Is Something Big Happening?, Tai Lopez Charged in $122M Fraud, U.S. Adds 130K Jobs | Harley Finkelstein, Vlad Tenev, Matt Shumer, Jeff Lawson, Sam Blond, John Ferrara

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:59) - Is Something Big Happening? (24:29) - Tai Lopez Charged in $122M Fraud (48:29) - U. S. Adds 130,000 Jobs (54:38) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:16) - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, is a Canadian entrepreneur and lawyer who founded his first company at 17 and later earned a law degree and MBA from the University of Ottawa. In the conversation, he discusses Shopify's impressive 2025 financial performance, including a 29% increase in Gross Merchandise Volume to $370 billion and a 30% rise in revenue to $11.5 billion, attributing this growth to the company's strategic investments in AI commerce infrastructure and the development of the Universal Commerce Protocol in partnership with Google. Finkelstein emphasizes that 2026 will be pivotal for scaling these AI-driven initiatives, positioning Shopify to support a new generation of billion-dollar brands. (01:40:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:46) - Matt Shumer, founder and CEO of OthersideAI (HyperWrite), is an AI entrepreneur and investor known for his work in AI infrastructure and development tools. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid advancements in AI, emphasizing how models like OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 are now capable of autonomously handling complex tasks, signaling a significant shift in various industries. He highlights the importance of individuals adapting to these changes by becoming proficient with AI tools and integrating them into their workflows to stay competitive. (02:15:21) - Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, discusses the company's strategic initiatives, including the expansion into prediction markets, enhancing family finance tools, and increasing access to private markets. He emphasizes the potential growth of prediction markets into a trillion-dollar asset class and highlights efforts to make Robinhood more beneficial for families by integrating partners, children, and grandparents into the platform. Additionally, Tenev addresses the inequities in financial services by working to provide broader access to private markets for retail investors. (02:35:08) - Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, has transitioned from his extensive background in software development to the fusion energy sector by founding Inertia Enterprises. In a recent discussion, he detailed Inertia's mission to commercialize fusion energy by building on the 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists achieved fusion ignition. Lawson outlined plans to develop the world's most powerful laser and mass-produce fusion fuel targets, aiming to construct a gigawatt-scale power plant capable of supplying energy to over a million homes. (02:48:47) - Sam Blond, co-founder and CEO of Monaco, an AI-native sales platform, discusses the company's launch from stealth mode, highlighting its rapid growth to a team of nearly 40 since starting in September 2024. He explains Monaco's comprehensive approach to sales technology, integrating various tools into a unified system that automates tasks like prospecting, outreach, and pipeline management, allowing sales professionals to focus on customer engagement. Blond also shares the challenges faced in securing the monaco.com domain, including a legal dispute with the government of Monaco, which the company ultimately won. (03:03:17) - John Ferrara, founder and CEO of Juxta, is developing a GPS alternative capable of tracking locations without external hardware like satellites or beacons. He discusses Juxta's synthetic fingerprinting technology, which simulates IMU measurements to map environments remotely, enabling scalable deployment in GPS-denied areas such as indoors, underground, and combat zones. Ferrara also shares his motivation, influenced by his parents' military service, and outlines Juxta's progress, including securing $5 million in funding and preparing for initial deployments in logistics, healthcare, and defense sectors. 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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 and today is Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. We are live from the It's good to be back. Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening. His viral essay, 45 million views, completely broke containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back, Vlad from Robinhood's coming on, Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on,

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Jeff Lawson, Sam Blonde, who I worked with at Founders Fund, is launching a new company, Monaco. Say of legend. And John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo Day. And so, we've only talked to him in person, and he's come into the Ultra Dome again. So, we will see him in person at 2. Well, is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good, it's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into, you know, how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like COVID? I have trouble with that analogy

• 1:22John Coogan?

  in particular. So, back in February of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote, "The most powerful force in the universe's compound interest." People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts, you know, everything is about exponential. So, seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that, just made people much more aware that if COVID got out of control and wasn't contained, you

• 2:07John Coogan?

  would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases. And that, of course, held for most of COVID, but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before. There are very few true exponentials in the real world because of course, things cap out, they turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right and then they plateau. Now, will AI plateau? There's been a series of plateaus, there's been a series of S-curves. That's the story of technology, really. As you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth, but in the moment, you see a number of S-curves. You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the internet, and cloud.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning, agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have sort of, if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau, but then we get the next thing. And so, the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while, but you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only 8 billion people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported COVID cases, but you just can't 100X from there. It's impossible. There's not 100 billion people to infect. So eventually, the growth rate has to slow down. And of course, there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if a bunch of people have had COVID, they can't really infect each other anymore,

• 3:36John Coogan?

  and all sorts of different things.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just jumping in chat, we are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  So, back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Cartershev type 2, like full Dyson sphere capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun, even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI. That we have the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly, and that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  And so I like the framing of, you know, it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI. But it doesn't feel exactly like COVID because COVID affected people, you know, older people, people who were not online, reading Balaji Srinivasan's post about COVID, studying the exponentials, modeling the R-nots. So it was very, it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, hey, like you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going to get rough out there. And people did, and it happened, it happened extremely fast. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI-generated reels that they couldn't

• 5:13John Coogan?

  detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses, something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models. Knowledge cutoffs, like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, there, the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaS apocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only mote was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden, an agent can just do it for you.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  And you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry, if you, even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive. Hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go get, go renegotiate your contract. But.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  When I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about like some of my real world friends, like I'm friends with a surgeon. Like, yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I don't, I would not recommend him vibe coding his own payment system and his own, you know, customer relationship.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  Compliance.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  System, yeah, compliance. But even, even outside of that, just like, that's just a headache. He should just maybe go to a startup that's cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So if he's actually getting squeezed and it's hurting his margin, then yeah, he should go and, and find a better tool, find a faster tool, find a newer tool. But like the humanoid robot that can operate on a patient in a surgical context and has the trust of the patient, like it's coming, but it's a ways away. And he's up to speed on surgical tools and how surgery robots are developing.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  And then you compare that. So compare him to Matt Schumer, Schumer.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  The guy who wrote this.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  And Matt has been building what appears to be, we can talk to him about it, but like the thinnest possible wrapper over.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Models.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  AI and other models.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Right. It is, according to the definition, your AI personal assistant writing and productivity tools.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. So.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  Again, like this is, I don't know, I can see him using ChatGPT.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  And Claude and Gemini and thinking, what am I doing with my life?

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Well, if he used the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65,000 likes.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Like on the, yeah, yeah, it works, but it's the AI. On the website, it's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Which you can just get the models to do today.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  When he started this, I'm, I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so he's been, his business has been getting steamrolled by the labs.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of?

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sam Altman famously said, don't build a startup that assumes the models will plateau in capability.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  And then he built Sora and if you, and that was a little bit of a violation for that, but sort of in line with what he was doing.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  But at the same time, uh, yeah, if you were just building a wrapper and saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, do better citations. That, that, that was always messaged as like, hey, you're gonna have a rough time.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Um, and so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just, just yesterday, Rune posted something. It was like, whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good, that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed, to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible, because that's clearly where the future role is going.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Um, but in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I sit them down, like I have a friend who's a teacher and I say, hell, like, like coding agents are here. You need to understand that this is going to change everything. This is going to be like COVID. It's like, well, for the teacher, like COVID was important because they could go there, they could get sick and then they could not work and they could, you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like you might go to, you might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with the humanoid robots because it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet. And so if the software gets better, then I'm talking about like grade school, like, uh, it's mostly like distracted kids.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  They'll be distracted by like better AI slot feeds, basically.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Um, but the actual pro- process of like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and that have a, have a teacher there, monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Like, yes, it will change over the next decade. Like, I'm not, I'm not AI. Bear here. I'm just saying like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that like surgeons change or or.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I gotta jump in. I know everyone, I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Godel Terminal says tax loss harvesting my audio right now. Is this the? Someone else said, is this the Sedance clang Sora version of TBPN? I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it and Trey says, already sold all my devices.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, thank you for bearing with us.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Boy plunger says we're back, so.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Are we back?

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Let us know.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, the chat saying we're back.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Chat says we're back. Hopefully AGI ASI is here. We're in the fast take off, but we can't get reliable audio.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Cut to John's screen for a second. I want to text something.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  We're so back.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  It still works. At least the, at least the graphics package works.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Brian Surf says TBPN terrible buffering, personal nightmare.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  We're getting cooked. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, but crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  All right. Thank you for bearing with us. Back.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Thank you. Back to. Well, yeah, we will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just, I, you know, I'm extremely bullish on AI. I do think like there's the software only singularity, super real, the singularity broadly. I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines, but it's just like, I don't know that February is the year is the month. February 2026 is the month where like everyone is changed, whether you're like a car mechanic or, yeah, like I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations. Like one of the things he had to do was like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like there's a crazy video of him like jumping over the counter and like, it's just like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're, we're, we're still like in this like slow takeoff, in my opinion.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  It is remarkable and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of like, talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome. Because you can just say, hey, like, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up? Like your vibe code, your wedding website. Like, what do you want to do? Like, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do. And you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But, uh, for most people, it won't be like COVID where 100% of people were like. Somehow, somehow affected it by it, you know, whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed. The coffee shop I like is closed, or I don't, I'm afraid to go outside.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the question I have is like even, even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  And, and even when people kind of like started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  It didn't mean all the jobs went away.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Some jobs have gone away, but again, head counts at, you know, even a lot of these companies have, have stayed.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, relatively stable. Uh, we had a good jobs report, uh, surprisingly.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, the question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs, a lot of email jobs have been pretty fake.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain?

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and how fast.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Overall, overall, like I didn't, uh, I, I, I was joking. I, I, I responded to the article and I said, TLDR. Freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around. Uh, I thought, uh, Jeffrey said, it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay, quote unquote, essay implies. So really, really going, really going hard.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but again, it, it felt like something like, you know, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever. Like kind of like.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a little bit of like a throwback to the, the permanent underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think my main critique is like, uh, I think with COVID, it's like very destructive, right?

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Maybe you lose your job, but like at the very least, like you might get sick.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Everything is like bad.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  With AI, it's like this article is like, yeah, people are like gonna lose their jobs. That's like kind of what the gist like you should be aware that like your job might get automated.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  But like AI is like fundamentally like it's like a productive tool, right? So I imagine like we're not, it's not gonna cause a recession. And like GDP is not gonna go down, it's gonna go up.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Like now it's like, I mean, there's probably like hundreds of people on X and their entire job, like their salary is just posting like basically fake AI news. And they get paid by, it's not even like sponsored deals. It's like they're just getting paid by X directly like that's like completely fake job.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  But like, that's gonna go up. There's gonna be more of those.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields, correct? Isn't that the, uh, uh, I mean, that was the original Sam Altman formulation was like, if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the internet. It's like, it makes no sense. And yet here we are, running a business, doing ads for 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. Should we keep touring the, the, the takes, the various takes on this article?

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Stay sassy says, I'm exhausted by the OMG, this changes everything. AI posts for this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI, I use it every day for increasingly non-trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it, vendors, tokens, acquisition. And I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty overly online, online dude's breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news and just be poor.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into X then. Logging off. Apparently stays as he works at the NASDAQ.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Apparently. You see, Robert Scobal, I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple of weeks and stay sassy. You're building Ambien?

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  Nelson says, okay, but this one really changes anything, everything. Please, I promise. Please.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable, crazy times we are in. Says, feels like an anon can just tweet. Just vibe-coded databic, databricks with a screenshot in the SaaS market will fall 5%.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Cephalopod. Yeah, I mean, if your job is building a wrapper on ChatGPT like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Iron shots.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  What did Joe Weisenthal have to say?

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Joe with a funny post. He says, seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like, AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like, maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Such good bait.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Incredible bait.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Master. Incredible. Solid bait, Joe.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  If anyone falls for this, you really deserve it.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yes. And software engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says, how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do?

• 18:45John Coogan?

  That's, that's so good. That's funny.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Buco Capital quoted it and said, a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock. For the hype you read online, it's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify valuations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  I was thinking more about Claude with ads, the vibe-coded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler and said, like, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the Claude app interface, same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff, like. Coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but like it's it would be harder and it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about like,

• 19:50John Coogan?

  if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like, we could have paid a dev shop, 10K to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Okay, what do you think?

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  I was do I was doing kind of drops, stunts like that before coding agents were a thing.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  And you could just work hard and do that.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Just grind.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Dylan and I, you know, we did, we did one back in the day with Party Around called Helpful VCs. This was during, you know, kind of, this was, I think, like May or June

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  of 2021. So it was before the crazy

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  NFT boom had really started, but CryptoPunks were popular. And we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs. And we just put them on a website and said, if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  And and so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with ads, where we just had the idea. We worked on it for a few days, shipped it, and that was it. So this kind of thing was

• 21:02John Coogan?

  How how long was it? A couple of days?

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  It was definitely no more than than five business days.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  We got this done in like one day.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, like, obviously, like, I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're like incredible. But it's still like I was spent like most, like almost all my Saturday, like building it out.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  It's not like, it's like

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we get it, dude. You took one for the team. You you sacrificed your weekend.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  No, I think like, like, these tools are like

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  You get it. Employee of the month. Employee of the month. Get it. You deserve it.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  You know, they're not so incredible that like it can't like literally one shot it in in five minutes. You can't just tell Claude code build

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Zach replica.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And it's it can't actually like do that yet.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, without you, it would not have happened because I was busy on On Saturday with a bunch of different, uh, I had a friend's birthday party and stuff and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just like comparing it to the.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  It's an example of like net new.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, comparing it to the helpful VCs drop, like we had to create original artwork for 400 VCs.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  That you would have actually, that would have been much easier with, with, uh, Gen AI.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so that was a factor too, but you're talking about, anyway.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, yeah, I'm just wondering like, you know, there, there's the Jevon's paradox. So we, we go back to Jevon's paradox here is like, is, is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter? And then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening, uh, versus, um, versus something that we would have done anyway. And it's more just like a cost savings thing. I don't know. It, it, it goes back and forth, but people are, people are debating and people are enjoying the, uh, the AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you got a lesson AGI is here. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson, bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're gonna put AI in your cereal, bro. Bro, listen, the only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Bro, I swear, I'd hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  That was a funny thing. He, he, what was the?

• 23:10John Coogan?

  What is the call to action? I, I actually missed that part. Um, it, it's like buy a subscription, uh, to OpenAI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like genius, like.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  No, he just said, sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, anyone who's saying that like this is like spawn con for the found, for the AI labs, like that's ridiculous. Like that's not, that's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. Uh, it's just, it's just how nuanced is it? So yeah, start, uh, you start using AI seriously. It's not just a search engine. Uh, sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. Like you don't, you, you don't post that if you're for economic gain. So I don't know. Anyway, graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Uh, delicious tacos. Favorite account says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long-winded articles on how scared they are of AI.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder, this didn't trigger my, this is AI writ slop,

• 24:12John Coogan?

  you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. I, it didn't, it didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this? Or should we move on to a different story? Because there's a lot going on in the news today.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  We can move on.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Okay. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor, retail rival, retail revival vow burned investors. The Wall Street Journal has a, has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack Pier One turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the American, the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self-help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send

• 25:14John Coogan?

  you just a box of books, which was like, not that scammy, like kind of a funny, cool thing. I mean, the books were like, very like-

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  He was automating book buying.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are popping onto Amazon to buy books they don't read.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  He's like, why don't I, why don't we just set this up on a subscription and save you the time?

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. He had this whole, he had this whole thing about, um, uh, knowledge and how like, uh, the, the original pitch for here in my garage was like, look at all my supercars. That grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around. A bunch of airport nonfiction. It was like, you know, a bunch of these like books behind him. And he was like, this book wall is more important than anything. Um, where, where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is. The Wall Street Journal.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich, quick advice and self-help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads. That when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign, very broad, not, didn't need to be super hyper-targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers

• 26:42John Coogan?

  to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap. Radio Shack, Pier One Imports, Dress Barn, Modell's Sporting Goods and Linens and Things with a promise to turn them into e-commerce winners. That was always a weird, weird, weird story.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Crazy pitch.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  It was a crazy pitch.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Radio Shack, alright, I know that one. Pier One Imports, I know that one.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Dress Barn, do not know that one. Modell's Sporting Goods, do not know that one. Linens and Things, do not know that one.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  At least Linens and Things, I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier One sells. I, I, Pier One Imports?

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy because almost every single, every single item that, that these retailers sell, sells on Amazon and Walmart.com.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  At, at extremely thin margins.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's really like a referendum on the, on aggregation theory. And, and if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting...

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  One customer database.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Leading retailer brand.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  That was sort of it. Yeah, we had one unified e-commerce front end, but a little late to be going after. I mean, there was, there were some successful, you know, come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion dollars? That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called, but Walmart made an acquisition of an e-commerce infrastructure provider that did have an e-commerce front end, but it never reached escape velocity. But it was like the perfect plugin add-on to Walmart's infrastructure. And now Walmart's a trillion dollar company, I think. It might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names

• 28:38John Coogan?

  and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return, but I think.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is called, you know, first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea, like buying old retailers and trying to revive them.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Is not illegal.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  But general solicitation.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Yes, very, very risky.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  And, and, and we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered and the gap.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  And you see, you see some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on X.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  That they're amazing. But I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing this.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Really quickly, phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middleman and spend with a phantom card. So he invested, Sean Murphy, invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, E-Commerce Ventures, REV, and Related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors. You know, we, we talk about these big funding rounds. We're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the later SPVs and all the, all the bringing retail into the private markets, but like, he really did it. Like, the, the power, you know, we, a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns

• 30:01John Coogan?

  and sort of don't, don't have a ton of respect for him in, in the business community, but he really does have a serious audience of people that have, you know, money that they need to invest, so one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret. So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier One gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Second mistake.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Second mistake. These guys lied, he said, they conspired, they led people on. Poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. The payments stopped abruptly in late 2022, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  So he had the 230 million of equity, and then he also levered out.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so the creditors got, you know, control of, of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners, accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened, according to people familiar. No charges have been filed yet, so innocent self-proven guilty here, but the Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to requests for comment. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So on his podcast, The Tai Lopez Show, and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X, "Never doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological." Was he talking to himself there? I don't know.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess. Staying, staying in character.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  So.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  I just can't believe how much like the, the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, apparent Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible. An 82-year-old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands. Yeah, Matt, like you can imagine somebody like this, like goes offline for 10 years. And then just like logs onto the internet and it's like, wait, this guy has Radio Shack.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  All my favorite brands.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Imports, linens and goods.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Linens and things.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Linens, linens and things. I mean, this seems like a winner. Uh, so yeah, uh, yeah, quick, quick Google search could have, could have helped to avoid this. I mean, it, it's, I, I feel like it's under discussed how Ty Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to inspire, to aspire to build like a personal brand.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  And, and he, Ty Lopez's greatest contribution, I would say is not very great. Is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in, in info products, which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a, it's kind of like a virus. Because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel, they realize like, hey, like this guy's actually making money with the courses. I should learn from him how to do courses. And it just kind of creates this web of people selling, um, info products and, and, you know, flaunting, uh, uh, a bunch of, uh, of their lifestyles. So.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  There, there's so many layers. The, you know, the course that teaches you e-commerce or dropshipping. And then the course that teaches you to sell courses on e-commerce. And we need to do the final boss. The course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell courses, about how to sell courses, about how to sell e-commerce or something like that. And before we move on, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, in Podcast Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was in prison for selling cocaine. After high school, he said, he spent several years working on farms, including with the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  He said, when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed in an insurance company where he cold-called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google Ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company and later at a financial services company. He found it. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled "Here in My Garage." In the first-

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  So crazy that that was 2015 in my head. This was like 2005?

