Twitter Cuts More Jobs and How Ford Metals Are Damaging the Amazon

to be damaging. The Amazon and those who call it home will bring you the details from that reporting class, we'll talk all things social media is Snapchat dives into the world of AI and meta in unveils a new tool aimed at protecting children. All that and so much more coming up. First, foremost, we get to those markets, but of a reprieve after the sell off the previous week, we're up six tenths of a percent on the NASAC all country World and next, also on the highest side,

Europe gets a bid. This largely feels that it's to do with boring costs. At the moment, they tricked down a little bit. If you're looking at US treasuries, we're just saw some buying, So maybe a bit of reassessment as to whether we're buying the dip, whether it comes to equities or indeed bonds. Let's flick it on. Let's look at what's not being bought on the dip right now. Actually, Crypto after one has been a pretty phenomenal for January

February a little bit less. So we're still if you look at a two day basis from the point that we're tracking at, it is up about two percent, but we're still below that twenty four thousand mark, even on a day that we saw US dollar weakness. Yeah, from the macro to the micro. When I look at individual names, there's a lot of energy in EV related stocks in the market. Pardon the pun. Tesla up five and a half percent that performance and Tesla reinstates Elon Musk as

the world's richest man according to Bloomberg. L gets that later. Fisk At up thirty percent. It's its debut year of production, Karen. They're saying that on an annual basis, they will see profit on an EBIT dar basis being positive in twenty three, which is staggering. Then life Cycle up four percent have been almost as much as twelve percent, but they've got a DOE loan. We're going to talk to the CEO

about how they use those funds. Moving to the downside, Meta actually kind of bucking the trend of Megacattech down half of percentage point that you mentioned. Palenteer actually down for a seventh straight session. That breaking news from our colleagues in the print newsroom about how they're going to cut staff less than two percent when it comes to Palenteer, which is interesting, but this was a company that kind of pledged not to make these kinds of cuts. Well,

you can see on a seven day basis. Actually it's a stock that suffered, as you know, Caroline, it's not just Palenteer, right. Twitter also seeing this fresh wave of job cuts, the layoffs hitting employees across the company, including engineering and product team, sources telling Bloomberg some employees learned the news via an email, others finding out because they couldn't log onto internal systems. Bloomberg's cut. Wagner here in San Francisco joins us for more. Not that surprise, really,

are you? No? Unfortunately? Not right. I mean we've seen a slow trickle now for a while, but this one felt more significant. Right. It did happen unfortunately on a Saturday night, Right, So a lot of employees are enjoying their weekend, and as you pointed out, some got email saying, hey, you know your job has been terminated. Others are simply trying to get into the system can't and they kind

of deduced from that. So not great, but to your point, not surprising when we know how much they're trying to cut costs over there, cut any theme as to where they were being cut from, or any key executives that went, Yeah, it was really heavy into the product org actually, and you know, if we've been hearing from a lot of people that they're having a tough time figuring out who's left in product over there, we did see several founders of companies the Twitter had acquired over the years get

laid off. Now they had been the company had been trying not to lay those folks off. The thinking was that you know, they might have bigger stock award grants, for example, having sold the company to Twitter. They didn't

want to expedite that type of thing. But in this case, you know, several of those founders were laid off, including Esther Crawford, who you know, sort of became a little bit a famous, if you will, as someone who was sleeping in the office early on in Twitter's Uh yeah, I was going to ask specifically about Mista crawl Fitz. She was one of these people, as you and I reported at the time, that kind of aligned herself pretty quickly of Elon Musk publicly tweeting about the things that

Elon Musk was wanting staff to do. She's gone, She's gone. What do we know about that? I mean, she was

pro Musk. Yeah, I mean, well you know this better than I even do ed. But like you know, you can be committed Elon Musk, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's reciprocated, right, And I think this is just yet another reminder to people who you know, work at companies that he runs that, Like you know, this is a job, right, And she was running Twitter Blue, which, as we know, is the subscription service that they're trying to build and m I don't think the adoption of that has been great.

