Brainstorm Tech 2024

Maryam Banikarim, Managing Director, Fortune Live Media, Andrew Nusca, Fortune, Alyson Shontell, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Welcome

Conferences

Hey, everybody. How are we doing? Yes, I like the energy. Very good. Very good. All right, good afternoon. And welcome to Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2024. We are so glad you're here and we are so pleased to be back in Park City for another year. Our annual Excuse him Mountain retreat since our very first in 2001 brainstorm has brought together the smartest people we know to tackle the world's problems and interrogate the role that technology plays in them. Veterans of this event? No. How many are veterans? Raise your hand? Oh, yes, I love it. Thank you. Veterans of this event. No, there is nothing like a fortune brainstorm. Each year we host a collective conversation, a dialogue, a discussion, a democratic exchange of ideas. Everyone invited to attend. Brainstorm is accomplished enough to speak and we encourage you to do so at every turn, especially at our signature roundtable sessions, let your ideas flow. And for fans of the TV, show The Bear, I present the following nonnegotiable, an environment that embraces and encourages razzle dazzle and the dream weave. All right. Anyway, there's a lot to talk about this year adversarial artificial intelligence for one regulation is another. Give it up for regulation. No, I'm just kidding. Robots in the workforce making bets in this economy are insatiable hunger for human connection. And there's some sort of election this year. I don't know, we'll talk about it later. Anyway. At brainstorm, we also host conversations with whom we call leading thinkers and thinking leaders to spark discussion among the group. And we're going to do that right here on this stage. You're in for a real treat. This week, the investor Roelof Botha is joining us, the musician and entrepreneur, Alo Black is on the program today. You will hear from Mary Daly, the president of the San Francisco fed tomorrow. You'll hear from the ceos of Grindr Zos ripple runway Lucid Motors. And if you don't stick around for my Wednesday conversation with Kara Swisher, you will surely regret it before I continue, I want to introduce you to the woman who now runs the business of brainstorm. Some of you have already met her in addition to that of fortune's most powerful women franchise. I first met her at this very event a decade ago and I'm delighted to now call her a colleague. Please meet connector community builder and consummate New Yorker, Miriam Bacerra. Um It's so nice to have you all here and I think we need another welcome for Andrew who's returned to fortune there. Just wasn't enough energy in that for me. Andrew. So sorry. Um I couldn't be more excited to lead brainstorm tech and most powerful woman alongside Andrew and the incredibly talented journalists and team that we have. Now, I'm gonna bet that like many of you, I was a kid who wanted to make a difference and I chose to make that difference in the world of business. And that's what actually makes me interested in this role at fortunes because fortune's mission is to change the world by making business better. And for me, that's personal, in a world that is filled with rapid innovation, societal instability and political polarization, we have an opportunity and that's why as I look across this room and I see all you smart, powerful people here coming together to solve some of the big issues of the day. I am hopeful. It's great to be back here. My first fortune brainstorm was in 2014. I love the energy on stage and in the tent. If I haven't had a chance to meet you yet at horseback riding or any of the other events, I'll be looking for you at the tent over to you, Andrew. Oh, thank you. Miriam isn't my only co conspirator for brainstorm. Of course, each year's program is carefully curated by an ace team, you know, some of them and that includes our co chairs and I'd like to introduce them to you. Now, hope please hold your applause until the end. If you don't mind, please meet fortune editor in chief and chief content officer Alison Chantel, fortune tech correspondent, Jason del Rey. Jason, where are you? There we go. And our two multi hyphenate guest chairs this year, the CEO of Pie and co founder of Bonobos Andy Dunn. Here's Andy and the founding partner of human Ventures and CASA Comos brands group, Joe Marchese. Joe. Where are you? There we go. All right, please. A round of applause for everybody. We also had extra help. This year, this year we established what we call our brain trust. It's literally called that an advisory board drawn from this very community. We wanted to hear your voices more powerfully. So we're so grateful for their guidance, the members of the brain trust along the way and I'm going to list them now. A special thanks to Eric Rie Olson, Terry Burns, Jill Greenberg, Chase Lucy Guo, Brooke Hammering, Lena Koko TJ Parker, Raj, Sadr Lila Treo and Ken Washington, a round of applause for all of them, please. So we want to also acknowledge our partners for this event, right? Without their continued support and contribution, this wouldn't be possible sales force our premier partner Lenovo New York Stock Exchange, Qualtrics and Threshold. And of course our sponsor KPMG. Thank you for helping make brainstorm what it is and then making it come to life. Finally, I want to take a moment and do a shout out to our fortune founders forum. I got a chance to meet some of them last night. They're an incredibly special cohort of early stage entrepreneurs that you will want to meet. And we've invited them to join us here in Park City. They're rising stars who are solving some very big problems and you'll be thrilled to welcome them. I am sure. So please look for them. They actually have a lanyard that makes them a little bit more obvious. So want to take it from here. Yes, thank you, Miriam. All right, this morning we kicked off the day with a range. That's a mountain pun. Folks of activities set against the glorious natural backdrop. That is Utah Show of hands. How many people broke a sweat this morning? Yes, me too. I love it. Thank you. That's right. We hiked, we w we whitewater rafted, we fly fished. We even bobsledded. All right, folks who were alive in the nineties, say it with me. Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme get on up it. Thank you, Sanka. Um An important reminder about that actually. Um We are at altitude in case you haven't noticed. So please drink lots of water all the way through the event. We have water stations pretty much all over the place. If you need any before we dive into the program. I want to bring up our editor in chief Alison Chantel for a few words. One about thanks Andrew. And I just want to say a big thank you to all of you for being here with us today. The Fortune's mission for 95 years has been to be the arbiter of truth and high quality journalism for global leaders. It's never been harder for any of us to do our jobs than it is right now. Um And so I think that mission of journalism is ever ever more important, especially as we're looking ahead at what A I will do to the proliferation of things like it'll bring of great change. It will also bring a lot of misinformation, a lot of lack of trust. So I think it is ever more important for all of us to gather in settings like this. I know your time is so valuable. The work we're doing as journalists is valuable too. I think the danger zone is when none of us want to talk anymore. I see that all over my social media feeds. It is so important for us all to be together in this environment, sharing ideas, challenging ideas growing together, making sure that the truth comes to in really responsible ways. So we're investing in bringing people like Andrew NSA back into our newsroom. Uh We're producing our next issue of the magazine coming up. You're going to see a couple of speakers here this week who will be featured in the next issue. But we're continuing to bring the high quality journalism. You need to run your companies to the best of your abilities and please keep talking to our journalists, please speak them out because it is so important for the communication to not stop. So thank you and enjoy brainstorm tech.

Mary C. Daly, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Interviewer: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: The Bull, The Bear, And The Banker

Presenter: Erik Brynjolfsson, Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor; Senior Fellow and Director, Digital Economy Lab, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

Brainstorm Tech 2024: A Roadmap For Converting Technology To Value

Good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here to share some of the research we've been doing at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and also at my company work Helix, which is trying to take some of that research and put it into practice. There is a lot of excitement about A I you mentioned maybe as big as the industrial revolution. I think that's true. But there's also a lot of hype out there. There's a lot of misdirection. There are so many examples of A I being applied to situations that just aren't going to work and as a result value is not being created. So one of the things I want to do in the next 15 minutes or so is share with you some of the research we've been doing to provide a more data driven approach to understanding where the real opportunities are. And I think they're enormous and also what sorts of things to avoid. So let me just start with some technological benchmarks every year. My team and I put out a report called the A I Index. It's about a 520 page report filled with lots of facts and charts like this one. And as you can see, a lot of technical benchmarks are getting much, much better over time, few things in the world improve as rapidly as A I and the pace of change is improving. And I put there a horizontal line for what's happening human level performance on these different benchmarks. And as you can see in many cases, the A I systems are matching or exceeding human level performance as an economist, that's a very important benchmark. Because when you cross that threshold, like when water crashes, the boiling temperature, it's a phase change and the economy fundamentally changes when you have a new way of doing something that does it better as well or better than humans do, but it's not enough to have amazing technology. We're not translating into business value. Mary Daly talked about some of the productivity gains we hope to see, but that's not going to happen unless we transform work, simply buying technology almost never turns it into business value. And one of the most common questions I get is are we just going to see the end of work, end of jobs as this technology replaces people? That's also not what's going to happen. At least not anytime soon. Jeff Hinton, one of the greatest minds in A I pioneered deep learning techniques and one of the reasons all those lines are growing so rapidly. A couple of slides earlier is because of Jeff's work. He's also has a side gig as an economist sometimes and predicts that we won't need radiologists anymore. Actually, he predicted that back in 2016 team. Well, actually we have more radiologists now, almost twice as many job postings. Now, why is that? There's two main reasons for that one is that paradoxically sometimes when you get better at something, when it becomes more productive and more efficient, instead of having fewer workers, you have more. Now, why would that be the case? Well, think about jet engines, they made airline pilots vastly more productive, more passenger miles, lots of metrics went up. Do we have fewer pilots or more pilots than before jet engines were invented? Obviously, most of you flew in here and jets are a big part of the reason of that. And with many other allergies, you have what's called Jon's paradox that as the technology gets better, it actually increases the demand even faster, not everywhere. But in some places, you have to understand where the second reason is that while A I can do many tasks, it can't do everything you still need humans in the loop for almost every category of work. In fact, the right way to think about it is to break it down to what we call the task based analysis where the task is the fundamental unit of an organization. Think of it as like the DNA based pairs for organisms tasks are that fundamental unit of analysis for organizations and for over a decade, I've been analyzing companies using the task based analysis where you take a job, which is a bundle of many little tasks. And then you analyze each of those tasks individually. You see whether or not A I gen A I robotics or some other tool can help them. So lifting a box, gen A I is not so helpful, but as we'll see later, robotics can help with that. Writing a memo, actually, that's one where gen A I can help. And then there are other tasks where no technology currently can help a whole lot. Once you've done that analysis of the task based analysis, task based level, you can aggregate them back up to the job weighted by wages or even to the entire organization. Now you're getting somewhere. Now you have a roadmap to understand where is this technology going to help? What specific ways and instead of having anecdotes and stories from vendors and things that you read in places, you're going to have a data driven approach to understanding where the opportunities lie. So we did this in a series of academic articles. I wrote one in science. About eight years ago, my colleague Daniel Rock had one come out in science two weeks ago where we used this approach to understand how the economy is going to change. Now A I is not A G which means it can't do everything but it can do certain things incredibly well. And let's take the case of radiology that Jeff Hinton brought up in our initial analysis, we broke the radiologists into 27 distinct tasks. And one of them, machine learning could do extremely well interpreting images, reading the medical images better than humans in many cases. And there's academic papers showing this. So that's great. But there are many other tasks that humans. You want to keep humans in the loop. You don't really turn over the keys to an A I system to start sedating people or do some of the other things that are on this list. And this is exactly what we found in every occupation we looked at, we found some tasks where A I could help other tasks where you really want to keep humans in the loop. Not once did we say A I run the whole table and just replace an entire occupation. So that is what you're going to be seeing in your organizations. You're going to see opportunities to use A I to help, but mostly as a compliment as a partner for humans to do it better. When, when Daniel Rock used to be a student of mine. Now he's a professor at Wharton did this for gen A I. He and his team found on the horizontal axis here is wages, vertical is the implication you can see a sort of upward sloping. What that means is that actually unlike some of the earlier technologies, gen A I dispose affect some of the higher wage occupations. So a lot of managers, salespeople, doctors, lawyers for the first time, they're going to really have their jobs affected, changed, transformed. And that actually is good news. It's where a lot of the productivity gains need to happen. And it also will help with income inequality. Let me give you a concrete example. So you understand a little bit about how this plays out. We did a bunch of case studies of A I being rolled out in different situations. One of them was in a call center customer service and this company Kresta did not try to replace call center operators. It would be most of it get kind of annoyed when you talk to a robot. Instead they had humans talking to the customers. But the A I helped them by suggesting possible answers and the human could use that answer or not use that answer. We had almost the perfect natural experiment to do causal estimates. Half the people got access to the technology. Others did not. We looked at over 5 million conversations, 5000 center agents and we were able to very cleanly and quickly see what a difference it made. The red line. There is improvements in performance of the people who had access to the technology. And you can see within just four or five months, they went from about two resolutions per hour to over three per hour. The folks who did not get access to the technology didn't improve nearly as fast and never got to the same level. So this is a very clean causal estimate of the effects of large language models in a particular application. What's more? We tracked a dozen other Kpis, we looked at customer satisfaction, we looked at customer sentiment, basically the ratio of happy words to angry words in those transcripts, we looked at employee turnover. All these metrics also went up by comparable amounts. So stockholders were happy year, the productivity was up. Customers were happier, more customer satisfaction and higher sentiment and even employees, this was not an electronic sweatshop. Employee turnover went down. The employees seemed to be happier working with the system as well. So it was a situation where you could actually benefit all the groups. It was not a zero sum implication of this. And interestingly as I hinted earlier, the less skilled workers actually were the ones who benefited the most. And so this closed income inequality a little bit and it was a big opportunity to do that better. Furthermore, we found that it did not deskill the workers the way we were worried about. There were at all systems. Sometimes the system went down and that's not great use for the customer. But it turned out to be a great another great natural experiment for us researchers. When the system went down, we continued to monitor the performance of those workers. And to our surprise, the workers who had been working with the system continued to outperform the ones who hadn't, they had learned, they had internalized some of those answers. They didn't do it as well as when they had access to it, but they had captured some of that knowledge. So it turns out to be a very good way to capture tacit knowledge and translate it over into people who hadn't otherwise gotten that. And this is the first time we really have a technology where you don't have to write down every single rule for what you want your workers to do. Instead, the LLM or the gen A solution will capture some of that knowledge and transfer it to other workers. This opens up a whole new set of opportunities that previously didn't exist. Now, I mentioned that you want to keep humans in the loop and this graph shows one of the reasons why you want to do that machine learning. Gen A I is great when you have lots of data, but you don't always have lots of data. There are some tasks that come up over and over those to the left of the chart there. Like how do I change my password? How do I log on? You get those questions over and over and you get to learn what's the best way to explain that answer? But there are other solutions or other questions at the far right of the tail that we only see one or two times or a small number of times in the data set. Well, ja I doesn't have a chance to learn how to solve those, but we humans actually are pretty good at extemporizing at dealing with exceptions. And so there's a natural division of labor. You have the machines do the types of projects that and the types of questions where you have lots of data, they can learn better and better solutions, but exceptions are better done by humans. We're seeing this play out right now with self driving cars where they work for 90 95 90 9.9% of the task. But there's these exceptions that humans still need to intervene in and eventually they'll get there. But in most of most of the projects we looked at, there's a natural division between humans doing the exceptions and machines doing the more frequently done things. Now the example I gave was in call centers, but it was striking to us how that same pattern showed up in all these other applications in coding, writing management diagnosis. In each case, we saw often double digit gains in productivity and coding is actually triple digit gains. In some cases, 100% or more productivity, we saw less skilled workers benefiting more and we saw the performance happening relatively quickly. So while there's a lot of hype out there, there are definitely some situations where gen A I in particular can very quickly lead to productivity gains. And eventually, as Mary was hinting that will aggregate up to the whole economy and we'll see better outcomes in the economy more broadly. Now, I'd like to give you guys a little bit of a road map so you can get to work right away and put some of these in place. Part of my mission is to shorten that time between technology and productivity between A I and business value and to do that, you have to change the way work is being done. And so work he likes the company I started is very much geared towards shortening that time. And I should mention, I think over here, our CEO James Milan was nice enough to come join us here. So feel free to talk to me or him later. But basically what we do is we do this task based analysis we put into software and this is something you can do, you can do it by hand, but it's a lot easier to do it with organization, with, with organizational software because we look at about 200,000 individual tasks and then we roll them up. Every company has a different fingerprint. And so this particular company, you can see software engineers are the biggest opportunity that's actually pretty common but not always others who may be call center management sales. And you see all five of those green dots, there are places that are pretty ripe for applying the solutions. You can double click and get in deeper about what are the tasks specifically that are involved in that like monitoring system or providing advice on project costs? And look at exactly how much of acceleration might be possible. How many hours per week people are doing those, what the dollars spent on it is and where the biggest gains are likely to be in this way. Instead of having just anecdotes to try to decide where to prioritize you get a road map of what's more important to focus on. And this was all done. I should say these initial analyses we do with external data. So things like linkedin burning glass, other data sources that we license, we already kind of know roughly how many software engineers there are in your company. As you can imagine that stuff is posted on the open web. And so if we license it, we can, we can see that, but we can also do a deep dive, which is an internal scan which hooks up to the HR is systems and that allows you to get a more specific understanding of what's going on. And I encourage you to do these kinds of analyses on your own to understand what are the specific tasks that are being done in your organization? And which of those are you likely to be able to have some sort of a, a gen a solution or of A I or robotics solution for? So what should you do tomorrow morning. Well, the first thing you want to develop a plan instead of just picking and choosing a few cases based on the things that your, your fellow executives are pitching at you or vendors are pitching at you do it in a systematic way, use the task based analysis to understand where the opportunities are. And then secondly, you want to start tracking progress. You want to keep track of those different KPIS, like I did customer satisfaction, customer sentiment time handled employee turnover. The set of KPIS is going to be different for every project. But if you do that, you're going to be able to turn these amazing technologies into productivity and avoid some of the pitfalls and some of the hype that you'll also you otherwise might fall into. So if you want to learn more about this, a lot of it's on my website at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. We have all those research papers that I mentioned there that you can read and get an understanding of the task based approach and more generally how A I is transforming work. I also have some mind my personal website and also the work hes website goes into more depth. So, thanks a lot. I'm looking forward to talking to all of you later this afternoon. I'll be around until dinner time and be happy to chat with you about how you're doing, how you're doing in your gen a transformation and your journey. Thanks very much.

Philip Clark, Investor, Thrive Capital Assaf Rappaport, Co-founder and CEO, Wiz Interviewer: Allie Garfinkle, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Google in Talks to Acquire Wiz for $23 Billion

Vlad Tenev, Co-founder and CEO, Robinhood Interviewer: Alyson Shontell, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Robinhood Trades Up

All right, glad. Thank you so much for joining us today. As Ali mentioned, 11 years at the helm of Robin Hood and so much has happened at that time. We were just lamenting that we were the geriatric millennials in the room. We actually are both DC area kids graduated high school, I think the same year and yet you are running a giant company called Robin Hood in 2021. It was hard, really, really, really hard to be the CEO of your company. There was gamestop mania and roaring kitty mania. You had to raise $3 billion in 36 hours to meet trading demand. You had to freeze trading for a little bit. Customers were angry. You got interviewed by a OC. You got interviewed by Elon Musk movie was made. You were not portrayed great in the movie. So that's crazy to live through as a CEO. I just want to hear from your perspective like how hard was that period. Uh Let's see. Um I think one of my weaknesses, uh you know, uh I haven't had a job interview uh in a while but uh sometimes I think through what I would answer these questions that, like I asked people and, uh, I've heard it described my, my weakness, which I think can also be a strength. Our strengths are our weaknesses. Um, I have like this pathological steadiness so I, I might not like emote very much. I don't get very excited about things. Uh, I don't get like, terribly distraught about things, um, which can, like, really be off putting to people in some ways. But I think can be the strength because like, when you're going through a crisis, I just like, yeah, you know, and it probably started out for me being uh an immigrant and my parents came to this country uh when I was very young and I was a latch key child. Um like some millennials now, people can't imagine, you know, having their kids go home from the bus stop half a mile and being home alone. But both my parents worked, we had no option. And so um I don't know that my childhood was like, not easy and there was this constant threat of like, if we don't make it in this country, we'll have to go back to Bulgaria where there's hyper inflation and, and so it was just like a constant struggle. So I think when gamestop cared for that and you actually, because though of like, what if my me, what Hollywood typecast guy came in and the CEO of Robin Hood and that's, that's hard self reflection to do. And what did you come away with? How did the company change after that? Yeah, I think that's a good, uh, yeah, I mean, it, it wasn't like, um, it wasn't so much thinking about the board doing that but more, um, yeah, this was like 2022 when things were rough and I think everyone just, uh, thinks about, like, the gamestop era and COVID and, and that being the toughest moment in my experience running Robin Hood, I actually think in a lot of ways 2022 was, was harder. The entire market turned, we went from like zero rate environment to high interest rates, highest inflation we've seen in decades. Um People just weren't interested in trading stocks uh anymore like that became uh undesirable and a lot of capital moved away from uh sort of like the higher risk equity markets to lower risk bonds and just like collecting yield on cash. And so Robin Hood's business had to fundamentally change in order for us to stay relevant and kind of thrive in this new environment. And, and that was very tough. We had to make a lot of tough decisions. Um You know, the, the company was carrying too much head count. We had to like refocus, we, we had a lot of bets um in various directions during COVID, we had to really refocus on the core business. Um And yeah, what I found was useful was um and I you know, everyone says don't talk about the stock, but our stock hit a high of like 75 in 2021 and then traded below $7 you know, a year later. So that, that was tough for uh a lot of people. And, and so I think, like, self reflection and asking yourself well, if I wasn't here and they brought in a CEO from Central casting to like, get this company on the right track, what would they do? And I think this was useful for me to go through because there's a lot of decisions that we hold on to because we made them earlier, right? And you, you don't wanna appear inconsistent with your earlier self. And so you can end up kind of holding on to the wrong decision for a while. So one example was we announced we were a remote first company in January of 2022. We had kind of like hedged our position on this for a couple of years. We were telling employees, hey, just wait after we get a little bit more clarity on this COVID situation. Um You know, we'll, we'll kind of announce what our full time, what the future of work looks like full time. And in January 2022 I kind of got tired of, of having this debate and kind of all the signals around me were we should go remote first. The market is demanding it. There's a war for talent, the best talent wants the flexibility. So we announced it and I kind of immediately regretted it. Um But at the time, it felt like a very difficult thing to pull back companies who hadn't announced that were having a hard time getting folks back into the office and, and normalizing that. Um So, yeah, that, that was an example of one of those decisions where I was like, ok, if, if someone came in with like fresh eyes, kind of without the burden of being consistent with decisions you made six months ago, um they probably make this change. And so that, that I think uh unlocked a lot of me and that, and, and that deep self reflection, I think uh allowed us to go down the list of the 10 things that had to change about the company very, very quickly to not just survive but thrive in this new environment of higher rates, less interest and more speculative equity investing. Um And, and I think that really accelerated Robin Hood's transition um into being uh uh a public company. And so the stock today is 28. So not quite at that 75 high, but way up from sevens. And also you had really good recent earnings. I want to point out that this time last year, this quarter, last year is a net loss and your net income is like 157 million now. So quite a swing part of that, I think has been, you know, a better interest rate environment and a lot of income interest cash. But you've also gone to pains to really diversify a bit more away from the hyperactive trading. Um, that has been the core of the business. I'm curious how some of those that have like diversifying your business model, how those efforts have gone. You've launched a credit card, there's retirement options and a lot of that has just rolled out this year. So what's that doing to the business? And how are those early products going so far? Yes, when we kind of like uh re articulated the the strategy in 2022 and kind of like re founded the company, we did a couple of things and um I think what made it hard was the, the top two priorities were like somewhat diametrically opposed. So the first thing that we did was we, we actually really focused on the core of the business and the core of the business is active traders. Like it's what has generated a bulk of, of our revenue. It's where we had a sustainable technology advantage. Um And we had kind of ignored that market um during COVID, um we're focusing on the new investor market. So we weren't really looking at someone that trades a lot and is a little bit more sophisticated. What their needs with the product are we were looking at? Ok. How can we on board as many first time investors as possible and streamline the experience for them and you know what, once they have their account funded and they're on boarded, we, we sort of like stop the investment so much. Um And so that manifested itself in this weird thing where the more active uh a customer you are of Robin Hood and the more revenue you generate from the firm, the less happy you are with our service, which is sort of like the opposite. Um The opposite of what you want. You want your most engaged, most active customers that are generating the most revenue uh to be happiest. So that was kind of the pathology. And there in lay, the first goal, the first goal was we want the more active you are the more engaged. Um We the, the happier you should be with Robin Hood, the more of a promoter, um you should be and within a year we actually reverse that. So, and that required changes on all levels of the company. Uh product, road map technology infrastructure, we started caring more about latency and performance customer service. Um And this was a tough one because um basically in the past, if you were a customer that had millions of dollars in your account, you were in the same queue as every other customer, right? So you could be waiting, you know, a really long time to get service and we had to sort of like recalibrate our service model so that the customers that had the most money in their accounts, the customers that had the most sort of like specialized needs, they were actually getting the, the level of support that they needed. Um And that was a tough one because a lot of people say, hey, Robin's mission is to give everyone equal access. So, you know, if you're a gold member, is it really fair to, to sort of like uh uh prioritize that person? And I mean, the, the obvious argument is we don't have a business unless our most active customers are really, really happy. That's sort of the foundation that drives everything. And so giving that all of the investment that it needs from all angles just was, was very important. So that, that was one thing, but simultaneously, we also didn't wanna be an active trader business. We wanted to, uh we wanted to diversify the business. And also we saw an opportunity for um for us to do more than just help people with their discretionary trading. Um And that's where we launched the high yield product where now you can get up to uh 5.5% interest on your cash. And that's uh we, we announced a recent number where $20 billion had entered that product. Uh Since it started, we, we launched our retirement product which um I mean, in my opinion, just from the, the economics and the user experience, it's the leading retirement product. So, um you get a built in match which you had to have an employer sponsored 401k to get in the past and it's the first retirement product to my knowledge to win a design award. Um So it's just like applying the Robin Hood recipe from active trading into more passive products. I think the, the, the credit card is just an extension of that too. We launched a credit card 3% cash back on all categories. You can't get anything close to that unless you're a high net worth individual at like a fidelity. Um And, and even then they won't give you a solid gold card that's, that's unique to us. Um So what even with those efforts, the the average account size is so, so you have, I think you get a lot of credit that you deserve for helping democratize finance and investing because if you look at the numbers, your average age is 34 versus 59 for typical brokerage. 14 to 16% of your users are black or Hispanic versus 4 to 8% is a typical. Um but the average account size has been stuck at like 5 to 7 K for a couple of years now. Um So that kind of leads you to believe like are these are the user too young to really make a big business, to grow into the leading person of the owner of all the wallets. Um How are you gonna unstick that? And I'm also curious, like, you are probably your, the person you would love to have on Robinhood. How much of your accounts are in Robin Hood themselves? Do you have more than that? 5 to 7 K personally? I, I do. Yeah. Um, but every time, like, like is like 80% like, I mean, what, what's the optimal and what's yours? Well, my situation is a little bit different because, um, I can't really trade, uh, because, yeah, it's unfortunate but, like, at, at some point I stopped being able to use my product for equities. Of course, I can hold ETF S and crypto and things like that. Um, but yeah, the lion's share of my worth is in Robin Hood stock. That's like, uh, but to my point is being that, like, people, like, have a, there's a graduation risk, right? If you have a play account sort of, that's Robin Hood, you might be in like Chase or something that's more established, that's a legacy firm. Um, so how do you get over that? Yeah, I mean, my, uh, my aspiration over time is for, uh, people like me also to have all of their wealth in, in Robin Hood and that's sort of like the, the, the sort of like upper end of the market, right? The folks that are working with family offices and they have private wealth managers, I think to, uh, to a large extent that's what Robinhood Gold is like Robin Hood Gold subscription. Yeah, long term aspiration is to replace your wealth manager so that, you know, anything that you can get as a high net worth individual from a wealth manager and a private bank can be accessible to anyone at a price point of around $5 a month. Um So that's the goal we obviously didn't start there. We started sort of like mid market, but we have been moving up. And for example, if you look at the credit card, it's a premium credit card. It's my primary credit card that I use for all of my spend. So I think over time you'll start seeing, uh you'll, you'll start seeing us moving more upmarket and the average account size has been increasing. If you look at uh assets under custody and deposits onto the platform that's been growing at, you know, uh 40% year over year, much higher than all of our peers. Um And granted we're much smaller from an asset base. But um I mean, one interesting stat, if you look at millennials, uh there's more millennials on Robinhood than Schwab Fidelity E Trade and Vanguard combined. And uh what we believe is over the next few decades, there's gonna be a massive wealth transfer. It's starting to happen, but it's, it's gonna accelerate of trillions of dollars, tens of trillions from baby boomers to gen X to millennials. And I think Robinhood can be uh the largest beneficiary of that. And we're putting ourselves in a position to do that. So we're making it really, really easy to transfer your account to Robinhood from a user experience standpoint incentives and feature set. Um, we're expanding to all sorts of products. And so I think we'll have that tail wind and, um, we already have the relationships with these customers. And I, I think that, uh as they get wealthier as they inherit more of the generational wealth and as we add more products, I think those trends should not just continue but accelerate. So you own your full tech stack. So to n and there's two trends that you think are really going to transform the industry even further to A I and crypto and you've been making some acquisitions in those places. I'm curious if you could just talk a little bit about how you think they're going to be really transformative and how are you preparing Robin Hood to capture that to become the place that all the millennials are putting all their money in the future? Yeah. Um I'll start with crypto. I think when a lot of people hear crypto, they sort of like gravitate towards meme coins and speculation. Um And I think there's, there's a part of the crypto markets that that's that certainly and it draws a lot of attention. But I think what we have the benefit of seeing because we sort of like have both of these businesses, right? And we can see them side by side and we now can look at crypto in the eu brokerage in the UK as well is the cost of running a crypto business is like an order of magnitude lower. Um because you get to leverage so much of the public infrastructure and these public blockchains do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to settlement and transactions um that there's just like a obvious technology advantage in putting more and more stuff on that infrastructure. It's kind of like going from mainframes to on premise to cloud. I think the next transition for financial services will be more and more of these things are gonna go on blockchains and more traditional, more of what we consider kind of traditional financial products will be traded and custody on blockchains as well. And you can to some degree see this with dollar stablecoins overseas. Um The bulk of transaction volume on Crypto Rails is dollar Stablecoin right now. And the reason is overseas, people want dollars and the easiest and most straightforward way to get them is through some of these Stablecoin products and you don't have to squint too hard to imagine a world where stocks are on blockchains and are tokenized, other assets like fixed income are there as well. And there's like a view of crypto as a technology layer that's gonna be really accelerated once people understand that there's just like a huge efficiency advantage. Um And, and so I think that's interesting. I think that will become increasingly clear and Robin Hood can be a leader there. And then, uh A I also has the potential to fundamentally change financial services. And I think what you're gonna start to see in the near term is customer support, which is a gigantic and deep market, um, which is kind of one major way in which consumers engage with financial services providers. Um You're gonna start to see that increasingly uh done by A I and on the other side of the spectrum, you have private wealth managers. Um And I think in the future private wealth manager, private banker, investment advisor, those will all be A I enabled and I think that that's going to be a hugely transformative force and it will lead to more people being able to access these services that otherwise would be reserved for high net worth individuals. Awesome. Well, Vlad, we look forward to continuing on your journey and watching you in action. Thank you so much for being with us here at brainstorm Tech. Thank you.