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah, it is retro. In the first, Lopez, wearing a crew neck shirt, glasses and a scruffy beard, stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge. That was the famous line. Knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, "I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought." That video spawned a slew of parodies. Around the same time, wait, around the same time, 2015, Tai Lopez launches 67 Steps? Six, seven Steps? He did this in 2015?

• 35:42John Coogan?

  He created the six, seven meme, apparently. This is crazy. He's pulling all the strings. An online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life by focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. Sixty-seven steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this, how, you know, nineteen details you missed in the Super Bowl halftime show. Like, the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's like feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, ninety-nine cents, that's different than a dollar, right?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, so, so in that video, when he, when he pans to the bookshelf.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  One of the books is called A Thousand and One Books. So it really has, he has three thousand and one.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  There we go. There we go. Books inside of books, layered.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  I guess where Mosey took this to the next level, where his new info product, isn't he selling like tens of thousands of books at the same time?

• 36:38John Coogan?

  There, I, I believe there was a, a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of, was that, was that you could buy like a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times Bestseller list. And I believe he, didn't he set a world record for most books sold or something like that? Wild. So, so, so, you know, all, all sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small, he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer-fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In one 2015 video, billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house. The two shot hoops and talked life lessons. For those who want to be an entrepreneur, what's the

• 37:19John Coogan?

  best advice? Lopez asked. Find something you love to do. Be great at it and sell it, Cuban responded. Honestly, good advice. Icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that, from very highbrow.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Ty should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a paper. This, he's like, this is such good advice. I can't, I can't just, I gotta charge for it.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  Well, that's the, yeah, that's the problem. A lot of the courses, it is just like, it's already been distilled into a sixty-second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that sixty seconds repeated twenty-five times. It's uh, it's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever buy a course?

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  That that actually changed your life?

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini, on Houdini, which is a uh, a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood. Uh, if you've watched Game of Thrones and you see all the horses galloping.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, what was the course title? Was it like how to get rich quick with Houdini?

• 38:16John Coogan?

  No, it was like, it was like, it was like, you know, like, like using Houdini in advanced VFX pipelines.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  So you weren't deep, you didn't, you didn't just, the course creator was not driving a Lamborghini?

• 38:28John Coogan?

  No. No, the course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love to pay you a thousand dollars to teach me how to do that. That's really cool and I want to learn that tool. I, I, I, I paid for a number of, of courses related to content creation, Cinema 4D, After Effects, like any like skip. Even you see me like edit something, you know, like all of that is, is I did, I did, needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff, but none of them were about getting rich quick.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  You paid to learn how to fish?

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  And now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. Because I mean, truly courses are good if it's a narrow skill. Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  And I doubt, even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Just learn from any Arnold video, any quick Google search, certainly can get it from ChatGPT. It was opinionated and I just followed it.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  And it, it was well worth the money, even though the information was like, there, there's something about if you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all. All information products are bad.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Oh, I completely agree. P90X, that was the workout course that was going viral when I was in college.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  The ones I do think are like really, really, really bad are when they advertise like trading courses to like young, younger audiences.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry, like you're not, you're not going to change, you're not going to change your life.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  You should learn anything else.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  And the crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course, which would be like, like buy ETFs, right? Like there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade, right? And it would be basically like, don't trade, like buy and hold, right? Dollar cost average in.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Invest a little bit every month.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Work at an investment firm.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or go pro and go work at Jane Street or Citadel if you have the chops.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  And turn at a wealth management firm.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Sure. The flip side is like, a lot of the courses, they weren't even, they weren't even teaching you how to, okay, well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies. Like that would be maybe a little financial advicey, but totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like Forex courses. So you were trading, but it was like essentially on top of a random number generator. Like it's like the most complex, like understanding the trade flows for proper Forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend. Like that is a life's work as opposed to just being like, oh, well, like I'm a kid. I'm, I'm, I'm using Uber all the time. Maybe I should buy some Uber shares.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Like that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing, in my opinion, than, okay, well, the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern, so it's gotta go up like chart.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Astrology.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, chartology or something like that called. Anyway. Vibe.co, we're D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Lopez teamed up with Alex Mayer, mechanical engineer who had co-founded an online dating app that sold for 255 million. Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami-based retail e-commerce ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and Mayer was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started. The spokesperson for Mayer said he believed in Rev's business models, put over $5 million of his own money into the company, and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit with the so-called severe post-pandemic macroeconomic

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  headwinds. Birken Road is represented by blah, blah, blah. Rev's first notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid $5 million for the e-commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn?

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Crickets. Where's the crickets? Where's the crickets?

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  That's a good one. Team crickets. Cricket sound effects. We got to add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree. In July 2020, it purchased home furnishing retailer Pier 1 Imports out of bankruptcy for about $31 million, followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains, sporting goods retailer Modell's for $3.6 million. Has anyone heard of Modell's?

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Yes?

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes?

• 43:14John Coogan?

  No?

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  And discounter Stein Mart. Has anyone heard of Stein Mart for $6 million? And we got another no. I feel like this is, we got people from all over the countries. I think, I think this is somewhat representative of the average American. And of course, Radio Shack undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for?

• 43:38John Coogan?

  No idea. Okay. There's a, there's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Mayer. I had to hunt it down. Sorry. I was distracted. First, I'm going to tell everyone about Label Box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Tell me.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  So Alex Mayer is, you know, controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this, you know, potentially disastrous deal.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Jessica Livingston, founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews. It's basically a whole bunch of podcast-type interviews combined. So 37 Signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal. There's the interviews in here are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr, Max Levchin at PayPal. This Founders at Work template, if you see, it has this like, we should pull it up, but it's like this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it, and then in orange, Founders at Work, and then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's coders at work about software engineers, and there's venture

• 44:50John Coogan?

  capitalists at work. And Venture Capitalists at Work is a different book, not written by Jessica Livingston, but Alex Mayer is in it because he founded Zeus, which was a dating site. And it's just like a funny, like fun fact that he's in this like, like book that is sort of tangentially like extremely legit. Anyway, we can move on.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  During weekly Zoom calls for investors, Lopez and Mayer pitched new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier rev deals, according to former employees. At his self-help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in rev brands. Joseph Bertow, a 44-year-old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertow recalled the message, "Give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off, and we can't get them fast enough." He invested about $350,000.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  So much money. I don't know. I mean, maybe people are-

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  At the same time, when I look back at like my first angel investments, which granted, I was like 22.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  I would, I thought that I was seeing good enough opportunities-

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  -that I would happily- Invest half of my like liquid net worth.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Half? I thought you were gonna say 10%.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Which I mean, it wasn't that much at the time.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I know, I know.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  Building my first company.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  I was like very young. I was down to take a lot of risks.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  I was like, hey, this is.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's gotta be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but but part of it is like when you start seeing.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  When you start seeing private deals for the first time.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  It feels special.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  It feels special. You look at the chart.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, and in hindsight, I'm like, most of the worst, like, there's certainly some people that have come on the show. Justin Maris is a good example. Like, you look at the first like three

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  deals Justin did and they were all like, at least two were unicorns. Like, he's, he's insane. But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were like, probably in the first five.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  People just don't realize how many companies are out there. How many private companies are out there? Like, you see this one deal, you talk to this one founder and you're like, this is everything. And I, and, and some of the early, uh, early angel investments that I made that were, were, didn't go well were, um, were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting, uh, category. And what I just didn't realize was that there was, like, they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead and there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead. And Sequoia had already backed this one, but they hadn't announced. And then the, you know, Andreessen had backed that one. And so I was in the one that didn't have any of the backing and was just going to be third in the category, which was just going to create this like power law difference.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  And if you don't have full coverage, you don't even know that those deals are happening. And so you, you wind up, uh, even if you get like the idea correct and like the team is good, you can still wind up in a really rough.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing here is in one peer one pitch deck, investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested 1 million.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, very odd.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  20% uh, return, which is insane. Uh, if somebody tells you they're.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Any sort of like guarantee of return is usually a huge red flag.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Huge red flag.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Before we move on, 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.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think we can move on.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  This, this story is still unfolding. It is very sad and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Getting into the jobs report.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Jobs report. Big beat. Hundred and thirty thousand jobs. Economists expected sixty five thousand jobs and a four point four percent unemployment rate. Bloomberg has a live blog here breaking it all down. There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July and revisions trimmed the US twenty twenty five payroll gain to one eighty one thousand. From Bloomberg.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I think everyone, there were kind of delays with the report, right? Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  And now I think the reaction is, can we trust, can we trust the data, right?

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  There's just been so much kind of like FUD thrown around, the data and, and the job market in general that.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to believe your own eyes.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  I was debating with a friend about, he was, he was sending me some economic data and he was saying like, like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and, and that's where like the real economy, like there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets. It's very forward looking. You're valuing things based on, you know, twenty fifty cash flow and being like, yeah, I'll pay for that right now because this company's going to be around. You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for a hundred years, right? And then there's like the on the ground, like do people have jobs or not? And the question of like, do people have jobs or not is much

• 50:08John Coogan?

  more in the healthcare and services sector. And so Bloomberg has been breaking it down. US payrolls rose in January by the most in a more than a year and the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continued to stabilize at the start of twenty twenty six. And now there's. There's going to be some debate over, you know, how real is this? Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show, and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs, usually they're pulling back on spending.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and revisions came out today as well. Showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, like we announced these big numbers.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  And then we kind of move on and then revise them.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is pretty big, though. You'd be surprised if this if this if this flipped negative. Like, maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much. But it still seems like like there is job growth broadly. This seems at least directionally correct. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3% according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year, which showed market slowdown in hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000 a month last year, down from the initially reported 49,000 pace.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Just a bit off.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring, while economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 2026. More clarity around the impact of President Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve's official inclination to keep interest rates on hold now. Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting tension, right, between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these like two things, like if you're if you're pushing for, hey, let's let's count every possible job

• 52:20John Coogan?

  that could potentially, you know, fit in this category, that well, then it's going to be harder to make the case that you should cut rates. In leaving rates unchanged last last month, Chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026, this is welcome news, said Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union. I think Fed Chair Powell was right. The labor market appears to be stabilizing. So Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday, said that the US should have the lowest interest rates globally, adding to previous calls for for rate reductions. Great job numbers, far greater than expected, he wrote in all caps. With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarks payrolls to a more

• 53:05John Coogan?

  accurate but slightly less timely series called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, that data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most US jobs. That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March than initially reported.

• 53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  The figure roughly aligned with that of the BLS.

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  Overall, I think, I think, you know, the team that had to revise last year down by almost a million now coming out and saying like, you know, everything's great and we crushed it.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't give you, I don't have any comp, like, a smart person might, might think like, okay, a year from now, we're going to figure out that this, none of this was real.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah. I mean, the market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S and P 500 is up 0.1%. The Nasdaq's completely flat, I guess technically up 0.01%.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Comments on Joe's post says, and you take these numbers at face value, question mark? Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers, lol. Almost every single person responding.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Just like, oh.

• 54:17Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Oh, well, what, what did Kalshi have to say? Jobs numbers this month?

• 54:21Jordi Hays?

  This is for February.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  This is for February.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60K.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  The current forecast is 68,000 and it, and it jumped in the last couple of days.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know what is real?

• 54:37John Coogan?

  What?

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  ByteDance, SeaDance 3.0. The model's very good.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  According to Ethan Mollick.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about SeaDance yesterday.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  And how he's thinking about competition from ByteDance, but we can't next time. Let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which if you ask me is worth the 2 trillion of CapEx.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Is photo real.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  In a world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  That's cute. I like that. 12 seconds, longer than most 8 seconds. And someone in the replies shared a Grok version of this, that it just has a little bit more... I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit more blurry, maybe, this video? I don't know if you can see it up close, but it's close, but it's not as real. This is Grok.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay. The audio is also much worse. I think I watched this.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Harley Finkelstein?

  In the skies above Alaska, a river otter pilots its plane. Its paws expertly handle the controls.

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you instantly clock the audio.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't on a sea dance. On sea dance, it sounds for sure real.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  Otter maxing. Lucas is firing shots at actors. But we can pull this up.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's get some audio.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal!

• 56:09John Coogan?

  My god.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  He was a good man! He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die, and now you die too.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Insane, insane audio, but the video, the video look, I mean, I can't... You've watched a handful of movies.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  I have.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  More than me. Does this look like it could be in a film?

• 56:34John Coogan?

  It's close. It's pretty close.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  What are you missing?

• 56:40John Coogan?

  I mean, just the length of the shot, it's not, it's not fully like modern, in the sense of the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either like way more cuts and just way more like detail shots, like cutting in and out, or they'll try and turn it into more of like a cinematic set piece and have like a drone shot or a sweeping shot. Like, it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of like the most modern movies.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  But if you were sitting there prompting and splicing it together from different angles...

• 57:17John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  You could...

• 57:19John Coogan?

  For sure. What do you think?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I think I do wonder if there's like interesting comparison to the the kind of Claude bot stuff where like I think one of my main takeaways from the Claude bot thing was that it's gonna be hard for for big labs to kind of replicate that just because of like you can't get the WhatsApp integration like stuff like this where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly like training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on like the the otter flying like that's David Attenborough's voice right like you're not supposed to be able to do that.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Where like can sort of can OpenAI really soar with with that exact voice like probably not like maybe they can try to do it but like they're clearly gonna face some legal repercussions.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Where like China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like, look, yes, like, we know you can prompt Disney characters, we're happy to pull that out, but also can you want to talk to our business development team?

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, like with OpenAI, you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Very quickly.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  China is not like I'm pretty sure that you can go and see uh see Dance

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, see Dance 2.0.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  And just prompt like Mickey Mouse, you know, doing a little dance or whatever.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  You can't do that with.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Let's look at this. Let's look at this other See Dance 2.0 post. Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster epic action film scene, different cuts.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  There you go, John. You wanted cuts. All you had to do was ask.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  This is pretty real. I like that Will Smith is just the benchmark forever.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  And I have the old Will Smith spaghetti AI.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  You do?

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Ready to go after this.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  All right, so this is February 2026.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's go back in time.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini. No longer. Yeah, this is good. This is very good.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  All right, pull up this next one. We got going back to 2023. We can see the progress.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  China can one-shot AI crime. Wow.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  This is the progression?

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I remember people used to post this exact same thing and be like, this is gonna change everything.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  And it did.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  And they were right.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were right.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  But it's still funny.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  And now, it's just him sitting there, enjoying spaghetti, I suppose. Yeah, wow.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  That looks cinematic.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  This is good for Will Smith, right? Like, they'll license his likeness and it's just more, more attention. I mean, this is like Jake Paul's strategy. He really wanted to be all over Sora, got a billion impressions or something like that.

• 1:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Daniel in the chat says China can one-shot AI crime.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Who do you think launches the next turn of the video model? Do you think we get V04, Sora 3, or the next meta-model first?

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  And while you're thinking about that, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  I'm hoping it's Meta. I really wanna see their model. It should, I'm expecting it to be like, super, super good.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  I think it'll be this, this quality. It, it has to be. This is like the standard. You can't launch something that's behind the frontier.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, also with Sora.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Content.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  No shortage of content, for sure.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I'm, I'm curious what they'll do with Sora, if they'll actually like, keep working on the app, or if they're just gonna kinda try to just keep like, making the model better? And then, yeah, they put it in the app, but it's not as big of a push this time.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. Well, um, yeah.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Another news.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about Mistral. Mistral's cooking.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  They're cooking.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  And they're investing 1.4 billion to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Bloomberg. The French AI startup Mistral is investing 1.4 billion US dollars to build AI infrastructure in Sweden as it pushes to become the go-to AI supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I cannot pronounce, Borelange, Borelange, in partnership with Echo Data Center AB, Mistral said in a statement. The facility will, will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models and is scheduled to be operational from 2027. So, at least a year out. This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France, and the company is

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  billing the build out as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty. As political ties with Washington fray, governments in the region are increasingly wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which dominate infrastructure, data storage, and cloud computing. Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack with data processed and stored locally. This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI, says Arthur Mensch.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Their last round was led by ASML, $1.3 billion from the Dutch chipmaker. That's a good deal.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that Macron should be highlighting.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess it's old news. You need to launch a new project. You can't just fully focus on.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  And they're announcing in the Financial Times that their revenue is now similar to Grok. Mistral's revenue stores over $400 million.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Interesting. That's pretty high. $400 million as Europe seeks AI independence. Well, they've certainly carved out a nice niche. Let's go over to the Grok team and GROK and the XAI departures. First, I'll tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Not on the chat, says Jordi discusses dissing Macron caused Domino fact and Mistral investment.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  You manifested it.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  I did it. I inspired them to grind harder. Now, of course, I was one of many who was having a little bit of fun last Friday. So Jimmy Ba said bye-bye yesterday. He said last day at XAI. And Tanish says with Jimmy Ba's departure, half of the XAI founding team has left. A lot of people have been trying to figure out, like, why is this happening?