I certainly don't consider that anything to do with her. I'm not sure that people necessarily want to pay for Twitter. But I guess my point is is like when you're high profile, when you're running an important product, you know that does not save you necessarily. When it comes to Elon Musk, there's some interesting reporting around stock compensation as well for those that remain at Twitter and how they're incentivized. Ultimately, what are we trying to make of the way in

which this business is being run? Yeah, well, I mean this is clearly an incentive to encourage the people who are still there to continue to show up and work hard. Right. Imagine you're you're working at Twitter today, You've made it through now multiple rounds of job cuts. You're probably looking around and close to seventy five eighty percent of the people you were working with six months ago are no

longer there. Like, if you're Elon Musk, you need to convince those people, hey, there's a there's a future here, right, Like, you should stick around because this thing is going to get turned around. And a big part of that, of course, is what will your compensation look like. Up until now, there's been a lot of questions about what it would be like to own any part of a private Twitter.

He's hoping to change that. We still want to know the details, but you know, presumably if you're going to stick around, you want to know that you have some skin in the game as well. Well. Put Katawagner, we thank you as always for jumping on these sorts of stories for us and probably busy on Saturday too talking about compensation. And I'm just looking, what was it that the red headline that came across the terminal just after the market shut once again? You know, Musk himself doing

pretty well from a conversation perspective. Yeah, he's once again the world's richest person according to Bloomberg's rich index. Rihgo on the Bloomberg jumping back above Bernard or no. And it's all about Tesla gains, right, you look at the breakdown of his wealth, a big chunk of it, of course, his Tesla stock and Tesla up another five and a half percent today. We've been waiting on this to happen for a few days. But that's why we keep talking

about him, him and all his companies. Yeah, I mean, let's delve into his companies a little bit for a moment as well, because what you're the man who covers all things space. SpaceX had one a little bit of a setback this morning. Yeah, well, stacks. It's a really interesting one. This was for the Crew six mission Okay to Fairy Astronauts three NASSA one Russian Cosmot to the International Space Station. There was a technical issue, so they're

now delayed to the early hours of March second. But that's also meant curiously, Caroline, they've had to delay other launches for Starling, and it just speaks to how I guess effective SpaceX is at putting people and objects into orbit. That they're managing all of this once, but it was so rare for them not to go off as scheduled. Usually it's weather, right that this was a technical delay. We've always talking about the weather an awful lot over here in New York and over there in San Francisco.

But I don't know what also we've been talking about, haven't we add is FSB. That's the update to well, it's a meta at the moment with Tessa as the way in which you're the idea as you can drive these cars automatically. It's a software update and then they'll be able to in some ways drive themselves. But it looks as though there's been a hindrance that particular part of the story as well right, and so they've stopped rolling it out pending at a software update. Essentially, Remember

the background to this was the Nitzer enforced recall. It was a software update that was required because they founded a crash risk associated with those using FSD beta. The fix is made remotely right over the air update. But we're micro focus on how Tesla keeps its customers safe. Precisely three hundred and sixty three thousand vehicles, as you say,

had been recalled already. I mean we keep focused on that, we keep our eye train and in fact at EV's more generally because there was a phenomenal story part of

our reporting that's known as the Big Take. Each day you do a deep dive into something that's really specific that you've got to get a hands around, and today it was a Blueberg investigation that traced that actually the aluminium as I would say aluminum if you're American in a Ford F one fifty, if you trace it back through the supply chain, it comes from a refinery in Brazil.

There's actually accused of sickening thousands of people. It's damaging the Amazon want to bring in one of the reporters behind this very story Sheridan Prasso. Sheridan, just talk to us about the company involved here, because this isn't actually that this molta or the mining capacity isn't coming from Ford. They're sourcing it elsewhere. That's right. The company is called Norris Kidro our Heedro, as some other people say. It's

based in Norway. They have a refinery in the Amazon in Brazil, and that refinery has been operating for many years and the people who live around it about eleven thousand people have joined a class actual lawsuit and they say that the company is polluting the environment, they are drinking water is undrinkable, and that they actually want to bring a case against Norse Chydro in a court in the Netherlands to seek compensation for the pollution that they

allege is making them sick. Ford did, of course come back a spokesperson you've spoken to within your reporting. Ford is committed to a supply chain that exceeds minimum regulatory compliance requirements, they say, and respects human rights, including the right to cleaner and clean water. But ultimately, how focused our companies such as Ford to their supply chain at the moment to ensuring that they're ethical, So it's quite complicated. Supply chains are very difficult to trace in order to

