Bitcoin Plunge, 1Password’s New Growth Phase, Beehiiv Launches Creator Toolset | Nov 17, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasrecha. It is Monday, November 17th. We have got a great show lined up for you today. First up, Bitcoin and crypto stocks are falling. Our crypto reporter will break down the why behind the latest moves. Next up, in the age of AI, security is both a challenge and also more important than ever. I'm excited to bring on the CEO of 1Password to talk about that and also about the state of his business. We're also talking with our Elon Musk reporter about the ways Elon is trying to get Tesla and XAI to work more closely together. And finally, Beehive, the fast-growing newsletters platform, is expanding beyond just newsletters with new features, including an AI website builder and digital commerce tools.

0:58You won't want to miss my conversation with the company CEO, Tyler Denk. I'm really excited for that one. There is a lot going on, and so let's get right on into things. Crypto prices have been cooling off lately, but the real story has been the plunge of crypto stocks, especially the ones of companies whose sole purpose recently became just holding crypto on their balance sheets. Joining me now to discuss this is Yueqi Yang, our crypto reporter, who wrote a strong piece on that trend yesterday in our Sunday Insights column. Yueqi, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash.

1:31So let's talk about our favorite topic, the crypto treasury stocks. It's something that we talk about a lot in the newsroom, me and you, because it's a crazy phenomenon that has been going on. Before we get to the crypto treasury stocks, let's just start with crypto prices directly. Why are Bitcoin prices down as of late? Bitcoin has erased all its gains this year, and it's down for both macro reasons and also crypto-specific reasons. broadly speaking, there's currently a market sell-off in all risky assets, including some tech stocks, but also crypto as well. But then within the crypto markets, long-term Bitcoin holders are cashing out.

2:12We know that Bitcoin historically trade at a four-year cycle, and the cycle was due to end next year in 2006. So people are trying to front run that cycle. But also earlier last month, there was a huge liquidation event that happened and a lot of traders got wiped out. So the crypto market is still reeling from that. Okay, so we're about a year early from the four-year cycle. But as we know, the bubble concerns are everywhere. So it kind of makes sense that maybe crypto prices are starting to dip. What's going on in the land of crypto treasury stocks now? Tell us about what's happening. The crypto treasury stock this year has really been the hottest phenomenon in crypto.

2:53There were more than 160 stocks in the US that have turned themselves into crypto treasury stocks, which essentially means that they're pivoting to buy crypto and hold crypto as their primary business model. And they're all following the playbook of micro strategy, which is buying Bitcoin and holding bitcoin as a stock proxy for investors to exposure so these stocks um from my tally they've been most of them have been trading down more so than the underlying tokens themselves micro strategy is one of them and uh more importantly historically these stocks trade at a premium to the underlying tokens and that's really the engine of their fundraising mechanism Meaning that the market cap of the company is historically more than the market cap of the crypto itself they hold, but now it's kind of inverse.

3:53Now the market cap is actually worth less than what the crypto would actually be worth. Yes. And that really creates challenge for these companies to continue their fundraising activities because now it doesn't make sense for investors to give them money so that they can then use it to buy less tokens than they had wanted to. And so these stocks have been a major buying force, driving up token prices in the crypto market. And now it seems like the trend is getting reversed. Now, you talked in the story about the multitude of companies that had gone public or were thinking about going public with this strategy.

4:32Can you just talk a little bit about the scope that this trend sort of played out? How many companies were there roughly? It wasn't just Bitcoin. it was other cryptocurrencies too that they began hoarding, right? Yes. In the U.S., there are more than 160 companies that are listed in the U.S. stock market that have announced the plan to become a crypto treasury stocks. 150, holy moly. It is a lot. And they raised an astonishing amount of money this year, especially in the summer. And we have data in our story that showed that the fundraising amount peaked in August and it's been on decline every month since.

