Inside the OpenClaw & Moltbook Craze, SpaceX’s FCC Filing for Orbital Data Centers

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Basricha. It is Monday, February 2nd. We have got a big week of tech earnings ahead, but we are kicking off today with our Amazon reporter who took a closer look at how Amazon is reshaping its leadership as the company looks to speed its development of new AI software. We'll then bring on our Elon Musk reporter to debrief a busy weekend of SpaceX news as it seeks the FCC's approval for one million satellites. I'll then sit down with venture capitalist Anna Barber, who is starting a new role today as GP at Everywhere Ventures. We will break down the current state of venture.

0:53We've also got to get into Oracle's big funding announcement from the weekend with our cloud and compute reporter. and we will wrap with a breakdown of OpenClaw, formerly known as MaltBot, formerly, formerly ClawedBot. We are also talking about MaltBook. We are going to bring on none other than Rocket Drew to help us make sense of it all. It is a big show and a fun one. So let's get right on into it. Amazon's layoffs last week and in the fall raised the question, how is the company orienting its leadership in its newest era? Here at The Information, we've also been very interested and how AWS's top leadership has been structured.

1:30My colleague, Catherine Perloff, published an exclusive inside look at AWS's revamped org chart, and I want to bring her on to talk all about it. Catherine, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. So where did you start with reporting the story? What were the main questions that you wanted to answer? I think, you know, I'm interested in sort of how Amazon is seeking to compete in the AI race. And a lot of that focuses on AWS. And AWS is going to benefit from AI because lots of companies are using its cloud, but how is AWS going to innovate in AI with their own product?

2:08So that's one question for me. And then the other question was Amazon laid off 14 ,000 people in October. They also laid off another 16 ,000 people last week or, yeah, like last Wednesday. And so knowing that those layoffs are kind of in the midst, I wanted to see there was a big reorganization that happened last March. And how did that affect the organization as they're trying to, you know, kind of almost work, in my mind, sometimes two goals that can be at odds, like getting rid of people, getting rid of middle managers, making things more efficient, but then also operating like a startup and trying to develop new products really quickly, which sometimes leads to a bit of waste and chaos and that kind of thing.

2:48And so what did you ultimately find? How are they rearranging things to pursue these ambitions? Yeah. So basically what happened was in March, there's this executive, Swami. I might butcher his last name. So I feel like I'm just going to call him Swami because that's what everyone internally calls him. But he, you know, had a purview over a lot of AI products. And they just kind of focused him just on a Gentic product. So some things, including some products that came out this after the reorganization, like Quicksuite, which is an enterprise search tool, a coding assistant, Kiro, that they're putting out.

3:31And they kind of gave ownership of some of these older AI products that Amazon has made, including SageMaker, which is sort of their like OG AI product. It helps companies build like machine learning models. And that was put out in 2017. And Bedrock, which is how companies access the LLMs into sort of different leaders. And I think that, you know, the pro is that sort of been able to like let Swami sort of focus on maybe like where the money and innovation is happening, which is agents. AWS CEO Matt Garman said he sees agents as like a multi-billion dollar opportunity for AWS, but it has led to a little bit of duplication, a little bit of hiccups along the way.

4:18So this executive, Swami Shiva Subramaniam, he is really in charge of where the company seems to be, where AWS is seeming to want to go, right, with coding and agents. I mean, it's very much the forward-looking products. Right, right, yes, and that's sort of, and he used to sort of have more of these sort of, I don't know if you'd call them legacy, but just older products in his purview, yeah. Right, and what were the other notable changes that you found in terms of which leaders are moving around? So, I mean, yeah, so then like the other products went, kind of got split between Dave Brown and Mylan Thomasin Bukovec, who previously reported to Peter DeSantis, and now they both report directly to Matt Garman.

5:12And Peter DeSantis, who was a really, you know, I think one of the sort of top AWS execs, got moved out of AWS in December to sort of take over ownership of this separate organization that is leading Amazon's homegrown foundation model research. So now he's gone and he was kind of a key executive shepherding this. Also, some of their sales, key sales executives have been swapped out or are leaving Amazon. So there's, and those are people responsible for selling these products. So there's a lot of moving parts. A lot of movement, right. So big picture, Catherine, when you look at these movements, I mean, we've talked on this show about how Amazon is really trying to become one of the first two, three names in AI the way that it may not have been able to in past years, at least compared to some of its hyperscale rivals.

