Bain Capital Partner on Modern Marketing, Apple-SpaceX Deal Discussion, AI Staffing | Oct 23, 2025

0:12Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Thursday, October 23rd. We are taking a full tour of the tech sector today, folks. First up, could Apple and SpaceX finally reach a deal together to work together on their satellites? Our Apple reporter joins us with some new reporting and talks of a$10 billion sale in the space sector. We're also talking about our scoop that Adobe considered a$3 billion acquisition of an AI video company. And separately, we're talking with the CEO of Trauma about how he is using AI to get more people into jobs. We're then going to talk to our Google reporter about how the company is courting younger coders with a multi-million dollar contract with a major college organization.

0:58And finally, our editor-in-chief, Jessica Lesson, sits down with Bain Capital Ventures to discuss modern comm strategies in the AI age. We've got a lot to get to, so let's get right on into things. SpaceX has quickly become a giant in the arena for satellite communications, and a new story my colleagues published today in The Information reveals that the company is adding more features that could make it more enticing for Apple to work with them. Plus, elsewhere in the satellite world, there has been talks of a potential sale of the satellite company that Apple currently works with. I want to bring on our Apple reporter Aaron Tilly to tell us more about what he's learned, and Tim Ferrara, president of satellite consulting company TMF Associates, for a bit of his analysis.

1:42Tim and Aaron, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome. Thanks very much. So, Aaron, I want to start with you. Look, on my iPhone, I see the satellite thing popping up, especially when I'm in the subways in New York. There's no service, and it's trying to send a message. I don't really know where the message is getting sent through, and half the time it doesn't even send. What is this satellite communications feature that the iPhone has right now? What is it supposed to do? Yeah, so it first launched in 2022 as primarily about sending messages to emergency services via satellite when you're off, you know, sort of off in the middle of nowhere without satellite reception.

2:22And so you need a clear line of sight often just to get that reception. And so it was about sending it to emergency services. And since then, they've rolled out doing it to sending messages to friends and family, sharing locations. So they've expanded the features over time. But it's primarily kind of when you're out of cell service, in the middle of nowhere, on back roads, on camping trips, sort of when you're outside of that. And so who is Apple currently working with to be able to have that functionality on the iPhone? Yeah, so since 2022 when they launched it, their sole provider has been this company called Globalstar.

3:01And at the time, the company was having some challenges. So when Apple came knocking, they got a pretty good deal out of it as far as a supplier relationship. And that's been their partner since. And Tim, Aaron just mentioned the company Globalstar was going through some challenges. I mean, just walk us a little bit through the landscape here of the overall space sector, and then we'll get to the news in just a second. Yeah, sure. I mean, Globalstar and Iridium date back to the late 1990s when we had a boom in everyone thinking that phones were going to communicate with satellite all the time.

3:41Those companies went through bankruptcy in the early 2000s and really had to refocus on niche applications like government and enterprise and a few people obviously who go out into the middle of nowhere. That's only been a small market and Globalstar needed to update its satellite system, replace its current satellites that were coming to the end of its life and Apple showed up with some money to do that and so it's been a good partnership for Globalstar. They generated$140 million of revenue from Apple last year. Apple's invested about$2 billion to help build new satellites over the next few years.

4:25But it's now, you know, what's that going to offer compared to what SpaceX is going to offer? I mean, they're a long way behind. And I think that's the challenge for Apple. So, Aaron, tell us about what you've heard now between the talks between Apple and SpaceX and possibly the ways in which SpaceX is kind of configuring its product now to open itself up to opportunities with Apple? Yeah, so Apple and SpaceX would be a huge deal for SpaceX. So we've heard that SpaceX has been configuring its satellites in order to support basically the current feature set that exists with Global Star. So there's certainly some indication that they're preparing for a partnership.

5:09And this all goes back three years ago, right before Apple announced its satellite feature first in 2022. Elon Musk, who obviously owns SpaceX, tried to swoop in and get a deal with Apple offering kind of exclusive partnership for a lot of money,$5 billion. And it was just so much money. And it was such a sort of hard bargain that Apple shut it down. They'd already done a lot of work setting things up with Global Star. But this would be a return of that potentially. But yeah, they're preparing things. Apple on their end is preparing their support for 5G non-terrestrial networks that could potentially support what SpaceX will offer.

