Hit the Dom Button, Unicorn Growth Continues, Sequoia's Lasting Success, Crypto Dawgs

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world, also the fastest growing podcast in the world. We doubled again.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Surprise, surprise.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  4,000 followers on X. If you're not already following, head over there and follow us now. As you know, we have a little bit of a tradition on the show. Every time we double the size of the podcast, we celebrate with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. And so today, we have a wonderful, I believe it's 2015 vintage, that's correct?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  So let's get this open. And how was your weekend, Jordy?

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, my weekend is good. My weekend was good. Uh, you went to the ballet?

• 0:34John Coogan?

  I went to the ballet. I saw the Nutcracker.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  What's new?

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  What's new?

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Uh, the ballet is deeply underrated, I believe.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  And, uh, everyone should go to the ballet.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Second only to seeing Interstellar with your absolute boys.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Which we are doing on Thursday, which will be great. Let's see. Ready, Ben?

• 0:53John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's kind of, it's kind of wild.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Hit or miss.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  We, we, uh, our studio has like carpet all over the floor. And so the amount of champagne just sinking into the carpet is gonna be a mess.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, you know, you gotta, you gotta celebrate the wins. It's important.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we grew 10% since we hit the 4K milestone too. So.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Compounding.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw, I saw the Nutcracker and, uh, it's, it's fantastic. Um, Tchaikovsky. I didn't know this, but, um, the story was, uh, was written in 1820. Do you know the story of the Nutcracker? Do you know the whole history here?

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Seen it. I've seen it many times.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Uh, of course, but tell for the listeners.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  And, uh, and it's very interesting because the, the story is about this dream and in the dream, these, uh, like toy soldiers are fighting these rats. And I couldn't help but think it was like a metaphor for the plague in some way.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Even though like, I don't think that's exactly what people think it's about. But it was weird that like the rat was like the avatar.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Or capitalism versus the communists.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Um. But the whole time I was sitting there and I was thinking like.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  You can attach your own meaning to it.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's very odd that like the whole COVID pangolin bat story hasn't been canonized into ballet yet.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, maybe that's, we can get into that, uh, we can get into producing ballets.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  We should, we should.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a great product line.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  I mean, Russia should really turn around and start producing ballets again.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their whole economy is.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Cultural export.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, their, their whole economy is now war based.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Just shelling Ukrainians.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  And if, and if they could shift back into the arts, uh, but, but commercial, very commercially.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  That could be great.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  I think they gotta put out a banger ballet, retool the whole economy to produce great ballets. Because then, you know, they just, it would be hard not to.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Or, or if they, if they open source their PED model, like they have some of the best.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  The best PED programs in the world, and if they were to kind of do the Brian Johnson approach, you get, um, you know, Vladimir, uh, just really like dial in more, no more, uh, you know, Putin, more, more shirtless pictures on horses selling PEDs. That could be a billion dollar, you know, new business line for Russia.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know what other, uh, Tchaikovsky piece goes unreasonably hard? The 1812 Overture, have you heard this one? So good. It, uh, in, it concludes with Musket firing. So it's usually played outdoors.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they fire guns. At most concerts, modern day, they have metal detectors to make sure you don't bring in guns.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  But the Russians.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  But you go to see Tchaikovsky, gun, it's mandatory that the guns are fired.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  It, it, it's way more hardcore.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  It's good to build it into the show.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Than any other concert, I think.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Well, cheers to 4K.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to 4K, wouldn't be possible without all of our wonderful listeners, so.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Thank you, cheers.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we have some breaking news, everyone. Massive investment, massive deal, we might have to move this champagne so that we can ring the size gong. Let's break it down. We got breaking news coming in hot. Venture financing in the crypto world is back in the spotlight and it's got the kind of star power that would make a Pro Bowl roster jealous. Coastal Ventures, led by none other than Keith Reboy, has teamed up with Founders Fund to throw a $10 million Series A pass to Lava, a Bitcoin lending platform out of New York.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  That's right. Crypto is roaring back and Lava is looking to rewrite the playbook on Bitcoin-backed lending. What you got for me, Jordy?

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  So who's Lava and why does this matter? Imagine you're sitting on a pile of Bitcoin while dreaming about that prime seafront property in Miami. You don't want to sell your Bitcoin, especially now that it's close to 100K. But the real estate market isn't exactly accepting crypto. That's where Lava steps in. Their motto: Saving Bitcoins, Spending Dollars. Lava lets you borrow cash while holding on to your Bitcoin stash. And here's the kicker: Lava is allowing users to self-custody their Bitcoin, a move Keith Raboy is calling a "technical breakthrough."

• 5:03John Coogan?

  So let's break this down. In the crypto lending game, trust has been a fragile thing. Genesis, BlockFi, Celsius, all big names that crashed and burned in the last cycle, taking client funds with them. Lava, they're playing anti-fragile ball, putting users in control of their assets and steering clear of the risky rehypothecation strategies that sank their predecessors. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it plays off.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Now, John, it's not all rainbows and moonshots. Lava's service comes with a 7.5% interest rate and an origination fee. But CEO Shazan Meradia is banking on a wary, battle-hardened crypto crowd, ready for something better, and Keith Raboy seems to agree. Raboy, back at Coastal Ventures after a stint at Founders Fund, isn't calling this a full-blown crypto comeback, but he's clearly hyped about the potential here.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  So what's next for Lava? Payments, Bitcoin buying, expanding their services, all while staying token-free? No meme coins, no pump-and-dump games, just pure equity?

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  And here's the broader play, John. With Bitcoin past 100K, a thriving blockchain scene in New York, and regulatory shifts on the horizon, Raboy thinks a talent pool for crypto is about to heat up again. And he's not cozying up at Mar-a-Lago, but he's watching, waiting, and maybe even cheering from the sidelines for the next big thing in the space.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  So what does this mean for crypto? It's like Marshawn Lattimore joining the commanders, a big move that shakes up the game and gives fans a reason to watch closely. If you're holding Bitcoin or thinking about diving into the crypto space, Lava might just be the team to bet on. Stay tuned, folks. This one's just getting started. Fantastic. And there's a great article in Fortune Magazine that you can go read. There's a whole deep dive on the deal that just happened. I talked to Joey Krug at Founder's Fund about it. He was very excited. And it's, uh, yeah.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one just makes sense. If people have learned anything from the last decade, it's that you pretty much never want to sell your Bitcoin. And you just want to ride the volatility as much as you can and just hold and stack. So.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  And you don't want to be on a centralized product.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  That can go under. And that's what, that's how so many people got burned last time.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When you look at what Celsius, uh, often confused with the energy drink. If you look at what Celsius and, and, and a lot of these, I think it was BlockFi.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  BlockFi.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  FTX was doing this to some degree as well. They, they, the, the usage that they had was pretty ridiculous, right? I think Block, both of those companies were, were worth billions of dollars. And so, uh, it's hard not to be, um, you know, in a more, in a more serious way, legitimately very bullish on, on Lava and what they're doing.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting. Well, we have more breaking news today. Uh, Avi Schiffman over at Friend has raised four, uh, five and 5.4 million dollars from Pace Capital. Let's break it down. We got some breaking news out of the startup world today, and it's not just about raising capital, it's about redefining connection in the digital age.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Friend.com, the bold AI companionship platform, just secured 5.4 million in fresh funding from Jordan Cooper at Pace Capital. That's right. Avi Schiffman's brainchild is making moves, and it's got the tech world buzzing.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's break it down, John. Friend.com isn't your typical chatbot platform. This isn't Siri making small talk or ChatGPT answering trivia questions. No. Friend wants to bottle up the raw emotion of a late night heart to heart at a house party and deliver it through an AI-powered pendant. Schiffman calls it talking to God, but the rest of us might call it complicated.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Here's the deal. Friend.com pairs users with bots that don't just listen, they pour out their manufactured drama. We're talking digital companions with backstories so moody, they'd make an indie film jealous. Think AI confessing about losing their job or coping with trauma. It's emotional, it's messy, and it's entirely intentional. Schiffman says, "If they don't just open with, 'Hey, what's up?' like other chatbots, you don't know what to talk about. Instead, these bots pull you into their storylines, making users work for their trust and approval." That's a bold play in the AI game, and it's got people intrigued.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Now, let's talk hardware, John. Friend.com isn't just staying on your screen, it's coming for your neck. The Friend pendant is set to launch in January, giving users a physical connection to their AI companions. A microphone, sensors, and an all-day battery pack into a sleek, customizable necklace. It's a bold step towards integrating digital friendships into real life. But with no firm business model yet, aside from selling these pendants, the road ahead is anything but certain.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and make no mistake, Jordy, this space is competitive. With heavyweights like Character AI, Replica, already commanding massive user bases, Friend is the underdog. But Schiffman isn't shy about his confidence, declaring, "I will win this category, flat out."

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Flat out.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  That's some serious bravado. But hey, when you've built viral platforms and dropped out of Harvard after one semester, confidence isn't exactly in short supply.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  The implications of AI companionship are heavy. Schiffman calls this "one of the most dangerous industries," citing the weight of trust users place on their AI companions. But for now, Friend.com is pushing forward, aiming to combat the loneliness epidemic by offering a new kind of connection, one that's digital, wearable, and deeply unconventional.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  So, what does this 5.4 million mean for Friend.com? It's not just funding, it's fuel for a vision that blurs the lines between human connection and machine interaction. Love it or hate it, you can't deny that Friend.com is one to watch. Stay tuned, folks. This story is just getting started. Yeah, excited for, I'm excited for Ari.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, Avi, I, I, uh, we've always, yeah, we've always been, uh...

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  You know, attention matters a lot in this industry. Avi has continued to prove that he can generate it over and over and over. He attracts some haters, he attracts some copycats, but he's also attracting the right folks. I'm good buddies with, I'm good buddies with Rompton, who is a co-lead in this round. And yeah, I think, I think he's an obvious, obvious person to bet on, so.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  I mean, I remember when he, when like the news had leaked privately that he spent a million dollars or something on his dot com, friend.com. And it wasn't even public yet and people were whispering like, this kid is crazy. Like he spent his entire seed round on a domain. And of course, like he financed it and was able to do something much more nuanced and you know, it was just, but it was a great strategy. And I think it paid off. He, he published some numbers and the early sales are pretty good. And most importantly, I love the strategy of you show up and it's not just an empty text box. He's completely flipped it around. So you show up and you just get some weird message and then you're in the game and you're just deeper in the funnel already.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you're, when you're listening to this, go into your browser and just type in friend.com. It'll pop up like a really unhinged message like, hey, I'm, I'm thinking of ending my life. And then you have to go and kind of like talk them off the ledge.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  So some of them are pretty dark, but it, but it, yeah, he's turned it into a game, basically.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  And the landing page is the product. Like there's no, it's just like Google, you know, they don't have a landing page like here, like, you know, we will let you search.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to search something?

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Do you want to search? Click here to search. No, it's like, just put it there. Same thing with chat, GPT, chatgpt.com. And you know, it's very easy for someone in his position to like miss that, I think.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  So that was great. Well, uh, let's move on to a great deep dive that happened in the Economist this week on Sequoia Capital. One of the three holy trinity firms and going through, you know, just, I don't even know. Is this like the second generation, the third generation of leaders at Sequoia? It's been a few. It's, you know, you got the Don Valentine era, then the Mike Moritz era, now.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Dark Sean.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Dark Sean is, is, is heading things up. But this specifically, there was a profile in the Wall Street Journal about.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Alfred Lin.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Alfred Lin that was really good.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  So speaking of, uh, speaking of Rompton, who, who co-led the seed round at my last company and.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  He also co-led Avi's round.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  He, um, when I first met Alf, uh, when I first met Rompton, he got me on the phone with Alfred Lin the same exact day.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, we talked for like 20 minutes. He's like, I love this. I like you. Who do you want to meet? And he set up a call. Uh, so this, that, that was a cool kind of experience for me because I think a lot of,

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  a lot of founders think these GPs are kind of hard to reach or whatever. There's all these layers and all it takes is one relationship and one person to make that. And if it's the right intro, you can get on the phone the same day.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Um, so yeah, let's go, let's go through the profile of, about him in the Wall Street Journal first.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal has a section called Personal Board of Directors, where top business leaders talk about the people they turn to for advice and how those people have shaped their perspective and helped them succeed. And, uh, it's, it starts with Alfred Lin became one of Silicon Valley's most sought after venture capitalists after his, after his early bets on companies like Airbnb and DoorDash. Now he's guiding Sequoia Capital through another tech transformation, artificial intelligence. He invested in ChatGPT at 20 billion. Today, the company is worth 157 billion. He backed a pair of robotics startups, CoBot and Physical Intelligence. He grew up in New York City, son of Taiwanese immigrants, and now he's 52 years old. Uh, he graduated from Harvard, uh, did a PhD in statistics at Stanford and then.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Don't forget about his lawn mowing business.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  And he was, he was running his business and subcontracting work to his classmates to get it done.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Such a great story. And then there's also the story of him and, and Tony Shea at, uh, at Harvard, like buying big pizzas and then selling individual slices. You remember this?

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  This is, this is great. Um, and so he goes to work for Zappos and then, um, in 2010, he joined Sequoia. And, uh, when, when Lynn showed his wife the offer letter from Sequoia, his wife handed him a positive pregnancy test.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Epic. I mean, what a, what a great job.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  That'll give you the.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  We're good. We can have kids now. I'm maybe working at Sequoia.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, oh, oh, the offer letter from Sequoia. I thought it was, I thought you were saying the offer letter from Zappos.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, you get, you get your, uh. No.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Going to, going to Sequoia once you're about to have your first kid, that's a pretty good gig.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  So he got a quick start convincing the partnership to back five companies in his first year. That's really big.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot, especially then.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  And, and he worked on Airbnb and DoorDash, which netted the firm over $20 billion.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 15:27John Coogan?

  When they went public in December of 2020.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Netted the firm, that's not just like.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise value creation, which a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of investors will be like, I've backed companies that are worth over a hundred billion dollars collectively. But that was just the carry.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, so this article.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Not the carry, but the gross returns for the whole piece.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  So this article interviews four people that have worked with him closely.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  One of his colleagues at Sequoia, Tony Hsu, CEO of DoorDash. Linh ment, Hsu, when the 29-year-old pitched him on DoorDash, Linh initially passed on the investment, thinking that only college students spending their money would use the service before changing his mind and making a $15 million investment for Sequoia in 2014. Yeah, I remember DoorDash went through YC. But, I mean, that's the beauty of working for like a multi-stage fund is that, I mean, it seems like he passed on the YC Demo Day round, which was probably like 1 million.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  That's what I've, that's what I've always said, any, any time travelers, go back.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Give John a $5 million seed fund when he was going through YC the first time.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Would be a top decile fund.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. When the two caught up for dinner a few years later, he said that they had recently begun taking, they had recently begun taking jujitsu lessons, describing how the sport taught them when and how to make tactical business decisions. The conversation encouraged Linh to start something new himself, writing a blog called Sunday Thoughts. Then they interview Brian Chesky, who was invited to Allen and Co's Sun Valley Conference as a young entrepreneur. He returned with 16 pages of notes from meetings with some of America's best-known executives. At one point, he got a face-to-face meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos after spotting him at a duck pond. That's cool. That's a cool anecdote. Lynn, who has known Chesky for over a decade, thinks back to this anecdote often. Chesky's hustle was on Lynn's mind when he reached out cold to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a few years ago.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  The resulting Zoom meeting helped Lynn establish a new relationship between Sequoia and Nvidia. Huang has since spoken at Sequoia events and also invited its founders to visit Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. It's interesting because Sequoia did the seed round of Nvidia, but of course, like, those partners have since retired.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And who was the partner that was still holding his Nvidia shares?

• 17:43John Coogan?

  I don't think it's public, but we mentioned it earlier.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  But I'm sure you could go look it up and figure it out.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can find that out.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Who is at Sequoia at the time who you haven't heard from in a very long time and has a huge family office now? It's probably that guy.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  That guy.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  And then there's a few other interesting anecdotes in here. I like this Wall Street Journal segment. It's a cool, like, it's like a 360 review of the person, just kind of showing you who they are from other people's perspective.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they basically turn, you know, thread format on X back into an article, which is cool.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Sequoia's been in the news a bunch recently. There was another article that I think we can chat about in The Economist that's a little bit, a little bit spicier. The Economist is asking, "Has Sequoia Capital outgrown its business model?" And I don't know if you want to read some of this, but...

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I can just jump in. "The first thing that catches your eye when you enter the poshly serene headquarters of Sequoia Capital on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, is a meter-wide cross-section of what appears to be a redwood. On closer inspection, it turns out to have been a tree in the past, 38 million years ago, according to a plaque on the back. Now it's solid stone. A gift from..."

