Who Is Soham Parekh? Erebor News Leaks, Microsoft Scales Back AI Chip Plans and Cuts 9,000 Jobs, Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching | Deedy Das, Emily Sundberg, Mert Mumtaz, Zak Kukoff, John Kim, Amit Jain

(01:35) - Top Stories (38:42) - Crypto Bank Erebor Rises from SVB Ashes (46:12) - Microsoft Scales Back AI Chip Plans (54:11) - Sam Altman Slams Meta (57:40) - Deedy Das, a principal at Menlo Ventures, has a background in engineering and product leadership, including roles at Google and Facebook, and was a founding team member at Glean. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from engineering to venture capital, emphasizing the value of technical expertise in investing, and highlights his focus on early-stage investments in AI/ML, next-generation infrastructure, and enterprise software. (01:28:56) - Emily Sundberg is a New York-based writer and director, best known for her daily business newsletter, *Feed Me*, which has garnered a dedicated readership of around 60,000 subscribers. In the conversation, she discusses her journey from launching *Feed Me* during the COVID-19 pandemic to its current success, emphasizing the importance of authentic storytelling and community building in the digital age. She also highlights the evolving media landscape, noting how independent creators are reshaping traditional journalism by fostering direct engagement with their audiences. (02:01:28) - Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs and a prominent advocate for Solana, discusses the emergence of tokenized private company shares on blockchain platforms, highlighting initiatives by Republic and Robinhood. He notes that Republic's offering involves mirrored assets with a $5,000 investment cap and a one-year lock-up period, while Robinhood plans to launch on Arbitrum before transitioning to its own optimized chain, emphasizing the importance of regulatory compliance and the potential for increased competition in the space. Mumtaz also addresses the challenges of integrating real-world assets on-chain, underscoring the need for clear regulatory frameworks and the ability to implement controls within decentralized finance to manage market risks effectively. (02:18:19) - Zak Kukoff, Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates, has a background in venture capital and entrepreneurship, including founding and selling an education technology company. In the conversation, he discusses his Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso watch, a gift from his family for his 30th birthday, highlighting its significance during a period when he and his wife were in different time zones. He also provides insights into recent political developments in Washington, D. C., focusing on the challenges faced by Congress due to a major storm that disrupted travel, affecting members' ability to vote on critical legislation. (02:27:23) - John Kim, co-founder and CEO of Paraform, a recruiting platform, discusses the company's recent $20 million Series A funding led by Felicis, bringing their total funding to $25 million. He explains that Paraform connects companies with specialized recruiters to fill critical roles, emphasizing the increasing importance of recruiters in the evolving tech landscape. Kim also highlights the growing demand for forward-deployed engineers and the role of AI in enhancing, rather than replacing, human recruiters. (02:43:19) - Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, discusses the development of multimodal models that integrate audio, video, language, and images to advance beyond current large language models. He highlights Luma's video generation models, which are being utilized by Hollywood, advertising agencies, and individual creators, serving tens of millions of users. Jain also addresses the transformative impact of AI on industries like Hollywood and advertising, emphasizing the need for adaptation to rapidly evolving AI technologies. (03:10:58) - Who Is Soham Parekh? Timeline in Turmoil! TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. The current thing has come in hot off the presses. It's Erebor, a new crypto bank. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Anduril founder Palmer Lucky are launching Erebor, a digital bank built for crypto and tech startups.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  You know what I'm saying, John? The trade of the century was going back and buying up all the, all the Tolkien domain dot coms.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  You would have become a billionaire yourself if you just bought all the dot coms.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  There was a lot of debate over whether or not the, the, the, the Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings naming scheme had kind of run its course, right? Because people were knocking it off. Non-founders fund companies were starting to use the names, not going to say any names. Oh, that is, that is insane. That is insane. I can't believe no one's ever said that. I'm not going to dig into that anymore because.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll let you dig into it for yourself.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Joke, but we have news from Zach Kukoff on the show yesterday. He's coming back on the show today. He's our Washington correspondent. He says, this is great news about the new, the new Lord of the Rings themed bank Erebor. Zach Kukoff says, this is great news. JP Morgan, HSBC, et cetera, haven't fully filled the gap that SVB and First Republic left. An insider run risk forward tech bank is much needed. Backers include Palmer Lucky, Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, et cetera. I think Lux is in this too. I don't know if that's public yet, though. We'll have to figure that out.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Scoop.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  But they're obviously, the Silicon Valley elite are rallying around.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  We love to see it.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  This, this new project. So they're calling it the next SVB for hard tech. The filing says, says Erebor wants to be the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions, an unusual boast meant to soothe OCC examiners while still holding stablecoins on its own balance sheet.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Who, who it serves and why Columbus. It's starting, this is, this bank's going to be in Ohio. Target customers are AI, crypto, defense tech, and advanced manufacturing startups. A digital-only model will be legally headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with a satellite office in New York to tap Wall Street.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Very exciting. So yeah, we'll have to dig into this. We're having Palmer Lucky on the show soon. Would love to hear more about the plan here. And I agree. SVB was a special, special institution. It was very sad when it went away.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  There's been a gap in the founder dinner market. They were a huge funder of founder dinners.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  And also mortgages.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Big on the mortgage front. I mean, it really was a crazy failure where you could have like $40 million but illiquid and be making like 200K.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  One million dollar mortgage.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  And you couldn't buy a house. And it's just like, okay. And then, and then you're strapped with this, with this question of like, okay, do you raise your salary and start raising burn just to get a mortgage and stuff? Or do you put it on the balance sheet of the company? That's been done before. There had to be a better way.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's crazy that, that within whatever, a month, we lost SVB and First Republic, the two funds that really served our industry. So it makes sense to build back. It is funny that, that Zach said, we need a risk-forward tech bank because.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  It was risky.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  What's interesting is they didn't get burned on the, on the startup stuff.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  They got burned on treasuries, the least risky thing ever. But, you know, no one was expecting.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  A duration mismatch.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the duration mismatch. Anyway, in other news, Microsoft scales back ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays, says The Information. And Neo Margana here is asking Grok, what were, what, what were they trying to do with their chip ambitions? And Grok says, Microsoft chip ambitions aimed to reduce reliance on suppliers like Nvidia, optimize for performance for Azure AI and Copilot at lower costs. They developed chips like the Azure Maya AI accelerator for AI tasks and Azure Cobalt CPU for cloud workloads. However, delays such as the Maya 200 chip postponed to 2026 and design challenges led to scaled-back plans. So, Google has the TPU.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Amazon has inferentia, Apple has the M1, M2, M3 chip. All the hyperscalers getting in on the custom silicon action.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  What was the name of the quantum chip that Satya was teasing?

• 4:32John Coogan?

  That's Majorana.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Majorana.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Majorana.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  But that's still in the works.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  That's still in the works, but that's a completely separate thing. And that, you know, that is such a different fork in the tech tree that you're not going to be writing. You're not going to be like, oh yeah, we have some CUDA code that's inferencing some, you know, large language model and let's just run it on quantum. It's like you have to rebuild the entire, the entire system to run on quantum. And that's very far out, but people are optimistic. People, sharp people that I talk to are saying like, quantum is, all the companies right now aren't delivering products that are in use, but there's no, like the physics, the science is solid. It just might be 10 or 20 years until this is really in production. So it's all about, you know, TSMC fab capacity right now. So Microsoft scales back ambitions for in-house AI silicon.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Maya, AKA Braga chips slip for a full year.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  You hate to see it. We love, we love custom silicon here. We want it to arrive as fast as possible.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  I hate when timelines extend.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  It does happen though.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  So, I mean, we are big tech defenders here and we are very sad to report this.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  The delayed part is expected to trail Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators once it finally ships, undermining Satya's goal of cutting GPU spend.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  And that's going to be hard because the new Blackwells are going to come up. They're going to be amazing. He's going to need some. You don't want to be GPU poor right now.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Not right now.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  You might, you can be a leaser, but you can't be GPU poor. And so while Microsoft pauses, Amazon is planning Tranium 3 for late 2025. And Google already has its seventh gen TPU in production, leaving Azure the slowest of the big three to deploy second generation custom AI software. And in other Microsoft news, they are reorging this entire company right now. They are announcing that they're cutting 9,000 workers in a second wave of major layoffs. We already reported on this. We talked about this, but they have 4,712 applications for A5B so far.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, how many full-time employees does Microsoft have? Isn't it in the hundreds, thousands?

• 6:36John Coogan?

  I like that Tyler's wearing the bezel hat today. It's a good one. Just throw on the team cap.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Tyler clearly doesn't have Cluley up, otherwise he would have.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  No, he really shouldn't be running that during the show.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Let me think for a second, but let us know Tyler.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Approximately 228,000.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  228,000, so this is what 4% of the.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  They're cutting 9,000 employees.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  It's 4% of the, 4% of the headcount. Uh, this is the second cut in 60 days. The July round follows 6,000 job losses in May and hit sales, gaming and engineering. Uh, flattening the org chart. Management layers are being removed to raise the coder to manager ratio. Love that. Um, you know, there, I mean, it really is this world where the line between coding and managing is blending and programmers can do a lot more and act like PMs because there's AI tools and they can roll out stuff. So you're, you're not in this cycle anymore of like, the manager decided that we need to implement a function. Go take a month to build that. Go take a week to build that. It's like, okay, I built it. Now what's next?

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  You got the afternoon.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, so that higher throughput engineering should come through in a delayering of the organization. And in general, these, these big companies, they often get really huge and then they need to, uh, they, they need to, uh, kind of delayer and streamline this, the, the company. Um, anyway, it seems like we have some technical difficulties. We will sort, sort that out while I read you the next story. Okay, great. Um, Google, Amazon and Meta have all trimmed VPs and middle managers this year. Redmond is citing dynamic market, market conditions rather than performance. Um, interesting. Um, anyway, uh, in other news, uh, China hosted the first fully autonomous AI robot soccer game. I'm hoping we can pull this video up.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Ian Bremer says they've still a ways to go. I want your review. You haven't seen this video yet, have you?

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  First time reaction.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  We're reacting to it live on the stream. Um, China's been working on this for a while and the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's a story in the journal about, uh, China is rapidly eroding America's lead in the global AI race. Uh, DeepSeek and Alibaba's open source Quen are now running inside HSBC, Saudi Ramco, and even on AWS and Azure, forcing Western vendors to justify higher closed source pricing. Um, very interesting development. We'll see what happens with the new Llama models, whether those can catch up to DeepSeek and Quen, unseat them. We're also going to have the founder of Mistral on the show soon. Anyway, this is the latest robot soccer game out of China. How do you think they did?

• 9:03John Coogan?

  It's not bad.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  They're not flopping enough.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't understand the meta game.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  If they were.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Oh, I got carried out on a.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they know showbiz.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good TV.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  That's good showbiz.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  So if you watch the beginning of this video, the beginning shows one of the robots falling down. Look at this guy. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, he's down.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  He's down. He's down.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay, they would have got a whistle for that.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  China knows how to pump up attention on AI. They got the robot marathons. They got a variety of stuff going on to draw attention to AI. It's certainly, it's, it's, it's the hottest industry. They got the hedge fund folks moving over.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  They love robots.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  And they love robots and, and, and we're seeing all those displays of drone shows, like the drone light show. That is going to inspire a generation to go want to work in drones, right? And so, and same thing with.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  To work in killer SPV drone.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. No, there, there is. Remember when we covered DGI in detail earlier this year? DJI puts on challenges where they, people can compete to make killer robots. So they don't even hide the fact that these robots can be used.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  As death machines.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're going to see a lot more of this, but the government is fueling a scale up of AI over there. Beijing is pouring subsidies into cost efficient, domain specific AI while Washington chases AGI, widening a practical capability gap despite US chip controls. US officials worry Chinese guardrails bake censorship into exported systems. The fractured ecosystem could undercut global security cooperation and US influence over AI norms. And so, yeah, this is what we've been talking to about Aaron Gin. He'll be on the show tomorrow. We're also talking to Chris Miller, the author of Chip War tomorrow, and we will dig into.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  If the US allows millions of humanoid robots controlled by Chinese companies to be sold in to the United States.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  It will be a colossal.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  Failure.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was listening to Dylan Patel's presentation at AI Engineer on YouTube on the drive in today. And the number of H100 equivalents that Huawei was able to fab at TSMC, like in the midst of the chip controls was crazy. He breaks it all down and it's fascinating. So first off, there was a, there was a company that was basically a front for Huawei. That was like, yeah, we want a ton of chips, TSMC. And TSMC was like, sure, you're not based in China. We'd be happy to sell these to you. But they sold them like a million chips or something like that. So the latest Huawei Ascend is crazy.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Then they have a Cloud Matrix 384 or something like that, which is like 384 chips all networked together. Specifically, instead of, so there's two different types of wires that can, that can wire the chips together. Basically, there's copper and then there's fiber optic. And fiber optic is, is NVLink. That's what Nvidia touts as like, when you get a rack of servers and they're, talk to each other really, really fast. That allows for better training and inference too. But it's very important. It's basically like, like you're taking a bunch of different chips and you're making them all work as one. So it's super valuable.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Apparently Nvidia tried to do a rack scale. I think it was 64 chips all networked together with, with optical cables. And they couldn't get it to work, like they couldn't get it out. And Huawei actually figured it out. And so even though their chips aren't as solid as Nvidia, like on the networking side, they're outperforming there. According to Dylan Patel. And then the other interesting thing is that like the chip controls don't just affect like TSMC and Nvidia. Like obviously you can't just go buy H100s or H200s if you're in China anymore. But you can go to TSMC through a shell company, but then you also need high bandwidth memory. And that comes from Hynek, SK Hynek in South Korea. That's also controlled.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  So what they would do if they had another company, they would say like, yeah, like we definitely want like all the best HBM, high bandwidth memory in like this device that we're making, like just build it for us and install it. And then they would ship it and then they would disassemble the, the device, rip the memory out and then put it on a GPU chip. Yeah. It's crazy, crazy, crazy. So here's a bunch of good details. We can dig into that a little bit more later.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  But DeepSeek was built in a cave with scraps.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Anyway, James Cameron has been talking about AI copyright fears. He says fears are overblown. Humans aren't original either. A lot of hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general are issues of the source material for the training data and copyright protection. I think people are looking at it all wrong. Anybody that's a human being is a model. You've got three and a half pound meat computer at the brain. Let's hear it for three and a half pound meat computers.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  As a screenwriter, you have a kind of built in ethical filter that says, I know my sources. I know what I liked. I know what I'm emulating.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  I know how I'm hallucinating.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  I also know that I have to move it far enough away that my own, that it's my own independent creation. This is the, you know, great artists steal. You know, instead of copying, what's the difference between stealing an idea, transforming it, turning into your own and just copying something, derivative? And we'll, and we'll go into that in a little bit. So I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective is, is what, is what's the output? Like, is the output transformative? And so the reason I want to talk about this is because the Wall Street Journal is covering the fact that studios, artists and tech giants are clashing over AI copyright in Washington.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Versus the algos.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a big one.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Meta recently scored a courtroom win. Judge Vince Cabria tossed authors' claims, but warned you are dramatically changing, even obliterating, the market for that person's work, signaling more litigation ahead. I don't know if I agree with that, right? I, you've used, maybe you've used ChatGPT to summarize the key takeaways from a book. Were you really going to buy? And, and, you know, does that stop you from, from wanting, is it, is it, how different is that from, you know, reviewing, you know, reading a book review? Or, or things?

• 15:19John Coogan?

  With regard to existing intellectual property, like I have gone to ChatGPT and said, hey, I'm trying to tell a story, a bedtime story to a four year old. Uh, let's throw Mickey Mouse in there and then why don't we mix it up with Batman? Oh, wait, they are owned by two different companies. One's owned by Warner, one's owned by Disney. How will ChatGPT handle it? Well, it tells me a story with both of them. It's fine. This could never happen in the real world because of the IP is owned by different companies. But it doesn't on ChatGPT. But is it, is it, is it a truly a substitute? Or does it actually just make my four year old beg for more Batman and Mickey Mouse toys? Like, I think it's probably net positive to the brand. Exactly. It's probably, it's probably net positive, probably not fully a substitute. We're still buying and renting tons of books.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Probably more likely to want to go to Disneyland.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  I agree. And also Universal Studios, go see the Batman ride. But um, the, uh, the other interesting thing, I guess Warner, so it'd be Six Flags, anyway. Correction.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Correction.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  But the interesting thing is that like, what about new intellectual property? Like, there are people that are saying, I'm gonna build a new intellectual property on, you know, and I'm gonna use crypto rails like pudgy penguins. Like, they're gonna try and use that technology to, to accelerate the develop of a new franchise, new IP that they own. There are also folks who are saying, I'm going to use artificial intelligence to create new IP. We saw this early with Little Michaela.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Now we're seeing.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  And then there's the community owned IP creation. What is the, um, what is the Italian?

• 16:48John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  The Italian, the, somebody.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Oh, you're talking about the Italian slop lords or whatever, the brain rot? Italian brain rot, yeah. Italian brain rot where like, someone probably owns some portion of the IP there.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know. It feels like a free for all.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, all this stuff is, is changing, is changing really quickly. But I think at the end of the day, all that matters is that like, everyone gets a steak at some point and everyone gets a slice of the actual like, economic profit. And it's somewhat fair. And so that's why the courts exist. They will sort this out.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, a proposed 10-year federal ban on state AI laws was stripped from Trump's big, beautiful bill after creatives and child safety hawks blasted it as a big tech giveaway. We heard from Zach Kukoff yesterday that this was a win, effectively a win for Anthropic, who was interested in seeing this get blocked. The issue is that states like California have so much influence that if California passes AI-related laws, they'll likely lead to widespread compliance.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  So it's pressure from both flanks. Tech lobbyists argue mass scraping is essential to US AI leadership. That makes sense. I mean, DeepSeek is certainly scraping the entire Chinese internet, and so you're going to get left behind.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  And the entire Western internet.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  And YouTube, probably.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  The whole internet. We'll take the whole thing.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  While Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA are pushing for compulsory licensing and outright data mining bans, leading studios caught in the middle. Anyway, we will dig into that more in a little bit. There's more news about the trade deals. So Japan is saying, "We're not going to do a deal," or "We're going to push back." They're calling Trump's bluff. We'll see. It's heating up. Trump on Japan. I will write them a letter saying, "We thank you very much. We know you can't do the kind of things that we need, and therefore you'll pay 30%, 35%, or whatever number that we determine, because we also have a very big trade deficit with Japan." Let's go to the video from Donald Trump, the president.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  But some countries, we won't even allow to trade. But for the most part, we're going to determine a number just very simply. Write them a nice letter, probably one page or a page and a half at the most. And it's going to be essentially congratulations. It's going to be an honor to allow you to grow and do business in the United States of America, because it really is an honor to be able to do that. But we never viewed it that way in this country.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's wearing the Gulf of America hat, you know. Mount Fuji's right there, might want to turn it into a different name. It's part of the trade deal.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe that could be a chip, you know, a bargaining chip.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Naming rights to Mount Fuji.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can keep the name of your own mountain named Mount Fuji. So a lot of this is going about cars, obviously. NSX is the top of mind for everyone, the Acura.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember when Sam, when they dropped Deep Research? Sam said he used Deep Research to find like a one of one.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, NSX, yeah. Yeah, these are important. This is why we have a trade deal.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  I like the hat, unclear.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Where this goes.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Where this goes. And I think, I feel like we've just had such a good thing going with Japan.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it's.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  They should be a logical humanoid robot partner. You know, they got Asimo, Honda's been building robots for two decades.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  I was really hoping that something would happen there.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  We never comment on politics, but I would, I would like to see the United States leaning more into that partnership and figuring out how we can make a lot of things together.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  So what else here? Tokyo refuses any pact that preserves Trump's 25% car tariff. Negotiator Akazawa fears electoral blowback if Rice and autos are conceded. Trump has threatened fresh duties and rejected deadline extensions, unnerving allies wary of US tariff volatility. And it's Apache Scorecard. To date, the administration boasts only a limited UK accord, a Vietnam mini deal and a China truce. Canada, South Korea and the EU remain stalled amid tariff threats. And so we're still in that pause. But. Staying on Capitol Hill, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick says,

• 21:30John Coogan?

  "Today, I called on the President to address my serious concern regarding reports that the United States withholding critical defense material pledged to Ukraine. This comes as Russia launches the largest aerial assault since the war began, firing over 500 weapons at civilian targets in a single week. Ukrainian forces are not only safeguarding their homeland, they are holding the front line of freedom itself. There can be no half-measures in the defense of liberty. We must, as we always have, stand for peace through strength. I have formally requested an emergency briefing from the White House and the DOD to clarify these reports, review our nation's weapons and munitions stockpiles, and ensure the United States remains fully committed to providing Ukraine with the resources it urgently needs to defend its people and preserve the cause of freedom."

