Self-Driving's Quiet Boom, Tech's New IPO Window, Worldcoin's Strange Debut — With Sarah Kunst

0:00Self-driving cars are quietly taking off, metas building a bunch of new chatbots. What is WorldCoin exactly? And the rise of DateMe docs. We'll break down this week's news on the other side of this break. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed.

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1:13Learn how Okta's identity security fabric can help you secure the next generation of identities, including your AI agents. Visit Okta.com. That's O-K-T-A dot com. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Sarah Kunst is with us today. She's the Managing Director of Clio Capital, a great voice on technology. You're going to love what she has to say about what's going on in the industry. Welcome, Sarah. Hey, I'm excited to be here and talk about everything going on.

1:49thrilled to have you here been watching you a bunch on cnbc lately so i was like we got to get sarah on the show talk about some of the things that we're watching so it's awesome that you're here um why don't we start with self-driving because i'm here in san francisco over the past couple weeks i've been hopping in self-driving cars um and we have a podcast with cal vote that's coming up the ceo of cruise that we're going to go deeper into this but it's just like a watershed week, I think, for self-driving. Waymo just said it's going to expand into Austin. That's its fourth city. And Cruise today and Big Technology announced that it's going to expand into LA in the coming weeks.

2:27That's going to be the eighth city that it has operations in as it goes toward ride hailing of these AVs. What's your take on, A, like the state of this? Am I getting over my skis in terms of my belief that this is sort of the most underrated tech story of the year, if not the last few years? And is it going to be real? Yeah. So, you know, one thing I'll say before I jump into all of that is it's fascinating that Austin is so early on this because I remember until relatively recently, like Uber was banned in Austin. You know, it kind of went back and forth, but there were years where you'd show up at South by and it's like, oh, you have to download this other random app because we don't use Uber here.

3:08And so, you know, it's fascinating to see that change. You know, I live in San Francisco and you kind of get used to self-driving cars. And the way that I think about them day to day is it's a little bit like when you see the cars that are like the student driver cars in that, you know, you kind of roll your eyes. You're like a little bit more patient and you kind of roll your eyes because you know they're going to like just not quite drive the way everybody else is. And that doesn't mean by the way that the way everybody else is driving is good because, you know, city drivers, but there's a lot of like four-way stops where it's just like, dude, you can go and I would honk, but you're a car with nobody in it.

3:53So everybody's just going to kind of be vaguely annoyed and cut you off. It's funny how quickly it feels normal. I think it's the future. I suspect at scale, what we'll see a lot more of in the next like five years is what like Ford is doing. Last summer, I was I was home in Michigan, where I'm from and got to test drive a Ford Lightning, their electric truck. And the interesting thing is it has self driving, right? So, you know, driving a couple hundred miles of just like flat empty highway to get to my parents' house from, you know, the airport. And, you know, my then boyfriend, now fiance is just like sitting there and he's like, I don't, I have a really funny video where he's just kind of like, I don't know what to do because like, I don't need to touch the wheel.

4:45And you get in the way of it kind of when you do, because it tries to change lanes and everything and it can do it incredibly well, but like you can't totally reclaim your time because presumably for liability reasons, you still have to like kind of be looking at the screen. So if you're just like fully on like a laptop or a phone, they'll be like, hey, you know, they'll kind of like beep at you. I think that's the near term future. And I think it's already here a lot more than we realize in like ways big and small, like assisted parking on Hondas and stuff. It is still weird though, when you realize that there's a bunch of cars with literally no one in them or everybody's in the backseat and there's no driver.

