Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Figma's AI Assistant | Dylan Field, Brian Chesky, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione

(01:25) - Google I/O Reactions (25:45) - SpaceX IPO (28:17) - Dylan Field, CEO and founder of Figma, discusses the impact of AI on design, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a balanced perspective amidst rapid technological changes. He introduces Figma's Design Agent, an AI tool designed to assist designers by automating routine tasks, thereby allowing them to focus on more creative aspects of their work. Field also highlights the significance of integrating design and code representations, aiming to eliminate false trade-offs between direct manipulation and AI-driven processes. (48:30) - Feross Aboukhadijeh is an entrepreneur and programmer, known for founding Socket, a developer-first security platform that safeguards software supply chains. In the conversation, he discusses Socket's recent $60 million Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, the escalating challenges in software supply chain security due to increased code generation by AI and the exploitation of open-source dependencies, and introduces "certified patches," a solution designed to efficiently address vulnerabilities in open-source code. (58:55) - Tae Kim, a seasoned finance professional and Senior Portfolio Strategist at Rockefeller Capital Management, discusses the robust growth and undervaluation of NVIDIA, the strategic challenges facing Google in AI, and the potential market impact of SpaceX's anticipated IPO. (01:26:55) - Immad Akhund, a British-Pakistani entrepreneur and angel investor, is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a fintech platform serving startups. In the conversation, he announces Mercury's recent $200 million funding round led by TCV, discusses the company's significant growth driven by AI-driven business formations, and highlights the increasing role of large language model (LLM) recommendations in attracting new customers. (01:38:35) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:44:23) - Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, discusses the company's recent expansion into new services, including grocery delivery, airport pickups, car rentals, and boutique hotel bookings. He explains that these additions aim to enhance the guest experience by offering greater convenience and a more comprehensive travel ecosystem. Chesky also highlights the company's efforts to rebuild its foundation to support these services and emphasizes the importance of listening to customer feedback to drive innovation. (02:04:27) - Marcus Milione, founder of Minted New York, transitioned from a career in commercial real estate to establish a brand that blends premium menswear, performance athletic apparel, endurance nutrition, and Italian-crafted jewelry. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from posting fashion and fitness content on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic to building a community-driven brand, emphasizing the importance of organic growth, customer engagement, and maintaining authenticity in product development. (02:28:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Little preview there for you. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra, Temple of Technology, Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The Capitol.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Uh, we're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. Some, uh, we're in unheard.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  People have been saying.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  They can't tell us apart. Is that what you're saying?

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  That.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  But people have been saying, I need something like a swear jar.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  When I don't wear a suit.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I'd like that.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, so yeah, something, something to consider.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  It should probably be a pretty big jar.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  20 bucks to the OpenAI nonprofit. That's what you gotta do. Um, no, we were in unheard. Uh, we, I mean, we can pull up the full, uh, the full post later in the show, but, uh, it was funny. I mean, it's a good, good analysis of like, uh, you know, what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from, uh, Alice Key. Uh, my latest for unheard is on why tech shows like TVPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by ESPN and why it's working. And they said, uh, where, where is it? They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, but, uh, we don't always have matching suits. Usually Jordy's the casual one, but yesterday we were both casual. Today we're both in suits.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  We do, we do still get the brother thing a lot.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  But yeah, I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, uh, we have to react to Google I/O. Of course, there's a whole bunch of announcements, uh, some really exciting stuff, some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all. But first, we need to watch this video of the humanoid robot.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Ram.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Why is Ram?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  No. Uh, uh, Sung Drip Wu says, I'm crying. Watch this video.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's get some.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  You gotta go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You gotta go to the beginning.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Doing pretty well, moving pretty quickly. Little bit of a, oh, catches itself, catches itself. Not bad, not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. I'm liking it. And then?

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking because you would think that there would be some programming.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  They gotta cut the music. They gotta cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your your boy's down.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  It just gets carried off like this. It's so crazy to just carry it off like this. Like, this this seems solvable. This seems solvable.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  It's kinda doing the moonwalk.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Do do tell operation takeover in that case, or even just have like a if on the ground, reset yourself by like doing a push up? Like, you could sort of hard code that, I would think. Like, that was a weird. I I understand that it can't dance and walk upstairs. Like, that is tricky. I understand why it fell down. But I don't understand why it couldn't get back up after it fell down. Anyway, singularity delayed.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is. It's possible that the robot died from embarrassment.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that like as it as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. But I'm fascinated by this. I wonder how many like this video was taken clearly in like the third row of an auditorium. Are people going to see robot dance shows? Was this an introduction to a tech conference? Like, I need so much more context here to really understand what's going on. Aaron Chen posted the full, the the first video, Aaron Chen AI. They had the chance to stop this when the robot almost fell, but then it really fell, but the show must go on. So who will dance on the floor in the round? Beware. Well, certainly solvable with enough time, but not quite there yet.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  If you're thinking of shelling out big dollars for a robot dance show, maybe make sure there's refund policy in case the robot absolutely collapses. That would not be good. Anyway, Google I/O, bunch of different announcements. Brandon Gurrell on our team posted on the TVPN newsletter some reactions, sort of bucketed it into four key areas. Intelligent eyewear. This is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni, we talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemini L L Ms. Those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, which is an interesting place with an interesting history.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  So let's start with intelligent eyewear. If you had to pick, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster. Have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I I I'm a fan of the business story.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Super familiar.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  I I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market, but uh the Warby Parkers, I've always I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand and I've also been impressed by the way they built that business. They were early to the D to C boom and then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's? Is that the same team or is that a different?

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  I'm thinking of.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  They were certainly when I when I think of D to C, I think of Warby.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  I think of Allbirds.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  I think of Everlane.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yes, but when you think of two, the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub a hundred million. Allbirds was trading at what 20 million or something and then spiked because of the AI thing, but uh Allbirds, Everlane, uh not really sustainable businesses. Uh Warby Parker, on the other hand, uh current market.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Allbirds has.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Cooking, sitting at three and a half.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Allbirds has pretty much been down only.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Down only. Since the pump, the AI pump.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  On their NeoCloud, no surprises there.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going, building their NeoCloud? Did they get allocation? Are they racking Cerebras? Are they racking GB200s? What are they racking and how fast are they getting power?

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Would be it would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about Allbirds on the earnings call today.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Didn't they?

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  There's a new.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? It was going to be like Bird AI or All AI like.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Allbirds still exists.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  But they basically kept the public and entity.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  And that's what they're building, the NeoCloud there. So.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Fun. Well.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Lots of fun.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Uh Warby Parker, uh resilient. I mean, uh in 2021, it was a $6 billion company. Now it's a $3 billion company, uh not the best scenario, but surprisingly resilient, I think, in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct to consumer, it was like either get rolled into a bigger company or uh go or or like face the fate of the public markets, but uh Warby Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung. Google says, "We're partnering with Samsung Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear." Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. And people are, I like feature economics from Sam, kind of crazy that you can wear

• 6:57John Coogan?

  your favorite Mag7 on your face now. You can. The Gentle Monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera. I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance. Also, Meta Ray-Bans have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see Ray-Bans and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking, oh, should I be looking for a, for a camera lens? Am I being recorded? But the Gentle Monster design, the silhouette, doesn't scream technology, it doesn't scream wearable face camera. And so, these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parker's look nice, but the camera bump on this, if you zoom in on the Warby Parker one.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, it makes a lot of sense that Googles and the Metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes. My expectation, my uninformed expectation is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? They will probably, I, it's hard to see them taking the route, at least early on, of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language. But it makes a lot of sense that, that Meta would partner with Luxottica.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Okay. First, look, look at the camera bump on this. If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but the, the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in, in, in the real world. Is that true about Apple? I thought that they had a partnership. I thought someone, I saw this on the timeline, that Apple would be partnering with someone on frames. Maybe that was just a rumor. I don't know where it went. Uh, okay. So, yes, I, it, it, oh, Apple has Carl Zeiss,

• 8:54John Coogan?

  which I guess is like a glass manufacturer. I don't know. Is, do they, do they make glasses? Glasses?

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Carl Zeiss AG, German manufacturer of optical systems.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Oh, they make eyewear. They have an eyewear collection.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Founded in Germany in 1846.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  By optician Carl Zeiss.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  The Zeiss eyewear collection. I don't know. Um, but thi- this was all from a joke, uh, from Abdu says, okay, so Apple has Carl Zeiss, Meta has Ray-Bans and Oakley, Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. Boring. Which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses? Would you rock these, Jordy?

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  I like those.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  3M safety glasses? You know what I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzzsaw.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  I do know.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  You have dust in your eyes.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  But these, these look cool. These are sporty. I'm, I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Just go full clank or full, full cyberpunk.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Full clank.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Full, yeah, full, you, you clank out. Full, full cyberpunk. I think that's a, I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that. Maybe Friend or something. Uh, anyway, um, what else? Uh, so Warby Parker traded down on the news, which, uh, Shiel Monat was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14%? They announced a partnership at Google I/O that's been in the works for a while. Is it because they aren't available yet? Um, and, uh, and our friend Rat King, Matt, Mike Isaac says, okay, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for Meta Ray-Bans. Google also said it would bring Gemini two glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and, and the eyewear companies, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which work similarly to Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, come with a camera, microphone.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. At what point, at what point does Google just buy Warby Parker? Right? It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Over the last, uh, over the last six months, it's up 43% in the last, uh, six months, although it's been, um, almost flat, uh, this year. Uh, I would say I expect that, uh, uh, Smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first. Right. If you already have to wear glasses all day long for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there? It's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation. Right?

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  And so, you know, Warby Parker's, you know, done quite well and has been surprisingly resilient, but they have, you know, incredible distribution and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like workflow, like a lot of the Google I O, we'll get into this, but was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant. And when I think about-

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  It's in Spark. It's in- Oh, just looking Omni.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products. You're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's, it's in Gemini, just created an AI studio. Oh, it's for your personal Google account. For workspace, you need Gemini Business. No, not Gemini Advance. That's AI Pro now, unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents? You do that in Spark, actually. No, not Gemini API Management. And it's the typical meme. But the, the, the interesting thing is that I do think Meta Ray Bans, like, it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp. You have a deep integration with Instagram, DMs, maybe Facebook Messenger. Some people are still using that. But in terms of like wiring into your life, there are way more people that see

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Google Docs, Gmail as like the central node in their personal life. Like, like people think of like my, the, all the stuff I have saved on the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think, okay, for the important stuff, I'll put it in Google Docs or Google Drive. And then most things flow through Gmail. Most things flow through iMessage. There are some people that just are like, yeah, WhatsApp is the number one screen time for me. That's where I really organize things, but Meta doesn't really have this like knock on effect of like, oh, yes, you've you you're it's not necessarily like an enterprise level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail, iMessage.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  I save my files in Apple Files, Apple, you know, the the cloud storage I use. My my camera roll is super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable and an AI agent running through the Google's ecosystem can be valuable. The Meta smart glasses, it's a little bit trickier to go and do anything that because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says, these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these Meta Ray-Bans. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse. I don't know. Ray-Bans are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  So we'll see, we'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground on the flip side. The red, the the Wayfarer is just such an iconic. It's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced. And that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade versus a century or something like that, however long Ray-Ban's been around, a long time, right? Anyway, Genie 3. You can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with Street View imagery. Google is sitting on a mother load of real world data.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4, maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data-pilled. He seems, a lot of the Mag7 CEOs seem very data-pilled. There's that story about Mark Zuckerberg, screen recording or or logging all the computer use from all the Meta employees. These important troves of data are increasing in value and Street View certainly seems like it's one of them. This is cool. I wonder how.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Interactive this will be, how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take?

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do they allow people to build games on top of this?

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just think about, I don't know. I mean, Demis has a background in games and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point, or at least be able to like, scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. Very fun story. But again, when I think about Roller Coaster Tycoon, which was not, I think, I don't think he was actually working on that game. It was a similar theme park simulator. But we are moving back into the simulator world. But the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often. When I think about the games that I've spent a long time with, some of them have incredible graphics, AAA graphics.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so that is what gets me to keep playing back.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  The legend Bobby Chipman in the X chat says, can't wait for smart glasses to fully replace my monitors.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta Ray-Ban display, certainly going that direction. The Orion. I've been surprised. Wasn't the first episode we ever did, we were talking about Orion? And they still haven't shipped it, right? I mean, they shipped the smaller version, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, which have sort of the Call of Duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting, I was expecting, we've demoed the Orion headset. And it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that, you know, everyone was saying it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for primetime. But, you know, look at how fast things are going. In a year, maybe two, we'll get it.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  And maybe that's coming at the next Meta Connect, maybe this summer we'll see it. But hasn't, haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI CapEx might have taken a backseat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. I like AR and VR. I think, I think we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro, Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want. Cheaper, maybe, but lighter and same screen. Screen was great. Anyway.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  We know, John.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Gemini Flash 3.5 looks pretty neat, according to Tenebris, and extremely fast, but still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google, generally a pretty disappointing I/O. Now, what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-trained, felt like it had some of that big model smell, felt like it was, you know, really delightful to talk to, and I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here, and also-

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're still waiting for Pro.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, Pro isn't out, but people are speculating that 3.5 Pro won't necessarily be a new pre-trained, and so it seems like it's a, there's a little bit of, you know, research being at odds with like the product cadence. Like, Google I/O is scheduled probably like two years in advance, and whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the OpenAI, Anthropic, the other labs, XAI, like they're launching models very much like when they're done, and then they will like instantiate like something that looks like a conference around it, or maybe a video, or a blog post, a model card. But

• 18:41John Coogan?

  if you're grinding towards a specific date and the specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really, really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January of 2025, right? Was that the date? Or was it December of 2025? Either way-

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  January.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much cutoff time, cutoff dates matter, because, you know, all these models, you know, can query the web and get-

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, seeing-

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Information, but-

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good. Not good.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, precaution here, has it? Unduewhelming.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Cursor ranked it on Cursor Bench. It is below Composer 2.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Is that, is that a fair thing? I mean-

• 19:33John Coogan?

  I'd like to see you rank another another livestream on T B P N bench. It doesn't match up. You know, it's like.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, they have, they have.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  I guess it is a bench.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  All the other, they have all the other frontier.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  And some of them are ahead of Cursor Zone models on.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  There's just one, it's just one data point.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's the other thing. It's four times, it costs four, it underperforms Composer two, even though it's roughly four times more expensive.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I feel like for a long time, Google's positioning was, you know, Frontier or near Frontier, but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy, perhaps.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Overall, it's starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Rikash says, seems to indicate that DeepMind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do, hence the TPU sales. Rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit. And there was some context on like, you know, we were asking the question like, will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area? Ali K. Miller shares, one of the loudest applauses in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the Gentle Monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini. An all-in-one prompt said, take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says, Google I/O 2026. And within seconds, the preview of the edited

• 21:07John Coogan?

  photo from Banana Banana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere. And so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Very cool demo, impressive technology. But Greg's gadget says, these companies truly have no idea what regular people want. Because, yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case. You need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that. Because this is a very, it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that like creative spark of like, yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time. Like, if you're not doing a demo, I don't think, his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature. Right? Anyway, you want to move on to something? Or you want to go?

