Saratoga Water, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Kian Sadeghi, Vercel and Replit

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:17) - Ashton Hall and Saratoga Water (09:40) - DOW jumps 500 pts (21:21) - Vercel Deep Dive (37:13) - Replit Deep Dive (44:20) - Guillermo Rauch (01:20:50) - Lulu Cheng Meservey (01:51:40) - Cloudflare Deep Dive (02:24:40) - Amjad Masad (02:54:37) - Kian Sadeghi

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN live. It is Monday, March 24th, 2024. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for saving me there, John.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  How's your morning routine?

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Quite sure. I was too focused on my routine this morning. I forgot to focus on the job at hand.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Which is to do the show. But typical morning.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Five 50. You woke up at 450.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  There's a guy online who woke up at 340.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  He's doing 340. I mean, there's real alpha if you're a morning routine guy and you're just getting up. If that's your identity, just be the, be the boss.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Also, if you're gonna film it, you gotta get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer. Hey, can you get in the building? Set up the cameras for every single shot. But a fantastically viral video.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  To start your day at midnight.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  When, you know, the clock strikes, uh, you know, 12:01, just, just get into it.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  I've been saying that. I, I've been waking up earlier and earlier to the point where some days I'll wake up at noon the day before.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Just to be super ready for the next day.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  But we are, of course, talking about Ashton Hall, the viral influencer, fitness influencer, who has a bizarre morning routine where he dunks his face in ice water and rubs banana on his face. But, uh, respect for the hustle.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  What we really care about is that he's moving markets.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  He's moving markets and he's also moving, uh, views. He has pulled basically a billion views, become a celebrity overnight. He already had millions of followers on Instagram. It's now at 8.8. I'm sure if I open it up now, it's even higher. He posted, what's interesting is that this broke containment. So this video, he's been posting on Instagram for years.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  This broke containment. It, it has like a million likes on.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Probably seen some of his other videos where he's running with the G-Wagon and it's.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Always, always great, but this video was art and so it broke out in a completely different way. It was actually not even posted by him on X. It was posted by Tips for Men, Fashion Essentials, Luxury. And it has almost a billion views, uh, 100,000 quote tweets, something like that. And it's fascinating the way it's structured just to be the most viral thing possible. I mean, he's obviously. Very muscular and jacked and then you have this weird repeating like imagery of the Saratoga blue bottle of water that he loves. He dunks his face in ice.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Which we figured this out. It's not, it wasn't sponsored by Saratoga.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  It was not.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  He was just appreciating.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  He's just a fan of it.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Just appreciating business, just wanting to put them on.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a bunch of other funny things where as you dig into the video, there's just more and more Easter eggs. Like at 6 a.m. or something, he dives into the pool, but as he's walking up to the pool, you can see that there's a no diving sign. Did you see that one?

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see that. I saw that he was in the air for four minutes.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  That one's really funny too. So like the editing is genius and clearly the, it's crazy because like the cinematographer and the editor on this is genuinely a generational talent in terms of social media.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  You don't think it's him?

• 3:13John Coogan?

  No, it's not him. He has a team.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He has a team of like three.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  I figured he was just setting up the camera.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can actually see the other videographer in there because he has a team of like three people. And in one of his Instagrams, I went on like a little deep dive. Yes, I went on a little deep dive and he, and he said like, if you want to be a successful online coach, he referenced Alex Hermosy. And he said, you need to, you need to build a team. And of course, his, his, the product that he sells is help you build that team to become the, the, the fitness coach or the online influencer, right? This is like, kind of like a meta level of like.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  He's the boss's boss. He's the coach's coach.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  He's a, he's a course seller who helps you sell courses effectively, but, but he talks about you need to start by getting a social media team around you. A great person that can film you constantly so that you're posting every single day. Then you need an appointment booker who just schedules appointments with clients, like your leads. Then you need the closer who gets on with super high energy and is like, yes, like, like this is going to transform you. Like get ready to put your credit card down.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  The closer's not you.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  No, he's not involved. And then, and then they get them to download an app. And then the app says, here's where your workout routines are. Here's where your diets, diet is. And then yes, Ashton will get on a zoom call with. You like ones, but like he's scaling his business out and so he can't possibly be on Zoom with, you know, 50,000 fitness clients, but they can watch his content and they can be in his program that he's overseeing as essentially the CEO of this training corporation, which is probably doing fantastically well. He says he hasn't made $10 million yet, but he is well into the seven figures, which.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  So he's not building in public. He's sort of like partially.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  He's.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Talking about it.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  I mean, you never really know with these guys if they're lying, but I totally believe that he's making millions of dollars. Like I, I think there's no question.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  It would be impressive if he wasn't making millions with that much attention.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  And he has deals, he has brand deals as well. I think he has a shoe deal already. And I wouldn't be surprised if Saratoga Water partners up with him as well because he's done fantastically for that brand.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Face of Saratoga.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  The news today is that the morning, LMAO, the morning routine guy really added 1 billion to the stock of the water he drinks. It's up 10% before hours. Saratoga is actually privately owned by another company. People are still buying it. We bought some of it.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Looking now, it's actually basically flat. I guess it popped out. It popped out of the gates.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  The short sellers think that it's not going to be Lindy. So I'm going to stick around. It is a very interesting question of how do you seize the moment on mega virality? He is not like the Hawk to a girl where he was unknown and then he went mega viral. He already has a machine to convert all this.

• 5:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  So I wouldn't be surprised if we see him do a whole host of, of interviews and podcast tour off of this. He already has millions of followers and a complete funnel with a team where he can capture and monetize. I think that was part of the problem with Haley Welch, the Hawk to a girl was that she became famous and then had to go do podcasts and then go and set up a podcast of on her own and then set up a business around it and start making money from it. She wasn't equipped to capture all that attention and all that value immediately. And so that's why probably when she heard, hey, this crypto thing's interesting. She launched the coin and then that went very poorly. So Lulu, who will be on the show later today, says, she's sad to see the Saratoga X account sleep through this. Most posts, most recent posts are from 2022 and they're hashtag soup.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  You're missing the moment. Get back in the game. You have three more hours before this vanishes, vanishes into the sands of internet history. And yeah, they don't even have their most recent bottle design on there. It's rough.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Pretty amazing. You can get almost a billion views at this point with, for free.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  For your product.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yep. So my question for Lulu, which we'll get into with her is, does Saratoga actually need to do anything in this case? Like if, if case in point, like the viral video of Ashton, the one that kicked all of this off, wasn't even posted by him. It wasn't even an example of him going direct. He posted on Instagram, Tips for Men, posted it on X, and that's the one that went viral. Doesn't matter. The value still accrues to him. Does Saratoga?

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  We need to go study the Tips for Men account because I don't know what the-

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Because they posted other stuff and they get like 10 likes. And then this one was like this giga bang.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's one of those accounts.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's just like, it's kind of just like slop cool images, sometimes some interesting stuff, but you know, it's, it's very high volatility because it's just a, an anonymous, like feed the algorithm account. So my question for Lulu is like, what do we want to see exactly? Let's try and concretize that more because if Saratoga just came out and we're like, we're like, oh yeah, like this is cool. Like, you know, maybe that gets some virality, but it's not going to be a billion views. They've already got the billion views in their product. They've probably captured most of the value. Like what do we really want to see from them? This is a company that's been in business since 1872. Let's remember. It's not like a founder's going to come on and be like, oh yeah, like let me tell you my whole story.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  This is a whole other, this is a whole other story, but at one point, one of my favorite bottled water brands is, uh, Mountain Valley.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Popular. It's the green bottle.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  True.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  I looked, they like at one point like filed for an IPO or something like that. And they didn't go public. So I looked at some of their numbers and however bad you thought the business of selling bottled water is, it's worse. Like they, they at one point with one of their SKUs did 10 million of revenue. 10 million at like, and they had $100,000 in margin on it. I was like, just, just don't do it. Just stop yourself. Just stop, stop that business activity. You know, there's, there's gotta be like better ways to make a hundred K, but.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, speaking of tips for men, I got a tip for men. Get an eight sleep, nights that feel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. If you're trying to wake up at 4:00 AM, 3:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 1:00 AM, you're gonna need an eight sleep. It'll help you wake up earlier and get on your grind.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  I actually did wake up on my eight sleep at 3:00 AM this morning. I assumed it was time to wake up. I checked the clock. I'm like, ah, I gotta go back to bed. At least for an hour and a half, but.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  I'm glad you were up early because you got to experience the stock market open, which was fantastic. Let's hear it for the stock market, folks. Let's hear it. It's fantastic.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  A massive rally. Stocks are up. The Dow gains around 500 points on tariff optimism. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Investors are welcoming the latest pivot on tariffs. With the US set to limit the range of import levies it introduces next week. US stock benchmarks started the week solidly higher. The S and P inched up last week, snapping a four week losing streak, partly driven by uncertainty caused by President Trump's trade policy.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  Many, many people are saying that this is related to tariffs, but you know, on the other side of this, it is very possible that the market is reacting to Ashton's routine going viral. And if you can imagine if everybody just started, you know, started consuming products at 3:45 AM versus waiting until 9:00 AM.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  It would be a big boost to consumer adoption.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just a big.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  And consumer confidence for sure.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Consumer, consumer confidence, overall spending.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  It is hilarious watching his routine and being like, this guy has been up for five hours and he still hasn't started work. It's like so much time before doing anything.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  I got very Tim Ferriss coded in college and I would do the whole like wake up, meditate, breath work, journal. And then I was like. What what actually makes me feel better about my life is to just get the things that are important done and be productive. And yes, be active, but the whole like hour and a half like morning routine just to start your day. I'm much more of the mindset now. I just like to get up and start.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's probably taking it a little bit too far, but I do. I do think there is some truth in there. He actually laid out his reasoning for waking up so early and he said, like, you should be up from four to eight. You will be unbothered. There'll be no one else bothering you. So you can really get deep work done, which is probably true, whether or not it's just this crazy morning routine. But even if you're just answering emails, it's probably productive. And he was saying that you will be self selecting your, you'll be selecting yourself out of the, the, you know, 10pm to 2am crowd, which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back, both physically and mentally. So I think there's some truth in what he's saying. And if you follow his protocol,

• 11:54John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, it's going to be a little silly rubbing banana all over your face, but you'll probably be, you know, closer to higher performance than the doing the opposite of what he's doing, right?

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  I think my point of view on it is that, like, it seems like willpower is one of those things that the more willpower you use, the more that you get.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  But it's almost, it's maybe not a perfect rule because if you spent all your willpower in the morning, like hammering through this like multi-step routine. And then you're like, you get to the email and you're like, actually doing my emails a lot less fun than like jumping in the cold pool. So maybe you should just start and do the stuff that takes a lot of willpower and then do the jump in the pool in the afternoon, right?

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Yep. I mean, he probably could get 90% of his workout done in like an hour instead of five.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  But I mean, he's a fitness guy, like he, he needs to be doing fitness.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I also respect his game of, of what is the most viral thing that I could do from 3:45 to then?

• 12:52John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  It's, it really is art and I think it's, it's just shows you how extreme the power law can be on social media.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  I think that we should spend this week and make the TV version of it.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  And roll it out by Friday.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Well, back to tariffs, the important thing. Trump said he would impose tariffs to match those aimed at the US by trading partners. The planned reciprocal action looks set to be more targeted than originally thought. The Wall Street Journal reported. The administration has narrowed its focus to about 15% of nations currently running persistent trade imbalances with the US. Treasury Secretary Scott Bassant calls this the Dirty Fifteen. The sectoral tariffs are now unlikely to be announced on April 2nd. Though the measures under consideration still amount to a shock to world trade, they fall short of the worst-case economic scenarios investors have been girding for.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  And so, another classic economic story where the initial headline news is very bad and then pull back and then you get to something that's a little bit more reasonable. So hopefully it shakes out, hopefully all of the companies that we're rooting for get through it and are able to make their products in safe places and deliver them to consumers affordably.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to trade the tariff news or get in on the action, head over to

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Or hedge.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  public.com.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Can do it all.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions, go to public.com and sign up.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  We got some news from Delian, friend of the show. He says, "Out with the old, in with the new." Keon over at Nucleus is building the new 23andMe and the old 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. He, Keon says, "Blockbuster has collapsed. It's time for Netflix to rise." The number one greatest detail that is currently being missed from the story is the chart below. When 23andMe launched in 2006, it cost about $10 million to read all of someone's DNA, a whole genome test. So 23andMe and the technology 23 used, missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family. 23andMe used something called shotgun sequencing. They basically blast all the DNA away and use a bunch of averages to guess what your genome's like.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  They don't actually read out a single strand of DNA.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  And so now

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Which, taking the shotgun approach to your health, sounds a little bit bad when you say it out loud, John.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  So we're glad to take the sniper approach.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And So now this whole genome test cost a few hundred dollars. We can now finally bring to everyone a true DNA health test, family planning, disease risk. And he starts showing for his company, which we love. So good luck to you, Keon. Let's read from the co-founder, Annie and Wojcicki. She says, "The 23andMe special committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through chapter 11. While I'm disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected. I am supportive of the company and intend to be a bidder. I have resigned as the CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder." She wants it back. I love it. 19 years ago, when I co-founded 23andMe, the direct to consumer industry did not exist.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  And most people had no idea they would ever want to see their genome. So much has changed. There's now a thriving direct to consumer industry. Over 15 million people have been 23andMe customers. These customers are continuing to learn about their family relationships and how to optimize their health. Thanks to the incredible team of individuals at 23andMe. And this is a pretty interesting bidding process. So lots of people came out in support of Wojcicki.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Didn't Keon submit an unsolicited sort of bid?

• 16:39John Coogan?

  He was talking about bidding months ago. We'll see what actually happens. I don't think he's quite at the scale where he could just buy this off of his own balance sheet. But you know, he is a growing company and there's always a chance of a bigger round and.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Got a bunch of big investors behind him.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  It's possible. Bology came out in support. Celine from Loyal came out in support, talking about how inspiring the leadership at 23andMe has been. And it really was a formative company in the, you know, 2010s, basically. What's interesting is that Will Manias has been beating this drum for a long time about, hey, 23andMe has a lot of genetic data. Let's not let this fall into the hands of an adversary country. So I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about who buys this and where the data goes. And if you're, if you have 20, if you did 23andMe, maybe like 15 years ago is like a Christmas present. Like you might want to export that data and then delete your account and make sure that they remove it from their servers.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Just so that your, your data is not up for sale at some point. I don't know. It's not health advice, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I do believe that if you ask them to delete your genome, they really will.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  And that is the, I would imagine that the core asset value of the business is the genetic data of the 15 million people that have used it.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  I don't even know. I don't think so. I mean, I think the core asset is really just like getting people to come and pay a hundred bucks for something.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  PE fund is saying, you know, look, we can buy this.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  No, I don't think PE funds are thinking that. I think maybe some venture investors might be thinking that in terms of let's train a customer. I think Kian is thinking that, but I don't think private equity is thinking that. I think private equity is thinking, okay, it has this much revenue. People kind of like, there's a thousand customers that come in every week and buy this thing that's a hundred bucks. And here, and here's the profit margins. Can we strip out any of the costs? Can we actually make this work? I don't think people are, are, are thinking about this trove of genetic data because it's, it's, it's very hard to monetize at this point. It's not like, okay, Reddit is for sale and you can just take the Reddit data and immediately train an LLM and boom.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  No, there's going to be so much scrutiny on this acquisition and who buys it, how, what they, what they intend to do with it. There's millions of Americans and I guess people globally that are going to be, uh, have, have, you know, want to have a say and what kind of happens. So.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  And so, uh, the Wall Street Journal reports that 23andMe said that there will be no changes to how it stores, manages and protects customer data. Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data. And then they immediately move on to the next segment, uh, in this, in this Wall Street Journal article. How do I delete my 23andMe account data?

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  But saying.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  And then it's very clear. It's like, log into your account, go to the settings section, click delete data, permanently delete data. So you can go do that if you want. Anyway, what will happen to the genetic data in a bankruptcy sale? Certain, in certain bankruptcy cases, a judge can appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman, ombudsman, who makes a recommendation on whether a bankrupt company should be allowed to, should be allowed to sell consumers' private information. This happened when lab, lab testing startup Ubiom filed for bankruptcy in 2019. The court appointed one, uh, who ultimately recommended approval of the sale of personal data. So watch out, you might get your data sold. Anyway, did you have something else to say?

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I was just going to highlight that. It, it seems like a very real possibility.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that Anne, uh, would have come out and said, there is no scenario in which a company buys 23andMe to then sell your data to other companies. She would have been very explicit about that.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  So the fact that she's not being explicit about that, and then they're highlighting this Ubiom.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Case where they did sell the data.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Case where they did sell the data.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would just, I think the, the safe thing to do is assume your genetic data will be sold to the highest bidder.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so if you're, if you're particularly jacked and have great genetics and great muscle insertions, you should go and put your data on 23andMe so it leaks out and then we can create more super soldiers.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  That's, that's my recommendation.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha there. It's kind of like training an LLM.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  You want to put a lot of content online.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Put your genetic data in 23andMe.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Do whatever.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  You want to influence the next.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Go into debt if you have to.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Well, if you don't want to go bankrupt, what should you do, Jordy?

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Run on Ramp.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Don't go bankrupt, people. Manage your expenses. Manage your finances. Get on Ramp. It's that easy. Anyway.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Time is money.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Should we move on to the, the drama that's tearing up the timeline?

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Tearing up the timeline.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Was really in turmoil this weekend. We got a post from Nico over at Default. He says, "This is like Kendrick versus Drake for people who know React." And it's because Amjad, who's coming on the show, is beefing with Guillermo from Vercel, who's also coming on the show. And we will try and take you through a little bit of this back and forth. And I just lost power to my.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  John needs a new battery. Yeah. So this, you've got new batteries here, right? You're good? Yeah. So this was tearing up the timeline over the weekend. We also tried to get the third, third party.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  We did. CloudFlare CEO, Matthew Prince, you're invited on the show. Please come on. If not today, maybe later this week. But Amjad took some shots at Vercel. So basically the, the, we, we should start by setting the table with exactly what, what's happening here. It all started because there was a vulnerability found in Vercel. And so Vercel is a web hosting service for NextJS apps, which is an open source React framework that they maintain. And so, research suggests that Vercel faced criticism for unclear communications about the vulnerability.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  The drama centers around a critical vulnerability, CVE 2025-29927, in NextJS, disclosed around March 22nd, that's two days ago, came out on a Saturday. And this allowed attackers to bypass middleware authorization checks. This affected versions of NextJS using middleware with Next Start and Output standalone. But applications hosted on Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare were stated as not affected. And so, Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rowe, acknowledged communication missteps, especially with key industry partners, and committed to improving processes. Cloudflare, led by Matthew Prince, released a tool to migrate projects from Vercel to Cloudflare. Savage.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Possibly to capitalize on the incident. So he's saying- I think a little bit more than possible. Beating them when they're down, saying, "Hey, there's a vulnerability. Get out while you can." Replit, under Amjad Masad, highlighted their proactive scanning and patching of affected applications while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over NextJS. And then, of course, there was a back and forth there because Replit uses NextJS for their website. And so, it's like, "How could you possibly come for us when you're using our open source framework?" And so, public exchanges on X saw Guillermo accusing Matthew at Cloudflare of using, quote, "childlike tactics and memes," suggesting competitive tension.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  The CEO of Cloudflare often refers to Guillermo as "the triangle boy" or something like that because I guess the logo for Vercel is a triangle. It's actually, the aesthetics of Vercel are fantastic. I think we were talking about this earlier, the design's fantastic. An X post by Anslem.io noted attacks from Cloudflare and Replit on Vercel as being in bad taste, indicating a broader controversy. Additionally, there was a mention of a significant customer switching from another company to Vercel, potentially heightening the rivalry. And so we can go into a little bit about the, the, the history here. And I thought it might be good to give a little bit of an overview of Vercel and then Replit and then Cloudflare.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  To tee up our guest, which will be joining in 20 minutes. So let's kick it off with Vercel. Founded in 2015.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One, one other thing to highlight. There was a post that you had flagged here from this guy. How do you know how to say this guy's name? Gurgly or?

