Brainstorm Tech 2022

Palmer Luckey, Founder, Anduril Industries
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: What Keeps Palmer Luckey Up At Night

Conferences

 Palmer Luckey, Founder, Anduril Industries
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: What Keeps Palmer Luckey Up At Night


Sol Trujillo, Chairman, Trujillo Group, LLC 
Steven Wolfe Pereira, Encantos
Moderator: Terri Burns, GV


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Tech And The Latino Market 

Sol Trujillo, Chairman, Trujillo Group, LLC 
Steven Wolfe Pereira, Encantos
Moderator: Terri Burns, GV

Brainstorm Tech 2022: Tech And The Latino Market 


steven. So good morning, How are you both doing today? Yes, very excited to be chatting with you both. Um, let's go ahead and just jump straight in. I want to start by backing up a little bit and really digging into how we got to this moment, sitting here on stage talking about tech and the latino market. So Steven, you just announced your new role um, as chief business officer of arepas. I want to dig into that a little bit. Uh, and soul, you've been an international business executive. Michael mentioned this before. Um, you've served as ceo of multiple large caps, international businesses, Fortune 500 companies. You're also a seasoned innovator, the first to deploy broadband, for example, amongst many other accomplishments. So, so let's start with you. Um, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what has brought, what brought us here to this moment today? Okay. You know, I've been in the business for a long time, so I've been involved in the digitization of everything starting in the 70s. So I am uh, let's call it a historian of what's been happening innovating with broadband back back in those days with the, the evolution of what we thought could be done with cable companies and telcos and others. And in terms of enabling most of what all of you have been talking about, uh, today and yesterday and, and on into the future. The second thing though, has been about innovating around services because the thematic that I would want to leave with everybody today is we can talk about technology, but at the end of the day, who's gonna use it, Who's going to watch it? Who's gonna consume it in whatever the various forms and fashions are and ultimately who pays for it. So the consumer has always been my mantra, has always been my driver which enabled the first deployment of broadband, which enabled the first real smartphone when I was running orange over in London or in Australia, where we innovated around these ultra high speed wireless broadband networks coming to market with the applications and the enablement of a lot of what we're talking about today and on into the future Stephen. So this has been a long, strange journey because I started my career actually in finance thanks to a program called sponsors for educational opportunity. And they were trying to diversify Wall Street back in 1994 and I was an internet, This little company called the Blackstone Group and there definitely was no black at Blackstone back then. Um, but 25 years, we're still having this conversation about, you know, where are, you know, kind of the people of color in tech, especially in this new mainstream american. I love that focuses on the consumer because the growth engine of America is truly the latino market. And so I'm excited that, you know, we're here talking about this because terry just needs to, you know, this needs to be discussed. We talked about and and to that point, so 94% of Latinos, these mobile devices to access the internet. And the purchasing power of the latino market is growing 70% faster than the non latino market. And so there's a huge sort of opportunity here. I'm curious to hear from from both of you, if there was a moment or or over time in both your lives and or careers where you began to really realize the true power and influence of the latino market in tech and entrepreneurship in business. There are moments of time. How did that show up for both of you? Well, I'll start by saying the first moment in time was when I was born as a uh and that's simply because as I was growing up, I grew up in the state of Wyoming. So think about that through hell in Wyoming and what I found was was that there were a lot of people that didn't understand what a true hero was etcetera etcetera. So it played into my career as I as I started running companies and I still always think about customers and who are the customers. So my first moment about the importance of the latino cohort was when I was running one of the baby bells and I found that the most consumptive cohort we had in our base of customers was the latino Latina consumer because they consume communications products and services is at a higher rate than any other cohort that we had and our average revenue per customer was higher than the other cohorts. And I was looking at the data and trying to help people understand that. And it carried through in terms of all the things that we've now seen in terms of smart smartphone introductions. You know, the penetration of technology in this cohort in the United States has been way above every other cohort because they're consumptive for many different social purposes and business purposes. I mean, what do you think about what I was talking about? And you know, I think he's being very humble as ceo of us west or orange or Telstra. But he also served on the boards of Pepsico and Target and WPP and Bank of America. Again, the growth driver has always been the latino market and then you know, larger, you know, the multicultural market if you will. And so I've been working tech for over 20 years and when I was working with walmart, I was running all of their media business. And it was fascinating that here you have Fortune one company and all the growth was coming from multicultural consumers, but specifically the latino cohort was the driver. And so when you just look at the math, you know here you have a company where they have, I think 11% of all Walmarts are in texas, 7% in California, You know, 6% in places like, you know, Ohio and other states. These are all multicultural majorities. And so literally you can't make the math work. And so how are you investing your dollars? How are you truly following the consumer? And then you think about culture, the largest, you know, kind of most streamed musician on the planet last year was bad bunny. And so when you start to see all these things, I mean you've heard all these stats you know that you know catch up like all these kind of things, you know, but for some reason there is a lack of investment in capital but we're all talking about where are consumers going and the growth is coming from the latino cohort. I really want to dig into this idea of the multicultural, expansive demographic within the latino culture. We were just talking about this backstage. My grandparents were Panamanian immigrants. And so when I think about my identity as an afro Latina woman, I am one segment of many within you know the latino community. I'm curious how you both think about that from the innovative entrepreneurial and consumer standpoint. Just a multicultural dynamics within the latino market. Well, I want to put an exclamation mark for everybody here to understand that in the United States, The us Latino Cohort is generating $2.7 trillion dollars worth of GDP. So what does that mean? It means it's the equivalent size of France, very close to the U. K. There will be a new study done by economists this year. That will show that it's probably gonna pass France UK as the size of a market within the borders of the United States. Okay. It's growing our GDP within the economy today at nearly 30% of the total volume of GDP growth in the country. So what does that mean? It means that they're buying more, consuming more 52% of all new home sales in the United States, new mortgages taken out to the latino cohort. Last time I checked, that's not a niche. You know, 50% generally teams seems to be the most or majority of all of that. And then when you look at other automotive sales, almost everything every consumer Based product and now soon to be B2B product is going to be consumed by these entrepreneurs, by these people that are younger. The most common age of a Latino or Latina in the country is 11 To put it in context, the most common age of the Anglo American Cohort is 58. So if you're building a business for the next few decades and thinking strategically and you're thinking about one million Latinos, Latinas turn 18 every year there's a huge wave. We have a tsunami And I'm gonna say one last thing not to take too long here. There's a person um that is a well known business publisher and economist and he talked about the latino cohort is like the cohort is the calvary that's coming over the hill to save the U. S. Economy back to what Stephen said about inflation and what the Fed chairs and other people are talking about. I think they're talking in the 20th century context As opposed to the 21st century context. I want to give the audience an opportunity to ask any questions if you have them to start thinking about them. Um before we get to that first, I want to dig into some of the work that you both are doing today. So maybe we can start with you steven. Um you just announced your your news with and and previously were working at, can you share a little bit more when you think about the latino market and tech and entrepreneurship, what are you most excited about with with the work you're doing now? Absolutely. Well as a proud father of, you know, two young kids. Um, I think Saul's insight about understanding the power of gen alpha, you know, this is, you know, kind of kids born after 2010, certainly kids that are growing up with, you know, Alexa, you know, google Siri in the house. Um, but this is now over 50 plus percent of this market of kids is actually diverse and it's being led by the latino covert once again. And so we started a kids entertainment company that was really grounded in tech, you know, digital and physical products. Um but the whole idea was to tap into this because their stories aren't being told, they're not seen. I mean great that, you know, you have maybe some folks talking about it, but literally there are more animals and kind of Children's books and content than there are Latinos. Um so this is the problem that we set out to solve and fast forward, you know, with Saul as an investor and you know, some other great folks um like Jeff Weiner, who is, you know the ceo of linkedin, um, Charles Hudson, you know, we actually have this incredible company doing kids and family, you know, I. P. And we just actually merged with a larger company called, which if you're familiar with what Reese Witherspoon is, Hello Sunshine or what Lebron is in Spring Hill, the biggest latino actor on the planet he's building that company at, and now we're gonna be the kids division of it and I'm now the chief business officer of that company. Amazing at the point around um in Children's books, more animals than Latinos, it really rings true. It kind of reminds me of that the anecdote around team pages, I don't know if you all have heard this before, but sometimes you're more likely to see the photo of the team dog than you are of a person of color on the team page um rings true. Thanks. Thanks for mentioning that salt. Um curious to hear when it comes to some of the things that you're focused on today. Lots of things latitude, You have latitude ventures, curious to hear about what you're really focused on as you think about the latino market. Well, I'm focused about on our economy in the United States and around the world. In terms of how we think about it and all of you that you know everything I've heard so far on stage, nobody's just limited to a geography. But the biggest and most profitable geography in the world is the United States and I know that other countries have volume but profitability is, is still the challenge for any ceo or any investor to to be thinking about. So I've been thinking about, so in our economy today as we age with the baby boomers, I'm a baby boomer as we age. You know, our throw weight changes. And the question is, how do we replace it? Like any business? As you think about wave one of the technology versus Wave two or Wave three, we have to be thinking about our succession as a nation. Well, guess what? We have a, we have a unique differentiator in our country called the Latino cohort because they're so young and also the most entrepreneurial cohort in America. They generate about 80% of all net new businesses in the last decade and a half, 50% of all net new employer based businesses in the United States And they're supplying 80% of all net new workplace entrants and the consumption numbers that you've talked about. So I'm spending my time thinking about, Does everybody understand this? So I've been involved in creating a new platform, an event called latitude where we bring in C E O s and I won't name all of them that were gonna be there this year. Political leaders and and economists and others and tech people to come in and talk about this cohort because this is if you want to make money, I mean, it's nice to have ideas, but it's even better to have the ideas make some money for those who invest. And so we're we're focused on getting this conversation, helping it understood and also looking at what our driver variables. Driver variables are always youth of a population and their adaptability. two is, is the notion of income growth which is happening with this cohort and then three is how you think about leveraging it within an economy. And so there's a lot of things I've been working on, I could stay here for about three months talking about all of it, but building platforms, communicating it, investing. And the last point I'll just make is and Stephen made it earlier, I had a bain consulting to a study last year. Less than 1% of all invested capital by VCS and pe have gone into this cohort, who is the most prolific business formation covert in the country. I'm a capitalist. I believe capital should flow to where the growth is. So we've got to fix some clog in the system, Part of its knowledge and awareness part of it is how you find it like those of you that look for talent. And I heard, I think it was Stewart talking earlier about, you know, where their employees are coming from, they're coming from everywhere now, not just the same places. So think about, don't look in the same places for innovation, don't look in the same places for talent and don't look in the same places either where you're going to access capital or find capital. I mean, I was being, you know, way too nice and you know, extremely humble about it. Saul now has one of the preeminent venture firms called latitude VC investing, latino back startups and you know, the fact that that 1% number given all the growth that we're talking about, given that literally look at millennials, everyone wants to reach millennials gen z the majority of those consumers, those cohorts are led by multicultural consumers and again led by the latino cohort. So there's a disconnect where you have these bubbles of Silicon Valley product. People, engineers trying to build for the customer, the audience, but it's all kind of, you know, depersonalized, they don't understand that, that consumer is actually gonna be driven probably by a Latina mom, which is, you know, the kind of main consumer focus of any retailer, um just understanding the household formations and so I feel like, you know, these bubbles, whether it's Silicon valley or you know, kind of Fintech or whatever it is, no one's really looking at this cohort and again, hopefully folks like G. B. And others are really going to make that investment to really invest in the latino community and and to both of your points, I really like this idea of, we can talk about diversity, inclusion, equity. I personally believe, you know, that's good to do good for the world, but this is also just a really big business opportunity. There's money to be made here. There's a cohort that um, can really be and will be the future consumers business growth driver. You know, you're exactly right and At latitude where I will have a lineup of 10 or 12 major global ceo I always tell them before they come. We don't talk about diversity, we don't talk about inclusion, we don't business and I want you to understand when we talk about what we've just been referring to. It's all about business and if you focus on how you make money, who your customers are etcetera, all the other things happen because you need people on your board, you need people in your sweet sweets and you need people in your investing portfolios to understand where this growth is when we think about in our last couple of minutes here, this market continuing to grow. Um, I'm curious to hear from, from each of you, what is your ask of the broader tech industry business world, the non latino market. I think we've alluded to this a little bit, but what is it that the industry really needs to do um to ensure that we are moving and serving this, this really large cohort in in the world? Well, I'll be the appetizer that's all. So he could actually, you know, put the exclamation point, I mean for me it's reforms like this, right? How do you actually get on the big stage? Not like, you know, kind of the ghetto ized version if you will the little latino, you know, kind of cohort in the corner. No, on the main stage at fortune brainstorm tech talking about this, that is super helpful, but we need more, you know, the reality is I'm super excited about web three, I'm super excited about the creator economy because now you're actually giving the ability for creators to have ownership and you know, kind of connect directly with their communities with their customers. And the majority of those creators are people of color, lead again by the latino cohort. I'll be a broken record about this, every single company that's been here from Stewart slack today too. You know, you name it, they are looking for growth and growth is only gonna happen with this Latino cohort. So the more that we talk about it from a business driver perspective, not from a charity, not from a diversity perspective, an HR perspective from a business growth perspective, this is the growth engine and as goes the Latino market again, 18% today, going to 30% a third of the country by 2040. But you don't have to wait for the future. The future is now because in every majority market, every top 20 D. M. A. It is a multicultural majority today. Led by Latinos. Absolutely. So last 20 seconds here. Well, I want to ask a question of all of you, how many of you are even aware of what we talked about today? It's hard to see from here. Good number, not everyone, but a good number. The question is is is the media writing about it. So that, and I don't mean just traditional media, but all all forms of media, are they talking about it so that people become more aware, are people really hiring people and investing in these kinds of companies. And so the exclamation mark for me is look, I'm a capitalist. I've made my shareholders tens of billions of dollars of value. And I want to encourage all of you that are innovating that are running companies, building companies to think about this as you're building your teams, as you're thinking about allocating capital. And as you think about what are the platforms that are gonna be most interesting to the cohorts that are of high volume the business growth standpoint. Amazing steven, thank you so much for coming today

 Adena Hefets, CEO, Divvy Homes 
Ryan Williams, CEO, Cadre
Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Real Estate Realities

okay, this is gonna be the best panel of the day, so glad you're all stuck around for it. We have to really great founders here that pretty much cover the waterfront in real estate. Adina Hess is the co founder and Ceo of Divvy Homes, which is really disrupting the housing market and Ryan Williams is the founder and now executive chairman of cadre, which is disrupting multi family commercial and office space. So we got the whole multi trillion dollar market in front of us there. They're both bringing and by the way, I think you're both 34 years old, I turned 35 oh you're getting old, I'm still 30 for 30 for your, which, which kind of freaks me out. Um uh, and both were on fortune's 40 under 40 list uh, and have been extremely successful. Why don't we start by just telling us how your company works you first? Sure. So Divvy creates homeowners, the way that we work is customers come to our web page, we underwrite them and give them a budget, will say you're approved for a $400,000 home in Dallas texas, go out shopping, they go and pick out any home they want that's listed for sale, We buy it then on their behalf, they move in as a technically a renter. Um, but we parse the payments into rent and equity, Equity builds up their ownership in the property the same way with the mortgage that you pay principal and interest, it works the exact same way and so you can continually build up equity in your rental property, get the benefit of appreciation and at any point in time, um either cash out and leave the home and you can take your equity and walk away or you can roll your equity onto a mortgage almost like a recent can you rent indefinitely. So we actually, historically, when we started um you know, originally I was like well how long should we make the DB program? And I was like, well five years feels too long. We were just founded, I don't even know if we're gonna exist in six months and I was like one year, feels too short. So we went with three years and that has been the product for a long time and we've actually just revamped it so you can continue to rent to own and definitely and it's a great model but I have to ask you, I mean brian referred to this as it sounds like a financial model, but brian referred to it as prop tech, where's the tech prepare yourself because I'm going to ask you the same question. Yeah, so it's it's interesting I think that the underlying tech platform that helps support our models will will be sort of the same drivers behind a lot of legacy industries that continue to innovate. And so for divvy the ability to buy thousands of homes at scale and do that with very few humans at a higher margin than what everyone else is able to do it because we have tech underlying it, we have tech that allows us to scale the operations and processes with text that allows us to make intelligent decisions. So today we're buying hundreds and hundreds of homes a month uh and we do that with an acquisitions team that's maybe, I don't know 10 people or so, whereas the largest single family rental company in the U. S. Invitation homes, $30 billion market cap has probably thousands of them. So you don't have to send someone out with the buyer, you do your due diligence with tech and they do the footwork. Not only do we do the due diligence with tech, we do all of the admin paperwork, everything is fully automated, which allows us to scale in a better manner. It sounds like you've learned the tech, we're going to tell ourselves that. Yeah, so I found the cadre about eight years ago, we are marketplace for commercial real estate investments basically. Uh The idea behind cadre was um I grew up renting never being able to own real estate. I ended up working at Blackstone right? When invitation homes was actually starting up, uh and I saw how much wealth was being created um by owning commercial real estate, multi family industrial office, these asset classes that seemed so inaccessible and I wanted more people to be able to share in the wealth. I wanted more people to be able to own their financial futures and um I felt like through technology which I'll get to on, you know, how we leverage that to scale. Um you know, I could bring commercial real estate to the masses and democratize access to the asset class and give people the ability to own their financial future. So follows investment that you'll take today is $25,000. It's spread across 15 properties. So we we build portfolios or let people pick and choose individual assets. Uh and we are in the process of working on a true retail products that will bring minimum down even lower, even lower so and the tech tech, so to Dana's point, it's all about scale and so um one of the things I was really focused on early on was build the premier brand for any individual looking to access real estate. So we have for our first, you know, 67 years focused on larger accredited investors. Um while we build the infrastructure so we can scale and reach the masses to Athena's point, we want to fully automate the end to end investing experience. We know that only through technology can we actually reach hopefully billions of people who can own real estate. And I'd say the second dimension is liquidity. So we've also built a secondary market which can only frankly scale through tech as well. It's very cool and I should point out Ryan successfully got his I. P. O. Out the door last year so has evaluation of of about three quarters of a billion. Uh Adina. Your your market values around two billion. Private still uh We'll get back to the I. P. O. Question but but I think what what I'd like to hear from you both because you both now have all this data about what's going on in the marketplace. You created, your company's in a rising market. We're now seeing interest rates go go going up we don't know how high they're gonna go up. What is the market? What what to each of your markets look like from where you sit Adina. So there's a couple of different ways that you can look at rising interest rates and the impact that it ultimately has on divvy homes. So there's from the perspective of of new customers coming in the door for D. V. It's it's actually quite positive. And the reason why is the higher that interest rates go, the higher it is to Or the more expensive it is to have a mortgage. So the average mortgage payment has gone from something like $900 A month up to something around call it $13 $1400 a month. And that's like a pretty large increase for individuals to be able to sustain. Um And so as a result of mortgages are number one competitor getting more expensive and more people actually end up turning to renting and they turn to divvy and so from the top of final perspective it's very helpful to be able to say that our competitor is now way more expensive. The mortgage and Debbie is actually way cheaper. Um And we also this other value proposition which is divvy the hedge you lock in a buyback rate that you get to buy the house. And so we give our customers certainty in an uncertain market now where the other side of that coin is, I have the cost of capital um and look early on, I think we, we took steps to make sure we're hedging our debt and so we have about 60% of our debt. That's something that we're looking to kind of expand over time. In your right, we will have interest rate increases. Um It'll, we'll see how much of that you can pass through rent increases to the consumer, but for sure that's definitely something that will impact our business. I'm a little bit older than the two of you. In fact, I think if you add your ages together, you get close to mind. Um But, and I was my, my first home, the first home I bought was that a 15% mortgage rate and inflation at the time was about what it is now, 8.5%. So we don't know where this is going, but at what point does it become unsustainable for divvy, what level of interest rates are are beyond what you can handle. Well, so mortgage interest rates are quite different than what, what companies are going to pay for collateralized assets, that's, that's a different pool of capital that's going to be serving, so you're not paying mortgage rates were not paying mortgage rates, we pay what a corporation would pay for an asset. Now, historically wasn't historically when the government made it, when the government subsidized mortgage rates, there are 2.5% it was a disadvantage because I paid more, but now it's actually flip now, it's actually an advantage for us. And so it's interesting, One of the things I like to focus on is you've got to be able to create a sustainable business absent when interest rates are absent, what inflation looks like absent what the macro is doing, you have to create a sustainable business through times when interest rates are low and when interest rates are high, and I think one of the biggest lessons I've seen as a founder has been how to navigate those waters. Um and thanks for creating long term sustainability. What do you like? I think, um we are definitely going to be in for a lot of pain um in the real estate market and I think the pain is actually gonna disproportionately hit uh communities, um who have already, frankly suffered a lot through the pandemic people who, you know, are not able to afford, you know, basic goods these days and um and I think that without platforms like ours, uh there's this real risk of a widening opportunity and um wealth gap happening. And so what we're focused on that cadre is actually getting down to the mass market as soon as humanly possible opening up access, because we know uh there are certain real estate sectors that have proved resilient. Um and that will be very resilient, you know, through this increase, multi family, multi family will be good. Yeah, we've seen um some pretty significant increases in rents because people are being priced out of being able to buy homes, but it can't be a good, we can't be looking at a good period for office space. No. Office office I think is definitely um going to be uh tale of winners and losers. I think the adaptable landlords who are able to basically, you know, um adjust their their space such that it's well monetized, more flexible. It's more conducive to people having open space and less density will will succeed. But there's a lot that aren't moving quickly enough, there's gonna be a lot of distress in office retail is already falling nice. Um and I think in hospitality, especially business oriented hotels, you see some stress as well, that actually presents opportunities if you're able to invest in some of those sectors and that's what we want to be able to do for the masses, so that more people can participate in the inevitable recovery that will happen. Can you both talk a little bit about what's happening in the geography of real estate investment because of the pandemic really changed quite a lot, the pandemic changed migration across the US for sure, and there's probably, I haven't, I don't know the net migration stats off the top of my head, but I imagine that there's a little bit more dispersion throughout the US from just being previously concentrated on the coastal areas. What I will say is that housing prices are highly local. Um And so when we're looking at uh where did he operates from a geographic perspective, there are some markets where they have seriously overbuilt homes Uh and they're going to get hit the hardest in the coming called 12-18 months. So Phoenix Austin are probably the two that come to the top of mind where we've overbuilt inventory um and are starting to see extreme inventory buildups in price, price declines in housing. Now, there are other markets that have been more stable, where inventory hasn't been overbuilt relative to demand, Atlanta is a good example of a market that we're seeing is holding up super well. And so I think what we're going to see from a housing market perspective is a tale of two cities, which is gonna be, some cities are going to do very well if they haven't been overbuilt and other cities are gonna are gonna struggle. I want to open it up the questions and comments in just a minute, if you if you if you have on raise your hand and we'll get the mic over to you. But but but Ryan same question, what are you seeing in the geography of of commercial and multi family? I mean, I think you've got commercial and particularly to overlay the geography, the market and the sector, because, you know, there's multi family and um new york and there's office in new york and frankly there's different picture based off, you know, which uh sort of combination of market and sector that you're focused on. But I think at a macro level, what we've seen is that um there are these emerging coastal markets that were overbuilt in a lot of ways um and that are no longer affordable. And so people are now reassessing, you know, do we want to move back to some of these, you know, large hubs um like new york and uh like Sf and like D. C. Um And I think it's gonna come down to affordability ultimately um from the residential perspective, an office perspective, I do think that um you know, the major cities um and the suburbs and the notes are going to continue to see a ton of deterioration and and rent and occupancy and um I could see a world again where remote is again the status quo and distributed uh kind of workforce is become the norm, not the exception. So in that sector gonna think you have to kind of look at the overarching macro picture. Um, but, you know, I think there's always gonna be opportunity. That's the beauty of real estate. Does cadre own many office buildings in big cities, we own none in big cities, bunch of office buildings, um, in life sciences, uh, life sciences sector, and then suburban office. So we actually took a contrarian view, pre covid, so, for instance, played out well for you really well, because we've seen a lot of people build home offices and get outside of the major cities. Um, and uh, and also landlords that are willing to be flexible and repurposed space. We have a couple of questions up here in the front, please. Yes. Hi, good morning tammy franklin with Marsh question on divvy homes. There's a good article in Fortune about Zillow, they did a postmortem Zillow and their attempted entrance into buying and selling homes. It talked a little bit about how they whatever algorithm they were using, they were paying over over market prices and in a market where there's already very limited inventory. In many markets, we have a housing shortage problem basically, are you taking a lot of homes out of the, out of the marketplace? Now, your financial model makes it affordable for what are the pros and cons of takes, how would you compare your model? Yeah. So I say institutional investors are not leaving the housing market, so they are going to be there. I think that in Atlanta. Um, what we're seeing is roughly almost 30-40% of the homes are being bought by institutions, which is, um, and it's definitely towards the high end of it. For sure. And so, um, what I would say is that's not going away. So you have to kind of learn how to play baseball within the rules, which is, we're going to take our customers, we're gonna put them on the same playing field as an invitation homes, as an eye buyer as everyone else. We put out all cash offers on their behalf. We close in on average 19 days. Um, and so what we're doing is we're taking consumers and we're letting them go head to head with a lot of these institutional buyers now do I think that uh, institutional buyers in some of those cases maybe drove up pricing for sure for sure. I think Zillow definitely got ahead of their skis and I think it was noticeable on the ground early on now these things are learning experiences, the most tremendous amount of respect for the yellow team. Um, but I do think it has an impact on communities. And our hope is that tv provides a counter to that, that we give an opportunity for our consumers stone a home. But I do think that it definitely institutions play a role in rising home prices. Nathan Ryan limited partnerships where you invest in a portfolio have to comply with investor rules if you create a portfolio for somebody who doesn't meet those requirements, how do you get around either state laws or federal regulations? It's a great question. So, um, we uh, were registered broker dealer. Um, so we can offer private placements through our platform to accredited investors and with the right rapper to retail investors, which we're working on. We also have an R. I. A. As well. So we actually last year launched our first sort of truly commingled portfolio product, um, and uh, you know, performed incredibly well to date in that product. Um, we have kind of investor count limits and we can create sort of separate vehicles alongside the vehicle of the main fund vehicle rather to accommodate more people. But you know, we brought, you know, a lot of the Finra and sec experts in house early on to ensure all the private placements were, um, you know, by, by all, you know, both state and federal regulations and uh, and also its quality because I think one of the important points is, you know, this is not an adversely selected platform. You know, we underwrite tons of homes, tons of properties. We only approve of, uh, 2 to 3%. We generate a little bit less than 30% net annualized returns for our customers to date. Uh, and I think it's a function as deena highlighted of both having the right real estate expertise, but then also having, you know, a technology team data platform to augment that underwriting. So we know when we're distributing the product, we're giving people good quality offerings as well. Let me ask you both, unless there's another question out there, I want to ask you both. Uh you're you're both very, you built very purpose driven companies very intentionally. Uh Ryan, you're focused on democratizing investment, you're focused on giving people access to homes by the way. We tried that once before, 13 years ago. It was the methodology didn't work out too well. So I hope but but but but tell me and I'm sorry, you have to do this very quickly. Why are you, why do you feel purpose comes first in your business? Homeowners have 75 times the net wells versus renters, there's mass wealth inequality in the US and you can ask people who are middle income to invest in Bitcoin and S and P 500 pick the right thoughts and that is not gonna work. Um The number one way to to take yourself from, from being, you know, to build family wealth over time is owning a home. And I fully believe that well put right, and how about you, For me, it's personal. Um you know, I grew up renting never owning. Um and uh and I've got to see through ownership of real estate, residential and commercial real estate, which has proven incredibly stable through periods of volatility with the right sectors that um you can give people the ability to democratize multi generational wealth creation. And that's what really drives me is I want any individual to be able to own their financial future, and Owning their fancy future comes from owning assets. And so we can level the playing field and, you know, not make this a global economy where it's, you know, the, the institutions were the only ones thriving. Um, I feel like we will have made our mark and I feel like our platforms are the right kinds, uh, to hopefully, uh, have that impact and legacy. Well, it's super impressive, both of you, uh, to hear your stories, you got a $40 trillion dollar market out there. You're both young, you have a lot of runway in front of you. Go get it, thank you.

Dee Goens, COO, Zora 
Lindsay Howard, Head of Brand, Friends with Benefits 
Moderator: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Web3 And The New, New Creator Economy