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  High level, what happened here, we basically opened a new front to this broader global conflict, right? We had Ukraine, then we added Iran. We didn't and don't have the munitions stockpiles to sustain two proxy wars, or in the case of Iran, an actual conflict.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  I remember reading in the Journal, the day Ukraine, the Ukraine war broke out, people were saying like, "Okay, we are out of javelins," like the shoulder mounted rockets.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  There's people like Drava, Rohendra from deterrence, who we've had on the show at least, I think a couple times, close friend and partner, and then Aaron Slowdog, who has been talking on multiple occasions about how some of the weapons systems that are critical to, you know, the US's overall strategy will have like, yeah, we have like 500 of those. And then you use them and then they're out, and then remaking them can take years.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  You're just not ready to be like, yeah, because in peacetime, why would you be like, "Yes, I need to produce a million drones that are just going to get blown up." Like, the industrial capacity just isn't there. So Patriot missiles have paused deliveries of Patriot interceptors, air-to-air missiles, and artillery shells have been redirected to replenish U.S. stocks, Pentagon officials confirm. The shift reflects a reranking of threats from China and the Middle East above Ukraine despite earlier White House signals of Patriot transfers. And Ukrainian officials and U.S. lawmakers say the delay could translate into more civilian casualties as Russia steps up aerial assaults. They're talking about aerial assaults.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Russia is taking advantage of this period where they know that Ukraine doesn't have the supplies to either get aggressive or defensive.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, it makes sense that Russia is going back on the offensive because of Operation Spiderweb. There's a very aggressive Ukrainian offensive to destroy a bunch of Russian airborne assets. Now they're saying, you know, hey, we're bringing the fight back to you. And so that continues. In other news, Tesla global deliveries plunged 3.5% in Q2 2025, but I saw a lot of posts on X saying that this was not that big of a decline. So Amit says deliveries were 384,000 versus 389 expected. Analysts thought it would actually be 350. Where's the brand damage, Lowell?

• 24:38John Coogan?

  This guy's a fan of Tesla, obviously, but there are some, there is some data here. So for the Model 3, Model Y, they produced 396,000, almost 397,000, and delivered 373,000. And so the consensus was 394K, marking the second straight double-digit quarterly drop. And so the question is like, how much of this is about just EV cost or perception of the cars?

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Q1, how much, Tyler, what were, how much were Q1 sales down? Because if you do two back-to-back.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Double-digit drops.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty meaningful. That feels like brand damage, but it's also a very competitive market, right? Every major manufacturer now has EVs in the market. And again, we've talked about this before. The biggest thing, it's possible, one of the biggest drivers here is that the lack of meaningful refreshes of the Model 3 and the Model Y. And the Cybertruck is just selling, seemingly well-selling in beautiful Los Angeles, but not selling very well.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  But it's hard at that price point to break through to the real truck market. I'm pretty sure the Ford Maverick, the F-150, I mean, the number one convertible in the, in the United States is Jeep Wrangler. Tesla doesn't have a convertible. They don't have anything that competes with the Wrangler, right? Tyler, you got some numbers for us?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it looks like it's down 13.5% sales.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  This quarter?

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes. What about Q1?

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, how was Q1? So year-to-date, Tesla's Europe sales are down 28% in May, and then in China, they sank 7.6%. So there's a whole bunch of different narratives around like, like, there's a lot of pressure internationally, but that's more about like the trade. And then internally, there's people that stopped buying them for political reasons, but then there's people who started buying them for political reasons.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  I think there's a big contingent in Europe that, that cares about the politics as well. The China problem is just the fact that you have Xiaomi and all these other players coming in with great cars undercutting the market.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  They got a Taycan knockoff. They got a Pro Songway knockoff. They got a Model S knockoff. Yeah, I mean, they're very good.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Not exactly innovating on the silhouette.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  But they are innovating in the, you know, sort of internal computing systems, features.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  There's some crazy, crazy Chinese cars out there.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Q1 was down 20%.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  20%? Yeah. So, I don't know. How do they build it back?

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  So, Amit's saying, where's the brand damage?

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Can we pull up the market caps for Tesla and the rest of the Mag 7? I want to see how they're ranking. Here we go. We have our Mag 7 leaderboard, and Tesla's at the bottom, $984 billion in market cap, trading at 172 price to, uh, price to earnings ratio. So. They're seventh, but if the cyber cab stuff plays out.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  The most magnificent things about the company is that the E ratio.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely fantastic.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  So, but, but if the cyber cab plays out, that is a significant, I mean, you look at what is the, what is the market for, you know, all the different robotaxi drives, right? Probably in the tens of billions of dollars that Americans would spend. And so I think, I think a lot of people are expecting that to hit and that to work. And that the fact that the cyber cab is at that 30K price point instead of the 300K price point for a Waymo, being a durable advantage, the fact that they can produce, I mean, the fact that they even make 400,000 cars in a quarter. It's 100,000 cars a month, 3,000 cars a day. That's a lot of industrial capacity.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  And so that has to have some, uh, have some, some value and some leverage if, uh, if totally the AI catches up and the cyber cab becomes dominant.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  The battle between Waymo and Tesla is just getting started.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  And then a lot of people are buying the stock on the promise of humanoid robots. It's like, it is, it does feel early. Optimus does not feel ready for your production or ready to buy or ready to go out on the manufacturing line. But what other stock in the mag seven would you buy to get exposure to humanoid robotics? If you think that's an important thesis, like there's not really that much.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  And even, and even in the, and even in the smaller, like, like, like mid cap or small cap stocks, there really aren't that many pure play humanoid robotic companies that are out.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  So there's not really anything that's sucking up that demand in the market. Anyway, speaking of the market, uh, Tesla, uh, Figma has dropped their S1. The numbers are strong. 821 million dollars in the last 12 months revenue, 46% year over year growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin. They turned profitable, 1.5 billion dollars in cash, zero debt, 91% gross margins, best in class for SaaS, 132% net dollar retention, sticky AF, says Jason Lemkin. Seven, uh, 78% of the Forbes 2. 1,000 use Figma, 76% use two plus products platform expansion from massive losses to 18%

• 29:45John Coogan?

  operating margins. This is how you prep for an IPO trading under dollar fig on New York Stock Exchange soon. So congratulations.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely, absolutely incredible. Obviously, Figma is a sponsor and partner of ours, but this story is really incredible. The other thing that Jason missed here that I think is interesting is Figma holds BTC on the balance sheet, which I think that retail is going to be excited by. There's also a really exciting AI story here. Figma Make.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  So they own almost $70 million in Bitcoin ETFs and was approved to buy 30 more million in BTC. Zach says, this is the first company we've seen this cycle that's buying Bitcoin and isn't bad. That's pretty notable. He used a different word. And Tane says, Figma has 1.54 billion in cash on hand, but only raised 749 million in primary capital in its history. It will go public with a negative net burn over its lifetime of 791 million, thanks to their efficiency and the $1 billion breakup fee received from Adobe. Wow, that's remarkable.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  Things are working out.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I mean, you know, they obviously getting shot down by the Europeans on an acquisition that I think was exciting for everybody involved from Dylan to Scott to the to the cap table and the team. And, you know, Adobe broadly was, I think, disappointing for everyone. But I think this is going to be, you know, in hindsight, I think people will look back and say this was this was actually the right thing.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  And I think the markets are going to love another. Founder-led company.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Yep. Christina had a good post here. The first thing I appreciated in Figma's S1, everyone said the S1 was the best-designed S1 ever, which makes sense. But was right at the start of Dylan's letter. "When Evan and I started Figma, too often companies write departed founders out of a company's story. Dylan did the opposite, and that says a lot." I love it.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Very classy. So, you can go to Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  And you can check out Figma Make. You can vibe code whatever you want. Tyler is in the midst of vibe coding a new product that we're going to release, a data product in the next couple of weeks for free, and I'm excited to share that. Otherwise, I wanted to pull up, let's pull up the polymarket for the reconciliation bill. Zach Kukoff is going to be coming on the show later today to give us the update. Things are trending down across the board. The getting it done by July 4th is sitting at a 61% chance, down 6% over the last 24 hours. So, we will follow this one, and I'm excited to get the update.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, a big bill like this with this deadline of the 4th of July, because there is this like overall incentive. I think people would like to enjoy their 4th of July versus angrily debating a bunch of small details.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  I think the debt ceiling always comes up during the summer. I remember years ago, it being a topic during summer. And it feels like a very weird thing that you have like this ultra-high-pressure DC narrative during like the slowest time of the year.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  The nicest time of the year in France.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  It's very American. We grind it out here.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  We grind it out.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, you don't need to be grinding on bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. You can go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. We need to tell people about, sorry.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  I was going to say, our new ad that we ship for Wander. We shipped this 35 minutes ago.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  We should show this off.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Live on location at a Wander, and I would encourage people to just go watch it.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Can we pull it up on the screen?

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up a few seconds. Let's give a little teaser.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  I think we can watch the whole thing.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  We can watch the whole thing? Yeah, it's only 45 seconds. Let's pull it up.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Let's pull it up and watch it.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  We went full golden retriever mode for this one, folks.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Can we go fullscreen on this? Is that possible? Go fullscreen. Well, we pulled that out.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Such a fun shoot. If you're a GQ fan, you probably noticed that we were heavily inspired. Maybe even, you could call it a shot-for-shot remake of the GQ video with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. But, I mean, fantastic inspiration from those folks.

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty funny. We showed a preview of that to a few people and they'd go, "Is that a wander?" We're like, "Yes."

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Yes, obviously.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  But still, this is a property in Malibu that you can rent this summer.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  And it is absolutely fantastic.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got to tell folks about the TBPN derivative works clause. So if you're watching the show, if you're writing about the show, engaging with the show, you should know that we have terms of conditions, terms and conditions, terms of use. We don't ask for much, but there is one rule that we take very, very seriously and our lawyers have been very serious about, which is that if you watch the show, if you engage with the show, if you write about the show, and then you go and create a derivative work, so a copycat, a livestream, a daily technology show, a clone, yeah, a clone.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  We don't ask for financial compensation.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Nothing.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  We don't ask you to stop doing what you're doing, but you are legally required to drink one glass of municipal tap water.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  Just one, every time.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Every time you do the show.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  So if you were to copy us and do a daily show.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  You would have to drink.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  A one glass of municipal tap.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yes. And so a lot of people have been fighting this. They copy us and then they refuse to drink the tap water.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  But this is legally.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  It's only a matter of time until they tap out. They gotta tap out.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep, this is called tapping out.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Tapping out is when you admit that yes, you did copy TVPN. And so you're tapping out, you're drinking the tap water and it's legally binding. So just if you're thinking about doing it, just be prepared to drink.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  And we wanted, we wanted this policy to be fair, right? It doesn't cost you anything.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Maybe your health a little bit.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so feel free to copy us as long as you tap out.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  As long as you tap out.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Always tap out. And we'll be, we'll be, you know, if you launch a derivative work, copycat, clone, whatever, we'll remind you.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  In the comments.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Everyone will remind you. Yeah, a lot of people are like, oh, how will I know if, if, if, if what I'm doing is truly derivative? Like, you know, is this, are these their definition? It's like, don't worry, you'll know. You will definitely know if you have to drink the tap water. Like, we're going to make it apparent. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  I was talking with Buddy yesterday. He was walking by one of our billboards in New York. He sent it to me and he said that he signed up for Vanta on Friday because he signed a massive logo that I can't say for a startup. And they said,

• 37:54John Coogan?

  SOC 2 compliance?

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna need SOC 2 before we can dance.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  On Vanta now.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  And I'd love to see it. So shout out to Vant. Uh, sorry. Shout out to Grant and Vanta.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Grant.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  For, for cooking.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go a little bit deeper into Erebor. This is certainly the hottest story in our world today. Uh, it appears the Financial Times, I think what happened here is that they found the, like a filing and then put the story together. So this is, there's a lot of no comments in here, but there's still some interesting facts that we'll go through. So, uh, Peter Thiel joins tech billionaires backing new lender Erebor to rival Silicon Valley Bank. And people have been talking about this new bank and the name and stuff. And so it had, it had been out there, uh, but it had not been.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  Startup named after the dragon's mountain in Lord of the Rings.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  So a group of tech billionaires led by Palmer Lucky, co-founder of military contractor Anduril, is preparing to launch a US bank intended to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank, serving startups, including cryptocurrency businesses. To be named Erebor, the bank would be backed by high-profile tech investors, including Joe Lonsdale from ABC. And he's a co-founder of Palantir, according to people familiar with the matter. Thiel's venture capital firm, Founders Fund, would also be among the investors, according to two people. Uh, like Anduril and Palantir, Erebor's name is a reference to J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Erebor is the lonely mountain whose treasures are reclaimed from the dragon's mouth. Lucky and Lonsdale, who were big donors to Donald Trump in the 2024, uh, US president election,

• 39:24John Coogan?

  want the bit, want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go-to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks might reject. We were talking a lot about like founder liquidity, but there really was a, a, a time when you raise a $10 million Series A and SVB would almost always underwrite that if it was with a tier one to the tune of like a $2 billion, uh, $2 million debt line. So you could just get an extra 20% as venture debt. And use that to fund CapEx or an inventory line.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, venture debt, venture, venture debt would always get a lot of heat.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Well, that's because there were a lot of.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Used poorly.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there were a lot of aggressive lenders, but SVB was kind of one of the cleaner ones.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, Airborne has applied for a national bank charter in the United States, a license that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank. The bank will be a national bank, providing traditional banking products as well as virtual currency-related products and services for businesses and individuals, according to the application, which was made public this week. Target market would be businesses that were part of the US innovation economy, in particular, tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defense and manufacturing, who'd also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies. It's also planned to work with non-US companies seeking access to the US banking system. Airborne's co-founders first discussed launching a bank after the collapse of SVB in 2023, according to a person familiar with the matter.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  SVB has been the main bank for US startups and their venture capital backers. Its assets were first sold to its first citizens.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  SVB is still operational.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  In effectively name only. It's owned by First Citizens.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  What's interesting is that it is, it is like owned, like the brand is owned and the corporate structure changed hands, but different pieces of the, of the firm.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Got sold off.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Like split off. I'm pretty sure like Morgan Stanley wound up with like the venture debt group or something like that, like different desks went to different places and they kind of parceled stuff up. Some of it was sold, some of it was just like, hey, this person, you know, would rather be doing X, Y, or Z at a different firm. And so maybe Goldman or Morgan Stanley is trying to get into a particular market and they're like, hey, SVB has some great guys over there. It was kind of like a free for all for a little bit. So, there's not too much in here. There's a little bit about who's running this company. So Lucky and Lonsdale were not expected to be involved in the day-to-day management of the bank, according to people familiar with their plans. It will be run by co-CEOs Jacob Hirschman, who previously worked as an advisor at crypto

• 41:58John Coogan?

  group Circle, and Owen Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of digital asset software Air Compliance, Mike Hagedorn, former senior executive vice president at New Jersey-based Valley National.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for senior executive vice presidents.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  For sure. We'll be the bank's vice, uh, we'll be the bank's president. And so they're gonna have co-CEOs and a president on day one. What a stacked lineup.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  You got PT, Palmer Lucky, Lonsdale in the boardroom. And then you got co-CEOs and a president. This is a stacked lineup. I think we're working on a graphic. I've been pitching it. The starting lineup for this new team is looking pretty good.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the beauty of business. It can feel like sports, but there's not the same kind of rules, right? You know, you can put as many people on your team as you want.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  There's no salary caps.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Most importantly.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  Juwan was, Juwan was, uh, was posting, he was like, we're gonna see salary caps in our lifetime. And I hope not, because that would imply-

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Well, Mumdani's trying to do that, right? He wants the salary cap to be like $999 million. Like, he wants to be a billionaire. There's Bernie, too, also wants salary caps in, in business and, and the economy.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Net worth caps.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Net worth caps, yeah. Uh, much like a salary cap. Imagine if there was a net worth cap in the NBA. It's like, yeah, like, okay, you've, you've made enough money. Like, you can't, you have to play for free now. Uh, its head office will be in Columbus, Ohio, which we talked about. Um, part of the application was submitted confidentially and has not been made public, uh, such as details related to its shareholders, equity structure and business plan. Lucky did not respond for requests for comment. Lonsdale confirmed he was a financial backer, but declined to comment further, and the other folks did not reply. Anyway, uh, I'm sure they're gonna be building some projects, and you know what they're gonna need? They're gonna need Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues,

• 43:50John Coogan?

  projects, and product roadmaps. Uh, XAI, Greg Yang, great poster. Someone, DJ Kauz says, another great account, says, "Visiting the XAI office really humbled me," and it's just tons of tents around a, around desktops. Is this actually the XAI office? I'm so confused. And then Greg Yang, who actually works at XAI, says, "That's not our office. We have way more tents." So, I have no idea where these original pictures came from, but it does look like a lot of tents in a, inside of a-

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  The internet's a tough place these days. You never know what's real, right? They could have just made, put up tents in a tech office.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could have been a prompt.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  It could have been a prompt, but I do know that the XAI team, I have it on good authority that they, there are tents in the office. They sleep in the office.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily like every day. Someone else was giving them a little, was chirping at them because they were saying, if you, if you stay up coding until 3, 4 a.m., but then you'll sleep in.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Doesn't really count. You're just nocturnal. It's like, what's impressive is like actually working really hard for like 12 hours, taking a break, having some rest time, and then getting a full eight hours of sleep. And it doesn't really matter what cycle that happens on. I guess the benefit of like the nocturnal programmer is that there's just less going on in the world. So there's less distractions.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  Knowing that you're grinding while your competitors are sleeping. That's priceless.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  I guess, but I mean, truly, truly, there is, like email is quieter during the night, right? And like the news is quieter. So you know, it's like, there's just less opportunity to get distracted by like the, the Elon Trump blow up. That happened when they were sleeping, apparently. So like, yeah, they, they, they woke up and they were like, okay, I guess something happened with our boss and, and the president, but you know, the story is kind of over, so let's get to work. Anyway, if you work at XAI, you're going to have to sell this to big companies. You're going to need Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. Anyway, we can go deeper into Microsoft. They are scaling back their ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  The Microsoft is focusing on less ambitious chip designs through 2028. They hope by scaling back some of the designs and pushing out the schedule for other AI chips, it's already working on, it can develop them more easily. The hope is that when these chips are released over the next three years, they will still remain competitive with Nvidia's AI chips. The decision follows delays in in-house chip development. This is from a report in the information. Microsoft wants to reduce reliance on Nvidia for AI computing, but if we pull up the Mag 7 chart. Nvidia doesn't seem to be affected. They're still at the top of that baby at 3.8 trillion, but Microsoft's coming for them at 3.6 trillion. And so it's neck and neck. If Microsoft can fab their own chips with TSMC, design their own chips, rip out Nvidia, that might be enough

• 46:46John Coogan?

  for flipping. Yeah.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna track on a poly market. Matt, Matthew from CloudFlare yesterday said, every time we've seen this type of scale up on the silicon side.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  It's a glut.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  There's been, ended up being a glut. So we'll see. Praying that this time it's different.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Would hate, would hate, love bubbles, hate the crash.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Well, we have a funny post here from Zach, quote tweeting, someone says, you attract what you fear. And Zach says, ah, I'm so scared of $3 billion and drunk cigarettes with her. I love that you put this in.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Zach's been on a roll.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're selling anything, including cigarettes, you're gonna need to pay sales tax and you're gonna need Numeral. Go to numeralhq.com. Also, don't sell cigarettes. It's bad. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  Says the nicotine salesman.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Very different.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  No, it is very different.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance and we use Numeral to sell nicotine.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  It is the sales tax automation tool of choice for Ridge, Groons, Graza, the list goes on. Go check it out.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Someone put us in the truth zone.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Andy.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2cents.money.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  Who's running 2cents. We gotta have him on sometime to talk about his, have you seen the screenshots from his app?

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  It's like Twitter, but it's anonymous.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Your net worth is there, just plaid, plaid and its consequences have been disaster for the human race.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, he has a post here, he says.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Did you imagine that this would result in a social network around your net worth? He's like, no.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  It's the magic of building infrastructure.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  I just wanted to make things a little bit smoother.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, he was putting Kylie, Kylie Robinson from Wired in the True Zone, says, claims to be wired, wearing AirPods, question mark?

• 48:42John Coogan?

  It's a good question, Kylie. You gotta answer some stuff. This is, this is big.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  I am a firm believer in wired headphones. Try them out.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say wired, the newspaper or the magazine.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  If I, it's terrible to say, but if I could only have one, I would take Wired headphones.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yep. Oh, well, well, she should get Wired headphones because that would be very, that would be very on brand for Wired.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have, we have an announcement. We're using Fin AI now for customer support. We've gotten a lot of questions coming into our customer support line, people asking, you know, are you guys normal heights? And Finn can just immediately chime in. Of course, these, both of them are normal heights.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to, no, we need to set up a, a, a support at tbpn.com.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Running on Finn.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  To answer these pressing.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  These pressing questions. There aren't enough ads. Can I get a bespoke ad? And it will just automatically generate an ad for you.

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  That would be what.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Is Jordi really 5'1"?

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yes. Do you guys really, would you really take a bullet for big tech? It's like, absolutely. It's like, Finn, we were joking about.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Relax, relax.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  No. Finn is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in ranking on G2. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. Go to fin.ai to check it out.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  In other news, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 workers. This is a short article, but we, we've already covered this, but it's interesting to track. What's interesting is like, is, is Microsoft the only one that's doing these big riffs right now?

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  See, this, this is what, this is what, this is what scares me.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is Satya now?

