Liberation Day, Tariffs, US v China Open Source, OpenAI Fundraise, $CRWV, TikTok | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week they discuss market uncertainty, globalism and tariffs, M&A, Wiz and GOOG, NVDA GTC, consumer AI demand, AI unit economics, & more. Enjoy another episode of BG2! Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:20) Liberation Day & Tariffs (19:18) US Open Source vs China Open Source (34:34) OpenAI Fundraise (52:25) Coreweave IPO & AI Demand (01:04:03) Rumors on TikTok deal Produced by Benny Beausoleil Music by Yung Spielberg Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com http://www.bg2pod.com Follow: Brad Gerstner @altcap https://x.com/altcap Bill Gurley @bgurley https://x.com/bgurley BG2 Pod @bg2pod https://x.com/BG2Pod⁠

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

• 0:00Bill Gurley?

  A riddle for you before we move on.

• 0:02Brad Gerstner?

  Yes.

• 0:02Bill Gurley?

  What do Salesforce, Netflix, Square, Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, Facebook, Snap, Proofpoint, NetSuite, and CoreWeave have in common?

• 0:12Brad Gerstner?

  No idea.

• 0:13Bill Gurley?

  They all broke issue.

• 0:15Brad Gerstner?

  Oh, wow.

• 0:28Brad Gerstner?

  And we're back, Bill. Great to see you.

• 0:30Bill Gurley?

  Good to be seen.

• 0:32Brad Gerstner?

  I mean, you have to, you have to be pretty stoked coming off those wins last weekend in San Francisco.

• 0:38Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, I'm repping, repping the Gator hat still. I'd say we kind of eked by, if you watch, for those that did watch.

• 0:45Brad Gerstner?

  That was, that was an incredible, that was an incredible final few minutes. Explain it. Take us through the final few minutes.

• 0:51Bill Gurley?

  Well, I mean, to be honest, like, I was afraid. Like, I didn't think there was a chance at this point because they were, they were behind by so much as, as you were heading into the end of the game. And they basically, you know, scored four three pointers, you know, against zero from the other side. They intentionally fouled and had missed free throws. So I think someone said the Yahoo game predictor had it at like 98% Texas Tech with like very little time left on the clock and they somehow eked it out. Now, the, the bullish people will say, oh, you lived through something like that. Now you have confidence to deal with anything.

• 1:33Bill Gurley?

  But, you know, the oddsmakers have put Duke in front of Florida at this point, and that started in the opposite place. So anyway, one game at a time, super exciting. I was out in San Francisco at the Chase Center, got to hang out with the coach a bit and some of the players, parents, and, and it was a good, good trip. And now, since I'm in Austin, it's right down the street here to San Antonio. So a lot of friends coming in, and we'll, we'll see what happens.

• 2:01Brad Gerstner?

  It's gonna be a heck of a weekend and maybe if a certain couple of teams end up in the in the championship game, I'll sneak in there on Monday night.

• 2:08Bill Gurley?

  I guess as long as we're repping and rolling, you know, I have two degrees, one from Florida and one from Texas. The Texas ladies are playing in the final four in Tampa. So a lot of good stuff happening.

• 2:20Brad Gerstner?

  Speaking of a lot of good stuff happening, I think there are some people in the world that think a lot of not so great stuff is happening based upon market reaction to the president's announcements of these tariffs. So why don't we kick it off talking about liberation day?

• 2:34Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, so we're recording this right after Trump's presentation. I think you and I both watched it and then we jumped on the pod. You've been talking about this like it's obviously been choreographed that this was coming. And, you know, you've been saying for a very long time that Trump and his team are very serious about this rather than the argument that, oh, it's just a means to an end, you know, and a way to get a negotiation started. You have made the point that you believe that they believe this is actually where we need to take the economy. And as as such, you've been conservative and worried about where this would go. You gave a presentation last week on how to think about this. What

• 3:19Bill Gurley?

  did you talk about there? I think it was at the JP Morgan Tech Conference.

• 3:22Brad Gerstner?

  It was pretty clear to me and you, we were talking about it in early Feb. You know, this was doctrinal. This, you know, there was a philosophical belief around trade that they wanted to, you know, create a more fair and level playing field. And the real debate, you know, has been going on is like, how big? And there are a couple of different camps. And so JP Morgan had this great event in Montana last week, 100 tech CEOs. But, you know, they had Howard Lutnick, Elon Sacks, Doug Burgum, all talking about, you know, various aspects of this. And they asked me to do a little bit of a presentation on decoding the Trump economic agenda. And really, it boils down to this, Bill. You know, at the top, I think that all the CEOs in the room are pretty excited about the golden age that

• 4:04Brad Gerstner?

  people have been talking about, you know, a pro-growth administration, pro-business, pro-investment, lower taxes.

• 4:11Brad Gerstner?

  Less regulation, pro M and A. We've seen this M and A flywheel starting to kick up. This AI super cycle, but everybody's been pretty terrified about these tariffs. And the real question going into today, liberation day, was where tariffs going to land closer to the 600 billion trillion dollar tariff level? The Peter Navarro had been talking about and Howard Lutnick had been talking about, or maybe at a little bit lower end of the spectrum. Which we heard a little bit more from, from Scott Besant and Kevin Hassett. And I think everybody was holding their breath. Well, we got the answer. We got the answer today. And so I was framing that. You know, at the JP Morgan conference, I showed this slide. You'll get a kick out of, you know, I ended the, I ended the presentation.

• 4:53Brad Gerstner?

  You know, with two planes coming in for landing, they both actually land, believe it or not. But it's like the glide path that we land here with tariffs and budget cuts matter a lot. And so, you know, we got the news tonight. You're right. We just, we just listened to the president talk. You know, and he came in on the larger end of this. I mean, there's no other way to slice it. There was a, there was a headline that hit right after the market closed from the Wall Street Journal, I believe. That it was 10% across the board and the markets jumped up like two and a half percent.

• 5:25Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 5:25Brad Gerstner?

  And then as the presentation started unfolding, they started coming in. People saw this chart that they presented on reciprocal tariffs, right? Where they say tariffs on China going to 54%. Can you believe that? 34% on top of the 20% that already exists. And he starts going through this list and the futures, the S and P futures, the Q, the NASDAQ futures start sinking. They had a 600 basis point fall between where they initially jumped and where they ended up. So the market is not liking this at all. And depending what index you were looking at, we were already down, you know, eight to 15% on the year. Now whatever comes in tomorrow will be on top of that.

• 6:07Brad Gerstner?

  So that's the chart. That's kind of the initial reaction out of the market. We can, we can break them down a little bit if you want. But that was the initial reaction.

• 6:16Bill Gurley?

  Right. And one of the pieces that I, you know, witnessed, and I think everybody else did as well, maybe you have more data on it is. When they said reciprocal tariff, they kind of redefined what a tariff is for the reciprocal calculation and they are including others, whatever, I don't know what else goes in there. Maybe you know exactly what, what fills this in, but, but basically the Trump administration is calculating an effective tariff, if you will, for each and every other country, which may not be the explicit tariff.

• 6:49Brad Gerstner?

  Correct. I mean, they call them non-tariff trade barriers. This is everything from what they call currency manipulation to things like judicial actions that restrict free and fair trade of our products into their countries. And by the way, we know there are non-tariff trade barriers. So like it's, it's not totally surprising, but if, if you and I were to do the math on these, you can kind of make those numbers, whatever you want to make them. And so, you know, if I had to go through this, the tariffs largely break down into, let's call it three or four big buckets, right? There's the auto tariffs. That's largely on Mexico, Canada, and Germany. And the auto tariffs were imposed at 25%. This, you know, in fact, he had 20 members of the UAW.

• 7:32Bill Gurley?

  Worth noting.

• 7:33Brad Gerstner?