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Gurgly or yours? I'm sorry, man.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  I tried to say it right. John, John made no effort.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  It looks like Gurgly.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Is that Gurgly?

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Gurgly or Rose. Up, up to recently, if a vendor had an outage or a security issue, their competitors would purposely not take advantage of this, would not bad mouth the vendor or tell customers to switch, at least publicly. Feels like this is changing. Replit and Cloudflare are both doing this following the next JSCVE.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so anyways.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  I was talking to a friend and he said, open source and security fights always seem to lead to no winners and everyone looking worse.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One, one thing that I feel like is potentially broadly happening in tech is that when, when, when there was so much internet to build and there was so many sort of like greenfield opportunities, it was very easy to have this sort of positive sum.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Mindset of there's plenty of market. We're just going after these sort of legacy incumbents. We're creating new markets. And then when you get into this sort of hyper competitive dynamic, where there's a bunch of different substitutes, yeah, then you get like rippling deal.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Issues, right? Where it's like, yeah, we are going to spy and like try to steal customers.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  You know, that, that our competitor is getting. So I feel like this is just the evolution of software broadly where in other industries, if a competitor has an issue, their competitors will try to highlight it and use it to their advantage. That's just business, right?

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yep. And it is, it is a little bit, it's not necessarily winner take all, but it is kind of zero sum in the sense that like you're either on Cloudflare or Vercel. And in many ways, there's been this kind of upgrading process where maybe, I mean, the, the story I think we'll get into is. You prototype and build like kind of almost like vibe code and app on Replit. Then you might take it a little bit more seriously and deploy something on Vercel, which is going to be very fast and we'll talk about some of their clients. But Mr. Beast famously did a merch drop on Vercel, drove hundreds of millions of hits very quickly. Vercel was able to manage it, but Vercel is on top of AWS and can be very expensive at scale.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  And so Cloudflare might be the cheaper option when you go a little bit more professional. And so they, they play in similar markets, but they're all at different tiers. And, and so they, they like to chirp at each other, especially with the coming wave of like AI and vibe coding and even less infrastructure, more abstraction. It's, it's, they clearly are all coming for each other's markets. And so over at WAP, Sharkey says, "The Vercel team has been a great partner to WAP engineering. They are always available to debug and solve our complex critical issues. Recently, we've hopped on several calls with their lead engineers. They all care deeply about what they're building, excited for the future of next." And Paul Graham came out in support of Vercel. Guillermo said, "One of our main values at Vercel, iterate to greatness. We're constantly learning, adapting and improving.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  We have an insatiable appetite for feedback. The job is never finished. Keep your asks and complaints coming. We're listening." And PG says, "A sign of, a sign of a company still run by the founder. What hired CEO would solicit complaints?" And so I think, I think Vercel's doing a pretty good job of managing this, but it's getting, it's getting a little nasty on the timeline because people are going back and forth. Anyway, let's give a little background on Vercel. Founded in 2015, Guillermo Rao, oh, he created Socket IO. I remember this. Socket IO was a, what was it? Web sockets framework for doing like communication in the browser in real time. So you open a socket for my computer directly to yours.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  So instead of, instead of going through a server and kind of round tripping, I can communicate with you directly. Great for chat apps, great for video and, and anything where two people are communicating directly. Lots of cool web apps came out of that at this, around this time, 2012, 2015 era. He founds ZEIT, which was the precursor to Vercel with co-founders. The mission was to simplify global cloud deployments and streamline developer workflows. So at the time, you know, you go to AWS and you have your application. When you open up AWS, you see a slate of like, 75 different products that AWS has. They have databases, servers, cloud storage, S3, like long-term storage, cold storage,

• 29:28John Coogan?

  hot storage, like all these different things. And you have to decide what you need to build your app. And so it's, it's an infrastructure as a service, infrastructure-first product. Now, they do have Vercel competitors. They have Heroku, which is kind of a Vercel competitor in the sense that you've

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to be clear, it feels like, I mean, Vercel ate Heroku's lunch.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  There was an era, there was an era where I feel like every Y Combinator company was on Heroku.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  I built on Heroku, it was great.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  And then it was, okay, everybody's building on it for sale now.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  And, and basically, it's a more expensive option, but it allows you to come product-first. I just wrote the code and I want you to handle the scaling and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it. It'd probably be a lot cheaper to go direct. And it's even cheaper to go below AWS at a certain point. You wind up like, you know, these big LLM foundation model companies are building their own data centers right now. They're not renting those from AWS because you get, you, you save money as you go down the abstraction layer, but you lose flexibility. And so, early product launches in 2016, they launched Now, a one-command development service for static sites and no JS apps. In 2016, October, they released NextJS 1.0, which was an open-source React framework for server-side rendering and static sites.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Now, React, there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time. I don't know if you remember this, but like jQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework. People were debating, should we use jQuery or, or Vanilla JS? And then, and then the, the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated. Google came out with this great one called Angular, which was, it had the, basically the Model View Controller, like you could basically say, on my front end, I have an idea of data. Like I have, on our website, you have all of our sponsors listed there and there's like a row for Ramp and a row for Bezel. And you pull those in and then as you're dynamically changing them, the, the front end's updating. Angular was really cool. It allowed you to, you had to learn it, but it was, it was pretty

• 31:25John Coogan?

  performant. And then Facebook came out with React and just like ate their lunch. And Angular went through the second version. They came out with a new version. It was, it was much more complicated to use, in my opinion. And so React really took off. NextJS is a framework for React, so they're layering on top here. And they wound up building an ecosystem around immutable deployments, preview environments, and serverless architecture. So the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the backend. And if a million people show up, or a thousand people show up, Vercel will just send you a bill that scales, but you don't actually have to go in and say, okay, I need 100 servers today instead of one. That's the whole, that's the whole pitch. And so in 2020, they rebranded to Vercel, and they wanted to

• 32:08John Coogan?

  reflect a broader focus on developing preview and shipping. They retained the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility, acceleration, excellence.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, Vercel's website is the fastest site in the West. It is hilariously quick. It puts every other site to shame. They're obviously just like flexing the power of their product. But go, go to Vercel.com and just click around. It's almost addicting.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  When I, when I figured out that these like CDN's, and you can basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN, so that when someone hits your, hits your website for the first time, they're not pulling it from your server on AWS in Virginia. They're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple of blocks away from them, and it's much faster. I was really hooked on it. And, but at the time, if you wanted to deploy your whole site to CloudFront, which is AWS's product, or CloudFlare, which we'll talk about later, it was a lot of work. Like you had to bake everything down into HTML and make sure it was served just like a single file, and there were no server calls. And it was very difficult, but it was a magical experience when you click, when you click on the link and it just loads immediately. It's amazing. Let's go through some funding milestones. Vercel

• 33:19John Coogan?

  does a Series A. So they were kind of grinding for like five years, doing this open source stuff.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  This is a 10-year-old company.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  10-year-old company. But in 2020, things start working. They rebrand. They raised $21 million from Excel and Nat Friedman. What do you know? He's in there early, of course.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Classic.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Goat. Uh, Series B, they get 40 million from Google Ventures. Series C.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  This was a, that was, that A was a COVID round, too.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe announced, maybe.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying if it was announced in April, it was getting done.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  March, maybe?

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Well, in Series C, June 2021, $100 million at 1.1 billion dollar valuation. Series D, just six months later, they get 150 million from GGV Capital. The valuation goes up to 2.5 billion. And then in Series E, just last May, 250 million from Excel. Company valued at 3.25 billion and they hit over $100 million in ARR. And they have over a million monthly NextJS users. And so we can go through some of their technology. They've, you know, they've built their whole, their whole game plan is build NextJS into the best React front end framework that everyone kind of needs to use. Now, this is a, now that, that is a controversial statement. There's a lot of NextJS haters out there that say, hey, you should just be writing React.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Why are you, why are you messing around with NextJS? It's going to lock you in a box. And then there's a lot of people that might say, hey, uh, you could use NextJS, but why don't you just host it on AWS? You know, just figure it out, figure out the, uh, the actual implementation. And so they also launched the V0 tool for generating UI components. They wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features, which we'll need to talk to Guillermo about. And in January 2025, they acquired Tremor, a React component library for data dashboards. And so, uh, they've, you know, they've built their team. They've made some acquisitions, they've done some partnerships. And now they have a pretty diverse, uh, list of customers. Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour, Fanatics,

• 35:23John Coogan?

  HashiCorp, Sentry, Autho, uh, OpenAI, Perplexity, Chick-fil-A, reduced build times.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  From 25 minutes to five seconds.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Love it. You love to see it.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  And, uh, and Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days. You'll love to see it. And Mr. Beast, as we mentioned, also.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs. Yeah, I think, uh.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Vercel.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Based.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  No, of course, because you you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about the scaling later. And at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost. Like, the server bill is going to be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementations. So you should just be able to to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure or your servers. And so, so that's, so that's kind of where Vercel is. I'm very interested to hear where Guillermo is planning to take the company. Because now they're, they're talking about, well, we're going to host Anthropic APIs. We're going to host L L Ms at the edge and deploy and scale those for you.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  So you should, in theory, be able to have a front end website that has an interaction with an L L M. And it's not needing to go call back to some Anthropic server. Because one of the most time consuming things, if you're wrapping one of these APIs, if you're an API, if you're a wrapper, is, okay, I take the user's request. The user said, you know, write me a funny joke. I take it to my server and then I take from my server over to OpenAI server. And then I get the response from OpenAI, back to my server, back to the client. And that's, that's just extra round trips. And Vercel is all about speed and you can't have that. It's unacceptable.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Well, let's, should we move on to a company that's been going even longer, I guess? Or, I mean, I guess the story has been going on for longer. This is Replit. They were officially founded in 2016, basically the same year as Vercel. Very different product approach. But Amjad Masad has been in the development technology world for years. In 2019, he wanted to build a browser based coding environment, a Google Docs for coding. He envisions a REPL, which is a read, evaluate, print loop, running entirely in the browser. Normally you have to open up the terminal, get install Python. But what if you could just do all this in the web? It would enable you to share these and then obviously like add a bunch of features over time.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  So he released an open source version in 2011 called JS Repl to allow interactive coding in multiple languages, brought some people on the team, brought some design stuff, and then he worked for companies like Code Academy and Facebook. He built development tools there. Then JS Repl used to power in browser tutorials at Udacity and Code Academy, proving the concept's value. So if you go to Code Academy and you were learning Python or learning JavaScript, you would be able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate it and run it in the browser, which was very fun. It definitely helped people learn this stuff. And so the platform grew to over 100,000 users, primarily students and self-taught coders. He founds

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Repl in 2016 with some co-founders, initially bootstrapped with personal savings and early community traction. They received seed investment from Bloomberg Beta and initially targeted both the education market, coding classes, and hobbyist developers. And so Repl has always been about like democratizing programming, much less about, hey, let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure. It is abstracting away complexities, but it's taking a much more product-focused approach. And that's led to, you know, a lot of fans, basically. A lot of solo developers, indie developers have really come out in

• 39:21John Coogan?

  support of Repl throughout the years. PG's been a big supporter. And so in 2017-

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting, both these companies felt like they exploded onto the scene in that 2020 era, but they actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that. So it was like these sort of like 10-year overnight successes.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  I mean, he didn't get into YC until winter 2018. But then, once he was in YC, he quickly closed a four and a half million dollar seed round from Andreessen. They surpassed a million registered users and developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects. And so the focus is really on these interactive multiplayer coding, kind of like

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Figma for software development, writing even backend code, any scripting. Multiplayer functionality was really new.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  There's GitHub integration, support for many programming languages. They raised 20 million dollars.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  The big moment really came in 2021 when they got the dot com.

• 40:26John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  That that just really put it.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  That's a turning point.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  March 2021.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Pounding the table, saying, we're here.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Let's go, it's here for replit.com, moving away from the dot I T.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Go to snag.com and reach out to our friend Rob. You want a great domain.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  I love it. So they upgrade the, from the Ace editor to Monaco in 2017, later transitions to CodeMere. The move to CodeMere sparks community backlash, which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes. There's Series B funding in 2021, another COVID round. I remember when these were happening, he raised 80 million at 800 million valuation. The user base exceeds 10 million. Infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth. And there was always this question of like, of like, is Replit for learning and testing?

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Or will someone actually build a real business on top of a Replit app? Or something that they develop in Replit? Is it more for, for practicing and prototyping? Is it a tool or is it an infrastructure?

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  And I think as we talked to him.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who's, who, what is the long-term customer base going to look like? Right? Is it, is it the, you know, indie hacker who wants to create their first one to 10 apps? Or is it somebody who's, if you look at their website now, it's really oriented around this, this similar thesis to like lovable, which we talked about with Harry last week, turning your ideas into apps with AI. What do you want to create? A website for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, et cetera. So kind of, you know, long-term, this feels like.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  The user base could, and he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like that, but more so with anybody can make a website that actually has like crud app.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Totally, full functionality. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's, that's what all these companies are fighting over is that everyone recognizes that that's a huge opportunity. And whoever gets to it first and becomes the portal for making new websites is going to be extremely valuable.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, Vercel is very much also competing with Cloudflare and competing over the enterprise and moving up market and moving into these other use cases. So.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Amjad and Replit have launched a few things over the past few years. They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks. You could just put up a bounty and say, hey, I need this built.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  And they had this massive community of like kind of indie hackers, kids who are learning.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  It was like, hey, let's give people their first time making money with, you know, by writing code.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I thought it was a really cool, a really cool thing. In September of 2022, they debuted Ghostwriter, which was a competitor to GitHub Copilot, something to help you, AI-powered coding assistant, essentially fancy autocomplete, but extremely valuable in the context of Replit. And then they partnered with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly secured a 97.4 Series B extension, reaching a $1.16 billion valuation. So up there with Vercel in the unicorn club, they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users. And then they fully removed the education product. The free starter plan limits new

• 43:41John Coogan?

  users to three public projects, and they're kind of going up market, trying to be more serious in like the business world. They relocated their headquarters from San Francisco Soma to Foster City, and now they are over 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development. It says they remain committed to innovating in cloud IDEs and AI-powered coding tools guided by the founders' original vision. And so that's the story of Replit. We have four minutes. Should we try and do some Cloudflare? We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this. Cloudflare.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Founded in 2009. Oh, wait, we got Guillermo on? Okay, let's just bring him in right now.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  We'll do Cloudflare after. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 44:22Guillermo Rauch?

  My man. Great. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Me too. I think everyone's looking forward to this. There's drama on the timeline. We need to have a TVP and segment. We really appreciate you coming on. Can you, can you just give us like a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Vercel right now?

• 44:40Guillermo Rauch?

  Well, yeah, maybe to introduce Vercel to for those that are there are new to our company. Vercel creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications. We're super invested in open source. We created a framework called NextJS.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:55Guillermo Rauch?

  That powers a lot of the internet and we're very proud about it, but we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects. I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, JavaScript ecosystem. So if you're building a new application, Vercel and NextJS are a pretty good choice for people.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And what's going on most recently?

• 45:16Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, I mean, if you go next, there's a lot going on. Maybe the thing that started a lot of this was we got a ping from a security researcher about a potential security vulnerability on NextJS. We get lots of this operating at the scale that we're in. We have millions of monthly active developers on NextJS. Tens of millions of applications deployed to the Vercel platform. And so we get, we get a lot of pings, but this one in particular was interesting because it was a potential auth bypass, which, you know, in the security industry, it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, like bypassing login signup, things like that.

• 45:54Guillermo Rauch?

  We took a look at it. We, we processed it through the queue. We remediated it. And then when we disclosed it to the world, you know, we, we, we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it. So we filed a CVE in partnership with GitHub, which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every NextJS user on the planet, whether they use Vercel or not about this vulnerability. But the awesome thing about NextJS is that once you use NextJS, you're actually not just getting the open source project NextJS, you're getting a huge ecosystem of products with it that you can use and integrate really nicely into NextJS.

• 46:31Guillermo Rauch?

  There are, there are a lot of auth partners, a company like Clerk, Stackoft, Betteroft, Lucia in the open source ecosystem. This is awesome products and. I think we should have notified those people before that CVE went out so that they could have had the opportunity to like look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that. On the other hand, we did test internally like, okay, is Netlify, which is another deployment option for Next.js affected? And again, we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like Netlify and CloudFlare who host Next.js as well. But it kind of became like a Twitter thing, you know, that like

• 47:11Guillermo Rauch?

  it got big and then CloudFlare got involved. I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined. And yeah, there's some banger tweets being exchanged here and there.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're I'm curious to get your read on it. You've been in the game for, you know, you founded Socket back in the day. Do you feel like the environment now, there's, you know, there's still a lot of internet to build and there's still a lot of opportunity. But at the same time, we have these sort of scaled businesses like CloudFlare and Vercel and things like that. Do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before? Cause there's, you know, people are, there's now like, sort of like, the market's established in many ways. It's not maybe going quite as quickly as it used to. There's new opportunities, but it's, yeah, it's like, it's started, you know, is this sort of more zero sum environment making things a little bit more charged today?

• 48:07Guillermo Rauch?

  I think not. I do think that on X, people get really spicy. I was very shocked that the CEO of CloudFlare came, I mean, he's, he's the CEO of a public company and he came guns blazing, even putting out like some like cringe worthy memes against Vercel, which is a company that is very developer loved. We invest not just in Next.js, but we power, for example, the AISDK, which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product. It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic. It's deployment platform agnostic. So to come after in such a

• 48:45Guillermo Rauch?

  aggressive way, I was, I was a little taken aback. Our style has always been, if you look at my X feed, the thing that I love to do is highlight great products. If you create anything great, Especially if you use Next Generation, I just love to say like, look at this really cool thing.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Guillermo Rauch?

