Karri Saarinen, Sean Frank, Semil Shah, Dan Lorenc, Google's Earnings Power Holding Up Well, Intel Says Layoffs are in Store, The Relationship Between Netflix and The NFL, Elon's Friends Sell Access to Stakes in Private Companies

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, a popular issue tracking and project management tool. Previously, he was a design lead at Airbnb, focusing on design systems and product development. @karrisaarinen Sean Frank is the CEO of Ridge, best known for the Ridge Wallet and expanding the brand into a broader EDC (everyday carry) company. He has a background in e-commerce and performance marketing. @SeanEcom Semil Shah is the founder of Haystack, a venture capital firm that has backed companies like DoorDash and Instacart early on. He is a seasoned investor and writer with deep roots in Silicon Valley. @semil Dan Lorenc is the founder and CEO of Chainguard, a startup focused on software supply chain security. Before founding Chainguard, he worked at Google, contributing to critical security projects like Sigstore and Kubernetes. @lorenc_dan TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.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 (01:30) - Google's Earnings Power Holding Up Well (14:14) - Intel Says Layoffs are in Store (47:14) - The Relationship Between Netflix and The NFL (56:09) - Elon's Friends Sell Access to Stakes in Private Companies (01:06:29) - TBPN Reacts to Tech Polymarkets (01:13:42) - Karri Saarinen (01:34:22) - Sean Frank (02:03:51) - Semil Shah (02:32:02) - Dan Lorenc

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Friday, April 25th, 2025. We are live from the

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Oh, I was in a particularly brutal board meeting with a venture capitalist, got ugly. We've talked about how board meetings should be more confrontational. There should be a threat of physical violence.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  That's right. It brings out the best in people.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  It really does. It really does. Oh, you want me to pull forward my revenue projections? Are you willing to die for that? Let's duke it out. Let's go.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Put it to the test.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Let's go to a foreign country that allows duels and let's duel to the death. This is the future of technology. Technology is not for the weak.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Big opportunity for Praxis is enabling duels.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Many people would like to duel.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  But they don't have the legal framework to really do it here in America.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  There are, I have looked this up before, there are countries where you can go and duel to the death legally. It's a little complicated. You gotta fly out there. You have to get some permits, but you can do it. It does exist. And maybe we should bring it back. You never know. It would certainly make tech more interesting. It would make our job reporting on tech more interesting. But nothing's more interesting than earnings season, baby. Can I get a sound effect for earnings season? Google's earnings power holds up in global turbulence. Google parent Alphabet reports solid earnings, but tariff impact on second quarter results is still unclear from the Wall Street Journal. Google's earnings power is holding up while

• 1:29John Coogan?

  they're making money, they're printing. They reported operating income of 30.6 billion for the first quarter on Thursday, solidly beating Wall Street forecasts of 28.7 billion. Revenue rose across the company's business units, but was largely in line with analyst estimates. Capital expenditures reached a record 17.2 billion in the quarter. Let's hear it for CapEx. We're going to be training bigger models.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Manager mode.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Sundar might be goaded.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  He might be goaded.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  He might be back.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  He might be goaded. He doesn't do a lot of shows, doesn't do a lot of media. He's starting to go direct, starting to post on X a little bit more, yeah.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  People were saying if he resigns, does the stock pop? He did it. While staying in place.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  And he deserves all the credit for it.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  He does. So congratulations to everyone at Google, all the shareholders, all the employees, the founders.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  And this was breaking news yesterday. We announced that we are joining the war against big tech.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  On the side of big tech.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yes, we are joining the war on big tech on the side of big tech. And yeah.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  It must be protected.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  It must. Big tech must be protected.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Just because we want to turn little technology companies into big tech.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  We still support big tech.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. We have a reverence, a reverence for big tech.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Be very clear about that.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  So the stronger bottom line showed Google's resilience in a quarter that was marked by fears of an impending trade war and the effect that could have on the global economy. Alphabet's share price rose 5% in after-hours trading. Again, this is like a trillion dollar company. That's $50 billion. That'll get you 100 of Sergey Brin's yachts, which cost 500 million. And so he could buy 100 of those if he owned all of Alphabet. And Alphabet should. They should get 500 corporate yachts, if, in my opinion, 500-foot yachts. But those worries remain.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  One for every VP.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  If their VPs are anywhere as good as Ben.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  They all deserve.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  100%.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Half a billion dollar yachts.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone talks about the perks of working at Google. You get the sleep pods, you get the nap room, you get the free lunches. Like, let's take it up a notch. All that stuff's old.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Avoiding the only perk that matters.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Which is yacht.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  The yacht. Yes. Really, I mean, it's so played out. They've hit the, they've hit what feels like the logical conclusion of perks, right?

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, free lunch. Oh, we'll walk your dog for you. Oh, there's yoga classes. Oh, there's a Google bus.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  I told you I spent a summer just eating at a Google cafeteria.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  One of my fraternity brothers.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Worked at Google for a summer and he spent the entire summer trading crypto.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  And when he would take a break while working for Google, to be clear. And. Oftentimes around dinner, he'd say, hey, do you want to come have lunch? And I enjoyed every

• 4:19John Coogan?

  I've had lunch there too.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Every salmon dinner that I had on Google's dime.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  You know, people, people were, people were upset about the Google bus that took Google employees from San Francisco down to the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. Should have just cut out the whole

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  Wait, why were they upset again?

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Issue with the Google yacht that takes you from, because it could take you down the bay.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  The Google yacht would be so much better. And the whole thing where they were vandalizing the Google buses, but it's so much harder to do piracy.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Some of their climate goals by using a sailboat.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  I love this. Yeah.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  No gap, no, no.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Just sailing to work. There are some people that actually sail across the bay if they live in Marin, which is pretty sweet. They ride their bike and then take the boat. And it's not a sailboat.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  It's nice.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  That's fair.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, people are still worried. People don't think Sundar can do it. Google doesn't issue financial projections with its quarterly reports, which leaves it unclear how, just how, just how its business was affected by President Trump's April 2nd announcement of high tariffs, but the turbulence that has followed amid the ever-changing status of those tariffs. And the company's earnings on, uh, Chief Business Officer, uh, Google's Chief Business Officer said it's too early to comment on trends for the current quarter. Now, Google doesn't manufacture a lot of stuff generally. Of course, they have consumer products. They have Google Home devices. Those might be made in China. They have Google Android phones generally, but

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  They have a merch store too. Andrew Reid

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, merch, merch store.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that Google has merch, which

• 5:47John Coogan?

  And so I'm sure they have operations in China, but they are, seem much less exposed to Chinese tariffs than Apple.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Right? And so if Apple is hurt and the iPhone does wind up going to $2,000 a phone, $3,000 a phone because of tariffs, well, that will probably drive even more people to buy Android phones, even if the Android phones are more expensive, because on a relative basis, they would be cheaper. Uh, and also, uh, the phones seem to have been unaffected. Uh, Ben Thompson was talking about, uh, Tim Cook. And there's the kind of dancing around this issue of is Tim Cook the right CEO for Apple? He's 64 years old, so he's getting close to reasonable retirement age.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say close to hitting his prime.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Hitting his prime, I agree. And I actually, I think I disagree with Ben Thompson on this. He was very shaken by the there's something rotten in Cupertino report by his co-host of of what is this other podcast? Yeah, Daring Fireball. And so there's this big question about the big miss on on Apple intelligence. Should that be serious cause for concern? That if Apple's not getting AI correct, do you need new leadership if AI is the most important thing in the world? But I think we learned from the tariff situation that in fact, supply chain is maybe the most important thing in the world and Tim Cook is world-class

• 7:10John Coogan?

  at supply chain. And so it makes sense that he is at the helm. And I think any discussion of Tim Cook stepping out of Apple is too is too premature. I think maybe getting new product leaders to push Apple intelligence more aggressively makes sense.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Supply chain expert at a point in time where we're dealing with, you know, really complex, you know, tariff policy and uncertainty. He's the perfect guy to be in at the helm right now. Maybe not the perfect guy for five years from now, but we can just.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  And which would which would affect more which would affect Apple worse?

• 7:51John Coogan?

  If they truly lose the AI agent Siri, you know, AI assistant landscape to the point where they need to open it up and they need to say you can map your Siri button to any any app and we're actually auctioning it off and Google's gonna bid, just like they did for the default search in Safari, and OpenAI is gonna bid. They'd probably make a ton of money from that, maybe not capture all of it, but they'd capture a lot of value from that. And that might be a loss strategically for them, that they wouldn't own consumer AI in the future. Obviously, consumer AI is something that you want to own. But so if they lost that, it wouldn't be good. But compare that to. Getting the tariff issue wrong, getting the supply chain wrong, not being able to deliver

• 8:35John Coogan?

  the product, delivering the product at three times the price, that is actually catastrophic. Versus, hey, there's this massively incremental technology and we have to partner with other big tech companies on it, like we did in search. I don't think it's that big of a deal. And so I'm pro Tim Cook in this case, at least for now. We'll see. But it's fun to watch it unfold. So Alphabet's operating income per quarter, just a hair off of peak. Of course, the Q4 season, I believe, is always strong, but they are rocketing towards over $30 billion in operating income every single quarter. You love to see it. Their advertising

• 9:15John Coogan?

  revenue rose 8% to $66 billion, while cloud revenue jumped 28% year over year to $12.3 billion. Let's hear it for them. Congratulations, everyone at Google. Both were declarations from the decelerations from the growth rates seen in the fourth quarter, but Google isn't blinking in its plans to invest aggressively in generative AI. The company maintained its plan to put $75 billion towards CapEx this year, more than double its annual average over the past five years. Of course, there's an acceleration there. The business has grown a lot and they are risk on. Correct. A-plus work on the soundboard today, Jordy.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  The natural evolution of this is that I have a soundboard with thousands of effects and I just don't say any words.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  You just move from front office to back office.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm just wearing an Apple Vision Pro and I'm just hitting the reactions.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  So, Google didn't exactly face a high bar coming into Thursday's results. Alphabet's stock has been flat over the past 12 months, lagging most of its mega-cap tech peers on worries about its position in AI and the loss of two federal antitrust cases that could ultimately result in the company's breakup. Of course, everyone was saying OpenAI is the disruptor to Google Search, maybe Perplexity is going to take a run at Google, but people are still Googling stuff. They're Googling stuff and then they're doing deep research reports separately and maybe that's chipping away, but it doesn't seem to be chipping away at earnings. Google seems to be Lindy in this case. So Alphabet also commands the lowest valuation multiple of the multiple of the major tech giants with the stock trading at just 18

• 10:56John Coogan?

  times projected earnings for the next four quarters compared to Microsoft at 28 times. The company said Thursday that it would boost its quarterly dividend to 5% to 5% to 21 cents a share, which comes a year after it initiated the payout. This, of course, was the famous criticism that Peter Thiel levied at Eric Schmidt onstage at that Fortune conference years ago. Do you remember this?

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  I had another thought jump into my head that's relevant, which is Netflix trading at a P/E ratio around 50.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  50.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  How frustrated you have to be as Google management when you look at Netflix and you're like intense competition from a bunch of different players.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, you know, they basically own the entire market. They have everybody signed up and the strategy now is just to just increase prices and reduce costs or keep costs as is. But ultimately, when you look at the sort of underlying quality of these businesses, it just really says that the market's firmly believes that Google is at extreme risk of disruption of the core business model. But when we talk to people like Logan, who we had on the show Monday, who runs Google's AI studio, it's hard not to be generally bullish on what Google is doing in AI.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I agree. It's interesting, the Netflix comparison, because by all accounts, you would have to assume that YouTube is just a better business. It is the final form of, you know, all the best content goes there. The algorithm sorts it all out, sifts the wheat from the chaff. The really low effort videos get a couple views. They make a couple dollars, but the Mr. Beast videos get 100 million, 500 million views and generate millions of dollars in ad revenue. And it's all decentralized. It doesn't have any oversight. So there's no overhead there. There's no negotiation. They're, oh, we lost this particular video. The videos go up like clockwork.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  And they have a subscription plus ad-based business model.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  They do. It's the same as.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that I think is worth noting on. On Google is yes, ChatGPT is a threat. Yes, there are people that are chatting with ChatGPT as an alternative to punching something into the Google search bar. But I look at it much more in the context of TikTok and Instagram. Yes, TikTok has taken away sort of usage from Instagram and other meta products, but it certainly didn't kill either of them and they've still been able to find growth there, so.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of Google's ad business, they're making tons of money running ads. We're making money running ads and you can make money running ads on AdQuick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to adquick.com. Let's kick it over to Intel. Intel cuts outlook says layoffs are in store.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  You hate to see it.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  Company posted a quarterly loss on Thursday. They are the old guard. I think Intel and Google both raised money from Clayton Perkins, I'm pretty sure. Maybe Sequoias in both of those, but similar venture capitalists, very different stages of life as big tech companies. Company posted quarterly loss on Thursday and gave a weak revenue outlook. Said it would lower its operating expense target this year by $500 million and would reduce it by a further $1 billion next year. This is on the tale of new chief executive officer Lip Buthan beginning a turnaround effort and we are excited to see what he does and how many pages he takes out of Stratechery printouts

• 14:48John Coogan?

  because Ben Thompson has been playing armchair quarterback for the last decade and maybe it's time for Intel to implement some of the Ben Thompson playbook.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Not a bad idea at this point.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Tan said to a letter, in a letter to employees, that layoffs would start this quarter and continue over several months, although he didn't quantify how many employees would be affected. That's pretty rough.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  That's brutal for the team.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Some people are gonna be...

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna be doing layoffs over a few months.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess it's like no surprises and hey, this is gonna happen and maybe you telegraph it early. They're also reducing capital spending by $2 billion, down to $18 billion in total capex they're getting into for this entire year. I mean, now they're spending less on capex than Google is spending per quarter. They spend less than a year than Google spends a quarter and it's like... Their whole business should be CapEx, in my opinion.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  They should be a fab, mostly. But of course, they also invest in design of semiconductors as well. And so there's been a slowdown in a gigantic manufacturing expansion undertaken by Tan's predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, finance chief, said tariffs were affecting the company in two ways. Customers rushed to buy electronics in anticipation of the tariffs, contributing to higher than expected revenue for the quarter. But looking ahead, he said costs would increase and the market would contract as consumers and businesses face an uncertain economy. And Intel's stock dropped by about 7% in after-hours trading. The revenue was flat.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  We are so far from the rumors last year that Elon was in the mix.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  I know.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  To potentially buy Intel.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  That felt like it was such a great timeline to be on.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  I still think it would have been so cool if, if the CHIPS Act was basically just, you know, structured as a, as a, you know, debt financing for an LBO and takeover, take private of, of Intel with, with Elon at the helm. I think that could have been a really, really great ending. And it would be so much less, it would be very, it'd be very easy for people to rally around America, from an American perspective.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Because it's, it's, it's so much less controversial than, oh, what's going on on X? It's the public square. Is it left wing? Is it right wing? Like, this culture war effort is, is, regardless of where you stand on the issue, it's clearly causing friction between Americans. Whereas if you get Elon and he's just off making semiconductors and the semiconductors are getting cheaper, it's like, who, is this a left wing or right wing issue? We don't even know. It's like, yeah, he's cutting some jobs there, probably, making it run more efficiently. But ultimately, the goal is cheaper semiconductors. I think that's something everyone can get behind.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, he made cheap cars.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  And they've been burning them down.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, maybe anything's possible. Who knows? Anyway, sales rose 8% in the division that sells chips for data centers and AI, obviously, a rare bright spot amid the gloom. Sales in its personal computer chip division, its largest segment, fell 8% to 7.6 billion. Its contract chip making business reported 4.7 billion of revenue, up 7%. Intel also gave a forecast of roughly 11.8 billion in revenue for its current quarter, lower than Wall Street's forecasts of around 12.8 billion. And so a lot of uncertainty. They are signaling to the market, hey, we're going through a transformation. We're going to be cutting costs, revenue might dip, but hopefully we will emerge stronger and we're rooting for you over at Intel.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  We would love to see Intel become a fantastic tech company as it has been throughout American history.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  It might need a new name, the American Supercomputer SuperCorp.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  SuperCorp. I like that. Yeah.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  It really needs to, you know, follow in the footsteps of, you know, some of our new hard tech companies.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Well, we'll see what Lip Buthan winds up doing. Maybe he'll need to take out some ads to make the company known again. If he does a rebrand, he's gonna have to buy a bunch of ads and we gotta do an ad. What's our next ad for? Bezel. Oh, fantastic. We've done some wrist checks on various and various semiconductor CEOs. We've seen Lisa Su over at AMD, rocking a Rolex.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  She is a collector.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  She's a collector.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  To say the least.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Lip Buthan, I know you're, I know you're listening. Get on Bezel, pick up a watch. Go to getbezel.com. They got a Bezel concierge for you, Lip.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  If Lip is not at Hill and Valley, that is bearish.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, he should get out there to DC.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully he's there. We'll talk to him.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  He should be wearing an FPJorn.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Or Richard Mill.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  A one of one.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  A one of one.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  A piece unique, ideally. Piece unique with the semiconductor right in there. That's what I want to see.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're moving on to...