Peggy Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Agility Robotics Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How To Build A Better ‘Bot

A lot of people want to work with robots. That's probably maybe a good start for you. Yes, I like that start. So you've been on this job an entire four months, is that right? Ok. You've had a long successful career, Qualcomm Microsoft magically most recently at CEO, I want to talk about that, but maybe that's over drinks or something. Why agility right now as your next CEO role, you know, it's a great question right now. Humanoid robots are having a moment for sure. And I've always been fascinated with robotics. My whole career, my first boss had done his phd in robotics years ago and they're finally having this moment. And when I looked across the field of players agility to me, stood far and ahead of the others. It had a working autonomous robot that was getting ready to take actual work in factories. And since that point, we actually have done that. So I think we'll get into some of that. But did you have a treat for us? I do if you'd allow me, I'd love you to let me welcome digit to the stage digit is the name of our robot. So I have one obvious question at first actually two. Why, why legs at all? Because a lot of robots maybe roll and then why those legs? Ok. So they notice they're going the other way. So we have to go where humans go. That's what we were designed for the small spaces as oh digits waving hello to everyone. The small spaces that humans operate in. So humans, if you go into some of these big warehouses, humans can only reach so high. It had to reach that high and they can reach so low. It had to reach that low. It turns out knees get in the way of of picking up heavy things from the ground. So we put the legs going the other way they don't get in the way. Do you call those reverse knees or are they just some people call them bird legs? I just like to say they're digits legs and they're what works best in that situation. I think we need audience over there to wave. Hello as well. Yeah. Digit digit don't be shy the question. Ok. Yeah, so this was um oh yeah, now he's a ham. Now we can't get him off the stage. I'm waiting for him to take one of my tasks and um so I, you know, obviously this is a brief little fun demo, but digit is actually in workplaces right now. So as of a few weeks ago, digit is at GXO Logistics. They're a third party logistics. A big one outside of Atlanta digit is taking path online and doing them in versus humans doing some of these dull repetitive tasks. Actually, Mary Daly was talking about it. If we want to augment humans, allow them to be freed up to do other things. And it will take the very repetitive things that are part of the everyday job off of the humans plate so they could be more productive in other areas. Are we going to see? I think, I think maybe we have a clip, we can show, we have a clip, we can show where we're operating right now if we can run that video. So GX actually moves spans women's wear and you know, they have these huge automated warehouses and then there's still a human moving things from a conveyor belt to a cart or from a cart to a put wall and it's those points. This actually is in an Amazon facility, a real, a real Amazon real Amazon facility. And um so amidst these islands of automation, this is sometimes the Achilles Heel because uh there's, there needs to be a human in there and they're hard to find. There's about 1.1 million open jobs in the material moving space in the US today alone and they can't be filled. Nobody wants these jobs. They're doubling it doubled in the last five years because we all want next day delivery. And you know, if you want your spans the next day, you know, you want digit in there delivering them. So we have a lot to talk about, but I'm sure the audience will have a bunch of questions. So I'm hoping to get to a few of you. So start thinking about what, what you wanna know uh from Peggy or maybe from well, goodbye digit. But um maybe from digit uh as well. So a lot of questions, you, there's a lot of money going into the space right now. A lot of noise, like you said, you're actually, you're, you have a real live commercial relationship with G XO. You're in Spank's facility. You're also in an Amazon facility. I've covered Amazon a long time. Some of the automation reduces repetitive tasks, but they've also had situations where it then speeds up the work and there's some safety concerns as well. So I'm curious like when you're going into these facilities, what the goals are and how much you prioritize safety along the way. Safety, 100% 100%. This company was built on a safety foundation. So from the software to the hardware to how it moves and how it's programmed, you are operating in an environment with other people right now, we still operate inside of a work cell. OK? But we're headed towards that means no, no humans within our able to, right. And that's powered down. They're 140 pounds. There's a lot of torque. And so you have to be careful about that. However, we're on a path to what's called functional safety. So, in the next 18 months or so, we'll be able to incorporate all of the things that are needed in order to be able to interoperate near humans. Can you talk about sort of some of the stats about what the robot can do in terms of weight, that digit can uh lift battery cycle obviously like these, this is a, this is a cost issue, right? For a lot of these employers. And so I'm curious all the metrics that go into them, figuring out whether they can save money by using digit or many digits. Yes. And right now we're looking at under a two year ry versus a human at a fully loaded 30 dollars per hour. So that's the benchmark that we're focused at. You're right about, you know, power, you need to be operating, we operate for hours, but we, we recharge ourselves right now. We're at about a 2 to 1 ratio. So what does that mean? Exactly? So two hours or units of operating time versus one unit of charging? Ok. But moving to a 4 to 1 and then moving higher up in our next gen to 8 to 10 to 1. So that's the trajectory we're on there. We can lift, you know, right now, between our current gen and next gen, we're moving from about 30 pounds to about 50 pounds. But you have this OSHA limit already in place for humans. So that's the bar we have to meet there and we'll, which is, which is the 50 uh, 50 pounds. Yeah, but, you know, if you think about 50 pounds lifting something over and over and over again, that's the problem. That's where the injuries come in. That's where the quitting comes in. The turnover. You know, there's in these warehouses, turnover is super high. So, so, um I, I will call and if, if anyone has a question, please raise your hand and I'll get to you. Um, ok, we'll, we'll go to one now and then we'll come back. Uh Please just tell us your name. Yeah, you right. Oh, you need a mic, don't you? Uh coming up, coming up right behind you. Tell us who you are and what company you're with, please. Hi, Peggy. Hi, Ken Washington. I'm the CTO at Metronic. Um, and I've known your company for a long time, um, from my days at Ford Motor Company and also at Amazon. And in both of those examples of my past, the, the digit experience has changed a lot and, but what hasn't, what I haven't seen yet is, is a inter inter, is an integration of digit with other automation platforms. Is that something that you're thinking about how to create an API so that other parts of your automated ecosystem can communicate with digit and vice versa? So that they create a system and work together in a, in an optimized way to workflow. Absolutely. So we have developed a software platform called ARC. It has all the API S to plug into the warehouse management systems that are existing in facilities today. So we've integrated already with Manhattan and several others. So we can step into the existing workflow. We don't want to have to have the operator change, the infrastructure change, anything about the workflow. We just step right in, plug into their management or their warehouse management systems. And we've also integrated with quite a few other robots, whether they're autonomous mobile robot carts or put walls or conveyor belts. And so we've got it on both ends where that human goes, digit walks in and we're connected on either side. How, how, how far along are you in that, in that journey? Like how confident are you that you can walk into a new customers facility and whatever the automation is digit can currently work within that or is that a work in progress? Very confident. The good thing is we have a team of people who started and built robotics companies on my leadership team and they brought that sensibility, the safety, the regulatory, the compliance, the fact that you have to step into an existing workflow. All of that is beyond just getting the robot to walk right. You have to enter the corporate it infrastructure and make it work for them, you don't want to make them change things. So we have a good sense of that from the leadership team that uh that the folks before I arrived had, had built, let's talk about the technology a little bit and I'll get to another question if we, if we have right after this. Um How is digit doing what it just did on stage? And then how is it learning and, or deciding how to work inside these active facilities that it's in right now, right? So how it's doing? It is company is 10 years old. It came out of Oregon State University with the Robotics Institute there. We have still a big tech force there and also a factory nearby that we have built to take advantage of the location. Um But digit has been, you know, 10 years in the making. This is highly complex, a highly complex physics project. The dynamics of locomotion are terribly complex. The team solved that part of it. Now, when, when the world changed November 30th 2022 with Chat GPT, we can start to introduce that to help with the semantic intelligence. Now, we have been using reinforcement learning for several years on the locomotion to refine the locomotion so that digit can walk over uneasy places, it can go up and down stairs and, and, and that's what makes it very different from say, a wheeled robot, it can traverse those things. So that part's been great reinforcement learning helps that. But the semantic intelligence with chat G BT is, is just amazing. It's the embodiment of A I. What, what can, can you give the audience an example of, of how that might work? Yeah. So now we have the ability to direct digit. So the other day, we threw a bunch of trash on the floor, different kinds of trash and we put all the bins behind digits. So, you know, recycle landfill and we said just gave it one command digit, clean up this trash and digit scans the room picks up the paper, puts it in the recycle, uh picks up some cardboard, does the same thing goes and picks up some bubble wrap and puts it in the, in the trash and we all went, uh you know, mistake but it turns out bubble wrap is not recyclable. So digit with the power of chat GP T underneath was able to make that decision. So now we don't have to code all of that. We can just with the, with Chat GP and other LL MS, we have the ability to just give digit a direction. So digit can do one thing in the morning for a company, a different thing in the afternoon. Um Do we have any other audience questions? Otherwise I'll keep going because I love talking. Um All right, I, I'm gonna start actually sorry, we're gonna start there. II I faked you out. Um Yeah. Right. Right. There, please tell us who you are. Yes, Sterling Audie with uh with Barclays. So the example that you showed is a single unit in a single unit use case. But I guess we can all envision armies of these being throughout the warehouse. So have you already kind of developed the the management platform and ability to kind of have a, you know, a control plane across the larger number of units? That's exactly what ARC is. So what and what we're finding is the employees who used to do, maybe all of that physical work are becoming the managers of the robots. So they're along the way getting to be upskilled with the use of our ARC platform. They're the ones who are managing the fleet and it doesn't have to be just digits, right? We're connecting to AMS and other things so they can look at the fleet of automation and manage that from there. They have a digital AM just for folks. Oh, sorry, autonomous mobile robots. So they're the carts that you'll see going back and forth in the warehouse facilities. Got it. Yeah, that answer a question for you. Ok. I'll come to you right now. Yeah. No, you can, you can go ahead a Cody Cerny with insignia Peggy. Great to see you. Is there anything that's keeping you up at night or any worries you have about the development of these robots and implementation? Well, the biggest thing keeping me up at night right now is I just got off the phone with my commercial officer and we are just getting ready to produce our next gen in the fall. It, you know, it's already developed and we have this factory up and running. We've got a line up. Why don't you tell people, I, I missed that one. You, you have your own factory. We built a factory in, out, you know, outside of Oregon State and we have the ability to ramp up to 10,000 units a year because we, we saw that demand and we didn't want to miss it as it was coming in. But right now we have handfuls of robots and we have a lot of interest from automotive companies, retail grocers across the board, anybody who's running these kind of facilities. And, and anyway, we're struggling just to figure out where they go next until the fall and we'll be able to open it up because the fall is when you'll, you'll making our next gen next gen. Um How many do you think you can produce next year? Versus that 10,000 capacity next year? We're hundreds and the year after thousands. So that's sort of the ramp that we're looking at. The good thing is, is the factory is in the US, my engineers are nearby. I don't have to put them on planes anywhere and it is, you know, it, we're capable of ramping up. It's not, and it's not Capex. Heavy. It's largely assembly test, repair, that kind of thing. So we can ramp up pretty quickly. If I need a second one, I could, I could get one up and running fairly quickly. Um, funding wise, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. Um How about 180 million? Not too much about that. Ok, so sorry. Ok. Um, like how much is, is that a constraint on building out this vision that you see for many different types of workplaces? Yeah, so the next we are raising now we're in our series C right now and that will take us out the next couple of years until we hit that 10,000 unit. But the good thing is because we're deployed already. We are getting the very first robot as a service contract, multi year contract for humanoids. So we're getting a monthly revenue already on those units and every and units that we put on after that we'll have that, that incoming monthly revenue. Do you know what the discussion is that employers are that you're testing with or or putting these robots into their facilities, what they're having with their employees? Because I know what we've talked about taking tasks, not jobs, but Amazon for example, second biggest largest, second largest private sector employer in the US, 1.5 million jobs. I've talked to hundreds of these employees over the years. Some of them, a lot of them see robots and their concerns So what, what, like, what is the message there? That is believable. Well, that's believable. I think it's reality. There is 1.1 million unfilled jobs. They can't find people to do that. So, what does that do? It? Taxes the people who are there even more and they're ending up doing this repetitive work for longer parts of their day when maybe it used to be a two hour job. They're, you know, they're doing it for four or six hours. And if you see in the video, you know, it's literally moving a plastic bin from here to there, it's mind numbing. And so it's not that people are seeking those jobs. They, they just can't fill them, you know, and it's a retired workforce, it can't refill. So they have a real problem so far. Everything that we, all of our interactions have been very positive because it does give you the opportunity to upskill that worker and put them into a higher. We'll come back in five years and talk some more. I'm getting evil eye. We're out of time. Thank you so much, Peggy. Thank you. Thanks everybody.

Adam Edmunds, Chief Executive Officer, Entrata   David Wright, Co-founder and CEO, Pattern, Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: A New Generation Rises In Silicon Slopes

Hi guys. How's it going? It's good. I'm still acclimating to the altitude to be perfectly honest with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it only takes like four weeks. You'll be fine. Four weeks. Oh, great. Well, good. Alright, I have 3.5 weeks to go gentlemen. I said a lot of jargon at the top about what it is that you folks do and I would actually like for the benefit of the audience for you to explain your companies. So Dave if you don't mind starting what is an e commerce accelerator for the normals in the audience? Yeah. Thanks for having us on first off. Yeah. So e commerce acceleration, we essentially built the category. We help brands sell their products wherever in the world they want them sold marketplace wise. So if you're a brand sitting in, you know, New Jersey, which I'm flying there on a Redeye tonight to own a big brand in New Jersey. And they've got an Ecom team generally, you know, 10 people or something and they have to tackle global Ecom which would include China. We have a couple 100 people in China. We have people all over the Middle East people all over Europe. And if we can do it at a margin that they can't do it at, there's just no reason why not to use an e Commerce accelerator. And, and so if you're a brand looking to sell your products globally on marketplaces, then that's who you'd partner with as an Ecommerce accelerator. Got it. And then similar view out of property management software. For who? For what? Yeah, we're probably the biggest enterprise software company. No one's ever heard of in here. We're about 20 years old based here in Utah. Um We build, we're a vertical SASS company. We build software for multifamily property management businesses on the enterprise site. So if you have 1000 units or more, you're a target customer for us. About 2500 people. Um About 1000 of those are engineers, uh just crossed 400 million of a RR. Um, the company was bootstrapped for several years, raised some money a few years ago, brought in a few investors. But um yeah, people always, most people have never heard of us. We, we, we, we're kind of the of the radar. All sleeper. Yeah. Yeah, gentlemen. II, I just wanna level set for everybody could, could you please very quickly just explain what your revenue looks like right now and how much money you've raised because it is really extraordinary amounts, Adam if you don't mind. Yeah. Uh so this company raised a million bucks. In 2005. That guy still is on the board owns like 15% of the business. So he's gonna do, ok. He'll be all right. Um, we, and then never raise money again. I came in to the business about 2020 as CEO we raised around in 2021 of five, a little over $500 million a lot of that secondary. Um, we brought in Silver Lake, uh, Dragon Air and then a couple of local Ceos Ryan Smith and Todd Peterson also, uh, he, he helped out with that round. Um And that's what we've raised. The company's always been break even slash profitable. I mean, that's the only way to be, um, bootstrapped for so long. Sure. Sure. And your revenue, did you say revenue? A little over 400 million of A R and like always been profitable? And thank you very much. Yeah, we started in 2013 and, and because my background wasn't in, you know, building a business or finance, I did, we never raised money until 2021. We raised 52 million at that point. We in total, we raised 277 million. We did 1.3 billion in revenue last year. And this year we'll do 1.8 right? So thank you for that. So we're talking about fast growth. A lot of, a lot of heads you both have, uh uh uh on your teams. Tell me a little bit about the environment that we're in. What has been a challenge for you in this economic moment. Uh, what keeps you up at night? Uh, uh, you know, you've raised a ton of money that, that's not free. Tell me about it. Uh, yeah. So for us, you know, we built the apartment industry so they've been facing major headwinds the last 12 to 18 months. Rents have really kind of stabilized, decreased in a lot of markets. You know, these owners are on, you know, underwater in a lot of the loans that they have mortgages that they have on buildings. So, um, luckily we sell to the biggest customers in our space. So they're super acquisitive. Um So that's, that's helpful when they go by other companies, it's just automatic growth that comes to us. But we're, you know, we're starting to see that turn around. I think as the fed starts to drop rates that's gonna make life a little easier for our customers. Um I've found over the last year or so. I think if you're profitable, if you're a big company, I don't know if the funding environment ever went away. People definitely got a little more evaluation conscious, I'd say over the last year or two. But, um, you know, I, I if we wanted to go raise around, I think we'd, we'd still have quite a bit of demand. Um Are you worried about getting over your skis? Given the the environment for your customers. Um We sell to a space that's always going to grow. It never grows super crazy. So getting out over our skis is, is would be pretty difficult to do. This company just will grow at 25 to 30% a year for a long, long time. Um So for us, it's just about, you know, maintaining efficiencies, you know, expanding globally, but being really smart about it is what we think about every day. Yeah. Saying, you know, we, we're lucky because we're in digital, you know, digital commerce. So as people move from brick and mortar, which is probably 78% you know, at least in the US, 78% uh 22% is digital and, but it's growing every year. So we have had slowdowns. I think the consumer, you know, and there's concern there. We don't feel it that much because there's generally as much that moves from brick and mortar into digital. So, you know, I think through the years of almost every tech company in the valley did, you know, layoffs, we managed to avoid that and I don't expect we ever will have one unless we, you know, can't forecast. But even if we get a little over our skis, we sort of the, the tailwinds help us grow out of it. I see. Yeah. Just being in the, in the space we're in now you both have interesting personal journeys as far as how you got to the place that you are now, you have strong feelings about the founder versus Operator debate. First off, I'd like to know where you land on that one since you've done both and why Dave, I think founders and Operators are can be the same. I think Adam and I are probably both more on the, you know, I, I founded the company but I think my natural skill is just running a machine where I think I've probably had the most tension is the investor founder, you know, tension. I think there's a bit there. Um Oh, do go on. Um We've had one great 11, not so great one, but generally it's just hard I think and you can see where they're coming from, but an investor comes in and they're like, we're long term, we're thinking five years from now. But in order to monetize something in five years, they're thinking we need profitability now. So a lot of the changes that we're doing are to set up a cell in 3 to 5 years. And that's a long term view, maybe seven, but mostly founders or deep operators are thinking, you know, 1020 years down the road and that is hard to bridge. And I don't know, you know, and generally, you know, a group of investors are holding the CEO accountable and if he doesn't hit certain numbers, he's going to get fired. So he causes them to do things in the short, him or her to do things in the short run that wouldn't be best for the company. So luckily, you know, me and I, who's our co founder, we own, you know, 60 70% of the company and we have investors, but we largely just say we're just holding the, you know, and there has been a lot of rigorous debate because we run a very slim margin because we have, I feel like it's better for brands and better for a pattern. But oftentimes, you know, so we grew a brand from 8 million to 324 million, for example, across global marketplaces. So our, our investors say things like if you grow a brand from 8 million to 324 you can charge them anything and we charge them, you know, 3%. And, and so that's generally the debate that we get is, but I just think it's better, long term thinking if you look at all of the companies in retail are in those spaces, they win by having the best service at the lowest cost. You do both. I wish I was a founder because then I'd own 60 to 70% of something doing 1.8 billion in revenue. So I started to, they were OK. The first one we sold for 10 million bucks. The second one we sold for 70 million bucks. Founders are psychos though like they care about everything. And they're like founders are psychos, they're psychos in the best way. I've worked with some of the best and I'm just my love language is like a metrics and customer acquisition cost and raising money and board meetings. So um after that, I went to a company called Podium. I was super early. We went from like wonder love languages, board meetings. OK. I'm just asking, this is, this is like coming. All right. No, like so the last company I was in, we went like 1 to 100 million of a RR raised money from like Excel and Google. Just lots of emotions and craziness. But now I'm in this big boring silver Lake private equity world and I kind of like it. There's no emotions, they get caught, they, they say they're financial engineers. That's great because they just, if you can see it in the spreadsheet, it's great. So II I actually wish I was a co founder that owns 60%. I am an operator, a big boring operator and I've just come to accept that. That's what I am and I'm OK with it. I'm gonna get you a mug that says big boring offer. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna come to the audience for questions in just a minute, but I've got one for you. So um you're both actually in Lehigh, is that right? So, um you know, we, we've talked on this very stage before last year about you know, the Silicon slopes environment. Um The pros, the cons, I would love to know from your perspective as operators in this environment, how has being in this region helped your business and how has it held it back? Um I, I'm happy to go first. So I started in 03, my first business and it was hard back then in Utah, like you mentioned, Qualtrics and omniture. This company was bootstrapped plural site. They were bootstrapped because you couldn't raise money here. Um The other thing that was really difficult is you couldn't find execs. Like if you, 10 years ago, if you needed a CFO that had taken a company public that did not exist in Utah, you had to import them from the Bay Area. That's changed quite a bit. What we've always had is really good, go to market talent. We've always had really good engineering talent at, you know, it used to be like 50 to 60% of the cost of the Bay area. It's crept up. We've still maintain that. But what's been nice is we've had enough of these companies that you've mentioned, get at bats in the public markets and big equities and multi billion dollar acquisitions. So the talent pool is really rising. So now I really think it's a huge competitive advantage to be here. We can get the talent, we need the execs, we need, you can raise money from anybody here. Times have changed. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's tough sometimes in Utah and I, and there is a stigma to Utah and some of them are true. You know, I think being, you know, I'm not LDF but the, which is the predominant religion in, in the, in the region. I think there's been a lot of history around that and a lot of it, you know, a fair, you know, assessment of, of, of Utah, maybe some things to look at. But from running a company, the talent is there. And if you love being outside, so the people we bring in, it's like a little bit of a love hate relationship when they come in and they land in Utah, they're like, I love this place and I will never move. That's how I feel about it. But I love to go outside. I love to hike, I love to fish. I love to run. I love to bike and I can get on a biking trail and I can go 20 miles up the canyon and never get off the bike, the trail, right. You know, so that I think it is nearly impossible to find. I don't know any other place where you can go and park and be in the mountains in seven minutes with your car. You know, that's from our, both of our offices largely. So a lot of advantages. But we do have occasionally, you know, the, you know, the person that comes in is like, you have to have a car here. Like I can't walk. No, you cannot, you know, you two miles to probably the closest store from most places, you know, but if you want to park without paying for parking or, you know, and you just drive up to the store, you get out of your car, you walk in, you get like, you know, it's fantastic. So, I think, and the talent is here, I think it has a, you know, people think it's, you know, you maybe need to go outside, but I think not anymore now we still go outside quite a bit for, because you have to be global, I think to win now. So, you know, we have 100 we have more people outside of the US than we do inside. But uh but I think every company has to do that to win now, certainly at the scale that you're facing. All right, let's go to the audience for questions. Any questions for the gentleman here. Any questions? Yes, back here. Please just wait for the mic, your name and your affiliation. Sure. Jason Del Rey from Fortune. Um I have a question for, for David. Um So I've covered Amazon for a long time. Um They have these policies about how they want brands to work with them. Sometimes they enforce them, sometimes they don't, they decide when they want to, that can really up in a business like yours or others in the ecosystem. How do you deal with that? And how do you sort of educate your employees to deal with that? I mean, we've been at it for 11 years so we've dealt with probably every policy change or wind of change that Amazon has done. And of course, we've had our moments where we've woken up and we've thought we're dead. Um But as over time, we've just come to realize if you provide value, you know, we're deep, deeply great at helping a brand on the technology side and have such a great track record. I just got back a stat from Amazon last week. This is from Amazon pattern is beating brands that are non pattern managed on the platform by two X and six X in in the health and personal care space on page views. So that's all just a tech. And so regardless of how Amazon decides to set up, you know, the model one P three P, however, they want you to move the goods and they change that. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day to winning because Amazon is always going to focus on the customer. So as long as a customer gets a great product at a good price and we can help that happen. It's all keyword, keyword phrase based from a machine learning perspective, then you will always have a job and pattern will always exist. The revenue models might change, those have changed over the years. But you know, we've come to care about them less as the years have gone on because, you know, we're on T mall in China, for example, those change all the time. Rakitin in Japan, you know, so it almost, you know, we support 70 marketplaces in 60 countries and they always have some new way of doing something. You almost have brands have to just adapt. Thank you. We've got one more. Yes. Your name and affiliation, please. Yeah. Uh Bank Bar then co founder and CEO of NANA, where we're a health care at home remote diagnostics company. I love the topic on the founder versus operator. I'm a first time founder. Uh but I think my skill set was always an operator beforehand. How do you guys see that skill set from the founder and maybe separately the operator of the blend changing now 2024 onward where a lot of those skill sets from the past are now being automated. They're being augmented or evolving from technology and you may not need those old skill sets like you did in the past. Just curious on your thoughts there if you can answer briefly. Yeah. Um I think it's hard to find someone who could scale founder to operator like a dollar to a billion dollars of revenue. Like Zuckerberg's maybe one of the few who've done it really, really well. It's hard because when you're small and you want to be a psycho and make every decision that those same personality traits as you get bigger will, will push every good executive you have out the door. Um And I don't think that has changed. Um, so I think, I think it's a really hard transition to make for a lot of founders. Um II, I personally don't know a lot of, a lot who have done it. Super Bowl. OK. I'd say that it's almost a misnomer because there is operators. But at the, at the end of the day, the people who operate things really well, companies, they're good at letting go and letting people do it. Because if once you're a founder of, you know, the 1700 people at pattern, no matter how good I am, I'm not running that machine. I might think I'm running the machine, but in reality, I'm not running the machine. And so if you can hire well and treat people well, have a good work life balance, build a machine, build a good culture. You're going to be a great operator. That's almost, I think how you define it. Even if you're not in the details, someone is who's great. Right. Right. Right. Well, gentlemen, I have one last question for you before I let you go. Um Are we expecting, I mean, I know the environment, economic environment is what it is. But are we expecting any uh liquidity events in the near future? Adam? Um We are preparing to be a public company. I think this will be a great public company for a long, long time. Timing is TBD. Yeah, same, same. All right. You heard it here. First, a round of applause. Thank you gentlemen for joining us today.

