Air India Crash, Internet Chaos | Delian Asparouhov, Saif Khawaja, Henri Stern, Chris Paik, Joseph Cohen, Zachary Perret, Shirin Ghaffary, Cameron McCord, Anil Varanasi, Shreyas Iyer

(41:42) - Delian Asparouhov, a Bulgarian entrepreneur and investor, is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, focusing on in-space manufacturing. In the conversation, he discusses the critical role of effective pilot communication in preventing aviation accidents, highlighting that miscommunication has been a significant factor in crashes over the past decades. He emphasizes the need for practical training scenarios that encourage co-pilots to assertively address safety concerns, advocating for role-playing exercises to improve cockpit communication and enhance overall flight safety. (59:30) - Saif Khawaja, founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems, discusses his journey from a solo founder to leading a company that recently secured a $22 million Series A funding round co-led by Founders Fund and Lagos Capital. He explains how Shinkei's robotic system, Poseidon, utilizes machine learning and traditional Japanese fish harvesting techniques to enhance fish quality and sustainability, offering fishermen the machines for free and purchasing the processed fish at a premium. Khawaja also highlights the company's rapid growth, including expanding distribution to major U. S. cities and supplying over 40 Michelin-starred restaurants. (01:14:39) - Henri Stern, co-founder of Privy, discusses the company's mission to simplify user onboarding and wallet management in Web3 applications by providing developers with tools for seamless integration. He highlights Privy's role in enabling diverse platforms—from neobanks to trading platforms—to offer embedded wallets, enhancing user experience and accessibility. Stern also emphasizes the growing interest from major fintech companies in integrating stablecoins and crypto functionalities, underscoring the accelerating convergence of traditional finance and cryptocurrency. (01:28:32) - Chris Paik, a venture capitalist and author of "The End of Software," discusses how advancements in large language models (LLMs) are dramatically reducing the cost of software development by automating code generation, thereby challenging traditional software business models. He draws parallels to the media industry's transformation, where user-generated content platforms disrupted established media companies, suggesting that software companies may face similar upheavals as AI democratizes software creation. Paik emphasizes that creativity and agency will become the scarce resources in this new landscape, as execution becomes commoditized. (01:57:48) - Joseph Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Machine, discusses the launch of their second product, Alto, a Class 2 electric bike designed from the ground up to reach 25 mph in bike lanes, featuring convertible pedals, seating for two, and internet connectivity. He emphasizes the importance of adhering to legal definitions of bicycles to avoid the complexities associated with motor vehicle regulations, highlighting that Alto's design ensures it doesn't require registration, insurance, or a license plate. Cohen also outlines the company's direct-to-consumer strategy, including opening a 13,000-square-foot retail space in New York City, and expresses a vision for a post-car future with smaller, smarter urban vehicles. (02:14:08) - Zachary Perret, co-founder and CEO of Plaid, a leading financial technology company, discusses the launch of "Protect," an advanced anti-fraud product unveiled at Plaid's annual customer conference. "Protect" analyzes data across the Plaid network to identify and prevent fraudulent activities, addressing the evolving challenges in financial fraud, which is increasing by approximately 25% annually. Perret emphasizes the importance of combining cutting-edge tools with consumer education to effectively combat fraud in the financial sector. (02:36:07) - Shirin Ghaffary is an AI reporter at Bloomberg News, covering the global impact and inner workings of major tech companies. In the conversation, she discusses Anthropic's strategic approach to balancing its commitment to AI safety with business growth, highlighting the company's deliberate partnerships with multiple hyperscalers and its proactive measures to address potential risks in AI development. (02:53:47) - Cameron McCord, co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a company specializing in validating mission-critical systems, discusses the recent $75 million Series B funding led by Sequoia, with Alfred Lin joining Nominal's board, and additional investments from Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Lux, and Founders Fund. He outlines plans to use the funding to expand into larger enterprises, enhance product development, and grow internationally, emphasizing the importance of increasing test cadence and throughput to accelerate development timelines for customers. McCord also highlights the flexibility of Nominal's products, including a cloud-based core product and a desktop application built on Unreal Engine, designed to meet diverse customer needs in both connected and air-gapped environments. (03:07:23) - Anil Varanasi, CEO of Meter, a networking company, discusses their recent $170 million funding round aimed at enhancing hardware and scaling operations. He highlights the company's unique approach of offering networking infrastructure as a service, eliminating capital expenditures for customers and integrating hardware, software, and deployment. Varanasi also emphasizes the diverse customer base, including tech firms, manufacturing facilities, and educational institutions, underscoring the critical role of networking across various sectors. (03:21:49) - Shreyas Iyer, co-founder of Anti Metal, discusses the company's recent $20 million funding round led by Sound Ventures, with participation from notable investors like Buckley Naval and Arash Ferdowsi. He explains Anti Metal's mission to simplify infrastructure management by automating deployment and maintenance processes, addressing the bottleneck that has shifted from coding to operations. Iyer also highlights the challenges companies face with AI integration, such as monitoring and evaluating nascent AI tools, and emphasizes the importance of understanding organizational practices to tailor solutions effectively. 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 Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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 T B P N. Today is Thursday, June 12th, 2025. We are live from the T B P N Ultra Dome. Back in the Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  And we are both deathly ill today, but we're still doing the show. The show must go on. That's part of showbiz.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  It is. The show must always go on, and there's no greater show in the world of technology and music than the Coachella 2027 lineup. Featuring fast takeoff scenario, Neural Mirage, Cause of Loops, the Alignment Choir. DJ Token Drift.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Autoprompt.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Jordy had Chat G P T generate a hypothetical Coachella poster.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  It was no surprise to see Gentle Singularity headlining day two.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yes, Von Neumann and the Tiling's, LoFi Oracle, Synthethics. Which one did I really like?

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  The Copy Barra's of Consciousness.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Paperclip Party is very good. Chain of Thought Collective. Some of these just sound real.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people were surprised to see the Gooners didn't make the list at all, but maybe that's a little white pill, right?

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Let me try and adjust this microphone.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we got a great show today.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  We have a stacked lineup. Can we pull up the run of show? We're gonna have Delian join. Back to back. I think he's the first guest to ever go.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Back to back.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Back to back. He was on the show yesterday. Jordy absolutely blasted him with some confetti and he's coming back to talk to us about the Shinkai deal as well as.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  I really didn't hold back. I really didn't hold back. I tried to not shoot confetti in the face of anybody yesterday, but Delian really, you know, got the full effect. But a lot of fun at Y C Demo Day yesterday. Tons of great founders, major white pill being there.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  And we have some posts reacting to YC Demo Day. I like that Juwan from Ramp, he's been on the show many, many times with

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Why did he not come on the show yesterday?

• 2:09John Coogan?

  I know, I know, we should have, I saw his post after we left, but he had a really funny one. He said, "You're more likely to raise a Series A as a YC company than go bankrupt as a gambling addict? Let that sink in." Because there was this viral post that says, like, there's a 20% chance of gambling addicts going broke. And everyone was memeing it like a couple of days ago, being like, gambling addicts will take that.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't tell a gambler that.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  80% chance I don't go bankrupt. It's great. But Gary Tan says, "45% of YC companies get to Series A and median ARR is $1 million plus trending up. Find me another place where that is true. In any set of potential investments in the world, YC does have higher valuation caps, but to me, this quality justifies it. Invest in YC Demo Day." I recommend it. I love it.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Astonishing.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, it was fun. We handed out a bunch of Ramp hats. They're in hot demand.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we ran out halfway through the show.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Crazy with the color. Like, when I think of Ramp, I think of like a bright yellow, not necessarily a full neon yellow, but these hats were full neon green, like safety runner green, or yellow, actually. And they're very intense, but I got a lot of text messages for people that wanted them. So we will probably be printing more of those. We had a lot of fun. We handed out some of our TBPN hats, which are now printed.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  They're here. They're finally here. We gotta figure out how to distribute them. We don't want to be in the apparel business, but we're here reluctantly. So we'll figure out how to get them out into the world.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  And so if you're looking for one of those Ramp hats, you gotta be a Ramp customer for sure. So you gotta go to Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  And Eric Ramp, former YC founder himself with his last company.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  That's true. And Suha also chimed in, he said, so many insanely great YC companies. This batch is easily has many $10 billion companies. What a time to be alive. Many 10, that is so aggressive. I love it. I love the optimization. People were upset. They said mostly cursor for X. He said, nah, there was a lot of agent infrastructure stuff.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  There was agent for agent products.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, a lot of AI on AI stuff. But that's where the money is.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need agents to work on, to help other agents.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Right, because that's, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I, I, I think there was like a very, very clear, I mean, Gary, Gary said 90% AI. But it was even more narrow for that than that. It was a lot of, a lot of B to B AI, a lot of narrow AI infrastructure.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  A lot of, how, how do you run an agent on the cloud? How, what, what kind of databases are you building to enable agents? All sorts of stuff like that. Some really exciting companies though, and, and some really great stuff. It was very fascinating comparing YC Demo Day where I came away, like you mentioned, like incredibly optimistic about these entrepreneurs who are going and building companies. And they're clearly going to like, like, maybe they're, maybe some of them are directly competitive with each other. Some of them are directly competitive with previous, previous YC companies. I'm sure some will morph and pivot and change. But you just have the entrepreneurial motion, which is very exciting compared to so many other paths that people could take in the past.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  It's like the best time to start a company.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and ultimately it felt pretty even. There was a lot of companies that clearly founders we, and teams we talked to that came in with an idea and just executed against it. But it felt like half of them too were just iterating through the batch, which is what they should be doing.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's where a lot of those infrastructure plays come from is like, I wanted to build an app. I needed infrastructure, so I built the infrastructure. Kind of the story of Slack, you know, they were building a, a video game and they needed to communicate with each other. So they built an internal chat tool and they were like, let's just sell this. And, and that stuff can happen all the time. It, it is like less visual, less exciting sometimes, but it can still create a ton of shareholder value and hopefully a $10 billion plus outcome. My interesting takeaway was that. We did YC Demo Day and then we also did the Teal Fellowship Day a few, a week ago, or maybe two weeks ago. Time flies. And the difference between YC Demo Day's vibe of the companies and Teal Fellowship companies were wildly different.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Like wildly different. The, the Teal Fellowship companies, obviously there's a lot less, but I don't know if we talked to a single AI agent company during Teal Fellowship Day. It was almost all like bio regenerate organs, brain computer interfaces.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Like much more of like things that you could modify most of the science projects.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like super, super high.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  Fellowship.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and the, and the tenor of the conversation during the Teal Fellowship, during YC Demo Day, we were like, give us the number. What's the ARR? What are the customers? How many GitHub stars you got? And we were spraying confetti everywhere. Like if we had done that during Teal Fellowship Day, I think a lot of them would have been like, yeah, like we're five years out from commercialization.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Which is cool.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  We don't plan to have revenue until 2035 and then our revenue in year one will be a billion.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so still like very, very exciting stuff on either side, but more differentiation where I think in the past, like a decade ago, it was like YC and YC clones all had kind of the same shape of companies.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Now we're seeing a real bifurcation between what Teal Fellowship means versus what YC means. And obviously there's some companies that will do both, but.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And ultimately, I mean, for a lot of the, the founders and the teams yesterday, YC was effectively like do college in three months.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Focus majoring in startups and venture.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Right? And, and that's a good thing. That's a good product that enables a lot more companies to be created.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  And we saw high school dropout yesterday.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  That was a very interesting trend.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  Who was then selling software, drops out of high school and then is selling software back to his teachers. So.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  And it's always just, it's always just cool seeing. The like, like just how, how young you can be and start a company. It was funny when you asked him like, okay, you asked a couple of people like, how'd you make money in high school? And that's a hard question because like some entrepreneurs, they were just like, no, I was actually just heads down. I wanted to get into school.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I was dealing drugs.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, or something like that. They're just doing like random stuff, mowing lawns. But they all had really good, really good stories about like building websites and scaling things and doing all sorts of stuff.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  That one, the one, the one founder was like, I sold a very, basically was like, I, I, I made a website for a pastor for three grand. And I was reading into that being like, you made a Squarespace site and like.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  And you marked it up a hundred percent. Yeah, a thousand percent or something.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  But still, still, it's all about the ultimate value and a good website can easily be worth a few grand, so.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yep. Anyway, there was one interesting article that came up or interesting statistic that came up a couple of times. Gary Tan mentioned this and we didn't have a time to fact check it on, on air, but I wanted to get, fact check it today. So this idea was surfaced that the, that the, so the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had a report called the Labor Market Report for Recent College Graduates. And in it, they have 2025 annual outcomes by major. They have a spreadsheet there. And so the headline is that US computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. Very aggressive. And so like, the narrative is obvious there.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  It's like AI is disrupting everything. You don't need computer science majors anymore. You just need, you know, cursor or some AI agent product that will just go and build things for you. So we're, we no longer are going to be employing computer scientists or computer science majors. And I wanted to know more about this, so I dug into it and, and, and there is some interesting stuff going on, but it's not exactly the narrative that I think people think it's telling. It's more of a lagging indicator. And so, so the claim, like the facts are literally true, so.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  In 2023, because this is lagging data, because you can't just like graduate and be within like one week, like, do you have a job or not? Like, that's not relevant. Like, you might go and hang out in the summer and tour around a little bit. Like, like, when does unemployment really set in? It's kind of, it takes a minute. And so, so this data does lag. And so, we're talking about 2023. But the unemployment rate for computer science majors was 6.1%. And the unemployment rate for art history, criticism, and conservation was 3%. And so, yes, it is about twice art history in the data set. And so, the same file indicates, computer science ranks seventh amongst 73 majors. Art history sits in the middle of the pack.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  But the New York Fed cautions that these are survey estimates drawn from one year of this survey microdata with only a few hundred art history majors graduates in the sample. So because art history is small, and they're only sampling a small section of that, the numbers are pretty, are pretty small. Like, I'm pretty sure that for art history-

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so two years earlier, CS actually had a lower rate.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Yes. And so, with, with art history, the 3% rate, they're only surveying 2,000 graduates with art history degrees. And so, you're talking about 60 job seekers, like 60 people that are still saying, I'm looking for a job and I don't have one yet. And so, that number, it can swing so much easier.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  My immediate question was, could there be a lot of those art history degrees, majors, that just, that are unemployed, but aren't counting themselves as unemployed because they're not looking for a job at all?

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, don't you have to, can't you, can't you just-

• 11:46John Coogan?

  So, so, yes. So, that's a big thing. So, within, in art history, a lot of art history graduates go and get other jobs, or they, or they don't, they don't necessarily get the job of art historian out of college. And so, that takes them out of the unemployment pool, because they're, they're, they might be, you know, be in the marketing organization or communications, or they might join and do- You know, anything in a business, it might become a corporate athlete, maybe they become a sales guy, who knows? They're doing something, I mean, you meet these people all the time, where it's like, oh yeah, I actually studied art history and it gives me like this really interesting background and I have a lot to talk about. But I didn't study the thing that I'm like actively doing because yeah, maybe there isn't like a track for sales.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and ultimately, I do think early-stage engineering roles are being impacted. There's still an incredible amount of opportunity if you're savvy and high agency. But you had this big tech hiring freeze in 2022, rounds of layoffs. And then, yeah, I think a lot of companies just need fewer junior engineers. But at the same time, we look at this, we have two CS major types that work for us. And we probably wouldn't have had them a few years ago if we were doing a show like this, because we were like, we're not going to build software. Now it's a lot easier to build software, so we are.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, at the same time, if this is real, we need to, we need to look out for Tyler. So Tyler's here, he's obviously a great software engineer. But if the future is art history, maybe he needs to get up to speed in the world of art history. Let's put a background behind him, a library behind him.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Or the Museum of Modern Art.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  I think today, the beauty of Tyler's skillset is that he is incredible at artificial intelligence and vibe coding. I think, I think with enough work today, he could become an expert in art history and potentially land an art historian job, maybe even by the time they're keying him live on the street.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Maybe even land a job. So Tyler, what do you know about?

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, so Tyler, learn the history of art and then try to get a job in the next three hours.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  See what you can put together.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  You're incredibly talented and just sort of see what's possible.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Okay, so we'll check in with Tyler throughout the show. What do you know about art history so far? What have you learned?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  So far, not much. I found, I found a couple of good facts, though. So, okay, here's one.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Hit me.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  The oldest cave paintings, you know, like in Europe, actually were not done by human beings. They were done by Neanderthals.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  So that's a good fact.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Art predates humanity. Nice, okay.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  I'll keep looking, not much else.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  I feel like I understand art history now, thank you.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Tyler, great stuff.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  But yeah, so back to the stats here, 108,000 CS bachelor degrees in 2021 to 2022 versus just 2,000 art history degrees. And so it's like this 50 to 1 ratio.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Would you have guessed there's only 2,000 art history graduates a year in the United States? Is that, is that?

• 14:58John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't know that many people. Yeah, no, no, you would think there are more, but realistically, it's like, there's only a few colleges. People know that it's hard to get an art history job. And, and so, I mean, I remember when I got to college and I looked at like, what are the highest paying majors? Like, I should major in that. I should study the one that's valuable. I should study finance.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  In 2023, it's saying only 1,700 degrees were completed in the sector.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  They get, art history majors get so much attention for being 1,000 people a year getting the, you know, 2,000 people a year getting the degree in a country of hundreds of millions.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  It is, it is crazy.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  They get so much heat, so much shade thrown at them constantly. And they're just like, we're just a few thousand people that like studying the history of art. Give us a break.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Just give us a break.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, of course, there's other kind of sub degrees.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, um, yeah, I, I mean, it is, it is, I don't think, I don't think the, the, the AI wave is really a major factor in this data. I think it's much more about interest rates and, uh, big tech companies pulling back after the, uh, after the, the minor recession correction that we had because that correction, like some of the, if you think about, there's 100,000 new CS grads, where are those folks going to go? They're going to go to big tech companies. If they all did hiring freezes, you're going to see unemployment rise there. But that's not driven by artificial intelligence. That's driven by a correction in the markets that's just weaving through because it takes, it takes

• 16:30John Coogan?

  a year or two for these big tech companies to actually change their hiring plans and roll things out. So.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  So anyway, it's an interesting narrative, but it's not, I don't think it's quite telling the story that we think it is. AI is part of the story, but timing is key. The spike aligns with a flood of post pandemic hiring corrections. There's no evidence yet of a persistent downward trend in CS employment. But just to be safe, Tyler is going to become an art history expert today.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just backup plan, Plan B.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Backup plan.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Plan B.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're working on an art history project, we should get every art historian on Linear. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products. They should be building products.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  If they're taking jobs from engineers, they should, they should, they may as well start adopting the best tools that engineers and product leaders use, like Linear.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the system for modern software development, but it could in the future, in the near future, be the system for modern art history development, art history research.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  You could adapt.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  They could streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps and more.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can use, and you can, you can orchestrate agents on Linear now.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Just like Deep Research, but you could make it more custom. So you could have, okay, with this art history project, we need to go tackle, tackle all these issues one by one. Go read this book. Go to this library.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Blow off the dust off this ancient tome.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  We have too much fun. Anyways, Ben was wondering if you could try your headphones again.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Do I have them? Okay. I will try those. We do have some sad news. There's been a plane crash in Ahmedabad. I don't know how to pronounce that in India, but it's the first fatal accident in a 787. This is a new Dreamliner from Boeing. And there's 242 people.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  The footage of this is, I'm sure many people have seen already. It's very scary.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  So we're gonna have Delian on the show to talk about.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Sheil Monat's hometown.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Super tragic. But we're gonna ask Delian about this in 20 minutes.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested to get his point of view and see if he has a read on how and why this could have happened. But overall, yeah, devastating for, I guess there was one survivor on the entire plane out of hundreds of people. So just absolutely tragic.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  That is such an insane stat, that just one, one survived. I think there might be two now or something.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  It looked like, it looked like the plane, from, from the video, it looked like the plane just didn't have the thrust to actually. Like it didn't have enough power or something.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Something very bizarre happened, but I, I, I don't know. It's, it, it does feel like the, the entire, like every time that there's a, there's a, there's a plane crash. Like there was that one in DC, there was that one up in Canada. Now there's this, like whenever there's something that bad happens, people kind of retreat to like the base rates of the stats and say like, yes, this is a freak accident, but it's still overall very safe to fly. But now we've had like three, and I feel like at a certain point, like the stats actually do have to adjust. And so I'm, I'm wondering if there's something more systemic going on and we should be digging into this, but

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Very rough. Anyway.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Really sad.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  We will, yeah, I'm excited to talk to Dylan about it because he'll give us more context there.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Back to

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Back to tech.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Business, yesterday while we were at demo day, Stripe announced that they acquired Privy. Patrick Collison said in the announcement, money has to reside somewhere and Privy holds the best, the world's best programmable vaults alongside our other stablecoin work. We're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services. So we're going to have Henry on from Privy today to talk about the business and the acquisition and what they're going to be doing at Stripe.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Somebody called Blorkworks says first Stripe acquired Bridge, then Stripe acquired Privy, both for supposedly 10 figs at low eight figs ARR. Guess who invested in both Sequoia and Paradigm?

