The Social Reckoning Reactions, Fable 5 Sparks Safety Debate, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Farza Majeed, Trent Simonian, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Matthew Prince, Vinod Khosla, Ranjan Rajagopalan, Markie Wagner, Bret Taylor

(00:26) - The Social Reckoning Trailer Reactions (15:24) - Fable 5 Sparks Safety Debate (30:06) - Farza Majeed discusses his journey from creating an AI tutor for DaVinci Resolve to developing Clicky, an AI assistant that executes user commands on computers. He explains Clicky's functionality, including real-time GPT responses and integration with models like Fable 5 for screen understanding, and addresses the business model, emphasizing cost-effective agentic work and a $20 monthly subscription. Majeed also highlights the importance of balancing his media presence with startup development and expresses his vision for Clicky as a versatile interaction layer across devices. (44:52) - Trent Simonian, co-founder of Sidetalk, a New York City-based one-minute street show, discusses the show's origins, emphasizing its commitment to capturing candid, high-energy street interviews without staging. He highlights the importance of creating shareable and engaging content, noting that their approach has led to collaborations with major brands like Nike and the NFL. Simonian also touches on the challenges of monetizing short-form content, explaining that while platforms like TikTok and Instagram haven't provided direct revenue, Sidetalk generates income through branded content and merchandise sales. (59:25) - Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake since February 2024, previously led Google's advertising products and co-founded the AI-powered search engine Neeva. He discusses how Snowflake's AI-driven tools, like Snowflake Cowork, have significantly reduced data integration times and enhanced conversational data access, enabling businesses to solve complex problems interactively. Ramaswamy also highlights the company's focus on streamlining migrations from legacy platforms, reducing timelines from years to quarters, and emphasizes the importance of effective go-to-market strategies and partnerships, such as with AWS, to deliver joint solutions to customers. (01:16:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:28:50) - Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, discusses the company's recent acquisition of Void Zero, the creators of Vite, a popular developer platform. He highlights the synergy between Vite and Cloudflare's infrastructure, emphasizing the potential to enhance support for internet agents and improve developer experiences. Prince also addresses the challenges developers face with CPU bottlenecks and outlines Cloudflare's strategies to optimize performance and efficiency in the evolving digital landscape. (02:04:41) - Vinod Khosla, founder and managing director of Khosla Ventures, discusses the significance of auto formalization in enhancing AI reliability by converting human language into machine-checkable formats, thereby reducing issues like hallucinations. He highlights Pramana's role in this field, particularly in formalizing complex domains such as tax law to ensure precision and compliance. Khosla emphasizes that while large AI labs continue to expand, there remains substantial opportunity for ventures addressing specific challenges through auto formalization. (02:15:41) - Ranjan Rajagopalan, founder of Pramaana Labs, discusses the company's mission to enhance AI accuracy in critical fields like tax, legal, healthcare, and governance by focusing on formal verification to prevent catastrophic errors. He explains their approach of converting complex regulations into formal languages, enabling AI systems to provide provably correct answers with mathematical proofs, thereby increasing trust and reliability in AI applications. Rajagopalan also highlights the importance of integrating formal verification with large language models to ensure AI outputs are verifiable and dependable in high-stakes domains. (02:28:49) - Markie Wagner is the founder and CEO of Poetic, an AI startup backed by OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, and Founders Fund, focusing on automating complex business processes with high accuracy. In the conversation, she discusses the challenges of capturing undocumented, intricate rules within large organizations and emphasizes the necessity of AI systems that can learn and execute these processes with near-perfect precision. She also highlights the importance of forward-deployed engineers who not only possess technical expertise but can also drive organizational change to effectively implement AI solutions. (02:45:33) - Bret Taylor, an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, co-created Google Maps, served as Facebook's CTO, chaired Twitter's board, and co-CEOed Salesforce before founding Sierra, an AI startup specializing in autonomous customer service agents. Taylor discusses Sierra's recent achievement of FedRAMP High certification, enabling federal agencies to utilize their AI solutions, and emphasizes the potential of AI to enhance government services like Medicare and passport processing by improving efficiency and accessibility. He also highlights the importance of multilingual support and the role of AI in transforming customer service interactions within the public sector. (03:02:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, June 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save, both easy corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Ramp to ramp.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  You go to ramp.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  You want some accounting help, they're gonna say yes, and thank you for using us.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  And what else?

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Um, two major stories, a bunch of major stories, but the big one, Facebook got a movie, another movie, actually a third movie, if you count the documentary, there's been The Social Network, The Social Dilemma, and now The Social Reckoning. Only two of those are, uh, are movies. The Social Dilemma is a documentary, but, uh, it's very interesting. And the, uh, and Anthropic got a fable, and there's been a ton of reaction, Ben Thompson was writing about it, uh, to the rollout there, the Wall Street Journal, uh, like, the announcement should have been like, the really good model launches, and people are amazed with what it can do, but they, they put the title Anthropic Puts Curbs on AI Models.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  So, the, well, I'm sure you've seen this on the timeline, but we'll take you through some of the, some of the, uh, some of the debates over how restricted the model is in certain areas. Bio is a big one, cyber is another one. There's a bunch of funny examples. There's a bunch of reasonable arguments for doing this type of stuff. So we'll go through all of it, but I want to want-

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Can we talk about who's joining the show today?

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Absolutely. We got a bunch of great guests.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  What a lineup.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  What a lineup. Hey Clicky founder Farza Majeed is joining. You've probably seen his viral demo last week. We're very excited to talk to him about computer use, uh, potential consumer AI applications, what he's doing to build hands-free AI voice assistants. Uh, the CEO of Snowflake's coming on, CEO of Cloudflare's coming on, Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures is coming on, and then, uh, Bret Taylor. Uh, Bret Taylor didn't even make the cutoff on today's lineup. What's going on here?

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. And of course, we have Markie Wagner.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Markie Wagner.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Coming out, announcing, emerging from stealth with her new company.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Very excited to talk to her.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  She's fantastic.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  So I want to kick it off with the the social network sequel. I want to watch the trailer for The Social Reckoning because Jeremy Strong is playing Mark Zuckerberg. I've heard people say, hey, he looks, he looks like Zuck, like the styling is there.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Henry says, no, no Doug from Semi Analysis.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  We gotta get him on.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  We should, we should get Doug on.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Hit him up.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Hit up Doug.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Let's get him on.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  See if he's available.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  So.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Not that we have any time, but we'll make time.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  We'll make time for Doug, anytime. So the one critique is Jeremy Strong looks a little bit older than Mark Zuckerberg did in 2011.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  They're calling him Unc?

• 2:53John Coogan?

  It just, it just, it just doesn't, it, I think it'll color the movie a little bit in the sense that the, the film is telling the story of this like very difficult whistleblower situation and, and it's different when it looks like a, you know, a mature adult versus someone who was young and running, running into these problems for the first time. Anyway.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  That says no Matthew Prince.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  What?

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  He is joining.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's joining. We, yeah, we got the CloudFlare.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  12:30 Pacific.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  12:30, get ready. We're gonna go through CloudFlare. They have a exciting news. I think it's public already, but I don't want to blow it up if it's gonna be announced later today. But anyway, I want to, I want to react to the, the trailer. So let's pull up the trailer.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Listen, before I go on, I want to make something clear.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  This is how it starts.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I have a hunch you're not a fan of Facebook, but I am. I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  You sent me a message. What would you like to talk about?

• 3:58Speaker 04

  The chairman gavels the session to order.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session, and we'll move to witness questioning.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Spell your name and state your current occupation for the record.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  So is it not venture this time?

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  And your occupation?

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Zuckerberg. Oh, it's co-produced and directed by Aaron Sorkin.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Companion piece to the social network.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Ish.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Ish?

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Is this Mike Isaac?

• 4:34John Coogan?

  I don't think so. Jeff Horwitz.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Who wrote Broken Code? He was journalist at the Wall Street Journal. He is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal. Broken a number of global news stories. Including the Facebook files.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Who Bill Burr?

• 4:59John Coogan?

  It's not a bad Zuck impression. He's got that voice tone pretty down.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  So what would you need? To stand up the story? The internal documents?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  This is a material violation of my NDA.

• 5:18Matthew Prince?

  We're twice as big as the biggest country on Earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post-government around here.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Twice as big as the biggest country on Earth?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  We have 102 hours to get everything.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  From a user standpoint?

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, users.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  I don't want to be made an example by a guy with unlimited resources.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie. Look around.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Man, if they were trying to go as inspirational as the social network, they really missed the mark there. What happened?

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that their intention was to try to fire up the next generation of entrepreneurs that to inspire them.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  It seems like they missed the mark.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  To inspire them.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  To inspire them, to uplift them.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  You could build any business out of your dorm room.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And also, it feels like if they if the goal of this film is to really, really take the viewer inside TBD and Meta Superintelligence and what's going on with Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Alex Wang, like it feels like they just dropped the ball potentially. It's sort of crazy.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I didn't see like anyone that even resembled Jan LeCoq.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  That is crazy to not to not highlight that and what's going on over there. The launch of Lama, the Lama four moment, that could have been the crescendo.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, behemoth.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Behemoth and all the drama around that. You want drama, you want Hollywood drama, you want Oscar bait. Lama four behemoth. That story is going to get put butts in seats.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right. No, more seriously, it's hard for me to, it's going to be really hard to not look at Jeremy Strong and.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  OC Kendall, yeah, because you're a succession guy. So this is a sequel to the social network. Instead of chronicling the birth of Facebook, it's the story based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Francis Haugen. It's going to be dramatic. It's not going to make people like Facebook more, and it's probably going to make Americans even more distrustful of tech. What's interesting here is that if you stop a random tech person on the street and ask them like, what is the social reckoning about? They might say Cambridge Analytica, because that was another drama moment. And I was sort of like, is it Cambridge Analytica? Is the is it the Haugen thing? And a lot of people don't even remember what the whistleblower story was. Little refresher there. It was an internal document leak. The

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Facebook files showed that it that Facebook internal employees were aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. Now, Nikita Beer chimed in, who now works at X, a rival platform to Threads, and said, Zuck makes a lot of mistakes, but this isn't one of them. Meta literally had multiple teams of of $1 million per year engineers working on teen mental health, and they had the agency to override big product decisions. They're probably a thorn in Nikita's side because he's trying to maximize click through rates, maximize attention, and he's getting pushback from, hey, there's guardrails here. And he says, the story, this movie is

• 8:26John Coogan?

  actually is about is actually a product manager who didn't get a promotion. And so that's the that's the pushback.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only the only thing, the only thing. And and the only thing with that argument is like you could make the same argument is like the cigarette company has million dollar like doctors and researchers focused on making sure cigarettes are as healthy as possible.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and especially with the new fertility data, I think that there's there's a new cycle brewing of like exactly how bad is social media. I still don't really buy the addiction thing, just because I'm familiar with like addiction defined in nicotine, which is like extremely addictive, it's chemical and like you have cravings. Like if you forget your phone, like, do you have the same cravings? It's it's it's sort of different. And but there's but there is like a very serious discussion going on around social media and it's a fax and it's

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  The phone addiction thing is is like very real, is I was at I was at an event last night and they required everybody to put their phones in these sort of like locked bags so you could go outside at any point.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  And you felt sick.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  I didn't feel sick, but but I noticed probably like 20 times throughout the night.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking like I was thinking of going for my phone.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  I didn't start having like physical withdrawal symptoms.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the craving was there.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just kept thinking about it. It was like phone. It was like phone noise, right?

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Phone noise, yeah. This is real, this is real.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  I was having some phone noise.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, that's legitimate. So the question that I had really quickly is like, what is the impact on Meta? Like, we can pull up the stock chart, it's a one and a half trillion dollar company, they're trying to raise more equity for the AI build out, hire people like is this good, bad? What does it look like over the short, medium, long term? So, short term, I think this was amazing timing, they really got lucky because as we will talk about, like, the fact that this trailer dropped the same time as Anthropic's Fable 5 was incredibly fortuitous because Fable just took over the timeline. And no one was really talking about this in tech. Tech insiders won't really see or talk about the social reckoning this week.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Case in point, I put it second in the newsletter when I wrote it up. Medium term, I think Jeremy Strong is going to drag Mark into like the bad group of AI leaders while he's on his Oscar tour. Like, there was a version of of Facebook strategy, a meta strategy, that's just like, hey, we're like Amazon, we're like Microsoft, like, yeah, we have bets in AI, but we're not like We're not deciding the frontier. Obviously, Mark has made the decision to hire some of the greatest researchers, invest very aggressively, and this puts him sort of at the center of the conversation around, well, what will the effect of AI be on our society, on kids? Should kids be talking to LLMs? Psychosis, all these different things will come up, just as we saw 4O psychosis and then Claude Code psychosis a little bit pop up and people

• 11:21John Coogan?

  are talking about that. Like, you're priming the pumps for the next wave of like, oh, a bunch of people went into the Meta app and like, they had a bad time and now we gotta talk about that. So I wouldn't be surprised if the next version-

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think Mark is gonna be more annoyed about this week? The fact that SpaceX is gonna be valued meaningfully higher than Meta or this trailer? It's actually a tough one.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, I think the real one is Fable 5. Because like, if Meta was using a ton of Anthropic models and then the new model comes out and says you specifically can't use it in MSL, the most important initiative in the company, like, that's like a pretty rough thing where you're like, oh, I've been working with this company to develop my models for my family of apps and now I can't use them anymore.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  But if they do, you know, Meta is spending billions of dollars a year with Anthropic. They have been for a while.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  ARR, but yeah.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. They will spend billions of dollars this year. And the question is like, if Anthropic does allow Meta to use their models for Meta's AI research, what does it say about what Anthropic thinks about Meta's potential in AI?

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Secretly love ads this whole time. I don't know.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  No, to me, to me, it would be them not feeling like they had a-

• 12:49John Coogan?

  The AGI.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  -ability to get to the frontier.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally. And that's an ace that's up their sleeve at any time. They can always just take the guardrails off and be like, hey, more, more, more AI, more intelligence on demand for everyone. So I think the fallout of the medium term, Jeremy Strong's gonna go on this press tour for the Oscar and he's gonna have a bunch of like, really emotional- These soundbites and then also be like just viral because it's funny to see him doing this impression and he's very good at like drawing. He's already gone viral for his Mark Zuckerberg impression in the past. So I wouldn't be surprised to see the next version of a Bernie Sanders press release about AI. Highlight Dario, Sam and Zuck instead of what has historically been the order, which is Sam, Dario and Demis.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  So it's always based on like perceived industry power and negativity around personal brand. So they have to have a scary quote and then they also have to have a lot of power in the industry. Zuck's power in the industry is rising and also with this movie, like there's more ways to shoot to take shots at him. Like, oh, look at what he did with the Facebook files. Remind yourself of that because a lot of people don't really remember the details. They're going to after they see this movie, then you can, then you can say, well, this guy's also building crazy data centers. And look at how he handled this. If they, if he handles the AI thing like that, it's going to be bad, right? So that, so that's like a little bit of a risk in the medium term. Long term, I don't think the social reckoning is going to matter all that much for Meta. People will complain about Meta's data centers.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  Why did they not, why did they not get Jeremy Strong like a wig?

• 14:18John Coogan?

  They did, or they, because also he is playing an older, remember when he had the Caesar haircut? Yeah. So it's a different time. So people will complain about all this stuff, but they'll do it on Meta's family of apps. I don't think there'll be churn and certainly advertisers won't pull out. It's impossible to pull out of Meta because it just drives, it just drives up the R, the ROAS, the return on ad spend for smaller companies. And a bunch of small businesses will just jump in and say, oh, great. Like, you know, some big company pulled out and is boycotting Meta. That's great. I'm ridge wall. It's going to jump in or somebody else is going to jump in.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  People have advertisers have tried to boycott.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can on Facebook. It's impossible. So the business is just too strong. And so, and I also don't think Mark will be singled out by a regulatory hammer. Should it come down hard? Like if there's a data center ban, I don't think it's going to be uniquely focused on Meta. Only Dara, or only Dario and Sam have like true scapegoat risk because they run pure play labs and have been so noisy about AI. And they have the biggest revenues in the category. There might be a data, there might be data center regulation, but it won't unfairly target meta. So anyway, that's my social reckoning take. Let's move on to Fable, which launched yesterday. And the model seems like incredibly impressive. I've been seeing these like vibe coded games

• 15:34John Coogan?

  that look really, really good. And for some of those, I haven't seen those like, like the vibe coded games hit really well on social media because you take a video of them and you show the example of what it built. You share the time and people just sort of believe it could be embellished, but in general, these feel like pretty solid. Of course, like making a great game is a great mechanic and there needs to be multiple levels. And like a single demo of like a forest putting in is not quite there, but really, really useful. And I'm sure we'll see a bunch more examples of like games as memes, simulators, and these things are going to get easier to build. That's really exciting. Of course, there was a bunch of debate on the timeline yesterday.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Uh, and it's bleeding into today around the latest model, Fable five, uh, the first Mythos class model. Uh, that both seems remarkably good at long horizon tasks, like software development, knowledge work, but rejects requests related to biology, cybersecurity and frontier LLM development. Interestingly, I haven't seen anyone share, uh, anyone share rejections around anything else. Like, did, did they remember to reject like build me a nuke? Like, I haven't seen anyone try that. And it'd be very funny if it was like, oh yeah, just we, we didn't get around to that. Or there, there are so many other things, but I think a lot of those other, other, uh, like things that you should reject, queries that you should reject have been ironed out in previous, uh, in previous iterations.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  So going back, you know, the say a slur was a big one for a while, or say something rude.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  And it's a different mechanic to like pausing, pausing a chat, basically just like shutting down a conversation versus like switching you to a less performant model.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it creates this like screenshot that went viral pretty much continuously yesterday. Um, and so this aligns with Anthropic's focus on safety, but as many people have pointed out, it's also just good business. Uh, you don't want competitors using your products to directly create competitors. And you also don't want financial liability or negative headlines from bad actors using your models to for nefarious purposes. Ben Thompson called it true alignment. The take safety seriously culture aligns with business value creation, which is very, very rare. Oftentimes, the like be good or your culture limits what you can do and actually hurts your business, but it's something that you do in favor of brand like Apple would probably be, could probably be more profitable if they were using like diesel generators for all of their,

• 18:00John Coogan?

  for all of their data centers. They went clean energy because they wanted to have an environmental brand. And over the long term, it's helped them, but in the short term, it's been rough. Of course, inexpensive. So Ben Thompson writes, what is so fascinating about Anthropic, however, is that while I'm sure some executives at the company are thinking this way, I also totally believe that the employee base broadly also happen to believe that they are doing the right thing. It's fascinating to observe. Me, the rational business analyst sees a hard-nosed but understandable decision to cut off would be competitors, Anthropic employees and advocates. The true believers see a regrettable but understandable safety decision that ensures that responsible and thoughtful people themselves, of course, will be the ones guiding our AGI future.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  This is true alignment and it's an incredible accomplishment. Facebook has tussled with this a bunch and, and we already talked about that. But to be clear, the Fable 5 rejection threshold really does feel way too low from what people are saying. Tons of examples on the timeline of a biologist just saying hi to the model and getting kicked down to Opus. I saw you shared, someone just said cyber with the devil horns, the purple devil horn emoji. And it's like, we can't do, we're not going further. Of course, like bringing down like a broad hammer, you can always dial it back over time. But every rejection is this implicit invitation to hop on the phone with an Anthropic sales rep and get on the Mythos enterprise plan. And that's where the real dollars are too.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  The timeline is unhappy because the idea of democratizing science, technology, all of this is very alluring. But the pool of dollars available from all the biohackers in the world probably isn't close to the budgets available from Big Pharma. And so. You again, you're in this like rational business analyst situation and you and you fail to see how this is that damaging, except to like the hacker community. The real tricky part is how AI frontier AI research is handled. Instead of outright rejecting the query and bumping the user down to OPUS, the model appears to answer, but quietly gives a degraded answer. And this was disclosed in the model card, which is interesting. So this is again reasonable.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but not disclosed.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  To the user in the product.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  While they're paying.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Which is a different, which is a different path than bio and cyber. So if you, if you go LLM frontier research devil horns, it will actually give you an answer apparently it won't bump you down immediately. But so it doesn't disclose that, which is odd outright rejecting requests for AI research and just saying, hey, user, sorry, this model doesn't work for that type of project. Please share, please use another model or contact sales if you want help with this would have been much more in line with the bio and security and cyber security strategies. And they, and then they also could not have disclosed, and it's also possible that they just didn't need to disclose this at all. Like they could have just released a model that was intentionally nerfed on AI research. It would have shown up in the benchmarks because people would have benchmarked it on