Joe Gebbia, Co-founder, Airbnb, Samara Interviewer: Jessica Mathews, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How To Put Housing Back On Solid Ground

Hello, Joe, how are you? You're getting some cheers that I'm not getting, which is a little disappointing. So the first thing that I have to know is, are you staying in an airbnb tonight or are you at the hotel? I wish I could stay the night. I have to get back for some family obligations, but obviously I would stay at an airbnb tonight. You'd stay in an airbnb if you are on the board of airbnb, are you even allowed to stay in a hotel? Only for competitive research? Ok. Got it. Well, glad we cleared that up. Well, the reason that most people know your name in this room and throughout Silicon Valley and the tech industry is because you are one of the co founders of Airbnb, which has been one of the most successful well known consumer tech companies. Um And you, but we're here today to talk about your new start up that you actually started working on while you were at airbnb. Um So your start up makes these small buildings called a these small little houses in people's backyards. Tell us what exactly is an ad and how did you form a company around it. Sure. And there's actually a lot of overlaps between the approach at airbnb and the approach at Samara, which we'll get to. But for those who don't know, an ad stands for accessory dwelling units, you may have heard of it. It's called a Granny Suite in law flat Casita guest house. There's a lot of names for it and A DS are, are all the rage in California and most people either have one or know someone that has one, a neighbor or a friend or coworker. And it is a um it's the fastest growing form factor of housing in, in the state. Uh One in five permits in California for a house was one of these. It's crazy. Um They range from 400 to 800 square feet and as we'll get into, people use them for all kinds of things. And so yeah, back at airbnb, I had this R and D group, we called Sara and we were exploring new business ventures, new, new paths uh for the company. And, and we stumbled on to this ideas of ad U uh large in part because hosts were renting them out and I saw this on our site and I go, what is this? Who's going to stay in someone's backyard? However, you could see it proliferate on the site and host actually renting out the spaces in their backyards for short term. And now for long term stays, uh the second thing that, that I noticed back in 2017, 2018 is the state of California started passing hundreds of laws to enable A US throughout the state. Why do they do that? Well, a couple of reasons, the first is that California needs more housing. And so as they looked across all the different form factors, they saw that like a US just had the most restrictive policies that you could imagine, you know, things that were archaic from decades ago, that didn't make any sense today if they wanted to stimulate growth of housing in the state. So they got rid of things. Like you'd add a second mailbox and a new address, you'd add two additional parking spots and about 100 of the things that just kind of didn't make sense in 2020 2018, 2019. Um And so the third thing is back in this time, I was actually in the market for an adu uh specifically Prefab, you know, as a designer, I kind of had this, uh you know, sort of fantasy of like, oh, you know, you kind of love the Prefab design factory made. Uh And when I went out to search for a unit, I was just completely underwhelmed by what was on the market from a design perspective. And I thought surely at some point, someone is going to make the, the iphone or the tesla of this, this form factor. And another year went by another year went by and nothing was emerging. I said, you know what we're going to do this, I'm going to solve this problem uh for myself and for other people. So Samara raised its series a round $41 million led by Josh Kushner at thrive capital. This was last fall. So since then you've bought a manufacturing facility in Mexico. How else are you planning to spend the money? Um Yeah, I think as they showed on the screen moments ago, the way it works is people go and order online like you would a Tesla, uh, you pay online, you put down your deposit and you configure and you hit order. And part of the innovation is not just the design, but it's the fact that we handle everything for the homeowner. Homeowners are not experts in construction nor should they be. Uh, and a lot of people as we went doing our research said, you know, I want this extra space in my life. I have a dozen different uses for it, but I, I quit, uh, two steps into the process because it's too much. You know, I don't have time for this. I'm busy. And so we just said, well, why don't we take that on and actually handle everything for the homeowner and the consumer. And actually, so when you, when you buy online, you're buying not only the unit but everything else. Our construction management, we handle the permitting, which is a huge hang up for people. We handle the soil samples, the utility hookups and about 100 other things that have to get done. Um And so, you know, being able to uh handle all that means that we're responsible not only for the manufacturing uh at our facility for the delivery. As you saw, we, we put it on a truck and we ship it and when it arrives to the uh the location, there's a crane waiting and we have what we call crane day, which was actually really fun because all the neighbors come out, people put out lawn chairs, everyone's taking pictures. And we decided at some point like let's just make this a neighborhood block party. Um So in a couple of our recent ones, we have music and taco trucks show up and it actually becomes a really fun event because it's, it's actually kind of magical Jessica to watch a home float through the air and land in its intended location. Um And when it lands in that location, we've actually developed a patented system on the foundation that allows. So when it comes down and it touches the ground on our foundation, it takes about 20 minutes to secure eight bolts underneath and that's all you need. And so we've reduced the construction process for one of these units, traditional construction from upwards of 12 plus months, you know, raise your hand if you've ever done a kind of a project with a general contractor, renovation, keep your hands up. It was on time. Every hand almost went down. You got lucky, sir. Um So we're, we're really proud that we're able to deliver on a fixed timeline with a fixed price. By the way, what you pay online is what you pay in actuality. There's no haggling, there's no back and forth. It's like buying a device online. So I'm assuming since it was a series a round that there was some revenue coming into the company already. So can you tell us how many 80 us that you've sold at this point? Well, it's still a private company. So uh we don't disclose that. But um just to give some perspective, uh last year in California, well, since 2017 in California, permit applications for AD US have gone up 20 X in five years. Uh And so in last year, there were 25,000 permits issued for ad us throughout the entire state just to give you a sense of scale. And this is a big purchase. This is, you know, north of 202 153 $100,000. And did you make about half of those or eventually? Um So, well, to say our factories is uh we're set up to do anywhere between 500 to 1000 units a year. Ok. And when do you think you'll be at capacity? Uh I'll let you know, ok, we'll talk, we'll talk. So one thing I wanted to ask you about was Reuters reported a couple months ago that you had made a personal decision to step off of a special committee at the board of Tesla that had been set up after the state of Delaware invalidated his compensation package and Tesla was deciding whether was going to move the company's domicile to Austin. And you had been on that committee, you decided to step off of it voluntarily for what you said was specifically because there was a potential business transaction between Samara and Elon Musk. So can you tell us what is that potential business traction and has it come transaction and has it come to fruition? Nothing to add on that. That hasn't already been reported. You know, I stepped down as a bunch of caution and yeah, he was interested in potentially getting a house. So did he get a house? Uh we'll let you know we'll follow up on that too. I know that you were not specifically on the compensation committee when um when his compensation was approved and you weren't even on the board of directors at that point. But do you think it should have been approved? Nothing to say about it? Ok. Ok. Got it. So going back to Samara, so I want to ask you about your business model in particular, it's kind of unusual in tech that you are really excited about regulation but, but you really are because in the state of California. Um, they've made a lot of changes to legislation to make it actually easier for residents to get permits to have these ads on their property, which has actually been a huge benefit to your business. So I was wondering who, which other states besides the State of California for, are considering legislation like this? And are you talking with them in any capacity with lobbyists or anything of the sort? I think it's interesting here is that, um, oftentimes California can actually, you know, get, get things right and be at the forefront of things, you know, we can credit them with smoky ban in restaurants, uh you know, decades ago. That is now, of course, national. Um And so I think as California solve the housing crisis, other states that also have a similar problem are looking to see how California is solving this issue. And uh there's many states, there's about eight states that are, uh looking at, some of them are actually modeling California's legislation. Um uh some that are, are, you know, moving us along Colorado, uh, New Jersey, there's been some action in New York State actually on this topic, um Texas has some action on this topic as well. And really, I think you can just follow, follow the, the, the trend anywhere there's a housing crisis as it gets hotter and hotter. You'll see the governments and policies try to adopt clear solutions that, that are working in California So which states would you be interested in expanding into? That's a great question. Um You know, we have a form field on, on samarra.com where people can put in their zip code where they want us to expand to next. And it's, I wish I could tell you, oh, it's these three states, it's actually everywhere. Like we have people in all, you know, other 49 states including Hawaii and Alaska that want uh a Sarra unit, uh you know, be, be able to put in their backyard. What are you seeing with legislation particularly here in the state of Utah? Since that's where we are right now? Oh my gosh. Um You got me there. I haven't, I didn't research that before I came. But um again, if there's a housing issue in Utah, I'm sure there are policymakers talking about it. So one thing that I wanted to ask you about is that there are some concerns here specifically in the city of Salt Lake. Um about whether there is going to be legislation proposed around a just because people are concerned, will this lead to more short term rentals in our neighborhoods? And I'm wondering if you think there's any credence to those concerns airbnb is an investor in Samara and you know, I'm wondering whether there are going to be more airbnb airbnb rentals in some of these neighborhoods where you're putting in these small homes. Well, yeah, so people get, why do people get in a why do they need 400 to 800 square feet in their backyard? And there's a lot of reasons one is to income and to rent it out and uh by and large anywhere you go in the country where there's a, there's a 30 plus uh night, you know, uh uh limit on those, on those, those bookings. So there's four long term stays. Let's be clear about that. Um Second is people house family and what kind of family? Well, as parents age, this is a great way to keep the grandparents nearby. Um They can keep the cat and be close to the grandkids. Uh It's a great place for Johnny to stay when he comes home from college. And so there's actually a lot of people who get in a to keep their kids close by as they, you know, graduate and come back home. And then there's other things like, uh working from home, you know, 41% of Americans still have a hybrid work situation and are looking for productive, quiet places to work from home. And of course, there's a lot of personal uses that people do the home gym, the yoga studio, et cetera. But I think what's most interesting is this the average homeowner in California has their home for about 16 years. So over the course of 16 years, you will likely use your ad U for all of those things because it becomes a flex space that allows you to live life allows you to adapt. If there's a, if there's a pandemic, it allows you to adapt with your parents getting older, it allows you to adapt with your kids as they grow up, as your interests change as you need more income, you can turn it on uh for income the next year, you can turn it off, use it for personal use. And in thinking about this for the last couple of years, it kind of strikes me that we've all had the space in our lives before in the 20th century. We just didn't know it called the Garage. The garage was the flex space. That's where you put the car. But then it became a lot more than that. It was the place where the band practiced. You turned into the kids' playroom, the place to make, you know, carpentry and a wood shop, turn it into an apartment or start a company out of it. And so I really see ad us as this century's version of that flex space to live life, how you, how you need it. So you're, you're envisioning these ad us to be long term rentals though at Samara. Yes. OK. Got it. So we're gonna open it up to audience questions here in a second. So go ahead and prepare your questions. Um I forgot one of the stats I think is absolutely fascinating when you think about multi generational living. Um in that use case, whether it's older or younger. Um One in four homes in the United States has two adult generations living together. That's crazy. Like homes were not designed for that, a single family home, it's for a single family. And so I really see this as like this addition to help people actually adapt to, you know, this new relationship that we have with our home post COVID. So the thing I wanna ask you before we open it up to audience questions is we, we have some people in the audience who are starting their own companies, you obviously have a lot of experience scaling one. And so what are some of the lessons that you have taken away from airbnb that you've applied to Samara? The first one that comes to mind is um having great co founders. I got really lucky at Airbnb uh with Brian Chesky, our, our CEO and Nate Bus Shazi uh who runs strategy for us. Um We did a personality assessment at 11 point in the history of Airbnb and they plotted our results on these concentric circles and we had a dot here a dot Here and a dot Here and the facilitator was like, oh my God, I've never seen this before. You guys are an e collateral triangle. Um I think that's what one of the many reasons why uh you know, the company is what it is today is that we, we often joke that like we had three legs of a stool and if you took one of the legs away when it, when it stayed up. Um And so I think having complimentary co founders is absolutely critical, you know, find the person that, that complements you. What, what are you not so great at? What are your weaknesses? Go find the person who has those strengths. How does Mike compliment you, Mike is amazing. Mike mcnamara. He was the CEO of Flex, which is one of the largest contract manufacturers on the planet. It's a $25 billion company, 200,000 employees in 13 plus countries. And he brings a level of expertise around building things, supply chain, manufacturing sales process. And between him and I, he handles that domain and I get to handle the things that I'm good at which is brand building user experience, design, architecture. Um And I think what you've seen so far through Samara is a direct result of that duality between the two of us working really well together. OK. Unfortunately, I just got the flag that we have to wrap things up. And so I'm not gonna go to audience questions. I apologize, but Joe, thank you so much. Really appreciate you being here. Thank you, everybody.

George Arison, Chief Executive Officer, Grindr   Interviewer: Polina Pompliano, Founder, The Profile; Co-chair, Fortune Founders Forum

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Rise And Grind

Tech

George and I were both born in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria and Georgia, the country in our, just a black the parts. Yeah. In our, in our cultures at the time didn't exactly put a premium on capitalism and entrepreneurship. But you moved to the US at age 14. Can you tell me how and what drew you to the US? So my dad was a little naughty and he believed that sin was going to fall apart and that English was going to be the kind of the way to survive. And when did he think that they like 19 eighties, early eighties? Yeah. And so he forced us to learn English, me and my brother when we were very young. Um I on my own applied to us prep schools when I was 12. I got into a few of them. Fortunately because I had an American tutors in Georgia who wrote me reference letters. And so it kind of worked out. Um and then I went to the embassy got a visa and showed up in the US when I was 14 and I was the one of the very first Soviet kids that allowed to leave. Um to come to the US. Um So I was very lucky. Um So I just ingrain anything like going to America was the thing to do. Um So even though I grew up in a very Soviet environment, like the support for America was very, very high in my mind. Um And, you know, I kind of jokingly like I've been built three companies since then and I joke that actually coming to America was my first start up. That was kind of game changing for my life. Yeah, we had a very similar upbringings. Um So before you became grindr CEO in 2022 you had actually co founded several start ups. And you've said before, there's, there's a lot of founders in this room, you've said before that founding a company is an impossible thing to do and that you have to be a little bit arrogant to become a founder, arrogant and crazy, arrogant and crazy. So I'd like to hear what you think it takes to start a company in today's environment. Yeah. So one of my motives in life is like, do impossible things, which obviously is an oxymoron. But I think it, it kind of encompasses at least how I shaped my life and I came up with it once because I had an employee at shift my previous company who was really complaining about like, I can't, this can't be done. This came and now I'm like, look man my whole life is impossible because, like, I'm now here doing this and, like, look at where I was born. So nothing's actually impossible. And so that's been really, been effective for me as an executive. Frankly, it's been very effective with my kids too because now my daughter, whenever she doesn't want to do something like, you know, oh, nothing is impossible data and I can actually do it, which is really good. Um, and, and I think that's true, kind of always, it's not a differentiator thing. Um I think the thing that's really different about now versus a even a decade ago is the number of people you will need to build a company is actually going to be much less than you needed in the past. Why? Because of what A I is going to do to how we work. And so the company being starting like starting now or especially a year from now, like I can easily envision a company getting to 50 or 100 million in revenue with like 25 employees because they'll have a bunch of synthetic employees as well doing a lot of the work. And so that's a really big difference because then the people you bring on board as your core team need to be exceptionally good because the synthetics are gonna be providing leverage for them and then to be able to work that way. So I think talent is going to become a more comp, I mean, it's always difficult. But instead of like, well, this is like, ok, for now he'll, he'll be good enough for the next 18 months. Get me to the next stage and then I'll get somebody else. I don't know if you could do that anymore in a, in a world that we're untrained to in the future. And I like that synthetic employees. I hadn't heard that before. So, so George actually took grindr public and a few things to note. Grindr generated $75.3 million just in Q one of 2024. And it has a market cap of 2.1 billion for those who aren't familiar with the Grindr model. How do, how do you make money? Yeah. Well, the vast majority of the money we make is through subscriptions. So we have two tier of subscriptions. One's 99 9 and one's 3999 and people subscribe to that. We have a fairly low pair penetration. It's about 7% as a comparison point. Tinder, which is kind of the dominant product for straight, straight people. It's about 15% penetration. 15. Yeah. So there's a lot of room largely. It's because the grinder never really focused on modernization until about three years ago. So we're now only now starting to kind of drive modernization in a big way by investing in the product and building features that people want to pay for. Um And then we have an ad business which is about 15% of our revenue. And that's a big growth opportunity as well for us because we have a very kind of in demand user base. You know, average gay couple in America has a household income that's twice as high as an average straight couple. Interesting gay men have two X likelihood of having AJ DMB A phd MD versus a straight male counterpart. They also don't usually have Children. So we have a lot of disposable income and more time. So the audience is really good for advertising. And so that's another big role factor. So those are the two primary ways in which money. Yeah, I want to come to you guys for questions. If you have a question, please raise your hand and we'll send somebody your way before we come to you. I have one more question for you. So it really feels like grindr is innovating at kind of breakneck speed. You have, you have added features, trip planning. It's more of a community than the other dating apps. You're creating a neighborhood in your pocket. What features can users expect in the near future? Yeah. So when I joined like grind has always been the thing that it does really well, which is like the right now immediate use case with a user or long term relationships. You know, our rough estimate is somewhere between one and 4 to 1 and five gay male relationships in the US originate on grindr. So we do play a pretty big role in that sense, but people do use the product in a very community sense as well. Like, hey, I'm going to Singapore, let me use Grindr to figure out what I'm going to be doing in Singapore. And oftentimes I interviewed a candidate once for a fairly senior role and like, oh yeah, my friend just had a tour of Singapore for three days with this guy that he met with on Grindr and that's not an uncommon thing. So a lot of what our focus has been like, how do we product all that? People already use grindr in so many different ways, but we don't have features for that. Can we build features for those? And so we are now going in that direction. There are two things we've publicly talked about. One is travel because I think there's a pretty big opportunity there in travel planning and in events planning and that's both local discovery and when you're traveling, discovery. Um you know, like, hey, what are the activities going on tonight? Where should I go to a bar? Um What are the places for me to stay, et cetera? And then the second big one is around health and wellness. Um You know, not surprisingly health and among is really important to gay by men is like a big driver of how we make decisions. Uh And so there's a lot we can do there. Um We're not really given use case examples of that yet because we're not ready to do that. But I think it'll be kind of coming. But you can imagine anything from like, you know, people might want to buy certain types of medications, which they already do, but we actually can extend our brand to let them do that and integrate it with our core products to, you know, loneliness and depression is a really big thing in our community. And if we can do things through A I to help support those problems and help people be in a better place that could be really valuable for the users. So that's kind of what we're envisioning. And I want to highlight something here because as I'm hearing you talk, if you're on Tinder or Bumble, once you meet somebody, you get off the app. But grindr technically, even you can stay on the app. A lot of people stay on the app, even not in a relationship that's actually quite common. Yes. People kind of do a little bit age out. So we do an opportunity to kind of bring people, you know, 40 plus to be more engaged. If you look at our user cohorts, like we start to not have as many users at that age group as we used to. So there is a way to bring them back, I think. But in general, people stay on the app for that long time. That's fascinating. Any questions right here. Uh Please state your name company and be concise. Yeah. Hey, Andy Dunn, my company is called P I live in Chicago. Do you think Chicago can ever become a great tech place? Yeah. So we were really lucky. Um Grindr used to be owned by the Chinese and was forced the recipe to be bought by, you know, a, a non Chinese ownership cohort which is mostly American and American allies. Um that, that, that bought it. And uh the, the, the team, the engineering team at that point was almost all based in Taiwan. So when that transition happened, they all quit. So there's like emergency, we have no engineering. What are we going to do in 2020 in the middle of COVID? It so happened with one of the people involved in that transaction was Sam Yan, who is a former CEO of, of match and he had been ac o another company that had sold to fedex and they had let go of a bunch of engineers. And so he's like, wow, I actually, I have a bunch of engineers in Chicago that like RDA should hire. And so we got a little bit of a like aqua hire like situation. It wasn't actually a hire, aqua hire, but, you know, we brought a bunch of engineers in together from the shop around team in Chicago. So we end up with a Chicago team that way. And since then, we've dramatically expanded that team. That's actually where most of our engineers are. We do have engines in the Bay area as well and it's been really effective. Um, I mean, I generally think that, you know, during the last decade, it's gotten a little bit out of control in terms of what people expectations are. And the Prima Donna nature of stuff has been a little bit too much and that's something we don't experience in Chicago. And that's very positive. The flip side, what's hard is actually finding mobile talent, like hiring IOS engineers in Chicago. It's been way more difficult than I would have expected. Um Grindr has 13.7 million monthly active users. That's an insane number. Why do you think that your dating app, competitors like Tinder and Bumble are on the decline while you're growing? Well, I'm asked this question a lot and I try to be super diplomatic in my, don't be diplomatic. Well, it's like, I mean, we are all kind of trying to do the same thing is like help, help people find love, right? So I think we should be positive about it. But in one of the things that strikes me about how Bumble and Tinder approach the world is that they frankly don't treat 70% of their users very well, right? Like 70% of people who use both of those products are men and the way they talk about their male users is actually really negative to the point where like, they're offensive to them. And like, I'm not their target audience but I still, I, as a guy, I'm offended and it's not because like, I think it's great to be talking about how we are really targeting women and we want to create a really great experience for women 100%. That's awesome. But you can create a great experience for somebody without creating a bad experience for somebody else. And is it the messaging or the c it's both and it's like the messaging but the music as well. So you have like these huge percentage of men who are looking to settle down, who are looking to find a partner but and they're very captive to the products in the period when they're there. Why not build a lot of features for them, by the way, those are your paying users as well because both of the products are built in a way in which men pay and women don't have to pay for the product as much. And so I think it's a huge missed opportunity in, in kind of how they speak about it and, and in some ways, it's gotten worse because instead like as a run into pro instead of thinking like, hey, I got this huge audience, I don't do anything for, let me lean into that one that's trying to mean more into the audience that they've always been doing something for, which is the women but the result of that is they're even more negative about men. So, like, when I listen to the earnings. So I'm just like, wow, like, if I was a user, I wouldn't want to even be on this product. Given how I'm, I'm, I'm, they're talking about me. So that's one thing. The second thing is the product innovation hasn't really happened. Right. Like, they've had the product they've had and they've not really innovated. Everyone's like, well, why is hinge doing so well? Because hinge is actually product innovating. So people are moving to a product that is new and different, which is exactly what you'd expect. I mean, if we, we did not product innovate for a long time either, that's why we're now very much focused on product innovation. Because if you don't do that, then the users are going to go somewhere else inevitably in 30 seconds. Can you tell me in 10 years? Is grindr still a dating app or is it something else? Well, we already, like I said this at an invest last month that we are more to a social network than we are dating up. Yes, dating. And the casual dating experience is always going to be co to grinder. I mean, very directly like sex is a really big part of gay culture. And if you try to remove that, that would not really work. But around that, we can build a lot of stuff that's more social network like with a very kind of direct online and in real life components. I think that's the direction we'll be heading into. And when can we expect more of these features to come to the app? So we gave a lot of direction on that, that invest today. We are one of the big things we're working on right now is called right now. That's going to be coming late this year, early next year. Some of it is already in launch, but a lot more of it and then the rest of it probably kind of in 25 and into 26. Amazing. Thank you so much George.

Susan Emerson, Senior Vice President, AI Product GTM, Salesforce Raj Seshadri, Chief Commercial Payments Officer, Mastercard Jeremy Wacksman, Chief Operating Officer, Zillow Group, Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How tech companies navigate privacy expectations with rising data concerns

Susan Emerson, Senior Vice President, AI Product GTM, Salesforce Raj Seshadri, Chief Commercial Payments Officer, Mastercard Jeremy Wacksman, Chief Operating Officer, Zillow Group

Susan Emerson, Senior Vice President, AI Product GTM, Salesforce Raj Seshadri, Chief Commercial Payments Officer, Mastercard Jeremy Wacksman, Chief Operating Officer, Zillow Group, 

David Neeleman, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Breeze Airways Interviewer: Jessica Mathews, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: An Entirely Different Kind of Flying