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  There are so many, there's, there's so many top signals.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Right now, just everywhere you look, top signal, top signal, top signal. I want to believe that this time it's different, but our industry goes through cycles naturally. Satya is a seasoned operator. He has incredible traction in generative AI. He's getting 20% off the top of whatever OpenAI makes. You would think that he was going, would be going on a spending frenzy.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Yet he's conducting routine layoffs. He's giving up, you know, data centers. He's, he's saying, yep, you know, you guys, you know, I don't need it.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Even though, yes, they're, you know, so I just think he's being.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  He's playing it, he's simultaneously being, he was being really aggressive like two years ago, and now he's starting to play it a little bit safer.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  And I think in some ways, you know, some of these riffs are just practical, right? He's realizing, yes, AI is making us more efficient, so we should need less people to do more work. People were putting Benny off in the truth zone last week because he was saying, AI is now doing 30 to 40% of the work at Salesforce, and yet his headcount has just been ticking up steadily. And so, yeah, this Satya getting hyper practical scares me.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  I mean, he's, I'm pretty sure he joined Microsoft in the 90s.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he's been through his.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  It's not like he's just lived through the dot com crash and the global financial crisis. He worked at the same company and saw how Microsoft handled those two crises. I think Microsoft handled both of them pretty well, but he can totally pattern match. Maybe he's wrong, but if he's still, if he's wrong and there's no pullback, there's no glut of chips, like the AI continues to progress, he's still set up pretty well for it, right? He's like, he's still, you know, major capex, serious hyperscaler, huge, huge bet on like the best horse in the race, basically, the best independent horse hitched to OpenAI, even as that relationship gets more and more complicated.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  It feels like he has a deeper connection to OpenAI than, say, Google does with another startup in the foundation model lab, or Amazon, or, you know, any of these companies, because they've all kind of like, like Anthropic has deals with Amazon and Google, and like, they're, they're starting to kind of warm up to being dance partners, but they're not, Google's not getting 20% of Anthropic's top line, you know, it's just not that, the deals aren't structured that way. So he has not only the leading lab, but the most dominant stake of any hyperscaler in a lab, period. So incredibly well set up, so we will continue to track it.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  But whether you think it's a top signal or a bottom signal, you gotta head over public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  And they have a triple.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  IRA match, 3%.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  1%, 1%.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  In other news, the talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams Meta AI's talent poaching spree. Missionaries will beat mercenaries, he says. Quote, "What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems," said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers. So, big, big question. Paula says, "With all the AI labs in SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries?" Funny. Oh wow, this is an old post, yeah, from, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new Meta Superintelligence team. Deedy, who's coming on the show, wait, in like three minutes?

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Three minutes.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Okay. I was thinking, wow. Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 Meta Superintelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. Seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa. Eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in the US. Immigration is key to US AI innovation. Jeff, Bev Jezos has a hilarious post here. "The foreshadowing here was insane." And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark Zuckerberg says, "The thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring."

• 55:06John Coogan?

  This is, this is an incredible series, the Startup School series that Sam did while he was at YC. He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks, and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation, like, right as they were kind of on the, on the biggest moment in their come up. Why are you laughing?

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  It's just, I love, I love this business.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  You're like tearing up, looking, how happy, how happy.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just, it's...

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Watching this great power conflict play out in real time is wildly entertaining.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  It's entertaining.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  And the consumer is going to be the net winner.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  I was about to say that, and also America.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  It's extremely, this is a pressure cooker of the highest, it's so competitive. But the good thing is that at the end, like, we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets, you know, like, goes to the Gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. Like, this is, this is, you know, the difference between being a, having $10 billion or $100 billion. It's like, it's kind of all fake, but it's all, it's all like, it's super high stakes, but it's still capitalism and it's still, like, the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool, even if you get beaten. But the end result is that we have this hyper-competitive race to build the best thing with, like, kind of a safety cushion so that you're not, you're,

• 56:38John Coogan?

  like, it's not like the government's putting a gun to your head.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's global, right? It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  In this talent pool.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  And many of them are getting maxed out on contracts.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Well, I'm sure both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are losing sleep right now over the talent wars. They gotta get on 8Sleep. Go to 8Sleep.com/TVPN, get a new Pod5 Ultra. Sam, get a new Pod5 Ultra. Mark, they got a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns and free shipping. So go check it out.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm back in the game today. I got an 89. I got massively dinged on my consistency, which has just been all over the place. 90 minutes of deep sleep, two and a half hours of REM sleep.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  You're really going into this. I mean, you won by default because I slept in Malibu. I'm moving the 8Sleep after work, so I don't have anything to act because I was...

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Si's gone for me. Si's gone for me.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Yes, congratulations, Jordy. You deserve it. You deserve it.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring in DeeDee.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing?

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Hey guys, how's it going?

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Great to have you on the show finally. I feel like we've reacted to almost every one of your posts. You're very, very helpful in terms of contextualizing and just like summarizing everything that's going on, giving breakdowns. It's really helped the show, honestly. So, thanks for being here.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Thank you for being a core contributor.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  I appreciate it. I'm a big, big fan of the show. I've seen all of your episodes, I think.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  So, you guys are great. You guys are great. I'm so happy for what you guys are doing.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Thanks, man. I really appreciate that.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  And did you join All In? What's this in the background?

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  This, this message has really been overloaded since the podcast, but no, that's just our, our venture message. I mean, this is what Medlo, Medlo's slogan is.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Oh, so you were using that slogan before 2020?

• 58:32Speaker 04

  It was.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  No way. They, they mogged you. They stole your, they stole your line. They just steamrolled you. This has happened a few times. Uh, what, what, what was it? Oh, Gemini. Uh, I thought, I thought of it for years as the Winklevoss-backed crypto trading app.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  Exchange.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Now, Google comes out and they're like, we'd like that brand actually over here. And so now Gemini, I think of as the Google product.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  They went from Bard?

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  They Bard it up.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  They Bard it up. No one was, no one was competing for Bard. Bard was clean space, but, uh, but they had to go Gemini. And so, good luck to the Winklevoss twins. Uh, anyway, uh, why, why don't you kick us off with like a little bit of background and kind of, uh, what, what you do, just to kind of get everyone familiar?

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Well, my, my background, I'm in venture now, but my background has been somewhat non-traditional for venture. I spent most of my career as an engineer and a product person. So, four years.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  If you say, if you say non-traditional, I expect, I expect Warlord, I expect Blackwater, I expect, uh, uh, kite surfer, or like someone who's like wing surfing or rock climbing.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  I actually thought, I actually thought you were joking for a second because I thought you were going to say, my, you know, non-traditional background, a venture, I went to HBS, I was a product manager, um, you know, I just found my way.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  We're not letting you get away with that, man.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  You would be hard-pressed to find. An actual person who's done engineering at a big company and and a startup from the very beginning. Not like your strategy and ops role for two years. In venture, I actually don't know that many people like that. I do know it's a meme though.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  You were in the trenches. You were in the trenches. You were in the technology trenches.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we'll give it to you.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. So yeah, what how do you how do you land at Benlo? Were you doing were you doing investing before Angel Investing? What did that look like?

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  No, I actually had no business being in venture. I never wanted to be in venture. I wanted to do build stuff. But after Glean, I thought, you know, I was exploring building something new and then I was talking to a bunch of these venture firms just get the get their thoughts on it. And and I was kind of roped in and I thought, hey, it's kind of strange that there's not as many people who are technical and really care about engineering stuff in venture. And it would be nice to have that because whenever I would speak to people, they'd be like, look, man, like, I don't really understand this technical stuff, but is this a big market? You know, like, is this going to actually work as an idea? And that's kind of the ethos of why I wanted to join a venture firm in the first place. Like, like, I think it'd be valuable for technical people to talk to

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  other people who really care and nerd out about the actual idea. So I've been doing that for a year and a half and it's been it's been more fun than you think. You know, venture has a lot of connotations on what the job involves, whether it's a sexy job or not. And I don't know, it's just very different for very different people, I'd like to believe.

• 1:01:25Jordi Hays?

  What's been your strategy the last year and a half? Has it been trying to find and lead deals yourself, support, a mix of both? What is the?

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Write a check, hire the CEO, take over.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, no.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Contrary, everyone's founder friendly now. You got to differentiate by being founder unfriendly.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  Very founder unfriendly. If you're, if you're non-technical, then you're gonna have problems. No, I'm kidding. Um, no, there's two things we do. I've, I have led deals and, and also co-led deals with some of my partners here. We've done about four. Three of them are announced. One is not in terms of Series As. But mostly like I got brought in to help lead the anthology fund, which is our a hundred million dollar fund with Anthropic. And that's been a lot of fun because it gives you a lot of leeway on the kind of deal structures that you can have. Uh, not your traditional like, hey, high ownership necessarily, Series As and Bs and Cs. It's more early, more, hey, how do we help the ecosystem? How do we just get into ideas, um, very, very early and just meet founders?

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  So you don't have a two-week process where you're trying to fall in love with the founder for the first time. So.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other thing I'm, I'm sure it's been massively helpful because one, one of the challenges, if you go from operating and then you join a fund and you're only able to do a few deals a year, it's like, how do you build up that? Those, the frameworks, how do you really learn the craft of investing and learn what not to do? And I, I, I think one of the, one of, um, you know, there, there's plenty of stories in the valley of people that, uh, our friend Justin Marres. I think like his first two companies he ever in, angel invested in were, were unicorns. And there's a bunch of other stories like that. From my personal experience, the, like, the, the average deal that I've done has just gotten better and better across the 60-plus companies that I've invested in. And so that, that, that can be a really big challenge. If you're thrown into a big firm, you're having to write,

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  make big investments and yet you're only able to exercise the actual check writing a couple of times a year. Um, how, how is, how's the anthology fund going? Are you, are you guys, um, you, you?

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Well, specifically, I want to talk about, uh, you said like non-traditional deal structures. And when I think of that, I think, uh, you can come to someone and say, hey, we'll do a $10 million Series A, but we'll also give you $10 million in credits. We've seen Nvidia do some of these deals. We've seen obviously the Microsoft or the Microsoft OpenAI deal was kind of structured as some sort of cloud credits and all this different stuff. And that can be really valuable. Is that what we're talking about here? Or is there something else? Or, or are cloud credits even relevant in like traditional deal structures these days for AI companies that are building on top of foundation models?

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  But we do, we do offer a bunch of cloud credits and we go up to like thirty to a hundred K in cloud credits. I honestly don't think that's the main draw. It's like nice to have for companies, all these good companies can figure out how to get credits or how to spend money on this. I think what's more interesting is, you know, even when I was like angel investing prior to being in venture, that's a different art, like it's much easier to get into deals as you guys probably know when you're angel investing because you just know the person, you're like, hey, man, I'm gonna throw in ten K. Can I get a ten K allocation? They're like, yeah, you seem like a good guy, you can be helpful. Here's, here's.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  The bar is just so much lower.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  The bar is very low and then you, then you go to a venture firm and the same companies and you tell them, hey, I want to lead your round and they're like, good luck, buddy. Like, here's a line, get to the back of it. Um, so that's, that's what becomes really challenging. But to the, the, the question of anthology specifically, I think probably the biggest draw from what the founders tell us is, hey, we just love to know what the labs are up to, how to work with them, how to plan for the future, because we have no visibility into that. And for us, it really helps because you can find, form a relationship with people and actually figure out, hey, you're an awesome founder and I don't know that because you've more than just the three week process that you've pitched to me. I know that for a good six to eight months now.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  So we, you know, we've deployed about thirty odd checks to anthology. I would say in the beginning, it was a little bit of calibration needed to figure out, hey, what was the right kind of company? Um, and we don't only do early, we do some like mid-stage companies that are interesting to us for a future round as well. And the, the two of them have graduated into full series A leads. So that's, you know, what was, was our success metric going in, which is, are these actually good deals? That will graduate to real ownership checks or not? And so we had good fire and then open router sort of be those companies that graduated.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  Very different companies.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  We had, we had Alex on from Open Router and neither of us, I guess, realized that they were announcing like this massive series B.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  So we had him on for like a full fifteen minutes on the day of his fundraiser.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  So I know his, I, I, I, I know an open C and I know how good Open Router is, but I didn't realize it was like, somehow the news got lost that it was like, oh, wow, it's like a massive. Massive fundraising day. I'm interested to know more about corporations or large scale ups partnering with venture firms. We've seen a bunch of different, I mean, going back to like the Slack fund. I remember Slack was investing in startups. And there's this question of like, for a lot of founders, it can be fun to have, you know, on balance sheet investment vehicle. A lot of founders have our scouts at VC firms or they invest off their own balance sheet.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Why would a big company come to Menlo to do the fund, like all the, it seems like you're offering like a lot of the work? And, and is that the right model? Like, should we see more of that versus the fully in-house effort that's staffed? I think Stripe's done some stuff in-house, Perplexity has a fund now. And I'm wondering if you have an opinion on like best practices or what works or what doesn't? Or when something would work on balance sheet or directly within the org versus outside?

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  I think it's just. Yeah, I think, I mean, personal opinion is you need a fortress balance sheet and you probably should be like a public company to be making balance sheet investments purely because of the duration mismatch. If you lead or participate in a series A and then don't, don't see a return, you're not, you're not going to see a return from that for maybe a decade.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  I mean, Bloomberg Beta has some other stuff like that. There's just so many fascinating, different, different like paths to it. And then it also is this weird dynamic where it's like.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Because it's like, hey, this is non-core to what we're doing, but it's important to the ecosystem we're building. Let's make it so that it's not our job to deploy this capital, but we still get a lot of the benefits.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Totally. So, yeah, I mean, give us your take on all that.

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  I think of, look, we did a lot of analysis on what a corporate fund structures look like and what kind of investments they do in the past. And these are all gross generalizations, but generally if you run a corporate fund. A, you're not compensated on carry, really. So the incentives are not really aligned to deliver returns. The incentives are pure ecosystem bets. So if you look at a bunch of the investments that Slack Fund have made, look, yeah, there are Slack apps, a lot of them, and that's good for the ecosystem. But are they real companies? Are they real businesses? A lot of them aren't. And when the more you look at corporate venture, like, they don't spend a whole bunch of time out on the road sourcing, really like, you know, balls to the walls, going to all of these people and trying to figure out what

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  the good companies are. The reason we wanted this structure was, A, so we didn't have that incentive problem. We could focus on real returns while also investing in companies that benefit the ecosystem, but not purely that. So a lot of the anthology companies, they don't even necessarily only use Anthropic, or use Anthropic at all, or necessarily even call L L Ms. They are generally companies that are beneficial for the AI ecosystem. That's one. And then number two, I think the bigger thing is, most companies have no business running a venture fund. This is just not, like you said, it's not their core business, not their forte, it's not what they do, it's not something they care about. So it's really nice where you're like, okay, you guys care about it. We care about the

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  ecosystem benefits. Why don't you help us run this fund? And then it works for everybody. And I think the one exception case to that is probably OpenAI. OpenAI Startup Fund has done very well, but you know, not in, not in small part due to Sam being-

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sam's kind of a good player.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  So- Potentially a generational VC if he was doing that full time. Yeah, yeah. What about the competitive dynamic? Like, like, would GV, I mean, Google Ventures has kind of spun out so much, but like, it'd be, it'd be crazy to think about like GV investing in perplexity, or Bloomberg Beta investing in perplexity, even if it's not actually that much of a threat, and they're, and the CEO's confident, like, hey, I'm not going to get disrupted by this. It's like, you have a portfolio CEO who's out there tweeting every single day, like, I'm coming for you, Bloomberg, let's look at how much money they make, I'm gonna disrupt you. Like, that just might be like awkward. And so, has there been any dynamic- Around that where you where you have like either a mandate to like, hey, let's stay away from pre from companies that do pre-training because that's on Anthropic's roadmap.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Or like even with the Claude code cursor thing, like you want to stay away from coding agents because Anthropic's really, really, really pro that. Like, how do you think about, like, you want to be close enough that there's a benefit, but not too close where your competitors? Is that, is that a real dynamic or how do you think about that?

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  It very rarely has happened. I mean, Dario is actually exceptionally missionary. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Like, he really does care about what these companies are doing. I mean, look at Goodfire. Like, they have an interpretability lab. They're like, look, another one is good for the world. We'll, we'll do it. Um, so there have been certain cases where companies, you know, some of them haven't been announced yet, but one of these companies has alternate approaches to doing a bunch of different model stuff. Uh, and we asked Dario, we're like, hey, is this bad? Like, are you okay with this? And he's like, completely cool with it. I, if it's not something that we have a very strong bet on, that they're going extremely head on and have a bunch of capital to go head on right now.

• 1:11:39Speaker 04

  It's just not something we'd care about. So we do try to tread carefully. Obviously, you don't want to bite that hand, but it's not been an issue at all so far. We've, we've never run into a conflict.

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  How are you broadly advising companies that are working with labs, but also fear that they might end up competing with them at the product layer over time? And I know, I know you were at Glean, the founding team there, and that, that feels like something that in the long run, obviously, um, you know, uh, someone like an OpenAI might, might want to compete there. So I'm curious how, how you think about that dynamic?

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I think the reality is, look, like, it's a free market and competition's going to happen one way or the other. Whether or not Anthropic backs or Anthology backs you and then Anthropic decides to compete at a future point, I don't think anybody.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm not even talking, I'm not talking about Anthology as much as just generally, you know, portfolio companies. Let's say you're doing, you know, code gen or something like that and you're working with a lab. And, um, you know, we had, uh, Syracuse. Was on the show probably a month and a half ago at this point, talking about like, it's not impossible to figure out what's important to each of the labs and the things that they might do over time. And you should, as a founder, be under, you should be well aware that what you're doing might be on the path at some point.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a question we get all the time. And I think the reality is, my guidance usually has been, and this was how we thought about it at Glean too, is, what is something that is a pie that is very valuable to you, but not at the scale that it's valuable to any of these big companies, until it is, you know, like you're really, the bet you're making is, hey, this pie is maybe $50 million in revenue and nobody, no big company will care about that. But once you capture that pie, it's actually way bigger than that. And if you do, then you can, you can reach breakout escape velocity before anybody else is at your heels. And hopefully you've built up enough of a, you

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  know, no, I hesitate to say moat, but you've built enough tech that it's not easy to replicate overnight. And if you have a little bit of that, there are odds that you could have a breakout business. And I think today's climate is actually way better than a year or two before, because the truth is labs have a huge revenue pressure. So they're not going to be investing in random crap. Like, they're going to be investing in stuff where they're like, okay, that's $1 billion in revenue, that's $500 million in revenue. I'm not going after this $10 million opportunity.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anthropic, anthropic one to four billion dollar run rate in the first half of this year. To justify a lot more resources, you have to be able to make a dent in that somehow, or show that you can make a dent.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  I mean, it's kind of like the Google problem with like, but at one order magnitude smaller, where like, if you're running a business at Google that's making $500 million, it's like, Okay, time to wrap it up. Let's move on to something bigger. This is not really relevant. And you're like, this could be a public company.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  This was actually the entire premise of Glean. I don't know if you guys know this, but when we started, Google had Google Cloud Search. And the reason we weren't worried about it is because we knew the team there and we're like, this doesn't make a dent on cloud.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  And the fact is like, Google Cloud doesn't care about this. And, uh, and now, you know, sort of, they sort of changed their mind and they care about it again. But, um, that's kind of what the sweet spot. You want to do something boring and seemingly small enough that nobody else cares.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Can you, uh, can you talk to me more about Glean? Uh, there's been some reporting about like the data wars. Uh, this question of what's, how, how, how sharp elbowed will Salesforce be or Google? If I'm a business owner, I've, you know, we just started TBPN as a, as a company and it's a, it's a greenfield. So you're like, this time I'm gonna get it right. This time I'll just have, I'll just, I'll, I'll just have one suite of tools that'll all work together. And then, and then, you know, three weeks later, it's like, okay, I have Slack and Gmail and a bunch of other services. And they're not really talking to each other the way I want. And as a, as a business owner, I'm very strong about like, that's my data.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  You have to let me have my data and not through this export button that takes two weeks to go. And I, I want an API that I can immediately send over to, to OpenAI or Anthropic or Glean. But the, the companies always find a way to kind of like have sharp elbows. And we saw this during the, during the, the rise of Google and Facebook. Uh, there was a pitch, John Battell, the, the, the, the founder of Wired was arguing that, uh, Google, you should be able to go to Google and say, give my Google search results to Facebook. And Facebook, you should say, give my social graph data to Google, just so I get better ads. And both companies hated that idea and they would not let you do that. Uh, it's a little bit different in the B to B context, but how do you see the data wars playing out?

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  How do you see, uh, the, the, the, the, the competitive pressure where a lot of the B to B SaaS providers also want to offer some sort of enterprise search experience?

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  Well, there's, there's a couple of ways to look at this. I think number one is, yeah, the reliance on, uh, Glean's reliance on just Salesforce is, is a small percentage of the, the many, many connectors we offer. And the many, many other things that we end up having to integrate with for especially Fortune 500 clients. They often don't even use a lot of the SaaS tools that are household names in, in the valley. So, uh, the, the net impact is, is somewhat limited because of that. But I think the more important point here is the reason why it seems like, the reason why people like Salesforce want to cut off connector access is like what you said, to sell a competing product.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  In practice, I think it's actually a pretty synergistic relationship otherwise. That's why we worked together so well for so long. Because you don't sell less seats because people use Glean. You actually sell more seats because people use Glean. Because now there are people who weren't on Slack, weren't on Salesforce, who are now discovering that information and going there and then reading the, reading the content. So your daily active users actually increase, not decrease, um, when they use Glean. In fact, like if you don't have licenses on Salesforce to a certain set of users, they don't even see Salesforce results. So it's not like you can also sell 10 licenses, connect to Glean and then have the thousand people in the company view those Salesforce data, that Salesforce data.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  We don't do that. We don't even offer that as an option, uh, because we want to stay true to the permissions of the source data source. So, you know, net, net, I think this is a situation that, you know, Glean will have to work out with all of these partners. But I think there's a good out. I mean, I don't think there's a reason other than them wanting to offer a competitive product that we, that they care about this access. Um, and the companies too, like you said, like if you're running TBPN and you want to connect to Glean, you should own your data. You should own your Slack and Salesforce data. They don't, shouldn't own it. So you have every right to give away that API access, but you know, that's going to be, um, a conversation that Glean's going to have to have with, with a bunch of the partners.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Where are you most excited about agents right now in terms of actual products in market delivering value for customers outside of coding?

