Meet the New Thiel Fellows, GPT 5.5, Thoma Bravo Loses Medallia | Victor Boyd, Alex Shieh, Nick Dobroshinsky, Ishan Gupta, Antoni Kiszka, Milan Lustig, Galen Mead, Aubrey Niederhoffer, Samuel Carvalho, Claire Wang

(02:15) - Thoma Bravo Loses Medallia (10:28) - GPT 5.5 Released (11:32) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (29:23) - Victor Boyd, co-founder and CTO of Cavalla Industries, discusses the development of autonomous forklifts aimed at delivering goods anywhere within hours. He explains the challenges faced with retrofitting existing forklifts due to their inconsistent internal designs, leading the company to build their own forklift to ensure reliability and scalability. Boyd also highlights the integration of teleoperation using Xbox controllers, allowing remote human intervention when necessary, and emphasizes the importance of delivering consistent results to customers, regardless of the level of autonomy achieved. (41:03) - Alex Shieh, a former Brown University student and co-founder of The Antifraud Company, discusses his firm's mission to utilize AI models for detecting government fraud and pursuing legal action against fraudsters, operating on a contingency basis where they earn a percentage of recovered funds. He explains the company's approach of combining open-source intelligence with AI to proactively identify fraudulent activities, emphasizing the importance of outbound investigations over waiting for insider tips. Shieh also highlights the significant impact of fraud on taxpayer dollars and the necessity of restoring trust in public institutions through efficient fraud detection and recovery efforts. (52:10) - Nick Dobroshinsky, the youngest-ever Thiel Fellow, has developed Every Ticker, a platform that utilizes large language models to generate high-quality research reports on all U. S. stocks, particularly focusing on small, mid, and micro-cap stocks often overlooked by Wall Street. He emphasizes that Every Ticker does not provide financial advice but instead aggregates and synthesizes research to help investors make informed decisions. Currently, the platform offers over 5,000 free reports, with plans to transition to a subscription model in the future. (01:00:59) - Spirit Airlines Eyes $500M Rescue (01:02:34) - Ishan Gupta is the Co-Founder and CTO of Juicebox, an AI-powered recruiting platform that leverages large language models to help companies identify and engage top talent. In the conversation, he discusses how Juicebox's AI agents analyze various data sources to find suitable candidates, reducing spam by targeting outreach more effectively. He also emphasizes the importance of job seekers showcasing their work through blogs, open-source contributions, and projects to enhance their visibility to AI-driven recruitment tools. (01:12:55) - Antoni Kiszka is the co-founder of Perpetual, a company aiming to create a derivatives exchange for a wide range of assets. He discusses their initial focus on meme coins to test their technology, with plans to expand into traditional finance markets, including assets like hydrogen, which currently lack derivatives. Kiszka also highlights the inspiration drawn from Kalshi's regulatory approach and emphasizes the need for derivatives that provide real value beyond speculative trading. (01:20:39) - Milan Lustig, co-founder of Opt32 and a Thiel Fellow, discusses his company's mission to develop modern full-stack compute infrastructure for physical autonomy, encompassing software and custom hardware solutions for devices like robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles. He explains their initial focus on the robotics sector, starting with software development and gradually progressing toward hardware integration, aiming to optimize machine learning models for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Lustig also highlights the importance of adapting computer science education to emphasize higher-level theoretical skills over low-level implementation, in response to advancements in artificial intelligence. (01:32:00) - Galen Mead, founder of a general research company focused on developing computer use models, discusses his transition from university dropout to full-time researcher, emphasizing the importance of computer use as a universal form factor for human-computer interaction. He highlights the potential of training policies on extensive supervised data from diverse environments to create base models for actions, drawing parallels to early work by DeepMind on games. Mead anticipates that by the end of the year, users will interact with complex software like Premiere Pro through prompts, similar to the shift from IDEs to command-line interfaces in software engineering. (01:39:10) - Aubrey Niederhoffer, a young entrepreneur who founded his first company in Africa at 15, now resides in Nigeria, focusing on building a super app for the continent. He discusses the nascent state of food delivery in Nigeria, highlighting high prices and limited competition, and sees an opportunity to offer more affordable services. By integrating food delivery with digital payments, he aims to create a comprehensive platform, drawing inspiration from successful super apps like WeChat and Caspi. (01:49:50) - Samuel Carvalho, originally from Recife, Brazil, attended Stanford University before returning to Brazil to found Prazo, a company aiming to modernize the wholesale sector by providing end-to-end infrastructure solutions. He discusses how Prazo connects manufacturers with small and medium-sized businesses through a tech-enabled platform that manages logistics and credit, addressing challenges like high customer acquisition costs and the need for short-term loans. Carvalho also highlights the significant market potential in Brazil and Latin America, emphasizing the opportunity to build a multibillion-dollar company by expanding beyond the initial focus on restaurants. (02:00:36) - Claire Wang, a former junior at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science, has a keen interest in neurotechnology, particularly whole brain emulation, starting with simpler organisms like C. elegans. She discusses her decision to pursue independent research over joining existing brain-computer interface companies, emphasizing the importance of making personal scientific bets in fundamental science. Wang also highlights the current favorable environment for independent biotech research, citing advancements in AI, alternative science funding, and increased openness to research risks in startups. 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.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  It's Thursday, April 23rd, 2026. We are live from the TBP on Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. We have a giga stream on our hands today. We will be interviewing one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 different members of the new Teal Fellowship class, working on everything from ultra-fast logistics companies to investigative journalism, to AI recruiting and compute infrastructure, all sorts of different projects. And I loved

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  10 minutes each.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  10 minutes each. It'll be a lightning round, lightning round of lightning rounds. I loved last year. It's always super inspiring to see what young entrepreneurs are working on. The Teal Fellowship class always impresses me. And we've had three of these folks on the show before. So we'll be checking in with them, seeing where progress is at. The Teal Fellowship, I feel like it's grown. I don't know that it was always $250,000, but it is now. So the Teal Fellowship

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow, keeping up with inflation.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  gives $250,000 grant to young people to build startups instead of going to college. So everyone here has either not graduated, or dropped out, or deferred, or declined to attend college, and instead is building a technology company.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Is this a smaller class than usual?

• 1:22John Coogan?

  We don't, we probably don't have the full class because of scheduling and not everyone can be everywhere all the time. We will be having them, all the Teal Fellows will be joining us remotely, but all, they are all in the same place up in San Francisco and we will be calling into them. And we have Nick and Tyler up there managing that end of the show. This class of fellows includes young founders, building hypersonic highways, a research lab for building foundational models for robotics, a fraud bounty hunter, and a simulated brain. And you probably know Dylan Field is a, Vitalik Buterin is also a Teal Fellow alumni. And we are big fans of so many different founders that have gone through the project. And Will Monitis is also a Teal Fellow. So.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're gonna get that sound ready because we got some bad news. Uh, Tomo Bravo is taking a massive write down on a software company called Medallia. Uh, Tomo Bravo is reportedly handing over the software company Medallia to creditors after restructuring negotiations failed to materialize. This is a $5.1 billion equity wipeout for the firm who bought the business for $6.4 billion in 2021. And there's some, uh, there's some background in Reuters that I think I should read through and then you can sort of give me your analysis and your, and what you're seeing on the timeline around take. So, uh, from Reuters, exclusive, Tomo Bravo nears agreement to turn software firm Medallia over to creditors.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  That does not sound good. Uh, private equity firm Tomo Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software firm Medallia to lenders, wrapping up months of restructuring negotiations. The move will wipe out 5.1 billion in equity. Medallia has struggled in recent months under the weight of $3 billion of debt, which it owes to Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Group, and Antares Capital. Tomo Bravo, Blackstone, KKR declined to comment. Apollo and Medallia didn't immediately return quest for comments to Reuters. So like other software companies, Medallia's valuation has been hit in recent months over concerns that its services will eventually be supplanted by artificial intelligence. What does Medallia do? Medallia provides software that collects and analyzes customer and employee feedback for companies.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  We've had some startups, some of them backed by Sequoia Capital, that are using AI to do this exact thing. That's potential disruption. And then there's also.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  So their, their, their main rivals, Qualtrics.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, but yeah, and, and maybe you said this already, but you know that Sequoia was one of the big backers of Medallia.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  I didn't know.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  When they were a private company.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. So they're.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they're still private.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  There, there, there's a long history of that with, um, uh, what was it? Uh? The the firm that was before Zenefits was called like SuccessFactors Lars Dalgaard did that deal.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  Sequoia is a real winner here. They they did 35 million in 2012. They did another 50 million in 2014 and then they later led a 150 million dollar round.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Wow. And then eventually, did they take it public or did they sell it for 6 billion to Tone Mabral directly from the private? Was Medallia ever a public company? That would be interesting.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  I think they were.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  You look that up and I will keep reading from this to give some more backstory. So, private equity firms invested heavily in the software sector when interest rates were low following the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We all remember 3% interest rates. It was the golden era of startups and growth. All of the DCFs were massive and then, of course, they became, the valuations came down once the interest rates went up. So, investors have become increasingly nervous about the sustainability of high valuations assigned to some of those assets and the debt raised to buy them. If you're on a floating rate and not, you know, these firms are not necessarily backed by a 30-year fixed mortgage like your house, your interest rate went up and the debt payments

• 5:11John Coogan?

  ballooned and if the cash flow from the business has not also ballooned, you could be in trouble like this company potentially is. Blackstone, KKR and Antares hold some of the debt in traded and non-traded funds. FSKKR Capital Corp. marked the debt at 79 cents on the dollar in its last quarterly report and of course, debt is senior to equity. So, what does that mean for the equity? Not good and that's why this deal is happening. Apollo Debt Solutions marketed at 74 cents on the dollar. So, a question about how can they even recover, you know, the full value of that debt? The equity is obviously in deep, deep trouble. So, Blackstone's global head of private credit Brad Marshall said on a conference call in

• 5:52John Coogan?

  February that Medallia had been, quote, "underperforming, not because of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution-driven issues." So, there is a question of, well, if they restructure and this... Company gets in the hands of creditors, maybe they can roll out AI features and become an AI winner and accelerate the top line and restructure the debt.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  I saw someone was sharing that there were there were some salespeople doing kind of some anonymous reporting and saying a lot of the reps were struggling to hit quotas. Okay. Like basically delivering like 20% of quotas.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Something like that. So just basically getting outcompeted in the market.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  And just go back to the earlier point, yes, Medallia went public in 2019.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  2019.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  On the NICE, it was taken private July 26, 2021.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  It had been it had been trading around the $5 billion mark prior to the take private at 6.4.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  So Tomo Bravo, after taking it private, installed a new leadership team in early of 2025. Marshall, the head of Blackstone's global head of private credit, said that they were working on a turnaround plan and we expect there to be discussions around the capital structure. And so people are blackbelling on the timeline. Brandon says, yes, I am sure this is the bottom in software and we won't get worse from here. Not good signs. This is, you know, potentially one of those cockroaches that Jamie Dimon is worrying about. There's another post that seems like it was deleted, but.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, so the.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Some of the screenshot here.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  The tough thing is that everyone involved here.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Has been on a kind of a press tour saying like, everything's fine.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, we're all good.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  AI is going to be an accelerant, but even even ignoring the AI question, a lot of these businesses no longer have, you know, are founder led. They're competing against other companies that that are founder led. And yeah, it's it's just kind of credit to Jamie Dimon for his comments.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Saying like, you know, basically saying, I don't think this is over.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  When you had First Brands and some other.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Shutdowns.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, in the previous startup era, there were, I mean, I feel like it would have been hard to raise for just like a vanilla Qualtrics or Medallia competitor and just saying like, pre-AI, like, we're just gonna build SaaS and we're just gonna build a, you know, a crud app and write software.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, new players, that company, Aru.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a very different approach.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Simulation.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Simulation, yeah, that's a very different approach.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  And then we had another one, I'm blanking on the name, it was a YC founder, he had gone through YC a few years ago, but his company is taking off doing something similar. So, people have been well aware of the opportunity that Medallia and Qualtrics have owned.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, in other debt-related news, Xi Jinping wants to use the International Monetary Fund to rescue the array of distressed Chinese loans around the world. This is an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal opinion. Noah Smith is laughing, he says, lol, Belt and Road failed so hard, Xi Jinping is incompetent. That is, this is very narrative.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Do not go to China, Noah. Do not go to China.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, this is, this is an interesting thing, but maybe a potential bargaining chip in all of the other discussions, you know, in tech, Tyler always points out that tech is like too focused on chips when it comes to Chinese diplomacy, that there are many, many other questions around trade and what Apple's doing and rare earths and there are so many, and just the broad history of the Chinese empire that play into what their Taiwan policy is, how they will interact in the Middle East. And we tend to focus it all on AI, it's all about the data centers and the chips, and perhaps there are more things, and this is one example of something else that is a key

• 10:03John Coogan?

  factor in a broader negotiation that includes chip exports and also rare earths and also talent movements and whether or not Manus will be able to move over to Meta and a million other things. And so, that is the job of these world leaders is to swirl around all the different trade-offs and get to, hopefully, a good deal for both sides.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Anyway. Some, some breaking news.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Merriam-Webster.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  GPT 5.5 is out.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Oh, it is.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Is out.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  This is just happening.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Introducing GPT 5.5, a new class of intelligence for real work empowering agents built to understand complex goals, use tools, check its work, and carry more tasks through to completion. It marks a new way of getting computer work done. Now available in ChatGPT and Codex.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  I like this demo of the Rubik's Cube. That's very cool. GPT 5.5 excels at writing and debugging code, researching online, analyzing data, creating documents and spreadsheets, operating software, and moving across tools until a task is finished. GPT 5.5 delivers this step up in intelligence without compromising on speed, matches, GPT 5.4 per token latency in real-world serving. There's the model card there, and there are some other posts.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  We will, we will wait for the reactions to come in.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  We will, we will gather them, we'll summarize them, but the team cooked.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Cooked.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  They absolutely cooked.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Congratulations to everyone that worked on this.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Merriam-Webster. John, what do you got?