So we both decided backstage that we're going to go on a bike ride after that. We were really inspired. Well, I'm wearing my glucose monitor. So it's kind of cool to see I get updates and, but it's, it's good to see lactose too. I'm excited to get that approved and more wearable the better. Yeah, definitely. Well, look. So Breeze is based out of Salt Lake City. So have you seen an uptick in flights this week for brainstorm tech? Um You know, we actually have flights into Provo and we serve a couple times a day from, from Orange County Airport. So I think there's a lot of tech down there. So I'm sure we have some people coming in. Do we have anyone here who took a brief flight in? Ok. Yeah, we got a couple of people going over there. We don't have a lot of service out of here. If we were in Charleston, then a lot of fans would go up or we're in Providence Rhode Island where we have big bases of operations. Got it. Well, David, we're really excited to have you today. As Andrew mentioned, you have founded several different airlines. And I guess my first question would be for you. Why start a brand new one? What's different about Breeze? So, you know, I, I, after I left jetblue, I went to, I was born in Brazil and my, my parents were living there and my dad was a journalist. And so I had the opportunity to be born there and I just, I don't know, I had had, and then I went back as a missionary for a couple of years and speak Portuguese. And I always want to make a difference for, for, for Brazil and, and the people and today it's, it's an amazing company as well. Has 1000 flights a day. We move 100 1000 people. So I was there and, and that was the airline you founded right before Breeze, right? As it was. Yeah. So as I look back to the US after 15 years, the airline started 15 years ago and today we, like I said, we have 1000 flights. We fly 100,000 people. We um deliver 200,000 packages door to door. Um I, I just looked back at the US market and I said, you know, there may be an opportunity here. Uh What's different about the US business airline business today than when I started jetblue is, it's a heck of a lot better. I mean, delta, you can partially because of jetblue. Uh you can sit down and, and there's live TV. And you have your free internet and the flights go on time. It's, it's a much better product than what it was back when I started jetblue. Uh also Delta United, everyone went through bankruptcy. So they were able to clean up all their legacy costs. So it was a much different market and a much better market. But what the trends that I saw because the cost that started going up is that the big airlines were forcing everyone through hubs if you lived in places like um, Hartford, Connecticut, if you lived in Hartford, Connecticut, if you lived in Huntsville, Alabama, I live in Bentonville, Arkansas. So you live in Bentonville, Arkansas, you had to always go to a hub. You, you had no really other choices to do that. Or if you lived in Huntsville, the other option, you could drive to Nashville two hours. So Providence, you could go to Boston but you couldn't have the flights out of Providence. So we thought if we could just get you there for twice as fast for half the price and do it with a different product mix than the traditional UF CCS. We call ourselves the NLCC, a nice low cost carrier and have options. You know, it's different today, Jessica about the industry is about 25% of the people want an upgraded experience. You know, one of the reasons the Southwest is kind of struggling today is that kind of the scramble for seats and it was cool back in the seventies and eighties and even the nineties. But today when Delta is so much better, when United is so much better, people don't want to fight for a seat. They want to pay a little extra to have extra leg room. They want to be able to pay a little extra for a first class seat, a lot extra for a first class seat. So on our breeze airplanes today. Uh First of all, we, we have about 200 routes, we serve 60 cities and about 90% of our routes, we have no nonstop competition. And then when you're outside of the huts, always, we're always outside. So, uh Huntsville, Alabama, we fly Huntsville to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, to Tampa, to Orlando places people want to go, they don't have to connect through Dallas, so they don't have to connect through um Atlanta for ex for example. So we get there a lot quicker. Let me, let me ask you. So you, you started this company at a very interesting time in the market. So you, you started building it right before COVID happened and then you launched it in early 2021 which is arguably one of the most devastating periods for airlines. So how was that? No, it was rough. It was really rough. And uh, it was not only because I mean, the business was coming back, but it was really the supply chain. It was being able to hire people during COVID. A lot of people decided they didn't want to go back to work or they wanted to work a lot less or they wanted to work from home. And so it was really, really tough and the, the big airlines had laid off and not laid off, they had bought off 7000 pilots, the most expensive pilots. They took some of the $53 billion they got from the US government and said, how about you guys all retire? And then when the business came roaring back, they said, holy, you know, crap, we got to hire 7000 new pilots. So they started going into the regional carriers and the regional carriers couldn't fly. The fa had staffing issues, certified stuff. So it was, it was a really challenging time to get it going. But thankfully now we're really hitting our stride and pilot issue has been resolved. We can hire anyone. We want to. We have, we have over 800 applications for pilots right now. So is the pilot issue totally resolved now? It is, it is mainly there's still a kind of a captain issue. You have to fly 1000 hours to become a captain. So captains are a little, a little, you know, it's interesting. The big airlines, the first officer pay has gone up so much that a lot of these people don't want to upgrade to captain because it affects their quality. Of life. So you may have a sitting in Miami, have a great line and then they say you want to be captain, you can be on reserve in Newark if you want. And they're like, no, thanks because I, I'm making 200 grand sitting here in Miami and I can make 350 in, in New York, but it's not worth it to me. So it kind of the marginal utility of money, you know, has, has forced a lot of people not to want to upgrade a captain. So I don't think we can have a conversation today about the airline industry without talking about safety. There's been whistleblowers at Boeing, they've had a lot of safety issues with their Boeing. 737 people. I talked to including myself, think a little differently every time you get onto an airplane now. And so e every airline carrier is having to think about that. You are in an interesting situation because you're also a start up where your brand is less known. And so how do you approach safety and how do you get customers comfortable with flying? Breeze in today's day and age? You know, it's um CP traveling by air, be it on a 737 max and an A 220 where we fly. Uh It is incredibly safe. I mean, it is unbelievably safe. I mean, it's really hard for anyone to think of the last accident um of, of, of an airplane, of an airplane, a large transport airplane in the United States. Uh, it's, it has been so long, uh, you know, I, I think, well, there was a, there was a regional plane Colgan that crashed in Buffalo, that was maybe 10 years ago. But, but if you go before that, it was like American Airlines, uh, out of JFK was like, right after 911. I mean, it was a lot of losing a door during your flight is also very terrifying. It is, but it shows the amazingly engineered engineering on that airplane that you lock the door and nobody was injured and the plane was able to last. Now, obviously, things happen will tires fall off airplanes, but the ability for these airplanes to withstand that kind of stuff is really incredibly. So does that feel like a non issue for you at breeze is that I can't very worried about people like you and everybody else, but it really is a non issue. But, you know, safety is our number one value. Every time I start an airline, we create values and safety is always at the very stop. And so we are, we, we talk about safety. We, you know, safety is part of our culture. Um you know, everybody can stop an airplane anytime if they feel like it's safety. So it's ingrained in our culture and because of that and because of the work the FAA does and because every time there's an accident or something, you close that, that, that something that caused it and, and uh, so that's why it's, it's really so incredibly safe to fly. Another thing that I feel is top of mind to many of us is customer service. And I'm thinking back in 2022 when Southwest had that insane scheduling crisis. And I think we can all relate to one of the most frustrating things in the world is if your flight gets canceled or delayed and you can't get a hold of a human on the phone. Um I know that breeze is very digital first in its approach to dealing with customers delays issues. Um Have you rethought that at all in terms of having people interact with the chat bot versus a human? Yes. You know, we just hired a brand new chief, chief customer officer. Ok. And when she was in charge, when did she join? She started last week? Ok. She's incredible and she is in charge of our any customer contact position. So she, she's in charge of all of our airports, all of our flight attendants and all of what we call our guest empowerment agents that work at home. So anyone that has contact with a customer she's in charge of. So, you know, her, her priorities are to a get make it the most on time airline in the in the country. I'm not content until we're 90% on time. We already um we operate, we cancel one in every 1000 flights. So we are hardly ever ever cancel a flight, but sometimes we have to overnight it or run late or something. So that's, you know, her number 1 90% on time. It will be today. We're around 70 we need to be better. So, so what about for those three out of 10 people that are, so then the second thing is our get agents right now. It's digitally. We talk to you by digitally. We don't have a big call center. Everybody works at home. So one of her jobs is to be quicker to call people. So somebody contacts us. Um, it's interesting that my, my daughter actually works for the company. She's in Dayton, Ohio and she goes, does all the MP S stuff and she told me the other day, dad, there's a couple of people that were blind that said they can't deal with it. How do we deal with them? You know, and I said, well, we need to call them. So, you know, we're going to be much quicker to be able to, we can interact with them, but then we, we can will call you. And so that's a much quicker. So you are incorporating more humans into the. Exactly. Exactly. Right. As it goes through, you know, using the technology and the A I to determine who really needs to be called. And then we, we, we're quicker to call them and then we're also going to have more people, our people at the airport right now. A lot of that's contracted. And the beautiful thing about having those two things combined is that somebody can actually work from home a couple days a week and then they can come to the airport and work a couple days a week. So it's a much more attractive job than having to go to the airport every week or, or stay home all the time so we can mix those two. Ok. So I think we only have time for one more question. So I'm gonna ask you to keep your answer brief so we can fit it in. I'm watching the clock myself. Um, so you have been in this industry for a really long time, have founded so many different airline companies. What do you think of this industry is gonna look like in the next five years, particularly after jetblue said earlier this year, it was terminating. It's ac it's proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines because of antitrust issues. What, what is the next five years gonna look like in your opinion? Well, I think, you know, it's, I think, I think A I will, will, will play a huge part. A I in the operation of our airplanes for a better fuel economy for predictive maintenance. So we can predict when parts are going to fail quicker. So we don't have less cancellations. Um, a better, a really more connect super apps that understand you and know you better and can serve you up relevant stuff instead of just blasting out emails all the time. Um And so I think, you know, a I is going to change the experience dramatically, make it better, make our costs lower and, and really um communicate better with our customers and lower our marketing costs because we'll, we'll know our customers better. You know, today we have an upgraded experience. You know, you can go and say you want to buy the $49 fare. No, I want, I want the 90 $9 fare that has the extra leg room and the free bags or I want the 149 fare that has uh the first class seat. And so we have that ability um like you can't get on spirit or front here and, and we can take you to a bunch of places that people don't fly. So, you know, there's, there's, that's, that's all the time we have today. Thank you so much for being here, everyone. Thanks.

Presenter: Wasim Khaled, Co-founder and CEO, Blackbird.AI

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Perception, Lies, and AI

Hello, everyone. Great to be here today. My name is Wasim Khaled. I am CEO and co-founder of Blackbird. A I. Blackbird is a technology company that helps some of the world's largest organizations understand and respond to disinformation and misinformation. This is something that we're all dealing with on a daily basis and this is a very important week to be here discussing this topic. Now, I am here today to talk about perception, lies and A I. But before we do that, we're going to do a little experiment since I've got such a great crowd here today, I'm only going to tell you two things I'm about to play an audio phrase for you and it's gonna repeat, you have to take my word for it that it never changes. I'm also going to flash a couple of phrases on the screen. So ask yourself, what do you hear? Not, not politics. OK. Not big, not big. Yeah. Not, not all right. I saw a couple of reactions here. Let me tell you a little bit about what you just experienced that's called an auditory illusion. OK. What I did here was I knew something about how audio and visual stimuli is processed and I exploited that to mess with your head a little bit. Right now. Some of you might have even felt a little bit uncomfortable on that last screen. And there's a reason for that. It's because no one likes to be manipulated. And so when we talk about disinformation and misinformation, it's really not about what is true and what is false. It is about manipulation of the narrative and what we are experiencing in today's information ecosystem is nothing less than a battle of the narratives. What I've always thought about since 2017, when we founded the company, a cyberattack on human perception. Now, every organization has a narrative and every narrative has a counter narrative. Sometimes dozens of counter narratives. What everyone has to understand here, it is the conflict between the narrative and the counter narrative that creates an opening for threat actors to polarize communities and society against one another, but also to drive some sort of sometimes ideological or financial gain or motive. Now, people get sideswiped by what we call narrative attacks on an almost weekly basis. Now. So what is a narrative attack? So the way we define this is any kind of assertion in the information ecosystem that can drive harm against a person place or thing. Now, a thing could be something as innocuous as an hr policy or an ingredient in a product. But what you have to understand about a narrative attack is that a single post or comment can turn into something that creates immense damage, both financially and reputation threat. Actors are just waiting for this opportunity. They use every tool available in the toolkit to make sure that the narrative they want seen are seen by as many people as possible. Now they use bot networks, they use techniques to make sure that the online groups that maybe you want the least attention from are the ones you get the most attention from. They use generative A I to fabricate entirely work realities and they can do it fast. And these are not Black Swan events any longer. Since we started the company, you'd see one of these maybe once a year now, we see them almost every week. I'm sure you recognize some of these billions and billions of dollars of damage have been caused by narrative attacks. There's just a name for it. Now, we also have Gener DB I. So when it comes to generative A I, we see fabricated images being used by threat actors to create entirely curated narratives that they cannot tell the difference between false. And what I think is most important about this is it's low cost, it's scalable. And when you're on linkedin, seeing all the cool things that generative A I can do for your company know that these threat actors are also there watching and waiting and scaling their information operations campaigns. So it is no surprise. That the World Economic Forum has declared misinformation and disinformation, one of the largest global threats, the number one global threat in 2024 and this is across economic technological and societal categories. Now I spend a little time thinking about what is the accessible case study that I could show this audience to really help them understand how a narrative attack works. We're, as you can imagine in the midst of a lot of analysis for a lot of hairy topics and situations, geopolitical risk wars, vaccines, anti vax. But you know, there was one particular report that we put out that pulled me into more newsrooms that got me in front of more cameras than almost anything else. It's probably a hard one to guess. It's not wars, it's not vaccines. The Taylor Swift. OK. So, so stick with me for a moment here if you're not following some of the weirdness. Um A Guardian poll recently showed that one in five Americans believe that Taylor Swift is a government asset and a psy op. OK. Well, how did that come to pass? Well, it started with the usual suspect with a conspiracy theory in the dark web, moved to public telegram channels landed on social media, it then moved into the mainstream media and everyone started picking it up. I mean, this was a week before the Super Bowl. They needed to talk about Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift before anyone knew it, millions of people had been exposed to these narratives and to these conspiracies and you know, marketing 101, you see something seven times sinks in that's kind of how these work. But what was really happening in the information ecosystem, that's what's critical and that's what we focused on at Blackbird. So what you're seeing here is the information ecosystem as it was behaving during the lead up to that narrative, these jellyfish like structures that you're seeing here. It's what a narrative actually looks like if you have the ability to visualize it. This is our installation platform. The tentacles are actually connections between multiple narratives and sub narratives and counter narratives. It's a pretty big mess unless you know how to read it. Now, the red that you see here are actually bott like actors very important quality to understand. I'll talk a little bit more about why in a moment. This also enables you to pull out executive summaries to help you make strategic decisions across coms and threat intelligence in a host of other areas. Everything from insider threats to m and A our platform has been utilized to make stronger, faster decisions. Now, here you can see the narrative was almost 90%. The narrative risk bot like activity 25 ish percent important to know if there are bots propping up narratives. You might not want to take the bait and react to it today. You can make that decision and finally cohorts cohorts are like-minded tribes of online actors, the ones you might want to avoid. Now, here we saw NFL fans and Swifties coming to Taylor Swift's defense in the narrative. However, there were Russian state actors amplifying these narratives. Why is that? Well, as it turns out almost anything that gets enough eyeballs, you will have threat actors amplify those narratives, especially when you can polarize broader societal divides to create friction and ultimately erosion of trust. Now, not every brand is Taylor swift to be resilient like a narrative attack like this. When it hits you, you can't always bounce back and we've seen companies lose 20 $25 billion in a matter of weeks and they never really bounced back. Give you another example, Silicon Valley Bank. A lot of people call this the first social media driven bank run. Now, I want to be really clear if you had narrative intelligence to understand what was happening that week, it wouldn't have stopped the bank from failing. OK. That's it's a whole different topic. OK? However, let's say that you banked with Silicon Valley or you were partners or you were just looking to understand what was happening. You would have had a big, big early warning if you were able to understand what was really happening. Now, in this case, part of the narrative, it's just an interesting point. What you see coded in blue is a cohort that we label as anti capitalists, right? They were driving narratives that created a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, and that cohort will often appear in almost anything related to an M and a banking narrative, et cetera, right? And then when you dig in, you also see all of the cohorts the bot like activity and everything else that was happening within that ecosystem. All right, now, I want to be clear that constellation is a team that is a tool that teams like threat intel analysts and coms teams can use to better make decisions. We're also going to talk about one more tool that we have in just a few minutes that anyone can use. I also want to talk a little bit about deep fakes and generative A I now I hear from our customers on an almost regular basis that they want to understand if there's deep fakes out that are manipulating their narratives, that's an important thing to understand. But in a world where almost everything is going to have some amount of analysis or manipulation by generative A I using legitimate tools by the way, it could be, you know, office 360 or all of the tools that integrate gen A just knowing it's gen A I is not enough. Let's assume that all the content is going to have a percentage of gen a analysis around it. It's important to know more, more so how that deep fake impacts the public and how far it's spread. Because if a deep faith falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it. It may not be worth responding to tools, make this very easy things like this. I'm going to show you some magic the real thing. I mean, uh it's all real. It takes 1020 seconds of video, a social media post with audio and you can generate something like this in a matter of minutes. Anyone can do it, But you have to also see how it moves through networks. No, you may be wondering, is my organization susceptible to these types of attacks? Can we see these things coming? I mean, I'm just going to tell you after talking to hundreds of organizations for the past 67 years, more than likely you're not going to see it coming. And our customers are always asking us, are we next? There's three questions you can ask maybe if you're a CEO or a board member or someone who is in charge of communications, you ask these three questions to your customers the first, if we are under attack, how will I understand the contagion, like effect of narratives, how fast they're spreading, particularly when they're mutating and evolving? Then how am I going to understand which of those narratives are bot driven synthetically amplified? You all are probably familiar with share of voice. Well, you have to be worried about synthetic, share of voice and finally who and what are the hyper agenda driven groups that are propping up this narrative and are are they collaborating which can cause even more harm to my organization if you can't understand these kinds of risk signals today? Fast at the moment of crisis, you are fighting blind. All right. So high fidelity, high resolution technology must be deployed. I know I've thrown a lot out today and it can sometimes seem insurmountable or daunting when you hear this all at once, particularly if you're not really looking at this space. In fact, it's been said that we as a species have primitive brains, medieval institutions and godlike technology. There has never been a time where that is more true. We've seen it this week almost more than we have in the past 67 years in kinetic warfare in cyber warfare. And now in information warfare defense has always trailed offense. It might even feel like whack a mole sometimes. But if you have nothing in place to defend your organizations and frankly yourself against manipulation, you will not be safe. Thank you very much.

Kara Swisher, Author, Burn Book; Host, On with Kara Swisher; Editor-at-Large, New York Magazine Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: From Crashes to Ashes

Kelly Hennig, Chief Operating Officer, Stoke Space Jaret Matthews, Founder and CEO, Astrolab Moderator: Jason Del Rey, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: A Space Race to Profit

Sky Christopherson, Olympic Athlete and Founder, GOLD.AI Rich Yang, Chief Executive Officer, Biolinq

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Biohacking Our Way to Better Health

We're going to be needing to be a lot louder because we have a real special live event today. Let me introduce myself really quick, Rich Yang. I've been in med tech for 25 years, 10 years as an investor as well. We've got Sky. He's somebody I've known for a very long time. Oddly enough, we did a keynote at the Consumer Electronics show over 15 years ago on this very topic, but we were talking about the promise of what can be done. We're actually going to show you live today, something that most people never get to see. So Sky is an Olympic athlete. Will have you introduce yourself for a quick second. Hey guys, Sky Christofferson, I was on the US Olympic cycling team and broke a world record in track cycling. And now we're here uh looking for a different type of record uh today here on the stage. So Sky sets the record. OK, guy is a little bit outdated. So it's been 12 years since his world record. So let me introduce Jared as well. Jared is one of our two co founders at Bink. So Jared will be helping set up what we're doing today is showing a live demonstration of continuous lactate sensing. If you have had a hard workout in the past and you're really sore, that's due to the lactic acid build up in your muscles. Well, so watching sky build up lactic acid isn't very interesting. If you follow Peter Alas Zone two training, lactate threshold training is going to be the new standard above and beyond what has been used for peak performance like vo two max heart rate. It's just that it's not easy to get lactate glucose or lactate samples because it requires finger pricking and blood measurements. So instead of having Sky do his own two threshold training on lactate threshold, today, we're going to see if he could break his old personal lactate threshold. We're going to drive him to maximum fatigue where he can't even stand and he is not a normal human being. So we're going to see if he can break his old records. And by the way, this is unscripted and I bet that he can't do it. It's been 12 years since your world record guy. So I bet you can't do it. So if you beat the record, I will do 10 push ups on stage. All right. Ok. So make that 20. Ah ok. All right. So um so let me give you a little bit of background what you're seeing today. Sky is wearing several sensors on his forearm. These are investigational prototype devices we are not yet approved by the FDA. We intend to submit our first product to the FDA by the end of this year. So he's wearing a glucose sensor, he's wearing lactate sensors and you're going to watch real time streaming data in a few different points along our talk this morning. So sky are you, are you ready? You seem a little bit slow this morning. So, you know, it's my father's 80th birthday this week and I think he might be able to roll a little bit faster than you. So, if you're ready, I would welcome your help. Let's pump him up. He's going to go three cycles, 32nd, cycles, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, 30 seconds on 30 seconds off. And then he's going to go for maximum fatigue. So maybe we do a three second countdown and we say go sky as loud as possible, Scott. Are you ready? Ok. 321 go, go, go. All right. So what Jared is doing what Jared is doing right now is he's controlling the resistance on this bike and he's going to be cranking up the resistance where sky can barely pedal. So he's going through his 1st 30 seconds. His horse is, his heart is racing. But what you see on the screen back here is what elite athletes do to get vo two masks. It's very hard to do. They have to go into labs, they have to get fitted with electrodes, they have to wear these masks, it's uncomfortable and this is how they do their peak performance training. Jared is also taking a blood finger stick measurement to get his Lactaid baseline measurements. And so it's very hard to do and the data that you generate for these elite athletes look like this. What in the world do you do with this kind of information with heart rate vo two max for people like us that want to live healthier, longer, happier lives. So thankfully, we have a I now that can digest all this and hopefully make it easier for us to digest. But sky set the world record for the indoor Velodrome track cycling. So he's in his second sprint right now. He's starting to feel his thighs burn and again, maybe I'll give you a little bit of background in terms of what the peak lactate thresholds are for elite athletes. And because it's Olympic season, we looked up what the elite athletes usually peak out at with lactate threshold, right? So let's take, let's take an Olympic swimmer, a gold medal. Olympic swimmer will typically have lactate levels that are peak lactate levels that are around 13 to 15 millimoles. So we have that on the screen for you to see in the back. So in the next 30 seconds, sky has to beat that for my 20 push ups on stage 13 to 15. So we're going to do his last, his last 10 seconds are going to be the hardest. Let's do a countdown. 10 987654321. You did it? All right, le let me explain how hard, let me explain how hard this is to do. All right. Um, an elite athlete, gold medal athletes, they require 30 minutes of this cycling to get to peak lactate. We just had them do it in 2.5 minutes. So this is why I'm saying, hey, Sky, I'm not going to be doing push ups. I don't think you're going to break. It's been 12 years, Scott. How are you feeling? All right. So what Jared is going to do now? He's going to load the data and we're going to see a preview on this screen. There you go, you see the spike. We're actually not going to show you the actual number until the end of our session. And here's why his lactate levels are still climbing right now as he stops. So, Jared is going to take another blood measurement and then we're going to show this again at the end and see if he broke what we, what would make me do 20 push ups on stage. All right. So how does this work? So the skin, let me talk about this for a second. For those of us that have been bio in bio sensing. We have always known in industry that the skin is the ideal location to sense anything and specifically the papillary dermis, which is right on top of the capillary bed. But for the last 50 years, industry could not figure out how to miniaturize biosensors using electro chemistry to measure biomarkers in this compartment of the skin. It was impossible to shrink biosensors that small without it breaking. So Bink is the first company to leverage semiconductor manufacturing, silicon micro needles and silicon micro needles that can penetrate your skin without you feeling it, no bleeding, no scarring, we never hit nerve ending. So you don't feel it. And we sit right on top of the capillary bed and we can measure things like glucose continuously. How many of you have actually worn a biosensor like a continuous glucose sensor before? OK. Now it's been around for 25 years and now it's barely beginning to hit mainstream. And so we're the first ones to miniaturize it to be able to access this compartment of the skin. Second, the skin is highly metabolically active. So if we want to push the boundaries of measuring multiple biomarkers, the skin is the ideal place to do it, we're gonna show for the first time we might need to lower your mic. And like I said, Scott, you're out of shape. It's been 12 years. So, so what you're seeing here is the world's first semiconductor biosensor and it's the smallest and I'm going to show you really quick. We brought one here with us. So this is an eight inch silicon wafer. This is the genius invention that our two co founders invented over a decade ago. So this is the world's smallest electrochemical biosensor. This has thousands of biosensors on this 18 inch wafer and the thousands of biosensors on this one inch wafer allows us to scale orthogonal. The likes of which have never been done before. Now, each one of these chips are very small. They're two millimeters by two millimeters you OK. Sky. Ah Yeah. And on each one of those chips, we have seven tiny little micro sensors. And each one of these micro sensors are 200 times smaller than a human hair filament. If you were to touch something that small, it would break how many of you knew that something at this scale in silicon is stronger and more robust than titanium and steel at this scale. This is how we're able to access the pyo dermis just underneath the skin to allow us to sense biomarkers right on top of the pyo dermis. So with that said, we have to run clinical trials to look at accuracy in this slide. Here in the far corner, you can see we draw blood every 15 to 20 minutes in subjects comparing Venus blood samples to the biosensor performance. So the sky's going to cool down for a few moments. We have added a few things on our biosensors. So glucose as an example is only one biomarker. We decided to add context in our wearable. So we have sleep activity, temperature glucose combined, all in one wearable that allows us to provide an environment where without using a phone, you get real time biofeedback on the wearable itself. So we put a user interface using led lights on the bow wearable. This allows us to do something that hasn't been done before, which is cognitive restructuring in real time. So there are three things required for cognitive restructuring, real time, feedback, passively when teachable moments arise. So when my glucose levels rise after I drink a glass of orange juice, I can see my wearable on my forearm change from blue to yellow, blue is my target range. Yellow means I'm high. I drink that orange juice. I have my glucose level sky that I immediately have that cause and effect orange juice may not be so good. Maybe I don't finish my glass of orange juice, maybe I take a brisk walk after my orange juice, but it allows me to have real time cognitive restructuring for sustainable behavior change. Now here is what makes our platform so powerful. We are in the first era of human history to be able to synthesize biology. So to be able to put these technologies on the tips of our micro sensors on our wafers, we can now sense things that traditionally were impossible to do. We have leveraged single strands of DNA called DNA omers and we are leveraging that technology with biomarker recognition elements to sense things that traditionally had no enzyme equivalent to measure like hormones, antibodies antigens. That brings a whole new world of bio sensing that can help with the next pandemic instead of swabbing every day for COVID. Imagine if these biosensors residing right on top of your capillary bed can actually sense antigens like COVID and turn red to let you know that you have been exposed. And it has taken 40 years for MedTech and consumer tech to merge in this picture is an insulin pump to go from this, this black and white picture to the one on the right took 40 years to get this technology to mature. Thankfully, we have big tech coming in and we can leverage A I the A I train is moving into health care. But what's missing in health care is the proprietary high fidelity, high resolution information on the human condition above and beyond biomarkers like glucose and or lactate alone. So, Jared, would you please show the results through quickly? Because I've got 30 seconds to do 20 push ups. And so by the way, the applications that are possible with loud sensing moving forward will be with companies like Golde and Sky is one of the co founders at Golde and Sky will be leveraging some of this information to help people live healthier, happier, stronger with biomarker input. So where did he land at his peak? I've got 30 he hit 17. So he broke records and by the way, he hit 17 Miller. That means he beat the Olympic Medalist. I got to do my 20 push ups really quick. 12, 3456789, 1011, 1213, 1415, 1617, 1819 20. That was very embarrassing. But congratulations guy. Actually, Scott. You want to give a quick comment? What is Lance Armstrong's peak? Sure. Yeah, so Lance Armstrong's peak was 18. So you just saw pretty good in 2.5 minutes. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Oh yeah.

