Tim Cook’s 15-Year Run, Meta's $18B Teen Safety Deal & 21 Banks Convene on Stablecoins

0:00Jobs was sort of visionary zero to one guy. And then Cook was like the one that just executed all of that. They are adding a two hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram. And, you know, the best way to call attention off yourself is to call attention to others. Historically, it has always been more of like a legal policy issue. And now you're actually seeing it be implemented into product. It is quite literally currency that moves like the Internet. JP Morgan's actually not among the 21 financial institutions that are there. You know, historically, it takes three to five business days to settle an ACH transaction.

0:41Stablecoins is instant settlements.

0:50We're back with another big week. Today, my co-host is Sam Eisler, a partner on Lightspeed's fintech team. This week, Tim Cook handed Apple to John Ternus after 15 years. Meta agreed to pay up to$18 billion to settle claims around teen safety on social media. And we break down why some of the world's biggest banks are considering a stablecoin of their own. Let's get into it. So great to have you. Thank you. Yeah, so the big news of this week is obviously Tim Cook officially stepping down. We have CEO number eight of one of the most valuable companies on earth, and he's handing over the keys to a guy called John Ternus.

1:32I feel like there's been a lot of chatter over Tim Cook's legacy, John Ternus, who he is, what he'll be able to do for the firm. But it's just been really awesome to also celebrate Tim Cook for that matter. Completely agree. I mean, I definitely think the company is taking a different shift with this transition, but it's hard to not look at the legacy that's being left behind in a bit of awe. Yeah. For reference, Tim Cook, in terms of his legacy, he, just by the numbers, market map moved it when he joined from$350 billion to$4.6 trillion. So he's added about roughly over$4 trillion of value in 15 years.

2:12Unbelievable. Yeah, revenue-wise scaled that from$108 to$416 billion. So quadrupled that. And I thought what was really interesting is services became a really big part of the business. So historically, the businesses largely relied on mostly the hardware aspect. But now services is around 75%. And this includes everything from App Store to Google search payments to iCloud, Apple Music. And I think people often don't look at that as the face of Apple. But these are actually very core parts of the business. Yeah. And I would say even as a services organization, like he managed to make it a pretty high margin business.

2:51Definitely a logistically operated, efficient mindset that he brought to his reign. What would you view as like Tim's legacy and your opinion around Apple? Like what do you view as his strengths? And, you know, when you think about Tim Cook and his 15 years at Apple, what are the things that you think, you know, really underpin all of the success? Yeah. I mean, I think Tim Cook really grew up in the supply chain and logistics side of the business. And he really mastered that art for Apple in a way that I think is directly responsible for some of the incredible figures that you just quoted. He really did streamline that entire side of the organization.

3:32And I would call him a very operationally minded CEO. Yeah. I feel like in my head, it's always like Jobs was sort of visionary zero to one guy. And then Cook was like the one that just executed all of that. Yeah. I mean, I think Ternus is inheriting a really well-built and strong organization to kind of take it to the next level. And they very much have Tim Cook to thank for that reframing of the business. I do think a lot of people have questions about the Apple that Tim Cook is leaving John Ternus. For reference on who is inheriting all of this, it is Ternus who joined Apple's product design team actually back in 2001.

4:16He's 51, became the VP of hardware engineering in 2013, SVP in 2021. And he's basically led every iPad, the last five iPhone generations, AirPods, a lot of their like Intel to Apple Silicon Mac transition, and then most recently MacBook Neo. So a very hardware minded guy. And I think just recently when he shared that he was stepping into a role, his first tweet was just like a hello or something on X. even before he had updated his LinkedIn. It'll be interesting because he is basically stepping into this role when there's a lot of questions around if Apple is going to come out on the other side of this whole AI transition.

4:57I'm curious, like, have you had thoughts on just how Apple has handled, you know, being an AI company in this AI era? Yeah, I mean, first on the Ternus comments, I think those are all really valid, open question marks in terms of the organization he's inheriting. I would frame him, we talked about this a little bit before, like more of the product thinker. And you mentioned the zero to one jobs phase of the business. I don't think we're in zero to one that same level of like ideation and creation, but we're definitely like entering a new way of innovation for the organization. I think Ternus' experience in actually architecting a lot of those really core products is going to be very important as they think about like suiting up for this, let's call it AI battle.