5:27I mean, fully autonomous, right? To me, this was sort of my takeaway having spent the past few weeks riding in the cars and speaking with the executives. The hardest part was just to get this working in one or two cities. And what I'm hearing from them and what listeners will hear from Kyle Vogt from Cruz in the next couple weeks is that once you get that a lot of this technology is generalizable so you can apply it from one city to the other and then your real issue becomes supply like how do you make the vehicles and that's why i think we're really at an inflection point i mean having ridden in the waymo and the cruise vehicles in san francisco like yes they drive differently from humans but they are smooth and they it feels like a much better driving experience you can text you can do work in them you can read in them as opposed to your typical experience in san francisco after you go up or down a hill you're ready to puke so this is what i'm saying i i think that this is this is a real inflection point and it's an underappreciated story because in last decade everybody was talking about how this was real and it just wasn't but it actually does feel real this time what do you think yeah i mean i it's real right like i i when when you're consistently mad at something because it's getting in your way, whether or not you like it, you have to admit it's real.

6:48And if you live in San Francisco, you know, you don't even notice it anymore. I think that, you know, there's a question of scale and that goes to everything from, you know, sort of who's buying these, how are they getting put on the road? You know, I think we're probably relatively far away off from individual private people at any scale buying these vehicles. And then what do they replace? I usually take an Uber. If I'm driving, it's because I feel like driving usually. There's a lot of these kinds of questions. Are you actually going to put your senile grandma or your infant child in one to transport them?

7:30Is that even going to be legal to do? I don't know. in the shorter term so like 10 years from now like this episode is going to be like a meme and we're going to look like you know total like get with the program whatever but i think in the the near term there are a lot of questions um and then also just who pays for it right in terms of of um you know who's paying for the insurance which is a huge piece of it you know car insurance is is really in america health insurance you're paying not really to replace the car but to replace anything you damage on people that you might hit. And it's not a small cost.

8:06So, you know, there's a lot of logistical questions, especially in cities that are pretty flat, pretty grid-like, they don't have a lot of extreme weather, things like that. You know, getting a car to drive itself is not necessarily the hard part. I think it's going to be the sort of soft skills around it that are going to take longer to get to Ubiquiti. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I think after riding in Waymo's for the past week, and I've been in a dozen of these, about a dozen of these Waymo and cruise rides, I would happily put an infant in there. Maybe I need some more testing data. Maybe I'm a little too credulous.

8:42I don't know. Do you have an infant though? Not yet. And also I really hope my wife doesn't listen to this part of the episode. So anyway, let's move on. So Meta is releasing a series or has under development a series of chatbots. they'll take on personas from people in history including like Abe Lincoln this is from the financial times they can have human-like discussions with metas nearly four billion users and these people said some of the people inside the company said that the chatbots which staffers have dubbed personas yeah will take the form of these different characters to you know they will have a new search function they'll offer recommendations and they can be a fun product to people with people to play with.

9:27I'm generally puzzled by how infatuated the tech world is at creating these personas for people to play with. I mean, we have a billion-dollar startup character AI. You can actually basically tell Bing or ChatGPT to please be somebody from history, and it will, and I'm sure there's some limited appeal to that, but why does everybody seem to go to these type of persona bots as like they're like number one or number two application of this generative AI technology? You know, tech is good at building things and usually a little bit less good about sort of thinking about the applications. And I'll take on, you know, stuck in meta a little bit, in part because it's just been such whiplash for me to go from being a huge, you know, meta bear last year during the legless metaverse days to now a little bit of a bull with the stuff they're doing around AI.

10:22But, you know, I remember way back in the day, Facebook would be like, hey, we're going to show you pictures of somebody you haven't talked to in a while. And here's all these old pictures of you with them that you're no longer tagged with. And it's like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, that's called an ex-boyfriend. And just because you've been with Priscilla since you're like 19, right, doesn't mean that like you can't like hire people who understand this, right? And so there's always been a little bit of that uncanny valley sort of human element that is missing in a lot of these sort of tech conversations.

10:55And I think this is another example. Like, her is not a love story. It is a dystopian, depressing story about like a horrible potential future. And the fact that there's going to be lots of people listening to this who totally disagree with me on that says like a lot about the industry that we're in. And so I... Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, it's already happening. There's a lot of dudes falling in love with their chatbots. You know, I guess anything that helps cure toxic masculinity. The problem is they're probably making chatbots that never interrupt them, never talk back and always tell them what they need for dinner.

