An Nvidia Challenger Files For An IPO + Can A New CEO Turn Nike Around?

Scott and Ed open the show by discussing Tesla’s quarterly deliveries, a potential CVS breakup, and a venture capital firm’s decision to return money to investors. Then Scott explains the biggest red flag he sees in chipmaker Cerebras Systems as it prepares to go public, but breaks down why he would still invest in the company. Scott and Ed debate about sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf and whether or not the funds make smart investments. Finally, they examine Nike’s earnings and break down why Nike’s dependence on its brand might have led to its downfall. Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:30Scott Galloway?

  Today's number: $762,000. That's how much Republican PACs have spent at the Capital Grill Steakhouse this election cycle. Ed, how do you bring a Republican to his knees? You paint your dick orange.

• 1:54Ed Elson?

  Hello, Ed.

• 1:55Scott Galloway?

  How are you?

• 1:56Ed Elson?

  I'm good. I'm more excited by that number than I am by the joke. 750K to the Capital Grill is one of the greatest statistics we've had on this podcast so far.

• 2:06Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but it's nothing compared to the amount of revenue that Grindr recognized in Milwaukee the weekend of the convention.

• 2:12Ed Elson?

  That's a good point. I'm sure they're correlated. I'm sure they both had spikes at the same time.

• 2:16Scott Galloway?

  So the most interesting thing about that stat, Ed, is that that is 13 times the amount of money that the Democrats spent. It's crazy, no?

• 2:24Ed Elson?

  It's unbelievable. What do you think is the Capital Grill equivalent for the Democrats?

• 2:28Scott Galloway?

  Epstein's Island?

• 2:29Ed Elson?

  That was good. That was good. That is good. Do you like the Capital Grill? What's your favorite restaurant these days?

• 2:36Scott Galloway?

  I'm sort of a creature of habit. My favorite restaurant in London is Granger and Co. I started going there when I spent a summer here and it's in Marlon. My favorite restaurant period is In-N-Out Burger, but in New York, my favorite is, my new favorite is Sartianos. Cause I know Scott Sartiano and I like him and it's cool. And I see celebs there and I kind of feel like, I'm like, oh, hi. And they treat me nice. Cause I know Scott and I feel big time there. What's your favorite restaurant? What do young, cool people eat?

• 3:00Ed Elson?

  Esodi in the West Village is pretty great. Pretty good pasta. I haven't been to Sartianos. I'd like to try it out. Granger is great and the ricotta pancakes are sort of a staple there. Have you tried those?

• 3:11Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, of course. Although I had all this blood work done and I'm used to, I'm used to walking into the room like I just won. Like I'm Simone Biles and I've just stuck the landing whenever I have blood work done. And she's like, well, this is a bit of an issue. We need to talk about this. I'm like, huh? What? Wait, no, I'm me. I'm, I'm like crazy healthy. I'm getting old, Ed. And I kept asking her to take my blood pressure until it was fine. I'm like, no, take it again. Take it again.

• 3:38Ed Elson?

  And why are we talking about this? Do you think your diet has something to do with this? Why are we on blood work now?

• 3:43Scott Galloway?

  I have no idea. I got here. I had, um, maybe that's part of the problem. So I've spent the last two mornings for two to three hours getting, uh, NADs. Do you know what these are? They're supposedly. It's basically biohacking. I'm convinced it's biohacking for rich people. Rich people like to think they can live longer than other people, so they do all this stupid shit. And I think I've fallen into this trap. So it stands for some nuclear atomic diogride or something. And supposedly it activates cell growth and I don't know, you're not going to recognize me on next week's pod. I'm just going to be.

• 4:20Ed Elson?

  You're going to be ripped.

• 4:21Scott Galloway?

  I don't even need to be ripped anymore. I just want to be this adorable little Jewish. I want to look like Barbra Streisand in Yentl. I just want to look young, infeminine. Wait, is this my way of coming out?

• 4:32Ed Elson?

  You want to look like Timothy Chalamet, I think is what you're describing.

• 4:35Scott Galloway?

  I don't know if it's his NADs, but my brain is just firing in a billion different directions right now.

• 4:39Ed Elson?

  Okay, well, let's, let's take all this energy and point it towards the markets now.

• 4:43Scott Galloway?

  Let's do it.

• 4:44Ed Elson?

  And start with our weekly review of market vitals.

• 4:53Ed Elson?

  The S and P 500 declined, the dollar rose, Bitcoin fell, and the yield on 10-year Treasuries increased. Shifting to the headlines, Tesla's quarterly deliveries rose for the first time this year, up more than 6% from a year earlier. However, that metric still came in below analyst expectations and the stock fell 3% on the news. CVS is considering breaking up its pharmacy and insurance businesses as it looks to improve operations. The company is also pursuing cost-cutting initiatives, including cutting nearly 3,000 jobs. And finally, venture capital firm CRV is returning more than half of the money from its $500 million select fund to investors. The firm decided to cut the select fund, which invested in mature startups after consistently seeing valuations

• 5:37Ed Elson?

  that were too high to get a decent return. Scott, your thoughts, starting with Tesla's quarterly delivery update?

• 5:45Scott Galloway?

