Tesla AI Day 2.0

what to expect. Plus, Bloomberg learns that super agent Ari Emmanuel is pushing a settlement between Twitter and Elon Musk. The social media company shares jump as Musks texts. Two key players are revealed, and Katie Hahn left Andres and Horowitz to start her own firm, Han Ventures. I'll sit down with her on how she plans to put the one point five billion dollars of capital she raised to work again to all that in a moment. The first let's get to the markets and wow, what an end

to a week, What an end to a month? And what an end to a quart of brutal for then as that one hundred bloombergs, Baby lip Scholtz here with the latest blimey, Yeah, pretty much everything under the sea or everything trading sharply in the red today. It's really just been a brutal September. When I have multiple emails from analysts and strategists saying good riddance September, that really is a signal of all you need to know for the Nazza one, in particular, a third quarter trading in

the red. That's its longest quarterly losing streak since two thousand and two. Obviously, this pain has really been across the board. You're looking at stocks trading lower than the likes of Apple, Microsoft providing the largest largest drag. Really just bad when the market is so heavily skewed to these tech giants. I think I took a bit of a pause during Friday to think when things were slightly different.

We had the FED on September twenty one, and then when I look at the NASTAC one hundred, I think I'm right saying mid August we were up nineteen point three percent for the quarter or something like that, and things have changed so quickly. What is top of mind right now for investors, particularly when we look across technology and the equity markets. It's a lot of uncertainty obviously around the Federal Reserve, the intent to continue raising interest rates,

keeping those interest rates higher for longer. But then when you really look at the latest leg lower and you look at Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, there are a lot of jitters around earning season. Earnings is right on the horizon. You looked at that report from Nike that really blew out the bottom for that stock, and wait on both

the Nasdaq one hundred and the down Industrial average. So concerns are really getting to the point where price to earnings are going to be something that falls under the mic right, and earnings expectations have already come down. We wait for the third quarter earnings and see how much earnings expectations full further thank you to bilian Berg's Bailey lip Sholts Right. On Friday night, Elon Musk will hold

testa second ever AI date. We expect updates on full self driving, the company's in house supercomputer, and of course Optimus, a humanoid Tesla box. You may remember the Mr Roboto style dancer the joint Musk on stage last year. This time he's expected to unveil a true prototypes. Sorry, it's hard to keep a straight face with that. On the screen to get what we expect. In the latest we're joined by Bloomberg Shawn o'caine over in Austin. So, Sean, what do we expect. It's about what it looks like

when I try to dance too. Um. Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we're waiting for is what kinds of demos. Musk has promised to show off a couple of different actual working demos tonight, and so I think that's going to be the thing that people take away

the most. More specifically, think a lot of people in the community who are working on robotics and have studied it for a long time, you know, I think we all they all expect to see Tesla try to prove that it can differentiate somehow from some of the other companies like Boston Dynamics that are already working on this

kind of stuff. And one thing we are probably going to get based on what Tesla has been tweeting and Elon Musk has been tweeting, is some sort of demonstration of manual dexterity and being able to show that the robot can really do fine motor skills, uh, you know, by doing some sort of demo whether that's you know, cracking open a beer or something like that. I don't know, I'm sure it will be something weird, maybe throwing up

a giant metal ball at a cybertruck. Bring us up to speed on where Test is at with its work around our official intelligence, Right, we're really focused on on Optimus, but actually the focus to this point has really been about full self driving. Yeah. I mean they have spent a lot of time. They have a lot of engineers who have been working on the sort of underlying the fundamental research and development and engineering that goes into trying

to make their cars be able to drive themselves. And they're not there yet, but they've done a ton of work going down that path, more than any other automaker. And you know, the thinking is and and the pitch from Elon Musk is like, hey, we're doing all this work, there's a way that we could leverage that into other

lines of business. And so whether or not that's taking the supercomputer that they've developed and making space for other companies to use it in some capacity because maybe in some ways it exceeds what other sort of chip makers are out there doing, or taking the virtual worlds that they're building to train those AI models to power the full self driving system and finding a way to use what they're doing there, and so you know, I think that's probably one thing we maybe get a little more