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  What next?

• 21:54John Coogan?

  IPOs?

• 21:56John Coogan?

  SpaceX IPO, we're getting more details by the day.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  The other thing, the other thing that is, was going pretty viral, last thing on I O, was that Google Anti-Gravity team flashed a Codex folder in their, in their actual demo video. Gergely says, "I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for Anti-Gravity. You can see people use Codex on the Anti-Gravity team. Did no one double check the launch video, the very least." Not a huge surprise. Obviously, Anti-Gravity looks, a lot of people were saying it looks quite, quite like Codex, so clearly.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  More than Windsurf? I feel like it would be, like, they would have just rebuilt Windsurf, I don't know. We'll have to see.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  No, so, but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models and products internally.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  There was that drama with Steve Yegi going back and forth with Demis about, like, what, what teams are using what models and stuff. There was a big back and forth, a big dust-up on the timeline, like, a month ago, about, like, whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't, and some of them are, and Demis chimed in and said, like, "This is just complete wrong, and everyone's using AI." I don't know. Goes back and forth. There's also, people are benchmarking OmniFlash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There was a, there were a few, like, little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct, maybe it was only a V6.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was missing two cylinders.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  It was missing two cylinders, but it looked good to me, I don't know. But now people are actually comping it to C-Dance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions, because I guess, just like Hollywood can't...

• 23:47John Coogan?

  File a lawsuit in China? I'm not exactly sure how that works because Seadance seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe-

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to US copyright law for a very, very, very long time.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  And it also might just take like years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, you can just go, like there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store-

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  And Nike has nothing to do with it-

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  And yet all the products-

• 24:18John Coogan?

  They've been selling Swatch APs over there for decades.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just ask Rolex and Patac how they're-

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, I've heard fake cars too. Like you can get a full replica of like a G-Wagon that's just made in a factory and then you could buy it, bring it over here and you take it to a Mercedes dealership and they're just like, "This is not a Mercedes." But it looks like one, like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside. But internally, it's just, it's just frauding. Anyway, Seadance 2.0 looks great. OmniFlash looks great as well. These are both like super useful. We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, like at what point, like it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right. The last 90,

• 25:06John Coogan?

  like we're at 99% fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details. When will we be in a paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video, six minutes, 10 minutes, like you would on YouTube? Very computationally expensive, very difficult to maintain the logic. Like what is the deep research report of OmniFlash? These eight second, 10 second, 20 second videos are impressive, but not perfectly substitutable for a 20 minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into. Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes. And so that's the next benchmark. We gotta move

• 25:46John Coogan?

  the goalposts. Anyway, SpaceX IPO, the prospectus is incoming, according to Zero Hedge, as soon as May 20th. That's today. We will see Goldman- Lead left. This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth. He went back to Morgan Stanley. There was a question about whether or not there would even be a lead left because it's such a big IPO. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously, they're all going to make a ton of money off of this. So, good news from start to finish, but it is interesting that Goldman was selected. Do you have a soundboard cue you want to play?

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm always ready, John.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Katie Roof has a scoop.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  The scoop athlete of the century, Katie Roof.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever. Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than 60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia have more than 20 billion.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, was this somewhat of a reaction to D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week, right? They're set to generate roughly 20 billion in returns. And maybe some of these other funds thought to put their hand up and say...

• 27:00John Coogan?

  I don't think... I think that at this scale, like, there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates and they've been, they've known the numbers for a long time. They've known the ownership, the holdings. And you do some back of the envelope and you get to some pretty huge numbers. Will be very interesting. Huge for Sean McGuire, huge for Luke Nosick and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund and Antonio Graciello at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, Sequoia, Founders Fund.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  They needed a win. They needed a win. I mean, you go back, like, you know, these investments were made like 2004, 2010. Like, it was not obvious. Certainly, there was no Starlink narrative when these were made. There was no space data center narrative. This was a rocket company that was blowing up rockets left and right and not quite getting to, you know, massive business. You really had to be a believer and they were.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  They benefit.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Paki was having some fun on the timeline. He said,

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Megaphones are too big to generate returns. They're basically just be collectors.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  And of course, they're printing.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Yes, they are printing. Well, we have a very special guest joining us today, the CEO, the founder of Figma, Dylan Field, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV and up. Dylan, great to see you.

• 28:21Dylan Field?

  Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me back.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  Too long. Great to see you.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  First question, are you alive or are you dead?

• 28:29Dylan Field?

  Very alive.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Very alive.

• 28:32Dylan Field?

  I am too, yes.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  It is such a white pill. Why? Well, I mean, how have you processed all this? I guess I, we can go into the business and the product and the financials, but I'm more interested in just like the mindset, the emotional journey, like, how do you stay sane? Is it an advantage to have been building this business for so long that you can draw on other experiences? Like, what has the process of going through all of this been like for you?

• 29:00Dylan Field?

  I mean, what's the quote? When, in the age of AI, those who stay sane win?

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Oh, I like that.

• 29:07Dylan Field?

  I think that's pretty accurate. And, um, yeah.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  You should, you should, you should own that.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm gonna attribute that to you.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna attribute that to you.

• 29:16Dylan Field?

  Not mine. But, but, but really, I think it's super important. You have to have a even mind about it. And, you know, I know that you guys know this, but social media, not reality.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  It is, it is not reality. We see this all the time.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  All the time. But.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the, the, the thing that I've been thinking about this week is how AI-generated design is seemingly becoming as easy to clock as the, as AI text.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  It's not this, it's that.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  This than that.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I feel like people kind of, like, uh, you, right now, I mean, the entire market is just going through like rolling stages of AI psychosis, and everyone's having it in different ways, right? So like, if you do like equity research, you're obviously going to go through a period of AI psychosis, because you can just like type in a few words and get like. What what looks like, you know, days, weeks of, of, you know, really, really great work. And sometimes it is great work. And if you're a designer, a web designer, and you can do type in a few words and get what looks like a great website instantly, you're also going to go through that period. And you can just see these sort of like pockets of of AI psychosis all around the industry

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  broadly. But it does sort of like fade at some point. And then if you're able to stay sane, you know, through those periods and not let yourself succumb to it, you can get excited about the potential and benefit from it, but not lose your mind in the process. And I think like, we were seeing that with, you know, early on with ChatGPT and like writing, right? Before it was super obvious to clock. And then we were seeing that with design specifically, where, yeah, when you can just go and just generate stuff, design that looks like good design. I'm not saying it is good design. And and I think we're kind of coming out of that now, where you can just instantly clock

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  when something was was generated. And sometimes, for a specific type of asset or use case, it's totally the right move to just generate something quickly. But I think we're already in a period right now where I if I go to a startup's website and it's clear that it was just like a one-shot, you know, prompt, like that says something about the company. Could be good, could be bad. We don't know.

• 31:46Dylan Field?

  Jordy, I think you're absolutely right. But seriously, I mean, this is the balance. Oh, thank you. I I use the balance we had to strike with the thing was design assistant, design agent launch today. And what we tried to do was make it so that we can really help you bring the context from your file into the agent's context window. And with that, do things that maybe are what will be most helpful for the designer in the moment. Spawn agents to do explorations, variations, do the sort of rote tasks that are more boring.

• 32:31Dylan Field?

  So things like design system maintenance, for example. How do we make it so that you're able to do that way faster with thing was design agent? Then you would if you're just manually clicking on all these variable names or manually changing a bunch of components or text translation or any number of things. And so, you know, it's been really fun to kind of explore how does the design agent work and where can we make it better because there's so much more we can do to handle more of these tasks that, you know, designers are able to elevate themselves and work at a greater level to actually push aesthetic past AI slop, to actually push past, you

• 33:11Dylan Field?

  know, the cliches and get to real innovation, solve real UX problems for users rather than making it so that you just have to go do this boring, these boring tasks to just get through and unblock people or unblock your team. And I think that the design agent will really help there and bring more of it into the canvas where then you can share and collaborate with your team or with other agents. So I'm excited for where it goes. And I think today's really big and kudos to the team because they've been working really hard making it so that we're able to take all the advances with models and LMs and apply them to design. You know, getting these models to speak design well has been non-trivial and very cool.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  That's awesome. I feel like a lot of, a lot of software engineers who are interacting with coding agents are experiencing like incredible amounts of like bloat in the code and there's questions about like, are you introducing, are you like laying really shoddy foundation that will come back to bite you later? And a lot of people say the answer to slop is just more slop. But in the design context, are you feeling pain from Pigma users? Fighting slop. Where design systems, or are you at least designing the agentic design tool in a way that is aware of that potential pitfall in advance? Because there is a world where,

• 34:40John Coogan?

  you know, oh, the drudgery is, is taking my website and, and, you know,

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Doing design iterations for every single possible viewport or device. And if that gets out of sync, that can be very complex. At the same time, if you wind up, you know, instantiating all that and then it doesn't tie together, you could wind up with some sort of, you know, misalignment and like it could be very difficult to manage in the long term. And you could wind up with like bloat.

• 35:11Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think that it's different context for sure. When you're in a sort of code base and you're using Claude and it's over claiming and making stuff up. Or you're using, you know, OpenAI's ChatGPT models, 5.5 is amazing, but like definitely over complexifies things. And, you know, these, these teams will deal with the sort of problems that are being identified and they'll fix them and figure them out. But overall, I think it's a different sort of class of problem than like when you're in a design file. And really part of your mode is exploration. If we can help you with that exploration, that can be useful for the user.

• 35:52Dylan Field?

  And in terms of semantics, I mean, the way that you represent a component or, you know, the way you apply auto layout even. These are all examples of things that we've had to get more rigorous around how we build evals for this. To make sure that we're doing things in a way that is both clear and opinionated, but also doesn't get in the way of the user. And I think the word of the year for us has been evals. And probably for the industry. And so there's so much on the eval side that, you know, we have to always be improving on. And part of the feedback that we'll get from this beta will be towards where have we missed the mark? And what do we need to do better? And I think there's lots of room to grow there.

• 36:35Dylan Field?

  I'll also say that I think that when you look at products like Weave, there's so much potential to.

• 36:43Dylan Field?

  Not have necessarily this pile-on effect, but rather to explore more with AI. The outputs of the models are like clay you can mold. And, you know, it's like, how do you take stuff, I mean, that might be a one-shot slop that's generated, but then actually apply it across multiple models in a pipeline in order to actually figure out a way to make it into what you want. And sometimes the best way to do that is to get on a canvas and use your hands. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a workflow you define. Other times, it's by going back and forth with an agent. I think you have to be very smart about what you do, when, and it's our responsibility as a tool creator to give you all the options.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Jordi?

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  What are you excited about in terms of using AI to help augment the creative process? Because when I think of, part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like, I don't, right now, right now, it's hard, like, a human still has to have, like, the fundamental kind of idea, right? And, and you, we know that because you have to, like, type it into a box, right? You need to, you need to do the typing still, so we, we're still, we're still necessary there. But when I think about, like, iconic, like, startup brands, I think of Linear. I think of some of what, like, Cursor has done over the last couple of years.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  I think of, like, Figma's brand, where there's so much work that went into, just like, coming up with that, coming up with, like, the concept and, and the look and feel of the brand. And then, like, way, way, way more work in terms of, like, instantiating that brand across every possible surface area. And part of what I think is exciting about this moment is, like, we're potentially entering into a world where you can spend more time just doing that, like, heavy creative work, coming up with, like, a concept that can stand out. And then, once you create a system, then you can, like, much more rapidly scale it across, again, all these different surface areas, whether it's, like, digital products, web, you know, email, ads, et cetera.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, like, augmenting and giving creative superpowers on that, on that, like, brand-building process when you're kind of coming up with, coming up with, like, the idea?

• 39:05Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think there's so much we can explore and do there. And using design systems effectively is hard. We certainly have not perfectly nailed that. I think we've done much more on the maintenance side. And we have a lot more coming on the execution side of how do you put the design system you've created together? So you can fully productionize that. And it's one of the things that, you know, we are looking at from so many angles. And it is critical context to be able to figure out across code, across design, how do you use this effectively? But brand, I think, is something where on the weave side, we see even more exploration with these workflows. And people being able to find workflows that are more canonical and then branch out from them.

• 39:48Dylan Field?

  And I think we'll see the same with assistant and with the famous design agent as well. And the, I also think that this idea bank, content bank can be established and added to over time and by more people. And what we're seeing with the last quarter results that we announced is that more people are starting to use Pigma in the organization. Thank you.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  They're fantastic results.

• 40:16Dylan Field?

  Thank you. But the breadth, I think, of the usage expanding is a huge part of that. And the more that you can get it to the point where people can come in with their ideas, contribute to the conversation on a canvas, collaborate with others to refine, doesn't mean that, you know, these like sort of non-designers who don't know all the conversations that are being had about the UX or the brand are going to be the ones that are bringing the idea, that's the idea they're going to ship to the table right away. But I do think that bringing more voices into that conversation, more viewpoints only helps.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  How do you think about the concept of gelman amnesia in like the, in the context of like staying sane in the age of AI? Like, because there's probably non-designers who use Gen AI tool and are like, oh, wow, like designers are cooked. And then there's real designers who use a Gen AI tool and say, oh, there's, you know, yes, it's maybe 99% of the way there. But the battle is to get to 99.999, maybe 100% of what you can do. And it feels like in staying sane.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  All outputs, right? If you ask, if you ask AI to generate you something around a topic you know really, really well. It's a different feeling than a topic that you're just learning about.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that basically, folks are in a place where they learn by comparative cases. And the more that they see great examples next to sort of output that's not as good and they can learn why, that's ultimately where you see folks then push further and, you know, they can then take it on to do more in an area and evolve their skills and their judgment, their sort of taste or not. But I do think it's really important to have those conversational loops going. And also get your arms around as a design leader, what is happening in your organization? Because what we're seeing is more people prototype things and then, you know, there's like this latent fear of,

• 42:21Dylan Field?

  oh no, what are we going to ship? And is it the thing that is sort of like a random exploration that someone thought was real? Or is it something that is like gone through our cycle and is ready to go and is like very well thought out? And in general, the other thing that I'd mention is it feels like there's a lot of tunnel vision right now. You know, I think that there's certain models that kind of went, oh, it's learned from 4.0. And, you know, are sort of synchophantic and doing that, especially for engineers, and get very latched on to an idea and then it's kind of like the AI psychosis sets in

• 43:04Dylan Field?

  and you're like, this is the best idea ever and you're fully tunnel vision towards creating it. And you can show massive progress, but like, are you going the right direction?

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Dylan Field?

