OpenAI–Microsoft Restructure, Winning Formula for AI Founders, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions

(00:20) - Timeline Reactions (02:39) - OpenAI & Microsoft's For-Profit Restructure (19:07) - Anthropic CEO Weighs in on Future of AI (22:35) - GPT-5 Data Analysis (25:04) - Timeline Reactions (01:00:34) - AI Startup Founder's Winning Formula (01:31:41) - Timeline Reactions (01:40:02) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:56:10) - Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and we are in an undisclosed location, so we will be a little bit quieter with the intro. But it is Friday, September 12th.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  Not to yell.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Yes, it hurts. We will be back in the Ultra Dome soon. Don't worry, but today we are still emotionally in the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital Capital. And we need to kick it off with the level 100 performative tech bro final boss, Peter Diamandis. Are you familiar with Diamandis?

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  An absolute legend in the game.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is it? Singularity University? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he has a podcast. He's, he's done a number of businesses, X Prize, I believe, Moonshot stuff. But man, was he early to the singularity game.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Like it's, he was talking about that with the, the Kurzweil era.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Um, and, uh, but the whole reason he's getting called a performative tech bro final boss is because of course he is vibe coding on Ratlet.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Over Starlink flying himself up to the Bay Area. The only thing he missed was sleeping on an eight sleep.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Sleeping on an eight sleep. He should have had the eight sleep in there.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  And then he should have had infinite jest printed out, sitting next to him.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Some type of, uh, homegrown, like autonomous flying setup, actually flying the plane.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  He should have had a ramp card in display.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, counting a whole lot more all in one place.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Lot more.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Um, we are of course on the road. We've been on the road a lot this week.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  We hate being on the road.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  It's not our favorite thing. It's very, very rough. We know it changed the show. Hopefully we will, uh, get back in the swing of things and kind of bring you the show that you know and love. But we're doing our best. Uh, of course this, this stream is made possible by Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Uh, and for our gracious hosts were able to loan us a, a whiteboard where we were able to piece together exactly what's going on in tech. We're going to take you through the stories today. OpenAI.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Calling this out.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  This is exactly.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Someone's gonna spend the next, uh.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Trying to decipher.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Three hours trying to decipher.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  They're gonna put it together.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  What does it mean?

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Understand the real nature of tech, how it all connected.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  This is the current state of tech, right?

• 2:13John Coogan?

  I like it because there are some connections there, like Amazon and Anthropic. That red line is real.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Real. The Hamptons and Patek.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Also real.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  There's a connection there.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Uh, Will Manitis, we'll leave it up to the viewer. That's an exercise for the viewer to see how he's involved. Uh, you didn't get Figma on there. We should have, we should have been doing all this on a fig jam. Uh, you should go to Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You get served for free. So the actual big story is that OpenAI, the nonprofit is going to control its for-profit arm and own equity valued at $100 billion. I believe this will make it the most highly valued nonprofit or like the most profitable nonprofit in world history, the best funded nonprofit, right? Uh, and it is remarkable to think about what that will be like. People have kind of written off the nonprofit as like, it's going away. Like it is not going away. Like it will continue to be a thing.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  It's incredibly back, uh, funded forever essentially to do a ton of interesting things. I think we're going to see interesting things about, uh, come out of that organization. Uh, but anyway, the news, this is from the journal and we'll, and we'll break this down, but Nick has it summarized here. OpenAI LLC will be converted into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. OpenAI nonprofit retains control of the new public benefit corporation. The nonprofit will hold $100 billion plus of equity in the public benefit corporation. The PBC structure enables raising large amounts of capital for the mission. Um, which obviously they're already doing, uh, they're still aligned with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  That's good. Also, it's aligned with like your shareholders. If you're just a normal C corp, I know they're a public benefit corporation, but if you're just a normal C corp, like shareholders are humans. Let's make sure it benefits the shareholders. That will by definition benefit humanity, but specifically they're saying all of humanity. Even if you're not a shareholder, AGI should still benefit you, which was a noble cause. OpenAI and Microsoft signed a non-binding MOU for the next phase of the partnership. A definitive agreement is still being negotiated. OpenAI says it's engaging.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Remember, as it stands, Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI's revenue.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  For the big man.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Something like that. Something like that, which it felt like a stretch to me that that would be sustainable. Given the looming costs that OpenAI needs to incur. Obviously, they're ramping revenue really quickly.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  But you have Broadcom to pay, you have Oracle to pay, you have all these.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  But it is tied to revenue, you know, it's not the same as being like.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  You're on the crazy.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  Five billion. Yeah, it's not a figure. Exactly.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  But still, but still, it's a lot of, you know, the, the, there's, these companies are under margin pressure already.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  And, and wasn't the original deal that it would, it would be 20% up until they paid $100 billion or something like that? There was something where like it eventually ran its course. I believe it had an ending and I think that's what's justifying a lot of the underwriting because the lesson from Google, the lesson from Facebook, the lesson from, you know, Microsoft and the rest of the hyperscalers was that you needed your DCF models to be 20 or 30 years into the future, right?

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  And so if you just, if you, i- if you didn't take into account the third decade of growth, you were undervaluing.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  It was originally reported 20% through 2030.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Which still is.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  I don't think a lot of investors are scared by thinking about value in 2035. I think they're fine with that now. I think they're saying like, yeah, I have a 10-year fund and realistically, all the best venture investments, SpaceX is still hanging out in the portfolio 20 years later. They got continuation funds. I think that a lot of investors are actually fine to say, yeah, this company is going to be like, you know, maybe a financial mess for 10 years, but if I'm super confident it's going to be a money printing machine in 20, I'll do the deal all day.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  I think that's.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  It's still, it's still insane to think that the deal ever got done in the first place.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  The Microsoft deal?

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you were, if, if, if you talked to a founder and they were like, yeah, I was running a fundraiser and like, you know, ended up taking this deal. I got the valuation I wanted, but ultimately it gave up 20% of revenue off the top too. So not 20% of like profits, but like a 20% tax on gross revenue.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just for the, just still 2030.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the founder's like, well, it doesn't matter that much because I'm in this for like 20 years.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, most, most.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Very few, very few.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  The pass on that.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very few businesses, very few businesses in the world, especially like highly competitive, you know, categories uh, can sustain a 20% tax off the top.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, and still really produce any profits or, or be.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Functioning at all, but obviously.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  I'll push you.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Profits are.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  What if your, what if your business is, uh, mobile games in the App Store? You've been effectively, Apple a 20%, 30% tax off the top.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  For, there's a bunch of examples, like Nvidia could do this too, right? And they sort of are.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Any deal.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  I, I don't know. I, I, I mean, I agree with you. Like it is, it is a crazy, crazy deal, unprecedented in a million ways, but everything about the entire OpenAI story is unprecedented.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Unprecedented to start as a nonprofit, unprecedented to have, who are the co-founders? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Like you have like seven different co-founders who have, a bunch of co-founders have gone off and start direct competitors. That doesn't happen very often. Usually people are like, I got bags in the category. I'm going to go work on something else.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of weird stuff. Anyway, speaking of the, the nature of the, of the industry and all the competitors, Sergey, uh, has a bit of a joke post here saying, Dario, Claude will take your job, but it will feel ashamed. Elon, look at this anime girl. She says the N word and is almost naked. Zuck, super intelligence will help people watch more Instagram reels. Demis, Gemini recently calculated more precisely the motion of the heavens. Sam, excited to open, to announce that OpenAI Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement with OpenAI LP and OAI Corporation and has signed MOUs with OpenAI OpCo LLC and OpenAI Global LLC.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  It really sums up, uh, it really sums up and Sergei.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  They're all cooking.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, they are all cooking and they're all telling like slightly different stories. Um, Sergei, these are all real corporate entities, by the way.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's, yeah, it's worth noting, it feels like Satya has definitely slow played the renegotiation of this deal. Like this has been, they've been trying to make this happen for a long time. It was reported a while back that Satya wasn't, wasn't budging. Uh, but it's good to see that the company is able to.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  So here's a from Rohan Paul and what's actually happening with this OpenAI and Microsoft, uh, deal. Uh, Microsoft and OpenAI struck a truce to extend their partnership, clearing a major obstacle to OpenAI's shift into a for-profit structure. The new agreement is non-binding right now, but it sets the final stage for final terms to be hammered out soon. In the proposed setup, Microsoft and the OpenAI nonprofit would each start with about 30% of the new company, with the rest going to employees and investors. The new company is the for-profit entity OpenAI is trying to create as part of its restructuring. OpenAI plans to keep nonprofit control and give that nonprofit an endowment stake valued at a hundred billion dollars. Wow. Which would be huge on paper, but the timeline to turn it into usable grants is unclear.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Although with the secondary markets, you, you imagine that that has to be like, they're going to make payroll next quarter. Like they'd be able to sell some, uh, a hundred billion dollars and, and do a whole bunch of grants. Um, California and Delaware attorneys are generally reviewing the plan and OpenAI has told its investors, it aims to finish the restructure by the end of the year or risk losing its 19 billion in funding. It's very funny that like for all this drama, all the books that will be written, the movies, like the end results, like, okay, there's like three parties around the table. How about we go equal? Like Microsoft gets a third, nonprofit gets a third, employees, investors get the third. Like there's really like three key counterparties in the deal and they're, it seems like if this is what happens, they kind of just all walked away being like.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, three, three key parties on the, on the, effectively on the cap table. But then you also have the California being like, hey, don't mess this conversion up. You know, you, you're a nonprofit.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  California, uh, and Delaware attorneys, uh.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, general are reviewing the plan and OpenAI has told its investors it aims to.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  I'm talking about like the, the, the end result of like who gets what in the like, there's a bunch of poker chips on the table right now. And there's a bunch, there's parties around there that all need to agree before anything moves forward. Right?

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  And it's just interesting that like, what they wound up with was like, let's go equal. Like, let's split it equally.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you play this out, what, what happens? What is the, what? What do you think the nonprofit looks like 10 years from now? OpenAI continues to execute very well, becomes a multi-trillion dollar, you know, tech giant.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  And you have a third of the company owned by this nonprofit. What do you think?

• 11:26John Coogan?

  I know what would happen, buddy.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  How would you, how would you allocate?

• 11:29John Coogan?

  What, what happens when you get a ton of missionary AI genius scientists who don't want to optimize for profits? They're just experimenting, working on whatever ideas they want. There's no pressure because they don't have a user base. They don't have an app store. They're not competing with anyone. They just get to go do pure research. What do you think will happen?

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  So they're going to create.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  Bang or consumer app will happen for sure.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, another one.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Nonprofit is going to launch another company and they're going to convert to for-profit again.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, you could, you could, you could.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Last time.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  The question is like, okay, what is the real relationship between the nonprofit and, and OpenAI like the, the, the private, you know, for-profit?

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Arm.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a world where they're just like, okay, we're just going to keep a lot of research and R and D happening at the nonprofit layer.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  And then like try to just be the ones that.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Commercialize it every time.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Every time, even though you would have to argue if it's like this.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  I think, I think over time, like the two entities will actually separate and drift apart.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  In which they drift apart when we're, you know, they're sitting on, on a.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Thirty percent of the cap table?

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  I don't know. That's not that crazy. Like there are VC funds that own 30% of the company when it goes public and.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, they'll drift.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Like the, the VC fund is like off doing some other stuff, right? Investing in competitors sometimes, like just kind of looking for the next thing, getting out of the position slowly. Right? Is selling into the public markets. So I don't know. Um, of, of course I'm kind of joking and it's like a little bit of a hot take to think that like there will be something, but truly like, like if you, if you want the, the, okay. And, and another interesting twist is like. Right now, there is a, there is a war for talent in AI and there's a war for, for specifically for missionary talent, right? The true believers, the folks who are just gonna go grind and, and explore and not be, not be beholden to, you know, optimizing the, like, next quarter's MAUs,

• 13:30John Coogan?

  right? So if you're OpenAI and you don't want your direct competitors telling that story, "Hey, we're the missionary AI lab," uh, creating a talent vacuum for that type of, that type of, that archetype of researcher with a nonprofit, saying, "Oh, oh yeah, what, like, we're a nonprofit, like, you can do whatever you want, uh, you can just do research and we'll match the salary that Anthropic's paying you." Or, or, "Oh, Zach made an offer? Yeah, we'll match it just for you to come and hang out here."

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can they give those researchers exposure to the private company fairs?

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  Just being like, "Yeah, all of our directors at the nonprofit, like, they get paid out a bonus based on, you know, there's, there's plenty of histories of nonprofits being abused, right?

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Like, nonprofit.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  People get paid, like, high salaries.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, yeah.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Like, stock in a different company.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but it could just be like, you know, every year, uh, the stock appreciates some amount and they sell off a position to be able to pay.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  You would assume that they, that they're selling down the position and paying cash.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  Such, such a strange position.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  It's extreme.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  And, and, um, this is why, when I talk to founders that are, like, uh, I think more and more people have kind of like standardized around just like, "Start your company on Stripe Atlas."