  Union in the front row at the event. He invited, I think the president of the UAW up on stage to make some comments. And he said, these people used to be Democrats, they're Republicans now. We're the only ones who fight for them. And by the way, this is really, you know, he said, we won the state of Michigan because of this. This is what I campaigned on. You know, these are the promises we made and we're delivering on the promises. It is striking to me that just politically, this is what Democrats were running on 20 years ago. And it just shows how much the political parties have changed. So, so this is a big, you know, tariff differential as it relates to autos. Then he had the reciprocal tariffs, which are the ones that I outlined here, Bill. Remember, Trump is the negotiator

• 8:16Brad Gerstner?

  in chief. This is the starting point. All these tariffs go into place. We'll put these charts up on April 9th, country by country. And so we're going to hear all these ad hoc negotiations going on, some of which I'm sure like Vietnam, he'll declare victory on even before we get to April 9th, because they've already capitulated on a bunch of. Tariffs. He's also declared that there are $6 trillion of new investments, right? That people have committed to in the United States. He mentioned Nvidia, Apple, TSMC, SoftBank, OpenAI in his remarks. In fact, I particularly noted when he talked about SoftBank and OpenAI, he said, "Great companies." So, you know, for the people who are, you know,

• 8:57Brad Gerstner?

  watching the battle between OpenAI and X, that was notable. And then he said, "We're going to have a minimum tariff of 10% on all countries. So even if you're not on this list, we're going to have a minimum tariff of 10% on all countries." And then, of course, China is kind of in this bucket on its own, right? That's going to be a huge negotiation on its own. There are a lot of things that go into that negotiation, everything from, you know, the Panama Canal to the TikTok stuff. So, set that aside, if you will, for a second. There's no way that lands, I think, at 54%. That's the headline tariffs, okay? When we do the math and we add all of these up and, you know, say, "What is this come

• 9:37Brad Gerstner?

  up with?" Okay. The headline is, we were at $77 billion last year, and we end up at about $750 billion, right? Remember, Peter Navarro, the hawk, the person who had been saying, "We're going to land big tariffs," he was estimating $600 billion. So this definitely landed on the larger side. But then they came out right after that, and there was a footnote about things that were exempted from the tariffs. Exemptions. Exemptions, which included pharmaceuticals, and notably, for you and I, semiconductors. Wow. Right? So Taiwan's got a 32% tariff, but semiconductors are exempted. And so, we're going through the value of those exemptions right now. My hunch is that this is going

• 10:21Brad Gerstner?

  to land right around $600 billion. But Bill, I have to ask you, you know...

• 10:27Brad Gerstner?

  Here we are, you and I, we're trying to make our way through this, make sense out of it. I don't think there are many CEOs we know who support this or like this. In fact, I think a lot of congressional Republicans don't like this. You've made an eloquent defense of, you know, the benefits of free and largely fair trade. When you start hearing things like this, like, okay, this category got exemption, you know, or this category got exempted, like, just give me your reaction, right? As somebody who, who I think totally understands the benefits of free trade, when you see the Republican Party doing this, you know, how do you, how does it make you feel?

• 11:07Bill Gurley?

  Well, yeah, I mean, at a high level, I'm a believer in open markets, free trade, and comparative advantage. And that's been studied for a very long time. There are very solid mathematical arguments why if you pull up the trade walls between multiple countries, that you're going to hurt the efficiency of both of them in the long run. And I, you know, at least from a theoretical perspective, I'm a believer in that. I think there's another issue for the markets and for the CEOs, which has to do with both the slow pace at which they could realistically respond to this, and then the amount of ambiguity that's been out there.

• 11:52Bill Gurley?

  And so, let's say what, what the administration wants to encourage is for you to relocate a factory that you have, or product, let's call it production, that you have in Thailand, you know, and put it on the American shores. That's not a quick process. And if you start that process today, it might take three years, you know, before you'd have the type of volume to be capable of bringing that back, and probably at a higher cost. I mean, one of the, one of the things that I've said over and over again, I don't think our labor is globally competitive, nor do I think it wants to be. And so, even bringing it back, you're going to have a higher cost of production because we're going to have a higher cost of labor.

• 12:37Bill Gurley?

  That being said, you know, this ambiguity, you know, there's a lot of people, even going right into this announcement, that didn't know what percentage of it was real versus bluster. And there's, I think- At this point, just reading the papers, not making my own assessment, the administration has a reputation of maybe some of this is for negotiation, maybe some of it's not real. And so you're left not knowing what what's going to be the policy three months from now, six months from now, 12 months from now, which makes it very hard to allocate CapEx in any meaningful way whatsoever.

• 13:14Brad Gerstner?

  I think so well stated. You and I have said, you know, markets and business abhors uncertainty.

• 13:22Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Brad Gerstner?

  Right. It can deal with almost anything, but it has to have predictability. So it can build a forecast, so it can look at a, an investment and say, is that MPV positive? And I was literally texting with some big CEOs during the president's announcement, and they are asking questions, do you see us exempted? You know, are we in there? And this is just amazing to me, right? That you have this level of uncertainty. You know, I was with those 100 CEOs in Montana last week, and I would say almost 201, they said, things are slowing down in February and March, because nobody knows what to do. And remember, you know, the Fed had just come out last week, had taken down their forecast for GDP growth, had taken up their forecast for inflation,

• 14:07Brad Gerstner?

  had taken up their forecast for unemployment by the end of the year. So the economy, you know, most major economists are increasing their probability of recession, are slowing the rate of growth. And the question today was, was Liberation Day a clearing event? Does everybody have clarity now? And I think your point you make is a great one. Even though they may have gotten an exemption, or they may not have an exemption, the question is, can I count on this? And how long can I count on this? And can I really plan a year out based upon this? Or is this going to change yet again over the course of the year? And so

• 14:45Bill Gurley?

  And by the way, there's, there's cascading effects. So if, if you're unsure about things like this, you're not going to hire a bunch of people, for example. You're probably going to pause hiring because you don't know, you know, you don't know how much earnings you're going to have. So those kinds of things can proliferate downward and affect unemployment and eventually affect consumer spending just by freezing, you know, nearly everything in the, in the economy.

• 15:15Brad Gerstner?

  Let me tell you two other cascading effects. I heard from one of the CEOs last week that four contracts with them had actually been canceled, right? Because they had like three European contracts canceled and one Asian contract canceled because the countries were so upset with America, you know, that they're going to do deals instead with European country companies or whatever the case may be, you know? And then I saw a couple tweets, Bill. One was that, you know, China and Korea and Japan were actually going to collaborate in a response to the US tariffs. And somebody said, you know, we haven't seen the Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese combine forces on anything since the Mongols caused them, you know, to get together. And so it is causing a lot of strange bedfellows. And

• 16:00Brad Gerstner?

  I sent you the tweet where the Europeans, the President of Europe, the President Macron, they're all going to China and they want to talk about closer trade negotiations, relationships with China. And you warned us about this.

• 16:13Bill Gurley?

  I think you said the meeting was in Vietnam. And obviously, I got that from the President of The Economist who had predicted that that would happen. But yes, you know, there's no reason that that wouldn't happen. And there's a lot of, lot of ramifications of this. I don't think that anything came out of it that's gonna be good for the markets and good for, good, you know, good for stocks. But that's more your world than mine. I've always shunned macro now.

• 16:40Brad Gerstner?

  Let me just maybe opine on that for a second. Like, where do I think we go from here? After hours with the NASDAQ down, peaked a trough post-Trump at almost 18%, right? That's down a lot. A lot of names in the NASDAQ are down 40 or 50%. So we're starting to get some of that fear into the market. Somebody asked, and I said, at very root, I do believe the President wants to do deals. He believes in fairer trade. I think we're gonna land the plane here closer to 300 or 400 billion in tariffs, not 600 or 700, and certainly not a trillion in tariffs, even though it feels today like it was bigger than that. And one of the things I think that's going to kind of force the President's hand, he talked at the press conference.