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster added a new word to the dictionary, I believe. And I feel like the pace of vernacular.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they actually added this?

• 11:44John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, it's in Merriam-Webster.com.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so they have a slang section.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Slang and trending. They, they must be working overtime over there because the number of wombos, if you're not familiar with wombos, these are word combos, things like queech.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Loraine.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Loraine. The lore plus explain or queech.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  I could tell, John. Can you lorraine GPT 5.5?

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Yes. Give you the lore.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  And explain.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Tell you about what happened with 4.5, 4.0, 3.5, 3 Da Vinci. Give you the whole lore, but then also explain what this model is capable of. That's the full lorraine of GPT 5.5. But we're not here to talk about lorraine. We're here to talk about chappelganger, which is a new word in Merriam-Webster, the dictionary. It's basically the main dictionary as far as I'm concerned. Chappelganger is a term for a less attractive version of someone or Something so whoever's going out there and distilling 5.5 into sort of a chopped version of it. That will be the choppelganger of the official GPT 5.5.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  So stay away from the choppelgangers unless you're unless you're really down your lucky. You need and you need a Chinese open source model to do something for you. Then, you know, buyer beware, because it might it might have some flaws, but.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Kristoff.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Separately, there is there is new news for Michael Kratzios that the government seems to be taking anthropic and open AI's messaging around distillation. Very seriously and is setting up a task force. We can read a little bit more about this later, but setting up a task force to actually. Figure out how to prevent distillation at scale as the models get bigger. It's more and more of an economic impact when you're talking about, you know, a hundred million dollar training run. And a Chinese lab can distill it and sneak the the weights out and sneak the, you know, exfiltrate the data. That's a lot different of an economic impact from stealing something that, I don't know, costs billions to to train or billions to to put together.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  So good news there. Hopefully they're successful. It was also sort of a white pill to see a lot of the labs working together to understand. Hey, we're seeing this weird amount of data go to this particular company. Are you seeing the same thing? Or it's a shell company and we have five shell companies in these areas that are asking for these queries. And and then the other lab says, oh, yeah, we're actually getting something similar. And if you puzzle piece those together, all of a sudden you're getting a really solid map of what a frontier system is capable of. And so it feels like we, the industry, are the victim of a distillation attack. Even if it might not register among a single lab, because that single lab is only getting hit with like one third or one fifth of the total attack. So.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  We can pull up this post from Kratzios. I'll read the letter.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Subject adversarial distillation of American AI models. The United States leads the world in AI technologies. That lead that lead reflects decades of foundational research, bold entrepreneurial risk taking and hundreds of billions of dollars in annual private investment. American AI leadership drives economic growth, strengthens national security and advances the frontiers of science, medicine, and human knowledge. The breakthroughs emerging from American industry raise living standards, expand opportunity, and improve lives around the world. However, the United States has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems, leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information. These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models, exploiting American

• 15:27John Coogan?

  I don't like that. That sounds bad.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  That at all. Exploiting American expertise and innovation.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Every AI researcher needs this button on their desk if they detect a distillation attack. Fire it off and the security team will come and make sure you're locked down. And it does seem like overall, all the labs are being more careful about how the APIs roll out, how they're doing KYC, how they're doing different partnerships and stuff. And I think it's all a back and forth and a dynamic. But it's fun that this new model is available and people will play with it. And I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff, some

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Cuen 3.6 rolled out yesterday. People are like, wow, it's almost as good as Opus 4.5. Yeah, because they distill

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Don't ask

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I'm glad that Kratos is on it, and I'm glad that the labs can coordinate and work together on this one.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  More breaking news.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  And unfortunate, but we had talked about this previously, Meta is cutting 10% of their workforce, which is 8,000 employees.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  But this has been telegraphed for a while.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Eliminating 6,000 open roles.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw Microsoft was doing something similar. They're offering early retirement to something like 7% of the workforce, trying to lean out a little bit.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  I'm sure the debate will continue to rage over the underlying motivations. These companies can be big and sometimes maybe they're too big. Maybe there's AI gains, maybe there's, you know, different investment strategies. We will have to see where they are moving chips around, what projects they are actually cutting, what projects they are doubling down on because these companies are also hiring at all times effectively. Well, Christoph had some actual media ideas for the tech industry. He says there's not enough media in tech. He's upset.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  We need more tech positive.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Media for sure. So he says silent library with founders winner gets investment.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  What is silent library?

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Silent library? So you're, is this like a, is this like a webcam that observes?

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Silent library is a television show. It had four seasons. It's a game show.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a game show. Game shows are fun. I can see a game show being, being fun, at least different.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Six friends vying for a cash prize. If only they can remain silent as one of them is forced to endure a bizarre stunt while seated in a library.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  What else? Jackass with founders.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  What does that mean? How, how do you make that tech related? Maybe like humanoid robots? Like I, when I think of Johnny Knoxville, I just think of riding a bull riding effectively. And so I imagine like riding some sort of, you know, robotic bull would be it. But, you know, it's very dangerous. Like the, the, the team that worked with like Dan Margera and Johnny Knoxville, they had some serious injuries from time to time. And, and I don't know if it's in your best interest to be a founder and be like, yeah, I need to, I need to launch my startup. So I gotta go in the ring with a mechanical bull and potentially break my arm and not be able to code. And I don't know, seems, seems rough, but would be entertaining and with the right twist, I believe it could work. Interview founders while going ghost hunting.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  I feel like paranormal tech content, Jesse Michaels doesn't get enough credit here.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  He is a technology.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  It's in, it's in the technology charts and it charts high. Like it's up there and he has an incredible pedigree, great investor and also, you know, has some of the best reporting on aliens and paranormal activity and conspiracy theories and, you know, I guess he just hasn't cracked the way to bring a founder along, but if you're, if you're friends with Jesse Michaels are in touch, maybe you just tag along for a little cameo on one of his, on one of his videos and that's all the PR you need.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  Founders give their pitches while skydiving. Can you?

• 19:37John Coogan?

  I like skydiving.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk while skydiving?

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Uh, with the right headset.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Have you gone skydiving?

• 19:43John Coogan?

  No, but I like the idea and I like the videos. Uh, I like, I like that. It's always in like the vibrales of like the, uh, what, what was that movie? Is it Keanu Reeves? Point Break? They go skydiving and he goes skydiving and there's only one parachute. So they have to fight it out for the parachute. You haven't seen this movie.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Have I, have I told you the story where I was, I was in, on an overnight flight back from Europe?

• 20:05John Coogan?

  No.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm sitting on a, on a plane.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  And I'm awake. I can't sleep.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  And out of the shadows.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Skydiver.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  John Wick.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Walking up the aisle.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  Keanu Reeves. Yeah.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  And I'm just sitting there. It's effectively like 2 AM.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  And Keanu Reeves is like walking at me on this plane in the middle of the night.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  We ended up talking for like five minutes.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Really?

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  It was cool.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  And then he went and then he went back to his seat.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, well, he stayed on the plane. He did not.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Super, super nice guy.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  What else do they have here? SF party. I'm schmacked videos. I don't know. I'm schmacked.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Unc. You're unc. You guys know. I kinda remember, but.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  You remember?

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Basically this was this whole like, um, like you could call it a media company, but it was really like a guy that would make party videos.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  For every, for every college.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  So it was really popular, probably 2010 to.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  So pre Nelk.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  2013.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'll, I will say a lot of people use these videos as a sort of college guide.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. Okay.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  So, so, um, I'm sure, I'm sure they have billions and millions of video, uh, of views at this point.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Last one. VC Price is Right. Is this a good idea? I feel like people don't like, there's always a huge adverse selection problem with anything related to sharing financials or sharing your company. I mean, this is a twist on Shark Tank to some extent, but they, they actually did try to do Shark Tank for software. It was called Planet of the Apps. Gary Vaynerchuk was a host. We can ask about him tomorrow. He's coming on the show and I'd love to know his reflections on tech media. I think Gwyneth Paltrow might've been a host, co-host. They had a pretty stark- Planet of the Apps. Look it up. Planet, Planet of the Apps. Instead of Planet of the Apes. Yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow was there. Gwyneth, and Will.i.am.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  They had some, they had a stacked lineup. Jessica Alba. Jessica Alba, founder of the-

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  On each of the episodes, software makers have 60 seconds to pitch their idea in front of the advisors-

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  On a slow-moving escalator for the visual idea of an elevator pitch. Why not put it in, why not put them in an elevator?

• 22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, new episodes were released on Tuesday. Uh, did it get renewed?

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Did any of these apps go anywhere?

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  They had Silo, Focus and Study Timer.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Companion-

• 22:30John Coogan?

  I could, I could imagine that-

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Mobile Personal Safety, Pair, A Showroom to Your Home.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dote? The Mobile Mall. Tracks Battle Squad, Twist, Live Events for the Dating Twist. Scooch, The Word Game. Yeah, these are, these sound like interesting ideas. Not as interesting as like a, as a cooler that is like, has a gas-powered engine that you can like ride around.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Which I think of as like the quintessential Shark Tank problem.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Like Shark Tank works because the products are very, are highly visual and you get to see, oh, we made a new mop. Okay, we're gonna watch Mark Cuban try and mop. And this is going to be like physical and visual and interesting.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  It is, it is very difficult. Uh, do we have, do we, are we making progress on our Shark Tank idea? I feel like this is very, very important. We'll have to get the updates in. How's the Shark Tank idea going? Are we making progress? We're on the way, okay. Good stuff. We're very excited about that. Anyway, lots of opportunity in media. Also, lots of opportunity in simulators. We have talked about simulators, TVPN simulator, we made Jeremy Giffon simulator, but the simulators are getting less advanced in some weird twist. You would think they get bigger and bigger and you turn them into real games. We're going the opposite direction because the simpler the game, the funnier. This is Coconut Simulator. Let's watch this video.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  This better be worth 99 cents, okay? I'm not gonna lie. Okay? What do we do? Do we move?

• 23:58John Coogan?

  It looks good.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  I can't move. Why can I not move? Am I like dead ass a coconut? Are you serious? I spent 99 cent to be a coconut? There's no way. What could be the difference between arcade and realistic? Coconut has no eyes, so you can't see anything in realistic game mode selected. You gotta be kidding me.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  It's just black because the coconut has no eyes. It's first person view.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  This is impossible.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  You were in third person view, but it gets, it gets better because there's a sequel. There is Coconut Simulator 2, which, which is now, I believe multiplayer. Let's play this one.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Let's game mode arcade.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  It's the same game.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  So what's the difference between Coconut Simulator 2 and 1? Coconut Simulator 2 is a lot more in depth. The other coconuts, it's multiplayer. I thought you guys said there was a story to this one. There is, you're just not seeing it. It's a beautiful story about growing old with your friends around.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  This game is definitely game of the year. It's beating Crimson Desert. No chance it survives. Trust realism mode is different in this one. I'm telling you right now, if realism mode ends up being the same, I'm gonna crash out.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Coconuts have no eyes, so you can't see.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  It's such a funny prank. I love, I love a simulator prank. What were you saying? Who's in the chat? Ty?

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  Ty's has games as a bit.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it is true. There's actually a third simulator that we need to review. This has been answered.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Banana Life Sim.

• 25:27Speaker 05

  You are the first person in the whole world to play Banana Sim.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  What do you mean?

• 25:31Speaker 05

  Remember when I showed you Coconut Simulator and I added this to my wishlist? It's not supposed to be out yet. You're the first person to play it ever. I'm kinda jealous.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  How did you get it then?

• 25:40Speaker 05

  The developers liked our last video and they sent me an email. They gave me this one for free.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  The developers of this game sent you an email?

• 25:49Speaker 05

  I have it on my phone too, if you want to see it. It's the same email, just smaller.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  So you didn't have to pay real human dollars to play this?

• 25:57Speaker 05

  Not this time.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  This one doesn't even have sound?

• 25:59Speaker 05

  It's the beta. Technically, you're the number one Banana Sim player in the world right now. You have 391 points.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  How do you get points?

• 26:07Speaker 05

  395 points now.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Just for playing?

• 26:10Speaker 05

  You have more points than me.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Diet Coke Simulator.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  You just play it, Diet Coke is good.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  You just sit there and every few minutes.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  I mean, we have Data Center Simulator. Maybe the next one's just GPU Simulator. And it just sits there and it just hums. That's it.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you overheat.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  That's the end.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you gotta be plugged back in.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's move back over to tech. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, had some incredible predictions in 2016. Let's read through them. Summary of the inevitable, understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. This was Kevin Kelly's book from 2016. According to Kelly, "Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable. The future will bring with it even more screens, tracking and lack of privacy." In the book, he outlines 12 trends that will forever change the ways we work, learn and communicate. Becoming, moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions. That has definitely happened. We're moving away from even seats. Everything's consumption based now.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Cognifying, making everything much smarter, using cheap, powerful AI that we get from the cloud. Nailed it.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  That is... That is...

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  That is a fantastic prediction for assuming he wrote it. He actually wrote it probably in 2015.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Published in 2016.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  But he's the creator of Wired. He's been tapped into tech his entire career and has a ton of interesting reflections, too. He's written a more recent book about reflections on life. It's very good. Depending on unstoppable streams of real time for everything, for sure. Turning all services into screens, that definitely happened. Your toaster can watch TV now. Shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we have access to all services at all times. Collaboration at mass scale on my imaginary sharing meter index. We are still two out of 10. Filtering, harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires. Remixing, unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways. That's definitely happening.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Coconut simulator, unironically, an example of that. Interacting, immersing ourselves inside of computers to maximize their engagement. Tracking, employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. Sounds scary, potentially a good outcome if things are done properly. Promoting good questions is far more valuable than good answers. What?