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  And my current. Belief is that, and this is based on some news that last week XAI executives were given the option, take cash as part of the SpaceX merger, take cash today and you can just move on, or you can take equity in SpaceX and stay with us for the next leg. And so I think a lot of the executives, which are just the founding teams and the co-founders are just saying like, hey, I'm gonna go work on something else. And so we saw some other posts, some of these people are teaming up to work on something new together. I'm sure some of them, you know, will just join other labs, but yeah, the big question

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  is like, what is, is XAI's strategy gonna change at all with the merger, or is it gonna be more of the same? I keep kind of wondering, you know, will they get into, you know, actually get into the NeoCloud business? I could see it, I could see it happening. But for now, I think this is maybe, like, people want it to be more dramatic than it actually is, I think, but.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is, I mean, when, when the, when the SpaceX merger happened with XAI, a lot of people were like, like, you got pre-IPO shares in SpaceX, like, you should ride it out and then sell post, post-IPO, because the stock will probably pop, et cetera. And, yeah, this feels like a quick exodus of people, which is aggressive, and it feels like, sure, you're behind the frontier on a few different vectors, but it is a place where you're sort of GPU-rich, very intense environment, though, so if you want something that's a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more research-oriented, you know, having

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  the CEO say, we're not doing research, we're doing engineering, that's not exactly a rallying cry, if you're like, but I want to do research, I don't want to do engineering.

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  But I'm a researcher, sir. You're an engineer.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  You're an engineer now, and so, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all of the departures from XAI?

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it probably just seems like more evidence that, that X is gonna be some sort of like GPU reseller or NeoCloud market, like, maybe. It's like, okay, Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put like so much like, you know, terawatts of compute in space.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, that if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just like so scaling peeled that you don't actually need to do that much research. You can just build up massive data center and then you just use the same paradigm of models. You just train the biggest model. It's 10x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best models. You don't actually need like the insane like moonshot research projects. Maybe there's something like that going on.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  A lot of the researchers, they said they're leaving.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  They said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recursive self-improvement learning.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a whole recursive hype cycle.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  It's like a very moonshot research project.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  That feels something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if XAI's whole path is now just we're going to scale up the data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things. Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the, what was the original Elon Musk prediction about XAI's progress around like solving something fundamental in physics or one of those like, one of those like major math challenges?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he said that at the Grok 4 launch.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, was that Nalaya Strokes?

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was something like that. It was, it's going to develop some novel, novel physics.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  The most impressive product that I've seen from XAI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Comedy mode.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  To a lot of people.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  And I've been seeing posts this week that have like 200,000 likes, meaning that it's incredibly mainstream on Instagram. And testing out the product, it's, it's like very quick, very low latency. It says, it feels like pretty much as close to talking to somebody like in a Google Hangout or Zoom as you can get.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  And so I think maybe, maybe their voice mode is underrated.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  I think so. I have a friend who has a Tesla with a long commute.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  The question is, is there value beyond comedy? Not saying there needs to be right now, but if Grok can actually get good at doing things for you genetically and you're driving in your Tesla and you can say, Hey, book me a haircut for next week and I can do that. Or hey, I need to get some groceries. Can you order some groceries to the house? And you're actually just getting that kind of like ambient assistant experience. I think that they could get some traction there. They do have an insane amount of cars on the road. That's a big user base.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a friend who has a Tesla with long commute and he talks to Grok voice mode, not the crazy mode, just the normal mode about, you know, putting together to do lists, planning out the day, researching things, answering questions, getting up to speed while he's commuting. I've done that a few times where I've just kind of sort of opened up, not the voice mode specifically, but the record my voice and transcribe it. And I'll sort of talk about what's on the agenda for today and then try and put it into just a sort of annotated note format that I can work with.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  We, breaking news from Elon.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  He shared, XAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As a company grows, especially as quickly as XAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways with some people and we wish them well in future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join XAI if the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  That's funny. I like that.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like mass drivers is like not an AI thing, right? So it's very clear that like, if you want to work on these crazy like moonshot AI, like this weird machine learning concept, like maybe it's not actually that aligned with XAI anymore.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, it's like, what type of moonshot do you want to work on? ASI that lives in a data center or the infrastructure that will power humanoids and the mass driver on the moon that's making endless satellites that, you know, build the Dyson sphere. It's like, it's a different direction, maybe even longer term moonshot, but it is different.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they still have like the macro hard project, which is like, I'm very excited to see what comes out of that.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, do they, do they have a CLI tool yet for Grok?

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  I want to say there's, there is a Grok code.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, XAI posted a 45 minute all hands outlining their accomplishments and a bunch of other stuff. So we will watch that right now in silence.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  No, we're not going to watch it.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  No, we'll tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's see. A lot of people, like a number of researchers have just been doom posting.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Timeline. Hugh Pham says, today I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do?

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's when, not if. So this is somebody who's actively at OpenAI.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  And so it's significant, but it's also great marketing for.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Investing in OpenAI.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  I think people are more skeptical when it comes from the CEOs who are actually out on the fundraising trail than from staff engineers who have less of an incentive. I don't know.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this post has been up for 19 hours and has 384,000 views. So you can assure you can, I would say, OpenAI comms has seen this post and has not asked them to take it down.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, they probably genuinely feel that way. The question is just like, how real is it? And how diffuse will this be? And how fast will it be? Is it February of 2020? Or is it, I don't know, some other time? 1995?

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already have the I already have the muted. But the formula is as such, Trunk Fan laid it out. Find a viral post. AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10 plus quotes in quick in a row and hope a few hit. Between 10:30 and 8 and 10:00 PM yesterday, cranked out 13 of them. 10,000 words total. All AI slop, every day unreal. And the. And so Trung fact checked their spot checked them with Pangram and you'd see that

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  it's fully AI generated, but apparently he blocked Pangram Labs. I was laughing because the there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes and some of them will just sit there with like one like, two likes, no likes. And so it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, something like almost 200,000 followers on X. Like it's working, but there's no real audience because if you post something that's just that only gets one like, it feels like there's no like real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering like how this monetizes, is

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  this a real business? Where's this going? But certainly frustrating some people at the trough.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Ackman makes $2 billion bet on Meta. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in Meta, making up up 10% of its portfolio or about $2 billion. The firm sees Meta as a top beneficiary of AI, boosting ads, content and future products like wearables and digital assistants. I saw somebody had wired up, I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up Open Claw with their Meta headset.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Okay. Which one? VR, AR?

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  The AR one.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  The displays.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  But effectively saying like, hey, buy this product and it would it would go to Amazon and buy the product.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  And that is, that is the vision. We've been talking, that is the opportunity. Zuck wants you to be able to just be in the world shopping.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  Yep. And for a lot of people that don't want to wire up an open source project, he will slowly do all the biz dev deals to, you know, drive traffic. Although Meta has tried to get into commerce so many times and we can talk to Harley about this as well. There's been, there's been a lot of back and forth about, you know, should you be able to just click and check out directly on Meta properties? It's never fully developed and you have to imagine they have all the biz dev horsepower in the world to try and go and do that. But for some reason that has, that has continued to live in the domain of brands in Amazon, on Shopify sites, et cetera. Quickly, Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  And Scott Wu is sharing some news from cognition. Your PR should fix themselves with auto fix. Devin now closes the loop on its own PRs. If Devin review or GitHub bot flags bugs, Devin automatically fixes the PR. Devin also tackles CI lint issues until all checks pass. And so there's auto fix and Scott just says one step closer to the recursive, ever improving AI coding system.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Jay Bull on X says, cool. So now Meta is Enron being a little dramatic. But Meta's Meta Platforms Auditor Ernston Young raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data center project off its balance sheet. Meta moved the data center project into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital and said it isn't the primary beneficiary of the entity. So it didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Four Democratic senators asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council to investigate the risks that AI related debt posed to the financial system, citing Meta's joint venture with Blue Owl as an example of a convoluted and opaque financing.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  This is this is sort of old news. We talked about the Blue Owl deal and how it was structured as its own entity. It's its own business. It just has Meta as a tenant.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think for me, I would probably need to see them doing like copy and pasting this like, you know, 10 more times to the point where I'd be like, you know, maybe Meta's not good for it, right? But.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  I mean, it still shows up in in the cash flow if they're paying for the data center. They need to monetize it properly, so.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Nas on a roll says, apparently Walter Bloomberg has no vocal cords left because of all the uppercase shouting on X constantly.

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  I bet a lot of people out there think he's just works for Bloomberg.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  They probably do.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Walter Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, Joe Weisenthal's boss.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  We got Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  To the TV panel. Harley, how you doing?

• 1:17:23Harley Finkelstein?

  Gentlemen, great to be here as always. Love being here on Earnings Day.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, always good to have you.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you back.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us the update on earnings and then I want to dig into, you know, what you can tell us about the economy broadly, 2025, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world. Help us understand it.

• 1:17:41Harley Finkelstein?

  All right, let's go. All right, let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think I came to you live from the middle of the National Retail, or maybe it's January, actually.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  January.

• 1:17:53Harley Finkelstein?

  NRF National Retail Federation. And I told you that you asked about how things were in Shopify. I said, wait for the earnings. So here are the earnings. We announced earlier this morning, GMV was up 29% to $370 billion, which is incredible. Revenue was up 30% to $11.5 billion, which is a decade of growth of over 20%. The number that actually, I've been in Shopify for almost half my life. This number is, I don't know, it hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14% of the entire US e-commerce market, which is remarkable.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  You guys did the, you did the 1% of the TAM meme and then you 14xed it.

• 1:18:32Harley Finkelstein?

  That's exactly, that's exactly right. And, and actually, you know, one of the cool parts is that we also did it with, I think with incredible discipline. Cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rails for AI shopping. And we did things like announce the Universal Commerce Protocol that we co-developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our Agentic storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot.

• 1:19:09Harley Finkelstein?

  And so I think if you, if you kind of think about 2025 as the year that we kind of laid the rails for Agentic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And, and so that I think is really incredible. Back to what we were talking about at NRF. We're talking about some of the brands and how the velocity of growth, we can talk about consumer as well, but just in terms of the merchants and entrepreneurs we see, I'm beginning to think that 2026 is really going to be kind of year one for this next generation of these billionaire brands. I think there's going to be more billion dollar brands created in the next 10 years than the last 100 years. And in terms of, you know, if you're looking for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean, we talked, you know, we talked during BFCM, of course, we did that, you know, I sort of became Super GigaStream.

• 1:19:54Harley Finkelstein?

  A couple of hours, exactly. But look, GMV for the quarter was 124 billion. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400 billion. And so if you, if you think about that as a proxy for, you know, how consumers are doing, consumers are buying, they're buying from brands they love, they're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars. But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Talk about agentic commerce. Is there any activity that's happening yet? Is the ads launch from ChatGPT going to be an important moment in driving that? What are you looking forward to this quarter in terms of agentic?

• 1:20:34Harley Finkelstein?

  So we do have some merchants alive already, merchants like Glossier, Spanx, Viore, Stanley, Steve Madden already live. Actually, if you just look from Jan 2025 to Jan 2026, we actually have seen approximately AI searches. So if you look at your Shopify admin in terms of sources, it's up like 15x. Still very early, but it's certainly beginning to evolve. And one of the things that we're trying to do for the merchants on Shopify is that if you're with us, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening, whether that's online or offline, or certainly on agentic. And I think, you know, you guys have discussed this many times, but I think there's going to be a bunch of like, there's going to be a bunch of different permutations of exactly how agentic commerce evolves. What we're

• 1:21:18Harley Finkelstein?

  doing is we're preparing for whichever path wins. Shopify is going to be well set up there. In terms of ads, I mean, that's not, you know, ads are not a new thing. I think ads have always been part of the commerce experience in some form, sort of natural evolution. I think consumers expect this. I think the key though is going to be, there has to be a clear distinction between kind of ads and organic content. And so far, that's what we're seeing as well. But generally, and you know, I think You know, we're in the early stage of 2026, but it does certainly feel like there is a massive I know you were talking earlier about, you know, how a bunch of young people became kind of dropshippers based on some influence. In many ways, it does feel like there are more people

• 1:22:00Harley Finkelstein?

  starting businesses, but the velocity of those businesses is just insane right now. And like, because like, they can access global markets like right away, they have incredible resources. It feels like a really, really important time to be an entrepreneur right now, and a very exciting time.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  What's the moat for D to C entrepreneurs? Is it changing? Is it brand? Is it distribution? Marketing chops?

• 1:22:23Harley Finkelstein?

  I mean, look, I think, let me, I'll give you a quick example. We launched Shopify Sidekick about a year ago or so, which is our, we sort of call it your co-founder. It lives inside of Shopify. It knows everything about your business and everything about commerce and Shopify. We added to this thing called Shopify Pulse recently, which is this new feature that effectively, it proactively helps merchants grow their business. It works in the background. It surfaces like these tailored recommendations for things you can do to grow your business. And then if you agree to them, it actually goes and executes. I heard the story last week of a jewelry merchant who was actually, who got a recommendation from Pulse to, rather than having four separate SKUs, to actually bundle them into a stack and create a bundle. And immediately, that particular merchant,

• 1:23:07Harley Finkelstein?

  like, immediately saw more sales happen. If you are meeting these great merchants with great ambition and great products, and adding this like personalized data analysis with great intelligence, I don't know, it's bespoke, it's intuitive, but it really will allow more of these direct-to-consumer brands to access, I think, more customers. And this idea of, you know, like, initially it was like online only for DTC, then it was like, let's try offline as well, have online and offline working simultaneously. It feels like we've evolved well past that, that, and this is kind of what we're doing at Shopify, which is that regardless of where consumers are spending their time, make it really easy for merchants and entrepreneurs to access those markets. And something as simple

• 1:23:48Harley Finkelstein?

  as like the Agentic storefronts, where with a couple clicks, you can push products to ChatGPT and to Gemini, that's only going to increase the velocity even further.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  SaaSpocalypse, how are you guys? I'm just gonna say the word that's been on everybody's mind the last like, you know, 10 days or so, or 10 months if, for kind of our corner of the internet. I look at Shopify, it's a system of record, it's payments, it's a consumer buying network, it's battle-tested infrastructure that, that needs to be, you know, have, you know, insane uptime. Like, I don't see the, I don't see the vibe coding risk at all. But how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts?

• 1:24:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, it's, look, I did our call this morning at 8:30 and we've basically been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of all, let me just say this. People have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one. We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong, which is, which is kind of fun. I think, a couple of things. I think AI, on the agentic side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially even how they buy. That's what we're building for. We are building for these agentic storefront experiences and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on Shopify, you're just better positioned. But, you know, the, the truth is, like, AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It's not, it will not rewrite the transaction

• 1:25:19Harley Finkelstein?

  contract. And, and one of the things that we've been building on Shopify, you know, everyone talks about the online store, like, you know, the e-commerce component of Shopify. The killer feature of Shopify, for a very long time, has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory and, and you do taxes and you do analytics and reporting, you launch marketing campaigns, and you create loyalty and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue really well, notwithstanding some of this vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are system of records, the ones that are actually operating like operating systems. And, and, you know, that's, that's Shopify.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I-

• 1:25:59Harley Finkelstein?

  And there's some other companies, yeah.

• 1:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just jumping in, like, I do think that there, when, throughout my history, you know, being, being a Shopify, you know, customer and, and user over the years, I would be, if I was operating like a tiny Shopify plugin that one engineer had built and they were charging- Thirty dollars a month, I would be a little bit worried about vibe coding because I do remember in throughout history using a plugin where I was like, okay, this is a nice little feature that I can bolt on. And I'm happy to pay for this because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom.

• 1:26:35Harley Finkelstein?

  Email.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, yeah, whatever, whatever that is. So I think.

• 1:26:38Harley Finkelstein?

  I can just do it.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  But again, but again, that is a, that is a, that's a tailwind for Shopify as a platform because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of like Lego blocks on top of it. So.

• 1:26:50Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. You know, one of the things we're noticing, actually, one of the questions that got on the earnings call this morning was the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're seeing app developers, but also merchants themselves. Who historically would hire, you know, a third party to build a tool, do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and, and these new tools to build on top of this because we actually think having more people build on, on top of Shopify. You know, benefits, benefits merchants, but back to that whole, like, if you were just a feature, I mean, you know, you guys, if I had to word cloud, you know, your show, the word rapper probably comes up as much as, as, as anything.

• 1:27:31Harley Finkelstein?

  I think you actually have to create something of real value. And if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're going to struggle. But companies and if you look at the apps on, I mean, you know, take some of the larger apps on Shopify, like the Klavios of the world, you know, who are, who built this incredible, in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing that is very, very difficult to disrupt. So I think the idea of like, we want to invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that, you know,

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Klavio is.

• 1:28:00Harley Finkelstein?

  Interfaces.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Klavio is a good.

• 1:28:01Harley Finkelstein?

  Never rewrite like real infrastructure.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Klavio is a great example because you could have a, somebody could, could build something that can send an email. But then if your delivery is just terrible, it's just going to be, you might like save a little bit, a little bit using the vibe coded solution. But then you're like losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not actually getting through to your customers. So there's, there's any like e-commerce operator, like getting, you guys know this too, like you've spent, like you guys have had a better solution in the market for how many years and you're still, you know how hard it is to convert a legacy brand to even trust a new platform. Cause they're like, our current system is not great, but. We know, we know how critical this infrastructure is and what a big step it is. So.

• 1:28:47Harley Finkelstein?

  It is interesting, even on the enterprise side, one of the things that I've noticed coming out of N R F, which effectively is like all the major, the largest retailers are all there, is that even the largest retailers, who feel like they have something that's good enough, they're getting pushed by their exec team or their board to think about like unified commerce, this idea that, you know, think about the metaphor of like a browser with 12 tabs open, online, offline, agentic, cross-sell on social media platforms, B to B, even the most traditional of retailers and businesses, we are finding now are coming to Shopify for simplicity, that they don't want to run this like, you know, this Rube Goldberg machine in commerce. They actually want to create this centralized back office that runs all of it. And that's been amazing for us. In fact, one of the biggest areas of growth for us has been the enterprise.

• 1:29:32Harley Finkelstein?