  The biggest trend, I think, in auto is that while everyone wanted to follow Musk because he's got a three-quarter of a trillion dollar market cap and it was all about EVs. It ends up they may have been wrong and Ford and General Motors went all in. And Toyota, which in my view is the best managed automobile company in the world, said, no, we're not going to go after the NFT of EVs. And they made a big bet on hybrids. And the consumer is actually moving towards hybrids and hybrids basically offer.

• 6:14Scott Galloway?

  A lot of the upside of electric, it's more efficient, less carbon or less shit into the air, and it doesn't rely on the grid. So you have more range, less insecurity about being caught somewhere without a charging station. They're actually less expensive. And Toyota is kind of killing it right now. And despite the fact that Toyota's killing it and growing faster than Tesla, really well positioned and made a huge investment on the right horse, and that is hybrids as opposed to EVs. It trades at 0.8x revenues, whereas Tesla trades at 8 to 9x revenue. So one of these things is either vastly overvalued or one of them is vastly undervalued. But we're so obsessed with Tesla because of the

• 6:58Scott Galloway?

  individual at the head of that company, that we don't talk about general trends in the industry. And I think it's all about hybrids.

• 7:05Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it is interesting how the EV used to be sort of the sexiest two letters in the auto industry. And it's kind of just so ubiquitous now. It doesn't have that level of hype and sex appeal that it used to. And so Tesla has to rely on different hype stories now. And I think that's why I believe that these quarterly delivery updates are becoming less and less important. Essentially, the story is they pretty much met expectations. They remain just ahead of BYD in terms of overall EV deliveries. The overall message, and we'll get a fuller picture at earnings in a couple of weeks, but the overall message is things are going fine-ish for Tesla. But more importantly for Tesla, this Thursday

• 7:49Ed Elson?

  is their big robotaxi event. And I think that's more important than the numbers because as we've talked about with Tesla before, the valuation is all about the narrative. This is the big moment where people will ask the question, is the robotaxi actually legit? My prediction is that that robotaxi event will be a giant letdown. Two tells for me why that's going to happen. One is the narrative leading up to it. Elon has a habit of overpromising and underdelivering, but he isn't even overpromising about this event. He's barely talking about it. He's spending most of his time shitposting about politics. Makes me think that he believes that this robot taxi is going to underwhelm. And the second tell for me is the location of the event.

• 8:31Ed Elson?

  They're doing it at the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank, which to me says this is going to be a cinematic event. This isn't actually going to be a sort of technological showcase. This is just going to be a big production sexy commercial about what the robot taxi could look like. As opposed to a tangible demonstration of what it actually looks like right now. So my prediction would be that this robot taxi event that's happening end of this week will be highly underwhelming. And I think the stock is going to suffer as all of the hype and the excitement around Tesla continues to deflate. Your thoughts on CVS evaluating spinning out their insurance and their healthcare businesses separate from their consumer business?

• 9:14Scott Galloway?

  There's a lot here. Essentially, they're deconglomerating. They saw Amazon coming and they felt like they needed to bulk up and take advantage of the user interface. Or the customer interface they had and thought we can up sell you upstream to insurance. We can up sell you or down sell you downstream to, you know, one minute clinics. I've actually used those clinics a couple of times for vaccines and I thought they were really, really good. So, but what happens with a conglomerate is you end up paying a conglomerate tax. And that is when the New York Times CEO thinks, you know, newspapers are a shitty business and I don't want to just answer for one company. I want to diversify. So they go and buy a bunch of other newspapers and then buy the building, their headquarters.

• 9:55Scott Galloway?

  At one point, the New York Times building was worth more than the entire company. So it had become a REIT accidentally. They own 70% of the Boston Red Sox, makes no fucking sense. I remember when I asked the CEO, I don't know if you know this or not, but I was on the board of the New York Times.

• 10:09Ed Elson?

  I need a bell. Where's my bell?

• 10:12Scott Galloway?

  In the boarding, they said, Scott Galloway, director. What do you think? We were talking about capital strategy. I'm like, why do we have the Boston Red Sox? And Janet Robinson, the CEO of the Times, said, because we get special insight into Boston Athletics. I'm like, oh, yeah.

• 10:24Ed Elson?

  I know about this story, but that's a very interesting detail I have not heard before.

• 10:28Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's called bullshit. She was trying to justify an asset they owned for no real reason. And I'm like, oh, yeah, we're known for our coverage of the Celtics. It just, it made no sense. But what happens is, is CEOs love to get, their incentive is to get bigger. Now, why do they want to get bigger? Because their compensation is based on the following. Directors don't like to do any work. The compensation committee hires a firm called Towers parent to come in and look at compensation. They say, okay, Janet Robinson, the CEO of the New York Times, it's a media company that is doing $5 billion in revenue. That's the thing. What kind of sector it's in, the size of the company. And then they say, the average person running a $5 billion media company gets this much

• 11:08Scott Galloway?

  in compensation and this much in stock options. So the incentive of the CEO is to diversify, such that their life is just less anxious, right? If one brand isn't doing well, the other is usually doing a bit better. It kind of smoothes out the earnings. And two, the bigger the company, you typically, the higher the compensation. So there are a lot of incentives to try and have a game changing acquisition. And two thirds of acquisitions do not work. They, people overpay for them because they get excited. They don't realize this business is hard. Integration problems, you have to pay a premium to take out the other shareholders. So they very rarely work. When they work, they can work hugely. Meta is probably the best acquirer in history. Instagram, which they purchased for a billion, is probably