I'm very excited to be here with two people who are old school on N. F. T. S. And they're gonna explain to us what's really going on. All right, D I'm gonna start with you. Your company zura labs raised $50 million in May lead in a round led by han ventures, valuing the company $600 million. So, first of all, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Big congrats. Still money going into the N. F. T. World. There is, there is at least in february there was All right, so, um, I want to get back to that in the second what you're gonna do with that capital. Um but firstly, I'd like to quickly here about your journey. Um, you were a college basketball player and then you started on your corporate career. How did you get into crypto? And then to N. F. T. S. And then to become a, the co founder of a company. Yeah, kind of a jack of all trades in that way. So, I was a basketball player at the College of Holy Cross, which is in uh, worcester massachusetts just outside of boston. Didn't have the most successful basketball career, to be honest, it was very underwhelming. And so was always passionate about the world, outside of the sport, whether that was investing or if that was technology or anything that I could kind of sink my teeth into. Um after college I went to the UK for masters at Imperial College London and I started to sort of hear murmurs of the crypto crypto bug in a way like yo I'm using Bitcoin for this or that. But I was kind of off put by it because it was so early and it was so nascent if you will. But uh I joined KPMG shortly after my masters and that's when I really caught the bug. So in 2015 I was at a workshop at KPMG in the U. K. Um and they were talking about the ethereum Blockchain and I actually had the thought, I was like man, this sounds like the kind of tech that could almost put me out of a job as an auditor. Like this is this is pretty exciting. And um yeah, I haven't let go since so then you go to coin base then you found Zora, yuko found Zora, what was the original vision of Zora when you guys uh kicked it off and 2020. Yes, so founded in March of 2020. Um We actually started off selling physical goods, believe it or not, we weren't even in the N. F. T. Space. We sold things like customized sneakers from artists like Jeff staple, we sold prints, we sold t shirts. Um it was very much like a stock X. Built on crypto or stock X. For web three. However, because it was like that we realized we would have to run basically an entire logistics business. Um and we were also having to deal with like angry sneaker heads screaming at us about like what is a redeemable token like the only more passionate people than sneaker heads might be like the chain link army for those who are familiar with the five. But yeah it was, it was pretty intense and so we realized that that wasn't exactly the type of business that we wanted to go into. Um and we also had a ton of artists who were onboarding into Zora who were saying, hey like I did this physical print, uh it's cool but it's way easier to do these things called N. F. T. S. Like can I sell my N. F. T. S on Zora? And so demand was slowly but surely growing and it was in december of 2020 actually um this is The meeting of many hats, the meeting of many hats. Um so the core founding team actually got on a call in December of 2020 about a two hour call where we all wore like seven different hats, which is ridiculous, but it was like a meeting of many hats to decide if we were going to pivot the entire business out of physical goods and into N. F. T. Um By the way, the physical goods business was super successful, like it had done millions of dollars in volume, We were onboarding some of the world's most iconic artists, it was going to be what I was saying to Jacob at the time, my co signer, I'm like man, this is a cash cow, like we would be foolish to completely pivot the business, but that is exactly what we did in december on the meeting of many hats, um we decided to fully pivot the business, shut down the physical goods store and go all in on N. F. T. S. With R. N. F. T. Protocol launch in january of 2021. Okay, now explain the N. F. T. Protocol, what what you're doing now, you've created a protocol that anybody can use to create N. F. T. S and T. S. Yes. So for those who don't know, protocols are actually like if we rewind a bit to Web one, um there's a bedrock of the internet in many ways. And so http for web sites SmtP for email, TCP I. P. For identification and communications a lot of P. S. Um but all of these protocols were collectively created, they're almost like public goods or pieces of public infrastructure. What happened in Web two Was those protocols had platforms built on top of them. And so we kind of traded away the sort of public infrastructure for the convenience and user experience of the social media giants that we know today are like the Ubers et cetera of the world for the convenience. What we're seeing in Web three is a return to uh the protocol based approach because there's now a mechanism for people to collectively own these public goods. Um and why it's important is that it mitigates platform risk. And so if you're a social media creator, if you're an artist and you create a massive following on a platform like twitter or tiktok, all of your audience, as well as your media, is sort of locked into that platform, what protocols do is they make it to where that audience media and the value creation opportunities there actually A level lower than the platform, meaning they can be 100% owned by the artist, the brand or the creator, and they're portable from one platform to the other. And so we launched this protocol in order to mitigate platform lock in or platform risk for artists who may wind up locked into the Tiktok of Web three or the social media platform of the future in crypto. Great. Uh if you have questions for Lindsay or d you know, get your hands up and we'll get um like Lindsay, I want to turn to you for a second last summer, when the N. F. T hype wave was surging up, and uh Web three was, you know, becoming prominent, becoming something that people have actually heard of outside of the those in the know, we, at fortune did a big crypto package and we did a big package on N. F. T. S and you earned a spot on our list of the 50 most influential people in amputees, deservedly the nifty 50 so, congrats Lindsay, um and at the time, you were the head of community at N. F. T. Marketplace of foundation, but I want to go back with you and your history a little bit too, because you curated the first ever digital art auction in 2013. So that's that's really O G. That's really way back before people were talking about this. How did that happen? How did you get into that uh space and then, you know, follow your path there. I've always been an internet nerd since the beginning, that's where I met all my best friends. And then gradually I started to see artists doing really interesting experimental project, um Net art projects in the late nineties, early 2000. And then once we saw these social media platforms emerge. The most interesting material that I found on there was being created by artists. So I became really interested in how you could translate the digital work into a physical space and kind of leverage that white the credibility of that white cube Gallery as a kind of mirror for the digital to give it more value. So this partnership that I did with Phillips auction house in 2013, and then in 2014 was about kind of taking that to the next level and creating sales records for things like animated gifs or art websites or online performances. And once we had those sales records at a major auction house in new york and in London that created a basis then that other galleries could start to sell that work and have something to stack it again. So that was the first kind of major digital art auction that took place. And then the N. S. T. Boom happening 67 years later, it was just um really about focusing not even on moving the digital into the physical space, but looking at it in its native form and giving it value. Which was incredibly exciting and gratifying for someone who um thought, you know, maybe we have to print this animated gif and then put it on the wall or we have to decorate a U. S. B. Drive and then sell that to the collector. These are all real examples of what we were doing at the time to try to create a market around digital art. But now it's incredible because these digital artists who have been really pushing the medium forward for decades um can actually make a living from their work and find the real collector base. Yeah. How much did the the explosion of interest and and capital take you by surprise? I mean, you've been working on this, working with people on this for a long time. And then all of a sudden the entire world was kind of focused on what your your community have been doing. So when we did the phillips sale, we sold around 100 and $20,000 worth of digital art. And we went out every publication and bragged about it because that was huge, 100 and $20,000 for animated GIFs and art websites. And then last year, um I personally sold around $20 million worth of digital art. So I'm not surprised because I've been into this for a very long time. I've always known that it had value, always believed in. It. Always saw the innovation that these artists were bringing both of these platforms and beyond in the digital art space. Um but maybe it was a little bit just like I knew. Yeah. Alright, so now you recently became the head of brand and Friends with benefits, as Mccall noted, awesome organizational name. Uh it's a DAO decentralized autonomous organization probably in this crowd. People know what that is. Um it's been compared to a decentralized soho house. Uh you earn some new york times notoriety recently, a big story uh posed the question is, is Friends with benefits empty hype or the future of friendship. And the article didn't really conclude but explain to us what Friends with benefits is for sure. I got really interested in the idea of a dow especially kind of moving from a marketplace into the dow space because I wanted to see if decentralization could actually work. We talked about it a lot in the web street space, but I wanted to see it in practice and I wanted to contribute to it. So Friends with benefits is a social tao focused on merging culture and crypto we have over 3500 members all around the world and it's really created a model to show how a DAO can um produce a wide range of products and collaborations um events and programs that both you know serve the community's needs push culture forward and then also drive value back to the F. W. B token, which is a really important part of the tokens. People buy tokens to join the community, right? And then they're part of this community, there's there's communication, there's collaboration potentially. But what are examples of how you drive creation where you know like is that still in the beginning or are you figuring that out? You know, those are totally in the experimental stage right now, which is what makes them so exciting to participate in. Yeah. Anyone can buy the F W B token um and participate in that way. And then there's an application process, there's actually a network within our community who reviews applications so it is um kind of invite only but anyone can participate in the kind of governance aspect of it, Which is really what sets a house apart from any other kind of space I've ever been involved, in which is that there is this kind of governance process where any member in the community, any one of these 3500 people can spin up a proposal for a new way for the Dow to be structured or for a new collaboration. They want to pursue a new partnership, a new event and then the community will rally around that vote yes or no with their tokens and then whoever proposed it is responsible for them producing whatever that is. Um And there are checks and balances um you know, the community can keep track and give us that kind of feedback loop on things, so they never go too wild and crazy. Um but it's definitely not perfect and it's not smooth and it can be chaotic at times. So if anyone here has ever been involved in a co op or any kind of like collective body where there's that sort of decision like collective decision making, it's imperfect because it's human, which I think is what makes it so compelling and so interesting. I was the president of my co op board in new york city for a while and leaving that job was the best thing that ever happened to me. Uh All right, so, if you have a question, get your hand up, but I want to ask you sort of big picture here. Um as we look back, I mean, you guys are both, you've been in this and at it for a while, but you know, it seems like there was the longest period of experimentation, really stuff, cool stuff happening beneath the surface, then there was kind of like the people, you know shot heard around the world and you know, we saw last year, N. F. T. Mania so much money flowing in huge deal volume offerings and then that's kind of subsided, crypto has corrected. So now we're in the post hype phase, it seems like where, where is it going from here? You know, I'd love to hear from both of you. You're obviously both. You know, your organization got funding last october, your organization's got new funding. Um, you're in the thick of it you're creating. But like what do you see in that, in that context? What's, what's, where's it gonna go from here? Yeah, I mean, so Zora is infrastructure for anyone, an artist, a brand or developer to build and create with N. F. T. S. And so I think the space is gonna start to onboard more types of participants. And so what we've seen is it's not just the visual artists anymore, it's actually writers. So we're seeing essays like Matthew balls, metaverse essay. Matthew ball for those who don't know is a VC and investor who actually coined the term metaverse. Um, but he never had an opportunity to really capture any value or have any real provenance from that. He minted that metaverse essay and sold it for $290,000 on Zora. And so we're now seeing new types of creators and writers etcetera participate. Similarly, we saw photography in ft by Justyna verso no cell for $2.5 million. So now photography, N. F. T. S are taking off. We're seeing a similar form factor with music as well where musicians are starting to adopt Web three and N. F. T. S. As a way for them to capture more value from their work. If you're a musician now and you're on a platform like Spotify, it takes you tens of millions of streams in order to make just a few $1000. You can sell an N. F. T. For a couple of seats and have the same value capture as if you had 10 million streams by the way, getting to 10 million streams is extremely difficult. Um It's the grid on Spotify is almost owned in many ways by the platform and the labels. And so what I think we're seeing are now that more tools are available, more media types are available. Is that more types of creators are starting to experiment with this medium as a way to capture more value. And so we're moving from and uh we're moving from sort of an earned media value capture or value model to like a captured uh a value capture opportunity instead of just the media earning opportunity. Even advertising models I think are starting to shift just a couple weeks ago at Zora. We actually put up two murals, one in new york, one in L. A. We minted those murals as an open edition N. F. T. And did over $100,000 worth of sales making the entire marketing initiative net positive and profitable for us. And so I think you're gonna start to see people use N. F. T. S. And use this technology as a way to not just earned media value, but to start capturing media value, if companies could all cover their marketing costs with sales, I think that people would be all in on that. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty cool when the ad itself is the product, it's not like that sold more products downstream, like like an ad that sold more iphones or a Nike ad that sold more sneakers. In fact, the ad itself was the product that we sold. You can imagine a Nike commercial or an apple commercial being an iconic piece of art to uh to the modern participants. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that sort of experimentation, dare I say kind of meta, just a little lindsey. What do you, what do you see happening? You know what you see like this continuing to grow in a more, you know sort of measured way, but continuing to expand and bring in new people. Yeah, we actually just created a large census for our community to find out where people want to go next because it's not really on us as a core team to be able to decide that it's like why, why are you interested in taos, what do you want to see happen here? What would make you proud to be an F. B. B member in five years? And we're just kind of getting those results back. But what is immediately clear is that people are here because we're on a mission. Um crypto has always had a diversity problem and by bringing in more artists and creators, it kind of changes the dialogue for a really, really productive way. And so a lot of the people who are attracted to F. W. B are here because they don't want Web three to look like Web two or to act like web to um to have the same behaviors as Web two in five years. So we're here to experiment as much as possible and see what we can learn through this process and share. Like we take our um you know, responsibility really seriously as one of the first major 1000 space. And so we try to be very transparent about all of our learnings and kind of share. Um so we can ensure that this space continues to grow in a really healthy um and inclusive kind of way. Great, well we will be watching to see what friends with benefits does. And of course Dora thanks so much. D and Lindsay for joining us today

Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, Editor-at-Large, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech


Brainstorm Tech 2022: The World According To Slack

Hello. Have a speech. How do you bend time and space? Oh my gosh, I forget the name of the company. But we, we did a series of customer stories in the lead up to the direct listing. Um and one of them was with a japanese, Like 150 year old company that makes pipes and hoses. Like that's the category. Um and it was the ceo of the company who said slack allows us to bend space and time. I have no idea what he was saying in japanese, but that was the translation sounds really good. Might have been like past the water. But so last time we had you here on stage in Aspen, on our stage in Aspen. Um, slack had gone, just gone public and you brought a picture of you with your mom after ringing the bell. So did you bring a picture of you and marc Benioff to show us today? Didn't uh that would have been good prepared in advance. But there is a, I guess. Uh No, no, well, it's um, it was the dream force, like the first pandemic one and Mark and I are out on stage and I'm, I'm not a very tall man. Um and Mark is very tall. So we were probably like 12 ft apart. And this wasn't intentional, like it wasn't the stage direction, but it was good because otherwise it would look kind of button Jeff like it's just so much bigger than me that even 12 ft apart on the stage. It created one of those weird optical illusions like where the where the room appears really large, like all right, well you have to bring it next time. So a lot of, a lot of changed. I definitely want to talk about salesforce and slack and how those two fit together today. But but tell us, first of all, just how things have changed for you as a, as a leader, your personal professional, you know, what would have been the biggest transitions for you over the last couple of years? One of them is I moved here to aspen colorado in January of 21. We had come for for the period over thanksgiving to christmas and brought some family. It was a pretty big realization that hey, we could just move here. Um and that's delightful. But I think if you zoom out a little bit, the context for that is Slack. Prior to the pandemic, had 1.5 or 2% of employees were remote and it was usually like a special concession for someone um who had been on the team for a long time in order to establish these relationships and you know, like Our cart granting this permission for people to move. And I was definitely in the class of people who, you know, like February 2020, you asked me could we all transition to working at home like that um, and still maintain the same level of productivity. I would have said no. And so I guess the big change over that whole period and this is ongoing theme of humility, I guess, but it's something that you thought was impossible, turns out to be possible. You're kind of forced to ask what else, what other assumptions do we have? Um That might turn out to be incorrect. There's been a lot. Yeah. Um so it's interesting because for for given what your company does, obviously there's a big correlation on the product side, what you've done and the the direction you've gone in um and the direction the company has has gone and so talk to us a little bit on the product side about some of the new things going on. What does a digital HQ mean? Exactly. Um This is a marketing term. I don't know if we have a service mark or trademark on it, but we probably should. Um but I think it's, it's something that existed prior to the pandemic and doesn't necessarily like it's a category that slack belongs to. But here's a weird thought experiment. If you go back to march of 2020 and you imagine some parallel universe where we were continued to be allowed to travel, do business dinners, use conference rooms, go to the office commute all that stuff, but you took away all the software then more or less every organization would have just disintegrated in 24, hours, like we were just all would have gone out of business. So at some point in the last 20 years the relative importance of the physical HQ and the digital HQ. And by that I just mean the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration that importance inverted. And none of us really noticed. And um to me that just seems like, I don't know, iron, iron clad, undeniable, um that we just as a matter of objective fact, continued to perform, continue to develop software, continue to sell it, organizations continue to add new employees and grow and attract new customers through that whole period, despite the fact that they were all working from home. And I don't mean to suggest that working from home is intrinsically better and people shouldn't go to an office. The point is just, we were able to do it. And so obviously there is some digital infrastructure that supports productivity, collaboration and if you're like me, uh ceo if you look back over the last 10 years and I thought about real estate leases this much and office build outs and conference room design, seating charts and and all of that stuff um an order of magnitude more than I thought about how people can become more effective users of these digital tools and how they can become more effective collaborators and uh lights are a little bright and maybe it's pointless to ask people to put up their hands, But routinely, when I ask people, Hey, do you know the Amazon, six page memo format, like at the beginning of the meeting, you read the memo rather than doing a presentation, people take 10 minutes and then discuss it. Um you don't have to put the lights, everyone will say yes. And the little rhetorical trick is everyone says yes because there's so few examples of people even trying to make meetings more effective or to take advantage of this. Um excuse me, opportunity to improve the way that we uh work together, that the one example really really stands out. So I think there's a whole host of opportunities that are that are like that and I realized that I was definitely wrong over that period, whereas paying attention and exerting energy, um give us some examples, what are, what are other things that have worked that are new and different for like how long are your meetings have you changed the way you do meetings? Yeah, we really try to put an effort in. But um there are your word organization Almost exclusively of knowledge workers, like certainly more than 95%. And if you look at how I spend my time, um any executive of the company, more or less any manager, it's pretty close to 100% of the time is on communication and that could be reading or writing messages, creating presentations, sitting through other people's presentations, phone calls, one on one meetings, all hands, all of that stuff. Um and if you look across the organization, it's it's definitely more than 50% of people's time on average and maybe more like 60 or 70%. So if you imagine you have a 10,000 person organization, um and just kind of like an average total cost of employment, it's several billion dollars a year that you're paying a payroll costs and most of that is going towards people communicating. So the pandemic really forced us to going back to the transcending time and space, what opportunities do we have to give people more flexibility? What conversations can become asynchronous? And that led to a whole set of tools, but even just going back to the like slack launched in February of 2014 and by halfway through that year we had received this piece of feedback over and over again from different people, but like almost verbatim phrasing, which was something like, hey, I just wanted to thank you for slack. I think it's really great. I'm someone who doesn't often speak up in meetings. I'd like to take a little bit more time to form my, my thoughts. Um and I found that I can really contribute in a way that I couldn't contribute before, so that was like an early hint that I'm not sure. Um it was nice and flattering and made us feel good, but it wasn't, it didn't take it as enough useful signal at the time, but in the pandemic we realized we need to make a lot more tools to either facilitate kind of ad hoc um uh immediate communication and that there's a feature called huddles and we'll come back to that in a second and the other one was to give people more of what they value out of the real time communication like video calls and stuff like that, which is the ability to speak a little bit more naturally have some body language inflection um you know that kind of a richer field of communication and that became something called eclipse and there's kind of a long stream on both of these. But um I think these are real components of the digital HQ of the future. And clips is just literally recorded a little video clip that you're talking, you can record your screen and put yourself in the little corner of the screen so you can walk through a presentation. But the advantages If we're doing a daily stand up meeting at nine that goes till 9 15, everyone goes around the room and says what they're doing this makes it makes us, I could record mine at 8 53 and then watch yours at 10 17 or something like that whenever it's actually convenient for me which frees people up for a lot. But also it means that the clip is portable. We take the um the audio, do speech to text, make a transcript transcript searchable. You can watch it at 1.5 X or two point or you can go back and rewind and you can cause in the middle and go to the bathroom or or whatever you want, what you can't do any meeting but there is this real desire for flexibility which was kind of immediately obvious to me and I think everyone else on the team but really showed up powerfully. So now when I see a clip just like open the transcript kind of skim through it a little bit, click on the line that she was interesting and and start the video from there, which is something that would have been hard to do before. And then just super briefly the idea is to recreate the spontaneity and serendipity of office based conversations. So it's not a call that necessarily starts or stops. That could be like open in this channel. People are joining and then leaving and you leave it open for the course of several hours and maybe the conversation even peters out um which you would never do on a zoom call, but then three minutes later someone asked a question, everyone can hear it just like they would if you're at your desk. My guess is that most people in the room here use this feature, how many of you are on slack to begin with? Not a lot of upside for me. Yeah, you really shouldn't have come. So speaking of asynchronous, um our editor in chief Allison, I don't know if you're in the room right now Allison. Um but that's okay but she she recently discovered that you can schedule slack messages to be sent out at a future time and tweeted about it. What a game changer. This is gonna make me a much better less dreadful manager which she's she's a very good manager but um but it's it's it's interesting like these kind of these tweaks these features um that not only allow us to collaborate better but also to you know where I spend so much time in slack today so much more than I did pre pandemic. You know there's good, there's bad to it right. Um what else are you doing or thinking about that will enable um people to have just a bit more of a of a balance and uh you know that's just become so much trickier when you're working remote. Right? Yeah so that it's a great example because um this is like a way too long of a story but the original reason we added the do not disturb feature wasn't so that you the recipient wouldn't receive notifications. Um Although that's obviously how it works, It was more so the sender wouldn't feel this tension between like for me for example it's 11:30 PM. I just thought of this thing I was supposed to say to someone or someone. Either I have to like write it down somewhere and then remember to do it tomorrow morning or I can send it right now but if I send it right now then that person is getting a message from the ceo at 11 30 PM and they're gonna feel obliged so that there's this whole host of features that try to encourage people to um people kind of pick their point on the continuum between synchronous and asynchronous because the Messaging aspect of slack and the notifications make people feel like it should be an immediate response if someone sends you something. But what we want is actually what that feedback we got back in 2014, which was um I want to take a little bit of time to think about this. Um and I want to formulate, you know, a fuller more carefully thought out response and and that's really what we want is to be able to um to give people that option or opportunity so you can find the natural cadence in a given a bit of work that really uh suits that bit of work. Okay, I'm gonna go to you guys in just a sec, see if anybody has a question for Stuart, but real quick on on Salesforce um you are now a part of Salesforce um going back to when you were last on stage, you were dealing with some um Microsoft things at the time. Um we asked you about Microsoft, you said it's hard to maintain a real focus on quality, on user experience and the bigger you get, the harder it is, Salesforce is pretty big, What what makes you confident that you will be able to retain the kind of product focus and and uh you know, customer focus that you've, you've always had with slack and previous companies. Um well I think it it is just like the amount of will if you're willing to exert to make that happen, and I think that's maybe made a little bit easier by the scope of the opportunity right now. So there's definitely the reason that the acquisition happened is because we have a real Microsoft. I thought that was funny. Only Stewart had a nervous laugh, but I don't know what to do it again. Maybe Microsoft? No, that's very thoughtful. Um because we did have a lot of shared vision and we didn't have that vocabulary that we didn't talk about digital HQ. But the reason they said that the category that exists with or without slack is because all of the Salesforce tools are a component of that as well. Like if you think about the, remember glengarry glen ross and they have the leads and they're like little index cards and they kind of hold them back. Obviously no one does that, no one puts all their customer information on sticky notes, they use sales cloud or some equivalent and that that is uh important component of the digital infrastructure that supports productivity and collaboration. So there's like this real opportunity to look much more expensively, whether that's sales or service or marketing or commerce or whatever. Uh But also I think there's just such an obvious opportunity now, whereas we had strong convictions about what we should do with slack from the very earliest days, but they were much more born out of intuition and kind of like almost like not religious actually but kind of more like a religious belief now that I feel like there's all of this empirical evidence, we're pretty far ahead of anyone else in terms of the um the product capabilities and what we're doing to support them so that the opportunity for us now seems to like press that advantage and keep going and I think that's really a common vision with all of sales. Where and how has it changed recruiting for you? Is it do you approach it differently now or? Yeah, I mean just like for the very simple fact that we had 15 offices in 10 different countries before the pandemic and in the U. S. That was new york and san Francisco and in Canada that was Vancouver Toronto and it was London Dublin Tokyo, Osaka Munich um pretty much to a t all very expensive places to live and very constrained and while you can maybe make an argument that the best of the best in the technology industry would end up in san Francisco or new york, there's millions and millions of people who didn't live there who have turned out to be great employees will be able to hire in those places. We've been able to give employees who lived in those places the flexibility to move away. Whether that's like moving from san Francisco to sacramento to get a 4000 square foot house instead of 800 square foot apartment. Um or moving across the country or even to a different country to be closer to family. Okay. Um real quick like 11 or two word answer here you have another startup in you another another gaming company that pivots to something. I don't think so. Yeah. Hey you move, you move to a great place if you're tired and if you're energetic too, there's a lot of a lot of activities you can do here. Apparently, Stuart thank you so much for for joining us. Please bring a photo next time. Okay. Okay I promise. All right, thank you.

Chris Smalls, President, Amazon Labor Union 
Interviewer: Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

Brainstorm Tech 2022: How It Started; How It’s Going 

Alright. Hi everybody, this one's gonna be different. Alright so chris let's just start with for people who haven't been following the details of the story. What happened. You've been working at Amazon for a few years getting promoted within the company and just tell us what unfolded. Yeah absolutely. Um I was working there 2015 when I started came an entry level worked hard, got promoted up to a process assistant which is assistant manager. Um I was in that position for the next 4, 4.5 years. I opened up to other facilities. My first building was E. W. R. nine New Jersey. My second one was B. D. L. To Connecticut Windsor Connecticut. And my last building was okay so then you get to JFK Staten Island and what unfolds from there? Well I came in 2018 the building just opened. It was great at first you know um like a launch of a new building is opportunity for me myself to uh show the company who I am as a supervisor, hopefully move up. And uh of course I love working with people. So it was great at 1st 1st 2 years I was on the night shift only thing uh was the issue was to commute for me um from New Jersey to Staten Island. It's very difficult. Yeah. How was that a couple of hours? Hour or two hours both ways. Okay and so where did the where did the trouble that that the president talked about start? Well things really took a turn before the pandemic for me um personally you know I noticed over the years, you know, of course I lost a lot of good workers around me, a lot of hard working people. Uh just because there was a system that was designed to turn the burn and um I trained a lot of upper management, A lot of people came in entry level and what amazon does with their process assistance, they have them shadow the new hires, especially the ones that are gonna be management. And you know, for years I'm doing this position and it only takes two years to become a salary manager. I'm wondering when it's gonna be my opportunity. I applied to become a salary manager 50 times and only was interviewed twice in five years. So it didn't make any sense to me of why somebody that opened up three buildings train thousands of their employees, hundreds of their upper management didn't get the same opportunity uh of other, you know, counterparts. And this was before the pandemic, you know, So mentally I'm physically I was already checked out. You know, I said, I put enough time into this company. Uh It's really time for me to resign. Um but it wasn't until COVID-19 came to play and I noticed that, you know, amazon dropped the ball when it came to protecting its employees. You know, we didn't have any P. P. We didn't have any cleaning supplies. We don't have the essential needs that we were delivering as essential workers in the beginning of the pandemic and I tried to raise the flag well before the virus transition from Seattle to new york city. Um As we were sitting in the cafeterias everyday watching CNN like everybody else um the TVs in the cafeteria is saying, you know, we all need to be six ft apart, we need to be mashed up, We really need to be quarantine. And we're watching this while we're sitting shoulder to shoulder in a cafeteria for the 400 people. So I immediately stood up and ran HR tried to go through the proper channels to raise the alarm saying hey what are we doing about this? You know, I'm a single parent got kids, a lot of the workers, there, a majority of women um a lot of senior citizens work there as well. Um We do have grandparents at home things of that, you know, so we wanted to make sure that we would say um just to make sure tracking. So in the absence of any organization to represent you, you did what many companies would want their team, their people to do is to just show up and raise the issue to HR you know, try to make the case and then what happens yeah after doing that for A day or two um the company was nonchalant about, you know what we were advocating for our first um So I had to take further action, you know um I pretty much told them that I'm not gonna work as a supervisor instead, I'm going to tell the work is the truth. Um what happened was I came to work on a Tuesday. one of my colleagues uh tested positive and she text me this and she came back to work because she needed to make her money and she didn't know what to do. Actually, can I stop you from that for a second because we're gonna get to talking about the union. But one thing that people in business often say is, well, we have a free market where it's competitive if you didn't want to work at amazon or she didn't want to work at amazon, she didn't like their safety policies or something like that. She could go work somewhere else. That's clearly, I think not how you felt about it, but when people say, hey, it's a free market, you go take another job. What's your response to that? But that doesn't solve anything. You know, it's just like jumping out of, you know, I don't want fire into the next. You know, they always say that you don't like your job, just quit. But this overall picture today, you know, keep quitting our jobs. The next person that comes in is going to go through the same thing and these corporations want that. I think you were saying that some of your colleagues learned they got fired by looking at some internal app or something like that. And so, but eventually you got fired. Right? And so what happened? Right? So once again, you know, my colleague tested positive, you know, that was it for me. Um, I came back to work, we had a meeting daily meeting with our upper management and then that daily ST meeting, they're telling me as a supervisor not to tell the rest of the employees in the warehouse that somebody was positive. They wanted to make sure that, you know, business as usual, exact words. And I said, oh wow, that was it. Um, I couldn't stand with that. So I told every employee from that moment that I came in contact with, um the truth that we're exposed by the end of the week. Um they didn't answer to our advocacy about it. We sat in the cafeteria Off the clock every single day for 10 hours a day going into the general manager's office to tell him, hey, we were scared, were afraid to come to work. What are you guys gonna do? We want the building to be Closed down for the minimum of the 14 day incubation period. The beginning, that's what we wanted. We come back to work. Um We wasn't getting that. So that's when we started to organize the walk out. Um we spent the weekend doing that. And on that Monday March 30 we let her walk out around lunchtime noon and um two hours after that walk out. Um I was terminated over the meaning all the folks who worked in that facility together. Many of them, maybe not all all walked out together at lunch. Uh Quite a few. Yeah. No, I mean I just point out earlier today, there was a session about talent here and we were talking about a company where all the engineers said we're gonna take a day, a month for mental health day. I was thinking well, you know, like take lunch for physical health and has a very different context. We think of it as a strike or work stoppage or something like that. And so that was the point. Then you get fired and then, you know, uh one of the elements, you know that I think followed that closely was that the general counsel of Amazon sent out an email saying that, you know, they hoped that you would be the face of trying to organize because they said a lot of, you know, unkindly not smart, not articulate. So then you start this unionization campaign and by the way, we're gonna answer questions asked, you know, get you guys questions in a minute, but just tell us what happened and what you want now, like, let's just get up to present day. Yeah. Um um Yeah, at that moment when uh that memo came out and motivated me to continue to advocate for workers rights, especially because Jeff Bezos who was the richest man in the world at that time, I was in that meeting and signed off on that. Um So we spent the year traveling to his mansions and penthouses protesting in front with amazon workers ah basically saying we're not gonna give up, you know. Um We got to a point where there was a union drive in Alabama. Um We supported it from new york, but we were curious about how they were doing it. We went down there, I learned some things, we saw some opportunities. Then we came back to Staten Island April of 2021 to begin our own independent worker led Union. Why did you want a union? Well, I've seen that there is a way of workers getting the protection that they need. You know, there's nothing on paper um that protects workers, You know, amazon's are at will company meaning that they can make up any reason to fire people. That's the system that's designed that we see Uh term terminates people at a rate of 150% a year. Um we're talking about 200 300 people losing their job every week in Staten Island. Um I just, I couldn't stand with that and having a union provides job security provide higher wages, provide better medical leave options, provides longer uh breaks if you need, it uh provides things that these workers need in these warehouses, just so they can have a better quality of life overall. And so those are the wants, that's what amazon labor union wants now, because you have this vote where, unlike in Alabama, you know, and for folks who don't know, those votes are certified by the federal government. You know, the majority wins. Amazon has since objected, which we could talk about a minute. But the idea is then you have a worker controlled organization that isn't part of some big national union, it's your own independent organization, and then the company is forced to negotiate a contract with you. That's the idea, right? Well, they're not really forced, you know, they they have to out of good faith they should come to the table to negotiate a contract. You know, the government can intervene and, you know, put an order for them to do that. But using how we're supposed to go, we won our election fair and square. Um the workers voted now, we represent the workers. The company should recognize that we won and come to the table so that we can negotiate the contract with those demands that we're asking for. Now. We don't get everything that we asked for. You know, this is why we call it negotiating. And we just, you know, once again, we deserve more as essential workers and having the union will give us representation. Uh, well, so, you know, and maybe it will turn to a question in a second. But let me just ask, you know, you're wearing, you're talking about Jeff Bezos, you're wearing the ether rich jacket and at the same time you're gonna have to have that company on the other side of the negotiating table. And I'm curious if you imagine what it might look like a few years from now. If somebody in this room is an amazon shareholder or something like that or an executive at amazon, what's your guess of how, what how should it play out in terms of what the relationship is between the company and the amazon labor union? Well, yeah, you know, number one, I represent myself, you know, I don't represent the workers, you know, the workers democratically decide how this union is formed. That's why it's an independent worker led union. I'm an intern president and the workers have a choice until the workers elect somebody that, okay, sorry, keep going. Right. So the workers feel that, you know, I'm doing a good job as the president, they will vote for it. You know, if not, um, they have the opportunity to elect one of their members are, choose who they like. You know, the thing about, um, you know, the way we organized, the way I talk, the way I dress the way you know who I am as a person. Um, it's important that we stay true to who we are. You know, I represent the community that we organized in new york city, you know, so for them, work is seeing that it inspires them. We're talking about labor and different platforms. We're reaching different plateaus. I've been at the White House Daily show, White House testifying congress. So it's just about breaking barriers, you know, a lot of stuff, a lot of stereotypes, you know, out there. And at the end of the day, I'm just, well, let me be direct then about the stereotype would not, it's not a personal thing or about the but the stereotype about unions is, and if you want to raise your hand and ask the questions, feel free with somebody come around with the paddle. The stereotypes about unions is, you know, an amazon said it, this is the greatest threat to the company. You know, Howard Schultz says it's an assault on the company. And the view is it will ruin the company. And so for people who like to shop at amazon or think it's a good business because it's been built in a certain way. What's your message to those people? Well, number one, we want the people to support the workers. You know, once again, these are your neighbors. You know, these are these are the people that come from your community, amazon sets up shop in your community. It reaps the benefits off of your community. Um, and it doesn't benefit in your community. I mean, your workers, your neighbors, they're going to work, they're getting injured at a high rate. They're being unprotected. They're working throughout the pandemic right now, they're being fired for by an app, you know, before you even get to work. Um, what's that app called by the way? Just so people, so the internal employee. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's been stories that people don't even hear about no deaths at these warehouses, you know, shootings, tornadoes, uh, violence, things like that is what we're trying to uh, pretty much bridge the gap. You know, as a union representative, we want to make sure that the company operates the way it is, make their money, but we want to make sure that the workers are also taken care of. So what I hear you saying is that the whole system has to work including for the workers. And unfortunately I think we're ticking down right here on time. Oh, it we haven't, can you do your question lightning fast before I get the Thank you for your, your perspective. My parents were both part of unions, one was a firefighter, one was a teacher and I think the biggest criticism around them has been kind of take backs that unions get. How do you look at that? Maybe explain what it takes back is? Well, I mean, I understand that there's some bad union represent, you know, uh, there's been bad unions in the past, there's been bad, uh, union contracts, things of that nature, but this is why we did, we chose to go the route we did. Absolutely. Because yes, you know, workers, what's the ultimate power of putting workers in the driver's seat? You know, we know the ins and out of the company, I knew the ins and out of amazon I was invested into the company. You've cited some of the management principles, disagree and commit that kind of thing. Absolutely. You know, I category same principles over to my organizing and activism. Yeah, somebody said to me, you know, are you pro union? I said I'm pro union in the same way I'm pro restaurant, I think they should exist, some are good, some are bad and so we're all gonna have to figure this out together, you know, for folks who are interested in exploring this further. You know, chris has been here the entire time, happy to talk about it and chris I just want to say we're learning because you're doing something completely new and for that example, I feel grateful and I hope we all should be grateful for the learning. So thank you very much

James Grimsley, Executive Director, Advanced Technology Initiatives
Blain Newton, COO, BETA Technologies
Bonny Simi, Head, Air Operations and People, Joby Aviation 
Moderator: Jessica Mathews, Senior Writer, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: A New Flight Plan 

James Grimsley, Executive Director, Advanced Technology Initiatives
Blain Newton, COO, BETA Technologies
Bonny Simi, Joby Aviation 


Brainstorm Tech 2022: A New Flight Plan 


James Grimsley, Executive Director, Advanced Technology Initiatives
Blain Newton, COO, BETA Technologies
Bonny Simi, Head, Air Operations and People, Joby Aviation 



