'Bloomberg Technology' Full Show (01/30/2023)
I'm Caroline Hyde IBEX World Headquarters in New York. And I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology Caroline. Momentum and technology stocks halted a big week of earnings and nervousness, also driven by geopolitics. Certainly is. Let's get straight to it. Coming up, the U.S.
China tech tension intensifies. The Biden administration weighing cutting off while away from U.S. supplies. Well, the CEO of Ticktock has been called to testify before U.S. lawmakers. Then why do the so-called Google or
China implementing generative A.I. into its own search engine? Plus, our conversation with Brian Johnson. You must have read the story. A 45 year old entrepreneur who's committed to reverse aging. But first, let's check in on these
markets. They're reversing two on the day. At least we've got a momentous week. Whether it's the Fed, whether it's jobs data, whether it's earnings that can fast NASDAQ off by 2 percent. In fact, worst day since back in December, MSCI all country world index all around the world. We saw this risk aversion just creep into the day's trading to yield, just pushing up a little bit, up some 4 basis points. We know that percentage point that two
year yields borrowing costs. Are we that it go higher? A little bit nervous about where the Fed Reserve takes us. Let's flip it on because as risk assets fall, well, that correlation is back with crypto. And in fact, we're under pressure on Bitcoin for the last two days. Well, by an eight percentage point. That's still what backfill above those twenty two thousand dollar levels.
Yeah, straight into earnings. It is a big week for semiconductors. We start with an XP, second biggest supplier to the automotive industry. And in automotive they saw strength, but their first cool quarter forecast, even the upper end of the range was below street expectations for the first quarter at three point one billion dollars.
The street looking for a forecast of three point one six. It's no automotive where there's weakness, but in the other end, markets that's a big cause for concern in a week where you have other chip names like Samsung reporting earnings around the world. The story of the day is one of news headlines hitting left, right and center across the world of technology. That's step up the board.
Look at some of the names that we're across, A.I, A.I., A.I.. That's all anyone's talking about. And it is the same in the markets as well, actually by two down four tenths of one percent on its USA doors. But it has been higher after that Bloomberg scoop that it is looking to do its own version of chat G.P.S.. We'll get into that later in the program. Big bets.
Know if you're familiar with this name. It's another name in the world of A.I.. It's just been swept up with this mean stock like trading that's gone on with A.I. related names up 64 percent in the session. Then those two names, really interesting snap reports. Earnings Tuesday up one point seven percent in the session, matter lower. We are bracing, Caroline, for a big week
of technology earnings. And in the background, artificial intelligence in the background. Also, geopolitics at play. And let's get to that, one of the most read stories in the bring back today.
Our tech executive editor Tom Giles, here to break it down when it comes to the world of China versus us, really the theme, the tension continues to consternation. Really, it feels like just talk to us about why, why, why we're really trying to shut off any supplies from U.S. manufacturers to what. This is all about isolating wall. This is a company that for years the US, U.S. presidents, U.S. federal government has singled out walkway as being a potential source of a threat to to our national security.
There's concerns about what happens with the equipment that we buy from waterway. There's concerns about us enabling waterway to become a bigger and more powerful player with with the components that U.S. companies sell to away. This would be yet another step by the
Biden administration to isolate what way to cut it off from vital U.S. supplies. There's a hardening of stance on debate and even for what it was under President Trump.
So President Trump put Wally on the entity less, but you could get licenses to do business, which US names are impacted by all of this because there are U.S. tech companies doing business with far away or or at least looking for exceptions. That's right. A lot of the business that we do with
the U.S. businesses do with what we had already been cut off. But there were still some exceptions. For instance, Intel and Qualcomm to the companies that would be affected by this move. Those two companies still sell Intel,
sells chips for laptops that are made by walkway and Qualcomm sells chips that are used in some of the iPhone. Some of the phones excuse me, the phones that always sells. So you were still having some U.S. companies do business with Wall Way. This isn't the instant. This is an example of the Biden administration being under tremendous pressure from Republicans in Congress to stay tough on China and not show signs of letting up, not show anything that the Republicans consider to be a sign of weakness. And notably, Tom, of course, this is
going international in terms of the administration looking to the Netherlands, to Japan. That was last week story, wasn't it, trying to get other countries to put similar tough stance as on China. You can't do this. Alone, even though the US is a major leader in chip making capabilities, technologies, you can't do it alone because an XP, for example, from the Netherlands sells some shit making equipment into China that is highly specialized, highly, very technical and very lucrative for an XP. And it's the technology that you just cannot replicate easily. China certainly can't do it.