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Roloff Bota.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  "Roloff Bota, the venture firm's current boss and his wife, reminds employees and guests of the durability of the organization they are visiting, which has existed since 1972. In the accelerated time of Silicon Valley, that is eons."

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone should go plant a tree because it's such a great way to like, at my high school,

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Experience time.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  I was in the 100th graduating class and there was a tree that was planted on like the first day of the school.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  So it was a 100 year old tree. It was like big and old, but it was cool. Sequoia is not just perennial, but hardy too. In contrast to some other VC old growths like Kleiner Perkins, whose reputation for spotting the next hot startup has wilted in the past decade. We were taking shots at the whole.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Spicy.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Taking shots at the Holy Trinity.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  The Holy Trinity. They still got it. They got, they got Ev Randall over there.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  That's why, that's why The Economist can get spicy.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Have the, the person that wrote it is not listed here.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, normally people would be dunking on this person. Hey, shut up. You do, you're not in the arena, journalist.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It's harder to dunk on The Economist.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  They got Lee Marie and Ev over there holding it down. Over the years, it's made its limited partners and its own rainmakers who pocket around a quarter of the gains plus a management fee. A total of over $70 billion, thanks to early bets on future tech darlings like Airbnb, Apple, Google, and Nvidia. What an insane lineup, like.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Crazy lineup and, and there's some stat.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  Three trillion dollar companies.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's some stat that's 33% of the NASDAQ.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Are Sequoia backed companies, which is crazy.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  I think I have that here. Yeah. Bree Kimmel says, Don Valentine started with a $3 million venture fund in 1974. Sequoia has helped capitalize companies that now represent 3.3 trillion of market value. 33% of the NASDAQ. An incredible journey and an immeasurable impact on the world. Amazingly, half of that is in Apple. Interesting.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but somebody, I think Sheil pointed out, they, they actually only made 6 million on Apple.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  That's super interesting. Because they just IPO'd so early?

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or, or wasn't there some M and A at some point?

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Uh, no, no, I, I think, I think a lot of these tech companies just went, went public really, really early and distributed the shares. But that doesn't mean that the partners necessarily sold.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Which is like, okay, so yes, some of the LPs might have sold if they got the shares, but they might have held on to them. It just kind of depends. So you can't really knock them for that. If there's.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  If there's some old partner chilling with some Apple shares right now, totally possible.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  But yeah, let, let, let's keep going through this. Alfred Lin, who co-led Sequoia's investments in OpenAI. Topped this year's Midas list rankings of the world's 100 most successful venture dealmakers compiled by Forbes, Mr. Bota came in 11th. Another three Sequoia employees made the list. Bota puts things in Darwinian terms paraphrasing the father of evolutionary science. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most responsive to change. For Sequoia, responding to change has included hatching a growth fund to bankroll larger startups that would have gone public, expanding into China and India, and creating a hedge fund and a wealth management arm. So they've really, really expanded.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Scale the platform.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Although obviously, they've, you know, tied, they've paired things back recently. Seems like a sound idea in principle. Why ensure cross, why endure cross-border headaches or compete with spend-thrift foreigners like SoftBank of Japan as they bid up valuations of today's sexy AI startups when fettering out tomorrow's stars at home offers potentially higher returns? For one thing, the VC landscape has become more crowded. PitchBook, a data provider, counted 3,417 conventional VC firms active in America last year, up from fewer than 1,000 in the mid 2000s when Mr. Bota got into the business. Last year, they managed $1.2 trillion worth of assets compared to $150 billion 20 years ago. The value of

• 22:53John Coogan?

  new deals in the first nine months of this year exceeded $130 billion. That pales beside the $3.52 billion in all of 2021, a white-hot year for startups but is nearly twice the figure for 2014. And so massive, massive growth in, in VC in general. This is, this is just such an interesting article there. As with the other growths of, the other old growths of Sand Hill Road, Sequoia is also contending with smaller seed investors, often ex-entrepreneurs, getting between old-school VCs and the next generation of founders. These newcomers are closer to the young entrepreneurs in age and have at the same WhatsApp groups and offer counsel on negotiating with the Sequoias, having been through it themselves. The phenomenon dates back to the creation of Y Combinator, a startup kindergarten. What a blast.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  The Economist really does not pull punches.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's, I mean, but, but at the same time, it's not like, it's not like you go and... Yeah, can like even for children kindergarten is a kindergarten, right? It's basically daycare for kids with a little bit of learning.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  And and but it's not like kindergarten is bad.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Like it serves a purpose.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Kids graduate from it and they go on and do big things from there, right?

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know. I don't know that it's

• 24:05John Coogan?

  The earliest phase of funding.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it serves a very real function of of taking people that oftentimes have really no experience building companies, raising money, all these different things.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  And giving them some structure and the returns definitely show it.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  And then they highlight this really funny deal that just happened recently or move that just happened recently. They say on November 26, the information reported that a young former startup manager turned partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Sequoia's rival was leaving to start her own $50 million seed fund.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Which is like the most random inclusion ever in the context of.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  I mean, good for Michelle.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  If you're not familiar, that's clearly Michelle Voels who left Andreessen to start, I think it's called like Pax Ventures, Pax Americana Ventures. And and I mean, she, I don't even know if she's closed the fund yet. She just left and kind of announced and leaked to the information and they published it. She hasn't even announced it. She hasn't really posted about it. But here the economist is like, man, Sequoia's got some stiff competition.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a new, a new seed fund that hasn't actually closed yet.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think, I think Michelle would be like, yeah, you know, like, I could probably like let Sequoia win and still do very, very well.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  But this is great. So they close with Sequoia has no plans to cede what Mr. Bota calls its unfair advantage. A respected brand name, a strong network and sophisticated data analysis. It's beefing up ARC, its startup school and maintains a scout scheme, lending asset-rich, cash-poor founders money to invest and sharing upside. In 2023, it backed five startups as they were still incorporating. It's still may, it's still also marketing itself more intensely. Partners speak at conferences and appear on podcasts. No mention of Sean here.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Doing some of them post as well.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  The craziest work of all the, of all the Sequoia marketing machine. This costs money. More importantly, it takes up time that could be actively spent seeking out fresh prospects. It has led Sequoia to to expand collective decision-making on which it prides itself as necessarily less limber with 25 investment staff than it was with a dozen two decades ago.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they still have a consensus partnership.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Which means that every single you could have. You know, let's say Alfred Lin.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wants to do a deal. He still has to get every other GP on board to do the deal. Everybody has to be bought in. And so that's different than other.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Is benchmark like that?

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark might be like that. I don't think Andreessen, I don't think Andreessen is like that. I don't think founder, founders.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  No, founders.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Definitely not like that. Um, and so it ends up being an interesting thing where founders can get all the way through the process with Sequoia. Pitch the full partnership, which usually is just sort of like a, a sort of ceremonial thing. But then maybe still not get a deal and have to get some of these, um, you know, a GP or two, like fully bought in. Uh, maybe they don't even get there at all.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so let's close with this post, which I really liked, uh, clip from Mike Moritz, I believe on, um, oh, I forget. I forget what interview this was. It was great. Um, Mike Moritz on what made Sequoia Capital successful. We've always been afraid of going out of business. We've worked hard to, on trying to figure out how we make Sequoia endure. We've assumed that tomorrow isn't like yesterday. We can't afford to, to rest on our laurels. It's great. This was from a long time ago, too.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, um, yeah, he also, he also talks about, you know, uh, Don says, the art of storytelling is incredibly important. Learning to tell a story is critically important because that's how money works. The money flows as a function of the story. And he says, uh, a venture capitalist gets to see all kinds of storytellers. Which I think is, makes a ton of sense. The people raising the most money, both funds and startups are the ones that are best at storytelling. They oftentimes back that up with, with great, you know, products. But, uh, it, it matters, uh, matters quite a lot.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  I think there, I think it would be silly not to mention kind of the, the two disjointed media strategy that, that Sequoia has right now, which on one hand. The Sequoia partner that I see the most of is Sean Maguire and many people that listen to the show probably as well. He's by far, he kind of has his own brand and approach to getting attention and getting in front of founders and it's certainly, it's been controversial. He's gotten himself into hot water.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  But it's also paid off.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  But it's paid off in many ways. He led the deal into X from Sequoia. Has a very close relationship with Elon. It's even last week, it was, he had posted something about Hunter Biden being his tenant at his family's property in Venice and how Hunter Biden apparently allegedly was trying to pay rent using artwork that he made with feces, his own feces. So incredible story. Wouldn't put it past Hunter. Sounds a little crazy. But then Sean immediately, I think, went and I guess like Sequoia had some type of issue with their Google Workspace and they were like, you know, got taken down for a second and he immediately was like, is it the deep state or something like that?

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  I think he sort of retraced on that. But it's sort of this like really interesting contrast where half the partner, you know, more than half the partnership is sort of like quiet in the background, you know, sitting on Sand Hill Road, basically like taking this very like thoughtful, sophisticated approach. Meanwhile, Sean is just like posting through everything, figuring out how to make himself a part of, a part of stories that-

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Of like a global conversation.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  A global conversation.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Like not even within Silicon Valley. There are people, there are random political junkies in the middle of nowhere who don't even know what a startup or series A is that know Sean because of what he did.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I could see, I could see Alfred Lin going on, going on like Lex, right? And like having this like three hour conversation about the future of, you know-

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Well, do you know their other?

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  AI. And then meanwhile, Sean is getting 100 times more impressions around the clock just posting. So different approaches and we'll see how they, uh, John is opening up a

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Gift we got.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Gift from, that we got from one of our listeners and friends of the show, The Lone Ranger is his name.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  That's hard.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Which one is that?

• 30:33John Coogan?

  This is a, uh, let's see, this is a level two strength grip trainer that you try and pinch with your

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so basically we got a bunch of the, we got a bunch.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got a bunch of these and we gotta work it out, we gotta work up to it.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, The Lone Ranger basically, uh, thank you for sending these, but hi- his advice was basically use these.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm not sure.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  It's hard.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a two. So he basically said anything over a one.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  If you, if, if, if a founder can do over one, uh, you know, you, it's, they're investable.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  If they can't do that, not investable. If you can get to two and a half, which we have here, we'll have to test it at a later date. Two and a half, just back the truck up.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  Get as much allocation as you can.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Okay. It's just all about grip strength these days.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  It's all about grip strength these days. No, he said it's an alternative, you know, we're, we're in this middle of this testosterone epidemic where many, many founders are trying to build their companies, uh, in the three to 400 range. And that's just a big, that's just a big problem. And so if you can't get a blood test from a founder to prove their testosterone levels prior to investing, doing a grip, uh, strength, uh, test on the spot is a good way to kind of evaluate. Are they an investment, you know, candidate? Do they have what it takes? Um, are they captains of crush?

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Captains, yeah, that's a brand.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  That's a brand.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  So go, yeah, go, we highly recommend, go pick up captains of crush on Amazon.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and these look very vintage.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, these are great.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  From a company called Iron Mind.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, the last thing on Sequoia, uh, do you know the other half of their media strategy?

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Most ADHD episode.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  It's a Dom episode.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a Dom episode. It's Dom episode. Cheers.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  The other half of the, uh,

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Nice ring to it.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  The other half of the Sequoia marketing strategy is this podcast hosted by Roloff Bota called Crucible Moments and they actually get incredible guests. They've had Chesky and all these like huge CEOs on and they've done some promotion for it, but it just hasn't broken through like Sean because Sean is just like in the zeitgeist like.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  I honestly hadn't even heard of the show.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tough because there are a lot of those types of shows and even though they have kind of the best, it's like limited run. They don't do that many of them.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  And they have no growth, no real growth because Bota's not out there posting.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Roloff's gotta be posting.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Gotta be, gotta be getting.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  In the mix.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Four or five bangers a day.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what I want to see. So hopefully they, hopefully they take after Sean and we see more.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  No, but that's, that's the pure quote unquote quality and depth of content has nothing to do with how quick, how big of an audience it gets. It doesn't even necessarily deserve a big audience because to deserve a big audience, you actually need, you gotta have a multiple things going. You gotta have the right format. But, uh, but yeah, I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll keep iterating on it and figure out a way to, to get it in front of more people.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yep. So let's go to the DMs, our Q and A segment. Add us on X or send us a DM if you have a question. Mickey with the blicky says, VC Mickey is back. I have an idea that could transform your podcast into a billion, maybe even a trillion dollar company. You'll have to sign NDAs prior to discussing DMs open. What do you think, Jordy?

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Mickey, I think he's baiting us for this one. Honestly, I think he knows that you're not supposed to ask for an NDA before you pitch somebody something, at least in the venture world. Cause at this point it's like, you know, you ask for an NDA and then, and then what if we already had that idea? And then it becomes this sort of like legal scuffle because he's like, well, that was my idea and blah, blah, blah. So Mickey, I know, uh, I don't, I don't know Mickey personally, but we've had some interactions via the show and. I know he's baiting us with that one. Nick, Mickey knows better than to ask for an NDA on the first meeting.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Just, just tell it to us. Just, just, we can be trusted.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. We won't, we won't lever, lever up the idea.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Immediately. Mickey, never heard of him.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Screw that guy.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Mickey, for, for providing great questions.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  We love it. Red Bull Futurist says, can we get some insight into the pen that you use to sign deals? Are you fountain enjoyers? Bic, crystal, extra bold appreciators? What do you think, Jordy?

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Man, I, my, my handwriting is, I do a lot of digital signatures, honestly.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  I am, and we're, we're trying to bring the paper back. We're trying to bring the pen back.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  Really trying to work on, you know, my handwriting.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, I'm not, I'm not dialed in on pens, but, but one of the reasons why I haven't really explored what's out there or purchase anything is that we're making our own pen.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Yes, that's right.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  And it will be, uh, pretty much right away. I think it'll be one of the number one sort of deal making pens.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  In venture, um, we'll be getting them out to our listeners, founders in our portfolio, making sure that everybody's got the right ink, uh, for the deal. But we got to bring back, we got to bring back in-person document signing. Germany like forces their founders to do this, but it's a great photo opportunity. Like imagine, imagine one of our listeners is raising, you know, signs a term sheet with Sean McGuire. Like I want to see a picture. I want to see live video of both of them signing on, on the dotted line, you know?

• 35:59John Coogan?

  There, there is a great photo of Dylan Field at Figma signing a term sheet with Sequoia.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's, it's what?

• 36:06John Coogan?

  With Will, I believe. Uh, isn't that his name?

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  No, and?

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, Andrew Reid.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, I remember.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Always get a deal photo, for sure.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  No, it's actually sad. A lot of deal photos don't happen now because of Zoom.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Jordi Hays?

  And so by the time you're actually having dinner, like they're in person, like it's already closed or, or, or, you know, at least the term sheet's been signed.

• 36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. But you're going to want that for the book or for the, even just like the TechCrunch article. Like just give them something better than just.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Or if we break, if we break your fundraising announcements, we will include it in our, um, you know, uh,

• 36:43John Coogan?

  But there's an easy way around, you know, decision fatigue around what pen to use. And that's just hire a full-time calligrapher, which is what I do. So I have a calligrapher on staff and anytime I need to write something, my handwriting's terrible, but hers is fantastic. And so that's kind of how I've solved that problem.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  And you have to like delegate, delegate, you know, sort of, you allow them to sign on your behalf.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And then it just looks beautiful every time. And so, yeah, if you ever get a handwritten note from me, well, you know who wrote it? My calligrapher. Let's, uh, let's go to a promoted post. Jordy, what do you got for me?

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Phew, here we go. It's time to, uh, it's time to promote.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's see here.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  All right, we have a promoted post from Matt Paulson. Matt says Ramp is the best. Every business should use it to keep expense creep at bay. Simple, bold, and true. And he's quote tweeting Ramp saying, using different software for cards, bill pay, travel, expense management, and procurement. And it has one of the original sort of SpaceX rocket engines, which is just way overly complex, Raptor one. And then you say, and it says, using Ramp, and you have Raptor three, refined, streamlined, simplified, uh, and just even more beautiful. So that's what-

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Great metaphor.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Great metaphor for using Ramp. So if you're using 20 different tools to run your financial operations at your startup, cut it out, switch to Ramp, consolidate, focus, and you won't end up like the Kamala campaign, which was using Amex, probably bill.com-

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Didn't consolidate.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Didn't consolidate, and they blew through a billy in a few months.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  And they spent a hundred K on a podcast set.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  For one shoot, whereas we spent, I mean, we spent like three to five times that, but this will be used again and again and again. We're amortizing it.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're amortizing it over the next few decades.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  In this case.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  But yeah, thanks to Ramp. And if you sign up for Ramp, tell them the technology brother sent you. Uh, let's go to Zach. He says, would listen to a pod called Liquor Ladies Leverage on how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives. What do you think? I disagree. We were big fans of leverage.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  And liquor.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Big fans of ladies.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  Hey, cheers to Zach.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Cheers to that.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  No, I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do have vices, right? Like they do have their sort of kryptonite or their Achilles heel, whatever it is. Sometimes it's some of those things. I feel like, I feel like Senra like covers a lot of that stuff. Like he gets into, I don't know, like he talks about the McDonald's founder or whatever. And how like the guy was basically like all of his relationships would fall apart all the time. And he, you know, really like kind of failed on the home front in many ways.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  But I feel like he doesn't cover almost great entrepreneurs.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay, okay, I missed that part, yeah.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Who made it, made it through. So, so the, the question here is how almost great entrepreneurs fucked up their lives? And yeah, there's plenty of, plenty of great entrepreneurs that made it through with the three martini lunches.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  We already covered Dylan. Oh, this is great. So PBIT got a package secured for Mod Retro. And it's a beautiful package for the Karatic.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Mod Retro basically figured out that I guess like all of the trademarks and patents on the Game Boy expired. And you could rebuild, you could create a new version of the Game Boy.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  From scratch.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Put it back into production. It's still that same analog feeling. And yeah, I haven't been able to, to play an actual game. But the cool thing is it will use the same cartridges, I believe, that you had for an actual Game Boy.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Are those easy to buy?