clarity on tonight. Musk is always very proud of the supercomputing team, and some of these things are happening, you know, far more in the background compared to sort of the electric vehicle divories and sales. So I hope we hear more about some of that tonight, but he's promised it's going to be very technical. Tesla treats all these events as recruiting events, so you know, if you're watching as a lay person, it might be hard to follow, but I'm sure there will be some some sort of dancing

robot to keep you entertained. Hey, show them real quick, give us some color. What what? What do these events tend to be like? How do they tend to play out? I mean they're overwhelming when you're there. Even the vehicle reveals are always a little bit um, you know, like rock concerts, I mean they're always it's always a big stage,

there's always a lot of loud music. Uh. And I was at the opening of the Austin factory earlier this year, and it was you know, Tesla took that to its most extreme and like actually hosting concerts during the event before and after Elon Musk's folks. So I don't think we're gonna get quite as much of that element tonight. It's gonna be a lot nearlier, but you never know. With Elon Musk, it can always go in a really

wild direction. And so I'm I think I think I'm most interested to see is how far has the development of this robot com Does it looked like someone dancing at a suit or will that actually looks like a robot? All right, Bloomberg, Seawan Okaine, thank you very much. I want to get some more analysis and bring in p F. Farrago of New Street Research. She currently has a by

rating on Tessa Stock. And I'm delighted to have you here in New York with me because you cover Tesla, but from the tech perspective, you also cover in video a chip maker that's done a lot of work around artificial intelligence, and we'll bring those themes in. What is your interest in the work that Tester is doing around AI? What do you see is the opportunity there so let's

talk about like the chip space. What's very interesting is that test slat today they have these giants and your network that is driving the car for you more or less, right, and these thing still has to train to learn. And the learning cycle today on giant clusters of Nvida GPUs takes let's say five days, and the objective of dojos has developed in nose is to be able to do that over one night, right. And that's basically instead of having people working and waiting a week, is people working,

going to bed, and the next morning working again. So it's a game changer in terms of the pace at which you can improve the system. That's that's all the vision of e learn and that's what the investment has been made there. It's interesting you went straight to the hardware, yes, component of this. You know a lot of Tesla fans and investors and owners that I've spelling to, they want to know about the latest beta version of full self driving updates. They want to know when there will be

a wide public release. Yes, what do you expect on that front? Yeah, it's a very good questions. So Tesla has already made a lot of fo guys on the system. I personally drive the latest version of every Day I like it Alert. My assessment is that on the perception front, Tesla has made achievements nobody and you need its ability to read the world around it. The GAK can figure out what's around it, like the traffic lights or the cars, obstacles, pedestrians, bikers.

I can't remember a single time my car would not perceive something around it um and I think it has been the focus of Tesla in the last in the last few years, and everybody that Sweatyland calls like real world AI interacting with the real world, and they've achieved

a lot. And what's very interesting that now now that the car can deceive the world around it's the next challenge to me is what we call representation, which is making sense of what what you perceive, what you see and figuring out, okay, is that's the stuff I need to wait and wait for this car and then sneak between these two cards and things like that, And that's where I feel fs D. But as a user, I

feel there's still a lot of work. It's already very impressive, but there's still a lot of work to do for really the car to step to level three where I can stop supervising it. And what I would expect today is actually Testalla to show these challenges and to show how difficult it is and what they're doing to to address the challenges, because that's the way you're getting to hire the best people on that point, what they're doing to address it, you know, Elon Musk builds. This is

a recruitment event. I did a Twitter pole, you know, and I asked Tesla owners, fans, investors, what are they interested in? And of course you see on your screen they're interested in lot mess the humanoid robot. I mean, how interested you in the robot itself? You know, what do you see? Do you see that as a product or it's just an in house tool or a gimmick. What's your read I'm going to be interested in exactly in the same thing. I want the test let's him

to tell me how far have they're gone. And I don't explain them to to have been to have gone that far. It's quite a challenging project. But I want them to articulate what the challenges are because that's the best way they're going to be able to hire the best people like you can work with it on most you can have exposure exposure to the Tesla stock options, and you're going to work on the most interesting challenges. That's really I think what they're going to try to have.