James bonny. Thanks so much for joining us today. I want to ask you, we've been talking about air taxis, beetles, whatever you wanna call them for quite some time now, when are we actually gonna be able to pull up our phones open an app and summon an electric powered air vehicle to come pick us up and take us to brainstorm tech Bonnie. Why don't you take a sure, sure so yes, if you think back, even back to the jetsons, this has been a fantasy of flying cars. If you will. We're on the homestretch, we're on the homestretch and there's quite a few operators out there that are looking at and building these out. We're targeting service in 2024 and uh, there's other operators as well. I see that this is very very real. We are flying our aircraft now with thousands of flights, so 2024 what exactly will it look like on that in that year? So for us we're, our initial service were operating, were very much leaning into our R. D. O. D. Partners. So we'll actually be operating even next year on military bases here in the U. S. Operating from one side of a base to another will build upon that experience in parallel as we're getting certification from the FAA. Now It is a challenge in working through, we have a lot that we have in control of and then we also have a lot that we don't like going through the certification process right now. We're still targeting our service in 2024 and that will ultimately mean operating our goal is to have that app. So the vision is, you've, you're in downtown L. A. You're in downtown new york and you need to get to the airport so you can pull up the app and you can, you could pull up an app on maybe partners say Uber and you can take a car and it might take you an hour and a half, there's traffic or you could have a multimodal service where a car picks you up, brings you right to the verge report or heliport brings you to write directly to the airport And bring you into the terminal taking maybe 15 minutes at roughly the same cost. That's how our, that's how we operate. So there are other startups, talking about the year 2024 as well. Like the helicopter as an example, James, I would like to hear your perspective, I know that you work very closely with the F. A. A. So based on your conversations with the regulator, the regulator of this industry, What do you think is realistic here? I think, well, first you mentioned the jetsons and, and ironically the jetsons actually did have a theoretical date of the series, it was supposed to be 2061. So actually, I think, you know, unfortunately aviation as public can attest aviation is one of the very regulated industries. We have a few industries that are very regulated and as such, uh, you know, the society has a high expectation for safety and our regulations reflected societal acceptance. I I anticipate. Um I would basically pose it as as when would we have the potential for ubiquity? And I would say the potential for ubiquity would be within this decade. Uh and ubiquity is where it's gonna be possible in lots of different places on on a wide scale uh certification is gonna be the tough part. And uh what has happened is, is I'm an aerospace engineer and historically in aviation, it took a long time to develop a vehicle. So it took a decade or so to develop something and our regulations kind of matched that, you know, it took a long time to do type certification, uh production certification, things like that. Now. We have kind of this new era of aviation, especially with electric propulsion, where we're able to design systems much faster, but our regulatory system has not really kept pace. It's really the, what's dragging us down uh the enormous economic investment and activity that's happened because of the vital and advance their mobility, is putting a pressure on the FAA that has never really existed. We've had a lot of, of uh political pressure for drones and things like that in the past, but we've never had the economic pressure that we have now. So the FAA is trying to react. That's the big wild card for this industry is when will the f a a be able to adapt to how quickly this industry because FAA. Thus far our regulatory system has not kept pace with technology at all. Um And ironically, you know, I work a lot with a lot of the company's doing drone delivery, I predict the same with drone delivery, I think ubiquity in terms of having thrown delivery in lots of locations is more on the scale of 2030. So it's it's it's kind of the questions if if we we made people have some isolated cases but I would say within this decade we have the potential for ubiquity and wild scale operation. Is there anything besides regulation in particular that's keeping these aircraft out of the skies right now? Well, there's a lot of the aircraft, I mean were there and then it's not just jobe we have several. Again, I mean there's an ecosystem. If it were just jobe it would probably be a harder path but because of the ecosystem and the investment that's in it and we have, you know, dozens of operators who are actually flying the aircraft now. Uh And so the certification is one part which we don't have as much control over, although we're well into that certification, we are leading in that space uh and working daily with the FAA on those on the processes. And then it's also just scaling up the operation. So it is a capital intensive business and uh so building out the manufacturing processes. It's great to build one aircraft, but you have to grow dozens and then hundreds and thousands of them to meet the ubiquitous scale there. So for us, we're thinking about that in the long and the long haul as well. I want to circle back to the point about funding a little later, but Bonnie, I do want to ask you. So in february one of your prototypes crashed. Can you tell us exactly what happened? And has that delayed any of your plans for commercial launch at all? So first of all, it has not delayed anything. So I'll talk a little bit about. So in earlier this year, our second prototype aircraft came off the production line. So when you have two assets now that allows you to do a lot more, our first asset had over 1000 flights on it and we operate and although the aircraft are intended to be piloted while we're doing the flight test phase, we, we've built out aircraft so it can be remotely flown. So now that we have two assets were able to take our first one and do what we call envelope expansion. And what that means is the normal, if you think about the normal operating range of aircraft in this, this area here, envelope expansion means operating it far beyond the limits so that you can see where those limits are. And when you're doing flight test, it's possible that you're gonna exceed whatever the limits ends up to be. And that's indeed what happened for that. But we were able to very quickly work through the investigation and we've had our second aircraft flying, we have our third aircraft coming off the production line soon. So we're back back on track and it actually, if anything is, is helping because it helps us see where are those limits and then take that learning and and play it back into our next aircraft James. I want to turn to you to talk about the funding question here. So really, over the past decade, venture capitalist have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into vitale companies. Some of them have gone public, there's been a lot of funding in this space, but we've entered a new kind of market where there's, we're not sure if there's such an appetite for unprofitable companies. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on whether you think these companies will continue to get funding and will continue to be able to put millions of dollars into this technology. I think the big question, um, if we look at another analogy, if we look at drones, uh, my opinion is we're really in the second wave and we had a first wave where there were a lot of failures and the regulatory system didn't keep pace. I think a lot of the business plans and were unrealistic. So we had a lot of failures, big, big failures. But now we have some pretty healthy companies that are part of the second wave that didn't even really exist a few years ago. And so we're seeing a second wave really take off and do well. And I think the big question is, will this first my opinion A. M. Is really in that first wave and it may be the first wave that makes it through. But I think the problem is gonna be, are we gonna be able to sustain that regulatory progress? Um and I do think it will take a lot of political pressure to do that. Um There's a lot of things, you know, we we are still grounded in in the way we we think about aviation in the old ways. A lot of the regulations are based on antiquated ideas of, you know, very mechanical propulsion systems and maintenance cycles and operating requirements and things like that. A lot of those things go away with electric propulsion. But the regulations stay and we could probably share all sorts of funny stories of how we've had to adapt just to accommodate unrealistically expectations. No joke. We, when we first started flying drones, there were regulations part 91. You have to carry your flight manual on board. Well, there's no pilot on board a drone. And so in order to satisfy the FAA, we would put it on a zip drive and tape it on the side of the drone. It was never going to be used. And the FAA would say yes, you have your flight, manual on board, you're good but that's the type of stuff that we're still dealing with. I think in a lot of ways just across aviation we have not really modernized, You know, so I think what what remains to be seen are we gonna be able to maintain because there's tremendous momentum, can we maintain that momentum to overcome that regulatory inertia and and see this first wave actually be successful? I can build on that a little bit. Yeah, so we we started 12 years ago and actually partnered with um the Gamma the General Aviation uh Manufacturing Association and build out and build out new regulations and and and we'll call it part 23 new regulations that will adapt with the technologies and we've been partnering along on building our aircraft on that. There's been some slight change however, the FAA has accepted and realized how far we are along in this process and the electrification is part of it. So you're right, electrification totally changes the game here in terms of operations, in terms of maintenance, in terms of reliability uh and it brings a lot more safety into the, into play as well. So um the regulations are are evolving And those that are kind of in the lead are are helping to move this along. We just, you know, we've been meeting with the administrator had a good um story in 60 minutes recently talking about how the idea, even though regulations are adapting that to not slow down the certification Bonnie. Can you talk more about the funding piece in particular? I know that used to be at JetBlue venture, so you're very familiar with the venture space. Um, this is a very capital intensive business. So I mean what kind of position is job Ian after going public back in 2000 and 2020 last year last year? Um yeah, I started actually and I've been coming here for many years on the venture side. So I worked at ventures and we felt that electric propulsion would fundamentally change aviation just like jet propulsion did back in the sixties. I mean, this was back in 2017, we canvassed the entire uh, electric propulsion and tv tall space and settle on jobe, we invested in joe be back then. And ultimately I've come to believe in how the model is working so much. I, I've come in house And it is capital intensive. Um, but what we've done with that job is because we started 12 years ago, we were able to, you know, build that sort of scrappy, how to work scrappy and keep, keep tight with our, our, our funds. We were able to go public last year. We've got 1.2 billion on the balance sheet as of close of the last quarter and we're very judiciously working through what we're doing in this year and next year and next year so that we can maintain that funding base and give a good balance sheet um until we hit commercial operation. So uh but it does take in this this downturn. There may be some that don't make it, there may be some that don't make it um those that who you think might not look again, I'm going to say that this is a broad ecosystem and we we want multiple players to make it because if it were just only one um they may not be as as accommodating right? They really want to work with multiple players. I'm not gonna say which which ones and who knows right? You just never know. But this isn't going to be an interesting call it three years. It's no secret that there is a severe lack of diversity in the aviation industry and I know that both of you are very passionate about this topic Bonnie, you're a pilot James, you work for the choctaw nation. You're very committed to bringing tribal members into this industry. So can both of you talk just a little bit about your experience and what can companies do to bring more people of color more more women into this industry. So this is an area I'm very very passionate about and when I first looked at at the E. V. Tall space. I said well autonomous aircraft that's going to take a long time for public adoption but a piloted aircraft, we have a pilot shortage And it's very much, I mean many of you, even the aviation system is being stressed as we speak. There's a lack of pilots. So what if you add more pilots? How can we do that? Well then I started thinking when when I became an airline pilot 30 years ago, 2% of airline pilots were female three decades later Where it's six why it's a structural issue. It is difficult to raise a family when you're gonna be gone three or four days a week and in other cities. Well in the vitale space can actually solve that because by design our aircraft don't fly all nighters. They don't fly trans cons or international. So you'll be home every night. So we are very much leaning into and our goal is to is to capture and the imagination of the young women and show the career path And that you can continue this career. So right now 15% of student pilots are female. The current path, they'll drop out by the time before they hit their commercial license. Our goal is to increase the student pilots and then have them come to the orbital space and then grow and learn and learn the craft here and they can move on to the airline pilots later if they wish. And the way we're engaging that is um you know from my own background. I grew up in a very impoverished area. I grew up in the heart of the Chocolate Nation and both of my family go back. I'm actually the first college graduate in my family, uh, paid my own way through school. You know, it wasn't the encourage that you went to college. And so I've lived that it's almost a learned helplessness, you know, why try Because you look around your cousin start doing things and I've seen what happens. And it really takes us working all the way down to the fifth or sixth grade level to build confidence. And especially with young females when I went through engineering school for my degrees, it was not uncommon to have a class of engineering students with a single female and all the risk mail. And I thought surely in 20 or 30 years there's gonna be more balanced and we really have not met that balance and it really goes back to the lower levels. People, young people form the opinion of what I can do, what I should do, What I'm supposed to do early on and what it takes is confidence from adults. They need to have that confidence that you're capable of doing it because there's a lot more people capable of things like engineering, but they're not put in an environment where they get to build that confidence and so we're trying all of the technology things. We're doing the choctaw nation. One of the most important parts is we're working very closely with the schools to try to build that stem pipeline because whether they come back and work with things within the choctaw nation or they go off, we still were m bettering their lives, but it's still a problem. There's still a lot of societal, um, encumbrances and influences that sort of influence young people while they choose. And we, we have to work very hard and, and those of us who are in tech, it's, it's very important for us to help do what we can, to try to influence what people let people know, especially young kids. These are great opportunities, you're capable of it, they need that confidence and that's something that's important to us and it's something as, as a whole tech industry, we have to take on before I keep going, do we have any questions from the audience at this point? Okay, I'll keep going then. So jobe has been doing this for 12 years, how important is it to be the first company going out the gates getting in the air. So, uh, we are leading in the space, we are ahead in both the certification process and the capital and you know, it's a big ecosystem, right? So there's, there's gonna be a lot of room, you know, whether it's in Tokyo and London new york Miami, there's a lot of space for a lot of players, I think being first does open up new opportunities for us, one of the things that Jobe is very passionate about and where we think public adoption is important is around noise and we've designed part of the reason we've spent as long as we have in designing our aircraft is how quiet it is. And recently Nasa, um, did a study to sort of prove our design, um, concepts where when the aircraft flies overhead, it's almost silent. Think of it as leaves in the wind. Uh, and at 45 decibels on the ground. It's 65 decibels, which is about what a conversation will be. So I, when I try to explain what it sounds like, like think of a home air conditioner outside and you're standing next to it. That's what it sounds like on takeoff and so that by getting that into the communities to see that this doesn't have that wagon, the noise or it doesn't have, you know, loud, top, top, top top, like a helicopter that will help with adoption for the entire industry. Well, James, Bonnie, thank you so much for coming and thanks for listening. Get

Merav Bahat, CEO, Dazz 
Assaf Rappaport, CEO, Wiz 
Stephen Ward, Managing Director, Insight Partners
Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Meet The New Cyber Defenders

Merav Bahat, CEO, Dazz 
Assaf Rappaport, CEO, Wiz 
Stephen Ward, Managing Director, Insight Partners
Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE
Merav Bahat, CEO, Dazz 
Assaf Rappaport, CEO, Wiz 
Stephen Ward, Managing Director, Insight Partners



this is, you know, if you think about what's happened since we last gathered in aspen three years ago, you had incredible acceleration of digitization, you had everything moved to the cloud, you had this incredible moment where everybody went home and they took their computers with, with them and insisted they be able to access all of their data from their kitchen at all times. And then on top of that, a geopolitical crisis. So cybersecurity, the risk has obviously expanded greatly. Uh, and I'm pretty sure if there's one industry that is now, surely recession proof it is this one. So I'm delighted to have this panel, Merav Bahat, uh, is the Ceo of Daz assaf Rappaport is the ceo of whiz, we'll ask them why the preference for double Z's. Well, actually, you only have one Z, z's generally a preference and, and Stephen Ward is an investor in both, Uh, with inside partners. So Steven, let me start with you. What I mean is this, it's like the 4th of July and you sell fireworks, right, this is uh, cyber is a great place to invest right now because of the risk. It is, and I mean, I've spent 20 years as an operator, You know defending networks of Fortune 100. So I've been on that side for a long time, only been an investor for the past year. So it's, it's nice to be in an industry where you can take those experiences and apply them to the investment side, um, talk to sisters all the time and the demand is not going anywhere. Companies need to be protected And unfortunately there's assailants out there who are constantly trying to break in. You mentioned the global economic, you know, the situation that we're in with Russia and Ukraine and unfortunately large corporations get caught in the middle of that. Sometimes their targets, sometimes they get caught in the middle of it. So when you see an increase of attacks and you see, especially when wars are a combination of physical wars and digital wars, um, you know, companies like Wiz and as you are needed in order to protect these enterprises. Well, let's talk about both of them. You worked with Merav in a previous life, correct? So actually, both I met both of them when I was an operator when I was a C so at home depot, that's when we originally met and that carried over into the investment side, interesting. So you had some history with them. So tell us, tell us about your company. Um, so does is about security remediation, um, where you know, moving fast to the cloud and security in general has kind of two steps. Um, first is detect issues, understand, you know, your environment, your risk, your posture. And the second step is to fix those things. But what happened with the fast move to the cloud as you just, uh, you know, shared with us is that, you know, people in organizations has the tons of security depth and it means that when we come into an organization, they have, they could have six millions alerts or five million alert that hasn't been addressed. So to help this organization fix them fast, which means collaboration between security and depth which creating this responsible for this alert. This is what we do. So the problem you're trying to solve is the fact that there are so many alerts going on. Companies can't react fast enough. And how about wiz, so so kind of before of that if you think about the cloud, the security debt that's rushing through the cloud and we definitely saw it like accelerated during Covid, I think basically how do you realize what, what is the risk in front of you think about it that for example, they know they're great practitioners in insecurity but in order to solve cloud problems and we're talking about when we're saying cloud is not one cloud going to be multiple, it's gonna be Azure AWS G C P and multiple others and it's different technology stacks. Super complex problem. So the problem is basically how do you bring the best of the security to the death and the devops and that's kind of how do you mitigate the risk of that? So that's kind of the kind of, we're complimenting each other, we have mutual customers that were fun working together. So you find yourselves working with a lot of the same customers Stephen one of the, one of the things that that raises, I mean you listen to Morocco and I've talked about this. It's a much more complex environment for for security csos companies, those companies than it was before. Um uh but it also is a complex response I mean so I have to hire whiz I have to hire dot how many different solutions Do I have to have to protect myself against cyber attack? I mean how do you deal with the, just the sheer complexity of the problem? Yeah, the last place I was at Fortune 14 Um I had 71 security solutions but we had three data centers. We were in multi cloud like a soft said so I think what people sometimes forget is it's not just additional complexity. The scale is much bigger. You're replicating these data centers in the old days, you would have one data center that was brick and mortar, maybe you had to as a backup. Well now sometimes you have two centers And then you also have 2-3 different cloud environments. The scale is so much bigger now. Um and then on top of it, these cloud environments, once you get in, they're very similar So to hack into a one Fortune 100 or a Fortune 200. Those environments can be very different like those traditional on prem environment you get into cloud environments, they're all sort of built the same in a lot of ways, which means Attackers can spread so much more quickly, which means you have to identify those things faster and then you have to identify response by the way? None of you have used the word prevent. I mean it's prevention gone or is that just not the issue anymore? No, not not at all. Actually actually this is kind of the movie because things are happening so fast in the cloud and the ability of the Attackers to, to, you know, to get to rule the kind of environment is happening sometimes in seconds, you know, kind of prevention and the and is super important and that's kind of where shift left is coming like hey, how can we protect? How can hey, I know now the image of the cloud that I have and I know what changes are gonna happen by the develops or the developers themselves, how can I mitigate it before it happens And this is a crucial part of the process of protection. Yeah, there's another just to add another thing here. So prevention is always important. Everything we do is to prevent eventually. But when you look at incidents like look for share, I don't know, you know, it's like uh probably not, not, not, not all of you aware of that, but that was a big incident. Everybody who has clouds and you know, they have environments were kind of panicked about it. It was a couple of days before christmas and uh, it was nobody's fault. You couldn't prevent it in with any tooling, right? It's, it's an open source kind of some, some kind of library everybody uses. Right? So the thing here is how do you detect it fast and how do you immediately Fast? That's a different mindset in Southeast critical piece. Well, let's talk about the geo politics of this a little bit. I mean, I would have thought in february when when Russia marched in Ukraine that the countries that were supporting Ukraine would be in danger of greatly increased cyber attacks orchestrated by Russia. But we don't seem to have seen that at least if we have, I'm not aware of it. I mean, are you surprised? Why haven't we seen it? Is it still coming? How would you think there's an, there's an uptick right now? Most of it was between Russia and Ukraine. Like there were some major cyberattacks between them. Um, as NATO becomes more and more popular out there, you're seeing some of the other attacks occur on other european countries. But I think one really cool thing to think about is the level of sophistication didn't go up. It actually went down and what we realize is back in the day when Russia would use other sources in other countries to attack. A lot of those resources came from Ukraine, a lot of the really talented hackers were in Ukraine, but when they split and had this war, those Ukrainians basically said, we're not gonna do this, we're going to put all our resources into Russia. So what Russia has really done over the past 3 to 6 months hasn't been that sophisticated, we've been a little surprised the volume is still there. But the sophistication hasn't gone up. So there is an argument that Ukraine had actually had more talent from a cybersecurity standpoint than Russia did. I think just to add to that, maybe the the other side not seeing it doesn't mean it doesn't exist and that's that's important. You know, and we need to remember this cyber weapon and you know, you know, to a decision of Russia or any nation to attack another nation. We didn't see that. We saw it in the in the past, we saw it between actually Ukraine and Russia even not this year even in the past years before, but it's something that we don't know how nations going to react to that. So it's truly a weapon. The capabilities are there. We know that we saw the Russian, the Russian, the Russian the chinese, the Iranian capabilities in the world in action. And they're pretty, you know, sophisticated in a way, I've heard some national security experts say one scenario is that Putin gets frustrated in Ukraine and he wants to escalate his options are nuclear chemical cyber cyber is likely to be the go to option. Yeah. I mean, we've seen him uses this kind of Russia uses this kind of, you know, cyber attacks as the weapon right already. But I think that, you know, I think that is going to create some chaos chaos, I think it's we're gonna see, I think it's too early to say as a staff set against not seeing, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist by the way, you two both have national security backgrounds, right? That's the reason there's so many Israeli companies in cybersecurity. Yeah, I think the 828,200, basically the Israeli N. S. A I would say 80% of the entrepreneurs are coming from there, so we tend to have a bias Towards security, that's what we've done in 80 200. So I guess you'll see more more bias in the Israeli ecosystem for startups, for security and yeah, I think, I just add, I mean there's also the, you know, multinationals that coming to Israel and actually have acquired companies, I think that gives um you know, the founders from the 1st 1st start, you know, the, you know, the the 1st 1st timers actually to build um products to scale in scale and the ability to actually grow faster and bigger. And I think that why we see the next generation of companies out of Israel that are actually growing and not just selling after, you know, a couple of months and a great number by the way to hold on to is In 2021 VCS invested 8.8 billion into Israel that was tripled from the previous year, so a lot of money and how much of that was cyber related, do you think? I don't know how much of it was cyber um I do, I mean us personally as insight, we're the largest investor in Israel um specifically to cyber and then overall software, so we're pretty bullish on 80 280 100. And the talent that they produce in the ecosystem, they have their Is incredible being a government guy and and doing 12 years in the government here in the us. I'm, I'm envious and I'm also irritated over it because I want us to have that every time I go there, I'm meeting with folks saying, well, how do you do it? And how do we replicate it? Very, very difficult to replicate steven. What's the endgame here, the business end game now moving away from national security. But you know, if I were that, uh If I were in your shoes and had to buy 71 different security solutions, I'd say this is crazy. I mean, does that lead, is there going to be a roll up to these companies? The Daz and whiz get bought up by bigger companies where clearly there has to be some consolidation here. Where do you think that goes from here? I think it's all, look, there's just in the past three or four months and this happens every time there's sort of an economic tightening on these large enterprises, the csos will turn around and go, okay, we're gonna slow down a little bit. Our budgets are going to keep going up, but we're gonna slow down and look for efficiency for synergies between technologies. So they may turn and go, hey, I really want whiz and dad to work seamlessly in the environment, Some will turn and say, I'm gonna buy one new one to rip out three and there will be a rip and replace, um, hands down. Cyber needs to roll up. Like, uh, you know, being new to the VC world. I came in and said, I want to combine these three companies and make one and it was extremely naive of me to think that that's easy. Works that easy. Yeah, egos are usually didn't say just do it. You know, we already know they're gonna be too big for each other pretty soon. Um, yes, there needs to be a roll up. Um, and I think the tightening and where we are right now and the slowdown in investing. I think that will organically occur, um, over the next year. Well, it's going to be a fascinating area to watch. Thank you both for making the long trip here. Thank you, Stephen for putting in some perspective. Great to have you on the brainstorm tech stage

Tom Hale, CEO, ŌURA
Eurie Kim, Chairperson of the Board, ŌURA; General Partner, Forerunner Ventures
Moderator: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Sleep Lab On Your Finger

Good afternoon. I'm here with the ceo of aura, tom, hale and yuri kim chair of the company's board. So let's get right to it. Can you walk the audience through what an aura ring is and what it's for and give them a bit of fomo. Yeah, we all have our rings, don't we? Actually, just by show of hands, how many people in the audience have an aura ring right now? Yeah. Looking around last night at dinner, I saw probably like it felt like three and 10, something like that. So good. Well, what, what is your ring for those who don't know, it's this little ring, it's made of titanium. It's got about four g of weight, maybe seven day battery life. You just put it on and it's practically invisible and it tracks all these signals that come off your body. Think of it as like, um I don't know, an eighth sense or something like that. It's telling you what's what your body's doing and giving you that feedback every second you can look at it on your phone and see what's happening. That's that's really what it is. It's a health tracker. It started in sleep, right? Started in sleep. Why sleep? Why is sleep important? Wow. Well, you know, sleep is something you want to see when, you know, you're, you're anxious. You know, if you get sleep, your mood is gonna be higher, you're gonna have better immunity. You're gonna not eat as much sleep is like this universal positive thing for you right, like sleep really helps you. And so if you think about um the value of sleep, it also has a long term value, right? Because if you sleep well, uh turns out you have a lower risk for Parkinson's disease, you have a lower risk for type two diabetes, you have a lower risk for Alzheimer's disease. And actually the american Health Association, just put sleep as the eighth factor in cardiovascular health. So sleep is really, really important to you now, that's why sleep. Um I think you guys can kind of imagine what what we're doing here is we're expanding into health. And I just want to tell a little story, personal story about, about the ring, which is about me because in the fall of this last year I was um I was pretty stressed out and I wasn't sleeping. And in fact, I had the aura ring and it was telling me kind of that it was gonna be okay. It was giving me some quick support. It was telling me I was sleeping three hours and 45 minutes, not long enough. Um, but I was really starting to say, what can I do to improve my sleep. And so I started testing different interventions to see if I could prove my sleep. I made the room colder. I stopped watching netflix right before I went to bed. I stopped fiddling with my phone, you know, and getting anxious about what's going on. I made some really strong behavioral changes and each day my sleep score kept getting better and better and better. I felt better now. That's all the positive things that I learned. That's all really good. But I also learned some negative things and I think maybe some people in this room might relate to it. Um I drink coffee in the morning, I worked really hard, hard, hard all day. And then um at night I might have like maybe a glass of wine, maybe maybe a second glass of wine. And what I learned was that second glass of wine killed me. You can see the screen on the right here, basically it ruined my sleep. I thought I was relaxing actually, it was ruining my sleep. So I stopped drinking coffee, I stop drinking wine. And let me tell you something, it was a huge improvement. You can see it in my scores here. These are the details I'm getting in the app. It's telling that my resting heart rate below 50 which is great for me. My HR V or heart rate variability was kind of a measure of your stress is 81. My um my overall readiness score was climbing from the low sixties into the eighties and that kind of reinforcement, That kind of data is really key. So that's the gist of it. And I know you've got one, I know you've got one, there's there's stories behind this whole thing. I call it the or a story or the or effect. So I don't know, you know, what's your story? So my journey started back in 2019. Um It was maybe 18 months after I'd had my first kid and obviously I was sleep deprived and I was trying to get healthier and I thought I need to do something to help my sleep, talk to a friend who is a sleep therapist, he's like, you should try ordering my husband at the same time, a physician talk to his physical therapist, he should, you know, you should try and ordering what is this thing. So I tried it actually, if you go back to the other side, this is interesting because when you look at tom's number on that average H R V H R V is heart rate variability, basically, if your heart rate doesn't drop low enough at night, it doesn't have enough time to have variability. Mine last night was nine, might as well have been dead, but evidently this altitude is pretty bad on me and I didn't drink that much. So it wasn't the alcohol, it was definitely the variability on the altitude, But more interestingly, so I saw how much I was using this ring and getting so involved in the data, this was the Gen two ring. So, before this ring that we all have now. And um so of course I'm a venture capitalist, I reach out and I say, what is this company like? Where is it from? I've never heard of it before. Look on crunch base of course. And uh it's a Finnish company has been around for seven or eight years, Never heard of it. And they didn't have a U. S. Website at the time. And uh and so I thought okay it's a Finnish company out of my focus area, I'll move on. And the next day a founder reached back out to me and said, hey do you wanna do you wanna meet or a ring? And I thought that's the world. Conspiring to say I need to talk to his company so fast forward. I started doing diligence on the company. Um I talked to a UCSF professor who was doing uh fertility research of all things and I was just trying to understand like why would a professor, a researcher be using the ordering because it was all about the quality and the accuracy of the data. That was the entire pitch that it was about sleep. So why are we talking fertility right now? And so she talks about it and she said, look, you know of all the things that we can use to track body temperature uh and and ultimately hormonal cycles for women. Um The ordering was the most accurate, not only because it was easy to use, but it also had the best sort of um sensor sensor quality and I'm listening, I'm learning I'm now you know whatever. Thinking about having a second kid anyway in our family and I'm and I just say, oh, well, that's really interesting. I wonder if I could track my body temperature too. So it's really awkward to be in front of like an entire group of people, half of, more than half of our men. But this chart here is my body temperature chart and you can see that there's like a natural curve on the sort of left half of that chart where it dips is essentially where a woman is supposed to ovulate. And the right half of that chart is when I got pregnant And literally I knew that information within what is that three days And it took a pregnancy test 5-6 weeks before it turned positive and you can't go to the doctor until you have a positive pregnancy test. So that was all before we even had the women's module. This was just the data that was in there and I was, you know, a user, a customer just trying to like figure out how to improve my health and and really knowledge is so empowering. Um And so as tom said, everybody who comes in gets Sonora's, you know, you you come for a reason, you're maybe running a marathon or doing a triathlon, like Phil, or you're trying to figure out your sleep and stress and for me it was my overall health and, you know, it's just really exciting to see the level of data that's captured on this little ring. Yeah, so um I did very much appreciate the accuracy of the sleep data, the heartbeats. Uh Sometimes I thought there was a bit of overkill like seven p.m. Every day. I get a notification saying you've got to start thinking about going to bed soon. I live in new york at seven p.m. I mean I do go to bed at 9 30 but still uh a few times I said to my phone yes mom. Um But by the way so um you know it's it's uh I never uh sorry I'm never a an early adopter. Um And because of the sports I do I already have a few wearables. And so for me you know what what I think you guys will, I know you're working on something we're gonna talk about a second. It's sort of like making the case for yet another uh device. But also and this is my obsessive neurotic side. Like I'm almost afraid of having new KPI to track every day because that can feel like that. So there so I think you know um uh there there are refinements and there are new things coming in. So actually why don't we talk a little bit about that like what is next for you guys? You have a sport, Same thing, you've got a fashion thing thing. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah so I mean we're just actually releasing spo2 So that's overnight spo2 so you can track your your breathing regularity, the amount of oxygen you get in your brain as you sleep. And that's really important, particularly people who might have sleep apnea. Um, we're also, we just completed a collaboration with Gucci, which is pretty exciting. We Gucci ring is a really, you know, kind of high fashion ring. It's black and gold. I'm wearing it here. That's not the thing I thought I would be doing. You know, it's in a tech ceo job, but it's been pretty fascinating working with Gucci. But in terms of sports this week, this thursday actually we're releasing stratas integration and that allows the data from Strabo workout to make its way into or idle track, you know, against your activity score. It'll it'll be tracked as correlation against your sleeve all the things. It just is really great. So we're super excited about that. That's gonna be a great positive. We look beyond that. We're thinking about health. I mean, you look at the fall, what's gonna happen in the fall, We're all going to get, you know, some version of the flu or something like that. Being able to detect your illness and give you notifications about that is really important to us. Obviously, women's health and reproductive health really critical, especially right now. I mean, even when Covid hit, we ended up doing a big study called the temperature study with UCSF And it was amazing how many people in the community offered their own data to be able to support covid tracking and the net of all of that was that anyone who was using an aura could tell if they had covid up to three days in advance of any test. And that is incredibly powerful to be able to say, hey, my numbers aren't looking great. Maybe I'll self quarantine, maybe I'll do something to make sure that I don't continue to spread this to my family. So these are all the things that we're trying to get at and really it always goes back to, you got to be good at one thing first and for the last eight plus years it's always been about sleep and you know, it's kind of cool now for other companies to get into it because they realize how important it is. But back then I remember this one stat in the pitch deck, you know, this is like the series b pitch deck, but 95% of people sleep every night, Only five or 6% work out on a regular basis. So when you think about how applicable this is to all of our lives and all of our health, there's one thing you can do and all I said was you had to sleep better. I feel like that's a, that's a good way to start. Um and that's certainly why I was like all in on it and you know, I haven't taken it off, I kind of joke, like I've got my wedding rings in this ring and most of the time I have this ring on and I don't have these rings on. I literally never forget my darling. I will panic and go back home. Thank you for this and I think later, we will all meet for at the reception for drinks and wreck our sleep tonight. So thank you for the introduction.

Anthony Levandowski, CEO, Pronto; CEO, Pollen Mobile 
Interviewer: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: What’s Next For AVs? (And For Levandowski)

What’s Next For AVs? (And For Levandowski)


Brainstorm Tech 2022: What’s Next For AVs? (And For Levandowski)


Rene Haas, CEO, Arm
Interviewer: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Inside A Chip Designer’s High-Stakes Reboot

 Rene Haas, CEO, Arm
Interviewer: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Inside A Chip Designer’s High-Stakes Reboot


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Inside A Chip Designer’s High-Stakes Reboot


