The Information's TITV
00:17:21 · David Risher
[00:17:21] S3: Sure, so I think a couple things. I think first of all, we're very focused on the customer experience. I don't want to comment on those other guys, but my general view, so for example, I'll give you some stats and then kind of go back to the core of your question. Right now, are markets where we pick you up four to even six minutes faster than the other guys. We price very competitively against the other guys. We have we have a almost a 50 preference. It's like 28% versus 56% driver preference. People who drive on both platforms, they prefer driving on us. Okay. Why would that be the case? It's because we start over and over again with what does the customer want and work backwards from that. Now, so for example, you talk about the relationship and some of the reasons that Waymo has given for that breakup, and part of it is they couldn't figure out a customer experience that really worked well. It was a little bit unpredictable and so forth. We've been in very, very deep conversations with Waymo for a long time on exactly these same issues, We think we've got a great path forward with them. Let me give you the evidence there. We run a big 80,000 square foot depot in Nashville, where we're actually servicing Waymo's cars and doing a really good job there. But we're also providing demand to them, and it's working. The reason I can say it's working is we're expanding the fleet by multiples. It's kind of one of those things where I think companies just have different ways of doing business, and ours is collaborative and generative.
00:18:40 · Akash Pasricha, David Risher, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:18:40] S0: David, let me ask you one last question before you go. We saw the DoorDash Instacart deal. Yeah. Has DoorDash come knocking on your door at all? [00:18:50] S3: I think they're pretty focused on delivery. I think both of us have a similar philosophy, which is let's really do one thing really well, and then partners with other to create additional value. And I think that's what we're doing with Instacart, really trying to lean in the delivery side. We've had acquisitions in Europe for rideshare. We've had acquisitions around the world actually for rideshare. So I think both of us are going to kind of pursue those types of strategies and then work together how to kind of create these collaborations like Lyft Go. [00:19:16] S0: Great. Well, David, I want thank you for coming on. That is David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, here on TITV. Dropbox announced it is acquiring cloud storage company Tigris Data for $350,000,000 The company also announced its third quarter results, another roughly flat quarter with solid free cash flow margins around 40%. For more on all this, I want to bring on Ashraf Alkarmi, co CEO of Dropbox, for more color. Ashraf, welcome to show. Great to have you back. [00:19:45] S4: Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me again. [00:19:47] S0: Great to have you back. So you bought this company, Tigris, and I was looking at the description of the company. It's more of a developer storage company, and you obviously are more consumer storage. The first thing that came to mind is you couldn't have just built this in house. Why did you have to buy it?
00:20:06 · Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:20:06] S4: So let's start with a little bit of context. So Dropbox is almost celebrating our twenty year anniversary in a couple of months, and that's a huge milestone. For the last twenty years, we've built a lot of incredible infrastructure, and that happened to be an amazing product for people. So basically, have the ability to have a trusted content foundation. You're able to not just store things, but securely share them, apply permissions. And what we found as we started rolling out our own AI capabilities, that we have a structural advantage. People don't want to just use AI. They want to use AI where their content is. They want to be able to use AI in a trusted, safe way. You want to be able to apply permissions and sharing. You don't typically work in a siloed environment, you work with people. And so what we solved for people over the last two decades, we realized there's an opportunity to solve it for agents as well. And as we started thinking more about it, we realized that what we've built over the last twenty years has an insane potential to enable other developers and AI companies to build on top of. And so as we started looking at this, we found Tigris to be an incredible match for us. And I'll explain why. Number one, they have actual thousands of customers who are developers, both AI builders and large known AI companies like fal.ai, for example. And so not only do they have traction, they have a lot of experience building for AI developers. And this is a company that built their product from day one for agentic use cases. So they have capabilities like forking and snapshotting. I'll give you what it translates to in simple terms. If you build agentic or AI workflows, you're gonna get better speed, better latency, and you're gonna be able to do things much faster and closer to your GPUs. So essentially, they've built their product from the ground up in a way that is really compelling. And what we could do with them, the match here, is we can help with taking this to more customers, and we can also help bring the exabyte scale efficient infrastructure we built in our own data centers to that company. So The Match was really great, and it accelerates significantly the opportunity.
00:22:31 · Akash Pasricha, David Risher
[00:22:31] S0: So are you talking to the replets and the lovables of the world about trying to make Tigris or, I guess, whatever you call it, DGX... Is it... DGX... Dropbox cloud? Is that what [00:22:44] S3: you're calling? [00:22:45] S0: Yeah. So we're Are you talking are you talking about them making it the the the de facto developer storage tool? I mean, is that the distribution strategy here?
00:22:45 · Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:22:45] S0: Yeah. So we're Are you talking are you talking about them making it the the the de facto developer storage tool? I mean, is that the distribution strategy here? [00:22:55] S4: Yeah. The strategy is twofold. One is to enable a developer motion that people can come in, pick up an object storage API designed for agentic use cases. We're starting with object storage, but we're not stopping there. That the things we built over the last twenty years will also be added as APIs. So I'm going give you examples. When you store content, you need to apply typically if you're building a product capabilities on top. So who has access to that content? Can you share it? Is it secure? So there's a lot of governance on top of that content that we have today in Dropbox that will add as set of APIs. We also have capabilities to edit and transform over 300 file types because over the last twenty years, we built these capabilities. So how to process the content? So now it does not only can just drop in stuff, it can actually govern it, it can process it. And so these are capabilities that we wanna add. So part one of the motion is to enable developers in a self serve fashion to come in and pick up these APIs and use them. And part two is going after companies that are building at scale AI solutions and need to store things. You and I both know that more agents means more content. And so we have a lot So [00:24:12] S0: you are talking to all these AI coding companies about about trying to make this the de facto tool, sounds like.
00:24:12 · Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:24:12] S0: you are talking to all these AI coding companies about about trying to make this the de facto tool, sounds like. [00:24:22] S4: Yeah. As an API, yes. And not just AI coding. We're talking about companies that, you know, you think of a, think of Higgsfield. There's a lot of companies that store a lot of content need to process it. Right. Right. There's a lot of different audience for this. Again, from self serve AI developers all the way to companies that have established products, yes. [00:24:46] S0: Right. Okay. So last time we had you on, we were talking about Dash, which is another AI tool that you guys are developing. This is of course the tool that will help people make sense of all of the context, I guess, that lives within their gigabytes, terabytes of Dropbox files. [00:25:08] S4: Sometimes petabytes, yes. [00:25:11] S0: Petabytes. I didn't know what came after terabytes, to be honest. So I asked you the question last time. I said, How are you thinking about monetizing it? You said, Well, we're going to test a few different ways in the quarter, and we are going to start monetizing it. Then they asked you on the earnings call, they said, What's the monetization strategy, but where it's at? And you didn't really answer the question. So, I mean, where is that at? How much money is Dash making you, if any at all? When are we going to start charging for it?