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't try to re-

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Delaware C Corp.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Delaware C Corp on Stripe Atlas.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Even the post Elon, like-

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Make sure you have that thing.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  ...steam, like, that has not made its way down to startups.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Most startups are just-

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  ...just C-

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  But- Every, I mean, I have, I have a friend of mine that I grew up with that, that had a breakout consumer product. He botched the cap table, didn't set up vesting and it ended up costing him like millions of dollars. He would effectively be retired in his thirties if he had not, if he'd done this correctly. And that's why it's like, it's so key to get the foundation, the legal structure of a company set up properly. And so the fact that you had Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, they all set up this, this entity. And, and in the fullness of time, it's like they botched it, right? Like it, it was, uh, it was a maybe a good idea at the time to try to create a nonprofit for AI research.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  But, um, uh, just got kind of messier and messier and messier and messier and messier. And, uh, every single, you know, person involved is probably thinking, I wish we just set it up as a,

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  as a C corp from the beginning.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, completely agree. Good take, the, yeah, this idea of like, you know, you like the folks who are on the founding team are not dumb. They're like the smartest people in Silicon Valley, basically. So maybe they were like overthinking it or like too smart and being like, let's create an even more complex structure. The other, the flip side of like the steel man on like what happened is if you play it back and you go back to like 2015, you say like, okay.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, they raised, they raised a lot of money and at the time AI was maybe too like there, there wasn't an immediate commercial opportunity. And so it's very possible they wouldn't have been able to raise like,

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Even if they raised, I think they might've been able to raise the money, but then my question is like, what happens in like 2017? When your share price is kind of stagnating, you still haven't made revenue and everyone, and the, and the meme in Silicon Valley is like, oh yeah, like Sam raised a mega round, a pre-product market fit, like that company's not really doing anything. When are they going to ship? Right? Instead it was just like, Oh yeah, like they have a research organization and they're like continuing to do cool like little projects here and there and like, oh, they got the, they got a, they got a robotic arm to solve a Rubik's Cube. We're like, oh, they won at chess or Dota or like whatever they did. And so I bet, I bet the vibes were better throughout that. It's really hard for C corp to, to keep, because everyone's

• 17:19John Coogan?

  looking at it for a decade.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  When you're flat. And then it's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, we've seen this with so many other companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars pre-product launch and it's really hard to get out finally. So I don't know. The counterfactual was fascinating. I wonder if it would have, how, how it would have played out. It's tricky.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just interesting that almost every person around the table probably feels like they would have benefited from a more simple, traditional structure.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  I think you're right. Yeah. And I think Sam's even said that. Been like, yeah, we kind of overthought this one and like, it would have been better just to come in clean. But, you know, it worked out anyway, more or less. And like, they, we, we got the product.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, honestly, OpenAI is the best example of like, if you have true product market fit, you can botch so many things and still be wildly successful.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  A great take. Anyway, automate compliance, manage risk and prove trust continuously with Vanta, vanta.com. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first work or managing a complex program.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Duolingo, Snowflake, Intercom, GitHub, Ramp, all of our favorites.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  So I think we covered most of this. We can go through a little bit of the Wall Street Journal's coverage. The, the primeogen, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, is, is putting Dario from Anthropic's claims about AI progress in the truth zone, said these, we are 28 months into six months from AI taking your jobs, four months into 24 months until cursor is obsolete and six months into six months until AI writes 90% of your code, part two, the coding. So exactly six months ago, this is the report from Futurism. The CEO of Anthropic said that in six months, AI would be writing 90% of code.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  And there, and so I think people, when he, when Dario said this, people interpreted it as, uh, okay, well, 90% of the software engineering jobs are going away. And that certainly hasn't happened. I mean, we're not seeing like fantastic job numbers broadly in the economy. There are like rumblings about software engineers not getting hired as fast as they should.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  New grads struggling.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  New grads struggling, but I mean, we're talking about like, like what a few percentage points, if anything. Certainly not 90% of software engineers are out of a job.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  But simultaneously, we're seeing folks like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase highlight that, what is it? 40% of their code is written by AI now. There's a lot more code being written.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  There, there are great companies.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  That are internally not focused on hiring new people.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  And yet they're still ramping revenue.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  And there's certainly ramping. We talked about this at the cart, right?

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Code.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Headcount.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, at Palantir, headcount is like relatively flat.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Revenue is way up.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Couple thousand people.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, um, uh, Klarna, right? Headcount is way down.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Revenue is way up.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Couple thousand people.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so you have these companies that are doing well, growing really fast and then not at needing to add a lot of people. Um, you know, you could just make an argument that that's like willpower, right? Or the other side of it is like, you know, they're getting new efficiency. Um, and, uh, yeah, there, there's, it's an interesting, it's hard to tell what, what's driven by increased efficiency due to AI versus just CEOs deciding like, we're all going to do more.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  And you don't, I'm not giving you, we're not giving you budget to like, for this new product you want to launch, have two people launch it.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  We're not going to give you, you know, 20 people and, and, you know, some massive.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is. Like if you had told me like artificial AGI is real, will pass the Turing test, AI will be able to write code at the level of a mid-tier software engineer, maybe not total top-tier software engineer, but like

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna one-shot a calendar app.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  And billions, yeah, you're one-shot up a calendar app and billions of dollars will be spent on this like every month. Uh, I would have said like, okay, well, like I would expect that like my, my, the app from United Airlines is less buggy. And like, I haven't experienced that. I haven't, I haven't been like walking around the internet using different websites and tooling and being like, oh, wow, they did a complete rewrite on this. It's so much faster. Or like, oh, wow, there's no bugs in this thing or that thing. It's like, it's still very incremental. Like, we really do have a lot more software to write. Cause I do believe that the code's being written and like the product, like internally, every company is writing more code and doing more things, but the amount of

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's

• 21:55John Coogan?

  You have to do to actually improve your experience is crazy.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of CEOs and CTOs and engineers that have come out and said 90% of my code is written by AI, but they're, they're still like, it's not like they suddenly only need to work for an hour a day.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  It's not like, it's just like, okay, we just need to do

• 22:15John Coogan?

  It's hard, if not more.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just need to do more.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yep, totally, totally. Uh, well, if you're writing a lot of code with AI, you need code review for the age of AI.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Graphite.dev, Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Teams like Ramp, Figma, Asana, Cursor, Shopify, no, like, more.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  We have a post from Ara Karasian, came on the show earlier this week. Um, he has the data on GPT-5. He says, GPT-5 was good, actually. After a launch that led, that led Sam Altman to apologize, the latest Ramp data shows OpenAI is growing business adoption faster than any other model company tracked by Ramp AI Index. Uh, it's also not just tech, tech manufacturing is adopting AI faster than any other sector. And it's why the consensus figures on AI adoption are probably wrong, or the census figures, which we talked about with Ara. Um, and he says, read, read his full analysis on Substack. You can go to econlab.substack.com to subscribe to our Karasian.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  And you should of course go to tbpn.substack.com and subscribe to our newsletter. So, um, The ramp AI index, the model adoption rate, the share of US businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models jumped significantly in, what is it? This is probably March was OpenAI's really crazy fast takeoff. And then in July, the data's up again. It, it, this doesn't read purely as, this, this reads more as like people understanding O three and reasoning models and starting to pay.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Also, just more monetization tiers, probably more ways to pay, maybe. But 44% of US businesses now have paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, or tools across OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, Google, and DeepSeek. And the, the Google number seems low, since I would imagine that some of those Gemini subscriptions maybe get rolled into Google Apps, like, because Gemini just shows up in the Google Apps billing already. We'd have to talk to Ara and dig in more. But I mean, it's sure like the clearest piece of the data is that OpenAI is on an absolute tear here in the B to B context, which is interesting.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  And, and it's not like, we're, we're not seeing like, oh, GPT five sucked, so it's falling off a cliff. It's like, no, like, the, the models are getting better. It's just like, we talked about this with the iPhone. Like, if it was a war, if it was worse, they probably wouldn't release it. They'd just stick with the best. But, um, anyway.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  This other, yeah, this is another pro ChatGPT's impact and OpenAI is like, I guess, like, I could put this loosely in the bull case, but.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Isaac says, I met someone this morning whose number one source of traffic is ChatGPT's supplement brand, and has figured out how to get ChatGPT to recommend the brand whenever someone asks about a specific problem. Crazy. That is crazy. I feel like I'm surprised we haven't seen more of this, but it's just taken a while for not only ChatGPT to get adopted to the point where it's statistically significant, but then. Also people to figure out how to make it happen.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  I mean, you live the podcast boom firsthand and how long was it like podcasts had existed for years before we saw like AG1 become like the podcast supplement brand, right?

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  And and there were a few other brands where it was like this, their whole growth strategy was.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Four Sigmatic, do you remember that?

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Four Sigmatic, for sure. That's a great example.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, yeah, my friends, uh, my friends had a podcast and, uh, I was in college at the time. They're, they were quite a bit older.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  And when I met them, they had one sponsor, which was like some random coffee company that just like happened at the founder happened to be in the audience. Just reached out.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Was like, hey, let me like, hey, so, so they, they didn't, they started the podcast without any real plans to monetize or anything like that.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I, at the time, it still felt like I was late to podcasting because there was a bunch of podcasts that.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  I mean, you could say the same thing about, uh, direct to consumer advertising on, on, uh, on like meta platforms.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Like the, the, the four Sigmatic, I heard, do, do we hear the numbers together? Someone was talking and saying that, uh, so.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  The DSC era was so crazy because it was like every, you know, a few, a number of brands realized like, hey, you can buy like really cheap, really effective advertising.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  On Instagram.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  On Instagram and meta, meta platforms broadly. And then.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  And that allows you to scale super quickly.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was literally like if you had a decent product and you had funding, you could like, you know, scale overnight. This is the mattress boom. So many people realized that, yeah, so many people realized the opportunity and just flooded it and it just.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Peated away.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  Auctions. So, so, uh, supply grew, but.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Demand, you know, for the ad inventory.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think in the mushroom coffee category, there are three or four different brands doing. A hundred million dollar plus in sales, maybe like three hundred million dollar plus in sales. Like there are some really, really big.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's Mudwater.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Mudwater, Orsigmatic, there's a two, there's two others that I haven't even heard of. And, and you just, every time you hear.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  I heard a crazy.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, they went from, they went from zero to two hundred million dollars in five years.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  I, I heard a crazy story about a, somebody interning at one of the mushroom coffee companies. Uh, leaving, starting, you want to getting and, and out and generate, this company was already at a nine-figure revenue mark. The intern left and started another one and then outgrew the original.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  That's insane. Yeah. Uh, yeah, a lot of financial, I, I, I do wonder what those companies look like in five, 10 years. I mean, we've seen, uh, when we talked to the Ridge guys, like, um, like top line growth is not the end all be all of D to C success. Like you have to generate.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Cash flow matters.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Cash flow matters and this takes time. And so, uh, when you hear one of those like crazy revenue ramps, especially in D to C, you should always ask this, even in AI, but in D to C, you really need to understand, okay, is there, is this just, the founders go to fundraising and they're losing money on every transaction and they're just going to keep this flywheel grow, going because they've figured out how to make their revenue steeper than everyone else and so they keep getting funded? Or is there something really special about that economic?

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  I always used to laugh, um, something about unprofitable SaaS. I mean, it's, it's like, how are you going to sell software and lose money? It's funny, but like selling physical goods, it's like, wait, you sold this mattress? It cost you money to sell this mattress, to make it sell this mattress?

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  And obviously there's plenty of cases of, of great companies that, that were deeply, you know, unprofitable for, for a long time, but something about D to C companies, you know, running, running in the red massively.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  It's like, come on, you should, you know, at least, uh.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  I mean, it's like lemonade stand stuff. It's like, as a kid, you learn like buy the lemons, buy the sugar, get the pitcher and then add it all up, multiply it by two, that's how much you're charging. It's like cost-based pricing is like, you know, the most instinctual economic force in the world that like a child can understand. Um. And yet we justify all these different things. And sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it does make sense to lose money on SaaS for a little bit if you're building a, you know, some sort of network, some sort of locked in thing, some sort of high margin opportunity down the road. Anyway, if you're growing your business, you need to analyze some data, get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run?

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. They're loved by two million users and trusted individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Equally important, we need to talk about profound in the context of chat GPT traffic.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  I would not be surprised if the company that Isaac is talking about here, that's getting all of their traffic from chat GPT is using profound.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Cry profound.com. It's in the back.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  There you go. I put it up on the.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your products and brands, get your brand mentioned in chat GPT.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, whether you're doing, whether it's consumer product that you're selling or enterprise software, you need to get on.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  We kind of like, we kind of took the conversation in like a, an almost like negative situation, talking about like the long-term durability of these businesses. But, I mean, really.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, this, this is crazy because it's organic.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like SEO is sort of like faded in terms of importance and relevancy.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  If you can, if you can be the first brand to go and find the, the correct strategy on Instagram and dominate, like that's, that's such a huge advantage. And it's the same thing with like, how did Airbnb get to scale quickly? Old school SEO, right? They just had landing pages for every single, you know, rental homes in Tulsa, right? And when you Google it, you go, they're really good at SEO. There's a whole bunch of other, Drew Houston at Dropbox, he was like, we, we copy pasted the entire like web 2.0 growth handbook, which was like, give 10, get 10 PayPal model of like, you know, incentive based viral growth.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  And with Dropbox, it'd be like, I give you five gigs of storage. I get five gigs of storage. We add it all up and it just went super viral and they. Uh, he said something like all of the, uh, all of the viral, like the viral growth. It's like you can go way deeper with that metaphor, uh, which is basically like as an internet SaaS company, you need to be sneezing on as many people as possible, which I think is hilarious. So he's like, he's like, you know, to get the viral coefficient up, you need to be sneezing a lot and not washing your hands. What does that mean in the Dropbox context? Well, it means when any, whenever someone clicks a Dropbox link, there's a little prompt, hey, do you want to sign up? Hey, put your email, let's just grab your email before you

• 32:25John Coogan?

  view this PDF. Oh, oh, hello sign. Yeah, we acquired them. Let's bring them in and oh, if you want to sign a document, like set up a Dropbox account, right? It's like, these are sneezing all over the internet is what he'd like referred to it as. I thought it was brilliant.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Angel List is, has done this well with, with, uh, their roll up vehicle product, right? Every time, every time, you know, somebody gets invited to a roll up vehicle, they create an Angel List account, they may, maybe make their first investment and Angel List can say like, hey, do you want to invest in this fund? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? Um, do you want to read through this journal article at all? Do you think we covered it?

• 32:58John Coogan?

  I think we covered most of this. Um, basically the, the journal's asking, uh, about OpenAI's funding challenges. We ran through this, um, yesterday and basically my conclusion was, uh, $300 billion to Oracle is a staggering amount of money, but it does, it is in line with what it takes to build, um, all the data center capacity for an amazon.com, a Facebook and Instagram, like meta platforms internal, a google.com, not the cloud businesses. Um, and so I can see, I can imagine the spreadsheet that, that, that they, that they used to develop the model. The question is, will the growth continue? I think they're on a fantastic

• 33:43John Coogan?

  growth curve. It feels like this will, um, that they will wind up paying a lot of this and that, and that's certainly what the market's pricing in based on the, the, the, the pop in the Oracle stock. Uh, it's not like Wall Street looked at the, the Oracle backlog and was like, oh, that's fake. This is bearish. We need to sell the stock. No, they were like, yeah, that money's coming in. 300 billion's coming in over the next, over the next half decade or something. So like, let's send us.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  I think that was.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think, I think you can, I think you can think that it may not materialize, but still think it's a good investment in the short term.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Sure, but I mean, they missed.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Like purely, yeah, yeah, but purely momentum.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Maybe that's I I I think that's kind of odd. It's kind of like a circular logic. Because I mean, then you get into like, you could say that about like, anything like, like, yeah, well, like they they.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we say like a bunch of people, a bunch of people are like, wow.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Oracle is going to generate hundreds of billions of revenue from AI. I want to own this stock. And then I'm just saying there's a category of people that are going to say like, okay, this stock is going to run.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  At least in the short term, but maybe it's nineteen ninety nine and and, you know, we're we're we're going to see some type of, you know, correction here, so.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  We will, we will find out. We'll see. I mean, we'll, we'll probably have more data on, I mean, as soon as Oracle's next quarter prints, we'll see exactly how much they're pulling down, exactly how much they're building. OpenAI in the last, in the last nine months has committed to spend around sixty billion dollars a year for computing from Oracle. And this will really, I mean, if this pencils out, like, this will drive a radical transformation in Oracle's business, like, you, we saw the the chart in the journal where their core business, like, everything that they've built up so far is basically expected to decline over the next five years as they switch to pure cloud computing, like they want to be a hyper.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Eric Newcomer this morning said, seeing a forty eight year old database company suddenly grow by more than the size of Salesforce over the course of a trading day is one of those occurrences that makes you wonder about the moment we're in. It's that once incredible and canyon terrifying, like your grandfather during a family reunion, gathering everyone around, tossing off his walker and doing parkour.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Good, very, very funny bit.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Eric, Eric Newcomer also was bearish on, he was bearish on OpenAI at around, around thirty, or at least like very skeptical.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe a year or two ago, he wrote kind of the bear case.

• 36:18Jordi Hays?

  But I think this is a very, very fair.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, OpenAI loses billions of dollars a year and has told investors it is on pace to make thirteen billion in revenue this year, according to a person familiar with the matter. Less than three years since the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI is tying its fate to a belief that companies and consumers will increase their spending on artificial intelligence at explosive rates for years to come. And I do, I do wonder, like, like, you have to believe in the agentic commerce story to,

• 36:53John Coogan?

  to, to really see another, like, ten X in revenue. How do they get to a, I mean, the, the, the projection that people are underwriting OpenAI, I believe, is two hundred billion in revenue in, like, twenty thirty? And, and it's hard to imagine, like, am I gonna pay two thousand dollars?

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to exist.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Is everyone gonna pay?

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  My soundboard.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  Would I pay? Yeah.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  I wanna, I wanna hit the air horn so bad.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I think.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  You gotta monetize the free users.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  You gotta monetize the free users. You can't get them all on twenty dollars and two hundred dollar a month plans. Maybe the two thousand.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  The example that I always give is, like, the average American, if they don't have a show they like on your streaming platform, they will just cancel it.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, like, I mean.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, they're like, sorry, I don't care.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  People just haven't upgraded, haven't, I mean, people are just starting to experience, like, the reasoning models.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  I don't know, like, I, I, if the, if the, if the paid plans stick around, like, it could be, they could get a lot more people to convert. Especially if it's, if it goes through your business, if you're expensing it, if, like, you know, how, how much, how much, how much money is spent on, like, email subscriptions across?

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting, an interesting comp is like, do you think that Netflix or OpenAI will have more subscription revenue in twenty thirty?

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Let's say OpenAI by a mile.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you, and you think that's because people will pay to have this, like, all powerful assistant that can?

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess I the only the only question is just like, is there a better way to monetize? Like, can you get $20 or $200 of value out of someone by just handling their purchases? And just doing the agent of commerce thing?

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and OpenAI is not, uh, OpenAI is completely aware that they're driving a ton of economic activity.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  They just saw it.

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I'm so happy that you're making millions of dollars from our product.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  How exactly did you?

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, like I'd like, you want to keep this relationship going, let's get a cut. And that's super valuable. That's what that's how that's how Meta generates so much money and Google too. Uh, the scale of like internet commerce and taking a cut of all of internet commerce is extremely, extremely.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  It's just an extremely huge pool of capital to draw from. It's a huge, it's a massive Thanksgiving plate to eat off of, right? And so OpenAI deals that came to light in the past week have added up, have added more than $400 billion to the market value of two companies. Chip designer Broadcom and cloud provider Oracle. They also put Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison in striking distance of becoming the world's richest person.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Oracle's stock market value jumped over $240 billion on Wednesday after the company revealed a giant backlog of computing orders. Uh, most of that is derived from a roughly 300 billion five-year computing deal with OpenAI. Well, if you are generating media, you gotta go to fall.ai. Generative media platform for developers, the world's first, the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Don't get caught writing a $300 billion check to Larry Ellison. Just go to fall.ai.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Cora, and many more are on, and you should be there too.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, do we want to tap through this? Uh, Dee Dee was highlighting.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was a interesting story.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  It it's so crazy to look back at these like incredibly strategic acquisitions from from, you know,

• 40:30John Coogan?

  A decade ago.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Couple, two, two decades, two thousand and eight. So in two thousand and eight, Apple acquired Palo Alto Semi. Fantastic name, really ahead of the curve. If anything, if anything, they were, they they created the trend.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  That we could actually have a company of Palo Alto. Really? Yeah.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  The silicon company of Palo Alto.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  What's funny is there's, is also Palo Alto Networks. And so I wonder if Palo Alto Semi was directly inspired. They're like, oh, well, like, we're in Palo Alto and we're doing something similar. Anyway, you want to.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  I actually like this formatting. They've just Palo Alto Semi, Palo Alto Network.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  More than the blank of blank.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  So you'd just be New York browsers?

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  The New York browsers.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  It sounds like a sports team. The Palo Alto semiconductors, the Palo Alto networks. Yeah, the Palo Alto networks.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  We should just, we should just rename our C corp to Hollywood Content Inc. Uh, but anyways.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Anyway, what they.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dee Dee says, few people know about Apple's acquisition of Palo Alto Semi in two thousand and eight, arguably the highest ROI acquisition in tech history. The $270 million price for 150 engineers laid the foundation for all the Apple silicon chips you see today that have generated over 500 billion in value to Apple. Uh, uh, and anyways, he's highlighting an article, uh, from two thousand and eight. An Apple spokesman said, Apple has agreed to buy boutique microprocessor design company called P A Semi. The company which is known for its design of sophisticated low-power chips could spell a new feature for Apple's flagship iPhone and possibly iPod products as well.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  These kind of acquisitions have created this set of circumstances that allow CEOs to justify these like un, like absolutely insane, um, cause when you get an acquisition, right?

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  The, the return is, is, can be as good as a, as a, you know, seed to unicorn, you know, venture investment.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  And so, but when you think about like the Instagram acquisition, the YouTube acquisition, uh, Palo Alto. Semi, right? These were

• 42:28John Coogan?

  A bit different. I I just feel like there is an alternative scenario where they don't, they don't buy P A Semi. Instead, they're just like poaching and and hiring one hundred and fifty people and it takes them like three years to get there, but they eventually wind up doing it. But maybe there's like in important I P. I don't know. I wonder, what do you think two hundred and seventy eight million dollars is in today's startup economy? Like, if you go back to two thousand eight, two hundred and seventy eight million dollars feels like a blockbuster acquisition to me. This is

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally. That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  But but is that is that a ten million, ten billion dollar acquisition, two billion dollar acquisition like?

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny that like M and A has like actually outstripped like inflation.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Well, a hundred percent. When you look at Scale AI, right, is a twenty, almost twenty billion dollar deal.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  For half the company.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I so I wonder, like, have we really had a hundred X increase in in valuations, basically? This makes me want to go dig into Apple's recent acquisitions because remember on the earnings call, Tim Cook said, hey, yeah, we're actually acquiring a company like every few weeks. Like, we've done basically one a month this entire year. And everyone's been like, oh, it's boring. Like, who cares? Like, like, these, they're not doing, they don't, they're not buying Anthropic or they're not buying Perplexity for ten billion. But if they have, if they have a net P A Semi in the in the portfolio right now and we just have a night clock it, like, that's going to be amazing. Yeah.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  So biggest M and A, I'm on on Gemini, biggest M and A of the

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Of two thousand eight?

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Two thousand and eight was HP acquires Electronic Data Systems.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  It was the biggest thirteen billion dollar deal.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Like a huge merger of math of companies.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  Oracle acquires B E A Systems, which was a business software company I'm not familiar with.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  But I love business software.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  Six point seven billion. Google acquired DoubleClick for three point one billion.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  That was the huge acquisition.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Which in hindsight, like, you know,

• 44:37John Coogan?

  It became a backbone of

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Incredible acquisitions. Yeah. And Business Objects was acquired by S A P.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  I like Business Objects. That's a good name.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Now make.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  It's like, we don't know how to name companies like this anymore.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  The business company.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  There was, yeah, a ton of like multi-billion dollar M and A that year.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Good.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  But it does feel like if Apple were to acquire, make a super strategic acquisition today, I mean, they were, who knows how real like the perplexity rumors were, right? They were, you know, Apple was under pressure to make an AI acquisition, but it didn't feel like Apple would ever get to the point where they would buy perplexity for 18 billion or whatever they wanted out of it.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  It's just odd for.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  It was like when you look at.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Buy an application layer company. They really don't buy a lot of applications. I mean, they bought Shazam, I believe, but a lot of times there, what they're buying are these underlying hardcore teams that are going to create the foundation of the next hardware wave for them. Like in the lead up to the Vision Pro, they acquired, I mean, you know, you know, someone who sold a company to them that went into their VR portfolio, correct? Like, uh, like that is the Apple playbook is we have a vision. We're going to do VR or augmented reality in a decade. Or we're going to do car or we're going to do custom silicon. And so let's start hiring, acquiring little, little investments here and there, here and there, and here and there.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  They're not just going to go out and be like, we're trying to buy Waymo or like, we're trying to buy the, the, the best asset. They're kind of the optimal.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they bought Beats when they bought Beats for.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  1.3 billion Beats was doing like 1.4 billion of revenue.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 46:22Jordi Hays?

  Trailing 12 months.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Again, it was a very, you know.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  So running the semi acquisition, Dee Dee has the story. P S M E specialized in power efficient chips with power PC chips that delivered 300% more performance per watt than Intel Xeon at the time, which I believe was their server chip. Founded by the late Dan Dobroplu. DEC Alpha and Strongarm Legend. In 2003, the team had expertise in low-power architecture that Intel couldn't match. The acquisition gave Apple the dream team that would create the A4 chip in 2010, launching Apple's silicon dominance. Key engineers like Jim Keller, G. Williams III, and Johnny Serugi architected the A series that powers

• 47:07John Coogan?

  two-plus-billion devices today, crushing Qualcomm's monopoly. This philosophy evolved into the M1's 20-plus-hour battery life that's powering this laptop right here.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  You getting 20 hours out of that bad boy?

• 47:21John Coogan?

  I'm plugged in right now. I'm not risking it while we're on the stream, but I think we could maybe get 20 hours if I was, you know, low, low dim screen brightness and maybe not connected to the Wi-Fi and maybe just in a text editor with a dark background the whole time. And it also had a 3.5x faster performance than Intel, one-third the power. The M line of chips today powers Macs, iPads, and Vision Pro. Without PSMI, there may never have been an iPhone processor independence, iPad dominance, no Apple Silicon Macs. The small investment, a Series A, a series B round today has generated 500-plus-billion in value. Strategic acquisitions like this can make or break the future of a business.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  And if you... What else? TurboPuffer. It's on the skit.

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  We puffin'.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  We're puffin'. Search, everybody. Serverless vector and full-tech search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  Pretty much used by every being company we've been able to find. There's a bunch of logos that they have that are absolutely crazy that they're not even listing on the website. So a lot more to come from TurboPuffer in the near future, but for now, get on it.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Did you want to go through this post by Ajnani Midhod and Drusin?

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I thought this was, I thought this was a couple of things you could read into this. So many, he says, "Many VC firms are being asked by their LPs how they so utterly miss the entire 20-25 cohort of frontier AI startups that are now category winners. Worse, they're being asked the same by next-gen founders. I've never seen so many traditional investors become obsolete so fast." It was like, if you think about, if you think back, like, the 20-

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  2020 through 2025, you had Zerp, where just every category was going crazy. And then you had like, like fintech was super hot, crypto was super hot. It was easy to get kind of like, if you were a generalist VC, a lot of generalists like decided, I'm going to go just be a crypto investor.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or, or I'm going to focus really heavily on fintech. And then you also had the, the sort of American dynamism boom, which people were, were drawn to in different ways. And, and, but when you look back at, um, um, when you look back at when some of these leading AI companies were started.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it really was like 2022 during like a time where a lot of VCs were like, trying to, you know, do like basically damage control on the, on their portfolios, right? They had funded a bunch of companies like at, at insane multiples. We started seeing, um, you know, a real kind of like correction in, um, uh, in venture and, and if, if you just like weren't really, didn't have your eye on the ball and weren't like seeing kind of the future. You missed a lot of.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. And when I see, when I think about the cohort of frontier AI startups, who do you put in that bucket in that cohort, 2020 to 2025? Like if you're a, if you're a traditional investor that doesn't want to become obsolete, what logos do you want on your portfolio page?

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  That signal to the next generation of founders and LPs that you did not utterly miss the entire 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, first example that came to mind was like Listen Labs, right? Six billion dollar company now, uh, started in 2022. Uh, seems like, you know, seems very obvious in hindsight, but if in 2022 you had like, funded, you know, 15 fintech companies and were trying to figure out what was going to happen to them as interest rates were spike, you know, spiking. Uh, and, and you were distracted by crypto, you just like.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  Didn't, you know, you weren't, there were people that were locked in on AI, right? The people that I, the people that I, that come to mind is like, people like a lot Gil, who are in a lot of these companies, right? Um, the, the, a lot of the platform funds, like, I mean, obviously, uh, uh, on, on Janey at, uh, at Andreessen is, is there in a lot of these companies, but they're multi-stage, right? So it didn't matter, you didn't have to catch them at, at, uh, Series A or seed, although they, they caught plenty. Um, and so, and then the other thing is like, if you're not in, if you're a platform VC and you weren't in any of the winning foundation models.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, what, what were you doing?

• 52:03John Coogan?

  So Postlaw has a fantastic story around early OpenAI. Thrive has a fantastic story around early OpenAI. Then there was that first, like, pre, like, right around the, right around the moment ChatGPT happened, I remember there was a big round and a lot of investors got in there and it was around, uh, it was in the tens of billions. And it was a crazy valuation to kind of come out of the gate with, there was already this Microsoft deal, it was a complex thing, you had to take a ton of risk on the nonprofit, for-profit conversion, but.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, there were, to be clear, there was plenty of reasons not to do.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  Not like, whether it was pricing, the structure, there was plenty of.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  The whole meme about, uh, the model, the foundation model layer will commoditize, right?

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  And so if you fell for that meme, you are not in.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  And then there was also the meme of like, the application layer, there's no value, there was a period where people.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Fell for both of these.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  It's like a mid-girved both of them. And then you're sitting here, you've got no foundation model bets, no, no application layer bets and you're, and, and you're like, well, even the new foundation models are too expensive, I can't do those. And then this company is just like a, trying to fast follow that company that already broke out.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yep. So, I mean, when I think about the, the 2020 to 2025 cohort of frontier AI startups, yeah, I think 11 Labs fits in there. I think Mid Journey, no one got into. I think, uh, I would put DeepMind, you couldn't invest because that was with Google, but it's got to be, uh, OpenAI, Anthropic, or a few of the other major, uh, like, like application layer companies that have done very well. And if you're in those, even if it was a growth round and you got in later, if you at least built a position and have something going on there, it seems like you kind of check this box. But it is, it is an interesting, it is an interesting question to phrase. You gotta, you gotta buy fifth app sometimes.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think all the breakout AI companies are already running on linear, and you should too.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Well, we have some news from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis. Another giant leap, Nvidia Ruben CPX Specialized Accelerator and Rack Inference Prefill Specialized GPU. Dylan says Nvidia has widened the gap for inference rack scale architecture yet again. Prefill specialized inference chips massively lower total cost to own per million input tokens on long context transformers. As usual, other AI chip upstarts will follow this with pre-fill specialized chips, but later. And so yet another bullish take for Nvidia. Everyone's competing. Following the AMD story has been interesting. Dylan's been, been pushing AMD

• 55:04John Coogan?

  to fix some of the bugs, get more serious about AI, really talk to the developer community, engage with the developer community. AMD was doing that, was seeing some, some positive, some positive early signs of being taken more seriously. George Hots was on the team a little bit, but, but has since like pulled back and, you know, Jensen sees Semi Analysis too, and can see, oh, AMD is coming for my lunch, I'm gonna step on the gas. And it seems like he has. So, congrats to everyone over at Nvidia for putting on a, putting on absolute clinic.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Jack Fields says, well, he's quoting Sam, there's not a single person in the world who needs a two terabyte iPhone 17 Pro Max. Jack Field says slaps car roof, this baby can fit so much other in it.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Is that a thing?

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you look at, if you look at like storage, there's like a category called other.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  And is it big? Is that just all the eyewear?

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  It usually is.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  It's a bad sign if I have other going on. I have a one terabyte iPhone and I don't have any other. I have no other. My, my, my phone is applications and then

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Other, I think I'm looking now. I don't, I don't have

• 56:24John Coogan?

  System data.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't have it anymore, but there it used to be.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  Oh, a little throwback.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  It used to be, it used to be a much bigger.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Well, they've done a lot better exposing where the data is actually stored. Um, I think, uh, you know, the two terabyte phone that feels like it's for, um, someone who

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Beast filming, you know, his entire.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and specifically the new phones, forty eight megapixel cameras, uh, Gen Lock. So you can run them for a long time, better heat management. So you can probably record for ten hours if it's plugged in, no problem. And then you're saving all that footage and you can record in raw video now, raw, so that those are huge files. So there is a world where if you're using this as a production tool, um, I saw another take that was like the, the iPhone seventeen Pro gets you ready for the two thousand dollar iPhone. Like the, like mentally, that's a, that's a threshold, that's a Rubicon that everyone has to cross and, uh, and, and maxing it out and offering that level of performance and saying, hey, look,

• 57:24John Coogan?

  we, we put pro on it. Like you have to be using this in a professional context. Like you should be expensing this. And for someone like Mr. Beast who says, yeah, I want

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  So funny. Every, every, every camera company just being like, or Apple's not a, you know, threat. Like they're really, they're really, you know,

• 57:39John Coogan?

  He might be placing that with the iPhone soon. I, I think the

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Watch out Sony.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Watch out Sony for sure.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  Cook wants your lunch.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  He's cooking. He's cooking. Uh, Naveen Rao is leaving Databricks, a little bit of a trade deal, a hundred billion dollar startup to build a next generation computer to shrink AI compute costs. And Databricks plans to invest. That's bullish. Uh, Databricks sits around one hundred billion dollars and just raised one B. They're also at a four billion dollar run rate. Congrats to Databricks, which we had our gong. The core problem for the AI industry is that large models are limited by memory bandwidth, internet interconnect latency and power. So every token can be, can produce, can be too expensive. A purpose-built computer may tackle those costs by bringing memory closer to compute, wiring chips with faster links. Is this data center focused or? Or or something that would actually sit on your on your desktop.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Does this is this a George Hots tiny box competitor? I'm not exactly sure, but congrats to Naveen Rao on the new gig. We will be following the story and monitoring the situation.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Big move. We'll try to get him on.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  When you sell those computers, make sure you're on numeralhq.com, Naveen. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Otto van von tweet mark.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Tweet mark.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Says, can you shorten an entire country?

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Referring to Albania.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Albania is appointing an AI generated governor, government minister to govern the country's finances. Apparently they've had so many issues with with like corruption and fraud. They're just like, oh, it's just like make an AI.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, no one's gonna, no one's gonna prompt inject.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  The top comment is their their alternative is Albania.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't I've never really I don't I don't think I know many Albanians.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, Eric Affleck has some wild stories about going to Albania, I believe. I don't want to dox too much, but he has some he has some funny stories. Hopefully we can get him to share them on the show.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  The idea of like, let's just use an AI to to to like clean this up. It's like that's who's prompting it like, are they reliable?

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, what if they're, I mean, Miramarati is Albanian.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  About Albanian Americans, so they could get thinking machines.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  It would be a pretty crazy story of what was it called Sovereign AI? It'd be a sovereign AI story.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know if they're claiming that it's that it's their national champion. Yeah, Albanian Americans.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  Well, if if someone in Albania needs to chat with someone about their tax return, maybe they could get on fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  John, I've been I've been informed that back home in the studio, the whole team is clapping along with us during the during the.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Hopefully we could be audio mix in and everyone everyone goes for it. Gary Tan had a post, AI startup founders tout a winning formula, no booze, no sleep, no fun. But Gary Tan disagrees about the no fun, though. And this is from the Wall Street Journal. San Francisco.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  This is the vibe right now.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Startup founding. And we talked to a few of these folks. One of these guys came on the show just at Y C demo day, actually. So fascinating. And, and this was, uh, this was the second, uh, this is clearly like a, a story that was inspired by that previous story of that, that, that founder who said that the vibes nine nine six, no run hard, lift heavy, marry early, that whole, that whole viral quote. Uh, this is, uh, probably like downstream coverage of that. But, uh, in San Francisco, startup founder Marty Kausus was at the office on Sunday. Where else would he be? Uh, Kausus, 28 years old, recently posted on LinkedIn that he put in three 92 hour weeks in a row. He went on vacation once, he said, but flew home early because he was

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  too stressed about work. His goal is to build a $10 billion company in 10 years. The motive isn't purely financial. There are easier ways to make money. This, uh, it isn't part of a social mission either. We built customer support software. Uh, it's not like this grand vision that we're saving the world somehow. He compared his pursuit to a board game, one he wants to win. I could be a programmer working at a big tech company, he said, but that doesn't sound cool. Instead, he raised $51 million for Pylon, an AI startup he co-founded. Congrats, I was going for that. Um, yeah, I was just reflecting on this, this, this whole vibe and the coverage of this vibe and thinking about when I got to Silicon Valley and what was similar and what was different. And so.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  You didn't have a PR person working over you. Coverage. That was your mistake, John. I, I know you only raised like 17 grand in your first round.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Raised $17,000 and, uh, there was no concept of going to the office because the office was my bedroom and my co-founder lived in the same bedroom as me. So we had two beds in the same room and we would wake up and go sit at the same desk next to each other.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  That's like a real lock in because you don't even have a private life, right?

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  There's nothing.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  You have nothing.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Nothing. It's purely like, there was, there's one local bar that we went to once in Sunnyvale because there was nothing to do. Uh, but we would, we would go outside and we'd throw the football.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Big skin.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  The pigskin. We would go outside and get some sun and throw the football back and forth and then go back inside and just program. And my, and my day was literally like wake up at noon and because you don't have any calls, wake up at noon, program until four AM, fall asleep, do the same thing the next day, seven days a week. And there was no, there was no alternative. And there's other, we were also in this weird, I mean, also I wasn't 28, I was, I was 21 at the time.

• 1:03:23Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because saying like I put in like three, like obviously respect to Marty, but saying I put in three 92 hour weeks is another way you could say like, for the last three weeks, I've slept and ate and done normal human things for about 12 hours a day.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  And the other 12 hours I spent working.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't hit the same as three, you know.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is, it is wild. Um, but I don't know. I mean, in, in general, like if this is a, if this is, there was, there was a time in Silicon Valley also that, uh, you could raise enough money that you could just immediately be on like a party circuit. And like clearly this is a step in the right direction away from that. It's like actually taking the business seriously. So hugely bullish overall. Uh, it's just funny like thinking about like, like the money flowing, like there were not that many companies that in 2012 that were raising, uh, like double digit millions, but then there weren't that many companies making money. Like we certainly weren't, we had no users. So like, who was going to fund us?

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Like $17,000 was the right amount of money to give us. Like, and also like, it's not like we were being recruited by big tech. Like if I tried to get a job there, I'd be like, no.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Capital markets were efficient.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  They were, they were. Like I didn't deserve more than 17K. I wasn't that experienced. Like I was just trying to, you know, like do something, build, build a website.

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  It is a, it is a, you know, it's very real that like a lot of founders would benefit from like having their first fundraise be like a hundred thousand dollars, which is just enough for them to like hack for two years and not have to get a job.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  But the current, the current state of the capital markets means that if you're like talented and charismatic and compelling, and you have an interesting idea, you can get at least a million, probably well beyond that.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know, at Demo Day, like, uh, it was very obvious.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  For the most part, when I, you could tell, I pretty much was guessing every time. I was like, let me guess your rounds closed.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  All those, yeah.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, in, in, in, in 2012, like I think they were probably like. Five or 10 teams that like raise solid rounds coming out of like an 80 team batch. Like it was, it was not, it was not snap your fingers and the money shows up. The, I mean, the hottest, like most overheated round was done at like 60. And everyone was like, this is a bubble. This is insane. There was one company.

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, a company was.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  It was a company called Virul and they were actually really good at viral videos. And they, they were great at video production and they built an ad network and were doing sort of like some programmatic ads. So it was more like an ad business than like, I, I don't think they ever fully stuck the landing on like becoming like a major platform. Like I, I don't think that they IPO'd or anything. I know the founder's done quite well and has, I, I think a number of businesses. But uh, um, they, they launched a few like extremely great launch videos. They, I feel like they almost, you could almost go back and credit them with like creating the original launch video. You should look up V I R O O L, like launch video on YouTube.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  V I R O O L?

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Virul, yeah. Vi, V I R O O L. And the whole idea was like, they would get you to go viral. And so you would pay them and then they did.

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  It's still a company, I mean, it's still.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Still going, it's still cooking. Well, A- A- Alex Deb- Debalov, I believe is the founder, uh, great guy.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  So I have 50, LinkedIn says, uh, I don't know, this company looks pretty dead.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Okay, well, but, uh, I mean.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's, it's now called, uh, I guess it was a.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  I mean, the founder, it was super young and, and I met him in college and it, you know, was just like, he really was the type of person that you would want to fund at 60. Because like he was making money in his dorm room, like hand over fist too. Like had actually scaled the ad network and was like, bring in real revenue and real profits. It was just maybe like, it wasn't necessarily going to turn into like, you know, adwords. Because he didn't have like a Google attached to the front of it. It's still like a super impressive business, right? But they had worked with this, uh, video production company called Glass and Marker. Which I wound up working with later, sort of like a precursor to Sandwich Video, a precursor to a Jason Carmen production and was particularly good at, at creating this like,

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  just super cinematic, like Hollywood level video production for like a launch video. And they, they, they put out a few that were really good. I remember that like SWAT team going in, pulling in like this like blue, uh, this like blue goo that was like radioactive. And it was like, you gotta get the formula to go viral. Uh, it was great. Are you throwing them on there? Are you throwing it on there? Viru, V I R O O L. Alex Debelov, if you want to come on the show and tell us the full story, uh, hit me up.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  The moon, probably the moon. Well, they, yeah, they were, they were going to the moon. Um, yeah, the, the other funny thing that I, I like is, is, uh, so like, uh, you know, the, the, the, these teenagers that they interviewed, they said, uh, the brass ring is a trillion dollar company with a global user base. To grab it, they rarely drink, scoff at work-life balance and are locked in a 24/7 competition to be or appear to be the most obsessed. Um, the, there's a framing, there's a one framing, which is like, I don't drink because like, it's like, I've done the research and it's a carcinogen and it's bad for my health. Um, there's another one, which is like, I, I don't drink because it's like sacrificing because like I care about work. Like for me, for instance, like we would drink every drop of alcohol that we could afford.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  It was just not that much.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  So we had like three beers a month because like that was what we could afford. And we, and we did not, it was like, yeah, like if you're going to Costco and getting like a huge box of ramen, like it's going to be a consideration if you take the 30 rack in the, in the bag. That's going to hurt your burn rate. When you're on $17,000 for six months, like an extra 30 bucks in beer is like material. It's, it's a serious.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was hacking Chipotle, you know, with the like double beans, double rice because it didn't add anything and then, and then.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  You're not being like, yeah, throw a Corona in there with my, with my meal at Chipotle. No way. Um, but.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  I used to go to, I used to go to, um, this is. Will be funny to you now, but I used to go to the first like 20 trips I took to Arowan, I didn't go in the building.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  I would just bring jugs of water to fill up in this thing outside.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  And I'd pull up with my car that had like 200,000 miles on it and just like, just be like, you know, carrying these huge jugs of water.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Fond memories.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Here's, here's the trade off. Um, why would I go to drink at a bar if I can be in, building a company? Um, I mean, it is the right trade off and it is the thing that you don't want to lose as the capital markets loosen, right?

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  This is such a, this, uh, all the people that are, uh, screenshotting this article.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  Why would I go drink at a bar if I could be building a company? That is a really.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, there, there is a little bit of this that's like, uh, that's like, you, you, the, the, the whole, the whole question the Wall Street Journal is clearly asking here is like.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't even like, I don't like bars and I don't like drinking, but this is still a funny quote.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I understand what you're saying and I understand what people are, are, are screenshotting it about, but the, the, the interesting thing is like, if the money starts flowing in Silicon Valley, like the thing that you would definitely not want to lose is like the time in the office. Like the time actually working, like that's the worst thing to lose. Um, and so, and yeah. Even if you have to justify it in this like, you know, psychological way.

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Uh, it's, it's good not to lose that.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Uh, because as soon as you actually go to the bar every night, like.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Definitely not building.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was thinking, I was thinking like, like I've always felt I had, you know, somewhat of a balanced life, right? I've had, we, we, we realistically, we work like 60 hours a week and that like we leave home at.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere around five.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Pretty balanced.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Get home around 5:30. Um, and then obviously working randomly on, on, you know.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Nights, weekends, et cetera. But I was thinking, you know, people say like, social life, work, like, you know, family, like, pick two.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  And I realized recently, it took me a while to realize like how much I sacrificed like my, uh, I like social life, right? Cause I feel like I have a social life at work and, and I'm lucky that a lot of the people obviously consider every person on our team a friend and, uh, and the people that I invest with are friends and the people that I work with are friends. But, um, yeah, you do have to, this, this is just, um, this culture of like sacrifice everything. But the company works really well when you're 20, when you're, when you're in your early twenties, mid twenties, depending on when you.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  I think we, I think we found the ultimate killer in this article. Uh, Hassan Ula, he works at a founders Inc., a waterfront campus in Fort Mason that provides desks, a hardware lab, game room, uh, stage area for hackathons. He lives on one Uber eats meal per day to save time and avoid cooking. Uh, Ula pays $700 a month to live at a former office building that was converted to a living and workspace for about 20 residents. The beds, which are clustered in a common area are fully enclosed pods. He literally lives in the pod. Um, with a privacy curtain, similar to a train sleeper car with the curtain shut, his pod gets pitch black, letting him sleep. Days after working all night, this guy is a killer. I'm betting on him.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  This is not a LARP. $700 a month is so little to live on in San Francisco. I assume that's where this is founders Inc., Fort Mason.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  He's living in the pod.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  He's living in the pod. He's locked in.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  It is funny. It is funny to do, to do.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  Shout out to this guy.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  You would think he could maybe eat two meals if he didn't do Uber Eats and he just walked to, to grab some food, but it's too locked in.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  Too locked in. Yeah. I, I think it's probably worth the trade off. Um, but yeah, I mean.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  This is still, I gotta put, I gotta, I gotta say like, getting delivery is still an extreme luxury. Still a luxury. Back in back, I would not when when.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  We used to.

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  When when I I would not let. I was like on a like, once a week, like, treat yourself to to Chipotle type of thing. And otherwise, it was like, yeah, there's, we have like chicken breast and rice at home.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, I have my own head being like, uh, you know, the quote, the meme of like, your, your, your mom says you have, you know, X, Y, Z at home. But that was like in my own head. I'd be like, I have food in the fridge. I'm not. I'd be and I'd be guilty, you know, being, you know, ordering, uh, ordering.

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  No, I I remember one, one, one night I was up like really late working. I boil some water in a, in a pot to make ramen. And I, and I got sucked into a coding problem. And I let the water boil and evaporate, and it destroyed the pan. And it was like, that's our CapEx out the window. We just devastating it to depreciation. Like, we were expecting to depreciate that asset over two years. And now we have to buy another pan. Like, what are we gonna do? We don't have a pan. Pans are expensive. Money doesn't grow on trees. We're, you know, we only have seventeen K. This is rough.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Kausis, the, the guy, uh, the, the original guy from Pylon, um, is on the Brian Johnson diet.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Well, he's raised fifty one million dollars. And to be clear, I do think that like, all of this is proportional. Like, if your business has grown to the point where you can raise ten million or fifty million, like, you do not be, you do not need to be living in the pot. Like, pay yourself a reasonable wage. As soon as we raised real money and we're making real revenue, like, we were in like decent apartments with cleaning and like with.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's amazing to feel like you, you, you have like a relatively, the, the lifestyle of like a corporate athlete.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Or or even just an entry level corporate athlete, but it still feels like a massive luxury.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, my, my.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Eight hundred square feet in a apartment yourself.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I first moved to LA, I had a apartment, my apartment, it was a, it was a, um. Two bedroom apartment that I had a roommate. So I felt lucky to have my own room, but I had no windows in the room because the window opened up to like a common area at eye level. So if I had my, if I didn't have like, I've literally put cardboard up. If I didn't have cardboard up, people would just see into my bedroom. I was like, and then

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  super dark. But this, this quote is hilarious. He said, his ideal employee for a sales role at the startup is a quote unquote PhD, poor, hungry and desperate.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  I like that. That's good.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Grinders.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  You gotta get grinders, people that wanna be on the, on the upside, take risks.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there, there should be a term for somebody who fasts until their next like steak sales dinner. It's like they only eat during, when they're closing. I only eat when I'm closing, like a real hunter on the on the savanna.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Pretty crazy. Niko Lachwaf, twenty five dollar, uh, twenty five years old, wants to build a trillion dollar company, uh, with the goal of replacing traditional insurance companies. His father is a lawyer from the insurance company. So he only hires people willing to work seven days a week. Of his forty plus employees, around thirty are ex-founders. That is a crazy stat, just because like, it really speaks to the, to the amount of founders that exist in the Bay Area now. Like, in, in, you could not, I mean, this happened, like, are, uh, are you familiar with the Y-scraper? Instead of the sky, skyscraper, there was, there was a, this is in maybe two thousand

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  eight, two thousand ten, uh, there was one building where all of the Y C companies lived after they graduated from Mountain View and went to San Francisco, called it the Y-scraper. And, and there was, and there was enough of, so you have, you have stories about like Coinbase working right next to the Airbnb guys. I don't know if that's exactly right, but like you, you could imagine a few different big companies coming. And it was like, if one company failed, it would just be like, okay, come over to this company, like join forces. But, but you couldn't necessarily do that to the tune of seventy five percent of the workforce in the first forty. That's, that, that, that feels new and it feels like a, a, an example of how

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  how much more popular entrepreneurship is these days. Um, it says he lives at the What he lives at the office, Lakuwa said, who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers. Employees share similar feelings, though not a work requirement, Lakuwa said, two thirds of our early employees got corgi tattoos. That is hardcore. Wow.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  I have no tattoos. I've never been big into that world, but that is certainly a commitment.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Hopefully you own the IP.

• 1:18:22Jordi Hays?

  So interesting that this company, I'm on Nico's LinkedIn and this is a stealth startup still.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Well, he's not.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  You're not. You're in the.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  They're getting.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  You're in the journal and you're tat it up. I think you're safe to come out of stealth.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, hopefully you have the IP locked up. I went through Y C with a with a company called Pair that was a, I think it was like an app for you and your significant other. And so it was imagine a social network, basically all the features of iMessage, you know how now in iMessage you can like see all the photos that you've shared between you and one person. So I can pull up like our iMessage and I can go into that info panel and see like, here are all the links that Georgie sent. Here are all the images. I can send you little stickers and all sorts of different stuff. Pair was that for like a romantic couple. So you could like draw to each other, had all these like fun little games and stuff.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  And Pair wound up getting sued by Pair Networks. And they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like we are a consumer dating, like messaging app for like a husband and wife to share their life together. You're a networking company, Pair Networks, like you sell into data centers.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Like, why are you suing us? And they were like, no, you're a technology company. We're a technology company. You have to change your name.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  And so they did, and they became couple. And it was like this huge, huge difficult thing. So anyway, the importance of getting your name, IP locked down before you get the tattoo.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  We have an important name to add. So Senna was in the YouTube chat. It says, can we get founders podcast on the board?

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  We didn't add you because this was so schizo.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  I you, but you are really the godfather of podcasting, created the.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  I don't think I don't think we can see up there. I don't know. We'll have to have to see we can't. We can't see you up there. You have a ton of space to your left, though. So get down and go keep going to the left past vibe coding and past discord to the left past Larry Ellison. That whole area you got like three feet to work with over there. You can draw massive stuff. There we go. Here we go. Oh, yeah, this is good going downwards. This is perfect.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm seeing everything. We're good. Lockwell regrets getting his Columbia University degree, he said, because he wasn't solving societal problems in class. I always want to do the maximally ambitious thing I can think of and make the biggest impact possible. Yuan, the Corgi co-founder, said her life too centers around work, which across the startup scene is populated largely by men. From a personal perspective, I don't mind it as much, but it does suck to see not that many women in startups. Jared Friedman, partner at Y Combinator, said the work ethic and energy of San Francisco's young founders feels like a return to the early days of the internet, and I agree with this. This is a great take. When people slept under their desks at companies such as PayPal, I actually see it coming as a as a full circle moment.

• 1:21:20John Coogan?

  AI is probably 10x as big. Friedman said the tech.

• 1:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's very helpful if you have, you know, five to 10 other heavily funded companies in your category, and so capital is not really constrained for anyone. And it just comes down to raw execution.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  Do we just conference Senna in right now on this?

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got to ask him about.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  I got to call Senna and get him getting get him to tell us about the sleeping under your desk. Should I give him a call? Senna, let's see, let's see if he's available. I'm calling him. I'll put him up if he's available. He's in the YouTube chat, so hopefully you can come on the show. I totally am saying, hey, how you doing?

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  You're live.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Did you need a call me?

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're live.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  We saw you in the, we saw you in the chat.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  We got Nat Elyson.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  We're doing, uh, we're.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Happy Friday, yeah?

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  We're doing a whole deep dive on this Wall Street Journal article about the young founders in San Francisco who are working 12 hours a day, six days a week. There's a bunch of examples.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we wanted to ask you, is hard work important?

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Or is it overrated?

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  You wrote an article about people working part-time?

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  No, no, no, really hard.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Working hard.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  And the article.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Being focused on the job.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  The article is framed as like, is like, are they working too hard a little bit? Or like, is this a LARP? Are they pretending? And, uh, we wanted to go to the source and get the, get the final answer.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  They do with the other.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  That's what Jordy said.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  As I said, it's like, put differently, they're, they're spending eight hours a day sleeping, four hours a day, you know, working. We're doing whatever they want.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Watching Netflix, I guess.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, what would I, what would my, what would our lives look like if we didn't have five kids?

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, and wives that we.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  I don't know, yeah.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Love dearly.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Sorry, that's part-time, buddy.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  996 is part-time. Breaking. David Senra has called it. Working 996 is considered part-time in the Founders Podcast world. It's good.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Ever, I know you're into like bodybuilding. Did you ever read The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger?

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  No, I should. Sounds fantastic.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Okay, so, um, somebody posted like The Great Lock-in and it's just like nine episodes of Founders.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, I saw that.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  I think. So one of them, I think, is Arnold's. So Arnold wrote two autobiographies. One when he was 70, which is fine.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  But the way more extreme one he wrote when he was 30.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. That's young.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  So the first half of it is really like 110, kind of 10-page biography, right? Autobiography. And then the second half is like his workout routine, which is like another 100 pages. But, uh, it basically, he would, you know, people were just like, yeah, I work 12 hours a day. He's like, so what else did you do with all the fucking time?

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  It's like.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  You're not working out.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  I I I don't want to get kicked off stream, but uh he tells us I'm gonna do the PG version of this.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Like, this is before he made it to America, right?

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  So he would go to like him and his other bodybuilder friends.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  They'd go to like this forest out in Austria or maybe in Germany. And they would bring a bunch of women and they'd bring a bunch of like beer, food, like schnitzel or whatever that is.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Schnitzel, okay.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they would essentially like go out there, they'd strip off their clothes and they'd like lift like tree trunks and like they'd swim in the and they swim in the uh

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Lake or something.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  In the lake and they were just essentially just work out all day. Uh, I was like, this guy's

• 1:24:48Jordi Hays?

  Worked out all day.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  Uh, who's the who's the hardest working founder purely by hours working, hours spent working on a single company that you've ever studied?

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  E- Elon probably, cuz if the the how Elon, thanks for um reading and covering that episode.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  It was so good.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  You guys did a good job on it.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  It was awesome.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  So there there actually had a really interesting conversation recently with uh, somebody everybody knows who's been a founder for multiple decades and I and he he came up in the technology industry and he's been there forever.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  And I actually asked him that question. I was just like, who's the greatest like entrepreneur you ever dealt with or you like you knew about? And uh, he's like, listen, you might not like him, you might not like working with him, but it was undoubtedly, without hesitation, a young Bill Gates.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Young Bill Gates.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  That would be my other answer if it wasn't Elon.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  It shifts from the time they started Microsoft in that little strip, that little um strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  The guy until he left the company, like I don't think he did a single other thing.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Do you think that Bill Gates hardcore uh founder mode era was defined by his ruthlessness with regard to deal making or actually the amount of hours he spent in the office? Like, have you heard stories about early Microsoft being this nine nine six culture, working twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day? Or was it strictly that when he went into every single negotiation, he was willing to do anything to win?

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  So like he's not working twelve hours a day.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  He's not.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  So I'll give you a preview, okay? Um, I'm the next episode I'm working on right now is about a young Bill Gates. Yeah. It's gonna, the title has to be something with hardcore because.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  They were.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  So he would work thirty six hours straight until he couldn't literally stay awake and then he just crash and sleep in his office for like a few hours and pop back up.

• 1:26:44Jordi Hays?

  That's hardcore.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  It's like.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  That's, I don't want to hear about, oh, I slept, I got a good night's sleep, but I'm, I'm, I'm a grinder, but I got a great night's sleep last night.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so like, let me, but you're a.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, you're a grinder, let me see your sleep score.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Better be in the single digits.

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Better be in the single digits.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  But let me tell you one of the funniest stories about Bill Gates. So the best book written about him is, it's called Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the Making of Microsoft Empire. So the same guys that wrote that, essentially it's a bi, it's a biography, the first thirty five years was like, then they, it, it was so successful, they wrote a follow up. The follow up book is not good, but there is a story in the follow up book that is one of my favorite Bill Gates stories of all time. And the, the thing I, the thing I would say about Bill Gates is like, he has a ruthless competitive drive that would terrify people. And so one of his main competitors is this French guy, I can't remember his name. Uh, they would like, you know, they were going to war over and over again. And they would go, they would, the only time they did like interact, they'd find themselves at the same like computer conferences.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  And so he, he sees Bill Gates sitting on a folding chair in the corner of this computer conference alone, looking at something. And remember this, they're like head out, head to head competitors, you know, now this guy's completely disappeared. And so he goes over and he wants to say hi to Bill. And then he walks up to him and he realizes that Bill's in the corner by himself staring at a picture of the guy.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Of his.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Of, of his competitor. He was assassinated.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, next time I see you, I'm gonna make, uh, you my profile picture when I call you your phone's background. Remind you, remind you of me constantly.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Hard drive, the way I described him in the first episode I made about him on episode like

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  is that Bill Gates is a Genghis Khan in a Mr. Rogers costume.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  There's a few ways to read that.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  That is, uh, that's hardcore. That is, that is hardcore. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for giving us more context on what it means to hardcore, be hardcore and grind in an entrepreneurship context. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  Thanks for calling me and I'm just gonna say publicly what I said to you guys yesterday after seeing what you did in your sessions. I'm super proud of you guys.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  Uh, you're absolutely crushing it. I just don't, I don't think you'd have any panel in involved. I'm very curious who you take this for these years.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, brothers.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  We'll catch up soon. See you.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Always good to have a guest, even when you thought we weren't gonna have a guest.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  They said we couldn't do it. They said it was impossible.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Impossible, but you just got two random mics in the conference room that you could have a guest on your show, but you can't. Um, anyway, uh, honestly, congrats to everyone who got mentioned in this article. I think there'll be some snarky takes. I think there'll be some supportive takes. Uh, overall, it seems pretty high leverage to, uh, throw up a flag that says, hey, I'm working hard on my startup, get mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. They probably had to take, what, half an hour off to do a little phone call for this. Um, and overall, probably pretty high leverage effort. So, uh, congrats to all the, all the young grinders in San Francisco working 80-hour weeks. Uh, good luck to you all and, uh, and congrats on your first Wall Street Journal mention.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  I've had many, hopefully.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  And if you want to help grow your startup, get on Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Um.

• 1:30:32Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that, uh? Polly Market is getting offers set up to 10 billion.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Whoa, Polly Market is of course a sponsor. What is volume just going through the roof? Isn't, aren't most of Polly Market's metrics kind of public because you can just look at the chain, right?

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, check the chain.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Driving growth?

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  Chain.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  That is, that's a good moment.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  They're about to be, you know, launching their app in the US. Everything to date has been international.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  That is a big catalyst, yeah.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  So, a lot going on.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  They're, they're obviously duking it out with Kelsey, but it's great to see Shane on an absolute run.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Matt and the whole team.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Put more, put more, put more cash in the coffers, more opportunity to, to build and, and scale the business. It's been a fantastic data source for us. Of course, Polly Market powers the ticker that you see on the show all three hours long every day. And it's been, it's been a source of, of insight for us through our entire partnership. So, thank you to Polly Market for sponsoring us.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Rehat has a funny screenshot, says, "Design is not just what it..." And you can't really see it.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  This is no way this is real.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Has to be fake. I think he's memeing some liquid glass nonsense and some poor design, mixing up the design. But he got 6K likes, potentially with the fake news. I don't know. If this is real.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  There's no way that.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  There's no way this is real, right? Anyway, we'll leave it at that. You're going to figure out.

• 1:32:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a good joke.

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, in other good news, Kaz over at Shopify now open door, is replying to random posts on Twitter, saying, "Email me. I'm still at Shopify until tomorrow. Here's my email." And, and Fad says, "Bro, this guy grinding to the last minute. Love this level of dedication." You know, open doors all over the place. The stock's way up. It's become this meme stock that is, is fascinating because, I was talking to Brandon about this with. He was saying like, there's something interesting about the Open Door story that is this like retail army driving a meme stock.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  The valuation is basically, I mean, Keith was actually steel manning it, saying that as a, as a revenue multiple, it's not that crazy. It's in the same territory as some other big public companies. I think he cited Robin Hood at 31x revenue or something like that. And so.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what company?

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  So, so Open Door. He was saying that like, Open Door is not disconnected from the financials if you, if you, if we can deliver on the growth and we can deliver on a revitalization plan, right? That was the, that, that was his pitch. And, and so, and so.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  But, but he wa, he wanted to fix it on the revenue multiple?

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  I think it was the revenue multiple.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  You, you, you can go and look at his reply. But basically, uh, I, I, I don't think anyone, anyone disputes the fact that Open Door is trading very differently than it was trading last year. Last year it was trading like a company that was in manager mode with a new CEO and, and had gotten kind of hit in the post Zerp era and had not done particularly well across a couple of quarters and was, I mean, the stock was, you know, Jim Cramer would probably say the stock's in the dumps. But the stock is no longer in the dumps. It's been on an absolute tear. People have been making fortunes off of it. And the question is, um, you know, what do they have to deliver? Well, they clearly have to go, you know, they have to kick it into a completely different gear.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  And it's just exciting to see Kaz take the CEO role and be cut from a very different cloth. Like, uh, I've interacted with Kaz. He's been, uh, I've actually emailed him at this email and he solved a problem for me on Shopify in like two seconds. Uh, he almost, he basically saved my business. So, I, I mean, he is, he's a remarkable operator.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very aligned, aligned comp structure as well.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  He's really, he'll only make money, making a salary that like a dollar.

• 1:34:41John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. Uh, and so people will debate the valuation. Um, it's clearly trading of, of, on the back of a completely different narrative with a completely set of investors that are setting the valuation. It's now valued, it was, it was valued very low. Now it's valued very richly. Um, but it's, it is interesting to see, uh, some real. Legit folks in Silicon Valley step in and say, hey, we're going to do the turnaround thing. You don't often see this. Most time when, most times when a VC incubates or backs a company and it gets out into the public markets and they're able to distribute the shares and they're able to sell their position down, if that company does not do well over

• 1:35:24John Coogan?

  the long term, they are looking for the next startup to go in and take a second run at that business. Right? So if I, I'm, I'm, I'm not going to be able to think of a perfect example, but I mean, even just think about like, like, uh, the story of Square. Like Square was Keith Roy as well. Right? He was in that. It's like, he wasn't saying like, okay, I sold PayPal. I need to get back into PayPal to do more fintech stuff. He was like, no, like I'm fine to do another startup. Um, and there's, and there's a variety of, of stories where, uh, someone's, someone's taken a company, taken it to acquisition or taken it all the way to going public. And then the VCs and some of the entrepreneurs

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  and some of the early employees say, hey, we still really like this. Uh, we like this industry. I mean, maybe the best example is, is Ramp and Paribus. Like Eric Lyman and Kareem Atiya took a run at, at, you know, understanding like the financial credit, uh, you know, how people spend money, saving people's time and money. On the consumer side with Paribus, sold the company and we're like, there's more opportunity here. Let's keep going. And so I feel like that's the default playbook in Silicon Valley is that once, once you've bet on an industry, you've bet on a category and you've backed the, the right founders, you've gotten your return, you've returned capital to your LPs either

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  through IPO or an M and A process. You're not saying, let's go back into that same structure. You're saying, let's start again. Let's start a new company. But this is, this is an interesting twist in that is that you could imagine Kaz saying, hey, I've been at Shopify for a while. I want to start a, a real estate technology company.

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  And so Keith is going to write me a check. Coastal is leading the series A. I got a couple of people that I've worked with before. No, he's coming into open doors. He's actually turning it around. So it's a little bit, it's a little bit different, although the, the GameStop story was somewhat similar because the, the CEO of GameStop had founded Chewy, I believe, and was a very successful entrepreneur. And it was a similar example of like someone, there were still a lot of questions about GameStop. Like can they turn that company around? But the stock performance was obviously crazy, but it was not a, it was not a purely financial person stepping into the role. It was an experienced CEO who'd built a real company and to like at real scale.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, I don't know if you have a, I don't know if you have more of a take on open door or Shopify or anything like that, but I've been.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited to see what Kaz does.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  Doing it. It'll be interesting. How did you sleep last night? Did you get to catch up? We need the soundboard because I got a 92.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  How did you pull that off?

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  I got a 92.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  I guess you're way closer to the airport.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  I got to bed really early. Uh, how's your, how's your sleep experience? I mean, using an eight sleep, by the way, eightsleep.com. Buy the one tee, 30 hour risk free, file free, returns free.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  I got only six hours and 27 minutes.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  I'll leave a five star review for eight sleep, the app. I love the app. It is fantastic.

• 1:38:30Jordi Hays?

  I am currently.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  Potentially you're, you're going into a big.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm currently ill. Yeah. But I, I have the, I have the HRV of a, of a dead person.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  It's terrible. Uh, well, lock in this weekend, get some sleep. We will be fortunately home later this evening. This is fun. iPhone air bend test on Tom's guide. Icon says, an Apple exec casually throwing their product across the room and not flinching at all when the host misses and it clanks off of the wooden table is insane. Apple is extremely confident in the.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  I looked this one up. I, I, I looked this up because I was like, again, it's like a parody account. It looks like,

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  It looks like it's. Fake video, but it's a real, real.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  No, it's real. They're talking. They've, I mean, the, do you remember Bend Gate? Do you remember this with the iPhone? I think it was iPhone six.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  They went, it was the thinnest iPhone ever and it got truly thin, like well, way thinner than this back then. They went, they were thin maxing. So they, they were width mining. I don't know. Is that right? They went super thin and the problem was that if you applied a little bit of pressure, you could actually bend it and break it. Like pretty easily, like you could do this and it would.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Now it's titanium.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  And now it's titanium. It's thicker. There's more structural support inside, but the question with the iPhone era was obviously like, hey, you're back to being super thin. Is this thing going to bend? And they just tossed it across the, the conference room and, uh, the, and the host tries to bend it and he's unsuccessful. And I think they figured it out. Um, anyway, they probably designed it in a Avengers themed office. Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal's mansion section today?

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Of course I did.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  4.4 million dollar renovation helped one Winnipeg couple turn their 12,000 square foot home into a, into an experience and a story. The Wall Street Journal says, "An Avengers office in a Frank Sinatra garage. They built their own Disneyland." I love this. I love when people go crazy with the, the renos and make the homes their own.

• 1:40:28John Coogan?

  Some Disney fanatics get their fix by visiting theme parks. Tech entrepreneur Jeff Fetts and his husband Chris Fetts wanted to live in their own Magic Kingdom. The setting for their dream home, a 12,000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the Tuxedo area of Winnipeg.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta ask you. I'm going to scare me right now. What's the?

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Tuxedo area of Winnipeg. And so here he is standing next to what looks like a very fancy luxury car with the biggest Cartier Santos on his wrist. I believe he was an absolutely beast of a watch. If you want a Cartier Santos, head over to getbezel.com. Your brother's concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Um.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Such a good transition.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  They uh, they brought the, they bought the brick stucco and limestone house for around four million in 2029. Then they spent 4.4 million in a three-year renovation.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Double it.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  To actually uh, to actually upgrade the house. Uh, we wanted to elevate the design to the level of fantasy. Uh, Chris, who was a full-time cast member, dancer and parade performer at Walt Disney World Resort.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Is he just, is this like extremely lucrative?

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Crazy. No, no, no, no. So, so the, so the, uh, his husband, so uh, there's Chris, and then there's also uh, Jeff. And Jeff, that's uh, has uh, has a startup, uh, has a business that does uh, actually customer service and uh, and has become very successful from that. Uh, he co-founded a customer service tech startup now and called In Touch CX. After uh, seven years, they moved to Winnipeg to be closer to the family. Um, they met in 1997, so they've been together almost, what, 20 years? Um, they're both students at the University of South Florida and uh, yeah, they figured it out. Um, they have some crazy,

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  crazy stuff going on here. Uh, let's read about the, um.

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  This shot of the, the cars in this entryway.

• 1:42:27John Coogan?

  The car in the inside. I mean, this Art Deco stuff is wild. Uh, we wanted each room to be experiential. Uh, who grew up going to Disneyland and would regularly grow, go to Chris's shows when they were first dating. The Garage Mahal, as they, as the couple have dubbed it, is a garage that was renovated to, as a shrine to Frank Sinatra. It houses a peacock blue Rolls Royce Silver Shadow sedan that's, that Sinatra bought as a wedding present to his wife Barbara, which Chris won in an auction. The Jazzy Room with lacquered wood paneling, oversized backlit framed photos of Frank and Barbara, and a curved blue sofa is where Chris hangs out, listening only to Sinatra records and drinking cocktails with his friends. It's way sexier than a man cave.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Jeff's downstairs office is nicknamed Avengers Headquarters and the windowless room has the feel of a spaceship. To enter, you touch a panel and a pocket door swooshes open like in Star Trek. There's a long metal mission control station, AKA desk. The walls are clad with stainless steel and covered with television monitors and Avengers logos, and there's room to store much of Jeff's 40,000 comic books. On display is a full-size Iron Man costume. It makes me feel very in touch with my childhood. They call one of the bathrooms the spa. And the story goes on. You can read it in the journal. But what a wild house. You love when someone makes it big and just blows it all on a crazy Renault.

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  I texted Jeremy.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  What did Jeremy say?

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  That studying for their dream, a 12,000 square foot traditional style home built in 2009 in the tuxedo area of Winnipeg. I said tuxedo area, question mark. He said enforced by law, actually.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Enforced by law.

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Do not go to the tuxedo area of Winnipeg without wearing a tuxedo. You will be taken into custody.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move back to the timeline. Nader Khalil says, friendly reminder that multiplying revenue by 12 is not ARR.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Says a lot that this goes viral in the year 2025. 2.2 over 2,000 likes.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  What about, Harry's asking the important questions. What about multiplying daily revenue by 365?

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  If you've got lumpy revenue.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  That you processed your biggest invoice and then multiply that.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  By the number of hours in a year.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Multiply by 24. Then you have your hourly.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Actually taking a step further to find the exact minute that you got the largest payment ever and multiply that by 60 and then by 24 and then by 365. And that is the way to think about a minute.

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  We just had our biggest minute ever.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Like people talk about their quarterly earnings.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  We just had our biggest minute ever.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Put us on a $20 trillion.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Here's the proof. Here's the Stripe dashboard. Here's exactly what here's the exact minute that.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to bet on some companies that are subject to GAAP regulations and need to actually deliver.

• 1:45:34Jordi Hays?

  Real ARR.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  In quarterly reports that are SEC regulated, head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Public.com. Also, Emily Sundberg, breaking news. She has commissioned Donald Boat's work. Do you want to know?

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a crossover I was not expecting.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Do you want to know the very first sensation I felt while attempting to eat this spasm? My jaw cramped, an inward violent shaking. I cried out in pain. Burgers shouldn't be this tall. That was the instant divine comeuppance. I was punished from above for even trying to place it in my mouth. So is Donald Boat. So I'm interested to see what Donald Boat does. Obviously, he's a very creative mind, very schizo. He he's mastered like he's we have this, you know, schizo red string diagram behind us. But Donald Boat takes it to a completely different level with his collages, which I have I've enjoyed. He's he's done some fantastic posting. Morning Brew has a story. Yesterday, Larry Ellison's fortune grew by $100 billion.

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  And today, Larry Ellison's son, his media conglomerate, is getting ready to buy Warner Brothers. Normal family things. These two, this father son duo is is on a generational run. You'd love to see it. He is running around acquiring companies, becoming a media mogul. Pretty fun.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  I actually have not dug into what's going on with Warner Brothers.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  What's going on with this discovery? I know that there's like the merger and the free press is involved somehow. I'm hoping we can get Barry Weiss on the show at some point to kind of break it all down for us because I.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  Warner Bros. is up, up 53% in the past five days.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  I do think it's interesting that, at least in the, at least in the dot com boom, like, the primary investment bank desk that would watch tech companies would also watch telecom companies and also media companies, tech media telecom. Like if you went to Goldman Sachs and you wanted to analyze what we think of as like pure technology companies, you would be

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  DMT.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  DMT, tech media and technology. And it's because they all have the same, they all have very similar zero marginal cost business models.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  So if you create, if you create Mickey Mouse, or you own a telephone line, or you have a website and you're selling SaaS, those are all financially modeled somewhat similarly. And so it made sense to put them all into the same coverage group. Of course, now, like, there's a dedicated desk just for semiconductors and just for, you know, social apps and just for SaaS and just for enterprise. Anyway.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine being able to run around buying companies, knowing that you have the full backing of your father, but you're buying company. I mean Warner Bros. is worth forty six billion there.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  That's a lot more than I would have guessed. Wow.

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Is preparing a majority cash bid, meaning that like they're gonna spend at least, put up at least.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  Ellison's into debt. I feel like he's not afraid to lever up.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  He's not afraid.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Maybe that'll happen at some point. But yeah, put the cash together, get the, get the company. I don't know, it'd be cool. I feel like, I feel like, I've never met Larry Ellison's son, but I feel like I would trust him to make the next Superman and Batman film. And Warner Brothers owns the DC Universe, I believe. And I feel like he would have good instincts. I'm also excited about the Jeff Bezos James Bond. I feel like it's gonna be good. I don't know. I know you know nothing about movies.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, who's the, who's the, who's gonna be Mr. Bond?

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  I have no idea. But.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  I just, I, I, I think a lot of people, a lot of the true James Bond fans are, are worried about this idea that, that now that Amazon owns the rights to James Bond, they're gonna like franchise it like they did with Star Wars. So it'll be like a James Bond show and a James Bond kid show. Like if you see Star Wars, it used to just be like, there's three great movies and there's three prequels. And then Disney was like, let's do three sequels and then two extra movies and then spinoff show, like there's probably six or seven different shows for the Mandalorian and the Boba Fett and all the different spinoffs and there's kids versions. I think that's kind of fine.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  I think, I think Star Wars has been kind of like, yeah, there's like some mediocre stuff in there, but like you can just not watch it. And overall, there's like, there's enough to pull off the shelf. So like, if you want to watch something with a four-year-old, you can. If you want to watch something with an eight-year-old, you can. You can get into the original. The original trilogy still exists there. Like you can still watch it. So like, I don't know. I've, I've been, I've been happy with that. I would be happy with more James Bond content. Let, let Bezos cook on, on, on Bond, in my opinion.

• 1:50:31Jordi Hays?

  The, um, it's so funny, people being like, oh, they're gonna spend 200 million on the free press. Meanwhile, it's like such a rounding error. Talk about like this totality of, of deals that they're looking at doing. They're looking at buying a, a $50 billion public company.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Very wise.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Majority cash.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49Jordi Hays?

  And you want to turn around these assets and, and improve them.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:54Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you need great talent. And if you need, if you gotta spend a couple hundred million to get somebody to, to, you know.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  I think, I, I, I, I think it makes a ton of sense. If you're just thinking about it through like those Mark Zuckerberg mindset of like, who do I want around the table right now? I want a bunch of great people who are entrepreneurial, who are, you know, super connected live players who really care about this stuff. Uh, yeah, you gotta go spend some money together, but, uh, it's gonna work out.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, apparently there's a company called Math Inc. And Will Brown.

• 1:51:28Jordi Hays?

  They really have a. They actually got, do you think they actually got Math Inc?

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Like, because these aren't.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Mathematics Inc.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, there's a certain flex to getting.