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised nobody did a Blackwell watch yet. It's like, I don't need the time. My phone tells the time, but I just want you to know that I have a, you know, I have a Blackwell on my wrist.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Blackwell on my wrist. That's really good. I mean, did you see the Nvidia purse? That was pretty cool.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was cool.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  That was great. And so someone took a Nvidia GPU and turned it into a purse that you can purchase for the, for the technology sister, for technology girlfriend or wife. Great gift. Um, anyway, we're moving on to probably an even more important story in the tech world.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is big.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Story about a man who built a house with room for 21 of his Porsches.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  He actually had one house.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  I can't tell you how many people sent this to us.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, are in this scenario. This is great.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, sent us this article and said, one, you have to cover this.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  The show wouldn't be complete without it.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  That's right. It wouldn't be a Friday show without something like this.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  So, uh, he wanted room for 21 of his Porsches, so he built a second house across the street, as one does. Uh, near Palm Springs, California, architect Stephen Harris spent millions designing a modern house equipped with an underground garage of his sports cars. He's a highly successful architect of houses and apartments, and his husband, Lucian Reeves Roberts, a prodigious interior designer, which we'll get into later. The interior, the interior design game is fascinating. There's trade deals happening all over the place.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Big deals.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Big deals. Uh, they spend most weeknights and, and the lifestyle of these two bros is top notch. So they spend most weeknights in an elegantly appointed loft in the Manhattan, in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. For weekends, they have a house called Galloway Hill. Always a good sign when your house has a name. Uh, you should always be naming your house. That's in Kinderhook, New York. For vacations, there's a compound on an island in Croatia and a restored mid-century modern house in Rancho Mirage, California, eight miles southeast of Palm Springs. So they got, they got, you know, their fingers in every single pie.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Croatia is very underrated. Have you been?

• 21:38John Coogan?

  I haven't been. I've been to Greece.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  I would like a compound there at some point.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Croatia's kind of a knockoff Greece. Is that, is that the case? I don't know.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Our two Croatian.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Listeners.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Size lords are gonna, are gonna be.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Few men.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Giving you death threats.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't really leave the United States. I don't go to any of these like backwaters, developing nations, regardless of how scenic and luxurious they are. But, uh, good luck to them. I'm glad that they, uh, built a compound on an island out there. Uh, for years, they were happy with those options, especially Harris says, because Rancho Mirage and their part of Croatia have perfectly reciprocal climates. That's pretty smart. Meaning that if it's the wrong time to visit, if it's the wrong time of year to visit one, it's the right time at the other, which is really smart. But there was more real estate to come. In 2016, a one acre lot directly across the street from the Rancho Mirage house came up for sale. They purchased it for 800K with no plan, Harris says, other than to prevent someone else from building something hideous.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  I love it. It's like, how bad could it have been? Like, it's probably just gonna be a normal house, but they're like, no.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  No, that could be a real issue.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Beautiful.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  It's really design driven.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  You don't necessarily control your neighbor's yard.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Architects and so they're like, we're not gonna let you build some McMansion up there. We're not gonna let you put the fake, fake blinds on the outside. So they found themselves wanting to spend more time in California where their neighbors include theater folks like John Robin, Robin Bates and Joe Montello and television personalities, Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos. And they had solved one of the logistical problems of being bi-coastal. And this is the art of the deal, folks. If you're not doing deals like this, you are gonna be left behind in the modern economy. This is golden retriever maxing, literally.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Taken literally. So.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  You wanna break it down, Jordy?

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  These two guys designed a client's private jet for free. Many of our listeners know and have gone through the process. When you buy a Gulfstream, you're not gonna sort of necessarily take the sort of stock interior. So they designed a client's jet for free in exchange for a promise to fly their yellow Labrador Retriever Zoe between New York and California for the rest of her life. And one of the two guys always travel with her.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  And so this is why in the modern economy, you don't just wanna be golden retriever maxing. You actually want to be a Labrador Retriever.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  You need to be working out deals that allow your pets to fly private whenever they want for the rest of their life in exchange for a one-time service.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  One-time service. That really has no cost because it's, it's, you're just designing it.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  So you're just like picking things.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  It's really just your time.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  It's just your time. So you swap your time.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  This is potentially one of the greatest investments.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  It's one of the greatest investments of all time.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Services-based investment.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Yes, we were talking about this. So with. Companies like Loyal, Celine, who we've talked about on the show. Loyal is working on life extension for dogs. And so, you know, how do you underwrite the price of private flights for a Labrador Retriever for the rest of their life? Well, you probably pull out an actuarial table like you're doing life insurance, right?

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  And you say, Labrador Retriever, how old is Zoe? You know, five years old, probably lives to 10, 15. But with modern advances in science and artificial intelligence, dogs could be living hundreds of years.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Thousands of years.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  And so this could add up to billions of dollars of value. This could be the greatest interior design project ever.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  Of all time.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Of all time.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  From a value capture.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  From a value capture standpoint. It's genius. But it's also going to be incredibly inconvenient for whoever's private jet that is. Because imagine that the dog wants to get from New York to California on Tuesday. You're trying to take a meeting in DC. Now you take off from LaGuardia and you're heading to, you're heading to LAX just to get to Reagan International.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  The dog basically runs your life.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  The dog runs your life.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know who agreed to this. It's absolutely insane.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  They basically said, this interior design service that I, that I'm a billionaire and I could just pay for is so priceless to me that I'm going to offer up my, my jet to the end of my days. I, I would expect the dog at this point to outlive the, the client himself. So anyways, going, going back to the house situation.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, because the cars are equally important. There's 21 of these vintage Porsches. They bought the, the house they had bought is historically important, so they couldn't modify it. And there are the pictures of the Porsches. And I love this because, so this garage is specifically designed, 21 Porsches in the collection? You don't have to move a single car to select any of them. None of them are double parked. And so. If you want to take the 1980s air cooled 911 out, you just grab those keys, you're good to go.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  Good to go.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  If you want to take the GT3 RS.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  In your path.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  You take those keys, you're good to go. You don't have to shuffle them around. You don't need a your personal valet.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Shuffling.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  You're all good to go. There's no stacking. There's a lot of people, Hoovy's Garage. Have you've ever seen Hoovy on YouTube? He has his garage stacked three high, basically. He's clearly not doing it right. He should have just built a 21 car garage where you can pull out any of them at any time. And so the new house would have two things. The old house didn't have a studio, complete with skylight, a third generation. Reece Roberts is a third generation painter and he would be painting in the studio with a skylight and an underground garage where Harris, a serious collector of vintage Porsches, could store 21 of his favorites.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  All 911 RS models made by the company from 1973 to 2024. Wow. So it's a, it's, it's the 911, I guess it's the 911 RS every single year. So, wow.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Unreal.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Incredible. And such dedication. I mean, Steve Jobs had the same dedication where he would buy a new 911 every single year, right? But I mean, I guess he would like rotate them.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  I was in the Middle East once and got to see a private collection and the collector had basically around 10 full scale warehouses on his property. And he would not just get, you know, a Range Rover every year. He would get every color that they made it from the manufacturer in that year. So it was literally like a rainbow collection where you'd walk into one of the warehouses and it's just every single color of car in that year. And then you would do it for

• 28:10John Coogan?

  The next year.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  You do it for Range Rover. You do it for Land Rover. You do it for Ferrari.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  So that's true wealth because the depreciation on a Range Rover is insane, unlike some of these Porsches.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Some of the

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Some of them, some of them, some of them do pop. But so in the new house, he can slip away to his studio when he wants and Harris is able to keep more of his 50 prized vehicles in California where he likes to take them out for early morning jaunts. He said he drives every one of his Porsches. We'd love to see a car collector who puts miles on the cars, doesn't just keep them in the plastic. You've got to be dailying your Countach, your LM002.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  It is a funny dynamic.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Daily your supercars.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  If you have 50 cars in your collection. It's actually hard to put a meaningful amount of miles.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Spreading the love.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Of course. And I mean, it's not like he's taking them to LA. He's probably just driving them around the neighborhood.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Full-time mechanic.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Having a collection, once you get into that range and above.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Yep. You talk to anybody that- Jay Leno has like a whole team just for registration because there's new registrations like every year. Well, you have 50 cars that every single week you're doing registration stuff. It's crazy. So even just one of his Porsches, 1984 911 SCRS, he's been offered more than $3 million for. He said, no, he said, I'm dating it. Yep. So they have no plans to live in the Palm Springs area until they helped a couple. They had no plans to live there until a couple of friends, until they helped a couple of friends locate and renovate a house at a country club. And then in 2015, they heard about a house for sale and decided to buy it after admiring its mid-century modern forms on Google Earth.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  They later learned it was designed by the prominent Palm Springs architect, Donald Wexler. When they renovated the 1957 house, they returned it as closely as possible to the original appearance. A reverence for the classics. This guy seems like the man.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  The new house across the street is more than just luxury for the two men. It embodies everything Harris has learned in more than 40 years of designing gracious, modern residences. Everything Rees-Roberts has learned from furnishing them, almost always with a mix of important vintage pieces and items of his own design. The two men work together on about three quarters of their projects. Each also accepts separate commissions. I love that. It's like, we'll work together, but you're paying us both. It's not a package deal. And also our dog's gonna fly private forever.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Mugged.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  It's the best. I love the journal for profiling these people. You just, you know, where else would you find this story? From the outside, the house is deliberately unimposing. There's no fence. The pool doesn't require one because the whole country club is fenced. Harris explains, Breeze Roberts and his landscape design partner, David Kelly, added topography to the previously flat site to match that of the golf course. They even gave the pool the shape of one of the courses nearby water hazards. The result is that the adjoining fairway seems to continue right to their front door. The club thinks of it more as a golf course and we think we have more lawn.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  More golf. The club thinks of it as more golf course. We think of it as we have more lawn.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  Just don't do a long, you know, sort of phone call pacing around the backyard.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, you might get smacked in the head. I like this. He calls it visual borrowing. And so when you blend your backyard into the golf course, it just feels like your backyard extends endlessly. Very, very cool. Inside, the house is light filled thanks to the oversized windows. To complete the landscaping, they splurged on over 100 palm, olive, and fruit trees at the cost of more than 300K. You'll love to see it. He's 72 years old and he designed a lot of the furniture himself. Fantastic.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Cool little backstory here. Harris says, I don't think of myself as rich. During his childhood in northeastern Florida, he says it was hard for his parents to scrape together his high school tuition of $700. Some nights were spent flounder gigging, a method of fishing that involves wading in knee deep water with a car battery in a wash tub.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  This is amazing. And you're building a chat GPT wrapper and you think you're scrappy.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a different level. From flounder gigging to every single Porsche 911. He says, I gotta repeat this. A method of fishing that involves waiting in knee deep water with a car battery in a wash tub attached to a tractor headlight on a pole.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Can we get the founder mode sound?

• 32:46John Coogan?

  That's so good. So he went to architecture school at Princeton on a full scholarship. And then 34 years, he lived in a rent stabilized loft on Harrison Street in Tribeca, where the rent never went above $300. That's so insane to be pulling in like millions of dollars collecting like, oh, yes, every single new Porsche 911 RS I buy and my rent is $300 a month.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  300 bucks.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  The landlord eventually asked him to leave, but also hired him to convert the building into condos. He created a brand new penthouse that sold for over 18 million. Wow. Reece Roberts grew up in England and spent summers in the Spanish artist colony, where he was fascinated by the work of Peter Harndon, an American architect who was modernizing old fishermen cottages for expats. He had undergraduate and graduate degrees from University of Cambridge. The two men working together in 1985, they married in 2013 together. Stephen Harris Architects and Reece Roberts and Partners have about 40 employees. What a small organization to create such a fantastic outcome. That's how many can fit in their

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Manhattan office buildings on Chambers Street, which is right across from the street, right across the street from their loft. So the men don't plan on letting their firms get any bigger. While pouring millions into the new Rancho Mirage House, Harris says, "My biggest fear is that we would like the old house better." But according to both men, that hasn't happened. The new house owes a lot to the old one, but it works much better for us. You'll love to see it.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  And, you know, in that house, what type of bed should they be sleeping on? I think they should be sleeping on Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. Every Eight Sleep guarantees an overnight success. They have an overnight success guarantee. So go to eightsleep.com. Clinically backed sleep fitness.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Let me guess, John, you don't even want to look at your sleep score.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Oh, have you seen the new app? By the way, they shipped it. The new, the new Eight Sleep app is actually incredible. You should download it. If you have an Eight Sleep, make sure you're updated. I think it's a way better design. I got a 91 last night. Not bad.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  I got a 96.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  96, of course.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  And we were just texting with Brian Arm, Brian Johnson.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  He's coming on the show in a little bit. And I sent him my sleep score from yesterday and he said, great job. So.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Uh, do you, Brian Johnson, is that the Liver King?

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  That's the other.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  That's the other Brian Johnson.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  There's two Brian Johnsons.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, that's right. That's right. Well, we should have the both on.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  The Sleep King.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  To have the, I would love to have.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would, you would love to have the Liver King on.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  But telling, uh, having Brian Johnson.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  When you posted that, I was like, this is the most dangerous post you've ever shared because he is normally so critical. And I was like, he's going to roast you for not being at a hundred.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I hit it.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  For work. Was it a hundred?

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  It was a hundred.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Oh, it was a hundred. But I, I had a feeling that he would dig into.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Thing for me, John. That's like, that's not like a, oh, once in a blue moon.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  I thought, I thought he would dig into one of the sub metrics and be like secretly, you're gonna die tomorrow unless you change everything. Cause he's normally just like so on top of it.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  He can just rip us to shreds once he's on the show. But it'll be entertainment.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Good. Yeah. Anyway, uh, let's move on to another, uh, story in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  This is John's favorite section, by the way.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  This is in the highlight of my week. Um, Gene Simmons of Kiss lists his Beverly Hills house for 13.995 million dollars.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  He's giving it away.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  But this is why it's funny. So he says, he, he listed the house, but he's not gonna sell to just anyone. He said, well, you have such wonderful times there. You don't want some schmuck in the place you call home.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  No drugs. He, this is his quote. No drugs, no alcoholics. I don't want anybody coming in here who's gonna destroy the place.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  I love he's selling it, but he's not letting go of control.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And I think, I think we should enforce the exact same rule. If you're an alcoholic, if you're on drugs, do not listen to TVPN. Unsubscribe.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a little bit harsh. If you are any of those things, uh.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  As I chug Celsius.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Get help and, uh, you're still welcome to listen to the show while you get, uh, on the right path.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. We're rooting for you. Um, but, uh, don't try and bid on Gene Simmons' house because, uh, he wants you to clean it up before you spend 14 million dollars. It is hilarious because.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  It could be an awesome arc if you, if you are.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Who is in, who is, who, how can you have 14 million dollars to buy a house and also be a schmuck? Like, it's very weird. You'd have to be a very, very high functioning alcoholic, right?

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  I gotta push back there. There's a lot of high functioning, uh. Drug abusers in the world.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  I suppose, I suppose.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  I hate to break your golden retriever mindset.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  It's been said I have the mind of a golden retriever. And maybe I got this one wrong. Anyway, the house is beautiful. Four bedrooms, roughly 7,740 square foot home, sits on a hill with views of Coldwater Canyon, Century City and the Pacific Ocean. And so if you're in the market and you're gonna join us in Los Angeles, we are super bullish on Los Angeles. We think it's the future of media. We think it's potentially, if things go right, the Silicon Valley of media.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  Could be the home of entertainment.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Could be the home of entertainment if, when we're done.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  This quote is fantastic. Simmons says, "I'm the most blessed human being on the planet. These hard times, you don't want to say, 'I have too many houses,' but we have too many properties," said Simmons.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  They have a house in Whistler, Canada, two homes in Malibu, two houses for their children, and they will be spending more time at their additional properties. This is in quote, "Whatever Whitey wants, certainly. Certainly. Happy wife, happy life." Gene Simmons just sending it, talking to a Wall Street Journal reporter.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Just yapping.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  It's homey and outdoorsy.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  Amenities include an art gallery space where he hangs his own artwork and a soundproofed home theater where Simmons said he screens movies for his production company, Simmons Hamilton Productions, which released the movie Deep Water in 2022. The home is outfitted with high-end smart home devices. "It's like a 22nd century house," said Simmons. "He's truly living in the future." "I had to go out and buy a simple microwave so that I could press one button and heat things up because the coffee maker, the cappuccino maker, the time machine, all that stuff was built into the wall, voice activated, I might add. It was so complex, I couldn't make it work."

• 39:08John Coogan?

  He bought, he was like, "Yeah, just like get the nicest stuff." It was too complicated for him.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  This is what I've been saying about smart homes.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  We want dumb homes.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Rip it out.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  I would invest in a dumb home startup, just like a bunch of knobs.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Nobbs, all.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Physical.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, get teenage engineering in there.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to be able to set the temperature in my home.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  That would be super cool.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, like an odometer style thing where you're just like.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  Yep. Outside the half acre lot, it has a solar panel, 40 foot, black lined infinity pool and 1800 square feet of patio space. He said he likes sitting outside with his children and significant others. They eat popcorn and hot dogs and play the adult card game Cards Against Humanity.

