From the heart where Innovation, money and power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde.
And edlud Love.
Live from Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York.
I'm Ed Ludlow.
Caroline Hyde is off today. This is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up on the program. Open ai kicks off its first ever developers conference, with engineers and entrepreneurs gathering in downtown San Francisco. We'll break down what we expect from the event. Plus we'll push your head to earnings this week and get the macro take on big text results as companies deliver even bigger profits than Wall Street anticipated, will it last? And Apple is in search of a new growth engine
after warning on a slower holiday season. Can the vision pro solve that problem we discussed at first? The maker chat Chat GPT sorry is about to still go through a kind of Silicon rally rite of passage. Today is OpenAI's first Developers conference in downtown San Francisco. Hundreds of software engineers and entrepreneurs gathering to hear about the best use of the company's tools and how they can build their own products with the underlying GBT technology. Who have
we got on the ground. Bloomberg's Rachel Metz is at the developers conference set the scene for us. What is this event symbolized?
Rachel, this event is a really big deal through open ai. It has to have a developer conference before. We've seen so many technology companies that are big and want to be larger create these events to get developers more involved with their products over time, like Apple and Meta and Microsoft, Amazon, and they do these events here after year, and they've in many cases become a really big deal for a company to telegraph what they want to share book with developers and eventually with consumers.
We relaunched the Bloomberg Technology Show almost a year ago to the day, and it's almost a year ago to the day that the chat GPT has made public. It's more towards the end of November, but open Eyes just dominated basically the discussion at least around the work in generative AI and the foundation models that power them. How big is that lead right now? Do you think, Rachel, based on all the reporting you've done over the last twelve months.
I think it's big.
But there are a lot of companies that are really getting in there and creating their own models, coming up with their own tools of open source. There's also from large tech companies. A lot of people are really interested in this space, and it's going to be interesting to see both what open AI brings out so it can stay ahead, and also what happens in the months to come.
So the one side of the AI story that we love is there's still a human side. There's who's who in the world of AI. We expect Sam Mountman of course to be on site, right Rachel absolutely.
I think well, there's probably bunch of executives here. I haven't had time to wander around too much yet, but Sam's expected to be here.
I believe Mira Murradi.
Will probably be here.
She's also a very important executive at the company, and probably a bunch of other people. I mean that it's a really interesting time for the company. I would guess that if you could be here, you'd probably want to be here.
Boombos. Rachel Metz on the ground at the Open AIS Developers conference, and she will be reporting across all Bloindoe platforms throughout the day. Thank you so much. Another story we're watching, Elon Musk revealed his own artificial intelligence spot to challenge chat GPT over the weekend called grock. He claims the prototype is already superior to GPT three point five across several benchmarks. It's the first product of Musk's XAI company that is currently testing with a limited group
of users in the US. But interestingly, you have to be an ex the company formerly known as Twitter Premium subscriber to get on that waitlist, something that I signed up for overnight. Let's stick with AI and bring in Mike Mason, he's Chief AI officer of global tech consultancy thought Works, and Mike I wanted to get you on the program because this is a moment where we can say, Wow,
what are twelve months it's been? You heard me frame it to Rachel in terms of what open ai did first in November of twenty twenty two, do you see them as having, particularly in the software space right a clear lead in the field of generative AI.
I think they certainly do have a lead. They were first out of the gate with GPT three point five, then four point zero, and just a month or so ago they added GPT four V, which is adding vision to their product. They're also scaling very strongly from a revenue perspective, but I think they are not the only game in town. Certainly we're seeing features from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and all of the cloud players are really adding AI into their platforms. I think AI is going to be
the next battleground for those large companies. It is almost a bewildering array of options.
So the thought works.
As a technology consulting firm, we advise our clients on how they can build technology to solve their biggest challenges, and AI is certainly in that list. We worked with one client where we were helping them with their AI strategy, and before we'd even got started, they showed us two hundred and seventy ideas for how GENAI might improve their business and create value for them. And so you know,
clearly having ideas is not the difficult bit. It's figuring out which of those ideas are really going to create business value for you, and then doing a proof of value and then getting that into production. Something that we're seeing a lot happening is that companies are able to do a proof of concept, but they don't really have the machinery in place to take that through into production at scale delivering value. And so that's an area where we can help.
