From Vibe Coding to Bank Battles: Cursor’s Meteoric Rise and Europe’s M&A Deal Drama

Hello and welcome to today's show. And we have 3 topics that we're going to cover. And this just goes to show that we do listen to you, our community and our audience, because the first one we're going to cover is Cursor. And Stephen said to me just before I hopped on this call, and I must admit, full disclosure, I've done zero research. It's all on Stephen and Aaron for this. But he started talking to me about vibe coding. And I was kind of like, Okay, so look, you and I, the listener, we're going to go into this together. So don't worry, I'll probe him. We'll find out what exactly he's going on about because Cursa's parent AnySphere's rise to potential $20 billion valuation. So much to talk about, I'm sure. Then switching gears, covering banking. Firstly, the news that Spain's Sabadell is interested in acquiring Britain's TSB. This is a defensive move to protect against BBVAs. Hostile acquisition. And then finally, to move on to speak about Barclays bringing in the consultants, which normally results in one thing, but certainly I'm sure there's more to it, as Stephen will explain. And McKinsey, of course, is sniffing around trying to find cost savings for the investment bank. So yeah, Stephen, vibe coding, explain.

Vibe coding. Yeah. Anything, any piece of technology that makes our lives a little bit easier. And I say this because Ant usually spends a lot of time prepping for these podcasts. He's a very professional person, but this is the third laptop, third computer he's been using to get on and do this podcast this afternoon. So, well done.

One would say that's commitment to the cause and to the community, but you know.

It's huge commitment. I do wonder whether kind of technology compounding upon technology does result in a worse experience. I am currently struggling, and shout out to anyone else who's currently struggling, with the quote unquote useful auto suggestions from Copilot across the Microsoft Office suite, where they do things like align things that you don't want and complete words that you don't want and create bullet points when you don't want them. It's actually driving me crazy, so I think I might just turn off the whole thing. But anyway, good segue into this first story. Shout out, by the way, to Salvaba, Salvaba, who commented on the YouTube, which is a bit of a thriving community. There's a lot of nice comments on our YouTube videos and some really good suggestions as well. And this is one from one of our listeners, one of our watchers, saying, look, Surely you've gotta cover Cursa. This is the world's fastest growing company. Potentially. It is the fastest growing company from $0 to $100 million of annual recurring revenue, making it from $0 to $100 million in 14 months. So this is why we need to kind of pay a little bit of attention to this company. And the headline that I wanted to start with was that cursor maker AnySphere, which is the top co, approached over a deal to double the company's valuation to $20 billion. Now you might be thinking to yourself, $20 billion. Yeah, we see that kind of number all the time. But just last month, they closed a funding round, $900 million funding round at a $10 billion valuation. So they're kind of doubling their valuation every month. And earlier on this year, back in January, they raised at a $2.5 billion valuation. This is an absolute breakout company, and it is all about this concept of AI assistance for programmers, for software developers. What I teased you, Anthony, with the phrase vibe coding, and I think that's a That's a mass simplification and total generalization of what the likes of Cursor does. But I'm just going to give you a little bit on vibe coding and I'm sure that after this you'll be vibe coding away. This phrase, and it's really interesting, it only got coined, this vibe coding phrase, back in February of 2025. But it feels to me like it's been around if you're If you exist in these realms, it feels like it's been around for ages, years. It came up by a guy called Andrej Karpathy, Karpathy, a bit of a, bit of a Twitter post. And he basically said, look, I'm going to call this thing that I'm doing now vibe coding, which is basically you use an AI assistant like Cursor or like Copilot or like elements of Copilot and GitHub. Whatever it might be. And you basically set, you prompt, code is generated, then you basically just accept the next suggestion, accept, accept, accept, copy and paste any solutions to bugs that might be, and basically just let the AI kind of go with very, very few prompts to get to your outcome. And as a creator of beta versions of interesting software layers, this vibe coding thing has become an absolutely huge trend. A, in the world of like, um, hobbyists and hackers, just, you know, figuring stuff out. And that was actually where Cursor got its first break. It was an absolutely classic business model. It said, look, we're going to give, you know, software developers, as I said, hobbyists, individual project people, bunch of free stuff that they're going to find useful, AI support in their, you know, their projects and things like that. Then we're going to give them a $20 a month Pro account, and eventually a $40 a month Business account. And this swelled the groundswell of Cursor's B2C business to consumer base swelled pretty quickly, hundreds of thousands of users at the time of recording. But what absolutely blows my mind, and we speak about this quite a lot. So they only started hiring B2B, i.e., selling Cursor's software and artificial intelligence support vehicles for software developers. It only started hiring B2B salespeople at the back end of last year. And now over half of the Fortune 500, including OpenAI, Spotify, Major League Baseball, Instacart, over half of the Fortune 500 now use this company. They only started hiring salespeople like 6 months ago, and they, they are now at over $500 million annual recurring revenue. In a company that's just over 2 years old. So this, I think, well done for raising it on the YouTube chat because this is absolutely bonkers.