• 17:25Brad Gerstner?

  Had a bunch of senators there and house members. The senators and house members are hearing from their constituent CEOs that they don't like these tariffs. And remember, most important to the president, he wants to get this reconciliation package passed, which he calls a big, beautiful bill. He wants to get this thing passed, which puts in place no taxes on tips and the permanency of the tax cuts, which he passed in his first administration. He can't afford to lose a single Republican vote. And so I think that that also is going to guide him a little bit more to the center. And that's what, you know, we'll see what the, whether, whether the market believes that certainly didn't believe it after hours today.

• 18:05Brad Gerstner?

  We're going to get a little bit more positive on the companies we like the best because we think some of this fear is now getting priced in.

• 18:11Bill Gurley?

  What, what will you be looking for in the next 30 to 60 days as this plays out?

• 18:18Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, I think, I think we're still in the fog of war, certainly, but I will be looking at, you know, do these exemptions on things like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals hold? Are we seeing the, the country by country renegotiation on some of these things? And probably most importantly, Bill, it's really about China. China is the second, you know, largest economic, you know, power, you know, in the world. It scares me how big the tariffs are that we are suggesting are going to go in place on China. Um, and I think, you know, it's imminent that he and she are going to have to talk and get a big trade deal done.

• 18:55Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Brad Gerstner?

  And so those are the things I'm going to be watching for. I don't think I see any clearing event here, um, for at least another 30 to 60 days. But remember, the best opportunities to buy something are when people are a little fearful. So you may have to just, you know, uh, take a bit of a leap of faith on this one. If you want to be, if you want to purchase at the best prices.

• 19:17Bill Gurley?

  Makes sense.

• 19:19Brad Gerstner?

  You know, another thing that we heard a lot about this week, Bill, speaking of China, is, you know, some developments in Chinese open source and some developments on the US open source front, particularly with respect to these frontier models. You have a lot of, I think, understanding about kind of the history in China around open sources, around the history in the United States around open source. So help us unpack, if you will. What do you think strategically is going on in China with respect to these open source models? I've seen some people tweet that maybe that, you know, DeepSeek was forced into open source by she.

• 19:57Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Brad Gerstner?

  Do you think that's going on or is there something else going on here?

• 20:00Bill Gurley?

  And by the way, I mean, all this culminated in the past week with OpenAI moving, you know, or talking again about open weighted models, which is a, I think, a really important data point. So how did, how do we get from where we were to where we are? So, yeah, I read that same tweet and I think it was remarkably misplaced. China has been supportive of open source for well over a decade now. If you look on most of the major open source products and look at the management page and who the sponsors are for these, like Linux, you know, that you'll see many of the major Chinese companies have been there and been supporting it for a while. Why? They've been accused of stealing tech IP for years.

• 20:44Bill Gurley?

  And so when something like open source comes along, this looks like the best thing possible, right? There's no one that can accuse us of IP theft because there is no IP ownership in an open source world. And so having dealt with those accusations for probably 40 or 50 years, I think everyone in China, you know, the government and the entrepreneurs writ large, view open source as a very positive movement for their country relative to the West. And so they've been, they've been in on it for a long time. They're very adept at it. They're very, they're very big believers in it. You know, when we talked about the interview with the DeepSeek founder, I would say he had as much kind of

• 21:31Bill Gurley?

  Emotional like his entire emotional mindset was tied to open source like he believes in it and wants to support it. So that's, I think that's an important backdrop. So I don't think China got there in some calculated way, or do I think it was some recent move? I think they embraced open source, you know, over a decade ago because it made a ton of sense for them in a world that had had pointed the finger at them from an IP standpoint.

• 22:02Brad Gerstner?

  So, so, so let me just double click on that. So basically what you're saying is they may have been fearful that they would have been cut off from other type of software products in the United States. Like, you know, there might've been export controls or other things put on them. So they said, I may as well support Linux because I may not be able to get Windows.

• 22:20Bill Gurley?

  Right. But I think that this, that discussion happened a long time ago. Like, it wasn't recent.

• 22:27Brad Gerstner?

  But I think it's important because that lays the foundation, right? That if that's a foundational belief among Chinese entrepreneurs and Chinese companies, then it's understandable that this new generation of entrepreneurs might also see the advantages of open source.

• 22:42Bill Gurley?

  Another, another thing that I think people have to remember is that within, also within the past decade and maybe 15 years, many US companies have learned to use open source as a defensive tool rather than just an offensive tool. And this is

• 22:59Brad Gerstner?

  Say more.

• 23:00Bill Gurley?

  Yeah. So this is the biggest companies out there. If they get in a position where they feel like they're behind the eight ball, so they're not in a leadership position, they will embrace open source as an attempt to level the playing field. And a great example is Kubernetes. So Amazon took this huge lead with AWS.

• 23:21Bill Gurley?

  In the hosted server business, everyone was afraid of that. Google had a piece of technology called Kubernetes that was orchestration that would allow you to move a workload if that became a standard from one, you know, one large server vendor to another, right? It basically created ease of distribution. So you could run on multiple clouds. They went to the Linux Foundation, they recruited IBM, a whole bunch of other people, got everyone behind it. And it gained so much momentum that Amazon had to embrace Kubernetes. So it worked. And we don't have a monopolist in that cloud business right now. You know, perhaps because of that deft move made by, made by Google. But they did it with Android

• 24:06Bill Gurley?

  against Apple, you know, being notable. And Meta did it with Llama here, right? They, they, they came to the table, they weren't first to the table in the AI space, but they were disruptive with open source. One other thing I would, I would point out about that type of move and attention, in addition to saying it's defensive, I think it's great for consumers. Like if you study economics in, in, in business school, you know, there's this notion of pure competition, like where, where do you have the most fluid competition, which leads to the lowest prices for a consumer? And certainly, open source does that versus proprietary code. Like, it's just hyper competitive. And that's why it's disruptive.

• 24:51Bill Gurley?

  And that's why people use it in this way. So that's a huge backdrop to where we are today. I believe DeepSeek has been remarkably successful in the enterprise. And that's, you know, it's hosted by AWS, it's hosted by Google, it's being used around the world. I've, I've heard, you know, from Hugging Face that it's been, you know, forked over 1500 times on their site. And so it's, it's prolific. I'm beginning to hear, you know, concerns that DC may take action to limit the use of DeepSeek and

• 25:24Brad Gerstner?

  You're saying Washington may intervene to take action because they're, you know, there are people perhaps lobbying against or other concerns that Washington may have about open source Chinese models being used by American

• 25:38Bill Gurley?

  I think it's safe to say both of those things are happening. There's people that are really concerned about, you know, China technology getting underneath our products. Whether or not this particular code could be bad or not, they just might have that default. And then I think there are people that are lobbying because it would benefit their company. Either way, if that gets traction, you have a window in the US right now where someone might move to go left of DeepSeek in terms of openness on one of their models, either an offensive or defensive move. And I think it's a short window. And so it'll be very interesting from my point of view to see whether Google does that or Meta. I think

• 26:21Bill Gurley?

  they have an announcement coming up in a few weeks of their next model. I don't think Anthropic would do it. They've been so anti-open source, it would be very out of character for them. But it will, you know, it will be interesting to see what happens on this front. And that leads us up to OpenAI making an announcement, which I'll let you describe.

• 26:40Brad Gerstner?

  Well, you know, listen, we've talked here and Sam has been dropping the breadcrumbs on Twitter, right? That, you know, they wanted to launch an open source model. They've been GPU constrained, they've been bandwidth constrained. But he got the announcement out this week, which I was thrilled with, where he said, you know, we're excited to release a powerful new open weight language model with reasoning in the coming months. And we want to talk to devs. So he's inviting all these developers to participate and give feedback. He said, we want to make it a very, very good model. We're planning to release an open weight language model, one of our first since GPT-2. And he says, we've been thinking about this for a long time. And the interesting thing is somebody, you know, in the replies I saw, somebody

• 27:26Brad Gerstner?

