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Making Markets EP24: dMY Technologies CEO on SPACs, Tech, Growth, and a Bevy of Macroeconomic Forces

In this episode of Making Markets, Niccolo De Masi, CEO of dMY Technologies, the company that sponsored Planet (PL), IonQ (IONQ), Genius Sports (GENI), and others over the past 18 months discusses what is in store for growth companies as well as what lies ahead for the economy and the impact of forces like Inflation, Interest Rates, and the market demand for results from publicly traded companies.

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Transcript:

Daniel Newman: With a bevy of macroeconomic factors potentially acting as headwinds for growth in 2022, just how bad could things get for small caps? Niccolo De Masi, CEO of dMY Technology, recently brought names like RSI, IonQ, Genius Sports and Planet, public via SPAC. In this episode, he shares why not all deals are created equal and why some growth stands a much better chance than other. This and much more in an action packed episode, so here we go. This is Making Markets.

Announcer: This is the Making Markets podcast brought to you by Futurum Research. We bring you top executives from the world’s most exciting technology companies bridging the gap between strategy, markets, innovation and the companies featured on the show. The Making Markets podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Please do not take anything reflected in this show as investment advice. Now your host, principal analyst and founding partner of Futurum Research, Daniel Newman.

Daniel Newman: Niccolo De Masi, CEO of dMY Technology, welcome to Making Markets.

Niccolo De Masi: Great to be here, my friend.

Daniel Newman: It’s good to have you. We’ve had a number of conversations in the background. And the opportunity finally came for me to get you here on the show. And it’s a perfect time because the markets are pretty chaotic. It’s early February. Amazon just reported today. Yeah, Facebook, Meta, yesterday. We’ve had a couple of weeks, the crazy earning season. We’ll talk about that in just a minute. I’m going to talk to you about the macroeconomics, some of the FOMC topics that have come up over the last few weeks, some of the growing global tensions, concern, supply chain. And then I’m going to tap into something that you’re really connected to, which is growth, as someone that’s brought a number of companies to public markets over the last year. But while some of the companies you’ve brought to market are pretty well known, not everybody necessarily knows dMY Technology. So you mind doing me a favor? Just give a quick introduction to everybody out there.

Niccolo De Masi: Sure, thanks. Look. I mean, dMY Technology aspires to be the leading SPAC franchise and sponsors for what we call all weather technology companies. So we’re looking for businesses that have a phenomenal macro, a secular tailwind that will carry them to be ever bigger every year rather relentlessly, regardless of inflation, COVID lockdowns, recessions, anything could happen in macro environment. And we’ll be tested clearly at the rate we’re going here in the coming year or two, but we do things like the world’s first quantum computing company, IMQ. We’ve done Planet Labs, the world’s largest earth observation satellite data business. We did an online casino business, RSI. And of course, we did Genius Sports. It’s the sort of leading sports betting data provider on a global basis.

And all of these businesses have in common that all weather phenomenon. They also have in common a similar enterprise value. So we sort of focus on businesses that are typically two or $3 billion as a starting point at their IPO. But we believe all of them will be double digit billion market cap companies. At least one of them could be a triple digit billion market cap company someday. We’ll see what the coming decade or decades have to come.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. And to be totally clear to everyone out there, there are a few names that he mentioned that I’m personally following. And ironically, it was before I met you, that I actually discovered these names because I am a person that loves growth. And while, at Futurum Research, we work with big tech companies. And those are the companies we have engagements with. And I don’t buy or go along on those because of conflicts of interest, but it was one of those things where it was almost serendipitous when I met you. Through my podcast cohort and partner in crime, Patrick Moorhead, had introduced us. And then when I found out you bought in public, I was like, “Holy cow, those are companies that I’ve been tracking, following and buying.” And it’s very interesting. And I want to come back and talk about those a little bit more for both personal interests. And I know retail is super interesting and a lot of the names that you’re involved in.

But let’s start at the macro environment. We’ve had a few back channel conversations, Niccolo, about things that are going on in this space overall. But the consensus is that in January, the growth market in tech was tumbling. Personally from looking in my portfolio, I think it was more in November, was when this really started happening around Thanksgiving. But there’s a bunch of external factors. You’ve got rising interest rates out there. You’ve got high inflation, extraordinarily high inflation. You’ve got a big election coming up this year. You’ve got supply chain issues that are still not completely sorted out. And now we’re even possibly on the precipice of war. So just, what’s the overall macro environment. How are you reading this right now?