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  You think total surveillance is potentially?

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Well, he says total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. So if there is a black box where my Netflix recommend, where my Netflix activity exists, where no Netflix employee can see it because it's encrypted, but it can make great recommendations and recommend me the next great show that I will actually enjoy, I'm cool with that surveillance. That's surveillance, but it's like, it's potentially good for me and I have a better experience.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  For the benefit of John Coogan.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There is, there is a surveillance bull case. Constructing a planetary system, connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix. Okay, that one, we're still waiting on. But a lot of good, interesting predictions. Jason Schuman says, wild how accurate these predictions were. And they were, in fact.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Very.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  Without further ado.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yes. We have our first guest of the Teal Fellowship GigaStream. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 29:28Speaker 06

  Great, guys. Nice to meet you.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. We're building autonomous forklifts. The real goal of all of this is get anything anywhere in just a few hours. And we're starting with what we think is right, and we're going to do everything it takes to get there.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts? Or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What are you thinking?

• 29:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, we actually started thinking we'd be the comma AI of forklifts. But you know, cars have CAN bus standardized since 2008. It's a software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts, even if it's the same forklift, same year even, the internals will look different from each other pretty often. So if you want to build like a kit that goes on any forklift, it doesn't actually make sense. So we tried that, we did, and then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift. You know, one model, you know, we'll deal with the differences throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay. We tried that. That also sucked. You know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer.

• 30:43Speaker 06

  We were kind of where everybody else was in the market. You know, this isn't the most original idea in the world. Everybody knows like.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, construction.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also big, there's applied intuition, like there's a company, there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. So you do, you kind of probably have, you know, you got a speed run trying a bunch of different approaches and figure out what works.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  But the same thing happened in the car industry where, you know, Ford and Toyota were like, yeah, we're doing self-driving too. And then it was like, okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control, but we're still, I'm still waiting for even Tesla level FSD from like three years ago to roll out into like the major American car manufacturers. So there's clearly an opportunity. So how do, so where are you now? Did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like what went into that?

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think what Tesla did right was that they got control over their platform, right? We realized that, you know, that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts. If you wanted to make it viable for customers, you actually had to, you know, make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift, and we did. You know, we built our own forklift in like Q4 last year through a manufacturing partner, and it worked great. You know, done some iterations since then. And now like we are deployed and we're deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability, which is really all we care about. Yeah. We plan on continuing this year. What we want to do this year is we just want to make it, you know, a super scalable product because to be honest, it's not right now.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but what, has there been a company in the last 10 years that decided to build a new forklift from the ground up? Or is this a category that has been generally overlooked as everybody has wanted to build new EVs and platforms that are maybe more exciting to some?

• 32:34Speaker 06

  You know, there's some people that kind of got halfway there. Like they would go with somebody else's design and make a few changes and think that that was enough. But realistically, like you have to be in the process from the very beginning. Otherwise, there's just all these trade-offs that are made in the design process that, you know, really affect you. It makes your product horrible. So we did it from the scratch, you know? We have some off-the-shelf parts, but that's a motor, right? Like obviously, I'm not going to design a motor from the ground up. I don't need to. I'll just use a forklift motor. But everything else needs to be me. Everything else has to be my design so that we can have full control over the system,

• 33:16Speaker 06

  iterate faster than anybody else, and build the actual, like, real product that actually works.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the environments that forklifts operate in? You mentioned that you're deployed in a difficult environment, but what's the standard environment? And then how does your test case differ from that?

• 33:37Speaker 06

  I mean, the standard environment, you can think of like a warehouse where they just ship a bunch of dog food. You know, uh, let's say like 400,000 square feet, um, just lots of rats.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  You know, it's not that difficult, right? Like if you cause product damage in a dog food warehouse, it just stinks. Uh, it does stink really bad. Like, don't get me wrong, they're not going to be happy, but you know, we, we went into a pharmaceutical warehouse. So whereas in the dog food warehouse, like, okay, I damaged the pallet. Let's say I destroyed everything on the pallet. That's a couple thousand dollars. In a pharmaceutical warehouse, I destroy a whole pallet, dude, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I think like our idea behind it was, you know, this is an incredible forcing factor. This makes us like actually build a reliable product that's not going to cause damages. And then when we are successful here, we get to show this to all of our other potential customers. Like, look, guys, I know you've been burned by the industry before, but look at how good we're doing in this place.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  I mean, if we, if we destroyed product in their place, we wouldn't be there anymore because we would have already, you know, we. It's a bad thing. You don't do it.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, talk about teleoperation. Did you go down that path at all? Are you compatible with teleoperation? Is there any value?

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like this is such a unique environment because you can, you can figure out autonomy, but there should be relatively easy way to like take over the system and just use an Xbox controller. As, as you get to full autonomy, I don't know if that's what.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  I'm glad you said Xbox controller. Uh, that's what it is. So like when we do teleop, uh, which is about 50% of the time right now, um, it is with literally an Xbox controller. Uh, there's like some things where they have to click on the screen to like select what pallet they need to pick up, for example. But, um, when there's like some scenario where the robot's lost, like it delocalizes, or, uh, we need some extra training data on some workflow, then it's like, yeah, just pick up the Xbox controller. It's literally, guys, uh, you know. They're not on site. They're somewhere thousands of miles away just getting it done. It works perfectly. I think it's extremely valuable. I think it was a dirty word in the industry for a long time to say like remote operation, which is really stupid because like customers don't care, guys.

• 35:49Speaker 06

  You know, customers don't care if you're fully autonomous. Customers care if the work is done. So if you're over here like, you know, stressing about, oh dude, we're only, you know, 10% autonomous, but you're getting the job done every single time and you're profitable. Like, I mean, obviously, keep going for more autonomy, push those margins, but dude, the customer could not care less.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally. We've said that to some humanoid founders on this show and they're like, no, it's gotta be fully autonomous.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is like a less sexy narrative and so I think people wanna deny it or something, but yeah. And work product makes the most sense. Talk to me about the interaction modality for the human or the manager or the owner of the warehouse in a basically full autonomous mode. Because I imagine at some point you have to have a system that decides, okay, we actually need to dispatch an order to get that dog food off of the top shelf. And there's a lot of different pallets that are stacked up at different levels. And like, what is the, what systems are you plugging into?

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Or do you want this to be something where there's still a human in the loop managing and dispatching orders? And then they're sitting in an office, maybe overlooking the warehouse, just sort of giving orders. But like, what is the path of the workflow?

• 37:17Speaker 06

  Right now, it's basically like the robots have this task that needs to get done every day, pretty much all day. This is very common in warehouses where, you know, there's only a few things that you need to do every day. And it just takes a really long time and you need to have it done by the end of the day, but it doesn't really matter how fast it is. And in those scenarios, I mean, you know, you just kind of give the robot instructions. We have a map and You can set up like zones or shelves and you say like this is what's in this zone or this is what's on this shelf and it needs to go to this other zone or this other shelf. And then the forklift just does it. I mean, you know, it can be that simple. Eventually, um, you know, the idea is that I would like to be able to run the warehouse for the customer.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't want them to ever have to think about it at all. I'd rather it just be like, okay, we are literally your pallet movement within this warehouse. We run your whole business anyway in terms of physical movement. We also have your inventory management. We can make decisions based off of that. We know your truck is going to be in here soon. For example, we'll just set up the staging for you. You don't have to tell us that has to happen. That's the the goal in the next, uh, next year.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Forklift is the wedge.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  It's very, very smart. Have you thought about, we were talking about, uh, simulator games earlier. The chat is asking, have you thought about making a forklift simulator where normal people could play the game online.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  But in reality, they're actually helping you train.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Sort of like the capture.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Your own.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, getting training data.

• 38:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's actually funny. I did think of that because I was looking for a game myself. Cause you know, like, I've always been into logistics, but I got into warehousing like a few years ago and like, you know, I looked on, I looked everywhere, dude. Um, I even looked on Roblox. Like I was looking on Roblox. They don't, they don't have any like good warehouse games, man. It's such a shame.

• 39:06Speaker 06

  Somebody needs to do that. Maybe, maybe somebody in your chat will do that for us.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  How did you make your first dollar?

• 39:12Speaker 06

  How did I make my first dollar?

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  I, I think I, I'm pretty sure it was when I was selling, I sold candy on Easter when I was very young. Um, and I actually made money there, uh, which is funny cause like, the kid I sold it to was literally walking with a basket full of candy, like definitely more candy than I got that year, but I sold him this egg. And I was like, dude, there's, there's something really good in here and you want it, but I'm not going to tell you unless you give me twenty dollars.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Mystery box. Random reward.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you, uh, did you drop out from anywhere or were you, are you, are you coming out of, uh?

• 39:45John Coogan?

  High school.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  High school.

• 39:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I dropped out of UAB. I went to a state school in Alabama. I mean, I grew up there and then, you know, I didn't have the money to go anywhere else. And I didn't know, I didn't want to go to school in the first place. So, you know, the second I got the opportunity to fly out here to SF, I was like, okay, it's over. I'm leaving.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  It's over. I love it.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just getting started.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Well, Victor, thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back on this year.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 40:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, guys.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Up next, we have the Anti-Fraud Company. If you hate fraud, you're gonna love this company. Alex from the Anti-Fraud Company uses AI.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask him about those bears.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Fake bear attacks.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  This is a big, this is a big opportunity.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  Yesterday on the show, we were talking about an insurance scam where individuals dressed up in full bear costumes with fake bear claws and vandalized a Rolls Royce Ghost from 2010, and then filed an insurance claim, which was then disproven by, I believe, some sort of biologist who knew about bears and what they looked like on camera and was able to debunk it. We were able to debunk it too, because it looked ridiculous. Anyway, we have Alex from the Anti-Fraud Company back on TBPM here for the Teal Fellowship Digger Stream. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing?

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Suit it up.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Suit it up.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Suit it up.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp.

• 41:13Speaker 07

  I cannot look like a fraudster when I'm catching fraudsters.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, have you been daily in a suit?

• 41:18Speaker 07

  Not every day, only, only when we're doing formal things. Yes, indeed.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  So, you've been on the show before, but sort of reintroduce the company and the shape of the business and how you think this will play out. And then I want sort of the update on where things are, what traction looks like, how you're actually applying the technology, and then I'm sure there'll be a ton of follow-on questions.

• 41:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it's, it's very simple. We use, we're building AI models to detect fraud when it happens, and then we go and sue the fraudsters. And we only make money on contingency when we actually get a recovery for the government. We're able to keep 15 to 30% under these whistleblower laws.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. And have you received whistleblower bounty yet, or is that something that's a goal for the next year or two?

• 42:04Speaker 07

  That is a goal, maybe not for the next year or two, because the US legal system is quite slow, so it might take three to four years before we see our first dollar of revenue, actually.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Okay. How much can you pull forward? I know that the plan is to use AI, but how much can you pull forward by just rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself, or hiring humans to sort of follow the same process? Is this a problem that can only be attacked with AI, like a recommendation feed? Like, you could never curate the TikTok feed for every individual on that platform without AI, but you can certainly, you know, go and take a photo instead of using AI. How dependent is this on AI from the very first project?

• 42:51Speaker 07

  Right, so I would say that people have always been able to find fraud manually, but usually either they luck into it, or they had a tip from somebody on the inside. And we're sort of trying to eliminate that bottleneck, essentially. We want to find the fraud using AI, because we're essentially building the Palantir of fraud detection. We're tapping into all these sources of data, and once we have a good idea of what's going on, then we'll send out human investigators, again, go talk to sources. But we want to be going outbound. We don't want to have to wait for people to come to us, because that's just less efficient. When there's $600 billion in fraud, you're not going to get tips for most of it. And if you want to solve it, then this is sort of the way you have to go.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  I remember during the COVID stimulus checks, there was someone who got a check for a company, what were those called, the stimulus checks? It was specifically for business loans.

• 43:45Speaker 07

  SBA.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  SBA loans, something like that. But those loans, one of them was just called like Ford Raptor LLC. And then someone dug into it, and lo and behold, like someone set up a fake LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor.

• 43:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  And that one seemed extremely obvious. But I'm wondering, how much is available in terms of public records versus stuff that you plan on doing FOIA requests for, to get new sources to comb over?

• 44:13Speaker 07

  That's a great question. So we use, so this sort of stems off of like the OSINT community, Open Source Intelligent. Sure. Which is where people go around and they look at publicly available data. And, and when you're doing pure OSINT, you're only using, again, open source stuff that's publicly available. That limits you. So we do get closed sources too. But I guess we, we want to start there. We view it like a funnel. So starting with the, the open source information lets us cast the widest net. Of course, some of it, we're going to need to do, do other things, like you mentioned FOIA is one way that you can get private information. But it's, it's really like, you have to know, again, what, what you're requesting from the government, or what you, what sort of private data source you want to buy, or what human you want to go out and talk to. And so, to,

• 44:55Speaker 07

  to get the high level view, you, you do need to be essentially just ingesting a bunch of stuff. So one, one analogy we like to make is, is the story of the, the blind men and the elephant, right? Is there's like five, five blind men, and they're each touching a different part of the elephant. The guy who's touching the legs thinks it's a tree. The guy who's touching the trunk thinks it's a rope, right? Is, fraud is kind of like this. It always leaves traces, but it's, it's somewhat difficult to put them back together. And that's why we just want to have as many different, essentially like sensors on, on the government databases, on contracts, on all these data sets. And that gives us a sort of a, a good look into what's going on. Then we, then we ontologize it, run it through the models, make, make graphs, and see if it matches on to any known patterns of fraud that we're searching for.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many like projects are you guys taking on at any one point? Because I'm sure every single day, there's like new ideas, new opportunities. Sounds like a very, very big market, unfortunately.