5:46And I think they're, at least from what they've published, being really smart about how they're thinking about it. They're not going head to head in, you know, the data center battle that we see on a daily basis. Like the thought process is really around how do we create the best product in the most CapEx light vision for AI by leveraging all the innovation that's happening around us in AI to better power our own products themselves and provide like the best user experience. I think that really goes back to like Apple's roots, right? Like the best product shape and the best product experience when interacting with it.

6:27Yeah, and it's almost like they are playing to their advantages, which is the fact that they have this massive distribution to consumers and product surface area. And when you think about all of these other hyperscalers spending, you know, north of the$100 million plus a year, I think Apple is actually only spending about$11 billion and, you know, relying on Google for a lot of their AI models as well as running their own private cloud compute. There was a lot of chatter around did Apple fall short when, you know, back in 2024, they had a big slash over Apple intelligence. To this day, I don't think we've seen Apple intelligence or Siri AI as I would have expected.

7:07However, I think when you think about its positioning, maybe it was for the better that they sort of played to their strengths and sat out of the kind of compute model building race. Yeah. Especially because where, to your point, like where they have that distinct advantage is building beautiful products. I guess where I also think there's open questions is, you know, in the era of all these personal agents that are coming out of anthropic open AI, whether there will be a battleground there. But at the end of the day, I do think there's still a large market to be captured around a lot of people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble who actually haven't really had this like magical agentic experience.

7:51I actually think maybe Apple might be the one to usher that in. Yeah, I completely agree. Look, we're not going to know until we know. And hindsight is 20-20. But I do think it's almost for the best thinking of their own competitive positioning that they didn't enter the race when they didn't. because it sort of allowed them to build this CapEx light model that we were talking about, or they can license these other models to actually get the same work done that they need to, while focusing on how the consumer actually interacts with the technology. On the personal agent side, definitely think it's top of mind.

8:26Just knowing Ternus' history, I imagine that this is at the forefront for him, taking that product lens into winning in the world of AI through the personalized experience that the user has with the product. Yeah, and one thing anecdotally that I've thought was notable is he is actually quite comfortable killing things. Like, I feel like Tim Cook was very diplomatic and obviously very execution-driven, but I think on the note of being able to ship products and really shape product strategy, you have to have someone who can very openly say that they're skeptical of Vision Pro or move people away from the VR, AR strategy into the AI build-out.

9:03But I guess we'll see. They have an event, I think, next Wednesday. Yeah, the big iPhone unveiling. Yeah, apparently there's going to be a foldable one, which will be interesting. Yeah. I haven't tried it yet. But and, you know, ask me in a couple of weeks when I'll probably have my new foldable iPhone. But for now, I'm like, I'm very curious to see how Apple positions that, especially since Samsung has been sort of the big foldable phone name. Yeah, we can definitely talk about it because it's on my to-do list to go get the new iPhone. I have it like you're marked in my calendar. ready to go.

9:35So maybe I'll come back on the podcast and we'll do a follow-up breakdown of the experience. Let's do it. The other thing I just think is interesting in this dynamic is Tim Cook is staying on as chairman, which I actually think is really good for Turnus because it allows Tim Cook to sort of handle these like broader geopolitical challenges that I think are going to continue to unfold in this world of AI. And it sort of protects him from having to get bogged down in that side of the equation and really focusing on some of the things we were just talking about on like pure product execution. Yeah, that's actually a really good point.

10:13I mean, I think in my head, it was like the natural old CEO moves, executive chairman move. But actually, to your point, I actually agree. I think this is actually extremely complimentary where Ternus can fully focus on executing on shipping new products. And then you have Tim Cook, who's just clearly been very good at straddling. Yes, I completely agree. The other big news from last week was around Meta's on paper very large settlement,$18 billion over one of the biggest child safety cases ever brought against a tech company. I feel like we've been having a lot of legal cases against tech companies, but this is probably the most notable outcome because there are also going to be product changes that come out of it.