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  Of course, we laugh our heads off, he said.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I love this. They call, they're describing his career. They say, "The Kiss co-founder." He's the co-founder of Kiss. He's not just like in the band.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Also known as the demon.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Is known for wearing black and white makeup, spitting blood on stage. In addition to his work as a musician, he has a restaurant chain, a record label, a reality show and other ventures. In the fourth quarter, luxury, single family homes.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  He really, he really beat the allegations that like, you know, metal rock enthusiasts, you know, become monsoon.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Totally. No, no, no, no. He's like, no drugs, no alcohol. Yeah, I'm gonna go wear some crazy makeup and spit some blood on stage and rock out.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they call me the demon.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  They call me the demon, but I really just want to play Cards Against Humanity with my kids and eat hot dogs.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  And laugh my freaking head off.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Anyway, last, let's do one more ad and then we'll move on to another ad for a Mississippi home and 14 million, it's selling for $14 million. So, let's tell you about Numeral. We've called it before, we called it AGI Sales Tax God Magical Sales Tax Intelligence from the heavens. Let's take a moment to say thank you to Numeral. Get on Numeral. And my company, Lucy, is officially a Numeral customer. I can't recommend it enough. We're dog fooding it here. Golden Retriever style. So, anyway, the $14 million home in Mississippi that you probably have your eyes on, it's being listed by Brett Favre, the legendary quarterback, Green Bay Packers.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  And if you're looking for acreage, this is the spot. They have 465 acres for only $14 million.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  And you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hubbub about new cities, new startups, start, startup cities across the globe. You don't have to go to the, across the globe to build your

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  You can just buy Brett's house.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  500 acre compound. You can just buy this one for 14

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  For the cost of a mango seed.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Million. Yeah. Honestly, that's the, that's the strategy. Head to Silicon Valley, head to Sand Hill Road. Hey, we need 20 mil. We're going to build a new city and then buy this and then just go live in it and be like, mission accomplished. We did our job.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Well,

• 41:53John Coogan?

  We built the new town.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  Get residents to come in and pay you, you know, $5,000 a month to be a part of the city.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  As a sort of citizenship, flat tax.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  So just like throw parties?

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  No, basically get your ARR up, you know, into

• 42:07John Coogan?

  So it's not like

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Well into the seven figures. So

• 42:09John Coogan?

  So it's not a complete fraud.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, and then I imagine you could do a lot of other things.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  So Brett Favre is 55 years old now. He's the star quarterback, played 16 seasons with the Green Bay Packers, followed by one with the New York Jets and two with the Minnesota Vikings. Wow. 19 seasons in the NFL.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  He was definitely sleeping on an eight sleep.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  Early prototype, I would imagine.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  He retired in 2010 with one Super Bowl ring and he joined the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016, just shortly after retiring. Pretty great. I grew up in Mississippi and they used this roughly six, 465 acre property called Black Creek Farm, another named house. We love named houses on this show. As a primary residence since the late 1990s, and there's a little bit of interesting history here about how they built this up over the last 20 years. And so the parcel was undeveloped when Favre bought it, said Callahan. Among the first things they built was the, was a structure with horse stables. We've been seeing a lot of folks in the technology journalism industry get into building horse

• 43:13John Coogan?

  stables because of all the generational wealth. And then a lot of post-exit founders also now following in the footsteps of the technology journalists, getting into equestrian dressage, et cetera. And so he built a structure with a horse stables on the first level and guest house on the second level.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  So smart.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, this, I mean, this is, this is, uh,

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  This is the playbook.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  This is the playbook, exactly. He's run, he's run top-tier plays for Green Bay. Now he's running top-tier plays in the real estate market. And so, uh, they lived in the guest house while building the gated main home. That was 20,000 square feet, a very reasonable number. Uh, that was completed in 2002. And then they build another house, 5,000 square feet for the mother-in-law. You'll love to see it shown love to the rest of the family.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this ends up getting a premium? I mean, to put this, to put the price $14 million for the 465-acre estate, that's only 329 Tesla Model 3s, which just feels very low to, you know, buy the home of a former Hall of Fame, you know, a quarter.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  But for the same price, you could also get the, the Demon's House. You can get the Demon's.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  You can get the Demon.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Can we get the Ashton Hall sound? The Demon's House is available, but also this.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these are really.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  But also, uh, Brett Favre's house is, uh, is up for sale as well.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere out there, somebody's gonna like, you know, basically make a call. All right, I have 14 million to spend on a home.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, which one are you going with?

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm either going to the Demon or going to Mississippi.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, Brett Favre has a nickname, but, uh, Pat McAfee got in a lot of trouble for calling him this. Do you remember this story? He called him the Sticky Finger Bandit, uh, because of some legal trouble that Brett Favre got into. But Brett Favre denied any, uh, any wrongdoing and the case is ongoing. So we will not be calling Brett Favre the Sticky Finger Bandit. But I love these nicknames. I love that we can say the Demon. I don't know if I want to call Brett Favre the Sticky Finger Bandit, uh, because I don't know anything about the case and I don't know if he's guilty.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  You don't know anything about sports, John.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  I don't know anything about sports, honestly.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  You thought UFC took place in, in a circle.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  I did, I did. But I've learned a lot more and I love the United Fisticuff Championship now. I'm a huge fan. I like the punching, I like the kicking. I like everything else that goes on in the Hexagon. Anyway, moving on.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, by the way, we have.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  Two pawns.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Bo Nichols is gonna be calling into the show, uh, early next week. He's got a big fight on May 3rd.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  I can't, I, I already have my questions ready. I'm gonna be like, which one was better? UFC 375 or UFC 524?

• 45:49John Coogan?

  You know, I've been doing the deep dives. I'm gonna get the answer from him. I'm gonna have him break down the greatest moments of the last thousand UFC's and tell us how it's all works. So this house has two ponds, one spanning roughly 3.5 acres and the other spanning two acres. Those are pretty big ponds. Favre enjoys recreational hunting on the property. That's pretty cool. Has a ray of wildlife, including whitetail deer, wild turkey and dove.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  It's so easy to tell when you get so into a story that you're like, okay, actually, we need to go back.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  We, yeah, we got, we, you can't just leave us hanging here.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  And not talk about the pond.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, speaking of Favre, let's do an ad and then we'll tell you more about the NFL. We'll bring it back to Netflix. So, Polymarket, get on Polymarket. We're gonna be doing a Polymarket deep dive later in the show. Stay tuned for that. We're reviewing the top eight Polymarket markets that we are tracking in technology. Anyway, the information has a deep dive, the big read.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  When I think of the information, I think of sports.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Sports.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  And so that's why we're gonna be talking about this article today.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm very excited.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, people, people often call the information like the, it's like the tech crunch of sports, right?

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  The NFL loves Netflix, but does Netflix want to love the NFL?

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  The assumption has been that the streamers will need sports as much as the leagues need the streamers. The reality is more complicated. We talked about F1, US, trying to sell the, the US television rights to Netflix. Netflix kind of balking at the price and saying not interested. Who knows? A deal could still happen, but it seems like there's a mismatch between the league's expectation from a, you know, pricing standpoint and what the streaming platforms are willing to pay, given. Again, that they're sort of at like peak sat market saturation. There's, you know, babies are being born that will someday sign up for Netflix.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we covered this on Netflix earnings. Like Netflix has great penetration and sports are important, but sports historically have been the thing that keeps people from cutting the cord. And if you just include it in Netflix, it's not that additive. And so there's a big question of what is the true value of live sports for Netflix. Now Hulu went really big into live sports. They have a whole campaign around that, of course, owned by Disney now. And but Disney also owns ESPN. So there's a whole flywheel there. So there was a gathering in at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, where the NFL was hosting its annual owners meeting. The conclave is a big deal for the league, an occasion for it to hatch hash out

• 48:29John Coogan?

  its multi-billion dollar business deals and discuss what the future may hold. The latest gathering, which lasted over four days, had a notable first time guest, Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, an absolute dog.

• 48:40Jordi Hays?

  Is there another tech company anywhere near the size of Netflix that has co-CEOs?

• 48:45John Coogan?

  It's very rare. It's very, very rare.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Public, but they're private.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But I would put them in the same league as Netflix in terms of just overall amazing.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  Market dominance.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Exactly. He came for a panel discussion about sports on streaming video services like Netflix. And the league revealed that Netflix would air two Christmas games, two Christmas Day games in 2025, just as it did in 2024. Everyone knew Netflix would do at least one Christmas game as part of a three-year deal that began with a pair of Christmas matches last year. The first NFL games ever broadcast on Netflix, but the deal requires Netflix to air one game per year. So now they're doing two. So they're going a little bit deeper. The media world saw the decision to have two games as Netflix's acknowledgement that it's interested in nurturing its nascent relationship with the league after decades of resisting live sports. For the league's part, it couldn't be happier. We're now in

• 49:40John Coogan?

  a world where there are some platforms that are doing one deal. That are doing one deal, you tap into global scale. The NFL's chief media and business officer said Netflix is one of them. Amazon is certainly becoming that and YouTube is certainly becoming that. Right now, the league is trying to find a marquee home for an opening week game on September 5th, September 5th in Brazil. And while it might go to a TV network, a streamer like Netflix is probably more likely since those companies have greater interest in international audiences. We talked about this with Netflix adding users internationally and more money to spend. And that's, that is a change in the sport world, in the sports world that is upon us. And for us, it comes at a good time as we think about global distribution.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  And so it'll be interesting to follow what happens with all of these different sports leagues and where they end up. I do think that eventually they have to each, each, each sports league has to find a home on a streamer, just because I don't see young people ever going back and uncutting the cord and getting on cable, right?

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Signing up for traditional cable.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  And so it will either be the, the Gen Z kids never get into sports really, or the stream, or the leagues figure out how to distribute.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, their testosterone has been cut by 80, 90%.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, Callie Means was really not mincing words of the younger generation. He was coming for them.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Not so alpha as it stands, but.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yep. Anyway, is there anything else you want to cover on the NFL and Netflix?

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm interested to see how this plays out. I mean, right now it feels like a pretty bad fan experience if you're having to kind of like bounce around, you know? But.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  And Netflix has a lot of really cool, I mean Netflix has a lot of really cool technology. Did you ever watch, what was that called? Baldur Dash or something? Baldur Snatch or something? They, they had a choose your own adventure video. It was kind of Black Mirror, I think it was directed by the Black Mirror team or something.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying Netflix should allow, sort of create AI-generated fanfiction of games where you can create a reality where your team wins every time? Is that what you're about to say, Dan?

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. No, I mean, on a serious note, there are.

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  Your team's just losing and it's like, do you want to see the final five minutes where they win? And then, yes.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  That would save a lot of households, you know?

• 51:57John Coogan?

  It would, it would. Oh, like, yeah. Dad's going to be in a bad mood unless, unless the Packers win. Let's just put on the, the good ending.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  No, I mean, I do think Netflix has embraced technology in obviously a very, you know, unique way. And there are interesting things that you can do over a streaming platform that you can't do over the air. And so that's things like letting the user choose the camera angle. Letting the user choose, you know, even subtitles, dubbing, these different things. I made a, I made a YouTube video a couple of years ago about how with the advances in artificial intelligence and wave to lip, which is a an AI model that remaps the lips of, to a waveform. I think this is what Tyler used to make Delian speak Chinese yesterday.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull that video up?

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, can we pull up the, the Delian speaking Chinese on TVPN? And yeah, drop it in the bangers tab. But I was very bullish on Netflix in particular, being able to redub every single piece of content with matching lip movements. Because I'd watched a German show about time travel called Dark on Netflix. And I was just too golden retriever brained. I couldn't get into it because I didn't want to read the subtitles, but the dubs didn't match up with the lips. And so it was very jarring. And so there's always this big debate about dubs versus subs. Dub, are you dubbing the, the words over or are you using subtitles? Let's see, Delian.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  山谷的历史是这样的，一开始的意图是举办一个大约三十到四十人的蜿蜒，但后来人数膨胀到了一百人。我想第一次蜿蜒大概有十二到十三位成员参加，然后从那时期他就不断的挤去石头，我们就像是蜿蜒规模越来越大，然后最终蜿蜒变得非常庞大。他们就想，哇，我们这里有很多非常优秀的人，而我们正在举办一个四人蜿蜒，我觉得公众会对这些人和在公共

• 53:55John Coogan?

  It's really funny when he gets to like the chat GPT thing too, because he keeps like not, it doesn't translate those words.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  All I have to say, Delian, I would want to see one.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  Let the audience figure out what that means.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I was really bullish on Netflix, basically doing exactly that, what Tyler was able to do probably in an hour.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  I doubt, knowing how cracked Tyler is.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  It's probably five minutes, honestly. But doing that for every Netflix show, and Mr. Beast has been doing this with localization of all of his content. Netflix is in a unique position to do that for all of their content and make it even more accessible internationally. That's obviously an incremental, an incremental source of revenue for them. And then there's a whole bunch of other things that you can imagine Netflix offering unique experiences to NFL fans, whether that's the ability to switch between different games very quickly. Like, have you ever watched NFL Red Zone? It was like a specific channel that would switch from one game to...

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's all the channels, right?

• 54:56John Coogan?

  It's all the channels. So it'd switch from any game that has an exciting moment, it would just cut over to that. And that's something that they were able to do with just a team managing all the streams. But you can imagine a whole bunch of different versions of that.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Members of the community that are huge NFL fans are gonna be like, oh, great, so John's explaining Red Zone to me.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  This is great. This is just great.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, why don't we move on to an ad, and then we'll move on to explaining how SPVs work. So before, after the SPVs happen, companies go public. Oh, I hear the sound of F1. Oh, is that public.com the latest sponsor of Aston Martin F1 team?

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Go to public.com, go to the website, create an account, transfer some money in, get set up, and then start hunting for those Aston Martin cars. They're not easy to find, but if you dig around, you can definitely find them and you can enter to win. And so get on public.com. Anyway, before companies go public, they are private, and they're doing a lot of SPVs. And the Wall Street Journal has a little piece about a side hustle for friends of Elon Musk, selling access to stakes in his private companies. Lucrative stock deals have allowed SpaceX to avoid public scrutiny, even as it has grown into one of the largest Companies in the United States and we might have to put this in the truth zone. But let's break it down. Truth zone. Interesting things here. So Antonio Gracias and Elon Musk go way back.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  The Valor Equity Partners founder and family and his family spend their Christmases with Musk and vacation with him in the Bahamas and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For for Gracias, it has been a lucrative relationship. He has become a multi billionaire in part by investing in nearly all of Musk's companies over the years, according to public filings and court documents. Now, Gracias and his firm have found another way to cash in on his status in Musk's inner circle by selling wealthy outsiders access to tightly controlled shares in Musk's privately held company. Jordy, do you want to give us a little 101 on how SPV hustling goes down? I've heard it's very much like club promotion. Is that an apt analogy?

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the average SPV promoter.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Is similar to a club promoter.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  Where they hit you up and they say, hey, coming around later? You want a, you want a, you want a bottle? You want a table? What's going on? Now, I, I think that analogy is accurate for some SPV leads, but.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Not at this level.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  For not all, not for all. And yeah, I just thought this, the, the attacks are, you know, continuing to rain down on Elon from all over the internet.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  And I thought the idea that, you know, the, the dynamic that's happening here is a very similar dynamic to what happens at pretty much every single private company.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  In which management teams and CEOs prefer to fundraise from people that they have long standing relationships with, oftentimes personal relationships with. And so nothing about this article should be surprising.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think that, again, over time, people have joked about the idea of I'm an, I'm an investor in SpaceX and you're investor and sort of like layers, layers of SPVs with high fees. And ultimately the SpaceX has performed so well that you're still up massively unless, you know, you were, unless you were really, really layered.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  And so I think investors have done fine in this. And I think that in general, this is just a function of there being so much demand for SpaceX shares that.

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  That, you know, these types of fee structures work.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I, the only thing that stood out and that was interesting is that Valor was sort of bundling SpaceX and XAI shares in a single vehicle.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Offering, you know, basically doing a $1 billion raise, 200, about 25% of that was XAI. So I think that could be more of a function of there just being outsized demand for SpaceX and less and basically forcing people to say like, you know, you don't really have an option, like you're buying both. That's at least the way I read it. Don't have any inside information.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  I think there's kind of two points on SPVs that are interesting. One is that at the ultra-growth stage, centicorne level, the fundraises are the same size as large venture capital fundraises. And so you might go raise a $2 billion growth fund and that might be a huge size gong moment and you deploy that over a number of years. It's a 10-year fund and you're expected to have a diverse range of investments across the portfolio. But when you're talking about raising $2 billion, you're talking to LPs that are writing huge checks. And those LPs might be fine making effectively a direct investment into a SPV and they treat it just like a growth fund.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  And they're just saying, yes, I'm, I'm, I'm writing a billion dollar check. I'm writing a hundred million dollar check. But instead of going into a growth fund, I'm just going into SpaceX with this. And so that makes sense. On the flip side, the, I think why SPVs get a bad rep sometimes is that they're assigned at the lower level. If you're doing a $1 million SPV into a $10 million raise, there's just a question about like, wait, there are so many venture capital firms that could just fill out this entire $10 million round. Like, why do we need an SPV?

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  It makes sense why you need an SPV for SpaceX if they're raising 10 billion or something that, you know, you don't want to suck up an entire growth fund.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  And, and to be clear, Valor and some of the other firms that do this are providing a service in a way to SpaceX because SpaceX doesn't want to have.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Tons of shareholders.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Of individual shareholders that are going to say, hey, like, what's the update? However, things going?