  I never talk about competitors, I never, especially in a diminishing way.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 49:09Guillermo Rauch?

  But in this, in this case, I had a reply. Because he's, because he's saying, oh, if you want security, come to Cloudflare. And the record shows that if you, if you want security protection, come to Cloudflare. There's a very mixed bag there.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:26Guillermo Rauch?

  Right? There's a mixed bag and like, I had to recover from the, from the ados of Cloudflare. I did bring up Cloud, Cloud Lead.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Guillermo Rauch?

  Which legitimately was one of the worst things that has happened to the internet. You could, I don't know if the audience knows, but you could Google and literally find off tokens of different companies like Uber indexed by Google. So that was important. And by the way, our bug was bad. I'm not here to say like, oh, like whatever, make excuses for middleware and whatever. Our bug was really bad, but theirs was catastrophic and you could, and the attack, the impact of the bug was Googling. It's like accessible to everyone. The impact of our bug is actually very, you know, nuanced and I'm super thankful to the researcher. Because it takes a lot of like thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions. Um, but yeah, to your point, I think that it was uncalled for.

• 50:17Guillermo Rauch?

  Uh, we've tried to, I think, and we could get into like the speculation of why he would do such a thing. We tried really hard to use Cloudflare. We were a customer. We tried it out for a new computer product, which coincidentally was edge middleware. And it didn't work out for a number of reasons. So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that, you know, we, we had a piece out of the, of, as a customer, we had to build our own. Uh, but I can only speculate.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's, let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and, and what the biggest opportunities, you know, that you feel like Vercel has in this sort of new, probably the most, you know, most exciting time of, of my life. Uh, John's, you know, a few decades older than me, so I don't know. The internet and AI.

• 51:04Guillermo Rauch?

  It really is.

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  No, but yeah, let's talk about, yeah, let's, let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and love to talk about, uh,

• 51:10Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  the future.

• 51:11Guillermo Rauch?

  Everyone loves drama, but my message to all of the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be. The pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology. Bursell doubled the number of signups year over year, mostly due to the introduction of V0, which is our coding agent.

• 51:33Guillermo Rauch?

  I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension, where every piece of software will be rebuilt and reimagined with AI. And the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about the size of your slides and taking cheap shots at your security competitor, to me, does signal shortsightedness on this AI opportunity. In fact, the ISDK is powering competitors to V0. So today, one of our partners announced New That Email. It's like the B0 for crafting email campaigns, all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from the zero and given back to the world.

• 52:17Guillermo Rauch?

  And so, and I also had a, you should check it out, I had a banger ideas thread on X the other day. Every single day, I'm thinking, here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy. I just actually interviewed, we're at a company offsite slash Ordo, and I interviewed one of the greatest public company CEOs of our times. I can't disclose who. And I asked him, what are your priorities for AI? He's like, oh, we're completely reimagining the company across these three dimensions with AI. I want to buy AI for this, AI for this, AI for this. So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody. There's all this amazing open source technology that you can use to create new products and new ideas.

• 53:02Guillermo Rauch?

  I also believe, part of my optimism is that in the beginning, two years ago, there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chatbot to rule them all. Uh, like a sci fi movie, you go to one computer or you talk to the room, hey, computer, everything is computer. Or what I believed at the time, and we actually, this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology, there's going to be expert AIs focused products that cater to specific requirements. And that's actually what's ended up happening, right? So on Vercel, we host companies like Open Evidence, which is a chat GPT for medicine. Uh, get G C dot A I, which is like the chat GPT for lawyers. Um, amazing products for finance like Hevia.

• 53:46Guillermo Rauch?

  And so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, that's happening with AI. There is also, I call it sometimes the unbundling of Google. It's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers, sorry, are not going to Google for certain queries and they're going to specialist products to answer like when I think knowledge, I may go to perplexity or I may go to Grok and do a deep search, right? So that unbundling of the, one of the largest companies in, in information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes. So I really do think I share your optimism and positivity beyond the drama uh that that happened.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  One thing I always think about with Vercel is just like the focus on speed. I feel like that's almost like the core brand tenet is just like, I mean, Jordy pull up versal.com. Yeah. It's like it's so fast. Is there a? And that's the whole brand. And I want to know, uh, what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments?

• 54:45Guillermo Rauch?

  Oh, it's dramatic.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  I know you're hosting AI, but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a, like a CDN? Like how, how does that work? And how does that, what impact does faster AI usage uh happen in like the consumer experience?

• 55:00Guillermo Rauch?

  There's a couple of things, if you're running a business that you should know right off the bat. Number one. A lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. I reported recently that we see five percent of our Vercel signups. That also happened to be some of the highest intent signups coming from chat G P T. Which is up from being like one percent or less than one percent six months ago. And it's growing. I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys since I like you.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Scoot.

• 55:28Guillermo Rauch?

  Thirty thirty percent um month over month.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Wow. That's insane. So so so so walk me through that. It's people going to chat G P T asking, how should I deploy this? What should I build? It's recommending.

• 55:41Guillermo Rauch?

  That's exactly right.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Vercel.

• 55:43Guillermo Rauch?

  Sam had a really good take and and also if you want to see a fast website, I am very proud that we host openai.com. Sam recently shared, you might not want to learn so much coding or only coding. You might just want to learn how to use A I, which one of the artifacts of that. And I love the Claude artifact name. I think it was one of the most important inventions as it has happened in A I in recent years. Is that? Coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the A I. So what's happening is people are asking. What is the best way to build a website? What is the best way to deploy? I actually posted, so we have a little tool, a little playground. You can check it out. It's S D K dot Vercel at A I and you play playground. You can ask a bunch of models. What they think about you?

• 56:28Guillermo Rauch?

  And that'll give you a glimpse into how the A I's are thinking. But not only how they're thinking, how they're directing the world's behavior in choices. I was very proud. I shared a screenshot that I asked like four frontier models in parallel, what's the best way to deploy? And they all said Vercel. And I actually constrained it to like, you can only, you know, the classic thing, you can only do one thing or.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:51Guillermo Rauch?

  Hurt myself like, okay, Vercel, Vercel, Vercel, Vercel. And so to me, that was, I actually didn't know at the time. I was just like, like messing around in the weekend with the tool. I think that's the canary in the coalmine of how you should be thinking about A I sending traffic to different places. The consequence to our business is. Number one, S E O still matters.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:15Guillermo Rauch?

  So one of our, one of our customers, for example, sponsors this fantastic show, uh Ramp.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 57:20Guillermo Rauch?

  During the business of being found. And so it's going to be through Google searches. Or it's going to be through these agents. And so the A H S are super forming a web search. So you still want to be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are like retrieving and crawling the internet, right? So that's one thing and Vercel really helps companies with SEO.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  That's an interesting thing to think about.

• 57:44Guillermo Rauch?

  Yes, sir.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's interesting to think about Google over time. If nobody's searching on Google, they just, every link is paid for. And they sort of still have this sort of like, you know, pay to play model.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Has the train left the station on SEO? Or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations? And I also want to hear your second point. Sorry for cutting you off.

• 58:06Guillermo Rauch?

  No, no, it's totally fair. So I think what's still relevant is that quality content, facts, proof. These agents will be, I actually like also Elon's truth-seeking AI goal. Because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is post-trained on truth-seeking. Right? During pre-training, you throw a bunch of data at it. During post-training, you like, sort of like, orient its behavior. And this model, and this is why I'm a big fan of OpenAI, in the sense of open source. And also in giving developers choice. The AI SDK lets you very quickly swap models. I think it's going to be very important as a community, as, I'm not talking about entrepreneurs

• 58:48Guillermo Rauch?

  or business people, I'm talking about as citizens of the internet. We have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models, the decentralization of AI. Something that Vercel deeply believes in is, and we have a, we have a template, you can, you can clone, you can basically roll your own ChatGPT within two clicks. And we recently partnered with XAI to power the default model. So you can go to chat, there's Vercel AI, and you can basically clone and deploy your own ChatGPT in your own domain name. And so what would be great for society is if we all invest in massively decentralizing intelligence, so that we're not at the behest of like, the one. Truth Center or Truth Company of the World. Sure, sure.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's one kind of question that comes to mind. So you guys are powering OpenAI.com. And OpenAI.com somewhat recently is like very much reoriented around being a sort of like, you know, search bar answer engine. And OpenAI right now is being priced like it's the next Google, right? At $300 billion plus, like that is the next Google. You talked about.

• 59:55Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, by the way, one comment on that goes has been super top of mind. I actually think that's a brilliant design. So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuilt as an AI product. What people will expect is that when they go to your product, there is an interface like that. And I actually think that's really good design because they blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website. I sometimes dismissively call them e-brochures.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Guillermo Rauch?

  To remind remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the internet.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Guillermo Rauch?

  The whole point of Nexa S and Vercel that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web. A web that powered products. And so what's brilliant about that design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience and it's AI native. And I think that's just a sign of things to come. You're going to go to so many other products. I mentioned the email one, but and Open Evidence has so many of those. Where the interface will be, okay, what do you need? What do you want? When you go to vzero.dev, the question that we ask is, what do you want to ship? Because we want you to convert an idea into an application.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  So talk.

• 1:01:03Guillermo Rauch?

  But yeah.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the line between developers and non-developers, right? It seems like it's sort of blurring today. Vercel's entire brand has been around building, building products for developers. That is the core of the mission. But is there a point in the future where, and you have your coding agent now, right? There's there's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where you land on versale.com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in?

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  What do you want to build?

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  A prompt, right? Because it seems like part of the drama, if you extrapolate it out, it's like there's real...

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable.

• 1:01:47Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, that was gonna be my third point, actually. So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agentic deployment infrastructure. So there's gonna be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet. And also to your question, I think that the TAM of what a developer is is going to so... I mean, we're already seeing it in the numbers. I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews. I was chatting with a lady yesterday on the X platform, the everything app. She was reporting feedback about B0. And at one point in the conversation, she goes like, by the way, I just want to be very clear. I have no idea how to code. I use B0 and I get stuck and I need some other, like another expert's opinion, like go to another doctor. I asked Grok and she brings it back and forth between the two products. And she's creating...

• 1:02:31Guillermo Rauch?

  The reason that she was giving me feedback is she was saying like, the app has gotten so big. What do you recommend? And so people are like, just having the best time of their lives, being able to create when they couldn't code before. But going back to the agentic infrastructure, think of it this way. B0 is automatically calling out to Versale to create deployments, to assign domain names in the future to even buy domains. B0 might even just say, hey, I thought of a banger domain name for your product. What do you think? And so we're very excited to see the growth of this infra. And by the way, there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working in infra that are listening to this call.

• 1:03:13Guillermo Rauch?

  I'm very convinced that Vibe coding will eat a lot of the world of creating frontend applications. Meaning, this AI is so good at writing React and Tailwind and Next.js. It's actually shocking to me. And I've been a frontend engineer. I started frontend engineer when I was 11 years old in Argentina. And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of writing front end code. I contributed to a library called Mood Tools when I was fifteen years old. Since I was like, uh, like the kid that could do front end. And and now I'm ready to like, give up on part of my identity of like, hey,

• 1:03:54Guillermo Rauch?

  V zero is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating front ends.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:04:00Guillermo Rauch?

  Now, what I'm not so sure about, and you've seen all this conversations on X about security and vibe. You can buy the code, but it's hard to buy debug.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Guillermo Rauch?

  I believe I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. We operate in twenty regions worldwide. We reach dozens of cities through our POPS in our CDN network. We have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties. From, you know, AI companies to cryptocurrency companies, some presidential meme coins, whatever you think of. So much is going on on Vercel. Every second of uptime, everything that can happen to this platform is absolutely mission critical. It's life critical. So many healthcare companies banking on Vercel.

• 1:04:51Guillermo Rauch?

  And so I don't want AI to necessarily messing with the foundational sort of infra and software that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly, the train runs on time. On the other hand, and this is why Karpathy, I think, pointed to vibe coding. When you're exploring, when you're creating, when you're designing, when you're crafting the interface, that's where AI is completely dominating.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 1:05:18Guillermo Rauch?

  And now it's gaining full stack powers where you can integrate with that infrastructure. So we recently partnered with companies like Superbase and Neon and Upstash, that they also hire those practical engineers that, you know, they might be using some AI, but you know, hopefully for our partnership, they're very careful. And but in in the in that creator, that new creator is getting the best of both worlds. That you you vibe code and you're working on rock solid foundations.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about value accrual in AI? I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer. You could even abstract that. And now people are just saying, I either want to be the aggregator, the chat GPT app that's installed on a hundred million phones, or I want to be in energy and get me get me shares in a nuclear company because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized. You don't have hardware yet or your own infrastructure. Does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time? How are you thinking about just the different opportunities? It seems like you're obviously going up market to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  But are you thinking about going down the stack further, build, training your own models, developing your own chips? Or like, what does the far future look like for Vercel?

• 1:06:39Guillermo Rauch?

  I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud and mobile. But it's going to be much bigger. And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it, there wasn't a particular player or category that had a lot of upside. It was all over. It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware, obviously. And and we're very proud to partner with AWS to provide sort of that quote unquote hardware layer to Vercel as a global network. There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly changed their behavior. So this is very important, by the way. When I noticed AWS, I was very quick to this.

• 1:07:18Guillermo Rauch?

  Luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me because I got so excited by the automation potential. And there's merits to all solutions, but being an early adopter and riding the right wave can be transformational to your career. Later on, it happened with React. React was open source by Meta. I believe that's one of their greatest inventions. And I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Next.js. And so I think my advice to people would be, you know, just adopt AI and see where you can add value.

• 1:07:55Guillermo Rauch?

  I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI, as I mentioned, will decentralize and unbundle. There's going to be a lot of upside for agentic infrastructure. So companies that know how to work well with not just humans, but agents. And that's a very, that's a remarkable shift, right? A lot of products have been so far created for developers, not for the agents. You think of it as a representative of the developer. You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  How do you?

• 1:08:28Guillermo Rauch?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, how, you know, as a leader, how do you work with your team? Uh, you know, the, a lot of people, the sort of like high level leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus. But then in the case of Vercel, there's so many different areas of the business now. And it seems like you're very focused on, on serving your customers, the developers and the sort of, you know, companies building on Vercel. But at the same time, you have like all these different bets. Uh, how, how do you kind of like prioritize internally? And it seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that, you know, Facebook releases React. You know, they've benefited from it, but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it.

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  And so it seems like you're okay with sort of, you're very open to sort of releasing things and not, it's less oriented around. We need to, you know, capture a hundred percent of the value that we create or.

• 1:09:21Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah, I think short term obsession over value capture is, is not the right recipe to build a generational company. And I'm obsessed with growing the, the size of the pie. My number one allegiance is the web. So when I was in Argentina, I was able to, and this, I, you know, when you're a kid and you try a lot of different programming languages? The thing that blew my mind is the URL. In fact, if you look at the success of RSL so far, it really is about the success of a URL. Is that I thought, holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard. CDNs are so hard. What if people could just deploy with one click or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on that they can share with the world?

• 1:10:07Guillermo Rauch?

  Look at other companies that have been massively successful, like all products like Google Docs or Figma. They've essentially done that, like a thing that didn't have a URL before now has a URL. We're doing that for every application on the planet. So it's primarily an infrastructure business.

• 1:10:24Guillermo Rauch?

  And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest, biggest number of people, open source is the only way. It's non-negotiable. And in addition to Next尚, like I mentioned, we created Next尚, sorry, Next尚 and AISDK and Turbo. And we acquired a bunch of companies like Shazian. And so the more we can, you know, cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win. And also it needs to win because we have the best products. I, you know, you can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem. Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple.

• 1:11:05Guillermo Rauch?

  Apple is holding an entire world hostage to a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls. You know, the web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless, which is also why I'm tripped to pill, then we could get into that and whatever. But permissionless is actually the most important. It's like freedom of speech is up here and then right up there is also permissionless, which is also increasingly a form of speech, is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission. And so that is the true enemy, so to speak. And I think my message to all these other comments would be like, let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an absolute review process.

• 1:11:48Guillermo Rauch?

  You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto. Whatever you want, you should be able to in in AI, right? Like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible. So that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems. I think I'm trying to think about like how nine thousand or whatever that is like. I or Skype, I just, I don't want to go to one interface. Brussels to this decentralized and democratized URLs and interfaces to the world. And by the way, my other point was going to be, I'll give credit to Apple. They have a culture of quality and they've managed to permeate that culture of quality to that to their ecosystem.

• 1:12:31Guillermo Rauch?

  And and I want that for the web as well. I want to make sure I actually don't even have a particular force in the race. And we don't, we not only support next year, as we support another thirty five frameworks. Whatever framework allows me to go to a website like a blind tasting and be like, oh, this process is freaking great. You should be able to work backwards to, oh, they use some technology supported by yourself. That's my, that's my fitness function.

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  Curious, did anybody ever come to your office with five billion dollars in cash and tell you to, you know, ask you to train a foundation model? And how did that conversation go? Because I'm sure like, you know, and all the craze of the last couple of years, there could have been an opportunity to just like, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to. Say, hey, you're really well positioned to build.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. When's the humanoid robot coming?

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not that.

• 1:13:18Guillermo Rauch?

  People seem to be very obsessed with the D zero data. So I'll tell you, I also haven't shared this before, but so many companies have come and asked for. Because by the way, like the interesting thing about B zero is in going back to the design mindset and quality mindset. Is we're trying to produce things we're proud of. And and nested, we're proud of our customers are proud of end users of the internet say, okay, now there's a better web. I think we should also ban against AI slop. Like, we shouldn't create a web. That has this overly brushed texture images coming out of like, like low quality models and whatever. And so a huge inspiration for me was actually Mid Journey. Mid Journey, speaking of which, is a next year as user that self hosts next year as extremely proud of that. And.

• 1:14:03Guillermo Rauch?

  There's something about like the taste that gets embedded into these models. So it's not just the data that you want. It's also infusing your preferences and taste. And it's almost like casting an opinion into the world. Like, this is what I believe products should look like. And by the way, you also want, and this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic. You can still leave the customer to their own creativity. So you can say, you go to B2 and you say, build me a product for travel. Like Wunder, actually, also Vercel customer.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:14:32Guillermo Rauch?

  And then you're like, well, I don't like it. Uh, make it more yellow. Uh, you know, and like the model will follow.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Guillermo Rauch?

  So it's striking that balance between creativity and best practices for a better web.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I have a question. So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of, uh, bringing in new developers, allowing even non, non-technical folks to build and deploy websites. But, uh, some of your companies, some of your clients are absolutely massive. And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure. It can get kind of expensive. What, what are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber on Vercel long-term? And what, how do you see those relationships going? And how important is it to not only enable someone to show up, non-technical, prompt, build an app, but then scale it into that one person, one billion dollar company? And they're saying, yeah, you know what?

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  I'm sticking with Vercel forever.

• 1:15:33Guillermo Rauch?

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, your question also contains the answer because you said, you know, Vercel has been getting a lot bigger.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Guillermo Rauch?

  And because we've been getting bigger, which, you know, comes with these challenges like X-drama and whatever. But the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do. When you're starting a company, a little company, like you're not optimizing. If you're thinking about optimizing, you're probably not doing the, you know, we, we have this motto that we introduced at Next夕ASConf. That is a famous, there's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of like, you first make it work, you then make it right, and then you make it fast. And I would add a fourth, and then you make it cost efficient.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:14Guillermo Rauch?

  And actually, from a computer science point of view, fast and cost efficient actually almost come together. We've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure, I think this year, we've already announced eight price decreases. Or like last quarter and this year, and we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure at, on all sides.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:16:39Guillermo Rauch?

  The CDN is getting more efficient. The compute, we just announced fluid compute. It's a staggering what we've done in terms of compute efficiency. Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of eighty-five percent.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:53Guillermo Rauch?

  So, so what I would say to the nineties of the world, the previous story of Vercel, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on-call and, and those human costs, which are ginormous. And now you'll be fighting for like infrastructure, high-quality infrastructure engineers with all of the AI companies as well. So like the human cost is very real of doing something in Vercel. But then the scale cost of like, Vercel actually gets more efficient the more I use it, is awesome. And we, we're committed to continuing to sort of share those infrastructure savings with our customers. And by the way, the inspiration here is AWS. I think when I started using AWS, it was quite expensive.

• 1:17:34Guillermo Rauch?

  And then they just announced so many price decreases because, and by the way, that's kind of the dance. We manage Next夕AS for people. You can also self-host and manage it yourself. And we're actually also partnering with companies that are even competitors of Vercel to help them manage Next夕AS better when they want to create an offering like that, and we know that there's work to do there. But the nice dance is that if we, if you let up and, and let us manage your workload, we will be able to optimize it to a level that is sort of unbelievable.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Well, it's noon, we'll let you go. I'm sure you have a bunch more to do today. Great having you on. Uh, please call back in when you have more news.

• 1:18:12Guillermo Rauch?

  I love it.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Really fun conversation.

• 1:18:13Guillermo Rauch?

  I love your show. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:18:15Guillermo Rauch?

  I'll see you next.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  This is fantastic. See you on X.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  See you on X.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fun. Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story. I feel like

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  We struck the balance there.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  It's great. When somebody's able to speak with more than 144 characters.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, all of a sudden the nuance just comes in. It's amazing.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Emerges.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. But very, very cool. Yeah, very cool company.

• 1:18:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's a crazy position to be in where you're hosting potentially the next Google.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Right? If you go to OpenAI right now, this is relatively recent. I don't know exactly when they searched it. It just says, what can I help you with?

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:56Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's no landing page anymore for learn about OpenAI jobs. It's like, you're here to do.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they still have a little bit on the side, but you know, they're very, very oriented around.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got Lulu coming on to break down the, the drama and the comms. We're going to talk to her about a bunch of stuff. But we got to ping her because she's not in the waiting room yet. So let's ask. Let's see. Okay.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Good.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  We do have her on.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe I should send her the link.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  She's extremely busy.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  She is.

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  She jumped on. She only had 30 seconds. We weren't ready. She bailed. No, I'm kidding.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  I believe it.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me try and send her this thing. And in the meantime, we should do some posts.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  And she is back.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Is she back? Let's see. Well, I mean, in the meantime, we can tell you about Bezel.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Bananas.

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  That's a great time. I got a, I got a beautiful Vacheron Constantin on purchased from Bezel. Highly recommend you go pick something up over there. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, folks. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. This watch right here, it's shipped from the seller to Bezel.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  And anytime I see drama on the timeline, I can't help but think if the two people arguing just went watch shopping together.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  I was thinking about that watch to watch.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  If they went, or no, if they just went. And they browsed around Bezel together for an hour, talking about what they like and what they don't like. They would find common ground and then they would squash the beef.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  This is Bezel is a, is a technology that will bring harmony to the timeline, I believe.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Now, a lot of people said, oh, we got Lulu in the chat. Let's do it.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing?

• 1:20:55Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Hey, good to see you.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Welcome to the temple of technology. We're live.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Great to see you.

• 1:21:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised it took this long to get you on the show.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Former brother of the year, 2024, and for some reason, we had to do 75 guests before we could get you to sit down. What happened?

• 1:21:13Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I had to make sure the show was good.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. I was big dogging us. It makes sense. It was reasonable. But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us, chat. There's so much to talk about. I want to talk about the comms around Saratoga water. I want to talk about morning routines. Did you wake up at 3:40 this, this morning and dive directly into a pool? Or are you taking a little bit slower today?

• 1:21:39Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  No, every morning I dive for five minutes.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:42Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I think the medium midair suspension is four. I like to go for five, sometimes seven.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:21:48Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Average five for me.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:21:50Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I duck my face like every once every 10 minutes, I think. Just gotta go a little bit above and beyond, stay ahead of the pack, rub the banana peel. I don't just do the face. I do the neck, get behind the ears. So fully ready for the show.

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Always taking it, always taking it to the next level. What, what do you, you had critiqued that Saratoga water, that their, their last post was a bunch of, it was hashtag soup. You described it.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  How, if you were, if they were a client, do you have anything particularly that you would have advised them on of what they could have done better?

• 1:22:22Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah, you're, I don't have any fancy water companies in my portfolio.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  You might get a call later today.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. Um, okay. I, I think they just have to wake up here. There's somebody whose job is to run social for them. I'm sure there's like a person whose area of responsibility is this. And they were just completely out of the game. Like some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there. Like they were present on Instagram with a checkmark. The posts weren't actually that good. I, I think there, there's some brands that are like. Boycotting X because of Elon, whatever, but you're just kind of hurting yourself. Like it's um, like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own Elon. You're owning your own cash flow because you're mad at Elon. Just like, go on X, make money, do what you need to do. Forget about your personal feelings. I don't know if that's actually the reason, but if it is, it's a bad reason.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  It does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame moment for them. And so I, I wonder like, what is the good ending here? Like they quote tweet the video, they lean in, they're making jokes, they capture a bunch of, you know, attention, maybe they grow their account from a thousand followers to even like a hundred K, because it's such a viral moment and a billion people saw the morning routine. But then what do they do with that? A- after, after that?

• 1:23:38Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I think they have to, okay, I think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the Hocktua girl. Like she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seem to suggest was possible.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:53Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And um, I think what the water company could have done here to, to extend would be like, lean into the routine, like partner on some routines, uh, lean into the unhinged. Like I know that they're this sophisticated fancy type of person, but still sometimes you just got to roll with it. Strike up some partnerships, have like follow on content, like lean into the funny, just do, the bar is like literally anything. And then it's like getting creative and then it's like something really enduring. If they want to do something really enduring, maybe it's like a program, maybe it's like some pop up stuff to just stay top of mind. But the, the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like the challenge is, I have no idea what Saratoga's brand stands for, but now in my mind, it stands for getting up at 3:45, putting the banana on your face, having four minutes of airtime. And so it's almost like they, they, I'm, I'm the most water obsessed person that I know by a long shot. And I didn't know what they stood for before. It's almost like the right thing to do is, the, the, the right deal to do is you hire, you just say, hey, we're going to kind of scrap our, our brand from the last 200 years. I think they're a very old company. We're now the Ashton brand, uh, you know, we're signing, we're signing them to a maxed out.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  It's just 150.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Eight figure.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  It's 150 years.

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's 150 year old brand.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  1872.

• 1:25:12Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Well, listen, it's time, it's time for a ref- do a brand partnership with Chiquita Banana.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:25:20Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  The banana collab, you could be doing like, uh, some people commented when he opens up the journal, he's on page one of his journal.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:29Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  A Notion partnership that like the world is a roaster here. There's a lot you could do.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let, let's talk about, uh, you created a meme going, going direct. Uh, I, I feel like it's one of the, the most powerful.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Like basically memes.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Wasn't it our trend of the year?

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Potentially trend of the year. I mean, that and founder mode are the two. When you think about, when you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last five years. It happens to be in my view, going direct in founder mode.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  And they go, they go hand in hand. Uh, have you, I'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what, what the next play is. Is the next, is the next play going indirect?

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Going indirect.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  And sort of like it going.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Getting puff pieces.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, getting puff pieces and stuff like that. Um, no, but what, what do you think is, uh, now that sort of this sort of like way of comms has become the standard, is this just the enduring approach for the next however many years until we get better institutions?

• 1:26:32Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Uh, you gotta, you gotta always outrun yourselves. I'm really glad you brought this up. We did not coordinate by this, by the way, like you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no talk points. I could be like, fully unprepared. Thank you. Um, so we didn't coordinate, but I actually had been thinking about this because Ratra, Ratra launched around a year ago, almost exactly a year ago. And in that intervening year, founder mode has, has kind of become part of the canon. Like it's here, it's not evenly distributed. Maybe Deloitte is not going direct, but like founders going direct is now part of the default playbook for comms, like any Y C company that's coming out into the world today, they're thinking the founder is going to go direct.

• 1:27:11Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  But the thing is you have to outrun yourself. Like once something becomes the thing that everybody does, that becomes the new norm and you always want to be standing up. Above the norm. Like, I remember for a while last year, I was doing manifestos. I was having all of like, my founders and my companies do manifestos. And then for a three-month span, it was just like every other week a manifesto. It actually began, I kind of got like manifested out and same with like the secret plans.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Same with the vibe reels, same thing, kind of burned through them.

• 1:27:38Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  That one happened really fast.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Sorry, everyone.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, so how do you, how do you think so?

• 1:27:44Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  No more montage reels, guys.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we just had Guillermo on. Vercel creates NextJS, they release it to the world, and then they say, "Yeah, we'll manage it for you if you want, or you can just use it by yourself." You basically open source the concept of going direct, but then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders. Is there anything else that, you know, the thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exactly, any, any sort of like highly specialized skill set.

• 1:28:10Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Double-fisting Celsius? What is that in front of your hands?

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  I go, I go Yorba Maté. John goes Celsius. That's, that's pretty reflective of our brand.

• 1:28:20Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Sorry. It triggered me because the week before last, I had two, I didn't know how caffeinated.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  They have a lot of caffeine in there.

• 1:28:28Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I needed like a defibrillator.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:31Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Well, Red Bulls.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Four hundred, yeah, it is six Red Bulls, I think, technically. Who's counting though?

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, gotta be careful.

• 1:28:38Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Sorry, Jordy.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  No, but the idea is like, is there other things that are, that maybe fall outside of that that you feel like you can sort of like, open source, like things that you can just tell the world, they're very hard to execute, so they should still go to your firm to actually pull them off. But what else are you thinking about kind of like open sourcing?

• 1:28:56Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah, or they can just do it. I like the concept of open sourcing. Like, in fact, you should be able to do it by yourself, whether I get hit by a bus or your team gets hit by, you know, gets hit by a bus, it should never just like rest on any one person. I think the next era, so, so going direct was probably the big thing for the last year. I think the next era is in shorthand, attention is all you need. Like, in a world where AI can just do anything all the time, you can see people like shipping and launching stuff. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now daily. There's just like huge drops all the time. And it's a tree falling quietly in the forest unless you can get people to actually care about it. So the two things are number one, how to get the attention and just like focus it for a small period of time.

• 1:29:39Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And then number two, how to harvest it and turn it into something like the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention. And then it goes away, like we're talking about Saratoga water. It goes away and you didn't do anything with it. So you're doing like attention, catch and release. Well, like, uh, like, uh, California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing. Like, don't do the catch and release. Hold on to the attention and turn it into money. Like your job is turning attention into money.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the beauty of the Ashton Hall thing. He, he went super viral, but he already had been on Instagram for five years, had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral. He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff. Like there is a funnel and if you found him from this X post, you're going to be paying him if you, if you like him very quickly. Whereas with Hawk Tua girl, we were talking about this, like she had to spin up a podcast and then I'm sure at a certain point she was like, well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money. Whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  We got a delivery here.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga.

• 1:30:41Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  That should do the dumb lives, the new ice bucket.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we also need bowls to dunk our face.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we definitely do.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  So, so here's a question for you that I think, that I think is actually an interesting one. So, uh, the three of us are, are, are dear friends with David Senra. Uh, and David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence. Right. He made a post, he made a post two weeks ago that was something to the effect of like, I talked to this family. They had written biographies about the family and he asked if he could do a, an episode on them. And they were like, absolutely not, we're not giving away our, our sort of secrets. Is, do you think that, you know, do you think that that, the playbook of just sort of like building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and nobody, you know, and not really

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  sharing what you're working on, do you think businesses like that will, will, there seems like there's tons of examples throughout history, but that was pre-internet, right?

• 1:31:38Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  If you take, if you take the strategy of, of we're gonna kind of like build in silence, you know, be very secretive, does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are gonna be extremely loud, constantly sort of like accumulating attention?

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  And I just wonder if that's sort of a pre-internet strategy.

• 1:31:56Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  So the, the thing here is, right, you know, one day soon, maybe you'll have the one person billion dollar company, but for now, the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent and the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated and they're all being headhunted by like the same firms. And so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can and they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you. And so if you're someone who's already a household name, like if Palmer Lucky went silent for a while, it'd be fine because people know what he's about. Ilya Sitskaver has been silent for quite a while and people know, you don't have to try to figure out like, what am I gonna get if I try to go work for them? And they have like demand knocking down on their doors.

• 1:32:40Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  But if you don't have that, then you do need to build it. And I think where your question is coming from too is like, we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much. And it's like, when are you, when are you building your company? Tweeting like every hour. And I think the, the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap, it's about the ship yap ratio. You have to respect the ship yap ratio. And if the rich was right, you can get away with anything.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Elon, Elon's a perfect example of this. Nobody's like, hey, what, you, bro, you're, you're posting, you know, 20 times an hour. Relax. It's like, okay, the rockets are, are being caught.

• 1:33:21Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  The rockets are being caught. It's sitting in the chopsticks. He's gonna, he can post what he wants.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  On, on going direct, I've always thought that there's a little bit more nuance there. Obviously, it's, it's, it's really key to tell someone that like, hey, it's okay to start posting and, and going direct and, and doing, you know, founder-led communications, but that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels. And I see it almost as like, Like tiers or levels. So level one is like you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility. Maybe there's some posts on X from the founder's account. Then you start doing new media, like podcasts like this, calling in, telling, you know, you're using other people's platforms, but you're accelerating. And then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile. And that still has

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  a lot of benefit. Can you talk to us about how founders should think about riding up that curve and where the value is across all three of those?

• 1:34:17Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah. So roughly, you want to think of it as like concentric circles going outwards.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:23Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And you cannot mess up the order. So the innermost circle is your co-founders and executives and the people who work for you. And they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle. Next circle maybe is investors board, and then you get to customers, and then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people. But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is, let's say that you didn't brief, let's say that you're launching like a new mission and you didn't brief your employees on this refreshed mission. But you go to the press and now your employees are reading it in the press and there's a disconnect. Two things can happen. One, they're like WTF, this isn't what I signed up for. Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming

• 1:35:07Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external. And two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like, well, wait a second, I'm not, are you sure? This isn't, this doesn't seem right. And then all of a sudden, everything, everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it. And so sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important. Like always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How, in terms of getting, every, every company wants to get attention. The challenge is that there's some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like, you know, basically like slop. Like I won't name it, but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just. In my group chats was like, super cringe. But then it got like, millions of views and I was looking at it, I'm like, alright, like, this seems like, cheap attention, but then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about, um, maybe talk about like, taste when it comes to getting attention and, and is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower ba- base of sort of like tasteful

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  releases and messaging and comms versus like, the cheap, high attention moments?

• 1:36:29Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah, tasteful, tasteful vids. So there's, there's two things. One is, that, you know, the, the crazy hot

• 1:36:39Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  chart?

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  The crazy hot chart?

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Who doesn't?

• 1:36:43Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  There's like, there's like a company crazy hot chart, where if you're really hot as a company, there's a lot that you can get away with. But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you, then every single thing you do or say is like disproportionately affecting how they think of you. And so if you have a 10-year history of just like, wins and bangers, and you have one thing that is kind of weird or flop or a little bit cringey, you can kind of get away with it, it gets absorbed a little bit better. But if your company is launching for the first time and the one thing people see is 100% of the data points that they have about you, you can't really afford that. So I'm not saying don't take risks, I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up, like, even, even more, when you're new and there's not a lot of data points about you.

• 1:37:25Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And then the second thing about, um, just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage. And the responses are all like bots. Like, if you go to a TechCrunch, um, X post and look at the replies, it's just straight up bot replies. If you go to these, uh, these like, framework bros, or I don't know, the, the like, mental model bros.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:37:55Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Here's what happened this week, thread bros. You had a lot of engagement, but I would not trade that for the world. And so the thing to look for is like, who is in the replies and who is not in the replies?

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Cause replies are usually really positive too, but it's positive from people that like, It's a counter signal if they like.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It's all about signal, right? Signal.

• 1:38:17Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the best sort of like going direct founder mode, to put it in one bucket, CEOs are sort of like born that way? And maybe you need to help uncover that ability of like sort of communicating their story to the world? Or is it something that anybody can figure out with sort of proper training and understanding sort of social mechanics and the platforms that we distribute content on and all that kind of thing?

• 1:38:47Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Okay, there are different archetypes of super cracked, impressive founder that you want to just throw your life to the side and go follow them and do whatever it takes to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling. There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes. You can't be in the cringey uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you. And you're sort of like make it halfway there. You can be the like super brash, controversial, loud type. You can be the meme, me funny type. You can be the strong silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year.

• 1:39:32Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  But if you're type three and you're trying to force yourself into type one, it's going to be painful for everybody, like most of all you. And people can tell, right? So, so I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it. And can you learn it or do you have to be born it? It's more like there's different types and you can fit into one of those types. But you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think about the difference between like David Holes and a Justin Mares. Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down. David Holes just shows up once a week and tweets something like about the future and how AI will like change.

• 1:40:10Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Yeah, like alien civilizations.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, alien civilizations, but they're both great posters. But if they tried to swap, it would be really, really, really weird.

• 1:40:19Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  You sometimes see people like online LARPing as Palmer.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're trying to be someone else. Yep, exactly.

• 1:40:26Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I have a chip on my shoulder.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  And I always say this for the going direct thing is like, how do you communicate? Because there are some people who their their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post. Other people can be really pithy and just post bangers. Other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit. Other people are great on, you know, national TV. And so figuring out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like, well, X is the popular one, so I got to figure that out. You it can be very hard.

• 1:40:56Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  This is what we were talking about and you were you were saying I should describe it as default out. Remember?

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that.

• 1:41:04Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Were we you and I were?

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out, standard out.

• 1:41:08Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  You were talking, oh, all right.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  So in programming, in programming.

