Swatch AP Collab, Cerebras IPO, Trump Visits China | Ferdinand Dabitz, Spencer Rascoff, Eric Olson, Matt Lohstroh, Jay Azhang, Amir Sadeghian, Alexander Taubman, Quaid Walker

(00:29) - AP & Swatch Collab (16:45) - Cerebras Boosts IPO Price Range (24:56) - Trump to Visit China (29:37) - Timeline Reactions (36:37) - Ferdinand Dabitz, co-founder and CEO of Augustus, a fintech company specializing in instant bank payments, discusses the recent conditional approval from the SEC to charter Augustus National Bank as a full-service U. S. national bank. He emphasizes the unparalleled global demand for the U. S. dollar and identifies inefficiencies in current clearing banks, which are slow and outdated. Dabitz outlines Augustus National Bank's mission to modernize this infrastructure, aiming to enhance the distribution of the dollar by offering faster and more efficient clearing services to global financial institutions. (41:47) - - Spencer Rascoff, co-founder of Zillow and current CEO of Match Group, discusses his transition from the board to CEO, emphasizing his commitment to addressing the global loneliness epidemic through Match Group's platforms. He outlines his initial focus on breaking down organizational silos within the company, transforming it from a holding company to an operating company, and highlights the importance of people, motivation, and organization in building great products. Rascoff also shares his hands-on approach to revitalizing Tinder, aiming to enhance innovation and user outcomes, particularly for the Gen Z demographic. (01:05:47) - - Eric Olson, co-founder of Consensus, an AI-powered academic search engine, discusses the company's recent $30 million Series B funding led by Great Point Ventures, aimed at expanding their product beyond search into a comprehensive workspace for researchers. He highlights the organic growth driven by direct-to-consumer adoption and partnerships with over 100 universities, where libraries distribute the product to students. Olson emphasizes focusing on automating specific research tasks, such as literature searches, while leaving uniquely human aspects like idea generation and interdisciplinary connections to researchers. (01:13:37) - - Matt Lohstroh, co-founder and CEO of Giga Energy, began his journey at Texas A&M University, where he and his colleagues developed modular data centers powered by flared natural gas to mine Bitcoin. Facing supply chain challenges, they vertically integrated their operations, manufacturing essential components like transformers and switchgear, and expanded into AI data centers. Lohstroh emphasizes Giga's commitment to rapid deployment, achieving data center energization in nine months by prefabricating infrastructure, and highlights the importance of community engagement to address concerns such as noise and energy consumption. (01:28:03) - - Jay Azhang, founder of N of 1, an AI research lab focused on financial markets, discusses his background in public market investing and software development, and how his company aims to train models that generalize across markets to eventually surpass human traders. He highlights the importance of integrating with various brokerages to provide a consumer-facing platform where users can describe trading ideas in natural language, which the models then translate into fully deployed trading agents. Additionally, he mentions that N of 1 recently raised a $15 million funding round to support their initiatives. (01:36:12) - - Laurel Supply Discussion (01:45:26) - - Amir Sadeghian, CEO and co-founder of Astrocade, discusses how their AI-powered platform enables anyone to create and share games using natural language prompts, democratizing game development. He highlights the platform's rapid growth, with over 75,000 games created by users from 80 countries and approximately 5 million monthly active users. Sadeghian also emphasizes Astrocade's mission to make interactive content creation accessible and enjoyable for a diverse global audience. (02:03:24) - - Timeline Reactions (02:10:12) - - Alexander Taubman, co-founder and CEO of Long Lake, discusses the company's recent $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel, marking their largest deal to date. He highlights Long Lake's strategy of integrating applied AI into service sectors, aiming to enhance productivity and customer experience. Taubman also emphasizes the company's focus on long-term growth and its commitment to transforming the services industry through technology. (02:25:11) - - Quaid Walker discusses the anticipated collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet, known as "Royal Pop," set to launch on May 16, 2026. He highlights that the collaboration is expected to reinterpret the iconic Royal Oak design into a more accessible format, possibly featuring a mechanical movement and a versatile design that can be worn as a wristwatch or a lanyard accessory. Walker also notes the potential impact on the luxury watch market, considering the collaboration's aim to introduce younger buyers to mechanical watchmaking while maintaining the prestige of the Audemars Piguet brand. 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?