5:12And the kind of tokens that they hold also vary. So the biggest ones are holding Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana, but there are also plenty of companies that are holding more speculative tokens and even mink coins, such as the Trump mink coin, and those stocks have plunged even more so than the mink coins. Now, have regulators at all picked up on this trend? Did they have any concerns? We know that the SEC is concerned about potential manipulation in some of the trading for these stocks. In September, the SEC suspended two small stocks because they suspected that there was potential manipulation for the stock before they announced their crypto purchase plan.

5:55And they were concerned that some people are promoting these stocks heavily on social media before the company publicly announced their crypto purchase strategy. And tell me, the move of the traditional financial sector to embrace crypto, did this movement have any impact on how they've been thinking about it? Was it a risk at all in terms of legitimacy for the sector? Because it very much seems like a bit of a flash in the pan movement that got some people rich and largely left many retail traders reeling in some cases because of the fact that the stock has really been plunging. Right. I think it depends.

6:34So we know that the reason that a lot of traditional institutions have been held back from offering crypto services was largely regulatory concerns. And I don't think that has changed yet. So for the companies like banks that are trying to offer crypto trading, I think they will still move ahead. But then I expect to see impacts on the upcoming launches of crypto treasure stocks. And I also expect the IPO market for crypto companies to potentially be affected. Just the market environment for crypto right now is not looking great. and it's no longer a red hot market for investors to be embracing crypto-related stocks.

7:16Well, that's really too bad because we were starting to see a slate of companies quickly march towards the exit. And to the extent that that IPO window is closing, that was a pretty short window in some cases. So, Uichi, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on. And it's a story that we'll be watching closely. So we look forward to having you on once again very soon. Okay. Hey, most of us know 1Password as the app that remembers all of your logins, but the company has quietly become a big player in enterprise security, protecting more than 1 billion human and machine credentials worldwide.

7:50Here to talk about how the company is evolving in the AI era and where security is headed next is 1Password CEO David Fogno. David, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Lovely to be here. Thank you so much for having me. So let's talk about 1Password. You had a big announcement recently. The company recently crossed$400 million in annual recurring revenue. That is up from the$250 million in ARR that you guys posted. I think it was a little more than two years ago now. So the company is clearly growing very quickly. Where has the growth been coming from as of late? You know, as you mentioned in your intro, we've really started to be focused on and really helping solve identity and access security challenges in the enterprise.

8:34And so we've now got 180 ,000 business customers. While we're known as a consumer application, we have millions of very, very loyal consumer users. 180 ,000 businesses trust us to help protect them as the world changes. And AI is introducing a lot of new challenges for those organizations. And we're at a wonderful point to be able to leverage kind of what got us here in order to be able to protect our customers. as they embrace these technologies going forward. Now, the company last raised money in 2022, is that right? Yes, that's right. And I know the company is generating a ton of free cash flow.

9:152022 was a long time ago, though. Is the company raising it all right now? No, we've recently announced a small secondary liquidity activity for some long-term employees and some founder liquidity, bringing in some great partners to help us on the next leg of the journey. But, you know, as you said, the company is very profitable. We've got a lot of money in the bank. So we're really just focused on solving challenges for our customers and making sure that the trust that they've instilled in us, we can bring that trust to where they need us as they start to adopt these artificial intelligence-oriented tools.

9:49Right. Talk to me about the company's integration with browsers. I know you guys have partnered with Perplexity to integrate that into their new Comet browser. What does this deal look like? Is this a deal that's sort of similar to the way that Google would pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari? Are you the default password engine on Comet? What do those deals actually look like? No, so our strategy here is we have the world's most trusted credential of all, and 80 plus percent of the bad things that happen are from compromised credentials. We really want to just be that trust layer for all of the new emerging AI-oriented browsers.

10:29And whether that's the headless browsers, you'll notice we released a capability called Secure Agentic Autofill with a headless browser company called BrowserBase, or whether it's with Perplexity as a launch partner or even supporting our customers that are using the Atlas browser from OpenAI. And so we've worked with all those parties to make sure that our customers can utilize those tools and still access their secrets in a fully encrypted, secure way without handing over raw credentials to the models or the browsers themselves. And so we want to be the trust layer inside of every agentic interaction, whether that's through the developer tools we have where folks are building new applications using the IDEs, the Vibe coding tools that you see out there, partners of the likes of Cursor and others, or in the browsers.

