Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news from the heart of where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
Live from New York and Caroline Hyde and.
I'm Jackie Devalas in Washington. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up Service Now makes a nearly three billion dollar AI bet in a move to buy startup Moveworks plus Crypto synks further with bitcoin's sub eighty thousand dollars is Tariff war tensions drown out Trump's pro crypto announcements, while President Trump says he's negotiating with four different possible buys for TikTok's US business and a deal could come soon. But first we highlight the market sell off. We are unwinding that AI trade once again when growth enthusiasm becomes fear.
We're down by three point three percent, and then as that one hundred having its worst dase it's December the eighteenth. We are the lowest in September twenty twenty four, the mag seven sinks in particular, we're looking.
At five point four percent drop.
Apple now sub three and a half trillion dollars you're looking at in video well below three trillion. We're about two point six trillion dollars in terms of market capitalization. We'll find another five point six percent as we think about.
What tariffs and what.
Overall geopolitical tensions mean for this AI trade that we were so long at the beginning of this year.
Move on and even look at TSMC.
They come out with good numbers analysts like the pace of growth in excess of forty percent from the month of February in terms of sales. All eyes on whether they can live up to their own internal guidance for.
Their fiscal first quarter.
But the AI demand still clearly there when it comes to the making of chips, but it is.
Drag lower by sentiment. Let's get to that sentiment.
Grude Meg's ron Vastelica is here and boy are we continuing these drivations in the market.
Yeah. Absolutely.
It does seem like there's just no end insight for all of this selling. You've had major names that were kind of seen as maybe a safety trade in the market.
They're all breaking down.
Major indexes have fallen under major support levels, key stocks have fallen under support levels. There's been hundreds of billions of dollars of value just completely wiped off. It's been a very broad based weakness here.
Rian, How broad based is that?
Because last week we saw chips really taking a hit. Is what we're seeing today just really a dragdown of a couple of the big names that have a high concentration in that Nasdaq one hundred index. Or is there broader fears here that we're just not seeing yet?
Well, I do think just the breath of the selling does speak to just the broadness of the fears out there. If we are going into some kind of economic contraction or just broader weakness when you do have potential terrorists and escalation and geopolitical tensions, that's going to weigh on the market. It's pretty broadly. But because tech has done so well for so long, this is a natural place for people to be taking their profits first.
Any hints of buying the dip just seems to be completely waight. I mean, the key question for the market is thus far Trump says he's not listening to the markets, But is there a point at which he starts to.
Wow?
I don't know about that, but at a certain point, you know, you do have a lot of people remain very positive about the long term potential of the big tech stocks, even the AI stocks. It is very possible at some point where people will come in and think, you know what, these names have really gotten beaten down. A lot of them are at multiples that they haven't been trading at in you know, a couple of years
or even longer at all. Speaks to like an environment where maybe people start to get a little bit more positive, start to nibble in at the bottom. But there's so much uncertainty just in the broader economy right now. It's hard to know when that's going to happen. But certainly if we did see a rebound from here, I don't think that would be too surprising because it's not like the fundamentals have really changed all that dramatically.
That's Bloomberg's Ryan glas Stelaca. Thanks so much for joining us late.
Today.
President Donald Trump is set to meet with CEOs of major tech companies, including IBM, Intel, Qualcom, and HP.
The meeting comes as the.
White House considers policy changes, including tariffs and stricter export rules that could impact the tech industry's global supply chains and operations. Bloomberg's Mike Shepherd joins us now.
To discuss more. Mike, what are the stakes of this meeting today?
Well, we are seeing the stakes of this meeting play
out in the market right now. We're seeing the kind of uncertainty that is gripping investors as really a reflection of what these companies are also going through, because the terriffs, whether they're imposed or not, are throwing an element of what happens next for them and their supply chains, and also what happens to costs that they may have to bear, and also markets that they may be trying to sell too, not only consumers when you think about endpoint buyers, but
also folks other companies that may be looking to make some acquisitions along the way for their own supply chain. So there will be a lot to say at this It's unclear whether there will be some big reveal or announcement from the president. It is not signaling that way when we think about the TSMC announcement from a week ago or the big Softgate soft Bank announcement on Stargate with open Ai Oracle. This doesn't have quite that vibe
right now. But we'll have to see what the President says, for now the meeting is closed to press, but maybe they will open it up.
That's a great point that you bring up with Stargate, because then it was kind of a slashier meeting that was, you know, we were getting some nuggets beforehand.