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  It's not just that. It's also legal. So one of the ways SpaceX has been able to maintain its private status is by limiting its investor base. Once there are 2,000 holders of record, not including employees who own shares through stock compensation packages, a company is legally required to disclose financial information similar to a public company. And so there was always a fear that if you raised money from a VC and then you ran your company for 10 years, they distribute the shares out and they have more than 2,000 LPs. I think this number might have been lower earlier, too. But if they distribute to the LPs and you wind up with 2,000 holders of record because you've done so many different raises and so many different party rounds that you wind up with 2,000 holders of record,

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  you could be running a small company that now has to disclose financial information similar to a public company. That could be very problematic. And so SPVs have always been a way to kind of tie a bow around a group of holders and then layer these structures. And I think that it's overall fine and doesn't seem like a big deal, but obviously it's of interest and newsworthy because SpaceX is an interesting company. Elon Musk is an interesting founder.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what the Journal doesn't.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Often don't get exposed.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what the Journal doesn't mention is that even if these investors were just investing directly, SpaceX can't do general solicitation as a private company.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  And nor, and the other factor is you still have to be an accredited investor even to invest in these SPVs. And in fact, I think these SPVs probably have much more firm accreditation checks than

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Other SPVs that might be investing into Figure as an example.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Yep. So yeah, there's some little bit behind the scenes texts from the Twitter deal. Venture capitalist David Sacks texted Musk in 2022 after Musk asked if he would invest in Twitter. I am, I'm personally in and will raise an SPV too if that works for you. And so good, good communication there from the investor saying, hey, I, I'm open to doing an SPV. I would love to do that for you, but only if it's helpful. And then on the flip side of that, Musk accused Twitter investor Jason Calacanis of marketing as SPV to randos during the first Twitter fundraiser. SPVs are how everyone is doing these deals now. Calacanis responded, but tensions

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  were flaring at that moment, but it seems like they have resolved. And so these, the sale of these SPVs generates fees, of course, and UBS is also getting in on the action because UBS, Swiss Bank.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's much less, it's much less of an article if the article was UBS and Valor Equity offer shares in SpaceX to their client base.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not even tied to a new mark, which would be more interesting to hear about, oh, well, like, you know, there's new revenue numbers or there's new, new, on the back of some change in the business, the company's worth more. It's more just like, hey, there.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX does these a couple of times a year.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Elon's been a master of, of ensuring fair liquidity to early employees because we've talked to a lot of the early SpaceX employees and investors and they've been in the company for 20 years. Now it's 2005 company. And so even if you're totally bought in on SpaceX and you worked there for a decade from 2005 to 2015, you took immense risk, you got comped for that in, in stock. At some point, you're going to want to put your kids through college or buy a house. And so having some liquidity makes a ton of sense.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Or start a 3D printing company.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  Yes, I love that. Let's recycle the capital and let all the SpaceX alumni go build fantastic companies. They're very, very interesting.

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  They also profile, Luke Nosick, SpaceX board member who worked with Musk at PayPal before joining Peter Thiel's Founders Fund in 2006. He and Musk remained close, sometimes attending game nights in Austin where they played Werewolf, which pits villagers against monsters, according to a person who knows them. Someone leaked to the Journal that they're playing essentially board games. Very fun. Nosick founded GigaFund in 2017 and has purchased roughly $1 billion in secondary sales of SpaceX shares. Probably a great fund in that case. It's pretty good.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Giga Fund, best name so far.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Giga Fund is a great name. It's a great name. This is interesting. MySpace co-founder Berman is getting in on the action. You don't hear about the MySpace mafia very often, but he frequently gets slugs of shares when SpaceX sells them on behalf of employees and earlier investors. His firm Troy Capital invested part of a $47 million fund in secondary sales in SpaceX stock in 2022, when the company was valued at roughly 127 billion. And so that investment is probably doing very well. Fishner Wolfson, an early investor in SpaceX and a friend of Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel, another close associate of Musk, also often gets SpaceX shares for his fund on 37 Ventures Management.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  And so fantastic to see the boys ripping some SPVs. You love to see it. And you love some capital flowing into important companies that are doing great things in space and beyond.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Should we talk about some markets?

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yes, let's, let's go to our poly market analysis for the day and debate some of these. The first one is the largest company at the end of April and Apple seems to be running away with it. It's April 25th, only five more days if Microsoft wants to catch up, but it was a knockout, drag out fight. Mid, mid month on April 10th, Microsoft was actually expected to be the number one biggest company.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  And what did him do?

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  He cooked.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  He cooked.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  He cooked. And so everyone else is left behind. The options are Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon. What would it take for Microsoft, Nvidia or Amazon to flip Apple next month? I think you got to see crazy tariffs on Apple that actually stick and hurt iPhone prices and sales. And you need to see. Increased AI demand for Nvidia to do it, something with Amazon. I'm not exactly sure what would,

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  What would be the catalyst there? Nvidia is the one that could pop, I feel like, if all of a sudden there's a news of a GPT-5. We're, we're, the, the whole, the whole rumor about the pre-training scaling wall and GPT-4.5 not being that great. It's like, i- if all of a sudden the game's back on, scales all you need, bitter lesson comes back in the meme, in the meta, and all of a sudden it says, no, you actually do need to build the $500 billion data center. You need to build a $5 trillion data center, and everyone is taking it seriously. Everyone is scale-pilled, AGI-pilled, you could see Nvidia maybe pop. But this is not financial advice. We're just debating the markets. I don't know. Anyway, the next

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  News.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  The next market is, uh,

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  What do we got?

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  What will Michael Saylor say during Strategy Q1 2025 earnings call? And I like this because they're, they're, it's not just that he'll say Bitcoin. It's that he will say Bitcoin more than 100 times in a single earnings call. They know he's gonna say Bitcoin, but will he say Bitcoin 100 times? And there's a 20% chance, according to Polly Market, that Michael Saylor will say Bitcoin 100 times or more.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  But he's also got a lot of Bitcoin.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. There is a 9% chance that he will say, uh, billion 50 times or more. Crypto at 7 plus.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  I've actually, have you ever listened to a

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Sailor call?

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Strategy earnings call?

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Oh, is it no longer a micro strategy?

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  I think he renamed his strategy. He dropped the micro.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Drop the micro, it's macro strategy.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  It's a Giga strategy.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  China is at 50%, inflation is at 56%, Nvidia is at 34%. Lots of, lots of people getting on the action. Some of these are very low volume. Interest rate is just $374, but

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, if you go to strategygot.com, by the way?

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  It's just a bunch of basically, it's basically a big ticker that shows their market cap, their share price, their six month or their three month return.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  As it should be.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting that he's stuck with it in the face of Bitcoin ETFs and wide Bitcoin availability. There was a big discussion for a long time of like, how do, how do the public markets get access to Bitcoin? Maybe MicroStrategy is just a wrapper around that. It's okay. But he's, he's stuck with it and so it'll be fun to see what happens with the, with his earnings call. The next market is asked by us, actually, TBPN. Will ChatGPT reach 1 billion monthly active users in 2025? The volume started small. It's climbing. It's now at $76,000. You can go on Polymarket and, and express your.

• 1:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they've, the, the numbers have been kind of all over the board. Sometimes they talk about weekly actives.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people like to look at similar web and other data sources for information. But ultimately, I think this will be such a significant milestone that they will come out and announce it themselves.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  I certainly hope so. And, and I would like to, hopefully this market gets, it matures. And then hopefully, people who interview Sam towards the end of the year will just ask him like, hey, are you over or under a billion M A use in 2025? Did you, did you hit this, this milestone? And this does seem like a milestone that might.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he said, he said, I think he said recently that somewhere around 10% of the world uses ChatGPT on a monthly basis.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  Yep, that's 800 million right there. So we're in hair's breadth.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  And this is just such an impossible number, almost.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you add another Studio Ghibli moment where it onboards a bunch of people. You, you just add more viral loops of sharing. Maybe they do the social network thing. And we actually do have more OpenAI news that we're tracking here. Will OpenAI acquire Windsurf before August? It's at a 52% chance now.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  This is sitting lower than I would have thought.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  But again, the, the. Headline that was initially reported was not a confirmed deal. That was

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  A publication, kind of like front running something, and this happens before.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's very common for, uh, media outlets to basically get word that a deal is in the works.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  And then just announce it.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's not necessarily a dumb, dumb deal. Sometimes a term sheet hasn't even been signed. Um, and so I can actually put a lot of

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  We saw this with Wiz, where, where there was rumors of an acquisition that happened earlier and then they denied it and it wound up not happening. And there's been other times when companies have, it's feels like they've maybe deliberately leaked news to

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Kick off a fundraising round. There's a bunch of different things that can go on. Um, staying in the AI model race, which company has the best AI model by the end of June 30th? Uh, Google is at 45%, OpenAI is at just 25%. And it's a little bit odd because, uh, the reviews of, of, of GPT-03, 4.5 have been remarkably good.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is June, June 30th, to be clear, not April 30th.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. So, so we're two months out and you get a little bit of like a yield curve when you compare these different, uh, these different time periods. And so, uh, a lot of it's driven by when developer conferences happen, when new releases are expected to happen. So if, if Google, for example, has Google I/O in mid-June and you know that they're going to drop something then, Yeah. Well, it might be a new model. Well, they might just

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Also, you know that

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Blow out the benchmarks.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Meta is sitting at 2% right now and you know that Zuck is just absolutely fuming every single day not having the best model.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Especially since this is based mostly on benchmarks. I don't think this is based on

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Vibes.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  Vibes, of course.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not based on vibes.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Although some of the benchmarks are kind of vibe based, like LM Arena seems to be like a measure of vibes, kind of. Uh, but it's a big market, over one and a half, uh, almost one and a half million dollars in volume on the poly market for which company has the best AI model on

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to just watch the graph and just see like, okay, on a longer time horizon, it just becomes very unpredictable. Uh, you know, who's going to actually be in the best spot. Well, we have, uh, uh, the CEO of Linear coming in.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Is our most recent partner. What's going on?

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you. Uh, it's great to have you a partner, uh, on the show as well. It's fantastic.

• 1:13:50Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I've been like following you guys along from the very beginning. I think like you really have like an interesting concept and like I think like some people are going for that three hour podcast, but I think like I like you guys are going for the more like shorter content as well.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Three hours a day. There's something for everybody. Yeah. It's fantastic. Well, yeah, there's tons of stuff to talk about. I think we'll probably see you up in SF next week potentially. The week after. The week after for Figma's event. But yeah, why don't you give a quick introduction for everybody that's not familiar, that maybe hasn't used Linear in the past like us, and then we'll go from there.

• 1:14:32Karri Saarinen?

  Sure. So yeah, I'm Karri Aronin. I'm the CEO of Linear. And Linear is basically this purpose-built tool for planning and building software or products. And we've been building this the last five years. And what we're really doing for the product organizations and companies is that we are helping them with the end-to-end workflow from like going from customer discovery, like collecting customer requests into planning roadmaps, planning projects, then executing on those projects and tasks. So we're trying to like be this like really understand the customer's workflow here, that what it takes for these different people in the organization to do their job well, and how can we streamline it or make it easier for them.

• 1:15:14Karri Saarinen?

  And today, we have about over 10,000 companies as customers. And like these can be anything from like ambitious startups to major enterprises. And I think like if you think anyone building something cool today, they're probably building it with Linear. So OpenAI, Scale, Your Sponsor Ramp, I think Mercury, probably the lot of logos that you see at the bottom of the screen, they are our customers as well. So I think like for me, it's or for us, it's been really exciting like work from with this very forward looking companies. And like they're always like thinking like how they can do things better. And I think like you probably talk about this a lot on the show that.

• 1:15:56Karri Saarinen?

  I think AI is the topic that like AI is changing the way we do work or how we like how people do it. Their personal work, but also like how the organizations operate. And I think like a lot of execs and CEOs and CTOs are now. Pushing it to their companies that, hey, we need to use more AI because we do. We do believe that it it can make us more productive and and more efficient.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  When when did you know you wanted to start linear? You were founding designer at Coinbase and then you're over at Airbnb. I imagine you were pretty frustrated with the tools at the time and and had a kind of concept for what you wanted to build, but I'm curious at what point it really clicked.

• 1:16:36Karri Saarinen?

  I I mean, in the end, it clicked with my my co-founders. I think we're all kind of frustrated at the same time. So I think we we had this like a. Time where we all worked on in our companies for like four years or so. And we're like, well, what do we do next? And I think like we're also frustrated that. Each of the companies we ever worked at, these tools never felt that good. And especially it didn't feel feel good for. Builders like us, like when we like, maybe that the tools were OK for the management and and like the some of the other people in the company for but like for designers and engineers.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very different if you're just kind of like looking at a dashboard as an exec and you're just kind of like monitoring the situation. But when you're the person that has to you to sort of like use the tool constantly and sort of be generating the content in the tool. It's just a dramatically different experience. I I remember my last company when our.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

  First employee joined this this guy, Brandon Jacoby, who'd been at Cash App and and Square and joined to lead design and product. He literally set up a linear account on the first day because he was just like, we're never, we're not going to use anything else. It would just be insane. So I'm curious. We talk a lot about venture markets broadly. I think you guys have taken a pretty unique approach and sort of like building, you know, being a sort of default tool. And I'm sure over time, getting an immense amount of pressure from investors to take on more and more and more capital. Yet I feel like you guys have had kind of like a efficiency ethos from day one. Can you talk about your kind of just like mindset when it came to

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  when the right moments were to raise and what went into that?

• 1:18:21Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah. So I think the ethos of the company is like, what we really try to do is like, we want to be the best tool for this purpose and this market. And I think that's the way we win. And that's kind of like the strategy we have. And for me, being a best tool means that you also need to be a quality tool, like a high quality tool. I don't think like you can be the best tool if it's like the quality is kind of low. So to do that, I think like sometimes companies get themselves or startups get in, get themselves into this stage where it's like, you just have to like work on the growth metrics because you need to raise the next round. We were fortunate that we didn't have to do that. Like we could hit the, we hit the market pretty well. And like we got like companies starting to use us like

• 1:19:06Karri Saarinen?

  in the first year. And, and we started getting revenue pretty quickly. And then given that we also had this quality mindset, like we always saw that we worked at Airbnb and Uber and Coinbase that, that like, and the amount of people doesn't necessarily generate the quality. A lot of times when we actually build, trying to build something new or something really like good, it was a small team. And so we, we took that lesson that like, hey, can we just build better with the smaller team? So that, that's great. So like situations like our costs are lower. But then also like, we were able to like start generating revenue so that we actually started, we became profitable the second year. And we've been profitable

• 1:19:45Karri Saarinen?

  ever since. So then the last like four years or so. And so what it, what it creates is like, we can have a little more control of our destiny of like, we don't have to work for the round that the rounds, all the rounds have happened because. We felt that like there's now like a good moment of bringing someone new in like we are in this new. I think with the with the seed, I think obviously there's some like, well, we should like, let's say, say, coiled our seeds. So I think there's some like a brand aspect of that, like, hey, we are like a real company now and we have like real backers. And then some of the other like serious A and B has been about, hey, we are now like entering this new segment.

• 1:20:26Karri Saarinen?

  It's a little bit uncertain like what's going to happen. We're getting these larger customers and maybe we need to invest more into sales. So like, I don't, I don't, the profitability is not the like, the number one goal of the company, like still the growth is, but. What it, what it allows us is like, it gives us a little more like flexibility. How do we go after it? Versus like, well, I'm running out of money like in six months. Now I have to like go. Figure out how do we put the numbers up so I can like raise a good round.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one unique part of your company, uh, in that it feels very core to the culture. You guys are, uh, remote, remote only. And then you simultaneously, I think it probably one of the reasons that works so well. You guys focus on hiring very, very senior people. Uh, do those two things go hand in hand or are they sort of separate and and both have their own reasons?

• 1:21:20Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I would say like there's some, some link there and I, I think like it kind of like. From the perspective, we wanted to have more that kind of like a talent density. So you have smaller team and like better talent. Um, so I think that that talks about like, that kind of goes into this more like senior people. I think remote, it, it is a type of mode of working where you have to trust the employees to like figure things out on their own. And usually that develops a little bit later in the career. Um, it doesn't mean that like junior people wouldn't, couldn't have that, but it's like just more, um. Just happens more and like as, as you get more experience. Um, I think it's.

• 1:22:03Karri Saarinen?

  Today, we are like hiring more more juniors and I think the the Indian like the remote to me is that there's a lot more focus on the actual work. Um, like I think like when you're in a company and in an office, there's all kinds of things going on and people have like crazy ideas all the time. Some of those ideas maybe are very good, but sometimes people end up or startups might end up kind of attacking a lot like they're like constantly changing the direction versus remote is a little bit, the management is a little harder, like it's harder to like, it's almost like herding people to the direction. So you have to do it more like this is the plan and this is the strategy and then you need to let the people to execute on that. And so you're gonna have to trust people's judgment. So that's what we try to hire for is like

• 1:22:48Karri Saarinen?

  hire people in all positions that like if we, if you get no instructions from us directly, then like, could you figure this out and could you like make something good?

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  About a decade ago, I was running an engineering organization. I think we were using Trello or Asana. I'd love to know kind of like what is, what, what is your battle card look like today? Uh, and what, what was the feature or, or pitch to get organizations that maybe already had some sort of product in place to switch over? Like, what was the killer go to market motion?

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it, not to jump in, is that if a, if a designer or a product manager moves to a company that doesn't use linear, the first thing they tell the hiring manager, I won't join unless you commit to switching to linear. But, uh, Kari, go for it.

• 1:23:40Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, I think the, in the end, that's kind of like it, like it's the word of mouth. So I, and I like, I think obviously that hap- doesn't happen and just automatically. So like it, it's been like interesting that there hasn't been necessarily like just one thing, but there's some, some kind of, these kind of tools are in some ways simple, in some ways complex. It's, there's like a lot of things that people do, different things people do in a product, different roles use it. So like a lot of things needs to go right. And I think our lessons like going, using these tools for a long time is like, one, it's like speed. It's like, It's really annoying if things are slow. Like if you're trying to like do a little task and it takes like every time it takes like a minute to do it, or you are confused or even how to do it.