  Said, are you going to make people buy licenses if they get a lot of users like Meta is doing

• 27:32Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 27:32Brad Gerstner?

  With Lama and he kind of takes a jab at Meta and he says, no, we're not gonna.

• 27:37Bill Gurley?

  Says no. Yes, he said no.

• 27:38Brad Gerstner?

  He says, says no, which, which indicates maybe we're gonna out open, you know, Lama. So that's, that's on the one hand, you know, kind of opening eye. On the other hand.

• 27:48Bill Gurley?

  Just, just.

• 27:49Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 27:49Bill Gurley?

  Hold your thought. So in case people don't know, you know, the openness is a continuum. It's not black or white, and that's true of all the open source technologies. In the open source model world, um, some of the players, most notably Meta with Lama, have a usage restriction a, a, against the free use of the model a, a, at 700 million. And that's what you were referring to. And so at least in a tweet, uh, Sam suggested they won't have that in theirs. So back to you.

• 28:21Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, no, which, which I think is notable because remember at the end of this month, we have LamaCon, which is the developer event for Lama. Um, it's a big deal for Meta. The, the launch of Lama four has been rumored for a long time. And in fact, I think there are just a lot of people who are surprised they haven't released it, but it seems to everybody they're going to have to release it ahead of LamaCon. What I'm hearing, Bill, is that it'll be a 400 billion parameter model. It'll use like, it'll be a mixture of expert model using, you know, 50, 60, uh, 70 experts. It's going to have huge context window, like 10 million context window, you know, and it's going to launch this month. I think it's terrific that OpenAI has now fully committed, you know, everybody on the team, Brockman, Kevin,

• 29:06Brad Gerstner?

  et cetera, we're all retweeting this, fully committed and maybe even suggesting that this is going to be a more capable model and even more open. I think it's good that we have competition in the U.S. for an open source model. And when it comes to the administration and what Washington DC is going to do, my best sense is they do not want to see a Huawei DeepSeek Belt and Road, either with chips or with open source models. They do not want to see the world run on. Deep seek on Huawei nine, 10 chips. And so this gets back to the AI diffusion bill and how we're going to restrict these things.

• 29:45Brad Gerstner?

  I think they would love to see the world continue to run on US compute, US silicon. And they would love to see llama and perhaps OpenAI's open source model around the world. They know it has a lot of distribution. So I think this was a really positive step forward on that.

• 30:03Bill Gurley?

  And you bring up an important point, which is, you know, you don't, you don't have to be. Let's say something does happen to limit deep seek usage. Whoever's going to jump in to try and lead the open source movement in the West. If they want to be a global player, they don't just have to get left of everyone else in the West. They still have to compete with deep seek on a global, on a global basis. And I don't think, you know, it'll be interesting to watch. I'm very, very curious how this plays out. I've already asked Clement, hugging face, if maybe he will create a continuum. So we can rank all these different models from an openness perspective. Cause there's so many different facets by which you could be open or not. Oh, but actually I had one more thing.

• 30:49Bill Gurley?

  And this is since you're involved at OpenAI, you can correct me or if I'm wrong. But you have been, you know, saying for, I would say a couple of quarters now that the real opportunity for OpenAI is on the product side versus the model side. Which, which hints at being more of a consumer product than say the enterprise APIs business that they've also been in. If, if they think that also, and I, I'm not involved. So this is conjecture of my part. Being more open with your model is, is a really deft move.

• 31:29Bill Gurley?

  Because it will put more pressure on other players to try and keep up. And it will allow your model to have more pervasive usage globally. And you talked about running out of compute. You know, the minute you put that model out where other people can download it. They're doing that on their servers, not on yours. And so I just think it's a very clever move for the same reason. Google would have supported Kubernetes. You're, you're, you're kind of. Wiping out the business opportunity for other models to play on the API side. If you make yours open, which is a helps protect the competitive flank. And once again, great for consumers.

• 32:13Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, I think it's I think, you know, it makes sense on a bunch of fronts. On the first front, I think they want developers to develop on their platform and build applications for, you know, for OpenAI. And so this brings them into the ecosystem. Number two, I think that they fundamentally have a view that they want to build, you know, they want to build products and applications that move humanity forward with AI. And this is another way to do it at scale. You know, Sam has said publicly now, I've heard him several times, say that he thinks that models are commoditizing, they're anti into the game. You know, they will continue to push the frontier. So he thinks they'll have the best models, but that general intelligence, you know, that average level intelligence is we already see is going to be widely distributed.

• 32:57Brad Gerstner?

  And that the battleground bill is really going to be fought around products and services. And I wouldn't say that they view themselves as an exclusively a consumer company. But clearly, ChatGPT is a major thrust, a major focus of the business. It's the market leading consumer application, probably has 80 to 90% market share. I think network effects are kicking in and other things. But I also think their enterprise business is, if not the biggest, one of the biggest, and also growing at the fastest rate. Because remember, the consumerization of the enterprise. One of the fascinating things that's happening in the enterprise is these are all users of ChatGPT. So when the CEO shows up in the boardroom and somebody says, yeah, we're looking at bringing AI into the company.

• 33:41Brad Gerstner?

  And they're we're looking at, you know, ChatGPT enterprise. It's an easy yes. It reminds me of when every CEO said, hey, get me an iPhone, you know, in the enterprise. And they were on BlackBerry and they all switched to iPhones because they loved using them at home. I think the natural thing for them to do. So it's not to say enterprise is going to be a battle. It's not going to be winner take all, but I think these guys do have their eyes squarely set on building a big enterprise business.

• 34:07Bill Gurley?

  There's probably two different types of. Enterprise, there's probably a product that people buy user licenses for for doing, you know, white collar, research type work where they may where I think what you said will be very relevant, like having the the UI they're used to. And then there's the the separate side, which is models that underlie the type, you know, types of business processes that you're building.

• 34:34Brad Gerstner?

  Well, one of the things you pinged me on this week was the investment round around OpenAI. And, you know, I'm happy to share what I can share, but, you know,

• 34:43Bill Gurley?

  Tell us what happened. What was announced?

• 34:46Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, well, I mean, they announced the long rumored investment that was led by SoftBank, which many people described in the headline as a $40 billion investment round. I think if you read the breakdown of it, it's, you know, it comes in a couple of tranches, the first tranche being closer to 10 billion, the second tranche being closer to 30 billion. And it's an extraordinary amount of money. It's bigger than any I bigger than I think the largest IPO sans maybe one or two that has ever been done. I've often described these as private IPOs. Altimeter participated along with several others who were reported. And the valuation was like 260 pre, which would

• 35:29Brad Gerstner?

  make it if all the money were to come in a 300 post valuation. And so it certainly got a lot of attention this week. And, you know, you asked me the question, I think, Bill, just around kind of valuation, right? How did we think about valuation? The first thing I would say is market leaders never look cheap. When I invested in Google in 2005, when I invested in, you know, Meta, when the IPO broke and we looked at those late stage private rounds, I certainly remember the Microsoft round in a Meta 15 billion that was roundly criticized as being incredibly expensive. None of these things, you're certainly not going to buy a market leader on the cheap. But if you really look at this, I think that they've they've said publicly, they expect their

• 36:14Brad Gerstner?

  revenues this year to be around 13 billion, right? To to do 13 billion in revenue, it probably means you have to exit the year closer to 15 to 18 billion in run rate revenue. So as I look at this on a forward run run rate for this year, you're paying something like, you know, 20 times revenue for the business. Okay? Now, we also had a couple other announcements, you know, this week. There's, you know, there's the Anthropic funding round and there's talk that they're doing a billion to 2 billion in revenue, a $60 billion funding round. So that to me, looks like something like 50 times revenue. So again, you got OpenAI at 20 times, Anthropic at 50 times. And then we had the merger of X and X.ai,

• 36:57Bill Gurley?