Niccolo De Masi: Well look, I think you’re correct, by the way, that the Ukraine is a factor, right. It’s not just a small factor. I think it’s a big factor if you look at the way that plays into commodity prices. Only twice in my investing career have I deeply regretted not wading into oil. And one of them was probably 2008 or 2009 when it was $10, $12 bucks. But boy, do I regret it. And it was at $5 18, 24 months ago because sadly, I’ve sort of always sat there and gone, “What is the chance in the next five years there won’t be some sort of crisis in the, I’m not going to say middle, just in the center of the globe, the way most maps are drawn.”

Right now the Ukraine and Belarus and Russia, and even Germany and pipelines are sort of showing that again. And I do think that that is a macro issue, not just a sort of potential war, because of the implications on gas, implications on oil and gas and general security, and also various potential implications around retaliations on sanctions, trade. And other ideas get thrown out by various newspapers, like what happens if you boot a nation out of the SWIFT system kind of thing.

Listen, I have spent most of my professional career growing up building public companies on the back of really challenging macros, right? So most of my first public company was built on the back of the dot com crash. And then Blue Mobile, and that was a UK listed business Group PLC. Then of course, Blue was built on the back of the 2008/2009 Great Recession, including the four businesses that dMY has taken public in the last year and a half or so. I’ve been on the board and helped build nine public companies. My SPAC business partner, Harry You, has done, I think about 16. So we’re at 25 in total and Harry and I have done maybe 200 or 300 earnings calls. We have a unique seat given that Harry’s a little older than me. So he’s been working since Black Monday in 1987, even before that when he was at Solomon Brothers.

And so. We’ve watched markets through the last, roughly 40 years. And Harry and I like this say we’ve about 60 years of public market experience between the two of us. And so we’ve been expecting the music to stop playing at some point, right, for quite some time. Nobody thought it would go quite as long probably as it did. I don’t think anybody thought that COVID would be so kind to technology companies and technology markets, right.

But if you pull out the last two years, a lot of where the markets are at today is kind of where they were before COVID really sort of bit. If you look at December 2019, January 2020, and then you look at December 2021 than January 2022, it feels a bit reminiscent of that. And also feels a bit reminiscent of where markets were in 2018, where there was kind of a big pause.

I am cautiously optimistic that the supply chain issues are going to be, first of all, the inflation driven by supply chain is a helpful price mechanism, right. So anybody who thinks that it’s not helpful to have items get more expensive when there’s fewer of them, go back and do the high school econ class again, because markets have to be able to adjust. And price is a big mechanism for that, right? Inflation is not evenly distributed by any stretch of the imagination. It is specifically driving reactions. And whether it’s the used car market, whether it’s in the cellular business, there are specific supply chain remakings that are happening because of price going up, not 6% or 7%, but you know better than I, probably 60%, 70%, right, in some pockets, kind of thing. And I am cautiously optimistic that will drive behavioral change that leads to stability over the medium term, and certainly the long term.

I am concerned that if we put these three or four or five rate hikes through, and we’re sitting here in Q3 over the summer, late summer and so on. And we’re reporting, we’re spitting out inflation numbers that are still 6% or 7%, people are going to go, “This is not helpful.” Right? It’s a mini stag-flation if you hike rates and you still have same inflation, but there’s a lag, right. So we’ve got to give it time to work its medicine. And we’ve got to give companies time to adjust.

We don’t have the debt overhang that we had in 2008/2009. Fortunately the US is still the driver of most international markets, prints its own currency. It’s not Argentina having a debt crisis, a currency crisis. No IMF loans here, right. And I do think that for better or worse, the US and the UK have intrinsic desires and needs to keep interest rates under control if you look at it on a historic basis. By under control, I mean, we were at what, 16%, 17% I think when Voker took charge in the early eighties to try and crush this when Reagan was in office. I don’t think we’re going to see that. I think we’re arguing here over one and a half… And we’re arguing over rate rises, but one and a half percent fed funds rates, not five and a half, not 10 and a half.

Daniel Newman: Near zero, by the way.

Niccolo De Masi: Exactly. And on a real inflation, on real interest rate basis, as you know better than I, we might well be negative. We’re probably negative, right? Borrowing money is probably still a negative interest rate activity if your mortgage is 3%.

Daniel Newman: Well, you’re doing the simple math, right. If they’re saying inflation 6%, 7% and most people would say the real math is probably more like 10% plus if they were being in especially in some areas. And most of the time you’re borrowing, you get 3%, 4%, 5% for a car loan.