10:58In particular, they are adding a two-hour daily cap across Facebook and Instagram. I don't know of any teens who are using Facebook, to be totally honest, but at least on Instagram, I imagine that'll be effective. Messaging will be excluded. And then only a parent can lift all of this. There's going to be night mode, so no feeds or reels, midnight to 6 a.m. No push notifications overnight. They'll nudge every 15 minutes of continuous use and then pause every 16 to 90 minutes. And then there's all these other things like chronological feed or responding to 90 percent of teen harmful content. And then parents also getting teens contactless.

11:37So there's a whole list of things. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on if any of these are particularly effective or ineffective in your eyes. I don't have a commentary on like overall impact. I think that just remains to be seen. But I do think this is the first, to your point, change that's really like had implications on how they're going to build and structure their own product organizations. And in that respect, like I do think that will be impactful. It will, you know, come into play every time they have to ship something new, every time a new PRD doc is spin up to actually like get in through a feature.

12:13It's just another layer of check marks that have to make sure are there. And in that sense, I do think that will change. Whether or not that, like, ultimately changes the mental health crisis among teens, like, I don't know. I think we're very much in wave one of what that could look like and how to mitigate. But it's certainly a step in the right direction. Yeah, I think it is structurally very interesting that this is not just, you know, we can talk about how the size and the extent of the slap on the wrist, but I think historically, it has always been more of like a legal policy issue. And now you're actually seeing it be implemented into product.

12:51I think for me, I am just surprised, honestly, at this point that a lot of or surprised yet not surprised. I think if you're thinking about like retention and numbers, obviously, you don't necessarily want to build a kid specific product. But I'm just surprised that it's taken so long to build like a kid or teen specific product, especially when you do have precedents like YouTube Kids. I think even ChatGPT has sort of taken a proactive move to develop ChatGPT teens. It almost feels like on this front, it's like a little bit of a catch up to the idea that we do have separate teen kid products and adult products as well.

13:29Yeah, I completely agree. I do want to double click on the comment that you made about, you know, slap on the wrist. Yeah. Drop in the bucket. One thing that I think could have made this even more impactful is if the fine and settlement had actually been larger. On paper,$18 billion is a lot of dollars. Sure. But when we compare that to like Meta's overall earnings, does this serve as revenue motivation to actually make the changes? I'm not sure. And I agree with you that it's a long time coming. I was listening to another debrief on it, and I think someone had said it was like the Reality Labs division of their firm like loses a billion a day or something.

14:11And so this is like just another month for them. Why do you think they decided to settle versus, you know, drawing this out? I mean, we'll leave like the overall dollar commentary, you know, without going too in depth. But I think that's at the forefront of it. Like this could have dragged out and drawn up in costs. And I'm sure it was a giant distraction for Metis policy teams in a time where there's just so much going on. And it's probably easier to settle and settle for in the short term what might seem like a higher price tag, but probably would have carried out to be much more expensive and taken down a lot of time.

14:49And I also think like would have revealed a lot of documents, a lot of exec time. Totally. And I think in a settlement, it does allow them to have like some level of control in the shape of the product changes that are going to happen, as opposed to if this had been drawn out and they ultimately lost the battle. They lose that control and dictation as to what they'll actually have to do and change. I think another point is that if they did bring this to court, any sort of consequences would have been meta-specific. But they actually, I think, very smartly turned this into an industry-wide thing.

15:23The same morning, they actually had an open letter to TikTok and YouTube to join us in supporting teams. And they basically plastered these, you know, full page ads in The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, and a bunch of paid placements in their own apps to basically ask the industry to adopt similar rules. I think they actually also had a little bit of like a prisoner's dilemma structure where they said they'd set the cap to tighten to one hour per app and actually, you know, add more stringent rules if everyone else also participated. I'm very curious if these players will actively engage here.