  Correct.

• 36:58Brad Gerstner?

  which are rumored to have around, let's call it 3 billion in revenue. And the combined market cap there is like 125 billion. So that looks like closer to 80 times revenue. So the market leader here, which usually trades at a premium, not at a discount. To me, you know, again, we can argue about the sustainability and could somebody disrupt them? And is 20 times a good valuation in this environment? And yeah, but aren't they spending a lot of money on compute? And is it really high value revenue? But apples for apples relative to their peers, it certainly appears to me like, you know, 20 versus 50 versus 80. It's hard to say that this would be more expensive on a multiple basis than Anthropic or X.ai.

• 37:43Bill Gurley?

  Yeah. And I also read that there, there like are still contingencies on whether the full conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit happens. So I think there's some stuff. If that's true, there's still some stuff to play out. But, you know, one thing I would say, when I witnessed this from afar, and, and once again, you're, you're involved, I'm not. So correct me if I'm wrong. But, you know, having lived through the Uber Lyft situation, which oddly had Masa coming to the table also, you know, our world has just evolved into one where so many people believe in power laws, so many people believe in network effects and that these markets are winner take all, that you end up with these

• 38:26Bill Gurley?

  massive capital raising rounds. And, you know, it's not lost on me that both with Stargate and with this one, the headline number is bigger than, you know, the piecemeal when you start to unpack it, which, you know, for better, for worse, from my position, smells of being promotional and, you know, and So why would you do that? Why are you? Why are you trying to have a bigger headline number? And that number does get repeated in the press. So it does work in that way. And, and I come back to, you know, I suspect the company sending a message to Anthropic and anyone else in the game that, that we're here for the long haul. And, you know, they probably didn't anticipate all the moves that Elon's made with X and Twitter.

• 39:08Bill Gurley?

  And, and obviously that is, is a, another deep pocketed player. But, but boy, you know, if you're, if you're on the Anthropic, you know, investment, you know, side, I, you know, I'd be scared like, like, you know, and I've, I've lived through this before. It is a, it is a, a sport of kings, if you will. And then lastly, one thing that naturally falls out of that is unit economics get postponed. You have to believe in the power law and the network effect. They, they, in addition to that headline number, you know, I think they've said publicly, they expect to lose, you know, five to seven billion this year. And, you know, with an employee count of the, I think, six to 7,000,

• 39:53Bill Gurley?

  that's not going to run you more than a billion or two. So there's some number between the revenue number you talked about and subtracting 2 billion for expenses and the rest is your operating cost of keeping this AI machine going. And, you know, I ran some loose numbers and I come up around 15 or 20 bucks a year for a non-paid user, you know, just to, to run the servers on their behalf. And, you know, eventually you might get to advertising. Eventually you may convert more of them to paid. These are, these are things we've seen play out over time. They played out with ad models. But once again, if you're going to try and lay chase to them, you got to be prepared to underwrite that cost yourself.

• 40:37Brad Gerstner?

  Right, you know, it, it, listen, I think the analogy is a fair one, Bill. And obviously, Masa was involved in the Uber Lyft battle, so it's an easy one, particularly with his involvement here, to say, you've referred to it before as weapons of economic destruction, all of this capital. But I would remind you, there was a moment in time in 2020, where the headlines were that Uber would never be profitable, it was a failed business model, it will never make money. And here's a business that's going to do 6 billion in free cash flow this year, right? No doubt, no doubt. And so, and so the winner does take all, the winner does take most. I will tell you, as a shareholder, I speak with the leadership of the company all the time about unit economics.

• 41:18Brad Gerstner?

  Obviously, if I'm investing in the business, I feel confident in their leadership around unit economics. I'm, you know, one of the things that I think is really important here is just like what's happening in the business, right? Sam tweeted this week, they added a million ChatGPT users in an hour. Yep. In an hour, that they crossed 20 million subscribers, paying subscribers for ChatGPT. They crossed 500 million weekly average users of ChatGPT. In fact, they were, they're, they're going so gangbusters, they're throttling all their demand. In fact, I don't know if you saw David Sacks's tweet, where he said, America's leading AI companies are all reporting that demand is off the charts, so much so that they're being forced to impose rate limits.

• 42:02Brad Gerstner?

  And he said, fortunately, we have massive new infrastructure projects coming online, which gets me to the point of why are they raising so much money, right? And you and I are talking about taking the pod down to Abilene, Texas, to see Stargate, to Denton, Texas, to see, you know, the CoreWeave facility that they're standing up for OpenAI. And the fact of the matter is, I think that they need to bring on a massive amount of compute just to support the demand they currently have. I can tell you, when you look at the product pipeline for OpenAI, right? Whether it's, you know, they're, they're two or three models they already have completed on the shelf. There's a lot of agent stuff that they want to do that's on the shelf. I think there's a lot of stuff they want to do around pricing,

• 42:46Brad Gerstner?

  but they can't do these things today and open source with their current level of GPU demand. And, you know, Sam went on, online, said, if anybody has a cluster of 100,000 GPUs, you know, send me a DM and, you know, you may say it's promotional and hyperbole, but, but the round was already raised. It could be both. He's not doing that. I actually, I actually think, you know, in this case, it's true. I know they were pulling, you know, a lot of things offline just to support the demand. Now, the irony is where, what was this demand coming from? Right? And the demand, you know, because we didn't mention Gemini 2.5 that happened to release, you know, in this last week. And part of the reason we didn't

• 43:28Brad Gerstner?

  mention it is because literally on the day that they, that they launch it, OpenAI launches this upgrade to Imogen, where people are making all these anime photos of themselves that literally blew up, like demand for a billion anime photos a day from the United States all the way to India, and they can't support it. And some people may say, oh, well, this is an example of how dumb AI is. People are using it to make anime photos. But I would point them to Chris Dikson's, you know, blog that he wrote, you know, some time ago, where, where he says, listen, the next big thing will first appear as a toy. Right? And there are a lot of things that we do for entertainment, a lot of things that, you know, we know that OpenAI and ChatGPT are being used for a lot of deep research. But the fact of the matter is, at least it's to this one. And I'm

• 44:13Brad Gerstner?

  not going to get into the other, you know, valuations for the other models. But I'd say at least it's to this one. I was an early investor in Google. I was an early investor in Meta. I saw what those early consumer products look like, what those demand curves look like, what that cohort retention looked like. And I would just say to you that, you know, what I see out of ChatGPT reminds me a lot of kind of those winner take all consumer applications. They're not infallible. It's not that they can't be assaulted. You know, Grok has been a great model, you know, launched by Elon. But I think they really do have a big moat. And I think the network effects are kicking in. And I think that not only are they order of magnitude bigger,

• 44:55Brad Gerstner?

  but they're also growing a lot faster. And so, you know, I think that the consumer business here will ultimately be valuable. But to your point, the unit economics can be crap along the way. And it's up to the company to launch the things like advertising, pace, you know, different pricing tiers, etc., that, you know, bring all those things.

• 45:14Bill Gurley?

  Let me, let me ask you a question. Since, since you, you went down that avenue. I think they've announced. Is it 20 million paid users and 500 million total users? So you have like a 4% conversion rate. How do you think about paid versus advertising that conversion rate? What is, how do you think about the business model with those facts on the table?

• 45:41Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think that right now we probably, you know, we're throttling chat GPT. So when you bring on more compute, all those numbers would be higher, right? If you just have more compute. Secondly, I think most of chat GPT users are using a model that's like a year old. Right? Because we haven't been able to upgrade the, they haven't been able to upgrade the models because I don't think they can support the things they want to do in the upgraded models from a GPU perspective. So my suspicion is when they're able to do that, that they're going to have a lot more flexibility around things like pricing tiers. Sam has said he doesn't particularly like advertising, but at some point they will obviously have something that they think is beneficial to consumers that will be around that.

