Live from Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco: Android Hardware, Mozilla's Open Source AI & Venture Capital

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21:41Carol Massar:I got to say, in prepping for this segment, I actually found a story back in 2019 that Bloomberg reported out. They did a deep dive. The story's entitled, The Smartphone Revolution Was the Android Revolution. It was by Shira Ovaday, and it got into how the mobile operating system called Android drove Steve Jobs at Apple crazy. And the reporter went on to note that while Apple sparked the modern smartphone revolution, Android, Tim, was the essential ingredient that made the devices ubiquitous. Okay, so fast forward just a few years to today, seven years later, the open source mobile platform. It's the world's most widely used, depending on the stats that you look at, just about 70 % of global share.

22:17Leading the global teams behind it, Samir Samad, president of Android Ecosystem. He joins us live here at Bloomberg Tech. Welcome. How are you? Thank you. I'm great. Nice to see both of you. It's good to see you as well. Look, we think about Android in the context of iOS, I think, a lot of people, because that's really the duopoly that exists, I think many people would argue. How do you position Android in the United States versus how you position it globally? Where it is more widely adopted? Well, Android is an open source operating system, which is really great because it allows people to build all kinds of different devices.

22:53So, of course, we know that Android is popular for phones today, where there's over three and a half billion Android devices that are used every day. It's the most widely used operating system in the world. But Android is so much more than phones. People use it for cars. They use it for televisions. They use it for smart watches and all kinds of new devices, including some smart glasses that we're working on for later this year as well. So it's really become much more than phones, and it's a whole ecosystem.

23:18Carol Massar:Well, you know, it's funny, before we got started, too, when we think about an operating system, how do you think about an operating system within an AI world? That is, we're still kind of figuring it out, right? We're all finding our way here. Well, it's changing a lot. Things are changing all around us. And I think the way we think about this moment is we're moving from an operating system to what I call an intelligence system, one that is able to be more predictive and more helpful in the moment for you. So instead of, you know, making you the micromanager of your device, which is the way I think computing's worked for 40 years, you have the idea in your head and you use a pointing device or taps to take that idea and do all the things you need to do to get things done.

23:58In this new AI era, how can we actually make the system much smarter? So you give it your intention, your goal, and it can translate that into the action that it needs to take to help you get more done. Yeah, I want to push on that a little bit because I still think when right now, when a lot of people think about AI, they equate it with LLMs and they think about LLMs not necessarily as, you know, clog code or helping us vibe code, but rather as glorified search engines. And that actually does search a lot better than we've grown up using. What is the value proposition for an ecosystem in the world of AI?

24:36Because you're explaining this idea of us being more productive as a result. of this technology but i don't even know what that looks like is it predictive does it know what we

24:47Carol Massar:want before we want it like what is it which just gets a little creepy then potentially potentially let me give you one simple example that i used a new release of android with gemini for recently on my my pixel device which is you know i had a list of folks that are coming to a barbecue that i'm holding and next to each person i had how many people are coming in their family are they vegetarian? Are they not vegetarian? You know, the normal thing you do when you're throwing a party, you make this list. But like, where do you put that list? Does that go in Google docs? I think I just had it in an email that I was writing to myself, you know, like we all do sometimes.

25:20And I asked Gemini working on my pixel device, can you take this list, analyze it, figure out how many hamburgers, how many hot dogs, how many buns, and then go to Instacart and add it all to my shopping cart. And then let me check it out. And you know, It took that, figured out all the vegetarians, figured out all the things, figured out how many people are coming, how many kids, how many not kids. And it did it for me. And so that probably saved me, I don't know, six, seven minutes. You add that up multiple times a day throughout all the things that we're doing, and that's really helpful.

25:52Carol Massar:Samir, what do you think in terms of the conversations that we're having about artificial intelligence? Because I do feel like you and I were talking about this at dinner last night. we're just scratching the surface in terms of certainly how we use it, how we need to push ourselves to better understand what this tool can do or eventually do. Well, I think the most important thing right now is for all of us that are in the industry or even around the industry is to make sure we have hands-on experience. One of the things we tell our teams and I tell my kids as well is we should engage with the technology to understand how it can help you and what the limits of it are.