Niccolo De Masi: That’s right. That’s right.

Daniel Newman: For a college loan, for a home loan.

Niccolo De Masi: Right. So my point is, it’s still a very net stimulative environment, right? I do think markets have probably over rotated, and in some cases, are not appreciating that “growth companies” have EBITDA. So they are value companies if their stock comes off. Even 20% or 30%, you’re growing EBITDA at a healthy clip. But double your rate, that’s probably going to be a value buy pretty soon.

And that’s kind of the natural stabilizer, Daniel, along with fact that there’s a lot of money in the sidelines, right? So everybody who has redeemed in a SPAC IPO in the last quarter, everybody who has sold Facebook or DocuSign or PayPal, or any one of a number of surprising moves down in the past quarter or so on the back of good companies with big brands and storied histories, right. They’ve got cash. Right?

And so the question is simply when it comes back into the market, and I would sort of maintain my thesis that this feels like 2018, 2019. It’s not 2008 or 2009. These companies don’t need to lever. Financial institutions don’t need to be levered. You can take your own view on the US and UK governments. They are way more indebted today than they were before 2008 and 2009. No doubt about that. But because of that debt, and this is just the reality, you make value judgments later. If you have $10 trillion or $20 trillion of debt sitting there, you can’t let interest rates go positive, in my opinion, not very positive anyway. So I think they’re going to stay negative or neutral on a real basis, is my prediction, kind of always, right? Because you just get into the runaway debt trap if these rates move up too far. Right.?

Daniel Newman: So markets are supposed to be efficient. And this is kind of a great example of markets being somewhat efficient and self-regulating right. At the actual onset of the FOMC decision that there will be a rate rise, the market actually started to correct itself immediately based upon on that decision, although a rate hadn’t actually changed yet. The rate still hadn’t changed after the most recent meeting. There’s talk of what is going to happen. And these actions of creating a less growth oriented environment, say growth friendly monetary policy, is about probably a number of quarter interest rate point hikes, maybe 4% to 6% is what seems to be the guess right now of these over the next year. So you set a point to a point and a half. And like I said, to some extent, the market is starting to adjust.

The other thing that you said though that probably warrants a little bit of reiteration, is getting the supply chains fixed will actually help this inflation more significantly perhaps than a quarter point, for sure.

Niccolo De Masi: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Daniel Newman: And most of the out of control items are true economic driven items. It’s supply and demand. We don’t have enough houses because we don’t have lumber. We don’t have enough steel. We don’t have enough chips. We don’t have enough gaming consoles. We can’t make cars. We can’t make computers.

Niccolo De Masi: Right.

Daniel Newman: What I’m saying is when we can, prices will gravitate back to normal and the quarter point or half point interest rate won’t affect anyone. But let me spin this question to you another way because this has really been interesting to me. And this is a little more on a personal note than a business note, but I think it affects everybody somewhat.

The actions the fed might take though, you start raising rates. And then what happens is that banks are able to then raise rates. And so the banks raise rates on home interest or home loans. They raise rates on car loans. They raise rates on credit cards. They raise rates on student loans. I guess what I kind of can’t help but wonder is, in the desire to lower inflation to that 2% ish level, we’d have to raise rates. But the people that are going to be affected in this environment are not going to be the top of the class. It’s going to be the middle class, the people we talk about fed policy and Congress creating laws to help. I’m just trying to figure out how does this benefit? Does it bring down a house value by 5%? Now you’re even taking equity out of those same people’s homes. S you’re taking equity out of their homes. You’re making it more expensive for them to borrow. How does this actually help? Rather than China, which seems to be like, “Good, let’s just keep running it hot.”

Niccolo De Masi: Yeah. So I think we’re going to be running hot. Let’s look at real interest rates for the last five years, 10 years. I would bet that real interest rates are more negative with inflation at 6.8% officially, and the fed funds at whatever 50 [inaudible] than they were two years ago, right. When fed funds were zero and inflation rate was allegedly 2%. Okay. So they’re probably more negative than ever, which would imply if you’re a rational mortgage owner, that you try and pay that mortgage down and you hang onto that house because it’s going to inflate and be a fabulous store of value, and frankly, driver of family wealth, right.

In my entire public company career, I have been, frankly, a bull on low interest rates. Whatever you’re going to call it, a bear on them going up. And my logic has been fairly consistent the last 15, 17, 20 years, which is all the way back to the dot com crash. I was like, “Well, the government has a lot of debt, so they’re not going to want the interest rate to go up that far. And that became even more true in 2008/2009.

