WHOOP CEO on $10B Valuation & AI, Apple Kicks Vibe Coding App Off App Store, SpaceX’s $75B Offer

0:13Aaron Tilley:Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, March 31st. First up, a couple of big stories this morning. NVIDIA plans to invest$2 billion in semiconductor company Marvell, and CoreWeave announced it closed an$8.5 billion financing round in debt to bolster its AI cloud platform expansion. We will discuss both of those news headlines shortly. The information has also published exclusive reporting with an update on Apple's Vibe Coding crackdown in its App Store. We'll talk about it with our Apple reporter. SpaceX is likely to file confidentially for its IPO any day now, and investors across the board are trying to decide whether or not to participate.

0:58Aaron Tilley:We've got a new story about that digging into the dynamic. We'll talk about that shortly. And we'll then pivot to our special coverage of the information's 2026 NextGPs list. We've got a partner from New Enterprise Associates coming on the show. And we will wrap the show with a conversation with the CEO of Whoop. The wearable company announced a new funding round at a$10.1 billion valuation. It's going to be a fun show. So let's get right on into it. The Information published exclusive reporting that Apple is escalating its crackdown on Vibe coding apps by recently booting one app out of its app store for violating its rules.

1:37Aaron Tilley:Aaron Tilly, our Apple reporter who broke that story, joins us now for the details. Aaron, welcome to the show. It's great to have you back. Thanks for having me. So what do we know about this app that Apple kicked out of its app store? So yeah, it's one of the growing set of tools in the App Store to create apps itself using simple prompts to text prompts to describe an app that will quickly build for you, also called Vibe Coding. So it had been one of the successful ones. There's a number of them, one of the handful of successful ones. And suddenly last week, Apple just removed it, straight up removed it from the App Store.

2:19and that is a significant escalation over its past actions, which is Apple's really been cracking down on these kinds of apps making updates and now Apple's just straight up removing them. So I think it's a pretty notable step for them.

2:35Aaron Tilley:And remind me, so anything was, it was literally a vibe coding app? I mean, it was a tool that you could just use to code things on your phone? Yeah, it's, you know, you pull up the app, you write in a text prompt of what you, of what the kind of app you want, the features you want, and the app would build it for you. And then inside the app, you could also preview what it looked like. And from there, you could, that app you just created, you could publish it in the app store. So there's been thousands of apps in the past, you know, less than a year since this app has launched. There's been thousands of apps published to the Apple App Store through this tool, through the Anything app.

3:19So it's, you know, there's just a number of these apps blowing up.

3:26Aaron Tilley:Now, you spoke with the person who was the creator of this app, who is running sort of the company that owns the app, I guess. And what was the stated reason that he got from Apple, or what rationale was he given as to why it was removed? Yeah, it's a typical response from Apple when they've blocked other of these so-called Vibe coding apps from their updates. It's a guideline 2.5.2, which restricts apps from rewriting their code. It features that rewrite code to sort of fundamentally change the functionality of the app. Apple is, you know, these apps don't think it makes sense as a rationale because what happens is that these apps that are being created are then reviewed through the App Store.

4:14But Apple's accusing these apps of sort of rewriting code in a fashion that Apple isn't getting a chance to review. So Apple is citing the same guideline 2.5.2 in shutting down the app. And that's similar to what they did with other Vibe coding apps that they've blocked.

4:33Aaron Tilley:And just remind us of the context here, because you published an earlier story with our colleague, Stephanie Palazzolo, about this dynamic that Apple is really afraid of playing out, which is the idea that, hey, if people can make their own apps and maybe use tools that are not directly affiliated with the App Store, I mean, it could sort of find itself out of the loop. What's at stake here for Apple if that story plays out? I think there's some amount of just losing control for them. Apple is always a company that wants control internally. They build all their own chips and software. And with their app store, they want as much control over it as possible.

5:21They view the app store as sort of a premium experience, and they need to justify the 30 % take they take on digital transactions on apps in the App Store. So I think it's about control and wanting to maintain that control in these apps, kind of representing the next stage of software and app development, which is kind of wild and experimental. and the App Store app submissions have exploded as partially as a result of this sort of vibe coding movement that's sweeping this software development space.

6:00Aaron Tilley:Now, what are you watching for next? Is this the only app that we know to have been removed? Are you looking for more data points of Apple cracking down here? Or is there even a broader sweeping action that Apple could take here possibly, or I don't know, could there be lawsuits in this field? Certainly some of these apps could accuse Apple of potentially anti-competitive behavior. I think that's already sort of kind of seeping into the dialogue here. But, you know, Apple is continuing to sort of like crack down. There's making, I know they've been making threats about shutting down other apps.

6:44So yeah, just continue to track that. And also like basically what is Apple's articulated strategy here? They've kind of refused to really engage in this topic and explain themselves more fully. I mean, there's a lot of suspicion about what they're going to do next, which is potentially just they want to be the VibeCode platform instead of any of these third-party companies. I think that's probably a likely future. They've already sort of started integrating AI into the developer codes, Xcode. So continuing on, maybe they want to control that themselves and sort of be the platform for vibe coding amongst its users.

7:24So I think just kind of, you know, just figuring out that understanding really what their plan is here, what their strategy is here is really a really fascinating thing. Great.

7:35Aaron Tilley:Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Aaron Tilley, our Apple reporter, here at The Information. SpaceX is likely to file confidentially for its IPO any day now. And in the meantime, institutional investors of all kinds are trying to run the calculus not just on what it would mean to participate, but what the ramifications could be if they don't. My colleague Corey Weinberg, our Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance, published a story about that dynamic today. I want to bring on Corey's editor, Ken Brown, to talk more about it. Ken, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

8:08Aaron Tilley:Hi, Akash. Walk me through this calculus here that investors are running as they look ahead to the SpaceX IPO. Well, the calculus is, do I buy or do I not buy? And the risk is, if you buy, it could be wildly overvalued and could be a disaster, or it could go up. The risk if you don't buy is if everyone else buys and it goes up, you're left behind and you're the loser. So fund managers, investors like that are in a tough spot right now. So this is kind of interesting because, look, I mean, in the sports world, at least, I mean, you know, we hear the losses hurt more than the actual wins. The losses are worse than the wins that make you happy.

8:56Aaron Tilley:You know what I'm talking about. But I mean, in this context, it feels like you're saying something slightly different, which is that I'm actually not concerned if I lose. I'm more concerned if everyone else wins and I don't win. Yeah. So let me let me introduce you to the concept of relative return. So for fund managers, they're judged on how they do versus their competitors and how they do against their index, the index that they're supposed to track, like the S &P 500. Now, that's not the best thing in the world for investors because investors just want to make money on their investments. But relative returns rule the game.

9:31And when you're an investor, you look around at all your competitors and the index and you say, if they own it, I'm either going to jump in with them or I'm going to take a big risk and stay away.

9:44Aaron Tilley:OK. And so there's nobody saying, hey, this thing might go down, so let's stay away from it. Like, that's not even a thought. And maybe this connects to the rule change that NASDAQ put out this week. Well, so people do. I mean, there are independent fund managers who really go their own way. And, you know, some of them have done fantastically and some of them, you know, get crushed by the competition. You know, the NASDAQ rules that came out yesterday intensify this pressure on the investors. Because what the rules did was say, we, NASDAQ, which runs the famous NASDAQ 100 index, which is tracked by a whole bunch of funds, we're going to put stocks into the index much faster than we did in the past.

10:35Stocks can go into the index if they meet the criteria 15 days after the IPO. So now, not only would you be stuck, if you stayed away, not only would you be stuck as the lonely guy out there against your competition, but now you'd be the lonely person against the index, which you're also judged on. The other problem is, once it goes in the index, everyone's going to buy. All the index funds are going to buy, more funds are going to buy, and that's going to drive up the price, meaning you're going to buy a stock when it's expensive, and that's always a bad strategy.

11:10Aaron Tilley:It's kind of funny to me. These indices, they seem to be weighted by market cap in some cases. Market cap, of course, depends a lot on the multiple and the forward-looking revenue that you are expecting or the forward-looking profits. You could make an argument. Maybe, well, we should not rank it based on market cap. Maybe we should do actual revenue or profitability. You know, something that is not just a hunch. Right. But the biggest rap against index funds, most index funds, is that you spend your money. When you buy them, you're buying the winners. You're buying the stocks that people have the greatest expectations for because they have the biggest market caps.

11:51And so indexing is great for most people, all good, but it is a problem. And SpaceX and companies like SpaceX really raise that, really bring that out into the open. Right.

12:05Aaron Tilley:Now, tell me a little bit about your thoughts on the relative amount here of the IPO. We know that as of now, the company is looking to raise about$75 billion. That's according to our most recent reporting. Of course, it could change, but$75 billion compared to the valuation that they're targeting, which is well north of a trillion dollars. So it's a pretty small fraction of the overall company. Tell me about the ramifications of that in terms of how this offering could play out. Well, it could make things a real mess, right? Because if you have all this buying pressure from the index funds, from all these big fund managers, because the stock is so big, the value of the overall stock is so big, they have to buy.

12:50The problem is only a small portion of the company's shares, roughly 75 billion out of a trillion, is going to be trading. So there's going to be this, it's like, you know, a whole bunch of people trying to squeeze through a very narrow door. And, you know, what could happen is the price could just shoot to the moon. And while all these people buy, and again, they're forced to buy under pressure. And the stock goes up way beyond where it should just because of the buying pressure. And then the shares fall and everyone loses money. So that's what's going on here. I mean, this is an old strategy that was used for IPO, tech IPOs for years, where you only put a little bit of stock out there.

13:30And then there's demand and the stock, you know, goes up 200 percent and everyone's excited. And then as more shares go out in the market, the price falls. This is just that times 100 or 1000 or whatever. So it's going to be a show.

13:44Aaron Tilley:Let me ask you this. So SpaceX is the IPO that we know to be nearest in terms of the three big IPOs we're watching, OpenAI and Anthropic, also coming down the pipe. The dynamics that we're seeing play out here, do you anticipate they could also play out with the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs? Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of demand. In some ways, you know, SpaceX is a weird animal because it's Elon Musk. And so everyone loves you or a lot of people love Elon Musk. But the company is a bit of a mishmash between X, XAI, the artificial intelligence company, and SpaceX, the space company. The other two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are clean AI bets whose revenues are soaring and who are, you know, seen as the winners in this space.

14:30So, you know, they're all going to be popular and people are going to dive in. But SpaceX is just a weird creature that investors are going to really be struggling with for a while. Great.

14:44Aaron Tilley:Well, Ken, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Ken Brown, our senior finance editor here at The Information. This week, The Information is featuring investors we included in our next GPs list. These are the people our venture capital reporter Julia Hornstein has dubbed most likely to lead top VC firms across Silicon Valley in the years to come. Today, I'm sitting down with Mustafa Nimuchwala, a partner at New Enterprise Associates. He has invested in companies like Together AI, and he already has a few exits. Mustafa, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash. Nice to see you.

15:19Aaron Tilley:How are you? Good. I'm doing well. So, look, I want to get your take on the big news this morning. NVIDIA is investing$2 billion in Marvell. You invest in semiconductor companies along with a whole host of other categories. What did you make of this deal? Well, I think NVIDIA's turned this$2 billion number into table stakes. I mean, they did$2 billion in the Synopsys, $2 billion in the CoreWeave, $2 billion in the Nebbiast, $2 billion in the Lumentum, $2 billion in the Coherent. I mean, it's wild because$2 billion was a great home-run venture exit not many years ago. And now$2 billion is the amount of equity they're investing in this ecosystem they're building.

15:59So I think the way I would describe it is NVIDIA is looking through the entirety of the stack in the present, and then also playing out time in the future and thinking, how can they make sure that either they can get all the supplies that they need? That's the kind of logic for the Lumentum and Coherent investments in the context of optical photonics and EMLs, like what those guys do. In the case of Marvell, they're seeing Marvell is building Tranium for Amazon and also Microsoft's Maya chip. And while they're designing that, they still use NVLink Fusion, which is from NVIDIA. This is a result, what NVIDIA is seeing is there's basically three ways the world, at least in the present, can go.

16:39One is a full NVIDIA stack. That's NVIDIA's rack-level infrastructure with NVIDIA's accelerators, NVIDIA's Vira CPU, NVLink, and a broader set of NVIDIA switches as well. The next part of the stack would be a hybrid piece. This is why they're investing in Marvell, where you can have Marvell's designed, for example, Tranium Accelerator, and still have Vera CPU, because when you have this NVLink Fusion interconnect that NVIDIA has, it has to connect to an NVIDIA product. So the moment...

17:09Aaron Tilley:So simplify this for us a little bit here. So, I mean, table stakes here. Marvell, are they in the networking chip category? I mean, what do they play in? So because of a lot of the consolidation that's happened in semiconductors over the last decade, Marvell has made a number of acquisitions. They bought Cavium in 2018, they bought Infi, they recently acquired Celestial. They're actually in a bunch of different areas now, but the way I would simplistically think about them is, at least in this context, is two things. One, they help people design chips, for example, Amazon's Tranium chip, Microsoft chip.

17:45And then secondly, they also have a really interesting optical portfolio from their acquisition of Celestial. These are the two areas that NVIDIA is interested in. So NVIDIA is interested in keeping a lock-in to the NVIDIA stack more broadly when it comes to the custom accelerator side. That's in the context, like we talked about a second ago, about Amazon's Tranium and Microsoft's chips and anybody else. But then also getting some ad-optical IP for their racks over time, similar to the Lumentum and Coherent deals they did.

18:12Aaron Tilley:So this is actually putting NVIDIA a little more in competition with Broadcom then, they were already in competition on the networking chip side. What I hear you saying is now Broadcom, obviously well known for the custom ASICs game that they are playing. This is NVIDIA saying, hey, we actually are interested in having exposure to that as well. It's a great question. So the way I would describe it is Broadcom is actually fully proprietary in terms of thinking about rack level infrastructure, where Broadcom actually chooses to use their own interconnects and they help people design accelerators like they do with google's tpu or like they do with metas mtia and others this is a hybrid where nvidia can have their cpu vera cpu and their switches in their interconnect in which broadcom otherwise would have done all on their own but also allowing marvell to build folks custom accelerators this is kind of a hybrid where nvidia is able to stay in the game versus if broadcom was doing this nvidia would have been completely out of the game in comparison.

19:13Right.

19:14Aaron Tilley:So tell me, does this investment, does Marvell compete with the other companies that NVIDIA has also made these$2 billion investments in at all? A little bit on the optical side by a celestial, but not really. Like you described, right? Marvell is really going more so against Broadcom and MediaTek, at least in the context that we're talking about. And so far, this is NVIDIA's first$2 billion investment in that original design manufacturing category. Wouldn't be surprised if you have more action in this part of the equation as well. Does it concern you or any of your partners at all at the firm the extent to which NVIDIA is really propping up the sector here?

19:55So I think people probably have a different view. One of my partners has been on the board of NVIDIA for 30 years. I think the way he would kind of see it and the way personally I see it as well is NVIDIA is really seeding many of these companies to make sure that the supply chain stays active for them. And then they're also seeding potential customers of theirs in the future, so they can make sure there's a fragmented ecosystem. And that, of course, is why they invested in CoreWeave and Nebus, for example, so they're not tethered to the hyperscalers forever. But then by doing Marvell, even now with the hyperscalers, for example, Amazon, like I mentioned with Tranium, NVIDIA can keep their IP involved as well.

20:29So really, I think when you look at the holistic landscape, NVIDIA is trying to have its tentacles be in every part of the equation and even better they're trying to make money from all of this as well as those companies go up in value through nvidia's own uh acquisitions and purchases their equity is going to go up as well and so they now have over a two and a half percent stake in marvell for example which is not small i mean you know that would be a public markets hedge fund take that that stake we'll be talking about it as a blockbuster stake in a company and nvidia's going

20:56Aaron Tilley:to keep it for a while now you mentioned core weave what did you make of the big debt deal this morning. More debt for CoreWeave. It feels like this is a headline that we've seen before. $8.5 billion was the number that we saw today. You are an investor in Together AI, another neocloud in this category. Are they taking on any debt? And then we'll come back to CoreWeave in a second. I think the entire category will have to be financed meaningfully through leverage because the amount of capex that we're talking about in the compute layer is so vast that equity only is actually inoptimal, and also you can't raise enough.

21:31To your point on CoreWeave, CoreWeave's raised 38, including this, CoreWeave's raised$38 billion in debt. And I think the way I would describe what we're seeing today is a few things. One, the demand for compute, but also the demand for credit products tied to compute is clearly off the charts, which is why they're able to get almost 6 % all-in cost of capital, which is unbelievable. I mean, it continually goes down and down. This isn't a time where people are talking about rates going up because of inflation related to the Iran War and tariffs and energy and other things. I think that's really smart of them.

22:04And I think a lot of people in the whole markets have been talking about rates and the impact rates would have on the return on invested capital question that already existed in much of this compute layer. And so I think the way I would see this is the debt markets are active, investment grade as well. And so now there's a greater pool of capital available for companies like CoreWeave. But I would say whether it's Together, whether it's Nebius, whether it's others in the category that want to go below in the stack and actually own the data center and own the GPU, leverage and debt is definitely a part of the equation because otherwise it's a very inefficient way of building that kind of multi-cloud, neocloud ecosystem.