So just give me a sense of like, so where, who started this? I think I've seen a photo of this when it really blew up a few months ago of 4 very young looking individuals, but what's the backstory here?

Yeah, this is 4 guys from MIT who are quote unquote, obsessed with efficiency across software development, which when I was at university, I certainly wasn't obsessed with that. I can tell you that much. But anyway, I'm not sitting on a $20 billion company. So they, you know, they got excited about the use of large language models and the ability to create effectively first chatbots and then secondly, kind of code prompts. And yeah, launched the company with a I think it was a, an $8 million seed investment in October 2023. So less than 2 years ago from, and that round, by the way, was led by OpenAI. So this, this, this ecosystem is hugely nepotistic or hugely incestuous, maybe is a better word.

I was going to ask, can you get access to that type of magnitude of seed funding if you're not at MIT or Columbia or a major university?

Yeah, no. So I think to have a funding round of that magnitude, A, you've got to be onto something pretty special. And obviously OpenAI saw the potential fruits of this labor. B, you have to be playing in the right watering holes so that you get seen, right? So whether it's MIT or whether it's Stanford— Stanford's obviously the archetypal incubator for smart people wanting to do startups— but there would have been some kind of demo day, some kind of pitching day, and maybe someone that knew a guy from OpenAI turned up to this MIT pitching day and said, these guys are smart. There's 4 of them. They've got the right— they've got— they're made of the right stuff. And they're thinking about things the right way. Why don't you go and meet them? And that was how I assume that first investment round. And then obviously the wheels are off, right? You know, if you're on a rocket ship, if you're building this momentum, you just go from strength to strength. And it is remarkable how they are batting away investors, they're batting away potential acquirers, You know, these guys are turning down $20 billion valuations for a less than 2-year-old company.

I was going to say, like, from a big tech perspective, you just mentioned there, I think at the top of the show, your frustrations with Copilot, for example. I mean, surely with the strategy of someone like Microsoft with their enterprise packages, this sounds like an easy win if they could pick it up and through his tentacles with his relationship through OpenAI and their funding rounds that they've had in this very company. Like, does it all get absorbed at some point?

Yeah, I think there's this classic, again, it all goes back to strategists. It's specialization versus generalized, or, you know, you have this concept of diseconomies of scale. And because Microsoft is such a big beast, and within, you It has, you know, you've got GitHub, which is still a favorite amongst developers. And obviously they've got Copilot and a whole raft of different things, including their relationship with OpenAI. But it may lead to the fact that they, they're trying to create an everything solution and trying to be interoperable across different platforms, whether it's GitHub to Copilot, Copilot to their Office suite. Whatever it might be, that they end up not doing anything particularly well. And I think the, the, to excuse a pun, the good vibes over Cursor is that they started this thing from the ground up. They just wanted to make coders' lives better using the nascent technology of the day, right? It's so much easier, and this is why it's always fun to be a startup, so much easier when there is a new there is new technological breakthrough to create something afresh. Whereas if you've got old rails, old tech stacks, and you're having to try and retrofit a new solution into an older business model, it becomes a lot clunkier and it becomes a lot harder. You have this, you know, massive sunk cost fallacy of investing billions of dollars in a not quite state-of-the-art version. Of what is really, really kicking off. And that's why happily we still have these small companies that are gaining prominence despite the heft and despite the size of these big beasts, the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.