And it became even more true in 2022, because look at the UK and US government federal debt to GDP ratio. It has climbed in the past 20 years from 20%, 30% into what? A 100%, roughly, 110%, 90%, 80%, 120%. When you measure it, right, forward trailing. That’s a big climb. And when you have debt to GDP over 100%, I think your challenges of runaway interest payments, adding to the debt and looking like in emerging market economy with a problem, are kind of meaningfully, if not exponentially, higher. Right?

So we’re going to run hot, is my bet. And by hot, I mean, either zero real interest rates or negative. I think we’re only debating how negative. Is it -4%? Is it -3%? Is it -5%? Right. But no one’s predicting rates are going up to five and a half percent, maybe one and a half percent. Right. So inflation is going to come down, you’re right, because of supply chain unwinding. And when a lot fewer cars are purchased, it gives automotive manufacturers a bit more time to maybe re-shore some work in some cases or build capacity.

Let’s remember that in my mind, a big piece of the supply chain issue is they can’t get the workers back in, right, in the factories, in some cases. Or the people that are willing to go back to work are not as skilled as they were before. I’ve heard stories of people buying cars that aren’t supposed to have issues and have issues they haven’t had in years, right. Because they’re restarting factory lines with new people. You call up most dealerships in this country and ask for a new car order and they give you an answer that’s in quarters and years, not weeks and months. I mean, I thought one of them was joking when I spoke to them. Not a luxury brand, an ordinary delivery dates here in Austin 18, 24 months now. I was like, “You’re going to deliver me in 2024 and 2023. What does that even mean? Right.”

So look, there’ll be adjustments there. People are fabulously adept at figuring out how to save and spend their money. And the markets going to allow, I think, an efficient reorganization here.

Let’s just talk about what’s happened in the tech markets relative to this. This is really driven, I think, the quality bar up higher for what it means to be a growing technology business and an old fashioned free cashflow generating enterprise. Right? So who’s been hurt the least? Free cashflow generating trillion dollar businesses. Who has been hurt the most? Speculative business plans with no revenue, if you will, and nothing special about them in a lot of ways.

I do believe you will see, hopefully, M&A consolidation coming into the marketplace if tech prices stay where they are. And I’m not talking take privates. I mean, public to public deals are going to be probably ferocious in the second half of this year if stock prices stay where they are. There’s some real deals out there. You have the chance of the big money, long holding funds with trillions of dollars in management, have a bunch behind the sidelines that can come rushing back in also. And M&A might be the catalyst, by the way, for people getting to see that we’ve reached real core value points on some of these stocks.

In a lot of cases though, Daniel, there’s no reason something has to trade at 200 times earnings when 100 is still pretty demanding. Right. And logically, all the way down the chain, 100 times earning can be 50. And 50 is still pretty good. It’s historically pretty good, right. And so I’ll reiterate for the third time, what I said was we’re back to where we were before COVID. COVID was a shot in the arm. Now the shot has as has come back out. Or as Warren Buffet would put it, the tide has come in, you can see who’s got their bathing suit. Sorry, [inaudible] see whether they have their bathing suit on or not. And so I think the themes of growth adjusted multiples, earnings have to be there, free cashflow has to be there, are going to stay with us to a grander extent than we’ve seen a year ago for the next phase of this cycle, for sure.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. You made a couple of good points. And one of the things I’m still just kind of trying to wrap my head around is at what point do the… Let’s be candid. I mean, a lot of the trading, it’s not like there’s actually people that are throwing paper around anymore making trades. You can actually watch certain segments of the market. They all trade in unison.

Niccolo De Masi: Yeah.

Daniel Newman: Growth, for instance, the SPACs, I could watch three or four of the companies that you talked about bring in public and they’ll almost trade on the same exact trend line. You can watch. Just put in Apple, put the four of them next to each other and watch it on an up or down day. They move almost-

Niccolo De Masi: Yeah.

Daniel Newman: Unless there’s a event, like an earnings event or an M&A event, they move exactly together. It’s the algorithms. But at some point you look and say, “Okay, how does a company like…” I’ll use an example of someone, of a company like yours because I know it, but you saw the run ups of IonQ. You saw the run ups of RSI. Again, you guys have a fundamental belief of companies that create cash flow, of companies that have the potential to make money either immediately or already. And my point is, they run way up, and then some of them have come back 40%, 60% and on nothing. If anything, their revenue is expanding. Their profits are growing. And some of these are getting darn close to their NAVs. If you were going to do that kind of calculation, book value, where you’re going, “Okay, when does the market see value and see that?”