11:29So, you know, it's weird. And I don't know if it's the most useful thing. I also don't know, to be totally honest, if it's the smartest thing. I have done a lot in crypto for a long time. And to some extent, I think that the generative AI should feel a little bit like, you know, what I think some of the smartest people in crypto have broadly always felt, which is you shouldn't have to know you're using it. If you're, you know, using the blockchain to settle some contract in some like middle layer of whatever, like, you know, if Plaid ends up like embedding blockchain at some point to like keep an immutable ledger of whatever, you probably don't want Plaid to rebrand as a blockchain company, at least in 23, maybe in 21.

12:17I think AI is kind of the same way, which is that like we use AI constantly in, you know, technologies from driving cars to, you know, using like almost any social media platform, like any, you know, things like this. We're on a streaming platform right now. There's tons of AI that's built into things because it makes it easier to use the technology. And for the most part, you don't know about it or need to know about it. I suspect that for Facebook, for Meta, the killer applications around AI are going to be, you know, really smart kind of workarounds with ad targeting and like finding new products you want or content you want to see, not necessarily a bot.

13:03And to some extent, that bot is probably mainly there to train you and get your data consensually so that they don't run into some of the problems that OpenAI has right now around getting sued by like the Sarah Silvermans of the world for taking that data. You know, one of the most interesting things last week that came out of Snap's earnings call that I don't think people are fully appreciating was that they are using the data from their MyAI bot to target ads. and you have to i think oh no no it's now rolled out to everyone it used to be that if you paid you got access to it but it is an interesting ad targeting tool and those things that you're talking about whether it's better recommendations or workarounds for apple's ad system like they're already in production with meta using their artificial intelligence not a deeply told story but that stuff is absolutely in production and i'm with you on that and what do you think about their open sourcing i mean i think you called uh the year you called this like the year of llama talking about how Lama met his open source large language model.

14:03It's like the biggest power play that this company has made. Where do you see the potential there? So it's been interesting to watch AI, how companies talk about AI and who talks about it publicly and who doesn't. It's to me like a really rough estimation of this is that the companies that have and have, you know, the companies that like five years ago were hiring really smart AI engineers that have always sort of had this as a focus internally and that are kind of thought of as having like, of needing a lot of tech scrutiny. So the Googles, the metas of the world, they're talking about it kind of less.

14:40And the companies that are like, wow, we really wouldn't mind feeling relevant and getting a shot in the arm for a stock price, like the Intels and the Microsoft, they're talking about it a lot. It's also notable that Microsoft talks about it a lot, but chose to do a lot of their AI development through OpenAI, which is an investment of theirs, which gives them some arm's length deniability when Elizabeth Warren calls them in front of Congress. So it's fascinating the way people have approached it. All of that being said, I think LAMA, which is the LAMA 2 now, which is the large language model, open source that that Meta is using to, you know, sort of build the base of what will then, you know, be all their different AI applications.

15:26I think it's smart. I think open source is smart in this space. I think that you get often, you know, bigger data sets, better results. You know, you get interesting things that other people build that you wouldn't otherwise know or see, and you don't have to pay them. I think it gives you a little bit of plausible deniability and arm's lengthness, you know, when things inevitably, you know, Gary Gensler started talking about AI. So, So somebody's head's going to roll eventually, you know? And so I think that that's all good. And I also think that it shows that like, there was a moment, I can't imagine, like Mark Zuckerberg's basically our age, right?

16:03Like, I think he's still not 40. And so he's like, in his 30s, he has like, you know, happy family, like all the things, like he has, you know, he's literally richer than God. Like I've seen God's bank balance. He is richer. like but he still like shows up at work every day and keeps working and like you know it was like treating it like a company that he needs to have a job at and so there was a and he has so much control over the board and all of that for a moment there is there was a time during the legless metaverse days where it's like huh he really might kind of run this thing into the ground right in the ground means like being like you know a 10 billion dollar company but it's like he actually might do this because he can.

