Next in Tech | Ep. 211: M&A in 2025

View Full Transcript

Eric Hanselman: Welcome to Next in Tech, and S&P Global Market Intelligence podcast where the world of emerging tech lives. I'm your host, Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst for Industry and Company Data at S&P Global Market Intelligence. And today, we're going to be diving back into the M&A and  funding and capital markets environments. And joining me to discuss all of this our returning guests, Brenon Daly and Scott Denne. Welcome back to the podcast to both of you. 
 

Brenon Daly: It's great to be back. 
 

Scott Denne: Thanks, Eric. 
 

Eric Hanselman: It is great to have you in interesting and I was going to say, tumultuous times, but there's certainly a lot going on. There's been a lot that has been going on. I guess maybe why don't we start off with a little bit of background and a little bit of the M&A side. Brennan, where are we coming from? And we've got some interesting perspectives on what happened last year, and I guess, an entree to what's going on this year. 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. It's great to be back on the pod. And I'll say from the outset, the tech M&A market is not where we want it to be. I guess that's the sort of the headline. We can get into any number of reasons why that is. But basically, we're not even back to sort of pre-pandemic levels in terms of spend, in terms of valuations, in terms of just overall activity. And the reason is we're finding ourselves kind of the -- at this very moment, right, M&A should be picking up. right? If we sort of step back and look at the market, right, we're in a time where tech stocks as anybody who has them in their 401(k) or works at a company and has equity, 2024 was a pretty good year. Tech stocks were up about 30%. The same isn't true for valuations in the M&A market, right? Because what we're seeing in the M&A market is a lot of capitulation deals, like a lot of companies that didn't participate in that 20%, 30% run on Wall Street, the companies that got left behind went private. So that's in the public market, right, putting pressure on the multiple. In the private market, I mean, any start-up could raise money in 2021. Scott is going to talk a little bit more about that. But like virtually, if you had a name and a napkin and a business plan, you could raise money in 2021. today, it's a much, much tighter funding environment. And so, a lot of start-ups are seeing the money that they raised in 2021 say, they're kind of burning through it. And they're looking for kind of a soft landing. Obviously, both of those types of transactions, of which there are hundreds in the global tech M&A market, that's -- obviously, those are low multiple transactions. Those are sort of capitulation deals. So that's putting pressure on the multiples. We're not seeing like the expansion deals like, okay, Google and Wiz notwithstanding. That was an anomalous event. 
 

Eric Hanselman: We can certainly get into all of the specifics. But this is the last time you run, you were talking about this realignment of expectations in terms of the environments and kind of multiples that people are thinking about and the economic realities that we're going home in that. 
 

Brenon Daly: Basically, the prevailing valuation last year for tech M&A was half the multiple that it was in 2021, right? That's just a stark fact. And complicating all -- any transaction in any tech market is entrepreneurs don't think that way. right? They're always thinking of up and to the right. There are always up rounds, up rounds, up rounds, the post-money valuation on your company is always the previous times 2 or whatever number you come up with your backers. And when... 
 

Eric Hanselman: We're better, we're doing more, the product is better. We must be worth more, right? 
 

