Tencent’s OpenClaw Obsession, The Information’s Next GP List, Former Tesla Exec on Elon’s Ideology

0:13Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, March 27th. We are kicking off the show today with some exclusive reporting. Microsoft executives have told managers in its cloud and sales groups to suspend new hiring. We'll hear more details about that from our Microsoft reporter. We've also got some more exclusive reporting from our Asia reporters. Tencent is making a big bet on OpenClaw as it continues to compete in the China AI race. We'll hear from our Asia Bureau on that. Next up, the information published its 2026 list of the next general partners.

0:49These are the folks who are most likely to become the next GPs running some of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley. We'll bring on our VC reporter to talk about how she made the list. Also, it is Friday, which means we've got another edition of The Editor's Cut. This week, we are talking about how private equity is stepping in to fund the AI boom. And we will wrap with a conversation with a former Tesla president, one of Elon Musk's direct reports, who wrote a book about what he learned in that role. It's going to be a fun show, so let's get right on into it. Microsoft has frozen hiring in some of its most important divisions like Azure Cloud and also North American sales.

1:28It is the latest data point that big tech companies are increasingly paying attention to their bottom lines as big capital expenditures continue to mount. Joining me now is Aaron Holmes, our Microsoft reporter, one of the reporters behind that story. Aaron, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hello. Oh, okay. Which groups exactly have frozen hiring?

1:50Ken Brown:So we know that this is happening not across the entire company, but it is happening specifically in the engineering groups that work on the Azure cloud business, as well as multiple sales organizations across North America, but that sell to large enterprises as well as midsize and smaller companies. So this is pretty widespread right now. And specifically, you know, So our understanding is that these units have been told to not move forward with any open roles between now and the end of the fiscal year, which is in June. And what is it exactly about these groups and the way that their performance is going that they've decided to freeze hiring there versus other parts of the company where I understand hiring is still continuing to grow?

2:36Ken Brown:Well, what we know is that the executives who have told managers to stop hires in these groups have pointed to the need to improve margins. Specifically, you know, in Azure, we're told that one of the top priorities between now and the end of the year is to get the gross margins in better shape. And essentially, you know, we got this email from an executive out to managers saying that until we have credible plans locked to address the gross margin gap, pressure on headcount will continue to cascade. Basically meaning that, you know, that these organizations are trying to get their finances right between now and the end of the fiscal year.

3:18Ken Brown:And that is also coming at a time when, you know, Microsoft stock is under a lot of pressure and investors are essentially, you know, with their selling of shares, telling the company that they want to see better margins from Microsoft. But yeah, I mean, at the same time, we're seeing other orgs like the engineering groups that are building Copilot, which is, you know, the AI add-on that Microsoft sells in its software, those teams are still hiring, which probably reflects that, you know, Microsoft is really kind of eager to race other AI companies and keep improving those products. And remind us, the Microsoft fiscal year, it ends in June, is it?

3:57In June, yes. Okay, so between now and June, they've got to get their house in order so that the total year looks just fine and just rosy. I want to ask you a little bit about AWS and Google Cloud. They're the other big cloud players here. Have we heard anything similar about hiring freezes there?

4:19Ken Brown:I'm not sure about hiring freezes specifically, but we do know that both of those companies are looking really closely at how they expand headcount. We know that at AWS, there was recently layoffs and my colleague, Kevin McLaughlin, just wrote about how, you know, the company is now telling employees to use AI agents to essentially automate work that was previously done by laid off employees. And I think the same is certainly true at companies like Google and Microsoft, where, you know, even if AI is not replacing cut jobs one-to-one, there is a growing expectation that employees should be using the AI tools, especially that these companies sell themselves to automate more of their work and to essentially do more with less.

5:03Ken Brown:And we're definitely seeing that across the entire software industry right now. Now, what has Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders said about managing the broader CapEx commitments with margins? What are they saying? So it's definitely an interesting time because we are seeing Microsoft and these other companies continue to spend exorbitantly on, you know, CapEx for data centers, also on data center leases, which are a bit more expensive, but help them, you know, free up more capacity more quickly. At the same time, I think that all of these companies are sort of reckoning with the fact that their workforces grew a lot in the last five years, especially in the, you know, post-COVID tech boom.