Aloe Blacc, Singer, Songwriter, Artivist; Co-founder and CEO, Major Inc. Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: From Music to Medical Breakthroughs

So let's talk about this new, I mean, it's a pair of eps but what inspired this nineties alt rock thing, man. You know, I was really inspired by a lot of different styles of music growing up. Of course, in the nineties, I was listening to a lot of hip hop, but the rock of that era had an impression on me. And as I got older, I started realizing that some of my, my predecessors in soul music had covered, you know, some of the greatest rock songs you could imagine. And one that comes to mind is we can work it out by Stevie Wonder covering the Beatles. And I thought, man, is anybody doing that nowadays? So, um I called up a friend of mine, Otis mcdonald, a great musician and songwriter and producer. And we just went through a list of, of the, the best of the best classic nineties songs that you could imagine a classic rock song and you got it, you got Blur but song two and you got, what else was it? What else? Oh Come on. Don't speak, don't speak lithium lithium Wonder Wall under the bridge. Um I mean, everybody hurts. It was, it was an exercise in nostalgia. But also what we did was we took the songs and just transformed them, flipped them, made them, um, something brand new. And so when I play them for my kids and I play them back to back, they, they tend to prefer my version. But, uh, but they, they don't, they don't know the history. So one day they'll learn to understand. Amazing. Now, look, we've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence at this conference, inevitably that has affected music as well. There's a lot of hand wringing about how it's going to affect the arts. How do you think about it as it pertains to your artistry? Yeah. Well, a lot of friends have been hitting me up asking me if I'm planning to use A I for music or if I'm engaging with it. I've tried all of the uh the program to see if, if they can help. At this point. I feel like what I do is a lot better and maybe, but II, I say that with a, with a grain of salt because I can see that the um the tide will turn quickly. Um These, these programs are getting way smarter. And I think in music we've been using A A I for quite a while, but just not necessarily in like generative A I, we've been using a lot of algorithms in order to create drum loops or particular chord progression. Um So it's not new, but we weren't calling it A I, we were just calling it the application or the plug in within the, the daw, which is the total digital audio work face. So you see it as a tool, not so much as a, as a risk of, of, of replacing your creativity. It's a tool. I don't think it's a risk of replacing creativity. Ultimately, I think everybody's going to have an opportunity to use it to enhance and amplify what they do. So at the end of the day, whoever makes the best story is going to win. Yeah. Now I want to go right to the audience for questions in just a minute. But I want to ask you a little bit about stand together. This is an initiative you've been working with. Tell us about it. Stand together is an organization that works with change makers across the country to help them improve some of the country's worst issues from economy to education, to broken communities. And they're working in a way with me where they're sponsoring an album. I get to write songs inspired by their mission, inspired by the mission of making America better, inspired by the mission of amplifying nonprofit organizations that are doing the most amazing work on the ground. And I believe in what they're doing, they believe in what I'm doing. So we've, we've come together to try to make this country a place where division isn't the norm and try to get people to come together. Even the most unlikely adversaries, if you can find one thing that you agree upon, that's where we stand together. That's where we work. That's where we move forward. Yeah, we might divide about the best nineties, all rock sound. I mean, you know, let me come to the audience. Does anybody have a question about ao's music before we turn to biotech and totally change the subject? Yes, way over here. Wait for AAA Mic, please. And then your name and affiliation? Hello Alo. Hey, I'm Alex Gross. I'm uh with Silicon Slopes Park City also um founder of Easy Press dot A I, we make A I content um for small medium sized businesses, but you just said something that really resonated with me, which is that you talked about the power of telling the best story, right? The best story will win when you think about what the best story is. Is it an A B test to figure out what's performative or is it about really just self expression and how do you see that changing in the future? Ultimately, it depends on everyone's perspective and, and, and tension within the art that they're creating. I like to tell the best story that's going to offer people an opportunity to um be inspired, be motivated and to seek to aspire to something great. Um Some folks just want money so if they can tell the best story for that. That's easy. You come up with a simple song with a repetitive hook with the same chord progression as everyone else and you probably make money. But what I'm looking at in terms of telling stories, I'm thinking about the greatest songwriters of all time according to my, my Ledger, which you know, Joni Mitchell's at the top, we're talking about Cat Stevens and James Taylor, Billy Joel and Paul Simon. Nina Simone Stevie Wonder, right. This is, this is the, the book of music that I'm listening to, to determine what is the best story, you know. Um And I've, I've kind of put a I up to the test to see if they can, if they can match a Joni Mitchell's both sides or a boxer or something like that. And it's, it's not there yet. It's a high bar. It's a high bar. Thank you for that question. All right, let's switch to the biotech side of your life. So major, you're trying to make this alternative to vaccines and involve something called pepto. So for the non scientists here, please explain to us what on earth is an alternative to vaccines as it pertains to transmit. It started as an alternative vaccines. But you know, with most companies, you pivot until you, until you make it I had, you know about with, with COVID and I had been vaccinated and boosted and I was looking for a host directed prophylactic solution and after reading paper, upon paper, upon paper, it happened upon this paper by Dr Goko Ga Maoria at the University of Houston School of Pharmacology where he's talking about blocking interface of the virus and the cell receptor. And I thought that's brilliant. Why can't we just keep the viruses from entering the cells? It stops replication and then it'll just either get excreted or it will degrade within your system. So I contacted him, sponsored some research and it turned out there was no money for COVID anymore. So we ended up building this, this business in order to advance his concept around drug discovery. And so beyond just vaccination, um it's a drug discovery platform that is addressing his 25 years of research in oncology and the patents that he holds addressing uh autoimmune dysfunction and immune dysregulation and addressing infectious disease like viruses. So, taking the model of his SARS COV two molecule and applying that to that concept to many other viruses. And so you looked at all that and you were, as you were, you were doing your beach reading transmissible disease, you know, and you were like, you know, my life isn't complicated enough. I'm going to start this whole other thing. How did this become an actual venture for you? So I wasn't, I wasn't trying to start a business. It was philanthropy at first. And so I reached out to the university and the professor, but then realized quickly that you know, universities are risk averse and they're not necessarily going to, to prop up a company, they have divisions that are, you know, incubation divisions and, and tech innovation divisions. But it really takes an outsider to come in and actually help push. And when I realized that, and I recognize the amazing technology that, that Gome has, I wanted to, I wanted to help and I felt like the only way to really help was to start a company and use the resources, the resources and relationships that I have, the access that I have to put him in the room. And so I'm able to get him in front of, you know, top vcs, top scientists and regulators, which is not so easy for a professor who's got class load a mortgage to pay to get put through college. And so we're going to build this together and hopefully we'll save a lot of lives. Tell me a little bit of these are very different walks, right? Tell me a little bit about the similarities between your music life and your biotech life. And forgive me if I'm drawing too hard a distinction here and tell me about the commonalities because, you know, I don't think your music has regulators, but you tell me, you know, music doesn't necessarily have regulators. I mean, I hope ultimately the audience is, is the regulator, you guys determine whether or not the song is viable. Um Actually, that's not true. I play the songs for my kids in the car on the way to school and they, they're the first the ultimate regulator. They are the first layer. Um But I, I would say in the terms of creativity, you know, Gomme is working with, he's a chemical biologist, so he's working with the Periodical Table and I'm working with 12 notes. And so we get to play in this world of creativity to see what we can do when you know, he's doing chemical synthesis. I'm in the studio doing musical synthesis and we're trying to see what's going to make somebody feel better. I think there's, there's some similarities there. Um But aside from that, it's pretty diverse, pretty different. Any surprises on the biotech side of things that, you know, that you just never would have imagined running a car, it's so hard. Go on business is hard. So I thought, I thought I was a businessman because I had a publishing company, a touring company, a record company. Um And then I started biotech and I was like, that's not, that's not business. This is, this is much different and, and the stakes are much higher. Um And it takes so many more people, you know, at the end of a movie, when you watch a film and you see the credits rolling and you're like, when are these credits going to end? There's a million people on this film that's starting a business that's, that's biotech and making a song I could wake up in the morning come up with an idea and by the end of the night, distribute it to 8 billion people in the world. That's amazing. It doesn't require the laundry list of everyone else to help. And those two, those two are like, really diametrically opposed. Like I love the freedom I have in making music by myself and I love collaborating as well, but it's really impossible to do, you know, business and biotech really by yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. It does. Let's go to the audience for another question. I saw one back here. Yes, please. Name and affiliation, please. Yeah. Thank Bar. Then co founder and CEO of Nano Health Care Remote Diagnostics Company. Um A first of all, thank you for everything you've given all of us with your songs throughout the career. You've been at this in seeing a lot of the economics of music and songwriting change over the years. I'm curious as to your anticipation of how it's gonna continue to evolve in the future for the next gen of songwriters. Like we used to buy C DS and full albums and then we would just buy one song that we wanted from Apple Music and now teenagers are getting their parents to shell out 10 grand for a Taylor Swift concert, right? So like, what's the next step there? And how do you think that's going to impact the next gen of songwriters if I had, if I had the crystal ball, I would not be sitting here with you right now. But I would say, you know, things have changed dramatically because of streaming. I think Pandora's Box is open and we won't ever be able to go back. I was hopeful that DSPS or service providers would be the, the, the conduit to the, the, the, the friction in the pay line. So rather than Spotify, charging you $10 a month or whatever it is, it potentially could be uh Verizon um AT&T or sprint charging at the tap, like when you use your faucet or your light light switch. Um That's hopeful for me because I think uh pay for play becomes a lot more easier for, for artists right now. We're in a, in a pool where the income that we get is dependent on the amount of streams that we, we make pro rata. So the biggest artists in the world are getting the lion's share. Everybody else kind of gets their prata share based on all of the money that goes into the pool from, from subscribers. I'd much rather live or die by the value of my song at the top. Um which is kind of the way it was in the past. I don't know if we're going back there. Where is it going in the future? Like I said, hard to say, um probably probably a lot more regional than, than like massive global artists. Um and uh a lot more live and local live. Yeah. Good stuff. All right, let's do one more question if you don't mind. One more anything. Amazing. All right. Well, I've got a question right there. Oh, is there one? Oh, fantastic. Thank you very much. Hey, thank you for your um mu music and, and the gift of listening to it for the past couple, for the past decade. Um My name is Nate. Um a question, you know, we've seen a lot of A I um that can emulate how artists sound. And so it seems like, you know, an A I track will come out and it sounds like something that the Drake or, or the Drake or the weekend or somebody else might have written or, and actually sung. Um Do you kinda see that as well? What role do you see that playing in the future of music? Like, do you see a future in A I where perhaps you like uh a artist licenses their voice or their likeness uh to a song and then licenses uh a A I contract out for generating songs that sound like they sung it. Um Or do you feel like that industry is something that um might, is just kind of like a fad or might fade away at some point? I think what you're, what you're touching on is possibility. Um I had a conversation early on with a company called Metaphysic A I and a company called Reech. Um They helped me to translate songs and sing them in Italian and Mandarin and Spanish and French. And it's, I look like I'm actually singing the song in those languages and, and speaking with perfect dialect. Um I think that personally, I would, I would get involved in that kind of thing. I think as I get older, um there's going to be an era of Aloe Black that ultimately is bankable. And that era I think I could probably continue to make money on for time in memorial. I was friends with Bill Withers before he passed and he stopped singing as he aged. And I always thought to myself, like, I'd love to hear what he's up, what he would want to say as an older, as an older person. But I think for him, he just realized like this younger generation is not interested in what I have to say. My voice doesn't sound the same. So if I can, you know, put that in a time capsule and then distribute that, that would be I think the best, the best use of, of A I, I'm all over it.

Roelof Botha, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital Interviewer: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Captain Of Capital

 Roelof Botha, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital Interviewer: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE

Philippe Krakowsky, Chief Executive Officer, Interpublic Group Interviewer: Joe Marchese, Founding Partner, Human Ventures, Casa Komos Brands Group; Co-chair, Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2024: When Advertising Gets Creative

So as you listen to everyone talk about A I throughout this conference and we are can L in recently and in the, in the news. Do you find it amusing or adorable? Because in advertising, you've been working with A I for the past two decades. Um You know, I think that if you use the word advertising, if you use the word marketing services, you're talking about, you're covering so much territory with such a finite vocabulary that, you know, we run a very large portfolio companies in the more precision tech accountability parts of our business. So if you put $35 billion of other people's money into, um you know, the media ecosystem, Joe used to sell us some of that time when he was running ad sales at Fox, we've been using A I, you know, whether it's machine learning, whether it's the kind of work we do around um all sorts of predictive analytics and segmentation work for at least a decade. We made a huge investment in a data asset when we bought axiom. I think where it's, you know, where everybody's focus now is kind of what does gen A I do to the content and creativity side of the business. So I think we'll break this into two sides. All right, one is going to be how is it changing the workflow and IPG 58,000 employees around the world. Is that right? So we're good. Yep. So we're gonna talk about how it's changing the workflow for people in the creative world. We saw runway earlier today and then we're gonna talk a little bit about the business of advertising, which is buying and selling attention and, and how that's gonna change with A I. So let's let's start with the workflow. How is it changing? What's happening inside the agencies and the work they do for clients? Well, I mean, it's interesting because a couple of the prior speakers talked about it, I think um tools to move faster down the track of personalization at scale and just the demand that exists for content, given what, you know, you all know better than most because you've been, you know, funding the technology that's brought platforms to the fore. Um You know, we're clearly relying on our folks to spend a lot of time becoming expert in the tools that get us down the tracks of, like I said, personalization scale. Another thing that I think is happening is, and I think it applies to lots of businesses is it's probably going to winnow out a measure of maybe the middle of, you know, many large companies workforces And so the question is, how do you use them as ideation tools? How do you in essence, get better hypotheses faster and put a lot of sort of sail to wind so that the folks who do have that expertise can get to good ideas and start going deep on good ideas faster. Is there a mandate or programs or, I mean, something, how do you disseminate the tools so that you get past the resistance of using them in a company as large as yours? And how do you get, like, how do you, how do you get adoption of something like what you're talking about? Well, I mean, in the same way that you get people to show up back in the office, post the pandemic, a certain wait, that's happened a week. Yeah, we're about three days across. It depends where outside of the US. People are back mostly five days a week. So there clearly do need to be sort of non, non optional, whether you're going to call them mandates or other non negotiables according to the. And so you're clearly expecting of folks that they are going to be going deep and putting all the technology to use in their day to day. And that's actually the KP I, that's a lot of, a lot of our operators are measuring against that. They're making it clear to people, they're going to be comped against that. Um And then the last piece that I think is sort of interesting back to your first question is just the ways in which the tools are kind of making a larger total addressable market for us because you're, you're able to democratize creativity and reach much further on behalf of your clients into their own ecosystem. So let's talk about that part because that's the part that fascinates me. We all saw the runway. Sure example earlier, if we're going to democratize creativity, we're going to give more people creative tools, Instagram did that. And this is why I say A I has been part of our world for a long time. Google search results is an algorithm. Tik Tok is an algorithm youtube recommended videos is an algorithm. It's been deciding what people look at in a world of infinite content, but it sounds like the amount of content that's about to be created is going to expand even further. So even if you can make the creative thing, how do you reach at scale for clients? Well, again, you start thinking about like in concentric circles about who is in their world. So a couple of very quick examples just you know work we've done in the last year off of the top of my head to just try to maybe, you know, dimensionalized that or bring it to life for folks. We have a very, very large practice area in health care. So there are 1000 people who work in our world who are doctors, nurses phds in molecular biology, etc, all of whom work in our dedicated health care vertical. So for a very large client that was bringing an Alzheimer's drug to market, we built a large language model that became and we did this in conjunction with a couple of large uh universities that became a way for families and caregivers going through this to in essence, help give the patient a way to write their own biography. Um for another very large client that has uh a whole secondary set of. Um it's a, I'm, you know, I'm from Mexico, the world's largest baked goods company is baked based out of Mexico. And so we've actually created platforms for the folks who are small businesses that work with, you know, that buy from them to generate very, very high level graphics and design to brand their mom and pop. 12 person or two location um food stalls in Mexico City. And then we populated an entire app and a whole ecosystem so that any tourist arriving in Mexico had just as much opportunity to see and be directed to or, or, or kind of have an appeal that is just the same that, you know, thinking about another start up that you had some time ago. You know, we all know what the great places to go in Mexico City are to eat, but there are just as many that you would have never otherwise heard about. And So we're finding interesting ways to push out. But these sound like so these, these sound like great products and they are um and they sound consultative to the client which most people don't think about advertising. People think about advertising is buying the, the Super Bowl commercial or buying, you know, the, the World Series. Um you know, there's been a big push accenture and uh the the consultancies coming into the world of advertising. We heard sales force earlier talking about personal is a, I gonna collapse. Who competes with who or do you think that the agency plays a bigger role? I mean, look, I, I think that it's been sort of happening anyway, right, in a sense, although, as I said, when, you know, we were dealing with it in the media side, um you know, the scale to operationalize, you know, all of that money flowing into the economy is pretty significant. So I guess what I'd say is it, you know, we're raising the floor and I think that's a given. Um I think that certain things that like folks in our space bring as opposed to, you know, what you would run into with a scale systems integrator or what you would run into. I think that um objectivity judgment. So the folks who sit on top of these things, their deep professional expertise, I mean, I think I talk a lot about the journey that we're on is one we're a professional services company and it's can we become a tech enabled professional services company? So I would sort of go the gating items that say no, not so much. Are, can you bring judgment and can you then you know the opposite of the, the we're raising the floor is a big risk to all of this is reversion to mean if everybody has all those tools at what point can you really start doing things that use them to, to innovate and to break through? Because if not everybody here is mccann Erickson, right? Which I'm not sure I'd wish that on anybody. So, but then, but then the question is, and I constantly come back to this, which is people don't think they're in the advertising business, but everybody's in the advertising business, you're in the advertising business personally, you're in it for your company, for your firm, but it's gotten harder and harder to get people's attention. That was the entry there. Kirsten had some great slides on how much is going, coming at people. You're in the business of getting attention for your clients. So you have the products you're building better. But the part of buying media put it this way. IP G is the business model, right? For sports, for cable television, for sponsorships, like what happens to that world of, of the paid media as it kind of condenses on the media owner side, where do the dollars go if it becomes so fragmented that everybody can make a movie like we saw on runway. Like what do you see happening? Well, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, I think I agree with you 24 hours in the day, people aren't going to basically just be consuming. But I think you, you triage and you realize that the level of, you know, the production values required or the capacity to generate the kind of mass content that is personalization of scale is at a certain level. And what you're trying to accomplish with that content and how you're going to define success or what you're going to. Now, what's interesting, you know, I would think for folks who are, you know, looking for opportunity or business models is that our, our industry has not done historically, a particularly good job of reaching the middle market and yet the platforms have been, you know, built off of small and mid size businesses. So there's probably an opportunity or a gap for companies that get specialized and can use those tools and then can solve that in a certain, you know, for very specific, you know, specialized use cases. I think as you move up stream, you get, you know, you get some of the examples I gave to you, which are how do we use this to bring more people into the conversation? And then as a tool for really high end creative people, I don't think that you're going to be able to none. You know, the rest of us aren't making movies like Scorsese no matter how many tools we've got. Well, I think that there'll be some people challenging that I know there will. But I'm, I'll, I'll take that bet for a while yet. The question I'd ask because we're wrapping up on time here. I've said it. You say I'm wrong that businesses that wholly rely on the platforms as their means of distribution. We had the D to C revolution for a period of time that their margins will eventually go to zero because the platforms in order to grow have to eat the margin of the things that are. There is a lot of argument that advertising has become reliant on the big platforms in one minute. What happens with the consolidation? How, how is your relationship between the agencies and the platforms right now? Well, what we've done is different than our peers is our peers by volume and act as principle. And so you do get the concern that over time as consolidation happens, we've gone in a direction that's more about can you be consultative? But also how do you build a layer? It can be a relatively thin layer of engineering and tech so that you can ultimately be more staff like and or license the tools so that your clients can in essence, kind of, you know, level the playing field and not be entirely at the mercy of a couple of key players in that space. Ok. All right. Well, we have to wrap up there. I know we do this a lot more, but thank you very much and we could do this for meaningfully longer. Thank you.

Karandeep Anand, President, Brex Sarah Levy, Chief Executive Officer, Betterment Moderator: Leo Schwartz, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: New Ways to Make Money Move

Good afternoon. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you for having us with you. I'd like to start with 2021 which I mentioned the intro there. I think euphemistically saying that growth has been steadier since then. But I think if you look back what you saw was hundreds of millions of dollars coming from investors, valuations of billions of dollars. And probably more importantly, this idea that fintech really be a sector that would replace the incumbents take over from banks and brokerage platforms. And I think that hasn't necessarily been reached. Now, obviously, valuations have come back down, venture markets have frozen up a little bit. I'm curious from both of your standpoints. Do you think that promise of 2021 is still alive? I want to start happy to, I think. Um so I think there was a very good session yesterday from folks from FED, which was I don't think anyone is immune to the macroeconomic, high interest rates definitely change. Uh what the growth goes we were seeing in fintech. But I think there are three very important things that at least I see to such as uh one fintech is a secular trend. We still have a ton of additional movement of money that happens and cross border movements are happening, which is happening on non fintech versus traditional banks. And that trend hasn't changed what changes like the spending levels have gone down. But I think fintech being a secular trend is a very critical, critical piece. And I think the second thing for BREX specifically is we sit in the intersection of fintech and enterprise sa I mean, that is something that changed, which is the promise was not just fintech, but fintech plus Enterprise S A and that has unlocked a lot of value for diversification. And third, which is on a lighter note is um you know, a tough market actually is a good way to weed out a lot of competitors. So a lot of competitors which were like fly by night. Zer phenomena no longer exist. So overall, I think the promise is still alive, the industry has got a lot more mature in what they expect to be the successful idea now. So I would agree. I mean, I think the opportunity is in the Tam which is in the trillions. So I think the promise is absolutely still alive. I think what I would say has changed is the amount of investment capital going into the sector. And it used to be that you didn't really have to differentiate yourself with the fundamentals right now. You need scale, you need profitability, you need sensible unit economics. And so I think it's really more about a rationalization in the marketplace than it is and sort of the winners and the losers so to speak than it is than it is about a shrinking promise of the opportunity. Yeah. So let's talk about that investment and I just came from a lunch. I'm sure some of you were at that was about Unicorp Ises or this idea of the billion dollar companies from 10 years ago that expanded and then never were able to find an exit. And I know that neither of your companies are anywhere close to being Unicorp Ises. But at the same time, I think both of your companies have been targeted by many analysts and onlookers as ripe for an IPO. Eventually, I know both of you, your companies have talked about a potential IPO and I want to go one by one and, you know, ideally get as specific an answer as possible. I I know that you'll be limited here with Brex. There have been interviews recently, you know, there was a lot of turmoil, there was layoffs, there was reports of cash burn and there was this goal of being cash flow positive by the end of 2025 and maybe that would lead to an IPO. And I'm interested, where do you see the current landscape there? What's the financial outlook for Brexit? I think the IPO is a definite exit. Like that's the exit plan. The two very important things that happened building on your previous question as well, is the investor expectations change prematurely from the growth at all costs to sustainable growth? So our focus for the last 18 to 24 months has essentially been how do we grow our gross profit and profit margin? And we've grown like 75% year on year is very heavy focus on margin, which honestly speaking was not the priority for a long time, pre 2021. And the second is bond reduction. I think there's expectation from investor community as well as like promoter shareholder is you have to do this in a sustainable long term way because what you, you know, back to early point is we're trying to play a 10 year or 15 year game and if you cannot do this on sustainable burn, it's hard to do it. So, so last year, uh last 18 months has been 75% profitability growth and then 50% reduction on burn. So we're still on target to hit our operating cash flow positive goals of 2025 and which with all the other clean up we've done is really helps us to get into that exit state. So 2026 for an IP O I am not privileged to say that number, but I think every leading indicator uh really points to that. I think the main thing is you have to time the IP O right. You don't want to rush into something which the market is not ready for. But I think we have to be prepared on sustainability growth and margins and those are the things that we within our control, we will continue focusing on. And Sarah, I think betterment has been in a steadier pace. There still were layoffs but, but not as severe. And I know you've been expanding your product offering. But how do you view the current IPO market for betterment? So I try not to get distracted by. Are you going ipo? And when are you going ipo? And are you profitable? I try not to answer that question as well. Um Where I am really focused is, can I build the definitive wealth brand for Zenn? And if I can do that, that means I will have scale, I will have a diversified, you know, diversified revenue streams. I will have quality economics in the three segments, customer segments I serve. And so that's really where I spend my time when I think about, you know, what would impact great companies get bought and aren't sold. So that's always an option. An IPO could be an option, but the bar has definitely been raised and I wouldn't want to be, have been in the 2021 class where you're now sort of fighting to get back to where you were. So when I think about it, I got to get to the scale and the profitability and the growth. And if I can be a rule of 40 company, then I can, you know, sustain a public company story. And I think this has been a uniting principle with both of your companies where you have had this much more sustainable growth. The past year, you've been expanding your product offerings, but, you know, I cover crypto a lot of the time and I think there's a danger where companies doing good work can still get wrapped up in the sector that they're part of. And we've seen that in fintech recently where the biggest story of the past year has been synapse and this collapse of intermediaries. And I think it is how a lot of consumers out there are thinking about sin. And I know again, neither your companies necessarily have that issue of synapse. Although I know that you do work with banking partners. So I'm sure it's something you think about. Do you think there have been lessons learned from that collapse that we saw over the past few months? Definitely. So, you know, yes, we did not work with synapse. We do not work with evolve, but we do. As you say, we work with a number of program banks. We are a regulated entity. So we have a broker dealer and we also have an Ria and so we have a lot of regulators monitoring us time and we are incredibly careful about the people with whom we partner. So how I monitor my partners and how they monitor me back is incredibly important and how they monitor me back is I think one of the great lessons of the synapse of all story because you are part of a network. And if they're not monitoring another third party, even if you're a good actor, that chain of events is sort of what we fear. I think to me what is most concerning sort of the consumer impact of what went on there, which is if consumers lose faith and trust in fintech companies, that is fundamentally a problem for us as an industry. But my hope is that we can, that consumers are smarter than that sort of in aggregate and can see the difference between a company that wasn't regulated and a company that maybe didn't follow all the rules and prioritize compliance and security and Kyb and KYC at the top versus those that do strong plus one to everything I said, I think there are two additional things that really important is uh a lot of people look for shortcuts in fintech and there aren't any uh and you know, I came from a very, very high moving growth company. You know, this is matter for a long time and come, come to Brax and I'm like, wow, like we could be doing five more things really fast. And the answer was like, no, we will build our entire financial services stack in house right from like sitting on the Mastercard rails or in this case, we sit directly on the column bank. If such, we build the entire fintech stack in house. Exactly for the same reasons which is when you're touching people's money, the bar is very high on how much trust. So we haven't chased like growth at all costs to the previous point as well. And a ton of investment went in making sure that the whole stack is paid for longevity with the regulation we regular entity and making sure that we are playing a very long game and not get exposed by like small term shiny marbles. And a lot of like our competitors uh got impacted with an app that involved and we see massive inflow of deposits coming to BREX banking as a result because people trust you. And this happened last year with the SVB crisis. It happened again. A lot of people moved from Mercury and Row because they were not sure how much of the data got compromised so long way of answering the question, which is, it's really, really important to invest in trust. And I think that's where most of our investments have been, is build it for the long term, build it in house. I do have a question on that where you talk about not taking shortcuts, but it still seems with fintech, a lot of what is happening is building bank like products without necessarily getting the charters that banks have and it seems like a lot of breakfast services are replicating what a bank is doing, but without necessarily going to the fed or the OCC or other regulators to do that. And that working with banks in the back end, like, what do you think makes you different from just being a bank? Excellent question. So I think we've partnered with a lot of different traditional institutions in the past. And one of the reasons we zeroed in on column as a partner to work with is they have all the tight regulations that we work with directly. So we KYC, the KYC, they check Cyrus Point, we keep each other in check. And the biggest difference is we also pick a partner which has a text powered mindset. So the big difference between traditional partner and a partner, the column is we have all the hard, hardening of a column bank, but they have the api first attitude. So they allow us to build, they allow us to experiment, they allow us to do everything else without having to compromise anything on the protections that we need to provide. So it's an interesting balance between you find a partner which is as mission aligned as you are, but also can move fast. And that's a holy grail of unlocking value. But no National Banking Charter is coming down the line. We don't need to, we have MTLS, we have money transfer licenses. We do have uh, we have, you know, we get audited, we go through every possible check so we go through all the checks, but we don't need to necessarily get the banking charter. And I guess the question, especially with synapse has been, how are consumers protected? So, do you still ensure even if you have partners in the back end that you'll have the same sort of FD I protection that a consumer would have if they're just going through a bank. Excellent question. I think this was tested last year when SUV crisis happened. People are like, OK, why would it not just move all the money into a traditional bank? And the first question we had to answer very simply was BREX does not touch your money, it does not store your money. We have FDIC insured, you know, we split the money for, for you. Uh What you would typically do on your own is like, I'm going to split up to 50 K to 50 K, but like, you know what they can do that for you. So we spread it across to 50 K accounts and everything else in excess of that gets swept immediately to an MMF uh in a, in a, you know, us government treasury. So these are examples of you don't have to necessarily do traditional banking to provide a treasury or a banking service to the customer base. So I think that is where the innovation happens. It's not like, oh I have to become a bank to provide banking services and that's where the value creation is. I mean, look, we're incredibly regulated, we've got Finra and we've got the sec that's more than enough regulation for my taste. Um So when I think about it, you know, banks have, have regulators as well, but I think the distinction between a setup that we have and a set up like is that synapse is just a software layer, whereas we are a regulated entity that partners with banks. And so I think that is actually an important distinction to make. But again, a distinction that may not be totally transparent or understandable, I should say to the customer and I am going to open this up to questions. So start thinking about if you have any, I just have one more for them and then I promise I'll get to you guys. Vlad from Robin Hood spoke yesterday and I think a lot about what companies competitors look like and how you differentiate yourselves. And I'm sure it's something for both of your companies brex. You have ramp betterment, you have Wealthfront, but it seems like Robinhood now is entering the space. They're doing retirement accounts, they're doing 5% back savings accounts. How do you think about differentiating in this time where a lot of fintech are merging to the same point? So it's very frustrating and I do worry more if I'm honest about Robinhood than I do about WEF front. And the reason for that is I have three businesses. I have a retail business, a 401 workplace solution and an R A custody platform which looks exactly like a fidelity vanguard or Schwab. So when I think about them, I am the millennial version of those three and most of my competitors are mono line competitors. So I compete with different, different companies in each of those three vectors which you know, we could debate the wisdom of that. But when I think about who could challenge me for sort of supremacy with that brand opportunity. With this next generation, it is Robin Hood more so than wealthfront. They've come at it totally differently, which is I'm serious money. And in 2021 and the meme stocks and all of that, there was a lot of like they're selling cake and you're selling, eat your vegetables and eat your vegetables. Didn't seem that sexy in 2021. And then in 22 and 23 eat your vegetables, started to sound a little bit better. And so I still believe that the outcomes we are driving for customers, which is diversification. Long term out, look slow and steady wins the race. That is the right approach. But the reality is, you know, Robin Hood is training a generation to day trade and to, you know, to be, to look at your portfolio on mobile as frequently as possible and to be too reactionary. And so that's scary and, and that's a formidable competitor because they're well capitalized, they're public and, you know, they've got a lot of great, great usability that, that I admire. I'm personally a huge fan of Robin Hood. They are both the BRC customer, uh, uh, like a very large bre customer. But also I think we decided very categorically to not get into consumer finance. And instead we, you know, we fintech, but we decided to go upmarket into enterprise S A in addition to that. So, so where I think Robin Hood is playing really well is they are expanding into consumer finance, consumer credit cards. And we're very in a very different problem space than what we're trying to solve with uh B to B finance and enterprise. So the space we replace is more a conquer and an Amex or traditional bank not in the consumer finance. And I think that being true to who you are is extremely critical because there's always going to be competition. And adjacent CS I know as investors, we all love adjacent markets, adjacent markets for us. Adjacent C is not trying to do another consumer play it to keep growing upmarket and have a time from five people start ups around bracks. A lot of you in the room are thank you as well as we have 50,000 employee companies. And we can, we can, there's so much time that we don't need to necessarily go compete with the likes of Robin Hood to ever get that. So I think I have time for one quick question. I'm sorry. We have one in the, in the front here. Uh I wish I could have left for a few more, but I'm sure this will be a good one. And if you can have your last thoughts here too, that will set me up for a good one as we set up right off the bat. I'm Michael Marcott. I'm the chairman of the RG Global Group. I'm also the co founder of the National Cyber Security Center. I have tremendous respect for both of you guys personally and the business models you have established, you support the sovereignty of the individual. With that being said, how would your businesses and you guys personally view the ultimate sunsetting of the US Patriot Act? Oh, my, pretty nice to have one for the end. I'm not even sure I know how to answer that question. I mean, right now I think more about sort of open banking to be honest and the importance of that legislation which has been, you know, 12 years coming. Um And I think it will ultimately extend to wealth whereas it'll start more in banking. But this idea that the consumer ultimately needs to control his or her data and destiny and should be able to move that around to different platforms, basically fighting that trend is what the incumbents want to do so that they can maintain market share and stifle innovation. And so for me that is sort of, I don't know if that's exactly responsive to your question, but that's kind of where my head is. I think a lot about that because in my last job, like, we were dealing with a lot of consumer data at Facebook, as you can imagine. Um Luckily I haven't had to think as much of the problem at BREX because we are based clearly B to B and we like serve a lot of large public companies. But I think for now as an example, we have 100 and 50 public companies on bre, which is a big departure from a start up doing it to a large regulated public company, taking a bet on bre. I think a lot of our investments have gone into cybersecurity, data governance and making sure that data residence really matters because, you know, our customers are spread globally. Uh We haven't yet had to tackle that problem and like, OK, I'm uh actually take Roblox or Robin Hood these companies. What happens to the data of an employee outside of the US with the US trade entity? I don't think we've tackled that as much, but we definitely will because we are playing in the global space. And even though it's technically B to B, it is, we will cross that line at some point. That is unfortunately all the time we have Thank you for that great question. Thank you to my Panelist. That was really great. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much.

