From Mahard where Innovation for Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
Live from San Francisco.
This is Bloombo Technology paramount up as the Nickelodeon and MTV parent follows Warner Brothers in a big write down of its cable TV networks and cybersecurity firm. Akami jumps as the DVOS specialist post strong numbers amid scrutiny of.
The cybersecurity sector.
Plus tech for Kumala, we speak to the technology leaders and Silicon Valley Democrats backing the Vice president's bid for.
The White House.
I want to get straight to financial markets and the NASDAQ one hundred, very tech heavy index. You have the megacaps and the higher multiple software names. What you're seeing is a five day chart of the Nasdaq and it is completely flat, zero percent over the course of the week.
But there is peril within that.
Because if the NAZDAT one hundred closes down negative on a weekly basis, that would mark five straight weeks of declines for that index, which is the worst week run of weekly drops going back to May of twenty twenty two. If it's positive, it snaps a four week declined streak, which it had seen in April, and things look a
little bit rosier. We are worried about growth, we're worried about a little bit geopolitical risk, but earnings have been a mixed picture, where in aggregate we're probably feeling better about the technology sector in part AI infrastructure.
That brings us to TSMC. The chipmaker.
Sales grew by forty five percent in July on strong demand. In particular, it would seem for AI accelerators. Those are the usadrs or US listed shares of Taiwan Semiconductor, up eight tenths of a percent in the US session bloombergs Ian King is here with me in San Francisco. The data is for the month, and we're trying to sort of extrapolate out and say, well, for the quarter, what does that look like? But I guess big picture it's bullish because TSMC is the chip factory for the world.
Basically, no exactly all roads lead to into Yeah, and I'm forty five percent is dramatic, right, that's tremendous compared to where we were last year. But we have to put that in context. Part of that was last year things were depressed. A lot of smartphone market related chip
orders weren't that great. But if you're worried about this AI infrastructure build out, if you're worried about what Invidia is buying, what AMD is buying, what even Intel is buying these days, this tells you Nope, they're still putting orders in and those factories are still working flat out.
Okay, In very simple terms, TSMC is a contract manufacturers, So the biggest chip names go to TSMC and say, here are our very special chips.
Make them for us please.
That brings me to Nvidia, which reports August twenty eight, and they are the market right now for AI accelerators. Look ahead to August twenty eight and what we're kind of expecting, and does TSMC kind of inform what we might get?
I mean to an extent, yes, I mean TSMC has a lot of customers, and Video is one of the biggest. But Apple is also a huge customer. Qualcom is also a huge customer, so it's not a direct linear relationship there. But at the same time, everything we've heard, all of the concerns we've heard about in video, can it continue this growth rue. Nobody is doubting the fundamentals of demand. We're also as you've seen lots of reports about some
problems with some new tips that they've had. Yes, but they've come out themselves and said the still demand for our olds. Yes, some worry about it.
That was specifically about design or engineering issues around Blackwell, which would be the latest generation accelerator. TSMC is interesting because it's literally concentrated in Taiwan a lot of the activity. But the story here in the United States has been the flow of public money from the Chips Act or government money to onshore our industry. And there's a piece on the Blueberg Terminal by Mackenzie Hawkins about how now present day much of that money has been allocated from
the Chips Act. What are the numbers behind that and what's the impact been.
Yeah, I mean the key point that she makes in her story is the hard work has been done, which is like, hey, we're going to give you this, We're going to give you this, but nothing has actually, no checks have been mailed, right, this is all promissory right. And as a US taxpayer, like we both are, that's actually a smart thing because you want to see these things built and in operation before you actually pay for them.
Right.
This is, you know, a very complex industry and it's very brutal economically, as we've seen with what's happening at Intel. So you want to make sure that these things actually get built, the equipment goes in, and then the money gets distributed.
As you've educated our audience on for it for quite a while. Now takes a lot of time to build manufacturing capacity for jips as well. Bloomberg's Ian King here in San Francisco, thank you. Let's get back to that story about Paramount that we alluded to at the top. Actually an interesting or positive reaction.
In the shares.