  And I think it's really important to steer and to actually be building what you need to build and to think, not just wear a thinking cap. So that is something that I think is critical right now.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I completely agree. Yeah, there's been a bunch of great takes about that. Help me, if I meet someone and they have the next great app idea, and help me pitch them, starting with Figma as the front door.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  To the experience of they're a non-designer, but they're also non-technical and they're hearing about Codex and Claude Code and those like code gen tools versus starting with a design, starting and having the design be the place where the idea person sort of instantiates their, their app or their product. And then, yes, there are agents and they might use different tools for, you know, spinning out backends and doing other things. Why should Figma be the front door to building?

• 44:13Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think that as you're exploring an idea, part of it is thinking it through and actually understanding what is it that I want to build? And you should not just start in a Figma, you should go talk to users. You should go think about like, what is it that I'm trying to build? What are my goals and the problems I'm trying to solve? So that might look like starting a sketchbook or a doc or in live conversation.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  I think there's a lot of people that have not asked that question to the LMS and jumped straight to, wow, I spent seven nights staying up all night, I'm coding this thing.

• 44:47Dylan Field?

  It's fun. It's addictive. It's box effect of like, will it write this time or not?

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, variable reward. Yeah.

• 44:56Dylan Field?

  It's box. And so, but then I think going from there to be intentional about, okay, I know what problems I'm trying to solve. Let me think through the solution. Figma provides an excellent spot to do that with in conjunction with, you know, brainstorming tools like Figma or, you know, document editing, spec editing. And from there, I think when you've got your direction, you know what you want to build, it's a great time to use our MCP. Go bring in the code or go bring in the make and make itself. Well, you'll see a ton of evolution on surface ahead. We've already had a lot that we've improved and you'll see even more in the weeks and months coming. And then I think that's a great spot where you can go back and forth because sometimes as you build

• 45:41Dylan Field?

  it out, you realize that actually there's more to explore and define on the design side. So use the best tool for the job, but I think don't be tunnel vision about there's one direction and that's the only thing that can work. That's where you'll fall into traps.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question for me. Huge revenue growth, massive success on the financial side. I'm interested in going a click deeper and trying to understand what is working the most? Because it seems like there's great retention among big clients and customers that are using Figma at scale across a huge organization. There's also new entrepreneurs that are a team of one, and they might be using Figma. There's almost like consumer use cases.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  The heaviest users of coding agents are heavily using Figma.

• 46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Because they're making more software.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  And they need to add stuff to it. I mean, I look at some of the stuff we've vibecoded, and I'm like, okay, like, it's time to level up and have Figma in the flow if it's not already. Even because you don't want some, even like the dashboards, like, these things need to be designed at some point, as they grow and scale. The first, like, most basic thing, it could just be a CLI, but as soon as we start building UIs and multiple users, like, it gets more complicated. But what is driving the growth? Is it both? Is one more of an opportunity for you over the next few years? Like, what are you most excited about?

• 47:09Dylan Field?

  I mean, I think we're seeing growth kind of across the board right now, and we're very thankful for that. But our eyes are always in the future. And, you know, the same things that I've said when I've been here in the past, and I think have become their own memes around design being the differentiator, and design as the layer above code, as code commoditizes more and more, design is, I think, increasingly the battleground. This is where everyone is going to really duke it out, to figure out what the direction is that they should explore and what they should go build. And we need to build for that world, a world where design representations, code representations

• 47:49Dylan Field?

  can live together, and a world where, you know, you don't have to make these false trade-offs between direct manipulation and AI, or, you know, being able to explore broadly or make fast progress. Like, both is the answer, and so that's what we're really building for right now.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week. Great to see you.

• 48:15Dylan Field?

  Good to see you all. Thanks for talking to you again.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Faraz from Socket back on the show to discuss a Series C by none other than Thrive Capital. We'll bring in Faraz from Socket from the waiting room to the TBT in Ultra Dome.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Get that gone, ready.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 48:35Speaker 05

  How's it going, guys? Thanks for having me back on.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  I think last time you were on, we'll see you soon, and here you are. Give us the news first. What happened?

• 48:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Socket announced its $60 million Series C at a billion dollar valuation.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again, hit it again.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, led by Thrive Capital.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  And it's a big day for us.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Absolutely massive.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Is what you do important right now?

• 49:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, you couldn't have really asked for a better, you know, perfect storm. You know, you have just the confluence of, you know, AI, cybersecurity, and all the different attacks we've been seeing, and we kind of built the perfect product for this moment. And it's been something that we've been building towards for, you know, it seems like it's okay, you know, we just, we had the right thing right now, but the reality is, you know, we've been building towards this for, you know, four years plus. And so, you know, it's an overnight success that took four years, right?

• 49:28John Coogan?

  Overnight success. There we go. I love it. Yeah, what was the key unlock for the new round? Growth? Needed the capital for specific expansion? Just the broad tailwinds of the industry? People looking forward to more demand? What's changed in the business?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  So, the business is just inflecting. You know, every year, I feel like, you know, okay, this is great, you know, certainly we're going to get like a regression to the mean or something, but it just keeps accelerating. So, over the last while, you know, we've had 500% plus ARR growth over the last 12-month period. And, you know, it's just, it keeps going. So, I think it's kind of, we're seeing kind of three forces converging all at once here. We have this kind of like perfect storm between, you know, AI generating more code than ever before. You've got developers, and increasingly non-developers too, that are, you know, pulling in open source dependencies and third-party code at like an unprecedented

• 50:28Speaker 05

  velocity. And you have more code being written than ever before, both by humans and AI agents. And the kind of- Maybe counterintuitive thing is it actually brings in a lot of third-party code. And that code is really vetted less than it's ever been before. And that's kind of like the first thing. The other thing is you got the frontier AI models like Mythos that are finding thousands of high severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and open source library. And so the total volume of vulnerabilities in code is exploding right now. And it's going to keep going as we start to throw these models against this backlog of code that's been out there for a long time and has a lot of vulnerabilities. And then kind of the third piece is that the attackers have really started

• 51:12Speaker 05

  kind of realizing that they can exploit the software supply chain to get into companies. So they're not really like coming in through, finding vulnerabilities, but they're actually kind of realizing if we go into an open source component, that's actually an easy way to get into an organization. And not just one, but usually thousands of organizations that all use that same component. So it's this like perfect storm of all these factors right now.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  So walk me through how your business model interacts with the open source community. Because when we see things like Mythos finding a bunch of bugs in open source repos, you know, we hope that everyone will just submit bug reports early for the good of the world. But I'm interested in like the economics of patching open source. If there's a really important package out there that maybe doesn't have a Linux foundation behind it. Like how at some point, like at the very least, there's inference costs. Who's paying to patch all of the open source software that so many different companies rely on? If you go to a big company, they pay you.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  They might patch like their dependencies. But how does this all flow together into an actually safer internet?

• 52:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I've been in open source for, I think, over 15 years now, and I maintain a bunch of open source packages and, you know, have a real soft spot for the open source community. And so, let me tell you, they were suffering under an enormous burden even before the current, you know, AI trends have kind of made it even worse. You know, they don't get much support, whether financial or just in terms of, you know, the number of people working on this really critical infrastructure is super low for how critical it is. And so, you know, we started seeing a lot of AI tools being used to create these slop PRs, slop issues, and that was already kind of causing a burden. And then now you

• 53:08Speaker 05

  have the various frontier labs that are, you know, finding with, with, with their, their models are finding a lot of vulnerabilities that, you know, were there, were always there, but, but the, the community didn't know about. And I will say they're doing a good job of, of providing a patch along with the, the bug that they've identified. So they're doing a lot of the work for the maintainer, but it's still, it still takes effort to review the PR. And the thing that people don't realize is when you, when you accept a pull request as a maintainer, you're not just kind of, it's not this one time cost. You're actually accepting the burden kind of indefinitely into the future to maintain that code and make sure that that code is, is secure and, you know, is kept up to date with all the other changes. And so I think what we're going to see, and we're already starting to see is, despite the kind of best efforts of the frontier labs, and they are making

• 53:53Speaker 05

  good effort, you know, maintainers are going to fail to actually accept these patches. And so we're going to see a lot of libraries that may have a vulnerability in them that like literally have, you know, effectively, you know, code sitting on GitHub that anyone can look at and use to generate an exploit against that vulnerability. And that's, there's not going to be an easy path for companies and for, you know, developer teams to go and actually patch their libraries because there's no version they can upgrade to because the maintainer is just sort of sitting there on that patch and hasn't, hasn't accepted it. So it's just creating this real risk where, you know, like there's more problems than ever before, and there's not really like easy paths. And so this is actually something we try to solve. So we built a, a solution to this called Certified Patches.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  And what this is, is basically kind of a deterministic way to in kind of one click make your vulnerabilities in your open source code go away. So we use, we use a whole bunch of AI and kind of produce these patches that make the vuln go away without any work on the, on the part of the developer. There's no kind of burden of, of upgrading packages. You just sort of in a click, the vuln is gone from your dependencies and you can kind of keep the rest of your code in your application the same. And, and so it's, it's really a kind of a quick fix to the problem that we hope, you know, is, is going to be part of the solution. And by the way, we're giving away all the critical, the critical patches to the community for free. So we can, we can try to disseminate this widely to as many people as possible.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  Are there, are you able, are you finding any companies that are completely asleep at the wheel? Or is everyone like giving this?

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Who should I hack today?

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  No, I just want like, I imagine like part of why the business is growing so quickly is this is like a hair on fire problem, concern every single day, right? You're seeing these like vulnerabilities or issues pop up. And so I would have to imagine that every, every software company online where the technical leadership there uses the internet, which I would imagine is all software companies are like pretty like leaning into this problem. But do you ever, do you ever, like, I'm curious even from like an outbound sales, marketing standpoint, are there people that are like, ah, this is like not that important for us right now? Or, or would like a no be like, we, we have a solution. It's with someone else?

• 56:12Speaker 05

  We, okay. So we've met one company that has literally no software. They, they produce toilet paper and they didn't have

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Christopher, no way of, of, of business, no smartphone.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I think, um, yeah, I think that it's, it's become a universal problem. When we started, it was kind of this like maybe more niche problem where people said, okay, you know, I got a lot of other problems that are more important than this. And we, we initially had a really good uptake, uptake of the product in the cryptocurrency community because they have a lot of software supply chain risk. And when, when these hacks happen, it's kind of an irreversible thing for them where they like lose all their, their funds. And then I would say kind of the AI labs were the next to pick it up and sort of, you know, SF tech companies realized that the kind of people that are ahead of the curve. And now it's become, I mean, it's like a top, I'd say top one or top two concern at

• 57:09Speaker 05

  Like nearly every company we talk to, it's a board level concern a lot of the times now. And CISOs and heads of engineering are being asked to figure out like, what is our solution to make sure the next time one of these things happens, we're protected? And the next time is probably going to be like, you know, tomorrow. Like, it's so, it's become so, it's literally like, you know.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, every day.

• 57:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, literally, our end of quarter was, you know, the end of last month, we, you know, we already were super busy. And then there were three major software supply chain attacks that happened that same day. It's wild. It's like more than we've ever seen and it's totally unprecedented.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Was the GitHub issue that I saw a supply chain attack? Or was that something else? I saw like a couple posts, but I didn't get to dig into it.

• 57:51Speaker 05

  No, I don't think they've released that information yet. Yeah, there's definitely been some speculation. I mean, the timing right now, every time a company gets popped or their source code leaks, it's the first question that people think of now. And the group, I believe, that claimed responsibility is this Team PCP group that has been responsible for a lot of the attacks. And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we learn, but I don't think, you know, that's something that we know right now and I wouldn't want to speculate.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if there will be movements to find like the compute infrastructure for Team PCP at some point, or like the hackers, because at a certain point, you would imagine that they're.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, they don't, I mean, some of this, a lot of this is still social engineering, right? So it doesn't, they don't necessarily need, you know, a country of geniuses data center.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  We got a couple dudes with phones. Who knows? Well, congratulations on the progress.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredible progress.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for keeping us all safe.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 58:47Speaker 05

  Cool. Thanks, guys.

• 58:49John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have Tae Kim from Key Context, the hottest sub stack on the internet. We have Tae Kim in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVG Ultra Room. Tae, how are you doing?

• 59:01Tae Kim?

  Hey, guys. Awesome.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  Here we go. Kicking it off strong. Ooh, good, good fit. You know what we need to do? We need to figure out how to do a like, real time, real time recognition of the face, face tracking, and then land the glasses on the correct, on the correct face.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  For your next appearance, for next.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  We need AI for that. Yes. And maybe before we get into AI and different companies, I'd love to just know how Key Context is going, how, like, what it's been like since we last checked in. How is life?

• 59:39Tae Kim?

  Uh, it's much better. It's going great. I think the last time we talked was March 30th and the market was right at the bottom.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 59:47Tae Kim?

  Very, everything was going terrible.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Tae Kim?

  You never worried though? Uh, I did not. I

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Trust her.

• 59:54Tae Kim?

  Tripled, quadrupled down on here and said CPU shortage.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Tae Kim?

  Buy CPU stocks, buy memory stocks.

• 1:00:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Tae Kim?

  All those ideas are up 50 to 150%.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Oh, that's pretty good.

• 1:00:06Tae Kim?

  I said, uh, I think 13 out of 14 ideas are solidly in the green. I joked that like Shohei Ohtani numbers with like

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  That's really good.

• 1:00:16Tae Kim?

  It's not gonna last, but uh, it, it worked out. I mean, we trusted in the actual underlying.

• 1:00:20Tae Kim?

  Shohei would love memory stocks.

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Tae Kim?

  Right? I think he would. I'm sure he's, his, uh, his financial advisors long HBM stocks, I'm sure.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I read some, I read some report that in, in South Korea, there's folks who are, uh, liquidating insurance plans to go long SK Hyunex. It's a huge, huge moment over there in South Korea.

• 1:00:40Tae Kim?

  And everyone's making fun of these Koreans for being long memory stocks, but I mean, we're talking single digit P multiples.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:00:47Tae Kim?

  Probably on lots, two, three, two to three more years, uh, triple digit growth. I mean, I, I quoted this Michael Dell thing where he spoke to a Wall Street conference. Uh, he says 2525. That's the thing you need to know about memory stocks. Uh, AI accelerators are gonna have 25 times more, like AI GPUs from Nvidia. Two years from now, gonna have 25 times more memory per GPU. And there's gonna be 20, a need for 25 times more GPUs.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:16Tae Kim?

  So he said, multiply 25 by 25, you get 625 more revenue, et cetera. And you layer on to the fact that four years ago, all these memory companies saw their, uh, revenue, you know, get cut in half. So they didn't expand capacity. It takes three to four years to expand capacity. So we're gonna see like mega pricing power like we haven't seen anything yet.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Tae Kim?

  These stocks are gonna go keep going higher and their revenue, uh, revenue rates are gonna be astronomical. So everyone makes fun of these Koreans.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Tae Kim?

  For piling into single digit PE stocks growing at triple digits. And this cycle is different because there are only three companies that can make, make the HBM memory.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Tae Kim?