• 1:19:01Speaker 04

  Okay, so this is the one I talk to all my friends about. It's not like a venture venture thing. It's just really a product I just have fallen in love with in the past week or so. You guys should all use it. It's called, and I'm not a paid shill. This is like just me loving a product. It's 19pine.ai. It's super elegantly designed, simple chat interface, your typical stuff. But what it does is it just goes and makes phone calls for you, but can coordinate very interesting things. So for example, just, just the other day, I was like, man, my, my insurance on my car is just way too high. I need to get this down. Can you figure out how to get it down? And it goes in it like these are no phone calls. Nobody wants to make goes and makes a phone call to my insurance, stays on hold for three

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  hours and then gets them on the phone, calls GEICO, calls State Farm, gets quotes, comes back and goes and negotiates and then it brings my insurance down. I did nothing. And the payment model is so, so nice because you don't pay a subscription for this. You pay a percentage of what you save, which is agreeable to everybody. And so

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would do that deal all day long with like, yeah, just call this person for me. If you save me like a thousand dollars, I go give you like a few hundred bucks, something like that. But yeah, I'm looking. I have the website pulled up. They got to get a better domain name. This is, this is absolutely brutal.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  What's the domain name?

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  1919pine.ai. But they can call the IRS for you, cancel your AT&T plan, talk to the DMV, get a refund from an airline.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  I'm going to use this. I literally have an old internet line in our old office that I need to cancel and I can only call during business hours and I just happen to be live on TV during business hours every day. So I just haven't done it and I'm just getting billed for Spectrum every month and it's so annoying. So 19 pines coming for you, Spectrum, you're on notice. Anyway, I want to get your reaction.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but any, any other, like this feels awesome, but as a consumer agent that is solving real problems and they, they have the economic model that people have been excited about of like selling, selling results. Any, anything else in the, in the enterprise, like sales agents, anything like that, that you're seeing that?

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Is actually working?

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  Look, there's a bunch of interesting companies and the revenue is inflecting, but you know, that's just not like it's good. Like these are good businesses that are working. I think the things that that excite me more at a more meta level is the the technology powering what agents can do. Um, and like, I think the elephant in the room is all of these, all of the new custom RL stacks that are helping agents use custom software is actually going to be a huge unlock. You know, like computer use hasn't really worked yet. It's not a thing that people use, but there is a world where, you know, just like nineteen pine, you could genuinely automate the work of people if you give computers access to your computer in a fast way. And I don't think we've seen that yet because the models aren't capable of doing that.

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  We've seen early versions of that with Claude code, which is, hey, what happens if you take a model and then RL it to be very good at agentic work and call a bunch of tools? Well, O three is similar. Um, what if you apply that to very specific domains of like, hey, man, like I have a gazillion enterprise S apps I don't even want to use and I don't even know how to use or touch. Figure out how to use them so we can just throw these agents at this stuff that a human was doing. Cause a lot of the glue work is still not solved by by agents. Like a lot of the glue work is humans in the loop. Go click this button, go review this text. If we want to fully cross the chasm of like ninety five percent of the work to a hundred percent of the work. I think that's super exciting on a meta level.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  And all of these little agent agent apps are, and sometimes big agent apps are are going to benefit from things like that. So that's one of the the broader themes I'm super, super excited about.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  I want to get your reaction to uh how the AI talent wars are affecting venture specifically. Uh, Will Monitis, friend of the show, has a post here. He says Citadel's law, any, any industry with sufficiently high stakes will end up mirroring the culture of hedge funds. Massive cash comp for the top performers, bid away dynamics where entire teams walk together. Extreme litigation of non competes, hard O work twenty four seven culture. But then he says, he ends with this at the margin, I think, makes the capital environment for funding independent, big. AI things much worse, not worth underwriting a team if you know they can do R and D on your dollar and then walk.

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  In the same way, my sense is fund staking terms got worse, not better post pod shop. So he's talking about how in, in, yeah, like, like if you are betting on a founder and then they get some massive, uh, massive aqua hire offer, is that going to distort the early stage venture market?

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, I think like absolutely. I've read that post. I love that post. Great, great commentary. I think the thing I would say is this isn't new. I mean, there were always startups never paid well, right? Like you're still getting paid like 170, 200 K on average. And you know, Google and Facebook are right there to pay you like a 500 K salary. So it's not like it's new that big companies can, can, you know, throw out their wallets and give you more money. Usually even at, at Glee, we had this policy where we're like, look, we're just not going to negotiate somebody who only cares about comp. If we lose that person, that's because they're a mercenary and that's okay. We're not judgmental. Just you do what you think is best for you. We really want people as missionary as you can be about like B to B SaaS, but we want people who are, you know, more

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  incentivized to do the thing that we're doing here. So, but does 10 million dollar a year, um, paychecks affect that? A hundred percent. Thankfully, it's just a few people who are privy to that. But if, if there's more of that happening, it becomes a risk. I mean, absolutely. The one thing that I do the most when I do diligence is aside from the typical venture stuff is I really need to have confidence that this founder, no matter what, wants to work on this problem for the next five years. And to the extent that you can get that confidence, that's what I'm looking for. But you can't solve for it. It's definitely worse. People are always on the spectrum for missionary and mercenary.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  And if the dollars go up, the spectrum shifts. So there's fewer people who can afford to be missionary if you're getting paid 10 million a year.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Last question from me, and then we'll let you go. Do you think the AI talent wars spill over into the rest of the mag seven?

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  You know, Mark Zuckerberg is founder mode CEO with a massive business throwing off billions of dollars in cash. He took, you know, he's spending $20 billion on the metaverse, was able to slide some of that over, put some crazy offers on the table. We, we, we keep joking that some of these meta AI, super intelligence offers are more than Tim Cook's annual salary. So that might be a culture clash, even if Apple says, hey, we want our own super intelligence team. And we've earmarked $5 billion to do it because they could. Meta or Apple has produced almost a trillion dollars in dividends or like free cash for their investors over the past decade or something like that 13 years.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  And so the logical thing would be, okay, maybe we will see similar bidding wars, talent wars continue at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. But maybe there's

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Or it just forces Apple to effectively outsource the R and D by paying OpenAI or Anthropic billions of dollars.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  So yeah, how do you think that shakes out?

• 1:26:33Speaker 04

  I, I don't think more firms, more mag seven companies are going to compete like that. I think Zuck has a particular style and he always has. I mean, if you look at, like you said, like Oculus, yeah, he's very happy to pour billions and billions of dollars into something with the hope that it will one day work. Most other mag seven companies don't usually operate like that and they can get talent in many cases for, for, for way cheaper. I just don't think it's, it's also not, Apple might be able to do it on their balance sheet, but it's not just something that everybody can afford to do. It causes a lot of cultural rift within the company. If you talk to, the other day I was scrolling Metas blind for, through a friend.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  I mean, people are upset, you know, like people get upset when you, you just hear that you can recruit somebody as an engineer and pay them $25 million a year. That's not a good thing for the culture of the company. They also check out mentally inside because they're like, what is the point? Why am I doing this? And so I think

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's one frame where it's like, oh, wow, we hired a 100x engineer. And there's another one, which is like, so I'm a one one hundredth x engineer? Maybe I should do one one hundredth the work.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you're, you know, the right way to look, look at that. You have some, you know, top 25 AI researcher in the world joins your firm. You should be excited because you're already compensated really well and it will probably increase the value of the company in the fullness of time, which directly benefits you. But of course, if you're making, if you're only making 80K a month, you know, not even, not even hitting that, you know, seven-figure mark.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Um, that could be a little bit, a little bit frustrating.

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  Still sad for the guys making 80K a month.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  3K more, they could be in that.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  The fact that you know the MRR numbers like the back of your hand is hilarious. Uh, this is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  This is super fun. Thank, thank you for joining. Let's do it again soon.

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  And John, thank you guys for having me. Uh, love it. See you guys.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Talk to you later.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Take care.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  You might've seen our billboards are tearing up New York City. We have our New York City correspondent joining right now, but if you want to run a billboard in New York City, get on adquick.com. 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.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  We went from the West Coast to the East Coast. Emily should, should take over the West Coast.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Oh, a Feed Me Billboards in LA? We will ask her about it. But first, we have to sing her a song.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Emily. We're hitting the size gone for you.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:29:17Jordi Hays?

  It was yesterday.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  It was yesterday, but it's...

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  July 1st.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  You just didn't come on the show yesterday, so, welcome.

• 1:29:22Emily Sundberg?

  I would've come on yesterday if you asked.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  We should've, we should've.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  We could've had a cake. We could've had a cake.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  What did you do for your birthday?

• 1:29:29Emily Sundberg?

  Um, I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty, which was nice. And then my husband took me to dinner.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, YMCA, underrated. You're, you're

• 1:29:41Emily Sundberg?

  Mine is nice. This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. What, what is the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment.

• 1:29:55Jordi Hays?

  Lifetime's making moves.

• 1:29:57Emily Sundberg?

  Lifetime's making moves. I, so I kind of do a high-low thing. I live in Park Slope. So the, the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me, but I'm also a member at a club called Casa Chifriani.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Small members' club.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:12Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  It's fun.

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  The high-low, the, the high-low. John, John's in favor of that too. We just started going to a new gym, but John is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to Gold's. Which I'm like, no, we're not. We can't do this.

• 1:30:25Emily Sundberg?

  There aren't, um, there don't seem to be as many YMCA's on the West Coast.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  No, no, not, not that many. Lots of 24 hour fitness.

• 1:30:34Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Gyms. I mean, Gold's Gym, it's the, it's the staple of Venice. It's where R F K works at, you know? R F K's out there. It's a good crew.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  John, John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period. And I just loved how out of touch you are, you were.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  It felt like premium, you know, but not ultra-premium. It's not, it's not the besties all on tequila level.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the location matters a lot.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, what else is new in your world?

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Give us a, give us a Hampton's update. People were.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Assume no one's in the city right now?

• 1:31:08Emily Sundberg?

  So, yeah, I, I got out here this morning. I don't want to brag. I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather, a 2006 Camry.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Iconic era of really great vintage.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Very reliable.

• 1:31:23Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. Awesome. So I drove out here today. Uh, it's crowded. It's really crowded. I'm hoping that this sort of, um, level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that. I rented a house out here, but we'll see. Um, what else is new since two weeks ago?

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Is there?

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the Hamptons broadly, people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year. Does it feel that way?

• 1:31:53Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I, I don't know how much of that was because of weather or, or, or people's finances. I think some people were less motivated to like make the move on booking a house because we had really bad weather the past few months in New York. It was really rainy and gross. It was sort of a late start to summer. Um, but I'm sure people's financial situation.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  There was also a trade war that's still ongoing. And if your portfolio is down tremendously, you're not exactly saying, yeah, I'd love to spend, you know, a hundred K for two weeks.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street, uh, like hedge fund guy. And, uh, she was like, yeah, it's going so great. Like it's amazing. And then like a couple of weeks later, she was like, yeah, he's just like really weird. Like, I don't think it's going to work out. And I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, so his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10% sell off that we just saw. You're telling me that this guy, his entire, his entire personality is derived from?

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  The state of the market.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  The state of the market. And she was like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. Okay.

• 1:32:56Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. Um, is, uh, is that, is that crazy white party going on? That's a Hamptons thing. Is that a, is that a July 4th thing? Or is that canceled? I thought Michael Rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy. Is there an update?

• 1:33:14Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I, I, I will see. Is that supposed to be 4th of July? I think that's.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  She's like wearing, she's like a white party.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:33:22Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Can't comment, can't comment.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  No, not the Diddy one. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. I think that might've been a factor in, in pulling back from that. But, but, but I always see like everyone's like spying the watches, spying like, you know, what cars people showed up in, all this stuff.

• 1:33:35Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, there's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of TikTokers. So you can see everything happening in real time.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:41Emily Sundberg?

  Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore. Like there's so much, uh, coverage of these events now. It really takes away.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  The mystique, the mystique. Somebody might.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  What's up with, uh, what's up with this place drugstore? You were covering it.

• 1:33:58Emily Sundberg?

  Oh yeah, this is awful. Um, Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie.

• 1:34:06Emily Sundberg?

  Smoothie pop up chain from like a Jay-Z invested celebrity chef. And he's these, these like very Instagrammable smoothies, which obviously Arowan started, but now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating like smoothies as a billboard, like brands can collab with them and then whoever's serving these smoothies is like making extra money from an advertising business, which is crazy. Like I think to get an Arowan smoothie for your brand, it's like 200K for a month or something.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  We have to do this.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we, we've been working on it.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  You say that's crazy.

• 1:34:43Emily Sundberg?

  You guys don't have to do this.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  I think that's worth every penny for the TBPN Feed Me Arowan Smoothie. You're telling me that's not gonna net out?

• 1:34:51Emily Sundberg?

  No, you should do a drink at like the US Open or something like, don't do the smoothie.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Don't do the smoothie, it's played out?

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's played, it's probably played out.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Didn't, didn't Arowan have a collab with like Volkswagen or something or some really funny like car company they did?

• 1:35:05Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, you're right. They did do a car company. I think they, they also do like beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff like it's not.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chevrolet. They did a Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1, like the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 Equinox EV.

• 1:35:27Emily Sundberg?

  What was in this smoothie?

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Uh, according to the manufacturer, the collaboration between, uh, it combines Chevy's commitment to emission free vehicles and Arowan's mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink called the Electric Juice consists of choo choo, chocho? I don't even know this, which is the most protein rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drink's ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers according to Chevrolet.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  The winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up.

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  Sure. I don't know. I feel like, I feel like everyone's getting the Hailey Bieber smoothie. I, I'm about to rock the Equinox EV smoothie. I think it has a certain badge value.

• 1:36:15Emily Sundberg?

  They're like 70 grams of sugar. It's like four cokes.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm long, I'm long sugar though. Four cokes is a lot.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  That is a lot.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  But I'm going long, I'm going long sugar from here. I did, I did an experiment. My, my wife is very afraid of the-

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  This is the worst experiment you ever, I continue.

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but anyways, people, people are very afraid of sugar. I, to prove a point, I drank a soda. Every single day. I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  But you're young and you work out every day and like, there's like a million ways to offset that.

• 1:36:44Emily Sundberg?

  It wouldn't be good.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  No, a lot of, a lot of people think, but-

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  No, I agree. It is a little bit, the people think like a single Coca-Cola is terrible. Like, but yeah, of course, of course. Everything's in, the, the dose is the poison with all of this stuff.

• 1:36:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  You know, you drink a full gallon of big deal.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  So this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars, how, um, basically AI researchers are being comped. Almost like pro athletes and sort of like, you know, these sort of nine, nine-figure massive offers. The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the, uh, media landscape. And we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic. I imagine that he's already like, run rating well, well beyond. I, I don't know, um, what it, what his metrics are, but I would imagine he's already-

• 1:37:30Emily Sundberg?

  He's brushing on Substack. He's catching up to me.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:37:33Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Or go subscribe to, subscribe to Feed Me right now and, uh, help, help win the race. But, um,

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Well, he's not winning the SCL war because his website doesn't come up.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  It feels like if, if, uh, legacy media companies, I won't call anyone out, want to, want real attention. Not just the sort of attention that comes from their logo to some degree in the prestige, but like actually quality content. Uh, at some point they'll have to like, kind of reevaluate their comp structures. I think the Atlantic was like 300K was being reported as like the kind of range. And when you can go on Substack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven-figure range at some point or another, it just becomes really difficult.

• 1:38:21Emily Sundberg?

  I see traditional media companies more likely to start doing like handshakes with Substack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  So like syndication, basically.

• 1:38:36Emily Sundberg?

  Syndication, or like, I mean, I've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are like trying to figure out how they can work with Feed Me. Is it like a co-publishing thing? Is it like creating a podcast together? And it's, it's been very interesting to experience firsthand, like talk to these people because I don't, I don't really need that. Like Derek doesn't need The Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes on the show, we pay her $100,000 for her appearance. So just, just to kind of set the bar.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  And it ramps up.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it obviously ramps up. But, but yes, I am interested in like the dynamic of like, you can still go and publish in, in traditional media. Is that just like freelance? What is the difference?

• 1:39:28Emily Sundberg?

  What do you mean? Like when I write for GQ?

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:31Emily Sundberg?

  There's no reason that I'm doing that besides that I adore my editor there. And I, I think that it's just like, it's, it's working like a different part of my brain. Like I don't, it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah. Do you, so are, are you a columnist over there? Or are you a contributor? Like, how does, with the actual shape, do you get assigned things? Like I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, I was assigned a story on nicotine, so I need to talk to you as an expert or whatever.

• 1:39:58Emily Sundberg?

  So with GQ specifically, my editor, Dan, when I wrote the Zin story and when I wrote a story about members' clubs last year, both were because I, I had written about both of those topics in my newsletter. And he was like, I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in like a larger feature in a, in a print issue. And that's how that's happened. I, I don't really, but like.

• 1:40:24Emily Sundberg?

  I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I want to write, like it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to the Times or to New York Magazine, because it, I can get it done faster on Feed Me.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:36Emily Sundberg?

  I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it, it's better for me to get, to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know?

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:47Emily Sundberg?

  I just have like a good thing going in GQ. It's kind of fun.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  That's cool. I want to bounce an idea off you. Um, there is this narrative that, um, like when you go direct, when you're on Substack, like it has a different texture, a different, uh, different vibe, different, maybe more objective, maybe more pro-tech or pro, you know, creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered. Uh, I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that essentially when you're in legacy media, you basically have a salary cap. And when you're outside of it, you have no salary cap. And that actually defines, the economic terms shape the, the type of content more than,

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree? How, how would you wrestle with that?

• 1:41:38Emily Sundberg?

  Can you, can you keep like expanding on that? I, I want it.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  So, so, uh, I think that there's, there's something where if you, if you're working at a, at a particular, uh, outlet and there's some sort of like salary cap. It's like, imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap. Like who would you expect to produce better basketball? Who would you expect to produce better content when you have, when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make 100 million? Like you're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the- Yeah, extremely ambitious. Yeah, and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work,

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece, it could not, it, it doesn't mean- Oh, here you got a $5,000 Christmas bonus. It means Spotify signed you to a $100 million contract. And it's the difference between like when LeBron James shows up at midnight to shoot more free free free free throws. Like that could be the difference between like a $50 million contract and $100 million contract. So going that extra thing produces like better content.

• 1:42:53Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give Substack a shot and like they just plateau.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:01Emily Sundberg?

  But I'm like, I'm an animal. Like when my eyes are open, I'm working like this letter goes out every day. It's I'm marketing it. I'm editing it. I'm pitching stories, but I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no. Like when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now. Right? Like, so I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing also attracts personality types that are had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. Um, and then when people who who don't think like that, think that they can find the same success, like they get disappointed or confused or think that it's rigged or something like that.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  Um, when really they're just getting out of computer.

• 1:43:45Emily Sundberg?

  Going going above and beyond for a job where the cap might be like, what did that New York Magazine story say about the Atlantic 300K? That's what they were paying their journalists like?

• 1:43:58Emily Sundberg?

  Okay, so like you're you're gonna go as hard as you can to make 300K and get those benefits and whatever. But the other thing that I'll say like is you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to, you know, have have months where you're you're not having like the support of a team. Um, and it's just like a very specific type of personality. Uh, but I think you're totally on to something like. I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a at a magazine or a newspaper.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also that the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome. And you can quit your job and say, I'm going to pay out of pocket for insurance for two years. And if this doesn't work out, then I'll I'll get a rollback. I'm curious, you you were commenting on Vogue partnering with Nutri Nutri Grain Bars. And I'm curious if you think.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  As people are so used to influencer creator-led advertising, like if you were to partner with a brand and people are like, wait, like what? Like, why did she partner? That makes no sense. Like, that's clearly a cash grab. That feels like, it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time, even though we're saying, you know, why is...

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Nutrigrain needs better marketing, because the first thing I think about with Nutrigrain is... I, yeah, I always think about the, I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere. I don't know if you've seen that one. But that's not Nutrigrain. And so, my biggest association with Nutrigrain...

• 1:45:40Emily Sundberg?

  Nutrigrain is like a long, big Newton.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta work on that. Yeah, it's like, is it a big Newton? Is it the crumbs one? Like, I just know it's not good, so they gotta step it up. But yeah, the Vogue audience, I mean, why, do you think that there was ever a pitch where it's like, okay, we're gonna go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for their kids? And so, it's some sort of like bank shot strategy?

• 1:46:01Emily Sundberg?

  For me, what stopped me in my tracks was it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter. It wasn't like one of those, it wasn't like somebody writing about their wellness routine sponsored by Nutrigrain. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City. And I really liked this girl, Michelle. When I saw her post it, and I saw that it was between Vogue and Nutrigrain, like, there was two, who was in the room? Who sold this ad? And how much was it for? And how much did Michelle get? And how much did Vogue get? Like, it was very confusing to me, because there were, there are other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense. And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation, but unfortunately...

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  The conversation was started.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:47Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, there's so many media reporters. If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have.

• 1:46:52Emily Sundberg?

  But I think that Conde Nast overall right now is on life support. Like, we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. Unfortunately, like, it's happening immediately right after that with this new, this new Vogue editor. It's a lot of, it's a lot of pressure for like, I don't know what, like, a few more years of running this magazine. It just doesn't really seem like how, it doesn't, Vogue doesn't seem... I don't know what I would look to vote for right now.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it kind of goes back to that idea of like the the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator. Like, we just released an ad for Wander that they we said they asked us, they barely even asked us to make it. And we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like edited it, we just did everything. We sent them the final thing and they were like, yeah, cool. And so I think the brand carried through.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  There was like a second that they asked for a tweak.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were like, actually, our font is this one instead of that one.

• 1:47:49Emily Sundberg?

  I loved it.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  And so and so like, that is the type of like, you know, entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on where they actually starred in the commercial would bring to a partnership and select and and coordinate with a brand that was actually aligned. But there were just like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day. And so it just wound up being very odd.

• 1:48:11Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, like I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at Barstool and like have them talk about like how this is like the bar, like the hangover snack like that I think would have moved the needle more.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:48:24Emily Sundberg?

