Figma Goes Public, CEO Field Sets Eyes on Growth

23:29Caroline Hyde:Caroline, down at the NYSE, we're still awaiting trading for Figma, and it is one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year. Now some breaking news. President Trump announcing moments ago on Truth Social that the current tariff rates for Mexico have been extended for another 90 days. Let's get out to Washington, D.C., Bloomberg's Tyler Kendall. And a part of this, as the president explained it, Tyler, is to allow more time for negotiation between Mexico and the United States. Right, exactly, Ed. He says that there will be an additional 90 days and they'll hope to ink some sort of trade agreement in that time.

24:01But he did write in that post on Truth Social that it could be even extended beyond that. Now, our understanding, according to the president, is that Mexico will continue to pay the 25 percent tariff that has been in place. and those sector-specific tariffs aren't changing, 25 % for autos and then 50 % for steel and aluminum. Keep in mind that Mexico had been faced with a 30 % tariff threat if they weren't able to make a deal by tomorrow, August 1st. And it's really important context here that the negotiations with Mexico have always been on a totally separate track. While Mexico was, yes, faced with tariffs on the same sort of legal basis, IEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, they were tariffed months before so-called Liberation Day, with the legal basis being from the administration that this is invoked over concerns about the border and fentanyl flow, something that the president also mentioned in his post on Truth Social.

24:56There's a few different threads here that we're going to be watching moving forward, but importantly, we should highlight that the aspect of USMCA compliance and that those goods are, of course, shielded here from the tariffs. The latest data I pulled at about 83 % of goods that came from Mexico last year, Ed, were USMCA compliant. But that still leaves about$80 billion worth of imports that are exposed to a higher tariff.

25:20Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Tyler Kendall in D.C. Thank you very much. Let's get to another earnings story. Shares of Roblox absolutely soaring today after the gaming platform reported a 51 % increase in bookings last quarter and a daily active user count that topped$111 million. Bloomberg's Cecilia D 'Anastasio joins us to explain what gardening has to do with all of this. We can get to that in a minute. But go through the numbers. What is Roblox doing well right now? Roblox is attracting a lot of users and connecting them to any of the millions of games on the platform. Roblox filtered a lot of users who would be excited about its hit game Grow Garden to that game.

25:58That's 22 million concurrent players at one moment in July. and the wealth is not just concentrated at Grow a Garden. Roblox's chief executive officer, Dave Buzuki, was bragging today that more than 75 % of the people who were playing Grow a Garden every day also played another game on the platform. So it's bringing people in and then just channeling them to other games that the company knows they'll love.

26:24Caroline Hyde:So Grow a Garden is kind of key. I know that in terms of their servers, it's a big use of capacity right now. But in the month of July, which we're still currently in, the platform has like several titles that have 10 million daily active users. Kind of explain that landscape to us, Cecilia. Of course, when you log on to Roblox, you have a sort of a big catalog of games that the platform thinks that you might like. And Roblox has done a really good job figuring out what a specific user might be interested in, whether it's like a driving game or a role playing game or a fighting game. And creators have been making games at the same time that, based on data that they have, they know that will be popular on the platform.

27:11And over the last year, four games have been published to the platform that have attracted a concurrent 10 million users, which is a ton.

27:23Caroline Hyde:Cecilia, Roblox has come in for a lot of criticism on safety, particularly around child safety. but looking at the narrative from leaders, they want to have a leadership position in safety in this domain, right? Yes. Roblox's chief executive officer, Dave Bazzucchi, says that he wants the company to be a leader on safety. And the company's implemented dozens of safety changes over the last year intended to ensure that children are not put in contact with people or materials who might cause them harm. Bloomberg, Cecilia DiAnastasio, thank you very much. and join us tomorrow for a conversation with Roblox CEO Dave Buzuki.

28:01Caroline Hyde:The stock up more than 12%, all-time highs. We want to welcome our Bloomberg TV and radio audiences worldwide. Shares of Qualcomm under a bit of pressure. The company posted third-quarter results showing a bit of lackluster growth in the smartphone market, but their story longer term has been a move into other areas. Delighted to say that Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon joins us now. And you and I have discussed this so many times, the move into IoT and in particular automotive. So I thought that a good starting point would be to ask when smartphone and handset is no longer the majority of revenue and when that kind of tipping point or how close toward that tipping point is where your diversification efforts have shifted the business model.

28:46Very good, Ed. Great talking to you. Look, I don't really understand what not to like about it. we have been consistently delivering what we said we're going to do. I think the company has changed. The company created a lot of growth opportunities. And to answer your question, we outlined, I think, last year on our Investor Day, a plan that we're going to have$22 billion of non-handset business by fiscal 29. And at that point, we expect the company to be diversified at a 50 % non-handset revenue. And we continue to execute on that plan. We're happy with it. We provided a new metric. The new metric that we provided, as we provide guide for fiscal 25, we now expect that we will have the second consecutive year of QCT, or chip business, non-Apple growth of 15%.