5:48Ken Brown:And I think now, from what we're hearing, a lot of senior executives at Microsoft are questioning, you know, have we reached peak headcount and do we need to keep growing headcount significantly in the years ahead? Or can we essentially, you know, make do with the amount of people we have now and continue to grow the business using other scaling factors like AI tools or, you know, potentially even cut headcount in the years ahead? So I think we've started to see that already play out with Microsoft's headcount kind of plateauing in the last couple of years after that rapid growth. But this is a very real discussion that's happening among senior executives.

6:25And last question for you, Aaron. I mean, among the sources that you talked to, I wonder what the general vibe is among Microsoft employees or people in the Microsoft orbit. I mean, the stock price is certainly one indication of how investors feel. But when employees hear about certain groups, and these are not small groups. I mean, you know, Azure is the flagship business. When they hear about hiring freeze, are they spooked? Are they sort of, do they understand it? What's the vibe?

6:52Ken Brown:Yeah, I mean, so I think a lot of Microsoft employees are a bit anxious and people have kind of become used to headcount reductions on an almost annual basis. We haven't seen any layoffs yet this calendar year, but last year there were about 15 ,000 roles cut, and a lot of people are bracing for maybe something similar to come again. This, you know, current calendar year. I think in general, people are aware that Microsoft is somewhat under pressure from investors. And one of the kind of easy levers that tech companies have to make investors happier is to cut costs. And headcount is usually kind of one of the first and easiest places for them to do that.

7:31Ken Brown:And that is definitely something that's making people a little bit nervous right now. Great. Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Aaron Holmes, our Microsoft reporter here at The Information. The Information's Asia Bureau published exclusive reporting about Tencent's big bet on OpenClaw as the company competes in the China AI race. The bet on OpenClaw started after one of Tencent's new product managers became obsessed with the open source software. Our Asia Bureau chief Jing Yang spoke with Juro Osawa, one of the authors behind that piece. Here is that conversation.

8:06Juro Osawa:Hi, Juro. So what's exactly been happening inside Tencent since OpenClaw became a global frenzy in January this year?

8:16Jing Yang:So Tencent has been doing a lot with OpenClaw and AI agents in general. So just this month alone, Tencent has launched eight different OpenClaw-related products and services. And that's on top of like five they had before that. And we've also reported exclusively that there are two more AI agent projects in the making. So there's a lot happening and different teams within Tencent are racing to come up with new projects.

8:47Juro Osawa:That sounds pretty messy and chaotic. I mean, is this something that Tencent's top management is encouraging deliberately or is more of like a bottom-up initiatives coming from different teams and units within Tencent?

9:02Jing Yang:So top management is definitely encouraging this, endorsing these projects. And Tencent's actually quite famous for making different teams compete inside the company to work on similar products. And people call this horse racing. So it's possible that the best product could come out of this kind of internal competition. But, you know, people may not need multiple AI agents for the same tasks. So, you know, some of those projects could end up competing against each other over users and, you know, also internal resources. Right. So but this right now, this makes sense because, you know, the AI agent battle is still kind of in the early stage.

9:45Jing Yang:So, you know, people don't know what kinds of agents will be the right ones. You know, what's the right approach. So they're doing, right now, experimenting with a lot of different projects.

9:57Juro Osawa:I see. And with Tencent so aggressive building open-claw-like or open-claw-based agents, how has this effort been received in Silicon Valley and especially in people who are actively contributing and maintaining the open-claw community?

10:19Jing Yang:So there was actually a little bit of drama because OpenClaw's founder, Peter Steinberger, complained on social media that Tencent was benefiting from OpenClaw without giving back to the open source community. But just days after that happened, Tencent made a donation to OpenClaw, and then last week, a senior Tencent executive ended up having a meeting with Peter Steinberger in the U.S., and they are proposing more support for his foundation. So things have kind of moved very quickly. I see.

10:55Juro Osawa:Well, this is certainly setting Tencent onto a course where they are going to be, you know, I guess they are positioning themselves as, you know, a contributor and an advocate for open source technology. But what could potentially be the pitfall or the risks for such a big company like Tencent, whose services are used by over a billion users? For me, it sounds like you are essentially building a lot of applications on technologies that you do not have oversight or control over. It kind of feels like handing the key to your safe, to another person.

11:37Jing Yang:Well, there was a moment, like even just last weekend, that OpenClaw had an update. And then some of those Tencent products based on OpenClaw stopped working. And so Tencent team had to run around and fix the problem over the weekend. And so that could be an example of relying on a different framework, external framework that's open source and that's not owned by Tencent. But at the same time, this is important to Tencent and it's an opportunity because Tencent in China, Tencent has been a little bit kind of behind in the AI race. and its own AI models aren't very competitive. And Alibaba and ByteDance are the big rivals, but they are ahead of Tencent in AI models and also chatbot applications.