  I don't know.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  Are are the when I think of logical vote partnerships, I think of like luxury brands. Are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership? Like, have you seen anything there? Like, what are what are the innovative things that you're seeing from like the really top tier brands out there? Have you seen anything cool?

• 1:48:43Emily Sundberg?

  You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars, like the metallic?

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had him on the show.

• 1:48:48Emily Sundberg?

  I love them. Um, I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week. Somebody posted a photo of like Balenciaga bars, like it's the same sort of metallic.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:59Emily Sundberg?

  Metallic label. I took a photo of it. I'll send it to you guys after this.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 1:49:03Emily Sundberg?

  Um, so I mean, like, is that going to move their their hoodies? I don't know. But like, that's those sort of fun, weird moments are more exciting to me. If we're talking about nutrition bars.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly shows that like Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because like Peter Rahal, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer packaged goods world and a little bit in tech. And some people know the story of RX Bar and then David Barr with the revenue ramp. Like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story. Like the average person on the street doesn't know that. So Balenciaga is kind of signaling a little bit to that.

• 1:49:42Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks like put together. Like, you know, it's not difficult. As far as what, what luxury brands are doing, I think it's a lot of events now. Like they're putting a lot of money into events. Like I was just at a Chanel event. They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival, which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway. So they, they throw events and make sure that people show up to that. I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events. It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it. And it's like, the brand is

• 1:50:24Emily Sundberg?

  the background. So you end up being like, New York just feels like a billboard every, every time you go out now because everything is a brand event. It's like dominating how people are organizing their social calendars.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream. What makes for a good brand event? Like, is this just a happy hour? Is that what we're talking about? Is there dancing?

• 1:50:42Emily Sundberg?

  A bad brand?

• 1:50:43Jordi Hays?

  It's actually interesting that, the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  collapsed earlier. They, they would, they would throw dinners that, like, like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial or, you know, companies that, that throw these dinners. The funny thing is that within tech, the companies historically failed to make them social moments. So it'd be like, it'll say the name, it'll say SVB on the menu.

• 1:51:13Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  But people aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures. So I think what the luxury brands do well is, is you're saying, hey, we're gonna invite

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

  It's a step and repeat.

• 1:51:22Jordi Hays?

  200 people into the space.

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  There's a professional photographer.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  And you're not going to be able, if you post any photos at all, we're going to be getting exposure.

• 1:51:28Emily Sundberg?

  We're gonna have a moment. Yeah. I, I threw a brand dinner, or a Feed Me dinner with my friend Paul from The Infatuation last year. And Andrew Ross Sorkin was sitting next to me and I gave him a Feed Me keychain. That was my brand moment.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  That's a great moment.

• 1:51:45Emily Sundberg?

  So that's another thing, like, those dinners are off.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are brands being creative? Are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats? Like, how can brands stand out with one of those?

• 1:51:58Emily Sundberg?

  Like, the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks, like, just people standing in front of, like, a 22-year-old DJ with, like, free drinks. And then, um, more innovative things are like, I think when you give people an activity to do, like, if you are doing, like, bowling, or, and making it, like, glamorous, or, like, um, you know, now, brands are, if they're doing a collab with, like, an athletic brand, they'll, they'll take a bunch of women to, like, tennis courts or a golf club in Connecticut, and, like, that's a photo op for everybody involved. Um, so, like, these mini expeditions,

• 1:52:39Emily Sundberg?

  or, like, J. Crew last year took a bunch of people on a gorgeous sailboat in the Hudson River off of, like, the seaport.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  It's basically, like, take your customers on a date.

• 1:52:50Emily Sundberg?

  Right.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, on an extravagant, adventurous date.

• 1:52:53Emily Sundberg?

  Photo.

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and then if you level up, then you're, you're gonna start talking about, like, brand trips. Like, Hermes took people to Aspen last summer, and, yeah.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time. Come with us, and we'll do a track day, or movie night, or we'll go out to, you know, the, some, you know, beautiful place, some ranch, and, like, shoot shotguns and have dinners, and it's a whole weekend.

• 1:53:18Emily Sundberg?

  Where's my call? I wanna do that.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  They should get you on the calls. We'll, we'll introduce you some folks.

• 1:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Postmortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of, um, coverage of, uh, Zoron's basically film, you know, vertical video-making abilities that seems to have played a key role. In the campaign, I'm curious.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Are you talking to any like TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That'd be interesting.

• 1:53:51Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I had a friend who I used, actually used to work with at Conde Nast, who worked in the White House for Biden. And I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign. Like, there are people who know, I think like, you have to be excellent at that job if you're working for a political campaign, especially in the White House, because the turnaround times are insane. And the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy, as they should be. So I think there's like a mini network. I mean, there's, there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like, they were recruited straight from Meta. So that's definitely a thing.

• 1:54:31Emily Sundberg?

  But I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work. And like, part of that is digitally now, like, and, and Zoran did that really well.

• 1:54:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election. And then the, the, this primary felt like the short form election. And that sort of, it makes sense, especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters.

• 1:54:56Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I mean, his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February. Like, I was, I was at a party, I think in March for him. But he's, he also went on, um, like Throwing Fits and a few other podcasts. And he did like a Q and A with me for Feed Me. So he, his team knew where to, where to activate.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  That's good. We've been talking a ton about the AI talent wars. There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making a hundred million dollars for in signing bonuses.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money. What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have a hundred million dollars burning a hole in their pocket? They want to get in the game, they want to step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend?

• 1:55:48Emily Sundberg?

  It's, it's funny that you go to fashion and cars, because I think there's a real.

• 1:55:54Emily Sundberg?

  A Louis Mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job. So I feel like you need a security guard.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:00Emily Sundberg?

  Security guard.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:03Emily Sundberg?

  Um, plain clothes, security guard, which means like those tight Lacoste polos, you know?

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Emily Sundberg?

  Um.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should, you know, if you got the, you gotta be everyday carry now if you're making a hundred million dollars.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  California's gotten more lenient.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. So I, I feel like you have to staff up in a, in a position like this. Like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't going to like leak your information, a personal trainer.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:31Emily Sundberg?

  Who's trustworthy, a feed me subscription.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:56:34Emily Sundberg?

  Um, and then I think it's like removing friction from areas of your life with, with like staffing up like that. I recently learned that, um, this neighborhood in the Hamptons called Sagaponic is a, a microclimate and I'm, I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Um.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, break that down a little bit, but a little bit more. It's just, it's just on an average day, it's nicer there?

• 1:56:59Emily Sundberg?

  I think it's not necessarily nicer. I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas. Like I am in a different neighborhood than that. And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here, even though it's not that far away.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, like you could be like Long Island as a whole is hot today, but Sagaponic could, could have a different weather report because it's this micro sub climate.

• 1:57:21Emily Sundberg?

  Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees and.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  There's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic as well.

• 1:57:27Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. I mean, isn't San Francisco like that too?

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yes. Famously. That's why in the summer it'll still be, it'll still be foggy and stuff. Uh, but then it's really warm later in the year.

• 1:57:37Emily Sundberg?

  Right. Yeah. So I, I feel like investing in a micro climate is a good way to spend your money. That just sounds wise.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yep. They're not making any more of them.

• 1:57:46Emily Sundberg?

  And then I, I think that you need to use your money to start taking some, some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes. There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items. So I would try to hang out with like, do you guys know the watch dealer, Mike Nuvo? Like somebody like him or like, you know, like take him out to dinner and talk to him and, and get some advice. I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  What'd you pick up?

• 1:58:13Emily Sundberg?

  Um, I got my husband a nice watch.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's go. Let's hear it for the husband.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Two size gongs, one review. That's how you know it's a good one.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  A birthday and a gift.

• 1:58:28Emily Sundberg?

  And maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise, consult on the closet.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Can you get us, can you get us Chris Black on the show? Because I, the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released, where it was a cease and desist from the New York Times. Cause they like copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  It was a, it was a work of art.

• 1:58:55Emily Sundberg?

  Chris would definitely come on. I'll connect you guys.

• 1:59:00Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I think the, the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just, you know, doing that automatic Apple Pay on, on, while they're shopping. And then you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or it looks horrible or something.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So stylists, tech.

• 1:59:17Emily Sundberg?

  Stylists, or just like paid friends. You know, like take, take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around, you know?

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Do you think it's good to surround yourself with yes men?

• 1:59:30Emily Sundberg?

  What do you, what's, how do you?

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  So if you surround yourself with yes men, then whatever ideas you have, all your yes men will just tell you, yes, that's the best idea ever. A lot of people say, don't do it, but maybe.

• 1:59:44Emily Sundberg?

  I would not do that.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea.

• 1:59:50Emily Sundberg?

  No, I would not. That's not good.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Okay. So stay away from the yes men.

• 1:59:55Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  You want yes people on your team where you say, I want to do the impossible. And they just say, yes, we're going to do it. But uh, there's, there's a line, you know? You don't, you don't want to cross it.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 2:00:07Emily Sundberg?

  Thanks guys.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  So send us the invoice for the 100K appearance fee and uh,

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Send the next few to.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Happy 4th of July. Have fun. Uh, we'll talk soon.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Mert from Helios here to talk about stablecoins, talk about crypto, talk about NFTs.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  We're doing it all this show.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Doing it all this show. Very excited to talk to Mert. He put on an absolute clinic during the last show. He might be having some technical difficulties. So let's go back to the timeline. Daniel, growing Daniel, says, "OpenAI is super nice for giving everyone the week off for interviews at Meta." And Elon Musk is crying, laughing. Absolutely brutal. You saw the Wander ad, but you can still find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge services, a vacation home but better. Vittorio says, "I used to pray for the day nerds would be treated like athletes. The day is finally here and it's glorious." And it's our post, put up by Tyler Cosgrove, the intern.

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  Tyler got 25,000 likes. Vittorio, quote tweet, "Get 50K. You'll love to see it." Anyway, we have Mert in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:01:24Mert Mumtaz?

  I am having some technical difficulties. Can you hear me?

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look good. The only thing is maybe rotate the camera if you're on your phone so we can go horizontal. But other than that, that looks fantastic.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Looking good.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time. I know you're really a jet setter at heart all over the world, but very excited to talk to you. There's a ton of stuff going on in the crypto world that we wanted to talk about. Should we start with the idea of private companies on chain? Is that a good place to start?

• 2:01:58Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, sure. So there's a few versions of this that have just been announced. One by Republic and one by Robinhood. You want to just go over both or?

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's start there. And then I basically want to cover public and privates, but we can start with privates.

• 2:02:20Mert Mumtaz?

  Sure. Yeah, I mean, so the details on these are a little fuzzy just because I think at least the name of the game for some of them seems to be regulatory arbitrage.

• 2:02:33Mert Mumtaz?

  But so for example, in the case of Robinhood, they just announced that they're going to have it and they didn't really give any specific details other than it would be on their own optimized chain blockchain for RWAs. For Republic, they basically said, and by the way, people thought this was for trading these private equity, like these private shares, but they're actually just for buying them and then holding them. And then you actually get, in Republic's case, you're locked up for about a year. And I believe the maximum size you can do is actually only $5,000. So I think they're basically just trying to test the waters and see how the regulators would react, is my reading of it.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the 5K limit is interesting. The lack of immediate liquidity is interesting, too. I mean, it's clearly a product for retail. The other thing that I was thinking about is, you know, if you if you just released, you know, SpaceX shares on chain, there's almost going to be infinite demand for them. And so the limit could also just be, hey, we want as many people to be able to access these as possible, or it just gets, you know, bid up and bid up. But it sounds like it'll be fixed price. Any reaction to Robinhood setting up their own chain to do this? And then it's also Europe only, from what I could tell?

• 2:03:57Mert Mumtaz?

  Right. Yeah. And by the way, just on the Republic private shares thing, it's actually, I looked into this, it's a mirrored asset, so it's purely mimicking the performance of the of the price of the shares. And then it's a note on the upside in the event of a liquidity event. So it's not like you're actually owning the stock by any means, obviously. For Robinhood,

• 2:04:27Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, I mean, they, it seems like they decided to launch on Arbitrum, the L2 to start with, with the eventual understanding that they will launch it on their own optimized chain.

• 2:04:41Mert Mumtaz?

  I think, you know, Robinhood has always been, has always been like a vertically integrated company that wants full control over the design, the user experience, the abstractions. And so I think building your own chain for this makes sense because, I mean, they obviously already have the liquidity, the users, and the distribution. So I think it makes sense, provided that, you know, they can hire, you know, Vlad can go full Zuck mode and hire some crypto talent to run the blockchain because that's hard work.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Run the blockchain. Break down the, what's hap- I've seen enough screenshots this week so far, I think you were sharing some of them of people, you know, swapping something, you know, an esteemed asset like Fartcoin for some Tesla shares. What is actually happening there? Are they, is it just a, is it, is there, are the ex-Tesla or whatever these are, are they tied to any real underlying asset? Is it entirely vibes? What's actually going on?

• 2:05:44Mert Mumtaz?

  Yes, so as sophisticated investors, we've been swapping Fartcoin into the Tesla and Nvidia stock and even Meta now.

• 2:05:53Mert Mumtaz?

  And so these shares actually are backed, one by, fully backed by the custodian.

• 2:06:02Mert Mumtaz?

  It's quite fascinating how it works, actually.

• 2:06:06Mert Mumtaz?

  And these are only available in Europe, by the way, both in the case of Robinhood and

• 2:06:12Mert Mumtaz?

  Kraken and this company called Back, that's actually doing the regulatory stuff. So what happens is there's some KYC at the beginning of the process where you actually have to buy from the primary market. But then, once it's withdrawn to the blockchain, it's basically, there's like this loophole where they're tree-like certificates. And so you can, as long as, you know, you say that these aren't supposed to be allowed for USA investors, as long as you basically just say that and, you know, you put the fine print there, once you do that, they're just tree-like digital assets. And so when you do trade, you know, shitcoin-

• 2:06:54Mert Mumtaz?

  Three thousand into Nvidia stock. Uh, it actually is like you're you're getting something that's a backed uh one one to one. Uh, however, uh, it's the same with um the the private stocks where there's like a pretty big limitation on the liquidity. Um, like I think, uh, you know, a hundred million is like the max that can be issued uh at at this point. Uh, and they're doing like uh several tens of millions uh in volume, so. Nothing crazy yet, um, but.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  How are they trading in the are they are they trade do are are are they're not stable, right?

• 2:07:33Mert Mumtaz?

  No, no, yeah, so there's a um.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  So they can trade at a premium.

• 2:07:39Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, no, they're not. This isn't uh it's it's uh not like a micro strategy play. Uh, we can talk about the treasury uh companies as well, but. Um, the prices are supposed to be indexed um uh one to one. And what's interesting is like you can now um obviously compose this with other applications in DeFi, right? So you can literally um buy Tesla stock and then take out a loan against it. And then maybe a Farpoint at that point, like you can do all sorts of different things.

• 2:08:10Mert Mumtaz?

  Uh, uh, and you can just like hold it in your wallet. Um, it's pretty cool, but like it's just it's very, very early, so I wouldn't make any.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  But how but how but but. It feels pretty monumental, right? This is not what what people have been. Excited about for the for the last decade.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  Two decades. Peter Thiel was saying that he wanted a cryptocurrency that was backed by a basket of every financial asset. And like we're on the cusp of it, it feels like that you could have like a token that owns a slice of the S and P, a slice of physical gold, a slice of real estate. And it'd be kind of like the most stable asset, even more stable than the dollar potentially. That was like the original thesis.

• 2:08:53Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, that was actually, by the way, that video.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:56Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, you guys should surface that video. That video was predicted in 1999. Um, but yeah, I mean, it is huge, right? Like, uh, it's got a lot of attention. Uh, and, and it's very exciting that you can just, um, basically start to like, um, actually modernize the financial rails. Uh, Pat, uh, Patrick Collison from Stripe had a really good way of describing stablecoins, uh, which was like, these are, this is like dollars on like super conductor rails, right? Where there's now no friction and you can just, uh, compose with any other financial instruments. Obviously that's on the blockchain. Um, and it's, it's just, it's got, it's taken so much work to actually get here, uh, and clear all these regulatory hurdles. Um, but you know, it's, it's, it's really just beginning. I think there's going to be,

• 2:09:41Mert Mumtaz?

  once Robinhood gets in and everybody else starts getting, I think Coinbase will also start, uh, pretty soon. Um, right? They also have their own blockchain. Um, so I think it's going to start getting very competitive.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Okay. I was talking to a retail investor who would be like so excited about.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  150 IQ?

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Uh, it would be so excited to be able to buy private company shares on chain, be able to buy all sorts of stuff on chain. Um, I, but he was particularly actually very upset and still held a grudge from the GameStop, uh, rally where there was no buy button. There was only a sell button and he felt like betrayed by the platform. Now, when I dug into it, it seemed like the, the situation with Robinhood was much more nuanced than that. And there was actually some liquidity constraints and there were a lot of reasons why they chose the whole narrative of like, oh, they, Ken Griffin called them and told them to, you know, save some hedge fund. I didn't really buy into that. But anyway, um, I think the more important question is when you put something on chain,

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  the idea is like the, the code is decentralized. No one has the button to turn something off. But the, the downside of that is that you could maybe get into some situation where. The like if there's if there's a you know reinforcing feedback loop of sell pressure or buy pressure, you could really, really distort the market. And so I'm wondering, like, you know, I'm thinking about the Terra Luna situation or any of these situations where there was like this perfect perpetual motion machine. But then the fact that it was actually that someone couldn't step in and just pump the brakes was actually a bug, not a feature at that moment in time. And I'm wondering if there are potential risks to having real world assets on chain

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  that where where everything is in code. Does that make any sense? I'm asking any sort of reasonable question here. Can you just move on that a little bit?

• 2:11:37Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, it's certainly a very valid point. And it's also why the Genius Act for stable coins was pretty monumental. Because like, you know, Terra Luna also had some very funky concepts around their stable coins and their, you know, not actually being backed by anything, right?

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:54Mert Mumtaz?

  And with the new stablecoin act, which like puts very or, you know, much more clear framework on like, how often should these things be audited? How should they be backed? Who can do this? Whatever. And with this new regulatory approach, consumers and users actually have like way better benefits and way better guarantees, right? And it's also, right, like, it's obviously decentralized finance, but it's also programmable finance, right? So in the case of an L2, for example, you know, Robinhood can add, again, the same types of rules that to enact some sort of control and like maybe freeze something.

• 2:12:38Mert Mumtaz?

  USCC can already do this today, by the way, right? USCC can actually freeze the USCC on a per wallet basis. And even on Solana, you can do this, right? The smart contracts have certain hooks, depending on how the issuer of the token actually encodes these. So you can actually still program these to get like the compliance, you know, flavor that you want. The difference is that it's extremely transparent, right? You can read the code and you can be like, okay, this is what can happen in this situation. And this is what they did. So you can actually audit it and it's very verifiable.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  I have a question about Erebor, this story kind of leaked out today in the Financial Times about Palmer Lucky, Peter Thiel and some other folks, Joe Lonsdale, working on something that sounds like a stablecoin bank. I would love to hear about the problems that crypto companies run into with banks. What might they solve if they, if you were imagining the list of to-dos? And then, have there any, I mean, there's been a few crypto-friendly banks, but if I have it correct, like, Robinhood isn't a bank, Coinbase isn't a bank, Circle's not a bank, Stripe isn't a bank, or maybe you can correct me there, but just kind of

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  take me through the, the, the problem that banks solve and then, in the current, in the current structure, and then, what problems are, do stablecoin companies still face with the traditional banking system?

• 2:14:14Mert Mumtaz?

  Right, yeah. So, I think actually, Mike from Pirate Wires and Nick Carter did a really good job on Operation Choke Point, where they kind of go in detail into the de-banking of, of, of these industries. I have like a much more trivial example, which is my co-founder, he's a, he's a, he's Canadian unfortunately, just like me, and he, he went to get a mortgage for his, for his new house. And, at first, I, I think they like approved him, and then they, they looked at where he worked, which is Helios, the, the company that we run. And then they actually rescinded the mortgage, and they said it was, you're in crypto, even though we don't have like a token, we're basically a cloud provider. And they said it's too high risk of an industry, and they, actually, he couldn't get a mortgage.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:01Mert Mumtaz?

  And like, this is Canada. And, so like, in terms of problems, you know, there's a lot of, maybe there's two dimensions to this. One is just the interoperability, right? Like, being able to off-ramp, on-ramp, compose, like, if you're earning money, USDC on-chain, how exactly are you transferring that? How are you doing payroll? All sorts of things, like, just the tech side of it? And then just like being able to get access has been historically difficult. Especially, I think this is changing, especially with, you know, the president of the free world and actually the first lady, both being the founders of various shitcoins.

• 2:15:43Mert Mumtaz?

  I think it's certainly changing, but.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we saw that. What was the announcement?

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  Are you talking about the social media founder, the founder of Truth Social? He has a coin, right?

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Unicorn.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  People don't give him enough credit. It's very rare that a founder of a social media company as big as Truth Social has a side hustle as demanding as being the president of the United States.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  It's pretty remarkable.

• 2:16:10Mert Mumtaz?

  Yeah, and he's a lot of founder, too.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  There was also the news that, I'm forgetting the governing body, but they were advising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start looking at crypto assets in the mortgage process.

• 2:16:25Mert Mumtaz?

  The federal housing.

• 2:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So there's progress.

• 2:16:29Mert Mumtaz?

  Right, yeah. So, yeah, so that one's super interesting, where you can actually, I believe the exact rule is something like the assets that you have on a centralized exchange like a Coinbase, and soon to be, I guess, Robinhood, you can actually take out a mortgage using those assets as collateral. And I believe they actually, I don't know if this was real news, I didn't look too into it, but like, I believe they were actually looking at like, if our coin is viable to use as mortgage collateral, because like, obviously you have to have some certain properties. But yeah, that can be very interesting.