It is a write down of six billion dollars on the legacy cable TV networks. Very similar to the news this week that we got from Warner Brothers Discovery. There are some points of distinction with Paramount in terms of the properties and some other news in there as well. Bloomberg's Hannah Miller is back in New York City. So Paramount the numbers on the right down the story behind the write down specific to Paramount.
What's going on, Yeah, So it's.
Very similar to Warner Brothers Discovery. Where they're writing down the value of their traditional TV networks. And this is after, you know, the streaming wars have broken out. You know, they've taken to reevaluating their cable television as streaming continues to grow more and more popular.
What's different here is.
That with Paramount, you have the backdrop of its deal with sky Dance that is expected to finalize in the first half of twenty twenty five. You know, there's still a forty five day period where you know, people can submit competing offers, but there is a lot of bullishness around Paramount because of this pending deal.
I'm reading through your story on Paramount. By the way, Hannah Miller, pretty new to this beat. How busy have you been in those first few weeks of covering the media industry? But Paramount part of the story is cost reduction in cost cuts as well. Is that directly related to the write down or is that a different story.
So before you know, we learned about this write down, you know, there's this whole five hundred million dollar cost cutting effort that Paramount has undertaken. And then Skydance has also identified two billion dollars worth of cost efficiencies. So all of this has played into that they're working to tighten the belt. Another big piece of news coming out of the earnings call yesterday was that there are layoffs coming that fifteen percent of the US workforce is going
to be cut before the end of this year. So there's a lot going on with Paramount as it prepares to final this deal with Skuyddance.
Hannah, I think I said this to you in the show twenty four hours ago, but I always tried to find the technology story within this, and what's common between those two names is the pain in the Legacy TV network side is because of the move to streaming. But actually Paramount streaming business just based on the growth numbers, it seems like they're doing okay.
Yeah, So for Paramount, they actually loss subscribers for their Paramount Plus streaming service during the second quarter, and that was because of a one time event the end of this deal in South Korea.
They're very optimistic about it.
Otherwise, you know, they have seen revenues increase there, so you know, despite this setback, like other companies like Warner Brothers, they're very excited about their streaming service.
I was referring to revenue jumping thirteen percent, But you're exactly right. Paramount Plus Service lost two point eight million subs due to that South Koreas you just outlined Bloomberg's Hanamella, Happy Friday.
Thank you very much for your reporting. Now coming up on the.
Show, Roger Leed, the creator of layoffs dot Fyi, a website for tracking tech layoffs, is going to join us to discuss all the job cuts in aggregate that have been announced in his data, and it's timely. Let's take a quick look at shares of Cisco. They had been positive or hire this Friday session. Cisco now softer six tenths of one percent. Reuter's is reporting that Cisco will lay off thousands of employees in a second round of job cuts this year, and that Cisco could announce those
job cuts as early as Wednesday of next week. It did move the shares and Wednesday of next week, by the way, August fourteenth, Cisco reports earnings. We'll keep an eye on that story and see if Bloomberg has any advancements on it.
Be right back.
This is Bloomberg Technology. We should keep talking about tech jobs and layoffs. Over one hundred and twenty six thousand tech employees have been laid off so far in twenty twenty four, with companies increasingly citing AI as a reason for the job cuts. I want to bring in Roger Lee, who's start founder and the creator of layoffs dot fyi. It's a platform that's dedicated to tracking tech layoffs since the COVID nineteen pandemic in twenty twenty and you and
I were just discussing this during the commercial break. I look at all of the news headlines and the cadence of headlines probably starting early June through to now. But you've got the data, so summarize the scale of what's happening in the industry right now versus prior years where we saw heavy layoffs as well.
Yeah, that's right, So corn and layoffs and FI.
We've tracked now one hundred and twenty six thousand tech employees laid off so far in twenty twenty four. The good news that's actually down forty two percent from the same time last year. And if you look at the quarter on quarter trends, tech layoffs have generally been leveling off since their peak in Q one of twenty twenty three. Of course, it has spiked a little bit in the past couple of weeks. The bad news, twenty twenty four is still on pace to have more layoffs than any
other year this decade except for twenty twenty three. And of course it's all a small comfort if you're one of those one hundred and twenty six thousand people laid off.