find out that this. These products from the Amazon go into the four f one fifty in the EV and in the one fifty. Both they make up the exterior panels. Almost all the aluminium that you can see on the outside of the F one fifty its origins are in Brazil. And the way that you trace this is you look at the box site mine that's in the middle of the rainforest. It has expansion plans. It's already three times the size of Manhattan. It wants to expand another size

of Manhattan to DeForest that area. Get the box site out of the middle of the Amazon, take it to this refinery that is alleged to be polluting, and then it's smelted in Quebec, and then it goes to the parts makers in the United States, and then from there it goes to Ford. And so you look at the entire aluminium supply chains, of course going into almost all the aluminum that we do have in the United States.

But the way to tell the story and the way to look at it is through Ford and to track the specific parts all the way back to their origins. And the Amazon, so not supply chains are so difficult to trace and so non transparent. I think it's difficult for the end user to necessarily know where the origins are in the Amazon. It difficult to trace. But you did do a fantastic job of the big take in doing exactly that, but in reverse right, start with r

F one fifty lightning, work backwards and we get to boxite. Right, So explain to our audience how we work out how the contamination is happening. My understanding is that bok site is then processed to alumina, and alumina is basically the white powder from which aluminum aluminium, as I used to say, is derived. What have we learned about how that contamination is happening within the Amazon itself? That's right. So boxite

mining itself is kind of a dirty business. They use strip mines to clap up the earth a lot of the runoff from the bok site and this particular mine it's called MRN in the middle of the Amazon, in the rainforest. For many years they were just kind of large quantities of box site tailing waste into a nearby lake and polluting the environment that people rely on There to live, their fish, their water supply, their water for washing,

their drinking water. Everything was affected by this mining operation. Even years later. It's impossible to clean it up people, they're told me when I went there to go and talk with them. So that's one of the aspects of the contamination that you see at the very source. Of course, MRN itself says they are operating within legal parameters and they take measures to try to minimize the impact on

the environment. That said, box sye running itself is actually quite you know, destructure for the environment to a large extent. And then the box site travels eight hundred miles down the Amazon River. I followed the trail of the box site run all the way down the Amazon River to the end to the refinery itself. Making making alumina, the white powder that becomes aluminum, is itself a very difficult, coal burning intensive process. That that technology has been around

for one hundred years. It hasn't changed all of that much. And in fact, it you add caustic soda and line to this solution and you store the waste of that. They take measures to try to make sure it doesn't escape into the environment. The people who live around it say that it does, right, Bloomberg shared impress Caroline, that is the definition of in the field reporting, if ever I've seen it in The response is that Ford now have to go back and look at their supply chains,

a story that will continue to track. Shares of lithium battery recycler life Cycles spike today after the company announced it's getting a three hundred and seventy five million dollar loan from the Biden administration, and that is for the expansion of a New York recycling plant joining us now. Is life Cycle CEO R J. Koja interesting? This is the second time Caroline and I've spoken to your industry in recent weeks about ade loan. My question is really

how much of a stopgap? This is? Right, because you take scrap and you recycle it, but there isn't that much scrap around and so I'm wondering how much you actually needed this cash to keep operations going as this industry ramps up. Yeah, great to be on it. And look, I think that's a bit of a misnomber. I thought, actually a big misnomer. So life Cycle we're commercial business today,

think of it as urban mining. We purely focus on lithmine batteries like we today have four commercially operational sites that are full of lithmine batteries of all types. To think of scrap from the making of batteries, but even energy storage systems EV batteries, evy batteries for example, from recalls. I think people don't realize as they go on the road there's a lot more batteries to be recycled and

of course consummatronic so we continue to grow. I think we've more than doubled our feed and take over the last year. So I think that's a commonly said thing, there being a lack of feed, but we have continued to see a very rapid growth through a customer base. If the scrap is not so limited, how high are the bids that you're having to put in to obtain it. I'm kind of interested out Jay's getting to the economics of the business right now rather than in the future

when more scraps available. Sure, so ticket step back. So there's really two parts of recycling. It's often like grouped into one, but there's really pre processing and post processing. Preprocessing is where you take the scrap into the batteries, go to an intermediate product. Post processing is to a finished chemical or good, so we do both. That's where