• 20:57John Coogan?

  some sort of AI research bench and been like, oh, weird. It's really good at all these other things, but it's bad at LLM research. And, and maybe that would have been a bit of a brand hit maybe, but users might never know that the model was intentionally degraded around this category of work. So that leaves this third more worrying position intentional degradation without disclosure in the model card. There's no evidence of this, but it's possible that other workflows might be nerfed and there's no law or even convention around disclosure. Again, maybe good business, but a weird situation to be in. So probably bullish for evals if you're building a business on top of a big lab, but you can imagine like a legal AI company will want to be really sure that the models they're using aren't degrading unexpectedly and not telling them.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  It's different if you're like, hey, I've been a bio researcher for a while. I'm using this and I know that this model was never intended for me or. Or I've been using it, but what you don't want is like, I'm using it and now it's giving, now it's leading me astray in my work and it's also not telling me that it's going to lead me astray, which would be like sort of an odd outcome that I, I, I think they'll probably address in the near future. Anyway.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that aspect, uh, triggered Dean Ball.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Essentially, he said, my last observation, re Anthropic's secret sabotage safety policy is that it undermines actually good safety policy. How? First, it is very plausible to describe this as anti-competitive behavior. Uh, even if you're maximally sympathetic to Anthropic here, you must admit this, and it is behavior being justified in the name of AI safety. If you believe, as I and many Anthropic staff do, that it may end up being critically important to relax antitrust enforcement so that the frontier labs can cooperate and collaborate on some areas of AI safety, Anthropic just undermined the case for that in a large way. Overall, this is ma- this massively and profoundly raises the status of the argument that AI safety has been hyped to justify monopolistic behavior

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  by labs. I continue to believe that AI safety is a real and serious issue that is growing in importance rather than diminishing. If you agree with me, this incident is a setback, maybe a serious one. And third, he says, as I have observed elsewhere, Anthropic's official corporate policy is structurally identical to the fact pattern alleged against them by the Department of War. I still think DOW acted both falsely and wrongly in that fight, but it is no longer possible to defend Anthropic with a full throat after this incident. This raises the case for heavier-handed regulations. Anthropic is making awfully good case here that their product ought to be treated as utilities and thus their alignment practices

• 23:32John Coogan?

  should be a matter of- Oh, common carrier thing.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  -public policy rather than private property. I am starkly opposed to this sort of state power grab, but Anthropic is doing more to justify it than anyone else. Thus, significant damage has been done to a community and an entire approach to AI governance that was done unilaterally by Anthropic, likely motivated largely by self-interest. And justified within the internal psychology of the firm through the lens of safety. I suspect this is fixable in the economic and legal senses for Anthropic, but I fear that trust has just been broken and the goodwill extinguished will take very much time to repair.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  And just to level set on Dean Ball, he wrote the AI action plan, but then also came out very publicly in support of Anthropic during the conflict with the Department of War, saying that the Department of War is completely overstepping by pushing towards supply chain risk designation, putting pressure on Anthropic for not wanting to work with the government in that particular way. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of new data that's been released and stuff and that that conversation has evolved, but he's not, he doesn't strike me as some like crazy hater. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider, user favorite agent to deploy web

• 24:48John Coogan?

  apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Doug Olafman was also sort of mixed results on Fable. He says, when it works, it's brilliant, but the unilateral guardrails make me frustrated beyond all belief. He has a folder of health information with like 100 days of aura health data. This is a very logical thing that people would do with Codex or Claude Code, gather up all your health data. I actually talked to a very, very prominent person in tech about how they got into vibe coding and CLIs and one of the first thing they did was reanalyze some whoop data, reanalyze some health data, and he correctly detected sleep apnea and went and got it treated.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Like that is, it's not a cure for cancer, but that's like incredibly awesome and like very, very good and exactly what you want to see. And who knows, maybe the thing that you detect early could lead to an increased risk of cancer in the future. And that would be a really, really big win for our society. And so a little bit tricky there. He says, there's a private investment in the life sciences tool space. Guess what? It's not safe. Doing some code scanning for vulnerabilities, not safe. I get the safety, but it feels incredibly Out of touch for a group of a few hu- a few thousand people making all making total comp in the millions telling me what is and isn't safe. Dario worried about inequality. I think he has to realize that he is the inequality and the unilateral gatekeeping feels whack as hell. I don't like it.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are, people are very.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  And like Doug O'Laughlin is extremely optimistic enough about Anthropic. Like he, he, he recognizes the power of the models in the business and has been a very, very strong supporter. I, I feel like a strong user. Uh, he was one of the first people to admit to Claude code psychosis. Uh, and he's unhappy with the current situation, but these things are very tunable. I'm optimistic, uh, with more disclosures and more fine tuning and, uh, and a, and a smoother, smoother path. Uh, I think we can get to the good outcome.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Kremu.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Unless you're Kremu.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Last, last one, Kremu says, tell me about mitochondria. It's the powerhouse of the cell, right?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Chat, nope. The chat pause is rough. Yeah, it's a, it's a screenshot.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  But maybe, maybe the harness is just saying like, sorry, if you don't know that the mitochondria is a powerhouse of the cell, like.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  It's not worth my time.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't even want your.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  I mean, th- th- that's the thing with like the.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  You know, there are dumb questions.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are expensive questions and all of these screenshots are clearly from, uh, like $100, $200 a month plans. And, uh, I'm sure the GPUs are on fire as they always are with any new model launch from a frontier company. And, uh, it can make rational business sense. And so when everything aligns, when you're like, yeah, we're maybe being a little bit too safe, but it's actually good for our business. It's very easy to say yes to that stuff. The big question is like, where do you get tested where something, there's a hard decision and it doesn't align with your business interests. That's always tough, right?

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  What, what's going on? Was there?

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  The the new data retention policies as well, that also has to do with like, does it trying to

• 27:58John Coogan?

  This one was funny because I assume that every tech company stores everything forever, basically. I didn't realize that they don't.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Not not for these like enterprise use cases.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  I know that the enterprises said that they wouldn't train on your data. But like, when I go into any chat app, I expect to have my data from a year ago still there. Like, I want, in fact, one of my main critiques and frustrations with these apps is that when I go to them, I want to be able to, instead of hitting the search bar, just go into the chat box and say, "Hey, remember a couple of months ago, we were talking about CrowdStrike? And I had you pull up some data. Can you just go refresh that, get the original thing?" And a lot of times, these apps are like, "Oh, like, I don't really have access to all your chats." But like, the chats are clearly saved. But so I I understand people were upset about this, but it didn't fully clock for me. Why?

• 28:54John Coogan?

  I I understand the training thing, like the, but.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're they're very explicit, they're not using the data to train.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  They're not, okay. Oh, well, then that's good. So the the steel man, I believe, was that you need to hold it for 30 days because companies, probably international companies, competitors, will set up a ton of shell corporations and send out like pseudo-random queries over random times, over random accounts through VPNs. And they will triangulate something that is useful to distill or learn from the model. And so by keeping it all, you can now run analyses and look at, wait, is there a pattern where where 25 different accounts that seem completely unrelated all seem to be triangulating the same question? That seems reasonable to me. But.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Stay out of my data. I'm built different. I'm not distilling anything. I don't know. I think it's time. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business, that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And speaking of AI agents, we have a founder of the company. I don't know if we should call it an AI agent. What are we calling it, Farza? Is this, are you creating a new category? Introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

• 30:14Speaker 07

  What's going on, guys?

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 30:16Speaker 07

  Nana, of course, of course. Farza's here, working on Hey Clicky.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  Man, what is it? It started as an AI teacher.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 07

  And I guess now it's an AI that, where you can essentially talk to your computer and it does whatever you want it to do from like...

• 30:29John Coogan?

  It's personal superintelligence and you got there before the big man. I love it.

• 30:33Speaker 07

  Somehow. I feel like the big man doesn't even know what they got sometimes, you know? And it takes the little guy to figure it out.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. I'm always rooting for the little guy. So, like, reintroduce the product because you went viral last week, but it feels like you've been working on this for a while. What's the nature of the team, the structure, the funding? Like, what's actually building this? What's adoption been like? Like, where is the product today?

• 30:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, it started eight weeks ago. I just wanted to build a, an AI that could teach me, that could teach me DaVinci, basically, while I'm like, actually using DaVinci. And I thought it was kind of really terrible.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  And this is DaVinci Resolve, the color grading and video editing suite that's free from Black Magic Design? Got it.

• 31:11Speaker 07

  Exactly, yes. So like, I, DaVinci Resolve, complicated program.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:15Speaker 07

  When I were YouTube videos, wearing it, let me just build an AI that can help teach it to me while I could talk to my screen and I could learn.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  I've been there.

• 31:21Speaker 07

  And put it out. And I thought it was really, a really bad idea. One of my friends just posted. So I posted it and it goes really big, about eight weeks ago. After that, I didn't keep working on it. But then the cool thing was, I saw all these people, you know, you know when you put something new out there, you have this emergence behavior kind of start happening? So when you let a human being talk to their screen... What did they start doing? Turns out they started doing a lot of crazy things, all the way from watching anime with Clicky, all the way down to like learning like Blender with Clicky. Um, cause it's so easy to just talk to your screen.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 07

  And that's kind of where it started. Yeah. About eight weeks ago.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Okay. So.

• 31:55Speaker 07

  And it started, it was, yeah, go ahead.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  I, I just want to hear about like the un-hobbling path because uh, I imagine that there's demand for uh, you know, like these chat interfaces have existed for years where you open an app and you uh, you know, do the voice mode and then you have it read it back to you. And there's some that are more polished than others, but uh, when I think about using a computer, I think rearranging windows. I want anime over here and DaVinci Resolve over here and the YouTube video over here. And I want to be able to puppeteer the mouse and the keyboard have full context. So I need to be taking screenshots every minute, every second, 30 times a second, 144 hertz. Like what are we doing there? How are you getting the data in? And then uh, what's actually under the hood?

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Because you need to process the voice actually produce an output. And it's surprising to see a harness like break out of this so quickly.

• 32:50Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. It's actually uh, so simple. We use GPT real time upfront to give you like the first layer to give you like the really quick answer.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:58Speaker 07

  But then uh, if you want like a deeper kind of like a uh, thought process over the image, you know, if you're in DaVinci Resolve or if you're in some complicated software, we now use Fable 5 actually uh, by default.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 07

  So now Fable 5 is like absolutely mind blowing in terms of how precise it is on screen understanding. So we use that now by default when you want to like uh, understand something on your screen. But yeah, we only actually get screenshot when you press a button.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:20Speaker 07

  I press the button.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  One screenshot.

• 33:21Speaker 07

  But it's, yeah, but it's really crazy because uh, we can still detect the program you're on and stuff. And that's already really helpful.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:27Speaker 07

  Like if I, if I know you're on Notion, for example.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 07

  And I, you're there for like 10 minutes. I can just ask you and be like, hey, like. What are you doing? Can I help you? And I think it's that sort of new modality that's like been really exciting. Because that's something that's just not possible today with any chat interface.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more like a coworker walking up. Like a coworker, just like being like present and like kind of like, like um. Sometimes you don't need help until you're asked, right? Or you don't know.

• 33:54Speaker 07

  I kind of describe it.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, I kind of describe it as like having this 23 year old intern. With like a decent, like a new grad that's always watching over my shoulder. And it's pretty much like seeing patterns in what I'm doing and then it's and then just tapping me and saying. Can I do that for you? Um, if I had that, of course, that would be awesome, but it'd be cool if everybody had that.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  A lot of these frontier models are expensive. How are you thinking about the business model? Because i- it seems like you've built something useful. People should just pay 10% on top of whatever the metered rate is. But at the same time, in consumer, prosumer subscriptions, flat pricing is very popular. But that in that introduces financial risk to you. You have to understand your costs and how they change. Uh, what do you think the business model will be as you grow the business?

• 34:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, believe it or not, like uh. People are very open to paying large amounts of money, like normal consumers, like large amounts of money. For uh, for like more uh, for having a better access to these models.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  Uh, different interfaces. So right now, we just charge a straight up $20 a month. Uh, but even then, there's a limit. You know, you get like for 20 bucks a month, you get 150 agents on Clicky.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:03Speaker 07

  But even that's very specific because. Once you pass that number, that's when we start losing money.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 07

  So everything's done in such a way where uh, it's pretty cost effective. Also, like, just so you guys know, like, just calling like Sonnet or Opus or Fable, it's kind of cheap overall. Uh, the expensive part is like agentic work. That's really expensive. Like, just to give you an idea. On GPT 5.5, if you tell Codex right now to like uh, go and click uh, add to cart in Amazon. That costs 25 cents on by just API.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 07

  Um, and I know because I'm seeing the cost myself.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 07

  And so there's a lot of tricks to kind of reduce that. Um, but no, overall, there's so many tricks to making agents cheaper, more efficient. Uh, changing the model based on their quest.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't catch it. Did you haven't, you have raised for this or you haven't?

• 35:48Speaker 07

  In the process.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  In the process. There we go. There we go.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  If you're out there.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but but if you're in the process, that means like you didn't launch this and be like, I'm down to be losing like $5,000 a day.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  You know, on, you know, like you, you, you've been focused on the economics probably earlier than you would have been if you were.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  That's really good.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Had raised money at the gates.

• 36:09Speaker 07

  I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm never the type of guy that wants to be losing thousands of dollars a day. So, uh, um, we can stop it early. But no, I mean, that's the, that's the thing about AI. Like, you know, if you're, I've looked at a lot of social apps in my life and for those costs technically don't matter based on the number of users coming in. But in my case, for every like 10 new people I add, I'm kind of losing or losing money or making money depending on who, what they're doing. So I kind of got to, kind of got to think about it. So yeah, it's kind of AI kind of accidentally making everybody better at business because it's kind of required.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  So is, uh, I'm, I'm thinking about the hilarious, uh, hilarious like, like trade off in having an agent that applies a coupon code, but winds up spending more money applying the coupon code than you save. Cause it's like, oh yeah, we put in this and saved you 24 cents, but the API call is 25 cents. Um, but how, how, how do you, how, how important to you, uh, will like creating an ensemble of models that sort of maximize the parade of frontier be as you build this business? Because I'm imagining that any day now, we're going to get somewhat useful on-device models on Mac

• 37:18John Coogan?

  from the new Siri models, the on-device models. Those will probably be very limited in what they can do, but useful for some things. And that's free for you. Then you'll have open source, you know, legacy models, GPT four class stuff. And then you might only call out to a Fable five on demand. So do you need to build your own router? Or is there a tool that you'll be using? Like, how important will that be from the interactions that you're seeing?

• 37:46Speaker 07

  That's a great question. You're pretty much asking like, what's the harness? And, uh, we just built our own. Uh, because technically like this is all so early where there's nothing to use off the shelf.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  Uh, you have to think deeply about it yourself and then build it yourself. So for example, let's just say, you know, you're on Clicky right now and you're saying, hey, Clicky, uh, I want you to actually research, uh, the latest in the Iran war and put it in my, in a notion doc for me when you're done.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:10Speaker 07

  What now? Like, should it hit OPUS? Should it hit Codex? Should it hit like, it's actually depend. And so like, we can take all those requests today and just route them ourselves. So yeah, we we use like, we use like four models right now underneath the hood. And do you have a model that's doing the routing? So GPT real time actually does the routing. Does the routing? Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's something that we, that's something that we figured out that I think not even the OpenAI team really knew. And they hit us up about, which is, it's a great router. Um, it's so good at like, uh, cause it's so good at tool calling. Yeah. Um, that means it's actually really good at routing requests. So for example, we have this tool called called Call Fable 5. Uh, so it's a user asks something that like, is a heavier pixel task. We call Fable 5. If it's like more of like agentic work, we call, um, uh, we call GPT 5.5. And so,

• 38:56Speaker 07

  uh, it's kind of all being done in the background. But that's the kind of magic of the product right now, where it's like, most people who use our product have never used an agent before. They don't even know what Codex is. And so to them, it's magical where it's like, oh, I'm just talking to my computer and it's doing the thing. That's, that's awesome. That's kind of what they want.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, How do you, how do you think about the tension between, I think, you being a generational media talent and then like startups? Cause I actually feel like, uh, this is our first time meeting, but I've seen your videos over many years at this point and like, you're just really, really, really, really good at it. So much so that as like somebody who's in media, I'm like, well, I kind of want you to just do that.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  You're a podcaster.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  And I don't say that normally, normally it's the exact opposite where it's like, hey, like, you shouldn't do this podcast. You should just work on your company, you know, or whatever, whatever the thing is. Uh, and, and they obviously feed into each other really well. Like you have an edge. You can get attention for free, you know, just investing a few hours, making a video, whatever. It's very, very powerful skill set. But, uh, how do you think about that tension?

• 40:03Speaker 07

  It, you know, it's funny, like, uh, I've been making videos for like 15 plus years and, uh, I, uh,

• 40:07Speaker 07

  Overnight success. I have second time. Yeah, I always just see this as a uh as like a I think I get to do for fun on the side while I get to do the main thing, which is like I actually build stuff for people. At the end of the day, like I am painfully familiar with how bad of a business like making videos is and making movies is and making music is like I know how bad of a business is like firsthand. And so I know, but I know more than anybody, the power of getting in front of a billion people every single month. Um, when there's a good engine underneath a good business engine in engine underneath it, um, that you that that's powering something else. And so uh, I fully intend to do that. So if I had this mediability, I'm glad I got it. Uh, I think, uh,

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's like a way to do it's like sales.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, sales.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like really scale your sales.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  You gotta be good at sales. Um, W W C, uh, some movement on interoperability in iOS. Still feels like the the the clicky iOS app is probably on the longer term and will be uh, you know, stuck in the walled garden for a while. Uh, but what I'm interested in is that do you see just a really, really solid market? Because there's no Da Vinci Resolve iOS app that I'm aware of and certainly people don't. There are there are like prosumer sort of professional tools that really only exist on a desktop or a laptop. And so are you are you interested in like going and hacking on crazy workarounds to build something that like

• 41:36John Coogan?

  maybe makes people a little upset in Cupertino, but gets you into that more casual mobile space? Or do you think that you just want to focus on desktop prosumer, uh, you know, uh, desktop apps?

• 41:52Speaker 07

  Uh, no, I want it all. I want I want when you talk to your computer, whether this is this is your computer.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 07

  Or your computer is this computer.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 42:00Speaker 07

  Uh, I want to be an interaction layer on top of it. That being said, though, I've known I have no interest in necessarily being like a uh, OS level uh, controller, for example, like uh, kind of like what Apple is doing right now. There's no real interest. Uh, for us, most of our customers and most of our users are essentially connecting like 15 integrations to Clicky from G Suite to Notes and to Dropbox and doing work with it. So I'm a lot more interested in like that reality. We're talking, what if I can talk to my phone in the morning and just say, hey, like look through all my emails and send me a uh, send me a brief, you know, when you're done. Um, and just I can just talk to my phone and do that. Uh, I'm more interested in that stuff, which is stuff I don't think Apple is gonna do personally. They're not gonna make like connect your. Connect these 15 places to my Apple account and do work with it. I just don't think they're gonna do it.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  How do you think the health of like open ecosystems in desktop software is broadly? Because there's two ways that you could like update an Excel file, or there's actually probably a bunch. But you can, you can, you know, puppeteer the mouse, move over, click, type the cell, save, you know, or you can just go edit the underlying CSV file in like raw text and then just refresh the front end. And I imagine one's way cheaper for you. So you want to like lean into getting the MCP servers, the APIs, the file, the file writing, like the CLI, you know, interaction down. But do you think that there will be companies that lean into that or companies that fight that?