• 1:41:11Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Standard out as the way as the way as like a as like a metaphor for the the default.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  The default type of medium that somebody should use.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:21Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And if they need to go outside of that, they can, but everybody has like a strongest, like a default medium. And you can, you don't have to like only stick to that. Like you can go outside of it. Some of these like Andre Karpathy posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into the Xbox and hits post and it's fine.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of that's about the flexibility of X platform. But there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually be in going and sitting down with, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin and doing an interview and they will they will crush that. And if they and then and then that clip should live on X and someone else should post that. But they should not try and turn it into a banger hilarious post because like that's just not authentic to who they are. I have I have a prompt for you. One of our one of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit. What's the strategy for getting TVPN on the cover of the New York Times or the New Yorker? What should we do?

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  The journal would be.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, the journal would be ideal. So how can we reverse engineer this? Take us through the steps.

• 1:42:23Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I think Financial Times.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  That'd be great, too.

• 1:42:25Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  For you guys. I see you looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that'd be fantastic. Okay.

• 1:42:31Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  You know?

• 1:42:32John Coogan?

  Financial Times. How do we get the profile done?

• 1:42:34Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Okay, so the first question is, what is the business goal here? Like, how do you convert attention to money, right? And you guys converted, okay, let's just work through it live. You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners so that you have leverage with advertisers, and then the advertisers pay you, and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  That's the business, baby.

• 1:42:54Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Number one question is, who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet? And you're gonna get more bang for buck by converting like people in tech who've been living in a cave and don't listen? Or are you gonna go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet? Or are you gonna go to some like in-between, like adjacent community where it's people who in, uh, let's say it's people in DC who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington DC, and they need to understand tech better. So it's like policy people who want to understand tech. So, so here's my first question to you is like, who is that next, um, group of listeners that you're going after?

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Probably slightly older public markets investors. We were pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving, or, or we, we like to think of it as like, YC Demo Day was our NFL Combine, uh, earnings season is our Super Bowl. And so we want to deliver on, you know, a Super Bowl level event for TBPN covering public company earnings, Mag7.

• 1:43:55Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Okay, so you want to go to sell-side analysts, you want to go to, um, uh, the big banks, you want to go to probably the exchanges have some events, um, like New York Stock Exchange has events. You probably want, uh, things that are like Citadel adjacent, like DSHI adjacent to get into that community. And also, there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young, um, hedge fund and quant trader people. Obviously, like the young Jane Street people just go back and forth. And so if that's the audience, then I would work backwards, like reverse engineer this whole thing and think, okay, where are they getting their information? And what do they already care about that we can tap into? Like, it's, it's, it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just never heard of.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Whereas, and Derek Thompson had this insight, too. The best viral thing is something that's a little bit new, but a little bit familiar.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:46Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Okay, let's say that we're talking to those people, you're probably gonna aim for. Well, I mean, they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times, let's just say Journal because the paywall is less strict.

• 1:44:57Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Um. Now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas like? Are you in tech? Are you in culture? Are you in finance or something? So there, for example, um, uh, New York Times has a guy who is like between tech and culture. Yeah. And so maybe someone like that. Or let's say it's the Journal and um, their tech. Honestly, their, their tech. Desk, their tech team is in like shambles right now because they had this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago. And there's just like a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people. The cost of AGI. It's crazy. So. Yeah, so maybe you want to aim for like. Culture, finance.

• 1:45:42Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And then now you're putting together two pieces, one piece is like. What are the uh, what do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about? And what are they thinking about? They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not. And they can see publicly available information, which is very scant, but they're trying to read. Behind the scenes of like which founders are respected and how good are they really and can they recruit? That kind of thing. And then what is the paper cover? And the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening in the world of AI like uh, as we approach AGI, what are changes happening in the world? So. And then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring. So I would start by not doing a pitch at all. Just.

• 1:46:25Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Vibing, networking, going out for drinks, chilling. And starting to talk about what's in the middle of that Venn diagram, which is like you have the unique experience. It's interesting to the people you're trying to reach and it's interesting to what the journal has been covering. Do that like. For three months or so. And then figure out one hook that's in the news and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook. And then have somebody who's not you, like have somebody else that they respect who's in your network and their network. Tell them or like, like a me or like a founder, like an Eric Lemon, you know. Uh, go to them and just tell them like this is the thing blowing up in tech and they should really take a deeper look. And at that point, you're familiar to them. Familiarity breeds.

• 1:47:05Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Affection, positive feelings, but it also breeds credibility. Um, so people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard a lot. So at this point, you're familiar, you have the story dialed in, you have your unique area of expertise. And then you have some third party validator telling them to look deeper into it. And that's how it begins.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for coming on the most profitable podcast in the world.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Last one, I know you've, we've got a minute left. Uh, are we try not to swear on this show because swearing is vulgar.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:34Jordi Hays?

  And we're very short bearish, uh, using cuss words online right now. How are you advising your clients in a world where, you know, big names are thrown around mean words?

• 1:47:48Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Um.

• 1:47:52Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  I think it's the same thing as before, which is like whichever bucket you're in, stay in the bucket. And if like.

• 1:48:00Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  If there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are, um, you can try to ask them to clean it up. I've never seen that work. I've never had an experience where someone tells the founder like, clean up the potty mouth and talk different and they actually do.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  And so it's just, that's your archetype, you stay there. But I will say, uh, the, the big takeaway, if, if people are trying to figure out like, what is the next era of comms? And just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about, about building a cult and a movement around my company. It's we're, we're entering the era of personality hires with respect and affection. You guys, ultimate personality hires, I'm one two, safe space, it's okay.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Cheers.

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to that.

• 1:48:43Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  But in a world where AI is better than us at pretty much everything, every human is going to be a personality hire. So just figure out what your lane is, is, and lean into that. And if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while, it's not the worst thing. And if you don't, don't try to LARP as Palmer Lucky and find the fights just so that you can have something to beef over it just. Find your lane, be in the lane, don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous and unnatural for you because people sniff it out.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot. Authenticity, as silly as it sounds.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  Great. Well, I have to say, thank you for coming on. When your clients have historically that I'm aware of have come on the show, I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show. I always come away and just tell John, ah, he was too, too, he was too media trained.

• 1:49:31John Coogan?

  Too prepared.

• 1:49:32Jordi Hays?

  Too prepared, too good. So you're doing great work and thank you for, for, for being a, the former brother of the year and a friend of the show.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  We'll see what happens this year. Keep up the good work. You might be two time.

• 1:49:45Jordi Hays?

  Just to be clear, just to be clear, it could be two times.

• 1:49:47Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  You need to do the ceremony, you need to do the ceremony where I go and put the crown and then we all cry.

• 1:49:52John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, I mean, we're gonna have a black tie event this year for the award show and I'm sure you'll be invited.

• 1:49:57Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  That's it. Perfect. All right. Thanks, guys.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by.

• 1:50:01Jordi Hays?

  Take care.

• 1:50:01Lulu Cheng Meservey?

  Bye.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  That was great. Lots of great insights from Lulu, as always. What's your review of the Saratoga water? Is this gonna, is this gonna put Rora out of business? Is this gonna put every water company out of business? They're getting so much. Let's do a taste test.

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  Tastes good. I mean, it tastes fine.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  It's okay.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this just screams to be the restaurant that a mid restaurant, or the water that a mid restaurant would stock.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  Trying to be like, oh yeah, we have bottled still.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we have Saratoga. Okay.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  Saratoga.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  I think it's, I, I think it's fun that it's going viral and good luck to the team.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm happy for them because I enjoy and appreciate value creation. So I'm glad they're, they're doing, I'm sure their numbers today.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic. They must be so happy.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every single.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Well, you know what they should do if they want to keep up the sales coming out of this viral sensation?

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Buy every billboard in the United States.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  They really should.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Just take advantage of this moment.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  They should go on adquick.com. They have out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. It's great. Do you want to dive into Cloudflare? Should we just move on to some timeline? What are you feeling right now?

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  How much did we actually get into of Cloudflare?

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  We didn't start Cloudflare.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  But they are the third player in this, in this debate. We're going to have Amjad Masad from Replit on in 30 minutes. And I thought it'd be good to kind of show the three companies that have been duking it out on the timeline.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:41John Coogan?

  We, we, we broke down.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's briefly cover it and then we'll go into the timeline.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic. So it's an older company. It's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince. That's the CEO who has been chirping at Guillermo on X. The goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance. And so when you run into Cloudflare, it is a CDN. And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic. The idea is instead of those hits triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on ABS, they hit Cloudflare first. It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's, it's just delivering the front end webpage first. And Cloudflare is a product that helps your website similarly to Vercel be very quick and fast.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  And they started with a $2.1 million series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations. They launched a TechCrunch disrupt. What a throwback 2010. They had core services CDN, DDoS protection, which I mentioned, performance operation. And it was all freemium model. So you get onto Cloudflare free for a little bit and then quickly as you start scaling, they start charging you more. But as the. The tenor on X has been CloudFlare is still pretty affordable, even when you scale up. Amazon AWS has a lot of CloudFlare competitive products. CloudFront, I think, is literally a direct competitor to their CDN product. But CloudFlare has been price competitive roughly. And so you get a lot of stuff.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  And then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionalities to their product catalog. So in 2011, there is a Series B by NEA. They wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domains served. They're scaling pretty quickly after only two years. They get to that $20 million Series B. Then the next year, 50 million Series C.

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they were basically five years-ish ahead of Vercel.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  But it's interesting how Vercel's Series A was 20, you know?

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh yeah. Everything get pulled forward around. That's just standard. And now a $50 million Series A is common.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  $20 million Series B.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  A company does that and doesn't say, hey, we intentionally raised, you know, less money than we could have. You're like, okay, they're probably struggling.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures comes in for the Series C. That's $50 million in 2012. And they added more points of presence, which means more local servers that can deliver content even faster. Because the whole name of the game is if you're in Chicago, you want a server in Chicago that's delivering that website. So it's extra fast because the speed of light and physics come into the equation. When you're going, even just going across the US and back is, you know, at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters. I think it's almost like 30 milliseconds. I don't know for sure, but it's significant enough that a content delivery network makes a lot of sense.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  Roughly, is that roughly how fast I was running this morning?

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:43Jordi Hays?

  When I smoked, the whole team.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had a little race, a little foot race this morning with the team. And Jordy came out on top. He's a fast, fast brother. In 2012, they reached a $1 billion valuation, or close to it, based on rapid growth and network expansion. In 2013, they added DDoS mitigation and they successfully defended against high-profile attacks. The Spam House incident, you know, that's gonna be a good start when you dig into Spam House. But I'm sure there were a lot of DDoS-ing going on. I mean, basically, anytime someone was... I mean, DDoS-ing was so crazy at the time.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  The backstory here. The backstory here is hilarious. So in March 2013, Spam House, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses, experienced a massive DDoS attack,

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  which experts called the largest in history that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the internet. So, hey, you know the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do? Let's stop him.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, DDoS stuff is serious. I mean, a lot of nation-states use it to knock off different services that they think are not aligned. X has been the subject of DDoS attacks. Elon's talked about this.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Somebody thought it was a nation-state, potentially.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  But it's happened all the time. And it can happen on a very small scale, too. If you're just running a small company and there's some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just wants to troll you.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  I used to DDoS my dad's website.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. He DDoS'd your dad's.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  From our own home. I'd set up a computer.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's basically... I mean, DDoS, it sounds complicated.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  I'd mess with them and I'd go like, "Dad, why is your website down?" And then he'd go spend like 10 minutes being like, "Oh, I don't know."

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  But it's really as easy as just going like in the Python code, while one, like infinite loop, request this website. And it just requests it millions of times and it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something set up, you can be in a lot of trouble. And so they doubled their domains to 1.5 million, servicing roughly 5% of global web traffic, getting really, really big. Then they go on an acquisition.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  The best thing is when companies do the meme. It turns out these generational companies, they do the meme.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  And that's the lesson, always do the meme.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Whatever, whatever percentage of your TAM that you put in your pre-seed deck that you want to achieve, just do it.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Just do it. Yeah.

• 1:56:59Jordi Hays?

  You'll be a big company.

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  They face and resolve scaling challenges. Then on 20, in 2014, they go on this acquisition spree. They acquired Stop the Hacker. What a great name in February of 2014 to boost threat detection. They acquired CryptoSeal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management. CryptoSeal, I believe founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine, great, just kind of genius programmer, honestly. Major initiative, they launched Project Galileo to protect, to protect vulnerable public interest websites, introduced universal SSL, free HTTPS for all customers and keyless SSL for high-security clients. And then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  That set them up for their Series D, $110 million from capital G, that's Google, Microsoft and Baidu. They got three of the hyperscalers essentially in the company. They expanded to China. And then they adopted a bunch of other technologies, web application firewall, introduced the I'm Under Attack mode to counter Layer 7 DDoS attacks. And at this point in 2015, they hit 62 points of presence worldwide. So they're continuing to grow. And whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge, we saw this with Vercel, Vercel going to something like 30 points of presence, Cloudflare's up at 60 in 2015. And that's the name of the, that's the name of the game when, when you're trying to deliver the internet very quickly. In 2016, they acquired

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Eager Platform Company to build out Cloudflare Apps Platform. And we'll talk about that because that's kind of the product that will compete with the Replit and Vercel stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on Cloudflare instead of just deliver content. So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load. Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them. Netflix is a great example. You want to put, you know, Squid Game, the video for Squid Game, you want that to not come from far away. You want that to be up close unless you're caching it. But in general, you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that button.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  We had explored, you know, people talk about high-frequency trading. We had explored this is big for us. High-frequency podcasting, trying to get.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  With the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build our own CloudFlare, honestly.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  And just buy our own hardware. We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants for to run the facilities.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the energy requirements.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Create our own chip fabs and ultimately design our own chips.

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Just completely vertically integrated down to the mining and extraction of nuclear fissile material.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  But that's the that's the modern media game you play.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Uh, when you're a 75 person company now, I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple of years.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  CloudFlare in 2016, they hit 100 global cities. They had some outages and operational errors. It's it's a it's a rough and tumble game that they're in. 2016, they spent, uh, this is what Guillermo was mentioning, the Cloud Bleed incident. A security bug led to data leaks, quickly identified, patched and mitigated. I don't think there was a huge, uh, huge impact on the business. I don't think information and we didn't get a chance to talk to Guillermo about this. But I think both with the Vercel, uh, security issue and with Cloud Bleed. I'm not sure that there was a lot of like, you know, customer credit card data that was stolen. But it was the potential for harm was was really significant. And that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication, which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  There was also a little bit of a little bit of like a, a political content debate, because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right wing website, was using CloudFlare and obviously was the subject of intense DDoSing constantly. CloudFlare had taken a stance of, hey, we're just an infrastructure provider. We we abide by the First Amendment, free speech. If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that. But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on the internet. We're just an infrastructure provider. But in in 2017, they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews. And they and they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy? What's acceptable and what's not? Of course, they're a private company. They can decide.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  What is appropriate to use their server for and they have the right to refuse service.

• 2:01:08Jordi Hays?

  They had this happen later. They had they had eight Chan.

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  That was the same thing. Yep.

• 2:01:13Jordi Hays?

  So they they dropped them at some point.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  And so that that's always been kind of a hot button for all these infrastructure platforms. When Alex Jones got deplatformed, it was all the way down to like, you know, the Shopify plugin that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  And it's all it's all a nested bottle, like a bag of worms, basically. It's very frustrating. And and I mean, we saw this with Trump where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff. So sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues. But back to the interesting tech stuff, they launched CloudFlare Workers, enabling serverless code execution at the network edge. So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your your HTML and your images. You're also allowing the user to interact with your app and and create actual server side functionality through these CloudFlare Workers, part of the whole serverless trend.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  They acquired NewMob to optimize mobile performance, implemented creative entropy generation, lava lamps, pendulums, Geiger counters to enhance security. That's crazy. Have you seen that lava lamps thing?

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  I haven't.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  So basically, there's this big question on it when you're working in security. A big piece of that is how do you generate random numbers? And so one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way. And so they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted. Because even if you're even if you're just like, we're going to use, you know, some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there where you can actually truly predict. They're all pseudo random number generators. So there's this like race to create the the craziest.

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look up CloudFlare lava lamps. They have a picture of the actual wall.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  It's so cool. It also just like a great vibe. So I love that.

• 2:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  2018, they launched the 1 dot 1. Dot one dot one DNS service is a free privacy first DNS resolver. They did, they, they expanded to domain registration, wholesale cost domain registration with no markups. Formed an alliance with major cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees, which can actually get really crazy expensive. Zero trust enhancements, Cloudflare Access and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for comprehensive security suite. So they're taking security seriously.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Putting the screws to Google and they set themselves up for an IPO. So in 2019, they go public. Right before they did pre IPO funding, Series E, it's $150 million at around 3.2 to 3.5 billion. They dropped more controversial clients, as you mentioned, H-Chan. And they had a few operational hiccups around this time. Some outages, some software deployment issues, but nothing that stopped them from going public.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  This is what Girma was talking about. The number one thing is mitigating outages.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  Yep. And so they filed their S1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at $15 a share. They raised over $525 million. Let's go. Historical size gone for them.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  They launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN mobility service. And then they went on another acquisitions spree. They acquired S2 Systems for browser isolation technology. And Link to bolster developer tools, leading to Cloudflare Pages, getting more into the application layer.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  And then they appointed the co-founder, Michelle Zetlin, to as president, marking a milestone in tech leadership. Revenue reached $431 million in 2020 with significant growth in enterprise customers. Because again, even though they are competing with AWS, they, they famously have built their own servers, own their own hardware, and it can be much more competitive on pricing. So they enhanced workers with support for new languages, launched Cloudflare Pages and R2 Storage, which is S3 compatible object storage, but it doesn't have egress fees. So if you're storing a bunch of images or text or JSON files on S3, you can just move right over to R2,

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  which is, I think, isn't that the one, one letter, one letter more and one number less? It's a very funny name. And so they're they're all about, you know, getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare. And then they acquired Zeraz to improve third-party integrations. Revenue grew to 656 million in 2021. They surpassed 1 billion in annual revenue in 2022, introduced D1, a serverless SQL database, and went on some more acquisitions, Spree's, navigated complex issues during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, balancing service continuity with policy adjustments. They blocked Kiwi Farms, which is another controversial website. There

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  were harassment issues there. And so they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of, you know, having a whole bunch of companies on their on their platform. Launched Workers AI in 2023, partnered with Nvidia to deploy GPUs at the edge. So if you want to do AI workloads in an actual city, very low latency, Cloudflare now offers that. More acquisitions, Zero Trust Networking Company, Secure Infrastructure Access Companies, Cloud Native Security Company, just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go. And now they are aiming for net profitability and targeting $5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years. They're expanding enterprise

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  sales and enhancing Zero Trust and edge computing offerings. And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform.

• 2:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And one thing I love about Cloudflare is they sponsor the US ski team.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  So if you like skiing, you might also like their set of products. And this is a Cloudflare at the moment is a $42 billion public company. And they've actually, you know, they've suffered, you know, much of the same sell-off that other firms have, but it's just wild to think about whatever that pre-IPO round was, the Series E, they did 3.2 billion.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  So they're up 10x, those IPO buyers, something like that. That's great. And certainly a good outcome for Union Square and all the early, early investors that got in at those $10 million, $20 million rounds, but took a while to get here.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's fascinating, so CloudFlare is a sort of scaled platform, has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers.