• 46:24Brad Gerstner?

  If you look at operator, if I say to operator, book me the Four Seasons Hotel in New York next Tuesday and it does that for me, which I think they're getting a lot closer to you and I have this back and forth on that. But, but, but, you know, let's just stipulate that even you believe at some point they're going to get there. And if we're driving that kind of value for users, either user will pay or the end merchant will pay. I think there are all sorts of business models that will evolve around that. So my hunch is you're going to see a mixture of advertising. You're going to see a lot of different pricing tiers. You're going to see models, I don't think we're going to have this, you know, this long menu of model choices that forces the consumer to understand the difference between 04 mini and 03 and 01 and, you know, all these different models.

• 47:08Brad Gerstner?

  I think you're just going to have a smart model, chat GPT 5 or, or chat GPT 6 that may be coming sooner rather than later, that's just going to make those choices for you. And so I think there are a lot of way.

• 47:20Bill Gurley?

  But by the way, you know, we talked about this in the past, but, but I've, I've often felt that one of the reasons that Google is so susceptible to disruption is how they've maximized the revenue per visitor. And I, I personally don't think there's any way. When that world you're talking about, that agent world evolves, that that that partner in a hotel is going to pay a fee anywhere close to the to the fee that's paid to Google by someone that's marketing a service that I always say using LTV math versus transactional math. I just don't think there's any way you can get there. And so that's a huge disruptive

• 48:01Bill Gurley?

  advantage for I think it's a huge disruptive advantage for OpenAI.

• 48:07Brad Gerstner?

  Well, let's click on that for a second. You know, we have our friend Glenn Fogel, who runs who runs booking.com and incredible CEO. They've been incredible business. You know, and they're one of the largest advertisers have historically have been one of the largest advertisers on Google. I think it's been reported that Google generates it's one of their largest advertising categories in the world is travel hotels specifically. Booking is one of their largest global advertisers. So you sell $100 hotel room and you take $20, right? You booking.com. Let's call it take 18 to 20 bucks and then you pay a portion of that to Google, maybe half of it, maybe more than half of it.

• 48:44Bill Gurley?

  Well, actually, actually, to be fair, in many circumstances, you know, they'll be using what I call LTV math and they'll pay.

• 48:52Brad Gerstner?

  Pay more than 100%.

• 48:53Bill Gurley?

  Oh, they'll they'll pay 50 bucks instead of 20 because and then they'll say, well, if the customer comes back twice in a year, we get to break even in the first year and we're going to hold them forever. And this is why that won't work in the agent world, which is no one's going to think that way because if you're a white label service that's underneath the the agent model, the most you can share is 10 of the 20, right? Or whatever, you know, it's a it's a.

• 49:21Brad Gerstner?

  So so so there's no doubt there's competition coming to that. You know, Google's traded down from 200 to 150 and change and and, you know, they see that disruption coming their way. The irony here, right, is we still have, you know, this anti-trust investigation with with with Google. I always I always get a, you know, a laugh out of the fact that finally in 2025, the first time we've actually had competition for Google like. Very clear that competition is coming to all those categories. And now we get around to talking about breaking up their search monopoly. I mean, it's ridiculous. I don't think that's, I think that's the last of our problems. But I do think we're going to see business model evolution around these different categories. So let's just say, Bill, that it settles out at 10 bucks, right?

• 50:04Brad Gerstner?

  That the hotel, hotels are clearly willing to give 20 bucks. Let's say it settles out at 10 bucks. Well, hell, that's all upside for OpenAI.

• 50:11Bill Gurley?

  Right, but it's replacing 50 for Google. That's my only point.

• 50:15Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, no, very good point.

• 50:16Bill Gurley?

  By the way, another thing played out in this space, a little, little out of order of our competition. But there's this acronym people are starting to use MCP. That is a way for you to represent your service. Like if you were booking.com to a, to a model. So that it's not simply scraping your website, which is certainly not the ideal way to do this thing. That, that standard, I believe, got started in Anthropic, but OpenAI has agreed to support it. And so another factor that plays out with whoever's most aggressive with the open standards is they might be able to take a lead in defining these things, which could be advantageous to them.

• 50:58Bill Gurley?

  And I gotta tell you, you know, I meant to say this earlier when we were talking about the open source stuff. But I gotta believe the anxiety is high at Google. I gotta believe the anxiety is high at Meta. We've seen some high executive shifts and departures also at Apple in terms of who's in charge of these things. And so I see those moves and I think that must represent anxiety. You know, these are, there's a lot at stake. And so I, it'll be really interesting to see how open people are, how willing they are to be open with their models, how aggressive they are. Cause I think it's a really critical window.

• 51:38Bill Gurley?

  I'm talking about like next three to six months could dictate who's standing on top of the hill five, 10 years from now.

• 51:46Brad Gerstner?

  Well, the tectonic plates, as I've said, as we've said for now two years, this is the first time they've shifted in this magnitude in 20 years, right? This is a 20, 20 year event. For 20 years, the search paradigm ruled everything in consumer internet and Google stood at the top of that mountain and it took something, you know, it took an AI level shift. It took chat GPT moment and then getting to the scale of maybe a billion monthlies and 500 million weeklies to even lead to this conversation. But things happen very slowly, Bill, as we know, and then they happen very fast. And I think that's your point.

• 52:25Bill Gurley?

  Yep. Before we run out of time, we had an IPO, which we haven't had very many of. Let's talk IPOs, both CoreWeave, but after that, let's just talk about IPOs in general.

• 52:38Brad Gerstner?

  That's great. You know, like, as you know, we're shareholders in CoreWeave since a couple rounds ago. We were one of the largest buyers in the IPO and we're happy we did, you know.

• 52:52Brad Gerstner?

  You know, I have to say on Friday, I was pretty damn nervous, Bill. It broke the offering price, went down to about 37 bucks a share. I think today they had some announcements of this deal with Google where they're going to provide Nvidia Grace Blackwells through, through CoreWeave. So Google's going to be buying a bunch of Nvidia chips through CoreWeave. And one of the big criticisms of this company was they were too dependent upon Microsoft, but now they've diversified. They have Microsoft, Meta, now Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cohere, Mistral. And so I think they've really, you know, emerged as the leading AI kind of cloud. And the stock in the last couple of days, despite the fact they took it public last Friday, I mean, talk about taking a company public into a category five hurricane. I mean,

• 53:37Brad Gerstner?

  we had, we had like liberation day staring us in the face and they had to fly into that. And as you pointed out, it wasn't the least controversial of IPOs, but I have to give credit to Mike Intrator and his team. And listen, I'm here in Silicon Valley. They started this company five years ago. It's worth over $30 billion today. It's played a really important role in standing up OpenAI and a lot of the leading AI labs. And I just think that's a good thing for all of us. But it's not, you know, it's also fair to ask the questions that you've asked, you know, around, you know, kind of the durability, if you will, about, about CoreWeave and the revenue.

• 54:15Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, and look, it's you're absolutely right. It's so funny. We sit around and complain about the IPO market not being open and, you know, for the entirety of 2024, the markets were up 30%. You know, the sunshine was out and no one was going. So here, someone finally gets the guts to go and the markets, of course, have turned the other way. And that's why, man, I like anyone that tells you when you're ready to go public that you have to wait on the markets to be in a particular place. I would tell them to shut the fuck up and like, like, like, take your company out. Like, you can't control that thing. That's an external factor. And I also believe a lot of people, because of my stance on direct listing, said, was this a good IPO, a bad IPO?

• 55:00Bill Gurley?

  I mean, as you said, there's stuff moving all over the place. Like, you have, you have a leader in their field unquestionably, huge revenue growth. Their business model isn't fully unpacked because the CapEx is invested so far ahead of of the product. So you can't look at the income statement and say, oh, the right unit economics are perfect. And there's, and there's questions about what is the appropriate depreciation schedule and all these things. But, but I am glad that they got out and I'm glad that it's done fine. They've had basically two customer announcements since they went out, which shows how fast this AI world moves. And I think that's why the stock went from 40 to 36 and way back up above that now.