• 45:52Speaker 07

  Quite, quite a few projects at a, at a time. And, and again, we're just looking everywhere. I mean, like you mentioned, small business administration is, is a great place to look with all these loans, defense, just anywhere the government spends money. There, there is undoubtedly going to be people who are doing it in an unethical way. Oh, absolutely, healthcare, yes. I, I mean, like, we spend trillions on healthcare, we spend trillions on, on defense. There, there is a lot of stuff going on in these places.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  And what's going on in Sacramento right now? Is there some new legislation that's trying to make it harder to do journalism around fraud? Did I see that?

• 46:30Speaker 07

  I believe so. I think this was a response to Nick Shirley, I believe. Oh, really? It's called the Nick Shirley Act.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Wow, okay.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  Right? I don't know if it's actually called that, but that's what people on the internet are calling it.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  I know it went super viral over the break, over the holiday break.

• 46:45Speaker 07

  Yes. No, that's my understanding. Obviously, Nick first did like the big expose about the daycares in Minnesota, which were getting funded by Medicaid or something of that sort. And so that also helps drive a lot of awareness and interest in our company as well, because, I mean, it's just sort of visceral. I guess first there was Doge, where people just got really mad about how their money was being spent. And then the daycare sort of was the next step. And I think there's just a big anti-fraud moment in the United States these days, where people are just upset about their dollars aren't going far enough, right? I mean, like, it's $600 billion a year. That's like 7%, 8% of the federal budget.

• 47:28Speaker 07

  So that means like a good chunk of your hard-earned tax dollars is just being stolen by people who are contracting with the government in the wrong way. And, I mean, we need to restore trust in our institutions. We need to have good governance, have people have faith in our institutions. And I think that, again, aligning the incentives, having sort of private actors come in and do this and rewarding them when they're able to claw back money for taxpayers, the most of the money that does claw back will go back to the Treasury and to the taxpayers. I think this is kind of a no-brainer.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  How do you think about the actual application of AI tools and models in this particular case? I understand that you're, you know, sort of creating a database or mirror, a data lake of all the different sources. But then, do you need a bunch of examples to fine-tune a model? Do you just need to load examples of red flags into the context window? How far down are you on like the AI research side of understanding the problem? Because I can imagine like with a frontier model, you can go, and if you give it a lot of examples and data points, you could potentially just one-shot like a detection, and then it's just applying it at scale is the problem. But how are you thinking?

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Thinking about applying the actual technology.

• 48:46Speaker 07

  So there are potentially two steps here, though. The first step is that a lot of this data is unstructured. A lot of this like is documents and so LLMs really speed that up. It's sort of getting structured entities out of the unstructured data. And then we ontologize this. We have like this company has this contract, has this relationship with this employee, etc. We build sort of this ontology, knowledge graph like thing. And then we have the second layer, the rules model essentially. My co-founders are both lawyers, have a legal background. They've been working on sort of the fraud issue in the legal sphere. And so they know what that looks like. And with their input and with their expertise, we're able to essentially develop this rules model, this rules layer, compare that to what we're seeing

• 49:27Speaker 07

  in the real world and flag things that look like violations in real time or at least stuff that could be violations and we need to get more information on.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Did you drop out? Because if you have two lawyer co-founders, did they drop out? Like, what's the story?

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Who's the dropout?

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Who's the dropout?

• 49:42Speaker 07

  I'm the dropout. My co-founders have JDs unfortunately. They're also a bit older, so they're not eligible for the Thiel Fellowship unfortunately.

• 49:52Speaker 07

  I did drop out of Brown in 2025 to work at Palantir and then to start this company.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. Well, good luck and thank you for everything that you do.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  How big's the team now?

• 50:04Speaker 07

  We have 11 full-time employees, but we're hiring engineers. If you're an AI engineer that wants to work on this problem, visit anti-fraudcompany.com and we'd love to work with you.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  It's a great name. Well, good luck out there.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Alex.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Good fight. And let us know when you catch a big culprit so you can come on and tell the story because I'm sure it'll be riveting.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  Yes, indeed. Thanks, fellas.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  It would be funny if he was investigating a company to have the founder on. We're interviewing them and then Alex joins the call.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Sort of, yeah.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 50:42John Coogan?

  That's what you want to do with fraud. This is a new media thing. This is the

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  New media opportunity.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  New media for, for pump and dumps and schemes and all sorts of stuff and rug, rug pulls. That inadvertently happened during the NFT and crypto boom because there were a number of founders who went on shows and then it was revealed. I mean, the, the famous one is Joe Weisenthal and, and, and some Bloomberg reporters talking to SBF, I believe on Odd Lots. And they ask him like, so this is like a black box that you put money in, you just get more money out? And he was like, yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  Wait, SBF was on Odd Lots?

• 51:19John Coogan?

  I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure it was Odd Lots with, yeah, I, I know, I know Joe was on that, that podcast with SBF. And

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  And, and, and he basically describes a Ponzi scheme.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy. SBF and Matt Levine.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Matt Levine. Yeah. And Matt Levine asks, like, so he describes a Ponzi scheme and SBF basically just says like, exactly. Like, that's why it's good. It's like, you, you put more money in, then you, and then it grows and then it's this magical system. And he was like describing like crazy DeFi schemes. It was a very, it was a rough time. It was a crazy time. But we lived through it and we became stronger in the process. We do have our next guest.

• 52:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it was April 27th, 2022.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  And so

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:05Jordi Hays?

  Six months later, everything would

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was, it was a wild, wild time. Well, we have Nick from every ticker in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel room. Nick, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? We're great. Thanks so much for taking the time. Great to meet you.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  We hear you are the youngest ever Thiel fellow. Is that true?

• 52:24John Coogan?

  That is true. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. So are you dropping out of

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  You can retire now. You should drop out of the Thiel Fellowship now.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm dropping out of high school. It's a pretty, it's a pretty crazy experience. Wow. Congratulations. What, what

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what have you done to, yeah, what have you done to date where you get identified and, and chosen for an opportunity like that?

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 08

  So the main thing I've been working on for the past year or so is EveryTicker. And I'll start with the problem that we're solving.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:56Speaker 08

  It's that the vast majority of the US equity market is in the small, mid, and micro-cap stocks, but Wall Street only covers the mega and large-cap stocks. So what we do is we use LLMs to generate high-quality research on every single US stock, including the ones that Wall Street doesn't cover.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay, so like the big stocks would have an equity research report from Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. These are the 20-page PDFs that you see come out every quarter or so with a buy, sell, hold. Are you offering financial advice? Like, who is the end consumer of this if it's some small or micro-cap?

• 53:34Speaker 08

  So our philosophy is that we explicitly do not offer any sort of financial advice. We don't give a buy, sell, or hold recommendation. Since, from talking to my users, I find that they want to use their experience and evaluate the stocks themselves. So what we do is we aggregate and synthesize all of this research. We come up with a thesis, and then we let the end consumer decide for themselves whether it's a stock that they're interested in.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And then what about the business model? Is this a subscription? I know if you want those Goldman Sachs equity research reports, you gotta pay a pretty penny. How much does it cost to get an EveryTicker report on a small or micro-cap?

• 54:14Speaker 08

  So, right now, all of our 5,000 reports are completely free.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 54:18Speaker 08

  Eventually, we want to transition into a subscription model, but right now, we just want to grow as fast as possible.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Love it. How do you think about competing with LLMs over time? I'm sure...

• 54:31John Coogan?

  People are doing equity research.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  People are doing this where they say like, "Act like a Goldman equity research analyst. Analyze this company, blah, blah, blah." You can prompt your way to it right now. It'll probably get easier over time.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  So how are you thinking about that dynamic over time? And I guess, like, how do you expand the product?

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm assuming that's where you'd go.

• 54:53Speaker 08

  So for our competitive advantage, you know, if you ask ChatGPT to write you an equity report on, say, Apple, it will generate you something that's decently surface level, but I would not say that it's as high quality as an analyst. So our competitive moat is that we have a agentic system that is fine tuned specifically for this task. It acts like an actual analyst.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:14Speaker 08

  And then we have all sorts of different data feeds that are proprietary.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:19Speaker 08

  And as for the product, this is just the starting point. We want to get really good at the specific niche of high quality research reports.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 08

  And then we want to expand to adjacent parts of the research workflow in the future.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is one way to think about what you've built is sort of like an agentic harness on top of the frontier L L Ms so that you can deliver.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's running in the background and then just producing the report.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Oh, and then the report's just instantly available at the click of a button, correct?

• 55:48Speaker 08

  Not even at the click of a button. We pre-generate all of the reports. So you can just search a stock and it's there.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  It's already there. Got it. And then you're probably putting those on some sort of cron job that runs every quarter or every month or something?

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how did you kind of stumble into this opportunity? Were you, were you investing a bunch yourself and just kind of struggling to find great research on, on some of these smaller names?

• 56:09Speaker 08

  So in seventh grade, I convinced my parents to open a fidelity account for me. And I just instantly fell in love with the stock market. I really liked, like the idea of it. And I quickly got into fundamentals focused investing and learned from like Warren Buffett and like that type of philosophy.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 08

  And over the summer of eighth grade, I was looking into smaller cap stocks because I think that's where a lot of the opportunities are. There's more mispricings there, right? And I realized that you can use L L Ms to generate decently high quality research on all these smaller stocks. And so I just built a quick MVP in three days, published it. And then I found that so many people found value in it. So I just started scaling it from there.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Have you thought about what you're going to do with the T L fellowship money? I know some previous T L fellows that have made angel investments very successfully. Do you, do you play, do you, is there, is there something in your mind that wants to potentially dip your toe into the hedge fund world or actually managing a portfolio?

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  YOLO into Neo Clouds.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 57:10Speaker 08

  Yeah. I don't think I would do that. Um, in the short term, I think it would probably just go to paying my server costs and things like that. I'll be moving to San Francisco. So, um, also things like rent and things like that. But if there's any opportunities that I see, I would definitely be interested in that.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Do you have a team yet? Have you built out an executive team of, of grizzled 60-year-olds yet? I imagine that that's the next step for you.

• 57:34Speaker 08

  No, right now, I think that, um, just being a solo founder is pretty good. It allows me to move super fast.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 57:41Jordi Hays?

  That's very cool. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Was it through EveryTicker?

• 57:47Speaker 08

  Actually, no. Um, in fifth grade, from fifth grade to seventh grade, I built a Roblox game. It was tens of thousands of lines of code. I was spending five hours every day. It ended up being a complete flop, but I did make a bit of money from it.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go. That's great. Uh, what, what advice would you give to young people who, uh, want to invest in the stock market? Where should they start?

• 58:08Speaker 08

  Well, um,

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  EveryTicker.

• 58:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that, um, I personally would advise fundamentals-focused, long-term investing. I think a lot of people get carried away by these, like, you know, super volatile stocks and all of these moonshot opportunities. I think it's important to stay grounded in where the real value is.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, what, uh, uh, yeah, that's interesting. Um, what goes into a great equity research report? Uh, can you share a little bit about differentiation? What, what I always find interesting personally is, uh, is the research reports that can sort of contextualize a company in its broader competitive set in the market. Uh, but, but what do you think, uh, makes for like a good flavor, like the qualitative elements that go into something that's readable, digestible, informational, effective, and ultimately satisfactory to the user?

• 59:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, the qualitative element is one of the most important things and it's one of my competitive advantages because I know exactly what the user wants. I'm one of my users and I talk to a lot of my users to see what they want. So the research report is, I take that into account. So, you know, as you said, you have to contextualize it in its broader industry and the goal of the research report is that after reading this 10-minute report, you'll be able to understand exactly where the company is, its competitive advantages, its moats, you know, like its trajectory, and you should be able to determine if it's something that you want to invest in or not.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  How do you think about the tells of LLM writing? You're absolutely right. It's not this, it's that. Those like stylistic flourishes, the contrastive parallelism that annoys tech insiders because it reads as LLM-generated and that reads as maybe subpar. But what are you actually seeing from users? Do they like that quality of writing? Are they looking for a different stylistic tone in these research reports?

• 1:00:15Speaker 08

  So I personally am quite annoyed by that. And so I use, I have a method of making things sound very human. So, you know, from talking to some of my users, one of their first questions is, how do you have so many research reports? And, you know, they don't even realize that it's LLMs or AI. So, yeah, it's, the language in our research reports is much more human than some of the other AI stuff you see out there.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. I won't ask you to divulge the secret, but good luck. It seems like it's going very well and congratulations on the Teal Fellows. Yeah, it's great to meet you. Great to meet you and excited to follow the journey. Come back on whenever there's a milestone. We'd love to talk to you again.

• 1:00:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Great to hang with you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Here's a, here's a micro-cap stock that might be making a breakout move. Spirit Airlines. They potentially are getting a bailout from the US government to the tune of $500 million in rescue funding. The money would come with equity warrants that could make government majority owner of struggling discount carrier. I know you're not a fan of Spirit Airlines, Jordy, but the administration is.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  You've never got it?

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  I've never flown Spirit.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Oh, it's it's bad. It's real bad. It's real, real bad. You have to pay for everything. You have to pay for where you board and if you get a water bottle, if you can go to the bathroom, they charge you for everything. But it allows them-

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  They charge for the bathroom?

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Maybe I'm exaggerating.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you get charged for water, too.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  You get charged for water?