So the US cannot fully isolate China. And remember, the US wants to make it hard for China to become a powerhouse in chip making capabilities. This is something that the Chinese have been have fallen behind, been behind the US for time immemorial. They have made it a commitment. They have made a commitment to spending the money that it takes to become a leader in ship making technology. And the US is saying no way to that. Then DAX executive editor of Technology, Tom Jobs across that big breaking headline this off today. Now let's dive into the water to talk
because the CEO show Chu Caroline is going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the company's privacy policies, the impacts on children and the company's relationship with the Communist Party. Want to bring in Alex Brinker on this. Alex, what to expect? You can expect potentially a bit of a spicy hearing here. This is the very first time that ticktock CEO should you will actually be testifying before a committee that's been known in the past for a grilling, Mark Zuckerberg on the Cambridge Analytics scandal and for really digging in on details around child privacy and around data sharing. And as we've talked about before, the Republicans in Congress are really concerned about the company's connection to China through its Chinese parent company. So you can expect questions on all of
those things. We also often see in these House committee hearings that the representatives pushing the executives to make promises to agree to do things. You can see some questions potentially around cutting off data or around, you know, putting up some blockades with their Chinese parent company, IBEX. Just remind us where we are, because the administration in many ways is meant to be leading the CPS is meant to be leading this. This is meant to be in many ways to deal with Oracle. We're all discussing my role in that timeline similar to the Wallaby situation.
This is another situation where Kong congressional Republicans are putting a lot of pressure on the Biden administration, who in the background for years has been going through a national security review, looking at tick tock, looking at connections with the Chinese parent company that our sources tell us is getting there. But there were some hiccups with particularly some members of the Department of Justice who were on the committee, who were not comfortable with some of the concessions that the company was bringing to the table in the negotiations. So it seems like a lot of Republicans in both the Senate and the House are saying, look, we need to wrap this up or we're going to take this into our own hands. We're going to introduce bills which they have done. The first of which will come to a vote to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs next month just before this hearing with the CEO going down to D.C.. I think what surprised me in our reporting around this is that it's the first time that Ticktock CEO Chu appears formally in a hearing. We've heard from other executives.
He was on stage, of course, earlier in the year with one of all senior leadership or senior editors here at Blain. By what do we know about his ability to field these kinds of questions and basically engage with us lawmakers? Well, he has basically been operating behind the scenes thus far. My colleague in D.C. and I wrote a big story last fall looking at their lobbying efforts, which were kind of behind closed doors. He was down there. He was taking meetings. Now, I'll tell you, and the company has taken kind of a change in the stands. We've seen them get pretty loud and much more forward about what they're doing, describing some of the data security policies that they're looking to put in place.
And this will really be the first time that he's OUTFRONT. We've seen Vanessa Pappas, who is the chief operating officer. She has been kind of the de facto face for tech talk here in the US.
She did testify at Congress, made a bunch of promises about data security controls, basically tried to put forth a message of you need to trust us that we're not sharing any information with the Chinese government. Now, there have been some kind of critical reports over the last month, including the company admitting that some employees of its parent company bite Dan's access, the data of U.S. users, including a number of journalists. So that trust has obviously been degraded, which again, is probably the reason we're seeing some heightened heat coming out of D.C. against this company. In bags, Alex Brink, terrific reporting around what is a focus for everyone right now, tech talk and whether it's going to have a future here in the United States. Now back to me in San Francisco, where Twitter made its first interest payment on the twelve point five billion dollars of debt that Elon Musk used to take the company private last year.
Twitter paid a group of seven banks led by Morgan Stanley, roughly three hundred million dollars, according to sources. And Bloomberg calculations questions over how the company will pay off its debt remains. Since the mass takeover, Twitter's failed to pay millions of dollars in rent, been sued by contractors over unpaid services. And, of course, auctioned off items not necessarily to raise money. Meanwhile, coming up, so much more to discuss when it comes to Silicon Valley.