  We got a banger show for you today, folks. We got a lot of guests coming on. We got two hours of back-to-back interviews with everyone from Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Match Group, to Alex Taubman of Long Lake Management. Quaid's coming on from Bezel. He's going to take us deeper on our first story, which is of course, Ademar Pigay AP is partnering with Swatch to launch a watch that's, you could call it a knockoff of the Royal Oak. It's certainly, it's not a knockoff because it's official. They knocked themselves off. And there's a bunch of interesting

• 0:44John Coogan?

  business, business implications of why they did this, what it means, what will happen. Let's pull up the video of the launch first. And you got to tell me, do you think this is AI or CGI? Because it's a launch video and in 2026, it's hard to tell the difference. So we're going to play the, this is from the official Swatch account. This is something that looked like, like a fake clickbait video, but it's real. Here it is. What do you think? AI or CGI?

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  CGI, precision, handmade CGI. Just like watches.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Not a transformer in sight, the way my grandfather used to like. There will be interesting pushbacks. I'm like, oh, this, this movie is awesome. It only use CGI. No AI involved whatsoever. Anyway, so wait, so is it a manual watch? Is it a?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  I think it's unclear. Right? So what, what there's been a massive amount of, of, everyone has basically created somewhat realistic looking posters for these. The actual watch has not been revealed at all. That's the only thing that's been.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Just based off of the fact that Swatch did a collaboration with a luxury watch brand, The Moon Swatch, which was based on the Moon Watch, right?

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, I forgot about.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so the Moon Swatch was successful. And was a a more accessible entry point to the Moon Watch, which is from Omega, which is sort of in that like Rolex tier. And I don't know if the Moon Swatch, what, how they saved costs because there's a certain amount of cost that just goes into making a a movement, a mechanical movement. It's a lot of small pieces. Sure, you can put it on a manufacturing line and press them and stuff.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  John, learning that

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Couple hundred bucks.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Watches have egregious profit.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  I know they have egregious profit margins, but still like, like the, the, the work to put together all the gears and manufacturing it like, I would be surprised if, if, if it's a mechanical watch, is it really gonna be like five dollars? No, it's not a Happy Meal toy.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  So there's, there's the fake Chinese version of all of these popular watches, Nautilus, APs, et cetera. You can get them, like you could go on Alibaba, get them for in the low hundreds of dollars, right? And so it is totally possible to put together a watch

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  That has a lot of the same componentry.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  I saw Nico Leonard on, who's a great YouTube watch reviewer, fun, very fun creator, on the Ice Coffee Hour with Graham Stephan. And they gave him, this is a fun little game that they, they're getting really good at playing games with their guests on this podcast. So they give him six watches and they tell him that three of them are knockoffs and three of them are, are authentic. And he has to guess and he nails, he gets all of them cracked. Even though some of them were very convincing, fakes, especially of Patek.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  So a lot of people are saying this is

• 3:48John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  It's over. They're saying, sell everything, freak out, sell all your APs.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  $500, rest in peace.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  AP has, you know, consistently done things over the last few years to, that were provocative, right? Some of the various partnerships they've had with talent, right? Celebrities, et cetera, have been somewhat provocative. But overall, the brand seems healthy, right? It's not going to be for everyone. I think in some ways this decision could be seen. And again, I'm no watch expert, but fakes are flooding the market globally. And why not, why not just lean into that, basically? And the other thing is, they don't have any entry level, like the gap between,

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  you know, what, I'm sure this, this, um, this Swatch AP will end up retailing for far more, or sorry, not retail, but secondary will be far more than, than whatever it goes out at. Uh, but the gap even then between that and a real Royal Oak will be immense.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  And the gap has been growing because the aftermarket prices have been increasing faster than incomes.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  They basically were like, oh, this is what our watches are worth aftermarket. We should price there, right?

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so you quickly wound up with like, to get in the game, you're in, you're at 30K. And that's just a lot. And there's not as much of a walk, crawl, run to get into the ecosystem that some brands have. Uh, AP certainly has not had that. And now this is.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  You go with a code, you go with a code.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Aren't those like 60?

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they are.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  I think they're really expensive. No, I think they're really pricey. I don't know. Um, but yeah, maybe they'll bring down the price on that. Uh, but live, live monitor, I guess, live monitor says, spend half a million dollars or $500 and you get something that looks pretty similar. Of course, very different materials.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  You can get a code 1159 for low to mid twenties.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Twenties, okay. Um, but there's another watch collab that I want your reaction to. You gotta see this. This one's gonna fly off the shelves, potentially selling more units than the Swatch AP collab. It's the Rolex collab. We can pull this up.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Something you've never seen before and you won't see again. A Chrome Hearts Rolex Daytona 18 karat gold. Starting offer, 370,000, okay? If you want it, there's only one way to get it. I've never seen this watch before. Neither have you. That's why I'm showing it to you.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Do you think this is real or just something someone made randomly?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Official Rolex over here telling me that the dial might be aftermarket. I don't know, you figure that out?