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Unless you tell them that you you need it for an emergency, then they'll give it to you for free.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it allows them to advertise very, very low headline prices. So if you're looking for LA to Las Vegas, you'll see something like $50. And you're like, that's impossible. And it's because like, you actually cannot just get through the plane. Because even for a carry-on, sometimes they'll charge, I believe. I don't know. A lot of this is just my, my, you know, memory from a decade ago. But the Trump administration is looking to invest as much as $500 million in Spirit Airlines to fund the discount carrier's exit from bankruptcy. The government money would take form of a senior loan with equity warrants that would come with it, eventually owning a majority stake in Spirit, which has struggled with high operating costs, stiff competition, and surging jet fuel costs amid the Iran

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  War. Well, we will follow that story more in the future. But we have our next guest returning to the show, Ishaan Gupta from Juicebox. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:02:41Speaker 09

  Hello. I'm doing awesome. Nice to be here.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:02:49Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I'm Ishaan. I'm one of the co-founders of Juicebox. We are an AI recruiting platform, and we help companies find and engage talent using LLMs. We build agents that'll go out there, find the right people for every role you're trying to fill, and get them into your process.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay. We have a friend who's an executive at a big tech company. He's been getting absolutely spammed with new outreach from what appears to be a new Gmail account that has been created. And what's so remarkable about this cold outreach is that it even nails the sort of like cringe footer that says like, you know, "Do not print this for the environment's sake." And like, you know, a little quote. And like, it doesn't feel just like a prompt box shot in there. There's a huge variety, but it's not, it hasn't been successful. He's annoyed by it. So how do you think about actually targeting the outreach so that you're not annoying potential new hires?

• 1:03:50Speaker 09

  Of course, yeah. I think the main problem is the exec side is almost like the extreme side of it. Because they're getting so much outreach, anytime an exec is available, everyone's kind of spamming them.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 09

  The thing is that for the average role, the best way to guarantee that you're reaching out to the right people is to spend more time on the search. What ends up happening in organizations today is that there's a hiring manager who really understands what they're looking for.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 09

  And then there's sort of this pattern matching that happens afterwards where talent teams are basically relying on these really hard filters like, "Oh, I'm gonna reach out to every software engineer at Google." That's not a smart strategy, right?

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 09

  What L L Ms are able to do is they can truly understand. Jeff, are you interested?

• 1:04:28Speaker 09

  It's like, L L Ms are able to truly understand what makes someone successful in a role and try to actually find people who are good at that. And instead of just pattern matching based on what company you're at, or what job title you're at, we'll actually go in there, we'll analyze your real work product, we'll see what you're doing on GitHub, what are you doing on different platforms, what companies you've been at, and develop a more deeper understanding of who's going to be affected, and then reach out to the right person.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:51Speaker 09

  So that, in fact, like reduces spam.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's flip it around to the person that's looking for a job. They want to get spammed with great offers. Uh, what should they be doing? Because there's a lot of software engineers where they can't contribute publicly because they work for an important company. Uh, there's a lot of folks who, their work happens behind the scenes. And maybe they are sharing it on LinkedIn, but can your scrapers reach into LinkedIn? Should they have a, a personal website and then, uh, you know, put that in some sort of robots.txt and web crawler filter so that they get indexed properly? Like, how can job seekers show up in results more aggressively at a time when more people are looking for jobs more aggressively than ever?

• 1:05:36Speaker 09

  Essentially, put your work product out there. Talk about what you're working on, putting out blogs, putting out open source contributions, putting out any projects that you've worked on.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 09

  Those things help because then that. Would three hours of live daily content help?

• 1:05:50Speaker 09

  I'm sure, I'm sure. I mean, it heads with an acquisition. Yeah.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Just talk about AI comms for for three hours a day and yeah, you turn some turns raise some eyebrows. Anyway, uh, what we yeah, what about I so are you purely focused on technical roles because you keep coming back to like GitHub contributions, breaking down, uh, breaking down example work products. And I'm just wondering for someone who's in more of a knowledge role, or they work in PR or marketing or biz dev or finance, like what should they be educating people? Should they be explaining their strategies? Like if they're not a natural writer, or they don't just have a piece of like a side, an obvious side project that they can open source, how can they show up to the AI researchers or the AI recruiters of the future, your company included?

• 1:06:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course. So we, we, we started out more tech focused because that's the industry we understood the most. And we started out working with tech startups and we started working with companies like, like Damp, Scale, all of these kinds of companies. And then eventually what has happened in the last year is we've grown way, way past that. So like now tech does not represent the majority of our customer base. We have more than 5,000 customers and a lot of them are larger enterprises and they're looking for all sorts of people. So what, what we are able to do is we're able to join profile data and your experiences on all the company data that we have. So essentially, if you put a little bit of information about yourself on different platforms, we're able to take that information, enrich that and do a deeper research on every single company we're in at,

• 1:07:21Speaker 09

  every single skill you've had, everything you've worked on and build a better understanding of exactly what your area of expertise is, and then make better matches using that. And it applies across industries. So for example, we have people looking for traveling nurses in the Midwest, very different type of role. But what we can do is we can look up profiles, there are registries available for nurses on, on the internet as well. We'll look up those profiles, we'll understand the different places you've worked at. We'll try to build a good understanding of what these different environments are, what kind of people do these other companies hire, where you've been at in the past, and then make a good inference on whether or not they are fit for the role you're looking for.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Why do you, why do you think there hasn't been a like a big? Like a like a deck of corn scale outcome in in recruiting tech today.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  What is indeed?

• 1:08:07Speaker 09

  I would actually argue, yes, that like LinkedIn's a pretty.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  LinkedIn, oh, got it.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Mog.

• 1:08:12Speaker 09

  Indeed is a pretty massive outcome.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, recruiting holdings, seventy billion enterprise value, bro. Come on.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  But that so that's but but that's but that's like kind of where kind of where I'm going. Isn't that like a a holding company of like staffing and recruiting firms?

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  So more more like labor intensive, but I can imagine.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  It's not the database market. Let's just be.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  It's not like, oh, there's a snowflake and.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  It feels like you could have, you could have, like, if you execute properly, there could be an outcome closer to that holding company that you just mentioned than some of these other kind of just like recruiting tech platform.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess like where is the source of like economic power and lock in and scale that would allow for a really, really broad outcome here as opposed to, okay, there's a whole bunch of AI recruiting firms and companies sort of bid them all down and there's not insanely high margins, good businesses, but not the hundred billion dollar outcome. Like, have you been thinking through that? I know it's early, but have you been thinking through like, what does this look like at mega scale?

• 1:09:15Speaker 09

  Of course, yeah, we've thought a lot about that. The the thing is that the main value in the recruiting industry always accrues in the services layer. So far, it has never accrued as much in the software layer.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Speaker 09

  Because it's really actually the work that goes into finding people. It's the ability to search for the right person and get them into any role. That is what people pay for, right? And so far, there has been no way of actually automating that because you cannot do that. It requires judgment. It requires actually understanding what someone's working on or what their capabilities are. That is exactly what agents are able to do. So this is really the first time when you have a massive opportunity in a market that's incredibly important and you're able to build that with LMS because it's just not been possible until now. And most companies have traditionally in recruiting tried to target this like software layer, which is like, hey, we'll build another CRM, we'll build another ATS and all of these different platforms. But the main value always accrues in being able to find the right person.

• 1:10:08Speaker 09

  That is what someone wants to pay for, and that is exactly what we're able to do with LLMs.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I remember first discovering that just everyday recruiting services companies could be big because hey, there's a, there's a public company called Hays, Hays.com.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  No way. Really?

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  It's just a public recruiting, like staffing firm.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, that's a very, very big opportunity for you.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the Teal Fellowship. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us and hope to see you soon. I'm sure there's a lot of milestones in the near future.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great stuff.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  Great rest of your day. We'll talk.

• 1:10:42Speaker 09

  Thank you so much for having me. It was awesome.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  Up next, we are running one minute behind, but we're going to catch up because we have, we have Derpetual next. Building infrastructure to enable derivatives trading on any asset. Interesting. Okay, Derpetual, Anthony Kizuk.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Before we go there, let's pull up this post.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  From none other.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Than who?

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Than Ben Horowitz, not Ben Horowitz.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Ben Horowitz.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  With the launch of the day.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Anti-grammarly.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  The anti-.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Mess up your emails with AI.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  I love this.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  If you're worried about people accusing you of, of using AI to write your emails, use sincerely.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yes, misspelled.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  To use more AI to add misspelling.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Yes, it, it, it condenses down that long, boring email that you were about to send that says, "To whom it may concern, I wanted to reach out to express my interest in connecting regarding potential synergies between organizations." And it just dumbs it down to, "Wanted to reach out. Let's talk." And this is newsflash, this is how people actually email and communicate when it's person to person. And I think everyone would be better off with a little bit tighter communication methods, especially in the age of AI. So I don't, this, this seems like a joke or a drop, but I would imagine this being a good product. And I think people might actually pay for this.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  I like, there are so many times.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  I think it's actually a real product.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  I hope so.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna charge five bucks a month?

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Alex Lieberman said such a good viral drop idea, but I, I think it's not a, I don't, I would not expect this to go away. I think this is a business and I think this will be successful and I think this is a valuable tool. And it's something that, that probably it would be hard for Google to justify baking into Gmail. It's like, it is a little bit counter positioned against.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a tough pitch.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  It's a tough pitch to be.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  We want to help our users get more type.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  It might be a good April Fool's Day joke that they could bring in and then leave it around.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  More, because Ben did it first.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Ben did it first now, so good luck to Ben and sincerely, we'll check in with him later. But we have our next guest from Derpatual in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TDP and I'll show him, how are you? Welcome to the show.

• 1:13:01Speaker 10

  Hey guys, it's great to be here.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:13:06Speaker 10

  I'm Anthony and I'm building a company called Derpatual and we want to create the derivatives exchange for everything.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:14Speaker 10

  So basically we created a new kind of derivative and we want to use this type of derivative to bring derivatives to, you know, assets beyond the top 1,000 that, that exist now.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Is there any crypto involved?

• 1:13:29Speaker 10

  Uh, currently, yes. Uh, our, um, our protocol is working on, uh, on meme coins. So you can trade meme coins with longs and shorts. But it's honestly a great way for us to test everything, right? We have the craziest markets in the world and the craziest people in the world doing, uh, doing stuff on, on our tech. So, so we get to improve and, uh, and check if everything is fine.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Yes, problem meme coins weren't crazy enough, we made them crazier. You're welcome.

• 1:13:59Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  What? Is there a plan to bring this to real world assets, prediction markets? You know, we've seen the different financial approaches to so many different categories. How do you think this actually crosses the chasm? Because we went through the meme coin boom and they did sort of go mainstream. But I think a lot of people just didn't really find lasting value there necessarily. And they sort of moved on and it's become sort of a bifurcated market. And I'm wondering if you have, is there a business to be built just in like the meme coin community? Or do you want this to go broader and wind up on Wall Street or wind up with retail investors? How do you think about the long-term plan?

• 1:14:44Speaker 10

  We definitely want to want to go to traditional finance and end up on Wall Street. In the end, the problem with meme coins and with most things in crypto is that they are not useful. So of course, there is a market for them, but that market is going to be 1,000, 10,000 times smaller than something that actually that actually creates value instead of just being a casino.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, how do you think about the current strategy that we've seen Kalshi roll through around CFTC and futures contracts? It feels like there's been a major acceleration in at least the, I don't even know. It's like, it's like the approval process for these new futures contracts. I know that for, for every new game, if there's a, if the Super Bowl is happening, they have to get that contract approved. And it feels like with their technology.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  It's like a 24-hour cycle.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like a 24-hour cycle. And so that restricts some of the things they're doing, but it still feels like the fastest that the financial sector has ever moved. Is that an interesting pathway for you? Or do you think that there's an entirely different way to attack the, like the problem?

• 1:16:01Speaker 10

  Definitely. I think Kalshi has been doing it right. And in the end, their strategy was pretty unique. As you probably know, they started their company and for a couple of years, they didn't do anything and just wrote letters to the CFTC about how they please want to be regulated. And in the end, that worked out and no one else is even close. So they are definitely something that we want to be learning from.

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  Is there a North Star asset that needs a derivative? That would resonate with a broader everyday audience? Because the derivatives on meme coins, that seems like there's a community for that, but that's probably not something that's super aspirational for the everyday American. How are you thinking about the actual application? The one that I always go to with derivatives is like weather futures for farmers. That's a very practical or hedging the price of fertilizer. These things are financialization, but they're clearly beneficial if you're running a farm.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  And so that's somewhat relatable to people. Do you have other derivatives that you think need to be unlocked in the near future in the real world?

• 1:17:26Speaker 10

  Definitely. And I think the inspiration is something that we probably want to have as one of our first assets in traditional finance is hydrogen. Because there is no hydrogen derivatives anywhere whatsoever. And it's a very popular asset for the industry, for energy, for things like that. But it's just to spread out. The production is decentralized, so you can't just create one hydrogen index and have it be traded. So I think this decentralization makes it impossible for traditional markets to bring liquidity to that.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 1:18:09Speaker 10

  A lot of things. I was doing um trading terminal for crypto. I was doing uh uh software house and that was my first company and I was also uh making um making money selling Minecraft items.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there you go. A lot of in-game item sellers so far in this fellowship.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Any chance that uh we will see onion futures traded in the future?

• 1:18:38Speaker 10

  Uh.

• 1:18:41Speaker 10

  My fellowship money uh might be deployed to lobbying for finally getting onion futures.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Onion futures. This is uh, this is a, there's many single-issue voters out there for bringing back onion futures. They were banned famously, very obscure piece of financial regulation.

• 1:18:59Speaker 10

  Yeah, and I think in general, farmers in the US have a lot of political power and especially onion farmers, you know, they really, they really want their futures.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  They do, they do. Well, hopefully it happens. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:19:14Speaker 10

  Cheers.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Uh, while we bring in our next guest, we were in Cultured Magazine, culturedmag.com. Uh, what happens when OpenAI buys your tech podcast? Ask the boys at TBN. We did an interview with them and

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had Sarah on the show.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have. Uh, so the first question they asked us was, what's one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life? I said Godfrey Regio's 1982 masterpiece, Coianus Kotsi. Jordy, what'd you say?