  And companies that traditionally did not come to Shopify, General Motors, for example, or Estee Lauder, for example, are now migrating to us as well. So I think, you know, it's an exciting time to be a new entrepreneur getting started because the resources and the tools are insane. But even for some of the largest retailers, the next few years are going to be incredible for them because they're going to access these tools and be able to operate at a pace that frankly, some of them have never been able to operate at.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Do you have a hard stop at 12:30?

• 1:29:58Harley Finkelstein?

  I can keep going for a bit.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to talk about evolution of UI, sort of tactical, like when I had an e-commerce site that was not on Shopify, regrettably, launching a new product was like, how are we going to, literally Django, go in the backend, what's the database schema, is it a Boolean, right? Like all these different things, right? Then you go to Shopify and it's very easy to.

• 1:30:23Harley Finkelstein?

  There's like Yahoo stores or something like what was it?

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  No, it was literally Django, like Python, like it was like hosted on Heroku, I think. And so, yeah, homegrown disaster, huge, huge waste of resources. You go to Shopify, you get a, an HTML page with a bunch of fields that you can fill in when you have a new product and it fills into the templates, right? Is the future, I.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Talk to Shopify in natural language? Is that actually better than defining my product variance in HTML UI? Like, do you think that Shopify will have an agent that where I'm making changes within the Shopify ecosystem, but in natural language? Or is HTML dropdowns, are there sort of like more Lindy than we think?

• 1:31:10Harley Finkelstein?

  So I think the good news is you can do both, right? The idea is can we make the important things really easy and everything else possible? There are merchants right now that we have a product we just announced in December at our at our edition called SimJim. SimJim effectively simulates what any task might be. So you can say, if I change this particular design, or I try this particular campaign, what does SimJim simulate will be the results of that. And we're seeing a lot of our merchants begin to adopt it now and try it out. I think the idea should be you can do both. If ultimately what you do best is you are an artisan, you make beautiful products, you make some sort of like children's toys, and they're amazing, and you actually do not know

• 1:31:52Harley Finkelstein?

  anything about digital commerce, digital marketing, I think you can use Sidekick as really your CMO and your co-founder that helps you become a lot more internet native when it comes to commerce and retail. In other cases, the idea that, you know, some of our brands like Skims, for example, or Aloe Yoga, for example, I mean, they want to do some really customizable stuff. They're very technical, they have an amazing engineering team, they want to go into the code and really make it. So their particular store is exactly what they want. That ability where, you know, at some point you had to either build your own stack if you wanted massive customization, or if you didn't know how to use anything when it came to e-commerce, you had to go and hire, you know, some sort of like company to go build

• 1:32:37Harley Finkelstein?

  everything on your behalf, I think all that's gone. I think the net result of that's going to be you're going to have way more people starting businesses and way more companies getting larger at a much faster clip. And Sidekick is a really good example of that, and so is SimJim. I think beyond that, the other thing is like this idea that You start with one particular channel, I think will very quickly go away. We're already starting to see that where immediately, you know, you may start with your online store as your online hub, but very quickly you're going to activate an Instagram channel or a TikTok channel, or you may decide, hey, I want to try this agentic thing. I think this idea that I am an X kind of merchant, I'm an online merchant, offline merchant, I think that's going to be something that like, it's going to be like talking about the color TV. It makes no sense in the future. But all that coming together is what we've

• 1:33:20Harley Finkelstein?

  been building in Shopify for two decades. And the end result of it is that, you know, we're seeing way more entrepreneurship than ever before. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Jordi?

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  How are you talking to, last question, how are you talking to friends, family outside of the tech bubble about AI on X? You were busy with earnings, but on X, there's a, there's an essay with like 50 million views, basically telling everyone to freak out. I'm curious how you're.

• 1:33:48Harley Finkelstein?

  I saw the essay before I started my day. I actually sent the essay to my wife, just because I wanted to substantiate that I'm not an insane person, talking about this stuff every single day. I think that essay, I think you guys said, or someone said like, that essay feels like it crossed the chasm. It did, yeah. Like, it, like, what I mean is like. Bro containment. Exactly. It went kind of well beyond just like our kind of little, you know, world circle of the internet. I think ultimately, the, the idea of being reflexive with AI, you know, Toby wrote this letter a couple of months ago, you guys probably remember it, it got leaked. And it really, you know, the reason it got leaked was, it talked about that if you want to hire someone at Shopify for your team, first you have to substantiate

• 1:34:33Harley Finkelstein?

  why AI can do it better. But if you actually looked at like, the meta message in the, in

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  Can't do it better.

• 1:34:39Harley Finkelstein?

  It was like.

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Can't do it better, right?

• 1:34:41Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, definitely. Cannot do it better, exactly. That AI cannot, that, so if you can't do it better, then you like, you can hire, but like, if AI can do it better, you're, you know, we're not, we're not, you know, the headcount doesn't get allocated. Which, what it really suggested was, this idea of like, AI reflex, that.

• 1:34:59Harley Finkelstein?

  Rather than sort of use it as a tool, how do you kind of use it as part of your day to day life? You know, when I'm preparing for an earnings call with Jeff or our CFO, we used to go around and meet a ton of different product leaders around the company to kind of glean and figure out and summarize like, what are the most exciting things happening at Shopify? It was like, it was part of the process for, I don't know, like 10 quarters. Now effectively, we go to Shopify's vault, we have like a dozen MCPs running, we're able to pull way more information we can. So when we do meet with those product leaders, the conversations are way richer. They're not spending a bunch of time explaining to us on a, you know, at a very abstract level or a, you know, at a macro level what they're working on. We can ask specific questions. I think companies have become

• 1:35:40Harley Finkelstein?

  more reflexive and individuals have become more reflexive, especially entrepreneurs. There's no doubt it's going to make you more, you know, it's going to make you more effective and more efficient. But I think articles like this, it invites the non-tech community into what we're seeing in a way that I think is important. I think the reason it's getting so much traction is because it felt like it was, it felt like it was written for my wife as opposed to for me. And not to say that she is a lagger, she's not, but, but she needed someone who isn't me to say, hey, you should really take this stuff seriously. It's really cool.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  But that's different than I think a lot of people are sharing it saying, you should take this seriously. It's really cool. I think a lot of people have been processing this as like, you should take this seriously. And it's like, get your financial house in order. Like, you know, this is like, you're going to get steamrolled.

• 1:36:28Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, I know. Look, I'm not like, I don't believe in the doom of them. I'm an eternal optimist. I think, I think what it's done for Shopify, for our merchants, for our business, has been incredible. I think what it's doing for individual entrepreneurs is incredible. My daughter, you know, we recently moved to, we moved to Montreal, which is a French city. My, my kids, we moved from an English city. My kids are learning French right now. There's homework that comes that I just cannot help them with. I would have had to hire a tutor. I still may have to at some point, but the fact that I'm able to do so much more on my own, even in my own like dad role, makes my life better. So, yeah.

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  And what's so cool about that is for, for you, you can, you can go hire a tutor, you could hire 10 tutors, but there's a lot of families, there's a lot of families that just never would have been able to do that. Their, their kids would have been struggling.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  And I mean, sometimes like my, my four-year-old will ask me just why, why, why, why, you know, the 10 whys of like, why, like, why is the sky blue? And I'll be like, I think I know why, but I even if I even with the money, I can't hire a tutor to come buy the house at nine PM on a Tuesday in two seconds, but I can go and look it up and then relay a story and I can tell that story however I want.

• 1:37:36Harley Finkelstein?

  So how can you not be optimistic when you have those tools available to you?

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:37:38Harley Finkelstein?

  The key, though, is looking at them as these incredible tools, looking at them as a way for you to create like some sort of exoskeleton in for all of our lives. And and there's going to be some laggards. I mean, it's going to be like, I think it was Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm. Like, we will cross the chasm where in the mainstream will use it.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Harley Finkelstein?

  My mom's using AI right now mostly for like things like recipes.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:59Harley Finkelstein?

  But that's sort of like a gateway drug, I think, for her using it for things like questions about, I don't know, banking or whatever my mom does daily. So I it's tough not to be optimistic and certainly from a shopper by perspective, it's been incredibly valuable for us. Agentic shopping hasn't even started yet, but like, we're prepared for it. And I think, I don't know, it sounds like I'm overdoing it.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even even for entrepreneurship, like.

• 1:38:20Harley Finkelstein?

  I think we're still underselling the opportunity with AI.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when when I look back in my early days of entrepreneurship, luckily I had people around that I could call and say, hey, how do you do this? Or what kind of contract do I need for this? Uh, how do I set this thing up? How do I what should I use a safe note? Should I use this or that? And now it's, you know, hopefully entrepreneurs can build a network quickly, but you don't need a network to get like customized advice on pretty much any situation. And yes, it could still be wrong sometimes, but it's usually directionally correct and helps you be more informed. And it's amazing.

• 1:38:54Harley Finkelstein?

  It feels also like we as humans, we don't often want to ask someone else the question that we deem as being like a silly question or a stupid question.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  That's one of my favorite parts of AI. You're right. Just like ask a dumb question.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Harley Finkelstein?

  Totally, totally agree. I remember when we raised our first, our series A, this is, I don't know, literally almost 20 years ago, I had to look up what a liquidation preference was. I have to call around and I and I felt like, you know, like we're raising a series A and it was a $25 million round, best of our lead it. And and I remember thinking like, I I went to, I was already a lawyer, like, I wasn't a very good lawyer, but I'd finished law school, then went to business school and I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I just sort of think back of now, the like, the amount of information I could have taken, I could have got all these case studies, I could have understood it in a much deeper way. That is where I think, so it's not surprising that this article.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  You could have dropped the term sheet into any L M and instantly gotten like pretty decent analysis, pull out all the main terms, hey, here's what's marketed, here's what you can push back on.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. No more doom.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for not.

• 1:39:56Harley Finkelstein?

  No more doom, guys. Come on, let's go.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  I appreciate you taking the extra time.

• 1:39:59Harley Finkelstein?

  This is gonna be great.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  We kept you long.

• 1:40:00Harley Finkelstein?

  Pleasure, always great to be here.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye, Harley. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small, modern, small and medium sized businesses. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Nikita Beer has a prediction. I want your take on Nikita Beer's prediction. He says, in less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. iMessage, phone calls, Gmail, and we will have no way to stop it. What do you think?

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, I mean, he must, he must be seeing something. Yeah, I would assume he's seeing something at X.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  He's been fighting this for a long time.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  He's been fighting the bots.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  He's in the trenches, for sure.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Fighting the bots.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I got a, I got a, a pretty good AI phone call yesterday that was somebody leaving me a voicemail that was just like, hey, just have a few questions, give me a call back.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Ooh, that's, that, that's one of the hook.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a good, you know.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, sometimes like the, the text message is like.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  But I listened to the voicemail.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  And I could clock it as AI, but when I just got the like, kind of like summary of it.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  But if it's David Attenborough, you're gonna be like, David. I would love to do a documentary about a flying beaver with you.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  I've been waiting for your call.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Sign me up. So, uh, hack that sort of solves this, uh, on X, you go into the settings and you turn off notifications from anyone that you're not mutuals with, that's not verified, that doesn't have a phone number, you just make it really, you will miss some stuff, but you will see way less spam. Uh, on iMessage and, and on, and the iPhone, I ju, I just don't accept calls from unknown numbers. And so, like, you have to be in my contacts book.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  And so, how do I actually meet people? Well, I get mutually introduced, I add their. Contact, we get into a group chat and it's just, it's just a game of chain linking one chain to the next. So if you give me Tyler's phone number, I add it.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  There's a small number of people who are free to call me out of the blue whenever and I will pick up if I'm, if I'm available. Then there's another big group of people that I'd be happy to have a phone call with.

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  But I'm not just going to pick up out of nowhere because, you know, whatever. Talk about it before.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  The typical spam functionality for a long time has been deny lists or blacklists where you have a list of spam accounts and you deny those, you block those numbers. Everything, everyone, everything is shifting to allow lists or white lists where you have an approved list of people that can get through through your messaging apps. And basically, cold, cold messages, cold DMs are going to be a lot harder to break through. So the era of the reply guy who gets retweeted and ratios and, you know, gets surfaced, maybe that's the, maybe that's the alpha these days.

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Where you just have to grind harder. I have a post that I want to read to you.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Turbo puffer first. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Shopify alumni. I have a post, I want your reaction.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  From Delicious Taco.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years. And I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it's a little different, but it is funny. It is very funny.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean, who knows? Hot dogs might change everything.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, you got, you got, you got quote tweeted here. You said, just in horses say we may be in a car bubble. Which is funny because that's a pro AI take, right?

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was confused by this and then AI not kill everyone is a memes responded, kind of saying. Horace says the real risk is what happens to the economy when the car bubble pops. So it's kind of, it's, it's, uh, this is a techno optimist account now?

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I think it's a Doomer account, right?

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I don't think so.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  They say techno optimist in their bio.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Okay, huh. I thought they were always like pause AIs, pause the progress. But maybe the, maybe the bubble is a, is a bigger issue as well. Well, we can continue to dig into that. Quickly, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  The, we got the, we got a Bugatti Turbine.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  The Luce.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Post here.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:24Jordi Hays?

  The Bugatti's mugging.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  So the post says, "The Ferrari Luce makes the interior of the Bugatti, Bugatti Turbine, look like an absolute masterclass. Bravo Ferrari. It's pure genius to be this bad." People are still going back and forth on this. The Turbine, this is, this is a driving machine.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  My take, my takeaway from all the reactions this week and my personal view is I think the Johnny Ive Ferrari will be popular in specific bubbles on the West Coast and generally not be very loved.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  The only, yeah, the only thing that, that really jumps out to me about the, about the design is the, is the rounded rectangle display in the center. It just is, it does feel iPad-ish. It feels like there's the tactile buttons, but the, just that block of like, there's a screen.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  There's also like a leather kind of lunchbox looking thing that you can pull out.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Which I think is weird. I don't, I don't love it.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  Take it on the go, I suppose.

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Rat Limit on X says, "People who back into parking spots cannot be truly present." You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Invisualized? This isn't even a word, is it? Envisioned? This is hilarious.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Still doing numbers.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Wow, 50K likes. I love it. You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived. You're not truly present.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Do you back in ever? I back in every once in a while, but mostly I'm angling for the room for the doors. So if there's a pillar in the parking garage that will block the passenger door and have a passenger.

• 1:46:05Jordi Hays?

  It's strategic, it's not default.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  Exactly. So I am extra, I'm extra present. I'm extremely present. I'm locked in trying to give my passenger the best possible vehicle exiting experience there could possibly be. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Toma Bravo executives fielded queries and held conversations with investors to discuss the impact of AI on their software portfolios. Vista Equities Chief Executive sent an email to clients and plans to follow up with a webinar. Don't worry, I'm following up with a webinar to discuss the state of the firm's portfolio, saying that we believe that AI will enhance software, not replace it. Leaders of several firms, including KKR, Blackstone, and Ares, reported that their exposure to the sector are limited and that the sell-off is overblown, with some saying that AI will not significantly impact their well-established portfolio companies. It's hard to say that it won't impact it at all. You kind of got to pick a side in most cases.

• 1:47:09Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it's interesting. You've got like, you know, PE firms that only own software and they're like, no big deal. We're excited about this. We're not worried at all. But they're having to do kind of like, you know.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  It's the what kind of American and are you meme. It's what kind of software did you own?

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  But then on the other side, you have firms that have some exposure saying, well, we don't have very much exposure.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  And so these are, you know, the messaging is.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  And so this is what we were talking about this morning. This, you know, I think there will need to be a, in many ways, a reclassification of who the AI winners and who the AI losers are in the software world, because there truly are platforms where, yes, you could vibe code it, but the value in the asset is the liquidity on that platform. Like you can vibe code an Airbnb marketplace competitor, but if there's no houses on there and they're all AI-generated, you can't actually go to the beach house. Like you don't actually compete with Airbnb. And so there's a lot of software companies that fit in that world where there's liquidity or some other network effect or some scale economy, but purely just having. Okay, we spent a bunch of money on R and D. We have a bunch of lines of code written,

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  and it would cost you a billion dollars to write the same amount of code and compete with us. So you're not going to do that because you're going to take a billion dollars to raise all the money, and then you're just going to be competing with us. Well, now that billion dollars is shrinking down. Maybe it's a hundred million dollars. Maybe it's ten million dollars. Maybe it's less and less and less. And so there will be need, in many ways, just a return to form of like, where are the true moats? And then, you know, intellectual property, obviously, network effects, scale economies, there's a few.

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  Regulatory.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Regulatory. So yeah, there will be some software companies, some SaaS companies, where you find out that it's like Duolingo with like, oh, it's actually a game, and people love the brand. And so that's been much more resilient relative to a Chegg that was basically just data that was scraped and put into ChatGPT, and the stock's down ninety percent.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  Pythia Cap responded to the comments from Tomo Bravo and Vista Equity, saying, "Breaking, six X levered long software investors who can't exit think software is okay, actually."

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  So. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate seventy percent of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also, Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital has quote tweeted my article, and he chimes in, sort of agrees. He says, AI, the title of my article was, "AI is not COVID." And he says, "AI is not COVID in three key ways." And I wish I'd put this in the article, because it's pretty good analysis. He says, "It's bigger, much bigger." And I agree with that. COVID, you look at the numbers, and it goes up. It was crazy, world-changing, but then, now we've moved on, and there's a whole different set of stories. It's durable. COVID was a wave. It came and went. AI will compound. And so

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  you never go back to not using the internet. You never go back to not using a mobile device. You never go back to not having AI in the world. You do go back to a world where you can walk around and not feel sick if you don't wear a mask. That happened. And then third, he says, "We have a choice." This is important, and the main reason to read the article. With COVID, everyone played defense. With AI, we can choose to play offense. Don't let AI wash over you. Put it to work. And this is what Harley was saying as well. There's an opportunity. And Pat Grady says, "The best time to make that choice is right now." And I agree. It's an optimistic message.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  Alex Su.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Says, "At this point, I can't tell if Harvey is in the business of selling technology to lawyers or equity to VCs." He of course is in.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  What business is he in?

• 1:50:45Jordi Hays?

