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cover of episode Tariff Turbulence For Fed's Soft Landing Hopes + The Future of Trust w/ Rick Heitzmann and Dashlane's John Bennett

Tariff Turbulence For Fed's Soft Landing Hopes + The Future of Trust w/ Rick Heitzmann and Dashlane's John Bennett

2025/5/8
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On The Tape

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D
Dan Nathan
知名金融分析师和评论员,常在 CNBC 上提供市场分析和评论。
D
Danny Moses
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John Bennett
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Rick Heitzmann
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@Danny Moses : 我认为美联储主席鲍威尔认为,如果排除关税的影响和不确定性,经济将实现软着陆。他关注的只有两件事:失业率和通货膨胀,他担心关税可能导致通货膨胀短期上升。鲍威尔多次表示,如果排除不确定性因素,经济状况良好。我对美联储何时以及为何会再次降息仍然缺乏清晰的认识。鲍威尔将经济的潜在问题归咎于外部因素,特别是政策的不确定性。鲍威尔认为,只有在需求不足导致经济放缓的情况下,关税造成的通货膨胀才会迅速消退。鲍威尔正试图最大限度地提高自己应对各种情况的灵活性。鲍威尔暗示了可能面临滞胀的环境,但他认为即使是滞胀也是暂时的。鲍威尔认为,人为的干预可能会破坏经济和通货膨胀的自然发展进程。 @Dan Nathan : 我同意Danny Moses的观点,当前的市场环境充满了不确定性,投资者难以判断市场走向。关税的负面影响是不可避免的,关键在于如何减轻其造成的损害。美国作为贸易伙伴的可信度受到了损害。标普500指数难以突破200日均线,部分原因在于盈利预期下调和估值下降。即使关税降低,其造成的经济破坏仍然巨大。即使取消关税,美国产品和服务的民族主义倾向也很难在短期内恢复。关税政策对低收入消费者和小型企业造成损害,并可能导致金融市场出现问题。私募股权和私募信贷面临的风险,可能会导致特朗普要求美联储降息。当前的市场环境风险偏向于下行。当前市场缺乏建设性因素,存在下行风险。关税问题可能导致市场出现“利好出尽”的现象。当前经济形势存在下行风险,包括失业率上升、增长放缓和盈利预期下调。

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Welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan, joined by Danny Moses, the host of the On The Tape Podcast. Danny, how are you? I'm good, buddy. All right. We just got done with the Fed Presser. We're going to hit all things Fed, what we heard, what we think about it, the market's reaction. But just stick around. After that conversation, I had Rick Heitzman, the founder of Firstmark Capital and the CEO of Dashlane, a cybersecurity company. John Bennett, great conversation, all things Fed.

cybersecurity and how Rick has been investing in the space for a very long time. So stick around for that conversation was great. Okay, Danny, we have basically an S&P that is unchanged. We're 25 minutes to the end of the trading day. You ran through the Fed's statement. Give us the 411 on what you read, what you heard, and then we'll hit the presser in a sec.

Everything would be perfect for the soft landing if it weren't for these tariffs and the unknown of what's going to happen was the takeaway. He's never used the word tariff that much. I would have to go back and do a control F or whatever the thing is, command F to put the word tariff in. You mentioned it a lot.

He's watching two things and two things only, as is the mandate, he said, unemployment and inflation. He mentioned that inflation obviously is kind of hanging out in the mid twos. He is concerned about a near term tick up in inflation as a result of the tariffs, but he's not going to make that claim. He was very even keeled. You know, it was just refreshing to hear an intelligent person give an assessment of what's going on.

with risks that are on both sides that can happen and i thought it was a very logical well thought out thing and he was pretty feisty a couple questions came up about oh what if you know trump were to ask you to leave or would you stay on on the board and he had nothing to do with that he got the

He was most feisty when someone asked, we haven't met with this president yet. Would you want to? He goes, that's not up to me. Like, so it's interesting. You can feel the hostility a little bit there. He wants to remain independent. I think he did a great job. Yeah, I'm not sure hostility is the right word. I know what you're going for. I listened to it too. And I think those were the sharpest sort of responses that he had to questions. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact he's not trying to leave

You know, anything for innuendo, if you will. Right. And, you know, he hasn't had the opportunity to make nearly as many comments about this as, you know, Trump has, because he can say it as he did, you know, on TV whenever he wants. He can true social it. And there's been a lot of that. What I find, you know, most.

interesting is what Trump might say after that. And if you're, you know, if we're somewhere in between hostility and also matter of factness, you know, that's something that Trump's advisors are clearly keying off. Now, the one thing I'll say is that he was asked questions

Trump, directly by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press this past weekend, you know what I mean? Would you fire the Fed chair? And he was pretty emphatic about that. He would not do that. So I think that maybe for now we can push that out. But if he were to come back and say that, I think it would be a real problem again, Danny. So, you know, is there any other takeaways? They don't do the dot plots on this one. Uncertainty was the other word, if you could

Control F. It'd be interesting to see which one he said more than the other. But my biggest takeaway was that he seemed to say this on many occasions, that the economy is doing just fine. You know what I mean? If it weren't for the uncertainty. So what do you take away from that? Because last fall, the Fed lowered interest rates.

by 100 basis points. They were worried about a weak jobs market. They don't seem to be so worried. On a few occasions, he basically highlighted the fact that the unemployment rate's at 4.2% and the like here. So I don't walk away with this for any more clarity about when the rate-cutting cycle might happen and for what reasons.

So the Fed cut last year was a catch up, right? The neutral rate was too high. So they brought that down. That was they were waiting. They were waiting. Remember, they were so scared. They waited too long that inflation was transitory. They waited and then they went. And I feel like now they feel like they're in a good place. To me, Dan, the next meeting's in six weeks.

And he set this up in a way to say, okay, as of right now, there's no, I don't see an impact in any, and it won't be caused by me if there had been. And so again, I think what he's doing is he's saying, here's my soft landing. If it messes up, it's because of you and these policies. And he did kind of, he did kind of insinuate, we need clarity soon. If we're going to be able to make these decisions going forward and he left open possibility that anything could happen. But I think what I read through that was, I think he's,

pretty keen on the fact that there are going to be inflationary things that occur near term, and then we'll see how it plays out. But the only way I believe, and I'm not putting words in his mouth, that inflation abates quickly as a result of the tariffs is lack of demand.

then that means the economy is slowing. So I think that's why he was so key to say, I got to focus on two things at the same time. If inflation runs high, but if I start to see unemployment move up as a result of all the stuff that's going on. And keep in mind, Dan, also, even before the tariffs, we were potentially, because of the cuts to the US budget and Doge and all that, we were seeing layoffs that were already occurring in tech land and the white collar jobs. We were already seeing stuff potentially slow on unemployment. So put that...