• 2:17:10Mert Mumtaz?

  I'm not sure how it'll go. You know, the devil's always in the details for these things. But there's a lot of progress, right? Like, two years ago with Gary Gensler, at, let's say, being the Eye of Sauron, you could not even, like, you could not even think this. You would, he would arrest you in your sleep. So, and then everybody left the States as a result, and now they're coming back.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Well, the Eye of Sauron is closed and the mountain of Erebor is born.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to have you back on soon to talk more. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for calling in. I'm sure it's late wherever you are and we really appreciate you taking the time.

• 2:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to catch up.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  So many zingers.

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  The crypto vernacular is just undefeated, but you heard Emily Sundberg tell it, mention it earlier. She bought her husband a watch. You can buy your husband or wife a watch on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest has an absolute hitter. I saw him in DC wearing a JLC Reverso.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Not to dox your watch, but it's a fantastic piece.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Walks doxed. Great. Now he's got a higher security.

• 2:18:30Zak Kukoff?

  And by the way, look at this.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Oh, he's got one. Oh, I love the Reverso. Let's go.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  The Uno Reverso.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Beautiful. It's a beautiful watch. It's fantastic. It has a great story.

• 2:18:40Zak Kukoff?

  It's a beautiful watch. It was actually, it was a gift from my wife for my 30th birthday. So a beautiful watch for my family for my 30th birthday. So I'm thrilled to have it.

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if I remember the story correctly, it was different time zones for a while.

• 2:18:53Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  No better watch than the Reverso to represent where you are physically and where your future wife is. Fantastic.

• 2:19:01Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. JLC sponsored the pod. We're ready.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Really? We are so ready.

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  So ready.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Until then, getbezel.com.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  It was lovely having you on yesterday.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  A lot tends to happen in 24 hours these days.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  What, what's new?

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Give us the update.

• 2:19:16Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, it's a big 24 hours. First of all, has anyone ever done the two day in a row?

• 2:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Back to back.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Dalian, Dalian did once, kind of by accident. He came on, he was scheduled every other Thursday and he happened to stop by our YC Demo Day stream for a very different thing. We hit him with a confetti cannon. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:19:35Zak Kukoff?

  That's all right. All right. We love Dalian. That's fine. Big 24 hours in Washington. In fact, it started right after I hung up with you guys. I don't know if you saw this. In the background of my shot. Yesterday, you had this beautiful vista over downtown DC. And as we were talking, there was a huge storm cloud starting to come in and completely raining on top of all of DC. So you guys know this, I think people probably know, in Congress, there is no remote voting. You are either voting in person, or if you are not there, you do not get a say in what happens. And right now, the big beautiful bill, which is in the hands of the House, is on the precipice. It could go either way, it might pass, it may not pass, but every single vote is necessary.

• 2:20:18Zak Kukoff?

  And I kid you not, there was a ground stop in the morning at DCA. And there were multiple members who were stopped, prevented from coming back into town to vote because of the huge storm in Washington last night. So just to give you a sense of how quickly things move.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  It's a biblical metaphor, for sure.

• 2:20:34Zak Kukoff?

  It is, it is biblical. I don't always see divine providence in politics, in fact, I just about never see it, but it's pretty hard to argue with a full ground stop in DC.

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  So, so does this make JD Vance's vote more important, less important? What, what, what's the read on Vance's role here?

• 2:20:51Zak Kukoff?

  So Vance is the president of the Senate. When there's a 50 50 tie in the Senate, which is what happened yesterday, his vote is the most crucial vote. And that's why, by the way, if you are any Dem, Governor Shapiro, AOC, whomever, running in 2028, it is now a phenomenal gift to you that you can go and badger JD Vance about his vote yesterday. But the bill is in the House today, so there's no Vance vote, there's no tiebreaker, there is no, in fact, the GOP basically has eight votes, or sorry, four votes they could lose. There were eight people who didn't show up this morning, there are four votes they could lose and still get the vote passed. And so all day, there's been this series, starting in the morning, of procedural votes as a way of checking

• 2:21:34Zak Kukoff?

  just who from the conference is even in town to begin with, before they get to the actual vote itself. This is like literally.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  It's a roll, it's a roll call.

• 2:21:42Zak Kukoff?

  It is literally a roll call. My mom was a teacher for a while, my grandmother was a teacher her whole career. There is zero difference between my grandmother teaching a special ed class doing roll call and what's happening today in Congress. Maybe a slight difference, but basically no difference. All right, so there's a couple of factions. You guys talked about yesterday the menu of different people within the GOP.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:03Zak Kukoff?

  The big challenge today is picking up votes where the GOP can, where the Republican Party can, in the menu of factions. The two big ones to keep an eye on are the House Republican Moderates and the House Freedom Caucus, which are the sort of more extreme, further ideologically opposed folks. If you're a moderate, you don't like it for one simple reason, which is it says a bunch of Medicaid cuts. In fact, there are far more Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of the bill, which is what you're being asked to vote on, and the House version of the bill that you passed a couple of weeks ago. And you don't want to hang that around your neck when you go back home. Remember, if you're in the House, you are always in campaign mode. You're running every two years. That's why you were out of town to begin with, because anytime there's a weekend, you're flying home to your district to go pick up a couple

• 2:22:45Zak Kukoff?

  extra dollars, right? So the moderates don't like it because of the Medicaid cuts, huge Medicaid cuts. The conservatives don't like it, the far conservatives and the Freedom Caucus don't like it, because it actually blows up a framework of balanced budget, or close to balanced budget framework, that they passed in the House last time. So they got to a, basically, a compromise agreement with spending cuts and with tax cuts that the Senate completely ignored. So that's much harder for them. And part of Trump's success, if this bill gets passed, will be because he convinces people from the Freedom Caucus in particular, to flip and become supporters of the big, beautiful bill.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  So, wrapping up on J.D. Vance.

• 2:23:26Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  If, if the vote goes through in the House, then people will hang on, on him. What happens if the bill passes? Does the other bill automatically die? Is there some sort of trigger there?

• 2:23:38Zak Kukoff?

  So if the House passes the bill today, the House is looking at the Senate's version of the bill.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Zak Kukoff?

  If the House passes that bill today, it goes right to the President's desk for signature. That is the Plan A scenario. If you're the admin, what you're hoping happens is it gets passed, it goes through. Plan B, or Plan C even, is the House says, we want to reopen the bill, and add a bunch of different amendments, because we don't like the Medicaid cuts, or we don't like the deficit expansion, or whatever. And then it goes back to the Senate, where, by the way, the Republican Party may or may not have the votes to get it done, and suddenly J.D. Vance gets into that spotlight again.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay, so the, so yeah, so the House can't change anything in the Senate bill right now. They just have to decide yea or nay.

• 2:24:18Zak Kukoff?

  That's exactly right. If they reopen, if they make any changes, which by the way, a lot of people in the House want them to do. Then the Senate has to go through the entire procedure of passing it again, which is a huge risk factor for them.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Is there any chance that the House tries to add back in that that AI, uh, state level AI legislation ban? Or is that even?

• 2:24:39Zak Kukoff?

  I think it's, I think it's fairly unlikely, right? Given the overwhelming, I mean, listen, given it was a 99 to one, uh, pugitation of a rebuke, rebuke of the AI moratorium, I think it's unlikely the House adds it back in because that's a signal from the Senate saying, look, if you put this back into the bill, all that's gonna happen is we're gonna lose even more procedural time getting it out of the bill again when it comes back to us the next number of days. But the only way this passes before the July 4th deadline, in my view, is if the House basically swallows the Senate version as is today.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  Yep. So you, you kind of defined some of the, the attack lines on the right, uh, with the moderates going after the Medicaid cuts and the, uh, and the farther right Freedom Caucus, is that right, uh, saying that, uh, they want more of a balanced bill? Have any particular attack lines been opened on the left that you've seen?

• 2:25:35Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the left looks at this, this is Christmas if you're on the left, right? You got basically to say, wow, the Republicans voted to take away your Medicaid, which is a huge bludgeon. You guys remember back in the OGT party, all those signs, keep your government hands off my Medicare, keep your government hands off my Medicaid, right? This is a horseshoe issue where people on the left and on the right are equally impacted by it. And the net result of that is that it's a great campaign line, no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So here's an example. North Carolina, we talked yesterday about Senator Tillis from North Carolina, who's not running for reelection and who ultimately voted against the big, beautiful bill passage. Tillis has a group of folks in the House who are predominantly from his state delegation,

• 2:26:17Zak Kukoff?

  who he has some influence, some relationship with, right? Many of whom have signaled, more, many of them are moderates and many of whom have signaled, I have some reluctance to vote for the bill. Part of the reluctance is because the Democratic Governor of North Carolina wrote a letter where he basically said, look, if you vote for the bill, I am going to make sure that these Medicaid cuts become a big issue in the next campaign. Because they massively impact his state budget. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania did the same thing where he said, look, if you vote for the bill, you should know that you will be impacting the Medicaid of Pennsylvanians. And I will use that politically against you. The last part is implied.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  This has been really, really helpful. I genuinely learned a lot. So thank you for talking about this.

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  You may not have been the first person to go back to back, but I have a feeling you'll be the first.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  To go back to back to back. This is very, very helpful. Thank you for breaking it down for us.

• 2:27:06Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it as always.

• 2:27:09Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you back on tomorrow.

• 2:27:10Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly. I can't see the Chiron, but I'm hoping it says Washington correspondent. That'll make my day.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  We will definitely update it tomorrow. Thank you so much.

• 2:27:17Jordi Hays?

  The Vice President of Washington.

• 2:27:19Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, great. I'll see you guys tomorrow, I'm sure.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Cheers, Zach.

• 2:27:22Zak Kukoff?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  Up next, we have our lightning round, beginning with John from Paraform. Welcome to the stream, John. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:27:35Speaker 08

  Good, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  Uh, what's the latest? Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? Jordy's getting the hammer ready. What's the latest news? Do you have any good numbers for us? We love big numbers, hopefully with lots of zeros.

• 2:27:50Speaker 08

  Yeah. Um, hey, everyone. Yeah. Um, great to meet you guys. I'm one of the founders and CEO of a company called Paraform. We just announced our 20 million Series A led by Felices and an incredible group of founders.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations. I like when Jordy does it because he goes in the camera feed. It's great.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 2:28:11John Coogan?

  Congratulations. 20 million bucks. That's amazing. Um, tell us what the company does. The inciting concept, the idea, how big you are, the scale of the business right now, that type of stuff.

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Let me guess, you're going to hire one fifth of an AI researcher?

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Use of buzz.

• 2:28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're getting one day a week.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fractional.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, fractional, fractional AI researcher.

• 2:28:33Speaker 08

  Oh, I saw that. And also like the founding engineer who, you know, four, four different companies. I think his name was So Hong.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:41Speaker 08

  Yeah. Um, no, yeah, but uh, for those of you who don't know, Paraform is a marketplace where we help the world's uh, most important companies hire top talent by connecting them with uh, expert recruiters who actually uh, act more like sports agents than talent sourcers. And you know, I've actually seen your, your post recently about the meta superintelligence team, like you guys framed it as like traded.

• 2:29:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:03Speaker 08

  Internally, we've been talking about this for over a year and it's really cool to see that sort of trend uh, sort of playing out live, but also it's happening a lot sooner than we thought. So really interesting to like dive deeper into like the trend of like just recruiting in general. Yeah.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've been, we've been talking about this a lot because it's good content. It's interesting. And uh, I think what uh, what's the surprising thing that we learned this week, I think, is that we put up that traded graphic for the meta AI researcher and it got millions of views, like millions of views. And it's funny and there's an element that can go broader, but it really does speak to the fact that tech has gone mainstream. The question that we've been mulling is where does this go next? Because when you look at the GOAT debate between LeBron James and uh, uh, Michael Jordan, you're looking at points per game, you're looking at lifetime career points, number of MVPs won, number of championships won.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  What metrics are you interested in looking at? Uh, is LinkedIn still relevant? Is GitHub still relevant? Uh, are you quantifying these things? What are you doing to try and match these folks together? You imagine that AI can be very useful. There's a whole bunch of different ways that I could imagine this uh, working, but you probably have to do some filtering on both sides to understand who's a good recruiter and who's a good, who's good talent.

• 2:30:26Speaker 08

  For sure, yeah. I think like, you know, the the trend that you guys picked up, it's like you're on to something and it's like very similar to what we think. It's like, I don't think that an important tech company hiring, let's say, the best marketing person will be too dissimilar to the Lakers announcing that, you know, LeBron joined or the Dodgers getting Otani. I think how we think about it is as AI sort of, you know, rapidly advances and it automates a lot of the mundane work, I think humans sort of focus on more like higher order functions, right? And one person will be able to do a lot more. Obviously, the GDP will accelerate, so the average salaries will go up. We've always internally talked about how the age of like a seven-figure salary is rapidly approaching. It already is for certain industries, but I think it will be a lot more mainstream.

• 2:31:11Speaker 08

  Um, so yeah, I think like there's going to be more scarcity towards good talent. It's going to get even more competitive. And when there's that scarcity, usually the value of a broker goes up. And we actually see recruiters, you know, kind of turning into almost one of the most important roles in tech, where essentially they're like brokering this human capital between the most important companies and making sure they represent the best talent. Um, in terms of metrics, I think very similar to maybe like the MBA or the MLB, like obviously they'll measure the company's performance. I think a lot of people commented on how like it's ridiculous to pay a hundred million dollars or whatever. But really, these companies, they're smart. Like they're doing that because the return on that is greater. Um, right? Like, I mean, solving AGI, I think is like an important enough problem where you do that, right?

• 2:31:55Speaker 08

  So I think, um, you know, that's one thing that you're going to measure, right? Like how well are companies going to perform and achieve their objectives? I think there's other like key KPIs, like, you know, I'd imagine it's just like the North Star metrics for different teams. Um, I wonder if there's going to be universal things like points, assists and, uh, you know, minutes played. But yeah, I think it's something interesting to think about. Yeah.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we kind of already do this at a little, at like a smaller level when someone says like, I was early at Stripe. What that really means is that like you were there for the creation of like the first fifty billion of market cap or something. And so if you were one of twenty on that team, yeah, we might give you, you know, fifty million dollars in points, right? Essentially. Um, so yeah, what what else is going on with the top of funnel? Where where where are candidates, uh, uh, percolating up into the Paraform system these days?

• 2:32:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, so one of the fastest growing roles we see are forward deployed engineers. Like obviously Palantir, they're one of our customers too. They coined this term and really do a good job of it.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  Shom Sankar, the OG, the first to ever do it. The first forward deployed engineer, he's been on the show.

• 2:33:05Speaker 08

  Exactly, yeah. I think, you know, obviously, you know, you guys know this too, but I think the biggest bottleneck in AI is quickly becoming implementation, right? Where, you know, we already have very good LLMs, we have already very good technology. It's just a matter of getting them into the hands of everyday people and the broader industry. And I think, you know, go to market motions are evolving to like actually fit this forward deployed engineer role. Where basically you have to like customize your AI solutions to, you know, everyday, everyday customers. So I think forward deployed engineers is where a lot of really good talent will converge. And at Paraform, what we're seeing is not only companies like Palantir, but also, you know, companies, you know, traditional companies like, you know, you know, that they're also like looking to hire forward deployed engineers.

• 2:33:50Speaker 08

  So that's one trend we see emerging very quickly, yeah.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  Any commentary? You mentioned Soham Parekh, the Indian engineer who works at three to four startups at the same time. He, Soham, says he's been praying on YC companies. Multiple people are hitting the timeline now saying that they fired this guy. That feels like something where we need almost like an inverse LinkedIn, because clearly he can pull jobs off of his LinkedIn and say he just worked at one place at a time. But do we need some sort of reputation score? Could that be abused? How does that evolve?

• 2:34:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I think it's also interesting to think about like the kind of remote work versus in person. Like this obviously wouldn't have happened if it was in person and you have to like validate things. But I think there's a really, a lot of interesting things there. For example, you know, I think with AI, like I think AI can be incredibly helpful in the recruiting process, making it more efficient. But there's also going to be a lot more spam. There's a lot, like recruiting is always driven by like this power law where unfortunately there's only a small amount of very good people and a large amount of, you know, sort of it's like a long tail, right? And I think with AI, I think that trend will like even accelerate. So I actually think that having a human in the loop to vet these things out. And not only just these things, but like think, think about like culture fit, interpersonal dynamics. Do I like you? Like these kind of things are actually like very much like what recruiters are effective at.

• 2:35:09Speaker 08

  So I think, you know, I think Paraform can help, you know, basically prevent these situations. Yeah.

• 2:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one question, just getting into, I'm sure this question came up in various pitch meetings and throughout building the whole company. There's, back in the early internet days, the dot com era, every CEO said, hey, we're going to need way less people. And people are saying that again right now. How would you answer that question? You're obviously building a talent platform. Is like, you know, and I'm sure people, you know, might say, well, what happens in a year if the hiring market gets racked? How is that going to impact your, your business? But I'm curious how you, you know, see that market evolving?

• 2:35:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think fundamentally, in terms of value creation, if you think about it from that perspective, like, I remember seeing a story where when Cursor, Winserve, these tools became so mainstream, you know, like, these Fortune 500s, you know, they were asked, hey, are you going to hire less engineers? Because, you know, can one person do more? And they actually said, no, because of these tools, we're going to hire even more engineers who can use this to be even more effective, right? I think at the end of the day, like, there is a ton of value to be created. There's a lot more innovation to, you know, continue to happen. So I think that actually, we're always going to need people. It's just that each person will be more effective. So I think we actually have a very optimistic view when it comes to like, the human and AI collaboration. And I think

• 2:36:34Speaker 08

  another thing is, yeah, like, we talked about, like, the sports agent analogy, I think each talent will, you know, become more and more valuable. So, you know, maybe the frequency of hire may decrease, but the value of each hire increases. And when it comes to sort of like, a success-based model like Paraform, I think the value we capture is sort of actually increasing even more with this trend. So, yeah, I guess like, not too worried there.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk to us about where the value is accruing, and where, where it's landed historically, and where it's going forward. Like, when I've hired engineers through recruiting agencies, typically, the company pays like, one month or two months of salary. So it's like, a percentage, and then there's some sort of clawback if they don't make it after three, three months. Sarah Guo was talking about how some folks are helping AI researchers negotiate, and they're taking a cut of the pay. And it seems like they're taking it from the researcher, because if I can get you five more, 5% more, that could be millions of dollars, you're fine paying me a million bucks for that negotiation. Then there's

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  platforms. So, do you see that economic equation shifting from the company paying, to the employee paying, to platform getting comped? How, how is that evolving?

• 2:37:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that's our example is also like exactly like what's that's what sports agents and even in the music industry, I think that's what they kind of do. But yeah, to answer your question. I think where we are creating value is actually while keeping quality, you know, consistent and maybe even better, we're actually reducing the time to hire significantly. So, you know, like every customer cares. The number one thing they care about is, you know, the best candidate's fast, right? So the metric we look at is time to hire and Paraform is making revenue by filling the most difficult world roles in the world. And we our average time to hire is under one month.

• 2:38:26Speaker 08

  And I think when it comes to efficiency, I think what what happens is at every step of the procurement process or the recruiting funnel, we're making it really, really efficient. I think we're basically decreasing downtime. For example, if you want to work with a recruiting agency, you're relying on word of mouth. You never know whether they're good or not before you work with them. And there's a ton of these little things that waste your time and and obviously cost. But at Paraform, based on what our customers are looking for, we're able to match them with the best possible recruiters, based on their track record, their candidate network. We have so much data on them that we're able to do like an instant good match of like best recruiter for the best role.

• 2:39:04Speaker 08

  So that already saves like weeks and most customers find the candidate that they want, they hire, end up hiring within the first week or two of posting on Paraform. And these are like director of engineering at, you know, high touch, like these are like very, very difficult roles. So I think that's where we create value. It's, you know, reducing the time to hire while maintaining and improving quality. Yeah.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:39:27Jordi Hays?

  I think we had a, it's coming back to me. I think we had a call maybe in 2023, early on. So it's amazing, amazing, amazing to see your progress and congratulations on the new round. Decided to, decided to follow along.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Really quickly, let me tell you about Graphite. Graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster and get started for free.

• 2:39:54Jordi Hays?

  We had breakfast.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  $52 million Series B from none other than Anthropic's Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures.

• 2:40:01Jordi Hays?

  We had breakfast with a friend of the show, Bailey Barrow, this morning, and he honestly wouldn't stop talking about Graphite. He's absolutely obsessed.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  He really was.

• 2:40:11Jordi Hays?

  Did he say a Graphite fanboy?

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  He said he's running the TBPN stack.

• 2:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:16John Coogan?

  He's got all of our sponsors.

• 2:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Linear Graphite goes down the list, but...

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  It's all good stuff.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  Harvey, Asana, Ramp, Replit. They basically, they got every logo.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  They got every logo.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  They got every logo. But head over to Graphite.dev and check it out yourself. Who do we got next?

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  Well, we have some more timeline posts. So Mike Newp, he's been on the show before talking about Arc AGI. Arc AGI 3 was just announced, the AI benchmark from Francois Chalet and Mike Newp. And this came as unexpected, which is what?

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Aren't people still massively struggling with?

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  AGI 2, that's right. But the goal for Arc V2 was to endure 12 to 18 months. The goal for the V3 is over three years. And so, he's talked about this before. When you design a benchmark, you have to assume that, like, if the current models are scoring 50% right now on your benchmark, they are going to solve it in weeks. Like, it's not even, it's going to be days. Don't even, people won't even bother with it. We were talking about this with the IMO with some folks from Cognition. You know, it's like, the IMO is so close to being solved that people aren't even really focused on it more anymore because they're like, of course we can do that. Let's not bother with it. And so...