So it might be a bit disappointing for like an atlyst and investors because you're not going to see the product getting into the market anytime soon. You're going to have like very technical discussions about how do you achieve you know, like the dexterity, how do you achieve perception for a robot or like UM as I say, um

representation and things like that. You've said in your previous research that Tesla is a matter of years ahead of others when it comes to ours official intelligence, and I said earlier you also cover in video and the video not just on the semi co inductor side, but broadly has done a lot of work in AI. Can you compare and contrast those two, you know, where does Tesla stand in your estimation and what has it achieved today

in the field of artificial intelligence. So in the field of like real world artificial intelligence, I don't think anybody stands close to test is ahead of everybody in terms of developing systems, but remember the videos a platform players, they develop a chip and like a Nichol system for people can develop their own systems, so they are not training the same game. And what's happening today is that Tesla being so ahead of the curves, the same with

Goodglele is ahead of the curves. These two players, whatever they done, they've developed their own chips and like the tipu at Google and Dodgo for for training at at Tesla, and they've done that for this reason that they need to accelerate the pace at which they develop their systems. So of course, like mainstreat, like common wisdom is that's not good for video because like the dream of Tesla is actually to turn off the Nvidia cluster and replace it by Dodgo. But I have a different take. I

think it's very encouraging. It's very positive because at the end of the day, what Tesla wants is to be able to do over night what takes them several days today. So they need more and more and more processing power and as you can imagine, very few people will be able to develop their own systems. So with Tesla and Google do it, and that's the market for nvideo. So I actually see Google developing the TPU Tesla developing Dodgo as very positive leading indicator of where the market of

Nvidia is going. Everybody needs more processing power to develop these models. Here. I wish we had more time, but very quickly we might get the court deliveries that this weekend. What are you expecting on that front? So I sense the SLA has produced a lot of car Wow, that's high, that's very high. I also suspect they've been struggling a bit to deliver all this car. So I think delivery is are more like a three sixty. And I think you have about twenty thousand cars that might be on

boots between China and the rest of the world. All right, Pierre Ferrague, New Street Research, thank you very much. Hollywood super agent Ari Emmanuel is trying to pave the way for a potential settlement between Elon Musk and Twitter. That's according to sources, The news coming one day after Musk's text between Twitter executives, close friends and potential investors came to light. Bloombergs Max Chafkin joins us discussed, just when you think that this saga cannot get any weirder, we

have a Hollywood super agent. You know, I'm not sure how seriously we should take this. I think one of the things we learned in these texts that dropped um is that there are a lot of people out there trying out trying to use their friendship with Elon Musk and sort of wheedle their way into this deal. Um. You know Ari Emmanuel of course, very very well known, very famous dealmaker. This is potentially a huge deal. I don't think it's hugely surprising that he might try to

put himself in the middle of this. I don't think that's a reason to think it's going to go anywhere. So let's get onto those texts. These are texts that emerge from court filings relating to the upcoming trial, which starts October seventeenth. They go all the way back to April,

which predates Musk's offer. I think we have a series of texts starting with the current Twitter CEO, Paragagrool and and basically what they seem to demonstrate is how that relationship deteriorated quite quickly, and then Elon Musk basically said, all right, I'm going to put a deal in too, make take Twitter private. Yeah, I mean one thing you learn when you read these texts that wow, like Elon

Musk is talking to a lot of people. He's having direct relationships with many many people in in sort of all different domains, politics, all these billionaires. Um. And he's you know, just texting away with with Twitter ceo and it's board um and it's kind of working things out as he goes. And as you said with the with the text with Twitter ceo, you see, you know what seems like pretty diligent efforts to work with him. Uh and then uh, the deterioration the relationship happened, you know,

almost immediately. We saw this play out, by the way, on Twitter as well, when Elon Musk's famously you know, tweeted a poop emoji at at the ceo of Twitter. But but it's it's pretty interesting to see this, um, you know, kind of in black and white. The other thing we learned is some of the background I suppose of how Elon Musk went out to raise tapits or outside equity financing for this deal. And in exchange with Larry Edison, he basically says, you want to get involved.

