Tech Charges Higher and Adobe Misses the Mark

Published Sep 13, 2024, 11:20 PM

Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde digs into the AI drivers of a tech rally putting the Nasdaq on track for its best week of the year. Plus, Adobe misses the mark as a muted forecast on AI growth overshadows better-than-expected 3Q results, and Uber powers ahead as it expands its partnership with Waymo, bringing autonomous ride-hailing to Austin and Atlanta. 

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This is Bloomberg Technology coming up. Tech charges higher as the NASDAC is sept for its best week of the year. We dig into the AI drivers as even as Adobe. This is the mark a mutant forecast on AI growth, overshadowing better than expected third quarter results. And Uber it powers ahead as it expands its partnership with Weimo, bringing autonomous right hailing to Austin and Atlanta. But let's look into what's happening with Uber because we are driving higher the putt four point nine percent. This is all surrounding, of course, a deal that it's making with Waymo.

It really wants the owning autonomous driving.

Let's dig into that news that it will basically be the only app offering driverless rides in waymow cars in Austin and Atlanta.

So good news for this stock. Natalie Lung is with us.

To break it all down, and Natalie overall, I am wandering more broadly about well what Uber.

Is seeing here.

Is it the challenge coming from robo taxes, challenge coming from Tesla, or is it something else that drives us?

He couldn't be a combination of all these things. And Uber wants to make early innings into being the platform that people go to, that regular people go to to get these consumer that get these driverless rides. So that's why they're making partnerships with Weimo, as with Cruise as well as byd for ride experiences outside the US. And it wants to be that so called indispensable partner to all these manufacturers who are looking to put their driverers cars to use.

It's going to bring on board all electric Jaguar Ipace vehicles the way mo offering how quickly am I going to be able to get in one at the moment? Where which cities? How fast will this expand?

Right?

So, Uber and Waimo currently has a collaboration in Phoenix, so that's happening there now, but starting early next year, Uber will be offering those way more rides exclusively in Austin and Atlanta.

It really is a good day for the Uber stock.

We're popping first days since August the eighth, but up almost five percent. Natalie Lung breaks down, we appreciate it so much. Meanwhile, Adobe ches doing the opposite, whipsawing to the lower side today after the company reported earnings yesterday, after the bell outlook really failed to quell investor impatience for new AI tools to start generating cash. Bradie Ford pointed us toward it yesterday and is here with the results today, and it does seem to be the digital media.

Side that is letting the side down.

Yeah, Well, here's the big question for these software companies that were the big winners over the last decade. Is AI a meaningful new product that will unlock new revenue? Are Is it just kind of like a cool feature that you add in and it's a nice to have, but it doesn't really move the needle. And that's the question that investors been batting back and forth with Adobe. And what we saw last night is just that that incremental revenue they were hoping to see from new AI products at least isn't materializing yet. We have executives talking about we are optimizing for use and adoption rather than really driving monetization on these products.

Yet.

Yeah, what did Chantanu have to say, to quell investors nerves because this is a heavy sell off in the stock.

But they seem to be.

Trying to show that, yes, they're driving profitability, they're driving forward in terms of their offerings, but not really speaking to this weakness.

Yeah.

Their defense, as I read it, and it was a bit of a subtle one, is that AI is still a value ad because it keeps folks from going to our competitors and it allows us to increase prices. Right, so it's not that I'm paying an additional ten dollars for the new AI tools, but it's that, well, I'm not going to go install Canva, and if you raise my prices ten percent, I'm not going to cancel, and I'm not going to fight you either. And so they said that it's it's kind of an indirect monetization story at this point, with more direct monetization to come in the future.

What levers, therefore, can they pull to monetize in the future.

In the future, the idea would be that you know generation saying photoshop, click here, make a picture of a dog doing a backflip. Every time you do that, you have let's say a thousand credit standard for generations you go above that, you start getting charged. That's one method. In more resource intensive models such as video, which they're working on, they said that could be a whole different monetization mechanism, in part because the compute would probably be so much higher. So general credit packs, consumption and additional productiers would be the general way folks would expect. And they've spoken about.

One area of focus that we have for Adobe going forward has been the investment that they're having to make as well. The partnerships are striking where they're trying. You were on yesterday just talking through how these businesses are trying to delve into the three D modeling side of things. How expensive is the artificial intelligence offering for them.

The beauty of being a giant company like Adobe. Some folks have told me that Adobe Suite of Creative Tools is one of the most profitable products ever and so they have a bit of a mountain of cash and so they're definitely able to train these things and throw some money around without it being too diluted at this point. So it's a big expense, especially for the startups. We hear about it being a you know, it can be even inhibiting factor. Adobe has really tried to message that, look, we have a diversified business. We are willing to pull some cash over here and put it over here to make sure we're able to keep on doing this and keep getting adoption. And they generally think that they're best set by centralizing users on Adobe and keeping them there by keeping AI accessible for a little longer before jacking up the prices.

Ready, Ford, we thank you, thank you. Let's talk aviation tech right now. Boeing factory workers walked off the job for the first time in sixteen years today, halting manufacturing across the plane maker's Seattle hub. This after members of its largest union voted overwhelmingly to reject a contract offer angle on strike. While both parties have expressed a desire to get back to the bargaining table to move ads to the strain on Boeing, let's just stick with the airline industry now, because United Airlines has announced a deal with Starlink. The airline is set to offer in flight Wi Fi through SpaceX's Internet service for free. Winimberg's Nongrasch joins us now, Wow, no more five dollars ninety nine minimum spends when if you get on the plane. What does it say about Starlink's reliability in the air right.

I think a lot of people were wondering when, you know, they would strike a big deal with one of the major airlines, and I think what it's showing is that all right. You know, there were some questions about whether or not it could handle the capacity earlier, but now I think at least one of these airlines says all right, I think they're ready to handle our fleet of vehicles.

When you say one of these airlines one of the big carriers in the US, they've already got to deal with Hawaiian airlines, right, They've.

Got JSX, which is a smaller airline you know, predominantly based out of Texas. But yes, this is one of the big four, if you will. And so now they finally have I think the bragging rights that they need to say, all right, we are here for the big time, the big players.

Just look at this deal.

Scott Kirby really talking about how you're gonna be able to just walk straight on the plane from the lounge. Everything will be seamless. Ultimately you'll be connected devices. Also, what you're going to be using on the aircraft itself. What in terms of market shared. Do analysts think that they're able to get his Scott Kirby the first guy to go and everyone else follows.

I think so.

I think a lot of people think this might be like.

A watershed moment for them, you.

Know, because it's a big advertising get right. They can say, all right, here we have one of the major players. When are the other ones going to follow suit? And so that's I think really the big get for them.

The technology is what we love to hear from you and ultimately, how hard is this? We all understand how glitchy the airline Wi Fi is at the moment, why is that?

What does starting offer?

Well, one of the big advantages that starlink has over its competitors for other Internet satellites is that they're closer. Right, So the incumbents that a lot of the airlines use use satellites that are in much higher orbits and so there's a latency. There's that lag that I'm sure everybody has been frustrated with on their planes from time to time. But what starlink offers their satellites are much closer to the Earth and so you can have that cut down in latency. Of course, that comes with more satellites in orbit. They need to launch more and more so that they can have that global coverage because when you're closer to the Earth, the satellites are moving a lot quicker, and so in order to have a satellite overhead at any given time, they just have to keep launching satellites. It's basically a numbers game. But if they are able to have enough satellites in orbit, then you cut down down that latency and it's a more seamless experience.

Willumbre analyst Luis de Palmas, he's to be saying Stalin is in no oppositioned to have the highest aviation mock show in the next decade, but he's not saying in the next two or three years.

This takes time run.

Yeah, it's definitely going to take time. And as we've seen, you know, in terms of where Starlink has excelled, they've really gone up in numbers. When it comes to individual subscribers, maritime deals. They're definitely very popular over the ocean right because there's less demand there, But when it comes to the you know, over land and with bigger airlines, you know that's going to take some time.

Also, you know, you have.

To get certain approvals, you have to re outfit the planes, so it's going to be a slow process.

But this is just the first step.

And well it'll be interesting to see if any of the other airlines follow.

I'm crush, what joy to have you in the studio in New York. Watch this here traveling thank you so much in a busy week in space elsewhere and transportation, Amazon says it will invest more than two billion dollars in its delivery service partner program, especially in an effort to raise driver pay to a national average about twenty two dollars an hour. Bloomberg's Matt Day reporting across this. Why do it, Matt Well?

Why?

The first and kind of obvious context behind this is a pressure from labor groups. You know, Amazon's contract delivery drivers are a focused for the team Stais in particular, they put a big target on Amazon's back, saying we're going after them. Famously, these folks represent ups and have said they think they can organize an Amazon worker. So Amazon playing a little bit of defense here.

Defense Ultimately, why do they go for contractors? To begin with? Why don't they hire their own drivers?

You know, the argument they make is that it's about empowering small businesses. I think labor experts would maybe bat an eye at that, but it is. It is a relatively common model, right, FedEx uses you know, versions of this. Uber you know, famously doesn't employ its own folks either. So for Amazon, this gives them, you know, a bit of a best of both worlds.

Right.

They don't have to provide you know, the perks of employees to these folks directly. You know, at the same time, they can exert a relatively high degree of control over independent, often bespoke contract outfits.

How does it look abroad?

Is it this model in the US?

Same elsewhere? Different?

There are versions of it, and obviously, you know, in countries with stricter labor laws, you know, they have to comply with those. The US has fewer of those when it comes to last mile drivers, but there are versions of their Delivery Service Partner program abroad. They say there's something like three hundred and ninety thousand drivers employed by DSP's worldwide, So it's a it's a huge portion of their you know, kind of workforce that does not accrue to their books.

And let's talk about that books because I think Ultimately, this is a business that has been cutting jobs, has been getting leaner and meaner in areas it can, while it's splurges an awful lot on artificial intelligence and compute. What does this say a two billion dollar investment, what does that in the context of Amazon's overall spending.

I think it's a reminder that, you know, as people talk about them as a technology company, you know, their core business of getting you things you know by by delivery is still growing, even if it's slower than it was during the boom years, and it still requires a whole lot of bodies to make it work.

Right.

We're going to see surely from them announcements about their seasonal hiring coming up for the fall, for the the peak holiday season, something they do every year about this time. So just a reminder I think that, you know, listen, while they're they is getting all the headlines, they still are moving a whole lot of stuff and require a lot of partners to make that happen that day.

All things Amazon, we appreciate it, Thank you so much. Now, coming up with the dirt bag of the Internet, who happens to be behind the Crypto project promoted by Donald Trump?

That's next. This is Blouly Big Technology Revolute.

It's seeking licenses to start operating in the Middle East. This is the London fintech giant hunts for growth beyond.

Its home market.

Now the firm has submitted applications to the Central Bank of.

The UAE reporting.

Shows to become an electronic money institution and offer remittiscences in the country they of course. The sources currently speaking to Bloomberg say that the goal is to eventually apply for a full banking license similar to the one that it recently received from regulators in the UK after years of work. Now let's stick with the world of fintech, but the crypto side of it. In the last year, Donald Trump has fashioned himself into a friend to the cryptocurrency crowd. He and his two older sons now have been particularly good friends to World Liberty Finance, the crypto project they've been promoting on social media. Here to tell us more about well, the deal maker behind the project, Sloomberg Investigative reporters Fox. You're also the author of book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering four, which is up for a few awards. So congratulations on that Zeke, you start your story focused on Chase Hero.

What can you tell about this guy?

Yeah, so Chase is an unknown in the crypto world, but I dug it into his career and he's been a marijuana dealer. He says he went to prison for that. He sold weight loss calling cleanses online. He had one hundred and forty nine dollars a month Get Rich Quick class. And then now he appears to be the main deal maker behind World Liberty Financial, which is this defive startup the Trumps are promoting, and President Trump himself posted a video saying, you know this is going to challenge the big banks. So it's really bizarre to see that this is the person they're partnering with.

I'm sorry, the guy behind this DeFi project isn't even known in the crypto world.

No, and I mean he calls himself in videos. He likes to call himself the dirt bag of the Internet. I found in another video he said regulators should kick people like him out of the industry, and not in those words. He seems to have a very cynical, to say the least, attitude towards crypto and this project World Liberty. You know it might sound kind of impressive if you didn't know about crypto, but it appears to be kind of a copy of an existing project that didn't go anywhere and then lost a lot of money in a hack.

Yeah, you're talking about the Dough project, right, Dough. That seems to be what's got actually industry inside. Is the crypto industry a little worried is ultimately that the people behind Well Liberty Financial have come across from a much smaller project that didn't manage to raise that many funds and actually got hacked.

Yes, and I mean we don't know the details of World Liberty. I obtained a white paper that lays out some of them, but I'm sure it's all subject of change. But this is supposed to be defile like decentralized finance. The white paper says that seventy percent of the tokens will be reserved for insiders. So talking to people in crypto, they said, this looks like it could be more of a cash grab than an innovative project.

Okay, And there in lies the issue that this could be some sort of cash grab.

Some of the.

Details in your story and that might hint that there's a slight difference in how this DeFi project is run compared to others is that the people behind the cut the overall project keep what of issue tokens.

That's a lot.

Yeah, And I mean like we're talking about this like I think we're talking about this even a little bit too seriously. Like you should go go read what this guy says about crypto. I mean, I can't, I can't repeat it. The language to this is a family TV channel, I guess, but the way he talks about it doesn't give you any confidence that this is a serious project that's going to challenge big banks.

He says, basically, you can sell us a rubbish and anyone will buy it in crypto. He happened to say that in a twenty eighteen YouTube video recorded as he drove his rolls Royce.

Yes, and I mean, I'm thinking deep to try and find his crypto resume, and I found that he appeared on influencer Logan Paul's podcast, and during the podcast, the two of them promoted a token called Omi, which I had also never heard of before since they promoted it a couple of years ago. Is down ninety six percent and another YouTuber, a scam busting YouTuber named coffee Zilla posted this expose that appeared to show the two of them coordinating ahead of the show their plan to talk about OMI.

I mean, it seems that someone else listed in the white paper who's responsible as operations lead used to run a service called Date Hotter Girls, where he taught seminars on how to pick up women. All of this just feels like a real risk ultimately for the person who is running to be president of the United States again to be associating himself with Why do it?

I mean, it's pretty bizarre, and the crypto industry, to the people I've spoke to from it, are not happy about it. They like that Trump has flip flopped and has endorsed crypto. He said that he's going to fire the head of the SEC and provide looser regulations that he says will make the US the crypto capital of the world. They're like, that all sounds great, but then why are you starting this pretty silly sounding new venture, a for profit venture just before the election. It almost discredits the I raises questions about his motivations for deregulating the industry.

What has ultimately the world liberty financial spokespeople said to you, have you tried to get in touch, What have they said ultimately about the real underlying necessity of this project?

So I did contact them, and I received an email back from a man who said he was not a spokesperson, but then he spoke for World Liberty and said that he could see where I was going with all these questions, and it was painting an inaccurate portrait of this company, and that time will tell that this is a serious project that's doing cool stuff. And Donald Trump has said he's going to unveil the details on Monday at eight pm on a Twitter spaces So I guess we'll see if what he says is consistent with the white paper. If they've they've made some changes, I'll certainly be listening whether or.

Not it will indeed move away from the old banks, as former President Trump has discussed zep Fox. We might need to come back to you on Monday. Thank you so much, extraordinary peace.

Meanwhile, some news.

From a company that used to be associated with crypto much more in the AI world now core Weave.

It's a cloud computing provider.

Now that's among the hottest startups in the artificial intelligence race, and as in talks to a range of sale of existing shares, valuing it to get this twenty three billion dollars, according to sources. The sources say that the company is discussing a transaction that would allow existing shareholders such as employees, to tender between four hundred million and five hundred million dollars worth of their holdings. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroin Hide in New York. Let's get your check on these markets, because they are higher, and in fact they've been higher for five straight training days. And then as that one hundred, if we've added more than a trillion dollars in market cap, we're up and another four tenths of percent. Maybe the panic of last week becomes the past, and we start to once again factor in maybe a forty percent chance at least that the Fed could indeed cut rates to the tune of fifty basis points as soon as September. That's what the market is currently trying to digest. We see that reflected in the bond market, the yields just falling on the two year yield. I'm saying this because actually equities worldwide are seeing buoyancy from their stock six hundred over in Europe. It finishes the trading week also on the higher side, and it adds some three quarters percent on the day. As we've finished trade, let's move on to some of the individual movers trading here in the United States. At least, look chips have been on fire. We've made up so much of last week's real panic selling that we saw. The socks is currently up one point four percent. In fact, every single name and been trading in the green on the day, and largely we've got some meteoric moves over the last five days.

Arm is up some twenty five percent.

This of course a chip design company that Raymond James is saying.

They're now rating it and outperform.

They see it growth few particularly when it comes to AI on the edge, and we're looking at Adobe though despite managing two live up to expectations in its fiscal third quarter, it's dragged lower.

It's forecasts not good enough. Where have we heard that before in video broadcon.

And we've heard this a theme in the earning season, and Adobe once again just not managing to show the generation of revenue from AI, even though they do add generative AI.

To their offering.

Let's just stick with AI now because AI pioneer faith A Lee has raised two hundred and thirty million dollars from a star studied list of investors for a new AI startup called world Labs, which officially launches today. The company aims to build software that can use images and other data.

To make decisions about.

The three dimensional world, building what it calls large world models. Here to talk about what exactly that means, and indeed the fundraise doctor Fai Failee alongside Bloemug's Rachel Myths.

It is wonderful to have you both here and well, doctor Lee.

I asked, first and foremost, what was it like raising funds as an academic now entering this private world to be raising money.

You've been in private well before, but to raise funds? Was it easy? From the starstut a list.

Good morning, Carolyn, it's really good to be here. Well, nothing is easy, but what's really really hard is make spatial intelligence happen. I'm just so excited that we've brought together a incredible group of pixel AI talents to work on this really, really hard problem that we now call spatial intelligence.

Explain to us what you mean when you say spatial intelligence, And what is it that you're building exactly?

Yeah, Rachel, Well, look, humans have spatial intelligence. It's actually a very ancient ability. We have evolved over millions and millions of years. It's the ability to understand, to reason, to generate, and to even interact in a three D world, whether you're looking at a beautiful flower or trying to touch a butterfly or building a city. All this is part of the capability of spatial intelligence.

We see that with humans, and we see that with animals. How do you expect that we'll see that with computers.

Well, that's the problem we're working on. We're already starting to make tremendous progress. The past decade of AI has been pretty exhilarating, and people hear a lot about language recently, but truly in the world of pixels and vision and spatial intelligence, we've been making progress such as understanding what's in the picture, to be able to tell a story of what's in the picture, to even prompting a sentence and get to the image out of it. But what's really the next frontier, which is such a hard problem to crack, is to bring all this into three D because the real world is three D and humans. Spatial intelligence is built upon this very native capability of understanding and working with three D.

So let's put into real world contexts that working with three D the applications. Is it robotics, is it manufacturing? Is it just us interacting with the real world when we put our AI function glasses on.

You're not wrong, Carolyn. This is such a foundational technology. It's a foundational ability for computers that it has implications in a wide range of use cases. To start with, right, creators. Creators includes not only artists and VFX creators, but also designers, in developers, builders, and this technology has a profound implication for them. But in the long arc of this, of course, robotics manufacturing.

A r v R.

This is you know, there's a reason that Apple calls their vision pros spacial computing. Well, in my opinion, spacial computing needs spacial intelligence, so does many other use cases.

Why does spatial computing need VC money, private sector action? What couldn't you achieve in academia?

So this is a whole ecosystem.

We've been seeing this in AI.

We've been seeing this for years now, and this dates back to any technology that our society our country is building right. This ecosystem needs upstream fundamental curiosity driven research, which I have spent many years of my life in, but it also needs very focused drive industry. We've got great big tech companies working on related problems, but we also what's beautiful about our ecosystem, our startups that has a toll dream has the ability to call on the believers who believing cracking such a hard problem, and we come together and focus all of our allergy in solving this truly hard problem that needs to be scaled, needs to be productionized, and needs to be delivered in the hands of users and customers.

Doctor Lee, One of the things that you're most well known for is image net, on big database of millions of images that really help push forward the field of object recognition and images. I'm curious how your work on that played into your decision to start World Labs.

How do you see those two things as related?

Yeah, thanks for asking that question, Rachel. I think they're related into two ways.

At least.

One is that image net is one of the earlier work in the field of computer vision, which is in the pixel space. Granted, in that time, you know more than ten years ago what image net and the derivative algorithms were able to do. Are still in a two D space right, recognizing objects in photos and eventually telling stories of pictures. But now this is an intellectual continuation of the early working computer vision. Now we're into the next really difficult chapter, which is spatial intelligence. So intellectually, I feel it's my life's work in continuation and zooming out one layer image that was my more than fifteen years ago. It was my intellectual bet on a big north star problem, a north star problem that can really change the course of AI. I do believe spatial intelligence is the next north star for me and for my team, that it will change the course of AI.

One of the things I'm wondering about with the funding for this company is there are a number of big names in AI in particular that invested in this. We've got Jeff Dean and Jeffrey Hinton and Dracopathy. Some of them you've worked with previously. I know several you were at Google at the same time. How did you pitch them on it?

Well, that's the beauty of our field. The first of all, these people have been friends and colleagues for years or former students. I think they share my belief. I think they see this as such a big problem and they believe in my team that when they hear my co founders been Mildenhall, Christophe Lassner, Justin Johnson, and really the entire funding team, they recognize that while this is a tough problem, it needs people who really can have the ability and believe to crack this, and I think that's why they support.

You've got money from big name vcs as well, Andrewson and Horowitz, to name just one. I'm interested more broadly about the rallying call you've had for money to go towards academia.

You went to President Biden himself saying.

That there needs to be more funding in the public sector as well as the private sector when it comes to AI, R and D ultimately so universities can access GPU and compute. Are you still feeling that necessity that public sector needs money or have.

You just sort of given up and gone to the private.

Sector here, Carolyn, I actually believe even more so now that I'm traversing both the private and the public sector that's seeing the access to compute, access to support in the private sector. I believe none of us will be here in the private sector without the public sector, you know, imaged net convolution on your network back probably gay transformer models. Maining of these seminal work in AI came from public sector first. So I think this ecosystem is so critical and missing or the imbalance of any component is harmful for the ecosystem. And now I have personal experience to see the access we have to resources. It makes me believe even more that our country needs to invest in our public sector, in academia in this kind of moonshop mentality to support students and faculty and researchers in basic science.

Research, academics backing you financially, as well as as I say A sixteen z Nea Radical Ventures, as well as many others and some celebrities in the mix as well. We thank you so much. World Labs co founder Faith Ailey and Brinibad's Rachel Metz appreciate it.

Now let's just talk about elsewhere.

And AI Open AI see Sam Altman and Video CEO Jensen Wang and other industry leaders have actually just been meeting with senior Biden administration officials at the White House just yesterday, where they discussed steps to address massive infrastructure means for AI projects.

Following the talks, the White House.

Announced an interagency they're calling it an Interagency Task Force to help promote data center development in the US and initiatives to support accelerator permitting for those facilities coming up.

I'm going to be joined by Dylan Cox, had.

A private market's research at Pitchbook for the firm's latest report on private money going into startups like we've just been talking about. And then we've got Rethink Impact founder and managing partner Jenny Abranson on.

The firm's latest fundraise. It's a lot.

This is reallymog technology. This week, Pitchbook released it's quarterly private market fundraising report. Not that pretty a reading. Funding was down in the second quarter, with bench capitals seeing a thirty three percent drop in fundraising year over year. As discussed at All with Pitchbook head and private markets research Dylan Cox, Dylan, we know that it's been hard to raise funds for some who particularly is it.

Hard for.

Well, thanks for having me on over the last twelve months. Our data shows it's been particularly hard for venture investors as well as private real estate funds on the flip side. Of things. We've seen some strategies have success, such as private equity secondarias, which provides liquidity to private markets and mitigates the jcre of impact for newer investors, as well as private real assets which a lot of people don't expect. There's a lot of money right now flowing into infrastructure, kind of along the lines of decarbonization of the economy.

What about well, data center and digitalization, and we're seeing that in terms of the real asset allocation we are.

That's another big piece of it. It's decarbonization, it's data centers. But not to be forgotten are sort of traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, ports and airports. And then something that also catches a lot of folks by surprise is the sort of slow but study chugging along of more traditional natural resources in that bucket, things like oil and gas and timber. Funds I think have proved to be a bit more resilient than a lot of investors would have expected, maybe five or ten years ago.

Less on our tech theme of things, but important to acknowledge. Talk to us a little bit about what's happening in BC. What are the funds having to say to former LPs to get them to commit to new funds. Where are we seeing outlies raise big new funds to allocate.

Well, AI is certainly the name of the game, which will of course surprise no. We're seeing much larger AI focused funds as well as AI focused deals right now, many of them you know, household names at this point. But in terms of the asset class as a whole, I think the single most important issue right now is liquidity. That's distributions back to investors of venture capital funds viewed as a proportion of the size of the fund or of the assets and the fund. We're reaching decade lows in terms of trailing twelve month distributions, which of course means that investors in those venture funds have fewer dollars on hand to recommit into the next vintage of venture vehicles.

Love that you talk us through the secondaries and the liquidity side of things as well. Dylan Cox's pitchbook, head of Private Markets Research.

Great to have your take.

We're actually going to now pinpoint a complete outlier to the conversation that we've just been having because we think Impact is now one of the largest VC firms dedicated to funding female CEOs, and it's just announced the whopping two hundred and fifty million dollar.

Fund, it's third and largest raised to date, any.

Doubling the firm's assets under management to more than half a billion. Founder and managing partner Jenny Abramson joins us.

Now, So, Jenny, we're.

Just hearing that it's dire out there for venture but not for you.

Who did you have to come on board? Which LPs are interested?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on behalf of my partner Heidi Patel and the rest of our everythinking back team. Yeah, we're very excited to have announced more than two hundred and fifty million dollar raise, the largest fund backing female CEOs. And we were fortunate, despite the trends that Dylan shared, to be able to do this in this market. And it was a large part due to major institutions who came on board to support the fund.

What sort of institutions are willing to almost take what now feels that the pendulum has swung on a more d I focused to investing.

Yeah, I think people major institutions. We had more than ten university endowments, we had more than ten major foundations, We had, for example, a hospital, and others that really do care about returns, and I think have realized that investing in women and gender lens investing is not just something that feels good, but is actually good business. And so they came on board along with many individuals self made billionaires like Sarah Blakeley of Spanks and Sneaks, to Melinda Frenchgates, the major philanthropists, and to many others. And we think the combination of big institutions that I named a global bank like UBS, Cambridge Associates and their LPs, these kinds of institutions have realized that this is now a mainstream opportunity.

We were just looking at some of your previous portfolio from the first fund. The vintage is good, the billions.

That you've managed to raise it well.

These founders have now managed themselves valuable at Guild Education for example, Spring.

Health, l Avest.

But these companies haven't yet exited per se some of them. When do you think that that might occur in the first fund? How is the IPO pipeline?

Look?

If you do these female founders want to go to IPO or are they looking at M and A opportunities?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the data has shown that female entrepreneurs do deliver higher revenue, more than twice as much per dollar invested, and tend to exit on average a year faster than their male counterparts. And these companies, you know, like all companies, there's been a slower IPO market, but we invest sometimes as early as a late seed, and so it can take companies typically eight ten years as long as well as an open IPO market. Of course, there's also M and A opportunities, pe buys and others, and so depending on the company, different different outcomes will occur.

We were just hearing from the people who've jumped on board to commit capital in and what I kind of already referenced of this moment where the pendulum has one, we are hearing more pushback against that focus on women, people of color, minority founders rather than wanting to embrace them. We've seen the Fearless Fund, for example, actually have legal issues being able to allocate its grants to women of color. Was that anything that you heard of when you were out this summer raising the money?

You know, we really mostly heard that people were excited by the opportunity that investing in women is no longer just a passing trend, and in the wake of the me too movement, and I think this raise makes clear that this is good business, good for the economy, and certainly here to stay. So that's mostly what we heard. Male founding companies continue to get ninety eight percent of investment capital, and almost all of our companies have men and women in the top team, and we think gender diverse teams outperform. And our goal is to you know, grow the pie here and grow the economy, which is which is what we're doing by backing these great female leaders.

Oh boy, Jenny, but you say that stop two percent basically a VC money going to female founded companies and it isn't changing. And I'm interested as to why you think that is occurring. If you give us all the statistics that they're managing to exit quicker, they're building revenue faster, we're seeing better outcomes.

Yeah, you know, I think this is the moment where it's starting to turn to us. This raise from Rethink Impact that we announced, it really shows that these mainstream investors, these institutional investors, see the opportunity and that the opportunity between the data and now examples of companies like many that you held up. You know, a company like Spring getting a three point three billion dollar valuation last month and many others. We think that's going to be the turn that leads to capital being more allocated in ways that grow the pie. So we're excited. We think this is that moment that things are going to finally unlock and change that data point that's been stuck for a while.

Wow, Heidi, patl and yourself leading this and raising a huge round, wreathing Impact founder and managing partner Jenny Abramson, We thank you for your time. One other VC story that we're watching, AI startup Paul Side is in talks for a new round of funding, giving an evaluation.

Of three billion dollars or this before.

The company even released an initial product. According to sources, the company is set to raise five hundred million dollars in new financing with being Capital and talks to lead the investment round. And that does it for this edition of Blomberg Technology. You do not want to forget our podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart.

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