And any idea how the marketing aspects of this worked at the beginning? Is it because of the nicheness almost of we're talking about a coding platform essentially and that's a domain in itself, which has a niche. And therefore, this is like the coolest, most, most advanced thing. And a small group of people use it and it grows fast and organically that way, rather than a coordinated way of— it was this almost like an unstructured thing that just ran away with itself over and above a really tactical way of going to market with a product.

Totally. And, and one of the articles that I was reading was calling it the viral coefficient in developer tools. So the viral coefficient basically means how viral is this product? How is it going to scale from word of mouth to word of mouth? And when one team member dramatically improves their coding speed, you know, their colleagues are going to notice immediately and want a piece of that action. And they're probably going to put it on a, you know, a subreddit and speak about it and say, this thing needs to be checked out. It is a different, you know, virality is a function of the speed at which one thing can spread across a particular domain. And obviously the internet developers are very, very kind of prolific users of the internet. And, you know, if they can save 50% of their time, they're going to be talking to people about it.

Yeah, it'd be super interesting to see that. Initial tipping point from when it was very early, early, and there's only a handful of people to then what saw it just massively expand.

Yeah. The Malcolm Gladwell tipping point. What, at what point did it move? And just to kind of finish on this piece, I just wanted to look up a few other startups that have hit that $100 million of annual recurring revenue. In a very, very short period of time, because it is claimed that Cursor with 14 months from 0 to 100 is the quickest. And I think, well, who knows, there's different ways of looking at this, but it looks like it is. Behind it, looking at this, the chart I've got at the moment, 18 months Wiz, which is a company we covered a few weeks ago, recently acquired by Google, then 20 months Deal. DEEL, which is HR software, 24 Months Ramp, which is corporate cards. And by the way, the thing that Cursor, DEEL, and Ramp have in common is that they are an app, or they are a layer above the LLMs to make life very, very easy at an enterprise level. So you've got the, you've got the large language models, you've got the huge processing power, you've got the, amazing innovation and breakthrough of some of these Anthropic and OpenAI-like companies. But there seems to be a lot of value very, very quickly accruing to the application layer, which is effectively what Cursor is. It's taking existing large language models and some of its own and putting that code application layer on top. And my gosh, they've gone from $0 to $20 billion. Super interesting.

Question then, because I know this is in your domain? Is this the normal stepping stones of when a new technology breaks, it is at that LLM level, then you get the application level, and then what's the next level? Because I know that this is kind of history repeating itself almost, it feels like.

Well, yeah, let's take two examples from the last 25 years, or the last 40 years maybe. The first is the internet. So the internet obviously was founded not by a private entity. It was founded out of a combination of military uses and our good friend Tim Berners-Lee and the work that he did. So obviously the value did not accrue to the architecture because there was no private entity to take the value. And obviously hundreds of, well, tens of trillions of dollars of value have been layered on top of that. The application layer of the internet being Amazon and Google, et cetera. Then the second example, which is maybe slightly more relevant, is iOS and opening— Apple opening up the App Store and developer tools for its new piece of hardware, the iPhone. And this was more interesting because you had a ton of value accruing to Apple because it was the, you know, and there were the synergies and the net and the benefits, the mutual benefits of a great app being created, A, for the app developer, and then B, also for Apple, because more people were buying iPhones and more people were buying stuff off the App Store and the App Store took 20% or whatever, or takes 20% or whatever the number is. So I would say that this new tech revolution is going to look more like the iOS store than the internet because the rails, the infrastructure is owned by private companies, but you're going to see, you know, the next Facebook, which is an application layer on top of the iOS or on top of the app, on top of the developer tools. You're going to see the next trillion-dollar companies come out of that application layer. And by the way, OpenAI might be that application layer as well, right? It's got the hardcore large language models and, you know, and capabilities, and then it is trying to turn it into a range of applications that lie on top. So there will be trillions of dollars of value and companies that we hadn't heard of now that will become household names in 2 or 3 years. And that's why everyone's getting so hyped, right?