I think he's setting up in a way that gives him maximum variability on what he can do. Yeah. You know, there was a couple other things he was asked that I thought was really interesting. So he said, you know, he was asked about some critiques of his management of monetary policy over the last few years. And he said, listen, we welcome it, you know, and I thought that was like very interesting. But it brings me back to and I pulled this up because Guy has referenced this on many occasions over the last year or so.

On May 1st, 2024, at the FOMC meeting during the presser, he was asked about stagflation. And he said, I was around for stagflation. It was characterized by double-digit unemployment, high inflation, and sluggish growth. Currently, we're experiencing 3% growth, and inflation is below the 3% mark.

I fail to comprehend where the stagflation threat is originating from. I don't see the stag and I don't see the inflation. So I think that's changed a little bit, you know, year over year. And so just break that out a little bit. I mean, Guy, you know, was in the mindset he thought that was a bit glib. But I think that comparing these two sort of, you know, situations is probably, you know, the 70s to where we are now is not that applicable.

Well, to compare May over May, a lot's obviously changed. And again, he did without saying the word stagflation today, Powell did describe stagflation that we could be headed into that environment, which is what I just went through on that step function.

So I don't think that I think he believes if we are in stagflation, it's temporary. That was the takeaway. And I think last year's read was, how could you see stagflation coming if inflation, which was trending down, an economy which was still staying strong? So I would have to agree with Powell's comment. I mean, never say never, right? Powell didn't indicate I'd never see that happening. But again, today's again, just like last year.

fed meeting, he said, you've ruined, this is the summary. You've ruined my soft landing potential. You've messed up everything that I've been trying to accomplish. Don't do this, right? Don't, don't do something artificial that basically hurts this natural progression of how we see the economy and inflation playing out. That's how I see it. So I wouldn't over-read into that. All right, Danny, this just hit the tape.

Right after the Fed presser, right after the markets are digesting all of the Fed speak and the like. And I think this headline is actually more important. It's coming from Trump. Trump to rescind global chip curbs amid AI restrictions debate. Now, they call this AI diffusion. The Biden administration put this policy in place. So not just curbs.

focused on China or Iran or Russia or North Korea, because we do not want our best AI technology falling into their hands. And it's not just chips, it's also models and the like. And so they're also focused on some of our closest allies because they worry about this technology going from our allies back door into China or some of these other nations. So the one issue I have with this headline is that we started a trade war starting with our allies,

but really focused on China for the most part. We're trying to have a lot of teeth to this, right? Trump put 145% tariffs on China. So those are the highest A that they've ever been, but B, you know, much higher than some of the other ones. And those other ones are gonna be negotiated in bilateral sort of manners. But this is the one that if you have export curbs,

If you're worried from a national security perspective of our technology getting into the hands of our adversaries, pulling back on this, it really is another instance of the administration blinking or kowtowing to some CEOs who've done their bidding or done Trump's bidding and the like here. And so I just think this is another example that shows under most circumstances, this administration is likely to fold on some of these key issues. Thoughts there?

they realize they put a ton of pressure on these tech companies to your point in general with the talk of these high tariffs and actually the implementation of them at least for a time being are you saying that obviously if you're nvidia this is a positive you don't have to take a brain surgeon to figure that out so obviously he's like let me give you relief somewhere else my question to you is

Does it compromise security or is it hypocritical to the tariffs in general because one of the biggest imports or one of the biggest exports that we have potentially of our technology is to China and some of these other countries? Yeah, but you've known this for 20 years. We've been talking about forced technology transfer. Our companies have been talking about that. Our digital companies, our tech companies who go over there

and they go over there and they're doing the manufacturing. And a big part of that is that the companies that were doing the manufacturing that were subsidized and backed by the Chinese government, they're basically, they were ripping off our technology. So the idea that we've had all of this

opposition you know what i mean from the government for the most part to export our bex technology but we've had the technology sector the ceos and the like pressuring trump under this you know new administration to kind of you know pull back some of these um you know restrictions and the like so i look at that headline and i say and if i'm china

I'm saying these guys, not only are they not good negotiators, but they're showing us all of their cards. You know what I mean? So how do you think about that as Besson is supposedly going to Switzerland to meet with some senior Chinese official to start the talks for some sort of deal as it relates to trade? I've said this before. I think the stock market and maybe even sectors within the stock market are the check on Trump's policies.

And when they trade down, marketing tends to relent on certain things. When they trade back up is when he talks harder. So I'm sure this wasn't just a one-off. This must have been in the works for a period of time or something they knew they could pull out of their back pocket to provide some relief, at least temporarily, or the psychological impact of the relief. And I'm not sure if this was the big announcement that Trump was teasing yesterday. He says, I have a huge announcement coming soon. I hope this isn't it. I hope it's something positive.

potentially better than this. But yeah, Dan, I guess it's just kind of a peace offering to the U.S. tech companies temporarily so they stay off of his back. I'm not sure, but the policy's fakak anyway. It's meant to be a point of national security. And this is one of the things that part of the trade war is to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., to diversify our supply chains also for national security reasons. You know, anything with the name Biden attached to it is being cut, the CHIPS Act.

You know, this is money that was earmarked for U.S. technology companies to bring manufacturing back here. They want to kill that. They want to kill this AI diffusion rule. So, again, I just don't think it helps our negotiating sort of tactics. All right, Danny, oftentimes you'll see a move after the Fed meeting, after the presser,

Oftentimes it reverses the next day. I think the clarity or the lack thereof that we got from that presser suggests the fact that, you know, with the market unchanged right now or up, you know, 20 basis points with like eight minutes left to go is that investors really don't know what to make of this.

