Silicon Valley's AI-Fueled Paranoia, Epic's Threat & The US Open's Metaverse Play | Aug 25, 2025

0:13Welcome everyone to the information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasritch. It is Monday, August 25th. Hope you had a great weekend. We have got a great show planned for you today. We've got a really interesting conversation planned for you about the market for AI medical scribes and the threat that Epic and Microsoft could pose to startups in that ecosystem. We're also going to talk about the angst and agony that AI is causing in Silicon Valley right now. We're then going to talk e-commerce and a new potential funding round that our newsroom was first to report this morning. And finally, if you like tennis, stick around because we have got our friends at the US Open coming on to talk about how they are leaning into tech this year over at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

0:55It's going to be a great show for you. Let's start with our first guest here. Last week, Epic Systems, the big healthcare software company, had its big annual conference, and one of Epic's big announcements was its AI ambient transcription tool with Microsoft. That's been a market that many, many startups have raised a ton of money to play in, and I want to bring on Mike Desjadden, the CEO of healthcare payments company Anomaly to help us make sense of all this. Mike, it's great to have you here. Welcome to TITV. Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. Well, I don't know if I can help you make sense of it, but I can tell you what I think.

1:28Well, so let's just make something clear. You were not at the conference itself this year, right? No, no, I did not go this year. Okay, but you got a lot of friends who were there. Tons, yeah. Okay. My text feed got most of the news before it came out, yeah. Well, so let's talk about the news. What was the news that came out of the user? It's called the user groups meeting for Epic. That's what it's called? Yeah, the Epic user group meeting. All the news that Epic's going to do with AI and I think the headline grabbing news was the Scribe segment. They had a very close partnership with Abridge, one of the biggest companies in healthcare right now, but then they came out with a rival Scribe powered by Microsoft.

2:06So that was the news at least that hit us. But we knew this was coming, right? I mean, this wasn't really that much of a surprise. It wasn't a surprise, but I think the announcement, the strength of the announcement paired with everything else they purport to be doing in AI was news. So, you know, we're a financial company. So in our space, the news around Penny was big. Don't you know that. Penny was Penny was which announcement, sir? Penny is their administrative AI. OK. So a name too cute by half, but that's the that's the one that hit us as well. Got it. So look, I want to focus on the AI Ambient Scribe tool that they unveiled.

2:44They unveiled it with Microsoft. You know, I can't help but think of all the startups that have raised money to build products in that space. I mean, what ends up happening to them in this ecosystem, do you think? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, their public statements have suggested that they're not worried. You got to be a little worried, right? I mean, if you like the upmarket health system market, which is kind of the biggest market in healthcare, I think you'd have to be worried. And we're talking about companies that have raised a lot of money that have billion-dollar valuations.

3:15Bridge, I think, is a$3.5 billion valuation. I think Ambience is close. And these are great companies with A-plus products. I've got friends at both those companies. And Bridge had a very storied partnership with Epic, which, being frank, speaking from a startup perspective myself, we were curious how they did it. because Epic historically kind of gives startups like ours, the Heisman in a lot of different ways, and they were partnered with the bridge. And I think there were a lot of folks behind the scenes in the industry with kind of cautionary notes saying, you know, how long will this partnership last?

3:46What will Epic do? And, you know, I think this partnership with Microsoft is at least a shot, you know, to that model just because of the install base. You know, will doctors get to keep a bridge? Will they not? I don't know. You know, that's a potentially trillion-dollar question. So talk to me a little bit about how Epic has operated historically and how this is kind of a slight deviation from that. Because Epic has long been known as a company that said, we will not go public, we will not be acquired, we will not do any acquiring. This seems, I mean, they haven't announced any acquisitions here, obviously, but the fact that they're playing with Microsoft here, that seems to be sort of a bit of a new paradigm for them, Right.

4:26Maybe. But, you know, if you think about it, it kind of makes some sense. Right. I think behind the scenes of what what Epic has always said about not wanting to be acquired or not going public, things like that is stability. I think if there's one thing that they've been consistent with is that there are partners, the health systems that they serve. These are companies that have been there for 100 years and will be there for another 100 years. So Epic has always said we will be a stable partner to this kind of stable environment. And if you think about their partnership with Abridge, Abridge is a company on meteoric rise, huge valuations.