What does it mean that these.
Are American companies, you know, as we heard from TSMC last week, are they looking more for guidance or is Trump looking something from them?
Well?
Trump is always looking for something from his counterparties. He wants some sign that they plan to invest, they plan to expand they plan to do more with their domestic presence. And yet the way the market is heading right now and all of this uncertainty, it is not an environment in which companies and businesses are more inclined to make those kinds of big spending, big investment decisions.
What's hitting the most mic is it tariffs? Is it a potential repeal of the Chip sacks? What is going to be that top question to President Trump these CEOs.
That's a great question, Caro, because the tariffs really have taken precedence over almost anything else. And his discomfort with the Chips Act, which he expressed during his address to Congress last week. Wawmakers quickly shot that down. They don't seem to be too inclined to cut off that picket of money. There wasn't a bipartisan support to get through. But the tariffs are really the thing out there that is sowing this kind of uncertainty about what the impact
on supply chains would be. Remember, the President has imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico and later put them in abeyance for an Now, our two largest trading partners here in the US, and then there's the world's second largest economy, China, that is the third largest US trading partner. Those tariffs of up to twenty percent of most products coming in from China really have an impact and start to have a bite.
Mike Shepard, we thank you for that breakdown. Now, amid these tariffs and market jitters, deals are actually still getting done. Service Now has agreed to buy artificial intelligence firm move Works for two point eight billion dollars as part of its push into AI tools that can complete tasks without human supervision.
From mex Bodiford joins.
US now AGENTKI here again but not organically grown over at Service Now.
Yeah, exactly every single software company is chasing this price of AGENTICAI. You know, I had to get a new laptop, you know, through work. And the idea is for a company service now is that when I type it in, it automatically routes almost everything. It makes a decision that says is this user permission for this? Is there a business case? What will it cost?
Cool?
The idea is ultimately that customers don't need as many people to you know, do in house tasks. Service Now's real core market is that it services and so move works. You know, it is a pretty clear play to be able to double down on that market and inject some AI into it.
Berdy Move Forwards.
Has been around for quite a while, even though we've been hearing about these customer service AI agents more as of late. It was less valued in twenty twenty one, and as we've seen in the broader start of market, it's really hard to raise money.
Especially if you're later stage.
Did Service Now get a good deal here?
It's a pretty good outcome. And as you said, it's been a tough market for VC backed companies right We've seen a lot of companies selling at below previous valuations. So I mean two point one to three. That's a pretty large deal. I think it's pretty successful for everybody. And with Service Now, it's funny because you know they're CEO Bill McDermott, at a reputation for huge deals at SAP. He came in at Service Now and said, you know, these days are behind me. We're going for organic growth.
But it seems like today the ugates may be opening, right. I mean, I think there's scent lights in the message that Service Now might be kind of ready to be a big acquirer.
It doesn't seem as though the market is that jubilant. I mean, the market is down across the board. The Service Now is down by more than six percent, which is more than the slump. And then as that one hundred, our investors just a little bit nervy about these sorts of big outgoings and a time where Service Now has a lot of government exposure, for example, in terms of contracts.
The big question for SaaS companies is how quick are you turning the AI moment into revenue for Service Now. In the most recent earnings they kind of showed that we are still prioritizing adoption rather than revenue. Spending three billion dollars to you know, essentially buy sooner revenue recognition.
That could be a sign of weakness.
Certainly, Ready Ford.
Who was front running the official announcement with a scoop over the weekend brilliant, thank you now coming up. Bitcoin slump continues despite President Trump's pro crypto agenda. More on the bitcoin space in a moment, but shares of Tesla is where we focus in on after bitcoin is off to be it's percent check out what this magnificent seven name is currently down by eight.
Point six percent.
It's leading in terms of the sell off we're seeing from a points perspective. Apple and Vidia also contributing. We're worrying about China.
We're worrying about.
Sales slump over there, but more broadly worried about valuations for a company that's ubs is saying perhaps the AI trade is a little bit too long a term for this particular one in the here and now they downgrade their view on sales for the first quarter. This is boombog technology. Bitcoin slide continues. It's now below eighty thousand
dollars for the first time since November. Now the asset class is consumed by macro concerns rather than the slew of pro crypto rhetoric that we got from President Trump's crypto summit on Friday.
From all let's break it all down with Shnani base icon.