Hello, Renee, thanks so much for being here. So you have had a pretty eventful five months or so you became ceo of arm in february um, elevated into that role. That was the same month that the planned acquisition of arm by NVIDIA was called off. You are running this company based in Cambridge in the UK and you're in SAn Jose. Um, so you just flew here from London as you were just telling me. Uh, so have you had a chance to breathe yet in this five months as much area as you can take in at this altitude? So what, you know, my hall mentioned the I. P. O. There's been a lot of talk about that. Obviously I should mention that you're owned by Softbank. Softbank acquired the company in 2016 for $32 billion I think. Um, there's been a lot of speculation and reports about what's happening with the I. P. O. You've talked about it a little bit, um, possibly a listing on the NASDAQ and a second listing in London. What can you tell us about it? What's the latest? I'm gonna be a little boring here and stick to the comments that were made back in february when we announced that the video transaction was done. Uh, Our chairman announced that the intention was to take our public, we hope to do that sometime before the end of our fiscal year, which for us is March 31 2023. And right now that is uh, about all, unfortunately I could say on the topic, but that is the plan we're on right now moving forward. That plan presumably that would bring in um an infusion of Capital which you welcome I'm sure. And we'll get to what your your plans might be with that. But I wanna just you know maybe help have you elucidate a little bit. Arm has a unique place in the tech ecosystem. You're not maybe that well known to consumers but there are more chips based on your technology shipped every year than any single other chip company, 29 billion chips last year. Um So how did arm end up in this in this corner of the tech world? And uh you know what are the advantages or disadvantages to being in that that corner we're we're a pretty important company that that many people probably have not heard of. Uh So first off we're we're in the heart of the semiconductor world but we don't build chips. The way you think about what we do is we do designs blueprints, if you will, of microprocessors we license those designs to people who make chips and then they go ahead and make the chips and put them in pretty much any kind of device you can imagine. And I can probably assure that but every person in this room probably has either an arm device with them today. We're just about every single smartphone but also probably in your home or through the data center. We started about 30 years ago we grew in Cambridge. Our first technology went into a product for those of you who might remember called the Apple Newton, which was a P. D A a way, way, way before its time. But uh, the lineage of the company was really around low power. It was around devices that operate off a battery. And uh and we really grew from that and uh and our our real initial footing was in in the smartphone market. We started with mobile phones then onto smartphones. If you have a question, raise your hand and we'll get a mic to you and uh my personal have a paddle and I'll call on you. Um, so the semiconductor shortage has been a huge headwind for all industries for months and a huge story and uh you were saying, you know, the biggest question you get asked uh, is what you're seeing with the economy, what you're seeing with the chip shortage. So what are you seeing? I'll just ask you again, you know, I I as we talked about before, I I feel that that the chip shortage is with us for for for a while and the reason there's a few reasons for this in my own opinion. First off the pandemic, really saw an acceleration of digitization of everything, whether it was again smartphones but obviously automobiles data center IOT we just saw a very rapid acceleration of that at the same time. Uh there had been not enough investment into key fabs that that drive this technology. And increasingly we're seeing more and more of the the advanced nodes, seven nanometer five nanometer three nanometer. This is the process geometry that is used to build chips. The need for more and more compute power was obviously on top of us and we didn't have enough capacity there. So I think we had all of that that was layered on top of it, that has created this, this shortage. But I also believe that the pandemic has really tipped a lot of things on its side relative to just fundamental supply chain. It really doesn't take much more than one region in one province to be shut down and the supply chains that go out to the harbor not being able to bring product to put everything in a total disruption. I mean we've had shortages such as baby formula, we've had toilet paper, we've had female hygiene products, you name it, products that, you know, looking backwards, we never would have thought we would have any issue regarding supply. So then you layer onto that, the complex, uh, what it takes to put together a semiconductor chip. Um, there's just a lot of complexities and interdependencies across different parts of the value chain. So I personally think we're in it for a while. Um you know, the the economy now we're talking about a recession, but I can tell you that from the world that we see demand for our products has never been higher. And again, I think there may be short term slowdowns, but the long term secular growth, I think is going to be very strong. So I think we have a question right here, if you could just quickly identify yourself with forge, Um I was just curious on your take on kind of a $52 million billion dollar subsidy related to intel in Ohio. And what's your, what's your view there given kind of especially competition with china and such. Yeah, So I think um you know, for those who are familiar with what that is all about, there is intel is looking to build a factory in Ohio and there's an act in Congress right now called the chips act, which is really about getting government funding for helping subsidize that. I think it's quite needed personally. I also think that right now the concentration of fabs have moved away from the U. S. And europe and they've moved more towards the to to Asia, Taiwan china and Japan and Korea. I think going forward this needs to be much more distributed. Uh not only in the US and europe, But 30 years from now, I would love to see fabs in India fabs in Africa across the entire entire planet. The technology is so fundamental. There's a lot of comparisons between semiconductors and oil that you really want to have no single point of failure relative to geography, is that have those factories. So I'm for it interesting. And we have another question right down here. Hey jake um with a software company called Bushel in Fargo North Dakota. And my question is Uh maybe two things, but one is kind of simple. What's your view and how his arm thinking about um uh the quantum computing world. How does that kind of play into your, your thought in the future and then second to that. How are you thinking about how you can help on the sustainability game? We've got a lot of investments happening on how do we get to Net zero and all these different areas. How do you think about some of that in your future? Yes. In the quantum world it's a really interesting question. Just relative to when, when is quantum computing going to be going to be real and real in the sense of produce herbal and and able to be economically viable for a lot of solutions. I can envision a world where an armed computing world sits next to a quantum computing world and they kind of coexist where there's traditional computing that runs and think of quantum as the accelerator, all accelerators. If you will at the speed it can run uh, on the efficiency question. That's a that's another very, very important question. And I think for us as I mentioned, the company was sort of born uh from operating off a battery. Uh, it's the heart of everything that that we do and we see increasingly whether the application is a, is a cloud data center, uh, a new data center has to be built, uh, the energy footprint is fixed, the square footage is fixed, but the amount of compute power is not fixed. So being incredibly efficient and sustainable, it is a must have uh, electric vehicles as we move towards the electrification of all vehicles and these vehicles have more and more chips inside them. In fact, I saw a a blur from Volkswagen that said the Porsche Tech in has 80,000 chips Inside it, which is a incredible number. 8000, not 80,000 8,000 8,000 8000 um, that there's a lot of energy and if you're going to have an electric vehicle that needs to obviously run and move the vehicle, uh, you can't really have a lot of extra power for all this computerized um, logic. So a lot of work that has to be done there, it's very, very central to what to what we do. So that was two interesting questions there and one about Quantum and you know, in terms of future technology. Another big theme we've been discussing the last couple of days is the metaverse. And I've seen you mention that as a potential growth area for the company, how do you think about the metaverse? And you know, obviously you'd be designing chips for the systems, they're gonna power, you know, the many iterations of that, But like when you're kind of looking out and thinking about what kind of chip design you need. How are you thinking about the metaverse to to guide you? Yeah, so the metaverse means many things to a lot of people. The way we tend to think about it is a uh an extension if you will of some virtual world either for gaining or for work or or other applications, I think it's going to have its own ecosystem, its own compute capabilities, its own software that needs to run on it uh ecosystems and high content software. That's our that's really stuff that arm is really good at. So we are very very heavily invested in that uh whether the footprint is a set of glasses or or these large VR glasses, I can almost imagine a world someday 10, 15 years where the image is actually a hologram and it's being projected out of something that maybe sits behind your ear and you may not actually have something you know, in front of you, you can just click that on and get a a virtual avatar that come up. It's it's been very obvious that, you know, during the pandemic, that there are certain aspects where that works well. I mean the virtual environment, the way we've been working for the last couple of years uh there are areas where that might be a really good replacement but I also think there'll never be any real replacement for for in face meetings. But I think the metaverse for us really means a brand new ecosystem and we're, you know, we're really excited to see what that will bring. So you have restructured, reorganized the company into these industry oriented verticals, I think you had already done that before you became automotive and industrial consumer devices like, you know, smartphones and tablets, data centers, Why did you do that? What what is that enabling you to do? And you know, is that scalable? Is that, did you do it with the intent that you can scale better that way? Yeah, so what we had prior to that change was what I would call a horizontal structure and we might be designing a product that would be a one size fits all. And what we were starting to see was an increased specialization that these markets were requiring, you know, for example, for the data center, the microprocessor that runs in the data center has different requirements than that. One runs in the smartphone, it needs to be more powerful, it needs to be able to run at higher speeds, need some different levels of efficiency. Uh, for automotive, we saw things such as functional safety that need to be incorporated in the processor that didn't fit well relative to our horizontal model. So we made that pivot. Um and we were able to make that pivot while softbank was owning us, which meant that we could make some extra investment with that, which was good and we could do that while we were part of Softbank, so we didn't have to report our earnings publicly at the time and now we're starting to see the fruits of that, of that investment. We, we finished our last fiscal year that we announced at the end of March with record revenues, record profits, the most chips we've ever shipped and the most of the growth really came in these new markets was an automotive, the cloud and in Iot, how quickly do you see the E V revolution spreading or scaling? I mean you mentioned you know that these cars are going to be super intense, chip intensive um, numbers are growing, but do you see like a tipping point where it really takes off hard to put a number on it, but if I was to measure it just by the level of intention that we're getting from senior executives in the auto industry, uh, everyone is now on it. Uh, everyone has looked and seen what the, what Tesla has been able to do, but more importantly, the benefits that those vehicles bring particularly back to the sustainability story. So I do think it's going to accelerate very quickly now we have the level of design engagement, we have with all of the people doing the automotive work has never been higher. Uh, and I do think we are, we are close to that tipping point um, all I can say is we see from an investment standpoint it's very high now, so in addition to the chip shortage, there has been a very, very tight market for talent, there's a, you know, giant demand for talent, how are you addressing that? How much is that affecting your ability to be as aggressive as you want to be or grow as fast as you want to grow and and what are you doing to find talent perhaps in new places? Yeah, well, well, well first off we have lots of open or extra engineers there on our website, so I'll start if anyone here is interested, come see me afterwards, we're looking for all kinds of engineers. Uh more seriously, we hire from really two primary channels. Uh we do a lot of university hiring, we take a lot of people in, from universities in Cambridge in France, we have big design centers in in the nordics in the US, so we look for a lot of new graduate engineers and we hire a lot of those folks and then of course other folks who, who come from other industries, we are able to attract a lot of, a lot of talent interim, it's it's still challenging but but people like to work on microprocessors and and the things that we work on with microprocessors are really the brain of the technology, the brain of these, these devices and when layer, when you layer onto that machine learning and ai people like to work on the problems that are solved. Uh but a lot of companies are doing it well and the fight for talent is pretty fierce. Yeah. So wait, let's stand up real quick. I'm 64. You can see he's tall, we can sit back time again. You still play much much your credit. I don't play basketball anymore, but you still do uh is that like, do you have to report into the board on any injuries you get when you're on the court? Is that like considered like a real dangerous? Yeah. I used to play a lot a lot of basketball my younger years, I still play some now people from the outside and watching right, watch me play now and say, well that's not exactly basketball what you're doing out there. But no, thankfully Masa does not ask me to fill out a writer or anything of that nature, but I know that you you brought basketball into your management mindset. Can you tell us a little bit about where you look for inspiration and how you use that? I think basketball is the it's the ultimate team game uh you know, for starters, which is why I enjoy playing it. But I also think it's a great metaphor for for working together because uh in basketball um the best five, the best talent doesn't always win. What does win is incredible. Teamwork, trust in your teammates and a transparency in terms of how you operate. Um that translates fairly well to to the corporate world. And uh I really like it as a, as a as a metaphor for for how to operate. So yes, I do. You know, I do like sort of the fundamental principles and if you watch a basketball team play, they'll have set plays, but then teams will know the teammates will know where is your teammate going to be at this time. How are they going to move where they like to get the ball and it moves almost like jazz music and that's how kind of great leadership teams work together. They know the strengths and weaknesses of their team. They're aligned very well and they can get the great results. So you, you talked a little bit about E. V. S. You talked about data centers. Um where else do you, you know what else when you're looking out into the future is exciting to you about, you know, where, where the tech world is going and you know, there are opportunities for you but that you're going to help drive. I think that the metaverse again is is a is kind of a a green field and again, I go back to this kind of this this holographic type of display technology. I think there's gonna be a number of things that tie into that that will really really change how we work and operate. You know right now, for example, your your cell phone is your heartbeat and if anyone was to lose their cell phone, you know in this room and or left it and at another area and had to get it back they would feel like they've they've lost their their heart attack, panic attack. Uh There will be a time and place where that just won't happen. Uh You'll have all kinds of digital twins. You may be able to use much more biometrics relative to identity management and the smartphone. Maybe just more of a display that you move with. But your heartbeat and how it's connected to you would be much more on your person. And I think there's a huge opportunity for for where that goes. We've we've become so reliant on these devices and again as I said if we were to lose one or it goes bad, it's a it's a catastrophe. Um there's a huge opportunity to do a lot of different things around that. Which would be exciting. How far out is that? I think you tell us when the I. P. O. Is. So you can tell us that there's a lot of work going on. You know, you know in this space when you think about everything going on with with cloud computing and near field devices and uh things that operate in together. There's a lot of people working on. There's a lot of things that need to come together to make all that work. But I'm pretty confident we'll see a future that day. Great one day. Well, thanks so much. I hope the next five months and five months after that are just as exciting, but that you get a little rest in and thanks for sharing, uh, you know, the what you're doing at arm and a little vision of the future of tech and how you're gonna enable it. So thanks for being here. Okay. Thanks.

Mark Johnson, CTO, Stand Together 
Uzoma "Zo" Orchingwa, Founder, Ameelio
Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Leveraging Tech To Solve Mass Incarceration 

 Leveraging Tech To Solve Mass Incarceration 


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Leveraging Tech To Solve Mass Incarceration 


Sam Harrison, Managing Partner, Lightspeed Faction 
Li Jin, General Partner, Variant 
Sriram Krishnan, General Partner, a16z crypto 
Moderator: Anne Sraders, Senior Writer, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2022: Tales From The Crypt(o) - Volatility Is A Feature, Not A Bug

Sam Harrison, Managing Partner, Lightspeed Faction 
Li Jin, General Partner, Variant 
Sriram Krishnan, General Partner, a16z crypto 

Volatility Is A Feature, Not A Bug


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Tales From The Crypt(o) - Volatility Is A Feature, Not A Bug


So I want to start off and hear from each of you, you know, we're clearly in a crypto winter, um, but from your vantage points, you know, do you think we've seen the worst of it sam we'll start with you in the head down the line. Yeah, I think, I think there's probably a bit more pain to come. We're in an interesting spot where we've not really seen a global sustained downturn um, during a crypto cycle and there's a lot of self inflicted wounds in the crypto space too right now where, you know, there's some bad practice, bad risk management outright scams obviously where the spaces put itself in a pretty delicate spot. I don't think we've seen the last of The contagion from stuff like three hours. Um, so when you pair that with a soft global macro, I think we could probably have, You know, week rest of the year for sure, maybe a week, 2023 And then hopefully positioning for a really nice 20, which is also a Bitcoin having year. So I'm excited for that. Yeah, so we are definitely not professing to be macro economic experts were not short term traders. And so the volatility in crypto prices doesn't really faze or affect us in any way. We are focused primarily on early stage venture investments and web three. And from that perspective we're still extremely bullish on the future of Web three as a technology. What happens in every bear cycle is that the critics come out of the woodwork with the, I told you so, um, calling projects and phenomenon uh, flashes in the pan or um non sustainable novelties, this happened in 2017 and it's happening again now. But what they fail to mention is that a lot of those seeming silly toys or silly novelties actually paved the way for more innovation and um, there's some seed or spark in them that then get innovated upon and get built into a more sustainable version. So we saw that with crypto kitties, which then paved the way for N F T S I C O s, which paved the way for governance tokens. Um, Maker DAO, which paved the way for defi. And I think it's interesting to reflect on this last bull run and look at some of the projects that people are singling out now for being not necessarily sustainable. Um, for instance, play to earn games or um, collectibles like NBA top shot or phenomenon like constitution tao and think about what is the core innovation there. What is the thing that consumers are trying to accomplish with this technology? What is the unmet demand and think about what that could become as it paves the way for the next cycle. Well, there's some definitely overlap with what we said. You know, here's a 16 Z, you know, we're not trading every single day. We don't look at the price every single day. We are an early stage venture, we are here for the long term. And you know, and if one of the things about the firm is we've been doing this crypto, we're almost close to a decade. And because of that, we've seen multiple of these cycles, you know, bull cycles in crypto winters and kind of like what lee said, if you look at the last crypto winter, I think circa 2018 out of that, you saw FTS, you saw, you saw all these innovations and our belief is, you know, these price cycles kind of, you know, that lead into product innovation cycles and you get these amazing founders building companies which leads to then prices going up. But you know, having said all that, you know, we just raised a, you know, $4.5 billion fund. Um, pretty recently, you just, this morning we announced an investment in a company forecaster. And you know, one thing that I think I get really excited about is uh, every day I talk to founders and I used to work in large consumer platform companies And every day I talked to product managers, designers, engineers who are working on 50 on the side who have an idea or you know, they're building a team and they want to go take nextel and that is just, you know, going on unabated. So I'm really, really excited and plan on working on this little stomach career. I'm glad you mentioned the $4.5 billion because that was my next question. Um, you guys just raised the funds, which is the largest crypto dedicated fund ever. And SAM fortunate reported this morning that you guys are raising about $325 million for your new fund. So I'm curious, you know, to hear from both of you, what's the right number for this market appetite? We'll start with you Sam Yeah, yeah, I can't comment specifically on our fun size as, as you know, um obviously that advice from our lawyers, but I will say, you know, a fund around that size could be, you know, a size that's kind of commensurate with the opportunity that we see today. Um you know, again, just thinking about deploying and about pacing as well. I think pacing is really important. Our last one Blockchain dot com ventures, um it took a full three years to deploy that fund and I'm glad about that. I think it was the right strategy to kind of take some time, see, you know, crypto has a habit of getting ahead of its keys whenever there's some hot topic and, you know, we've mentioned a couple of them, it gets really overheated and then crashes back down to reality. And I think having a smaller capital base and taking a longer time to deploy that capital allows you to kind of navigate, you know, if you went head first into defi and we love defy we invested invested in Zurich, but You know, if you went headfirst into defi and deployed the whole fund in a 12 month period, um yeah, that's when I think it becomes challenging for you and investors. So I really think, you know, it's about how big is the opportunity set and how quickly do you deploy? And I think fund of that magnitude feels about right for the opportunity that we see today. Um you know, I think every firm is obviously very different than, you know, how they think about things. And I think for us, you know, it kind of reflects our belief in the space, uh you know, we are long term players, you know, we've been doing this for many, many years, we hope to do this for many, many years or decades to come. And in some ways it's kind of a reflection of the founders and the companies and, you know, the opportunities we see, uh you know, like, you know, uh we we see people coming to us every single day working on something cool interesting and we want to take advantage of that. And so this is really a reflection of our belief in the space, you know, in a very long term capacity and, you know, the people that we hope you're fortunate fortunate to work with and I guess given what we've seen in the market, you know, you guys all focus a lot on sort of consumer products and applications of crypto, but certainly in the past few weeks and months it seems like Crypto still is very much a speculative investment speculative asset. So you know lee I know, you know, you talk to founders and companies all day basically um what are maybe one or two like actual practical use cases for consumers within crypto that you're noticing emerge? I think it could be useful to share my journey into crypto and how he became a Web three investor after about six years of doing traditional consumer investing, I was really drawn to the potential to distribute ownership much more broadly to participants of network. The killer application of the past decade of internet companies has been networks whether their social networks or multi sided marketplaces and they have generated tremendous amounts of wealth for their investors and founders and executives, but notably the people missing from that equation are the actual participants and users who are doing the work on a daily basis to actually contribute value and make these networks interesting and have utility. Um and so I was drawn to crypto really as a way to balance that equation and as a technology that would enable the distribution of ownership to a much broader set of participants and we're seeing that already across a number of different categories ranging from N. F. T. Marketplace is to use their own financial marketplaces. Um but to single out some specific instances of, you know, this is real, there are actual use cases happening in Web three which I know is a debate that's raging right now I think it's interesting to call out that N. F. T. S. And social tokens have introduced a completely new business model to the creator economy that previously didn't exist. They've enabled creators to monetize based off of their digital content. Um rather than just relying on the altruism of their fans and today creators are earning something to the tune of $3.9 billion last year according to a 16 C. Report from N. F. T. S on ethereum. That's a staggering sum. When you consider how much creators are earning from really mature platforms like Youtube which are paying out I believe something like $10 billion a year after being in existence for a couple of decades. So that's one example. Um There are now thousands of doW's or internet communities that are enabling people all across the world to pull together capital at a really rapid unseen speeds before to acquire assets and to manage them collectively ranging from things like NBA teams to golf courses to an attempt to acquire the U. S. Constitution. So I think all of these examples speak to the fact that there is a real consumer need and there is real consumer benefit that is being delivered by Web three today. I think clearly you know we're still not near critical mass for these things for the most part and true I know you you know you've been interested in sort of the social media aspect of web three. Um and same as you if you want to chip in as well. But I mean in terms of, you know, when do we get to that point where enough people are using this one? They're logging into their social apps. It's a web three social app. What what is the timeline that you guys are thinking? That is a fantastic answer from lee and I was actually gonna use some of that and um and look some of my personal story, you know, just for context, I spent nearly the last 10 years working in these large social media companies, facebook snap and twitter and I think what pulled me into crypto and we have three was two things right. First, you know with the token and you know what is possibly we have three, you don't have a new set of primitives, which I think, you know, I'm old, You know when I think back, I felt the same way when the iPhone came out when the Internet first came out in the 90s. And I feel like this is a new technology canvas which is going to lead to a whole set of new applications. That is one. The second is I saw all of my smart peers, engineers, product managers all go into Web three but you know, we had some fantastic examples around creators but to pick something out on social media. Um we announced investing today in a company called forecaster. And what's really interesting about that is first of all, you know, if you download it, use it, it's fun. It's a fantastic community, kind of what you expect. But that it gets really interesting is you anybody here can go build on forecaster as a protocol without any middlemen, without any app store review process, without needing any permission. That's number one. That used to be a thing which is possible on the internet back in the day. You could build on your own email client or you could even build back on social media networks over 10 years ago. But it all ended. This is not possible. Again, the second thing is if you sign up for a podcast and you sign up for a user name that is yours and the relationship with your audience is yours forever. That is encoded on chain. And so let's say 10 years from now, there's a new leadership team or something, nobody can take it away from you. So I think these two, um, you know, along with what is possible with a token are just fundamentally new primitives. I'm just gonna add to the story. I remember in the late 90s when somebody told me about Wikipedia, it was crazy and then anybody can edit that just nuts or when Twitter first came out the idea that you want to tweet what you're eating for lunch. That's just nuts. But I think they were all powerful in terms of how they harnessed kind of the collective human energy and that's kind of what I see with weapons and social web marketplace and honestly like a lot of stuff that Lee was talking about as well. So when will my parents be using a web three social media app? Can you give me can you connect me to them? I can set them up today. I don't know if I can just um I agree with all of that. I think it's um from our perspective it's still so early you know the amount of time spent. The amount of developers, the developer infrastructure the later ones all of these things are still nascent. So what we're seeing more kind of organic product market fit and traction around the simpler use cases almost primitive like where you can you know simple financial use cases take, Yeah paid for payments from essences. I thought there's a good headline today bit so is doing four of U. S. And Mexico Remittance with crypto rails. I mean that's real that's like Remittance is a real thing touches real people. They're finding it more efficient to do that. So it's kind of simpler you know debt trading anatomically swapping between tokens arguably some some of that speculation some it's not but it's hundreds of billions of volume of month and then the N. F. T. Point as well. I mean there is again speculation there but there's also that connective tissue between you know and we touched on it between creators and fans And that that that that really yearn for that additional layer of engagement And that that's consistently doing a few billion dollars a month in G. M. V. As well. So these are kind of organic real use cases just simpler. And I think it's you know we think it's the Infrastructure improves. We'll see some of these higher order use cases. They're just starting to break out and lends you know another social projects as well. I think they're just about to get to 40,000 accounts and they've been getting it so that there is demand. But it's you know there's a few years left of development. Sure. And I want to turn to the audience if you guys have any questions feel free to raise your hand once you do please just stand up and say your name and your company, keep an eye out. In the meantime, I did want to ask um you know through your firm Blockchain dot com ventures you invested in uh Carolina which was if you guys don't know the algorithmic stable coin that kind of imploded earlier this year. And and sort of set off a chain reaction in the market. Um I guess you know how are you sort of thinking about that experience in terms of you know where you're thinking about investing moving forward. Um And maybe you know how you think about risk. Yeah I think Terror exemplified a lot of what we look for in a venture investment at the outset at the very beginning high I. Q. Team solving a real world problem. That's a big problem. You know one of the co founders, he's not often talked about now um was the founder of one of the biggest e commerce companies in Korea and originally it was a payments play had millions of Koreans that had been, you know it was a hook to get them off credit cards which is an expensive way to pay and use this stable coin as a as a payment mechanism. And it's better for the merchant fast element cheaper and better for the consumer that's paying because they got a rebate from some of that cost saving. Um And I had real usage, you know that was the origins of Terror. Um It also you know Exemplified eventually return profile. You know, it was a 3 400 x multiple for early investors and and then sadly where it went wrong and it is truly sad. I think it set the industry back, it's an awful story for lots of people that have gone involved later. Um you're truly regrettable that it morphed into uh you know basically using this to as a tool for growth. They heavily incentivized anchor. Everybody probably knows the story, you could get 20% yield that wasn't organic, that wasn't coming from um you know actual activity on the network and as a result grew too quick to relative to the scale of the whole terror ecosystem. Fickle money, you're about to tell me to stop. You have time for a super quick questions, quick answers. I think I saw a hand over here. If you just say your name and company please. Sure, steven Wolfe Pereira, chief business officer at. I'm curious a lot of talk about creators and lee your great evangelist for it. I'm curious. How do you think about brands? You know, and do you see brands actually launching their own coins and really participating as well? Yeah, I think um definitely it definitely extends beyond creators utilizing some of this technology and we've seen lots of instances of brands or companies um and enterprises getting involved as well, uh, leveraging N. F. T. S, um or tokens in different ways in order to engage their customers. I think there's a really interesting um future of how brands deliver really personalized experiences to consumers based on their on chain activity today, your status with one brand, your loyalty to one given company doesn't move from merchant to merchant. And when you go to a new e commerce website, they don't know anything about you based on your other behavior, other other stores with other brands. And I think there's a real opportunity to build um sort of this like shared data layer on chain that enables merchants or any other type of consumer application to know the consumer from the moment they walk in the door from the moment they land on your page to personalize those experiences, unfortunately, out of time. But thank you all so much for joining me. Come.

Manish Chandra, CEO, Poshmark
Max Rhodes, CEO, Faire 
Additional speakers to be announced
Moderator: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Retail Reimagined (Again)

well, good afternoon everyone and maximum welcome. So why don't we start with before we get into the details of your business models and all that? Let's talk about, uh, the retail environment at the moment, both of you of course, look at it from a different lens, but tell us how inflation, you know, pessimism around, pessimism around the economy is reflected in how businesses going on. Your maybe we can start with you, maybe just in a sentence, explain to people what fair is. Yeah, So there is a wholesale market place, we connect independent brands with independent retailers, kind of like an online trade show or wholesale version of amazon and the, the impact that inflation is having on our business. I mean, we can, we can see it in our data, we can see that Brands are raising prices. I think prices are up about 6% year over year. So it's not like it's not happening, but in terms of the impact that it's actually having our retailers, we haven't seen it yet, their sales are actually up year over year and they were up year over year over the prior year. Um, I think one of the things that's interesting about independent retail is that The retailers that have survived over the course of the last 50 years aren't doing so by competing on price. They're doing so by competing on curation on experience on community and, you know, they've figured out how to live in a world where they don't have the lowest prices and as a result, I think they're proving to be more resilient in a time when, you know, some retailers that I think their consumer is much much more price conscious is struggling. I think independent retail at least continues to surprise, you know, me in terms of how resilient it is through the through the pandemic, through this inflationary cycle, um it just continues to impress me how resilient these these businesses are and how creative they are in ways of of of continuing to survive and thrive. Does that apply to outside the U. S. As well? You guys are in some international markets as well? Right. Yeah, we, the data that we have on how our stores are doing outside of the U. S. And we have, you know, tens of thousands of retailers in europe at this point, it's not as robust um but nothing in the data that we have suggests that that there are the stories any different overseas Manisha body, what are you saying? You know, if you think of cash, Mark, you know, we really enable everyone to take their closet and put it online for sale. So in inflation at a fundamental level, everything if it becomes more expensive, then the asset you have, which is your clothing also becomes more expensive, so suddenly everything you own is actually more valuable. So in a way our consumers can tap into the closet really recirculate so without getting into specifics were not quite as, you know Phil uh just the broader thing I would say is that inflation combined with sustainability, are actually two high dimension forces which are propelling resale into the center of retail as we are seeing broadly brands retailers, everyone adopting resale as a core paradigm. And I think inflation is going to only accelerate it further, sorry for the digression, but I can't help notice your amazing shoes, what's the story behind them? Your shoes, everything, everything is from bosch marks, I I you know, I'm 100% Mark customer. Okay, well, they're fabulous. I have not seen another cool pair of shoes like that in this whole conference. So, um, so let's talk a little bit about supply chain, it might be a little bit different from you since your resale site, but you know, does that have any impact on posh mark? Right, Two things, I think every time that there is disruption in the economy, it does affect the business in the entire retail ecosystem, whether it's posh Mark or others. So, supply chain disruptions initially were an accelerator of our growth because what you see in supply chain disruptions is people have to tap into supply that's already available today. What's happening is that supply chain is actually creating price arbitrage opportunities. And so so many of our resellers are tapping into that to offer that inventory at a discounted price, into the marketplace. So that's sort of, I think in a, in a way, supply chain, the flip side of supply chain, is that what you see in terms of fashion and, and and it's changing a little bit as we are sort of coming into, I don't know whether it's post covid or whatever transitionary covid world, but people were forced to restyle stuff because it was not a whole lot of new fashion coming out as you look into the future, people still mixing and matching. And so this whole world of evolving fashion is accelerating in a very different way, tapping into pieces you have and tapping into pieces you're buying and when you start to think of supply chain disruptions, that also gives an opportunity for recycling and reuse, combined with new stuff to create new means for fashion. And then we look at a platform like Tiktok where each of these fashion trends can get viral and suddenly you can run out of small lot inventory. Then posh mark as a platform offers alternatives for either getting that same item or similar items that people can use for their styling. How about you max? What do you think? Yeah, we're hearing about it, some from our retailers, you know, particularly in the apparel segment. Um, but I think the story that you're hearing from big box stores and from larger retailers, I think the situation there is much more dire because they're buying so much more of their product from china where, you know, the supply chain issues are really starting and they're having to buy so far in advance in such large quantities. Independent retailers are just much more nimble and you know, I talked about the fact that they figured out how to survive in a world where they don't have the lowest price is part of the way that they do. That is by sourcing products that are made in the United States, that are more unique, um you know, that are less likely to be made in china and therefore, I think they they've been a little bit more resilient to the supply chain challenges. I think we've also seen, you know, our retailers turning to fair um as a way to help solve some of the supply chain issues that they're running into because we have, you know, 70,000 brands on our platform, some of them manufacture in china, some of them are having supply chain issues, but we allow retailers to get visibility into the availability of the products and to source from products and brands that don't manufacture in china that aren't having supply chain issues and enable them to be a lot more nimble and respond, you know, in real time to the challenges to make sure that they have the products in stock that their customers want. I'm glad you talked about big box retailers because I'm gonna skip a couple of questions go back to them, but what can big box retail retailers learn from each of your companies, Do you think they will start with you max since you brought them up? Yeah, I think that the big challenge that big box retailers have is their core value proposition is assortment and price. And the truth is that the internet just does that better. Uh And on top of that, the internet has, you know, the ability to deliver things directly to your house. It has the ability to recommend products to you based on your prior search history. And I think that puts big box retailers in in a pretty difficult position. Um I think the reason why independent retailers Have proven to be resilient over the course of the last 10 years over the course, really, the last 20 years, but especially the last 10 years, the number of independent bookstores in the United States is actually more than doubled over the course of the last decade, which always shocks a lot of people, but I think we're seeing it across almost every category. Independent retail is really thriving despite the rise of e commerce. And the reason for that is because independent retailers have figured out how to compete on experience curation. You know, they build a presence in their community and to be totally honest, I think it's a lot harder for big box retailers to to reinvent themselves and to do that. It's harder for them to change course, it's harder for them to offer some of the things that independent retailers offer, but to the degree to which, you know, they're trying, I think it's figuring out how to, you know, tap into the power of the internet. Um, it's figuring out how to offer better experiences. You're not gonna be able to rely on just having low prices, large assortments. You really have to figure out, you know, how to how to offer a compelling experience in store. And, you know, I think the big box retailers that are doing better are, you know, the folks like Best buy or Home Depot that have really figured out compelling reasons why, you know, people need to come into store, whether it's the expert advice for the experience. Um, and I think that that's something that they can learn from the independent retailers that buy unfair. What do you think? I think um when you think of any, any large big box retailer, they are aggregating audiences as well, so they have a massive audience of shoppers and I think when you start to match the audience of shoppers into the different kinds of supply that are available, the thing that can learn from posh mark is really the power of community and sort of nation. If you look at the online presence, almost every big box retailer is becoming a marketplace, Right? So there's hardly any big box retailer that's not a marketplace. The marketplace is the new retail architecture is, in a sense, we're running different forms of retail out there. Uh, if you can start to map it into physical retail and really empower the local community is very powerful, You know, I I used to often talk about the fact that you go into a big fashion store day when you go, it's a little overwhelming. There's so much selection Day three, you go, nothing has changed. It's the same thing, right? It is when you look at Posh mark, you go in, you open up the app, you go an hour later, it's a small facet personalized to you. You see something new, something new pop up. So how can use the power of community and community merchandizing to completely create a retail experience without having to disrupt anything except the facade of these stores. So I think some people are trying to do that. There's some, some innovation stuff happening. But I see that that partnership with the local, with the global and then aggregating audiences and supply can be quite powerful as people transform, especially when you start to connect it back to digital haven't followed. I will open it up for questions. So in in a moment, so start put your thinking caps on. And then if you have a question, we'll we'll take it. I'm glad you talked about community and that's actually one of posh Mark secret sauce is right like you because otherwise, you know, it's just a site with a lot of product, um how has that evolved? You know, this, this, you know, creating communities online and how do you keep fresh and how do you make sure that the approach still works? Yeah. So you know, community is something which was definitely a thesis we had when we started the company but the formation the scale and the passion of it organically happened over time but there's a few artifacts that we created. So one of the things that bash mark has a social sharing where you can curate products, you can curate products from your own store and closet. You can also curate product from other people that creates what I would call. We were using this term in the previous panel agency which gives people power and empowerment to engage. Probably the only few platforms where sellers and participants have enough power without having to spend direct money, no advertising, nothing is needed. So that creates a level of flow and connection. Then we mapped it into physical events. So we have tons of physical events and again in the early days we did it by necessity because there was no mobile marketing dollars, there was no way to market. And um so we had to go out and do physical events. But over time they became their physical events fed into virtual events. Virtual events fed into physical events. And that created a sense of hyper local communities where you could sort of have these local communities and then people could throw hyper local events where you have events happening in small towns etcetera and that form other communities. And then communities were initially very seller centric, then they became seller in style centric. And the power of it is manifested in many different ways. So for example, you know, you hear amazing human stories where people are getting supported, so you have people pulling money together, pulling inventory together when somebody has gone through a divorce and shipping them inventory so they can make a living. You have people funding cancer treatment with in a pool sort of process. You have people taking trips together, road ships together, uh, physical trips together. So the power of community then starts to become very much a fabric. That's part of the platform. And ultimately what it does is it creates enormous loyalty to the brand without actually being about the brand because you have loyalty to each other on the platform. Do you do in person events? You just started, we just started. So we had them. The funny story is that in 2020 when pandemic just first started, we were about to launch 400 simultaneous events across the country, physically in coffee houses, we have to put that on a hold and now we're just starting. I think people are feeling their way to attend larger physical events. You know, it's fun to see everyone here, we have our passports coming up, we'll see how many people attend. But, you know, I think it'll take another year or so to kind of get that machinery going now, your your company sort of, you know, is a compliment or replacement for trade shows. I mean, can you do it? Do you do anything in the physical world for two to match your, the people in your marketplace? Can you? Yeah, we, it's actually around trade shows. Uh, we we tend to do, um, you know, get together and meet up. So it's something that we've we've explored doing um, in, in cities, not around trade shows, there definitely is a strong sense of community among the brands and retailers that are on fair. I think one of the things that's interesting about our platform is it's not like your typical consumer marketplace and it sounds like posh mark may be different, but a lot of consumer marketplaces, it's just super transactional where I'm buying from the brand. I have no relationship with the brand. I don't even want to necessarily have a relationship with the brand. And on our marketplace, there's a much, much stronger sense of connection between the brands and retailers. They really view each other as partners um, in, you know, trying to help each other be successful. We have small businesses on both sides of, of our marketplace and they really, I think empathize with one another and recognize that they're both out there trying to do the best that they can. And I think that really lends itself to, to building a sense of community and we have started to explore different ways of trying to create that um, online as well as offline. So I want to ask you both about technology since this is a tech conference and not a retail one. Um, you know, what's the technology you use to know what's trending, know what you should be promoting or making the users of your respective sites aware of and how has that changed for us. Our philosophy has been to experiment with technology and then see what really starts to hit the click in terms of actual product market fit. So for example, in the very early days when Apple Watch was coming out, Apple Watch apps were there, we created an Apple Watch app and you know, sort of experimented with that. We were the first to go to market. So we do that in some cases, you know, we haven't been able to be as aggressive and we are catching up like streaming, etcetera. But the goal is to make the technology work for the customer as opposed to customers sort of have to work for the technology and, and that requires some experimentation and when it starts to get some sort of a fit, then we scale it up. We started with betting on a technology that was pretty novel when we started the company, which was, we built an end to end marketplace on iphone which was considered sort of crazy at that time, like who would bet their entire future an iphone in 2010, every VC wanted me to do a website. And I said, no, it's just going to be an iphone app which was considered extremely risky in 2010 max. And he thought, yeah, I mean part of our core thesis when starting the company was trade shows, do a really poor job of sorting brands and retailers and matching them. It's basically, you know, you end up buying the products that you walk by um, and you end up seeing the products that you're able to see in a day, you know, depending on how much ground you want to cover and the decisions that retailers are making, particularly independent retailers, they're kind of guessing what's going to sell. Um, and what's not going to sell. And it's really difficult for them to make good decisions. And part of the core thesis was fair was by pulling hundreds of thousands of retailers together, seeing what's being reordered, what's being returned. You know, understanding who's buying, what we would be able to bring. You know, a much more data driven approach to buying for retailers, something that larger retailers have had for a long time. They have teams of buyers poring over data. They have tons of historical data. They can look at what's selling in austin texas and compare that to what's selling in Portland. Um, we bring that power of data and scale to independent retailers and we now have machine learning algorithms, they're looking at hundreds of different signals, determining what we should recommend to every retailer and ultimately helping them be more successful as a result. Well, on that note, I'm going to thank for joining us and check out their site figure.