Well, a company having two hundred and seventy ideas, I don't know that there are two hundred and seventy large language models on the market to choose from. Maybe there are that many. I think we're talking about those with sort of tens of billions of parameters, you know, from GPT three point five LAMA to the work then thropic inflection. AI are doing things like that. Today is the Open AI dev conference. And when a company holds an event like this, Mike, what is it you want to hear from them?
Well, so I would expect to hear more about model features, So new features that they're introducing, maybe more vision, maybe some cogeneration. Maybe also multimodal models, so that's a model that can work across text and speech and image and possibly video, both for input and output, and can kind of fluidly move between those modes of interaction. I'd expect to see greater clarity around costs of using these models.
One of the problems with generative AI is that the costs are unpredictable, and that can be a serious barrier to getting these things into production and creating value from them. I might also expect to see some words around safety features. Safety,
of course, is a huge factor in AI. We put out some consumer research a couple of weeks ago where we interviewed ten thousand consumers about their attitudes towards AI, and we found that more than ninety percent of people had concerns about data privacy, their data usage, and whether companies are being responsible and transparent with AI. And actually, I really think there's something there. You know, taking a privacy forward stance can be a brand enhancing move.
We're just showing on the screen, you know that the cloud provider perspective, because ultimately, if you're a company that wants to invest in AI, what we're talking about here is compute and you mentioned the costs associated with that. I've reported that open ai will likely book a billion dollars of revenue this year, but there is a concern about the competitive pricing to bring in customers and then the long term profitability because crunching the data is proving expensive.
How closely do you look at that, mic Well, I.
Think it's difficult to look at it closely because those figures closely guarded secrets from those companies. But reading the tea leaves I would say that I don't think they really know whether they're pricing is where it needs to be to make the money. You've seen both Google and Microsoft with Duet and Office three six five add GENAI features to their productivity tool suites, and that's kind of
in the thirty dollars per person per month zone. I don't think they actually know whether they're going to make money from that. It's something that's going to shake out in the long term. Rumors around chatch EPT five, of course, say the open AI is really focused on efficiency, and efficiency really means bringing down the cost to run that. I think another option that should not be overruled is to look at the open source world. There's amazing progress
with models that are less big, smaller. You know, you can run them yourself, you can run them in house, and that's especially useful if you want to keep tight control over your data and not actually use a cloud provider for your AI.
Well, the event is underwear in San Francisco in about an hour's time, so whether their rumors or not, we will get some more information later on in Monday's day. Foult Works Chief AI Officer Mike Mason, thank you so much now coming up here on Bloobow Technology. Earnings of the big tech companies are kind of about the way. We're going to take a deeper look at how the group delivered in the past quarter, what that spells for the sets going forward, big emphasis on profit. We're also
taking a look at another Elon Musk company, Tesla. Reuter's reporting that Berlin and Gigaberlin will be home to this twenty five thousand euro next generation platform. That's around twenty seven thousand dollars. You know, I was speaking to sources throughout the day. The long term expectation was that it would be Shanghai that went first, but it looks like in the battle for affordable EBS that battleground, at least Tesla's perspective, and according to Reuter's reporting, is going to
be done out of Berlin. The stockdown half of percent. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment and a note on programming. Tomorrow, Bloomberg will introduced a new podcast called Elon Inc. It's going to break down the most important stories on Mask all of his companies in his empire across the Bloomberg newsroom. Tune into that. This is Bloomberg Technology okay, time for talking tech. First up, Bumble founder Whitney wolf Heard is stepping down from her role
as CEO. Wolf Heard founded the women's centric dating app in twenty fourteen and later took it public in twenty twenty one. She also briefly became one of the world's few women billionaires, who will be succeeded by Slack CEO Lydian Jones in January. And a Chinese startup founded by bench capitalist Kaifu Lee has taken the artificial intelligence space by storm with its one billion dollar valuation just eight
months into its existence. I'm talking about zero one AI, which also received funding from the likes of Aali Barber's cloud unit. The startup developed an open source large language model available in both Chinese and English. Plus a flurry of AI related hearings are set to take place on Capitol Hill this week. US lawmakers in both the House and the Senate will gather to discuss possible measures to rain in the technology, especially as campaigning for the twenty
twenty four general election heats up. This comes amid President Biden's sweeping executive order, which of course was issued last week. Now earnings for most big tech companies have come out, and while the group deliver better than expected profits, the outlook for those stocks are on shaky ground based on sales joining us from Chicago blooms Bloomberg's Ryan Lostellica. It's so interesting how the story changed. Right we go into it going, oh, that the magnificent five or seven. They're
propping up profit estimates for twenty twenty four. We've come out the other side, and now everyone's worried about the sale out the ryme.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean the thing about this earning season is really that no matter what narrative you really want to abscribe to, you will find a big tech result that will kind of fit your point of view. So Microsoft, for example, had very strong results. The stock initially did quite well, but given concerns about the macro backdrop and the Fed and treasure yields and things like that, the stock barely
ended higher on the day, you know, pretty slight gain. Then, on the other hand, you have something like Alphabet, which was also a pretty strong result except for some weakness in their cloud business, and that stock saying almost ten percent following results, So a pretty outsized reaction, especially for a company that would probably classify as one of the cheaper of the big tech stocks at these traditional evaluation metrics.