• 11:52Scott Galloway?

  worth a couple hundred billion. But the vast majority of the time, they're not. Now, on the flip side, what almost always works is the disposition of assets or spins. Because in a conglomerate where investors think, you know, I don't need you to, to diversify for me. I can go buy an insurance company all on my own. So I don't like this kind of milquetoast, amorphous Frankenstein of a company. So they end up, typically, the market says, let's find the shittiest business and assign that multiple to the entire thing. You end up with this company that despite perhaps having good assets, trades at the multiple of a shitty retailer in decline. So this insurance company that they own would probably trade

• 12:35Scott Galloway?

  at a much higher multiple for an independent company. So the disposition of assets becomes accretive to shareholder spins almost always. Work. So I think this is a, I think this is a good idea.

• 12:46Ed Elson?

  Our final headline is CRV returning their money to investors, something you basically never see venture capitalists doing. What is your read on this? Why have they done this? And what does it say about, about the VC industry right now?

• 13:03Scott Galloway?

  All of the returns are kind of aggregating to a small number of funds that are essentially getting the best deal flow. And they're looking for companies that they can put hundreds of millions or billions into because they've raised so much capital. And I think what you're seeing is this enormous shakeout in the VC community where you're either one of these mega funds that before the returns on fund nine come in, you're already raising fund 10. And because you get amazing deal flow, your, your institutional investors get good money, or really niche focused VC firms that bring a very specific knowledge, like Lux Capital, Joshua's company, that's kind of this deep, serious, you know, forward

• 13:46Scott Galloway?

  looking technologies like brain scans, brain implants, or nuclear power, whatever it is. But just a smaller, medium sized VC that's trying to invest in tech, you're kind of fucked. You have no advantage. You don't have the capital. You're not getting good deal flow. And so I think there's just going to be, I mean, there already is kind of a pretty serious shakeout. And I think these guys have probably said, we can't find good deals. And the few deals we find are just so expensive. The, the market has taken startups. I mean, it's sort of tempting. Right after I sold L2, I immediately went to, well, I'm going to go raise, start another company because the amount of money you can raise

• 14:27Scott Galloway?

  at a valuation, it really has gotten kind of batshit crazy. But at that point, my attitude was as a quote unquote, proven entrepreneur, there was maybe two or three investors I would raise money for, or I was just wasn't going to raise. And so to be a tier two here, it is really, really tough. And as a whole, I just think it's a shitty asset class.

• 14:49Ed Elson?

  More specific to this CRV headline.

• 14:53Ed Elson?

  It's really all about late-stage VC. They're still operating an early-stage fund, which, you know, they didn't return the money there. I assume it's doing okay slash fine. But their concern is late-stage VC. And just some statistics here. Last year, late-stage deal volume fell 53%. And late-stage funding, the amount of actual capital going into these late-stage companies, fell 60%. And in addition, we're seeing this giant drop-off in IPO activity. We've only had 150 new listings in the US this year. You compare that to 2021, where we had more than 1,000 new IPOs.

• 15:34Ed Elson?

  And so the general theme that we're seeing within VC is that we're seeing far fewer Series D rounds, far fewer Series E rounds, far fewer companies are sort of breaching the surface of growth stage and, you know, picking up steam and entering into the public capital markets. My question to you would be, why is that happening?

• 15:55Scott Galloway?

  I would speculate that that's a function of the fact that the IPO market has yet to emerge from this sort of deep freeze it's been in for the last several years. Because typically, late-stage investment is, all right, we need to shore up the balance sheet, maybe make a few tuck-in acquisitions, but we're basically getting cleaned up for an IPO. And it's sort of right now, the worst of both worlds, and that is it's expensive because these companies still have a, you know, the market is still fairly hot for companies in the right sector. But the IPO market is all but shut to just a few players. So it's sort of like, okay, I'm paying a lot, hoping to get into liquidity in a market where fewer companies are getting, are getting out.

• 16:36Ed Elson?

  It feels like deal flow is very downstream. And what I mean by that, we're seeing far fewer IPOs recently. And now we're seeing that also late-stage deal flow is falling off a cliff and funding. And I wonder if that means that this is going to continue to trickle down into early-stage startups. And I wonder if the general theme is that we're seeing the ramifications of a world where simply fewer successful companies are being created in general.

• 17:09Ed Elson?

  And you know, we're just beginning to see the after effects of that. We're seeing the impacts where the market is becoming more and more dominated by these mega, mega giant companies, the magnificent seven, big tech, the companies that we constantly talk about on this podcast. And in the meanwhile, actual successful company formation has been slowly dying. And we're beginning to see the ramifications of that in the public markets and then in late stage. And I wonder if that will continue to the point where suddenly maybe venture as an industry is not a thing anymore.

• 17:44Scott Galloway?

  Well, you just made the argument for Chair Khan. That's her whole rap is that effectively what we have here is an ecosystem that says, find the monopoly or find the future monopoly. And then, once that company starts, a company starts to show market leadership in a hot sector, you just try and out raise everybody and just, just literally sweep the competition off the deck with brute force with more and more capital. And it just, it's not a very healthy ecosystem. What you have is a small number of apex predators where they introduce a reticulated anaconda to an ecosystem and there's just no other species that can fight back. So what you're saying is accurate.