  So don't make fun of the Koreans.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Don't, don't. Uh, is the, the, the, the pullback that you pushed to, uh, that you mentioned, like the, when they were beaten up, was that the post crypto slump when semiconductor equipment and, and GPUs were being used to mine crypto? And then there was a pullback there. Is that where you were referring to? Like, what is the prehistory? Why were these stocks beaten up?

• 1:02:19Tae Kim?

  So in 2022, like we had a kind of a tech recession. Like everyone, all these tech companies were laying off people. Even Intel and Nvidia had these 50% drawdowns.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Tae Kim?

  Uh, the whole, you know, everything was, it's almost like the, the post, uh, COVID, uh, kind of overhang.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Tae Kim?

  Where people bought too many digital computers, electronics.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Tae Kim?

  And, uh, there was too much over.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  And so what, yeah, what was?

• 1:02:44Tae Kim?

  Different.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  What was, what was Nvidia doing, uh, during that 50% drawdown? Were they buying the stock back?

• 1:02:51Tae Kim?

  Uh, not, not really. Nvidia, if they buy a little bit of stock back, but not, not really. And back then, this is a different Nvidia where like.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Tae Kim?

  Data centers, 10% of the revenue and gaming is 80, 90%. Now it's split.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:04Tae Kim?

  Where data center is nearly everything.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Tae Kim?

  Uh, what happened with Nvidia back then is, uh, everyone's mined their GPUs to mine Ethereum. And then Ethereum did the whole proof of state, proof of work thing. So demand for GPUs collapsed. And Nvidia had like a terrible quarter, they, where they missed by like 2 billion, which was a big number back then for them. Now.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  That's a rounding error.

• 1:03:25Tae Kim?

  Back then it was, uh, 20% of their revenue and the stock, uh, got hit hard.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what are you looking forward to from Nvidia this quarter, this year? What are you watching?

• 1:03:35Tae Kim?

  So we had like two unbelievable quarters, the last two quarters, and I expect another great amazing quarter. I mean, Jensen is out there saying GPU consumption is through the roof. On Monday, he said AI demand is far exceeding supply and capacity. So I think the numbers are going to be great, and this is without even China. So, I mean, the absolute scale of these numbers are mind blowing. We're talking like 80% growth on an $80 billion number, 79 or 80 billion. Just think about it, in three months, right?

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Tae Kim?

  So the absolute scale, and the stock is like almost as cheap as it's ever been. Like, it's trading at 19 times forward, below the S and P 500, which is growing at like 10%. Nvidia is growing at 80%. So this dichotomy where Nvidia is becoming more and more undervalued, and we could talk about why.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I'd love to know, is that just because they're the largest company, 5 trillion? It's hard to wrap your mind around a $10 trillion company.

• 1:04:34Tae Kim?

  So every year we go through this cycle, the last three years during this whole upswing up, everyone says, "Peak is here, right? Nvidia can't grow anymore." And then Nvidia keeps growing at some ridiculous growth rate. So the skepticism, the only reason why it's trading at below market multiple is that the AI skeptics believe that the peak year is near, right? There's going to be a no growth.

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Is it AI skeptics, or is it TPU and Tranium enjoyers?

• 1:05:02Tae Kim?

  That too. They believe that competition is coming, and they're going to gain market share. I kind of laugh at that, and the numbers that people, you know, put out there for the competition, it's like a rounding error. It's like a small, low, single-digit number compared to what Nvidia is going to grow in the next few years. And what people keep forgetting is, like, if you actually look at the numbers, I mean, Nvidia has a trillion dollars in orders, right? They're the ones that have locked down all the memory. Like, I met someone, a guy at GTC. He's an optical startup, and Nvidia locked up all the capacity for lasers and optical, right? So Nvidia has the supply components with memory, wafers, optical.

• 1:05:45Tae Kim?

  So they're pretty much the only game in town if you want to actually buy AI GPU capacity. Like, TPU gets headlines, but, I mean, $5 billion, like, is nothing when you're comparing it to a trillion dollars, right? So they had the volume, they have the great power, you know, power per watt numbers and metrics that basically if you're doing inference, Nvidia GPUs, even they cost a lot more upfront, when you actually do the inference, performance per watt is excellent. When these are

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you grapple with the question of whether or not Nvidia is a car? There are competitors, you said low, single digit percentage of the market, but AMD is getting its act together. Intel's maybe back in the game in a few years. You have Tranium and TPU. Competition is rarely a good thing. Is Nvidia a car or not?

• 1:06:42Tae Kim?

  Okay, obviously it's not a car.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  I would have loved to, I would have loved to be in the room with you while you saw that segment. You just like taking your computers.

• 1:06:53Tae Kim?

  I think I was tweeting about it. I think I wrote a piece on it. I wrote like, you know, four or 500 words about that. I don't know if we want to go into that. But, you know, they're going to be 80, 90% of the market. Maybe they'll lose 10% of the market share in two, three years, but 80, 90% of a market that is growing, you know, 50, 70% a year. And the hyperscale capex numbers went up huge. There's like 780 billion going to a trillion dollars next year. Like the market believes with Nvidia's valuation that Nvidia's going to stop growing within the next year or two. But the overall market, I think, is going to keep growing at 50% at least. If it grows 50% in the next two or three years,

• 1:07:34Tae Kim?

  Nvidia is going to grow. Even if they like maintain market or, and I don't believe that's true. I think they're actually going to maintain or even increase market share. But even if market share goes down 10%, I mean, the numbers are just insane. And I don't think Nvidia's going to trade at like. 10, 12 times earnings when they're growing at 50%. I mean, that doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's going to re-rate higher. And then the key thing here is the stock. Stock buybacks. Because that's like, if you guys remember during the whole iPhone, like when, when the iPhone 5 and 6 came out, when they actually had the large screen iPhone, Apple was trading at P/E of 7. Like X cash. Like, people thought Android was going to, almost like the same thing. Like, Androids come in and destroy the iPhone market share.

• 1:08:17Tae Kim?

  When iPhone went on this generational run with the large screen iPhones, right? But a, a big thing that Apple did was, they started buying back stock. And that's when their multiples started going from single digits to 15 to 20 to 30 times. And I, I think what, and they already kind of hinted at it, but I think Nvidia is going to start buying stock buyback in size. They, they said 50% of their free cash flow in the next 12 months. They're a little bit cryptic on if that was after or before prepaid, the prepayments they have for the inventory and suppliers. But I think we're going to get some more clarity tonight. And if they, if they actually put numbers, maybe it's this quarter or next quarter, if they actually put the actual, we're going to buy X hundreds of billions of stock, you

• 1:08:58Tae Kim?

  know, in the next 12 months, I think that the P/E is going to re-rate much higher. So, you know, as soon as we get visibility that next year is going to keep growing at 40, 50% or higher, I think it's going to be higher. And the year after that, you know, stock, that stock should go on top of the rerating from the capital returns.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Gavin Baker was on our friend Patrick's show this morning. He was making the point that it's possible that TSMC, uh, TSMC could prevent a, a bubble just given that they are not investing in, in CapEx as aggressively as, let's say, Jensen might want them to. He said, you know, basically said what you're saying, which is, uh, Nvidia could sell a trillion dollars of GPUs, you know, pretty much immediately if they, if they had the supply. Uh, what, what's your, what's your read on that? Do you think that TSMC is?

• 1:09:51Tae Kim?

  I think, well, so I think I've been, I mean, I've been following chip industry for, you know, 30, 40 years, so, you know, I, I'm very good at reading. I'm very good at reading the tea leaves and I've noticed that Jensen and what TSMC, what the CEOs have been kind of hinting at, that their tone has changed in the last two, three months. So TSMC just reported their Q1 earnings and you know, if you read the transcript, it's pretty obvious that they're just going to raise CapEx on a different order of magnitude for the next year and the year after. They said their CapEx is going to be much higher over the next three years than it was the last three years. And basically, and all the stuff they're saying, you know, they're saying, and Jensen's been

• 1:10:34Tae Kim?

  going out there during these speeches and Q and As, he's confidently saying the supply issues in two, three years are going to be on a different level. Like even with memory, he's saying all these component issues that we have now, in two, three years, I think he even said that on the Workesh podcast interview, two, three years, this all will be like less of issue. So I'm confident that TSMC, memory might be a little problematic, but TSMC wafer wise, you know, it's going to be dramatically higher over the next two, three years.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  But even if they raise CapEx, it feels like there might be like a, I don't know, a speed bump essentially, because if they, if they triple capacity and that takes two years, but everyone's sort of pricing in or expecting 10x a year or, or half an OOM a year, there's a mismatch there.

• 1:11:23Tae Kim?

  But what I'm saying is right now, right now, the Nvidia valuation is trading like it's growing at 10, it's going to grow at 10% the next year or two. They grow at 50% the next two, three years. I mean, that's definitely, you know, like TSMC is going to raise their CapEx. So it's like the numbers are way off.

• 1:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm more just thinking from a broader market perspective.

• 1:11:49Tae Kim?

  The 10x is not going to happen. But you know, 50 to 75% the next three years, I think that can happen. And stocks will go much higher if that happens.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:12:00Tae Kim?

  That 10x is, you know. It's not software. I mean, this, you know, you have to actually move physical atoms.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How do you, how do you think Nvidia will be positioning China exposure, China opportunity? That was an interesting point of debate on the Dor Cash.

• 1:12:17Tae Kim?

  Yeah, I mean, I've given up on China. I mean, at GTC Jensen said, you know, he got approvals on both sides and then weeks later, like that, you know, filter again. Like it's, forget China. It's probably isn't going to happen. There's also another report that gaming GPUs were incrementally banned in China. Like I, I just think like you can't rely, temper your expectations. I don't think China is going to happen.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Not relevant to the business case or the valuation, but potentially important to like the geopolitical story?

• 1:12:52Tae Kim?

  Um, I, I think it's just going to be the status quo where Nvidia is not going to be able to sell to China. And anything that happens is incremental upside, but it's not going to be a huge number anymore. Even the stuff that is allowed is, is a limited number. The, the way the US has, you know, approved the licenses, it's China is the one that's saying, no, we're not going to let you sell right now. Like it's been going back and forth between China and the US, you know, who bans what and whatever. But even the incremental numbers, even if China starts approving it, it's not a huge number the way it was in the past. So I would temper expectations on China. It's just, it's been so, you know, so back and forth and unreliable the last, last couple of years.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to Google I/O?

• 1:13:34Tae Kim?

  Uh, I'm actually pretty negative on Google right now and they're, you know, they're basically non-existent in the whole coding agent stuff, which is like the one that's going to, that's growing exponentially right now in terms of coding agents and everyone's paying tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic and now Codex for OpenAI, you know, they're adding a million users every few weeks. Um, Google anti-gravity is, is nowhere to be found. You know, no one's talking about Twitter. Every, anyone that talks about it says they don't like it. So.

• 1:14:09Tae Kim?

  The hottest thing, which is coding agents, that's gonna automate things and do actual work for an enterprise is the biggest market that's taking off like a rocket. Google isn't there. So, I mean, Google Cloud is doing great.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Tae Kim?

  Token growth, etc.

• 1:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Did seeing yesterday, did it start to make more sense to you why Google had been committing so many resources to Anthropic? Like, do you feel like that's...

• 1:14:36Tae Kim?

  Yeah, so I think they see Anthro...

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Because at the time, at a lot of, you know, at the time, everyone was like, wow, I wonder how, you know, Demis feels about this. Of course, Demis is an angel in Anthropic and obviously, you know, thinks they're a great company and they have a good relationship. But at the time, it was like, wow, what, like, they have this new model incoming, they have this massive compute advantage, they have this massive distribution advantage, they have this massive data advantage, like, they have every single advantage, they had this huge head start. And ventured the transformer. And they can just vend it in everywhere on all these platforms from Google Workspace, which is like a massively, you know, underrated distribution point to the Google, you know,

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Docs and Sheets and basically everywhere, like, every single possible advantage and incredibly talented team and exponential demand for tokens. And it was still, you know, somewhat surprising to see them, you know, invest that much in a competitive lab.

• 1:15:41Tae Kim?

  And they are benefiting, you know, with Google Cloud at getting that business. But I think, long-term strategically, I think Google has to be very careful, and I think Microsoft is experiencing this with OpenAI, is once the value accrues to Anthropic and OpenAI, they're gonna be the power players, you know, four or five years from now and be able to push people around. I mean, we saw that when Yahoo literally used Google as their search engine, right? Google was nobody.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:10Tae Kim?

  And Yahoo put it on their homepage and powered their search engine, and then Google became the power player in a few years, right? Same thing with Netscape and Yahoo. I mean, this is like history repeating itself. Netscape was, everyone used Netscape. I don't know if you guys were around then, but Netscape was the browser, right? And the reason Yahoo became powerful is because you clicked on that little thing on the right... On the homepage and it drove people to Yahoo, the portal. Then Google, you know, took off because they started using Google, the Google search engine inside Yahoo.com. So I, I think all these companies have to be, be careful. Like if you, if you help OpenAI, Anthropic become super powerful and they have the best models and you know, this thing is all a flywheel, right?

• 1:16:55Tae Kim?

  The more people that use it, the more people that use Cloud Code, you know, Anthropic's gonna get smarter and make the better version of Cloud Code, same thing with ChatGPT. And if you let Gemini kind of like lose the market right now, like and Anthropic gets all the business and all the revenue, like Google starts losing power in the whole tech ecosystem.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's almost like the whole industry is on a merry go round, but they're, you know, it's like a Spider-Man meme with like, you know, guns, everyone's kind of just like going around.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Very, very.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  What are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? What does that do to the market? They sort of jump straight into the Mag 7 in terms of valuation. Are they gonna suck up liquidity?

• 1:17:36Tae Kim?

  First of all, it's really, it's really tough to tell without that S1.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Tae Kim?

  We'll see the person, you know, all we have is like these spot leaks and

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Tae Kim?

  you know, Starlink and that now with the, you know, selling the, the AI compute across this to Anthropic. I mean, the valuation is extremely, extremely high. Even, even the D1 Capital guy who, who's up, you know,

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Dan Sanheim.

• 1:18:03Tae Kim?

  Yeah, he, he was interviewed on, on Osha's show and you could tell, if you just read his body language, he's like, wow, this is a really high multiple. I mean, go back and listen to it, even he, even though he's gonna benefit from it, like he's like, wow, this is really high.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Tae Kim?

  So.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of SpaceX investors were happy with, you know, the investing that 60 billion, but it was doing 10 billion revenue and had great margins and it's a completely different business, both on the valuation side.

• 1:18:33Tae Kim?

  Who goes to them? They saw something, I mean, like it, you know, the launch costs going down and Starlink coming out of nowhere and adding billions of, you know, unbelievable telecom business total customer market, it's great. But like 1.5, 1.75 trillion off the Starlink revenue number.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Elon's earned the, what was this from Gavin Baker? He was saying like Elon has just always delivered for shareholders and that means that he can marshal unlimited capital at all times and it just continues.

• 1:19:04Tae Kim?