Maybe there's this underwhelmed feeling from the crypto summit, but it is macro front and center in terms of the sell off on crypto.
Right first and foremost, the risky appetite is pretty tough out there, and you have a fairly high correlation still for bitcoin two stocks. So if you're selling off risk assets, you're certainly not buying bitcoin today. I think what's remarkable is not even just today's decline, and you are now flirting with that eighty thousand dollars level. We have dropped below it, but it's trying to kind of keep that mark.
You have bitcoin down more than twenty five percent since the highs that we saw, So if you bought bitcoin at one hundred and ten dollars, one hundred and ten thousand dollars nearly you're feeling that pain. Today on a seven day basis, bitcoin is down more than eleven percent, So too is a theoreum. But one thing that's important about all this is also that strategic Bitcoin Reserve that the White House had been talking about. It's not the
idea here that they'll be buying more crypto assets. They would be taking assets from what is already forfeited.
Right from what they have seized.
So if you're not buying from the US government, then it remains that bitcoin needs that extra marginal buyers story here at a time where as we've been talking about risk, appetite is quite low.
Shanali cryptos almost synonymous with volatility. Depending on where you sit, how much of these swings are actually unprecedented, How does it compare to what we've seen in the past.
Well, think about it this way, Jackie, on one hand, is on it is very something. It's something that big investors who have been in bitcoin a long time have bared before. You have the billionaires in the crypto industry pretty used to losing a billion or a few in a single year. But if you're a retail buyer who have maybe got in at the end of last year when the prices were still high through the form of an ATF, it is tougher to bear now if you're
thinking about the look ahead as well. There are a lot of meme coins and a lot of alt coins that people have bought into in addition to Bitcoin, even more of a drop than Bitcoin today is for example, Doge and many of you might notice that over the weekend there was a lot of criticism around DOGE and the plans for it, both by judges as well as members of the administration, according to different reports that were out there. So it's not just Bitcoin, it is the all kinds.
Outside of it.
They saw this big rally when President Trump initially had hinted that Salona Cardano XRP could be considered for this reserve, but they were not in that executive order necessarily for purchase for this strategic Bitcoin reserve so now or crypto asset reserve. So you do see pain there as well because the government's plans are somewhat unclear even after that big White House summit on Friday, Jackie.
That's Bloomberg Shanali base I thanks so much for joining us. We caught up with White House, AI and cryptos are David Sachs ahead of the Crypto summit on Friday. Here's what he had to say about the creation of the bitcoin reserve.
The reason why we need a bitcoin reserve is that the federal government already owns some In the past, the strategy has been simply to sell it, you know, in an ad hoc way, almost willy nilly, and that cost American taxpayer something like seventeen billion dollars in lost value. So we want to have a long term strategy to maximize the value these holdings.
For more on the crypto landscape, Stacy Rowland, zero one Strategies founder joins a snow Stacy, why did this crypto summit fall slap because hopes were pretty high?
Well, I think it's important to realize that unlike markets that react instantaneously, policy making is requires patients.
It's a slow process.
So, yes, the ball started rolling on Friday with the president's call for the creation of a strategic reserve and digital assets stockpile. There's a lot of details, as we've been discussing, a lot of details still need to be filled in, and there's still a role for Congress to play.
Stacy, with the work that you've done with the government relations that you built with Advisory, what you've been doing two companies trying to assettain what the government might do. Is that consistency enough? Because I think the fact that you're saying.
It's day one.
It takes a while to really digest what a strategic b QUES reserve means. But the lead up to the strategic strategic reserve was long, and many had anticipated that would be buying that maybe wouldn't.
Just be bitcoin.
We were allowed to get over enthusiastic about what the announcement would be.
Uh, well, it's a.
Great question, and I think essentially more conversations will have to happen, right Congress will have to be involved. Uh, these are these are long discussions. I do think looking at the details, one thing that I think is really interesting is, you know, the part that the public was able to see. There were interesting comments made, especially by the Treasury Secretary where he suggested that, uh, the Treasury was going to be playing a role in assessing the
tax code and looking at risk waiting. And I thought that was a really interesting hint. I'm very interested to see what Treasury does working with the OCC and the I R s uh in you know, he what the Secretary had promised was, uh, you know, looking at applicable regulations and amending or rescinding as necessary. I'm interested in seeing whether he is limiting those comments just to the strategic reserve or whether he was suggesting something broader and there's more to come.