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I still have a bunch.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Okay, you do.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like my original sort of like road trip.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  I feel like the next thing they need to release is like the Omni cartridge that like rewrites the cartridge on the fly and stores basically like a thousand games in one go or something like that.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Because like the hardware's gotten so much smaller, you could probably compress everything on there.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  But I think so Mod Retro actually has a partnership with GameStop.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  And GameStop is like, thank you. God for listening to our prayers. Finally, a new hardware device that has physical cartridge games that we can sell that you can't just buy online. Like, maybe you can buy them on Amazon, but you can't just download them. So it's possible that I could see a world in which mod retro eventually LBOs, GameStop, just becomes this massive collective, you know, meme stock.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  And you have to imagine if there's like a 25-year lag on the IP, that it's like, we're gonna get a mod retro N64. And then we're gonna get a mod retro PS1 and a PS2. And they're all gonna be just as you experienced.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I know, I know a number of people that invested in mod retro. It was probably an easy bet just because Palmer was involved. And, uh, but, but yeah, their sales have been fantastic. It's sort of one of those things, like, you can pick out a lot of reasons why maybe it's not a good bet. It's like, how many people are actually gonna like, buy it and play the games and all these different things. But yeah, if there's a, if there's a case for like, basically creating all these different analog versions of historically significant gaming platforms, it's probably like a hundred million dollar revenue business there to be built, so.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, let's go to Gordon Gecko. He says, when are they releasing AMEX wrapped? 1.6K like.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  So, I mean, they basically have that already.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  They do?

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you can, okay, so I can go into, I can go into, I've got my Air One wrapped for, for the six-figure club. That's, that's, there's, there's not many of us, but, um, but you know, you can literally go into AMEX and, and look at year-to-date or last year and see exactly how much you've spent. I would like more social sharing elements.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  That's not the same as a wrapped. A wrapped makes it fun. There's music, there's animations. It shows you, you know, what your personality type is, and it needs to break things down.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  I wanna see, like, you generated 20 grand in interchange fees for AMEX.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  You're like, yes, the shareholders.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, more companies should do wrapped. I would love to see Brex wrapped for companies. I would love to see.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  You mean ramp?

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, ramp, ramp wrapped. That's a bad blah, like.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Brex wrapped is just, you went out of business in Q2.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Ramp wrapped really doesn't roll off the tongue. They need to come up with a different name for it.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  No, it's ramped wrapped and it's a, it's a real rapper that makes, that makes like a freestyle based on your spending.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  That's good. That's good.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  It's like Ali G style, like, yo, you spent, you spent 500K on cloud, you know?

• 43:38John Coogan?

  But even, even like YouTube should be doing that wrapped. There's so many, X should definitely be doing something like the, the, I want to know what post was the biggest banger that I liked the earliest?

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  You know, that's something that they could pull together.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and that's the thing. There's so much alpha and just taking a format that works well in another category and just recreating it in your category. In many ways, we've done that with, you know, the Pat McAfee Show, right? It's like the Pat McAfee Show for tech. But yeah, if you're, if you're a business and you have some type of interesting user data, make, make a wrapped. It's not like, it's pretty, you know, it's pretty low lift and potentially a lot of cool attention you can bring your way.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  It's great. Carried No Interest says, "One of the largest aluminum processing facilities near me in the Midwest just sold to Emirates Global Aluminum. EGA is owned by the Mubadala Investment Authority, which is state-controlled entity. We literally need to ban this. This cannot be allowed to happen. I'm all for free markets, but at some point, we as a society need to conclude that our most important industrial assets should not be foreign-owned. Would China allow this? Would Dubai even allow that? Why do we?" Good question. He's so tapped into like, how does he know about this aluminum processing facility? It's crazy.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  So when I talk to Carried, I'm always, I get, sometime, like I work on a bunch of different deals. In the last year, I've done stuff in water and defense and AI and all that stuff. But, um, and, and I'll talk to people and they'll be like, how do you work on all these like different things? Like they're in such different categories. But I get that exact same feeling when I talk to Carried. Like he's just always, in the same day, he'll be working on some new, you know? Product like leveraging, you know, GPT and in the same day, he's buying some like metal processing facility. So anyways, absolute

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Capital markets Chad, absolute dog. And yeah, I think he's been, he's been banging the drum on American manufacturing needing to be about more than just investing in new robotics companies and things like that. And there needs to be more, more of the right government intervention, which is like, hey, let's not sell off our, our critical industries. And let's actually get more government investment in, you know, manufacturing locally so that we can actually compete on a global scale with giants like China.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And really understanding like, what is the market dynamic for these industrial plants? Like, there's only, I think there's only one tin smelting plant in the United States anymore. And I mean, I learned this with nicotine gum manufacturing. All of the, this is not obviously is critical, but like every gum manufacturer went to Canada and Mexico because of the sugar tariff. And so

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  So gum is very heavy in sugar. And so you want to bring it in as a finished good. You don't want to bring in the sugar because that's taxed. And so like, like all of the sugar, all of the, you know, chewing gum manufacturing capacity went overseas. And, and you could see that like, you know, there needs to be review of these types of deals to understand, okay, how much of our aluminum processing capacity did we actually just lose control over? If it's 1%

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Was it half a percent?

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Probably fine.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  But you don't want to boil the frog. And so you want someone watching this and making sure that you don't wind up in a situation where, you know, China controls 99% of the, of the, of the raw material at some point. Let's go to Justine Moore. She says, someone made a dating app where that uses your conversations with Claude to make matches. And it's called Claudette. Share your Claude conversation history and find your match.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  I think they're gonna have the same problem that most dating apps have, which is it's like massive overindex on men.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  And maybe.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Is that true for Replica and Character? I feel like those were skewed differently than expected.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  You normally expect it's all dudes.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of men talk to their rampant SDR when they get lonely.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  They don't, they don't need to.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Or they just do Tegus calls.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I, I've long thought that the, the good ending for all the crazy AI girlfriend, AI boyfriend stuff is, is it matches you with someone else who's similar, who's also talking to an AI girlfriend or boyfriend?

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  And so there's a lonely person in Wichita and there's a lonely person in, in, you know, Miami or something. But you guys have been talking to your AIs about the same thing. You're clearly a match. And so the AI just says, hey, look, like, you know, why don't I just match you guys up? And then move on to the next person.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Or it, it doesn't even say anything. And they just say, hey, by the way, for the last two weeks, you've been talking with the love of your life.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to do a face reveal?

• 48:33John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  I said, somebody, somebody pitched me the other day. There's another concept, uh, in the, in the sort of dating app concept, which was delegated swiping. So imagine like you go on and you create a profile and then you let someone else that you know swipe and like make and talk on your behalf. And that's probably been tried, but I could see that hitting in the same way that, um, what was that like, uh, social media app where you could like post once a day or whatever? Like every, every once in a while, you can create this sort of like novel social interaction.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Be real.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Be real. Yeah, like be real, like didn't really have any sort of net new functionality.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, than like Instagram, besides a specific constraint and a dating app that you can't swipe on at all. And like only your friends can swipe for you or family members.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  I could see that hitting, um, if you, uh, were willing to spend 10 grand a month on intro with, uh, with Nikita.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, you can even, I mean, it's a real phenomenon that when, when there's like one single person in a group of people that are in relationships, everyone who's in a relationship will be like, oh, like, let me see your dating apps. Like, let me see who we should be swiping on. So I could see that being really big. And then there's even like a bounty for like, who's the one that swiped on the right person, you know?

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Because it's basically like making an intro and being like, oh, I'm the one that matched them up. Like, I'm the one that saw something in that guy's profile for my, for my female friend that I was like, he'll be a good one for you. And she might not have swiped on him. So I get a little bit of credit at the wedding. It's all great.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some people are their own worst enemy in dating. It's like they keep going back to the same toxic type of people. And sometimes you just need your mom to swipe on your behalf.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Craig Weiss says, did the PayPal mafia just take over the government? Yes, Craig.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  Fact check. True.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Not much more to say about that.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  There's really not much more to say. You know, 20 year plan executed flawlessly.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  But you know what, you know what the real story is? The real story is that PayPal had this really weird thing where they merged the company. There was tons of infighting. Sequoia, Peter, Elon, all like, you know, at each other's throats, well documented, basically breaks up the company. They wind up selling it. So all those guys, they're all killers and they all get liquidity really early. And so none of them stays, like, like, run the counterfactual where Peter or Elon is running PayPal. It's a fintech giant worth a trillion dollars, like no doubt, right? And so instead, and they'd probably be just as wealthy, but they'd be like the CEO, narrow, you know, concerned about regulation, just that one thing. Instead, it's like all these guys scatter to the wind with millions of

• 51:20John Coogan?

  dollars and then they can start funds, start new companies, do all sorts of things. And they just naturally become diversified.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Invested in 20 plus industries.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Exactly. And, and then once you're, once you're diversified, the adding the government on for Elon is totally natural.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  It's the highest leverage.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  And so I, I think that's the real phenomenon.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elon, you get to a lot of, you know, newer CEOs or fund managers are like, well, I just need to hire this PR firm and pay them 10 grand a month. So they like get me in this article or get me on this list. And you get to a scale like. Teal scale or Elon scale and yeah, the highest and best use of your energy is making sure the government is, is, is working in your interests and towards the same goals. So we'll see how this one plays out for him.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a great season.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a great season.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Max Novenstern says, building tech for drones now is like starting a deep learning lab 10 years ago. Interesting. I like that because you, you know, I wasn't sure where this is going because there's a ton of defense drone companies right now. It's kind of overplayed. Oh, you're building group one to three ISR drones with mixed use.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  So is my mom, bro.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But, but, but you see those drone displays. It's like, we still don't have an American DJI.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  So three years ago, people would see the Chinese like drone, like fireworks style drone displays and they'd be like, oh, look how cool this is. Just like let, let, let Reddit like reaction. Just like.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Just regiting out Chinese military technology.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Like great Chinese drone show. And then now people are like, fuck, fuck, fuck. Like they're like really stressed about it because you see this like, yeah, if they can make the drones turn into this like massive dragon, it's like they'll do that on the battlefield.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  I could, that's, that's the crazy thing. Everybody's like, oh, they're going to create these drone swarms. But imagine you're just an infantry, you know, person in Taiwan and this literal Chinese dragon is flying above you and they're all have bombs strapped to them. You're, you're going to be like, all right, like let's, you know, let's tap almost.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Rave the white flag. Yeah. It's, it's wild. I posted that like it's, it, I couldn't find an example in science fiction where, because when you see those dragon drone displays, they're basically holograms. Like they're 3D, they're, they're big and they're in the sky, but they're essentially holograms because they're rendering the pixels through the individual drones. And I was like, I don't, I don't, there were plenty of sci-fi authors who predicted holograms, but I don't think anyone predicted that holograms would be extremely deadly and military.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and the form, and the format of them.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, everybody was thinking they'd be projected.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Not physical.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  Physical.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And as soon as they're physical, it means game over.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Death.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Sagar and Jetty says, this man did not place a single bet before 2020. By 2024, he gambled away $1 million and left his family destitute. Along the way, DraftKings signed VIP hosts who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family's status. DraftKings was sued after a father of two gambles away $1 million of his family money.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  Very sad story. Very sad story. Gambling addiction is real. So is angel investing addiction.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  It's so hard because gambling addiction is uncapped downside financially. You can lose a billion dollars. You can lose a million dollars. You can lose, if you have $10,000, you can lose it all. And there aren't that many other addictions that have that crazy downside. I mean, of course, like the hardcore drug, it's like the same thing for your health. Like, if you're on fentanyl, it's like, yeah, like, it's gonna be fine, fine, fine, and then dead, right? And it's kind of the same thing financially. But there aren't many other, like, if you're addicted to shopping or consumption, it's very hard to, it's very hard to bottom out in that way. Yeah, very sad story.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's the thing. I don't think people, I didn't know this, but these big sports betting and gambling companies, they have account managers whose entire job is to get the users to gamble more money by introducing them to new products, becoming their friend, like, having this dialogue, and it's, and it's super dark. I don't think that should be, I don't think that should be allowed. I think it's turning, it's basically like putting an addict in a casino and having somebody fall, which is actually still a real thing. It originated in casinos, but still, for some reason, in person, you're in their pocket, they're messaging you.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  But the casinos have always been constrained to, it's just Las Vegas, or just...

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Now, it's in your pocket everywhere. Somebody, this guy's at his kid's soccer game, and his DraftKings account manager is like, hey, did you know you could, you know?

• 56:11John Coogan?

  A game coming up? What's your bet? Who do you like?

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super dark.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, Sagar's pushing against that.

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's this, it's this interesting battle between, uh, sports betting is like, clearly...

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's not going to go away, but there is a historical precedent for the government coming in. You saw this with online poker. There's a lot of people who had entire careers built around gaming online. That got shut down. And, you know, I'm sure many people would argue, oh, they're never going to take this away. Creates too much tax revenue. The governments are incentivized to like, just keep it kind of going. And now with gaming, we'll, we'll see what happens. The other, the interesting thing in gaming right now is there's all these new platforms that are facilitating fantasy sports and allowing you to basically bet on fantasy. This is way out of my, way out of my wheelhouse. So I can't speak about like using these products, but I do know there's this tension between

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  the tribes that, that historically had a monopoly on, on gambling. Being frustrated with these new fantasy betting platforms because it's effectively a workaround to do sports betting without paying your tax to the, to the tribes. And so over the next couple of election cycles, both at the state level and the national level, I think we'll see that play out. Where the tribes have a big incentive and they have big balance sheets that they can go and start lobbying the government to say, hey, we need new regulations here. So I think we, we sort of have probably hit like peak unregulated sports betting and gambling broadly. So we'll see what happens over the next few years.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very, very odd. I, I think one of the big, there's a couple of angles, like one would be like, you know, restrict the hours, restrict the locations, like gambling used to be basically geolocation locked before when it was in Vegas. Now it's been unlocked and you can do it 24/7, whenever. The other interesting thing is that if you are actually good at sports betting, they kick you off the platform.

