00:01:59 · Molly O'Shea, Jaimin Rangwalla
[00:01:59] S1: That's great. I was also walking around the office talking to some people, and they mentioned to me that you have a secret soccer group that goes to the pier at 06:30AM twice a week? [00:02:11] S0: Yeah, it's not secret. It's selective. I mean, it's a selective group. But yeah, we've been playing soccer for maybe eight years ago we started, and it started with us playing like two on two in our gym, and then we moved it out. And now we're playing eight or nine of us against 8 or 90 bucks, and it's super exciting. We keep score, we have a ranking every week, we count people's goals, the grades move up and down on who's doing well and who's not, and it drives not that we need any more competitive fuel to drive us, but it drives a little extra, in the culture. [00:02:47] S1: Oh, that's so fun. Okay, so we're here today to talk about your spring CO2 investor update. You just got off of it. There's lots of data. I've had a couple conversations with leaders at CO2 previously, Michael Barton, Thomas Lafont, and we've walked through all the different stages of the tech cycles. So we walked through internet, mobile cloud, we're now in the AI era. What is going on here? I feel like every six weeks we need an update at this point. It's just moving so fast, so what are you seeing?
00:03:19 · Jaimin Rangwalla
[00:03:19] S0: Yeah, I mean, honestly, you said is the reality, that AI is big and everyone can make these grand statements about how big it is, and we've also tried to do that a little bit in our slides about trying to size the TAM, But the most exciting part is the pace of the innovation, and you can look at that across how quickly companies have reached $10,000,000,000 $30,000,000,000 $50,000,000,000 of ARR, which we talk about quite a bit, how OpenAI reached almost a billion users in the fastest time in history. Like all of the curves are so much steeper and faster of adoption, whether it's at the consumer level, the enterprise level, revenue level, like however you think about it. And so to us, we always think about rate of change. Like that's how you really define technology and how quickly it's catching on and how big it can be. And a lot of times you see quick rate of change and then flattening, right? A lot of times when we look at apps that used to be popular, there was an app that might've done something, it gets to like 10,000,000 users, and then it all of a sudden flatlines. But the fact that you're hitting these metrics, whether it's top down metrics or user metrics that just continue to go and continue to grow at such hyper rates, and sometimes they actually are seeing almost like a little bit of a slowdown, and then another level a leg up, which just tells us one, we're still early in that adoption, and then the market is bigger than anyone is. Even the biggest bulls, I think, aren't capturing the size of the markets.
00:04:35 · Molly O'Shea
[00:04:35] S1: As CIO of the public sector, how do you map out all the different categories within this era?
00:04:41 · Jaimin Rangwalla
[00:04:41] S0: Yeah. So I think that we are constantly rethinking how we're covering stocks, how we're covering themes, how we're covering subsectors, within the theme. Two or three years ago when we first started investing in NVIDIA, we thought about, oh, now we have to follow the GPU. Like, we we bet on NVIDIA early, but that's usually not enough. Like, what we really characterize a big theme being that there's many ideas across a theme because there's so many companies that are gonna be benefiting and impacting the the forward kind of future of a theme. And so we said that we had to follow the GPU, and so we were thinking about, okay, what does it mean if you're gonna sell, you know, billions and billions of dollars of GPUs? What are what's all the infrastructure that needs to support it? And now I think we've even hit a little bit of a different slice where we're thinking about follow the gigawatts. And really, the gigawatt is almost the the atomic unit of where the growth in AI is coming from, and it's one of the biggest shortages as well that's out there. And I think that we're now identifying, okay, well, what are all the inputs to the gigawatts? What are all the things that are helping reduce the lead times of gigawatts? Who are all the buyers of gigawatts? Who are all the users of output of tokens from the gigawatts? And so we're almost slicing it very differently than we have historically, where it may have just been, okay, semiconductors and internet and aerospace and defense, just kind of sector level, we're almost thinking what slice of the AI supply chain, and then who are the people we're going have covering those slices.
00:06:02 · Molly O'Shea, Jaimin Rangwalla
[00:06:02] S1: What's been the biggest surprise so far? [00:06:04] S0: I am surprised at how the tightness has persisted for this long. Historically, you look through waves of tightness of any kind of technology, memory has had many periods where it's been tight, but the fact that it is tight and it almost seems like it's getting tighter every week that goes by. And now in the case of memory, for example, you're now hearing supply agreements, guaranteed commitments through twenty nine, two thousand thirty. Like, I've never seen that level of tightness, and that number just keeps extending out, which to me just shows me that you have the largest companies in the world. Right? The buyers of everything are all trillion dollar plus companies, right, for the for the majority of it. They're not stupid. They're not investing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars growing at these high rates into something that they think is just going to kind of peak in trough. And to me, like that, the strength and the length of the strength is actually the thing that has surprised me the most. [00:07:03] S1: And you've started your career here in semis. [00:07:05] S0: Yeah, I started in 2007, right when the iPhone came out. Wow. I know I age myself a little bit, but [00:07:12] S1: I mean, it's pretty cool we have this as the backdrop, and like, there's so many little exhibitions around the office too.
00:07:12 · Molly O'Shea, Jaimin Rangwalla
[00:07:12] S1: I mean, it's pretty cool we have this as the backdrop, and like, there's so many little exhibitions around the office too. [00:07:19] S0: Yeah. I remember when I first started, we had sent four of our IT staff to go wait in line for the iPhone and we all got it and it was like, What is this? And you touch It was very, you know, we're all in a BlackBerry world before, and so it was just like, that was my first taste. I was 25 years old of, Wow, innovation happens. You don't expect it to happen. And then you see the power of what happened from that first million units of iPhones to what they're doing now, and it was really the best lesson I could have ever done. [00:07:48] S1: I don't think many people know about you, so I would love to get a little bit more into your background and how that scaled up to being CIO. [00:07:55] S0: Yeah, so I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I went to NYU for undergrad, and then I did [00:08:00] S1: So did I. [00:08:01] S0: Oh, really? [00:08:01] S1: Yeah. Go Violets.