  You know, I'm just hesitant, like, you know, at those extreme valuations, that's less upside for a retail investor.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hard to imagine like the Tesla scenario.

• 1:19:15Tae Kim?

  Yeah, the passive indexes, if they go in at that price, that valuation, like, on the next downturn, it's just, I just, I just wish Anthropic went out first, right? Because the numbers are dramatically real. I mean, OpenAI probably is accelerating now with Codex 2.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Tae Kim?

  And, you know, that, that will help things a lot better than, you know, you know, spry.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the interesting thing right now, looking at the valuations of the Mag 7, and then you add SpaceX in there, and then you add, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI, and SpaceX will look, potentially make Anthropic and OpenAI look cheap on just like a revenue multiple basis. But then it still looks very expensive versus, let's say, like a Meta, right? Sitting at one and a half trillion with, with one of the best businesses of all time. I did, I did want to ask you about Meta, your kind of updated mental model. They obviously had a big painful round of layoffs today to be able to afford their inference bill.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm joking there, but it does seem like, you know, they're effectively, whatever they're saving on, on comp, they're just sort of reinvesting into AI, both CapEx, but also their, their inference bills.

• 1:20:37Tae Kim?

  I mean, I think you asked me the same question, you know, six, seven weeks ago, and, you know, they, they reported an unbelievable quarter. I mean, they're growing at 33%. Like crazy amounts of profits, like um there's market skepticism that they could do well in AI models, but you know, there's also the plan B like you could say the same thing about what happened with Elon and XAI like they were able to there's so much demand in this mega trend hypercycle that even if they falter a bit, they could sell compute capacity to to the highest bidder uh that's out there. So I I wouldn't count Meta out. I actually think like I said um their core advertising advertising business is more durable than the Google

• 1:21:22Tae Kim?

  search engine right now, which if you go, you know, it's filled with ads everywhere. It's not it's not a great experience and a lot of that, a lot of that traffic is going to shift over to AI chatbots. So I if you actually look at the numbers, Meta is is their business core business is very durable, has competitive advantage, it's growing, still growing like a weed. Uh I I just wouldn't count them out.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, as soon as they either have an AI breakthrough uh or they pull back on AI, the stock has to re-rate.

• 1:21:56Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:21:58Tae Kim?

  Yes, yeah, I mean, that's the same thing happened with with with the the Metaverse stuff.

• 1:22:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Tae Kim?

  As they start cutting back spending, you re-rate higher because of all those losses don't don't hit the income statement.

• 1:22:10Speaker 07

  They look tiny now.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'd be so it'd be so wild to think about what Meta's stock would be doing right now if the Metaverse debacle had never happened because the Metaverse was like this high conviction bet on a category that was just way too early and yet AI doesn't feel and yet they feel like late on AI. I think Mark felt late or at least clearly felt behind enough to to to sort of, you know, 10x the seriousness. So.

• 1:22:40Tae Kim?

  I think investors are, yeah, I think they're a little more skeptical because of what happened with the Metaverse where they spent tens of billions of dollars. That has pretty much gone.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Becoming a NeoCloud is a weird outcome for a hyperscaler that could totally have a cloud platform, but has not historically. And you would imagine that there's a whole bunch of hard-won lessons that Azure, GCP, AWS went through, organizational decisions, structures, just key people in place. It feels hard to spin up immediately. At the same time, there's NeoClouds that are scaling revenue extremely quickly every day. So I agree with you that it is a possibility, but a whole set of new challenges if that's the direction it goes.

• 1:23:24Tae Kim?

  That's the worst-case scenario, right? Like, they want to use AI compute capacity to make their internal businesses better with all the ad personalization and monetization and create this stuff. And actually, I've been playing around with OpenClaw for the first time a few weeks ago. And yeah, I've been using WhatsApp. And that's the future. Everyone's going to have a digital assistant. It's like so amazing. I ask it to give me the top 20 stories. It's powered by the latest version of Codex. It goes out there, searches every day for me and emails me the top 20 stories I should read. And it's really smart. You guys should try it. It's actually amazing. And the thing I'm thinking is like, why can't Meta do this? I mean, they have this Meta AI that's not horrible. But, you know, having

• 1:24:09Tae Kim?

  this little channel for my little Taybot, I call it Tbot. And all he does WhatsApp it and say, do this, do this, find this for me. Everyone's going to have this. This is the basic thing. And I'm using WhatsApp.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  I mean, the big headline token number from Google was that they 7X token production across all of their services. That actually seemed a little low to me, given how broad the surfaces are and how crazy the models have gotten in the last year. But I would expect to start seeing that out of Meta, because now when you go to Instagram and you search, it gives you a little AI overview. And obviously, they have the Meta AI app. And I would imagine that there's more AI hydration happening across the ecosystem.

• 1:24:51Tae Kim?

  And this digital assistant thing is going to be like OpenClaw. Like, I was skeptical until I tried it. Oh my gosh. So Meta should be all over this because it's on there.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  And probably with the Ray-Bans, they'll do it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great hanging out.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. What do you do for Nvidia earnings? Do you, do you just like turn off all the lights in the room? And, and like, just like sit there.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Case of beer, nachos, big screen TV.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Is it more like a Super Bowl or like a?

• 1:25:21Tae Kim?

  I, I wish like, we should bring back those bar crawls.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Tae Kim?

  They did it once and then it's top. Like we should bring that back.

• 1:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Too much of a top signal.

• 1:25:30Tae Kim?

  This is gonna be the number one most valuable company for a long time.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Tae Kim?

  Like, I'm sorry Alphabet, it's not gonna happen.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Tae Kim?

  So we should bring those, those bar earnings party back.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day.

• 1:25:44Jordi Hays?

  See you.

• 1:25:44Tae Kim?

  Right. Thanks guys. Good to be again.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Uh, before we bring in our next guest, I want to actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article, see how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see, uh, the first graph, the, these are IPOs. Uh, over the last seven years, uh, ranging from zero billion dollars raised, probably 10 million, a hundred million dollars, all the way up to 2 billion. Continue to scroll down and you'll see what happens as the blockbuster IPO starts stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of just in a few minutes, uh, ARM, Cerebrus, uh, Uber and Porsche.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  And then as you keep going, Saudi Ramco comes in at 25 billion. If you keep scrolling down and then eventually, uh, SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at 80 billion. To make everything else look like a flat line on the chart. Uh, absolutely blockbuster IPO and should make for a ton of great, uh, takes and analysis. And it'll be a fun, fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes, goes public soon. We're getting the S1 any day now. Well, our next guest, Ahmad from Mercury is here with a big funding announcement. So we'll bring him in from the waiting room into the TV pen. I'll turn on the mod. How are you doing?

• 1:27:04Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, great to be here. Am I not gonna get the dong?

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you'll get the dong, but you gotta give us the news. Tell us what happened.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be patient. You gotta give us.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  What happened today?

• 1:27:12Immad Akhund?

  There we go.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:27:15Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, we just raised 200 million.

• 1:27:21Immad Akhund?

  TCB is leading, so excited about that answer today.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. What was the traction that unlocked this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst?

• 1:27:31Immad Akhund?

  Uh, you know, we've just been kind of grinding away for the last, uh, what is it? Seven years since we launched.

• 1:27:39Immad Akhund?

  Seen a lot of growth in Q1, especially about 2.5x our Q1 last year in terms of applications. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there's been a lot of new business formation.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Immad Akhund?

  A lot of, you know, companies being built using AI. So obviously we, we hear about like these big startups in AI, but there's also just like normal businesses being built with AI being a big catalyst. And we saw, yeah, big increase 2.5x over last year, which last year was a big year for us.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  How are you reaching those customers? Like, what are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? Because they don't exist. It's hard to reach out to them before. You have to be very aware.

• 1:28:16Immad Akhund?

  The other crazy thing for us is we, most of our growth is organic, uh, but that even the percentage organic has been growing for us. So even though we're growing, we're getting more and more organic, which, you know, uh, was unexpected. And the other big channel for us is LLM recommendations. So, you know, if you go into your favorite LLM and you say, you know, what bank should I use for my startup? Mercury is often the recommendation. So that's the, yeah, we try to deliver the best customer experience possible. And, you know, because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it. And that's like a nice library for us.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  What, what is, is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LLMs is just because people recommend Mercury so highly? Like I, I can't be, I, like, I, I'm just trying to get at, is it like, your team was like, hey, we should really optimize this or it was just sort of like?

• 1:29:06Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, I think it's really hard. Like there's a whole thing called G E O, which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X, like if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds into the algorithm.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business seven years. Not so long that you're the, the articles are about the downfall or like the, how you're a dinosaur. All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out. And so that surfaces. How are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations? And sort of like the agentic commerce of actually opening an account? Is that something that's on your horizon to integrate?

• 1:29:50Immad Akhund?

  It's kind of interesting thinking about like the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI. We launched, that was a month or so ago, and we launched an MCP actually in December. And our growth on like those is like through the roof. So in tons of people are using Claude Code or Cowork or ChatGPT to connect to Mercury. And then, you know, I think the, well, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, they're kind of running their whole business and their life in AI now. And, you know, if you can pull in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your existing workflows, that's really powerful. And I think if you, there's a flywheel between like, if you build great tools that AI can use, it actually recommends those tools even

• 1:30:31Immad Akhund?

  more. I mean, that's partly why like, you know, people like Superbase and like those kinds of tools.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  Then how do you, how do you deal with the tension of like, you could build a dashboard visualizing payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it. There's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane?

• 1:30:59Immad Akhund?

  I, I think for us, it's like do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI and we, we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and those, those services. But we also have another team that's working on, and we just launched Mercury Insights, which, you know, summarizes your transactions, gives you like, kind of AI insights on end, lets you talk to your transactions. And then later this year, we're launching Mercury Command where, where you can do kind of complex workflows. Like, hey, I just hired someone, set, set them up in payroll and create a card and, you know, do all of that without me having to kind of click around all the, all of the kind of Mercury surfaces.

• 1:31:34Immad Akhund?

  And I think number one, I don't know exactly where the world's gonna go, right? Like, maybe everyone's gonna be using AI assistance to do everything, or it's gonna be a combination. So we wanna service both of it. And B, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, you know, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions, whatever, you know, Mercury's been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and like, you know, the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we wanna be at the forefront of that. And, you know, that's gonna increase the spread between like what people get from Mercury versus like what they get from the incumbents.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was reading an article in The Economist a couple of weeks ago about stable coins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or like a maybe just a, you know, stable volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stable coin-related features in fintech broadly?

• 1:32:38Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. I think if you're in the US and you're sending money to a US business or you can US consumer, you know, wires, ACH, all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. If you're paying money internationally or, you know, you don't, you're not in the US and you wanna have like a stable currency, that's where USDC and these other stable coins are doing really well. So, you know, we don't currently support it natively, but lots of our customers use, you know, some of these kind of stable coin services. And we'll probably have kind of at least payment features that are based on stable coin, especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for the US banking system in the US. I think it's, it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Is, oh, sorry, Dory.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Why, why was this year the right time to get into payroll?

• 1:33:32Immad Akhund?

  You know, we've been expanding our services. Obviously, we're known best for banking, but we've had a corporate credit card for three years and that's going really fast. We have a bill paying invoicing solution and, you know, over time, I really want Mercury to be the place that you do most of your business finances, right? It's kind of annoying. Like, if the money's here and your users are here and your finance team is here, you know, you want to have all of that kind of in one place. So, yeah, we made an acquisition in payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running, we're continuing to run them and we're gonna, kind of, over time, make it more like a fully integrated Mercury payroll solution. But, yeah, payroll is like a big category. You know, it's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider. You have to send money. It's kind of sits around

• 1:34:16Immad Akhund?

  for four days before it shows up on your employees. And, you know, Central's done a really good job with kind of AI first. Like, they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack and, you know, we're kind of taking some of that learning and putting it in our own kind of command launcher.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink product roadmap expansion differently than a few years ago? Like, when I think about neo-banks, fintech, modern technology-enabled banks, I think like you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer, you could do all sorts of the insurance. There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time, there's this foundational unlock in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension?

• 1:35:13Immad Akhund?

  You know, I think, number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't want to like invent things that they might want, kind of thing. It's definitely accelerating. You know, I think the two vectors are like, A, it accelerates software development. It doesn't necessarily make like, kind of, the more financial, like, it doesn't make lending that much better, faster or whatever. Maybe you could underwrite a little better, but there's still like kind of limitations. But you can build software, especially new software, much quicker. So definitely thinking about that and like, we're already seeing an acceleration in kind of new software launches we're doing. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is, you know, Interfaces tend to get cluttered over time, but AI has a decluttering effect. Like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need.

• 1:35:58Immad Akhund?

  And like, you know, I really think the future is people are not trying to do a specific thing, but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like, hey, you know, I just need to make payroll, like, you know, help me think it through kind of thing. So you can go like a level above, like solve the problem rather than like be like a feature, which I think like has a decluttering effect to interfaces.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so amazing. I just think back to, you know, 10 years ago at this point, like starting to, to build companies and just seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees because like the function of a bank is to like hold money and let you do things with it. And yet, obviously, you know, it took, took some time for you guys to enter payroll and then all these, all these other things, like just, just the concept of getting, getting an invoice, wanting to pay it, like you really should be this simple as like dragging it somewhere and then that's it, right? And so there's all these things that like right in this moment, there's going to be

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  an entire generation of entrepreneurs that like only knows this like completely frictionless business finance and I'm very happy for them. And I'm happy for, I'm happy for all of us that, that had to go through, do it the hard way for, for so long.

• 1:37:14Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, when I started Mercury, that's actually what got me excited, that like after you build a bank account, there's so much more to do after that. You know, I really didn't want to, this is my fourth company, so I really didn't want to do like this thing where you build a thing and then all you do is like incrementally improve it a little bit over like a decade. Like I really wanted to do something where like the start is just a start and it's kind of a platform to build a lot. So I'm exciting, excited that we're like finally like getting to build that kind of multi-product strategy.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Last question. Deployment pace for angel investing. Are you accelerating it? Are you decelerating? What are you doing on the angel investing side?

• 1:37:49Immad Akhund?

  Maybe I'm a little old school, but like when, I think when the valuations are the highest and the hype is the highest, you should like not accelerate. You should like, you know, we saw 2021, like I'm trying to keep like a continuous pace. Like I think it's total.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Don't you know this time is different?

• 1:38:05Immad Akhund?

  Yeah, I think that there's a reason for the hype and there's really exciting companies being built, but I think it's going to be even more fun when the valuations come down after the hype dies out and you can then deploy, you know? It was crazy, no one was deploying in 2022 and 2023 when it was the same companies at like a massive discount.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, the smart funds were and a lot of great companies made it through, grew even bigger and are bigger than they've ever been, as you are. So congratulations on all the progress. Thank you for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. There have been a number of AI images hitting the timeline. One was of Peter Thiel eating ice cream in Buenos Aires. He has been spotted at a chess match. I think that image was not AI. This one is AI-generated by Cat McGee, but it still sparked a bunch of funny reactions. One of them, the question you need to be asking is what delicious ice cream is almost nobody eating?