And then last week we saw Apple come out and they really gave a sort of a discouraging forecast for their holiday season, especially given concerns about the strength of their business in China, which is a major market for them for both supply chain and consumer demand purposes. That stock, however, it fell on the day, but not too much considering because there was a little bit of optimism about FED policy and you know that path going forward there. So
again a very mixed thing. There's a lot of focus on the macroeconomic environment. But I'd say overall the big tech earnings have been mixed so far. But it does seem like people, you know, overall have been kind of looking past them and looking to what's the come next.
Ran you are a member of the Bloomberg newsroom who's just like zeroed in on the Bloomberg terminal, every headline, every piece of data, and you flagged me before the show this UBS note right, which shows us that not everyone agrees with the fair you know, UBS's perspective is that tech stocks look contractive right now.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It says that some of the figures surrounding the group are overdone, and the you know, the sector looks pretty well positioned for growth, especially in twenty twenty four. It expects it to be one of the most you know, robustly growing sectors in the economy.
So that's obviously a positive.
It sees you know, buying opportunity and semiconductors, it sees you know, pretty you know, attractive margin prospects for software companies, and you know, we're talking about pretty widespread optimism there. And I would say that even though there were some disappointments this season and some pronounced selloffs, you know, most analysts remain pretty positive about the group, especially from a longer term perspective as far as their growth potential.
So there's what's been and then there's what's to come for me in Vidia. You know, it's been an incredible ride on the stock YEA to date, but now because it's so big, like from an index perspective and a wasting perspective, the market will pay attention, right.
Yeah, absolutely, and it's going to get you know, additional focus you know again for you know, one of the several quarters in a row now just because it is so central to the AI thesis right now, chips are really the first stop or anyone who's looking to build out any kind of AI infrastructure. Past two quarters have been extremely strong as far as their forecast goes. Will they go for a hat trick?
Will they do it again?
I mean, we'll see, And even then if they do, who knows how the stock's going to react? Is because you know, it's a name that you know by many traditional metrics, is you know, kind of looking pricey, especially within a context of you know, potential or higher rate environment. So that's one that people are going to be paying a lot.
Of attention to.
And if they kind of give any indication that AI demand isn't as strong as maybe some people are hoping for, that could have some broader implications as well.
Definitely in the data center contact we focus so much in H one hundred. We have Grace Hopper coming down the pipe as well, thanks of billiam I's Ryan Flaseelica out there.
People want to keep flying, families want to go on holidays. They just don't want to pay of turns as outrageous prices. So I think fares that next year, I mean, my operating assumptions fhares will go by a low double digit percentage again through the summer twenty four. It'd be the third year in a row, third summer in a row, we'll see double digit fare increases in Europe.
That was Ryan S CEO Michael O'Leary earlier on Bloomberg Television with his outlook for travel demands. Also talked about the fuel prices at the moment and sort of delays in taking new airplanes impacting their ability to meet demand and sticking with travel demand delights to say, we're joined now by Expedy A CEO Peter Kern, and Peter is interesting to hear what Michael leary said there, you know, the challenges alongside meeting what he sees is demand. What kind of demand do you see?
Yeah, well we've seen thanks ed for having me first of all, and I enjoyed the clip.
What we see is steady demand.
I would say, I think what he's talking about is that we are seeing some shifts as customers are looking for lower cost carriers over the main airlines. So he's probably benefiting from that and seeing a little bit of a move in his direction. I think overall air demand in Western Europe and in the North America, et cetera. Is pretty steady, but we're seeing generally priced declines across
the markets. So I think what he's discussing as a shift in his favor, but it's not necessarily that that's true for everything across the board.