• 1:24:25Karri Saarinen?

  That means like you you probably won't use the tool that much. Like engineer will just, well, whatever. I'll I'll go there once a week to update my status.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  That's the worst, having like dead project management software, product management software. That's like, hey, we we paid for this. We have it. It's my dashboard into what's going on and no one's updating. And you got to go around and be like, everyone, you got to update. Yeah, bad. Jordan, you got a question?

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  You guys had a an agent focused launch recently. I'm curious to

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  you guys are a company that historically is is less fixated on sort of chasing trends, right? Like you know what you're building, the best platform to plan and build products. And so when a new trend pops up, you're not sort of automatically piling into it at the same time. So so in that context, I think, you know, having this new focus on agents is probably a reaction to what you're seeing from customers, what you guys are doing internally. I'm curious how you kind of to get your thoughts on on where agents are today in a sort of workplace environment and kind of how you see them evolving over time, just because you guys are in a position again where you're not

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  you know, trying to raise a billion dollars selling, you know, a dream around agents. You're just trying to build great products. And so I think it's more real grounded context.

• 1:25:50Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I think like we definitely have followed the like AI, what's been happening and experimenting on things, but we we like a lot of times we do ask, talk to the customers and that's kind of like what we see now that there is a lot more interest and demand for this. And and then also, I think the in the last couple of years, the models have gotten better and we're now like starting to see like this like agent like companies building agents and like agents, I think people are fighting like what the actual definition is, but I think to me what it means is that this kind of AI model or system can take some kind of form and or like a shape in these tools and or outside of the tools and

• 1:26:32Karri Saarinen?

  that you can start delegating things to them. And so like in our context, it could be like, obviously, there's a bug being reported. Maybe the agent can see that this is a bug that can they can solve pretty. Confidently and they could just say like, hey, I can solve this and then someone, some human like approves that. Or like as an engineer, like an ICE, individual contributor can, can just look at their task and say like, hey, I'm, I'm gonna try to delegate some of this task to, to the agent. And then I go work on my own task, like whatever is the most complicated one. So, yeah.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the trends in management philosophy. I remember agile, Kanban, Toyota management, all these different terms. There's books written on these. What's the latest and greatest? And is there, I, I remember a lot of companies were kind of aligned with one strategy or the other. What are you long? What are you short now in terms of like management philosophy?

• 1:27:36Karri Saarinen?

  Um, yeah, I, I think that, I think a lot of this like systems are like agile or say for some of this like other like frameworks. I think I generally short frameworks when it comes to any kind of management like systems. So I'm, I'm more like, I, I'm long on like the first principles of like, I, I think like in the end, it's like what, what any kind of organization is about is like, how do you generate the output? It's like, doesn't really matter how do you get there? And so with linear, I think the idea always been like, can we make it simpler? And I do see like, like if you like, Brian Chesky and Airbnb, they have this founder mode idea. And then I think Prex had, had like a similar shift that like, hey, let's try to simplify the system, like the framework.

• 1:28:21Karri Saarinen?

  So I think like that, the simplification kind of, I think why, why it helps is that like, it makes the, makes the real things more visible. Like it's easy to like, if you have this like very complicated framework or system, it's easy to hide in the corners of like, yeah, we're kind of like moving things around, but nothing is actually happening. But I don't know, it's interesting questions of what does the agent system does? I, I think in some ways it's, it, it's one thing, I think like it's like interestingly, each individual contributor kind of like maybe becomes more like a manager. Because they have this like, almost like paralegals working for them.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. You have to imagine that there's more focus on like CI and less like waterfall, monolithic, mono repos in the age of AI. But I don't know what you think about that. Does that track?

• 1:29:13Karri Saarinen?

  I think it could track in a way that it's it's if building things, implementing the code becomes a lot cheaper and faster, you can, I think like today, we have this waterfall processes, partly because the engineering is expensive. So you do the thinking and the design before you start building, because the building part is kind of like the bottleneck or expensive. But if that equation changes, so now we can just start like what we see with a lot of this, like, like, um, kind of website builders or something, it's like, you can just try something out and see if that that's like actually like useful. So I think that's it does flip the system, but I think like you still probably need to go back to the planning a little bit,

• 1:29:58Karri Saarinen?

  like, think, why are you doing these things? But you can maybe like start experimenting more internally, directly with code and and not not like try to have this like very waterfall process.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about partnership partnerships in the context of your agent, you know, support? I imagine you got you guys have your own sort of agentic workflows, but then over time, I imagine some, you know, coding agent will come to you and say, hey, can we get sort of plugged in so that, you know, instead of delegating a specific issue to an engineer, you just delegate it to us. But then that introduces kind of a vector where I feel like linear is about like surgical sort of precision and perfection with product. And so adding this sort of external agent who's now sort of becoming a part of the

• 1:30:50Jordi Hays?

  product, even though they're sort of in some way mirroring what what an external engineer might look like. But but I'm curious how you think about that.

• 1:31:00Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, our view is that there's going to be like hundreds of agents, maybe like thousands. And I don't think we can, we can hold it back. And like, I don't think we should. So so what we're doing is like, we're kind of fully leaning into that, hey, linear is a platform for for agents. So this might be like third party companies building agents, maybe we build our own agents, maybe our customers build their own internal agents and they want to bring them on. And our job there is to like figure out like, what is the right way to like, what is the kind of interaction layer like, like, how do you actually? Use these things, like use these agents, how do you delegate the work? How do you monitor it? How do you review the work?

• 1:31:40Karri Saarinen?

  Or how do you, as an organization, um, kind of just generally monitor the, the security or the usage or the cost, for example? So we, we just think that like, there will be a lot of, at least in the short, medium term, there will be like a lot of different agents and we should just like support that. Um, and so, so that's, that's like, we already have two, at, at least two, um, that people are using like Devin and CodeGen, that they, that, that exists on a platform, you can assign issues to them today and they will try to fix them. And we actually seen like a lot of devil, like other developers and we are launching something in a couple of weeks, so I think there will be like more launch partners there.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it actually, I mean, it just gets me really excited because historically using linear, there's just so many sort of the issues that you create that are assigned to a junior engineer. They take a crack at it. It's, hopefully they get it right. Sometimes they don't and then you bring in other people to actually get it resolved. And so it's just like such a natural workflow, but it's also exciting because June, even more junior engineers will learn sort of how to manage engineers just by managing agents. So.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  I'm excited to run the show on linear. Project one, ticket, bigger gong.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Bigger gong. Yeah, we're gonna need a bigger gong.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  More tinfoil hats, more soundboard effects. Can we get a founder mode sound effect to kick it off?

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  In, in talking with your team, I mean, one of the, one of the, like, uh, everybody that, that watches the show knows this, we're trying to make the show, you know, one, one percent better every single day, but sometimes it's in different ways.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  But we really do have so many projects, new studio, new lighting, like I have 20 projects in my mind and, and like, they don't perfectly map to this product and tech.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, a lot of people think of content as like, you know, it's a camera.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  And a microphone.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  But if you're not improving it.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  And you're editing, but it's more so like the, the show is an ever-evolving product.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, uh, excited to hang.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming in, always welcome and, uh, yeah.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:33:41Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. See ya.

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  And next up, we got Sean Frank coming in the studio.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  The wallet man himself.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  But we're going to tell you about Ramp in the meantime. Time is money, save both. Get on ramp.com. Switch your business to ramp.com. Also, find your happy place. Go to wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  What does Wander always say? Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Well, we got, we got Sean Frank in the studio. The wallet salesman here, here to break it down, talks tariffs. Great to have you on the show, Sean. How you doing?

• 1:34:27Sean Frank?

  Dude, I'm excited to be here. You know, I typically watch at 2X speed and I got like two or three screens going. So, you know, I feel, I feel a little bit ahead of the curve here. I think I know what you guys are going to say next.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 1:34:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are we going to say next?

• 1:34:43Sean Frank?

  I mean, you guys are going to compliment my suit, I assume.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic suit. There we go.

• 1:34:47Sean Frank?

  It's a fantastic suit.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  He's got a suit.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  He's got a suit. He's got a suit. Let's go.

• 1:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Looking great, looking great. I, uh.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  I went through a bunch of stuff.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's so much to cover. Uh, how are you doing, first of all?

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  How was the, how was the private equity conference at Jeffries? I thought it was a little derivative of the TBPN format. You said you spent the day talking to 20 to 14 different firms, 30-minute meetings, speed dating style. We do 30-minute segments on this show. What's going on? Are you copying us? What's, what's happening?

• 1:35:20Sean Frank?

  Dude, it wasn't me, but Vinay, the senior vice president of Jeffries is a huge TBPN fan.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:35:28Sean Frank?

  He's like, dude, I'm a day one listener. I'm in chat. I stole this from them. Don't tell them about it.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Okay, well, maybe we can have a truce then. That's great. He can, he can borrow from us. The, the, the official creator of the 30-minute segment over here.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  But yeah, how, how was it? What did you learn? Who'd you talk to? Can you break it down for us?

• 1:35:48Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so it was a mid-market consumer conference. So to break that down for the audience, I'm sure everyone here knows what that means. There are probably a lot of LPs and funds, but mid-market is like 100 million to like 500 million in revenue. They're typically deploying checks of like 25 to 100 million dollars.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  That's on the equity side, right? Not, obviously not the total.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  Round.

• 1:36:15Sean Frank?

  So.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  So businesses are doing between 100 and 500 million. Is that right?

• 1:36:19Sean Frank?

  Yeah, typically, that's the valuations that they target, right? And then their their equity checks in are, you know, 25 to 150 million, something like that. These are smaller private equity funds. They're typically a billion dollars raised and deployed.

• 1:36:34Sean Frank?

  And this is like the first professional layer for private equity, right? Like, small market private equity is very scrappy. It is like guys who look like us, like out there grinding it out, trying to find deals, where these these people are professional bankers through and through. So they're they're going to go to good schools. They're going to have, you know, five to 10 years in the industry. And yeah, so like, this is not your your mega funds. These people are not deploying five billion dollar checks, right? The the fund size will be under five billion dollars.

• 1:37:06Sean Frank?

  And they're very targeted on consumer. So anything consumer discretionary. What we've seen is that that segment of the market has been destroyed probably since 2022. It got really, really hot in 2021. There was a bunch of spacks in the space, right? Famously, you have like, you know, Warby Parker, but then you also have solo stuff that just got de-listed on on Monday.

• 1:37:27Sean Frank?

  So I mean, there's a lot of great, smart people, and there's people who are on the solo stuff deal. So solo got taken public by Summit, but Summit's like a a little bit bigger than a mid-market fund. The first check into Summit was Bertram. So Bertram Capital, really great firm based in the Bay. So they found solo when solo was doing 60 million in top line, right? They put a check in at like 100 million dollar valuation. They probably owned 40% of the business, maybe more, and then they sell it to a different fund. So that's typically how mid-market works. You're going to be selling to a different fund to take them public. So Bertram made a ton of money. They sold all of their shares to Summit, right? They maybe they had a little bit more that they sold in the IPO.

• 1:38:08Sean Frank?

  But then, you know, a a larger cap fund is going to take a company public. So what's happened in the space? They are cold on consumer and the only categories that are interesting for them are. Services. So like talk to a lot of funds who are buying like roofing roll ups and uh you know, they're trying to buy plumbers like that type of shit like because it's um non discretionary spend. If your roof fucks up like you're gonna get a new roof and they're but really into the pet space like pet is still really hot. I have a friend Bill who just announced today. He sold his company to Morgan Stanley in the pet space and it's on Twitter. You guys can engage with it. So check out Bill. He he's crushing it.

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw that. He's been grinding for a long time. So that was great to see. Yeah. It's funny. Uh, there's, there's a guy uh who works in in mid-market uh PE who knew that I was friends uh and and and and associates associates with with Sean and he basically would email me once a week for like three years asking asking for an intro.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  I want to say I want to stay on on solo stove. You broke down um what happened. Is it a casualty of tariffs? Is it mismanagement? We've talked about it a little bit before, but can you give us the full postmortem post NYSE suspension, which we hate to see here. We want to see more IPOs, not more de-listings.

• 1:39:29Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's a lot market activity in the wrong way. Um, so what's happening with solo? So there's like the bigger third thing. And actually, I mean, I'll break some news. I talked to uh the corporate dev buyer at Yeti who was at the conference yesterday and I asked her like, oh, so you're gonna buy solo? And she's like, even if you gave it to me for free, I don't know what I'd do with it. She's like.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Why is that? Isn't it making like 500 million? We looked in the numbers recently. It seemed like it was like even if revenues are declining, even if there's tariffs, like there are people buying stoves, there must be a way to make some money out of that company, right? Am I crazy?

• 1:40:05Sean Frank?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of that. Um, and and people, there's, there's two main problems. One, it was like the biggest COVID trend of all time, right? There was, there was a two year period where all of us were uh. Stuck inside, couldn't travel. We all discovered the great outdoors. They sold a lot of stoves and there's a negative flywheel for that business. If you sell one stove, you're never going to buy a second stove. Like it actually, it removes a buyer from the market. So now it's harder to sell the second stove. So it's a horrible problem with that business. The second is massive tariff risk. They are 100% sourced in China. They are very tight with the manufacturer there and you just cannot get stoves right now. So you have a situation where they have their growth solution.

• 1:40:46Sean Frank?

  The past two years has been to go to mass market retail. They're in Costco, they're in, you know, Home Depot, whatever. And then those retailers won't let you raise prices. So you, you have a contract to sell it to whatever price. You're direct importing from China. You have stuff on the water and now your inventory is essentially toxic, right? Like, are you gonna, they cost 75 bucks to make. Are you going to give the government $125? Like, probably not. So.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Okay. So casualty of tariffs then, or mismanagement or?

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we talked about this months ago. Remember we were, we were kind of looking and, and at first it was a debt issue and that issue was looming. Regardless of tariffs happening or not, it seemed like it was.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  So it seemed like this was predictable from day one. If you were really clear eyed about that fly, that inverse flywheel you mentioned. And then also like the COVID dynamic.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  How about Chubbies though? Chubbies has to have some, some broader.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  That has a positive flywheel. You buy one pair of shorts, you like them, you buy more and then you're replacing those shorts every year, right?

• 1:41:46Sean Frank?

  Yeah, look, and I love all these guys. So Kyle, the founder of Chubbies is awesome. He's building a software product. Won't plug them. They gotta, they gotta pay for that, but really, really smart founder. And Chubbies is a good business. Like Chubbies does $100 million a year top line. They do $10 million in EBITDA. Like that business is worth something to somebody, but John Maris was the CEO of Solo. And his idea to solve the negative flywheel was to bolt on acquisitions. He's like, I'm gonna, you know, I'll, I'll fix my company wide LTV. By having solo customers buy chubby shorts and that just didn't happen, right? Like they, they could never integrate it.

• 1:42:30Sean Frank?

  Because somebody likes the outdoors doesn't make them more likely to be a Chubbies customer, right? Yeah, it would make more sense if Chubbies, I don't know, started selling beer pong equipment or something, right? Like, there could be some sort of like, you know, positive flywheel there. But their solution was to broaden the overall product offering with just like very distinct businesses that have no cross-sellability. So.

• 1:42:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can you talk about, I, I, people have this idea that, oh, I'm in, like, I feel like everybody's in love with the idea of a consumer product holding company, because like, people just like consumer goods. And they're like, oh, we have, we're good at selling this, we'll be good at selling that. But then when you, when I, you know, understanding, you know, that your focus and Connor's focus over the last, you know, coming up on a decade in not too long, the idea that somebody could compete in the wallet space with you guys while being part-time is just like insane, right? Because you guys are best in the world at what you do, and you're

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  just able to put more time into it than anyone else. Is the idea, is the consumer product holding company model just like generally flawed? Is it, is it not something that people should be going after? Or is it just more about actually having like distinct businesses and ultra competent management in place in each of them?

• 1:43:54Sean Frank?

  So, it's just really fallen out of vogue, right? So, very famously in the past two weeks, Hermes became the largest, most valuable company in the, in the consumer space, right? They were three hundred whatever billion. And they surpassed LVMH. So, LVMH is the holdco model, right? And that was, like, everyone wanted to be a holdco because LVMH was. And then Curing became a holdco, right? They have Gucci, they have a bunch of assets. Well, Gucci just put out their earnings, they're down 25% year over year. That came out on Monday, right? So, like, the holdco model is just falling out of favor. In favor of Hermes, single standalone band, super valuable. Lululemon set the trend. Lululemon is worth more than Honda. So, Lululemon makes awesome leggings that we all love. They trade more

• 1:44:39Sean Frank?

  than the best car company, or one of the best car companies. And then On Running is also, I broke this trend, right? So, On Running's worth $10 billion today, single brand, just making shoes. So, right now, the markets are valuing. Beautiful brand, super clean focus, owning a category. That'll change again, right? Someone, there's really great holdco's out there. You know, the people behind Crocs, Crocs owns Hey Dude, they're becoming a great holdco. Deckers is another shoe company. They're crushing it in the holdco space.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  But isn't there something about even the way that LVMH has approached their holdco? Which is like, we don't, we never share kind of creative resources across brands. Like there's very distinct, kind of like firewalls in place. Is there something to that? Is that what you think? You know, is, does Deckers sort of benefit from scale as just being like a massive shoe manufacturer? And then it's like, when it, when it comes to the kind of individual brand level? Like, let's just make sure that people are ultra focused on, on the sort of, the purity of the brand and sort of scaling that?

