All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Nikesh Arora: Mythos is Real, Analytical SaaS is Dead, and Google can be a $10T company

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

(0:00) Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora joins the Besties! (0:47) Claude Mythos found years of vulnerabilities in Palo Alto's code in weeks (5:15) Are cyber defenders losing the race against AI att...ackers? (6:50) Analytical SaaS is dead, so what survives the AI wave? (14:06) If models become a utility, where will the money be made? (20:35) Armchair CEO: Nikesh rates Waymo, Google, and OpenAI (28:22) Palo Alto's M&A playbook and the path to $1 trillion Thanks to our partners for making this possible! EY - AI ambition isn't enough. EY.ai Value Blueprints move organizations beyond pilots embedding measurable business value by design. https://www.ey.com/en_us/services/ai/value-blueprints?WT.mc_id=3501320&AA.tsrc=sponsorship NYSE - Thank you to our partner, the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE. https://www.nyse.com Plaud - Never miss a moment. Plaud, our official wearable AI note-taking partner at All-In Liquidity Summit, captured every insight. https://www.plaud.ai Follow Nikesh: https://x.com/nikesharora Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 It's one of the biggest winners right now. The big daddy of the cybersecurity space. Palo Alto Networks is an outperformer in the space. CEO Nakesh Aurora. This might come as news to you, but humans have been writing bad code for a very long time. I spent 10 years at Google, and Google search was democratizing information.
Starting point is 00:00:19 If you take that analogy and think about what AI is doing, AI is democratizing intelligence. Money is a way to keep track. Yeah. It's not the goal. You've been the CEO of Apollo Alder Networks for eight years. Coming up in eight years this week. Eight years.
Starting point is 00:00:34 And I think when you started, it was $17 billion market cap, if I remember correctly. And this morning I checked, it's $238 billion. Which, if you listen to what we said yesterday, now that you passed 100, you're more likely to actually 10x. So the first 10x was actually much, much harder. So you're on your way to a trillion dollars. From your mouth to God's ears. Well, I think you are.
Starting point is 00:00:54 Okay, so let's just double click into what you see, because you are. sort of in a really interesting position to see all of it. You see the birth of AI. Maybe you've seen the rise and fall of SaaS. All the models talk to you. The rise again, right? The rise again. You were one of the first and the few that got access to Mythos.
Starting point is 00:01:16 So just let me just push the button. Go in a Keshe. Well, first of all, thank you for having me here. I think AI is exciting. I think it's exciting to see all the stuff. stuff that's gone down in the last possibly 24 months. I think Sarah just said it. They were right in anticipating the huge amount of compute that was going to be needed.
Starting point is 00:01:40 So all that stuff's going on. But you can see that there's this notion which we talked about briefly last time that AI is really democratizing intelligence. What that means is I have 250 people in marketing that produce varied forms of output. Now you can get 90% of the output to be consistent across those 250 people. I have 5,000 people who talk to customers. My failure mode is when 5,000 people do different things where people say, I want to talk to Joe because he knows how to solve the problem,
Starting point is 00:02:14 and Jim doesn't. So now you can get 5,000 people to act almost consistently in their interactions with people on the other side. So I think it's going to have a phenomenal impact to how we run businesses, how we all, operate, it's going to change the entire landscape. Now, in that context, you've touched upon Mitzos, and I know Dave has been very involved with this.
Starting point is 00:02:36 Mitzos has shown us that all the bad code that humans have written over the last 50 years can be assessed by AI and shown, the vulnerabilities can be shown. We tested for six weeks, and in six weeks we found what have taken us five to seven years. Wow. Say that one more time. In six weeks, we found vulnerabilities, which would have normally taken. taken us five to seven years to five. So these are vulnerabilities where?
Starting point is 00:03:02 Sorry? These are vulnerabilities in your own code base? In our own code base. In our own code base. Oh, wow. So mythos was not oversold. It was legit. The capabilities of AI in being able to assess vulnerabilities in code are real.