Peter, what fascinates me about Expedire in the portfolio of brands and platforms is the granularity of your data. You know, you can tell me the demographics of people that are not traveling where they're traveling too. Right now, what does gen z look like? I know that's a very specific question, but who's traveling and particularly how have you seen the younger traveler behave in the most recent quarter.
Yeah, I think we don't tend to break it that way, but I can tell you that the travelers, you know that Weezer travel has remained strong. Corporate still, you know, still not back to pre COVID levels. You see a
lot of differences geography to geography. You know, we still have Asia is still opening up to a certain extent, which has been a tailwind in Asia and Latin America, whereas the West has sort of normalized, I would say, and in general, by and large, you know, people have been waiting for travelers to trade down for cheaper alternatives.
We haven't seen that very much. Now.
It's true that at the lower end of the market you see it a little bit more. But as you know it, we introduced our new grand loyalty program called one Key, and what we're seeing as people get accustomed to that is they're actually trading up when they have value that they can use to get a better room. Like if they have one key cash, which is our rewards currency, they trade up to a better room or a better experience, or use that for something better.
Alongside Sorry to interrupeed, I was gonna say, alongside rewards. You've also focused kind of on content creation and influences on social media. Has that given any sort of tangible boost to your sales?
Yeah, well we're you know, we're using all the latest marketing and reach tools we can. I mean, for us, it's an education process when we launch something like one Key, we want people to understand it. When where you have one key now in Verbo, which is the only place you can get rewards and vacation rentals, we want to make sure that people that are interested in vacation rentals
understand and appreciate the benefit. So sometimes, you know, old fashioned advertising is the best way, and it's easier to reach people with more information through influencers and such. But you know, you referred to all the data we have on gen z. That's really what's powering our product now as we make the product better and better. The fact that we have all that data is what allows us to now take friction out of the process, use AI and machine learning to make the.
Experience better, in the product better. And that's really where we're focused.
It's the expedia that the consumer and our audience around the world knows. And then there's the B to B business. When you look at your growth trajectory going forward, what is the splitting contribution of those two.
Yeah, well, B to B it's had a very good run for us, and in part, as I mentioned earlier, it has to do with the exposure of the business, which is exposed more to Asia and some of the markets that have come back more recently post COVID. But also we've been building that business, building the technology in that business, expanding our customer base. So that business has seen you know, growth in the twenties for the last several years, twenty percent plus.
Top line growth last quarter.
Was closer to twenty six twenty seven, but we expect that to continue. It is a smaller part of our overall business, and as you know, we've done a lot of work in the last couple of years on our core consumer business with one key with the launch of new products and capabilities. So we expect our bigger business to accelerate now, but the B to B business probably has slightly more you know, tailwinds still for a bit.
Peter, very very quick. Friday, your stock took off like a rocket, biggest jump since November twenty twenty. You must be happy about that.
I was.
I don't pretend to understand the markets, but we've just been shipping away at it, and I think the market's starting to understand that all the work we've done has set us up in a better way to go forward than most of our competitors, and that's what we're really excited about.
The market recognize it.
Expedia ceopiece, can Goods catch up? Have you here on Bloomberg Technology. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology ed here in New York City this week. I want to get a quick check in on bitcoin and it's been interesting to track this, honestly, it's kind of been up and down.
It's trades twenty four to seven, of course, but there's a debate whether any movement that we've seen to the upside as we are around thirty five thousand US dollars per token, has anything at all to do with the outcome of the FTX trial and Sam Bankman Freed, who was found guilty on multiple counts of fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy. Let's get to Sam Bankman Freed's guilty verdict.
The thirty one year old MIT graduate has been charged on seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering and now faces the possibility of decades in prison when he is sentenced, which we think will happen in March. Joining us for more reaction on that trial, but its impact on the cryptosphirit large is Jilak Joban Putra, founder and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures, an early stage VC firm that focuses on blockchain technology, crypto assets, AI,
and human computer interaction. Your reaction to the outcome of the truck, Well.
It's great to be with you. I think this is a huge sigh of relief for the crypto industry. We've moved on from this FTX trial or the news for the last year. But at the end of the day, fraud is fraud is fraud, and it doesn't matter what industry. It's good to see that justice is served and we can go back to backing and talking about the builders that are in it to create a better world using this new technology.