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Because they want you to stay, you know, mouse and keyboard at all times?

• 43:32Speaker 07

  That's a good question. I don't think so, because at the end of the day, what Clicky is doing in the background, just so you guys know how it works, we literally took the Rust binary that's in Codex and we package it with our, with our app.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:44Speaker 07

  So that when you actually call the Clicky agent, you're just calling a sub spawn of Codex.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 07

  And so this is on purpose. Like I just want to use the best, the best model and the best kind of thing possible.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 07

  And so, uh, no, I don't think that's gonna end up happening. In fact, it's better. For example, if you ask me Clicky right now, hey, like, how do I actually like, uh, add a formula to this Google Sheet here?

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:06Speaker 07

  There's two answers there. One answer is let me show you. The second answer is I can show you, but do you want me to do that for you?

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:11Speaker 07

  And I think that's where we're gonna start going with computers.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 07

  Where you're just gonna start, your computer is just gonna say, can I just do this for you? Like, I see you doing it. Like, I can just do this. So that's where we're kind of going.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Well, good luck with the fundraiser. I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon. Let us know when it closes.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, uh,

• 44:26John Coogan?

  I'm excited for this.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I love watching you, you win and, and have fun in the process.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  It's great to finally meet you.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Better.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And up next, we have Trent from Side Talk. He's a creator and co-founder of Side Talk. He's in the waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV panel to go on. He'll turn Nick's fandom into one of the internet's most recognizable sports media brands. How you doing? Take us through it. How is New York? How is it going?

• 45:05Trent Simonian?

  Yo, it's crazy out here, I'm not gonna lie.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:07Trent Simonian?

  I was about to do this interview from my apartment and then I realized, hold on.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Trent Simonian?

  Has anyone done a TVPN interview live from the streets of New York?

• 45:14John Coogan?

  You gotta go to the sidewalk.

• 45:15Trent Simonian?

  This is a first.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Founder of Side Talk.

• 45:16Trent Simonian?

  This is amazing. Come on. Amazing. Right here.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  For those who don't know you, take us through your media empire, take us through your strategy, break it down for us.

• 45:26Trent Simonian?

  Okay, so I have a little company called Side Talk. You might see the logo. And pardon the potential loss of voice from this Knicks crowd. But, uh, you know, we kind of pretty much run around New York City and let people do and say whatever they want into our microphone. We created the Bing Bong trend years ago. We created these Knicks videos. Unfortunately, there's a little bit of chaos outside of Madison Square Garden due to us. But yeah, we're pretty much let people say what they want in New York and it's pretty fun and entertaining.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  What's the secret to a good street interview?

• 45:58Trent Simonian?

  You gotta keep it shareable and engaging. It sounds obvious, but like, why would you want to watch an interview of someone talking about something boring? Or, or low energy or anything like that? What would you want to send to your friends? And that's kind of the difference. So you ask people about like, language model diffusion? Always, always, always, always. That's what we love talking about.

• 46:17John Coogan?

  Token price saving and all of that.

• 46:20Trent Simonian?

  Exactly.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Sean's private credit, yep.

• 46:22Trent Simonian?

  Yeah, yeah. That's what the people want to see. We're gonna start talking about that outside of the Knicks game, I think.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, where, where, uh, so I, I understand that a lot of the, uh, you know, man on the street interview format these days. It, it can be very prepped. It can be, uh, there's a PR person that's pitching, uh, some successful business person for the, what do you do for a living? It looks candid, but in fact, it's staged. Uh, do you ever participate in that or is everything candid? Is that part of the brand?

• 46:49Trent Simonian?

  We're a hundred percent natural on the streets. You don't know what you're gonna expect.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:54Trent Simonian?

  Yes, sir. Organizing. But it's really cool too.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:56Trent Simonian?

  Cause, uh.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 46:58Trent Simonian?

  But.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Uh, then my, my follow-up is like, then if you aren't prepping and understand who you're gonna be interacting with, like, how do you vet, like, where is the bar? If you see somebody walking and they have a baseball hat on and they probably don't want to be bothered? Is there some sort of social contract where you shouldn't, like, the, the, is there a doom scenario where everyone in New York is getting asked, what do you do for a living 15 times when they walk to go get their morning coffee?

• 47:24Trent Simonian?

  Yeah, honestly, it's it's a bit of an epidemic going on. I actually am kind of scared that I'm gonna get pulled up on right now and ask what I do for a living or what song I'm listening to.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Trent Simonian?

  But, you know. The the people, the people of New York, I think they distinctify side talk a little bit from that. They know we're not there to to ask them something like, I don't know, so so cookie cutter like that.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:45Trent Simonian?

  Uh, and I don't know. Now people come to us when they see the microphone, which is great. And, uh, yeah, we we we just go with the flow.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  How do you think about monetization? Short form monetization notoriously hard, but you have some merch. Break it. Break down like the business side of the business.

• 48:00Trent Simonian?

  Yeah, it's actually very interesting. You would think that you would, that, you know, I would have made a dollar off of TikTok by now. I don't think I've ever gotten paid from TikTok or Instagram, literally not a dime. Which is, which is fine. It's cool. Go on TikTok, go through. But, uh, no, it's cool. We we do a lot of branded work.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:16Trent Simonian?

  For companies. So we've worked with everyone from the NFL to Netflix, Nike, Google, Amazon, creating a lot of content for them. So they'll come to us with a product or an event that they want to highlight. And they say, hey, you know, you know how to get clicks and views and you kind of pretty much apply our formula to that and then create a really good video for them.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Okay, I I have, uh, like a hot take and I want you to wa- walk me through whether you agree or disagree. Um. I think you should just do a mid roll ad in a three minute Instagram reel, uh, because I see the, I see the branded integrations. It's like, oh, uh, there was this example in on Subway takes where someone's take was Android's better than iPhone. It went massively viral on r slash Android. And then the second, and then Google was like, oh, we'd love to work with you on another take that's the same thing, but it's branded. And those sponsored takes, they often don't go as viral. It's hard to get branded content to go viral. But in some of these longer three minute videos.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Uh, if I'm locked in after two minutes, I would sit through a 10 second mid roll of like, hey, this was brought to you by this. Thanks for sponsoring this video. And then it's just all organic content around it. Does that work? Is that already happening? Are you thinking about that? What's the deal?

• 49:28Trent Simonian?

  Definitely, we, one thing we really like doing is kind of like a natural integration.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 49:33Trent Simonian?

  So we just did something with Nike, which is really cool, where they hit us up for these Knicks colored shoes.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:39Trent Simonian?

  Okay, who better to get word out about these Knicks colored things and side talk. So we had people wear them in the episode. We were talking about them. We asked people to react to them. I think that feels authentic because that's kind of something we would do anyway.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 49:51Trent Simonian?

  And it did really well.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, predictions for tonight?

• 49:56Trent Simonian?

  We know if you're losing me, by the way.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  A little bit. It's a little patchy.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  We are losing you, but the energy's still there. Um, predictions for tonight?

• 50:06Trent Simonian?

  Knicks in five.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  Knicks in five?

• 50:08John Coogan?

  What's the plan for covering the game?

• 50:10Trent Simonian?

  Dominate performance.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  But isn't it in your, isn't it kind of in your best interest for it to be all seven, all seven games? Like, you know, more, more content, more attention. Like, you kind of want, you know, you, we, we obviously want your Knicks to win, but you don't want them to win too fast. It's got, there's.

• 50:28Trent Simonian?

  If we can guarantee a win in seven, I would like seven. If we can guarantee seven, that would be great. But listen, we need to get the win more than anything.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Okay. What, what, what, what is the process of a shoot day? How early are you getting there? Who are you bringing with you? How big is the team?

• 50:45Trent Simonian?

  Definitely. It depends on what we're doing. We do such a wide variety of stuff. We can randomly go to a hot dog eating contest in Plenty Island. We can go highlight a random character in Brooklyn. We can go, obviously film these Knicks games. It was pretty dependent on what's going on, but with the Knicks games, we kind of show up in like the third quarter as it's ending. Unfortunately, we can't bring our equipment into the stadium, so we lowkey just have to stand there and watch the game on our ESPN app and hope that the Knicks win or we hear, you know, someone just scored, something like that. And then the chaos erupts. We go into the chaos. We're there for like hours and hours at a time. And at the end of the day, people see, you know, 55 seconds, but we're out shooting for like eight hours throughout these playoff games.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Got it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you. Good luck.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we will. We'll feature some of your videos in in tomorrow's episode from tonight. Good luck out there. Have fun. Be safe.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm hoping for I'm hoping for Nixon seven personally. Let's do it. Let's do it. Can't guarantee it yet. So have have fun out there. Thank you for. Thank you for this walk and talk. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you. Yeah, great to hang, dude.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Appreciate it. Thank you. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We will be joined by the CEO of Snowflake in just a few minutes. Thank you for tuning in. We need to move on to the next story.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Canon says, the cashier at Home Depot just asked if I want to round up to support the SpaceX IPO.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  SpaceX IPO is going to be big Friday. We might have a surprise guest. It's going to be fun. Also, there's this crazy meta story going on, not meta, the company, but like story about a story behind Ty Morse. He's going all out trying to get an Elon interview. And it's been fascinating watching him build the craziest set in podcasting history. We're rooting for you, Ty. Good luck. Hopefully you land it. It is the quiet period, so it might be difficult, but I think that there's a plan to extend the effort. And everyone's rooting for it to happen. It's been viral on X many, many times. Also, Bloomberg is reporting that the SpaceX IPO is for X oversubscribed. Do they know that already?

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Does do you get that information at this point? That's really good news for the market, for the for the overall. There was an interesting article. I mean, we can go through some of this. I think this was in The Economist, SpaceX, talking about, where is it? Can the market swallow SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? Watch out for indigestion. But they talk about the throat, the float, the free float. This was very interesting. So obviously, the

• 53:35John Coogan?

  A company might be worth a trillion dollars. How much of that trillion dollars is actually actively being traded? Like, sure, Fidelity might at any point in time have a price at which they're willing to buy more and a price at which they're willing to buy to sell their stake. But founders are often locked up. Founders often want to maintain control. Employees are locked up for a certain amount of time. Certain investors might be locked up unless you're Bill Gurley. Don't try and lock him up. He, he, nobody can lock him up. He's a wild man. But the float is important because there's, if it's a trillion dollar company and it's the CEO passed away a generation ago and there's all, all financial managers in. It's only owned by hedge funds.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  This was the story of Take-Two before Strauss Zelnick came in. Take-Two, the makers of Grand Theft Auto. It was entirely held by, by shareholders, by financial investors. And they were unhappy with the management team and the management team didn't have any equity. And so he was able to raise his hand and say like, I'll run this thing. And they were like, absolutely. Thank you. And they let him take over the company without really putting anything up. He didn't need to do a hostile takeover, like bring a bunch of capital to bear to get control of that company and become the CEO. And it's been a fantastic success for him and fantastic success for Take-Two shareholders who stuck along, stuck around for the Strauss Zelnick era. But the, the float matters. And, and Microsoft, it's a hundred percent floated.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  The free float is a hundred percent because the founders have moved on and divested and they're not locked up. At Apple, it's like 99%. Broadcom's also at 98%. Nvidia at 96%. Amazon's at 91%. Only Jeff Bezos is considered sort of off the table. Alphabet at 90%. Tesla at 89%. And Meta is notably of the big tech companies. The lowest free float at something like 88%, 86%. And the reason for that is because Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of control. If he sells his stake, he loses control. So no one's expecting him to sell, even if the stock goes way up or whatever. Like, he's going to maintain his position because he wants to run that company.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Now SpaceX is in an interesting. Interesting place. So 13% of Meta shares are owned by Mark Zuckerberg. SpaceX plans to release locked up shares in a series of tranches. If its IPO issues $75 billion of shares, valuing the firm at its hoped for $1.8 trillion valuation. The initial free float, because if you buy the IPO, you're not locked up, you can sell the next day if you want. But this means-

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, technically, it's not like the whether, whether somebody's like buying through, you know, investing through like JPM, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, all these pieces. Like technically you can go and sell.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  They just might restrict you from other IPOs. So you would expect like serious, and, and this happens like on all the different apps, you know, Robin Hood, public, et cetera. If you're buying into an IPO, they, they basically are asking you nicely, do not sell. Don't, don't flip, don't flip here.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  But people can. And so with how many retail dollars are flowing into this, I expect a lot of people that are buying, buying, you know, you know, basically buying the IPO to start trading almost immediately.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Exactly. But importantly, it's only 4% of the free float. So only 4% of that 1.8 trillion, it's a lot of money, but it's only 4% will be really free trading. And then of course, during the IPO process, you're vetting investors and you're trying to get the people that will hold forever. And Elon has done a fantastic job of that with the indices. So he's gotten the NASDAQ, the S and P and a few others to, to like commit. So although NASDAQ has already shortened the seasoning period before index inclusion to 15 trading days. The Russell slashed its waiting time to five days. Most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of the shares released for public trading.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  And this is important because people look at the S and P 500 and say, wait, S and P 500, a $2 trillion company coming into that, you're wait, if you're just buying- The S and P 500 is going to be more than 1%. It might be in the single digit percent. That's a lot. And we've been talking about the S and P 499 for the bears, right? Uh, in fact, the initial weight in the S and P 500 will be around 0.1%. Because it's just that 4% free float and then it increases over time as the shares get locked up. We actually have a chart here of how the lockups work. And it takes basically

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's

• 58:22John Coogan?

  A full year, almost two, for everything to get unlocked. And it's also triggered based on share price appreciation. So if the shares trade up 30% or more, then more shares become unlocked. And the road to 100% uh lock lockup ending uh happens slowly. And so uh just a little bit of an interesting deep dive into how the SpaceX IPO will fare. Anything else to talk about on that story?

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  On that note, apparently Senator Warren

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Has urged the SEC to halt SpaceX's IPO citing governance risks, Elon Musk's control and potential foreign, especially Chinese, investment concerns.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  She also highlighted SpaceX's role as a US defense contractor. Uh Senator Warren has never met a business that she liked. I think, except maybe

• 59:18John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  Large financial institutions.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  She likes those.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Uh, Sridhar Ramaswamy from Snowflake. He is the CEO. We're very pleased to be joined by him. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 59:35Speaker 09

  I'm all. Thank you for having me.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  I can imagine you're doing well. The, the company is doing fantastically. I am interested to hear, I mean, obviously there's been an emotional roller coaster, but I'm more interested in the data that you're seeing that shows acceleration, so much promise, so much opportunity in this particular business.

• 59:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, data is the foundation for insights. I worked in a data company, worked in the search ads team at Google. Very great data was the flywheel that made it into a great business. That's what we aspire to do with each and every one of our customers. Yeah, it's done a couple of things. It's made the act of bringing data into Snowflake doing just a whole lot easier. Pipelines that used to take weeks to set up or migrations that used to take years now have dropped to days and months, which is pretty remarkable. But people also realize how much more power they can get by having great conversational access to their data. And now with things like Snowflake Co-Work, how you can actually solve pretty meaningful

• 1:00:41Speaker 09

  business problems in an interactive way. It's that it's that loop that is compounding for us that drives a lot of our growth.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Has there been any movement downstream for Snowflake? Whenever I hear the story of a data lake, a properly managed data warehouse as an entrepreneur, even in a small business, I think that sounds amazing. That sounds like the dream. And then I see the companies that, you know, actually have the resources to onboard be, you know, immensely large and obviously that's fantastic for your business. But I'm interested in in what the future looks like. Is there a world where a 10-person startup with AI agents and and these pipelines that can be built much faster can actually set up their business and then not have to go through a cumbersome migration in the future?

• 1:01:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, we are seeing that happen in front of our eyes with Snowflake's own data team. You know, they, like with every other company, used to years long. You ask them for a feature, they'd be like, here, take a ticket, come back, you know, in a few quarters. What they've been able to do with Agent AI is grind through those kinds of backlogs very quickly. Absolutely. Data and agents are going to make it much easier to set up these things and have them evolve as they go along. I'll give you examples from Snowflake. We rewrote our both our support teams and our SRE teams' software. These are the folks that take care of different kinds of problems that we get into an. And the net result of that.

• 1:02:19Speaker 09

  By agents investigating the problem. And if you see enough instances of a problem that you have not seen, you go figure it out, go write a tool for it. It's now in a self-healing loop. I increasingly imagine that more and more operations get into that kind of a mindset where there are very competent agents, sets of recipes, you can call them skills, there'll be some other name tomorrow, that take care of problems. But it is a self-learning loop. That's what AI makes possible.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Got it. Where are we in the path to like fully automated migrations, fully automated new integrations? It feels like every new model release, we're like, this is the one. This is the one, the non-technical CEO is going to be doing the job now. He's just going to say, hey, we have two systems. Go fix it, go integrate it, get it into Snowflake. It's going to happen. And then reality sets in and there's not just token costs and cost of that to delegating to AI, but also just the real world of other decisions that need to be made that might be outside of the context. So what are the remaining challenges that come up

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  when you're building a new integration or working on a migration?

• 1:03:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think the timelines are definitely shrinking when it comes to migrating off of legacy platforms, the on-prem ones. We used to think of them, the biggest ones as running into say like three odd years. And these strike terror into every company's heart because it's three years of like really anxious development work and waiting for results and hoping things don't go wrong. To give you very concrete numbers, we now feel a lot more confident that we can tackle really tough migrations and have them finish in a couple of quarters. That's a big deal. It's going from 12 down to one or two. And the migration team, which work on top of agent harnesses that we create.

• 1:04:15Speaker 09

  More confident that the technical parts of these problems will be solved by the end of the year, but there is the change management, there is all of the other applications that are running on the old system that you have to validate on the new system and ensure that there is business continuity. That kind of change management is still going to be non-trivial, but the technical parts, the act of doing the migration or writing new software, these are the things that AI is absolutely driving down.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  What is the biggest?

• 1:04:44Speaker 09

  And by the way, I actually go check out every feature my team puts out using our coding agents. That's already a thing and honestly, it's not that hard if you have a modestly technical background.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense. What is the biggest lesson that you or the company have taken forward from Frank Slootman's era?

• 1:05:07Speaker 09

  Frank was always about amazing go-to-market execution and we remember that. And in fact, our sales teams are incredibly well-versed now in our products and in AI as a whole because we created products that could work for them. And having an effective go-to-market motion is the real strength of Snowflake. Again, to make this super concrete, the number of use cases, these are new products basically within customers that are account executives, one, went up by some 75% year-on-year. That's the power of sort of using AI to get work done faster and that is a tradition that will continue.

• 1:05:50Speaker 09

  What we have added on is new focus that comes from a product-first person like me. AI in sort of a generic way, all about worry about things like what can it do? But I think sometimes what we forget is if you have a well-built system that uses like the latest It's actually an incredible delight. All kinds of information that you would want. I was at a conference recently. Every piece of information that I wanted to know about a customer that I was having a conversation with, I would look up even live if I didn't know. I would do it in front of them and show them the power of Snowflake's AI.

• 1:06:31Speaker 09

  A big part of our success over the past couple of years has been internalizing this. AI is a different way to think about product and product delivery. And the companies that are going to succeed are the ones that truly internalize that. That there is a big chasm between how we did it with webpages and clicking on things to these agentic flows that can truly solve problems.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  Then how is the sales, the role of the sales rep changing? The sales associate changing? Are you looking for any different skills? Or are you doubling down on what worked in the pre-agentic AI era?