• 1:19:45Jordi Hays?

  Borat.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Borat. I think that's good. I think that's good. Um, they asked us, what keeps us up at night? We said data centers being even slightly delayed. That would be terrible. Like, I lose sleep thinking about it. A single supercomputer delayed by even minutes.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  We missed opportunity to say supercomputer.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  They did ask us, we, we, we had some fun with some questions. We told some serious answers. You know, we, we mixed it up. Uh, they asked us, what do you think your biggest contribution to culture has been? This is the question of Cultured. What do we say?

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Making tech people put on a suit.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  We've seen a few suits on this Thiel Fellowship GigaStream. We've seen some suits creep into the tech podcasting world. Job's not finished, but we're making progress. We'll go back to our Thiel Fellowship GigaStream with Milan from Opt32, developing compute infrastructure from compilers to chips for physical autonomy and local intelligence. Welcome to the show. How are you?

• 1:20:46Speaker 11

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:20:52Speaker 11

  Yeah, totally. So I'm Milan. I'm one of the co-founders of Opt32. And at Opt32, what we're trying to do is essentially build modern, full-stack compute infrastructure for physical autonomy. So more concretely, like you said, that's everything from software, so compilers, down to chips, right, custom accelerators, to run on-device machine learning and things like robots, drones, cars, autonomous defense systems, other autonomous vehicles.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  That seems extremely, extremely, extremely broad. Are you going to narrow it down? Is there a beachhead that will happen where you will find a particular niche? Or is going broad?

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  He's like, you know, the idea to pick a small niche market and dominate. I think it's wrong.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Everything all at once.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  I'm super curious.

• 1:21:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I guess a couple of things to touch on there. So the first is that, you know, the nice thing about building infrastructure and compute infrastructure in particular is that it does generalize fairly well to many different applications. So you can use the same chip and the same software to run ML in a robot as you could in an autonomous vehicle.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Speaker 11

  I do think we are, you know, taking a sort of an entry approach into the market, particularly from the robotics side.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:03Speaker 11

  And from, you know, our side, we are starting at the software layer and then gradually working our way down the stack towards hardware.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Okay. And in terms of, so if you're starting with a software layer, walk me through the the infrastructure stack that you might be buying off the shelf. Are you buying like Nvidia GPUs? I know that like when I think of like a previous autonomy stacks, I think of like Tesla being very vertically integrated and then Nvidia and a few other partners sort of being like Mobileye, sort of going around to the rest of the automakers and the OEMs and sort of plugging in with a little bit more flexibility. But those companies that provide that stack aren't fully integrated. So I see the opportunity, but I'm curious about how you're solving the short term where even if you wanted to design custom silicon today, it's probably not going to ship to you in a year, right?

• 1:22:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, certainly. So what we do right now is we essentially build a fully automated model optimization platform, right? So say you're a robotics company, you're deploying some perception model on your robots. You very often need extremely low latency. You have compute constraints and they can't just toss a massive server scale GPU on a robot that runs off, say, a battery. So what we do is we work with these companies to get their models running faster or for them to be able to fit more intelligent models on cheaper hardware, stuff like that. And right now, our software layer is pretty much hardware agnostic. So it could in theory run an Nvidia GPU or even like a, I don't know, Qualcomm accelerator or something like that. But primarily, we do target Nvidia GPUs as our backend.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, where, what, are you excited about like robots that are too small to house an Nvidia GPU? I'm thinking of like the Matic robotic sweeper or the Roomba. And I've been super excited about the potential, like the Roomba had such wide deployment. It really did break through across the chasm in terms of like robotics in the home. And I'm wondering if you're excited about or optimistic about sort of a shorter timeline to those more incremental steps to robotics robotic deployment versus, you know, we've

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  heard a lot of pitches for like the straight shot to humanoid AGI. And I think that's coming, but are, is there a wall crawl run that, you know, technology sector will do here?

• 1:24:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. I think we're very excited about sort of the gradual deployment of robots and autonomy into our everyday lives over the next few years. I do very strongly agree that as, you know, we get maybe, you know, jumping three years into the future, we'll see a lot more autonomy in consumer life. So, you know, that could be something like a Roomba, could be something like a cooking robot, could be civic duties like street cleaning. As well as another area I'm particularly excited about is autonomy in manufacturing. I think it can do a great job at sort of augmenting human workers and helping to sort of bridge this gap we're seeing where there's not necessarily enough skilled, say like welders or something to fulfill all the manufacturing wants.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Is there enough data in manufacturing to do anything at scale with machine learning? Or is there enough, you know, transfer learning from the big models?

• 1:25:29Speaker 11

  Today, maybe not. Over the next few years, I would hope so. We don't concern ourselves with the model layer. We try to be everything after that. So we don't build our own models. We don't train models. We work on running models essentially.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Jordy?

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What were you doing before this?

• 1:25:45Speaker 11

  I was a freshman at Harvard studying CS and philosophy.

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Why do you, why do you, why did you get into Harvard other than you seem like a, a smart guy?

• 1:25:57Speaker 11

  I have no idea. I don't know. I spent most of high school doing CS research. I started writing compilers back when I was a freshman. Worked in a bunch of different university research labs, all on, you know, compilers, computer architecture, programming languages.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  While you were in high school?

• 1:26:12Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  What do you make of the decline in computer science as a major across universities? It feels like there's a, I've seen some stats that show like a pretty, pretty steep drop off and yet-

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  He's contributing to it, John.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Ah, no, no, no. You did, I mean, you're still, you're still CS like major effectively. But, but it feels like the route that, like, the fear around don't major in CS is very much like, don't major in CS and then try and go get like a front-end engineering job that's just writing code. But if you're majoring in CS, that still might be the best path into working in robotics, working on infrastructure, doing a lot of different things. So how have you processed the value? Like, do you feel like the CS that you've learned is less relevant today?

• 1:27:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. I think there's sort of gonna need to be a reallocation, so to speak, of talent and focus within the field of CS, where as we see, you know, artificial intelligence capabilities advance, we see a move up layers of abstraction to where skills like system architecting, sort of higher level theory, are gonna become more and more important. And kind of these, you know, very low level implementation details, like you said, being like a front-end developer, doesn't provide as much value. So I don't necessarily think CS as a whole is dropping off so much as it's reallocating towards those higher levels of abstraction.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. How big is the team? How are you thinking about the capital intensivity of this business? When I hear custom silicon, I'm hearing like hundreds of millions of dollars to do really anything interesting. We've had some previous Thiel fellows from ATCH on the show, or I've talked to them and done podcasts with them. And it feels like this can be extremely capital intensive, or you can find partnerships and do something that's much more on the actual, you know, software and infrastructure side that might be less capital intensive. But how are you thinking about it?

• 1:28:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, so right now, the team is just the three of us co-founders, me and my two high school best friends, all technical. We are hiring and hoping to grow pretty quickly. In terms of capital intensivity, the really great thing about, you know, building full stack compute infrastructure is that we can actually sell our software in isolation of the hardware, and we're already doing that and working with some early design partners. So we can get revenue, we can do that quickly. Software development costs are relatively cheap. Sort of the, you know, cost of operating our software is essentially zero. So any revenue from that is pretty much pure profit. And in terms of hardware development, I think there's a great path towards gradually moving towards a full production run of a custom ASIC. You know, in particular, what we're gonna do is build single board computers, so PCBs,

• 1:28:55Speaker 11

  around some existing accelerator chips, and build the entire software layer there. Then we'll move on to maybe implementing some chip architectures and FPGAs. And then from there, you could do a, you know, smaller, not super advanced process node. Kind of prototype tape out run and then say one, two years down the line. Once we've raised a lot more capital, that's when you go for the, the big advanced process node, a full production take out.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Are you working with Victor and Kavala yet? The chat.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Or are you competing and bitter rivals?

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. They'd be, they'd be natural partners to some degree.

• 1:29:29Speaker 11

  Yes, yes, I think we'll be definitely working with Kavala at some point in the future. Um, right now we're mostly focused on sort of internal technical work, but shortly.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Uh, why, uh, what is the, uh, the, the, especially in the manufacturing sector? Is there not a lot of energy being devoted to, uh, not tell operation, but just putting compute, like, like, I guess like a thin client for robotics would be the term. Like you have a server room with a N V L 72 rack on site. And then you're doing inference in the I T cabinet or closet or the local data center effectively. Uh, and then your robot can just be much lighter and has like barely, it just has a camera on. That's just feeding up and like, yes, there's maybe a little bit of latency, but you're talking

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  about, you know, the speed of light across a high bandwidth wifi. It seems like that might be an interesting solution. Like, is that happening? Is that one of many strategies or is that a dead end?

• 1:30:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think it's a split, right? I think there are definitely use cases where you can do that. And there's also other use cases where you might have some sort of network constraint or some sort of extreme latency constraint where you can't. And, you know, some things that we work on are actually like splitting the workload across both a cloud server call and maybe something that's more latency sensitive can run on device.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Have you guys raised money already outside of obviously, you know, fellowship is, uh, fellowship is for you, but, um.

• 1:31:02Speaker 11

  Yeah, we raised our our seed round about two months ago. We raised a five million co-led by Box Group and by Venture.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Box. The Ticianator. The Ticianator would get into this one.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Tish is in.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love him. Uh, great, great pickup. Uh, man, great to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 1:31:22Speaker 11

  You guys as well.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 1:31:25Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Galen Mead from Standard Intelligence, focused on

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Not to be confused with non-standard superintelligence.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Non-standard unintelligence. You don't want to be unintelligent. Uh, building aligned general learners. Galen Mead joins us on the show, and I believe Galen is in the waiting room, so we will bring him in to the TVP and Ultra Dome as soon as he's ready. Galen, how are you doing?

• 1:31:58Speaker 12

  Hey, doing well.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Reintroduce yourself and the company.

• 1:32:04Speaker 12

  Uh, yeah, we build computer use models. We're a general research company towards a land AGI.

• 1:32:12Speaker 12

  I dropped out, uh, I think around three years ago. Didn't spend much time in university, and I just wanted to do a research full-time.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Did you jump straight to computer use, or was there something in the intervening years?

• 1:32:27Speaker 12

  We, at the time that we were started, there wasn't really this notion of a Neolab. So we, from the start, wanted to be a general research company.

• 1:32:40Speaker 12

  But initially, we started with some work on audio models that I had continued from asset compute.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:47Speaker 12

  Just because, you know, you train some state-of-the-art model, and people see that you can train models, and you can go from there. Uh, I think this is maybe one of the worst decisions. Um, not worst, but worse.

• 1:33:01Speaker 12

  Strategically, but computer use models are nice because it's a play general form factor.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:33:07Speaker 12

  I always wanted to have a base for for taking actions.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, why is computer use important? I think there was maybe like a one week period where everyone was super, everything will be a CLI and there's maybe like a resurgence in computer use. But what uniquely captivates you about computer use as a as a goal here?

• 1:33:32Speaker 12

  So it's a training recipe that I had always wanted to do.

• 1:33:37Speaker 12

  You can see in some of the early work on games from DeepMind, there's this notion of training a policy on tons and tons of supervised data from diverse environments and getting something that is like a base model for actions. And it occurs to us that this exists for real world work in the form of like, screen recordings with a computer being the universal like actuator that humans use to interact in very diverse environments. So this is this real opportunity to pretrain base models for being agents. And this is a very appealing

• 1:34:21Speaker 12

  concept from a research perspective, if you want to make very competent agents.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  Do you think, how far out do you think we are from using like a truly complex piece of software like Premiere Pro or Cinema 4D or AutoCAD, any of these tools? It feels like we're on the cusp. Is that this year? Are you seeing glimmers of, okay, the average Premiere Pro user will probably be interacting with it through a prompt pretty quickly in the same way that software engineers migrated from the from the, you know, IDE to the CLI and the text box pretty quickly?

• 1:35:04Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think it'll be this year. I Back in like middle school, did freelance like animation.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:13Speaker 12

  And I had to sort of bring that out recently for our model launch. It was a bit over a month ago to put together our Dharma videos. And it honestly felt like Stone Ages compared to working with like the AI assisted code editors for my day to day job.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:32Speaker 12

  So I think we'll get there by the end of this year. And I think that will be a pretty big step change for all of these industries that aren't used to working with a copilot.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Is there any, is there any difficulty with the lack of open source tools in other computer use like areas? Because it feels like part of the reason potentially for the acceleration in coding is that the, the IDEs were open source and also the programming language is open source. And like GitHub is this rich repository. But if you're, if you are, will there be like this battle fighting between, you know, some proprietary piece of software that doesn't want to be used by an agent? And then you're trying to figure out how you can do it. Have you, have you grappled with any of that?

• 1:36:23Speaker 12

  So I, I think we're somewhat unique in that we are rather obstinate about hitting the input and output of a human exactly.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:33Speaker 12

  So we take video inputs, we output mass state deltas and like character level keystrokes. And yeah, nobody's copyrighted the form factor of a screen and a keyboard.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 12

  So if we interact on that level, it's fully general.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you want to instantiate this with a customer?

• 1:36:56Speaker 12

  We're pretty agnostic on that right now. There's a lot of ways to go on the model capabilities. We can get pretty crisp signal on like, there's a lot of things where we should be able to tell the model to do something and it should do it.

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 12

  And once we're at that point, we'll.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  It's just download the app and start paying probably.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Little bit of a, little bit of a tangent, but how have you processed the SaaS apocalypse? There are some, there are still some SaaS bowls and they'll tell you, we're going to have, we might even have more seats because we're going to have agents that are using computers and using existing software, just like a human would.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  But, but how have you processed it overall?