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Mint chip. Mint chip is... Is mint chip properly rated or underrated?

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Mint chip might be underrated. I think it gets thrown in with the chocolate category. It's sort of a second fiddle to the vanilla strawberry chocolate.

• 1:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Always the mint chip kid.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  I like mint chip. I was always strawberry. I like strawberry ice cream.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Question.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  But I think as you zoom in on this AI image, you can tell that it's AI. It's just too crystal clear, too well lit for, you know, someone to snap a picture unnoticed in Buenos Aires at an ice cream parlor. This would require professional lighting to get something like this out of a camera on the fly if you saw someone. Zero to yum is what they say. Anyway.

• 1:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Question, Sean, that I was asking you this morning.

• 1:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's better to rest on your laurels or sleep at the wheel?

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  I think I have my answer, but I'm gonna hear yours. Uh, I think in the modern era, sleeping at the wheel is increasingly safe because of self-driving cars. You can be, you can be sleeping in a Waymo. You could be sitting in the front seat. I don't know. Do they let you sit in the front seat of a Waymo?

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so. Maybe if there's a fourth?

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Can you?

• 1:40:26Tae Kim?

  Not, not behind the wheel.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Not behind the wheel. But what if I'm in the back and I wiggle my body through the front two seats? Sit in the front, it'll stop the car?

• 1:40:35Tae Kim?

  They're gonna come on the phone, they're gonna stop.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, uh, then it seems like it's increasingly difficult to sleep at the wheel. And so perhaps resting on your laurels would be the better option.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  I think so because it allows you to, one, it's obviously comfortable.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Quite relaxing.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but just because you're resting doesn't mean you can't get back in the game.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to begin with. Whereas sleeping at the wheel, you just have a car.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  It could be.

• 1:41:03Tae Kim?

  It might not even be your car. It's also very Lindy, right? People have been doing this for thousands of years.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:07Tae Kim?

  Imagine a Roman emperor resting on their laurels.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  But they weren't sleeping at the wheel. They hadn't invented the wheel. They barely invented the wheel.

• 1:41:14Tae Kim?

  I think they had the wheel.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Well, they would ride on top of wheels. They had the wheel.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  They were, they were planning to reinvent the wheel.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  But no one had a wagon that had a wheel that would steer the wagon.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  You had reins. They would take the horse by the reins. That's, isn't that the phrase? Take the bull by the horns? What, what, what's the reins idiom? There's some sort of reins idiom. Anyway, um.

• 1:41:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, no, I think, I think personally.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to rest on. Sleeping on the wheel means that you just got behind the wheel of some car.

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  You could be in a sudden death situation.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  Yes, much, much riskier.

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  High risk, high risk, low reward.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:51Jordi Hays?

  Almost, um, very, very.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Plenty of people rest on their laurels and just fade into obscurity. They aren't met with, with true downfall if they're resting on their laurels.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  But sometimes you just rest, recharge, get back in the game.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Ideally, you avoid both. Ideally, you avoid both sleeping at the wheel and resting on your laurels.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Imagine just a bunch of laurels in your driver's seat and you're just sitting.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  You could be doing both at the same time.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Both. That is the riskiest possible scenario because you're gonna be the most relaxed.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  Highest likelihood of, you know, careening off the road.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  You want to avoid both. You want to avoid both. What do you think of this desk? Herman Miller launched a gaming desk. People are saying it's tasteful, a tasteful gaming setup for once. They thought it was impossible.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  You personally find pretty much all gaming setups tasteful.

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  Extremely tasteful.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  It's a big part of your culture.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  I love, I love a gaming desk. Uh, I don't know. The, the, the thing is that I don't know this, uh, watching this video of the coil gaming desk, it doesn't scream that tasteful to me. It seems like a minor upgrade. Probably the best gaming desk out there. Seems very functional. I also, I don't know why there's a back panel there. I don't know what that's for. Is that for, uh, passing wires through perhaps, but, uh, how would you rate this gaming desk? Is it tasteful?

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I like the red coil. I like a pop of color.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Okay. A little color in there.

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  I love, that's, that, that color red is one of my favorite colors.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  I have a, uh, I have a, uh,

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  What is the coil for? Oh, it, it takes the cable down so you can plug it in because it's adjustable?

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Certainly power?

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  I feel like they could just thread that through the leg and it wouldn't even be there, but I guess it adds a pop of color.

• 1:43:37Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying overdesigned.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Overdesigned. We'll see. Herman Miller, Herman Miller has a whole gaming division, I suppose. Anyway, uh, you gotta remember, this is from Will Depew, you gotta remember that there's some guy out there who's the Michael Jordan of steel processing. He's on a generational run right now. Everyone sees their niche is the center of the world. So many greats you'll never hear of. The Michael Jordan of steel processing. We gotta find him, dig him up, get him on the show. We've had the Michael Jordan of acquiring rare parcels of land in Montana on the show.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have him back on. He's gotta be pretty excited for this, uh, upcoming round of IPOs.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Data center build out?

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  A lot of.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  A lot of those IPO.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  We can come back to the land, the land strategies. Because we have our next guest here, Brian Chesky from Airbnb back on the show. Only a few weeks since we talked to you last. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 1:44:33Brian Chesky?

  Hey, guys, how you doing? Good to be here again.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. We're not in, I'd be better if we were in a blimp right now.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  It'd be better if we were in a blimp, but we're one show closer to hanging out in a blimp together. Give us the update. What's going on in Airbnb world?

• 1:44:46Brian Chesky?

  So we announced a few things. The first thing we announced is a whole bunch of new services, probably starting with grocery delivery. A lot of people love that Airbnbs have kitchens. So now when you book an Airbnb, you can have groceries waiting for you in Airbnb. A number of people tell us that if you go to Rome, it's hard to get an Uber. So now there's going to be somebody that can welcome you at the airport and pick you up and take you to Airbnb. We also announced finally, car rentals, a long time coming. And so now you can get a car rental on Airbnb. And we also announced that we have now boutique and independent hotels. If you book a boutique or an independent hotel, we are creating a price match guarantee. So if you see a lower price anywhere else, we will give you the difference back in Airbnb

• 1:45:26Brian Chesky?

  credit and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. So those are just a few of the things that we announced. Really, the basic idea is just continue to listen to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our hosts, and just keep expanding, perfecting the service and trying to make Airbnb a bit of an ecosystem of other developers and other apps.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, this feels like the fruition coming to reality of like a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. What was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas? Like, a lot of these feel like they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel or button in the app.

• 1:46:13Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good, a good, a good question, guys. The app that most people see is maybe something like call it 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app, but again, most of the work about Airbnb is what happens in the real world. And I think I said last time that we spent a lot of time, imagine like you're living in a one-story house and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor. But you didn't build the foundation for a four-story building. And so what we had to do over the last few years is kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things. Amazon had this problem in the late 90s. They were built on ISBNs for books and they had to basically take their website and turn it into a bunch of primitives. So we've basically already done that work.

• 1:46:56Brian Chesky?

  To give you an example, it took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us two years to develop service experiences. It took us eight months to develop groceries and it took us only two months to develop luggage storage, airport pickups and car rentals. So basically, looking at the time to launch from conceptional launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market, sometimes within like a couple of weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing one or two things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Cars. Why, obviously a hard thing to do, but I'm sure people have been asking this to, for, for, you know, decade now. Why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you, why are you making those? Why was, like, why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such, such a, you know, such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere, you know, give me one click to, to add a car. Obviously, there's more that needs to happen on the backend, but why?

• 1:47:56Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, another great question. And I ask myself that, like, why didn't we do certain things sooner? And if I could, I would have. You know, I remember that one of my early investors said, starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down. I never realized when I started a company that...

• 1:48:16Brian Chesky?

  I never realized, I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you'd have all these extra people to do all these extra things.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Brian Chesky?

  But when you're, when we were in hypergrowth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in the 2010s during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work. Tried in 2016, didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019, and then suddenly the pandemic hit. We lost 80% of our business in eight weeks. We said, oh, man, we don't have time to do this right now. We gotta go back to our core business. So we've kind of had three different starts. And we tried it before, we just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So, yeah, people have been asking for us for more than a decade. In fact, 15 years. 2011, we began thinking about it. And now, I hope, I'm happy to say that hopefully going forward, we won't have to wait 15 years for another service.

• 1:49:07Brian Chesky?

  It'll be, they'll be coming really fast now.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  And, and how, how is it working under the hood? Are you partnering, like, is this a also kind of like sharing economy play? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you wanna...

• 1:49:24Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers, so we're gonna be working with a number of different partners that be able, that can fulfill this. Some of the services like Bounce, like, we don't do luggage storage. They have 15,000 locations, almost as many there are Starbucks. So that's more like an App Store integration. And then sometimes we have to build the services first party with our own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. No one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more countries than Coca-Cola, so you have to patch a bunch of things together. I think over time, we'll probably get a little more...

• 1:49:57Jordi Hays?

  You guys are in more countries than Coca-Cola?

• 1:49:58Brian Chesky?

  I think that, like, we were, at least last time we checked.

• 1:50:01Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is Coca-Cola doing? They're asleep at the wheel.

• 1:50:06Brian Chesky?

  I know. Come on, what they do?

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  They need to go founder mode.

• 1:50:09Brian Chesky?

  I think we're in every country but North Korea.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Brian Chesky?

  Iran.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Brian Chesky?

  Syria, Russia, Belarus. Maybe there's one other, so we're just about near the other country.

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing with cars that, and as I was just like thinking about that, as, as kind of Turo came on the map, the, one of the...

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  And I love cars. So as always, I thought very briefly of, well, maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like and maybe turn it into a little business. I quickly realized that like, it's like fundamentally, a fundamentally a wildly different business because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it 365 days a year, if I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate. Cars are the exact opposite. And it's just like a wildly different financial equation. And so it made, that always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like incurring some like heavy, heavy costs associated with actually like supplying,

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  you know, providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side. You know, again, you're, you can get a bunch of rental income and not, not occur any, you know, significant losses associated with the asset.

• 1:51:24Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really, really good point. And usually people's second biggest asset after their home is their car. And so I think now we have people's time, we have their homes, we have their cars. We would like to move to a lot of different other categories. Over time, I think you'll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next year or two on Airbnb, essentially building this entire ecosystem of services. But you're right. I mean, I think maybe one way to think about Airbnb is like just getting more capacity utilization out of assets. You know, anything that's empty, it could be further monetized and the world could be a bit more efficient. It could be cheaper to own a car. It could be cheaper to own a house if you could defer the cost by sharing with other people. That was basically how it started. I couldn't afford to pay rent. But that doesn't limit itself to homes, as you mentioned. It could be anything. Cars,

• 1:52:08Brian Chesky?

  it could be boats, it could be equipment you have laying around, it could be kind of anything.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about the, the previous services that have tied into Airbnb? Was there ever a power law distribution in those, any few services? We've talked about, you know, fitness trainers when you're in a town or private chefs or anything that can add to an experience, a kayaking tour, a hiking tour?

• 1:52:35Brian Chesky?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Was there a power law distribution in those? Are you seeing breakout successes?

• 1:52:41Brian Chesky?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  In in those like what what's the shape of that side of the business these days?

• 1:52:45Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, so basically we learned two things with these services. I'll talk about service and experiences.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Brian Chesky?

  There are three services. We launched your ten, three breakout hits. The three breakout hits are photography. A lot of people want photos on their vacation and obviously if you're a family of four.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:00Brian Chesky?

  Like one of you is not in the photo or you're giving your camera to someone else and you know you want to remember these trips. So having a professional photographer. Take your photos for thirty minutes.

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09Brian Chesky?

  Pretty reasonable cost.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:10Brian Chesky?

  Very popular.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Brian Chesky?

  Chefs chefs are not as popular in very urban areas, but like let's say you go to Lake Tahoe.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16Brian Chesky?

  You have a big kitchen, maybe you have groceries, maybe you don't want to cook.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Brian Chesky?

  A chef could come over. There's not a lot of restaurants there. And then the third one's massage, especially again in vacation or villa destinations. Massage is very popular. Other than that, it's really geography by geography. So we see like in Salula. It's a different kind of experience than say in like the Caribbean. So it really depends geography by geography. With regards to experiences, we're seeing a couple of things. Number one, no surprise landmarks. People, the first time you go to a city, you want to see a landmark. But the thing we learned is the second time you go to city, you don't want to see a landmark. You want to experience food. And the third time you experience a city, now you want to get inside access. So a big thing we learned is is this your first, second or third time to city?

• 1:54:00Brian Chesky?

  Or do you live there? And depending upon the answer to the question, depends on the type of experience we offer you. This was a nuance that. We didn't really appreciate the first time around and now we do. And I think my prediction is. The thing that will make service experiences really big is people will start booking them in their own city. That's when the TAM goes by, you know, by a factor of ten. And not to say it'll be every day, but it just makes the lot bigger TAM.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, just just clicked for me that, uh, you know, one of the challenges of all the marketplaces like photography, chef marketplaces. Uh, massage, all of them. We don't, I can't even really think of their names, even though there was like venture-funded companies in those categories, because the second you hire a chef, they're literally preparing you food. You immediately develop like trust and a relationship, and so in, if you book, find a chef in your hometown.

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  You're talking about disintermediation.

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have this massive disintermediation risk.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  And also, like, economies of scale, if you're just the private chef booking company, very hard to support the entire operation, the back office, but Airbnb is a big company, this can be one of many features in the, the, the.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but with, with travel, it's like, yeah, I want a photographer here, I want a chef here.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:11Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, you bring up two points, um, I'll bring up both points. So, one thing is, most services, there's not even one app in the world.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18Brian Chesky?

  So if you want to get a massage in the United States, you might use an app like Zeal, but if you want to get a massage in Korea, I don't even know the app, it's probably a Korean company, and if you want to go to Brazil, it's gonna be a different company. So it's not even possible for most people to know which app to use in which country. And so being able to aggregate all that demand is great, and these apps, these developers, love it because we basically are their international expansion strategy. Another, much of these companies, the hardest challenge they have is growing internationally. And we say, well, we can introduce your brand to a global audience. Well, now let's talk about locals. Yes, I don't, if you're gonna do a repeat service, we don't want to charge 15, 20%. We're gonna have to decide a business model, and maybe there is no commission, or it's a very, very low commission, and maybe the value there is this, we make your life easier.

• 1:56:03Brian Chesky?

  And I don't, I think this brings up a larger point, which is, we don't need to monetize every experience on Airbnb. The best thing is have a great relationship, add value, and know that there's enough high-value assets we can make money on, and we don't need to try to get every last dollar. We just really want people to love our service, and as you know, you know, we generate quite a bit of free cash flow, so, um, you know, we're one of the more profitable companies as a free, as a free cash flow standpoint. So, we are able to pass a lot of value on to customers.