• 18:26Scott Galloway?

  And for me, it all kind of forward engineers to the fact that we just need dramatically more antitrust.

• 18:32Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I think the other alternative for VCs is you either try to get a 10, 20, 30x return on the company that you bet on that becomes a monopoly, or you're going for a one and a half to two X return where the company will be aquihired by a big tech company.

• 18:50Scott Galloway?

  I can just speak from experience. General Catalyst invested in my company, L2. 27 months later, they got three times their money back and they were disappointed. Their attitude is you're either 10x or you're zero.

• 19:03Ed Elson?

  Which means so many VCs are going to get crushed now because there are fewer and fewer winners.

• 19:08Scott Galloway?

  A hundred percent. That's why I'm really not cut out for venture capital and I probably should never raise money from venture capitalists again. And plus, at the age of 50, I probably shouldn't. And that is my, my skill has been taking a company from A to DRE and selling it for, for a really good valuation. I build companies. You know, I built my first company, my first, I started a strategy firm and sold it for $33 million when it was doing 10 million in revenue when I was, I don't know, 33 or 34. And then L2 built it, got it to 20 million revenues, sold it for 160 million. That's what I'm good at. My investors were sort of nonplussed by that. I mean,

• 19:51Scott Galloway?

  they, they were happy. They made money. They were willing to invest with me again. But they're in the venture business, they're like, go baby, go swing for the fucking fence. And if you, if you herniated a disc, okay, that's fine. But we're not, we're not here for singles and doubles, folks. The difference, the reason why I like working with private equity is you're in companies and the private equity guys say, all right, we're going to give management 8% of the company. We're all on the same page. We're going to try and be in this thing three to seven years and then sell for two to three X what we invested. I find that's much healthier than a bunch of young guys from Stanford saying 50 X, baby, 50 X. It's just sort of, okay.

• 20:34Ed Elson?

  Wish me luck.

• 20:34Scott Galloway?

  I'm gonna try real hard.

• 20:36Ed Elson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:40Ed Elson?

  We'll be right back after the break with a look at a new AI IPO. If you're enjoying the show, hit follow and leave us a review on Prof G Markets.

• 20:57Speaker 00

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• 22:31Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. California-based chipmaker Cerebras Systems filed for an IPO that could raise up to $1 billion. With an offering of that size, the Nvidia challenger could be valued at around $7 to $8 billion. Cerebras showed strong, albeit early-stage growth for the first six months of 2024, with revenue increasing more than 15-fold from a year earlier. The trouble is, 87% of those sales came from just one company. That company is G42, the top AI firm in the United Arab Emirates. Should the US give Cerebras any trouble with its export licenses, most of the company's revenue could be at risk. Scott, what do you make of this IPO filing from Cerebras, perhaps the new Nvidia?

• 23:16Scott Galloway?

  Look, this is... Never underestimate the market's ability to come up with a product when consumers have cash in hand. And you have a small number of companies that have kind of soaked up the majority of the capital in the retail markets. And that is the SPAC market emerged because there were a lot of dentists and lawyers and retail investors that thought, I would really like to be part of the Pepsi generation. And I'm willing to buy a cool little company, even if Goldman Sachs doesn't think it's ready for prime time. And the demand was there amongst retail investors and SPACs went out and then they were largely shitty companies and a lot of retail investors lost a lot of money. The demand from retail and who do you invest? If you're a retail investor that wants exposure to AI, where do you invest right now? It's basically Microsoft or Nvidia. What else do you invest in?

• 24:01Scott Galloway?

  That's it. There is so much demand for Nvidia like competitor, even if it's even if it's a distant, distant, distant number five, that there's a market for it. Now, the first sign is that Barclays and Citi are not tier one. And to be clear, Barclays and Citi are the underwriters of this IPO. Yeah, they're the underwriters. So what that says is Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs said no. Otherwise, one of those guys would be on the cover, which isn't to say it isn't a good company, which isn't to say that it won't get a good reception in the marketplace. But that's sort of the first, I don't call it a red flag, but the first indicator here. The red flag that is the size of Kansas here is that 87% of its

• 24:46Scott Galloway?

  revenues come from a company backed by, I think, the UAE that is building its own LLM that also owns or has the opportunity to buy shares in the company. I mean, it's kind of a related party conflict, overly concentrated customer base that is the stuff of nightmares. Having said that, I would like to invest. Whoever, I mean, there's a couple of reasons I'd like to invest. I like the idea of bringing attention, sunlight, and capital to anything in this space that is not Nvidia or OpenAI. It would be great for other competitors to emerge. So I would love to be supportive of this company. I want to follow it. I want

• 25:26Scott Galloway?

  to talk about it. I want to water as many new companies in this space as possible, such that it just doesn't develop into the wind tail, only much more concentrated. The second is, I just think this, I think there's a decent chance this company gets an enormous pop. Because, oh, it's AI. Oh, it's a competitor to Nvidia. Sure, I'll throw some money at it and it's going to go out at a $7 billion market cap. Say there's a one in 50 chance it becomes a quarter of Nvidia. Well, that would be 750 billion. That would be, I mean, do the math. That's still an okay investment. So this is a lottery ticket,

• 26:08Scott Galloway?

  but it's a lottery ticket on, you know, the super, super, whatever it's called, the super jackpot or the Powerball that all of a sudden we woke up and it's like it's 1.1 billion dollars. The prize here is so enormous for anybody that establishes momentum and traction. So it's not the ilk, it's not the pedigree you'd want in a company like this right now. I wouldn't be surprised if the thing doubles on its first trade.