12:39Jing Yang:So this open-claw boom in China, it's creating a new opportunity for Tencent to kind of try to get ahead in this race. And if they can offer the best way to use open-claw in China, integrating it with WeChat and offering a bunch of services, maybe that will help Tencent in this overall race. So I think that's the idea. Right.

13:05Juro Osawa:I guess that is the hope and the game plan here. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. We're going to have to wait and see how many people and companies are actually going to adopt these agents and how effective they actually will be. Thank you, Jiro. Thank you. That was Jingyang and Juro Osawa from the Information's Asia Bureau. This week, the Information launched our 2026 edition of The Next General Partners. Our venture capital reporter, Julia Hornstein, went to her sources to find out who is most likely to ascend to the most powerful posts in Silicon Valley venture capital over the next few years.

13:44It is an exciting project that the Information publishes every year. And so to talk about who she picked and why she picked them, I want to bring on Julia to talk to us about her reporting. Julia, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Great to be here. Okay, let's talk about the next GPs. I wonder, let's just take a step back from who's on the list. How did you even go about choosing who's on the list? What were the criteria that you landed on? So we talked to roughly two dozen sources in the industry, and that can range from anywhere from founders to limited partners to investors who are a lot of these people's peers.

14:20And we really tried to index on people who have led major deals on behalf of their firm. Many of the deals that came up were in Together AI, which was one of the more popular companies on our list. But we also looked at people who were really trying to seize the moment in venture. And this year, unlike other years that we published the list, that was really defense tech. So we saw some people on the list who had led major investments into autonomous shipbuilder Cerronic as well as some investments into Antwerp Industries as well. So this is kind of like the power law in play here. It's like the people who got into the biggest deals.

14:57I mean, those are the people who most likely will have the momentum then to get the next big deals. And that's ultimately what would lead to a GP promotion. Yeah, I mean, we're really looking for people who get into these deals early, who can at least initially point to some on paper returns. But ultimately, we really want people who are returning capital to limited partners. And this year, that looked like a lot of M &A. We had some people on the list who had invested in chip company Grock, which was bought by NVIDIA in December, which we reported. But we're also looking for people who are getting in early to these major deals like Sironic.

15:34Okay. And again, we'll get into the list in a second, but I wonder then themes across the company. You talked about a lot of AI companies. Was it only AI companies? Sounds like there was a little bit of defense sprinkled in there. What did you notice? Yeah. I mean, defense was just one of these areas with a ton of overlap. I mean, like hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call it, has just become all the rage this past year in Silicon Valley, especially, you know, given the current presidential administration's interest in adding not only AI into the military, but also this ready-made Silicon Valley tech, hard tech into the military.

16:10Eric at Altimeter, Mustafa at NEA, they really stood out as people who had invested in autonomous warfare, as well as hardware companies like Sironic, as I mentioned, Andrel as well, but also Chaos Industries and Castellion, which are two other up-and-coming players in the space. You mentioned Eric. I mean, I was looking at some of the interesting names on the list. And we should say there's people on the list from Andreessen, from Lux, from Lightspeed, NEA, like you said. Tell me a little bit about Lisa Hahn and Max Rimpel. Those were two names that stood out to me. Yeah, I mean, Lisa is a partner at Lightspeed.

16:48She invests in early stage enterprise software companies where she's, you know, she's worked at a firm for a couple of years, I think since 2022. There she sourced and led the firm's investment into chatbot maker, Character AI. I think she invested in 2023. That investment at the time was valued at roughly$1 billion. But then, you know, Character was bought in that kind of complicated purchase by Google a few years later. She also invested in Thinking Machines Lab, their, you know, seed round in 2025, which the information covered extensively. So I think that she's really proved herself as someone who can source these deals super early and have compelling exits despite a tough IPO market.

17:36And what about Max? Yeah, I mean, Max is a partner at General Catalyst. I think some of his buzziest deals are he helped out with General Catalyst's seed investment into AI staffing company Mercore. He's also invested into Aru, which is this predictions research startup that I think was founded by teenagers, which is just so crazy to think about. But he's also invested into a world model company, General Intuition. And since, you know, I think that what we saw with Max is since General Catalyst led Merck Core's seed round in 2023, I mean, this startup's valuation has just soared. I think that it was last reported at$10 billion, including the investment as of October.

18:19So I think he was another person where we were able to see this trajectory, at least on paper, in terms of returns. I wonder, as you talk to all of your sources and maybe even spoke to some of these investors personally, as you were doing this project, did you learn anything about the state of venture capital? and even though I think about the likelihood of promotions, past lists that we've done, there are certainly people who have been promoted, but then there are people who have been poached and they become GPs at other firms. And I mean, I just wonder if you learned a little bit about whether or not there's room at the top for more GPs given the difficult state of venture capital.

19:03And I know LPs are kind of tightening their wallets too. I mean, what did you hear? Well, I mean, big funds still have a lot of pressure to deploy capital. I wrote a story about this a month or so ago, but all of these big funds have been raising. At a really impressive clip, I mean, Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year raised$15 billion. Kleiner Perkins just raised$3.5 billion. Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and others are reportedly raising billions of dollars in new funds. So although it's a really tough venture market for people who are sold below GPs, people who are working with smaller amounts of capital.

19:40At the top, there's just so much pressure to get this money out. And really, the only way to do that is by growing the share of general partners at the funds. So I think that there's still a lot of opportunity for people, as we have on our list, who are in these really top funds to make a name for themselves and deploy billions of dollars of capital. In addition to that, as people see that these people are putting money to work, there is opportunity for them to get poached by other funds. Someone who is going to be on our list, who we ultimately couldn't include, was promoted from partner to general partner on Monday.

20:18Who was that? I think it was Morgan Hitzig, but don't quote me on that. Well, look, Julia, it's a great list, and I want to thank you for coming on. and a very exciting project. I encourage everyone to check it out. That is Julia Hornstein, our venture capital reporter, here at The Information. It was a busy week of news with the social media trial and OpenAI's Sora pivot making headlines. But this week on the Editor's Cut, I want to talk about a slightly different topic that we've been covering here at The Information. Private equity has its sights set on AI as firms look for ways to apply the technology to their colossal portfolio of tech companies and beyond.

21:00The information senior finance editor Ken Brown wrote this week in his column about why that is a bigger deal than you might think. I want to bring him on to talk about that, and I also want to bring on our co-executive editor, Martin Peers, who I know has thoughts on all of this. Welcome to you both. It's great to have you here. Hey, Josh. Okay, so Ken, you started off your column this week by talking about the market dynamics for compute and the market dynamics for AI and how So sometimes those line up, sometimes they don't. Where are they at right now, and how are you thinking about that? Well, one of the points of the column is they kind of lined up a little bit.

21:40In the last year or so, you've had huge demand for AI infrastructure, right? They're building data centers as fast as they can, raising billions of dollars. It was unclear whether there was going to be demand for AI, the result of all what these data centers would produce. And so my point was this week, this has become clearer. there is more demand for AI itself, which then justifies the spending that we've had for the data centers. And this is because the PE companies have come knocking. This is so right. There were two deals in the works, they're not final, where groups of PE companies are aligning themselves with OpenAI and Anthropic to use their technology, to use the AI in their portfolio companies.

22:25And these are thousands of companies that they own and they are profit-making entities. They want to make these companies more profitable and sell them. And they're going to use AI to do that. And so that's going to create demand. And my view is it's going to create more demand throughout the whole economy. So, Ken, this is kind of interesting. I mean, you have these PE companies. They're sitting on, they own all these different companies, all different flavors of companies. And we know that private equity companies have a reputation of making large-scale changes across their portfolio. I mean, I guess my question is, this sort of still depends a little bit on how good the AI actually is, right?

23:04And if there's actual ROI from implementing these changes? Well, yeah, of course. I mean, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But they're going to be trying it in a lot of different ways, right? Because this has not been a great time for private equity. They have not been able to sell companies they own. They own a lot of software companies which have gotten hammered in the markets because everyone thinks AI is going to crush them. And these private equity firms don't sit back and just let things happen. They're going to be very aggressive in doing everything they can to spruce up, improve profitability and everything for these companies.

23:41And so my view is AI, they're just going to dive into AI and be very aggressive and try a whole bunch of things. and it's going to be a bit of a guinea pig situation, but on thousands of companies. And, you know, yeah, of course it could not work, but I think there's a lot of good evidence that AI is working in enterprise and companies. And so I think this is going to be a big test. Okay, so Martin, what do you think? You think it's going to work?