Starting point is 00:03:18 Not just that. If you put it on ultra mode, which is persistent thinking, so it keeps trying until it gets an answer, you can actually daisy chain vulnerabilities, i.e. finding a new attack path into your vulnerabilities. Now, we pride ourselves as a top percentile of companies that tests our code because we're in cybersecurity business. If you take that and compound that across all the companies
Starting point is 00:03:41 that exist in the world that write their own code or the 10 million developers write code, this thing is going to find stuff, which would have taken us as 10 years to find. How much did it cost? Did you track the token cost? Was it $100 million, $10 million? No, it was in the low millions. But again, the cost, as Sarah said, the cost curve is going to come down already. Open AI has got a model which is cheaper and more consistent. You know, Anthropics come out with another model. You buy the hype. It's true. That's the point. The capabilities are real. You know that. The capabilities are true. Yes. I mean, you saw IBM announce a project for $5 billion to fix open source. That's the biggest problem. What would have happened if Claude didn't have the restraint and they put it out in the public? Do you think it? it would have been like a real attack vector and caused chaos in corporations?
Starting point is 00:04:29 I think we're three months away, if not already there, from this being available in the wild. Okay, open source. Yeah. Just three months. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, we've been saying that it's roughly six months away before mythos level capabilities are available in Chinese models, you know, open models, whatever. But you're saying it could be three months. Well, look, there's, what is?
Starting point is 00:04:55 4.8 is already out, 5.5 is already out. They have similar capabilities. And look, you don't need to crack the hardest code to crack. You just need to find a few vulnerabilities in code that are out there. Just take an old industrial system, which is running OT code on the edge. You can find that vulnerability reasonably easily. So we're in a race right now between the cyber defenders finding these vulnerabilities and patching them before the cyber attackers do the same thing.
Starting point is 00:05:25 Yes. And how do you feel like we're doing in that race? So not as well as we should be doing, which is great for our business, but that's a different story. So, look, every company has to go look at their code base and figure out where the vulnerabilities are and fix them. So if you talk to CIOs today, their biggest problem is all the vendors are showing up saying, please patch my piece of boxes, the hardware that you have, please patch my code that you have because I found vulnerabilities fix it. while the siots are busy finding their own vulnerabilities to fix their own vulnerabilities, and then this huge thing called open source,
Starting point is 00:05:59 which nobody knows quite how to solve. So is it fair to say that it has model capabilities go up, systemic business risk of large enterprises also goes up? On the cyber side, yes. There are antidotes being built by people like us and others where we're going to provide some capability where you don't have to patch everything. But, look, Sarah said something very interesting around harnesses, memory, and context. Right? The part we don't talk about here is organizations don't have memory and context of everything they do every day.
Starting point is 00:06:31 That's why you need to store a lot more data enterprise-wide to learn what good looks like and what bad looks like. The same problem is in cybersecurity. We need to collect 10 times the data in the enterprise from a cyber perspective to be able to understand how to defend ourselves against the AI attackers. Do you think that the traditional companies, like the SaaS businesses that have existed in this world, what is their place? As all this knowledge becomes more persistent and stored, what happens to SaaS? Well, you see, as Bill said, SaaS is different pieces, right? If you're an analytical SaaS company, it's over. It's over.
Starting point is 00:07:11 What is an analytical SaaS company? Somebody that says, I'm going to collect a lot of data free and analyze it for you. I don't need you to analyze it for me. I can run models against data and analyze them myself. So if you think about every SaaS company has a marketplace. You can buy Salesforce Marketplace. What is they say? You have Salesforce data.
Starting point is 00:07:30 I'm a marketplace app. Take me and I'll help you analyze the data. I don't need you. You don't need that. I can just go run an LM against the data. So the entire incrementality that has been sold as incremental software modules to all of us doesn't need to be sold to us because I'd much rather have our lens run against that data. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:07:46 You bring this up. We had an instance with a SaaS product with 20 seats. Nobody was logging in and using it, but the data was there. Yes. So we created like three accounts, got rid of 17, connected it to Slack, connected it to Claude. And now everybody can interface it through a natural language, and we've reduced our bill by 90%.
Starting point is 00:08:08 Well, not just that. What are you going to do next, Jason? You're going to take data from different products, put them in one place, run the analytics against that. I want my data for my sales reps, my productivity data, my inventory data from SAP. I want it all one place so I can run analytics against it and say, who's selling a lot, where do I have less inventory, less bill inventory in a region where my salespeople are extremely productive. To run that query, you'd have to talk to three different SaaS products.