When you served within the Accessory Department and you was in staff of the Office of Tax Policy, so you're someone who should know about these tax perspectives. And thanks Jack, you for holding on for this moment. But Stacey, I am interested in what it means in terms of the future of on ramps. Here we talked about stable coins getting some sort of regulatory clarity. That's something that investors want, not just tax clarity too.
Yeah, that's exactly right. There are calls for clarity across the board. Those are largely in Congress's perview. And this week in Congress, if we can take a quick shift to look at what's going on on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, there will be this week we're going to have action on stable coins and on information reporting in taxes. So we're going to see.
It's a very busy week in these.
Areas, both coming out of the White House reactions to that and actual you know, policymaking on the Hill.
You mentioned that Congress is going to have to be involved. What kind of bipartisanship do we see around crypto.
Yeah, increasing right, And I think it's important for people to realize, especially in the work that I do, that every Congress is different, right. And so last year we did see a shift over the years for this issue to be sort of increasingly partisan.
But a lot of.
That was largely to do with the political realities. You had the Biden administration that was signaling you know, skepticism, right, some would say hostility to some areas of digital assets, and the heading into a contentious election year, Democrats were going to you know, defer to their party leader. Now political wins have shifted, right, we have a Republican controlled Congress.
Clearly policymaking will be happening in this space and that middle that that you know opper coortunity for bipartisanship is much broader than it ever has been.
That's Stacey Rand of zero one Strategies. Thank you so much for joining us.
Time now for talking tech first s up shares of Redfin surging today. Rocket Companies has announced a deal to buy the real estate listening site for one point seventy five billion dollars, paying twelve and a half dollars a share in an all stock transaction. Rocket CEO b Oun Krishna join Bloomberg Open Interest have this to say about the deal.
We're very excited about this deal. Two of the biggest growth opportunities for Rocket that we've talked about are really growing in purchase and AI, and by bringing together the leading home search website with the leading mortgage finance company, we expect to accomplish both.
US deliver Room it's set to exit from its Hong Kong business due to wheat sales and mounting competition. Now, the London based delivery company will sell some of its assets to rival food Panta, with other assets at the delivery app will remain active in Hong Kong until April. The seventh and self driving startup Wave says it's near a commercial debut with major automakers to launch his driver assistance system in the.
US and in Germany.
Now.
The startup is back by SoftBank and Video, Microsoft and Uba, also saying that it's AI software can adapt to US driving behavior's faster at Wave did not have them mentioned a timeline for release or the name of the car makers involved.
Jackie for more on a Wave.
Dana Wolman joins US now Dana autonomous vehicles are really having a moment here. How does Waves stack up to what's already on the market and what we've seen so far.
So for listeners who are unaware, Wave is not a consumer facing product, So it specializes in autonomous driving software, and as you might imagine, it is AI powered and that software goes into various automakers vehicles, and it may may not even be branded as Wave in front of consumers. So it's not that the consumers can purchase, but it may be something they experienced, depending on what car model they p purchase in the coming years.
So the competitive threat is to Tesla FSD, is to all the other automated offerings that were about to be consuming, you.
Know, possibly the likes of Weimo. What I find so fascinating about this space is there's a lot of frenemies. There are clear competitors, but sometimes depending on the web of who's invested in who, a partner could also be a sometimes competitor. I think the relationship, for instance, between Uber and Weimo is really fascinating in that regard.
Dana, what does this mean for the market here in the United States? Does this mean that it's sort of kind of getting crowded when it comes to who's already out there putting this software in there. One thing that you mentioned that really struck me is that it can adapt to us driving behaviors. I mean, are we just bad drivers here?
So that struck me as particularly interesting too. Alongside us providing some news today about the company's timeline or this vague timeline, the company put out some data today just suggesting that it has a newer and more efficient approach to adapting its algorithms and its AI models to basically US signage and US road rules. And this has been
a really fascinating topic. It's actually something that Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang brought brought up at the company's CES keynote, and Jensen in that keynote.
Talked about how difficult it.
Is for companies to map local roads safely and efficiently at the same time without it just turning into this cost effective balloon essentially, And so given that context, it was really interesting that Wave came out and said, hey, we've got these models and they were trained in Europe, but we can really adapt them pretty quickly and easily to the uniqueness of US roads.
No clemen on us THISUS European driving rooms.
Welcome back to from their technology. I'm Caroline Hide.
In New York and I'm Jackie Devalas in Washington.