16:02Yeah. And, you know, the best way to call attention off yourself is to call attention to others. And I think we're seeing that play out in real time. Yeah. And even here, we're like having an industry wide discussion versus a meta discussion. So I actually think it was a really smart way to restructure that loss. And ultimately, I recognize this is not a meta specific problem. them. And these product changes will not be effective if these users end up just migrating to Snapchat and to TikTok. You know, if I can't watch Reels between midnight and 6am on Instagram, then I'll just go to TikTok. I have seen some people float the idea of like a age-wide ban.

16:44Like I think in Australia, they recently implemented a social media ban. I know there are questionable outcomes around that. And so I do think there is this broader discussion now that, you know, we're one or two decades into this whole social media experiment. I think we know this thing is not necessarily great for mental health, but what is the right way to actually like curtail and guardrail it? I think there's just very open questions around what the shape of that looks like. Yeah. And by the way, I don't think there's a right answer. I think we're going to continue to see a lot of different approaches.

17:17But I think it does give me some comfort that at least it feels like hopefully the norm is that we will see more teen kid products and that tech companies are intentional about building products for very different users and recognizing that a lot of these come down to decisions at the product level. It's not just building for the sake of building and then having policy teams retroactively fix or create policies around it, but rather recognizing that like every single product decision does have a downstream impact. And then finally, big news from the Wall Street Journal that it sounds like still in process, nothing confirmed yet, but 21 financial institutions potentially huddling by your end to issue a dollar stablecoin.

18:03I think this might be a really helpful time to actually demystify what even is a stablecoin and why does it matter and why these banks are incentivized to build this consortium. But since you're deeply involved in a lot of our fintech investments, really kind of have this unique window into where things are being built, maybe I might just ask you the one-on-one question of what is a stablecoin? Yeah. I mean, first of all, really exciting news, definitely moving in a very positive direction for the future of stablecoin. And we can get into that a little bit more as it's like a real stamp of legitimacy in the ecosystem.

18:40Just taking a step back, like what stable coins are. I mean, at this point, I think many of us have heard of cryptocurrency, blockchain, and this idea of like digital money. One of the most challenging pieces of moving money across those ecosystems is just variability of value. What stable coins does is it basically pegs a specific token one-to-one to a reserve. So the stable coin that we're most familiar with today is the USGC. It's pegged to the US dollar. Companies like Circle and Tether who have mostly been the primary issuers of these stablecoins. And this announcement is kind of these major financial institutions are saying, hey, we're ready to get in the game.

19:30And we're going to actually build a company around issuing stablecoin ourselves. And some of the best value props of stablecoin issuance is the ability to move money fast and cheaply. Historically, it takes three to five business days to settle an ACH transaction. Stablecoins is instant settlement. You usually have to pay an FX fee of some kind in order to move money from bank to different currency. stable coins it's all backed to the usdc so you're getting a faster and more secure way to move your money both you know within institutions and then also across border yeah it is quite literally currency that moves like the internet and in many ways i think oftentimes also like dollars for people who can't get access to dollars i think what was helpful for me in understanding a lot of this news was also just the way that Tether or Circle's business runs, in many ways, sort of like a bank.

20:34But maybe even just to take a step back, you know, say I give Tether$100, they give me 100 tokens, that obviously allows me to, you know, as you mentioned, it's pegged to the US dollar, so I can take that out whenever. So obviously, a lot of inefficiencies in our system, as you mentioned, when you wire money, there's just all these frictions. You know, banks are closed on weekends. There's often a lot of fees internationally. So I understand why it works for a consumer and why consumers flock to things like a tether. But why would a bank even engage in all this if they already have a well-set-up, non-stable coin structure?

21:14Yeah. I mean, I think just on regulatory background, the first important piece of context is July of 2025, the Genius Act officially passed. It basically gave Tether and Circle the right to be able to do this at scale. You didn't really have to be a fully chartered institution to be able to hold these reserves in order to issue stablecoin. And so since that time, we've just seen Circle and Tether and other companies in the space really capture a significant amount of transaction volume. And this consortium is basically these large financial institutions saying two things. One, we think stablecoin is here to stay.