Starting point is 00:08:36 Tomorrow you can put all the data in one place. So that's sort of category one, analytical SaaS is dead. Category one, analytics dead. Yes. In the medium term, you've got all these bounces today and tomorrow, these are marginally irrelevant. Infrastructure software, undervalued. Okay, what is infrastructure software? Stuff that gives you databases.
Starting point is 00:08:56 You collect data into it, stuff that allows infrastructure to work, whether it's a database software. This is like Staterbrick, Snowflake, Mongo, DB, Oracle, all these things. You need. Core storage infrastructure, core data. We are going to need 10 times the data stored enterprise than we have today. Right. It's three years, 10 times. Okay.
Starting point is 00:09:15 So anything that helps you collect infrastructure, data, manage it, you need. I think the category in the middle is called, let's call it, system of work or system, you know, a record, people call them. Those are deeply embedded in the way businesses work. I have 6,000 salespeople, they know how this works. What's going to happen is step one, we will take away UI and let agents do the work. UI enterprise software and consumer software UI is the worst thing we did as technologists. You had a couple of examples of this. You told me this story.
Starting point is 00:09:47 I don't know if you want to repeat it of this one company. They tried to hold you hostage on a license. Yes, that was analytical SaaS, so that's over. And you just pointed AI at it and you just... Yes, we just got rid of them. That's a different issue. But, I mean, think about it today. We spend our lives having product managers design UI
Starting point is 00:10:02 so all humans can interact with data behind the UI. Yeah. If you believe agents are going to work, and I say, I just tell an agent, look, figure out from my sales call, figure out the key points, and go post it into... you know, whatever sales tracking system I have with this Oracle or Salesforce, right? An agent conceptually should be able to do it.
Starting point is 00:10:21 We're spending trillion dollars building these agentic backends. We need these agents to be able to do it. If that happens, UI goes away. If UI goes away, I can rewire my system of work. Right? I have sales guy shows up and says, I had the sales call to do all the paperwork and all the shit that needs to happen in the background of the company
Starting point is 00:10:40 and just, I'm done. If I can change the way work happens, which is where you will get true efficiency, where five people become one in a company, all these SaaS software that does system of work needs to be re-engineered for the next five years. And it's also happening passively, which is really interesting. It's looking at email. It's automatically taking the Zoom transcript and summary. So the sales system of record is now like you don't even need to input it. It's like, I already have the Zoom call notes. I have the deck. The deck was. made, the sales deck was made by AI. It's just, we're all going to be looking at a chat window and just saying, here's what I want. Your audit trail gear comes a lot better because humans are not touching your data. It's always been managed by agents.
Starting point is 00:11:25 So I think the whole system of work, system of record gets reinvented the next five years. Yeah, there's no data entry. That's an interesting point. Let's talk about national security for a second. I just want to maybe zoom out. So the one side of mythos, as you said, is like the value that it has to you and to your, and to enterprises. The red team version of mythos is where foreign state actors, you know, can essentially create economic havoc inside of a country. As these models escalate in their capability,
Starting point is 00:11:56 what do you think should happen when these models are ready? You know, the sad truth is, in a year there's a few thousand breaches or attacks that happen. They happen for pretty rudimentary reasons. It's not because somebody cracked a heart-to-crack thing. It happens because 89% of the attacks happen because credentials get stolen. Use your name and password. That's it. My password is password. Yeah, I'm sure it is.
Starting point is 00:12:20 Do you have dollar signs? Dollar sign password. Fantastic. Well done. See? You're only ahead of everybody else. So 80% breaches happen because of simple things. I don't think we need more models to go crack the stuff.