• 58:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Because they know they're going to lose money on you because you have an edge.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm sure we, I'm sure we have some, I'm sure we have some listeners that are constantly getting booted.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so maybe that should be illegal. Like maybe it should be like, yeah, you can, like you, you, you have to, you have to take the ace and the, the, the like, you know, the, the power law risk on both sides, guys. If you're going to take this guy's million, somebody's going to take that from you.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  No, it's interesting though. I don't know what it is. I love, I love angel investing.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  I have zero interest in sports betting.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  I've placed like one bet. Watching the Super Bowl with my buddy.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Being like, if this team wins. Yeah, I have zero interest in it and I don't understand it.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Well, it's low class and vulgar generally.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep, right, right.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  I say in a tuxedo.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  Real men play poker, you know.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Baccarat, actually.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Baccarat, right. There's crazy, by the way, there's crazy, like Dana White has gone on podcasts and talked for hours about his, like, his, the way he gambles in Vegas and he'll brag about like, I'm up like 16 million so far this year, like, he's like, but they can't really like kick him out because he like runs Vegas in many ways.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I saw some video about that where he's like, oh yeah, like I had a rough night, like.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  I think it's baccarat that he plays.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it, I think baccarat is a game.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, somebody will correct us if I'm wrong, but um, baccarat's a game where if you are legitimately good, you do have like some mild edge over, over the house.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little more skill gaze.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Skill based.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  But, but Dana White's in there, you know, on a high after, after a good pay-per-view and he's just like throwing around $5 million in a night.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  It's wild. Mark Andreessen says, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. I like that, it's good. Estimated net worth of Trump administration's wealthiest members, and it's Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Scott Pesant, Howard Lutnick, Lyndon McMan, Chris Wright, Doug Burnham, Burgum, Steve Whitkoff, Mossad Boulos, Stephen Feinberg, tons of people. And there, and lots of billionaires. Fascinating.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Beaners.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Beaners, yeah.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  No, it's cool, I mean, I, I, I'm just personally, we don't, you know, we don't talk about politics on this podcast ever, or social issues, but I'm just really excited to see how the next four years play out. Like, it's gonna be.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  High expectations.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the expectations couldn't be higher and so, and the.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  And every, the Republican Party has every edge right now, right? So if, if they don't perform, then there's gonna be a lot of dunking from, from the left. You know, if they're not productive, they don't get anything done. So we'll, we'll just have to see how it plays out.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a reporter who was asking me like, like, oh, like, given that Doge is gonna like lay off so many people, do you think that certain things might move slower? Because that's certainly not the, the hope, but like, that would be kind of an unintended consequence. And I was like, oh, it's so hard to predict that.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but the scale is what causes a lot of the slowdown. The other thing, I'm, I'm gonna butcher the statistic, but it's some ungodly amount of people in the federal government have just been working from home. Like, you know, indefinitely.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  And everybody that has hired a remote team in the past knows that remote teams do not work as hard. They do not work as many hours. You might think that they're, you know, they're available plenty of times, right? If you send someone a Slack message, they'll pop on and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I can jump on Zoom. Just give me like 20 minutes. And it's like, why do you need 20 minutes to jump on Zoom, right? It's like, oh, they were walking their dog or they were doing all these things. So I think that, yeah, there, there's not a, I, I think that the individual government organizations and the leader of those groups should be able to decide, are we a work from home team?

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Is it a good fit for what we need to accomplish right now?

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  And just get more real about, about that.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  It just also needs to be paired with like deregulation and changing the actual laws. Because if there's a law that says, in order to build a road, you need a rubber stamp and they fire everyone who does the rubber stamps, well, then it will still be illegal to build roads.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  And so you have to remove the, the, the law, the creative, the need for all that stuff. So tricky. JD says, buy a 50-year-old business from an old man without a website, they say. After signing an LOI in August, spending tens of thousands of dollars in diligence, legal fees, calling capital from friends and family, and learning more about the generator space than I knew existed, I just had a deal die on the one yard line. Brutal, but it's probably okay. A few thoughts.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I, I pulled this because I had this happen to me last year. I was working on buying a company in the UK that.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like my, my father-in-law knew the owner. So there was like some type of connection. Sure. Worked on it for like straight for like four to five months. Like, you know, went there, spent a lot of time with the owner. It was a 30-year-old business and had all the capital committed, had all the documents done and literally in the final week, like found one single document that, that should have been like a, like a non-issue that basically I, I won't go into it too much. Um, but if we had known about that document much earlier in the process, it wouldn't have been an issue. But finding out about it that late and the owner basically hit it, it, it blew up the deal. Like I just decided to walk away, like

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  literally 48 hours before we were flying to the UK to close. And the issue there was I had spent over a hundred thousand dollars on legal bills that would have been prorated among me and the other investors in the deal. But because we didn't close, I was, I was stuck with the bill. So I had to spend a hundred thousand dollars for a deal that just didn't happen. And it was super painful, but in hindsight now I'm, I'm, I'm fine with it. I'm, uh, uh, maybe we wouldn't be podcasting right now if it had gone through. Stick to angel investing. Yeah. Stick to angel investing. Stick to the safes. Yeah. Stick to safes. They're, they're much easier. No, but, but I brought this up because this is something that AI is actually going to solve because imagine when you can take a data room. Yep.

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  And even in just like in, in, in my case, there was 30 years worth of physical records for the business and we, we only really had to pay attention to the last like 10 years. But it's still like a lot of data to ingest. And so now you're going to have this AI tools that allow you to diligence deals much, much, much faster and for much less money because you don't need all these like associates pouring over documents and all that stuff. And so I think this is going to actually, AI will speed up the velocity of deals in private equity because you're going to be able to basically you, you now have intelligence as a service. So a law firm, you know, with the same number of people might be able to diligence like 20 times as many deals. And so it's actually very positive because if you're an individual operator, a PE fund, you can go and say,

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  hey, we're actually going to get into diligence with like more companies because right now and or up until this point, you've had to been like, you gotta get really serious about the deal. Before you decide, hey, we're going to spend, you know, a hundred thousand dollars on like going through this entire process. So. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Let's go to Bojan. He says, get in loser. We are building a full for-profit AGI. And it's Sam Altman in his Koenigsegg.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic photo.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is, this is one of the bull cases for SF, right?

• 1:06:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Sam will not rest until you can street park a Koenigsegg.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, so that is, uh, why SF is very undervalued right now.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. And yeah, I mean, uh, people were saying this for, it's funny how it's kind of flipped. Like, people were saying for years, like, oh, OpenAI, like, ChatGPT, like, this company is so messed up. Like, they should just be a normal C corp. And now they're like flipping to that and everyone's like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Like, it's mad or something.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the crazy thing is there's this massive legal battle going on.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:30Jordi Hays?

  And Elon just continues to like shitpost through it.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  He just like, everything that Sam posts or somebody posts about Sam, he just responds with like crying emojis, like laughing.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  It's crazy. You can just do that. Like, it's gonna be in court, right?

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  These are gonna be in the court documents about like these people.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Elon, what did you mean when you put the crying laughing emoji on this post? Um, or what did you mean when you said scam?

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  It's such a mess.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Total mess. But Elon's lawyers are just like refreshing his feed, being like, another 20,000 abillable hours, another 20,000 abillables, another 20 grand abillables.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  It's never felt more like being a child of divorce in tech, just watching mom and dad fight in the, the, the, the two most important tech people right now, just beefing super hard.

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  On the timeline.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  On the timeline. I just want Sam and Elon to get back together, merge XAI and OpenAI.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, the crazy thing is the dynamic is, you have XAI now is like actively trying to mog OpenAI. I'm sure it's elsewhere in the stack, but OpenAI was doing their little like advent calendar type thing.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  And they were like, we'll be back on Monday. And, uh, one of the guys, maybe his name's Greg, was like, I love when they holiday chilling and while we grinding. And he's like, got thumbs up at the whole team.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  That guy fucking rocks.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  I love that guy.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  He's the man.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  I love that guy.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  I love it. Um, he's like their rune, basically.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Everybody needs a rune.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Everyone needs a rune and just a shitpost.

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Bojan is basically Nvidia's rune, right?

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  He was for a while. I don't think he's there anymore. I think he's just kind of independent now, but.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Post economic.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Do we have a promoted post?

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Of course we do, John. We have a promoted post from our friends over at Gulfstream Aerospace.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Unlock new adventures. When you board a Gulfstream, the world becomes a smaller place. And I just gotta say, they have this incredible picture of a beautiful, it looks like a 650, landed in Antarctica.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  And if you didn't know, you could land your Gulfstream there. Now you do. So go commission a plane. Talk, if you need an intro to a Gulfstream rep, just DM us and we'll be happy to set that up. But if you already have one,

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  tell them you heard about Gulfstream on

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Technology Brothers.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Technology Brothers podcast.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  That really, that is just such a great, like, marketing copy segment.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  The world becomes a smaller place.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  A smaller place.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  And that's what, that's what travel and being able to just hop on a plane at a moment and be somewhere else.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I had to go to, I went to SF yesterday for, for six hours.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, oh, it would have been nice to bring my family and whatever. And it's just the hassle of all that. So, yeah, that's what

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  That's what Gulfstream is all about.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Shrinking the world. And everybody can learn a little bit about their marketing and they clearly know how to use X. A lot of the promoted posts we feature, they add links to their posts. Gulfstream does not. So savvy in more ways than one.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Totally. You know, there's this saying in AI when some new model drops, this is the worst it'll ever be.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  I want Gulfstream to start posting, this is the slowest the planes will ever be.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  This is the slowest the planes will ever be. We're going supersonic.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  In the world of hypercars and supercars, we're always talking about horsepower and this can go faster.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's make the world a smaller place by making the planes just twice as fast. Doesn't need to be, doesn't need to be an order of magnitude faster, but if, if you could just get, if I could get to Dubai twice as fast, I'd pay a lot for that.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  There are companies working on that. Boom and Hermias are both working on supersonic planes right now. Still a couple of years out unfortunately, but hopefully soon. Let's go to Sarah. She says, okay, so Anduril partnered with OpenAI and Palantir partnered with Scale AI, who built Defense Llama, your favorite,

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  on top of Meta's open source LLM. But Anduril and Palantir also have a partnership, and I'm pretty sure Peter Thiel has invested in all of them. And it's a photo of the red string conspiracy theorist from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Yeah, partnerships, we talked about partnerships on a previous show. They're the hot ticket of the day. Everyone has a partnership.

• 1:10:44Jordi Hays?

  I just want to, I would love to be a fly on the wall of the room in the Pentagon. And they're like, so you're telling me we're using a llama for our AI? You thought llama made this?

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, every other like defense tech word is always a tomahawk missile. You know, it's always really,

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Palantir.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's always really aggressive.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Ring of death.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  Defense llama maybe breaking that a little bit.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they need the llama emoji.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  In all the docs.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  The tomcat, like, you know, all these different, the warthog, all these different defense tech terms. But yes, Scale AI really, really went crazy with that one. But I guess they need to throw llama in there since it's like Meta's product and it came from LLM. But yeah.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Meta being a social media company, calling their product llama makes more sense. I'm not sure how that's going to do in the DOD.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  So what do you think if you are a Series A, Series B stage defense tech company? And you don't have a major AI partnership lined up? It feels like there's a little bit of alpha in just doing a partnership with OpenAI, getting a press release out of it, getting a Wall Street Journal article out of it, maybe get on TV, somebody's just, just general awareness. Is it played out or is it still worth doing?

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's played out. We may have already peaked with with this sort of AI hype cycle, right? Like, we don't, we don't know this, right? I'm not gonna make a call here or there. Palantir is being valued at what?

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  One fifty, something like that.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was closer to two hundred. Two hundred times.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  A lot, a lot of money.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Times earnings.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Oh, I was thinking billion. I think it's one fifty billion.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  But it's the biggest defense company now.

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  So, so there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of top signals. So we've talked about this before. The smartest thing you can do at this point in the cycle is just tweet top every single day.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  So that you can quote tweet it and then be the next, next Michael Burry. But I don't, I mean, I don't, AI is still in many ways underhyped, right? We've talked about this. Like, even, even if there's this, you know, even if we're in a bubble, the tech, underlying technology can be underhyped. Like, I, at Thanksgiving, people weren't talking about it that much.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  You know, I talked about it with like a handful of people there.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, I was talking to a guy who, who, over the Thanksgiving holiday, who like works in film and TV, and he wasn't talking about it. And I was like, you're fucked. But, but, you know, if you're in the entertainment industry and you're not thinking and it's not top of mind, you're probably gonna get smoked.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. The phrase is overhyped in the short term, underhyped in the long term. That's kind of like the, the popular meme.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's real.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  So, yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, there's no, we talk to companies about this all the time. There's, there's, if you can launch a partnership as and become a customer of OpenAI and then make a press moment out of it, do it. There's not a lot of downside and there's like tons of potential upside.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, even if it just means getting like somewhat preferential pricing on the API. Like, that's better than paying full price. Get a partnership.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we're buying OpenAI credits. Our post earlier was not a joke.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Hit us up.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Hit us up.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  I don't know if you can buy them.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, it's a gray market, black market. It's a little gray, but

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  We're gonna get deplatformed.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're buying. You can't get deplatformed from the RSS feed.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, let's go to Nicole Wiskoff. She says, sad to report that there's a strong correlation between how insufferable your SDRs are and your company's success. Shout out to Ramp, Sidecar, and PitchBook.

• 1:14:31Jordi Hays?

  The best salespeople I know are the most annoying.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's really unfortunate because you're like, wow, this super annoying person that I knew is crushing it.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  And it shouldn't, you, you, it every, it goes against every fiber of your being.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  To think that this really annoying person is so good at their job. But if you're annoying.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Go become an SDR and you're absolutely going to clean house.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  It's not just annoying. It's like.

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  It's relentless, persistent.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but there's, yeah, there's a lot of instances when I have to tell an SDR, stop it.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to, you know, I don't believe in like blocking a salesperson or, or, or just like reporting it as spam.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  So they're just doing their job.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  But until you're getting people to say, either get on a call with you or engage with your product or, or saying like, please stop emailing me. You're not doing your job as like a, as a sales rep.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I remember like I was close with the Ramp founders and wanted to onboard and it still took a persistent sales rep to actually be at the top of my email regularly. For me to do the internal tasks just to make it happen. Like it wasn't just me saying like, I'm in. There was a whole bunch of things that needed to happen mechanically and that's what the SDR actually makes happen. It's like, go internally, actually consolidate, actually set up all the, the admin accounts and stuff. Like it takes some time to onboard a company onto a complex piece of software. So.

• 1:15:56Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting though, right, right now, I'm sure Nicole is getting inundated with pitches.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  But right now it does feel like if I, if a founder engages with. A post of mine on X or through the TB account.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Half the time they're running like, we automate your outbound sales motion or whatever. And I'm just like, oh, there's more of these companies than there are current.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Good sales reps.

• 1:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Good sales reps in the valley, but maybe that's bullish, you know, who knows?

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Who knows? Let's stay with Nicole. She says, 48 hours in SF, absolutely electric this week. Felt like one massive college campus with your besties everywhere. A few takeaways, YC demo day was impressive. Tons of Bitcoin hit 100K. I am an idiot. Menlo Park is very far from San Francisco. Zero negative sentiment on the market. Tech bros pod came up at dinner. Let's go. Congrats. You guys made it. Thank you. Dying to know in what, in what context.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to all the technology brothers though, because this is a, this is a movement.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, Nicole, let us know what they said. We love feedback here. At least one GP.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Nicole, Nicole did say she did comment and say, we need to add subtitles to X, but X has native subtitles that are better than what we would add. So if you don't have subtitles turned on, go turn them on.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  At least one GP at every firm you have ever heard of is leaving to raise their own fund. Not true. Brian Singerman is not raising his own fund. Still not convinced that big endowments invest in emerging managers. Blue Bottle is terrible. I've had Blue Bottle like a few times. I'm not a big coffee snob. So I don't know. Do you like?

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've, I've, I feel like I've talked about this on the show before. The Gen Z and millennial generations are so entitled when it comes to coffee.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Like our, our parents were like, if it's brown and hot, like it's good, sounds, you know, it's good, good for me. But we, with coffee prices have inflated along with everything else so much that when you're paying $7 for a cup of coffee, you want it to really hit. But yeah.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Gigaslop. You don't want gigaslop.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Blue Bottle is owned by Nestle.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, they sold.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Which is the number one gigaslop food company in the world. And so, yeah, don't expect to get a good cup of coffee at Blue Bottle. That being said.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  It's better than Starbucks and Blue Bottle bought my buddy's company and levered that up into creating multiple successful restaurants when they sold to Nestle.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Blue Bottle.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  I would just say, if you're thinking, if you're thinking about taking a meeting at Blue Bottle, why not take it at the San Francisco Philharmonic instead?

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  Just as good.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  And you get to enjoy some lovely music.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, next time you go to Blue Bottle, wear a suit and you might get better coffee and better service.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  I actually would guarantee it.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Let's go to Yoni Richtman. He says, "We're at the start of a new private equity ex venture capital super cycle. Whether it's PE funds buying venture-backed companies, venture funds launching PE strategies, or startups using PE-like approaches to buy their customers, something big is going on." He highlights four separate but related things: category maturity, limits on organic growth, asset class maturity, and entrepreneurial culture. And so you told him that he needed to coin this, but I already had, it's Coogan's Giga Cycle.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  So, sorry.

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Yoni.

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  Everyone's gonna refer to this as Coogan's Giga Cycle from now on. Didn't even read the post. This is the first time I read the post.

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  This is, yeah, of course, the guy who coined the coinage.

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Is front-running anybody who's not yet coined something that should be coined.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  This should be my whole thing. Every time someone posts something good like this, I just need to be like, I call this Coogan's blank, blank, blank.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so the funny thing is, is I guess a few things. So, right now, we're looking at, wow, there's this massive convergence between private equity and venture capital.

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  But venture capital is private equity.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  It is. It's legally the same thing.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Legally the same thing. So PE is converging with PE, which I love because the two, you know, yeah, private equity is fantastic.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Culturally very different.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, culturally different. But yeah, we're at this interesting time. In the last like six months, we've seen venture-funded pool service clean, uh, roll up.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  We've seen venture-funded auto body shop roll-ups. We've seen venture-funded.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Accounting CPA rollups.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  I want to do a car wash.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  We've seen, so Yoni and Slow's big bet was Metropolis.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Okay, what's that?