26:27And it's changing so quickly. What I tell folks is even if it wasn't able to help you with something this month, put a note for yourself and check back three months later because it's moving so fast. What I think is important about your example is that you had the initiative to actually ask Gemini to do that. I think that the challenge in this world is that a lot of people don't know that LLMs like Gemini can actually do that sort of thing. So they wouldn't even know that with that example, AI could save them six or seven minutes. How do you communicate that to a population that has no idea what this technology can do, truly has no idea?

27:10Well, I think that's a great question. And in the beginning, when these interfaces came out, you had a chat prompt and we didn't know what we could type into it. And I think people do discover over time by, by trying things, but most importantly, the software itself, this is where the operating system can be really helpful. You know, you, when you talk about an intelligence system, it should be able to understand from you what your intention is. You know, what, what's my goal? What am I trying to get done? Oh, I'm planning a party. Okay. Well, did you know I can help you with this, you know, and to prompt you to do that and to, to show you how that it can assist you in that moment.

27:48And that's a different kind of user interface than what we've seen. What I have noticed is with Google Search, it's actually pushing me to Gemini within web-based Google Search, and it's becoming very natural. So it's sort of like, I'm not starting at Gemini, I'm starting at Google Search, and then using it, interacting with Search like an LLM. Well, I'm glad it's helping you. That's great. We have so many different tools that I think are there for folks. I just want to give one small example of one called Notebook LM. And if your viewers haven't checked out Notebook LM. People love this. Yes.

28:22I mean, Notebook LM is one of my favorites. And on the Android app, for example, for Notebook LM, my son, who just finished finals, he was like, Dad, can you help me study for the science final? And I said, sure. Overly confident as I am about this. And then he gave me the material. And I looked at it and I said, I haven't reviewed this in years. But tonight I have to do a study session with him. So I put it all in notebook.lm and it gave me an audio podcast that I listened to on the way home. And when I got home, I looked like super dad, you know, because I could answer these questions and go back.

28:55This is where it starts to become helpful. And I think it's all about the purpose, the way in which we use this technology in a purposeful, intentful way to help make our lives better. And that's what we're trying to do.

29:09Carol Massar:So let's go there, because last month when you guys announced a bunch of upcoming features for your Android 17 operating system, you made some comment about there's a great concern about AI for AI's sake, and we want to be very purposeful. What does that mean? Well, I mean, I think if you look at any, just go talk to people. The word AI has become pretty overloaded, and I think people are, they have mixed feelings about it. Let's put it that way. I think what they really want is to not hear about the technology. What they really want is to hear about how is this going to help me. I gave the Notebook LM example, but there's so many more that when you talk about how this can help you, it changes the conversation.

29:53I'll give you one of my favorites from Android. Android has a feature called Circle to Search. And Circle to Search is really simple. You hold down the Home button, and then you see a flash. And at that point you can circle anything on your screen. Let's say you have a celebrity on your screen wearing a great outfit. Circle it and say, shop the look. Google will go take what they're wearing and figure out what the jacket is, what the tie is, all the different pieces, and bring back each of those to you so you can figure out where to buy them and if they're right for you. There's a ton of AI behind the scenes there.

30:30That's not the important thing. The important thing is that it's super helpful, packaged in a way that's intentful, purposeful for the user to help them get something done that they couldn't do before.

30:39Carol Massar:Samir, where do you think AI impacts our world the most? Is it in our personal lives? Is it in our work lives? Is it everything? We keep talking about what it's going to mean for our health care and medical world. Where do you see it impacting our world the most, or will it be everything? Well, I think there's a number of places that it's already impacting our world. But I think if you take the discipline of software engineering, for example, that's going through a lot of change, I think exciting change, but also there are people who are concerned changes with that as well. I think in the end it will be very productive and we're going through that same change at Google as well.

31:14But I think if you look at every industry, there are amazing applications. If you look at biotech, there will be amazing applications. If we look at, as you said, healthcare, there will be amazing applications. I'm wearing my new Fitbit Ace, which is a wearable. I spy three different trackings. I'm a wearable guy. I'm a wearable guy. But I think the most exciting part about wearables these days. That's the new screenless Google device from Fitbit. Yeah, and I love it. And the most exciting part for me is we've had wearables. As you can see, I've got a bunch of them, and I've been involved in this space for a long time.