Starting point is 00:12:30 Now, these models can attack critical infrastructure and things we try and protect from a national security perspective. Yes, we need defenses there. I'm not worried about the national security part being protected. because they're very on it, they are the right people, they spend 10% of their budgets on IT on security. I'm worried about the small offices across the country where they're using some piece of packet software
Starting point is 00:12:53 and you're running a dentist office or a doctor's office. Remember when change healthcare got breached, every physician's office shut down. Shut down and it's ransomware. Because of ransomware to change healthcare. That's what the clearing system. That's when United Health Act actually give billions of dollars of credits to the physicians
Starting point is 00:13:10 to be able to run their business. is at that point in time. That's what one should worry about. It's less about the big nuts will get cracks. It's less about cracking some PG&E power generation facility. It's more economic chaos. Yes. And so what do we do? I don't think there's a sort of a silver bullet. I think this will take time. I think this will basically take a while until every system gets upgraded, renewed, fixed over time. I just think it increased the terminal value of the industry, Do you think that there's a world in which these models become so good that you could see yourself advocating for more nationalism around how they're controlled and how they're managed and how they're where we point them? Or do you think there should be maybe a set of these models that never see the light of day that only the NSA and other folks could have access to or guys like you?
Starting point is 00:14:05 I have a slightly differentiated about models and how they will evolve versus what we heard earlier from an open-eye perspective. I think I still believe models are going to become a utility layer. You'll be able to buy intelligence on the fly, or you can say, I don't need an 180 IQ person to go do this task, give me 120 IQ, and I need a 250 IQ to do this task. I'll pay $10 for this, and for this I'll pay $1. So I don't know there's a one-size-fits-all, give me the most up-to-date model to answer my customer calls saying,
Starting point is 00:14:38 sorry, sir, I have no idea how to solve your problem. So I think models are, get differentiated from the utilitarian perspective. So if you look at already what's happening in the market, right? The profit pools are in applications, not in models. Sarah talked about codex running away. She didn't say, open eye is running away. She says, codex is running away.
Starting point is 00:14:59 Just say, that's the way I'm sure Dario says cloud code is running away. So you're seeing that. They're attacking profit pools. They're attacking profit pools because that's where the money is going to come from. The profit pools are in applications that companies can use. The profit pools are not in model usage by companies, Most companies have no idea how to use the models. So you can look at these companies in a way, Open AI Ananthropic as the new Microsoft office
Starting point is 00:15:21 coming in and doing all applications, all productivity software for organizations. No, I see there's going to be application companies which are going to arbitrage between models and solve your business problem. So you still think they won't go to the application letter because this is a big debate. Should you engage with Open AI and train their systems to then take your business from you. And Anthropic keeps releasing their legal model, their accounting model. And it does feel like in order for them to hit their revenue numbers, they might need to do what Microsoft did, which is release the office product on top of the operating system. See, if I'm a company, I don't want to write every piece of software myself. I want my HR system
Starting point is 00:16:04 software, which is agentic enabled, and AI enabled to be delivered by some application company. It could be a new AI application company. I want my. sales management system built by the new agentic AI sales force of the world, whether it's sales force somebody else. So I want applications. Now, what Sarah said is the profit pools are in the application layer.
Starting point is 00:16:24 That's why they want to be the application layer. So I think we're still waiting for that layer of companies to be invented or created where applications will sit. Because 50,000 companies need the same application. Why would I build it myself? It's highly inefficient. It's silly for me to use open ad directly
Starting point is 00:16:40 and rewrite my entire sales system because I'm smart, right? I'm not. I want somebody to do it for me. So I think that layer of companies are still not fully formed. We're still going to be waiting for it. You want a control plane, a harness,
Starting point is 00:16:52 and then... That's right. They will build the harnesses and the memory into those application layers. Now, the question is, how big is the application layer? Is it one application? Is it one enterprise application that does everything?
Starting point is 00:17:03 Or is it specialized application? When you did it and you kicked out this software vendor, you did it because they were being abusive in pricing. We still use this different vendor. What's that? We swapped out for a different manner. We just took more control. Love it.
Starting point is 00:17:15 So it really is a pricing issue. And that's why the Saspocalypse in some ways makes sense. They're not having pricing power because you could say, I'll just put 10 developers on this and I'll save $10 million. Yes. I think the part back to what Shammat said about the regulation or whether you want to regulate these higher powered models, the question is at some point in time when these newer models which are even more powerful get built, they will come at a different price point.