• 55:45Bill Gurley?

  Let's hope that it brings more IPOs to the table. This company needed capital because it's a capital intensive business. And, and those are the ones that tend to, you know, come to the markets eventually, no matter what. We have this offsetting reality, you know, that the stripes of the world and Databricks and others are choosing to delay being public and have massive access to private capital. And maybe that's a discussion for another day, but there are a few others, Klarna's in the pipeline. You know, we've talked about Cerebras being in the pipeline. And so I, I'm always hopeful. I'm always kind of just wanting for there to be more companies that are willing to move into the public markets.

• 56:28Bill Gurley?

  But the offset of what we talked about at the beginning is going to be there. And so we'll see how those things interact with a choppy market.

• 56:36Brad Gerstner?

  Well, you know, and somebody else I should mention is Morgan Stanley. I mean, they took a lot of heat last Friday, you know, on this deal. Why are you bringing it now? The, you know, the stock went below 40. CNBC was roundly critical of, you know, of the company, you know, and of Morgan Stanley, and the stock's at 60 bucks or whatever it ended today at. And so, again, you know, we feel good as shareholders. I feel good for the people involved in the company. Obviously, there are still questions, um, you know, that remain about the business. You mentioned depreciation. The one thing I'd tell you about the depreciation argument as it relates to this company is, you know, a lot of people

• 57:17Brad Gerstner?

  push on, you know, there's a statement by Jensen at GTC that, you know, Hoppers may not have value because Grace Blackwell is so much better.

• 57:27Bill Gurley?

  He was a little more aggressive than that.

• 57:29Brad Gerstner?

  Okay, so say it.

• 57:30Bill Gurley?

  He called himself the, the chief revenue destroyer and basically made statements that I think if you interpreted or interpreted accurately would imply that maybe you should have a two-year depreciation, not a six. Like, he made it sound that way. He's very abrupt. And he took a lot of heat. He probably wishes he hadn't said it, but he said it.

• 57:54Brad Gerstner?

  My, my view on this is like, listen, because we got to square this circle. We have, you know, the Saks tweet, you know, we know the inference demand is off the charts. Everybody has, you know, is demonstrating their need for more GPUs to run inference. Everything in the world's becoming, you know, inference. We've talked about that at length. And so, my view is this, you know, like, when you talk about two years for GPUs, they're going to, cutting-edge GPUs are going to be used for cutting-edge training for the, you know, frontier models in that first two-year period. But all these things are going to continue to get used for inference. And the right way to think about CoreWeave, you know, and, you know, I think the consensus margins for this business are like 25% EBIT, you know, over

• 58:35Brad Gerstner?

  the course of the next couple of years. How do they get there? You know, so think about their, their unit economics, Bill. You know, their, their CapEx, their OpEx, so they got to, they got They gotta get a data center, they gotta pay for all their operating expenses, then they gotta buy the servers. So the way this works, I think, is they sell a four-year deal to Microsoft, or a four- or five-year deal to OpenAI, or four-year deal to Google, or whatever. They expect to pay back all the CapEx, OpEx, and GPUs in three years. And so the fourth year, which is a four-year guaranteed contract, the fourth year is your profit margin, right? And then anything you earn past the four years, that's all gravy on top.

• 59:16Brad Gerstner?

  And the consensus earnings are not giving them any credit for anything after the end of those contract periods. Now, what I'll tell you is, you know, and we've done a lot of research on this. There's still a lot of A100s in use in the world today. In fact, Jensen has talked at length about that. That's a 2020 product. So we're in the fifth year, and A100s are still out there being used by almost everyone that bought A100s. You know, and then if you look at it, I think Jensen at GTC said last year that OpenAI had just retired the V100s. That was a 2017 GPU, so that's like a seven-year lifecycle that they were using those for. And so I think that we have a lot of comfort

• 1:00:00Brad Gerstner?

  that at a minimum, people are going to be using these things for four years, a couple of years for training, a couple of years for inference. I've yet to hear of anybody throwing away any GPU because it doesn't have value. Remember the way CUDA works. The software that runs these GPUs, it constantly gets upgraded. It's like my Tesla, right? I had an old Tesla Model S, like seven years old, but it felt like a new car because my software got updated all the time. And so, and frankly, the, you know, it still got me to the places I needed to get to. It wasn't as good as the new model I bought in December with full FSD and everything else, but it didn't feel like a really old car because the software was constantly updating. I kind of think of that the same way for these GPUs.

• 1:00:44Brad Gerstner?

  The GPUs are getting better every year, even though the hardware remains the same. So I'm not nearly as worried about that depreciation schedule. It seems to be, you know, a big hit on the company, and lots of people are talking about it, but... They're out the door and you know, kudos to them on this big new deal today.

• 1:01:00Bill Gurley?

  But look, the, the pushback on that is obviously that, that it's not a zero or one. Like you make it sound like it's binary. You either throw it away or it's super valuable. And what inevitably happens is the earning power of that product drops over time. And so there is, I think, a reasonable question, you know, should it be more of like an accelerated depreciation schedule? The idea with depreciation is to kind of, um, you know, they say the useful life. So you'd kind of wanted to mirror the earnability of the asset over time. And so six years straight probably isn't the best fit for that, but we'll see, we'll see what happens over time.

• 1:01:41Bill Gurley?

  You, you know, their peers, the, the incumbents in this world were at four years ago and pushed it to six, which

• 1:01:48Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Bill Gurley?

  wasn't, uh,

• 1:01:51Brad Gerstner?

  And the answer may, the answer may lie somewhere in between. And you know, like I said, I don't think they need it to be more than four in order to achieve the, the, the margins that they have, but they're also, to your point, it's a highly levered business. They got to delever the business. So there's a lot of things in play here with CoreWeave. That's why, again, if you look at the, the multiples it's trading at, um, well, I don't know what they are today, but the, the multiples that came public at were not overly taxing from our perspective. But there's a lot of headwind for all these AI companies. I mean, you have Nvidia trading at 19 times fully taxed earnings. And so, you know, there's a lot of skepticism in the world, notwithstanding all the stuff we hear about demand. A lot of skepticism in the world about, uh, AI demand.

• 1:02:34Bill Gurley?

  A riddle for you before we move on.

• 1:02:36Brad Gerstner?

  Yes.

• 1:02:36Bill Gurley?

  Would do Salesforce, Netflix, Square, Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, Facebook, Snap, Proofpoint, NetSuite and CoreWeave have in common?

• 1:02:46Brad Gerstner?

  No idea.

• 1:02:47Bill Gurley?

  They all broke issue.

• 1:02:49Brad Gerstner?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:50Bill Gurley?

  And so when the talking heads on CNBC and others are critical of a company because they trade below their IPO price, it's just such a wrong way to look at things. And, you know, I think one of the reasons those high quality companies get priced to perfection is the founders are stronger minded and have more leverage and negotiate more on this agreed upon price, which would also go away with the direct listing. But boy, what a silly way to think about quality, whether or not, whether or not you give away more and pop. That's what a lot of people think. You know, I don't think that.

• 1:03:32Brad Gerstner?

  You know, well, I kind of thought that maybe you thought this was a perfect IPO because it ended day one at precisely 40 bucks, which was the offering price.

• 1:03:41Bill Gurley?

  Engineered. Let's be realistic. You also, you also, there's some peculiar terms in this company that you may have played a part in that the series C has a put right at like 3875. No doubt in my mind, people wanted to make sure it priced above that, which may have played a factor here. Who knows? But, but let's move on. Let's talk about one more thing before we go. So much news in one week. The, the TikTok thing, there's new information as we speak. Tell me what you know.

• 1:04:14Brad Gerstner?