• 26:34Ed Elson?

  Well, I find it interesting that they're almost borrowing marketing tactics from the fast food industry. And that is, you know, when Burger King sales start slowing, a very surefire way to stoke demand and interest in the company is to come out with a triple Whopper or a double King XL. Basically just create a fun size item of the product that you're already selling. So having said that, I'm just going to read you some of the main details from the S1. The first page in gigantic font, it takes up the entire page, says, quote, "Bigger chips are faster and more efficient for AI."

• 27:16Ed Elson?

  In the prospectus summary, quote, "The third generation Cerebras wafer scale engine is the largest chip ever sold. It is 57 times larger than the leading commercially available GPU. It has 52 times more compute cores, 880 times more on-chip memory, and 7,000 times more memory bandwidth. The sheer size of the wafer scale chip allows us to keep more work on silicon and minimize the time-consuming, power-hungry movement of data." In other words, the sales pitch. Is that size matters? That's basically it. But then again, they also say that it's 20 times faster than Nvidia's chips.

• 27:58Ed Elson?

  And to your point, you know, if it's, if it's a good marketing tactic, maybe that's all that matters. Maybe people read that, they hear how big this chip is and they think this is great. We want to get involved. So I'm sort of find it a little bit ridiculous parts of this. I'm certainly concerned about that 87% number going to one company. But there is an argument to be made that this kind of stuff could work and coming out with fun sized AI could generate the momentum they need to actually do well in the stock market.

• 28:31Scott Galloway?

  If they can do anything, if ends up at any of their IP, any of their niches, if, if defense contractors or pharmaceutical firms find that this monstered supersized chip works for them, it's going to be worth a lot more than seven billion. So this is highly volatile, but the upside here is asymmetric.

• 28:52Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it's like a mean stock play.

• 28:53Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I could easily see this thing on any signs of life going to 30, 40 or 50 billion. Seven X versus assume the downside is zero.

• 29:01Ed Elson?

  But we should be clear, this is not at all value investing. This is not based on the fundamentals and I do want to get your take on the fundamentals. So they did 136 million in the first half of this year. That number is up 15 fold from the previous year. However, as we pointed out, 87% of that revenue is coming from one company and that's G42. And just I want to get your take a little bit on G42. So this is an AI holding company that is based in Abu Dhabi. They do AI everything. They, I mean, the website, it says AI research, AI cloud computing, AI data centers, AI healthcare, investing, et cetera, et cetera.

• 29:41Ed Elson?

  And they are largely controlled by the royal family of Abu Dhabi and largely funded by the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• 29:50Ed Elson?

  My instinct when I see these kinds of companies is that this is very rich people who don't really know what they're doing. Another word for that is, another term for that is dumb money. You know, people who have more money than they even know what to do with. That is my instinct. Having said that, though, Microsoft is also a significant investor in G42. They have partnerships going on with OpenAI and Dell and IBM and Microsoft. They could be legit. But my question to you would be, is the fact that their biggest client, a Middle Eastern royalty backed holding company, is that good, bad, or does

• 30:35Ed Elson?

  it not matter?

• 30:36Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so there's some good and there's some bad. So let's talk about the bad. Related party transactions in 1999 and 2007, when I was starting my tech companies, what we found is that basically it was if you had a software company or even brand strategy, my firm Profit, in 99, we were killing it because there were all of these startups who needed a brand identity and a logo and a strategy and a positioning and a website. So it was just champagne and cocaine. When the market collapsed in 2000, just all of our new clients dried up because all of the new guys were gone. They just got swept off the decks. And a lot of times you found that all these new software startups, Broadcom

• 31:18Scott Galloway?

  and all this e-commerce shit we were buying, they were selling to all these hundreds or thousands of e-commerce startups. And then overnight, 60% of them were gone. We were kind of all selling software and shit to each other in the, in the kind of the new brave world of the ecosystem. There are so many new AI startups that the fear is, okay, if there's a chill here, these guys get swept off the deck first. This is The scariest thing here is the concentration of one client, right? Now, having said that, you can imagine that the Gulf and the entire world looks at the amount, looks at this sector and says, this is going to be probably the sector that creates the most shareholder value the quickest in a long, long time.

• 31:59Scott Galloway?

  And it really bums us out, the 97% of it is in one nation and 80% of it or 70% of it isn't with a seven mile radius of SFO International Airport. And as we try and transition, we being the Gulf States or the UAE in this case, from a fossil fuel based economy to a services, tech, hospitality, education, and in this instance, you know, technology based economy, we would like to have a presence in AI. So the related party transaction here is really uncomfortable. Having said that, when your related party has the deepest pockets in the world, it's kind of a good related party and they'll be very supportive of the company moving forward because they would like to see the center of gravity, at least a little bit around AI, move into that region.

• 32:44Scott Galloway?

  So red flags, red flags everywhere. I'm a buyer.

• 32:48Ed Elson?