Mike Brock, GM, TBD, Block
Brooke Major-Reid, Chief Capital Officer, Affirm
Adam Nash, CEO, Daffy 
Ksenia Yudina, CEO, UNest
Moderator: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: The Future Of Fintech

welcome. So mike I know you have a bone to pick, let's start right there. Okay. Uh T. B. D. Is part of block formerly square, incredibly successful. Fintech company T. V. D. Is frequently described in the press by my media brethren and sisters as a Bitcoin centric subsidiary of Block or Bitcoin focused subsidiary block. Uh and you don't agree with that, So set the record straight. What is, what does T. V. D. What does it mean? Uh or why would people call it a Bitcoin centric subsidiary? What I what I would agree with is that Bitcoin is the technology that we most believe in as a future um basis for building a new financial system. But we also believe that stable coins are a very very important part of the future. What I actually quibble with is when people say that we're building everything that we're doing on Bitcoin and and and the reason why I quibble with that is I think what people are doing is they're taking a lot of the patterns that they've learned from this web. Three discussion of like trying to put all of these uh technologies and products and services onto Blockchain and that's not what we're doing. Like we don't think that that's the right approach for everything like we are focused very very heavily on building decentralized systems which serve um the goal of being able to let people own their identity and own their data and we don't believe that that all of that has to be done on the Blockchain, in fact, we think Blockchain is a pretty terrible tool for that. What we do believe in though is that like we think Bitcoin as as Jack often says, is that we think it's the true native currency of the internet. We also believe stable coins Yes, on Blockchain are a way in which to uh put forward financial empowerment for individuals all around the world. But the story of decentralization is a much broader conversation and we're making large investments in those technologies throughout the ecosystem and many of them have nothing to do with Blockchain. So what's an example of the kind of decentralized services that you want to build? You know, that would be the first big targets? Yeah, I I think I think this, I think the first of all, I think the most important application that needs to be solved is identity. I um the identity is at the heart of everything we do on the internet, at the heart of our life is at the heart of how we use money, how we identify ourselves, how we um identify businesses and institutions and create secure like transactional relationships between each other. And this is this is a problem that has really not been solved in a decentralized way and I think it is ultimately the key for moving towards a more decentralized future and once you have those base layer of technologies that allow us to own our identity and then ultimately own our data attached to that identity, then you can really start thinking about reimagining financial services, social media and all of these other areas that I think, you know, a lot of us would would like to see more democratized and more decentralized. Um I don't think you get there without decentralized identity. And so we've been really laser focused on that. Um we've been actively contributing uh around the D. I. D. Specification um which is an open standard which has been submitted to the W three C. Were also participating with decentralized Identity Foundation um and working towards a common standard that all individuals, companies institutions and even governments can use um in order for us to break free of this paradigm that we have today of like log in with google, log in with facebook, log in with amazon. Like I don't think that that I don't think that that's the right frame for a competitive, more democratic future. So you mentioned Web three and you know, you recently announced uh along the lines of what you're describing with the decentralized um Platform, you just you announced that you were creating something called Web five, which is intriguing because, you know, we're only getting our brains wrapped around Web three. And what happened to Web four? Why Web five? Why are we jumping right to Web five? And how did you pick that? Well, I mean we we wanted we wanted to do something that would get people's attention to start talking about. Um and and I think what we really wanted to do is draw attention to the fact that if what you're really trying to do is thinking about think about decentralized applications and services, then you really need to like think very deeply around things like like like like how how are you going, how is what is customer experience going to look like? What are your customer acquisition strategy? Like I don't believe Toca nomics is something you want to expose to a customer. I think, I think the average consumer wants to pick up their phone, use an app very simply not think about micropayments and all the stakeholders hold their capitalism stuff that like people think that at the average consumer is like somehow like crying out for I think they want something that's simple, that works. That's even simpler than their current experience today where we can one click on board to a financial service or one click on board to healthcare service and have our information be transmitted to our doctor about our health records that we control. These are all things with the Web Five technologies that we believe can be accomplished in a way more technologically sound way than trying to find ways to stuff it onto the Blockchain. And with Web five, I think we forced open a lot of those conversations around Are the technologies of the Web three community are using to try and reinvent these things actually fit to the purpose of the problems they're trying to solve. And we think the answer is no. And that was the basis for the narrative around Web five got it Brooke, I believe that today is prime Day. And the reason I know that is because I've seen about a billion tv ads for it. But the reason that I'm asking you about that is because last year a firm announced a partnership with amazon and so this is your first prime day and I'm wondering how's it going? Are you getting live updates? You know, our people like blowing up your firm account on prime day? Yeah, no, we're super excited about it. I think once it was announced the, the possibilities around what partnering with an amazon would look like. I think you leave that to the imagination and to have our first prime day, The entire company is extremely ecstatic and we are getting a lot of great traction. And also in terms of just demands using a form at the checkout. And so it's something that when you think about momentum and scale, um, it's, it's definitely something you lead into and with something as massive as, as prime Day, we're all kind of looking at the metrics and making sure that we are optimizing for consumers in all the ways possible with a partner like amazon. So a firm is basically described as a bin al pay later, You know, digitally could for people who are not familiar with it. Could you just give like a very quick description of like the service you offer right now and sort of where you're going with it? Yeah, I know, absolutely, I I'd be happy to. So do you think about buy now pay later? It's, you know, ranges from just providing um loans for folks to at the checkout to really purchase things that are actually either considered purchases or more um you know, everyday purchases. The thing with the firm is that what we are aiming to do is create honest financial products that improves lives. So when you think about transparency and all the things that folks want in their financial partnership with companies, it's really around kind of that trust. And so what a firm is building is more than just you know, products that people at the checkout use or merchants are, are satisfied with. It's a platform that engages the consumer in their financial activity day to day. So where we are today is that we offer um, you know, loans to check out in terms of you know bi weekly To all the way to 60-month loans. So zero all the way out um interest bearing 60 month loans. And we actually create an ecosystem where you're providing value for the customer in terms of meeting them where they are, but also for the merchants in terms of, you know, providing access to consumer base, fewer abandoned carts um hire a ov um check out so where we're headed with it is using that interaction and, and and really leveraging the transparency and the honesty around what we're providing to create an ecosystem around payments and all the things that we know consumers want to kind of aggregate their financial life. So when mike is talking about is laying out the framework of a decentralized way of handling transactions and breaking the paradigm we have now do you see an intersection with the kinds of services you're providing and that kind and that kind of uh framework? Yeah, I totally do. And I think the interesting thing about is that we're uniquely positioned given the fact that we underwrite each transaction. We are actually engaging in a way that is using technology um in terms of underwriting and all the things that you want in terms of proper risk management and and the, the identity piece and ensuring that you're actually not thinking about the customer, just another credit score. You're really taking that information and decision ng in a way that is informed but also beneficial for the customer in terms of who can repay the loan at the transaction level and engaging with them in an honest transformative but also a very simple transparent way Cassina. I mentioned in the introduction um the amount of money raised by Fintech last year, one of those companies was your company. Uh You raised $26 million B funding raised last year. Um so I just wanted to like unesco is an app that you've created a service to save money for your child's future. What was the back story for? You know that motivated you to create an app to create a new way of doing this? So the motivation was actually coming from three directions. First I graduated from U. C. L. A. Anderson with about 200,000 in student debt and a lot of my friends were affected by the same issue uh and I really saw an opportunity to change the future of the next generation by providing the right tools to the parents right now to save for the kids future. Um Second I'm a parent myself, so I understand that for any parent, the kid is number one priority and once you have a child, our priorities changed from ourselves. It's not about our retirement anymore, it's how can I provide for this little human that really needs my help. Um but most importantly I spent four years at Capital Group, which is the parent of american funds and is number one provider of 5, 29 U. T. M. A. S in the nation and I was working with individuals, learned about pain points, learned about what was broken in the industry uh and that existing solutions pretty inaccessible for average americans, people that need it, the most existing solutions are very expensive, They require a lot of paperwork. Uh they're very inconvenient. So my inspiration was to create something that will be intuitive, simple and accessible to people of all economic backgrounds. Great, if anybody has a question, raise your hand will get you a mic. We do have one over here, so we'll get a paddle over there. Meanwhile I want to ask you. So you were very familiar with the 529, the standard sort of education savings fund paradigm. How did you consciously create your app to differ from the existing, you know, uh structure? So one interesting observation about 529 is that 70% of people still don't even know about uh about this excellent tool to save it, invest for kids. Um and even those people that know they find the solution very complex and overwhelming and you know, time consuming a lot of people are just put off by the complexity of the existing process. So our solution uh actually criticized the United the transition to a different type of account that's much better for our user base. But our solution meant to help you create accounts in just five minutes versus like ours that will take you. Um you know, we were acting as financial advisors by helping you to identify the right in the petroleum for your kids that would become more conservative as you know, child becomes older and approaches college and also it was a very social experience. So you don't have to do it yourself as a parent, you can actually get help from your friends and family. So we created this gifting feature to accept gifts into the app. Like with, you know, easily sharing the link. Um and also Brands we partnered with over 150 different brands. Every time when you subscribe or shop through the app, you actually get financial rewards into your child's account. So you have some news coming up that I have to ask you about. I'm excited to ask you about in August you're gonna allow parents to buy and hold crypto in your app. Um not everyone would think that was maybe the best idea, especially after crypto or you know, Bitcoin fell below 20,000. Um why are you doing it? Uh and you know, what does the data show you about? Uh why it's a compelling and and good thing to do for, for saving for your kid's future. So we always listen to our users and trying to get the feedback before we launch any product on our app last year. We stand the survey to all user base to understand, what is it? Parents would like to see next on UNIX platform. And we asked about things like life insurance and debit cards, to manage allowances and credit cards to build the credit overwhelming feedback was that parents want to see crypto and individual stocks on the platform. Uh so that's what drove our decision. I would say that crypto is really going mainstream, more and more consumers hear about it. I want to give it a try and uh in terms of like volatility, yes, we understand that there is like some risk and volatility involved but we are here to give parents access over the long term to build a future for their kids and we believe that crypto can be a pretty transformative well building tool if you invest responsibly over the long term key part is the last part there probably but Alright, let's try to get one question. I think we have one over here just quickly stand up and identify yourself. Hi dan Dolev payments analyst at Mizuho, so I actually cover two names here and I have questions for both Mike and Brooks mike like how does the kind of going back to what you said about Bitcoin? How's the decline in Bitcoin changed the strategy strategy at TBD if any. Uh and then for you Brooke what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about a firm. Okay, let's keep it kind of tight, you know this this is gonna, I mean this is gonna sound a little bit too easy and dismissive but in but it is the truth, I don't think much about the price of Bitcoin. Um I I look at the Bitcoin infrastructure as infrastructure like as an open protocol. Um I have a belief that long term that um that Bitcoin will continue to accrue in value. Um Net net I do not generally, I'm not one of those people you see on twitter encouraging people to um buy Bitcoin or do any technical analysis. I definitely think people should invest responsibly um and should not invest more money than than they're able or willing to lose. Um but I believe that the core technology of Bitcoin which we are using to do things like secure digital identity um and also you know provide a layer for enabling uh you know completely decentralized payments is the future I believe in that technology um and the market machinations are are largely um uh like in many ways for me right now. A little bit beside the point. Yeah, no thanks for the question. Exactly, no thanks for the question. I think everybody understands the firm is the solution both for both consumers as well as merchants. I think one of the things that um we really need to drive home and make more well understood in the market is how we underwrite and the technology that goes into risk management, we are extremely front footed in terms of controlling the risk in our book and in the business and as someone who has the responsibility of managing the capital that is available to fund our business. It is impressive when I joined over a year ago to see the rigor around that and how holistic it is. So we do underwrite every single transaction, it's a very transparent process for the consumer. You sign up, you are um you know, decisions around a transaction, we know exactly what you're purchasing, but then we basically continue to monitor and look at the portfolio in a way that is very front footing in terms of managing risk using machine learning tools and continuing to create rigor around not just risk management in the book, but risk management around the profile of the products we offer to clients. So um if I were to ask you to take one thing away in terms of being mystifying something about a firm is how incredibly in control we are of the outcomes, the credit outcomes and the nature of our book that allows me to have a better time um financing the business uh despite any idiosyncratic moves in the market. At the end of the day, we control creating good product, good loans that are finance a bill in the market. Now, you made the debate as to where the spreads go or where the market goes, but at the end of the day you can control what you can control, which is uh generating good credit outcomes. So you have access to robust pools of capital. Great, well, and at the end of the day, you guys are all bringing some creativity and rigor to creating new services and thanks for sharing your stories today and thanks for being here. Okay

Lise Buyer, Partner, Class V Group 
Gene Munster, Managing Partner, Loup Funds 
Moderator: Terri Burns, GV


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Making Sense Of The Market

jean. Please welcome. We're excited to have you here today. It's delightful to be here. Can we have class outside next time next time? Um Let's just jump straight in. I'm curious to hear what is the state of the market today? What is it gonna look like tomorrow? Gene you recently said in the press that we're halfway through this bear market curious if if you still think that's true. Uh At least when R. I. P. O. Is going to happen again, what is the state of the market? The words that pop to mind are probably not appropriate for a fortune. Uh We've got some were in aspen. So the market was I would argue way over its skis and we hit if you will to torture this analogy a snow snake did a huge honkin face plant and now we're still wallowing around in the snow. And I think with with time and time in my opinion is not measured in weeks, we'll get back up. Um But what's the state of the IPO market? I'm going to have a really nice calm summer because there's no action in the I. P. O. Market right now. And the reason um is that money managers are, let's say the market is unpredictable but it's not irrational. And um having been a former fund manager when you hit a rugged market period like this, the first thing you worry about is am I gonna have to give money back to my investors And generally speaking the the terms of your mutual fund don't allow you to have a lot of cash. So if I'm gonna have to give money back I'm gonna have to figure out what am I gonna sell. And so you stack rank everything in your portfolio. What am I absolutely not gonna sell And you know what's gonna get the boot And the things that usually get the boot first are the riskiest investments. And that would be as you can see looking at the market all the 2021 I. P. O. S. Because younger public companies are just by definition riskier than those that have been public for a while. And I'll stop this answer very soon. But anyway so first you you rank things then you sell off the riskier investments. Then you begin to look around when we hit a low point in the market and say are there any companies that I wish I had purchased earlier that are pretty tried and true and those are the ones that will come back first when we get there. That's I don't know is that Microsoft is it into it? Is it lassie? And it's the companies that don't miss And only when you've purchased you've added to the positions in those. You begin to go risk on. Do you begin to think about newer companies that will give you bigger returns as opposed to fear of something dreadful happening. And only then do you begin to look at things like I. P. O. S. My bet is 2023. 2023. Okay. Good to know Jean. So when I think the concept is, what's the state of the market? Right. Sure. Yeah. State of the market. I think the better question is what's the state of the market early in 2023? And the lens of the market obviously has forward looking six months and I'm going to make a prediction that the who knows what's coming out tomorrow morning economic data, C. P. I. Number uh raise of hands. If you've given the C. P. I. Number any thought Shocking, I would have guessed that two thirds of the people would have thought of that CPR numbers. So I expect it to be a big number. The market expects it to be a big number. The takeaway is gonna be. The Feds are gonna need to do more work on July 27. I think the actual market goes up on that. I think at this point the market has moved beyond concerned about inflation and interest rates. That is the a topic that's the vortex. But I actually think the market is going further down and starting to think about length and depth of the recession. And I suspect that we will see during this earnings period, negative commentary from companies. And so we'll we will probably get a boost in the market on Wednesday. I think we're gonna see some essentially retreat Uh that that gains throughout this earnings period. And ultimately to answer your question, talk about this bear market view that I've had were more than 50% in cash, we were 60% in cash a few weeks ago. So we were starting to kind of invest in what we call is forming the bottom. And I just want to propose one thought when we think about the market, is that there is whenever someone talks about the market, they'll say, but it's impossible to pick the bottom Actually. It is possible. I'm not saying I'm gonna do it. It is possible. The reason why it's possible is that you have to have a view of what's gonna mark, it's gonna look like in six months. You can be wrong. And my sense is in six months from now, investors are going to be more confident that the growth rate is actually going to be better in 23 than they were 22 and I suspect that over the next three months we're gonna be forming a bottom. And so I've been negative for the past year. It was painful When we were 50, in cash last year. Imagine the conversations with our LPS about what you're missing, it's moved back into our favor here and we're excited to be deploying cash. What we think is going to be a pretty ugly earning. And remember the market leads the economy. So when the market's been down, it makes perfect sense that it's been down ahead of the recession and I would argue that the market has priced in the likelihood of a recession at 98%. Whereas a bunch of economists are like, yeah, probably, but not so sure. So I'm gonna agree with you that I think the path ahead is more optimistic but not starting tomorrow. Absolutely. I want to get some questions from the audience in just a second. So start prepping those. I'm curious to know given these assessments and and sort of predictions. I really appreciate that that concrete prediction gene um, how should institutional and or retail players act accordingly? How are each of you, the institutions are in the audience, Let's ask them. Um, uh, you know, I think it's a great warren Buffett's statement. I'm probably gonna butcher it. Exactly. But it's something along the lines of be scared when others are greedy, be greedy when others are scared. Well others are scared. And so, um, I think if you have patience, there's an opportunity to maybe pick and choose and you know, stick a toe in the water. And particularly frankly with crypto my sense is that we can use an analogy of companies and stocks are like investors, Children kind of thing, investors think their Children are more beautiful than they actually are. And I think that we're gonna see some of that. Um, I guess that kind of that gray side here in the next few weeks. So my recommendation is first just don't fall in love with your companies and recognize that there can be some Pullbacks and the concrete example I would give is, uh, probably 1/7 grader and an investment course could tell us this, but it's true. This is a dollar cost. Just to say the market can be priced in a lot of negativity. Now, maybe it jumps up, but maybe our kids aren't as beautiful as we think they are and they're gonna go down even further. But I still love them and I'll still own those And it just kind of, we were framing it as this next three months. We're just going to be patient, judicious and um, and, and deploy, uh, as a waiting average. Any questions from the audience. Yeah. Let me ask a question for the honor. If I may before I said, I asked if people cared about the CPN, that actually doesn't even matter anymore. I think the market, even though You read every headline, everyone's gonna be focused exactly at 8:30 PM tomorrow morning. What that number is. Um, does anybody have a view that the number is 8.6? That's what it was last month. Uh, the expectation was, it would be 8.3. It ran a little bit hotter. And even though you may not have been thinking about it, I would just love a show of hands. This is actually doing research right now, by the way. Um, I would love a show of hands of who thinks the number is going to be greater than 8.6%? Who's kind of bracing for something that's ugly. Okay. And the number of people, yeah, got it. Okay. And there's probably some people that don't want to vote. So maybe by that measure, maybe half of the group thinks that it's going to be below it. There is this piece to like, I think it's gonna be a hot number. But there's a piece of me that says, oh, I saw those gas prices go down and actually, maybe maybe it's gonna be good. That needs that feeling inside you that says, uh, this is fully priced. It needs to be eradicated before we really hit the bottom. And so at the point where everyone hands goes up and says it's gonna be 9%, 9.5 That everyone's hand went up there. I would say, go, everybody take a break here, go back and buy some stocks. But we're still not there yet. We're still at a point where there's still debate. And I think some optimism around, um, how this is gonna play out one. Yeah. One, I want to jump in right here for just a second. I'm glad that you, you mentioned gas prices because we were, we were talking about this earlier. Um, there's a lot of factors at play in general. And of course, in the market in particular right now and, and in history, what are the factors that both of you think most greatly have impacted where the market is today? So let's think, Covid, let's think of international relations, uh, back explosion is something that you, you know, I know you have thoughts on lease, when you think about some of the factors that have, have played into the market today. What do you think have been the most influential? It's all of them. We we had an economy where, right, when Covid first hit, we pumped a huge amount of funds into the economy at the same time, that people weren't working. And then we have the supply chain issues we've heard about. So what's the economics one? Oh, one definition of inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods. You know, that got people's attention add to that gas prices, add to that uncertainty about the economy and to that we've got an interesting election coming up. Um, I think, and, and add to that the fact that valuations were crazy, right? I mean, there was just more optimism than was justifiable. Eventually. Eventually stock prices reflect the discounted stream of future earnings. They just do, it takes a time for them to get there. But we were paying massive amounts for companies that are a little unproven might be, mine is housing. I think that, uh, like this is really bad. What's going out there? We all know that we probably, this group doesn't feel it as much as everybody feels it. But going, we won't go through the numbers with the recent spike in interest rates and what it's been over the past few years. But if I'm the Fed, you gotta take down the spike in housing actually to bring housing prices down. And that only happened once over the last 30 years after whatever that was 2000 and 2009 From peak to trough, it went down 28%, something like that. It's pretty rare that housing uh goes down. But the Fed needs to tackle that because that has an incredibly Wearing a fact on people. Imagine if you're in your mid-20s, you're trying to think about owning a home. It just seems like a dream, literally a dream. And so I think that um and you can kind of look at riffs on the housing and see how that plays out. Look at, you can look at lumber futures for example, and they call it 6 700. Right now before pandemic there, 400, I think they got to go down to 300. You think I'm crazy. But the Fed needs to just keep cranking rates to get housing under control to make people feel that at least there's a sense of stability about their future. Absolutely. And least you, you mentioned in your answer as well, valuations, both of you and your roles in various capacities have have had this intersection between both public and private markets. I'm curious how you think about the relationship between the two and how both the private and public markets influence each other. I keep going first. Alright well fine. Um had you asked me a month ago or six weeks ago, I would have said the difference in valuation is as large as I've ever seen it because we've obviously seen what happened to public stocks, But a lot of private companies raised money last year at very high valuations and they've hit their numbers, they've done what they said, they would do and there's this belief that I did what I said, I would do, I was worth $6 billion December. I should be worth $8 billion dollars now, not correlating that at all to the fact that institutional investors will take a look at what the multiples are on existing companies. So the bid ask if you will was The spread was enormous. Um you know, you can't miss what happened with Karna earlier this week, the biggest car coming back together for those who haven't looked the most recent raise is about 86% below where the last raise was. So we're not there yet. And I think a number of private companies are still optimistically assuming that their valuations will be close to what they were earlier and not so much. Not for right now. So coming closer, not there yet. I actually want you to answer that question, given your view and a tv and just what you're seeing in the private market, we're a hybrid fund, but I think you probably have a better insight. Yeah, I think that there's definitely, you know, obviously a very close correlation. I think sometimes it's easy to think in private markets that there's more upstream impact, right? Like you price a company or value a company at a certain amount and therefore hope that the public markets understand that, believe that and price it accordingly. Um, but we've seen that, that's not necessarily always the case, Right? And when you look at public markets, I think that there's been a more downstream impact versus upstream where we're paying a little bit closer attention to what is happening in public and having that in some cases impacts the way we think about pricing are, are private companies from a venture standpoint, So very close correlation, how we think about what comes first kind of chicken or the egg? Uh, it varies depending on the market conditions. Let me ask you this three years ago, do you think you'd be looking at the public market? Um, I would say yes, absolutely. Um, at least in my vantage point. Um, but I don't know if that's the case across the board when it comes to private, remember how do you think about this? Well, we were, we had our first fund was a venture fund and like I didn't even know what the market was doing. Like I was totally clueless. It's like we're doing venture investing warning for the long haul and now we're a hybrid funds. So we we look at both public and private, but I think that if I was just doing straight venture today, I would be paying a lot of attention in the public markets. Yeah, I think I agree with that trend across the board. More people are sort of paying attention to that private investors and I would say sometimes that looking upstream in a risk on market is called the greater fool theory. Whatever I'm gonna pay the next guy is going to pay more. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. Final question. We have just a little bit of time here. So so quickly this of course is fortune brainstorm tech. And so I want to talk about tech really quickly when we think about the tech darlings. Um, to some they are no more or perhaps on their way out. Uh, final thoughts from each of you, is there something there? Technology is going to be important? I would hope so, yeah. Um, if you're asking me to pick which stocks are going to be the big winners a year and a half hour, I can't possibly do it. No idea. Let's see who, let's see who weather is a difficult economic period. Well, let's see who spends their a lot of companies raised a lot of money over the last couple of years and now let's see how they put it to work and and obviously the market has shifted its attention from growth to profitability. Let's take a look at that. Yeah, not investment advice. The apple iron ores, they're gonna get in the car eventually. They're gonna do something. They're uh, they're going to be something more with carplay or actual car. Don't know, Huge impact to publicize their business, Amazon another Big one. You get the retail business for free right now. Uh, Toy Department, I got 18 seconds. Toy Department means this is money you can lose. You don't care if you lose it. Uh, Peloton offer pad, open door. Uh, they're either going to zero or going to a hunter. Don't know. Alright, love it, gene. Please thank you so much.

Hayden Brown, CEO, Upwork 
Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox 
Zig Serafin, CEO, Qualtrics
Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Back To Work - Whenever, Wherever

 Revathi Advaithi, CEO, Flex 
Interviewer: Alan Murray, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Building More Efficient Supply Chains 

thank you so good to see you, thanks for being here. You know I think we should start. You you run one of the largest companies that many people have never heard of that. Right. So why don't you tell, tell, explain what flexes and what flex does and how big flex is? Absolutely. So flex also called flextronics. We're manufacturing services, design services company and we make a little bit of everything, lots of different end markets, everything from medical, automotive tech to consumer products. So think of something, we probably make it for our customers. We are around in around 30 countries, around 1000 customers, 100 80,000 employees. Around 26 billion in revenue. And of course in the middle of the supply chain conversation that's happening now. And so what? Well let me ask you this, you you flex and other companies like plus we're part of offshoring contract manufacturing, all the things that really made the global economy that we grew accustomed to and now it's changing. Uh I mentioned the word friend showing how how big is the change? You probably have a better view of this than anybody we could have on this stage. How big is the change? How fast is it happening and what does it mean? And you know, alan I think in the conversation just before somebody talked about ensuring and reassuring. So let me just kind of frame the problem first. I mean we're talking about supply chain resiliency actually, which has become the forefront of conversation for every C suite I would say across the world and if you think about supply chain um resiliency, they're kind of two big concepts that everybody is talking about One is where do you manufacture things and why? And that's where the whole idea of re shoring on shoring is going on. And then the second is around the digitalization concept that will get to probably in a few more questions, but on the idea of on shoring re shoring, you know, the world's gone through in the last few decades, a whole bunch of changes, right? It was all about labor arbitrage. Where could you get efficiencies of production and everything moved to china and through all the trade issues and the pandemic and the supply chain crisis. The big focus is where do I make it, how can I bring bring it closest to the and consumer? And I would say progress is definitely accelerating and um it's somewhat, you know, will be slow because it's a complex equation that's been created over many years, But it has definitely started at flex itself, I'd say close to 80-plus% of a lot of our programs that we're doing now involved moving some form of production closes to the end consumer for our customers, 80% of the work you're now doing is some form of re shoring or moving closer? That's an amazing statistic. And do you, is there any reason to think that will slow down or reverse itself or do you think this is a trend we're going to be living with for quite a while? I think it's a trend that will live with for quite a while because one thing that is changing is the conversation is just not about cost of the product itself, right? People are becoming sensible about total cost, freight costs are escalating or going up significantly the risks of the, you know, geopolitical risks and where product is made, it's hard to quantify. So it is, you know, I think the train's left the station on this, this is going to go through decades of kind of change again, where you're gonna see bill of materials change in a pretty significant way, As everybody looks at where is the best place to reduce risk? And um, I think that trend is definitely on the move we've had on this stage in the last 24 hours, this debate over whether inflation is transitory or there's some fundamental longstanding pressures like that that might cause prices to rise for the longer term. Can you do this kind of on shoring without having some effect on prices. You know, I think there will be some effect on prices because at the end of the day Asia had developed a highly efficient supply chain and it is hard to compete with that if you look at it only in a cost by cost basis. But I think organizations that are able to look at it more holistically will be able to take the long view of you know costs in one year will be offset by total cost over a long period of time. So you will see some level of inflation I would say resulting from this, you see that today freight costs you heard from, you know the Fedex Ceo is has escalated over the last year and people pay for it. So there will be some level of inflation associated with it. You are, we're talking about supply chains and as fascinating as that has become you know, whoever thought we would be talking about supply chains on the but I'm glad we're talking about it is fascinating but but we should also talk about I mean you're one of the largest manufacturers in the world. Uh We should talk about manufacturing and how it's changing. Give us a sense of of the 10 year view of how manufacturing is going to change. And I'll talk about manufacturing in two parts because you can't um separate out supply chain from manufacturing because everything has to arrive into a factory before you make it. Right. So the whole supply chain has to change pretty significantly. You heard all this conversation about ai and digitalization and I'd say to some extent it hasn't touched supply chain the way it should right? Because data is not that available across the ecosystem in the supply chain. It's not like google where consumers are, all their data is available. And you're able to kind of mind the search engine for all the data here individual customers and suppliers have all their data sitting in their independent E. R. P. Systems. So finding a way to mind that level of information sitting in the supply chain and making A. I. Relevant to supply chain is going to be really important because otherwise we will have another semiconductor crisis like you have today. And the result of that could be significant if you don't solve. It's a good data and information whose whose job is it to make that happen? I mean how do unite all those databases? It is tough. I would say you know flex is an initiative going where we're trying to bring customers together. I'm working with the commerce secretary in an effort. She's driving to bring that information together. But it is difficult because every company wants to protect their I. P. And their information. So I'd say a lot of work to be done on the digitalization side of supply chain and then on the manufacturing side you know you can't move and re sure things very easily if you don't have labor available. Think about the demographics issue that exists everywhere. So automation and driving a high level of automation into manufacturing is critical. That is. And the good news is it's available today. You saw the demonstration that you saw earlier. Things like that in manufacturing are critical if you can reduce the amount of time in a warehouse if you can reduce the amount of time you're doing servicing of equipment. Um if you can launch programs through digital twins and simulation, which is what we're doing in a covid time. Those are all kind of technology that can really accelerate how you manufacture. So if I look forward, you know, for in a decade I would say my vision would be you know, you walk into a factory, you should be able to have managed everything of it sitting from your home, you should have been able to program your equipment, send your demand planning work and should be just managing the product as it moves through the factory. That if that is doable then you can see a lot of manufacturing moving and reassuring because labor of availability is a big issue. Yes. So we should talk about that. The war for talent. I mean you're in the middle of it. What are you seeing there right now at the first two fronts. One is you know, we have two sets of people that we employ, right? One is manufacturing, labor is a significant issue. You know, you can't talk about moving manufacturing to the U. S. Or any other part of the world and not have people and skilled labor available. So that's one significant challenge um that we're working through. But in terms of talent itself um I'd say you know we're not a tech company so we don't compete for the typical tech talent but we're like every other company that's working through the issue of attrition is high. You know, people have different priorities of what they want today. Um, so I'd say it is challenging, but we have, you know, ways of working with local communities and technical schools that meet more our requirement of the kind of talent we're looking to hire and so we're doing those types of creative things to really drive, um, and keep our production going. But I'd say, you know what, it's, you have to be an appealing company for talent to want to work for you. And at the end of the day, I always say it's all about the culture, if you have the right culture will have the right people and you don't expect that to change either. The talent. I don't think so. Well, it depends on if the economy slows down and everybody keeps talking about, you know, are we going to have the demand we have, then maybe it reduces some, but I don't see the fundamentals changing in terms of the wall or in talent, will you have a view into a lot of companies order books? Do you see any slowdown? Well, not yet, not yet, not yet. We're hypothetical for you. That's right for us. It is hypothetical, you, you see some a little bit in the consumer space. Um, so that everybody's hearing and, you know, talking about cell phones and laptops and, you know, vacuum cleaners and things like that, but we're not seeing any demands slow down. It's a unique time, Alan, you know, you know this well, right, inflation is high, demand is very strong. Supply chain is absolutely bottlenecked. It's a very unique time to be able to look at it and predict like when does all this come together and when you really see demand slowdown, I want to be sure to give people an opportunity to ask questions if you have any, please raise your hand and and and grab grab one of the paddles. But everybody, I want to ask you about your journey because you're running one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world. There's not a lot of women who run manufacturing companies that hasn't been the friendliest space for women. How did you get there? What? Tell us a little bit about your unique journey to this position? Yeah. First, alan uh say there's not a lot of women running anything, so not manufacturing, it's, you know, tech or any sector. I think the largest challenge we have and it's probably in any sector is that we see a lot of women going into kind of functional roles like HR legal finance. We have a hard time convincing people to come into business rules and manufacturing as such is really tough. You know, you have to be able to work in the factories, navigate the factories, You have to be very global. Um So it is a very difficult space for women. Well, I love manufacturing. I'm a mechanical engineer. Not many women want to be a mechanical engineer. I just love watching things being made. It just fascinates me. I just couldn't imagine sitting behind a computer and programming software. That's just not me. You did your engineering degree in India in India. That's right. A mechanical engineer. And you came here to work for, I came here to do a master's and then I realized I needed a job. I was broke. So I joined a company called etON and their power management. Energy management weren't a lot of women had eaten at the time. No, no. Yeah, there's not a lot of women now either. I would say in the industrial space. And so, you know, I joined them in the manufacturing shop floor as a shop floor supervisor in Shawnee Oklahoma. And then just worked my way through all the different jobs there. And uh that's how I ended up here. So I'd say in general, women have to be able to take vigorous sector. You are, you have to take risks in the jobs you take and you have to put yourself in an uncomfortable position and be able to take jobs that you, you know, it's not obvious and apparent that you're going to do well in. And I had great sponsors all that help. Well, we're glad you did as well as you did. Thank you for sharing what's going on in your space? And thank you for being a brainstorm tech.

