Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple Over Lawsuit, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Big deal, the big one that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable founded in 2012 and once valued at $11.7 billion is getting acquired by Bending Spoons founded in 2013 at 2.7 times ARR. Once hot startup, now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says Didi Das. It raised $1.4 billion, only to be sold for $1.285 billion enterprise value because they had almost $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet. And so the total equity value was 2.25 billion equity value. Just clearing the preference stack.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  So, early employees, founders probably got something, later investors probably got 1X their money back, but probably had it tied up for a few years. So, not a good outcome, but there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it's good for, could be good for Bending Spoons if they got a good deal and they turn it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going because they're sort of dividing it up.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Really, sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars and everyone's like, wow, that's unfortunate.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  And in a wake-up call to the, to the many, maybe younger companies that are at a lower revenue run rates, that are raising at much higher valuations, and basically signaling to them, like, you've, you've got some, many, many years of compounding to do.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. There's a SaaS apocalypse narrative, which is like, these companies are going away, software won't exist, you'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that, it does feel like the, the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single-point solution SaaS products, single-player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable. It's not that they're going to zero. Bending Spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero. But at the same time, you can't underwrite it.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's still growing, it's growing 20%.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but you can't underwrite it at 40X revenue, 100X revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with D2C e-commerce, honestly. There was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture backable and you could, and you could underwrite them, or they were being underwritten, similarly to venture startups that had true modes, true compounding advantages. They would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or, or an AI company or a, or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of a, just a weird quirk in the system for a couple of years. And then go forward a few years when there were some pullbacks. Some of the IPOs went out, they didn't do

• 3:06John Coogan?

  that well, they traded down. And all of a sudden, it was like, okay, well, if we're doing, if we're doing, you know, in my case, like food on the internet, we're going to VC back a food company, like, has Nestle been disrupted? Like, no. And that would, now Unilever, is Unilever trading down like crazy? Because they're facing so much pressure? And that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation. Like, you see this with, I saw some crazy posts about how people were bearish on Starlink for a while and the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And, and you see this with, you know, social media came out. And yes, like the newspaper and the internet, actually, the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in, in e-commerce,

• 3:47John Coogan?

  D2C e-commerce, any of that. And, and we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business, if you're saying, look, I am in this SaaS industry, it is going to be more competitive going forward, but I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple so that at every point, if I'm trading at 3x ARR, I'm happy because the cap table's set up for that, right?

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing I will say is, I started using Airtable, it was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in. But the product, the way that I use the product back then for my, for my first business, I would 100% just, just vibe code a solution today. Because I was using like very basic dashboard functionality. I wanted dashboards that we could use internally, share externally. Now it'd be very, quite easy to just do all of that in Codex or your favorite agent. So, I do think that business is very much under, under threat over the long run, but still has sort of compounding that it can do, just given how, how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and some, and the long tail of, of small businesses.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  I'd be very interested to know, what is, you know, new user, new logo growth like versus just expansion within an organization? Because if you have some company that's already sort of running on Airtable, they're growing, so they're adding seeds, they're adding functionality because they're sort of bought in and they're not going to rip it out. What does that growth rate look like versus, you know, new companies actually going and signing up and saying like, yes, this is the best tool for the job? Because you do get a lot built for free and like, it's not like they don't have access to AI agents that can improve their systems. Like, you might be doing a lot of maintenance on your vibe-coded solution, but at the same time, a lot of people, especially in smaller organizations, were using this as like just

• 5:38John Coogan?

  one small dashboarding tool, one small database that is sort of replicable. So, interesting to see where it goes. And, yeah, just like an, an interesting data point in the SaaS apocalypse, late-stage growth, like, is it a zombie corn? What are you, what term are you using for it? Jared Sleeper has some more thoughts. 480 million ARR, growing 20%. It's a unicorn exit. Many very satisfied customers, including Jared Sleeper for years, fantastic run, never underestimate how much VCs love products that make, quote, "everyone a builder." The wrinkle is that one-player products are high churn. Was Airtable, I mean, I feel like the whole pitch for Airtable was that it was multiplayer, but maybe that