That is sentiment I think echoed by a number of our guests on the show. There are those that acknowledge, however, that it had an impact right up until the jury gave its verdict because of what it represented from a sort of high to low collapse of the industry. As a venture capitalist, have you been able to go out and write checks with confidence over the last twelve months into startups that are working on the underlying technology or even backing a token of their.
Own Absolutely, I mean we were long term investors. We have a ten year fund. I've been in the industry, in the venture industry since nineteen ninety nine, so I've certainly seen many cycles, and even within crypto for the last ten years, there have been many cycles. So look, I'm not going to lie FTX and what happened there was such a magnitude that it did impact and have an effect on all entrepreneurs, large companies and smaller companies
in the sector. But what the jury showed is four hours to come to decision shows that the evidence was so compelling that people are not going to get away with this type of fraud in the industry. And I think entrepreneurs can rest easy there and people who are passionate about the sector continue to build and have continued to build. Downturns are notorious for giving birth to some of the most impactful companies throughout history.
Nick Kotta was on the show and Friday Costwhile Adventures and he said that they were offer the opportunity twice to invest in FDx, but they didn't feel right about it and so they didn't. Just for sheer transparency of our audience, did you ever have the opportunity to back FDx or an associated group and did you? Yeah, I'll do.
Nick one better on that. We had an opportunity three times to invest in FTX and did not. So we are early stage investors. We like to see governance even from the earliest stages in companies. Look crypto regulations very uncertain around the world is getting more and more clarity as we move on over the years. But that lack of regulatory clarity actually creates more need for diligence on the part of investors because we don't have regulators overseeing
these companies. So it's really important to know that, you know, other co investors have the same it's kind of the same incentives we do. That we trust the entrepreneur in a sector that that's new, and there's lots of capital floating around even right now in a downturn.
So where does the capital go, particularly in the context of the underlying blockchain right you know, on this show most recently we increasingly talk about it in the context of gaming as opposed to crypto, where right now excites you most well.
Our thesis from our inception feature of Perfect Ventures in twenty fourteen is that crypto which is part of Web three. So this intersection of crypto, AI, machine learning, Internet of things, this collection and analnalytics of data as well as a distribution of data is going to be the next Internet. And so just like the Internet has impacted every industry, the media, industry, financial services, we believe that Web three crypto being a part of that will impact every industry,
so gaming is certainly one. I wrote a blog post recently about what we're seeing around deep fakes in the media. So one of the really great elements of crypto and blockchain is the fact that you can track data prominence. And that's why FTX is a little ironic because the industry is supposed to be all about transparency, not about cover ups, and so this provenance tracking of data. We know if we're seeing a clip whether or not that
is authentic data. What we need now is the intersection of machine learning where we can collect and analyze this data in real time. So WhatsApp has forty million messages that get posted per minute worldwide. Now there's no way to quickly analyze all of those messages right now in real time, but we are getting there, and when we get there, we'll know that our data is authentic, or it'll at least be water marked in a way where we know what we're consuming is authentic.
Galacto Van Puncher, founder and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures. Great wide, broad ranging conversation, Thank you very much. Now coming up here on the show, we're going to talk about the state of investing in Europe's tech sector, and celebrate an anniversary with Shnali Dereika of AXL That coming up next from London, This is Bloomberg Technology. Some news
out of Europe. Artificial intelligence startup alif Alfa has raised more than five hundred million dollars from a consortium of industrial giants and financial investors as it tries to build a European rival to the large language models created by Open Ai and Google. Schwartz Group and the venture arm of Robert Bosch joined a group of seven other new investors in the financing round, which included SAP and HPE. Right sticking with tech in Europe, It's time for today's
VC Spotlight. And joining us today is Sonali Deria, a partner at Excel, where she focuses on the consumer next generation financial services and software companies. Excel is also celebrating this week four decades of operating in Europe. Shanali, welcome to the program. Forty years of venture activity globally and in Europe. How did the firm do it?
Thank you for having me here. Ed It's great to see you, even if I'm in London and you're in New York. You know, forty years it's a big milestone and it's a really important time to be reflective. And what I'll say is that we've always had the DNA at Excel to find to build a relationship and to invest in founders, exceptional founders really regardless of where they are,
and typically that's been in really far fun places. And it's this philosophy that made us open up our London office twenty three years ago, opened up India fifteen years later in two thousand and fifteen, and it's really been a core part of our success and why we were able to invest in companies like Qualtrics in Utah, a Classian in Australia, in Romania and Bucharest UiPath, one of the most iconic companies to come out of Europe, companies like fresh Works in Chennai in India, and to construct
a firm that things.