Like I said, my thesis is tech is deflationary. I mean, gaming. Do you think people are going to stop gaming because of a 1% interest rate hike? I don’t think so. Do you think enterprise companies are going to stop looking at quantum technology and how it can solve problems in engineering, in pharma, in all kinds of different financial services and fraud? I don’t think so. Do you think companies are going to stop buying technologies and for space, like in your business in Planet because of a small rate hike or because of high inflation?

I mean the market hasn’t changed at all. And in fact, demand won’t go away. And by the way, proven from what we saw from Microsoft, proven from what we saw from Alphabet this quarter is that these big companies, like you said, with great cash, meaningful businesses. Not only do they deliver good quarters, Niccolo, but they guided to a good future. And they don’t seem to be at all concerned. $68 billion cash deal. Microsoft put on the table for a gaming company right in the middle of this supposed storm. In their eyes it’s growth. It’s growth. It’s growth. And 1%, 2%, whatever happens to interest rate, it’s not at all going to impact their plans to keep growing going forward.

Niccolo De Masi: Yeah. So look, the correlation between any IPO is almost identical from a macro perspective. So there have been a lot of SPAC IPOs, what I call S4 mechanism IPOs. There’s been a lot of S1 IPOs. They’ve been about almost even in the past 12, 18 months, I think a year, year and a half ago, there might have been slightly more S4 IPOs than S1s. But if you look at, and I have all these share price graphs up as you do, the correlation is almost perfect in the last three to six months of how an S1 IPO has performed against a quality S4 IPO. There’s always not quality IPOs that happen. And that’s been true for the last 22 or 23 years since the dot com boom.

But the reality here is there is a rotation away from small cap tech. If you can get the growth from mega cap tech, why would you not hold Google growing at 30%? if you can, with a name you know, and a relatively small cap business growing at 30%, right? So you have to see out sized returns and growth the whole hold a supposedly smaller and riskier asset, right, growing at the same rate as a trillion dollar business. The points on growth are spot on. And I stand by what we’ve always said about our businesses, which is you close your eyes. You come back one, three, five, seven years later, all of our businesses are going to pass and are passing the Warren Buffet test. They’re going to be bigger. They’re going to be more valuable.

But multiple compression has been a feature of public markets as long as I’ve been involved. And I’ve watched the same assets, business as I run, business I’m on the board, business I’ve invested in, go through cycles of being in and out of the sort of so-called macro. And that macro has a perfect correlation because you’re right, there’s an algorithmic correlation. There’s also just judgment. And there’s also people’s judgment about other people’s judgment that drives that wonderful, and right now not so wonderful, herd mentality, right? I love these companies, but these other guys might not. So I better sell too. And then there’s people going, “Well, if it went down 10%, it might go down another 10%. So I don’t want to risk that. So I’m out.”

But again, when they’re out, they’re holding cash. And so what is driving this market change is a thirst for yield. And what is going to drive the upswing and correction is a thirst for yield, right? If you were not comfortable with a volatility and you could got out of some position after a 10% decline, you’re now going to look at it and go, “Well, if I liked it at $15, I sure as hell like it at $11.”

And as I said a few minutes ago, I think M&A is going to be a catalyst here. You’re going to see companies stepping in first going, “Well, I see value regardless of whether or not long only funds or long only funds, shorter term funds see value. I see tremendous strategic value and I want to own the whole asset.” The way that Warren buffet now buys whole companies, he doesn’t invest in them. He takes them out entirely, right? And so that, I think, will drive reevaluation.

I think you’re correct that running hot with negative interest rates is going to get people to re-judge where they’re getting yield and where they’re not. And companies that can grow at all sizes as they put the numbers up, people are going to reevaluate that. This is sort of a healthy piece of the market. As I always like to say, just because you’re compounding for the next five, seven, 10 years at a phenomenal growth rate, doesn’t mean that the market can’t change what they want to pay for that growth rate. That is not something, and I’ll repeat this as a CEO of public company, public company CEOs don’t control what a fidelity, a tier [inaudible] capital are willing to pay for the growth of their business. What we control is growing our business, right? And we can communicate that clearly and we can hit those numbers and we can show we’re doing what we say we’re going to do.