• 1:45:48Sean Frank?

  What I think LVMH does beautifully, LVMH calls them houses, right? So they're houses, but they're in the same neighborhood, right? And what they're able to do is they have El Catterton, which is like, they're picking up. Like, imagine this is like basketball. There's like amazing high school players, right? El Catterton is signing those high school players. El Catterton is their private equity arm, very much owned and controlled by the Arnault family. So, you know, Chrome Hearts is the, the greatest American accessory brand. That's in the El Catterton portfolio. At some point, they get called up to the major leagues and then they get integrated into LVMH. And then LVMH has the spotlight light approach. So of course Louis Vuitton is always going to be the, the best branded in the spotlight.

• 1:46:32Sean Frank?

  But when there's a challenger like Off-White, they can put that in the spotlight for a little bit. And then that becomes their star player and they cycle out to somebody else. They just got caught flat footed that they don't have a good star player right now. So like, that's the challenge of LVMH. Kering tried to do that, right? Richemont is the other big holdco in the European fashion space. Richemont's crushing it because they own Van Cleef and they own Cartier. Those brands are very, very hot right now. So LVMH is trying to take over Richemont because they want to be in the spotlight. So that is the inside baseball, the inside basketball, if you will, of the luxury space. You need to have recruits and you need to have a star player you can cycle out. And LVMH just doesn't have a hot brand right now.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  I like this idea of the pure play, you know, it aligns with like the founder mode, the life's work entrepreneur, just not getting too scatterbrained and focusing on one thing. What is the postmortem on some of the pure play companies in the fashion space that weren't able to reach escape velocity? I'm thinking of Allbirds and a few other brands in that space. Is it, is it just doing too much too early? Or is it just like missing some fundamental insight? Or is it more of like a market segment? And this maybe works in the high-end luxury market, but it doesn't work when you're more in that hundred dollar range competing directly with Nike? What's your take on that?

• 1:47:56Sean Frank?

  Well, you can't be cool forever. So that's, that's like, that's the biggest challenge. Allbirds was really cool, but San Francisco famously horribly dressed people, right? They have, they have no sense of fashion. Why do we think they're going to tell us what's cool, right? And they were betting on a sustainability wave, right? So like Nike is able to, like, they just benefited from people caring about athleticism, right? That was, that took them from a billion dollar stock in the eighties to 180 billion today or whatever, right?

• 1:48:26Jordi Hays?

  But they were caught flat-footed by wellness, right? And that, and effectively Nike was the brand for sports enthusiasts, everything from fans to athletes. But then wellness kind of came out of nowhere, took the, you know, the aloe crowd whenever they're on running in many, in many ways, Lululemon, obviously. So it seems like Nike missed the wellness trend. And that was, again, probably the biggest miss.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your take?

• 1:49:02Sean Frank?

  Well, and their stock suffered for it, right? I mean, like Nike is down massively from all time highs. They're down from their five-year mark. And it's because they missed that trend and, and they didn't pivot in fast enough.

• 1:49:17Sean Frank?

  The other thing that's happening is that's happening in beauty right now. So if you go to Sephora, you're either a celebrity brand or you're a wellness brand. That's all the newness going into Sephora. So Sephora and beauty in general is going through this wellness craze right now as well. Like skincare is taking over everything. So we're going to watch more of those waves happen. Consumer trends change over time. You can't be cool forever. So the whole thing like, and this is the biggest problem with venture capital coming into the consumer space. Coca-Cola is the most popular drink in America and it doesn't even have 20% market share. Because people like different drinks, right? Now Uber is a service that is just great for everybody. They'll have 100% of like the,

• 1:50:01Sean Frank?

  the ride healing market, right? Google, it's just the best. So I'm going to Google everything. There's no second player and consumer taste is just so important.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  There's no monopoly outcomes. They're just inherently oligopolistic markets. Interesting. So if you, if you go back to the founders who do, they focus on the pure plays.

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have a good, I have a good example. It's something you brought up before. I mean Chrome Hearts.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  I was about to ask.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  Needs to be studied and, and one of the reasons why, you know, right now it's like they've never been, they've never been hotter, but they've gone through periods where they certainly weren't nearly as hot. And I'm curious what you think they've done right. I think to my knowledge, they've stayed mostly family owned or certainly majority family owned. And is that, you think, allowed them to kind of like, ride different waves and, and not, if at any point they were overly fixated on just pure scale, you know, maybe they would have not been able to kind of come back in the way that they have. But I'm curious what your take is.

• 1:51:04Sean Frank?

  Yeah. I mean, the creative minds behind Chrome Hearts, they're artists. They're going to do what they're going to do with or, with or without you. If you think it's cool, if you don't think it's cool. Like Cher was wearing Chrome Hearts in the nineties, bro. Like they're owned by the Sinatra family. Like they're going to do what they're going to do. And it'll come in and out of oak, but they don't care. Right? So that, that, that's true authenticism. Like they've never chased revenue. Like they'll make pants that are like. $112,000 because that's what they would, that's what they choose to do that day. And then you know who buys them Drake? It's like.

• 1:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I've heard they, I've heard they, they basically they'll mog Drake too. They'll be like Drake, like Drake will be like, I want some new pants. And they'll be like, cool. Like get in line, like other people want the pants too. And then Drake has to like, you know, try to cozy up with the, you know, the SA, uh, but.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:51:55Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So it's, it's just like a commitment to the craft that like, I mean, this is the reason why the Europeans are so good at fashion. Is because they will do it for 50 years, making no fucking money, right? Or Goyard, Goyard's another like amazing brand. They just don't have a website. You can't buy on their website. Now it'd be awesome. They would make way more money. And if private equity owned them, they would open a website immediately. But then they're like, no, we want you to remember where you bought the bag. That's important to us. So like, you have to go wait in line and you have to, you can only buy what we have that day. And it just creates like a very personal relationship with the products. That is, people are longing for in the internet age. So yeah, the Europeans are the best at this.

• 1:52:39Sean Frank?

  I talk a lot of shit about Europe, but they do have this figured out.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I want to go to tariffs. Uh, I saw a viral thread yesterday by Ramon Van Mir. Uh, he says, everyone says they'd pay more for made in the USA. I tested it. We make a $129 filtered shower head manufactured in China with tariff surging to 170%. We explored reshore, reshoring. We found a US supplier. Our costs nearly tripled. I ran a clean A B test. You had two options. There were 25,000 users that did this, the exact same landing page. You can choose made in China for $129 or made in the USA for $239. And they had zero conversions on the US version. The add to cart rate for the US version was less than 1%.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  And over 3,500, uh, 3,500 people bought the Asia made version. What, how, how did you process that news? There's some community notes on it. I want to know what you think.

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think overall it was flawed experiment, but uh, it's a good story. But what do you got?

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Good viral post.

• 1:53:44Sean Frank?

  Yeah, we've seen this play out with sustainability, right? So people, people have two options on their website, like sustainable packaging and will buy carbon credits versus not. And like, people won't pay more than 5% for that. So it ends up being. There's tons of cheap goods in the marketplace and there's tons of substitute goods in the marketplace. And what you need, you need value props to stand out. So like Ridge has, you know, best materials. We have a great warranty. We have tons of reviews. We have social proof. These are just value props. Made in the USA can or cannot be a value prop, right? And if he ran that experiment with a Japanese audience, what you'd see is the Japanese audience is more willing to pay for made in America goods. And if you go to Japan, there's entire stores built around made in the USA, right? If you go to Dubai, it's the same thing.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for the Japanese, showing some love for the Americans.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so paint me a broader picture about how the tariffs are affecting e-commerce.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Is it a bloodbath? Are people figuring out ways around it? Is it, or is it going to put companies out of business? Are people going to lose jobs?

• 1:54:49Sean Frank?

  With, so without a doubt, it's the most challenging self-imposed regulation we've ever seen, right? Like, we went through COVID. That was hard for a lot of reasons. That, that was external forces, right? We went through iOS 14. We're peons in that. We have no idea. We can't control that. Consumer demand has been up and down for fucking years at this point. I have a lot of friends who will go out of business because of the tariffs, right? And a lot of people on the internet, you know, are celebrating that. They're like, well, fuck them for buying from, for China. But here's the thing. A year ago, it was encouraged. It's like, it's very hard to actually produce things in America. I've tried for years. I've put millions of dollars into it. So like, the government basically gave you a free pass

• 1:55:33Sean Frank?

  to, to, you know, buy international goods and then import them. And then all of a sudden, it's, it's became very, very difficult to get anything in from China. And I don't think small independent businesses should suffer for that. I've publicly appealed to JD Vance. I'm like, look, I totally get you want to incentivize made in the USA stuff. Like, don't just steal our money in like a massive tax. I have shit on the water. You're just making me give you money. Like, this is the government getting more revenue and getting bigger. Let's put it into a fund where if, if, like, I owe you that money unless I invest in American business.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought this, I thought this.

• 1:56:11Jordi Hays?

  It was a really good take and a really good kind of concept, especially to kind of basically extending out the timelines. The policy as it stands today is just like pure pain now, like you're, you're being like, you know, punished versus what you laid out. So maybe extrapolate on that a little bit.

• 1:56:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like, look, I mean, I, I understand the goals and this, this is hurting China more than America. Like, I think, I think people in America are wanting and complaining because like tea and shipments or, or tea move shipments are more expensive. I'm like, look, I do business in China. I talk to Chinese people, factories are shutting down and you have youth unemployment of 25% in China. Like it's going to hurt them way harder, way faster. We'll feel it in 30, 60, 90 days when shit in Walmart is more expensive. They're feeling it right now. Right. And there is, there is ports that are just shut down and it hasn't been good in China for like five years. Like it's been a very difficult economic, uh, you know, situation over there. So it will hurt them way more, but the flip side is we don't want to also bankrupt a bunch

• 1:57:12Sean Frank?

  of American businesses, right? Like what we want to do is incentivize them to either near shore or onshore production capacity. That takes three to five years and takes millions of dollars. So look, charge me tariffs, but give me an out. If I take that money and I bring it to American manufacturing and I hire workers, I open factories, I don't have to give you the money. Right? So it's like a one-to-one duty deferral to incentivize US investment. I mean, do you guys want the government to get more money or do you guys want fucking more investment and factories built or whatever? Right? So that's, that's, that's my pitch to everybody.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Um, I want to get your reaction to this Slate Auto launch. Uh, have you seen this truck? Uh, TJ Parker was talking about it. Finally, someone built a simple, cheap utilitarian truck, 20K, made in the USA, no touchscreen. Uh, lots of people are talking about it. Did you see the launch? Did you watch the video?

• 1:58:10Sean Frank?

  Hell yeah, man. That guy's been working on it for a long time. I think he's been documenting on YouTube. So hell yeah, brother. I love to see that. And I was in China a year ago and I was at a big like electric vehicle. Like, you know, potentially sales summit, like they have 50, 100 brands all competing to sell little tiny electric vehicles. And those actually can't pass US safety standards. So they're only sold to Africa. So it was me and a bunch of African buyers walking around and like, you know, they sell for five, 10, 15 grand or whatever. Now, if he can actually hit American safety standards and ship a $25,000 truck. I mean, this guy's, I mean, he'll, he'll, he'll do $10 billion the first year, maybe more, right? Like it's a sales gong.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Let's do it. What do we got?

• 1:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the sound effects board is down. Brutal.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  Founder in founder mode. I, I, I want to talk about the ad. People were very happy with that. Dynamic first second, clear initial framing in the first five seconds, curiosity gap in the first eight seconds, frunk, disarming anti ad humor, founder, CEO curiosity gap. In terms, you, you obviously make a lot of ads, you buy a lot of ads. What did you think of the actual launch video?

• 1:59:24Sean Frank?

  Look, people are saying inside that front, there's actually Ridge carry-ons. So I'm not going to confirm or deny, but there could be a cameo from Ridge carry-ons.

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  I did see that.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Those are Ridge trunks. I love to see it. I love to see it. Yeah. How do you, uh, what, what would your, uh, complete guess on what their, what their margin profile could look like on a $20,000 made in America truck? I know the $20,000 is like allegedly due to some EV incentives. But, but ultimately, uh, what, what, how much are they actually going to make on, on something like that?

• 2:00:00Sean Frank?

  Yeah. So I think, I think they said it's 27,000 and then you get a $7,000 credit. If you buy an EV from a new manufacturer, I think they're going to lose about three grand for the first million of them they make. And that's just how auto manufacturing works, right? Like the costs to set them up, you have all these fucking machines, you have to depreciate them over time. Rivian still loses $20,000 on every Rivian they sell. So it's a, it's a different model to a higher price point, right? They're going to lose three to 10 grand for, for each one they sell, but. And, and if you guys ever sit at the auto market, the amazing thing about Tesla is every car manufacturer loses money on every car they sell. They only make money off of the, the parts and repairs. Tesla found out a way to not do that, right?

• 2:00:44Sean Frank?

  Tesla found a way to actually turn a profit on, on the actual purchase of vehicles. Ferrari makes $80,000 per car they sell. Tesla makes, I don't know, I think it's like, it's like five grand or whatever. Every other car manufacturer breaks even or loses money on the actual purchase of the vehicle. It's all about financing. It's all about parts, it's all about service. So I, it'd be, it'd be crazy to think they're making any money on these things, but the demand shows that like they could make money over time.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  I think they'll have trouble because if you have $20,000 burning your, uh, burning a hole in your pocket, you could get 200 Ridge, Ridge wallets or something, right?

• 2:01:19Sean Frank?

  That's true.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, it's like a tough trade off.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  200 Ridge wallets or a little truck.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could buy every product on the Ridge website.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, yeah, it's, it's an interesting dynamic where it's like, he has to show so much demand that he can justify, you know, potentially raising

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Lots of money.

• 2:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Five to 10 billion dollars over time in order to just like actually get these to scale. But, uh, I think the thing looks awesome and, uh,

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Also interesting, I think Bezos is in this one. He's also in Rivian.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised, I'm actually surprised they didn't go with a slightly higher reservation price point, just given the history of Tesla charging a hundred bucks.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  What is the reservation?

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  It's 50 bucks.

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  50 bucks.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, Tesla charged a hundred bucks, you know, had this big demand signal and then obviously like, you know, a lot of people didn't show up.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  It's expensive.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  It's a much different price point.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  And I think this is a car that people would just buy as like, I, I would just get one and park it outside of my house and maybe do coffee runs in it, go surfing.

• 2:02:20Sean Frank?

  I would put the $20,000 deposit down today. Like if they, if they made skip the line, give us 20 grand today, I would totally do it.

• 2:02:27John Coogan?

  Well, I would do it if they put a naturally aspirated V8 in it. I don't know about the electric stuff, but I would, I would be very pro this vehicle. If it had a really loud exhaust note, it was kind of like a more affordable Raptor. That's what I'm looking for.

• 2:02:41Sean Frank?

  Yeah, man. Well, you know, today I'll publicly announce if you buy a slate, I'll have a partnership with them. Free Ridge wallets for every slate customer. We can get one to one.

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you, Sean.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  I love you. You're looking great in the suit. Don't take it off after this call. I'm gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have our paparazzi, you know, outside your house confirming. Oh, Sean Frank just puts on a suit to go on TBPN. Make it a part of your brand. Okay?

• 2:03:15Sean Frank?

  Dude, it's custom too. So you guys didn't even ask me. This is custom. All right. See you guys later. Made in USA too. Bye.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Thank you. That was fantastic. Always a great time having Sean on the show.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Sean is one of my favorite entrepreneurs.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  He's one of my favorite wallet salesmen. He's up there with the best wallet.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Definitely up there with the best.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  The world. Next up, we got Semil Shah coming in from Haystack. Semil, welcome to the show. Good to have you here. How are you doing?

• 2:03:43Speaker 05

  Doing great. I'm really excited about this because you're, I've had like a hundred friends telling me that they love this podcast.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing to hear. Yeah, I'm so glad. I'm so glad that we're, we're breaking through. We've been spamming the timeline, spamming everything on X. We've learned that slop is the future and, and, and volume wins, pace wins, speed kills. And we've been trying to do all of the above.

• 2:04:07Speaker 05

  Also, in a, in a previous life, you know, I used to work in the podcast industry and I love the medium. This is way before it really took off.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:15Speaker 05

  And I, I love media and I love TV shows and I always felt like there should be like a live tech VC segment.

• 2:04:25Speaker 05

  You know, so I just.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a crazy idea to do a live daily show for, just for technology, but it's been a lot of fun. It's been working out. I'd love to start.

• 2:04:35Speaker 05

  Did you ever look at Cheddar?

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we actually talked to the CEO earlier this week.

• 2:04:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  I was, I was familiar with it. Where they took that business was much more, I mean, they actually wound up owning RateMyProfessor.com. That was interesting. They also owned TVs on college campuses. And I do think we have a bunch of college students in the audience, but definitely we have focused more on, you know, insider baseball in Silicon Valley and, and stuff that's not quite as general audience. But who knows where it goes? You know, this is still an early project. It's evolved a few times and, you know, we'll see. Anything's possible.

• 2:05:15Speaker 05

  I love it. Well, thank you again.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I actually would love to start with your experience in the podcasting industry and, and what you were doing and kind of what lessons you learned, just because I'm curious.