Kirsten Green, Founder and Managing Partner, Forerunner

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Winning with Consumers in AI

Good afternoon. I'm thrilled to be here and grateful for the opportunity to talk about winning with consumers in A I, I've got 15 minutes and 50 slides so and a big topic. So I'm going to power through the slides to tell a narrative. Some of the slides are dense. I'm going to do my best to pull up the key takeaways. If something piques your curiosity, I'm more than happy to share the slides following the talk. And also worth noting that to the extent we reference consumer feedback and preferences in the materials that's out of some survey work that our team has conducted over the last couple of months. So with that, um so there are two major shifts that we care about as investors and people tracking the market. The first are value shifts which drive demand and the second are technology shifts which underpin adoption. When we talk about value shifts, we talk about major movements that are fueling mass adoption over time. And with tech shift, we're talking about inflection points that unlock new capabilities, both value shifts and tech shifts are rare and defining for the future. And when they intersect, it's even more rare and these are a place where businesses get built that can change categories and become new industry giants. We're at one of those inflection points today with generative A I powering a shift of a new generation of companies playing into the trend of access, moving to edit. What do we mean? Well, let's start with talking about access. So the last couple of decades, it has really been about unlocking access to experience to products and services. This has been an incredible place to build from with huge consumer pull and industry giants have been built. The social web has been a catalyst for this access. Here. We have familiar social networks that have tens of millions, 100 million active users. Similarly e com and digital services have hit huge penetration with the major companies having a billion dollars, tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue, device adoption has reached full penetration. And for the last 10 years, we've been in a steady state with some shifting you're seeing between device types which we understand as consumers buying 2nd and 3rd devices and the appetite for technology has been so great that consumers have been readily embracing products built for the enterprise for their own personal use. So for reasons we're gonna get into in a few minutes, we believe that at this point, we've reached peak access. It's a time when more is no longer more and people are feeling overwhelmed if not burdened by the level of information and hyper connectivity they have. And it's becoming counterproductive. If you ask consumers today, they'll reference this. The majority of them are saying that they want to engage less with technology, less with their social media, less with news headlines, with notifications, with games, their devices in general. In fact, we see this hyper connectivity as an underpinning for stress people. This year report elevated stress levels to the tune of 40% just year over year and 75% of people report they've walked away from decisions or purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed by the abundance of choice and input. We see these stress levels as a harbinger for what tech can solve for going forward to make things better enter gen A I which we feel has the opportunity to power the shift from access to edit. What do we mean when we talk about edits? So rather than give me more options, show me the option. That's uniquely right for me rather than give me the tools to do something myself, do it with me or better yet do it for me rather than make me productive, be productive for me, outsource the work, give me the output and let me leverage that a powerful way to think about edit is personalization, which has been a topic that we've talked about a lot in tech, but it really hasn't come to fruition. In fact, the thing that I think about is the most personalized experience I have online is in my Instagram ad field or in the Tik Tok algorithm. So we see A I being uniquely suited to make personalization a reality through these mechanisms, being able to deliver on your preferences, taking action on your user's behalf, having context and situational awareness and obviously doing that while you're maintaining privacy and the consumer is here for it, they're already in tune. There's an incredible awareness around A I and the power of A I so much so that in two years, chat GPT mindshare is touching the levels of Instagram. This slide is dense and that's the point. So when asked users on what dimensions do they want to use A I, there was a significant response 40% plus across a wide range of tasks that span career finance, personal services and health. And you see here at the bottom, there's a few that are kind of ranked in the 20 below 20% and those are really ones where the human element or the emotion element is the product. So think of coaches and therapists when consumers make decisions they do so on a three part paradigm, looking for advantages on price, convenience and quality. The business cycle of the past when it was delivering access is really focused on setting new standards in price and convenience. And even with parody on quality companies were able to take mindshare. These are some of the biggest winners of the last generation in comparison to the prior gen alternative. And you can see here that in many cases they won on price and convenience. If you think about what it takes for a consumer to trade out of an existing product and service in adopting a new one. Yes, you have to maintain an eye on price and convenience. But with A I and introducing that into the conversation, we're seeing an expectation for higher quality, moving into the driver's seat of a decision making process. The journey, there is a journey ahead to building out A I to be a full expression of what it can be. But we do see a path and we do see the opportunity for better quality. So instead of just access to information, more health care data, more data on your wearables device, taking you to a place where you can take action from it and you can get better health care. For example, that said the consumer expectation is high, they set a high bar for what is better. Their patience isn't exactly abundant and that makes the window for experimentation, quite narrow. All the more important to get it right? When you're just getting started as a business to that end, we propose the business, this business idea to focus on two fronts. One is delivering magic and the other is building trust. We think about these on two dimensions. So magic from delight to relief and building trust from do it with me to do it. For me in the context of delivering magic delight is more of a novelty. It's that moment that evokes a sense of joy or a sense of surprise versus relief, which is about taking something that's in the red. That's a burning challenge for a person and solving for it. Over the past decade, magic experiences have predominantly been anchored in delight. In fact, when you look at the winners of the past decade and you go back and talk to some of their earliest users about their first impression of the experience. They say delight at a high, high rate in terms of what underpins that moment of magic for them. Yet, when you talk to consumers today and you introduce the possibility of A I or the power of A I powered, we hear consumers saying they're looking for a sense of relief. This suggests a powerful place to build on the top half of this two by two graph and it's a zone that hasn't been as penetrated as the delight part. Again, here's a dense chart, but it says that same task list. And we said when you, when you, when when offered the opportunity to have A I powered, what do you imagine as your experience? And they by large sighted relief and the good news is that's a really powerful place to build a business from. It offers a better chance for retention and engagement over time. But how do you craft a magic experience? So the next two slides are deserving of a talk in and of their own, right? But to give a nod to the idea, we see four main jobs to be done on this front. The first solve a red hot problem two have a high quality output, three be efficient while you're doing it. And four make something affordable that previously was out of reach. And with respect to the technology, we have some philosophies and some early product ideas that suggest that it's important to be anchored in transparency to be upfront about where the A I is creating the advantage to show users that they're going to get more than they give and to bring them along in that journey. Here's a sample of some early movers in A I that are already performing well on these dimensions of relief. Now moving on to trust, let's start with the reality that we're up against some hurdles. So getting back to that idea that there's sky high consumer expectations and patience for experimentation is quite narrow. We can see in the headlines today, there's plenty of critiques on the products that are out there. So with trust and building it, it really starts with engaging with collaboration with the user, allowing them to have some agency and starting with a do it with me journey. We see an opportunity and an openness when talking to people on the almost wanting to embrace the do it for me but not, not unexpected. Most of these things today are more conceived to be in the do it with me phase. And probably that's because it's early in the A I journey, we haven't totally proven out the power of it yet. But when we do, we imagine that there's going to be a shift to an autonomous format across a lot of these tasks being possible. And when you think about this in the context of the two by two graph, we're now talking about the upper right quadrant, which is a relief, you know, delivering relief and doing it for you is a really powerful place to build a business from. And it may sound crazy to think about taking your hands off the wheel and letting A I do something for you. But remember how foreign or even inconceivable, it felt to get in a stranger's car or to get in some stay in someone's house, um We've clearly moved beyond those spheres. And so in addition to designing with user sensitivities, most companies have ramped up their controls and protections. And that plus a consistency and experience and generally a lot of this is powered by user, really wanting these tech enabled products has allowed us to build enough trust to get to where we are today. Um That said there's new layers of confidence and trust that will need to be built as A I reaches its full potential. So how do you build trust? So some starting points that we suggest with on the delivering it on the do it with me, do it for me. Scale is don't over promise, be realistic about what you can do and ensure you deliver on it. Confirm that your service is really satisfying a need and that you're moving things forward from what already exists and really understand what the cost is of missing the mark, be in tune with what the downside is. Understand the perceived versus the actual risk and protect against disappointing the user. We're already seeing some developments here. You've got some industry leaders like Adobe making a forward step to honor the IP rights of creative and you've got some early movers like perplexity introducing the idea of citations into their search results. There's a lot of building going on right here and this is what we're calling the trust stack. It's an emerging foundation of tools and technologies that will underpin the ability for A I to become autonomous. There's lots to be done. They will need to be leveraged across many things to deliver on that experience, but there's work being done and there's a path forward on it. So in closing, we see a consumer that's generally eager and optimistic about A I 50% of the people we talk to have engaged with it already in some way and 80% plus of the people imagine it being a positive lever in their life. The intersection of a growing desire to move towards edit or personalization with the actual possibility that A I can deliver on that offers a step change for consumers and for business. And we see a winning formula in delivering magic. So solving a red hot problem, delivering quality, being efficient while doing it, making something possible or affordable, that wasn't before while building trust in the form of managing your expectations, providing transparency, encouraging collaboration and mitigating risk leading to a path of adoption of loyalty and of scale.

Jennifer Fleiss, Partner, Initialized Capital; Co-founder, Rent the Runway, Jetblack Interviewer: Andy Dunn, Chief Executive Officer, Pie; Co-founder, Bonobos; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How to Innovate Without Losing Your Mind

Thanks for having us. So Jenny and I were comparing notes we met in Soho in 2009 and you were starting rent the runway and I wanted to begin with what it's like when you come down from the entrepreneurial journey. So you spent nine years building rent the runway at some point that went public. Then three years during the go go days of e commerce Transformation at Wal Mart. What was it like? After all that excitement came too close. A really big comedown. So nine years then jumped straight into the next role, starting and leading and growing up to zero to about 300 employees within the business. I ran at Wal Mart all of a sudden came out of that and it was COVID and I had left Wal Mart and I was like, who am I as a person? What do I want to do with my life? And in that process of that span of entrepreneurship, which was a complete blur. I had, had three Children. I had lost my mom and there was a lot I think I just hadn't processed because it was 1 ft in front of the next problem solving, taking care of the hundreds of employees that we had at various companies. And so this kind of question of like, what did I actually want in life? Where was I in life? Like, really suddenly hit me really hard along with time to kind of process that, which is in theory important, but it can also be a little bit rattling. Yeah. So one thing I like about you is that over the years as we've gone through some ups and downs as friends and fellow entrepreneurs, we've talked about where do you get help from a mental health perspective? We've compared notes on executive coaches and I think at some point shared one of those compared notes on therapists. How do you decide as a founder when you're dealing with difficult things? And maybe even as a human folks in the room who have this decision to face, when do you hire a coach? And when do you hire a mental health professional therapist, psychiatrist, et cetera? Yeah. Well, before I had a coach or a therapist, I had people like you, Andy, honestly and my co founder, but truly in New York, I mean, the ecosystem is a lot bigger now. But when we were starting around the runway in Bonobos, there was like eight of us and we all were helping each other. Whether it was like, how much are you paying for per square foot for office space? Like the silliest question all the way to really hard stuff around fundraising or first person, you were going to fire and the ability to, like, authentically form friendships and meet people and get advice from them both. Kind of the most practical way. Like, we didn't have any time, it was like a very practical way to get things done and figure it out. But also it was like, it was really meaningful and it led you feel like you're not in this alone and having a co founder does that as well. And so I feel like, very grateful that in these like dramatic highs and lows of entrepreneurship, I had someone not just to deal with the low moments because those definitely happened in entrepreneurship, but it's way more fun to deal with the high moments. And like at the end of the day, that's what kind of gets you to muffling through the next, the next blow. And that idea that you're not in this alone because your co founder implicitly like cares just as much as you do, like your necks are both on the line. You've both got to make it work. That was something in the second business that I started for Walmart. Like I didn't have that in the same way. And I never, I never actually took it for granted because like, it literally came up so often. And I think that's what kept me really afloat in a very sane way amidst losing my mom and having three kids while being at rent the runway. Yeah. And we joined Wal Mart at roughly the same time, I can remember sitting down with Doug mcmillan when we were doing the Bonobos deal with Wal Mart and Doug just looked at me with those like piercing blue eyes and he was like, Andy, why do you want to do this? And I was, I was nervous at that dinner. There was a $300 million deal on the line and I just thought about it and I said, Doug, I need a job and he was like, you have a job and I was like being a founder of a company is not a job. Always worrying about payroll and all these things. I'm curious was your experience of managing your own mental health different when you were a founder versus when you were a doing great things but effectively a corporate executive. Interesting, you know, I think, um I think the biggest difference was probably like, there was more resources that you could put to work within the ecosystem of Wal Mart. One being coaches, for example. So around the runway, there was easily seven years before we had coaches or we talked about having a coach for Jen and I within the company, I don't think it was as common back then. You know, we launched the business in 2009, but we also didn't necessarily have the capital, the resources or really the time to be thoughtful about that. I mean, I wish we were more proactive about it. What we did do very well, Jen and I was, we forced ourselves to sit down every other week together. The two of us, whether we thought we had something to talk about or not and it was meant to be about, like, our relationship and, like, talking about like us and like, there was some hard stuff that came up, there was like some funny stuff that came up, but like definitely some like hard tense conversations that came up and that advice had been given to us by of our board members who's still an observer to our board. But I think just having, you know, for those seven years having great board members, great advisor, great peers around the table took that role within the Walmart ecosystem. Like they have a great set of existing coaches that they can pair you with and I was able to see like huge benefits in then leveraging that resource and also having this feeling, you know, within that broader corporate, I wasn't also fundraising, you know, there was a sense of like there was some safety net connected and this broader, you know, it wasn't entirely 100% on my shoulders. So I think that let me breathe a little bit more, but it was also like a different sort of responsibility to live through totally. And I do want to take questions in a moment. So please prepare your question. Um Let's talk about co founders for a second. And I have to tell you something. You don't know when we sat down for lunch in 2009, I was in the middle of a co founder, divorce with my business partner. And I remembered thinking these two have no idea how hard it is to have two amazing leaders. Both who with business school pedigrees right out of H BS. The two of you were, this isn't going to work, which was the most weird thought to have had. And then you have endured with your co founder and the CEO of Run Runway Jen Hyman. You were there for nine years. You had a thoughtful transition. You're still on the board. What is unique about your friendship and partnership with her that has enabled you to do as friends and co founders, something that we so rarely see which is to endure as both. Yeah. Well, thank you. You truly have seen the whole trajectory. It is probably in the course of around the runway. What I feel the most proud of like legitimately is my relationship with Jen and the fact that it's still a very strong relationship. Today, we talk almost daily about pretty much everything and I'm still on the board with her. So some of it is business related and some of it is like friends and life related. But the reality is we started our friendship and our relationship during this time where we went through so many moments together of blitz scaling and highs and lows and fundraising and go public and COVID at a time where people didn't need to get dressed and we could never imagine that would have happened. Right. And then the moment when I did decide to leave and the moment when we brought in a couple of senior executives for the first time, like there were just so many like hard and special moments that like kind of like a spouse, like no one lived through that with you in the same way. But then I think knowing also as a person that she and I could both kind of weather storms as people and keep that relationship with each other. And I say with like our founding team in this really like special place, like that's a, that is like the stuff that's meaningful uh in life. And, and ultimately, I don't know, like it, it really is what I'm most proud of when I think of my time there, great anyone ready to jump in over here? Um Can you talk about the specific moment when you had the self awareness to know you had to step away in order to keep the company growing? Yeah. So I've always loved the earliest stages of entrepreneurship and at rent the runway like Jen and I were able to have really real conversations. And so at one point I took on a role in like starting the new parts of our business actually. And so I started our omni channel retail strategy. I started our subscription business, which is say about 90% of more than 90% of our company. I started a whole sponsorship business. So we were like finding these ways to like use my best self that would also make me the happiest within the business. And at some point, like, there wasn't more stuff we should start, it was just about baking all of that. So that was like a very clear thing. And we'd also hired an amazing senior team that felt really like good that, you know, I felt like I could leave if I wanted to. And coincidentally, I feel like, right as everything was feeling very settled and good in that way, Mark Laurie, who we both worked with at Walmart, reached out with the opportunity to go start a business on my own within Wal Mart ecosystem. And he's like, you know, pick your team, like, you know, it's your company, your vision. And I had for really all of my career, done things with Jen and she'd always been the CEO which like I was always psyched about and that was great. But like, it was a chance for me to be like, who am I as an individual leader and business person and to like, try that on and have that experience in a really unique moment in time. I mean, this like entrepreneurship at a moment where Mart had just sunk $3.3 billion of like through the elephant in the swimming pool. Like we actually care about digital and we were led to take some really big swings. It was, it was a really unique opportunity. And I think she also saw that and wanted that for me as well. And the whole board, the whole senior team, I think we were able and we still have like very healthy relationships and conversations because I would never have left if it wasn't that I knew like the business was in a really good ok place. So back to rent the runway, the company went public at one point. I remember it was valued at 800 million in the private markets and worth more than a billion. I looked this up last night, 66 million of market cap today. Tell us two things about that. What's that been like for you as co founder? And what has that meant for showing up for gen and maybe some specifics on how you've had to show up because it does become asymmetric at some point being the person that's still in it and running it versus being the board member looking in on it. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, as much as there's highs and lows at a company, as much as there's for your co founder it is quite different when, you know, I've diversified from my own career and from my role in investing now and the portfolio of founders that I work with versus being there day in and day out that said, you know, like the actual valuation of the company, I think in some ways that's never, has never felt like something where like, wow, that's money in the bank. I mean, like my shares have been like, as far as I know, it's kind of like, always been this thing where there's, there's money that hopefully at some point will exist, but it was never, it was never as like tangible. So like, I like the pieces that I cared the most about and that I really saw Jen care the most about were like when our employees who were brought in with like option valuations at a certain amount. Ben saw those being underwater in a way that when you're a private company is never visible and it was not, it was not at all connected to the actual performance of our company or what they were doing, it was connected just like what's out there publicly day to day and you have to kind of manage through that emotional and kind of cultural tension and pain for your employees. Like that stuff was really hard and friend of mine um seeing Jen carry the weight of what like I think for her too, it was more the weight of what that was to be a leader to employees then than it was like what her personal portion was was worth and to like, try to be the partner for her to support her in the moment where that was happening and then you have to compound it with like laying off employees at different points in time. Yeah, it was definitely really tricky. You know, I think all this stuff though. It is. What in this next chapter now where I landed about that? Tell us about now you're on the other side of the table, you're a venture capitalist. What's different about being a founder now from back then? And how do you show up for the founders that you partner with? Yeah. So it, it still feels, I don't know, I still feel like I'm both an operator and an investor. So I started doing investing while I was at rent the runway even and then at Walmart. And I think one thing that's awesome about initialized is like all the partners are former operators and founders. And so I actually feel like I'm at home in this entrepreneurial ecosystem and in the way that we work with founders. So that was like for me, my answer of how do I find my happy place in making this dramatic transition between being a builder, being an operator, growing teams to being the one on the sidelines and guiding. But what I will say, you know, I think all the learnings and the highs and lows like have become these amazing learnings that I can now share. They weren't just like for nothing and it wasn't just like these pains and scars and bruises. They were ways that I could like now guide and share it with founders. And, you know, my favorite one, I actually shared this tip with a founder earlier today. It's not just about sharing the scar stories. It's also like create an email account that's like memories at Rent the runway.com or whatever it is. And when you have like a fun moment, a funny email, a photo just like BC that email and then like look back at it every five years and like celebrate and figure out like fine, like remember those special fun moments because it all goes by really frigging fast, right? I've got one more for you. Yeah, let's go back to the beginning. Let's say you had a founder who was exited and was at a similar low point. What would you say? What would be the one thing you would say to someone who was in the, in those shoes that you were in just some years ago? Yeah. Well, first off, I hope that I would be the type of investor that they would come to because one reason why I went to investing is our first investor, Scott friend from being capital. He had been an operator and the ability for him to empathize and to be that person that we called at like 830 in the morning or 10 pm at night in those moments, like is literally still there. Like I still have to find an investor with empathy with the empathy that's on through it, that you can trust that like you want to call and you feel is going to be there for you and have real thoughtful advice. And I think what he what other people told me, it's like this journey and life is like a lot longer than you think of it as when you're an entrepreneur, you're entrepreneur, it all runs by and I'm getting to this. You're going to let me just say I so admire your journey and thanks for being here to talk about this. Thanks everyone.

Raja Doddala, Managing Director, Churchill Asset Management Michelle Gonzalez, Corporate Vice President and Global Head, M12, Microsoft Mark Suster, Managing Partner, Upfront Ventures Moderator: Terri Burns, Founder and General Partner, Type Capital 

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Investing In Disruption

Raja Doddala, Churchill Asset Management, Michelle Gonzalez, M12, Microsoft, Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures, Terri Burns, Type Capital 

Raja Doddala, Managing Director, Churchill Asset Management Michelle Gonzalez, Corporate Vice President and Global Head, M12, Microsoft Mark Suster, Managing Partner, Upfront Ventures, Terri Burns, Founder and General Partner, Type Capital 

Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind and Google Research, Google Interviewer: Jeremy Kahn, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Google’s Gemini Man