We just illustrated that point, Roger with a chart which was showing your data at layoffs still FYI.
And then here's the point that I was making.
Those are big names, right, Intel, Tesla, SAP in Germany, Cisco, We just broke that reporting on in the stock move AI. So what you're to may or may not track, is is there a reallocation of resource to new jobs if the justification is AI.
That's definitely what we're seeing in a lot of the company's announcements for the layoffs that tech companies are increasingly citing AI as the reason. You know, for example, earlier this week, Dell cut thousands of employees as part of a sales team reorg that included creating a new team
focused on AI sales. And then earlier this year, you Know, into It laid off one thousand, eight hundred employees and cited that they're doing so so they can invest and make more hires to help build Eye into its text crop software, and it is definitely an allocation of resources.
You know, building AI is expensive, and according to salary tracker comprehensive dot Io, a senior AI engineer in the Bay Area earns two hundred and eight thousand dollars per year just in base salary, and that's sixteen percent more than a non AII engineer and doesn't even include stock. So if you include stock options equity, that pay package can total easily half a million to a million dollars, not to mention all the costs involved in infrastructure and hardware for building AI.
So you know, the economic environment still tight.
Companies are finding that the only way to increase investment in AI is to cut cost elsewhere, and hence all the layoffs that we've been seeing.
Yeah, as Bloomberg Technology producer Margarite Galleryini just reflected on in our team chat, maybe we're in the wrong line of work because it's lucrative if you are a computer scientist or software engineer in that space. There's a point you made a minute ago about twenty twenty four. We are in early August and so let's try and extrapolate out. I look at the number of companies, for example, rather than the jobs in aggregate that are making these announcements.
Have you a sense in the direction of travel for the remainder.
Of the year. Yeah.
Typically what we see is that Q one and Q four and to be the biggest quarters for layoffs. That's often because companies do their annual budgeting around the end of year, which leads to those layoffs, Whereas the middle of the year, you know, summer period that we are right now, actually tends to be slower.
In terms of layoffs.
Obviously, there's some notable exceptions that you see on the screen here.
So unfortunately, I would.
Expect that pech layoffs may pick up again as we head towards the end of the year and early next year, as companies take stock of their year forecast into next year, do their annual budgeting and decide whether they have the right team to move forwards.
So let's do something else and do this and aggregate. You know, you started tracking this data at the early days of the pandemic. How does this four year period or so compare to history. I think about the dot com combubble, the global financial crisis.
Are the ways to compare and controst.
Roger, Yeah, stop to say, you know layoffs AFII.
We started in twenty twenty, so don't have the numbers from those those two time periods.
Although I will say.
The scale of the tech industry is just so much bigger than during the dot com era or even the global financial crisis, So in aggregate numbers, I believe that this current period of layoffs is going to be the most that we've ever seen in the tech industry, just because the scale of the tech industry and the number of people working in this industry is so much higher now than in previous years.
Roger Lee, creator of Layoffs, FYI, thank you for your analysis and sharing your data with us, and the chart depiction in particular really helps to illustrate what's happening in this industry. We're also going to look at shares really quickly of ak am I. We're going to be having a conversation up next with the CEO. But in the cyber space, this is a d DOOS specialist.
You see the stock off session.
Highs, but up almost ten percent a good quarter. But the question that the analysts in the street has is this is a company that's maybe inconsistent in the number of quarters it strings together. A conversation coming up with Tom Layton, who is the CEO of Akamai. Maybe he'll push back on that. What the streets view of his company. We'll see. This is Bloomberg Technology. It's time for talking
tech and in the news. The owner of the company behind Timu, Colin Wang, has become China's richest person, amassing a fortune of forty eight point six billion US dollars. That's according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Hung's rise has been fueled by China's changing shopping habits and expansion outside of the region. With its TMU brand, plus Amazon Incs
an e commerce deal with TikTok and Pinterest. Users can now link their profile from the social media platforms to their Amazon accounts, allowing customers to buy products directly from ads. This is social shop becomes more popular here in the United States, and Turkey's Instagram ban hits female entrepreneurs. Orders drown up from female led businesses who relied on the
popular social media platform to drive sales. Turkey abruptly blocked access to Instagram on August second, without explaining why that was a very e commerce themed and focus selection of news stories out there today. The earning story also continues, and we continue to look at cybersecurity and Akamai. The company reported earnings after the closing belt Thursday. Co founder and CEO Tom Layson joins us now for more.