29:46So we have second year double-digit growth on non-Apple revenues. I think the company continued to diversify, continued to generate growth. We're executing what we said we're going to do, and we're happy with it. And we're creating optionality for the company in other areas. For example, data center in robotics, all of those which are going to be upside to the plan. So we're just going to continue to execute on our strategy.

30:10Caroline Hyde:The data point is new, right? QCTX Apple revenues. And I was interested to read and understand it. You've also communicated quite a lot about this shift as Apple moves away from your modems for iPhone. May I ask what you think investors need to understand and remodel for? Or even what is it that investors are misunderstanding about that process, Cristiano? Look, I believe that investors are probably still over-indexing on the short term. And they've been focusing about Qualcomm as a handset company. I think the handset market has been a market that has not been growing. And then you have this conversation about the fact that Apple's transitioned to their own modem.

31:00You have to step back. And you have to step back and you have to understand that Qualcomm has very, very unique and competitive IP across many areas. We're no longer just a communications company. We have very compelling computing IP, both on the CPU, on the GPU, on the AI accelerator of our NPU. And this IP is creating leadership position in other industries that we execute on our growth and diversification. Out of nowhere, we create an automotive business. We're now going into the era of AI at the edge with industrial. Our IoT had a great quarter and exceeded expectations because of new personal AI devices like the MetaGlasses.

31:48And we're growing on Android. We had outlined we're going to be doing 5%. The market will grow on Android 5 % per year at our investor day. We're doing around 10%. So the company is showing its growth and earnings power 15 % on Apple.

32:08Caroline Hyde:Yes. Sir, I'm sorry to interrupt you. There's so much I want to get through because I understand the calculus on the long term. The thing that many were trying to understand is the pull forward effect of tariffs. Did you see in the data or anything that would suggest orders went in in 1-H or the most recent quarter and then won't show up in the second half of this year? No. And that's reflected in our guide. We had a strong guide in the handsets for the next quarter. I think we'll remind folks that we don't have flagship lines in this quarter, and we have seen no pull-ins. If you're listening live on Bloomberg TV and radio, we're speaking to the Qualcomm CEO, Cristiano Amon.

32:48Caroline Hyde:Cristiano, I don't know if you remember, but two years ago, almost to the day, you and I sat on stage and did a demo of an on-device running of an LLM in airplane mode. Two years on, I'd like to ask if that shows up yet in revenues and how that's playing out in the real world. Yes, you have to look on how people are using those devices. And we provide an interesting data point. With the Samsung Galaxy S25, that is the one they're selling right now, compared to the prior phone, the Galaxy S24, the use of Google Gemini is 3x, triple. So what you're starting to see more and more, you have people using AI.

33:30It's a mistake to be talking about, is this cloud connected? Is this on-device connected? It's both. The smartphone is the most cloud-connected device in the world, and we have a lot of processing power in our devices. And we see that playing out. And in this quarter, we said something very unique, Ed. We said, first time ever we show one billion-parameter model running on a glass, on a smart glass. So think about, for example, the use case of everything you say to the glass. You can have an immediate response with the model running locally. And this is how this is going to evolve.

34:03Caroline Hyde:As you know, I'm probably one of the few journalists on the planet that likes to rip apart things, including cars and servers. I've been thinking a lot about your automotive business. You've made gains. Sales are up. But I wanted you to talk through the equation of content per vehicle and whether that's the key metric that's going to drive growth.

34:26Most of our growth right now is actually converting our pipeline into revenues. Remember, we outline a very large pipeline of design wins as those cars are being launching. They're launching. They're getting to SOP. Those started to show their revenue. That's what's driving our growth. We're actually not, our growth has not been driven by the size of the market. It's by converting. It's about share gain, converting the pipeline. Having said that, we see content in automotive accelerating. More and more computing is going to the car in the digital cockpit for Gen AI use cases. A lot of OEMs adding use cases on the dashboard of the car, on the infotainment, because we're going to be working from the car, get entertained from the car, we're going to talk to the car.

35:14The second thing that we see is content for ADAS and autonomy, And that is adding a lot of processing content. And we have a runway ahead as a lot of these software-defined vehicles change microcontrollers into a central computing. So we have a roadmap to continue to increase content.

35:33Caroline Hyde:Cristiano, I asked this same question earlier in the hour to Arm CEO Rene Haas. So I'm going to ask you the same question out of sheer objectivity and fairness. Longtime partners, when will you bury the hatchet? My understanding is investors want to see movement towards that. Look, the most important thing, we had a trial. We are incredibly happy with the trial outcome. It determined that Qualcomm is fully licensed for Orion CPUs and will continue to be able to build ARM-compatible CPUs. So from our perspective, as our ability to continue to build incredible products and ship to our customers, we're in great shape.