6:13So in that pursuit to really become the forefront of AI. How do you think these changes ultimately do there? Do people think that they're going to be productive in helping them? Yeah, it's interesting. I think that they're sort of working things out. For example, within that older product bedrock, they had this search tool knowledge bases, and it was kind of technically identical in a lot of ways, even though it's sort of a different customer than this to this new product they're building quick suite so they have to sort of unify the tech stacks and there was some competition between the units and they also so so i think it's sort of like how do we kind of take what we have and make it the most efficient for customers and i think they're working that out and i think that reorganizing can help them with that goal i think that maybe the risk that could come is like do you forget about the older AI products that like people are really using and are like serve like a really important function for people.

7:15For example, there have been sort of longstanding work before, you know, chat GPT mania to sort of unite SageMaker with some of their data products. And that work kind of got reshuffled in this reorg. And one bit actually didn't make it into the article, but I talked to a customer who was like, you know, we use SageMaker more than bedrock because LLMs are really expensive. Machine learning models are cheaper. So, you know, often older products, you know, maybe have more customer adoption, more name recognition. You know, we know that companies are still trying to get value out of LLMs and that hasn't fully worked out yet.

7:49So I think, you know, it's sort of like that balance of like, we want to push the new, but not at the expense of the old. Great. Well, Catherine, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Catherine Perloff, our Amazon reporter here at The Information. Okay, SpaceX over the weekend shot approval from the Federal Communications Commission to launch one million satellites into space for a giant orbital data center. We have covered Elon Musk's outer space data center ambitions a bit on this show, but I want to bring on Theo Waite, our reporter covering the Musk empire, to break down these latest developments for us.

8:26Theo, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hello, good to be back. Another busy weekend in the Musk empire. What happened with the one million satellites that SpaceX wants to launch into outer space? So for those of us that were refreshing the FCC registry on Friday night, there was a filing from SpaceX that requested approval to launch a million satellites that would form a gigantic orbital data center that would be more powerful than all data centers combined that currently exist, probably. to put that in perspective the 1 million number only 25 ,000 satellites have been launched since the 1950s so in all of history we've been launching satellites so it's just a totally unprecedented number and scale and very light on details as well and do you think that they ultimately will get approval for these 1 million satellites?

9:31that's kind of impossible i was asking a smart lawyer that knows space about this who was just like i have no idea because nobody's ever asked for this kind of thing before and it's it's a it's a bit hard to say but you know in the past like the way that that that elon's companies have approached problems is like there are two bottlenecks and one of them is the technology and the actual product and one of them is the regulators and they would much rather have the tech be the bottleneck than the regulator so you can think about it as you know trying to get ahead um on on data centers in space if if they really think they're going to be huge they'd rather get permission and then figure out how to actually do it later um the other factor here that that's impossible to ignore is is that you know there's a lot of ipo hyping going on right now and spacex is a rocket launch and satellite internet company, and they want to convince investors that they're an AI company or they're going to become an AI company.

10:30And one way to do that is to file this kind of thing and signal that you're serious. And just to confirm here what we know and what we don't know, we know it's a million satellites. We know that it's this application. We don't know what types of satellites these are going to be or even what the timeline would be for launching these satellites, right? I mean, that's still very much in the air. Yeah, it was very light on details. I mean, we don't know the size of the satellites. We don't know when they want to launch them. In general, what Elon has said is that there's a Starlink satellite called the V3 that they haven't started launching at scale yet, but that they will launch sometime soon that they could retrofit and have be an initial version of a data center in space.

11:18And so we could see the first satellites that SpaceX calls data centers in space, you know, in the next year or two potentially, but definitely not a million of them. Well, and as you talked about earlier, the two bottlenecks, one being technology and the other one being getting permission really from the government to basically build this business out the way that they want to. I mean, it does strike me that it is, it's very much out of their hands in some ways. If the government says you can't do this, I mean, it very much does stifle the ambition to the company. And it really just highlights just how much this sector is dependent on regulators and what you can do right now.