11:21Regardless of where the browsers come from, customers trust us. They expect us to be there with that trust for them in these places. And so it's just making it easy for them to access. That's what we've been about from the beginning, making it easy for people to stay secure while they leverage technology. I am curious, with respect to browsers, since you're playing in that space a little bit, or at least paying attention to it with your partners and stuff like that, where do you see the browser space going? Chrome has such tremendous market share, as does Safari. There's a couple of big fish out there, and now we have this emergence of all these AI-powered browsers.

11:54Do you see this becoming a much more fragmented landscape in the long run here? Do you think it will end up being two that win out? I think it's going to take a while to play out, but I think you will see some fragmentation where different use cases sort of drive different adoption models. And that's both on the consumer side and on the business side. With what we do and how we play with browsers and our browser extension and the way we bring security to the mix, We want to be, as I said, we want to be everywhere for our customers and partner with all the folks, and we do. And so that'll be our strategy to really just bring that trust layer regardless of the use case.

12:30But I do think there will be some fragmentation for a while before we see some convergence. Right. I want to talk about this report that Anthropic released last week, given that you're in the cybersecurity space. The report, just to remind folks, is Anthropic came out saying, hey, there are some bad actors out there that are using our technology to basically expedite the cybersecurity threats across the world. And it basically highlighted the extent to which there are risks that come with all this AI technology. And then also there are benefits that, you know, you can combat things better, too, given that it's easier to code solutions.

13:05Do you think that AI is a net positive for the cybersecurity landscape or are we all kind of doomed with these threats that are now easier to code by whoever's doing it? Well, one thing that's always been true about security is the bad guys are usually more focused and more well-resourced than the good guys. And so security has always been a little bit of a whack-a-mole as the threat profile continues to change. And so you put a tool, you know, tools like AI in the hands of bad actors with a lot of incentive to utilize them. You've got an uphill battle, you know, for sure. You know, vendors are going to leverage AI internally to improve the capability to fight back.

13:50But again, it's an ongoing battle between the good and the evil. I think that what Anthropik's announcement shows is that the threat landscape has really changed and will change pretty dramatically going forward. not only for something that was such a large scale, fully automated cyber attack, like the one that they pointed to, but think about less high profile targets where now because of AI, very sophisticated social engineering can happen at scale, very, very low cost without much human interaction. And so again, we need to be as 1Password in the middle of these transactions where we can secure the credentials because again, credentials are the place where most of the bad stuff's happening.

14:38And so making sure that people are taking their credential hygiene seriously at every layer, not just for the largest systems at the largest companies, but all across the organization and for companies of every size because social engineering can happen extraordinarily sophisticated manner, very, very effectively because of what AI can do. And so we need to fight back. Can I ask a question about product development and cybersecurity? Because it's something I've always been curious about. I don't really know how product development goes in cybersecurity land, mostly because if I think about what it's in response to, what's it protecting against, it's largely against threats.

15:14And so I wonder, I guess what I'm trying to get at is, you know, customer research, right? When people develop these products, you go to your customer, you ask them, well, what do you want? And in cybersecurity, it kind of seems like a bit of a different scenario because it's actually you're developing products that are reactive to the threats that are out there. And so I wonder how you think about growth for your company in terms of new products. Are you just getting people to try to hack systems in different ways and protect against that? Or how do you have foresight into saying, well, this product will ultimately sell?

15:47Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in our case, we're built on the premise that we have zero knowledge base in our approach to security. So your credentials, if you're a 1Password customer, we can never see. And we go through extraordinary lengths to make sure that your credentials are yours and we can't see them and the bad guys can't get to them as well. And so we take that element, that core, and we build around capabilities to make it useful in a proactive way, as you mentioned. So if you think about identity and access management broadly as a category, people want to have access to resources that can help them be more productive in their day.