21:54And two, we're a little worried about losing out on new payment rails and being able to monetize off of those rails. So it's sort of their viewpoint that maybe ACH and SWIFT rails are not going to be the forever ways in which money moves across the globe. And if that's true, then that's a huge monetization challenge for them. And this is sort of their way of saying, all right, we're ready to get in the game. And we want to own being that. And in order to do so, we have to unify across the ecosystem because we need buy-in from these large institutions in order to actually make that happen. The most interesting part that I find, which is not explicitly written in any of these headlines, is J.P.

22:39Morgan's actually not among the 21 financial institutions that are there. And there's many theories as to why that's happening. I mean, if we go back a year and a half, Jamie Dimon has even publicly said that he's skeptical on stablecoin and its long-term value prop. He's actually walked that back so much so that J.P. Morgan actually launched JPM Coin. It's basically their own token deposit and they have their own token network as well called ConnectSees. I think it's really notable that they haven't joined here because in my mind, it signals either a hesitation about the long term viability of stablecoin or almost agreed that they're so excited about it that they don't really want to share in the wealth.

23:25And, you know, they have their own foots in the race already, and they'd rather deploy all of their strength to building out those and taking a better hold of the market. Yeah, I never thought about that layer beyond just to be part or not be part of the consortium. But it does sound like either way, the big takeaway is that the money is moving, whether or not they like it. And if the deposits are going to leave, then the banks are highly incentivized to keep them at least in the family. Exactly. I sort of want to make this tangible for people who don't interface with financial institutions or are a little less familiar with stable coins.

24:02But for regular people, then, say this consortium gets built. What kind of downstream, what does this look like for society, for banks, for everyday consumers? Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think worth clarifying that in the short and medium term, this is really more of a B2B impact than an end retailer impact, specifically around this consortium, not on the future of stablecoin. Ultimately, many of these institutions hold the deposits for some of the largest enterprises around the U.S. Think about it like a tool for the CFOs and the Treasury departments to make their organizations more efficient.

24:40That's how I think about this consortium more directly. There are other initiatives that are going on. Specifically, there's an initiative called OpenUSD, which is about 140 other tech companies, including Stripe and even the likes of Visa, who've basically sort of worked on their own version of this consortium, which will allow the consumer to have stablecoins more in their hands as well. because the Rails will be actually more directly accessible to them through networks that they're already using. So I think about this consortium as more of a like, hey, this is a first wave to get enterprise onto the stablecoin movement.

25:21But obviously, the end customer of a lot of these enterprise-level transactions is the end user. And so it's possible that the way in which you receive your money was transmitted to you via stablecoin. But ultimately, when the dollar arrives, it doesn't matter to you how it was actually transmitted. You still have the dollar to spend. You can just spend it faster. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there's just so much invisible infrastructure that we as consumers are not aware of. As a team, I know you all on FinTech have been spending a lot of time in this space. Any trends or spaces you're particularly excited about?

25:52Yeah, I mean, we have a couple of portfolio companies who are building this space. We're not yet ready to talk about them, but we will be soon. Stay tuned. And, you know, maybe they'll be on the podcast here in the next follow-up session. But we're super excited about this space. I mean, the way money moves just impacts every individual or on the globe. And it's really fascinating to think through what that infrastructure can look like. And we're already seeing it play out in real time. This is a really exciting space and we're looking forward to how people build in it. Well, thank you, Sam, for joining us.

26:29This has been such a fun conversation, especially, I think, on the stablecoin topic. Like being able to hear your analysis of the entire space and where the world is going. There's just been so many interesting topics from this discussion. At least for me, I think I am most excited to track what happens in sort of this social media space because it still feels like there's open questions around AI companions. So that's probably the story I'm most kind of open questioned around. But yeah, it's definitely a really interesting moment culturally. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.

27:08I'll keep you posted on what I think of the new iPhone when it comes out in a couple weeks as well. Yeah. We definitely have to do a follow-up whiteboard on all things fintech. And especially when those companies come out of stealth. But definitely more episodes to come. Great.

27:30Thank you.