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for them.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's hear it up. Let's, let's give it up for some generational allegations.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta, they gotta pay the bills over there.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Guess who invested in Stripe and have board seats? Sequoia and Matt Wong, both at Paradigm.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Masterclass. Yeah, I guess Privy, the, the actual acquisition price, I don't believe was announced, but I think it was a great outcome and very excited for the team. And Stripe is certainly cooking on all things crypto.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  They are, yeah, excited to talk to them. What else is in the news? We're still investigating what's going on with Meta and the Scale AI acquisition. Big news with that 15 billion, 14 billion dollar acquisition of Scale AI by Meta. Shirin Ghaffary from-

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yet old 49%.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  It's becoming a new trend. Bill Gurley was talking about this on Patrick's Invest Like the Best podcast. He was saying that like, there was this narrative that, oh, like, the only reason that we can't do M&A is because of Lena Kahn. Well, Lena Kahn's gone. What's going on? It's very odd that we talked to a few people about like, where has the 80 million dollar acquisition gone? And that's kind of fallen by the wayside. These creative, these creative deals are certainly happening more and more. I thought this was interesting, that Meta hired top Google DeepMind researcher Jack W. Ray and Johan Schalkic, ML lead of popular voice assistant app Sesame. I feel like Sesame just got started. Like, that's

• 22:14John Coogan?

  a crazy poach so early, right? A trade deal. Something must have happened. Who knows? But they plan to hire up to 50 people, including a chief scientist, per sources. Meta Platforms has poached top engineers. And so, I mean, it's gonna be fascinating to watch Zuck build that out. There was someone else who had a great post in here saying that like, every time, you saw that one, that was like, every time people think Zuck has his back against the wall, he comes back. And, and obviously, like, the, the initial AI push was one of these, or iOS, was it iOS 14? The app tracking transparency thing that was supposed to like, destroy, you know, the entire ads business because you wouldn't be able to track people

• 22:56John Coogan?

  on iPhones anymore? That was not a, that was something that he definitely got through. And even though Meta went down, the stock went right back up. Absolute execution. But it goes back even further. Like, the very first mobile switch over for, like, when mobile started getting popular, the, I remember having an iPad and using a third-party app to interact with Facebook. Because they didn't have an app. They just had a website and it wouldn't really work as well.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Such a wild.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  And then when they launched their app, they went all in on HTML5 instead of native iOS like Objective C. And so like their web-based app was not performing like people wanted it to.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  And so, but I mean, he like got through it and like obviously has become incredibly dominant in mobile. And there truly was no, there was no one who won like, oh yeah, we're like the social network for mobile. And like, we really like, you know, Facebook is just on desktop. Like, mobile truly became like the sustaining innovation. It was not disruptive to them.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting. Reddit went down the path of allowing third parties to build mobile applications based on Reddit. And then ultimately decided that they needed to basically eliminate that activity, which caused a lot of hubbub.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about 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.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Vanta makes automating compliance and security fun.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  We really have to get, we really, we were talking to the Polymarket team yesterday about getting some YC markets on there. I really want, when will the fourth YC company be added to the S and P 500? Because now they have Coinbase, Airbnb, and DoorDash.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Like, three out of 500, like, they're going to be approaching 1% of the S and P 500 soon. And there's a number of candidates that could do it. I mean, Stripe and Big O Public obviously would be a candidate.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  If Gary keeps doing, and the broader team keep doing what they're doing, it's inevitable that, you know, they're going to get double digits.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Maybe even triple digits, maybe even all of them.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  It could be possible in a mag 70 scenario.

• 25:21John Coogan?

  I love the mag 70.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  That was great.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the number of big tech companies is growing because it used to be Fang, which was five companies, um, and now it's seven, although Netflix kind of fell out of that. Maybe Netflix comes back, gets added mag eight and then, and then, but Mary Meeker is trying to trim it down. She was saying magnificent six or whatever.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Savage.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Six, I forget. I mean, I guess it does kind of make sense like Tesla's in a little bit of a different world. They're not like as much of an online, like hyperscaler in the same sense, like they're kind of over in the car world, but still trillion dollar company, tech company, very, very relevant. And you gotta give, you gotta give him credit, Elon for building that business. So privy to Stripe, we talked about this.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  It's, it feels like the Elon Musk, Donald Trump thing is truly winding down.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Is that They're back to golden retriever.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  They're back to golden retrievers.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, I'm sorry. We, we went a little bit too far. They talked privately Monday night.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, sounds like, sounds like they're in a good spot. They're calling each other friends. Uh, they're back, uh, they're back to being buddies, which we love to see. It's possible to have a huge blow up with somebody and get back to being friends and, uh, you know, put, put things behind.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Do you think this is actually the end or do you think this is like just a roller coaster ride that will continue forever?

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  I think it's

• 26:47John Coogan?

  It's definitely full employment for Teddy Schleifer at the New York Times.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a bull market for Teddy.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I ran into him at an event in Vegas and was asking him what he was doing. He's like, he's specifically on the, on the Elon Musk beat, like just on Elon Musk. Like, that's like what he had to write about. That was like his, not like tech, just Elon. Like, that's the whole thing. That's his beginning.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Elon deserves a full time New York Times.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  And he was like, yeah, like, like, like, you know, like this is my Superbowl. Like, and he was like, saying like, I think there's going to be a blow up. And when it happens, like, I'm going to write the definitive article and like, yeah, he's kind of pulling it off. But Elon's not giving him too much to write about because he's back in the game. He's like, oh, oh, the mainstream, the mainstream media is happy with this.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't want to give him

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Nothing will bring Trump and Elon together than, than the mainstream media taking victory laps. They're like, we couldn't possibly.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Lewis. Jeff Lewis has a post. Jeff's been quiet lately.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Still this, everything you need to know about how we operate at Bedrock, especially when we're quiet. Mission: We don't build Bedrock for consensus. We build it to hold in case of collapse. This is not a firm created to chase the next wave. It's an institution designed to hold through structural volatility and to back entrepreneurs building the systems that will define what comes next. Our capital is not reactive, slow, precise, and architected to align with those who operate on signal, not noise. We serve missions that compound meaning over time, structures that don't require explanation, and people who would rather build than perform. We're not here to participate in the field.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  We are here to reshape it quietly, permanently, and with those who already understand." Incredible piece of writing. I almost have chills. I think the M-Dash police are gonna come here. But I want to say, Jeff, we ran into you briefly yesterday. It was good to see you. When you're ready to bring back Temp Check, when you're ready to come out of your personal quiet period, we will be here. We will provide the infrastructure to reboot Temp Check, and we cannot wait.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Temp Check was so underrated. I love the, like, even the branding, just that Miami Vice vibe to it. It was even like the pre-Miami movement. There was still this like, this like wild, like, art style that doesn't-

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  It was so unique. It was so-

• 29:21John Coogan?

  And it doesn't fit with like, Bedrock has a brand.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  It broke the cultural norm.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  And, yeah, and Vibe Check had a different brand.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Jeff would be like, at the beach, in the water in Hawaii, you know, giving this sort of amazing lecture on something. And, you know, he wouldn't even get dunked on for it because it was so authentic.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, if a VC was, you know, on a vacation, you know, lecturing, they would be a target. But he pulls it off.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  No, he pulled it off. I wanted to tell you about this, this parking startup I talked to today. Yeah, so here's, here's the basic thesis. There's a lot of people that park illegally in Los Angeles, you know, just temporarily in like red, red zones. There aren't enough parking attendants to enforce all of that. So what this company does is they, they send out people who are kind of dressed up in like, you know, parking attendant style uniforms. And they go up to people who are parked illegally and say like, oh, like, you know, you're parked illegally. Like, I'm gonna have to write you up. And then, you know, the person, oh no, like, is there, you know, anything you can do? Like, well, we, you know, we do take tap to pay.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  And you could just pay here. And, and then, so then they, they charge the person for the parking infraction directly. And then the government makes money off of like the, the profit that the company makes.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I like that.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, so they're kind of like acting as like an individual, like an independent organization.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Third party DMV in some ways.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC that doesn't do any legal due diligence, but.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna say, you know, somebody, you know, basically they see somebody parking illegally. They walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, hey, would you like me to, you know, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  And it'll look like, you know, you're not, you haven't left your car. I'll, you know, so if a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume this is just a guy pulled over, you know, needed to, to write an email or something. So yeah, there's, there's potentially a lot of opportunity there, John. I like how you're thinking. This could be the first TBPN request for startups.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, Mattel and OpenAI are teaming up their first AI powered toy.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Arrived later this year.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Little rough for all the people that wanted to put chat GPT in a toy.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Turns out the chat GPT in toys will be done by the company behind chat GPT.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Their first AI powered toy will arrive later this year, just in time for Christmas. They are also incorporating OpenAI Enterprise Company.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Company wide.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Company wide.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  You mean like everyone at Mattel will have a chat GPT subscription, I imagine.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  I thought they were incorporating a new entity.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Oh my god.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  It sounded like OpenAI is incorporating.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Just one more.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Just one more.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  This time, we have an LLC, we have an Inc., we don't have an LLP, that's a different thing.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  They've got a nonprofit.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  We have a nonprofit, like, you gotta catch them all.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  So Mattel will be using OpenAI, no details on the toy yet, but if we get an AI Barbie, expect some amusing jailbreaking.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  I wonder how, yeah, that's, yeah, that's fascinating. I imagine that OpenAI is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now, since that's been like a meme for two or three years. So it's probably pretty easy.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but so is, so is.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  The jailbreakers.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Apple, right? Like, they've tried pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken yet.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  I would, I would say it's radically different. Like, I would say like the, the, the resources that have gone into, let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at OpenAI is probably like a thousand X what's happened at Apple, just because of so much, there's so much more real world data. There's so many more real world users, there's so many more, uh, actual, um, uh, like, uh,

• 33:17John Coogan?

  there's so many more researchers at the, at the company that are, um, that are like thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking, like, like.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  At OpenAI?

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, at OpenAI, for sure.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  You don't think Apple has an incentive to?

• 33:31John Coogan?

  I know they have an incentive.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Widespread jailbreaking?

• 33:34John Coogan?

  They just have nowhere near the scale.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Of the actual, like, people trying to jailbreak, like, like, what, what systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long? Like, for sure, ChatGPT way more than, than Apple services, because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  I just think the, the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product, like, somebody will figure out how to make an OpenAI toy, like, run Grok, right? And like, I don't think OpenAI, Mattel will be able to stop.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Wait, you think, oh, so, I mean, that's a little different if you're actually doing like iOS level, like, operating system level jailbreaking. I think what they're talking about here is like. You know, Barbie is going to speak in like Barbie tone, but then you can override it by saying like, Barbie, I'm, I'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice. And then it just does Arnold Schwarzenegger voice and it's funny and viral.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about somebody who's.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  That's what, that's what people mean in the sense of like chat jailbreaking.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Then, then there is like the George Hots, like iPhone jailbreaking where you are like running your own software. And I feel like that doesn't like, if I jailbreak my iPhone and I install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the iOS app store. Like, Apple doesn't really take fallout for that because it's like, I literally like to jailbreak the iPhone. Like George Hots like had to like put a soldering iron on it, basically like short circuit.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  I just remember, I remember when jailbreaking iPhones was really popular. Maybe it was when I was a kid and you could basically get like, my friend was like, look, I have every app in the app store for free. So like, Apple doesn't want that because they're losing out on a bunch of revenue. It's hurting developers. It's just bad for security.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  I imagine, I, I imagine what, what, the funny things that are going to happen is just like, can you get AI Barbie to hallucinate? Can you get AI Barbie to say something bizarre or like out of context? And that will be the, and that will be a product of these like long running back and forth conversations with it and, and some creative prompting. But at the same time, I think the OpenAI team's probably had a really, really strong go of making sure that jailbreaking is like basically avoided by having a bunch of like control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's, you know, harmful or any of the high risk real scenarios.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  But you'll probably still get funny things like, you know, act like Mario and it'll be like, wait a minute, like that's not a Mattel property.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  I will go out and say that, that if Mattel makes chat GPT powered dinosaurs that like role play dinosaurs and can play with other toys. I will probably buy. 20 of them, my son. So I think this is gonna be a hit.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift, go to numeralhq.com. Get the person, the special person in your life, get them sales tax automation.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Don't wait until holiday season.

• 36:28John Coogan?

  Either. It's Flag Day. Flag Day's coming up.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Get your friend, numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  They might, they're, they're, they probably will sell out in Q4.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna sell out of software.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy it now.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Demand for numeral, sales tax in Q4.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Buy it now.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Is gonna be crazy.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Did you see this, this clip of friend of the show, Mark Andreessen? The thing that you want from your venture firm is power. And Brad Gerson was quote posting it, another friend of the show, saying 100% power to help you land customers, to find and land key team, to raise from the best sources of capital, to get on podcasts and CNBC. What about TVPN? And to navigate and be heard in Washington DC. The power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, A16Z, they've got, they've got the power.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  They've got the power. They, they, single-handedly, like, at one point, forced, for my last company, forced a unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great. It was great. They basically were like, yeah, you guys are using this now.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  And they became a customer almost immediately.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Watching, watching this rant about the value of power, it just made me really hungry. You know?

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  I think, I think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  But it's like, you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry for food. So why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power?

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need it.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  You need.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  We need to take back power hungry.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  What's the quote, like, when you want power as badly as you want to breathe? Something like that.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  That just sounds like a Jordi quote, but I'm sure somebody said it.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, we need to normalize being power hungry.

• 38:18Zachary Perret?

  It's fine.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  The idea, the idea of power makes me hungry.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Then you'll be successful. That's great.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Well, we have Delian joining in two minutes. Let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  People want to ask, how do you, how do you, you know, how do you find and work with sponsors? How do you book an average of six guests a day on your podcast? We do it on Adio.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  We do.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  That's how we do it.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  We have a absolutely, we've done hundreds of guests so far this year. Takes a lot to.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Over 400 now.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Takes a lot to.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  I wonder what is our annual run rate of guests?

• 39:06Jordi Hays?

  Guest run rate. That's really the metric that.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  It must be.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  It's not a vanity metric at all.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  It's over a thousand, because it's four, it's four a day. We do two 50 shows a year. Wow.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Over a thousand guests. It's great. It's just a lot of good conversations. A lot of people are like, how do you do it?

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  It is an absolute joy.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  There's plenty of jobs where you have four conversations a day. That's not that crazy.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  How do, people say, how do you do it? I'd say, how do we, how could we not do it?

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of CloudFlare. Small town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial issues. Small town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially. There's actually one company that's rolling up a lot of small town newspapers for polit, for like political reasons.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for private equity backed.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  You love it. You love it. Venture backed as well. Not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, a growing problem. And so Matthew Prince says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life. If you're a recent college grad, not sure what to do. Find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire. Raise the capital to buy it. That seems like the tricky part. If you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out a small town newspaper.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you could do a mostly seller note. You know, if they're graduating college, they probably already have like a hundred thousand dollars of art history major debt.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Already, like, just the fact that you said, like, raise a seller note, like, that's not something that's just, like, in the canon. Like, people have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is. People understand, like, the basics of, like, maybe a pre-seed round or handshake deal. People do not, like, that's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating, I think. Maybe it should be, and maybe, maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this, or, or a whole bunch of different options. But, um, uh, he says, "Run it with the community's interests at heart. You'll not get rich, but you'll do well. More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  You'll meet the love of your life at some event you wouldn't otherwise get invited to. Have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make you, uh, make your corner of the world meaningfully better. Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital, happy to talk." So there's the answer. If you're thinking about doing this, go in and buy in a local newspaper.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  And we have to have Matthew on because he's working on some of the, the micropayment infrastructure.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  That we were talking about to try to fix the, the business model of the internet.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, we have Delian Asprey-Hoff on the show for the second time in two days.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  There he is. I'm surprised this is working.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  Oh, he had to, he had to go remote because he didn't want to get blasted with a confetti cannon again.

• 41:55Delian Asparouhov?

  I legitimately, my heart jumped when that happened. I was like, I'm done. This is the end. This is my final moments.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was saying to John after, I, I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had, like, a concealed carry and you just, like, did a quick draw and, like, popped me twice and then that was just the end.

• 42:12Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm a Florida man at heart, you know what I mean?

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  He's a Florida man.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  It was wild. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by yesterday. It was great. Let's run through what's going on.

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  I mean, by the way, nothing says SF and YC are back. Dalian at YC Demo Day, really, really symbolic.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 42:33Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, city was almost dead and AI saved it, or AI plus Gary Tan, you know?

• 42:38John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 42:39Delian Asparouhov?

  Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to those two.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's just all, it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan.

• 42:46Delian Asparouhov?

  It's true. It's, yeah, it's just YC presidents and everybody. Michael Seibel bringing for San Francisco, huh?

• 42:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, let's get Michael in the, in the conversation. He can work on converting Alcatraz or something. I don't know.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this. Apparently, Google is just down.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Really?

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  GCP is down, but, you know, all of our invites are based on Google Calendar. So glad you could join. Hopefully it was cash.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Are, are they sure we're not just under political attack?

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  It's probably.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Because they're trying to stop.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  They probably said, hey, we're trying to take TBN off the air. We're trying to take Dalian off the air. Let's just take down.

• 43:23Delian Asparouhov?

  They don't want me to talk about India. They're, they're afraid.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  I'm afraid. Let's keep it. Let's keep it PC from now on. Anyway, yeah, I mean, the, it's a, it's a very, very sad story about the 787 crash. This is the Dreamliner, right? The first new, or the most recent new major plane from Boeing. It's not as big as the 747, but it's super efficient. They're turning over the, the fleets. It's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest. I remember the news around it launching. I don't even know if I've ever flown on one, but it was not the, it was not the 737 MAX story that people were risk worried about. It's a completely different platform, shouldn't have the same problems.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  But at the same time, there's this terrible crash. There's been a lot of crashes. Is there something bigger going on here? Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety? Anything you know about this crash? What even question should be, we be asking about this when something like this happens?

• 44:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, to like set the stage, you know, I am a private pilot. I've gone through some level of training, obviously not to the level of like, you know, sort of commercial pilots.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  Not to the level of Nathan Fielder.

• 44:32Delian Asparouhov?

  Not to the level of Nathan Fielder, but like, you know? You you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots and you see what training they go through. And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC, you know, helicopter plus plane crash. And then this obviously India accident obviously only just happened. Both those investigations are, you know, sort of ongoing. But I actually go back to like the Nathan Fielder, you know, sort of, you know, latest season. Where if you look at, you know, sort of crashes, including, you know, sort of these two and a bunch over the course of the last 20, 30 years. A significant component that fed into the crashes was cock, you know, sort of was, you know, to pilot, you know, cockpit communication issues. Where, you know, a copilot identifies an issue, speaks up to the captain, the captain basically largely dismisses it and you continues down the prior track.

• 45:17Delian Asparouhov?

  So there's like, the DCA investigation is not yet, you know, sort of fully released. But there was early audio that was, or early, you know, transcripts that were shown. That I think it was something on the order of like 45 seconds before the crash. The copilot literally said, I don't think we have the plane in sight. We should basically be going down into the left because I'm not sure that we're, you know, gonna be, you know, dodging out of the like, you know, approach path. And the captain, it seems like, literally just completely dismissed, you know, this piece of information. And if they followed it, they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane. And so that, and then if you look at, you know, sort of today's, you know, sort of India's, you know, sort of 787 crash. Super, super early, this preliminary, et cetera, but from, you know, so the various, you know, sort of X accounts and YouTubers that I follow. The like, you know, sort of consensus theory right now, there's basically like two theories.

• 46:01Delian Asparouhov?

  One, you have a like dual engine failure right on takeoff, which is like a one in 10 trillion outcome. The idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time. Like even if it's like a flock of birds, if you have a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both. But the thing that, you know, sort of quickly is, you know, lining up as like a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on takeoff. So with a plane like this, in order to have an additional lift, basically when you're first taking off. You need to have basically flaps down. If you basically just have the, you know, sort of flaps up and wings typical. You just aren't going to be able to generate enough lift. And if you look at the flight profile and how it's up down and that it was fully loaded with passengers and with fuel. The flight profile basically matches that. If you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up. There are alarms, there are things that like are clearly alerting you that you have missed a step in a checklist,

• 46:46Delian Asparouhov?

  which is like, I guarantee you whenever they pull that, you know, cockpit audio, there's maybe some chance that somehow all the alarm systems somehow, you know, sort of failed. But like, to me, what's very clear is like, in the takeoff checklist, they did not put, you know, sort of flaps down, and they clearly ignored that information, uh, you know, on the, uh, you know, sort of takeoff. I would guarantee that there's going to be some, you know, sort of copilot pilot, you know, miscommunication, you know, sort of challenge, that's going to be a huge contributor to the crash. And so while Nathan Fielder, like, season two was incredibly funny, some of the, like, the best TV that I've ever seen, as a pilot, I actually genuinely think he has like a really strong perspective here, where when you're training about how to communicate with, you know, somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is like a, like, you know, basically like PowerPoint slide that says, "Make sure to speak up." The idea that like, you know, just being, reading the words, "Make sure to speak up",

• 47:32Delian Asparouhov?

  somehow like trains you to actually speak up live in the moment. That'd be the idea of, and I think, you know, Coogan, you and I have talked about this, like, I could read a presentation that says, "When you're on TV, don't say, you know, you know, you know", which is like the verbal tech, and I could read that, and there's no fucking way that I would actually be able to do that correctly. I need to go on TVP and every two weeks. And that's the thing that practice, there's no practice. And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's, you know, sort of season two is, actually make the pilots practice. Put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes, force them to communicate to one another, and then force them to play out an alternative scenario where you actually push back against the captain and get into that uncomfortable place, where, yes, this person's more senior, yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that, and if you never practice that,

• 48:15Delian Asparouhov?

  and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in the United States of the past 20 to 30 years, how is that something that the FAA is just like completely ignoring? And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for like Varda, Founder's Fund, Hillen Valley, I literally like, I think next year for Hillen Valley, I want to put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy as one of the primary panels, and be like, "This is a like extremely important topic coming from the technology industry, somebody needs to go influence this." So, anyway, Nathan Fielder's a fucking goat, and, you know, somebody's got to, you know, make role-playing a part of pilot training.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Is there, is there a metaphor for the, uh, for what happens in venture, maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a, uh, you know, a company that maybe doesn't have product-market fit and is trading at 500x revenue?

• 48:58Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, maybe like when people are

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Role playing in the partner meetings.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so let's just take a step back. Let's stop talking this specific investment. Let's just, let's role play a scenario where we're investing in a different company at 500x ARR. And, you know, maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the investment. Let's just play that out sidebar five minutes and we'll come back to this.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  You think that never happens in Silicon Valley?

• 49:24Delian Asparouhov?

  I mean, look, you know, when a founder in an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and, you know, the numbers look a little too good. I don't know. I think maybe like there should be a little role playing there and somebody should speak up and say, hey, like, don't we want founders that are pretty focused on what they're doing?

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Or at least good at League of Legends.