Julie Larson-Green, CTO, Magic Leap 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


 Brainstorm Tech 2022: Demo - Magic Leap 2.0

we are starting off this portion of our main stage conversations with a look at some pretty cool eh, our tech, in contrast to some of its tech titan competitors, A r Trailblazer magic leap is focusing on real world business applications rather than creating alternative universes. Its new lighter goggles magically too, could be a breakthrough product that transforms the ar market we're going to hear from magically chief technical officer, how the goggles are designed for training three D visualization and remote. So in what promises to be an exciting trip, which we will all go on right now, we're going to go inside a wildfire training mission with magic leap to please welcome to the stage julie Larson Green cto of magically welcome julie Jai Mahal. Alright, give us a little bit of a sneak peek, just what's new at magic leap um so much as new magically. But I mean we're really a brand new company in a number of ways. Peggy johnson took over as Ceo almost two years ago and has remade the company recapitalized company, created a new management team. I came on as an advisor. In fact, she and I were texting while she was on stage at M P W a couple of years ago, she asked if I'd come on and help her team learn how to develop enterprise software. So a whole new focus from consumer over to enterprise people that are already wearing things on their face that can really take advantage of having their world augmented and so we're ready to go with a whole new way of thinking about what we're doing. Open platform, all kinds of new developers and connectivity to other technologies. So it's been really exciting time. She convinced me to join full time during the process. It was great. Came out of um okay, and tell us more specifically about magic leap to what does it do, that magic leap one? Well, it's also completely retooled. So the biggest thing you're gonna notice right away is the 70 degree field of view, which is just much bigger than anything out there. Um you know, it's not a race to the numbers, it's really about having you see all the augmented content just as if you were moving around the real world magically won and other competitors. It's like looking through a little porthole That was magically too. You can see a six ft tall person from six ft away. So that digital content is really just in the room with you as part of the natural environment. So different than saying immersive technology when you think of VR where you're going into a separate place, you're immersed in that technology all around you in the room that you're in. So beyond that we have first to market a new technology called dynamic dimming. Dynamic dimming is instead of darkening the whole screen, which you can do with magic leap to, you can also darken portions of that of the content. You put a mask behind the content. So the digital content really stands out, which is really important in high light. Um, uh, scenarios like the operating room or next to a window or other places where bright light is coming in and you can really see white whites and blacks, blacks. And then the other one that a lot of people comment on and our developers are really excited about is the Spatial audio. So 360° audio opens up all kinds of new user experiences. Not everything has to be right there in front of your face because you're really just naturally interacting with the environment around you, both with a controller which you can use behind your back or hands free. So it's a whole new thing and I think you guys are gonna love playing with it and seeing the possibilities. So, um, another question for you, we have, we've all heard about magic leap for a few years now. A lot of money, billions of dollars have gone into the company, we've had Peggy has been on our stage, we had Ronnie, the founder and former Ceo on stage here in Aspen. What makes you confident that this time, this is the right approach, This is the mark, the right market, the right applications and technology for you guys. I think it's a number of reasons, you know, it's not just technology that has to get ready and that's where all that money went is into the state of the art technology that we have today, but also the market has to be ready. That things with the metaverse and people talking about it, the world seems a little more ready for the kinds of scenarios. And then us focusing on enterprise, we're really focused on industrial enterprise, healthcare, uh public sector, which we're gonna show you a public sector, command and control scenario is really the place where people are already using augmentation to get their work done and wearing glasses on their face. So, you know, instead of trying to convince all of you to walk around with glasses on, we're going to places where people are are already working with that. So you actually are trying to convince us to put glasses on here, all of us. But yes, out in the demo average are sure. Um No, I'm just joking but but but another, another quick question, just on sort of the um the evolution of the company, um the previous iteration, everything was very, very secretive for for years, right? Um this is not the same mentality approach at all, so so why why the shift? Yeah, Super open. I mean, we want to make it easy for developers to build applications no matter where they're coming from. So, you know, we work with the latest tools unity, you bring your own cloud, it's this open platform, open Xar as they can make it to make it easy, it also makes it easier for people to deploy it because we have a number of M. D. M. Many folks that are gonna make it easy for people to get the product out into the workforce. So it's much more developing in the open. We started giving it out to developers in november, very early access, working with some of our engine partners to make it easy to develop and we're still quite we're really pleased by the excitement that people have had and the number of people that have asked to be part of our early adopter program. Okay and tell us specifically what exactly are we going to see today during this? Okay so this is super fun. So we're gonna see what we call a command and control scenario. So command and control is basically when you uh need to manage remote sites from afar you want to see the whole thing and kind of do it for training purposes or for managing in real time kind of scenario. So this scenario is a firefighter scenario training people how to fight wildfires. We worked with firefighters for how they do it today which is kind of an old fashioned way of sand table. So they put the sand on the table, they mount it up to look like mountains, they put the trees in, they said people are gonna come from here, the trucks are gonna come from here. The helicopters come from here, we reinvented that to show a demonstration of what you can do with magically and so the data comes from Nasa, the terrain, the wind speed, all of that video and everything is all integrated into one place and you're gonna get to experience it and the audience is going to get to see what my whole sees on these monitors and the screens in front of you. So, so I'm gonna have Jonathan to come out and he's gonna relate us through that demo and have fun. All right. All right, thank you. Well, Michael, thank you very much for hosting us today and we're very excited about this opportunity to share our technology with you and with all of our audience. Um, so before we dive into the demo, I do want to go over a few things about our product. This is our second generation product, Magic leap to, we kept the original configuration we had with magic leap one. So we have a compute pack a headset and a controller. We did that so that we could take all of the weight associated with the battery and the computer and take it off of your head. We want you to have a very comfortable experience when you're wearing this device. We don't want any adverse effects, no neck strain, no eye strain. And we've gone out of our way to make sure that this is the lightest headset available on the market. So, um, we, uh, this can be strapped onto a belt, it can be clipped into a pocket. We have a shoulder strap, we have a vest as well. There's a lot of different ways to manage the compute pack. The headset itself is 50% smaller than our previous generation, 20% lighter and we have doubled our field of view. Like Julie was saying earlier, this was actually part of the headset earlier on. You know, we always have this configuration and I think this is very heavy for putting on my head. You wouldn't exactly, you wouldn't want to put this on your head and you want it to be offloaded. We also have a controller, you can think of this as your mouse for your headset, it's optional. We also have full hand tracking for both hands. So there's a lot of different ways to input into the technology. So today we're going to do a demo, you and I will be in the headset. We have a third person that's joining us through the camera over here on the left. So everyone out there, you're going to see what my hall and I are seeing just from a different perspective. And with that we'll go ahead and get started so to put it on and grab it with both hands, pull it apart and slide it over your head. Great, All right. Uh, so if you look over here, we're gonna step back, just take one step back and two, you can pick that up. There you go. We have a map that we developed for uh, our our demo into at the world Economic forum in May. So like julie mentioned earlier, this is a firefighting scenario. One of the first things I want you to notice is that you can still see me when we're talking. So this isn't virtual reality, this is augmented reality and virtual reality. You put a headset on that blocks out the real world and you enter a virtual world in augmented reality. We are bringing and adding the virtual world to the real world. So we'll go ahead and zoom in on the western us over here on the left and you'll see a map up here in front of us on the table. So go ahead and guide your attention to the table. We have a wildfire developing over here on the left side of our map and we're learning how to manage this fire. Maybe we're new uh firefighters and we want to look at some historical data and understand how to properly manage this fire. So we're notice that we're combining three dimensional data. We can bring in some two dimensional data that can be a video feed from the ground and we have the context of the terrain, uh and that video combined. So we know exactly where that's being recorded. This can be a training scenario, could also be a live command and control scenario. Uh and this can apply to a lot of different industries. It doesn't have to be just firefighting. So think about your business, what type of data you have, How can you combine that in a way that's intuitive and enables your employees to better understand your, your data. If you look up here, we also have some two dimensional information. So you're a firefighter, you're going to want to know about the wind and the smoke, the weather conditions that there are taking place right now. Well, notice that the wind is starting to shift. There's a city over here on the left, so we go ahead and give an evacuation order to the city and they begin to evacuate. The fire is progressing. We have a couple of helicopters that we can instruct on where to uh drop some water and they'll go ahead and they will drop that right at the last second and uh, and stop the fire from reaching the city. Uh, so I want you to uh realize that what you're looking through is 32 different layers of materials are optics piece is what makes magically unique. We manufacture all of our optics inside of florida. And uh julie had mentioned earlier that we have an additional layer called they're dimming layer. Um, so the audience will be able to see this if you want to see it, please go to our demo, but I'm gonna turn it on for you also, you have to sell it for me, Does everybody try to, I feel like such an idiot, but I just want to touch it every everyone wants to do that. So I went ahead and turned that dimmer on. So if you look at me now, you you really can't see me because we're blocking up to 99% of the light, and then I'll turn that off. So the firefighters dropped the water, they saved the day, uh and uh and we learned how to how to manage a fire. Um This is really just a taste of what's possible with magic leap, we're just beginning to scratch the surface on how we can use this technology. If you'd like more information, please visit our website at dot com and thank you very much. My whole for hosting. Thank you. I gotta like fluff my hair back. Um Do I do I have a r R. It's really cool. It's interesting because um every time I've tried VR I just feel kind of woozy and maybe I'm just haven't done it enough. Um And with with this, maybe it's a control thing, I really don't know what it is, but like I I like that, that feeling a lot more um the audio is is pretty wild, like it's really you feel like you're there. Um What, so is this is this particular application in use currently, or this is just a demo application has been created, but we're working with a lot of different developers that are developing tools to be able to create these kinds of scenarios. Both no bs as well as individual enterprises there putting stuff together. And it's nice because you know, VR your occluded. So you can't take a cell phone call or an emergency call that you could you could see the audience, you could interact with the real world at the same time that you're seeing that content. It's world box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't it doesn't move with you. I don't have to worry about falling off stage, which is okay. Real quick um other applications that you think are really going to be definitely things in the operating room. Lots happening there. Uh there are already used to using robots and things on their face to help them augment surgeries. There's lots there. Industrial enterprise, we have several companies have been working with that are doing training, both, capturing the knowledge of people that are going out of the workforce into the magically scenario and the headset and don't really training people on the hands on way and saving waste and saving costs in training and also bringing tech to some places that aren't technology forward and attracting new kinds of talents, all kinds of stuff. Okay. And Julia. I know you've got some news to share. So what what is this gonna what is it gonna cost? When is it available? Tell us Well, we're gonna be available starting september 30th. And we have three editions are base edition is 32 99. Our developer pro is 40 99 then the enterprise edition is 49 99. So go to magic leap dot com and all the details will be there and see who we can buy from our partners. And really excited. We've already got so many developers working on being ready when we deliver on september. So check out outside how many of you have already tried it out in the booth, A few people. All right. Try it out if you have a chance. Thank you so much for for being here. And we look forward to Magic Leap three. Right. Thank you very much julie.

 Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, YouTube 
Tom Ryan, CEO, Streaming, Paramount Global
Moderator: Terri Burns, Partner, GV


Brainstorm Tech 2022: New Models In Streaming 

neal Tom we're very excited to have you both here today. Thanks for being here. Let's go ahead and jump straight in. So maybe we can start with you tom I want to just level set a little bit and hear from both of you, your general interest and the importance of streaming today. Can you speak to that a little bit just to kick us off? Yeah, sure. Great to be here. Um streaming for us is a top priority at paramount Global. Uh we uh see streaming certainly as the future of television, I think that's clear. Um and so we've been investing very heavily in both are free and are paid streaming ecosystem. So we've got with a differentiated uh streaming strategy which really spans free pay and ad supported, which we think is going to be the future of streaming um full stop for the entire industry over time With Pluto TV, which is a company I co founded and launched in 2014, we've got the leader in the free, ad supported streaming TV or fast category. So that is basically hundreds of channels, thousands of TV shows and movies on demand, all delivered for free. Um and with paramount plus, which we launched uh last year we've got a fast growing paid streaming service which essentially delivers um live news, um live sports, a mountain of entertainment, um all for a very attractive price point, which we think is really important in today's economic environment. So you can have paramount plus for 9 99 without ads, but you can have it with for 4 99 with ads And we think advertising is a big part of the streaming future, as we're starting to see with lots of different um paid services, adopting an ad supported tier. I definitely want to spend some time digging into revenue as how you both think about that, but Neil do you want to jump in first? Yeah, I mean, I agree with a lot of of what what tom said and you know, as the, as the Youtube guy here, uh it's no secret that streaming is something that is uh you know, near and dear to my heart, it's something that has been core to our business for um uh for a long time. And I think it's uh it's there's 22 aspects of it that I think are what make it so powerful. One is the, this this kind of vibrancy of streaming creates enormous opportunity, enormous choice for all of us as consumers, like, I think that's obvious to everybody here in the audience, We all experience that as consumers ourselves. But the other aspect that I think is even more exciting is it creates uh an incredible set of opportunities for creators and creators writ large, not just, you know, kind of traditional media creators, But youtubers, you know, tens of millions of them all over the world would not have been able to thrive if it wasn't for streaming platforms today, YouTube, uh you know, is um gets a reach of about 230 million users across the us on a monthly basis. And that happens for two reasons, I would argue related to what I just said the first is this connection between all of us as consumers and creators, you come to Youtube because there's content that you love, there's creators that you love to follow and connect with, not just to watch, but to interact with. And then the second aspect, of course is just pushing the frontiers in terms of innovation, what we've been able to do on the streaming platforms. So there's of course are our main app, but there's Youtube in the living room, which is our largest and fastest growing screen now in the US, there's Youtube kids, there's Youtube music and of course there's Youtube tv. So all of that innovation, all of that connectivity between creators and fans is just what makes streaming super, super exciting for me. I really want to drill down on this idea of just content creation in general. Um Obviously there's there's UGC content across Youtube user generated? Uh Yes, exactly, user generated content. Um and then there's produced content when you think about paramount Plus Youtube Tv, how do you both think about content creation in general and what it really means to create the next frontier of entertainment. Uh well at paramount, we're a professionally produced content business for streaming, so whether it be for Pluto Tv, which is really a third party content service where we have hundreds of content partners who provide us with content so that we can program these channels, um, or whether it's paramount plus where we are primarily a first party content service, leveraging all of uh, paramount's brands and franchises from Nickelodeon to cbs to uh, comedy Central to MTV and a bunch of originals that we create, we're really in the professionally produced premium content business, whether that be third party or first party. Uh, so, you know, youtube, our endemic creators as unitary are front and center to everything that we do. We have millions of them all over the world. Uh, and what I said before, uh, in my, in my, in the, in your previous question, I think really applies here, of course, we have all kinds of content on our platform. We partner with uh, programming partners on a regular basis, paramount um, many others, but our, um, our lifeblood is, are endemic creators are Youtubers and um, uh, they're pretty amazing. And I think the power of an open platform really shows, uh, in what they've been able to accomplish on Youtube because there are no gatekeepers because there's nobody who's telling these creators on Youtube that hey, you know what your, your accent is not quite right or you don't have the right skin color or you're not tall enough short enough, what have you or you're from the wrong part of the world, none of that exists. And these creators who otherwise would have had to face all of these hurdles now can come onto Youtube, build an audience all over the world, not just in their countries and then build a business on it. And I think that that's what is super, super exciting to me just by way of sort of quick, quick anecdote, you know, Mr Beast, I think most of you are familiar with one of the largest creators on Youtube, he's got 100 million followers. If Mr Beast was his own streaming channel, he'd be larger than the next three streaming channels combined. And so that is sort of the power of the reach of these Youtubers, how incredibly large their followings are and how engaged those subscribers are to their content. I want to open up questions to the audience in just a moment to start getting your questions ready, but first let's drill down a little bit into how we think about new models that will keep consumers happy and of course revenue coming in. So you both have touched on it a little bit, there are ad based tiers, there are paid tiers on, on both of your platforms. How do you think about that today? And how do you think that these new models might evolve in the future? Maybe you can start with you tom Yeah, so I mean I think it's uh it's clear that you want to provide the most flexibility to consumers so that you can um have a service, you can have a variety of services that actually meet consumers where they are. Um And so having a free price point um for Pluto Tv is great for paramount plus again we've got a premium without add uh price point, but then we've also got an ad supported price point, the collection of those different um means of meeting the customer, allow us to have the greatest addressable number of subscribers or users as well as the greatest revenue potential. So we think that that's really a winning strategy and that's going to continue to evolve into the future. Yeah, I would say, I mean um as you all know, our primary business is an ad supported one. Uh Youtube has, you know, two billion users all over the world. Uh that is an attractive platform for advertisers to be able to connect with their prospective consumers, existing consumers right? When those consumers are engaged very lean forward with their favorite creators on Youtube, that is sort of the core value proposition of our ads business. And that's why it's kind of the essence of everything that we do at Youtube, but of course, Uh we want to have a variety of options, not just for our viewers but also for our creators. And so we've invested very heavily in subscription offerings. Uh we have two of them, YouTube premium, which is our music oriented subscription offering now has over 50 million subscribers worldwide, that number continues to grow. And there the value proposition is simple, which is uh, an incredible music listening experience, an incredible Youtube experience without ads, without um, uh, with background play with offline play. Uh, and we have a uh, subscription streaming product of course called Youtube Tv and that is a product that we've invested in very heavily with the core, core purpose of uh really just innovating on the product and we work very closely with partners to make sure that we have the best content on the platform as well. And as a result of that investment, uh today I can announce that we crossed the five million subscriber and trial or threshold um, at Youtube tv. The business continues to grow and all of that is through the hard work of our product and engineering teams, all of our partners and so really excited about that subscription business as well. So for Youtube, it really is a combination of a Vod vod. We also have many other direct consumer uh, ways for creators to generate revenue in our platform, whether it's channel memberships, uh, things like super chat, super stickers, other ways for fans and creators to engage and create sort of that creative economy. Uh, and as a result, we've paid out, you know, tens of billions of dollars to creators over the course of years across our platform, all over the world. Five million special. We're very excited about that and I just like to add to, it may be obvious to uh an audience like this, but you know, today consumers are really creating their own bundles, they're no longer um getting um their television from one monolithic tv provider. And so it's important to have this flexibility so that, you know, people can actually have that custom created bundle of video or tv content that they're looking to watch um specific to them and they change what that looks like um you know, quarter by quarter. And so what was 1 to 2 paid services a few years ago when I was building a free ad supported service service entirely has now become five in the US people are demonstrating that they're paying for more subscription services, but they still want to complement that with a free offering. Um and so that's why it's so important to have this flexibility. Yeah, the customization piece of, of how we all consume this content, I think is really interesting how folks choose to bundle it. It's all about consumer choice at the end of the day, I think that's super exciting, 100%. Let's go to the audience, We have one question over there, can you state your name, company and the question please? Hi, I'm john Miller Ceo of demo and this may be you sort of answered this question a little bit, but you know, from a pure consumer perspective, like I really want to watch Ted Lasso or I really wanna watch Yellowstone or I really want to watch we crashed and I end up with like a new subscription every time and then I wanna watch the World series and then I've got another, you know, subscription I've got to add. So my question is, how do you see this kind of coming together? And what do you see the consumers doing? Are they, are they kind of moving to their own custom bundles? And how do they do that? And where do you see the eyeballs shifting to create these customized or flexible options from a consumer perspective? Uh I think to to start, I mean today, yes, consumers are creating their own bundles. That does mean that you have a set of subscriptions and you may change those out from time to time. I think for our part we're also trying to make that easier by bundling our services together so you can get paramount plus and showtime for example, um at a discounted price um where, where we offer that but in the future I think that there will be um and there's already services that are trying to do this at a sort of a meta level or at a at a sort of an aggregation level on the device side um abilities to make recommendations that will suit your taste and allow you to subscribe but it still results in subscribing to some more services. Whether those services will be combined over time, I think remains to be seen. But we're at this point bundling to try to solve that problem. I would say that in the near term, I think you're gonna see the entire range, you're gonna see existing bundles, there's gonna be innovation on top of those bundles. Youtube tv is a version of a bundle that has a lot of this product innovation on top of it, right? You know, multi screen, you know, DVR on the cloud, google personalization, all of that sort of stuff. So I think you're going to see lots of that innovation. I think you're going to see more and more subscription unbundle ng also happening. And then I think you're gonna continue to see uh the extraordinary growth of sort of everything on the other side of the spectrum. Keep in mind that if you're a young person today, you know, maybe almost all of your consumption is none of these things. It's actually, you know, a lot of the other platforms that are out there, whether it's, you know, your set of favorite Youtubers or your, you know, other platforms that you might be consuming video content on as well. And I think that, that, that spectrum will exist in the near term and I think it's really gonna get driven what I buy, what I was saying before, which is consumers are gonna vote with their feet. I think we have one other question up here, Hi, my name is Kirsten wahlberg, I sit on the board of epidemic sound, a company that soundtracks a lot of the creators that are playing on youtube and many other platforms. You talked in the opening about sort of the north America or the american penetration but growth globally, I'd be interested in more specific perspectives on which areas globally are growing fastest and what are the factors you think they're driving that? Yeah, so I think in terms of our business, the largest and fastest growing countries for us are countries like Indonesia, India all over asia for example, that shouldn't shouldn't be a surprise given the population, given the change in the underlying infrastructure, data plans, availability of you know, mobile devices, basically how consumers, they're sort of skipping a generation in terms of access to that type of content. Uh and so that's where we see extraordinary growth. Um and I would say that the growth so that that's one aspect. But other parts of the world are are also growing. You know, lots and lots of growth outside of north America and western europe is sort of the way that I would, I would put it in a nutshell. And what I would say is really exciting from an innovation standpoint is it's not just about user growth on products that are built here for example and then sort of exported around the world. A lot of the product, innovation, new business models, new ideas, new ways for creators to actually connect with their fans are emerging out a lot of those parts of the world and coming here. So for example shopping is a great example of that the way that influence or driven shopping happens in a lot of those markets driven by you know youtube creators but creators on other platforms I would say is ahead of the curve in terms of where we are North America western europe. And I think that's uh that's super exciting to see as well. So truly global. Uh Not just the most uh users but the fastest growing as well outside of outside of kind of traditional north american market. The other question Time for one more over here. Okay great. Thanks a lot. So um enjoyed the conversation Vicky huff with P. W. C. My question is more on the creator side and what trends you're seeing emerging going off of your last comment um whether it's you know, a lot of Youtubers are in gaming, right? And maybe N. F. T. S. Or things of that nature, What are the trends? Do you see anything that's starting to clearly evolve for your younger consumers that you think will go mainstream over the next couple of years? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean I think as you all know uh the Youtube platform does skew young. Uh and so a lot of the trends we see are trends that are popular amongst that cohort, the biggest one by far I would call out a short form video. Um, and so we have a product on Youtube called Youtube shorts. It's about, you know, mobile created vertically oriented, relatively short video content as you all know, there's other platforms that do that as well. Um and that's one of our fastest growing formats and we have creators that focus just on Youtube shorts, we have multi format creators that do traditional Youtube videos and shorts, Uh and we just passed um, you know, 1.5 billion logged in users of short content a month on our platform. And so the growth and adoption amongst users is there too, which of course keeps the creator flywheel going. So that's probably the biggest trend live is another one gaming you mentioned live streaming is a big thing for gamers. And then the third thing that I'll just mention is back to what I was saying, which is shopping. So you know, you come to Youtube to be entertained, but just like you go to a mall to be entertained and you might purchase something along the way. Lots of those types of user journeys exist on Youtube as well. And I think that that creates Interesting product opportunities for all of us as consumers and viewers, but for the entire, but also for the entire creative set as well as future creators as well. We have 30 seconds left. I would want to know if you have any closing thoughts tom uh yeah, I just say that, you know, clearly we're in a global mega trend with streaming right now. We're still in the very early innings. And um, I think, you know, as we look out into the years ahead, um, in terms of video consumption, streaming is certainly going to become the primary business model um, for our industry. And so we're really, really excited about our growth and the future to come. 100% Neil Tom. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Aaron Levie, CEO, Box 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


 Brainstorm Tech 2022: Thinking Outside The Box

how's everybody doing? Sweet they're they're awake. Right more coffee guys. Um Okay my first question is very important. Okay did you figure out the light switches in your hotel room last night? We we figured them out. I don't know if anybody everybody staying at the ST regis great hotel but like there's literally like 17 different lights that you have to coordinate and and I like some of them are completely hidden so like it literally takes about a half hour to actually get to your hotel room in this uh this environment. It's tough it's tough. Aaron tweeted last night about how this should be Elizabeth Warren's top priority is mandating this and chargers are I think the two important things that we can solve chargers are her priority apparently. Who here follows Aaron on twitter raise your hands. Okay. Okay. Okay so um 2.4 million followers on Twitter do you count? Do you like I mean I think Alana has established that most of those are bots now so I it doesn't really easily 95%. Um Actually he was he was tweeting back and forth with you last night about the light switches and he had a light problem also I think so I actually didn't totally understand his tweet. It was about these red and green led lights but then actually I ended up actually one of the L. E. D. Lights end up keeping me awake. So that's very funny figured out I love that you tweeted back at him like let's focus here people this is about light switches so okay I promise we'll get to like more you know. Yeah we will. We will. But um but I think it's it's really one thing I find really interesting about you is that um you somehow managed that like I read your tweets, I follow you and I am somehow interested in like anything from enterprise software and cloud and light switches. And of course you you throw in a lot of other stuff that that is much more substantive and not that the cloud is about about politics and so what like how did this even, how did you develop this voice on twitter? And do you like do you do you censor yourself? Do you have someone help you with your Oh the things I actually want to tweet never end up showing up. So I like tell us about one tweet that you like you were like no I'm not gonna well I actually delete probably like 1/5 of my tweets because because the replies just start getting too angry and then I just like okay this is I can't ruin my saturday like this. So um but no I mean I mean I think we all have basically the same thoughts and I've just unfortunately decided I'll put them on the internet. So um so that's sort of the thing that I did okay and when it comes to like some of the heavier stuff that polarizing, you know you've you've spoken out about turns out actually my crypto tweets are the most polarizing, so not gun control, no, actually gun control at this point, like I get a couple random trolls, but crypto is where you get destroyed. So you can talk about based on anything political at this point and you're far better off than talking about Web three. Okay, well since you since you brought up Web three, I didn't mean to, I really didn't mean can we talk about cloud computing? We will we will. I promise. Um No, but but another of your recent tweets and I promised you guys I did this is all just um no, I won't I won't only fixate on your tweets, but it's a good way to like, you know, you're very prolific. So I think it's a good way to get some into like some of your your mind. Um not a 4/5 of it I guess is the fifth you delete and so on. On the crypto side. One of your recent tweets said something about how we're all talking about entering a crypto winter. But when was the crypto summer? When did that actually take place? Why? Why are you such a hater when it comes to what? 3? Um I actually didn't mean to be a hater. It's funny. Um the I sort of just stumbled into apparently being a hater, but um I pay attention to basically every tech trend that emerges um you kind of have to if if you're obviously in this audience or or or in any kind of tech company, because you want to know like, well where's the future going and um, and you have to try and make the right types of bets for your organization or your team or, you know, whatever you're working on. And so every time there's a new big wave of technology, whether it's VR or AI or you know, obviously cloud computing or, you know, many of the sort of sub genres of those technologies, you want to understand, what is this going to have an impact, meaningful impact on on my business or my product, and how do I adapt to it? And so that led me to obviously studying Web Three as an example, because there was a lot of, you know, great commentary about this could be the future of a decentralized, much more open and equitable uh, you know, kind of internet platform And and that that is actually extremely exciting. So philosophically, I'm actually very aligned to the ideals of of of Web three. But then when you kind of drill into it a bit more on both the technical dimension, as well as more of the kind of economic and human behavior and incentive dimension. It really, I struggled to sort of think through how this would actually play out in a way that was matched and married to the what the proponents were talking about. And so if you kind of just look at the technology itself, it's, you know, super interesting for, you know, trading, uh, you know, limited amounts of data, uh and and, you know, passing money and and things of value back and forth, not super effective if you had to, you know, scale a global, you know, scale internet service, um, and decentralize it meaningfully using a Blockchain. So, so a lot of the technical architecture didn't really make a lot of sense. And then the economic challenges were, uh, were those of of just, I think what we're now seeing kind of blow up, which is a lot of the value was built on, on, you know, other people believing that that something had value and then then paying more for it and eventually that kind of runs out. Um and and so a lot of the dynamics of various crypto projects didn't seem to have sort of strong network effects. In fact, they kind of have anti network effects where the larger they get, the more people want to bail because you've already made your profit. And so then you bail. Uh and then you sort of unwind the value of that project. And so for for again, a variety of reasons, it just didn't feel like it was going to play out as the uh as, you know, some some kind of you. And so then you kind of look at the whole macro picture of technology and you think about all, I mean, the prior panel you think about all the things we can do in health care, transportation, communication, entertainment, retail, you know, commerce, education And you have so much of a, you know, large landscape to go and innovate in and you know, a lot of what we were seeing was, you know, in Web three would not impact any of those things. It's really for, you know, trading things that that we ostensibly, you know, kind of are creating value around. So it felt like a little bit of a mismatch between the hype and what the impact will ultimately be able to be. You do you do think though that the the concept of decentralized innovation is has some, I think that the internet already does. That that's the power of the web. The web is a decentralized medium that lets anybody build a company and start an idea and if you want to go totally off the grid and not use amazon web services or google you can totally do that. And so I think we actually have a sufficiently decentralized network um I think the idea of having more openness, more protocols, more open source, those are all fantastic ideas. I think token izing those with with sort of somewhat opaque incentive schemes, I don't think actually plays out in practice in the way that we think it will. Okay, I'm going to do like hard pivot to box because there isn't a good segway web really anything naturally. Okay um Alright so um tell us just a little bit about the last couple of years and the shifts at at box and sort of how you um have you've led the company through all this mess? Yeah. Well which mess are you referring to the pandemic? You know if you want to talk to you about products too? But internally, you know I know you have a lot of thoughts on the future of work. So what have you learned along the way and how to lead today? Yeah. Okay because we even had we had activists, we had our own mess um kind of you know we know we like to create our own dramas sometimes. So uh so you know we started the company in in 2005 and the original idea was make it easy and secure to access and share information from anywhere that was like the premise of the company. And so in the very sort of business plan of the idea of the business, we had remote work as sort of central to why why, you know we were starting the company was make it so in the future you could just work from anywhere and access your data from anywhere. So as the pandemic, you know kind of ripped through, you know the basically every country it was very easy for us to respond to that um operationally because our company was sort of built for this type of environment and then strategically it was it was built to serve customers in this type of situation. And so um what we did is we step back and we said okay how how should we make sure that our product roadmap is now really oriented toward what is no longer a visionary idea of the future. Um I. E. Hybrid work or remote worker working from anywhere but now actually a necessity for every corporation and um and you know we spent Basically a decade and a half trying to convince everybody that the future was work anywhere at any time 24/7 you can access information from anywhere and now that was no longer a strategic advantage for companies, it was just like definition early how you worked. So we we basically you know we looked at our whole product strategy we we got into a number of new markets um as a result of the pandemic and where we thought work was gonna be changing. Um And uh and now we're gonna well into that road map of just trying to reimagine how our company is gonna want to work with all of their data in a secure way with more automation with more intelligence, with more collaboration from again any device anywhere anytime. So has selling actually gotten making the pitch gotten easier to large companies? Yeah I mean we're basically you know the pitch is sort of now established and it's sort of the default, it's you don't have to pitch cloud computing anymore, you don't have to pitch remote work anymore. You don't pitch digital transformation anymore. Now it's the nuances of what are you adding to uh you know, to the I. T. Architecture that that wasn't possible for and are our single mission is that we think there's a tremendous amount of data that is being created all around the world that's incredibly valuable and right now it's fragmented across lots of different systems and so our platform is meant to go and simplify that problem to help companies actually get more value out of all of the data and the content that they're working with. Okay question for erin and about his tweets, can we keep the tweets out of it or? Okay. He's also very eager to talk about twitter and the deal. So if you Hi dom um Aaron, good to see you again, I'm doing well, doing well. Um I'm just curious uh with starboard, you know, having dealt with activist shareholders myself. Yeah, it wasn't fun Pandora but um just curious what's your take on that that you brought it up and I thought it was. Yeah, I really didn't mean to bring it up when we when we edit that out of the um so yeah well so it was it was very much a learning experience um and uh you know, it's definitely not something that I would recommend anybody want, you know, want to go through, but, but, you know, I'm actually of two minds. Um, actually really, really like that. We have a form of capitalism that allows shareholders to participate, you know, as actively as as they see fit. And there's a nice game theory because, because, uh, you know, those shareholders will only do as much as they think other shareholders will support. Um, and so you, you sort of have, like, there's a nice system to it. Um, and in this case, we had a shareholder that we actually work pretty collaboratively with, and eventually, we sort of divergent views of where we wanted to take the company long term and kind of our strategy versus theirs. Uh, and, um, and so, unfortunately couldn't then negotiate any further. We couldn't kind of align on, on a path. And so then I had to go to an actual proxy fight where, you know, basically everybody gets to vote. And, um, and unfortunately we, we sort of handily won the vote, but in the process, you know, it's a year long of, you know, engagement of just constant back and forth and debating, you know, lots of minutia about the business. Um, and, you know, what, what happened in a phone call between you and the act. I mean, it's kind of bizarre, the level of depth gets into, um, when actually really, it's like a fundamental vote of, you know, do you like this strategy or do you like the activist strategy? Uh, and so learned a ton, uh, mostly how to try and avoid, you know, getting into the situation in the first place. And, um, but I do, I like the element of capitalism that that sort of affords us disability where shareholders have a voice. Um, and, and can, you know, sort of sway companies obviously in the case of maybe pandora or other, you know, companies that, that maybe didn't play out as positively, um, from a strategic standpoint. So we've seen plenty of examples where that can veer companies completely off course, um, which is incredibly, you know, um, you know, disheartening. Okay. So it was a learning experience experience. Okay, one more quick question for you. You, you missed the session we had here last night because you were too busy tinkering with the light switch at your hotel. Um, but we had this very heated discussion on, you know, the, the tech exodus or supposed tech exodus way from Silicon Valley. Um, what, what has kept you in Silicon Valley? And I remember by the way, the first time I met you, you guys were still in the building with fries were fried electronics rest in peace. Was, so you've been there for a while. What was that a pandemic loss or was that before? The pandemic? That was okay. Um, so, uh, you know, I mean, a lot of, a lot of reasons why we're still, I'm, I'm personally still in the valley, you know, friends, the weather, uh, nostalgia. So I think there's a long list of those things. I do think that the push for hybrid or remote work is a boon for just the globe, you know, the fact that anybody anywhere can participate in, in, you know, technology companies, uh, that, that, you know, normally would have been very, very constrained to a very limited amount of geography. I think this is a great thing for, for society, for business, for technology. Um, I, you know, a friend, uh, sort of considers it a great way to export hopefully better cultures to companies all around the world if you have a company that is not very innovative that maybe, you know, oriented around micromanagement and, you know, you know, not, not a lot of transparency, not a lot of collaboration. Um, you know, they now have to compete with a company that will, will hire people remote and uh, and everybody has to sort of upped their game because we've now sort of exported, exported, you know, hopefully more modern ideals about business and, and how companies and cultures work. So I see that as a great thing and um, uh, but you know, for me personally, it's, it's hard to beat the bay area. Well, um, we're really happy you came to ask. Thank you. Good to see you on stage, not just on twitter was like the first time. So good to be out of the house. It's been getting really kind of crazy out there. Thanks.