• 2:07:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  And you would think if Matthew Prince, the CEO, is coming after Girmo,

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  that they would have be positioning.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  I would expect a CloudFlare versus Vercel landing page.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  And there's no mention of Vercel on CloudFlare's website at all.

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  Who are they comping themselves to?

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Vercel does mention CloudFlare. But, uh, but, but I'm sure.

• 2:08:22John Coogan?

  CloudFlare does not. Interesting. Well, maybe that changes after today's spicy episode.

• 2:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know,

• 2:08:31Jordi Hays?

  who knows what's going on behind the scenes, right? Girmo didn't mince words when he said like, we tried to use CloudFlare for a pretty important project internally. It didn't work. And so now I can imagine there very well could be some ego involved.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, anyways.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like a little bit of like a big dogging going on, just like, hey, little bro, like you don't even have servers. You know, Vercel, like, you know, we have our own infrastructure. We compete with AWS, you, you're not even in the conversation. Like, that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings, but, you know, hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a growing pizza pie. And the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we want to see. We want to see bull markets everywhere.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Do you know where, uh, where you can enjoy a nice piece of pizza pie?

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  At a Wander?

• 2:09:23Jordi Hays?

  That's right, John.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:09:29John Coogan?

  Book a Wander. Go to Wander.com.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Go do it. Use our code.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, use our.

• 2:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Enter, uh, they're giving away a trip to TBPN, uh, audience.

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, go check it out.

• 2:09:38Jordi Hays?

  So go check it out. Wander.com slash TBPN.

• 2:09:41John Coogan?

  Inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got eight minutes. Should we hit the timeline?

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the timeline.

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Sheil.

• 2:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Great post from Sheil here. He's pulling up, uh, he says venture capital in the 90s was wild. Good funds had triple digit IRRs and he's pulling up, uh, so KP here, vintage, their first vintage.

• 2:10:06John Coogan?

  This is why they're in the Holy Trinity.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  This is why they're in the Holy Trinity.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  So their first fund, it's an eight million dollar fund, they only got a 31x on it. So only a 51% IRR.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  But why, yeah, why is the IRR so low, given the multiple? Is that just because it was such a long fund? It took them a long time to get liquidity on those? Like, because they had a 32x fund, Fund 7, but it's 122% IRR for, for Kleiner Perkins Fund 7. I wonder what's going on there.

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  There's no other, there's no insight.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  We'll have to get Everett Randall from Kleiner Perkins on the show.

• 2:10:41Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, their best performing fund was in 1996, unsurprisingly.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Right before the dot com boom.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  The right time.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  They IPO'd everything in that portfolio, probably.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they have a 17x multiple, but their IRR was 286%.

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  That's crazy. I mean, they turned.

• 2:10:57Jordi Hays?

  On 300 million, so it was a much bigger fund.

• 2:10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, so they turned it into like almost $6 billion.

• 2:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:11:02Jordi Hays?

  And then there's a bunch of other funds here. You've got Mayfield, which I feel bad, I should know better, my venture history better.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Legit. Very old school though. I mean, you can see in, in the eighties, they were already on Fund 4.

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine KP comes out, their little eight million dollar venture fund, they 31 exit and they're like, oh, I think we might be on to something here.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  What's also interesting is all through the eighties, they just were like, we do 150 million dollar funds. Like, that's what we do. They were very disciplined.

• 2:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating thing is they have their first fund in 1972, eight million dollars. They don't raise their, their second fund until eight years later.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:37Jordi Hays?

  The 55 million dollar fund.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  Probably just so slow and took so long for those companies to get to liquidity.

• 2:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Funny that.

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  They had to prove it.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  The learning is like, they do this huge, we don't have any data past their 96 fund, because I think it just switched to being KP at a certain point. But, um, it's funny that like, they didn't learn their lesson on like, upsizing the fund, because they just put up this ridiculous performance on, on the biggest fund that they have outlined here, so.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder what's in that 72 vintage. It might've been like Intel, maybe? I don't even know. Apple.

• 2:12:10Jordi Hays?

  That kind of thing helps.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Get a couple of those in a fund.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  A lot of bangers in there. Sequoia also doing quite well, putting up big numbers.

• 2:12:17Jordi Hays?

  It'd be fun to do, I have a feeling that this summer, the news cycle will slow down a little bit.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  Deep dives on this.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  To do.

• 2:12:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Deep dives on like the top 20 individual funds ever.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  And the individual partners.

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:30John Coogan?

  I want to talk, I mean, if they're, they're still in the game or they're still.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Got to get them on the show.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Maybe probably retired, probably skiing where they don't have chairlifts.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Let's be honest.

• 2:12:37Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  But we'll get them on the show, we'll have them break it down, we'll have them toast to the good old days where you could put up a 31X multiple in a couple of years.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  I want to, I want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the seventies, send them a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Saratoga.

• 2:12:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  And say, hang out with us for three hours straight.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:56Jordi Hays?

  And let's just.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the good old days.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism?

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  I love this one. It's Andre Karpathy, and if you break down his last name, it's Karpath. And of course, this is the man who worked at Tesla on self-driving cars. An AI pioneer and DJ Kows says, I think about this every day. And I think about it too, a lot, not every day.

• 2:13:18Jordi Hays?

  We do think about this phenomenon a lot.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  But I love this, yeah.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  The, the, Bill Ackman is really into nominative determinism. That's why he's Ackman, activist man.

• 2:13:27John Coogan?

  Sure. Yep. Makes sense. Yeah, it's a good, it's a great one.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a good one.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Uh, should we go over to Super Dario, talking to Arvind Srinivas?

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just thought this was funny because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show. So, Arvind Srinivas from Perplexity says, we're building, uh, why, explaining why they're building a browser. He says, it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps, especially on iOS. The goal, agents that can book travel, buy things and act as a personalized assistant. So, we're just waiting some, for one person to build an agent to book, um, uh, private jets.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  You know, this is, this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read, but. Ramp travel is fantastic. I like, it is a magical product. And I'm not, I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted, but honestly, like you go there, it aggregates all the flights, it saves all your information perfectly.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:14:26John Coogan?

  You, you click it and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into like, you just, you just show up to the airport and, oh wow, my TSA pre-check is in there.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheapest rate too.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's a flawless product. And then you can also book the hotel right there. It is such a good product. And of course, like as a, as a, as a, you know, a manager of a company, you can decide what's in policy, what's out of policy, how much you want to spend and stuff. But, uh, you know, for, for us, it's more of like, you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel. So that, yeah, we're, we're not staying anywhere.

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Staying on brand.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  But, uh, for some companies that want to save same time and money, they can put the cap on that as well. But it really is, it really is a magical product and I, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent book for me, it's in ramp, honestly. Because they, they've, they've built all of the, like the harnessing to actually plug in in a really, really seamless way. And there's no like ads or upsells. It's, it's so much better than booking.

• 2:15:24Jordi Hays?

  No ads in there, so we'll put one in here. Um, we got a post from Austin, a friend of the show, uh, has been giving, uh, me a bunch of just, you know, he built the morning brew into a monster. Uh, has been very helpful on TVPN. He's retired.

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  I, and I, and I put this in here because I want to call him out. Stop it.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  This is like one of the worst things I've ever seen. I really, really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring. It's like, get back in the game, create some shareholder value, build a massive business. You should be working a hundred hours a week. America needs you. And I saw this and I was just disgusted.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but, but.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  It was revolting, honestly.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  It's, it's really, really depressing.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  But, okay, but clearly he's a marketer, he's a media man, and he's retiring so that he can unretire, come out of the gates with a maxed out.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  I get it, I get it. I still, I just have a lot of sensitivity around the R word specifically.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  I don't think we should be talking about retirements. I think we should be working to the bone forever.

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's staying busy.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  He is. I love it. He's got a bunch of things that he's doing.

• 2:16:33Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna have him on the show soon.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to pull him out of retirement.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  We're gonna pull him out of retirement. We'll convince him. We'll give him a talk. We'll give him a talk.

• 2:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Come get on the show.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Jordi Hays?

  We'll give you a dedicated spot.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is funny because he's like, I'm in, I'm in retirement and here's my focus. I'm training for a half iron man. I'm investing. I've written five angel checks. I'm tinkering. I'm playing with dozens of AI tools. I'm growing. I helped 3X Ocean's talent monthly growth rate in 2.5 months. Obviously, he's still in the game. He's merely in his Michael Jordan playing baseball era, I believe.

• 2:17:04Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  He's getting back in the league.

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  I was looking for the right sports analogy. I was like, I just don't know. I don't know these things, but did Brady, Brady retired at one point briefly? Did he?

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Is that not even correct?

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  It's more like, doesn't Bo Nickle retire in between every UFC fight, right? And then he comes back? Is that how that works? It's technically a retirement.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. You always find something new to not understand.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  Well, come out of retirement, come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work, Austin. You're on notice. Let's skip the humanoid thing because that's a bigger deep dive. Let's do just a funny, funny post because we only got a couple minutes. Actually, how are we doing on Amjad? Is he in? No? Okay. We will do this Ashley Vance post. Dan Primack shares, remember when Elon and Zuck said they were gonna fight in a cage and lots of people believed them? I believed them. And Ashley says, I heard somewhere that Italy wanted to charge them $300 million to use the Colosseum. Not sure if it's true, but I think it is. And I think it killed the brawl.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  What a miss.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  It would've been so good.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  In general.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  It would've been amazing.

• 2:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Cash grab, not, not usually a good idea. And missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, pay-per-views, things like that.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Huge miss. Also, they had a rough weekend.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  Who do you think would have won? Because there was always the thing about like Elon is just much physically is physically bigger, but Zuck had been training more. And so it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing, Zuck would have won. But if you gave Elon a year to train, Elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win. What do you think?

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  I think in a pure play boxing rule set.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  It was gonna be Mick Marshall Arch, right?

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it was?

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is something I know about. The only thing I know about UFC is from the Zuck.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  It's actually so funny because I do think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right and Elon would go into it being like, yeah, I'm just gonna rely on my size advantage and just try to.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Not work out at all.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  And then Zuck would just be nerding out. He'd get some like super technical submission.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  I mean, the weight alone, I mean, there has to be like a 40 pound gap or something. It's like pretty significant, right?

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of the Italians, they had a rough go in F1 this weekend coming in at.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Both, both didn't, didn't finish.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  Leclerc and Hamilton. They've had a, they've had a rough start to the year, people are saying.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Was it mechanical issues? Was the car?

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's always something with Ferrari.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  It's always something with Ferrari.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  People, people are saying like Lewis has gotten like a full season of like the typical Ferrari stuff just in, in, you know, barely starting the year.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  One race, two races.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  It's unfortunate.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  But predictable.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Well, should we go to Zach Glabman? I don't know how to pronounce that. It might be Zach G. Labman. Says crazy ad placement, try ramp. And it's a United worker at an airport and in the middle of his, in the middle of his bright yellow vest, it just says ramp.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  And this just makes a lot of sense because you have.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Business CFOs are flying.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Traveling ramp has travel products. I actually saw this and I was like, wait, is this actually?

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Do they actually do this?

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Of course not.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  It's a joke, but the guy works on a ramp, I guess.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  We got a chart here from Orin Hoffman. He says insane growth, what an amazing company. And he's showing the flock safety ARR chart from Sakura. We gotta have the Sakura guys on sometime.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Because they have some of the best insight. We gotta fact check. Adcock came out and said that

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Figure is the number one most in demand stock in the private markets, which I think is categorically incorrect. Based on my insight into the market, but I would like to have Sakura on to talk about what are the sort of, they do this research, heavy research on private companies, kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely. And yeah, I would imagine they would have something to say about that, but um.

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Y C company, flock safety. We've talked about them before. 200K in revenue in ARR in 2017, growing to 285 million in 2024. Wow. That is a lot.

• 2:21:43Jordi Hays?

  And I wonder what they do next.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  I can talk briefly about Prasana, who's the founder of Rippling.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like he had a, was really in a pickle over the weekend. This was yesterday at 6 a.m. A lot of people sent this to us. I like when there's just something extremely dramatic. People send it to us.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I get some of these texts and I'm like, is this a tech story?

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  We'll cover it, but it's not necessarily top of our list. But it sounds like he was, had some.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  But you gotta pay attention when there's a billionaire on the run. That's always an interesting story.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Billionaire on the run, yeah.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Something like that. I don't know.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  He's close to it, at least. We just spend like 10 minutes analyzing like dilution.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Well, well, Green Oaks came in at this valuation. They wanted 10% dilution.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  But then they have the SVB thing and they had to take, you know, kind of an emergency round of sorts.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  And were they 50/50 when they started the company? We don't know.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  We don't, we don't really know. But.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, he's going through divorce, had a bunch of issues over the weekend, but they've been resolved, I think, so I was happy to cover that now. He sent an update post.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, the high level here is that Prasanna posted a massively viral thread, 17 million views, 68K likes. He said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chennai police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu. He had a rough go with his wife, who he was married to for 10 years. They have a nine-year-old son. Their marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair. He was accused of a bunch of crimes. The police came for him, but it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now, and is now safe and sound. And fortunately, the kid is unharmed, and I think

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  that's the silver lining of what really matters here.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We got a post from Will Brown. He says, "Bro..."

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  This is why we do the show.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  "Last night was a deep-seak moment."

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  It's funny because like, that makes sense, and the whole deep-seak thing, the whole reason that that phrase makes sense is because people were saying, "Deep-seak is a Sputnik moment."

• 2:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  It's like, now, last night was a deep-seak moment. I love it. The internet utterly snapped

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Did we kind of miss coverage a little bit on deep, deep-seak?

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  There is a new version of deep-seak out, but I don't think it was as revolutionary. It was much more incremental, and it didn't have the narrative of, "Oh, it was built for $10 in a shed with, you know, screws and hammers."

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it doesn't hit the same.

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Doesn't hit the same. And you have a bunch of fake news around it.

• 2:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, there's also the new Baidu model that they're, they're training, right? Or no, it's Jack, it's Jack Ma with, with Ant.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of someone as handsome as Jack Ma, we got Amjad Masad in the building. Welcome to the show!

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Yo!

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Crazy intro.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:24:52Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? How are you?

• 2:24:54Amjad Masad?

  Good. I just dunked my head in a bowl of ice.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Oh, we got a Saratoga here too! I hope you use Saratoga, man.

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  I hope you got your banana on there too.

• 2:25:04Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, my banana is coming.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  The banana's key. You can't get, you can't start your morning without banana on your face.

• 2:25:11Amjad Masad?

  No, no, just some banana all over, you know?

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  Are you still lifting like crazy? Last time I saw you, you were deadlifting like 500 pounds or something like that.

• 2:25:20Amjad Masad?

  I lost a lot of weight, you know, it's just like you get you get to a point where it's unhealthy. It's it's not exercise. It's it's it's fucking killing you.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  It gets it gets a little risky. The risk of injury gets up there, but you gotta be able to, you know, break a sweat every once in a while.

• 2:25:36Amjad Masad?

  You see Daniel, growing Daniel's tweet is like, if you want to look like shit and feel like shit, start powerlifting.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, because he's just, oh, well, if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more. And then I'm just eating so much.

• 2:25:51Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I still maintain some of the muscle, but but, you know, just trying to work out for longevity and health.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining. Can you give us just like a brief overview of like where Replit is, what you're working on? How's it going?

• 2:26:05Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, so Replit, kind of like the genesis of it has always been, how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people? It's had a profound effect on on my life, like, you know, coming from from Jordan, growing up there, you know, lower middle class family, being able to come to the US, come to New York initially, and then move to the Bay Area and be able to build a billion dollar company. That's outrageous, and it shouldn't be possible. But the reality is that, you know, we have this massive wealth engine machine

• 2:26:45Amjad Masad?

  that's called the internet. And for a long time, you know, it hasn't really been possible for a lot of people to to kind of take part in that. There's the, I think Peter Thiel said, like, the paradox of the internet, it was supposed to sort of decentralize wealth, yet somehow concentrated into into Silicon Valley. But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are becoming more accessible. And that's really been my my my mission. And so initially, Replit was about, let's get people learning how to code. And I think that was a good pursuit.

• 2:27:24Amjad Masad?

  But people don't want to code. The reality is I spent the last, uh, whatever, working at Code Academy and Rapid. I mean, it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code. And at Rapid, we built a ton of infrastructure around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating all of that and all the way to deployment. But really, the big unlock was the agents, you know, putting an agent on top of all of that. We were the first agent in the market to be able to configure services, databases, deployment and go all the way to, uh, to deploying, uh, deploying an app. And it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the, the benefit of knowing how to code? And how that collides with vibe coding? I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Karpathy is like, I vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Karpathy is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding. Like, is there still value to learning to code in 2025?

• 2:28:30Amjad Masad?

  I, I, I, I think there, I think there is, but I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if, you know, in the up case, like, you know, what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI-generated. You know, I assume this optimization path we're on, where agents are going to get better and better and better. You know, the answer would be different. The answer would be no. It would be a waste of time to, to learn, learn how to code. But like, you know, you could have different predictions and I think different people will, will make different assumptions. I, I, I'm at this point, like sort of agents pilled, you know, I, I, the, the progress we're seeing with agent.

• 2:29:13Amjad Masad?

  We just, we just are rolling out V2. Agent, I've never seen a sort of like an A B test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy just by improving the agent. Like 100%, 500% in certain metrics and on success that users are having. And so I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using Cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there's the guy that lost six months of work on Reddit. There's the guy on Twitter that leaked his API keys. Like on Replit, we do get commit for you.

• 2:29:58Amjad Masad?

  You don't have to worry about that. We hide the API keys in like a secure vault. And so I think a lot of it goes to like, hey, these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools. And instead they should come to places like Replit. But that being said, I'm very bullish. Like, you know, I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago. I would say kind of learn a bit of coding. I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, right? Learn how to communicate clearly, you know, as you would with humans, but also with machines.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Can you tell me some stories about like success stories from Replit? Maybe like what's possible as a solo dev today? I mean, we're seeing Peter Levels I O do crazy stuff. But what are you seeing from the most successful Replit users?

• 2:30:51Amjad Masad?

  Let me start with the business cases because I think those are kind of really profound. Because we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money. And, you know, it's certainly accelerated massively. But 100 plus year old company, Sears. I don't know about you, I didn't know they continue to exist, but they have this spinoff called Sears Home Services.

• 2:31:17Amjad Masad?

  About a year ago, they hired a team to like a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever a hundred year old program language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they'd done that, you know, basically, most, most companies, as they're modernizing, they go adopt a bunch of SaaS tools and no-code tools and local tools and to become like a modern company. They actually skipped all of that and went to, went to AI. And their operations team, which manages the kind of field workers that go out and every day, kind of do house repairs and all of that, they started, they started building AI tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would, would go and would talk to the

• 2:32:02Amjad Masad?