31:48They're collecting health data, but it's what you do with the data that's most important. because if you're looking at your sleep score, I mean, I kind of know when I had a bad night of sleep. So the question is, what are the patterns, what are the trends, what are the insights that can really help with wide behavior change? I think that is where AI on the device can really help us with that. Yeah, if you're listening on radio, Samir's got a Fitbit on one wrist. It looks like an Android watch. I have a Pixel watch. An Aura ring. He's got to check out what the competition is doing. If you have any others to recommend, all yours.

32:19So I want to go back to this whole idea of the ecosystem and how it relates to AI and Gemini and the stickiness of it. Because I think that's a part of the conversation that really has just recently occurred to me. And I'm wondering what advantage you think Google has having Gemini as its own AI operating system along with Android and not working seamlessly across whether we're talking about your Fitbit, whether you're talking about an Android phone, whether you're talking about a Pixel watch versus sort of third-party LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT? I want to say a couple things about that. First, Android is an open platform.

33:01And so one of the things that's the central tenant of Android is choice. So Android is the only mobile operating system where you can choose your personal assistant. You can choose the agent that's important to you. So if you want Gemini, you can use Gemini. If you want Claude or something else, you can choose that. And those will work equally well? Yeah, the idea with Android is that it's open and so you should be able to plug in what's important to you. That's a fundamentally important part of Android, and I think it's an advantage in this world when things are moving fast. From a Google perspective, of course Google competes with some of those companies, and I think Google has a unique position in that it has a full stack of innovation that it's worked on over a decade, from Silicon, unique Silicon in the data center, foundational models, all the way through to the operating system.

33:45And we want to connect those things in ways that are powerful and that help consumers live better lives. That's what we're doing. In fact, recently we announced something called Gemini Intelligence. Gemini Intelligence is the best Gemini experience available on the most premium Android devices. So take a Samsung device or a Pixel device. And that's really where you can experience the best of that entire stack.

34:08Carol Massar:Do you think being open source and being able to let users choose and select what their agent will be will give you guys longer term advantage? because I do think there's folks say that at some point there's going to be some shakeup because we're not going to need necessarily every big LLM. Like at some point people are going to financially, we heard it from the Cerebris CEO last night, that people are going to select kind of what they need and want. I think that competition is good. And I think that it's led to a ton of innovation. I mean, look at all the change we're seeing. That's fueled by everyone competing, which is great.

34:42From an Android perspective, the thing about Android being open source and being an open ecosystem, it means that we work with many, many different partners. We work with, for example, of course, Google builds its own hardware with Pixel devices, but we also work with Samsung and Motorola and many other companies. And what that usually leads to in times of very fast-paced change, Android does better because of that open nature. You have innovation coming from everyone. And so you've got foldable phones, you've got different types of LLMs, You've got different types of screen technology. And all of that is great for the consumer and usually pushes the ecosystem.

35:19Carol Massar:So, yes, it's an advantage. But it also sounds to me like it's a risk and it's a branding risk because the experience that someone might get on a non-premium smartphone or a non-premium device that uses Android might be completely different than the experience that they're getting from one of those high-end Pixel devices that you talked about. So how do you control for that and how do you sort of protect the brand in an open source world? That's a great question. And what we do as Google, our role in this from an Android perspective is to do a couple of things. First is to make sure that the experience has a certain amount of compatibility.

35:54Meaning, if you get the Google Play Store, for example, or any store of your choice, and you download apps, they should work. They should work really well, right? So that's a baseline set of compatibility, including the new LLM apps that you want to get. That's really important that we create that baseline of compatibility. But it also means allowing manufacturers to bring the latest and greatest technology. You know, if we controlled everything on our end, you wouldn't have foldable phones. You wouldn't have flip folds or open folds. And that's pushed the industry forward. And so that is the dance.

36:28It's Android being open. You want to create a great experience. You also want to let innovation thrive because that pushes the whole industry forward.