Lila Ibrahim, COO, DeepMind 
Richard Socher, CEO, you.com 
Moderator: Verne Kopytoff, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Delivering On A.I’s Promise

it's good to see everybody. Thank you Layla and Richard for coming, appreciate uh one housekeeping note will be asking the audience to want some questions, questions at us towards the end of the session? And so please have some good ones ready? Uh for Layla and Richard uh to start off with um you know, since we're talking about a eyes, you know, fantastic promise, uh what is the milestone sort of the big sci fi achievement that would make you say eyes promises is finally realized that, wow, it's here, Richard, um I think AI and the definition of AI is actually continuously changing to what we are just not quite able to do yet. So as soon as we actually solve something, it's just a large language model that can write text for you and an entire essay, we don't barely call it AI anymore. So I think we we keep shifting the definition of AI and we're gonna keep doing that and we see a I right now already writing proteins generating photo realistic images based on a simple description uh and so many more things that would have been impossible 5 10 years ago. And I think as we as we keep doing that, well, we'll keep pushing that definition of what A G. I. Or artificial general intelligence might be. Thanks for having me here. It's good to be back in the United States. Deepmind is headquartered in London and actually our goal is solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity. I kind of audacious goal? Um but quite exciting. So I think that's actually my answer to your question is can we use artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence to understand the way the universe works. Can we understand better understand chemistry, biology, physics, and can we use that to solve world problems and uh issues like life sciences, better understand disease, climate sustainability. And I think that ability to use um a more generalized intelligence uh to augment human knowledge to have some of these breakthroughs um is really going to be quite spectacular. And and how many years do you think it will be to get to general Intelligence? Uh It's anyone's guess right now. Um we were quite excited. I think the pace of advancements, I think as Richard mentioned, um it's speeding up. And so I think there's a lot of new approaches that are happening. The field is um getting more active. So it's quite an exciting time right now and um finding and I'm sure we'll get into this, but it just means that we have to continue investing more in some of the responsibility and ensuring that we are actually solving problems and not creating more. And and Richard, you've you've had some sort of spicy things to say about what some companies are doing in ai what what what's the beef? Yeah, I think ai right now is this kind of dual state, on the one hand, you have uh research towards a gi and continuously harder goals. The other hand is here, right? It's changing all our lives as we speak every time we make a search there a lot of Ai models. And unfortunately right now AI is often uh trying to just suck you into engagement loops online and a lot of very smart people at various companies and other search engines and social networks mostly try to spend time on getting you to spend more time looking at content, eventually click on an advertisement. And I think that's not ideal. I think it's important that as the I influences us, we need to have some explicit control over it. So at dot com and you search engine, we actually give you explicit control and you say, oh you want to see more Reddit results or less twitter or vice versa. You can actually up and down vote the rancor and change the neural network that you know, basically influences your information diet. And I think that's an important aspect of Ai that people that are influenced by it have some control over it and Atlanta, what are your thoughts on that, you know, Ai for good versus ai forgetting to click on more ads. Um, well and and that's really when I, so I have 30 years of experience in technology prior to deep mind and it was one of the reasons I chose to actually join this organization was because I felt like the mission was really what I was looking for, of how to bring my experience in tech and really focus on the impact that Ai can have. Um we're unique in the way that Deepmind works in which we are very much a research focused organization of kind of a bottoms up and top down and when we start new areas of research, we really think through what are the potential impacts and from the beginning design in a lot of the parameters that we want to consider around what might the risks be. Um where do we not have expertise that we want to bring in and who are the partners that we might want to work with um to help take some of the technology forward so that it does have the type of positive impact into society. And what what what do you think could be done to encourage ai for good more of it. I mean obviously like I said a lot of, a lot of it now is being done to get you to click more on facebook or on on ads. Is there anything specific that can be done? I think a lot of this right now is about um collaboration and um awareness. So when um the founders of the mind, I was we were comparing notes from 10, 10 plus years ago when the company was founded and at the time they had a hard time getting investments. In fact some of they were somewhat nervous to tell even their professors at the time what they were going to uh go do and start this this company at this at that time I was actually in venture capital in Silicon Valley and a I wasn't necessarily on our radar as something that an area we wanted to invest in. And I mean you just heard Richard like rattle off a bunch of examples of how ai has The terminology has advanced in people's understanding even my 12 year old daughters, my twin daughters like they know you know this is just all around them and how they interact with devices and what they're learning in schools etcetera. So a lot has changed in the past decade. So I would say that awareness is increasing increasing which is an important part of it. But I think collaborations are our key. Um Can I may I give an example? Okay, so um one of the areas that we've been working on in Deepmind is we initially started off with an environment of simulated environments and gaming just to try to develop new methodology around artificial intelligence systems And instead of so trying to innovate in that space, we then wanted to apply that more generally to real world problems. So we took on an area of protein folding um and protein you say, what is what are proteins? They're basically the building block of life. And if you can predict a three D structure of a protein, you can better understand its function, you can better understand disease, which comes with therapies, you can understand um how to deal with industrial waste. There's all sorts of interesting opportunities now Scientist biologist have been working for over 50 years to try to solve the protein folding prediction problem with our advanced Ai systems. We were able to work with biologists to make great advancements. We about a year ago we gifted to the world a database of millions of proteins and have been working with organizations were providing the um the model predictions but we're not the ones to be able to take this. This really is a collaboration and it's an opportunity to be equitable and access to the protein. So for example we've been working with a neglected disease folks to help democratize some of the understanding of diseases and drug discovery as an example. Um or we're actually working with an enzyme innovation center that is working on plastic eating enzymes. So we were able within days to provide 100 proteins where that they can start doing their research. So I think this type of collaboration public private collaboration, we're accelerating. We're leapfrogging areas of work that have people have had bottlenecks and trying to make some of these advancements. Really good organizations, smart people And this is a great example of where technology can help augment human understanding to benefit the world. And uh the protein space is really interesting at Salesforce research. Actually one of my last project when I was chief scientist there was to build a large language model similar to the large language models that can now right text If you actually are not familiar with this, you can go to you dot com slash right and have a whole blog post written for you. Uh but that same technology you can use to write english sentences. You can also use to write proteins. And so we actually then synthesize these proteins and generated completely new kinds of proteins in the wet lab that are inter bacterial and have, I think a lot of potential to change all of medicine. So it's one of those really interesting ones to get to your earlier question. I think ethics is becoming more and more important, especially in that part of the eye that really does influence our lives and it is essentially still just a tool and it's only as good as the systems, the people and the data that feed it and work with it. And so I think it's it's extremely important that we make it more transparent uh and also collaborate and and how do you, how does deep mind handle the problem or the challenge of of ethics when it comes to um yeah, you know, again, I'm fairly new to this field. So my experience in tech and when I was looking at where to it did, did I really want to spend this part of my career, like the prime of all this experience and apply it into artificial intelligence and you know, there were a lot of organizations at the time and I honestly, the more I learned about artificial intelligence, the more uncertain I got Like um and I kept thinking about this is the world my daughters are going to live in and can they go to put them to bed at night and they know what mommy was working on. And so I actually, when I was interviewing at deepmind, I spent about 50 hours interviewing just to make sure that was the field I wanted to go into. Was this the organization? And did I think I could have an impact and I often describe it as almost like a moral calling of yes, this um, I felt like there was something to contribute here from my experience in bringing new technologies um, into, into market and what do you mind? What I've been really excited about is from the very founding of the company, uh ethics and what we actually call it, pioneering responsibly. There are two of our values. Um but it's one of our first principles um and we think about things in terms of responsible governance. Like I mentioned earlier having these multidisciplinary teams of people that talk about our work very early on, not bolted on. We bring in outside experts as needed um responsible research because we are a research led organization. This is, you know, we've partnered with organizations like women in Machine learning. Um Deep Learning INDABA, which is an african effort to try to help the artificial intelligence that the computer scientists kind of come up to speed on the researchers on the latest trends co founded by some of our employees and then we've also do a lot of work around socio technical research, so areas of like queer fairness and D colonial ai and then the final area responsible governance, responsible research and then responsible impact. In the example of Alpha fold, our alpha fold system in collaboration with the outside world. To take try to understand what are the root node problems that we can deal and open up new fields of science again, to try to benefit a broader, broader societal impact. Let's go to audience questions. If anyone has a question, please look out for one of our assistants who has a microphone and paddle anyone. Thanks so much love this panel. Mat McElwain with madrona lila, super interested in how what you've been doing with alpha fold has been pushed by the competition from Rosetta fold at the Institute of protein design in Seattle. And not only from a research perspective, but from an open source perspective in terms of you all being more proactive about open sourcing after Rosetta fold took that path. Um, so if I can, I wasn't sure about your question, but maybe what I can do is one of the things that I mentioned is we really think about the responsibility all the way through and we wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing could go out into the world and uh how could we ensure that it would be used for good and mitigate risk because we had spent the majority of deepmind history focused in simulated environments and this was really one of the first broad scaled impacts. We wanted to take a very thoughtful approach to how we did this. Um we're not a traditional organization in that sense and I would actually say even being based in europe versus being based in the U. S. Has some difference in how we approach this rolling out of the technology and the collaborations that we have. We're approaching one year since our alpha fold system launched. And actually it's been quite exciting to see. Um I am generally, you know, with my background in tech, I love seeing so much goodness happen. Um and I think that when more organizations participate that it actually helps make us all better. Um the fact that we're having conversations about ethics and we're having comp conversations about ownership of your privacy etcetera. I think these are really good things because that's going to help hold us all accountable. I do love the push to open source more. It's kind of fascinating. But whenever someone has An incredible new capability, it usually only takes 3-12 months for someone else and another organization to replicate that capability and then usually open sources. So just today, actually hugging face. Open source, one of the largest language models. Full disclosure is one of my favorite investments. Um but you know, they are now at the very forefront and all the models, many from different organizations are put out there on the hugging face uh hub to be able to be explored by everyone else. And now that people used to think you couldn't train these very large foundational models in an open way but they showed that it is possible. So it's a very exciting time for ai to move forward quickly. Last question. Hi Jim Swanson from johnson and johnson. So very familiar with the protein folding. We're doing a lot of good work. I think party with you guys. Um one of the things that we continue to watch for is bias nous in the data either unintended or intended. Can you talk a bit more about what you're doing to look at uh parody of data to make sure bias is not built in and how you're assessing that over time and what should everybody should be looking for in that and that's important space. Go ahead. Richard. Yeah. Boy Quick. Please we only have 45 seconds. Yeah boy. Um we can talk for an hour about um bias. Yeah. As you know, uh many of you here are familiar with kind of the problem of thinking of your training. The model to predict the beauty of a person for instance and silly classifies that were trained. But the training data was just uh data samples from past beauty pageants that didn't have any woman of color in the dataset. And so they classify would not be able to possibly say a woman of color can be beautiful, which is terrible. And so this is just one of the many examples of bias is the same thing happens in giving out loans uh and you know restricting people in different areas of the world from getting loans or just in the wrong zip code because the classifier picked that kind of bias up from past uh biased samples and and data in the world. And so it's a problem that has no silver bullet. You have to really look into each industry and very carefully understand who is infected by that classifier or that machine learning algorithm and then do your best to try to mitigate and try to sample data from other areas or just get rid of certain features entirely. That might be relevant but would then result in a racist or sexist. I want to thank you we are out of time. I want to I want to thank both of you for talking about ai with us and thank you very much

Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Google 
Interviewer: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2022: Organizing The World’s Information

Hey. So Alan says good morning. Um, I want to start with a quick question for you. How many things have you googled this morning so far today. What 45, would you mind sharing the last thing you googled? Um oh boy, the last thing I googled was uh, someone said uh, this thing is running on tech me, can you go take a look? And I'm like, okay, I don't know what it is. So I went and googled it. We'll find it. Of course. Exactly. All right. So we had a chance to talk in new york a couple of months ago, which was really interesting. Um, and you gave me uh, you know, some insight and previews into some of the technology you're working on and the advances in search. And I want to dive right into that for instance, you demonstrated um this new type of image search that you're marrying with uh the shopping function on google where you can take a picture of an image or even of a pattern and you and connect it to something that you might buy. You know, something that you're looking for. Could you just talk through the technology that's behind that, the advance that that represents and you know, where you see that path going. Because I think that illustrates sort of, you know, some of the progress you're making research. Okay. I think the example I gave you was I took a picture of a rug in the room and said, uh girl you should help me find blind matching, which may not be a testimonial to my credentials and interior decorator. But uh, the technology behind this is amazing. Imagine allowing a user to express their intent, but taking an image and appending to it, the need for blinds or curtains. Uh, so that level of expressivity requires first of all, a ton of underlying technology to be able to take the description of that rug. A picture is worth 1000 words translated into a query append to it blinds and be able to shop for blinds matching the drug. And that's brian that's an evolution of the expressivity that we're bringing to users over the time. If you go back 25 years, you met Mandela, the artist era, Anyone here remember, I remember there's a couple of people here who are over the age of 30, evidently. Uh, so so back then your type queries like pyramids height and you've got a slew of blue links that contain the world's pyramids in height and you hope for the best. Then we opened it up, especially using voice to let users be more expressive and they would say things like what is the height of the great Pyramid of Giza. And you had, they expected you to say 455ft not regurgitate a whole bunch of pages. So we opened up expressivity for users using natural language understanding, uh, Voice became a powerful driver of that in some countries, we're seeing 30% of all queries, voice queries, right. And the next step in the journey is images and being able to search by image. But really the practical use cases like the one described. Yeah, well, just to stick with the voice thing for a second because another thing that you, you that we talked about that's really interesting is that younger users are using search in different ways and sometimes surprising and sometimes challenging to your, your algorithms. But maybe you could just, you know, elaborate on that, how people in the developing world, for instance, for instance, are using search in a different way and how you have to revise the we all keep learning over and over again. Is that new internet users don't have the expectations and the mindset that we have become accustomed to. Right? So, so I mentioned that if a third of your queries of voice queries, that's not typical in uh, in Western europe and in the United States. Right. So, uh, having rich expressivity through voice that comes naturally to them. Uh, the other thing is as a result, the queries they ask are completely different. They're not, You know what you and I used typing 2.6 keyword queries. They don't do that. Uh, beyond that, younger people don't come with preset expectations. So I'll give you just two examples in our studies, something like almost 40% of young people when they're looking for a place for lunch, They don't go to google maps or such. They go to Tiktok or instagram. So think about it. Right? So the journey begins in different forms than before, visually rich forms. Right? I'll give you a different example. Uh, and this is some has to do with my maps, responsibility. People are coming online for the first time, but it's young people, new users in emerging markets, they've never seen a paper map yet. Maps products today looks like a paper map stuck on the phone, which is wrong. Right? So we're not meeting the user's expectations. We got to change so they don't have the contact that you or I might have. That's right. They don't have this notion of the projection of and so we have to conjure up completely new expectations. And that takes altogether new technology underpinning this and I want to ask a follow up about that. I just want to remind everybody, I'm sure that there are people with questions for Prabhakar. So we will have some time for that, raise your hand if you'd like a mic and we'll get a mike handler to you and then we can call on you. So I know that you recently announced, um, some coming advances in map technology, more immersive types of maps that combine, uh, you know, augmented reality and maybe you could explain how that works. Let me give, give you a preview of how that's working and it's still early stage. Right? So the first use case we tackled was one that may be common to some of you, you're in a large city for the first time? For me, it happens anytime I go to London use the tube, I come out of the tube and maps is telling me to go that way except I don't know which way that is. So we brought an augmented reality uh, with an experience where for directions, you hold up your phone and it figures out exactly which way that way. So you don't walk 50 yards the wrong way and then turn around, which is experience. I'm sure you can all relate to, Right? So that's a powerful use of augmented reality in real time. In fact, it became so compelling that users uh, using it would walk into other pedestrians. So we had to introduce afford ince's to make them put down the phone every now and then to look where they were going, right uh then we would all put down our phone every now and then. Especially when walking in a busy city as somebody walking around new york a lot, we have to avoid people. Good idea. Uh, the other thing we're doing is bringing in three d maps uh, for, to begin with in five cities, but later this year we hope to get to 50 of key uh, points of interest. So that if it's Hyde Park in London for instance, you can get a good preview of it. Get a good sense of what it's like, is it crowded etcetera before you even get there and augment that with real time information like how busy is a place and this is actually super important, especially during the pandemic. People are very concerned about whether the place is too crowded and so on. So bringing all that information together leads to some very exciting experience. So you're talking you're using the word augmented a lot, we're talking a lot about metaverse here at this this gathering this week. Google is not talking so much about metaverse. You're you're you're advancing the technology in ways where it's we're going to have an altered or enhanced form of reality. But how do you think about that? The augmented versus you know, the metaverse, like totally digital realm. Yeah, I don't think it's essential to presume that you're restricted to an alternate universe. We still want to serve users in the real world, but using these technologies of augmented reality that we've actually been working on for many years, some of you have heard of google class that we were working on over a decade ago. So the idea is to bring these A. R. And we are techniques really to deliver services to users in the real world. So, you know, a lot of what you're describing is a I behind the scenes. I think people don't really see all the furious paddling below the surface that goes on with with with developing search, but like you've been, you know, you're an academic for a long time before you took over this role running, you know, a giant company, a giant business operation. Now, what you're seeing with ai and how it's combining with sort of like connecting the dots of what you're talking about. What can we expect of where searches going like over the next couple of years and how we're gonna be using it and how it's gonna be, you know, interacting with how businesses use it as well. Yeah, I'll give it a shot. Right. Uh you're absolutely right that the underpinning of a lot of this is fairly complicated machine intelligence that very few people actually understand. Uh just the notion of language. Do we really understand language? Uh we give the illusion of understanding language, but we don't actually uh as the models ai models get larger and larger, we get deeper and deeper understanding of the nuance of language so that we can tell the difference between, for instance, ah what causes Alzheimer's disease, to what is the most common cause of Alzheimer's disease. Right. And being able to tease out these nuances uh requires very fine grained understanding of language. And you've seen us announce a lot of breakthroughs and natural language understanding that I think will let users get more and even more expressive about their intent, Right? So that's one trend that I expect to see continuing the other trend that absolutely will continue is users bringing in more rich content, images, the analysis and understanding of video to the same level we did with documents. So I'll give you an example if you go to google now and say how do I change a flat tire? Well in the old days we used to give you back pages and then we started showing you videos of how to change a flat tire. But now we've actually analyzed the video to say, well seven seconds in we tell you about loosening the lug map 11 seconds and it's about raising the jack and on and on some of the hubcap etc. So getting that level of deeper understanding is the journey was still on, right? But we want to get to the point where you should be able to say, how do I do? You know? So if I'm stuck on lug nuts, um, to the exact point right, and all of this requires prodigious amounts of ai uh, to get done, raise your hand for mike handler if you have a question. So, you know, what you're describing is spectacular and amazing. It's also, you know, the more that the algorithms understand us and understand what we want even more than we want ourselves. You know, also tends to raise the question of privacy about how much you know about us, how much data you're you're processing about us to reach these conclusions and obviously google gets a lot of scrutiny for that. How are you thinking about it? How do you, how do you sort of give us what we want without exploiting it? And you know, what's the, what's the current state of thinking in google about how to do that? That's a great question. Uh So thank you for that. Let me begin by getting uh putting out of the way the obvious Google does not sell your data, your search queries, but then I'm going to give you a personal anecdote that seems to fly in the face of this. Uh some weeks ago, my wife at home searched for Roomba vacuum cleaners. And then for some days after that, whenever I was at home, I would get ads for Roomba vacuum cleaners. And you say, aha, caught google selling my wife Square isn't also somehow figured out and I was my wife. Right. Actually, no, that's not what happened. Right. Uh So step back, maintaining trust on the internet requires robust privacy prince. How do you know? It wasn't what happened uh because we don't celebrate as you know what you do and don't like, we don't know, but but uh you know, if you think about a bit about it, uh you look at what's going on behind the cows, uh there's actually players in the industry that fingerprint hardware devices in this case, the router at home and use that to track users across the internet. Uh This is a fairly unfortunate practice. It's a shady practice because users aren't aware this is happening. They aren't told this. They have no control to opt out of it. So that's not good. We think the answer actually is comprehensive privacy, like regulation that shuts these practices down because that's what you need to restore the public's faith in the internet. And so so we're all for get you know, so you might might surprise you to know that I'm arguing for regulation, but I think that's the right answer. Uh, so big journalism scoop potential there. Who's who's tracking uh, baca's information. But also, so you you favor privacy regulation. What do you think are the chances that there's going to be movement on that? In Washington? I am optimistic. But in that there'll be as much moment in Washington as editor's sounded tentative when he said he was optimistic. I think the emphasis was on movement in Washington. Yeah, right, let's um, tackle quickly a related topic misinformation, which is on everybody's minds. Uh, we have fortune just around a big story about misinformation and disinformation, which is permeating all parts of our lives. And and as usual, people are looking to google for leadership in the digital realm on this? What, you know, what are your internal discussions? What are the actions you're taking to address misinformation to help people guide, you know, get guided through to accurate information. This is a great question, because I often get the question, why don't you just detect all the misinformation. Just shut it down, right? Uh, if I knew how to do that, I would The problem is what philosophers call the relativism of truth. So let me give you an example. If you tell, if you ask google a question, how far is it from When they like to Paris? We would give you the answer 10,000 something km. Right. If you ask, what's the Communist cause of Alzheimer's disease will say, well, we really don't know because we don't. And the reason we don't know is the way we answer all questions is by assembling a consensus of historically expert opinion, historically dependent right on on the distance between manila and paris. There is consensus That we can assemble and and all the computers 10,000 so many kilometers on the question of the communist cause of Alzheimer's. you're not able to assemble such a consensus. Now, what that means is there will be cases where we have to admit that we don't know the answer. And so we have additional metadata on every search result that says about this result and you can go in there and explore whether it's from a reliable source, how long the sword's been around, whether it's a secure site, etcetera. There will be cases when events are developing so fast that it's impossible for us to compute what's right and wrong. So was this from two months or so ago was the hospital in Mariupol bound by Russian forces, right? And until consensus was established, we would put up a banner saying results here are changing really fast. We don't know. So treat the following with caution. Right? So that's our way of telling users caveat emptor. So there will be cases, we'll have to do that. How many people are involved in that? How automated is that system to determine something so subtle and complicated? It is by and large gets done mechanically. But there'll be difficult policy choices like when the european union said, you need to get rid of all Russian State Media, right? We had some difficult choices because we do stand for free and open access to information. If you're a journalist, you do want to have access to Russian State Media, we don't think we have the right to shut it down, but we get we get a court order, we will do that. So in europe, we actually took it off and reported to the Harvard uh, lumen database. Right? So those are some difficult decisions. We had to thread right. In other cases, you know, it goes pretty academically great. Well, Prabhakar thanks so much for joining us and for shedding some light on not only what's happening with search now, but where it's going really exciting stuff and thanks for being here. Thanks, Take care

Roy Bahat, Head, Bloomberg Beta 
Lucy Guo, CEO, Moment
Drew Oetting, President, 8VC 
Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Is The Great Tech Exodus Really That “Great”? 

 Is The Great Tech Exodus Really That “Great”? 

Raj Subramaniam, CEO, FedEx 
Interviewer: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Office, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: A New Era In Global Delivery

thank you so much for being here and for the excellent outfit coordinator. That good good on that one really. It's great to have you here, you know, over the years we've had many C. E. O. S. Who replaced founders but I think this is the first time we've had a Ceo who replaced the founder who was in the job for 50 years. I mean how how do you replace a legendary founder? Well you don't that's that's that's the first order answer. But the great news here is that I have had the wonderful opportunity to work for fred and work with fred for so long and especially the last three years when the succession planning was pretty much telegraphed and uh you know, opportunity to work very closely together. Especially I did some some of the most important work in the history of our company as we delivered the vaccines and health care stuff all around the world. And it's been just an incredible journey with him and you know he's not only just Ceo school, its history school, his geography school, it gives you a whole different person and he's not going away. I know you say you know you're still here and you know obviously it's a wonderful opportunity. I had a mentor who once said that you should choose your predecessors carefully. You may have failed on that score. No I did not. You know I'm I'm totally what happens in the future. I'm totally grateful for the fact that I've had that opportunity to work with. So as you heard from dan from for just a minute ago we've had a fair amount of conversation about is there isn't there a recession this afternoon? You have better data than any of us, do you? You have a sense. But that was a fascinating set of charts that was put up right now. I was always interesting to see. Uh so you know, from our point of view, actually, if you look around the world, uh you know, china went through a pretty tough period in in april may all the numbers of volumes were down and then, you know, come back now and the manufacturing is back online, but at the same time the consumer demand is now definitely slowing. As we just saw, europe is in the war situation uh with the energy crisis definitely driving all aspects of that economy down and us is kind of somewhere in the middle right now, the consumer side of the equation, the spend is there, but there's a dichotomy between higher wage earners and lower wage earners and they're also between goods and services, there are more being spent on services now, whereas goods and so that's um that's also happening. There's a little bit of a reset on e commerce before the pandemic. E Commerce represented about 16% of retail at the height of the pandemic, it reached 22% is now back down to 20%. So yes, it's a little bit of reset going on but still significantly higher than 16. So hopefully that gives you a flavor of yeah, so it sounds like there's some indications of slowing but not not clearly recessionary. Well I don't know whether our volumes across all lines of business and just reported quarter was all down and so we we we experienced that and so again you know we like to tack up the numbers and when the quarter gets done and we can technically say one way or the other but the numbers are volume numbers were down in the fourth quarter of our fiscal fourth quarter. So you know supply chains used to be a forbidden topic on stages like this. Nobody wanted to talk about it or hear about it and and and now it's kind of uh the topic what are you seeing improvement in in predictability? Yeah. You know it's kind of crazy. I mean I must have you know someone just woke up in a different place where supply chains, everyone wants to talk about it. But the two aspects of supply chain to be honest with you, the first one is really the supply chain manufacturing especially the high value goods like semiconductors and so on and that's the classic supply chain bull whip effect where the first the the demand went down, the supply went down, the demand went back right up but the supply never caught up and so we are now seeing you know 12 18 months gap and it was for that second was this physical transportation issues especially in the port of Los Angeles and um you know, so really the issues were in the 1st 20 or 30 miles from the ports from there, our systems work or we flew over that over that So that's going to get resolved probably faster and then probably the next 6-8 months. But that's you know, that's that's what we're thinking. 6-8 months for the those uh first friends, the semiconductors and such. It'll be much longer, take longer time because it takes a long time for manufacturing capable. So so you know, we all think of Fedex as the planes flying into Memphis and so forth. But there's an enormous amount going on there. I know you've made a lot of technology investments. Can you talk about how Your business is going to change over the next decade because of technology? Yeah, I mean just make up one broad point here the last 15, 15 years, you know, there's so much value being created by tech platforms and digital companies. It's been amazing to see how, you know, how they've succeeded. Um you look ahead, I feel like this is now a time for physical companies who adopt digital transformation and then combine both both assets. I think this is a great opportunity for those companies to create value and it's not gonna be easy because you know, but I think done right, this could be significant value creation in this regard. So give us some examples of the kind of value that will yeah. As well as you know, so for example, we have, you know, more than 15 million packages that travels through our system every single day and each of those packages are scanned 20 or 25 times. We're sitting on a lot of insights about the supply chain every single day. So we are now creating common data platforms and working strategically with our customers, some of the top retailers in this, in this world. For example, the minute somebody orders something on online on their on their side, that information is passed to us and we can immediately say based on weather patterns, based on traffic patterns, based on our network, their network and say to get to the service level commitment to your end consumer, you need to fulfill that from from Chicago or Dallas or wherever the opportunity. Maybe the other thing is information to us. We get that information 12 hours before. Before that before, before we used to get when we used to get before that's a lifetime for Fedex and we can manage then we can optimize our resources. And thirdly then consumer and we are now using the latest and greatest in data and Ai and Ml to be able to provide predictability and visibility for that, you know that shipment to come when they come to the house visibility where I'll be able to track what you're shipping for me that you always add it. But now we can, you know, we can tell you more and more accuracy or when that package is going to come to you, we're gonna have photo on delivery and you're gonna show up on your doorstep and you know, just, you know, so they just peace of mind and then consumers, so you can see supply making, supply chains Smarter is a new mission. And can that technology ever reach the point where where it becomes a differentiator for Fedex where I as an e commerce buyer can say, I really want my stuff to come to me by Fedex, not ups not yeah, it's a very good question. It's already a differentiator today from the shipper side of the equation because what we're not talking about is, you know, we're really making efficiency and, and visibility now we have to keep adding more and more and more value to the end. Consumer, before we get to the state that you're talking about, we need to get there. But I think it's, uh, but you know, there's just by itself won't be enough. But ultimately, the consumer has so much choice and visibility and predictability, photo and delivery and other aspects of it, potentially there could be a day where they say I send it this way, not that way, I want to talk a little bit about geopolitics because Fedex is such an important part of sort of the global economy. I had the opportunity to be with fred smith on the day that Russia rolled into Ukraine and of course it was, he was the perfect person to be with that. You can imagine talking to him about the effects of that. But how is it changing your business? I mean Fedex really was the, was the marker of, of globalization and you're looking at a very different geopolitical world right now. Yeah, No, I think the globalization, the measure of global one measure of globalization is percentage of trade as a percentage of GDP and that actually peaked Like in 2010. And after that it's been pretty much flat a little bit up and down. So even today, uh, that's that's that's where it stays. And especially in the high value part of the trade, those numbers still holding up. It's not, there was a golden era from you know, 1980-2010, let's call it that or 75. That was, you know, there was a constant increase in, in the global trade as a percentage of GDP and especially the high value trade, the situation in in europe is, I mean, first of all as a human tragedy. And uh, so our first priority was making sure that our team members are taken care of. And um, so that's what we did. But in addition to that we had to, you know, we had all our, you know, our flights that or, or flow um, Ukraine we had to reroute it. We have been spending a lot of time and effort spend, you know sending relief material and in fact we just last week we had a airplane go down there to send more relief and things like that. So we're doing a lot in that front. But from a pure globalization perspective we are in a stall area right now. We're not totally declining at this point. I wouldn't say that. But what's going to happen here also is that the patterns of trade are going to change and whether it is a near shoring or re shoring. So maybe more regional trade and the good news for us is that the fact that we have networks everywhere that we can move our capacity and connected to. It doesn't, it doesn't hurt your business. No, we we can move much faster than manufacturer seeing that happen, ensuring, ensuring we watch it very, very carefully and add capacity to write notes and connected to our network. And how do you think about china these days? I mean again fred smith was one of the leaders in getting china into the W. T. O. Uh you have major investments there but a lot of companies are kind of rethinking their connections with china in the wake of what happened in the Ukraine wondering, well what if this had been xi in Taiwan, how are you thinking about it? Well, you know the chinese business is quite large as is the case for most companies. Again, it's the manufacturing ecosystem. And so we, we are working with our, I mean as you said, our customers businesses. It's a referendum every single day on our network is what we see on our, on our, on the networks. I think the the thing that we should remember here is that you know, there is such a strong ecosystem for manufacturing in china. It's not so easy for somebody to just up and leave because suddenly then you are looking for all the parts that you need to make your product and you go, so it's a slow process. So yes there is, there has been some move to Vietnam, some of Southeast Asia, some move to India. But for the main, you know today, even today the Chinese manufacturing is I think 28% of the global manufacturing and still very large. Uh, Fedex has made an impressive commitment to reaching net zero by 2050 people don't normally think of Fedex as a politically correct uh, company or a awoke uh, woke company but, but explain what you're doing and why you're doing and why it's so important Islands. 2040 24, you've already moved it up. So no, it's uh, no, we have been, we've been working on this for quite some time. It's something that's near and dear to my heart the whole company. So you know the assets that we have in this business, we have 700 airplanes. We have 200,000 motorized vehicles. We have 5000 facilities and uh, so electrification on the, on the road is the way to go for us. And that's, that's the strategy on the facility side of the equation. You know, we're gonna make it carbon neutral. How about up in the sky? So that's the, that's the airplane is the trickiest one. Everyone talks about sustainable aviation fuels and we will obviously look at that. But the issue with S. A. S is one that the supply is only a very small compared to the demand. And then the green premium is, as it's called, is very high. So that's why we are now investing in fundamental research and we invested $100 million with and created the Yale Center for natural carbon capture. And then if we're building partners across our industry and you're doing so you don't see your name anywhere on it. It's the Yale center for natural carbon capture. The whole notion here is to get the aviation industry, you 2% 3% of emissions to be carbon neutral. And so we're working on that and then we're working with our customers really to truly for them to understand their carbon footprint so we can make their businesses carbon neutral and give them options to say, okay, do you want this is what the green shipping option could be there. There was a question right over here. Hey, uh, jake here again from North Dakota, we're going to solve your renewable diesel and aviation fuel problem with. Don't worry about that. But the question is, what's keeping you from completely being all in, at least in the metro's an electric? Like what is the, keeping you from keeping you from being all in on TVs or are you, we are, you, are, you know, we are, that's what we are. That's our, we're committed to going into electric vehicles by 2035. What's the limitations to get there? What's your biggest, it's the biggest issue really is the infrastructure needed to support the fleets that, you know, it's a massive fleet. So we need to have, it's got to be a public private event here. So that's, that's the limitation. Another question. Mac McKelvey question on the skies. What about drones? Yeah, Drones is a question that comes up often. It's, you know, anything that flies, we kind of know about the issue is purely, is, uh, you know, it's not the technical issues technically is available. It's a question of, you know, what makes sense. You know, doesn't make sense to send, you know, 50 million packages on drones or, you know, how do you scale it up? And so those are the kind of things. What's your guess? I think the, the real issue on the drones on the road. So we have something called Fedex Rocks. So it's a, you know, if you, if you haven't seen it just google it up. You'll tell you, you know those are, those are, you know, gets you on the road, you know get get to you know your pharmacy or your pizza or coffee or whatever and comes climb some stairs on your on your porch, opens the door here it is take it, it goes goes right back that kind of solutions And we're working with neuro on their their their product that those kind of drones on the road a little bit more scaling. I think that's, that's, that's a real office on the roads more than the sky. The sky will be specialized applications, healthcare, you know, and then specialist applications question back here. Hi, my name is Gary lauder lauder partners. Um, my, I am a frequent user of Fedex and ups and I found that both have had incredibly bad reliability lately. I've googled it to try to find out why it's a mystery. So could you help us understand? Yeah, thank you for the question. I think, you know, I think the reality is the last two years and we have had tremendous growth driven by e commerce and you know, in the last two years we've got $25 billion at the same time. The company, we just saw the labor labor was a big issue. So a year ago we went to a situation where we didn't have the right labor uh, to, to deal with the demand and that resulted in inefficiencies as well as uh, in the network. So that's now behind us uh services where we, that's our differentiation, that's our brand, that's where we stand for our purple promise. You have the people you need to do. Yes, we do. Yes. And is not going to have this problem again? Yeah, we'll make sure he doesn't know his problem again. I mean, you know, but we stand by our purple promise right back here Nathan Rosenberg from Insignia Raj. Um, I think there's a flip side of Alan's point about technology thinking back 30, 40 years. Uh, there was an envelope, it had documents in it and you guys promised to get it to the next place the next day. Obviously that business has probably gone away because of doc you sign and other kinds of technology. So what are the technological threats to Fedex business? You gotta be quick on this one. Okay. No, I think, I think you know, until we get beam me up scotty machine, you know that there's, you know, we move high value trade and they got to move and that's why the physical networks are so important. People try to kind of where we want and you know, see if they can do it without it, it's impossible. The physical networks are very important. But having data, having insights, having new solutions that right on top of that will give a complete value add uh, to what we already provide. On the physical side. Fred Smith did the job for 50 years. You're gonna do it for 50 years. I don't think I'll be alive 50 years. I don't know, maybe some technology here, but I'll work on it. Thank you so much for taking. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Dan Frommer, Editor-in-Chief, The New Consumer