• 6:20John Coogan?

  wasn't the way that people were actually using it that often. A lot of people would just be like, oh yeah, that, that guy on the team is using Airtable for that thing. But, I mean, certainly from very early on, the pitch was.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  I think by one player, he means that you can, it's more like product-led, like one person at a company. Because I've only used it in a team capacity, right? But one player can sign up, start using it, invite other people to the team.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's an advantage because you're bottom up, you can just ramp into a different company so quickly. But at the same time, if you're not like going through the CFO and being like, there is a mandate that we're using this ERP system.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Selling 200 seats at once.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah, it is a little different. Three, his third point. Gross retention remains the single greatest predictive variable of terminal value for any business that doesn't have a scale effect or network effect. It dictates somewhat mathematically what folks like Bending Spoons will pay. Great to see employees get liquid, but perhaps sad that some are learning about liquidation preferences, SaaS multiples to their disappointment. So, of course, if you had mentally marked your stock at 11 billion, but then this deal happens, the investors that put in that money at 11 billion, they're going to get their money back first, and then you're going to have to fight for whatever's left over, the scraps. Silicon Valley can do a better job talking to employees about what stock is worth in

• 7:40John Coogan?

  various scenarios, but no one is incentivized to do it. Well, I mean, you can also just look it up, there's a whole bunch of blog posts about it, you can ask GPT and get a whole deep dive on run this whole scenario and play out every possible option. But yes, I, I agree. No, no one likes to, you know, oh, we're closing the big candidate. Let's tell them about what's going to happen if Bending Spoons comes in.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's tell them what happens if we get our spoon bent.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Bending Spoons is emerging as the constellation software of the prosumer high churn, higher churn SaaS, is a fascinating turn of events and a good thing for pref stacks everywhere? Just because there's more liquidity for systems?

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's a buyer of last resort.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, whereas.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Like, no founder, no founder's setting out, hey, I want to be, you know, go on this generational run and then get my spoon bent. But it's still, it's still great because it allows, again, it is real liquidity. This is a win. I think Bending Spoons, Bending Spoons will obviously end up.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would say like right sizing the company. They're not going to continue to run it the same way that it's been run.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  But at least it allows everyone to get out and go on to do new things.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. In an interesting twist, speaking of getting out, Sheil Monat shares this about the Airtable acquisition. They spun out their AI business, Hyperagent, prior to the acquisition. So the company lives on and likely some cash with it probably can be recapitalized. Seems, seems like a fantastic outcome. Shed the old business and focus on AI. So I would be very interested to see who is going to be working at Hyperagent? Is this something where the founders didn't want to exit the business entirely and then just start from scratch? They wanted to take a whole bunch of the team with them and they wanted a bunch of the resources and learnings. And so they were able to package everything up and this will be something that's very founder-led? Or was this just, okay, that is a more expensive piece of the business?

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Benning Spoons, it's, it's, it's earlier in its ramp. Maybe it's working, maybe it's not. But that's not the business that's Benning Spoons in. And so this is more like a bending.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, bending spoons, look, we've had, we've had both founders on the show.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Bending spoons is like, hey, let's take a great product and just basically right-size the team, run it efficiently. And we're not trying to get growth back to 200, 300% a year. Howie's been on the show. He talked a bit about Hyperagent. That's a product that if they execute well, can grow 10x year over year, right? And so I could imagine, again, leaving some of the team to just continue running Airtable indefinitely. And then again, like you said, taking some of the talent out and saying like, let's take another big swing.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Liquidity is, is laughing about the fact that Benning Spoons has a very soft, friendly brand. Benning Spoons branding, very, very simple. And it just sounds like such a simple name. It's not like Cerberus Capital. And yet, when they negotiate, they're presumably difficult to negotiate with. I, I don't know. I mean, in a certain situation, you can be very friendly and amicable and just sort of say like, yeah, we're, we're a buyer at 2.7 ARR, you know? We're not going to like screw you over here. We're just going to give you, this is a fair price. Take it or leave it and you can take it. You don't necessarily need to be this like crazy werewolf like a shark, you know?