Everybody. Thanks for joining us, Jeff, thanks for being here. Um I'm gonna go to the audience for Q and A pretty early on in the session. So please have your questions ready. Wait for Pat Mike handler to come to you and then stand up and please say your name and state your question. Um So Jeff in the introduction, Andrew talked a little bit about the merger between Google Brain and Google, Deepmind, Google had these two separate A I fundamental research units. What was the reason for combining them and what benefit have you seen from that, that merger? Yeah, I mean, I think both organizations were doing fantastic work and you know, a lot of different A I innovations have come out of both groups prior to the combination, you know, things like Transformers and Burt and alphago and various other Alpha related projects on the Deep Mind side, Alpha fold. But I think as we realized that we were both striving, you know, both organizations were striving to build, you know, large scale multimodal models that can do lots of interesting things. It made sense to kind of combine the people working on those ideas so that we have, you know, a better set of ideas to build on to pool the compute. So we sort of focus on training one, you know, large scale effort like Gemini rather than multiple fragmented efforts. And so that's been really good. I think it's been really great to see people come together and really just kind of work together on, you know, building awesome stuff. Right. And has there been a change in sort of the tempo with which you're able to sort of move things from research to product as a result of that merger or a change in the culture at all? From the from that merger? I mean, I think obviously we want to build, you know, things like Gemini that can sit underneath a lot of different products. And so we have a pretty strong focus on, you know, how do we make great models that are great for, you know, cloud applications, but also, you know, sitting underneath various search features or Gmail or other kinds of, you know, existing Google products, but also can create new kinds of products. So that sort of large escape of product focus is really important, but we're really focused on the fundamental research and making the best things possible and then rely on product teams to kind of, you know, take those building blocks and figure out how best to use them in their setting. Great when I talk to companies about using generative A I one of the things that always comes up is the rate of hallucinations from these models. And it seems to be one of the things that's created a bit of a bottleneck to actually deploying them in any kind of real use cases. I know you guys are working very hard on this issue. There was some hope that when multimodal models came around like like Gemini that that would reduce hallucination rates because the model would understand both the language and also the visual imagery that went with that language, it's made some difference, but that hasn't completely gone away. How are we doing on solving the hallucination problem? And is there kind of a, you know, do you think it's a solvable problem in the current architectures? Yeah, I mean, I do think we're making progress like it's a difficult problem for sure because the models are trained to generate, you know, probabilistically plausible sentences and those are not always true. So, but I do think there are some glimmers of hope. So, one of the things in the latest Gemini models is the fact that it has this very long context capability. So you can put lots of information that you're trying to sort of use and in answering questions that you that you're doing, and that information to the model is much clearer than sort of the model, the training data that the model was exposed to in the pre training phase, which is sort of like a big jumble of tokens that are used to generate these probabilistic models but is not as clear as you know, information in the context, right? So that information I think is much easier and the model tends to hallucinate less about that information. I think that's, you know, one promising direction and we're obviously pushing on lots of different other directions, right? At Google IO. This year, I know you guys made announced that you have this thing called project Astra, which is an attempt to kind of build an a a model that have agency. What what kinds of actions will astra be able to perform and how soon is this going to be released? Yeah, I mean, we're hoping to have something out into the hands of test users by the end of the year. So it's pretty exciting. I think the ability to combine Gemini models with models that actually have agency and can perceive the world around you in a multi modal way is going to be, you know, quite quite powerful. I think we're obviously approaching this responsibly. So we want to make of the technology is ready and that it doesn't have unforeseen consequences, which is why we'll roll it out first to a smaller set of initial test users. But I think it's going to be pretty interesting because all of a sudden, you know, the model can be perceiving the world around it around you and doing, doing stuff on your behalf. Right. Interesting Bill Gates recently said he thought, you know, large language models, there were sort of two more turns of the crank in terms of scaling up these models further. But he also said that he didn't think that those two turns of the crank would kind of get us A G. I'm curious what you think, how many turns of the crank are left on sort of transformer based LM models and where will those turns? Get us? Yeah, I mean, I think as you see the models grow in capability, some of that is due to scaling. So every time you increase the scale of the model and the amount of training data that these models are trained on with the model capacity as well. You do see new capabilities kind of emerge, you see the models, you know, hallucinate less, you see them sort of able to do things that they couldn't do before at smaller scale. So that that is a promising sign and you know, a couple more generations of scaling will get us considerably farther. I do think we're going to need some additional algorithmic breakthroughs, which is something that we've always focused on is how do we sort of take scaling but combine it with algorithmic approaches that combine well with scaling to sort of improve the capabilities of the model. I think things like factuality and reasoning capability where the model can sort of uh sort of imagine plausible outputs and you know, reason its way through which one makes the most sense or the kinds of things that are gonna be uh important to really make these models robust and, and more reliable than they already are. Right? I want to go to questions from the audience. We have a question, please raise your hand and we'll get a, get a mic handler to you. There's one right down here. Um If we can please get a mic to this gentleman and if you could please stand up and say who you are? Alright. Thanks, Mark Paper Master. I'm CTO at A MD. And uh Jeff, we're all um excited with the advancements like you, you all are doing with Gemini, but we also all are talking about the the demands of power. How do you think about it holistically from your role in terms of everything from the chip engineering all the way through the uh models in the application stack? Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the things that, that I really like about Google is we have a fully integrated system. So we have, you know, we design our own chips for A I, although we also use other people's chips and then we have our own sort of system software on top of that, we can make efficient use of those chips. When we first introduced the tensor processing unit in 2016, you know, that was quite a big advance in terms of energy efficiency. It was about 30 to 80 times more efficient than CPUS and GPUS of the day. And we've now been through multiple successive generations of CPUS that have also made pretty significant improvements in energy efficiency. And we've also, you know, for many, many years focused on the overall energy efficiency of our data centers. We have very low P we have, you know, a lot of data centers of ours are powered by percent or more clean energy, which is super important as despite this, Jeff, you just reported that your co two emissions have gone up over the last several years, despite these sort of improvements and despite these optimizations, so can you talk a little about what's going on there and sort of how, what's the path out of this? I mean, if, if we have, you know, carbon footprint scaling at a rate that's, you know, going up at the same kind of slope as capability, maybe that's not where we really want to be. Yeah, I mean, we have a public commitment to by the end of 2030 you have essentially 100% of our data center operations powered by clean energy. And that's not necessarily a linear thing because often we make, you know, we uh work with clean energy providers, solar, solar, you know, capacity providers or wind providers and some of those things come online in 2027 2028 29. And so those things will provide sort of significant, you know, jumps in the percentage of our energy usage that is from energy. But then also we want to focus on making our systems as efficient as possible, right? And, and is, is, is the access renewable power become a constraint on sort of how quickly you can scale the technology. Um You know, I think there's been a lot of focus on the increasing energy usage of A I and you know, from a very small base that usage is definitely increasing. But I think people often conflate that with overall data center usage of which A I is a very small portion right now, but growing fast and then sort of attribute the growth rate of A I based computing to the overall data center usage. So I think it's really important to look carefully at all data and really understand the true trends that underlie this cool other questions from the audience. Please raise your hand. If you have a question, if not, I've got plenty more for Jeff. But if someone else in the audience has a question over here in the back, the gentleman in the colorful shirt first, I think, and then if you can please stand up and state your name, hey, Will Wilson from antithesis, Jeff, what is your current take on the debate over A I risk and alignment and all that stuff? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, it's a good and healthy debate for sure. I mean, I think there's, you know, many different viewpoints along a spectrum of, you know, optimism and pessimism and, you know, how much concern should we have for, for, you know, disastrous consequences? I guess I'm somewhat in the middle. I think there's a huge amount of benefit from A I technologies to the world. So we should make sure that we sort of do, do our best to make sure that the world gets access to those things for things like education and health care. But we also need to make sure that some of the, the risks of A I are sort of mitigated or diminished in, in rolling these things out for the positive benefits. So it's, you know, obviously hard to predict the future in a very fast moving field. Uh I think probably the most extreme viewpoints on either side are probably not, not the most uh likely outcome. Do you have a take on, on the California Senate bill? 1047? Do you have a view on whether that's a good approach to regulation or not? I don't, I mean, I would say in general, it is really good for governments at all different levels to be thinking about how they want to regulate A I, I think there's certainly, you know, I sort of think of it as a very general technology and often the regulatory process probably should focus on how is that technology being used in a particular setting, right. So like if you have autonomous vehicles that makes sense to have like a certain set of regulations there in health care settings, there's already sort of a relatively comprehensive framework around roll out of new technologies and health. And so I think, you know, adapting those for new A I based things makes a lot of sense. Cool. I know we have at least one other question because I saw a hand up before. So why don't we go to the uh someone else? Um Just here. Yeah, please say it stand up and say your name. Yeah, hi. This is Sidar Taral with s software company work. So Jeff, I'm a zoo. So I have a soft spot in my heart for Google. But having said that one of the challenges we have is as we look at models, we don't want to be locked into one particular model because we don't know which model or which company is going to drive innovation the fastest. So what's your advice for companies like us in terms of how we should think about not locking ourselves out of future innovation by picking Gemini. Yeah, I mean, I think I hear those concerns. I think, you know, we think we're going to innovate quite quickly and then give people what they want in terms of models. But we also recognize there's a whole bunch of choices. This is partly why we, for example, have open source models called Gemma that we've recently introduced. We just provided Gemma two updates a few weeks ago of 9 billion and 27 billion parameter models and the 27 billion parameter model on the LM SIS um sort of elo rankings actually is the top ranked open model at the moment or it was at least a week ago. I haven't looked this week. This is a fast moving field but, you know, open source models can provide people some comfort that they have sort of a little bit more control. But I also think a lot of people want sort of a PS that they don't have to necessarily spin up a whole bunch of GPUS themselves. They can just sort of use it as a building block for, for getting stuff done. Cool. Uh Other questions down here in front. There's a question I see. Uh if we can get a mic to this gentleman just here right here in the front row. Oh Can we get a mic to this to him right here? Sorry. There we go. Thank you. Please say your name. Hey, my name is Ken. I'm uh CU and co-founder at union. Firstly, I'm a huge fan of your work. 20 years. Every paper, everything. This is what we have built on. Secondly, I think this is mostly looking into the future, purely technical question, not talking about the implications of business, but what's the one thing uh in a that will surprise you in a good way, in a bad way in those cranks that we're spinning. Like let's say we have this two, the next generation. I'm not even talking about the second one. What is the one thing that will surprise you in a positive way? And what will disappoint you if it doesn't happen? Like, yeah, I, I mean, I think um one of the things that is probably going to be a surprise to people is the improvement in multimodal capabilities. You know, I think the first couple of iterations of Gemini really sort of introduced multimodality, but I think it's going to be a much more naturally integrated thing for many different kinds of modalities, audio video imagery, both on the input and generation side. So I think that's going to be an exciting new, new direction. Uh you know, I'm the, the what will surprise me on the downside that's always hard to predict, right? But it's always gonna be disappointing when it happens because you're like, oh, I could have sworn this thing was gonna work out but it didn't. And you know, I think this is part of the nature of kind of a a research driven but still fairly close to product kind of development framework is you're constantly trying to bring new research innovations into the thing you're building at the largest scale and make sure that those things have been de risked at a smaller scale. And sometimes those interactions, you can really predict really well. And we, we do our best to sort of scientifically rigorously evaluate how they're gonna interact. But when they scale up, sometimes they interact in ways that you can't predict. Ok, let's, let's get another question while we still have time. Let's go right here. You got, hey, Healy Ier boom pop. Thanks for being here. Um One thing I think about a bunch is the fact that education in the States is like we're 60 or 70th out of 194 countries. And I think with access to A I, it's wonderful because as internet and mobile phones are around, everyone can ask questions and get answers the trick, I guess. And this is kind of a very high level question which I think is the stuff you think about probably is if you're getting the answer all the time, how do you also balance the responsibility of giving that person who might not have education to think critically? Do you think about the answer? And how do you caveat? How do you say look a I may be right? May be wrong. And how do you make sure that I guess critical thought remains center in humanity as A I becomes more prevalent. A good question. Yeah, it's a very good question. First. I think there's huge, huge potential for A I to help in education, right? We know educational outcomes when you have a personalized tutor are two standard deviations away from those when you have a much more sort of group focused setting where you're not being challenged at the level of an individual and, you know, someone who knows what, you know, and knows what you don't know. So I think that's the potential. I think, you know, part of deploying these systems in education if you want to have the system really challenge people in how they learn best and make sure that they're actually mastering the material before they sort of go off, but it does enable them to kind of take the right educational path for them. And I think that's, that's hugely huge potential. Yeah, I just want to ask a quick, there's been a lot of concern that the use of generative A I is churning out a lot of misinformation. A lot of poor quality content. Google obviously is a company that its entire business is based on finding good quality information on the internet. And there's a lot of concern about the poisoning of the information ecosystem. How are you looking at that at Google and how you're concerned that this technology you're helping create is also kind of rooting the very thing you built the business on? Yeah, I mean, I think this gets to our responsible A I principles like we've, we've always focused on how do we roll out A I technologies in ways that sort of benefit people and that sort of minimize things like harmful bias or misinformation or other things like that. And so it is true. These models can create misinformation. Misinformation though is not a new problem. It's something that's existed for years and years and, but A I also gives us tools to battle misinformation so you can do both. I'm afraid we're out of time, but I want to thank you all for listening. It's been great, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Peter Rawlinson, Chief Executive Officer and CTO, Lucid Motors Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: A Moment of EV Clarity

So yesterday, I um had the good fortune to partially interview a robot which was staged over there today, not a robot, but in my layman's term, I'll call it an engine. But what do we have here? What are we looking at? Well, this is the drive unit from a Lucid air. This is the propulsion unit that takes the electrical energy from the battery and converts that into rotary motion which powers the wheels. So we have three key elements, a motor, an inverter and the transmission, all combined. This unit is capable of well over 600 horsepower and it's created entirely in house. It's mass produced in our factory in Arizona. So I let's set the stage a little bit. The company has now been producing vehicles for, are we on year four now? Is that right? Yes. And since late 21 and the differentiation you talk about is the technology in large part. Can you help the audience explain a little bit why when they think about innovation, they should be thinking about lucid ahead of whether it's Tesla or some of the fast growing companies out of China. All right. Well, there's a general perception that all evs are born equal, the gasoline comes have add to the environment and all evs are good for the environment. And unfortunately, that isn't true just as there's a whole array of goodness within gasoline cars or badness. And there are gas guzzlers, there are the equivalent of gas guzzler electric cars and I term those electron guzzlers. Ok. And what's really important is that we recognize that and we work assiduously to advance the state of the art of the electric vehicle. That's what Lucid's all about. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm still working like crazy advancing the state of the art of the electric vehicle. And there's a reason for this, there are two fundamental widespread barriers to the widespread adoption of EVs one is range anxiety and the other is the cost of attainment and range anxiety. Just to make that clear is the idea that I might not be able to easily get from point A to point B. You might not make it home. Yes, I mean, I've had that happen to some relatives, they cannot afford a lucid but, but maybe another brand. Go ahead. So we've addressed range anxiety with when we launched our first Lucid Dream edition in late 2021 with 520 miles of range. So that, that's a lot. And I think that that, I mean, it's still the longest range car. Uh We still have 100 miles more range than the nearest competitor in the market today. So we've really addressed range anxiety in terms of that range. And also we can charge 200 miles in just 12 minutes. So you could travel 700 miles in a day with just 12 minutes downtime. I think that you would need that for other reasons rather than the limit of the car. But the the other aspect, the other main barrier to widespread adoption is just the cost of attainment. And when we look at why does an electric vehicle cost so much? A large part of it is the cost of the battery in our cars, relatively high end cars. The battery can you just can you can you just let the audience know sort of your price range on your current. So UC it starts at 69,900 with a Lucid Air pure and it goes right the way up to 249,000 for our supercar, the Lucid Air sapphire right in my journalists salary range just suit you. Yeah, and, and that's after a few, the lower end is after a few price cuts in the last year. Is that correct? Well, well, that's misunderstood. What's happened is we've been able to bring out successively more affordable versions of a car, which has meant that we've been able to address a more attainable price point as a result of bringing those models out. So that's been a large reason for hitting the magic 69,900. Got it. And where are you in this evolution of trying to both keep this technology differentiation, investing in it and also making a car that maybe more than just the 0.1% can afford or, or, or is that your market and you want to not at all. So one of the biggest misunderstandings about Lucid is people think we're some niche luxury player and nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not here to operate in a niche. We want to be huge, we want to be a mainstream player. We have to start with a relatively high end product because paradoxically the cost of industrializing a car is inversely proportional to the cost of the car. So is that part, I mean, so you know, just looking at you're a public company looking at financials from last year just to give contact around 600 million in revenue last year. Is that, am I right there? OK. And about 3 billion in the operating loss, right? So is that, is that part of what is that what we're talking about? Well, it would be worse if we try to go with a relatively affordable car to start with. It's that bad when you go for high end product because uh the the the the cost of a factory for a high end car is significantly less than for a low price point car. Why is that because that's all about volume. So if you're going to make a Rolls Royce, not many people can afford a Rolls Royce. So the factory is pretty small. You don't need a tooling that's going to be really hard and make thousands of parts. So the tooling costs can be less, can have a lot of it hand built. So the cost of a Rolls Royce factory is low, but the price of a Rolls Royce is pretty high. And conversely, if you're making a Volkswagen golf, that's all about numbers. You need to spend zillions on a huge factory with a huge degree of automation. I would have had to use it as a start up. I'd have had to raise an extra 10 billion. If I would take that route, it would have been prohibitive. I wouldn't be speaking to you now. So we had to start with a high end product first and this is a world prod path in Silicon Valley. And so a next product that you will be starting to deliver or rolling off the line this year is an SUV. And I think I think we have a video to show. Is that correct? Yes. Ok. Let's see that. So can you let, let's talk about what, what we're watching here? This is the earliest days of what would you call it? Well, this is our gravity SUV and this is in our design studio. This is the interactive process between design, styling, design and engineering in creating a car. We still use traditional clay modeling techniques linked with a completely digital array of tools from digital wind tunnel to digital crash analysis, for example. So there are, there are a lot of experts and industry analysts who believe that you need to nail this vehicle in terms of um both. Yes, the supply but the demand side for for a lucid to have a long term future. Is that, is that fair? Yeah. So it's, our finances are really, I mean, you, you, you touched on our finances. If they're dominated by scale, we need more scale and that way we can amortize our fixed cost. And that is the route to profitability for us and that there are four steps to achieving scale. We need to grow the word that we've got the best car on the planet available. Now in the lucid air, more and more people are recognizing this. We've just come off record quarterly sales were up 70% year on year. We're bucking that trend. Sell more airs, get gravity the SUV into production. That's got about six times the total addressable market. Then we move to the big one. What's the, what's the price point? Well, it's going to be from just under 80,000. So it's still relatively high. And is that price point related to tax credits? Unfortunately, it's above the air is above the tax credit threshold, but the lowest end version of gravity just gets it in to the 7.5 1000 federal tax incentive by virtue of being SUV. Ok. Yeah, I interrupted you. You were in the midst of I was in full flow. So we moved to the big one, the exciting one, ladies and gentlemen, late 26 where a mid size platform vehicle is scheduled for start of production. That's where we compete with Tesla Model three and model Y price point from about $48,000. And we're designing that to be capable of a million units per annum. I mean, this in the most respectful way possible is that 2026 date reality? I believe it is. I wouldn't say so otherwise. Um I, I also do want to field some questions from the audience. So um I'll come back to you in a minute. Um I have to ask you about a certain person who you want to work for and his name is Elon Musk. Um Over the last few years, he has taken a few opportunities to um come at you in a couple of ways. One has been related to um trying to minimize the role you had in the creation of the model S. Um Another was at one point related to um a stock compensation package you had um right after I think shortly after the, the IP O and the spa, I'm sorry, the spec um two questions about IAN. One is what, what do you think is behind that? And then the second question is, when was the last time you talked to him? Well, it's surprising that uh little Lucid has attracted so much of his attention. We must have something, something going on to do that. Uh Yeah, and, and regarding my, my package, which has been so, so misreported, um my uh my, my, the package that you're, you're referencing was all very, very, substantially, very high percentage in shares. And I sold not one of those and it was all performance based from because iiiii I co founded the company took it public and it was a recognition of all that, that, that good work. Yeah, I made the journalist error of asking two questions at once. So I'll, I'll restate my second one, which was, when was the, uh the last time we've spoken? That was when I, when I handed my resignation to him, when I was at Tesla. How did that go? Well, you might imagine. Ok. Um One more, one more ian related question because it's very newsy in the last day or two. He has, um, come out with a sort of full fledged support of uh former president Trump in his re election campaign. Um He has also, uh there's reports that he is now, um, um I guess giving 45 million a month uh to Trump's a Trump associated PAC, I'm curious there, there are some Tesla uh customers who may be fine with that or, or like that. Others, not so much. I I'm curious if you see any impact on your business, potentially from Iwan, sort of stepping into politics in a big way. Well, I think this is another salient example of his level of distraction, Tesla used to have the lead in electric vehicle technology. They truly were the pathfinder. There was an absolute laser focus there and I think that now the man has passed to Lucid just this morning, we formally announced a landmark, a technological landmark that we were able to achieve 5.0 miles per kilowatt hour for an electric vehicle. This is a major step forward in saving the planet. This is the most efficient use of energy achieved by any electric vehicle. We've registered also a record 146 MP G and these are not claims by Lucid. These are validated by the Environmental Protection Agency and this puts Lucid at least four years ahead of Tesla in what I think is a critical technology race to help save the environment. Do we have any questions from the audience? I have a few more. Um I saw one back here first. Please just tell us who you are and try to keep it concise if possible. Van Bar, then co founder and CEO of Nana Jason, you touched upon in the beginning and Peter you were just ending on it, your discussions with regulators in DC in this space with Transportation, not only the Department of Transportation, but also Congress. How has that evolved because they have to be your partners in this. Uh And is that 2035 goal, Jason that you touched upon having discussions in DC on a federal level? Totally, I'm actually headed towards DC next week because I see a responsibility from someone like myself to help guide the knowledge of the space. Because the decision makers, they're making decisions which will last potentially a generation or more. They need the wisdom of Solomon and it's very difficult for them to get their heads around this weird and wacky world of evs. So I'm delighted that we can play our small part in providing technical data so that their decisions can be based upon facts and best evidence. There, there's another Trump administration potentially help or hurt your vision for Lucid. Look, I'm politically agnostic, what my vision is to really accelerate the uptake of not just sustainable evs but the evs which are affordable via their sustainability. And this is critical. This isn't just chasing the semantics of a technical solution with technical excellence. If we can build evs which go further with less batteries, we go to the very heart of the, the, the, the, the the main barrier for ev adoption, the cost of the battery and that's what my focus is not politics. I'm gonna come to you in one second. I do have one more question. I, I, you know, you are a public company but you are 60% or more owned by, um, the, the Saudi Arabia Sovereign Wealth Fund. Um, they've invested more than 6 billion in your company. I think you have enough cash right now to sustain the company through middle of next year. Is that correct? Yes. What kind of guarantees do you have from them that they won't walk away at a certain point and go to plan B. First of all, they have been the perfect partner long term. And this partnership transcends a mere financial investment because we're in this together. Long term. They have a vision for their country to, and it's a bold vision to transition their country away from fossil fuels to a sustainable economy. For 25. We are a cornerstone of that. We're in this together. So you don't, you don't fear they want our cars as much as we want them. I can maybe almost as much as I want to do this. We're in this together now. I can't make promises for them. Absolutely not. And it would be very imprudent for me to do that, but to date, they have been wonderful and outstanding and strong long term partners with a shared vision. Let's try one more quick question here. We have about a minute. Hi. Um Thanks for the opportunity. I'm a co-founder CFO of the next Gen battery company and two questions. One is I heard because of the more and more harsh competition for the price, particularly with the Chinese EV makers. Nowadays, car O ems are more interesting cheaper battery rather than high energy density battery that was very popular 34 years ago, if it's true or not. And secondly, unlike um also you say bat or lithium metal bat that may or may not take 10 to 15 years for the commercialization. What if you have the battery with high energy density, high power density with safer features with a cheap price and must production visibility within 23 years. Is it your or not? Well, of course, that's a panacea. Is it in my interest? It would be, it's music to my ears, but we have to trade multiple, multiple attributes cost gravimetric energy density and, and just the scalability of that. Our technology, our advancements works with high energy batteries or low energy. It's equally applicable. We're out of time. Thank you so much. Thank you for the great questions as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with us.

Presenter: Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer, Colossal Biosciences 

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How AI can bring back extinct species

We have this field called the extinction. We are correcting our intervention in nature. Absolutely critical. Hello. So I'm an evolutionary biologist and a recovering academic until three months ago. I was a professor at UC Santa Cruz where I'm standing there beneath a blue whale at our blue whale skeleton at our southern, at our coastal campus. I ran a lab for the last 20 years where we were innovating and revolutionizing a field called ancient DNA. We'd travel out to cold places in the world and collect the remains of things like mammoths and mastodons and giant bears and wooly rhinos and extract their DNA. The goal of my research was to use that DNA to understand how species and communities and ecosystems evolve and change. With a goal to use the past as a kind of completed evolutionary experiment to make more informed decisions about how to protect living species by understanding what makes certain species more robust than others. But when you extract DNA from million year old mammoths, the conversations you have about your work often tend to go in a slightly different direction. And so in 2015, I wrote this book really laying out all of the steps that one would need to overcome if one were to bring a mammoth or some other extinct species back to life. My goal was to lay out the technical ethical ecological regulatory challenges that we would have to solve, but also to highlight how transformative this technology would be for the conservation of living endangered species. And then about seven years after I published this book, Ben Lamb and George Church co founded a company called Colossal with the goal to do exactly what I had played out in the book. And so of course, Ben called me and said you should join us. You wrote the playbook and I was a little hesitant, I joined as a consultant, I wanted to see how far they could get in pushing along this technology. And I was immediately surprised, excited, really enthusiastic by, by how far they able to get in such a short amount of time. And then a few months ago, I decided to take the D and I am now colossal s Chief Scientific Officer. Colossal goal is to make extinction a thing of the past to use the tools of gene editing genetic engineering to replace missing components of ecosystems, to help these ecosystems to become more robust and resilient. Given the dramatic upheavals that are happening to habitats across the world. Today, we've launched three de extinction projects. Mammoth Dodo and Thylacine, which is also sometimes called the Tasmanian Tiger. The choice of these three species is purposeful. We have a marsupial mammal, a placental mammal and a bird. And as we develop the technologies to bring these species back to life, these technologies will have immediate applications to helping species pretty much across this animal diversity to survive and adapt in the climate of today. Core to the core to colossal s mission is this idea of de extinction. And when most people think of the extinction, one very specific image comes to mind, but this is not what we're doing. First of all, I'm a scientist, so I have to break down the science a little bit. Dinosaurs went extinct more than 65 million years ago. The oldest DNA that we've so far is somewhere between one and 2 million years old, but most DNA degrades away by about 10 or 20,000 years. Dinosaur fossils are rocks and rocks don't have DNA. It is also not possible to recover DNA from mosquitoes preserved in amber. I've tried it, it doesn't work amber. It turns out is a really poor environment for DNA preservation. It forms in very hot places which encourages speeding up of DNA decay. And also it's porous, which means that microbes can get in there and chew up the DNA really quickly making it disappear. There's no DNA in mosquitoes in amber. There's no DNA in dinosaur fossils. Dinosaur distinction is not going to happen. I'm very sorry. Right. Sorry. But this is not the plan. The other thing that the scientists, the Jurassic Park did was they took these tiny little short fragments of DNA and then they filled in the missing bits that they could get with frog DNA, which is a weird choice given that even at the time, we already knew that birds are dinosaurs, right? But whatever, and then they put the dinosaurs in habitats that they were completely maladapted to and chaos ensued. This is not what we want to do instead, what colossal is doing is rebuilding extinct species. For the present day, we will identify these core traits that make these animals unique and important components of their ecosystems. In some cases, we will augment these traits because ecosystems of today are different from the past. And when necessary, we will add additional evolutionary adaptations to these animals. Lots of habitats right now and species are suffering because of introduced diseases or introduced predators. And we can use the tools of genome editing to make these species resistant and resilient, creating different spec see in the form of these extinct species. This is our definition of de extinction. If we look at the mammoth project, for example, all we're going to do is start with something that already exists. An Asian elephant is the closest living relative of a mammoth. They shared a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Their genomes are already 98% identical. So when we have an Asian elephant cell growing in a dish in a lab. We already have 98% of a mammoth. We just have to engineer the remaining 2%. So how do we do that? This is a bit of an oversimplification. Pretty good for a walk through. We go out into the fields. My sites in Siberia, Alaska, Yukon, we collect mammoth DNA. We've done this already. We have hundreds of mammoth genomes. We can line them up on a computer next to each other. Collect a bunch of Asian elephant genomes, line them up against the mammoth genomes and identify where they are different from each other and yet where all of those mammoths are the same as each other. These are the portions of the mammoth genome that are important to make a mammoth look and act like a mammoth. Then we use the tools of genome editing to gradually tweak those Asian elephant cells growing. In addition, a lab to be more mammoth like. Then we have our mammoths, Asian elephant cells in addition to a lab. Then we use somatic cell nuclear transfer. A process commonly known as cloning that most famously brought us dolly the sheep to transform those cells into an embryo. And then we implant that embryo into a surrogate maternal host that embryo develops and builds into a beautiful, wonderful little mammoth size Asian elephant and it is born and it looks and acts like a mammoth and it lives happily ever after pretty straightforward right. What's exciting to me about all of this? Clearly, this is hard and there are a lot of hard problems that are here. But the core technologies exist for each of these steps and as we improve on these technologies and make them applicable to non model organisms, things that aren't mice or fruit flies, we will develop and innovate across all sorts of disciplines that have clear application to other biological disciplines. Advances in bioinformatics that allow us to map a DNA sequence or genotype to the way an animal looks or acts of phenotype. Advances in multiplex genome editing or the assembly and insertion of long synthetic DNA constructs, advances in animal reconduct animal reproductive biology and cloning. These all have application to agriculture, to livestock engineering, to animal husbandry and to human health. If we just think about the mammoth team, for example, this team has already made more stably integrated edits into a cell line that is stereotypically normal and therefore capable of being cloned than any publication in the academic literature. To date. A few months ago, they announced that they had generated induced pluripotent stem cells for elephants. A global first. This is important both for elephant conservation and for de extinction. It means that we can take these induced pluripotent stem cells and transform them into all different types of tissues and organoids and use these to test hypotheses about the edits that we're making without having to use animal models. We may even be able to grow our own elephants eggs to use for cloning. Another innovation that is along our path to elephants. The extinction is to eventually have an artificial womb that we can use to avoid the use of elephants as surrogate hosts. This requires developing platforms for fully exogenous embryonic development. And our teams of engineers and developmental biologists have been building several platforms to work with both placental and marsupial mammals. As we discover all of the cues, hormonal physiological environmental that are responsible and necessary for the development of different tissue types and organs throughout the process of embryonic development. This will also have application to regenerative medicine to personalized medicine. Imagine we can grow your own kidney from your own cells and of course, to understanding the biology of pregnancy, our animal operations team is already making incredible discoveries that are helping endangered species. Today, collaboration with the nonprofit bio rescue. We are working to save the Northern white Rhino from becoming extinct. Today, only two northern white rhinos are alive. A mother daughter pair, both females. Obviously, this would make it difficult for northern white is to reproduce. However, by isolating egg cells from these females and fertilizing them with sperm from northern white rhinos that died some 10 to 20 years ago, we've created embryos that are being used for embryo transfer into Southern white rhinos as surrogate hosts, creating a path for northern white rhinos to reproduce even though there are no males alive today. Our conservation team is also sitting in the development of a vaccine to help save baby elephants from a virus, elephant, endothelial tropic and herpes virus. That is the leading cause of death of Asian elephants, juvenile Asian elephants in captivity and increasingly in the wild. And a few weeks ago, our partners at the Houston Zoo administered this vaccine to a baby elephant for the first time, a huge win for conservation and also for elephants in general. But this is not all that the tools of de extinction can do for the conservation of living animals. A few weeks ago, I was in Mauritius, the island's home of the extinct dodo and the critically endangered Mauritian pink pigeon. Discussing what we might do using the tools of the extinction to help save the and pink pigeon from becoming extinct. Pink pigeons are in trouble because they nearly went extinct and have been managed heavily since that time. They are suffering from the consequences of inbreeding the lost of genetic diversity that's caused by breeding with close relatives where there aren't that many individuals left. You really don't have a choice. What we can do is we can use our bioinformatics tools to discover where in the pink pigeon genome, these mutations that are reducing the fitness of these birds are, we can go to museum collections and sequence genomes of pink pigeons that used to be alive and then replace the parts of the genome that are making these animals less fit with extinct diversity that will actually help them to become more robust and healthy. This is just some of the ways that the tools of the extinction can be applied both to resurrecting extinct diversity and extinct species, restoring missing components of ecosystems and making these ecosystems and communities more robust. It is clear that we are in the midst of a biodiversity loss and extinction crisis around the world. The rate of extinction today is more than 1000 times greater than the baseline rate of extinction in the fossil record. The acute problem that species and habitats are suffering today is that the pace of change is faster than evolution is capable of keeping up with. Ideally, we could all take a step back and give the species and communities and habitats of the world, the space and time that they need to catch up and adapt. But we can't, it's too late and the human footprint is too big. But the tools of the extinction provide hope we can engineer missing diversity, we can replace missing components of ecosystems, we can bring back, we can be extinct, missing phenotypes, missing interactions, even missing entire species creating robust and healthy habitats. It is obvious to all of us that extinction is a colossal problem. It's obvious to me and hopefully now to you that the tools of the extinction will be part of the solution.