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I don't, I don't follow it. It's funny, uh, um, somebody on X over the weekend was, assuming that I was into Chrome Hearts because I joked a lot about Chrome Hearts, but no, I'm not enough of an expert, uh, to-

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Well, that's Dylan. Um, Dennis is playing off of your joke, saying, "I tried to buy the Swatch, AP Royal Pop collab, but they told me I had to buy this collab first, and it's the Code 1159." If you're not familiar with the Code 1159-

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Great post.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  -it's the newest watch from AP, uh, but it has a less distinct silhouette than the Royal Oak, and has been not loved by the biggest fans of AP broadly, and so it has been underselling, probably relative to the, the new Rolex, uh, whi- which, which one's the new Rolex? The Land Dweller, which, uh, has been, I think, selling very well, and, uh, it, this one has been, the Code 1159 has not been doing as well. Um, well-

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's head over to Reddit.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  AP just killed its brand, is spiking on Google, but, uh, there, there was some debate over whether or not this was driven-

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, this person is, this person is obviously disagreeing with that line by saying, like, "Interest is great."

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, I thought it was interest in the quote, "AP just killed its brand."

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my view is you have-

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Oh, because the brand is attention.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, I don't know how many of these they'll sell. I'm assuming they'll sell out.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  And that's gonna be hundreds of thousands, probably, maybe, you know, tens of thousands at least of people that either already own an AP, or they want to someday, and this is, they'll wear it every day and, and work, I'm sure, wanna work towards getting-

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  -the real thing. Uh, let's head, head over to Reddit-

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  -and check out what they're doing there.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  What are they doing there?

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  They have, uh, somebody has figured, figured this out ages ago. I want your reaction, John. Omega on one side, but the Omega is strapped to the wrist with a whoop band.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, whoop on the inside, Omega on the outside. It just doesn't feel right. It feels a little unnatural to me. I don't know. But I did, I have seen a lot of people wearing the Whoop bands lately, and I think that there's some remarkable data. I was talking to someone who connected their Whoop data and found out that they had sleep apnea by analyzing it with an LLM, which is something you would expect Whoop to be doing on their side, but for regulatory reasons, it might be slower for Whoop to roll out that feature of like health monitoring. And so there's a lot of like DIY science that comes from it. So I don't know. It's weird no matter what, because if you have a Whoop on one end and then on one hand and then a watch

• 9:15John Coogan?

  on the other, that's an odd choice. I feel like, isn't there an opportunity to put the Whoop band somewhere more discreet? Like even like a chest monitor would be less

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  You can, I think you can.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  The Oura ring is not very intrusive, but they should really make the, what do they call it? The Boston Fitbit? It's the ankle monitor? I can say that because I'm Irish. But there was some debate over AP's motivations. Arrow Grivner says, "As an IP nerd, I love this. AP's trademark loss means they lost the moat around their octagonal bezel and their dial." So what do they do? They license its crown jewels to swatch for a flood of legit, affordable Royal Pop pieces, a masterclass in damage control. And so this

• 10:06John Coogan?

  is on this news that AP lost a trademark fight in Japan in 2024 and in the US in 2025. The courts ruled that the bezel and the dial aren't distinctive enough to legally own, but there's some pushback in the community notes.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, they have managed to, I think, maintain a trademark around the octagon.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there's a trade dress, so you can never do a full knockoff of a direct product, but they couldn't lock down the idea of an octagon. That was like simply too much. So I don't know how much of this was damage control around the intellectual property, but it's certainly, certainly an interesting thing. And there's also some people thinking that this is a way to make money. You see this gem changer said, "Every unemployed guy with a group chat of equally unemployed friends, this post is for you. The Royal Pop drops Saturday, May 16th." They're coming out with this quickly, just one week teaser, and then it's out.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  He says, "This is the easiest four-figure week you'll have all year." If you're willing to do something that resembles work, resembles work for 14 hours, if you're willing, let me lay out exactly what to do. Retail is in the $400 range. It's in-store only. There's no online sales. They're limiting it to one person, one piece per person, per store, per day, not two. So your hustle is per warm body, not per pair. And then there, he shares some, some expect, some expectation about where this might trade. Maybe 12X retail, maybe 5X retail. And so if you go and you wait in line and you buy this and then you sell it online, you might be able to make a pretty penny pretty quickly, but you'll need a bunch of friends.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  And he gives a bunch of advice on where you should go. Avoid Soho, Times Square, London, Singapore. You gotta go to secondary cities. Troy, Michigan, King of Prussia, Canoga Park, Honolulu. Going to Honolulu just for this.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  I think this is, I think this is gonna be a hit.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  The haters, I think the haters are wrong. People love G-Shocks. Sort of a combination.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  I think so too.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  They'll do well.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  It just seems like a fun, a fun watch. And I, and I do think it's a nice entry point for someone who's getting into watches. Like start with this, then get something else. It's like a Striver, like, you know, it's a point along a curve, which I think will be popular. And it's also just like a lot of fun and it'll look good.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to China.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  What are they doing over in China? They're

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  BYD.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  BYD.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Got Daniel Craig as the new face.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Build your dreams. They're building their dreams. For the Denza Luxury EV, James Wood says, it's an amazing ad. And Adam Thomas says, China uses James Bond for a Euro push. The world is changing. Let's play this advertisement from BYD.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  He must have had an exclusive, did he ever have an exclusive with Aston? Or was that just the James Bond franchise?

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think I've ever seen him in a, in a Aston Martin ad.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  How blessed to live and life in a world with the capacity to find change. Just as spring follows a harsh winter and summer looks back on a routine spring. Old selves, past identities, they ship. They have to. It's so exciting, don't you think?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  And it doesn't life ask us to step out of the shadows and embrace the new to evolve or not?

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  Are there car seats for dogs?

• 13:31John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I think it gets pretty dangerous. Although that dog looks like it's wearing some sort of harness that could be tied in.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  What do you think?

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  See, post James Bond, he has a lot more comedic timing. He's done SNL a few times. He's done a couple comedies. There's a lot more to it, but he will still just never not be James Bond because he had such a successful run of James Bond performances. He's really driving this car. Is this an SUV or a wagon?

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Pause, pause, pause. Rewind 10 seconds.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Okay. What do we listen for?

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Listen, because there's some, uh...

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't that, doesn't that sound like a internal combustion engine for a second there?

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  So they're larping.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  It's played through the speakers while you're driving? Is that an option?

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  I feel like it has to be an option if they're advertising it like that.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  But who knows? You never know with these, with these BYDs if there's actually an internal combustion engine in there somewhere that can activate at a certain point. Like, everything feels like a hybrid these days. But, I mean, it says luxury EVs. I, I like the design of that car. I think that's cool. It looks kind of like a wagon. It's got like a, it's a shooting brake design.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  I love a shooting brake.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  It looks nice. Uh, but yeah, what a, what a great, uh, what a great partnership and what a great run from Daniel Craig to be able to just like cash in on the, the aura of being James Bond forever, even after the franchise ends and he had to move on to other things. It really is remarkable if you're Daniel Craig. And it also helped that, did you ever see Layer Cake? No? No one's seen Layer Cake here? Oh, such a good movie. And he plays, he plays like sort of a, someone involved in like the drug trade in Europe, but it's a very James Bond-esque character. And so even throughout his portfolio of movies when he's, and then, and then he

• 15:33John Coogan?

  plays Benoit Blanc from Knives Out. And even that character, even though it has a different, even though he has a different accent, it still feels like he carries the authority of a James Bond-like figure. And so he's always had this same sort of demeanor and aura around him that's been built through his entire cinematic portfolio that he can continue to cash in on. And when you're thinking about advertising a particular car like an Aston Martin, like this luxury BYD, your mind goes to him before anyone else, really, anyone else. But

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Do we know what the BYD Denza is priced at?

• 16:11John Coogan?

  I don't. Probably like, I would guess like, the equivalent of like $13,000 and it probably goes 0 to 60 in probably one and a half seconds and has like a 700 mile range.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  I think European price tag is 134.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay, they're actually getting pricey. Usually, like, when you see these BYD numbers, it's always like, it's the performance of a Ferrari for the price of a Camry.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, so there's the Denza Z, which is sick, the estimated price is 60 to 140.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  It's a big range.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  But a lot of the other Denzas are in the 40 to 60K range.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Not too bad, not too bad. Well, you know where I'd like to see Daniel Craig do his next endorsement? Cerebras. I would love to see a Super Bowl ad where he's lamenting the slow speed of AI inference and he solves His problem in this Super Bowl ad by partnering with Cerebras, firing up some Cerebras chips. The IPO is looking like it's going very, very well. So Cerebras updated their filing, according to Reuters, the IPO date will be Thursday, May 14th. I heard maybe Wednesday, but any day now. And they're offering 30 million shares. That's up from 28 million. So they're, they're offering more shares than they were expecting to. And they also

• 17:29John Coogan?

  increased their price range from 115 to 125, up to 150, 160. And so they're going to raise, instead of three and a half billion, they'll be raising 4.8 billion. And allegedly the, the

• 17:44John Coogan?

  The round is massively oversubscribed to the tune of 20x demand for that 5 billion. So something like 100 billion of demand for that 5 billion, which is remarkable at that price. Now, does that mean it's gonna 10x on day one? No, but it's certainly a good sign going into this IPO. And so that's why I called it like a potential $50 billion IPO, just to sort of have some parallelism with the $500 watch on the 50 trillion of GDP meeting in China that we'll talk about later. So there was a bunch of FUD around.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Ben Thompson this morning says, if you're looking for the ideal time to IPO, being a chip company in May 2026 is hard to beat.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  It really is. It really is. He had a great piece called "The Inference Shift" today in Stratechery. Go check it out. There's been a bunch of FUD about Cerebras. I mean, for a long time, they were just sort of like building in stealth or talking about the idea. It takes a really long time to design these chips, tape them out, and then actually produce them. And then the first version is less flexible, less designed collaboratively with the companies that are using them. So there was like one customer that was buying them, and there was a lot of customer concentration. Now the chips have actually been deployed. And there was this big narrative about like, okay, well, they're maybe overly optimizing for the transformer architecture. What happens if the AI researchers come out with like, attention is all you actually don't need that much.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Attention is nice and useful, but we have a new thing that's better. And that didn't happen. And so attention and transformer-based architectures are still dominant, and inference costs are extremely important in the age of AI agents. And speed is so, so important. And so demand is 10x-ing every few months at this point. And there's a very, very clear business story. Tyler, you have anything else for Cerebras?

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, just like if you use the Cerebras chips, like you can use it, GPT 5.3 Spark in Codex. It's like insane.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  It's wild.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you want to give it a try and actually demo it, which I think is important with these semiconductor companies, if they're like abstract and you're like, I don't know if it's like. A real company or something like you can actually just go download Codex Desktop, pick from the down from the dropdown 5.3 Spark and then you can you don't even have to get it to do code. You can ask it history of the Roman Empire and it will just instantly tell you a full page of exactly the response. With 5.3 level intelligence, which is pretty good. And it's a pretty remarkable experience and you can imagine this coming to every LLM interface, every AI experience, which has normally been like for any meaningful work, fire it off, come back five minutes later, sometimes two hours later.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  We'll cut all of that in in, you know, in half or by 10. And that's where this is going. So you can see, you know, significant demand, even though there's this like customer concentration thing. I don't know why there wouldn't be a lot of different customers lining up every, every lab that has exploding. Demand cursor, Anthropic, Meta and Google like unless they have like a direct answer to this. I would see them being a buyer in the near term. So the Cerebras upsized its IPO and top of the new range Reuters says the IPO drew orders for more than 20x the shares available. Cerebras makes AI inference chips and lists Amazon and OpenAI among customers.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  So there was, there was a question about like, was it all OpenAI? And I guess Amazon has jumped on very flexible with regard to the chips that they rack over at AWS. What else is going on here? Polly Market is projecting Cerebras to close above 50 billion market cap by the end of day one. That would be about 100% above the target valuation of 26 billion that was previously reported. So.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Preparing for an IPO on the NASDAQ next weekend of the ticker C B R S. And traditional semiconductor manufacturing works like this, a silicon wafer is fabricated. The wafers cut into hundreds of smaller chips. The chips are packaged individually and connected together in systems. Cerebras took a completely different approach. They use the entire 300 millimeter wafer. Four trillion transistors, 900,000 AI oriented compute cores. And the big thing is the petabits per second of internal bandwidth. So better memory bandwidth for KV caches and everything that you need to do in AI. I think something like that. Benchmark is going to be absolutely cleaning up. They still own over 20% of Cerebras, apparently. And if

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  When did they make that investment?