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's just not, there's just not that many, there's not that many buyers for a company like Airtable.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  A, a, just sort of in this, in this economy, a slow-growing enterprise software business, right? There are not that many buyers. If Airtable had wanted to sell in 2020, I'm sure they would have gotten meaningfully more. They probably did have offers at different points. You could imagine Airtable, you know, ending up at a, you know, a Salesforce as an example. But now Luca is saying the buyer of last resort is, is like, maybe, maybe unfair.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, just like a value-based buyer.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Snap earnings happened and Evan Spiegel was on CNBC talking to Sorkin. And it's a very interesting storyline because people are obsessed with the specs. I mean, job completed in terms of like getting more attention for the company. But it's been sort of a weight around the company because the question is like, okay, is, is everyone going to be buying $2,200 smart glasses from you anytime soon? When that's not really the story. The story is actually like the revenue growth, the profit, the operating leverage, the coming back into the business. So I mean, overall, it was a good quarter for Snap, clear beat. Revenue was up 19% year over year with profitability and cash generation rising even faster.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  So that's that operating leverage. They're growing revenue faster than they're growing costs. And so they're increasing their margins. Advertising revenue grew 9% to 1. roughly 3 billion in the quarter. But the really interesting number that was surprising to me was they're making $316 million a quarter in subscriptions and paid services. Up 85%. So just subscribing and being a paid power user, it's only 3% of the user base, something like that. But that's, that's now a billion-dollar line of business, obviously very high margin. Working really plays to the strengths of what Snap offers.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  And usage is up globally, but they're losing a step in Western markets. So the North America, I think, fell 7% and Europe fell 2%. And so that's not great for long-term ad monetization because you want to be in the, the richer countries generally. But still, revenue is accelerating. They are monetizing better. And that's probably an AI story. It's just like a boring AI story because it's like the ad recommendation system got a little bit better. Nobody really cares. People want to focus on specs, but they're $2,200 and they're bulkier than competing smart glasses.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, it felt like in that interview, Spiegel was talking about specs, but he wasn't wearing them.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does he need to wear them?

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  I think he kind of needs to wear them all the time.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  I mean, you're going to hold Apple to that? Tim Cook's got to wear a Vision Pro everywhere he goes? That'd be hilarious.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but the Vision Pro is not meant to be.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Augmented reality. It's augmented reality. It's meant to be worn 24/7 if you're a serious person. Let's actually pull up.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  You should do a full show. If you love.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  I could.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  Apple Vision Pro so much.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Not be a problem.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Do the full show.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Do the full show.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  This Friday.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Well, we'll, we'll test around it with Tyler.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  So here, here, here's an interesting tidbit. Specs, it feels like, oh my God, they're spending so much money. It's like so crazy. I think the rough estimate is like 300 million a year, which is a lot, but it's only 5% of their cost. It's like 20% of their overall R and D budget, maybe something like that. These are very rough numbers. But it's not like, it's not like if they just spun out specs or cut, cut specs and they were just like, we're not doing anything there. All of a sudden, the business is like wildly profitable. It's not that big of a stone around the neck. It's more just like a distraction and a question. And it's also not great that on the earnings call, they asked, how many pre-orders have you sold?

• 14:53John Coogan?

  And he sort of danced around it and really gave a straight answer on that. Because if it was good, you'd probably be like, yeah, we sold.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you'd lead with that.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's play a little bit of Evan Spiegel on CNBC. I want to hear him talk.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Snap reporting Q2 results after the bell on Monday. They scored an earnings beat with $1.6 billion in revenue. It's 19% higher than just one year ago. And joining us right now for more Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. He did not bring his glasses on the set, but we're going to talk about those glasses in just a minute because I think that's been a big part of the story. But you beat across the board, not just by the way on the revenue piece, but on the margin piece, which is what I think the market was actually looking for.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on, Andrew. It's such a beautiful morning here in Aspen. It was a great quarter for Snap. And I think what folks are seeing is that the free cash flow in the business is really starting to inflect, which is allowing us to offset dilution, to strengthen our balance sheet, and of course, to continue investing in the future, which is so important to us.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Okay, click forward to like 2:30.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Pieces of that story. I mentioned glasses. We'll get there in a second. I think glasses.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Because I want to hear him talk about glasses.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  About 2,200 bucks right now? 2100 bucks is what they're going to come in at?