And we check in these markets that are in cell off territory.
Once again.
Look, we are questioning growth in the US, we are questioning tariff impact in the US, and we're questioning valuations of the AI trade were off by the NASA that one hundred almost three percent, bouncing off of our lows, but nevertheless underwater. We're looking at Bitcoin of by three point four percent at one point sub eighty thousand dollars.
We're still higher than the day of the US.
Election November last year, but only just Meanwhile, we're training at the lowest level than as that one hundred since December the eighteenth of last year.
Move on and have a little.
Actually the Lowes office in September the worst day on the market since December of last year. I'm looking at basically the entire mag seven drive bring us lower in terms of our points perspective.
There are zero cell ratings on a number of these names.
Nvidio zero cell ratings in terms of analyst expectations, Microsoft zero cell ratings, but still we go lower, as we cannot fathom when we start to see a bottom and people start to buy the dip, Teslau as the most off by eight and a half percent. We were about Chinese growth and we are about a future of AI where Ubs cuts their forecast for this year's sales to the company. But Microsoft and all these names just in the red. But there's much more news when it comes to Microsoft.
Checking that's right, Microsoft has created its own in house AI models that it thinks it can go toe to toe with industry rivals like open Ai. According to sources, Microsoft has been developing a family of models called Mai to perform a variety of tasks. For more on this, Bloomberg's Matt Day joined just now, Matt, Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into open Ai. Why is it developing its own models now?
Well, I think Microsoft wants a hedge at some point, right their agreement with open Ai the main one that's gotten all this in from all this all this attention last couple of years that only runs through twenty thirty. That that could be extended hypothetically, But at some point Microsoft's going to need to shoulder the burden for its own AI services. The company clearly believes that AI is
the future. And so even though they've been partnering with opening Ia real closely, as they say, every time they open up their mouths on the subject, you know, they're still working on their own models as well.
We were just talking about frenemies in the AVA side of things.
Is this a question of frenemies? Are they competitors or are they ponting?
Is Matt Well?
Is it's both? You know, Like I said, they Microsoft seeings opening Ice praise as anytime they can, you know, but they're also realistic about it, right, They've worked on their five models for for a long time. Either are smaller set of language models that can run on a laptop, or at least they're designed to be smaller than the big,
big kahunas at chat GPT. But I think both parties are are kind of sober and realistic that you know, they're going to work together, but they're also going to build their own their own.
Master tramps, Matt, opening Ice technology like chat GPT underpins a lot of the existing technology that Microsoft has already sold to its enterprise customers.
Does this move risk spooking that base?
You know it might, but I think if we're way, way way early on that, in part because Microsoft has only just started testing, you know, whether they could use their own models, like whether they could use non open AI models to power pieces of its copilot, which is Microsoft's main sort of AI go to market for its office user base. So we're probably really really early for that, you know. Right now, Microsoft woul tell folks say, we
still use open AI. That's the industry standard, the state of the art.
Fascinating Deep dive and Microsoft, we thank you, Matt Day. Meanwhile, let's talk about more on the Generator of AI. Space, a startup from two former researchers at Google's DeepMind, have raised one hundred and thirty million dollars for a new company, its goal to create AI powered super intelligence. Co founder
and see of Reflection AI, Misha Laskin joins us. Now, Mischa, this is around coding and the fact that coding can be done better than a human and not just as some sort of copilot, but actually going off and building the code itself.
That's right, Thank you for having me. So to take a step back, we're team of researchers and engineers from formerly Frontier labs like deep Mind, where we contributed to some of the biggest breakthroughs in AI over the last decade. And the mission of the company more broadly is to build superintelligence. And what we believe the starting point is is exactly what you said, it's building incredibly reliable autonomous coding systems. So that's what we're focused on today.
Deep might not want to do that. Why did you have to go off and set off your own company.
Well, we think it's really important to not just do research in the wild, but to be really closely coupled to product and customers. A model that we have the company that the only EVAW that really matters is the real world EVAO and so we felt that by being really close to the customers, we'd be able to see through the mission better.
I mean, when I think about coding assistance, I think about Microsoft Gethub copilot. It's extremely popular amongst the coding community out there, and I'm curious what kind of reaction you've seen from your customer base with the notion that you want your tool to be able to do it on its own versus kind of have this human intervention alongside of it.
That's a really good question.
So, actually, we've found that the tool, both internally at Reflection and the way our customers use it is incredibly empowering because it allows engineers to focus on the stuff that is really high priority and they want to work on, and we kind of take the more tedious work off
their plates. So we kind of think of an engineer of evolving over the next few years and becoming basically an architect that has an army of these one hundred AI engineers working for them and helping them see their visions through.
When I hear super intelligence, I remember a lot of the initial more existential kind of concerns that we're coming up at the really beginning of chat GBT taking the world by storm, And just last year we saw a wave of AI safety focus researchers and leaving open AI. I'm curious how you're going about the safety conversation.
A year afterward.
That's also a really good question. Safety is definitely one of the things we.
Care about a lot.
This is a lot of the work in safety is traced back to what's called reinforcement learning from feedback, which is what our team led at Gemini, and the way we think about safety is from a very practical perspective. We believe that superintelligence cannot be built in a vacuum, and so it's really important that you iterate closely with customers and users and make sure that these systems are aligned from day one with their needs and are put on the right guardrails.
Many are worried ultimately about whether this disrupts the labor force. You're saying, look, you're just going to free up the engineers to do even more, But ultimately, what talent do you need right here, right now and in the longer term will you need as much talent?
Well, the challenging thing, both today and in the future is how to ask the right questions, how to design the systems so that your AI engineers do the work for you. So today a lot of the talent is around research and distributed systems engineering and very kind of complex engineering tasks. Now AI engineers might help upload some of that in the foreseeable future, but I think asking the right question will still be a really valuable skill.
It's quite busy out there in the world of general to AI coding assistance and startups that are getting mind modeling valuations. The latest was any Sphere coming out with a ten billion dollar valuation. We understand they're going to be getting money replete. We think about poolside, how are you thinking about standing out from the crowd and continuing to be able to raise significant amounts of private money.
What we're building is significantly different from the existing suite of coding AI products today. The way we think about the existing Coding Eye products is akin to a cruise control for engineers. This is really useful, but the engineer still does most of the driving. We're building systems that are fundamentally autonomous from day one that you give You're give them the task and they take you from point A to point B and they need to do so reliably.
And to do that, you need to drive fundamental breakthroughs in intelligence, and that's what our team is focused on.
That's na Sh'll ask and CEO of Reflection AI, thank you so much.
For joining us coming up v on.
Tobol I've inspired Capital joined us to talk about the future of social commerce.
Caroline And while we check back in on these public markets and they're having a torrid day.
We're off of our lows.
We're down by two point six percent, not as much as the more than three percent sell off we saw earlier in the NASA one hundred, but still the worst day since December of last year, mag seven off by four percent.
Stay with us.
This is Bluebog technology.
Venture investing is on track to be at its highest level since twenty twenty one.
That's calling to data from Pitchbook.
But much of that funding is going to start up powerhouses open.
AI and reill.
Let's talk about what it means for the cycle of investing with Alexavon Toobo, founder of Inspired Capital, nearly nine hundred million dollars in assets under management, three funds, generalist early stage, but how much of you had to just focus in on the generative AI trade.
There is obviously so much happening with AI RI at large, and I think it hits so many verticals. So for us, we're very thesis driven, and you know the future of social commerce, which I know we're talking about today. We've had a three year thesis that we've just been thoughtfully executing and so that's how we like to do our work.
Okay, So when you're thinking about a thesis such as social commas, that is how AI can interweave with my social experience and some many my scholping experience becomes that much, we'll talk with it.
That's exactly right.
So in our point of view, you'll have the huge open AI, the lms, the perplexities of the world, but there will be an AI application layer above that. So, for example, we back to a company called duck Bill, and what duck Bill does is get snowed you exactly knows how many children you have, what products you're interested in, and then serves them up for you. So it takes discovery from going to Google and hunting for that birthday product.
My daughter turns ten this month. For example, duck Bill this morning alerted me here are products you should.
Think about buying and should we buy them?
And the answer is yes, thank you, but very very very customized AI based on who you are, and these llms really get to know you and then recommend products.
Alex, So what have you seen from like consumer behavior studies?
Do people actually like that?
Because when I think about seeing a lot of these targeted ads, the first thing that goes to my mind is how do they know this? Am I giving them permission to be able to scrape whatever data to give me this wonderful recommendation for shoes or whatever it might be.
What are we seeing from the consumer side of things.