• 1:56:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think, you know, that, that framing as like a concierge for the world, where like if you're staying, if you're staying at a hotel, like the concierge is not always thinking like, okay, this person wants something to do today. How do I get the maximum amount of value out of them in this moment? Right? Because then you'd always send them to, well, why don't you eat at this restaurant on the property? Or why don't you do this thing on the property? But just like actually taking a positive some view and just know that like you want to be core to someone's experience wherever they are in the world, I think is

• 1:57:04Brian Chesky?

  I like concierge for the world, by the way. That's like a very good slogan, actually.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Coinage. I love it.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  It's all yours.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Maybe this is a random pivot, but the total solar eclipse is happening, August 12th, 2026. I want to know, it, it feels like it's driving a lot of travel broadly. And I want to know, like, do these special events?

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  First of all, like, I feel like every time there's like one of these things, it's like, this will never happen again for 600 years. And then it happens in like two years.

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. It's a very specific band.

• 1:57:38Brian Chesky?

  There's something that happens every 600 years, but there's a lot of things.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. So a couple of years ago, it happened in Texas and the, and this time it's happening in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal, and Spain. And so there is a lot of travel and I've heard stats from other companies. And I'm just wondering about these like big events. First, like, how much do they show up in the data? How, how much do you see them? And then second, like, what are you doing to like amplify and get the most out of these? Let your customers know? Because you, you frame this as like, sometimes the best experience is like when you know it's the first time visiting a place, second time, third time. But at the same time, as a user, there's this tension between, I love it when a company knows something about me before I have to fill out a form. But also it gets a little creepy if they know too much about me. And this like this weird tension where I want you to know, but I don't

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  want you to tell me that you know. And I don't want to fill out the form, but I don't want you to spy on me, but I sort of do want you to spy on me. So walk me through all of that.

• 1:58:31Brian Chesky?

  Okay, so yeah, two parts. I'll do the solar eclipse and then we'll talk about potentially personalization without being creepy, maybe is the point.

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Brian Chesky?

  Okay, so on the solar eclipse, in 2024, I think it was the spring, or I don't know when it was in 2024, we were able to see a heat map. So yes, you saw the data and we were able to see a heat map of the exact path of the solar eclipse. And you could look at a heat map of all of our bookings and anyone that was in that line of the eclipse, you saw a massive increase in bookings. When the Taylor Swift Eras Tour came out, you could literally follow the tour from the data on Airbnb. When the World Cup came in Paris, um, I'm sorry, the Olympics came in Paris, 700,000 people stayed in Airbnb. That's like eight, nine Olympic stadiums were the people. In Milan, 200,000 people stayed in Milano Cortino for the Olympics earlier this year.

• 1:59:20Brian Chesky?

  The World Cup's coming up in Mexico, US, Canada. We're expecting that to be the biggest event in Airbnb history. Um, you're actually hitting on a really key point. The only, maybe the reason Airbnb exists is this weird phenomenon where people list their homes for an event. Most people have only attention of listing one time, but about 50% of the people continue hosting.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Brian Chesky?

  And so it's kind of a hook. And a lot of people are like, I don't want to host, but they do it once, they make a bunch of money, they realize it's not weird, and they keep doing it. If it wasn't for this phenomenon, there may not have been an Airbnb. We used events to grow. So that is basically a core part of our strategy.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  I see a financial product.

• 1:59:58Brian Chesky?

  Or La Palooza.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  Airbnb futures. I should be able to go buy, buy, I should be able to go, you know, see events that I know are gonna happen, Olympics, World Cup, and basically buy and then resell. I'm kidding.

• 2:00:11Brian Chesky?

  Um, oh, and then I want to, I want to answer the second part of, I think, John's question, which is personalization without being creepy. Um, so right now, I think most websites, um, and most apps don't really ask you questions. They infer things, right? They think that if you ask somebody a question, that's friction. And so for 25 years, this is Amazon, this is Instagram, this is basically every app, including Airbnb, we're mostly just looking at what you click on, what you book, your prior behavior, and we try to infer based on that what you want in the future. I think going forward, we're going to go beyond that. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is, we're going to ask you questions. That's what an agent does. An agent asks you questions.

• 2:00:52Brian Chesky?

  So your concierge for the world should ask you questions. You went to a travel concierge, but they didn't ask you a question. That'd be pretty weird. So I think that's the social contract of the app is more conversational. We're going to get more information. But the other thing is designing preferences. We found that people are fine giving us their information if they know why, where it's going, that it's vaulted, and what we're going to do with it. So we're going to develop a preferences panel. Like we announced today, that one of the things I'm most proud of is the design of our privacy page. Most people, they either don't care about the privacy page and like the people that it's like their entry level work, or they make it, sometimes they make it purposely hard. But then ultimately that erodes trust. So we're making preferences.

• 2:01:35Brian Chesky?

  I want to basically build a preferences library where we show you, here's all the stuff we know about you. Do you want to add anything? Do you want to add it? And here's what we're going to show to whom. And you can say, show this to the host. This is only available to an agent. This, no human can see. It's vaulted, but the app can see it and eventually maybe it's encrypted. So that's kind of where we want to go.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  2034, total solar eclipse in Egypt. You can stand at the pyramids and watch it. Book your Airbnb futures.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go and offer cash today.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  You should start buying property all over Egypt and...

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Last question. What's the last major fitness or health unlock that you've had? And then we'll let you go.

• 2:02:16Brian Chesky?

  Oh, very good question. Fitness or health unlock.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Could be a habit, could be a supplement, could be anything.

• 2:02:26Brian Chesky?

  Great question. Actually, okay, if you're asleep, I've been taking creatine, five grams since I was like 17. But I read that they did some studies that if you didn't get a good night's sleep, you can take up to 20 grams of creatine and you are nearly as alert as if you got a full night's sleep. And I don't know, if... Seems to work. If you don't get a good night's sleep, instead of taking a normal dose of creatine, take a much higher dose. The only other thing I'd say is... For those listening, I'm a big fan of compound movements. I think the most important exercise if you only do

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  One is the squat.

• 2:03:02Brian Chesky?

  Um, and I

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Brian. Sorry, Brian. I don't mean to laugh at you. We have these sound effects. So John, talk

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  It makes it sound like this. Can you push?

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  It makes my voice sound like this. And Jordy was doing it to you during that last step. And it sounds ridiculous.

• 2:03:19Jordi Hays?

  He was like

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really like compound lifts.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Compound lifts.

• 2:03:23Brian Chesky?

  Well, that's, that's, that's good. That's exactly how I'd want to be able to say it when I'm talking about squat. By the way, before we go, I just want to tell you something.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:03:31Brian Chesky?

  Are you guys still interested in doing the blymp experience?

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Yes. 100%.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  We're ready. We're ready. We packed our bags already.

• 2:03:36Brian Chesky?

  So we've been talking to brands. We've been talking to people and I want you to know that we're going to make this happen.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  I, I'm very excited. We're going to make it happen. The team is pumped up right now. Everyone's fired up.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  We're fired up. Uh, congrats to the whole team on the, on, on all the new releases.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 2:03:51Brian Chesky?

  Thank you very much, guys.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Great progress. Always fun.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Goodbye.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so unfortunately, the, the first chat guest, very fitting.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  So unfortunately, the chat effect, uh, the

• 2:04:05Speaker 02

  Guest cannot hear it.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Only, only you can and the two of us, uh, but we're going to keep

• 2:04:12Speaker 02

  Using it strategically.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  It's a really good effect. I was so skeptical when you launched these buttons. I was like, can we get the comedic timing to work? Will it hit?

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yes, it's working beautifully. Well, our next guest, get that button ready because I think we're going to be using it again. It's Marcus Malone from Minted New York. Did I say your last name correctly or did I mispronounce that?

• 2:04:38Jordi Hays?

  Botched.

• 2:04:38Speaker 10

  It's Milioni.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  Milioni, I'm sorry.

• 2:04:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, I've been getting Malone my whole life. So it's fine. I'm used to it.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  It was, it was, it was written sort of tiny on my sheet, but

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Dude, it's a, it's incredible to finally have you on the show. Uh, way, way overdue. I've been following your

• 2:04:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Long time now. You've been absolutely on a tear and, uh, yeah, we're, we're excited to have you. Uh, since it's your first time.

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, zoom out for us.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Zoom out for us. Uh, you know, all that stuff.

• 2:05:06Speaker 10

  All right. So, um, I don't know how far back you want me to go.

• 2:05:09Jordi Hays?

  Go all the way to the lax days at least.

• 2:05:12Speaker 10

  All right. So I played lacrosse in college. I played at St. Joe's University in Philly. Um, After I graduated, um, I was working at a smaller regional bank doing commercial real estate debt.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Speaker 10

  Uh, until like a year or a few months into COVID. As COVID started, um, minted kind of spawned after I was posting, uh, on social media, Instagram, Tik Tok.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  Were you just doing your own accounts first or were you thinking like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build something or was it experimental? Like, what was the actual flow?

• 2:05:51Speaker 10

  Um, well, I was a little bored during COVID. I was at my parents' house. Um, I thought I was gonna be there for a long.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Regional banking?

• 2:05:59Speaker 10

  What's?

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We love regional banking here.

• 2:06:03Speaker 10

  Um, yeah, so I thought I was taking a long weekend at my parents' house and COVID would like blow over, over a long weekend. And then, um, so I just started posting about things I liked mainly around like fashion and fitness on, on Instagram and Tik Tok. And then the brand kind of spawned out of that.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the first format? Direct to camera, like scripted, unscripted, just yapping, get ready with me?

• 2:06:28Speaker 10

  Phone in front of my face, yapping.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 10

  Um, I guess that was mainly Tik Tok and then Instagram was more just like outfit photos.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:35Speaker 10

  Like I liked putting outfit, outfits together.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then what was growth like linear? Was there, was there a key turning point? A lot of times, uh, like with my YouTube, I started a YouTube channel during COVID, very similar story. And for the first year, it was like a thousand views. And then I cracked the code on one video, correct structure and it started, it went, I think it got 60,000 views, which was like an insane takeoff by comparison to the thousand views that I was averaging. And I credit that a lot too. I had the editing dialed, I had the script out, but I really got like the structure and the title and the thumbnail all like packaged up. So it like could fly. And I'm wondering, uh, like what the, what the process was like for growing on, on Tik Tok and Instagram.

• 2:07:18Speaker 10

  I mean, I kind of viewed it as a reps game.

• 2:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Speaker 10

  I told myself, at least on like the short form video stuff, since I had no background in it. I was like, I'll just do three videos a day for 365 straight days. And by that point, you know, you start to see, you get feedback from like the analytics. And so after a certain point, you're like, okay, well, this did well here. Let me like, you know, try some variation of this next time. Um, but really, yeah, it was just like a reps game. I would try any sort of, of video style, but a lot of it was just talking. And I think at that time, there was a lot of like, it was still a dancing app, right? Like people were just doing dances and I wasn't doing dances. I was trying to just provide some form of value to the viewer. Um, and you see it a lot more now, but at that time it was kind of like,

• 2:08:05Speaker 10

  not as prevalent. So I think it helped.

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think of you, I mean, I think of you as like the, the, a new generation of like founder led company, which there was like, you know, great companies have almost always been, uh, well, every company started by a founder. But, uh, but, uh, you're like the first generation that was this like hyper online. You're in public, you're.

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  You're building your personal brand.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  You're building your personal brand as well as like, you know, people are following along, building the company. Also like your own, uh, journey as like an athlete and doing those things together. And just having this like hyper presence where historically a founder, even if they were pretty online, they might pop up and do like an interview every few months and people would be able to tune in there. Or they might post like, post a little, uh, you know, somewhat actively on Instagram, but it wasn't like three video, three like medium form videos a day for a year kind of thing. Um, and I just feel like that built so much momentum because there was like multiple things to latch on. People could latch on to like, how are you, how's your, how's your actual running going?

• 2:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Like I, I, you know, remember video after video where you're like pushing yourself super, super hard. And then there's also like, some people can latch on to the business side, which is like giving people behind the scenes and really making people feel like a part of building that, which. Has ultimately led to where you're at right now. You had this drop this week that I hit you up yesterday. It must have been extremely chaotic. You guys sold out so quickly that you were you were going back through like trying to identify like bought like people that were bought it to resell.

• 2:09:46Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, take us through, but like before we get there, like kind of the key moments along the journey. You start out, you're just making videos. At what point were you like, oh, I can quit. Like, when did you quit your job?

• 2:09:58Speaker 10

  I gotta make some money off this. Yeah, so it was like month eight of kind of after we started. It started January of 2021. And then by month eight, we had kind of had four large releases under under my belt and it was starting to become too much to try to juggle between real work and not like letting anything like slack there because obviously that paid the bills.

• 2:10:26Speaker 10

  But I remember talking to my dad and trying to figure out, okay, what's, you know, a good exit plan. And so we came up with like a revenue number that we would hit over the next three months. And if we hit that, then you know what? We're gonna take the jump and and quit our job. And so the very next release, we hit it in like five minutes. And I remember, I remember being at home and being like, well, I guess we're just gonna.

• 2:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was part of what must have been nerve wracking quitting, right? Because it was a drops based approach. And so you have a super spiky revenue. So it's, you know, you're thinking like, okay, well, if this drop goes well, and this drop goes well, and this drop goes well.

• 2:11:05Speaker 10

  Doesn't feel like a paycheck every two weeks.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's streaming in.

• 2:11:08Speaker 10

  No, I mean, you're also you're betting the farm like the entire time. Every single drop, I was just run the bank account to $0 on production and hope that it went well. I guess at any point like it could have blown up in my face and gone to zero.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  So that that happens, what, when you, when you're looking back, what was the next like significant moment? You're like, okay, this seems like a real business. People like what we're doing here.

• 2:11:35Speaker 10

  I would say that, that following Christmas, like that December, so 12 months in, we had like the largest release of, of the company's history. It was like going into Christmas season and holiday season. And we released and I remember being like so blown away by the number on the screen, but then also realizing like, okay, all this inventory is in my parents' garage and we have to ship all this out as fast as possible. Yeah. So I need all hair, hands on deck. I've got like, I've got my, my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Like everybody is there packing and I'm like, this is going to take us two days. It's like no problem.

• 2:12:14Speaker 10

  And it took us like six days of packing every day, like through Christmas, might've ruined Christmas. I'm not even sure. But it was so new. Everyone was so excited that like, I mean, obviously toward the end, we were definitely getting on each other. But it was so new and exciting for everybody that, um, yeah, kind of just, it was a blur.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then this whole time, uh, like running is blowing up, running got, running got cool. You, you, you clearly thought it was cool before you started the brand, but I think a lot of people realized that maybe it was cool. You know, around 2022, is that like when it, when you felt like it was really becoming part of popular culture and in a bigger way?

• 2:12:57Speaker 10

  It was, I mean, yeah, it was really becoming part of my life then too. I think I probably started in 21 and then really picked up and wanted to start racing.

• 2:13:06Jordi Hays?

  What were you running from?