  Yeah, just one final comment from me on these sovereign wealth funds. The Public Investment Fund, which is Saudi Arabia, Mubadala, which is UAE. These funds, in my view, are the most susceptible to bullshit. They are not disciples of the boring is sexy argument which you have made. These are people who invest hundreds of billions of dollars into whatever is the technology du jour. They'll invest billions into buying Premier League teams. They're building cities that have artificial moons. I mean, these people love sexy stuff. And so the idea that there is a company that is pitching the world's biggest GPU cluster.

• 33:35Ed Elson?

  I'm just not at all surprised that the biggest backer is someone in the Gulf with a shit ton of oil money.

• 33:41Scott Galloway?

  What I have found, the worst thing they could have done for their brand was this brand called Masayoshi Son. And that is the whole WeWork fiasco. SoftBank got this reputation for coming in and just overfunding stupid fucking ideas. And it's tightly linked to this, what you would, what you would describe as dumb money in the Gulf. If you spend any time in the Gulf and you spend any time with these guys, I would argue on average, they are more professionally managed than the majority of VC hedge funds in the West. I mean, a rookie move is if you meet a new VC or fund and they think they're going to fly into Riyadh and just like hold out a hat and that billions of dollars is going to drop into their fund, they're in for a rude awakening.

• 34:24Ed Elson?

  That's what's happening, no?

• 34:25Scott Galloway?

  No.

• 34:26Ed Elson?

  I feel like those are the head, fair enough, I don't experience it personally, but what I certainly see in the headlines is that you, you, you take a flight, you have your brand, you hold your hat out and they dump billions of dollars in.

• 34:40Scott Galloway?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. For every, for every fund that's raising money there, there are a hundred going there and going to a cool resort in the desert and going to the Superfund Conference and then coming back with no money. As a matter of fact, they've switched their objective to no longer letting money leave the region, but what they want is what's in it for us? We need to get, we want to create jobs, we want to, we know we, we know we're running out of oil. We don't know if it's 40 years or 70 years, but we know we're running out of it. So we need to make this transition and the transition is not only making money abroad, but it's building sustainable industry here. They're trying to build a huge industry and even a city focusing on gaming, you know, video games. They're building huge universities. NYU has a huge presence in Abu Dhabi.

• 35:25Scott Galloway?

  I think it's a little bit reductive and, and I don't know, I, I, I think you're falling into the trap of believing that there, that you've seen the headlines and the stories and the-

• 35:40Ed Elson?

  They've made bad investments.

• 35:41Scott Galloway?

  Oh, no doubt, but I also think they've made good investments. And my experience with them has been that they are just as if not more sophisticated than any other alternative investments investor. Anyways.

• 35:55Scott Galloway?

  Come to Riyadh. You and I are going to Riyadh.

• 35:57Ed Elson?

  Exactly. I think, I think that's where we're headed here. I think either MBS is in the room with you with a gun to your head, or we're going to get him on the podcast. One of those two things is gonna happen.

• 36:08Scott Galloway?

  Neither of those is true, and I want to be clear. I have no investments or vested interest in the Gulf right now. Just, just to be clear. Just to be clear.

• 36:17Ed Elson?

  We'll look into that. We'll be right back after the break with a look at the path forward for Nike.

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• 38:09Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profiteam Markets. Nike withdrew its full year sales guidance ahead of its new CEO's arrival later this month. The company also postponed its investor day, signaling that a meaningful turnaround will take some time, and the stock fell 7%. As we discussed previously, Nike tapped company veteran Elliot Hill to take the helm amid declining sales. Revenue for the most recent quarter dropped 10% year over year. CFO Matthew Friend said pulling the guidance would give Hill, quote, "much-needed flexibility to evaluate Nike's strategies and business trends." Scott, based on your experience, one, what do you make of these Nike earnings, revenue down 10%? And two, what do you think the new CEO Elliot Hill needs to do here to stage a comeback for Nike?

• 38:54Scott Galloway?

  You know, I like this company so much, I have a bias. I want you to go first, Ed. I think you probably have, I mean, you know, unlike, unlike your exceptionally biased bordering on racist views of the golf, I'd like your, I'd like your views on Nike on the swish. And by the way, they're really nice white people. Go ahead.

• 39:17Ed Elson?

  No one's going to buy this. No one's going to buy that the reason I believe that they're investing in this company is because I'm racist.

• 39:24Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, go ahead. What do you think of Nike?

• 39:27Ed Elson?

  Well, I think what's interesting is that, you know, that there's not one part of the business here that is working. It's basically bad across the board. So you're seeing revenue declines in direct revenue and brand revenue and wholesale revenue. You're also seeing revenue declines across every region. So it's down 11% in North America, it's down 13% in Europe. The slowest decrease was in China, which is down 4%, but that's sort of the rising tide with all boats as we're seeing, you know, China is somewhat improving, or at least it's falling less fast than it was before. So the financial picture for Nike is very simple. Things are just bad across the board.

• 40:09Ed Elson?

  The only other interesting detail is the fact that they decided to withdraw their full year guidance, i.e. their financial forecast for the next 12 months. And instead, they're only offering quarterly forecasting. And their explanation for that is that, you know, we have a management shakeup, we've got a new CEO, we're in a transition period. I can't tell if that is an appropriate excuse or not. So I would like to get your take on that. What do you make of a company like Nike as big as Nike saying, we actually don't know what the next 12 months looks like because we've got a new CEO coming in. Is that a valid excuse or is it a little bit bullshit?