There are loads of words.
And adjectives and praise used by the cell side Tom a clean print, strong quarter growth, But what there's less discussion of is why what were the specific factors in the quarter.
That put Akamai up from Well, we.
Have several market leading products, and security obviously very important today given the large number of damaging attacks, ransomware, data exfiltration, and our enterprise.
Compute business doing very well.
You know, we talked about just really getting started in that aspect of the business this year, and now we think we'll exit the year at a one hundred million dollar a year annual run rate and revenue with a lot of exciting potential for the future. And I think those are great proof points that investors are now seeing.
On the enterprise side. I find that very interesting.
Is it demonstrative of broad strength in your client base those industry sort of willingness to spend or is this something specific that Achimi is doing that allows you to sort of outperform in a difficult environment.
Well, security is important for every major enterprise, even in tough economic times, which we're seeing some of now, and we have the market leading products and.
The major enterprises really need them to be safe.
And in compute, I think we have a very compelling value proposition. You know, we can provide better performance at a much lower price point. And when you can do that and help a major enterprise save money, well, this is a good time to be able to have that happen.
Tom strength in the areas you outline compute security and then a little weakness in CDN. I would like to talk about what's happening in your industry overall. I think we start with CrowdStrike, endpoint Specialist u DDoS. But what was that weak and situation like for Akamai. Was there any tangible positive read through for you or any way that you capitalized on what happened?
Well, we don't use that software ourselves, so there was no impact to Akamai, and we helped our customers you know where we could, But that was an area where we don't really do business I think there were a lot of learnings for the industry as a whole. You know, first, it really is clear you just can't be doing updates all at once everywhere in the world. You know, most of the time that's okay, but eventually you're going to have an unintended consequence, and if you update the entire
world at one time, you've got a disaster. You know, that's a lesson we learned at Akamai pretty painfully about twenty years ago, and ever since then. You know, we.
Phase our updates.
After you've been through QA and you're confident, you still just go one stage at a time, so in case there's something that was unanticipated, you catch it before you cause a problem. I think also there's a much better understanding that reliability matters, and it takes a lot of investment, but you see what happens when when you have something like this. I think enterprises will pay a lot more attention to reliability going forward.
I hear you on that I'm not a cyber expert by any means, and I know that a lot of CIOs cyber managers CSOs watched this program and for them, top of mind is a sort of academic debate agent versus agent lost delivery or security of that delivery of security? Do you see though, away from the academic debate on the best security systems action, your enterprise customers saw the news cycle and picked up the phone and said, we are changing how we do cyber.
No there, you know, they were just trying to get out of the disaster. I think going forward there'll be a time of reflection into how do you prevent this from happening? How do you keep a vendor from you know, having this consequence. And it's not just a situation of having multiple vendors, because might even increase the problem because of any one of them.
Has a big issue.
You got a problem, but really selecting vendors who put the extra effort and investment into making sure things stay reliable as reliable as possible.
Tom, I guess closer to home for you, a higher profile d doos attack on Azure in June. What did you make of that and Microsoft's handling it and how did it impact you?
You know, DDoS attacks are probably the oldest kinds of cyber attacks out there.
They go back more than twenty years as well.
You know, that's an area where we have leading services to help defend customers. In fact, you know, just last week we saw one of the top ten DDoS attacks of all time coming out of the Middle East.
You know, with the war there, we're able to.
Defend a very important financial enterprise from that kind of an attack. So even though it's been around a long time, we are still seeing some very large DDoS attacks and it's important for enterprises to have stayed.
Up the art defenses.
Even today, did us Tom Layton, CEO of Akamai. It's great to have you back on Bloomberg Technology on your strong quarter, but also I appreciate discussing news of late.
Now coming up on the show, we're going to talk about how some.
Of the worlds in tech think about Kamala Harris's campaign with Tech for Kamala co founder Shannon Nash and also Matt Mahn, the mayor of San Jose. That conversation is coming up next Q the Beautiful Pictures Expedia eight point six percent strong quarter, positive discussion about the summer months, different to what we heard from Airbnb. An interesting one to track this is Bloomberg Technology.
I am now officially the Democratic number. You're in Atlanta Georgia.
When President Biden was on the ballot, Democrats had basically conceded to losing the state.
Now that it's Vice President Kamala Harris democratcy, all seven swing states are back in play.
Kamala Harris is well known, but she is not well defined.
She's not somebody I've researched to in depth.
She's kind of laid low, But that's kind of what Vice presidents doude.
You're going to see both Democrats and Republicans defining her in the ways they want those voters to see her. Success for Harris will mean sustaining the momentum that's been fueling her historic run.
I get chills when I think about that, just being a part of history, understanding that we have someone who represents our communities.
She's also like a really dynamic candidate, especially for younger people like us.
See people, if you asked a month ago, they probably would have said that the country is not ready. But now people are rethinking that and they're like, oh my gosh, this could actually happen and I could be a part of it.
You can watch the full story of that at Bloomberg dot com and some of the recent guests here on Bloomberg Technology have also been weighing in on the election and Kamala Harris.
Listen to this.
There's going to be huge amounts of money that come in on both sides.
I think there are a lot of people like myself who are really enthusiastic and excited about what the Kamala Harris campaign stands for.
She's been a longtime supporter of the tech industry.
She will do very well in the debate, and she's she's all over a high energy.
She's from the Bay Area. She understands technology, she understands innovation.
She shares a lot of values that many of us in the tech industry have, particularly with regard to immigration.
And ensuring that we are continuing to drive innovation in this country.
Let's keep the conversation going with Tech for Kamala, a grassroots group of about twelve hundred tech workers that just came out in support of the Democratic candidate. Tech for Kamala co founder former Wing CFO Shannon Nash joins us now alongside the Mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahon and Shannon.
Good morning, Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. Those points made in those sound bites and the backing that this new organization is giving actually are the same points that many Silicon Valley voices bench capesis in particular made in backing of JD Vance. And I just want to point that out because we've sort of had equal coverage here on
the program. But what compelled you in the first instance to be a part of this movement and what is it that you see in Kamala Harris as being the right president for the technology industry.
Yeah, I'll start really quick with that.
I think what we've had is a few people with big microphones, if you will, to be able to talk about their support.
Of Trump and Van.
Why we founded Tech for Kamala was to give voice to the over seven million tech workers, people who work every day at some of the most well known tech companies vcs, founders, operators, engineers, marketers, you name it, and
all the industries that are related to tech. To give voice to other people who actually feel completely different and in fact are supporting Kamala Harris for all of the work that she has already done in supporting things like responsible AI, STEM education, just being a real innovative leader.
So that is why we founded the organization, and.
I gotta tell you, ed, within like a week, we had over twelve hundred people who wanted to jump on the bandwagon and also announce their support.
So you know, it's one vote for one person.
Whether you have a lot of money or a big microphone, we still all get one vote. And so this movement has aiming to give voice to the millions of people who have one vote and want to make sure that their vote is heard.
Maya, mayhe your city, San Jose is just so closely and intimately linked to the technology industry as well. You come at this, I guess from the political perspective, but why do you think that the technology industry is an important voice in backing your preferred candidate.
Well before I was mayor of San Jose, which is the capital of Silicon Valley with nearly one million residents, really the hometown for tech's workforce and home to many leading technology companies like Adobe, Zoom, Cisco.
Paipal, and on and on. I was in the tech sector myself.
In fact, I first met Kamala Harris about a decade ago at Airbnb, which was just down the street from a startup that I was involved.
In founding and leading, and I was very impressed with her.
You know, she came in sharing her work on public safety, which continues to be top of mind for all of us, and she has great experience there.
But she also engaged with a number of us who were tech.
Entrepreneurs and founders around innovation topics. She understood the importance of having a diverse workforce and supporting immigration, intellectual property, and the kinds of infrastructure investments that we need in common sense approach to regulations.
So, you know, really excited that she's the top of the ticket.
Shannon the Man makes an interesting point, which is policy specific policy when it comes to technology, antitrust, artificial intelligence. I think a lot of people are asking questions, are there specific ways that Vice President Harris will be different from President Biden's administration on the policy side as it relates to tech.
Yeah, Look, what I think that she's coming out with a lot of our policies. As you know, she's got ninety days or less. Right in terms of making her voice heard, what I will say to you is that we believe in an administration that continues some of the things that President Biden was working on. I think that she will also bring a fresh perspective. You know, she's
from here, she was an attorney general. She has spent a lot of time, as Matt has said, really listening to you know, what would be innovative for tech.
And so I think that we're going to see a lot of policies and things.
That are really helpful for the tech industry, but also that are inclusive. And I think that's really important to point out about, you know, something that I think a lot of people in tech would like to see.
Man man local issues.
You know, our guests in that SoundBite and challenge just now reflect on Kamala Harris being from the Bay and outside of technology. There are issues actually statewide, but the clearing of encampments or encampments suitepes for EXAs following the Scotis Grants past decision. It's an interesting case study. How do you feel that that issue will be addressed by the Harris campaign and how central is an issue do you think it will be in a presidential election?
At Lodge, look, I want a partner in the White House who is not going to use Silicon Valley or California more broadly merely as a punching bag. I want a partner who is pragmatic, who understands our region, who's going to help us deal with the very real challenges we face. You mentioned homelessness, which is an area where we are getting more pragmatic. San Jose saw fifteen percent reduction last year. We need a partner in Washington who's going to help fund innovative solutions.
Same goes for public safety.
That's an area where I appreciate that Kamala Harris has been a pragmatic centrist and I think the right approaches.
May men, I just jump in and ask, you know, from the Trump Vans perspective, the messaging of that campaign is that Kamala Harris has been responsible for what they see as being big issues with Bay Area in California cities. Your city is under the microscope to that extent. Are you worried about that message resonating from the Trump Vans campaign.
No, I'm not, because I think Kamala Harris has a record that stands on its own and she can speak to her policy positions, which it's you know, it's kind of ironic.
She gets attacked from both sides for being too tough.
On crime or being associated with what some perceive as California's crime problem, I think she's right down the middle, and that's exactly where I am somebody who understands her has to be consequences for committing crime, but we also should invest in rehabilitation and support those with addiction and helping them get treatment.
So I think she's got the right pragmatic approach.
And we need that kind of partner in Washington we navigate some very real challenges of our state faces.
Shannon, I want to finally go back to the idea that we talked about at the start, that many came on this program and said jd. Vance understands entrepreneurs He has been a venture capitalist, whether you see that as a positive or otherwise. They see him as being supportive of technology because of his direct industry experience. What would your answer to that be, And do you see the same level of support for entrepreneurship from Kamala Harris.
I think that Kamala Harris.
Actually I see more support quite frankly from Kamala Harris for entrepreneurship.
I think that she has shown that already just by the.
Simple fact that you know, you've reported on how quickly so.
Many people have mobilized.
It hasn't even been two weeks, right in terms of supporting her and supporting this ticket, I think her VP pick is.
Also really impressive.
And so what I would say to you was, it's one thing to have people come on this show with big microphones. It's another thing to listen to the people, the seven million people that are in tech, listen to what they're interested in with their interested in for their future, for their families. Who in the White House will most represent them? And I think that that clear choice is Kamala Harris.
Tech for Kamala co founder and former Wing CFO Shannon Nash and San Jose mayor Matt Mehn, Thank you both. Okay, I want to go back to markets and look very quickly at what's going on. As a reminder, it's kind of a big moment for the NASDAQ one hundred. On a five day basis, we are basically flat, completely flat, as you can see on your screen. But if the index drops on a weekly basis, that will be five straight weeks of declines, the worst run of weekly declines
going back to May of twenty twenty two. If we end in positive territory by more than about two tenths of a percent on the week. Then that would snap four straight weeks of declines, and I guess the narrative would be a little bit different. Is a big factor in video isn't until August twenty eighth. That's kind of where we're looking. Bitcoin check out as well. Early in the week, when we had that big financial market pressure on Monday, bitcoin was nearer to fifty thousand US dollars.