a spoken home model reverse logistics. You know, through the first step, I'd say, look that part, we have a lot of advantages there that helps to secure the feed. That's been a very important part of our journey. But the real margin at the end of the day is through the second step, through the making of the battery grade lithium nickel cobal That's what we're going to be doing at our Rochester Health facility in Rochester, New Yark. That's what this conditional commitment is for the loan, the

three hundred seventy five million dollars loan. So look, I say, over our next one to your journey, that's a key inflection point for us to eke out that lithium value, that nickel value, that cobalt value in the batteries. Just to remind us, of course, all of this, the focus the financing coming from the US government is to ensure that we have a more secure supply chain right here

in the United States. How much will you be supplying, Yeah, so if you think about an EV terms or over two hundred thousand evs equivalent of materials that will be producing at the back end, if not more, we'll be producing another fact which will help to understand. Will you're producing up to eight thousand, five hundred tons of lithium

carbonate EAR. That may not mean much to folks, but in the United States today the production is five thousand tons, So I don't think many people have clued in that will actually be the largest source of lithium production in the United States, albeit from recycling as opposed to mining. My name, of course is an important part of the equation, but it's inherently long lead. So one of the key advantages we can deliver is a faster time to marketing

and to your perspective. The customer base is it largely evs? Is it storage? Who are we going to be really seeing you supply too? Yeah, so predominantly evs for sure. You know, as ED was opening in the beginning there. As you make batteries, it's not perfect. It durings level scrap. LG is one of the largest EV manufacturers batter manufacturers in the world. They're an investor in customer of life cycle.

So that's a great you know, steady state growing you know, base of us for feed But interestingly, We've seen a lot of other segments growth, for example, energy storage, residential utility, so each of the segments were in all types of mind batteries continue to have significant growth. We thank you are j for coming on all about securing this new loan, this focus on growth our j Cocha of life cycle. Thank you great house and time. Meanwhile, coming up, we're

going to turn to today's talking tech. We're going to look at Snapchat jumping into the world of guess what an AI chatbot details to follow and as we had to break another story we're following and it's actually a senior US cybersecurity leader that it's spoken to just very recently. Well, she's urging that Microsoft and Twitter do step up their protocols when it comes to use the security. Jen Easiley, the director of Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, says BAG software

unsafe practices are fueling ransomware attacks. The span essential services from energy to supply to food production to hospitals meaning schools. She pointed to Apple actually is a bit of a role model for companies to look to. Thissciblime Bag Buy things to watch from this year's Mobile World Congress. Number one Artificial Intelligence think chat GPT that is on everyone's lips. Number two the metaverse. Is it the future or is it just a fad? Number three the challenge to Elon

Musk's starling the space industry is burgeoning? Will there be a response from Europe? Number four? It's quit or less about the mobile phones. Frankly, it's much more about the automaker's healthcare defense lining along five G and the opportunities there. Number five. Shina is here in force defiance, it seems from the operators, some of which like Huawei, are blacklisted. That was Bloomberg's Tom McKenzie at the Mobile World Congress

in Barcelona. And it's time now for talking tech, a look at the tech stories making headlines in Silicon vat Valley and beyond. Let's kick things off with Nokia, the finish maker of five G technology, rebranding with a new logo to try and get away from its mobile phone routes. Nearly a decade after they stop producing the devices, the company's still dealing with perceptions that it does produce phones.

The announcement and revamp comes alongside a set of new strategic pillars intended to enable faster growth as the world increased Singly adopts five G mobile technologies, and show Me unveiling wireless augmented reality glasses, the concept device from the Chinese phonemaker designed to let users gesture via its embedded camera to select an open app, swipe through pages, and also exit apps to return to the start page without using a smartphone. It's the company's latest attempt to build

momentum in an arena that's yet to become mainstream. And finally, Snapchat entering the world of artificial intelligence, the social media company unveiling an AI enabled chatbot, becoming the latest major tech company to roll out features powered by open ais GPT technology. Snapchats My AI bot will be pinned to the top of the apps chat tab, letting users engage directly with the AI as they would with friends on

the popular photo sharing and messaging app Carolina. I think you and I both saw this headline and thought, okay, the latest name. Why snap Why are you doing this? I mean they've got a r prows. Many would say that perhaps perhaps artificial intelligence is a clear area that they're going to be good at, but it's notable that you've got to pay right three dollars ninety nine, Like it's not month in terms of a subscription, but it really is trying to just be a little perk if

you're a Snapchat Plus member at the moment. And what were they advocating that use it for? Sort of writing love letters of to cheese obsessed friends about yes cheddar cheddar fans can talk cheese with the AI. But you're right, they're charging for it. It's a value add our BI colleagues Bloomberg Intelligence pointing out also kind of makes their first party data offering more attractive to the advertisers as well.