Brenon Daly: Exactly. And when we exit, if we do decide to sell, it's going to be at a premium because all along the way, we've been bumped up in valuations. And that scenario broke because in 2023, which was the great tech reset, right, 2023 was a great tech reset where companies basically just said like, yes, we're not doing deals. We're just not doing deals. We're firing people. we're closing offices. We're getting rid of these deadweight products, right? And all 3 of those strategies, by the way, are directly orthogonal. They fly in the face of M&A because M&A brings people places and products, right? So, M&A was out of the question in 2023. Spending overall for tech M&A in 2023 hit its lowest level in a decade. So, roll forward into 2024 last year, everybody expected, hey, market's back. We're going to pick up right where we left off. We're going to get running again. And it's going to be the tech M&A market that we all know and love. And it didn't happen because last year, everything kind of got pushed. We have thousands of clients. And at any given time, there are dozens of them in M&A processes. And what we heard throughout the year last year was deals getting pushed out. Let's just wait until we get some stability around the elections. Let's wait until we get some relief from J.PalL, stop raising rates to a 20-year high and maybe we can get some financing relief. So, it was a question of last year, like we want to transact and -- but this sort of overhang of uncertainty around politics or financing just kind of prevented those transactions from happening. Then both of those got resolved, both of those concerns got resolved in late 2024 and the market just sputtered and it's continuing to sputter, right? Spending in Q4, M&A spending in Q4 was 1/4 of what it was in 2021, right? $50 billion, which is nothing, right? I mean, Google just spent $30 billion in a single deal. And we had $50 billion total for 3 months for every company, every transaction. So, the market just sputtered, it lost momentum. And the final point on what's happening in the market right now and what's lacking in the market and why is this -- there's not any momentum. It's kind of like investing on Wall Street, honestly. It's green days turn into green days, turn into green days, turn into green days, and that's how stocks triple in 2 years, right? There's just a certain momentum in investing or acquiring. And as I say, in 2021, we were knocking out $200 billion worth of spend quarter in and quarter out. every single quarter. As I say, this quarter, Q1, we're almost done with Q1. It will be like and $1.25. So, half of what it was. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and we saw that in sort of the sentiment data that we see in studies as well, right? I mean what we were seeing out of the banker study, every year, you -- the team puts together the big deal, the decision on where that went. And that was not clear cut, the Golden Tombstone Award. That was, I guess, a little challenging for people to come up with their favorite deal of the year. 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. I mean it was sort of -- it was representative of an underwhelming year basically. right? It was a subpar year. Last year, it was about 20% below -- in terms of overall tech M&A spend. It was about 20% lower than the 10-year average. And there wasn't really like a defining transaction. And it's important because investors and acquirers look for signals, right? There are companies that are bellwethers, whether Cisco back in Internet 1.0 was a bellwether. IBM in its day was a bellwether, and they set the tone for the overall market, or they help to set the tone for the overall market. And we didn't see that sort of like breakthrough transactions. Instead, what we saw in my world in M&A was companies that realized they weren't a bellwether, and they had no chance to become a bellwether, and so they looked for somewhere else. And it's -- that's kind of the public market version, but it's even more pronounced, and Scott has done a lot of work on this. That's happening in the public market very visibly. But in the private market, I would argue it's probably even more pronounced. 
 

Eric Hanselman: So, Scott, a bit more dower on the private side? Or how do you see it? 
 

Scott Denne: Well, I mean, those -- as Brenon pointed out, the public market and the private market often track each other in terms of valuation. And in 2024, that was something that sort of separated where we saw these rising valuations for public companies and the reading on private software valuations, in particular, just headed in the other direction. That continued to tick down. There's always a gap, of course. They're never the same. A private company has better -- a public company rather has better liquidity and so on and so forth. They tend to be a little bit larger, a little bit more of a rarity. So, they command a higher multiple, but those multiples for private companies were at a historically large gap in terms of the median multiple. I think the median multiple for a software company was somewhere in the neighborhood of private sales, roughly 4x trailing revenue, definitely well off what we were seeing in 2021, probably like something similar to what we're seeing really before there was a flood of private equity in the software market at the sort of midpoint of the last decade. Now we are seeing those public company multiples come down, but sort of begs the question of how much further do the private company multiples come down? And the answer is we don't know because none of them are getting bought. There haven't been. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Deals are not happening. 
 

Scott Denne: Yes. There was wiz and its investors, and its executives are -- have every reason to celebrate because they've got a massive return. But does that trickle down to the rest of the market? It's really tough to make a case for that. And in some ways, the return on that kind of investment highlights the broader problem in the venture industry because you need a $32 billion return to have $32 billion exit to have a venture return where one deal can make the entire fund, I don't have the numbers of the return exactly off the top of my head, but it's significant. Even if it's -- even for the last money in, I think it was $12 billion was the post money on Wiz. You're looking at a $32 billion exit. Of course, there could be structure and whatnot. But ballpark, you're looking at 2.5x and change. That's a good outcome for just a couple of years in the early-stage guys, even far better IRR. But put it in context, Wiz is $32 billion. It's almost 50% larger than the next best return ever. So, the M&A knowledge base, I think #2 is WhatsApp, Facebook, again, way back when could play with its own lofty valuation was willing to do so, paying up $19 billion for a company who was at $16 billion, but either one, the point stands for a company with like $50 million in revenue at the time. So that whiz is such an anomaly really raises the question of what is everybody else going to do because there aren't going to be many deals that size. Even if you expand the cohort to $1 billion or more in an M&A exit, there are, in a good year, 10 companies that get that. I think there's quite a few more in 2021. But at the same time, VCs, pumps, S&P Market Intelligence post-money data shows that they created about 550 tech unicorns in that year alone, a few more before that, a few more after it. So, there's a -- how do we get from creating -- having this portfolio full of, let's loosely call it, 700 or so unicorns when 5 to 10 are trickling out through the public markets. And then on a good year, 10 more are getting an exit that's at that $1 billion valuation, which isn't always a great outcome because -- we saw this in the ServiceNow deal when they acquired MoveWorks. MoveWorks, they -- it was another anomaly, not a record-breaking exit, but a pretty good one if you were the seed Series A, Series B investor. They sold for $2.8 billion. I think the seed round was typical stuff, probably like a $9 million valuation. That's a good return, even though it took 8 years to get there, all pretty typical stuff for a good outcome. But the last money in came in at $2.1 billion valuation in our favorite year 2021, of course. So, the investors there making the assumption that structure and there are some unknowns, it's a private company. But if they went in at a 1x liquidity preference, at $2.1 billion, that means their return is about 30%, 35%. Well, in that same time, the S&P is up 46%. So are their LPs or their investors paying to -- paying 2 and 20 to get a bit below the index. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Yes. It starts to get a little painful there. 
 