It's now nearer to.
Sixty or just above sixty thousand US dollars per token. But you can see it's kind of traded in an interesting sideways pattern throughout the week, and it's becoming part of the discussion around the election that we just had. Coming up on the show, we're going to be joined by Alexandra Berbie. You get the Private markets take investor at Sound Ventures for her investing thesis on how to approach AI from the VC perspective. This is Bloomberg Technology.
This is Bloomberg Technology, and you're looking at a live shot of the principal room. Check out the Bloomberg Technology podcast. You know where to find it on the terminal as well as on Apple, Spotify, iHeart.
This is Gwenberg.
Okay, it's time for VC Spotlight, and today we're taking a look at Sound Ventures. It's an early stage VC firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy is Siri, which is invested in companies like Airbnb, Spotify, Open Ai, and more. The firm currently has over a billion dollars in assets, and Sound Ventures investor Alexandra Burbie joins us now, having recently joined the firm herself. It's good to have you
here in San Francisco in person. Interesting move. Yes, could we start there and talk about, you know, how that happened Sound why you wanted to go and work with Ashton?
Sure?
So I got to know the team actually over the last couple of years and had really just had an admiration from Afar for what they were building. And I think as the firm has evolved one they've invested in some of these incredible companies and some of the best founders, and the way that those founders speak about them really spoke to me.
And I think as an angel.
Investor, I'd had the opportunity to work with a lot of early stage companies at the later stage at my previous firm. I had also seen some of those companies that had made it through ten years with Sound as a partner, and often they had mentioned that their their favorite investor on their cap table. And so when you hear that type of feedback, it's hard to not want to get involved. And so I joined the team a couple months ago and it's been a great.
Experience so far.
The particular interest that I have in Sound is the approach to AI application layer, foundation, layer, infrastructure. It's basically everything we talk about in the show every single day. Do you have a particular focus within those three buckets or are you going to approach all three?
So we are generalists as a firm, and i'd say that within that. Of course, where we're spending all of our time is in AI. I think it'd be silly not to be saying that. But the way that we've kind of broken out our fund is in twenty twenty three, we launched a thematic fund, which was on the AI foundational layer. So we invested in companies like Opening I, like Hugging Face, like Anthropic, and that was our thematic fund.
We use those thematic funds.
To actually work in parallel with our flagship funds. So the flagship fund is where I sit and I spend time with companies across the application layer, infrastructure, and then the everyday software layer, which is the companies we've been investing in for fifteen years. But now they're using AI to their advantage. So there are companies that are using AI to speak to their customers better, to get to market quicker, to be more.
Effective at what they do.
And in that way, we are really investing exclusively in AI companies. But it's because every company needs to be an AI company in some form or another, or frankly, they'll get left behind.
How the firms runs really interesting. There are very large firms with people who are over the place. There are small firms that are just here in the city. You're here in San Francisco. Sound has a relatively large presence in SOCOW.
That's right.
So you'll be focused on the Bay Area or how is that going to work?
I mean, it's really we're focused on where innovation is and so to the extent that that's in the Bay Area, of course, we're going to be here. To the extent that's in New York and LA, of course, we're going to be there, and wherever it is throughout the us throughout the globe.
That's where we'll spend time.
And so from that perspective, i'd say we're not regionalized by any means, but we do spend time with founders in all of those places, and we tend to try to meet them in prison.
So you were over at g squared, another name known to us here on Bloomberg Technology.
But kind of like consumer or consumer.
Internet focused background, you're going to carry that forward and merge with AI.
Or is that an area you've kind of left behind? Yeah?
So I think that my background has always been generalist to a fault, and so I think that I've spent time in many different industries on purpose, and it's been very deliberate to have that kind of breadth of experience and also breadth of founders that I've worked with, and so at Sound, i'd say.
That carries on.