Ah Well said, it's always about trying to close that loop and sure that they become a little bit more addictive to the user or maybe a little bit more addictive to the advertiser as well. Welcome back to Belween their technology. I'm Caroline Hine in New York and I Mead love Loo in San Francisco. Let's talk drones. Caro Skydio raised two fifty thirty sorry million dollars to expand its factory tenfold, a financing deal that gives studio at

two point two billion dollar evaluation. CEO Adam Bury joins us to discuss Adam how difficult was it to raise those funds in this environment. Well, look, I think we're fortunate to be serving a customer base that's just critical to how our civilization runs. You know, we're serving national defense customers, we serve public safety. A number of our

customers use our drownes for critical infrastructure inspection. So it's not to say that we're totally detached from the mainline economy, but this is core stuff that helps our civilization function, and there's some degree of independence, And you know, I think we're at a moment in time now where these devices, these drones that started off looking like consumer choice have really proven to be critical tools to help all these

industries run and function. And it's also become equally clear that we can't be relying on drones that are calling home to China to take instructions. So there's a lot of themes in play that I think are really important and and this is something that we take seriously as a company, and I think that's part of the reason why we were able to do the fundraising even in the face of a challenging macroeconomic environment. It's also not

just the sum of money. I was looking at the investors backing you, and you basically have a split of strategic investors in relevant defense industries and then sort of classic venture capital names which are more important for you. Does it matter where the money comes from in terms of opening doors to new markets, Well, it definitely matters where the money comes from, and we're fortunate to have a great group of investors going back over the life

of the company. Now, you know, in this funding round, we're especially excited to be adding Axon as one of our strategic investors. So Axon is a great partner of ours. They're a leader in the public safety technology space. You know, they make tasers, they make body cameras, and we're partnering them now to bring drones and real time aerial situational

awareness into their product portfolio. So that's an example of a technical partnership, but go to market partnership or we're already doing things to help our joint customers be successful, and we were very excited to bring them on as an investor as part of this round. We're also excited to have Video reinvesting in the company. So Nvidia has been a great partner of our since the very beginning. You know, we started working together in twenty fourteen before

the explosion of AI computer vision, machine learning. But their chips are at the core of our products and really help make our stuff possible. Going back to ax On as a strategic investor, some of them queried whether you, with the funding, start to expand the offering too. At the moment, of course, you offer natural drones the capability, but some are saying, maybe you start to offer the client base the ways in which you then use the

data that's gathered. Would you look down that direction. Yeah, it's a great question. So we're most focused on making it frictionless and automated to capture the data, get it up to the cloud, and then make it useful however we can for our customers, and the way that people want to use the data varies quite a bit by industry. So public safety, the integration with Axon and their evidence

management system is great. You know, we're not going to build our own digital evidence management system and hooking in with a partner like Axon where they're aggregating body camera data data from other other sensors in the public safety space with grown data makes a lot of sense. In other customer bases that we serve, for example, energy utilities.

What they really care about is extracting insights. They're looking for damage, you know, RUSS cracks things like this and their infrastructure, and it's kind of a different technology landscape and a different partner landscape to enable things like that. So we're most focused on the capture and getting the data to the cloud and then working with the right set of partners to make the data useful for our customers.

And in large part, the way in which you've sort of discussed that you're almost able to move through this economic environment no matter what is because in large part, in the same way we're just talking about batteries being made or recycled here in the US, it's about making drones here in the US, rather than depending on China. Where are you intend of the technological divide between US China dronemaking. Yeah, So it's historical perspective on the drone

industry is interesting. I mean, these things started off basically like radio control toys, and this is actually the world that I grew up, and I grew up flying radio

control airplanes. I didn't start doing it because I thought it was going to be a career, but essentially what happened is the drone industry threw out of the RC helicopter industry, and that was a manufacturing base that came up in China, and so that's where drons started being built, and Chinese companies still control a dominant share of the market.