16:23But to the extent that you add too much friction and for them doing that, they will work around it. And so what we do is we try to make that really, really secure way to leverage your things. Also, the easy way to go about your day, whether you're a consumer logging your kid into a school portal and signing them up and putting in a social security number or your partner's TSA number as you book a flight, or in a corporate context, how do you make sure that the right people are getting access to the right systems on the right devices and that it's all measurable, trackable, revocable when necessary?

16:53And so we take a more proactive view to say, where is the world going? How are people utilizing resources in their businesses and in their home lives? And how can we make it really easy for them to stay secure when they do that? And that's the way that we come about building our product set. Great. Well, David, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It was a great conversation and we look forward to having you back on soon. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Great to see you. Okay. At Tesla's annual meeting a few weeks ago, shareholders weren't thrilled about a proposal that would see the company invest in XAI, Elon Musk's AI company.

17:27But a new story from my colleague, Theo Waite, shows the ways that Musk is still finding ways for the companies to collaborate. And I want to bring him on to talk all about it. Theo, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Good to be back. Let's talk about the shareholder meeting, about Tesla, about XAI. Tell me a little bit about what your thoughts were coming out of the shareholder meeting, why you sort of focused on what you did and what you ultimately found. So the vote at the Tesla meeting was on Tesla investing in XAI, like a traditional equity investment. And I think that Tesla has a lot of stuff they need to spend their money on besides equity investments in Elon's own companies.

18:09And a lot of shareholders agreed with that. But, you know, I think that Elon is in a place now where he has this huge compensation package at Tesla that will give him a greater level of control over the company. And that makes him a bit more comfortable making Tesla kind of central to his other businesses. And when he kind of blurted out on stage that Tesla will probably have to build a chip fab, you know, that kind of got me thinking, like, there's no way that's only for Tesla. Like that has to have some kind of SpaceX or XAI, you know, element to it. And so through my reporting, I found that was the case.

18:50You know, it seems like Tesla had kind of talked about building a fab internally for a while before he made that comment. And it's also likely that XAI would be a customer, I found. Tell me a little bit about how this all intersects with the company's plans with Optimus. So ideally, Elon wants there to be one kind of super chip that will work in Optimus, the humanoid robot Tesla's building that will work in its vehicles. So the CyberCab and other newer Tesla cars and in its data centers. And that's kind of a shift from how, you know, chips have traditionally, you know, been developed and kind of divided between like AI training and inference.

19:38But that's what that's what his goal is. And talk to me a little bit about, you know, with Optimus, right? We've talked about what this robot could end up being. You had some great details in your story about what the company's vision of Optus could be. Something about deliveries and, you know, being the future of Amazon. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So, you know, Elon will talk on stage about how Optimus is going to do literally everything that a human is capable of. So it's, you know, reporting on specific, um, you know, things that, that, that optimists that he wants optimists to do is, is almost like, you know, trying to narrow down this, uh, you know, enormous basket of things he wants it to do.

20:22But I understand that, um, Elon, you know, one use case that's been talked about in particular inside Tesla is, uh, having optimists work for package deliveries. So like, uh, you know, arriving in a vehicle and picking up a box and walking to your door and setting it down and going back. So it's not a, the robot is not driving the car. The robot is sitting inside the driverless car. Theoretically. But the robot is supposed to get out and deliver the package and they come back and sit in the passenger seat. Yes, theoretically the car would drive itself. Okay. And then the robot would walk itself with the package.

21:04And among the many technological issues that that might come with, what are the specific issues that you found the design team is having with the idea of this robot getting out of a car? So, you know, thinking about robots and humanoid robots in general, you just realize all these things about our own bodies that we take for granted. and one of those is the ability to step out of a car, which is actually kind of a weird motion if you think about it, right? Because you have to like sideways and up at the same time. And apparently what I found out through my reporting is that kind of the way that the back and like the hip connect to the leg is not ideal for doing that.