• 1:37:33Speaker 12

  I mean, I have one friend's doing a search product to friend it nicely that there's an opportunity for a lot more usage if you have tons and tons more agents actively using these products. I haven't been following this sort of stuff very closely. I'm pretty off the internet.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Locked in.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did we get how you made your first dollar?

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, was that was that during?

• 1:37:58Speaker 12

  Freelance animation.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Freelance animation.

• 1:38:00Speaker 12

  It's great. Artist.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  What was the actual project? Is it like marketing videos or?

• 1:38:07Speaker 12

  It was a bunch of like forum graphics stuff. It's a very niche space. Yeah.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  That's cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come share with us.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update. Come back on for your next big launch.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Congrats on the progress. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Back to the culture magazine article. They asked us what grounds you and what invigorates you? We said the daily schedule grounds us. The show goes live every day, every weekday at 11. So there's no room for projects to drift or spiral. Booking a fascinating guest on the same day. Everyone is discovering them is incredibly energizing. That's the Soham Pareek moment in a nutshell.

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  They asked, what would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  What'd we say?

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  A TBPN racing jacket covered in logos. So at least we're getting ad impressions for our sponsors.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah, we had a lot of fun. What are we looking forward to this year? Self-improving AI systems. That's on brand. Anyway, we have our next guest from Swoop, building a super app for Africa, starting with food delivery in the waiting room. Let's bring in Aubrey from Swoop. Aubrey, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:39:16Speaker 13

  Hey, I'm doing well. Yeah.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:39:22Speaker 13

  So yeah, we're building a super app for Africa. So I live in Nigeria now. I started my first company in Africa when I was 15. So I got like really into geography growing up. I had this first company. It was a recruitment company in Southern Africa. And I was spending all my summer and winter breaks in high school with the Africa building this company. And I realized that all the biggest opportunities, basically you had to live in Africa. All these export industries were way more competitive, anything where.

• 1:39:52Speaker 13

  Yeah, you had to live in Africa was a lot bigger opportunity. So I was figuring out, you know, what is, what is the biggest opportunity in African tech? Because I knew I wanted to move to Africa, build a tech company, went, went on this idea of building a super app. Biggest opportunity has been tech, but I felt like, you know, doing a super app is going to be the way that you can get there, how you can build a, you know, multi-billion dollar consumer business in Africa.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Let's start with the state of food delivery in Africa. Are the major players there in a minor capacity? Are they failing? Or is it sort of a wide open blue ocean market?

• 1:40:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, so it definitely depends on the country. So for instance, South Africa, Uber Eats is doing quite well. But Nigeria is our big market right now. So Nigeria, where we just launched, we have two major competitors. We have Glovo. It's an international, you know, competitor and you have Chowdeck, which is actually the market leader. It's a local company. But, you know, Nigeria is very early stage. If you look at, you know, the ratio of GDP to how much GMV food delivery is doing, Nigeria is, you know, five or seven times behind a lot of comparable countries and it's still growing, you know, more than 150% of a year. So it's still very early days. What you see is in food delivery in particular,

• 1:41:13Speaker 13

  once that kind of service becomes available, the culture adapts and it can continue to grow for a really long time.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think the other players are, are doing poorly? Like where is the opportunity to differentiate?

• 1:41:25Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is price. Prices are really expensive in the market. We're a lot cheaper. And then I think you, obviously to have a lower price, you have to have a vision for, you know, how, how you can keep those prices low. So that's when we get to this, you know, super app idea. If we can convert a significant percentage of our food delivery customers over to being payments customers for us, that's, you know, something that's really exciting because, you know, payments are extremely large. There's 18 trillion in digital payments being sent in Africa every year, 2.6 trillion in just Nigeria. If you can capture a significant, you know, percentage of that and you can be converting each food delivery customer, maybe one in five of them,

• 1:42:09Speaker 13

  you know, starts using your peer-to-peer payments product, sending money to other users. That becomes not only, you know, a really effective way to acquire customers for something that's very high margin, but also It allows you to keep the food delivery service cheaper because you don't necessarily need to make your revenue from it, whereas a company like Guovo, they're international, they only run a food delivery service in Europe. It's too late to build a super app in Europe, so they're not set up to build a super app. They'll never launch a payment service in Nigeria because that's not their business, but it is ours, so we do have an advantage there.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  What's the, what does the North Star super app look like these days? What is the canonical example of success?

• 1:42:52Speaker 13

  Is it still WeChat? I'd say WeChat is definitely big. I think one company that I get really excited about in terms of comparison is Caspi. So they're not only like the biggest e-commerce company in Kazakhstan, but they're also one of the biggest payments companies, one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan. They do e-commerce, they do a bunch of verticals. I think it's a really exciting business and Kazakhstan's not that much of a bigger economy than Nigeria. It's about the same size, but Caspi's doing 2.4 billion in profit every year in just Kazakhstan. And I think that you could do that in a number of African countries with the state of what the competition is. I think it really is early days. These

• 1:43:34Speaker 13

  verticals are growing very fast. The competition is not established to the point that it's impossible to win in a lot of these verticals. And in a smaller market, you have this where the gains to scaling become greater than the gains to specialization, whereas in a bigger market, you might need to specialize because the fixed costs are relevant relative to the potential size of the business.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  How big of a deal is the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa these days? We were reading about some potential bailouts for some loans from the IMF being discussed at a very high level, but is the Belt and Road Initiative a big deal from being actually there? What's your perception of it?

• 1:44:20Speaker 13

  I wouldn't say it's maybe like, you know, top, top two or three things that, you know, we're thinking about in terms of what's gonna shape a country. Obviously, it's very real. There's a lot of infrastructure that's going on that's being built. Actually, the, one of the countries that we work in, our first country, actually, Eswe Tini, you might know it as Swaziland, that was the old name. In Swaziland, that's the only country that hasn't taken Belt and Road money. It's interesting to see because they actually recognize Taiwan, so China will not, you know, do Belt and Road. There's 53 African countries that do get Belt and Road funding, Swaziland is the one that doesn't. But there is like a difference there in like, you know, who's really roads, who's building, you know, different infrastructure.

• 1:45:04Speaker 13

  But I don't think it's like, you know, one of the top three things that I'm looking at as something that's gonna, you know, change development in Africa.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about geographical expansion? How local do you want to be focused from a staffing perspective? Do you imagine having satellite offices internationally? Or you want to centralize everything? What are the trade-offs there?

• 1:45:25Speaker 13

  In terms of recruitment, first of all, like, our team is primarily across Nigeria and India, so I decided that we would go, you know, international with the software development function in particular, to be able to, be able to capitalize on just all the markets. That's, you know, my first was a recruiting company, that's what I felt was the right thing to do, and I think we have been able to bring out a great team that way. That being said, the majority of our team is in Nigeria, and going forward, I expect to, you know, expand primarily in Nigeria for, let's say, the next year. And then from there, we'll be looking at primarily launching other African countries and hiring there. So the vast majority of staff is in Africa.

• 1:46:09Speaker 13

  There's amazing talent in African countries, particularly in Nigeria, and if you are able to identify that, if you have a good process, I think there's amazing talent there. In terms of geographical expansion for the business itself, I'm definitely excited about a couple of other African. Markets and we just need to be able to get to a point where launching another country would not hinder our business in Nigeria, which that's not where we are today. Obviously, we just started in Nigeria, started marketing actually last week. So we're not at that stage yet, but I would love to be at that stage where we could start launching other African countries.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  What did you learn from the recruiting company? What was the story of that business?

• 1:46:55Speaker 13

  Yeah, I think I had the most important thing I learned is how to recruit.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:59Speaker 13

  Uh, second most important thing I learned is how to sort of operate a business in Africa, what it's like to to live in Africa, what what are the challenges, what are the biggest opportunities? I learned a lot about what the opportunities were. Uh, but I think number one most important thing is how to recruit. I I feel that most companies in the world, uh, but maybe particularly in Africa are not meritocratic with hiring. If you are, if you, you know, could go out into a new market, if you can figure out how to, you know, source thousands of candidates. Uh, if you could reach out proactively to people that you know are good, if you could do more than reliable referrals, if you could build an effective way to actually assess people that, you know, you don't know before, right?

• 1:47:43Speaker 13

  If you can actually build that, there's incredible talent on the continent. We've been able to, uh, you know, bring some amazing people onto our team. I think that's the biggest thing I learned. Uh, basically, how how can you get an advantage in recruiting?

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, congratulations. Thank you so much, Jordi. You have anything else?

• 1:48:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 1:48:02John Coogan?

  Uh, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:48:04Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the lunch.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Congrats on the fellowship.

• 1:48:06Speaker 13

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Uh, people having more fun with the OpenAI image model, a hydrologically accurate cutaway of the Strait of Hormuz drawn by Richard Scarry. Are you a Richard Scarry guy? I'm a huge fan of Richard Scary with the cats. This is a good way to learn. It's a good way to learn. Riley Walls was doing some crazy stuff where, or actually it's Riley Goodside, the prompt engineer. I got them mixed up. So Riley Goodside worked at DeepMind and Scale AI and he asked ChatGPT Images 2.0 Pro, generate a photo of a cake decorated with an SVG that when transcribed to a file renders the cake, another cake. And so it is absolutely wild.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  People have been putting, putting the model through its paces.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  I like this other one from Tinder.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  That gotta say GPT Images 2 is pretty clutch for interior decorating ideas.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. If you, if you have an empty wall, put a fridge of

• 1:49:11Jordi Hays?

  What happened?

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Monster and Red Bull in your blank wall.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Sobi's been discontinued, John.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Insane opportunity for certain people to remember who they are and bring this back.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I was never, I was never a Sobi drinker, but I always respected the brand and what it stood for, the funny ads. And what a, what a wild time. Was it highly caffeinated or was it not caffeinated enough? It seemed like it just got steamrolled by Red Bull and Monster eventually. It'd be interesting to dig into the story of Sobi and what happened there, but we will have to do that another day because we have Samuel from Prozo, creating an AI-powered infrastructure for wholesale commerce, covering procurement, credit and workflows for SMBs. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:50:00Speaker 14

  Good. How are you?

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 1:50:02Speaker 14

  Good to meet you.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:50:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, of course. Well, I'm originally from Northeastern Brazil, a city called Recife. I ended up going to Stanford for undergrad, but dropped out and came back to Brazil and started Prozo.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:16Speaker 14

  And we're tackling a major problem in Brazil and trying to build the new infrastructure for wholesale.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  And when you say infrastructure, that could mean everything from warehouses to warehouse management system to e-commerce software. Help me understand what infrastructure means in this context.

• 1:50:33Speaker 14

  Yeah, for sure. We're trying to build it end to end. So the idea here behind the business is that while retail has seen a lot of digitization in the last 10, 20 years in Brazil or in other countries across the world, wholesale, in our view, has been left behind. And these small and medium sized businesses are still procuring the same way that they were 20, 30 years ago. Distribution hasn't changed. We're basically building a tech-enabled wholesale commerce player where we deal end to end. So we deal with manufacturers and we help them reach small and medium sized businesses in a more efficient data-driven way.

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  Sure. So is Alibaba reasonable comp here? I feel like that's where a lot of people meet wholesalers and suppliers, if they're operating in China at least.

• 1:51:23Speaker 14

  Yeah, but we're only tackling Brazil. So we deal with Brazilian suppliers and Brazilian merchants. We started out with food and beverage, which is the highest frequency category with the most number of merchants. So today we serve a little bit over 10,000 restaurants in just the northeastern Brazil so far. But only restaurants, if you look at restaurant procurement, is an over $50 billion a year market. But if you go to other verticals-

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  In Brazil?

• 1:51:50Speaker 14

  Which, in Brazil, yeah. If you go to Latam, it's double the size, so about $100 billion a year. And if you go to other verticals than restaurants, the market just multiplies by five or six. So it's a massive market. We're starting out with restaurants.

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the secret to getting 10,000 restaurants on board? Is this cold email, phone calls, sales reps, advertisements? Like, what's the funnel look like to actually grow? Because you're operating this two-sided marketplace. I imagine that demand generation is top of mind at all times.

• 1:52:21Speaker 14

  Yeah, I think the trick with serving small and medium businesses is that they have high natural attrition. So the way to grow in an efficient way is having very low CAC. And the only way you can grow at a very low CAC is if merchants love your product, then they will refer you to other merchants. So basically today, about 40% of our customer acquisition is sales-led. So we have sales reps just reaching out to these merchants and onboarding them into Prazo. But 60% of our merchant acquisition comes through either organic or merchant referrals or channels which are more product-led.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  How do you, is disintermediation a problem for you? Like, how do you stay? I imagine that there's transaction fees for finding and working with a supplier if you're a company that's on the platform. Is there a fear of someone meets a great supplier for their food or beverage product and then they start dealing with them directly? Is that an issue?

• 1:53:24Speaker 14

  Really? And the reason for that is that we are serving these very small merchants. So the biggest challenge for a manufacturer to serve them is not, one of them might be reaching them, but they couldn't do the logistics by themselves, which is why we do the logistics as well, and we also do the credit. So oftentimes, a manufacturer, they don't want to get into these small merchants because the drop size for delivery is very low and they can't do it in an economically feasible way.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, I want 500 Coca-Colas. And it's like, and I want credit.

• 1:53:55Speaker 14

  Exactly, and they want credit as well. And manufacturers are, in general, one, they're not very good at assessing credit risk of a small merchant, but second, they're not senior in the merchant's payment stack, right? At Prazo, since we're serving them as a one-stop-shop and we are getting more and more share of their procurement, we are becoming more and more senior in their payment stack. So as we grow and we become more relevant to these merchants, our delinquency rates just go much lower.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Do you think you'll have to raise a lot of money to underwrite more credit products? Or is there a banking system that you can plug into and sort of use like another fintech, you know, ally to sort of service that?