Cool. All right, well look, let's move on and let's talk about some of these Spanish banking giants, because that is what they are. And I'm assuming particularly if you're in the US, you've probably never even heard of them. And also Britain's TSB, which I didn't even know still existed, to be quite frank.

Yeah, yeah, I know. We go from the kind of the heady highs of Silicon Valley and and the new economy and trillions of dollars of value accrued.

Yeah, this is old school.

This is old school. But by the way, if you're going to work in this space, this is real life. And even this is a very exciting form of real life in the world of M&A and investment banking. And it's a really, really interesting story because it involves a hostile takeover and they're always really fun. So obviously not maybe for the company that's being taken over, But this is the story of Banco Sabadell, which I was reading earlier on, was founded in 1891 by 128 families in Catalonia, in Spain, with the aim of financing the local industry. And interestingly enough, they're still massive in Catalonia. They're the biggest bank there, with a smaller presence outside. But anyway, Banco Sabadell, a slightly subscale I think it's the fourth largest bank, maybe the fifth largest bank in Spain. It has announced that it is considering spinning off its UK acqui— well, ownership of TSB. I think the people in the US, the UK think about TSB as the adjunct to Lloyds, Lloyds TSB. But TSB is a standalone entity, actually now owned by Sabadell, bought it in 2017, I believe. It's a pretty impressive company. So they acquired it in 2015, apologies, for about £1.7 billion. They spent years turning the business around to the extent that TSB posted a pre-tax profit of £290 million in 2024, up £53 million year on year. It's highest since 2013. It's got 175 branches, high street branches, old school physical. Um, across the UK, and it has more than 5 million customers and 5,000 staff. Now, you know, a pretty decent business. And by the way, I wouldn't, I wouldn't like to speculate as to what is harder. One, creating the next $20 billion application layer to a, uh, to a large language model, or two, turning a British high street bank from a loss-making entity to one that generates pre-tax profits of £290 million, I'd probably rather the first challenge than the second. It's so remarkably difficult to take these very, very old institutions that have got a fixed business model and try and make them efficient. But anyway, TSB potentially being spun off. Now, why? This is the most interesting point. They are potentially being spun off because Sabadell is facing a hostile acquisition, a hostile takeover from the much larger BBVA, who approached— I think we covered this on the pod 6 months ago. They approached Sabadell a year ago, tabling an €11.4 billion offer, not recommended by the board, so it went hostile. And BBVA are really up for this. They've got it cleared by the European Commission because obviously this is going to have regulatory and antitrust considerations. They got it cleared by the Spanish equivalent of the FTC. They haven't yet got it cleared by the Spanish government who are worried about monopoly power and the lack of choice from a competitive perspective. But if they can do that, they will formally take that €11.4 billion offer to the shareholders and say, look, we're better together. You're going to own a slice of BBVA. We're consolidating. The industry is consolidating. It's all about scale. It's all about synergies. It's all about, you know, a defensive consolidation. That's the way that BBVA are approaching this. Obviously the board of directors don't really want this to happen because they didn't recommend it. So what they're thinking of doing is they're saying, all right, if we can spin off TSB, right, raise £2.5 billion and then return that £2.5 billion to shareholders as a special dividend, that automatically makes the company less valuable and makes that €11.4 billion offer, I mean, much more expensive. Because suddenly you're buying something ex the profit center, which is TSB, and you've just given away the proceeds of that to existing shareholders. So it is kind of a roundabout defensive strategy to say, look, BBVA, we don't want you to buy us and we are willing to spin off some of our most profitable assets in order for you not to get your hands on the rest of it. So it's an absolutely fascinating story.

What's the phrase? Is it like cutting off your nose to spite your face sort of thing where it feels a little bit like here is a game of bluff. So I'd be like, okay, this is a profitable unit that you have. You want to stay independent. Go ahead then. Call my bluff, spin it off, and let's see how that goes.