He says, sure, how much? Elon Musk says, oh, two billion. Yeah you think they were, you know, talking about buying a cup of coffee or something. Larrie Elson says, oh billion, you know ish uh the I think what this shows first of all, number one, this is a hot deal. I mean, and we can debate whether the whether they're fundamentals to back that up, or whether it's just Elon Musk.

But you look down the list and you see Ellison, Mark and Reason, a bunch of lesser investors, all of them basically willing to get in and on this without much of a many questions asked, um which I think you know that tells you something about how things turned out. It also tells you just the gravity around Elon Musk h. He is clearly at the top of the Silicon valley.

Totem Pole. You have Mark and Resent, very influential venture capitalists basically putting up a quarter of a billion dollars, no questions asked, and and and in seeing this over and over again, including Larry Elson, another you know, rich and powerful guy. So when the news broke that Aria Emmanuel was, according to sources, brokering some kind of settlement, the shares rose at one point to their highest level since man I think we have a chart which shows

the spread. You know, I look at it from time to time. It's kind of a soft indication of where wool Street sees this deal's likelihood. Where do all these tech leave us ahead of the trial? Is my question? Well, I think one of the things people have observed this already about Elon Musk, But you know, he has some things in common with the former president. And one of those things is he tends to tweet what he's actually feeling. I mean, and and so if you look at these texts,

they are very interesting. They give you a sense of what is it like to live as Elon Musk. You have a lot of people hangers on, rich guys bothering you all the time. But it doesn't actually change the narrative all that much. Elon Musk has said many of the things that we learned in these texts he's already said publicly, including this thing about bots, where he was already you know, talking about bots publicly before you have a business week call him out. Recently, Twitter's woes come

from Jack Dorsey being too busy with bitcoin. Very quickly, give me the overview of that. So Dorsey and and this is one interesting thing that that came out in these texts. You see Dorsey, who had just resigned from Bitcoin from Twitter, probably to spend more time with his Bitcoin u talking to Musk and saying, you know, we really need to change things. We need to we need to shake this up. Maybe it should be a protocol.

He's very much whispering and Musks here encouraging him to pursue this deal and encouraging the idea that there needs to be significant change, which is kind of strange because he was the CEO until very recently. It's and it kind of tells you again the gravity around Elon Musk that Jack Dorsey thinks that this outsider can come in and do something that he, as a founder and CEO cannot do. All right, So much more to learn, Bloomberg's Max Chafkin, Thank you much more ahead, stay with us.

This is Bloomberg. Google continues to collect ad revenue from crisis pregnancy centers on abortion related search terms, while failing to properly lay them as organizations that do not provide abortions. Bloom The Quick takes Medicine Mills paints the picture is Google keeping its promises on abortion information After Roe v Wade was overturned. The information that's displayed on Google products

across maps, search and ads became really crucial information. Google announced that it would adjust its search engine so users could find verified abortion providers. But are Google's changes actually working in practice. Let's say we're in Lincoln, Nebraska, where it can be hard to get an abortion. If I search abortion help, the contextual labels provided by Google seem to work. You can see that the first search result clearly says does not provide abortions. In this case, the

labels are working. All of these search results are for crisis pregnancy centers. That's the type of non medical organization that aims to persuade women to not get abortions. These centers pay to appear in searchers for women horse seeking abortion information. The problem is that this approach from Google doesn't seem to work in searches for adjacent terms. In September, when I searched for planned parenthood, for example, I found that Google provided no labels on any of the ads

that came up in search. The top shown result was for Nebraska Parents Center, which is a known crisis pregnancy center, and there was no label. According to an investigation by Bloomberg and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Google also failed to add these labels on other abortion related search terms like pregnancy help, abortion pills, and n a F hotline.