• 1:54:39Speaker 14

  Yeah, today we already use a partner for financing. But I don't think we would have to raise a lot of money for that. And the good thing about our business is that we don't believe in offering very long credit to small merchants because they're very volatile, right? So we have to offer short-term loans. So our average loan is about 10 days. So we turn that three times a month. And that helps a lot in keeping a low outstanding balance but compounding at a very high rate. The company overall is already profitable. So we've raised funding to date, but we've become profitable. Thank you.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  How big is the team?

• 1:55:20Speaker 14

  About 100 people.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Whoa. When did you start this then?

• 1:55:25Speaker 14

  I started the company about four years ago and moved back to the northeast of Brazil. Today, we only operate in two cities in northeast of Brazil. So there's major opportunity for growth from there. These two cities combined are only 4% of Brazilian GDP. So we have an opportunity to tap like a 25x bigger market just in Brazil without even expanding to other countries in that time.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel a little bit like an unk being a part of this Thiel Fellowship class? We had the youngest ever Thiel fellow. You seem like maybe a 10-year age gap with him. Is that correct?

• 1:56:06Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah. Well, not that much because I got into Stanford a little bit earlier. So I had skipped grades in school. So I got into Stanford. I was a little bit younger. But I think I might be the oldest in this class.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna call you the elder, the wise elder.

• 1:56:24Speaker 14

  Usually the youngest wherever I go to somewhere. But in this group, I'm definitely the oldest.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Well, keep you aggressive. Can you zoom out for us? Oh, sorry.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I had one more question around what do you think the path for this business is? Is this eventually come and IPO in America? How deep are kind of Brazilian capital markets? How do you think about scaling?

• 1:56:52Speaker 14

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, most of our investors are US-based, so it definitely helps a lot to raise venture funding here. And I think ultimately, we would want to IPO in the US. But if you look at this, there's just a major opportunity. I think the market potential is even bigger than food delivery. So for example, Ifood, which is the largest food delivery player in Brazil, is controlled by Prozus. It's an over $10 billion market cap company. And we think there's an opportunity to build something even bigger. But while Ifood goes in the consumer space, we go B2B. And we think there's an opportunity to build

• 1:57:34Speaker 14

  a multi-billion dollar profit company. So it's such a massive market, and there's a long way to building it.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question for me was

• 1:57:42Speaker 14

  I believe.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Zooming out, can you get us up to speed on the Brazilian economy broadly? You know, China's been growing very quickly. America's at the risk of like some stagflation. You know, gas prices are high. There's some economic growth. It's heavy in data centers. And we've been tracking the American market. But how are things going in Brazil broadly? Like, what is the economic outlook?

• 1:58:06Speaker 14

  Yeah. I would say it's not great. However, the way we generally put this is that compared to the other emerging markets,

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:15Speaker 14

  we are better. So they're all, they're all in a very bad position. So relatively, we are better. So that's why, like, if you look at the Brazilian stock market, it's been going up.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:24Speaker 14

  But it's mostly because I think investors want to invest in emerging markets have relatively worse places to put their money.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 14

  But I think Brazil tends to grow a lot in the next maybe decades. And the reason for that is too, I think, especially energy. So like, demand for energy will probably like go up a lot in the next few years. And Brazil has sort of a very big renewable matrix. And we have a lot of opportunity for energy. So I think that helps a lot. Over 50% of our energy is hydro. I think over 70% is renewable.

• 1:59:04Speaker 14

  Yeah, and the second thing is, we have one of the largest reserves of rare earth metals in the world, which I think is very strategic as well. So I think Brazil is a very well-positioned country. It just needs great leadership to take it to the next phase.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Well, we're glad you're taking the helm and they're lucky to have you.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super impressive.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Come back on the show next time you guys have a big milestone.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a profitability milestone, like your first, you know, first eight-figure EBITDA quarter or something like that.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  I can see it in your future.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 1:59:40Speaker 14

  It's sooner than you think.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:59:41Speaker 14

  Okay, thank you very much.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to meet.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Someone went to the new ChatGPT Images 2.0 model and said, "Make me the most AI slop image that ever AI slopped, the pinnacle of slop, a seminal work on AI slop." And people are saying, "This is unironically a work of art. This is a crazy, crazy image that's all over the place. It's really just like every style, sort of. There's some Fortnite in there. There's a, there's a jazz cup, a car with an alien, and Clippy's in there somehow. I wonder if this is the real prompt. You never know when people post online, but certainly a..."

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Pretty rough to look at.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  It is very weird. It's, it's not, it didn't nail like the beauty of many of these things. Anyway, we have our last guest of the show, Claire Wang, building biologically accurate simulations of nervous systems.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  No company, pure research.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, Claire. How are you doing? Great to meet you.

• 2:00:45Speaker 15

  Hi, nice to meet you.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. Please introduce yourself.

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Age of research.

• 2:00:50John Coogan?

  Age of research. Yeah, tell us, tell us a little bit about what you're working on.

• 2:00:53Speaker 15

  Yeah, of course. So I'm Claire. I actually just dropped out, but I was a junior at MIT studying electrical engineering, computer science. A lot of my interests in the past bit has been in the field of neurotech, which includes a focus in... Whole brain emulation with the focus on doing this with worms first, but also like how useful this could be for brain computer interfaces and understanding consciousness maybe

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Speaker 15

  And that sort of direction.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  So, uh, I mean, we, we've talked to a number of, uh, of, of companies that are working on brain computer interfaces, bumping into this general, uh, scientific discipline. Uh, what was the, uh, take me through the decision to not join one of the existing efforts or stay in academia and actually go out on your own?

• 2:01:39Speaker 15

  Yeah, that's a good question. So I would say like, um, there's still a lot of current efforts that I think I really believe in.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:45Speaker 15

  Um, and that like I'm good friends with them, would help out with them. I think there's a lot of bets that people have to make.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:50Speaker 15

  And these bets are unfortunately kind of fundamental science bets of like, oh, is this physics gonna work? Is this like biological, like truth actually true?

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:59Speaker 15

  So I think like, while these people, I, I think all these bets are really interesting. There's no 100% and so I think it kind of makes sense to, um, instead make your own bet on what you think makes the most logical sense. That's, that's kind of my reasoning here.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you also think it's a better time than ever to be working more independently on biotech? Generally because of the advance of AI and we've talked to a couple of companies that are sort of working on, uh, you know, the AWS of, of lab equipment, more rentals projects so that maybe you don't need to raise, you know, a billion dollars out of the gate and build a bio safety level two lab on day one. Uh, do you feel like more empowered to do, uh, you know, to validate those hypotheses that you were articulating earlier?

• 2:02:47Speaker 15

  Yeah, no, I think that's a, this is like probably the right time. I think it's a mix, like definite AI, um, definitely a surgeon's, like insurgents of like alternate science funding,

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:57Speaker 15

  Um, a willingness for academics and for example, like people in startups to work together. Um, I also would think that people are just much more open. To, you know, new ideas and research risk at startups, which I think like, you know, 10 years ago, you'd be told like, never ever invest in research risk versus now, like, everything is a research risk.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:16Speaker 15

  I think, I think that's like a really good time.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a good point.

• 2:03:20Speaker 15

  For you to do it, like, right now, yeah.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jordi, you have a question?

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, my, my main question was like figuring out when, when that right moment is because there's, especially after the, you know, the announcement of the fellowship this week, I'm sure you've been offered, I'm sure people would offer you millions of dollars over email to just say like, it's fine if you want to just keep doing research, but, but I guess you'll know it.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Well, help me, help me bridge the gap between what we've seen in BCI with mostly reading from the brain, getting an X and Y output so you can control a mouse on a computer, incredibly impactful technology, and then simulating nervous systems. How are these two things related in your mind? Why are they important to overlap? Like, what is the overlap?

• 2:04:11Speaker 15

  Yeah, I am. So I think right now BCI technology is very powerful in the sense that it is on a great path for its clinical applications.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Speaker 15

  Soon, like, people who are paraplegics can maybe walk again, and people who are blind can see again. But a lot of this comes from almost like post hoc problem solving. You like throw enough data at a model of like someone's brain, and like maybe you can help them like move their arm in the X Y direction.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:35Speaker 15

  Or like move a mouse in a specific way.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Speaker 15

  But when you are able to like actually decode information from the brain and read and understand like, you know, exact signals coming from every region of the brain, being able to like truly like control the brain, for example, like if you know which regions to activate, then you have a more naturalistic control method. So like instead of like only being able to move my arm left or right, you can move your arm like very naturalistically in any like degree of freedom. And I think that's kind of the like power of being able to simulate the brain. You could do a lot of like research, understanding of like one of the most complex things in the universe. And I mean, obviously, like, we're not starting with the human brain, but any level tells you the sort of data that you need and tells you the sort of like imaging techniques that work.

• 2:05:20Speaker 15

  And I think through that, you get a lot more information and like progress in BCI.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  Why C. elegans and not mice or monkeys or something else? Is it cost? Or do you have a firm belief that if it works in C. elegans, it'll scale? Is there prior art? Like, what excites you about that particular target?

• 2:05:41Speaker 15

  Yeah. So, C. elegans is 300 neurons. It's really dumb. It's like, really just not... I mean, it's not close to humans at all. But I think the argument is like, we can't even submit to C. elegans. There's a lot of benefits C. elegans gives us. It is translucent. You do... It's much easier to do gene therapy. So like, fluorescence therapy. So easier to image as well. And also, they're just like, very simple. They have graded potentials instead of action potentials. So, I think the idea is, we can't even do C. elegans, so we have to start with that. And there's a lot of like, what is the sort of data that you need? Like, do I need voltage data? Or is calcium data enough? Is light sheet or electron microscopy enough? So like, there's all these questions that C. elegans can answer.

• 2:06:22Speaker 15

  And once we answer that question, obviously, the goal is to move on to like, zebrafish and mice and fly, and so on. But right now, like, we are not close. Or like, we're not close to mouse, for example. Because like, there's no way to image the mouse brain while the mouse is still alive.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:38Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  But you can't with C. elegans.

• 2:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  Are you thinking about... You'll... Do you think you'll wind up with co-founders? Like, how early are you in the process of like, turning something into a company? Do you want to just sort of like, be on your own? Or do you want to build a... Some sort of team, even if it's loose? How do you think about like, research collaboration?

• 2:06:58Speaker 15

  Yeah. So, I mean, I've been able... I've been lucky to work with some of the most amazing researchers. And I think these are people I want to continue to be around and learn from. But I think in terms of specifics, like finding co-founders, finding the right bet, for example, the scientific bet I want to make. That's still up in the air. I'm still like, learning. I'm still meeting a lot of people. And seeing like, what do I believe in? And what do I like, think makes the most sense? So, it's still quite early stage for me.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Are you gonna move to San Francisco?

• 2:07:22Speaker 15

  Yeah. Yeah, probably.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Reluctantly, maybe?

• 2:07:27Speaker 15

  I mean, I like SF. I lived in SF in the past, but like, I don't know. It's kind of a principles thing.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you always been pure researcher or do you have entrepreneurship background as well? What else have you done?

• 2:07:39Speaker 15

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I would say like almost most of my background is a very clean mix between like the startup space and research. Like I've done a lot of work in like, for example, working at various startups, helping out with startups, some like small scale like investing stuff. So I think like I have a good mix of both sides.

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  That's very fun. Well, good luck.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, come back on whenever you have news and congratulations.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to catch up soon.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Intel is up.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Intel's up.

• 2:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Massively.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  The market is broadly down today.

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Intel is up 15% after hours.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  15%.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  They reported earnings.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  That's good news.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Let us see. Intel reported.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  We pulled Ashen Better continues to cook with his Intel bet.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  He needed another win.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  He needed another win.

• 2:08:28Jordi Hays?

  It had been a couple of days since he had a massive win.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Yep. I think there's actually another story in here from today about a memory company that he invested in that's doing very well.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, more breaking news in the Journal. Bob Iger is returning to where?

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Disney?

• 2:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Thrive.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Thrive? No way. That's amazing.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Back to Thrive.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think he's been an LP in Thrive, but he also bought a piece of Thrive.

• 2:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. Okay. Well, that'll be a good next act for him. I'm very interested to see where he goes. There's a whole alumni class coming together. Reed Hastings is out and on to the next thing. We'll see where they go. Hopefully.

• 2:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Back to Intel. Intel announced its first quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom line and providing better than anticipated Q2 guidance on strong data center sales. Intel said it expects revenue of 13.8 to and 14.8 billion for the second quarter. Wall Street was anticipating 13 billion. And as of this morning, they were they were at around 100, 100.

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Times PE. And so it's only, I guess, only up for Intel.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Climbing the ranks, climbing the ranks. Tesla also released Q1 earnings, revenue of 22.4 billion versus 21.4 billion estimated. So they beat on top line. They also beat on net income, 1.45 billion versus 1.17 billion estimate. The interesting article in the journal was that Elon was being more cautious about Tesla, talking, saying, I think we need to get realistic about some timelines. So he is certainly not, you know, pumping everyone up and, and he's trying to sort of reset around the fundamentals. And so we will see where that goes.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  It is a wild timeline that SpaceX, if it goes out at 1.75 trillion, will be bigger than Tesla, which is sitting around 1.1, 1.2 trillion these days. So still both huge companies.

• 2:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Credit to Bubble Boy over on X. Two hours ago, he says, everyone asks me about how I'm playing earnings. He says doubling down, 25% of my portfolio is in Intel calls.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Wow, there we go, Bubble Boy. Congrats.

• 2:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Well done. Well played.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Stuff. Well, thank you for tuning in to our Teal Fellowship GigaStream. We will be back tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com. Throw that flashbang, Jordy, because we are out of here.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Been an honor.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  It's been an honor and a pleasure.

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for hanging out with us.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:11:14Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Goodbye.