• 40:48Scott Galloway?

  I think it's the latter. I think when you're a company like Nike, you should have such a deep bench. You should have such a talented CFO. You should be able to draw on such an incredibly talented CEO, which I think the new CEO is, that you should be able to handle earnings calls and forward looking projections. So if you really feel that way, that you need to free up, the excuse they gave that it would, it would essentially, what was it said, that it would much needed flexibility to evaluate Nike's strategy and business trends? That's why companies are taken private. Because when you have a public company, you're sort of promising that you're going to give a certain level of transparency, especially when you're an S and P company like Nike.

• 41:29Scott Galloway?

  So that is yet another signal that these guys really don't have their shit together. And even if you were to come on and say, I'm new, this is what I'm thinking and have the CFO report in a very no mercy, no malice way. You know, this is what's going on. I think analysts would be fine, but to kind of go back into we, we don't know what's going on. We want the freedom to figure this out. Come on, you're fucking Nike for God's sakes. You should have that. You should have five people sitting around the table that could probably be the CEO in the earnings call for, in the next two or three quarters that are just very good at what they do. And the fact that they don't have that, it reflects poorly on the board and, and, and the bench, if you will.

• 42:09Scott Galloway?

  Now, down 10% on a company of this size is no doubt, that is, that is nearly a meltdown for a company like this that is so diversified around the globe. I wonder if this was a bit of a kitchen sink quarter, if they kind of threw all their bad news in here. What do they need to do? I'd be very curious to know, and you never like to say this out loud. I'd be very curious to know what their revenue per employee is. It feels to me like a pretty significant layoff is coming. But what they need to show is some momentum around shrinking the product development time and getting kind of, if you will, I don't want to say cool again, but on trend again, getting out there and getting much more in touch at a ground level with some of their cooler, smaller retailers being more on trend.

• 42:53Scott Galloway?

  And then, once they discover trends, getting stuff from design or concept to shelf much faster. And I think they should be able to figure that out. Also, they've just left these niches and these doors wide open for Hoka and for ON. At the end of the day, I agree with you. They shouldn't be saying, oh, we're in such disarray that we're not going to be able to do it. Basically, every public company man, 97% of public companies manage to do this and none of them have the, or very few of them have the resources and the depth of the bench of a Nike. So I just think this brand is just, I don't care where you go.

• 43:33Scott Galloway?

  I don't care if you go to Cape Town or Seoul or Cambodia. 11 year olds playing football in the yard are wearing Nike. And the brand has always reinvented itself. They have such powerful marketing roots or not even needed to reinvent itself. It just resonates so deeply that I like this company a lot. I think at these price levels, I mean, I'd be prepared for it to go down more, but this is, you know, I'm thinking about setting up a trust for my kids. And this is one of those stocks that I would put in there and just say, okay, look at it in 20 years.

• 44:10Ed Elson?

  Two things I find quite interesting. One is I think you're right that the CFO kind of did a shitty job here and the rest of the management team while the previous CEO, John Donahoe is out. And it sort of reminds me of like the Gareth Southgate problem where we have this tendency to just assume that. Everything's going bad because the head honcho sucks. And now the head honcho is out. And we're seeing that maybe actually the rest of the management team sucks too. Maybe the players on the field are not performing as well as they should. But we're so obsessed with blaming the manager, in this case, the England manager, or in this case, the Nike CEO, that we just get so caught up with that.

• 44:54Ed Elson?

  And then when they leave, we're like, oh, maybe it's an us problem that we didn't realize. The second thing I find kind of interesting, what you're saying about the brand and how strong it is. We often hear this idea of of brand as moat. That if you have a strong brand, it can act as a really strong moat to prevent competition from your competitors. And, you know, 10 years ago, I feel like we would have used Nike as the shining example of this. We have said, you know, Nike is far and away the winner. It has a huge moat because it has such a strong brand. But I look at what's happened in Nike here. And I look at what's happened to a lot of other iconic brands recently that you have been talking about and that you've written about in your blog.

• 45:38Ed Elson?

  Starbucks, for example, Disney, down more than 25% in the past five years. Estee Lauder, basically cut in half over the past five years. And it feels like at this point, you could maybe make the opposite case. Which is that, you know, a strong brand, when it's strong, looks like a moat. Until eventually it isn't. Because what looks like might be happening is that these companies have become so reliant and so dependent on their brand that it ends up being their downfall. They think that they're invincible because we're Nike, because we're Estee Lauder. Who could come after us?

• 46:16Scott Galloway?

  It's an interesting observation. And that is, so the algorithm for printing money from the end of World War II to the instruction of Google has come up with a mediocre product, a mediocre car, salty snack, mediocre shoe, mediocre.

• 46:30Scott Galloway?

  Carbonated drink and then wrap it in these amazing brand codes of youth masculinity, European elegance, sex appeal, and use this incredibly cheap medium. We didn't realize how cheap it was called Broadcast Media, where all of America was watching one of three channels and just pound away at these associations and people would pay two bucks for 20 cents of peanut butter paste because it meant that you loved your kids more because choosy moms chose Jeff, or that I was a more competitive, strong, masculine, individual American person if I bought $210 Air Jordans. Since the introduction of Google, the rise of quality and innovation has just been dramatic. And the example I use is hotels.