What we're finding is that Google's tiny policy changes do actually have a big impact on whether people are able to find accurate information about abortions or if they're misled. In a statement, Google said it has clear and longstanding policies that govern abortion related ads on its platform, and it applies these rules to all advertisers. It added that the company is constantly reviewing and updating its pauses as needed. That was Bloomberg Quick Takes. Madison Mills another story we

continue to watch. Our Trier has ended a deal that barred it from competing with Jewel that opens the door for the maker of Marlboro to buy an e cigarette company or develop its own vaping products. In Trier announced a twelve point eight billion investment in Jewel. As of

June that Steak was worth four and fifty million. And just this hour we got the headline that Intel's Mobile I has filed for an I p O. We knew that Intel had planned the spinoff, and according to sources, that would be a lower valuation of thirty billion dollars. Very interesting time in considering the markets and a lack of companies going public. The company seeking to list on the NASDAG under the ticker m b l Y. This

is Bloomberg Technology, im Ed Ludlow in New York. Rising interest rates and repeated market volatility has created a funding void, leaving many cash hungry startups scrambling for backup plans. So how long are the hard time is gonna last? Joining us for more insight is Kathy Gau, partner at Sapphire Dventures, whose investments include the likes of Fitbit and twenty three and me. Kathy is good to catch up. I've been asking venture capitalists all week, where is your head at

right now? Well ed? As we know, the markets have been absolutely crazy, But I will also say there's a dynamic in the venture capital industry right now where VC firms are sitting on an unprecedented amount of dry powder, about three billion right now, sitting on the sidelines waiting

to be invested into private companies. But as we sit here on the last day of Q three and look back at the quarter, deal activity is still well below that of last year, but in the past month or so I am starting to see certain pause of signals that indicate a pickup from the summer slowdown. So, first of all, more and more companies are starting to raise growth stage rounds and that's what I focused on Series B all the way to pre I p O or they're at least more open to talking to investors about

a potential funding round. Number two blockbuster M and A. A few weeks ago, Adobe acquired the popular design platform Figma for twenty billion dollars and fun fact, it's actually

the third largest acquisition of a subscription software company. The first one was Salesforce acquiring Slack for about twenty seven billion, and the second one was Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn for twenty six billion, So the Adobe Figma deal is definitely up there in terms of large M and A. And lastly, the I p O market is slowly showing signs of revival. Earlier this year, Instacar did file to go public, but more recently, the corporate trip management company trip Actions also filed.

So all in all, the world is crazy, the markets are crazy, but as a venture capitalists, I am encouraged by some of these signals. Let's let's talk a little bit in a moment about the kind of I P

O winter that we've been seeing. As you look across the startup curve, what are the headwinds right now to both deal making and also I guess the temptation to proceed with an I P A Absolutely well, you know, founders and CEOs continue to postpone fundraising number one due to the very large amount of money that they raised

last year. Many companies raise mega rounds last year at very very high valuations, so they have plenty of runway to continue to grow their business commensurate with the valuations they last raise. And at the same time, of course, there's global headwinds to a lot of businesses. Uncertainty has caused a lot of fear in the market, and companies

as a result are cutting back on spend, including software spend. Well, Cathy, I know you to be this kind of long term optimist, right you look at the global economy, you look long term, and you see opportunity. So what is the opportunity down the line? You know? And I'm still very long term bullish on enterprise fas I fundamentally believe that current macro challenges can actually be a catalyst for increased innovation and

optimization at many companies and enterprises. Of course, buyers will continue to be very careful with spend because burn is very important, but they'll also be looking for the next and best, greatest solution, right They're looking for the best solutions, and I think it might trigger a soft software upgrade buying cycle across many of the sectors that we cover. And I think it's also important really to take the