Starting point is 00:17:40 and they might have to go to a certain vetting process to understand what their capabilities are. But I think we're in a global race. I don't think holding back our models for three to six months is going to help us any. Somebody else is going to put them out in open source. I was shocked to hear when I was talking to CEO of one of these model companies.
Starting point is 00:17:57 It says the entire weights of their most recent model can fit on a USB stick. Say that again. The entire weight. The entire model weights of their newest model fits on a USB stick. That's the IP. That's incredible. Because all the data can be distilled in under 24 to 48 hours, then the model comes out.
Starting point is 00:18:18 I'm curious. So that's the IP. So are you telling me that we can hold on to that for six months? Right. We have a debate about how difficult it is to make a frontier model. Some companies are starting to think about making frontier models using their data advantage to build their own. Have you thought about that at Palo Alto? Because it does seem like you have proprietary knowledge on how security works.
Starting point is 00:18:45 Could you build your own large language model or a VSML, a small language model that would give you some advantage? Here's the part nobody talks about. Is the false positive rates on the models. What is the false positive rate on 4.8 and 5.5? No idea. You guys don't talk about it. We should. The false positive rate on Mythos was 30%.
Starting point is 00:19:08 Oh, wow. Right? So we thought it found something, but it hadn't. Yes. So the problem is, it's great for attack. It's horrible for defense. Because it finds 30% of time it finds something, I found a problem, and you say, let's plug the hole.
Starting point is 00:19:25 Wait, there wasn't a hole there in the first place. No missile inbound. Right. Yeah. So now the same problem applies enterprise. If you use a model without the right harnesses, the right training, you could be running into 10, 20% false positive rates. let's use the model to pay, I don't know, insurance claims.
Starting point is 00:19:42 Yeah. Oh, great. 10% and 20% false positive. I just lost money. The sycophantic nature of these is ridiculous. So the problem is not who wants the U.S. model. The problem is how do you take that model with 20% or 10% false positive and make it 0.01%?
Starting point is 00:19:58 In my business, I want 0%. Without losing the false negative. Sorry? Without losing the negative, the false negative. Yes. But it's like saying, hey, let's take the new self-driving car, Mercedes is going to use Opus 4.8, and you can just sit in the car and it's going to drive you. I'm not putting my kids in that car.
Starting point is 00:20:13 No. There's a 10% false positive rate. Are you? So there's a lot of work that happens post the model, which needs to happen to make this thing useful and effective in the business context. Let me slightly pivot for a second. You were for a very long time, the chief business officer at Google. You were the president of SoftBank. Now you're the CEO of Paul Alton-Hareg.
Starting point is 00:20:34 So let's play Armchair CEO. I'm chair CEO. I'm still bristling from David Friedberg trying to create a distinction between founders' CEOs and non-founder CEOs. Just saying. Just saying, David. By the way, it's false positives.
Starting point is 00:20:46 Sorry? False negatives, too. Give us what you would keep, what you would change, and what you like about the following companies. This is going to get recorded and put out there. We're just getting your thoughts. You're one of the smartest business people.
Starting point is 00:20:58 I don't get to live the glory of the all-in podcast. We're asking you a question. Don't. Hazing people and roasting people. Are you ready? Sure. Okay. Why you keep, what you change, what you like, what you don't like. Uber. In a world of the... I'm the board of it, dude. I can't talk about my...
Starting point is 00:21:15 Oh, you're on the board of Uber. I'm the board of Uber. I'm not going to talk about it. I didn't know that. Sorry. Dr. Dara, he's the CEO. He's a great guy. Okay. Waymo. Try to get me fired. Waymo. What do I like by Waymo? The cars work. It's amazing. They should have more. In many more cities around the world, faster.
Starting point is 00:21:33 I would say that to get her. I think she knows. Google writ large? I think Google's underrated. I think it's going to be the first $10 trillion company in our lifetime. I think they have all the assets that are needed to make this successful. I think people underestimate. You can be a model company. You still need to have a sales force that convinces customers to go out there
Starting point is 00:21:52 and embrace these bottles and buy them. And if you think about it, three hyperscalers have the biggest number of salespeople out there. Part of why they're a little bit undervalued is just the conglomerate nature is hard to understand. I don't know. You guys are smart of that stuff. I'm just a hired-hand CEO. I didn't say that. Reber said that.