• 15:58Speaker 03

  2195.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Okay, so the question I keep thinking about is how quickly those can come to market in a way, at a, in a way and at a price point that people buy them, you know, en masse? And how you think about the competition coming from whatever you think Apple is ultimately going to create, whatever you think Google is working on, and whatever you think Meta is going to do next?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Well, we've been working for more than 12 years to reinvent the computer and make it feel more. Overnight success. I think today people are spending more than seven hours on average staring at screens. Specs represent the opportunity to bring computing into the world, to make it a shared experience. And ultimately to help, you know, bring all the productivity gains we saw in desktop computing and laptop computing to the real world and to real world jobs, which is the vast majority of jobs, about 60% of jobs. So I, I think this computing transformation is incredibly exciting. We're certainly the, the leader in the space. I think specs represent a totally new category, right? If you look at the landscape today, you have very bulky but capable headsets. And then you have very limited but lightweight AI glasses. And specs represent, you know, the capability of some of these VR headsets in terms of the immersiveness and the ability

• 17:03Speaker 03

  to really have a full workstation experience, but with the wearability of some of these lighter weight glasses.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  But do you say to yourself, Apple's going to come and do the same thing and Meta's going to go? I mean, so how do you think about that, given the cost of, of putting this all out there? And the amount of money that some of these big companies can actually throw at this?

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, as we look at the history of innovation, I actually think one of the things that helps power innovation are constraints, right? And one of the things that makes Snap so unique is that we've been so laser focused on specs for such a long period of time. So I think this focus, our history of innovation, you know, and our first mover advantage in the space.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  It feels like it should be a different company. If you want to be laser focused, it feels like the benefit would be like, do the Elon thing, start a separate company that is laser focused on it. The investors in that company are laser focused on that, the employees.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, have a distribution deal with Snap.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, like, just, just have this, like, you know, get, we're good on this video. Just get Snap to a really polished, oiled machine. You own all the equity. You have the founder control. It's your, you know, your, your, your financial backstop, your, your credibility for, to actually go and truly laser focused because like, it's weird to be laser focused on a thing that's not your core business. And then everyone's just constantly asking you, like, we'd love for you to laser focus on the main business that's making billions of dollars every year.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Seems pretty solid.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like making $6 billion. Well, what do you think, Tyler?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, earlier this year, they did spin off the AI video company. And that seems like much more related to the main, like, you know, Snapchat app than the glasses, right?

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Wait, what is the AI video company?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  I think it's called Dotmo. It was like their internal generative video team.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  He was talking about enterprise use cases for the glasses?

• 18:52John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Like workplace use cases? It's so hard to imagine. It's, it's, as an independent company, you make a really great device. I can imagine that company having its own go-to-market motion saying, hey, Amazon, we want you to use, you know, our devices across your workforce. And maybe they do a pilot.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  But trying to sell in like Snapchat glasses into the enterprise?

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Feels like just gonna be a tough sell.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  OpenAI is firing back at Apple. A little, little glazy, though. They say Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time. What a funny way to kick off a, a blog post. Firing back at a lawsuit. Apple just cooked, uh, OpenAI just cooked.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, they say in built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  True.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  And then they go on to say, maybe there were some details that were missed.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yes. So what, what were the key things that they said? They accused, Apple accused OpenAI of ignoring them. Turns out the lawyers emailed the wrong Asian guy because two Asian last names look similar. They claimed you discussed the allegations with OpenAI's general counsel. They admitted that that conversation never happened. Accused ex, ex, an ex-employee of improperly accessing files. They forgot to mention, Apple employees were allegedly asking him to access those same files after he left. So there seemed to be some scenario where like, the guy had left, but he had so much internal knowledge that someone at Apple was just like, hey, like, can you remind me where this thing is or something?

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When reading through the initial complaint, Apple made it seem like the employee or the former employee was just running wild through his old laptop.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  He had sent a message to someone at Apple saying something to the effect, I'm paraphrasing, but I still have access to my computer lol. But the reason that, in the text messages that they shared, you can imagine the reason that he was there and sending that message. Why would he send the message if he was doing something that he was, that was wrong and that he would feel guilty of, right? He was helping his former teammates.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Weird.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  And they say, there's 10 other people I could ask you, but you're the smartest or something like that.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, and so when you have all this context, the story looks quite a lot different.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're sharing a lot of text messages. You can go read the blog post, but there's like full back and forth iMessages between Chang Liu and Apple employees, where Chang, whose last day at Apple was January 22nd, 2026, is being asked by his former colleagues to help them locate files and information to assist them with their Apple work. Note, other individual names in Apple confidential, confidential information has been redacted. So certainly another, another wild.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm still, I'm still just very surprised that, that Apple, during the middle of a, you know, a, a year-long talent raid, uh, would know that someone significant had quit and that would not go through the process of actually taking back their laptop and making sure that, um, you know, the, the separation was, um, really finalized. People, people have been saying stories how historically, you know, maybe call it 15 years ago, if you quit Apple, someone would show up to your house immediately and take back any prototypes that you may have had or anything, anything of the sort.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm excited for Prediction Markets to get on this, honestly. It was very helpful during the, uh, the Elon Musk, OpenAI case. Currently, call she has a few here. Will the OpenAI Johnny Ive device have a screen? No is at 82%. Um, when will OpenAI release Astra? And there's some dates here. What else are they? Will OpenAI increase the cost of ChatGPT? No, at 87%. Uh, no market on the Apple lawsuit because it's, it's still very early. There's not even like a court date yet. Um, but we'll keep tracking it because it's an interesting story. Uh, is BMW forcing owners to watch a Spider-Man Brand

• 22:52John Coogan?

  New Day promo when they start their cars up? That's the question. A lot of people were upset about this. Jordy this morning is like, this is awful. Uh, there's some nuance here. So BMW, BMW owners are debating the company's latest in-car promotion after videos spread across X showing a Spider-Man Brand New Day animation appearing on their vehicle's infotainment screen at startup.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  And the reason why this, uh, fake news triggered me was back in the day in college, I was getting a Kindle.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  And on the checkout page, it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad-supported Kindle? And as a college student, I was like, hmm, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table, just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like, I would have actually appreciated ads.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Can't you just flip it upside down?

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  One, one simple trick.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Jordy hates this one.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  One simple trick. But it wouldn't be ads for like Spider-Man. It would be ads for random books.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah, books.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, and the targeting wasn't good. So again, people don't like ads.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  If the target was good.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, what happened here, John?

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so venture capitalist Shiel Monat wrote, when you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider-Man, really cheapens the BMW, in my opinion. A 16Z partner, Josh Elman, added, of all the brands I thought I might, I thought might bombard you with in-car ads on screen right when you start the engine, I had BMW pretty dang low on that list. Uh, this seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand? I thought they were premium.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, I think it's a premium brand.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Premium brand. Uh, even Paul Graham weighed in, though, uh, reposting Monat's video and saying, I'm never buying a BMW. He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in a E39M3?

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but what, what actually happened? You have to opt into this.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Community notes added important context. According to one note, the Spider-Man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27th through August 10th, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full screen ad. Instead, owners must tap it to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited time startup experiences in the past, including holiday-themed animations. Jordy?

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, very different. Uh, you can just see the pop-up there. Surprise. Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW. And then it's an ad.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  That's if you press the button. You have to actually turn it on. It, it's not.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, but I'm saying there's a banner ad.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Oh, there is a banner ad?

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  It's just a banner. Look at the video. Start it over.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Uh, let's see. Let's, let's be the judge of this.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Look at this banner. It's a banner.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  If you click the banner, then it plays an ad. So it's a pop-up that you click.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, wait, what does this pop-up? Why does my car have a pop-up?

• 25:53John Coogan?

  It should probably be tucked into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like promotions or themes.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  That didn't look tucked in anywhere. Yeah, they're literally saying, surprise, a Spider-Man ad. And they're not even, like, they should just say, hey, we have an ad for Spider-Man here.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  If you'd like one.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Okay, this is right on the line.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  But this, this is, this is, this crosses my line.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  This crosses your line.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Because you're like, what does Spider-Man have to do?

• 26:18John Coogan?

  This is above your line.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  What does, what does Spider-Man have to do with my car? And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider-Man.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Spider-Man's doing well, though. So the ads are working. So, you know, maybe the BMW show, owner showed up in droves because the new Spider-Man movie scores Hollywood's second biggest debut ever. That's actually huge. The Sony film grossed $932 million through Sunday, topped only by 2019's Avengers Endgame. That is massive. Did you realize that this movie was making that much money?

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if you had asked me an hour ago, is there a new Spider-Man movie coming out? I would say, haven't heard of anything.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I haven't seen that much energy about it. I've been aware of it, but I have not, I've not seen like a massive takeover. Um, but also, I'm not driving an ad-supported BMW, so maybe that's the problem. Uh, Spider-Man spun a massive weekend for movie theaters flouting superhero fatigue and giving a major boost to Hollywood's summer block, uh, box office. Sony pictures Spider-Man Brand New Day open to an estimated $932.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  We got some good ideas here in the chat.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what we got?

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  So ad-supported cars that get you free self-driving, where they, the ads take over the whole entertainment system in the car. So you're sitting there relaxing, you know, the car's driving itself, but then it's just blaring high volume every.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  I'll take it a step further.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Every five minutes, one 30-second ad.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  What if there was a, what if there was a whole company dedicated to building self-driving cars that was funded by an advertising company? Like a company that just prints billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising, like their DNA is advertising, and then they go into the self-driving car market.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Why has no one done this before?

• 28:06John Coogan?

  They would have a huge advantage in terms of targeting.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why has no one done this before?

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. They could even have a video platform where they're making a lot of money running video ads and they could take that video platform.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, almost like a YouTube, something like that.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Like a YouTube, yeah, exactly. So you could have like, uh, you know, a huge ad network, YouTube ads, and then you could have a self-driving car company, put them all together. That's synergy.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  And maybe you could spin the company out at some point and raise some venture capital, too.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Spin the company out.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  They're secretly still advertising. No, I don't think Waymo will do crazy ads. I think, I don't know, maybe.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  A major streaming executive just texted, a major streaming executive just texted me and says, "Okay, going to get Tubi to build a car right now."

• 28:51John Coogan?

  You gotta build a car. You gotta do it.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX announces a new partnership with Nvidia to design its StarMind AI1 payload, bringing data center class compute into orbit. That makes a lot of sense. Let's find some actual numbers.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  So, revenue was 7.81 billion versus 6.93 billion. Expected loss per share was nine cents. Average analyst estimated a loss of 26 cents. Revenue jumped 92% from 4.1 billion a year earlier. So, huge, you know, you're even at this scale, still doubling the revenue. And it's the first time Elon Musk's reusable rocket maker will face Wall Street in this capacity, and investors are jittery. SpaceX stock has dropped 16% since opening at $150 a share on June 12th. And SpaceX lost 4.9 billion last year, largely due to heavy investments

• 29:54John Coogan?

  in artificial intelligence, which we've discussed. The company merged with Musk's XAI in February. CNBC reports saying that at the time, the vision was to build data centers in space, but the launch business, which counts on large contracts from NASA, is losing money. Most of SpaceX revenue for the year, and its only source of profit, came from its connectivity segment, which consists of its Starlink internet service. Starlink is sold directly to consumers. So here's how SpaceX performed in the three key segments. For space, they brought in $962 million versus 835 million, which was expected. So they beat in space. On connectivity, they

• 30:36John Coogan?

  brought in 4.29 billion. So the Starlink business is four, more than four times the size of the actual launch business. They brought in 4.29 billion versus 3.83 billion that was expected. So they beat there. And on AI, they brought in 2.56 billion versus 2.18 billion expected. So beats across the board. And very interesting to see that the thing that they started doing, space, of course, launching rockets, is now their third largest line of business. Connectivity is of course bigger, and also AI is bigger.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Everything's computer, John.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Everything is computer. That is a good summation of it.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  And that's a good place to end our show.