long run view. Some of the best companies have started and we're built and emerged from economic downturns, companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe. So caffy real quick, we were just looking at some of your portfolio companies. What is the advice to found is right now in terms of cash

preservational how they use cash's talent key in this environment. Absolutely, And you know the four main things I chat with my CEOs about, uh every week is Number one cash, right, just you've got to make sure you have enough runway to hit the milestones you need if you need to raise the subsequent funding round, So CEOs are all keeping

cash firm in mind. Number two is really customer attention, right, make sure your current customers are happy by delivering a great product and a great service and really listening to your needs. This is not a time to be neglecting your current customers. Um. And lastly, and this might be the most important of all in my opinion, your employees right. Continue to hire the best and develop the most talented

people you can find, all right. Thanks to Caffie Gaal partner of course at Sapphire Avenches, now General Motors is taking its next dive into electric vehicles. GM president Mark Royce took my mate Bloombergs Matt Miller on an exclusive first ride into the company's e V truck, the Silverado RST. Miller joined him from the GM headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. M What people need to do is get into it and see what an electric truck really can do. And

this is a dedicated platform with Ultium. You know, we're just bringing our cell plant online right now in Ohio and the second one will be in spring Hill. But the center of gravity is different. You know, We've got this will beyond sale here um in the spring with our work truck, which is uh, you know what you're probably in today, and so you know, for under forty thousand bucks and that's a that's a heck of a deal. And uh, you know, we're gonna start off with about

ten thousand pounds of towing with it. We'll follow it up with twenty pounds and it's just a very capable truck. What's demand like right now, I mean, not just for the business in general, the American consumer. What's demanded? Well, we haven't seen a lot of demand UM fall off even with some of the you know, sort of the ups and downs of the economic situation that or we're seeing in in the United States. But the demand is there.

I mean we we are. We are selling every single thing that we make, and we're selling it deep into the pipeline. So our dealers have really done a good job of being able to UM show people what the truck or whatever the product is UM that they want, and then when it's built, and then when it's coming and that'll just get get better as the chip UM, the chip piece of this becomes begins to level off and be more consistent. Are you seeing any signs of that light at the end of the tunnel in terms

of chips? I think so. I think we're seeing you know, fourth quarter here UM A little bit of leveling off, it's nowhere near what the demand is. The demand is still going to outstrip what we can actually supply because the inventory levels are still extremely low. So it takes a while for us to get the inventory back. But that means no incentives obviously. Um. In fact, people are paying more than M S r P in a lot of situations. How long can that last? I won't last forever.

There's no way that can last forever. But you know, again, until we begin to fill the pipeline again with some inventory, UM, that's going to be the case. I think, what about the electric pickup I'm not the pickup truck, I mean to pick up in terms of consumers buying electric cars. I drove the Bolt out here and it was surprisingly luxurious for a car that you basically get into for thirty five thousand after rebates, right, and it's even lower

than that now. We dropped the price on it here a few months ago, and uh, you know, we're seeing I think you'll see in our quarter quarterly results that people are really interested in the Bolt as one of the probably the lowest cost ev that you can get

into in the market. And you know, strategically that's great for us because our dealers begin to learn how to sell e V sum into the into the dealer footprint with our customers, and then our customers are looking for the cars so um, you know, and their supply um, and you know, we we're matching that the best we can right now. So it's a very very compelling vehicle, always has been, particularly with super cruise on the e u V, and we're seeing a lot of demand for that.

What about how does the business look to you as we see rising rates, as we hear concerns about a recession, how do you plan into that? We plan into it with our cost structure and so we um, you know, four or five years ago, we really went at our cost structure and you know, we're in good shape, but we can always be better, and so we'll continually take costs unnecessary, you know, uh, cost out of the business from an efficiency standpoint, and next year will be better

than this year. And that's the way we're gonna work at That was GM president Mark Royce with bloom Bags Matt Miller earlier today in the latest episode of Studio One Point, former federal prosecutor turned crypto venture capitalist Katie Horn shares her outlook on cryptocurrency markets. Horn sits down with Bloomberg Technologies Emily Chang to discuss why she left story venture capital firm Andreas and Horro Wrists to launch her own firm, Horn Ventures, and just how hard it

was to do so. Take a listen. What I set out to do was to continue to invest in this ecosystem that I think is so broad. That decision was very purposeful and the timing was very purposeful. We have an early stage fund that does seed stage, Series A, even Series B, and then we have what we call an acceleration fund, which is it's not a growth fund, it's a crypto growth fund, and I think those are different things. But later stage it might be crypto publics.