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Frommer’s Guide To The New Consumer

Hi there. I'm dan Frommer, I am the founder and editor in chief of the new consumer and I'm very excited to debut a brand new consumer trends report for you right now. This is a world exclusive. So let's go. Um The covid 19 pandemic as we know is not over. But what we call economic Covid is mostly finished. The ο wave broke case records and my chart in fact, but consumer mobility remains very strong only down about 7% from normal this spring. According to Google e commerce growth had a massive spike early in the pandemic and growth has decelerated and those huge early spikes up and down for things like home goods and luggage have also normalized in the last few months. According to Ernest research, Restaurant dining is basically back to normal in the us just down 2% in June And air travel has now recovered about 90%. But uncertainty is still our reality. About half of us consumers pulled by Colin think the pandemic will still disrupt their lives for more than six months. Record inflation is here and the U. S. Consumer is feeling it Prices were up almost 9% in May. A 40 year record Still varies widely by category gas up almost 50%. But it's actually a good time to buy a TV right now. Americans. So the perhaps the most important part of our research is what we call the consumer trends survey twice a year. A company called to luna helps us pull more than 3000 U. S. Consumers about all kinds of topics. Um We just performed our last one a few weeks ago ending in june and this is one of the more interesting things we learned. We asked what's the most important problem in the US right now and almost half chose inflation is one of their top three. Um Up quite a bit from the last time we asked this question in december number two government and poor leadership. Covid fell to number four was previously number one. Late last year, I wanted to illustrate what inflation actually looks like. So for a for a very rough example, here is what the average US household annual spending looks like and this is your brain on drugs, this is what may's inflation numbers made the spending feel like again, here's how it feels. In our survey, more than 70% of consumers said that Over the past six months it feels like prices have increased a lot. So even though they're only up 9% across the board you over here, it still feels like a lot and that's up from 58%. Just last, November. only about a third of consumers say they feel moderately or optimistic moderately or very optimistic about their financial situation right now. Down from half in our survey last summer Gen Z and millennial consumers were raised on the Internet and they experienced the world differently. I think this is very important for us to grasp in the tech world we care because these generations represent about 40% of the us population and they're entering their prime spending decades. I love this one more gen Z and millennial consumers tell us they feel most like themselves online than offline. About 40% say they feel more valued for their work on the Internet, They're more likely to meet their closest friends online. Many feel more creative online. The majority tell us that they consider themselves a gamer, whatever that means to them. We didn't, we didn't ask them, but most Gen Z and millennial consumers consider themselves a gamer and more than 1/3 consider themselves a digital creator. E commerce continues to redraw the trillion dollar US grocery industry. Online grocery of course, got a huge boost early in the pandemic and has actually maintained most of it. This is spending data from earnest research, consumers love convenience and they love choice. Most of the people who say they switched to online grocery during the pandemic had stuck with it more than half say they still prefer it over their previous shopping techniques. I don't know what you want to call it routines. Uh, younger consumers gen Z, millennials plan to spend an impressive amount of their grocery bill online. We care because people buy groceries differently online than they do in person. Major implications for the retail world, Major implications for brand and tech. It is a fundamentally different user interface to shop here in the beverage aisle of my local air juan as it is to shop for beverages on Instacart. And there's a big share shift this money heads online. It doesn't just go to the e commerce website for the grocery store, It goes all over the place, it goes to Uber and Doordash, It goes to DTC brands last year. This time the big story was 15 minute delivery. Of course one of these companies is already out of business but we'll see what happens. There could be interesting something that means a lot to me. We've spent the last decade talking about how algorithmic news consumption is riding our brains well now we're buying food because stores are recommending purchases to us. Two thirds of millennials in our survey say that gross online grocery stores have a responsibility to recommend healthy food. I can bet you right now they're not plant based meat has potential but more innovation is definitely necessary beyond meat is a great proxy for the rise and now the plateau of plant based meat or fake meat, whatever you want to call it, retail remains a very important uh channel for discovery there about a third of U. S. Consumers in our survey last month. So they plan to eat more plant based foods over the next year. Tracks with younger consumers and also with higher earners. Perhaps no surprise there, most consumers say they're at least somewhat interested in plant based alternatives for meat or dairy. Why the number one reason they chose were health benefits, number two, better for the food supply and number three, better for the environment. Number three, not number one, those who are not interested say they just enjoy real meat or dairy, they don't like the taste, it's too expensive. In fact, it is often usually more expensive still than real dairy or meat. So if technology can get us to a point through economies of scale where plant based alternatives are cheaper, would people switch? Actually, the majority of gen z and millennials say they will switch, so we'll see what happens there, sustainability is not the consumer purchasing behavior right now, but it's increasingly part of the behavior about half of consumers say that they prioritize sustainability highest among millennials in our poll. It is already a top three purchasing priority for some people, not for most people, but for some and it's different by category cleaning supplies, baby food and beauty high up on the list and this is important, diehard sustainability consumers, if there is a downturn, if there is a recession, say they will actually prioritize it more than they are right now. So good for the planet. I hope the future of fitness still looks like a hybrid digital and gym combination. The gym membership is coming back to life. This is spending data from earnest research, home fitness had as we know, a huge early pandemic boost. Still growing just not as much as it was a year or two ago. Uh, most people who switched to working out at home during the pandemic have stuck with it more than 80% and most also still prefer. It almost 60% Felton of course was living in a pandemic dream and is now living the pandemic nightmare. Still growing number of subscriptions. But engagement is down a lot overall. Home fitness is still the story we believe. But most people who exercise still want some gym access. So very interested to see who develops that hybrid opportunity. I'm calling it the covid at home test is the gadget of the decade so far and has opened a new world of possibilities for at home testing. About 40% of our consumers in our polls say they've taken an at home covid test. Higher percentages among higher earners. A large percentage are comfortable performing more at home tests including nostril swabs, cheek swabs, urine samples. For what? Sorry? Why? Uh, number one reason to save time obviously also saves money and is more private. And for some things you can test more frequently. What tests are appealing viruses obviously beyond covid as well. Blood sugar, insulin cholesterol and vitamin levels. And also early screenings for things like cancer, Future of work. We talk about the future of work attitudes around work have changed. Perhaps permanently New York City subway ridership has recovered 60%, but office occupancy is only around 40%. The return to work is stalled, depends on the city though. Dallas and Austin are much higher than New York. I love this staff though 75% of consumers in our survey say they believe they should have the legally protected right to work remotely if technology and the nature of their work permits it. I think that's a strong statement even higher among women and millennials. But also they have the leverage right now unemployment at a record low. We see short staffing everywhere we go. So if there's a downturn, if that shifts a little bit, we'll see what happens to remote work and those legally rights, legal rights, weird times ahead. Uh Most consumers in our poll believe a recession is likely within the next year. And there has been a rapid rise of news articles about the recession. Obviously nobody knows, but we are not yet in a recession, consumers are still spending a lot of money according to spending data from earnest research. It is the first down market and perhaps the first sustained down market for many consumers, especially younger gen Z consumers. That's important. And also we've learned that things can lose value. Perhaps a valuable psychological shift. Things like sneakers and N. F. T. S not worth necessarily what people thought they were forever. Weird times. Like I said consumer sentiment at its lowest point right now since the university of michigan started tracking it. And as we head into another election season, we are still highly divided in this country. 39% of our consumers polled say they would vote for Donald Trump for president if he runs in 2024, undecided. We also asked who is the right leader for 2022. Uh, only four said Elon musk, but what do they know? Uh, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you to my partners coefficient capital for helping me with this research in this report. Once again, thank you to Fortune. And you can see all of these slides on my website at New Consumer dot com. Thank you.

Dario Gil, Director of Research, IBM 
Interviewer: Brian O’Keefe, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: When Does Quantum Become Real, And How?

When Does Quantum Become Real, And How?


Brainstorm Tech 2022: When Does Quantum Become Real, And How?


All right. I want to start with a quick show of hands how many people in this room think you can explain quantum computing. Nobody's raising their hands. How many people here have at least heard of a cubit? Alright, alright. That's pretty good progress. Yeah. Not the video game, the computing thing. Um So uh sorry, this is a pretty savvy group but they're still brave enough to admit they don't really understand quantum computing. So let's turn to you the expert first. Let's start with uh Maybe you could just give us a quick refresher course on what quantum computing is, what it means, how it works. You know how it's different from classical computing. Just like give us like that quick overview so we can dive into sort of the details. Well, the first thing to understand is that quantum computing is the first time that the category of computing and I mean computing with a capital C. Has branched. So that's not an everyday occurrence that that happens. And we moving forward, you already refer to the term that we will adjudicate to all the computers that we built to date, which will be called classical computers. And then there's this new branch called quantum computers. And it's you know, nothing less than a re foundation of the world of information technology. If you look at how we have built the modern information technology edifice, it actually began back to uh you know, fundamental idea that was put forward by live in. It's the great philosopher and mathematician co inventor of calculus with Newton. That envision envision it was, you know, creature of the renaissance. This idea of creating perfect logic. And he understood that you could encode almost all information in a in binary digit And the idea was you could reason over it and you could create this perfect reasoning machines. He didn't know how to build them. So it took until the 1940s with Claude Shannon and then on touring and others to start building and creating those ideas. And we introduced the term the binary digit, the bit, the zero and one. And in that abstraction we understood that the zeros and ones could be separated from their physical manifestation meaning hey, you could build a computer with vacuum tubes or you could build it with semiconductors and with transistors. And we've made, you know, the story of moore's law has been the story of making those bids more more efficient and cheaper and so on. At this separation between the zeros and ones and their physical manifestation bothered a number of physicists. And they started probing into this question. And it turns out long story short is that there is a relationship between physics and information and there's a set of properties from quantum physics and from physics in general uh called superposition entanglement and interference that get mixed with this idea of information such that we can represent it much more richly meaning instead of just having two states and build machines that process those two states. Now the information is more rich. The representation is more diverse and quantum computers are nothing less than the ability to create these new expanded representation of information to create these quantum bits that have an exponential number of states present in them. If you build the machines properly and to manipulate that information in such a way that you can perform computations that you simply couldn't do classically or to do them much more efficiently. So new generation of machines that have re founded the very idea of information. It doesn't even preserve the idea of the zero Under 1. Okay, so let's get quickly now into the central question of our discussion, which is when does it become real? And let's start with just is it real now? I mean like you know, I I've seen you know stories about mixed results in the comparison of quantum computing results versus classical computing in terms of where we aren't now with quantum computing but we have obviously IBM but google and Microsoft and amazon and a lot of inter backed startups investing a lot of money in this field. There seems to be a lot of their there. But what can we look at right now to see that uh that quantum is actually starting to go from theory to you know, brilliant theory to real world manifestation and and what are sort of some of the signposts that we're seeing that mark that progress. Well, first of all quantum computers are real and they exist right now. Just to give you some some grounding at IBM we have over 20 computers to 20 quantum computers right now on IBM cloud at clients and uh and the community can use every day all over the world again to give you a measure. 3.5 billion quantum circuits are run every day on IBM quantum computers. Since we put the first quantum computer on the cloud, it was May 2016 over one trillion quantum circuits have been run on actual quantum computers. We have gone from the first generation that we put out had just five cubits. We went from 5 to 27 last year we broke the 100 cubit barrier. We have now a system that has 127. This year we will deliver a system with 433 cubits. Next year there'll be one in 2023 with over 1000 and by 2025 or plan is to build a machine with over 4000 cubits. So first of all the reel machines, you can program them, you can run things on it. Over 1000 scientific publications have been run on IBM quantum computers as an example. So it's a real technology that is present. I would say the experimental aspect of building real devices and real quantum computers has been the food of the last 20 years But really has been the last decade and specifically the last 5-6 years will be seeing this very, very sophisticated advancement now at the same time no one has yet built quantum computers that for a practical application can outperform what you can do with a classical computer. That threshold, what we call quantum advantage is something that you know we're all hard at work on the field and that is expected. That certainly is going to happen this decade. But it's likely that some first demonstrations can happen as early as the next few years. So that's the big next milestone in the in the field. But there's now hundreds of thousands of people who are writing programs on quantum computers. Quantum computing is being taught in universities the world over and there's a very rich and energetic environment of venture capital as well and major companies. So I mean when you are you're talking about your roadmap for building these devices with more and more cubits Like I don't really understand what that means. Other than its more cubits. More cubits sounds better, sounds more powerful. But when you go from 127 Cubits processing power to 4000 express like how that makes a difference or you know does it just is it gonna be like a moore's law of cubits where we always need more and more cubits on you know or is there like a sort of threshold you need to meet to kind of do the things you need to do to get that quantum advantage. Yeah good question because there is an exponential underneath it. So the number, remember I told you that the number of states that you'll get to represent, you get to represent information more richly than with just zeros and ones. So to be precise the number of states you get to represent is two to the end where n is the number of Cubans. So that's an exponential right there and just a good number of states. So just translate that. So like if you're if you're analyzing a problem instead of two things at once, you can analyze infinite number based on how many cubits you have to process that. This scenario. That's right. So basically how an algorithm works in a quantum computer and it's gonna sound a little bit abstract for a second but just bear with me for a minute. So imagine for um for a second that you have a fear right in So picture of fear and in classical world you can put a zero in the north pole of your sphere or a one in the south pole of that fear. Now in quantum world the first thing you use is you put the computer in a superposition of states and what that means is that imagine that if you put it in the equator now you would have a linear superposition of zero and one. But the reality is you can put them anywhere in your sphere. So you have all these potential combinations of representing information. So imagine that you have in that fear is populated with like a huge number of those dots in the surface of this sphere, each one of those is represented by an amplitude and a face like those little dots on that sphere like moons that can rotate. So what the next thing you do in an algorithm is you put data into the computer in practice. What it means is that you take those little moons that are in that here and you rotate it slightly different. Now your machine has all the possible states that they can represent based on the number of cubits data is encoded in the state of that machine. And now the magical act of quantum computers is that you get to actually interfere information like waves in the ocean. So the right answer is maximized. And other things you don't care about cancels out notice is so different than what we learn about having zeros and ones and transistors or switches. And you use boolean algebra to be able to do calculation. Okay, I want to stick with that for a second. I do want to remind you if you have a question, raise your hand will get you a paddle. And uh So we'll get some questions in a second. But like all right. So you just described beautifully the wave the crescendo of the wave of all the possible solutions. But like can you translate that to you said people are running these every day in large numbers. What's an example of one challenge that you solve with the quantum and how you'd reach the solution differently than if you were running a super powerful regular computer. Yeah, just Okay, so, good question. So, so they're working there was the original idea around the possibilities of why build a quantum computer, Why why do this? Was to actually model nature better? So nature? Uh, the environment around us obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. So if you actually want to understand the properties and how you know, physics operates and materials and chemistry, let's say you want to build a better battery technology uh, for electrification or let's say you want a better fertilizer for agriculture or a better catalyst for industrial process or a better alloy. Right. If you're an aerospace, that's a process of trial and error in materials development And with the advent of computers, we had the opportunity to calculate things. However, the calculations that you perform with traditional computers, the characteristic that they have is that there's an exponential number in their meaning, as you try to say, model two molecules to build a better lithium chemistry as you start looking at the interactions, the electron orbital's of the atoms are present in there. The number of calculations that you have to solve classically grows exponentially. So the reality is that even with the best supercomputers, the best we can do is to approximate an answer in quantum you don't have that problem. So the idea is to build machines that behave quantum mechanically to be able to model these problems. So for all the industrial sectors that rely on advances in materials in chemistry and physics around that this will have a huge impact. Now, interestingly enough, what happened is that clever people discover other problems that had nothing to do with modeling nature. And that also delivered you an exponential advantage compared to classically. And the most famous example of that has to do with factoring. And the reason that that matters a great deal is because that the fact that it is hard to factor numbers in classical computers is the basis of most if not all encryption that we rely to secure the modern digital economy. So now we have these two vectors of everything that has to do about modeling our world, the natural world and now this ram of like mathematics that also is going to have big implications for industry and for society. Okay, I'm seeing hands which is good. We're gonna we're gonna see what questions people have will go right here first. Could you just stand just give us your name and company franklin. Hey daria, how are you with Marsh a quick question. So I think you just answered it though. So classic computing. Quantum computing you're not saying that quantum computing will replace all classics. I thought certain datasets lend themselves more to quantum computing solutions than classic computing. But can you confirm that or? Absolutely right. So quantum computers will not replace all classical computers by any stretch of the imagination. The future is classical and quantum working in concert. In fact to run a quantum computer, you need classical computers uh to be able to do that. And it is indeed the case that for example, for lots and lots of applications running your spreadsheet or you know your word document or playing a video or so on, you're not gonna need quantum computers. There will be a subset of problems that but but the interesting thing about quantum is not that they're slightly better than a classical version. There are classes of problems that we will never be able to solve. Exactly. Never with classical computers. That's what's so exciting is because the only technology that alters the equation between what's possible and impossible to solve, but it's all about the combination. In fact I have this little sort of pseudo equation that I like to share with people that the future of computing is bits plus neurons plus cubits. And what I mean by that it's a form of high precision calculations that we do with a lot of our machines. The neural networks are the basis of artificial intelligence and the sort of cubic technology based on quantum. And I say that to emphasize the pluses each vector is fascinating. But I think what the world has been yet fully grasped is the implications of the convergence of these technologies. So the future of workloads will be you to take your problem and behind the scenes we will partition the problem to figure. What do you run with high precision calculations? What do you run with neural networks and what do you run with quantum machines and then bring it back sort of in a transparent fashion to the user? We have a question over here. Hey, my name is jake, I'm with Bushel from Fargo North Dakota. Thanks for having us here so on. Would you say on the Ai side, would you argue that quantum computing capabilities have changed the assumption around ai, could you argue that today that not just neural networks but the next level of because we know that neural networks are interesting but they're still solving for approximation sort of outcomes. Would you say this is likely the path or has this created a much more likely outcome where we'll have true human AI capabilities in quantum computing. Would would that be an argument? Well, what what I would say is that for many decades we were in um sort of intellectual and computational straitjacket, which was you know, very precise forms of like microprocessor architecture is a particular way that there was a uniformity in computing with ai over the last decade has demonstrated, is that specialized forms of computing can deliver tremendous value for very specific kind of mathematics. So in implementing neural networks and they multiply accumulate function that is inherent in there. You can have Gpu s as an example, there are much more efficient compared to a traditional CPU, there's a lot of excitement and it's a new field but it's a research field around the possibilities about this intersection between quantum and machine learning. So it's a new area, right? It's a new scientific discipline and so on. And it will require not just to cast the same problem as we've done with Gpu. S with machine learning, but to reformulate the possibilities of how do you do neural networks and how do you do training using quantum machines? So one of the most important things about to be successful in the quantum world is not to be in the mode of I run something today. This is my software today. My algorithms today. I just want the quantum machine to run it faster. That's actually a recipe for going down the wrong track. It's about giving this new way to represent information. What should I think of differently? How should I explore new possibilities of performing computation calculations in novel ways? So it requires a lot more creativity to be able to do that. But the application of quantum machine learning is one of the most exciting areas in terms of a research endeavor. I think we have one more question here in the back. Sure, My name is Blair Lacorte. I'm from a company called Ai it's actually a E Y E. But ai every time you know we build really sophisticated sensor networks. Used to be targeting systems and I. S. R. Systems now our cars need to virtualize the environment. It actually occurred to me maybe this is a bad assumption but we model things all the time whether we get you know, RGB um you know vector analysis and orthogonal data because we have to model the world almost like creating virtual reality for a car to see. But wouldn't this kind of technology be better for modeling the metaverse? I mean for modeling environments that are very sophisticated that you want to replicate quantum physics in? Okay. Sexier, if you attach metaverse to it. Yeah. I try not to have like a bingo of tech books you know. But um well you said something different so I I don't know about like the generic metaverse story but like if you were trying to model environments that behave you know quantum mechanically or behave like you know, according to the laws of physics in a way that you needed to have that level of fidelity you could imagine down that stack of doing that modeling of a combination of classical plus quantum where there will be an element of quantum computing coming uh to um you know to to help with that. So in some ways it's gonna be a little bit behind the scenes, the way, sort of like we are going to do the algorithmic primitive calculations and so on, but that doesn't mean it's gonna be, it's not going to be incredibly important. Um And what I mean by that is behind the software of the future, I'm absolutely convinced we will always have behind the scenes this element of ai behind the scenes, this element of sort of very deterministic high precision calculations. And there will be quantum algorithms behind the scenes as well. And and I think that that's that's the world that we're trying to create. But you know, I sort of close with the thought of this is actually the most exciting time in computing in many decades. There's nothing equivalent to what is happening right now than the equivalent of what happened in the 1940s and 1950s. With the advent of those like beautiful computers that you would see in bloodshed park and places like that, where people were imagine the possibilities around this. And I think it's a moment that calls for a lot of like creativity and enthusiasm around imagining possibilities. And it's the reason why there's so many institutions right now embarking on this journey, even if you tell them, hey, I cannot solve a problem better right now, but they understand that this is gonna be possible this decade and that's why the field is advancing so rapidly Dario thanks for sharing your enthusiasm for expanding our minds And hopefully now everybody can raise their hand and say they understand quantum computing. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

Deena Shakir, Partner, Lux Capital
Carolyn Witte, CEO, Tia Health
Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, Senior Writer, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Digital Health Startups In A Post-Roe World 

Digital Health Startups In A Post-Roe World 

Hi Dina and Caroline. Thank you so much for joining us. Um, so obviously the end of row is affecting everything in so many ways for you Caroline. How is the end of nationwide abortion rights, affecting your business? That to us? Sure. Um, well, first off, thanks for having me here and thanks to fortune uh, for putting this important topic on the main stage. I think there's never been more uh, is an important time to talk about the moral and economic imperative to invest in women's health businesses like TIA and others in the space who are innovating, uh putting forth innovative solutions that expand access to comprehensive women's healthcare solutions inclusive of but not limited to abortion. For those of you that don't know what TIA does. We are hybrid virtual and in person care delivery. Uh, company designed for women. Uh, we provide integrated physical mental and reproductive health care services, inclusive of medication, abortion, uh, for women's whole health for their whole lives from puberty through menopause. Um, and so for those reasons as um, a venture backed company who is responsible for tens of thousands of lives in California new york and Arizona patients and providers. We've been uh, both devastated but also not surprised in being prepared for what we've long anticipated to be post road America and that's involved for us. That's been, has meant reimagining how to deliver reproductive health care services in this new landscape, figuring out how to deliver medication, abortion, which we believe is a cornerstone of the future in terms of how we're going to expand access to women, both in protected and restricted states through our virtual care platform uh and figuring out how to empower all women to have access to all of their choices in a new model for women's health care. Uh that shifts the conversation a bit I think from the courts uh to the exam rooms where we believe abortion should be an integral part of a new standard of primary care for women in America. Thank you so much Caroline. Uh Dina, how are your portfolio companies being affected especially in the fertility space? Yeah, so first of all, thank you again for having us. Um at luck, we've invested in companies like maven clinic, you heard from kate just about an hour ago as well as a life health, which is a company that's using ai to advance the efficiency, the efficacy and the equity infertility care. And one thing that's not discussed as much is the impact of this reversal, not only on abortion care, which in itself is a massive issue, but also on issues in women's health and family health that are orthogonal to abortion, fertility being a big part of that. There is already undue stress on the limited supply of clinics that are providing care uh and that is only going to be increased as embryos are at risk and families are unable to receive the care that they need. Um This is the case also for contraceptive care, which is another big area of focus and so all of our companies, whether they're in states where this has been, you know, officially, uh, you know, overturned by a trigger law or in states that are perfect that are protected are seeing the impact immediately with more to come. Yeah. Tina, how are investors responding? Are they cooling off on women's health as a category? And how are you feeling? Are you still bullish on it despite this roadblock? Not at all. In fact, I have been so heartened by the outpouring of interest and support in this space, both from investors who have already, uh, put a lot of money into women's health and others that see this capital deployment as a mechanism for action. I think there are, you know, tremendous examples in history where regulatory, uh, you know, constraints have impelled creativity and innovation. Um, and I'm really optimistic about the work that some of our companies are doing, that companies like t are doing, uh, and uh, and and others that may not have focused on women's health that are actually taking this on as part of their day to day work Caroline. You mentioned, you know, your passion for treating abortion care as part of primary care and really caring for the whole person. You know, what lessons do you think that that viewpoint has for employers in the audience who are now maybe because of this decision and other factors being forced to really think about their employees as whole people. It's a great question and I think really requires taking a step back and thinking about how abortion and reproductive health care has historically been delivered in this country. Why um to put a controller and view forward row may have failed women, not just from a policy perspective, but from a healthcare perspective and what a new model should look like as you look forward. So today, only 1% of abortions are done in a primary care setting. Only one yet 90% of abortions are medication abortion eligible, meaning they occur within the first trimester where medication abortion can be safely administered by any primary care provider, whether virtual or in person, an Mp. Or an M. D. To be able to give a patient access to safely terminate a pregnancy either in a clinic or in the context of her own home. Yet only 1% of abortions are occurring in a primary care setting today. So why does that matter for women? And why does that matter for providers and employers and why do we Tia believe it's critical that we change that. So, I mentioned this issue of um Abortals of course. Now being restricted not only of course to women who live in restricted states. Uh, so abortion is now no longer a right, but a privilege to those who live in 20 states who have chosen to protect that or for patients who have means to access those states. What this has created is not just an issue for women in those states though, but for women in California new york, no matter where you live. For the reasons I think Dina mentioned this isn't just abortion, this is Miss Care, this is a topic pregnancies, this is uh embryos. There's so many health care issues that necessitate access to abortion services and we believe integrating them into primary care is the way to do. So there's a massive supply gap facing women in America and providers in America. If every uh primary care provider in California stepped up and started providing medication abortion as part of their standard of care. Just as another healthcare service alongside treating strep throat and pink eye and uh you know mental health and pap smears and birth control and all sorts of uh commonplace medical services that primary care providers Do day in and day out. We could cover the supply gap facing the 34 million women in America no longer have access to abortion services. And this is why we believe the future lies in abortion becoming a new part of primary care. And for employers to ensure that all their female employees. have access to an integrated solution that is inclusive of abortion but addresses women's whole health as whole people not parts or positive pregnancy test. Yeah, thank you so much. Um just to remind you for the audience that will be coming to you for questions soon. So raise your hand if you have one anytime soon, we'll be back. Um Tina. I know you have some thoughts on all the calls that have been out there for people to delete their period tracking apps. You know, what do you think is back? And what do you think is fiction? Yeah. So this has been um sort of the the aftershock if you will of understanding the reversal is uh fear. There was a tweet that I think went viral on that was calling for women to delete their their period tracking apps. There's still a lot that remains to be um understood here. And I'm certainly not giving any legal advice but we do need to be aware of the privacy implications here. And I think there's you know, discussion that's happening in D. C. Right now on this topic and there's a lot of fear. But at the end of the day they're from a legal perspective like there's it's all still up in the air. I don't think we necessarily need to be, you know, deleting all of our period apps. I think we need to understand um from a provider perspective what is covered by Hipaa and what is not provided. Um But also from a legal perspective what actually can be penalized and what can be and as Carolyn mentioned, it's not just about uh you know, pregnancies and miscarriages but uh primary care in general. There are many issues related. You know within women's health that are not specifically around the reproductive care cycle that are also at risk here given this reversal just to layer in there. I think the the the challenging part though is it's that much more important that women are body literate and and deeply understanding things like their cycles or miss periods and things like this at the time when access to services like abortion is going to be increasingly more restricted. And so I think the legal, the legal situation is gray and hazy and it's on us to to give patients clarity by giving them access to comprehensive health care services that include navigating an increasingly complex legal environment state by state. Uh, so that they can make informed choices day in day out when there is a increasingly ticking time bomb uh, that exists as a reality for women when it comes to making daily decisions in the context of their health. Yeah. You know, for the tech companies in the audience, um, what can they do to protect people who are seeking abortion care? You know, what are their vulnerabilities when it comes to user data on things like location data, Whether you're a company that directly deals with um women's healthcare information like a period tracking up or something totally different. Yeah. So, you know, I think there are already companies that have come out with statements around how they're making sure that, you know, they have a sanctuary for for data and how they will protect and there needs to be more of that. Um, employers in general are also stepping up and have been stepping up since the news came out uh, to support their employees and it's not just the women employees. I mean this is an issue that affects all of us as human beings. There are men who will be affected by this. Um, and especially in the midst of the great resignation that we're seeing right now, it is more incumbent than ever for employers to provide the care that families need abortion is about abortion care is about health care at the end of the day, it's not an issue that should be relegated to a specialty provider or to a specialty cause um, yeah, do you have any questions in the audience and if you could just introduce yourself by name and company again with forge. Um, I'm just curious how is this might be more for Caroline like cross border um medical, medical, um abortion. How is that impacting your business or what influence because I feel like that's like a nexus that has yet to be. Hey, yes, thank you for raising this. Um, it's a really important question because the, you know, first and foremost, I want to acknowledge that there is no silver bullet solution to this problem. Um, we believe it's going to require a lot of innovation both from healthcare providers like TIA as well as employers stepping up as well as insurance companies stepping up to actually increase coverage uh for medication, abortion and other services, nonprofits policymakers. It's gonna take a lot of efforts with respect to uh medication abortion, which is a critical, it's a tool in our toolkit that we know that can cover the vast majority of abortions in this country if we're able to figure out how to safely and legally help women access to them, figuring out how women travel across state lines to get these services is one component. Um I need to figure out how to protect the patients and the providers delivering this care. And so I want to call it, California has been a real leader here in terms of passing protective legislation, both for patients who may be traveling from a restricted state, uh saying they can't be essentially brought back to their state or criminalized. Um but also the providers in that state, and as someone who employs hundreds of healthcare providers, I can tell you uh, that this is a daily experience. My providers come to us and say, what can we do? Can I counsel my patients? What are my rights? Am I gonna be criminalized? And until we can give our patients and providers clarity about what they're able to do, they're in the business of giving, delivering um equitable, high quality health care and helping women make decisions for themselves, but they need to understand what their legal rights are. You cannot is not medication abortion to clarify that currently. Um telehealth regulation prevents providers from prescribing any drug across state lines. Um this is true for uh an ss ri and it's true for medication abortion as well. There was a temporary temporary regulation laxed. Um I think certain laws with respect across state lines describing evolving so much and including um you know, regulations that are outside of states as well. But Dina, I'd love to talk to you about how this is affecting digital health beyond women's health. You know, other spillover effects of this decision into other categories of digital health. You know, I think what we're seeing is certainly some companies that may not have focused on digital health or may not have focused on women's health more broadly. And digital health taking this on one of our companies, for example, Carbon Health is now providing care in this space. But the other point I wanted to make that I'd be remiss not to include is around the impact on underserved communities and especially communities of color. Uh well before this ruling came out, we know that we're in the midst of a black maternal health crisis gemma just released a report a few weeks ago on the impact on latin X communities again, pre pre reversal. We were already seeing an increase in maternal mortality rates and of course this is going to have an even more outside impact again on those communities, almost half the babies in this country are born under Medicaid. So although we've talked a lot about the impact, you know, on employees and so on, there is a large percentage of the population that will not have access to that. And so I'm heartened to see companies that are stepping up to the plate, like maven who are, you know, launching in Medicaid communities for the families that need it most Well, thank you so much, Carolyn, thank you so much for sharing your views on this important topic.

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Marc Murphy, World-Renowned Chef and TV Personality 
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