Starting point is 00:22:09 Let's just be clear. I know. I was providing a thesis on recovery out of the SaaSpocalypse. Okay. Okay. Just to be clear. There's a way to segment that basket. And you're not in that basket.
Starting point is 00:22:22 I think you were making a distinction about how people who are founder, CEOs, have the right to take more risk and are allowed to take more risk. I was saying that. And I think you provide a unique, counterpoint to that. And there's not a lot of... And the false positive of your model. And by the way, I think the same was true of Jeff Weiner. And I think that there's a few other really great CEOs, but they are like Neo in the Matrix type anomalies. And I think you're one of those people. And there's a very rare kind of personality profile of someone that's willing
Starting point is 00:22:52 to take risk and take ownership of something that wasn't theirs in the first place and they make it theirs. And it's an extraordinarily unique trait. Far more unique, actually, than being a scalable founder. It's an incredible save. You're forgiven. Yeah, good safe. Let's go back to Armatured. Wow, that was incredible. Open AI.
Starting point is 00:23:09 He's more sycophantic than chat GPT. He's like, actually, I think we're the best. Let's go, let's go back to Armatured. I'm liking this. He has to be more often. Open AI. They do sell faster. Open AI.
Starting point is 00:23:22 They should sell faster, right? They should sell faster. I mean, you said it. Didn't you just say it when you said it when you said it was here, that Anthropics seems to have improved their ARR much faster than Open AI? I mean, that's just. statistics. They kind of went all in on enterprise and coding specifically. I think that's, the conversation right now is it's a race to take over the profit pools. If you are going to need
Starting point is 00:23:47 tens and tens of billions of dollars every year to get worth that, one gigawatt is 10 billion of revenue, what is it cost to build you? So what are the most exciting? So this is a great deal. So what are the most exciting profit pools then? So we got coding. That's been the breakout application over the past year. It's massive. You've got infrastructure, like you said, the new databases. I think cybersecurity is clearly one of them because of threats and patching cycle is so much more dynamic. There's a slight difference. Yes, as you can see, these models are trying to be the enablers of better cybersecurity,
Starting point is 00:24:21 which is good because all of us need to use them to test. And you're probably going to see, I mean, if you saw, Anthropics already made their cyber-capable model available generally so that everyone can use it. And I hope and I has got one, I'm sure Google has one too, but they understand this is a place where CSOs or chief security officers want to use it to test the code. So this is another profit pool. I think we haven't seen the onslaught against the application software companies yet.
Starting point is 00:24:48 I mean, there's tens and tens of billions of dollars in application software, which is waiting to get reinvented, as we talked about. I think eventually you'll see these people saying, what if I took this 40, 50, $100 billion time down, I can build a whole brand new backbone. with a Gentic AI, and it'd be so differentiated that it will cause customers to move. We are seeing it as a playbook in the accelerators now. In the year zero and year one companies, people are coming to us with the pitch.
Starting point is 00:25:14 This is $1,000 a seat per year, $500 a month seat, SaaS software. We can do it for less. We're going to charge them based on consumption. We're going to take 80, 90% of the cost out as to what you're doing with 8090. The two fastest places to make revenue in enterprises, the replacement dams. If you replace something, I already have a budget, it's easy. I take something bad or replace something better, I get money. So replacement times are beautiful. If you can replace an industry, replace the profit pool is great. The second place is consumer revenue.
Starting point is 00:25:47 It's a lot easier to get five bucks per user on a consumer side. Netflix. So that's where, I mean, look at it. I think we collectively probably pay more on subscriptions per month than we ever did historically. And you saw your cable bill was high. Yeah. Do you think that you're going to end up building more or less hardware in the future, if you had to guess? Hardware, even today, is the cheapest way to manage low-latency, high-throughput bits. You still get a data center. What's the data center doing? It's just managing high-throughput, low-latency bits.
Starting point is 00:26:21 That's why, if you look, financial services is the most reluctant industry to go to the cloud, because you increase latency. If you increase latency, you reduce profit. So if you look at every of your largest financial services company, that it's Goldman or JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, or these guys, they're doing hardware. Try to get them to run their business in the cloud. They can't because they will have higher latency.