Global from the get go.
We sort of walk our walk and talk our talk, if you will, and help our companies and help our founders to become these category leaders. Wasn't easy, but I think it's really been quite unique and it's been core to everything we've achieved so far.
The rapid pace of companies being founded and funds being raised in the AI context kind of set up this nice USA versus Europe discussion, Right, is there going to be a viable European maker builder of lms to take on the likes of open AI. You heard me mention alf Alfha now seeing a five hundred million dollar raise this morning. What do you see as being potential for European AI builders?
Yeah, I know, it's a great question.
What I'd say is that if you just take a pause and think back around AI, because AI is really, you know, the overnight revolution that's actually been going for decades. It's more generative AREI that's probably less than a year old. And when it comes to research, when it comes to citations, Europe's probably had sort of fifty percent more in terms of publications than the US. I mean, if you're going
to do the US versus Europe. That said, I think a lot of the funding activity and a lot of the startup activity and even the incombing activity has been more in the US. But we're seeing a lot of promising companies and entrepreneurs over here, and the majority of the activity so far has been more in the infrastructure. The large language model space, if you will. But the Denovo the native applications if you will, that'll come in and really native to AI, it's really still early innings.
So I think we're very much a little bit like what mobile was and if you think six or seven o eight when iOS and Android came out, but it took a while for the Denovo apps on mobile to really become big. And I think we'll see Europe play probably a bigger role in some of the more vertical AI.
Applications Sonali As an aside, did you look at alif Alfa or even a Mistral, you know that made a debut with such a giant round earlier in the summer.
Yeah.
See, it's our job to, as you can imagine, to meet with all the great founders, and we tend to do this even when the founders haven't even started to become founders themselves. We sort of track the builders, if you will, as you called it. So, yes, I think, you know, we've spent time with all of the interesting companies in the AI space, and I think what I'd say is that generally there's so many flavors of how
to think about these large language models. This infrastructure part of the stack, from data, sovereignty, from privacy, from language, from security. That there are a number of companies that are sort of trying to figure out which part open source, close source, which part of the box, if you will, or the part of the market that they own. So there's a number of these companies, and yeah, we spend time with all of them.
The last time that I was in New York City was in that September period of the IPO windows suddenly opening up, and I was looking at your current portfolio and then the historic Excel portfolio. So many successes you know of companies that went public and built a legacy. What's next in the IPO market? What is the next name to your mind, particularly out of Europe to tap the public markets.
Oh and I wish I knew.
I don't have a crystal ball to figure out what is going to be nice, I will say, you know, from an investor, from an entrepreneur perspective, it is a bit of a confounding time time.
There is this deglobalization.
Everyone's trying to figure out what the next move is from the central banks. We have some serious geopolitical issues to wars, and so really thinking about what's going to make the IPO window, which feels standardive right now truly open isn't clear to anybody. I think the obvious answer would be a real bell Weather stock to go public. So, but time will tell. I think nobody's in a hurry.
A lot of these companies have a lot of cash on their balance sheet, so everybody wants to make sure they have time to execute and really have that be successful, and so time will tell.
One portfolio company currently is Monzo, and I think Bloomberg's listed Monso at least is a candidate for IPO at some point. What happens next for them?
Mcmonzo is it's a special company. I mean from a standing start, it's what is it the seventh largest bank already in the UK. I think eight and a half million customers. I think one one in every three six people sorry in the UK have a Monso bank account, and most of those customers find Monso pretty organically, so
it's got to a sizeable position. And I think, you know, there was a point that a lot of the fintech companies were out of favor, and I think Monzo really prevailed because why of their promise to really deliver a fabulous product with trust and safety to the consumers. So I think companies like that really have a lot of options open to them, and I think that will be the name of the game, where companies really want to
control their own destiny. And that's the way we you know, that's really our language with our founders and on the bords is make sure you can control your own destiny to the extent possible.
Sinari, I want to reflect on the next forty years hopefully for Excel and maybe the role that London will play in that. You know, that's city where I was born, It is my home for most of my life. Caroline as well. We're talking about London more and more outside of a more narrow scope of fintech. But as you look at the firm future, what role do you see that city playing in your portfolio strategy and where you're writing checks.