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  Team was saying when you're designing a benchmark, you need to target, not only will it get 1%, it'll get 0%. You need to imagine a benchmark that in a year, the AI will still be scoring like negative 100%. Like it will get every question like so wrong that it yeah, that it's that it's actually

• 2:41:54Jordi Hays?

  We're deducting even more points.

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  Exactly. Like you need to, you need to really think through the philosophy of what makes a really, really hard benchmark. And they've done it at RKGI and we're, we're really happy to support the team over there. So if you're building a foundation model, head over and give it your best shot. And if you're a human, go try and solve one of these prizes. They're pretty fun.

• 2:42:15Jordi Hays?

  They're pretty fun. More breaking news. Quinton Farmer, one of the co-founders of Tolan's has announced a series A led by Raboy over Coastal Ventures.

• 2:42:25John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  They launched just a few months ago. They have 3 million downloads, $12 million run rate, and now adding this $20 million series A.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Wait, is this that

• 2:42:35Jordi Hays?

  This is the one they're using.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  That fun like, it's like Tamagotchi almost?

• 2:42:38Jordi Hays?

  I think it's like purple, purple dino things. No, purple aliens.

• 2:42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Alien best friend.

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep. So

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Brilliant.

• 2:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely ripping.

• 2:42:47John Coogan?

  76,000 reviews on the iOS App Store, 4.8. Wow. An alien best friend. Very cool. And, and somehow less dystopian than the AI boyfriend.

• 2:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wired has an article today that just came out. What could a healthy AI companion look like? So if you're looking for a healthy AI companion.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Love it. Why don't you ring the gong for them and then we'll bring in our next guest.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Let's do it.

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  Hit that gong, Jordy, for Tolan.

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  To the team over there. You're welcome to come on the show and you're welcome to send one of your alien friends over to the show to do the interview for you.

• 2:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Send them on.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  Send them over. Anyway, we have our next guest, Amit from Luma AI, coming on the stream. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

• 2:43:31Speaker 09

  Doing very well. Great to meet you as well. And thanks for having me.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Of course. Welcome to the stream. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, any breaking news for us?

• 2:43:43Speaker 09

  Awesome. So my name is Ahmed. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Luma. At Luma, we are building basically what we consider to be the future of multimodal intelligence. That includes what comes after LLMs, building multimodal models that learn from audio, video, language, image, all together. Our first product is video generation models, models that are able to generate video, audio altogether. And currently, we are working with Hollywood, we are working with advertising agencies. We are working with also a lot of individual creators and we have about like, you know, tens of, multiple tens of millions of users. We just don't talk about the exact number of users.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. What, uh,

• 2:44:22John Coogan?

  explain to me multimodal

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  models, like, are you trying to tokenize everything into some sort of standard format so that a, an image, a video, code, text, it all appears as, as tokens in the same kind of stream? Or are you creating a system that can kind of shift gears between one and the next?

• 2:44:47Speaker 09

  That's, that's a great question. And this is basically the core differentiation. So right now, most people are doing the latter. Most of the AI labs that have large language models, they're using those as backbones and trying to like, you know, teach them how to read image and video as token. But the problem with that approach is that like, you know,

• 2:45:05Speaker 09

  the output is very, very suppar. And, and even on the most basic tasks, second generation deep learning models, which are like, you know, your convolutional networks, outperform on most VLM tasks, right?

• 2:45:18Speaker 09

  This is the first approach, which is you create a joint latent space where all of this information is in the same representation. And then when you learn on it, it is quite analogous to like, you know, how brain learns, like, you know, a human brain, right? Audio, video, image, they're not really terribly different for us. Like, these are all just signals. And when we think of an event, like, let's say, dropping, dropping a glass, right? We can hear it in our head, we can see in our head, and we also can predict like, oh, if it's a piece of glass, it might, it might break. So. Currently, this disparate approach of training a language model and a video model and an image model, things like that, this is going to get old very quickly because on language model side, like you're kind of running out of data, right? Like, you know, as you're seeing with G P T five

• 2:46:01Speaker 09

  or the previous thing that was called G P T five, ten times more compute, ten times larger model, but like the the the performance isn't much better than G P T four. So it was retro retro aggressively renamed to four point five. On image and video model side, like even the models we make today are kind of dumb. They're basically translators that take text, right? Like, you know, or prompt and translate them into video, which is interesting, but that doesn't solve someone's problem. And the problem being like, you know, hey, explain to me how something works, or tell me the story, right? Like, or or or here is a like, you know, here's a script, make me the whole thing. That needs a level of reasoning and understanding that these models don't have. So when you combine them all together, then one, you solve the

• 2:46:43Speaker 09

  data problem, because, you know, just immense amount of image, audio, video data in the world. And two, you're able to build intelligence that goes beyond what L L M's are able to do today.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Talk to me about images and chat G P T. Do you think that there are multiple layers going on there? I was shocked by the quality of text and then the quality of the Studio Ghibli moment, the it feels like style transfer on steroids.

• 2:47:08Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  But I was particularly surprised they could do both. And it felt like it felt almost like two different layers running. And I was trying to do some tests where I would have generate some text and then have a snake weave through in front and behind the text. And it was kind of struggling with that. And it was making me feel like maybe there was like a second pass here. Is that a reasonable theory? And also, I'm not saying that is like a knock on anything because if I went to a human and asked how a human would would design a birthday card with a, you know, a dinosaur in the background and then happy birthday text on top, they would draw the dinosaur and then they would use type setting or they would draw the text on top. And so I don't I don't necessarily think that's like the wrong path. I'm not knocking

• 2:47:53John Coogan?

  the strategy. I'm just curious about what is actually going on in that model because it was remarkable.

• 2:47:58Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:47:59John Coogan?

  But but it raised a bunch of questions for me.

• 2:48:01Speaker 09

  Absolutely. So to the best of our understanding, basically, they're doing like, you know, auto-regressive image generation as the first pass, right? That that produces a blurry, low-resolution image or somewhat high-resolution image. But like, you know, you're missing sort of high-frequency details. And then you do a diffusion pass on it to get to a decent quality, you know, image representation. Now, there's so text is one thing, but I believe text actually, text rendering in image models, especially like the latest image models, and then what we're seeing in our next Photon 2 model, that's actually getting very good. So that is not the problem. You know what's really interesting, though, is structure. So then you do image rendering with just a diffusion model, like, you know,

• 2:48:46Speaker 09

  stable diffusion or like, you know, NEMEP. Yeah. There's really like, you rely on the text encoder of the model to like, you know, kind of tell you about the semantics of what the person is asking about. And then you just rely on the diffusion model to do all the intelligence and like, you know, let's say you're asking it, hey, what is two plus two, right? If there's nothing in front of it like an LLM that is able to say like, oh, user is asking two plus two, so let me draw equals to four. If you don't have that, then these models have ridiculously zero understanding of whatever you're trying to say. Right? It will just render two plus two equals two and stop doing it, right? This is, that's what I mean, zero understanding. But when you have an LLM in like, you know, generating it

• 2:49:28Speaker 09

  or a thing that has good understanding of language and it's unified, so they call it the 4O Omni, right? Then, in language space, especially within the model, you can reason about it. That like, oh, two plus two should be four, and let me render that. Now, to what I believe, though, GPT-4O is still a system rather than just a model. Sure. Right? So then you type something, it still goes through GPT, right? They do all the prompt enhancement and reasoning about it in language space. And then give it to the model, and it does a very good job of rendering it. But when you ask for like, you know, complex layouts, then I think that that strength starts to show. But of course, you gave an example of like, you know, the snake coming in and out.

• 2:50:13Speaker 09

  So this is again the question of prompt alignment. And while it is good, it's not perfect yet.

• 2:50:19John Coogan?

  Do you have any reaction to, in the Wall Street Journal today, there's Hollywood wants AI protection. There's a lot of back and forth there. I was particularly shocked that there's been a Save us. Save us. I mean, there's been a number of interesting moments in AI imagery and AI video. Obviously, like the narrative, the general narrative is like the technologists are like, this is amazing. We've created this amazing algorithm. And I agree with that. And then the backlash is like, we don't want all the, you know, the photographers to be put out of business. But the more interesting stories that have emerged are like VO3 and Google seem to be able to generate Disney IP with perfect accuracy, no problems. And maybe that's because they have some deal with YouTube. And

• 2:50:59John Coogan?

  then when the Ghibli moment happened, I was like, wait, like, like, GPT, images and chat GPT would reject different things for, for safety reasons, but also for intellectual property reasons, but not Studio Ghibli, which is a style, but it's also intellectual property. And it's not exactly like the cleanest thing. So, but maybe there's a deal behind the scene. So how do you think, how do you think like the, like the, the, the interplay between the, the startups and the technologists and the legacy media Hollywood, Washington DC? Like, what stories are you tracking? How is that evolving?

• 2:51:38Speaker 09

  Right. So there's two axes that you're talking about. One is basically the adoption and job losses and things like that, right? You know, that is a narrative. And the second is the IP itself. And how do you think about that? Right? So on the first one, there's like, it's actually at this point a foregone conclusion that unless Hollywood and the traditional way of producing media changes, they are on a path to extinction. There is really no two ways about it. And of course, there are arguments like, oh, but it can't do this, it can't do this, it can't do this. The thing is like, you know, we spent last year, 2024, building out this infrastructure for training these really large, really capable models. And like, you know, it

• 2:52:19Speaker 09

  trains on petabytes and petabytes of data and much more complex than LLMs. Because LLMs like, you know, of course, they're complicated to train. But you still have like very little data. The amount of engineering that is required to train multimodal models is insane. Anyway. Now that the infrastructure exists, the rate of progress is very, very fast. We saw the same thing in language, right? Initially, everyone had to build from zero to one, but once you have zero to one, they're like, you know, turning out models takes a quarter, sometimes less, right? So anything that they think, oh, it can't do today, yet like, you know, can't do 4K. Well, tomorrow's, like, we already do 4K. Oh, it is not able to let me control, like, you know, exactly the pose I do. We launched this thing called Modify Video, where you can give it your camera feed as a prompt.

• 2:53:01Speaker 09

  And you can control exactly any camera movement, any pose, anything that you want, right? So we work with some of our great partners in Hollywood. And like, you know, some of them are way forward, some of them are very much not there today. But when you think about what a studio is, right? Like, a studio is two parts, a financial institution that is responsible for, like, you know, green lighting things and managing, like, okay, this area we do go in, this area we don't go in, all these kind of things, and a production part, right? The production part largely works by contracting other smaller production houses, but generally, that's, that's, that's the structure. AI, especially generative media, changes the economics so wildly from like, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a minute and now to sometimes a million dollars a minute,

• 2:53:44Speaker 09

  all the way down to like, you know, ten dollars a minute, a hundred dollars a minute. When that is the level of economic change and you follow the money, there's just no, no scenario in which you don't come out thinking that like, okay, the old way of doing is not going to work.

• 2:53:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and interesting thing I've been thinking about is, is if the cost of production drops by an order of magnitude, just by being able to shoot some, maybe you're shooting some scenes with regular actors and cameras and union crews, but then you're able to create certain scenes or moments. If the, it seems like the internet has this insatiable demand for content, and it feels like when you look at some parts of the sort of entertainment production stack, writer, like, great writers might be more in demand than ever, because like, they'll have to write more. Like, but, but sort of like,

• 2:54:42Speaker 09

  Great stories would be more in demand.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, you can imagine a world where HBO is putting out, you know, an iconic, you know, potentially iconic new property or franchise, or like, shipping them monthly, right? When historically, maybe they only had One big, you know, one or two massive releases a year like a Game of Thrones. And so I actually think that the consumer is going to win in the industry, the people that adapt within the industry and say, I'm going to lean into using this tool so I can write better, I can, I can produce. Or even, even the idea that I'm sure you're, I'm curious if, if scripts are now, certain scripts are now being encouraged, like bring your script with kind of an idea of what this

• 2:55:25Jordi Hays?

  world looks and feels like so that it's not just like this static, you know, text-based concept, right? Show me, give me the pilot, basically.

• 2:55:35Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's top of mind because today we, we released an ad that we handmade, farm-to-table content for one of our partners, Wander. And there's like a few scenes in there that we probably could have AI-generated, we didn't, but they cost us real money, right? Like that, that we could have potentially stripped out and it feels like, feels like we're so close.

• 2:55:57Speaker 09

  Yeah. So here's the over and under on that, actually. The, the, the demand for video is absolutely absurd. You're right. Like, you know, so average person is watching about three and a half hours of video on their phones every day.

• 2:56:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if it's good, but it's a big number. We're certainly, we're, you know, might be contributing to that.

• 2:56:23Speaker 09

  But it's true. And, and the, the, the thinking about that is very simple. That like people don't like to read. If they could watch an explanation, watch how to do something, watch a piece of news, whatever have you, they would do that over reading it or reading about it, right? Like all day, all night. So that means, um, for entertainment, yes, like, you know, generally entertainment, we think about like, okay, you make it once and then like millions of people will watch it again and again, all these kinds of things. But when you think about like news and you think about question and answer and you think about explanations and all these kinds of things. That's ridiculous, right? Like, you know, you can't generate a video for every explanation, for every scenario on every planet. It has to be done dynamically, it has to be done automatically, and it has to be done with AI. Now, the number I track is, okay, for every person on the planet,

• 2:57:08Speaker 09

  like, you know, out of that 3.5 hours that they watch, if we can generate at least an hour of video a day, that is what the success metric looks like for us. So that is, looks like about 6 billion hours of video per day generated. One, there is no human capacity that can actually generate that kind of video, right? Editors can't do that. And two, there's no compute in the universe at the moment to be able to actually do that. So, but that is what to track towards because video is now the substrate of information on the internet. There's two things happening to the internet, right? One, it's becoming zero click, which is like, you know, you don't hunt around in websites and try to like, oh, this done, so this done. No, you just ask an LLM, or now Google also has AI mode if you're in the labs experiment,

• 2:57:52Speaker 09

  then you just get the damn answer. And second thing that is happening is the substrate of information is changing from text to video. This is what people do. So if you just extrapolate from this trend,

• 2:58:09Speaker 09

  video production has to change, entertainment has to change, and people who don't come along, like, you know, it's going to be a very hard journey for that. Advertising on the other, we can talk about advertising for about an hour, and like, you know, Cannes was very illuminating for me in that way, about how people are thinking.

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to get the full update from Cannes. Is this your first time going? Break it down, like, what?

• 2:58:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  This is the Cannes Film Festival, right?

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, one of the exciting things about what you're doing is when you look at the cost structures of consumer brands, which we both have exposure to, so much, oftentimes, consumer brands are held back because they don't have net new ad creative. And so not only is it a cost, it just takes a long time to produce. And so you have these gaps where a brand will see lower performance, you know, slowing growth, et cetera. And it's really just because they don't have access to net new ad creative that can drive new demand. And so that's an entire area that I don't think that's being fully priced in yet.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  How the great brands will actually be able to grow faster because of just being able to day by day, generate net new ad creative.

• 2:59:25Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:59:25John Coogan?

  Give us the full con recap. Sorry, answer that question and then I want the con recap.

• 2:59:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think the answer to that question and can is almost the same. So yes, it was it was my first time.

• 2:59:38Speaker 09

  Beautiful place, to be honest with you, but but really interesting, like, you know, one, everybody, I mean, it's not an AI event. It's not an AI conference, but literally every conversation was about AI. Every conversation. But what's really interesting is that

• 2:59:57Speaker 09

  maybe 1% of the people knew what the hell they were talking about.

• 3:00:04Speaker 09

  I

• 3:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Nobody knows, but everybody's excited.

• 3:00:08Speaker 09

  Yes, but I got blisters in my ears hearing the word agent. All these like, you know,

• 3:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Agent, really?

• 3:00:17Speaker 09

  Yeah. All these agency people pitching, right? Like, oh, we have AI agents to do this and we have AI agents. We are building this to do this. In fact, like, you know, Adobe was there and their salespeople were trying to pitch nonexistent AI agents to people and trying to log them into three year contracts. Right? It was palpable, the level of desperation.

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired. Shots fired.

• 3:00:43Speaker 09

  But it's insane. And when you go and ask like, okay, what do you mean? Right? Like, we talk to, we talk to everyone and what is it? It's a prompt box where you can select a bunch of models. That's it. That is not an AI agent. That doesn't do anything. Right?

• 3:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Senator, that's sass.

• 3:01:02Speaker 09

  That is sass, exactly. And the issue is that basically, like, you know, a lot of people are thinking like, okay, well, you know, developing this is basically like, you know, nothing. And then we will just like, you know, produce the models and it's going to happen. Developing model, developing agents in creative space, in visual space is very difficult work. Right? Like, you know, you need new kinds of models, the kinds we are training. Because think about it, like Gemini is the best VLM that is out there right now. And it is barely able to meet about 3% of our benchmark of visual like iteration. Let's say you're talking about brands. So we met quite a few, including like, you know, partners like Coca-Cola and others. If you want to make an ad, and then let's let's not think about a Super Bowl ad. If you just wanna like, you know, make creatives, like, you know, say a hundred ads for different markets.

• 3:01:47Speaker 09

  Um, getting them to be right, getting them to be on brand, getting them to like, you know, look exactly like, you know, how they should look like. That's a hard job. Like, current image and video models, as I was telling you, like, are dumb. They will just like, you know, make whatever. They have no idea. And then when you use V L M's to critique them, the outputs are are barely any good. So it's you need a new kinds of, you need like the next thing after L L M's, the next kind of models that are able to understand visual information, instructions, and and and what makes something engaging. That level of information is what you need. Like, L M's are getting there, right? Like, for for stories. When you write text, L M's are now making things that are very engaging. Now we need that next jump in in in models. So

• 3:02:31Speaker 09

  that was my, like, you know, overall impression in Canada. The second thing I felt like, you know, by next year, this place is gonna look very, very different. Uh, like, you know, fortunes are gonna change significantly because when you talk to some of the most senior folks in, like, you know, various agencies, uh, you know, whatever have you, the the writing is on the wall for them. Like, they employ hundreds of thousands of artists and and like, you know, people. And and they are asking us, like, oh, how do we actually do this more efficiently? Uh, and and the thing is, like, that that's that's incorrect way of thinking about it. So uh, um, long story short, like, um, it was not an A I conference, but it ended up being an A I conference where nobody knew what the hell actually the A I is, and consequently, nobody knew what is coming.

• 3:03:13Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm. What areas do you think are safe from disruption? We talked to a photographer who does stuff in C P G, and he was saying there actually could be a situation where if you're McDonald's, you can't generate A I images of your burger because it could be.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  There are already F T C rules around you have to use the real burger because there were all these like, the false advertising lawsuits where they show the perfect cinematography burger that was perfectly made and looked amazing. And then you'd go expectation versus reality. And those those memes went viral enough and the the flat disgusting burger bubbled up. And eventually, I guess there was a lawsuit. And so now, you know, and even in, if you're selling a phone, you have to say, screen images simulated. Or if you're driving on a truck, you have to say, close course, professional driver. That's for safety reasons, obviously. Drink responsibly if it's an alcoholic. So the FTC has a bunch of rules. Do we think there'll be anything there on the AI side?

• 3:04:15Speaker 09

  I think those rules will change too.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:17Speaker 09

  Basically. So currently, like, so the burger example, right? The problem is you are over representing the product you're selling.

• 3:04:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:04:27Speaker 09

  Right? It is not the problem of the tooling you used to make it with. You could have made it how the thing actually is. I mean, that would look very disappointing in the ads. But you could have made it closer to how the thing actually is. Since that, like, you know, people aren't misleading, thinking like, oh, I'm gonna get this big giant thing. Which is very fluffy. And then you, when you get in like, oof, this is the thing, right? So it's really not about the tool you used. It is about the intention of what you had behind it. You clearly wanted to mislead. So I think the FTC rule is right. But the rules should not be, oh, they should not be created with CGI or with AI or whatever have you. The rule should be, don't misrepresent your product.

• 3:05:04Speaker 09

  And for me, basically, the singular thing to think about is follow the money. Right? So then, you're, like, you know, actually in advertising, the point you were making is really, really salient, which is, advertising is all about stats, right? And how, like, something that performs well, something doesn't perform well, it's very hard to predict. How quickly can you replace the thing that is not performing well? And in the gradient of the things that are performing well, that will lead to the best output. Today, that cannot be done automatically at all in any visual form of advertising. That is done for text advertising. It has been algorithmic for a very long time now. And that results in very, very good outputs. So when companies actually are faced with the idea like, okay, well, like, you know, on our other products where we can do this,

• 3:05:49Speaker 09

  it performs so well. And on these products, no, the regulations, they will lobby for the regulations to change up this kind of thing. And I think the regulation should be, don't misrepresent your product. Not, don't use AI.

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question from me. What about more narrow AI use cases in Hollywood? I'm interested in like, just, just like, in the VFX pipeline, there are, one second.

• 3:06:15John Coogan?

  Let's do, sorry, I'm scheduling someone.

• 3:06:21Jordi Hays?

  We're doing it live.

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  So, so, so, my question, now, we're, we're going to cut this, so it doesn't matter. My question is, more narrow VFX use cases, like, is there a single company that's just doing amazing green screen rotoscoping? I've seen Runway do that in like, kind of the prosumer arena, but there's so many different pieces of the pipeline that I think artists would be much less jostled by if it's just, hey, I, I have to track a camera all the time in 3D. You know, there's, there, there are services that do this using traditional, like CPU based pipelines and solvers. There's IMUs that measure the movement of the camera. No one really cares about that, that particular role. It's kind of just a hassle that they have to deal with.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  And, and, and so all sorts of different, more minor vertical AI use cases, those feel like point solutions that could be deployed right now. People could go and get a foothold. Maybe they expand to, oh, prompt to movie, but it is in the meantime, like, how about we just speed up the rotoscoping?