Arian Simone, Founding Partner and CEO, Fearless Fund Interviewer: Allie Garfinkle, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2024: A Different Kind Of Equity In Venture Capital

Hello again. Hello, long time. No, see. Yeah, we were both standing together backstage. Get it. Thank you so much for being here. Truly. Oh, thank you for having me. So we have a lot to get through. Let's jump right in. I would love to just start by setting the table here a little bit. Where are you at? In this legal battle? You're fighting in this legal battle. The plaintiffs filed three things against our companies. They filed a temporary restraining order that got withdrawn. They filed a preliminary injunction against one of our grant programs and they also filed the case itself. We went to court on the P I the preliminary injunction we won in the district. It was immediately appealed. We lost in the appeals process and the case itself has yet to even be touched. So, where are you? What happens next? This most recent loss in this ruling? Where do you go from here? Because there's still a long, there's still a long fight to go. Yes and no. It depends on a variety of things. But what I can say is the options would be of course to appeal to the Supreme court just to educate the audience. Um, the plaintiffs in our case, Edward Bloom, the founder of a, a, er, American Alliance for equal Rights. He recently had a Supreme Court victory of stopping affirmative at the Colleges of June of 2023. And we were the next lawsuit he applied. He sued basically after his victory. And I don't desire, this is me speaking personally, not my legal staff, but I don't desire a Scot's ruling. I don't desire the implications of what that could be if it didn't go in our favor and how that could be so catalytic for other people. Um My desire is for us to be able to come to an agreement of settlement to be released from it. Now, tell me a little bit about what it's been like investing throughout this because the Fearless Fund hasn't stopped working. So walk me through your success to date and what you've been up to. Thank you. The Fearless Fund has made a lot of impact in the area of venture capital. Women of color are the most founded entrepreneur demographic. Just the least funded. We are the nation's first venture capital fund that is built by women of color, for women of color. And we invest in women of color co-founded businesses. They receive about 0.39% of all the VC funding while making up over 20% of the US population. So the work that we do is very important these people are more than deserving. Our success is very simple. Prior to the fearless fund's existence, black women had an average fund raise of $30,000 and we came on the scene cutting seven figure checks. We have invested in almost 50 companies. Our women are phenomenal. They are getting eight figure revenue year, over year growth, aggressive growth and their next levels of capital infusion will position them for exit. They are doing extremely well. They're on the cover of everybody's magazines, everybody's list magazine lists. Give us some examples. Give us some examples while we're here. Yes, I know. I'm asking you to pick a favorite child on stage. How would you pick one child? You love a lot to talk about. We love all of them. We love all of them. We love that. I'll just give you a few partake food, slutty vegan, the Lip bar 13 loon. Those are just a few, but they are all amazing. In fact, I actually have the lip bar in my makeup kit up. You do? I do actually. Um So tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about this next phase for the Fearless Fund. Next phase. For the Fearless Fund, we will continue to do the work that we're doing global impact for us is a very big focus. What happens to black and brown people, anywhere happens to black and brown people everywhere. So 20% of our portfolio is actually allocated to international investment or international impact. And we look forward to making this expansion very successful and you're, and you, you do a lot of policy work as well, right? Tell us a little bit about that, but we don't do a lot of policy work. I think that's in our door kind of by accident prior to us even being sued. I wanted to be an advocate in the space of more access to capital for marginalized communities. So we have definitely taken in on the initiative now that we've actually been a victim of this lawsuit to say we need more policies in place to protect the right to fund marginalized communities. And the reality is it's just good business. At the end of the day, we know that the US economy is made up of over 54% small businesses and growing when you cause disruption to access the capital, you're causing disruption to the US economy as a whole. This is more of a macro issue than the micro issue that you see that we're going through. Now tell me a little bit, we're about to come to the audience for questions. So get some ready everybody. But tell me a little bit about your LPS JP Morgan Chase mastercard. Tell me about how they've been a partner to you, especially through the last couple of years. Well, a lot of our LPS had already reinvested in fund two prior to being sued. So we had a lot of re ups um post litigation. We have had obstacles to overcoming fundraising because people are like, oh, gosh, they're under litigation. Do we fundraise? We had closings falling apart left and right. And I was like, oh, no, this can't be happening. And as of recent, so we have hired placement agencies. We're looking for capital even um outside the country, just diversifying the LP base, I would say. But companies such as that you've mentioned before, a lot of them had already invested in fund too. And have you and have they been talking to you through this? Like, what's what are those conversations like? Oh, everybody has definitely been talking. I would like to see probably more than talk from a lot of them. Not just the ones that you've mentioned from a lot of them as a whole because everybody was very loud in June of 2020. At the wake of George Floyd, we saw commitments in the area, diversity equity inclusion like we had never seen them before. And due to these losses we've experienced and witnessed this chilling effect of people not talking much at all and it's still a priority, it's still needed. And at the end of the day, it's just good business and good for the economy to that end. There is a indisputable societal level chill when it comes to talking about D I. So what do you attribute that these lawsuits? I think it's litigation they have used litigation as a way to try to chip at diversity and it doesn't, it doesn't have to be that way. I think if everybody were to stand strong in the statements that they've said in just recent years, I mean, 2020 was just four years ago to stand strong in those statements and stand by the money. They said they were deploying. I think that's what's needed. I don't even think it's a matter of saying women, people of color are diverse, equity inclusion. This is just good business and every report says that diverse teams outperform non diverse teams on any given day. This is just good for the economy. Capitalism is just good across the board. All right, I'd like to open up the floor to questions. We have a paddle over there. Please stand up. Hi, say your name company and please keep it concise. Hi, Ari, I'm Emma Hinchliff with Fortune. It's nice to see you. You know, even in the past week, we've seen so much more of Silicon Valley and venture capital specifically coming out in support of Trump. What is it like for you to see your colleagues in this industry aligning themselves with the movement that brought this lawsuit lawsuit forward against you? Oh, well, we are clearly caught up in somebody's political agenda that I had no plans on being a part of at all. Um What I can say when it comes to working in financial services. We, it's not that you lean towards either side, you're not leaning towards the democratic side or a Republican side, you lean towards the side of your outcome in financial services. We work with whoever is in office. We just, we just do um, anybody that has a stance against diversity, I think that's more so where you're going with the comment. Yes, that is concerning, that is definitely concerning. Um because if, and today it's just good business and if you ch you're choosing to not support diversity, it is alarming because are you trying to signal that your desire of oppression and suppression is, is greater than a desire to make money when this is capitalism and you're in it to make money? Well, and we actually talked about this a little bit backstage, but you were really surprised when you got the news about this, about this lawsuit. Oh, of course, it was a beautiful sunny day in Atlanta, Georgia and I found out in the news that we were being sweet. You found out on the news. Yes, I found out in the news. I thought it was chat GP T or something had taken place. Mind you, we are tech investors just like many of you in the audience. And I said somebody has something mixed up and that's how I found out. And I realized that I told my staff, you know, what federal lawsuits are public, go find the filing and they found the filing. So you that I had no idea I'm genuine. I hope you can see the genuine surprise. Any other questions for Arien, I can talk all day. I would say I can talk all day too. You know, one of the things that I've been wondering about is how you suspect some of these lawsuits, the societal level chill will affect funding towards ei initiatives. How do you sort of see those downstream effects playing out? Uh You mean in reference to just the chilling effect overall, it's concerning one thing I can say is that when race based consciousness is removed, then race actually, especially with black and brown people get left behind, there has to be a level of awareness, there has to be a level of consciousness, it has to be a level of intentionality in order to produce the results. I tell people all the time, I actually desire the world that our plaintiffs desire a world where race conscious things don't matter. We're just not there yet. We have to have a focus and we have to have a level of intentionality to get to a place of an equitable society. Now, once we get there, feel free. I I have no problem with it at all. I I would love to be able to not have these emphasis, which is why we're even petitioning the current administration, the current president and vice president to definitely step up in executive orders. They've done executive orders and diversity before we're asking for one in the area to protect the right to fund marginalized communities and it's not personal, whoever was in office, we'd be asking them to do this. How would you describe the state of diversity in venture capital? There is no diversity and I asked it open and I know how you laughing. I work in an industry that is 92% white male on the investor side. I'm a strong believer that if we can diversify the investors, we can diversify investment because you can take away racism and sexism and you still have what you call proximity. People are gonna do business with people who are in their networks and who were they're surrounded by. It doesn't even have to be a level of bias is there, you're going to get deal flow from what's in your proximity. So yes. Um I, I don't know if there's too much diversity in the industry that I work in, but I am an advocate for it and I definitely encourage it. So one of the other things I would be really curious about is you said something to me while we were sitting in line for coffee outside. Um You said the most important thing to me is the law. What did you mean by that? The law? Because right now I'm in a lawsuit and all people are doing, you go and you argue the law and I even did a post recently, I'm like there was a time when slavery was legal just because something is legal does not make it right. So we have to make sure that there are laws in place that are there to protect our right to fund marginalized communities. So having perf perfect policies, well, I won't say perfect but having policies in place that support this type of work, support, minority fund manager, support access to capital. It is very much so important right now, our industry of pe VC is a $62 trillion industry and the bulk of that, a lot of the large investors come from pension funds. Well, pension funds are built off the backs of police officers and teachers and firefighters and there are people of color in large numbers in these bills. And then it goes up of course, until the venture capital world where like I said is 92% white male and then it goes up from there into the start up and it very rarely makes a full circle back to a lot of the people of color which ba who backs this, this money was built off of. So, yes, I do desire for policies to be put in place to make this a more equitable society distill it down a couple of sentences. What's one thing you want this audience to take away one thing I want the audience to take away that diversity makes good money. This plain and simple. It's just good money and good lipstick in some cases. Thank you so much Arian for being here. Thank you for having me and thanks for following the case. Continue to do this. Yeah.

Jake Aust, Chief Innovation Officer, AGBO Cristóbal Valenzuela, Co-founder and CEO, Runway Moderator: Sharon Goldman, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: AI Goes To Hollywood

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much, Chris. It's great to see you again. Jake, it's great to meet you. Well, well, this is amazing. I, well remember seeing the first generation of runway A I and I think, you know, we can all see the progress that's been made. But Jake, I'm going to immediately go to what I consider to be the cinematic elephant in the room and that is will A I kill Hollywood. Hollywood's been around for 100 years. Will A I kind of end this run of Hollywood as we know it or are we not there yet? I think we've been here before and I think it's, it's important to recognize that Hollywood exists because of technology and there have been many, many technological revolutions that have happened across the history of Hollywood. You know, from bringing sound and color to, to the, to the picture, to CG and there has been existential angst in Hollywood and outside of Hollywood as to whether or not this was going to kill Hollywood. I don't see A I as something that's going to kill Hollywood. We are at the end of the day, an artist driven company at Agbo and it still takes the human, the human touch, the human connection. Now that said, will it be revolutionary? I believe it will. I believe it will. But I don't see it as a revolution that kills Hollywood. OK, Chris, I'm going to push back on that a little bit because you know, as Ali was saying, and as we've discussed, you know, many actors, writers, creatives of all stripes have pushed back on this technology. We can see how amazing it is and folks have raised concerns about it just a year ago, started the SAG actor strike. And you know, just last week, there was news that actors had pushing back against digital scans of their likenesses. What are they misunderstanding? We were just talking in the green room about kind of the nuance around this discussion. Can you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. The first thing is, I think I agree with you, Jake with regards to how really art and technology are entwined like cinema and filmmaking, the history of technology in a way. And I think what we're seeing right now are more disdain. These are really exceptional tools for great artists and kind of what we're discussing before to a point of nuance. I think these days it's really hard to get nuanced conversations. I think we get into extremes. This is either destroying everything we know or is the best thing we've ever seen in our lifetime. And I think it's like none of those. It's like somehow in between it's gonna create a lot of change. I think technology creates change. And that's a good thing. And it also is going to allow for many more things that we never thought could be possible to be possible. And I think that the first type of thing that I think is necessary to get a bit more of a nuance is if you're afraid, if you have your opinions around this, if you've never used any of those tools, then the first thing you should do is use them. Like if you've never ever created a video, using a model like gen three, then go ahead and create a video and you'll see by experience in like two minutes where things are, what are the challenges, how it can be used and how filmmakers are using it so far. And so getting to a nuance is somehow difficult, but I think it's needed. Well, I want to come in a few minutes. I want to take some questions for the audience. I'm sure there is some. So just think about that. But Jake, I'm going to turn to you again. I'm not sure how many people realize that for a long time, you were a producer, you know, on some iconic TV, shows that we all love like the office and community. So I feel like you have a unique take on this, moving into this innovation role at ADVO can you talk a little bit about how you use today's A I tools in production, whether that is runway or I think you were talking about kind of even earlier in the R and D process. Sure. Yeah, I did start as a producer and I've been involved in technology through my entire career right now. I think what's important to realize is this technology when it comes to being useful to a company like ours, Agbo is very much in its infancy. We're in a, we're in a very early stage of now. We're all watching it progress at a fairly rapid pace. The question is, does it continue to accelerate or to progress at that same same pace? But what we see opportunity in right now is, is what a lot of people in Hollywood are using generative A I for is bringing vision, visualizing your creative idea prior to when you would even have access to a crew to a team of artists that can visualize that for which might have been the traditional process or you just don't have the money to do it because you're, you know, you're an independent filmmaker with, you know, a much lower budget potential and the generative tools can really help you. It's like sketching, you can, you can get your ideas out and look at it and say is that it's not what you're going to put on the screen at the end of the day. The way we look at it right now anyway. Um it, it is, it is a way to get your ideas out there and to communicate your ideas visually. And that's a, that's a very powerful thing. We've seen it as a, as a powerful thing, especially when you're in the middle of still creating what the story, what the world is. And again, like I said, it's, it's early in the process we call development where you're, you're, you don't have access to things, you're going out to the studios to pitch your ideas, to try and secure financing. And this gives you the ability to, to, to give just a little more than you could before Chris, we've talked about your early days runway started in 2018, you and your two co founders met at NYU at art school. So I've always been super interested in the fact that you are a visual artist historically and you know, that has sort of helped inform run. Can you talk about how that is the case? And now when you kind of get pushback from creative communities, how you kind of bring that back to your own background? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we better runway 2018, I've been working on some of the concepts and ideas of runway almost for a decade now. And I think like the unique aspect of what we build over time is really the intersection of art and science in a way that makes sense for tool makers for artists who want to use this and leverage it. My personal passion was really trying to understand what new art forms can emerge out of like new models like this ones. Now, the world was very different in 2018 in terms of what journal models could do, what even computer vision could do at the time. But I felt like there was something there that just felt very differently. And I think over time, we're pushing only the research boundaries with the timeliness of the videos that we just saw, but also with how accessible these tools can become for more people. And that accessibility requires empathy and understanding how artists really work. If you simplify the creative process to pushing a button that missed the whole point, it's a process, you sometimes don't know exactly where you're going. You start with an idea and it's about experimentation. And so building tools with the experimentation mindset at the beginning is something we've encouraged the team to do from the very beginning. And I think we'll continue to do so for, for the time being. Um And then how we've uh I think how we manage that, that to communicate that across and also speak more about the nuances with uh encouraging more people to um view what's possible with A I States in the context of really high kind of like production like environments. Like we have this film festival we host every year, I think you, you went, that uh that's an invitation basically to celebrate artists who are using new technologies, not technology. We're not, we don't discuss models, we don't discuss A I, we, we just discuss like people using models or technologies and that is one of the key things I would say they need to do more of. We, I'm obsessed with technology. I think a lot of people here are, but we should start obsessing with people more than like the technology itself. Well, speaking of the people, I'd love to take a, a question. Does anyone have one? We've got a mic back there. OK. Right here. Just say your name and where you're from. Hi, Chris Willis from Domo. Um I love what you said about uh your creativity is not just pushing a button uh with these new tools, you know, we, we, we hear that it's not gonna replace jobs, it's gonna replace kinds of tasks, but going forward. What kind of people do you think will really thrive with these kind of tools or what do schools like our schools at NYU need to be teaching? Yeah, that's a great question. I think like you can look at the past to get a sense of uh of how to make sense of the future. I would say this is uh the, the, the current like generation of artists were benefited a lot from the f transformation technology that we saw a couple of decades ago. And right now, something similar is happening where a new generation of art of artists are gonna be embracing this as tools for them to take on will be the ones that will like I would say thrive. I think the the mindset that I'm trying to um uh move away from is the stasis mindset, which is thinking that what we have right now, production wise, tool wise, uh technology wise is the forever way we will ever do things. And I think that for me is a mistake that uh puts not like the history of art in like context. There's, there's art is an ever changing like form. And I'm curious and I'm really thoughtful and I'm really excited for the ones that are going to think of these things as a new media type, as a new art form that will require people to experiment, to create new things that we haven't never seen before. And the ones that are doing that are the ones that are not constrained by how things used to work. And those for me are like the ones that are pushing the boundaries these days. And so we incentivize also in schools for students to be more of that mindset. That leads me to my next question for Jake, I feel like video and photography and creative mediums are a good example of where we've already had so many tech developments in that area. You know, we've had Photoshop, we have youtube, we have different apps on tiktok to make videos. How is this different? Do you see it as different even more game changer down the line or do you see it as just another evolution in the history of video and photo and, and visual art? I would say probably somewhere in the middle of that, I think there's a lot of similarities to, let's say the release of Photoshop and the ubiquity of Photoshop. We were grappling at the time with a lot of very similar issues, which is what's real. You used to see a picture, you could see a picture of something, it was that man, it was real. And then all of a sudden Photoshop started questioning and you started Photoshop became a verb very quickly and we grappled with that and we are all fine still, you know, like it's OK, you know, and so I think that there's some of the same wisdom should be applied today to what A I tools are that said, I think it is, I very much agree with Chris. I think there's a, there's potentially a new medium here that is about enabling something that doesn't currently exist um in terms of personalized interactions, in terms of um you know, um uh being able to, to get exactly what you want at the time that you want it um in, in, in, in relation to, to creative works, you know, an IP that might exist or have been created. It's a really, it's a really interesting, I think, possibility and that's where I'd like to keep my eye is not trying to save a nickel doing the stuff that we've always done. But like, what's new? What, what can we create here with this technology? We have, we have one more question here. I'd love to take uh Hi, I'm Kako Shrivastava, uh CEO of Splice. We are creator first, uh A I tech for music and musicians. So I really appreciate your question, Sharon. Um We also believe that it's about the creative process first and you have to focus on the creator. I'm super curious in both of your work. What have you seen artists do differently with this technology? That's not just a productivity gain but a creativity gain and more specific, the better. Um Go ahead. Sure. Um You know, I've been, I've been, we, we've released a new model. Uh I think it's been like 12 days or so. Um I've been obsessed just watching people generate things. So I do like something where I just see people like generate things and, and work with these models and the more I see them, the more I started to understand that um this is becoming more of what I I've been thinking about as um think about it as like a dream for the mind. You're going to exercise your creativity, not for the sake of creating some sort of like mastermind picture like film that's gonna make you an award winning director. But more because you wanna just exercise your own creative like mind and it's a tool that allows you to basically do that. You go in with some ideas you have in your head, something you've ever wanted, always wanted to create, you start creating with it. The model responds back with new things you've never thought of before. You take those things, you adjust them and you spend hours doing it and then suddenly you're like in a flow state where like you spend hours thinking about stuff, creating stuff, the output is not some productivity, like video that you're gonna put for a self pitch or I don't know a film. It's just for your own like like joy and you're happy with it. And I think that for me has been something I've never seen before that you engage with the technology in a way you've never engaged with any other technology before. I think part of it is the model becomes extremely creative as you use it more. And also it's a very fast feedback process. So you, you think about something you see it, you think about it again and you start doing this all the time. That for me has been like one of the most interesting non like productive like use cases I've seen so far. All right, we've got literally just over a minute left. I want so, so watch that. I want final thoughts. Three final thoughts. But what should we be thinking here? I mean, I think, you know, just to relate back to what I just said. I think it's, it's keep, keep our eyes on the future, keep our eyes on what's possible. I think the artists are going to show us what's possible. I think Chris's art background is, is, is uh, is so critical to what you're doing and, and I think it's going to be the artists that show us how these tools are used and it's the happy accidents. It's the, it's the, you know, the hallucinations that happen that are inspirational. I think that is, is what's new about this. What do you say, Chris? I basically think the same, think about and try to go for the things that don't have names that you've never seen before. When photography was first invented, people didn't have the words to describe it and they looked at it as something new. The first photographers ever made were referred to as mirrors with memories because that was the language people have, they had time to describe this new thing. I think pretty much what you were saying. Focus on the artists are going to push the bond just to figure out those new languages. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Chris and Jake. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.

Tim Rosa, Chief Executive Officer, Somnee Interviewer: Leo Schwartz, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Don’t Sleep On It

Good morning, everyone. I think Andrew might have taken my question, but I was going to start off. I know last night might not have been the most conducive conducive to a good night's sleep. There was arcade games, there was bowling. It was a busy night. But can I just pull the audience on average? Who thinks that they mostly get a good night's sleep? All right. That's a, that's a pretty good, pretty good section there. I know, especially among this cohort sleep apps and sleep tracking is incredibly popular from fitbit to eight sleep. Now, I've had a very interesting experience the past couple weeks of testing out the product offered by Tim's company here, Somny, which is very different. It's a headband that you wear with electrodes and it delivers electrical pulses to your brain. So you wear it for 15 minutes before you go to sleep. When you close your eyes, you can actually see lights flash before your eyes and you can feel like a warm tingling sensation and it plays music. So it's very different, I would say than probably pretty much anything that you're used to. And I want to start off with Tim, if you can really explain what somny is and how the technology works, how it differs from a lot of the other tools that are out there. Yeah. So somny was actually uh invented by four UC Berkeley professors and neuroscientists. Um One of them, Doctor Matt Walker, he wrote the book Why We Sleep. He runs the sleep lab at UC Berkeley. Doctor Robert Knight. Uh he runs the Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley and two others. And they basically pioneered uh this idea of using neuro stimulation to uh manipulate your brain to help you fall asleep. And the way it works is we have an eeg sensor that maps your brain. Um We then personalize the data sets to determine the right frequency to help you fall asleep faster. So we cut the time it takes to fall asleep in half. We also eliminate uh sleep disruptions by a third and we outperform sleeping pills and traditional defaults like taking Melatonin or C BT I. Um as Matt says, sleeping pills are really bad. They're like a baseball bat to the brain. They're addictive. There are a lot of side effects. Um So it's a new technology, it's a new category product. It is a closed loop product. So it's a diagnostic as well as a therapeutic, which is pretty rare and it's exciting and it works. So, yeah, so Tim, you were previously at fitbit and I mean, like you said, this is a really different product than probably most of the different tools that anybody in this audience has tested out instead of waking up the next morning. And it telling you, you know, you've got two hours of deep sleep and one hour of rem cycle, which doesn't really mean that much to most people. This you only wear for 15 minutes. And again, it's a pretty strong pitch, I think where you're getting electricity delivered to your brain, what made you decide to go from fitbit in this last cycle of wearables to SOMNY, which is really representing the next generation. Well, Fitbit, um and most wearables are general diagnostics at Fitbit. We pioneered sleep tracking and sleep sensors. Um I always knew, you know, the size of uh the population that is focused on sleep and the issues around sleep. Um I believe 70 million uh consumers have a sleep disorder in, in America. Um What we're trying to do is focus on the therapeutic side. We need the diagnostic. It's a clinical grade diagnostic. It's the gold standard EEG and PSG sensors. So bringing that into a wearable that you can use and wear for 15 minutes is something very powerful. But the unique thing about it is a therapeutic, I think with wearables, they're great obviously tools to help improve and monitor your overall health. But we're literally literally tracking sleep data sets at the source. So at the brain, as opposed to on the wrist and the finger. So you're getting really clear data sets and we need that in order to perform the therapeutic side of the product. Do you think the pitch has been harder to make to customers where again with something like Fitbit, you know, you wear it on your wrist, you get some data, you can do what you want with it, with this. You know, you're putting electrodes on your brain as you sleep at night. Is that a harder product to convince customers to adopt? I think there's, there's certainly education. Whenever you create a new category, there's a lot of education that comes with it. It's the same thing. And when we launch Fitbit, we had to educate the, you know, consumer market about what we're doing. Um Data was really important, owning your own data was incredibly important here. It's the same idea. Um Basically, we're trying to help you understand um how to improve your sleep. Sleep is a deeply painful and personal experience for a lot of people myself, I struggled with uh uh adult uh insomnia um until I started using uh Soni. And so the thing that's really unique and sets us apart is that there is education, there's more awareness, especially coming out of the pandemic. The great thing about the pandemic is we transition from Kardashians as influencers to scientists and doctors as influencers. So people like Andrew Huberman, certainly, Dr Matt Walker, Peter Tia provided a lot of research and validation around what was happening in just overall health. Um Sleep obviously is one of the most important things we call it. It's a, you know, sleep is your superpower, it affects your physical health, your mental health and certainly performance weight loss, etc. And so for us, it's really about how do we embrace the technology, how do we create education and awareness for what we're doing? How do we drive efficacy and certainly how do we improve your sleep overall? Do you think that this category of wearables which are more focused on therapeutic services than tracking data is going to replace the last generation? No, I think, I think wearables are great. They're really important, obviously, you know, I help launch Fitbit and, and, but wearables are very important because they give you an idea of what's happening and there's certain, certainly certain sensors depending on the that are more accurate. Um We know about, you know, the finger is an accurate uh placement for uh uh heart rate data, et cetera, but we're not looking to replace your, you know, your whoop or you know, your aura. In fact, we'll be partnering with a lot of the wearables. Um just given the, the clinical data sets that we're providing, but even at 50 it, we were always trying to figure out how do we close the loop? We were doing a lot of, you know, M and A looking at the reality is consumers are always looking for the silver bullet, they want to understand what's happening. But how do you drive to a health outcome? How do you improve a physical, you know, fitness goal or a weight loss goal or how do I improve sleep? So, again, the unique thing about what we're doing is the closed loop nature. The therapeutic side of actually fixing your sleep, it's very, very powerful. It's certainly unique. There aren't many products that exist like this on the market. Um One of my personal favorites is a company made a product that's made by a company called Eight Sleep. Um And they make um incredible uh diagnostic and therapeutic products to help regulate your body temperature as you may or may not know, in order to fall asleep, you need to reduce your core body temperature by three degrees. So a sleep makes an incredible product to help you improve your sleep through lowering that core temperature. So barring everyone going out and getting saw me tomorrow and by the way, you can test it out in the networking tent next door or getting one of these, I think the eight sleep mattress is something like $3000. So it might not be for everyone. Are there any other simple tips that you can offer? Maybe that Dr Walker shares on how people can improve their sleep on a nightly basis? Yeah, I think these are basic and all of this is out there at this point in fact on our soni website, we have all of math's tips. Um One of the most important things is being regular with your sleep hygiene and your schedule. So going to sleep at the same time, waking up at the same time, very important. Something that I learned. Uh Actually I didn't learn until I started working at Somny was, I always thought caffeine had a six hour shelf life, but it turns out it has a 12 hour shelf life, so, or shelf life. So if you drink, if you go to sleep at 10 o'clock, you need to stop drinking coffee by 10 o'clock in the morning. And so, um those are things that are really important again, regulating your core body temperature, uh reducing light. Um And certainly one of the other things is exercise. One hour of vigorous exercise does a lot to improve your deep sleep. Um And the single most important thing to not do is alcohol. We being here, we're certainly drinking a lot of alcohol. Alcohol is really bad for sleep, certainly bad for your, your rem sleep. Um So making sure you monitor your alcohol consumption during the evening before you go to sleep. So unfortunately, that's all the time that we have a reminder. You can go check out Somny in the networking 10. I also think that you have a 2.0 version coming out soon. So keep an eye out for that. Tim Thank you so much. For joining us here today. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Brad Garlinghouse, Chief Executive Officer, Ripple Interviewer:  Andrew Nusca, Fortune

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