Um certain kinds of public tokens were set up to hold tokens and participate in the token ecosystem or later stage companies. I mean, you know there are now several crypto many crypto unicorns. The space has become really competitive. Even though you say, um, you know crypto has had

its kind of ups and downs. The thing is a lot of people in some of those last cycles have seen the kind of venture style returns that can be had in crypto and so you've had a lot of new funds enter the space and that's driven up competition. So what differentiates on ventures that and from you know, all of these other crypto funds or even the more traditional venture capitalists like Entries and Herowitz or Sekoia they also have crypto fun sure well, I think a lot

of traditional venture capital funds now have crypto funds. It used to just be like a regulatory designation. I was like, are you in r i A, which is Registered investment Advisor? I would say for crypto founders today, um, it's not enough to just be an r I A. Right they frankly, I don't even know if a lot of them care that's a regulatory designation. What crypto founders today want to know is do you live in breath crypto? Do you inhale the discords? Are you part of the community, do

you participate in governance? Are you going to be um staking these kind of crypto verbs um out there? And if you're not really in this space full time, I think it's very hard to run a successful crypto fund. We don't have a hedge fund component, so we're not sitting here buying and trading and selling. UM. That's a hedge fund structure, and there are crypto hedge funds. Um, we're not one. We're making seven to ten ure bets. Just how hard is it to launch a crypto fund

from scratch? You know it's hard, but it's not impossible. And we don't have a crystal ball. I don't know. I can't predict cycles, but I knew that we were in a cycle where you saw so much forever an excitement around the space. And I already talked about what makes us different, But I think one thing also is we are a nimble strike force. We don't fish in the same pond we have the crypto natives. We have a fish and execution. We have operators, seasoned operators who

really know how to stick the landing. And I think that's reflected on our culture. I would say the only thing that's changed in our strategy as a result of the market correction is really more of a focus on early stage. But we still have our late stage fund. And when we see valuations, which I think will still see correct um spoiler, I think we'll continue to see some corrections and UM, so we might deploy our later stage fund a little bit more slowly. It might not

be on an even cadence. And that's okay. Long term, our strategy hasn't changed. Long term, we're committed to this space. How much do you think valuations are going to correct? You know, it's just I can't give you a one size fits all answer because crypto is not a monolith. You have some crypto companies that really follow more of an enterprise sas business model. You have others that are layer one protocols UM. You have still others that are

consumer facing applications. And I think one of the things we're seeing right now is the infrastructure layer, and that's where we're spending a lot of our time, by the way, and we think more and more use cases will come about when the infrastructure layers in place. UM So, my own view is we are not rushing to deploy. We're certainly not getting caught up. Do you get try not to avoid that, you know, Look, I think it's very easy to get into that mindset, right. It's because it's

competitive sport. It's a competitive space, and I think I'd be lying if I said that that doesn't influence anyone. I try to what I do and I think I do differently, is I try to take stock of that. Oh, that's the foe mo mentality kicking in. That's bad again. You don't want to over correct though. What we look for is we look for amazing founders. It doesn't matter

if I think valuations will correct. If there are amazing founders, there's a huge tam We also look for what's your regulatory plan if you're launching a token, what's your plan to comply with the law, what's your plan for security. By the way, we've seen a lot of hacks in the space. We want to really dive in there and make sure that the founders have been thoughtful. That was Horn Benches founder and CEO Katie Horn with Bloomberg Technologies