Brenon Daly: And just to pick up on that, I mean, Eric, you're asking sort of like give us -- take the temperature of the M&A market, right? And like put what Scott said and what I said together. And it was like in 2023 and 2024 and into 2025, honestly, you didn't sell unless you needed to, right? Like that was the driver. It wasn't the buyer expanding it was the seller given up basically. 
 

Eric Hanselman: And so that means you've now got this whole set of folks out there who are getting a little long in the tooth. Yes. And Scott, to your point, those portfolios, not much movement in a while. 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. And I mean -- and that's because the market is imbalanced, right? Like there's a supply and demand. I mean every market, you can -- and venture is just one market, right? And there's an imbalance, right? And it's going to become increasingly problematic, not just for venture capital, but for the other private capital folks, much larger private capital folks, private equity, right, those buyout shops. they're sitting on even more tech assets and available capital than venture capitalists. And they're even at a more disadvantaged starting point, right? They need to transact. Like that's the name of the game. They are deal machines. They don't care if they're buying a retail shop or a retail software. It just goes into the machine and then the private equity firm gets on with its real job, which is to raise the next fund which, by the way, is $20 billion plus now is kind of the individual firms are raising $20 billion buyout funds. Some of them are coming down because LPs aren't really willing to quite fund the way they were. But the point being is like we've never had more capital in private equity firms for tech M&A. We've never had more private equity investors, right, just sheer number of investors. And they've never had more portfolio companies. And yet year-on-year, '23 into '24, they flatlined. -- right? They just -- and you can obviously point to Fed funds rate being the highest in 20 years. Of course, that's the cost of capital. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Money actually costing something and minor things. 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes, I mean, if you can borrow for nothing and go buy it, and I mean that's -- I could make money on deals... 
 

Eric Hanselman: Work. 
 

Brenon Daly: But -- so now they're having to work through much like -- it's not directly analogous, but it's somewhat like the venture capital portfolios. Like they're having to look through there and actually make financial decisions that don't assume an up round -- and that's a really hard conversation to have. It's -- I mean, it goes against -- again, like it goes against human nature basically, right? It's like you're worth less today than you were yesterday. That hurts. Nobody wants to say that. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Not a happy thing. So, but AI, I'm... 
 

Brenon Daly: Surprised it took us this long... 
 

Eric Hanselman: Anything on that's just grind up a little unicorn horn and you've got the appropriate dust there to make that happen, right? 
 

Scott Denne: I don't want to get into a debate about which asset class is worse off. But private equity, and I'm overgeneralizing because, first of all, the line between the 2 is blurrier than ever. The types of companies that private equity has acquired, especially in that 2021 period do look more venture-y than they had in the past. But still, again, generalizing, if you've got a private equity-owned business that has really just one owner to report to that probably generates some cash that's probably bigger. It has more options beyond M&A or IPO. There's all this private credit sitting on the sidelines that can be -- they can do some Dividend, something that's kind of equity, kind of not. There's all sorts of options or more options, whereas if you're a venture-backed company or at least looking at the venture portfolio broadly, it's still -- yes, there are continuation vehicles that some have tried and will try and have worked. But it's really just you got to get to an IPO, you got to get to M&A. A few of them, yes, can play in the private credit markets and so on, but fewer. And to go to Gen AI, VCs are really still selling dreams. Private equity is selling functional oiled if a little mature businesses. So, the Gen AI piece Brandon, you and I have covered a lot of tech cycles and Eric as well. This one is odd and different in so many ways, just setting aside the debate of how big of a change will it ultimately become and how fast will that take hold. If you compare it to other cycles, you had the Internet went way up, came down, took 5 or 6 years before VCs really landed on the next thing, which was sort of simultaneous cloud plus mobile, a lot of change happening. Right now, you had a 2021, mostly 0 interest rate environment led boost to venture valuations and venture funding with a little bit of a story that, oh, well, COVID accelerated the TAM in all these digital markets, which did not ultimately play out. You fast forward to today, and they're not even starting to recover and yet here's the next thing, Gen AI that if you're a VC, you can't afford to invest in it because you haven't returned any capital. And DPI, I looked up our data through our partnership with Preqin, where what's the DPI, the distributed to paid-in capital, how much cash have VCs returned through the first 3 full years of their 2019 to 2021 vintage funds, and it's below 10%. Now that number would almost never be above 50% or 100% because we are still talking about its early days 3 years in, but usually, there's a couple of wins you can point to. So, when you go back to your LPs for the next fund or even just the next distribution to make this investment, they have cash and they're willing to hand it over. Now they don't have the DPI, the enough time hasn't gone back where they haven't forgotten about the wound and yet they're asking for more money for Gen AI. And they have to because whether you are bearish or bullish, it's the theme of the moment and no VC can go to their LPs and say, it's overhyped and we're passing. 
 

Brenon Daly: And Eric, just to put a point on it since you asked most broadly, right, like -- so my company -- a company I worked at went public in January of 1999. -- in one of -- when the browser was -- so the browser was the most disruptive piece of technology, right, much like ChatGPT is disruptive. Mobile was disruptive. So that trend, I wrote that up. I was a paper millionaire. I would just say that I'm still working. I'm on this call with you talking about the next trend, right? And then in M&A, I'm looking back on IoT, and I'm thinking like, man, a boat load of capital went into IoT, where we were going to connect everything, like my fridge was going to send a text to my phone to remind me to pick up milk and my car would know where... 
 

Eric Hanselman: Be connected to your jet pack, right? 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. I mean it was all going to -- everything is going to be wired and work seamlessly. And like, yes, maybe, but not really. Like Cisco bought Jasper, okay, that $1 billion deal as a platform deal, horizontal deal, good. Samsara, they got some traction, great. But like you can't really point to like many billion-dollar exits from IoT and... 
 

Eric Hanselman: A lot of cash went into it, not a lot. 
 

Brenon Daly: A lot of cash went into it. 
 

Eric Hanselman: And now I sort of wonder the other piece of this on the AI side is that we've talked about the role of strategics as being another potential avenue. And the concerns that now you've got all of what are the classic strategic investors who are sinking a lot of their resources into their own investments now. Is that taking a lot of that capital off the table? 
 

Brenon Daly: That's the same thing. I mean, like everybody is like, oh my God, Google, $30 billion for Wizz. That's amazing. That's -- as Scott said, that's 50% larger than the previous VC exit. It's like doe, Google is going to spend $30 billion on CapEx next quarter. like Microsoft too, like it's -- and that's just chips and data centers and whatever, right? Not to mention like how many engineers -- salaried engineers they have unleashed on AI, right? How much -- how many resources they have moved, how big DeepMind is now and how hard they're hitting DeepMind to get returns on that, same with Azure, right? And I mean, they're doing aqua hires, right? They're not acquiring. I mean, they're investing in OpenAI. They're taking the dude who got the boot or left there from Anthropic, right? And -- but they're not like buying -- except for ServiceNow, like they're not buying the stuff. right? They're partnering and everybody loves a partner. It's like, I love you, Matt, I love you, too. It's great. We should have a partnership totally. But like we're going to keep engineering this, and we're going to do a lot of it in-house. ServiceNow went out of house, okay, fair enough. They had an existing Agentic business, $200 million ARR business, so not bad, bigger than what they bought probably. But they felt the need to go out of house. I'm going to suggest that that's going to be the exception. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, I mean, Scott, on our webinar we've done now 1.5 months ago, a lot of that data that you had in terms of where the hyperscalers have sunk a lot of capital, those numbers are huge. 
 

Scott Denne: And they actually -- those were -- so that webinar was, I think, in January. So, it was based on S&P's reported numbers and the S&P estimates for their CapEx spending. And I think all of them definitely as a group, though, spent more than the Street was expecting. So, the numbers are even bigger. 
 

Brenon Daly: And to Scott's earlier point about venture capitalists can't afford to do it, but they have to do it in the investments. that hyperscalers are -- they can't afford to do it because they're sitting on record amounts of cash, and they're doing it anyway, right? Like Satya is upfront, he says, we are buying ahead of demand. Like that is speculative purchase, right? Those are real dollars going to assumed demand, okay? And that's why DeepSeek just knocked the knees out of everybody was because we were operating in this assumption, right? Like I'm paying -- I'm buying as many Blackwells as I can get my hands on or whatever I'm doing. I'm going to CoreWeave and they're going to hook me up and I'm paying -- I mean, Microsoft, was it 60% of CoreWeave's revenue is coming from Microsoft? Okay. 
 

Eric Hanselman: Although they have sort of backed off a little bit in terms of what they were looking to push out in their IPO. 
 

Brenon Daly: Because, again, we -- I mean, life is assumptions, right? Like business is making assumptions, right? I assume AI is going to be a profitable, productive enhancement to my software. So, I'm going to either buy it or I'm going to build it, right? Microsoft looked at it and said like, "Hey, we missed mobile, 0 to show for that. We tried ad tech to be Google, but Scott knows firsthand, that didn't work out so well. So, they couldn't afford to miss this, right? -- it's really similar to the VCs. They can't afford to not invest. Whether it ultimately works out or not, we'll see. But the hyperscalers and a lot of the big tech companies can't afford not to invest. Like when you look at Google, Google is -- its ad business, which is still overwhelmingly even with the growth of its cloud business and being the established #3 in a huge market, still overwhelmingly an advertising business. But if you take another plug for S&P Visible Alpha looking forward at the consensus estimates for the next few years of its advertising business, it's going to be if those ultimately pan out, its advertising business can be a single-digit grower for probably barring any massive shift forever. And what is Google's future patterns in regulation, like... 
 

Scott Denne: Yes. That's -- yes, this is just in terms of like looking at the market size and Google's share and whatnot. There are, as you point to, even bigger questions, but just even the base case of it continues to grow, its advertiser -- it's had years of single-digit growth, but never an extended trend of single-digit growth, and that's what it's facing now. So, what happens when Wall Street starts looking at Google as this isn't a growth company. This is a traditional advertising business like a cable company. They have to grow that cloud business and Gen AI is the vector. 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. And compounding that problem or that challenge rather, is the very fact that AI effectively could replace Google Search. 
 

Eric Hanselman: And then what happens to the ad business? 
 

Brenon Daly: Exactly. So that helps explain sort of in the big corporate chessboard, why you pay $32 billion for a security when you're a distant third in a highly competitive market, but still double-digit growth, right? Like AWS is putting up whatever, $30 billion, $40 billion a quarter. right? And they're still growing at 20%. So, the Google folks down in Mountain View are looking at that and going like that's sustainable, that's durable, right? That's what we want out of AI. We don't want people like querying Gemini asking for like recipe plans for the week, which is most -- I don't know, 99% of the ChatGPT and Gemini queries or whatever. That stuff is money losing. But if they do it right with security because as you know, I mean, you're a network guy, but you're also -- you get dragged into a lot of security conversations. because you know that like that is foremost in any consideration for where do we put our workloads and security is top of the list as a consideration. 
 

Eric Hanselman: It all gets back to all the prospects in InfoSec, right? -- right. So where are we headed with this? Where does this take us in the immediate future? Do we continue to sort of bubble along? I mean it seems like somebody's got to actually start to do some transactions to actually shake some of this out on both sides of this equation, public and private, right? 
 

Brenon Daly: Yes. I'll start maybe public market, Scott, and you take private market, okay? We'll divvy up the landscape that way. And in the public market, I mean, keep in mind, Wall Street is rewarding the CapEx spend. They're saying fine, keep spending, spend ahead of demand. That's great. And then if Microsoft gets on a call and says, "Oh, we were capacity constrained, which is -- I don't know how you do that if you're spending $30 billion a quarter and you're capacity constrained, something's wrong. But if Wall Street is giving you the green light to build for AI, whatever your particular flavor of software is, whether it's infrastructure or apps or whatever, if you've got the halo of AI, run with it, run with it and make -- do some business. That's what I would say because right now, we're at a kind of a -- the play time with AI is over. for companies, right? Like I'm talking from the end user point of view, like 2.5 years in, everybody has done some cool per tricks with ChatGPT and maybe we've worked on it a little bit at our -- on our office laptop, maybe we've done some queries and some -- this and that. But like demonstrably changing and importantly, improving the efficiency of our workflows, that's still questionable. And it's questionable because none of the vendors have figured out how to price this stuff. Microsoft is just better, Branded -- so how much do I pay for better, Eric? 
 

Eric Hanselman: Well, and this is -- we see this in all of our studies, right, which is we still haven't figured out what are the KPIs for on all this stuff and everybody wants this to happen. But I mean so... 
 

Brenon Daly: So, you end up with like, okay, do I do per agent? Am I still on per seat? Is it consumption model? Do I have to rev share if I'm running on something else? Do I do a value-based price? Like how do you do that? I mean -- and just not to single out Microsoft, but look at Microsoft, I mean, they know a few things about selling enterprise software. They've had some experience doing that. They can't figure out how to do Copilot. And I mean, ChatGPT coming with a $20,000 a month fee for deep research subscription. Like sure, maybe there's 2 people on the planet -- but like that just says to me like, hey, if this is going to be like the technology, I will give you -- 100% give you that AI will change the way software runs and the productivity that we get out of it, just like a spreadsheet, just like Excel, change bookkeeping. But -- and there will be value accruing there. But it is not as simple as the last iteration. -- of software enhancements. So that's the public market challenge. On a smaller scale, Scott, the start-ups have their own problems to figure out. I mean... 
 

Scott Denne: Yes. Yes. I mean, looking at private markets, and it really doesn't matter whether you're looking to buy or sell an early-stage start-up, a more mature ERP business. Gen AI, no question is the key debate. And I'd say the sooner that debate gets clarity is the sooner you'll see an uptick, barring -- setting aside all the macros that none of us can predict that are weighing down the deal economy right now, just the sooner that debate gets a little more settled, the sooner you'll see more deals. So right now, it's such an unknown. If you have a private equity-owned software company or an interested private equity buyer, and you can't articulate why Gen AI is a tailwind for your business, that deal doesn't get done. So even if you're not in that category, so the reason that question comes up is because it's a total unknown how Gen AI could impact for better or worse, a variety of different categories. As Brendan said, the pricing is confusing. The current level of demand is unclear. The best, most scalable use cases are still an open question. So, when we get clarity, now when does that happen? That's a tougher question to answer, but that's what's really needed to have a boost here because then that's when you'll see not only people feeling more comfortable to make a certain acquisition, but also companies in danger of being left behind or feeling like they are starting to do a little bit of panic buying at lofty valuations and in past deal cycles or past tech cycles rather, that's what's driven those early and big outcomes like Jasper and IoT was when you had enough of a use case or at least you felt you had visibility into what was going to happen and you had to either aggressively go after it or defend against it. in Gen AI, it's just too early, which is why we haven't seen lots of VC investment in Gen AI, but very little M&A, the move work that we mentioned earlier, does anecdotally feel like I do see a little more cadence of announcements, but not big, massive deals, just tuck-ins to address specific and narrow use cases. But to get past that into one of these classic massive strategic acquirers beyond ServiceNow, Salesforce, Google, take your pick, making a big bet there, they have to have just enough clarity to give them serious concern or see a serious opportunity. 
 

Eric Hanselman: We've got to get to a point at which things become that much clearer. I guess we'll have to see where that winds up. But we are at time for this episode. And hey, great to have you both back when things happen, and we get a little better definition than going on. Well, this has been great. Thank you both for being back. 
 

Brenon Daly: Thanks, Eric. Great to see you again. 
 

Scott Denne: Yes. Thanks, Eric. 
 

Eric Hanselman: And that is it for this episode of Next in Tech. Thanks to our audience for staying with us, and thanks to our production team, including Sophie Carr, Feranmi Adeoshun, Kyra Smith and Adam Kovalsky on the marketing and events teams. I hope you'll join us for our next episode where we're going to be touching on another hot and buzzy topic NVIDIA GTC is actually going on and John Abbott is going to be on to get his take on what was happening and what he saw. So, I hope you'll join us then because there's always something Next in Tech.