Why your. How is it treating generative A.I.? And is it the catalyst for the next wave of tech giants? Or is it just a bit of hype? Well, let's bring back. Before the release of Chat TPP, many people had been underestimating the progress that A.I. has been making over the last few years. I actually think the UK is one of the most interesting places in the world for artificial intelligence. Today, we have to get governments to think about how best to make you make you very fast emerging industry. A lot of other large companies that are figuring out what are they going to do? Google is the most notable on the sideline.
I think they have bigger regulatory headwinds. People want regulation for A.I.. They want to feel safe. Microsoft's ambitions are going to continue to extend far outside, just enterprise software. So there's gonna be a lot of progress over the next couple of years. I think it'll be pretty, pretty fun to watch. And we are going to keep on talking
about it at the rise of generative A.I. and we know actually quite a lot about the US based work on that front. But this is an international project, right? Yeah. Really fascinating reporting from Bloomberg out of China. And according to a Bloomberg source by who is working on something very similar to chat. It was interesting.
At one point in Monday's session, the US listed shares radials by Du Rup almost two and a half percent. All told, we closed down four tenths of a percent, but there was some kind of momentum behind this stock. Based on this reporting, we don't know a lot.
What we do know is that it could come as soon as March. And what would by do we do? Amanda Lang is the so-called Dougal of China, but they are planning to embed this artificial intelligence platform into their existing services. And you know, what we know from a design perspective in terms of capability perspective, is that by DOS chat tool or chat, I would basically give you a conversational response, just like chat is done. But this is really interesting. You and I've been talking a lot in recent weeks about China's move into artificial intelligence. The hype around artificial intelligence
here in North America and beyond. Luckily, we have just the right person to discuss the hype and A.I.. Dr Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed A.I. Research Institute. Where should we start? Let's start with that news in China, right? It's unsurprising that by now you would go ahead and try to work on a tad CBT type product. This thing is taken in wrestling English language sources by storm. It would make sense. And by you being China's Google, they
have the amount of data that it takes to actually train one of these very large models. This is a kind of a model known as a transformer. So by you, you would naturally go into space and make something about the height.
You are an academic, a researcher in this field. When you see a name like Baiji moving into this space, do you think that they are a credible player? Do you think, okay, I'm interested in what they're working on here? They're definitely a credible player. I mean, they have masters of data. They already in so many different
spaces. Google's in that space, Microsoft, Facebook and what not. And so it makes sense that they're going to take these kinds of technologies and move into the space where they're building these models that can generate language at such a large scale and take a massive amount of queries. I mean, much has been written.
Nobody is about the race in A.I. between us and China and many they will thought that China was ahead, particularly when you think of all the language basis, the way in which they have connected devices in the home. I'm interested. Go to Hana. And what about the ethics race here? I have a feeling that many would say the US is thinking about the banal. Are they thinking about it quickly
enough? Are they thinking about some of the biases that are baked in within artificial intelligence? Are they trying to think can get ahead of that as it starts to take us by still? I think they're trying to find out what's happening. But as we see with tabs. BPT When you feed it some kinds of inputs, especially around race and gender, that produces these biased outputs. And this has been shown time and time again since we don't have a lot of visibility into what Biden is doing. We're not sure what's going to happen there. We've seen their uses of AIB bias against certain ethnic groups like the Weavers. So it's not quite. We don't know necessarily what kind of
biases are going to happen there and how it's going to exacerbate further inequality there. Is it exacerbating racial, gender, class inequality at the moment in the US already, or are people managing to tamp down or at least start to learn and show that that's the models on building that? I think there is a potential for it. Definitely in English language, there is less of that possibility. Just because there's been these issues have been documented by many people before.
But as these things are being used in other domains where we don't have a good idea of what kinds of biases may be baked in, especially when it starts getting away from English language, there's not enough data that really is there and not enough regulators or legislators focusing on that to prevent that from happening. Let's talk hype. Well, you know, I think that Caroline and I have gone over with you in the show in recent weeks, worries about plagiarism or how artificial intelligence might contribute to inequality across race, gender. But everyone's talking about this facial intelligence on the DAX. There's an interest, too, to use it. Does that worry you or excite you?