16:43And he, you know, he can stay irrational far longer than the markets, you know, can can stay solvent on him. And I thought he might do it. There was no sort of pulling out of that death spiral other than him deciding like, hey, this is a terrible idea. I'm going to go back to like building stuff people actually want that will actually make me money and shareholders money. So like props to them for doing that. And I think Lama is a huge part of it. Well, what do you think about Threads then? I mean, Threads is part of this revitalization of meta. But there was just some data from Sensor Tower that CNN reported.

17:18Sensor Tower is like a third-party service that monitors traffic and usage of apps. That Threads daily active users fell to 8 million on July 31st, down 82 % from launch. And the daily average time spent fell to 2.9 minutes a day on August 1st, down from 19 at launch. So clearly that app is having some retention issues. Do you think it's just a blip or is this, you know, speaking of death spirals, when I read those numbers, that's where I go. Even though I have, like I've said it before, I have a pretty active community on threads. But it does not seem to be a good sign for the app if it's losing that many users that quickly.

17:56Twitter became sort of this town square, political front page, media thing. And it wasn't always that, but it became that. And you can port that interface, but the Instagram community definitely is a little bit different than the Twitter community. and I also think that like the use case right now, right, is a little bit different. To some extent, I think threads would have maybe had a more seamless transition to a real like solid Twitter actual sort of replacement if they had launched sooner. I think, you know, I saw some data point the other day that like 60 % of American adults who use Twitter had like taken a break in the past year.

18:46And like, I know, I mean, you had asked me to come on the show earlier and I missed it because I don't check Twitter anymore. Right. And, and so I like log on every couple of weeks, retweet a bunch of stuff and that's it. And so like, I think that part of it is that people got exhausted by Twitter and all the changes, you know, especially around just knowing who's who, I don't have to agree with you on Twitter, but I want to know who I'm talking to. That was stripped, you know, with the verification changes, all of that. Right. But even still threads is like I said, like this, the data does not look good.

19:23Yeah. And I guess my deeply meandering point on that is just that that I think that it's going to threads is not a one to one Twitter replacement. I think it's going to become a different thing. I would argue that you should flip the data, which is that the initial bump in like downloads was unprecedented and didn't ever seem like it was going to be sustainable because nobody knew what they were doing there. Social media networks functionally never start out with a giant bang. is it hard to come back from a dip? Yes. But you have to remember that they haven't done much to like force it into your other sort of meta touch points, right?

20:09It's not in your WhatsApp feed, or it's not in WhatsApp, you know, as a status message. It's not in, you can import it to Instagram, but it's not super seamless. It's not on Facebook. Like, so as those things become more integrated. I'm far from counting it out. The other thing to keep in mind is that advertisers are going to love it because advertisers are very comfortable with Instagram. Yeah. We just had a story on that. They're just dying to advertise with threads. Exactly. So I wouldn't count them out, but I don't think it was ever going to be the day one downloads were ever going to stay consistent.

20:43I want to talk about your perspective on what the IPO market's going to look like in the next few months to a year. There's a story that you brought up that you wanted to chat about, which is that Stripe named Stefan Tomlinson, who is formerly of Confluent as its new CFO. And maybe that's a signal that the IPO market is about to heat up. And that would obviously bode well for you as an investor because, well, there's a chance for exits again, at least to the public market. So what do you think that signals? Yeah, I mean, I think that Stripe is in an interesting position and it's fascinating. The best way to have a bellwether is to have a company that is truly indicative of the larger market it sits in.

21:30And all of the sort of short term IPO bellwethers are not that right. So, you know, Stripe has a massive valuation. the early employees haven't had a ton of liquidity. You know, the early investors haven't had a ton of liquidity. This is a company that a lot of people have held. You know, they waited a little too long to go public, you know, in the, and then sort of the market, you know, slowed and shut down. And so, and then, you know, FinTech has been, as a category, has had a really hard time in public markets. And even though Stripe and Affirm have nothing in common, if they end up grouped in that same category, then that's a hard comp.