  AI and it would optimize its, their route. And would, you know, that made it so that they're making a lot more money. And now that team, everyone in that team started building AI tools. And so you have this ops team that's highly levered, that are able to move business metrics. And, and, and they leapfrogged an entire era of computing and, and landed on, on AI agents. And now they, these are the journalists that are building the business. And I think this is a view into, into the future where firms would not be made of like, you know, SDR and like, yeah, whatever, it's going to be like, I'm a sales journalist, right?

• 2:32:45Amjad Masad?

  I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things.

• 2:32:49Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How, how do you think about balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people and customers of the, of your platform, right? You have somebody that comes on, they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey. They build something, but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business. And once you become a business and you're sort of like servicing, so like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform and they, and some of them can end up wanting different things. What it, what, yeah, just what does it look like in terms of, you know, you want to be able to continue to service these users over time while still making sure that Replit

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  is the best place for somebody to sort of like start their journey?

• 2:33:38Amjad Masad?

  We we've taken a a a difficult approach approach and perhaps not not the smartest, right? The reason I've been working on it for my entire life is because

• 2:33:50Amjad Masad?

  it it, you know, what what I try to do is like

• 2:33:57Amjad Masad?

  build a an end to end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers.

• 2:34:07Amjad Masad?

  You actually, you had that in the past where like the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers. And even Windows, as much of as we we, you know, look down on it, but you know, Visual Basic was a great product. It made a ton of decisions for you and like, you know, a lot more people were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement. And the open source was was this radical disruptive, you know, bottoms up thing where there's a hundred computing libraries and a hundred computing ways of doing things. And that created a lot of mess and create a lot of power, but now getting started and doing things programming became a lot more difficult.

• 2:34:51Amjad Masad?

  Like, imagine setting up a modern web,

• 2:34:55Amjad Masad?

  you know, app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. Like, if you mess up your Python environment, the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new one.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  I've been there. It's miserable. It's terrible.

• 2:35:09Amjad Masad?

  So, you know, so you had this, you know, bottoms up innovation and kind of like the early hacker lingo, you had the cathedral versus the b- bazaar. So the Windows ecosystem is the cathedral. The open source ecosystem is the bazaar. And so in my mind, well, build, let's build cathedrals ma- made of bazaars. Like, I think open source is awesome. But let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that. So my my work at Facebook, I was part of the early React team. You know, I was working on the tooling there and especially especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes you can spin up a hello world app.

• 2:35:49Amjad Masad?

  As if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS, that would take you, you know, hours perhaps. So. You know, now fast forward to to Replit and we built basically that you all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to to make software. And so that's been a lot harder. But but I think you end up with this general purpose horizontal tool that can satisfy a lot of needs. The challenge, of course, is like positioning and marketing this thing. You guys know as entrepreneurs, like, people like to do to pick one product on the market.

• 2:36:30Amjad Masad?

  But look back on the history of computing, typically the the the best products that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal products.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  There's kind of a narrative that's floating out right out there right now that companies that are aligned with the AI growth trend are seeing extremely fast rates of adoption. You're seeing companies get to a hundred million ARR faster than ever before. The risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up as customers test a new AI tool and then kind of bounce around. They're using Cursor one week and then Claude Code the next week and then they're bouncing to this one. What are you seeing and what do you think's happening? And do you think there's any any merit to that fear in the market or on X right now?

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  That maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SaaS installation cycles?

• 2:37:35Amjad Masad?

  It is certainly suspicious. I mean, it, anyone who tells you differently is sort of. And I was a little worried about our growth, like, is it, is it going to go away? What is going on? Like, this is like a little too fast. And I think, you know, we really start focusing on the other metrics that really matter, which is the revenue quality, retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention. We actually have above hundred percent net dollar retention, even for our consumer plan, which is probably unheard of. But

• 2:38:14Amjad Masad?

  You know, I, I think that, uh, I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you want to make sure you're providing an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform. I think especially on the VS Code Wars, the switching cost being so low is, is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot to Win Surfer to Cursor in like five minutes, same project.

• 2:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:45Amjad Masad?

  Quite like it's one click, you can open the project. And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate. The great thing about Replit, we provide this really great convenience. And so if ain't broke, don't fix it. You deploy something on Replit and people, people really tend to stay.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Internally, I'm sure the entire team is using Replit all, you know, all day long. Is there still a place for traditional prototypes or are you, is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping of features, which is obviously something that your end customers use? Or is there still like, hey, let's just, you know, make this in Figma and kind of align around it first?

• 2:39:33Amjad Masad?

  There's certainly a place for, for Figma. I think there are, first of all, there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very, very quickly, even, even faster than, than sort of any kind of software prototype. And it depends on how people think. Like I think designers still would want to, would want a canvas to, to think. And I think products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you go to Replit, you initially have some kind of canvas and that kind of results in a, in a piece of, in an application. But right now I, I still think there's a, there's

• 2:40:16Amjad Masad?

  a place for Figma. But the way I think about what Replit is doing to, to our organization, I hope more and more companies, it's like everyone is highly levered. Like we just built

• 2:40:30Amjad Masad?

  You know, agents are new and part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents.

• 2:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:40:37Amjad Masad?

  There's no tracing tool, you know, like an APM, like a Neuraly or Data Dog for agents. So we built our own internally and, you know, a couple, a couple of people on our, on our team spent like a week using Repland vibe coding, uh, this really a great infrastructure tool that has saved many, many hours of engineering. We have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do, or it was too expensive. She spent three days, she spun up this org chart tool with like, uh, connection to ADP and, and, and sort of

• 2:41:18Amjad Masad?

  versioning history and it's amazing. She never coded, right? So I think the way to think about it is like, um, how to increase the productivity in your company and less about like, oh, what should we displace? You know, I think, I think these, these tools will have their place.

• 2:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, um, how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software? When, you know, you've obviously been building Repland for a very long time. 10 years from now, you guys are in market for a new CRM. You're talking to the big players is, is building it yourself just become uh, a part of that sort of like RFP process where the team is like, okay, well, we can build this. Like this is, you know, what we think is gonna, it's gonna cost to, you know, basically build it, maintain it.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  It used to be the biggest bear signal if a startup was building their own CRM. It was like, oh no, you're way over your skis. This is gonna get terribly wrong and you're gonna be maintaining this thing for years. And you actually don't have a special, you're not a special snowflake in this case, just use Salesforce or something.

• 2:42:26Amjad Masad?

  But yeah, does that change? Like NIH not invented here syndrome.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 2:42:32Amjad Masad?

  So, um, yeah, I agree. So I think I, I, I thought quite a bit of like future of SaaS. I think that the, the question is like, uh, if you can conjure up a SaaS product, can you, like, is there even a future there? And we do see this every time I wake up on, on Twitter, I see someone using Repland and replacing a piece of software that costs them 15,000, 100,000. I just retweeted one this morning. Um, and, uh,

• 2:42:59Amjad Masad?

  So there's a lot of, I think, vertical niche specific SaaS tools that are generatable very easily, even with the today's technology, let alone like a year from now. I think you'll be able to kind of generate them, especially on a platform like Replit, which gives you all the cloud services involved. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. So I think, think about Rippling. How embedded into your company as like the, what do they call the, the like system of record?

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:35Amjad Masad?

  And Salesforce, think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:40Amjad Masad?

  So I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese style company. Which is, I think what Rippling is doing. And I think, I, I think this idea of like being generative and me, you know, having larger pieces of software, I think is going to become more important in the future. So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SaaS, but I think I would bet on those horizontal SaaS companies.

• 2:44:09John Coogan?

  Well, we got to ask about the Vercel drama. We talked to Guillermo earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us?

• 2:44:19Amjad Masad?

  Well, you know, I, someone asked me, do you, do you plan on supporting Next Yes and Replit Agent? I said, no, because we want to bet on something like Veet that is open, like community built. And the way Next Yes has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel. They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. There's a project called OpenNext that makes it so that, you know, Next Yes is deployable on more platform. Matt, the CEO of Netlify, commented agreeing with me. The larger community feels like, you know, Next Yes is

• 2:45:04Amjad Masad?

  Is perhaps more tied to Vercel than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and they strysened my comments. I think it would have been a less of a story if they, you know, they don't overreact to it. And I look, Vercel is an amazing product, it's an amazing brand. They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just Next.js. And for me, water under the bridge, like, you know, I, you know, I think, you know, emotions get high on Twitter and you start flame calling and, you know, I wish them really the best.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, how is, how is Next different than the React relationship with Facebook? I mean, with all these big main core frameworks, you're kind of, if you're in Angular, you're aligned with Google. If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook. But has, has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community?

• 2:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're not trying to monetize it as aggressively.

• 2:46:04Amjad Masad?

  Well, not at all, not monetized. Look, I worked, I exclusively worked on open source at Meta. And the, the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at Meta is that there's no direct tie-in to, to, to the bottom line, right? So we were not trying to monetize React.

• 2:46:26Amjad Masad?

  So far, they haven't monetized Llama in terms of like selling an API.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:31Amjad Masad?

  And so generally, as long as they are, sort of, they're using it internally, they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and mindshare support. Now, the disadvantage of that, we actually weren't ever able to like make a complete product. Because like if you go to Google and, you know, use now Flutter, I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct incentive to advance the Android ecosystem, for example. And so Facebook, we built really cool pieces of infrastructure, but the UX around them are bad.

• 2:47:12Amjad Masad?

  So you have companies like Expo building on React Native to make it a better experience. Companies like Vercel building React to make it a better experience. And these are amazing companies and I think that's how it should be. I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the core, core software and really tying them together.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  What do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibe-coded apps and websites and games? Obviously, for a long time, it's felt like web development services, if you could call it that, were very much, it was bifurcated. Like, there was Shopify, which is a Power Law winner, but then there was also Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well. But if there's a new aggregator emerging, and Nikita Beer's written about this, like, maybe there will be one company

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  to really break out and be the hub for vibe-coded N64-level games. That would be very valuable. It would also be more of a winner-take-all environment. How do you think that that plays out in your category?

• 2:48:26Amjad Masad?

  Look, I don't really, that's not the model for our business. Like, the way I think about it, in the early computing era, you had the mainframe. It was the domain of the expert. And then you had the PC, and it became possible for anyone to use computers. And that ended up eating our economy, essentially, because that's how disruptive technology work. And so, in, you know, the modern era, the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert. And now it's become so that anyone can make software. Initially, it looks like a toy, vibe-coding games and things like that. But I think it will fundamentally

• 2:49:06Amjad Masad?

  change and transform the economy. And my model for what we're building, it's let's build an Excel. It should be fun, you know? We do a lot of things that, you know, make it fun. We actually build a 3D gaming stack. But the model is like, can a billion people use it to, you know, as part of their everyday work, to build businesses, to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy? And the idea that, you know, it's gonna be Roblox, I don't see that as interesting. I mean, Roblox is a great company. You know,

• 2:49:46Amjad Masad?

  maybe Roblox is the aggregator for vibe-coded games. But I think it's really not the big prize. It's like, you wanna build a trillion-dollar company, you gotta think a little bigger than that.

• 2:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you have any, do you have any words, words for your doubters? Something you said is like, the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you can apply to, you could have applied it to crypto. This was Chris Dixon's, I think, original thesis. It still feels like, you know, Riplet is this billion dollar company now, but I still think your doubters and your haters would say,

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  No, it's just a toy.

• 2:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's just a toy. Like it's, you know, kids making apps or whatever. But do you, do you like that, that people still kind of underestimate this potential? Is that part of what creates this sort of, the, the opportunity for the next 10 years? Is people not realizing like the tsunami that's kind of about to hit the industry?

• 2:50:43Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I think, I, it used to bother me, but, but now I think it's, it's actually an advantage. And I think, you know, when, you know, when we're at the height of like AI trend in us, and at Replit, obviously was early, you know, we were the first outside of Co-Pilot to train a code model. We're like this company in the city and we're growing fast and, you know, hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the, the sort of the hype, kind of Silicon Valley. They jump from one company to another. And, you know, last year, you know, I did the founder mode. I cut the team in half.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:51:22Amjad Masad?

  Now like 65 people. I moved us out of the city. We're now in, in Foster City. Literally, there's no other sort of, there's actually nothing out there. It's sort of a desert. And, and so we have this nice sort of, kind of office that we're turning into a campus. We have, we have food, we have all that. And, and, and the team here is sort of a tight knit team. There's a selection effect on who joins Replit. If you are smart enough to figure out that Replit has this amazing potential in the future, then we would want you on the team. If you think, if you really think it's a, it's a toy, it's not worth, it's not worth your time, then, then great. And so I think these things that just sort themselves out.

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Love having you. We'll have to have you back soon.

• 2:52:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for, for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10. And yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon.

• 2:52:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic.

• 2:52:19Amjad Masad?

  This is awesome. Thank you for, for doing the show. It's, it's been, it's been really cool.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 2:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Good man. Cheers.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Do we, uh, do we have another guest?

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  We have a surprise guest for you all, folks.

• 2:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Surprise guest. Is he ready?

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Uh, I just sent him the link. He's jumping in in just a minute. Um, and, uh, he should be all queued up. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll go through some more posts while we wait.

• 2:52:44John Coogan?

  Oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We gotta talk to him. We gotta have him on the show, figure out what he, what he bought. Bryce Roberts, uh, over at NDVC says, bought two cars today. One dealership wanted me to come down to the lot, get on a bunch of calls and refuse to send me basic info over text. The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested, requested over text and email. Can you guess which one got the sale? And it's not a Tesla. He went, he, he said he's done being a Tesla customer. Not a political statement, just that his lease is up and his Model X was absolute trash, according to him. I wonder what he did to the car, but, uh, we'll have to talk to him about what car he chose. I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM002.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  I think that would be a perfect fit, two-car garage for Bryce, but we'll have to talk to him about it. But it really is a, an interesting take. I, we talked to the car dealership guy and I've wanted a car dealership that, I mean, sometimes I just want to buy a car and just want to click a button and I don't really care. Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree. I want to just push a button and have it arrive, uh, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I, I certainly enjoy it and let's see if, um, ready when you are. So we are going back into the 23andMe news and we'll give some more context on this, but I like that we're able to be responsive.

• 2:54:12Jordi Hays?

  It's actually crazy that Keon's single-handedly bankrupted 23andMe.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  He was barely in market for.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, it doesn't, it's not a surprise because he did the TBPN interview and I'm sure, I'm sure the market saw it and said, hey, you know, if he's going to be in the temple of technology every week, let's just get out of the stock. Let's just call it. So let's bring him on down. Keon, how you doing?

• 2:54:39Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:54:40Kian Sadeghi?

  What is up?

• 2:54:42John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Are you guys celebrating? I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of depressing. It's kind of macabre to celebrate on when your, when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened?

• 2:54:52Kian Sadeghi?

  Listen, let's, let's put this tweet up, John. We got a tweet up here. I put up late last night. I think it was around 2:00 AM Eastern or so, maybe 1:00, 2:00 AM Eastern. I saw the announcement. The first thing I have to say to 23andMe is thank you. Because the reality is, you stand on the shoulders of giants here, right? We stand on the shoulders of giants. All companies do, you know, you go from Blockbuster to Netflix, you go from, you know, BlackBerry to the iPhone, you know, go from MySpace to Facebook, and now you go from 23andMe to nuclear genomics, right? The industry is wide open. Nucleus is years ahead and we're going to seize the moment. But before I talk about that, thank you to 23andMe. Did a great job building the foundation. And now it's time for something new. That's the reality.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  So yeah, talk me through the key. It seemed like your post was really focused on the, on the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing. Talk to me about that. How different is the technology? And also, why can't 23andMe just use the same tech as you?

• 2:55:46Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah, great question. So I have another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another tweet thread out here that I think you guys should pull up on the screen, give some further context on what's going on and what 23andMe users should actually do. It's currently riding high on Twitter. But no, difference between micrion and whole genome sequencing is massive. It's like a horse versus a car, right? You're talking about 23andMe's technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers. Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment. So it's fundamentally different here. And the same question is the classic innovator's dilemma's problem, right? Why can't this big company do this thing? Well, because imagine, you know, 23andMe is a castle. They have to pull out the foundation of their castle. Everything has to change. Technology, product, regulatory infrastructure, every single part of 23andMe has to change to actually embrace whole genome sequencing. This is capitalism at work. We love capitalism out

• 2:56:31Kian Sadeghi?

  here. 23andMe is dying because they couldn't adapt. Nucleus is standing because we are embracing the newest genetic technology. But actually, I think it even goes beyond technology. Yeah, go ahead, John. You have something to say?

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  No, I I I just want to push on that more because like if I'm like I like you, I'm not going to compete with you. But if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23andMe, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, Illumina or something and figure out how to do a whole genome and.

• 2:56:57Kian Sadeghi?

  You would independently derive Nucleus. That's the beauty.

• 2:57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So maybe you need the de novo approach. Yeah, yeah, maybe the de novo approach is correct. And I mean, that's why I'm bullish on you. But, you know, at the same time, it just, I'm still not really understanding, like, why is it such rocket science for them to just offer? All right, hey, we're on V2 now. We we're like, you still spit in the tube, you still pay a hundred bucks, you mail it to us. We just put it in a different machine. It doesn't seem that complicated to me. No offense.

• 2:57:27Kian Sadeghi?

  Well, it's a massive informatics change. It's a massive regulatory change. It's extremely non-trivial. It's kind of like being like, you know, horses both get out of places. Why can't they just make an engine? It's fundamentally different, you know. But really, the thing that 23andMe got wrong, it wasn't just technology, it was also actually the philosophy of the business. They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs, but because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer, the customer is the pharma company. And I want to say here's something really important, which is a lot of people ask me right now, what should I do with my 23andMe data? What should I do with my 23andMe data? Well, first and foremost, you should move it to a HIPAA compliant environment, right? Like, one of the most shocking things about 23andMe is it's actually not HIPAA compliant, right?

• 2:58:11Kian Sadeghi?

  It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded. So Nucleus, for example, we are HIPAA compliant, we are physician ordered clinical grade tests. We make sure no genetic or protected health information is shared with any third party. It's very similar to like going to your doctor's office. Another thing to know, and I hope you have the thread up here, which is, you know, we outlined some of these things is we, you know, 23andMe. The reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company, any health insurance company, as well as any employer to use your genetic information. That's been illegal for two decades. It's very, very important to say that. So there are some safeguards in place, even though not 23 and me is not HIPAA compliant. But if you're a 23 and me user and you're listening to this, you do two things. One, you should download your genetic data, secure your genetic data.

• 2:58:54Kian Sadeghi?