That's correct. And I think while you were talking and you're reading the red headline, we were down 20 bps on the S&P. We went up 75 basis points in the S&P. I assume on that news that you were talking about. Right. And so I'm just looking at Nvidia stock in real time, shut up to, you know, 118 ish back down to 116. So, yeah, again, this is the type of market that we're going to be in for a long time. And you got to, like I've said before, know what you own. Bottom up, take advantage. So

Perfect example, Dan, a move like that. If you know that you own a chip company, you're like, I got to get out of this thing at some point. And you get a pop like that. I don't know what the rest of them did in semiconductor land. Take advantage of crap like that and sell, right? The same way when talk of a tariff, which is nonsensical, like,

Let's be clear. There is no way that these tariffs are going to stay. The problem with that is that what damage is going to be done on the way and how much can you repair? That's the problem. And I'll say this again. The trustworthiness of U.S. as a trading partner is damaged. It's not coming back anytime soon. Hopefully it comes back to some

you know, nice level, but it's not going back to what it was. And that's the part, Dan, you talked about earlier today on Market Call with me. The reason that I think it's going to be so tough to get the S&P back above the 200-day is not because that's where the 200-day is. It happens to be during this time period. A lot has happened in the last 200 days, but you're not going to get back to those multiples. And if you don't think that earnings are going to reaccelerate,

Then by math definition, you have lower earnings than expected and a lower multiple. So that's where we're kind of stuck, Dan. And I, you know, again, I think it comes down to,

Stock picking understand what you own and it's just I'm glad I'm not managing other people's money Dan right now because it'd be very tough to have to stay invested Well, some guy who managed a lot of other people my money is Paul Tudor Jones yesterday on CNBC You know, he said even if the tariffs come down to 50% the disruption there is still massive, right? And so China is going to be the highest You know tariffs when we're all said and done with this and I think it's important for people to remember back in 2018, you know when Trump put tariffs on China

They didn't have a phase one deal until January of 2020. Just think about that. And the tariffs were much lower and the economy started to weaken in 2019. And to your point about us as a trusted trading partner, here's one thing. You can get rid of all those tariffs, okay, for the most part, okay? There's still going to be a base number that kind of sticks around, even for probably a lot of our allies. But nationalistic tendencies towards products and services that come from the U.S., they can't repair that

in 2025. They might not be able to repair that in 2026. And there's certain examples like that. We don't know with Apple just yet, but China sales are dropping off dramatically for Apple in China. Tesla has seen a disastrous decrease in demand, not just in China, but also in Europe. Actually,

also here in the US. So it's really hard to fix brand damage, especially when it's one of those situations where you have, in Tesla's case, an antagonizing CEO, but in Apple, you have a high price point device

where their consumers have a choice. They can go with low-end Samsung or Android sort of phones, and they have their super apps, and DeepSeek is all over that device, that sort of thing. So those are some of the things that I think are really important.

- Yeah, and I would add to that, that these are the chip companies coming to complain to Trump. The next are the private equity guys that complain as a result of these policies, because as Bethany McLean pointed out on her podcast, which came out today, that the people that get hurt are the low income consumers. And then think about this, the smaller businesses that'll shutter. Well, a lot of those smaller businesses and mid-sized businesses

have loans out. And some of these have been syndicated out through private equity, through private credit, and depending on what segment you're in, what industry or whatever it might be. So that's the next wave, Dan. And that would be what will cause Trump to go back to Powell and say, you got to cut rates because private equity is telling them that rates are too high.

credit spreads are widening and all that stuff so that's the next leg of this dan and so the private credit private equity being exposed to degree is the end result potential of everything that we're talking about which has much bigger ramifications than just trying to figure out if powell's going to cut rates in the next 6 to 12 weeks yeah no doubt and i guess one of the things you know people keep talking about the vix it's elevated it's you know right now it's come off a little bit it was above 25 it's at 24. i stay focused on where's the tenure the 10-year is

to 4.28%. Gold is off one and a half percent, right? The Dixie is kind of unchanged. So to me, we went from something that looked like risk on prior to, you know, the Fed presser to risk off. So that's why I'm focused on the 10 year. That's why I'm focused on gold.

all of those conditions are, you know, helpful to the equity market, especially if you think you get headlines like we just got. And if the trade war is going to get tamped down and you think that something good is going to come out of the Besant meeting over the weekend, you know, the pain trade right now feels like it's higher. I think you and I both think it's going to go lower. You know, I heard Jeffrey Gunlock on with Scott Wapner on the closing bell. He thinks we get down to 4,600. Paul Tudor Jones thinks the lows are not in and we could break those, you know? So again, it's a,

It's one of those things where you don't want to be too smart right now because there is a scenario. You get from a technical perspective through that 200-day moving average, and the news seems benign. I think you'd probably go higher, but that's not how I'm playing it, Danny. Yeah, you're still getting 3.8%, 3.9% in money markets, people that can wait, right? You're still getting low risk, decent reward relative to what you're talking about, the volatility you have to deal with. And let me just say this. If we go to 4,600,

Everyone that says, I'm waiting for the market to go lower to buy it, they're not going to buy it because that's just behavioral finance 101. Because the reasons that would send it back lower are the stuff that we're talking about that could rear its head. And that's a lot of inflation as relative tariffs, a lot of

shelves that are empty, results of supply chain disruptions, and just complete chaos. And we have completely forgotten about all these other things. We just take them in stride, India, Pakistan. I hope nothing happens. I hope the thing completely calms down. Those are two nuclear countries that are firing on each other right now, thank God with not nukes. But I guess my point is, Dan, the geopolitical stuff out there only seems to be getting worse. And again, I will say this once again, it

Even before tariffs happened, there was stuff that was happening that potentially would portend a slowdown. And I think, so is tariff resolution potentially sell on the news at some point? I don't know. But if we go back to 4,600,

I think it's going lower than that. Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, I'll just end it with this, is like there's nothing particularly constructive out there if you're looking at it, right? Like to me, the unemployment rate could probably only go up. Growth, although the GDP in Q1 was explained away because of the imports, that sort of thing, in my mind, it probably only goes down a little bit from here once that kind of gets rebalanced.

re-rated, right? If you think about corporate earnings, you know, it seemed like that was about as good as it gets what we heard from Q1 results, you know, that sort of thing. So again, I think there is, you know, a rosy picture to be painted that things don't get much worse from here, that some of the geopolitical stuff slows down a little bit. Some of the tariff stuff is overblown and we have a situation where maybe, you know, all of the trading partners, whether they're allies or adversaries,

We all come to our senses and say, who needs a global slowdown? You know, that sort of thing. You give Xi a win, you give Trump a win, at least a saving face. And then maybe you have a market on its way back to 6,000. I don't think that should be the case, but who knows, Danny? Really appreciate your time. We're into the close here. The market's closing up. A lot of benign stuff. I think the headline about the AI diffusion helped off a lot. Appreciate it, bud. All right, stick around for my conversation with Rick Heitzman and John Bennett, CEO of Dashlane.