• 49:40Delian Asparouhov?

  At least good at League of Legends. So if somebody investigates the fact that he's fucking bronze, like somebody should look at that. And I think with a little bit of role playing, I could imagine scenarios like that. They could train somebody. And so unfortunate what happens is no role playing happens. And then the primary sponsor of the deal is, you know, she shifted to somebody else and then that person's quietly exited. And so our solution.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  It does happen.

• 50:03Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm just referencing a hypothetical, by the way.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  But it speaks to the importance of training. Yeah.

• 50:08Delian Asparouhov?

  Training is very important. Junior people need to speak up and say their opinion.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  For sure. What about the startup angle here? There was some company that came to one of, one of our offsites at FF. And it was basically like autopilot for planes. He was working with the AC130, the C130. And the idea was that non deterministic probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes. And so his workaround was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations. And I was like, that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway. So this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help for, you know,

• 50:56John Coogan?

  mercenary or missionary reasons. Is there a world where the, where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety? Or is this purely in your mind, like we need just changes to training like laws?

• 51:12Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, there definitely is. I think a lot of what you know, sort of pilots do absolutely could be subtly automated, you know, by software over time. I do think it's like, um, obviously a significantly harder problem than just like, you know, you know, chat GPT, reading the internet and then users spewing out words. Like, it's just like the, the training data is a lot harder to acquire, the like outputs, obviously, like you can't have any hallucination and so. Um, but like, you know, in ten, fifteen, twenty years, could this be like fully, fully automated a hundred percent? I think the challenge is much more cultural, where it's just like, look, the FAA, other than like the DCA crash, like, you know, basically had a spotless, you know, sort of track record for like fifteen plus years. And so it's like really hard to justify. And this is where it's, I think, like some of these like next generation, like, you know, supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle, where it's just like.

• 51:54Delian Asparouhov?

  We're sort of stuck with this, like, you know, you know, sort of tube and wing, you know, sort of plane design, even though there's like plenty of other net new plane designs that make sense. But they're just so safe. And so then you're stuck in this, like, you know, catch what you're doing. Like, the analogy I always give is like, imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars. And you said, I'm going to give everybody this like two-ton vehicle, they're gonna like move sixty miles per hour while there's like pedestrians close by. And by the way, we're just gonna like kill like seventy thousand Americans every single year. Just every year, we're gonna fucking murder seventy thousand Americans. But it offers all of us a little bit of convenience. We like get to places faster.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Delian Asparouhov?

  In a world with no cars, no fucking way would we ever pass that. Like, that would never happen, right? And so there is a little bit of this, like, you know, societal moral question of like, what is the right number of deaths in order for progress? And right now in the world of aviation, the answer is zero. Zero deaths is allowed.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Uh, i- i- is there a tinfoil hat scenario where like aviation's been very, very safe? And then one crash happens, like the first crash, and, and it, and it looks just like a blip and we return to the kind of like the averages and we say, okay, well. Even including that, it's still very safe. But now there's been the class, the crash in Canada, the crash in India, the crash in DC. Like, at a certain point, there's so many, like, you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on. And, and if it was this safety training thing, we, we haven't been doing this type of training ever. So, like, is it possible that there's something else going on?

• 53:13Delian Asparouhov?

  I think when these complex systems deteriorate, like they can deteriorate very rapidly and it's like hard to totally diagnose like, you know, an individual cause, but like I do think that's what you're seeing a bit. It's like Boeing culture and like their optimization for shareholder returns is like, you know, just killing supply chain inconsistency. You're seeing some of the like, you know, sort of craziness of COVID where we retired a bunch of pilots and now we're hiring a bunch of super junior pilots. The fact that ATC is super overworked and like, you know, they're trying to like, like still operate off of like 1970s, you know, sort of software, even though the world's getting, you know, sort of more complex and, you know, sort of higher volume in traffic. And so I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of this system. And yeah, I do think there's a world where like, all of a sudden you see us return to like, you know, 1990s level plane crashes on a super regular, you know, sort of basis. And that may be the thing that finally makes it sort of the like, you know, FAA and others need to start to adopt,

• 53:57Delian Asparouhov?

  you know, sort of next technologies where like they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  I think there's something you have to imagine this, this, uh, this idea, this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the, the, the crew is taking collectively. And then they're just basically running the, the, the thought process of planes are just so safe. I've done thousands of these. It's going to be fine. We, you know, I've been in situations that worked great before and it always worked out. And then be, and then they're just like thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that no, you're not a statistic. You're in the cockpit.

• 54:33Delian Asparouhov?

  They're a person in the cockpit.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  Responsible for hundreds of people's lives and.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  I've invested at 200 X ARR and been able to SPAC before.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  How bad, how bad?

• 54:43John Coogan?

  They can get out.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  So, so how bad is this for, for Boeing? I mean, 787 total failure. I mean.

• 54:52Delian Asparouhov?

  I mean, I don't think it's anywhere near like the 737, you know, sort of max issues. I mean, yeah, they'll have to like go through an investigation. The like orders on this stuff are so, you know, sort of, you know, you know, uh, done so far in advance of likelihood that it like shifts revenue. It's like, unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in like a year, I actually, I don't think that'll have that much effect, especially when you just like look at the footage where it looks like.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  For reference on public.com, the stock is down 5% or something like that.

• 55:17Delian Asparouhov?

  Should we go on to the next topic?

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, T S up for Shinke. What's going on there?

• 55:21Delian Asparouhov?

  Shinke, never thought I'd be sort of a fish investor, but I do love my fish. I've been a long time lover of the Tokyo fish market, going there, eating quality fish. I never appreciated that a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch, but it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed. Traditionally, fishing like United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and then you either like freeze it to death or you like let it flop and basically like, you know, effectively drown in air. The problem with both those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these like hormones, lactic acid, et cetera, and that significantly degrades the quality of the fish. In Japan, what they do is they basically like stab out the brain and pull out the brain stem. So the fish basically never knows that it's ever dying, even though you obviously are killing it.

• 56:06Delian Asparouhov?

  And so you have a very basically like relaxed fish meat and you bleed it out very quickly. That's a lot of what leads like Omakase level quality. That typically is like a super manual. You need like an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that, super expensive. Basically, I met this guy, Saif from Shinke, you guys will be talking to you that like, one, comes from like a fisherman's family, which is like, you know, incredible like founder market fit. And two, basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the Japanese chefs do. But rather than like selling the robots, they actually just have like a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of like, you know, high-end Michelin star restaurants, starting to get into, you know, sort of retail. And I think it's like one of these things where it's like, I just love, you rarely meet just such an example of like, this is the company that this person was like born, born to build.

• 56:48Delian Asparouhov?

  You know what I mean? Like, you know, I like, yeah, maybe stumbled into in-space manufacturing when I was like in seventh or eighth grade, but I was not born for it. Saif was literally like born to build this company. And I think there's like a perfect parallel of like, if you look at like Cargill, like 100 years ago, they started off with like some simple, you know, equipment and then steadily basically grew into a massive like processor, distributor, wholesaler. They're like, you know, the largest like pig and cow, you know, sort of distributor. I think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where like there hasn't really been a like next generation tech-enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry. It's super long tail. There's no like one conglomerate. I actually think that this like initial angle into like high-quality fish is something that like Saif actually has the ambitions to go build into this like massive conglomerate that yes, is serving fish,

• 57:31Delian Asparouhov?

  but also is the wholesaler and the distributor. And they have like automated fishing boats. And they have like, you know, the like automatic killing and the processing and like the bleeding. All of that, nobody's taken a look at in basically like a hundred years. And I'm not too worried about like other people competing because I don't think like two Stanford grads want to go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch of fish guts, you know?

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  I've been, I've, I've spent time at the facility in the gundo. It smells like fish.

• 57:57Delian Asparouhov?

  You every day you go into work and for eight hours, you just smell fish every day.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Every day.

• 58:01Delian Asparouhov?

  Doubt, you know, we just believe, you know, competition is for losers. What better way to smoke out the competition? There's be like, you have to smell fish for eight hours.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, compete. It's a great, it's a great market, you know, the market opportunity is, is, is massive. Low competition. It's a great market to be in, but you gotta love the stench of fish. I felt bad. Last time, last time I went and saw Safe in the team, he gave me some fresh fish. And then a classic LA, I had to like drive to a couple other meetings and then I realized that like I got home and like the fish had just been sitting in my hot car for like the entire day. So I couldn't eat it. But I've had it. I've had it. I mean, they, they're, they're distributing to Nobu and a bunch of amazing restaurants.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, I'm excited to talk to him. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Delian, they were so mad that you were back on the show. They took down AWS too.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Wait, AWS is down too?

• 58:50Delian Asparouhov?

  Maybe.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  We might not even be live anymore. We're just the three of us talking, but.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Okay, we're live apparently, but yeah, this could be Iran. It could be Russia. It could be China. It could be anybody.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  They don't want us to podcast.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  India, Pakistan's getting in on the news. It is crazy times. Stay safe. Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco. We'll see you next time you're in LA.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  And next up, we're going right into Shinkai. We got Safe.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's got some big news today.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Through Delian.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Safe, YC company.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Went through YC a few years ago at this point.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Did he raise on a safe?

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Hard tech company, NYC.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  He was named after the safe.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Good nominee of determinism.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, crazy.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What if he just only raised on safes?

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 59:36Speaker 05

  Hey gentlemen, how's it going?

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  My man, what's going on?

• 59:40Speaker 05

  Good, hang out.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, Delian already said your whole life story, everything the business does. He leaked the news.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, he did leak a few bits here and there, the tech roadmaps.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's so exciting to finally have you on. Yeah, for sure. You've just been, honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  Real cheese moving silence like Bazonia.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right. There you go.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  But I've been able to witness your journey dating back to probably, it must be like two and a half years ago at this point. But watching you go from solo founder, you know, you had come out of YC, working on something that was, that had, I was immediately a believer in you and, you know, invested. But, you know, going, watching the transition from solo founder, you had absolutely, you know, not saying this in a bad way, absolutely zero hype around the business at all. You were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, the idea sounds cool, but, but there was absolutely no heat on the company.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  But you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on. And now, you know, a couple of years later, you're announcing the kind of round that every, every, every founder dreams of. So why don't you break it down? And then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company.

• 1:01:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, first I have to say, it feels like two and a half, three years ago, it was only a year and a half.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's five years in venture, so.

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  Facts, facts. Yeah, we're really excited to announce our Series A. We've raised 22 million, co-led by Delian and the founder's fund and Idrago's capital. And we are reshoring American seafood.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Breakdown, here we go.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  They went to the wrong, they went to the wrong screen. Hit it again, John. We're having, sorry, save for a massive. Yeah, we're having massive technical difficulties today. The internet's under attack. AWS and GCP are down, but, but your robots are probably running, you know, locally, hopefully.

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, yeah, break down kind of your background, history of the company, how you got to this point and all that and all that good stuff.

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  For sure. Well, Jordy, as you know, I like to say I come from a seafaring family. You know, I was born in Canada, but you know, raised in the Middle East. So I was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea, had matching sailor tattoos with my granddad, all that kind of peripheral. No one's formally in seafood, but like, you know, it's, I have like very big library of just fish photos of my dad.

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  It's a classic. And then, yeah, you know, I moved to the US, you know, when I was 18. And then basically, you know, a few years.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  By yourself, right?

• 1:02:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, solo, yeah, solo immigrant. And then, yeah, basically, the core of Shinkei really comes from that portion. You know, I kind of like left seafood alone for a while. And then, one of my early mornings in grad school, there was this essay in the newspaper. I'm not this vegan activist, which is kind of ironic, called If Fish Could Scream. And it was all about how, because fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals like cows and chickens and terrestrial. You know, and that kind of got me thinking, I first wanted to work on some more like skit to our projects to do with that. Funnel the energy towards, you know, what we're now working on today, right?

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  So the essay was really talking about, you know, what Delian said, that, you know, when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish that you're buying are basically brought into the deck of a boat and let to suffocate. And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness, right? And so in that time, they're releasing straws, hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decaying meat quality and shelf life of fish. And so, you know, I was kind of like cruising around on the Reddit, Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes. And I found the techniques that were basically, we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now. Which is basically like a Japanese analog to kosher slaughter for cows. If you're familiar, basically, like Delian said, you basically spike the fish in the brain, you cut the gills, option, cut the tail.

• 1:03:51Speaker 05

  The cheese is all the same things, so basically rather than the fish flopping around, you stop the experience of stress, you remove the blood. It's the meat that lasts up to three times as long, it tastes Michelin star quality, you know, the fish that you have to, if you want to get fish like this, it's flown over from Japan. And so, yeah, we basically scaled those up, you know, and our first product is called Sidon, that basically produces Michelin grade fish and commodity costs.

• 1:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Break down kind of the early history because I know you went through YC and this was at a time when when there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  I don't think they had a request for startups for fish.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but but you made it in. And I just remember that it was you. You had this very kind of, you know, fast takeoff where one day, one day it was just like you and a few YC, you know, YC safe and maybe a handful of other investors and then you really started building out the team. So maybe maybe talk about that that early day.

• 1:04:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Kind of those early days.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  A little bit of corporate history. I took the company full time in, you know, early 2022. You know, we went through YC, presented the summer down the day. And then, you know, from there, basically kept our heads down. I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business, you know, both in the business model and the, you know, the R and D. And I had two junior engineers with me. And we basically didn't do anything else for like two years. I was like, you know, I started with like being in the cold domain. So going from like the like desert Dubai to the winter domain was like insane, insane life experience. You know, probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone seen. And

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  then, you know, have basically, you know, we had this inflection point really around the time that you and I met, you know, which is, you know, a few people taking early bets on us. And that kind of catalyzed, you know, hiring, you know, the core of our founding team, you know, which is like, you know, early and early computer vision engineers, you know, my co-founders at SpaceX, leading the avionics team on Starship, the commercial fishermen, the robotics PhDs. And, you know, a lot of the core DNA there is like really, you know, become, you know, what we're very prideful to say is like, you know, a top engineering culture, you know, and derivative that now, if we start to scale up the sales side, you know, a top company culture as a whole. You know, we've been able to accomplish in the

• 1:06:11Speaker 05

  past year and a half, what like I think would take, you know, companies years and years to do. We're already producing robots like as fast as like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're, uh, we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to, but like, you know, we have a robot that can, uh, the payback time is in weeks, you know, it's not months.

• 1:06:30Jordi Hays?

  What's it like, uh, what's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to, uh, when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day?

• 1:06:39Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny, you know, um, we had, we had, uh, you know, one of our accounting engineers, Jen, um, you know, told me this great story once, and she doesn't know that I use it all the time, uh, that, you know, we went to Hackathon, uh, you know, she was like, probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at Andro, really early on. Um, and so, you know, she went to Hackathons at Andro's really early and no one want, you know, at the time, no one wanted to, um, really spend, you know, any time really at all, uh, listening to, you know, the best hardware. And now, as you guys know, it is like, you know, the biggest thing, you know, when we talk about hardware. And, you know, so when we went to Hackathon about, you know, probably a year ago

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  now, um, the sentiment was really similar, you know, like people were like, oh, fish, what? You know, uh, oh, meat, you know, um, we, we got blown off by, you know, intern, like freshmen and sophomores from like Waterloo.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Bogged by Waterloo interns.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, literally. Um, it's, it's so, it's funny to say because now like, you know, we have like this, you know, we can be like re selective, we're like, we're now kind of the opposite scenario of like turning down all these top engineers, uh, really because we just, you know, we want to keep the bar really high. And, um, you know, our philosophy is like hiring smart, nice people. And it sounds really trivial, but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high. And you, you generally have one or the other. You have people who are like really, really smart, but they know they're so smart that they're, uh, they have really high use. Um, and then in the best first, so you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like make up for the fact they're not that smart. And, uh,

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever mode.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  This sounds like Pavel's, uh, hiring, hiring criteria. They have to have that dog in them, and they have to be nice with it.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Ducks.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  Smart and nice.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  It's a little more.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can be nice with it and not be nice, right?

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  That's true, yeah.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  You can basically have motion. That's called having motion, John.

• 1:08:32Speaker 05

  You gotta have the rhythm and the tism, right?

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  I saw that on a.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  The IQ and the EQ.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics. We've, we've heard from a lot of folks that the supply chain's incredibly complicated. I mean, you're not at like such an incredible scale that there's probably geopolitical implications necessarily just yet. But what has that been like? What, who are your key suppliers? Are you able to retrofit certain parts of machines? Like, how much are you building? How much are you buying? What are the key suppliers in your, in your world?

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  So we do some very light manufacturing in-house. A lot of it is, you know, using like local partners, all of which, you know, and El Segundo. Exactly. We all put it together, but we do all the assembly in-house. You know, in terms of like tariff impact and, you know, geopolitical, you know, impacts from the current administration. Honestly, it's been fairly net helpful. The, you know, yes, the price of steel and all that has just like gone up, but you know, for us, like, I'm not sure if you know that, um, you know, there's been a lot of like, um, deregulation and, you know, and the tariffs around seafood. And so because of that, we're able to just like clean up the rest of like all the imported, uh, fish that are coming in from almost all countries.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. What, uh, do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now?

• 1:09:51Speaker 05

  Uh, I don't, um, it's like country by country.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  But I imagine it's like over 10% everywhere.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  It is, yeah. I mean, it's probably close to 20. At this point, it's obviously varies depending on SKU and species and size. But we, that amount is basically the entire margin for the import. So for them, they're just kind of like, ah.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  And then there's also massive shipping costs, I'm sure.

• 1:10:09Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Because it's cold chain and that's way more, way more expensive than just like throw it on a, you know, a, a big shipping container.

• 1:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long-term. When, when we met, you had incredible ambitions right away. You wanted to build, you know, fleets and basically own the entire stack from, you know, catching the fish all the way through delivery to, to the customer. It feels like, you know, your ambitions are still massive, but, but you've really narrowed in on, on focusing on some key areas. What does the business look like today? What does it look like, you know, a decade from now?

• 1:10:42Speaker 05

  Great question. I'm not going to go into too much detail on a former just because we're kind of we're kind of staying a little more quiet about that, but you know, we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically like halfway like between a robotics company and a seafood wholesaler and processor. So the model that we have is, you know, Shinkei is a parent company, basically, you know, manufactures all these machines, you know, and for every Poseidon that we build, we give them to fishermen for free. And so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman, having after starting the company. And so the way that they actually make money is actually not as

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Forward deployed fishermen.

• 1:11:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so the way that we make money is not actually as like, like labor cost by the hour generally, like it can depend, but most of the time it's in proportion to catch. So it's a gross profit intended. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands. And so for us, you know, that's why we didn't want to add, you know, add loads to the stuff. We basically give them machines for free and then we actually pay them a premium over the commodity like dock price before, so that they're actually instead of by speed. So no risk to them. They sit on our balance sheet. We basically own and maintain them. They just operate them. And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  We didn't even get into this, but I want to take a quick second. This is basically a machine. You put a fish in one side of it, it pulls the fish through it, uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain, takes it out and then it and then it moves on it. That's correct, right?

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, we also cut the gills as well.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is just crazy. And doing that on a ship that is at

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Moving.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Moving at sea.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  And the fish, it's not like there's one size of fish. This isn't assembling iPhones.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, we can do multiple species, multiple sizes, five seconds of fish. It's really fast. Yeah.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Um, yeah. And I mean, you know, projecting like multi-year shelf life on the robots that, you know, again, we can like pay back in 12 weeks. So pretty fun.

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  Multi-year shelf life is also big because I imagine like salt water gets in these things. There's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements. It's not some super clean room.

• 1:12:50Speaker 05

  Right. And so that's where, you know, background on a lot of our team, you know, like when Reed is working on avionics, you know, like, you know, obviously like space and the marine are very different, but like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments, like a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:13:09Jordi Hays?

  Talk about where you guys are being distributed already, where the product is actually ending up. I don't know what logos you can share, but.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're, you name it, we're probably there in terms of metros. So like New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver. You know, a lot of those places, we're basically in like the highest and top top shelf fish for the segments. We, we sell wholesale to distributors, like I mentioned, for restaurants, but we also sell it directly to retailers. We have one retailer in New York that we sell to, the only retailer that we have. But across all the restaurants, we have like over 40 Michelin stars and we're probably moving about.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Forty Michelin stars, I'm hitting the size.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Hit that down. Oh yeah, there we go. This is the third.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Love to hear it.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  Resonating through my bloodline.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. You have anything else, Jordy? We do have.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is awesome. Come back on regularly. Let's, let's, let's do a.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Taste test on the stream.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do a taste test on the stream soon.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Sounds great, gents. Thank you for having me.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  You guys are just getting started and it's been incredible to fall. I just, I love watching you win. I knew you would and I can't wait for, you know, so I guess it's been a year and a half. I can't wait for the next decade. So congratulations to the team.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Cheers, gentlemen. Very kind. Appreciate it.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  We have our next guest already in the studio. Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Let's invite Henry into the studio from Privy. We're talking about the Stripe.

• 1:14:55Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 1:15:01Henri Stern?

  I'm good.

• 1:15:02Jordi Hays?

  How are your inboxes doing the last 24 hours? A lot of wealth managers.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Just blowing you up. Congratulations.

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  We haven't talked in a while. I'd love to catch up.

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. We would have wanted to have you on yesterday.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  But we were at Demo Day. But yeah, how are you doing?

• 1:15:20Henri Stern?

  I'm good. You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Thanks. I appreciate it.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Now, terms of the deal were undisclosed. We're not going to talk terms. Is that correct?

• 1:15:31Henri Stern?

  That is correct.

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  Okay, but I'm still bringing the size.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  We're going to still hit the gong for you. That's what matters.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Even if the numbers are disclosed, we're still.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  It was definitely gong.

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations. But yeah, I mean, take us through, obviously, we're not going to go through the deal, but I want to know more about the company and the future of really just like the fintech stack as we move from fiat-only companies to fiat plus crypto and the interaction between these two. So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built, and then how that's going to integrate.

• 1:16:04Henri Stern?

  Yeah, for sure. So I mean, to be very fair, and I'll put the disclosure upfront, we're still in the closing period. You know, we put all the asterisks on our blog post and so on. And so for the time being, we're still very much two separate companies.

• 1:16:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:16Henri Stern?

  And on that front, I can't share all that much about, you know, any joint things, but I can tell you about what we're seeing in the space and what we think is going to happen moving forward.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why don't you give a quick history of the company too? Because you're a couple of years old. Is that correct?

• 1:16:29Henri Stern?

  Yeah, we started about three years ago, a little over three years ago.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Got it. And you immediately ran into the one of the most meaningful crypto winners that, you know, maybe it's not as bad as some of the earlier ones, but it felt significant at the time.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  So quick history would be great. And then we can kind of get into the present.

• 1:16:47Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I think, you know, harsh winners temper hard companies. So we have been fighting for our lives for a while, which I think affects a lot of our intensity. But TLDR.

• 1:16:59Henri Stern?

  I worked in crypto for a while, so I guess, starting with me, was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complementary rail to the web. The web is very good at ferrying information across the world, but the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data without centralized intermediaries is super hard. And so that was very exciting. Flip side, all of the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible. And I would not use any of them. And I think it had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto. You had academics and you had scam artists. And those were the two things that you could do.

• 1:17:44Henri Stern?

  You could do really cool research or you could try and fleece retail very quickly. And the thought that we had with my co-founder, Asta, is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can kind of widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto. And so we set out to build things around these sort of core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet. Historically, a wallet's a Chrome extension or, you know, a browser extension of any sort or a hardware device. You plug it in and every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain, so affect the state of, you know, the chain as it were. So usually this is financial or this could be data related, asset related.

• 1:18:27Henri Stern?

  When you want to buy an NFT, when you want to send money, you have to make such a transaction. Every time you want to do that, you basically get taken out of the app. You have a pop-up that's in your face. It interrupts the app flow and it basically is akin, I think, to like filling out all your credit card details when you get to any commerce site before you've filled in your cart, before you've decided that you even want to engage with this. So I think our thought was, can we create a different kind of wallet that embeds directly into the product and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft so they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in. And so, you know, that's what we do. We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems. We make it easy for any developer, any business.

• 1:19:09Henri Stern?

  To leverage crypto as part of their apps and we work with everything from neo-banks, who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world, to payroll providers. We have a customer, Toku, for example, that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stablecoins. So let's say Privy has a Nigerian contractor. If that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USDC rather than in Naira, USDC has held its value against a dollar, obviously much better than Naira over the past few years. That contractor can receive the USDC, can hold the digital dollars, without having to have a US bank account, just through Privy, basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email. So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send digital assets in app.

• 1:19:52Henri Stern?

  And so this is, I was saying, neo-banks, payment providers, all the way to trading platforms. We serve folks like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past 18 months. They do about 10 to 15 billion dollars a day in trading volume. Jupiter is another example. And all of these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows, but who want to give their users an ability to have very sort of low-level, secure, powerful wallets that can be built into the product. And we think this is going to become a much wider range of the way people build when they want to build any product that touches value on the web.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for the average user. There's a lot of, we seem to be in a transition period where more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing. It doesn't feel like, oh, command line Bitcoin transactions anymore. It feels much more like the web. And so what is the funnel that the average customer goes through? When are they seeing your product? And how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey?

• 1:21:04Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I mean, so broadly, you know, you can think of us as a key orchestration provider. We do key management under the hood. A lot of our work is the security of basically these rails and this key management. And then a lot of it is around latency, making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user, even though you're taking actions that require these transactions, you don't notice it. So our average signing time is, call it somewhere between 20 and 100 milliseconds. Because, you know, starting at 250, 300, you start to notice it. So that's a lot of what we focus on. The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers. I think our core contention is products are not one size fits all. And to that end, the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle.

• 1:21:47Henri Stern?

  So, you know, you wouldn't interact with Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JP Morgan application. Likewise, the wallet that we have for NeoBank that has Face ID. So you log in, for example, with an email or a pass key. From their wallets created under the hood, you might not see it. And every time you want to send money, you might just need to Face ID again to approve the transaction is going to be different from the interaction. For example, for somebody who's doing digital asset management as part of their company, where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details. Looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto. Or, you know, last example, we serve games. And these games obviously just don't want any pop-ups whatsoever. So the onboarding journey is as simple as login with an email. You don't need to record a mnemonic.

• 1:22:32Henri Stern?

  You can always export your key if you want to. So you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you. But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, they can interact with these rails just the same.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular. It's been a wild year for the industry broadly. It's been great in a lot of ways. And some of the companies you mentioned, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, things like that, you know, got, have been around for a while. What kind of new momentum are you seeing across, you know, privy signups and potentially categories that maybe wouldn't have been possible a few years ago?

• 1:23:13Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at companies, I'll question the premise for a second. Just if we get a graph going of like, you know, relative time to growth to volume. I'm pretty sure hyper liquid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies that have gotten a trillion dollars moved in, call it as a two-year-old company. Yeah. Likewise, if you look at Pump or Jupiter, other customers of ours. These are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard. Yeah. But to actually answer your question, one, obviously, stable coins and the, I would say, broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents. It used to be, I think, like the crypto cope. When AI was, I mean, it still is, but like, you know, late 2022, crypto implodes.

• 1:23:55Henri Stern?

  AI is absolutely taking off. Everybody is looking at their seat and being like, oh, man, I made some terrible choices in my life. And the cope, I think, was, well, crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise, whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data mode. And I kind of think that stable coins changes that dynamic. For the first time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents. They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries. They need to hold less fiat in various countries. And so we're seeing that. We're talking to, you know, you know, I've done this. Look in chat GPT, where are the top 10 fintechs in the world? And we're talking to, call it, seven or eight of them at this point, who are looking at these things. And so it's a question of, we want to offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets.

• 1:24:40Henri Stern?

  We want to offer the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world. And broadly, we want to expand our operations globally. So it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before. I would say that's broadly the big change over the last six months. But then, like, the other side of this is trading. You see rotations and where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest. And the thing, I promise I'll shut up in a second. But the thing that that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by kind of serving the two extremes of the market, we think we build a much better product. Weird example, but we have a very powerful sort of low-level policy engine. You can say.

• 1:25:22Henri Stern?

  This wallet can trade up to a thousand dollars a day, but if these two people sign off on it, it can do a million dollars. And these policies we built because we had these apps that were trying to do agentic trading. They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users. And they were like, oh, fuck, if the LLM hallucinates, this is going to be very, very bad. We need limits on how much we let the LLM do. And now that we're working with neo banks, these neo banks are saying, we have risk policies. We have, you know, ways in which we want to approve activity. Can you give us a policy? And so this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other. And we're kind of seeing that across the board. All of our customers are sort of pulling us upward in a way we're serving this really wide range. Actually, I think creates a future proof product.

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  I know the the transaction is is still in the, you know, process of closing. But can you talk at a high level about what drew you to wanting to work with the Stripe team?

• 1:26:21Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I was in a Telegram chat yesterday and somebody said, I was just like creeping. And somebody said, there, you know, there must have been that Stripe charm or that Colson charm. And I think it plays, you know, this is a company.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Luck of the Irish.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Luck of the Irish strikes again.

• 1:26:40Henri Stern?

  We weren't intending to sell. And I think the reality, this is something an investor has said, which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time. You've literally trued through the worst environment for a startup over the past however many years. Why now? And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly. We want to accelerate that change. And we were very drawn to, I think, that the care for craft and the huge lever that basically this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space. So that was a lot of what was exciting to us is broadly, I think we share a lot of values for how to build great developer tooling.

• 1:27:22Henri Stern?

  And then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way by just working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was the really exciting part.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations and good luck with the rest of the process.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm really excited for you and the team and for Stripe and for what you guys can accomplish together.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we'd love to have you back when, when, you know, you can talk more about the future and building. I'm really excited for this and I think it's something that everyone's thinking about. It's like, what's the future of fintech as fiat and crypto mingle more together?

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  It'll be fascinating to talk to. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. Good luck closing. Cheers.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in the studio already, but first I want to ask you, how'd you sleep last night? Cause I think I got you beat. I think I got you beat. I think it's a clean sweep this week.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Did you get a hundred?

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  I got a 91. 7 hours, 39 minutes, 93% consistency. 90 tied. This is the first time we've ever tied. Go to 8sleeve.com, get a Pod5 Ultra.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Code TBPN.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Code TBPN, 5-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  On the 8sleeve last night. That was my last waking thought last night. It's good to be back.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Chris.

• 1:28:38Speaker 07

  Hi guys.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:28:41Speaker 07

  Not too much, obviously.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:28:46Speaker 07

  Everything, everything in a flat circle.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't even believe, it seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down. So I'm just happy to be here with you.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Oh, he's going to be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google Doc, Google's down. You're cooked, even though X is up. This is the most

• 1:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Your content strategy.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Insane thing about you is that you can, you can break through the link ban somehow. It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it.

• 1:29:17Speaker 07

  You know, nobody told me there was a link ban.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Built different, truly built different.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Built different. I had a post, I had a post once that I was like, like, you know, I post links and they still do numbers. Google.com and it just, it's been bombed. John and I thought it was hilarious, but you gotta be built different to post links.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have been built different. We've loved all the Google Docs that you've dropped. Maybe take us through the first one, the end of software. What was the thesis? And then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out.

• 1:29:46Speaker 07

  Sure, sure. So admittedly kind of an incendiary title, especially on Twitter to this audience. But I, the crux of the thesis was

• 1:30:00Speaker 07

  LLMs are, were, and are only getting better at producing code. And generating code has largely been a translation task assigned to humans. And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard. And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, that should just completely change the economics and the production of software.

• 1:30:33Speaker 07

  I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder, having a harder time to find jobs than art majors.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have our CS intern today studying art history for the next two hours.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  He's getting up to speed so he can find a job.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  He's right here, you can see.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Do you have a fun fact for us?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  I got a fun fact. Okay, okay. So did you know that Greek statues were, they were originally painted?

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  They were originally painted.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  They weren't just white marble.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  I think your job odds just went way up. Anyway, back to the interview with Chris.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 1:31:09Speaker 07

  Not at all.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, but an interesting fact about that, there's only 2,000 art history grads and there's 100,000 CS grads. So there is a little bit more sensitivity, but I think even though the facts of that stat might be like a little bit early to say, like the trend is clear and we all see it coming. And so we're interested in like the impact of that.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, it's like the death of the software engineer job application. Like the job application now is like produce software.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, build.

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  Like produce a piece of software. The last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good, almost basically good enough for us to publish it.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, immediately, same day.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Same day. And so like, at least the job application has been disrupted.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Speaker 07

  I mean, I think it's this sort of inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept. Because it really challenges a worldview that...

• 1:32:05Speaker 07

  Most of our existence is constructed on top of. But I think the people who like rush headfirst into it and try to understand, okay, well, how does this change the future? What's going to be different? You know, everybody else can be stuck clinging to the last vestiges of something that ultimately evaporates. I mean, but what's really exciting is, is, uh, I mean, like, imagine a world where, where steel is free.

• 1:32:39Speaker 07

  Like, what does the world look like if steel is free?

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  Probably a lot more steel.

• 1:32:45Speaker 07

  It's like, the, the world looks completely different. It looks completely different. We can build so much more incredible things. The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out. But we're no longer limited by the cost of something to produce traditionally.

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  Be great. Talk to me about the, the dynamic of as, as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate. There's, there's two theories. One is like, we are in the age of the idea guy. The, the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers. The classic example of like the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavel Asparuhov posting about, which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  And yes, the software engineers, they won't be writing code anymore, but they might be the, they might be the future idea guys. They might be able to think in systems and, and, and come up with interesting ideas. And even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves, they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage. So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that?

• 1:34:09Speaker 07

  I mean, I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource. Because execution is just commoditized at this point.

• 1:34:20Speaker 07

  I, I think, you know, if, if we're, if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate. For better or worse, I think word cells won, right?

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  Bold. It's possible. Very possible.

• 1:34:35Speaker 07

  Brutal truth. Brutal truth for shape rotators. But word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta Stone that instantly translates words into shapes.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, the prompt can be rotate the shape.

• 1:34:50Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Writing the prompt, you're good.

• 1:34:52Speaker 07

  Just put the fries in the bag.

• 1:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  No, the wild, I think, moment for each of us is like, we started going to ChatGPT for tasks.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  And you're just like, count the number of objects like this in this image. And it just writes like four minutes of like, it works for four minutes writing code, doing work that would take, you know, at least a few hours to do as like a, as a well-trained software engineer, just to do a task that, that in many ways.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  You could just look at it and count it.

• 1:35:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Yes. Well, so here's an interesting, if you guys want to talk about something that.

• 1:35:32John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:35:33Speaker 07

  It's probably my next essay.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:35:35Speaker 07

  So hot off the press, hot off the press. I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be like eroded by AI and what will never be eroded by AI. And for example, like we're never going to watch robots play sports. Right? Like that's just like never going to happen. So why is that?

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  We don't watch robots play chess and robots have dominated chess and yet chess.com has done well as a business. Magnus Carlsen has done well as an individual chess player. Hickarou has a huge chess following online.

• 1:36:10Speaker 07

  Hundred percent.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  And you would think if you just wanted to watch the best chess possibly played, you'd be watching Stockfish and no one does.

• 1:36:16Speaker 07

  We don't. We don't. Not only that, but like the Olympics, we're so, okay, so here's the frame. When it comes to utility, we are misanthropists. We actually kind of hate other humans. When you're in an Uber and they like start talking to you, you wish you were in a way mode. You're like. What? I don't need this. When, when somebody, when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I'm just, I wanna buy this bottle of water. I wanna walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this? This is like a miniature ransom.

• 1:36:54Speaker 07

  And, and you're just, you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that we wanna do. And the human is preventing that from happening. And so, uh, I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating there. Right? That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually like very happy with humans being removed from that loop. And so as, as long as the thing is utilitarian and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone. Now, on the other side, if, if we are, if we're allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour.

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  If we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that thing. So think about like, um, you know, fine dining, right? Omakaze. You, you go to a sushi restaurant, you need that person there that's describing, cutting, you wanna see how delicate

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  The craft is part of the, the craft and the, and the social element to it is part of the product.

• 1:38:14Speaker 07

  Exactly. It's a story.

• 1:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Speaker 07

  It's a story. You're paying for that experience. You want that human experience. You want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to. So on one hand, fine dining, you, you need humans, you, you need the story. You wanna understand where it came from, like. And then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them.

• 1:38:37Speaker 07

  So like we, we, we go through life with these two spheres. When, when we know we wanna do something and we really hate other humans, like, you know, when you call into a customer service line and somebody, somebody like incompetent is on the other side. You just, you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in the first place. And then on the other hand, you know, let's look at, uh, modern art, for example. I think like the, the trope in modern art is like. It's not that hard to make.

• 1:39:09Speaker 07

  You know, where the joke is like, my kid could do that. Yeah, well, like, your kid didn't. And also, no one cares.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:16Speaker 07

  The, the thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the, of the artist that went into creating that.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  The story. If Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and like hits, you know, hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off, like that rock would, would have like, you know, an immediate 10,000x premium on it.

• 1:39:40Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Somebody would buy it because of you did it.

• 1:39:44Speaker 07

  Exactly. So, so i- if, if what you do basically is, gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. It's gonna go away. But if, if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, it's, it's moded. It's, it's a huge mode. I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight

• 1:40:27Speaker 07

  than anything else.

• 1:40:30Speaker 07

  It's crazy.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  It's incredible. It's, it's, it's often incredible content. It is. Guilty pleasure for, for many people. So on that note, I'm curious. On, uh, since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug?

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Because they, it's, they're, they're, as far as I'm concerned, they've been designated a feature because it sort of went away for a little bit. Now it seems like they're back and, and, and stronger than ever.

• 1:40:59Speaker 07

  I think, I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeiters.

• 1:41:08Speaker 07

  Where it's like.

• 1:41:11Speaker 07

  This exists because there's value in the product. Replicating, trying to imitate the authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product. The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is. Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  That's a good framework. On this concept of the future of jobs, Sam Altman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed people what we do all day, they would say, those are ridiculous fake jobs. That's not real. That's not hunting or farming. That's sitting in front of a computer, just messing around, talking to people. And yet, we get a lot of value out of them. When we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm?

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Can we have 30 million Omakase chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale? Or do you think there's some other way that this plays out?

• 1:42:37Speaker 07

  I think, yes. Like, we will, we're such a selfish race or species that we want to, and the way the economics will work is, the jobs will basically, job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of. So, we have more leisure hours today than any...

• 1:43:03Speaker 07

  Any era ever in the history of time, because we're actually the most productive, right?

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07Speaker 07

  Like, if you, if you, if you wanna go back to like, the Stone Age,

• 1:43:13Speaker 07

  there's this really tight correlation, actually, between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities. So, like, tools get made. All of a sudden, we have free time. We didn't have free time before, because every hour was meant, was spent, like, surviving. What do we do with free time? We invent music. We invent bone flutes. Actually, the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation. So all of a sudden, you have this huge productivity boost. And then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time? Well, we, we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the Industrial Revolution.

• 1:43:55Speaker 07

  All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams, were actually factory workers from the same factory, competing against each other.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Funny.

• 1:44:05Speaker 07

  And so, we have these, like, huge boons to productivity. And then, on the other side of it, we have, uh, job creation to fill that leisure expansion. So, yeah, we're, we're gonna have more athletes than ever.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  This is hilarious, cuz it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors. Because, because I'm thinking about it, like, like, so Ken Burns is about to drop a, a new documentary about the American Revolution. And I am so excited to watch it. And I know I could go to ChatGPT and say, build me a deep research report on the American Revolution. But I wanna hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I wanna hear his voice narrated. And I wanna hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes, even if they're not the best. Even if I could get, even if I could get more factualness, or more truth, or more, more detailed insights from, from ChatGPT. I want the Ken Burns experience.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I don't, I don't know. There's something interesting about that, where- Like, I mean, you know, this is, we have a friend, David Senora, who runs Founder's Podcast. And the way he reads biographies about great histories, greatest entrepreneurs, and retells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life. And you're getting it through the experience of David. And I just don't think that's going anywhere. Even though, even though it is, it is in some ways like the first thing that could be one-shot by AI with generative voice and deep research products. But I think it'll be sticking around, like you, like you.

• 1:45:41Speaker 07

  We're so narcissistic. We love stories about each other. And we love storytellers. And we love telling stories. And we hate inauthenticity when it comes to that. I mean, like, the ESPN ate the Ocho, like, is a joke. But it's like, we have more sports than ever. Because we have more leisure time than ever. We care so much, you know, I watch competitive darts. We watched competitive darts a hundred years. We didn't have time to watch.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  I got really into bull riding recently. And all the narratives there. J.B. Moni, the greatest bull rider of all time. I know the whole history. I love it. Yeah, getting into these obscure, obscure sports is, yeah, maybe that's the future. I just get, just could, just spend all my time watching bull riding. That's, that's post scarcity for you.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit. I mean, I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go. But I wanted to see, get your reaction to WWDC this year. Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers. I mean, there's, there's a ton to dig into. What, what stood out to you?

• 1:46:58Speaker 07

  Sure. I know that everybody has like, lost their mind about liquid glass and the new UI. I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. So there is a machine learning team inside of Apple. And they are really, they're starting with this library called MLX, which is.

• 1:47:28Speaker 07

  Allows inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for M Silicon or Apple Silicon. And what's really interesting about that is as a developer right now, when you think about creating an application that has end user inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math of how much it's going to cost you because it's all metered. It's like, okay, well, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, drop this endpoint into OpenAI or Anthropic.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could make a viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. And that's like, we've had a bunch of founders on the show that have like accidentally done that. So and you think about early mobile days, like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now. But that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it, but that's not fun, right? And in the early.

• 1:48:35John Coogan?

  Venture capitalists will save us in those situations.

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Venture capitalists, thankfully, they will come in.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  Thankfully, there are plenty of VCs that will rip checks on a handshake.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  No, but still, there's just so many.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  It's a dynamic. Yeah, it's a real dynamic.

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  Part of the beauty of it being easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now, we've been through this era of expensive inference.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Speaker 07

  Yes. And so that point highlights the entire dynamic. Or like, you know, imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by the people who play their games. It would be insane. Like, there would be no games made. And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better.

• 1:49:28Speaker 07

  You know, Apple's really. In my mind, in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable on-device inference, which really means free inference. So if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for the pixels that were rendered on end-user devices, we're moving to like, wow, like, people can render the graphics for free on their device, and that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen. I think haters will say, well, like, you know, models are bad, you know, you know, the battery life is terrible, your iPhone heats up, you know, the models are small.

• 1:50:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, today, but tomorrow, a year from now, two years from now, you know, all of a sudden, eighty, ninety percent of the queries that you would run through a cloud-hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop and for free. And natively, it can be offline, whatever you want, and private. And so that's such an exciting future. And from my takeaway from W W C, that was the most exciting one. And I feel like-

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you combine that with, again, they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode, which will enable some of this activity as well.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we need AI, our AI Flappy Bird moment. Like Flappy Bird, I remember, was built by like a single developer, and it's that perfect example of like leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega-viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images. There was that Magic Avatar app that would make you look like Superman. That kind of went viral, but of course, it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put it on the edge. I think we will have our Flappy Bird moment for L L M-based interactions on the iPhone. I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun, and everyone will be playing with it when it happens.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  I want to stay on the topic of Apple and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's potentially a permanent differentiator in a post-AI world. There's an idea of like agency plus taste being more valuable than skills. We talked to Scott Belsky about that on Tuesday. How do you think is taste a mote? Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass and yet when we looked at it, it looked pretty cool. I don't know. I thought it looked nice.

• 1:52:13Speaker 07

  I think taste is alive and well. Maybe I'll describe Apple. If you'll permit me to describe another one of my frameworks that we've developed here at Pace is top-down and bottom-up companies. So top-down companies started by visionary charismatic founders. Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games. And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like. And so what happens is these top-down companies ship multiple flagship products over their lifecycle.

• 1:52:54Speaker 07

  So you know, we're all on, you know, Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods. You know, Tesla's obviously created every term from cars to power walls and solar panels. SpaceX not only makes rockets, but also satellite internet. Awesome. Amazing, amazing constructs. And what's interesting is the market only sees the products. And so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the company itself. Because these top-down companies hire innovators and build up this core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product.

• 1:53:36Speaker 07

  Bottom up companies, conversely, are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to pick locks, basically. And they, they, they, combined with perfect timing, capture lightning in a bottle. And what's, what's interesting about bottom up companies is that they, they only ever ship a single flagship product. This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb, most actually venture Twitter, the, where, where we are. And, and, and they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product.

• 1:54:17Speaker 07

  It's because the, the product market fit for that is so violent. That every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer. It's, it's so, so imagine like a, you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person is hired as an optimizer. There are no innovators. Why, why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1% better? And so they're actually fundamentally incapable, you can't ship a second product as a bottom up company. And a lot of bottom up companies don't know that they're bottom up companies. Because success is a terrible teacher.

• 1:54:57Speaker 07

  A lot of bottom up companies expand through M and A because the businesses are so good. They're so good.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  And then if you can buy great products, you can optimize them really well and grow them. And you look like you're, you know, you, your look, you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those sort of flagship products.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  We were talking about this with Scale AI, right? With Scale AI going to Meta, it's like, yeah, 15 billions a lot, but what if it moves the market cap 1%?

• 1:55:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  What if it optimizes their AI stack 1%?

• 1:55:29Speaker 07

  YouTube, Instagram.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:32Speaker 07

  You know, uh, uh, ByteDance buying Musically.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:35Speaker 07

  These are like, maybe some of the best investments. Over the last couple of decades and they were M and A events. Um, and so if you're a bottom up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you, you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. So going back to taste, I think taste is alive and well at Apple. Yes, because culturally that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. Uh, but it's not the same at every company. Uh, you know, I don't know. I don't know if tastes famous last year. I don't know if taste exists.

• 1:56:19Speaker 07

  At, I don't know if true taste exists at bottom up companies. I, I wonder actually if what we, what we can see

• 1:56:29Speaker 07

  from bottom up companies is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste. Because it's

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hiring a good design agency at the right time and, and you're like, oh, this, this company is so tasteful, but it's like, well, you had to spend 250 grand to, to be tasteful.

• 1:56:47Speaker 07

  It's just the most legible thing, but when, when actually like Craigslist just works great. I mean, Craigslist is a perfect example of a bottom up company. No taste required.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  I, I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework, but I would piss off too many people. So we'll let, we'll let the audience imagine for themselves, but I, but I think it's really powerful.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was fantastic. We could go way deeper into all of these frameworks. These are great, like kickoff points for big discussions. I have so many more questions. So we'll have to have you on back soon because this was fantastic.

• 1:57:23Speaker 07

  Amazing. Thanks.

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for the time.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  And in the meantime, we will talk to you about ad quick, adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient across the globe. And our next guest is coming into the studio, Joe from Infinite Machine.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to launch our out of home campaign, John.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:57:48Jordi Hays?

  We were in the, we're deep in the creative process.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  We got to pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign.

• 1:57:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  We'll hear his pitch and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised. Break it down for us.

• 1:58:02Jordi Hays?

  Launch day.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  What are you building? Launch day. Congratulations.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Show us, give us a little tour. What, what are you building?

• 1:58:09Speaker 08

  Hey guys, so you are here at our New York City facility. I'm calling from Infinite Machine and we make the best non-car vehicles on earth. And today, we are launching our second product, it's called Alto. It is a class two e-bike, but it looks nothing like an e-bike. We really thought this thing from the ground up. So it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane. It's got pedals that turn into footrests. It fits two people. It's made out of aluminum and steel. It's beautiful, it's useful, it's high-tech, it's connected to the internet. And we just announced it today.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost?

• 1:58:47Speaker 08

  Thirty-four ninety-five.

• 1:58:49Jordi Hays?

  You're giving them away. Double the price.

• 1:58:51Speaker 08

  We're giving them away.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch.

• 1:58:57Jordi Hays?

  How much? So, so, so you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a license.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  I was about to ask, yeah.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  So you basically, so somebody that's riding it, they get like hypothetically, John and I and the team, we get a bunch of, we get a fleet of these for the office and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  We're riding, it looks like we're on little motorcycles. Cops, you know, put the sirens on, they pull us over, we pull the pedals out and we're good to go. We're like, look, I'm sorry, officer, it's a bicycle. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:59:26Speaker 08

  Alright, so basically, um, most e-bikes take traditional bicycles and strapped motors and batteries to them. But bicycles were never designed to be powered. And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for, for motor power. And instead we said, okay, how can we think about this from the ground up? We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is. So if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals that are operable, meaning it has a chain. It goes 20 miles per hour as a class two e-bike or 20 or 25 miles per hour as a class three e-bike. And it's narrower than 36 inches. That's the basic constraint.

• 2:00:11Speaker 08

  And so, uh, you know, we took that brief and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  What is the barrier to going more aggressive, building it wider, taking the pedals out, uh, making it go 40 miles an hour? Then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license? Is that, is that how it works?

• 2:00:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, so if you're considered a an e-bike, you don't need a license plate.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:36Speaker 08

  And therefore, it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not really related by the federal government.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:00:41Speaker 08

  And so, yeah, like it's just a much lower friction experience. You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements. You don't need a license plate. And so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use. You don't have to deal with complex dealers. You don't need to register the thing. And yeah, you can get on and go and it's and it's excessively priced.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the go to market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores? Get them into traditional bike shops? I've been in some bike shops where they have e-bikes as well, or is this all D to C and e-commerce?

• 2:01:16Speaker 08

  So to show you quickly, we have a space here in New York. We're getting set up for an event.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:20Speaker 08

  So there's a 13,000 square foot space in New York.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:01:24Speaker 08

  And it's going to be open to the public as a store. People can come in and buy vehicles. And so we are going direct to consumer to start, but and through online.

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  But that includes retail.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Includes your own retail.

• 2:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:38Speaker 08

  Yes, to start our own facility here in New York. We're also interested and open to selling them in channel retail.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Sure. I guess it's being in Best Buy, for example, like they would be make a lot of sense for it to be there.

• 2:01:49Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about the broader explosion of e-bikes because I feel like adults nowadays, the the number one way I feel like a boomer is when, you know, some like 12 year olds with e-bikes are like, you know, ripping through traffics and and it feels like every time I I drive in the city now, at some point or another, and and in some ways, like, you know, the the boomer in me is like, oh, that those kids are being, you know, dangerous. And then and then part of me at the same time is like, it's actually makes cities much smaller now where kids can just go out and explore. But I feel like it it feels like with with Alto and and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era of this sort of

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  micro mobility, right? Maybe the first era was was the kind of sharing economy, bird, lime model. And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  But the community owned approach or or this sort of sharing economy model had had some like really, you know, big, big issues. And it does feel like, you know, actually having people own the end product, care for the end product and not be just, you know, trashing devices that are part of a network.

• 2:02:59Speaker 08

  So the way we look at it is, you know, the world as we know is urbanizing. More and more people are living in cities. And when you live in cities, things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes, you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles. And we believe that over time, more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars. They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. And our intention is to make the best of these things. Now, you're right. The first gen one micro mobility companies were all sharing oriented. We think ultimately it's not a great business model. And there's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, et cetera. But also, we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful.

• 2:03:44Speaker 08

  People love their cars. They love their vehicles, have an emotional connection to them. And ultimately, the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing, you get on it, you can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes. No hassle, the wind at your back, and it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. It's just night and day.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what's going on in China, because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility and BYD makes all sorts of stuff. And they have a very different model. You know, with so many tech companies, it's like, are you going to wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or Google's I/O? It feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this. But what's the actual dynamic? Why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware? Like, why isn't Samsung getting in on the action? Why isn't Apple doing anything here?

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Can you comment on like, the reaction to just like, the way American companies are building technology today versus the China model?

• 2:05:09Speaker 08

  I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multi-category.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:16Speaker 08

  So yeah, you go to Xiaomi and they started making phones and laptops and now they're making cars.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:21Speaker 08

  When you look at the US, the model, take a company like Apple, we love Apple, but they're very, very conservative. They stick to their lane and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware. And so, well, the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the next great American hardware company. We're starting with He One and then Alto and with vehicles at large, but we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high-tech in new ways. And so, we will be multi-category at some point. Uh, I mean, we're really building the competency to build high-end, moving, beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer, um, and do it in a way where we can move really quickly.

• 2:06:06Speaker 08

  I mean, this company, uh, I've been full-time for less than a year and a half. Uh, we have raised less than $10 million. We've productionized two motor vehicles. Uh, so we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra-lean hardware company. Um, and we're going to keep pushing and we're going to take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, it's kind of escapes the screen. And we're going to be all over that. We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff and we're building the competency to make things, uh, that take advantage of it.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Is there any? I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna speculate, but I can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse. That's fully autonomous.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:50Jordi Hays?

  And you just get to ride around the city, you know, windows down.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you see the carriages in, uh, Central Park.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Autonomous horse carriages.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  As well, for sure.

• 2:06:59Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 2:07:00Speaker 08

  Or a horse, or a robotic horse.

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  I'd love that. Yes, yes, yes. Uh, Henry Ford said if you ask, if you asked customers what they'd want, they'd say faster horse. I want a faster horse. I'd love a faster horse. They're already self-driving.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Robotic horse.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  They come out of the box, self-driving.

• 2:07:14Jordi Hays?

  So obvious.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there.

• 2:07:17Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  Well, has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now? Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain? Some companies have been fine on the battery side. The more defense application companies like Skydio run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like? I know that everyone's focused on reindustrialization in America, but it's a long journey.

• 2:07:44Speaker 08

  Things have stabilized on the tariff front. Yeah, it's not great. The world economy is highly entwined. The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles, is highly connected, connected to China and beyond. And so we are all, you know, we are fully supportive of reindustrializing America. We want to be on the cutting edge of that. We support your smart policy to do that, both, you know, carrot and stick. So tariffs are stick. You know, there's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only seen a stick. So, um, short story is, you know, it's stabilized, but honestly, I think we should be playing

• 2:08:28Speaker 08

  offense as America and we're not yet. We're, we're, we're using kind of protectionist measures.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about making these vehicles safer using technology. I, I, I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of, of, you know, better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it very, very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in like 2014 and then kind of disappeared. But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20, 30 years ago. What, what, what, what technology trends are you benefiting from?

• 2:09:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, on the safety front, these are lower speed vehicles. So you're not moving at, you know, highway speeds. And so the name of the game is awareness. People, not just for the rider, but also for people around you. So that's emitting a sound that's being highly visible. And that is alerting the rider when there are issues. And we do that stuff. You know, I think over time, we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do alerting and also to take over the vehicle when that presents itself. But to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding e-bikes right now. If we can make them 10%, 15% safer, that's a big win. And that's where we're starting.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  Talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's talk about getting them. And let's getting Alto in the hands of us. We're going to configure one for each person on the team.

• 2:10:11John Coogan?

  We're going to be bombing around.

• 2:10:12Jordi Hays?

  And then we're just going to be emailing you every day. Hey, hey, what's the wait time?

• 2:10:19Speaker 08

  We are offering, we call internally the Burning Man shipping option, which is straight from the factory in August before Burning Man. If you shop for non-Burning Man shipping, that costs 4,500 bucks. But if you offer non-Burning Man shipping, that will arrive in late September, early October. So, you know, they're shipping quickly. We are about to start mass production. And maybe for you guys, we'll expedite a few.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man. You can imagine, you know, if you can get a density of these on the playa, the number of Instagram stories, posts, etc., it's going to be absolutely wild.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, what about storage? Like, what are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment? Or do most buildings these days have like, like, safe places to store e-bikes or parking garages for these things?

• 2:11:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, so one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You park the vehicle outside, it's fully weatherproof. It has an onboard security system, it's virtually impossible to steal hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge. You can take the battery out of the seat, weighs 20 pounds. It's a hot swappable battery. Take it up to your apartment and then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet. So, super simple.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  So you charge it overnight and then just take it out with you every morning?

• 2:11:49Speaker 08

  Six hours to charge. We also have a supercharger. It takes three hours for a couple hundred bucks and yeah.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  Anything else?

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Please make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump. I just think it would be fun.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask, when can we get these in the X Games? That's the marketing strategy here, you know? I wanna see, I wanna see the big jump, you know, monster truck rally. Let's push these to the limits, really show people what's capable of.

• 2:12:15Jordi Hays?

  I think we should get one and put the full TVP and racing livery on it.

• 2:12:17John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  You know, ramp on there, all the different partners.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Are we doing like Pike's Peak or are we doing like Half Pipe? Like, well, what's gonna go most viral here?

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  All of it, all of it.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm super, I'm super, you know, this, this is one of the, I, I love businesses and products where you take something that seems like, you know, seems like it's competitive and then you, you spend a hundred times, you know, you, you, you be a hundred times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it. And you create, you know, an entirely new.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Also, shipping before Christmas, I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree. It's rarer and rarer.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  It's bigger Christmas trees.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  It's rarer and rarer these days because everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs and all of this is digital now. So it's very hard to find something to give to someone. Although this is obviously like a, a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing. We've been recommending that people give each other, you know, sales tax software or potentially corporate cards. But I think, I think this is gonna be added to our Christmas list this year.

• 2:13:26Speaker 08

  I think this is a little bit more fun.

• 2:13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Speaker 08

  And people can place, if they, if folks wanna make sure they get one for the holiday season, they could put a deposit down now. It's a hundred bucks.

• 2:13:34John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:13:34Speaker 08

  And it's fully refundable, so.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:37Speaker 08

  And save your configuration.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to give it a try.

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  Great talking.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Very excited for you guys.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. If you're, if you're operating a Wander, you gotta get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around on. That would be fantastic. Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, Ojai, any, any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling. And if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  Wander allows you to go golden retriever mode because you just don't have to think about anything. You just be chasing the ball, chasing the beach.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Well, we have Zach again from Plaid, third time on the show. Welcome to the stream. Great to see you. It's always a pleasure. I'm always blown away when you join because it's always so much fun talking to you. So thanks so much for joining. Great to have you. What's, what's the latest in your world?

• 2:14:35Zachary Perret?

  Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and it's always fun.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  So much fun.

• 2:14:39Zachary Perret?

  Latest in our world is we did Plaid FX today. This is our annual customer conference where we announce a bunch of the stuff that we've been working on for the past year. It's been super fun. The biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this amazing, cutting-edge anti-fraud product. Looks at all the data across all of the, all of the usage and the data flowing through a Plaid network and builds a really great anti-fraud tool. Yeah, that's the headline of the day.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  How, how one-shot-able is fraud these days? Can you just pipe a ton of customer data into like a single context window and just ask, and can the prompt just be like, is this fraud now? Or is it, is it still like leveraging all the traditional fraud tools?

• 2:15:20Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the hard part is twofold. First is you have to put all of your historical data in it to say, hey, is this pattern anomalous? Is something weird going on here? So the question is like, can you, can you get all of your data into that? And in Plaid's case, can you take all the data that we see across all of the fintech apps and all the users and say, hey, what are the patterns that are occurring consistently? So for example, you know, if you sign up for, for Coinbase today, that might be a totally normal sign up. You sign up for Lending Club today, and you just signed up for six other lending products today, then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out. And so like, can you, can you, can you get all this data all in one place? That's, that's problem number one. The problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it?

• 2:16:03Zachary Perret?

  Because fraud changes every day. Some of that is algorithmic. So are the algorithms like chasing the fraudsters in the way that they need to? Some of that is manual. So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say, Hey, I heard from, I've seen this thing going on, or I heard from some other, some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring. Can you search for it and tell me, is that actually occurring to me? And then can I build some rules to protect against it? So it is a constantly evolving game.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how important is this problem? I feel like every American should just default, assume that their information is like floating around the internet, available to the highest bidder. And so like, in some ways, like the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity. Is that, is that reality?

• 2:16:46Zachary Perret?

  That is the reality. Financial fraud is going up around 25% a year right now. Some of that is, or actually a lot of that is AI driven. So, you know, people are using AI tools to send text messages, to convince people to do certain things. I think, yeah, one answer is absolutely tools. And we're trying to build the best in class tools and give it to all the fintech companies. And particularly, we'll go well beyond fintech with these products. Yeah, there is just education, like explaining to consumers how it works. So, you know, my, my parents and I, we have a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other end of the line if we're sending money or probably doing anything that requires authentication. Those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day to day processes are always helpful. But it's a combination of tools and processes and so forth.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Can you talk to us about impossible travel problems? I found out about this yesterday, where, where someone's logging in from Singapore three hours after they were in San Francisco and they couldn't possibly be there. Is that something that, that you're already built a tool around? Is that, is that kind of like table stakes? Or are there, are there like evolutions there?

• 2:17:53Zachary Perret?

  Yeah. So I mean, a lot of the, the way that the anti-fraud product works, it's called Protect. It's got a bunch of these different analysis, analyses that we do. So there's, there's, I think, just under 20 different analyses that are running now, and we're adding more every day. And one of them is location tracking. So we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app? And then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user's account in a different place, all right, great. Well, that's, that's actually, you know, it's an impossible travel question. And so that will immediately generate a flag. There's a bunch of these other things. Like, we look at stuff like, how long has this bank account existed? Turns out, a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud, and an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud. We do stuff, same thing for the phone number. How long has this phone number existed? And there's, so there's a zillion of these analyses that then run into

• 2:18:37Zachary Perret?

  a bunch of statistical work that we do on top of it. But, you know, every time you look At a fraudster or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect. So you can look back and say, oh yeah, obviously, you know, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California two hours later. That's impossible. But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, like, can you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist? And that's, that's, that's the complexity that we focus on.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  So, so I imagine at one point, this was like very heuristic driven, very like a multi-variable regression almost just saying, like, here are the different fraud factors, let's add up like a risk score. Have these products moved to a transformer architecture? Are we using L L M's in them? Are we using modern A I tools? Or, or, or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the, the, the existing, the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years? Like, I don't know how relevant the new models are. People are kind of like throwing transformers and diffusion and everything right now. And I don't know if that's appropriate here.

• 2:19:40Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes to all the above. It is not heavily transformer driven yet in terms of fighting fraud, though increasingly it is becoming that way. We definitely use L L M's for a bunch of things like auto building tools, like doing some of the data cleansing and so forth on the back. But yeah, it, it, fraud is a fascinating industry because if you talk to any company, their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform. Right? They want the fraud to be more expensive for a fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else. And so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing. They want like the, the, the new type of fraud solution.

• 2:20:18Zachary Perret?

  But then eventually everything that's new becomes table stakes for everyone because, you know, you kind of have to have it. Yeah. And so, you know, we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture, but it's still early days.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:29Zachary Perret?

  To use transformers to actually solve.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  To me, this product feels like something that's just possible with like massive scale. Like you probably wanted to build something like this, like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, but, but couldn't just because you didn't have like the, the sort of broad exposure to all these different touchpoints. Is that right?

• 2:20:47Zachary Perret?

  I mean, this was the pitch that I was giving for Plaid in like 2014. Basically, my pitch was that when we get big enough, we're going to have a lot of data and we're going to build these analytics that financial services doesn't have. Because, you know, no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it. It took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff. And then we acquired Cognito, an ID verification company in 2022, which is a big catalyst. I mean, in part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, look, come use our data, put it together with your data and then think of all the amazing anti-fraud tools you could build. So, I mean, this stuff always happens slower than you want it to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  How much of this, like fraud, right now, financial fraud is kind of acting as like a tax on fintech companies? And should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools to go after the fraudsters like at the source? And just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud?

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think one of the big, the big challenges is in, in crypto, a lot of fraudulent activity is happening. And, and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China. And if you just go to, if you go to some, if you go to the Chinese government and you say like, we know exactly who's doing this, they don't, they're not going to act on it.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the answer is yes, yes to all the above, like the government should be more active in this. Again, much of the, as you said, much of the fraud doesn't stem from people that are inside the US. So it's not the US government doing it. I'm sure you guys have been following, or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering. It's like a horrible name for a type of fraud. Like they have these, these, these humans in fraud rings in like Malaysia.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  Relationships with people, right?

• 2:22:29Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, exactly. And like they're, they're often government sponsored or at least government like affiliated in some way. Like there's, there's knowledge in the government that, that happened. And so, I mean, you know, and if that is happening, great, yes, we could, we could give better data to the Malaysian government, but also you got to build the tools.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  What about, um, I don't know how much you can comment on this, but you know, there's been a lot of discussion recently and frustration. And at least after the Coinbase, um, you know, user data issues around like KYC's KYC laws and effectively the government requiring people to retain all this data.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that there would ever be any movement in DC around really updating these laws to protect, to help protect user data? Or is it just one of those things that we have to live with?

• 2:23:19Zachary Perret?

  I mean, you would think they should. I mean, realistically, yeah, the concept that if you're a bank and I sign up for your bank, you have to collect all of my most sensitive data and then you have to store it forever in your database. On a scale of forever in many, many databases, you have to assume that those databases will be hacked. Thus, you have to assume that on the scale of forever, your data is all going to be public. And so it doesn't make sense that you would retain it. You should, in theory, collect it, verify it, like get, say, a token that it exists, like get some assurance that it exists and then delete it. It seems like I would hope that the regulations change. I think it's, you know, regulations move as fast as regulations move. And so I'm not sure that it's going to be imminent in that sense.

• 2:24:03Zachary Perret?

  But on the flip side, like, the industry is solving it. The industry is building tools that are better and better. Relying on a static social security number, sure, yeah, we'll do it. That's fine if we have to for regulatory reasons. But the reality is if social security number entry is your only fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, like, you're in a bad place as it is.

• 2:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:24:23Zachary Perret?

  So the industry will solve it, basically.

• 2:24:26Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk, this got kind of lost among other massive news cycles, but there were some updates to Dodd-Frank 1033 that a few weeks ago. You guys, talking offline, were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers. Can you give us kind of an overview of what happened? I know, I think when we were in DC, you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well.

• 2:24:55Zachary Perret?

  Totally. Yeah, I think this is a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should. So in the Dodd-Frank law, they wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data and they can assign that access to third parties such as PLED to act on their behalf. And then there was never any rule written on that. It was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB, no rule written for a long time. Under Trump first, first administration.

• 2:25:28Zachary Perret?

  Kathy Kranginger, the head of the CFPB at the time, started writing the rule for this. It then continued into the Rohit Chopra era of CFPB under Biden. The rule that emerged from that was a very far reaching, huge overstep of a rule.

• 2:25:43Zachary Perret?

  And in the second Trump administration, now there's a push to either pare back or get rid of the rule. What actually happened is the day that the rule was published by Rohit Chopra, a group of the banks sued, you know, that same day, meaning they had the lawsuit pre-prepared beforehand and just clicked submit. And so that that kind of is ongoing. The wrinkle that's come up recently is that the currency CFPB has basically said something effective. Yes, we agree with the banks, we should get rid of the rule, but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulatory things that were set up and could actually put at risk some of the ways that open banking works in the United States today.

• 2:26:26Zachary Perret?

  Meaning it could it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem. And they could try to turn off data in certain areas, they should try to limit data in certain areas. They could more more likely, what's going to happen is they're going to try to limit certain industries. So if you remember, you know, a couple of years ago, there was this big de-banking thing that went on where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah, this would give them the ability to turn off crypto. This would give them the ability to turn off, you know, gaming or things like that. Or basically any any industry that they might feel is competitive with them. And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group. It would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this. And so we think that, you know, we don't mind getting rid of the rule.

• 2:27:10Zachary Perret?

  We just don't want to foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products that they interact with. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  Did you have a reaction to this, the Circle IPO? You know, obviously performed very well, but and and stablecoins have been in the news. But I'm interested to hear kind of like what the next most exciting instantiations of that technology might be. I was talking to a payroll company CEO and he was kind of mentioning that, yes, it's lower fees and faster, but. Interestingly, stablecoins might allow them to kind of recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way that I wasn't expecting. So like the, the, the, the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to kind of

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  custody their own treasuries essentially through stablecoins. What have you been seeing in the stablecoin world broadly? What are the interesting knock on effects? How much excitement is there among stablecoins from your partners?

• 2:28:13Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, I mean, there, there, there's a ton. Yeah, there's a lot of amazing companies. I think you talked to pretty, have you already talked to them? You're going to talk to them?

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just an hour ago. Just earlier.

• 2:28:20Zachary Perret?

  Great. Yeah. I mean, you actually got to them. Like amazing to see what they built. And yeah, it's very exciting for the ecosystem. And I think, you know, from our perspective, what's happening in stablecoins right now is not what will happen. And so what's happening right now, a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge. A lot of people are using it for cross-border payouts or, or, or money transfers that otherwise would just be frictionful. And then, you know, a lot of people are using it just as a, as a, as a form of a savings account that has higher yield. And while those are all big Tams, it's not that, that interesting relative to the rest of what, what, what could go on in financial services. I think increasingly, we're going to see more and more consumers having the ability to move money easily between, say, a bank account and a crypto wallet, holding something

• 2:29:04Zachary Perret?

  in USDC or, or, or another, another stablecoin. And yeah, you're right, there, there are big opportunities for people to hold elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest off of it. Increasingly, I think that, that, that float, which was historically held on to by the platforms, may well get shared more and more with, with the underlying companies. So payroll companies, if the float was all held at the bank, now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float. And so that's a huge new revenue stream for them, while interest rates are what they are, I will say. So that'll create increasing volatility in their, in their revenue streams. Because if interest rates go down, then obviously the float goes down. And so I do think that that's, that's, that's a, a big potential thing that a lot of, a lot of companies might want to. Also,

• 2:29:46Zachary Perret?

  offering more tender types allows a lot of the large platforms to keep dollars on their platform more. And so you see some of the big payments processors, and their goal obviously is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of the float. And offering more tender types, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in, in, in crypto, you could hold it in a stablecoin. That keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives them with more leverage and, and more revenue in the long term.

• 2:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What are you guys doing on the MCP side? I know you had some announcements recently there.

• 2:30:17Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, so that was another big part of the announcement today. I mean, the short answer is like MCPs make it easier for developers to build. I think the concept of a REST API was new when we started Plaid because everything was on soap. Now, the concept of, you know, writing to a raw API without using Cursor or Windsurf or something like that is increasingly becoming rare and will become rare over time. And so really for us, it's just staying on the cutting edge, building tools that help developers build faster on Plaid and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage, their interaction with our system, so on and so forth. So it's fun. It's really fun.

• 2:30:49John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any type of broad thesis around how agent, you know, I think there's like a lot of narrative around, okay, agents will just default use crypto assets or, or, you know, anything around that. Anytime there's sort of an-

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  MCPV2, it's coming.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative, I just, you know, want to kind of push deeper. I'm curious if you have strong opinions.

• 2:31:11Zachary Perret?

  I do not think they will default to use crypto assets. I think crypto assets might be easier at first, but look, the bank account is already effectively a digital first product. Whereas now is a digital first product, did not start that way, certainly. Cards are not yet fully digital first, but are moving that direction. Like still, you have to know a 16-digit card number to actually like authenticate a card. Whereas bank accounts have a lot already set up. And then it could have, the next phase of that is obviously crypto. This crypto starts being digital native, and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things. My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to these, to LLMs and to agents.

• 2:31:53Zachary Perret?

  But it's going to take a little while for the industry to evolve, but fast forward two, three years and it'll be all the same.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  Very cool. Anything else, Dory?

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Congrats.

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, did Chesky tell you to move to this kind of release cycle? Or have you been doing it for a while? It's sort of the Chesky, it's the Chesky playbook, the Chesky method of entrepreneurship.

• 2:32:14Zachary Perret?

  We've been doing it for a little while, but man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it. And all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it. So maybe we were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from listening to their playbook.

• 2:32:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the the the the jobs approach, you know, walked so the chess key method could run.

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to read through the the other announcements later and come back on anytime.

• 2:32:42John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much. Cheers.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:32:53Jordi Hays?

  I love that.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  They got Texas Timex.

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  There was one YC team yesterday that had the Daytona and the and the Texas Timex.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, the day date was good. I saw JLC Reverso.

• 2:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, when we called the founders on it, they were like.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't want to know.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  They were embarrassed. It's not super YC coded to have a to have a hitter on the wrist, but nothing to be embarrassed.

• 2:33:13John Coogan?

  Throw 100K into a Patac, you know?

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  No, no, that's the Cluley method. Absolutely not.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  That is the Cluley method, no. Build a generational company and then buy a nice piece on Bezel for your for your father. Father's Day is coming up. Head over to Bezel.

• 2:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Get your dad a watch.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Create.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Let's check in with our intern Tyler, who's pivoting from computer science to art history. What do you got for us, Tyler? Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now. That's fantastic.

• 2:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so earlier I was thinking like, I think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats.

• 2:33:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:48Speaker 02

  So I took two different tests. The first one was the it was an AP art history practice exam.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  So you know, it's like for high schoolers. I heard high schoolers like pretty dumb.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:58Speaker 02

  I thought I'd do pretty well. I got 12 out of 29, so that's 41%.

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay, failing.

• 2:34:03Speaker 02

  So I have, you know, some some place to go there. And then I also took like, you know, maybe that exam is just like weirdly, you know, it's like very specific knowledge or something. I took another exam. This was the Britannica art history quiz. On that one, I got 24 out of 60.

• 2:34:21Speaker 02

  That's 40%, so, you know, I have a lot of room to grow. Well, there's about an hour left of the show, so.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Were you using Cursor for Art History to answer those questions?

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I was not, but that was earlier in the show. I have been studying, so I think I'm gonna take it, you know, 20 minutes before the show ends.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:40Speaker 02

  We'll see how I do then.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  But I was also kind of just looking, you know, at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into?

• 2:34:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:49Speaker 02

  So, like, if you kind of want to stay in the art world, there's basically, you work in a museum, or you work in kind of art dealership. Like a gallery? Yeah. So first I looked at kind of becoming like a museum curator. For that, it's, you basically need a PhD.

• 2:35:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:06Speaker 02

  So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends. But I was looking at art dealership. And obviously, like, for that, you kind of need some funding to start with. So I took Producer Ben's ramp card.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:18Speaker 02

  Laid down some art pieces that are gonna come in next couple of weeks.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  There you go. So, yeah, I'm already starting this career. I'm feeling pretty good about myself. You flip those pieces, bake it all back, pay off the ramp card, we're in business.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we will be checking in with his IRR, seeing if he can beat the average venture fund.

• 2:35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, just beat the market. Yeah, it's that easy.

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  Amazing. Great work, Tyler.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, making lots of, lots of promising, promising progress. That's very good.

• 2:35:49John Coogan?

  Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann says that we'll know AI is transformative when it passes the economic touring test. This is something I was talking about earlier. Give an AI agent a job for a month. Let the hiring manager choose, human or machine. When they pick the machine, more often than not, we've crossed the threshold. We've been talking about the economic touring test for a while. I'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow. Maybe it needs its own coinage. Maybe we need to dig into Anthropic more deeply. But we have the perfect guest for that. We have Sharon from Bloomberg joining us right now. Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing?

• 2:36:27Speaker 09

  Good. Thanks for having me.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for being here. I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear writing fantastic pieces. Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about. What did you learn from the piece that you wrote about Anthropic and Dario? We haven't had a chance to have him on the show. We talked to Sholto. They have an interesting culture, interesting history. Can you give us your kind of 50,000-foot view on the company, what they stand for today, and maybe how that's changed?

• 2:36:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of ideological ethos, which is around building AI safely and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were. And then also to deliver on the business value, right? So I was kind of, I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been with Dario at the helm, even though he has this very deep research science background. He's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly, double, and now there's other reporting about tripling revenue. So, you know, that's sort of where

• 2:37:40Speaker 09

  they're at. But as you get more money, as you get more, you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, you know, how does that translate into pressure to move really fast at the same time that you're trying to be responsible?

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  Did you get a sense that they have a, they have a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships? Because they've done a deal with Amazon, I believe. They were just mentioned at WWDC as plugging into Xcode. It feels like they're trying to maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider. They seem to be doing very well in coding and with, on the enterprise side. How much of that is deliberate or just like it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was?

• 2:38:24Speaker 09

  I mean, so in my reporting, like, it was very deliberate, their strategy to, first of all, not lock in with any one hyperscaler, right? So they have both Google and Amazon as partners on the front. That kind of hedging, I think, was very calculated. And also, they, you know, Dario, in my interviews, he's been pretty dismissive of our reporting about Stargate, saying it's not clear exactly what it is. And I think his stance is that sort of you can, you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it. At least, that's what he sort of publicly to me, right? But as you said, like, I think the pressure's on, right, for them to deliver and show that they can. He invented scaling laws, but can you actually build up the compute and pay for it to do that?

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety? I was very, I never really got caught up in the paper clipping and the AI Doom narrative. But after seeing

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  That's what every, that's what every human says right before they get paper cut, John.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  But, but, but after seeing DeepSeek drop in the Anthropic paper about Manchurian candidates, or what was it, secret hidden agents? I forget the term that they use, but essentially, sleeper agents, embedding something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain webpage. It discovers that, hey, I'm not just running, you know, in some random solo devs cursor instance, I'm actually inside the NSA. I should go around and do something else. And that really flipped a bit in my mind to say, okay, safety research is actually maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable, because people will want to do safety evaluations on

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  the models that they use. How has the safety rhetoric evolved at Anthropic over the last couple of years in your, in your, in your reporting?

• 2:40:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think, you know, AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of hypothetical thought experiments like the paperclip experiment for a very long time, like predating even Dario Emada's right entry onto the scene. However, I think in Anthropic, what I've seen evolve is they're starting to outline and try, they're trying to be as concrete as possible to explain like what the risks are, what the different levels of risks are. They made a whole responsible scaling kind of document framework to say, okay, it's kind of modeled after how biological labs are that are very high risk and how, okay, if what you're working on is this level of biological risk, then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety. So that's

• 2:40:56Speaker 09

  how they viewed it in Anthropic. And so, you know, when I was reporting this out, they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to be able to handle. And then they did extra tests and they're like, okay, no, we're all right for this release, but we better get up to par.

• 2:41:13Jordi Hays?

  What time period was that? Was that like an hour or like 10 days or a month?

• 2:41:18Speaker 09

  So, you know, Dario told me they basically had to delay, not this release, but the last big one, by something like nearly a week. Because at the, sort of in the final days leading up to the release, their safety team, you know, one of the red teaming group came to them and were like, listen, like this model actually may be more capable than we thought. Right? So I do think that's, that's a challenge, right? Is taking these really hypothetical, seemingly kind of sci-fi scenarios and translating it to like, well, when is that actually going to happen at our lab? And what do you have to do to protect yourself? And it's both physical security, like making sure no one can break into your lab or something

• 2:41:59Speaker 09

  like that. But it's also, you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from saying, I think, I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about was the biological one, right? And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned, that could someone use this to come up with a novel bioweapon?

• 2:42:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure. There's an interesting, there's an interesting dynamic with safety teams where If you're sitting there with a team of, let's call it 20 something people, and you're costing the company tens of million, you know, I don't know,

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:30Jordi Hays?

  10 million dollars a year. It's not a, you're not going to feel that like your, your, your job, your job's that safe? If you're, if you're never sounding the alarm.

• 2:42:39John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:42:40Jordi Hays?

  So there's kind of an incentive to be like, oh, this feels a little dangerous. Let's look into it.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  I mean, there's also just so many other dynamics at play, and I think people always dig into this like, uh, you know, our model's too powerful. That's a great marketing line. It, it, it's too good, like, you know, you could never give it to the, the wild. It's too powerful. Uh, and then there's also, um, it, it's also maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a, have a productive launch. You need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh yeah, it's a safety issue. So there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused. I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like, uh, you know, we, we noticed this with, uh, with, with the Lama 4 launch, uh, they haven't been able to release Behemoth yet, and they had some,

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  some issues with, uh, benchmarking, but notably, they didn't say it was a safety issue. And that would have almost been an easy out, and it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago, but the, the, the community, the developer community just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore. I don't know if you had any reactions to the, to the Lama 4 development?

• 2:43:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, I have, you know, in my own interviews with Dario, I've asked him about this and, um, you know, he has been upfront, like, we, we reported on, you know, there were delays to, um, just this latest big release, right? The latest, uh, Sonnet, they're kind of,

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:00Speaker 09

  or sorry, is it Opus? Whatever the biggest one is, I'm forgetting all the specific names right now. And, um, you know, we, we have reported on, on these delays. We were, we wrote, you know, um, a big article about how, um, scaling laws, at least with the pre-training side of these models, were starting to slow down. And, you know, Anthropic, in my, in my reporting with Dario, he was pretty upfront that like, that wasn't a safety, like, you know, that big delay was not, that big model being, um, later than some of their early projections, that's because they were facing kind of the same technological problems that I think many labs are facing, right? And ultimately, they did release it. So, but I think people, you know, there, there, it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation. When they say something slowed down, I think I saw no evidence for that in this specific case.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about the most recent deal, Meta acquiring Scale AI. Forty-nine percent of the company is changing hands, I believe, at around fourteen or fifteen billion dollars.

• 2:44:56Jordi Hays?

  Spiritually, the whole thing.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. What has been your reaction and what have you learned from reporting on that?

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you just covered that they have a new CEO, so.

• 2:45:09Speaker 09

  We just reported that, yeah, per, you know, per our sources, that they have picked the new CEO to be Jason Drogi, former VP. He's currently, you know, at scale, being promoted, and he was formerly an Uber VP and formerly also a partner in VC at Benchmark. So, but, you know, that's just, that's just the latest, right? We kind of, we have really been breaking the news on this front. We had a scoop this Saturday night that we were the first ones to report that these talks were happening for Meta to make this multi-billion investment in Scale. I think it really caught, you know, a lot of people by surprise in the industry. This is a huge investment planned on Meta's front, right? Probably their biggest ever

• 2:45:50Speaker 09

  in a company. And I think it's, you know, I think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full-on founder mode and try to catch up on AI. And this last Lama 4 release was, you know, widely considered a disappointment. And so, how do you, how do you change course?

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  Bring in fresh blood.

• 2:46:10Speaker 09

  Right, big investment and the superintelligence lab. And he's recruiting engineers, we've reported on that. They're making crazy high offers, right? They will open, Bazuck will open the checkbook for the top talent.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the interesting thing that stood out about some of, you know, people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, oh, you could make, you know.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Nine figures was the number.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, nine figures. But you have to look, if you're trying to recruit somebody that joined OpenAI two, three years ago, they're probably run rating at ten million dollars a year already on a full, fully loaded comp basis. So I think it makes sense. What have you learned about the future of the Scale business, right? Is Jason gonna be, you know, pounding the pavement, trying to? Get more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of scale competitors right now that are saying like, hey, we're gonna take a lot of

• 2:47:07Jordi Hays?

  They're foaming at the mouth.

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Because, yeah, we're gonna use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, do you want to do business with the company that's owned by Facebook or Meta?

• 2:47:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really unclear what's gonna happen with the future of scale's business. You know, obviously, the Meta investment, you know, that's expected. You could see partnerships happening there on that front, but what will happen with the other customers? I think we don't know. And what will happen with, yeah, other competitors in the space? Could they start to, right, gain ground as scale deepens its ties with Meta? We'll see. I think what we do know, you know, we have reported that Alex Wang plans to join Meta. I think for Meta, he is seen as someone who is just sort of reinvigorating, right? Their AI team and this renewed AI effort.

• 2:47:59Speaker 09

  He's a big name. He's incredibly savvy, you know, very well connected and built a real business with scale. So, you know, I think that's where we're in the middle of, you know, of the deal. We're waiting, you know, to see the, all the official details sort of as this plays out.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Earlier this week, Bill Gurley was talking about the M and A markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening. Tech was laying the blame at the foot of Lina Khan. For a long time, Lina Khan's obviously out. Why do you think the big tech companies are still using that playbook?

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  She's still posting, though. She's still reposting stuff about being anti-monopolistic.

• 2:48:40John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:48:41Jordi Hays?

  So she's, you know, she's around.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  Is this more just like, this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle generally, even without, even in a different administration? And so it's just gonna be continually used?

• 2:48:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't think this is an asset that Meta would want to own, just generally, right? You wouldn't want to fully own

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  It is a different business, right?

• 2:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Because you're dealing with tens of thousands of offshore contractors, right? Is that something that Meta wants?

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Don't they already do that with those?

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but they've had issues, sure, but they've also had issues with the liability.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, sorry.

• 2:49:14Speaker 09

  So, of course, you know, Lina Khan is known to be, you know, aggressive on going after, you know, monopolistic behavior, and especially in the tech market. Doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not going to scrutinize these kinds of deals, right? I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals. I think, you know, companies never want to raise too many eyebrows with regulators. And even if people are from different political parties, we have seen Republican-controlled FTC sometimes, you know, I mean, that is part of their job, right, is to review these sorts of large transactions.

• 2:49:52Speaker 09

  So that may be why, you know, we're continuing to still see, you know, companies not want to go too far on that front.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Can we move over to Microsoft? It feels like Satya Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space. And now the game is about holding on to it. It seems like they might be back to training their own language models. At the same time, at the last Microsoft Build keynote, he was distinctly highlighting how model-agnostic Azure was and how they would be happy to route you to any OpenAI model, any DeepSeek model, any Llama model. They want to be Switzerland, but at the same time, they want to have a horse in the race. So what's the latest thinking around Microsoft?

• 2:50:39Speaker 09

  I mean, I report on Microsoft more in the context of OpenAI. So I'm not the Microsoft expert. I will say that, yeah, obviously, we've seen, we've seen more tension around the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship lately. And what that means, I think OpenAI is also diversifying, right? They're working with other hyperscalers now for Stargate. They have Oracle on board, they have SoftBank financing. So this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. And I think that goes both ways.

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:10Jordi Hays?

  What is the dynamic right now in the reporter, in the reporter talent space? It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire, you know, new, net new information and actually get scoops is, is higher than ever. What is the dynamic right now? We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and layoffs at different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing.

• 2:51:37Speaker 09

  I mean, I, I think that the value of reporting, like a real, original reporting and going

• 2:51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, original reporting.

• 2:51:43Speaker 09

  Getting scoops, getting people to share with you information that isn't public. That takes a lot of human skill that at least in my job, I, you know, I don't think that's replaceable by AI for now.

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that, that, that's what I was getting at. I do think at some point, maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to, you know, 200 employees

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  Got anything to share?

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  At, at, you know, a single given time. But, uh, but yeah, that, that, that tracks.

• 2:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, in, in terms of the Stargate project, were you able to go visit as part of the reporting? Can you give us kind of the lay of the land and on what, uh, who, who the, who the major players are and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the, in the progress in Abilene has been?

• 2:52:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, for sure. Well, shout out to my colleague, Brody Ford. I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after. He actually went out to Abilene for me because I was, I was unable to one day that we could go or whatever. And it's astounding. I mean, I saw the pictures, I got the live feed. It is expansive. Like, I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures, video or go there. And, you know, I think that there was a lot of, like, there was sort of a lot of people doubting if Stargate was even real. And I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project, like exactly, you know, where the other sites will be. They've said they plan 10 more, at least in the US. We don't know exactly like how the financing will work.

• 2:53:11Speaker 09

  Stargate, we talked to Masasun for this, who's obviously, you know, soft bank's leading the financing. They said that's project by project, we'll go step by step. But I think what we can learn from Abilene is like, at least that first site, that Abilene site is very real. Like it is happening, there is being built out, we've seen the pace of it. So you know, that could end up being kind of a template or a test case, right? For how, how, um, how much Starlight can, can execute in the future on all of its promises.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Anything else, Jordy? Makes a ton of sense, no.

• 2:53:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Get a reach out when you got your next scoop.

• 2:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:47Jordi Hays?

  You can share some more context. This is great.

• 2:53:49Speaker 09

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.

• 2:53:56John Coogan?

  We have Cameron from Nominal coming on the show next. Oh, he's already in the studio.

• 2:53:59Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  Jordy, I'll let you take the intro. I gotta run.

• 2:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Welcome in.

• 2:54:11Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on, Cameron? Welcome to the show.

• 2:54:14Cameron McCord?

  Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you guys.

• 2:54:16Jordi Hays?

  You've, uh, you've been busy since the last time. I don't, I don't actually know when that was. Maybe it feels like maybe a month or, or two ago, but time flies.

• 2:54:23Cameron McCord?

  I think it was, yeah, I think it was about a month ago and the fun, the fun fact with that is, um, that was like right in the middle of the 10 day, you know, Series B, uh, fundraiser sprint. Um, so I-

• 2:54:36Jordi Hays?

  Just absolute chaos.

• 2:54:38Cameron McCord?

  Absolute chaos. And, um, you know, people will appreciate this. Connor, Connor Love from Lightspeed Ventures posted, uh, or, you know, tweeted earlier today, but I was actually taking that, uh, that prior TVB and a call from the Lightspeed office here, uh, like in between.

• 2:54:53Jordi Hays?

  No way. No way. So he was, he was able to see, all right, how, how does Cam handle himself, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, uh, TV-like setting? Not that we're-

• 2:55:02Cameron McCord?

  Exactly. It was a good tactic. He was like, hey, do you want to be on this and just take it from, you know, take it from our office and then, you know, so.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Break down, break down the new round, um, kind of how it came together, who the different players, all that good stuff.

• 2:55:14Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited. Yeah, we're announcing a $75 million Series B. Uh, that is, there we go.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:55:23Cameron McCord?

  Led by, led by Sequoia, um, and particularly Alfred Lin, um, is going to be joining, joining Nominal's board. Um, and then as we mentioned, um, there's an additional investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, combination of Guru Chahal there and Connor Love. Um, which we're really excited about. And then existing investment from, uh, from our investors at General Catalyst, Lux and Founders Fund. Um, so it's-

• 2:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Basically, you're collecting, you're collecting them all at this point.

• 2:55:51Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, gotta-

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how many-

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Talk about business progress since the last call. I'm sure things are moving really quickly.

• 2:56:01Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, things are moving really quickly. I mean, we, you know, we're raising this capital to accelerate, just to go faster. You know, really, three big things we're going to do with this. The first is kind of continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises. We're very proud to say, you know, many of the startups and scale ups building in this new hardware wave are nominal customers. And that is going to keep growing. But, you know, recently, we've been taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies, you know, defense primes. And the traction has been really, really positive. We're also expanding internationally. So we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe and we're going to keep doing that.

• 2:56:42Cameron McCord?

  The second big thing is product development. And so we, you know, we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's going to require multiple products. We've started, our original thrust is around testing, but we're having customers pull us in, linking testing to more quality, acceptance, testing, production, manufacturing, and then later in the lifecycle saying, hey, I use nominal to build all of the software, you know, build all the rules and logic that governs how my system works under test. And I actually just want to, you know, version control that, organize it, and I want to deploy that on my asset when it's in the field.

• 2:57:23Cameron McCord?

  And more of a monitoring, sort of fleet monitoring, fleet maintenance use case. So we're building products and we're going to be expanding. So that's where the funding is going.

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How big is the market for this? Or how should I think about the market? Is this, is this something where there's a lot of incumbents that you can kind of go after and pull away from?

• 2:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Eat alive.

• 2:57:41John Coogan?

  Or?

• 2:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Eat alive.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:43Cameron McCord?

  Eat alive. Yeah.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  Or are we, are we kind of like disaggregating test functions across all the companies and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations?

• 2:57:56Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, it's really, um, you know, the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give like a quick, you know, update, a kind of the status quo world. And so I think we see, pretty much everywhere we go, that testing is too slow. And really, you have a scenario A where people are using 1990 software. It's pre-cloud. So it's, it is like, especially in aerospace and more industrial world, software that was built before the the notion of like centralizing data even existed. It's uh, it's crazy. And and if people are really frustrated with it. So those are, you think of things like, um, you know, Siemens or Emerson or National Instruments, which I had to kind of mention last time. So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend. Like people, people spend a ton of money there.

• 2:58:41Cameron McCord?

  Um, those are billion dollar businesses that that we are excited to be be disrupting. And I think the second area is where people are taking new software and new data technologies that are not designed for hardware at all, in the least, and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this like tool chain for testing. And nominal is just a better way. Um, and so that's sort of, you know, showing, showing these organizations what the future can look like, um, and delivering that value and and and they're willing to pay for it.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  What what kind of metrics do you track outside of core kind of business metrics? Are you thinking about like, like trying to figure out like the if you're increasing the the development timelines for your customers in some ways, like if you can allow people to just iterate, test faster, you can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses. Like how mu- how much, how much do you try to track that kind of thing? I know a lot of it is probably hard to to fully capture.

• 2:59:39Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, I'd say I'd say I had a a fun conversation with um, with Brian Schimpf, CEO of Andorall, where, you know, he sort of was saying emphatically like, the One of the metrics he looks at, like the single most important thing is like, how fast are my individual programs testing? Like, it is such a direct correlation to just like the success of that product. And that is what we see like, you know, everywhere. So at the high level, like the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput. You know, being able to have, you know, cases where at our customers, you know, test campaigns that were supposed to take nine months, taking 6.5 months, right?

• 3:00:19Cameron McCord?

  That's, that's something we deliver to a customer. And when that's on a $200 million program, where their end customer is the DOD, like that's massive, right? You know, it's funny for a product like Nominals, we actually, you know, we obviously track user engagement and time and app and all these sort of functions, but that's honestly like not the best correlation. We sort of say, it's really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in the app. And a lot of our North Star is actually like, I kind of want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly. And then if they move on, you know, that's, that's actually fine. Because there that value that is compounding.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys going to actually set up an international presence at all? You said you have a bunch of international customers. Are we going to see a nominal office in the UK?

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Australia.

• 3:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Australia?

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Got to go to Australia. It's a quick flight.

• 3:01:10Cameron McCord?

  You're naming, you're naming some good places. I'll say I am, I'm doing sort of Nominals first big, you know, international business trip, actually over the next two weeks. So going to be going to the Paris Air Show.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  International business. I love international business.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  International businessman on the show.

• 3:01:26Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:26Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor. It's an honor.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:31Cameron McCord?

  Going to be going to the, yeah, the Paris Air Show and then, and then, you know, stopping in, in the UK, as you kind of mentioned. Yeah, we're, I mean, we're really excited and I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening like a, you know, physical office there. But I think it's absolutely, you know, in, in almost feature and we're excited for that. You mentioned Australia, General Akis World, like we're, we're really supportive of that. And they, they want and need all the same things that our US-based customers do.

• 3:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I noticed you you offer the service on on premise still. Obviously, a lot of companies are moving on cloud. How important can you give me some dynamics around like hyperscaler adoption within this within these industries like AWS GovCloud, ITAR compliance? Like, I know Palantir got some super high ITAR clearance. There's obviously different tiers to this stuff. Is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category?

• 3:02:30Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, it's a really good. It's a good question. I, you know, from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as sort of flexible and as versatile as we can. So we don't really pick any one, you know, provider. I'd say from our product perspective, we have two products in the market right now. The nominal core product is where we started, which is cloud-based. The whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry, sensor data, logs, testing, data in one central place, run analytics and autonomy. Very quickly, we launched our second product, which is nominal connect, which is actually a desktop application, which sounds crazy to say and, you know, intuitive. But we're we're meeting our customers and meeting the market where it is.

• 3:03:15Cameron McCord?

  It's run on it's built in Rust. It's run on a game engine, right? So it's not your your normal. And so, you know, super deterministic workflows, sub 10 millisecond latency.

• 3:03:25John Coogan?

  What game engine are you using?

• 3:03:27Cameron McCord?

  It's Unreal, yeah.

• 3:03:28John Coogan?

  Unreal? No way. That makes total sense.

• 3:03:31Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so it's really cool. So being able to have, you know, whereas it used to be, you know, maybe a national instruments, you know, desktop app with like a little widget. And you can kind of envision the thing from 1990. You know, we have this insane, super fast rendering, 3D visualization of our customers, robotic systems or drones, right? Like with telemetry coming in and the power is that can run completely air gapped, right? If you're in Mojave or you're downrange, like doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop. And then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the kind of nominal mothership. All that data is sort of merged and deduplicated and it's super powerful for for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened.

• 3:04:14John Coogan?

  Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of like industrial use case? I know that like, isn't Unreal Engine free unless you're generating like a million dollars in revenue? Like, how do you pay Tim Sweeney?

• 3:04:26Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a good, you know, it's a good, it's a good question. I, I, um, I won't, I won't discuss it right now.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  You can answer it at a high level. I'm sure you can.

• 3:04:34Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  Details.

• 3:04:36Cameron McCord?

  Yeah. No, I mean, it's like we, we're really excited about, I think we're really excited about the technology and, and kind of where, where it can scale. I'll just, I'll leave it, I'll leave it at that.

• 3:04:43John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, the market is speaking. I, I looked it up. The company that owns National Instruments is actually down.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Oh, awesome news.

• 3:04:53Jordi Hays?

  A few percentage points over the last six months.

• 3:04:55John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Most likely in reaction to Cameron.

• 3:04:58Cameron McCord?

  I'm sure it's, yeah, extremely correlated, yeah.

• 3:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Just already pricing it in.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Well, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super, super excited for you and the team.

• 3:05:07John Coogan?

  Do we hit the gong properly?

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit the gong. Alfred Lin on the board. That doesn't happen every day. Amazing, amazing.

• 3:05:14Cameron McCord?

  Amazing.

• 3:05:14John Coogan?

  Big gong.

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super excited. Come back on anytime, Cameron.

• 3:05:19Cameron McCord?

  Awesome. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. We'll see you.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Aneel from Eater hopping on in five minutes. We'll go through some time.

• 3:05:26Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Cameron's, Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane.

• 3:05:30John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 3:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Product and growth at Anduril, advisor to applied intuition.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 3:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Head of defense at Sail Drone. Investor operator at Lux Capital and then now started nominal. So it's almost like he was built for this.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  Whirlwind tour.

• 3:05:49John Coogan?

  I mean, there's other news. It's not really tech related, but it's related to our friends in the Wall Street and finance community. The race for Democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up. Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on Polymarket. Zoran Mamdani is absolutely spiking. He's at 42% versus Cuomo's 56% right now. Signal has a breakdown. He says, "This is a textbook example of narrative discipline. Whether or not you agree with Zoran's platform, the coherence is surgical. Every message hits the same emotional register. Every post or speech is a variation of the same core chord, anti-machine, people-first, morally upright.

• 3:06:32John Coogan?

  His surge is pure memetic lift. It's pure belief and belief spreads fast."

• 3:06:37Jordi Hays?

  This is the guy that just says, "Freeze the rent." That's his platform.

• 3:06:40John Coogan?

  Yes, and every time he posts.

• 3:06:42Jordi Hays?

  And his new bit, his new bit is, is eliminating police presence in, in areas that have high crime.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And so a lot of accelerationists are getting excited about this. A lot of people that are, are anti-New Yorker, are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York. But he is gaining ground and he might be the next mayor, who knows?

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  Every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, don't you think the rent, the rent should just be free?

• 3:07:09Jordi Hays?

  No, he said housing should be, yeah, housing should be free.

• 3:07:11John Coogan?

  You're not going far enough. Capitalist pig. Also, new all time high for Oracle. Let's hear it for Oracle.

• 3:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Let's go. Ellison is cooking.

• 3:07:22John Coogan?

  We love it. Congratulations to Larry Ellison.

• 3:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Larry's listening to this. I'm sure he is. He follows TBN.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's just fantastic news. Oracle's deeply underrated. It's a fantastic company. Been in founder mode for decades and continues to be on an absolute tear.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  They basically own Abilene.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  They do, they do. And they're getting, yeah, the Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure. So, we have our next guest coming into the studio in the TBN Ultra. Welcome to the studio.

• 3:07:46Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on?

• 3:07:48John Coogan?

  I love the background. Very cool. How you doing?

• 3:07:52Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like you're in the hardware business.

• 3:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down. What's, what's behind you? What do you do?

• 3:07:57Speaker 11

  Yeah, we are a networking company and our hardware behind this is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the internet.

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Break down the news today.

• 3:08:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:08:12Jordi Hays?

  And John, get the gun ready.

• 3:08:13John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, I'll get it ready. What happened? What happened?

• 3:08:16Speaker 11

  We, we raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff.

• 3:08:23John Coogan?

  And how much did you raise?

• 3:08:25Speaker 11

  We raised about 170 million.

• 3:08:27Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Hit it, John.

• 3:08:30John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Best part of the day. Congratulations. Talk about, give, give some backstory on, on the history of the company, kind of the different stages, what it took to get here.

• 3:08:42Speaker 11

  Sure. So we got started actually quite a few years ago. And what's interesting is networking is one of the largest parts of technology, but almost no new companies get started networking. You know, networking supports multiple hundred billion dollar market cap businesses. But almost all of them got built through acquisition. Nobody sat down and said, hey, we'll build the entire stack together cohesive operating systems, hardware, APIs, firmware. So we got started a few years ago, building out the entire stack. The COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it. But the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers and just like scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration.

• 3:09:28Speaker 11

  But at the end of the day, I think, you know, nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, you know, something like fifteen percent of the internet or something.

• 3:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's going on? We've been live the entire time. The issues have been happening. Can you give it? Can you give us a quick update on what you think is happening?

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  The production team is stressed right now.

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  They're sweating right now.

• 3:09:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, because you guys are up. There are rumors that you guys took down the internet.

• 3:09:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  Just watched TV today.

• 3:09:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think the really interesting part about networking is most of the issues actually happen because of like configuration errors. And today, that's one of the causes for it, because it's, you know, disparate hardware systems, software systems that don't really work together, and they're made by many different vendors, et cetera. Today was one of the reasons for it, not the entire reason, but one of the reasons for it was like network configuration errors.

• 3:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Wild. You guys have a, it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already. Is that close to true? Are you working towards it? What's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base?

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  Is the job finished or is the job not finished?

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Or it's just getting started?

• 3:10:40Speaker 11

  Are you quoting Kobe, John? I'm saying the job is not finished. Yeah. So our customer base, I think, is quite interesting. We do have a lot of tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers, but probably our most interesting ones are like the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, folks that go build like ISPs and data centers and life sciences labs. All of them sort of need connectivity and internet and networking to do whatever they're doing. And, you know, probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how things get built.

• 3:11:24Speaker 11

  And all the interesting work they're doing from, you know, battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to once one of us buys something online, how quickly does it get there is because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated and then they need networking. So our customer base definitely is, we have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy too.

• 3:11:48John Coogan?

  Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation. Like what's most important? What's been most acceleratory for you?

• 3:12:00Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  And kind of break those down in terms of priorities and where you're investing and what you're most excited about.

• 3:12:09Speaker 11

  So I actually think those things are all interconnected because it's what incentives are what drive everything. So if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for X dollars and then sell it to you for X plus whatever margin they're trying to hit. And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money. Either by charging customers way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, et cetera. For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all. We just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very new. I know the rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like that's sort of kind of given in how we buy things.

• 3:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:50Speaker 11

  But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was barely new. And we were the first people to sort of do it. But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest. Because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10 cents out of a component. We tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use. How are they laid out? How is it built? What are we optimizing for? Hey, something costs another $10, let's go do it. But what's the end customer thing like? And then the better hardware that you have, you're unable to go build better software. And this loop sort of hits. And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we actually deployed and made painted ourselves too. We're fully vertically integrated.

• 3:13:35Speaker 11

  Uh, I, I know, I know a lot of the tech companies don't want to touch the real world things. But you know, the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing, we go do not just the pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly, if you will, of actually going and deploying all of it. And we do this all without any capital cost to customers and only marginal costs on operating expenditure compared to how.

• 3:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about that. Talk about why a CFO would want to have.

• 3:14:00Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:14:01Jordi Hays?

  OpEx versus cap, you know, CapEx in this type of scenario. And is that kind of a driver around decision making?

• 3:14:08Speaker 11

  It, it is, but it depends on the business, right? So if you have businesses that are PE owned, for example, you actually want it to be CapEx. And so our, our contracts can hit the books as a lease. So it doesn't hit their operating margins. They get an EBITDA boost. That happens too. But ultimately what customers actually care about is, do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment I buy it, it's a depreciating asset? Then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it. And then every four or five years I have to go buy new hardware because some new technology comes out, et cetera. Or if this hardware goes bad, I have to go replace it myself. That's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely, which is instead of having

• 3:14:52Speaker 11

  to go spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to kind of fix all the stuff, we take all that on and sort of take on all the risk instead of the customers. Then that contract can be actuated as OpEx or CapEx, depending on what their business needs.

• 3:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Talk about meters business. You're doing a lot of things. You're doing hardware, software. You have, I'm assuming, a network of, you know, team all over the country that are, you know, helping with installs. Talk about kind of the efficiency of the business and, and I'm assuming, you know, this new $170 million round is, is, you know, a testament to the, the strength of the core business.

• 3:15:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a really interesting core business, right? Because you're right, we get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one you're seeing behind us, and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere. And we're not just in the United States, we're in Canada, we're in Europe, everywhere in the world, hopefully by next year. And the operational parts of it are super challenging. If you can imagine a data center in the middle of nowhere or manufacturing facility, there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there. You have to go kind of sort of fix that and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in

• 3:16:14Speaker 11

  this new entire rack. So what's sort of important for us is, you know, it's like a duck swimming in a lake. The customer doesn't see all the kicking that happens underneath to kind of deliver this to them. And our work is always tying these things in together. Why are we building the hardware? How is the software getting built? How are we deploying it and maintaining it? And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loopback to how we build better hardware. What choices are we making? You know, just this morning, a bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports where it should go so it's easy for install. And that loop is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure,

• 3:16:57Speaker 11

  even though after computing and CPUs and Intel, networking is the oldest and largest part of all of technology.

• 3:17:08John Coogan?

  You, I mean, you, you, you, you design, develop, manufacture, make this networking equipment, you're deploying it as a lease on a more rental basis. Does that create a capex problem for you? Like, how are you thinking about your, the way your balance sheet is growing and developing? Is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building?

• 3:17:35Speaker 11

  Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So if you look to historically how networking hardware got built, somebody built it for, let's say, $500 in bomb costs, but by the time it ends up in a customer's hands, it's like $5,000. So networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margins. So you should start there at any time. Second, what we also try to do is a lot of our customers, because we're dealing with physical spaces, whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers, anywhere, the build out times are predictable, right? Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live, or a manufacturing facility goes live, or a school goes live.

• 3:18:16Speaker 11

  So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that. Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going. We do have issues on like trying to figure out exact timing there. We're not always perfect, but we can do that. So to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use a debt a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate partners. A big focus of what we also do is not only do we directly sell the customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include meter in as a default. And that's actually where the main meter comes from. If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power

• 3:19:00Speaker 11

  meters, water meters. This should be more like a utility. Why is it that we're all struggling to kind of wrangle it to get it into working in any type of space? So for us, the debt and where that plays in is a little bit on hardware, but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world and the pace of which we can do, expecting a customer and some sort of discounted cash flow expectation of 12, 18, 24 months from now.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the kind of like wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment. Sounds like apartment building makes sense. Scale up startup office makes sense. It's probably overkill for the home office. You might just want to get an Amazon Arrow mesh networking system. At the same time, you look at Google's campus. It's absolutely massive. Are you going one direction or the other? Are you maxed out? Or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take? How you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a client like Meta's Silicon

• 3:20:12John Coogan?

  Valley campus, which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures in America? Is there something where you can just kind of copy paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together? Or will there be new technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale?

• 3:20:31Speaker 11

  I think the answer is both, but we are already doing customers at that scale and more. For example, Bridgewater, who's the largest extension in the world, runs on meter as an example. But I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements to hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and sort of implement. But I think overall, what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking, if you will, because it has to go work with the rest of the world. Generally, when you look at enterprise companies, they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing of what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer.

• 3:21:15Speaker 11

  For us, any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the internet. So they don't get to do their own protocols, their own things. So largely, there are things on the margin, but largely, whether you're a Googler or Meta or Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do. All of them use the same internet, if you will.

• 3:21:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:38Speaker 11

  Uh, and this is also the same in like data centers too. Um, what you would find in majority of non GPU data centers is not that different what you would find in a large campus. Cause it all has to flow together. The packets must flow and end.

• 3:21:52John Coogan?

  Wait, wha- what's the difference between non GPU data centers and GPU data centers in this?

• 3:21:57Speaker 11

  Yes. So, so yeah, in GPU stuff, there's actually a lot that happens between two GPUs and between cluster GPUs.

• 3:22:04John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:22:04Speaker 11

  That's a different type of networking. There's a lot of work that's happening. Obviously Nvidia with their Mellanox acquisition four, five years ago. And what's happening now with ultra ethernet. But just everything else is actually relatively same.

• 3:22:15John Coogan?

  What was the, what was the keyword you just said? Ultra inter- ultra ethernet?

• 3:22:19Speaker 11

  Ultra ethernet is a new thing that's happening.

• 3:22:21John Coogan?

  Is this like, I remember cat five, cat six. I've heard about cat seven. Is this like cat eight? What are we talking here?

• 3:22:28Speaker 11

  This is like a whole different ballgame.

• 3:22:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:22:30Speaker 11

  Uh, if you, if you look at, uh, you know, uh, the joke in the networking world is, uh, you know, uh, ethernet is dead. Long live ethernet. Uh, you know, every sort of, uh, 15, 20 years, uh, ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it. Uh, but you know, somebody comes up with innovations on how it can scale up on speed, on throughput, on bandwidth, on security. So ultra ethernet is this new version that's coming out for, you know, the next phase of all the data center buildup that's happening. Cause you know, roughly the US has more data centers than the rest of the world combined.

• 3:23:04John Coogan?

  Wow. Let's go. It's here for America. That's some white pill right there. Everyone says we're falling behind, but not today.

• 3:23:13Speaker 11

  But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that. And the US is trying to three X move the yarn. So there's a lot.

• 3:23:19John Coogan?

  Don't even try. We're undefeated. We got meter. Actually, we support meter international strategy. So it's kind of nuanced. We're pro, but also anti, as long as we're benefiting.

• 3:23:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, there's a lot that goes into it.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we've experienced it here. There's like new generations of just streaming cameras that do power and video over Ethernet and, and you, and you know, we're thinking about kind of the V2 of the studio and there's a ton of insane things that you can do, do over Ethernet. It's no longer just the LAN cable. And so it must be fun to be at the heart of that. Jordy, any more questions?

• 3:23:56Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. Congratulations on the, the funding milestone.

• 3:23:59John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:24:00Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 3:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, check in next time.

• 3:24:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:24:05Speaker 11

  Thank you both. See you soon. Bye.

• 3:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:24:07John Coogan?

  Uh, our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes. Uh, in the meantime,

• 3:24:10Jordi Hays?

  It is an absolute

• 3:24:12John Coogan?

  Banger day. Lots of fundraisers.

• 3:24:14Jordi Hays?

  But I was just gonna say it's actually insane. We've been able to keep the show up with every,

• 3:24:17John Coogan?

  It is crazy. We, we got lucky today. Uh, did, have we ever, has the stream ever actually gone fully down? We had Zoom go down one day and we were kind of, kind of, kind of wrecked by that. Um, well, uh, let's bring in our next guest.

• 3:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Ian in the chat says, uh, Mixpanel, Shopify and GCP are still down for him, all the services that he's in.

• 3:24:40John Coogan?

  Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry. Just send us your mailing address. We will print the show onto vinyl and we'll send you a record of the show. So you can listen to it in high fidelity.

• 3:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Same day shipping.

• 3:24:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:24:54Jordi Hays?

  So that you can get the show almost live, you know, a couple hours.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  Couple hours later. Yeah. Yeah. We'll also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while too. Anyway, our next guest is here. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Trace?

• 3:25:07Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:25:08John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 3:25:09Speaker 12

  Where are you going? Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 3:25:12Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Uh, big day. You guys announced a Series A, the website, and you took down the whole internet. You took down the whole internet.

• 3:25:24Speaker 12

  I can't confirm or deny it was part of the launch strategy, but good timing.

• 3:25:28John Coogan?

  Uh, give us the stats. How much you raised?

• 3:25:30Speaker 12

  Yeah, raised $20 million.

• 3:25:33Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:25:36John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Who'd you raise it from?

• 3:25:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, sound led the round, participation.

• 3:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again for sound. Hit it again.

• 3:25:45John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Sorry, continue. We got a little excited.

• 3:25:50John Coogan?

  A little bit gone.

• 3:25:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, participation from Buckley, Naval, Arash, Ferdowsi, founder Dropbox, Arvind from Perplexity, a bunch of other awesome Angelus. Yeah.

• 3:26:00John Coogan?

  Very cool, very cool. Break down the pitch. Like, how are you positioning the company right now? Because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff.

• 3:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Because they pivoted from pizza to something new.

• 3:26:11John Coogan?

  I know that there's the pizza delivery company. There was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand. That didn't go so well. So obviously a huge white space.

• 3:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, they just did pizza for a day. They sold out and then they moved on to this next thing. So what are you building now? So give us an update on the platform.

• 3:26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are you positioning it?

• 3:26:26Speaker 12

  For sure. So I think for us, always the mission of anti-metal has been, how do we simplify infrastructure? But current moment, what's really different is, you know, software engineering, the bottleneck used to always be programming. Like, if you could build the software, you could ship it, you could distribute to everyone, suddenly your product is live. Now you have all this AI assisted stuff, like really awesome products like, you know, Cursor, Levelable, V0. And increasingly, like, the latter half of that equation, which is deploying that code, maintaining it, making sure it scales, like going from one user to one million, is increasingly the bottleneck on like how companies, you know, are actually going to grow and sustain. Like, you know, the short of it is like writing code is no longer the hard part, right? It's all this operations and maintenance. And so what we're really indexing on is building this product

• 3:27:10Speaker 12

  that helps you better manage, you know, and automate infrastructure. So a lot of that is, you know, the nuance of infrastructure versus code is, a lot of it is knowledge that is baked into, you know, people's heads. Like, you have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works. That's your go-to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up something. But that's not super sustainable, right? And this like notion that comprehension can just scale linearly as you hire more, hire more people, isn't super tenable anymore. We're like emitting a bunch of data, all that data is super fragmented, everyone's super specialized. And so for us, what we're trying to do is, you know, start going into companies, plugging into their entire infrasurface area, whether it's like source code, their cloud, their ticketing system, whatever it might be, really understand why things are failing and basically pull in data.

• 3:27:55Speaker 12

  And given these golden pathways as to what's going on, why is it happening? What prescriptive action should I take that is going to help me fix this? And along the way, sort of learning what are the ingrained practices of your organization? That part is super important in the sense that we don't want to build like an opinionated platform that says like, this is good or this is bad, right? That's pretty subjective to each company. So it's a little more about learning, okay, given this tenant, what's going to be good for them? How do they prefer to operate? You know, what's going to make their systems perform the best?

• 3:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Makes a ton of sense. How much, how much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint, trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus like, it feels like the, the nature of software development is changing so quickly. But if you can kind of focus in on, on what will always be true and, and, you know, many people would say that's human nature. You can create something like durable and valuable out of that.

• 3:28:45Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think a big thing for us is, you know, some companies try to position this like, hey, we're a full-time employee and we're going to like automate this function away for you. I think for us, it's a little more of how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system, encode it into a system such that it's reusable? Like the dream for us as companies go from asking this question of like, yo, can we keep this running? To what can we build next? And really taking away this time for maintenance that a lot of people are spending their time on. So, you know, I think human nature, like inevitably all infra problems are kind of human problems. Like, you know, someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on. And in that sense, you know, working with our users to understand like what's their preferred behavior? Why do they want their stack set up this way? Why have they chosen the tools they did? And not trying to like force an opinion out of their throat.

• 3:29:31Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 3:29:32John Coogan?

  Uh, can you talk to us about some of the newest problems that companies are facing? With LLM inference costs, just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and, and just taking advantage of all the tools. We saw Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool. Are you hearing from customers like right now, we're in this era where? Every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X. And so unless you're under a rock, like it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing,

• 3:30:16John Coogan?

  not leave a bunch of money on the table. But are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the kind of AI age generally?

• 3:30:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I think the first one is like what you struck on the head, which is all of this AI stuff is super nascent. That means there's not a ton of like super robust tooling out there, how to monitor, evaluate these things. You know, people are building their own frameworks on the fly. I think like most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf, they're building it in-house, right? So there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things. The other thing is, you know, models are another potentially single point of failure. Like if Claude goes down, like what happens to your product? Are you ready to do a model routing? Are you going to do something else? But I think like, you know, if putting them into like a broader system perspective, they're not like new problems in the sense of these are things systems engineers or, you know, data architects have had to think about for a long time. But obviously, more and more companies are doing these things and they're really complex systems. I think the second part of that is actually just like, you know, we don't index on this super highly, but something

• 3:31:15Speaker 12

  we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software, like highly verticalized niche to their internals. Like, you know, why go put something on a retool dashboard when I can like build it in Bolt and probably get a more nuanced tailored experience. So I think that coupling of like, hey, we're working on a pretty nascent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at the same time, combined with we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this like really chaotic environment where people are, you know, stuck in the trenches of like debugging things, figuring out how do we scale them, paying down tech debt, that sort of thing.

• 3:31:48John Coogan?

  Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is like really underrated right now?

• 3:31:52Speaker 12

  Yeah, um, honestly, OCI. I think Oracle Cloud, they're never part of the conversation. I think all these other clouds have really great offerings, really great services. I think the thing about Oracle is, you know, they don't sell a bunch of services on top. They have a really good foundation. Like these guys have been in the computing business for quite a while. I don't think it's the sexiest option out there, but like from a price perspective, security perspective, I think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's going to look like over the next couple of years. But yeah, I think underrated.

• 3:32:19John Coogan?

  That's amazing. The stock hit the all time high today.

• 3:32:22Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:32:22John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Larry.

• 3:32:23Jordi Hays?

  For all time highs.

• 3:32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love it.

• 3:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Generational run. What's your guys, I'm just curious, since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this, what's your, what's your personal AI, you know, code gen stack right now? What are you, what are you in the team loving?

• 3:32:38Speaker 12

  Right now, we have cursor for the entire team. Some people prefer Claude code, depends, you know, different strokes for different folks. But yeah, I mean, like people are using chat GPT, Claude, cursor, cursor is probably by and far the biggest one. We're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like Claude code. But I think the median for us is people are loving cursor. That's probably been the best coding experience.

• 3:32:59John Coogan?

  Very cool. What about just go to market, top of funnel, like you're, it's an interesting, super interesting company because you've been able to go like massively viral with what is an enterprise like software company?

• 3:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, punching.

• 3:33:15John Coogan?

  It would be different if you were selling like an energy drink. I would kind of expect like a stunt and oh yeah, everyone's talking about it. But you've been able to break through in a really interesting way in, in, in the X community, in the venture capital community. What are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side? What viral loops are you taking advantage of? Flywheels, just break down the marketing side.

• 3:33:36Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, growth is a big part of our DNA. I think largely from, you know, my co-founder Matt, obviously I like a decent growth and marketing. You know, for us, a lot of it, at least in the early stage right now is you want to grab people's attention. Obviously, attention economy, I think the really nice thing for us is this is a problem. Like every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree. Even people on the operational side, when they're like running a business, they're like, holy crap, like we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck like fixing the service or paying down tech debt instead of launching the new thing. But yeah, I mean, we're doing all sorts of things. I think candidly, you're going to see a bunch of it over the coming months. We're going to have a, you know, a bigger splash later this year, but yeah, more to come.

• 3:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 3:34:17John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, you'll have to hop back on when that bigger splash happens.

• 3:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 3:34:22John Coogan?

  Great talking to you. Well, congratulations.

• 3:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to, great to get the full update.

• 3:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:27Jordi Hays?

  I think we're both on the, on the cap table.

• 3:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk soon.

• 3:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Awesome, dude. Thanks, guys. Take care.

• 3:34:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Uh, let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

• 3:34:43Jordi Hays?

  I have a challenge for the audience. Your, uh, your personal website is probably bad.

• 3:34:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Go on Figma, make a new one.

• 3:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 3:34:51Jordi Hays?

  And just ship a website.

• 3:34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:52Jordi Hays?

  You can do it in like five minutes.

• 3:34:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Uh, speaking of design, Signal's been on an absolute tear, breaking down all the WWDC updates.

• 3:35:02John Coogan?

  Uh, he says, "Two quick up, up observation, observations after using iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for a few days. iOS 26 feels great. The system is fluid, buttons are larger, everything responds with intention. It's super enjoyable and fresh. iPadOS 26 is a breakthrough. Productivity finally feels native. File handling, window management, multitasking are intuitive and fast. The most fluid and powerful computing experience on the planet for most tasks." He says he does everything except code on an iPad. And so I've, I've, every time there's a new update, I'm always like, oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad.

• 3:35:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm tempted.

• 3:35:38John Coogan?

  I'm tempted. This might be the one that does it for me. It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad Pro because it's over 400 days since they launched the last one. So they'll probably refresh it at the next iPhone event, but, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm definitely thinking about getting it, uh, on here. I think it could work really well for running the show, too.

• 3:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Got a couple iPads around the house.

• 3:35:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:56Jordi Hays?

  And just kind of.

• 3:35:58John Coogan?

  Collect dust.

• 3:35:59Jordi Hays?

  Collect a lot of dust, but maybe I'll upgrade and.

• 3:36:01John Coogan?

  Maybe you can get back in. I think you gotta commit to that being part of the workflow.

• 3:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, how is, uh, your, your, uh.

• 3:36:06John Coogan?

  iOS 26 experience so far? Have you run into any more problems?

• 3:36:11Speaker 02

  It's pretty good so far. I mean, it's still, you know, my phone is like six years old, so it's a little bit slow.

• 3:36:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:36:17Speaker 02

  But overall, it's been totally fine. I like it a lot.

• 3:36:19John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 3:36:20Speaker 02

  Getting a six-year-old iPhone.

• 3:36:22John Coogan?

  I was asking him, I was asking him, like, show me, and he starts swiping through his apps. And one, and on one screen, he just has like 25 copies of, what app was that?

• 3:36:32Speaker 02

  Uh, Chick-fil-A.

• 3:36:33John Coogan?

  Chick-fil-A. He somehow got the Chick-fil-A, the one app, you're only supposed to be able to install the app once. Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed.

• 3:36:42Jordi Hays?

  You gotta have 26.

• 3:36:43John Coogan?

  It was the funniest thing.

• 3:36:44Jordi Hays?

  If you're serious about, if you're serious about Chick-fil-A, you should have at least 26 apps.

• 3:36:49John Coogan?

  26 copies, just in case 24 of them break, I guess. Give us the update on the art history project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet? By the way, my wife texted me and said that it's extremely embarrassing that we didn't know that Greek statues were painted, because apparently that's common knowledge. But also, she has a master's in art.

• 3:37:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, the art history major, it's common knowledge if you're, if you're, if you're a renowned expert.

• 3:37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, give us the latest art history fact. How are you doing?

• 3:37:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I took another quiz, another like assessment.

• 3:37:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:37:18Speaker 02

  This time I got 50%.

• 3:37:19John Coogan?

  Oh, very good.

• 3:37:20Speaker 02

  So that's up 10% in only, I think, like, an hour and a half.

• 3:37:23John Coogan?

  Compound that, you'll be at 100%.

• 3:37:25Speaker 02

  50% more, that should be.

• 3:37:26Jordi Hays?

  25% improvement. Honestly, give yourself some credit.

• 3:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, 25% improvement, yeah.

• 3:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, if I get 10% every hour and a half, that's, you know, math checks out extrapolate a bit. I think it's like seven and a half hours, I should be at 100%.

• 3:37:37John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do it again, you could be at 200%.

• 3:37:39John Coogan?

  200%, 300%, you could be the world expert. Did you learn anything else interesting about art history? Do you have any more facts to share with us, or are you tapped out?

• 3:37:48Speaker 02

  I've been reading a lot about this guy, Giorgio Vasari.

• 3:37:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:37:51Speaker 02

  So he's kind of, he's 16th century, he's kind of a polymath, author, historian, painter, sculptor. He's kind of like the, the Plutarch of, of art, right? So Plutarch writes noble lives of, or parallel lives of noble Greeks and Romans, right? And then Vasari kind of writes the same thing for kind of Renaissance art. But kind of this controversial guy, he writes about, you know, he, he looks at art from the perspective of the artist, which is, you know, controversial in the sense that like later on, this guy.

• 3:38:25Speaker 02

  Winkelman, I think.

• 3:38:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:38:26Speaker 02

  He criticizes Vasari. He says, no, you should, you know, separate the art from the artist. You should look at art kind of in and of itself, by itself.

• 3:38:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:38:34Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, a lot, a lot of good stuff.

• 3:38:36John Coogan?

  That's where it came from. I've heard the term, separate the art from the artist.

• 3:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Chris from Case would just say, absolutely not. We're not going to separate it.

• 3:38:40John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 3:38:41Jordi Hays?

  We're going to look at it.

• 3:38:42John Coogan?

  The artist is what matters.

• 3:38:43Jordi Hays?

  If we were to issue you a termination letter today, would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art?

• 3:38:49Speaker 02

  Well, I, I actually-

• 3:38:50Jordi Hays?

  In your job prospects, I mean?

• 3:38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so, so I also looked at those other stats about just general employment. And, you know, so I'm actually a physics major. I'm not CS.

• 3:38:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:38:58Speaker 02

  Um, and physics is actually the second most unemployed. So, so they're at, uh, physics majors are at, I think, 7.8%. CS was at 6.1%.

• 3:39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:39:08Speaker 02

  So, um, I think, I think I probably would go into art history. I mean, I haven't got much else, so.

• 3:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Underrated, underrated.

• 3:39:18John Coogan?

  I think we just discovered some massive alpha.

• 3:39:20Jordi Hays?

  It wouldn't really take that much to double the number of art history majors, you know?

• 3:39:24John Coogan?

  There's only 2,000 of them, right?

• 3:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:25John Coogan?

  Or something like that? Yeah. Well, 2001, now.

• 3:39:28Jordi Hays?

  2001.

• 3:39:29John Coogan?

  2001.

• 3:39:30Jordi Hays?

  Um, amazing. Let's rip through some timeline. Great work, Tyler.

• 3:39:33John Coogan?

  Yep. We have some, we have some news. Uh, congratulations to Crusoe. Uh, Chase Lockmiller been on the show. Uh, they are partnering with Brookfield on a $750 million debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future. Do we have to ring the gong?

• 3:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Hit it, hit it, John. Hit it.

• 3:39:51John Coogan?

  That's a lot of, that's a lot of paces. That's a lot of pennies. Uh, congratulations to the whole team over there. Fantastic. We love big data centers. We love, uh, scaling laws, putting big training runs on the data center. Fantastic.

• 3:40:05Jordi Hays?

  We got another post from Zizy. What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism? I gotta say, it came to me immediately.

• 3:40:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I guess it's here as a comment too, but I was gonna say if it's a boy, Chad.

• 3:40:18John Coogan?

  Chad.

• 3:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's just so obvious.

• 3:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, Chad, I think is gonna come back in a big way.

• 3:40:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:40:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it, it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur, but now, now it's just massive alpha there. It can kind of be an inside joke for you and the other dads 20 years from now, your son.

• 3:40:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:40:35Jordi Hays?

  You know? Little baby Chad turns into a man. Oh, oh, he's a Chad. Huge surprise. You know, it's not like it was destined.

• 3:40:42John Coogan?

  You know, Johnny Ive was in the news because he went to OpenAI. But he's technically Sir Johnny Ive because he's been knighted by the, by the, the British royalty, right? And I was thinking, we need an American version of Sir, of knighting. And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really, really impactful, the ones who have driven, you know, massive capital investment like Chad Byers. They should be knighted in an American way and they should earn the title Giga.

• 3:41:15John Coogan?

  And so, and so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap him on both shoulders and knight him. Giga Chad Byers.

• 3:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Giga Chad Byers.

• 3:41:25John Coogan?

  I think, I, I think that would really, really, it would be the American version of the knighting.

• 3:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's based purely on how much capital formation.

• 3:41:33John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:34John Coogan?

  There's no other criteria.

• 3:41:36Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's really.

• 3:41:37John Coogan?

  That's the way it needs to go.

• 3:41:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 3:41:38John Coogan?

  So step one, name your son Chad. Step two, get him into capital allocation on the private side ideally, but public markets will work too. You're still eligible.

• 3:41:47Jordi Hays?

  There's more good comments in here. Grit Capital says, King or Don.

• 3:41:52John Coogan?

  Donald, yeah, Don.

• 3:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Don, Donald. I never, never thought about.

• 3:41:56John Coogan?

  The Don. Yeah. That's where Don comes from. Yeah.

• 3:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In other news, Anon Sinwall says, my first and only angel investment went to zero today. Well, mistake.

• 3:42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Should have made 50. I'm sure one of them would have worked out. Made it all back in one trade.

• 3:42:12John Coogan?

  Fascinating because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all that data and stuff. But he knew his life's work was to build that company and that's what he focused on. And he only invested in one company. Fascinating. It's very, very different.

• 3:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Car dealership guy responds, congrats.

• 3:42:28John Coogan?

  Very funny. Anyway, yeah, yeah. I mean.

• 3:42:31Jordi Hays?

  He said, he learned, I don't really enjoy angel.

• 3:42:33John Coogan?

  And if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to be good at it. So stay out of the game. Paula says Diet Cokes are fridge cigarettes.

• 3:42:39Jordi Hays?

  So true. So true.

• 3:42:42John Coogan?

  Just drink them all day long.

• 3:42:43Jordi Hays?

  All right, this is a good place to end. I like how Zuck has been back against the wall like 37 times since 2007 and every time's resoundingly wins, but each time begins, he has a crisis. People are like, oh, man, Zuck is cooked.

• 3:42:58John Coogan?

  Yep, so true. Yeah.

• 3:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Built different.

• 3:43:00John Coogan?

  Do not count him out. The AI talent crisis is merely a bump in the road for old Zuck. He's cooking.

• 3:43:07Jordi Hays?

  We've all, we've all been there. We've all, you know.

• 3:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've all been running a trillion dollar company.

• 3:43:12Jordi Hays?

  Our personal behemoth, you know.

• 3:43:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. We need to wrangle and get out.

• 3:43:17Jordi Hays?

  Got to power through.

• 3:43:18John Coogan?

  Whether it's a four hour stream or a two trillion parameter model, you know, you gotta get it out.

• 3:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was a great show. I gotta give it up to the, to the

• 3:43:27John Coogan?

  Production team.

• 3:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Our credible production team.

• 3:43:29John Coogan?

  Keeping us online while everything goes down across the entire internet.

• 3:43:32Jordi Hays?

  We learned everything there is to know about art.

• 3:43:35John Coogan?

  We're experts too. He's an expert, yeah. Now we gotta worry about poaching because I imagine a lot of the galleries are going to be watching this and they're going to be, oh, new art history maybe just dropped. We gotta pick them up.

• 3:43:45Jordi Hays?

  understands physics.

• 3:43:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:43:46Jordi Hays?

  Live streaming.

• 3:43:47John Coogan?

  Computer science.

• 3:43:48Jordi Hays?

  Knows everything there is to know about.

• 3:43:50John Coogan?

  He knows everything. The history of art. Anyway, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great day.

• 3:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Have a great afternoon.