36:36Carol Massar:Samir, you know, we've just got about a minute or so left here. And I look at your background, Bachelor of Computer Science from UC San Diego. You completed a program for management development at Harvard Business School. What's your view on AI in education and maybe how education has to evolve? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that AI can play a huge role for the positive in education if we embrace it and use it correctly. Obviously, there's a lot of ways and a lot of concerns about misuse of AI in education. I think that my experience is that there is not enough access to high quality education around the world.

37:12And if you think about, for example, learning English, that's not only a skill that is important if you want to be bilingual in many countries. It improves your economic standing in many places if you're multilingual or in particular if you have learned English. Now, how can we get English language learning, for example, to as many people in the world as possible? And there are companies like Open Education and Open English that are doing exactly that and using AI technology. That's awesome. That provides wider access. And I think we're going to see a number of things like that which help level the playing field.

37:45Carol Massar:Samir, thank you so much. Give us so much time. We really appreciate it. Samir Simak, president of the Android ecosystem, joining us here at Bloomberg Technology. I love the three different pieces of wearable technology. It's pretty impressive. Are you getting consistent scores, Samir? No. Okay, this is good. I have to say, the URA is the hardest on me.

38:10But I really love the new health coach with Google Health. I have, like many of us, I'm sure we all have our 48. We all have our ailments. I have a lower back. It's not great. I told it that. I gave it my MRI report. And it has totally tailored my workout to prevent injury. And that's been awesome.

38:33Carol Massar:interesting stuff. Love it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate Samir Samad joining us. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Business Week Daily coming up after this.

38:45You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg business app or watch us live on YouTube. Well, let's continue talking AI and specifically talk about mythos. It's the AI model from Anthropic that has central banks, financial institutions, governments around the world freaked out. It's aimed at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Anthropic has said it was too dangerous to make available to the general public. Actually, the co-founder and president of Anthropic, Daniela Amadei, was on stage here earlier talking about the model.

39:21If you missed any of that, you can check out that interview at Bloomberg.com and on the terminal.

39:25Carol Massar:Yeah, and some are also seeing opportunity. We should point out that the technology organization Mozilla, it is known for Firefox, actually used mythos to find and fix more than 271 vulnerabilities identified in a recent version of Firefox. We want to get into that and so much more. Joining us from the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco is Rafi Kerkorian. He is the chief technology officer of Mozilla. Welcome, welcome. Nice to have you here. You know, as we mentioned, people know Mozilla as really the organization behind Firefox. What are the vulnerabilities, though, that Mythos actually identified?

39:59Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of them. A lot of them have to do with being able to break out of the browser itself and actually execute code on your machine. So, like actually having JavaScript or HTML come in and just load it from a web page and instruct the browser to go do other things. So, Mythos has been very helpful for us to actually find some of these really long-standing old bugs and actually help us shut them down. But what I noticed in the blog post that your team wrote about this was that, quote, they wrote, quote, we also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher.

40:33So is it as powerful as everybody says it is if an actual human being could have identified these things? Yeah, no, I mean, it's just a question of just, like, how many elite human researchers are there in the grand scheme of things? So, like, yeah, these models are pretty powerful, and they're allowing us to do what, like, thousands of these researchers could do instead of just, like, six of them. So, would you have been able to identify these with your own team? We have a really good team. I think in the fullness of time, yes. But, like, allowing us to, like, rapidly accelerate and just close out a bunch of stuff that we didn't even know about.

41:06So, should we be freaked out about this tech? Yes, I actually think we should be. I think we can, like, we'll be getting to a world, like, once everything settles down where things could actually be more secure. but we're living in this intermediary zone. Is the reason why we should be scared because if Mythos is in the wrong hands, they could go to your bank and say, okay, identify the vulnerabilities in Rafi's account and then they get access to your money. The bank, the water company, the power company, like all the critical infrastructure of the world. I actually have faith that like intranet folks will figure this out.

41:37We're used to patching things and deploying at scale like Heartbleed when SSL had problems. Yeah, right, yeah. But I don't think my bank knows how to do it. Like you said, I don't think my power company knows how to do it. Those are like the other pieces of critical infrastructure that I'm really worried about. I mean, you're a CTO. You should tell them CTO, okay?