Well, what's super— yeah, I totally agree. What's super interesting about this is that in the context of the takeover bid, any major asset sale from Sabadell would require shareholder approval. So I've just got this kind of, this image in my mind of two letters. I'm a Sabadell shareholder, two letters arriving on my, you know, through my letterbox. One saying, do I approve of the TSB sale? And one saying, do I approve of the BBVA takeover? Because I'm going to have to try and figure out which one, you know, if I agree with the TSB sale, I will probably not agree with the BBVA takeover. And how do I come to a decision that benefits me most as a shareholder? And just as an aside, the BBVA offer, it's not massively lowballing. You know, it's still, I think, a 35% premium on the 30-day average share price before it was announced, right? So it's not like BBVA, you know, are taking the piss. They're just, the Sabadell board just don't want to be sold. It's as simple as that.

Is there any UK input into the dialogue that's happening here? I know Sabadell said took on TSB, but you said also there's 175 branches. There's lots, millions of customers. And employees in the, you know, to the tune of several thousand. So do they have it? Is there any UK government input in this in terms of what happens?

Yeah, I think it's interesting because it's not as if, it's not as if TSB is a kind of, is a national institution that has been independent for a very long period of time, and this would be the first foreign incursion into the British banking scene. The fact that the most likely acquirer for TSB is probably NatWest, which again, you know, British, probably, it probably will be a good owner of TSB. Although I would say that with a slight note of caution because there will be towns up and down the country that have a NatWest right next to a TSB branch. And obviously the synergies are shut one of them down and become both. And that might, you know, that might result in a reduction of staff and maybe even a reduction of choice on the high street. So yeah, and the same will apply if Barclays buy them or if Santander buys them or if HSBC buys them. So it probably will get looked at. There's very, very little reason why it wouldn't, but would it get blocked by the UK? Probably not.

I'm conscious we have a lot of US listeners, so can you explain to me like who NatWest are and how NatWest, how, where they sit in the banking scene in terms of the composition of their business to other banks like Barclays and HSBC and so on?

Yeah, you wouldn't have heard of NatWest because they don't really have a strong investment bank presence, certainly like Barclays and to a lesser extent HSBC. They're also not a massively international bank. When you think of I think when you think of HSBC, you think Asia, global bank, trade finance, lending, business banking, that kind of stuff, right? If you think of Barclays, you probably think, you know, trying to play with the big boys from an investment bank perspective, trying to be the bridge between Europe and the US. But when you think of NatWest, you think much more about more traditional commercial corporate lending, corporate relationship management, the kind of flow products that are required to keep the lights on at business, and obviously a big retail presence as well. I think it is now the largest retail bank in the UK. Someone will probably correct me if I am wrong. But yeah, that's why you wouldn't have heard of it. But again, it's quite interesting if you're coming from a US perspective. You've got obviously the big bulge bracket universal banks that you'll see everywhere. Then you've got the investment banks, which you'll probably only see in certain major financial hubs around the country. And then you've got tens of thousands of smaller banks, right? Obviously there's been great consolidation, the likes of Wells Fargo being big consolidators that you don't see as much over on this side of the pond, but you have all of these quote unquote regional or local or high street banks. Of which, if you were to come over to the UK, NatWest would probably be the biggest one, maybe Wells Fargo. I don't know if that's the right analogy, but something like that.

Okay. So to conclude then, if you zoom out and put this deal in context with the sector overall, what signals are you getting about the wider trends in the UK banking sector and just generally, because this includes Europe as well?

Yeah, I think we've spoken about this before. There is this general assumption, and we looked at it with the UniCredit deal over in Italy buying the German bank Commerzbank. So there is this desire for defensiveness in scale. And again, a bank is a pretty simple business, right? In its essence, the bigger the deposit base, the bigger the opportunity to make money through lending. And the more defensible you are, the more capital you have, the more defensible you are. So scale is super, super important. And you're seeing this in Europe. Obviously you're seeing this potentially with BBVA and Sabadell. And in the UK, weirdly enough, the UK banking sector is not in, again, anyone that's old enough to remember 2008, 2009 through to about 2015, and beyond, UK banking sector's not in bad shape after years of hardship, but there is still this move towards consolidation. I think the likes of Metro Bank, I think they were, I think they've drawn interest from Pollen Street Capital. Don't really know much about Pollen Street Capital. And again, Santander UK, spoken a lot about Santander in the past, is rumored to be on NatWest's radar as well. So Is there a bit more consolidation to come to get that scale of the deposit base and to get the synergies of not having to have, you know, two high street branches on every high street? Yeah, I think that's probably the way it's going. You don't want to be too skinny in terms of one or two or two or three banks taking the market because then the consumer loses choice. But you certainly want to have some pretty robust institutions that aren't going to wilt as soon as the next recession comes.