Many people actually think about Sound as being an exclusively consumer firm as well, and that's a misnomer. I'd say that people are surprised. Tell them that we've invested it, get lab at the seed or sent to one at the series seed. You know that that surprises people, and so you know, I like that element of surprise one. But I do think that having a consumer background is actually really helpful for the enterprise because consumer companies think
about brand day one. That's their bread to get it telling stories exactly, and the enterprise it takes a lot more for them to get to that go to market, and they're focused on their product day one, and they're focused on the technical side of building out their team. We can be a really helpful storyteller because we have this consumer lens, and we're actually able to help them in a very differentiated way because consumer is part of our roots.
And so I think that actually bringing.
The two of those together is something I'm very excited about and I'm looking forward to it.
Alexandra berbeus sound Bench is great to have you so early on in your time at a new firm, accounset in San Francisco. Okay, coming up, Musk sued an advertising group of organizing a boycott of ads on X.
Now that group.
Is shutting down, will have the details next. This is Bloomberg Technology. It's the final few days of the twenty twenty four Olympics in Paris, and the Global Sporting Showcase has been going viral daily. It's not just sports taking on the Internet by storm, but also chocolate muffins. Norwegian swimmer Henrick Christiansen, now known as the Muffin Man, went viral on TikTok for videos about his love for the muffins in the Olympic Village cafeteria, gaining more than twenty
million views. Another breakout star is Turkish shooter Usa d Ketch, who went viral for winning the silver medal in air pistol shooting without using any equipment. The athlete caught the attention of Elon Musk, who posted a meme of the shooter on x okay. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a prominent coalition of advertisers, dissolved yesterday, just days after Elon Musk's x filed a lawsuit against it over organizing
a boycott of the platform's advertisements. The coalition says the whole ordeal has quote drained its resources and finances, prompting it to stop its activities. Joining me on set Bloomberg's asha counts, I've done a lot of reporting over the years on Musk's litigation. It's a tool that he uses, but I just explained basically what happened in a twenty four hour period.
I mean, yeah, it was so fast.
So he filed this lawsuit earlier this week, and the basis of the lawsuit was that this organization caused advertisers to flee the platform. Now, part of what the Global Alliance Responsible Media does is set guidelines around the type of content and ad can pro next to you. So you can imagine a big advertiser like an app or a Disney wouldn't want their ads next to pro nazi content. And so after they, according to Musk, right led to this boycott, he got upset.
He filed this lawsuit, and now they're.
Dissolving because they don't have the resources to sort of fight back. And this is a tactic Musk is done over and over again. As you mentioned, right, he did this last year with two organizations. One was a research organization, another nonprofit because they found harmful content on the site. So this is at tackle that he uses when his advertising business is threatened.
Earlier this week on the show, we played some of the SoundBite of Lindy Yakarino, the CEO of X, what she had to say about it. You can go back and watch that episode. You've also been writing about misinformation it's important, but it's kind of falling off the priority lists in some places. This is your Tech Daily. What is it that you're trying to outline here?
I mean it feels like a shift, right.
I think this is something that's been happening for years, but this moment feels different. I mean, we saw this with the warrant between Israel and Hamases. Again we're seeing this, of course, as you mentioned around the UK rights misinformation circulating, and the problem is the social media platforms may catch it, they may label it, they may take it down, but by the time they do, there's already millions of views on this.
We well, on the UK riots.
I've been tracking what's happening in the UK, my home country. Of course, it's also who is involved in the sharing of that information. So one thing Musk has been caught up in is sharing some what appeared to be articles about that situation that ended up being not a real news article.
That's one example.
Yeah, it's a great example. It's a terrifying example. He shared a fake article from the Telegraph, and Telegraph later came out and said, you know, we never created that, but he shared it and it got almost two million views.
Before he took it down, right, and maybe he did take it down.
He did take it.
Down, he did well.
It was deleted by their original creator, I believe, but that.
Was, you know, within the hour.
But again, almost two million views by that time, so the damage is done in some ways.
Bloombergsasha counts important reporting. Thank you that for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Just big thanks to everyone in the control room in New York, Jackie John Justin, Marguerite Pyle here in San Francisco, and all the studio crew.
Check out the podcast. It's been a big week.
There's a lot to recap on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, and all of the Bloomberg platforms. From San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.