4:59There's going to be exits at some point. Then you look at Microsoft. Microsoft is an enormous company. Stability, huge footprints in these health systems. In a sense, though, that's not something Epic has traditionally done. It actually makes a lot of sense, given their stated objective of being a stable partner for health systems. And so I just want to go back to where we were at the start of this conversation, which is that these startups, you know, they have been building in this space for a while. Now this 800-pound gorilla enters the space. So what hope do these smaller startups have at competing with the likes of Epic and Microsoft?

5:33Yeah, well, one, I mean, Microsoft has been in the market for some time with the Nuance Dragon products, and they're pretty good. Abridge is a fantastic product, but there's a tremendous amount of position to light. I think it's why, you know, they've gotten so much uptake. And I think, you know, I've heard great things about ambience as well. And there's lots of others. I mean, those are just the two sort of big names, but there's a number of names here. I think they're, you know, from a kind of high level perspective, they have to do two things, right? They're going to have to go down market.

5:59They're going to have tough competition now in the kind of bigger, larger sort of health system space. They're going to have to go down market to practices, individual physicians just to be able to grow and breathe. And I think they've got to continue to focus on, on a plus product. there will be health systems that, you know, kind of listen to their physicians and want the A plus product, not suggesting Microsoft's isn't, but that's always kind of what a bridge is traded on. And then I think it's no secret that they're going to have to creep into other spaces, the revenue cycle space, MySpace, for example, they're going to have to, and many of them have started coding, for example, talking about things like denials management.

6:33And the revenue cycle industry is enormous. And you're talking about$150 billion now going to$300 billion by, by 2036. So it's ripe round to play, but it's also a very different industry because documentation and billing seem so adjacent because of the penalties. You'd think that it's easy to move in, but it's not. Right. And last question for you. I mean, this is a highly regulated environment, right? There is sort of some kind of an argument to be made here that Epic has been operating this space for a while. Just from a regulatory perspective, it has those relationships in place compared to smaller startups.

7:11You are in a totally separate, not separate, but like you said, revenue cycle is sort of a slightly different sandbox. How have you navigated that in terms of like trying to build that regulatory credibility as a startup? Well, I think for us being in the financial space, you know, if you look across how health systems have utilized Epic and then utilized, you know, different companies and capabilities outside of Epic, the companies and capabilities that last outside of and then integrated in Epic operate in areas of criticality for the health system. Like I have to have the best of X, right? And we live in the payment space and they either get paid or they don't.

7:49And, you know, I think Epic has thrived on being able to tamp down competition by having a VAT for everything, right? Oh, we also have, you know, an analytics tool. They call it slicer dicer. We also have a billing tool, right? But when it comes down to things that we do, like make sure health systems get paid, you know, correct the things that are broken up front, you see your balance sheet, right? You can't have a C plus solution because at the end of the day, you got paid or you didn't. So that's what we're going to continue to focus on. From a regulatory capture standpoint, you know, I don't know that there's much we can do.

8:18I think people sort of maybe forget the history of Epic in that regard, you know, 2007, maybe 500 million in revenue. Then you have the 2009 High Tech Act, you know, which pushes, you know, more than$35 billion into the EHR and interoperability space via the federal government, you know, and their revenues are now, I think, 5 billion, you know, maybe a little bit more after that. So I don't know that our segment industry will benefit from that same regulatory opportunity. But I think where companies like ours and mine specifically play is we're able to ensure that any payments, you know, that are kind of subject to that kind of rate.

8:55So I think Medicare payments, Medicaid payments to make sure They're done right. Those are the life systems. And we'll continue to live in that space and thrive there. Great. Well, Mike, thank you for coming on and helping us make sense of this. It's a fast-moving space. And as there are more announcements coming out, we will be sure to bring you back on. That is Mike Deschadden from Anomaly. Well, it has been a busy summer for everyone in the tech sector, and it hasn't exactly been a relaxing one. Over the weekend, my colleagues published a story capturing what very much is an anxious time for Silicon Valley as everyone tries to make sense of how AI is going to transform their businesses.

9:32I want to bring on Natasha Mascarenas to talk about that story that she wrote. Natasha, thanks for being here. It's great to have you. Great to be here. So tell us, what is the vibe right now in Silicon Valley? Yeah, I mean, the vibe is very much paranoia. We were looking with this story to capture the middle ground or the duality of this moment between both the excitement of being an AI company, but also the challenge on if you're not in that really concentrated group of companies that are soaring right now. And yeah, I mean, within the first few minutes of many of my calls, I had CEOs, investors really emphasizing the paranoia of this moment.

10:14And, you know, as one reader put it, forget coding. The vibe right now is very much FOMO. So that was very much the takeaway from my story this weekend. I just want to back up a bit. As a reporter, you set out to do this story. You're working on a bunch of different stories in the background. How did you get the idea for this story? I mean, is this people telling you in the background as you're asking them about something else? Like, I'm so stressed right now. I mean, you just don't understand how much I got. How did you get the idea for this story in the first place? Yeah, I mean, it's very much the whiplash of reporting, to your point.

10:47Within the same day that I'm chasing a story on a company getting preempted for a$9 billion valuation without needing a drop of capital, I'm reporting on Cognition CEO offering its staff buyouts because, you know, they're making sure that everyone in the ecosystem is working as hard as the employees that got there before. So very much, like, on any given day, I'm covering layoffs to preemptions, and it very much feels like everyone is kind of running around. But yeah, because to your point, about two years ago, it really felt like founders would not admit pivots on the record. And here we are.

11:29We have Howie, the CEO and co-founder of Airtable, admitting we were scared of being dinosaurs. And I think that's a very powerful moment that is worth saying out loud. And Airtable is not a small company. I mean, we're talking about well-established companies having these existential thoughts. Talk a little bit about, you know, this is kind of, there are two sides to the story. One is the big tech companies worrying about the future of their business. And then you've got these startups that are, they're facing competition too. And it's kind of like everyone's in paranoia. Totally. I mean, there's, depending on who you talk to, you might hear about the zombies or the dinosaurs.

12:07Um, and for me, like, really where I would start this conversation is the companies that were born before AI Native or the AI Boom really became a thing that we cover all day, every day. And so when you think of Airtable, you think of a company that was actually the cream of the crop in Silicon Valley for a very long time. And you'd imagine my surprise when I was talking to a founder on the earlier stage, say, you know, if Airtable can pivot, so can I. And when I was digging, I ended up finding out that Airtable had actually pivoted to a version of a vibe coding where they were going to help its users be able to text prompt into creating, what they say, more enterprise-ready apps than the cursors and lovables of the world.

12:51And to me, I can barely change the word that I start a Bananagrams game with, let alone a company that is entirely pivoting after 12 years. And so I think you really see the older companies need to make a decision pretty fast. and if they want to grow 1 % to 2 % a year, or if they want to take their chance at a more explosive growth pattern, while earlier-stage startups are still worried about OpenAI eating their lunch, Anthropic eating their lunch. And so they have their own version of urgency. And that's a little bit bigger, but in my eyes, that's a little bit more common in the land of startups.

13:26You're always working crazy hours. You're always thinking of existential risks. Those timelines have just really gotten compressed. And that is the angst and agony that executives are feeling. One of the other things that you mentioned in your story is that the employees at the ground level, I mean, you've got big tech companies that are laying off people. You've got people, what we call scrutinizing budgets, you know, optimizing headcount, I guess. It's also kind of a very anxious time to be an employee at these big tech companies because, I mean, you don't know if the CEO decides that we're going in this direction, suddenly the entire department goes away.

14:00Totally. I think AI fluency is a big demand from CEOs to their staff. So yeah, to your point, Akash, I'm definitely talking to a lot of employees who actually were impacted by layoffs this summer over the past two years that are trying to figure out how to build up their resumes so AI bots can scan them better. And then of course, if you're at a company, the new sort of phrase you might be hearing from your CEO is, demo it, don't memo it. And that is very much a way to say, you know, I want to see you use AI instead of writing about using AI. And I think that can create a lot of pressure and, you know, potential forced exits if you aren't able to keep up.

14:41So my last question for you, Natasha, is, you know, does this feel, this feels like sort of a new normal that actually, it's not unique to tech companies. I mean, I think we've written actually in our applied AI newsletter about how oil and gas companies and manufacturing companies, I mean, everyone is sort of rethinking their business model, I guess, in the era of AI. And so you have this new normal. And so let's just say it persists for however long the AI hype keeps going. My question for you is, do we think that the businesses are going to come out stronger? Because you have this whole narrative that people say, well, diamonds are made under pressure, right?

15:20The best businesses, the ones with the most sustainable business models, those are the ones that will flourish. Is that the consensus amongst the people that you talk to? Or is it kind of like, you know, we're just going to keep funding until we don't know what happens? You know, it very much depends what school of thought you believe in. I would say that the existential question that investors are talking about that we haven't gotten too much into here is, how healthy is the revenue of these companies? If every company starts to hit$1 million or even$100 million in revenue faster than before, how long before that reverses.

15:55I think that's why things like net revenue retention and churn are starting to become things that early stage investors pay attention to more than before, because suddenly a lot of companies look like they're booming. I think the challenge going forward is how long the boom will last and really how sticky it is. Right. Well, Natasha, it was a fascinating story. It actually was not one that I expected to come out of sort of, you know, The stories that we publish are very much that funding, funding, funding, everyone's funding. And then you came out with this very much reality check of, hey, everyone's funding, but everyone's also frazzled.

16:31So thank you so much for shedding a light on that. And thank you for coming on the show. That is Natasha Mascarenas, who covers venture capital here at The Information. Well, e-commerce is a sector that has waxed and waned since the pandemic, and so too have all the startups around it. Fair is one company that got a big boost from COVID-19. Things eventually cooled, but now the information is first to report this morning that it is talking to investors about potentially raising more money. I want to bring on Anne Guillen, one of the reporters who broke that story. Anne, welcome back to the show.

17:04Hi, Akash. How's it going? I'm doing well. So, look, FAIR. I took French as a kid, and I know that FAIR, I believe it translates to make or to do, but I don't know what the company does. So please tell us what the company does. Sure. So FAIR, it's an online marketplace, but instead of being where shoppers go to buy stuff like Amazon or, you know, something else like that, it's for brands to be able to sell to retailers, actually. So usually these are small brick and mortar stores, but the brands are trying to sell their products to retailers in bulk. So if you're a small gift shop or a clothing store, and you want to add some unique handmade products to your inventory, FAIR pitches itself as the best way to find and buy that kind of stuff.

17:58So it's sort of, it's like a combination of Etsy, Amazon, and Shopify, but it's for brands to sell to businesses and retailers, not to sell to consumers. Okay, so you've got like a cost-to-gift shop is going to buy, you know, in bulk, I don't know, flower pots from fare, you know, to sell to my customers. Got it. So you got this company, it's popped up. It's been around since before the pandemic. What's the news that you found? Yeah. So like you mentioned, they've been around since before the pandemic. The founders actually met working at Square, which is a payment company for small businesses.

18:39So they've always had that kind of, they've been very familiar with small businesses and the problems that they have. But the news is they're on track for$500 million in net revenue this year. And they're also at the very early stages of considering raising more money or doing a share sale for employees. So that would really help them capitalize on a lot of the growth that they've been seeing recently. And like you mentioned, e-commerce and FAIR have been through a lot of ups and downs over the past couple of years. So they're really trying to emphasize their growth right now. They've expanded their business.

19:12They're selling more kind of add-on products to the merchants that use their site. They've expanded into advertising. And we also broke the news that they've considered launching other services for brands that sell items on their site, like warehousing or shipping. So this is pretty interesting because FAIR was a pretty high-profile e-commerce company during, like you mentioned, when e-commerce was booming during COVID-19. So if they do raise more money successfully, it will be very interesting to see where the valuation lands, because like so many other sectors, the market for e-commerce startups has really been reset over the last couple of years.

19:52So I definitely am very interested to see how that would all play out. So let's talk about the e-commerce industry, broadly speaking, because as you said, it's kind of in this interesting time. I think the thing that stands out to me is we have all these tariffs that people are watching to see their impact. And yet you have a company like FAIR that is saying, we're going to be able to raise all this money. I guess we don't know 500 million, what that is from a growth perspective, I don't think, unless I missed something in your story. But I mean, this strikes me as kind of an odd case here that an e-commerce company can raise money in this highly uncertain environment where, I mean, we haven't even seen the impact of tariffs on e-commerce sales really yet.

20:34Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think it's an interesting, I think FAIR is definitely trying to sell a growth story still. And I think tariffs are definitely still a big question mark. And FAIR sells globally. So, you know, if you're buying something, if you're a U.S. retailer and you're trying to buy something from a business, from a brand in Europe or Asia, you know, tariffs will certainly impact that going forward. But I think the flip side of that is for brands and merchants that already have inventory here in the U.S., the tariffs could help give them a big boost and fare could stand to benefit. If, you know, you're a store, a small retailer, and you have been sourcing a lot of your inventory from overseas and you need to kind of quickly pivot and restock in a way that's cheaper and doesn't expose you as much to the tariffs, I think FAIR could certainly stand to benefit there.

21:32And let's talk about the other detail you had in your story, which is their play to diversify their revenue stream. You talked about advertising. The$500 million, how does that compare to other marketplace companies? I don't even know what a comp would be in this size. And is advertising kind of the obvious way to go in terms of growth or what did you make of that? Yeah, I mean, fair is definitely a little bit tricky to find an exact comp for. Like I mentioned, it's kind of a mashup of different aspects of Etsy, which emphasizes handmade, unique stuff, but they sell. It's where merchants sell directly to consumers.

22:16it's kind of like Amazon or Shopify, but not exactly. Again, the B2B kind of aspect of the business makes it a little bit different. But yes, so FAIR, in addition to seeing their sales growth kind of pick back up again, they've also looked to diversify their business and ads are definitely a natural place for a marketplace to go when they're looking to do that. So merchants selling on FAIR can pay to have their products featured more prominently in search results, which is a pretty classic business model. Every marketplace does. Amazon does something very similar, and that's quite a lucrative business for them over the years.

22:59So while$500 million might be pretty small compared to Amazon, I think FAIR and their investors would tell you that they hope that one day FAIR can be the Amazon of the B2B commerce world. So certainly a lot of opportunity there. And it, of course, is where Akasha's gift shop will go to find all of its flowerpots when the shop comes to a neighborhood near you. And thank you so much for coming on and explaining that story to us. That is Anne, who covers e-commerce, for the information. Well, the U.S. Open has officially kicked off here in New York City. And one of the things that I've always been fascinated by are the ways in which sporting events like these try to play with the latest and greatest technology.

23:45I want to bring on Brian Ryerson, who helps run Digital Strategy at the United States Tennis Association, to tell us about what his team has got cooking over at Arthur Ashe Stadium this year. Brian, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. So who's on deck today? Who are we watching this morning? Oh, man. We got a lot of good tennis today, a lot of good matchups, and I'm really excited to see how Match Chat's going to operate today to give us some of those predictions. Okay, so Match Chat, what is it? So Match Chat. Match Chat is a new feature that we launched. I'm going to call it an AI agent that's really focused on, you know, giving all of the rundown of what's happening in a match.

24:28So it's everything from catch me up. So if I missed the first set and I was late to tune into a match, I can ask what happened to even deeper insights to things like, you know, who had the most aces, who had the most winners today. Some of the predictions of, you know, who's going to win this match. It even helps, you know, answer if it's a player that you're just learning about and you want to know how to pronounce their name, because we have some really hard player names to pronounce. It will even help you with that. Okay. So, and tell me, this is an app that I download when I get to the U.S.

25:00Open grounds or I can do it right now? No, you can do it right now. So it's part of our U.S. Open app. Okay. It's available, you know, in the Apple App Store as well as Google Play Store. Got it. So you can download it. We have a number of features, but, you know, our SlamTracker is our premium scoring application there. SlamTracker is scored? Oh, Slam Tracker is where all of our live scores are housed. Got it, got it. After a match chat lives, we also have a live likelihood to win and other features to follow every match. And there was something about AI commentary. What was that? Yeah, so AI commentary, this is something, you know, even before I would say AI was a buzzword back when we called it machine learning.