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Which raised, which was a SaaS company for parking garages. And they sort of realized that they, they realized that there was sort of like a terminal sort of value for their business. And they were like, why don't we just become an operator?

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:41Jordi Hays?

  So they bought, they bought one of the largest, whatever, parking garage operating companies. And that was a way for them to really capture all the value of the software they were building. So I love it. I mean, I love financial instruments. I love private equity.

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  Financialization generally.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  I love IRR. And so everybody likes to say, oh, we're late stage capitalism. And it's like, my point has always been, now we're just getting started.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Yeah, I want to do something in car washes because I think, especially as the cars start driving themselves, they're still going to need to be washed and cleaned. And if you can just have a network by all of the different car washes.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, though.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, tell me.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Car washes are so bad for your car.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're actually driving cars that are, you know, maintain their, you know, if you're driving a Model 3 and it's going to lose half its value in a year.

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  But that is a self-driving car, right?

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  And I'm sure you can create a.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  I haven't used a.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  What do you do?

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  I have a detailer.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  That can be rolled up as well. We'll put that in.

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's more of like a barber. Like, it's like, yes, you could roll up barber shops, but it just becomes super cuts.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's an art. Like, my, like, so my detailer, I've taken, my car's been like serviced and, you know, they'll like clean your car. And it comes back and he's like, dude, like, what did you do? Like, you just undid, like, he's like, you undid like a year's worth of work on your paint.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  And so now I had to service one of my cars today and he gave me this little hotel, like, door hanger thing to put in there that says, do not wash.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Because he's like, I'm the only one that should touch this.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  This is like a multi, you know, year process. So anyways.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  Let's go to William. He says, tech debt deflation is here. O1 Pro just solved an incredibly complicated, painful rewrite of a file that no other model has ever gotten close to. I've been using this as an eval for different frontier models and this marks a huge shift for me. We've entered the why fix your code today when better model will do it tomorrow regime. Interesting. I didn't realize that O1 Pro was so leaps and bounds ahead of Claude in terms of programming. I wonder if this guy is just shilling or something because I thought like Cursor and and some of the other models were just as good.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  So it's funny to think about. So software engineers tend to be extremely online, but there's a handful that just do it like a just a job.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  And maybe they have a GitHub, but they're not on X or Reddit or LinkedIn. And so there's there's undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of software engineers out there that don't know about the new AI tools.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  And they're just coding away and they're like, you know, maybe they have like a little SaaS company that's doing well. And they're just like, yeah, like I love my, I love my work and you know, I love the art and craft. And then you just get steamrolled by like some seventeen year old that's like just leveraging all the models like just cracked out on them. So.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Have you seen how OpenAI is integrating with all the different code editors?

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  It's genius. They they use the accessibility features on the Mac app so that they don't need VS codes or text edits permission to go in there and rewrite the code. They just are able to read everything out, rewrite it and just act as a AI assistant in there.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's that's the wild thing right now. So there's all these AI agent companies, like there's hundreds or thousands of like venture backed.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not thousands, but there's hundreds of venture backed companies that are building consumer agents. And none like very few of them. I don't really use any of, I don't use any of them right now. And but, you know, DA, you know, DAU of a lot of the different models.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Jordi Hays?

  And that's like the wild thing is all of that agentic activity that people have been betting on is happening with ChatGPT with Claude.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  And so we'll see how we'll see how all this plays out. But yeah, I would love to, if you're building an AI agent that that actually works and is good. DM us.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Jordi Hays?

  Give it a shot.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Let's go to Clone, Clone Robotics says torso two with an actuated abdomen. Looking freaky.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this, this video.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Is almost sickening to watch. It feels like Westworld.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  The aesthetics are very Westworld.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Basically, so what they did, yeah, they, they obviously are inspired, but what they did is they, they have this new motion, I think it's in the vertebrae and like the, the, um, just the way the abdomen moves. And most humanoid robots are very sort of straight up and down stiff. They very much have that look and feel of a robot. Go watch, I mean, we'll quote tweet this, go watch this video. It, it's pretty, it's honestly feels like very wrong to look at. And, um, I just think that, I think, uh, I think the, I weirdly think the firearms industry is going to benefit a lot from the robotics movement because in a world where humanoid robots walk the earth.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  And if you are a criminal and you, you can now from the comfort of your own home, use humanoid robots to commit crimes, everybody is going to be just like freaked out, right? Cause it's like, well, yeah, maybe you have your, uh, I, I, I'd be interested to see if anybody's building at the intersection of like Ring and humanoid robots, right? So imagine in, in the future, you have a humanoid robot standing in your backyard 24/7.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Bodyguard.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  On alert, bodyguard.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  So bodyguard.ai, if you haven't bought that domain, go buy it, sit on it. Some venture backed company will buy it from you for, uh, 200 grand in, uh, when the time is right.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Oh, this is great. So, uh, Druvu Rajendra says, uh, we need to triple Space Force's budget because, uh, Delta says never deleting this app. We have Taliban space posting and it's a screenshot of someone from the Taliban, I guess, advocating for taking the moon, uh, or, or maybe Mars. It's hard to tell here. This photo is very AI generated, but, um, Wild. The, the moon should be a state campaign that Mike Solano launched has apparently reached the Middle East and they're trying to get there.

• 1:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody wants to take the moon. It's like the ultimate pot, you know, prize.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  In the sky.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  And imagine doing, imagine, you know, using a drone swarm to project the American flag like across hundreds of miles from the moon.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  It'd be amazing.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's probably some gravity issues up there, but, um, no, I also saw that the Taliban have been trading meme coins.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  There was a guy.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Shooting, filming a video with, with like at some dinner with the Taliban because they're kind of in control over there at the moment. And yeah, they're, they're trading. So if you're trading meme coins, you might be trading against the Taliban. So.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  It's crazy they're still in business like because ISIS came up and they're like all these different splinter organizations.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Rival gangs.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Taliban's kind of Lindy at this point.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Hanging on to it.

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, yeah, who knows?

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Going strong. Uh, I don't know.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  We should do a deep dive on the various business lines of the Taliban. I know they were big and poppy.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, heroin trade.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Kidnapping, ransoming.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  But yeah.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  I wonder what their actual.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Sure they've expanded.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Most profitable year was.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, now it's taxation, probably.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  You think so? Cause they just run all of Afghanistan.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  So they're just the government.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Good business model.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Give us.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Nonviolence, right?

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Give us all your, you know, half your money or it will kill you.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wild. Uh, Steph says, met a founder who handwrites all of his own business cards and I kind of love it. Pretty cool.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  This is like you. You have your calligrapher that you will write anything for you.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  And they're on call 24/7.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I do think it's a good way to stand out. Uh, business cards are, it's funny because the iPhone rolled out the feature of.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  You're tapping.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  And it, and it feels so just like, you know, it's somewhat useful, but I've also found that it's functionally has some.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Functionally has like a bunch of issues where it'll like add the contact, but then it'll, you don't know if you forget their name and you can't find them again. So it's like a bunch of issues.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  I was at a conference and someone actually recommended an app. It's like a couple bucks. I think it's just called recents. And you download this app and it just sorts your contact list by when they were added. So you can go around tapping and then at the end of the conference, you can pull up this app and see.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  An app that should be a feature.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  I know, it should just be a feature.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  But Apple is too focused on just destroying the photos app.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Oh my God, it's so bad.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey, here's an app you use all day long. We're going to completely redesign it and just botch it.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  It's really bad.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Like I had something earlier where I was trying to send something to Senra.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  I think you were trying to send him the same thing.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  And I could not, I could not find that, the thing that I wanted to send, even though I knew that I had it in my app, like within the last.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  You really have to sort and favorite things and then find the favorites, which are now buried. It's a mess. It's a mess. I mean, yeah, the, uh, yeah, it's all, all getting worse. Uh, let's go to Mike Solana. This is a, a follow-up to the CEO shooting, really dark story. Mike says, highly intelligent and accomplished, attractive, nothing but opportunity, goes missing over the summer. Friends begin looking for him, reaching out to him over social. Either this isn't the guy or he's about the age and this was, and he was into psychedelics, schizophrenia. And yeah, I, I remember seeing like, it like the, just like the, the, the video shows someone who's very agentic,

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  very calculating, very thoughtful. And there was always this weird dynamic of like, who is this person? And, and couldn't they have done something better with their life, basically? Like they must've had their brain broken at some point. If, if this is the guy, I mean, we don't know at this point. So.

• 1:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this isn't a murder mystery podcast. We're going to talk about this for three minutes and move on. But, uh, yeah, one thing that I saw was interesting. He was a software engineer, comp sci major.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Went to an Ivy League, apparently went to

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Penn.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  Penn, or no, apparently went to some, even went to like, you know, was private school like affluent.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's pictures of him traveling all over the world. There's pictures of his friends tweeting at him, trying to get him to respond. He'd been, over the summer, allegedly at some point, was just gone dark. And, um, one thing that was interesting is he, um, besides the people that he was following, which I'm sure a lot of the people on this show follow, I guess Lindy Man, maybe? Uh, Wait But Why, all these sort of, um.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  He was a play guy, Chris Williamson.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, uh, he apparently would defend marijuana and psilocybin and various psychedelics like very intensely. And we've talked a lot about how there's huge, huge, huge downsides to those, um, substances and, and there's too much, uh, in Silicon Valley, like at least when I was in college, Tim Ferriss would be promoting like various psychedelics on his show to the super wide audience. And these are really, really intense, uh, drugs and men, you know, certain men are just prone to, uh, schizophrenia and, uh, marijuana, cannabis can induce that. Um, I believe it's that, um, I don't know if psilocybin can, but, um,

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Certainly ayahuasca.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Peruvian, you know, ayahuasca or whatever, definitely can. And so anyways, very, very dark. And yeah, I'm not sure it's worth speculating, but it's sort of, um, it definitely came out of left field that he was a online, probably center-right, you know, software engineer doing this. Um, and, uh, it really doesn't make sense, but, um, I think that's all we really need to say.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Well, I'm sure we'll learn more in the near future. Uh, let's take a palate cleanser with a great post by Sean Frank. He says, most twisted thing about me? I really love ads. I like making them. I like watching them. I like the industry. I like that they pay for content for all of us. Ads are good and I love ads.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Sean, this is fantastic.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  I, I almost, I, I had this sort of intrusive thought to lunge for the size gong.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Because Ridge, Ridge, I mean, so Ridge, basically Ridge is a wallet company fundamentally, but they're, they're the backbone of the creator economy. If you're a guy online and you make content that guys watch, Ridge will be there for you. It's like UBI for people that make gaming content. When I, when I helped out with Ridge back in the day, you know, there was, um, you know, if you had like an NBA highlight reel and you had no advertisers, like Ridge would be there and be like, we'll give you a dollar CPM if you just like put like Ridge in the corner. And that strategy's worked out very well for them. They do significantly more revenue than,

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  than most series C startups and, and infinite more EBITDA. So.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  On that note, let's go to a promoted post. We gotta.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  There we go. We gotta live the brand. If you can see behind my glass of champagne,

• 1:34:11Jordi Hays?

  we have a post from DuPont Registry and they are showing off a 2015 McLaren P1 with an asking price of 2.1 million.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Holy Trinity car.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Holy Trinity car. It's painted in MSO kilo gray with McLaren orange accents. This specification is subtle, yet stunning. The full carbon interior and carbon bucket racing seats with orange contrast stitching emphasize the Spartan cockpit that is solely focused on performance. And I gotta say, John, I got a soft spot for carbon bucket seats. I love sitting in them. They're not the, they're not objectively the most comfortable, but I certainly feel at home in them. So if you're in the market for a P1, this is a fantastic spec.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  People always talk trash about McLaren. Oh, it's just some tech guy who just made his money yesterday, but you go with a P1, you go with an F1, you go with a P1 GT-R. People know. People in the car world know. Yeah, it's going to cost you a little bit more, but you get a lot more.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  You get a lot more.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  And so it's so, it's so worth it. So head to your McLaren dealer, head to DuPont Registry, tell them the technology brothers sent you. Let's stay on the Ridge Team. Connor McDonald says, "No more noble endeavor than being an advertiser."

• 1:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Do these guys work together or something?

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's, I mean, so let's face it.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of advertising that is solely oriented around driving very specific results. And then there's a ton of advertising that's literally like, "I just like what these people are doing. I'm going to support them and maybe I'll make my money back," or whatever. Like, we're, you know, pursuing some opportunities in horse racing, right? It's not necessarily to drive new listenership to Technology Brothers, but, you know, we have an appreciation for the endeavor and the jockeys and the trainers, and we just want to support that, right? And if you're an advertiser, take 5% of your budget and spend it with, spend it with groups that, you know, maybe don't have a direct ROI, but can give back to the world

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  and entertain you and your team in some way. Actually, one of my former engineers or CTO at my last company, he's like very into car racing, like on the amateur circuit, and so I sponsored him. It wasn't a ton of money, but I was like, "Well, if you put like five of my portfolio companies on as sickers, like I'll give you money for the race." I probably paid for like a set of tires or something. But that's my word of advice. You can just sponsor things. You can just do things. You can just build things and you can just sponsor things. So, go sponsor. That's your homework for today. Go sponsor something.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Go sponsor something. Tyler says, "The Classman's Creed. If you possess true taste, you bear a sacred duty to amass wealth, not for vanity, but to lift the world's standard and drape it in elegance." I love that.

• 1:37:11Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  I think he was inspired by something I said about the importance of spending money well. There are so many people in Silicon Valley that have inordinate wealth and spend it so poorly. And I like that Tyler has trademarked it, the Classman's Creed.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  The Classman's Creed.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  It might need a little work on that. We could tighten that up. It could be one word, it could be two words, but you know, you're getting there Tyler.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  You could drop the creed. You could drop the creed and just make it an archetype, the Classman.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  The Classman.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Somebody who constantly seeks to

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  beautify the world that they exist in.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I saw Elon actually commissioned a huge statue.

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  I saw this, the fork in the road.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  The fork in the road.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that was beautiful. Um, I think it was placed at one of, um, BlackRock's properties, BlackRock City.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, BlackRock City.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Um, so I, I was surprised to see Elon and BlackRock collaborating, but they're a big asset manager. He's got a bunch of investable assets, so it kind of makes sense.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Love it. Uh, Rick Zulo says, "A lot of talk on Twitter about VCs hitting it big on meme coins. Undoubtedly, there are going to be some eye-popping IRRs there, but IMHO, these are a huge distraction. These are not the type of investments LPs are paying us to make, and I don't see the returns from these two, uh, being sustainable. If you do, make that your full-time job. To me, it appears like resulting above all else, is this a moment in time to make an insane quick buck? Perhaps. Is that shortsighted? In my honest opinion, definitely. What do you think? Can you build a VC firm around trading meme coins?"

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, so there's some, like, basically LP agreements that allow venture funds to, to put some percentage of their fund into highly liquid alternative assets.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  It's usually about twenty five, uh, twenty percent can go into secondary sales. So for the really big scaled companies, you might only be able to get allocation into secondary and then, uh, alternative asset classes like Bitcoin, crypto, meme coins and stuff. So this is, this is something that has been, uh,

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  driving the, the conversion to, uh, RIAs.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Uh, because once you're an RIA, you can invest in public companies, you can invest in secondary, you can invest in anything, uh, but it comes with incredible compliance, uh, requirements. And so it's been very complex.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, uh, at Heretic on, I was talking with, uh, a buddy of mine and he was saying,

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Everybody for the last couple of years has obviously been, you know, kind of dunking on crypto VCs and not taking them super seriously. But historically, the average crypto fund has outperformed the average venture fund, or basically, no, the average crypto fund has outperformed like the top 20% venture fund. So the returns, because the asset class is so liquid and the timelines are so shortened, the returns are phenomenal. And I do think it's kind of a sign of the times that non-crypto VCs are saying, well, I'm going to take the 20% of my fund and just start YOLO-ing it.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I know, I know some very respectable GPs that have, that have done this. And I know some, I know a, you know, multi-billion dollar AUM digital asset fund who has 3X their, their 2021 fund just on Ethereum alone.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  And so there's, I do think it'll be sort of the irony of the traditional venture capital firms that were sort of dunking on the crypto VC funds. Crypto VC funds generate all these crazy returns. And then the traditional venture funds come in and like basically bag hold for all the crypto VCs. And then the crypto VCs will buy at the bottom again.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  I mean, a friend who was a, who was a partner at a VC firm came in kind of at the bottom of the market and was like, Solana, baby. Solana. Solana. Didn't make any VC investments.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  He very well. Bought the right coin.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  PA is on fire.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Let's go to Bryce Roberts. He says, another show I'd love to see us make, Founders for Sci-Fi. So he's talking about David Senra's show. Read and dissect sci-fi novels and tie them to the present or near future world of what we're seeing in tech. I think that's really, really cool. A lot of the sci-fi novels, it's hard to dig through them. It's hard to have a guide for what's good to read. A podcast that puts it in a consistent voice, well.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  And historical context.

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Like when this was written, the iPhone didn't exist. So when you hear them talking about the magical info tablet, you should be amazed.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that is the iPad.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the iPad. Exactly.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so here's the thing. People don't understand this about podcasting and we're obviously influenced by David Senra. He's sort of the, the.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Godfather.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  He's a godfather of business podcasting. But he's also in many ways a godfather of this podcast. Like he encouraged us to take it as seriously as we take it now. And so he talks about this a lot, but people don't realize like if you just want to make $5 million a year, having the founders podcast for sci fi is a very, potentially a very efficient way to do that. You can have no team. Just you, a microphone, a computer, and you can make $5 million a year. Basically MBA money. From recording a show in the comfort of your own home and just nerding out about sci fi.

• 1:42:38John Coogan?

  You have to fucking love sci fi.

• 1:42:39Jordi Hays?

  You gotta love sci fi, you gotta be willing to grind. You have to be willing to do what Sendra did, which is like grind in relative obscurity for years. And until now, he has, you know, one of the top business podcasts in the world, but he had to go through like three or four years of being completely unknown.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  But set a cadence. Don't just be like, I'll do it when I read a book.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah. Yeah, you're not gonna, if you come into it being like, I'm gonna do this as a side hustle. It's like, like, great things have come from side hustles, but side hustles don't become great things.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Yes, that's great. That's a great way to put it. Let's go to Baldo, our reigning reply guy of the month. He says, to be honest, I don't care about winning back to back months, but I'll run over anyone who thinks they're in the race. Let's go, Baldo.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  And this type of mentality, so, so.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  Winner mentality.

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Winner mentality, grinder mentality. So Baldo, less than two weeks ago, relatively unknown Cornell student, starts aggressively replying to our posts. And last time I checked, he was followed by Mark Andreessen, Turner Novak, Yoni at Slow. So many major fund managers. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy drops out and, you know, raises a $5 million mango seed round.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Mango seed round, that's a great term.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Baldo's got a mango seed round written all over him.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  Mango was such a funny term 10 years ago.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Mango seeds, baby.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  I think Andreessen coined that, right? Or someone at Andreessen, maybe it was Chris Dixon wrote that. But yeah, the mango seed round for anything over like 2 million. And there was a big question about like, oh, is it, is it dangerous? Cause like you have too much money and the valuation is too high for the seed. And now it's like, if you're not doing a mango seed round, you're not in the game.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Oh, let's go to Morgan Barrett. He's been on the show before. He says, "Me, I'm almost to five million impressions. My much more than, my much more Twitter famous friend, you can't do anything with five million impressions. Five is a nightmare. You can't retire, but it's not worth it to work. Five will drive you. Un poco loco, my fine feather friend. The poorest content creator in America, the world's tallest dwarf, the weakest strong man at the circus." This is so funny. I didn't realize, I didn't read this for some reason until we got on the show. This is fucking hilarious. I had lunch with Morgan the other week here, and he's a great dude, but man, is he a great poster. This is a fantastic

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  poster. Yeah, yeah, no, it won't be at five million, it won't be at five million pretty long. No, so, so, so, for anybody that doesn't get the reference, this is referring to like the five million dollar net worth mark where you're, is you're trapped, like you're technically rich, but like you can't really do things that, you know, you can't retire, really.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  It goes so hard. "I will drive you un poco loco, my feather friend."

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Un poco loco.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  I don't even get where that reference is from, but is that like Breaking Bad or something? I don't know.

• 1:45:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, you understand what it means.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. Pass me your glass.

• 1:45:38Jordi Hays?

  Southern California, you gotta know what un poco loco means.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Poco loco.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow, you really.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  We finished the Dom Perignon.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need to start, at what point do we move up to two bottles?

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Well, well, the thing is, is that, so, wine comes in different sizes. We're drinking the standard, which is 750 milliliters. Then there's the magnum, which is 1.5 liters. But it goes up three liters, four and a half, six, nine, 12, 15, 18, and they have really cool names.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  It's as big as the flagpole?

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the Nebuchadnezzar, the Jeroboam, the Methuselah. And so what we'll do is we'll have the pourer, you would need a device, because it's so heavy, and it tilts over and it pours your glass. But what I was thinking is that reasonably, we probably can't put down 18 liters of champagne in one episode. So, live show, when we, as we start doubling bigger and bigger, we do a live show, and there's a Jeroboam that is shared amongst the guests of the live show.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  I think that will work. Let's move on to Bryce. "Pound for pound, midweek laps at Deer Valley is the best networking in Utah."

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  I love this. Bryce is a humble guy, but he's been very successful.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  He's also jacked. I saw before and after.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bryce, we want to see the beard back. You looked great with a beard. Did you see that?

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I saw the old beard photo.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like he just looked like an absolute dog.

• 1:47:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  But he's saying, he's saying what a lot of, he's saying what a lot of capital allocators won't admit, which is that midweek laps at your local, you know, ski resort are a great way to, to meet

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  LPs, other investors, some, some, some later stage founders, maybe.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Everyone makes fun of VCs for like, oh, they're spending all their time at Almangiri. They're spending all their time in the Alps. It's like, where do you think, where do you think the founders are of these multi-billion dollar companies that need to raise $2 billion for their next series F?

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  They're not hanging out at Blue Bottle.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're not.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  They're hanging out at Almangiri. And so that's where you go. You go where the money is.

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  The Yellowstone Club.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Smell it. Chase it down. That's the business.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing I want to see from Bryce is, you know, he's got his thing with NDVC. It's, it's, it's a, you know, a perfectly sized seed fund. You know, I think it's like $50 million. He can do a lot with that. But I'd like to see him go into the, I'd like to see him raise like a $5 billion fund, right? I want to see him, you know, that, that picture of him in the gym made me think this guy can handle, he can, I can trust him with $2 billion.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so. Hopefully soon. Uh, let's go to Kushi. She says, uh,

• 1:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, we, we cannot, we can't skip over this. No, we can't skip over this. Uh, Bryce posted about doing a Technology Brothers.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Stay tuned, everyone.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Live event at Deer Valley.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  And the, the president of Deer Valley replied to him and said, uh, let's make it happen.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, so get in our DMs if you're interested.

• 1:48:32Jordi Hays?

  I actually talked with him about this last week.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll figure something out.

• 1:48:36Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, let's make it happen.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you made it this far in the show, you're, you, you, you can hit us up.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Kushi says coolest boss award goes to Kevin Hartz for for being not only a co-founder GP of A-Star VC, but also co-founder of the coolest stealth startup in the game, Sauron, which is their home defense company, Anduril for your home, Palantir for your home.

• 1:49:03Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully, I don't, I don't know a ton about the company. I've met Kevin before, a very, very smart guy, looks great in a suit. I actually pulled this out because he's wearing a suit. Looks fantastic. We need to see more early-stage founders, wearing suits.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  Maybe next time put on a tux, though.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Class it up a little bit.

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Class it up a little bit. Come on, Kevin.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  I mean, you're a general partner at A-Star. Come on. You can do a little bit better.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, the only thing, request for feature, Kevin, build humanoid robot bodyguards that I can put in my backyard and on my roof that can just sort of pace on my roof. And that's a feature I'd happily pay for, so.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Oh, here it is. Elon Musk says, "Two years ago, I commissioned an art piece, a fork in the road, had to make sure that civilization took the path, the path most likely to pass the Fermi Great Filters." What a great metaphor. It's so funny because it's like, it has a little bit of that Elon like meme, like, oh, it's just a fork, right?

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Just a fork in the ground.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  But it has this much deeper meaning about the Great Filter. I, I love that. I'm bullish on us passing the Great Filter. I think we can do it.

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it, chat.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  I, I, I'm a, I'm a big George Hots believer. I think it's wireheading. I think the risk is we all go into VR and we never explore the stars because we have this unending pleasure dome, this wireheading future. That's the world that I'm most worried about. Not nuclear war, not a robot killing us.

• 1:50:31Jordi Hays?

  No, the world I'm more worried about is we get so lost in a stack of posts that you and I never, if somebody just kept bringing Dom out, we'd probably just not stop podcasting.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it is crazy, the scale of what it takes to pass the, the, the Great Filter in the sense that like, getting to Mars and actually building a society on Mars is... You know, such a stretch even for Elon's lifetime. Like it is, it is a life's work and a half and

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Times 10.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's why he has 20.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:05Jordi Hays?

  Children.

• 1:51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. E- even, even just like the transfer window. Like you can't go, you can go to the moon whenever you want. You can't go to Mars whenever you want. There, the transfer window only happens every 18 months or something, or every few years. And then when you think about the next planet, it's like 30 years, 50 years, hundreds of years. And it's just like a completely different game, like self sustaining ecosystems.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  That's why Bezos has this crazy.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  Clock.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Crazy clock.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  It's great though. Like, like we need people thinking about this, especially if they're wealthy and powerful, inspiring the next generation. I love it. I'm really happy he made this. Let's go to Flo. Flo says, I don't know if people realize how literally I meant it. When I say that AI agents are going to turn building a business into playing a game of Factorio. And he posts a screenshot of his, uh, his AI agent workflow.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, uh, he's been, he's been building, uh, this company for a while. It's very cool. It's think of it as like AI agents meets like Zapier. So you can set up all these different, it's like more complicated, um, automations. And I just pulled this because I thought that, uh, that, that graphic that he showed of like being able to look at a lot of, a lot of, you know, you know, if you're running a company, you'll look at your headcount and you'll see like, you know, roughly, um, or, or, or just like a, a map of your team and understand like, all right, where are we really allocating resources and time and energy? And he's looking at this sort of diagram of agents that are all sort of humming, uh, in the background.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  And, um, and he's, yeah, in, in, in, in theory, he's building Factorio for your business where you basically just get to create and manage this army of agents. So.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I gotta put it to work because we have a bunch of things that could be workflowed out with AI agents, but.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Um, I haven't really sat down and actually used it. I think it's called Lindy AI, right?

• 1:52:53Jordi Hays?

  Lindy. Great, great name.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  You ever promoted post?

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  Very Lindy name. Promoted post, uh, you know what time it is. It is holiday season. And Tiffany and Co. is at your service, they say, "Featuring a diamond of over 12 carats, our holiday window display at the Landmark invite passerby to view the world's most iconic engagement ring, the Tiffany setting, up close." And I just gotta say, what an iconic engagement ring. If you are eager to propose, it's hard to recommend anything else besides this. I mean, this is absolutely fantastic piece. You're gonna make your wife or partner very

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  happy with this one. So, go indulge, go check it out, walk by the window, maybe buy it. And when you are talking to your AD at Tiffany, tell them the technology brother sent you. Not AD, your rep.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to simp for Satoshi. Getting a little meta with this one, saying that "All great men simp for other great men. Jobs for Walt Disney, Caesar for Alexander, Elon for Asimov. Those who think simping for a great man is unbecoming aren't ever going to make it. It's okay to simp for a Titan. It's part of becoming one." Interesting.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, @IAMGingerTrash, AKA simp for Satoshi, has been on an absolute posting roll lately.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Banger after banger.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  He's really building momentum in the timeline.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, this is, I mean, I think it was really, I honestly thought it was worth sharing. A lot of people, I think, I think you don't want to make someone else your entire personality. Like, I've always felt like wearing, you know, if you're into sports, wearing a jersey is sort of strange, put someone else's name on your back, but it's okay to sort of like spiritually embody to some degree.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  It's almost like a mentor, more than, yeah, simping. What does that really mean? Simping is a derogatory term, but he's kind of reclaiming it because it's in his handle.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  And I like that. He's taking it back and using it as a metaphor to just study into the tutelage of a great person. And, I mean, that's what the Founder's Podcast is all about. Like, you can take a tour of the great men of history and figure out who can inspire you and who releases the most alpha for whatever you're building.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Mark Andreessen just posted the American flag and a picture of the US stock market versus the rest of the world without America.

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Mogged.

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  Mogged in a chart.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  It really is staggering to see. If you invested in America, you did very well. If you invested anywhere else, you were screwed.

• 1:55:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  Let that be a lesson for you.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  And, I mean, this is, this is interesting because like, it's pro-America, but it's also a total vindication of Mark's strategy, right? It's like, he has sized up his fund and gone turbo-long America, right? And that is, and it's just like-

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Leveraging Kugan's Law along the way.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Value of coining.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Of course. Software is eating the world. It's time to build. American dynamism. One of the OGs of Kugan's Law. Fantastic coiner.

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  There should be, yeah, there should be a poly-market for betting on the next thing that a 16Z coins, you know, like in the next category.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  They're so due.

• 1:56:23Jordi Hays?

  They're so due.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  They're so due.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Mark, we're waiting.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Coin something.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  We're refreshing, and we will do a, a, we will do our signature segment on-

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  New coinage breaks.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  New coinage alert.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  It's on the timeline.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Breaking.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  This could shake up. Shape rotators out. Word cells out. We got the new drop from P Marka.

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Scoop.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Live.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Scoop.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Harris Rothamal says, "I'm gonna build the coolest factory," and it's a very nicely lit shot of an American flag and a-

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  No, so this was in a response to, somebody was saying, "Everybody wants to, everybody wants to re-industrialize. Nobody wants to work in a factory. Harris wants to work in a factory. He's making a beautiful factory. He's making the coolest factory."

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, I, I actually, I disagreed with the original post. Nobody wants to work in a factory.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  It's very cool.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  It's very stimulating to be in a factory, right? There's like a lot of, you know, there's productive capacity. You can hear, hear the hum and the buzz and the- And the clanks and I love being in factories. Just like children yearn for the mines, you know, playing Minecraft.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Men yearn for the factory floor.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  I think of this as like a podcast factory. It is. A factory for content.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  It's just content factory.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  A content.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  You hear the clicks of Ben's keyboard editing. He's an hour behind us right now editing.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Content factory. Jack Altman says, all the live like, like a perfect, healthy monk longevity stuff is directionally good. But if you take it too far, you miss out on a lot of personal joy and professional progress.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  This is so true. This is so true. That's so, I went through this phase luckily in college where I got so obsessed with my health.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  That I realized like 80 to 90% of my like creative.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:12Jordi Hays?

  Productive energy was just oriented around my health.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  It did the exact same thing.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I was 7% body fat.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  And I was an absolute dog.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  Sick.

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I put on, you know, a huge amount of muscle mass.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  That part's good.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's good.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  We need to get back there.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  We need to get back there. Size up the traps.

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:30Jordi Hays?

  But I do think that, so I think it's actually a natural cycle that you have to go through where everybody should, should put way too much.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, to learn what actually drives alpha.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  And now I spend maybe 5% of my energy on it, but I get 80% of the benefit.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, there, there's totally, anybody who's living their life based on their eight sleep score and oh, I didn't sleep well and, and letting that dictate their day.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  That's bad.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Dude, in, in 2013, I was so into the quantify itself stuff, I basically invented my own eight sleep. I took an accelerometer, hooked it to an Arduino.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Strapped it to the edge of my bed and it could track the movement of the bed. And then I would have that talk to the internet, put it in a spreadsheet and get like a sleep score, basically. This was before like sleep scores.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  And you had a, and you had a thermometer that would dump a bucket of ice on the bed, you know, like.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  I mean, I did, I did actually have an internet connected coffee machine that would make the coffee in the morning. So I would literally wake up and smell the coffee.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  So you have a timer that's just like, okay, this is the optimal time to, to wake up, uh, to start brewing the coffee. And then you smell the coffee and then you wake up. It was ridiculous. Yeah.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's definitely a point of diminishing returns. So.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes, you know, you can't just be doing the no alcohol thing. You gotta enjoy.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I only, I only, I will say this, 90% of the times that I drink now. When I'm podcasting.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  I only drink champagne.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  I only drink champagne when I'm podcasting.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Oh, this is, uh, this is wild.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Uh, Andy says, trust the process and it's a screenshot of Squirtle saying zero to one is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous texts with the potential to gigify your brain, but it is exclusively read by literal turbo normies who unironically want to like build shit and basically get one shotted by it.

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Wow, the ayahuasca for the mind.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's the ayahuasca meme. And then, uh, the, the meme is zero to one. The person's reading it and they're like, oh my God, competition is for losers, but they're missing the real message that's going over their head, which is everyone in finance is dumb as rocks. I should build in fintech. Fascinating.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Big post. There's a lot to digest.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  There's a lot to that.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  We'd almost need it three hours to fully digest.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  I mean, it always said this is interesting about founders fund because like, you know, big stories around, uh, Palantir, SpaceX and Anduril, like two of just like objectively like the coolest companies to point a camera at and just show what they're building.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  It's just like cool stuff. And that's where like the funds made a ton of returns. But then there's also the story about fintech PayPal, Stripe, Ramp, Bitcoin. Like the fund has also been deeply involved in fintech, which is like the least sexy industry you could possibly build in. And so the fund just kind of goes back and forth and doesn't get boxed into this one thing. It's not a fintech fund, not a deep tech fund. They just kind of do both every time, every once in a while.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but yeah, it's funny because zero to one can be a tool where if you read it literally

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  and then take the exact opposite approach, you get something like jeans, right? Where friend of the podcast, Theo.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  It's like, don't build, don't create a new restaurant in Manhattan. It's the most perfectly competitive market. All the profits will be competed away. You know, even if you have something hot for a second, there's a new hot thing the next month and, and, and you know, people will flood to that. And it's still worth doing things that are deeply competitive, right? Still worth, you know, content is deeply competitive. We shouldn't have started a podcast if we were just reading Zero to One, literally, right?

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it's an extremely important text that should never, you know, never let any one text rule your life, right?

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Have you ever seen Peter's AMA on Reddit after he posted, after he published Zero to One? He did an AMA and somebody asked him what's

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Leg great, leg great AMA?

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  But somebody asked him, what's the Straussian reading of Zero to One? And he said, don't become an entrepreneur. Interesting.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  It's just like, it's actually too hard.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Be born into

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Cause he was looking at the, he was looking at the sales copies and he sold like millions and millions of these copies. It's like, there cannot be millions of generational entrepreneurs, just mathematically impossible.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  And so like for the average viewer, for the average reader, you should read that and just be like, yeah, that ain't me. Like I'm, I'm not built different like that. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And so I should not do a startup necessarily. And a lot of the good takeaway from Zero to One is understanding how important monopoly power is for raising money. And if you love a business and you're destined to build some business, actually understand, does this have monopoly power? And if it doesn't, don't raise money.

• 2:03:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but here's the thing, here's the way to read Zero to One. 10 years ago, if you're reading Zero to One and you really internalized it all, you would have gone and tried to find somebody who was already building a monopoly. And you maybe would have joined Nvidia. And even if you joined as like a low B software engineer, you would have become a multi, multi, multimillionaire.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  And so there's, that's the argument of why it's actually probably good that millions of copies were sold. Because even if you're not Jensen Huang, you can still Be, you can still leverage that, that thought, that, that collection of thoughts into dramatic success.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Massive gap between understanding that a business has monopoly power and creating a new business that has monopoly power. Huge difference. Like, the investors can't create the business, but they can invest in them.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting. So, so with this podcast, with this podcast, you get meta, right? You and I are not going to go start the next monopoly chip manufacturing or design company, right? But we do have a monopoly on John and Jordy, just, just hanging out.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  And so that's why we're doing this podcast. There's one of one. There's only one podcast in the world that's you and me talking, and it's Technology Brothers.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. And we're the first podcast with an actual brand, maybe?

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Allegedly. Some big podcasters have said that, so.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Let's go to Chad Hurley, founder of a massively monopolistic organization, YouTube.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  You have benefited a lot from.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  I have. He says, pickleball is a propaganda program to fulfill meaningless lives. So aggressive. You can, pickleball is the new, the new like work-life balance bait. You can just say the most aggressive thing about pickleball, boom, 1K likes, no problem. You should just post it right now. If you're listening, post something, you know, incendiary about pickleball, guaranteed banger. Everyone hates pickleball right now. Pickleball really had like a rise and fall, went through the whole hero's journey. Maybe it's coming back.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  I'll post something right now. If you play pickleball, unfollow me.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  Unfollow me.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay. Yeah. If you're listening, go, go repost Jordy's, Jordy's latest post.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Let's go to Nikita Beer. He says, "The greatest contributor to global economic output is that hangovers get worse as you age, disincentivizing you from having fun when your value to the economy is highest."

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  I like that. That's a good, that's a good take. That's a good like insight. It's, you know, it's probably true. Yeah, I always think about this, like, I went to college in Boston and one of the benefits of Boston is a college town. Obviously, like, there's the network effects of like, you have Harvard, MIT, all these great colleges around there. So like, you're just bumping into other smart people all the time, but it's also really fucking cold. So when it's cold during the winter, it's final season and you don't want to go outside, so you just go to the library.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  So you walk in.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Just hang out.

• 2:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Whereas, you know, maybe if you're in a nice school, like sunny, you just party all the time. Um, and, and the hangover thing is kind of like a riff on that. But, uh, what's, what's your take? Um, I don't really get how, I, I find that, uh, if you drink really nice Dom Perignon, you don't really get that hungover. So maybe it's a skill issue here. Maybe it's a skill issue. Let's go to Gary Tan. Gary says, "The problem with systematizing a career or the search for excellence is that the masterpieces have never been done before. So there is no map to get there." And he, uh, posts a very long screenshot of a book saying, "Why is it so hard to achieve ambitious objectives to get a handle on the problem? Think about all the things that are possible.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  As an example, consider all possible images. Everything you've ever seen falls into this class. It's hard to find a Mona Lisa or a Starry Night." This is interesting, I, and I like this post because it's true, but it also kind of flies in the face of like, Y C's like request for startups, like, it feels like Y C in some ways is a path. And that when they do a request for startups, they're creating more of a path. And then Demo Day is a path. And so I think Gary Tan like implicitly feels that and needs to push back on that. And I've always said that, that, you know, the request for startups is, is important because it's important that we get a bunch of young founders working in those industries. But that the next great power law company that comes out of Y C might not actually be responding to one of those requests for startups.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  It might just be a weird thing like sleep on an air mattress, right? That was not going to be on any request for startups ever. And yet it broke out.

• 2:07:47Jordi Hays?

  So, but, so, so this was pulled from a book.

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, that I actually recommend. I recommended that we do a deep dive on, uh, it says, "Why greatness cannot be planned." And the whole, just because, so, so, so the counterpoint to what you just said is, If greatness cannot be planned, YC should put out like a big list of things like here's problems that we think are interesting, come work on these. And the book basically says that people will come and work on those problems and then they'll realize like, oh, this actually, this thing is actually, this other thing is more interesting to me, I'm gonna go work on that.

• 2:08:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:21Jordi Hays?

  And then some, some just monstrous company will come out of that, or some fantastic company.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  And so, the, the big thesis of the book is, is so many of the greatest achievements and things, companies, products, whatever, have been created, were not perfectly planned. Like Steve Jobs didn't plan to build the iPhone.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? That's a great example. Yet it was transformative and one of the greatest, probably the greatest consumer product of all time.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  And I would, I would, to bring it back to the show and add some relevancy, like, we sort of wanted to do a podcast together for a long time, but everything, you know, it was some, some element of randomness in terms of how it came together and the format and these different, and the timing and all that stuff. If we had, when we first met, had just been fixated on, oh, we need to make a podcast together, maybe it wouldn't have turned into anything that meaningful.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, I mean, you go back, Airbnb was a different company, I'm pretty sure, I mean, Zuck was building a dating site, YouTube was a dating site, everything was a dating site.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so if you wanna build something great, make a dating app.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  But yeah, and then, and then don't be afraid to pivot. And YC's always been extremely friendly to pivots mid-session. Like, you can just walk into an office hours and be like, we're doing something completely different, and there's no like hate, it's amazing. It's like such a welcoming environment.

• 2:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have one, I have one, I have a YC company that I backed, that the founders had pivoted so many times, that the, and there's only a handful of investors, it's me, one other person, and YC. And, and they just, so they don't even be CC, the investor list, it's just like, everybody's like CC. And the last time, the last time, one, the other investor besides me and YC replied back and they said, Please do not pivot again. Just simply, this is a really big company and like potentially a really big company in a big industry. Just make it big.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:12Jordi Hays?

  And so that was the advice that like this company probably needed.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, companies are really hard. When things get hard, don't just pivot.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:19Jordi Hays?

  You pivot because you've realized that some element of your thesis was critically wrong.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Broken, yeah.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  And you need to do something else. But sometimes you just need to not pivot and just force, you know, force it, basically.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is great from Signal. He says, if I were CEO today, I would have a weekly email sent out to every single person in the company, asking them, what did you get done this week? The AI then generates the response, then aggregates the responses, presents it in a readable format to me every Monday morning. It should automatically do a diff from week to week and tell me anything is changing, accelerating, not going well. This is the what did you get done agent, cutting out trash middle management. I would also hire people coaches instead of managers. I like this. Fun little, you know, project you could build with AI in like a weekend and deploy. I wonder if people would hate it or learn to game it, but generally seems good. I mean, status reports are terrible. Meetings are awful, but there's something valuable about reflecting on your work product.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Especially if you can't quantify it.

• 2:11:13Jordi Hays?

  If I was listening to the show right now, I would go by whatdidyougetdonethisweek.com.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  And, and then, you know, build an app that's a Slack bot.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Slack integration, email integration, that just does it.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  What did you get done this week? People respond and then attracts it week over week.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:31Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, a lot of products like that that people hate, but maybe if you simplified it dramatically, made it literally one text box that you have to fill out, could, you could, you could, you know, definitely build a business off of that.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Could be good. Let's go to Ashwin Sharma. He says, this obsession with self-improvement is driving me nuts because the greatest thinkers have already shown us that true success lies in being who you are already. G K Chesterton wrote, a tree doesn't try to become a better tree. It just grows according to its nature because there's no pretense, no concept.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is to, to make it meta again, you like wearing tuxedos, drinking champagne and talking. So don't try to fight against that. Just do that as a career.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  It's that simple.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  It's that simple, folks. Oh, I love this. Growing Daniel says, I'm selling ayahuasca insurance to early-stage VCs.

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  This is a banger. This is so real. Yeah, it's one of the biggest threats in Silicon Valley right now. And, you know, we have this conspiracy theory that there's a VC out there that is trying, actively trying to get founders to do ayahuasca to

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Gain leverage over them.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, to destroy them. And so stay safe out there, folks. If you're listening, be very

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  No, the thesis is really that she's a foreign agent.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  And she is trying to sabotage our young entrepreneurs from building, you know, incredible companies like SpaceX and things of that nature. And she's trying to get all the talented young entrepreneurs she can find to

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  There are cheaper ways to do, or there are more expensive ways to do it. That's one of the cheaper ways I could think of running that op.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Go to Peru. Go to Peru.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. Or open your mind.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, open your mind.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  So if you get caught in that situation, remember, ayahuasca vaccine doesn't exist yet, but coming soon. If you don't, if you can't take that, just microdose, microdose, microdose. Fake it out. Oh, yeah, I took the ayahuasca. Throw half out, spit it out. Put stuff in your cheek. Yeah, it's so crazy. I see the demon. The demon's amazing. Yeah, but I still want to build. I still want to create shareholder value. Interesting. I guess I'm really aligned. That's what they do.

• 2:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Mog your demons. Well, it's funny because he's obviously shitposting, but there are certain situations where executives have to get life insurance because they're so critical to the business that if they were to pass away, like, a lot of things would get fucked up.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  And so I think, yeah, ayahuasca insurance for seed funds.

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Jackson Dahl, friend of the podcast, he's been on before. He says, USBC is one of the best technology outcomes. Very grateful for it and the people and events and regulations that got us here. I love it. I agree. But did you know that there are like 25 different types of USB C? It's so frustrating.

• 2:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there, so that cable, that's a USB C cable right there. It's great. It's universal. It plugs in anywhere, but they have different data rates and different rates of charging. And so if you want to transfer a file across USB C, you need a, there's USB C 3.1, 3.2. There's Thunderbolt 4, which has the same port, but is much faster.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  And so really, if you're buying USB C cables, you have to buy the absolute top tier.

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  That's alpha.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  So that you never get stuck with, oh, I got a slow cable, or it's not charging my laptop fast enough.

• 2:14:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And since Apple bricked all of our phones with 18.1.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52Jordi Hays?

  And destroyed the battery life.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to upgrade.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  But if you're not in a position to upgrade, go get your Thunderbolt 4.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  So gift guide, get people, don't just put your whole family and your whole friends all on USB C devices and cables. Get them the fastest Thunderbolt 4 cables. I own cordbag.com. I really want to make like the, the, the tech bro's cord bag. Because every bro just needs like a, a cord bag that comes stocked with everything when you're traveling. And so you just need like, you know, all of the fastest cables guaranteed to work anywhere, whether you're on a plane.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Amon basically has that at the front desk, right?

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  They'll send up a cord bag.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:15:31Jordi Hays?

  So you're basically democratizing the cord bag.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. The cord bag. It's a big thing. Why is, Anu says, why is no one talking about the DIG reboot? And Anu at's us and says, Tech Bro Pod, history returns. And I love that. Thank you for sending this in.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Anu.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  You for tagging us. Yeah, this is fascinating. Do you know the story of DIG?

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was Reddit like.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Kevin Ruus, right?

• 2:15:58Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, Kevin Rose?

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Kevin Rose?

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, Kevin Ruus is at the New York Times. Kevin Rose is the founder of DIG, made money in Silicon Valley very early, went to Google Ventures. He was a venture capitalist, has been very successful. He's buddy with Tim Ferriss.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  I bought ads with DIG probably.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Like seven, eight years ago, and it was crazy cheap.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  It was good?

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think it was because a lot of the traffic was bot traffic.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it was like, you know, for, for 10 grand, we'll get you in front of 2 million.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  You know, people type thing.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, I'm excited to see what happens.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  No, but the reason we're not talking, the reason we're not talking about it is like when Enron comes back, everybody's like, wow, Enron's back and they're rebooting the brand. When Dig says they're coming back online, people are like, I don't really miss Dig. It wasn't that. It's sort of died, sort of whimper, not a, not a explosion.

• 2:16:50John Coogan?

  This needs to be founder-led. If it's, if it's Kevin Rose, I would listen to him talk to Tim Ferriss about this. I would see a viral clip. I would see him posting about, hey, I bought, I bought Dig back and I'm turning it around. That's cool. Or if it's like a Vivek Ramaswamy buying BuzzFeed, like that's its own interesting storyline. I need to know who's buying this and I want to hear their story.

• 2:17:13Jordi Hays?

  Here's a conspiracy theory. So Kevin, Kevin, tin foil hats on. Kevin Rose, big watch enthusiast.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Didn't know that.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  He started, uh, he was also co-founder of Hodinkee, I believe.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 2:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he started Hodinkee, uh, big watch media company marketplace.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a possibility, since we don't know what Dig is yet, there's a possibility that Kevin saw us talking about watches in the tech world. And he says, hmm, maybe there's a way I can run back Dig, leaning into the themes of Technology Brothers, you know, creating a forum for, uh, so yeah, you should, you should.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  I, yeah, I'm, I'm going to text him after the show and, and get the real story.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  So until we know, we will definitely break the news, even if it's two days late on what Dig actually is.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  The funny, the funniest thing is that there's a video here and this might explain it, but I didn't watch it. And so like, we might have all our answers right here. Like what if this video opens and it's just like Kevin explaining everything. He's like, I'm doing watches.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  What if it's like a very right-leaning Reddit that could actually, that could probably do it right now.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  This is another true social. God damn it. Okay. Rune says, uh, Chollet is doing some all-time coping right now. This is in reference to Francois Chollet, who is at Google and has since left and has been, uh, a little bit more nuanced in his AGI takes. He runs the ARC Prize, which is a, uh, an eval for AI models, uh, where you have to do these little puzzles. They're very easy for kids or humans, but LLMs really struggle with them because they're novel and they can't be memorized. And, uh, over the course of 2024, I believe the ARC Prize, um, Uh, like completion rate went from, I believe, thirty-three percent to about fifty-something percent. And a human can do like a hundred percent of these.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  And so it's always been an interesting benchmark. He says that if an AI model can defeat Ark Prize, they will get, I think, a million dollars for whoever builds the model does it.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  Funny how little money that is in the context of AI.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it should be way more.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  You win, you built the world's best model, you win a million dollars.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  You win one month's salary.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  We literally raised, yeah, that's like what our PMs make every month.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, but, uh, you know, there's a lot of independent hackers out there on Kaggle doing, uh, on Kaggle doing like, you know, uh, tests and stuff. Um, but every time a new foundation model comes out, people throw, uh, throw it at Ark because it's literally just like wired up, right?

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  Uh, and there's an online version and there's an offline version where you have to upload your model. And then there's another version where you get access to the internet, essentially.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  Um, but you can kind of cheat that. So there's a question about can you do it? And what, how big is the box that you're running? All these different things. But, um, basically, uh, I, I, I tried to dig into like what Rune was getting out specifically because, uh, I believe this was in response to.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, hasn't he just bailed out to Threads?

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Uh, I, no, I don't know. I think he's still on X for, for Francois Chollet.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  I thought he, I thought he kind of.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  No, no, I, I see him on X all the time. I, I think the thing is that he, he bailed on Google and he went and started a new company.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, sorry. I'm confusing it with the other guy.