Yeah, you know we're based in London, but we really cover a very vast footprint from the London office. I think at last COUMP we've invested in over sixty eight cities, more than twenty countries just in Europe and Monumn counting sort of outside of the European market.
So London is an important base.
I think it's probably the second most exciting place when it comes to deep tech AI talent, and there's spades of it and I count sort of Greater London in that too, and our ability to really spend time with the right founders in the region from the London office is going to be very important, and so that's how we really view it. In the UK is of course
a big part of the venture capital scene. But as the principles and rewards of entrepreneurship really become even better understood, and as technology becomes pervasive, there are really going to be great founders coming from everywhere and this is the best place for us to be in order to travel and see them and spend.
Time with them.
Snarali de Riiker of Excel. Congratulations on forty years of a bench capital in Europe and beyond, and stick with us in the next forty Thank you very much. Okay. So Apple has not managed to snap out of a year long sales slump, and on a conference call with analyst last week, the company hitted at a holiday period that would not be stellar, maybe a little sluggish, It would mark potentially it's fifth straight quarter of sales declines in a row. So now Apple's in need of a
new growth engine. Can the vision pro mixed reality headset for Phil batt Let's bring in Bloomberg's chief correspondent Mark German, who's been writing about this idea and power on. It was interesting on the call, right that the analysts ask questions about vision pro in how it's been received with developers, the early signs that they'll get when they start shipping it. But you've got a pretty clear thesis outlined in today's news.
That.
Yeah, it was interesting because going into the call, Wall Street and the breadth of vandalysts we cite were pretty adamant that Apple would grow about five percent in the holiday period, right, but then look on my instry of the company's CFO, he dropped this figurative, you know, this this big announcement saying that it would be similar. Right, the holiday quarter would come in similar to last year, which means, like you there a decline or no growth,
so flat for the fifth quarter in a row. And so this is a pretty you know, interesting situation for Apple where they are making a ton of money, but they're not growing like they used to.
And so Wall Street.
And analysts and investors. They're looking for a new growth engine, and there's this strong potential for the Apple Vision Pro, this mixture that's to one day be that growth engine for the company.
Right, it's a new.
Category, but it's still very nascent, and at the get go, it's going to be very expensive. And when they're putting it on sale in their Apple retail source, it's going to be a very curative experience that requires appointments, it's going to require tryals sizing, and it's not, like kin Cook said, going to be a graund like experience, which means it's going to take a long time for them
to gather numbers gather revenue on this device. So combined with that retail approach, combined with the price, this is going to start out very slow, and eventually I think they're going to need to switch more to an Apple Watch model where they're moving from a curated experience with appointments to something that is a bit more grab and go, let's say like a mac ipowder.
I film even, well, it's interesting how they plan to sell it, but also what it is. Right, I remember being in Koubatino for the unveil Vision Pro You've written so much about this. It's a thirty five hundred dollars product, high end, but it's almost designed for developers, not a mass market. So what is the plan with Apple for a sort of more approachable, mainstream headset for a broader audience.
Yeah, the first iteration of the product, like you said, is essentially a development device, right, This is a device that developers are going to build mixed reality vision os apps for and then eventually hope and pray that they come out with a down market version, something maybe in the one to two thousand dollars range that eventually, eventually, I say, maybe ten years from now, be a computer replacement. And the goal is to have that app ecosystem ready
for when that day comes. And then the ultimate holy grail in this space, in the future of computing space with wearables, are lightweight augmented reality glasses. Now, if Apples are able to come out with well priced augmented reality glasses in five to ten years from now with a full blown app ecosystem, going to have a huge hit on their hands, potentially something that rivals the iPhone. But the only way to launch with that type of success, that type of interest in that type of market is
consumer education and to build an app ecosystem. So the vision pro for at least the next few years is going to be about educating consumers about this mixed reality technology, how these applications work, and to get developers on board because of course, many of the apps written for this device will of course one day be compatible with other augmented reality had it sets from Apple.
All right, Bloombog's chief correspondent for all things devices Apple, Markum, and I really recommend our audience world, why do subscribe to power on because it has all of the detail about present and future products coming out of Apple. Well,
that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Thanks so much to everyone out there that's reading the news but also listening to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts, all of the Bloomberg platforms, but we're also putting it up on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart from New York City this week, all week long, this is Bloomberg Technology