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All right. Welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. I'm joined by a friend of the pod, Rick Heitzman. He's the founding managing partner at Firstmark Capital. Rick, welcome back to the pod. Awesome to be back. It's been too long. It has been too long. You've been busy. You're on lots of boards, but you're on a board of a great company called Dashlane. And we have the CEO here, John Bennett. John, great to have you on the pod for the first time here.

Yeah, Dan, I'm really excited to spend time with you today. Yeah, this is one you and I've got to know each other over the last, I want to say, six months or so. And this is one of the companies that, you know, some consumers probably take for granted a little bit. And we're going to talk about because once you have a great application that's doing a really important thing for you and it works in the background, maybe you don't think about it too much. So we're going to talk about Dashlane, your products from a consumer standpoint, which I think a lot of folks who are listening to this, you know, use these products one way

or not. But enterprise has been a really important part of the strategy you took over two years ago, I'm going to say, in 2023. Just a little past two years now. And obviously, you put your fingerprints on a lot of stuff that you're doing. You've had a long background in software and SaaS, and you were there for the explosion of SaaS before. I remember Larry Ellison on a call in 2007. Do you remember this? He's like, what the hell is the cloud? People keep talking about the cloud. So you were there at that

moment. And then he turned around and bought all these cloud companies. Yeah, exactly. Once he dampened the transportation. 100%. 100%. And you know what? And then Mark Benioff says, I'm out of here. I'm going to start my own cloud company. And he's done an amazing job with Salesforce. And Rick, you led the seed round of this company

back in 2010, is that right? - 2010, over 15 years ago, we thought about, hey, your identity and your password and what you're doing is gonna proliferate, and you're gonna have different websites, different applications, different devices that you're gonna wanna have access to in a very simple way, in a frictionless internet, and also other people are gonna wanna have access to, you gotta prevent them from going on. And so we found some literally French kids, French students,

who thought the same way. And they had one application which kind of worked on Firefox, on a PC. And we thought, this is interesting. I think this is the beginning of a megatrend. Can we get involved here and then use this as a starting point to grow a very big company?

Yeah. And so this is interesting because Rick and I, we've talked about this both on the mic, but offline a lot is that, you know, you think about generative AI right now, people are really geeked up about it, but the last major secular shift within tech was mobile social cloud. And it was happening right around then. And so, you know, speak to a little bit, John, of like how you were thinking about it. Again, you've had this like tremendous, you know, multi-decade career. I'm not trying to, you know, you know, age anybody here. I've been in the business for multiple, multiple decades too. But,

at other organizations that you're involved with, are these things, you know, you're on the precipice of this massive, you know, sea change in the industry. Talk to us a little bit about your background in the software business and kind of what led you to Dashlane after, you know, after 15 years of it being in business, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I think one perspective is when you've been around as long as I have, you get a little bit better at looking some of the opportunities and the trends that emerge and,

You talk about 2007 and Larry Ellison, and it's interesting. In 2008, my business partner and I, we sold our second company together. We sold that to Citrix Online, and that was, again, this emergence of go-to-meeting, go-to-webinar. These were products for being able to have conference calls and video calls and do webinars, and that was...

I think the beginning of this real acknowledgement of how rapidly things were going to move to the cloud, how disruptive that technology was. That time there, I think, was very formative for how I thought about what the longer-term opportunity is.

I was there for quite a bit of time and then ended up at Loggni Inn where I ran an identity and access management business unit. That was about a quarter of a billion dollar business unit in over a four-year period of time. This talks about adoption and just the rate of growth that you can see in these businesses.

When I left four years later, it was a half a billion dollar business unit. And that was driven by the growth of a product line that was similar to what Dashlane was doing. And so sort of full circle is when I sort of got the call of like, we'd like to talk to you about this opportunity. And then I looked...

First, I was familiar with Dashlane and just loved what they did on the consumer product and how they delivered this great experience. And then the second piece, obviously, is who are the investors? And if you look at investors, it's not just Rick Heitzman at first, Mark, but you've got Sequoia Capital and Bessemer and Rowe Capital. So I had this sort of context and I got excited about, hey, there's still a lot of runway in this space.

And there's a lot of runway in this business. I'm very impressed with what they had done over the sort of the, you know, first sort of 12 or 13 years of the business being, you know, sort of in the marketplace. And so when I had my first conversation with one of the board members, I just got so excited about the passion that still existed in the business and what we could do to it in terms of like,

take advantage of some of these trends we were seeing, not just really in the consumer side, but the perspective I think I brought in is,

how big of the opportunity, how big of the market was, how big of the problem was in the enterprise market. And that's where I sort of came in. Yeah, and then I guess going back to the consumer side of things, Rick, when you guys made this investment 15 years ago, some of the big incumbents were the ones who probably owned this space a little bit, probably because of their platforms and their ability to kind of market these products

products. And back then, if you think about the explosion of social, you know, you needed to have a password, right, to get on this new technology. And I'm sure a lot of the scammers back then were looking at this and just saying, hey, listen, this is going to be we're going to have a field day a little bit with this. So when you guys were focused on this, was it just about consumer or could you see a path towards like enterprise applications for Dashlane?

Well, when John hit on what the megatrend is, the megatrend was you're going to have this identity, maybe even multiple identities. You have your consumer identity, you have your enterprise identity that's going to proliferate across devices, operating systems, applications.

And what our job is to do is ride that megatrend. We're not sure how that's going to manifest itself from a product perspective or from a market perspective, but hey, is there a trend that's big enough that we're going to see what happens? And even in the earliest days of Dashlane, we were doing analysis of what people were using as their password. And at one point, 60% of people's password

was password. And those were the things that were being easily guessed. Those were people, you were getting your account stolen, you were getting your credit card stolen, all those things. So being secure has always been more important and only will continue to be more important as you're seeing more phishing, more spy versus spy that exists in the cybersecurity world.

Yeah. So I saw this. I read this somewhere. It was a feature. I think it was an Atlantic magazine, John, that you were in there. And I saw this quote. And as I was getting to know the company a little bit, I thought it was kind of funny that it said something like, you're trying to get rid of passwords altogether. Passwords themselves, and this is your quote, have progressed from security measure to security liability. Exactly.