• 47:13Scott Galloway?

  Whenever I traveled, and I've been traveling 180 to 220 days a year for the last 30 years, I would stay at the Four Seasons or the Mandarin Oriental. One, because someone else was paying. And two, they were always an eight. On a scale of one to 10, they were always an eight. And if I was in Madrid, I didn't have the time or the insight to figure out, is there a better hotel than the Madrid Four Seasons, which I know is going to be lovely. Now, with the introduction of Google, TripAdvisor, your social graph, Instagram, within about five minutes, I can figure out the Rosewood Villa Magna is absolutely where I want to stay in Madrid. I mean, that's just it. Or when I'm in Sao Paulo, yeah, the Four Seasons would be great. But again, actually, the Rosewood there is probably, in my opinion,

• 47:54Scott Galloway?

  the best hotel in the world. It's the Fiina, you know, in South Beach. And people can figure that out now. So it sounds passe, but all of a sudden, product and innovation are the new bomb. And the notion that you're putting forward, that they got too reliant on the mode of the Nike brand and not focused enough on new product, new innovation, new marketing channels, I think that's a worthwhile or a fair criticism. But having said that, there are certain brands and certain items where brand plays a bigger role. You are a panerai, it means you're having a midlife crisis, maybe a little bit of erectile dysfunction, have a little bit of money.

• 48:35Scott Galloway?

  But if you have sex with me, if we can, if we have kids, your kids are more likely, more likely to survive than if you.

• 48:43Ed Elson?

  Yes, that's, that's what everyone thinks. Exactly.

• 48:47Scott Galloway?

  Then if you have, just go with it. Then if you have sex with Ed, who's wearing a fucking Swatch watch? So your watch, your watch, the, the degree you got from college, the only reason your girlfriend's with you is because she heard you went to Princeton, Ed. I've already spoken to her about this. Uh, your car and also your shoes are really powerful forms of self expressive benefit. And the self expressive benefit of Nike that registers across two, three, probably four million consumers around the world is still unbelievable. Translates unbelievable margin, but it, the brand era, I agree with you, the brand era is officially over. Now, I don't know if you'd call it the supply chain era or the innovation era, but the way you communicate a better supply chain

• 49:33Scott Galloway?

  or the vessel for communication for supply chain or innovation is still the brand and the logo. Anything that's on HBO, I'll trial. A big thing, a big show coming from HBO, I'm like, oh, I'll watch it because they just have a finer filter. Any hotel from Rosewood, I will try because it does have, in my opinion, a finer filter. Now, does that mean brand is as big a moat? Absolutely not, because I have my, I have Instagram, I have my social graph. So what you're saying holds true. A company like Nike can, if it's not careful, fall further faster. But just based on that base of, of awareness and aspirational value and self expressive benefit,

• 50:13Scott Galloway?

  they have just tons of permission. If they come out with a decent product line, you're gonna, I think you're gonna see those revenues start to, start to pop again.

• 50:23Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I think that's right. Let's take a look at the week ahead.

• 50:28Ed Elson?

  We'll see the consumer price and producer price indices for September and third quarter earnings season kicks off with J V Morgan, Wells Fargo and BlackRock all reporting. Scott, do you have any predictions for us?

• 50:39Scott Galloway?

  Well, just based on what you said, I do think there's a, I think churn is really important. And I'd like to think there's some churn going on right now. Companies like Starbucks, Intel, Disney, Nike, Estee Lauder, Warner Brothers, these companies are, as they should be, getting kicked in the nuts. And that makes room for new competitors, I'd like to think. Unfortunately, they're mostly being kicked in the butt by, by TikTok. But anyways, in a weak Chinese consumer. But you are seeing a changing of the guard. Too many old people running these companies. Too many old people who are getting paid too

• 51:18Scott Galloway?

  much fucking money for lackluster performance. So all super talented executives. But I would speculate that Bob Iger and David Zaslove are going to announce, or at least put in place some sort of succession plan in the next year or two. These are people who are both great executives, especially Bob Iger. Zaslove has made a third of a billion dollars to lose 60, 70% of his shareholders valuation. And then the final one is, I think, Fabrizio Fredda, the CEO at Estee Lauder, that company has shit the bed the last five years. They're probably do. He's had a great career, a storied career. He's made a lot of money. He deserves

• 52:00Scott Galloway?

  it. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the next three, six, 12 months, if you get the timing right, we see succession strategies announced at Warner Brothers and Disney, and we see a new CEO at Estee Lauder Company.

• 52:15Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our executive producer is Catherine Dillon. Mia Silverio is our research lead and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for a conversation with Mark Zandi, only on Prof G Markets.

• 53:17Ed Elson?

  Nike withdrew its full year sales guidance ahead of its new CEO's arrival.

• 53:21Scott Galloway?

  Fucking jingo-esque. I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 53:25Scott Galloway?

  Go ahead.

• 53:25Ed Elson?

  Nike withdrew its full year sales guidance ahead of its new CEO's arrival.

• 53:28Scott Galloway?

  If they were white, would you think they're smarter? Their kids go to Princeton. Does that help?

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