Starting point is 00:26:43 They will lose money. So hardware is still be made. I mean, I remember when I used to buy Silver Lake and I heard Dell was done. Nobody wanted hardware. I think Dell might be back to like a $300 billion market cap. So hardware is still going to be around. We're going to need it. the fastest way to move.
Starting point is 00:27:01 Are hardware development cycles changing because of AI? Are you seeing a lot of generative design, stuff moving in silico that historically was manual and long cycle? Yeah, but the long pole in the tent is their design, right? Long pull in the tent is production. Today, you can't get a box produced because every piece of hardware componentary is back-ordered. Everything's expensive, and every factory in the world is back-ordered because, We're trying to build all these GPUs based chip cards for every day or the center of the world.
Starting point is 00:27:34 Do you think the U.S. is equipped to fill that supply chain need? Can we do that here? In 10 years? 10 years. With a firm top-down commitment. Well, I mean, the good news is that I think the hardware industry is seeing a bonanza of a lifetime. And generally, when you see a bonanza of lifetime, you can go commit 10, 20, 50, 100 billion dollars. And I've seen a CEO on television
Starting point is 00:27:59 coming to go $100 billion plan to go build more memory. So that's good. That means they have the money to go put the money in the ground, literally, to go build these things for the future. So I think that gets us more certain that the... I think the tax incentive has a big... It's a lot to do with that.
Starting point is 00:28:14 The accelerated depreciation on the CAPEX. You get 100% write-off in the first year, right? Under the... Just the final question as we wrap up. You, over the last eight years, you've grown organically very aggressively, but you've also been pretty inquisitive. You'll take shots, and they've generally worked.
Starting point is 00:28:32 So you have a ton of permission in the market. When you hear what Bill Hackman said about how there's this kind of overbeaten companies, there's a few that get celebrated, that's a ripe pool for you to pick from, but some of that would require you to go maybe a little horizontally far afield, some would say. How do you maintain the discipline, or do you see yourself at some point considering things that are not nearly so much right down the middle of cyber?
Starting point is 00:28:58 So I tell you what, until about an year and a half ago, we used to buy product companies and throw them into our go-to-market engine. We could rewire their back-ins so they can work better with our go-to-market engine. So for me, if I'm selling $10 million to a customer, next time I go to it later, if I can sell them 20, it's the most efficient way for me to advertise my go-to-market spend. So that was the model. We played that. We ran that playbook to not to 150 billion. Then we go to a point where it says,
Starting point is 00:29:24 oh, we see an inflection arriving in identity. It's going to be important from an agentic perspective, security perspective. So we bought a $25 billion company, which we closed three months ago. Now it's actually a very different opportunity as presented itself. And the different opportunity sort of goes like this.
Starting point is 00:29:42 If you can be the best at leveraging AI to run the most efficient enterprise business in the world, your operating margin can be far in excess of the industry. And if you can crack that code... Gross and net, you're saying. Gross in the 90s, net in the 40s. If you can crack that code, then it doesn't matter what you buy. I think the problem right now is the execution problem.
Starting point is 00:30:03 Most subscale companies cannot afford to go optimize their company and run it better. So if we can run our company much better than everybody else and have a higher operating margin, then the street will say, fine. If you take something at a 20% margin, make it a... Your first MNA was really tough, no? Like, they were pretty skeptical, and then you kind of shoved it in their face. They were pretty skeptical when they found a guy who didn't know cybersecurity, didn't know enterprise show up, who worked to Google. And they're, you know, the track record of people leaving Google and being successful out of Google is still varied.
Starting point is 00:30:33 So basically you're saying the menu's open. I think we need the next six to 12 months to figure out how this AI settles down and how can we use that effectively in enterprises. I think if you think about it, you know, the people keep hoping that. that less people we need to run companies, I actually have a counterview. I think we're gonna have more people at Palo Alto on the technology side than we've ever had before because AI is causing everything to ask for a transformation.
Starting point is 00:30:59 So I have more technical people today than I would have had if AI didn't exist. Ladies and gentlemen, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Nakeshawarra. Thank you guys. Thank you, sir.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.