• 2:05:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, just real briefly, it was kind of in the 2012, 13, 14 timeframe and the entrepreneur at the time, who was a repeat entrepreneur, who's a technologist and a mentor of mine from Stanford and was on the faculty, had this idea of like a personalized audio. So if you, you know, I don't want to date myself here, but imagine you 10 years ago or so, you opened Pandora on your phone and you're going in the car. What would, what would the AM version of Pandora be? That was kind of the vision. And so we really spent a lot of time curating the initial set of, of things that would come onto the platform, you know,

• 2:06:03Speaker 05

  the big categories for commute were news, spirituality or philosophy, comedy was probably the biggest one on the nighttime drive. And then it was like giving the person the opportunity to skip. So now if you're in a Spotify playlist, for example, we just take for granted that we can just skip to the next song or in Instagram, we can flip to the next reel. But users didn't really have that amount of control back then. But ultimately the cost of acquisition at that time, you know, was really, really difficult and.

• 2:06:35Speaker 05

  There wasn't as much podcast content. It was mostly kind of radio or TV content being ported over. You know, this is pre Joe Rogan and all that kind of stuff. So eventually it was acquired by Apple primarily for the technology of streaming, the ability to stream from server across different telecom networks.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  Interesting. I'd love to know your kind of venture origin story. One fun question is like, what was the deal that you where you caught the venture bug? What were some of the early deals that stuck out to you as, hey, maybe I want to turn this into a real career?

• 2:07:14Speaker 05

  Well, it really started because I was working as a consultant for a lot of different firms. I was working in industry and I was writing a lot online and doing lots of media stuff just for fun. And a lot of people who happened to be investors and LPs read it. And I thought, oh, it'd be, you know, I was helping a lot of friends raise capital. I thought, of course, one of these funds that is employing me as a consultant will give me a job. That did not work out. And so Haystack was born literally out of desperation of having nothing else to do. And so it started with a $1 million fund and in the first eight months, wrote seed checks into Intercart, Envoy, DoorDash and HashiCorp.

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Wow. Banger after banger after banger after banger.

• 2:07:59Speaker 05

  I knew in the first, the first two funds, which took about three years, I, I knew that I would enjoy it because I had been around it a lot and so it was a lot of fun.

• 2:08:12Speaker 05

  I did not realize how much I would love it. And then the other, the other component, I was called luck and love, like, Mike Maples has a great line, which is like, you got to get hit by the lucky truck, you know? And I got hit by the lucky truck a bunch in the first three years. So it was, it was very fortunate, you know? But it was, it was a different era. Like I could never raise as much as I wanted to for, for funds. And I would have to beg, borrow and steal to make sort of ends meet at home. You know.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, imagine you're not eating foie gras on the $1 million fee structure.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's 200K over 10 years.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Over 10 years.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Pretty brutal.

• 2:08:55Speaker 05

  I didn't take any fees really in the first three funds.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:08:59Speaker 05

  And, yeah.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Are you surprised today when you see managers without much of a track? I mean, you know, you listed off a few of the companies that you invested in the first fund.

• 2:09:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  You would think that that kind of portfolio would would get you a, you know, if you had that today, it would probably get you a $500 million, you know, fund two type of thing. Are you, when you talk to, you know, upcoming managers today and they're they're sort of complaining about sort of the challenges of of raising money, yet they're still raising, you know, 50 plus million dollar funds. Do you, I'm assuming you don't have a ton of, I mean, you have empathy, but you're also.

• 2:09:39Speaker 05

  Well, it's a, it's a very astute question you're asking, especially since we don't really know each other, because that that is, that is a very astute question for two reasons. One, one is that the rational answer to your question is that it kind of makes sense because, you know, back when I started, people didn't really know how big Uber could be or Palantir could be. It was like, well, I'll just wait to see what happens. I mean, a lot of VCs just passed on Palantir for rounds and rounds and rounds and rounds. And Uber was like, you know, just kind of blew people's mind of how fast it grew. So now I think a lot of LPs and a lot of people around the world are like, hey, the

• 2:10:21Speaker 05

  tech startup ecosystem is a place where I need to have some money at play because, you know, people who come on your show, like, I mean, Kari, I have a great story about Kari, by the way, so we think we got to jam that in.

• 2:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do that.

• 2:10:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, people like Kari are like coming here from, you know, Europe and like doing amazing things and like you find one Kari in a career, you know, or in a portfolio. It's amazing. So I kind of understand that more LP dollars are coming here. America is a more attractive, the American entrepreneurial ecosystem is an attractive place to park some money and put it in the ground. It totally makes sense. And when your choices are billion dollar plus funds charging you 30% carry and and they're going in a little bit later, it's kind of like, well, okay, do I, you know, which burning building do I want to fall off of, you know?

• 2:11:11Speaker 05

  Now, the the more micro answer and why I thought that was the stupid question is that a lot of people come to me and ask for advice or help with LP and Rose or how to like design their fund or do stuff. And I've learned, you know, from like, I had amazing access to people and that cannot be shortchanged. Like, I was very lucky to have access to like incredible, incredible VC people, you know, VC creators and fund creators that you would all know by name. I had direct access to them and still do. So I try to pay it forward by helping with LP intros and doing all that stuff. But occasionally I do get that, oh, my God, like, you know, I need to raise a fund of the size to pay myself. And I always come back with who who says you need a who's who owes you a salary to deploy the money?

• 2:11:56Speaker 05

  And and that's really the line I always come back to, which is it's a little bit unfair because you could have a really qualified person who doesn't have access to capital. And part of the game of a VC is to aggregate capital for the entrepreneur. That's part of the game.

• 2:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Speaker 05

  So if if you have a unfair capital relationship or an asymmetric relationship where you can aggregate capital, all of a sudden you're in the game, but then you have to access the founder. So it's that you got to aggregate supply on both sides, high quality supply on both sides. But this idea that like the fund should start paying you is a luxury in my mind. And of course, if you have access

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  But isn't

• 2:12:35Speaker 05

  people are willing to pay the fees, like you can get paid.

• 2:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't today, though, I feel like L from from my understanding, if you go to LPs and you're trying to raise a small fund, let's say 10, 20 million bucks, and you say, I'm not going to have any any fees or or maybe a very small admin fee to cover the cost. Isn't that, given that they're just so used to paying fees everywhere, is that even like a selling point? Or is that send the wrong message to?

• 2:13:03Speaker 05

  That's a fair, that's a fair question. I think that LPs are happy to have their GPs if they want to work with them, pay them in some fees. I think the point is that when you're starting and you're trying to hit a target or you're spending a year or two trying to fundraise. The idea that like you're owed a salary philosophically to me is kind of bankrupt. And and that like you can you can say you're gonna do that, but at the same time, um, it is a market and LPs vote with their feet. And sometimes they make smart decisions and sometimes they don't.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:36Speaker 05

  Um, but yeah, I would say that somebody going into market with that thirty million dollar fund should have a budget for how they want to pay themselves. But also like, um, sometimes you have to cut deals when you start. Um, like, you know, a lot of people who want to raise in a hundred million dollar fund, maybe the market only gives them six or eight. You know, and it's like, that's where you should start, but a lot of people don't want to start there.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 05

  And it's it's a little bit unfortunate because Angel List, which kind of came up when I was coming up, created a whole new pathway for me too. Like, that's available to you now, you know? And so a lot of people do use it, but I think a lot of people want to aggregate more and more capital before the market's ready for it.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  What Angel List products were you leveraging most aggressively on the come up?

• 2:14:26Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. We've heard a lot of these. This could be its own, this could be its own pod, deep dive pod.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 2:14:31Speaker 05

  I mean, I went, uh, I mean, first of all, the vol gen- genius, uh, you know, and really was helpful to me. Um, but essentially there were a couple of like, uh, public products and a couple of off book products. The the public products were that, um, you could do these kind of like software click and subscribe SPVs.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:52Speaker 05

  You know, um, where if you could aggregate from your following or people who were following you and say, okay, I have overcapacity in a deal. Um, you know, uh, there, I've got a fifty K allocation in a series A that I did a C then and I I don't even have the money, right?

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:07Speaker 05

  Um, you could do that and then set the carry. You could even do little things like portion out the carry based on, you know, people who are helping you on the deal or the people you wanna, uh, give a little gravy to. Then it turned into like, um, these rolling funds or Angel List funds, which are very popular. You know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and are kind of industry standard today. And then the, I hope Naval doesn't mind, but like the off book thing, he, he did me a solid for it because I had known him for a long time and he, he is just incredibly helpful and savvy. But he had raised a private pool of capital in an SMA from a, I can't really disclose who, but let's just say a large sovereign.

• 2:15:46Speaker 05

  That wanted to basically pump a lot of money into the ecosystem and he picked four, you know, early managers uh to kind of whitelist and he chose me and told them just do whatever he does.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  When you're, uh, I'm curious, how long should someone wait to get hit by the lucky bus? Before they should, you know, hang up the cleats? Cause I, I really do feel like in, in my personal experience, if you're in venture seriously and you don't get a true banger in the first five years, like this, the, your, your job just becomes infinitely more difficult in every conversation you have from LPs to entrepreneurs to other managers that you might be co-investing with, but I'm curious how, uh, if you've seen examples where like, you know, year eight, they finally get the banger.

• 2:16:39Speaker 05

  This is, um, this is a very, very good question. I mean, I, I should be back on this pod at some point because you guys are asking like the right, awesome, detailed questions. It kind of depends, I think, your, to answer your question, based on what fund you're at and what stage you're investing in. So let's say you're at a larger fund and you're doing kind of like a classic series A where you're joining a board or you're putting seven, eight million plus in a deal. Maybe you're doing Bs of 2025.

• 2:17:10Speaker 05

  You, you can only do in a, in a high quality sense, maybe two to four of those per year. And everyone that's your partner or who's around you or the bigger heads in the, in the fund. They'll ask you to report on your portfolio on a monthly quarterly basis and they'll have a sense of an underlying like what's happening there. Sort of like a few times a year, they're now, obviously the boards are gonna be using AI, sorry, the funds are gonna be using AI to like track the board. So it's not just about the relationship with that investor, but like sometimes the investor in the old days could say everything's going fine, but underneath the hood, it's on fire.

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  Uh, they'll have more of a record of what's happening. And so generally the people who are running the funds will watch and see like, what are the underlying metrics? Who's gonna follow your deals, right? As a proxy for quality. And so all those things are under a microscope. I think when you're a seed investor like, like myself, where you're in that early part of the ecosystem, where you're not investing seven million dollars per deal, but it might be two hundred K, five hundred K, a million dollars, you can take a lot more shots on goal. And people suspect that some of those things are not gonna work and you only need a couple to work, right? So you have more chance, you have more surface area to get hit by the lucky truck early. The trade off is that you don't own as much as you would if you did a rifle shot later.

• 2:18:34Speaker 05

  But yes, I think five years is actually too long. And um, there's a couple heuristics here, like it used to be in venture when you would join like a really good fund. They would, they would hand you a later stage deal that already had a board in place and already had some momentum underneath it. So you could learn the ropes and have like a good kind of chip uh, to put on the mantle to start. Um, but if you think back, I don't know if you have come across Matt Kohler, but Matt Kohler was a GP at, at Benchmark for 12 years. And this guy's hit rate at Series A was incredible. Um, and even he doesn't even get credit for certain deals that he sourced, but he just doesn't care, you know?

• 2:19:19Speaker 05

  But you know, very few people are going to have that rifle shot selection. Yeah. That Matt did. Um, you know, someone today who I would mention would be like Mamoon. At KP, I mean, you look at the guy's track record, it's absolutely insane to pick off the money round.

• 2:19:37Jordi Hays?

  How common is it for you, because I'm assuming you're LP in a ton of different funds at this point, how often do you see like a $50 million fund these days that's fully deployed in a lot of winners, but just not, you know, kind of a dud of a fund just because of concentration issues, pricing, et cetera?

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  Well, I, I do lots of small investments in friends and like other people to support them when they're starting funds. So it's relatively small. The funds are relatively small. And when the funds are a little bit bigger, those managers have already had experience around portfolio construction.

• 2:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:17Speaker 05

  So, so, so you can get away with kind of shittier portfolio construction when it's a smaller fund, because you're just really chasing the alpha in that. But I would say the broader point I would make here is that the idea of portfolio construction and the math around it, it's, it's no more complicated than basic algebra.

• 2:20:39Speaker 05

  And I would say I probably spent a lot of time trying to learn it and around a lot of other investors to deeply understand it. And it was still probably the hardest topic for me to like grok, you know, years.

• 2:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:55Speaker 05

  For me to grok. And I think that's why a lot of LPs like to fund people who come out of these bigger funds, because you're served that every week when, when people are doing partner meetings and portfolio reviews and the people running these funds know it. So it's very hard to learn from scratch.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  I want to follow up on a talk we had with Sam Lessin yesterday. He was saying that the unicorn factory is broken. And it sounded a little bit like he was complaining that just like the big funds, you know, the crossovers have squeezed the growth investors, the growth investors mess up all the early stage markets because they're just like, oh, $10 million Series A, it doesn't really matter. And then the Series A investors mess up the seed markets and the seed markets mess up the angel investors. How real is that dynamic? Are you feeling pressure? Are you optimistic? What's your takeaway on the broken unicorn factory?

• 2:21:42Speaker 05

  I gotta watch the Sam episode. That guy's full of, full of amazing thoughts.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  He's a hot takesman.

• 2:21:47Speaker 05

  He is a hot takesman, very artful. I think Sam's exactly right. You know, everyone is on everyone else's long, you know? And so, yeah, it's definitely a concern. I still feel at the end of the day, and maybe this sounds like Pollyanna, but like...

• 2:22:05Speaker 05

  The game is can you meet great entrepreneurs every week, every month? And you're not bogged down by other BS that your partners throw on you or that you go to stupid conferences like? We all have like a ton of time every week. And we should all be meeting awesome founders as much as we can. And like, can you connect with them? Can you get to know them? Can you take a bet on them? And I still think you can because a lot of investors have ADHD and they go to stupid conferences and they go to stupid meetings and so. That's my kind of view is that like you're not going to catch everybody. Uh, there's no way to meet everybody, but like there's plenty of people here that you can take a bet on.

• 2:22:51Speaker 05

  And you can get paid, you know, if you're only chasing hot deals and everything's priced in perfection, we all know where that goes.

• 2:22:59Speaker 05

  So the other thing I will say is I've been seed investing, you know, in this part of the market for 12 years now. And every single year, with the exception of like a few six month periods of like COVID or dislocation or something. Every year people complain, there's too many smart people starting companies. There's too much money in the early stage market and the round sizes and the valuations are too high. I hear that every single year. So I just don't know when that's going to stop. Like maybe a meteor will hit the earth. I don't know.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  No, I, I, I got to Silicon Valley in 2012 and, and I got a big sit down speech. We are in a bubble. And it was like, yeah, we were for another decade.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, I mean, but one of the things that makes me so bullish on America is just we spend every single day talking to bright entrepreneurs. And at a macro level, it's obvious that there's bubbles in different, you know, kind of sectors and industries, right? People say, oh, manufacturing is an investable. And then you talk to an entrepreneur who's like. They've actually spent six years developing like a proprietary method for manufacturing metal. And you're like, yeah, you're going to. Sell billions of dollars of, of, of, of this product. Uh, I want to ask you about two archetypes of new fund managers. And I'm, and I want to get, uh, maybe the advice that you kind of like give them as they think about raising. So the first one.

• 2:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Is the angel investor who's sort of casually locked into maybe investing in a bunch of winners while they weren't taking investing seriously. And I think this is fairly common. Somebody's like working at a great company or they're a founder and they just happen to invest in, let's say they invest in 15 companies, couple of them end up being unicorns and they decide they want to become a fund manager. And then the second archetype is somebody who's at a big fund,

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  gets hit by the lucky bus maybe, but doesn't really realize the kind of dynamic in which enabled that investment, which might have been the fund's brand, or it might have just, you know, a variety of factors. So I'm curious how you talk to those types of managers, both of which believe that they deserve a $50 million seed fund and deserve they should be, you know, able to kind of like win deals and they very possibly can. But it's not necessarily a walk in the park.

• 2:25:24Speaker 05

  The, for the angel archetype, I mean, let's not forget like a Elon Gill was like a super angel and then turned into like his own growth fund as a brand. I mean, it still amazes me to see like the entrepreneurs, you know, when they create their Coachella banners for their huge fundraisers.

• 2:25:40Jordi Hays?

  It's just Elon Gill.

• 2:25:41Speaker 05

  Andreessen Horowitz, Elon Gill.

• 2:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Elon Gill.

• 2:25:44Speaker 05

  Okay, that's pretty awesome.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome.

• 2:25:46Speaker 05

  So, you know, he was born from that. I think that like the, the pattern, going back to your question is, you know, hey, you've been doing this as a founder or stuff. I would think about a couple of things. One is like, when you have a founder, especially a founder who's like, or operator who's like very, very connected and just kind of angel investing for fun, a sophisticated LP. Now, the problem is here to do a 20, $50 million fund, that person could just call his or her friends. You know, but let's say if you're going to like a sophisticated family office or institutional investor or fund to funds and all these managing merging programs or managing man and emerging manager programs are popping up.

• 2:26:28Speaker 05

  That LP knows that they're trading off access that this person may have that's unique for that portfolio construction and discipline of building the basket. And so that person I would advise to say like two things to watch out for is how are you going to get smart on the portfolio construction and and build a model that works and kind of stick to it? You can you can deviate from it a little bit, but you want to show consistency, right? Because as you build up your track record, literally when we raise funds, you know, we're we may or may not be in the middle of that right now.

• 2:27:03Speaker 05

  They take your whole bank ledger, like every dollar that comes in from an LP and every dollar that's wired to a company is just in an Excel spreadsheet.