So, for example, and again just sticking with Duckbill, Duckbill is a platform that you give information to, you tell it. So it's all stuff that you have downloaded in terms of your budgets and what you like to spend, where you like to buy flowers, from, what your kid's interests are. And then from there the recommendations keep getting better based on their AI infrastructure of things you've allowed.
So that is all opt.
In and I would just say incredibly simple and making your life better in terms of executing on products.
When it comes to where humans are left in this social commerce thesis, because when I go on tip I love seeing product recommendations, whether or not they're sponsored by a person, it's the human that's making the recommendation that's really the sell for me. How does this fit into how you're going about looking for companies in this space?
That's exactly where Jackie.
So Jackie on the other end of that spectrum where an AI brain is recommending a product to you. In the last just few years, AI content has exploded ten thousand percent increase of content online videos, written content, et cetera. And so we actually have the opposite thesis as well, which is the pendulum is going to swing back to really trusting brands, products.
People that you know.
And so we back to a company, for example, called shot My. Shotm just announced a seventy eight million dollar Series B and shot My is a platform where you can go online and follow the exact people your best friends, people in your sphere, or influencers or content creators that you trust, the enthusiasts that you love, and then buy
products directly from their recommendations. And in so many ways, Jackie, that shrinks in our down to just the people you want to follow, just the things that you're interested in, and it's your front door. So again Google no longer being your front door. It's going to be your AI application layer, and then it's going to be a company like shop mine, for example, where you're just buying from the people you love and trust, which is how I buy offline, and now it's coming online.
What about if you're actually a creative that can't find exactly what you want and you want to make it, and you're sort of back in companies that almost get rid of.
The brand entirely, right, We're all going to be our own creators in some way.
That's right, and actually so again on the sort of far out there ideas of our thesis is the idea that we no longer because of generative AI need Let's pretend you and I are buying a white coffee table marble. You know, you would take a photo, you would upload it online or start hunting on Google seeing pictures. Maybe you end up at Etsy, and then you perfect it and you buy it, and it's so much work. There's a company called Arcade AI where you literally, if you
can imagine it, you can make it. And what Arcade allows you to do is write into gen AI old coffee table, three legs, and all of a sudden it starts to show it, and then you can tweak the picture the way you want it, and then it shows you all the places you could buy exactly that table
by connecting your deaf directly to the makers. So what that does is it turns all of us normal everyday people into expert creators where you can manufacture your own products, which again is a more out there edge of the spectrum, but a big, big, big idea in that company's just released forty two million.
I mean in terms of being an expert, you're also an expert founder yourself. You built lenves and I can imagine at this moment, when you're thinking about a company that's building around a global maritch of a building your own products, you're getting a lot of cools from these founders being like, what do I do in this sonart? We've got no consistency in terms of path the direction right now from a government level, how.
Many cools do you feel from your founders right now?
I mean we often literally see fifty companies a week. We are talking to our founders regularly because we're in a tectonic shift right as you think about innovation curves, we are at the edge of the beginning of a brand new innovation curve that is more isaac than anything we've seen in the last twenty years. And so I think being very thoughtful and precise and again thesis driven about where's the world headed, where do we believe the world is headed?
And how do you make those bets?
And of course that advice we give at inspired to all of our founders as well.
Alex.
So when I think about shopping, I mean, it's interesting that a lot of your companies.
Are really the software layer. You can't really see it, but it's there.
But at the end of the day, these are products that have to arrive at someone's doorstep to kind of really finish off that customer experience. We're seeing a lot of volatility when it comes to those with exposure to manufacturing kind of cariiff concerns. Are any of your companies grappling with any of those fears right now? Absolutely?
I mean, as you think about tariffs and what that will look like and products that are being manufactured outside of the country, every single one of those founders is asking and my co founder and business partner Penny Pritzker, we just stated content on tariffs and exactly how people.
Should proctically think about them.
And obviously they're very volatile, but I think preparing people for the worst of what they should be prepared for is how we operate at Inspired and always providing that macro lens is critical as people are actually executing in the day to day.
You'll co found A helped build paperless posts into what it is Alexa.
I go back to where we started.
We started it that VC's having kind of a nice dea yep, but certainly in the judges of a I space. You've just mentioned a lot of companies getting big series B series full of on funding. Is that the environment and you'll see right now people all getting money.
I don't think it's typical. I mean, I think it's the haves and have nots. I think you're seeing for companies that have big, compelling ideas, huge breakout shop Maize revenue has grown exponentially more than ten x in a short period of time. And I think you're seeing in companies that are really working, the dollars are there, and I think then you're also seeing in companies that are not working. It's very dry, and so it is a
tale of the haves and have nots. And I think things that are at the forefront of which we have a few in our portfolio of AI. I think the capital is not only there, it's many funds are there at the same time, very very quickly. And so again I think when the traction has really proven out, that's when you're seeing the capitol.
NICs on Tobal, great Teyr and managing partner, founder and spat capital.
There's going to be a deal on Tiktoks.
There could be We're dealing with four different groups and a lot of people want it and it's up to me.
So there could be President Trump.
They're speaking about efforts to find a buyer for TikTok's US business. For more.
Let's speak to Bloomberg's Kirk Wagner. The clock is sticking.
Is April the fifth is the time they've got.
Are we going to have to extend?
It's very possible, right.
I mean that comment from President Trump was sort of more optimistic, I think than the things that we've been hearing from behind the scenes. It really feels like things sort of have stalled out. A lot of potential bidders. Have you made outreach but not necessarily gotten a lot
of feedback in return. And so this idea that you know there might be four possible groups that are all in the mix here, I think makes it sound more optimistic again then I was, you know, feeling that it was forty eight hours ago.
Let's talk about in the mix lot, Because we've spoken on the show plenty of times to Frank McCourt junior. He's with Alexis o'hanian on the one front. We've also speaken spoke to Jesse Tinsley, who might or might not be powering up with a mister Beast, but certainly he's got some other key founders like the Roeblock CEO alongside.
Him, and then there's sprinkling of others. Who are these four, do you think?
Yeah?
Well, obviously President Trump didn't name the four, right, So we know of three groups that have come out publicly. You mentioned two of them, Jesse Tinsley's group, the Frank McCourt and Project Liberty Team Perplexity AI has you know, supposedly made some type of bid for TikTok as well.
So those are the three that have sort of been public But again we've also heard President Trump sort of throw his own names out there, right, Larry Ellison with Oracle, Elon Musk of course with his stable of businesses, and so we don't know who he's talking about. We only know who's raised their hand. But the numbers don't add up. He says four, we know of three, so supposedly there are some some mystery names still out there, and.
The numbers are all in a mystery.
As well, because is it worth up to fifty billion dollars for US TikTok If they don't get the underlying algorithms, such as with Project Liberty's bid.
Yeah.
I think what makes this so complicated is that one the range of prices, you know, I believe Project Liberty bid twenty five billion, and another group, the Tinsea Group, I think, was saying more twenty. We've heard numbers as high as fifty, as you mentioned. And I think it all depends on what is included in a deal, right, doesn't include that underlying algorithm, doesn't include just the brand and the user base.
And also what role does the US government have here? Right?
President Trump has talked about the US taking fifty percent of this, right, and so that has to factor in two.
Is that even doable?
So this is not traditional caroline, as you know, And so I think that's what makes you know, even basic numbers here or ranges here very hard to predict.
And what's totally unprecedented is the idea that the president himself has the time of the bandwidth to be negotiating any of this. But it is a geopolitical context because China gets sort of a rite of reply in all of this, and at one point seems only one Elon potentially as a bidder.
Yeah, well, I point out two things. One, it feels like JD.
Vance, Vice President Vance has actually taken on some responsibility for trying to get this over the line, right because the President is presumably very.
Busy, and so he's passed at least some of this aft to him.
The other thing that hasn't really been mentioned here is like, just because President Trump wants a deal done does not mean a deal is going to get done, right, Like bike Dance has to agree to this, and by association, pretty much the Chinese government has to agree to any type of deal. Right, So he is really representing just one side of this equation. And so I think, you know, will you factor those two things and again that there are four people bidding and I have control over this.
Those kind of comments from him, I think are lacking some major context around the fact that he's not the only one who gets to side here.
Clark sticking.
Kurt Wagner, thanks for the update on all things TikTok. Meanwhile, we take you back to the public markets. Selling pressure remains. We're off by three percent on the Nasdaq one hundred magnificent seven, having an ugly day of by four and a half percent.
We question US growth.
We questioned Taris, look about the earnings that we're coming up.
Of course, this does it for.
This edition of Blueberg Technology. You don't want to miss out on Oracle's numbers. They report after the close today. We're off by four percent on Oracle. We question AI and the data center. We also talk about AI Human X in Las Vegas.
Join us there tomorrow.
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