Tech SNAPS it's Losing Streak and Metaverse Wealth

pun is intended, plus lessons learned. I speak with the CEO of Solar Winds two years after that nightmare hack that started with Russia and blindsided Key customers and making money in the metaverse. We'll sit down with Roadblocks CEO David Bazuki to talk about the weird, the wonderful, and the lucrative as the form works to build a digital but civil community for kids around the world. We will get to all of that in a moment, but stocks

climbing first. After another volatile day in week, tech stocks in particular bouncing back. Let's stick with the markets and the moves in tech this week and joining me from San Francisco, Mark Leman, CEO at j MP Securities, Mark, thank you so much for joining us. You know I asked at the same question, how are you making sense of all this week. You know, first the bottom falling out from under us, and now now suddenly investors are

okay with it. Well, i'd say kind of yes. So a week and as that claimed a thousand points off the bottom at about three o'clock East coast time last Friday to today, it's almost a thousand point rally, and that's historic, um. But it shows you the amount of pessimism that was in the market. And look what's happened in a week. Okay, we like we've heard rates has stayed relatively tepid two or on the tenure, We've rallied massively, and we've actually had some earnings revisions that have been

somewhat negative. But the market I think has seen some of those and said, you know, they're not as bad as I once would have thought. We've seen the consumers slow down a little bit, which is also a positive sign that this runaway inflation may be tempering a little bit. And I think most importantly, I think companies are getting more realistic and the market is getting more realistic. But the public market and the private market, and that is I think amplify about what we saw some m and

A this week, So you take all those factors. Yeah, I'm not going to predict the other thousand point rally in the NAZAC this week, but I think we came so far so fast that we needed a little bit of some good news, and this week even some of the more moderate news was perceived as good news. That's a great sign. So let's go back to them. That snap pun is the snap case isolated to SNAP or two maybe social media stocks, and not potentially such an

indication of such a broader narrative. Listen, I think Snaps over the zealousness at the last quarter is reaping some of the downside that we saw this week. So they put out a terrific fourth quarter, if you remember, and the stock zoomed up no pun intended to a much higher lofty level after that. And then when we saw this tempered note about the rest of the year, stock

got punished greatly. And I think some of that quote unquote a rational exuberance from before they're paying for You also see some people like Workdre today which did not

put out a particularly good report. The stock was down five, but that on a on a day like last week would have been down a lot more and when you see companies putting out more tepid guidance and the stocks really not getting creamed, I think that's a sign that investors are getting comfortable with multiples and maybe the worst is behind them, and that again is a good sign. The fastest way for things to go up is for things to stop going down, and I think we've seen

some of that this week. And I think this is a really interesting point because again the consumer is slowing down, the high end consumer still has ample capital, and I think the market reflects that. We also saw one of the biggest tech deals in history sealed this week Broadcom and v n where. Of course, you know we've seen some big deals in the last few months, Microsoft Activision,

of course, this potential deal Elon Musk buying Twitter. Are these unique one offs or are we going to see a trend in M and A. I think you'll see more, and I'll tell you why. Um companies obviously have balance sheets that are fortified. So you're seeing big tech have balance sheets that are fortified. You're seeing capital on the sidelines for interesting deals. It's ready to get deployed for this.

So when you announce it to the market, the stocks obviously are working because they see the combination of those two companies working. Now we see some other things in the on the name m and A World, or to go private world with Twitter that are different. But when you see that kind of activity that we've seen earlier this year we saw with Tomo Bravo taking company private, those are signs that there's lots of capital on the sidelines.

Evaluations are getting to a point where private equity really likes them, or public currency is enough where they want to use them again. That's another sign that there's lots of capital out there, and at these prices, buyers are going to show up. So if you're looking at the numbers right now, what do you think are the biggest risks? What are the names you see as most risky, What do you think could potentially behave in profitless tech continues

to be a place that people are worried about. And I think companies, every boardroom, every venture capitalist, every private equity person has told their companies, show me your path to profitability and show it to me now. And I think that's really showing up in the boardrooms and showing up in investor's psyches, and frankly, showing up in private evaluations too. They were in denial because when you stay private, you can tell anybody what do you think you're worth it.

You can tell what the last round you raised, and that probably was inaccurate if you did it at some point. So profitless tech with no path of profitability is worrisome. What I would point towards some of the darlings of last year that are not the darlings of this year. So I point to some of the I p O s last year is a company called legal Zoom that we were part of, trading at three times revenue. There's

a smaller company in Israeli company. Israeli companies were the darling of the market last year called Walkbee two times revenues, almost market caps in cash. A big one. Airbnb fallen greatly from the April hives. And just because it's falling doesn't mean it's cheap. Okay, Well, we will see what the next week brings. At least after a holiday weekend here in the United States, we'll be watching crypto trading through the weekend. JMP Security CEO Mark Lehman. Mark, great

to have you back with us here. The name Solar Winds and many of us might immediately think back to that major cyber it's hack that originated from Russia. Hackers gained access via a software update to major companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. Well, nearly two years later, the company is sharing more information about how it's gotten past that massive breach and its new approach to preventing it from ever happening again. I'm joined now by solar Wins President and

CEO Sedaka Rama Krishna. Saka, thank you so much for joining us. So solar Wins doesn't actually sell cybersecurity project products, but I t management software to hundreds of thousands of customers. How is your new approach different from the approach you had two years ago? As fall Emily, thank you for having me here. You are right. We selling software and support and serve customers, in fact, more than three hundred

thousands of them worldwide. As we came out of the cyber incident and learned some key lessons in terms of how to improve how soft ware is built not only today but into the future. Hopefully. There are some critical things that we've done in the context of what I

call secure by Design. One of the fundamental aspects of that is how we actually build software with the key goal of reducing the threat surface and reducing the threat window for attackers to attack supply chains involved in building software. What do you mean by that? So every software product, such as the ones from US or Microsoft or actor who never involves the compilation of a large number of files. Uh, and many times we use third party software in the

building of our product. So in essence, similar to hardware supply chains where you build let's call it a television with parts from various suppliers, you're doing the same thing with software as well, and so at every point there is a potential for security threats and hacks. And so what we've done is build a unique model of creating software which involves parallel build systems. So think of it as the same software is built in three different locations.

I may not exactly know where they are being built, but at the end of the process we check the integrity across them such that an attack if they have to attack, will have to know these locations and attack them exactly consistently, making it more painful for them to attack. So, aside from building the software in different locations, a year

and a half later, what would you do differently. Now when you look back terms of I wouldn't call them so much doing differently because the security posture and the security investments that Sullivan's may commensurate to the industry, but maybe I call it from my industry standpoint. Some key reinforcements. First I would say is you cannot do it alone. Uh, security breaches. No matter how big and how resourceful you are. You could be a Microsoft or an Octa or a Sullivance,

you are not immune to it. So the notion of public and private partnerships are incredibly important and incredibly critical. So that is an area where I've been working on and others have been working on as well. We see progress, but we are not quite where we need to be. The second pieces, transparency is extremely important because as sooner we identify and report these issues, the sooner we inoculate,

the less the damage. And oftentimes people tend to not come out in the fear of victim shaming or lawyer up and not address the real issues in war. And the other piece I would say, in addition to collaboration is humility because it is not a letter of when or if I should say, but when so let's talk about the when I'm curious if there have been any updates to the actual investigation. Is there any new information

about when those hackers first breached solar winds? We we largely concluded our investigation last year and reported our findings, so there has been no new findings since then. It's all been focused on redeveloping our focus on how to build software in the best possible way and engaging with our customers and partners and employees worldwide. But there are still plenty of things that aren't known about this incident

or understood. There really hasn't been a public accounting of what happened by the government, for example, and by most of those in the private sector. What questions should we be asking of government and industry officials about it? The key question to really ask is what key improvements in information sharing between public and private have been created and proliferated. That is still a very asymmetric relationship at this point

in time. As I pledged, we are driving a greater level of trans spendency and collaboration with the government of parties. The reciprocation has been there, but I would also say that industry wide, it is extremely inconsistent, So I'll give you one statistic here. On an industry survey, more than nine percent of respondents said that public private relationships are important to addressing security issues. However, about said that these

are effective today. So there's a wide disparity between what is perceived need versus what is actually there today. So Dr Rama Krishna, CEO of Solar Winds, thank you for sharing some of those lessons you learned with us. Coming up, if your kids are playing video games, they are likely on Roadblocks. My conversation with Roadblocks CEO David Bozuki on Studio one Point up next us it's the online platform

kids are going gaga for. I spoke with Roadblocks CEO and co founder David Bozuki about the ind out of building a digital community that is safe and civil while it's gloring new ways to make money and scale a future metaverse on the latest Studio one Point out, Take a listen and um. It goes back to how exciting it is to have a company in this space that I think is ultimately got so many years of growth to it and is a new category following other types

of technologies. There's still so much innovation to be done, and there's so much invention to be done in this category that it's mind boggling. The critics think that metaverse the term is just marketing. How do you respond to that? This type of technology is much more difficult than the net or the web, which was another huge thing that we saw predicted and has started to come. But but

I think we're seeing early signs of it. When Mark Zuckerberg announced his plan to own the metaverse and change Facebook's name to meta as if it was something new, did that kind of bother you? Um? No, of course not. It's really hard to predict in five to ten or twenty years, what are the companies that really figure it out. And there's so many elements of innovation that are needed. Um, having a U g C community one of our strengths. We think that's like a huge starting point for us.

But we're early in our quest for innovation here. Roadblocks has built a huge business selling road bucks. Does this evolve into a much bigger marketplace? It was this revelation that people would ultimately make a living on platforms like this that started this digital currency is very Roadblocks centric in netwere a systems company or utility so it has formed this robust economy. It's allowed us to keep robox.

You know, roadblox is free for the vast majority. Would Roadblocks have a partner with some of these other companies working on the metaverse, whether it is Meta or Unity or Epic or Microsoft the core technology of you know, how are we going to ultimately support fifty people in real time on a phone and going to a concert together and waving your friends. I think that's going to be a lot of engineering work that each company is going to be working on, and it's going to be

really hard. As far as ultimately can an avatar go from one place to another, I think they'll be lightweight ways of starting to think about that. So what role do you think Apple and Android should play in the metaphors and what their policies need to change to really support this vision? And the biggest thing we would take advantage of if it were to happen is a change in those store fees. We we stay out of it. We let Google and Apple kind of run their businesses.

But when we think about more and more developers making a living on platforms like us and having to build stuff, if those store fees were to change, we would move most of that money back to our developers. Your goal is to build an entirely new category of human co experience, the next phase of human interaction. Yeah, how do you moderate that on such a massive scale? Are you doing a good enough job? In the third week when we were live, you can go imagine Eric and myself back

in our small office. Eric and I said, oh my gosh, safety and civilities, We're going to have to do it. We had maybe a hundred people at the time chatting on roadblocks. We saw a few not that agreed just by early signs, and we just made the call. This is going to be the foundation of what we do in the early years of Roadblocks. As we've gotten bigger, we've gotten to the point where there's thousands of moderators. Every image that goes on our platform gets human reviewed.

We filter texts very stringently, especially for thirteen and under players. We use a lot of AI and mL to help do this. We're always getting better, um, but it is a key thing for us. How optimistic are you about AI and tech being able to do that? I'm really actually opt mystic. We would never compare to the real

world because our standards are so much more stringent. But I do believe this will just keep getting better and better, and I think over time it will get to the point where if a six year old is on our platform, it's literally as if the parents wanted to be there with them watching everything. We'll be able to offer that type of thing. Now, a lot of parents are terrified. They're terrified of a future metaverse. They don't understand the

parental controls. Do you understand that feeling? We do. We actually have to. I think it creates a higher standard for us, because I think we can't assume every parent is going to get that involved with their kids. There have been some serious content challenges. You know, stories about roadblocks being a playground for virtual fascists. Well, there was just this story about Kim Kardashian's own child seeing an ad for a game that claimed to have a sex

tape of her. What happened there that was very unfortunate. There was a text blurb very shortly that very very few people saw. We took the place down, We moderated that user, and they're off our platform. It was now the video was never on our platform. There was no imagery on our platform. It was a very short mention, but very unfortunate and um, well, you know, our vision

is to be the most civil place for everyone. You can check out the full studio one point at Bloomberg dot com or listen to the podcast and later the company that is partnering with Row Blocks on a brand new f D A approved video game to help kids with a d h D that's up later in the show, and the pay equity start up backed by Steph Curry. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Emily checking in San Francisco.

Let's turn out to what is becoming one of the biggest stories of the year, and that is Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter shares of the company, rising for the third day in a row. Now it's best streak in a month. Twitter chaining at about forty dollars to share, closing that gap, getting a bit closer to that fifty four and twenty cents per share offer from Elon Musk. But in another twist, news that regulators are looking into how Musk said about building his steak in the company,

joining me to unpack it all. Who else but our very own ed Ludlow so ed what exactly is the SEC looking at now? So they released the letter on Friday, dated April four, and that's important because April fourth is the date that Elon Musk first disclosed his nine points you percent stating the company and they're asking him for information. Why did you use this particular filing type. The filing type he used was for passive investors, but he had more than five cents steak and as we now know,

he had activist intentions. He went on to put a bit in for the company. And there was also a timing. You know, when you build up a steak, you have a window to disclose it, and they asked him why he disclosed it outside or after that window. But the reason we care this is serious. This is the SEC taking a real look at this deal and perhaps the inference being they could look at it even closer. Right, So what could the consequences be or the fall outbeat? Well, simply,

did Elon Musk breach any securities laws? We don't know, but that is what the question is at least. So you were at the a g M earlier this week when Dan Durban Silver Lake board member doesn't get the votes to stay on the board, he resigns, but Twitter's board doesn't accept his resignation. Correct, so he's still on the board. And this is, by the way, someone who is an ally or known as an ally who masks. So there was a vote whether he should stay on

the board or not. He didn't receive enough votes. Some of the funds that voted against it, for example, said he's on too many boards. He's on like six public company boards. That's too many. So Twitter cited their proxy by laws of theme, and he's saying, we don't accept his resignation from the board. We're keeping him on the board. They exercise the right to do it. And it's as simple. So what's the point of his older's voting. I don't

think it's a great question. It's a good corporate governance question. But they basically said the Twitter's management and the rest of the board he has exceptional history skills, he adds incredible value, he understands the industry. He's an asset. We would like him sell on the board. That's the matter. So shares are up, of course, the broader markets are up. Is this also confidence that the deals will happen because we've seen Elon Musk makes some moves this week to

restructure the deal. So when we saw the big sell off in tech Stox, Twitter didn't really follow suit, and so the the idea was that why would it. It's kind of up for purchase. The deal has gaining a bit of confidence right that. We call it the spread, the gap between where the shares are currently trading and the offer price four dollar twenty cents. I don't know if we have a chart on that we can show

very quickly. But the other big news this week was Elon Musk took out the margin loan component component basically debt to on the deal that's secured against some of his test assault. That's now gone and it's a pretty much majority equity financing deal. He still has to ask others, including Jack Ducy, if they'll participate, maybe rollover existing shares, But I think all told, in a crazy week, we're

moving towards a place where the deal could happen. We'll see, all right, Aboma, thank you well, Instacart, PayPal, Microsoft all announced this week that they are cutting staff or slowing hiring. It is part of a larger trend across tech as companies prepare for a possibly prolonged downturn. I want to talk about all this and more with Maria Colacuccio. She is the CEO of Cindio, which helps companies not only identify, but address and resolve pay disparities. Marie, it's great to

have you back here on the show. So you have a really unique window into how companies are navigating some major cultural shifts, the move to work from home, the great resignation, now this downturn, and you know, perhaps some rethinking of the potential to resign and how exactly our companies navigating this. Yeah, and thanks for having me. It's a great question. So I think we're seeing a really

interesting trend start to unfold here. And if you just look at what you reported on today around Microsoft, you see it very clearly. So Number one, Microsoft just to x their comp in this initiative to increase retention and keep their workers in seat. And on the second, they also just announced that they're slowing down the rate of hiring. So there's this really interesting environment going on right now, particularly in tech, where a lot of us founders, entrepreneur

CEOs are thinking about cash preservation. We're thinking about runway, we're thinking about optimizing efficiency, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that we're also still in a very very tight labor market, and so how do we keep the folks that we fought so hard to get into our companies? How do we keep them there well? And so how our employees approaching it? Are some employees rethinking whether or not they want to make that job change

right now? Given that we're now seeing layoffs and hiring phrases. We're not seeing that yet, at least amongst our customer set, and we deal primarily with the Fortune two thousand, But I think we will. I think what we'll start to see is a little bit of a weight and see mode coming from employees. I think we'll also see a continuation in employee demands of employers to sort of make sure they want to know, why are you worthy of

my labor? So, if I'm going to make a change, particularly in a market that might be a little bit more volatile, I want to make sure I'm going to a place that's going to stick. So how much progress our companies really making on pay equity? I mean, there's been this concern that let's say women, for example, might be backsliding uh in the pandemic because companies are just prioritizing staying afloat um and not thinking about these things.

It's such a good point, and I think the pandemic is a key data point in this, and that we went backwards and we were already making glacial progress against closing the pay gap, and then COVID actually disproportionately added a number of years to our progress, so it made it worse. And I think there's a real danger here

of the same thing happening. And particularly among my colleagues and friends that are black entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, people of color, they're really concerned that people will start using the recession as an excuse to go away from some of these commitments toward diversity, increasing representation, committing to pay equity. But on the flip side, I think this is an opportunity for companies because the toothpaste is out of the tube.

There's really no going back in terms of what employees want. And with legislation accelerating around pay transparency California just passed a state bill and medium pay gap disclosure on Tuesday, this is going to continue. So companies that are really progressive and think about how can we maintain progress against these initiatives. They're the ones that will ultimately on the talent side and out when we come out the other

side of this. Okay, but California just overturned a law SP eight two six that mandated that companies add women to their boards. Here we are moving backwards, what like, what what happened there? Yeah, So it's interesting because the acceleration has really been on the pay transparency side. So you've got California joining Washington State, New York City, New Jersey, Colorado passing laws that require companies with over a hundred employees to post the range of salary for particular roles.

So you've got that happening on the employee side. And then, like you said, you've got the backsliding on the board. On the board piece. But I think, I think that's going to be a blip in the road, particularly because you're going to start seeing and continue seeing institutional investors like Goldman Sachs continue to push for more diversity on boards. I mean, they've already expanded from saying one board member has to be you from a diverse background to two.

And so I think even as you see things like the board decision that was just overturned. You're going to see institutional investors. You're going to see a continuation of activist shareholders and this coming up in proxy in addition to hearing from employees who really want this stuff. Well, speaking of investors, Steph Curry is, of course one of your investors. And the Warriors just made it officially to

the NBA Finals. Yeah, go dubs um. How involved is he in the business and how has his activism around social equity made a difference. It's it's made a really big difference. If you think about what's going on in sports with the U S women's national team, I think we're hearing a lot more from people like Candice Parker the w n b A, You're hearing from Eric Armstead on the forty Niners, You're hearing from Steph Curry, all laying in on this really important topic, not just pay

equity broadly, but pay equty, particularly in sports. And we're starting to see the fruits of that come out. And I think what's great about Stephen is that he was in this game literally and figuratively, long before it became the cool thing to do. I mean, he wrote an article about pay equity as far back as two thousand and eight team when he had his daughters and was really starting to think about the type of world he wanted to invest in in order to create a better

environment for them and others like them. So I think what's great about stuff is he's not performative performative. This isn't just words and talk. He is truly invested in the business and does what he can to help the business. Now, Warriors coach Steve Kerr made really impassion remarks, UM, a couple of days ago on the day of the you've all the shot shooting, and I just want to take a moment to listen to what he had to say. I'm not going to talk about basketball. Nothing's happened with

our team in the last six hours. We're gonna start the same way tonight. Um, any basketball questions don't matter. When are we going to do something? I'm tired. I'm I'm so tired of getting up here and offering condulces to to the devastated families that are out there. Maria, what do you make of of those remarks and him using that moment to say what he said, Yeah, I mean, so, Emily, you have four kids, I have seven. I think, I think what's happening right now and it's really critical that

leaders pay attention to this. That the Edelman Trust Barometer just came out this week saying that workers have the most trust in business than they ever have. It's the highest amount of trust in any institution, over government, over media, over Google, which is new. And with that trust, they require transparency. They want CEOs to be speaking out about what they believe can be done on some of these issues.

And I think when you look at Starbucks, you know, shutting down stores in Ukraine, you look at Dick Sporting Goods saying they're going to stop selling weapons in certain stores, the pressure for companies to start having a voice on these things is going to increase. And and I also think just the human side of this. I mean, what Steve Kurt did that was so remarkable is he showed his humanness, and in that he he gave other people the right and ability to be vulnerable and to also

show their humanness. I mean, if you're a leader, your people are struggling when they see people that look like them killed because of their race. They're struggling when they see people with children that are the same age as their own being slaughtered. So we've got to start thinking about not only taking a stand, but leading with empathy and understanding that we're all humans and and this is

tough stuff, tough stuff to process. Indeed, Well, mom to mom, thank you for sharing your human nous with us today. CEO of Cyndio, thank you well. Crypto had another bad week and it may only get worse. Joining me now, Katherine Dowling, Chief Compliance Officer and general counsel at bit Wise Asset Management. So look in bitcoin right now, trading

at just under twenty nine thou dollars. Of course it will continue trading through the weekend, but we did see tech stocks bounce back, why not crypto well, and thank you very much for having me. Despite the volatility we're seeing in prices, crypto is it is a volatile asset, and it is a risky asset, and it's gonna it's gonna be affected or impacted a little bit more than the general market. But we've we've seen the pullback in the stock market, we've seen the pullback and crypto as well.

But we've had a number of pullbacks and crypto since its start, and it has survived each one, and it continues to be up into the right. So I think my message is really just keep calm and carry on, look at the long term horizons. None of the business fundamentals have changed, and we will look at this, learn the lessons and continue. So, you know, what do you think is going to be needed to turn crypto into a truly you know, inflation act? Will it ever be that? Well?

What we've seen happen over this year, I've been calling it the Year of the definition. We're getting into a more mainstream, pushing into institutional audiences. You've seen Fidelity has now added bitcoin as an option in IRA accounts. This is huge, This is not going away. And now what we're also seeing more of this year is a is

the crypto education. UM I just came back from the DC Blockchain Conference, and what was really positive and compelling was seeing the number of Members of Congress who attended the event. They were engaged, they were talking about learning more, they were engaging in person, which was great to be able to have that in person with members of industry

saying teach us more. We want to learn more about these businesses and whether they were taking the approach of Corey Brooke Booker, who was taking the approach of my constituency needs access and this technology will give my constituency access that they haven't had from a number of the financial intermediaries that have shut them out of the financial system. Or if you're taking the approach of a Senator Haggerty who's saying, look, this is innovative and we need to

keep this business on our shores. The message between that is we need regulatory clarity, and we've got a number of folks who are really pushing towards regulatory clarity, looking forward to seeing the Lemmits Ujila brand bill coming down the pike, and all of these are pushing that year of the definition where it needs to be get more regulatory clarity, which is what this as needs. Okay, so teach our audience please this terror situation. How damaging is

this gonna be when we look back? So I think it's gonna be a pets dot com right, I mean it's I don't mean to be cute. I know people. I'm sympathetic to the that's helpful. The metaphor is helpful. I'm sympathetic to the folks who lost money in that investment. It was a risky investment, and I think what it is is one of the headlines I saw spoke to me, which was, you know, the ground shook, but the foundations are still solid with regard to the crypto ecosystem. So

it had its impact and we learn from that. We learn from what happened with this particular digital asset, and the people who made that investment also learned, Okay, this is very risky. Did I make the did I do my homework? Did I Did I put it in the correct category? It's not backed by fiat currency. There are other stable coins that are much less risky UM that are pegged and they're backed one to one with real assets UM algorithmic stable coins on the other hand, or not.

It was backed by code, it's backed by you know, if you're looking at something that's backed by code, then you have to kind of look one step further. Okay, what are we looking for? And if you continue to look and you can't really figure it out. One gentleman at the conference I just attended had a great line. He said, you know what, if you can't find the yield, chances are you are the yield. So I think on the go forward, we learned from this example, and for

every pets dot com there are hundreds of amazons. Interesting. Well, I appreciate the crisp comparisons there, and I think it definitely helps us better understand that. Katherine Dowling, bit Wise Asset Management, thanks for sharing your definitions with us. Well. For most video gamers, playing games is a way to unwind or connect with friends, but for some it can

also be a medical treatment. There is now an AFT approved racing game called Endeavor r X that's being prescribed by doctors four kids with a d h D. The company behind that game, Achille Interactive, just announced a first of its kind partnership with Roadblocks. Joining me now, Eddie Martucci, CEO and co founder of Achille, So explain to me how what are the mechanics of this? How can a video game help cure or treat a d h D? Sure, no problem, nom only, thanks for having me. This is

really a digital medicine. That's that's what we've built here, and that's what we've spent about a decade building. Um It's built on another decade of research on a very specific sensory and motor stimuli that activate the midline prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that actually controls attention functioning and other related cognitive issues. We coded that into an environment that looks and feels an acts every single second

like a video game. So you can really think about this as underneath the hood, there's this really strong neuroscience patented has been taken all the way through trials the FDA. It's a aura, um, but the delivery of this is something that we think, um can really fulfill a need in the marketplace, which is medicine that isn't scary but actually can be fun. And so we've decided to deliver this in a unique way, which is through a video

game platform. So so what do you say to the skeptics that, you know, more video games means more screen time, could fuel more addiction to games, which isn't necessarily good. No, it's a it's a really fair point, I think, Um. I think skeptics are there for a reason. It's usually because people have been burned, right, and so certainly, um, you have kids, I have kids. We see we see children play a whole lot of video games, and we're probably nervous most of the time what they're doing to

their brains. There's a little bit of research out there on what they do to the brains. Um Our point here is not to significantly increase random screen time. Our point here is to say we know parents understand that there's good and bad screen time, that there can be benefits to using phones and tablets UM, and to in our case, have a proven and in this case, the

only proven and prescription enabled video game. UM. So you're really thinking about offsetting some of the screen time that children might take for other things YouTube, etcetera, and using that to get proven benefits when you have UM a condition like a d h D and you need help. And you're also working on potentially applying gaming to long COVID in addition to this roadblock partnership, tell us a

little bit bit more about how that will work. Sure, sure, yeah, this is not This is not a technology approach that's based on any single game or any single population. So this is really about a new way to activate neural networks in the brain that control attention. We think one of the largest unmet needs in central nervous system medicine

is actually cognitive functioning. It's how the brain's processing information on a second by second basis that's been pushed aside in medicine that's been treated a little bit more as holistic medicine or occupational therapy. We think that's wrong. We think that it's something that patients deal with on a daily basis. And that is true in a d h D where we have a first product FDA cleared, but it's true in many other populations depression, multiple sclerosis, autism,

and yes, even long COVID. And those are all areas where we have completed our ongoing clinical trials. Because our aim here is really to create a class of medicine, a new business um that is specializing in the best and ideally most effective and safe way to intervene in cognitive function across different ages and across different diseases. Absolutely fascinating. Addie Marcucci, CEO of a Chilly Interactive We'll keep watching, thank you, and that does it for the decision of

Bloomberg Technology. Wall Street Week with my colleague David Weston is coming up next. Got a great round of guests they're including, of course Larry Summers. Um have a wonderful weekend. Everyone. Don't forget to check out our podcast anywhere you get your podcast, and again you can catch that full Roadblocks episode at Bloomberg dot com. Who do we have any day to U