Mark Mahaney

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75 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Mark Mahaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Prof G Markets · What to Buy When the Tech Sector is On Sale — ft. Mark Mahaney · 1 May 2025 podcast

Over the last two to three years, I think they also used AI to rebuild almost completely their ad tech stack post the Apple privacy changes two or three years ago. So I think they've already been deploying it. And you're right. They have one huge advantage, which they've got first party data, which nobody else, Google will have to.

But those two companies, you know, Facebook is one of the very few that has that kind of. level of data. So yeah, I think because they don't have a separate cloud business that people have wondered whether they're a real AI play. I absolutely agree with you, Scott. I think they are an AI play.

They're a play at the AI application layer, which we don't really have many examples of, but they're sitting right in front of us. I think they're a wonderful example of AI.

Google is the cheapest stock. I've thought about two or three overhangs on a stock which explain why it's the cheapest stock. It's got a DOJ overhang. Is it going to be DOJ roadkill? It's got an AI overhang. Are they going to be Gen AI roadkill?

You know, are we all moving towards ChatGPT or significant enough of us moving a significant enough of our queries over to ChatGPT perplexity and maybe some other entrance. So those are the two overhangs.

And then when Google prints up a quarter like they did last week, but then they disclose that their paid click growth grew 2% year over year, it kind of feeds into this thesis that, you know, this company is going to go negative in terms of unit growth soon. They talk about how AI overviews, AIO is really boosting their search queries.

But if that's true, why is your paid click growth only growing 2% year over year?

So in their quarterly filings, they disclose two metrics behind search. Paid click growth and then price per search, CPM. And so this last quarter, they did 9% to 10% search revenue growth. And what they disclosed in the queue was that they got there through 2% query growth and 7%-ish pricing growth.

And generally what investors want, growth investors want, is they want more growth to come from units than from pricing. And I know there's a lot of things that go into those metrics, and there's a lot of noise behind there. But still, that unit growth has been slowing for a couple of years, and they're concerned that it could go negative. Why would it go negative?

Because it's a very mature business. It's not saturated, but it's clearly mature. But the second thing is they may well be losing query share to investors. you know, to perplexity, but particularly to chat GPT. That's the overhand concern. I still like Google as a stock because I think this risk is more than priced in.

And I think they're doing a lot of great innovations to make the search product better. But that explains why the stock is so cheap.

Absolutely, it is. It's part of the option value in the name. I'm here in Waymo Central. I can look out my window here in San Francisco and see Waymo circling around the financial district. By the way, I can see Uber circling around too. It's just they're not marked. So it's not as obvious. But yeah, I've watched Waymo. I've written reports on Waymo. I mean,

just i'm a huge fan boy fan person of uh of waymo but it's still so early stage this is going to take years before it's truly mass market but they're seeing great adoption in some of their newer cities and i think that there's a chance here for um google to own the um avos the um autonomous vehicle operating system.

And there was a company 30 years ago that minted a fortune creating the operating system for computers. And now the open question, I think there's going to be a company that's going to mint a fortune creating the operating system, autonomous vehicle operating system for all vehicles. I think that's where Google's going to go with Waymo, whether they win that or not.

And my guess is that they probably will. They'll probably beat Tesla just because Tesla's just... Tesla's going to be focused on one vehicle, whereas I think what Waymo's going to do is develop this technology and then be willing to sell it to all OEMs. And so every car that gets bought and sold, my guess is starting 10 years from now,

There's going to be somebody's going to make money off the AV functionality in that. And right now, the leading player to do that is Waymo. So it's absolutely interesting for an investor who's thinking the next year or two. However, you got to first deal with DOJ. You got to first deal with this this AI, you know, this potential disruption before you can get paid on Waymo.

That's the challenge you have. But, you know, I love Waymo as part of the option value. And I don't know of another tech company. I'm sure there are some that have. have a Waymo, you know, Meta doesn't have a Waymo, but the most interesting one out there, the most interesting option value I see in Techland that I look at is Waymo with Google.

Well, the biggest overhang on Uber stock, it's not really a tariff issue. I mean, it's, it's, uh, It's got economic whatever. It's a cyclical stock, but it's also got interesting counter cyclical hedges, too, and an economic slowdown. They're just going to be more people needing a side hustle. There'll be more couriers, more drivers.

So there's actually a little bit of a counter cyclical hedge to Uber's business model that I don't see in any of the other models I look at. But the real issue here is robo taxis. And, you know, there's a lot of. debate on this, and some of it I think is a little bit noisy and unnecessary. Here's your simple action question.

I mean, do you think that Uber is going to have robo-taxis as part of its network in the future, five and 10 years down the road? I think they will. in part because I think consumers are going to want them, but in part because I think they're going to be multiple AV vendors. That's a risky assumption because we only really have one now, but one that's really commercially been tested.

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