5:58So there are certainly signs that they're talking. Tim, I want to ask you for people who don't know a whole lot about space, myself included, is Apple the biggest customer here? I'm sure there are bigger customers. I mean, Apple is one that we've obviously heard of. I mean, how big a deal is Apple in the grand scheme of customers that are buying access to the satellite technology at all? Yeah, I mean, so one way of selling the service is to go to mobile operators. And traditionally, that's been the way of partnering for the satellite providers. SpaceX has been partnered with T-Mobile, AST, which is their main rival in the US, has been partnered with AT &T and Verizon.

6:42But going via the handset manufacturer has a lot of advantages. This is a pretty challenging service to implement. You need to get it into handsets because you need to implement the new spectrum that SpaceX has now bought. And so if they could work with Apple, you know, that's the phone that an AT &T or Verizon can't refuse to sell. So immediately you'd expect SpaceX to be able to offer service through those other companies, not just through T-Mobile as it does at the moment. And are those deals that satellite companies sign with the mobile carriers, are those bigger deals than what Apple has?

7:21Or do we know anything about the size there? Well, I think today the revenues have been pretty limited. We've only just got started with a SpaceX T-Mobile deal. AST is still in the process of trying to launch its satellites. But Apple is already paying Global Star well over$100 million a year, and that number is going to increase substantially as they go forward. So, you know, this is a good business for Global Star, and it comes from the fact that Apple wants to sell more iPhones. it's quite difficult to persuade people to pay for these satellite services you know you don't know you need it until you need it and you break your leg out in Yosemite National Park so you know it's been difficult to generate a lot of service revenues and I think you know T-Mobile hasn't seen a huge amount of usage so far so that hasn't meant them paying a lot of money over to SpaceX so far so much less than Apple is paying GlobalSign right now Now, the problem for Apple is there's no obvious evidence that they sold a lot more handsets as a result of this deal with Global Star.

8:28You know, as I say, people don't know they need it. And so they don't necessarily, you know, consider. And they don't even, I mean, I can't even tell if the thing is working or not. I just sort of bank on the message getting there. And sometimes it says satellite connection. But, you know, I haven't been out in the woods very much using it. So I couldn't tell you if it works or not. But Aaron, so let's come back to the Globalstar side of the story. I mean, Tim has talked a lot about some of the difficulties of operating in this landscape. You had some reporting that the company was in talks to sell itself for a pretty whopping price tag.

9:05Tell us about what you found. Yeah, so Globalstar, my understanding is that they've been kind of looking for a deal for a while. It's chairman Jay Monroe bought the company out of bankruptcy in the 2000s. It was an investment firm Thermo. And he's been looking to do a deal for a while. And this is potentially big, but also the company is not valued massively. But he has been looking for around more than$10 billion. and certainly the deal last month between SpaceX and EchoStar where SpaceX bought Spectrum, EchoStar Spectrum for$17 billion was an exciting moment to kind of prove there's value in this kind of spectrum.

9:54So there's hope, but it's a lot of money and there's not a lot of buyers, potential buyers here. So it's going to be potentially challenging. Tim, I want to end with you here. For people who might think that everything in space is still years away, the talk of, hey, well, what actually impacts me as a consumer right now? People might say, look, I have my phone, I have my data plan, it seems to work fine. Why should people really care about this deal and this story and the burgeoning satellite sector at large? Well, I mean, Apple needs to up its sales over time and grow market share in the handset industry.

10:39And an association with SpaceX could well be a route to doing that. If they can sell another 5 or 10 million handsets a year to people who this service appeals to, then that's billions of dollars of extra revenue we definitely need. And I mean, that's the decision they have to take. Is it worth perhaps paying some money to SpaceX for exclusivity? in exchange for the prospect of a significant boost to sales. And that's what we're going to see. And last question, Tim, do you think this deal or a deal like this happens between Apple and SpaceX? Could you see that partnership happening? I think that's very likely.

11:16I think that SpaceX needs the handset support. It can't just rely on people just building chips and naturally making its way into handsets. I think the handsets are optimized. you know, the software that Apple's implemented with Globalstar is really quite elegant at the moment. And I think they could do a really good job implementing something for SpaceX as well, that would make the service a lot more appealing. Great. Well, Tim and Aaron, I want to thank you both for joining us for going to keep the show moving here. Enterprise software giants have looked closely to fast growing AI startups to help keep them current and find ways to continue growing.

11:52The latest example of that, Adobe over the past few months has talked with AI Avatar video company, Synthesia, about acquiring the company for$3 billion. That deal never ended up happening, but I want to bring on our Deputy Bureau Chief of Venture Capital, Katie Roof, to tell us more about what she's learned. Katie, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Great to be here. So let's talk about this deal. What do we know about Adobe's efforts to acquire Synthesia? So my understanding is this was a pretty serious effort. Adobe is already an existing investor in Synthesia and they wanted to buy it.

12:27But the two parties could not reach an agreement. Synthesia thinks they're worth even more than the$3 billion that was discussed. And they are currently in talks to raise a new funding round before the end of the year at an even higher valuation than that. So it was really just price. That was the main reason that fell apart? Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, it's interesting because it tells a story that Adobe is interested in making acquisitions again. I'd broken the Adobe Figma news at one point, and that deal never happened due to regulators. That was quite the ordeal for Adobe, but they, like all the other tech incumbents, want AI.

13:07Talk about the rationale here for Adobe. Couldn't it just build this in-house? Yeah, and I think that's always the question with M &A. Do you build it or do you buy it? But sometimes they like to buy a team that already works well together, a product that customers already like, Like, you know, Synthesia is already used by a lot of corporate clients who are creating AI avatars to build corporate videos, whether that's for marketing or training or all sorts of things, really. And so they just like the product. Well, and one of the things I've been thinking about is just how ubiquitous these deals have been getting in terms of larger tech companies going after these AI video companies.

13:48I mean, Meta too, we've heard about their efforts to do deals with companies like Midjourney. This seems to be something that the consensus says, hey, we need to move quickly and we need to work with startups to help get the talent that we need really. Well, Meta, yeah, they've certainly been very active. So Meta actually also held M &A conversations with Synthesia and they've held M &A conversations with just about every AI founder, it seems. They, you know, at one point, I helped break the news that they bought 49 % of scale. And they, you know, Meta realized that there's a lot of AI talent out there and they wanted them in-house.

14:30Well, Katie, I want to thank you for coming on. It's certainly an exciting name, Synthesia. Like you said, it's been floated around in many M &A talks. And so it's a deal that I was interested to see having come through the pipeline. And of course, we'll have to see if Synthesia raises money now and what price tag they do value themselves at because, like you said, they think they're worth more than$3 billion. We'll see if that comes through. That is Katie Roof, our Deputy Bureau Chief of Venture Capital here at The Information. Okay, we've talked a lot about jobs that AI can automate on this show.

14:59And while industrial roles and physical jobs aren't high up on that list, that's not to say AI won't change how those corners of the labor force may operate. Trava is a company that is at the center of that. The company is backed by a number of big name venture capitalists, including Founders Fund and Kostla Ventures. I want to bring on the CEO and co-founder, Mike Shevitt, to talk more about where he's taking his business. Mike, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you. Thank you. Happy to be here. So tell us what Trava is. So Trava is a full stack labor platform that connects industrial businesses with high quality workers.

15:34and we're disrupting the$130 billion light industrial staffing industry. And when you say light industrial staffing, what kind of staffing are we talking about here? Yeah, so it's essentially this massive backbone of the economy, whether it's manufacturing, food processing, or fulfillment, all the workers that do the tasks in those facilities. And so these are like what the short-term staffing shifts that these food manufacturers, I mean, I guess what you need like 100 workers next week type of thing because of seasonal changes or how does it work yeah yeah exactly whether it's seasonal changes but there's also the use case of when they get a big customer request there's just a lot of volatility in this in the supply chain and the supply chain depends on the staffing industry to help connect them to workers to supplement those workflows okay and so what what sorts of tools have these companies been using traditionally to help them staff these shifts on short notice?

16:33And then, you know, why is Trava different? Yeah, so the staffing industry, it's a massive industry, but it's terribly inefficient. They can only provide 46 % of the workers that businesses request. It takes actually weeks to fill a request rather than same day or next day like Trava does. So what we do is we basically take all the manual crazy workflows that the staffing industry uses, whether it's vetting or essentially arrival tracking, worker support, timekeeping, fraud detection. We've essentially created AI agents that do all of those workflows end to end. So our customers get really high quality workers, nearly perfect fill in a few hours.

17:15And is it just finding the workers and sort of scheduling the shifts or is your software also embedded in different ways on the ground, for example, how they, I don't know, pay these workers and stuff like that. Yep, we can actually provide instant payment to the workers, which makes a huge difference because of our fraud detection software. So we actually can have high confidence that the worker was actually there, worked the shift and provided that payment. Whereas the staffing industry doesn't have any technology. They're essentially relying on sign-in, sign-out sheets. And a lot of these customers have actually never seen the workers before.

17:50So there's a lot of back and forth to really figure out if the worker can get paid quickly. So that's why workers have flooded our platform as well. How many companies do you work with? How many workers do you have registered onto this system, I guess, that you have? Yeah, so we have over a thousand businesses across the country that rely on Traba and hundreds of thousands of workers. Okay. Quite scale at this point. And what is the business model for Traba? Yeah, so the business model works by the business sets the pay rate for the worker. So let's just say it's$20 an hour, then the business will pay Trava a markup rate on that pay rate for us providing the workforce to them.

18:32So that'll that usually is around 35%. So that would be a$7 revenue to Trava$20 just goes straight to the worker within 30 minutes. And then we use that$7 to essentially pay bonuses, background checks, things like this. So from a margin standpoint, it's actually a very healthy margin. Most staffing companies in the United States are actually cash flow positive, EBITDA positive businesses. But of course, since we're a tech company and we're reinvesting in R &D, we are growing at like a negative EBITDA, but very positive margin, a contribution margin. You talked about the business model. So how much revenue are you generating right now?

19:14Yeah, so we've grown quite quickly. A couple of months ago, we finished up with$20 million of annualized revenue, and we're actually going to finish the year with$40 million annualized revenue. So growing quite fast with bigger customers that are spending more money on our product. So$40 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2025. And I just want to be clear. So the way that we measure that, I mean, this is basically, that is the total sum of the take rate. Like that's the total sum of the$7 you're taking on top of everyone's hourly wage type of thing. Yeah, yeah. We at Trava are really conservative with our financials.

19:52If we were to think about GMV, the full$27, we would actually be making hundreds of millions of dollars of annualized GMV. But we measure it on a net basis just to be more conservative with it. You guys raised your last round, what, in 2023? Is that right? Yep, yep. And give us a sense for growth. I mean, you said$20 million a couple months ago. So, I mean, the growth rate-wise, I mean, what? That's fast. Yeah. In 2023, we're only around, when we raised our round from Founders Fund to lead their Founders Fund 8 fund, we were only at about$3 million. And just because we are capital efficient as a company, we haven't actually needed to raise financing since then.

20:37But yeah, we've grown quite sizably since then. So, but you're not profitable right now, but you've got enough cash, you're saying you're not looking to raise anytime soon. Well, we may raise over the next couple quarters because we actually are finding a lot of expansion opportunities. So our customers are actually relying on us as their tech provider. They see the disruption happening with AI and they're coming to us to actually figure out how else we can automate other workflows that are highly manual in their operation. So we actually want to lean in here and see if we can grow even faster and generate even more lift with additional capital.

21:17But on a per shift basis, we do make money. We make actually almost 60 % contribution profit. So real dollars on per shift. The money that is usually spent is just more on engineers, designers, product, all those big things like that. I want to zoom out just a little bit. We had the Tesla earnings call last night, and Tesla has obviously made a lot of noise about their humanoid robot ambitions. And certainly in these industrial settings, it feels like that is the first application for robotics. And we obviously see it in many points along the supply chain. You're kind of in an interesting point because you don't really fit into the equation where it's AI replacing white collar jobs, which we've talked about on this show it's more about getting people in these industrial roles getting them more opportunities do you think at all that some of this work can be automated by robots i mean how quickly is that coming are you seeing that with any of your customers at all yeah so i spend a lot of time with our customers so i get to see what happens on the ground and what i'll say is these businesses they evolve every day they switch out how they do things so they as of today they really need a dynamic labor environment with human judgment.

22:31I will say, though, that as tech continues to get better, specifically robotics over the next 10 years, we believe that we're going to be well positioned to actually help guide those customers into the robotics age in a similar way that we've helped guide them into the AI age with improving a lot of their manual workflows. So I will say that it's funny you mentioned Tesla because I saw that this morning too. If you go back to 2018, Elon Musk himself actually tweeted that he was a champion of humans and he essentially tried to replace, like automate a lot of the Gigafactory and it didn't necessarily work.