11:59Yeah, and regulators are a bottleneck in so many ways for SpaceX. I mean, if you think about, like, the amount of disruption that rocket launches cause to air traffic, for example, like that really is a pretty unresolved issue because SpaceX wants to be launching you know many starships today in the future and they haven't really figured out how to do that without being a huge pain for a lot of other people and so and that's just one example I mean they're going to be a ton of regulatory bottlenecks to these things and it makes sense that they would try to get out ahead now in the background here we do have all of the reports that have been coming out over the last few days about the possibility of a SpaceX XAI merger.

12:44Maybe Tesla is in the mix as well. I think SpaceX and XAI sort of seem to be what the latest reporting says is getting closer. My question for you, Theo, is not so much on the latest here, because I think as we know with these types of deals, I mean, things will change quickly and it's all just based on reporting right now but what do you think musk's end goal is here with this consolidation is this really trying to give spacex just a better ai narrative for the ipo what do you think i mean i i i think that would be the the bullish read on it you know or the the pro elon read would be that these companies are so great that everyone wants them to be combined because they're so amazing but i mean the other thing is like spacex is a real business xai is not really a real business yet and is burning a ton of money and you know in the background it's it's hard not to think that that it would it would benefit xai to have access to a ton of money that spacex is going to raise in this ipo and that's like doubly true if they're not doing so hot well and the other thing that I am thinking about, though, is that we also have in the background the race, to the extent that there is one, between Anthropic and OpenAI to go public.

14:07And of all the big AI labs, I mean, not all of them, you know, there's obviously the public companies like Meta that are already public, but I mean, maybe there's a little bit of antsiness in saying, hey, we need XAI to go public in some way, shape, or form. Let's tack it on to SpaceX. Maybe that's a race he cares about. I don't know. Potentially. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, clearly everything that OpenAI does, he watches very closely and wants to beat them. So I think that's conceivable. Yeah. Right. Great. Well, Theo, I want to thank you for coming on. By the way, and last question, were you actually refreshing the FTC website on Friday night?

14:42Is that what you did? I don't tell my editors, but I may not have been actually doing that on Friday night. Okay. All right. Well, thanks for coming on, Theo. We appreciate that. It's Theo Waite, our Elon Musk reporter here at The Information. Okay, Everywhere Ventures is getting a new general partner. Anna Barber is joining the firm from M13, where she will continue to stay on as a board partner. Anna has invested in startups in customer support tools, retail technology, and also companies focused on scaling childcare. I want to bring her on to talk more about her new role. Anna, welcome back to the show.

15:18It's great to have you here. Great to be here, Akash. Thanks Thanks for having me. The announcement just launched, so it's an exciting day to be talking to you. Well, congrats on the new world. We are very excited to talk to you about it. Tell us a little bit about what Everywhere Ventures is focused on and also what you're going to be focused on at the firm. Everywhere Ventures is a global pre-seed firm. So for the past eight years, partners Jenny and Scott have been investing really in the earliest stages, so first rounds across a bunch of categories, enterprise, fintech, healthcare, really focused on things like infrastructure and security and highly technical companies, which is a great alignment also with what I've been doing at M13.

15:59And so at the new firm, where are you really going to be planting your roots? What are you going to be focused on? Well, we think there's an interesting opportunity with such a huge pre-seed portfolio, global brand, to do more. So Scott and Jenny haven't been able traditionally to double down on their winners and wanted to bring in a partner with lead investing experience. So I've been leading deals for the past five years at M13. Companies, as you mentioned, like Max Retail, Maven AGI, Avantos, Replenish, and others. And so bringing in someone who had that experience of leading deals to complement their kind of broad-based pre-seed investing is the key to growing the firm to the next stage.

16:46I want to talk to you about the overall state of venture capital right now. There was some data that I was looking at over the weekend. PitchBook puts out their quarterly venture monitor report. And, I mean, the latest one is a couple weeks old now. But, you know, the data that I keep coming back to that is staggering to me is they pointed out that VC fundraising from LPs is the lowest that it's been since 2017. And on the other hand, if you look at where capital or how much capital is being deployed by venture capital firms, I mean, that is back up to the levels that we saw in 2021, you know, in sort of the post-pandemic era.

17:26And so you kind of have this interesting scenario where there's not a ton of money coming in, it seems, but there's a lot of money going out. And I'm just trying to make sense of all this. I mean, what is it looking like on the ground? How does the business even stay sustainable in that way? Yeah, I think I saw that stat too. I think it's super interesting. I think what's driving this is really the largest firms at the top, what we call the mega funds, who are raising really the bulk of the venture capital. So the other trend there, overall capital rate is going down. Most of it is aggregating into the top firms.