But I think we've reached a point in time where it's just not tenable to be relying on these systems, especially for DD customers, but even for public safety, for critical infrastructure operators, and so that is certainly a major theme in play. But I think the other really important theme, and for us, you know, I think the one that's going to be more important over the long term is

the transition from manually flown drones to autonomous drones. So the sort of status quo state of play in the industry today is if you have an expert pilot knows what they're doing flying the drone, you can do some useful stuff, and we see examples of that value being proven everywhere. But the future of these things is automation.

The drone should fly itself, it should live in the background, collecting data whenever it's needed, and you shouldn't need to have an expert pilot they're flying it, and that's really what we're all about as a company. We bet very big on AI computer vision when we started, and we're seeing those bets payoff and really come to life with

our customers now. So one of the products that we announced at the end of last year is the dock and Remote Operation system, where rather than needing to have a pilot on flight to fly on site to fly the drone, it lives in a charging base station, it can fly itself on demand, it can be commanded remotely over the Internet. And this just totally changes the paradigm.

So we see a future where every substation, every power plan, every police station, every construction site has a dock drone that's available to respond to emergencies in real time or to just on a regular schedule collect the data. And I think that's the real opportunity in the industry. So the national security implications of drones certainly matter, but the biggest thing that we're leaning into is the automated future. Well, Adam,

you know, the opportunity was born. I think it's fair to say out of the war in Ukraine that put a lot of spotlight on the use of drone technology. How big a chunk of your business is military, and looking forward, you know you kind of more dependent on military contracts than some of your other customers and their end markets. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a really important topic area for US. So again, the historical perspective

here is kind of interesting. We started is basically a consumer focused company, but at this point DoD is a major part of our customer base, and I think that's thanks to some really forward leaning folks within the US military who realized that these civilian drone technology was essentially

outpacing the traditional defense systems. You know, the drone that you can buy as a consumer or as as a private company that costs a few thousand dollars in most cases, has more advanced capabilities, more usable, as more accessible than the traditional military system that might cost a few hundred thousand dollars. And tragically, Ukraine has really put an exclamation

point on this. You know, civilian drones have become strategically super relevant, and they've also highlighted the deadly implications in many cases of using groans that are calling home to China and aligned with Chinese foreign policy. So we've been a part of this for years now and we're seeing those trends really come to a head in Ukraine. Yeah well, well said I mean, and we talk about the growth, we talk about course the applications and some of them

more emotional than others. But we thank you so much Adam Bury for spending some time in a skydoco on the latest series Funding Round. Thank you, you know, while coming up how to close agenda gap but the help of tech Spring that collective, Courtney Lancula is going to be joining us. Tell us more line from the nicey

floor and as we head to break watching. She has a FISA which she is in early stage talks to acquire the cancer therapy develop a siegeon for a deal that could exceed forty billion dollars Fizer down more than two percent in traditional training. This is blue mug Now. Today the VC Springbank Collective hosted the Closing Bell at

the New York Stock Exchange. Why well, it's shining a light on companies and their portfolio who are building the infrastructure to help close the gender gap, addressing the long overlook needs of women of caregivers of working families. For example, let's bring in Courtney lan Coola, own a partner of Spring Bank Collective for more on this Live from the Nice Sea and Courtney. The light that you want to shine is a trillion dollar I believe opportunity you see

hiding in plain sight. But how is it affecting working families right here right now? Well, I think the opportunity is enormous as a trillion dollars, as you say, and we see it in kind of three big buckets. So firstus the future of inclusive work, making better jobs for women and caregivers across the board in the economy, especially

in the frontline workers. Also, secondly thinking about the booming care economy, so a lot of times we think about that as healthcare, but it's also childcare, eldercare, certain areas of women's health underserved. And then the third area is really thinking about sort of the next wave of financial health and progress for families. And there's an incredible role that tech can play in building in all three of

these solution areas. And we feel really excited about opportunity. Okay, so what's being built we see when you go to the website, the amount of builders that you shine a light on, some of them women, people of color on I'm interested is they're specifically trying to fix. Yeah, so some of the founders that we had ringing the bell with us today, I'll give you an example of a company called Wealthy. So Wealthy is building a care coordination layer and it is sold through employers as a benefit

for their employees. So think about if my mom lives in Florida and she falls and she breaks her hip, God forbid, Suddenly I have a lot of work that I need to do. Right, somebody needs to call and fight with her insurance company. Potentially, someone needs to find the best physiotherapist in town. Somebody needs to figure out how to get her a ride there. That's usually the burden that falls to what we call the alpha daughters or those working women who are in the prime, sometimes

called the Sandwich generation or the Panini generation. And what Wealthy really does is support that the caregiver, usually a family caregiver, usually a woman, as we know, and take some of that burden off of her hands. The second shift, and what we find with clients of Wealthy and the end users is that women are far more likely to stay in the workforce. They're far less likely to resign, need to go part time or take a leave of absence.

So in this content economic which is such a bizarre one in many ways, where we have an incredibly type labor market, but we're all worrying about a slowing economy, worrying about companies deza to be spending on benefits such as this. Where are we in the client security to be paying for companies stalled ups and help fuel their growths in this way? Well, I think that's what I love about being able to ring the bell today. We did just have our portfolio companies. We had their biggest

clients with us too. We had merc we had Oscar, we had AIG, we had Bank of America. These are huge employers and they don't just employ white collar knowledge workers in the tech industry, where we know typically benefits have been really generous. A lot of these companies employ a large number of frontline and hourly workers, and they are realizing that in this climate of an extremely tight labor market, when care falls through, people do not show

up to work. If you think about the railroad strikes that we just went through this past fall, they were about these care issues. I think fundamentally, they were about paid leave, paid sick leave, and they were about scheduling and absence management. I really think you don't have to peel the layer back on the onion very far to

think about those as care issues. Most people take a sick day because their child can't go to school or to daycare, right, And so I think that these issues of care and the needs of care workers and also unpaid caregivers, they're really striking at the heart of the American economy right now. And so I feel really encouraged when I think about the large employers Nicey listed that we had with us there today and these young innovative

companies they are committed to working together. I think even in this environment, we are not seeing a pullback on this new and emerging category of caregiving benefits. We think it could be a ten billion dollars spend by employers

in the next ten years per year. Well, Courtney, you've taken us to the opportunity, right, Caroline, and I have so many ventch capitalists on the show that will talk about the IRA, for example, right, the Inflation Reduction Act, and making sure they have portfolio companies that our positions take advantage of that public sector spending and all of the kind of wide benefits, but that's all about energy and about electric vehicles. Seldom are we discussing issues of

healthcare or basically what all basic society will needs. That seems to be where you see opportunity. Yeah, I think we see a huge opportunity. And I'll try an analogy out on you. But I think the same way that we are waking up to the fact that as an economy we have been addicted to artificially cheap fossil fuels, I think we are also finding through the COVID crisis and beyond that we are also addicted to the artificially

cheap labor of women and caregivers. And when we don't value that care, just like when we don't properly value the cost of burning fossil fuels, there are a huge economic implications. So BCG just published a report saying if we do not fix the care crisis, both the paid worker crisis as well as the burden on unpaid caregivers, it will cost the US two hundred and ninety billion dollars of GDP. That is more than a full point of GDP growth by twenty thirty. So there is a

huge opportunity when we think about the IRA. I love this too. We get very excited about green jobs. I'm

excited about them too. But for every soular technician that we need to produce in the next ten years, we need to produce twenty nurses, and so there is a huge opportunity to think about retraining, how to make nursing jobs better, how to apply things like generative AI to really frankly pretty mundane and difficult and burnout related tasks like charting and taking notes and things that we know

really dragged down the hours of paid medical professionals. So I just get really excited about the opportunity that there is in care. I think there's a great intersection with technology and care, and I think we're frankly at the very early gettings here. So how do you discern which names in your portfolio are going to be disruptive? Taught us about where you're investing across the startup curve and kind of the time horizons some of these companies realizing

the benefit of your thesis. So we're a very early stage fund, and I think it speaks so that we're very early in the s curve for I think the general pool of venture capital and risk, capital overall getting turned onto these issues, and so I feel really excited about the rate of company formation in our thesis. When we started a few years ago, most of the founders we met, frankly were like me. They were women, they were mid career. They had met a problem and they

wanted to go and build around it. They were not traditional tech founders, they were not necessarily engineers. Many of them have gone on to build amazing businesses, and living

that problem is really powerful. I think what I feel excited about is that as the venture ecosystem starts to churn and get excited about this, as we start to see things like Andreas and Harrowitz having a sort of American dynamism agenda which very much centers some things around care, we're seeing mainstream capital get interested in this, and we're also seeing more traditional profiled founders get interested in this too.

We're seeing more engineers, we're seeing more tech talent. We're seeing people who haven't necessarily met the problem, but they have the foresight to see the problem and they're building for it too, because they see that it's a huge economic opportunity in a place to make money. It's not just about fixing a problem that they're personally passionate about. What about the LPs out there? What about the source of funding that you turn to? Have they acknowledged this issue,

They acknowledge this problem. They acknowledge that they need to put capital to work here. They do. Yeah, we have an incredible group of LPs and I feel really proud to call them our investors and to go to work for them every single day finding great companies. I think that impact capital, traditional capital, frankly, corporate capital. A lot of traditional sources of capital for investment are recognizing that

there is a big white space here. It is true you're pointing out this is not something which is kind of maybe common on the Technology Show, But I think that's also an opportunity to make a huge amount of money, is to be able to get in and to see the opportunities before they become really obvious to everyone else. I tell you, what we are talking about an awful lot on the Technology Show is jobs that are being lost within the technology space, as you just sort of enunciated.

And I'm interested as to whether that suddenly means the companies that back or awash with talent and people are wanting to go and work and fixed real world problems or is that yet to come to bear in some way, because in many ways, you look at the job stata, you look at the jobless claims that are meant to be out this week, and we don't seem to be

seeing those numbers yet. Absolutely, I think the war for talent for the best talent is always going to be ferocious, and it doesn't really matter where we are in the economic cycle. But I think that there is a larger group of folks who are certainly amenable to switching right now, to joining and as you say, pursuing something which maybe sits with them a little bit more strongly from a mission and a purpose standpoint, and also which really touches

the real economy. I think it's probably a lot of fun to work on building a gaming startup, but I may not have the same kind of reward building something in care infrastructure or the future of inclusive work, or thinking about how do we bring all of these incredible productivity tools we have at work and then do something for families so that we're using something other than a whiteboard and a marker to manage our teams at home.

Courtney Line Cooler founding partner of the Springbank collective. Thank you so much for your time from near Mic appreciate thanks. Thanks guys. There is a new tool to tackle online sextortion. Take it Down is a free to use service that's being funded by the tech giant matter And to try and tackle the rising rates of what is known as sextortion. This is why a child perhaps is forced or tricked into sharing an intimate photo of themselves with someone else online.

They are then threatened, blackmailed even to stop that photo of being shared more widely. Cases are perhaps more than doubling or sextortion in twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one, so says one not for profit, and it's actually teenage boys that are being most commonly targeted at the moment. So how does it work? This is a web based tool where you can anonymously share a video or photo

your worried is going to be distributed widely online. It is then using this tool, never actually leaving your phone, but on the web browser able to give it a sort of digital fingerprimut as known as a hash. They are then shared that hash with other social media platforms that they can take down any photo or video that this is recognized with and ensure that it isn't distributed

more widely. The National Center for Exploited and Missing Children is driving this forward with the platforms that Meta owns like Instagram, like Facebook, and others are also involved at the moment, platforms like only Fans, pornharp U Bow. But they're hoping that more will come online to this. And of course there's all occurs at a time where big technology companies worldwide are being asked to do more to protect children online. Let's focus on this. We know this

is a global push. Who's seeing governments trying to create policy head around protecting children in the UK and Europe? And I thought this was also a key area to look today. The story that China in particular is looking in many ways to be focusing on what the ways in which they regulate children's consumption of small short video right in particular, I think of TikTok, I might think

of Instagram reels. It's interesting once again China looking to curb that in some way and make a policy basically around it. Yeah, it mirrors kind of what we've seen out of China in twenty twenty two, even going back further than that with the video games industry right where there's two parts to it. The Chinese government has been taking action against the big tech giants, but also looking at industries where there's a lot of user data involved

and where perhaps society or cultural values are targeted. That seems very much like what's happening here with regards to the video names, and it is your Billy billies and your ten cents that could be impacted. This is bloom Meg technology.