Alright, onto our final story. And yeah, interested about this one because I think when I talk to and interact at least with a lot of students, there tends to be like these career pathways and they always tend to think of them as very defined. It's like accountants and you go and work at one of the Big Four, for example, or consulting and you go and work at McKinsey or Accenture, or you go down investment banking and you work at Goldman's or AMS, but Yeah. Interested in this story to see how in this case the two latter ones intersect, so to speak. So what's happening here with Barclays?

Yeah, I mean, the headline here is Barclays brings in the consultants to find efficiencies in its investment bank. Barclays hiring McKinsey to help simplify its investment bank and identify hundreds of millions of dollars in potential savings. When I left university, I think I probably should have become a consultant. So there's something quite lovely about being young, getting into like a big business, telling them what to do, and then buggering off again before you can actually see whether what you said has worked. The reason why I say this is I remember very, very clearly when I was at HSBC working on a big strategy and efficiency project, much like this one that was announced by Barclays. And I was upstairs, as it were, you know, working on this project with some of the senior people. And we had BCG, Boston Consultancy Group, to help run this analysis and help do this big strategic change project. And they were with me in the office for a few months. Guy that I sat next to, bearing in mind I was only 25, 26, guy that sat, I sat next to, just out of university, he's 21. And he's furiously, furiously smart. Shout out to Dominic if you're, if you're listening. Furiously smart, but basically was just telling us that we need to fire 20,000 people in our business. You know, he'd run the numbers, he'd done the models, he'd done the analysis. He's extremely confident that this was what we should do if we were to achieve the outcomes that we wanted to achieve within that part of the business.

Could I just ask though, on that point, like someone of that age might have the technical capability to run the models, do the numbers, but you and I know that the success of a change strategy, a transition, there are people involved. And there's people who stay despite those people who are lost. And so, and if you're going to pivot strategy as well as reduce the workforce. So how that sort of person, I mean, how is that, how do they acquire those skills in order to like put the wrapper around what the model is saying?

Yeah, there's a couple of answers to that question. The first is I think that he was remarkably good. Uh, the, the second is the way that a consultancy project or engagement has historically worked is you've got a, a, a very senior partner that does a lot of the initial negotiations and the pitch and is there periodically to check in on the project team that is doing the thing, right? And it might actually be that partner that is doing the big summary presentation and recommendations at the end of the period. So that, you know, that tends to be what happens. However, there are also obviously plenty of instances where you've got, you got, get the guys from BCG and they do a piece of work. Let's say it's a 3-month project to come up with a bunch of implementation recommendations through all of their, using all of their, all of the tools in the consulting toolkit. but then they are asked to be kept on to help actually implement. So this is why you might have some friends, uh, as, as, as kind of people fresh out of university here, you might have friends that have been working on one particular, they work for consultants and in your mind you think, oh, you know, a month project here, a couple of months here, come up with a 50-slide pitch, you know, presentation, off you jog to the next exciting thing. You'll have some consultants that are basically just employees of a company, right? You know, you'll have some consultants that have worked for the same company or the same government or the same civil service branch for the last 3 years, because effectively you are a highly skilled resource that doesn't have to be fully employed. And as we mentioned at the top of this show, you, you know, you can be the one where the blame is laid, right? So, oh God, the consultants came in, you know, it wasn't up to us firing 300 people. The consultants came in and they, you know, they're the ones that you should get angry about. Often that is a very kind of simplistic view, but it's definitely something that senior members of businesses have bought into.

Okay, so look, let's go back then to Barclays. I know they are, as you said, they're going through this dramatic shift at the moment. It's been in play for a while, but can you just go over that again? What are their goals? What are they trying to get out of this kind of slimming down exercise?