• 1:51:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you can get the domain.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Christian says, excited to share that I'm starting a new company dedicated to the creation of verified superintelligence via auto formalization. So is this a competitor to, is this a competitor to Vlad's thing? Building on the amazing RL infrastructure that we developed at Morph Labs, Mathematics Inc. has already achieved a breakthrough result. And their hiring page says, we call a date a square if all its components, day, month, year, are perfect squares. I was born in the last millennium and my next birthday will be the last square date in my life. So there's a very hard math problem here and you just have to, in order to apply for their jobs, you have to solve a math problem. So I don't know, you want a job and you're good.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Also, I feel like this is, this is an odd question because I feel like if you copy this and you, and you ask it like of a frontier model, like it's gonna one.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  That's the whole, I imagine that's the whole point. I doubt it. Do you think it can?

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  We should try.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  If, well, if it would.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Pretty, I mean, I, I have yet to see like a, like a hard math problem out there that, that hasn't been pretty easily one-shot by most of the, like, like this type of like concise question is typically handled by a frontier model with reasoning. Maybe not, but we'll see. More importantly, a video game entrepreneur has just paid 31.5 million dollars for an oceanfront Hamptons home. You got Hamptons up on the board, connected to Pawtech. The deal marks the latest in a string of luxury transactions of the busy east end market.

• 1:53:26John Coogan?

  So, Karch, this is Matthew Karch. It's a circa 1970s home in East Hampton. He's the co-founder of Saber Interactive, a video game developer and publisher. And I dug into them and they do a lot of porting and platforming. So a game will be put out by one publisher and they'll, and they'll say like, we would love to get this Xbox game on Nintendo Switch and. Matthew Karch will pick up the phone and say, my team would love to do that. We will do the hard work of making sure your game works on the Nintendo hardware or over here. And they do a lot of other stuff, but he has some, he has some great video games in the portfolio and obviously it's, it's provided for a wonderful life and he is now in the position where he can

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  buy a $31 million home. He's also, I believe he sold the company and the company changed hands again. So it's unclear exactly who, who owns what, but it's a cool story. And now he has a wonderful stunning house. The house literally sits on top of the ocean. The property is so amazing that I wanted to buy it and figure out the details later, he said. So he's talking to the journal. He loved to see it. If the, if the journal calls you about your home, you gotta pick up the phone. The seller, an entity linked to Norman and Helene Stark, bought the estate for $4.7 million in 1994. The property first hit the market in 2017 for 75 million. Wow, that's high. It'd been off the market for years. The most recent asking price was 39 million. Property contains five bedrooms, roughly 7,000 square feet, main house, as well as a guest house,

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  tennis court and pool. The Hamptons real estate market, like those in many vacation destinations, soared during the pandemic, but the number of Hampton's sales hit a 14-year low in 2024 amid tight inventory and rising mortgage rates. And there's an interesting dynamic where renting a house in the Hamptons is like a massive multiple of what it costs to buy, pay the mortgage on a house, because people really only want to be there in the summer. They don't necessarily want to buy or live there. So there's the kind of an odd disconnect between the rental and purchase market where you might not see that in that way.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the same time, I don't, I don't think it necessarily masks out to buy Hampton's house right now and just rent it in the summer.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:55:36Jordi Hays?

  Just given, given where rates are.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. In the second quarter of 2025, there were 26 home sales in the Hamptons at or over $10 million compared with 22 in the second quarter of 2024 and six in the second quarter of 2023. 2023 was really slow. Karch also owns two properties nearby Sag Harbor that he uses for vacations. He's considering selling one of them. Anyway, another

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  Keep a couple of homes nearby.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Deal. There's a Series A financing for a new company that just came out of Stealth Brain Company. We saw math company. Now there's brain company. Brain Company emerged

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  New Meta.

• 1:56:15John Coogan?

  Today. We're getting somewhere. We're seeing a trend. I like it. Uh, Brain Company emerged from stealth today and we are announcing our thirty million dollar Series A led by Alad Gill and Jared Kushner's affinity partners. Brain Company provides an AI platform and applications for the world's largest and most important.

• 1:56:32Jordi Hays?

  We were getting this company?

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Did we?

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we we were connected. I I believe we'll hopefully have the founder on soon. Um, Alad Gill is also coming on the show soon, so we can talk to him about this. Um. So go check it out if you're looking to get in early, go work there potentially. Um.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, the profound team is using out of home advertising to try to find an office in Union Square, driving around a uh. Driving around a advertising truck, a box truck, uh, trying to find their.

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  I think that they could scale this campaign. They should get on Adquick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I mean, seriously, they should put some of their testimonials or like case studies on like billboards and airports like that makes a ton of sense. If you're just like a general business and you're interested in getting your brand mentioned on ChatGPT, uh, just flashing the profound name in front of people. That's pretty high value. Anyway, did you see the knockoff Bugatti?

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  I did not.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  This is, uh.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  But this is offensive to my.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  This is extremely offensive to, uh, Bugatti is Italian. We Bugatti is an interesting company, right? Cause they're like, it's German, but then they have a, they have a, they have a, uh, their manufacturing plant is like on the border and it's like changed hands a few times or something. But, uh, anyway, most people know the Bugatti, uh, Veyron, Chiron, um, but, uh.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  So it's German and then French.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Is a top. Yeah, that's right. It changed hands. Uh.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  But then it was acquired by an Italian.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Slash home cleaning robot maker and it's showcasing the photo of its first car, a Bugatti like luxury battery electric vehicle. So it's a.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Is this a dream? Is this a Chinese company?

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  So, uh, T R taxes says a vacuum cleaner robot company founded in twenty seventeen.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  They're literally a Dyson knockoff.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  They're a Dyson knockoff.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  That's now knocking off.

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  Uh, valued at three billion dollars is making a luxury EV now. Apple gave up after ten years of trying, burning ten billion dollars and.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  This is so offensive in my culture.

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  I know. It's crazy how much it looks like a Bugatti.

• 1:58:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it wasn't even.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  It even has like a weird diffuser on the back.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so they're knocking off like the Veyron, but then also the new one, which I've.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Turbion?

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Turbion's the latest one, although are you talking about some of the one offs? Cause they've.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  There was a one off that looks.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  They've done like convertibles, but there, there's only, I, I believe there's only three major platforms.

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  There's the Veyron. Solitaire, the Solitaire is there. So they, this knockoff is using the front end of the Solitaire.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's basically.

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  The Veyron.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Closer to it is just like a Solitaire knockoff.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Really, really dark. Never do this. Uh, if you're, if you're running Dream Tech, um.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Stop.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Contact your lawyer and uh.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  You'll be.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Work with them to wind down the company.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, just shut it down, close up shop. You guys had a good run. You're out of ideas and uh, just, just uh, close it up.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  How do you think this sells? I mean, China's knocked off the Taycan successfully. They've knocked off a few other cars successfully. Um, I wonder what the.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do think I, it, it, the, the, the humor here, um, is that they will probably make a pretty solid car.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  And it will cost like, they can start selling Bugattis for a couple of hundred thousand.

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Dollars probably.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but like, you could imagine they sell this for like.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  It's probably like.

• 2:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Couple of hundred grand.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Hundred and fifty or something, which is why.

• 2:00:04Jordi Hays?

  And then if these, I could see this making it into America where somebody's like, wait, I can drive.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Make it to America. This will get caught at the ports for sure.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  You mean, you mean like?

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, IP trade dress, like, it'll be easy to lock this up. It's not making it to America. Um, but people will be driving around in China. I mean, I've, I've heard about fully, fully counterfeit cars before, like in China, they, they, they have the ability to set up like, it's a G wagon factory and it makes cars that look like G wagons and.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  That are bad.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Every, and it's badged. Everything is trying to be as perfect as possible, a true knockoff. And then.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's a different thing that they.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Other countries, you take it in the dealer and they're like, we can't work on this engine. This is not a Mercedes engine.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and, and the reason that knockoff cars are not as big as knockoff watches is like, there's no regulatory framework for watches, right?

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna hurt someone else by driving.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wearing a fake Rolex or whatever.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Um. This was big. This was big. Two of the Cluly founding team have broken off.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Pretty crazy.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  I guess they're doing, running the same playbook.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yep. Chris says, "Life update. Left Cluly to start our own thing. Already at 1.2 million ARR. Seven days in stealth. Had no idea making money was this easy. Announcement soon. Instinct Inc." This post is fascinating. Fascinating. Because doesn't say what the business is. 1.2 million ARR. What is the subscriptions of some sort?

• 2:01:42Jordi Hays?

  It's written to, it's written to trigger.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Had no idea making money was this easy. Yes, you did have an idea that making.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Because you were saying that.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  You said that clearly. You said making money was easy. I know how easy money is, but here we are talking about it. Anyway.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  It worked. You baited us. You baited us. No, but yeah, wishing them, wishing them luck. And I wonder if they will start beefing with their former employer to.

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  From, yeah. From a WWE perspective, that is going to be unmissable content. If they are constantly chirping at each other and fighting and going on podcasts and debating each other and, and taking shots and running adversarial billboard ads against each other, like, there is a world where that generates more views than anything they've done before. That might be the final state of, of startup media and marketing. The real question is like, what is, what, what, does this say something about like whether or not Cluly has hit product market fit? We demoed the product. We were not very sticky. Tyler, it seemed like he enjoyed the product and thought there were some glimmers of hope, but he did not become a total user.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Audience.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Well, when we talked to Roy, it was, it wasn't clear who the, who the target audience was. It was maybe the college kid who wanted to cheat on an exam, or you want to cheat on an interview, but then that was probably illegal and risky, so you don't want to do that. Then there was like, maybe it's enterprise sales, then Roy was talking about brain computer interfaces and VR. And so like, there were just like a bunch of different ideas. Clearly throwing spaghetti against the wall, unclear what was sticking. Um, and so I'm, I'm interested, I am interested to see what Instinct Inc. Winds up building and I'm wondering if they, uh, have done more work to make sure that they're building on top of a solid foundation. Because the big question that was looming around clearly was just, uh, masterful marketing.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Lots of clearly breaking through the noise, cutting through the noise, getting downloads. Um, but was it a leaky bucket? And so have, has this team now that they're on their own, have they built a less leaky bucket with this? Because what happens if you stop going viral? Does that 1.2 million dollars in ARR turn into nothing over 14 days because everyone unsubscribes? Who knows?

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I would go out and, uh, guess that they're just starting a creative agency. Which would probably make a lot of money really fast.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  That would make a lot of sense. Anyway, uh, one of, find your happy.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  Book of wonder with inspired reviews, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Uh, we will close out with this 25 years ago. Uh, there was an article in the newspaper, in the Daily Mail, Tuesday, December 5th, 2000. Internet, quote, "May just be a passing fad as millions give up on it." And of course, recontextualized to Max, the VC is obviously drawing a comparison to the AI narrative. I don't know if anyone's gone out and actually said AI is a passing fad.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Uh, people have kind of said like, maybe we're over our skis on CapEx or maybe we're over our skis on, on, you know, enterprise value.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe the promises are too grand.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe we're not getting ASI tomorrow.

• 2:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 2027.

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  But I, I, I don't think anyone is out there really saying, yeah, in, in 10 years, like, we're not going to be chatting with L11s on the phone.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  So funny to, to try to, I mean, it's, it's very difficult to, to, uh.

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Like this article is especially funny because internet may just be a passing fad as millions give up on it. It's like, well, are those millions of people benefiting from other people using the internet? If so, then like it's it's uh has enduring value.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Crazy. Researchers found that millions were turning their back on the world wide web, frustrated by its limitations and unwilling to pay high access charges. They say that email, far from replacing other forms of communication, is adding to an overload of information. Experts from the Virtual Society Project, which published the result, the report, say predictions that the internet would revolutionize the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate. Many teenagers are using the internet less now than previously, they conclude. James Chapman, I would love to know where James Chapman is now. He was a science correspondent at the Daily Mail.

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  And it's interesting. I mean, he it's you can't really say like he got this wrong because he's just publishing the facts, which is like these researchers found this data point and kind of leaving it up to your interpretation, but um.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's like all these articles come out like AI adoption in the enterprise is dropping.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Or or what was the MIT report? Like 95% of Gen AI pilots are.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  I mean, that that that meter report was like the most bearish take on cursor possible because it was like cursor is slowing people down. That was like the the.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  And yet.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  The basic.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and yet demand.

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  But you dug into it and there was a lot of different ways that it could actually speed you up in certain in certain contexts, in certain.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and if you just.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  And then all the products are getting better.

• 2:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Look at the demand for.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, incredible.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  The apparently cursor in the secondary market is trading closer to 30 billion than 20.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  That's up there, man. That's up there. It's great, though.

• 2:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Incredible time to be alive.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Incredible time to be alive. Well, thank you for tuning into our remote livestream today. We will see you.

• 2:07:40Jordi Hays?

  We did it. They said it was impossible. We proved them wrong. And next week, got some travel in the in the middle of the week, but we will be back in the Ultra Dome Monday and Tuesday. Very excited. And get out there this weekend and touch grass, be with your loved ones, log off. I'm excited to log off. I think Charlie would.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  Watch the same thing.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Was known for logging off from Friday night to Saturday and will be doing my best to do the same. And.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for tuning in this week.

• 2:08:21John Coogan?

  We'll see you Monday. Goodbye.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Love you.