Emily Chang. You can check out more of that conversation tonight at seven thirty pm Eastern four pm Pacific here on Bloomberg Television. Coming up, one company focusing on hiring hourly workers get sixty million dollars for its series B. I'll chat with the CEO of Workstream about the digitization of recruitment and state of the labor market. This is Bloomberg Workstream, a texting based hiring platform working with big

brands like McDonald's and Marriott. Just raised sixty million dollars in fresh capital to help it expand to even more industries that are employing hourly workers. Let's get right to Workstream co founder and CEO Desmond Limn. Desmond, how does Workstream work? Yeah, So we are this texting base hiring software that helps you do actually saw screen actually onboard

hourly workers faster. In the world of of trying to work with with with with this hourly folks, there are much more on the phone, they are much less tech like Salvy. So we actually built a software that's really built for them to be able to help them be able to hire onboard faster. So it's to me about the kind of circumstances that the workers themselves, who who you hope to hire through your platform operating? What kind

of workers are these and in which industries? Yeah? Yeah, I mean we all work across a really broad, broad broad broad spens of the sacnis as. So now we all work with more than four thousand customers from Burger, King, Dairy, Queen, Merit and more. And I always say that as as of now, our main focus has been in this restaurants, but we have grewed very quickly into retail, healthcare order

and like you know, much more alvious. Yeah, there's a very big difference in terms of folks who work in there's hourly death less world and those who work in tech office worker. I was saying, there's actually hourly world. People are not as tech savvy. There's very high like turnover, very high churned. Um, so there is a need to actually tell the alwhere there's really built for them. I

think back to the August jobs data. You know, there's there's tens of millions of people in this economy who are working part time but by choice, and of course there are many people on the sidelines who are trying to find some part time work. You must have a very interesting lens into the state of the jobs market. What can you tell me about what your customers and clients are looking for. Are they able to get the

workers that they need? Yeah, I would say that it is still very very tough to actually find talent and difine people. Staffing is to the top challenge for many of this businesses, from restaurants to retail, hotels and and more. But I think that's the very first trend that we see. Second trend that we see there many of this business they are much more open to actually embrace and to

try it out software and tech. We have seen a very strong growth, almost like a tanext growth in terms of how the business owners and and really ops leaders are much more open to actually use software. So I think that that that that's been very good. I think the very the trend that we see more it's like more and more folks are trying to focus on this actually hourly worker. I would say that in the past few years that this hasn't been much focused on this

audi worker, which really powers the world. Right, there's more than two point seven billion business workers in the world. There's more than eighty million auti workers in the US. It's a very big market, but it hasn't been enough good software and tech built for them. So I'll say that there's more and more needs to look towards them. Now. So you've got sixty million dollars in the bank. What do you need to do with that cash to expand your offering? What are you going to do to develop

your tech? Yeah? Yeah, we are very thankful and very humble that we raised this right. I think this is really with this funding it grows out, is be the actually overall million dollars. And we have triating goals for this. First's really want to expand from our main focus of this restaurant into new vote goals, into retail, healthcare, warehouse and more, and so now beyond some of the brands that share we all work with like merit ups and many many more brands. So that's the very first goal

part of this funding. Second goal that we have is really really go ahead. Yeah, I think the the goal next we have is really to build new products. Our first product is hiring. Our second product is this on on boarding helping you to actually like really really help we do smooth yarders people work faster. So I would say the next goal is really you're built new products.

The final goal is really leading into our company mission, which is really to serve this to really serve this doth Las Ali worker, to build better software and tag for them. Give me very quickly, desn't really have that thirty seconds? A sense of how many workers are using your platform? Yeah, we have now more than four thousand um customers across more than stars. We have now actually helped to all domit more than ten ten ten million hourly folks with been through our our this software alright.

Workstream co founder and CEO Desmond Lynn, thank you very much. A good lens on the labor market. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and of course, as always on I Hot Radio. We made it, guys. The end of a tough week, the end of a tough month, the end of a tough quarter with volatility and financial markets, venture capitalists sitting on

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