Apple Unveils iPhone 17 Lineup, OpenAI & Oracle's $300B Cloud Pact | Nico Rosberg, Josh Machiz, Nir Zicherman, Amjad Masad, Alex Mashrabov, Stefan Cohen, Rohan Kodialam, Timothy Luchini, Marc Boroditsky, Michael Tannenbaum

(04:11) - Apple Unveils iPhone 17 Lineup (40:36) - OpenAI & Oracle Strike $300B Cloud Pact (52:44) - Timeline Reactions (01:12:51) - Josh Machiz, recently appointed as Chief Marketing Officer at Lightspeed Venture Partners, brings a wealth of experience from his previous roles as Partner at Redpoint Ventures and Chief Digital Officer at Nasdaq. In his conversation, he discusses his excitement about joining Lightspeed, emphasizing the firm's comprehensive support for companies from seed stage through IPO and beyond. He also highlights plans to enhance Lightspeed's media presence through platforms like TikTok and Instagram, aiming to authentically share founders' stories and differentiate the firm's brand in the venture capital landscape. (01:30:44) - Nico Rosberg, a German-Finnish former racing driver, won the 2016 Formula One World Championship with Mercedes before retiring days later. He discusses his transition from racing to venture capital, founding Rosberg Ventures to invest in top-tier VC funds and bridge European corporates with innovative U. S. startups. Rosberg also highlights the challenges European car manufacturers face in adopting new technologies and the rapid advancements of Chinese electric vehicle companies. (02:01:02) - Nir Zicherman, CEO and co-founder of Oboe, previously co-founded Anchor and served as VP of Audiobooks at Spotify. In the conversation, he introduces Oboe as an AI-driven platform designed to create personalized, multimodal courses on any topic, aiming to make learning more accessible and engaging. Zicherman emphasizes the importance of multimodal learning experiences, including text, audio, and interactive elements, to cater to diverse learning preferences. (02:09:42) - Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, discusses the company's recent $250 million funding round at a $3 billion valuation, highlighting the launch of Agent 3, an autonomous AI tool designed to test, fix code, and build custom workflows. He emphasizes Replit's mission to democratize software development, enabling individuals without coding experience to create applications through natural language interactions. Masad also envisions a future where AI agents can autonomously develop software, reducing the need for traditional coding and expanding access to software creation across various professions. (02:26:39) - Alex Mashrabov, CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, is an entrepreneur specializing in consumer generative AI products, with a background that includes leading AI initiatives at Snap Inc. He discusses Higgsfield's recent $50 million fundraising, the company's support for social media-native creators, and the rapid growth of their AI-generated content, which has surpassed 1.3 billion views in just five months. Additionally, he highlights the launch of Higgsfield Ventures to support the next wave of AI startups and shares insights into the future of AI-driven content creation, predicting that in three years, every second video will be AI-generated, with Higgsfield playing a significant role in this transformation. (02:35:10) - Stefan Cohen, a Partner at Bain Capital Crypto, has been leading the firm's crypto investments since 2016, focusing on areas like layer 1 infrastructure, scaling solutions, DeFi, and privacy. In the conversation, he discusses the firm's flexible investment strategy, which includes both liquid tokens and early-stage projects, emphasizing long-term positions over active trading. He also highlights the importance of supporting founders with unconventional ideas, noting that many successful companies start with concepts that are initially hard to believe. (02:47:10) - Rohan Kodialam, co-founder and CEO of Sphinx, discusses how his company is developing AI copilots to transform raw data into actionable business insights, particularly focusing on tabular and time-series data that traditional large language models struggle with. He highlights their initial work with hedge funds, providing tools for quantitative analysts to extract valuable insights from data more efficiently. Kodialam also touches on Sphinx's go-to-market strategy, which includes both enterprise sales and a bottom-up approach targeting data scientists frustrated with existing tools, and emphasizes their focus on building transformative solutions over immediate monetization. (02:52:49) - Timothy Luchini, CEO of Intramotev Autonomous Rail, discusses the development of battery-electric autonomous railcars designed to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of freight transportation. By equipping individual railcars with self-propulsion capabilities, these vehicles can operate independently or integrate into traditional long trains, facilitating more frequent and adaptable freight movements. This innovation aims to reduce idle times, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and make rail transport more competitive with trucking by offering faster and more flexible delivery options. (03:01:26) - Marc Boroditsky, Chief Revenue Officer at Nebius, brings extensive experience from leadership roles at Twilio, Oracle, and Cloudflare. He discusses Nebius's recent $17.4 billion partnership with Microsoft to provide AI infrastructure, highlighting the company's focus on building AI infrastructure for startups and enterprises. Boroditsky emphasizes Nebius's commitment to delivering comprehensive AI solutions, including model creation, training, and inference capabilities, to support customers from development to production. (03:09:44) - Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure Technology Solutions, discusses the company's recent IPO, highlighting its growth and profitability, the $185 billion total addressable market in private credit, and its leadership in tokenizing real-world assets on blockchain. He explains how Figure's technology streamlines loan origination and capital markets, citing a partnership with Houzz that reduces loan processing costs by $11,000 and shortens timelines from 45 to 5 days. Reflecting on the IPO process, Tannenbaum notes the shift towards virtual meetings post-COVID and emphasizes the importance of public markets for growth and branding, drawing parallels to his experience at SoFi. 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 Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai/ 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Thursday, September 11th, 2025. We are back in the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Rough day yesterday, rough day today. Our show, we're gonna stick to covering tech and finance news, but there are some fantastic journalists out there who are in media outlets who are unpacking the Charlie Kirk story and its implications, new developments as they unfold. So we want to recommend following those folks if you are interested in that story. And we just want to say rest in peace.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Rest in peace to Charlie Kirk and sending prayers to his loved ones and family and everyone in his life. It's absolutely devastating.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So today we're going to be catching up on the news that we touched on over the last two days, but we're pretty swamped with Y Combinator Demo Day. Had a great time there. Interviewed a ton of founders and I liked the change that we did this year where we asked everyone their favorite entrepreneur, everyone how they made their first dollar. I saw some folks posting that, like the meme of us asking that question on X to other people. And so it seems like we sort of broke through with that.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting to see how many patterns there were in that from trading.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  The opposite. I thought there was no, oh yeah. So there was a huge pattern in how you made your money. There was like almost no pattern in who's your favorite entrepreneur. I thought it was gonna be like all Elon and Steve Jobs. And it was like all over the place.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the patterns in the how they made their first money. It was Minecraft servers.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was definitely eras, right?

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  And so many different eras.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, some crypto traders and then some people who definitely just took the question is like, well, like after I started the business, I made a sales call and we're like, that wasn't really what we're asking, but we're in the lightning round. So we're just gonna move on. Anyway, stay tuned. We will be putting together a recap video of both of those questions soon. And so you can get the full view of that. And of course you can watch our coverage from the New York Stock Exchange. Exchange or Y C demo day in the feed.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yesterday was a strange show.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was amazing to speak with Sebastian, the founder and CEO of Klarna. I think his story is amazing.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  He's just very cool. I think I came away from that feeling like people have a, people generally have a lot of misconceptions around the category.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to go out and make the case that, that it's some incredible business, but I do believe this is a business that will, you know, continue to, to compound and be a much bigger business and, you know, a decade from now. I don't think it's going anywhere, but the, the kind of his intentionality and like why the company, you know, why the company even needed to exist, should exist, all the, all these different things.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  My most botched interview question was asking Andrew Reid, like, so like, what was it like investing in Klarna? He's like, well, I was a child because it was 15 years ago.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  I was a boy.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  I didn't, yeah, I mean, he was in college, but I didn't realize.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  It was a few years. They, they made the investment, I think, like four or five years before he joined.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  But obviously they ended up investing more money.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But still, it was just wild. And we missed everyone in chat. It was, it was rough. We're going to figure out how to get chat involved when we're on the road. We're still figuring that out, but thanks everyone for tuning in today. Back to the normal schedule. John Exley is here. You know, it's a good day.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you guys. We missed you all in chat.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Techno chief. We see you techno chief, Siraj, and a bunch of other folks, David.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yesterday being, yeah, being.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Nature of live TV.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's the nature of live TV.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. They hit one billion in ARR. We have been asking Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, is the job finished? He confirmed with us on the phone that it's not finished. So if you sign up for Ramp, just know he's keep, he's going to keep building. Anyway. We need to dive into the Apple and the iPhone announcement briefly. Obviously, this has been talked about. It happened a couple of days ago. But the post that stuck out to me, there were a few about the design, but the big one was that the iPhone 17 Pro now has more graphics power than an M2 MacBook Air. I have, this is a MacBook Air. I don't know if, this might be the M3 or M4 version.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  What have clocked you as an Air guy?

• 4:37John Coogan?

  I just went for it because I was like, I'm traveling more, I'm less of like in workstation mode. And, and so like, let me give this one a try. And let me see, I have the, I have the M4, so I think I have more power here than the iPhone 17 Pro. But even just two years ago, it's crazy to think how quickly the chips are shifting from workstation, which is huge, you know, laptop to phone. And so I wanted to talk about what the downstream implications of this are and.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you see the camera functionality? Apparently if you take, you can take a photo, holding your phone vertically and it will give you the landscape.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, because again, it's, I think it's, I think it's a square sensor that's maybe 48 megapixels.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  How are you feeling about the, the orange? Do you think this is, this is Tim Cook signaling that he's a BTC maxi?

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought it was him talking, giving a little nod to Gary Tan, my commentator.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  That's one of, one of, one of the other.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Clearly, I.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  Had to be one of the other. It is the color, the colors, I like, I like orange. I think it's an underrated color in general. But still, the color options were interesting, like no matte, you would have thought they would have done a matte black.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  They didn't do matte black this year. They just, wow. So they have a silver and a black and like a blue, I think, something like that. I like orange. I, I think it's a cool, bold color. I think, I think it's one of the ways to stand out. It's McLaren orange, you know?

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  McLaren orange, yeah.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Looks like F1, maybe it's a nod to that, who knows? But they're, they're having fun with it. Hopefully next year, the color I'm pulling for, Ramp Yellow. Can you imagine the Ramp Yellow iPhone? It just might happen. Maybe we'll, we'll make it happen. But on the tech side, you know, people were pretty, like, there were a couple of takes early that were pretty like bearish, like, oh, like, nothing changed, nothing changed. And Ben Thompson summed it up pretty well.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  I mean, you had a funny banger about this.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Tim, Tim Cook posted. He did post

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  The morning of and he was like, days like this make Apple. You know, like, like, basically like hyped it up as, as though it was going to be this dramatic announcement.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think people were pretty

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Pretty let down.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  At this point, if it's not a change in the overall form factor, like you're going to folding phone, it's not going to be as easy just to talk about completely. But at the same time, it has a bunch of, it has a bunch of improvements that I think will have downstream effects that might be interesting and might actually have kind of these like viral moments.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  I'll get into my thesis here. So it has a vapor chamber in it that allows it to cool. So if you're in the sun or you're running, you know, you're running some heavy duty app, you're not going to get, your, your phone's not going to be as hot anymore. 50% more RAM, obviously that's important for AI. And then they have a new chip that's designed with the LLM transformer architecture in mind. So the Apple A series of chips, they've always been somewhat AI optimized, but more for just broader machine learning tasks. Now they're doing the same thing that OpenAI is doing with Nvidia and Broadcom on chip design. Same thing that Google DeepMind TPU team is doing over at Google and Anthropic is working with Amazon and Tranium.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Here's my post introducing iPhone 4000, a newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster, newer and better. Bye.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  How many, where did this land? How many likes did this wind up getting?

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Six.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Six thousand?

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Thousand.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  And the funny story here, the little inside baseball. Jordy posted this exact post like five minutes earlier.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so I originally had this post as a draft.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  And then I altered it.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  And I posted it and it completely, I had a different picture and I did iPhone 472. And it was just completely flopping. It got like one like on like 300 impressions, like people hated it.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  The timeline hated it.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  I just went back to this version, posted it and then it completely ripped.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Never give up, never give up. If you think you have a good bit.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  But the, the, the funny thing here, I mean, obviously just funny that Apple always comes out and is like, it's our most powerful iPhone ever. Because it's like, well, if it was, if you, if you guys messed up and accidentally created a less powerful iPhone, you would just keep selling the current one. You're not, you're never going to come out and be like, This year, we're selling one, the latest iPhone, but it's less powerful. Because just sell the last one then. Just be like, no new iPhone, because we couldn't make it any more powerful.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  We actually made it, we made it perfect.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  We made it perfect.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, uh, what are you, are you, how are you feeling about the Air? I think that's gonna sell incredibly well.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'll, I'll need to like feel it and, and, uh, and try it. I've never had any iPhone that's not just like the biggest and most of, they're like the, the biggest screen, the maxed out one. I've always gone for like the, the most power, the biggest one. I've actually considered carrying an iPad Mini just as a phone. Because I'm so big that my pockets are big enough to carry an iPad Mini. Yeah, no, no. I, I was feeling it and I was like, you can get it with cell service. And so I think you can get a phone number on there. And so you can just have, like, pull out your giant iPad Mini. But, uh, but I never did that. I've always just stuck to like the Pro Max, the big one, the, the big screen, but it, it's, it's easy.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  The, uh, I don't know. The, the interesting thing about the, uh, the iPhone Air was this, uh, you know, the whole computer is in the camera bump now. And basically everything that drops down is just battery and screen, battery and screen all the way down. Um, and so people are wondering like, uh, you know, they could clearly take out the battery and the screen and maybe make like a pin, like it, it, they're, they're getting so good at miniaturizing like what it means to be a computer. Uh, that they can put that in all sorts of different things.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  I would be, would have been really excited to have an iPhone that doesn't, that will sit flat on a surface without a case on it. I haven't used cases in, in many years. I just like the, the feeling of the phone.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  It is crazy that they've never tried that.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Just perpetually like, you know, it just give me like a flat surface. Like I'm happy for the phone to be as thick as necessary to just give me a flat surface.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  And it looked like they were gonna do that with the iPhone Pro because it has this wider notch. So at least if you did, if you did the notch evenly all the way across.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  It might be nice if it's kind of like sitting at an angle a little bit.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  That's fine, I guess. I don't know.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  But it's also so funny, the idea of like, you have this incredible camera.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  And then you're just like putting it on, like, I really want you to buy a case. Like, it's like, a lot of the product design seems driven by.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  I don't think that's the real, I don't think that's the real reason.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think it's.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's genuinely like, people don't like heavy phones. And so, you have to balance, like, you need, you need the optics of a camera, this certain thickness, and then you need the phone to be thin, so that people actually carry it around and aren't like, this thing's heavy. Tinfoil hat, yes, is the case. I just don't think, I don't think they make that much money. How much money do you think they make from cases?

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they're adding, what percentage of people do you think, when they go to that, buy an iPhone, buy an Apple case?

• 11:40John Coogan?

  I would, I would estimate that it's less than 1% of their overall revenue. Cases, yeah.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Totally, but you're talking to the GOAT of profit maximization, Tim Cook.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  There's just so many other ways. I feel like you could sell 1% more iPhones if you, if you actually choose this odd choice. Because people are like, well, yeah, it's, it's the lightest iPhone. It's lighter than the Samsung one. It's thinner, it's lighter, it's, it looks great. And then there might be something about like, the notch kind of holding on your finger. And so you can actually hold the phone easier with that, as opposed to if it was just like, fully, fully smooth. Anyway.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, I mean, when you start thinking of, when you start, like, the incremental sales from, from, like, design-driven decisions like this.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  I do think, I do think it'd be significant.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Huge keynote, filmed on an iPhone, obviously, a lot less graphics this time around. If you're doing a keynote, do it on Restream, one live stream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  And we have a bunch of people joining from the Restream waiting room.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Later today, we're gonna have Josh from Lightspeed, Nika Rosberg.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Look at that lineup.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Will be joining. Mike and Nir from OBO.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Amjad.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  Amjad from Replit, Alex from Higgsfield, Stefan Cohen from Bain Capital Crypto, Rohan from Sphinx AI, Timothy Luchini from Intramotive.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Mark from Nebius, who just signed the 2017-ish billion-dollar deal with Microsoft.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  And then, of course, Michael from Figure, who just IPO'd today on the NASDAQ. And the stock is trading up, I believe, 35% right now. So he is gonna be joining us as well.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yep. So my, my take on the iPhone Pro was you're, we're getting to the point where you could run an LLM on-device, and even if it's not Apple Intelligence, you know, through that API, just the ability to actually distill something that's like GPT-4 level and have it be free. Not even an API call that you need, not even cheap on a per-token basis, but actually just have something that you can basically drag and drop.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Cost of the energy.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Cost of the energy, and no one thinks about it because they charge on the edge, because they charge their phone every night, anyway.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  So I was talking to Tyler about this earlier. Try and put into context how powerful a, an LLM running on-device could be with this next iPhone. Because currently, people have done it. I feel like people have distilled models to the point where they can run locally on phones, but they're not fast, or they're not smart. But it feels like we might be at a point where you get like, to some sort of like touring, touring test passing, plus not waiting forever.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Chad is asking if it's Nico Rosberg.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  It is. It is Nico Rosberg.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  The former F1 world champion.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  And now a capital allocator.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Now a capital allocator. So yeah, Tyler, what is your take as this gets into people's hands? How solid do you think the actual interactions with LLMs could be on, on-device?

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think, I think it's 12 gigabytes now.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Up from eight.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  So you can probably run like a, like, very solid, like, 7-billion parameter, like, not super-quantized.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Model. We've had those for a long time that are like, very solid, like, obviously, they're gonna pass Turing tests, whatever.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  You're probably not gonna be using it for like, doing your, your like, hard physics homework.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  But like, most like, things that you want from like, a non-device model, like... Helping look at your emails or like doing stuff that like you would think of like, like a really good Siri product would do.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  I think it's like totally capable of doing that. I mean, it's like, I don't think that Apple Intelligence was bad because the hardware was lacking. It was like, like, I mean, you can, it'll be a little bit slower probably to run on cloud, maybe.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, with my experience with Apple Intelligence was it was just instantiated in very odd ways. It was, they didn't really have like a killer app there. And it was like a bunch of different things that kind of piped in and you could like, highlight text and then just say rewrite this, all sort of like very incremental games.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  Bots summaries.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, the summaries are botched, but sometimes that's might be the best feature, actually.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a feature, not a bug.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  We just saw, we just saw it in our chat, in our group chat. I posted some fake news and Apple summarizes it like.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, shouldn't Tyler be back in school? Gabe, you must have missed the episode, but Tyler, taking a gap semester, he is riding with us.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so I think it's, I think there's like, there's something magical about getting the ability to inference a GPT-4 level model on the edge for free. Like, you can, you can quibble about the level of intelligence that is, but it is actually too cheap to meter because you won't even have to set up an API key. And so you can vend in a GPT-4 level model and then go viral and not have a bill show up and not need to think about monetization, not need to think about anything that's a drag on your just pure virality. You can have a free app that just grows and grows and grows and figure out the monetization later. And I feel like this sets us up for.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Maybe something interesting to happen in consumer. We haven't really had that that moment of, you remember the Lensa moment, the magic avatars? You upload your picture and it turns you into Superman or something. And then the Studio Ghibli moment. We haven't had that many like viral apps that are purely based on L L M interactions, like text interactions. There's been a couple like, there was one called like Generative Dungeon. Do you remember this? It was like a dungeon crawler text thing. So it would say like, you walk up to the dragon's lair. What do you want to do? And you could just type like, I brandish my sword. And then it would say like the dragon.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  That was like G P T two.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was super low level, right? So imagine that plus like, but but you can do it on device at a reasonable level. And and you can bring in some other U I elements from the iPhone, bring in the camera, bring in G P S, bring in, you know, all the other tools that are available just in the I O S like Swift, like, you know, Developer Kits, the S D Ks. I feel like there will be a ton of people that are just building cool, interesting things on the iPhone that could potentially like go viral and and then become real businesses.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I don't think this will be that like meaningful for like Apple Intelligence because it's not like, that's like a product issue. It's not like a hardware issue. But yeah, I definitely think for like third party developers, this will be like pretty big. You can do like, you know, if you make some random game, you can now have like avatars or whatever. Like if you make the S D K really easy where like it's very easy to inference L L M, you don't have to like figure out how to like download and then do inference and all that stuff. If they like abstract that away, I think it could be interesting.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  And I just feel like we've seen so many, there's been so many companies. We talked to some folks at Demo Day who were doing this where they were like, we have this cool A I agent that like scrapes your emails and does this. And it all is, it's all predicated on you installing a Mac app, which is a really, really hard thing to do.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Whereas like. Yeah, how many Mac apps do you think you've installed this year?

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Oh, it's super rare. It's super rare. You know, I got something to put the decks together. Like I literally have a Chrome, like that's the one I installed. I'm looking at my Home Row and it's like, it's just Chrome.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Well, and this is why everybody's obsessed with the browser.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Truly, truly, because if you can get people over there, then you're there. But, but I have installed apps and I've installed little tiny apps. We were talking about the, the workout tracking app Strong. That I saw my friend at the gym, he was using an app to track his workouts. Said, what app is that? I went and downloaded it. You went and downloaded it. It was very easy for that app to like loosely go viral and it's a free app. But it doesn't have any like AI, it doesn't really need any AI. But, but you could imagine that the, the viral coefficient of, of, someone downloads an app. They have a magical experience with some twist on top of an LLM, something storytelling, something astrology, who knows what it'll be?

• 20:25John Coogan?