Explain that. Like, explain that because it's still something that I think annoys the crap out of most consumers, like trying to figure out all this stuff. Now, the enterprise get it. It's mission critical, right? Like for them. But like, let's think about that from a consumer standpoint. Yeah, I think, you know, look, I think one of the things, if you think about the origin of passwords, they just weren't designed to work across, you

tens and hundreds of applications that both consumers and businesses are living in and wanting to get into. And they certainly weren't designed for, the human brain wasn't designed to begin sort of saying, okay, I need to have something that's 12 characters or more and special characters in it. And so what we've seen in sort of why these are a problem is, well, what do we revert to? I'm like, well, I've come up with this password and I think it's kind of unique and I can remember it 100% of the time.

I'm going to use it everywhere. I'm going to use it everywhere. And that has created, again, this rich opportunity for threat actors to take advantage of that, right? Because they're able to increasingly now, even with AI, is have very sophisticated phishing attacks or brute force attacks. And so their success is just getting the velocity, the sophistication, the success is just getting better and better every year. But

The context there on that quote was what we want to do at Dashlane is be part of the solution. We want to be able to say there's an opportunity for you to authenticate or be able to get into the information, the credentials that you want to store without having to use a password. That's where we want to be part of the solution.

I think just touching on the enterprise piece, when Rick talked about this, again, these people, they're using these passwords, and 60% was literally password. Well, guess what? The same thing exists in business. I won't go into deep technical detail, but there's applications and security stacks that help provide a lot of security measures for employees.

but there's all these applications that exist that are outside of that. And those applications are, are where the risk is for organizations. All right. Let's talk about one of those applications, which it sounds like Dashlane had one, but you killed it a year and a half ago. So these authenticator apps, like these drive me bat shit crazy. Like, and I never had one until I like had crypto wallets. This is going back three or four years. And so the wallets were annoying enough.

But then the authenticator apps, like, you know, there was a Google one and there was a Microsoft one. And those were probably the most widely used. Right. And not only could I not get into wallets because I couldn't get the authenticator, like then I would just lose those altogether. So what was your take? You got there in 2023 or you got to Dashlane in 23. And it sounds like by mid 24, you killed the authenticator app. Like, give me a little background on that. What I kind of look at it, the business like Dashlane is like, what are we best in breed at?

where we've driven a ton of innovation in the industry around cybersecurity and around identity and protecting identities and passwords and credentials,

It wasn't around like multi-factor authentication. It wasn't around these authenticator apps. And I looked at that and I said, we're kind of creating a problem and a friction point here. And there are other applications out there, whether it's Duo, whether it's Google, whether it's Microsoft, which are always just going to be better at that than we are. Like, let's do what we're great at.

And what we're great at on the consumer side is, again, providing this incredibly secure vault, this digital vault for people to secure their credentials and secure notes and your crypto key that you need and don't ever want that to get out in the Internet to anybody. Let's focus on that. And that's the same approach that we've done on the enterprise side as well is,

Let's look at the stuff where we've driven a ton of innovation, we've got intellectual property behind that, and focus on solving what we think is a really big problem.

But, I think what I've seen in companies, and I saw this at LogMeIn, is a lot of times you just build up these applications and product lines over time, and they deliver some incremental value. But the cost of actually to the business moving faster and getting on that mega trend, it's a real hindrance to that. So, when I look at any organization I come in, it's like, "Why?

Why does this application exist? And that was why we killed it. And you've kind of hit on the key thing in cybersecurity, right? It's how do you secure people when people still use it? So the authenticator apps, a lot of cybersecurity, people just don't use because it's just too hard.

And I think the interesting thing about Dashlane is coming out of the consumer side, it was very focused on usability. How do we have an application that people want to use and makes their life better? And therefore, they're going to adapt it to become more secure. So it's the candy-coated medicine as opposed to a lot of these cyber apps, which are just medicine and terrible tasting medicine.

So looking at it through the lens of the public markets, I'll just say this is that we've had a lot of market volatility over the last call it month and a half or so. And some of the best performing stocks in the entire market, not just in tech, have been some of these security names like Zscaler, Palo Alto. I mean, these are names that you obviously know CrowdStrike really well. It seems like they're recession proof. It seems like they're tariff proof.

Like talk to me a little bit how you see the industry because you were just out at RSA this what a couple weeks ago in San Francisco. Yeah, and this is the biggest security conference in the world, right? So everybody's there from the big public companies to smaller startups and then larger startups where you live. What are some of the themes that came out of that? Because at least through the stock market, it's saying that these companies are good to go right now.

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I'll start sort of back up in terms of why I think they're performing and why they're more recession-proof is...

We live in this space where things are changing so fast with generative AI and how we've talked about this, like the acceleration of phishing attacks and email attacks and social engineering and deep fakes. Well, one of the things that companies are recognizing, they're also going through this digital transformation and acceleration in terms of moving stuff to the cloud and

using AI. So one of the areas we've seen that there isn't a slowdown in terms of companies' budgets is,

they know they have to continue to invest in their cybersecurity stack. I think one of the themes that came out is, yes, that's because, as Rick talked about, just the acceleration in these different threat landscapes. Now, with the emergence of it, you think about it, we're all in our companies at some level and every function are saying, we're using AI somewhere in the company. We're using large language models. Well, that's true of every enterprise and every public and private company. We're all figuring this out.

That's also now creating injection of prompts from a threat actor, and what does that mean for the business? There's A, the existing threat landscape that has not deaccelerated, and now there's a new threat landscape with AI. I think that's why companies, again, as you said, like Palo Alto or Zscaler or SentinelOne, maybe not at that size.

why they're still seeing the tremendous level of interest in their products because they're also solving for a real need. And then I look at companies like Dashlane and what does that mean for us,

There's this whole other element of it, which we've talked about here, which is this human risk element, this human aspect of it. Companies are increasingly saying, it used to be, they'd come in and they'd say, "Okay, I've got single sign-on. I've got CrowdStrike. I've got my endpoints protected. I've got my cloud applications protected.

And they would look at sort of credential security or password management as departmental. And what's shifted, and that's not just for us, but it's these other companies, now they're saying, I've got to protect every employee in the organization. I need to do it sooner than later because they're beginning to recognize that

The human aspect is the biggest risk to their company right now. Coming to RSA, I think there are a couple of trends. One is, it is this cat and mouse. There's an enormous investment in innovation on everyone in the space. We're rolling out an AI-driven anti-phishing capability in June. All the scale platforms are doing things with the Gentic AI and AI agents.