  He's in, uh, works for a company called.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  Oh, a competitor.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  We specialize in providing a high-end flexible legal talent to corporate legal departments. So he's in a, a legal, a lawyer staffing firm.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, uh, hard to take this post, uh.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Guess what? Newsflash. If you're the CEO of a startup, you're in both businesses, buddy. Always. No matter what. You gotta raise, you gotta outraise your competitors. If you're in a competitive space, if you're in a high-growth industry, you have to be selling equity to VCs. And you also gotta be selling your product to customers. Get used to it. It's the game on the field and you're gonna be playing it. Let me tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheer tickets says, knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket. And they blew his head. Smooth off. I can't believe how mainstream this, this is. 5 million views, 167,000 likes. Andre at console says, should I use console? Does, does solve that exact issue.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Soph over on X says, gonna name my son Garrett. Short, short for cigarette.

• 1:52:04Jordi Hays?

  I never put that together.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  I, I used to have this joke with.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Would be a beautiful name.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  I used to have this joke with Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures because, uh, the, his first initial is C. So if it's C-Garrett, it's cigarette. It's like he has the name. Anyway, BlackRock's getting into DeFi. Totally unimaginable five years ago, but they're doing it. Uh, we should talk to a lot about this. This will be interesting. Um, yes, they're, yes, they're buying Uniswap tokens. So Fortune has a story here. Uh, in the latest sign of the rapid convergence of Wall Street and crypto, the world's biggest asset manager is moving into decentralized finance or DeFi. BlackRock on Wednesday revealed it will be bringing its treasury-backed digital token called Build, with misspelled. That's very online for BlackRock.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  On to Uniswap, a leading DeFi platform where it will be bought and sold by institutional traders. As part of the tie-up, BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's own token uni. The new arrangement, which is being undertaken with tokenization firm, Securitize, is a significant milestone for the DeFi sector, which many view as one of the most useful applications in crypto, unlike traditional trading, which relies on centralized intermediaries to record and settle trades. Platforms like Uniswap rely on smart contracts to match buyers and sellers via liquidity pools and automated market makers. Currently, there are around $100 billion worth of capital sitting on DeFi platforms. I remember DeFi summer. Were you deep in the trenches during

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  DeFi summer? It was a big, what was that, 2022? Right? 2021? It was before the crash.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  It was the era of like Thor Chain and like-

• 1:53:46Jordi Hays?

  It was 2020, 2020 or 2021.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, something-

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  But I think that 2021 was the Solana summer.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. DeFi summer was-

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  Must have been-

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Major FOMO, basically, for anyone who didn't participate, and major heartache for many people that did. It was a wild time. A lot of people having fun. And interesting from a, you know, it had, it had some of the same feelings as the, as the open claw thing. It was like, you had to set out, you had to know the terminal a little bit, you had to be comfortable sort of, you know, installing these tools, understanding, oh, don't send your money to the wrong address. The address itself looks like a hash. And so it's like a little bit like lightly technical. You didn't have to write any software, but you had to be able to use different wallets-

• 1:54:33Jordi Hays?

  People were getting nerd sniped.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  It does feel like there was a little bit of nerd sniping. There was also a lot of real businesses built and, you know, obviously there's still $100 billion sitting in DeFi, and DeFi survived the DeFi winter that followed DeFi summer. Of course, sort of bad nominative determinism. The DeFi summer sort of implied that a winter was around the corner, and it was. But BlackRock's now going into DeFi. So they're listing their build token, which launched in 2024, and boasts a total market value of around $1.8 billion, and it reflects a major vote of confidence in DeFi from one of the finance industry's most influential firms. The practical impact of Uniswap adding Build to its platform is likely to be minor at first, though, since the arrangement involves Securitize creating a whitelist of eligible

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  institutions that can participate in the DeFi trading. The firm is also whitelisting a handful of market makers, including longtime crypto liquidity provider Wintermute, to facilitate trading. Meanwhile, access to Build is restricted to qualified purchasers, a legal designation for those with assets of more than 5 million or more. So, they're getting into DeFi, but they're just dipping their toes in the water. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, there are lots of essays that everyone, it's like Essay Week in AI. People are writing essays about, is AI like COVID?

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Is you need to talk to your family? Zoe resigned from OpenAI on Monday, the same day they started testing ads in ChatGPT. She quit in protest.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  She did?

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  And she dropped a guest essay.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Guest essay in the New York Times.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  In the New York Times.

• 1:56:18John Coogan?

  That is a crazy thing to do.

• 1:56:19Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI, I feel like a company hasn't fully arrived until an employee quits and they have the opportunity just to go immediately write, like, an opinion essay on said business.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Pretty soon, you're gonna quit and drop a whole Mr. Beast video. That's the future. You drop, you drop a, drop a 10-part, hour-long mini-series. Just, just raise the stakes. Go with the, the, the, the biggest.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  The biggest splash you can possibly make.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  So, first, Zoe makes the bull case for ChatGPT as a business. OpenAI has the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the tidal forces pushing them to abuse it? Again, so far, the ads will effectively be display ads. Not, not integrated into the content and not, yeah, not, not influencing the content and.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  But again, she's arguing that you can sort of start by doing that and then there's an incentive, there's a business incentive to up the ante a little bit. Hope's Revenge says, I don't mean to be rude, but I feel like this article says very little. I think everyone will agree data privacy is good. Two tech companies have a bad track record of resisting their incentives to misuse this data. You vaguely gesture towards certain kinds of oversight, mostly niche and European. But I think we both suspect that that's probably not going to happen in this case. There really isn't a model here. I'm a lot more interested in why you joined OpenAI and stayed for two years and what you would slash wouldn't do in the AI space. I do think you're right to draw attention to what is special about the intersection

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  of AI and advertising, which is that the dataset being created and the product itself has a much higher potential for abuse than other familiar tech models of ad monetized platforms. This feels like fairly obvious point that I don't see enough of. You're also right to draw attention to the fact that people don't necessarily have a problem with the fact that ChatGPT is doing ads now like this, but that they likely don't think it will actually stop their slippery slope. Thanks.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  There's a very funny paragraph in Ben Thompson's Sir Teckery piece on Google earnings that is basically the flip side of this that I thought was very funny. He says, this is probably the least important of the three benefits of LLMs for Google search business. He's covering Google earnings and what ads are doing for Google. Everything's going very well. And he says, what's notable about that ranking, however, is that this is basically OpenAI's entire proposed advertising business. Google has the luxury of not putting ads in Gemini, but that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting with ads in conversational AI.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  They're just doing it in AI mode and their initial offering sounds a lot like what OpenAI is going to do in ChatGPT. Put ads, put in ads based on the content of the current conversation. Meh. It's the meh that is scaring. Google's upside revenue potential from LLMs is so large that its side project, which is OpenAI's entire proposed business, hardly merits a mention in terms of justifying CapEx. So, Google's saying, hey, we're going to spend so much money on CapEx, but analysts, shareholders, don't worry because we have really great applications. And the great applications, like, they put ads in LLM responses really, really low. And so, Ben Thompson's like, it's this like, this thing is happening and

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  everyone's very focused on this ChatGPT ads thing, but Google's doing it and it's like, meh, like, not even a big deal for them. They're like, of course, yeah, we just stuff some ads in the thing because we're doing AI search and we'll keep them out of Gemini, but we're, you know, display and, and search ads and YouTube ads are going to be way better and we're making so much money over here that this, this thing that's like, causing so much drama and people are doing Super Bowl ads about? Like, yeah, we just did it and it's minor to the financials and, you know, if you're an analyst or shareholder, like, don't even stress about it. And also, no one's paying attention. So, it was just very funny that, uh, says there, there are plenty of justifications elsewhere, while everyone else is going to have to keep, have to spend to keep up without nearly the obvious high margin benefits. So, Google has a bunch of different places to put ads and so much surface area, so many users, um, and, uh, and so little pushback, you know? I, I don't

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  think anyone at Google is going to be quitting over ads in AI mode, um, because they, it's an advertising company and everyone's used to it. We have our next guest in the re-stream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike first. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Matt Schumer in the re-stream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Matt.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  The Schumanator.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  The man of the hour. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Most viral essay ever, maybe? Has there ever been a more viral?

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Would you have won the million dollars if you posted this a week ago?

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I don't know, but I do wish I posted this a week ago.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, fantastic response. What has the response been like to the essay from non-tech people? I imagine that you have friends, family, friends that have been texting you screenshots or something. Like, walk me through the experience of this.

• 2:01:25Speaker 06

  It's been crazy. I I wrote this with that in mind, but still I didn't expect it to actually happen. You know what I mean? Right? I I originally wrote this for my parents. I was trying to explain to them what was going on while I was actually home for Super Bowl Sunday with them, some family friends. And frankly, I couldn't find anything that was both clear and accurate, but also understandable for them. Right? I was looking at Dario Moda's essays. And when you read them, they're perfect. They're amazing. But you have to be intact to understand them. And I just wanted to find a way to communicate this in a way that allowed them to actually understand it without having to know all the jargon, industry dynamics, everything. Because I think it's important for

• 2:02:06Speaker 06

  people to know this, but there's just not much out there for the person that's not in tech. So yeah, it did take off. It's been surprising and exciting. Frankly, I've been getting texts from friends who I haven't heard from in years. And they're like, my boss is sending this around the office. It's it's it's surreal. I thought it would go a little viral. I didn't think it would go mega viral, and certainly not this level. So I'm kind of taking it all in. I've slept like two whole hours since I posted this. I'm exhausted, but it's been it's been crazy. And I'm glad that the message was received. I think that's the most important part, right?

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what?

• 2:02:43Speaker 06

  Not happen the way I'm expecting, but it's good that people know that there's a chance.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  And the message is just something big is happening. You just want people to pay attention. Because I think people are going to debate like how how you presented different things. Is the COVID comparison really that accurate? But is that is that specifically, or you're just trying to wake people up?

• 2:03:03Speaker 06

  Exactly. Right? I if I knew how viral this was going to go, I think I would have spent more time thinking through some of the parts of how I presented them. But

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Is part of is part of why you why you you're maybe sort of worried, or you want people to pay attention is is your experience as as an entrepreneur here? Because it feels like, in many ways, hyper right, like, you know,

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Probably made more sense as a product two years ago and as all the different LLMs have gotten better and the products have gotten better, I imagine it has been great and it sounds like maybe you're moving on to focus on investing, but is part of this it's been kind of very personal experience of just kind of waking up to the power of the base models and the labs in general?

• 2:03:48Speaker 06

  It has and I'll share more on the company side soon, but I've been in this industry since 2019. I got in when I was in college working on a VR startup and I realized that like if I didn't drop everything to jump into AI, I'd regret it for the rest of my life and I'm glad I did, but seeing the progression is kind of freaky. I mean, you know, it couldn't write a sentence accurately in 2019, much less a line of code. Now we're looking at models that can build autonomously for many hours. I had early access to GPT-5.3 Codex and that was a very eye-opening experience, getting used to that. At first I was prompting and using it like I use any other model, little things at a time, iterating back and

• 2:04:30Speaker 06

  forth until I realized, wait, this isn't screwing up. I started pushing it forward and pushing it further and just saying, hey, here's the big spec I want. Don't come back to me until it's perfect and get it deployed on a server and it did.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Speaker 06

  And I'm not saying every industry is going to go just like that. I don't think it's going to look like that in every industry, but if that's a sign of things to come, I think people should be paying attention.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the VR example is so interesting because like completely agree with you on just the power of the models. Like it's so real, it's so legitimate and it does, and truly a lot of people are like, oh, it's still hallucinates or six fingers in the images. It's like that is antiquated, like you need to get up to speed. But at the same time, like if I was, you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg like cutting back on on virtual reality spending and plans there like, and it doesn't, and it feels like if AI is like going to advance everything, you'd be like, great, like I can invest 10 times less in reality labs and the headsets are going to get 10 times better. But there's a lot of these things in like the, they're not even, it's not even physical world. I'm

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  not even talking about doctors. I'm talking about VR headsets, but even that doesn't feel like maybe like AI doesn't really pull that forward. And I'm just wondering like when I go to my friends and family. How many of them will actually be like, yes, this is going to change my life in whatever I do versus like, yeah, software will get better, but software is a small piece of what I do. But how are you thinking about about people that where software is like a more minor piece of their world?

• 2:06:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is something that, again, hindsight is 2020. I wish I had spent more time on knowing what was

• 2:06:16Speaker 06

  I try to address it a little bit in the article and I'll hopefully provide more color here.

• 2:06:21Speaker 06

  My dad's a lawyer, as an example.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23Speaker 06

  Like, it's not going to stand in court anytime soon.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Speaker 06

  Right. It can help with writing. It can help with reviewing things that he's he's working on. It's essentially an associate and it's getting better every year.

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Speaker 06

  But it's not going to stand in court. I think the ideal thing here is people read this and they kind of take it in their own unique way for their own unique needs for what they're doing, right? If you're somebody who's very, very exposed, I think there are a lot of people who are who kind of are denying it.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 06

  I think it's worth paying attention and saying, okay, what is the world going to look like in two, three years? How do I prepare myself? Because it's it's worth it just in case. There are industries where I think it will take longer, though even in those industries, for example, let's say legal, those that are just getting started today might have a bit of a rough time, whereas a partner might do quite well, actually. So I think it's very contextual for each person, and that's what I wish I kind of got across a bit better. Maybe I'll do a follow up or something like that. But yeah, I I I think it's really tricky to give sort of like a silver bullet, one size fits all answer for everybody.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:07:22Speaker 06

  The goal is to say, hey, look, this is happening. Can you try to think about it a little bit for your industry? Because even if it's going to change an industry and there's like, like the ability for it to happen, it's not going to happen overnight, even if the technology is there. Though I do think for a lot of these industries, the technology will be there relatively soon. It's just a matter of how long it takes to proliferate proliferate through society.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, lawyers don't tend to post as much as software engineers.

• 2:07:47Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 2:07:48Jordi Hays?

  But you can imagine. Lawyers out there thinking, I don't even write contracts anymore. I just review, which is like kind of what you're seeing.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Most engineers saying.

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  Lawyers are so.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, so, so part of the, I, I will, I'll be interested to see what happens with like the general legal job market.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but we've just been hearing examples from companies being like, I need to hire hundreds of interns that are just going to come at work.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  In a new way and, and use the tools sort of natively.

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  And you can imagine that happening, but, but again, there's just, I don't know.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what advice, uh, or what, what recommendation would you make to a new grad right now?

• 2:08:29Speaker 06

  It's really tough and it's one of those areas in the article that I don't think I had a clear answer on, but that's because there is no clear answer. I have a lot of people in my life that have asked me this and part of my thinking on this article was like, can I answer some of these questions? And there are parts of this that got clearer, parts that didn't. This is one of the parts I don't think I have full clarity on. I think knowing the tools is better than not knowing the tools.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53Speaker 06

  Focusing on industries that maybe will take a little bit longer to be disrupted. So you can entrench yourself a bit first is valuable. And there are people better than I at knowing which ones those might be. Um, but really I think it's just getting used to using this because this is the new world. It's like, you know, if, if a calculator is, is available.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:10Speaker 06

  You should probably be learning how to use it. This is, this is that times a thousand.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:14Speaker 06

  Uh, so I think it's just learning to be adaptable. I think there probably is, we'll look back in 10 years and there will be clearly like, this is what you should have done. I don't think anybody knows today.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:25Speaker 06

  But it's also been very contextual. It's going to depend on what your goals are as a person.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, obviously like there, there's those posts about like, it's the last moment to join a lab before the takeoff. And like, it'll be fun to join. And then it makes a ton of sense. At the same time, I, I love the idea of being a young person, becoming a, a hacker, like lightly technical, but really fluid in the tools. And then going and working at like an oil and gas company and just being like the most cracked, most productive person at this company that has like assets and you're going to be able to just do so much more across the organization and, and be that like, you know, a hun- thousand X intern, basically. Uh, Jordy, where do you want to go?

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  A lot of, uh, comments from people asking if AI wrote the essay.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your writing process actually like these days?

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  It didn't stick out to me as AI, but.

• 2:10:13Jordi Hays?

  You definitely, I didn't, you, you probably, if you did use AI, you pulled out a lot of the M dashes.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:18Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:10:19Speaker 06

  It did help a lot. And I think that's kind of the point. A lot of people are like dunking on me for saying that. And I posted that I used.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not really a gotcha if it did insane numbers, like whatever.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  And it's not a lot. Like if you're upfront about it, it's fine. Yeah.

• 2:10:36Speaker 06

  It's like proving the point. It's like people are saying this thing sucks at X, Y, and Z, but like, look, it's 50 million views. Like, there's a reason that I'm talking about this stuff. Um, and you know, I think there's like little details I get wrong here because this has been a crazy couple of days, but the way that I approached it was, again, I wanted to write sort of like a Dario style essay, but for the average person. So what I started doing is I have like lists of like all the things that have like sort of made me think over the years that I agree with. And I've sort of points on what I agree with in each of those articles, what I disagree with, what I think has grown, what hasn't. And I've kind of dumped this all in. And I used Claude for this, even though I think Codex is way better for engineering. Claude is better for this sort of stuff.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Speaker 06

  I dumped all those articles in and I said, okay, here's what I agree with. Here's what I don't. Um, and then I basically spoke to it for like an hour with my own thoughts and my own feelings and how I wanted to present it and what I think actually makes sense. Cause a lot of these things in the past kind of are somewhat accurate, somewhat not. And I iterated with the AI for, for many, many hours going back and forth until I finally felt like, okay, it's time to write. And I kind of had to put out a whole sheet on how to do this. And then I actually went and I took that and wrote the first draft myself. And then there were obviously parts I struggled with. I had AI come and help. Um, I had to kind of like work on the wording with me. And then once I had a first draft, I brought it back and I had it critiqued. Um, and that's, there's obviously more details.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, I, I think when people lob the like, this is AI, they think that you, that your prompt was like, write an essay that will get 50 million views. And it just like one shots. It's like, no, this is a collaborative back and forth. Yeah, of course. Um, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  We tried that on X. A lot of people. A lot of hashtags.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. It can be, it can be a little rough. Um, yeah. Fascinating. Um, Jordy, anything else?

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no. What are you, what are you, what are you going to do next?

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I've noticed from your portfolio that there's a lot of chip companies, hard tech investments. Like what are you most excited about just in the economy broadly?