• 2:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:13Speaker 05

  And so everything is recorded. And so, you know, you go too wild by a second or third fund when an LP is really looking at you, they may say like, love to see this smoothed out a little bit, you know? The other thing is just what I say, network atrophy, which happens to everybody, which is like, if you're not constantly replenishing your networks.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:27:34Speaker 05

  Not everybody or the Coulson brothers.

• 2:27:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the big, the big thing, the big thing, the big red flag for me on the angel side is, you know, as an angel, I have 50 plus companies that I've put various checks in.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Both of my, you know, true banger unicorns, I would not, I got 25K into if I tried to do 50K, they would have said, sorry, like, you know, we have a bunch of people on the round. You had access, but not that much access. Yeah, yeah, I had access and I was intelligent enough to just give the founder money. But and and so and and so if I if I were to go out and raise a fund, I it wouldn't be authentic to say like, oh, yeah. I could totally put a million in. At that point, I would have, you know, been co-leading the round or whatever.

• 2:28:23Speaker 05

  You're you're talking about like the what happens with check size escalation. So like, I'll give you a couple of things to noodle on. So for me.

• 2:28:33Speaker 05

  I had no choice but to crawl, walk, run. So I was incrementally increasing my check sizes and the same kind of rounds. So the same rounds I was doing 12 years ago, we're doing today. Now, most people will just say, oh, I can go a little bit more. I tend to think if you talk to other seed investors, that kind of line is around somewhere between when you're asking for 250 to 500K, starts to get tight.

• 2:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:55Speaker 05

  So, so you could have an, you know, one, one model is you could have an aggressive angel who gets that right away and starts firing the million dollars instead of 25. And they still have a hot hand. They still have a good network. They still have good judgment and knows like that can work. The problem is like, you're gonna, you're probably gonna light a lot of money on fire too, because the deals are moving too fast and they don't have like that deal judgment going. But the, the broader point you're making is a very good one, which is around like what check size can you really write in the competition set?

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In the one, in the companies that matter.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. We definitely do have to have you back on. Uh, we could talk for another five hours.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  I gotta ask one more question. Uh, can you, how, how, uh, how do you think, uh, X is today in comparison to, the good old days of Twitter? I think you were one of the first people I ever followed on tech, on tech Twitter. I didn't get, I got on like somewhat late. Uh, I was in college, but.

• 2:29:51John Coogan?

  I mean, five letter username. It's no four letter username like at TVP N, but it's pretty good.

• 2:29:57Speaker 05

  I'll see new people follow me and like, usually it's just bots or people with like a, you know, an animated, uh.

• 2:30:04John Coogan?

  The anime profile pictures, there's alpha in those. Some of those folks are really great AI engineers.

• 2:30:09Speaker 05

  But like recently, a bunch of people have like followed me and I'll look at like recent followers and it'll be like Barack Obama.

• 2:30:18Speaker 05

  What's so funny? Uh, yeah. If Elon, if you're listening, I love X. I love Twitter. I've been on it for, I don't know, over 15 years. I just want TweetDeck back.

• 2:30:28Speaker 05

  Because I think TweetDeck being removed has disrupted my flow and I've never, I haven't been able to like find my footing again. But I think the content on there is great. It's just, it's harder to find.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:42Speaker 05

  Right now, and I tend to get the best tweets in my social chats, in my, in my group chats.

• 2:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Speaker 05

  And to me, that's a sign that like the interface is too much.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked about this with Eric Torreberg a little bit, that a lot of the alpha has shifted to these big group chats and there is a little bit of that that's lost. I mean, Twitter originally was like the global group chat for the world and for tech and you had NFL Twitter and all the different Twitters. Uh, there's still a little bit of that and we're bringing it back with the show.

• 2:31:11Speaker 05

  I think Elon and them can make more money by going back to TweetDeck, redesigning it. And then in each stream, you can have different ads just at the top. It's like such low hanging fruit.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, this is awesome. Thank you for coming on. Let's do it again soon.

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  Great to meet you. Take care.

• 2:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Uh, let's bring in Dan from Chain Guard.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Announcing a, a, a pretty, really meaty, medium sized round. I think it's just in a couple hundred million dollars.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  By the way, did our, uh, our three o'clock meeting get moved to?

• 2:31:42John Coogan?

  Oh, did it get moved?

• 2:31:43Jordi Hays?

  To 2:30. So we got even less time.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Wow. Okay. Well, we might have to re, uh, reconfigure some of the agenda because a big meeting just got moved up. And it's all the way across town in LA traffic on a Friday. We are going to be in trouble. Uh, we will figure that out, but we will first have a chat with Dan from Chain Guard. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining. Congratulations on the hefty $356 million Series D. Uh, we'd love for you to introduce yourself, break it down, give us the news, tell us what's up.

• 2:32:22Speaker 06

  Oh man, I was just on my roof 10 minutes ago, trying to get my Starlink to work because my internet was down for two hours and it came back on five minutes before this. So I'm so happy to be here.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  It's a miracle. It's meant to be.

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wait, where are you right now?

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:38Speaker 06

  Uh, I'm in my basement in Rhode Island.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Oh, nice.

• 2:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:32:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're an all remote company. Yeah, we're about three and a half years old at Chain Guard. We got started during the pandemic, so there were no offices and we've kept it that way as we've grown. But we're building a safe source for open source software. Open source is this kind of like hippie software movement. It's been around for like thirty or forty years, but it's like anyone writes code and puts it on the internet for free and people use it. And everyone kind of gives back and trusts it and it mostly works. It's awesome. It's like ninety to ninety-eight percent of the code that people use when they're writing, you know, their own applications. But when you're using code that's written by anyone on the internet, it turns out not everyone on the internet is a nice or responsible person. And that leads to security issues.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what was the single?

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  I was about to say, yeah, what, what's the exciting story? Is it SolarWinds? What, what do you go back to as like the, the foundational story that we will be able to prevent in the future?

• 2:33:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, SolarWinds was like one of those eye opening moments. It's something I've been paranoid about for a while, though. There's actually this paper that was like written in the seventies by Ken Thompson called Reflections on Trusting Trust. And it was like a Turing Award winning paper, like it was his, his paper after he won an award. And he kind of proved by pranking all of his coworkers at Bell Labs that if like there's a backdoor in a compiler. A compiler is a thing that turns source code into like, you know, the thing you're actually going to run. Then you can't really trust any of the programs that are ever built with that or any of the things that are built with those things. And it's an awesome paper and then everyone just kind of blocked this out for like the next forty or fifty years. Until SolarWinds happened, basically, where somebody actually spent the time and did something like that and then had dramatic consequences as a result to all of those kind of downstream customers.

• 2:34:28Speaker 06

  But my co-founders and I have been working on this stuff for a while at Google and SolarWinds was kind of the kickstart to actually get this company going.

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Got it. So, uh, talk to me about, I mean, the ramp on this company is cra- is crazy.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  What was the first customer? What was the go to market? How did you scale? I wanted to hear all that.

• 2:34:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, we spent a while in the beginning trying to figure out what we wanted to do from a product side. Software supply chain, security, open source, security. It's a whole bunch of problems. It's not just one problem. And it took a while to figure out what, which one people actually wanted to solve first. There was this topic everybody knew about after SolarWinds. There was an executive order from the Biden administration, that kind of thing. But nobody was really ready to take action yet. They were all just paying attention to and learning about the space. So we tried a bunch of different things. But this product that we have now, our Chain Guard Images product, we started on it pretty early and it took a while to get going. Because there was a lot of software that we had to build to get to this point where people could come to us and get whatever they wanted to run from us. We first started selling it like, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I, I, I just wanted to hear, uh, just finish that story and then I'll ask the next question about, you know.

• 2:35:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, we really first started selling it about halfway through calendar year 2023. We got the first couple of customers on board.

• 2:35:39Speaker 06

  We had a couple of sales reps at the time. They reported directly to me. After it really started selling though, and we had a feeling it was repeatable, we brought in a VP of Sales. Really started to scale that, but we've kind of been perpetually behind on, you know, growing our sales team as a result. The demand has been more than we can handle.

• 2:35:54John Coogan?

  You're doing great.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, I want to ask you, uh, more potentially just a fun question, not so serious. Talk about the brand. I think if you said 20 years ago that like a security software company would have such a fun, delightful, uh, brand, they would have kind of laughed at you. Is it just, uh, is it just an extension of, of, you know, the team and, and your guys' internal culture? Or how did that come together? And, and what's been the customer response to that? Because I imagine you're like, at, at this point, many of your customers are not just cool ex-native startups. They're, you know, really, you know, scaled enterprises.

• 2:36:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, it's a reflection of, in some ways, our internal culture, right? Like, security is really serious work. It's the type of security we do is really tedious work. It can be boring. It can be hard stuff. Nobody really wants to do it. We try to keep it fun. One of our, you know, core values is we do serious work, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. And we spent a lot of time on that one. We have fun at all hands, we have crazy stuff, some, it's that kind of thing. And it helps keep the culture light, you know, when you're about to, you know, go spend eight hours trying to fix some tiny bugs somewhere in some piece of software you don't understand. It helps to laugh every once in a while, but you know, it keeps everybody engaged, keeps everybody having a good time. Especially when things get tough. And we try to, you know, reflect that in our social media and our branding and the events and all of that stuff we do.

• 2:37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:22Speaker 06

  I get cold called all the time. There's all these brands out there and like just some personality authenticity really goes a long way in this.

• 2:37:28Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Uh, what, what, uh, what, what are the, the general risks in, in, in, you know, cybersecurity risks around software that, that kind of like keep you up at night that aren't related to chain guard directly in what you guys are doing. So kind of like more at a macro level.

• 2:37:46Speaker 06

  Um, I mean, this one's sort of related to us, but it, it really is the one that keeps me up at night, but we don't have a perfect solution to it either. So, so I don't feel too unfair, but it's the XZ util's attack at the start of, uh, last year, if you remember that one. I think that's the one that probably should be keeping the entire industry up at night. Um, it was this piece of open source software that had been around for like 30 years. It's this compression library that's used everywhere across the internet. You know, as you upload, download things, it all gets compressed and decompressed, just like from Silicon Valley, um, you know, the middle out compression kind of thing. Uh, it's everywhere and you don't even think about it. And it was maintained by just one person, like a lot of projects are for, you know, like a decade. And, uh, somebody else just showed up and started helping.

• 2:38:26Speaker 06

  And they were like fixing bugs, doing good stuff, cleaning up the old code. Nobody else got around to for like a year or two. And then the original person was like, you know what? I've been doing this for a long time. You're doing a good job. Why don't you just take over? And the original person just kind of left. Uh, and then three months later, this malware gets slipped in. It was incredibly sophisticated. And it turned out it wasn't even a real person. It was just like a made up name on an email list.

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  The name was Gia Tan.

• 2:38:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, Gia Tan. That's not even a real person. Um, like there are people with that name and they had a terrible week, uh, getting harassed. Uh, but none of those were that Gia Tan. Um, and, uh, it was luckily detected at the last minute and it was a, a really close call. But that's not the first time that's happened. I'm sure it's just the first time we've noticed and that's definitely not the last time that type of thing is going to happen. It's about trust in the end. You have to trust the people that are doing this and you don't know if they're a nice person on the internet. And what's that old meme? You don't know if someone on the internet is a dog, right?

• 2:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

• 2:39:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, a dog, Russian or North Korean hacker, you know, nobody on the internet knows these things. It's kind of related to what we do, but like it's a hard one. It's impossible to solve unless you know the identity of every single person and know their entire life history.

• 2:39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is somewhat related. I can imagine there's a world where this is handled by the government and if there's critical software that's identified, it's like, we're gonna find this person and verify who they are and basically do a background check. On the other side, the more futuristic Silicon Valley tech approach might be, hey, we have incredible software L L Ms. We have A I agents. What if we just run an L L M over every piece of public code constantly, 20, every, review every, every git push or every pull request, right? How are A I agents effective? Is it just gonna be a, like a Cold War of, of both sides using A I to sneak ever, ever more complex hacks in and catch them?

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  Is it cat and mouse? How are you seeing A I and A I agents helping or hurting in the future?

• 2:40:29Speaker 06

  I'm scanning the internet right now while we're talking. Yeah, I'm vibe, I'm vibe scanning the internet. Yeah, no, it's, it's an arms race. Like everything in security attackers get better. They move around and find different ways in. And defenders have to, have to keep up. Right now, I think we're losing that war, right? We're getting a lot better at finding vulnerabilities in software and finding ways to exploit than we are at keeping up with that. I hope that changes. You know, A I adoption in security is, has been pretty slow. And for a good reason, it's kind of scary. You don't want to just run these things with direct access to all of your systems, but attackers aren't slowed down by that. They're running this stuff every day and every week as it changes. So it's gonna be a kind of wake up call and catch up period as the defenders figure out how to use it as well as the attackers are.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the vibe in the security community right now? Just i- is it, I remember I like accidentally landed in Vegas during DEF CON or Black Hat and was kind of out of my element one year.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  But what does it take for somebody to break into the industry? Where are the key pipelines? Are people even like, are universities relevant here anymore? I know there's a lot of hackers that just kind of do C T Fs and then become famous. But what are the typical pipelines into either career at your company or just the industry broadly?

• 2:41:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, security is both really easy to break into and hard at the same time. Right? Like, like you mentioned, universities aren't terribly relevant. There's no, you know, college that you get a degree in cybersecurity from. Even programming in general, right? You can learn this stuff on your own. I learned it on my own. I did mechanical engineering. I never took a programming class. But it's also hard because there's so much esoteric stuff. Like, there is no curriculum. You kind of just have to spend all that time on those forums and reading hacker news and reading all these different sources. I'd say there's not a lot of credentialism. But there is still this, like, kind of obscure, dark knowledge base that you do kind of have to pick up on on your own. But it is incredibly welcoming. Hopefully, you had a good experience when you landed there in the desert.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Speaker 06

  At DEF CON. It's always a fun crowd.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:42:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's way more fun than RSA.

• 2:42:38Jordi Hays?

  You never know what you're gonna get in Vegas. It might be the plumbers, you know, annual conference or an arms dealer conference.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's always different. But yeah, I remember people were joking like, oh, like, don't even go near the DEF CON folks. Like, they'll hack your phone in two seconds while you're not even looking.

• 2:42:54Speaker 06

  No one takes a shower. Yeah.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what's next for the company? I mean, you have a new war chest. You mentioned hiring salespeople, scaling that up. What are the new challenges? What are the goals for the coming 12 to 18 months?

• 2:43:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're trying to be the safe source for all open source. You know, up until today, it's been pretty limited with just dark container images. We're adding new products. We just announced a few a month or two ago. Virtual machines, language level libraries. You know, we're really just on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to open source. So we're scaling up our investments a lot in R and D, our automation, making this stuff easier for us to do as we continue to grow and scale, you know, the amount of open source that we have. It's moving even faster. You asked about this about AI. Open source is accelerating. You can crank out code even faster now. Today, it's more people writing more code. All code has bugs. We haven't really made an improvement dramatically that way in like, you know, the number of bugs per line of code written. In fact, it'll probably go up as more inexperienced people start writing more and more of this.

• 2:43:54Speaker 06

  So the security gap is getting wider and we have to get even faster at it.

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes sense. One more question on AI and we'll let you get out of here. Dario over at Anthropic just published a piece, "The Urgency of Interoperability." Jordi and I were talking a few months ago about DeepSeek and this idea that even if it's open source, there could potentially, it's a little sci-fi, but there could potentially be a Manchurian candidate buried in the weights of one of those models. Is that something you're thinking about? Is this pure sci-fi? Is this a year, two, five, 10 out? How should we think about auditing the output of open source LLMs? Because that seems like a really valuable target if I'm a hacker.

• 2:44:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've seen studies, not even just recently, you know, the last couple of years, where if you could taint a percentage of the training data going into a model, you can control some of the output. This stuff is not possible to reverse engineer. Code is hard enough to reverse engineer and this is that scaled up by like 1,000x. Open source models, you know, there is an open source definition for models and these ways, but you can read source code, it's hard, but you can't read these ones and zeros in a 40GB file.

• 2:45:07Speaker 06

  It would not shock me if it's in there, not even just DeepSeek, in any of these models intentionally or intentionally. We like to think that we can review stuff line by line and catch these bugs, but there's no possible way to do that with LLMs, the whole explainability pieces. Scary.

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  Totally. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We have to cut it short because we have to run to a meeting, but this was fantastic. We'd love to have you back on the show whenever. Hopefully, there's never a big security incident, but if there is one, we'll be calling you.

• 2:45:37Jordi Hays?

  And we'll be playing this sound effect.

• 2:45:40Speaker 06

  You know where to find me.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:45:44Speaker 06

  Good luck getting into that meeting.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you later. Bye.

• 2:45:47Jordi Hays?

  See you, Dan.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we have to wrap up. We have one last ad. Linear. You heard from the CEO directly. It's the new standard for modern product development. Go check out Linear.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Dot app.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Build with focus, ship with care. Linear.app. And thank you. We will wrap up there.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  We will be back Monday. Yeah, we're sorry. We have to run. It's gonna be a massive week next week.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Massive week.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be on the ground at Hill and Valley.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  In DC. We have a lot more planned, a lot more timeline, a lot more top stories, a lot more real estate stories, hopefully.

• 2:46:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  I'd love to break down some more mansions. We'll see. Anyway, thank you for watching.

• 2:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  We will see you soon.

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Have a fantastic weekend.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. Bye.

• 2:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.