• 3:07:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, why not? Right? So, so, for instance, like, you know, we released this thing, it's called Refram. So, what it does is you give it video in any aspect ratio, and it's able to generate like, you know, any aspect ratio out of it without cropping. So like, it will generate like, you know, if you're, if you're, if you give it a 16 to nine, a vertical video, and now you want to share it on, on YouTube, for instance, where like, vertical videos don't perform well, you want something like, you know, that is horizontal, 16 to, or 16 to nine ideally, you can like, you know, generate any of these variants, any number of these variants, all you want, and it's now a point solution. Doesn't matter how the original video was made. You could have totally created that clip, using any traditional methods, or whatever have you. So I think, this is,

• 3:08:10Speaker 09

  so here's something interesting, right?

• 3:08:13Speaker 09

  This is not what you asked me, but I promise I'll lead to the answer you're talking about. So at least in my life, since I've been conscious about this, there's been like two really big changes before AI. One was mobile, and mobile was a very large consumer side change, right? You know, people changed their behaviors drastically, like, you know, not overnight, obviously, but it looked like overnight, to be honest with you. And then the second one happened about a few years later, which was cloud. And cloud, consumers didn't really, it didn't affect them too much, right? Maybe enterprises, yeah, but it affected companies. And companies were done inside out, things they used to do on paper, things they used to do on print, things they used to do like, you know.

• 3:08:57Speaker 09

  So these were two very radical transformations, but they happened to different segments of the world. AI is, for the first time, at least in my memory, a transformation that is happening on consumer and enterprise levels. It's basically rewiring companies from the inside, and it is changing consumer behavior like nothing else before, right? So coming back to your point now, you can take the slow route. You can say like, okay, well, like, you know, let's do rotoscoping. But the tiny studio down the street, like, you know, that used to probably just like, you know, create frames for you up until last year, is now going to start releasing stuff that like, you know, looks kind of as good as yours.

• 3:09:37Speaker 09

  And now, what they can do, like, you know, edit a fast clip, and they're releasing, like, you know, weekly episodes and iterating on it. And how long will it take before their IP is actually bigger than yours? Yeah, good question. We have seen this happen on YouTube again and again and again and again, Cocoon Melon, right? Like, it started from nothing and look at this now. So bigger than a lot of Disney IPs, right? And Disney, I think Disney bought them, Disney tried to buy them, something happened there. Yeah. So this is basically the difference. You can do, like, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it, you should do the small things. But if you are in the business of producing content, if you are in the business of thinking about advertising,

• 3:10:20Speaker 09

  if you're in the business of touching pixels, the world is not the same as it was two years ago. And not in a small way, in a very, very deep way. While it might not solve the whole thing for you at the moment, but you have to start really thinking about, what would the economics look like a year from now, two years from now, and five years from now? And what should the business be like exactly?

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 3:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, this has been great. We would love to have you back on to, uh, there's so many different topics we can cover. So, and I appreciate how freely that you're willing to speak on, on so many different, on so many different topics. So. That's the only way? That's the only way. You just gotta be yourself. Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 3:11:00John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. See you guys.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  And we have some breaking news from TBPN. Let's go to the printer cam, which I believe

• 3:11:10Jordi Hays?

  The timeline is in.

• 3:11:12John Coogan?

  Printer cam's ready.

• 3:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Terminal.

• 3:11:14John Coogan?

  I see it spinning up. We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news. What is this? Traded. We got a trade deal.

• 3:11:22Jordi Hays?

  He's wanted. Timeline is in turmoil. Special segment starting now.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  I love this because it's.

• 3:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Soham Parekh just became famous.

• 3:11:30John Coogan?

  It's funny because.

• 3:11:31Jordi Hays?

  In the last few hours, not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous.

• 3:11:35John Coogan?

  No, no. Is this a real picture of him? Do we know?

• 3:11:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  But this is from Var Epsilon, says breaking meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have signed Soham Parekh as fractional chief AI officer. Obviously a joke, but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple YC companies, multiple companies at the same time. Um, what's funny is that we were, we were working on a, uh, during the show, we were working on a post. We couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of Soham. And some fan just did it for us and nailed it and got a thousand likes.

• 3:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Fully centered. So, uh, Matt Parker from Anti-Metal was, uh, actually Soham was their first engineering hire in 2022. Really smart and likable. Enjoyed working with him. We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Uh, Matt says hiring Soham is his new rite of passage, DBH. Any great company should go through it. Uh, so Su Hail was the first person to call this out. Uh, he said this morning, or actually it was last night. So this has been, this has been building. PSA, there's a guy named Soham Parekh in India who works at three to four startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more.

• 3:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Gary is not going to be happy about this. You do not, you don't want to put up the bat, you know, you don't want Gary, people to put up the Gary sign.

• 3:12:59John Coogan?

  No, you don't want to go up against the dork.

• 3:13:02Jordi Hays?

  But apparently he's been preying on Y C companies. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people.

• 3:13:08John Coogan?

  Oh, this is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratika Meta? Tyler put this in that. You want to read this one?

• 3:13:14Jordi Hays?

  He's been all over the place. Roy said, I interviewed this guy yesterday.

• 3:13:17John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing. Tyler, break it down for us. What is Pratika?

• 3:13:21Speaker 02

  Okay, so apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've actually, I've sent him an email.

• 3:13:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:25Speaker 02

  I've attained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see. But he says, the dude clears interviews. He's good with that. After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work.

• 3:13:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:13:35Speaker 02

  And he has around 20 employees and interns, basically a small dev shop.

• 3:13:38John Coogan?

  Wow. So he's just figured out the economics of like, hey, if I'm making 200 K or 300 K.

• 3:13:42Jordi Hays?

  He's basically signing people do a 20 K a month retainer. He knows he's going to have some churn.

• 3:13:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:13:47Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity.

• 3:13:49John Coogan?

  This is fascinating.

• 3:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Equity comp as well. I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested.

• 3:13:55John Coogan?

  He's got some shares on the balance sheet.

• 3:13:56Jordi Hays?

  At any of these companies.

• 3:13:58John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 3:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Ken Watana says Soham Parekh is the Bonnie Blue of Y C. Very vulgar. SAR says, all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on T B P N to figure out what is going on.

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  Open invite to Soham. We'll, we'll talk to him.

• 3:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Santiago says Soham on T B P N. When Daniel, growing Daniel says, Microsoft just laid out,

• 3:14:19John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 3:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Laid off 9,000 workers, all of them Soham Parekh.

• 3:14:24John Coogan?

  If your CEO doesn't have a Soham Parekh email in their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume. Cause he hasn't reached out. It means he's not bullish on you.

• 3:14:34Jordi Hays?

  Austin Allred says, must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that Soham Parekh has been hired 79 times in the past four years. And then Matthew Berman says, are you think A I is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Parekh. Signal says, "Not now, honey. There is Soham gate happening on X."

• 3:14:56Jordi Hays?

  It is really funny. It's basically say, "I'm gonna build a dev shop, but it's gonna be my name." And I'm, you know, he probably, no, he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop.

• 3:15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but, but, but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters. And the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracking. We don't have to outsource. The whole thing with Uber, remember Uber's initial build-out was all outsourced? And it was like, it was like a mark on the company. Obviously, it didn't affect them. They went on a generational run. It was fantastic. But there's this, there's this idea of like, if you're building a startup, you need, the founders need to be coding. The employees need to be coding. Needs to be handcrafted. Can't outsource.

• 3:15:42Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 3:15:42John Coogan?

  You know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess.

• 3:15:44Jordi Hays?

  True. So, we're working on getting him live. We got another post here from Growing Daniel.

• 3:15:51John Coogan?

  Has he gotten back to you, Tyler, on email? It seems like he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and try to get him on.

• 3:15:56Speaker 02

  Hasn't got back. I sent it 20 minutes ago.

• 3:15:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, no.

• 3:15:59Jordi Hays?

  I think he needs to come out and say he's sorry. He needs to come out and say he's sorry.

• 3:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:04Jordi Hays?

  And he needs to say, "This is the right time to launch his..."

• 3:16:08John Coogan?

  His dev shop, yeah.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it should be called "The Dev Shop of Soham Parekh."

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Yes. This is, I mean, I don't know, maybe he's delivering, but...

• 3:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel has a post, "Your Chief of Staff Brings List of Applicants. Really Likes This One Indian Guy. Asked If It's a Rune or a Soham She Doesn't Understand." Pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between runes and Soham. She laughs and says, "It's a good engineer, sir." It's a Soham.

• 3:16:35John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a wild post. That's great. Oh, this is great. Anyway, anything else that we need to cover from the news today? Apparently, crumble cookies have 62% of your daily calorie allowance, Nick Carter says.

• 3:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Staying on Soham, Gabby Goldberg says, "I'm at the intersection of Soham Parekh and Worker 17."

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, Worker 17.

• 3:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we got another one. Growing Daniel's going on an absolute tear. We're just gonna keep these coming. Pull this up in the chat.

• 3:17:07John Coogan?

  Posting. Soham Perique, new CS grads. Yeah, Soham Perique's really soaking up the jobs.

• 3:17:14Jordi Hays?

  The job market.

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  It's the power law.

• 3:17:16Jordi Hays?

  He'd been sitting over this post being like, "The job market is actually fine. You guys are just bad at interviewing."

• 3:17:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Jacob Posel says, "Introducing our newest product, Soham, the AI coding agent that can work for anyone, any codebase 24/7. We've been testing in stealth for a while and results are looking excellent. Please reach out."

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, I wonder if he's a cursor user or what he's got. Maybe he's got Devon under the hood. Maybe he's got Claude Code. Who knows? We definitely need to know Soham's tech stack, for sure. That is interesting.

• 3:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson says, "Soham never even applied to Flexport." Sad face emoji. Ryan, Ryan would have caught him.

• 3:17:55John Coogan?

  Delete that. Don't say that alone.

• 3:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Adam over at Warp, CTO, has a few. He got to a round two. Soham got to a round two over at Warp. Sounds like he didn't make a hire. So.

• 3:18:12John Coogan?

  It's fascinating.

• 3:18:13Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, "Worker 17's name? Soham Perique."

• 3:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Antonio says, "He was marked safe from Soham Perique today."

• 3:18:22John Coogan?

  He did tear up the valley today. Completely, completely. Anything else we should cover in the timeline?

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  We have a, someone in the House of Representatives is coming out against car headlights. They're saying they're too bright and I'm going to do something about this. Brightness has doubled in the last decade, but manufacturing standards haven't budged in 40 years. Drivers and oncoming traffic deserve visibility. It matters for seniors and rural roads. Are you anti-bright lights?

• 3:18:53Jordi Hays?

  I am. I think we could tone them down a bit.

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, really?

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  I think we've toned them down a bit.

• 3:18:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:18:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't drive at night much, but when I do, I'm reminded that lights kind of peaked probably in the early 2000s. They were solid. We didn't have to keep improving.

• 3:19:08John Coogan?

  They also got bluer because they went to LED. They used to be sodium vapor tungsten.

• 3:19:15Jordi Hays?

  Widespread blindness.

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  I would say if you're driving a car, just, just light a candle and hold out a, hold out a lantern like you're.

• 3:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Like on a fishing rod almost in front of your car?

• 3:19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no. Just, just, just while you're driving like this. Yeah. Just hold out the candle. The candle lantern. That's great. We got a, we got a highlight signal before we head out. Signal Labs is unapologetically a wrapper company. We use state of the art models made by others and give credit where credit's due. Our first product is so simple. When you see it, you'll probably say, wait, that's it. That's really the point. That's our ideal reaction. I've been using it for two weeks and genuinely can't imagine life without it at this point. We don't have any evals, no real QA other than our own intuition, but it surprises you and makes you feel something. Hopefully everyone enjoys as much as I do. So very excited for Signal's launch.

• 3:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Get us an invite.

• 3:20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Send it, send the invite. We'd love to, we'd love to test drive it and we'd love to have you on the show when you launch.

• 3:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 3:20:09John Coogan?

  Anything else worth covering before we hop off?

• 3:20:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's so much news. There's so much news, John. This Flo actually hired.

• 3:20:18John Coogan?

  Flo Krevale?

• 3:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he hired him a week ago, fired him this morning after seeing Soham's post. It's just funny that the guy wouldn't kind of mix up the name, you know, it's a small industry. Stuff's going to get around.

• 3:20:34Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 3:20:37John Coogan?

  It is crazy. Yeah. You'd think, you'd think different names, different GitHub profiles, different LinkedIn's like that wouldn't be that hard. It would, it'd actually, actually like the best way to, to run this like scheme would be to set up a number of different folks. And, and instead of having one person with 20 junior devs underneath, have five people each with three underneath. So you're still doing the subcontracting, but there's only one face per client essentially. And this is basically what market.

• 3:21:05Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to give them too many ideas, John.

• 3:21:07John Coogan?

  This is basically what, what, uh, what market, like you go to like RGA or Wyden, they'll be like, here's your, here's your killer, you know, Don Draper. Like this is your account representative. They'll be coming up with the ideas and they come in once a quarter and give you a presentation on, you should do this Superbowl ad. And like, and investment banks do the same thing. Hey, we, you know, we'd love to do a private placement. We'd love to take you public. Here's this, you know, 200 page deck on why your business is, is amazing and how much money we can get for it. Who built that deck? A bunch of analysts working 100 hour weeks. That's it for sure.

• 3:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, the next 24 hours matter a lot for Soham Parekh. We will be watching. We'll hopefully get him on the show tomorrow, but.

• 3:21:50John Coogan?

  Do you think he's going to raise money?

• 3:21:52Jordi Hays?

  He might, he, I definitely saw somebody joking around saying that he raised a Series A from some friends of ours.

• 3:22:00John Coogan?

  Tier one.

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Tier one.

• 3:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's totally possible. But, but, but do you think?

• 3:22:07Jordi Hays?

  The greatest irony would be, is he's like, sorry, guys, I've, you know, what that guy was joking about a few minutes ago, saying like, yeah, I've actually been building a coding agent. I named it after myself. This was the best way to test if it, if it works. It's not as good as a 1X engineer right now, but it's good enough to keep a job for a few months.

• 3:22:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22:28Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, we will be watching his response.

• 3:22:32John Coogan?

  Narrative violation on Soham. It is really dominating the timeline.

• 3:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Soham gate.

• 3:22:38John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, you posted Timeline in Turmoil. Buy markets in turmoil, sell Timeline in turmoil. Then I'm seeing pictures from our billboard. Yeah, it's funny. You just refresh and you just get pure Soham. Everyone's having fun. I love, I love a good, I love a good current thing. You know, we started the show with the current thing. It was Erebor, the new crypto bank. We ended the show. We lived through it. We experienced the transition. The old current thing is out. The new current thing is Soham Parekh. Fantastic. I wonder, we, we gotta get his tech stack and I want to know how much he's actually pulling in.

• 3:23:23John Coogan?

  How much do you think he is?

• 3:23:24Jordi Hays?

  I, I would expect it, I would expect if, if people are triangulating now that he was maybe had three to four jobs at once, I'm going to make the bold bet that he's actually has, like, I could see him having 20, 30.

• 3:23:38John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 3:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Just imagining a really hardworking guy running a dev shop.

• 3:23:43John Coogan?

  A lot of companies aren't posting publicly about it.

• 3:23:44Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of companies aren't public and he could be just finding some random SaaS company in the middle of nowhere. Not a lot of management oversight. Companies aren't in founder mode. If he ships, you know, a few PRs a day and he's just chugging along.

• 3:23:58John Coogan?

  So you think over-under top line, 2 million?

• 3:24:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm going over.

• 3:24:04John Coogan?

  Over.

• 3:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Over. The challenge would be daily stand-ups, right?

• 3:24:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:24:09Jordi Hays?

  It's like.

• 3:24:11John Coogan?

  You gotta see him, but then again.

• 3:24:12Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but he's kind of on the precipice, he's kind of on the precipice of this, you know, video AI models. He could have other versions of himself, voice modulation and AI-generated images. So he can have his employees.

• 3:24:25John Coogan?

  The thing you can do is you can puppeteer the image. So you have a different person, a real human's joining, real, real human.

• 3:24:31Jordi Hays?

  He just needs a video that he loops and it plays at the right time. It says, "Nothing from my end, thanks."

• 3:24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody could have posted that. That's definitely a banger. Like Soham Parekh, when he, when he says, "Nothing from my end, thanks." This is the, this, we're gonna go through all of the current, all the current thing memes. The, the, "Honey, how did you get, how did our family get so rich?" "Oh, my, your father worked at seven different jobs with a team of junior engineers under him."

• 3:24:59Jordi Hays?

  This was kinda, I mean, this was happening more in 2021, where somebody would have a big tech job, but, and they were kind of bored, they were kind of just, they weren't working too hard. And they would get, they would just start moonlighting at a startup.

• 3:25:12John Coogan?

  That was a common thing during COVID.

• 3:25:13Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I expected a company to start that actually enabled anonymous work, right?

• 3:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Didn't, didn't, it was very much like, it's typically a, a top signal when people start moonlighting too hard.

• 3:25:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably. You've been on it, you've been, you've been, you've been close to calling the top, toying with it.

• 3:25:33Jordi Hays?

  I've been toying with calling the top.

• 3:25:36John Coogan?

  We'll see. "After the Soham saga, pretty sure every few, pretty sure very few YC companies will hire remote Indians. Classic case of one guy exploiting high-trust society, which leads to downfall of the others around him," says Varunam Gharash from Warp. I think you already read this, but Gary Tan chimed in. He said, "If this is true, it would be sad. The Soham saga doesn't seem widespread to me. He seems like a five-standard deviation above the mean kind of fraud. Decent startup idea in here, though. There's probably a space for remote employee certification. Interesting." Yeah, I was thinking about it like the you should be able to have an AI that that looks over the GitHub, the GitHub. When I first heard about this, I thought he was directly moonlighting. Like, it was like, from, from, you know, you get a job on the East Coast,

• 3:26:21John Coogan?

  you get a job in Chicago, you get a job in Denver, and you get a job in, in San Francisco. And then, yeah, you're just going from one stand-up to the next, and then you work three hours at one job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job. And I thought it was just him. I didn't realize that he had teams under him. But in that, in that scenario,

• 3:26:41Jordi Hays?

  You would think this was something-

• 3:26:42John Coogan?

  Oh, well, like, all the, all the pull requests come in at the same time every day, and he's not doing, like, he's, he's not sending Slack messages randomly throughout the day. He sends them only in this two-hour block. But that's not true if he's sending, like, no, there's actually two or three people that are dedicated to your account, basically, like, all day long, right? So, I, I don't know how you, I don't know how you do remote certification. You need to have, like, the camera on. We need WorldCoin. This is a WorldCoin application.

• 3:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Atlas says, "Breaking, Soham Parekh closes a $15 million round led by A16Z, 2,000 likes."

• 3:27:17John Coogan?

  This is great. Reed Hoffman says-

• 3:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Reed Hoffman's chiming in?

• 3:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, "Do you think Soham Parekh's LinkedIn, what do you think Soham Parekh's LinkedIn header is?" This is hilarious, the founder of LinkedIn chiming in. It's great. Opens timeline, "It's all Soham," says Beth. The timeline's intermural, baby.

• 3:27:38Jordi Hays?

  You would think that this would be something that Bookface would have solved, right? One of, one of the issues here is that when people make a poor hire, they don't exactly want to go tell a bunch of other people that they messed up.

• 3:27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  And so, you can imagine people just experiencing this and not wanting to talk about it. And now, now it's becoming a meme to talk about it. There's a guy, I think this account was just created, Soham, well, it was created in February. He says, I think he's just joking around. He must have just changed the name.

• 3:28:11John Coogan?

  I think he just changed the name.

• 3:28:12Jordi Hays?

  "I was fired from being a founding engineer, principal engineer, backend engineer, and frontend engineer today. If anyone is hiring for all four..."

• 3:28:21John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 3:28:22Jordi Hays?

  And this is clearly a fake account. He says, I make more than 99% of YC startups. This is the real reason they're mad.

• 3:28:30John Coogan?

  This is very funny. Everyone asks, where is Soham Parekh? Nobody asks, how is Soham Parekh?

• 3:28:39John Coogan?

  I'm glad we found this account. Whoever's writing this is great. Elon can work at nine startups. Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies. But when you do it, it's scam.

• 3:28:49John Coogan?

  Oh, this is gonna be a good account to follow. Everyone should follow this. Phantomthread underscore D. This is definitely not him. I mean, if this is actually him and he's a great poster too, that's a quadruple threat. Quintuple threat. We'd love to see it.

• 3:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Aiden over at OpenAI said, hey, sorry, was out this morning. Who's Soham Parekh? Must be a pretty popular name because I think my accountant and front end contractor have the same name.

• 3:29:19John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 3:29:21Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think the next move from here, prediction clearly gives Soham a maxed out contract.

• 3:29:28John Coogan?

  For sure. It's just, it's just too good of a meme.

• 3:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal in the works.

• 3:29:32John Coogan?

  Get him to America, shoot a viral video. This is a no brainer. There's gotta be, there's gotta be a viral video in here somewhere. We are actively monitoring the situation for sure. For sure.

• 3:29:45Jordi Hays?

  We are. Yeah, Bobby says, looking back through our engineering applicants and Soham never applied. Chat, am I cooked?

• 3:29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone should search their email right now for Soham. It's amazing. Okay.

• 3:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think that's a good place to wrap. It has been a fun show today. Hopefully more breaking news on Soham. If you find him, send him our way.

• 3:30:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye.