Samsung Invests $70B in AI Chips, The Cubanator Joins, Apple's Do Nothing Win AI Strategy | Mark Cuban, John Kim, Eugen Alpeza, Ari Herbert-Voss, Alex Konrad, Carl Eschenbach & Pat Grady, Jim Cantrell, Tom Hulme

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:45) - Samsung Invests $70B in AI Chips (09:15) - Composer 2 Available in Cursor (17:49) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (28:43) - Apple: Behind in AI, Ahead in Revenue (40:23) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (57:09) - Carl Eschenbach & Pat Grady. Carl Eschenbach, a seasoned technology executive with over 35 years of experience, has held leadership roles at VMware and Sequoia Capital before becoming co-CEO of Workday in December 2022 and sole CEO in February 2024. In his conversation, he discusses his return to Sequoia Capital, emphasizing the firm's unique position to navigate the massive technological disruptions, particularly in AI, and his personal mission to mentor and support founders during this transformative era. Pat Grady is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on early- and growth-stage investments across software and consumer technology. He has led or supported investments in companies like Airbnb, Zoom, and DoorDash, and is known for his work with founders on scaling products and building enduring companies. (01:29:44) - Jim Cantrell, an American entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, co-founded Phantom Space Corporation in 2019, aiming to revolutionize space transportation through mass production of rockets and satellites. He discusses his extensive experience in the automotive and aerospace industries, including his early involvement with SpaceX, where he accompanied Elon Musk to Russia to purchase rockets, an endeavor that ultimately led to the founding of SpaceX. Cantrell also highlights Phantom Space's development of the Daytona launch vehicle, designed to provide cost-effective and responsive launch services, and emphasizes the importance of vertical integration and mass manufacturing in reducing costs and increasing access to space. (01:49:54) - Tom Hulme, Managing Partner and Head of Europe at GV (Google Ventures), discusses the firm's significant focus on AI investments, noting that 80-90% of their current activities involve AI, and emphasizes the importance of technical talent in Europe, highlighting that 35% of the world's AI researchers are based there. He also mentions the emergence of repeat founders and a "PayPal mafia" effect in Europe, citing investments in companies like Snyk and GoCardless. Additionally, Hulme underscores the UK's substantial contributions to AI research, particularly through DeepMind, and discusses the potential of new AI technologies such as world models and reinforcement learning to complement existing large language models. (02:00:41) - Mark Cuban, born in 1958, is an American entrepreneur and investor, best known for his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks and his role on the television show "Shark Tank." In the conversation, he discusses his positive outlook on life, his information consumption habits, and his approach to handling AI-generated communications. He also shares insights into emerging trends in AI-driven startups, the evolving landscape of sports and entertainment, and his perspectives on the future of robotics and self-driving cars. (02:35:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:40:58) - John Kim, co-founder and CEO of Paraform, discusses the company's evolution from assisting startups in building founding teams to serving a diverse clientele, including public companies like Palantir. He highlights Paraform's recent $40 million funding round led by Scale Venture Partners and outlines plans to deploy the capital for team expansion and product roadmap acceleration. Additionally, Kim shares the company's strategic move into the legal hiring market, aiming to become a universal hiring platform across various industries. (02:48:40) - Eugen Alpeza, co-founder and CEO of Edra, discusses how their agentic learning system connects to existing enterprise systems like ServiceNow, Jira, Outlook, Salesforce, and Zendesk to observe and document employee workflows, enabling automation of tasks without requiring explicit instructions. He highlights that Edra's approach is particularly beneficial for large companies with complex processes, citing clients such as ASOS, Cushman & Wakefield, and HubSpot. Additionally, Eugen mentions that Edra has raised $30 million in funding, led by Sequoia, with continued support from ATVC and A-Star. (02:52:31) - Ari Herbert, founder of RunCivil, is dedicated to automating hacker intuition to enhance internet safety. He recounted his journey from being OpenAI's first security hire in 2019, where he contributed to GPT-3 and Codex, to establishing RunCivil after recognizing the need for proactive security measures against malicious AI use. Ari discussed the diverse threats faced by organizations, the limitations of model distillation, and the importance of tailored security solutions for enterprises, emphasizing the necessity of offensive strategies in cybersecurity. (03:02:37) - Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media, discusses the evolution of his media company since its launch, highlighting the introduction of a podcast and feature stories aimed at providing service-oriented coverage for founders. He emphasizes the importance of delivering concise, informative content tailored to the busy schedules of startup builders, such as commute-length podcasts and illustrative articles that simplify complex topics. Konrad also reflects on the current state of venture capital, noting the significance of domain expertise and the challenges of maintaining visibility in a competitive landscape. 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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?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Thursday, March 19, 2026. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy as corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more. Don't test me with the soundboard. Don't go soundboard for a soundboard with me. You know I got.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  That's a narrative violation.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Uh, we're having some fun.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're out of control.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  We got a great show for you today, folks. Carl Eschenbach is Eschen back at Sequoia. We love to see it. We had the pleasure of chatting with Carl a couple of months ago, and I've always been a big fan of his, but we'll let him introduce himself. Let's pull up the linear lineup. A linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and you should be too. We also have Mark Cuban coming on the show.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  The Cuban.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  And what a fantastic return to form for us because the first time we had him on the show, we discussed, and we can talk about Cuban in a second, but of course we have our light, our Lambda Lightning round. And Alex Konrad from Upstarts Media is joining as well. Anyway, last time we had Mark Cuban on the show, we were debating ads in LLMs. And since then, we've gotten a bunch of data points about ads in LLMs. And I think that some of his takes have probably aged well. Some of our takes have probably aged well. It'll be an interesting time to reevaluate what's actually happening. There's been a lot more points.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, John.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  We just have more.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  I said that ads would be fine.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  And now the world is ending.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Now we had, now we have.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  It's not because of the ads, though. It's not because of the ads. It is, it is much more complicated than that. But here's a white pill. Samsung is investing $70 billion to advance their fab capacity. They're, they're, they're getting back in the AI chips game. They've always been in the AI chips game. So brief history of Samsung. You probably know them from the phones, from the TVs. They, of course, are a major player in HBM, high bandwidth memory. They. Are a massive company, over a quarter million employees. They're close to touching a trillion dollars in USD market cap.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  They pull in around 200 billion USD a year in revenue, maybe 250 billion this year in revenue, really good. All that's USD. When you look up Samsung, you get South Korean won, but I like to think in USD because I'm an American.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  And it's actually kind of complicated thinking in foreign currency. They're the global leaders in memory and OLED displays as well. So a lot of the displays that you see in other electronics, even it has a different brand name, it's still Samsung actually making that OLED display. But they're second in smartphones to iPhone, to the iPhone and Apple, and they're second in the semiconductor foundry business to TSMC. Semiconductors still make up 30 to 40% of their business and they supply HBM to Nvidia for the H100 and Blackwell Systems. So it's not like they're sitting out the AI bull market. They are doing great. They are definitely participating.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  They're incredibly important in the AI build out. But if TSMC is bottlenecked and TSMC is sort of a risk off and they're not going to be, you know, guiding to like insane capex numbers while every American hyperscaler is, well, that creates an opportunity for Samsung. And so Samsung is stepping up and they're announcing that, hey, we're going to put another 70 billion to work on this particular business. So Tesla has been working with Samsung on the foundry side in AI for a while. So Samsung's never really been on the frontier with a direct competitor to the H100 or the Blackwell chip. That's been more of like AMD's game and AMD also fads at TSMC. So there hasn't really been this like neck and neck battle between TSMC and Samsung.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  But it's like you can do AI inference on a Samsung chip and we know that because Tesla went to Samsung years ago and said, we need a chip that can Take in pictures from the road, decide where the lines are and decide. They want their chips with the dip. They want their chips with the dip and now Samsung does too. That's all you know. And so the FSD system, if you have a Tesla, you might be familiar with like HW3, hardware 3. That has been deployed into millions of cars and it was fabbed on Samsung's 14 nanometer process, which is a lagging node. We're not in the 3 nanometer, the crazy frontier stuff, but it's working and it's on the road. And according to a US regulatory probe, there

• 4:39John Coogan?

  were 3.2 million vehicles, Teslas, on the road in America with FSD systems that were basically all running Samsung chips inside. And so now, to be clear, Tesla, just like any foundation model lab company, they have training and then they also have inference. They're a little bit different than many of the labs that you know and love because they do training in a data center using what's called the Dojo chip and that is fabbed at TSMC. But, so they train the system, they take all the data in from every Tesla camera, every road, all the information that they have. Every time that there's a disengagement,

• 5:21John Coogan?

  that's feedback to the reinforcement learning system. It says, hey, we were in FSD mode, but then someone grabbed the wheel or someone stepped on the brakes. You made a mistake. Understand what happened to get you to that point where you made that mistake. And so that, all that data gets collected in a Tesla data center, runs on these Dojo chips. They do the training and then they deploy the model onto the Samsung chips in the actual cars. So if you're driving a Tesla, you have a Samsung chip in there that was trained and the model was trained on TSMC chips. And so the Dojo D1 is one example of their training chip. That was fabbed at TSMC on 7 nanometer and it's completely separate from the in-car FSD chip. So with the backdrop of Nvidia's massive GTC news cycle, they've done so much press around GTC and so many different launches, you know that Nvidia is

• 6:06John Coogan?

  just going to suck a lot of the air out of the semiconductor discussion this week. Out of the clean room. Out of the clean room, yes, which is recycling all of the air every three seconds or something like that. So Samsung dropped this update. It was pretty quiet. We were actually struggling to find it. There was one Wall Street Journal article about it, but it has not SEOed well. They, maybe they need to, you know, do some more podcasts or something. But. But they did, in fact. I mean, Jensen's doing the whole fleet of, you know, shows and interviews.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Podcaster says companies should podcast harder.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yes, the solution to everything is more podcasting. Talking my book here.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think this is like particularly important, especially this morning. The, I guess the CCP put something out in the last 24 hours, basically saying, hey, Taiwan is going to have an energy crisis due to the broader global energy crisis.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  So we need to reunify peacefully.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  There's an opportunity for peaceful reunification.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  But peaceful reunification, even if it was completely peaceful and all the Taiwanese people just say, hey, we want to be part of China, and they all vote for it democratically. That's going to be rough for the American chip buying industry, if you're a buyer of chips that are fabbed there. And so having another chip on the board, metaphorically, to make physical chips is probably a good thing. You know, I was writing yesterday, I'm very excited about Samsung, very excited about Intel, very excited about all of the new fabs, the GigaFab, the TerraFab is the one that Elon's talking about.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Launches in five days?

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Oh, did he actually say that?

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  He said seven days.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Seven days?

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  A couple days ago.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Wait, five days, like the plan launches?

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  He just said TerraFab launches in seven days.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know what launches mean.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  And Tyler, what's the lead time for an ASML lithography machine?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's at least like, you know, three, five years. Yeah, depending, it depends on which like tool.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  So the TerraFab will be ready in five and the ASML machine.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  It's possible, ASML, it's alien technology.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Elon's going up and back to space all the time. Maybe he got some of his own.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine on the moon, on the backside, on the dark side of the moon. They just had them stacked up there in crates potentially. So yeah, Samsung's been doing well over the last five days. Stock's up 11% during a time when the NASDAQ is down 2.2% and geopolitical tensions continue to rise. The compute bottleneck, we know it's important. We've been discussing this constantly and it's going to be very constraining over the next few years. So every increase in CapEx in the supply chain is a step in the right direction. And so Samsung gets the first gong hit.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations, doubling over at Samsung, making a big bet. Who else is making big bets? Cursor is making big bets. Before we talk about Cursor, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. And let me also tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Cursor is out with Composer 2.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Composer 2.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  It is frontier level at coding. Priced at 50 cents per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens. It's also, they have a fast version. They say we're able to significantly improve the model quality and cost to serve. These quality improvements come from our first continued pre-training round, providing a far stronger base to scale our RL. It performed quite well on, what is it, Cursor Bench?

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yes. Which is a funny bench, but...

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Which is, well, yeah, yeah. TBPN performs quite well on TBPN Bench, too.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yes, it's a little silly to design the bench and then publish the bench, your score on your own bench. But, I mean, to be fair, like, they're putting GPT-5.4 High and Medium above them. So it's like, they didn't, it's not one of these graphs that's just like, oh, look, we made some arbitrary X and Y axes and like, we're in the top right corner, of course, because the axes are like, good and cool.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  On TBPN Bench, like, technology podcasts publish at least three hours of content every week.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Naturally, naturally, we are the...

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Right at the top.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Right at the top. And it's actually, there's no one else on there.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  But...

• 10:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, this seems fair. It is a little bit odd to read this because the cost, the cost is on the X-axis and it's inverted. So the further you are to the right, the cheaper you are. Which makes sense because people associate an X and Y graph with, you want to be in the top right quadrant, and they certainly are. And it does seem like in terms of this parade of frontier, you want to be on the frontier, you want to be pushing out across every single curve. Maybe if you are interested in...

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Sparing no expense, you'll go with the GPT 5.4 high or medium model and you can, you know, align cursor to to GPT. I'm sort of, I'm sort of surprised that Opus is not doing as well on Cursor Bench. That feels surprising based on like the general vibes around, around Opus 4.6 generally, but Cursor has specific needs for specific customers. And I don't know, what else do you think is going on here?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the cost is really big. Like, this is basically like 10x cheaper than Opus.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So I think also, you know, Cursor has kind of been like, not really a like dark horse, like everyone knows about it.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  But in the coding race, it's like, everyone's like, okay, there's Codex versus Claude Code.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  But like, you know, if you imagine that, you know, Claude Code and Codex are kind of like these environments for getting a ton of like really good data for training coding models, like Cursor has had that for way, way longer.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Than than OpenAI Anthropic.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So you should imagine that, like, at least, you know, in the near term, like, they actually have like really, really good data.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  That they can, you know, train these, these good models on. And obviously, like, this is a very specific model. This, they've said it like, you're not going to write poems with this model. It's this very like specific, kind of, almost like point solution model where it's, it's just.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Don't listen to them, Tyler. Write a poem with the model. Poem Bench.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Poem Bench. Um, yeah, I, I would be interested to know, like, how many sacrifices were made, because it's at a certain point, like, I remember talking to an AI researcher, actually a semiconductor entrepreneur, who was saying that, like, he actually thinks, he actually does believe that importing, like, The Odyssey and like Homeric epics is key to humanoid robots learning to walk.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think like if you look back at just like the general history of like machine learning AI like the the lesson is that like big general models always beat these small specific models.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  But i- if you kind of zoom in on the time scale, like you can still train, you know, GLM, some open source model on a very specific task like accounting or something and you can like he'll climb and you can actually make it better than the frontier models right now.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  At that specific thing. And especially at cost, especially at cost.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yeah, very much so. But like on the long term, if you zoom out, what actually went here, it it seems like it's basically always going to be these big, you know, general models, but.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  And I wonder, I wonder if that's true. I mean, we talk about this a lot where the big general model outperforms the smaller model. But at at the limit, like if you were to think about like a Python if statement, just like flow control that is truly deterministic. Like, yes, if you if you piped the same question of like the if statement, like is this number bigger than this number? You pipe that into 5.4, it's going to get it right all the time. It's going to be very expensive compared to an if statement, which takes like no, no compute whatsoever, right? But the if statement is 100% accurate, like unless there's some bit flipped from cosmic radiation, like it is deterministic.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  And so if you're in a world where the small model that you've built, the classifier that you've built, whatever machine learning pipeline or small model you built is actually functionally at 100%, well, then there's this upper bound that even like the bigger smarter model doesn't get you any benefit at all. So you're just purely in cost control mode, I would imagine.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's reasonable, but I think.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  This is not a great example because coding is more.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Coding, we're not at 100% saturation on just coding.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  And just literally one.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, look at the, look at the chart, like the best performing models are sitting at at 65%, 60, 63, 64%. So there's clearly more, more room to saturate this particular bench. I'm actually super interested to know about what goes into cursor bench at this point because I feel like when I see every benchmark, it's like 100% now. But that's just from, you know, the old, the old models.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Legendary poster sent Culp says all S H I T S and giggles on that headline till Anthropic or OpenAI decide to cut off their access to cursor, referencing the Bloomberg article, Cursor is taking on Anthropic and OpenAI with a new AI coding. Model.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Would would that matter? Like, at this point, if they have if they have Composer 2, and it's a small model, but it's good at writing code, and it performs well on Cursor Bench, and the Cursor users are satisfied with the Composer 2 model, and they do, Cursor does get their access cut off, and when you install Cursor, you roll it out to your organization, you just get Composer 2, and you know what? It's it's, you know, maybe there's taste that would pull you.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just say at this point right now, I don't think we have any visibility into like, how much of Cursor's revenue right now is tied to using OpenAI or Anthropic models?

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Well, I think like, in some ways, all their cost is, but is all their revenue? It depends on the perception of the user base, because the revenue might be, well, I pay for Cursor. Like, I don't really care what they use under the hood. There's a lot of people, this was Ben Thompson's argument for a long time, was that there's, for a lot of people, they just show up to ChatGPT, and they wouldn't care if the model was powered by Gemini, because they're just like, I just ask it a question, and I get an answer. And so, if you're a Cursor user, it's possible that you're in the same boat, where you don't really mind what happens, but like, under under the fold. What else is going on here?

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  George says, I'm hearing tons of complaints from Cursor customers at enterprise companies as silent change, but almost all models Cursor uses behind max mode. Devs who used to manage to spread out monthly credits over a month see all of it used up in one to two days.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Are furious and switching.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  It does feel like there's a little bit of like, an economic war here.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is what came up, like, you know, earlier this month around the labs sort of subsidizing.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  So, they're not, they're not in an easy position, but they're such a talented team.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, you know who's great at Pareto Frontier pushing models? Gemini 3.1 Pro. It's here, and it has a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Graphite, which is owned by Cursor, correct? Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Nikita says, "We're rolling out summaries for articles now. Just tap the summarize button if you want to know if it's worth your time to read it."

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it's basically Grok. Turn this into a regular tweet. "I am excited about the listen button. I've had this, you know, on my commute. There's so many moments where I'm like, I wish I could just have somebody read this article."

• 18:01John Coogan?

  I actually wound up doing this with a number of Will Manitis long-form essays. I would copy them, put them into 11 Reader from 11 Labs and have it read it to me in sort of a

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  A silly voice.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  A silly voice. It was a good time.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was trying, I was actually trying to use Grok.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  But it was actually

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to use Grok in the X app

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  to just take an article, paste it into Grok and say, "Hey, can you read this to me?" And it said, "Cannot find the post." It couldn't, it couldn't kind of actually get the content.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  It is sort of, it is sort of crazy reflecting on the fact that there is so much software out there that, you know, we, we, we talked about DoorDash, like how can you completely reimagine the experience with agents on the platform? And there's so many different things that you can do to sort of like re-architect what your product is if you've built a successful software company. But then there's all these like little things where like, yes, every product probably does need an LLM that can summarize text and expand it. And that's what Grok does. And also, everyone wants text to speech and everyone wants speech to text. And, and everyone wants, okay, if there's an image, I want you to, you know, have a text version so it's searchable. Like I've complained about if I see a funny meme on

• 19:15John Coogan?

  X and then I want to go search for it later. Impossible. Like there's just no way you could ever do it because that is stored in Twitter's database or X's database as like "image number 762542" and someone's comment was just like, "This changes everything." And I'm never going to remember what they said. But now you can run every image through a image model to understand what's actually going on and then potentially surface that in search. Now, that's going to be a long project to actually implement that. Make it fast, make it cheap, make it affordable, make it like fit within the business model of X or whatever plat- social platform is out there. And, I mean, you can see Instagram like struggling through these things right now as, as search becomes more important and

• 19:58John Coogan?

  as ranking becomes more important. Meta's already seeing the lift from machine learning applied to add ranking and whatnot.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  But this is a response to, you know, every article people would post, people would always say Grok summarized this. And now there's just a button. I wonder if this button will be gated by X premium. Because I recently learned that you can only ask Grok, like at Grok, is this true? You can only do that if you're paying for X. And sort of underrated how well X has seemingly, I don't know how big the subscriber base is, but that was a crazy idea to have a paid social network. Dalton Caldwell, from formerly Y C partner, actually launched a competitor to Twitter back like maybe a decade ago.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  That was paywalled only and the whole pitch was like better content, more Substack model, no ads. And he never really got it, you know, to a perfect product market fit. But it was an interesting idea.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's because people are deeply addicted to X.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  It is very valuable to them to be on there to participate.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  And the paid functionality, the way that it was marketed and the way that it generally worked was like you were going to have a bad time on X. Like if X was valuable to you and you didn't pay the $10 a month.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  You, it was going to be like significantly less valuable to you probably, you know, you might, you might, depending on what kind of business you're running or what you use X for, it might be the equivalent of like losing thousands of dollars a month of value. Or you could just pay the $10. So it was a good trade.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. But. It was also just, it was weird how the targeting never seemingly got dialed to the point where you could actually target the CEOs of companies who were on X. Like, I mean, you see Travis Kalanick on X, like replying to things. It's like. He's raising money, he's growing a business. Like, there's a lot of value in advertising to him. Uh, because he's gonna be picking a corporate card soon, or he probably already has, or it might be in that market. He might be picking a payroll suite. Like, there's all these things where if you could deliver that to that audience, it would be incredibly valuable and the CPM should be like through the roof. But I think for privacy reasons and for variety of other reasons and sort of like,

• 22:23John Coogan?

  that like really monetizing that long tail has been very difficult across every platform. So they've just gone with scale. And the products that have sold the most on social networks have been very broadly marketed. And the, and the, the criticism that we saw from the Oscars is always like YouTube ads are generic. It's just like for a pillow or like injury or like something that applies to every single person.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  But there's always this like hyper-targeted opportunity there.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing is, is, uh, the paid program with X has seemingly worked. In that we know a lot of people that happily pay and have no plans to churn. But it would be a failure in the context of like meta-scale, right? I think the last reported number that I saw was something like they had like one to one and a half million paid subs at $10 a month.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, uh, on X?

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you're talking about somewhere in the range of 100 to 200 million of like ARR.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  And if Mark, if Zuck had launched a product like that, he would just wind it down, right?

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Reels went from zero to 50 billion of run rate in like a handful of years, right? That's what, that's what a home run looks like. And so I think it makes sense for X, but it certainly is not a home run from a, you know, consumer application standpoint. And they still need the, you know, the overall business.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Olivia Moore had some extra context there around, uh, monetization of via ads versus, uh, versus subscriptions. Um, so Neil Patel.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Who is the founder of NP Digital, a New York Times bestselling author, shared, this is how ChatGPT ads are performing.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  He's like the SEO guy, I think.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Okay. He said, the data is from, is only from five businesses, but these businesses also run Google and Meta ads. Compared to Meta, ChatGPT's rough qual, uh, lead quality is 256% higher. On the flip side, lead quality is 49% lower than Google. I mean, that seems like a miracle to be in between two hyperscalers on, on like day one, basically. But on the bright side, due to ad costs, it's substantially cheaper from a CPA perspective than Meta. And this was sort of what we were talking to the folks, the good folks over at Ridge about was that, uh, at least, at least in the early days, like, like being, being early to a new ad platform that can, you can potentially scale on, can drive a bunch of new conversions.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  But Olivia Moore said, a big story that most people are missing in the AI race for the consumer, ChatGPT versus Claude is ads. Right now, most consumer AI revenue is coming from power users who are willing to pay high subscription costs. This currently skews positive for products like Claude, but this will not be the end state. Google makes $460 per user per year in the United States, more mostly on ads. I didn't know that their ARPU was so high. Meta makes around 250. Um, I mean, I guess those Google ads are really, really valuable. Uh, and it's so intent driven that it, it makes sense. Um, I would argue, or she would argue, uh, that ChatGPT's ad-based ARPU's will be even higher as they will ultimately have deeper, more frequent user engagement. Even at the $460 level, monetizing everyone

• 25:33John Coogan?

  in the US via ads is 152 billion in annual revenue. By contrast, if you're able to monetize even 5% of the population at $200 a month subscription, which is a stretch, that's only 40 billion. That's a, that's actually a crazy difference because $200 a month subscription is, is like super high. Like, you know, you're talking 20 times like Netflix or something else that's, you know, uh, premium and like really important.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The $200 subscription at the time was crazy.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  But even at that point, some of the people that were more. Kind of just like AI pill generally for like, oh, it's actually possible that someday you could spend $20,000 a month.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  I was like, give me the $20,000 monthly. And it sort of came via API, but it was heavily subsidized. So she says, I suspect this will be even more drastic outside of the United States where users are even less willing to pay or directly pay for subscriptions. And the earliest data from a very small rollout shows chat G P ads are already outperforming meta in effectiveness. This just gets better, uh, uh, uh, it just gets better over time. So, uh, interesting. The, the question about Will Minnitis and the article summaries, should he move to Substack? He's threatening Nikita. He says, I'm defecting to S B S T C K. He won't even type it out. He says they pay more and Nikita didn't reply. Uh, I think people would follow Will over there.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  I think people would read his articles anywhere potentially. But, um, if you're looking to advertise, why don't you head over to AppLovin', profitable advertising made easy with Axon dot A. Get, get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and H R, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. So.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Carl says, it's time to return to the place where I know I can have the most impact. I'm beyond excited to rejoining Sequoia as a partner. Here is what I shared with the team on how I am approaching my next chapter. He wants to serve the ecosystem. Fire to win. Let's see what this means. Being a servant leader does not mean I have lost my edge. In fact, the fire in my belly burns brighter than ever. The difference now is that I'm not using that fire to light my own path. I'm using it to light the spark in others. So their fire burns brighter. Leading from behind, I have no interest in the view from the front of the room. I will leave that to our, to great leaders, Pat and Alfred. I want to lead from behind empowering each of you. Egoless impact, contagious energy.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Mentor and build great leaders, always ready to serve. Carl's the man. We will have him on in just 30 minutes so we can wait to cover more of that story.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  But first, we gotta go to his Alan and Co. photo shoot. Dual wielding coffee, jump rope, and a faded Sequoia t-shirt. Andrew Reid says, "Immediate overwhelming response to VC push-up debacle. Welcome back to Sequoia, an all-time great partner." That's a great, that's a great photo. He's looking great there. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. This is an interesting story. This is an interesting story.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  They say, "Apple is way behind in AI and still making a fortune from it. Let's see."

• 28:52John Coogan?

  begs the question, are they actually behind?

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Its AI revenue is set to top $1 billion this year, reassuring investors wary of rivals' sky-high spending.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  And, keep in mind, this is-

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  They have a chart here showing gross revenue from GenAI apps as well as Apple's commission, so.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Look at this. The, the, the beginning of 2025 was really the boom of GenAI app growth. 400 million, is this, is this monthly App Store revenue? Wow. They're really cooking. And then, and then sort of a flat line.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, so interesting that, that it actually dropped.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we did read that article a few days ago about how Apple has been pushing back against some of the vibe coding apps. And there's this question about, you know, where are the bounds? Obviously, Apple's had pretty strict App Store rules around adult content and, you know, what else you can do. Even just the app reconstituting itself, pushing changes because they want to review every line of code that goes in the App Store. If someone's pushing 10, 20, 30,000 lines of code a day, that's a lot of code for Apple to review. It's gonna slow things down. So that could be a little bit of what what we're seeing. Maybe they've capped out on their ability to review all the vibe coded apps that are flooding the App Store.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  But let's go to the Wall Street Journal and dig into this.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Apple's on pace to surpass one billion in AI revenue this year, a tidy sum that demonstrates the company's AI advantage even as it struggles to deliver an AI strategy of its own. Its Siri chatbot is still weak by modern AI standards. What Apple does have that the other AI players don't is a dominant position making devices. However, however fancy OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and XAI make their chatbots, iPhones are still a primary way to deliver them to customers. That means they typically pay the App Store tax roughly thirty percent of subscription fees in the first year and fifteen percent a year thereafter, though rates vary. Gen AI apps paid Apple nearly nine hundred million dollar in App Store fees in twenty twenty five with all, you know, almost a billion of revenue and very, very, very little capex.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  Three fourths of the revenue Apple rakes in from Gen AI apps in its App Store come from ChatGPT.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Next at about five percent is XAI's Grok. There we go, Grok.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Fucking. I mean, there's so many different like funnels. They did the essay competition. They did the the video competition. And I mean, I've talked to people that are just still, they're like, you know, like people that are in the Apple ecosystem, they're like in the Tesla ecosystem. And so they're like, yeah, I talked to Grok on my way to work. I'm not kidding.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Grok in the iPhone App Store is that did twelve million last month.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I know, I know, like the the true like AI heads will be like, Grok's behind on this benchmark or model or whatever. And Tyler, is that a correct characterization?

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Grok did more revenue. Grok did more revenue last month than than Claude in the iPhone App Store.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  But but like I've I've started having conversations with, I mean, I'm using ChatGPT, but I I wanted to just, I I wanted to get up to speed on on Taiwan and the the just the like, what was the the reason for the original civil war and stuff? And so I was just having a conversation back and forth and at no point was I like, oh, it really needs to be like, you know, GPT five point four pro. It's like, these are things that exist just like with one search to Wikipedia or one search to any, it's probably baked into the weights of three point five, but. So, so like if I'm just going to be like chatting with someone who's like reasonably smart, like I would say Grok is there. And so what do you think?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you like, you could be talking to someone who's really, really.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  No, like not if you're asking like basic, basic knowledge retrieval questions that like, that like any model is going to one, one shot and just be.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you're describing stuff that you could just like actually Google.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but I can't Google via voice in my car on the drive. And for someone who's driving a Tesla and has a Grok integration right there, they're just like, sure. Like, this is great.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, that's fair.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  It's like not, like the frontier use case is important. Like that's where the action's happening. That's what's driving the next order of magnitude of growth. But like, there are plenty of people who are like, Google's search overviews are amazing, you know? And they're like, that's like, that's my level. And like, that's good. And they're like.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, I don't think those people have actually tried like GPT 5.4 Pro.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  But I don't.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  So good.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  It is, it is good, but it's slow. And truthfully, like, like you can fire off the exact same query to 5.4 Pro and 5.4 and 5.4, 5.4 fast, fast. And, and if the query is simple enough, the answer will be exactly the same. Because if I ask, if I ask 5.4,

• 33:52John Coogan?

  5.4 extended thinking, like, what is the capital of California? And it thinks for 10 minutes and it just tells me Sacramento.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  See, you, there you go. That's why you need to think a lot of people.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  I told you, I run my life on GPT two. I hallucinate a lot, but.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  People have said I have the mind of GPT two.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  It's true. It's true. But, but so, so I think, I think for, I think for some use cases, you know, a smaller model, something's a little faster, something that's not, you know, absolutely frontier is, is fine. So I don't know. What, what, what do you think?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so imagine that.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Do you think there's something else going on?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  5.4 Pro Spark. So it's on, you know, Stuber's chip.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Would you hit that every single time? When would you not use it?

• 34:36John Coogan?

  I would not use it if I was doing like a deep research report necessarily. It, it, because I'd want, I just want extended reasoning for certain things.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  No, but I'm saying like, you could have that, that like.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, so.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  You can use like five point three Codex Spark, which is like super fast extended reasoning, but it's still super fast because it's on super chips, right? If you had that.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yes, if money is no object, absolutely. Like, I, you know, I'm happy to pour out the glass of water for to get the best and the best intelligence possible.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Like, I just think that even if you if you just care about speed, there's still better. I think, in my opinion, like, right now, there are better models than than.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so, so, so walk me through it. Like, 5% of App Store revenue seems really high. What's driving that?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, not everyone is like extremely tapped into like the, you know, the current model that came out two days ago.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  You gotta use it like.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  So you agree with me? I think you agree with me.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  About?

• 35:28John Coogan?

  About the fact that that like good enough intelligence is still like a good business to the tune of 5% of App Store revenue from Gen AI apps.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm saying that like you, because you know about the stuff, you should like.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, I'm not, I, I told you, I told you, I'm talking to Chad GPT. Look, don't, don't shame me, I'm not the one. But I'm just saying, like, I don't even think you should be shaming someone who's talking to an old model.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  I'm not shaming them, I think, I'm saying.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Your model's shaming.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  It could be better, like, you could have a much better experience.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so you want to evangelize the frontier? You want to evangelize the frontier?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  But, but I mean, I, I'm just, I'm just wondering, like, if we did, we need a new touring test. So we need to have, uh, random people come in and they get to talk to 5.4 or, you know, 4.0 or something. And can they tell the difference? And which one would do they prefer?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And they might prefer 4.0.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  They might prefer 4.0. This is the new, this is the new, uh, New York Times writing test. We should, we should put one of these out and be, can you actually tell the difference? This is interesting because I feel like a lot of people say they can, but they, they, they probably, unless they're really, really grinding and they're trying to do something that requires like a really long reasoning chain, it's totally possible that they're just like, yeah, like, it's, it's, gave me the right answer, like, it looks good.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  That's a narrative violation.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's continue. Apple's revenue from generative AI apps rose from about thirty-five million in January to a high of a hundred million in August.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Do nothing, win.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Do nothing, win. Create an app store over a decade ago and just keep reaping the rewards. They sowed and now they're reaping. Sales have fallen from their peak, partly because chat GPT downloads have declined, according to the data. As a proportion of Apple's total sales, one billion dollars is small, yet Gen A apps are, Gen AI apps are the growth driver for Apple's services business, which investors have focused on in recent years because it has grown faster than device sales and boasts higher profit margins. Apple's dominant share at the top of the smartphone market affords it another luxury, time to get its own AI strategy right. So they're making money while they figure everything else out. Apple's AI plans, plan runs counter to strategies of competitors that are spending hundreds

• 37:44John Coogan?

  of billions of dollars on chips and data centers to build frontier language models. Apple is spending a fraction of that, aiming instead to use all of the personal information people store on their iPhones, together with the chips that it designs itself to power an on-device AI strategy. That strategy could prove a winner if, as some AI researchers have suggested, access to user data and strong privacy makes on-device AI the dominant way consumers access the technology. Apple investors want to see progress from Apple's own AI strategies, such, said Charles Reinhardt, chief investment officer of Johnson Asset Management, an Apple shareholder. Quote, "If they can act as a toll road for providers of AI, then they'll probably end

• 38:27John Coogan?

  up looking good long term for not having the big capex overhang." Now, I have to imagine that Apple is not capturing any revenue from enterprises, developers, Claude Code, Codex, any of those developers, they're probably not, even if they, even if they are winding up using like a chat GPT subscription in Codex, they're probably setting that new subscription up on desktop.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  It's not a toll road on, on the, on the actual.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's a toll road on consumer, which is, consumer sales. All the more reason to get into ads, honestly, because Apple does not tax those.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and AI is exciting for Apple because they need, they need a new product that they can just randomly bill you like two ninety-nine.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Anytime they need. Like some additional cash.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Two ninety nine?

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, don't you get just random bills from Apple? Like here and there.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Two ninety nine? Like two dollars and ninety nine cents?

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I feel like every time I check my email, it's like, Apple has charged you some random amount for some for some subscription.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  No, I do get emails from Apple, but it's always like two days after I bought I bought or rented a movie on Apple TV. And it just says like, you rented this movie and I'm like, yeah, I know, I clicked the button. It's fine. You don't need to email me.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other news.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Rolls Royce has scrapped plans to go all electric by twenty thirty as quote, drivers prefer V twelve engines. Would you look at that? I mean, and this is just a total shock. Total shock.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Total shock.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Drivers totally had to experience, you know, being forced, uh, EVs forced upon them for the last few years to know that they they they preferred uh, combustion engines after all. Of course, I'm kidding. I think a lot of people were just, you know, sort of saying this over and over and over. Manufacturers were not listening.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Everyone said, Elon has been saying the roads to reveal will blow your mind. If it has a V twelve.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  We've been, we've been.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  People are going to be going crazy. If he drops a V twelve, that would be, that would completely break the internet.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  It'd be incredible. Anyway, let me tell you about public dot com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about this Tesla that you were following yesterday.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Did you drop this in the chat already? I sent it to you. I know, we we we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we shouldn't share the actual picture. Um, but I saw a Tesla that was a very funny mix of it had the anti Elon club on it, but also an eleven ninety nine uh, license plate and it was a plaid and it just like mixed every possible political ideology together.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  And it had a vanity plate.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  That was very sci fi.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Sci fi. So it was mixing like, I do want to go to Mars.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  But not with Elon.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  The license plate basically said, "Beam me up."

• 41:29John Coogan?

  Beam me up.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  So they want to go to Mars, but not with Elon. They support-

• 41:33John Coogan?

  They have an incredible amount of disposable income based on the trim level.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  They enjoy high trim levels, but they do not agree with Elon's actions.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Well, maybe they work for a rival AI lab or something. And so they are extremely sci-fi pill, but they just don't like, they just feel like they're competing with XAI.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, California has now spent over a hundred million dollars on a new bridge to nowhere.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  It is a wildlife bridge, which I have driven by hundreds of times.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  I've been seeing it. I've been experiencing the traffic that it causes. I'm not against the concept of a wildlife bridge. In fact, I think it's fantastic.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  It does feel like-

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  But it is very-

• 42:19John Coogan?

  In a concrete jungle, this is beautiful.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  This has a lot of opportunity to actually improve the visual aesthetics of this particular part of the state.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Caleb Hammer says, "Bro, this state cannot be real."

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Isn't Caleb Hammer-

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  It's very real.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Isn't Caleb Hammer, uh, he's like a finance-

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's got like the number one.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  He's like the one person you'd come to to be like, "Should I spend a hundred million dollars on a bridge?" And he would say like, "No."

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually, it's actually quite a bit more than a hundred at this point. Uh, and the funny thing is like, it's just kind of a bridge, but it doesn't, it's lacking the entrances to the bridge.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like if they had built just like, even just a little bit of wood to like, like smooth it out so that it looks like there's at least going to be start of a, of a, of a ramp to get on the bridge. Like, the bridge looks solid. The actual center part looks solid. It doesn't feel that hard to finish this bridge. I'm optimistic that this gets done in the next hundred years, like tops.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Colorado built a, built a wildlife bridge for a low cost of fifteen million dollars.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Oh, that's not bad.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, functionally, uh, something very, very similar. The, the interesting thing is apparently the bridge is, is, uh, in some part for cougars.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  And the wild thing is like, on one side of the bridge, you have a bunch of like residential homes.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  And on the other side, you have a bunch of cougars. And so-

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  They're now gonna, the cougars are gonna be able to go hang, basically hang-

• 43:43John Coogan?

  It's exciting.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  In all the backyards. So we'll see how this goes, but I'm excited for this to be finished up.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  It's been, as long as I have lived in Southern California, they've been working on this bridge and it's about time.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Well, former partner of TVPN, Fall, a generative AI model hosting service that you know and love, is in talks to raise 300 million to 350 million dollars at an eight billion dollar valuation. Annualized revenue has hit 400 million dollars, up from 200 million in October. That's the

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  No, they've executed incredibly well.

• 44:21Jordi Hays?

  Really, really, really

• 44:22John Coogan?

  We're good friends.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  So congratulations to them.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  Growth. And I look forward to having them on after they move past the advanced talks.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. What is Miles Brundage saying? He says, I'm a bit worried that Anthropic is an org-wide case of AI psychosis that makes them think Claude is good enough that they can ship random product features without breaking things, but they in fact do keep breaking things and they're not online enough to notice people complaining.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't, yeah, I don't know about the last part. They seem very online.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I don't know too much about the issues, but there is, like if they're truly competing in consumer, like there are like low hanging fruit, like text to speech on deep research reports is not a feature that exists yet. Feels very obvious, but it's so interesting being in this dynamic where, you know, you can ship things so fast and yet there's some obvious product improvements that are just sort of stuck in the queue because there's a lot to do and it's an exciting time. What else is Anthropic doing there? Hiring for a policy manager who will be in charge of chemical weapons and high-yield explosives. This reads like you're going to be building high-yield explosives, which

• 45:37John Coogan?

  sounds like an annual job posting, but it is in fact for a policy manager who will be hopefully stopping people from

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I think I I I read this as somebody whose job it is to decide how Claude is used to create chemical weapons and high yield explosives.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  I think it's, I don't know. I I think it's probably like this person decides like where's the edge. So if you if you're asking like, okay, I have a firework and I want to make sure it doesn't go off. Like, should I, you know, throw in the trash or put in the recycling or take it to a special place? Like Claude should answer that. But if you go to it and you ask it like, how do I build a C4 or something like that? Like, like, there's all these like policy edges where if you're talking about Counter-Strike and you say like, let's plant the bomb, it shouldn't flag that as, okay, you're actually trying to plant a bomb. It's like, you know, you're asking about a video game. We we know how to interpret that appropriately. Uh, but there needs to be like a human in the loop to decide like where that frontier

• 46:38John Coogan?

  is and where that particular trade off is. Anyway.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  Orf says, what terrifies me is if AI were to cure cancer and save 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash from hardworking scientists who wanted to cure cancer themselves.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  They will be involved for sure.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting that that was, that was like at least one person's response to the Australia dog story where they were like, yeah, this, we we've been able to do this for a while, but like, don't do this, which was, you know, an interesting response to somebody who, you know, went on a multi-year journey to try to save their dog, seemingly is having some good outcomes.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Very, very odd. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me also tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, PG says, anything made before 2028 is going to be valuable. And he's quoting an OpenAI employee who he says implicitly discloses their.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Timetable? Anything made before 2028 is going to be valuable. That is such a vague, uh, someone was hanging out with with Paul Graham and was like, let me vague post IRL.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  I require content.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  I require content.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  This, this is gonna be very valuable. I'm not, I wouldn't get this up.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  We are working on something that will be incredibly valuable. One, one of our team members had a major breakthrough, and it could be the blockbuster product of the year. I'm very excited for this.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  This actually, this, we were just messing around this morning with, with an existing product that we had.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Had a breakthrough.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  We had a major breakthrough.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  We, I had nothing to do with it.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  We, and when I say that, I mean Ben, had a breakthrough that I think will change one of America's pastimes forever.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Actually.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  It'll be like before and after.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually so confident in this, that I'm willing to vague post about it.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  We need to get him a patent, for sure.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Get this, get this young man a patent.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  I'm on a patent. I have a patent. It's great. Yeah, when you get a patent, you can also like frame it, get a little tombstone. It's very nice. Regardless of what happens with the business, it's like a good moment in your business career to like have a patent.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Do you have a tombstone for your patent?

• 48:55John Coogan?

  I don't. I need to order one. It has been issued, like my name's on it. I'm like the, you know, seventh name on the list or whatever, but I'm technically on it. Uh, and so I should, I should get my, you know, plaque or whatever. I'm sure you can just buy them. Um, there's probably something on there. Uh, what did PG give? He gave some more context. He said, this was after I mentioned the idea of buying rare old things as a hedge, since the one thing AI won't be able to do is go back in time, that we know of. I don't, I mean, that's a whole plot of Terminator.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Say you're not AGI.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  Just say you're not AGI filled, like just everyone's saying it's gonna be like Terminator, it's gonna be like Terminator. Well, what happens in Terminator? They invent time travel. And so you're gonna be able to go back. You're gonna be able to go back in time.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like after we get AGI and we can like build incredible things, like those will be really valuable too, right?

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. But, yes, I mean, he is correct. They're like, they're like, like, uh, you know, images in chat GPT and, and VO3 and mid journey, like, don't decrease the value of the Mona Lisa. Like, that's just like obvious, and everyone agrees on that. Uh, except you. You're like, I would actually like to go to the mid journey Louvre.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's why Banks, maybe Banksy sort of intentionally kind of, kind of revealed himself.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  I don't, I didn't follow that story. Like, how did that happen? Because I feel like most people would just be like, I don't.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Somebody just caught him with a, hopefully, uh, Scotto is watching and can fill in, but I think he, I think he was just kind of like caught in the act.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Really?

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, but maybe, maybe he's confident enough, hey. AGI is coming.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  AGI is here.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  My stuff's still gonna be worth a lot.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Even, I don't wanna be in the shadows anymore.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's very interesting. So, anyway, Paul Graham clearly does not believe in the Terminator thesis of the AI future where time travel is op, is, is, is possible. Imagine being in the Terminator future and creating the time machine and just being, okay, I'm gonna go back in time and, and, and paint new paintings that then I can acquire over time and have new Mona Lisa's. He's just, he's just like, no, we sent you back to save the human race. It's like, but I gotta hang out with Leonardo da Vinci. I gotta, I gotta build my art collection. He said, I don't put too much weight on the specific year, but the shape of the idea isn't, is interesting. And I agree, it is an interesting thing to, to noodle on.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Similarly, CrowdStrike, interesting idea. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer as well. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  Martin Shkreli.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  He was coming on Monday.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  For the great debate.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  The peptide debate says, good music is the last mile of AI. And Lil Wayne has some thoughts.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Should we listen to this?

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this clip.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Let's play this two-minute clip from Lil Wayne on a podcast. Let's see. Here we go. How you handle AI in this, in this business now?

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Challenge, the challenge.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Bro, this is wild.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  I love it. AI is a better thing. I love that AI is what it is.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Cause man, I love to be able to stand right next to whoever AI is, he, she, they, whatever, or whatever AI is, stand right next to it and I'm still better.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna keep telling you what you do again?

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  You're gonna, you're gonna ring your listener? I do this, I do that.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  I love it, I love the challenge of it. The first time I seen somebody was, my, my friends was a little worried, they was like, man, bro, they got this AI stuff where you can just ask it to do, give you a verse like Lil Wayne. And so I did it, I said. Let me have a verse like Lil and he gave me her best shot.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  And then on a couple of devices that you know, not only a phone, a computer, uh, even for a commercial. I was shooting for the Alexa thing. I want to hear and I have a thing called Proto at home. They got his own little robot thing. Asked her to give me one and they all, oh, you suck.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  So that's how I'm gonna be okay.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  I fuck with that. Yeah. Who was it? Beanie Siegel? I think he had to start using it because he like was losing his voice a little bit.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another rapper to mog.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Basically, that's his take. That's so funny.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Well, uh, how do you, how are designers feeling about AI these days? Samir says, bro, it's so over for designers. Google Stitch is insane. Uh, Google launched a new, uh, generative AI design tool where you can sketch something out on a piece of paper. Turns it right into an image. Uh, and there was a lot of back and forth over, um, you know, how, uh, how, how, how this debate is playing out between Google and Figma. Hadley Harris says 12 years later, the VC who passed on Figma's seed because Google could kill them is finally feeling seen. Uh, lots of amazing work done, of course, in the interim. Um, very, very silly.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Uh, will be interesting to see how Google pipes this into the other tools. I was on Google.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, apparently this is an, uh, engagement bait.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Other people are testing similar prompts and getting much, much, much worse results.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Um, I, I, I was on, uh, AI dot Google dot com or just AI dot Google. Not even AI dot Google dot com, looking at all the different Gemini features. And, uh, it feels like the next, the next challenge is, is just integrating all these different things. They have like so many great models, Nano Banana, VO three, Notebook LM, Gemini, Flow, uh, AI Mode. There's a, there's so many and actually, uh, piping of a workflow from one to another. Uh, is, is, is certainly going to be like the next, the next question. And does this all live in the Google search box? Is it in, uh, Google apps or something?

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Um, either way, they're, they're certainly investing in AI across the organization. And Ryan Peterson says whoever named Gemini at Google really named it. In the mythology, the immortal twin gives up his immortality to save the life of his mortal twin. It's just like Google giving up 100% of its free cash flow to make sure DeepMind survives. That is not actually the reason for the name Gemini, but do you know the name for why they picked Gemini?

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Because they had two internal teams that they brought together.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Together, yeah, the twins. It's a good name. And it's really, they were suffering from a bit of a naming crisis for a while with Bard and Palm, and they were definitely shipping a little bit of like, not necessarily shipping the org chart, but shipping some of the internal naming schemes that were like abbreviations.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Even like Nano Banana Pro, like the image models used to just be like Gemini 3.1 image.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Whatever. They didn't get 3.1, but.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  There we go. There we go.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Like Nano Banana was famously just like the internal name.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Name.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Used, right?

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and sometimes these internal names can really fly in consumer contexts. Mostly, I don't know what it is, but something about like Nano Banana like really sticks out. It's so funny. It doesn't sound like an AI product. Like when you have Siri and Alexa, and then you have Rufus and Argus or Sparky from Walmart, like doing another human name can actually be a disadvantage because you just get lost in the clutter. But if no one's really using the Nano Banana name, I know Strawberry was used by OpenAI before, but no one had really like used that as a public name. It certainly like helped them break out. But Gemini has been an interesting name. It's good. It balances both, it sounds like a product, but it sounds, but it's just one word.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  It sounds like a, it doesn't anthropomorphize too much, but a little bit. It is reference. There's a lot of deep knowledge there. Quickly, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology with 11 Labs. And let me also tell you about vibe.co. We're D2C startups.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  For DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. So without further ado, we have our first guests of the show. Pat Grady and Carl Eschenbach from Sequoia Capital. What's going on guys? Carl, Pat, how are you guys doing?

• 57:18Speaker 04

  We're doing great, man. We're doing great. It's great to be with you guys.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you so much for hopping on the show on this day. Walk us through the decision. How long have you guys been talking about potentially reunifying? What's the thinking? What's the role? Sort of break it all down for us.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  From the moment Carl left Sequoia.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Come on back, come on back.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, well, maybe I'll just start and then my partner, Pat, here can jump in. And I say my partner because I've been his partner for 10 years. Like I joined almost 10 years ago, you know, at Sequoia, which was an incredible journey at that time to join. And then I decided to step away back into an operating role. You know, after an eight-year total journey at Workday, five years on the board and then back into the operating role. And I remember, quite honestly, when I left Sequoia, three years, three months ago, I said to Pat and the team, you know, I'll be back.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  I'll be back.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  If you'll have me back, because I always had wished, I dreamed and envisioned of coming back here. And I thought it would be a great place to end my career and provide the impact to the partnership, my partners and companies that we work with. And, you know, when I stepped down at Workday now two months ago, we started talking without exaggeration that day.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Typical Pat fashion, the news was out and it was within, no exaggeration, five minutes, I started getting texts from Pat Grady, every single partner at Sequoia. Not only did I get them. But my wife started to get it. And they were like, when is Carl coming back? We want you back. And I will tell you, it's a blessing to be back. And here we are today.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Okay, walk me through the bull case for becoming or, you know, going back into venture capital in 2026 there. You know, it's maybe a little bit crazy narrative, but there's a narrative around like AI is eating everything. AGI is here. The big labs are dominating. They're going to eat everything. You know, Google is going to beat every company now. OpenAI is going to beat every company. Sequoia has investments in the labs. What's the opportunity that you see for new startup formation, new growth rounds? Where do you want to see opportunity? Either in AI or in software or outside of AI? Like, what is your thesis for why it's going to be a rewarding experience to be a venture capitalist now?

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it's a great question, but let me step back and go back two months ago first.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  When I sat down at Workday, I did open the aperture up and look at everything. I looked at everything from going back into an operational role at very large companies, big public companies. I looked at operational roles in private companies. And some of those private companies are the AI companies that our friend Terry Sequoia at the time had invested in and being part of it. And then I also started to think about, well, what would it be like to go back into venture, go back to Sequoia? At a time of what I would describe as the most massive technology disruption we've ever seen in the history of mankind.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  And to be part of it across many companies as opposed to a company is something that really excited me. Joining someplace like Sequoia, and I'm biased when I say this, guys. The greatest venture capital firm on planet Earth ever. Mission living, the greatest partners in the world. People that are smart as hell, that even I at this age get to learn from every day. And to be part of something so iconic in the midst of this massive tectonic shift and get to explore across so many different companies as opposed to a company is something that really excited me.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Just in my first two weeks while I haven't been fully, you know, on board yet until today, I've met with so many companies for Sequoia, right? And got to experience the vibrancy of what's happening in the AI world. And I just felt like Sequoia is a place that gives me the opportunity to stay engaged, partner with incredible people like my young man here next to me, Pat Krake and his team. And just be part of a generational shift, both as Sequoia inside the building and outside the building when it comes to building tectonic technology companies that will stand the test of time.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  And I get to be part of that across all different dimensions of this crazy environment we're living in.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  I love it. It's amazing. So you talk about this massive technology shift, which, you know, we can all agree on, is part of your thesis of coming back and judging from the letter that you sent to the team. It felt like to me, like some element of your approach is like, hey, a lot of stuff is changing in terms of technology and markets, but a lot of what you're trying to bring is kind of wisdom around maybe what isn't changing, which is human nature and leadership and how to work with people and how to get the most out of your teammates. Is that like part of your mindset at all in just coming in and helping both portfolio companies and the, you know, the entire team at Sequoia just level up?

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, clearly, I think that's a big part of my personal mission going forward. If you read the letter that I sat down and wrote one evening to Pat and Alfred in the partnership. And by the way, I wrote that letter after looking at a lot of operating roles and talking to a lot of other venture capitalists and firms, and I kept coming back to myself and saying, why not Sequoia? Why not Sequoia? That was always my grounding point when I was thinking about what to do next. Fast forward, I wrote that letter because I have a mission in life, a mission in life to give more than I get,

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  a mission in life to not focus on success, but focus on significance and impact to others, including my partners, the partnership and founders. And now being in the industry for 38 years and having been here for six and spent 32 years in operating roles, I felt like I was uniquely positioned to bring wisdom, to bring advice, to bring coaching, to bring mentorship to younger founders, right, to help them achieve their personal professional goals. And the Sequoia platform and my incredible partners like Pat and Alfred and Andrew and the rest of the team here, give me that opportunity to bring what I'm most interested in,

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  and that is serving others, to the table at a time that while, yes, technology is moving at a pace and rate that we've never experienced, there's also a need to help people understand how to build, scale, grow, lead, inspire, motivate others. And that's something I'm super passionate about. And my incredible partners here at Sequoia said, hey, this is a place for you to do all of that, both inside and outside the building. And that's why I'm here, and I couldn't be more excited about it, guys.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Nowadays, it feels like, and also in the data, companies are growing faster than ever. And you've got what would have been maybe 10 years ago, like five years of company building compressed down into two years. When you're kind of mentoring CEOs or leadership teams in the portfolio, like what advice are you giving them around that new dynamic, which is that, hey, you might raise three rounds in a year, you might be adding headcount at a much higher rate than you had to. And meanwhile, like, again, the technology is shifting at this insane exponential rate as well.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's a great question, and I'd have Pat chime in because they're seeing this, you know, obviously, every single day, companies are raising a round, and one, two, three weeks later, they're raising another round, and then they're trying to figure out what the hell to do with that capital. But let me go back and just share with you one of the principles that I've always focused on when it comes to business strategies. And I always have talked about speed as being one of the best business strategies ever. This is long before the current environment we're in. And I say that because I use, if you will, a sports analogy. If Pat is faster than me, is operating or executing faster than me, or running plays faster than me, it's hard to defend.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Speed is a business strategy. And right now, we're in the midst of everything happening very, very quickly, so speed becomes more important. But you can't be sloppy. You can't do things in a wasteful way. You can't just spend unlimited capital because at some point, that capital will have to be replenished and now have to come to people like us and others. So I think there's a dimension of how to leverage speed as a winning business strategy, but also be smart about how to do it and where you're spending those dollars. And I'll let Pat chime in and what they're seeing. I saw it today on some of the calls that Pat was leading across the partnership.

• 1:06:58Pat Grady?

  Yeah, I think that's well put. Speed is, you know, one dimension of a vector. The other is direction. I think the other thing that's interesting right now, it's not just how quickly things are happening, it's how dynamic the entire market is. You know, our partner Konstantin has this framework that there are some revolutions in computation and some revolutions in communication. A revolution in computation is about the way information is processed. A revolution in computation is about the way information is distributed. Cloud, mobile, internet, all of those are revolutions in communication. It's about the distribution of technology or of information. This is a revolution in computation. It's about the processing of information. The result of that is that the raw ingredients that you have available to build your product

• 1:07:42Pat Grady?

  change every day, or at least every week, possibly every month, but they're changing fast, right? And so you can be running like heck in a particular direction. If it turns out that that technology floor shifts underfoot, all of a sudden you're going to change direction. And so I think one of the big sort of things we have learned from the founders who are doing it best, the Daniel Nadlers and Winston Weinbergs of the world, is that talent density matters so, so, so much. If you, it's not about being bigger, it's about being better. It's about having the densest possible talent pool so that when the world shifts, you're not caught flat-footed, you go in the right direction.

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  Makes sense. It feels like an amazing time to join Sequoia. The technology industry is bigger than ever. Venture capital is bigger than ever. We're in an AI boom. But I'm wondering if you could turn back the clock for me and tell me what the vibe was like when you joined VMware? Because it feels like a very different time. And, and what was that like, you know?

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  2002, right?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, wow, you're taking me way back. Yeah, I joined VMware in 2002.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  And when I joined, I think there was a couple hundred people with probably ninety-five percent of them being engineers. I think it was a deeply technical company by great, great founders out of Stanford and Diane, you know, the founding CEO, great people. And I remember joining, you know, this young little company, basically no revenue, and saying, hey, we're gonna go change the world, like every startup says, we're gonna change the world. And I remember Diane Green saying to me, we're gonna virtualize these little x86 computers and the entire world's gonna run on top of them. And I remember talking to Diane at the time and said, Diane, you mean like mainframe partitioning, L-parts? That's where we do. And then she said, no, we're gonna do it on these little boxes.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  And I'm like, who's gonna, who the hell's gonna do that, right? And then I went home and I thought about it. And then I had to go quite honestly to my wife and say, all right, I just left working for a Bay Area company, living in Pennsylvania, computing. I committed I wouldn't do that again. And I thought about this more and I said to myself, wow, if Diane and this incredible technical team can do what they say they're gonna do and turn that slide where into software that virtualizes these servers and allows you to run multiple applications, operating systems simultaneously. So I said to myself, if they can do that, the next thing I said is, I can figure out a distribution strategy and I can sell that shit, silly. Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  And the journey began there. First year or two, no one was buying it. It's like all startups go through that phase, like, wow, you want me to take all of these ten, twenty servers, physical servers, separated by physical computers and put them on one? And if that server goes down, then everything goes down. And I'm like, yeah, that's what you should do. Yeah. It should go real well at the beginning. But then we hit an inflection. And then, once we hit an inflection with this technology at the time that they brought to market, it was called V-Motion, which would actually allow you to take a live-running virtual machine and move it across physical servers without the application ever going

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  down. So now you had some redundancy and backup. And when we started to show people that, first they're like, wait, this isn't really working. So we had to unplug cables to show things were actually working. And then it inflected and, quite frankly, one of the greatest, you know, professional journeys of my life, being there 14 years, a couple hundred people to 20,000. Yeah. And I was so blessed to be there because I got to do so many different roles in the company. I was never CEO. I was always, I guess, number two guy at the time across three great CEOs, between Diane, Paul Rich, and Pat Gelsinger. And got to be a CFO for a while of a public company, got to help run product when our CTOs left.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  It was just an incredible journey. It gave me a view into a startup and it gave me a view of how to scale companies. And it really helped me get a deep understanding of how to build global operations and build a mass scale at the enterprise level. Yeah. And...

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Why did you, what made you push through that one to two years where you felt kind of silly even selling the product? Just given that, that there wasn't, it didn't feel like you weren't feeling that pull from the market. Eventually, you got the breakthrough with V-Motion, but what was the signal that made you keep just running down opportunities?

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  Great question. Very simply, the engineering talent at the time, if you look at now, the industry is proliferated with incredible talent from VMware. It's everywhere, from CEOs to head of sales to head of engineering, it's everywhere. What gave me the conviction and belief to keep pushing through is whatever that engineering team said the product would do, it would do.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  And I kept saying, I remember at the time telling people, right? We moved from forecasting numbers or revenue or bookings to forecasting, literally our forecast calls was, how many proof of concepts have we started? Because if someone tested it, it worked. It literally worked and we were having.

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  So the market was like, we don't believe you. And you just had to, you just had to actually convince them to let you show them.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, well said. I had passion, I believed, I had conviction and I witnessed the technology working as advertised. A lot of times it doesn't in startups and it takes a while to get there. And I knew it was not if, I knew it was when the market would tip and come our way. And then when it tipped and inflected, it, it took off very quickly. And then we started to see all this competitive pressure come in with open source technologies like KVM, uh, you know, OpenStack, um, HyperB by Microsoft. But we just stayed focused, we stayed convicted about the technology and, uh, and we proved it time and time again to anyone who tested. It was an incredible journey and I'm so grateful for that 14, 15 years.

• 1:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Yes, it's such a, such a wild ride. I mean, you've at various points been working at organizations with a hundred people up to 20,000. Do you feel like you have a good calibration on when you're talking to a founder or an executive, just asking yourself the question, can you see this person thriving in an organization that's three orders of magnitude bigger? I don't even know if that's a relevant question anymore for a venture capitalist to be asking, but I'm, I'm curious if you feel like there is a set of patterns that you've discovered or a set of skills that are on display from younger, more up and coming executives and founders that sets them up for success at massive scale.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I can identify patterns and I have enough experience for the six years that I was here with Pat and the team, learning from them about what to look for in a founder and whether or not they can scale. One of the things I absolutely look for is self-awareness in founders. And are they honest about what they're good at? Because a lot of these founders, quite frankly, are just incredibly intelligent human beings. And sometimes they think they can do everything, when in fact, they can do everything, but not great. And they have something they're really good at. And do they have self-awareness to say, but I need to go get the other people as part of the company to help me scale, so I can focus on what I'm really good at?

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  Do they have the ability to know when to turn things over to others? It's critically important, and I've seen that happen time and time again. And then the other things, quite frankly, that I personally look for, I'm sure Pat, I heard Pat talk about this this morning. There are attributes and characteristics of people that I look for that are way beyond the intelligence side of the equation. You can't teach grit, you can't teach drive, you can't teach a great attitude, you can't teach determination, right? All of those are things that are innate and part of people, and you want to see that in these founders. And when you find someone who has that passion, drive, desire, relentless ability to fight

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  through challenges, issues, and opportunities, and then they have the intellectual horsepower on the other side, when that comes together, that's a beautiful thing.

• 1:16:36Pat Grady?

  That actually reminded me, the first time I, I don't know if Carl remembers this, the first time I met Carl was 2010. And it was Doug Leone, Fred Luddy, who's the founder of ServiceNow, and I went to visit Carl to get some advice on scaling ServiceNow. And I was probably in my, I was in my late twenties, Carl was in his early forties.

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  Still in his late twenties. Look how young this guy is. That bothers the hell out of me, guys, how young, how smart, helping run one of the most iconic partnerships in the world, and here I sit, turning 60 this year. He pisses me off every time.

• 1:17:10Pat Grady?

  But so I have like pages of copyist handwritten notes from this meeting, which I'm sure exists somewhere around here. But the the one liner that's stuck in my brain, which is very consistent with what Carl was just saying, was attitude determines altitude and will determines skill. And I always think about that and we kind of morphed that into the expression, attitude is the ultimate input. And I think when you see these founders, I'd also kind of use the Ray Dalio line, you know, pain plus reflection equals progress. When you see these founders who are willing to take a risk and experience the associated pain, and then reflect very honestly on what happened and what they can do better next time, progress is inevitable. And so I'd almost say there's this,

• 1:17:54Pat Grady?

  and like you have to have the right attitude to put yourself in that position. But if you're willing to take risk and experience a little bit of pain, and then if you're willing to be intellectually honest with yourself and self-aware and sort of clinically diagnose what you can do better next time, like those founders are just going to keep franking.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, really well said.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Taking introspection.

• 1:18:12Pat Grady?

  Yeah, taking a side, taking a side on the introspection gate.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  I was gonna try and tease something up, but you really delivered. Talk to, talk to us about both of your agreements or disagreements, maybe. I'm sure you've been debating the future of enterprise software, the future of what's going on, the SaaS apocalypse, public companies, like just the nature of business changing. What is, what remains true now that hasn't changed and won't change for decades versus what maybe has changed in the last few years and needs an update in terms of how people think about how businesses grow, how businesses flourish in, when they're working in the technology industry?

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll let Pat start and then I'll, I'll give you my perspective because I've answered this question about 17 million times in the last three and a half years. And I have a different perspective than probably most.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:11Pat Grady?

  So, you know, it's funny, the first thing that comes to mind is a line that I learned from a man named Carl Eschenbach, who was a partner at Sequoia from 2016 to 2022. And the line is, people do business with people. And I think there's a, there's a, there's a foundation model maximalist point of view that the labs themselves are going to do every, everything and every nook and cranny of the economy. And I just have a hard time imagining that version of the future coming to fruition because people do business with people. And I think that between a job to be done and the raw capabilities of a model, there's a lot that needs to happen.

• 1:19:51Pat Grady?

  But like, shape it into the path of least resistance for you to travel down as a user to get to the right answer with the least amount of pain. And there's probably a person in between who's going to do that work. And as a customer, you want to do business with that person. And so I, I think people do business with people is going to remain true. The shape that that takes in terms of what the businesses are is probably going to change. I think in the world of software, you know, the first wave of the on-prem to cloud transition was this transitioning of systems of record, you know, the workdays and sales forces and service nows of the world. The second layer on top of that was the systems of engagement. You know, those systems of record might own the core database, but then there are a bunch of different workflow applications that reside on top.

• 1:20:35Pat Grady?

  I think what we're going to see with this, the wave of AI software, is this third layer on top of those, which some people call system of intelligence, I don't want to call it that. It's the layer that does the work, you know? It's the, it's the agents getting deployed that may or may not need those workflows beneath them, but certainly need access to everything that's sitting in that system of record. I think that's what we're going to see. And as a result, I think those system of record companies are relatively safe. They may not catch a lot of net new workloads because a lot of the net new workloads might go to the AI native companies, but I think they're overall pretty safe. I think some of those workflow based companies in the middle are in trouble because they're neither the system of record nor the agentic capability that's getting deployed.

• 1:21:17Pat Grady?

  And so they'll have to figure out how to become like that agent harness, so to speak, for whatever job needs to be done. And then I think those AI native companies on top, the, the basic thing they need to achieve is figure out the context of this organization, figure out the guardrails, come up with some sort of an eval framework, some, come up with some sort of a value function, basically wrap all the context around the capabilities of the, of the foundation model. To achieve the outcome that the business person wants. And so I think there's a very important job to be done for those, that new layer of companies. And, um, and again, people want to do business with people. Like, there's a lot of value in, you know, having somebody you trust. Take your hand and meet you into the AI future.

• 1:21:56Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So first of all, it's the first time I heard someone else ask this question to someone else other than me and.

• 1:22:04Pat Grady?

  And then use you for the answer.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  Actually, it's so funny. I was sitting here thinking, I am going to respond, but you're going to hear something very similar from me.

• 1:22:14Pat Grady?

  Sure.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  I'll start in kind of reverse order. I do think there is power to use Pat's exact analogy of a system of record. A system of action, a system of engagement, and I will use system of intelligence. Because I think if you have the bottom three and you can layer on an agentic or agent strategy. And you back that up with the data, the context of the data, and you own the business process workflow, you're in a unique. Unique position to have a great enterprise AI software company that stands the test of time. I don't think we're in a world where does AI win?

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  Or do the incumbent SaaS companies win? I think we're in a world of and. And I think some people are the beneficiaries of AI, like a Workday, like a Salesforce. And then others maybe have more headwind because they can be disintermediated because there's AI and you don't need access to all that data. I personally believe all of the challenges with software companies at scale and what's happening in the stock market are completely overblown. I've been saying that repeatedly. They're not going anywhere. Incumbency is incredibly powerful in the enterprise. Incumbency is even more powerful when a company like Workday, who I was blessed to be there for over three years.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

  Has a 98% gross retention rate of 11,000 customers, 65% of them being Fortune 500 companies.

• 1:23:52Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Not going anywhere. And the other thing we can't forget is why I say and. Is because what matters in the enterprise is scale, security and compliance. And some of these big SaaS companies have that. That all being said, the pace and rate of change that can happen outside of the big incumbent and big SaaS companies who are innovating like crazy, we're innovating at Workday like I've never seen, have an opportunity to start completely fresh and start from scratch, get to leverage all the technologies and all the models that are out there and build agents and agentic solutions faster than anyone else.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  And they're going to be able to go in the enterprise and provide value day one, either on their own or on top of and through some of these SaaS companies. So I think it's an and opportunity that's going to happen in the enterprise, in the market as a whole. There's going to be some winners, there's going to be some losers, but I think the current narrative out there of these SaaS companies being overblown or being in trouble is completely overblown. And obviously I'm biased, I think Workday stands in a very unique position to completely, you know, continue to crush the ERP market, both on the HR and finance side. And I couldn't be more bullish on the opportunity ahead. But at the same time, I'm super excited watching these young, talented people now that we

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  get to invest in and how quick they can iterate, leveraging AI and just completely disrupt markets, legacy markets that don't have all of the data, don't have the context and don't have the workflows.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  What advice would you give to a Fortune 500 CEO that maybe is an incumbent that's thinking about buying versus building these agentic products?

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  I tell them to do both. I think if you have all the data and you have the context of the data and you can build a great engineering team, right, that comes with an AI background, build as much of it you can. At the same time, go do acqui hires, go buy technology companies that are completely AI native from the beginning and bring them into your organization. I wouldn't say do one or the other, it's both. You know, at at work day, in the last six months I was there, we fought for AI companies and they've become part of the core fabric of the company that a Neil and Garrett and a leadership team there get to take advantage of. At the same time, they bring in their talent on their own as they build out their organization.

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  So I don't think you say it's it's one or the other, you have to do both.

• 1:26:32Pat Grady?

  I think it's also one of the classic questions of what do you want your best people focused on? You know, do you want your best people building the same sort of stuff you can get out of the box from somebody else who spends all day long thinking about that thing? Or do you want your best people creating competitive advantage for your company? Like, I think if you're a Fortune 500 company right now, kind of a no brainer to go with Harvey for everything related to legal, kind of a no brainer to go Sierra for everything related to customer support. You know, you should probably try something like Expo to work on pen testing. Like, these are excellent companies with excellent people who spend all day obsessing over a particular problem. Why take your best engineers and ask them to go do that? Go do something that's going to be unique to you.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Okay, last question.

• 1:27:13Speaker 04

  By the way, Pat makes a great point, having spent a lot of time with CEOs of Fortune 500s around the world. There's this whole narrative, we're going to do it ourself, we're going to build our own agents. And they will do some of that, but why, if you can go to a Harvey, right? Get what they've already built and leverage it and very quickly get a return on that investment. So there's a time cost to value equation here for the enterprise. Go with that solution and let them go focus on financials or insurance or retail or whatever CPG. You know, let them focus on what their core business is. Why build that technology if someone could do it much faster outside the company?

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  Last question for Carl. A few years ago, you were spotted at the Allen and Company Conference, sporting two coffee cups. You have an incredible amount of energy. Are you a two coffee in the morning guy? Or were you bringing an extra coffee for a friend?

• 1:28:07Speaker 04

  Well, the answer, I hate to use this term again, but both.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  I was bringing a coffee, I was bringing a coffee back to the room for my amazing life of thirty-five years, Anna. Uh, and, and, and, yeah, and, and, and I used to drink probably eight to ten to twelve cups of coffee a day.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:28:28Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  That's all I have all day.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  And that's all I have all day until I get to dinner, when I eat dinner, it's my one meal a day.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Wow, incredible amount of energy. Well, it's clearly working. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  It's so good to see you guys both back together.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  No, thank you. And I, I just want to say, listen, I, I just want to thank Pat.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Speaker 04

  I want to thank Alfred. I want to thank the entire partnership here at Sequoia for allowing me to join them and serve alongside them. Our, our, our partners, our customers.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  Uh, our companies we're investing in, our founders. It's a true honor to be back. I'm super excited about the journey ahead. And, uh, I think, you know, Sequoia is uniquely positioned to continue to be one of the most iconic, uh, mission-oriented venture firms of all time, and I'm proud to be back part of it.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're, we're excited for you. Thank you so much.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Incredible stuff.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Ten to twelve coffees a day.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  That's incredible. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me also tell you about Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Uh, and without further ado, we've been running long, but we will bring in Jim Cantrell from the Phantom Space Corporation. Sorry to keep you waiting, Jim. Thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing? Uh, please, uh, you have a fascinating background. Give us a little bit of your background leading up to this company, and then I want to talk about how you're thinking about the business and also just the orbital economy more broadly.

• 1:30:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I've been in the automotive and aerospace industries for north of thirty-five years and had positions everywhere from the front space agency to early at SpaceX. I was the guy that took Elon to Russia to buy Russian missiles and when that didn't work, we started SpaceX and after that, I am on my twelfth space or automotive startup and Phantom Space is the last one of them, but several of them have gone public since then and you know, Phantom Space was sort of the ultimate of all the startups that looking to solve the problem that really needs to be done.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that that story of going to Russia to try and buy the ICBM has been has been told and written about in books, but what what does the current narrative get wrong? What's your side of the story? What were expectations like going into that meeting? Did you was it seen as a long shot at the time or did you think that it was likely to work?

• 1:31:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, it was a complete long shot. You know, when he when Elon called me, he had just left PayPal and had this idea of, you know, trying to inspire humanity to become multi-planetary, he still talks about. And he wanted to do what amounted to a stunt to, you know, show that we could send creatures to Mars. That turned into something that we put together, which was a growth chamber to land on Mars on a lander. And we needed Russian rockets to buy it. So by the time we got done dealing with the Russians, they didn't want to sell to us. They were just being Russians. And Elon announced to all of us in a sort of shocked way, we we heard that he wanted to start the company SpaceX and build the rocket ourselves. So I will tell you that very few people gave us a snowball's chance

• 1:31:53Speaker 08

  in hell to make that happen. Now we can see twenty-five years later where that ended up. But, you know, everybody betted against Elon and the rest of us and You know, what the story's gotten wrong and what it gets right, what it gets right was, you know, this determination of this guy who knew nothing about rockets, who decided to learn everything he could. And he got a bunch of space cowboys around him. And most of us were sort of revolutionaries in thought at least, and wanted to stick it to the system and do something that everybody said we couldn't do. What the story got wrong, sometimes people write and say, I was never part of it. I don't know why that got written in, but I was definitely employee and had founder stock and whole nine yards. So here I am.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  There you go. What's the modern version of the long shot in space? We've heard about colonies on the moon, colonies on Mars, space data centers. What do you think is the most practical problem right now in space that people are maybe undercounting?

• 1:32:51Speaker 08

  So I think there's three tracks that it's going down. One is, is, you know, military use of space, which we see ongoing today, right? Wake up and read the news every morning. The second one is planetary settlement, which is what SpaceX is trying to accomplish. And everything that Elon does, I believe, is aimed at that planetary settlement goal. And then the third is kind of more recent, even though I've been thinking about it for almost a decade, is putting compute in space. And now AI is the killer app that enables this, much like the internet came along as a killer app that enabled Starlink. So I think what we'll see is the next generation of AI in space, these so-called space data centers, but not in the way that the the common narrative is going to portray it.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Okay. How will it be different? I mean, Jensen Huang at GTC earlier this week was standing on stage saying that, you know, he will be providing chips. Elon has given some, some outlines around what that might look like. We've talked to Star Cloud, a startup that's planning to put data centers in space. There's a whole bunch of other people that are approaching this problem. But how do you think people are getting it wrong? And how do you think you fit in?

• 1:33:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, you know, Nvidia, to just address that, is nailed the silicon, right? So, there are going to be the winners on that, I believe.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:34:08Speaker 08

  Among others, right? But they're going to be one of the primary winners and thank you for doing that, Nvidia. Number two is, there's going to be a camp that I think is mostly hype that says, we're going to put, you know, these large language model hyperscalers into orbit. If I'm generous, that's maybe 20 years out, right? And it's like flying a big factory on a huge rocket that doesn't exist there. So, everything that's going to happen in the future is going to be distributed data centers on a much smaller scale. Everything's more expensive, right? So, we're at least 10 times, maybe 100 times more expensive to do something in space today. So, the really killer app I see is to put AI inference in orbit, close to where the data tsunami is being generated.

• 1:34:53Speaker 08

  And today is a tsunami and tomorrow it's going to be a mega tsunami. And what the problem is, is being able to get that data back. So, there's this funnel that restricts how much of that can get back. So, AI is a natural way to reduce that data load and get it back to the Earth. Maybe later we'll solve the issues with, you know, with the Earth power and heating. But, you know, Phantom, you know, we've been at it for 10 years, one form or another, writing patents, writing about it, speaking about it. It's nothing new for us. And we're putting together micro data centers to address exactly this, along with data backhaul from the satellites to really exploit what we think is the next killer app there

• 1:35:37Speaker 08

  and create a space app store environment and an ecosystem for others to implement their creativity on.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  So, where do you think in the supply chain or the rest of the orbital economy, there is enough maturity that you will never really need to build? I imagine you're not going to build a new rocket, but are you planning to do connectivity through Starlink? Like, where will the partnerships happen? And then where will your, you know, your core value prop live within the supply chain?

• 1:36:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question because this is exactly where I think all the differences between the approaches become evident. So it's my belief that in order to be successful in this, you really have to vertically integrate, much the way we did in the early days of SpaceX. We saw that building the rocket and building your satellites and then implementing, in their case, Starlink and now, you know, their version of XAI in orbit, you really have to have that. And, you know, SpaceX is going to dominate a lot in that Phantom space. We have exactly the same playbook. So those who don't have that vertical integration are always going to be at the risk of what amounts to a very scarce launch supply, even today. You know,

• 1:36:49Speaker 08

  there is a perception that there's more launch than we need, and it's not true at all. It's very scarce. You know, Phantom, we're building something we call the Daytona, which is quite a bit smaller than anything SpaceX builds. So we're more the taxi, they're more the, you know, the freightliner. And so, you know, we find a real market for that. People are buying our things, and there aren't that many people that can actually build launch vehicles at work. It's a really tough business, and it takes five to 10 years. So that's going to always be scarce. The rest of it is really a matter of supply chain control. So the, you know, the silicon, Nvidia, you know, all the rest of the satellite parts, suppliers, but, you know, you have to have somebody to put it all together, operate it, and manage it. So we think of ourselves as building the railroad to space, and then

• 1:37:34Speaker 08

  ultimately in the space app store on top of it so that so the people can build their own code.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about some of the trade-offs of the launch vehicle decisions. Are you thinking about reusability? Is that less of a factor at this scale? How frequently do you want to be launching? Like, I imagine taxis, they go everywhere, they launch from everywhere. Like, how else? Play out the taxi analogy for me a little bit more.

• 1:37:59Speaker 08

  Well, so, so launch is like the critical cost of getting any data system into orbit, period. And so, you know, it's incumbent on companies to control that cost. And if you can build it internally, if you can gather the capital and the talent to do it, you're in better shape. So there's, there's a trade on getting that cost down between building a super large, like Starship. And reusability and then mass production. So mass production like the car you drive probably cost a hundred million dollars and you maybe paid a hundred thousand dollars for it. And there's a huge cost reduction through this here number. So at Phantom, we're going to apply both reusability and the mass manufacturing because we're smaller, we can do that.

• 1:38:43Speaker 08

  Whereas Starship is an example, uh, won't necessarily be mass manufactured, but probably mass used. So reusability is a core thing more for the logistics of these things. And then the other side of it, here's the other choke point in the business is launch sites. We are really out of range capacity, launch range capacity in the United States. And we will be, I think, at that limit within five years. And so companies that control that range capacity are going to be in a position to control, you know, the railroads or the shipping lanes, as it were.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Interesting. So are you looking at land?

• 1:39:17Speaker 08

  Yeah. What's the process to create more capacity? So, uh, it's very complicated. It's very bureaucratic and it's very political. So we have, uh, five different launch ranges in the United States. Yeah, exactly. Music to my ears.

• 1:39:35Speaker 08

  So the, most of them are all federal ranges that, that we built during the Cold War. And there's one in California, one in Florida. We, we know at least about the one in Florida, very, very nicely canaveral. And so there are so many pads you can put on there. Most of what we're using today is legacy from what, what was built in the Cold War. We're, we're grandfathered into the, you know, the, the, the bureaucratic process that approved those pads. So any new ranges, you're going to run into huge opposition. There've been people who tried to build new ranges on the coasts of, of this country. And everybody not in my backyard comes out of their home to, to oppose it, right? And even in California, Vandenberg, uh, you know, SpaceX recently got into lawsuit.

• 1:40:16Speaker 08

  We had about half their capacity, which was governed ultimately by the coastal commission in California. And, uh, you know, SpaceX had to sue and they got a little bit more capacity, but that, that's what we're heading into. So that's why you see these launch ranges around the world coming into play. And the, the problem for US companies is we're restricted from taking our launch vehicles to these foreign countries without government approval.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's so tricky because I, I can imagine living next to, uh, you know, a, a launch pad. And, and the first time the rocket goes up, you're like, wow, that was amazing. And then if it's like, we're going to be launching those every 20 minutes. Uh, my windows are shaking a lot. I actually would like.

• 1:40:55Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  The, the novelty wears off pretty quickly, so.

• 1:40:59Speaker 08

  Cool, it's not, yeah.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so, and so, yes, well, obviously, as a country, we need to figure out where these go that are not disruptive and are scalable and are tied to the supply chain, maybe actually near a railroad, who knows, a physical railroad.

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Give us, uh, give us any predictions around, uh, the moon economy.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  I was gonna say moon.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Over the next.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Decade.

• 1:41:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised by the, by the SpaceX pivot to the moon.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:24Speaker 08

  Um, it's been something, you know, since I was first in this business that a lot of us saw as a logical pivot. And, uh, there was, it was almost like a religion between, do we go to the moon first or we go to Mars?

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  So you thought it was logical, like, twenty years ago.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  To do moon first, right?

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  And so you're surprised, you're surprised at how late the pivots happened?

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Speaker 08

  Uh, it, it doesn't really matter, honestly, in terms of their technical capability.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:48Speaker 08

  It's, it's, it's more incremental in terms of the development of the technology, which is probably why they did it. I really don't know why they did it.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 08

  It could be a business decision. There's certainly, I think, a more near-term economy there. I think of Mars, you know, as, as being so far away, eventually that economy will have to form on its own, kind of like this new world where we all sit, formed as an independent economy from Europe, five hundred years ago began forming. And Mars someday will have its own manufacturing bases and, you know, you might have products labeled made on Mars, right? But that's a longer-term thing. And, uh, that's really where Elon's mind always was, you know, from the early days that I was with him, that it was all about Mars. And to me, the moon is just a stepping stone on, on that way. And I think there's a lot of people who see that as a, you know, sort of an effectively a theological choice.

• 1:42:38Speaker 08

  Uh, where it's really not. It's, it's just a technical issue.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Economic opportunities on the moon.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  That you think are. Interesting.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  We've heard about Regulith and maybe like a mass driver, but there's so many opportunities, uh, obviously besides tourism.

• 1:42:54Speaker 08

  The most obvious one is helium three. So this is pushed out by the sun. There's something like 18 kilograms of it in the United States and it's a strategic resource. It's a byproduct in nuclear weapons manufacturing. Now, what are you going to use it for? Well, you can use it for a couple of things. Clean fusion energy is one of the few fuels that doesn't create radioactivity as a byproduct. So that's obviously desirable, right? The second part is for quantum computing, which a lot of these have to be near zero. So this is one of the few substances that you can cool to near zero temperature. And the other is an absolute zero in temperature. So there, there's a huge demand on that. Now, once you start mining it, does that, you know, that price collapse? Probably to some degree. The second one that

• 1:43:39Speaker 08

  I see is this, this mineral, this rare earth mineral kinds of deposits. And we honestly don't know enough about what's up there. We have a pretty good idea from the Apollo missions, but there's probably a lot of rare earth deposits, my guess. Um, and I don't know geologists, but I would guess there's probably some rare earth minerals that, you know, mining from the moon, which would be more palatable than tearing up our beautiful earth, uh, would be as long as we can solve the transportation problem. And all comes back to the rocket, by the way.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 1:44:10Speaker 08

  My pleasure.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Congratulations and, uh, well, we'd love to talk to you soon.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back soon.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day, Jim. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, let's bring in Tom Hulme from GV. Tom, how are you doing?

• 1:44:40Pat Grady?

  What's going on?

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  We could hear you for a second. Can you hear us?

• 1:44:44Pat Grady?

  You're back.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  You're back. Where are you calling in from? Can you hear us? No? Yes? No?

• 1:44:51Jordi Hays?

  Check.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Check.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Can you hear this? I'm going to tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and it helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Could you hear that? Because I could also, I can also potentially tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Because if you want to raise the, if you want to raise capital, Tom, you got to do it at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm sure a lot of your companies are aiming for IPO. Let's get them live on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  We'll get Tom back.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  We will, we will have a team trouble.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  There is some breaking news that we do got to talk about, which is that Jeff Bezos.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Nothing gets me more fired up than a personalized ad. Okay, breaking news.

• 1:45:32Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Bezos in talks to raise 100 billion for AI manufacturing fund. The Amazon founders traveled to the Middle East, Singapore in fundraising effort linked to Project Prometheus.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  That is incredible.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Very, very exciting.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  We have the red lights going, breaking news. Advanced talks, I don't care if it's just advanced talks, I'm hitting the.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations to Jeff Bezos.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funds for the project. A few months ago, he traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well. He's, it's being described as a manufacturing transformation vehicle. I am absolutely.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  It's going up against TK, right?

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean TK's not as directly focused on manufacturing, like this, something I asked.

• 1:46:21Speaker 01

  Vehicle, right?

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  No, no, he's saying manufacturing, like it's a vehicle, a fund for transforming manufacturing.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like an investing vehicle.

• 1:46:31Jordi Hays?

  It's aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chip making, defense, aerospace. Let's try again with Tom. Get out of here, Tyler. It's on time, Tom.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  There we go. Hey, Tom, can you hear us?

• 1:46:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no. No, we don't have audio. We don't have audio still.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Guys, try it out. Nothing? Okay. We, we, you can hear us. We can't hear you, but we can tell you about this post that we enjoyed from La Rican. Got my horse to water. Now for the easy part.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to continue. The fund is aiming to buy major industrial sectors, such as chip making, defense and aerospace. It would dwarf the size of some of the world's largest bio funds and rival SoftBank's $100 billion fund. I gotta wonder, how much, how much do you think, uh, how much do you think Jeff is pitching in himself? I could see him, you know, anchoring. He's like, I'm good. I'm good for 30, you know, something in that range.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's, he's got some funds.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  But this is such a white pill.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah? Why?

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the whole, this is like, you know, we, we need to manu-, we need to manufacture, you know, basically, we need to re-industrialize America.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  We're not going to do it by just copying everything from the past. There's some element of transformation that needs to happen as well as new efforts.

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, this is, uh, this is tremendous news.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, there, there has been like a venture capital boom in re-industrialization, but most of the funds that we talked to that are in that category are 50 million, couple hundred million, certainly nothing at this scale. And this has got to be, uh, incredible news for, uh, the, the founders that we talked to that are part of the re-industrialization effort because they, they have a new potential investor. Uh, did you see that OpenAI has acquired Astral? Who will be joining the Codex team? So finally, OpenAI has Astral Codex, which of course is a great play on Astral Codex 10, the, uh, the blog, which has some fantastic articles.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Uh, will OpenAI increase the cost of ChatGPT? This is a Kershi market out there. It's a 46% chance. If either ChatGPT Pro or Plus have a price increase after January 2nd, 2026, and before January 1st, 2027, so in the, in this year.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Based on the current pricing of $20 a month and $200 a month.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  What do you think? I, I feel like, I, I, this isn't financial advice, but I feel like they're not going to move the price points because they're focused on so many other things.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only, the only thing is I could imagine an, an additional plan on top of it.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:49:23Jordi Hays?

  But that would be an incremental plan versus changing.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Max, Max is right there. We got Pro, we got Plus, we got Pro. Sign me up for the Max plan. And, and I think they also have a Light plan and, and I, I would imagine.

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  There's like Go.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  There's Go, yeah. So I would imagine that there's more tiers within there. At the same time.

• 1:49:39Jordi Hays?

  Give Tyler the goat.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Ripping the Band-Aid off of price adjustments is extremely painful and probably the earlier you do it, the better. Like Netflix. Yeah, yeah. Like Netflix has been increasing prices and when they're at nine ninety-nine a month or something, it's very normal. And then when you go up, it starts everyone, oh, you raise the price, but you just raise it every couple of months. Anyway, we're good.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Third time.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Third time's the charm. How you doing?

• 1:50:03Speaker 09

  I'm very good. Can you hit me guys?

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  Hey! Fantastic. Introduce yourself.

• 1:50:09Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Tom Hulme. I'm one of GV or Google Ventures' managing partners. I'm based in London. I'm gonna hope I'm gonna bring as much energy as Carl.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  It's a tough act to follow, but it's a good start.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  AI, good or bad, what's your strategy? What are you investing in? What are you seeing?

• 1:50:26Speaker 09

  As you can imagine, eighty or ninety percent of what we're doing is AI. In truth, it's hard to imagine a credible founder that isn't leading with it at the moment. And so we're viewing everything. I mean, in your email that you sent out today about Samsung, about some of the effects of the, what's going on in the Middle East. We're even looking at that through the lens of AI and how it should affect our investing strategy.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Sure. And then in terms of the portfolio founders that you're talking to, how interesting is the sovereign AI efforts? How interesting is just finding amazing entrepreneurs that are going to run through walls all over the globe and they just happen to be there. So you're the first point of contact. You meet them early versus maybe going to an American entrepreneur that has some traction. You're going to help them, you know, if you join the board, you're going to help them go global. What are you thinking?

• 1:51:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we're really proud of is that we actually are sort of a global firm, primarily the US and Europe. And so we offer founders soft landings in Europe if they're American companies and vice versa. So that's something that works well. But in truth, we're finding we're meeting more and more technical founders and Europe has an edge on that. To give you an idea, I think thirty five percent of the world's AI researchers or master's programs are actually in Europe.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Speaker 09

  We've got four of the top technical universities globally in Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, ETH Zurich. And so there is this incredible sort of talent building up. So historically, I think Europe's bottleneck was probably human capital and financial capital. The financial capital is now global. Your guys' show's global. Now the human capital is really growing and we're seeing a real multiplier effect in two ways. So the first is the very best founders are starting companies over and over again. So we have investments in, for example, Sneak's founder, Guy Pajani, who has now done Tesla. Most of our European founders are actually repeat founders. And the second thing is

• 1:52:21Speaker 09

  we have an equivalent of the sort of PayPal mafia happening. So we were early investors in Go Cardless. We've now seen other companies coming through as a result of that, like Monzo.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Speaker 09

  And I think I'm just keep seeing that multiplier effect.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah. Does, uh, does Europe broadly give, uh, give England enough credit for DeepMind? Because it got rolled into Google so quickly, but I feel like, like the UK punches way above its weight in terms of AI research with DeepMind and maybe that's under discussed?

• 1:52:54Speaker 09

  Oh, I think it's under discussed. And I think it's easy. People will often post rationalize it and say how great it would have been if it had stayed independent. But we've got to remember, when DeepMind was really going in two thousand and twelve,

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06Speaker 09

  it was really hard for people to see. The twenty seventeen transformer paper had not been written for five, you know, years. It's early days and so it's easy to look back and say it was obvious. It wasn't at the time. But I think the person that single-handedly has done as much for tech in the UK as anyone else is demiss. Sabes, the founder, he insisted on keeping a base here because he knew the technical talent was here. And now we're seeing that kind of multiplier effect. So there's great Neo Labs being funded right now. You've got reinforcement learning companies like recursive superintelligence. Like Tim Rocktashow is based here, Richard Sosha and Timo from the West Coast. Uh, you've got ineffable, Dave Silver's new company. You've got world model companies and these are all coming out of GDM.

• 1:53:51Speaker 09

  So you're getting this multiplier effect. Uh, they deserve huge credit for that, for every one, sorry, I'll do it.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When, when, when you look at a Neo Lab, it feels like there's a thesis where it's just, okay, you have a brilliant technical mind. They're going to go explore. Uh, yeah, the price might be high, but you're underwriting it as, uh, you know, a venture style bet. There's a chance that something great comes. But do you have, or at least from conversations, do you have an idea of how the Neo Labs might plug into the broader uh, AI ecosystem, either through partnerships with big labs? Or are, are you talking to Neo Labs that are saying we can leapfrog on certain vectors? Or maybe we can launch in our own consumer product that's happened before. Well, what, how do you think about where the Neo Labs fit in post the research phase?

• 1:54:43Speaker 09

  Yeah. One of the questions we've been asking ourselves is the current S curve of technology that we're on, perhaps the third phase of large language models and diffusion models, like the existing companies are doing very well and they're often chasing benchmarks. You become what you measure. And so they're really driving fantastically into that. The question is, what are the other S curves of technology that could be explored? And the two that I think are really interesting are world model companies at the moment. So AMI Labs just got funded. Our portfolio company, Odyssey, is going in that direction from diffusion. And then reinforcement learning, we think there's huge work can be done. So if novel breakthroughs can be made on either of those, we think that they actually can be complementing to the existing companies and they could work in addition.

• 1:55:29Speaker 09

  So very rarely they may go full stack and create their own product. Uh, often they will actually service their unique intelligence through API.

• 1:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Predictions around the next breakout prosumer products from Europe. We've seen the Lovables, the Granolas, anything that is like very on the radar in London. Everybody's talking about, but hasn't necessarily broken containment and gone super global yet.

• 1:55:58Speaker 09

  I mean, one that everyone's really excited about, but it's partly we just exited the business to Apple is people keep asking me what Q is.

• 1:56:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right.

• 1:56:08Speaker 09

  It's rated company, second biggest acquisition by Apple.

• 1:56:11Jordi Hays?

  It was in stealth until the acquisition, right?

• 1:56:16Speaker 09

  Correct. So I was on the board for the whole of that period. We did the, we led the seed and did the series A with our friends at Kleiner, Aleph and Spark. And that company is going to do something very special. A few years ago, we had a thesis that actually voice is really interesting because you can communicate in voice about 150 words per minute. It's high input information because of intonation, et cetera, versus typing, which might be 90 words a minute. We invested in Neuralink, which is like the very invasive version of high throughput. And then we started exploring what are private ways to communicate by voice and Q is that company. So I'm asked about that a lot at the moment. The other one I'm excited about from a consumer perspective is our investment in nothing.

• 1:57:01Jordi Hays?

  Any, any ideas or guesses? It's probably not your information to share, but like, you know, Apple is making, you know, huge push and effort right now. They need to show the world that they still got it on the, on the software side. Is Q something that, you know, Apple, you know, iPhone users will get to experience in 2027? Is it the longer term? Will they ever kind of like, well, do you think there'll be like a moment where they're like, wow, this is, you know, a huge?

• 1:57:31Speaker 09

  Yeah. I think it's going to be a wow moment and I think it'll be in 2028. And, and you know, our belief is actually that if you believe the software, the models actually kind of overshoot requirements, then a lot of the value will actually accrue to the physical devices because that'll be the distribution point. So we, we, for example, invested in nothing. They just sent me their new products, which I'm going to unbox after this. But they incredible smartphones. We believe that actually the value accrues to the distribution and so whoever owns those smartphones.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Carl being in the, Carl being in the position of the, you know, they've proven they can make beautiful products, but then also being able to be really flexible and quick around implementing AI all the way down to the hardware level is a very cool position to be in. Yeah.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  It's a fun time. Well, thank you so much for taking.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  You brought the energy. You brought the energy.

• 1:58:25Speaker 09

  My apologies, but I also brought the technical issues. So apologies, next time.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  It happens. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  That was great to meet you, Tom. Come back on soon.

• 1:58:33Speaker 09

  Good to see you, though. Take care. Have a great day. Thanks.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may Claude Code Codex or a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. And without further ado, we do actually have.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's play.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Soon, but what do you want to play?

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's play if we have time before the Cubanator joins.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  We're, we're working on some.

• 1:58:59Jordi Hays?

  We're working on it. I don't think we have time. I'll try to.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Let's rotate that screen and I think we're almost ready. The, the, the one small news article here that we can talk about is that Meta has signed a 10-year lease for a 15,000 square foot townhouse on 697 Fifth Avenue to open Meta Lab New York. It's first Manhattan flagship retail location. They painted it completely blue, apparently. The store will focus on hands-on demos of Meta AI glasses and VR headsets. So they're getting into the retail space. Well, um, let's figure out.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  Still working on it. I can tell you about Way Shirt Capital.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Okay, tell me about this.

• 1:59:41Jordi Hays?

  They invested in SpaceX.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  At apparently 200. Okay, it's fake news. Brutal.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  That was quick.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. I was like, this seems too good to be true. Pitchbook is, uh, but we can tell you about Rivian RoboTaxis.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Uber and Rivian have announced a deal. Uber is going to invest 1.1 and 1/4 billion in Rivian and deploy up to 50,000 R2 RoboTaxis. I'm so interested to see what Rivian can actually do on the RoboTaxi side. I have friends that have owned Rivian's have said that the autonomous driving is fantastic. It just feels like this, um, I, I will be very interested to see if more than, you know, a couple of companies can really crack it quickly.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  But it's a young company, very agile and lots of opportunity. Well, I believe we have Mark Cuban in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Ultra. Mark, can you hear us?

• 2:00:48Mark Cuban?

  Yes, but you're too loud. Hold on one second.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Too loud?

• 2:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Too loud.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:53Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. No, cause of my ear.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  It's great to have you, Mark. Thank you so much.

• 2:00:57Mark Cuban?

  Hey, guys.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing?

• 2:00:59Mark Cuban?

  Hey, guys.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:00Mark Cuban?

  I'll deal with it.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Good to see you. How's your 2026 going? We haven't talked this year yet. What's life like?

• 2:01:07Mark Cuban?

  I'm loving life. I got no complaints whatsoever.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's amazing.

• 2:01:10Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I'm loving life.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, are you, so you're not disappointed about the rollout of ads in LLMs thus far then? Does that say the same?

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  It hasn't ruined your year.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Because I saw the first ad, it was for the Wall Street Journal and it was just a little, little bubble at the top. Hey, you might want to check out the journal. Seemed innocent enough to me, but how are you feeling?

• 2:01:30Mark Cuban?

  I have, I haven't seen it at all, so it hasn't ruined my life at all.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  What's your information diet? Cause it's hard not to log on the internet and not start blackpilling these days.

• 2:01:41Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, no shit. So my first stop, my first stop is a site called Mimi or Random, which kind of gives me an update on all the, what's happening in the world. My second stop is Drudge Report, cause that gives me the hyperbole on everything that's happening in the world. And then after that, all the different newsletters and emails that I get just that try to keep me up.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the flood of cold emails that appears to be thoughtful, but

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  It's AI generated.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  It's actually AI generated because you are notorious for your response rates and getting back to so many people that have reached out, but it but it feels like maybe an impossible task now.

• 2:02:23Mark Cuban?

  No, I do what everybody else does. I bought a Mac mini.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  You did.

• 2:02:28Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, for sure. And I'm still learning.

• 2:02:31Jordi Hays?

  So you're just like, you hit me with AI, I'll hit you with AI back right away.

• 2:02:34Mark Cuban?

  Right back, right. Because it's it's not even like the cold emails, because that's pretty obvious. You know, it's pretty easy to see. It's people subscribing me to shit. And, you know, the good news is Gmail has an unsubscribe button. So you just got to train it to hit the unsubscribe button. Then I just review it and all that shit. So it's still a work in progress, but at least I have a path.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, the the issue with that with us is that historically, if you had a podcast and somebody wrote you an email and said, hey, I really appreciate this moment where you're talking about this one thing.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Totally. You're like, oh, they actually listen to the show.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Tell like, hey, at least they they press play and at least they found a moment. But now AI just does it instantly. So there's no way to clock whether whether somebody.

• 2:03:16Mark Cuban?

  Whether it's real or not. Yeah. And that's okay, right? Because they're gonna the response rate most likely will be so low. We're in that trial and error phase where people are like, we're gonna try it, see what happens. You know, maybe we'll get lucky and then they'll get bored and then it'll drop off.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is owning a Mac mini a green flag for entrepreneurs these days? Talk to me about what you're seeing in early stage startups in this AI era. Like where where are the interesting builders? What patterns are you seeing that are like, oh, I didn't think that this person would be going down the founder road, but they are now?

• 2:03:49Mark Cuban?

  Get agents for everything.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Mark Cuban?

  You know, it's just because once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people. And then you can turn that into what would have been a SaaS business in the past is now, you know, we'll create your own marketing team and we'll, you know, do all these different things for you that you no longer have to do. And we'll charge you X number of dollars a month. That's it. And I'm seeing dozens of those, you know, typically one for every industry you can ever possibly imagine.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  And are they growing revenue faster or are they growing profit faster?

• 2:04:21Mark Cuban?

  Neither. They're just still trying to get some, just trying to get some traction at all.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Mark Cuban?

  You know, because if you're growing revenue quickly, you're probably not coming to me yet.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:32Mark Cuban?

  You know, you're because, you know, the marginal cost to start is so low and it's so fast. And you're using the agents. So if they can get anybody to give them a credit card.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41Mark Cuban?

  You know, or sign up or, you know, now there's a little bit of a battle to use USDC for payment, the payment rails.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:49Mark Cuban?

  You know, to make it so that, you know, just give me your wallet. And that's, you know, it's going to end up being a scam and a lot of people are going to get ripped off there. But, um, but I think the real thing right now is agents for vertical, verticals and trying to turn that into replace all your employees. So you can start up or you can cut costs.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Do you think any of those agent focused, sort of like niche, at least niche to start businesses, would be a fit for Shark Tank?

• 2:05:17Mark Cuban?

  Yes and no. Yes, they should be. No, people won't understand them. And the other sharks wouldn't understand them.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:23Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. I mean, effectively anything you can do.

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  But you only need one shark to understand.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:28Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, right. And I'm not on the show anymore. So you're fucked.

• 2:05:30Jordi Hays?

  It's time, it's time to go back. It's time to go back.

• 2:05:33Mark Cuban?

  No chance.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what was the anatomy of, I, I, I think we talk about what makes for a great company all day long. We'll talk about that throughout the, the show today. But what makes for a company that will put on a particularly captivating Shark Tank appearance?

• 2:05:52Mark Cuban?

  You've got to remember it's for TV. You have to be entertaining.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Mark Cuban?

  And if it's not entertaining in some shape or form, it's just not going to work regardless of the quality of the business. If you don't have a charisma, you don't have a compelling pitch that's entertaining, it doesn't matter. You could be selling dollar bills for 50 cents and it would fail.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Interesting. How important is like the visual component? There's a lot of physical products, but at a certain point it gets too big for the studio. How important is it like the physical product presentation?

• 2:06:24Mark Cuban?

  Well, the good news is that producers will work with you on that and they make them practice over and over and over. And of the hundreds, if not thousands of pitches I saw in 15 years, we only had one really just choke, right? Where they couldn't spit it out. Maybe two, which is amazing. It's a testament to Mindy and the producers there and how hard they prepare them.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think Shark Tank and shows like it will change in the era of AI video generation, you know, endless content? Is it stronger than ever because it's a known brand or is there some weakness there? Like, how do you see that playing out?

• 2:07:08Mark Cuban?

  It all depends on platform. It's like you guys, right? You know, it really just depends on reach of the platform and quality of the product.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:14Mark Cuban?

  I think for Shark Tank, it's not going to have to change because of AI or technology, simply because you're really communicating to a family audience. And the message you're communicating isn't, hey, here's a bunch of businesses that are great. The message you're communicating is that could be you on the carpet. The American dream is alive and well.

• 2:07:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:36Mark Cuban?

  And so that's really what makes Shark Tank successful, not the quality of the businesses.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about sports? I've seen some robots playing tennis. They're going to be playing basketball soon. I don't think I'll be watching robot basketball, but how do you think live events, sports, basketball will change over the next decade?

• 2:07:54Mark Cuban?

  I mean, maybe for the referees, like you've seen in tennis, but that's it. I think in reality, more people will want to go to in real life events than before because if you're just managing agents, looking at output, looking for exceptions.

• 2:08:10Mark Cuban?

  You're going to want some human touch, right? You're going to want to be able to engage. And I think that's really, really important. And I think that's where sports will grow. I mean, you're starting to see that now with, you know, what happened with the Olympics. The World Baseball Classic, you know, became much more popular because people want that disengagement from all the stress that's happening right now.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, at the same time, it feels like there's almost an opportunity for, not to bring it back to targeted advertising, but AI can tell me, okay, my favorite team's in town. I should go to this particular game. I should remind me at the right time instead of just signing up for the newsletter.

• 2:08:50Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, that's not AI. That's not really AI. Yeah, that's just targeting, right? And I'm going to tell you what, in terms of, I'm going to take it down a different path because I'm contrarian on this. And that's with robotics. I think everybody's making this push for humanoid robots. I think they might have a five-year lifespan and then they'll fail miserably, maybe 10.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  You mean the device, you mean the companies or the device or the individual hardware?

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  Physical robots.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Or both?

• 2:09:17Mark Cuban?

  Both, right? Because I think everybody defaults to, well, we live in a human world and humanoids will take the place of humans for various functions, particularly in the home. And I think there's just no chance. I think if you look at warehouses and what Amazon does, they're not humanoid robots carrying boxes. They're robots that are designed to fit the environment. And I think, you know, I've heard people say, well, a house is a house. You need a humanoid. I think houses are going to be redesigned completely so that whatever the optimal robot is that allows it to simplify the house, that's where houses will go.

• 2:09:57Mark Cuban?

  So I'll give you an example. If we had robots that looked more like spiders that could, you know, but had... Hand, you know, the ability to carry and lift things, where more like ants, I guess, maybe.

• 2:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:12Mark Cuban?

  Right? But and you could create a house where the pantry and the refrigerator and the washing machines were hidden behind the garage, if you even have a garage. And that way you could redesign it. So all the living space was for people. Because you know that the robots aren't going to be full formed humanoids. They're going to be whatever the optimal shape is, and they're kind of co-designed. You design the house to fit the robot, and you design the robot to fit the house. And I think that way you could go a lot less expensively on both.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, the humanoid founders will tell you, you know, how do you solve stairs? Right? Like, it doesn't work for wheels. But if the robots are really great, people, you could put like a mini robot elevator, right? Like, if it's on wheels, like you could just put it, yeah.

• 2:11:04Mark Cuban?

  Like, you see like the old house dumb waiters, right? Where there's just the thing where you pull it, you put it in there, and you pull it up, and it goes up to the next floor, and somebody opens it up. You're going to see, you know, a mechanized equivalent to that, right? Where the, it recognizes the little, you know, ant robot that's coming up, and it opens up a little door that's, you know, that leads to the size of whatever it is, it needs to carry or whatever. And then it goes up the dumb waiter, does this thing on the next floor, the next floor, the next floor, and does what it needs to do. I don't think, you know, stairs are an issue at all.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about just these types of ideas, AI products, generally getting rolled out and then hitting it, bumping up against like human guardrails? Like, when I hear that, I think like, that sounds incredibly sci-fi and potentially. Possible from an engineering perspective, but then, you know, you try and, you know, remodel your house and then you're stuck in permitting for two years. And so that tends to slow the progress down a little bit. Is that, is that a real thing?

• 2:12:11Mark Cuban?

  Technology.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:12Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, of course it is. But that's all technology during the interim period, right?

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:15Mark Cuban?

  There's always a transitional period where you go from the old to the new. Like back in the day, you know, there wasn't enough electrical outlets for your PC. There wasn't enough, you know, you had to go into the walls to, to run all the ethernet cables and all that shit, right? You know, and so the houses and offices weren't designed for that because it wasn't considered when they were built. But they adapted. You found ways to adapt. And it'll be the same thing with homes. It'll be same thing with offices.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Mark Cuban?

  We'll find ways to adapt. I think, you know, the biggest challenge going forward is going to be as we go from an LLM world to a worldview, a worldview world of AI where, you know, we're taking in, um, video and learning from the video and extracting rules from the video. A lot of the things that we're going to do are going to be outside or, and are going to be, going to have to consume in the interim at least, either, um, satellite bandwidth or 5G bandwidth. And I don't think there's going to be enough bandwidth when you're working with video-based, um, AI models.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. Interesting. Uh, you mentioned maybe a garage not existing in the future. Is that a way to say that you're excited about self-driving cars? Like, what are you, what are you thinking is going to happen there?

• 2:13:32Mark Cuban?

  You know, I, I played around. I have a Tesla and I upgraded for a couple of months and it terrified the shit out of me. Not that I didn't trust it.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:39Mark Cuban?

  Oh my God. Because like when you're going 25 miles an hour, it's no big deal.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:44Mark Cuban?

  You go in a highway, you're going 70 miles an hour and, and there's a median right there in the middle of the highway.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:50Mark Cuban?

  I was like shaking. Like, I was like, I don't, you know, Elon's cool or whatever, but you know, I ain't trusting them that much, right? You know, and I'm not waiting for that.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Mad Max mode? You know about Mad Max?

• 2:14:02Mark Cuban?

  No, no. No, no, no, no. Uh, you know, but you set a delimiter where it's like, how much above the speed limit are you willing to go? And if the speed limit is 65 or 70? You know, you gotta go to the speed limit and it was scary as fuck trying to go 70 miles an hour. And I don't want to be there when somebody paints some adversarial, you know how there's graffiti in the weirdest places? Wait until there's adversarial graffiti.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like somebody, if somebody paint, if they put a brick wall and then they paint it to look like the road, road runner.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Wile E. Coyote is gonna.

• 2:14:37Mark Cuban?

  No, that's like ridiculous shit, right?

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Wile E. Coyote is gonna paint the tunnel and then you're slamming.

• 2:14:44Mark Cuban?

  There's somebody somewhere trying to figure out how to fuck up self-driving mode, right?

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:14:50Mark Cuban?

  And, and just because it's just taking video input.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:54Mark Cuban?

  And, you know, what, it could be some pattern and all of a sudden you're seeing this pattern on medians or, you know, overlaid on stop signs or whatever.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Mark Cuban?

  You know, because, you know, somebody's got to do that because it's just too easy not to.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hyper-realistic camo rap gets confused, you know, eventually.

• 2:15:15Mark Cuban?

  Whatever, right?

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  You wrap your car in camo and if the camouflage is effective, you're gonna confuse the AIs. It's a risk.

• 2:15:22Mark Cuban?

  And you just might, and there could be a predator, right? Alien versus predator.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:26Mark Cuban?

  Predator could show up, right? And if Arnold isn't there to save us.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  It's possible. I mean, it's, it's, speaking of Arnold, are you, it's, it sounds like you're in a good mood. You're optimistic about things. Are, does the question of AI doom come into your mind? These runaway robotics, are you worried about that at all?

• 2:15:45Mark Cuban?

  No, not even the least bit. For, for the reason I just mentioned, right? In, in order, like, right now, it's, LLMs are basically bimodal with some video, right? Where it's almost all text and pictures with some video. You can't, you can't model the world with that. You just can't. AIs right now doesn't understand the consequences of its recommendations. It has no idea what happens next. A two-year-old kid with a high chair and a sippy cup knows if it pushes the sippy cup over the, off the high chair, mom's coming running and the kid's gonna start laughing at mom, right? Large language models don't understand.

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 2:16:23Mark Cuban?

  Every time, right? And there's no large language models.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Ever, right?

• 2:16:30Mark Cuban?

  Ever. And it's hysterical, you know, unless you're mom, right? But, um, but you get the point, right? You, the, the large language models we have today can't do that. And so we have to evolve to models that can capture the world and physics and deal with the latency of capturing or not being, having access to, um, video that you can't see. And so you have to try to model that. And not only does that take up a lot of processing power, but it takes up a lot of bandwidth, as I mentioned before. And so the Terminator's taking over. I just don't see how it's going to happen. Now, you can have, you know, localized brains for, for military applications and power get better and manual dexterity will get better, all that.

• 2:17:15Mark Cuban?

  But that's, that's not going to allow you to take over the world. Right? That's going to be application specific. So I'm not afraid of that at all. And I also think that, you know, we're talking about agentic applications. I, I think particularly for small, medium sized businesses and some large businesses, they're not going to have that skillset. It's not going to be natural for them to do that. And I think kids coming out of school today that have taken some Python, don't have to be comp sci majors, but have done agentic AI. Like when I go talk to schools, that's what I tell them. You know, get into Claude, you know, teach yourself all the agentic stuff and then go to small businesses because they're not going to understand how to do any of that shit at all.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what advice are you giving to friends, uh, portfolio companies, et cetera, around navigating as a business leader during, uh, a time where we have, you know, major global conflict? I don't know what exactly you were working on in 2002, 2003, 2004, but there's so much. I mean, right now, uh, everyone's hoping for a quick end to the conflict, but it's hard to lean on that.

• 2:18:25Mark Cuban?

  You know, it's funny, in 2002, um, when we attacked Iraq, um, I created something called the Fallen Patriot Fund, um, which, you know, was just money available that I funded myself, money available for the families, um, of soldiers who didn't return or soldiers that were, you know, horrifically, um, Injured or disfigured or whatever it may be, and we paid out millions of dollars. But the bigger point was the way the media world was back then, we kind of just trusted what was presented to us by the gatekeepers, right? You could have an opinion whether it was right or wrong, but hey, there were WMDs, right? Weapons of mass destruction, and we kind of trusted.

• 2:19:08Mark Cuban?

  Now, there's so many information sources and social media, and we really only consume what the algorithms show us, you know? And each one of us has a different algorithm. Like, the three of us are out... Algorithms are like fingerprints. No two are alike. And because of that, everybody's got a different perspective on what's going on in Iran and what's happening around the world. And to me, that's scary, right? It's hard to know what's real and who to trust. And now with AI, video, you know, what's been created? And we really are in across our fingers and hope things work out for the best, because

• 2:19:49Mark Cuban?

  I don't know that there's a way for anybody to really participate in a decision or make a good decision.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're all trying to predict the future together.

• 2:20:02Mark Cuban?

  With imperfect information.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, based on wildly different kind of influences.

• 2:20:06Mark Cuban?

  Exactly. You know, we don't have access to the information we truly would need in order to make a cogent decision or even have a decent opinion. I mean, we just don't. And we spend more time trying to filter and determine what's real and what's not, so that it's almost impossible to really do anything but just hope and pray.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  We have a couple of questions from the chat. The first one is about cost-plus drugs. Can you give us an update there?

• 2:20:35Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  How's it going?

• 2:20:37Mark Cuban?

  Crushing it.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  What's the thesis?

• 2:20:39Mark Cuban?

  Crushing it.

• 2:20:40John Coogan?

  Sounder, no.

• 2:20:44Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  Like, give us a sense of scale, give us a reminder of the strategy, reintroduce the company.

• 2:20:53Mark Cuban?

  Sure. So what, you go to costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of the medication. If it's one of the thousands we carry, then we actually show you our actual cost. Then we show you that our markup is only 15% and we charge you $5 for shipping and handling and then the credit card fee. And in doing so with only a 15% margin, we're, unless it's like a $4 Walmart drug, we're almost always the cheapest option for anybody. So if you're underinsured, if you don't have insurance, you know, even to compare it against your copay or coinsurance, we may be cheaper than your copay. And because of that, our business is just skyrocketing. So that's part one of our business.

• 2:21:35Mark Cuban?

  Part two to our business, for my company, for my employees and their families, I went around and talked to the CEOs and CFOs of a lot of hospitals and found out where they were getting ripped off by the insurance companies. You know, if you think about this, and I don't think many people do, if, whatever your deductible is, if something happens to you and you can't afford it, even if you have great insurance, you might have a $1,500 or $2,500 deductible, which is big company, good insurance, but if you don't have that money and 40% of people don't have $400 for an emergency, when you go to the hospital as an example, they literally end up loaning you the money.

• 2:22:17Mark Cuban?

  And that, as a result, we've turned hospitals and providers into subprime lenders. Think about that, right? And then you have the denials and then they underpay, late play, call back. So anyways, so I went to local hospital, Baylor Scott White, who's a really forward-thinking hospital system, and I said, "Look..." I understand where you're getting ripped off by the insurance carriers. I'll pay you on time. I'll pay you what we committed. I won't claw back. I won't lay pay. In exchange, I want two things. I want a better price. I want it as a reference price of Medicare. A hundred to a hundred percent of Medicare unless it's really complicated. And more importantly, we created a site called costpluswellness.com.

• 2:23:01Mark Cuban?

  And we are going to post this contract on costpluswellness.com. So that any business, you guys, TBPN, anybody, any size that wants a direct contract, can reach out to Baylor Scott White and get the same pricing that we get. And it's just blown up. I mean, it's just incredible. We have more than 9,000 providers. And what we're trying to do is teach companies who self-insure in particular, that they can take control of their expenses. You don't need to be dependent on the insurance company to come up with the right deal, because they won't. They'll steal from you.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Did you ever, I mean, it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting company for you. Because I feel like when you have as big of a presence as you do, it could be a book, or a course, or a protein powder. Did you look at anything else?

• 2:23:55Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Have you burned out on that stuff?

• 2:23:57Mark Cuban?

  Creatine. Protein powder. The Cubanator, the Cubanator Protein Stack.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  I'm in the, no, this is obviously much more, much more important.

• 2:24:07Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I just thought, you know, nobody looks at healthcare and says, you know, the economic side is great. We're doing it the right way in this country. It's the exact opposite. And so if you're going to try to disrupt, go big or go home, right?

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Another question from the chat. What's the most underrated business you've seen in your career? I think they're talking about something that like you, it is the moment you saw it collect and you were like, okay, this is like a wildly mispriced asset, or something that could really fly.

• 2:24:35Mark Cuban?

  Streaming.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  Streaming.

• 2:24:36Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, we called it Internet Broadcasting. I sat down with a buddy of mine, nineteen ninety-five, at a California pizza kitchen. And he was like, how can we listen to Indiana basketball in Dallas, Texas?

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Mark Cuban?

  And this is right when the Internet had just started, right? It was brand new to everybody. And I'm like, let me figure it out. And so we started a company called AudioNet.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Mark Cuban?

  And got the right stuff, you know, hundreds of schools, hundreds of radio stations, TV stations. You know, back then, the copyright laws were different. Created our own Internet jukebox and unlived a number of Internet radio stations. And started streaming until we sold it to Yahoo. That was the most obvious thing I'd ever seen in my career.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  What was the domain name negotiation like? Jordy's a big fan of, of great domain names.

• 2:25:21Mark Cuban?

  Great question. Great, great, great, great question. So when we started, it was AudioNet, and I just registered it. Nobody had it.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:30Mark Cuban?

  But then.

• 2:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Wait, AudioNet.com or Audio.net?

• 2:25:33Mark Cuban?

  No, AudioNet.com.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Okay. I like it, yeah.

• 2:25:36Mark Cuban?

  Because we were just doing audio in nineteen ninety-five.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:38Mark Cuban?

  And then by ninety-seven, we, we started to do video, and AudioNet wasn't going to cut it.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:25:43Mark Cuban?

  And so I found Broadcast.com, because we wanted to broadcast everything and anything. And found the guy and paid him eight thousand dollars. And he was thrilled to get the eight thousand dollars.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:54Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, this nineteen ninety-seven.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Did he ping you after the, did he ping you after?

• 2:25:58Mark Cuban?

  Yes, he did. Yes, he did. But wait, it gets better. But wait, there's more, right? And so I'm like, oh, shit, this is nothing, right? It's an automatic traffic generator. And so I started going out there and just glomming up, just grabbing all kinds of URLs so that we could put content on them and then drive it back to Broadcast.com. So literally, I owned FinalFour.com, I owned Baseball.com, I owned Sandwich.com. You name it, I bought it. I bought it, I would buy like just packages of URLs, right? And just.

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  And this is because people were just going to their browser and being like.

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  This is before SEO.

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Sandwich.com.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Before search engines.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  And they would type it in.

• 2:26:41Mark Cuban?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  So people would just go and type it in.

• 2:26:44Mark Cuban?

  Exactly. Everything was a portal, right? Everything was a front door. And so I was like, anything that generated traffic. And I've done it since, like, I own MrPresident.com. I own Democracy.com.

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  He privatized democracy.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  He took democracy private.

• 2:27:04Mark Cuban?

  I was worried. I was worried.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  That's the most American thing I've ever, I've ever heard. I love that. That's incredible. Okay, the last question from the chat, and we'll let you get back to your busy day. I want to flip it around. What's a, what's a business that you've seen in your career? That you wanted to work so well, but for whatever reason, the business just didn't achieve what you had in mind? And why?

• 2:27:26Mark Cuban?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:29John Coogan?

  And you don't need to be specific about this particular company. I mean, like, a technology or maybe an anonymized company, something like that.

• 2:27:35Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. God, I'd have to think about it. You know, what was not the motorized skateboards, they weren't called it with the two wheels?

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Hoverboards.

• 2:27:43Mark Cuban?

  Hoverboards.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, hoverboards.

• 2:27:45Mark Cuban?

  So.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  I agree. I want to have a hoverboard future. Everyone traveling on hoverboards everywhere.

• 2:27:50Mark Cuban?

  Yes. So a buddy of mine, his son was an engineer. And I was like, okay, this kid could try to come up with some new ways to do hoverboards, make them safer, etc. And so we started a company that did hoverboards. And there were so many more patents already in place than I ever imagined. We couldn't get past them and that it failed miserably.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a very interesting boom, the hoverboard boom. It sort of came out of Shenzhen, fully formed. Because there was a massive supply chain and they were all over, but there was no one brand. There were like a ton of different brands because really what was going on was there was one amazing supplier in China that had like 20 different companies that were reselling it all.

• 2:28:29Mark Cuban?

  And they were making a killing.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they were. Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, uh, is it still possible to create a widget and make? Like a hundred million dollars from it, or does the cop or do the clones come? Cause I, I, I know the guy who made um like the, the, the fidget spinner, like his claim to fame.

• 2:28:47Mark Cuban?

  Right, right, that's cool.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  And but, but he didn't.

• 2:28:50Mark Cuban?

  It got knocked off like that.

• 2:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was the kind of thing that like was a hit product.

• 2:28:55Mark Cuban?

  That's all on Amazon, all on Amazon.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so it's.

• 2:28:58Mark Cuban?

  Right, so, so I started talking to some Amazon resellers like mid 24, cause I was just curious about some things. I'd see some things on, on X and um as it turns out, if you're an American seller, it may have changed. So correct me if I'm wrong, if you're an American seller, you can have one company that sells on Amazon, right? For, for your, but if you're Chinese, there's no limit.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Mark Cuban?

  And you don't even have to have a nexus. So if you're that American company and you're making sales and making money, then you have to pay taxes and define your nexus and you know.

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so you're just screwed because you, cause you're.

• 2:29:33Mark Cuban?

  You're screwed.

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:29:36Mark Cuban?

  Because so these Chinese companies to this day, as far as I know, these Chinese companies don't have to have a nexus, don't pay the taxes, even though they're supposed to, right? You can literally have a Chinese bank account and Amazon will send the money right to that Chinese bank account. And I was proposing to these guys and talking to some legislators at the time that Chinese companies should have to post a bond before they can sell the product and post it on a website that whatever, whatever dot gov. So that, you know, the fidget spin guy, spinner guy could come in and say, you know, we're having an agent now that continually, continuously checks to see if there's a knockoff of their product and then can challenge it. And then at least there's that 10,000 or 25,000 dollar bond that offsets the risk for that fidget spinner.

• 2:30:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I know, I know one, I know one widgets company that bought the next five most popular widget. Oh, wow. Companies in the category that were knocking them off. Yep. And they just continue to operate them. Yep. But they have enough ranking on Amazon and they have the scale.

• 2:30:37Mark Cuban?

  But it's just wrong. It's just wrong that, yeah, because any, whether it's China or Vietnam, any country, if you're outside the United States, you immediately have a cost advantage, not the manufacturing, but just from an IP, from a, and from an Amazon cost perspective. Why in the world is it cheaper for a Chinese or Vietnamese company to sell on Amazon and to easily knock off than it is for an American company to sell the original product? That makes no sense. And, yeah, and legislatively, you could fix it in a heartbeat. You gotta post a bond, $25,000 bond, depending on the size of the market, maybe more, and then give everybody 90 days to check it.

• 2:31:18Mark Cuban?

  And all of a sudden, the whole industry changes and American manufacturing skyrockets. And the, because that, that cost of knockoff isn't just about the cost of, um, losing sales. It's the administrative, the, the, the legal cost, that there's just so many nuanced things that you have to spend money on.

• 2:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have, we have, we have a knock, we have a knockoff issues and like, we, we spend thousands of dollars to have our lawyer like chase them down and send takedown requests.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  From our merch, like just t-shirts and stuff.

• 2:31:49Mark Cuban?

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Merch is crazy. And then IP too, right? All the, the DMCA takedown notices because they're just scraping and, you know, reposting all that shit, right? It's easy to fix if, you know, someone has the guts to do it.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  What is the anatomy of using your likeness? Once you've made an investment, what, what, what does the, the best relationship look like? I imagine it's very open and transparent, but I imagine that anyone who's been associated with you at all is trying to like slap your face next to their product and like pump it all over. And maybe you haven't invested yet and you just said, oh, it looks nice. And then they're like, clip it. He said it looks nice, you know?

• 2:32:31Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I mean, it depends on the company, you know, usually I, I don't even care, but two things. One, you know what Synthasia is? Synthasia.io?

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think so.

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've been on the show.

• 2:32:41Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, they have the avatars there, Victor and all those guys. Well, I was their first investor, so I send them there.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Your dog, your dog. That's a unicorn.

• 2:32:55Mark Cuban?

  And I gave them a lot of money. I gave them a lot of money. This was 10, 12 years ago. Way ahead of the curve. Yeah.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's an easy.

• 2:33:12Mark Cuban?

  Yes, so it's easy. So I'll push into them or like I'll just fuck around like you saw with Sora. Um, they had, um, so I just, I, I put one picture of me out there, but I was playing with it because I want to learn all this stuff. And they, um, Sora had this thing where you can put conditions on how, when it can be used.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  And so I made the, yeah, so I made a condition. I made a condition so that at the end of every video that, video that used my likeness,

• 2:33:39Mark Cuban?

  you had the, it showed the logo for cost plus drugs.

• 2:33:42Jordi Hays?

  So smart. So smart.

• 2:33:44Mark Cuban?

  And it's been used like hundreds of thousands of times. And I know we've seen a bump as a result.

• 2:33:48Jordi Hays?

  So smart. John did the less commercial thing. He said, portray me as a bodybuilder.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  It's funny, but a lot less commercial.

• 2:33:58Mark Cuban?

  But unfortunately, Sora is kind of falling behind now. So they kind of, I don't know if the opportunity is gone.

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's good. It's gonna, it'll just get added into chat GPT and then you got a billion people just, just pumping cost plus drugs.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Mark Cuban?

  It's always, it's always crazy to me to see it like I tell it, you know, don't, you know, because it has, um, terms of service. You can't show drug use and that and all. And so there's pictures of me like doing lines of coke and shit. And I've got, you know, so it's kind of crazy, but.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Um, what, uh, when is the right time to, for a company to apply to Shark Tank?

• 2:34:29Mark Cuban?

  Anytime. You just don't know. I mean, they have open auditions, um, all the time. So if you go to, um, Shark Tank's website, it'll give you all the information there. And you just got to go out there and have fun.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Go out there and have fun.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the peptide boom? Both FDA approved?

• 2:34:46Mark Cuban?

  Non-participant, non-participant. I'm not a believer in that shit at all. Like every single LLM that I put it into and asked for, you know, show me the trials and show me the, um, research.

• 2:34:58Jordi Hays?

  You mean the non FDA approved, just, just the, the stuff coming off the boat?

• 2:35:02Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  Or are you short Eli Lilly?

• 2:35:05Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no. The insulin, like the real, because when people talk peptides, you're talking supplement type stuff, right?

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:12Mark Cuban?

  Right.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  You're talking BBC 157. Yeah, not Ozempic that's running Super Bowl ads.

• 2:35:17Mark Cuban?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  Very heavily regulated. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:35:20Mark Cuban?

  No, because that stuff's going to come down in price.

• 2:35:22John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:35:23Mark Cuban?

  And now, you know, Lilly and Novo are smart now with their GLP-1s.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:26Mark Cuban?

  They're working around the PBMs. They're doing direct to patient, direct to company. And that was brilliant. That was really smart.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Jordy, you have anything else?

• 2:35:36Mark Cuban?

  It's always fun.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  This is super fun.

• 2:35:37Mark Cuban?

  Always fun.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Great to see you, Mark.

• 2:35:39Mark Cuban?

  Always fun, guys.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  Enjoy the rest of your day.

• 2:35:40Mark Cuban?

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:35:42Mark Cuban?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I think we got a future Shark Tank.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. I came up with the name. I came up with the name.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 2:35:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it, but the domain's available.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  Okay, we're getting the domain.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  We're getting the domain. You're going to Shark Tank. You're going in the tank.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  I'm so excited for this.

• 2:36:08Jordi Hays?

  You're going in the tank, Ben.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  I'm so excited for this.

• 2:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Not you, Tyler.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  Not you, Tyler.

• 2:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Keep working on, keep working on our other, our other launch.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Once, yeah.

• 2:36:15Jordi Hays?

  All right, we gotta, we gotta hit the size gong.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  Okay, what do we have to do?

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  For Ro Khanna.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Ro Khanna?

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  He's put up 609 million of trading volume while in Congress. He's fighting back against the elites by trading against them.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  I was, I was, I was talking to Jordy about this this morning, and I was like, is, is, like, volume is hard because you can be very, a very high-volume trader, but I was reflecting on like, there are years when I just don't really trade that much.

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Or the only volume is the buy.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  The buy, and then you just hold or something.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  But, but he's putting up big numbers, but maybe he's running like, maybe he has like 10K in like a high-frequency trading operation.

• 2:36:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, long, short strategy.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  It's just, they're just eking out milliseconds of a tick.

• 2:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe he's running, maybe he's got a stack of 40 open, uh, open claw.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe he's been poaching from Jane Street, and so he's putting up a lot of volume.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  This is just insane volume from the anti-elite champion.

• 2:37:13John Coogan?

  It is crazy.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  He said, you guys want to dance?

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  337,000 trades.

• 2:37:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to trade against you.

• 2:37:17John Coogan?

  How do you even have time to consider 37,000 trades? Like, he's, I mean, how many?

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  How many minutes are in a year? In a year.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  That is a lot of volume and a lot of trades.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Five hundred thousand, five hundred and twenty-five thousand minutes in a year. So you can spend, you know, twenty minutes on each trade if you're working twenty-four seven. That is.

• 2:37:42Jordi Hays?

  He's been in.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  I'm sure there's something else going on.

• 2:37:45Jordi Hays?

  He's been in office for nine years.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  It's probably just like a, uh, like a investment manager. Yeah, he says it's his wife's money prior to the marriage.

• 2:37:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's averaging eleven trades a day since he went into office nine years ago, roughly.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the, and the stock ban legislation.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  And that's no days off. That's, that's weekends, holidays.

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  I don't know, let everybody trade. Let, why, why not?

• 2:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it sounds, it sounds like he's locked in.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  At all times. Oh, what else is going on?

• 2:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we are removing sanctions on Russian in, and Iranian oil.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which is.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Craziness.

• 2:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Craziness.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Didn't think that would happen. Let's watch the public latest ad. Is that, is that what we should pull up next?

• 2:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Pull, pull it up. Actually, let's, let's pull up this, this video first of our president.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  Of Gary Tan.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  But this is Gary Tan when he sees a Y C applicant using G stack to ship five hundred thousand lines of code daily. This is one of the best videos of all time.

• 2:38:46John Coogan?

  Just pulling out a wad of cash. I'm ready to invest.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Quickly counting it.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  It is so funny how lines of code became like not important at all.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Eyeballs.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  And now it's new.

• 2:38:56Jordi Hays?

  They're the new eyeballs.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Oh, the lines of code are the new eyeballs. I hope not. Uh, I was thinking that we should do a challenge here in the studio where every member of the team has to race to generate ten thousand lines of code. And whoever can do it fastest.

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  Okay, but how do you define a line of code? Like, I can just run a for loop that says.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  I will run a for loop after the lines of code are generated. And I will pass every line of code individually through G P T five point four pro. And I will ask it one question. Does this count as a line of code?

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  Okay, but can I have the same line of code ten thousand times?

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  You've invented the for loop, potentially, print, print this. That would be the most efficient way to do it, potentially.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this ad.

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  It might even be faster to just clone a repo, right? Clone a 10,000 line repo. Do you have to write it from scratch? We need to write the

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Download timing. Pull up the ad, sir.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are we watching here?

• 2:39:54Speaker 04

  Well, looking at your portfolio, you've got diverse equity exposure, broad market ETF, some fixed income. However, I am seeing a gap here. College basketball, baby. I'd recommend a three leg parlay. Maybe sprinkle in a few play props just to even things out. I've got a strong read on an early upset.

• 2:40:16Mark Cuban?

  If you're looking for a broker that's not also your bookie, we invite you to try public.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  It's a good ad. Really, really solidifying public's position as

• 2:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which has been very, very consistent.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very smart these days. Taking shots at

• 2:40:31Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if they're gonna actually run that on TV for March Madness.

• 2:40:35John Coogan?

  Would that be the right place to run it? I feel like March Madness viewers kind of want a bookie. Like they want to

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, March Madness is just like kind of everyone.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  Ah, yes, yeah, makes sense. Anyway, we have our start to the Lambda Lightning Round. Let's take a look at the beautiful cloud. And let's tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And we'll bring in our next guest, John Kim from Paraform. How are you doing, John? Thank you so much for taking your time to come chat with us. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:41:14Speaker 10

  Hey, guys, one of the founders and CEO of Paraform. We are a agentic hiring platform that makes hiring exceptional talent as easy as pressing a button.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:41:23Speaker 10

  So our first product

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got your button in the mail.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  We did.

• 2:41:27Jordi Hays?

  We got your button. We got a package from you guys.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  It was very well recorded.

• 2:41:30Jordi Hays?

  It was a great, great execution. The only issue is the chocolate completely exploded everywhere over the box.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  It made it way more memorable, honestly.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will never forget.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  Maybe there's alpha, there's deep alpha there, there. Anyway.

• 2:41:43Jordi Hays?

  But no, it was awesome. Thank you for the conversation.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  So who is the customer who's paying for this? Is it, is it large corporations, small companies, startups? Or do you have the applicant pay sometimes? How, how, how does the business model work?

• 2:41:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. So it's the companies paying. Um, we started out helping startups, you know, build their founding teams. Now we have sort of SMB mid-market enterprise. So, you know, everyone from like a fast-growing startup all the way to public companies like Palantir are our customers. Yeah.

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  And, and you raised some money. How did it come together?

• 2:42:16Speaker 10

  Yeah, um, yeah, we raised a $40 million round led by Scale Venture Partners. Um, I need to wait for the.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  And, yeah, and, and, and, uh, help me understand how you're going to deploy capital to accelerate at this particular moment in time? Because, uh, I imagine that actually building the platform has gotten easier, but engineers are still expensive. You still have to do top of funnel work. There's SDRs to hire. How are you thinking the shape of the business evolves over the next 12 to 18 months?

• 2:42:51Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, um, might be just like a classic answer, but you know, we, you know, obviously, uh, want to continue to, you know, do best-in-class growth. Um, we grew a ton, 10x our revenue last year and we want to continue to grow, uh, you know, at a, at a fast pace. So in order to do that, you know, we need to grow our team and, you know, all that stuff.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Speaker 10

  Uh, but, and also accelerate our product roadmap, right? Um, I think in particular, I'm personally spending a lot of time this year, uh, you know, really just narrowing down, focusing on our product roadmap. So, yeah. Uh, one more thing I will mention is, uh, we, uh, we sort of started in tech and helping tech companies hire, you know, EPD talent, sales, design, you name it. Uh, actually, we launched a new vertical, so we're, uh, helping, uh, law firms hire as well. Uh, you know, our goal is to be a universal hiring platform, not just for tech companies. So obviously deploying capital, uh, going across industries as well. Yeah.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the legal hiring market. Like, are you sourcing those people in a different place? Like, what's different about that that requires investment and changing the and generalizing the platform?

• 2:43:59Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through that.

• 2:44:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, since we're a recruiter marketplace, you know, in order to scale to another industry, we basically need a sort of a new set of supply, like legal recruiters. You know, actually, a lot of lateral attorney and partner hiring at law firms are driven by recruiting agencies. So the boutique, you know, sort of heavy hitters like who do all the recruiting. So, yeah, I guess to expand, we need a new set of supply. So we're doing that.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about just areas of growth in the US economy broadly? If you stack rank, like, there's a lot of energy around reindustrialization right now. We were hearing that electricians might be the LeBron James of the next era. But that feels like, I don't, I don't know that electricians are on the internet the same way that software engineers are, where they might have public GitHub profiles, blogs, LinkedIn profiles. How are you thinking about solving those next verticals?

• 2:44:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, I think like definitely like defense and government seems to be a huge area of growth. Yeah, like you said, manufacturing, like anything that's sort of like atoms, not bits. I think it's like sort of also going to grow a ton. I actually think like travel, entertainment, like those industries, media, you know, is going to do well as well. So, yeah, we're looking at what sort of verticals to go after, like to your point, based on what, what, you know, what we think are exciting. I also read the Anthropic report where they published sort of like what jobs are going to be like sort of replaced by AI, all that stuff.

• 2:45:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. They did that spider chart and then Andre Karpathy posted something similar.

• 2:45:35Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think actually, like, you know, my, my point of view is that the economy is not like a zero sum game, like it's actually an abundance game. So I actually, you know, not too worried about like AI replacing people. I mean, like, sure, there's some like adjustment on like what, how we need to upscale, upscale ourselves and differentiate, but. I think every technological revolution like humans figured out a way.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, the the interesting thing about that chart is that what's missing from that chart of things, jobs that will go away is like the new jobs that will be created.

• 2:46:04Speaker 10

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:46:05John Coogan?

  Like live streamer, business, technology news was not a thing when I was a kid. I there's zero chance that I ever could have put that down as like my future career will be live streamer.

• 2:46:15Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  That wasn't a thing.

• 2:46:16Jordi Hays?

  What uh in in conversations with investors for this round, what were you like, what kind of exits like were kind of referenced in the in the recruiting space? I know there's like public.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46:30Jordi Hays?

  Recruiting firms like, you know, these these companies scale to like massive, massive revenue.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Brett Adcock had a company.

• 2:46:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're they're not, no, I'm talking about like non tech companies that are just like we do staffing and recruiting.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  In different kind of verticals, but there's massive, massive companies in the space. Are you comping to those and saying like, hey, we there's we can be a billion dollar business? Uh, just based on serving a similar kind of uh sector.

• 2:46:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, I I think I'm not, I'm I'm not too sure if that was like the focal point of all the conversations, but I think it's a great question nonetheless. Like, I think.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I just I just say that because there hasn't been like, like every company has to hire a bunch of people, but there's not like the the.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  The Facebook.

• 2:47:10Jordi Hays?

  The face uh recruiting, there's nothing that like, there there's not like a perfect comp. Where Big Ma's like, well, like you have Adobe, so we're just gonna like eat some percentage of Adobe.

• 2:47:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think the way I look at it is if you look at the total amount of like dollars spent on recruiting, broadly speaking, like where does it go to? And actually, um, the biggest spend category is uh external recruiting. So outsourcing recruiting, working with recruiting agencies, staffing agencies. So like that's uh sort of the biggest spend. But actually, if you look at traditional like VC dollars over the last ten, twenty years, it all went to like HR software or recruiting software. And that category is actually not that big. It's like maybe ten billion, I uh I'm not sure exactly, but it it's not the biggest category. Yet ninety percent VC dollars went in there. But I think there's a little bit of a, you know, I think mismatch there. But um obviously, the market we're going after is um, you know, like, you know, labor market itself, right?

• 2:48:07Speaker 10

  I think um, I've heard somewhere also like we're shifting from paying for like software to paying for work. And instead of sort of building, paying for tools, we're paying for outcomes. And I think Paraform is very much aligned with that trend. So yeah, we're going after the biggest market in recruiting. Yeah.

• 2:48:25John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the new round.

• 2:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to get the opportunity.

• 2:48:30John Coogan?

  And good luck.

• 2:48:31Speaker 10

  Thank you.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:48:32Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, John.

• 2:48:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:48:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  And we will continue our Lambda Lightning round with Eugene from Edra. He's the co-founder and CEO. You have some exciting news for us today. Eugene, how are you doing?

• 2:48:46Speaker 11

  Good. How are you guys? Thank you for having me.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Exiting stealth. I love when companies exit stealth.

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the public eye.

• 2:48:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the public eye. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:48:56Speaker 11

  My name is Eugene Alpez. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Edra. With Edra, really, what we saw is that models are smart enough to do basically any work inside an enterprise. But the only problem is you have to tell them exactly what to do. And nobody has that, right? Like, you can't go to any company and tell them, just tell me exactly what to do.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't know what to do. How am I supposed to tell you what to do?

• 2:49:18Speaker 11

  Yeah. So what we do is we built an agentic learning system that just hooks up to their existing systems of record, figures out what their people are already doing, writes it out for them so they can see it, and then we use that to actually automate and do the work.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  Makes sense. So talk about what it means to like, just hook up to their internal systems. Because I feel like there's 20 tools in every category, and every company has 30 tools, and you multiply that together. That's a lot of integrations. Writing new integrations is easy, but is there a platform that you can sit on top of?

• 2:49:53Speaker 11

  For sure. So we have a couple of core systems that are really good for us. So we do ServiceNow, Jira, Outlook, of course, can't forget Outlook.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:02Speaker 11

  Salesforce Zendesk are some of the main ones.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:05Speaker 11

  That are kind of the first ones that we are working on top of.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then I'm sure if there's a client that's big enough, that could maybe prioritize an integration or something. But how big are the companies that you're working with at this point?

• 2:50:16Speaker 11

  Yeah. So I mean, our specialty is like, the larger the company, the better it is, the messier the process, the more of a challenge they have. So if you look at some of our customers that we went public with yesterday, includes ASOS, Cushman Wakefield, HubSpot, right? So pretty, pretty big.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the process like for closing those deals? Do you meet at conferences? I imagine that it's not some sort of direct response ad. You were in stealth. So how'd you get those deals done?

• 2:50:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, we've been around the block for about 10 years doing a lot of these things. So we had enough of a network and I think it's just a very compelling pitch, right? Like, I'm not telling you, "Let me come in and it's going to take three to six months and we're going to figure out what we're doing." I'm literally saying, "Hey, just give me one static cut of your data and in a week I will show you new things about your own company's operations you didn't know about." Right? And if I can't come back with that one week with something new, don't hire me. But so far it's been going pretty well.

• 2:51:13John Coogan?

  Are you throwing frontier models at just at every problem because you're in a high growth phase, you want to have the best possible product? Or are you already offloading certain jobs to lagging models, open source models, cheaper models? Just how much of the parade of frontier are you using these days?

• 2:51:32Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we need the smartest possible model to help us figure out what people are doing and what the process actually is. But then if you do that well enough, you don't need a super sophisticated model for it. So we just need something that's good at instruction following and that tends to be fine.

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  That makes sense. And how much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

• 2:51:52Speaker 11

  So we raised $30 million.

• 2:51:54John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 2:51:55Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:51:57Speaker 11

  Just Sequoia or did you let anyone else get a slice? So Sequoia led our A, we had ATVC and A-Star who they led our seed already. So we have continued support from them too.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  It's a murderer's row. Fantastic.

• 2:52:16Speaker 11

  Great lineup.

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress. Congratulations on exiting Stealth and thanks for taking the time to come chat with us today.

• 2:52:22Speaker 11

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:52:24Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And we will continue our Lamb of Lightning round with Ari from Run Civil, who's in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring Ari in. How are you doing?

• 2:52:41Speaker 12

  Howdy, good to meet you.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  Hey. Good to meet you. Uh, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:52:47Speaker 12

  Yeah, happy to. All right, so I am a man on a mission where we're trying to automate hacker intuition. Um, I guess I can start with a brief introduction to myself. So I was technically the first security hire at OpenAI uh back in 2019. Um, I was a grad student at Harvard doing my machine learning PhD. And I saw GPT-2 come out and I was like, wow, um, this would have been really useful back when I was a miscreant teenager doing insane operations on the internet.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:11Speaker 12

  Um, so I ended up bundling up a couple of demos of things that I would have made as a miscreant and I sent them to Sam Altman. And I sent them to Jack Clark, who was the head of comms at the time. Um, and then kind of the rest is history. They liked it enough that they invited me to come join. And so I was there for three years. Um, I was a core researcher on GPT-3 and on the Codex model. Um, I also built our first monitoring system for when we started offering the API as a thing that customers were then using um to make sure that customers were following our terms of service. Um, and then I left the company in part because we just didn't have a good answer for when the bad guys have access to everything.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:44Speaker 12

  Um, black pill moment for me was uh when we were doing this anonymized review of model outputs. I saw somebody uh trying to lock a file system and that could be totally benign, you know, educational, like how does encryption work? Or it could be somebody, you know, futzing around with malware and uh ransomware specifically. And there's really no way of telling that particular intentionality. And at the time, like our thought was, well, what if um, what if we focus on the monitoring? We just block people that are doing bad stuff. But realistically, when you have something that's as explosive as language models have become, uh, you're not going to be able to like play whack a mole. You kind of have to get um offensive with it. So uh, I started this company. Um, I have very blessed to work with my co-founder Vlad Ainescu, who uh built the red team at Meta.

• 2:54:23Speaker 12

  Um, and then I have a team of really strong engineers that we pulled from some of the top security engineering teams um in the industry. And we're focused on uh building something that will make the internet uh just broadly more safe. And it's just really rewarding to see a payoff.

• 2:54:37John Coogan?

  Are you seeing more uh more danger and risk from like large scale state actors? Or like the script kiddies who are just trying to like wreak havoc? Or is it both? Because I feel like some of the, some of the, it's like, like some of the, the problems with like the new AI security threats, like there's new capabilities, but there's also like a lot more cost than just like running some PHP script that like guesses WordPress passwords like back in the old days.

• 2:55:04Speaker 12

  Yeah, I'd say it's actually kind of a combination of the two. Like you have two types of threats and oftentimes it also depends on the type of organization that you are too. So for our customers that are smaller startups, like they're not really seeing any of this kind of stuff. But for our larger enterprises, we've been asked by a lot of them if they, they basically want to replace us with their bug bounty. Or they want to replace their bug bounty with us.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Oh, they want you to win all of the bug bounties. That's great.

• 2:55:29Speaker 12

  Just don't make mistakes.

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  That's your, that's your immediate TAM and I'm sure, I'm sure much further, but uh, talk to me about uh, model distillation. There's been a lot of news about uh, it, it, it's not as, as serious of a threat. It feels more like a business threat, but uh, I've always been, I've always been shocked by, you know, the stories about different open source companies where it feels like they trained on an American lab and that seems like something that the lab should be able to detect. Is that hard? Is that something you can help with?

• 2:55:58Speaker 12

  Yeah. So that's not what we do, but it is something that I've dealt with previously. Um, and it is something that everybody does and everybody kind of knows about as sort of a bit of a dirty secret. But I'll also say that when you do distillation, the model that you get out of it is going to be like net less good than the model that you're distilling off of. Like that's just information theory one on one. So it's something that is somewhat of a business threat, but it's not as big of a business threat as say like stealing the actual model itself.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, just actually breaking into the system.

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us your pitch to like a startup or a scale up on the customer side? And then all the way up to a lab, like how you, how you sell the product right now? Cause I understand like the opportunity at a high level, you know, basically every, all these companies are distributing intelligence. It's hard to understand how it's going to be used. A lot of people are going to use it for things that they shouldn't, you want to stop that. But like, what is the specific pitch in this moment in time?

• 2:56:52Speaker 12

  Yeah, I'd say like for one thing, focusing on like, security means a bunch of different things to different people. And right now what we're saying is that smaller teams need different things from larger teams. And the benefit in, of the way that we've built our product is that if you have more attack surface, it's just much more interesting for the type of things that we can find for you. So we've been moving up into enterprises and we have a lot of strong response from enterprise teams that are large. They have a lot of the old code bases that go back 40 years. There's a lot of cursed things in their environments, trying to get like additional coding tools in is, is kind of tricky.

• 2:57:23Speaker 12

  And I actually have kind of an interesting hot take for you, if you'll take it.

• 2:57:25John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:57:26Speaker 12

  Love it. Okay, so obviously, there's a lot of movement in security in terms of like the markets, especially when Anthropic dropped some of their news about some of their vulnerability discovery stuff. So I think a lot of people are concerned about whether or not like are the language model labs just going to solve security? And what I think is interesting is if code gets so much better in terms of security, the main question is like, does that mean that hacking gets harder? And my answer is no, because I think that speed is what's going to kill us. So the space of these large possible attack vectors requires a lot more data than simply the code. So if you look at the code, I like to kind of think about it as you're looking at the code of or looking at the bones of a dinosaur. It's you're going to find a lot of interesting things about structure, but you're going to miss a ton about things like muscles and whether or not they have feathers and also

• 2:58:11Speaker 12

  like behavior and like broader things like that, which are also very important for understanding the ecosystem. And that's true of code as well, and it's true of computers. It's easier to find bugs with the code, you know? Having the bones is very helpful for us, even knowing that these dinosaurs exist, but you miss so much other stuff. And that is where the real delta lies here. Authentication, for example, is famously difficult to suss out. Like, there are not very many, I don't think there are any good authentication scanners out there. But the way in which we build our product, it's very good at finding off-bugs. And in fact, one of our strengths that we've heard continuously is that like we're very good at finding these weird esoteric things that have existed in bug bunnies for like the last 10 years. And we get like pretty nice payouts from that, which is always fun.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  That's really cool. Talk to me about your take on the forward deployed engineer, pattern, model, trend, boom, whatever you want to call it. Are you in favor of that? Are you employing that at this time?

• 2:59:06Speaker 12

  That's a good question. I think that forward deploy is important if you're working with enterprise, because a lot of them, there's a lot of a human factor, like At least in startups, what we've learned is that people just want to solve the problem. Like the CTO comes to us and is like, hey, I have this deal blocked by SOC 2. I really need to get a pen test. And we're like, on it, got you fam. And we get them, they're on their merry way. But with these enterprise companies, it's a lot more of a political process. Security in general is kind of, it's partly the people and it's also of course the software too. And what you can do with a forward deploy engineer is you can provide more of that layer of trust. You can communicate a lot more with the proper stakeholders so they don't feel like their job is going to be taken away. There's a lot more of the human factor that you're able to introduce when you have that. And I think that's why it's so popular.

• 2:59:48Speaker 12

  We do something somewhat similar there and we find it to be particularly helpful with bringing people on board and being able to serve them faster.

• 2:59:54John Coogan?

  I'm looking at some of the customers here, Cursor, TurboPuffer, Notion, Base10, Thinking Machines. Congratulations. The business sounds great and makes a ton of sense and obviously raising money. But I'm curious if there's a almost like direct to consumer play at some point because everyone is going to be vibe coding. Like we are a 10 person team. We have like three systems and you know, we're sort of, you know, security second, maybe.

• 3:00:21Speaker 12

  Oh man, I have a black pill for you then.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  So tell me.

• 3:00:24Speaker 12

  Yeah, I don't think so.

• 3:00:27John Coogan?

  You don't think so?

• 3:00:27Speaker 12

  So because people don't like paying for security.

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Okay. But isn't there another way that you can make it so cheap or bake it in or partner with a lab where, you know, I'm vibe coding something and I, you know, get RunCible installed or it's modeled into the system somehow?

• 3:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the SOC 2 examples relevant because that's somebody that's like, I have to do this.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  Because I'm selling the software.

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  It's hurting my revenue.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  But we've heard so many things about somebody's using OpenClaw, they're vibe coding something, they're running their business on it. And increasingly it's turning into a system and at some point they need to think about security.

• 3:00:57Jordi Hays?

  But think about it, we bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of like camera equipment before we bought cameras to secure, you know.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  And even when we were doing that, we were like, eh, like.

• 3:01:13Speaker 12

  I think there's some truth to that, but let's also think about like the economics of who buys these tools too. So if you're paying like 20 bucks, 200 bucks for like a month long subscription, how much are you going to pay for like additional security on top of that? That's something that you're going to have to sell direct to that company. And there's not a lot of companies that really offer code securing related stuff. So I think for companies that are making the bet in that space, they're focused a bit more on like the ecosystem, which is we're focusing a bit more on like the overall ecosystem within an enterprise that has a ton of ancient code that is going to require a lot more in order to fix. And they also have just these enormous attack services that need some help.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, how much did you actually raise? Tell me about the fundraising round. We want to ring the gong.

• 3:01:52Speaker 12

  Oh yeah. So we raised 40 million, which we love.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Who came in?

• 3:02:00Speaker 12

  So Coastal had the round. We had participation from S32, Conviction, La Gill. We also had a bunch of angels as well. So Nikesh Aurora, who I know is on the show.

• 3:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Friday. That makes a ton of sense.

• 3:02:12Speaker 12

  Jeff Dean.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Wow. Ian Goodfellow too?

• 3:02:16Speaker 12

  It was pretty good.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  That's incredible. Congratulations. That's the lineup. Thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. I can visualize the Coachella poster. And thank you for securing the American software ecosystem. We appreciate that as well. Get every bug bounty that is out there. You deserve it. We'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you. Very, very blessed.

• 3:02:33Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And we have our last guest of the show. We will leave the Lambda Lightning round and bring Alex Konrad in to the TVD UltraDome from Upstarts Media. How are you doing, Alex? Good to see you again. He's back.

• 3:02:49Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm back. It's great to be virtually in the UltraDome.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  Yes, I love that poster behind you. That's a TV. Oh, is that a TV?

• 3:02:58Speaker 07

  We're high tech here, John.

• 3:03:00John Coogan?

  Okay, that makes sense. Anyway, what's new since we last talked? Tell me about the shape of Upstarts, how it's going, what type of beat you've... I don't know, how have you defined your beat? I think everyone knows your beat from before with the Midas List, of course, but what's changed? What's remained the same?

• 3:03:21Speaker 07

  You know, it's been almost exactly a year since we launched and you guys had me on the show, which is awesome. And as you know, year one startup, everything is crazy, but a lot of fun. You know, we've, we've launched a podcast, we have started doing some feature stories. We had one on William Hockey from Column that was a lot of fun a couple of weeks ago.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 3:03:38Speaker 07

  And just, and having a lot of fun experimenting, you know, we, we haven't been to the Ultra Dome in person, but that's a year or two stretch goal. Yes.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about lists? I remember we talked about this and I was like, I know you can't do the Midas list, that's left behind, but I feel like there's a big gap in the tech media landscape around lists. Market maps do well, people are split on them. We had a lot of fun with, uh, with a Metis list of AI researchers. Have you, are listicles just cringe or are they just actually not that interesting to you? Are they bad business? Cause I feel like there's a, there's something there and you're the guy.

• 3:04:13Speaker 07

  You know, I, I'm sorry to say we don't have that list for you yet, um, but maybe that'll be a thing this year. We are trying to do really service oriented coverage for founders. I think, you know, the reality is founders are super busy, right? And, and so are builders at startups. And so our podcast is one commute length. It's, it's a, you know, if you're not listening to TBPN yet, you're driving to the office, you can, you can tune in for upstarts each week, you know, 35 minutes. And then similarly, we tried with our article this week, a illustration where this woman Natalie Frato actually drew how data centers connect to this new GPU startup so that people could visualize it. And the hope is that it just helps people understand the info super fast.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  That's very cool.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  Or I, I, I read about this company, Giga, uh, today, that I don't even know if I should call it a startup. They haven't raised any money, but they're in the AI boom. It's just a business. Are you seeing like these knock on effects of the AI boom show up? And are you getting pitches from those folks? Or do they see themselves as like outsiders and they're happy to remain outsiders? Or do they want to cross over into the tech ecosystem? Like, how do you think about the broader, the broader ecosystem and knock on effects of the AI boom?

• 3:05:29Speaker 07

  Well, startup can mean anything these days, right? Like, I remember when we all started our career, a startup was venture-backed. It was maybe less than seven years old. It wasn't hiring people for a billion dollars.

• 3:05:39John Coogan?

  It wasn't worth a trillion dollars for a IPO.

• 3:05:43Speaker 07

  That's right. And now startup, I think, is more of an aspirational goal. You know, some days, Upstarts feels like a startup. Some days, it feels like a small business. I think similarly with these companies, in my mind, if they're trying to be really high-growth, if they're trying to move fast, and if they're serving a tech-savvy audience, that's good enough to be a startup.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. What do you think about the scoop economy? The big labs, there's so much drama, so many personalities. There are some journalists who've gone out and carved out, like, you know, they're just the scoop masters. Is that something?

• 3:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Scoop athletes.

• 3:06:15John Coogan?

  Scoop athletes.

• 3:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Trying to get to the scoop policy.

• 3:06:18John Coogan?

  As someone who's, I don't think, ever had a scoop, I don't know if I just haven't felt a rush, is it addictive? Like, what are the pros and cons of getting into that side of the business?

• 3:06:28Speaker 07

  There is a huge endorphin rush, right? If we're chasing endorphins and avoiding cortisol, I think, like, you know, when you do publish that scoop, it can feel really good. You know, for a while, our biggest story at Upstarts was last summer, we wrote about a startup that had left OpenAI, and they had raised a ton of money to do an RL, you know, reinforcement learning company. And when you looked at the spike in subscribers we got, like, that felt really good in a way. But you don't want to play that game all the time. I think it does end up being like chasing a rush that is not sustainable. And so I think, you know, I will let Katie Roof and those self-described scoop athletes chase it for the love of the game. For me, it's only really relevant if there's something concrete, like a lesson or an insight for that wider ecosystem versus just the horse racing of,

• 3:07:13Speaker 07

  hey, these guys from OpenAI raised even more money than those last guys.

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  In terms of the horse race, obviously, you ran the Midas list for many, many years. Is there, are there any venture capitalists who are underrated right now? Or do you think that there's any misconceptions in the venture capital community? Because I feel like the strategies have shifted so much, and we're seeing bifurcation between the small funds and the mega funds. And there's folks who are venture capitalists, but they're trading in public markets all day long, or running private equity shops now, or buying hospital networks. Like, the strategies have evolved so much. Like, what other stories are interesting in the venture capital landscape broadly?

• 3:07:57Speaker 07

  Well, first, I think this year, we're gonna have to start a upstart spotted on the street VC thing, because I saw, I spotted Keith Raboy at a restaurant earlier this week in New York, and I gave him the eye, you know, and I said, "Come over," and we shook hands, and, you know, the poor founders who are with Keith were like, "Who is this dude?" So I do think we should do a segment of just where I spot VCs around New York City and San Francisco and awkwardly wave to them.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  TMZ.

• 3:08:21Speaker 07

  Popper out. Yeah, that's right.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, TMZ mode.

• 3:08:24Speaker 07

  That's the coverage we need, right? We need the gossip coverage of VC again. But on a serious note, I mean, I love the domain experts, like the really nerdy guys who are not posting a lot on X, who are just really well-regarded. When I ask around, like, "Hey, who's really smart on GPUs?" And so my advice to VCs usually is like, have a thing you're known for. If all you're known for is posting on Twitter slash X, that's probably not a defense, you know, defensible strategy in the long run.

• 3:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:52Jordi Hays?

  What is, what, what advice do you give to VCs that might be due for their first Midas list appearance now that you have a bit of space and you're not involved in the process?

• 3:09:03Speaker 07

  I mean, at the end of the day, venture is a results business. I mean, you, you guys have had guests on recently who've talked about what is real and what is not, and I think the numbers generally do speak for themselves. You know, you get a big exit that is kind of the mic drop that I think Midas is a lagging indicator to notice. I think for VCs who feel like they have that portfolio that's not recognized yet, the first thing I would say is be top of mind for your founders. You know, often journalists like me or at the big shops, like, we'll talk to a founder and we'll be like, "Who are the couple of VCs who backed you, who we should call to get to know your business better?" If you're not one of those first two or three VCs that the founder mentions as a reference, that's, that's not great. So I'd start there with like, "Are you top of mind for your biggest winners?"

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's a mix of results plus the mic drop moment in the last 12 months plus kind of founder brand. Is that a good way to think about it?

• 3:09:59Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, I mean, the Midas list is data only, so the the founder brand doesn't matter as much. But I think if you're feeling like, hey, I I want those flowers.

• 3:10:06Jordi Hays?

  It's data, yeah, well, it's data, it's data only, but it's not just like blended IRR across every investment.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  And there's still a crazy internal politics at every VC firm of like, oh, yeah, that associate who was here for two years and was the one who actually got that deal, but then left, like, that's my deal now.

• 3:10:23Speaker 07

  Hey, I mean, you guys know venture is a tough game like that, you know, my wife just left VC to go into operating back at a startup clay. And, you know, she she will have her deals that she sourced and she was involved in. And will she be in the history in years? You know, we don't know. And I think similarly, if you source the deals and you moved on to another firm, or you went back into operating, like, history will, I think, give you the credit in the long run. But yeah, for Midas, that can be tough, because like, five people at Sequoia claim each, you know, big deal.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I heard that there's one firm, I don't know if it's benchmark, but they have like a ledger that when the deal closes, they all agree on the allocation. Okay, you brought it in and you're going to be on the board, you get 80%, but I worked the deal with you, so I get 20%. And we all sign, and then we know who got the credit.

• 3:11:10Jordi Hays?

  System of record.

• 3:11:10John Coogan?

  A system of record, ERP, basically. But I don't know if that's employed at every every VC firm. Has there ever been, in in your memory, a situation where sort of like a VC stake was discovered in sort of an IPO prospectus, or like an S1? Because I imagine usually the VCs are taking plenty of victory laps throughout the process once things get close. But I'm I'm wondering if there's ever been like, the quiet VC, not on Twitter, not posting, and then all of a sudden, the IPO comes out, and they're like, wait, they own 20% of this company? This is crazy.

• 3:11:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, a firm that was historically under the radar was Sutter Hill.

• 3:11:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:11:51Speaker 07

  So Michael Spicer, when Snowflake went public, he got tons of credit, deservedly so. But they had been totally under the radar. And so those more incubation type ones, those are really interesting.

• 3:12:03Speaker 07

  And I think, I think otherwise, the thing to know with the S1 is it's usually like a big dog at the firm whose name is attached, but that doesn't mean they necessarily were the, the person who did the deal. What happened earlier in my career is people would be like, did you know I sourced that deal? And then I left that firm and I hadn't been in the game long enough to like know any of this trivia. And so that was terrifying for me. Over time, I started to know all the trivia, like Airbnb was sourced by this person and then this person was on the board and then this person was on the board. And I, I don't wish that data on anybody's head.

• 3:12:33John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 3:12:36John Coogan?

  Do you view venture capital and the startup ecosystem as like a buyer's market or seller's market? Like, like, is it a good time to be in a startup versus it's a good time to be a VC? And where are we in the cycle?

• 3:12:53Speaker 07

  What an easy question, right? You're, you're saving all the, the easy ones for less. I think, you know, we're, we continue to be in that have and have not market where I think you see crazy valuations for companies that have traction. And then I hear from so many startups that are still like, how do we meet these guys? Like, how do we get anyone to pay attention to us? And it's, it's humbling for me that, you know, even though I'm saying, hey, we want to cover startups that aren't getting that coverage, even then there are most that I just can't help or get to. And so I think like, I would encourage people to get away from the buzzwords, uh, you know, especially get away from Silicon Valley. And there's still plenty of companies that are not getting funding.

• 3:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Will you ever write a book?

• 3:13:33Speaker 07

  About what? About you guys?

• 3:13:35John Coogan?

  No, about your experience. I mean, this is a common path, I feel like.

• 3:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you find a, a company or a team that-

• 3:13:43John Coogan?

  And, and, and the scoop grows into a book. Sometimes there's, you know, composite profile of an industry or a career. I don't know. It, it sounds like, no, it sounds like you have no appetite for a book at all. But is that

• 3:13:55Speaker 07

  Well, I just don't have the bandwidth. I mean, like you guys, I think I'm in the arena every day now. Putting points on the board and I think, you know, books seem like a beautiful stretch goal. If upstarts really scales, but you know, I wanted to write books in the past, maybe, but I think you need to really have the idea.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:12Speaker 07

  You can't just reverse engineer. It's like saying I want to be a founder and not knowing what company.

• 3:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to have a book in you at the time and then it just has to sort of.

• 3:14:20Speaker 07

  And you have to love the topic, right? Like, how boring would it be to write the world's 10th book about Nvidia? Like, do we need that? I don't think so.

• 3:14:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 3:14:29John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 3:14:29Speaker 07

  Jordy's like, you're gonna do it.

• 3:14:32John Coogan?

  I would, I mean, I would, I would, I would read an entire book just about the

• 3:14:37Jordi Hays?

  The leather jackets.

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  Or the leather jacket.

• 3:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Leather jackets.

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  Or just an entire book just around the history of DLSS. Just, just deep learning super sampling.

• 3:14:46Speaker 07

  Well, you know what I think you guys are speaking to that I do think about a lot? Like, information is so crazy right now. You know, you guys have these amazing guests on every day. You're grinding and, you know, so many people are out there putting out good information. Is there room for that person who just kind of disappears for a long time on a crazy project and comes back with like a big fish?

• 3:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we talked about this a while back with, there's this YouTube channel that I love called The Corridor Crew. And they talk about visual effects, specifically very niche. How would that ever be on TV? It just would never be on TV, but it's turned into a TV show. Multiple episodes every week, fantastically successful. They build a whole business. They have a studio and team. And, and their, their dream was always, okay, we're good at visual effects. We want to do a movie or be the VFX crew on a movie. We're capable. But they kept building up their YouTube business and every time Hollywood would come to them, they would say, yeah, we'll give you, you know, we'll give you 300K. And they're like, but our business is making a million dollars now.

• 3:15:50John Coogan?

  And they say, okay, it doesn't work. And they come back and be like, you know what? We're ready. We got a million and a half dollars for you. And they're like, but our business is doing 3 million. Like, we can't step away. And so this tug of war is always happening. And I feel like the book is the same thing where, you know, can you really turn off the podcast? Or can you turn off the reporting? Or can you turn off the, the, the, all the, all the other reporting?

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I've just come back to this as like legacy media brands are the best place to go. You know, fishing.

• 3:16:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Because they're, they will say, yes, you can, we're going to pay you a salary and you're going to go work on the story.

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  And you might not be able to show any real results for a longer period of time. Doesn't work that well for a Substack model where you got to show.

• 3:16:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Value.

• 3:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times a week.

• 3:16:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's totally true. I mean, every week I feel like I got to win, win the week, you know? I feel like I'm proving myself to my audience every single week and day.

• 3:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we feel the same way.

• 3:16:41Speaker 07

  I will say, we are doing these quarterly profiles now. Hockey was the first one with column.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 3:16:47Speaker 07

  I think we have a really cool one cooking for the second quarter. And the dream is that maybe like we put four of those in a little booklet.

• 3:16:53John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 3:16:53Speaker 07

  That, you know, can be on a coffee table and maybe we start to get into print and have fun that way, but it's, it's baby steps, you know?

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, do, do you have sort of a, a, a media critique take on like the future of investigative journalism? Where that might exist, what the funding model for that is, because it feels harder than ever to have a, a journalist go and spend a year on something that may or may not work out.

• 3:17:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, um, the short answer is that I agree with Jordy in a lot of ways that you do need the sort of big shops that can still weather the storm for someone. You know, at Forbes, I would be hunting that big cover story and do it and then recharge my battery while other people were kind of putting up the singles and the doubles. And now it's like, you need the singles and doubles and then you look for the homerun. Um, so I do think a team is important there. But one, one thing I would challenge people to think about is, is there a way to fund a project for a year? Like, you know, like whether it's Patreon or Substack or something like that, where you do a year or even a multi-year subscription, where you say, we're going to give you money upfront. Do the best, craziest thing you can do in that time. And, you know, it can, it can be as few as one thing.

• 3:18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:03Speaker 07

  But then we'll be happy because I think the challenge, as you said, with Substack is, Substack sends you the numbers. You can see them going up and down. You never want to see them going down. And so could we create that headspace via some sort of crowdfunded model? I mean, I would love to see the innovation.

• 3:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems tough. Well, thank you so much for taking.

• 3:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the gong for a year. Is it actually the year of the, the first year? Did you hit the anniversary yet?

• 3:18:27Speaker 07

  We're a week away.

• 3:18:28Jordi Hays?

  A week away.

• 3:18:29Speaker 07

  Can we, can we hit the gong anyway?

• 3:18:34John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up, Alex.

• 3:18:35John Coogan?

  Great to catch up and we will talk to you soon.

• 3:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to the team.

• 3:18:38John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:18:39Speaker 07

  All right. See you guys soon.

• 3:18:40John Coogan?

  Here's some advice, don't buy AirPods. You need the Sony WH1000XM5WHCH720NWF1000XM5CH520s. Get those, just pick those up. That's what Dylan

• 3:18:59Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe how mainstream this post is.

• 3:19:01John Coogan?

  Whoa, I didn't realize 150,000 likes. What is Sony doing? They need to rename their products. Just call it like the Sony, I don't know, head pods or something, headphones. They should, I mean, people say XM4s, which I think is the, like, the last three digits. That's what they refer to them, or the last three characters. That's what they refer to the headphones as. And so we will just call them XM4s. But, uh, rough with the naming schemes. Anyway, uh, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor to be with you today.

• 3:19:33John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.