  I can't predict it. It's as hard to predict as Instagram or Uber, but it's unlocked by having this, having this ability for free on the iPhone. And then people are sharing screenshots of, oh, I had this hilarious interaction or this was incredible or I love this app. They create some viral loop, they do some Nikita Beer type stuff. And then, and then everyone's downloading the app and then it gets actually really, really big. And I don't think it's going to be a competi-, I don't think it's going to compete with ChatGPT. I think it's going to be a completely different thing and it's very hard to predict, but, but it feels like we might be seeing it. Yeah. And, and, and it's going to require some like really, you know, crack level of creativity like what we saw with Harry, Harry Potter Balenciaga.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Where it's like, the technology existed and then someone came up with, with the great idea to actually go like instantiate it. So if you're going to be locking that app up, you're going to do it in Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal was also covering the Apple's iPhone Air. They had a whole interview. They, they, they, they had really good coverage of the, of the iPhone event. There was a few, there was one thing in the, the reporting from the Wall Street Journal. I don't have, I don't have this particular article actually, but they did an article with the Wall Street Journal and Apple revealed that, I, I believe they said the majority of iPhones, fifty-one percent or more, that are shipping to America are going to be made in India. And I'm not sure if it was this cycle, but it seemed like they were taking the tariff stuff really seriously. Moving the, the actual manufacturing capacity around.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Obviously Foxconn, their, their manufacturing partner is a Taiwanese company and so they're worried about geopolitical risk as well. And so just another, another. Data point around Tim Cook, he is not loudly shouting like, America, I'm all in, reindustrialize, but he is making moves.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week? Wasn't it?

• 22:29John Coogan?

  I don't know if he had a number because who was it? It was, Zuck had a number and did Apple have a number too? That was 600 billion or something? Apple has thrown out a number at one point. You're completely right. My, my, my point is that we've seen.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  The number of thank yous.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. The number of thank yous is a lot. But, but, but we've seen he's invested in, in some semi, some rare earth developments in the United States and starting to think about manufacturing internationally. And, you know, the, the, the pro bullish bet on Tim Cook is that like, if he was able to set up this in China and he's the reason, he can set it up somewhere else because he's the guy who did it. And so even though he hasn't been really loud about his moves, because obviously if he says like, oh yeah, I'm not going to be manufacturing in China anymore than like his important business partners over there are probably going to be like, well, yeah, like, we're not going to take your business seriously anymore. There are a ton of different geopolitical considerations.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Such an iconic line from the dinner.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Cook says, I've always enjoyed dinner and interacting.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you're getting dinner this weekend with one of your boys, just tell.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  It's like how to say something that like, no one can, you know, cancel you for. It's like, I've always enjoyed dinner and interacting.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Two things I've enjoyed.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  He's a dinner enjoyer.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  He's not saying, I've always enjoyed dinner with you.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  And interacting with you. He's just saying, I've always enjoyed dinner and interacting.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Incredible. Putting on a claim. I, I feel like for watching some of these, like I was watching the Tucker, Sam Altman interview and there's a certain level. Of polish that some of these, some of these CEOs have when they get to a certain level of media training and public speaking experience where I think of them more as like word rotators than word cells or shape rotators. Like they can, they can so quickly like shift a sentence to be like, like that, like so perfectly balanced where you're like, wow, every word in that sentence was calculated so that it's the rides this perfect line like, like Sam was going back and forth with Tucker and Tucker's like, I didn't accuse you. I didn't

• 24:46John Coogan?

  accuse you. And you, and if you run back the transcript, you're like, yeah, technically he didn't. And there was not, it was not an accusation. But then, you know, they're, they're rotating the sentences around to try and like pin each other. It's like watching a wrestling match. It's crazy.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook said they would be investing $600 billion.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  600 billion. Yeah. Okay. So, Apple says the majority of iPhones shipped to the US are now assembled in India, meaning they face no tariff, yet Indian suppliers aren't yet capable of delivering as many of the pro models that US consumers demand. So, most of those still come from China. So, this is the majority of iPhones in total because iPhone, Apple makes a ton of those, but they can't, they can't make the leading edge. And then the other thing that everyone always talks about with this like assembled in India is not the same as fully manufactured in India. Obviously, the, the advantage to Chinese manufacturing prowess is that you'll walk across the street and there's a CNC shop with 25,000 CNC machines

• 25:42John Coogan?

  that can just immediately make you any part and make a million of those parts if you need. So, obviously, it's going to be a long road for them to set up manufacturing anywhere other than, other than China. But it does seem like Tim Cook's taking it seriously.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  I would love to understand Tim's actual strategy here because I don't think he's saying, I'm going to invest. He's not going to be in a huge hurry to invest that 600 billion, right? He may, you know, he may not actually believe it's, it's had all the right decision for Apple and he's just feeling like he needs to placate the admin. And then if, and then in 2028 comes around and he just, you know, can pull back or pull out.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  There's also like so much to 600 billion of CapEx over what, five years or something like that? Like? That includes HQ. That includes data centers for iCloud that need to be local. If you're streaming the F1 movie on Apple TV Plus, you don't want that stream coming from a data center across the world necessarily. It needs to be cached locally. So there are like so many different pieces of the business. Building more Apple stores, like that counts as CapEx if they build them and they, you know. So 600 billion doesn't necessarily mean like, yes, like we're building like the one plant. Because you know, this is like a rainforest of complexity that actually delivers the iPhone. It's not just, it's not just like one iPhone factory, please.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  It's like a whole network of things. Battery life appears to be a challenge for the air. Apple always says like all day battery life, but people are like.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Allegedly.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  What kind of all day are we talking? Are we talking scrolling for 18 hours?

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Proper doom scroll.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Are we talking proper scroll? Proper doom scroll. Apple announced a new battery accessory that will attach to the air. And obviously that's no longer as thin. The company added what it calls a plateau on the back of the Air and Pro models, adding thickness at the top of the device to fit bigger and hotter chips.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Not a bump, it's a plateau.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  It's a plateau, yeah. Oh, they're, they're rebranding.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're signaling that we're, maybe this is Gartner hype cycle coded.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  The plateau productivity. I mean, they have plateaued in productivity for sure. The hype cycle, they, they've been through it. They're like, first hype cycle? First hype cycle? I've been here, I'm, I'm plateauing. I'm, I'm getting productive. Anyway, we also talked AirPods Pro, heart monitor, Apple Watch detects if the wearer has high blood pressure. And you know, more, more news. So we'll, we'll, we'll keep moving on. Ben Thompson also had a great article, you can go read it on Strategery.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  What was, what was he alluding to with the sugar water trap?

• 28:25John Coogan?

  The sugar water trap? I don't know if I want to give away the, the game. We can pull up the actual, let me see, sugar water. That is an interesting phrase. I like a good coinage.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Apple took the liberty of opening yesterday's presentation with a classic Steve Jobs quote. Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works. That's a great quote from Steve Jobs. Setting aside the wisdom of using that quote when the company is about to launch a controversial new user interface design. That's iOS 18. Is that what it's called?

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  The new one?

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Which one did we have you update?

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  That was iOS 26.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  26. They're on the year. They're on the year release now.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  But they haven't updated the iPhones to be on the annual release.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait. I can't wait for iOS 4000.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  They really should just move to the year on the iPhone too then. It's like, yeah, I have the iPhone 26. Oh, because you bought that in the year 2025, like a car.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Would make sense. Match it all up. Maybe they'll do that. Maybe they'll do that next year. They'll just skip five. Because they wound up doing that for the iPhone X. I believe there was never an iPhone 9, right? They went from 8 to 10 and then they, for 10, they called it the X. And they were like, really dancing around with the names for a while. It was like iPhone 6 and then Max Pro. They were like testing all these different things and they finally kind of like defined the note.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  I like modeling it after just cars. It's just the year.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  I think that's the future here for sure. So that was in the Steve Jobs quote, this presentation. And Apple's general state of affairs made me think of, says Ben Thompson. What I was thinking of was the question Jobs posed to then PepsiCo President John Sculley when he was recruiting him to be the CEO of Apple in the early 1980s. Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world? This is what Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, then PepsiCo President, trying to recruit him. Said, hey, you're selling sugar water. Come over here and actually build something that matters that changes the world. So Ben Thompson says iPhones are a great business, one of the best businesses ever in fact,

• 30:38John Coogan?

  because Apple managed to marry the malleability of software with the tangibility and monetization potential of hardware. Indeed, the fact that we will always need hardware to access software, including AI, speaks to not just the profitability, but also the durability of Apple's model. The problem, however, is simply staying in their lane, content. Can be a hardware provider, can tend to be a hardware provider for the delivery of others innovations feels a lot more like Scully than Jobs. Jobs told Walter Isaacson for his biography, "My passion has been building an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary." Sure, this is Steve Jobs talking to Walter Isaacson.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Sure, it was great to make a profit, but that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. So Ben Thompson goes on, he says, "Apple, to be fair, isn't selling the same sugar water year after year in a zero-sum war with other sugar water companies." You know, no one's talking about the Pepsi 2026 edition. It's the same thing every year. He is, Apple is making improvements. The sugar water is getting better, and I think this year's seasonal concoction is particularly tasty.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  It's great. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products, the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates. Somewhat true. I mean, they did take a big shot on Vision Pro. They're probably going to continue there. Maybe they'll, but yeah, I mean, until they launch the iCane or...

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Scott in the chat says the Xbox naming convention is in an abstract liminal space.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  That was a wild one. Are you familiar with the Xbox naming convention?

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  The X, the S, the 360.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's the 360, and then they should have just done 720, 1080, obviously. That's a no-brainer. But then they wound up doing... The Xbox Series X and then they did the Series S and then they did Xbox, it wasn't the Xbox Edition was one of them?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  I think it was Xbox P60 and then Xbox One and then there was X, S and then now there's like-

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  You gotta keep them on their toe, on your-

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, going back to one is always a crazy, crazy move, but people love doing that. Anyway, that didn't matter for a long time. Smartphones were the center of innovation and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. And now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery and Ben Thompson thinks that more than anything is, that's what bums people out. No, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world. Well, if you are trying to change the world, you need to be compliant, you need to be on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove 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.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  This is Vanta country.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  So, other reactions to the iPhone news, we'll run through these. Andrew Clare had a bunch of funny-

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  The-

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Observations.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I was just pulling this up, so you go through this and then all- Yeah, so Andrew Clare says, "Things I've learned since the iPhone 17 series was announced, everyone hates the color orange." I don't think so, I think this is gonna be-

• 34:09John Coogan?

  You said on the day, you were like, "I'm getting orange." And, and I, I would get orange too, I like orange, but I feel like if you have orange and then I have orange, it's like a little bit too much.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Did I say I would get orange?

• 34:18John Coogan?

  That's what you said to me, you were like, "I'm getting the orange." If you don't get it, if you're passing on the orange, I'm doing it.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think there's just not many options, they have the Navy-

• 34:24John Coogan?

  There's only room in this town for one orange iPhone Pro.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, we already, we actually already have the same color phone and we only get it mixed up like twice a day.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  That's true, the, the, the display or the background does a lot of heavy lifting there, so.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, no one, so, so Samsung mobile US Twitter was, was going off.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, love it.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Responding.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  They're boys, Samsung, US mobiles.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  48MP times three still doesn't equal 200MP hashtag I can't.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  And then then was quoting MKBHD saying, actual innovation is greater than hype. Slap hashtag, I can't again.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Then they said, hashtag, I can't believe some people had to wait five years for sleep score.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  What? Is this from the Apple Watch?

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  Then they said, Apple just announced live translation at the ZZZ note, like sleep. It's calling.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Oh, wait. So, yeah, Samsung is is is taking shots.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  Taking shots at Apple on every on every single.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  So they put some, you know, probably zoomer, social media person on on it.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  It's not a zoomer, though, because they're using hashtags.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  And and Samsung had posted in 2022, let us know when it folds with like one of these emojis.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  And then they said, hashtag, I can't believe this is still relevant. So they really were going for this.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  The jugular.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  This like I hashtag, I can't campaign.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Rough, rough.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Well, the the other observations, iPhone Pro is for pro TikTokers. Mr. Beast will now solely be using iPhones on his channel. That's super interesting.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  Is this?

• 36:07John Coogan?

  This is because of.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a paid partnership or?

• 36:09John Coogan?

  I I think he just is.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  Realize you can achieve.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you tour Mr. Beast's facility, you'll see that he has like closets with like hundreds of cameras. Because they all need to, they need to record. So they have like GoPros and and, you know, FX3s and all sorts of different cameras. But a lot of the reality TV is just like, random stuff's gonna happen. You have to have a camera on it. And your budget for that camera, it can't be $100,000 for like a pro cinema rig. You need just like, oh, yeah, throw a $2,000 phone there. It's super light, plugs in over USB-C.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  How cool would an Apple.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  And save everything to the cloud, save everything locally. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is what Apple should be doing. I mean, they should be just constantly going up against DJI and just really keeping the screws to DJI.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's tough because the gimbal, the gimbal might be like a billion dollar a year product line.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  DJI has one, and that unlocked the gimbal that goes on the drone, which is also the gimbal that goes into Hollywood, which is also the gimbal that goes on the RC car. And like, the DJI, they now own Hasselblad, so they have lenses and cameras all the way down to the drones, and then they have vlogging gear, and DJI has great microphones now. And so they've, they've realized DJI has really leaned into this trend of like, the prosumer content creator who wants like, just one notch above, but can't afford a Steadicam operator. So they just need the Ronin or the Osmo to have a gimbal. And a lot of people put iPhones on those. But that would be, that would be a fun challenge for, for Apple to go and

• 37:45John Coogan?

  take the, take the fight to DJI. But, oh, well, the conclusion of this post is Tim can still cook. Hopefully, he is putting his team on graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Also, Trung Fan said, "Apple, after spending $100 billion on R&D over the past five years, nothing really changed in the design language from the 11 Pro Max to the 16 Pro Max." But Sebastian comes in with a quote post and says,

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  True, son.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  "During these six years, Apple managed to develop the best CPU architecture in the world, outpacing both AMD and Intel. Also, their GPU is nowadays state of the art, which we talked about, beating Nvidia in some areas. Nvidia is a $3 trillion GPU company."

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  Chad has, Chad has corrected. So Mr. Beast was at the Apple event.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was at the Apple event, but I don't know if it's a direct partnership. Like, I think he might just be like, "I'm all in on iPhone, I'm buying them." But maybe there's some sort of deal, but he was at it. And that's where he announced this, that he was like, "I'm in." And the big one is that there, there's Gen Lock, so you can have one time code across a whole bunch of different iPhones. Again, very valuable. So if you're, if you're filming Beast games, and it's like, American Ninja Warrior, and a bunch of people are gonna be running around, you're gonna have 25 different angles. It's like, "Oh, well, like, we need a telephoto lens for this shot. Just put on the 24, the 48 megapixel 4K." You know, telephoto, put on the wide angle and then sync it all. So when you bring it in the timeline,

• 39:15John Coogan?

  you can be like, let's cut from this angle to this close up to this one to this handheld and they're all in perfect sync. So I'm sure there's gonna be a ton of really creative stuff.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, I don't know if we'll ever be allowed at Apple considering I posted the iPhone 4000 meme. Might have got us banned for, might have got us banned for life, but we love Apple.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  We'll see, we'll figure it out.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Love Apple.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Also, the new iPhone, when you throw it in, the orange iPhone, when you throw it in a green case, it looks like Master Chief from Halo. Very cool. Also got a little Michelangelo from Ninja Turtles vibe to it. I think it'll be popular with the kids. Blake Scholl says everything's battery and shows that the entire iPhone air is just up top. Very cool to just see the miniaturization of electronics just flow through so, so completely. And of course, Duolingo traded down on the news that Apple is bringing live translation to AirPods Pro 3.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Morning, Morning Brew saying that Al is gonna break into Tim Cook's house tonight.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for, not quite Duolingo, but AI for data analysis, go to Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Loved by 2 million plus users and trusted by individuals at Zapier, BCG and Princeton University.

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  Legends.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  In other news, Larry Ellison got the number one spot as the world's richest man with $70 billion gain after Oracle reported quarterly results after the market closed. Oracle surged 40% and he made $100 billion. There's a funny post in here that-

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, he didn't make it. He's not selling.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's not selling, but, and you pointed out a couple of other things that, you know, this is the biggest gain since 1999. What happened after 1999? A trillion dollar company is trading like a penny stock. There's this circle of money going on in AI where Nvidia sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle uses it to power its data centers. Oracle builds cloud on those GPUs. Nvidia rents compute back via signed deals from Oracle. And so if there's, like, if the economy needs external, the economy needs to, it cannot be entirely self sustaining just on a few companies.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  The the actual top story is is people were wondering like, how did they get this backlog so huge? And the answer is OpenAI. So Oracle signed a contract with with OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to buy $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years. People familiar with the matter said the deal is one of the largest ever cloud contracts signed, reflecting how spending on artificial intelligence data centers is hitting new heights despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble. And the Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity roughly comparable to the electricity produced by not one, but

• 42:08John Coogan?

  two Hoover dams, or the amount consumed by four million homes. Oracle shares surged 36%. When they revealed it had added $317 billion in future contract revenue during its latest quarter. So Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are clearly in cahoots, working together to build a next generation hyperscaler. They're teaming up. And so the the question that I had was, everyone thinks this is crazy. Like, this is somewhat like a revision on the Stargate story. Like, the Stargate story was at a high level. The people in the room with Donald

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Trump that day wanted to do a $500 billion project together. It wasn't like the money had been wired and it's in the company. It was like, it's a variety of companies. It was like a vibe.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's go big.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  But but it but the vibes were let's go big. And so this feels like just one notch more clarity into how Stargate and the other projects might kind of come together. I don't think I don't think you should look at this as as like its own separate, its own thing. It's a piece of the overall story that we're getting around Stargate and just big data center investment around OpenAI. So my question.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Reminded me of the, you remember that exchange between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Bawani?

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  When they said, this is our year, Tiger. That was kind of the original Stargate meeting. They were just kind of getting together.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  This is our year.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  So it was Masad Shisong. Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump saying that the the plan was for those four loosely, plus a couple of other people, to invest roughly 500 billion over a series of years. And

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  They were early to use in the five, the half a trillion dollar number. Now you've got Mark throwing it around, you've got Tim throwing it around. Everybody's throwing it around.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Everyone's throwing it around. And so I guess I'm in I'm in the steel man category today, figuring out how crazy is that number? Like, how how should we be thinking about that number? How can we put it in other contexts? And so one context that I thought would be interesting is if you assume, if you if you assume that ChatGPT, like as a consumer product, as an as an internet company, is going to be roughly the same scale as Google, amazon.com, and facebook.com? And like the Facebook apps? Like, it will have similar revenue, similar scale, similar user adoption, similar monetization?

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Like, you get like one ultra-compounding trillion-dollar, like, consumer-style website at the end of the day. It's like an internet company, right? You have to support that with data centers. Not just, like, be a hyperscaler and then build a cloud business. Like, you need servers to run Instagram. You need servers to run Gmail, you need servers to run YouTube, you need servers to run AWS, you need to, not just AWS, but amazon.com needs servers. That's why AWS grew out of amazon.com, was because they were investing so much, so many servers in just supporting amazon.com.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Also, Prime, Prime Video, Twitch, these these all, all of their internet properties, aside from their resale business in AWS, and aside from Google's resale business, GCP. You need a ton of servers. So my question is, like, Sam Altman saying, I'm gonna be one of those. Like, think of OpenAI as the next Google, the next amazon.com, the next Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, right? How much did those companies spend to support their trillion dollar businesses? They have a trillion dollar in a business? How much did they invest? And so I tried to pull all the CapEx that they've spent roughly that doesn't go into their cloud business. And the numbers are big.

• 46:14John Coogan?

  Amazon Retail, X AWS, this sort of, this includes like fulfillment, transportation. So it's like, it's Which is significant. It's very significant, but $250 billion. Meta's core apps, so X new AI, X Gen AI. So not counting the llama stuff. That's $130 billion in CapEx. And we've seen that these hyperscalers are all spending 60, 70 billion a year. And they've been ramping. So if you work back from that ramp, you're spending 60, 50, 40. You add all that up, you're in the $200 billion range. Google's core services, X GCP, and this is probably the best comp because they don't have warehouses for fulfillment.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Google's core services, not including Google Cloud Platform, $210 billion is like the reasonable estimate for how much they've spent on the servers just to serve YouTube, Google Search, databases, all that stuff, Gmail, all that stuff. And so when I think about OpenAI, what they're trying to do, become in the conversation with as many user minutes, as big a penetration as Facebook, as Google, as Amazon.com. That feels like a couple hundred billion in CapEx. And so you project it forward and the CapEx is way more expensive because you're doing AI inference instead of just pull the search results out of the database, put the data, put the search results in the bag.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  300 billion seems like it could, if OpenAI succeeds in

• 47:48John Coogan?

  If in five years, we're talking about it as like, yeah, amazon.com, google.com, facebook.com, chat.com, like, these are all, these are the new mag four, mag seven, or mag eight, mag nine, whatever. Like, if they're in the same conversation as like dominant internet companies that are used by everyone all the time for everything, not a niche, not a Pinterest like outcome, not a Snapchat like outcome, but a Facebook.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you factor in that like

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Amazon like outcome.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Inferencing language models today and various, you know, all the models is just extremely compute intensive in a way that that serving Gmail is not.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, and this was the story of YouTube. Like, I believe that the compute, like, the capex that went into supporting YouTube was way more than Google search, because Google search needed, you know, it's just like

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  I was just thinking this yesterday, there was a number of, Hassan Piker was streaming on Twitch and had 200,000 live viewers, which probably is costing Twitch, you know, multiple dollars a second.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Something, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, somebody, somebody ran the numbers just on the Apple stream, because the Apple stream on, on YouTube had like millions and millions of views, and they were talking about the data, just, just the data transfer cost. And so the economics of scaling a consumer AI company like ChatGPT is different. And so it is going to be more costly.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, and the reason that, the reason that, so Oracle and OpenAI are now incredibly linked, they're betting on each other.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  And both have to execute pretty much perfectly.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, there's going to be absolute chaos.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  And so on the absolute chaos, the bare thesis, it's, this feels like 1999.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so, yeah, the concern, the concern is like, okay, so Oracle just had a double miss on earnings, right? And we'll see how they do this next quarter, if they come out and blow out earnings, I'm assuming, you know, like, if they can get sort of like back on track.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  It'll be, everybody will be very excited, but the question is like, everybody is struggling to get the you know, the various like components necessary to build data centers right now, right? Elon's talking about making his own transformers, right? Everybody needs

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Wait, electrical transformers? He said that?

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Whoa, I missed that somehow. That's crazy, okay.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  And so you have to assume that Oracle can develop this capacity on a reasonable time horizon in a heavily supply constrained environment where they're competing with, you know, five or so other heavily, heavily funded players.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  You have to assume they can execute perfectly. And then you have to assume that OpenAI is going to be able to scale revenue to the point where they can actually sort of pay for this $300 billion of compute, right?

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  It has to come from somewhere. I don't think, I don't know. You have to wonder, can Sam Altman raise $300 billion?

• 50:49John Coogan?

  It's on his way.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone ever raised $300 billion?

• 50:54John Coogan?

  I was talking to Brandon about this, like, you sort of need to...

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  That's actually an interesting question. What is the...

• 50:59John Coogan?

  What's the most money ever raised? I don't know. You get into crazy, crazy comps. How much did...

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Because even a lot of the best and biggest companies end up getting to the point where they're like, "Well, we got enough cash."

• 51:11John Coogan?

  I mean, Google was cash flow positive at IPO, right? And so they were not...

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the single biggest is OpenAI's $40 billion raise, but even that, again, was...

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Didn't they only draw down like eight of it or something?

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  It's contingent on the for-profit conversion.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, wild. It is unprecedented territory. But it's an unprecedented technology. Like, you use it and you're like, "Yeah, this is magical." Like, this is gonna be around.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Larry prayed for one more bubble like this.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  And he hit. He hit hard.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  Just one more.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it will be interesting to see, like, the Oracle street, like, the investors should be looking at Oracle and saying, "Okay, you have this backlog. Like, how quickly can you draw down from it? Like, next quarter, can you convert that backlog into serious revenue and profit? If not, and it's just staying out in the backlog, it needs to be discounted a lot."

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're looking to scale your generative media strategy, go to Fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Trusted by over a million developers and Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Quora, Perplexity, and many more.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Really enjoyed having founder on the other day.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  Chris Baki, who somehow hasn't been on the show yet, I feel like we would have overlapped at some point, but we've reacted to a ton of his posts. He says, "My son's preschool teacher asked me to read to his class next week and bring three kids that, three books that the kids will enjoy. These four-year-olds are in for a treat," and he has Zero to One by Peter Thiel, High Growth Handbook by Alad Gill, and Titan by Ron Chernow. Love it. The kids might enjoy some of those books, but some of them are a little bit dry for the kiddos. Robin Hood has launched a social app. This was in the Journal. Robin Hood's For You, says Nir Sain, Robin Hood's For You will let you tweet positions

• 53:28John Coogan?

  with your real profit-loss, supporting both options and crypto. Vlad has been in the trenches, grinding, launching new products all the time.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Dalton Caldwell announced a new fund, or I don't know, maybe he announced it prior. He was at Y Combinator.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  F Y C started a new fund.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  But he's come out with Standard Capital, standardcap.com, the AI-native Series A firm. The reason I thought this was particularly interesting is they're doing it, they're doing effectively like seasons, so they do, they're basically doing batches, right? And so, they say, "Standard Capital operates on a quarterly, on quarterly funding cycles." Applications are now open for Standard Capital's fall 2025 funding cycle. So, interesting to take this sort of like systematic model of funding and apply it to Series A. They're differentiating as well by...

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  They're only looking for 10%. Obviously, plenty of Series A firms will happily take 10%, but this might be particularly interesting to founders that are generating a lot of revenue already, want to get a Series A done, but just don't want to be peer pressured by the current capital and the new entrance to the cap table to just raise closer 15, 20%.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, who else is running Standard Capital? I feel like he got someone else on the team.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  Paul.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Paul Boukate?

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  I love Paul. We got to have both of them or one of them on at some point. I'm interested to know how the fund is structured. If each, does an LP get exposure to a fund? That's a specific season cycle?

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  I think it's pretty straightforward. It's like, hey, we're going to fund, I don't know how many they're actually doing. Let me try to find it. They're doing five, so they're going to do five companies per cycle four times a year, so 20 companies a year. They can, I imagine they're planning to write like, you know, five to $10 million checks, depending how overheated the rounds get, but it's pretty easy to plan out. You can go to your LPs and say like, look, we're going to fund this many companies over the next two years. Obviously, there'll be edge cases and I'm sure they'll, they'll, they'll end up doing like off-cycle investments here and there, but it's pretty cool to see some experimentation with the model.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, leaving Y Combinator, he can, this, this becomes like a net positive asset to Y Combinator to provide downstream funding.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Yes, and there was always this dynamic of, is YC going to cherry pick the best companies? Is it like a counter signal if you get to Demo Day and none of the, none of the partners have been like, yeah, I want to invest in the next round. And YC Continuity was a thing for a while. And there was this odd dynamic of like, well, if YC Continuity, YC Continuity was a fantastic fund, but people were always asking questions about like, what does it mean? Do they have like extra insights? So it's an extra good signal or is it a bad signal? Because like you couldn't do it with somebody else. And, and this, yeah, sort of solves that potentially, which is good.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else posted today, @YCDemoDay, ran into a multi-stage firm that has invested in 600 YC companies over the last five years. Of those, one has raised a Series A. They still invest in 10, invested in 10 companies.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  That seemed like a low hit rate, but how young are the companies?

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  It's been over many years?

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly low, incredibly low.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  Hit rate. I mean.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  They, they, I, I don't, I don't know.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  I feel like Gary has shared other stats where like way more.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you, you, you have to, we have, you would have to study this firm and understand like how.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  Seems like they're underperforming.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  Like figure out and do basically the opposite of.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you could just do random and be at the, the.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, just like.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Like the purely random.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  Don't meet the founder.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Series A hit rate is higher than that.

• 57:28Jordi Hays?

  Have a database and just like offer money.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Maybe they're printing, maybe they only invest in, maybe they're really good at going in and finding the companies.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're gonna make it all back.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Never need to raise again.

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, none of them raises a series A, but they have 12 IPOs.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're fine to just make it all back in one trade.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  They have 75, yeah, maybe that one company is like, it's Coinbase or something. It's like, yeah.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so apparently they only picks consumer companies.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Okay, that's.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Consumer is like extremely power law.

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  Y Combinator, consumer.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  But very hit or miss.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  Consumer AI.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, very power law.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, not Y Combinator, OpenAI. I guess they were, they weren't a consumer company when they were going through YC, but.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Nope, they pivoted, classic. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, Search Every Byte, Serverless Vector, Serverless Vector and Full Text Search Built From First Principles On Object Storage, Fast, 10x Cheaper And Extremely Scalable.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have Simon on from TurboPuffer ASAP. He's so fun to talk to.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Should we be investing in Turkish bonds?

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Turkish bonds.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Did you see this? Turkey just cut the interest rate from 43% down to 40%. And Maine says, did bros say 40? So like, I mean, I don't know, but like if you go over to Turkey and you put your money in like their equivalent of T-bills, you just earn 40% gains?

• 58:49John Coogan?

  Like, is this not inflation adjusted, I assume? I assume they have like really high inflation, whatever it's denominated in. But DC investor says, we need to be farming this. Yeah, that was my first turkey too.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  Put your bonds on chain. Let, let.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Let hyper liquid go wild.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  The fair value of your, of your bond.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Trenches decide. Andrew McCallum answered our TVP N question that we were asking Y C D M A. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? He says, uh, mine was at 13 years old. I was contract, I was contracting CNC shops to produce parts for my online RC car business. Cold fusion racing, good name. The Traxxas crowd will remember me as the steel differential guy. Made thousands of upgraded steel planetary differentials after the brushless motors hit the market and were shredding the OEM plastic ring gears. I literally rode my bike to the gas station for money orders. What a fun time that was.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Amazing. Makes a ton of sense why he's doing what he's doing now. He of course works at Varda and is building.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have him on to come on and talk.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to hear about the project.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Andrew, come on the show.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  You're welcome.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  It's time to Bob.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  And if you want to get project Bob mentioned on chat GPT, go to profound Andrew. Get your brand mentioned chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Hunter shared this interesting fact. If you become a billionaire and then you lose it all, Forbes still keeps you on their real time net worth tracker as some sort of dark humiliation ritual. And so Elizabeth Holmes, Renee Benko.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. They just throw you at the boss.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  And, and Sam Bankman Fried is at 0.0 billion. I'd want to put that in the truth zone and SBF, he might have a hundred million dollars tucked away somewhere in crypto.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Tucked.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  I think Elizabeth Holmes is seriously zeroed, but SBF, it would have been so easy for him to have some random Solana on a USB stick somewhere on a, one of those like offline drives and, and, and, and just have it waiting for him because he buried it. You have to imagine. I, I'm not saying it's a hundred percent, but like.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  You have to imagine that he is like.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Tinfoil hat.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  You have to imagine that he is like placing, like he's, he's getting.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Printouts of, of charts.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  And he's like basically figuring out a way to day trade behind bars.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  And probably.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, that's an interesting, uh, do you think we'll, do you think we'll see?

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Max in the chat says SBF might have a bill. I think that's possible. I would put, I would put, uh, him having a billion at like 2% or 5% and him having 100 mil at like 20% maybe. So I would still probably put him at point 1B on the Forbes tracker, but I don't know. Uh, yeah, not that hard to just remember a pass phrase. Just, just memorize the, the seed phrase and, you know, go to jail and when you come out, you know, some unusual whales account will see, oh, a bunch of stuff's moving that hasn't moved since the day SBF got locked up and now it's moving and it's grown a ton because it's just been sitting there. Uh, the, the, the potentially the underweighted way to,

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  to diamond hands is to go in the clink where, where diamond handsing is the only option. Uh, anyway, Antonio Garcia Martinez says, "Part of Facebook's baked in advantage was slash is having the same user ID across devices and apps from browser cookies to mobile devices. Why Apple leaned into privacy was nuking everybody else's ability to identify the same user across apps on the same phone. Identity is king," he says. Um, interesting. Well, if you're building something that's built on top of identity, do it on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects and product run apps. Uh, we are going to be talking to the new CEO

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  of Open today. Um, and going deeper into the open door story. Martin Scrawley says, "The new CEO is a big win for Open. Not sure how you turn around this business, which seems fundamentally broken, but that's what good managements do." Um, and, uh, it'll be interesting to see, the, the, the stock has been way up. The retail army is marshaling.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Up 70% today.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Uh, Keith Rorbo is back on the board. We had him on the show, uh, when they were, when there was rumbling on the timeline about what might happen with open door. He is getting back involved, but not in a day to day capacity, but. Anyway.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Such an interest, I mean, such a wild story.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, interest rates are high. That should be, you know, a reduction to liquidity and transaction volume, probably a headwind, but they might come down, which is a potential

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  They picked up a

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Tailwind.

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  An absolute doc.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  They did. Kaz is the man. I've talked to him before. He's great. Hello, 2.6 million. Welcome to the stream. Tech Sales says, imagine being the sales rep who closed the OpenAI Oracle $300 billion computing deal. What's your next move? Obviously, this is done between Sam and Larry Ellison directly, but it's funny to imagine that you're just some SDR and you're like, yeah, like today I'm gonna call up Oracle, like, can I? Or vice versa.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  You're at Oracle and you're just like, you know who needs computers? OpenAI. My brother-in-law was telling me about this new app.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna see if Sam wants to get, grab a dinner tonight.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:22Jordi Hays?

  Just calculating.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Maybe invite him to some sort of sports game.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  We got, we got a box.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Get a box.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, get the Warriors. Yeah, that's probably how it happened.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  That's what Sam will want to do.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, that's how it went down. And then, and then all of a sudden, the rest is history. Well.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  Eliyahu Udikowski has a new book.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you read it yet, John?

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  I have not read it. I was thinking about reading it. It seems like he distilled his thesis. Niraj Weiss Blatt says, posts some highlights from a review in New Scientist. No, AI isn't gonna kill us all, despite what this new book says. Udikowski has a number of policy prescriptions, all of them basically nonsense. Wow, putting Udikowski in the truth zone. First is that GPUs, computer chips that have powered the current AI revolution, should be heavily restricted. They say it should be illegal to own more than eight of the top 2024 era GPUs without submitting to nuclear-style monitoring by an international

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  body. By comparison, Meta has 3,500, 350,000 of these chips. Once this is in place, they say, nations must be prepared to enforce these restrictions by bombing.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Did you see what the title, the title of the book?

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  What is it called?

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  If anyone builds it, everyone dies.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Why superhuman AI would kill us all.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 1:05:49John Coogan?

  I don't know, I like the real thesis.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Like bait.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  But Perry Metzger had a good take on it, he said.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  It's starting to look like the worst thing Eliezer Yudikowsky ever did for his cause was actually write down all of his arguments in a form compact enough that a norm person could read them in a few days. Before, the arguments were scattered all over tens of thousands of pages of really wordy blog posts, and only extremely dedicated people could bother to go through them. You get nerds sniped by them. In truth, the whole thing could be summarized in a few pages, now that he's at least condensed it down to 256 pages, good number of pages, I like that, he's using a factor of two, which normies might consider reading. If they read it, though, they will learn that the argument isn't at all persuasive. You get people like the New York Times Reviewer saying, "The book reads like a Scientology

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  manual, the text interspersed with weird, unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR code." So, that's very cool. Tyler, what's your take on Yudikowsky?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  I think he's like, people hate on him too much, I think. Also, like, there is already a book about AI safety that's like, very famous, that's like readable.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Bostrom?

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, Superintelligence Nick Bostrom, which is like, a good book, I think. There's a good, actually, Young Macro post about-

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say fang pneumonia. Just kidding.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Young Macro.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  There's a good, uh, Young Macro post?

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  He says, "Bay Area rationalists continuously getting spat on for warning us about their very rigorously researched and thought-out eschatology must be one of the most flagrant cases of unfair maligning. They should be treated more like Christian missionaries worried about hell." Which I agree.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's like, people just like dunk on them constantly, which, like, I've read a fair amount of like, less wrong posts. I don't, I'm not like a crazy doomer, but it's like, you can understand the-

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  The trade-offs.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a valuable, it's a valuable public service to just spend your time, for at least some people in the world, to think about, what if this goes incredibly wrong?

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I'm very glad that someone wrote this book.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  It's great that most people are thinking about, how do we make this go right?

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  But it's not necessarily- It's not it's not net negative for the world to have to have, of course, unless like, you know, you figure out that the ideas catch on to such a degree that it makes it so that humanity can't, you know, again, it's it's like a it's a fine line between, you know, some of the policies that have been proposed like around the US at the state level have been like crazy so far this year, right?

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, like people anthropic who are like doing safety research is that's like obviously a good thing.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  There's like, you know, they publish it openly, it's like open source. I think that's like good. Obviously, I'm not in favor of bombing data centers.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  But I think it's reasonable to like.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  People, I think people will dunk on him way too much.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think that when, yeah, when, when the, when the dunking on the doomer, when the doomer dunks were at an all time high, people like, like there was probably a group of like, I don't know, 80% of tech that was like, let's dunk on this, this is not good, this is nonsense. But I feel like over the past two years, you've slowly picked off like two, like 20% chunks of that group and said, well, actually, I'm interested in safety in this context. And so the examples they'll give are like, there's a lot of people that are like, yeah, I don't think I'm going to get paper clipped anytime soon, but I love AI safety research if it can tell me if DeepSeek is trying to, you know, poison the American population

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  against capitalism and it's like a geopolitical weapon. Or I'm worried about people getting one shotted and getting and going crazy from chatting with 4O for days and days and days. That's a safety research problem. You know, are people using it just to go and and, you know, like the classic example is like, oh, like someone develops like a chemical weapon or biological weapon, but what about just like an actual weapon? What about just like a normal like, you know, like any, so we just saw this with the terrible Charlie Kirk story. Like, like if you're, if you're, if you're sending in to any LLM sketchy questions that, that highlight like you're planning something, there is, we need to do, we do need to have a discussion

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  about like, when does it call the cops on you? When does it flag this? Like, how anonymous is this? Like, if someone's blaring and obviously going to Google and saying like, I'm trying to do a bad thing, like, should that flag things? There's a whole discussion to be had there, but that's, I put that within the broad context of AI safety and AI doom. And I don't think it's unreasonable to have those discussions at all. So, I don't know.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think also, like, even if you're like accelerationist, you like, think doomers, safety is like completely useless, you can probably make the case that LA is like writing about AI in like early 2000s accelerated AI in general.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  So, like, yeah.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Totally. I mean, it's certainly like marshaled capital to be like, oh, well, like, if this is the final innovation, like, if it's, if it's gonna be able to do that, like, then we gotta get this deal.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  It has anti, it has a, a anti, like, it has the opposite effect that he wants, which is, he says, this is the most dangerous technology ever. And people are like, I gotta find a way to make money on this.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, that was, that was the story of just nuclear power. It was like, the bomb went off at Trinity, the bomb went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and people were like, wait, like, this is a terrible, like, disaster, like, so, like, awful. And like, there's a true doom scenario, which is we all bomb each other, and nuclear holocaust happens and everyone dies. But very quickly, people were like, wait, there is a positive way to use this, and that's with a nuclear reactor, and that's with positive energy. The, the, the interesting doom scenario that I think you could get from Yudikowsky's fears, like, really running wild, is just a stagnation, where if we actually say as a, as a society, we agree with this,

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  and we say, yeah, we're never going past one gigawatt for a data center ever, and we will bomb them, and we all agree, like, well, then, yeah, you do wind up in the nuclear energy scenario where we stop building them. And basically, the amount of nuclear power just kind of stagnated. And we had the technology, but we didn't really ramp it. We were just like, yeah, we'll find other ways to do things. And like, we found other ways to generate electricity with oil and gas, but also solar and wind. And we stayed away from nuclear for decades. Now we're getting back into nuclear. We could find other ways to. Generate images and, and, and deep research reports. Like, we could say, hey, we're not going any further as a society if everyone agrees. Now, there's geopolitical considerations. There's a lot of things where I don't think that's going to happen, but it is something that could

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  happen. P stagnation is also like a key metric to be tracking alongside P doom is, is the response to P doom is P stagnation. Anyway, I believe we have our first guest of the show in the Restroom waiting room, Josh. Ooh, look at this.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Look at this background.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Wow, impressive.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Production.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Longtime listener, first time caller. Hey, guys.

• 1:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to have you on. And congrats on the new gig.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  I'm thrilled to be at Lightspeed. It is a very exciting moment for, for my career, for, for Lightspeed. We're going to be doing a lot of fun things. You know, Lightspeed's AI, like we're Anthropic, we're Mistral, we're XAI, we're Glean, we're Pika, Bridge. We've got the AI hits.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Got the hits.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Uh, talk about your journey. Uh, what were you doing before?

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was at Redpoint for the last four years, uh, building the platform team there.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Wow, poached, trade deal. Oh.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  We love our Logan Bartlett.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's fantastic.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  That's true. And all the content we've built there, that is exceptional. They're going to continue to absolutely crush. Um, but this was just an incredible opportunity. I think when I was younger, I was chief digital officer at Nasdaq and I worked on, you name the IPO, I worked on it. Uh, and Lightspeed had just always been that kind of like aspirational venture firm for me. I got to work on the Nutanix IPO. I did AppDynamics and then the night before AppDynamics was going to go public, like they got acquired by Cisco and I had like take things made. Like, this is the firm that I wanted to work at when I was that age. And it's just such an honor to even have been considered for their CMO role. And

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  I'm just very, very thankful to Robbie and Bejel and Ramona and the whole Lightspeed team for, for giving the trust in me to, to shepherd this incredible brand into the future.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Give us the master plan. Tell, tell all and we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, no, no, tell it.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Exactly the same stuff we did at Redpoint because that wouldn't be any fun. Uh, but look, I wouldn't be here on TBPN if it wasn't a new media landscape. You guys have changed the game, like created a way for founders to tell their story in an authentic way without like shock journalism of being asked about like crazy news that doesn't apply to what they do and actually having deep questions of people that understand venture backed businesses and how they grow. I think we're in a new landscape of just finding ways for founders to tell their story in a compelling way. And that's the same kind of stuff we're going to be building at Lightspeed. We'll obviously not be caught catting TBPN.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Uh, but we've got a lot of stuff. We'll be really, you know, forward on TikTok and Instagram as you could imagine, but um, yeah, we'll, we'll be everywhere.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, so Red, Redpoint, uh, Redpoint, I mean, you guys must've been getting like millions of views on Instagram on your account there for like a long time. Like what, how valuable has that been as a channel? Because I feel like, I feel like X is like especially noisy with like venture, right? You have tech Twitter. It's like, you know, every single day there's, there's funds and companies piling in to try to get, uh, uh, get the word out on one, what they're doing and their strategy and thesis and all that stuff. But Instagram is like relatively, it's not an area that we've focused a huge amount on. Um, but, but how, how important do you think that is as a platform for investors?

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, Instagram was really the tip of our spear at Redpoint, right? Like when I joined, of course they didn't have an Instagram and then I had to get the keys to it from the Instagram team and start building. Uh, but I think, you know, when I started it, people thought I was kind of crazy and they're like, this is, is this is going to be good for the Redpoint brand? And then, you know, it very quickly changed when you go to a pitch meeting and the founder goes, love your TikTok guy. Or that video was so relatable. Like it just creates a brand affinity that you just can't buy. And I felt like a lot of firms were a little scared to dip their toe into Instagram, but you know, quite a few have followed us there and.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  And very proud of what the team will continue to build there, but it it really is an important channel. And I think that the great news is that's where founders are in this decade, right? Like today's founders are on Instagram and TikTok. Like, yes, X is still the place to share the clips, but that's where people consume their content. And so I felt like while it was an unlikely channel for success for a VC firm, I think it's actually really important because it's like the place that everybody actually goes to just have a good time.

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Do you do you see venture funds eventually following the same path as as other financial institutions in terms of advertising? And let's say like print media, right? You can imagine like BlackRock will run, you know, a print advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, right? Do you ever see, do you think that's an interesting way to potentially uh uh build the brand with? Uh, I don't know that many founders that read the journal, at least as religiously as us, but certainly there has to be. Uh, in the role of CMO, you have to be marketing to founders, but also LPs, right?

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, actually, interestingly, my gig at Nasdaq when I was pitching IPOs for a living, that was something we would put in every single proposal. You get like a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. But I think today's founders that that resonates as much. I think honestly, they're better off buying a piece of your hat on TVP than they are like buying a page in the journal. Like spend that money on on Instagram advertising and TikTok ads and.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, I meant I meant more, I meant more for for you at Lightspeed. Like, I think it would be iconic for Lightspeed to have a page in the journal that says like, look at all, like, we are in all the AI winners.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  Like that Lightspeed is AI with just like the list of of companies that we're in.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  Get ready, we're uh, we will be on every media platform. Legacy Media still has a very special place in my heart. It's like, you know, I I spent a decade on the floor of that exchange, working with every media outlet to help get companies as much noise as we can make them around an IPO.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  How is, how how do you think um? Like, how is the, how is like IPO marketing changed over the last decade since you were at NASDAQ? I mean, we have so much activity this week. We were at, we were at the Klarna IPO yesterday, which honestly felt incredibly quiet in comparison to Figma, which, which was, actually, we figured out it was intentional. The founder was like really celebrating back in Sweden, right? So he, he just came in. He didn't even bring his family. He just handled business and got out of there. And then you had Figma, which very much was like a celebration of, of, of.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  They have an office in New York.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  They have an office in New York, but it was a celebration of like the entire community. It was really like an event. It felt like being a festival.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Just in Manhattan, probably tons of Figma.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, like broadly, they have, how, how do you think that, that landscape has shifted?

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  Well, that was the fun thing about that gig. I got to work with every great CEO, CFO and CMO. And you kind of get to see them almost in like, what is their Super Bowl? Like for their company and how they perform at the top of their game. Sometimes people are looking for that more muted response that I think you saw with Klarna, which I just think is like stylistically that company. But I think if you're looking for IPO excellence, what Figma did and what they pulled off, what, you know, some of the VC firms that helped them behind the scenes on their comms, like it was a massive win for noise making. And I think it was like kind of the gold standard for what you expect from an IPO.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  I think the thing is, is a lot of companies don't realize that like, this is your one day to make the noise because you've got the quiet period before and you got it afterwards. And so really you have to squeeze as much juice out of the fruit that you can. And what I would always advise companies to do is spend every dollar you can across the, you know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, promoting the fact that you went public because this is your opportunity to tell those enterprise customers who weren't necessarily ready to sign on to you when you were a private company, no matter the size,

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  that you're ready for them.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  It's the best branding ever to be like, yeah, we're, we're a public company.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  We're public.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's on par with a great dot com. Probably, probably more significant.

• 1:21:46John Coogan?

  A great ticker. Works well. Uh, how are you thinking about positioning Lightspeed in the venture ecosystem? Like, um, I feel like there's a couple of funds that have carved out, like, kind of just very clear definitions of like, okay, we're, we're a crossover hedge fund. Uh, we have Publix and then we have a growth fund. But like, we're, we're not even trying to be known for early stage. Maybe we write some seed. And, and like, just getting that clear message of like, when to call what fund? I feel like is the first job to do of a VC marketing arm, maybe? Um, how are you thinking about, uh, either narrowing or expanding or like defining the definition of like,

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  what is Lightspeed? How does it fit in? How is it different?

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  That's a great question. Look, I think actually it was one of the things that drew me to Lightspeed.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  Right? When I was on the floor of the exchange as a young guy, like, companies were going public in like seven years.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  And then while I was working there, it became 10 years and I'm chasing companies for, you know, from series B for like seven years before they would go public with us. And now it's 15. And I think honestly, Lightspeed strategy is what attracted me to it because literally we support companies from seed through IPO and beyond. And I think that focus of saying, we are going to be great early-stage investors and then we're going to take the ones that are really winning, apply our full muscle to giving them all the tools that we can give them for an unfair advantage as they,

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  you know, go up against the Goliaths in their industry. And then bring them through IPO and provide them the, that added lift that they need in those later growth rounds. I think it's a really unique offer that is quite differentiated in the venture space. And actually that, that multi-stage thing is, is why I'm here, right? Like, I get to. Give early-stage companies the noise-making. I get to help the late-stage companies with their IPO prep. It's truly like a dream job to go and and take this into the future. And we're going to be doing a lot of branding about why that model is so different than everybody else.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is great.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the new gig.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  I'm looking forward to my TBPN traded card. Can I get that?

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll work on it. We'll work on it. Logan, Logan, we might have to use the-

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  I don't know if we want to upset Jeff Brody. I mean, he did go to my high school, so I gotta keep things friendly over there.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  I know you've got some other lightspeed people coming up, too.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Good buddies with Bucky. We'll have him on soon. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Josh. Congrats.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys. Bye.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  See ya. Quickly, let me tell you about Numeral Sales Tax on autopilot. It's super intelligence for sales tax. They said if if they build it-

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  This is what Eliezer was worried about.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  If they build it, everyone will spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, I think we have our next guest already in the restream waiting room, Nico Rosberg. We will bring you guys in studio. Nico, how you doing?

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Can you hear us? Sorry for keeping you waiting.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  We got a bit of lag.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Oh, we got some backgrounds.

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us?

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Can you hear us? Hello. Testing, testing. One, two, three. Can you hear us? Let's try and get him on the on the call. In the meantime, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive, number one ranking on G2. Also, people having fun memeing the the AirPods 3 live translation. It immediately became a meme format. I was disappointed that I couldn't workshop one in time to get a banger up, but people were having a lot of fun with it.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  I just like this this picture, this picture of being like, hola, and it just says hello.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  What is what is hola mean?

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this. So hola is a Spanish word for hello.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Okay. So if I pay $300, put in my headphones.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  You would be able to do that.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is incredible technology.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the whole, you know, I have no idea how to how to kind of judge Duolingo as a as a as a public company and what the fair market value of Duolingo is, but I do think there is like.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  I don't think it's competitive at all.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Studying language has never been about.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I shouldn't say it never, but it's like for 90% of people is not about the like practicality. It's about stimulating your mind and and new things and and.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Even if this existed, I still would have done years of.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Wikipedia exists and like Founders Podcast exists and they're very different products.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Like they can both tell me what was Larry Ellison up to in the 90s.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  And when and when the Oracle news broke, I actually went to both. I looked at the Oracle Wiki and I also listened to the Founders Podcast on Larry Ellison and they're very different. And I feel like Duolingo plays this like fun game thing. Tyler, what's your take on Duolingo versus the AirPods 3?

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Well, so about the AirPods, like unless both parties have them, then it's like not that useful, right? Because if if you only speak Spanish, I only speak English, you're talking to me, I can't I can't reply.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  There are a variety of ways to use it with one person. So if I'm going around, you you speak to me and then when I speak, it can go into an app on my phone and I can just hit play and it will play the audio from my phone or it will show you words. So if you're speaking Spanish, I'm hearing English and my phone, as I'm talking, is displaying Spanish text. And so I can actually hand you my phone and you can read what I'm saying in English in Spanish. So they've thought of some of the stuff. It still does seem like there's a little bit of a technological handshake going on where I need to say, hola, like, would you like to use AirPods Pro 3?

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  See if you can translate this.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Let's put.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  See if you can translate this Mandarin. Well, hunshy one, Pijo.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Of course, I would like a beer, please.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Close, I really enjoy beer.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  I really enjoy beer generally, of course. Yes, this would be huge for ordering an Obruski. Noah Smith called it the universal translator from Star Trek.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very cool.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Vitalik said it can't arbitrary, can't translate arbitrary alien languages it hears for the first time with any, with only a tiny sample, though. Although, maybe what happened in Star Trek is that every species realized that it's a good idea to expose a clean API that blurts out like one terabyte of all your historical cultural works, and that is enough to generate the embeddings for their language. I've seen AI work before that suggests that if you have the embeddings for two languages, you only need a very small amount of translated word pairs to find the mapping between the two. Not sure if this holds for languages that evolved in totally separate worlds, but maybe it still does for convergent evolution reasons, and that gets you a translator.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  And so it ships, and so ships just always scan for, "Give me a terabyte of your culture" API, and always end up finding it. That's very funny.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Speaking of alien languages, Tyler, you were mentioning that we discovered alien life on Mars, or it was fake? What was your take on that? You were saying that the moon landing's fake, and you don't believe in the moon landing, right?

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  You don't believe in space.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  You said that off mic?

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more about space is fake, yeah.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  Space is fake. Going up high is fake. Planes, when you get in a plane...

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Rockets.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Why do they always have the windows down? It's because they're changing out the set decoration around you.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  You just get on the plane, you sit there for six hours while they rebuild the city around you, you get off, and then you're in the New York, oh, I'm in New York City? Oh, really?

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I traveled thousands of miles. I moved thousands of miles in a tube.

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  Put the boards up? Yeah, okay. I'll believe it when I see it.

• 1:30:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, what was the news? NASA got a photo? How is there a new photo on Mars? The rover's just going around?

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so the rover's going around, looking for stuff.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Wait, can we pull up the picture?

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  It's in the deck, it's later in the deck.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  So, who took the photo?

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  The Rover.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  The Rover of itself, like, kind of like selfie stick.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Rover has like a 360 cam on the end of an arm. And there's someone who gives instructions, I think like once a day, because there's such a delay to get the message there, that they say, the Rover's kind of semi-autonomous, then they say, hey, go look around over here.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  The chat, just to defend Tyler's honor.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  He is not a flatterer.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's not a flatterer, we're just joking around.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  We're joking around. Anyway, we believe we have our next guest, Nico Rosberg. How are you doing, Nico?

• 1:30:52Speaker 04

  Hey. How's it going, guys?

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  It's great, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  Thanks a lot, pleasure to be here. I'm doing good, thank you. You're catching me in Monaco.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Monaco, no.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Which is where I've grown up here.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Classic.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  How is it this time of year?

• 1:31:08Speaker 04

  Actually, it's lovely because it's kind of still summer. Still really warm, and we're still enjoying the outside, going to the promenade, going to the pool with the kids, because I have two kids, they're seven and nine.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:19Speaker 04

  And they just started school again after the summer, but still really warm here, so it's lovely. South of France is beautiful.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:31:25Speaker 04

  What about you guys?

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  We've been traveling a lot. We were in New York City yesterday, San Francisco the day before, for the Klarna IPO, and then Y Combinator Demo Day, and then back to LA, so a little bit too much travel, a little frazzled, a little.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know how you, I don't know how drivers actually do this, right? Just because when we go, we go on the road for 48 hours with that kind of pace, it really throws everything off, but we're here.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, can you give us a little bit of backstory on your path to venture from your racing career?

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So obviously, it's not the most natural switch, yeah? And racing career, yeah, I was on it, I was at it for 20 years. You start when you're 10 years old. And then I ended up winning the Formula One World Championship at the age of 31 with the Mercedes, with the Mercedes team. Thank you very much, lovely to hear that. And I did the, yeah, pretty extreme thing of retiring like five days after I won the championship. Because it just felt like my dream was complete, I achieved what I set out to do. And it's an insane, I mean, all the founders listening, it's an insane lifestyle to pursue relentlessly your goal, just like for founders, but it's the same for athletes.

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  It's really, really madly intense. And so I was quite happy that it was all achieved and I just wanted to move on to the next life. But then I had no clue what to do. So I was researching a lot of things and now nine years after.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Before you dive into that, what, do you have any idea what percentage of drivers that, that, that end up, end up as a Formula One driver, actually even podium at any point in their career? Isn't it?

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Extremely low.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it extremely low?

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure it is. I don't know the exact numbers, obviously, but if I had to guess, it would probably be less than 10%.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  Around 10% if I had to guess now. That's just a, that's just a wild guess now. And then, of course, in terms of world champions, there's 30, 34 or 35 world champions in the 70-year history of the sport. And there's been, there's been thousands of F1 racers, you know, so it's a, it's an extremely small percentage, yeah.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  So yeah, talk about the transition to investing. I've heard a little bit of the path and it is unconventional, but when I heard it explained, it made perfect sense, but I'd love to hear it from you.

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  No, it's just, I mean, I always, I've always appreciated the startup world a lot. When I retired, mobility was just going through this extreme transition. Suddenly there was like autonomous driving, there was connectivity, shared mobility, and it was all kicking off exactly when I retired. And I was the mobility world champion. So it's kind of natural for me.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  You're good at getting around.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was kind of natural to take a first look there and Mercedes also helped me out and because they were investing in startups. So I got going that way, really loved it, was fascinated. And it's been a journey ever since. It's been up and down and now finally I kind of found my venture capital North Star and I'm building Rosberg Ventures now, which is a venture capital asset manager. And we have multiple, multiple products, strategies and, but very much, you know, focused on the US. So it's kind of bridging, bridging Europe with US. That's really our, our big focus and yeah, I'm, I'm really excited.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  And so that means sort of like European LP base, but investing in America.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly, yeah, that's one one facet of it. But also then the European corporates, connecting them with the with the breakout generational startups in the US.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 1:35:21Speaker 04

  Because there's a great connectivity between between the startups in the US and the corporates in the US. But sometimes that link to the European and German corporates is quite weak. And also surprisingly, like the German, the German large caps, they don't have a very deep understanding of what's going on in the US venture capital landscape. Um, so there's a great opportunity for us to add value in creating those connections. And as you know, to win.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  What what's the openness to partnering with like if you're a if you're like a German, you know, a multi-billion dollar company, what's the openness to even using products from startups? Is it is it high, low?

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  It really depends. I mean, one of our, one of our most famous car manufacturers, not gonna say the name, but the likes of BMW, Mercedes, et cetera, um, we're working with them and we're introducing startups. And then the other day they said, sorry, we have no more budget to explore, to explore. And and you're like, okay, but you guys are facing insane like insane threats from Tesla, China, and you're telling you're telling us here that you don't have budget to like explore transformational solutions from the from the startup landscape like that was.

• 1:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the the point of enterprise software for the most part is how people save money or how people make money, ideally do both.

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  Exactly. So actually, we so we brought them like a a tool that that that is gonna analyze their whole procurement contracts and everything. And they actually, their revenues are only, they are

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  part of the save, the cost savings that they generate. Yeah. And then then this car manufacturer BMW, Mercedes, Audi, whatever, they're like, oh, okay. So we don't need to invest anything upfront here. They just take a cut from the savings that they generate for us in on the on procurement. Procurement. And then they're like, okay, this is great. Let's let this will definitely have a look at.

• 1:37:24Speaker 04

  So it depends. But anyways, in general, there's a great readiness, uh, which is reassuring nonetheless. But but they're not really like, um, very.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, in depth at the moment and understanding what's coming in terms of transformation AI. You know, it's a big, big challenge, as you know, for enterprises to adopt that.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Outside of the corporates, what does the family office or ultra-high net worth individual landscape look like out in Europe? Are they more risk on now? Are these the type of folks that you met through your F1 career that became LPs eventually?

• 1:38:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. It's many of the families that I got to know in racing that were like big sponsors or even the car manufacturers.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  So that's kind of the link back to my racing, which is nice for me as well.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Speaker 04

  And in general, it's, it's very risk off in Europe compared to America, which is a real weakness.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  Because risk doesn't even necessarily have to be risk. If you have a long, long-term time horizon, even something like the NASDAQ becomes low risk, even though on a, on a three-month horizon, it's a high-risk, high-risk investment. And that's the one thing, that's the thing that the Europeans, yeah, I don't know, I'm, they don't, they don't really get that right. They're very conservative, but in a bad way.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  So very often, they hardly, like the endowments, they hardly beat inflation. But there was the high inflation, they were hardly beating, or not even beating inflation. It was, it was pretty shocking. But for me, it's awesome also because I can take all my learnings now from sport into this venture capital business that I'm building, you know? And one of the main things, like us athletes, it's, I think we're pretty good at this relentless pursuit of our goals. Like, second place just does not exist. Giving up does not exist. It's like absolutely, it's pretty, pretty insane. I think that's one really big strength of ours, which is really appreciated in the venture capital ecosystem.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 04

  Because of course, the best founders are exactly, are exactly the same.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about some of those best founders, the relentless, the risk takers, the ones who don't accept second place. Who do you look up to in the American entrepreneurship world or, or see someone where maybe they didn't, maybe they weren't built for F1, but you think they could have done well if they were a racer?

• 1:39:46Speaker 04

  Well, that's a hard question now. I have no idea. I mean, the racing skill, the racing skill is hand-eye coordination.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Okay, sure. But what about a more abstract level?

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  The foundation of everything. Then, of course, in terms of being relentless in the pursuit of, of winning, there's, there's many, many examples. And I'm personally involved with the likes, for example, I'm a personal investor in like Applied Intuition.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Spencer Unis is fantastic.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  There is a, is a like, he's a, he's a machine as well, you know, and it's like unbelievable. The energy and the determination and grit. Or, or some European companies, examples are like Eleven Labs, which I'm personally invested in, or, or Lovable.

• 1:40:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  And like Lovable Anton is also a pretty extreme, pretty extreme, towards the level of commitment. But I'm also excited, you know, by now I really have really cool portfolios in terms of my personal investing.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  And yeah, it's just, it's, it's great to see how, how these companies are, are growing and unfolding.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yep. Jordy?

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how have you, um, what? Yeah, it feels like over the last few years, founders have started to sort of adopt the, the health practices or the approach to health that, that athletes do.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, there's been a bunch of viral stuff recently, people joking around about this. What, uh, has, has there been, uh, what was sort of most, most impactful for, for your performance during your driving career that you still apply to building like a venture firm from a health standpoint?

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so I was really quite a perfectionist when it came to preparing myself in the best possible way. So I've been through everything. I had a psychologist working with me. I did two hours of psychology and philosophy every two days. Like, I was absolutely flat out on this because I could feel, and it was obvious that I had more, I had capacity to improve mentally as an athlete. I was. Under pressure, you know, scared, worried, distracted and all these, all these things. Um, so there was a lot of capacity there for me to improve and, and I found incredible, incredible, incredible progress mentally.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  Um, and I, so I did a lot of meditation, um, I simplified my life, I removed all emailing, news. Everything was gone, Instagram, social media, there was nothing on my telephone, uh, on my pursuit to becoming a world champion. Uh, so it was really quite, quite extreme.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Would you do, uh, would you do caffeine or any, any stimulants or does that just throw you off in terms of, you know, we've, we've seen like Mark Zuckerberg doesn't, doesn't do caffeine.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, doesn't do caffeine.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I could imagine in a driving, driving setting, you're just like a slightly more twitchy or, or nervous because of caffeine and you, you know, crash the car and, and your race is over.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, so I didn't do caffeine also because the problem I have is when I take caffeine, I can't sleep at night. Uh, so that would be counterproductive. Um, then even like, for example, when it came to jet lag, I have, I had a Harvard sleep professor working with me who actually now has, created an app based on what we had been pursuing at the time, which is called Time Shifter. And it's actually was App Store app of the day. It has like a million subscribers by now. It's like becoming quite a success.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

  Um, and this, this Harvard sleep professor was, was supporting me at the time and I did a whole year with no jet lag. You were saying before earlier how traveling is destroying you and you don't know, you don't know how the athletes do it, I think. Um, so, and I did a whole year, no jet lag. So it was all about like, one and a half hour steps per day maximum in time zone shift, even before you start traveling. The last five days you leave home, one and a half hour steps, blackout glasses, 10,000 locks like Brian Johnson in the morning, first thing. All these tools and it was incredible. It was incredible to do a whole year traveling continents, no jet lag.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Um, so it's really all these things that it's just really, I, essentially what it is, it's, it's putting together all the, all the little details, incremental gains and focusing on them. Cause you all know that. Many incremental gains are a huge progress. And sometimes we kind of neglect them and are lazy and don't focus on the small steps as well. And that was probably a strength of mine, which I'm now taking into venture capital as well. Just all the details, putting them together. It comes back to being relentless again.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your state on the read of, what's your read on the state of F1 broadly? It feels like from an American perspective, Drive to Survive was a big moment. Cadillac's coming into the, Cadillac has an F1 team joining next year. There's a few other milestones and key storylines. But what's captured your attention over the past few years in the story of F1 broadly?

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  My attention has been how F1 has managed to conquer America.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Speaker 04

  And forty percent of the new fans are women. So it's almost like fifty fifty male women, male female.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  Which is, which is so cool.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Speaker 04

  And this is a big change and it's all, it's thanks to Netflix.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  It's thanks to social media. They've opened up social media. Like in my time, social media wasn't even allowed nine years ago.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  Because it was taking eyeballs off the television product.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 04

  But actually, it's a multiplier, you know? So that was a bit short sighted.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 1:45:15Speaker 04

  And it's Liberty Media, you know, who owns F1, who's done such a great job. And Netflix has been so powerful because they actually managed to capture the humans behind F1. And, and it's like a reality TV show rather than documentary. And that's what we love. We love to see emotions. We love to identify with the, connect with the humans behind the sport. And they, they just managed to do such a great job. So that's really what I'm, what I'm finding so cool is how our sport is growing, developing. The excitement is growing. Super, super thrilling.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  What, how, how are you thinking about the rollout of autonomous vehicles over the next five to ten to twenty years even over the long term? Is it something you, you spend a lot of time trying to invest against, any type of thesis?

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  So I invested in a tele-driving, remote control driving solution, so tele-driving. And at one point, we were like, oh, this is gonna go wrong because we're going to full autonomy now. But it looks like someone like Tesla is actually having much more troubles than they perhaps expected two or three years ago. And especially in the edge cases, they're still having too many issues. So, and you know, they had to launch their robotaxis with safety drivers in their cars, et cetera, et cetera. And the question is still there. Is their camera-only solution actually ever gonna be good enough?

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  Yes, they're learning on millions of miles every year, but can the camera solution only deal with all these edge cases of fog and rain and snow, and et cetera, et cetera? So there's still a very, very big question mark. And no one really knows. Then you have the Waymo, which certainly is better tech, but of course, unit economics, I mean, it's super expensive hardware per car. So how scalable is that? Also, difficult still to judge at this point, even though they seem to be going strong at the moment. But yeah, so it's really not clear yet who's gonna be the eventual winner there. But it's, yeah, again, fascinating time, but it will take some more time for us to finally know who wins.

• 1:47:25Speaker 04

  And then the worry, though, is, like, Europe, for example, unfortunately, is almost missing out completely on this value creation. Because they don't have, they don't, they're gonna end up like the mobile phones that just became hardware. So the, the, the system was done by Android or Apple.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  And then they just became hardware suppliers, you know? And that's a threat for the European car manufacturers.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  Because they won't have the autonomy. I wonder if they'll even have the connectivity to their customers.

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  But isn't applied intuition could potentially save them?

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  In terms of that interface connecting to the to the customer who's riding on board, etc. So a very tough moment for European, the car manufacturers and also honestly, many of the American car manufacturers, they're pretty much in the same situation.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  We have Formula One, we have Formula E, which showcases electric vehicles. Do you think we'll ever see Formula A to showcase autonomous vehicles?

• 1:48:34Speaker 04

  So we had that already. There was robo- robo-race, I think it was called.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  They're still somewhat slower than us, like 15 seconds a lap or something, 10 seconds a lap. So it's gonna take some more time there, too. I don't know if that's because we we love the gladiators, the human.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  In the sport, you know, and if it's just tech racing each other, I don't know if that, of course, it will can find its niche, but I don't think it's gonna be a huge, fascinating, global, global success story. Who are you guys rooting for in F1?

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  I, well, I I'm I'm I'm super interested in this, in this, like, you know, we've seen the benchmarks of human versus AI in so many different categories, and I want to know when an autonomous vehicle will put up like a sub seven-minute Nürburgring time. And and it seems like it might be years. It might be a long time, actually.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Especially if it was a manual.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Yes, especially if it's a manual and it has to be driven by a humanoid. So you can't just plug in like you do with a Waymo. You have to actually put the physical robot in the seat. They have to, the robot has to buckle itself in. Very dexterous, very difficult to slide into a cockpit properly. Do you have any favorite?

• 1:49:46Speaker 04

  I'm impressed you know your Nürburgring times. I'm very impressed. So Nürburgring, for all the viewers, it's the greatest racetrack in the world.

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:56Speaker 04

  And it's this crazy 15-kilometer roller coaster through the through the forest in the middle of Germany. And it's called the Green, the Green Hell, and all car manufacturers set benchmark lap times there. And if you manage to break the record, you've got like global news and everything. So it's a very, very important racetrack.

• 1:50:16Jordi Hays?

  Is it, I haven't, I haven't driven it myself. Is it, but I did the last time I was really, I mean, obviously, we'll watch when the manufacturers are doing lap times, but the last time I saw footage from, I saw a GT3 RS get just absolutely destroyed. On the track, is it, is it safe to go out and just do public laps? Or would, would you stay away from something like that? I'm sure when you want to race.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  I wouldn't do it. I would be scared. It's, it's the craziest racetrack in the world.

• 1:50:46Jordi Hays?

  And you have a bunch of people from all over the world coming and just like, they want to go fast. They want to go fast.

• 1:50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course. But it's, it's very, very dangerous. So I'd be careful with that.

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  What else are you tracking in the automotive world broadly?

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  There's, uh, there, yeah, there, there, have you been tracking what's happening in, in China? Are there any other interesting dynamics with any of the upstarts? I feel like most of these companies are post startup rounds at this point with Rivian and being public at this point. But have you, have you been tracking any just future next generation OEMs?

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  So I was in China recently and shocking, you know how Porsche, Porsche, Porsche? I can't remember how you're supposed to say it. They have, they have the Porsche Taycan, yeah? Which is the electric, their electric superstar. And then you go to China and there's Xiaomi, who, who has this, I don't even know what the Xiaomi is called.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  I think it's the SU7 is the one you're thinking of.

• 1:51:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, very good.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  SU7 looks exactly like the Cayenne.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  And I rode in this car. So first of all, the Taycan is $120,000 or $130,000. This thing is $40,000. And, and it looks the same. So they just copy the look of it. And I get in and like five years ago, seven years ago, the interior quality then was rubbish. Everything was cracking, felt like it was going to fall apart. And then you start driving and the drive, the, the handling also then feels rubbish. And now I'm in this, the interior quality is perfection. It's just beautiful. It drives awesomely, has more power than the Porsche Taycan, has more range than the Porsche Taycan. So it was proper scary. I was like, oh my God, like what, this is, this is like, this is shocking. And then let me just finish, you would say, okay, but Porsche still has their brand.

• 1:52:36Speaker 04

  But even that is gone because the Xiaomi founder is a rock star in China. He's like the Elon Musk of China. He has a huge social media following. So even the brand um uh mode is uh is is gone in uh in China. So it feels like it's just complete game over there and and it's happening. But and they're coming to Europe too, which is so scary. Now BYD just overtook Tesla as the best selling best selling electric car in Europe. So it's a really um watershed moment and super critical moment for for the automotive sector. Yeah, but um and then in terms of startups, uh I think I'm I'm not seeing much at the moment, really.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really capex intensive and a lot of those businesses have.

• 1:53:19Speaker 04

  I mean, even uh BYD, for example. So if you look at BYD and Neo, I believe, they got ten billion in government subsidies in order for them to get to where they are now in terms of taking on the world.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:33Speaker 04

  But that is never going to happen in Europe. You're never going to have the the European government supporting a startup with ten billion or a cargo with ten billion in order to become global electric vehicle manufacturing leaders, you know. So, yeah, uh tough to compete against that, isn't it?

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Um. Last question from my side. Um, did you have a reaction? Did you see the F1 movie? Did you have a reaction to Apple's F1 movie? Uh, wh- what'd you think if you saw it?

• 1:54:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, so uh the honest answer is I haven't seen it yet. Because because I was I was holding out to see it with my wife and then that didn't work out for some reason, whatever.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  You have kids, it's natural.

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  We're still holding out and we're probably going to do a cinema night at our at our hu- house here in Monaco.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 04

  With any friends left that have not yet seen it. Maybe we'll do a cinema night next week or something.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Well, I.

• 1:54:21Speaker 04

  But I hear great things, you know. Of course, it's it's Hollywood, it's fake, but I hear great things and.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  And it was amazing. I was at the racetrack and and and Brad Pitt was on the real grid.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Speaker 04

  Just before the race start.

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Speaker 04

  With his race car.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 04

  And he had a real garage in the pit lane with his race car, like at the real race, like the race start. And he's there, like, it's so crazy uh how they put that together. And and then with augment virtual reality, they overlaid his car onto one of the real racing cars in the race.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:51Speaker 04

  For this, it's like, it's pretty impressive. So anyways, I hear good things and I think it's a great uh great step again for for F1.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, total American F1 dominance.

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  What are you guys most excited about in the startup world? What's the last thing that you've seen which which you're raving about?

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  Oh, that's really hard to put on the spot. In the startup world at the early at the earliest stages, I mean, we've been seeing a lot of folks work on new AI hardware devices. And there was one that just put out a video about where where it it's it looks like it looks like headphones, but it measures the electrical signals in your jaw. And so you're just whispering, you're not even making any noise, but you're talking like making mouth movements and it can transcribe that into an app.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Text.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Or so I can be talking to you across without across a crowded room and you can hear me and I can hear you, but no one else can hear us. And if you imagine about voice interfaces in in the future where you're talking to chat GPT or any LLM all day long, being able to do that in a public place or randomly, that feels like that could be the next like big thing. There's a rumor that Sam Altman is working on that with Johnny Ive. So that that was something where it's like there's going to be a new wave of some sort of input technology, pre Neuralink, but.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on my side, this has been such an insane year on so many levels. You have geopolitical chaos, you have warfare, you have assassinations. Tragedies. There's so much uncertainty, there's so much negativity in the world. And from our point of view, we get to interview talented builders every single day. We've interviewed hundreds of of founders this year. And that is like the bright spot to me is like across every industry and and any sector that's important to the world, there are bright, bright, optimistic people that are dedicating their lives to solving, solving problems from logistics to, you know, autonomous vehicles

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  to new consumer hardware, like any, any, any category, there, there are bright people that are dedicating their lives. And so I think that's like the white pill for me is when I think about. How chaotic and crazy the world and there's a lot of, like John said, tragedy. But at the same time, there's people at an individual level are committed to changing the world. And so I think it's much easier to be incredibly optimistic about the future and not give in to the doom when you have our job. And I know it's the same for you as well in terms of meeting talented people that are dedicating their lives to solving real problems in the world.

• 1:57:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's lovely. There's so much hope in the startup world, so much ambition. It's really, really impressive. By the way, I met the founder that you were talking about with that

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:57:59Speaker 04

  device on the year. I know him. I know him very well. Kleiner Perkins, which is like perhaps one of the, I mean, the best VC firm at the moment, or one of the best. They're backing him.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:58:10Speaker 04

  So I know him well.

• 1:58:12Jordi Hays?

  I think you, I wonder if you just

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Worked in the US.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  But that's, that's amazing.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  How often do you visit?

• 1:58:21Speaker 04

  No, I didn't break news. Come on. We don't know. You didn't mention any names or anything.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know nothing. It's just a rumor. How often do you come to the US?

• 1:58:30Speaker 04

  So I have to, I mean, of course, yeah, it's important for me to be there. So I'm there about once every two, three months. So quite a lot. Coming there quite a lot, yeah.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, next time you're in LA.

• 1:58:41Speaker 04

  I love hosting at F1 races also. So I'm constantly hosting all your friends from the Bay Area and New York also at the races. So I host everybody in Miami, hosting everybody again now at Vegas, which is lovely. It's very cool.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a late evening to chat with us. We had a lot of fun talking to you.

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  Come back on anytime.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to talk to you.

• 1:59:05Speaker 04

  I just got an email in my top right corner where I'm going to find out if I get accepted to one of the very best funds in the US. And now I'm going to click on it.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:59:15Speaker 04

  And it's been a five day fight with all nighters and everything because of technical complications, whatever.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  Because it's so hard. They're like, everybody's like 2X oversubscribed. It's like crazy times in the US.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to open, do you want to open it live?

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Open the email. Give us the reaction. Let's let us know.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  If I get a negative, if I get a negative, uh, thanks for your patience. Can you still? Oh, man. We are going ahead. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yes. Can you still see me, actually?

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we can.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  We get it. We get it.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Yes!

• 1:59:50Jordi Hays?

  We get it. Hit the gong!

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We got a, we got a fund allocation for Rosenberg Ventures. Let's go!

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna, I was gonna, we were gonna end the show.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  We were, yeah, we were gonna give them a call.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  And we were gonna drive to Sand Hill and say, "Correct this right now. This is an injustice."

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  That is fantastic news. Congratulations.

• 2:00:11Speaker 04

  Let me narrow it down for you as well, who it was. Come on, at least for some fun.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 04

  It's between something like Thrive, um, Axel, uh, Green Oaks, or, uh, or Elad, Elad, Elad Giel.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, these are great firms.

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  It's one of those four.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Okay, those are great firms. Let's go.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Shout out to all the Absolute Boys.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, you, you should get the other, the other three, too.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, get the, get the full stack. We'll, we'll make some calls.

• 2:00:35Speaker 04

  Maybe we have all of them already.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for, for hopping on the show. This is fantastic.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to hang, uh, come back on.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  That was high stakes.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  High stakes. He lives, he lives his life on the edge.

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Lives his life on the edge.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  That's a real F1 driver move to open and he had a

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Live, for a live audience and potentially getting rejected.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Uh, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Michael.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI day of CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. We have our next guest.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Two-timer. We got Michael.

• 2:01:13Speaker 05

  What's up, guys?

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  With the TVPN hat. Thank you.

• 2:01:15Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Great sign of respect.

• 2:01:17Speaker 06

  I gotta do my part, guys. I gotta do my part.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:01:20Speaker 05

  I didn't, I didn't have one of the hats.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  We will get you one. We will get you one.

• 2:01:23Speaker 06

  One day, one day, Nir.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  We were oversubscribed, actually. We, I think we made a couple hundred of them and, uh, uh, not nearly enough. But thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Uh, let's, uh, let's just kick it off with some intros for those who are listening.

• 2:01:38Speaker 06

  Nir, take it away. Take it away, Nir.

• 2:01:40Speaker 05

  I'm Nir Zicherman. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm the, uh, CEO and co-founder of OBO. And the other co-founder is my good friend Mike here.

• 2:01:47Speaker 06

  What's up, guys? Great to be back. Obviously, we've spoken, uh, a number of times. I'm, uh, one of the co-founders of OBO and also a partner at Lightspeed. And Nir and I had previously co-founded, uh, Anchor, which we sold to Spotify.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  No way. Putting the gang back together.

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Two hundred.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, let's get into the news. So you guys launched, are you guys?

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  What's the product? How are you positioning it?

• 2:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is it a beta? Is it a thing? GA? What's going on?

• 2:02:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're out there. OBO is live to the world and it is the easiest way to learn anything. So you come to our website, obo.fyi, single prompt, we will magically create a course to teach anyone anything. When I say anything, I really mean anything. Mike and I were talking earlier. What was the example we had? We had, you could learn about how to cook pasta and you could learn about the quantum physics of why, of how cooking pasta works if you wanted to. So truly a broad range of topics. And with OBO courses, we let you learn in a variety of different ways, right? So you come in, again, we magically create a course and it is made up of everything from

• 2:02:59Speaker 05

  the ability to read about the topic, short form, long form, to listen to a podcast about it, two hosts like yourselves talking about whatever the topic, completely personalized to the user. We have games, we have quizzes, a totally immersive experience to let you learn.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw a screenshot from none other than Martin Scraley saying this was very cool. And it showed, I mean, it felt like a lot of the Anchor DNA was in there in the sense of, when I think about Anchor, it's like you have an MP3 and you need it on a lot of different, and you need to instantiate it in many different ways. Distribution is multi-platform. And you have essentially like some sort of deep research project going on under, collecting information, organizing with LLMs, I'm sure, but then instantiating it in a summary, a deep dive, an audio product. So talk about the multimodality, where you see that going in the near term? When are we going to get video in here at some point? I could imagine with VO3

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  and some of the advances there, eventually you'll be able to just like, sit in on a one-hour generated video lecture if that's what you want. I don't know if anyone wants that long-term, but where do you see all the different multimodalities going?

• 2:04:10Speaker 05

  I actually think a lot of people do want videos in the works. We are working on it. And to me, you know, I mean, people spend hours on YouTube.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:17Speaker 05

  Constantly trying to learn and, you know, explore curiosities. The reality is people are online learning constantly. You just don't think about it as learning. You know, you're on tons of different websites, tons of different apps, trying to like figure out, understanding things in the news, understanding what you read, trying to get, you know, you're curious about things and you want to dig in. People do not learn in one path and they don't learn with one format. So a core philosophy of ours is if you're going to build a learning platform, you have to learn it the way that people actually learn. And the way that people actually learn is multimodal, right? It's immersive. Mike, what do you, what do you want to add?

• 2:04:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think the, the, the beauty of the multimodality is it lets people learn on their terms. You know, one of the reasons we started this company is we sort of looked at education. We looked at learning and we realized that the way people learn right now is too rigid. It's too one size fits all, right? You have higher education and traditional education, teaching every single person on the planet, the same thing in the same exact way. And that's just not how we all learn. We all learn in different ways. Some of us like to read, some of us like to listen, some of us like to watch TikTok. And so what we realized is we have this technology now that can personalize learning for anyone on the planet. And so it would be a shame to not actually do that and make the most personalized form of education ever before.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about gamification? I seem to remember you guys had badges in the first app and to kind of help someone get over the curve of actually distributing a show. We're seeing, you know, the both like resilience and the stocks all over the place with Duolingo, but it feels like Duolingo has done a great job of taking an education product and making it fun and, and repetitive and maybe even a little addictive. And it seems like that is a piece of the goal, but how do you think about the various trade offs there?

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  Look, I think gamification is key. I think the main reason gamification is key and accessibility and making it fun is key is because learning is intimidating.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15Speaker 05

  Most people who want to learn something new, they look at how you do it and they just get intimidated and they turn away. And that's why so much of what we've built and what we'll continue to build is around making it really digestible, really piecemeal, like Mike said, putting it in the control of the user so that they could decide how they want to navigate things. I think any course on OBO should be presented to a user today and in the future as you can do this, we're going to help guide you through it, right? But we're going to put enough tools in your hands so that you could be the one to guide the system and let it know how to effectively teach you.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how are you guys thinking about solving for hallucinations? If, if, if I, if, if, you know, if you can remember a teacher that taught you something and it was wrong, it's like it just completely destroys the trust. Like it's hard to, you're like, you said that this event happened in 1970 and it actually happened in 1950.

• 2:07:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, what would, what would we be as a 2025 AI startup without a multi-agent architecture, right? Nir, explain our multi-agent architecture.

• 2:07:17Speaker 05

  Let me, let me tell you about our multi-agent architecture. Look, the big challenge in a lot of what we spent resources on over the last year building this thing was on how do you present to the user really high-quality engaging content that is accurate extremely quickly? Because for this content to be lightweight and accessible, it has to happen fast, right? So the way that this works under the hood is like this, I, I think the, honestly, the toughest challenge is an orchestration challenge. It's how do you simultaneously have an agent generating, you know, the skeleton of course, and the references that it's going to pull in and the script for the audio and fact-check all this stuff, agents correcting other agents and all that happens within seconds of you generating a course and it's going to continue to get better.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  Well, hallucinations, I think, are, the reality is, I think, right now, people primarily learn through resources that are completely unchecked. And so I think one of the biggest advantage that, advantages that we want to invest in is making sure that when people come here, they feel confident that they're getting the highest quality and the most accurate.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the launch. I'm excited to try it out. My challenge for you, I don't know if either of you play the oboe. You need to use oboe to learn to play the oboe. You need to dog food your own product. Next time we have you on the show,

• 2:08:27Speaker 06

  That's the goal.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  I expect a solo on the oboe.

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Oboe solo.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Oboe solo. Let's make it happen.

• 2:08:33Speaker 06

  I think it's a great idea.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  You should.

• 2:08:35Speaker 06

  Guys, let me just, let me just say one more thing, if you don't mind. I know you got another guest coming on. We are investing a lot of money in AI. We've invested like, what, a trillion dollars at this point or something? It seems crazy to us that we have invested so much money into a technology that's going to make an alien life form that's actually smarter than us. And so the whole purpose of this company is to actually use the artificial intelligence to make the humans smarter. That's what we're trying to do here. It's actually, let's pour that investment back into human intelligence. All right? We're bringing human intelligence back.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Organic intelligence, farm to table.

• 2:09:06Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:09:07John Coogan?

  Farm to table intelligence.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to check it out. It's, you know, we, we cover like hundreds of topics a show. There's often times where we're coming into a show and we have like 10 minutes to prep on something that we know nothing about. And I have a feeling that oboe is going to be a great solution for it. So thank you guys for joining and, and congrats on the launch.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Next up, we have

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  Amjad from Replit. While he's coming in from the Restream waiting room, I'll tell you about 8sleep.com. Get a Pod5 Ultra. Five-year warranty, 30-day risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. You heard Nico Rosberg talk about the importance of sleep. You need an 8sleep. Anyway, we have Amjad from Replit in the Restream waiting room. Bringing him in. He has some fantastic news for us. Break it down. Welcome back to the show.

• 2:09:57Amjad Masad?

  Great to see you. Thanks for having me here, guys. Good to see you again.

• 2:10:01John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. You look, uh, yeah, just great lighting. You look healthy. You look like you're dead.

• 2:10:07Amjad Masad?

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  More than ever. I feel like there's been a PR in the recent, in the recent history. I won't hold you to it.

• 2:10:11Amjad Masad?

  I've done, I've done a bit of a PR on, on just getting healthier in general. Actually, weightlifting is really bad for you. Powerlifting especially. You get, because he, once you start chasing weights,

• 2:10:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:22Amjad Masad?

  you, you know, you, you're fine with getting fat and you're fine with anything. You're, you're willing to die to, to add that extra pound on your lift and it's just a bad sport in general.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  Yep. Well.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John and I, John and I go back and forth here. John's, John's very fixated on, you know, constant improvement in the gym. I'm, I'm more so like, you know, I want to be strong and healthy. But anyways, it, it, you're, what did Dalian say the other week? It's like, you're always either like adding to your one rep max or

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  Or losing.

• 2:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Losing.

• 2:10:57John Coogan?

  So it's one way or the other. Well,

• 2:10:59Amjad Masad?

  Did you see what, did you see what Graham Daniel said about powerlifting?

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 2:11:05Amjad Masad?

  It's like, if you, if you want to look ugly and feel shit, take up powerlifting.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not for the aesthetics, for sure.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, PR on fundraising. So congrats on that. What's the news?

• 2:11:19Amjad Masad?

  Thank you. Yeah, we raised $250 million.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:11:24Amjad Masad?

  Let's go.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:11:26Amjad Masad?

  At, at a $3 billion valuation,

• 2:11:30Amjad Masad?

  led by Prism Capital with Amex and Google joining the round and a bunch of our lovely investors, such as Andreessen Y C and others, kind of doubling down.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Massive takeoff, fast takeoff in, in revenue and users. Like, like the, the vibe coding era is definitely a narrative that's, that's, you know, on a tear right now, correct?

• 2:11:55Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, but, but we're actually trying to change the game a little bit. Like, I think vibe coding is, is, is awesome. But ultimately, like what Replit is and what I've been trying to do for a long time is make it so that anyone can make software.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:07Amjad Masad?

  Vibe coding is still somewhat coding. You're still sitting in front of an IDE and like, most people don't want to do that. Like, a lot of people like it, but people just want to solve problems, start startups. That's why they do, you know, coding. And so Replit Agent 3, we, our target is for it to feel like a human developer, for it to work on your behalf. And so the main target we set from like a research perspective is can we make it run for 200 minutes? So when we went from Agent 1 to Agent 2, went from 2 minutes to 20 minutes. So now from 20 minutes to

• 2:12:46Amjad Masad?

  Three hundred, two hundred minutes. And actually, I'm seeing people show me apps they've built that it's taking four hours on its own. It can boot up a browser window, test it, test the app for you. It can run unit tests. It can review its code. And we have this adversarial relationship between Claude and GPT-5, Gemini arguing and fighting. And so it's like this multi-agent system. And it's really the state of the art autonomous coding agent. And so the idea is not to vibe code. The idea is to to build things. And oftentimes, you don't even have to be in front of the computer for that to happen.

• 2:13:20John Coogan?

  How big of an opportunity is mobile?

• 2:13:24Amjad Masad?

  Mobile is huge. Like, so a lot of our customers are actually executives. So I was at the All In Summit. We hosted the AI dinner. Broad Down from Seattle, Lloyd Frank, Frank, from the co-founder of Zillow. And he is Repli's champion at the firm, right? This is executive chairman of the board. And, you know, a lot of his time is in between meetings and things like that. So he can like boot up Repli on his phone. And we have a lot of other CEOs. I've heard the story secondhand that, you know, Vlad from Robinhood would like prototype applications on Repli on his phone in meetings to kind of show engineers what they should go and build.

• 2:14:06Amjad Masad?

  And so I think it really changes the game. It's no longer about being a computer nerd sitting in front of a computer. It's about making things, whether it's on your phone, on your, you know, hopefully in the future, even, you know, you can just talk to Repli via your headphones and it just goes and does the thing.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Yep. No, I know. I think that there's, there's that meme of like where you sit in the org is correlated to how many monitors you have, right? And it's like the person who's like keeping the entire app online, like the genius systems engineer has three monitors. Then like the product manager has like, you know, one extra monitor and a laptop that they take to meetings. And then the CEO is just on their phone all the time and giving the CEO or executive who's just on their phone. The ability to express themselves in software is extremely powerful. I'm interested, oh, sorry.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about projecting and forecasting market size of code generation broadly? Because Repli was early to this space, but it's heavily competitive via, you know, there was even.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Now that I think about it, at Demo Day, there was a, the other day, there was a company that I was kind of thinking when I heard the pitch, like, this feels like, basically like, a feature of Replit, right? So it's just like, hyper-competitive space, but at the same time, the world wants-

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  It was prompt to test flight, specifically, is that the one you're thinking of?

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but the world just wants more and more and more code, and the cheaper you make it to make code, the more the world wants it. But I'm curious how you think about, kind of, the overall market opportunity.

• 2:15:42Amjad Masad?

  First of all, super vindicated, right? Like, I've been talking about this since I was a teenager. I was working at, you know, Code Academy, and we were saying, "Anyone can learn to code. Everyone wants to make software." And everyone's like, "Well, you should learn to be a plumber, because everyone needs plumbing." I was like, "No, it's different. Like, we need an abundance of code. You don't need an abundance of plumbing." And, some people do.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. It's a great line.

• 2:16:08Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, and, and so, it's awesome. Like, I, I think we lit a fire, and now the forest is on fire, right? But, and that's, that's always, I think, good. I think the, look, there's a zero-sum market, and there's a positive-sum market. The zero-sum market is a professional engineering market. You see the co-pilot versus cursor chart. And as, as cursor's rising, co-pilot's going in market share. That's a zero-sum market. Now you see it with Codex and plot code. And so, there's only so many tools that software engineers can use. But, like I said, we're bringing, we're, you know, executives are making software, salespeople, marketing people, doctors, nurses, everyone.

• 2:16:47Amjad Masad?

  I haven't, like, at this point, I've, over the past year, I've heard every profession under the sun has used Replit in some use case. And so, I think the market size is, is, is, is probably the market size of software, or the market size of computers. Right? And, and by the way, this is the original vision of computing, when the original creators of computers, that's what they envisioned. They envisioned that you buy a computer, and you program it. That's how you use it. They didn't, like, envision the software industry. And I think that's, that's the true essence of, you know, how computing could be really, really powerful, is the ability for anyone to program it. So that's one.

• 2:17:28Amjad Masad?

  Another sort of, we did it like a one more thing as part of our agent three announcement. And it's a sort of this low key launch that I think will, will, will you know, transform our business over time. And it's the ability for Replit Agent to make other agents. So we've gotten really good at making agents and now we're imbuing that knowledge into the agent itself. And what we're finding in the enterprise is that a lot of people want to solve problems. Software as a mean, means of solving problems. You create an app and then you use that app to take an action, right? But a lot of times you, an agent can take an action on your behalf.

• 2:18:08Amjad Masad?

  And so you can create an HR agent, a sales agent, uh, you know, there, there's, there's so many things that could be automated. And there's an entire industry that's going to emerge around vertical agents and that's fine. But a lot of times you need very domain specific, like HR onboarding agent for the idiosyncratic bespoke way we do onboarding on, in our company. And the only person who knows how to do it is one HR ops person at our company. And so, uh, you know, now agents can make other agents and that market size is also dising, dising a large because that starts to displace, uh, white collar labor, labor in many ways.

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  On the topic of just more and more code endlessly, I'm interested to know how you think instantiation of code will live in the consumer world over time. And I'll, I'll give you an example. So, uh, I've, I've fired off deep research reports in, in OpenAI's ChatGPT. I've also once gone to Claude Code and said with same prompt, do all the deep research, but then instantiate it as an HTML site that is mobile responsive and can use all different HTML tables. And you can tell that when deep research fills in from ChatGPT, it has the ability to use markdown and create a table, but it can't.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Just pull a random JavaScript library and create an interactive bar chart. It can't randomly throw images in and add all these different divs that you could possibly do on HTML. And so I was thinking about, you know, are we going to get to a world where you open up your favorite LLM chat app? And in order to answer the problem, it's building a widget, building a piece of software, the same way when you go to Google and you ask for two plus two, it just gives you a calculator, an actual HTML calculator. You can instantiate that calculator and code. And so I'm wondering how you think the market will look in like five, I don't know, 10 years or something like.

• 2:20:06Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. How much code? Yeah, I think you hit on something super important. I think it is easy to look at this and say this is the market for code gen.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Amjad Masad?

  No, it's a market for software.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:17Amjad Masad?

  The, again, if you go back to history, when, you know, Turing wrote his 1936 paper that, you know, invented the computer, the Turing machine, it's about universal computation is that, you know, computers can be these dynamic systems, right? And we know initially computers were these fancy calculators. You couldn't program them in software, you had to kind of, you know, rewire them. And then von Neumann in the, you know, 50, 40s, 50s created the stored program computer. And the idea is that you can suddenly program them and, you know, every computer we have right now is a von Neumann machine. And I think this moment is as big as that moment. You went from static computers to programmable computers.

• 2:20:59Amjad Masad?

  Now we're going from static software to dynamic and malleable software. So every piece of software application you're going to be working with will be generating software on the fly, pulling packages on the fly and creating bespoke software for your use case. So, you know, in, in, instead of like going and buying Tableau to do this one exact thing, you can go to Replit or Manus or even ChatGPT will do it in the future and all that. And depending on how depth of the power is, I think Replit is going to be the most powerful.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:32Amjad Masad?

  But, but of course you can use any of the other tools and they're going to generate the bespoke software that you need for that exact use case. And I think that's a very exciting future.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, there will be sort of like continuum of complexity.

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  When you see some of these insane cloud backlogs where you have like Google and Microsoft and Oracle and everybody's reporting like we have backlogs in the hundreds of billions and the, and, and I think Wall Street looks at that and they say, okay. Where's this, where's this revenue really gonna, where's this, how is this revenue?

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  That's not what, I mean, sorry, but like, that's not what Wall Street's reaction was. Wall Street's reaction was like, oh, the money's in the bank, like, let's drive the stock higher.

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, sure, I'm saying to more critical investors or thing, like, that's a lot of money being thrown around. A lot of numbers, where, what, how do you, you know, make it? But, but on your side, as you see, you know, the entire market of software shifting from, you know, we make software and we sell a lot, a lot of times, do we make software continuously for the needs of our business? Do those kind of backlogs start to make sense to you?

• 2:22:38Amjad Masad?

  I think so. Look, I'm, I'm not an investor. We might be in a bubble in the short term, but I am confident that the long-term value of this technology, especially as it pertains to LLMs making software, is massive. In some sense, it's going to displace existing value, so that's in the vertical point solution SaaS space. I think it'll start doing some jobs that otherwise humans have been doing, so that the existing value capture from the existing market, but it's also gonna fundamentally change how we use computers, how we run our businesses, businesses can be a lot more efficient.

• 2:23:20Amjad Masad?

  And I, I think that, like, you know, an economist or philosopher need to start thinking about what the future of work would look like when everyone has a fully autonomous programmer in their pocket. It's, you know, every company is bottlenecked by software, every company in the world, from one-person company to a hundred thousand person company. So when your finance team needed this, like, data to be pipelined from, like, Stripe and other places so they can run certain analysis, they're bottlenecked by data engineering. But if I can, like, let loose, you know, Replit or Clockcode, whatever, and just say, like, go figure out these data sources

• 2:24:01Amjad Masad?

  and plumb them in so I can run SQL queries on them, and then three or four hours later, you have that ready, then, you know, you unblocked yourself, you created massive improvements to your processes, and also, you don't need the engineers to go work on the site quests and they can focus on the core software that the company is building.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We went viral last time, asking you, advice for young people. Let's get your updated thinking, should you learn to code in 2025?

• 2:24:34Amjad Masad?

  What do you want to do, I would say? Like, do you want to start a startup? Go fucking start a startup. Like, go to Repli, put your idea in, and, you know, in 20 minutes, you'll get a prototype. And then, once you have a better idea of what you want to build, you can put in a larger prompt, and have it run for three hours, and then come back to you with a product that maybe you can release even in the first day. Is that what you want to do? Now, you want to be a specialist, you want to go work on, you know, writing C soft, provable C software for the, you know, next Apollo program? Yeah, go get a PhD in computer science. But really, it comes down to what you want to do. I think the future is entrepreneurship. And not just entrepreneurship and building businesses, but also,

• 2:25:17Amjad Masad?

  what we're seeing is there's a lot of entrepreneurs within companies that are creating tremendous value. We hear of companies all the time, employees using Repli, creating millions of dollars of revenue for their company. And they're not engineers, they're operations people, product managers, and all sorts of people are now empowered to do that. But I think the main skill, uh, the main set of skills is going to be resourcefulness. Uh, I think the worst thing you could do is be, do what you're told today. The worst thing you could do is perhaps listen to your parents. And here we go, maybe that goes, goes wild.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  That was a great answer.

• 2:25:57Amjad Masad?

  Because, you know, look, I think that, you know, all the advice is outdated, and I think, uh, we're entering a very dynamic era, and I think, you know, especially young people need to think for themselves. They'll know much better than their teachers, their parents, everyone else, what they need to focus on, what kind of skills they need to learn.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:26:16Jordi Hays?

  The robots will do all of the process.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:19Jordi Hays?

  You just need to ideate and create things.

• 2:26:22Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, that's true, the human spirits. That we're not, we're never going to lose that. That's the human spirit.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  I agree. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the, on the, on the new round.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  Always a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:26:33Amjad Masad?

  Alright, cheers.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and trusted by millions. Up next, we have Alex from Higgs field AI in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBN Ultra dump. Welcome to the stream, Alex. Great to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:26:56Alex Mashrabov?

  Doing great. Thank you for having me.

• 2:26:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Give us the news. Do you have anything to share on the fundraising side?

• 2:27:03Alex Mashrabov?

  Yeah, for sure. Guys, happy to announce that we raised 50 million and we purposefully pick you guys.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Oh, what?

• 2:27:13Alex Mashrabov?

  As you, yeah, you represent a new media.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:27:22Jordi Hays?

  I got a little excited.

• 2:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Continue. You said.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  I think you were saying something very nice about how we're neatly organized. We're just banging gongs and stuff. Anyway, I'll let you talk. Sorry.

• 2:27:34Alex Mashrabov?

  Yeah, I mean, we're just excited to support this new wave of creators who are social media native.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Alex Mashrabov?

  And I think TBN is a great example of what it means to be social media native and don't be the gatekeeper.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:51Alex Mashrabov?

  So that's for us, we also are excited to share some stats today.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:27:56Alex Mashrabov?

  We, in just five months after the launch, we probably crossed over 1.3 billion views on social media. All the content generated with Higgs field crossed over a billion views on social media.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  That was crazy. Congratulations.

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what kind of, what kind of power law is there in that?

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Is there one? Because if you had the Pope wearing the puffy jacket, that could be like 200 million views. Or is it more, yeah, what does the power law look like? What's the most interesting image you've seen?

• 2:28:28Alex Mashrabov?

  Look, I think, I think what matters today is consistency. You guys go out every day, right?

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:36Alex Mashrabov?

  Higgs field releases every day. And successful creators, they have to post like five times a day on social media, some short snippets. I think frequency and relevancy is what matters.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  What are the, what are the most interesting use cases that you're seeing? Uh, the Nano, there, there was obviously the Studio Ghibli launch where we got the ability to create cartoons. Nano Banana, I saw a lot of people like, just like swapping clothing. Uh, has there been kind of a killer use case that you've seen? Where you've gone to maybe friends who aren't, you know, reading the deep dive, how to prompt all these threads? But, and just said, hey, we, we got this specific thing covered. You're gonna have a great experience if you use Higgs field in this way.

• 2:29:21Alex Mashrabov?

  For sure. Um, primarily Higgs field stands behind creators and really supporting creators is, uh, the primary goal. And we integrate all the best tooling, including the Nano Banana, which you mentioned. One of the most surprising, um, use cases where we see a lot of traction is actually product placements. And we are excited to see Higgs field being adopted by Fortune 500 companies. To really put their products to work, to get traction on social media. And this, and this is where Higgs field proprietary models like Higgs field soul come into the play.

• 2:29:59Alex Mashrabov?

  As those large brands, they create own AI digital spokespersons to really promote the brands.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Talk about Higgs field ventures.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Pretty uncommon for companies to launch venture funds so early, but obviously Slack had a fund, Stripes invested a ton. Uh, what's the thinking there?

• 2:30:22Alex Mashrabov?

  First and foremost, we just received a lot of inbounds. How can we get the access to Higgs field models?

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:30:30Alex Mashrabov?

  How we can grow the same way as Higgs fields? And we thought that there is a need to to explain to developers, to support the next wave of AI startups. And that's why we launched Higgs of Ventures. So really, the program is not focused on like just on a traditional venture investing. It is around sharing the growth playbooks and providing unique access to the technology.

• 2:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Are you worried if you give people the playbooks and the models that they'll come and compete with you? Or is it or are you positive some?

• 2:31:09Alex Mashrabov?

  We have contrarian view on that, to be honest. Look, I think that there is a traditional. There is a traditional way to build a company and that's very often in a very often in the technology space before it really required to raise a lot of funding and burn and burn money. And we have seen that recently Andreessen and Martin Casado, they pushed this consensus driven investing narrative a lot, which obviously benefits them as they probably have the largest fund in the world. In the same time today, what we are observing is that there is a there is a new next generation of AI lean startups like Higgs field, which are actually profitable. Profitable almost from the day one.

• 2:31:53Alex Mashrabov?

  And and we believe that this is the this next wave is probably gonna be as large as VC backed startups and I think we can we can support the creation of this next generation startups.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  How?

• 2:32:12Jordi Hays?

  How did you pitch this latest round? You know, if somebody is giving you fifty million dollars, I presume they would like you to at least be a billion dollar company someday. What is what is Higgs field as a, you know, multi billion dollar company look like? And what's your kind of, if you had a crystal ball, what would paint us a picture?

• 2:32:33Alex Mashrabov?

  For sure. I think this is quite simple.

• 2:32:37Alex Mashrabov?

  A lot of people got super power with self-expression thanks to social media and mobile phones. A lot of people are probably still shy to do that. And Gen AI is just going to propel self-expression. And essentially, we believe that in three years, every second video is going to be AI-generated, and it's going to be AI-generated with Hixfield. So the impact is going to be way bigger than just, let's say, building video version of Canva. I think this is going to be a transformative movement in the social media space.

• 2:33:19Jordi Hays?

  And that's because today, every piece of content that's produced has some sort of cost. And as more and more content is produced with AI, you guys can effectively capture some of that, some of the costs that would have been spent on traditional video production, whether it's just somebody with the phone and their time in their hand, or it's sort of a more produced shoot. Is that, am I hearing that right?

• 2:33:42Alex Mashrabov?

  Yeah, for sure. The cost is an important factor. But it's not just that. Like, look, I mean, for a live show, you guys clearly kill this. But you bring the best people in the industry. Like, you see the lineup today. No one else can bring the... I'm not talking about myself, obviously, right? But there are other people whom you bring, and they did not typically show up in the live shows.

• 2:34:08Alex Mashrabov?

  But many people cannot really do the same stuff which you do. But people have ideas like how they can make shows, like, let's say, cartoons for kids, how they can make fantasy content, and so on. And before that, before Gen AI, it was impossible for those creators to really create content for social media. And all the content which we are seeing today is primarily just live content, like, people just recording themselves. So Gen AI is just gonna, like, I think, we should expect that amount of, number of different genres or types of the content is just gonna 10x from what we have today.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update. You guys have been crushing it.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  The round. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  Cheers, Alex.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. Let me tell you about 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 and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is from Bain Capital, Stephen Cohen. Welcome.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  BTP and UltraDigm.

• 2:35:22Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:35:23Speaker 09

  Guys, everyone.

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. Welcome to the show.

• 2:35:27Speaker 09

  Good to meet you guys, too. Thanks for having me.

• 2:35:29Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, give us, give us a quick backstory on yourself and then there's a bunch of stuff to talk about.

• 2:35:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, uh, quick background of me. So I've been at Bain for 10 years now. Um, I joined from one of our portfolio companies in the data center software space called Turbonomic that we, I was an early employee there, post-Series A. We sold that business to IBM for a couple billion and, yeah. And, uh, I, um, yeah, I joined BCB as a partner, uh, focused on early stage investing and about five years ago, we decided to spin off a dedicated crypto business, uh, Bain Capital Crypto, which I'm one of the co-leads on and, um, it's been a really, really fun and interesting run. We've been investing in the space for about a decade now.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Uh, what is, uh, like the crypto strategy? Is it, is it a mix of, of privates and, uh, and, and, you know, active trading? Like what's, what's the actual strategy?

• 2:36:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the, the setup is, it's kind of the core premise when we launched the firm was that, uh, we thought that a lot of value would accrue to protocols. And so, um, we felt like we needed a flexible mandate to be able to buy liquid crypto and also invest in early stage projects. Um, so the fund is very flexible in that manner. We have liquid tokens that we purchase on the open market. And then we also have, you know, seed through series, CED investments that we've done. Um, yeah, we try to not be active traders. We don't think that's the most, the most productive use of our time. We, we think of these as like kind of long hold positions that we'll, we'll build real concentration in.

• 2:37:05Jordi Hays?

  How has it felt like for so, you know, when you think about the, you know, not, not deep history in crypto, but let's say like 2020 to 2024, it felt like the, the tech, I mean, the technology was just handy, like being handicapped by the regulatory environment. You had this mix of, you know, as an investor, you'd be investing in, you'd invest, let's say on a, on a SFT or a safe plus a warrant. And then there's these sort of like two assets. You have a token that's trading and then you have like the actual equity in the company. And that always felt like there were some key areas that it, that it made sense. But then a lot of points here, like what, what do I actually own here? Where's the value

• 2:37:50Jordi Hays?

  going to, going to accrue? With the updated regulatory environment, meaning that kind of feels like you can do almost anything now. How, where is, where is value going to accrue? Are we going to see company, you know, crypto projects really try to tie the equity value to the token? Or are we still going to see these kind of like dual, dual approaches?

• 2:38:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on what folks are building. You know, my, the sort of like early premises of investing in crypto protocols, which are these like decentralized apps or blockchains themselves, was that the tokens kind of are like equity like looking instruments where based on the usage of the protocol, they accrue, they accrue fees through usage and then they have a cash flow profile and you can kind of fundamentally value them. And they're not owned by any single party. They have, you know, governance rights where they can have vote on code contributions to the application or the blockchain that they're tied to. And I think that core principle hasn't changed. And so for for those types of protocols, that's very true.

• 2:39:01Speaker 09

  I think structurally, things have shifted. You know, we had to do a lot of sort of heroics pre this administration to ensure that we were protected from a regulatory standpoint when we were doing token launches. And so a lot of these teams would basically have like an equity company. You'd be issued token warrants and then at the point of issuing the token, you would have an offshore foundation that would actually issue the token itself and the investors would have rights to that. We have, I think, most projects right now have kind of had that legacy model. I don't know that many are actually trying new and different models for.

• 2:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess what what I was trying to get at is like, how do you, what's what's after this sort of foundation model? Is there enough regulatory clarity that we could that that that that these that you could establish kind of a new model? Or is it now been workshopped enough and trialed enough that it actually is the right model for the future? And that.

• 2:40:00Speaker 09

  I I think the model works fine. I mean, I I suspect people will try other different structures. But, you know, the fundamental problem with the model is you end up with this like equity company that it often oftentimes doesn't have any real value associated with it. And there is, you know, we've had to deal with some things with legacy portfolio companies where they either need to shut those down or sort of allocate their balance sheet over to the foundation. But that seems to not be like the the fundamental shift from a regulatory standpoint right now. I think the the fundamental shift is that founders are now emboldened to be able to go build again, which is really exciting.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Tell me about the hyperstition investing thesis. I've never heard any VC put that in such, you know, stark terms before.

• 2:40:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think there's sort of this like consistent pattern that we've recognized with the most outstanding founders and companies that we've had a chance to work with, which is that. Their ideas are initially disgusting and really hard to believe. You know, it's sort of a, if you think of this like, you know, this, this bell curve of, of companies at the beginning, it's like offensive. And then, once you get closer to mass market adoption, everyone's kind of like, okay, yeah, that, that makes sense. And then usually there's like a trough of illusionment where everyone's lost faith in it. And maybe that was like, you know, post 2021 crypto in a way.

• 2:41:18Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:41:18Speaker 09

  Um, but there's been this consistent theme with founders, which is that, um, many that are starting out that have sort of these, these, these views of what the world should look like and how the world should be should sort of shaped around their values and principles. Um, in the beginning seem, seem kind of unreal. And, uh, we increasingly have, have learned that like the, the real art to this is uh, to investing, um, with these sort of long tail outcomes is to work with those founders and believe in them and believe in them with capital and not just, not just with, um, you know, our, our, you know, our belief as a group, but, um, we, we're really like in, in search of those types of ideas.

• 2:41:59Speaker 09

  And, you know, I think the, the two examples that, uh, we really point to, one was Crusoe when they were raising their seed financing, it was, it was kind of an unbelievable idea, which was like, we're going to go off into the oil fields and build data centers that are capturing flared natural gas and, uh, we'll scale those to eventually, uh, handle AI level compute. I mean, it's sort of, it was, it was so, it was so crazy that at the time, like they actually had to go and build a box in, they were, at the time it was in Colorado to show that the, the model actually worked. And, you know, more recently, um, we've had the privilege of being involved with WorldCoin, which, uh, you know, outside in is this, um, is this, this sort of decentralized identity network.

• 2:42:39Speaker 09

  But the real notion is that in the future, and I think we're starting to feel this more and more now, um, it's very hard to tell what's real and what's not on the internet. And, um, we, we sort of view that this like this model of trust in the internet is breaking right now. And one of the core premises of trust is like, are you even talking to me right now? Um, you know, did I tweet the thing that I tweeted earlier? And, um, and so this notion that proof of humanness and proof of identity in a sort of globally distributed internet native way is very important. So, um, we're, we're on, we're on the hunt for those types of ideas and, and that's part of what makes the, the job really fun.

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  Do you believe in the Landian idea that capitalism is a time traveling artificial intelligence?

• 2:43:27Speaker 09

  I don't know that I've heard this idea. You'll have to, you'll have to explain it to me.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  The idea is that artificial intelligence existed in the future at some point and, and built a time machine and came back and invented capitalism because capital acceleration will by nature create artificial intelligence and, and that is the Landian acceleration path that we're on. I don't know, I'm getting too deep in the weeds.

• 2:43:49Speaker 09

  I like it. I mean, I like it. The, you know, one of the things that I'm always kind of struck by is, is how like innovation breeds solutions.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:01Speaker 09

  And, and you know, AI is like obviously a manifestation of that, but you know, even in the crypto world, like stable coins weren't really invented to solve the US debt issue, but like a byproduct of inventing these like digital dollars.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  You socialized the debt across the entire world.

• 2:44:16Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm sort of like, I continue to just be like hit in the face with these moments where like, man, it's almost too perfect.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:23Speaker 09

  And so maybe, maybe that's right.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Stable coins are now regulated in the US or, or have a framework and, which is wild thinking about the stablecoin businesses that were started when there just was no real clarity. So, you know, obviously credit, credit to them for, for having faith. How do you think foreign governments will respond over time to USDC and, and USDT and other stablecoins getting, gaining adoption in there? Because like, as an American, the idea of sort of like outsourcing our debt problem or, or spreading it around the world, sounds, sounds great, but if you're a foreign government, you

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  know, you want people like Turkey's paying 40%, you know, on their bonds right now. And, you know, if, if everybody in the country can get access to, I mean, I guess that's a mechanism for them to get people to keep their capital in the, in the Turkish system. But, but yeah, how, how do you expect foreign governments to respond?

• 2:45:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one because like on the one hand, they already were doing it, right? They were buying our debt all over the planet. It's just it's more recent than not that other governments have sort of been, you know, moving out of US treasuries. But, you know, what I what I view is happening right now is really we're transitioning from sovereign governments owning our debt to other people holding our debt, right? It's like you think about what like really what's happening with stable coins is that businesses and individuals outside of the US, particularly right now. I mean, I think over time, the US will become more of a center of adoption here. But but really, the like $250 billion of issuance is

• 2:46:11Speaker 09

  just people and businesses offshore that want a more stable access to dollars. And I think government, some governments, obviously, will try to do capital capital controls and prevent that from happening. I think many view it as if they can plug into the system well, like Brazil in particular is, I don't know if you guys have tracked what's happening with New Bank and PICS and stable coins, but there's, you know, there's quite streamlined interoperability there. And if if users have to transact in local currency in that economy, then they're forced to go back and forth. But certainly, some governments will take an adversarial view of it.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, but some governments have more gain than lose, so they'll take it, which is great.

• 2:46:53Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  Play that eagle sound, Jordy.

• 2:46:57Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  America, thank you so much for having.

• 2:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for joining, Stefan.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:47:01Speaker 09

  Good to see you guys.

• 2:47:02John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Bye.

• 2:47:03Speaker 09

  That's good, too.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We will bring him in. And to the TBPN UltraDome and continue today's show.

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Rohan from Sphinx AI, I believe.

• 2:47:23Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. He's robbing me.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us a breakdown. Introduce yourself. What are you building?

• 2:47:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I'm Rohan. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Sphinx. Sphinx is a company that is solving AI for data and specifically we're razor focused on the idea that large language models and AI today are really good at text. They're good at code, which is just the type of text, good at images. What they're not good at is the type of tabular, semi-structured, time series information that makes most of the world work. Everything from supply chains to high finance to manufacturing. We're bridging that gap and delivering co-pilots that can think about data natively and help people get from piles of raw information to valuable business ideas, what we call alphas in finance, but can be extended to almost any industry.

• 2:48:10John Coogan?

  Interesting. Who's the first customer in finance then?

• 2:48:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, first customer in finance, don't know if I have the rights to name them, but we do have-

• 2:48:17John Coogan?

  No, I mean like the architect, the private equity, hedge fund, quant, high frequency. So yeah, so someone who's like analyzing a stock on a quarter by quarter basis almost?

• 2:48:27Speaker 11

  That's right. Yeah.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 2:48:29Speaker 11

  Quarter by quarter, well faster than quarter by quarter, really. I'm working with a lot of quants. So people who are maybe day by day or even faster than that.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:36Speaker 11

  But yeah, the hedge funds are the target market initially. They are able to solve these problems where they find a single insight that can make billions in a year.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  That's interesting. Yeah. And then I imagine that if you go any faster, the customer wants to write their own O camel if we're talking about Jane Street. And so it's for specific quant that's looking for, yeah, day by day analysis. Interesting. So what is the, what is the go to market like? I imagine that maybe it's more of like an enterprise software deal. You're actually going outbound, meeting with folks, steak dinners, signing deals, or is this kind of like general sign up on the website?

• 2:49:15Speaker 11

  Both, right? So we are, we are going to people, maybe not steak dinners yet. Don't know if we have that budget, but we certainly are talking to a lot of different companies across industries. But it also is bottoms up motion. There are a lot of people, myself included, in my past role, I used to be at Citadel. I ran a quant team. So I was very frustrated at the lack of tools like this to help me get from idea to value. So we do have quite a robust set of data scientists, quantitative researchers who are just using the product off the shelf, but we're also making those enterprise sales as well.

• 2:49:44John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:49:45Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, give us your read on the talent wars between the citadels of the world and the frontier labs? And now Sphinx, of course, because I'm sure you're.

• 2:49:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, um, no, we've, we've gotten people from hedge funds, not from Citadel. I do have a non solicit, but we have gotten people from other hedge funds and I've gotten, uh, people, um, to take our offer over, say Anthropic or OpenAI. Uh, look, like it comes down to what you're optimizing for. I think if you're going to these foundation labs, you're betting on AGI and if you win, good for you. That's a great bet. Um, hedge funds are betting on almost nothing. I think if the AI bubble pops tomorrow, said it'll make a hell of a lot of money and that's great for them. And really for us, we're focused on our specific application. So it comes down to what you're passionate about. Is it, is it money? Is it AGI? Or is it just like razor sharp focus on solving one problem and that, that's who we hire.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  What's your take on, uh, on Microsoft Copilot and Excel? We've talked to probably four different companies that are building Excel add-ons. Uh, there's, there's that world. Uh, how does that fit into your strategy? How, uh, are you doing something different or, or do you see that on the roadmap? How do you think about that?

• 2:50:51Speaker 11

  Look, like I, I think Excel has been the tool for data for like whatever it's been out there, but, uh, we don't see that as being the transformative layer. Um, the kind of serious data work, the kind of data work that makes people billions of dollars is done on a slightly different stack, uh, stack that can scale a little bit more that translates more naturally to production. And, and we really want to target that. And, you know, Excel is easy to use, but what's easier than Excel is writing prompts. Um, so over time, um, I'm not saying I'm killing Excel today, right? But over time, I see that as kind of becoming a less relevant layer, almost just the interpretability layer on top of something like Sphinx. Uh, actually getting work done in Excel, I feel is going to become a thing of the past. Uh, we're going to be able to build much more serious models with a lot more financial impact.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 2:51:33Jordi Hays?

  How do you charge for Sphinx? Because it, it feels like, uh, you know, or the best companies create a lot more value than they capture.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Percent of AUM.

• 2:51:41Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 2:51:42John Coogan?

  Just 2% of AUM. Just give me 2% of your AUM Citadel. We're good.

• 2:51:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your entire.

• 2:51:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, I'd love that.

• 2:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but it's like, you know, if you help, if you help somebody make, if you help people make money, they're happy to pay you, uh, a lot for that.

• 2:51:57Speaker 11

  Yeah, look, we don't only work in finance. We were already quite horizontal and it's very hard for us to tell the exact nature of the value we're delivering. But some of our customers, of course, are open with others like hedge funds. They're not going to even tell us like what they found. So the kind of way of capturing that value, you know, it's hard. It's hard for us. But really, for us, the focus is on building something transformative. And this is step one, as we're able to get more and more autonomous and we're able to eventually say, you know, we can solve large scale data problems in a couple of seconds, fully autonomously. I think the value becomes enormously clear. So we're not overly focused on that right now. Really, right now, we just charge for usage. We want to deliver people something that they use. When they use it, they have to pay us to get that service.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to come talk to us.

• 2:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to meet you.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of the day. And I will tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with aspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. Timothy, welcome to TVPN. Fantastic background. How are you doing? What is behind you? Break it down. Introduce yourself. What are we looking at?

• 2:53:10Speaker 12

  Yeah, guys, good to be on the show. Decided to share what we're doing here at Intermotive. We're building a battery electric autonomous railcar. So when you think of trains going across the country in two or three mile long strings, we make every single one drive themselves.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Train maxi.

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:53:26Jordi Hays?

  I've been waiting for this. This is the, I think this is the first we've interviewed hundreds of founders.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  I'm blown away. This, this doesn't seem like something that, like, give me the why now. Like, why didn't this happen 10 years ago? Like, you don't have the same problem as Waymo, where you have to steer as much? Or do you? Like, why is this just happening now?

• 2:53:48Speaker 12

  No, it's a great question and it's a great natural place to start from and really rail is out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people. Especially when you think about our tech workforce and the people that are trying to solve really hard problems out there. And that's exactly why there's so much opportunity here in rail to do exactly that, take the technologies that have been pushed forward, maybe for a decade. On the perception models, the control systems, the electrification's happened in the industry and bring that to rail. And to build a team of tech workers around it, that's really what we're doing here and. It naturally makes sense. You do have fixed infrastructure. You've got track. You've got.

• 2:54:22Speaker 12

  Points of rail that go across the country. You've got a hundred and sixty thousand miles of track generally utilized at a three percent utilization factor. And all that stuff just stacks up to make this a very logical place to implement these types of technologies first. And we're excited that we're in in production. We've got vehicles out in service, running for customers every single day. Going to move over thirty five hundred Carlos in production this year. And really just focused on getting America's rail system back on track where it's forefront and the front part of people's minds. And let people know this is an exciting place to to come put technology in. It's important for the US economy. It's important for our customer stakeholders in agriculture, energy, mining, any of those places and and just get that supply chain right.

• 2:55:08Speaker 12

  With rail. It's fantastic.

• 2:55:10Jordi Hays?

  When did the, when did the idea click for you?

• 2:55:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, well, I'm I'm an engineer by training. I did my.

• 2:55:17Speaker 12

  P MBA in South Dakota, the PhD at Michigan State, and then I went to work in the defense industry. So I went to go work on cruise missiles. Fighter jet platforms, a bunch of unmanned systems. And that's really an industry that's been doing some of these things since the seventies in a lot of ways, building systems that can fly themselves. And then twenty seventeen came and everybody was going to fly to work. So I got to build a flying car and a package delivery drone and. Help build a team of forty engineers behind that. And then. As many founders know, you got the right co-founder in in the team that gets you to go look at something different. And he was doing his MBA at USC. Studying supply chain logistics and looking at rail in twenty nineteen and looking at competitive threats of autonomous trucks, electric trucks, and then.

• 2:56:00Speaker 12

  Came to me and said, what do you think happens if we bring these technologies to rail? And that's really what got us off and running. So we have built a system that's backwards compatible with the existing strengths of rail. So if you think of a two mile long train running across the country from the Port of Long Beach to Chicago, we can fit in that train. We can hybridize the whole train and ride along with a large diesel locomotive unit. But really, that two miles of stuff isn't consumed in Chicago. You got to break it down and get it to Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peoria, Illinois. And that's really where we can make short trains with unit economics of those two mile long trains. So you can now say, I need five cars in Gary. I'm going to cut those five cars off, use Intermoto's products and get it there.

• 2:56:41Speaker 12

  And I need 10 cars up in Milwaukee. I'm going to go feed a brewery somewhere and cut 10 more cars off and just send them on the unit economics of a short train. And that's really a game changing paradigm shift for speed and flexibility on rail. And it already has a cost advantage. So that's really how we think about it. And where we build out and where we started is in some places like mining and plant railroads and facilities just like this one in St. Louis where we're headquartered. And continue to build it out and utilize that infrastructure better.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  So you guys have track that runs into your facility?

• 2:57:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, this car is sitting on track. We've got two parallel production lines here in St. Louis and honestly, St. Louis is the right type of place to be for this because we can access all the railroads in the entire country from here. And it's a hub and spoke model and we're at one of those hubs in St. Louis and we can get to all the spokes from here.

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  Talk about the electrical systems. How do you charge this? Do you swap the battery or does? I imagine it takes a ton of time to charge the the actual train or maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Break it down.

• 2:57:43Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's the beauty of the system. So when you think about rail, you think about where it came from. Came from a steam engine in the 1800s where the smallest power system that they could make was this giant steam locomotive. But maybe it pulled 10 cars with it at that point. And that necessitated steel track and steel wheels because of how heavy that system is. It also drove the infrastructure the way it is. So that's why we have these tracks run across the country. Get one, two, three percent better every year for the last 200 years. And now you look at a system where you have a two or three mile long train. Um, but what happened there is that you had the right of ways at all the crossings. You don't start and stop a lot. You go through mountains and sit around them. And all that energy efficiency that goes into that then just makes a battery system actually work pretty well.

• 2:58:26Speaker 12

  We granularize it. So we get down to the single car size where we can make a battery pack the size of a Tesla car battery, or I drive a electric truck. So the size of my electric truck battery and we can actually move 100 tons of freight several hundred miles with that system. And if you want to go further, you just add more of our units and you get really granular. But that leads to us to be able to use level two charging infrastructure and a lot of the investments that the automotive industry has done to get those standards up to par. Um, and also not try to recharge what a locomotive would be, which is 50 to 200 megawatts of power on that unit plus.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  This is fascinating. What's the state of the company? Like, how big are you guys? Have you raised money? Um, uh, what, like, how big is the business?

• 2:59:10Speaker 12

  Yeah, we're, we're in St. Louis here. We've got a 67,000 square foot production facility.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:15Speaker 12

  We've raised, uh, up to a series eight at this point to fully deploy these assets.

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:59:20Speaker 12

  Uh, generally we're around 50 employees at the moment, uh, with largely engineering coming from automotive, aerospace and rail, kind of this perfect mix where you can guarantee something cool is going to come out the other side.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:32Speaker 12

  And about five years old at this point.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic progress. Remarkable. Um, last question from my side. Um, uh, is there, is there anything that you're, I mean, I, this is obviously like an American reindustrialization project in many ways, but are there any, um, top of mind asks for DC or American lawmakers? Like, if you had a make rail great again agenda, like, what would you change? What are you asking for? What do we need to do more of? Um, just at a high level, what like, like, what else would help that that's maybe just outside of your control?

• 3:00:09Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, I think really, we just need to talk about it a little bit more. So people talk about highways. They talk about autonomous trucks. They talk about autonomous cars. It's in the news every single day.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:17Speaker 12

  We're getting people to talk about rail and talk about that infrastructure because in reality, to make rail better, all it is is making stuff move more frequently. You don't need a hyperloop type of technology where you fire packages in a tube. You just need to keep the stuff on the rails moving more frequently. We don't really need to rebuild anything. Uh, we just need to unlock that massive network and uncongest it and we can make this extremely competitive. And our technology positions us to do exactly that. And then from the regulatory perspective, they've been very uh, open to these types of technologies in a really positive way. Um, and we've proven it out in whole section of the market that's unregulated. So we can just go out there and, and use those use cases, collect the data that's necessary to get to the regulated use cases from there.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:00Speaker 12

  And then, uh, generate that data that then goes directly to how we would certify these products in a, a regulated use case.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy day to come talk to us.

• 3:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for train maxing. Somebody had to do it.

• 3:01:12John Coogan?

  Somebody had to do it. We will talk to you soon.

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  It'll, it'll look obvious in hindsight, I think.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 3:01:18John Coogan?

  Talk to you.

• 3:01:19Jordi Hays?

  See you, man.

• 3:01:19Speaker 12

  Thanks.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Cheers. Uh, up next, we have Nebius, which was in the news just, uh, yesterday or the day before.

• 3:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Chief Revenue Officer, Mark. Mark.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Oh, he's the guy that did the deal.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Who, uh, certainly would have played a part in this new deal with.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  We're very excited to bring in Mark from the Restream waiting room. Let's.

• 3:01:39Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Mark, what's happening?

• 3:01:41Speaker 10

  Hey, Johnny, Jordy, fantastic to be here today.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you. You, uh, you look, you look like you're in a pretty good mood. Is any, any reason?

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  Any good news that happened recently?

• 3:01:50Speaker 10

  Oh, man, it's been an exciting week and I think you already called it out in the, uh, wind up to my showing up. It's extraordinary what's going on at Nebius today.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Uh, give us the, give us the high level, a couple of bullet points on, on the deal this week.

• 3:02:05Speaker 10

  Well, we announced a landmark partnership with Microsoft, one of the leading AI labs that is out there to support them with AI infrastructure under a four, a five-year agreement valued at at least $17.4 billion with the potential GTP and a $19.4 billion.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Did you think you could get a deal like that done when you join? I mean, I have to imagine that you you joined roughly six months ago, was it?

• 3:02:35Speaker 10

  I joined a little over three months ago.

• 3:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. So maybe the deal was in the works, but it sounds like.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, did they see Sachin Adella on the Dwarash Patel podcast say, I'm happy to be a lease-er and you said, oh, well, we'll lease to you? Is that exactly how it played out? Or I imagine there's probably conversation.

• 3:02:52Speaker 10

  I think it's a little more, a little more subtle than that, but.

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  Because he really did hold up his hand and say, hey, come pitch me. And people did, and you got the deal done. Congrats.

• 3:03:01Speaker 10

  It's extraordinary to have them as a partner. I mean, Microsoft is by itself an amazing company and for us to be winning the, the honor is a landmark for the company and it's helping us to accelerate all of our plans.

• 3:03:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Talk about the collection behind you. The chat's calling it out. Crazy, technical.

• 3:03:20Speaker 10

  Uh, that's, uh, those are Legos, man. That's a, that's a Ferrari, Lamborghini and a McLaren and.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  Holy Trinity, almost.

• 3:03:29Speaker 10

  That's the Trinity over there. There's another Trinity over there of Land Rover and G, G-Wagon.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:03:36Speaker 10

  I love making the Lego cars.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  Those are fantastic.

• 3:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, give us, give us the state of the, the company. We've, we've covered, we've covered Nebius on the show before. We know, we know kind of the backstory, but, uh, yeah, talk, talk about kind of, um, the kind of more recent history. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm sure you, you got up to speed as you joined and, and first learned about the company.

• 3:03:59Speaker 10

  Well, the company is very laser focused on building the AI infrastructure of choice for startups all the way through enterprises and we are making big strides against that that vision. We continue to support the most innovative startups. As a matter of fact, one of our customers was on your podcast today, Higgsfield.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:04:21Speaker 10

  Amazing company, amazing company and very privileged to have them as a customer. Likewise, all the way up to major enterprises like Cloudflare and Shopify.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:32Speaker 10

  And in all cases, we're helping them to not only service the near term model creation or early development works that they have, but also helping them to scale their applications and deliver the inference that they need. So it's a it's a very exciting time.

• 3:04:49John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 3:04:50Jordi Hays?

  What, yeah, going forward, you set the bar pretty high here with this recent deal with Microsoft. What what was kind of the focus over the next, you know, like how, I guess I'm curious to understand, you know, with the with the news around Oracle and OpenAI this week, a lot of people are, a lot of people were just kind of questioning like, okay, you're going to build something that's like AWS scale in a in a very short amount of time here. That seems pretty challenging. How much is a lot of the effort at at Nebius really around just like scaling infrastructure and knowing that the demand is there, but it's just like you have to, you have to build that capacity?

• 3:05:33Speaker 10

  Well, we've always had the vision and Arkady, our CEO, has said it for a long time that we would do some of these super lab deals. Today's market, it happens to be a fantastic opportunity, but we believe in the fullness of time. The real opportunity is more along the lines of what you described, which is delivering the AWS equivalent for AI. And that's where the priority is right now focused. So continuing to build out our software stack, being able to cater to that, you know, single engineer that's trying to build something from scratch that signs up with our self-service experience. And then being there with them as they scale and their needs expand. At the same time, we're pursuing all of the other high-scale AI-consuming customers out there.

• 3:06:18Speaker 10

  And, you know, we think that the next several years are going to be a crazy time as capacity supply is being chased by a lot of different people. But ultimately, the long-term, you know, the hundred billion-dollar-plus business opportunity is servicing the equivalent of the hyperscaler requirements for the new class of AI customer.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  Friend of the show Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis gave you guys a gold medal in the ClusterMax ranking of GPU clouds.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Give us one layer deeper in terms of how you frame what Nebius does best uniquely among the competitive landscape.

• 3:07:07John Coogan?

  You know, Semi Analysis called you gold, but I'm sure there's a lot more details of how you stand out.

• 3:07:12Speaker 10

  Well, we're delivering the software tier that's giving the AI engineer the tools for them to operate a small or large cluster or multiple clusters as they see fit, and we're seeing more and more of that. We give the AI engineer the tooling to create a model and optimize a model, and we put at their fingertips all the open source models. We give the AI engineer the ability to conduct their training and retraining capabilities. And through our AI Studio solutions, we also give them the ability to deliver inference. So you can think of it as a full spectrum set of AI capabilities for the AI engineer. We're going to continue to innovate and add to those capabilities.

• 3:07:57Speaker 10

  So you can think about all the adjacent spaces that the AI engineer is likely to need to tap from data pipelines to repositories to who knows what comes next. But our intention is to be fully catering to that AI engineer and being able to serve them whether they're in a small company or a large organization.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. How does the future of the actual inference API business look? Is that the, is that more of a focus for growth versus going more of the construction and real estate route and, and building mega projects versus creating like a fantastic API? Do you want to do both? What does the next couple of years look like?

• 3:08:44Speaker 10

  The, the simple answer is we're going to do both.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:08:47Speaker 10

  And the reality is at the, the foundation is we're chasing demand.

• 3:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:51Speaker 10

  So today there is a fair amount of construction taking place. So being there for all of these new model development and retraining requirements is critical. As those projects and customers move into, you know, real production, inference is picking up and we're seeing it. The redistribution as people succeed is very real. And the fullness of time that we should all want, and this is thinking about it from the standpoint is end customers or investors, is we want to see all of these projects turn into inference driven because that means that they're actually in production, being utilized by hopefully commercially paying customers somewhere.

• 3:09:30John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Real value.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the deal. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to, great to catch up, Mark. Congrats on.

• 3:09:35Speaker 10

  Pleasure to be here today. Thank you both.

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:09:38John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:09:40Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get more, we gotta get more Legos around the studio.

• 3:09:43John Coogan?

  We do.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  I was envious there.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  I mean, Tyler's over there just waiting to put them together.

• 3:09:48Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:09:49John Coogan?

  He just needs a time trial.

• 3:09:50Jordi Hays?

  The assembly line over here.

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado, we have.

• 3:09:54John Coogan?

  Michael from Figure.

• 3:09:56Jordi Hays?

  From Figure.

• 3:09:57John Coogan?

  Coming in from the restroom waiting room. Michael, how you doing? Good to meet you.

• 3:10:00Speaker 13

  Hi, how are you?

• 3:10:01John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 3:10:02Jordi Hays?

  We're great. How are you doing?

• 3:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 3:10:04Speaker 13

  I'm good.

• 3:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Big day. Just, just another day at the office?

• 3:10:08Speaker 13

  Yeah, no, look, big day for Figure, big day for all the employees, super proud of what we were able to accomplish. So it's been awesome.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  Take us through the story. What happened?

• 3:10:18Speaker 13

  So today was our IPO.

• 3:10:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:10:21Speaker 13

  We.

• 3:10:21John Coogan?

  You rang the bell, didn't ring the bell.

• 3:10:23Speaker 13

  Yep, rang the bell. So actually, when you did that. Yeah.

• 3:10:26John Coogan?

  You don't ring the bell, you push the button.

• 3:10:29Speaker 13

  Push the button.

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  All digital.

• 3:10:32Speaker 13

  It's digital, but you know, we're blockchain, so we like that.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:10:36Speaker 13

  And yeah, no, so it's been a, it's been about a six month process getting ready. You do a bunch of meetings, testing the waters, they call it now. So from my understanding, IPOs have changed a bit since, since COVID. And now more is virtual, more is done up front. And there's actually a little bit less pressure on the roadshow itself, which was kind of a learning for me. But uh, let's talk about figure.

• 3:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, please. Yeah. What, what was the, what was the story about the position of the company? Why the why now of the IPO? Take us through kind of the roadshow narrative.

• 3:11:12Speaker 13

  Yeah, I think, I think folks were focused on probably three things. One is rare combination of growth and profitability. And you know, we have both of those, which is, which is awesome.

• 3:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:23Speaker 13

  I think number two is just huge market. So we, we're in a hundred and eighty five billion dollar TAM. Basically, we are standardizing all the private credit, starting with mortgage. We also do crypto back loan, a few other things like that. And we're standardizing those rails on blockchain. And then I think lastly, we are one of the few companies that adds value with blockchain into the real world. So we, we're in kind of the real world asset space, which also is called tokenization. We're the market leader in debt for that. We're about 75% market share. And so what we do is we partner with about a hundred and seventy really well-recognized brands

• 3:12:04Speaker 13

  that work with us to originate or tokenize assets, put them on a capital market that's all based on blockchain. And what it does is it ultimately saves a ton of cost and time and just improves both the investor experience and the consumer experience.

• 3:12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through a case study of one of those brands that you work with. Uh, and, and walk me through some of the value or the, or the differentiated benefits of being in the crypto world. Is it just access to international capital, speed of transactions? You can move money around on the weekends, nights of weekends? Is it regulatory hurdles or being able to access certain markets? Walk me through all that.

• 3:12:42Speaker 13

  Yeah, no, happy to. I think to to start, I'd take something like Houz, just given the audience, I feel like people are probably familiar with them.

• 3:12:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:51Speaker 13

  They are a kind of housing and home design marketplace.

• 3:12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:56Speaker 13

  And normally, somebody like Houz would not really want to get involved in the loan origination process or really be comfortable with like mortgage or anything of that nature. But because Figure is so simple to embed, you know, in Houz's case, we work with an API, we can kind of integrate with them and help their end customers take equity out of their homes for things like home improvement and financing contractors and pools and those types of things. And so what what we actually do in the process is we take the attributes of the loan that, you know, Houz is coordinating, and those are hashed on a blockchain at

• 3:13:37Speaker 13

  once upfront. And then as the loans move throughout the capital markets, there's way less checking and confirming of those details because people can just verify it on blockchain. And so what we actually do in doing so is we save about $11,000 of cost out of the production process out of 12. So it's a really big savings and we can do it in five days versus industry average of 45. So it's a pretty material difference.

• 3:14:06John Coogan?

  It's so funny because like the the like the very like popular like anti crypto take is like, oh, well, you could just do this in a database with like Python and, you know, high frequency trading doesn't need a blockchain to trade stocks really fast during the market open. But like I just, I just paid off a car loan and like I'm waiting on the title and I have to like go to an app and like text with somebody. It's going to take me like weeks to just get that. And it's like, okay, yeah, like that other path is not happening. And it's been years of like, we would like to speed up the the the normal rails and it just hasn't happened. But so, yeah, what was, I mean, raised a ton of money in the IPO, what what are the, what are the, what does that do? What does that change about the company now that there's more cash on the balance sheet? What was

• 3:14:51John Coogan?

  the structure of the deal and like the the rationale for that amount?

• 3:14:55Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's interesting. So one thing to point out is with, you know, at Figure, I'm working alongside Mike Cagney, who was also worked with me when I was at SoFi. So he was the CEO there. I was Chief Revenue Officer. Here, I'm CEO. He's Chairman. And together, back at SoFi, we actually raised the largest capital, private capital raise at that time in 2015. It was a billion dollars from SoftBank. Yeah. And what it did was it really catalyzed SoFi's growth over the years. And if you look back, that was one of the big differentiators. And I think it's one of the reasons why SoFi is such a big company today. It really stood out amongst its fintech peers. And so I think from that background, you know, this IPO is

• 3:15:40Speaker 13

  similar. It's going to be a major catalyst for Figure's growth. It's a big opportunity for us to really raise a lot of capital, come out as a market leader, use that to seed out the marketplaces that we've been doing, right? Figure actually started direct to consumer, then went embedded B2B, then went pure marketplace. And you need capital to do that to show leadership position and to keep adding to that 170 partner base that we have and we're really proud of.

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  What are your lessons from the kind of the SPAC era, the 2021 era? SoFi is like one of the examples that we keep coming back to as a company that has performed really well. Stock's trading at $26 today. Obviously went out of 10. I think it's at all time highs, doing very well. $30 billion company. It's no joke. And

• 3:16:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, I joined with 75 people.

• 3:16:31John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. But, but I mean, obviously, there was a lot of, there were a lot of different decisions that were made at that time. What lessons are you, are you looking at 2021, seeing anything now and deciding any structure of the business or decision making currently based on what you learned during the last cycle?

• 3:16:52Speaker 13

  I'm glad you asked because it's actually something I've been thinking about a lot. I feel that post kind of 21 and what happened with SPACs, a lot of people became very negative on going public. Yep. And I don't have it all figured out. We, this is, you know, our first day. Yeah. Uh, but that said, I do think from going through the process that going public is something that companies should consider. I found the markets to be receptive. Yeah. I thought, you know, there's a big premium on growth and I think in the tech world that we all live in, everyone's so used to, you know, growth. But you meet, you meet these kind of investors and the kind of the, the pantheon of investments they can make. Yep. You know, when you're growing 20, 30, 40, 50, 60%, that's just so impressive and unusual.

• 3:17:37Speaker 13

  And so there's a lot of excitement and I do feel that in the case of, and in the wake of what happened with 21 and that hangover, people soured on the public market and everyone thought, you know, let's not do it. And of course there's obviously drawbacks and I'm, there's definitely going to be days where I'm going to think, you know, this is a challenge. But at the same time, I found the capital markets to be very receptive and I also found it to be a great branding exercise and really a great way to kind of get liquidity for shareholders. So I do think that ultimately it's something that people should consider and not necessarily be afraid of what happened in 21 because there are cycles and I think that's just part of the US capital markets.

• 3:18:18Speaker 13

  And it's frankly, one of the reasons why we're excited about blockchain and its ability to continue to add value and disrupt in some ways. Yeah.

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the, what's the 10 year vision?

• 3:18:29Speaker 13

  Yeah. So right now we are just about 35 basis points of private credit in terms of our market share. So even though we're a big rapidly growing company, we do see, you know, we've started by standardizing the mortgage process on blockchain. In particular, Using our integration between the origination system and the capital market, which really has never existed before, right? Everyone's doing their own thing. I see Ramp, for example, sponsoring this podcast. I have background at Brex. You know, those are two companies that are both building separate capital markets and separate underwriting processes, whereas if Figure had existed when both started, they could both be on Figure, just as an example.

• 3:19:10John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:19:11Speaker 13

  And so for us, we started in mortgage, we started standardizing and homogenizing those assets and making them tradable on a blockchain. We can do the same across every single private credit asset class and beyond. So we're really in the early innings.

• 3:19:25John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. It's exciting.

• 3:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:19:27John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. Thank you for making time.

• 3:19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, we appreciate you taking the time.

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  On the big day for you and the team. And a little celebration is in order. Take, you know, feel free to take, you know, back, back to work tomorrow, but, uh, but.

• 3:19:42Speaker 13

  Got it. Well, I'm a big fan of you guys, so really appreciate it.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:19:47Speaker 13

  An honor to be here, so thanks so much for having me.

• 3:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Come back, come back on whenever you want.

• 3:19:50John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:19:51Jordi Hays?

  After the, I guess, when, when does your quiet period start? Is it?

• 3:19:55Speaker 13

  Well, not until earnings.

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:19:57John Coogan?

  Well, fantastic. We'll coordinate. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 3:20:00Speaker 13

  All right. Thanks, gentlemen. Really appreciate it.

• 3:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Good man.

• 3:20:03John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:20:03Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  And that concludes the guest section of TBPM Thursday, September 11th, 2025, live back from the TBPM Ultra Dome.

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Gary Marcus hit the timeline.

• 3:20:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:20:17Jordi Hays?

  With the article, "Peak Bubble."

• 3:20:19John Coogan?

  Peak Bubble.

• 3:20:20Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to see how this won't end badly. He says, uh, and he, the first, he starts the post by sharing the tulip mania Wikipedia.

• 3:20:29John Coogan?

  He famously said the deep learning is hitting a wall now.

• 3:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:33John Coogan?

  Calling.

• 3:20:33Jordi Hays?

  He said, "I don't know when the Gen AI bubble will end, but this has got to be peak bubble." And he's highlighting the Oracle OpenAI signed $300 billion cloud deal. Um, and he said, "In short, OpenAI doesn't have $300 billion. They don't have anywhere near $300 billion by their own."

• 3:20:49John Coogan?

  It's not how that works, but.

• 3:20:51Jordi Hays?

  "Optimistic projection, they won't turn a profit." Yeah, well, uh, obviously we can, we can steel man for OpenAI and Oracle, but by their own presumably optimistic rejection, they won't turn a profit until 2030.

• 3:21:05Jordi Hays?

  And all of this is from a company that thought or claimed that GPT-5 was going to be close to AGI. For good measure, Oracle doesn't have the chips they would need to fulfill the contracts or even the cash to buy them. I won't say this is all make believe, but well, you do the math. He says, if Oracle actually collects its 300 billion, I will be truly astounded.

• 3:21:27John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:21:28Jordi Hays?

  And Martin Shkreli commented on the, on the original post and said, do you want a short OpenAI at a $500 billion market cap, which I think is

• 3:21:38John Coogan?

  The expression.

• 3:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Interesting question.

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? And, and

• 3:21:42John Coogan?

  But, but that's not even necessarily the, the, the take that we've been debating, which is not necessarily OpenAI, it's, it's Oracle. It's, it's, is Oracle overheated because of the, this deal? Like Gary Marcus's claim is that Oracle will not draw all that 300 billion down on, on schedule. And if they, if they fail to pull that backlog through, then that would be a cause for concern, potentially. Anyway, I wonder what Warren Buffett has to say about all this. Did you see that he was at the 30th birthday party for Squawk Box yesterday?

• 3:22:20Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:22:21John Coogan?

  He was hanging out with Jim Cramer, yeah.

• 3:22:22Jordi Hays?

  We were hanging out with Jim Cramer.

• 3:22:23John Coogan?

  I know.

• 3:22:24Jordi Hays?

  I didn't realize it was 30th birthday.

• 3:22:26John Coogan?

  It's the 30th anniversary of Squawk on CNBC.

• 3:22:29Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 3:22:30John Coogan?

  Happy birthday to everyone over there.

• 3:22:32Jordi Hays?

  We got to, we got to briefly hang with Jim yesterday.

• 3:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:36Jordi Hays?

  He is incredibly fun to talk to.

• 3:22:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Exactly like he is on air.

• 3:22:41John Coogan?

  He's fantastic. Encyclopedic knowledge of stock prices can just go back, oh yeah, in, in 2015 Broadcom was at this price and just rattles it off to the sense. It's remarkable. He knows his stuff.

• 3:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Such a legend.

• 3:22:54John Coogan?

  And

• 3:22:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm honestly jealous of, of his engagement hack, which is by people, by people believing that he always gets trades wrong.

• 3:23:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is just like fundamentally not

• 3:23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not true at all.

• 3:23:07Jordi Hays?

  Not true. They, they constantly engage with his posts, no matter what he said.

• 3:23:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23:12Jordi Hays?

  So it's like a way to get

• 3:23:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23:14Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of real accounts to drive like real engagement.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23:16Jordi Hays?

  And, and you can imagine he gets an incremental Five, 10 times the impressions because people are just like quoting it, commenting, things like that. But a master at what he does and a great entertainer.

• 3:23:29John Coogan?

  Tyler, what was your reaction to either this or Gary Marcus's post?

• 3:23:33Speaker 02

  Well, I think for this, I think maybe a good segment we should start doing is right after Founder comes on, you just immediately say long, short.

• 3:23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'll make everyone super happy. They will love that.

• 3:23:44Speaker 02

  And then also regarding the Gary Marcus thing, I think there's that joke about Michael Burry where it's like he's predicted eight of the last two like market crashes.

• 3:23:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:23:54Speaker 02

  I think there's something, you know, something there.

• 3:23:57John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yeah.

• 3:23:58Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying this time is different?

• 3:24:01Speaker 02

  I think Gary Marcus has said many times like, oh, this is the end.

• 3:24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, just look at the fund returns, I guess. If you, but he doesn't have a fund, so you just kind of have to like, like the, the, the nature of investing puts your thesis in extremely concrete terms. Like you are short to what degree? Are you, are you going long with leverage right now? Maybe you're, you know, 60% long and 40% bonds. Like you can be a variety of risk levels. You don't need to be purely, I'm bullish or bearish. You can be anywhere in between that. You can be 100x levered long to 100x levered short. Like you can take wild swings in either direction.

• 3:24:46John Coogan?

  So you can express like, I'm not feeling great about this particular valuation in a bunch of different ways. And, and, and as a pundit, I mean, someone in the chat was asking about the inverse Kramer. It is a meme. It's an ETF. It's done somewhat well in various times. I've seen a whole bunch of different reports where someone tried to take every single one of Kramer's calls, put it into a spreadsheet and see how it would perform. But it's very hard because if he says, I'm bullish on this company, he doesn't necessarily revisit that company every day to tell you when he would sell. So he could say, like, we watched that Apple interview and he says, I love Apple. It's

• 3:25:28John Coogan?

  a, it's a stock you own. You don't trade it. And so like, How much credit are we giving him for his Apple call? Like, at some point, five years later, he might have seen earnings and been like, oh, Apple's in trouble. And then they, and then they quantize that as like, he's flipped bearish. When really, it's like, he didn't necessarily say, sell Apple. He just said, like, this data point is, is negative. And so, there's a bunch of ways that it becomes difficult to actually understand, like, if the mind of Jim Cramer was actually running a fund actively, what would the return profile be? The, the other interesting thing is that there, there was one analysis that did look at all of his buy, buy and sell ratings.

• 3:26:08John Coogan?

  They tried to get as close as possible to like, what it would look like to just take every recommendation and put it in a portfolio. And they found that it did actually outperform the market, but it outperformed the market when the market was going up, and it, and it underperformed the market when the market was going down, because it was effectively, like, like, beta on, it wasn't producing alpha, it was producing beta. And, and that sort of makes sense in terms of the content creator world, because when things are going up, it lends itself to enthusiasm, and when things are going down, it lends itself to misery. And so, I don't know. Overall, nice guy, and hard to, hard to, you know, perfectly quantize the, the value of a call on live TV.

• 3:26:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, Jordy, anything else we should talk about before we get off?

• 3:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Nepal.

• 3:26:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:26:59Jordi Hays?

  The, the Gen Z of Nepal overthrew the government and have chosen their new leader via poll on a Discord server.

• 3:27:06John Coogan?

  That is wild. They overthrew the government? That is crazy.

• 3:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been crazy over there.

• 3:27:11John Coogan?

  I don't know anything about Nepal, really.

• 3:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, crazy, crazy time in the world.

• 3:27:14John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, we will keep monitoring the situation. Hopefully, you can monitor the situation, and we will see you tomorrow. Live.

• 3:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait.

• 3:27:24John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 3:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks. Love you.