The flip side, it's also happening with the nation-state actors and the other cyber criminals that there's high-level investment, there's high-level collaboration, and they're also seeing the opportunity of leveraging these tools. I think that's why there's resilience here because

The threat's not going away. It's going to continue to be sort of this friction between how fast we can create new capabilities to defend and how innovative they can be on their side. So I think that was like the biggest takeaway from RSA. And a lot of it will be about the humans. So people's biggest risk in their enterprise are their employees.

And whether it's having a Post-it note with your password stuck to your laptop or whether it's sharing your password and, you know, whether you're at home and you're sharing a Netflix password, you're sharing a Canva or Adobe password if you're a product manager. All these things are tremendous risks. And therefore, Dashlane is hitting on, you know, what we think is going to be the biggest growth category of really defending your humans against other humans and other threats out there.

Yeah. So this century, to me, we spend a lot of time, again, you know, with public markets and thinking about the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent over the last couple, two and a half, three years or so by the hyperscalers and the like. And they're basically, you know, spending like drunken sailors. We've seen this before in the pace in which they're moving and the dollars in which are being committed are like crazy.

they pale, you know what I mean, in comparison to anything that's done prior. Do you think both consumer and enterprise, there's enough attention being placed on the scaling of these platforms, right, versus like security and the investment there? Because I could almost see this as something that there could be a gaping hole. We could look back and say, okay, all those companies are willing to kind of go forward and ask for, you know,

forgiveness relative to permission. And again, this is something maybe I get your take too, Rick. You sit on a lot of boards. Is this something that is a conversation that's being adequately discussed by the people that are doing this allocation of spend right now? Well, from my perspective as a board member, no board member is ever going to vote against security. So whether you're an early stage company and you're putting your infrastructure at risk, you're a growth company getting ready to go public,

The thing that you'll push on every cost, you'll want to be more efficient, but you're never going to say, hey, we need less security. We want more risk in our company. So because of that, I think that's what the mega trend you're seeing in all the security software companies. As this is becoming more complex, as it's becoming more dangerous, this is becoming a necessary spend category. And just to add a little bit of context on it, like where it's showing up in the enterprises and in the cybersecurity companies is,

There's a couple trends emerging here, which is there's one thing to say, "I've got employees that are using compromised credentials to log into business applications that are available on the dark web." How do you begin to get visibility and protect against that? Those are things that Dashlane's focused on. How do you get visibility across every employee? Now talk about employees that are bringing large language models into the company and the type of data that's going into those models, highly proprietary data.

So, the stakes are much higher. So, when we talk about shadow IT, shadow applications, it was one thing prior to AI. It's completely different now with AI in terms of, you know, there's the example of the Disney employee that downloaded a video editor model and there was key logging software on it. And what that meant is they got into his credentials and they were able to get into Disney and do damage, right? And I think that's

I think that's why you're seeing, A, the level of pace and, to Rick's point, I think enterprises and business recognize, "I've got to move pretty fast here to make sure, one, I've got the right security policies and posture within the organization, and I'm spending the right money in terms of on applications and security applications to begin thinking about just the damage that can happen

because of what's going into those models that it's different than a Dropbox breach versus than a large language model breach. So in the public markets, we've seen a compression of multiples on a lot of the names associated with generative AI. But one space that seems to be really resistant to multiple contraction is the security space. I'm just looking at I pulled it up on my fax that while we're talking here, you know, a CrowdStrike

trades at 124 times this year's earnings, 22 times sales, right? These are names that you've been involved in and hyper growth tech companies for a long time, whether it be in the private markets and selling to public companies. And, you know, when you get to like an M&A environment that should exist, when you think about the capex that's being spent by the hyperscalers, it's really hard for companies to to buy, you know, companies at these multiples and with these market caps, the way that they've kind of exploded.

Like, help me think about that, because you've seen a bunch of M&A cycles. It seems like and I'm not asking you to comment on, you know what I mean? Like, you know, the consolidation. Yeah. You know, the good thing is that these guys trade at such premium multiples and now they have vast distribution. And Palo Alto was built through acquisitions.

that once you get the CISO or the CIO's ear, you're able to sell more things into that. And Palo Alto has continued to do increasingly large acquisitions of products that they think are important.

And that's why it's made Palo Alto an enormous company. It's what's made Okta a very big company in a narrow field. And I think you're going to continue to see that. Even Wiz, which is the biggest acquisition ever by Google, was driven by the same megatrend.

and so one of the things i think is interesting you just mentioned that they're acquisitive now these were companies that were always on short lists of companies that were going to be acquired right and so now you know palo alto um and crowd strike have over 100 billion dollar market caps and so they cannot be acquired i think your point about wiz is a great one and the thing about wiz you know on a podcast that we um had yesterday that dropped

with Gene Munster, friend of the pod, great investor, great analyst before he was an investor. And we were talking about, you know, like one of the things that I found fascinating about the Wiz acquisition, and again, it hasn't closed, it's got to get through regulatory. I just don't think that's going to be a problem for regulatory. Here's a company that basically has one of the largest public clouds, GCP, right? They're basically saying that, you know, we are not Azure and we're certainly not AWS from a market perspective.

a market share perspective, but we're going to buy a company that helps our clients think about their workloads across public clouds, you know, and it's a security component, right? So talk a little bit about like the M&A environment because Google had made, in my opinion, a recognition about what they don't have and how they're going to compete. So talk to us about the M&A landscape because we haven't seen a lot other than that yet this year. Yeah, look, I think it's

One of the things that we're seeing, and you touched on this, is there's now this realization that some of these scaled cybersecurity companies have the potential to become the size of a platform.

potentially of a Google or a Microsoft over the next decade. And you're seeing that in the emergence of CrowdStrike and just the acceleration in their business and the same thing with Palo Alto. I think from the M&A perspective, what you will see, even in this market, is they understand that...

consolidation may be coming in parts of the market, that the market is changing dynamically. And I think that if you look like what CrowdStrike, you know, not CrowdStrike, but Palo Alto just bought Protect AI. Super strategic, right? So I think they all have this, what do we need to think about in terms of continuing to defend and also be ready to take advantage of some of these emerging sort of opportunities and

And Protect AI was a great example of that, right? Which is like, okay, how do you start securing this AI infrastructure that enterprises are driving? So I do think, I don't know if we're going to see

you know, a dozen, you know, greater than half a billion dollar, you know, acquisitions. But I think we're going to continue to see, you know, strategic acquisitions of scale across all these players over the next 12 months. And it's going to be broader. You can imagine Microsoft buying folks, obviously Cisco bought Duo in the security space. I think that Cisco Duo platform will continue to look for products to sell into that customer base and Cisco was built

by controlling a customer and selling additional products into it. So I think this category is going to become much bigger and they're going to look to have more products be sold into it, especially with such a changing landscape. Right. You know, coming into this year, you know, with a new administration and some, you know, this pro-growth supposedly agenda, which, you know, again, you know, the jury's still out on that one, but one of them was, okay, let's free up the IPO market a little bit. Let's, you know, let

kind of some M&A run its course. But when you think about it from a regulatory standpoint, I mean, nothing's really changed as it relates to Google and Meta and even Apple for that matter. And I think that's obviously something that a lot of these folks that lined up on the dais behind Trump at the inauguration in late January are probably pretty disappointed because they probably had one goal when they were thinking about this. They know the playbook from the first time around.