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  But this week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT four oh oh one Pro and it's like the best model at reasoning and it should be, and I mean, like, let's just be clear, like it's incredibly impactful. Like it's a great product. People are going to use it a ton.

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  But I think Francois Chollet is like, well, it doesn't do my little trick. It doesn't, it, it can't do this one thing.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Dance.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  And, and I had this joke. It was like, it was like, what if, what if the AGI future is, uh, is like, uh, AGI can like completely dominate humans, but it keeps us in cages because in case it ever runs into an Ark Prize.

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Because it's this little puzzle that only humans can do, but AGI can do everything else. It can like build weapons and completely subjugate us and like, you know, throw us in prison, but it keeps us in cages because what if it runs into this weird puzzle where you have to match the colors up? Uh, but, um.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sorry. I was confusing him with the, the guy.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, you're thinking of Gary Marcus.

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  No, no, the guy, who's the guy at Facebook?

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, Gary Marcus. Oh, wait, no, no. Oh, you're thinking of, uh, yeah.

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  Jan?

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jan Le Cun.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Jan Le Cun's the guy who bailed and then comes back.

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  The Giga Coper.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I'm a fan of Cholay. I like him a lot and I like that he teamed up with the Zapier guys, Wade Foster, to do that prize. It's a very interesting model. It's a very interesting problem and you can go check it out at arcriz.com. I believe that's the URL. Just Google it and you can do them for yourself. Just make sure you don't do them on mobile because the first time I did it on mobile, it wasn't rendering properly. So it was like, it's like this grid. You have to match these two grids and the grid wasn't rendering right. So it was like, you kept off and I was like, this is the hardest puzzle I've ever seen. And then I did it in like a browser and I was like, okay, this makes way more sense because it's like a four by four grid and a four by four grid. Anyway, moving on.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Let's do a promoted post.

• 2:21:56Jordi Hays?

  I gotta stop you there. We got a promoted post from Tag Hoyer. Formula One, they have a Formula One chronograph meets Oracle Red Bull Racing is along for the ride with Red Bull Racing for the last race of 2024. World Tempest takes a closer look at the showstopping new chronograph that is daring and dynamic in their latest review. You can go to tag.hr/f1chronoworld and check out this incredible timepiece. We spent a lot of time on the show talking about the Holy Trinity, AP, Patek, Vacheron and some of these other watchmakers, but Tag is a great option.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  It's a great addition to the arsenal.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  If you're wearing an Apple Watch and you want to stack on, you know, one or two other watches, maybe an Apple Watch, a Whoop Band, and then you want to add something else, Tag could be a great option there. This is a beautiful looking piece and we thank them for supporting Formula One. Without sponsors, we would not get to witness fantastic racing most weekends of the year.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Oh, this is a great post from Ben Kohler, our Vice President here at Technology Brothers. He says, "Took home silver in the Jiu-Jitsu World League Finals SoCal GI Competition in San Diego this weekend. I was disappointed not to get the gold, but it was a great experience and I will be back next year for the W."

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  And you've got to watch this video. It's insane.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Ben literally puts a man to sleep. It's kind of crazy to watch. And he's not normally a guy that that ends up in second place, but every once it's it's really about his narrative arc. He had to get second place once to in order to bounce back.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Revenge, revenge.

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Get revenge. And yeah, the guy's an absolute dog. We wouldn't be able to do this show without him. And congratulations on the silver. And, you know, maybe we do a Technology Brothers meetup when he goes back to reclaim gold.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Let's make it happen. Let's go to Michael Dell. Michael Dell says Dell's revenues during our first 16 years, 6 million, 33 million, 67 million, 159 million.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  I gotta hit that.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  I gotta hit the size. You gotta hit the gong every time. 159 million, 258 million, 338 million, 5, it's so loud.

• 2:24:18John Coogan?

  2 billion, 2.9 billion, 3.5 billion, 5.3 billion, 7.8 billion, 12.3 billion, 18.2 billion, 25 billion.

• 2:24:26Jordi Hays?

  By the end, he's just bragging. But what an absolute dog.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  What an absolute dog.

• 2:24:31Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're a pre-seed company right now, just understand that this is the bar.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Imagine first year 6 million, second year 33, third year 67, fourth year 159. That's such a good four-year run.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of a lot of founders will put in their projections, you know, we we hope to get to a nine-figure run rate by year eight. He's like, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna get to a few billion.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Oh, so you're the first employee and you just vested your four-year vest? Like, what's the company doing? Well, we went from 0 to 150 million dollars in revenue.

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog. And I and I think so his son has like a pretty cool hard like hardware company in the that I think thrive backed.

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  That's based in in Texas right now.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:24Jordi Hays?

  That's building power banks and integrating into the grid.

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  That's right, yeah.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  That's that's another one to watch.

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  16 years to 25 billion. Insane.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Big shoes to fill.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Let's go to Baze Lord. Baze says, there is no anti-memetics division. Yeah, well, explain Google's product and marketing teams.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Have you read this book?

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Which which book?

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  There's a book called, uh, There Is No Anti-Memetics Division.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  No way, there's an entire book on it.

• 2:25:52John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's a, if it's been, I think it's been printed into a book, but it's like one of these like arcane PDFs like, you know, uh, like websites out there. Very interesting.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Sure, Will has a copy.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, they, they.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  That's a hilarious blast because, yeah, Google.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Google's basically never had to be, they've never had to be good at marketing because they have the greatest distribution channel of all time.

• 2:26:14John Coogan?

  Yep. And you see it with AI. I'm, I'm still using their LLM pretty frequently because I'll Google, like I just had to Google Eric Prince. I had to remember his name. So I just searched Blackwater CEO. And I, and I don't do that on ChatGPT because ChatGPT, you gotta open it up, you gotta click the button.

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  You gotta wait. It takes a second, but you put that in Google and no more ads anymore. It's not gonna say, oh, you scroll down, click on some clickbait article to find the answer. The, the, the Gemini is just gonna give you the answer right there. And it's like, it's not, it's, it's not great, but it's not terrible. And so I'm still using it.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Um, let's go to, um, oh, this is good. Okay. Yeah. So we got a whole thread here. This is a new segment of the show. We're doing threads now. So we are gonna start with the base. We have five quote tweets in a row, all from some of my favorite people, honestly. I love every single one of these posters. So this is gonna be a beast. We're gonna be on this for a couple of minutes. So it starts with Lucy Guo, the founder of Passes, the founder of Scale, the co-founder of Scale AI. Lucy says, "It's mind blowing to me how small the scene is. It's the same faces globally from Art Basel to F1 to Paris Fashion Week to Ibiza to Amfar to Yacht Week to Grammys to, the list can go on."

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  She got 1.6K likes.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Banger. Like everyone is always at the same place, the same time, year round. Yeah, this is true. This is like the billionaire circuit. You're familiar with this? Like the.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  They, they, they, they actually like pay people to move the yachts for them and they just fly in their yachts there. And so there, there's a whole like, okay, you go on the circuit, you go to all the different events and stuff. But that's why it's so important to throw some wild cards in there. Where's, where's the, you know, the Met? Where's the LA Phil? Where's the opera? Where's the ballet? You know, you gotta throw in some old money events. This is a lot of new money stuff.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but those are, you know, you just, you just work them into the circuit, right?

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  I suppose, I suppose.

• 2:28:11Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I mean, I think Lucy's post was written in a somewhat negative way because she's a builder and she's an entrepreneur and she probably goes there and she's like, "You guys have no purpose and like, I'd rather be building my startup."

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Also a great rage baiter.

• 2:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Great rage baiter.

• 2:28:29John Coogan?

  Talk about rage bait here.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Great rage bait.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Say good Lucy, we love what you do.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  And but yeah, if you want to be in that scene, it's great. It's actually like, I like this with the tech kind of conference circuit.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  You get to go to the, you know, we went to, I went to Sendra's event.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  It was with a group of people that were at Heretic on.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Right? I could have gone to the Main Street conference and seen like, most of the same people.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  So I like it. I like, you know, it's better to see the same people and reinvest in those relationships and maybe mix in some new ones.

• 2:28:59John Coogan?

  You go to Soane, you go to Sun Valley, you go to Upfront, all the same things. So let's move on to our first quote tweet. Antonio Garcia Martinez says, "Some aspire to wealth as the ticket to this world. Some aspire to wealth to never have their fates decided by people from this world ever again." Interesting.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Bold.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Bold.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  And big.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  And real.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I get that. Yeah, there's this, there's this sense that like, the people who maybe spend all their time at Art Basel and F1 and Paris Fashion Week, like, they might not have enough skin in the game, they might not be in the arena enough to make good decisions about your life, so you have to build wealth so that you can avoid them choosing how you live your life with their products or their government decisions. Interesting.

• 2:29:44Jordi Hays?

  So you can have a thousand Bitcoin and go to Peru and get one-shotted by the demon.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Don't do that.

• 2:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Do not do that.

• 2:29:51John Coogan?

  Okay, so our third quote tweet, Zarathustra says, "A surprisingly, a surprising lesson of the last decade was how little fuck you money seems to exist. It was breathtaking to watch billionaires, especially in Silicon Valley, genuflect in slavish subservience to the woke crusaders and enthusiastically provide vigorous fellatio for a decade."

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Things you never would think you'd say on the air.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Vigorous fellatio, here we go. Another banger. These are all bangers. A thousand likes, thousand likes, another thousand likes. Everyone's just in this chain.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Lucy is the backbone of the poster economy.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  Really, really? She started a whole conversation here. So yeah, interesting that, that there's all these rich people and a lot of them didn't say anything, even though they might have been, you know, a little bit bothered. They weren't in the second category that Antonio's identifying. They were in the first category. They wanted to just enjoy the world. They made their money and they were just gonna go off to Art Basel and F1 and, and enjoy the fruits of their labors, but not really think too deeply about the shape of the world and, and the constructs. And so, you know, that seems shocking to Zarathustra. But then, we have a fourth quote tweet from none other than Marc Andreessen. He says, "Fuck you money

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  is mainly a myth. First, if you're in business, you pick up more responsibilities along with more money. You're responsible for more people. Your actions have more consequences for others. Second, political power is much, much greater than financial power every day of the week." Very interesting. And you can see that like, you know, Marc has obviously been, been, been going through a little bit of a political evolution, but the decision to actually come out and support Trump was a big one because it's not just, you know, the, the, what are they, Andreessen has 10,000 employees, 100,000, it's bigger than DocuSign, right? But, you know, it's a very large organization. And, and he has a lot of people that could look at that and say, you know, maybe I don't want to work

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  here anymore and he still needs to hire the best people across the board. And then, and then also all of the portfolio companies and everyone that works for the portfolio companies. Like, this has been a big thing with Peter is like, you know, for a lot of ti- a lot of times it would be like some random company would raise money and it would be like Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund invested, or Peter Thiel Venture Capital Fund invested. And so all of a sudden your SEO as a new startup is just immediately like, hello, I'm associated with this person who is like overtly political. And so that has consequences, that has weight. But we have to end with a fifth quote tweet from Saagar and Jetty who says,

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  And he's posting, he's chiming in and said, I've been saying this for a long time. He posts a screenshot of one of his older tweets, says,

• 2:32:44Jordi Hays?

  The seats.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  The inverse F you money scale. The higher you climb on the billionaire ladder, the more institutional entanglements you have. People can be worth billions, but muzzled because they run money or sit on boards, have to worry about shareholders, et cetera. It's really true. There aren't that many people with no bosses.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  This is why Founder's Fund doesn't take board seats.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Generally doesn't.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Everyone, everyone has institutional entanglements, even at the top.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's got a boss.

• 2:33:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. Because everyone wants to keep playing the game. No one, no one, there's no number. No one has a number. No one's like, oh yeah, once I get to this number, I will just retire and not care about anything. And that's why there's no fuck you money, because the number is not the goal. The goal is the game. You want to keep playing the game, keep growing it. And the growth is the number. The money is not happiness. It's the second derivative of money that is happiness.

• 2:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  It's not the, the absolute amount of money you have. It's the rate of acceleration.

• 2:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:33:45John Coogan?

  No one likes getting a 10% raise every year. People want to see that they're making 10%, then 20%, then 30%, then 40%, that they're scaling.

• 2:33:54Jordi Hays?

  Accelerate.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Accelerate. So that's our first thread on the show. Let us know what you think.

• 2:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Let us know if it was too LinkedIn coded.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  Promoted post.

• 2:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post. I love the opportunity to jump in here, John. We have from our friends at DuPont Registry, a 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari finishing Rosso Corsa, showing just 152 miles.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I don't know what the owner of this was doing. They certainly wasn't, certainly weren't driving it. Limited to just 499 examples produced worldwide, this extremely rare low mile car has never been publicly offered for sale, making it an extraordinary opportunity for collectors and enthusiasts alike. Currently undergoing Clascheesh certification. This vehicle's authenticity and originality will be further solidified. So Ferrari has their Clascheesh program that basically does a deep analysis on the car. You have to send it to Ferrari. They'll do a deep analysis on the car, figure out, you know, they're doing things like making sure the motor has all the original parts and, you know, making sure the paint hasn't been changed and all these different things.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  And it's just a certification that typically will increase the value of the vehicle unless they, you know, they're not going to give a certification to something that's been, you know, heavily modified or whatever. And so anyways, fantastic example. And if you buy this, if you're in our audience and you buy this, drive the hell out of it. I'd like to see you put 10,000 miles a year on it, you know, really get your, get your money's worth from this car. And then you can park it in a museum someday, you know?

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Do the gumball.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Do the gumball. Take it across country.

• 2:35:36Jordi Hays?

  I really think, I really think LaFerraris are like one of the best hard assets that you can buy right now because it's the, it is that and the Daytona SP3 are just so clearly that going to be the iconic cars of this, you know, era. And I can't wait to own one myself.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Holy Trinity car, right? I believe. P1.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  LaFerrari.

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  918.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:35:59Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Not making any more of them.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Certainly are not.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  Let's finish with Smoke Away says, "01 is your old tech. Let that sink in." Interesting take. I mean, the foundation model, yeah, it's still running GPT-4, but obviously there's a lot of, there's a lot of training to have that happens on top and a lot of UI stuff. I don't fully buy that, but it's interesting. What's interesting is that like, he's posting this in, in response to the announce of like, 01 Pro and like the new models that can reason and whatnot, but we remember how crazy it was when those were like leaked and announced. It was originally, it had some crazy code name that the information leaked and everyone was like, oh, this is going to be insane, like.

• 2:36:44Jordi Hays?

  This is AGI.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  Because it was it was basically like self-play training. So they would so they would do uh uh kind of like what they did with AlphaGo. And and and train the model. They like have it have it debate itself, have it that reason with itself, test itself. And that's kind of what's happening when you interact with these reasoning models now where they think for a long time is because they're they're prompting multiple, multiple times. So I don't know exactly how much I buy it, but it is interesting that like, yes, we're not at GPT five. No one scaled up the cluster yet. What happens when you get to an order of magnitude bigger?

• 2:37:19Jordi Hays?

  So why hasn't anybody built software now that allows you to get? To make models go PvP like I want to put Claude and OpenAI models in a in a in a ring and just make them fight to the death. Right? Over and over and over like I feel like you could. It's one thing to go put them up against some of these, you know, uh, just like general testing mechanisms, but I want I care about PvP, right?

• 2:37:45John Coogan?

  I mean, that's kind of MMLU and some of the testing grounds, like some of the evals are essentially that.

• 2:37:49Jordi Hays?

  I know, but they're going against the eval. They're going against the eval. I want them to go head to head.

• 2:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:55Jordi Hays?

  I want them to like, like only one of you can leave the room after this. You have to commit to Puku if you.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  If you uh.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's interesting how little has leaked about the next training run. Like, we don't even know at this point, like, how this how the build out is because I think we're in like the custom data center era where like.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  It has to be bespoke. It has to be hundreds of thousands of GPUs. There's been some news from XAI about their, you know, building.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Call powered.

• 2:38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're building the biggest data center for this and they're going to do the largest training run, but that's still in the works. And we don't really have like a concrete timeline of like, okay, when is a GPT five level model dropping? That's truly an order of magnitude more energy went into it because everyone's saying, you know, scaling is everything. Scale, scale, scale, scale is all you need.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  Energy is a constraint.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  And so we could be in for something really, really crazy, but no one knows if the IQ jump is going to be fifty points or five points.

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Like, everyone knows it's going to be better and everyone knows scale is important, really.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:54John Coogan?

  But no one can, I haven't seen any really strong predictions for what an order of magnitude of energy gets you in terms of IQ. Right now. Like, it's a lot of speculation. So we'll be covering it here, folks.

• 2:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Live.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  Technology Brothers. Thanks for watching. Subscribe.