• 1:07:10Speaker 09

  First of all, a lot more familiarity with Snowflake is a must.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:15Speaker 09

  Because these folks now have access to products that show off what Snowflake is about. I expect every sales rep to have cowork on their phone and be able to show off the actual impact of having a product like that with ready access to information to each and every one of our customers. When it comes to our solution engineers, these are the technical pre-sales people. Used to be that we'd have six demos total for all of Snowflake and maybe they would do a little bit of customization and say, hey, here's what Snowflake can do. Now, pretty much all of them are capable of creating a custom demo tailored made for a specific customer in a vertical, in a way that makes sense to them, that will really illustrate the power of Snowflake.

• 1:07:59Speaker 09

  It's that kind of empathy that they can use the technology that we create to drive. I would say it's changed in a really, really big way because a lot more possible, but the bar is also a lot higher in terms of what you're expected to bring to the table.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through the partnership with Amazon Web Services? I'm sure you compete in some categories, but how did this come together? What does it mean for the future of your business?

• 1:08:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, we work with the hyperscalers. AWS is the biggest partner. And, you know, we work with them on a number of different levels. We work on product integration.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:08:41Speaker 09

  You know, buy a lot of capacity from them, a lot of GPUs that our inference team runs models on. But where we really shine is in joint go-to-market. AWS is an incredibly customer-first company. And if a customer says, hey, I want AWS plus Snowflake, they lean into it. They bring us. And we really focus on how do we solve problems jointly for our customers. And there's a deep, deep relationship, both at the account level, going all the way up to the CEO level, that ensures that problems that come up in practice get solved very quickly. It's the kind of partnership that one only dreams of. It's incredibly effective in practice.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  What's been your, what's been your strategy for trying to predict AI progress? Because, you know, we have people on the show every single day, somebody from a lab, somebody that's an investor, you know, customers of the labs, things like that. Everyone has a different opinion. You have to weight them differently based on their incentives. But you're running a, you know, massive company that's leveraging these tools. But at the same time, you want to understand what the capability will be one year out, two years out, and it feels harder than ever to actually be able to predict that.

• 1:09:59Speaker 09

  I think this is a, is a really good question and one that to deal with. I don't think the software industry as a whole has internalized that this precious commodity that we all love creating by hand, which is software, the cost of creating new software is going to keep going down. I tell people that the best analogy that I can give for them is to go back to, let's say, the 2000s when the cost of creating and distributing new content truly dropped precipitously. And you have to work through what is the implication of something like this.

• 1:10:38Speaker 09

  For example, I think simply getting deployed into an enterprise and being part of a workflow there is no longer a guarantee that things are going to keep continuing because switching is also easier. I would say that's the first thing. Every company that's in the world of creating software as a big part of their business needs to think through what is the durable value that they are creating. I think it's a really hard question to internalize, and so we spend a lot of time just thinking about it. The second one, and this gets to the heart of your question, and I honestly just have

• 1:11:18Speaker 09

  a practice, which is that this is a bad time to be making two and three-year plans. Anytime things are getting better or worse by 20, 30% every month, the human ability to predict these things, which are exponential in nature, it doesn't really work. I joke to people that at this point in time, we should treat coding agents the same way we treat traffic. Any in-person is always going to look at Google Maps first before they go somewhere because it's an all-seeing app. Agents are sort of becoming like that when it comes to software. And the more you have that open mentality, that more things might be possible with a

• 1:12:01Speaker 09

  new model release than was possible before, the more you will be pleasantly surprised and you'll be ready to take advantage of it. And so I stress that childlike quality in figuring out what is possible. Obviously, there are nuances to how do you put in work in such a way that even if the model got better, you'll still be able to take advantage of what you have done before. There are practical problems like that. But the biggest thing that I ask for is that open-mindedness to what is possible today because a lot different from what was possible, say, a month ago.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Are you positioning

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Snowflake as a company that's in the token path or in the token stream. I don't know if you've heard this phrase that's sort of new coinage for a position in the AI value chain. And it feels like you're firmly in the in the token stream in the token path. But I'm wondering about what you think about that category. Is that is that narrowing you? Is that is that valuable to communicate to customers and investors? What do you think of the phrase like in the token path?

• 1:13:13Speaker 09

  It's a useful way to think about how value is going to get created. Remember, back in the Webera, we talked about, you know, number of visits, number of unique visitors. These were the things are weekly active versus monthly active. These were the abstractions that we used to ground the numbers that various people would report in a reality. You can think of the token path as existing along this path that is using the power and knowledge that these models have and creating value for customers. And both in the data where our coding agent called Coco comes into play, where we want

• 1:13:55Speaker 09

  everyone that wants to get value from data to be using it to create all of the artifacts in that path, but also in the consumption path where our product is Snowflake Co-Work, where I want every employee in every company to be able to access the valuable data that is in Snowflake, but also in other applications via things like MCP to be using Co-Work. And so we very much think about can we be in this path of coding up the things that are going to drive consumption and creating value, but also in the path of how does an end user query enterprise data, take an action on that data and also creating value. So we very much think about this.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  So my last question is, you said it's a bad time to be making two and three year plans. How far are you looking into the future? Do you have a one year plan, a three month plan?

• 1:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, as a public company, you do have to.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to have forecasts, but but but more qualitatively, like what are you gunning for this year or over whatever time horizon you think is appropriate at this point in time?

• 1:15:06Speaker 09

  Our overall strategy is very clear. It's just what I described. Anytime anyone wants to do something with data, I want them to use agent tools that are created by Snowflake, Cocoa, for example, to be able to do that. We want to have the best data platform in the world. So that when and whenever someone thinks, hey, I need a historical view of this, or I need an OLTP database to do this, they think of Snowflake. They can use any coding agent, not just our own, to be able to, to be able to do that. Similarly, we think a lot about how can we make sure that we sell cowork to CROs? And demonstrate what we have done internally within Snowflake, just transform our own sales organization.

• 1:15:48Speaker 09

  So we think a lot about how do we take our customers through the same journey that we have been through? In terms of how can AI make a difference to the business? There'll be a lot of details along the way, but that's the path that we are headed in. AI leveraging the full power of data.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you and congrats to the team on all the momentum.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yes. Stay strong in the token path. We love to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context. Yes, apologies for.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  For the technical issues. A lot of people are saying, is this AI?

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  It's not AI.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Is this AI? There was some type of.

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  I've never seen that exact technical failure before where it cuts out entirely. We've heard scratchy audio. We've heard degraded video. The video was coming through crystal clear, but the audio was cutting in and out a little bit, but I think we got a lot of good stuff. Cocoa, they should have called the AI agent Frosty. Snowflake?

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Frosty.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Probably intellectual property.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Frosty the agent.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Is a jolly, happy coder.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Coder, yeah, something. Anyway, Citadel, Citadel Securities, former employer of mine when I was an intern, wrote a post on Tokenomics. They're one of the most significant hedge funds and they just dropped Tokenomics. I have it here. I have a second printout. Tyler, you want to bring that over to me? It's not what you expected, is what they say. So, so we've argued for some time that agentic and complex workflows delivered by frontier models would be expensive to run, constrained by physical bottlenecks and vulnerable to unrealistic expectations of frictionless deployment costs. That judgment now looks less contrary than it did

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  when we set it out in February. They're taking a victory lap over at Citadel Securities. Amazon has now removed its token leaderboard. Microsoft has canceled Claude code subscriptions and there have been multiple reports of unexpectedly large token bills. The salient point is that even the most powerful technologies must pass through the prosaic discipline of cost curves, capacity constraints and marginal returns. Adoption is therefore becoming less about what frontier models can do in principle and more about the price and scarcity of the inputs required to make AI operational at scale. Compute power cooling, memory bandwidth and inference budgets are real and binding constraints.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  They go into economic theory, talking about the three functions that prices provide. So they signal scarcity, create incentives for substitution and ration scarce resources toward their highest value uses. This is the stuff that goes viral on TikTok. We're deep in it. You heard of the keeping the viewer watching. This is the most important thing. You read the Citadel Securities macro strategy report. But they do say they ration scarce capacity toward the areas where marginal productivity in AI justifies the marginal cost of using it. They're talking about ROI maxing. For the economy at large, simpler models may be more cost effective, productivity augmenting pathway until physical constraints are eased.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  We hence see growing signs of a bifurcation in frontier versus everyday AI usage. They actually shared some data here around token expenditure index dropping, the log growth rate declining, and so folks are pulling back. A little bit and shifting towards cheaper models as they figure out a new workflow, something gets unlocked and then they say, hey, we got to actually make this ROI positive. So that's the latest from Citadel. Let's see what Amazon Web Services is saying because they're blackbelling on the timeline. They said more AI generated code doesn't make your team faster. It might actually slow you down. Crazy post from AWS.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Would have expected it from like some AI thought leader, podcaster, Twitter person.

• 1:19:57Jordi Hays?

  AI bear.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's funny coming from the AWS cloud gold check.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because it's also like, if you were to write this, I think a lot of people would write this as more AI generated code doesn't necessarily make your team faster.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  No, just per.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  No, more AI generated code doesn't make your team faster, which is just like factually incorrect for like a lot of teams.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Right? Kind of like, we're actually moving faster than ever. Also, okay, uh, read the next post in this thread. It's like very clearly AI generated.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  The real bottleneck was never writing code. It's releasing it, debugging it, keeping it running well. So when Honeycomb, Honeycomb I O.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  CTO.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  CTO charity majors set a productivity target, she didn't chase 10x. She chose 2x and built from there.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  You think this is AI? Because the choose 2x comma and ampersand built from there.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  I think it was human edited, but like that, that.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Syntax feels a little AI. I agree. I agree. Her team also skipped the mandates and built a set of AI values instead. Every AI output has to have human owner.

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  If you don't want your name on it, it's probably not good for it.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's reasonable. Uh, quality first, quantity second. Uh, so they had a podcast about it. Uh, coming from AWS, that's a wild statement. This is, this is very funny.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  But yes, also funny with the backdrop of, of a $500 million budget.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and it's funny because, uh, Amazon is of course one of the largest investors in both OpenAI and Tropic to.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Leading coding model provider.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Hey, they didn't say more AI generated posts don't make your social media team faster. Entirely possible it sped them up. They certainly got 14,000 likes on this. This is a banger post from a corporate account. Rare to see those numbers put up on the timeline from corporate accounts. So, congrats to the team over there putting up some fun numbers. Sriram Krishnan, the, I don't know how to differentiate them. He's at KearneyJackson.com, investor advisor, two bending spoons, not the former A16Z, A16Z GP who worked for the government for a little bit. Sriram Krishnan says, "Not many Silicon Valley VCs took our bending spoons intro in

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  2022. These VCs thought it was beneath them to be associated with the company. From 2024 onward, many clamored for an introduction to sell their portfolio companies." Bending spoons is going public. So, bending spoons will be a public company and they own a number of, of, you know, historical companies. They own AOL and have done a bunch of other stuff. Eric Sufer broke down the-

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  They literally own America Online.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  They own America Online. It must be electric. I can't get into my mobile dev email. I'm just gonna skip this and move on. But you can, Eric Sufer over at Mobile Dev Memo wrote a breakdown of, the Suferator wrote a breakdown of bending spoons filing to go public. The Italian roll-up operator that owns among many other properties AOL, they own Eventbrite and Vimeo. Don't they also own Evernote? Or am I getting that mixed up? Someone owned Evernote and the Evernote employee growth chart looks like a fast takeoff. Like, post 2020 COVID, they went from like 1,000

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  employees to like almost 6,000 employees or they tripled or doubled the workforce. And bending spoons, you know, known as sort of like the, the operational excellent, almost like a private equity firm, private, like they're, you know, they're gonna do cuts. They have done a few cuts, but like, the, the actual headcount has like had, held fairly stable. And I think the business has gotten to a much better place. So, interesting to see there's a time and a place for being aggressive, expanding, when there's a big moment and the market's up. And then there's also a time to consolidate and focus on operational efficiency.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Why, why is this guy so obsessed with GTA, John?

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Have you ever played GTA? Any GTA?

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Maybe like, uh.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  GTA 3, GTA 4.

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Maybe like for like two minutes.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Two minutes?

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  And I'd be, and I was like, wow, you just.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Loser. What a loser. Never gamed in his life. Can't get a load of this guy.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't get into it. I couldn't get into it.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, you're a Russ guy. You're, you're a con guy.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  Everything, like I just, even as a child, I was like, everything that you can do in this game, you can just go do real life minus like crimes.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  It's all crimes. Wait.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jordy turned it down.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  He turned it down.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's. Well, yeah, maybe, maybe I'm pure of heart and I don't enjoy, like, okay, like crap.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  They were gonna let me play for like 15 hours, 10 hours, maybe five hours, but I turned it down.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  They were like. They actually wanted to pay me. They wanted to pay me to play.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they wanted to pay you to play. Strauss said, actually, I would love for you to play.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, one of my first jobs, I was a video game tester. I got paid to play video games.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Best job. Play video games all day.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  They, they got you hooked.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they got you hooked. No, I was already hooked. I was elite.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Uh, so yeah, you go play the games while it's in development. You file bug reports. You're a quality assurance tester, but you're, basically your job is to play video games all day. Worked with a guy who was super chill and like, he was just like, this is my career. Like I'm, this is, I'm happy with this. Like I'm, I'm, I'm a video game tester. And then I, I checked in with him a couple of years later and I was like, hey man, like how's the video game testing business going? And he was like, you know, I actually had a shift in my career. I'm a DVD tester now. It's even easier. So he just, I just sit there, watch the full movie and then tell the, tell the people like, yep, like there were no audio bugs. There, there was no, there were, there were no drop frames in the whole movie. I sat there, I watched

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  the whole movie and it looked fine. Thumbs up. And then every once in a while he'd be like, oh, I was in the menus of the DVD and when I went to behind the scenes footage, it wouldn't play the correct video. It had the title for, you know, interview with the director and it actually played interview with a cinematographer. So you gotta fix that. Like these things happen, like UI bugs pop up in DVD menus, but what a wild job DVD tester. It's a good one. Good one. Anyway, this fellow is obsessed with GTA 6 and he's doing anything and everything to understand whether or not GTA 6 will be released on time. There's two methods here. If you want to know GTA 6 is going to get released on time, you can just shake down Strauss Zelnick for the truth,

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  or you can do what he did, which is he set up acoustics around the Rockstar headquarters to measure audio levels near a meeting room. And he discovered that his equipment had disappeared. And when he returned to check on the latest data, but he didn't stop there. He started camping outside, monitoring traffic and tracking the number of cars and their estimated value. Oh, there's an executive in town. That means something for the GTA 6 release date. Uh, oh, there's more cars coming in. Probably a lot of people working late nights getting it out, uh, burning the midnight oil. And so he believes such data can be used to speculate on how many executives may be spending time at the HQ as opposed to regular employees. And an increase in both traffic and high value vehicles could indicate trailer three is coming.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  He's also considering an even more insane idea, which is to measure the amount of oxygen in the area to monitor how many people are around. And he did it. He started monitoring the oxygen around Rockstar North and he believes trailer three is coming soon. After noticing that oxygen levels dropped to about 20, 20.3%. We actually need to use basis points this time from 20.3 to 20.04 after 5pm suggesting increased oxygen consumption in the area. After normal working hours, he's also monitoring the number of cigarette butts. I thought it was just a GTA 6 fan. I'm excited. Everyone's excited. Maybe it's a Rockstar or a Take-Two shareholder. You had a different theory. What was your theory on his motivations?

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't believe that people are going to go to these lengths unless they're making money on it.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Okay. And how would he make money?

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a lot of like prediction markets with, you know, plenty of volume.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, could be trading the stock directly, but could also be betting on a prediction market that's.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah. If there's a, yeah, theoretically, if there were to be another delay, I'm sure the stock would probably react to that.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. It is very, very interesting strategy.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  But regardless.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Fun story.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  A hedge fund should hire this guy to do

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  other types of detective work.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost, I, it almost feels like it's going over the line, maybe illegal. I don't know. Like if I, I, I would be very frustrated if someone was standing outside of our UltraDome with a

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Measuring the air.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  measuring everything to see if we're going to interview Matthew Prince yet next.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, we are.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  And we are, because he's in the waiting room and we're bringing him in to the TBP and UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Matthew. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 1:28:58Matthew Prince?

  Good to see you. I'm doing well.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  What's new in your world? You made some acquisitions. You made an acquisition. Take us through it.

• 1:29:06Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, so we, we bought a company called Void Zero, which makes Veet, which is one of the most popular developer platforms that's there. Just an incredible team. Evan Yu, who's the founder, is just a, just a first-class human being, someone who, who our team is super excited to work with. The team that he's assembled is, is just great. And I think that this is increasingly becoming the platform that is being used to power a lot of the agents that are running around, around the internet. And, and a lot of those agents are running on CloudFlare. And so we think it's just a really natural combination.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  How simple is the synergy? Is it you'll funnel those 130 million users who download Veet every month? I think it's 130 million weekly downloads, weekly. Wow, yeah, that's a lot. Into, you know, preferring CloudFlare, defaulting to CloudFlare? Or is there more synergy under the hood around developer integration, company integration? Like, how are you thinking about this playing out?

• 1:30:08Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, we continue, we, we plan to continue to leave it as an open source project and support it and invest in it that way. We want to integrate it closely with CloudFlare's developer platform and make sure that CloudFlare is the best place to run any sort of Veet project that you, that you have. But it'll work in any, any of the different platforms as well. And so we just really wanted to make sure that Evan and his team have the support to make sure they could continue to, to really invest in, in what was, in what was just an incredible platform. And, and we think that that is going to drive more developers to CloudFlare, CloudFlare's workers platform as well.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  What are the headaches for developers these days? I know everyone's concerned about token costs and token budgets. Sometimes that doesn't show up for the developer. It's more like the CEO that's worried about it. But is uptime more difficult to maintain? We've been seeing screenshots of different uptime tracker status pages that have more and more red and yellow on them. Like, what's at the top of the stack and how are you helping?

• 1:31:10Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, you know, I think that you need a different architecture than we've had to build sort of the last generation of applications for what's coming with agents. If you imagine, you know, there are about 100 million knowledge workers in the United States. If all of those knowledge workers had one agent which was working on their behalf, that would, and each of those agents was running in a container, a traditional container like something you'd get at AWS or a Google Cloud. The amount of just CPU resources that would be needed to run just those agents, assuming they just had one agent per person,

• 1:31:52Matthew Prince?

  is about 50% of the total CPU capacity that's generated by all the different CPU manufacturers that are out there today. And that's just the United States knowledge workers. If you take that to the world, then it's several times, 30 or 40 times the capacity of GPUs and CPUs that are existing today. And so what we really think is that as these agents are creating code, you need a different platform for it. And CloudFlare was built, CloudFlare Workers was built, not on containers as much, but on something called isolates, which is a much more efficient technology. And so what we're seeing is that as people are building these agents, as they're using them, it's just a much more natural place to be running them.

• 1:32:34Matthew Prince?

  And it's, I think, why you're seeing more and more of the big AI labs have CloudFlare as the preferred target for where their code gets run. You know, OpenAI released a project for their enterprise users a little while ago that, again, is targeting us. And we want to make sure that with things like Veet as first-class citizens on CloudFlare, that we can help power that future. Because, again, it's not going to be kind of the same system that we built with the hyperscalers. It's going to be something different. And again, I think that we have a really good shot of building that different thing.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  So can you help me understand more about the problems of like CPU bottlenecks? And then maybe some of the solutions? I'm just thinking about like, I would think bandwidth would be an issue, obviously CPU load, but is there a world where we get to some sort of convention around, maybe it's the robots.txt or just the user agent and when Google bot shows up or any other AI system, AI agent shows up, you're just delivering a, it's almost an MCP server, but you're just delivering something that looks more like a JSON package, something that's a little lighter, little less CPU intensive. Is there a path there to optimization? It feels like we're in the era of like squeeze

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  every ounce of performance out of everything. But what's actually going to happen here? Where, where, like, are we just screwed or is there an opportunity?

• 1:33:56Matthew Prince?

  No, I think so. I think two, two different, different problems. So the first is, if you, if you're, as, as, as you ask these, the, these different AI systems to perform tasks on your behalf, what, what has to happen behind the scenes, especially those tasks get complicated, is that they need to be coordinated in, in some way. So if you say, plan a vacation for me or something like that, what, what goes on behind the scenes is that there, there's coordination there. And the best way to be, make that as efficient as possible, what, what agents are really good and, and, and these various LLMs are really good at is actually writing code. And so that code needs somewhere to live. And the problem is that if that lives in a container, then you've got to bring in an operating system, you've got to bring in all the tooling and everything else. And

• 1:34:40Matthew Prince?

  that's actually extremely heavy weight. And so that's the first place that you've got both a CPU and a GPU bottleneck that's there. And so with, with something like Cloudflare Workers and Isolates, you, it's just a much lighter weight system. And so that means that you can have more agents running on the same CPU infrastructure and, and be able to provide that. And again, I think that's why a lot of these next generation tools are actually built using our, our platform. You mentioned something else, which is, you know, as, as these agents go out and interact with the rest of the web. That you want to make sure that that is done in the most, most efficient way. And so if they're pulling down, you know, all of the HTML from a, from a webpage and it's,

• 1:35:22Matthew Prince?

  and those webpages are designed kind of to be consumed by, by humans, there's just a lot of cruft on that that isn't, isn't necessarily as important. And so some of the things that we're doing are, you know, for those, those customers of ours that want to make sure their content is consumed by, by agents, want to make sure it's as accessible as possible, we are automatically converting things into Markdown, which is a much simpler system that, that saves you a ton of tokens, it saves you a ton of processing. It means that your context window can be, can, you can fit more useful information into, into a context window. So I think there's a ton of optimizations and we're helping both on the developer side as well as on the content side, making sure that we can have, have these agents be as

• 1:36:06Matthew Prince?

  powerful as possible and, and get as much done as possible.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  John Gruber, total victory. You know, he invented Markdown?

• 1:36:12Matthew Prince?

  I did not.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  Grubinator.

• 1:36:13Matthew Prince?

  No way.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Isn't that amazing?

• 1:36:15Matthew Prince?

  Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's one of these things that just, you know, it, it turned out it was, it was ahead of its time, but it's, it's such a key for making sure that we can take information and make it, you know, as compact as possible.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  John Gruber created the, the, the format for God. It's a funny, funny world we live in.

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, uh, it was last week, you guys announced that the threshold had been passed around agent versus human traffic. Talk about that moment. Did it happen sooner or later than you expected?

• 1:36:47Matthew Prince?

  Much sooner.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Much sooner.

• 1:36:49Matthew Prince?

  Yeah. I mean, it was, I, at the end of last year, uh, so the end of, of 2025, I said that I, I thought that we would pass, um, uh, it, it bot traffic, um, and that's, that's, you know, across the board. So that's like Google's crawler, but also, you know, the new agents which are, which are coming out. I thought would, would pass human traffic by the end of 2027. About three months ago, I revised that, um, based on the traffic that we were seeing to say that it would actually be in the first half of 2027. And so the fact that it actually happened in the First half of 2026 is just, is just, has just been extraordinary and it just shows how quickly this, this is, is growing and, and the, and the real key here is that I think that if you know, you or I as humans

• 1:37:34Matthew Prince?

  were researching to go buy a digital camera or something, we might visit five websites and do, you know, a little bit of research and some price comparison. You know, you just watch as you use these agents, they have boundless attention to be able to just go to maybe 5,000 websites to find exactly what you're, you're looking for, the best price, the best delivery, the best service and everything that's, that's there. And so that's just driving an enormous amount of consumption of, of, of the internet. At the same time, the other thing is happening is that for a long time, since about 2015, the, the web is kind of plateaued. There were not, there were, there were more websites that were being shut down than were being created during that time.

• 1:38:17Matthew Prince?

  In the last 18 months though, we're, we're back to the, the web growing at a rate which is, is exponential. And, and what, and it looks sort of similar to what, what was happening back in the early 2000s in terms of, in terms of growth of the web. And so I think you're seeing both more sort of consumption of what's online, but you're also seeing more things online as it, as it goes forward. And so in both of those directions, you know, that's, that's, that's going to continue to just drive, you know, more and more use of, of the, of the internet. And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, going, going, you know, forward, say five years, that, that bot traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online and we've, and we've got to make sure that we make the internet work for, for that new future.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, like every year, we're just going to add another nine to the nine, nine, 99.999% of internet traffic is bots. Do you, do you know what the baseline was? Like pre-AI, were we at like 1% bot traffic? I mean, I've set up websites.

• 1:39:17Matthew Prince?

  It was, it was more, it was more than that. It was about 20% for work for a long time. Yes. And it's, you know, Google was the, was the largest and then, and then obviously there's a lot of malicious things that, that run around online, but that was, that was. Around what what it was for, and it was pretty stable over, you know, the history of CloudFlare at least, so where we could measure it. So since 2010, you know, it was always kind of around that 20% range. And then, and then it's, and then it's grown, you know, it's, it's in the last few years, it started growing steadily. And then it really accelerated in the first half of, of 2026.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the inference stack, I guess, like we're seeing two things play out. We're a sort of a bifurcation, like a WWDC, Apple's launching on-device inference. That's, it's not going to be frontier, but it's going to be usable for sure on your phone, on a computer. They can obviously go to their private cloud as well. And then you have like the new NVL 72 models. There's stuff in between on cerebrus chip, fast but expensive. Then there's everything from, oh, it runs on commodity hardware, but it's still pretty big. You need a real desktop for it. And I'm wondering about how you see CloudFlare fitting into that.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  It would be a logical extension to CloudFlare workers to have inference on the edge, inference in different places. Like, where do you see yourself offering inference, if at all?

• 1:40:47Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, well, we, we, it's actually kind of funny. Back in 2022, we, we issued a press release that there was a graphics chips company that we were going to partner with in order to put GPUs at the edge, edge of our network.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Matthew Prince?

  That graphics chip company turned out to be Nvidia.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  Nvidia, yeah.

• 1:41:08Matthew Prince?

  And, and, and what was, what was amazing was at the time, it was just crickets, like nobody cared.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:14Matthew Prince?

  And, but, but we, we had, we had, and so we, we sort of did a little of it, but we hadn't really rolled it out broadly. And what was funny was, and then you fast forward two years later, and all of a sudden, everyone cared. And so we basically just reissued the exact same press release. And, and now, you know, that's become, that's become a pretty, pretty important part of our, our business. And so today you can run inference at the edge of CloudFlare. And because of the fact that we're You know, in over 350 cities worldwide, you know, we're within within milliseconds of the vast majority of the world's population. We've become a very natural place for inference to happen. I my my working assumption has always been that about 50% of the inference that happens

• 1:41:55Matthew Prince?

  will be on device, whether that's your your phone or your or your laptop or whatever. But that there needs to be some standard protocol where your phone or your laptop or whatever that local thing is can hand those either long running tasks or larger tasks off next to the network. And so that would be to us. And then if if for some reason you need something that's more than that, that it could handle it back to, you know, some centralized data center with, you know, with with more more capacity than than we may have. And I think that that's what that's what we're increasingly seeing. I think my my assumption was a little bit probably off. I think actually think less is going to happen on device today because I think more and more of the tasks are going to be these long running tasks where it's not going to

• 1:42:39Matthew Prince?

  be just, you know, what's, you know, what's the, you know, what's the temperature in in New York today?

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Matthew Prince?

  Instead, it's going to be something like, help me plan a vacation, go, you know, take into account all of these different things, shop for, you know, different hotels in different places, plan all the plan all the the the travel between between the different locations. Here are the criteria that I have. And that might be something that takes, you know, maybe, you know, certainly not going to be seconds. It might be, you know, minutes or hours or days in some cases to run.

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  I feel like you're gonna have. I feel like you're gonna have long running agents just for Park City snow forecasting and reporting, tracking like individual.

• 1:43:19Matthew Prince?

  I already do.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Individual individual runs, you know, maybe a network of maybe a network of drones that are identifying what's tracked out.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  Satellite photos, planet labs.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Optimizing your routes on the mountain.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Lot of stuff.

• 1:43:30Matthew Prince?

  That's exactly that's that's exactly right. Hopefully, hopefully, it snows this year unlike last year.

• 1:43:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  So what are the decisions when you're doing inference on the edge? Because it's sort of a hard pitch to say, I'm going to shave off 300 milliseconds, 600 milliseconds, when you're talking about a 20 minute workflow or even a even a 10 second workflow, you're getting me a 3% boost. Is that going to make the difference? But are you optimistic that there will be sort of like a in between state where there will be inference that happens and it needs to happen within the request loop under a second and then? The latency matters?

• 1:44:12Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, well, I think there are sort of three different buckets. Why people choosing to run inference tasks on CloudFlare. I think the first bucket is exactly what you said. It's latency. And so especially for those things that have human and computer interaction, where any delay feels like it hurts you. That people are trying to make sure that they can get the best performance possible.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, for voice models, I mean, it feels like that has to... Yeah, voice models have got to be local. Yeah, I love that.

• 1:44:41Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, and so that's... And so, again, there's a case for that. I think the second case is that a lot of times, for either privacy or regulatory reasons, people want to keep things as close to where they physically are as possible. And so I think that a lot of, especially in Europe and otherwise, of places think that they made the mistake with the Internet, kind of 1.0 and 2.0, of having everything go back to Ashburn, Virginia, everything go back to the United States. And so I think that there's a real kind of sovereign desire to keep things local, and that's important. And I think the third thing is we actually can be oftentimes much more cost-effective because of the fact that we are a network and because of how we're interconnected with networks around the world,

• 1:45:26Matthew Prince?

  bandwidth for us is effectively free. And so it's very easy for us to get things on to our network. And because of where we deploy systems, we often are in places where we don't have to pay for the space or the power, which allows us to then pass those savings on to customers. So it can be significantly more cost-effective to use inference with us than it can be in some other places. That's somewhat counterintuitive, but it's sort of the nature of what we've built and kind of the secret to what's allowed CloudFlare to deliver as much as we have over time.

• 1:45:59John Coogan?

  There's a ton of debate over data centers, how they get built, how big they should be, what we need, the pushback, regulation, et cetera. Is any of this affecting your business? Are you thinking about how you position your footprint in the real world? How are you processing the evolving discussion around data center construction?

• 1:46:25Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I mean, we're going to need more data centers. I think a lot of, a lot of the discussion is somewhat silliness. I mean, the water consumption, I mean, these are closed-loop systems. I mean, a golf course uses more water than, than probably all the data centers in the United States over, over the course of, of a year. Yeah. So I, I think that, I think, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of kind of silly concerns that are there. And, but, but there are, but there are real concerns as well. We've got to make sure that there are efficient ways to get power to these things, that it's not taking power from, from other, other systems that the grid can support, support that. And so I think those are all, all, all good considerations. For Cloudera ourselves, you know, it, it, we're, we're a little bit different, where

• 1:47:07Matthew Prince?

  in, in the case of, you know, if you're a AWS or a Google or, you know, a SpaceX, you're building one big facility or a handful of very big facilities and putting a ton of machines in that, that one facility. Cloudera is different. We have a ton of machines, but we spread them massively all around the world. And oftentimes, we, we want to go into the places where networks come together. And so those, those can be, you know, some of the oldest data centers in the world. And in any of those facilities, we may not have, you may, we may have only hundreds of machines. But over, collectively around the world, we've got, you know, what is effectively much larger than any individual data center, which is, which is out there.

• 1:47:49Matthew Prince?

  So I think we're less, less impacted from, you know, the new builds of data centers. I think we're much more impacted by how do we find our way into the existing data centers? And then how do we make sure that the equipment that we're deploying is as power efficient as possible? Because we're often given sort of, here's the envelope that you have to fit your, fit your, your equipment in. And we're often guests of, you know, whoever the local ISP is, or, or, or whoever, you know, partner is that we're working with in, in the, you know, the thousands of buildings that we're in all around the world. What's new with Italy? Yeah, Italy and Spain, like it's, it's, it's.

• 1:48:29John Coogan?

  So you're fighting with Italy, you're fighting with France.

• 1:48:32Matthew Prince?

  Your summer plans are limited, dude. Are limited, yeah, yeah, no, no visa for me or the multi-coast. No, it's, it's, you know, I think it's, it's interesting. It's been actually kind of puzzling for us. So all of this stems back, so for those who don't know, in both Italy and in Spain, there, there've been pretty aggressive tactics to come after either me personally or, or CloudFlare. And it's all been driven largely by the football leagues, the soccer league in those places. And what they're concerned about is, is piracy. The, the thing that's been ironic about it is, like, we don't like piracy on our network either. We don't make any money off of it.

• 1:49:15Matthew Prince?

  It's, it takes bandwidth, it steals resources. And so we have a whole team that's working all the time to shut, shut the pirates down. And, and yet, you know, the pirates are clever. They find ways to, to use our system because, you know, huge percentage of the internet sits behind CloudFlare, you know, there's gonna be stuff from time to time that we don't, we don't capture. It takes us some time to catch. With leagues everywhere else in the world, so the NBA and NFL and, and MLB and, and the Premier League in the, in the UK and others, we work really closely with them to, if they identify a pirate stream for us to, you know, pull that down. Because again, it costs us money. We don't like it. But for whatever reason, La Liga in, in, in, in Spain and, and the, and the league in Italy

• 1:50:00Matthew Prince?

  have, have decided that instead of, instead of partnering with us to take this down, they, they would sue us instead. And so, so again, yes, it, it, it does cramp some of my summer plans.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  I want to talk about IPOs, life as a public company. There's a few entrepreneurs that are trying to go public this year. You had a very successful IPO. The stock is up more than 100,000 basis points since you went public. Fantastic run, but advice for...

• 1:50:30Matthew Prince?

  We're putting everything in basis points now.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Even better. I mean, this talks about 1000%. It's fantastic, but 100,000 basis points sounds even better.

• 1:50:38Matthew Prince?

  110,000 basis points is a lot.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  110,000 basis points. Who's counting? But anyway, what was your process like? We were talking about the level of float lockups. Like, what were the hard decisions? Were there things that we're talking about now with these big IPOs that weren't even on the top 10 of your to-do list? What is important to a successful IPO and then running a public company?

• 1:51:06Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I think, you know, there are a handful of things that are interesting lessons from it. So first of all, like, I love being a public company. It's, you know, I think that it's interesting, you know, that in jurisdictions where, yeah, you don't have no-fault divorce, spousal homicides are much higher, which is, I think, kind of an analogy to the difference between private market investors and public market investors. It's really hard to fire your VCs. It's hard for your VCs to fire you. And so as a result, like, actually, it's kind of dysfunctional. Whereas, public market, like, I love our investors, because if I do

• 1:51:49Matthew Prince?

  something stupid, they call me up and they say, "That was stupid. I sold your stock." And then we have a conversation, and sometimes they say, "Oh, actually, that makes sense now, and I bought it back," right? But I think you can have actually a much more honest, much more real conversation. And that's felt actually just a lot healthier than what you see in the private market.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so, yeah, it's so true. I mean, there's, everybody that's angel invested in any number of meaningful companies is going to have portfolio companies where you've fully given up on the company, and you just try to be, try to be nice and, yeah, help if you can. But at some point, you're just totally disassociated with the investment, and you're just like, and that's, that's, that's a reality. But, yeah, so it's very healthy to be like, "Yep, I'm disassociated, like, moving on."

• 1:52:37Matthew Prince?

  And in both directions, right? I mean, it's just a better, it's a better relationship. And so I like, I loved the process of going public. I think the thing that we did, like, it was, it was an opportunity for us to really kind of retell our story. Like, you don't get to reinvent yourself very often, but the process of writing the S1 was incredibly, just an opportunity to sit down and really do it. And, and we, you know, really dug in and told the story in a way that, to this day, we still refer to parts of that, that document to sort of explain what is CloudFlare and how did we work. I think that the most clever thing that we, that we did, and this was advice that I got from, from Ryan Smith, from Qualtrics,

• 1:53:21Matthew Prince?

  was he said, you know, he's like, what are you doing about friends and family? And I'm like, we're not gonna do it. Because you can take 5% of a IPO and allocate it to friends and family. And I didn't want to get my aunt, like, over, if the, if the stock went down or something, I didn't want to have to explain that over Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving dinner. And he said, no, no, you're thinking about it wrong. Think about the people who, if they, you know, if they owed you a favor, that they could make a meaningful difference in the future of, of CloudFlare, and then offer them to the ability to invest in the IPO. And I was like, is that, like, is that legal? He's like, check with your lawyers, check with the bankers, but the answer is yes. And I was like, some people are gonna have, like, conflicts. He said, it doesn't matter.

• 1:54:03Matthew Prince?

  Like, even it, just the fact you offered it, even if they can't do it, will, will mean that, you know, that, that, that, that they'll, they'll always remember that super fondly. And it was incredibly good advice. And we made this crazy list of all of these, you know, people who, you know, who were like, you know, at some point, that might be an important relationship for us. And like, 75% of them said yes, and, and they all made, you know, a ton of money as a, as a result of it. And it was, it was, it was one of those kind of-

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Now your aunt doesn't talk to you anymore.

• 1:54:38Matthew Prince?

  No, it might, well, yeah, my aunt doesn't.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  So I missed out on 100,000 basis point, basis point move. How could you?

• 1:54:45Matthew Prince?

  I am always comforted that we actually, so we priced it fifteen dollars a share and it went up to, and that's actually the other thing that's interesting. Everyone, like Bill Gurley and I have fights about this from time to time about IPOs. Like you have a lot of control over how much the pop is gonna be and we sat with bankers and we were like, listen, we want it to go up about twenty percent. And, and, and they were like, okay, if you want it to go up twenty percent, you price it right here. So we priced it right at that point and it closed the first day at eighteen, which is exactly up twenty percent.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Okay, but just to steel man a little bit, is that, is that a function of your business? Not to like be rude or anything, but there are some businesses that are just like mean stocks out of the gate and like they're in some weird thing and there's some froth and like they have less control or is it always controllable?

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, and part of that was like, did you think the fair value of your business was eighteen percent or twenty percent higher than where you priced it and so you wanted, like you basically wanted the market to sort of reprice and you didn't care about not?

• 1:55:47Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I mean, and if we had priced it at like thirteen, it would have gone up more.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:52Matthew Prince?

  But, but the problem, again, like you wanna, you wanna play for the long term here. And so again, my fight with Bill is, you know, he says, you know, that you should, you should do, you know, some sort of system where you're, where you actually, you know, price it at whatever the top price is. The problem with that is if you look at all the companies that have done that, so the Airbnbs and, and others that they basically, you know, that's, that's great for your private market investors, that's great for the VCs, that's great for any of the, the founders that are taking money off the table. But you gotta keep running the company. Like the IPO isn't the end. It might be the end for the VCs, but it's not the end for the operators of the company. And you want to be able to kind of build that relationship and build that over time.

• 1:56:36Matthew Prince?

  And so I think, you know, we worked incredibly hard to be very sort of choosy on who are kind of, who we gave allocations to. And we, we went through every single name on the allocation list. And, and I think as a result of doing that, you know, if you look at like who our top ten shareholders are. It's been incredibly stable over time and they're folks who give us, again, great advice and have been really just really, really great to work with. So I'm sure that there are times you don't have it, but I was surprised at how the banks have a really good sense of if you price it here, here's what's going to happen. And in our case, it was to the penny.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Last question. How are you thinking about long-term planning as a CEO when we're on these exponentials? The example of like agent versus human web traffic. You had more data than almost anyone on the planet and your prediction was still off, your original prediction was still off by 18 months, 24 months, something in that range. So how are you thinking about overall business planning when model capability is increasing and you're just seeing sort of exponentials everywhere?

• 1:57:53Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of different things. So one, I think we're trying to make bets on people who can really function in really dynamic environments. And that for us has been somewhat different than I think a lot of other people. A lot of other people have cut back, for example, on kind of early career hiring. We, you know, Clutter's about 5,000 employees, a little bit less than that now, but we hired 1,111 interns this summer, straight out of college. And they're like, they're just killing it because they are so native to these tools.

• 1:58:35Matthew Prince?

  And again, I think we've always thought of our job as training the interns, but this year, like the interns are helping train a lot of us in how to do these things really well. So I think staying super dynamic and then, you know, from our perspective, just making sure that we've got optionality going forward. So, you know, it has gotten tougher to get equipment today. Memory prices are through the roof and things are harder, but we just have a team that's always constantly trying to figure out how to refine that. Generally, I think we're we're trying to be a, you know, big adopters of AI, not just in developer land, but also across the entire the entire business. So we built something called CloudFlower OS, which allows, you know, anyone on our finance team, legal team, you know, accounting team, finance,

• 1:59:20Matthew Prince?

  anyone that's out there at the company to be able to have access to to tools and and and really figure out how how their job gets done. The clever thing that we did to seed it was we actually set this email address. And initially, we told the team that it was this magic AI model. And if they just wrote to the email address and and ask it, you know, I have this part of my job that I need to get done. How do I get that that done? It would, you know, sometimes it would ask some more questions, but it would it would actually give you kind of a response back. What we didn't tell people was actually it was a team of humans behind the scenes that was initially receiving these these emails. And then they were using AI systems to kind of flush things out. But what they were really doing

• 2:00:04Matthew Prince?

  was recording all of the kind of key jobs to be done within the organization. Because, you mean, you have to, if you're going to have AI systems that can help facilitate this, you actually have to record what are the steps that people are doing as as as a part of that. And so as a result of that, we've been able to seed this this CloudFlower OS now with the ability to do things like if you're on the sales team and you have to do like an account plan, you know, you can literally just type slash account plan and then describe what it is that you want to do, and it will output that. And that's made that's made our team so much more productive. And again, I think it's giving us the flexibility to be able to respond to, you know, whatever comes next.

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Final, final question. Are we gonna are we gonna see an exponential increase in the number of interns this summer? We're gonna see 10,000 interns?

• 2:00:52Matthew Prince?

  I don't know. I mean, I I I we've got to find a place to put them all. And so it's, I mean, our office in Austin, like we've it's a big space in Austin. We've run out of space there because we have so many interns there. It's, um, I just I just think that there it's, I think a lot of companies are doing this wrong, where they're saying like, we're not going to bet on. On the new people coming out of school because you know AI is going to replace them. I mean, these kids know how to use AI better than anyone else. So we're going to bet incredibly heavily on that. And it's, and it's so far it's paying off. I mean, these that like, I think the person who eventually replaces me might, might literally be one of the interns to today because they're just so, so, so smart.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  It's happened, it's happened before. I mean, I don't know if Satya Nadella was an intern, but he has that famous video of him as a product manager demoing Excel. And yeah, nothing like a company man.

• 2:01:43Matthew Prince?

  I remember, I mean, I was on a bunch of, of calls with Satya before he was, before he was CEO. And he was, he was just a product manager, you know, at that. So I think just if you can find really great people and, and be able to.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  He's the goat.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  You're the goat as well. Yeah. You know, whenever you put up a hundred thousand basis point move in your stock over just a couple of years, you're in, you're in contention for goat. I, I.

• 2:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure, Matthew.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Always a fantastic time.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for jumping on.

• 2:02:17Matthew Prince?

  Good to see you guys. By the way, I haven't talked to you since the acquisition.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about console.com. Console automates, builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We will be joined by Vinod Khosla.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  And while we.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  In just a few minutes.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  While we wait, MAD's summer vacation is looking good. Let's see what's on the schedule.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  What is on?

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  6am, he's waking up on the wrong side of the bed. 7am, he's split between judging a book by its cover and beating a dead horse. 8am, this is where it gets spicy. He's going to poke the bear.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  He's going to poke the bear.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  And shortly after that, he's skating on thin ice, right into walking on eggshells.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  And at 10am, he decides, all right, it's time to address the elephant in the room.

• 2:03:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  At 11, gets a bit dark. If you're going to cry over spilled milk.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:15Jordi Hays?

  But at noon, he's letting the cat out of the bag.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  And that's where it really ramps up. He's starting at one to bark up the wrong tree. Again, but at the same time, holding his horses.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  He's double booked.

• 2:03:26Jordi Hays?

  But then at 2:00 PM, he's gonna add fuel to the fire.

• 2:03:28John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:03:29Jordi Hays?

  And I can't really think of a more perfect summer day, John.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  You know, you know, there's, you can share your calendar with someone else and you can share it privately. So you can just see that I'm booked, but you don't actually know if I'm having a meeting with someone. Maybe I'm interviewing Vinod Khosla, you won't see that. But you could build a plugin that changes the books to just these things. That would be delightful. Maybe the next Google April Fools.

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Super intelligent.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  I would love.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody just can only see that you're letting the cat out of the bag.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's pretty exciting. It's kind of mysterious.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Okay, don't interrupt him. It's an important meeting. He's letting the cat out of the bag. Uh, but hey, he's just beating a dead horse. Maybe I should go grab coffee with him, see if he wants to spin out on that.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  There's a website.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  This is big.

• 2:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is turning Joe Weisenthal's tweets into full articles.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  This is crazy because there's a, there's a live show that turns his tweets into like minutes of just back and forth.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Banter.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Conversation and banter. Uh, but somebody made a version of our show that's just webpages. So they scrape every Joe Weisenthal tweet and they turn it into a full SEO optimized.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Apparently, uh, it is great and Joe looks great in this photo. He's looking good. He's looking quizzical. He's having fun. Well, uh, let's bring in our next guest, Vinod Khosla, the founder and managing director of Khosla Ventures. Vinod, thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 2:04:55Speaker 06

  I'm doing great. Great to be here.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Fantastic to have you. Uh, I want to kick it off with some of the recent deal making that you've been doing. Your outlook on artificial intelligence is obviously front and center. But what has been the most recent fundraise that you've done? Why did it get you excited?

• 2:05:14Speaker 06

  Well, obviously, there's a lot. It's all on yesterday or today. We are working a lot and doing a lot of new things.

• 2:05:26Speaker 06

  That I'm pretty excited about is a company like Primana. But more importantly, the broad category of auto-formalization, which isn't talked about much. But humans aren't very good at talking to AI in driving what they precisely want. And that's where auto-formalization becomes important. And companies like Primana become very important.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  How did you get into auto-formalization? And I guess the big meta question is, as an investor, you have to consider, is auto-formalization on the direct path for the other labs? How do you think about competition in this area? Investors are going back and forth, and it's been fascinating to see things that appear to be directly in the path of the big labs. They're still growing revenues, two, three, four billion dollars. We're seeing sixty billion dollar acquisitions. Everything seems to be going well up and down the stack, but why is there any? Why is there a particularly big opportunity right now?

• 2:06:34Speaker 06

  Well, the labs, they will do more and more over time. But I still see the opportunity at being very broad for venture capital in part notes.

• 2:06:48Speaker 06

  In part notes are coming up with great ideas. Primana, for example, looks at the tactile and says, it's not very precise because it's written by humans. You can make it into a machine checkable language. Mathematicians turn all their problems in this specific language. It is hard for humans to understand, leading. Auto-formalization allows that kind of formalization so computers can operate on it precisely, not probabilistically. And that's a really important thing. If you look at today's world, AI systems have been awesome and the rate of capability development

• 2:07:31Speaker 06

  is awesome. But they have some pretty big gaping holes. They still hallucinate. I don't think hallucination is going away anytime soon.

• 2:07:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Speaker 06

  So the reliability is low. Humans aren't great at specifying what they want, the specification problem.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:49Speaker 06

  And then verification of what are you getting the right answers? Or are they hallucinating? Those are all large, interesting problems which are open for untobought. Things can be built in certain domains.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:08:06Speaker 06

  Uh, where you build a lot of value and a lot of capability that the general models don't do.

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about applications of this technology in particular? Uh, it's been so hard to predict, uh, the original GPT. No one was really expecting a knowledge retrieval service. It just sort of went viral when ChatGPT launched, then coding agents. Uh, some people had predicted those, but it was sort of an unexpected emergent capability. Do you expect that auto-formalization as the next critical frontier of AI just makes all the existing applications better? Or is it actually going to unlock new applications?

• 2:08:52Speaker 06

  I think it will allow humans to use AI where it wasn't previously possible.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:08:59Speaker 06

  If you want to know what your bank account is, you can't have hallucination.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:05Speaker 06

  Um, if you have a medical problem, you can't have hallucination. So auto-formalization will significantly enhance existing models in domains like tax law. You know, you can have lots of tax startups, but they can't formalize. You take tax law, it's a very specific thing. And that's an area Pramana is, uh, initially to say, can you formalize the tax code so computers can work on it precisely?

• 2:09:41Speaker 06

  And not be subject to probabilistic answers or likely answers. So it's very, very important in certain domains to have precision, reliability, verification. And that's where auto-formalization can significantly enhance the applications and still leverage all the power of L L apps.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Well, we're excited to talk to the founder of Primana in just a minute. We've been having a few technical errors, so we will end this here and hopefully we can have you back on the show soon to go deeper. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today, Vinod. It's been a pleasure.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for jumping on. It's an honor.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to be here.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunate technical difficulties. I couldn't really hear anything personally, but fortunately the founder.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  He's coming on.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Discussing.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  In just a few minutes.

• 2:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Right now. So we're going to hear it.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  So we're going to bring it in.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Again and again, sorry about that.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Nikesh Arora is on the timeline, quote tweeting, I like that he's, you don't think of him as like a big poster, obviously 73,000 followers.

• 2:11:03Jordi Hays?

  I think of him as a poster.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  He's successful, but he said, congratulating Prime Minister Narendra Modi on becoming India's longest-serving elected prime minister for 1,399 days of leadership, earned the trust, earned through the trust of 1.4 billion people across three democratic mandates, from lifting 250 million people out of poverty to making India the world's fastest-growing major economy. PM Modi's tenure has been nothing short of transformational. Look forward to a continued US-India partnership. Love that. Yogesh says, bro went from stopping global ransomware attacks at Palo Alto Networks to doing math calculations on PM Modi's calendar milestones like it's his final exam.

• 2:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Just in quotes too.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  And Nick Cash appreciates it.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  Uh, there's been debate over beverage media. Have you seen this? This is a very, I saw this eight likes, but I think this is an interesting post worth discussing. So Vasa, I don't know exactly this account before, but beverage media doesn't have the good nuts to call out celebrity brands objectively because the economy is fanboy, of fanboying and CPG. Celebrity founders sell tickets to events, but they don't always move the industry forward. I think he's probably subtly subtweeting the, maybe Tom Brady launch of the, of the, the, the nuts, which is a reference to the coconut water brand that's, uh, Tom Brady launched. But this does happen all the time. There's a lot of celebrity brands. We've had some celebrities on the show to talk about their brands. It's fun. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  That's the fun part about interviewing a celebrity about their brand. You kind of get to clock it and be like, nah, like, uh, you know, this person's really on to something.

• 2:12:40Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think why they, they named the brand that is they ran, fully ran out of other names. So that was literally their last possible name that they could choose.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  We're not getting any, uh, Tom Brady will not be coming to our, to our event and selling tickets. Um, but it's interesting because yeah, BevNet, uh, reports on, uh, CPG brands. They're, they're one of the insider media, sort of the tech crunch of CPG, at least in beverages. They also have Nosh for food and there's a number of other CPG media and, and critics. But, uh, if you gotta have one of those celebrity founders at your event to sell tickets, uh, you get into this weird, you get, uh, sort of audience captured. I don't know celeb captured, you just get raptured in the, in the aura of the celebrities and you have to stay out till 2am parting, partying with them. It's craziness out there. Uh, but beverage media, uh, I think it's a, it, it, it's just interesting in the backdrop

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  of more, more of a, more and more celebrity brands, although it does feel like we're at peak celebrity brand at this point. And I feel like the more modern celebrity strategy is just invest in companies that have a number of good VCs on the cap table. Be happy with that. You can still.

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Aura farm. Yeah, okay, disagree. Explain.

• 2:13:53Jordi Hays?

  I think celebrity, celebrity brands have always been a thing. They're just way more in your face because now celebrities have their own channels that they can communicate.

• 2:14:00John Coogan?

  I'd say they're less in my face. I, I say we're on the decline. We've reached top celebrity brand.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  I'm quoting John Feeney.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's just getting, it's getting easier and easier to start a business. I think you'll see more celebrity brands. I don't necessarily think you'll see more breakout brands.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So your claim is, is quantity is increasing.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  I think it's probably getting harder.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Quality is decreasing.

• 2:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Quality.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  More distribution.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Greater, greater, I mean, there's going to be some breakout celebrity brands.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:27Jordi Hays?

  There's going to be big exits.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's going to be as many failures as ever, right? I mean, my favorite example was like Travis Scott a few years ago, launched a, uh, RTD like canned cocktail thing, uh, shut down, I think within like a year, like, uh, maybe, maybe, maybe more. And so I, I think you're just going to see more and more and more.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Would you put the Johnny Knoxville Neo cloud in the, in a bucket of celebrity brands?

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  That is something I would like to see. Less.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Less beverage.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  2K.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Less beverage, more Neo clouds.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  More Neo.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  I want to see Johnny Knoxville levered up.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Right? I want to see.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Backing GPUs himself.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  I want him like operationally involved too. Not just like.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Not just a pretty face.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Endorsement. Yeah.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Not just a pretty face. Um, so anyways, I think more on the horizon. Uh, and it's not necessar, you know, a lot of, I, I don't know. I feel like some people don't, don't like this, but I think it's fine.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  It's fine.

• 2:15:31Jordi Hays?

  It's fine.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  You heard it here first. Jordy Hayes. It's fine. No one else is fine.

• 2:15:36Jordi Hays?

  Get used to it.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  The New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  More than fine.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest might be there soon with Primana Labs. We have Ron John, who's the co-founder in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TDP and Ultra Dump. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:15:53Speaker 10

  Doing great, John. Jordy. Uh.

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Since it is your first time on the show, please introduce the company. We heard a little bit about it from Vinod, but I want to hear it from you.

• 2:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bravo, by the way, of getting, being able to get Vinod to just like personally pitch your company for 15 minutes on, on internet television. It's a, it's a good, uh, it's a good sales, sales hack.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  Good pitch.

• 2:16:16Speaker 10

  Thank you, thank you so much. At Pramana, we try to make AI more provably accurate.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:24Speaker 10

  The current frontier of AI focuses on recall, which is more along the lines of how do you make more answers come out?

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:33Speaker 10

  But we are trying to focus on very specific mission-critical domains like tax, legal, healthcare and governance, where a wrong answer could be catastrophic.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:42Speaker 10

  You wouldn't want AI diagnosing you wrong and ending up in a catastrophic situation. So that's where we focus on. And the technology underneath it is formal verification.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Speaker 10

  I'd like you guys to dive a little bit deeper and I can get more technical as it be.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I I'm just wondering about the actual like rollout of this. Like, people are using AI tools for healthcare now. They've been using WebMD. People have been misdiagnosed with cancer for by random internet posts for like decades. You go to WebMD, you're like, I have a headache. And it's like, you got brain cancer. And then you freak out, go to the doctor. And they're like, what are you talking about? Take an Advil. But so like, who exactly is is not adopting AI right now because of the hallucination problem?

• 2:17:31Speaker 10

  One, two major examples currently are like big four firms which are tackling tax and legal cases. You would have heard about the Australian government suing one of the big fours, stating that there is a hallucination which ended up happening. And AI can actually make a loss on the flight.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:50Speaker 10

  If it wants to suit a particular situation, it can make a loss on the flight, which can lead to catastrophic situations. And another thing which we have noticed is also that insurance providers, major insurance providers of US have also moved away from insuring AI outputs. So there is a very specific class they have introduced to say that we will not insure if AI is behind whatever you have said. So those are some things which have come out specific to domains like tax, legal and healthcare. For healthcare, we can even see the models themselves typically stating that you need to go to a doctor to verify. We will, we will be absolved of the responsibility.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much?

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, imagine your CPA being like, great, I just, I just finished your, your return. It's ninety-nine percent chance it's accurate.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  I mean,

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  There's 99% chance.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  The steel man here is like, that is how I feel about my lawyer. And like, I love, I love the people I work with, but like, humans do hallucinate. And so if you give me something that's, doesn't even need to be superhuman, something that's gonna just sit alongside that person, I'm pretty happy to buy, but I understand that I would buy more if I could be more sure. And so I understand that. What I'm, what I'm confused about is like, uh, how are you thinking about building new foundation model, new LLM, new AI technology that, that bakes formalization into the actual workflow versus like, you know, we were talking to Dr. Carb from Palantir last week about, you know, the idea of like,

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  you've built this ontology, you have your ground truth, you have your system of record, and then you can have the LLM hallucinate all over the place, because at a certain point, they're going to run into the ontology, and that's going to be the formal, the formalization process. Like, is there something, i- i- is it, is an extension of that two systems running side by side, checking each other? Or is it more of an entirely new system?

• 2:19:50Speaker 10

  Uh, so it would be a couple of systems, uh, interlocking with each other.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:19:54Speaker 10

  Uh, we actually have four layers in the stack. I can go through an example of how it happens. If you end up asking whether a particular transaction is taxable in a Illinois.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:06Speaker 10

  You have, uh, the first thing which we do is actually a fair bit offline. For tax specifically, we are formalizing the US tax code.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:14Speaker 10

  So we are taking a very formal domain, but expressed in English today, and we are converting that into lean, which is a true English. So when we, so, uh, when we do that, we get it ratified by experts. So our work is deeply involved in formalizing specified domains, and ensuring that we get it ratified by the experts themselves too.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:36Speaker 10

  In that place, we u- we do use a lot of LLMs, because the current knowledge base is already not formalized.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:42Speaker 10

  It is present in English. And, uh, once we have the whole knowledge base. Whenever a question pops up, we convert it into a series of constraints.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:50Speaker 10

  You would have noticed Vinod also talking about how humans are not great at specifications. So we ensure that we ask the right set of questions so that ultimately we can give you a reliable answer. Post that, we have a solver and prover working in tandem to ultimately give you an answer along with a proof of correctness.

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:08Speaker 10

  So the key difference between an ontology-based approach and a lean-based approach is that a lean-based approach is intrinsically verifiable. Your answer comes with a proof of correctness. The proof is something which a mathematician trusts.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:22Speaker 10

  That's supposed to give you more comfort in a way. And like you suggested, you're right in saying that even like best humans might make mistakes.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:33Speaker 10

  Uh, but if you actually have a mathematical proof encoded in lean, you can choose to trust. And that's the frontier which we are aiming for. And it involves like fair bit of work between formal verification experts who are a deep part of who we are at Pramana Labs.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:21:49Speaker 10

  Working along with CPAs, frontier CPAs, frontier lawyers and frontier doctors.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how, are, are, are models getting better at interacting with lean? I've seen a lot of progress in frontier math and the, the different really hard problems are getting solved. Sometimes they don't use lean and that's sort of a, a flex. Sometimes they do use lean and they perform even better then. Uh, but is that getting just table stakes now? Because I think, uh, your average white collar worker doesn't know how to interact with lean.

• 2:22:24Speaker 10

  Absolutely. Uh, so the models are getting better at proving with lean.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:29Speaker 10

  Uh, but we are building more foundation models along the lines of formalization in the first place. If you say something in English, how do you convert that into a construct in lean? That's where our focus is on.

• 2:22:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:40Speaker 10

  Uh, if you think about it, lean is a system which has been around for the last 12 years.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:44Speaker 10

  It has taken humanity around nine years to formalize a significant portion of math.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:49Speaker 10

  We are taking that same technology and we are, we are trying to blitz through tax, legal and healthcare.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:22:55Speaker 10

  Where we are identifying what is the core knowledge base and then we are converting it into lean. Uh, where you can reason on top of it provably.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 2:23:08Speaker 10

  Uh, I was a machine learning engineer at Google, primarily focusing on Google Maps. Interestingly, I dropped parallels over there because I was focusing on getting addresses and phone numbers accurately in Google Maps.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:20Speaker 10

  If you think about it, Google Maps is like a very, very messy, real world domain.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:23:25Speaker 10

  Uh, and we have been able to make it trustable. A lot of people do trust uh, Google Maps to a very large extent.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Speaker 10

  I intend to bring the same level of rigor to multiple other domains all along the business.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:23:42Speaker 10

  Thank you so much. Yeah.

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful work for, workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 2:23:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that's right.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  So, there's a bitter feud going on.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  There was a, there was a good uh, comment over on the X chat.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Steve, he said, we're on the topic of celebrity brands. He said, flip it on its head, Jordy. Brands by average Joes, like a painter or the owner of a lawn care company instead of celebrities. I think there could actually be something here. I think he's joking, but imagine as a brand, you're trying to differentiate. You hire an actor.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  That's just playing the role of an average Joe.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey, this is average Joe electrolytes, right? I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not a professional athlete. I'm just a normal guy.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm just painting houses, right?

• 2:24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Just painting houses. I get a little dehydrated. I take my average Joe electrolyte. It's relatable.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  I like it. I like it.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  The average Joe.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  I do.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Brand meta. Steve is calling it.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  I, I enjoy it as an idea. I enjoy it as a joke. I do think that there is a version of this, which is if you walk through an Arowan or Whole Foods and you pick up random CPG products and you look on the back, there's often what's called like the love language or whatever. So it's like a couple paragraphs of text. Uh, good example is uh, is it Dots pretzels or there's some sort of like pretzel twist that's very popular right now. It's a little spicy. It has the the name of the founder and it and it tells the story of like an average Joe. The Buzz Ball, for example, that is an average Joe brand. It was not a celebrity brand.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Explain.

• 2:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Nothing average about that founder. One of the most elite entrepreneurs.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  After she started the company.

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna make the case that she was always elite.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Always.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  The buzz, the buzz ball woke it up.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, but there are a lot of brands.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  That their whole origin story is like, I was just a normal person. I had a problem for myself. I was going for, you know, olive oil and I smashed the bottle. So I made a squeezy bottle. Like, there's all these stories that aren't celebrity brands, at least at the start. And they have, you know, rags to riches stories that are told sort of quietly on the back of the packaging. And then slowly over time, eventually Unilever buys the company and takes that off.

• 2:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just like thinking of it as like a from the marketing lens, a brand that is like, doesn't have this like heartwarming story.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, yeah, we just hired a guy to be like, yeah.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Just be the guy. Just be the average Joe. Just be an elite snowboarder like Nima. Starts Salt and Stone, you know? He wasn't a celebrity before, although he was a fantastic snowboarder.

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our next guest, Markie, let's put, pull up this video. Somebody put up fake tech ads. What's going on here?

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  Hmm, I don't, I love ads, but I hate fraud. So I don't know how to feel about this. This is gonna be peculiar.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't think there's anything wrong here.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  With fake tech ads? That's real ad space. That could have been sold, Jordy. You're destroying shareholder value by running fake ads. We would never do that. We did do that early in the days. If you go back through the archive, Dr. Squatch had that feel. Oh, Vince Vaughn. Vince Vaughn running a.

• 2:27:17Jordi Hays?

  We have the video here.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I know exactly where they're going with this. We put the Q and Q on 1777. This is hilarious. What if Texas is upside down?

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is actually how, this is how, actually how normal people view.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  What if the Rizler was purple? Wireflow.

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  You pay it.

• 2:27:46John Coogan?

  We pay you. You pay us, we pay you. Wireflow. Wow. What does this say?

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Dennis can tell you.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Dennis can tell you.

• 2:27:59Jordi Hays?

  I like Ziplink is now.

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  They put up a lot of these. Wow. They really went hard. Who is behind this? This has to be a tech insider or someone making.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Ziplink is now Fable. The cloud-based online safety you know and love now in the palm of your hand.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  They put up so many of these. This is such a great stunt. Is this a, if this is a, if this is a launching campaign, a launch campaign for a tech brand marketing firm, it's genius. And whoever's behind this should actually be calling every tech company and saying.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  What if.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  You want your ads to not look like these? We know how to make good ads.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  What if forks for spoons?

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  What if forks for spoons?

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Go to cutlery.ai.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  Lots of people have been asking that question recently. Anyway, very fun. Uh, let me tell you about Cisco.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Markie Wagner from Poetic. He's the founder and CEO.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Future Hall of Famer.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  He's a prolific mafia player. What's your favorite role in mafia?

• 2:29:04Speaker 11

  Ooh mafia, I think, who doesn't love to be fascist in mafia? I, you know, you always kind of hope you're getting the fascist card, but uh.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  It's the fascist mafia. I thought it was just mafia towns person.

• 2:29:15Speaker 11

  Oh, sorry. I'm the secret Hitler.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  Oh, you're the secret Hitler.

• 2:29:18Speaker 11

  Yes, yes. Um, uh, yeah, I mean mafia.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  Is that mafia?

• 2:29:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, every single time.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  It's always power. It's, it's less empowering to be the towns person because you feel like you're just getting killed. You have no superpowers, but running angel or sheriff, that can be fun. But then if you get killed off early, it's the end. I'm just thinking about it because the, the latest episode of mafia, episode two from Founder's Fund dropped and you're backed by Founder's Fund. But since this is your first time on the show, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us how you wound up in a position to raise money from Founder's Fund.

• 2:29:50Speaker 11

  Cool. Yeah. So I'm the CEO of and wait, okay. Yes, I'm the CEO and founder of Poetic.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:57Speaker 11

  And Poetic's an AI system that will learn and execute super complicated processes in some of the biggest companies in the world at over 99% accuracy, which is, which is quite hard.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  So what is the process for obtaining and documenting the workflow? This feels like you could do something very database driven. You could build an ontology, you could just wait and maybe the models get better and stop hallucinating. There's been debates over the various approaches, like what, what did you pick and why?

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we, before we get into that, like, talk more about the kinds of workflows where like, you know, we, we caught up a few weeks ago and you were saying like some of the customers that you're talking to, even if, even if somebody came through and they were like, our AI system is 98.5% accurate. That that would actually create, you know, hundreds or thousands of hours of like issues in an organization. And it would actually like rolling that kind of system out would have sort of like negative enterprise value.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  That's just a pitch problem. If you're pitching a software like that, you just got to tell someone, our system has 9,000 basis points of accuracy.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  This is the goal.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Put it in basis points.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Put it in basis points.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, talk, talk more about the problem before we talk about the solution.

• 2:31:18Speaker 11

  Yeah. So I think the problem is, you know, one of the things you've seen is, you know, obviously AI is incredible at writing code. And it has really crushed that, but you know, a lot of the main processes that are at the heart of these giant businesses have remained pretty untouched by AI. And the reason why is that the rules that govern them, you know, the 10,000 secret rules, they live in people's heads. Right? And these rules need to be followed every single time. You know, we work on things like anti-money laundering and underwriting and fraud investigations where every single step matters. And to actually get from where we are now to those running on machines, you need two things. One is a system that can learn the process, not the hundred pages of written down stuff,

• 2:32:03Speaker 11

  but the 10,000 secret rules that live in people's heads that they've never written down before. So that's part one. And then you have to be able to run them with many nines of accuracy. Not, you know, I was talking with one CEO, he's like, you know, 80% on an eval is great, but in underwriting, it's unusable. And I think that's the you for a lot of these processes that are at the heart of these like really big and old businesses. So you gotta do two things. You got a system that can learn all the rules and then run them with nines. And if you have that, you can get from where we are now to this version of the future that I think everybody's really excited about, but you need to build that bridge.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  Not everyone's excited about it. AI has very low approval rate, but tech leaders are certainly excited about it. But so why have you started with such big companies? Like, I feel like you've been, you've been, you know, at the heart of the startup ecosystem for so long. If you came on here and said, oh, we have so many, you know, my friends' companies on board. These are the named customers, SoFi, Chime, AIG, like, these are large institutions at this point. Why, why start at the top? Feels harder.

• 2:33:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think our view was, when you're, when you're building something like this, if you build something that's less powerful, it's hard to sometimes make it more powerful. Like a lot of these drag and drop tools, they were simpler, they were easier, they could do simpler things faster, but they just couldn't handle super complex things. And so you kind of get kneecapped in terms of what you can represent and build. And the view was, hey, AI is going to be doing a lot of this, like, writing of the software. You'd be in a better place optimizing for the power of the thing. Can it express and run these five hour processes that require those nines? And then everything else becomes really easy, actually. And I don't think that people are going to be having a platform for the easy stuff and the hard stuff.

• 2:33:58Speaker 11

  I think they're just going to be running all of their processes in one spot.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  I mean, you mentioned like, tens of thousands of hours of information stuck in people's heads. Like, what is data collection? What does data collection look like? Conversations? Like, it feels like, yeah, like, is it the McKinsey model? Or is it the, you know, self-serve software model? Like, where do you want to sit?

• 2:34:22Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is it's evolved over time, but the place that it has ended up going is looking closer to data labeling. So what happens is a big company will say, here's my biggest process, there's a hundred pages of documentation. And you know that that's only 20% of it. So the question's like, how do you get that other 80? Well, what we'll do is we'll take that operating procedure, we'll generate the AI operating procedure, it's written in step by step English. What our system does is turn that into code into the hood and you run it. And when you run it and you put it in front of those experts, they have a ton of opinions, they have a lot of feedback to say, you know, you forgot that the threshold is actually a million, not 10,000, right? All these little things, which get merged back into that document. And you're sort of doing that more and more automatically, um, so that it looks almost like

• 2:35:05Speaker 11

  training a program or something like that, um, rather than sort of, uh, like long calls or, or, uh, you know, process mining and like the, the normal sense. And so more and more, it looks like people giving feedback into the system directly. And that updates the rules that are written in it.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  And so you're using AI models to generate that code that is then deterministic, which gets you the reliability that these companies need, correct?

• 2:35:29Speaker 11

  Yep. Yep, exactly. So the, you know, the source of truth is that AI operating procedure, it's English. But what are some of those turn into code? So when it runs, if the, if the world's the same as yesterday, it's just going to run this code. Great. Nothing to see here. But if something changes, like the column name changes from month to months, or the save button moves, only then will AI go in, repair it, look at what the English goal was, and then update it. Um, and so if you do that, you can get the best of, hey, it's code, it's precise when it runs. But if something changes, instead of breaking, it will actually just kick back and recover. And that's important because a lot of this work, code couldn't do alone, and agents couldn't do alone.

• 2:36:11Speaker 11

  So code is very static, right? It's like very brittle. So even one small date change or something could break the whole thing. And so that's one side of it. Agents, on the other hand, are pretty improvisational and they think step by step. And, you know, when you're figuring out what to do as you go, eventually you're going to make a mistake. This is something that's kind of in the middle where it's code of things the same, AI is there to test, heal, recover if things are different. And that's how you can kind of get those nines.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  So are you hiring forward deployed engineers? Like, what is the role of engineering in your organization at this point?

• 2:36:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we do, we hire tons of forward deployed engineers from all the best spots. Um, you know, whether it's a place like Palantir or, you know, even like retool or scale and all these other sort of new places that have had their own versions of forward deployed. Um, and yeah, I think it's interesting. It it is over time looked less like extremely just only focusing on engineering, like hard engineering. It requires being able to change how people operate, right?

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:11Speaker 11

  And I can write the best code now, but even if you have the most incredible piece of software, you still have to change how the business organizes around it. And so the people who understand like business and can think about, hey, like, what is the best possible fraud process going to look like? And, you know, what, how should we reorganize the business around this new kind of thing?

• 2:37:30John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:31Speaker 11

  And they understand AI are the ones that are just like totally crushing it.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that feels like an entirely new skill set, like much more people driven, but also like

• 2:37:38Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  forward thinking in technology. I don't know.

• 2:37:41Speaker 11

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a, it's an interesting new.

• 2:37:43Jordi Hays?

  How has enterprise sentiment around just AI changed during the course of building the company? Right? Because like every, you know, it is, I would say it's a roller coaster. In some ways, it's like going up.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Up into the right, right? There's generally more excitement about the potential, but at the same time, there's these sort of like period troughs of, uh, of disillusionment. Uh, and you guys are coming out out of stealth at a time when, again, I think companies are more excited than ever, but at the same time, sort of like understand the overall shortcomings. And and we had, uh, Karp on the show, uh, last week. And, you know, he was just saying like, a lot of these deploy codes coming in, they're just trying to like, they're, they're, they're trying to deploy, their, their goal is to deploy AI, but they don't fully understand all of this like business process under, under the hood. Uh, and he makes some good points.

• 2:38:41Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think sentiment has evolved quite a bit. Um, you know, I think it was extremely excited earlier in the year. And then, you know, around the board meeting times, more and more CEOs would come to me and say, hey, like, you know, how do I get ROI here? Um, and, uh, and this is what your other customers are seeing, um, uh, in these domains. And so I think now people have realized, like, you cannot just throw an agent at a problem and expect, uh, to see the result that you want, right? Um, for an agent to do a useful bit of work, it needs to learn how to do that work and run it like quite accurately. Um, and that knowledge transfer between how's the work done today? And getting it written down enough to where AI can run it. Um, it's just hard. Um, and it requires,

• 2:39:27Speaker 11

  you know, we sort of jokingly call it the great migration internally. Like you have to go and migrate these like tremendous amounts of rules into something that AI can touch and improve and evolve. Um, and if AI can't touch it, it's not going to be able to help it. Um, and so, you know, I think deployment is really important because in, yeah, until that transition happens, it's going to be hard to just throw tokens to, to see better outcomes.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Uh, give us some backstory on what you were doing before, how you wound up here.

• 2:39:56Speaker 11

  Yeah. So, uh, I got my start. I got extremely into AI in middle school after reading too much sci-fi, you know? A lot of Dune, a lot of, a lot of Dune, mainly Dune.

• 2:40:07John Coogan?

  Is that the message in Dune? I thought Dune was the, but, but Larry, but Larry and Jahan, right? I guess, yeah.

• 2:40:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, it just felt like it was going to be really important during my life. Um, you know, and, you know, you read and you watch sci-fi, you know, the biggest difference between the future and today, it's like mostly machines thinking. Like that is sort of the main AD sort of BC moment. Um,

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  In like hard sci-fi, in soft sci-fi, it's like time travel and faster than light speed and like aliens, but I take it. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Moon is made of cheese.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  That's the type of sci-fi I'm trying to read. That's the white pill. Uh, so then, uh, walk me through the consulting work that you did and how this like evolved out of that. Was there like a clear moment where you're like, I'm stopping that and starting a company? Or is this an evolution or a, a change of structure?

• 2:41:01Speaker 11

  Yeah. So I was initially got my start in research. So I was, I was at Stanford working in AI like Waymo and, you know, Google. Um, and then, you know, one day I sort of realized that. You know, all the things I built like, you know, didn't, didn't matter too much. Um, and that was Friday and I ended up dropping out on Monday. Um, and the idea was like, hey, you know, we've had software for decades. What are people still doing and, and why? And I felt like I didn't really understand anything about how the world works. So to your point, started consulting and the idea was like, let's just go into some of the oldest companies around and understand like what his software is still not touched and, and what happened there. Um, and when you do that, uh, and you start doing some of the work yourself and like going into, you know, I went to North Carolina, you know, you're watching people who've done this stuff for like decades.

• 2:41:46Speaker 11

  Um, you realize that a huge amount of the work is really just operating procedures, documents. And people are just following them. And that this class of work everywhere and, you know, whether it's underwriting and claims and insurance or onboarding customers and fraud and banks. It's just still sort of done by, by people and software hasn't been able to go there. The reason why is because the second you write all this code to do that process, something will change, right? A button will move, a column will change. Um, or maybe even the, the process changes. You want yearly instead of monthly transactions. Um, and when you, you know, automate and see that happen enough, you, you realize like, hey, there's a missing kind of material here that can flex, but still have guarantees. And I really just waited for the models to get better. Um, I knew some of the researchers and said, hey,

• 2:42:31Speaker 11

  the models of today are not it. Uh, please let me know when they get good enough to do this stuff. And I truly just waited.

• 2:42:39John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, uh, congratulations on the round. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

• 2:42:44Speaker 11

  Oh yeah. So you raised $50 million.

• 2:42:49John Coogan?

  Congratulations and thank you so much.

• 2:42:51Jordi Hays?

  Who besides FF is in?

• 2:42:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, Kleiner Perkins, First Harmonic, uh, Genius Ventures. All, all participated in the round.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Round of applause for Genius. Very good, Ben and Adam.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  It's great news. Well, have a great rest of your day.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  So great to have you on the show. Congratulations on coming out into, uh, into the world. And, uh, I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Mark.

• 2:43:17Speaker 11

  Thank you. Appreciate it, y'all.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  Um, let's see, can the AI, we gotta talk about the dog, the dog walker and the dentist, the bitter feud between a dog walker and a dentist over who owns the beach. A lakefront owner likened his neighbor's shoreline walks to a home invasion and a dispute that could be headed for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Who you got, Jordy? Knowing nothing about this story, are you going dentist or dog walker?

• 2:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Pure vibes.

• 2:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Pure vibes?

• 2:43:56John Coogan?

  Flip a coin, which one you got?

• 2:43:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  Who you got? You don't know? It's your job to know.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Is the dentist a day trader?

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  See, it's your job to pick someone wildly and then defend it throughout this article. A recent trial in Shorewood, Wisconsin had all the trappings of a minor legal dispute at disgruntled neighbor, a defendant representing himself who called his own father as a character witness. You love that. Hey dad, tell him I'm a good person. A hundred and thirty, a hundred, uh, three hundred and thirteen dollars were at stake. Three hundred and thirteen dollars. That's thirty one thousand three hundred cents, if you're paying attention. If it, uh, but an if academic and devoted dog walker Paul Florsheim gets his way, the case will go all the way up to the Supreme Court, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, that is, and reshape the contours of shoreline access to one of the Great Lakes. It started when

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  Florsheim started walking his two dogs past the Lake Michigan property of dentist Daniel Domagala, locally known for the time he spends in a tiki-style boathouse and deck that doubles as a surveillance post. From there, Domagala monitors traffic and sets off alarms to scare walkers, swimmers, and kayakers away. He's got an air horn. He's got an air horn. He sets it off when somebody comes by. It's crazy. Florsheim repeatedly ignored signs outside of the dentist's house that said private property behind the sign, only water access behind this, beyond this point. Domagala kept calling the cops and the village eventually issued a trespassing citation rather than pay the fine and walk away. Florsheim dug

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  in. At stake is what right people in Wisconsin have to take a shoreline stroll. It's high stakes stuff, and we'll be following this case closely, of course.

• 2:45:37Jordi Hays?

  One of the most important stories in technology.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  But more importantly, we have Bret Taylor from Sierra here in the waiting room. Welcome to the show, Bret. How you doing?

• 2:45:46Speaker 12

  Doing great. How are you?

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  You're going dentist or dog walker? We won't make you take a side. That's a tough question.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  That's a tough question.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  We're gonna ask you the real tough questions. How's business going?

• 2:45:57Speaker 12

  Business is great. We just crossed 200 million in ARR. We were

• 2:46:06Speaker 12

  hoping to get a gong out of that.

• 2:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Revenue gongs are always the best gong.

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Fundraising is easy.