• 2:13:09Speaker 10

  Honestly, a lot of different things, probably now that I think about it, but, um, yeah, I mean, like it started like everybody else. You sign up for half marathon and you're like, okay, I gotta train and I'm going to give myself a time goal. And then like anything else, it's a sickness and then it just gets worse and worse.

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you start, do you still feel pressured? Were you feeling pressure to be the best runner?

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Out of your customer base, like, I mean, like, I feel like you're you're you're you're kind of running two races, you're building a business, and then I can imagine it really gets in your head because you start sharing some times that you're running and then, you know, you're competitive and you want to improve. Walk us through that that.

• 2:13:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, the beauty of posting on the internet is that you get to hear commentary from everybody on the internet. So I always approached it as if we're going to make a performance running apparel, I better have some half respectable times. I'll never be elite. I may never be sub elite, but I at least put in the time and effort and try to run fast. Yes.

• 2:14:21Jordi Hays?

  And then, at what point did you start getting approached to do, you know, big partnerships like this drop this week?

• 2:14:29Speaker 10

  Uh.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Because these type of things are typically, you know, you brands need to like meet in the middle. The best the best partnership, right, is like a win for, you know, it's sort of like legitimizes the rising brand and then makes the the this maybe the more legacy brand like, you know, cooler and more relevant and and but timing matters a lot for these things.

• 2:14:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, I I think it was toward the end of 2022. So we, you know, coming to the end of our second year, I got an email from Jason over at Saucony, who kind of heads there. It's called Energy, but partnerships. And it was really cool. I mean, the the email started out just lifestyle because at this point, the brand wasn't as heavily focused on the performance running piece, and it was a lot more menswear and jewelry and stuff like that. So he wanted us to work on a lifestyle shoe that kind of fit into that world. And then when they brought us up to Boston, I kind of pitched the idea of, well, we should do a running shoe too, because we run and we're also making performance apparel. And

• 2:15:37Speaker 10

  so it was lifestyle first, then the running shoe came, and then now we've had two running shoes.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then how are you thinking about beyond, beyond running? Like, what are there other, are there other categories that you're particularly excited about? Or do you want it to be a brand that can exist anywhere that your kind of like idealized customer goes?

• 2:16:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, I look at, I mean, an athlete spends a lot of time outside of sport. And so I think that being able to provide products, uh, like, as I call them, off court, uh, is important. But from like a performance sporting side of things, I think we're really focused on running right now. But I'm, I'm interested in a lot of the endurance sports, you know, cycling is very interesting. But, uh, for right now, just, just the running piece.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about, like, growing the business? It's such an interesting, uh, like, origin story because it's not, okay, I was in business school. I raised money. I went to a design firm and set up a DTC website. Like, that era existed and there were a couple of companies that made it through. A lot of companies that we've talked about that, uh, didn't quite make it or wound up selling off at a, at a discount. And it feels like at some point, if you're not already there, there might be like a crossroads of like, are you gonna take a run at being, you know, the next Nike, raise as much money as possible, retail footprint all over the world, like, go crazy?

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Or, you know, more, you know, family business, compound slowly, grow, grow, grow, do things tastefully. And there's obviously like a whole, you know, a whole gradient of, of pathways in between. But what, what, what feels natural to you?

• 2:17:29Speaker 10

  It's hard to say. I mean, since, like, we're bootstrapped now in year five and, uh, obviously like,

• 2:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Take it all the way.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong for that.

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  We're hitting the gong for that.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  The god for the anti-funders. You'll love to see it.

• 2:17:45Speaker 10

  So obviously, like, you know, it caps what you can do and how big you can do certain things. But I mean, in my mind, I want the brand to be as big as possible on like a global scale. I don't think when you're trying to build something like that, going slow and building a really strong foundation is a bad thing. You know, I don't think us being almost handicapped in the bootstrap way from a money standpoint is a bad thing.

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look at the last, look at the last, you know, month. You had Airbnb pivot to being, or sorry, Allbirds pivot to a Neo cloud. You have Everlane, you know, sell to Shein. Examples of high growth. If you're doing anything like cool in apparel and you're executing well, you're going to go grow quickly. But high growth appears to be entirely at odds with like building a lasting consumer lifestyle brand.

• 2:18:42Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a playbook where you just turn on the meta ads faucet and just like throw money at it, right? But I mean, we do very, very, very little advertising at all. I mean, we're really just, I would say 99.5% organic. And that feels like a really nice, strong foundation where if we want to turn on the paid advertising, it just makes our life a little bit easier because we're building a brand that people know and you're not just like getting fed ads all the time and then you end up buying it and you're not, you have no real like affiliation with the brand.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the worst CPMs you'll ever have are when you're, you know, there's no brand awareness. Like every year you delay that, it gets, the economics probably gets stronger and the TAM gets even bigger. How are you thinking about bots? What is a do not buy decoy listing? Explain to me like how all this fits together in the modern era.

• 2:19:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I mean, when when their shoe is anticipated in that way, like we saw it with the Speed 4, which was the first shoe we released, we got slammed with the bots. And, you know, it's people submitting orders for 30 pairs. They want to resell them a lot of the time. And so this time, I took to Twitter before the release and and called upon people who have either like bought it in the past or are current botters to try to get a little focus group together to figure out how I could jam up the bots. So I'll give you the sauce on what I did. I had those two decoy listings

• 2:20:22Speaker 10

  on there because I guess, you know, the bots don't look at the screen. They're just going right to checkout. And so I had those be the correct listing, naming, structure, everything. And then the real listing, the one with the green border, had none of the real terminology associated with the shoe on the listing or in the kind of like the metadata. And it seemed to work. I would say like 99% of the orders were manual. Some people did bought it, but it was very easy to catch and then go ahead and cancel those orders. So.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what was on the decoy pages, though? You should have you should have sold like sand for like a thousand, you know, like $200 a pound.

• 2:21:03Speaker 10

  We had it so that the the shoes were like 10,000 pounds. You couldn't get a shipping rate because they were so heavy. So you would get to checkout and then the whole thing would break.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Oh, that is brilliant. It's really clever. I feel like this cat and mouse game is going to go on forever.

• 2:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's such a it's such a, yeah, having having like hype and and way more demand than supply is like the, you know, is a blessing for for a brand, but it is such a it's such an interesting challenge because you want to get your product. You don't benefit at all from shoes selling it two, three times, whatever it is in the secondary market. And so like your entire focus has to be on like, how do you get the shoes to the actual people that are a part of building this brand with you? And it's.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  There's probably like a, has anybody built like software to help with this? It's a pretty niche problem because most brands are like, we'd be happy to sell out with bots immediately. But it feels like there's like a software product there.

• 2:22:05Speaker 10

  You can go the raffle route where like, you know, you can collect entries and like pre-charge cards a dollar. And then if they win the raffle, I think like people like the idea of first come, first serve. And if you get in there, you enter your card information, you get past the age captcha, like you are rewarded with the shoe. And the raffles I've, I, in talking to a bunch of people who buy sneakers and are a part of, of that stuff. They, it just takes a lot of the fun away from releases like that. So try to keep it as pure as possible.

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about Nvidia earnings? John, John, you're, you're laughing, but Marcus has a dedicated account where he just talks about Marcus.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he's been live with us while the earnings dropped.

• 2:22:54Speaker 10

  Does anyone have any numbers?

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  Yes, the top line and bottom line EPS of 187, revenue came in at 81.6 billion, double B in the stocks down 2.4%. No, it's popped back up maybe? I don't know. It's jumping around.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  Just as Tae can predicted.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Plan truster over there. Nvidia earnings live. Are there any I R L events that are small right now that you think have the, the seeds or showing promise of becoming the next, you know, run club? Like we went through like the padel and pickleball booms and the, I'm wondering if you're tracking anything that feels like, could be a source of communities and cities, something outdoors or I don't know, anything in that realm that's like run club shaped? That's really small right now, but shows like, oh, there's some deep interest there. I, that might go somewhere. I don't know where, but it's at least showing, popping up on your radar now.

• 2:23:58Speaker 10

  You know, I, I don't know if I'm like the best answer to answer that question. I, I'm not too sure. I stick to running.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:06Speaker 10

  I see people go on group bike rides.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:08Speaker 10

  They seem like a lot of fun. You know, you go on a 50 mile ride, you stop halfway, get a coffee and like a donut with your friends. And then you bike back and it's like, you know, you're exercising out in nature. That, I don't have a bike, so I can't participate, but if I were to do another group activity outside, it would probably be that.

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Jordy's been getting really into the LARPing, the live action role playing where you dress up in

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  A full suit of armor and you just thrash on each other with swords and flails.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  I have been getting into it personally, but I've been sending you videos of, there's some, I'll send, I'll send you after this. There's, um, there's a, yeah, John has a helmet. He's ready to LARP. Uh, there's this account where they have like, uh, LARPing, like pretty high, uh, pretty high skill LARPing going on.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Where they're hitting each other legitimately so hard. I'm like, you, you're gonna give each other concussions, but it seems like it's fair play.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  Not with this helmet on.

• 2:25:03Speaker 10

  I think I've seen some of that stuff. That might be a good, maybe we get like a little tech version of that going.

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  How big's the team these days?

• 2:25:10Speaker 10

  Three people and then my sister's part time.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  That's elite.

• 2:25:14Speaker 10

  She, uh, she does the customer service and she's the goat, but yeah, three full time.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Three full time and, uh, all, all in-house, like in, in, in office in New York. Uh, how, how like, what is, um, how are you thinking about supply chain? Like, uh, you're making a lot, you're making some stuff in New York from, from what I recall, but I imagine you're making it all over.

• 2:25:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, a lot, a lot of the performance stuff is made over in China. Um, you know, the, the shoes were Indonesia. That's a, that's a Salki factory. So that's not us jewelry, Italy. I mean, we're kind of spread out, but, um, we have a lot of good manufacturing partners. I would like to bring some more of those pieces here to the U S. I think it's just, we're not super agile. You know, as a company, so switching, uh, a factory overnight isn't really possible. And there's a whole like re-sampling and, and reproducing process that would need to go into that. So, um, We're focused on like catching up to the fashion calendar right now because right now

• 2:26:21Speaker 10

  we've been behind since day one. We've been behind and we kind of release when we can, but we're this year, we will catch up to the calendar and be, you know, releasing products in the proper weather.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Is that a double edged sword?

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  It's like, hey, we have a winter coat.

• 2:26:42Speaker 10

  We've done it. I've done hoodies in the middle of August.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wait, but is that a double edged sword where like if you're the only hoodie that's going on sale in in the summer, like at least it's like not a noisy time and you're not getting crowded out. And so maybe there's a benefit or silver lining.

• 2:26:57Speaker 10

  No, it feels bad. It feels bad. It feels bad. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to do that.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  You don't want to do that. That's funny. When you say like the the calendar, are you just talking about the seasons or are there specific moments where all the brands, you know, sort of coalesce around like this is the day or this is the week when like fall collections go on sale or like how precise are we being? Because I know that there's a whole fashion runway show circuit, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if there's a real cycle to it or a logic.

• 2:27:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, I don't think it's that crazy for for like the performance stuff. I think you want to hit like spring, summer, fall, winter. And even that is a little more relaxed. Like you can kind of do it based off when people start training for certain things or how the weather is shifting. But, you know, there are times if you want to do stuff around the the world marathon majors, then you kind of have to like prep for that. And a lot of those start, you know, November, October, November. So, yeah, I mean, depending on what you want to hit from like an event standpoint, that kind of shifts shifts stuff because it does get cooler then, but you're still releasing, you know, obviously tanks and stuff that you're running into stay cool. But, yeah, I mean, spring, summer, fall, winter, for the most part is is good enough.

• 2:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Are you a nominative determinism guy?

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  The chat thinks you're basically a millionaire, Marcus millionaire.

• 2:28:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, I don't know. I guess on paper, yeah, the company would be worth, worth, yeah.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on the show. And yeah, just congrats to your, to your team of three on accomplishing what, what, what would be difficult for, for even a team of 300. It's super impressive.

• 2:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:42Speaker 10

  Thank you. I appreciate both of you. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon, dude. Congrats again.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  Jensen Huang talked about the quarter that Nvidia just had. He said, the build out of AI factories, boo. The largest infrastructure expansion in human history, yay, is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay. Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that there is progress being made. A Gentic AI has arrived, he says, doing productive work, true, generating real value, true, and scaling rapidly across companies and industries, also true. Lots of good stuff. Nvidia net income, it rose to 42.96 billion. They almost hit 43 billion.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Not too bad. A year earlier, they were doing just 18.8 billion in net income. Huge, huge increase.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Really wild.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  Really wild.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Printing, definition of printing.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  All good news. The stock is sort of up and down, basically flat, but Nvidia revenue jumped 85% to 81.62 billion from 44 billion last year, the company said.

• 2:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Shocking.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, great stuff. In the timeline, you know who, I mean, Steve Wozniak crushed the, crushed his commencement speech. Well, we have to debate this to see, was he actually a good communicator? Is he setting the tone correctly? But we should still play the clip of Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple at Grand Valley State University, because he talked about AI. And unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get booed off, booed offstage. He actually got cheered for his comments.

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this was, who was it, Tyler? Steve Wasniak?

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Shots fired. I'm a big fan of Steve Wasniak.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  I love the Was.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 2:30:46John Coogan?

  Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State University on Instagram here. Can we play this from the beginning?

• 2:30:53Speaker 07

  Nine months.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  It might loop back, but he's doing bits. He's getting laughs.

• 2:31:00Speaker 07

  You all have AI.

• 2:31:03Speaker 07

  You all have AI. Actual intelligence.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Oh, mic drop.

• 2:31:09John Coogan?

  Knee slapper.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  Hey, climb to the crowd.

• 2:31:13Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna need a big.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  He knows the audience. He knows the audience.

• 2:31:15Speaker 07

  We're trying to figure out how to make a brain. Software, hardware, synapse chips. And I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain.

• 2:31:25Speaker 07

  Takes nine months.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Um, yeah, knee slapper, but he knows the audience. He's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI pilled? Is he super intelligence pilled? Probably not, but uh, it is uh, regardless, I think uh, it's, it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience and uh, and and that is a way to bridge to a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post AGI world. Uh, I don't know. We'll have to go watch the full clip eventually.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's uh, close it out with this video from Tyler that we can pull up.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  Okay, what is this?

• 2:32:05Jordi Hays?

  This is the video I was referencing uh, with, with Marcus. I'm very concerned about these gentlemen.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  And what they're doing.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  Pull it up.

• 2:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, pull it up.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  What's happening?

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's get some.

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Like this is, this is insane content. I mean, the helmet is getting dented. I think this is very dangerous.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Skill issue.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  They really hitting that, aren't they?

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Run it, run it back one more time.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  One more time.

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  He's just, this is just wrong. They're taking it too far.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't see how you leave this without a concussion.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  But we'll try it out after we do.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  We have the gong, Gallet.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  That, that seems like it would do some damage.

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. It has been the honor of, of our lifetimes to podcast with you today. We hope you have an incredible evening and we'll.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter, tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.