It does both. It worries me because I think the way that we think about artificial intelligence, we think about artificial intelligence as it's kind of separate consciousness that is going to emerge as this thing of science fiction. We talked to Jeff chat G.P.S. like it as an actual person. But really what it is, it is something
that is taking existing data and reproducing and pattern that it's seen before. But it has a lot of ways in which it could be tentative, it could be helpful, it could help human flourishing, especially when we're thinking about ways in which language technologies could be useful, especially in places that don't have a lot of good translation. That collaboration could be really fruitful with affected communities. But right now, as it is, especially as it's being controlled by players like Open A.I., Microsoft and BI do, it's
probably going to reproduce a lot of those inequalities that we've seen before. Dr. Hanna, what's interesting is that, of course, your dare itself is read today, AI Research Institute. It sort of comes at it from a community based focus. You'll trying to move away from what it's called in your Web site. Big text, pervasive influence. What about the startup, the seed scene, the smaller players within A.I.
that are building something really exciting? We talk a lot about open A.I. and Microsoft. We know the power of that alphabet has within the realm of A.I.. Who else is doing this on a smaller scale, but with really interesting outcomes. We've seen this on less, I'd say on the seed scene, at least for what we see the major players feeding, especially in venture capital in the US. But we've definitely seen projects like Mosconi, which has a collective of African researchers using A.I. for machine translation on the continent, also less on a guy who's one of their fellows. Ashman last tech out works at us and
doing machine translation and automatic speech recognition for some. Some languages are less represented, and so the more and more we see A.I. being done with community players as a means of sourcing groups that are had been less resourced. I think those have been some really exciting uses and deployments of A.I.. I think there's a push to rush towards doing things that big tech do it is doing.
We've actually seen a mass exodus from places like Google where people have gone ahead and start to try to develop these large language models. But it tends to be in English and it tends to be in a way that's going to attract the most ISE from these seas in ways that they're going to get the most investment. So these community based projects, I think, are really interesting. Just quickly, a mass exodus. Can you quantify that? I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I did see a story about something like 30 researchers that were coming from Google Brain, which is an organization that I came from, had left the company since. I want to say in the past two years. Mostly they found things that were focused on A.I. language technologies and they're afforded that kind of nimbleness and going to the startup space, they can get that seed funding.
They can kind of produce a product that might be quicker to market than a place like Google. That is a little slower to react in those in those cases. Dr. Alex Hanna, thank you for your time. Director of research that distributed A.I. Research Institute. Great to have you in the studio. Meanwhile, coming up, the price was
building up for now, flashing one of its own prices following Tesla. More on that sweet spot. It's a pretty black. Is this the star of any the price war? Ford is now cutting prices in the US on the electric Mustang monkey. The move is meant to counter Tesla's
price cuts. Earlier this month, which Christie as 20 percent, according to Elon Musk, that did spur new demand for Tesla. Now, across all of Ford's marquee versions, it's an average trim of forty five hundred dollars. But the most significant cuts are on the most expensive versions. The GTA extended range, for example,
drops fifty nine hundred dollars to start at sixty three 9 9 5. The move brings the marquee in line with new caps on TV prices, which qualify for a federal tax credit of up to seventy five hundred dollars under the Inflation Reduction Act. Ford's also offering discounted financing rates as low as five point three percent now last year.
Ford was the number two evey seller in the US, but that was way behind Tesla, which controls almost two thirds of the market. As always, your first and foremost, with all this sort of news and and just talk to us about why Ford is doing this. Many would say it's because of the Tesla response. Some would say it's actually to try and
make it more available to certain subsidies, right? Yeah, I think a number of analysts are saying this is just a response to test. But my point in that piece is while they're cutting prices where the vehicles already most expensive, which would give evidence that they're trying to make them eligible for this seventy five hundred dollar tax credit and take advantage of that. So it's an interesting one. But Ford kind of talks a big game, right, about how demand is outweighing their ability to supply right now because they didn't build that many of them last year. And so to that point, I mean, what's interesting in the story, it shows that this was sort of already a loss making type of car anyway. So ultimately, they just decided to take a hit to margin when necessary on certain types. What about the rest of the vehicles that they want to be coming out with? Yes. So Ford had planned for the market to be
profitable from unit one. That just didn't happen. It's unprofitable because of rising input costs, commodities. But their plan now ramp up volume production, make more of them and improve margins to offset these price cuts. Had that before. What does it to be?