17:59And they have an incredible need to deploy capital. All that capital has to go somewhere. So I think what you're seeing is actually velocity in terms of cycles, of cycling capital, getting money in the door and out the door more quickly at the top, whereas the overall number of venture firms is contracting. Interesting. There was another stat that was released today, which is the number of funds graduating from fund one to fund two is at a five-year low. It's down to something like 10 percent of firms started in 2023 have raised a follow-on fund. So you're seeing contraction, but also this massive recycling of capital at the top end.

18:39So this is really the phenomenon of the idea here of kingmakers, I guess. Really, you have a few really large funds at the top. You have a few really large companies that are attracting all the capital. Where does that leave opportunity then for you? How do you stand out then in this climate? Yeah, I mean, I think people have commented that a lot of what the megafunds are doing, maybe it's no longer even venture capital. So I think what's true now for smaller emerging funds is what's always been true, which is you really need to have an edge. You need to offer something distinctive. Capital is a commodity now.

19:19That's not what founders are looking for, just someone to write a check. So a firm like Everywhere that's founded by operators and traditionally funded by operators, so the LPs in Everywhere have traditionally been operators themselves, is really able to support companies in getting off the ground in a way that is very meaningful at the earliest stages when speed is everything in a market like today. So that's really the edge, is the edge of operators and being built on a community of operators. Can you get – I hear this term a lot. I'm wondering if you can get a little more specific with me in terms of like things that companies really need help with right off the bat here in the pre-seed route.

20:04I mean is this – like is it engineering guidance that they need? Is it product positioning? Is it figuring out what the idea is? Like what is the most tactical thing that you see them needing help with? Raw unfiltered feedback from people who have actually been there, most important thing. Number two, network connections, introductions, customers. If someone can give you a warm intro to another company, a small company, big company, place they used to work who becomes your earliest customer, that's like oxygen for startups. And then the third thing is really networking into your next set of investors.

20:37Your first round just never goes very far. So being able to quickly circle the next round of capital, especially in a high velocity market like today, is absolutely essential. And that's a place where everywhere excels. One more question for you. Another stat that popped out to me from that PitchBook report was that 41 % of unicorns have not raised since at least 2022. So you have these companies. I didn't look at the sector breakdown. I imagine you probably have a lot of enterprise software companies, a lot of fintech companies that raised a lot of money in the Zerp era. We, of course, saw the Brex acquisition a couple weeks ago.

21:17So what do you think happens to all these companies that did raise a ton of money and maybe had the unicorn valuation in 2021 or 2022? And now they're, I don't know, they're just chugging along, I guess. Yeah, so that's my theory. My theory is that these companies are a bit stuck. They can't raise more money because they would lose valuation. So they want to hold the mark that they got in that 2022 round. So they kind of can't raise more capital. They can't exit also for similar reasons. So what a lot of these companies, I think, are trying to do is grow organically with no new capital to kind of catch up to the valuation that they had in 2022.

21:53So they're not zombie companies because they're profitable. In all likelihood, they're just kind of stuck or stunted in terms of being able to grow because they're trapped with a valuation that may no longer make sense. And so what is your advice then to founders in that position? What do you tell them to do? Is it ultimately, you know, we've written here at the information a little bit about how PE companies may be interested in rolling them up into companies that they've acquired. I mean, is it really to look for a buyer, look for a new home? What advice do you give them? I think capital is a means to an end, not an end to itself.

22:32And so my advice would be the same no matter what stage is build a great business and the results will follow. So, you know, an interesting thing about this current market is that there are exit pathways for founders and for partial exits. While you keep building your company, there's secondary funds, there are buyers for this private stock, you know, to increasingly give founders and employees some kind of an off ramp while they continue building. But I'd say just don't focus on the exit, focus on building a great company. And that can take a decade or more and the results will follow. Great.

23:05Well, Anna, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Anna Barber, the newest general partner at Everywhere Ventures here on TITV. Okay. Oracle is raising up to$50 billion in 2026 through debt and equity, the company said. The company is looking to plow all of that cash into building more data centers to service its big customers like OpenAI and AMD. Joining me now to discuss the news is Anissa Gardizi, our cloud and compute reporter. Anissa, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. What stood out to you about this announcement over the weekend? The thing that stood out to me the most was the way Oracle phrased who this data capacity, the data center capacity will be for.

23:49Obviously, one of their largest contracts is with OpenAI, and the concentration there has sort of been a worry for some lenders. But in this announcement, Oracle made it very clear that OpenAI is not the only customer who will be benefiting from this capacity. They weren't even the first company listed in the list of companies that Oracle said it would be serving. Oracle said we should expect that this money will go toward data centers for TikTok, AMD, Elon Musk's XAI, and NVIDIA. So I think, you know, it was interesting that they did that, but I think it makes a lot of sense. They want to make sure that people know OpenAI is not the only beneficiary here.

24:27And on the funding side of this, did most people expect that there were going to be new debt and equity raises to fund this data center boom? Yeah, I think for me, in this Oracle announcement, the equity part was a little bit surprising, but everyone was very much expecting them to potentially tap debt markets. The big question, though, was how much was Oracle going to raise? There are already some deals out there in the market where someone building for Oracle is raising debt, and they're sort of raising that debt and telling lenders, hey, look, we have a lease with Oracle. Can you lend us money to build this data center for Oracle?

25:08And it was very clear that that would only be able to happen on so many deals. There is already more than$50 billion of those types of deals out there. So the fact that Oracle would have to eventually raise its own debt, I think, was pretty expected. But from what I can tell, no one knew how much it was going to be. And having this clarity from Oracle, I think, is going to be very helpful as people make decisions. So just to confirm, so these are data center developers that basically were saying, we'll take the debt and put it on our balance sheet. And that would sort of make it less risky for Oracle to pursue them, essentially.

25:45Exactly. And they're able to do that because they can go and show lenders that they have a lease with Oracle. But at some point, there are so many companies that have a lease with Oracle, you know, it's getting harder and harder to raise those rounds. But Oracle has hinted to investors that it would potentially explore taking on its own debt. I think it's just helpful for everyone to know now, OK, in 2026, you know, we should expect the 45 to 50 billion from Oracle. And I am thinking about the crowd that you were hanging out with a couple of weeks ago in Hawaii, the data center developer, the fanciest data center conference in the world, in Hawaii.

26:24So presumably you were catching up with those people over the weekend and last week as the Oracle news has come together. I wonder for them, as you just talked about, now this is sort of – it's a nice gift in some ways because they don't have to take on the debt themselves. And they have Oracle that's fronting some of the risk. I imagine for them it's like what? Like the party continues – there's more data centers to be built here. Yeah, I think the overarching sentiment is that this is good for the industry. Even having the clarity on what Oracle plans to do, I think is helpful for some of them.

27:02But as you said, you know, one of the topics that people brought up the most at that conference was just kind of concern around all of the projects tied to Oracle and how long, how much longer they could continue funding in the way that they were. So, you know, that concern is hopefully answered a little bit here with the Oracle announcement that they had yesterday. And we'll just have to see, you know, do we know about this big OpenAI contract? I would expect that Oracle maybe makes more specific announcements around what it's building for those other customers that I mentioned earlier. And then in terms of timeline, how quickly or how long will it take then to turn this cash that it's going to raise through these equity and debt issuances into actual construction of new data centers?

27:49I mean, we're still talking, what, two to three years in terms of timeline? Yeah, yeah. The timeline here to think about is definitely years. And there's going to be a lot of upfront investment on Oracle's part before the revenue starts coming in. But just to remember, Oracle is the smallest of the so-called hyperscale cloud providers, the Amazon, Google, Microsoft. So they are much smaller and definitely need to invest a lot before they can recoup the revenue. They don't have this existing massive cloud business like Amazon does, which can kind of fuel the expansion. But yeah, we're thinking about years in terms of when these things will actually be ready for customers.

28:29Great. Well, Anissa, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Anissa Gardizi, our cloud and compute reporter here at The Information. Okay, it's been a busy few weeks of new product releases in Silicon Valley with the OpenClaw craze. It, of course, wasn't always called OpenClaw. We'll talk about that in a second. There has also been new attention on Moldbook, and all of this comes after Claude Cowork took the Valley by storm. To break it all down, I want to bring on Rocket Drew, our AI and robotics reporter. Rocket, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me, Akash.