22:14And so there's just a bunch of weird quirks, like IPOs that are like 100 million, like these huge IPOs, like the Ubers, the Facebooks, typically don't pop on day one and then just keep climbing. There's usually sort of a dip. There's a lockup. There's all these, now we're going into an election year And, you know, that like the credit ratings of America aren't great. Like all of these things are sort of externalities. And it doesn't change the fact that Stripe has investors who want liquidity. Stripe has early employees who want liquidity. Stripe has, you know, Stripe probably wants liquidity.

22:49So at some point they have to go. And it looks like they're gearing up to do that in the next six months, certainly next 12 months, whether or not it's an ideal time. If they IPO, does that sort of open the floodgates for the bunch of other private tech companies to say, all right, we're going in? I mean, that'll be the question, right? There are a couple others, you know, that we were talking about, like Arm, which used to be a public company and then, you know, was taken private by SoftBank and they're in AI. So they're an obvious one to go public. Just the fact that SoftBank owns them is massively boosted, you know, SoftBank stock over the last six months.

23:22And so they probably want to get out sooner rather than later because AI is hot now and it may not stay hot. You know, but that's also a little bit of a different question. And then you have companies, you know, like like potentially Starlink or SpaceX, where, you know, to some extent, those IPOs could be driven by, you know, Elon's need for liquidity because you just burnt 56 billion or whatever on Twitter. And so they're not a monolith, but I do think we're going to start seeing more IPOs and the bankers are dying for them because that's how they make money. And how can that change the way that we see companies like yours invest in startups?

24:04I do really early stage. So I do pre-seed. I'm pretty immune to the vagaries of the IPO market for another three or four years. The rest of your counterparts. For later stage venture funds, I think that there's two questions. The secondaries market is definitely heating up a little bit more. I'm seeing more names kind of get passed around and a lot of them are still discounts or flat to the last rounds they did in like 2021, but you're starting to see a little bit more of that. A lot of that is early employees and early angel investors selling to family offices. But, you know, I think that a lot of these big tech, a lot of these big funds would like liquidity, but they don't need it right away.

24:50Sequoia is not going to go out of business because the IPO market shut down for a year or two. The midsize funds have a bit of a quandary on their hands because they can't raise more money and often until they've returned money if they're an earlier fund. And if they YOLO'd a bunch of it and, you know, crypto and tokens and then it's going to be harder for them to do that. But a lot of those mid-size sort of 21 vintage year funds are also just kind of dead in the water. And the founders are like enjoying their fees while they last for the next handful of years. And they know they're going to have to do something else.

25:24Sarah Kust is here with us. She's the managing director of Clio Capital. On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about WorldCoin, which I have so many questions about. And then DateMeDocs. Are Google Docs going to end up displacing the dating apps. Sarah is someone who's had some experience in this area working with the companies and I can't wait to ask her about this. All that and more coming up right after this. These days it feels like every dollar should be working a little harder, but figuring out where to put your cash can be confusing. That's where Wealthfront comes in. Wealthfront is a tech-driven financial platform built to help you grow your savings into long-term wealth.

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26:36It may not reflect the experience of others, and there's no guarantee of future performance or success. Wealthfront brokerage is not a bait. Rate is subject to change. Promo terms and conditions apply. For more information, see the episode description. Shape the future of enterprise AI with Agency. A-G-N-T-C-Y. Now an open source Linux foundation project, Agency is leading the way in establishing trusted identity and access management for the internet of agents, a collaboration layer that ensures AI agents can securely discover, connect, and work across any framework. With agency, your organization gains open, standardized tools and seamless integration, including robust identity management to be able to identify, authenticate, and interact across any platform.

27:23Empowering you to deploy multi-agent systems with confidence, join industry leaders like Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle, Red Hat, and 75-plus supporting companies to set the standard for secure, scalable AI infrastructure. Is your enterprise ready for the future of Vigentic AI? Visit agency.org to explore use cases now. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Sarah Kuntz, the Managing Director of Clio Capital. Sarah, got to get your perspective on WorldCoin. I mean, you know, I have a sort of cursory understanding of what's happening. People are like going up and scanning their retinas and getting tokens.