41:53Carol Massar:So there are things that are happening. Why isn't it happening more? Or is it in where they're being caught or what? Like, give us an idea. Yeah, no, I think we need to have actually a real large scale, like Y2K-like effort to actually start closing a bunch of these critical vulnerabilities. And, you know, many kudos to what Anthropica is doing, but we need to give access to more people. Like we need to get access to all the open source providers. We need to get access to all the database providers. And then we need to fund them to actually start doing the work. So not only do we need to clean the bugs up, but then we also need to start thinking about mitigation.

42:23Like this is actually a large scale. Think about how much work we did for Y2K. Boards got involved. Governments got involved. Insurance got involved. We haven't kicked all those in yet.

42:32Carol Massar:Why aren't we doing that yet? Because this is moving so fast. Is it just, is that it? That's exactly the problem. I think this is just moving so fast. Like Mythos was only really given to us in the wintertime. It's only been a couple of months. But the real question is that open models are catching up. So I think it's only 6 to 9 to 12 months when all the open models can start doing what Mythos are doing. So we only actually have a small window of time. So then how do we get to a point where you're sitting here with us a year from now. Mythos is going to be old news. There's going to be some sort of next model that is just that much better.

43:08How are you going to be sure that it's a company that's, you know, quote unquote, responsible behind it? Like many would say anthropic is being with this rollout, maybe too responsible in your view. But how do you make sure that it's not a bad actor who has this kind? Yeah, no, I mean, I think this is actually where some government intervention might not be a bad thing. Like actually making sure that we put the right investment into actually getting these things shown, deployed, exactly. Have you been to the post office? Yeah, I know. 100%. I mean, but we do need to do all this work across all the efforts.

43:42We need to secure that post office, too. I don't disagree with you, but I think there are many people out there who say this could be something that maybe the free market would solve more efficiently than government bureaucracy. You have experience in government, sort of. No, 100%. In politics, you have experience. I think the real problem is that public sector infrastructure is not treated in the same way. And so, like, we need to figure out how to do the real investment there. that I don't think is purely just maybe a public-private partnership solves that, but I don't think that's purely a market problem.

44:11Carol Massar:Rafi, you were the first CTO of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. Politics today, we see the impact social media. Some good, some bad. Sure. On politics, what about AI? No, I mean, I think about this a lot. We're living in this world where we're owners, not renters, on all this technology. Just think about your search experience. It used to be 10 blue links on Google. And now it's one result when I ask the chatbot. And it's the right result for somebody. Like, is it the right result for me? So I really worry about this world where, like, living in someone else's intelligence all the time.

44:47What does that actually do and how we think, how we decide, how we buy, all those kind of things.

44:51Carol Massar:Can we actually get ahead of that and be better with it? I mean, this is where I really think we need to figure out how to do open deployments and open governance. Like, right now, the incentive models are just such that, like, there was a whole study based out of, I think, University of Maryland. where they just ask a bunch of these chatbots to help you buy something, and they're vastly weighted toward sponsored and promoted goods. So how do we make sure that they're really on my side? I need to be able to go into it, understand it, tweak it, work with it, as opposed to just being delivered it.

45:20So we need to start working on those kind of questions now. You were talking a little bit about your family earlier, and I'm just wondering how you, as a CTO, and somebody who understands this technology and the potential downfall, and pitfalls of it, rather, you sort of have that diet, that information technology diet. I mean, can I tell you the pros and cons? Yes, please. My 10-year-old is vibe coding video games. They're actually unbelievable, cute and stinky productions. It's like the best thing ever. And so it's an expression of creativity. My 13-year-old, I got a phone call from a teacher saying, I think you've chat-chipeded cheated on an essay.

45:56So we do need to figure out how we actually treat people. How do we teach critical thinking? That's the thing that's still missing, and that's the thing I think we need to really hone in on. It's less about the tools. So how do you do it there? I think it's asking real questions. I think it's having lots of conversation. The Pope is an encyclical called it fasting from AI. So we just need to figure out a way. We need to teach this new tech, but we also need to just monitor and help them do productive struggle.

46:23Carol Massar:We're being told we have one more question with you, and it's Twitter or Uber. It's Uber. So go. I was going to say, Tim's got to ask. Yeah, I mean, you were at Uber. advanced technology department. This was like the precursor to self-driving cars. This department was killed a few years ago. The promise was that you would have driverless cars at Uber. The technology as it is today, I mean, you walk outside of here, there are Waymos going everywhere. Not really in New York City at this point. Where are we when it comes to just getting into a car and it taking us where we need to go and there's no steering wheel?

46:57I mean, it turns out to be a really hard problem. This is one of the things we learned, right? It turns out to be a really hard problem to do generalized self-driving. Like to be able to drive anywhere under any condition, under any situation. Like a city by city basis seems to be working out. Like Waymos are pretty good. You know, I recently crashed my Tesla under full self-driving. You did? I did. So like the Teslas clearly have problems. We slammed into the wall at like 30 miles an hour. Oh my God. And so like there are clearly still problems with all this technology. That doesn't sound like full self-driving.

47:26It doesn't sound like full self-driving. I totally think that the Tesla technology is not quite ready yet, whereas Waymo has been designed to literally not have a person in the wheel. The whole human-in-the-loop version of self-driving, I think it's not the right path that we should be going on, and we should be thinking about just actually tackling the real problem head on.

47:42Carol Massar:20 seconds left. What's the question we should all be asking ourselves in this environment today? Yeah, I mean, the question is, how do we make sure all these technologies we're deploying are actually on our side, not on someone else's side? I want to live in a world of 7 billion AGI, if not 7 AGI. So how do we get there? Ah, really interesting. Robbie, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. Yeah, fun for us too. Robbie Krikorian, he's Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this.

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50:10Carol Massar:Carol Master, Tim Stenevich, live here at Bloomberg. Technology out here in San Francisco. Getting ready to wrap up, but we have one more important conversation to bring to you. Yeah, very excited to have Katie Hahn with us. You know her because she's a former federal prosecutor. She was the first female general partner at Idrisom Horowitz. She made her name investigating digital assets before investing in crypto startups. She's raised a billion dollars for new venture funds. She's also getting ready, too, to join Bloomberg's Emily Chang up on the main stage to talk about where she's looking when it comes to new opportunities in tech.

50:43And she's joining us on Bloomberg Business Week Daily.

50:45Carol Massar:We're eager to pick her brain. Katie Hahn is founder and CEO at Hahn Ventures. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Welcome to California. Thank you. We love California. What do you, when you look at the world broadly, we're having so many conversations about AI. We're going to talk crypto and some other things. But where do you think about the best opportunities and where you might want to commit investment? Well, I think how we think about it is we've raised a billion dollars in new funds. And the world looks really different than four years ago when we raised our first fund.

51:15And it even looks different than 12 months ago. And what we're doing and where we're excited to invest, where we're seeing a lot of opportunities, is what I'm calling the new economy. It's founders that are building the future of finance, for example. And obviously, digital assets are a part of that. But we're seeing kind of three structural shifts right now that we're keeping a close eye on. The first structural shift we're seeing is what I'll call the new plumbing or the new financial infrastructure. This is a financial infrastructure that's built for a global world from day one. It's built for a 24-7, and it's built for a digital world.

51:46So that's the first structural shift. The second structural shift is kind of new asset classes entirely and new markets. And it started as stable coins, a new digital form of a dollar, for example. But quickly we're seeing tokenization of stocks, of bonds and of other funds. And so with those new kind of asset classes, also you can have new markets, things like prediction markets, which we can talk about. Things like perpetual market. That's getting a lot of attention ahead of the SpaceX IPO. And then the third structural shift we're seeing, and this is really exciting and probably the furthest away, is what I'm calling the future of agentic finance.

52:20And it is quite simply, what does the world look like when you're building financial services and products for the end user who is not a human, but the end user who is an agent or a computer? And that's just kind of a mind-blowing world. What does that look like? They don't stop working, by the way. They're 24-7, so it's got to be always on. Is crypto still, though, part of the DNA of the fund? Absolutely. You know, we've always said we're looking to back founders who are building the future of finance. And cryptographic primitives and digital assets are still a huge piece of that. I mean, stable coins.

52:54A lot of people don't even think of stable coins as crypto. But I think they very much are. So is the tokenization of assets. Like I said, prediction markets. But there's a lot of synergies between the two. You've had a really strong track record with stable coin companies. I mean, we can just go through some of these. Bridge, Stripe acquired for$1.1 billion. That was a home run for you guys. You also invested in the stablecoin company, BVNK, sold at MasterCard for about$1.8 billion. So you know what you're talking about when it comes to stablecoins. But is that era, like, are the opportunities for early-stage venture capitalists, are we past that because of the successes that we have?

53:32I mean, it all depends on how you define early stage. But I think we're still in the early innings. You know, actually, I've been talking about stablecoins since 2017. I mean, I debated Paul Krugman about the promise of stablecoins in 2018, and he said it was a flash in the pan. And obviously, I think, you know, we're seeing that it's not. I mean, MasterCard, the transaction you just mentioned, it was the third largest acquisition in history that company's ever done. Stablecoin's not a flash in the pan. I think that's fair to say. Bitcoin right now is under serious pressure. Having a moment. Yeah, having a moment.

54:04We're, you know, we're basically at levels not seen since 2024. for really the well we saw them in february we did that's what i mean like so february so like we're down to those levels right right um but my point is that it's they haven't tricked it hasn't participated in the risk on rally that we've seen i mean the nasdaq 100 is up more than 30 percent just since the the end of march yeah michael saylor's strategy is selling just a little bit of bitcoin what what's going on right now i logged into x earlier this week and it seems like people are losing faith yeah i don't think so i think look i i remember where i was the day bitcoin first hit$1 ,000.

54:38I remember where I was the first day it hit$10 ,000. And I remember where I was the day it first hit$100 ,000. And I wonder, where will I be when it first hits$200 ,000? I think it's just a question of time horizon. And of course, we're not a hedge fund. We're not trading in and out of these assets. We are a long-term venture investor. And we've made bets in our first fund in Bitcoin, for example, and those have done very well for us. So I'm still a believer in the long-term store of value story that Bitcoin, it clearly has product market fit. Another thing I debated Paul Friedman on years ago when it was in the billions of dollars as an asset class.

55:12And now today that number is in the trillions. And again, to your point, it does vary dramatically. But if you would have told me a few years back Bitcoin has crashed or have a moment at$65 ,000 or$64 ,000 or$63 ,000, I would have told you, oh, my gosh, really? Incredible. So it's all about time horizons. And that's why we're taking a long-term patient view.

55:32Carol Massar:Katie, is AI sucking some of the interest out of the retail investors or retail trade and they're kind of shifting their efforts and their attention? Well, you know, one of the interesting things about the digital asset space that I've been really, really pleased to see is the institutional story. And I think that's the quiet story. And that's what's really changed. So where you have retail focused is not necessarily always where you have institutions focused. And it used to be the case that retail made up 90 % of kind of the digital asset economy, 10 % institutions. Now that number has shifted.

56:04It's kind of closer to 20, even 30 % institutional. And I think I would actually say that's why we're seeing the volatility lessen. I know it doesn't feel like it from what you're seeing. It's like almost more traditional. That's right. It used to be much more retail heavy and still retail is a very important component of the digital asset story, but it's not the only component. And I think what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of institutional participation. You're seeing BlackRock. I mean, you mentioned Michael Saylor, but the reality is that it was a very de minimis amount that he sold. And it's all about the net accumulation.

56:34Yeah. I think for some people it was symbolic because he's such a maximalist. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to talk some personal investments versus investments in the fund. I mean, we go through the list of like some of the hottest companies you've invested in personally. Cerebris, Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Databricks, Cognition, Figma, Grok, Niko, OpenAI, SpaceX, the list goes on. How do you separate sort of your interests as an investor personally versus the fund? Because I'm sure there are a lot of people who invested in your fund who'd say, wait, I would love to have investments on that list.

57:09And I think many of them do have investments on that list. The thing that you mentioned, it's very easy, actually. If you're in the future of finance, if you're in digital assets, the new economy very clearly it goes in the fund and the fund has the first opportunity but if you're talking about you mentioned neco you mentioned edison these are great examples these are bio companies these are longevity companies and they're really harnessing the power of ai i mean if you take a company um like edison it's doing drug discovery and shrinking the discovery of medicines using ai that's clearly not in our mandate as a fund of the future of finance but i'm really lucky being where i am and being in these circles to meet these incredible founders.

57:48Neko, another one, you know, it's coming to the U.S. People who are in London have obviously heard of Neko. That's Daniel Ek, one of his new ventures. Founder of Spotify. Founder of Spotify. It's really exciting what they're building, what he and Shaq are building with Neko. And there's a long waiting list in London, but it's coming to New York, actually, to your neck of the woods later this year. And it's going to be under$500. And you're really talking about preventative medicine that is accessible. And that$500 is the starting point. Obviously, I think that company, you can talk to them, helps to bring that price down over time.

58:19We were talking about really harnessing the power of technology for preventative medicine for everybody, not just for a few people. And I think that's really powerful. And it's not in our fund mandate, but I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and not participate in those. And it's really great for our founders to be in touch with founders of the Han Ventures portfolio, because there's actually a lot of synergies between some of these technologies.

58:39Carol Massar:Well, I love that you went there, because when it comes to AI, I mean, there's a lot of obvious things that we think it's going to do. but I think about the things that you guys might be investing in that maybe isn't in the headlines or the main stories. Where do you think investors need to be thinking about how this ultimately impacts our world? Well, look, there's two areas that our fund is really excited about. You asked, is it sucking all the air out of digital assets? And I would say no, there's so much synergy between the two frontier technologies. If you think about cryptographic primitives and you think about AI, one of the things I think about is agentic commerce, right?

59:12And we have companies like Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, Coinbase looking at authentic commerce platforms. And if you think about, I think we can all agree, can't we, that agents are going to be doing more than humans are going to be doing with these tools, right? Who knows about the pace of that? Who knows how much work they'll take from humans? But certainly, I think we can all agree that computers are going to increasingly take on more and more of our work. And they're going to need to pay for things. If they're going to be effective, they're going to need to transact and they're going to need to operate 24-7.

59:43And we don't think they're going to use the old payment rail to do that. They're going to have to be able to subscribe to services. And what are they going to use? We think they will use technologies like stablecoins. But another really important thing I'm really excited about, four words, provenance, identity, privacy, reputation. Those are so important in the age of AI. And these are things that people in cryptography have been working on for years. Do you have agents acting on your behalf right now? Yeah, we do at the fund. Okay, what do they do? Well, I'm not going to give away all of our secret sauce here to folks who are looking, but we're experimenting, I think, like many.

1:00:18You know, I still think we're at a point where we still need a lot of human oversight. And particularly, I do have people who tell me, well, AI agents can pick and they're better pickers than humans. I don't believe that for a second right now. I still think there's a really important role for humans to play, especially when you're judging founders and figuring out what to invest in. Well, Samir Samad over at Android Ecosystem gave us a great example of how he was, you know, having an agent help him get food for an Instacart for a barbecue that he was having. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So you want an example?

1:00:46I mean, we're definitely using it to help us make sure our pipeline is strong. Are we seeing everything? Definitely my investment team is using Claude and using Codex and using other technologies to make sure we're scanning the full surface. Because, of course, where we're investing is not just here in Silicon Valley. It's global.

1:01:02Carol Massar:Katie, what you're seeing, and maybe I think we've probably got to wrap up soon, but in terms of dislocation to the economy, jobs, is it just another technology where there's going to have to be a little adjustment period, or is it something more significant based on what you're seeing? Look, it is transformational technology. I think what we could debate is the timeline. And I think that's really unknown. I think there are a lot of people that are prognosticating that that's going to happen this year. I think that's really unknown as to how long that's going to take. and I still think there's a really important role for humans to play here but I do think it is something serious to pay attention to just socially and economically and one of the things I think back to is you know the computer era obviously that replaced a lot of jobs but it also created a lot of jobs so I think there's truth on both sides and I think it's something that everyone all of us need to pay close attention to great stuff yeah stay in touch thank you so much as you I love also to going into the medicine and longevity, because I think these are things, the areas that could be impacted greatly.

1:02:01Carol Massar:Katie, thank you. Thank you for having me. Have fun on the stage. Thank you. Bye. Take care. You too. Katie Hahn, founder and CEO over at Hahn Ventures. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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