But again, nothing's really changed. And so I guess, Rick, this is more a question for you. When you think about the IPO market, I couldn't think of a worse name that started off the generative AI, if you will, adjacent IPO, which is this CoreWeave. I believe this is going to be, I'm not asking you guys to pine on it, the global crossing of this kind of era a little bit and not a great one to bring out.

in my opinion. But when you think about IPOs, like the volatility in the market has really probably, you know, caused a few companies to take a step back. And then the question about M&A, like tuck-ins make a lot of sense. I could see some like billion dollars, sub $3 billion acquisitions really take, you know, kind of the lead versus IPOs. How are you guys thinking about that? We've seen the same trend. A big theme of the second half of 24 was even, you know,

corporate development was picking up their pencils again. After being on the sidelines for a couple of years, and whether that was the Delaney-Kahn FTC or whether it was just volatility in the market in general or depressed prices, everybody was put on pause. They started to pick up their pencils again. We just sold a company yesterday. We've sold probably a dozen companies in the last nine months that have taken advantage of that trend. But then the tariff-driven volatility that we've seen over the last month or so has put everybody on pause.

So both things are on pause, both the IPO market's on pause and to a certain extent the M&A market's on pause. But it's obviously easier to turn back on the M&A environment. And I think what we're starting to see, and we're obviously very close to the corporate development teams

from all the major players across the technology landscape is, all right, well, once we get through this tariff thing and there's some volatility, I think that there's going to be some good opportunities for M&A, and that'll lead out, and hopefully you're going to see an IPO market which should open up after Labor Day. All right. So, John, this is Wednesday at noon, as folks just to timestamp things a little bit. So they'll be listening to this on Thursday. And, you know, here's a headline.

that caused some massive market cap movement in the public markets today. So Eddie Q, who has been reassigned to run Apple's AI strategy, Apple Intelligence was rolled out in June. A lot of fanboys got super geeked up about it. I think all of us were kind of, I know Rick and I were sitting around, you don't have to opine on it,

We're like, there's no there there, right? And these guys are so far behind, you know, what an anthropic and an open AI and a lot of those folks in the private markets have been able to do and the funding that they've gotten. And they basically, you know, given a blank check to go do and build these things. And some of these large incumbents, even a Google that had been working on this stuff for years, right? When you think about like a lot of folks thought that they had such an early lead. And then after ChatGPT,

Bard was a horrible rollout. Gemini wasn't doing particularly well. And so the headline today is that at EQ, they're thinking about adding, let's say, Claude or Perplexity, for that matter, which, you know, to their search on Safari.

And so when I think about Apple's mantra has been security, right? Since the day that they started with the iPhone and all that sort of stuff. Security and privacy. But it's really held them back in a huge way when you think about this. And so now some of their competitors who they didn't think were competitors, let's say over the last five to 10 years, as they were building out this mobile strategy,

This headline has caused Google to drop eight and a half percent as we are recording right now. Help me think about that a little bit. So Apple, one of the strong points of their ecosystem was security. But now it seems to be it's something that's held them back in a big way. And I go back 25 years or longer with Microsoft, some of the things that they were focused on, and it caused them to miss the Internet and miss mobile. Help me think about that.

Yeah, you know, so, you know, if you just think about the context of, you know, Apple making the decision, like, we're going to potentially work with, you know, perplexity or, you know, Claude. You also think about perplexity. What did they announce recently? Like, they're going to build their own browser.

because they think that's integral. As is OpenAI, by the way. As is OpenAI. I mean, OpenAI is- They don't buy Chrome. They don't buy Chrome, right? And so I think- Google could not sell Chrome to them. Like when that headline came out, they were trolling. That was like an amazing- That was clickbait. Yeah, that was an amazing trolling of Google. But again- But if you think about perplexity and you think a little bit about the culture of Apple, and again, you talk about the privacy and focused on the experience.

The one thing about Perplexity that might be a good fit there is they're the ones where you're using them to search that you can go and validate all the results. They've got really this great experience. If you're doing research, they're going to have all the links to where the documents came from. And that

I think that does sort of fit into Apple staying true to, "Hey, this data can be validated. You can trace it back." I do think it goes a little bit to the innovator's dilemma in this case. I talked about this yesterday in the company at All Hands, which is,

I think there's going to be a compression in that time period of where large companies can be disrupted in a meaningful way because just the pace of innovation that's happening now. We think of what happened when we went from desktop to mobile and the explosion of mobile that lasted a 15-year wave.

And we're in a new wave now. I just think there's going to be a compression in terms of where we're going to see both on the positive side and I think on the negative side where established players are meaningfully disrupted in a much shorter period of time. And by the way, in fact...

40 years of Apple's existence, we have never seen well, let's go back 25 years because Apple was kind of on the ropes, you know what I mean? The late 90s. But in the, you know, in the mobile era from let's call iPod was a mobile device and then the build out of an ecosystem with the, you know, the app stores and the music stores and all that stuff, which obviously was, you know, really aided adoption of smartphones, specifically the iPhone.