  And then two, which is microarray data, small snaps of your DNA. But two, you should probably put that in a HIPAA compliant environment. You can actually DM me. I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading their DNA to Nucleus currently because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA because it is, of course, ultimately all about the patient.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, there's not total clarity right now. 23 and me is not HIPAA compliant. I'm trying to understand in a, in, you know, 23 and me in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset. It's pretty damaged. It's a pretty damaged brand. There's not a lot of brand value necessarily. What are, what are some of the risks of, of the types of buyers for that business? And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it and with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business, but just monetizing the underlying user data.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  Is the value the data or just the revenue stream? Because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running. I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them a hundred bucks a test or something. There's some, there's some normal business going on there. It might not be profitable, but like, maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability. Or is this, is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data? Is that at all credible?

• 3:00:15Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah. So it's a good question. I think one thing is Nucleus actively is looking into right now, considering whether it makes sense to, you know, earlier, I'm sure you remember, you know, we explored the possibility of requiring 23 and me. And we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we can do and how we can help in this situation. I think the thing to remember is that, again, this is microarray data. It's a small sliver of someone's DNA. A lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about simply do not exist in the data. And that cannot be overstated because it is microarray data. It is a small sliver of your DNA. It misses the most fundamental health risk that someone could have. So in some respects, it's a little bit overblown when people are worried. But sometimes there's this funny narrative. People are like, I did 23 and me. I learned that, you know, my pee smells like asparagus.

• 3:00:59Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, if that gets out, I mean, that's bad. It should never have gone out. But like, you know.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Not that big of a deal. Yeah.

• 3:01:04Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:04Kian Sadeghi?

  You wonder like, you know, like.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It can't be both doomsday. They're getting my DNA and also the product isn't that good and it's not that reliable. It can't be both.

• 3:01:12Kian Sadeghi?

  Exactly.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:13Kian Sadeghi?

  Exactly. I would encourage people to think about this. Your ops found out your smell. There's, there's two really extreme narratives about 23andMe.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:01:19Kian Sadeghi?

  It's actually, if you start looking at it, it's like, oh, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learned nothing? Because it's a small slip of your DNA. That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world. My data's shared. It's like, well, actually, you know, the reality is that it's a small slip of your DNA. Obviously, no data should ever get breached. No, no one's saying that. Of course not. But of course, it's, it's micro data. And so what I recommend is download the data, knowing that, one, there's better regulations that protect you and protect all people who do genetic testing. And that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical genetics companies like Nucleus that can safeguard your data, right? It's like going to your doctor's office. So that's the thing I think that should be top of mind for consumers right now.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  You, you mentioned that, that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies. Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable, then who are they selling it to?

• 3:02:03Kian Sadeghi?

  So, but this is also, this, this is one of the, again, again, this is a great point. This is one of the reasons why 23andMe failed. Because originally the founder, Anne, she said, okay, listen, we're going to use this data. People are actually, she has a quote on the record, people are going to donate data to 23andMe. In other words, one of the reasons why 23andMe failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application. It was never actually about, hey, can we provide you with life-saving or medical insight? It was about, hey, because it was really a genealogy business for a long time. Hey, we're going to get ancestry on. We're going to get as many people as possible. We're going to take this data and then go to GSK. They worked with, you know, GSK, for example. The problem with that is, this is the thing they underestimate is because it is a small slip of your DNA. It's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which caught up with them. Because then if your business model is based off collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's micro data.

• 3:02:48Kian Sadeghi?

  It's kind of, it doesn't work, right? The customers don't want what you're buying, which is why eventually 23andMe collapsed. So i- in some sense, it's a technological problem, which is, again, it's a small slip of your DNA. But also, I think it's a philosophical problem. They didn't, the customer wasn't the customer. The pharma company was the customer, right? And so that's why people say, I didn't learn anything about it from 23andMe. 23andMe didn't really, their goal was not to actually to really help you in your health. And, and that's another big shift from 23andMe to Nucleus, right? We're HIPAA compliant. Our technology is far more advanced. We actually want to give you medical-grade insight that helps you live longer. Helps you have healthy family as well. And then also, we want to continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, urinalysis, full body MRIs and beyond into a true consumer health application.

• 3:03:30Kian Sadeghi?

  Imagine 23andMe shipped, right? They were how far ahead that would be? They'd be 20 years ahead of everyone, right? Consumer health has just recently hit the zeitgeist, right? 23andMe would have had a head start, but that wasn't the customer. And so it's just not just technological difference, it's actually a very strong philosophical difference as well.

• 3:03:45Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how were they such a, you know, they, they have this sort of one-time purchase problem, uh, that, that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint. Uh, it becomes much harder if you're sort of get this upfront, you know, payment and then, you know, I'm assuming the average 23andMe customer just like, you know, gets the testing done, you know, maybe references back at some point, but, uh, why, why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy? Given the scale that they were at, right? This is a company that does hundreds of millions of top line revenue. You would think they would be able to figure out some economic, like they've, they've been in trouble for a long time.

• 3:04:28Jordi Hays?

  You would have thought that they would have gone found, you know, and would have gone founder mode and, and like figured out a way to.

• 3:04:34John Coogan?

  Well, it sounds like she tried and, and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode maybe.

• 3:04:40Kian Sadeghi?

  I, I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And the reason why people always say 23andMe is one time, 23andMe is one time, right? There was actually no difficulty for 23andMe to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated. But again, their customer was the pharma company.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:59Kian Sadeghi?

  They actually, they, they didn't care that it was one time. They got your DNA. And that is the fundamental difference. 23andMe could have solved that problem. I mean, you look at some companies today, you know, some blood testing companies that are building on top of Quest Diagnostics. 23andMe could have snapped their fingers and launched that product in one minute, right? But of course that wasn't the customer, that wasn't the business model, that wasn't the strategy. So this is a good example where strategy meets technology, which eventually results in failure, right? You have the innovative dilemma's problem. The genetics has really changed. 23andMe has been around since 2006. 2006, the cost of being a genome was, you know, 10 million a sample. Today, nucleic acid's over a couple hundred dollars. It's one of the greatest technological shifts ever. Right? And so all these pieces together, you have, you know, 23 and me collapsing, which is sad, but I also think it's the sign, it's time for something new. It's time for a true health, consumer health application.

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about ancestry.com? They were acquired for by Blackstone for 4.7 billion. It seems like that business is doing pretty well. Again, not a genetics company, particularly they have their little niche in ancestry. People really love that. They become experts there. But how does that business play with you?

• 3:06:01Kian Sadeghi?

  Great question.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  23andme.

• 3:06:03Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, it's interesting because one time a very, very wise investor of ours said, he said, retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case. Okay. It's a very sharp comment. And I think ancestry is a great example of that because genealogy is a very super high touch point of business. People love genealogy. They love looking at who their ancestors are. The people like literally spend their entire hobby actually around this, right? And ancestry capitalized on that. They realized that genetics was a mean to do better genealogy. 23andme never realized, are they a genealogy business? Are they a health business? Are they a drug discovery business? They never got that right. For Nucleus, we use genetics to help people live longer and have healthy families. The value prop is very clear. It's not about DNA.

• 3:06:46Kian Sadeghi?

  DNA is a means to accomplish some end goal for the user, which is namely better health and having a healthier family, right? That is a fundamental difference. And to your point, ancestry is a multi-billion dollar business. Natera, people say genetics business don't work. Natera is a clinical genetic business. It's about a $20 billion. Okay. So genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here. And I really do think in the next decade, you're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth. And that consumer health behemoth is going to have a whole genome, an entire someone's DNA at its foundation. And it's going to impact not just someone's health, but again, also their family and Nucleus is building that future.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  So is it, is it possible then that 23andme had become this sort of toxic brand? And even the pharmaceutical companies said, you know, we like the data they have, but we don't want to kind of like even mess around here because there's huge potential for blowback, right? I imagine, you know, there's, there's some risks there. Is that? Part of why they

• 3:07:46Kian Sadeghi?

  Well, the pharma companies worked at 20 to me, but because the data is such a small sliver, they realized that there was something to be found. The, the, the most important thing for drug discovery in a genetics context is finding rare genetic markers. Because there's actually a lucid mechanism to identify novel rare genetic markers. You need a whole genome file. Right. Cause a micro again is such a small bit of your DNA. If your DNA is a thousand page book, 20 to me, they said one pages, one page, you can't actually get anything out of that. So it didn't work from a drug perspective business. It didn't work from a consumer health business, hence its collapse. There's a great actually chart here. I don't know if you guys, it's old tweet, Peter, my, maybe you guys pull it up later. It's on Bedrock. Just, just screen sharing work. Can I share my screen?

• 3:08:25John Coogan?

  I think you can actually.

• 3:08:26Kian Sadeghi?

  Oh, here we go. We're gonna try.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:28Kian Sadeghi?

  This is a technology brothers first here.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Whatever you screen share is live, so do not share your API keys.

• 3:08:36Kian Sadeghi?

  Ignore the tabs. There's a lot of tabs up there. It's actually small.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  It's actually cropped out perfectly. Yeah, it looks great.

• 3:08:41Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. So here we have, uh, you know, this great thing. I shout out to Bedrock, right? They have this narrative violations, right? Clean tech is dead. You have Tesla. Day nap, so it's fast. You have Tinder. Consumer is dead. You have Canva. And then of course, the most recent artificial intelligence has been overhyped, underdelivered for 10 years. You have OpenAI. I will tell you what is next in 2024. Popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead. And then right now nucleus is OpenAI. That is what's going on.

• 3:09:05John Coogan?

  Let's go. Pump the bags. Let's ring the size gong for Keon on nucleus.

• 3:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you have any idea how quickly, do you have any sort of read on how quickly this is gonna get resolved?

• 3:09:19Kian Sadeghi?

  Well, you know, nucleus might be the one resolving it, if you know what I'm saying. Listen, I'm probably, some of our, some of our. Some of our, let's just say some of our big, some of our big boy investors is my, you know, they currently text me saying, Keon, what can we do here? And you know, I, you know, we, we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars. You know, what's $50 million?

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 3:09:37Kian Sadeghi?

  You have to ask.

• 3:09:38John Coogan?

  Getting cheaper every day. Getting cheaper every day.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go. All right.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, good luck to you, Keon. I hope you can pull it off. I know you'll be successful regardless of what happens.

• 3:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for jumping on. Uh, I hope, I hope this gong is gonna get hit for a very specific reason soon.

• 3:09:54John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Good luck to you.

• 3:09:56Kian Sadeghi?

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Take care. Thanks for coming on.

• 3:09:59John Coogan?

  Bye. Breaking news. I love some breaking news and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down because we are going full golden retriever mode. I don't understand anything about that, but that's why we get the experts on. That's the way the show works. Trust the experts, folks. Trust the seed stage founder pumping his bags.

• 3:10:18Jordi Hays?

  Even trust yourself.

• 3:10:20John Coogan?

  Don't even trust yourself. Just the experts. Exactly. You want to finish out the timeline right now?

• 3:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can do a little bit. I thought this one from Liz Wessel. This has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and pre-seed I've seen in my tech lifetime, 2012 to present. It's becoming truly absurd. I-

• 3:10:39John Coogan?

  Ramp investor, seed stage.

• 3:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  She did the seed round.

• 3:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Goat it. I haven't seen anything crazier personally-

• 3:10:51John Coogan?

  I mean-

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  than 2022.

• 3:10:53John Coogan?

  I was gonna say crypto stuff was really crazy.

• 3:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, the last company that I committed to was like a $60 million post-seat round, but the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions and I don't care. But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's trying to, you know, cares about ownership targets or anything like that.

• 3:11:15John Coogan?

  This is good context from Jason Lemkin. He says, "I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher." And so, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, we had Logan Bartlett on the show to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets because there should be some sort of tracking between these two. And it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think, hey, maybe the public markets are a leading indicator on what will happen to venture valuations. But at the same time, there's a lot of companies that are getting to higher ARR as fast as than ever. And it'll be interesting. The weirdest outcome, I think, would be that, you know, seed and pre-seed deals, they get overpaid for and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes. Like, maybe there's not a single trillion-dollar

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  company that comes out of this vintage, but all of those companies wind up producing like 100 million of EBITDA. And they're like, good businesses. And then like, the funds kind of perform anyway. Like that would be a very strange outcome. It would look nothing like venture has ever.

• 3:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:19John Coogan?

  But to see a, it would be very interesting to see a venture fund, vintage 2025, produce a reasonable IRR without a power law winner in the portfolio.

• 3:12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:30John Coogan?

  I have no idea if it's possible, but it'd be interesting.

• 3:12:33Jordi Hays?

  The, to steel man that.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:36Jordi Hays?

  There's potentially, we've accumulated in the last 25 ish years, the know-how to repeatedly build valuable software, just technology businesses generally. And in that scenario, paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team.

• 3:12:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:58Jordi Hays?

  And maybe you only get a 3X on that one investment, but you get a bunch of other 3Xs. And collectively, you get a 2X fund and that becomes venture.

• 3:13:07John Coogan?

  That'd be very interesting.

• 3:13:08Jordi Hays?

  And there's nothing, if that happens, and I don't, I can argue against it easily.

• 3:13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:14Jordi Hays?

  As well, but if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has like, you know, has just been doing these sort of 2X funds for however many decades, they've done very well. So.

• 3:13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 3:13:30Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:31Jordi Hays?

  We want higher success rates for founders and teams too, even if it's lower terminal, sort of like exit values.

• 3:13:37John Coogan?

  It's also interesting that, I mean, OpenAI is maybe positioned itself as like potentially the power law winner of AI. Like people are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of like a trillion dollars. They think it's going to be a big consumer tech company and no one's really concretized how, like what the source of monopoly power will be in that company. Like there's not really a network effect yet, at least. There's.

• 3:14:06Jordi Hays?

  No, the value is.

• 3:14:08John Coogan?

  It's just an aggregation theory thing.

• 3:14:10Jordi Hays?

  It becomes a verb.

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  It's like Google. Competition is always a click away, but you accumulate so much customer support that you just.

• 3:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Data and by nature of the usage, the product gets so much better.

• 3:14:21John Coogan?

  I would think so too.

• 3:14:22Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 3:14:23John Coogan?

  You know, so maybe we're bullish, who knows? But I mean, it's certainly not cornered resource because the LLMs are, you know, commoditized now, it's not really scale because everyone can serve these, all the hyperscalers can serve these, it's really just that, that attention. Anyway, we should have Augustus on to talk about this next one soon.

• 3:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  From Lee's Jin.

• 3:14:44Jordi Hays?

  I actually want to have him on to talk about his.

• 3:14:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the debate with Ron DeSantis. Or, or yeah, his, his.

• 3:14:51Jordi Hays?

  He was debating Ron?

• 3:14:52John Coogan?

  Well, Ron DeSantis.

• 3:14:54Jordi Hays?

  He's been trying to ban cloud seeding.

• 3:14:55John Coogan?

  Has been trying to ban cloud seeding and RFK recently came out saying, I support what Ron DeSantis is doing, like part of the Maha movement is anti-cloud seeding. And Augustus came out very strongly saying like, no, RFK, like, don't do that, like, like this, there's more nuance to this argument. And so we should unpack that, we should unpack his testimony, which was very interesting. And we should also have him talk about this, which is that China is erasing deserts from its map. The first time I ever met Augustus at Josh Steinman's house having some cigars was, he could just comes up to me and is like, oh yeah, did you know that like the Gobi Desert is going away? And I was like, what are you talking about, dude?

• 3:15:32Jordi Hays?

  It's the Gobi.

• 3:15:33John Coogan?

  And he's like, yeah, China's erasing their deserts. And I was like, how? He was like, yeah, they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees. And that's exactly what this video shows. He says, by far, 65 million MU of desert has been greened. That's around the same area of Denmark. And you can watch this video and it's crazy because it's just like, literally just sand dunes and then the most verdant lush greenery you've ever seen. And it just looks like, wow, like I would never want to live in the desert, but I would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farmland. Like, imagine plopping like a nice farm farmhouse on that. And that's just like the American dream. And we could do that with our deserts in America. And so we should, yeah.

• 3:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  And so we talked to Augustus about this earlier, saying, you know, after you do cloud seeding, like, is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built or will that be your company? And he was kind of saying, maybe it'll be a different company, but, but I want this to happen and I want to figure out what the economics of this business are. Is it just a handout from the, from the Chinese government? If so, do we need to do that in America? If there, is there a way that you can do this just with the free market? That would be amazing, you know?

• 3:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this ties into the terraforming stuff with the. What's the, the Salt and Sea?

• 3:16:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16:48Jordi Hays?

  If we can get water back into that bad boy, then everything around it. But we have some breaking news. I wanted to pull it up.

• 3:16:55John Coogan?

  I don't even know what to tell me.

• 3:16:56Jordi Hays?

  It's not actually breaking, but well, it is breaking. It's the Nucleus Genomics team.

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:00Jordi Hays?

  They were all posted up watching Kian come on the show. So Ben, Ben, pull it up if you can. Look at the team here.

• 3:17:07John Coogan?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 3:17:09Jordi Hays?

  All meetings were canceled, but shout out to the team. Thank you for keeping our

• 3:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for watching. We appreciate it.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Genetic data safe.

• 3:17:16John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:17:17Jordi Hays?

  It's great having Kian on the show. He's, he's definitely built for television. We talked about this. We talked about this earlier with

• 3:17:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Lulu, like what is his format?

• 3:17:25Jordi Hays?

  What's the format?

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  He's a good poster, but he's great in an interview.

• 3:17:28Jordi Hays?

  And just come on and rock and roll.

• 3:17:29John Coogan?

  And, and rub the

• 3:17:30Jordi Hays?

  And rub his hands.

• 3:17:31John Coogan?

  He thinks about acquiring a, a multi, former multi-billion dollar company.

• 3:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Well, that's a great place to end the show.

• 3:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you for watching.

• 3:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Go leave us a five star review. Put an ad for your business or your fund.

• 3:17:44John Coogan?

  Read it on the show.

• 3:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, into the

• 3:17:46John Coogan?

  And if you're breaking news, if you're raising the big money, if you think we should raise, ring the size gong for you, give us a call. We'll have you on the show.

• 3:17:53Jordi Hays?

  And we have a number of founders this week coming on to break their fundraises.

• 3:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can't wait.

• 3:17:59Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 3:18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:00Jordi Hays?

  It is a beautiful

• 3:18:01John Coogan?

  We're gonna have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it. It's like, oh, 50 million, that's, you know, that's a Tuesday for us.

• 3:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  Call us when you're raising 80.

• 3:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 3:18:10John Coogan?

  But right now, it's a golden opportunity for anyone who's

• 3:18:13Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 3:18:14John Coogan?

  Or making, making waves in venture.

• 3:18:16Jordi Hays?

  It's a beautiful week to get to work in and around technology.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  For sure. So many interesting stories.

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  And if we keep up this pace, we will be doing a Dom episode probably next week.

• 3:18:26John Coogan?

  I can't wait.

• 3:18:26Jordi Hays?

  We're at 26K.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  I can't wait.

• 3:18:28Jordi Hays?

  6K out.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  Let's go. Thank you for everyone who's been supporting us. We really appreciate it.

• 3:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Have a great rest of your Monday.

• 3:18:34John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Bye.