But Warren Buffet’s made a lot of money starting his Berkshire Hathaway in the fifties when he was paying four times earnings for good companies or NAV in a lot of them. Today, he can’t pay four times earning anymore, because everybody else has worked out that’s a pretty good yield, right? So the conversations moved on to paying 14 times earnings is a pretty good yield, not four, right? And that’s just the way sophistication works and the way that the flow of capital rolls. I think we’re at a speed bump, not a stop sign. We do not have a structural issue. Structural issues I think are behind us in a lot of ways, or about to be behind us. And I think people are going to work out pretty darn soon that there really aren’t better investments than growing technology companies in a deflationary environment, or rather an inflationary environment. Tech probably is deflationary. I think you’re right, Daniel, on that one from all that I’ve seen in my career. And that’s a very powerful source of both good and a powerful course of competitive advantage.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. If you take your kind of thought that people are going to be looking for yield, and you basically look at what companies that pay yield and grow slow, value companies really can deliver. They may be safe in the short term while volatility’s high, but you look at the risk of leaving that money sitting there when you get over the speed bump, when the final tire gets over that bump, and then things start to turn. And in an environment with negative rates, effectively negative rates, right, when inflation is higher than interest rates, you need to grow significantly faster.

So making 3% or 4%, while a stock goes sideways, there’s a compound value to that. And if you’re retired and you’re trying to just hold onto your money and you have a fixed income and you’re living, sure that makes sense. But if you’re young or you’re trying to build a nest egg, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And if you’ve got the appetite for it, I think it was a Charlie Munger quote that said something along the lines of, “If you can’t handle 50% pullbacks, basically you’ll never really win.” I mean, it’s a meme.

Niccolo De Masi: Yeah.

Daniel Newman: I don’t know if he really said that, but I think he said this. But the point was is those pullbacks, not only do they not… But they’re the opportunity. You said it something along the line of, “If you liked RSI at $15 you’re sure going to like a lot of tech.” And what I’m saying is because especially if nothing had changed, if they’re growth is still there, revenue is still there, earnings are still there. And it just happens to have had an earnings compression, a compression on the value. That’s a good time to accumulate more. And then when it goes up again, you see everything accelerate faster. So you bring up a lot of good points. So if I’m reading this right, of course, none of us have a crystal ball, but you’re saying is that it’s a hurdle or it’s a speed bump. But the macro environment really doesn’t warrant a significant further pullback. Or if it does, it’s going to be temporary because growth will be back.

Niccolo De Masi: So two things. One, I actually don’t think that most retirees looking for income can afford to stay in fixed income and not be in equities because people are living longer than ever. Healthcare systems are better than ever before. If you hold 150 bit treasuries in a 6%, 7% inflationary economy, you do that for five, 10 years. All of a sudden your real incomes down 50%. No one wants to go from the age of 65 to 75 and find out their buying power’s been cut in half, right? So you got to hold stocks. No, I’m dead serious. People forget this point. It sounds smart to say, “I’m in bonds.” And right now, it probably was smart to be in bonds for 90 days, but it won’t be smart to be in it for the next nine years.

If you stand back and look at performance of tech companies and companies in general, my business partner, Harry You, always likes to point out for the last 40 years and throughout history, companies that have the ability to raise price, do the best in inflationary environments. And so, if you look at all of our businesses at dMY Technology, IonQ, absolute price setter right? Best in the world. You’re going to be able to charge whatever you want for that, more or less. Planet is the only person that scans the whole earth every day. You can put prices up. There’s only one source for that data. It doesn’t exist otherwise.

My gaming businesses, RSI and Genius, you’re spot on. It is the cheapest entertainment per hour on the face of the earth. And when there are COVID lockdowns or there are recessions, you know what happens? People cancel the trip to Hawaii. Sorry, airlines and sorry hospitality. And they spend $100 on online gaming, gambling, whatever. It is far cheaper dollar for dollar entertainment. Right.

So our businesses, all weather is not just in any macro. All weather is specifically performing well in an inflationary environment. We’ve actually been watching this trend throughout our entire dMY franchise creation. And we’re very confident in how our businesses are going to perform because of the ability to pass on price or do very, very well when people are looking at their disposable income going, “I don’t have as much as I thought I do.”

Daniel Newman: Niccolo De Masi, I want to thank you so much for taking the time here to join me. I could have kept this conversation going for another few hours. I’m sure everybody out there is going to probably have more questions than not. So I’m going to go ahead and throw your Twitter in the show notes. So that if anybody wants to bug you there, they can. And you can decide whether or not you want to answer their questions. But as always really appreciate you taking the time to join me here on Making Markets.

Niccolo De Masi: My pleasure, look forward to coming back and do it again, my friend. So, to many more.

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Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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