Volumes over margins at the moment over at Tesla's the way to go anyway. Coming up, the future of the gaming industry. We'll discuss the latest gaming report from convoy ventures with their managing partner, Josh Chapman. That's all coming up next. This is Bloomberg Quicktake. Did you get a video game for Christmas? If so, clever gift you do that got off.
Cheap prices for games, toys and hobbies fell forward eight percent in the year to December. That's mostly due to cheaper computer games, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. So what happened in December? Three things.
First, a lack of releases in 2010 to two new games tend to be more expensive. So since there weren't that many hot, pricey launches, people simply had more discounted titles to choose from. To be fair, there were a few new games in December, but none of them made it to the top of the charts. For example, the latest need for speed was the best performing and face, but sales for the first five weeks were 40 percent lower than its 2019 version. Second, holiday discounts. Gaming companies ran their typical Black Friday and Christmas deals to boost sales for existing games.
Look at FIFA 20 free to top game in December in the UK, which was discounted as much as 70 percent. And third, despite cheaper prices, fewer people were buying games. It looks like quality, not price, is king. Even at a cost of living crisis. So does that mean video games are getting cheaper? Well, the short answer is probably not. 2022 was a corrective year after two exceptional years of locked down fuel growth for the entire gaming industry.
So prices will probably rise again. That's, of course, if all lunches go as planned. That was quick takes area. And how? So let's stick with gaming news. Caroline Mehta reported to have contracts with at least 200 gaming creators, according to information matter.
Ended the relationships in the second half of 2022 and also cut contracts with streamers who weren't successful. Building an audience, the information said, citing a Mets spokesperson. It's also a big week for the giants of the industry, with Electronic Arts EIA reporting earnings Tuesday and we get a readout on PlayStation demand. When Japan's Sony reports numbers on Wednesday. So let's get into it with Josh Chapman,
co-founder and managing partner at Convoy, an early stage gaming investment firm. He recently launched a one hundred and fifty million new fund, which will take in assets under management to around 270 million dollars. And you're out with a new report on the state of the gaming industry. See that? See how much is going on right now? Josh, in the world of gaming, I think what's interesting for me is that the conclusion of your report is that there is a pathway to growth here. Talk us through what you found. Absolutely. And thank you again for having me on the
show. So we noticed in 2022 is essentially three things. One is that gaming investment is up about 2x where it was in 2020 and pre pandemic levels. So given investment is increasing while the industry, as your great segment just showed, continues to increase. The second thing we noticed that there is about 45 billion dollars in cash sitting on the corporate balance sheets of gaming companies today, creating an incredibly healthy gaming emanate environment. The third thing that we're noticing is
given, as you all well know, that the IPO markets are close, late stage investing in the gaming market has slowed almost to a grinding halt while early stage continues to grow, as you see in this chart. Gaming will continue to grow and is expected to continue to grow over the next five years. We had a report last year that showed that gaming over the last two recessions was incredibly resilient.
So no matter where we're at right now, we think that will continue to thrive as an industry. Just I'm interested to go back to the consolidation point. There's a lot of cash on balance sheets, but there's also a lot of regulation about where that cash is put to work.
We just think about Microsoft and Activision. Is that still going to go through? Does that matter? Do we see more waves of this? Absolutely. So the FTSE is absolutely doing their job and trying to protect the gaming market. Our opinion is that their objections to
this emanate acquisition is actually unfounded. One, it's based on what might happen and not what is happening. And that's a really key thing to highlight here.
We think this acquisition should go through. We think it will go through. We believe that this is absolutely a fair acquisition. You know, it's worth highlighting that post acquisition, the gaming revenue to Microsoft would be around 21 billion dollars. That would be about 11 percent of the entire gaming market. But right now, Sony makes about 18 billion in the market and there's actually a lot of competitors there in that similar range. So we think the FTSE is worried about
what might happen. And we think that sets a very dangerous precedent for emanate across not only gaming, but broader entertainment and IP in general. So we think this should go through. We think it will go through after it gets through all the objections. But certainly an intense environment, broader entertainment is an interesting one because we know that Netflix has been making ISE it the view of getting into gaming more. And we've seen it as evidence. And these are sort of companies that start picking off interesting companies. And what kinds of companies can you see this consolidation occurring? Absolutely. Great question.
So Netflix is actively building out against business. Basically, this is a reaction to the fact that passive entertainment is losing out to interactive entertainment, passive entertainment, which is one way. Like Hulu or HBO Go or Netflix is losing out to to a interactive entertainment. Which gaming has been a professional out for 50 years. So this interactive entertainment is where a lot of groups like Netflix and Amazon and Google are moving towards. You're even going to see Disney eventually enter the space in a much bigger way.
I think that a lot of the cash on the balance sheet, a broader tech companies is not only going to compete, but likely entering new ways into the gaming industry alongside the active 45 billion in cash that gaming companies like the traditional ones like Activision, Blizzard and Nintendo have. It's interesting because you cite those numbers in your report, right? You look at the cash some of the mega CAC tech companies have. And the conclusion you draw is there's still a healthy money environment. And yet Caroline and I are here waiting every day for some updates around activation Microsoft. Will it happen? Waiting to happen with regulators day. Do you think it will happen?
I do. I do. In the short and I do. And the reason why is because the objections are based on the theoretical of what might happen in the future. I don't think that's going to win out in court. I think it sets a dangerous precedent for future emanate across all of entertainment, not just gaming. Well, we might become a monopoly. So therefore, we should stop this money. The FTC later could retroactively, if
their fears become realized, can step back in and try to slap the hand of Microsoft and say, hey, you need to divest or you need to separate so they can always step in later if their fears are realized. But right now, it's a really tricky environment and it would set a weird precedent across all of the FTSE ISE scrutiny of different markets. OK. Josh, your funds, your new ones where whereas been ripe to invest. They're essentially going to be a few areas that a lot of hype is going to be generated round.
So around gaming, one of those is artificial intelligence. People are talking about artificial intelligence that's going to make the creation process much easier. We think that is absolutely going to play out. But it will be very tricky how this is going to exactly going to play out from a tech standpoint and whether it will be investable to build a billion dollar companies.
So question mark, but that will be invested in. The second is Web 3. People are waiting for Web 3 and blocking technology to really provide a monetization addition to the gaming industry in the same way that we saw free to play back in the emergence of mobile. The third is probably going to be around, you know, new marketplace dynamics in the virtual reality space.
So as virtual reality continues to be adopted, we think there'll be continued investment. Some of the areas that we're most excited about as a firm is things around the intersection of gaming and education, gaming and healthcare and gaming and and VR. That's really kind of where we're seeing a lot of exciting opportunities on those themes. Josh. Electronic Arts reports adding changed a Sony later in the wake of those names, that kind of legacy names in the video game industry still relevant to those growth areas. Those feature opportunities you've just outlined.
They're certainly relevant in the sense that the companies that I'm investing are looking to land those clients, those people as clients. So the groups that you're mentioning, whether they're from the tech space like Metta that are entering gaming in a big way through things like Oculus or the traditional ones like Zynga and EAA and take two and Ubisoft, all of them can become clients of the technologies that, you know, us as a firm are looking to invest in. So they're absolutely still relevant. And eventually, if these companies, you know, find an amazing business relationship, they can become an acquisition relationship. Time back to a few the topics we just talked about. But it is absolutely still relevant. These are great companies that are at the forefront of where we're kind of going.
And so we're just hoping to work with them more. All right. Josh Chatman, convoy co-founder, managing partner Caroline knows that I've been wanting to have this conversation for weeks, months, purely about video game. Let's talk again in a few months time and see how it goes. Now, from video gaming to my other passion streaming, Paramount has announced that Showtime will merge with its Paramount Plus service.
The merge will be across both linear and streaming platforms, resulting in a rebranding of the pay TV channel to Paramount. Plus, with Showtime. Bit of a mouthful. The updated offerings and Showtime name change will launch later in 2023 and only affect the premium tier at Paramount Plus and the Showtime Linear Network in the US Carol. We wanted to talk a little bit about, well, maybe both of our passions, crypto bitcoin and the entire digital asset class. Having their best start for the year in
a decade. It's been. So I jumped Monday after announcing plans to reach profitability in 2023, shares surged after the company posted record revenue across all three business segments lending technology platform and financial services playing DAX Sonali Basak discussed all of those results with sci fi CEO Anthony nights earlier. We're ahead of where we expected to be at this point. We've had seven record quarters of revenue in a row and in this quarter our revenue growth actually accelerated to 50 percent year over year, up from 51 percent in Q3. So we ended up exceeding expectations. Now, as we mentioned on the earnings call, we believe that the scale that we're driving in revenue will continue into 23 with about 25 to 30 percent year on year growth to a range of about one point nine billion dollars in revenue to two billion dollars of revenue. And that was achieve got profitability
by the fourth quarter of 2023. One of the other important milestones we achieved this quarter is that our EBITDA of 17 million dollars, which was up significantly versus a year ago and contribute to our total for the year of 143 of the DOT, that 70 million dollars is equal to our stock based compensation, which is a critical milestone to hit on the way to gap profitability. Isn't the optimism, the positivity coming out of so far right now at a time when a lot of fintech broadly basically being washed out in addition to ISE, I should say, consumer businesses like Goldman, of course, your alma mater, other markets, business, for example? Do you think those competitive headwinds kind of moving to the side is really boosting the momentum for your own business? I think we took a very different approach to the market five years ago when I joined in, that we wanted to become a one stop shop for all the major financial decisions in your life. In all the days in between, we didn't cherry pick the most popular products at the time or the products that were growing the fastest were the ones you could make the most money on. We picked all the products that allow us to help you get your money right, to help you borrow better, saved better, spend better, protect better and invest better. And because we were committed to those activities that help you get your money right.
Over the last five years, we've built a durability in our business and a robustness that allows us to allocate capital to those businesses that are most in need at that moment in time and leaves us less vulnerable to different exogenous factors that we've seen impact other companies. That's not to say that we're bulletproof or perfect. That just means more work, more robust and more, I think, stable, and that allows us to be more durable. And the strategies really come together in the last two years. So against that backdrop, Anthony, can you give us a sense of your your goals on the deposit base, because I think you went from something like a billion to seven billion over the course of the year. Yes, the deposit base is really critical, so before having a national bank license, which we got about a year ago. We'd we generate about a billion dollars
of deposits in four years. This year we added another six billion in one year. Quite frankly, not even a full year, probably closer to nine months. That was so fired.
CEO and see no time. Meanwhile, Carey, things are actually looking up to cryptos largest assets. Remember, so far he's been trying to get into the crypto wave a little bit as well and maybe the waves coming PAC Bitcoin. Just check out the O.G. of the crypto space. Best January 2013, in fact, up 39 percent in 30 days. Look, it's more base.
The rally in virtual coins. They've managed to pump through some of the fallout and the collapse of some Matt Miller feeds RTX. We know that because they managed to shake off the latest news from Genesis.
You can see the smaller coins to Solana at one hundred thirty eight percent this quarter, actually infinity to do with the gaming up 77 percent decentralized. Look still at point 7 3 5, but that's up almost 150 percent. So two hundred and eighty billion dollars is how much digital assets have climbed over the course of January. Yeah.
And there's an element of inevitability. But it's not just the digital assets themselves. BLOCK chain or crypto related stocks also on the mend since the RTX fiasco. I mean, when you talk about correlation, there's no sort of high correlation between crypto currencies and the stocks whose companies only do crypto related underlying technology or the assets themselves. Well said though, correlation these all
risk assets and indeed the risk universe has been going higher. We've seen the Nasdaq outperform too, but it's notable they really have managed to come back. Meanwhile, well, we've got a fantastic conversation coming up because it's the BusinessWeek story that gone completely viral. You won't miss it. What does it take to actually be younger and logically younger? We'll tell you how to reverse the aging process. Maybe. Great back.
Look, it's no secret that people are willing to spend big on their health. LeBron James spends upward of one and a half million dollars per year on his body. Tom Brady invests in what he sees as age defying supplements, but their health routines look like child's play compared to one. Brian Johnson, the tech entrepreneur
behind Braintree Payment Solutions. He's got 30 doctors and health experts monitoring his every bodily function while following an extremely stringent daily routine, which he calls the blueprint. Forty five year old Johnson says he's slow to space of age, but 24 percent managed to reduce his biological age by five years already. He's on track to spend, though, two million on his efforts this year. Joining us to discuss the blueprint, CEO, the founder, Brian Johnson.
Wow. I mean, tell us, what effects have you seen so far? It was pretty remarkable. We didn't really know what to expect when we started the five point one year age reversal for epigenetics was interesting. And in slowing the speed of aging by 25 percent was something that we found really exciting. It's probably seeded our expectations when we say stringent 1977 leaving calories a day, two dozen supplements and medicines exercise an hour a day of high intensity, three times a week sleep at the same time every night after two hours of ragged losses and light. I don't think I particular want 33000 images of my bowels.
But you were doing this for her for another reason, a purpose. Where does this go in terms of next stage therapies? The idea behind the project was if you could measure all 70 plus organs of your body and enable each organ to speak your heart and lungs and liver and pancreas and express what they need to be in an ideal state and then take those needs, look at gold, standard scientific evidence and then create a protocol. And I've agreed to go through that process. And so we make hundreds of measurements, my body every few months and we just references the scientific literature and we do this again and again and we try to fine tune it. And so we're trying to basically create the perfect diet and health protocol. And so I've spent millions of dollars
developing this with a world class group of scientists and doctors, and I've made it all available for others at no cost that people can implement and improve upon it. They can record their own data. It's really easy to push the entire field forward. Well, that's that's the point. I'm fascinated by the reaction we've been showing your morning routine on this screen. You'll exercise your calorie target. To be fair, it's not that much different
than mine. And yet I'm definitely aging quickly. But do you sympathize with the reaction to this story? Actually, for most everyday people, this is not a reality. This is not an accessible method of reversing the effects of aging.
I absolutely do. And I mean, it really started when I was in a pretty bad situation. I was I'd had a chronic depression for a decade. I tried everything to fix it and I was feeling hopeless. And there was one particular version of myself and I playfully referred to him as Evening Brian, 7:00 p.m. Brian would roll around on the days, dress would be very heavy and he would inevitably eat too much food or the wrong food.
And then that would cause poor sleep and would cause the next morning feeling groggy and I'd be overweight. And so one day, playfully, I said, evening, Brian is fired from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.. This version of myself has no authority to decide if he's going to eat. And it was the first time I really understood me as different versions of myself. And so while I do understand that the protocol I have now is pretty daunting for most people. The basic principle, I think is true for
everybody. We all have these versions inside of us where we commit this self-destructive behavior and we do so again and again. And oftentimes some of the biggest gains can be made if we just stop some of those more self-destructive behaviors. Brian, we are sorry. Audience what they were willing to do to achieve longevity, I suppose if you're not thinking about aging in reverse and this is what they had to say, pretty split. A third of respondents all my money. And so I don't you laugh and then, you know, 36 percent nothing YOLO.
I think actually, again, touches on this in this story about how doctors praised you for what you've done, but actually for the everyday person, it's not achievable. What if all the things that you did are the simplest that you felt? This is an easy change that has really helped me. Yeah. I mean, first of all, the expectation of blueprint is not that the individual person's going to be able to do all these things. The objective is to show that if this protocol is implemented, you can achieve remarkable results in slowing the rate of aging and reversing aging. And then if that's the case, it really is a contemplation I find interesting is could we do this as a society, make this standard where we don't ask people to go out and navigate McDonald's and algorithms are trying to addict them and every where they turn. And so this is really about trying to create change, a change in society. But for the basic simple things people
can do, prioritize, sleep, eat more vegetables, nothing berries and stop self-destructive behaviors. And you're off to a pretty good start. Ron, can I ask you a personal question about the reaction to this story? Because it did go viral and there's a lot in that way. There's a split view. Some are really engaging you and saying this is great and something to be admired and others maybe through their own inhibitions and issues hating on it. How are you finding the reaction online? It's understandable. I mean, I think all of us have the same dialogue that is happening online is the same dialogue that happens inside of each one of us. It's the same thing.
I mean, we're all very critical of ourselves for making observations about our behaviors all the time. We are own worst critic. And so I see when people are talking. This is just what I think I call a blueprint. Blueprint. They're a group therapy. We're having a dialogue about the
difficulty of living in modern society with everything around us, trying to addict us all the time. It's very, very hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle. You have to really go out of your way. And so I think the commentary is really about larger society than it is about me. Guy Johnson very fancy our founder. Come back. Tell us how it's also going.
That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Tuesday Nicolosi, you don't want to miss it. A big sit down for us. This is Bloomberg.
2023-01-31 13:19
