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Anthony Wood
Stephen Desaulniers | CNBC

Roku has built a dominant position as the co-leading streaming video distribution platform in U.S. households, in a near dead-heat with Amazon. The two companies own more than 70% market share, according to research firm Parks Associates.

But can Roku maintain its lead over Apple and Google if Americans’ future is a house controlled by a voice-enabled smart-home device that can turn on and off a television and change the channel?

That’s not what people want, claims Roku CEO and founder Anthony Wood. He spoke with CNBC’s Alex Sherman in an exclusive interview.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Wood’s thoughts on Roku’s culture can be found here.)

Sherman: Let’s talk about interactivity. Is it just a matter of time before Roku lets me watch sports and bet from my TV at the same time and do other sorts of cool stuff people have never seen before?

Wood: It’s a complicated question. A couple points. One, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but even today, many companies just don’t really understand the attitude people have when watching TV. They want to sit there, drink their beer, and watch TV. You’ve seen over the years, there was this whole phase where there were interactive TV companies. They all failed, because people don’t want to do that. My philosophy is to keep things very simple. So any time interactive ideas have come up, we would not do that.

That said, there are some exceptions. For example, advertising — we offer interactivity to our ad partners. If you see an ad you’re interested in, like a car ad, you can browse, or do something simple like press a button and send me a text with an offer. So, we experiment with that type of interactivity because it doesn’t get in the way of the viewing experience. If you want to get a free coupon because you’re interested in a commercial, press a button, you can do that.

One of our main goals as a platform is to help you find content that you want to watch. Things like universal search — where you can search across services for an actor or a movie — and get information about if something is free on one service or you have to pay for it on another, that type of interactivity is something that people love, if it’s around discovering content. So, we’re looking for other ways to help people discover content that’s interactive in its nature.

In terms of sports betting — maybe. We’ll see.

Is the future of the TV ecosystem one where every device in the home is connected, and I just call out to my TV and it turns on, and I don’t need a remote anymore?

We are incredibly focused on being the best TV experience. That’s why we’re successful. There are a lot capabilities that I think are silly. People generally do not want to talk to their TV to turn it on, for example. Because as soon as you turn it on, you need to pick up your remote control anyway.

Well, you do today, maybe, but theoretically, you don’t have to, right? Why can’t I control everything by voice? Isn’t that easier?

I don’t think people want to talk to their TV. In cases where it’s faster and easier — search, for example — we make voice remotes. We focus on integrating voice into areas where it can really make a difference, like entering your password or your e-mail address or searching — those are things where it’s tedious to tap stuff out on your remote. But other areas, like just scrolling up and down or the power button, it’s actually easier to use the remote.

But I always lose my remote.

Well, that’s why we let you use your phone as a remote. We also have a cool feature called remote finder, where we help you find your remote for you. We’re big believers in remotes. You look at Chromecast, they made a huge bet that people wouldn’t use their remotes. That wasn’t the case.

One topic that investors are curious about is international expansion. Do you have a broad road map for international? I know you’re in Canada, Mexico and Brazil a little bit. But there’s a whole world out there. What’s the plan? Lay it out for us.

We have a strategy. We have tactics and road maps which we don’t disclose. But our strategy is pretty straightforward. If you look at the evolution of our business model, first we focus on scale, and once you have enough scale, then you start focusing on monetization. That’s the same strategy we’re talking on international. With most countries, we are still at the building scale stage as opposed to the monetization. There are some exceptions. With Canada, as you mentioned, that’s the first country we entered. Now we sell ads there and we have The Roku Channel there. So we’re doing monetization there.

The other part of our strategy is using the same techniques that have worked for us in the U.S. and applying them internationally. So, focus on growing our smart TV market share — we’re No. 1 in smart TV market share in the U.S. We’re No. 1 in Canada. We’re No. 2 in Mexico. Samsung is No. 1 there, but we’re catching up fast. So focusing on smart TVs and selling low-cost players is how we gain scale. For example, when we launch a player now, we launch it in many countries at the same time as opposed to just the U.S.

If you look at all the countries that we’ve entered, our market share is growing and we’re doing well. Android has been the default choice internationally for a long time because it was the only option. So they’re our biggest competitor. But as we add new countries and start focusing on them, we have an awesome solution. The same reason we’ve won in the U.S. is the same reason we expect to win internationally.

I’ll get into this in the main feature more in depth, but after you started Roku, you worked for Reed Hastings at Netflix for about nine months. Have you modeled your leadership at Roku after him? And if not, has there been anyone you’ve tried to emulate?

My relationship with Netflix is obviously very important to Roku, but I only worked there for nine months. It was nine months. It was a great experience. I’ve got lots of people I respect, but I haven’t tried to copy anyone in particular. I used to read a lot of business books when I was younger, but now I’ve stopped.

Is there a reason you stopped? Did you feel like you just didn’t get any use out of them anymore?

I think you go through different phases in your career. When you first start out, just like when you first start out in college, you just have no clue. So, reading books and talking to people is a good way to learn the basics. As you advance, I think, you become much more experienced, and you find that a lot of the books are not helpful. Like, “Oh yeah, if I didn’t know anything, that’s what I’d do,” but that’s not actually the right way to do it.

One of the best things I’ve done to help me build my skills since Roku has grown is to have an adviser — kind of like a coach. He used to be the CEO of a public company. So when I have issues, I talk to him. That’s David Krall. He was the CEO of Avid. He works one day a week for us being an adviser. Talking to an experienced CEO is helpful.

Describe yourself as a leader.

What I try to do is hire good people — people I want to work with, so there’s a good chemistry and team — and devise a strategy and some high-level goals. I might come up with the strategy or work with the team to develop the strategy, but there will be a strategy. I think I’m pretty strategic. And then, focus on execution, giving people the freedom and whatever they need to do their job. That’s what I spend my time on — hiring and strategy.

You’re 56 years old, is that right?

Maybe. That sounds right.

Do you expect to be running Roku as an independently traded company ten years from now?

I have no idea. I’m happy running Roku right now. I have no idea what I’m going to do 10 years from now.

Do you know who your successor at Roku will be?

All public companies have to have a succession plan, so we have one. I focus a lot on developing talent on my team. But often there’s talent outside the company as well. So, I don’t know. I have no plans to leave, but if we were to hire a new CEO, I’d imagine we’d look internally and externally.

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Silicon Valley’s early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

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April 5, 2025

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Silicon Valley's early return on Trump investment: Plunging valuations, delayed IPOs

The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.

Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.

The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.

Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.

Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.

With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.

CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.

“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”

CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.

“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”

Tech will see an 'economic armageddon' if these tariffs stay, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

‘Cave rapidly’

During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”

A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”

That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.

At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”

However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.

“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.

Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington. 

Stephen Brashear | Getty Images

Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.

When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.

Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.

C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.

Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.

“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”

— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

WATCH: Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

Chime is reportedly delaying its IPO

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Tesla’s June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

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April 5, 2025

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Tesla's June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been promising investors for about a decade that Tesla’s cars are on the verge of turning into robotaxis, capable of driving themselves cross-country, after one big software update.

That hasn’t happened yet.

What Tesla offers is a sophisticated, but only partially automated, driving system that’s marketed in the U.S. as its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option, though many Tesla fans refer to it as FSD. In China, Tesla recently changed the system’s name to “intelligent assisted driving.”

Full Self-Driving, as it was previously called, relies on cameras and software to enable features like automatic navigation on highways and city streets, or automatic braking and slowing in response to traffic lights and stop signs.

Tesla owner’s manuals warn users that FSD “is a hands-on feature” that requires them to pay attention to the road at all times. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times, be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic,” the manuals say.

But many of Tesla’s customers ignore the fine print and use the system hands-free anyway.

Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have been a source of inspiration for its stalwart fans. But they’ve also caused controversy and concern for public safety after reports of injurious and fatal collisions where Tesla’s standard Autopilot or premium FSD systems were known to be in use.

FSD does a lot of things “amazingly well,” said Guy Mangiamele, a professional test driver for automotive consulting firm AMCI Testing, during a recent long drive in Los Angeles. But he added that “the times that it trips up, you could kill somebody or you could hurt yourself.”

The pressure has never been higher on Tesla to elevate the technology and deliver on Musk’s long-delayed promises.

The Tesla CEO is the wealthiest person in the world and was the biggest financial backer of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Since Trump’s January inauguration, Musk has been leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to drastically slash the federal workforce and government spending.

The DOGE team has been connected to more than 280,000 layoff plans for federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies over the last two months, according to data tracked by Challenger Gray, the executive outplacement firm.

Musk’s work with DOGE – along with his frequently incendiary political rhetoric and endorsement of Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD – has led to a tremendous backlash against Tesla.

Protests, boycotts and even criminal acts of vandalism have targeted the electric vehicle maker in recent months and led many prospective Tesla customers to turn to other brands. Meanwhile, existing Tesla owners have been trading in their EVs at record levels, according to data from Edmunds.

Tesla’s stock dropped 36% through the first three months of 2025, representing its steepest decline since 2022 and third-biggest slide for any quarter since the EV maker went public in June 2010. Tesla also reported 336,681 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% decline from the same period a year ago.

Product unveilings and a “robotaxi launch” expected from Tesla in Austin, Texas, this year could revitalize investors’ sentiment about the company and hopefully lift its share price, Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note following the worse-than-expected deliveries report.

On Tesla’s last earnings call, Musk promised investors that Tesla will finally start its driverless ride-hailing service in Austin in June.

To see whether the company’s FSD technology is anywhere close to a robotaxi-ready release, CNBC spent months riding along with Tesla owners who use Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and speaking with automotive safety experts about their impressions.

Auto-tech enthusiast and Tesla owner Chris Lee, host of the YouTube channel EverydayChris, told CNBC that Tesla’s system “definitely has a ways to go, but the fact that it’s able to go from where it was three years ago to today, is insane.”

Many experts, including Telemetry Vice President of Market Research Sam Abuelsamid, remain skeptical. There’s been “no evidence” that FSD is “anywhere close to being ready to be used in an unsupervised form” by June, said Abuelsamid, whose firms specializes in automotive intelligence.

Tesla FSD will “often work really well, particularly in daytime conditions” but then “randomly, in a scenario where it did fine previously, it will fail,” said Abuelsamid, adding that those scenarios can be unpredictable and dangerous.

Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and whether it will be robotaxi-ready this June.

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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1 day ago

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April 5, 2025

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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