36:20And I think you should be looking at Qualcomm as a company that has the ability to provide one of the best ARM-compatible CPUs. And we're going to bring that across every one of our markets.

36:34Caroline Hyde:Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm CEO. Thank you for your time here on Bloomberg Tech.

36:47We are outside the New York Stock Exchange with one of the very early backers of Figma, which today goes public. Mamoun Hamid of Clymer Perkins joins us now. And Clymer Perkins' history with Dylan Field, the CEO, goes way back. And I'm just interested as to your perspective of what you saw in him in that series B-Rab. Yeah. Yeah. So we've been fortunate partners with Dillon Field for the last eight years or so. And Dillon always embodied the spirit of what we embody at Client of Perkins. We want to back founders who make history. And Dillon is certainly one of those. If we actually look back at our investment memo from 2017, we wrote something like, Dillon and Evan are special founders, and they reference as such, and they built a team around themselves that will help them scale.

37:35and that absolutely still holds today just as we look at the team that was up there ringing the bell with us and it's quite a few of those folks were with us back in 2017. I mean like we're looking at a photo as you speak of you with Dylan and what's also interesting is it was your first ever check that you wrote at Kleiner Perkins. I mean I don't know if you could say what the valuation was back then but it was definitely sub 200 million and now it's worth potentially 20 billion. I'm looking at indications that this stock is going to double as it opens. How does that make you feel that it's a$40 billion company?

38:08Yeah, well, I guess nothing surprises me with this company. Yeah. And just going back to when we first invested, it was a bit of this unmistakable love for the product that we see here at the NYSE today. If you look around, you see just like the Coachella for design that is happening around us here. And that was actually the love that people had for the product in 2017. The user base may have been small, the product may have been early, but you would walk around cafes around San Francisco with people using Figma to design things and digital products even at that time. And that really just kind of continues on.

38:49And I had some of this perspective from early investments in Box and Figma, where I saw great products built that had this amazing bottoms-up enterprise adoption. and Figma sort of followed that path as well. And what was really just stood out for Figma though was the depth of engagement that Figma had in those days, which really spoke to designers who were using Figma daily to get their job done. And that sort of, that down now, that depth of engagement was incredible even then. And now it's, you know, just expanded multifold. The depth of engagement in the stock, I'm just being told that there's a$75 to$80 dollar per share indication on the stock right now.

39:30That is even as in the S1, Dylan Field is very clear that he's focused on building this company. He's not looking at profit. He's looking at being thoughtful, but he's investing in M &A and he's investing in innovation. How important is that investment, self-investment, growth over profitability when he's got generative AI by startups coming at him? Yeah, AI is probably the biggest thing that's happened to us, maybe in all time. It will have a tremendous societal and economic impact on all of us. And we're excited about it. And we're excited about it not just at Figma, overall, at Kleiner Perkins we're excited about it.

40:12But as we think about AI and what the capabilities of AI are, which is to create more software faster, there's an important role that design plays. It is melding both the machine intelligence and artificial intelligence with human creativity. And that is precisely where Figma plays is that we are the platform where products get built and where AI products get built. And that's the position that we have. Going back to where the stock is indicated, there was a very thorough process as the company went out and road showed and got really a test of demand. But if the share price doubles on day one and you have an influx of retail investors, you've got the head of product at X saying this is going to be the meme stock of all meme stocks.

41:01Do you want that as someone who's going to be, I'm assuming, holding this stock for the longer term? Yeah, I think we want people to go and learn about Figma. If you haven't used it, tried it, go play with it and have more people use the products. And we have not just one product, our design product, we have now eight products. And I think there's something for everyone. Even my young children who are just outside here use Figma products to design websites, to build products. Yeah, and so I think there is a market for a lot more people than our tens of millions of users today out there. And so it gives an opportunity for folks to get to know more Figma products.

41:42That's a great thing. And a global product. Because I think what stands out for me reading the S1 is that 80 % of users, and there's 13 million of them on a monthly active basis, are actually outside the United States. What is the global nature of this business mean to you? Yeah, to your point, 80 % is international. And it's actually also 80 % of users of Figma are non-designers. And if you think about it, there are billions of people consuming digital products today that are designed inside of Figma. If you look at Google Maps, if you're hailing a ride through Uber or streaming a show on Netflix, those are all products that are today being designed inside of Figma.

42:25So the global impact and scale is tremendous. And 95 % of the Fortune 500 are customers of Figma. But do you need that to go public in this moment? Do other portfolio companies need to be that international to have this level of demand? Or is it just having a growth story? I think, generally speaking, more software companies go international faster as the world gets flatter. And that's just been our experience in software. Mamoun, it's been great having time with you here at the New York Stock Exchange. Mamoun, we thank him so much for Kleiner Perkins. Back to you in the studio.

42:59Caroline Hyde:Great job at the NYSE, Caroline. Now coming up on the program, Ayoko Yoshioka from the Wealth Enhancement Group joins us. And we're going to get to Meta and Microsoft's earnings because those stocks are making big move. Also discussing the road ahead. We've got Apple and Amazon posting earnings after the bell today. It's just an astonishing 24 hours. This is Bloomberg Tech. The people who seem to get more done than everyone else. They're not working longer hours or running on more caffeine. they've just stopped wasting time on the stuff that doesn't move work forward. Switching apps, re-explaining context, hunting for files, those aren't small inefficiencies.

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45:41Caroline Hyde:Big day for U.S. tech. Let's get back to earnings after Microsoft and Meta showcased some record spending on AI, sending both of those stocks soaring post-market. And now in this session as well, Yoko Yoshioka joins us, Portfolio Consulting Director at the Wealth Enhancement Group. I'm going to start with Meta. It wasn't just the ad pricing in the quarter gone or talking up all of their AI prowess or narrowing the CapEx range. The thing that surprised many was them saying, next year, 2026, we will grow CapEx. What did you make of that? Right. Now, it tells you that the spending on AI really does continue.

46:22I mean, I think everybody's been concerned that the spending is going to drop off a little bit. But from a dollar perspective, Meta talked about how 2026 will see, you know, substantial increase in CapEx similar to what we saw in 2025. So very strong for the overall infrastructure of AI.

46:42Caroline Hyde:I think what Meta was trying to explain is how AI is improving existing product. So there was strong ad pricing. I mentioned that because some of the Chinese advertisers pulled back in the period, but they still did well. What people still struggle with is the future, how Meta presents its AI to the world. Did you have that question answered? I think with the way Meta is approaching AI, I think they're trying to figure out how much they want to keep closed and how much they want to open it up to the rest of the world. And I think that's still up for grabs a little bit here. And I think they're going to just keep trying to test what's best for them.

47:22But for Meta, they're really seeing that ROI come through. And I think that's what investors like to see.

47:29Caroline Hyde:Just very quickly on Microsoft and Azure, we got a revenue number for fiscal 25 and we got growth numbers. What did you learn? Sure. So for Microsoft, we continue to see, again, strong numbers and the cloud continues to grow, helped by AI. So I think we want to stay the course with Microsoft. I don't think you want to drop off that train, but we know that concentration continues to be an issue within the index and these names just keep getting bigger. After the bell, we have Apple and we have Amazon, which you most excited about? I mean, Amazon, there'll be read across from Microsoft. Apple, my goodness, there are many headwinds in front of that company.

48:12Sure. I think Apple is the one that I'm probably interested in and a little concerned about, simply because they've been a little bit slower when it comes to AI deployment. And, you know, just the iPhone hardware upgrade cycle is what everybody's been waiting for. And we have yet to really see an acceleration there.

48:34Caroline Hyde:We just showed that the estimate is for Apple to swing back to growth in greater China. So away from tariffs, the end market there. How closely do you watch that? Sure, I think in the short term, we're continuing to watch that because it's been such a high topic of conversation. But I think for us, we try to look at the long term and how Apple will continue to be. It's a little bit more like a consumer staple at this point with the Razor, Razorblade model. OK, I want to bring some news that's broken in the last few minutes. NVIDIA has said in an emailed statement that it won't allow backdoor access to its systems and that there are no backdoors in its chips.

49:14Caroline Hyde:That was response to a story overnight where China's Internet regulator had summoned NVIDIA representatives. They were concerned based on comments that lawmakers in the U.S. had made that they would require NVIDIA to have some kind of backdoor access. Clearly, this China issue with the H20 is not as smoothed out as we thought. just your reaction to that basic story? I think in general, we are more positive than negative on this story, just given that, again, we all thought that the China market was completely closed for Nvidia going forward. And there are still details that need to get worked out.

49:54But eventually, we think it'll get worked out. And it will be a positive in that Nvidia will be allowed to sell to China.

50:02Caroline Hyde:Is there a path very quickly, Yoko, for China to go back to being proportionately the level of revenues for NVIDIA that it once was? I think there is probably a path. It's just the details need to get worked out. There still seems like, you know, as we build out AI, security tends to be a big issue. And so we're going to have to figure that out. Hayoko Yoshioika from the Wealth Enhancement Group. Great to have you back on the program. Thank you very much. Astonishing day for U.S. technology. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. But there's a lot to recap, just critically important conversations with CEOs, including Figma CEO on their IPO day.

50:43Caroline Hyde:Find that recap on the podcast and you're aware to find it on the Bloomberg Terminal and online on Apple, Spotify and iHeart from San Francisco. And today from the New York Stock Exchange, this is Bloomberg Tech. Before you sign off, you tuned in for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker.

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