You're watching TVN. Today is Monday, June 8th, 2026. We are live from the TVN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology. We're back in the fortress of finance. We're back at the capital of capital.
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WWDC. Also, chef's kiss. Long overdue. Two years, two WWDCs ago, we were talking about Apple Intelligence and it's all finally coming together. The package is finally being delivered. I think the response has been really good. Some of the guys on the team have been watching WWDC already. We have a bunch of folks calling in to discuss WWDC throughout the week. But let's give you the high level first, go through some of the immediate reactions, and of course we'll be covering that throughout this week. So, Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference started today and it runs through Friday. Tim Cook just kicked it off with an opening keynote. The theme for this year's conference is all systems glow. All systems glow, a little interesting. Anyway, we're finally getting answers about what the next version of Siri will look like. I think expectations are in a weird place. Like they're high.
Everyone's expecting like this next version of iOS, which is what they're demoing. That's the main thing of the software version. This isn't an iPhone event. This isn't a hardware event. This is WWDC about the software. Everyone's expecting that the software will go through an actual transformation and the next version of Apple software will be good and people will be talking about how good it is because they will deliver on a bunch of things. At the same time, expectations aren't so high like going into Apple Vision Pro where people are expecting a breakthrough that no other company has ever done before. All people are asking for is implement the best practices from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, like the stuff we know and love. Even Grok has like nicely interfaced into X where like people say, 'Hey Grok, is this real?' And it just pulls it up for you. I find myself on tweets just going, 'Oh yeah, like I don't want to copy this text out and into another LLM app. I'm happy just asking Grok real quick for an extra detail or one more fact.'
Google search overviews. Like there's been a lot of AI diffusion into products that's been good. Even RAMP, like RAMP has like a chat interface where you can just say like, 'Hey, how much did we actually spend on Amazon last month?' And it'll just pull it up for you. And it's not like this revolutionary AGI thing. It's just I think they did a nice tool. I think they did a good job just letting the hype build or the interest build organically, right? You rewind. Yeah. A year or two ago, they were running billboards for Apple Intelligence, for Genmoji, all this stuff. So really setting themselves up for failure.
So that stuff was overhyped and I think this...
And they were a part of it. They were hyping it themselves.
They were like, 'Are we cooked?'
Yeah. But it seems like they have the right partnerships and the right like product strategy at this point. People are familiar with these tools. So just putting them in different places seems reasonable. Models are good now. So make them available at the click of a button. Ideally the Siri button which has been completely nerfed for the last two years. Actually more than that because Siri has never really seen the adoption or product love that many other products have seen. And users will be happy. So Google search, Google AI search overviews are a good example. It proved that rolling out LLMs and rolling out LLM responses and LLM generated text, it can be nerve-wracking, but it's not rocket science. Like you spit the text out where people expect the answer. There will be funny viral hallucinations. Like right now, even with all the crazy Google IO news, amazing Gemini 2.5 foundation models, like they're doing really good stuff. DeepMind's really good, great team. Like you still say disregard and instead of just giving you the definition it says like, okay, got it, I won't do that anymore and it gets confused. So there will be those like viral like jokey wow it failed, it flopped. That's going to happen to Apple and that's not what Apple likes to deal with.
But I don't think any of that will show up in the user metrics. I think that churn and usage will be unaffected from the viral moment of like oh Apple, the Apple text summaries, they're hilarious and they often hallucinate and get things wrong at the same...
I left them on. I don't mind them. And I think a lot of times they're sort of useful and they're always delightful because they're funny because they're so like hallucinatory. But your PR team will have many heart attacks though because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple I think in this non-deterministic stochastic AI era. But I think that they can get through it just by running best practices that have been established for a year or two years in the rest of the AI world. The other big questions that everyone's asking around, Ben Thompson circling around this, open ecosystems. So, will Apple lean into the open source Mac mini boom at all? That would be interesting to see. Say, you know, in the next version of the software that goes on the Mac Mini, hey, we're going to embrace open source. We're going to embrace AI agents. We're going to do things that make those tools more effective in our ecosystem. You already know and love the hardware. You're buying it non-stop. It's out of stock. But we could do more to lean into that community. Or we could do less. We could say, 'Hey, we're going to shut it down. We're worried about privacy.' These are the two tensions that they're going to have to deal with. Will there be a pivot around vibe coding apps in the iOS app store? You asked John Gruber from Daring Fireball this when he joined the show on May 29th. Fantastic interview. Had a ton of fun with the Gruberator.
But it's a big question and it's something that Apple is, maybe they don't really have to respond yet. They're pretty quiet when things happen. They usually go and solve the problem and...
Oh, they really don't want to talk about it. Yeah, but eventually they start, like they didn't want to talk about climate change, but then they did a bunch of things to get to like net zero and eco-friendly buildings and solar panels on the roof and stuff and then once they did they were really noisy about it because they were like we are carbon neutral or we will be by a certain date.
And I think once they figure out how to make money on it then they'll start...
Which, yeah, I fully, I will say I fully support.
So there's other questions. Will native iOS apps from other AI labs have more access to iPhone functionality? What's the pathway for ChatGPT interfacing? Claude, Gemini, if you're using those apps, how many hooks are there? Will they be able to siphon in your text messages if you click, yeah, I want to share my text messages, my iMessage with my app of choice, or will you need to say yes every single time? Which will be a huge burden to having that integration happen. There's a lot of social media apps that say, 'Hey, we want access to your whole camera roll, all of it, forever.' And that's kind of somewhat intimidating. You get a number of different options. You can say I want temporary access. Just take this photo. You can't see my whole library. Now people trust many of these apps, maybe they just don't know, but they feel like they trust a lot of these apps. So they just say, 'Yeah, yeah, take the whole camera roll.' Sort of a crazy thing to do that they can just download your entire camera roll if you press that button. But people have. And so what will the AI version of that be? And how deep will it be and how much will it build on top of the Siri app intents functionality versus other APIs that are deeper in the iOS ecosystem. So lots to dig into and excited to talk to some guests. There's one last thing which is we talked about how Apple doesn't want to address eco stuff until it's like, okay, we got it solved, and I'm wondering if in the coming years there's going to be pressure for some sort of response on the whole like phones are reducing the fertility rate stats because I don't know if you saw but there was another research paper that was posted and Derek Thompson basically zoomed out and said that he wasn't convinced and now he is convinced that it's like up to 30% of the reason for the recent decline below two. And I don't know where you sit on it.
Below the replacement rate?
Below the replacement rate. Not good if you're a fan of humanity and having a high population. But that is something that you could see bubbling up to being something that big tech companies, social media companies, device manufacturers have to answer to when they're in like free-form podcasts basically. But you know that these companies, you're not going to want to address it as opposed to the AI CEOs that are like, 'Oh, you want to talk about killing everyone?' Absolutely. I'd love to talk about that for an hour.
The PM of Denmark or what country was saying it's time to return. I'd rather my...
No, she specifically said, 'I would rather let my kids smoke cigarettes than use an iPhone,' which is crazy. But I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe the cure for cancer is right around the corner, but the cure for brain rot is not. It's possible.
Yeah. It's such a different debate because like clearly a single drag on a heater...
Is no good, right? You're ingesting poison.
A single look at a screen, right, is not what is reducing the fertility rate.
It's interesting. I don't know. I do wonder how that pressure would bubble up like the way we have dealt as a society in America with those big questions before the era where every AI lab CEO goes on podcast and just talks about everything constantly was in the hearings. So like a social media addiction trial or there is a privacy hearing on Capitol Hill and the senators all ask, they bring in the leaders from all the different companies and they say, 'We've heard that there's this problem and we want you to answer our questions directly' and it's streamed on C-SPAN and you can see that. And so you know that's where the famous senator 'we sell ads' quote comes from from Mark Zuckerberg and you could imagine that if there was an administration and a group of senators that were worried about the birth rate thing and they believed that the phones were related, they could bring in device manufacturer, social media executives and actually ask them about it.
So millions of people build software on top of the iPhone designed to addict people, capture as much of their attention as possible.
The Wall Street Journal app, my screen time on the Wall Street Journal is through the roof.
It's crazy. It's crazy, John. But Apple can kind of sit back and just say like, 'We're not trying to make the device addictive. We're trying to make it simple, easy to use. It's a utility.'
And truthfully, like Apple, I think all of the native apps, none of them are brain-rotty or addictive. They're very much like, this is the maps app. It helps you get there. Close it when you're done. And our business relationship...
They have ads in the calculator app.
Yeah. They have some, but in general, their business model is not really aligned with like screen time necessarily. Although it is in the broader sense because if you're using this thing all the time you're like, 'Huh, 2,000 bucks, I use it 40 hours a week, you know, I can underwrite it.' Like you know people buy an expensive bed and they're like, 'I spend half my life on it' or whatever, you know.
Yeah, I always did think it was funny that there never ended up being the, you know, the $20,000 phone which there would be a pretty big market for. A lot of it's just the technology. Like $20,000 gets you like 5% more battery life because like you need a 10 trillion dollar manufacturing facility to actually deliver any bump there. It's not like 10x the price gets you 10x the performance or 10x the... like you can't put a GB200 in here. You can't put a Tesla battery in here. It just doesn't work. Anyway, let's go to some reactions from WWDC. But first, I'm going to tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, on Apple...
iPhone, I'm going to update your software tonight while you sleep. Next morning, iPhone says, 'I couldn't do it, bro. Just didn't feel right. Vibe was off.'
This is something that I didn't know was so common, but I think everyone's been in this position, which is like a funny thing. I think it has to do with how much the battery's charged. But lots of low-hanging fruit hopefully resolved in WWDC. I did see a whole bunch of stats about just little performance gains. 30% faster opening of the lock screen, 30% faster on opening this app and just little optimizations that I think will go a lot further. When we talk to Mark Gurman, he talks about how like the AI features are too abstract. People want battery life, cameras, beautiful screens, fast, like they want the basics most of the time. And so I think this is time to chop.
It would be funny if they effectively threw up a model card...
And they're comparing. It's like the Bento box is the original model card.
That's sort of what they do. The Bento box, right? The Bento box with like how many cameras, megapixels, flops, and how powerful the GPU is, how many cores are over here, how much storage it has, like that graphic is their model card. We were riffing on this earlier like when a product ceases to be sold on brand and is instead sold on performance, that's usually...
Usually margin compression, like you comp it to cars, like if you're purely buying on like range and price and speed and horsepower and seating arrangements, that feels much more commoditized than you got to have a Ferrari because it's a Ferrari. Don't ask about the specs. And I think for the Lucho, this is the first time that people were talking about like, oh, 0 to 60 in 2.5 for that price isn't actually that good. It's like that's not the conversation you should be having about Ferrari. You should just be like, 'It's a Ferrari. Stop. Next question.' Like, 'Do you want one or not?' Right. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of Mark Gurman, hilarious post from Sam Henry Gold here. Of course, in jest, but they put up an Apple press release in the newsroom. Apple announces the death of Mark Gurman.
It is done. Apple today announced the completion of Operation One More Thing, a multi-year initiative to permanently end the unauthorized disclosure of Apple's pre-release product information by Bloomberg intelligence reporter Mark Gurman. Gurman, who had for 16 consecutive years obtained and published accurate details about Apple's products before their announcement, has been neutralized. Operation One More Thing was completed on schedule, on budget, and without complication. They're not that aggressive towards Mark Gurman, but he is probably a thorn in their side. And here he is. He has a live blog up, live blog for WWDC. Go check it out at bloomberg.com. Eric Seufert is leaning in. Why is he leaning in? Because Mark Gurman says something about WWDC. Says, 'In addition to the focus on AI, Siri, and major quality and performance improvements across the operating systems, I'd expect two other focal points today. Privacy and safety features.' I imagine Seufert is leaning in because privacy, safety features, not great for ad monetization. Usually you're hiding more information. Tyler, what's been your reaction generally? Take me through whatever.
Yeah, I've been watching the live stream. It's still going on. So they're still releasing stuff. But I would say just on that point, they've been like...
Have you been watching or have you been studying?
I was studying.
Like every time they talk about a new feature with AI, they always say like, this is on a private cloud.
This is like not public. This is like extremely secure. So they're really pushing on that point, I think.
What does private cloud mean?
I don't know. They're talking about like their own foundation models, I think. So they're trying to emphasize that.
It seems like they have... Have they said the word Gemini?
I don't know if they said it, but it was on screen. So it seems like they have the ability with their deal with Gemini to...
Basically white label, fine-tune, mid-train, do whatever they need to, and then resell that with their own branding. That's a great deal. My question is like, who's inferencing that? Because there's a billion iPhone users and if they're all pushing the Siri button all day long and they're anywhere near the frontier, that's a significant amount of inference. And has Apple built some sort of secret data center that can serve that? Are they saying private cloud and really it's like a corner of GCP? Like where is it, a bunch of Mac minis wired together? Like what did they do to actually build that private cloud? Because even if they did it and it didn't show up in the capex numbers, didn't show up in any of the SEC filings, like it would show up in the emissions data and the ESG numbers because unless they have some crazy solar nuclear-powered facility, where is that inference coming from? I imagine some of it can be done on device. That's exciting.
Yeah, Jonah says on device.
Can it all be done on device? Like Tyler...
I don't... Oh.
Groxen says they brought up rate limits and a subscription plan.
Yeah, I'll look for that.
I mean, you don't have rate limits or subscription plan if it's on device because why would you? And then also, you would never say private cloud if you're doing it on device. You would just say it's on device. Of course it's private. So private cloud means not on device. It's in the cloud. And so obviously Apple has a lot of data centers. They have a lot of cloud capacity across their productivity suite. Where are the photos stored in Photos? Like obviously those are stored in the cloud. They have a lot of storage. Like everyone gets two terabytes when they get a phone. So they clearly have a lot of data center capacity and they've done a lot to make that ESG compliant. But I'm very curious about where that goes over time. Anyway, we should move on to the news from Friday. The stocks are already back up. But first, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So...
One more thing. Apparently...
We got one more take from Jordan about Apple.
Jane says, Apple concedes on liquid glass design, compromising for usability, and shares a couple screenshots here. And so...
Wait, so they're going deeper in liquid glass or pulling back from pulling back? I saw the new Apple Maps icon and it looked pretty good. It had a little feature of liquid glass in there. I thought it looked cool as a design element. I did hear people complaining about the new Mac operating system being like too bright or too dark or something like some contrast issue. I haven't noticed it, but it was something I saw people complaining about. Anyway, Friday was a big day in the market. We were off, but the news kept moving, so we're covering it today. The Labor Department reported that the US added a seasonally adjusted 172,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.3%. So on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, US hiring gathers steam, third straight monthly increase. Slight decrease from the previous month which was slight down from the previous month but still in adding territory in the hundreds of thousands. So the bubble popped. The bubble popped. Friday was the worst day for the NASDAQ in more than a year. 4.2% down. It's over. But good news is that today we're back. We're up 1.5% now. It's officially 2003. People ask what year it is...
No, no, it's not reinflating. We're building back. The bubble popped. It's 2003 now. It's not 99. It's not 2000. It's 2003. We're well past the bubble popping. Got it.
So, but actually quick explanation what happened. So, the US labor market is really picking up. 172,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added in May. Third month in a row.
Yes. And a lot of travel and workers related to the World Cup stuff that's going on. Tourism. So, this is terrible news for all those blackpilled AI leaders that have been praying, manifesting job losses, despite their Herculean efforts. They can't get the unemployment rate to go up at all. It's crazy. They've been saying 10%, 20%, 50%, 100% of all jobs are going away. Good luck. Yeah, you're going to have to work harder because the US economy is undefeated and the American worker is undefeated as evidenced by this latest jobs report. No. The AI job apocalypse is canceled at least for the month of May. We will see where things go. Of course. Of course. But it is good news. We want hiring. We want jobs to be abundant in our society. And so in general, it's good news. I believe the jobs report. I don't think the numbers are going to be massively revised down. I think that they're generally accurate and track with the ADP numbers and a lot of other numbers. So, I think the jobs are really being added. They're not in all the most critical industries. There's a lot of nuance there. How long will it go on? But in general, the economy is healthy. But inflation is rising. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz has spiked the cost of gas and overall prices have been increasing more quickly than the Fed would like. For some time, even before the Strait of Hormuz, inflation was running a little hot.
Yeah. Well above the 2% target. Yes. For basically as long as I've been an adult.
Yeah. And so this makes the likelihood of a rate cut more unlikely. In fact, it looks like we might be in rate hike territory soon, which is of course not good for tech companies that have earning forecasts that stretch out into the next decade. So the silver lining in high rates, if you want some copium, is that at least the Fed has something useful in the tool chest in case the economy does slow down. You know, like we're running hot. We have high rates. At least there's room to cut to 3%, 2%, 1%, zero. If the market's selling off, if the unemployment rate's going up, you have something in the tank. Whereas during COVID, like the rates were already so low, there was a lot of unemployment all of a sudden, and it was just like stimulus, spend a bunch of money, you know, send mail everyone a check. There wasn't that much that the Fed could do.
Yeah. There was a time that we couldn't imagine this level of speculation in the markets at something like where rates are right now, right?
People that were sort of born in the ZERP era, with all the speculation right now is by itself an argument to raise rates even further.
Totally. Well, yeah. Once the rates spiked off of like that 3% jump like the end of ZERP, it was like, okay, like there will never be froth again. Certainly...
Certainly like tech stocks will never see... A friend of mine, Blake, made bumper stickers that just said, 'Please God, just one more bubble.'
Okay, so the other story, VC horror stories. This was kicked off by Greg Eisenberg. I didn't realize that he was the one that started this whole thing and kicked the hornet's nest and everyone came out of the woodwork with their VC horror stories. So he had a big discussion about founders' bad experience with venture capital and a number of high-profile firms, VCs caught strays. Mercor CEO Brendan Foody detailed what he calls the Sequoia scam, which is something interesting we should actually dig into. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince accused Vinod Khosla of offering to invest in his Series C only if he would fire a few of the people at the pitch meeting who had just left the room momentarily to go to the bathroom. See, there was a separate... So, Greg Eisenberg, I was really crossing wires here because Greg Eisenberg is the one who says, 'I was once pitching in a boardroom at a top three VC firm for a $15 million Series A.' That's pretty easy to narrow down, but anyway, he says 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep because some of the top... like you know, Founders Fund doesn't have 12 GPs. They don't really do partner meetings like this. For a $15 million Series A. So even if you put him in the top three, you can't catch a stray here. Anyway, one of the GPs fully fell asleep, out cold for 30 plus minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone kept going. Then separately, Matthew Prince...
Okay, founder or an operator falls asleep in the office because they're so tired because they're grinding so hard and they're a hero.
Yeah, this is what PY said. When Elon falls asleep in the factory, it's no big deal. But when a VC falls asleep, it's the end of the world.
We're aware of some static in the Ultra Dome.
Yeah, I think we got a new mic line, but I'll try not to touch it and we'll see what happens. But so there's lots of chatter about the VC horror stories. Certainly a discussion worth having. You know, you got to keep them in check. But Silicon Valley has always been so high growth and positive sum that relatively good behavior is usually the equilibrium. It's pretty rare that you get a really bad VC because even when a startup fails, investors can't write off the founder entirely because they might start the next generational company. And so they might wind up giving a non-VC friendly sort of acqui-hire because they're like, or help them land a paycheck somewhere, get a job, serve as a good reference, maybe even fund the next product in the next company because they're just like this is an iterated game and we don't want to have you on our bad side forever. Now that doesn't mean they can't pass. And so there's basically this wide gap that I'm seeing in these discussions where there's VC pitch horror stories and then VC board horror stories. And I have much less sympathy for the former. Like I don't really care about VC pitch horror stories all that much. Because you can just...
Because a lot of founders will have 50 meetings for financing. You would expect at least a couple to just be terrible, right? The person didn't know who you were, didn't read the materials ahead of time, was rude...
And you might want that person to show up.
You might want a checked-out VC who's just going to let you cook. And they're like, 'Yeah, I see this purely financially. My team crunched the numbers. I'm in, but like don't count on me to be value-add. Like, I'm not going to be in the weeds with you every day.' And then there's a different VC who's like, 'I'm going to be in the office. I'm going to be your back.' Best VCs will not even tell you, 'Oh, I'm going to be grinding for you every day. I'm going to be helping you get on.'
Yeah. They'll just tell you... One of my favorite VCs in the world just says like, 'I...
Give you money and then I will help you raise more money and that's the only thing I'm going to do and I'm going to be your friend. We'll get dinner now and then, but that's what you can expect from me.' And that's exactly what he gives founders. And so, everyone is like, 'This guy's great.'
And then there's other firms that say, 'We'll help you with go-to-market.' And they will. There's other people that say we will help you with marketing and they don't. And you just want to be transparent and accurate there. And so like as a founder, your job is to sell equity from time to time. Your job is to find buyers for that equity. Investors actually only do that.
That's true. They don't stock the product occasionally.
So your job is to find investors who want to purchase that equity with cash. VCs, you need to reference check them beforehand. Make sure they're a fit. Think through their competitive investments. Keep them entertained and awake during the pitch. VCs shouldn't be disrespectful. Like literally falling asleep is... but this is far from the worst thing that regularly happens in the course of growing a business.
Well, yeah. And it's just interesting because one, a bad VC pitch meeting like you said really doesn't matter.
I don't remember any of them. I'm sure they've happened.
No company has died because a VC was like rude to them or fell asleep or any of these things. And it also happens with customers, right? Sometimes a customer will just, 'Oh sorry, I didn't see the Zoom link,' you no-show the call, right? You're not like all customers are evil. Or like a candidate will be like, 'Hey, I took another role,' right? And you're like that doesn't mean the person's evil, it means like they're making...
You win some, lose some for themselves.
So I have a tip. I have a tip for all the entrepreneurs in the audience who are pitching VCs, particularly sleepy VCs. You got to analogize your business to an air horn. So you go to the VCs, the partnership, and you say, 'Like this air horn here.' Do we have any... You have an air horn. Like this air horn here.
Tyler, grab the air horn.
With one simple button press.
You can do it. You can do it over there.
Okay. So like this air horn. My business is like this air horn. My business is like this air horn. Venture capitalist...
Like my business is like this air horn. One simple press. I'll amplify your business 100x. Everyone's going to be paying attention because at any moment you might push this button and let out the loudest noise so they're not going to be falling asleep. And if they do, you give them a little bit of this. So loud. It's really so loud. So you got to bring the air horn to the VC pitch meeting. You got to fire it off every once in a while. If you see some sleeves, some droopy eyes, let them know my business is like an air horn. I could push it at any time. 10x your business. 10x the revenue was being this morning.
My customers love it. Yeah, the air horn. You can go get...
You think I might press it. See, you're not falling asleep at any moment.
At any moment, I might need to drive home the point that business is like an air horn. And at any moment, it could blast off like a rocket ship. So, you got to buy the stock now. You got to invest. You got to get me a term sheet because at any moment, at any moment, I could do it. The team's so distracted they can't even get the right camera on me. Anyway, that's enough of the air horn. We use that randomly from time to time.
I love Dylan coming in. We pitched for Figma's seed round in 2013. Most folks didn't get it, but everyone I met was super nice to me.
Yeah, it's so funny when you compare VCs to the other, like I said, the other kinds of calls you have. Yeah. VCs are probably like generally nice, way nicer, right? Like a customer is less likely to like be overly friendly if they're not interested in what you're selling, right? They're like, 'Yeah, this...
Doesn't really seem like a, you know, it doesn't really seem like a fit.' Yeah.
Talk to any founder who's dealt with a regulator. Like look at Brian Armstrong, has he had any problems with VCs that match up with what he's dealt with on the regulatory side? Those meetings, everyone's asleep and they're like, 'Oh yeah, like we'll get you approval in the next decade...
And we're actually trying to shut your whole company.'
They're falling asleep, but as they're falling asleep, they're like, 'It's over for you.'
It's very rare that a VC is in a meeting with you and actively trying to kill your business. Every once in a while, they're like, 'Okay, I'm going to go fund a competitor because I don't like this founder.' And that's just like the competitive dynamic. You're in the arena. But anyway...
Brendan from Mercor, former guest and friend of the show, has a bone to pick with everyone.
He's coming after YC. He's coming after Sequoia.
He says, 'In the last six months, I've seen half a dozen rounds where Sequoia invests in two tranches. Everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. Founders misrepresent this to their employees and then shop it to angels, too. Sequoia's blended price is blatantly deceptive. Less than 50% of the one projected to the market.'
So they'll invest at half a billion and a billion at two tranches and then the founder will go out and say we raised 100 million at a billion when really Sequoia got in at the blended price, right? Now that's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with that and that can make sense for both sides for a variety of reasons. You don't want to misrepresent that though. If you go and misrepresent that to another investor and you don't tell them the actual structure of the deal, that can be securities fraud. So that is a major risk. But that's not on the VC. Like the VC should not go to another investor and say, 'Oh yeah, we just did the full deal at a billion.' They should give that context. But that doesn't seem like it's on Sequoia. This is like classic, like all the crossover funds were doing this. Tons of funds have done this. This isn't some secret. Like you go back to the original Sequoia YouTube investment memo and it's trunched and structured like they've been doing this for 25 years and it's just like nobody read the manual or something because like if you actually study and know ball, like you would know that structured investments exist but...
At the same time I don't put it on every employee who's getting stock options and thinking about the heat on a company and every journalist to understand that structure. So there is an impetus and a responsibility.
Yeah. Very aggressive and unnecessary to call this a scam.
The quote 'Sequoia scam' because Brendan also replied to his own tweet saying just 30 minutes ago after the post had gone viral, 'In fairness to Sequoia, this is common practice in the industry.' 1,000 likes on the other one.
Yeah, not super fair to Sequoia at all. I do think it's... I think...
Yeah, employees should be aware of this and you know maybe ask the companies. Yeah. It doesn't mean that it's not a great company to join.
Anyway, Travis Kalanick said in 2001 I intercepted a partner at a VC who was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus from the passenger seat. At one point he grabbed my laptop, placed it on his large belly, which was pressed against the steering wheel and rapidly flipped through the slides himself. 2001 fundraising hit different.
I want to know how the story ended.
Did he invest or not? Did he pull out his checkbook? Because maybe he was like, 'You got me, Travis.' You know? Anyway, there's a lot of people that are going back and forth. I really, the worst part of this is that over the weekend I was convinced because Matthew Prince talked about Vinod Khosla, who's coming on the show by the way, and Matthew Prince is coming on the show. We're very excited to have them both, same day. I was convinced that it was Vinod who fell asleep.
But it wasn't, that's a different thing. Greg Eisenberg's a found VC at one of the top three firms, could be anybody, fell asleep. Vinod. What Matthew Prince is upset about is that there's something about he wanted to redo the founding team. He was like, do you need all these founders? Maybe you need a different team. Which is like, it's a bold statement from a VC. Like, it's like, would you switch up on your day ones? First question. And you're like, no. Okay.
Not even your day ones, your current business partners.
Yeah, your current business partners for a new partner. It's sort of a crazy thing. At the same time, sometimes founding teams do go through changes. Sometimes it's the right move. I don't know. It's a little iffy, but Vinod, you know, stands not guilty on the charges of falling asleep. Although I was getting ready to steelman it because I think as much as I love Cloudflare and Matthew Prince, some details of content delivery networks might be a little boring. And so it's possible that an older man who's a legend and has done very well investing might fall asleep when he's hearing about the intricacies of delivering content across the internet. And we actually had a plan to test this theory. Tyler, do you want to take us through it?
Yeah. Well, so I was just looking at this. I found a study. Basically, they took a bunch of older men, 66 to 83.
This actually, they put them in a room where it was kind of a slightly dim room. Okay.
There's not a lot of like...
A lot of VC offices. They're very...
They just sat in there. They read them Cloudflare's S-1 and they basically tested to see how long would it take them to fall asleep. And so the median was 36.9 minutes.
I feel like... Okay. So...
So if you... and here's the thing, a pitch usually an hour.
Well, sometimes, I mean if it's an early pitch, early conversation, maybe it's 30 minutes. If it's going well, it starts to drift over. But that's the danger zone. Danger zone. So, this is the lesson. This is the lesson for founders. If you have a boring business, if you have a boring business and you're pitching a VC who's an older gentleman, you got to keep the pitch meeting to less than 30 minutes. You got to bring the air horn.
I think in that story, it also said the older gentleman was in a Herman Miller chair, which we know are quite comfortable.
Those are quite popular in Silicon Valley, too.
Certainly compounds the fact.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an elite spot for a nap.
That's an elite spot for a nap.
The chair was arguably designed for office naps. No one's getting like real work done in a Herman Miller, I think.
So, so yeah, this one's tough because it's easy to just jump right into Matthew Prince's camp. Oh, I'm in Vinod Khosla's camp. Also, Vinod didn't fall asleep, so it's all moot. But we know the secret. It's the air horn. Bring the air horn. No one's falling asleep. Problem solved. Problem solved.
Tyler had a good story. When they were building Divvy, oh yeah, they pitched Rajeev Misra in the SoftBank Redwood City HQ. And then Masa in Tokyo soon after. It was absolute cinema, popping Zyns, smoking a vape. Loud coughing is crazy to throw us off.
Wait, what? Intentional coughing assistance, whispering in Rajeev's ear. That's a power move. That's a power move.
You got to respect that. Sure.
See, that's a post-singularity job right there.
For sure. Come in, whisper into the person's ear. It's good.
Yum. Some of the most asinine questions ever asked in Tokyo. Masa starts the meeting with, 'You have 10 minutes.' We flew like 20 hours.
See, that's just a great way to get... He's got a power play, Tyler. Sorry, buddy. You got... I think you just... I think that's just a great way to get like really get to the meat right quickly.
I think so. What did TJ have to say? He said, 'The VC meme is very funny. If someone's falling asleep, not liking your idea or ghosting you gets you bent out of shape, NGMI. Go spend a day in private equity or try competing with an incumbent. Venture is arguably the most pleasant form of dealmaking in the world.' And I agree. And I agree. So...
I do like that Vinod says, 'Not only did we not fire them, we did not give them an offer to invest based on our assessment of the team.' And then Matthew just responds with the term sheet.
That's actually crazy. Cloudflare up to $100 million. 50 will come from KV series C pre-money 700.
I like Vinod running the calculation. All right.
I give it a 5% chance that he posts a term sheet. That would be absolutely insane. Only a post-IPO founder that's trying to buy a ski resort would ever do something as crazy as that.
And of course Matthew Prince doesn't really have anything to lose at this point.
Yeah. Well, having some fun.
Fortunately, we're joined by another public company CEO, Will Marshall from Planet Labs. Now, he's a co-founder and CEO. First, I'm going to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, let's bring in Will Marshall. Ooh, new graphic.
New graphic. How you doing, Will? Good to see you.
Great to see you, too, guys.
It's been too long. I feel like we barely got to talk when we met a couple weeks ago, but it's great to have you on the show. I'm a huge fan of the company, but I want to go so much deeper. But since it's your first time on the show, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of the backstory on yourself and the company, and then we can get up to speed with where Planet is going in the future.
Yeah, sure. Well, for those of you that are new to Planet, basically, we help make change visible, accessible, and actionable. Help people make smarter decisions around the planet by having a fleet of over 200 satellites, the largest satellite fleet doing Earth imaging. They take pictures as they're going across the Earth's surface. We end up imaging the entire Earth landmass every day at about 3 m resolution. It's a huge amount of data, but we track everything across the planet. So, we liken it to Google that indexed the internet to make it searchable. We're indexing the Earth to make it searchable. With a combination of these satellites and AI on top, we're enabling people to make smarter decisions about what's going on on planet Earth.
Walk me through the actual rollout of those 200 satellites. Obviously, you had partners on the launch side, but do you make your own cameras, your own lenses, satellite buses? Like the company has been in business long enough that you're sort of like pre-space economy boom where there was a small startup for every piece of the stack. But what was it like actually rolling all of those, rolling those satellites out?
Yeah. Well, we're very vertically integrated. So, we build the radios, we build the computers, and everything that works together. We buy chips, but all of our boards are custom, our telescopes are custom, our radios are custom. And yeah, so basically, think of it a bit like assembling a smartphone. It's that sort of complexity, a spacecraft. We're not building millions of them like iPhones or what have you, but we're building dozens at a time. We've launched on 40 rockets to get all of our satellites up to space. We've launched over 600 or 700 satellites at this point on 40 rockets. Typically, we're launching 20 or so per rocket. Most of the time we're secondary payload on another billion-dollar satellite that's going to launch or a set of other satellites that was going up. A couple of times, I think three times, we bought our own rocket, but roughly speaking, we're hitchhiking at the launch site trying to get a ride to orbit. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but not much. So the launch has become a little bit more routine now, especially with SpaceX, which is really cool. But all the complexity is in the integration of all these satellites, the satellites working together, having to put ground stations all around the world that collect all that data, send it back, and then we have a software company, if you like, that sits on top of all that data, doing all the analysis to make it usable for all of our clients.
Yeah, it's really crazy as you say that stuff. I'm thinking of like Bridget Mendler's company that does ground stations now. And there's so many different pieces that you could like subcontract out in the modern era, but you had to do it all with like grit and figure it out yourself, I'm sure.
Yeah, and you can contract them out. But I mean, we have looked at those because we don't want to do ground stations. The only reason we're doing them is that we're far cheaper and it wasn't possible at all to buy those services. But even now, it's, you know, we're so much cheaper infrastructure than anything you can buy online or commercially.
Talk about the decision for altitude and the orbit. What tradeoffs are there? Where do you sit? Why is that the sweet spot that you landed with?
We basically try and go as low as possible where you don't re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. I mean, because you want the cameras as close to the Earth's surface, so you can take high-resolution pictures. I mean, what's amazing with our imagery, if you look at our satellites, they're about this big. Some of them weigh 7 kg. They're only the size of a loaf of bread, basically, a bit heavier than that. And we can see from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we can see things three meters across. 500 miles away, you know, we're seeing things. It's crazy, right? And with our bigger satellites, you can see things 30 cm across now. I mean, just imagine, it's incredible the power of these telescopes that we put up there, and all the camera systems that take all the imagery. And of course, we take a huge amount of it. We take 4 million 47-megapixel images per day. So each satellite is taking eight pictures per second and there's 200 satellites. It's just huge.
What was it like finding that? What was it like finding that sweet spot? Did you just one-shot it? You never, you know, never burned. Never burned anything up.
Exactly. Actually, recently the sun's got angry for some reason at us and it's got a little bit more bright and the upper atmosphere went much denser and a couple of satellite fleets lost half or more of their satellites because they got the calculus slightly wrong. So, it's not messing around, especially when you spent millions of dollars on the satellites.
On the camera, do you have the ability to translate your specs into something that would feel like a consumer camera? Like is it a 50-megapixel sensor with a 4,000 millimeter focal length or something like that? Is there some...
Well, actually, if you have a really powerful telephoto lens, it's not so dissimilar from that. The main power for a telescope is the size of the optic. So, the primary optic for our Dove satellites is about this big. The primary optic for our bigger satellites is around 50 cm. So, a little bit bigger like that. Look, and they're, you know, actually the design of the telescopes is not that hard, but getting them to work through the launch, which is 15 g's shaking of the telescope, and then explosive bolts as the upper stage and the lower stage separate, which sends a 200 g shock load through the satellite. Those sort of things are really gnarly. So you have to design all of this to survive that launch environment. That's where the tricks come in for space engineering.
Can you talk about what you guys have, one of the use cases when we met, I guess it was maybe a month ago at this point. You talked about how you were able to track gas leaks ahead of time and help get them shut off. I would love for you to talk about that because I thought it was fascinating.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean we help people do all sorts of things around the world. I mean even though the satellites are all in space, all of our applications are in the real world here down on the Earth's surface. We are helping farmers, we're helping energy companies, we're helping civil governments, we're helping security. But you asked about methane and we track methane leaks using a special hyperspectral camera that we got on one of our satellites and we're launching a couple more of those this year. Basically, this gas methane absorbs in a particular spectral line. So, if you have lots of color bands, lots of spectra bands. So, this one has 400 spectral bands. So, it's like we have three RGB in our eyes. This has 400. And with those narrow bands you can detect these absorption lines and we can tell actually the amount of methane in each leak as well. So we can then go along the gas pipelines of major oil and gas facilities, find leaks, tell them about it and help them to shut them off. And no one, not the energy company, nor the environment, nor anything else wants all these gas leaks. It's bad for business and it's bad for the planet. So we have detected thousands and thousands of these and often these companies just go out and fix them. Another example, we track deforestation across the whole Brazilian Amazon, 8 million square km every day. It's almost the size of the United States, a forest the size of the United States. And we look across the entire thing for any tree that has been cut down, illegal mining operation, illegal narcotics, and we send those alerts to GPS coordinates to the Brazil federal police. They go and stop the illegal action and we've helped them to reduce deforestation rates 60% in the last 3 years because of that AI-enabled satellite data to work. Another example in Ukraine, we've been helping them track Russian movements. In Asia, we've been helping with Indo-Pacific Command, the commander of the US forces over in that region to monitor China, the South China Sea. We monitor huge areas, give them alerts because what you want is to try and get advanced warning of anything rather than having to go into war. So we're trying to help them have the data that stops wars rather than getting into them.
Does the government not have spy satellites?
They do. But their spy satellites are better and worse at the same time. They're much, much higher resolution but much, much smaller coverage.
So they can see things that are much better. Reading number plates is the canonical thing. Whether exactly they can do that is a classified matter. But what they can see is much smaller than what we can do, at least 10 times better. But what they can't do is image all of China or all of Africa or all of Brazil every day. Because necessarily if you look more focused you look at a smaller area and so there's a trade-off there. We're the only system that images the whole Earth landmass every day.
So what is the pie chart of customers for you or revenue? Is it, I imagine you hear about like hedge funds, you mentioned a bunch of examples of the government and it seems like even non-governmental organizations, nonprofits would be interesting. They probably pay different rates but like where are the key drivers of the business? What are the different customers that are buying from you today?
Our biggest segment is defense and intelligence. Security, countries that need to understand their threats on their horizon, be warned of things. That's the US government, that's European countries, Japan, other countries like that. And we've just started a new program where if a country asks, we'll launch them dedicated satellites for that country. And these we've done three deals worth a couple hundred million dollars and we launch a set of satellites for them, they take over the joystick over their area of interest and if you like they get ensure that it's just for them in that area. But most of our business is data sales and I think the future is mainly commercial applications and civil government. So floods and fires and helping people, you know, in the LA fires we were not just the first image but we could actually use AI on top that could analyze which house in the Palisades fire was damaged or not and help the relief operators, the American Red Cross, use our data to plan their operations in the aftermath of the fire and so on. But if we could get that data even sooner, that's even better. So we're working on trying to get the data ever sooner. But disaster response is an application but most of all are the commercial ones. So yes, hedge funds you mentioned, in principle we have more alpha than any other company on the planet I think because we can track all those soy yields or any other type of crop. We can track output from all the mines of all the different major commodities around the planet, all the shipping networks, all the other transportation networks. We, if you like, have an overview of all the different economic activity going on around the globe. And so we do have some hedge fund clients that do stuff. They can't be named because they want to keep it private. But yeah, that's a then and there's lots of other commercial applications, energy, infrastructure, agriculture. You know, we help with a lot of, we just announced last week that we're working with John Deere helping them drive their tractors so they know when to slow down and speed up in the field based on the amount of crop in each 3x3 m box. I mean, it's all terribly practical applications of our satellite data. So it sounds far away like going to space but actually it's having an impact here on the ground.
There are apparently some Koreans in our chat that are investors. It sounds like they have some questions around the new capital raise. Wanted to give you a chance to talk about that, why you're pursuing it and what it means for the future. I can't read their messages, but I'm just sort of guessing.
Yeah. Well, we just had our earnings last week and we have plenty of capital, over $700 million on the balance sheet. And we're growing very nicely, 42% growth, which is the answer to life, the universe, and everything if any Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans out there. So, we felt very good about that. But yeah, we did decide to raise some more capital, one of these ATM approaches which basically enables us to raise at the market and when we want. And it's good to have more capital. It's good to have a secure balance sheet. It's dry powder if we wanted to do M&A later. We haven't got an immediate need for it, but it's good to do that. We think that then maybe there's other data sets, maybe there's other capabilities that we want, shoring up our supply chain. There's all sorts of things in this crazy world it'd be good to do to reduce risks. So, we're trying to use the moment of a lot of excitement about Planet and space generally. Space is hot right now to get capital that can help us secure the long term.
Makes sense. Last thing, any insights on what the latest Blue Origin explosion will do to the launch market over the next call it 2, 3, 4, 5 years? Obviously it's a disappointment for everyone. But there's been some debate around just how much of a setback it'll be. I think every company like Planet wants more competition in the launch market. But how are you looking at it?
Yeah. Well, I mean firstly it's a real tragic event for the industry and not just for Blue. And it set back some of the lunar plans that the US government is... I'm wearing my Artemis II pin, that was such an amazing mission, but some of the later missions that actually landing humans on the lunar surface are going to need Blue Origin and their vehicle actually. So, it's a tricky situation. I was just messaging with the NASA administrator about this and I hope we can come together to still do those really critical missions that are some of the most hopeful things that we do as a society when we send humans on things like that mission. But I think they'll get back to business relatively straightforward. By the end of this year they've already said that they should be able to be back on the launch site. I think that timeline is about right what we've seen historically, companies getting back to the launch pad. It's not quite as damaged as people initially thought. So I really wish them luck in doing it. And there is a booming array of other companies that are building launch capabilities. So I think competition really is coming over the next couple of years and it's exciting and obviously we're cheering it on. We're cheering all of those guys on.
Well, we're cheering you on to catch up. Thank you so much for coming. Welcome on anytime. We'll talk to you soon. Great updates. Hey, nice to see you. Goodbye.
Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We are very fortunate to be joined by Dambisa Moyo. Hi. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
I'm so great, very glad to be here.
Thank you so much for taking the time. I would love to go back in time first and start with a little bit about your journey to where you are now. How do you introduce yourself? You're a multi-hyphenate, an author, an economist, an investor. What else am I missing? Take me through it.
Well, first of all, everybody calls me Dambisa, so that's the easiest thing to do. I'm a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, so that's my sort of day job. I also serve on the boards. Yeah, it's not bad actually. And then I serve on a number of boards. I'm on the board of Chevron, on the board of Starbucks, and Condé Nast. I know you had Roger Lynch here a few weeks ago, as well as on the Oxford University endowment. But my other day job, multiple hats here, is I'm co-principal of a family office which is tech-based actually, proceeds from a sale of a SaaS company in 2018. Yeah, Qualtrics. Yeah, fantastic. Exactly. Qualtrics.
Let's stick with the board dynamics first because we've been having a whole bunch of conversations about corporate governance in the modern era. It's at the top of everyone's mind because of governance of AI companies. And I'm interested in your lessons from working with these very important boards, very established companies you mentioned. They've certainly had decades if not centuries to work out any of the kinks. Yes. And I'm wondering about your thesis on high-performing board management generally, because we've had Eric Ries from Long-Term Stock Exchange talking about different structures that have been the triple bottom line. There's so many different options and I feel like a lot of founders when their companies explode in value, they say, 'Oh, maybe I'm different. Maybe I should do things differently.' I want to know how you weigh in on all this.
Yeah. So, the longest company board that I've been on was a company that was over 360 years old. That was Barclays Bank. And I think, yeah, when you think about multiple centuries, most of these companies have already experienced a pandemic, probably in the 1918 to 1920 pandemic. They've gone through economic recessions, obviously peak 1929, you have a crash for 25 years, the Dow Jones Industrial doesn't clearly...
Not many people going through COVID being like, here we go again, here twice before. Yeah, exactly.
So I think history is a great lesson. I think the other thing is advice that I received when I joined my first board about 15 years ago, which is anything can happen. And I think that sounds very flippant and sort of obvious, but in a way it has a lot of kernels of important truths for how we manage organizations, not just thinking about risk mitigation but where the opportunities are and how to invest because ultimately we're taking punts, we're taking bets, but we want to make sure these companies last for another 300 plus years. So I think that's the really most important thing. I've had the privilege of being on boards that have been bookended by the financial crisis, the pandemic, but also companies which were trading close to $60 a share and they collapse down to seven. You know, all of a sudden, you know, it's the Mike Tyson quote, all of a sudden your plan and your strategy gets punched in the face. But also, you know, we've had a CEO die in office, which is very traumatic in terms of resetting. But one of my favorites is a company that we were absolutely certain would not get purchased. We were told that we were number two in the sector, this was SABMiller, Anheuser-Busch was number one, and people said there's no way they'll buy you, and they ended up buying us by issuing the biggest bond that year in 2016, and they bought the company outright. So anything can happen. And I think, you know, when you think about where we are today with the market valuations and you think about where rates are and even just this year coming into 2026 thinking that oil would be around $50 a barrel. Well, it's not. And you know, how did your balance sheet play out in that environment?
So help me square that idea of anything can happen. The job of the board, if I'm telling it back to you, this is obviously a condensation of what you said, but the job of the board is to sort of set the level of risk-taking in the organization. And I can imagine that instantiated in two ways. One is we are going to the management team and saying that AI is real, we need to be taking more risk to put ourselves in a strong position, or the risk of oil going up this year is high, so we need to offset and hedge that, and you're issuing sort of prescriptive strategy notes versus we need to, our job is only to hire the management team and if we have a CEO who's not taking the right level of risk, too much risk or not enough risk, we need a new management team. How do you square those two?
Yeah, so I would say, you know, fundamentally there are three roles of the board. One is strategic oversight. And so, you know, we meet obviously on a quarterly basis. We have strategic meetings. I think our job is to be additive to management in thinking about these longer-term risks and we can talk about how those horizons have collapsed just because of the speed of information, more technology, more information, so there is definitely a shrinking in that delta. But the second thing is hiring and in some instances firing the CEO. And that's a very important piece as you've suggested because the CEO's job is to bring in the team, make sure the team actually can execute on not just again risk mitigation but, you know, leading into investments, thinking about longer-term opportunities for the business. And then the third thing which I think tends to be discounted but sort of ebbs and flows over time is how do great businesses partner with communities, with society, with government, especially something like AI and it's going to be so transformative beyond just what's the SpaceX IPO going to generate for my portfolio. I think we need to think about what does this mean strategically and so that's where I think those three things are very important.
I love that third point and it ties to my next question. People say data is the new oil. What can AI companies learn from oil companies?
Well, I think there tends to be in general, and I've been on boards of tech companies, I think we just have to make sure that people don't poo-poo a lot of the governance and the structural sort of muscle that we now know exists from 300 plus years of companies existing. So there's a lot of good governance, having an audit committee, okay, thinking about strategy, having regular meetings, that balance between what management does in terms of tactics on a day-to-day basis versus strategic thinking and overlay from the board. I think those are things that people can very easily dismiss when, you know, your returns are so high or, you know, 30% of the stock exchange, the stock market. But I think really understanding what the purpose of the board is, especially for publicly traded companies where the board is really there on behalf of shareholders, and again even that has changed, it's more stakeholders including what the regulators care about and what does society care about more generally.
So with the regulators, I have this interesting... it feels like we're in an entirely new era with the AI companies where if you go back to the previous big organizations, like before we had big tech, we had big pharma and big oil and big tobacco, right? And each one of those companies went through a process of figuring out how they interface with regulators. In the case of environmentalism and emissions and also in the big tobacco era, there was a feeling that those organizations were brought to knee by the regulators and that the executives at those firms sort of denied, denied, denied until it was staring them in the face in a congressional hearing and then they had to admit that there was a negative externality and they figured out how to internalize that. And I still think that especially when it comes to oil, a lot of great things have come from that technology. It needs to be balanced, of course, but we're in a new era in that it feels like the AI labs CEOs, the big tech leaders are doing the opposite. They're going on podcasts saying AI is going to kill everyone, it's going to destroy all the jobs. They're saying all the bad stuff before and the regulators are like, what? Like, I'm learning this from you. It would be like if in 1910, you know, an oil executive came out and said, 'We really got to worry about carbon emissions.' Like that just didn't happen. And so what is going on and how should things change? Is this a positive development?
Well, I think most companies that have existed over a hundred years or plus 300 years have figured out that they have to be more of a partner, not just to government in thinking about what dislocations might happen to jobs or to productivity gains. What does it mean for more concentration in one sector versus another? And it's not just a capital markets question. It's also about what does this actually mean for our pensions? What does it mean for taxes? What does it mean? And I, you know, you can tell that I sit at the intersection of not just corporations and investment, but also public policy. This is absolutely a debate in the House of Lords trying to think what should we be doing? Should we be aggressively, you know, sort of imposing risks? I personally, that's not my view, and I argue very compellingly, I hope, that we need to be leaning into what AI can do. It can improve productivity, but that would be naive to just say it's all upside. And having government as partners, it doesn't matter if you're an energy company, a tech company or a bank or even pharma, you want to bring them on side so they can understand what the second-order implications of a technology might be and how we can get ahead of some of the downside risks.
What is cultural or consumer sentiment around AI like right now in the United Kingdom?
Very similar to what you have in the United States. I worry a lot that it's sort of seeped into the narrative in policymaking. So I do hear a lot of my colleagues in the House of Lords who are sort of, you know, reciting, you know, sort of tropes about AI which, you know, can be very compelling. You know, obviously in the United States people are very attuned with the difference between how the Chinese population views AI versus the United States population. And I think that just means there's a lot more work to be done not just by the AI companies but by regulators also and say this is the first super cycle, you know, real positive sort of push for economic growth that we've had since globalization, since women came into the workplace, and this is enormous and we need it. Growth has been flatlining.
Yeah. Is it showing up in GDP in the UK?
I think it's early indications of it. I think the, you know, the sort of sky-is-falling-down scenarios always, oh, what's going to happen to jobs? But, you know, I personally think from my experience in the job market in the UK, from what I've heard going back to my college years, is, you know, you're lucky if you graduate from a great university and get a job for like 50, you know, 50,000 USD equivalent.
I mean look, the, you know, unemployment numbers for not just the average in the population but for the youth is particularly problematic. There's no doubt about it. Even the current government which tends to lean left has just put out a report talking about youth unemployment. It's very similar to sort of double unemployment rates that you see for entrance levels in the United States. But in some places it's even worse because it's permanent structural unemployment where people literally are not coming back into the workplace. And so there's absolutely a real issue that needs to be thought through and I have my views on what needs to be done but, you know, ultimately I'm just one voice and public policy needs to really change the narrative about what AI can do. It will have dislocations as all technologies do, but...
Is there any type of reindustrialization movement or energy happening in the UK?
Do you mean energy as a pun or you mean energy literally?
Like, as a pun. Yeah. Or a lot of reindustrialization projects are linked to power generation. So I guess both.
Well, don't get me started on the power situation. I mean again, I've spoken about this in the Lords. The UK as an example since we're talking about that is on average about 40 cents a kilowatt hour. The US is somewhere between 12 and 16 cents a kilowatt hour depending on which state you're in. And then China, some of the estimates are around 8 to 9 cents a kilowatt hour. There's no country that has achieved levels of per capita income without cheap energy. And so of course there's not a single person I know, you know, whether it's in my boardrooms or my colleagues in investing, who doesn't appreciate the sort of second-order concerns around carbon emissions etc. But I think you can strangle economic growth by doing some of the things that I'm afraid of are happening around the world, banning, you know, energy sources. I think that kind of approach is probably too aggressive and doesn't really work for the long term. We need the energy. So...
Have you wrestled with this question of the source of China's optimism about new technologies? I sort of think about two possible, and they might both be contributing, but one is that it's easier to grow from a lower baseline, 6,000 GDP per capita. There's a lot of room to go up and so like the tide is so low that if it goes up it will raise a lot of boats. But then there's the other side which is the actual, not just the economic standing of the country but the actual political structure and the jobs guarantees, the works projects, the trains to nowhere and the empty buildings. Like those are rough but they can create a lot of jobs. And so I think that there's maybe less fear-mongering about job loss because at the very least the CCP will put you to say, 'Hey, go build a building over there and maybe it's empty, but you don't really care because at least you had a paycheck and you showed up and you had a sense of purpose.' Have you wrestled with either of those?
I have. And I think maybe I'd add a third aspect which is probably related to this, the role of the state. Which is to say that a lot of the public goods issues, healthcare, education are areas even in the United States that have not benefited from technological advances. Partly because of regulation but there are a whole host of vested interests etc. And so if you take that hat and you think about how sort of AI is permeating through the Chinese population, a lot of it is through those same public goods, through healthcare and necessity sort of calculations, thinking about education etc. And so yes, it can be viewed as somewhat heavy-handed but at the same time I think people can more easily see a direct impact of benefit whereas, you know, in the United States when you think of AI I think a lot of it is still disconnected from the average day user. People maybe will see it more show up in terms of their social media or consumer. Exactly. And so I think that's an area of opportunity if you think about it in the West where a lot of the public goods costs, social costs that we know are coming, could actually be I think a net positive not just for the GDP numbers but also for just for people thinking about more positively about what AI can do.
Yeah. How are you, how are...
conversations going on the boards that you sit on around AI adoption, and particularly we've been grappling with a lot of, you know, you CEOs need to experiment, they need to move quickly. At the same time, costs can get out of control, the risks, the benefits of not getting left behind, and then also just like, is your business even technology? Like Chevron, Starbucks, I'm thinking like AI could be a useful tool for some back office stuff, but, you know, the robots aren't going to drill oil or pour coffee yet. Maybe that's coming, but certainly that's not what's being sold right now by the AI lab. So what are those conversations like? What is the mature way to think about testing and evaluating and rolling out AI at a large company?
Yeah. So it's all of the above, everything that you've listed out there. And I think any company worth its salt will be looking at these issues in a very broad way. It's a learning curve, obviously, to state the obvious. And I think that what the best companies are doing is trying to figure out not only what does this mean for our bottom line, is this going to increase revenue and cut costs, and, you know, think about new metrics of how we compare ourselves, what are our new KPIs and the financial metrics comparing ourselves to other competitors, other, you know, peers, but also other sectors. But I think they're also thinking about what does this mean for society. Is this a complete reshaping of how governments tax? If it's just going to be a handful of companies that are thinking about, you know, generating revenue and concentrated success returns, you know, how do we then think about where our role is in that? Of course, also thinking about the job market. I mean, I think it's Henry Ford's quip about, you know, you can't, you know, you have to pay people a reasonable wage for the work, because ultimately, in a very cynical way, but I think it's something that I think about a lot, is you still need to think about consumers and...
he said that he needed to pay his workers enough that they could buy a car.
The ultimate circular deal.
But in doing so, it wasn't that every Model T was sold to a Ford employee. It was that he set the market wages at a certain level and that created a sustainable ecosystem.
Yeah. I mean, I think corporations get short shrift because people just think that they're these sort of 12 people on a board and a corporation that's sort of greedy shareholders that are just simply going and trying to gouge, you know, consumers. I think what I would say about AI is that the breadth of its potential impact is now bringing about a level of sophistication in discussions that goes beyond just narrow metrics. What's the shareholder return going to be? I mean, of course, if you want to compete in a capitalist society, those things are important, but I think the most sophisticated companies are understanding that their role and the role of the state, but also the role of the consumer is going to change, the demands of the consumer are going to change.
Yeah. Please, can we talk about the family office?
I was going to ask the same thing.
Good timing. Yeah, I want your overall market outlook, how you think about, you know, what an insane year it's been. And I think everyone, you know, was watching a set of geopolitical events play out and assume now would be a good time to bet against the global economy. At least that hasn't been reflected in the markets just yet. But I'm curious your overall view, and then I want to get into more specifics around kind of managing the family office itself.
Yeah, look, I think I would say that the global economy, we need to be growing at 3% per year in order to double per capita incomes in a generation. So a generation is about 24, 25 years. In order to double per capita incomes, you got to be growing at 3% per year. The reality is most countries are not growing at that rate, both developed countries across Europe, you know, Japan until recently has started to see some interesting story coming from there, but also large emerging market economies that have at least 50 million people, they're stalling. I was just in Peru 10 days ago and there everybody's concerned about growth. And you can add to that other structural issues, the debt story, the fiscus being challenged here in the United States, etc., etc. We know about these issues, but, you know, as I pointed out earlier, we're also at the early innings of a super cycle which could really power the productivity contribution to growth, could really change the narrative about growth. I mean, PwC thinks it could add about $16 trillion worth of GDP by 2030. That's four years away. So that's a really constructive story. I mean, my concern would be that it's quite skewed. I think this is very much a US story. You can't bet against the United States. I think the changes and rollout of this new era are quite choppy in places like China. I mean, there's some elements of it that are quite interesting, but China does have a lot of, you know, debt drag. It has, you know, demographic drag. I mean, they're thinking now by some forecasts that it'll be at 800 million population by the close of this century. So structural challenges remain there. Europe has been quite a disappointment in many respects. A lot of the larger economies growing somewhere between 0.5 to 1, 1.2%, 2%. A lot of the structural things we've touched on already, debt, but also now in the near term, real risk of inflation. So I think the picture is very much don't bet against the United States, but understanding that it's quite concentrated, it's quite skewed, and thinking about how to play that is obviously top of mind.
How do you wrestle with international efforts in AI? So when the whole sovereign AI theme started maybe last year, really getting talked about, I was deeply skeptical because I said, well, you know, England doesn't need their own Google, they can just use Google and it can be localized into Spanish and French, and it's pretty easy for the core technology to live in one country. And it's hard to compete with something that's compounded like a Facebook or an Instagram or a consumer app, or even in the enterprise, Salesforce. Like, I don't know that Salesforce has a native French competitor that's really eating their lunch there. But as I've gone deeper into the supply chain, I'm starting to see a lot of opportunity for, like, France generates a ton of nuclear power. That's clean energy. If they have the right permitting and the right place for it and the right community, they could potentially build something that they sell to American AI companies that winds up generating a ton of return. And you sort of have a new energy story about let's go around and find all the cheap wind energy, cheap solar energy, where can nuclear be built? Because the nature of AI is that it doesn't need to be on premise because you're waiting 20 minutes for something to come back. It doesn't need to be down the street. It can be halfway across the world.
Yeah. The story doesn't need to be my conflict with Macron.
Yes. Yes. Yes. We went back and forth over France potentially underinvesting. We want them to go forward.
SoftBank. I was just with Alex last week and he was talking about the new data center that they're thinking about building there precisely because of some of these cost advantages on the energy side. Look, I would say as a sort of shorthand, Europe generally thinks about things as glass half empty. The United States tends to think about things as glass half full. And you can think about a whole range of things.