• 2:12:37Speaker 06

  I mean, in terms of what I'm investing in, and I intentionally tried to leave this out of the article because I wanted the article to be just purely my message. Kind of like have to deal with the sort of interplay of that. But in terms of what I actually believe in, I think the chip companies are very interesting. I was, you know, I don't know if so, a couple of years ago, I kind of helped Grok blow up and that's worked out quite well. I mean, etched a few others like that. I also think the rails are going to be very important. I tend to invest in, you know, I just started my fund around this thesis that there are going to be sort of these things that AI needs to proliferate. Right. It's not just the model itself and the weights itself, but it's the, you know, the rails for them to communicate with each other. And I just invested in a new company, Agent Relay, that's about to come out, but I think it's going to be really exciting there.

• 2:13:22Speaker 06

  I also did the agent mail, so very, very similar. Daytona, SF Compute's a little different, but I think they're going to be, which Evan is, a killer.

• 2:13:32Speaker 06

  I'm sort of interested in that sort of stuff, like how do you take the models and then bring them out of their boxes? Because this is obviously happening and you just kind of want to put your money where, where it's going to grow, obviously.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's, whenever something crazy happens, there's a lot of like, ah, it's almost like nerve wracking panic. But I, I do think we're in this moment right now where there's going to be a reevaluation of how value accrues in tech. Because tech has become everything, like, you know, car companies are tech companies now. Everything's a tech company and, but the business models are wildly different. And, you know, you know, the, the software agents are going to accelerate some companies. They're going to damage some companies and we're, we're going to be following it all right here. But we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get some sleep.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the massive article. I, I mean, it, it, I definitely agree with the point of like, we, we're not talking about the, the latest updates to AI broadly enough.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  I do think it's interesting, some people will read this, let's say they're a firefighter or a school teacher.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  And be like, wait, I'm going to have to do less paperwork.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  There's actually a lot of people that should see this and be excited.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  That's a good thing. There are some beautiful white pills. There's obviously some quagmires and some quicksand you want to avoid, but this is how technology is rolled out and adopted. And so you want to skate where the puck is. But we appreciate you coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Thanks so much, Matt.

• 2:14:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado, we have Vlad Tenev from Robinhood in the restream waiting room. Let's bring Vlad into the TVB Ultra. Vlad, how are you doing?

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, cactus.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Cactus?

• 2:15:19Vlad Tenev?

  How you doing?

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  I like the... Is the cactus symbolic of something?

• 2:15:24Vlad Tenev?

  Uh, well, I love succulents and I think we're... We live in a dangerous world, gentlemen. You know, you turn around, you just got to be careful. So it's a constant reminder that you just have to watch your back.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  With a physical cactus behind you, yes, you need to physically watch your back. Don't back up during this interview.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 2:15:42Vlad Tenev?

  I have to really be careful here.

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  I love cactuses, too. This is probably going to inspire us to get some cacti.

• 2:15:48Vlad Tenev?

  Cacti.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Cacti, right. No, no, you're right. We'll get some cacti around this.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  I'm more of a Christmas tree guy. I like a big Christmas...

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I've been missing having some plants in the house.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, sorry, we're not here to talk about...

• 2:15:59Vlad Tenev?

  And you know what's the thing about this cactus is?

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:01Vlad Tenev?

  You think that it's very dangerous, but you can train yourself to actually like...

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  No way. Whoa!

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  Alpha right here.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's all about the angle.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  This is amazing. I had no idea that you could do that.

• 2:16:14Vlad Tenev?

  Band-aid on my hand later.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Fearless CEO touches cactus.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  That's great. How's business? What's new in your world?

• 2:16:22Vlad Tenev?

  Well, we've got a lot of things going down. You know, I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future. And what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. So a couple interesting things. Number one, in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle. And eventually, this asset class is going to go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. So we're in the thick of that. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally. Private markets and family finance. So...

• 2:17:04Vlad Tenev?

  Through this year, if you look at the end of the year, Robinhood should be better for you, the more family members use it. We want to get your partners on Robinhood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family, and we're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets, I think access to private markets is one of the biggest iniquities in financial services today. So we're just working really hard to solve that for people very, very quickly and urgently.

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, more specifically, you guys have a fund set up. Like, I imagine there's more going on. Like, where's like private markets as a category going on the platform?

• 2:17:47Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Because fundamentally, fundamentally, the problem of like, a lot of people have been excited about these billion-dollar companies and watched them go from single-digit billion to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. And having to just sit on the sidelines and hold SaaS has been rough, rough for a lot of people over the last year.

• 2:18:07Vlad Tenev?

  And I think it's really a continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades, right? It's gotten harder and harder to go public, and at the same time, more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company.

• 2:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:21Vlad Tenev?

  And, yeah, our efforts in the US to stem the tide are Robinhood Ventures, which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our N2, which you can think of as kind of a S1 for funds. So, we're in the strict quiet period for that, so I can't talk about the fund specifically. But in the US, we're very focused on solving this problem, and we think we have a path. And internationally, we're going to push forward on tokenization. Last year, we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways, which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year, it'll be about

• 2:19:06Vlad Tenev?

  Hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real, making those products real and tradable for, for customers and, and also getting the companies to like engage in it willingly, right? I think, I think we experimented a little bit, but we, we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as, as it is to the retail shareholder.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  If you could rewind, how would you have, have let retail traders invest in Robinhood? Would you have done it at seed round if you could have? Series A, series B? Would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it? Walk me through if you could replay.

• 2:19:53Vlad Tenev?

  We, we absolutely would have done it at seed. Not only do people know this about Robinhood, but Robinhood was actually, we had kind of a hard time raising our seed round. And, and so we talked to probably over a hundred investors. At one point, Robinhood was live on Angel List, if you remember that platform. And you could invest in Robinhood at seed at a 10 million valuation cap. So effectively think of it as a 10 million valuation. And we would take all comers. I mean, we would pitch, you know, middle aged ex-retirees

• 2:20:36Vlad Tenev?

  from Nebraska, the same way that we would pitch like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. And, you know, they would ask us questions. And if they wanted to invest, we, we typically would just let them invest. So we have, we have tons of shareholders that were just essentially retail. I mean, high net worth, maybe, but, but they were just normal people. And, you know, some of them even have messaged us, they held through IPO and over the years and, and have done quite well. So I absolutely would have.

• 2:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Understatement.

• 2:21:08Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I absolutely would have.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  I want to, I want to go back. Yeah, I want to go back to prediction markets. Prediction markets are bringing new people to the Robinhood platform. That's exciting for the business. The pushback and concern that people have is like people coming on, maybe they want to trade the Super Bowl. Are those people going to make great financial decisions on the Robinhood platform? Obviously you guys are an open platform, people can do. Whatever they want, but what are you going to be looking for to make sure that over time, there's, I think that the general concern is, I'm not going to use the G word, but bringing like trading, high-risk trading to the platform, there's some very real kind

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  of concerns around that. So how are you making sure this kind of rollout as prediction markets as a category grow still serve the overall user base?

• 2:22:04Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think this is one of the things that we're actively working on. I think you have some customers that really love prediction markets and for them, they want it to be easier to get to and more intuitive. And they don't like, they would probably say that our experience right now buries them too much and we make them too hard to get to. And then you have customers that don't want anything to do with it, they don't want to see it. And so we've been actively working on greater personalizations so that we can let customers opt in or out if they'd like. And also, we can detect automatically when someone wants to see that content in different places. So this is just, I mean, prediction markets are kind of a

• 2:22:49Vlad Tenev?

  test case. It's where it's most acute, but we see it across the entire spectrum of products as we expand the breadth of our super app offering. For example, we have a credit card, we have Banking Now. Banking is a separate app and you have some customers saying, well, I'm kind of annoyed having to go through two different apps to get access to Banking. Can't we put it in the same one? Others want it to be separate and prefer it. And so we're continuing to experiment with this stuff, but where it ends is just a really, really tightly personalized experience depending on what each customer is looking for and expecting.

• 2:23:32Vlad Tenev?

  And I don't think, I think we're actually breaking new ground. I don't think financial services companies have done that. You see that a lot with consumer products, but we're investing a lot on the machine learning infrastructure on the AI side into delivering that for customers across our entire product suite. And I'd say more generally, prediction markets. One of the unique things we have is we're not a monoline prediction markets player. So we have the suite of products. We can offer you a lot of things. And what we've been seeing increasingly is prediction markets have been great at attracting a new type of customer who previously may have not been as interested in Robinhood.

• 2:24:14Vlad Tenev?

  You know, they hear about us, they download the app, they onboard for prediction markets, and we're making that process easier and simpler. And then we can onboard them to all sorts of other stuff. So be it retirement accounts, our credit card, our banking product. And I think that's just something that's generally good for these customers. I see nothing wrong with someone coming in for prediction markets, but then being, you know, discovering our retirement account.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I certainly hope that people come in, maybe they want to trade something that's happening in the news, or a game, or something like that, and they realize, hey, I actually just want to save good amount of my paycheck every month, invest in stable assets, and, you know, invest in my retirement.

• 2:24:58Vlad Tenev?

  I think that's actually true, because

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think people are

• 2:25:02Vlad Tenev?

  The media talks about these as two different types of people. You have your prediction markets users and your people that are interested in stable retirement, but what we increasingly see is that actually it's the same people. And, you know, I might be, I'm obviously interested in a retirement account. I might have a small portfolio for my prediction markets, or my options trading, or my more speculative trades, but having both together in one roof makes it a more valuable service for me.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  How do you think about the news generation from prediction markets? It's always been an interesting way. We pull up prediction markets all the time to understand what markets think about, you know, how many SpaceX launches there will be this year. Do you want to do more in content driven by prediction markets?

• 2:25:57Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, and we've been doing that quite a bit already. We have a whole slew of prediction markets that are non-sports. And actually, one of the interesting things that we saw was the week after the NFL season ended, we had the government shutdown. And the prediction market contract on the government shutdown actually drove a ton of volume because it was on everyone's mind. And people wanted to see what the current status was, how likely it is, and of course, some portion of those customers traded. So we think that will be a bigger and bigger thing. And again, as we make it, as we make it easier to surface things that are trending and things that we think you might be interested

• 2:26:41Vlad Tenev?

  in, I think that'll strengthen the use case of looking at prediction markets as a source of news.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the wealth management industry broadly will adapt to AI? I think there's a lot of conversation recently around, hey, do I need to pay somebody 1% if I can ask an LLM, hey, what's a good strategy for somebody that makes X amount of money a year and wants to retire at this point and wants to take a little risk but not too much? And you can ask some questions about it. So feels like that model could be threatened or at least margins could compress. But how are you thinking about it, both as an opportunity from Robinhood and then, you know, how the industry will have to evolve?

• 2:27:26Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think I think the there's going to be a lot of disruption by AI. I mean, we're starting to see it already. And we have Robinhood Cortex, which really has done well, sort of like helping customers think through their their trading, their sort of self-directed activity. But we've already begun conversations with regulators about how to bring Cortex to advice, making recommendations and doing ongoing portfolio management. So obviously, we'll want to roll that out safely and in a trustworthy way, but it's coming. And I actually think on the human advisor side,

• 2:28:05Vlad Tenev?

  A lot of people prefer a human advisor. They prefer the relationship. They like to have someone that has the full picture and that they can talk to. So I don't think that's going away. And in fact, AI is going to be a really integral part in streamlining the workflow of those people so that rather than serving 50 clients per advisor, you go to serving 500 or possibly more. So I think you're going to see both models continue, but costs and efficiency and capabilities continue to grow for each of them.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  What's the status of copy trading? There's a lot of people that are excited about situational awareness, what Leopold's doing over there. How many clicks is it to copy his strategy? And how closely is it possible to copy these days, the big funds that have generated a lot of excitement?

• 2:29:02Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, well, we have a product coming out, Robinhood Social, which should commence rolling out in just like weeks to low single-digit months. So we're kind of putting the finishing touches on internal testing. We just integrated prediction markets, which actually makes the feed much more dynamic. And when we announced it, one of the features that was particularly popular was whale tracking. So following Nancy Pelosi's trades and other things like that. So we're going to make it really easy to see what others are doing.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  It is such a funny world we live in. It's the Nancy Pelosi's stock ticker and endlessly entertaining category. Always, always new innovation. But congrats on the progress. That Robinhood Social feature, how much of his vibe coded? How much of a speed up are you getting internally? Like, what is the software engineering org look like these days in an era of coding agents?

• 2:30:07Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, we've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers. Okay. Perhaps not at the, definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021. But one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity and keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI. And there's, there's two things that we sort of like talked about at earnings. When we, when we look at internal operations, the two areas that move the needle are software engineering and customer support. And I think we are at, or at the very least, near best in class for both of those.

• 2:30:47Vlad Tenev?

  So customer support side, 75 plus percent of all tickets are handled by AI, including licensed cases that would have previously required a licensed brokerage professional. And, and we thought, I mean, frankly, we thought that would be further away. We were able to, to get there and deliver a great experience relatively quickly. And on the software engineering side, it, it's been tremendous. I mean, with every new generation of models, you look at, you know, Opus 4.6, now you've got Codex, you can essentially have it running autonomously overnight, checking its own output,

• 2:31:28Vlad Tenev?

  debugging itself, and have it do the work that probably would have taken an individual software engineer weeks to do while you sleep. And one year ago, that wasn't possible. So the acceleration from each new generation of models is, is tremendous. And I, I think there's going to be lots and lots of disruption. You can kind of see the market starting to digest that. But I think the firms that adopt AI and are actual technology companies.

• 2:31:59Vlad Tenev?

  This is the opportunity to dramatically accelerate relative to incumbents. And financial services, you know, a lot of our competitors aren't really even on cloud infrastructure anymore. They're still on mainframes. So I think, I think, I think it's going to become, it's going to become increasingly tough.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question, then we'll let you go if you have another second. How are you thinking about M and A? You guys clearly have built the muscle to take new products from zero to one. I'm sure you have a lot of confidence around that. But what, what's interesting from an acquisition standpoint? What's your M and A team, you know, spending time on generally?

• 2:32:38Vlad Tenev?

  I mean, we're certainly always, always looking. Last year, we were quite active with a number of acquisitions. And I think we've really built the muscle to integrate them well. In particular, you have Bitstamp, which since we closed that acquisition, has basically doubled in, in revenue. And typically, when you go through an integration like this, it's tougher, right? Because things tend to slow down. But we've been able to actually accelerate as we've integrated. So that's good to see. And, and we're on the lookout. You know, a lot of people are bearish on the crypto industry right now. We remain bullish on, on crypto. And we think that, you know, now's the time for builders to build. And

• 2:33:19Vlad Tenev?

  just, just like in the past, the cycle goes up and down. But long run, we think crypto is going to become the financial system, and they're going to converge. And so, you know, I think we're, we're still investing heavily there.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Very, very interesting.

• 2:33:39Vlad Tenev?

  Thanks, John. Thanks, Marty.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good to see you.

• 2:33:41John Coogan?

  Hope you have a good rest of your day.

• 2:33:41Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. So, so many others, other CEOs come on and they're dealing, you know, with the crazy volatility in the market. And you're just like, you're like, first time?

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's great. That's right. Good to see you.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Grizzled.

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Have a good one.

• 2:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Unlock infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Jeff Lawson.

• 2:34:07Jordi Hays?

  And we are starting the lightning round.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  We are starting the Lambda lightning round.

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  Let's activate the gong. Thank you, Ben. We have Jeff Lawson in the restroom waiting room. Or actually, are we delayed here? Let's, uh, let's figure it out.

• 2:34:24Jordi Hays?

  We can go back to the timeline.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Because it's actually the next, uh, one in the stack. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Uh, we have Sam Blonde coming on the show in just a few minutes.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Buko, uh, this kind of gets at what I was asking Vlad about. Buko says unless you have five million, AI is already good enough to be your financial advisor. Even then, it's probably good enough. Try it, share net worth, where, how you've allocated assets, what your goals are. Ask it to analyze and identify opportunities for improvement. Stress test, different scenarios. It gets basically everything right. So bullish on just out of the box LLMs for helping with this stuff.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Very good. Well, let's bring Jeff Lawson in to the TBB Ultra Dome. How are you doing? What's happening?

• 2:35:14Speaker 08

  Very good. Thanks, guys.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, first time on the show, I mean, I feel like most people will be familiar with your career, but please give us a brief introduction.

• 2:35:24Speaker 08

  All right. So I'm Jeff. Uh, you know, I've been a, an entrepreneur my whole career. I've been a software developer and started a bunch of companies on the internet. So, um, very first company in the dot com era. Was the first CTO of StubHub, was one of the first product managers at AWS. Uh, but then founded the company that most people know me for, which is Twilio.

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:42Speaker 08

  Uh, back in 2008, so enabling software developers to build, um, communications and all the apps that we use all day. And grew that over 16 years to about four billion in revenue. And took it public in 2016 and, uh, and now I'm here in the fusion energy world with Inertia.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Amazing. I have to, I have to say thank you because, uh, Twilio sponsored a lot of hackathons when I was in college. And it was like the go-to, like fun. Tool to pull off the shelf and build something that was a little bit more interactive than just a normal website. I built something that would text me every day with little updates and stuff. It was like so much fun to be tinkering in that era. So thank you for everything you did at Twilio. But

• 2:36:22Speaker 08

  It was a crowd pleaser.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, it just like delightful product experience. So many interesting unlocks. And then obviously like huge partnerships. You see a part powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages. So obviously fantastic business, but get us up to speed on inertia enterprises.

• 2:36:39Speaker 08

  Absolutely. Well, so inertia is the commercial fusion energy company. And I know that sounds like, you know, saying, yeah, we were selling unicorns or something, but that's because fusion energy has been the thing of of myth for nearly 100 years since it was first hypothesized because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean, it is safe, it is low cost, it is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022, when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with fusion. And this was a huge breakthrough. And so inertia is commercializing that experiment, taking it out of the lab and bringing it to the grid. And the way we do

• 2:37:22Speaker 08

  that is with few things. Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorn sized bit of fusion fuel with the world's largest laser. And you get it just right, you compress it and you create this reaction that releases a bunch of energy. And so for us, commercialization means, number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important, right? You want to have science, basic science that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one. Step two, we're going to go build the world's most powerful laser. It is a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use over Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:37:58Speaker 08

  It is

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  Big number.

• 2:37:59Speaker 08

  20 times more efficient. It is one tenth the size. So it's a really modern, but the coolest laser the humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're going to go do is build the world's first fusion fuel factory where we are making these fuel targets in an automated, scaled way. And then last, we bring all that together and we build a grid scale gigawatt scale power plant that has enough energy to be able to power a medium to large sized city, a million homes you can power with this facility. So that's our plan.

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  That's so crazy. Talk to me about the capital intensivity of this. This is hard tech. This is energy. This is a big deal. How much did you raise?

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  I love that you're doing the meme too, the like, you know, make, build software, you know,

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  and go into hardware, yeah.

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  And then do the hardest thing possible, right? It's great.

• 2:38:48Speaker 08

  Well, you know, I feel like that's one of the things that is exciting to do, like having done the software thing for most of my career, taking what I've learned in terms of building a company and scaling a company and now bringing it to this new domain is really exciting. So in terms of the capital intensity, you're right, fusion is not a cheap endeavor. So today we announced our first capital raise, $450 million. It's a milestone-based approach.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Nothing like 450 to kick things off.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic round.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a good way to get started.

• 2:39:22Speaker 08

  Thanks, thanks. So we've got a milestone-based approach. So we basically, we take this and we've got a great group of investors have come around and said, hey, look, you know, fusion is something that we want to invest in, but we want to invest in a commercialization effort, not in basic science. And so that's what our investors have come to the table to do. And so we're really excited to be embarking on this. Now, we will raise more capital later, especially as we get to that last stage, which is to go build the first fusion power plant. That'll be capital intensive. But this funding is allowing us to take a lot of the design work that we're doing today and then start building these prototypes, a scaled-down version of that laser, a scaled-down version of that target assembly plant in order to prove that these technologies are ready for the scale up.

• 2:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. With a business like this, it feels like, you know, obviously the TAM is massive. It's no doubt that the world needs tons and tons of energy. We want as much of it as possible. How do you, how do you look at the risk to the business? You've got technical risk, execution risk, regulatory risk. What's your, what's your kind of personal framework? And, and how are you trying to like, you know, chase each one of those down and to, you know, eliminate that risk?

• 2:40:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting. It's the exact opposite of the world of software. The world of software, it was always, you know, you can build just about anything. The only question is, does the world want it?

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:40Speaker 08

  Is anyone going to pay you for it?

• 2:40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:42Speaker 08

  This is the opposite. You know the world needs energy, especially if it is cheap, clean, abundant, uh, and, uh, safe. Uh, the only question has always been, will it work?

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  Can you do it?

• 2:40:51Speaker 08

  And so here we are with the, you know, physics of it now proven it's a scale up. And so what does that scale up consist of? Well, uh, it is essentially building supply chains, building vendor bases and scaling up, uh, a number of fields to meet the demands that a first, uh, power plant would put on some new technologies. So for example, we're working with a lot of, uh, companies in the, uh, laser diode field to scale up production of the particular kinds of laser diodes that we need to go build our, um, our plant. And in order to do that, we have to scale up production of these particular semiconductor diodes by about a thousand X what the global production is today. And so you look at something like that, you're like, okay, that is doable. It's a lot of hard work. Uh, and so the milestones that we look at is like, okay,

• 2:41:36Speaker 08

  we're bringing the vendors along for the ride. We have to do some inventions, some automation. But you know, this looks a lot like bringing, um, a consumer product, uh, to the market. And I think about, here's what Apple does every year. They dream up a new iPhone and then they figure out, how are we going to make a billion of them? And then they introduce it to the world. And every time they do that, well, there's a bunch of hard things they have to go figure out about how they're gonna, uh, take a design and manufacture them at scale and with a certain yield and with a certain precision. And so those are the kinds of, uh, undertakings that we are, uh, going under for both the laser scale up as well as our target development scale up.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Hmm. How important is it to find a dance partner with one of the hyperscalers now? I, I've seen a number of news articles about not just fusion, but also fission projects and just big energy projects. You know, these things are measured in years, if not decades. Uh, and it feels like, uh, there's a lot of advantages to having, uh, at least an LOI that says, hey, if we can deliver this, you know, AWS wants it or something like that. How are you thinking about, uh, you know, spinning up the biz dev muscle of the business? Maybe before you break ground?

• 2:42:45Speaker 08

  Well, you know, I think that if anybody is able to deliver on cheap, abundant, clean, safe energy, is there any question that you will have buyers for it? You know, I don't think that's really the problem. I think really the problem is actually bringing those things to reality.

• 2:43:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  When you say the people that are like, you know, still have all this risk, technical risk to their business, can they scale it up, regulatory risk, all that, and they're focused on like finding their dance partner, it's like, is that just for hype? And do you think maybe that's like the wrong focus? Or is creating some amount of hype necessary to attract capital? I mean, you have the luxury of a track record that allows you to raise half a billion dollars out the gate, whereas someone else might need to find that dance partner to get any type of excitement around what they're doing?

• 2:43:30Speaker 08

  Well, I think really it's about focusing on the core progress that needs to be made. Because no matter what your approach is, there's a lot of things that have to get proven, there's a lot of things that have to be done. And so I don't think that necessarily the validation of a buyer is the most important thing for the stage at which, you know, most fusion companies are at. That said, we were happy to have Google Ventures become a part of our round, so they are an investor in Inertia. And obviously, we, you know, we think that if we are able to deliver on the promise of clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy, that they and many others will be interested buyers. But really, our focus is heads down, let's make it work, let's do the engineering and

• 2:44:12Speaker 08

  the scale up and the supply chain work that is needed in order to go build that first plant.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  Why Inertia? How'd you pick the name?

• 2:44:19Speaker 08

  Well, there are two major types of fusion, like methods. One of them, which I think you may have heard about before, is magnetic confinement fusion. The other one is called inertial confinement fusion. And we are doing the inertial confinement fusion using lasers. And so given that, I thought the word inertia was a super interesting word, because it both can refer to the The lack of change of direction, right? The if you have inertia, you're like, well, you're not going to move. And I thought that actually spoke to humanity's dependence on carbon-based energy, interestingly enough. But inertia, the flip side of inertia is once you have momentum, once you are moving, it's hard to stop you.

• 2:45:04Speaker 08

  And of course, that's our goal with building the company. And so I thought there was a number of interesting things about the name. But it all stems from the the basic technology that we're pursuing, which is inertial confinement fusion.

• 2:45:13Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, prior to this, you've kind of lived and built through a number of cycles. How have you been processing kind of everything else happening? And you're outside of, outside of energy?

• 2:45:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We started StubHub, it was during the the dot com meltdown in 2000, started Twilio during 2008, the financial crisis. And so

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  You were born in the darkness.

• 2:45:37Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:45:39Speaker 08

  You know, I think the thing is you gotta start companies irrespective of the macro environment that you're operating in, because the macro environment is going to change. And so the business itself has to be built on the fundamentals of whatever's going to make that business successful. So for the case of, say, StubHub or Twilio, the fundamental was focus on customers. If customers need what we're doing, great, we'll eventually, you know, show the world and win and do all the things we need to do. If we're not serving customers, then we won't. It's as simple as that. For inertia, it's a little bit different because we're not going to have customers in the short term, but I like to say our biggest customer is the laws of science. Right? So we always have to be serving the laws of physics. Uh, and if we focus on that, taking

• 2:46:15Jordi Hays?

  You gotta talk to the, you gotta talk to your, you gotta focus your time talking to your customers. Well, physics, laws of science.

• 2:46:21Speaker 08

  Our customer is, uh, yeah.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  The universe.

• 2:46:25Speaker 08

  And but if we focus on that, of doing all the engineering, all the scale up work we have to go do to go take the proven result and now build it bigger and into a power plant, that's the thing. By the time we're done with that and proving that out, whatever the current economic story of the day is, or even the story of the year is, will be long gone. We'll be talking about something else. And that's how I've always looked at my, at my startups.

• 2:46:47Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the hardest role to hire for right now?

• 2:46:52Speaker 08

  Well, you know what's interesting? We are, one of the things I like and I'm really excited about with inertia is that we are not fighting the talent war for AI engineers. Now, we have software engineers on staff and we are hiring people versed in AI, but it's not the same kind of people that, you know, that Meta and Google and every startup down the street, and I'm here in San Francisco at the moment, is fighting for. And you see some pretty bonkers things going on in the talent market right now for those, you know, foundational AI engineers. And I'm quite frankly, just happy that we're not in the market for that talent. We're hiring for a lot of engineers, but you know, not necessarily those.

• 2:47:33Speaker 08

  We're hiring for mechanical engineers and materials engineers and industrial engineers. We're hiring people from the likes of, you know, Apple, people who've figured out how to take these products every year and take them from a designer's desktop into, you know, a factory where they're making billions of them. We are hiring people from the likes of Wemo, where they had to figure out over the last decade, hey, how are we going to build this first of a kind autonomous car and scale up things like LiDAR and make them better and cheaper and faster and all these things in order to enable those amazing cars we see driving around autonomously here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it's like, those are the types of people who've done those scale ups are the most, you know, a lot of the interesting talent that we're going after right now.

• 2:48:14Speaker 08

  And I think that's just a little bit different than the, you know, than the AI, let's just call it a hot mess right now in the industry.

• 2:48:24John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come by and explain it all to us.

• 2:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. And yeah, we're excited. Come back on anytime.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Everyone's rooting for you in the chat.

• 2:48:33Jordi Hays?

  Big updates, small updates.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  You're going to be legendary. Thank you for all the hard work. It's going to be probably decades, but hopefully we'll have you back a bunch along the journey. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:48:43Speaker 08

  Hopefully a decade and then, and then the next decade.

• 2:48:46John Coogan?

  I like the optimism. There we go.

• 2:48:48Speaker 08

  Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it.

• 2:48:50John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And without further ado, we have Sam Blonde coming in to the TBP and UltraDome. Sam, good to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:48:59Speaker 09

  Thank you. I'm awesome. Thank you for having me, guys. Here, let's start off with a little bit of fun. I think the squad is ready for a big show.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:49:07Speaker 09

  And we're gonna dong it right back at you.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  Wow, look at that team. Here we go.

• 2:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing. Hey, team.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  Wow. So, coming out of stealth today, it seems like you hired half of San Francisco already. How big is the team? How long have you actually been working on this? Because we worked together, what, two years ago? And then you called me and you were ready to launch.

• 2:49:34Speaker 09

  That's right. So, we really started working on this September of 24.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:39Speaker 09

  Kugan, awesome to see you again. Jordy, great to see you. Great to meet you. Hopefully the first of many. And started September of 24. Squad's about going on 40.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:49:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, going on 40, a lot of EPD, and we're starting to build out go-to-market too. So, having a lot of fun.

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  Introduce the full product, the company. Since no one's heard about it yet, but you're launching it today.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  People have heard of Monaco, but now they've heard of the real Monaco.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  The real Monaco.

• 2:50:08Speaker 09

  There's a maybe fun story with Monaco. We've already been in a bit of a lawsuit, so we can go there.

• 2:50:15Speaker 09

  If entertaining for the viewers.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:50:17Speaker 09

  Okay, so more importantly, we're an AI sales platform.

• 2:50:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:50:22Speaker 09

  And I think like, you know, two-minute version or one-minute version is on the tools side, we're a replacement for legacy CRM. Most commonly, this is going to be like your HubSpot, your Adio, your Salesforce. We also replace all of the point solutions that integrate to those tools. So, this is going to be data provider like an Apollo or a ZoomInfo. We provide all of your signals like a clay. We do your call recording like a Otter or Fireflies. We do all your sequences, like a number of different companies that do outbound, in a deeply integrated platform. And for us, that's really a means to an end, which is we're replacing full sales workflows with agents.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:03Speaker 09

  And so, we have agents who identify the right company to target, the right person to target, the right message to send. We leverage signals to. Incorporate into that message. When you get a response, we schedule a meeting. We record that meeting. We update your pipeline and really architected in a way that is not to be reactive to user input. If you've ever worked in a sales tool, you sort of get a database that's largely empty that you need to tell it what to do. Day one, when you log into Monaco, everything is already done for you. You're just sort of a beneficiary and recipient of things like meetings, feedback on things you can be doing better and more.

• 2:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is launching with a platform like this only possible because of AI and the advancements in coding agents and coding tools? Because it seems like you're sort of rebundling. You listed off maybe like 10 different point solutions that are now coming together. And it's notable that you guys didn't come out of stealth like maybe six months ago when you maybe had five of those things operational, but you clearly decided to launch with a full suite.

• 2:52:10Speaker 09

  I think a few things come to mind. One is we are able to build software faster because of the coding co-pilots that you just alluded to. And so I don't know that we would have been able to build a Monaco-like platform in the amount of time that we've been able to pre-AI. We're also building for a segment of the market. We're purpose-built for earlier-stage startups. So this is Series A seed-stage companies. The needs of these businesses are relatively unsophisticated compared to much larger companies. And so because we're purpose-built for a type of company that doesn't need super-deep functionality, unlike the database side.

• 2:52:51Speaker 09

  In fact, when you have super-deep functionality, it makes it more difficult to interact with. And so you bundle all these tools together. If you're a Series A startup, it actually works against you because the tools are so complicated to integrate, customize, work with. And again, we're purpose-built for that company. And then the last thing that comes to mind is it wouldn't be possible to build Monaco without AI because we're AI-native. So like everything that we do is sort of oriented and the decisions that we make are around how can we program the platform to have an agent doing this rather than a user? And so very different user experience than if you're used to logging into these sort of reactive databases.

• 2:53:32Speaker 09

  I listed a few of them. HubSpot, Adio, Salesforce. Totally different user experience.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about the domain. You got monaco.com. Talk about the lawsuit. Talk about how you picked Monaco to begin with. Uh, I want the full story.

• 2:53:49Speaker 09

  Okay, so, uh, naming was hard. It took us, uh, a couple of months and like tried a bunch of different names and you can't just like pick a name that you like. We couldn't have just called ourselves like sales.com. Uh, because the, like, one, we wanted the dot com to be available. And two, you like can't name it if something already has that name. So I was trying to associate the brand with, um, like luxury premium. Was thinking through like, what are some names that, uh, are typically associated with that? And I came up with Monaco. My older brother, who is a co-founder, when I told him I really liked the name Monaco, his response was, that's the stupidest name ever. What are we going to just call it like New York?

• 2:54:30Speaker 09

  Uh, and so, uh, he, he wasn't a fan, but I think like over, over time, um, started socializing it with some other people and started picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. Um, it's a cool sounding word, like Monaco is just like a nice word itself. Uh, the place is associated with, I don't know, um, uh, wealth and success.

• 2:54:51Jordi Hays?

  Yachts, Formula One.

• 2:54:53Speaker 09

  Yachts, um, but a big one is Formula One. A lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our, our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up into the right.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:55:03Speaker 09

  Uh, and, um, let's see. So the domain dispute, we, we ended up calling it Monaco. Really liked the note, the domain.

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Uh, was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker and get?

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  A domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDad.

• 2:55:21Speaker 09

  We, we had monaco.co and that was a couple thousand dollars.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:26Speaker 09

  I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees, we spent like, I don't know, another eight or $900,000 to add the M. So we got monaco.co evolved to monaco.com. Uh, we did use a broker. Shout out to Loomis, uh, if they're watching.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  I love Loomis. Yeah. I've used, I've, I've worked with them on a bunch of domains.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Shout out Loomis.

• 2:55:47Speaker 09

  Cool.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, how, what, what lessons?

• 2:55:49John Coogan?

  The dispute.

• 2:55:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. The dispute. What actually happened?

• 2:55:52Speaker 09

  So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while. And we get this like hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain. That the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We'd never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there was like a regulatory body for domains. Anyway, they made like, you know, all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated like trademark claims. We, I had to get legal representation. This was like a couple of month long process that required all sorts of evidence and more. And we ended up winning the case. So all's well that ends well. We are Monaco. It's official.

• 2:56:33Jordi Hays?

  Gone to war. Just went to war with a country before even launched. Not, not many. Wartime CEO. There we go. What, what are you, we've been covering the SaaS apocalypse. You guys have the benefit of kind of understanding the world in its current form and building from the ground up. But, but a lot of questions around seat based pricing. Do companies need to evolve to more value based pricing? What are you learning about kind of the broader concerns around enterprise software? And how are you kind of applying it?

• 2:57:06Speaker 09

  Well, I can tell you what we're doing right now. We're, we're in public beta. So yesterday we were in private beta. Today we're in public beta. We'll eventually get to general availability. Right now we're pricing around simplicity. So we charge a platform fee that includes all of the compute that you need relative to these other companies that I've referenced. We have very high compute costs because of all of the agents that are doing the work. We also have really high servicing costs. We pair what we call forward deployed AEs with every customer that signs up. So we charge a platform fee. Those things are included. Right now we're charging annual platform fee of $25,000.

• 2:57:47Speaker 09

  That's discounted to what it will be as we go into GA. And we will, I suspect, when somebody who is at the company that is much smarter than me on the finance side, I think we will be in this sort of like you pay a. A minimum amount for the initial compute and then it's pay as you go. It just makes far more sense with the value that we're adding to do this usage based sort of compute predicated pricing. But right now we're solving for simplicity and eliminating friction from onboarding customers. And this has been a price point that has been met with very little resistance.

• 2:58:23Jordi Hays?

  How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare, you know, code, any, any software engineer says, oh, I don't write any code. I just review code now. What, what's the equivalent experience in sales? Yeah. How, where do you think it goes?

• 2:58:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's, it's a thoughtful question. Um, you know, look, uh, my answer may change six to 12 months ago from now. So let me give you the like today answer.

• 2:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Um, I, it, it doesn't seem that, uh, the, the sort of customer facing relationship building

• 2:58:54Speaker 09

  aspect of sales is going anywhere. In fact, that, that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople in, in some of our customers cases founders are doing, trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with, you know, some sort of like agent that is pretending to be a salesperson or, or whatever it might be. People want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. It's the sort of non customer facing activities that we believe agents are far better at. So I'll give some examples. Building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you, um, without being customer facing,

• 2:59:38Speaker 09

  who are the best companies for you to target and why? Here's your prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list. We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We are going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you, as the beneficiary, whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing the way that I'm speaking with you guys right now. And we're going to optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow up. So you get off the call, we have the call transfer. We've written an email for you to follow up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send. It's time for the next call.

• 3:00:23Speaker 09

  And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around. It's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers, and actually emphasizing the relationship building that happens that is sort of customer facing.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  What's the best way to get a job as a salesperson in 2026? Advice for young people, maybe mid-career people, somebody who wants to sort of be on, I mean, you worked in sales, had a great career. What does it take to be the next Sam Blonde?