  Well, I mean, listen, there's a lot of rumors swirling, which not surprisingly, this deal is, you know, set to expire and need to be extended by April 5th, under the terms of, of the first congressional extension that was made by Trump. They, you know, they made very clear that, you know, there are a lot of buyers for the TikTok asset bill and that the president has, wants to put together a deal. And, and, and of course, we have all these tariffs going on, on China. And so I'm sure this will end up as part of a big trade negotiation as it pertains to China. But as you know, just for everybody, you know, we're shareholders. I've been a shareholder in this company since

• 1:04:54Brad Gerstner?

  2015, one of the earliest venture capital rounds in ByteDance, the parent company, which, you know, which owns TikTok, you know, and for the last two years, I've agreed largely with Elon and Sacks and others that we should engage with China. We shouldn't just shut down TikTok. We should make TikTok abide by the rules and regulations, right, that we have in this country. And, and, and that's what this whole legislative unwind was about, you know, the forced sale of spin out TikTok US. So here's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that there will be a new company stood up, you know, and I'm not privy to any information. I'm not party to, to these negotiations, but I'm

• 1:05:32Brad Gerstner?

  heard, you know, let's call it TikTok US. And that TikTok US will be partly owned by ByteDance. But I think they have to keep that ownership threshold under 20%. So let's call it 19 and a half percent owned by ByteDance. That it will be owned partially by just the existing shareholders. Remember, the shareholders in ByteDance, 60% of those are US investors like Altimeter. So that we'll get our shares in ByteDance or in TikTok US. And then 50% of it or thereabouts will be new investors. So think folks like some of the rumors I've, I've seen, Amazon and Dreesen, Oracle, you know, et cetera. And these are investors who are not currently in the cap

• 1:06:17Brad Gerstner?

  table of ByteDance. So Altimeter or Co2, we're currently in the cap table of ByteDance. So we're not going to be part of the new investor syndicate, or at least that's my understanding. So, so imagine they stand that up and then the question-

• 1:06:31Bill Gurley?

  And where would that, where would that money go, Brad?

• 1:06:34Brad Gerstner?

  So the money would go into this NewCo, right? So the NewCo would be capitalized with this new money. It would have a new board.

• 1:06:41Bill Gurley?

  It would, it would, so it'd be new, fresh capital for NewCo. It wouldn't go to ByteDance.

• 1:06:46Brad Gerstner?

  No, that's my understanding that it would go into NewCo, that NewCo would get a license to the algorithm and it would be up to NewCo to audit that, to audit the data. Because remember, that's the whole point here, Bill. Like, we want to have some control over, you know, the algorithm and the data. So it makes sense that Oracle would be involved in that because remember TikTok runs on the Oracle Cloud down in Texas. I think a logical question is, okay, like, what's the big, what's the so what here? And I'm hearing that the valuation for TikTok US could be pretty low, which I would expect, right? Um, because remember, the, you know, Trump has said, maybe we'll put this in the US Sovereign Wealth Fund. So he's negotiating the deal.

• 1:07:31Brad Gerstner?

  I expect that he wants to get a pretty damn good deal.

• 1:07:34Bill Gurley?

  You didn't mention what percentage was for that. But is that part of the cap table too?

• 1:07:38Brad Gerstner?

  No, no, no idea, no idea.

• 1:07:41Bill Gurley?

  Yeah, one, one particular question. If you go back six months, maybe three or six months, there was a lot of discussion that I would suggest that, that the parent company ByteDance had no interest in this deal. They'd rather shut it down than do this. Have they changed their mind for some reason? Is there new, a new perspective from their side?

• 1:08:02Brad Gerstner?

  Well, I think, remember, if we go back six months, there was a camp that said, shut it down. And there's a camp say, saying, or we'll just take it, right?

• 1:08:13Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 1:08:13Brad Gerstner?

  And like, I think that the company's perspective, Yiming, the founder of the company, he basically said, there's no way to separate the algorithm between TikTok US and TikTok rest of world. Because creators in the US create content that go to the rest of the world and vice versa. And so like, if you took away all the US, it does so much damage. He would, you would be better to shut down TikTok US and just have, invite the US creators onto the French platform or the, the, the United Kingdom version of this or the Australian version of this via VPN or something. So I think the big change here, Bill, is this idea that US TikTok and global TikTok will continue to

• 1:08:56Brad Gerstner?

  use the same algorithm. And it's just a license to the US TikTok would be my guess was part of that bridge or breakthrough. I think a key thing here is like, how does Altimeter or Sequoia or other US investors? Remember, 60% of the investors in ByteDance are US investors. And the investors in places like Altimeter, their pension funds, their teachers, their firefighters. And if you think about the fair value for ByteDance, I think most people, although it only trades it, let's call it 300 billion, most people think the fair value of this is closer to a trillion dollars, or certainly to 800 billion. So if you take 60% of a trillion dollars, that's 600 billion

• 1:09:40Brad Gerstner?

  in locked up venture capital value for all of the endowments and pension funds, etc., for US investors. That's more than almost every other unrealized venture gain put together, Bill. Right? And so if you're able to take this company public, that turns into DPI, like hundreds of billions of dollars of DPI that goes out to the investors in these venture

• 1:10:07Bill Gurley?

  This company being TikTok or ByteDance?

• 1:10:10Brad Gerstner?

  This company being ByteDance. But we had to get the TikTok deal done as a condition required to get ByteDance public or ByteDance out the door. And so remember, ByteDance, about 90% of ByteDance's business is not TikTok US. 90% of the value of the company is things like Douyin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok, and Daobao, which is the Chinese version of ChatGPT, and TikTok around the world. And so there's a huge and profitable business inside of China and in rest of world. And we're just debating this piece in the United States. And so as a shareholder, I will tell you that whatever the dilution is caused by this, it's nominal relative

• 1:10:55Brad Gerstner?

  to the value of the total. And what I really want to see get done is just certainty. Right certainty for the company. I think it's good for the US that Tik Tok will remain. My kids love it and I don't, you know, I I'm glad we're going to make them abide by the rules of regulation. I think it's a win, uh, you know, for, for, for team Trump. I think it's a win for ByteDance, but remember now, we just hit them today, Bill, with 54% tariffs. Okay, so there may be a conversation that has to occur before Xi and Trump. I thought this deal would get approved by China. Now I'm not so sure.

• 1:11:29Bill Gurley?

  Right, and the Chinese government could probably block the deal.

• 1:11:33Brad Gerstner?

  Exactly. So just because we announce a deal, if we do hear a deal announced over the course of the next few days or over the next week, doesn't mean that it's a done deal, but I'll leave on an optimistic note.

• 1:11:44Bill Gurley?

  Okay, let's do that.

• 1:11:46Brad Gerstner?

  I think that the president wants to do a deal with Xi. Um, I don't believe we're going to have 54% tariffs against China. Um, we have two, it's too important, um, to the rest of the world, uh, that we can cooperate with China on things like ending the war in the Ukraine, things in the Middle East. Yes, they are a, uh, uh, you know, there is a great competitive struggle between the two, uh, countries, but I think that ultimately, um, you know, the president will cut a deal. He said that he likes Xi, invited him to the inauguration, and as we know, he's a dealmaker. And now we've got the, everything from the Panama Canal to negotiate over to, you know, Tik Tok, to all the other trade

• 1:12:29Brad Gerstner?

  deals between the two countries. Um, so I suspect that that, when we get back to all, what, what really came out of Liberation Day and what really matters, I think the most important thing that matters is US-China bilateral trade relations. And, um, I think that's gonna, that's gonna really dictate, um, the direction of global growth and the direction of US and China economic growth over the course of the next few years.

• 1:12:53Bill Gurley?

  Important to watch. All right, man. Take care.

• 1:12:55Brad Gerstner?

  Great seeing you. Have fun at the games. Take care.

• 1:13:07Brad Gerstner?

  As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.