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CEO of The Production Board David Friedberg walks to a morning session at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 09, 2021 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
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David Friedberg is known in Silicon Valley as an early Google executive who started farming insurance company Climate Corporation and sold it to Monsanto for $1 billion in 2013.

More recently, Friedberg has gained the nickname Queen of Quinoa on the popular All-In podcast with investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks. The lifelong vegetarian earned the nickname when he purchased Canadian quinoa supplier NorQuin in 2014.

Friedberg remains board chairman at NorQuin and is chair of Metromile, a software-powered auto insurance provider that he started a decade ago and took public through a special purpose acquisition company earlier this year.

But he’s spending the bulk of his time on a project he started four years ago with the help of old friend and Google co-founder Larry Page.

After leaving Monsanto in 2015, Friedberg began talking with Page about a way to build and finance a whole new batch of start-ups focused on agriculture technology, sustainability and advancements in life sciences. He didn’t want to return to Google, so Page — through parent company Alphabet — agreed to help finance a holding company that Friedberg would operate.

Google CEO Larry Page holds a press annoucement at Google headquarters in New York on May 21, 2012. Google announced that it will allocate 22,000 square feet of its New York headquarters to CornellNYC Tech university, free of charge for five years and six month or until the university completes its campus in New York.
EMMANUEL DUNAND | AFP | Getty Images

Friedberg launched The Production Board in 2017. He’s now revealing Alphabet’s and Page’s involvement for the first time.

The company, which Friedberg describes as a venture foundry, just raised $300 million from Alphabet along with investors including Baillie Gifford, Allen & Co., BlackRock, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global.

While Page was the initial Alphabet sponsor, Friedberg said the Google co-founder hasn’t been involved in the company for a while. Alphabet’s Anil Patel, who leads investments for the Other Bets segment, is on TPB’s board.

TPB is an investment company, but it’s not set up as a venture fund. That means Alphabet and other outside investors own shares in the parent entity but not the portfolio companies. They only get liquidity if TPB goes public or gets acquired.

“If one of our companies were to go public or get sold, we don’t take that capital and distribute it back to our shareholders,” Friedberg said in an interview this week. “It stays on the balance sheet and we keep building.”

No shortage of problems

Friedberg said neither he nor his investors need money, but they’re all trying to find solutions to some of the planet’s gravest existential challenges. With climate disasters emerging across the globe and more parts of the world becoming uninhabitable, TPB is investing in science and research to create new systems for food, agriculture and health.

“At least for my lifetime, I don’t think there’s going to be any shortage of problems and opportunities to go after,” the 41-year-old Friedberg said. “If we have a liquidity event, we should be able to recycle that capital and use it for new work.”

Friedberg said TPB has only 15 employees but its companies have hundreds of workers combined. His strategy is to hire top scientists, follow research trends for breakthroughs in genomics and life sciences and then fund R&D to determine if his team can develop a marketable product.

If there’s a business opportunity, TPB will spin the company out and give it a CEO, management team and lab space, while still offering centralized services for legal, human resources and finance. Some of the companies have raised additional capital from other venture investors.

“They can focus on getting a product built or getting product-market fit, and then over time as they mature, we start to hand some of those operating functions off so they can operate independently,” Friedberg said.

TPB’s existing investments include Soylent, the meal replacement beverage and nutrition company, and bioreactor lab Culture Biosciences.

Soylent
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

In a blog post Friday announcing the new investment, Friedberg is naming five foundry companies that TPB launched and turned into businesses. They include Pattern Ag, which is using precision engineering to help farmers make their land more productive; UR Labs, which makes a meal replacement shake to help people with diabetes lower their blood sugar; and Ohalo Genetics, a company using gene-editing tools to breed plants that use less land and water.

TPB also started Triplebar, a company using biotechnology to try to make food production, processing and packaging more sustainable. To run Triplebar, Friedberg teamed with Jeremy Agresti, a scientist and former Harvard fellow whose research was central to the creation of 10x Genomics.

Friedberg said seeking out and recruiting talent is a major part of his job.

“I love science,” he said. “Finding awesome scientists and trying to convince them to do this work is fun for me and a good use of my time.”

Along with hiring and raising capital, Friedberg has also been busy working on a SPAC. In February, he filed a prospectus for a blank-check company called TPB Acquisition, with plans to raise $250 million. He later reduced the target to $200 million.

The SPAC is looking for companies in the same markets that interest TPB. According to the filing, the transaction could even merge one of TPB’s businesses with another company.

“We will not, however, complete an initial business combination with only TPB or a portfolio company of TPB,” the filing said.

The SPAC hasn’t started trading or announced a deal, and Friedberg said he can’t talk about it at the moment.

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Roblox announces short-video, AI features amid child safety concerns

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Roblox announces short-video, AI features amid child safety concerns

Thiago Prudêncio | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Roblox on Friday announced new short-video and AI features that come amid increasing lawmaker scrutiny into how the company protects children on its platform.

With Roblox Moments, users 13 and older will be able to create and share video clips of their gameplay with others on a feed within the platform. The artificial intelligence additions, meanwhile, will allow users to generate advanced 3D objects for the games they create on the platform.

Tune in at 4:15 p.m. ET: Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki joins CNBC TV to discuss the company’s latest announcements coming out of its developer conference. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Although users can share video clips from mature games on Moments, users who do not meet the age requirements of those experiences will be unable to view them, the company said. Roblox will moderate each video shared on Moments and will allow users to “flag content that they find is inappropriate,” said Matt Kaufman, Roblox safety chief. Moments is launching in a limited release on Friday.

The AI features will roll out to users before the end of the year. Roblox users will be able to use the artificial intelligence tools to create objects, like futuristic monster trucks, that match the aesthetics of the games users build on the platform, said Anupam Singh, Roblox’s senior vice president of engineering. Those creations will also be moderated, Kaufman said.

Roblox faces a number of lawsuits alleging that its design enables online predators to exploit underage victims.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sued Roblox in August, alleging the company fails to implement robust safety protocols to “protect child users from predators.” At the time, Roblox said, “any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue.”

The company on Wednesday announced it would expand an age estimation program that Roblox debuted in July.

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Google hit with $3.45 billion antitrust EU fine amid U.S. trade tensions

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Google hit with .45 billion antitrust EU fine amid U.S. trade tensions

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Google was on Friday hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) antitrust fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative advertising technology business.

The European Commission, which is the executive body of the EU, accused Google of distorting competition in the so-called adtech market by unfairly favoring its own display advertising technology services to the detriment of rival adtech providers, advertisers and online publishers.

It also ordered Google to “bring these self-preferencing practices to an end” and “implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain.” The company has 60 days to respond.

“Today’s decision shows that Google abused its dominant position in adtech harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers. This behaviour is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement Friday.

“Google must now come forward with a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest, and if it fails to do so, we will not hesitate to impose strong remedies.”

Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the EU decision is “wrong” and the firm will appeal.

“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Mulholland said. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before.”

The case dates back to 2021 when the EU first opened a probe into Google to assess whether the tech giant favors its own online display ad technology services.

The news comes after Reuters reported earlier this week that the Commission had delayed the fine as regulators were waiting for the U.S. to cut tariffs on European cars as part of a trade deal.

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Broadcom stock jumps 15% on new $10 billion customer that analysts say is OpenAI

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Broadcom stock jumps 15% on new  billion customer that analysts say is OpenAI

Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom.

Martin H. Simon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Broadcom shares soared 15% on Friday after the chipmaker said on its earnings call that it had secured a new $10 billion customer. Analysts quickly pointed to OpenAI.

Following a better-than-expected earnings report late Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told analysts that a fourth large customer had put in orders for $10 billion in custom artificial intelligence chips, which the company calls XPUs.

“One of these prospects released production orders to Broadcom, and we have accordingly characterized them as a qualified customer for XPUs,” Tan said. He added that the order increased Broadcom’s forecast for AI revenue next year, when shipments will begin.

Analysts at Mizuho, Cantor Fitzgerald and KeyBanc all said they think AI startup OpenAI is the customer. The Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the partnership, that the two companies co-designed a chip that will hit the market next year.

OpenAI declined to comment on the report.

While Broadcom doesn’t name its large web-scale customers, analysts have said dating back to last year that its first three clients were Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance.

“During the call, the company surprised us by noting that it had secured a $10B order from a fourth XPU customer (we believe this is OpenAI), adding significant upside to the company’s three current XPU customers (Google, Meta, and ByteDance),” analysts at Cantor wrote in a note late Thursday. “Shipments are expected to commence in 2026.”

Broadcom’s stock has been on a tear of late as the company has joined Nvidia at the front of the race to build the kinds of processors and infrastructures needed for massive AI workloads. The stock is up about 130% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap past $1.6 trillion.

For the fiscal third quarter, Broadcom reported earnings and revenue that topped estimates. The company said it expects $17.4 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, higher than the $17.02 billion expected by Wall Street analysts, with AI revenue reaching $6.2 billion.

But news of an incoming $10 billion customer is what got Wall Street excited.

Tan said on the call that “immediate and fairly substantial demand” boosts the outlook for next year, “and really changes our thinking of what 2026 would be starting to look like.”

The company didn’t provide specific guidance for next year, but Tan suggested that growth in its AI could be above the 50% to 60% range he’d offered in the prior call.

Analysts at Mizuho raised their AI revenue growth estimate for next year to 76% up from about 60%, which would bring the total to $35 billion. Total revenue for the year ending in October 2026 is expected to increase about 30% to $81.8 billion from $63.1 billion this fiscal year, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG.

In addition to hardware, Broadcom has a large software business, keyed by its $61 billion acquisition of server virtualization software vendor VMware in 2023. Revenue in the infrastructure software business, which includes VMWare, rose 43% to $6.79 billion.

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report.

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