• 2:46:14Speaker 12

  Yeah. And today we announced we're certified FedRAMP pie, which really simply put means now federal government agencies have access to Sierra, which I think is really exciting. If you look at, you know, the conundrum of the federal government, it's like we want greater services for our citizens, but we have a really big national debt. I think AI is going to be a huge benefit to, you know, programs, whether it's, you know, getting a passport or Medicare. So this is the first sort of the door opening so we can serve these agencies, which I'm really excited about.

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  Interesting. I don't think of, like, you're breaking my brain, because I don't think of, like, getting a driver's license to the DMV as like a customer service interaction. But is that where we're going, where more and more of these, like, reform-based, request-based, back and forth?

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Like an address change on like an ID, like something like, you know, if the DMV had super intelligence. Yeah, there's a lot of these.

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, walk me through the fed size.

• 2:47:14Speaker 12

  If you think about all these government services, you've got Medicare, you've got Medicaid, you've got the Department of Veterans Affairs, you've got, you know, immigration, like, you know, the passport agency, all of them run large call centers, but more importantly, people depend on them. You know, people depend on them. You have, you know, someone on Medicare, you have a vet who depends on Department of Veterans Affairs for their healthcare. It's a really big, both payer provider, if you look at, you know, what we do for, you know, folks like Cigna and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and you squint, well, it's almost that entire stack in a federal agency. And, you know, for good reason, there's just a very high bar for cloud technologies when you're serving the federal government. And this is the main certification that kind of opens the door there. We're already working

• 2:47:57Speaker 12

  with a few agencies, none that I can fortunately talk about today. We've worked with FINRA, the regulator. So we've always been really passionate about, we want the best technology to be available even in regulated industries. And so it's a big step for us. We're really excited about it, I hope. Hope we can contribute to the quality of life as US citizens, you know, and do so in a way that's a lot more cost effective.

• 2:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, um, I'm, I, it's interesting, like, would you, would you, i- i- is the, is the biggest low, low hanging fruit just taking some of these agencies and making them available 24/7? I feel like one of the most frustrating things that I run into is like, call from nine to five, and I'm like, I have a job.

• 2:48:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, the other, the other thing is, yeah, the ticket, like, uh, uh, the difference between interacting with like a public utility versus like a waste management, right? Like waste manag-, like waste management, right? Like, you know, maybe it's not perfect, but like, it's pretty fast, like, you can get stuff done, like, it's efficient, and then like, the, trying to do the same exact thing with like a public utility, you know, usually, you, I, I, I always personally estimate, like, okay, if it would take me like, you know, 10 minutes with waste management, it'll take me like 30 minutes with a public utility. And so like, bringing, bringing that, there's, there's no reason that those two things can't be at parity, but it is entirely, it is almost entirely a, a technology and like process

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  problem, right?

• 2:49:22Speaker 12

  A hundred percent, and there's a couple of factors, I think, go into why it's so hard to have great experience with some of these government programs. You know, first, a lot of people do need to call things on the phone, and it's only been the past couple of years that we could digitize a phone call with AI agents. So, we've essentially digitized the last remaining analog channel, and everything you said is true, it could be 24/7, as importantly, it could be multilingual. If you imagine staffing up a big call center and you want to represent all the languages in this country, from Spanish, Mandarin to Gaelic, you know, like, go down the list, really, really expensive to do, now you can do it at scale, each new language, the marginal cost is effectively zero. And then the other part of it is, for good reason, as I said, there's just a really high compliance bar for technologies to be available, and as a consequence,

• 2:50:08Speaker 12

  If you look at what Waste Management or just pick any private company, they can go off and get the best of breed solution for any given technology problem they have. That is not something all federal agencies can do. And so what I'm really proud of is that Sierra is the best of breed solution in customer experience. We power everyone from Singtel to Rocket Mortgage on our platform. And now, because we have this certification, federal agencies have access to the best of breed solution in this space as well. And so I'm really hopeful. I think AI, if you look at some of the parts of the economy, the governments, both state and federal, the healthcare industry, which has gotten progressively less productive over the past decade, it's one of the few parts of the economy that has.

• 2:50:49Speaker 12

  I think AI is incredibly important because these are the parts of the economy that need productivity. We actually want to have great service as citizens and reduce our spending. AI is the answer. So we're really passionate about it. We're patriots here and we love our technology. And so I'm just excited that we can apply it in a great way.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  Talk about pilot programs and conversion to real customer. Is that timeline a KPI for you? Is that something that you monitor very closely? I have to imagine that's speeding up, but whenever you shake the hand of a CEO and they say, let's do this, or someone in the federal government perhaps, an agency lead, and they say, I'm ready, I'm bought in on the vision, the demo looked good, but then there's obviously an implementation time. What does that look like now? What did it look like a year ago? Where's it going in the future?

• 2:51:43Speaker 12

  We track it and we measure it in days, not weeks. And so some of our favorite, like Nordstrom, from concept to 100% of their phone calls was 35 days.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  That's good because you could have said 3,000 days is good. Then we're back to, oh, you're gaming the stats.

• 2:52:01Speaker 12

  What's neat about that too is we started out at 1% of their phone calls and I think four weeks and went to 100% in just a week. And that's because of the Nordstrom team. Actually in Fiserv, which is an amazing financial technology company for banks, just broke the record. So I don't know if I'm at liberty to show the number of days, but they have an amazing president named Divya. She was just top down like we're gonna do this and broke the record. So we have a leaderboard internally about how quickly when a customer talks to us, can we go live and start delivering value? For what it's worth, I think it's really relevant in this world. You can, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, it's all token maxing. What value are we getting from the tokens? Like, it is kind of in the headlines right now.

• 2:52:45Speaker 12

  We don't really have that issue with our clients because like our thing is like, let's start answering the phone as quickly as possible. Start driving those operating expense savings as quickly as possible. But as importantly, show that you can actually improve sales, improve CSAT at the same time. Our, you know, as you know, we've been really pioneering this idea of outcomes based pricing, with the idea being you only pay Sierra when we successfully resolve a call or successfully make a sale. It's, it sounds like a small business model thing, but it's big because we don't get paid until it's live. So it really aligns like all the incentives. Like, we don't care about the sales process. We care about the go-live process. And I think it really changes, I would say, almost the social dynamics between vendor and customer,

• 2:53:29Speaker 12

  where we really become a partner because we have the same incentives as our clients. And I think it's a really big shift and you know how much I'm an advocate for it. But I actually think a lot of the, you know, token maxing issues would go away if more companies were just focused on outcomes.

• 2:53:44Jordi Hays?

  How are you tracking the popularity of the message, "Talk to a human"? Or the statement?

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. When I pick up the phone, I say, "Talk to an agent, agent", and then they put me on phone with an AI agent. It's great.

• 2:53:59Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, thank you for that. You're on my side. So we actually have a name for it. We call it greeting acceptance, which is basically what percentage of the time do people get past the greeting and actually give the AI agent a shot? It's going up. People in general, I think the problem was we had 10, 15 years of bots that were really bad. And so you're just like paying down this debt because if you were talking to an AI more than three years ago, it sucked. Like, let's just be blunt about it. Now you can talk to an AI and it's conversational, it's multilingual, it has access to systems. I mean, the AI agents of today are just like a completely, it's like- Horse and carriage versus flying car, right? They're just very different technologies. The problem is, in the first five seconds of a call, you're wondering, is this one of the crappy ones? Or is this like one of the good ones?

• 2:54:44Speaker 12

  And so we have a lot of techniques on our platform to help people with that. I think the real key is making sure the first greeting is personalized, is engaging, is empathetic. And I think the trend is in the right direction. I think over time, I mean, I don't know if you have this experience. If I have to call a restaurant to make a reservation, I'm like, I'm going to a different place. Like, if you don't have open table or resi or whatever, like, I'm out. I think we're going to get to the point where people demand an AI because they're not going to want to wait on hold. You know, and what's also interesting is these AI agents, once they're properly configured, are faster. For me, as a consumer, they have access to my information. They can get the things done quickly. We're not 100% there. And as I said, we're just paying down the debt of bad tech that we've had for the past 10 years.

• 2:55:27Speaker 12

  But I'm hopeful in three or four years, it'll be the norm.

• 2:55:30Jordi Hays?

  When did it become popular to get the, like, there's a 30 minute wait, like, press one if you want to call back? Because I felt like that wasn't a thing when I was a kid. But now that feels like a pretty meaningful innovation at some point in the last 10 years, where it actually is really convenient to not be like, okay, like, I'm on, I'm just going to say.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Some guy has a patent on that.

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure. But like, that was like the last great innovation in customer service.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was.

• 2:55:59Speaker 12

  Well, I think it's going in a really good direction. I mean, first, I think, you know, not having to wait on hold. We should never have to wait on hold again. Like, that is going to be a thing of the past.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  What if the G P user on fire? It's like, we'll call you back when the G P U's call, like, cool off. We're load balancing right now.

• 2:56:15Speaker 12

  Please wait on hold.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Imagine that world. That is bizarre outcome. I mean, on that, on that note, are there any, are there any, like, how close are we to thinking about, like, A6 for voice models? Or we were talking to Matthew Prince from CloudFlare about edge computing for voice models? That feels more relevant than, yes. If you're going to cook for an hour on some deep research project, go do it in the, on the NBL 72. But how, are you actually at the point where you're starting to think about that optimization? Or is that more a few years away?

• 2:56:49Speaker 12

  I think it's probably not a few years away, but it's definitely in the future. But I'm excited for it. I actually agree with your intuition that, you know, we're entering a world where first, the frontier models are actually separated, in my opinion. GPT-5-5, the recent releases from Anthropic. I mean, you can just see it, like, the gap between the best models like GPT-5-5 and the others, the open source models, is growing, not shrinking, which is probably not something we would have predicted a year ago, or at least, like, certainly not what I saw on X and the press. But we've reached sufficient intelligence for a lot of different domains. Like, you don't need, you know, a multi-billion dollar, multi-billion parameter account model to do a simple classification, or, you know, just do basic, you know, transcription.

• 2:57:33Speaker 12

  So as a consequence, I'm hopeful that over the next few years, we'll end up with a constellation of models, with really purpose-built ones. And as you said, just given the power of the hardware in our pockets right now, I think Edge will be a part of it. There's just no doubt. And it just stands to reason, there might be creative ways to, you know, maybe convert what you're doing into tokens, you know, so that you have, like, lower bandwidth connection if you're doing voice. Could there be opportunities there? There also could be some privacy benefits to that. I have a strong intuition, though no knowledge, but just intuition, that's got to be something Apple's thinking about, just given their posture on privacy. So I'm very bullish on the frontier models, like, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic have, you know, really shown the strength of their research groups, but not at the expense of all the specialized models.

• 2:58:18Speaker 12

  I think we're entering a world where, you know, just as we become more sophisticated in deploying AI, we're going to have a constellation of models with just different capabilities. So I'm excited for it, but it's not now. It's in the short-term future.

• 2:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Did you guys have to build in guardrails to prevent people from access? Every, like, month, there's a post that goes viral of somebody that's, like, figured out, like, some endpoint that they can hit to get, like, Chipotle code? Like, frontier model imprint. Somebody figured out a wire up.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  Well, they took some sort of like open code fork of like Codex agent coding model, but it's wired up to Chipotle's customer service in the backend. This is a huge risk because you could run up a big token bill that way. Is this actually a tough one?

• 2:59:03Speaker 12

  We have guardrails on it and you know, it's just like any other thing. It's you know, sort of you're always in a race, the good guy, the white hat versus the black hat to you know, handle it. You know, in practice, I think it's more like digital graffiti. I think nowadays, like in the early days, you'd see a post online of a chatbot saying something goofy like, oh my gosh, now people are like, yeah, you fooled with it, you know, like, come on, you know? So I think first, I think it's probably jailbreaking, I think is a really interesting area of AI security, but probably more around the areas of cybersecurity and bio and things like that. I think this type of thing, it's why people work with places like Sierra to have good guardrails. I also think like, you know, social media sort of become numb to it at this point, you

• 2:59:47Speaker 12

  know, it's like, oh, great, you got a chatbot to say something silly again, you know? I think the bigger issue will be just as these frontier models become more capable, the guardrails around using them need to be more and more effective. And I think, you know, as you think about kind of the mission of OpenAI ensuring AGI's benefits humanity, you really need to make sure that those guardrails are effective against jailbreaking, which is not, you know, it's not like possible to make perfect, by the way, but just because these models are sort of capable under the hood, which is why there's been such an interesting, you know, topic around cybersecurity and others. So that's probably the area I think more about, though, you know, the digital graffiti is going to continue to exist as well. Yeah, that's a good, good term.

• 3:00:28John Coogan?

  Have you ever heard of 0.02 cents?

• 3:00:30Speaker 12

  No, tell me.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  This famous customer service nightmare call where someone called Verizon, they were getting billed at 2 cents and they were in the, and the actual rate was supposed to be 0.002 cents, so they were off by two orders of magnitude. And they're talking to this customer service agent, we'll play it on the show after we wrap, but. They're talking this customer service agent and the customer service agent just actually doesn't know the difference between a decimal cent and an actual cent. And it the frustration that just ensues is like turned into this massively viral video. There's whole websites about it. Verizon math dot blogspot.com from 2006. And it's like this whole deep dive. I'm sure you've heard about all of these different.

• 3:01:16Speaker 12

  I will take a look at it. The good part is a super intelligent AI probably will know.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  I think it will. It's some ground true thing, some code in there. There's, there's opportunities here.

• 3:01:26Jordi Hays?

  PhD level intelligence for.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  The raw audio for this call is 27 minutes. The guy went back and forth and it's hilarious. There's cut downs we'll have to play, but yeah, they had unlimited data plan in the US and recently crossed the border to Canada prior to crossing the border. He called customer service to find out what rates he'd be paying. The data rate he was quoted was point 002 cents per kilobyte. And then he got billed at point 002 dollars per kilobyte. So it was a hundred times more and he couldn't get out of his quagmires Kafkaesque customer service interaction. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's always a pleasure.

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure. Incredible progress. Looking forward to the next revenue gong.

• 3:02:11John Coogan?

  Yep. Come back anytime.

• 3:02:12Speaker 12

  I'll come back. See ya.

• 3:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Accelerating.

• 3:02:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 3:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, we're going to now play this 27 minute video.

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  No, we can play this one. Uh, this is a, this is a, just a little bit of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the one, the, the, the three, the three minute version. YouTube math fail. I want to hear a little bit about this, see if it holds up or if see, see if I'm washed unk at this point, being old and remembering a seventies video. Not this one. It's the 002 cents. Uh, this is exciting news from Canva. We can talk about it later, but, uh, you can turn your chat GPT images into fully editable, fully editable, uh, Canva designs with magic layers without ever leaving the chat. Great integration there. Apple intelligence has some more updates too. We can run through later in the week, um, but let's play the 002 cents, at least a few

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  minutes because I want to hear if it holds up.

• 3:03:12Speaker 13

  Was done while in Canada? Point zero zero two dollars.

• 3:03:15Speaker 14

  Do you recognize that there's actually-

• 3:03:17Speaker 13

  Point zero zero two cents.

• 3:03:19Speaker 14

  Yes, do you recognize there's a difference between those two numbers?

• 3:03:25Speaker 13

  No. Point zero zero two dollars and point zero zero two cents.

• 3:03:29Speaker 14

  Yes, is there a difference between-

• 3:03:30Speaker 13

  They're both the same if you look at them on paper wise.

• 3:03:33Speaker 14

  No, they're not actually.

• 3:03:35Speaker 13

  So if you take point zero zero two-

• 3:03:38Speaker 14

  Cents, remember, cents.

• 3:03:41Speaker 13

  Times thirty-five thousand eight hundred ninety-six. Seventy-one dollars seventy-nine cents.

• 3:03:49Speaker 14

  No, that would be seventy-one cents. How much should I be charged?

• 3:03:54Speaker 13

  By, by the way this is calculated? Seventy-one dollars seventy-nine-

• 3:03:58Speaker 14

  I like this guy crashing out of a serving bag.

• 3:03:59Speaker 13

  You're paying two tenths of a penny per kilobyte.

• 3:04:01Speaker 14

  Two tenths, hold on, hold on. Two tenths of a penny would be point two cents. You quoted me point zero zero two cents. I think this guy also might be entirely wrong. He might have just been quoted the wrong number.

• 3:04:14Speaker 13

  Point zero zero two, sir.

• 3:04:16Speaker 14

  Point zero zero two watt. Watt?

• 3:04:19Speaker 13

  Cents per kilobyte.

• 3:04:21Speaker 14

  So you just said it was point two pennies.

• 3:04:26Speaker 14

  And then you also said it's point zero zero two cents. Those are two completely different numbers, they're one hundredfold different.

• 3:04:33Speaker 13

  George, hold on one second for me, okay?

• 3:04:37Speaker 14

  This guy is so dedicated.

• 3:04:40Speaker 13

  This is Andrew, I'm the manager on the floor, how can I help you today?

• 3:04:42Speaker 14

  There's another manager's involved. Do you recognize that there's a difference between one dollar and one cent? Coming out of the gate.

• 3:04:47Speaker 13

  Definitely.

• 3:04:48Speaker 14

  Definitely. Do you recognize there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?

• 3:04:52Speaker 13

  Definitely.

• 3:04:54Speaker 14

  Then do you therefore recognize there's a difference between point zero zero two dollars and point zero zero two cents?

• 3:05:02Speaker 13

  No.

• 3:05:03Speaker 14

  I'm keeping that.

• 3:05:05Speaker 13

  And I, I mean, I'm trying to get what you're saying here, but it's just not-

• 3:05:09Speaker 14

  And we're talking about cents, right?

• 3:05:11Speaker 13

  Right, point zero zero two, if we multiply that by the amount of kilobyte usage that you have-

• 3:05:18Speaker 14

  Three-five-eight-nine-three.

• 3:05:20Speaker 13

  Three-five-eight-nine-three, that comes out to what you pay, seventy-one seventy-nine.

• 3:05:25Speaker 14

  Cents. You never did the conversion from cents to dollars.

• 3:05:30Speaker 13

  I don't know.

• 3:05:31John Coogan?

  I'm not a mathematician.

• 3:05:33Speaker 14

  0.02 cents.

• 3:05:34Speaker 13

  Right.

• 3:05:35Speaker 14

  Times my 35,893. It's is a number, but it's still in cents.

• 3:05:42Speaker 13

  We're not quoting point 002 dollars. We're quoting point 002 cents.

• 3:05:46Speaker 14

  Oh, God. Honestly.

• 3:05:49Speaker 13

  Well, I mean, it's obviously a difference of opinion.

• 3:05:51Speaker 14

  It's not opinion. Okay, well, you know what? I'm gonna post this recording on my blog.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  Oh. Cancelled.

• 3:05:59Speaker 14

  That's what I'm gonna do. And and and then you guys all at Verizon can learn.

• 3:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, what a funny interaction.

• 3:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Well, now, now that you get a PhD level mathematician's knowledge.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  Somebody's gonna run this on an on an AI lab. I was quoted point. I was quoted. I was quoted five cents per million tokens, not five dollars per million tokens. And confuse someone, get 100 100x discount on your on your bill, your token bill. Anduril has a space something. What was it? Space Observation Network. These are ground based satellites or ground based telescopes that monitor space. And look at this. Captured by Anduril's network of 400 telescopes deployed around the globe. The second stage of the Falcon Heavy launch of ViaSat-3 F3, performing a routine thrust event. This produced a spiral shaped plume effect, a nominal part of operations for a successful

• 3:06:59John Coogan?

  launch of ViaSat's latest satellite. I thought this was a cool image. And we learned in the process that they have 400 telescopes all over the world. Anyway, we can dig into all of this more later. More tomorrow. We'll be back at 11 a.m. Pacific. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Fun show, everyone. Have the best afternoon or evening of your entire life.

• 3:07:27John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you later.

• 3:07:28Speaker 13

  Always, folks.