Yeah, so this is the CS, uh, the CEO, CS, uh, Ven— Venkat.

Oh, I knew that would test you. Even someone with your prowess for these sorts of things.

I'm absolutely I'm rubbish at names.

Just say CS. CS.

Sorry. CS Venkatakrishnan. CS. There you go. CS. So the CEO, he's been under pressure to boost returns across the bank. And the investment bank in particular consumes a lot of capital, obviously, which is the fuel for any bank. And a part of his strategy, which he laid out in 2024, was to find £2 billion worth of efficiency savings. Across the bank by 2026. And in fact, you know, this is the latest stage. I think earlier on this year, they cut 200 jobs across investment banking, global markets, and research. This time last year, they cut 200 jobs across investment banking, global markets, and research. And this project with McKinsey is all about trying to find efficiencies duplications, potential savings, automation across the front office, across finance, risk, technology, onboarding, know your customer, credit, all of this stuff, right? You know, is there inefficiency there? And obviously whenever you hear the word automation, you probably think to yourself, all right, heads are going to roll. Bring in the AI. That's what I say.

The strategy here then, because I know that they've been on the ticket of some pretty big deals, Barclays, perhaps there's a few you can remind me of, but is there that strategy here then, like with where they want to focus and given the general nature of the ebb and flows, just to go back, I know we talk about it quite a lot of what makes a bank like JP Morgan such a dominant banking giant because of its Multiple tentacles. So what's— so Barclays here seems like they're doing some great guns on some big M&A deals and then they're dropping 200 people within the team.

Well, yeah, it's a very interesting point. So yeah, Barclays is performing pretty well. It's up 20% this year, share price, which is more than all of its peers across the UK and the US as well. So it's having a great start to the year. It's ranked 6th in terms of year-to-date investment bank league table with a particular boost in its M&A practice. I think it was on the Wizz acquisition that we spoke about, the $32 billion Alphabet acquisition of Wizz, and then Sunoco's acquisition of Parkland for $9 billion. So it's been on some pretty hefty tickets that have shotted up the ranking. But this is interesting, right? And this is unfortunately a trend that we are going to see play out over the next 5 to 10 years, which is revenues going up, but personnel's going down because people are able to do more with less. And to an extent, AI has not yet hit investment banks in the same way. Sorry, I've mentioned that. There you go. So just as an aside, I'm gonna let Ant pause whilst I mentioned AI for, I think probably the 65th time on this episode, and suddenly the fire alarm goes off.

What people can't see, there's a button on my desk and every time you say it more than 5 times, I go bang and I hit the button. And that was the button going off, not the fire alarm.

Yeah, exactly. The AI button. But I think it is, it's coming in slowly. But it's an important trend to watch out for as young people that are trying to figure out, all right, A, should I be breaking into this industry? B, if I'm really into it, how do I break into this industry? And then C, what are the kind of skills that are going to be resilient in this industry over the next 10, 15, 20 years? We can answer, as Amplify, some of those questions. I don't think we can answer all of them.

Yeah. New technology is going to continue coming. Businesses are going to continue facing challenges. They're going to want to operate lean and double down, lean into those technological advantages and tools and application layer. Feels like consultants, feels like consultancy is going to be a pretty good gig.

Well, this is it. Get the, you know, bring the consultants in. So whenever I, you know, I spend quite a lot of time speaking to students about this and again, my advice is find a job where you are doing lots of different things and engaging with lots of different stakeholders at different levels, having conversations about different elements during the course of a single day or over the course of a week. And you're probably quite defensible because you're learning transferable skills. You're learning nuance, subtlety, negotiation, how to convince people, how to structure your analytical kind of hierarchies and things like that. And actually, as much as I hate to say it, consulting is a very— it definitely gives you those skills. So maybe I missed out on a career.

Come on.

It's not too late now.

It's never too late.

If McKinsey, you're listening to this, I'm in. I'm not cheap.

All right, cool. Good stuff. We'll wrap it up there. As ever, any questions at all, do let us know. And don't forget to subscribe and follow the show. Turn on notifications, weekly content always coming out and Keep vibing, Stephen.

Keep vibing, Ant.