited to now own that technology and to bring a stable point to the market, hopefully by the end of this year. Allen, we'll have to have you back as regulators put more guard rails on this industry. That's silver Gate Bank CEO, Allen Lane, Emily Bowery, Joannale, Allen, thanks coming up. Pit is not the ring that rolls them all, but it can track your sleep, heart rate, and even your body temperature. We're gonna see how it fairs or will fare in the
crowded field of wearables in an exclusive interview with Cora. Next, this is Bloomberg, or the finished wearable tech startup is getting a new leader. Tom Hale, former president of moment of Global, which owned survey Monkey, in charge of growing their wearable subscription business, specific the fitness ring that tracks sleep,
heart rate, body temperature and more. Let's talk about it all in our exclusive interview with Tom Hale himself and Erika managing partner at for Runner Ventures and or at Share of the Board. Time. I want to start with you, how do you think Ura will stand out in a very crowded field of wearables amongst giants like Apple well or as a smart ring that delivers you personalized health data, insights and guidance that foster healthy habits. But we started
with sleep because it's the foundation of health. Of us will sleep every night, of us will exercise regularly or say that we will and sleep. It's just it's the universal solvent. It helps you feel better, perform better, improves your mood, reduces your appetite, increases energy, improves your complexion, it reduces inflammation. It's it's a nightly habit for most of us, and most of us don't do it very well.
The ring as a form factor is really differentiated because of the location on the body gives you a more accurate signal. Most consumer friction around wearable techno oology is about accuracy, relevancy, and especially battery life and wear A wear ability or as ring addresses his head on and is like the sleek, small, powerful uh computer on your finger with the strength that's a hundred times stronger than a riskable. Now you're the former CEO Hart Pizzing Rye
stepped down? Why is that? And why do you think Tom is the person for the job? You know, I think that, um, sorry, you know, we we really think her preat for all all the contributions that he's made with the company, and I think that right now this transition is indicative of where the company is in its scale and stage of growth, and Tom's really the leader
that we need right now. With the CEO search, we were looking for a nuanced combination of deep technical and product expertise with with an authentic cultural fit with our international team and aspirational mission. It was a really tall order and Tom immediately rose to the top. He brings decades of technology leadership cross complex consumer and B two B companies. He's got knowledge of subscription business models and
driving international expansion forward. He's got situational experiences and scaling teams from hyper growth through I p O, all of which is critical to AURA in this next phase of growth. Now, Tom, you've got some interesting sports partnerships. I know Chris Paul is the user, Lindsay Vaughan partnerships with the NBA, w NBA, NASCAR F one. How do you think these kinds of relationships can help drive growth. Well, everybody aspires to be like a superhuman, but not everybody can beat Chris Paul.
But you know, exercises only one portion of the equation of health, sleep is the other part. And quite frankly, when we start to hear about the travel, the troubles that some of our ambassadors are facing, and you know, learning learning to sleep better. But it's really inspiring to everybody. We all want to be like Lindsay Vaughan, but you know we can relate to her. And I think that's really one of the powers of of AURA is that
it's a level for everybody. I know that personally for myself because you know, in the fall of this year was a pretty stressful year and I was my sleep was was really hammered. I ordered an AURA ring over the holidays. Improved my sleep and my overall health within
a matter of weeks. And when I saw that, that that power, that behavior, that that just made it clear that this was an opportunity I had to jump at now or is now value at two point five five billion dollars, URI is an I PO coming up soon while we see something like that this year, you know, we're just get starting. It's getting started here. We're eager to build out our membership experience for both the individual consumers as well as our enterprise partners. When we originally
invested in Aura's four runner back in ten. We always believe in the big vision of changing population level health that with each ring, each night of sleep, all of this would ladder up to data and insights I could really save people's lives. We're beginning to deliver on those aspirations, and as we scale, will certainly consider the best financing paths to support growth, including going public and being available
for all to take part in our collective success. Right now, we've got our heads down and we're going to continue to deliver the best experience for our members. Tom, how are you thinking about the macro economic environment. Obviously, markets are in turmoil. I think we're starting to see it bleed into the private markets. Inflation is a big concern for all consumers. Well, you know, interestingly enough stress and anxiety is really good for our business, so quite frankly,
we might see some benefits from that. But clearly the macro market is is one we got to pay attention to and and frankly we're just here for the long term to build our business and build the value for our customers. Uri, I gotta ask you, women hold just six point seven percent of board rolls board chair roles globally, so you know the fact that you're in that seat, UM means a lot. What more can we do to move the needle here? You know, it's a stat I
actually recently learned myself. I didn't know that it was a rare to be a chairperson of a board. Um. I've been you know, honored to serve on the OR board since and I took over because the team asked me too. They felt like I had a collaborative leadership in communication style that could bridge the various voices around the table. And it turns out I'm like strong communication and listening skills are two of the most helpful skills
to have in leading aboard. So you know, I know companies are working hard to add women to their boards. I think that it's about twenty percent now of women holding board seats globally, which is good, good, but not great. Um. I think further elevating women to board chair positions not only adds those diverse voices to the decision making, but also fundamentally changes the way boards are run. Amen to that, uh, you're a Kim for Runner Ventures chair of the OR
board along with r CEO Tom Hale. Thank you both will keep watching and that does it. For this edition of Boomberg Technology Big Day Tomorrow again, earnings from Meta PayPal pinterest will also be joined by and Wichetski of twenty three and me. I'm Emily changing in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg h