Dan talks with Deirdre Bosa, co-anchor of CNBC’s “TechCheck,” about her path to becoming a tech reporter and co-anchoring at CNBC (2:19), what Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai had in common at the Code Conference (4:10), Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s transparency around the company’s recent challenges (8:55), TikTok’s intensifying pressure on big tech giants (10:34), if BeReal is the next cool social media app (20:10), why more tech CEOs are bringing up “focus” as they navigate an industry downturn (22:28), and if Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi can bring the ridesharing company to profitability (25:49).
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Hey listeners, it's Dan here. I want to tell you about a company that I'm really excited about.
00:04 It's called Current. It's a fintech company that's completely disrupting traditional banking.
00:08 I'm a new Current customer and it's already helping me and my entire family manage our finances,
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00:20 That's Current.com/ok. Current is a financial technology company, not a bank.
00:26 Banking services provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC,
00:32 pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. and can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
00:37 Hi, welcome to another edition of OK Computer. I'm Dan Nathan. I am here with one of my dear friends from CNBC.
00:45 She's actually a co-host of CNBC's Tech Check. She is Deirdre Bosa. We just call her affectionately Debo.
00:52 Debo, welcome to OK Computer.
00:55 I'm thrilled. I made the cut. I've been wanting to be on your podcast forever, Dan, so I am honored and excited.
01:01 You know what's really funny? We actually emailed you a couple times last year and to your NBC Universal email,
01:08 you never responded. So we thought you were ghosting us.
01:11 Never. Now you've got my Gmail as the path.
01:14 And I'm not going to dox you. But here's the deal. You and I saw each other IRL.
01:18 We were at Kara Swisher's Code Conference, her last conference last week in LA.
01:23 And you and I sat into a bunch of the sessions. It was pretty fascinating.
01:26 And I want to kind of go over a little bit of that. I want to go over today.
01:29 We're recording this on Tuesday afternoon, a day that the Nasdaq closed down 5 percent,
01:35 the worst day in the stock market in over two years and just a lot of cross currents going on.
01:40 And I know that, you know, again, before you were on the tech beat, you were a reporter for CNBC in Asia and London.
01:46 And you have a great grasp of, you know, all things macro, but also markets.
01:51 And sometimes, you know, I've been following tech for a very long time.
01:54 And now you follow both public and private tech markets.
01:57 Sometimes they just get disconnected from each other and they're telling different stories.
02:01 And depending upon who you're talking to, they might have totally different vibes.
02:04 So I want to hear all about that, your take on some of that.
02:07 But first things first, how did you get to be a co-host of CNBC's Tech Check?
02:12 You were on the West Coast when I first saw you. You were doing, I think, Squawk Box Asia.
02:17 This was back in like 2015 and '16. And when we were on the set of Fast Money,
02:22 you were just getting teamed up in the morning over there and you would come on our show.
02:25 So talk to us a little bit about your trip around the world with CNBC.
02:29 Just a young green reporter. I remember that if you were in Singapore and you had to do the U.S. hit,
02:35 no one wanted to do it because it was late in the afternoon.
02:37 You had to stay way later. And we started like you do here, very, very early in the morning.
02:41 But I always put up my hand because ultimately I thought I wanted to come back to North America.
02:45 I'm Canadian, but U.S. was close enough. So I started in Singapore. I was in Beijing for a while.
02:50 I convinced them to hire me. Not on my first time, mind you.
02:53 I remember I went in for my interview and I thought I just had to read the prompter.
02:58 And they were like, no, no, no, no, that's not how it works here.
03:02 So I went away. I literally studied for a year to try and be able to come on CNBC.
03:08 I came back again and they hired me. I went from Singapore to London to,
03:12 I was the original home studio in Vancouver, Canada years ago.
03:16 And then down to San Francisco where I've been ever since.
03:19 Yeah. Well, you do a great job and I not only enjoy your reporting,
03:22 the sourcing that you do is amazing and you're just really, really good at it.
03:25 Thank you. I learn from the best. All you guys.
03:29 I'll tell you this because sometimes people think if you're on a show or you're on CNBC,
03:35 a channel like that, that you're like a journalist. And I have to be very clear that I am not a journalist.
03:39 People like you are actually doing journalistic work, reporting, you know, building sources, that sort of thing.
03:44 I just show up and offer some hot takes. But one thing that's really funny,
03:48 every once in a while when we're doing a promo or something, they'll ask us to read prompter.
03:52 I cannot read prompter. It is a skill. Am I right?
03:55 It is difficult. I will tell you that I'm still not very good at reading prompter.
04:00 And I ask our producers on Tech Check to sort of write as little as possible.
04:05 And I've got Carl and John who are amazing. And I feel like we all come from a different perspective.
04:10 So we can talk anything. And I get tripped up on the prompter too. It's not just me yet.
04:15 It's hard. All right. Let's get it. Speaking of getting tripped up,
04:17 let's talk a little bit about what we saw, heard, kind of witnessed at Code last week.
04:21 It was a pretty fascinating conference. It was Kara's 20th.
04:24 She started doing all things digital with Walt Mossberg again, 20 years ago,
04:28 when they were at the Wall Street Journal, it morphed into Code.
04:31 And this was a bang up final year. I mean, in 24 hours, Andy Jazzy, the CEO of Amazon,
04:36 spoke, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphapet, Tim Cook, the CEO.
04:40 I mean, it was pretty amazing, right?
04:42 Trillions in market value over a course of 24 hours.
04:46 Most important companies in the world. It was amazing.
04:49 It was amazing. And I did fast money from there.
04:51 And I think that night or the second night, I said we had $6 trillion in market cap.
04:56 Just speak to us and the CEOs, but more dramatically, 1.2 trillion in annual revenue
05:02 and growing for those three companies.
05:04 So I'm just curious, like, what was your takeaway?
05:06 You know, for me, it felt like there was three CEOs of three of the largest companies
05:11 in the world that were managing towards a very difficult macro environment,
05:15 managing towards deceleration post-pandemic, specifically Amazon,
05:19 but generally kind of have their arms around things.
05:22 That was my take. And we also had a market that was kind of coming off of a two-week slide
05:27 and was rallying a little bit. It just felt like a different vibe.
05:30 Then throw in today and some of the hardest hit stocks.
05:33 You know, Apple was down nearly 6% in market cap terms. That's massive.
05:37 Microsoft was down 5.5%. Amazon down 7%.
05:42 So I'm curious, like, week on week now, two totally different vibes.
05:46 Any takeaways from last week into this week?
05:48 That's exactly how I felt, too, even though it was just a few days ago.
05:52 Last week, it felt like a totally different vibe.
05:54 But then again, you've sort of seen these companies.
05:57 They're the cream of the crop. They're the industry leaders.
05:59 They have so much cash versus the smaller, unprofitable tech companies that we cover.
06:04 So they're in a position of kind of luxury.
06:06 When Sundar Pichai says something like, "We have to be 20% more efficient,"
06:10 you believe him. You believe he can do that while delivering on profitability
06:14 and revenue growth and all the things that he has.
06:17 And he said something similar to me when I interviewed him a few months ago.
06:21 It was on a similar day as today. The market had just dropped.
06:24 I think I was looking at the Nasdaq. It was down 4% or something.
06:27 And I kind of threw out my script and asked him, "This is happening."
06:31 I think this was in May, you know, at the start of the real market turmoil.
06:35 And he gave me a very similar response.
06:37 And I think that was my takeaway from hearing from these three CEOs,
06:42 the steadiness that they're able to give investors, maybe employees.
06:47 I think their employees is a different challenge.
06:49 I know you've talked about this before, but a lot of their employees,
06:52 this is something that Sundar Pichai told me months ago,
06:54 a lot of them have never seen a recession or a downturn, a real downturn before.
06:59 But certainly in terms of investor sentiment, I felt like they reassured.
07:03 They once again reassured last week.
07:05 Yeah, it's funny. At a conference like that, you know, it seems like a lot of the people
07:09 that are speaking on stage are public market executives.
07:13 And it seems a lot of people in the stands, in the crowd, are private.
07:18 There's a lot of VCs there.
07:19 And so let's talk a little bit about that disconnect.
07:22 Because on OK Computer, and I know a lot of the guests that we've had
07:25 and a lot of my co-hosts you know and you speak to, that sort of thing.
07:28 And one of the very common themes is that usually the private tech markets lag,
07:34 public markets by, let's call it, you know, 6 to 12 months or something like that.
07:38 And that's when you have an unprofitable tech.
07:40 And, you know, Evans Spiegel, that was, although that is not a big company anymore
07:44 by any means, $5 billion in revenues and less than $20 billion in market cap,
07:48 down 80% from its all-time highs.
07:50 Big news broke while we were there that they were cutting 20% of their workforce.
07:54 So that came out the prior week.
07:56 But then it was an internal memo that suggested that by the end of next year, 2023,
08:00 that they were going to have 20% revenue growth and 30% subscriber or user growth,
08:06 which was like kind of eye-popping a little way.
08:08 What was your take from that?
08:09 And again, you know, the stock market, or at least investors,
08:12 rewarded the company for that guidance.
08:14 The stock rallied 10%, 15%.
08:16 But again, this is a very unprofitable company.
08:18 Notice they didn't say anything about profitability.
08:20 Yeah.
08:21 One thing I like about Evans Spiegel is that he's very transparent.
08:24 And a lot of the CEOs we hear from actually on TechCheck,
08:27 because they actually come on when their stock is down,
08:29 when they're going through challenges.
08:31 And I always go back to, as an example of this, to an Airbnb.
08:35 Do you remember when the pandemic hit,
08:37 you thought this is a company that is going to get killed.
08:40 They are on the path to an IPO.
08:43 They took a haircut.
08:45 I think they were valued at $33 billion down to $18 billion.
08:49 They raised debt.
08:50 They didn't get very good rates to do so.
08:53 And then they came roaring back.
08:55 And I mean like roaring back just, what was it, like six months later?
09:00 So I think good CEOs, they talk, they're transparent, they come through.
09:04 I think Evans Spiegel has a lot more challenges.
09:06 There's something about what Apple's doing that is upending the entire ad landscape.
09:11 What TikTok is doing is upending the entire social media landscape.
09:15 But I think that he is someone who investors,
09:18 at least you can count on hearing from him.
09:20 He's not going to back away if they don't live up to the expectations.
09:23 And he talks to investor communities and shareholders so often
09:27 that I put a lot of weight into that.
09:29 Yeah, well, you could tell that Kara Swisher really likes Evan.
09:31 And what was shocking to me, and you forget sometimes,
09:34 because he's been in our lives as the CEO/founder of a company that has a service
09:39 that almost every other person you know in America is using in some way, shape, or form.
09:44 He's 32 years old.
09:45 And Kara, I think, really respects exactly what you just said, the transparency,
09:49 which you know as a journalist, because again,
09:51 he's not only out there touting great new products when they're at Cannes and this, that, whatever,
09:56 but he also shows up when they have to do a meaningful guide down and cut 20% of their workforce.
10:02 Can I also say one thing about him?
10:03 You brought up a really important point.
10:05 You didn't hear much about profitability.
10:07 I appreciate that.
10:08 Don't tell me you're going to be profitable for some obscure metric like adjusted EBITDA,
10:13 or even free cash flow that is less than your stock-based compensation.
10:17 So I appreciate that he kind of puts it out there and lets you decide.
10:20 All right, we're going to talk about those two points that you just made,
10:23 because you are also on the ride share and delivery beat.
10:26 And that is a theme that flows.
10:28 Could you tell I was thinking of something?
10:30 Yeah, I definitely could.
10:31 And we're going to get to your interview with Dara, because you had a number of really good ones,
10:34 but you just spoke to him in the past week.
10:36 But I want to hit on one thing, and I thought it was pretty fascinating,
10:39 that while TikTok was not at this conference,
10:42 TikTok was on the tips of everybody's tongue, if you will.
10:46 And I think they've turned into a really easy scapegoat, if you will,
10:50 for a lot of U.S. social media or ad-based models,
10:54 because, again, I think a lot of these CEOs know that they're squarely in not only the sights of U.S. regulators,
11:01 but also ByteDance's partner in China.
11:04 We know what's happened over there.
11:06 Talk to me a little bit about some of the conversations that you had.
11:10 Was it really just lip service that a lot of these companies,
11:12 it was very easy for them to blame some of the woes?
11:15 And again, you just mentioned Apple's ATT, the app tracking, everything like that.
11:19 There's a whole host of headwinds that are hitting these companies.
11:22 But let's talk about TikTok a little bit and just your thoughts and some of the reporting they're doing
11:25 and just some of the stuff that you're hearing from investors.
11:28 I mean, the holy grail for advertising is engagement,
11:30 and that's what all social media companies are trying to figure out.
11:33 And Dan, have you ever been on? Do you use TikTok?
11:36 You know what? It's really interesting, and I think you know this.
11:38 I have daughters that are now 17 and 19, and during the pandemic,
11:42 it was something that just obviously exploded, and people had a lot of time.
11:46 And they went from not only consuming but creating a lot of TikToks.
11:51 It was like an activity that they could do, and they were tracking different dances,
11:54 and they were doing a lot of stuff.
11:56 And I will tell you now, they're still spending a lot of time on it, but they're only consuming.
12:00 They are not making anything anymore.
12:02 And that could be purely anecdotal, but whatever the behavior, the user behavior has really shifted,
12:08 and you just said the holy grail is engagement.
12:11 I don't think power scrolling through videos is like a really upper-end engagement,
12:17 unless you get your arms around what the ad load looks like, right?
12:19 Because that really isn't.
12:21 Right, so you're saying maybe there was more engagement at the beginning of it
12:24 when they were participating and posting their own content or just watching.
12:27 I will tell you, an hour will pass on TikTok, and you sit up, and you're like, "Whoa, what just happened?"
12:33 It is so addictive, and it's so easy for the other social media companies, like Ameta or Snap,
12:39 or anyone really, to say that it is addictive and it has some of these qualities that we don't like about tech.
12:45 But that is sort of the brilliance of it too, right, is this algorithm, and that's the fear,
12:48 is that it's at the end of the day in the back end, a Chinese company that is consuming this,
12:54 that knows what's capturing your attention, that leaves you on the app for an hour.
12:58 You don't even know where the time has gone.
13:00 But I also feel like it's a little silly to talk about banning TikTok for its privacy issues
13:07 when we have such poor privacy protections here in the United States.
13:11 We like to say that on Tech Check that it's not the lawmakers that are regulating privacy,
13:16 it's Tim Cook and Apple.
13:17 They've done more on this front than anyone has.
13:20 And it's easy because TikTok is that elephant in the room.
13:23 We spoke to Jim Breyer as well, a brilliant investor who was an early Facebook investor,
13:28 who was on the board, I'm not sure if he still is, but he came on, he said, "Yes, the TikTok threat is so real."
13:34 And we interviewed Bill Reddy from Pinterest this morning too.
13:37 And we asked him, "What are you doing about video?"
13:39 Because even TikTok looms large for him.
13:42 John, my co-anchor, was saying, "You know, the Kardashians should be on Pinterest, not on Instagram."
13:47 And it's true.
13:48 It's kind of every social media network, every e-commerce platform is trying to in some way get that TikTok audience.
13:54 Well, it's funny when you think about what Trump did with Truth Social.
13:57 I think the Kardashians, if they came together with private equity backing
14:00 and wanted to create their own version of whatever they're unhappy with, with Instagram's reels or whatever,
14:05 it would probably take off like wildfire.
14:07 So, hey, Kim, give me a ring if you're into it.
14:10 She's a VC now.
14:11 I know.
14:12 Well, Debo, you could be like, you could do some big things there.
14:15 I'll put the cash together.
14:16 But let me take a step back because you just mentioned meta.
14:19 Well, two things about the banning.
14:20 Okay.
14:21 I will just say this.
14:22 My view has less to do with privacy because I agree with everything what you said about privacy here.
14:27 Okay.
14:28 My view is more if we are going to be in this tit for tat economic war with China and many of our large tech champions,
14:36 if you will, don't have access to their markets, which, again, Twitter, Facebook, most of our digital companies do not,
14:43 social media companies, that sort of thing, then why should one of their largest companies have access to our markets?
14:49 Now, we might have a civil war, teenage girls versus regulators here in America.
14:55 We may have another capital riot here.
14:57 But my point very simply is that I think ultimately you saw what just happened with NVIDIA,
15:02 this proposed export ban of certain chips or something.
15:05 This is not going to get better before.
15:07 It's going to get worse before it gets better, if you will.
15:10 Well, okay.
15:11 So I don't think you would have teenage girls versus the regulators.
15:13 You would have an explosion of VPNs.
15:15 That's what all the youth does in China, by the way.
15:18 Everyone actually does access the American apps if they want to.
15:22 But I actually don't know that they really want to because they have their own apps like WeChat over there that are hugely popular.
15:28 But they're censored, right?
15:30 They are censored.
15:31 You need to get past the gray firewall.
15:33 If you use a VPN and you're in China, though, and you get found out, you get in some serious trouble.
15:39 And so, I mean, again, we don't have that issue here.
15:42 And I know how lazy teenagers are in America.
15:45 The idea of setting up a VPN, while it's pretty easy, I just don't see it happening.
15:50 So who knows?
15:51 And I think that's why what we've done with chips, what the U.S. government has done with chips is so interesting because years ago, leadership in Beijing said we're going to pour billions and billions of dollars into our own chip ambitions.
16:03 And we're going to create the next cutting-edge chip.
16:06 And they've really been unable to do so.
16:08 It turns out that this is really, really hard to do.
16:11 On the lower end, yes, they've been able to.
16:13 But you need the NVIDIAs.
16:14 You need these high-end chips to create technology, the next generation of technology.
16:20 So I think that's more interesting and probably a lot more powerful than banning TikTok here.
16:24 But they're a communist government, right?
16:26 They can ban things left, right, and center, not even have to give a reason for it.
16:30 Do we want to get into that fight?
16:32 I don't know.
16:33 Should we find a legal reason to ban TikTok?
16:35 Well, I think this could get pretty simple for us here.
16:38 Especially as our major manufacturers are looking to reshore manufacturing that is dependent on China and Taiwan, I mean, this might just kind of escalate in a manner where we have like a bipolar tech world.
16:51 I mean, you just mentioned the great firewall.
16:53 We already have that.
16:54 So we might just see more and more reason why to kind of meet force with force.
16:58 Hey, Dan.
17:01 What up, guy?
17:02 You're into this fintech.
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17:05 You're going to like this guy.
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17:10 Wait a second.
17:11 Does that mean I don't have to drive to the bank anymore?
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17:27 That's Current.com/OK.
17:30 Current is a financial technology company, not a bank.
17:33 Banking services provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC,
17:39 pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc., and can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
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19:20 You mentioned meta here, and this is interesting.
19:25 There was a Wall Street Journal article yesterday talking.
19:28 It said Instagram stumbles and push to mimic TikTok internal document show.
19:32 This quote was pretty shocking and got a lot of play here.
19:35 Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching reels,
19:41 less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform.
19:48 So this is really an issue, as Zuckerberg a year ago wanted to reposition this company
19:53 towards whatever his vision of the metaverse is, and they went off on a huge spending spree to do that.
19:58 The stock has been more than cut in half since then.
20:01 It was down nearly 10% today, making new 52-week lows.
20:05 Talk to me about that, because here's a company that has over 3 billion monthly active users.
20:12 Just think of that, like a third of the planet.
20:14 Now, the engagement is kind of lessening. Their ability to monetize them is lessening.
20:18 They still have average revenue per user far greater than any other social media platform on the planet that ever has.
20:25 But when you think about the importance of Instagram right now, I mean, those numbers are staggering,
20:30 and it doesn't seem like there's any way in hell they're ever going to be able to catch up to TikTok.
20:35 I come back, this seems very basic and a basic thing to say, but Facebook, Instagram, it's just not cool anymore.
20:42 Have you noticed too, with your own social media network, like every 10 years or so,
20:47 you want to kind of flush it out, but you can't.
20:49 And you have all of these people, first it was Facebook, that you kind of were like,
20:52 "I feel weird knowing so much about their lives."
20:54 And then you have Instagram, and you have people you've had on your Instagram for five-plus years,
20:59 and you want to kind of flush that out.
21:00 And somewhere along the way, it's just lost its cool factor.
21:03 And that's when Snap came along, and now you've got TikTok, and now you've got a new app, Be Real,
21:07 which I love because I've got like five people on it, the five people I really want to see what they're doing.
21:12 Yeah, it's funny. I mean, over the last, call it 10-plus years, I don't use a lot of those things.
21:16 I try them, I tinker them, just because I want to see what's going on,
21:19 like something that threatens an incumbent, that sort of thing.
21:22 Be Real, to me, seems exactly what goes on in Snap.
21:25 It's just a different functionality.
21:27 I see my kids, they take selfies and just send like a picture.
21:30 That's exactly what's going on in Be Real, but it's like two-sided.
21:33 So I get it. It doesn't seem particularly innovative to me,
21:36 and I don't expect it to be something that is like a powerhouse.
21:40 Well, here's my question. Does it represent something to a younger demographic?
21:44 And we've talked a lot about the mental health issues that social media networks have helped create or amplify.
21:50 I don't know, create, just maybe amplify.
21:52 And this is what I asked Evan Spiegel, too, last week at Code.
21:55 I said, does the rise of an app like Be Real, what kind of opportunity does that represent to you?
22:00 It's not curated. It's more quote-unquote "real," and that's, I think, probably Snapchat's sticking power.
22:07 They haven't figured out how to monetize it, but their user growth has been really strong.
22:12 Yeah, well, I mean, in a different regulatory environment, Facebook would have just snatched that right up.
22:17 And so when you think about it, I mean, they did a Series B round.
22:21 This is Be Real. It's a French company at $600 million.
22:25 And back in the day, I mean, when you think about that, that would have just been snapped up for a billion.
22:30 That was like the nice round number that Instagram and everything like that.
22:33 So Evan Spiegel maybe should be doing that.
22:35 When you think about their ability to buy things, I think some of their massive competitors,
22:40 you know, obviously Alphabet and Meta would have a hard time.
22:43 I think much less so when you think about the troubles that a company like Snap is having.
22:48 If they want to go out and buy some innovative things, the problem is, again, on a gap basis, this is an unprofitable company.
22:54 So, I mean, you and I could go back and forth on the things that they should do.
22:57 My biggest takeaway from that conversation with Evan, and I know that you had time with him on TechCheck,
23:03 was that they really want to get focused right now.
23:05 They really want to kind of get down to what the core of that product is and figure out how to better monetize the users that they have.
23:12 But then also, I mean, they're laying down the gauntlet because you said you're happy that they didn't come up with some BS sort of profitability metric that they will hit.
23:20 But gaining 30% of their users over the next year and change, that's a lot.
23:24 It is a lot. You bring up that word focus. I've been hearing that more and more recently.
23:29 And I spoke also this morning, we had Bill Ready of Pinterest.
23:33 And I asked him, OK, what's your strategy? How are you going to turn around that social media network?
23:37 And he just kept coming back to this focus.
23:40 They're going to focus on getting growing the merchant base and intent to buy there.
23:45 Talked to Chesky a few hours later, and I asked him, OK, when are you going to go like vertical?
23:49 You know, you're this platform and that's great.
23:51 But now you got cash and you can do something like build hotels again or manage hotels.
23:57 And he said, no, something I learned during the pandemic is that I have to focus.
24:02 And so that's what some of these CEOs are taking this time, this downturn with their stock falling so much from their peaks to just focus in on the thing that they do best.
24:12 Well, Dan, you and I may have all these ideas. OK, you could go out there and do this acquisition.
24:16 Wouldn't that be interesting? But it feels like a hunkering down moment for those, especially those unprofitable tech companies.
24:24 Yeah. And I worry even like a Twitter, you know, again, about five billion dollars in revenue is the same for Snap.
24:30 And Pinterest is half that. I mean, I just don't know how those companies kind of go it alone.
24:34 I mean, Pinterest is, you know, marginally profitable on an adjusted basis and, you know, is expected to be next year.
24:41 But I just don't know how they get the scale. And so if Snap is only worth 18 billion dollars as an enterprise value,
24:48 there's no way that if a Delaware court makes Elon Musk close on Twitter at 44 billion, that Snap is only worth 18 billion in my in my opinion.
24:59 So I think the best thing again, I think Twitter shareholders make out if he is forced to close.
25:05 I just don't think he will close. I think he will continue to stretch it out and move it around.
25:09 But if you're a shareholder, you have every opportunity in the world to sell your stock.
25:13 You know what I mean? Like you see the stock. Yeah. I mean, like, right.
25:17 You can sell it right now if you just don't think it's a trading near forty two dollars in the price is supposed to be fifty four.
25:23 But I guess my point is, is that if that doesn't happen, the management's out, the board is out.
25:28 The stock is a two handle on it, meaning it's like somewhere in the 20s or something like that.
25:33 And in that scenario, I think that you would maybe see.
25:36 And I know that they're not similar products, but Snap and Twitter and you just mentioned this, they should combine.
25:41 But you just mentioned this is that really important audience, that teen audience.
25:45 Well, let me tell you something, OK? Like teens are not really spending.
25:49 You know what I mean? Like just an interesting thing. And you almost want to upsell them to different platforms and different opportunities.
25:55 Talk to me about that. Look at Roblox. I mean, they came out.
25:58 It used to be exactly what you're saying.
26:00 You used to say they say, look, our user base is young. They're under 13 years old.
26:04 They're eventually going to spend money. And now you hear the CEO saying that, OK, now the majority of their users are over 13 years old.
26:11 As that is an asset because they're going to have more money to spend.
26:14 So it is moving up the value chain, but it feels like such a shift from the last few years.
26:18 We talked about the Coinbase and the Robinhoods and the Snaps having this active young user base that they can capitalize on.
26:25 The problem is that it's been really, as you say, really difficult to capitalize on them.
26:30 That's always going to be the case. I mean, they have to keep them on the platform and make sure they don't go somewhere else as they get older.
26:37 Yeah, and that's it. And they need to have more offerings than just like like VR glasses or something like that.
26:42 So I'm with you. All right. Let's talk. We only have a few more minutes.
26:45 You spoke to Dara this morning, the CEO of Uber.
26:48 You've had a lot of interviews with him since he took over a few years ago from Expedia here.
26:52 Talk to me a little bit about that business, because they have come roaring back.
26:56 Both Uber and Lyft have actually given some pretty upbeat guidance, right, about their businesses going forward.
27:02 And these two companies are famous for guiding to some sort of like profitability metrics that most people think is a total fugazi.
27:08 But again, talk to me a little bit about like what you think the vibe's going there, because Uber has had a huge rally.
27:14 It got to about 20 over the course of the summer and it was just trading, I think, around 33.
27:21 And even today, it really outperformed the broad market.
27:24 It was only down three and a half percent versus a Nasdaq that was down, you know, five and change percent.
27:30 Relative outperformed. But when you say come roaring back, come roaring back from when?
27:35 I mean, they didn't do anything during the pandemic, didn't really do much after.
27:40 Uber went public at forty five dollars a share.
27:42 And remember, I remember so well covering that IPO and there was talks that, oh, could this company go public at one hundred and twenty billion dollar valuation as the investment bankers were fighting over, you know, who got to represent them?
27:55 And it just hasn't lived up to that potential, because I know the reason I love covering Uber so much is I feel like it was my baby when I got to San Francisco as a tech reporter.
28:04 I didn't really know what I was doing. The first company I looked into was Uber.
28:08 It seemed like this exciting disruptor that had become a household name, a verb with this really controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick, who would go on to do all the wrong things, including that video of him chewing out a driver when he was in the backseat.
28:23 So Dara came in and, you know, it's really admirable what he's done in terms of taking on this challenge.
28:29 This is a Wall Street guy, though, right? And he's very good at telling investors what they want to hear.
28:36 So I wonder, this is a stock with an overwhelming buy rating. I don't know exactly what it is, but it seems to me like Wall Street loves the stock.
28:43 Well, they were all on the deal. OK, and there's forty three buys, four holds and one sell.
28:49 And I mean, that that is astounding for a stock that is down, you know, twenty five percent of the year.
28:55 It has outperformed many of its peers. But to your point, they were all in on the IPO.
29:00 They've all stuck it out. And it's been a dead bang loser because the stock's thirty one bucks.
29:04 It traded twenty, went public at forty five, didn't spend a whole heck of a lot of time above that.
29:10 But here's the astounding thing is that they're expected to have thirty one billion dollars in sales this year, but on a gap basis, net income loss of nine billion plus, which is wild, easy.
29:22 And then look at their valuation. This is not a tech company. This is valued like a value company.
29:28 Right. But that's kind of what Dara Khosrowshahi has been doing.
29:32 He has sold off all the most interesting parts of this business, like autonomous driving, that its founder, Travis Kalanick, said was existential for the company.
29:40 That is how they grow to become worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
29:44 They don't have that anymore. They don't have scooters and bikes.
29:47 They have done a bunch of acquisitions like Postmates, but Postmates was sort of tossed around by everyone in the gig economy.
29:56 And the result of the M&A activity has been extremely dilutive to shareholders as well, along with the stock based compensation.
30:05 So, again, I appreciate how we moved on from adjusted EBITDA. That metric just drives me crazy.
30:11 But now it's free cash flow and it feels like sort of the new crutch for unprofitable tech companies.
30:17 They can say, look, we have free cash flow, but then you look a little deeper.
30:21 And if you put back in stock based compensation, which Warren Buffett and others think is a real expense, a real cost that you need to take into account, they're still unprofitable.
30:31 Yeah, well, I get that. And again, that's why we like to look at the gap.
30:35 And some of these names that you mentioned in the gig, I mean, Airbnb has a 79 billion dollar market cap.
30:41 When you think about DoorDash, also like a 25 billion. We just talked about Uber at the 60.
30:46 I mean, so these guys, the unit economics in these companies have not gotten a whole heck of a lot better.
30:51 Except for Airbnb. Airbnb has gap profitability and they just did or they just announced a two billion dollar buyback.
30:58 So it's interesting to see, actually, how.
31:00 Yeah, but I don't want to see that. If you were a shareholder of that company, why are they buying back their own stock?
31:05 Yeah, they want to be focused. They got rid of experiences. They got rid of hotels. You want to go do some cool shit.
31:11 And you know what I mean? Like, so to me, I don't know. All right.
31:14 Yeah, I hear you. I hear you.
31:16 No, I mean, again, I mean, it's the kiss of death when you see like Twitter.
31:20 You know what? Right before in February, they announced a stock buyback.
31:23 OK, the stock was in the shitter back then. OK. And Elon was buying it.
31:27 Maybe they knew Elon was like buying stock out there. They thought it was a good time.
31:30 And I remember seeing Ned Siegel, the CFO out in L.A. This was in early February before that thing.
31:36 I said, dude, when you guys announced that stock buyback, I was like almost fell off my chair.
31:41 And I said to him, to his face, I don't know the guy either. I went up to him at a party somewhere and I probably ruined his night.
31:47 Sorry, Ned. Nice guy. And I was like, listen, just wait.
31:51 I said, that is literally like you just waved the flag for the activists and they're coming.
31:56 I know you're real. I'm sorry. I try to be real as the I like I would do the same thing because I'm such a nerd.
32:04 I love that. I mean, come talk to me about buybacks at a party. I'm all in.
32:08 Well, let's let's be in you. We got to get together. We got to talk about buybacks.
32:12 We got to talk about like kind of funky profitability in the gig economy space.
32:16 But listen, Debo, I know you got to go. I really wanted to catch up with you after code because you and I had some of the same thoughts after hearing some of those conversations.
32:25 And I really hope that you will come back and OK, if you will come on on the tape with Danny Guy and me, because I know that they're jealous that I had you to myself today.
32:35 I would love to. And I will sort through my NBC email to make sure I never miss an email from you again.
32:40 All right. Fair enough. All right. Debo, thanks for joining us.
32:43 And OK, thank you so much for having me. All right. See you on Tech Check. See you. Bye. Thanks.
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