21:52And basically they have to figure out the design before it's going to be able to seamlessly get in and out. You need significant hamstring flexibility, I imagine, to make that work. That's right. And there's actually, I don't know if you follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, but there's a great evidence of this in a Kim Kardashian photo shoot from last year where she is standing next to a Tesla cyber cab that has an optimist sitting in it. And, you know, Optimus, like, you can tell in the photo shoot, if you look carefully, that it's kind of been jammed in there because it has like one leg still sticking out of the car and its head is like a little bit against the ceiling.

22:38And so that's kind of, you know, my reporting is not based on that picture. But if you look at the picture, you can see what I'm talking about. So we can rule out Kim Kardashian as the sources that are giving you the reporting, I guess. I would love for her to be my source, but not right now. Well, so, okay, so talk about maybe the closer term targets then. If that's sort of what this looks like in the long run, what is Optimus trying to be used for, or what is the idea that it will be used for internally to at least prove out that the robot actually works? So right now, they're focused on deploying Optimus internally in various Tesla factories and warehouses and that kind of thing.

23:22And there's still a lot left to do. I mean, based on my previous reporting, I understand that there are only a few hundred Optimus robots that exist so far, and they want to build thousands next year, probably. And there's plenty of stuff to do inside Tesla with thousands of robots before they put any out in the world. And it's an interesting contrast with, you know, other humanoid robotics companies like One X and a figure that, you know, are solely humanoid robotics companies. They don't have huge factories that they own to put their own robots in. Whereas Tesla, you know, they have warehouses that ship parts.

24:01They have, you know, obviously huge manufacturing facilities. Right. There's a ton of stuff that they want to use Optimus for internally before they put it in someone's house or someone else's factory. Right. Last question before you go. One of the things you talked about in the story are the company's cyber cab ambitions in Austin and in cities around the U.S. Where do we stand on that with respect to not the progress of the cyber cab, but also the infrastructure they need around it to be able to roll out this technology around the U.S.? So I think building the cyber cab itself is not really the hardest part.

24:37Like Elon is good at building cars. Tesla knows how to do that. it's more the software that the self-driving software needs to be completely perfect because this is a car that doesn't have a steering wheel so you theoretically need to be able to never drive it um and then the other side is regulators and there are a ton of hurdles there that they're going to have to get through still right well theo thank you for coming on and thank you for telling us all the ways in which kim kardashian connects to elon's humanoid robot ambitions. It's not a connection I would have made, but that's why we have you on to explain it to us.

25:14That is Theo Waite, our reporter on all things Elon Musk here at The Information. Thanks to you for coming out. We appreciate it. Thanks. Okay. Beehive last week made a big slate of product announcements that is pushing the newsletter platform into website building, podcasting, digital commerce, and more. Joining me now to discuss that big slate of announcements is Tyler Denk, CEO of the company. Tyler, it's great to have you back. Welcome back to the show. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. Well, so let's talk about all the things you announced. There was a lot of announcements that you made, and you made a really nice 22-minute keynote video, I thought is very well done, with all of the different product releases.

25:54It kind of reminded me of the Apple keynotes, the way that we do them. My question for you is, Tyler, 22 minutes was the length of the keynote. How long, how quickly do you think you can rattle off each and every feature for us? How quickly can you do it? I mean, I have a list up to the side of me. So pretty quickly, to be honest, I'm cheating. Okay. All right. So can I give you 22 seconds? Can we see how many you can get there? And then we'll talk about them in detail. Let's do it. Okay. 22 seconds. All right. Yes. All right. We're starting the clock in three, two, one, go. where digital products first, AI website builder, podcast integration, website analytics, link in bio, templates, dynamic content.

26:40I can see it. I am cheating. I am cheating. I was working on this earlier. I didn't know what the questions were going to be, but I had this up while I was working on it. Automations, ad network, paid subscription. Those are the 10 that we launched last week. 22 seconds on the dot. There you go. I like it. Okay. Well, let's double click on some of these because it was a really exciting winter release as you say if you were to pick two that you think are really going to move the dial for beehive which two have you been really focused on in terms of attracting customers and and you really think is going to expand the strategy yeah i think the first two that we launch with which is one digital products just another opportunity for our users and creators to monetize their audience so whether that's an ebook a template or booking time directly.