• 3:01:00Speaker 09

  Oh, well, that's, my answer might come off as too arrogant. Why don't I just come, why don't I come up with like, what would I do if I wanted a job in Monaco? I think, I think there are a couple of things that stand out right now. We've come out of this like, and I think we're long out of the sort of like COVID time period. We are five days a week at least in San Francisco. And so anybody that is sort of looking for this, like, I expect to be able to, you know, potentially work from home one or two days, that like sort of COVID hangover, that's a thing of the past. So I think from a quality standpoint, people that are just looking to win,

• 3:01:42Speaker 09

  understand that it's like hard work to work and win at a company like Monaco. I do think that like track record of performance is an important thing. And so if you are, you know, a little bit later in your career, have several years of experience leveraging the relationships and the network that you've developed through that process. I think for us, it's going to be hard to hire someone that sort of comes to the website and fills out a, like, I want to be a senior AE at this company, like, job application without a close connection.

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  They gotta send you a bottle of champagne, right? That's the secret?

• 3:02:24Speaker 09

  Look, I won't say I can't be bought.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're looking for a job, send a case of champagne, you'll get the interview maybe. Who knows? You gotta have the resume too and the skills to back it up. Jordan, anything else?

• 3:02:41Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. Congratulations on all the progress. I'm, yeah, I'm excited to watch more companies pick this up and, and start to grow their revenue faster. So.

• 3:02:52Speaker 09

  Thanks so much, guys. Right back at you. Thank you for having me. Congrats on the success. We'll talk soon. Take care.

• 3:02:58John Coogan?

  Have a good one. 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 takes, automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And without further ado, we have someone in person. Who is it? It's John. How are you doing, John?

• 3:03:21John Ferrara?

  What's happening?

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Grab a seat. Yes, even better in person. What brings you to LA?

• 3:03:29John Ferrara?

  Well, a couple of other meetings, but I figured I had to stop by.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:32John Ferrara?

  And you know, little known fact, I was actually in journalism school.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:03:36John Ferrara?

  Before, along with data science, I was also majoring in journalism at Northwestern. And if this had been an option when I was still in school, I might have not dropped out and just tried to get a job here.

• 3:03:45John Coogan?

  Who are your heroes? Who's the, who's the GOAT journalist in your opinion?

• 3:03:48John Ferrara?

  Oh, man. Well, I dropped out for a reason.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  Didn't learn anyone's name? Uh, that's funny. Uh, well, reintroduce yourself. Tell everyone what you're working on, what you're building.

• 3:03:59John Ferrara?

  For sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth, outdoors, indoors, underground, without relying on hardware like satellites, beacons or cameras. So that's a bunch of buzzwords to say.

• 3:04:12John Coogan?

  Without external.

• 3:04:12John Ferrara?

  Without external hardware, right?

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Still need your hardware.

• 3:04:15John Ferrara?

  We use IMUs that are already installed on devices like phones, robots, embedded devices, medical devices.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  So no magnetic fields involved?

• 3:04:23John Ferrara?

  No, that's kind of a, um.

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  Different tech.

• 3:04:25John Ferrara?

  It's a, it's different tech and, and the key differentiator in what we've built is something called synthetic fingerprinting, which is this idea of being able to simulate. IMU measurements at scale for different people and objects. And the value behind that is essentially from this desk here, we could map out and simulate an environment anywhere in the world, an Amazon warehouse in Boston, and then have that up and running like in an hour.

• 3:04:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:49John Ferrara?

  If you wanted to typically use like a magnetic approach, you actually, because it's hard to simulate magnetic movement because it's usually dependent on objects that are hard to predict being in the environment.

• 3:04:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:04:59John Ferrara?

  You actually have to go to that warehouse, collect that data manually, and then train models on that. And so our idea is that the ultimate scalability with any positioning system is one that can be deployed fully remotely because I can't possibly go to, you know, every corner of the earth and install beacons, cameras, or, you know, collect fingerprint data.

• 3:05:16John Coogan?

  So what's the, what's the textbook device? Android phone? iPhone?

• 3:05:20John Ferrara?

  Yeah, so I mean, every, every mobile phone today has an IMU inside of it. So like the same thing that's powering your compass app, right? Accelerometers, gyroscopes are what we rely on.

• 3:05:28John Coogan?

  Are they getting better? Because I feel like the compass app came out, I don't know, a decade ago, and it works as well as I can tell.

• 3:05:36John Ferrara?

  I mean, they've gotten better. Like, so the traditional problem you'll see in the like inertial measurement unit space, if that's one, a space that you find yourself in, is that drift is pretty prominent. So, you know, in theory, if we can do something that's faster, better, cheaper, and more accurate, you know, everyone's like, why haven't this been done before, right? So the idea is typically because IMUs drift a lot. So if you want to actually, you know, track someone or an object over a long period of time, typically they veer off course, and then you end up losing.

• 3:06:03John Coogan?

  So the example is the phone's here, you know the phone's here to start, then you raise it one foot, the IMU knows you went up a foot, you put it down a foot, the IMU knows you went down a foot, and so you know where you are.

• 3:06:14John Ferrara?

  Yeah, that'd be probably like an accelerometer, like a altitude sensor, but we're talking about usually speed and orientation vectors. So the simplest way to think about it is, right, if you know your starting position and you're stacking vectors related to speed and direction, that's called dead reckoning. That's the approach where you're not actually, that's just like very drift prone, right? And so then what we do with our simulation and then our kind of, the models that we've built is what mitigates drift by like 90 plus percent.

• 3:06:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:39John Ferrara?

  And is able to track people and things over long periods of time. So the value adds or replaces like in defense and military, right? Because GPS gets jammed like instantly in any war zone.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:49John Ferrara?

  In indoor environments like warehouses, hospitals, any sort of like logistics centers. So those are kind of where we target first. Obviously, our long-term goal is to sort of be like a, like I said, a pretty wide-scale GPS replacement. You can imagine like That way down the road, eventually someone like FEMA being able to use this to find survivors of natural disasters under piles of rubble where a GPS signal might not be able to penetrate through. But in the near term, those commercial opportunities are pretty.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  Do you have any customers yet or do you have pilots running and how big are these firms that you're working with?

• 3:07:19John Ferrara?

  Yeah, so we work with, like I said, kind of those three industries mostly right now, logistics, healthcare and defense. We have three customers, our ACVs are in like the mid to low six figures. So those deployments, the first deployments are actually going out in March, which is exciting for us.

• 3:07:35John Coogan?

  And do they have to change anything on the hardware side?

• 3:07:37John Ferrara?

  No, so we're, we work kind of out of the box by design again. The whole goal is we want to eliminate as much, especially compared to like our TLS solutions like beacons or cameras, we want to eliminate as much friction as possible. So we integrate directly onto device and they don't require any setup.

• 3:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. How'd you get into this? Were you just annoyed by messy, noisy data and you were like, I gotta fix this?

• 3:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Going into GPS denied zone.

• 3:08:03John Ferrara?

  Yeah, you find yourself there all the time. Well, that's the same reason why if you're ever like driving in a city and it tells you you're going the wrong way on your Maps app and it's really annoying, that's why. For reference, those building, even outdoors, those tall buildings get in the way of the signals. But I got into it largely because both of my parents were in the US military, in the Navy. And so for a cumulative set of years, they were deployed between Afghanistan, Asia, all over. And so I think I kind of was exposed early on to the idea of like wanting to know where your parents were when you were a kid.

• 3:08:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:31John Ferrara?

  And it's funny how you develop these like random hyper fixations, maybe at that age that feel random and then over time, you know, an elementary explanation from my mom or dad kind of converted into like a prolonged interest.

• 3:08:40John Coogan?

  That's cool. What's the status of the company? How much have you raised?

• 3:08:43John Ferrara?

  Yeah, so we raised, we, out of YC, which we were in the summer 25 batch, we raised a little over $5 million.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  That's hit the gong.

• 3:08:49John Ferrara?

  Nice.

• 3:08:50John Coogan?

  You never hit the gong for this race.

• 3:08:55John Ferrara?

  It hits different in person, too.

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  It really does.

• 3:08:57John Ferrara?

  It's better in person. But raised five million led by CRV.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:09:01John Ferrara?

  Out of YC.

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  Charles River Ventures, correct?

• 3:09:04John Ferrara?

  Exact. Well, yeah, I did not. I should have probably known what it stood for before I took the money. I learned that after the fact. She locked in.

• 3:09:10John Coogan?

  Looked it up.

• 3:09:11John Ferrara?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:11John Coogan?

  So how big is the team?

• 3:09:13John Ferrara?

  Right now it's seven.

• 3:09:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:14John Ferrara?

  It's a pretty technically dense problem and so essentially all of our talent are like the top. There's a very small community of hyper talented engineers and researchers, mostly in academia, who focus on like no hardware tracking, submitted data, all that stuff. We've been fortunate enough to probably have what I feel comfortable in saying is probably the highest concentration of those people at a single company today. Maybe Waymo or maybe Tesla, who does a lot of light on slam stuff. But yeah, seven people, pretty much all engineers.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  And the IMU manufacturers, they don't want to get into this side of the software problem for their clients, providing API that is less noisy?

• 3:09:53John Ferrara?

  Yeah, it's like probably a business opportunity for them, but it's a pretty drastically different space than like manufacturing sensors that are like the size of your pinky nail into sort of building like simulations and all these like drift loss functions that are like, again, pretty concentrated in the know-how among the 10 or so people that can actually build that across the world.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. What was the biggest thing you learned in YC?

• 3:10:17John Ferrara?

  Well, YC was interesting for us because we are, I think like 95% of our batch was B2B SaaS or like agents, I think even maybe.

• 3:10:24John Coogan?

  I remember.

• 3:10:25John Ferrara?

  Which was, yeah, you were there. You got agents for your agents.

• 3:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a lot of agent infrastructure companies. I think you were.

• 3:10:32John Ferrara?

  You know, we're actually in, our office at Union Square is Browser Base's old office.

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 3:10:35John Ferrara?

  So hopefully we're summoning some of the good juju from them. Yeah, yeah. No, YC was good for us because they basically shove all of the non-agent companies into one group office hours. So like our, like eight companies, our weekly meetings was like a missile company, like I think Percy's Defense, Knox Metals, if you're familiar.

• 3:10:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I love them.

• 3:10:58John Ferrara?

  Us, robotics, like a robotics company. There are another couple of guys building like magnesium alternatives. So it was a pretty eclectic group. Nobody was really focused on the same thing, but they were really good conversations. So my favorite part about that was probably the group office hours. If you can like finagle your way into the eight or nine deep tech companies.

• 3:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:15John Ferrara?

  What are you, what are you trying to prove out before the A? Before, well, I mean, realistically, like I think for us. It's like a technical question more than it's like a market question, right? Because again, if we're coming to, right now, 90% of all human and object movement globally is in GPS denied areas, which makes sense if you think about it. Like, right now, we're in one. Anytime you're indoors, underground, in a combat zone, there's no location data being tracked, so you're missing tons of analytics. So I think the appeal is pretty strong in terms of the need, and we can do it if our technology works, as we say it does, at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time with the same accuracy and reliability. So essentially, it just comes down to proving out the tech. And we have a lot of, we also have a lot of pre-orders, aside from the customers we already have, that I think will propel us to all the revenue benchmarks that are important.

• 3:11:58John Ferrara?

  For us, at this point, it's essentially proving out that we're able to, again, mainly reduce drift meaningfully, so that we can track people for hours or eventually days on end without it being a, without it being a significant problem.

• 3:12:11Jordi Hays?

  How, I gotta ask how you're thinking about privacy, security, all those things. I'm sure the internet, if you're successful, you'd be one of the most hated people on the internet.

• 3:12:20John Ferrara?

  No, I'm like-

• 3:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Just from the, from the schizos-

• 3:12:22John Ferrara?

  Well, I've been seeing all the hearings online of all the, yeah, the hearings get pretty tense now.

• 3:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Get ready for-

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  Weather modification is what I'm thinking of.

• 3:12:29John Ferrara?

  Yeah, exactly, so I'm like, maybe next up, but, but, no, I mean, privacy is essentially something that, like, we're usually selling to vendors or companies who have end users on their side.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:42John Ferrara?

  So, by and large, like, our direct interface is not with the people who are being tracked with their location. That doesn't mean it's not important for us. Obviously, we have our methods about it being encrypted.

• 3:12:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:51John Ferrara?

  Working a lot with defense and those environments has to be very secure. But generally, like, when we work with healthcare, for instance, you know, tracking staff is usually a matter of, what does it fall within the union rights? Like, is it something that, if it's on a hospital-issued device, usually they're allowed to track them without it being a problem. If it's on a, you know, personal device, then it's obviously, it comes down to the direct discretion of the employee.

• 3:13:11John Coogan?

  And even the personal devices, like, you know, Apple can track you, but Apple has spent probably billions of dollars talking about how they treat privacy seriously. You sort of know that if you open up the Maps app, that you're paying the GPS on the light.

• 3:13:24John Ferrara?

  Yeah, and, and, and for what it's worth, like, we're using also the standard infrastructure that Apple's also using in their devices. So, like, the actual things that we're going off of in terms of hardware have already been greenlit and approved by, hopefully, institutions that people trust.

• 3:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:36John Ferrara?

  Again, though, it'll ultimately probably come down mostly to the interactions and the relationships between the customers that we sell to and their customers. You know, my long-term vision, though, is, right now, we're selling commercial. It'd be great, over the course of, you know, five, 10 years, you can see a use case where- You know, there's a consumer facing version of of Juxto instead of Google Maps or Apple Maps. You get the added benefit of again, a navigation tool that will never lose your direction when you're in a big city. You can route it from your house to your exact appointment room at a hospital. It'll give you routing on the road to the parking. Once you're in the hospital, navigate you to the room. So there's those easy, you know, added benefits. But more than that, like when I think about FEMA tracking you, right? Are people is are people going to download a FEMA app to be tracked by FEMA in the event they're in a natural disaster? Probably not.

• 3:14:19John Ferrara?

  So I think about like in terms of how we can ultimately eventually interface with people directly is we might partner with companies or in agencies like FEMA or whoever else. Who want to track location in sparing moments. And they basically as a user on like the Juxto maps, you can opt in.

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:14:34John Ferrara?

  To FEMA tracking you if you live in a natural disaster area and one strikes. And then that's sort of a consent process that we would deal with directly with the customer. But for now, that's probably much too ambitious and way down the road.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, also the phone OEMs would probably want something like this, like, you know, Apple just like randomly rolled out like, hey, if you're if you don't have cell service, like you can send one text message via a very slow satellite.

• 3:14:53John Ferrara?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  And everyone was like, awesome.

• 3:14:55John Ferrara?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:14:55John Coogan?

  If I'm ever lost hiking, I'll probably text someone. What does the data side of the business look like? Is this a big data problem where you need to actually source a ton of data to run a model on top of?

• 3:15:05John Ferrara?

  So so the big again, the big breakthrough with us has been the synthetic fingerprinting process. We're the first company publicly that I know of that's built an IMU simulator. At scale that's as reliable as ours is. So essentially we can give be given an input of an odd. We do a lot of asset tracking too. So we do a lot of like warehouses and and different like shipments. Given the dimensions, weight, height, whatever of a object or person, we can then simulate it in our physics based engine, have them moving around a 3D space. We because we render, we basically take in a map or satellite image of whatever the space is. We use computer vision to render it into this 3D model.

• 3:15:38John Ferrara?

  Then we simulate all these people or things moving around the space and create these basically anchor points, benchmarks of what IMU measurements are going to be at certain spots, given how that person is moving and where they started and all that other stuff. And that allows us to to to benchmark that data. So we're able to that ability to synthetically generate it is what makes it so scalable. In terms of like, again, long term, really long term visions, like my anticipation is we'll be. One of the largest holders of all labeled map and floor plan data in the world by a good margin, right? There's actually, it's a pretty untapped, but important space to have labeled data as we can imagine.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  For physical AI broadly.

• 3:16:14John Ferrara?

  Yeah, and because the input, the only input that we get from users is the floor plan or the satellite image of the space they want to track.

• 3:16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:21John Ferrara?

  So if we were to partner with, let's say, a major grocery store chain across the United States, you know, we'll probably be the only company at the moment that has that much labeled data about aisles, shelves, checkout lines, everything like that. So that's maybe not a, that's more of like a monetization route down the road. In terms of data that we need as our input, the synthetic process kind of allows us to circumvent a lot of that.

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well.

• 3:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Hang out, hang out for a little bit.

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll hang out after.

• 3:16:49John Ferrara?

  We'll do.

• 3:16:50John Coogan?

  Thanks. We gotta plant the bomb. We gotta tell everyone, thank you for watching the show.

• 3:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Not yet, John. There's one more video. There's one more video I want you to watch. I don't think you've seen it yet.

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  We got a video.

• 3:17:00Jordi Hays?

  This one is for you.

• 3:17:01John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm excited. Let's pull it up.

• 3:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Sharing it with the team.

• 3:17:06John Coogan?

  What else is going on? We got through a lot of stuff today. Oh, I think I know what you're pulling up. I think I know.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  You guys got it?

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  Let's see. Blue Water Autonomy had a announcement. Okay, let's, let's watch this. POV nightly reel scroll, but you're performatively into physical media. So they print them out. I could get into this.

• 3:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Commenting.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  Commenting, okay. Double tap a like, okay.

• 3:17:35Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, this is how you're gonna start consuming short form.

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, people, people always lament the fact that we don't print out the tweets anymore, but a lot of the tweets are videos and you can't print those out, but maybe you can. Maybe you actually can print out the videos. Uh, anything else you want to talk about before we get out of here?

• 3:17:54Jordi Hays?

  No, fun show today. Thank you guys.

• 3:17:56John Coogan?

  You don't want to talk about the Hermes leather pool table in Emerald Green? Plant that bomb and we'll tell everyone about the leather pool table. It's Emerald Green. This would look great in the UltraDome. It's only $264,000. What a steal for an Hermes pool table.

• 3:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely stunning.

• 3:18:16John Coogan?

  Ooh, and they put the H on the cue ball. I like that little detail.

• 3:18:20Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  Let everyone know. You got the Hermes version.

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  Could be passed down for generations.

• 3:18:23John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp.

• 3:18:33Speaker 05

  Nice work brothers, I'll see you on the next one.