Apple is on the precipice of being massively disruptive. And I wish Eddie Q had listened to the Risk Reversal podcast going back more than a year and a half ago. He might do. But the point is, I was saying that Apple at the time, pre-WWDC last year, pre-Apple Intelligence,

they should buy Perplexity, and this was when it was a $2 billion round, and I think they just raised it 20, because the idea that they weren't doing what the hyperscalers were doing. They weren't building the infrastructure to train large language models, and they needed something on that device. They didn't need it on device. They just needed a cool app that

gave users the reason to do it. And then you say, all right, well, is that going to cause an upgrade cycle? Because everything in their heads is like, what causes an upgrade cycle? I think Apple is about ready to blow it here. I think they're going to be years beyond, let's say, some of these other things. Now, you can say to me, well, they have a tremendous amount of high-end market share on the smartphone space, and they're going to have some time to figure it out. But help me think about, here's a company, based on what you just said,

Can they, they got security down ish, but in this new world of like say LLMs on the edge and that sort of thing,

like they're going to need a really good security strategy above and beyond what they've done on device. I think everyone that is, you know, bringing these applications into their ecosystem is going to have to heavily invest and rethink what, you know, what their security strategy is and what their security posture is. And I think that's going to be true of everyone that's

opening these applications into their ecosystem. I think the other piece around Apple and these large-scale platforms, they had all these resources, all this money. One of the learnings for me as I've spent time, and I was at a conference where the founder of Perplexity presented, and the thing you realize is the number of companies that are being started today that have no developers.

Like they're building a business with like AI agents and, and then you look and you look at like just the level of now the probably the talent pool is getting better now. But if you look at some of these companies, you know what, you know, especially in perplexity or open AI or Claude, like,

And this talent is very, very specialized, but you don't need like 500 AI engineers to have a real impact on the business. And I think that's one of the things I think I'm excited about is you're going to see a lot of applications and companies built on top of these foundational models. They're going to come to market and they're not going to have this massive burn. Right.

They're going to come to the market, and they might be cash flow positive in the first six months. We're starting to see some of those companies early on, but you're also starting to see some emergent winners. If you talk about Apple, you have to start building the arc before the rain came, and you've already seen some winners, and we've talked about that, and they're probably going to need to be in a position where they can act quickly with someone who's established and part of the benefits of having a trillion-dollar market cap.

It's so funny because, you know, when I think about, I met one of the Wiz founders a couple weeks ago and you look at this kind of relatively young guy and he reminds me, and again, I'm 52 years old, so I don't mean to sound like, but I remember Sergey and Larry and these guys were like the new guys on the block disrupting, you know, some of these massive companies, AOL and Yahoo. And, you know, like this is going back, you know, 25 years or something like that. And you meet a guy like I just met and you say to yourself, this is the sort of new blood that a

company like Alphabet needs. You'll meet Arvind Srinivas and he's like, you know, Arvind, the first time he ever came on CNBC was on our show and I had reached out to him actually through Ann Burdutsky who's at NEA and she's a great investor and, you know, she had made the introduction because we were talking about this company. This was not long after like ChatGPT was really getting some

And I was like, these companies, like, Eddie Q needs a guy like Arvin working there. They may have some of those guys. I don't know. But Apple's made a big mistake that they have not put those people out in front of, let's say, consumers and the markets and the enterprise and that sort of thing. So, again, I think we're on the cusp of seeing. There has to be a lot of strategic M&A coming in the next few years. And you have to empower those people.

also, right? The world is moving so quickly that you can't manage by consensus. You need to have people with an opinion and you're taking that opinion and you're willing to move quickly. And I'm not sure, you know, taking existing management enables you to do that, but

being able to inject in people who have a bias to action, people who act with urgency, and people willing to take the next hill, I think will be incredibly important for all the hyperscopers. - Yeah, no doubt. I mean, like, I think this Apple thing is the battleground that I'm most interested in because you think of their installed base and you think of their focus, again, on security and trust and their lack of, like,

innovation in and around something that's moving really quickly. So, hey, John, leave it, leave us with something that we don't know about the security space, because, you know, this is one we started off the conversation a little bit where as a consumer, I think I get technology, but this is a space that I find really hard to deal with the products that you offer for consumers. I think make it, you know,

A lot easier for us to think about this and not have to worry about some of the worst case scenarios that you see on the news and stuff like that. People getting their wallets drained or, you know, their identities taken or that sort of thing, because you get in one of those situations and it takes you years to dick out of as an individual. It's yeah, we run into those situations and, you know, it's just everyone.

it has such an impact on them for the rest of their lives when that happens. I'll leave you with something I think a lot of people maybe don't know now is, so now we're talking about the catch word from RSA was agentic AI. And agentic AI is like having an agent that has autonomy. So it can have sort of this autonomous workflow within a business and it can go complete tasks.

Part of the things I think people don't know that we're working through in the industry is, you're now having this idea of these AI identities and how do you manage those identities? The other part of it is, they're doing a workflow. They have to have access to credentials. How do you make sure that that access is secure? How long do they have that access? I think agentic AI, I think a lot of people don't know is,

it's going to start touching on all these different aspects of credentials and other applications, other data. And so again, making sure that how do you make sure that all those touch points are secure and protected?

I think that's going to be, that's going to be, you're going to start hearing a lot more about that. I think over the next six months. Yeah. Well, I'm just as dumb podcaster and stock market jockey here a little bit, but as I read more and more about agents and I get it, you know, you think about this application layer that that's where a lot of the value is going to be extracted from all this investment over the last, you know, a few years or so. And I take the over on agents. I just think from a trust standpoint, I think it's going to be something first from a consumer

I'm not going to trust Expedia's agent to go book me a vacation and understand all the things that are important to me, the nuance of that sort of thing. And on the enterprise, the point that you just made, trust massive, right? And you've got to think that that's where a lot of cyber threats are going to exist. So my point is that's a great runway for companies like Dashlane because the longer it goes before consumers enterprise trust is more opportunity for you guys. Well, the other thing you're seeing a tremendous amount of is bad agents.

right? Evil agents who are going in and doing work of spyware, doing work of credential stealing, doing work of that, that oftentimes the bad guys adapt the technology before the good guys. And you're seeing the evil agents trying to penetrate the enterprise. And that's the great opportunity.

Yeah. Well, listen, guys, this is a great conversation. I think it's one that for our listeners are concerned from a consumer standpoint. It's great. We also have a lot of folks that invest the way Rick does. And I think this is the sort of thing that might be underappreciated when you look at the investment that's going on in the sexy stuff as far as generative AI and all the commentary that we hear from

about those building the models, whether it's Lama, whether it's Gemini, whether it's Altman with OpenAI and Anthropica, and the list goes on and on. I think there's certain cracks in all these thesis if they can't figure out to get businesses or consumers comfortable with the risks that they're taking. So John Bennett, I really appreciate you being here. Rick, as always, we'd love to hear your insights here. So I hope you'll come back. Thanks so much.

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