23:10So he said that like he's bringing the humans back. But that being said, I do think that, you know, humanoid robots will get there eventually. And I think that Trava will be well positioned to help facilitate that. Great. Well, Mike, thanks for coming on the show. It's a It's a fascinating business. That is Mike Shemit, the founder and CEO of Trauma here on TITV. Okay, there are plenty of races in the AI age. Investors hunting for the next NVIDIA. Companies dangling huge pay packages for top talent and firms fighting to get developers using their coding tools instead of their competitions. Now, Google is adding fuel to that fire, making a play for younger coders.

23:48Google announced an exclusive three-year, multi-million dollar contract with the college hackathon organization, Major League Hacking. The group will promote Google's Gemini AI model and coding tools to its many developers. I want to bring on our Google reporter, Erin Wu, to tell us more about Google's strategy with all this. Erin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for having me. So let's talk hackathons. What is Major League Hacking? So Major League Hacking is this massive college hackathon organization. They have like 4 ,000 chapters. They say they reach 1 million developers.

24:20I don't know if you coded at all in college, but essentially a hackathon is - Zero, none. I didn't even hang out with the coders. It's essentially just a weekend long or like a day long competition to make something essentially. Like you're given some kind of prompt, like oftentimes this runs for a whole weekend. People do not sleep very much, but people who do it tell me it's very fun. Okay. And the idea here is you have to build something in a weekend type of thing, right? Yes. Okay. So now Major League Hacking, What is their role in the college hackathon circuit, I guess, in America? Yeah, so they're basically this big umbrella organization that runs a lot of hackathons, partners with a lot of hackathons.

25:00For example, they partner with Kelhacks, which is the Berkeley hackathon, which is happening this week, and it's the biggest one. So they have this huge network of college developers that they can reach, essentially. And so that's what makes them interesting to Google, and that's why Google signed this deal with them. Okay. And so what is the premise of this deal here? That every hackathon here will use Gemini and only Gemini? Is that the idea? So obviously, the students can use whatever they want. But MLH is doing all of this stuff to promote Gemini. So this ranges from starting hackathons with a three to five minute demo of, here's how you could use Gemini to build a hackathon project.

25:39hosting on-site evangelists from Google Cloud who can explain how to use Gemini, having best use of Gemini categories in the competition. So there's a lot of different ways to essentially introduce people to this AI model and incentivize people to use it. Okay. And how much is this deal worth? Do we know? We don't totally know. I talked to MLH, they would not tell me. I talked to Google, they would not tell me. What we know is it's a multimillion-dollar contract over three years, and I'm told that every single year is worth millions of dollars. So, you know, it's kind of interesting here because this feels very much like a play for Google to say, hey, if we can teach the young coders of America to use our tool to code everything and, you know, vibe code it, I guess, whatever it is, you know, they will keep using it throughout the rest of their career.

26:30I think the strategy seems pretty clear to me. My question for you really is how Google's AI coding tools compare to all of the other coding tools that are out there. Do we have any data? We have some data. So it's a little bit hard to tell because OpenAI and Anthropics, they're private companies. They don't totally publish their user numbers. So what Google has said is that 9 million developers are building on Gemini. 1 million developers are building with Gemini CLI, which is one of these new coding tools that they've developed. In terms of how that stacks up to competitors, it kind of varies a little bit depending on what stats you use.

27:07So there's this coding startup Modu that we've written about before that says that Gemini is trailing Anthropic OpenAI, this startup called Cursor in terms of download. Another software registry says that, well, it's still trailing Anthropic, but it's on par with OpenAI. We don't quite know. I mean, the idea is essentially this is a really fierce competition that a lot of the labs are focusing on. And how have these tools changed the way computer science and coding is taught in colleges at large? Yeah. So there's it depends on it depends on the school. Obviously, it depends on the student. Like a lot of I used to talk to a lot of college students as I was working on the story and these things like they love to write like this is their big thing.

27:53They're kind of like, oh, well, like I'm using this a lot for side projects in my classes. I'm still not personally using it as much. One student was telling me, like, yeah, like he was in a systems class and like the midterm was a disaster because like nobody knew how to code. And so there's definitely a lot of impacts. One of the other interesting things, though, with these younger kids is that it's changing the way that a lot of them are thinking about CS education and like CS degrees and like what they can do with them. I talked to one student at Stanford who was saying that, yeah, she's not sure that SWE or software engineering is going to be a viable career in a few years, which was obviously crazy to me as someone who graduated from Stanford in journalism at a time when all of the viable careers were software engineering.