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Eric Vishra made it. And he

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking it up.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Has quite the portfolio in his, in his, in his X account bio. Fireworks, Benchlink, Contentful, Cerebras.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  So they did it in May 2016.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Sunday Robotics. May 2016. Wow. Overnight success right there. If it trades at even half of how Shanghai priced more threads in Cambracon, it will be over 500 billion in less than two years. Okay, that's a big step. It will break the venture model if they hold. Has a shot to deliver the number one fund in VC history. Benchmark on an absolute tear. Quantient says, Cerebras is pretty funny because you can just imagine the origin story being some boomer, non-technical manager going, okay, but why can't you just put 50 gigs of L3 cash on this chip? And the engineer being put on the spot and going, uh, I guess you could.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  And said, uh, someone else in the comments here chiming in. I, I random history major had a much less important version of this conversation with my college roommate, fancy engineer doing computer vision stuff one time and still feel really good about it. I think it helped just weld the thing that does that onto the other thing. Have you considered, have you considered building the entire plane out of the black box? But it works and the plane goes Mach 10. That's exactly what happened. They should build planes out of

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Co2.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  What's going on with Co2?

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  They did the B.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  They did the B.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  That same year.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Ooh, in 2016?

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Interesting. Back to backgrounds in 2016 and then just trough of disillusionment for a decade. Not really, but I mean, it was like, it, they were, Cerebras was pretty quiet for five or six years. Like it took a while to actually get to scale. And you can see it when you talk to the founder.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Apparently they did. Yeah, well, they did the C in 2017. So they were making progress, but certainly. Certainly, you can imagine some of the investors saying, ah, this AI thing, I might have been 10 years too early.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what a good origin story. They they worked together at C. Micro, an ultra-dense server company. They sold to AMD in 2012, and then they started Cerebras together in 2015. Five industry veterans, Andrew Feldman and some other folks, joined. Andrew Feldman has been on an absolute tear, generational run even. Well, let's move over to China. Donald Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping this week, and you were you were sharing some info on how many journalists are going over there?

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it a field trip.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  It's a field trip.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it a field trip because Tim Cook is going, Larry Fink.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I thought it was journalists, but I guess it's tech people.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Jane from Citi, Chuck Robbins is headed over there, her friend from Cisco, David Solomon.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  And a whole bunch of others. I guess Elon is supposedly on the trip as well.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully, they can get a word in edgewise because the the vast majority of the discussions will obviously center on the war in Iran. This is from the Wall Street Journal. As the heads of the world's two superpowers meet in Beijing this week, President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will have another nation looming over their summit, Iran. The long-anticipated meeting has been delayed once due to the US and Israel's war against Iran, which has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is eager to move on from the Middle East war that is sapping his domestic power and straining the global economy.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  As of this morning, the peace deal was, according to Trump, on major life support.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  On major life support. Is that good?

• 26:19John Coogan?

  I guess it's better than it being dead. So hopefully we get a peace deal because if you're on life support, sometimes you can have a miraculous comeback. I don't know. That's what I'm pulling for. He will land in Beijing, prepared to push China, which relies on Iran for low-cost oil in their transactional relationship, to help broker an agreement that ends the conflict. Xi Jinping also wants the fighting to stop as Middle East turmoil restricts China's oil supply and shrinks countries' ability to buy Chinese goods. Finding a resolution could raise Xi Jinping's stature as a global statesman who swooped in at the precipice of a possible military escalation. Trump on Friday threatened to resume Project Freedom, the US-led operation

• 27:02John Coogan?

  helps ships navigate the straits safely, adding this time that the operation would include, quote, "other things." Very ominous. So I think there's a few different things. So Trump, the deal on life support, but most recently, he rejected Iran's latest response to a US peace proposal. They're going back and forth. Oil prices have climbed amid fears that roughly of a prolonged disruption through a choke point that carries roughly one-fifth of global oil flows. And the summit is focused heavily on Iran, but also trade deals, specifically Chinese purchases of American agriculture, energy, aerospace products, and some other

• 27:44John Coogan?

  related investment mechanisms. But the tech industry is obviously hoping to like wind down the conflict peacefully and quickly and then move on to discussions of export restrictions, GPUs, the AI supply chain, rare earths, all the different things that go into what the tech industry needs to flourish. But I was thinking we wouldn't get that much movement or that many soundbites from this trip based on how large Iran is looming. But with all of those tech CEOs there, you would imagine that there's some conversation that happens.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially or farming, potentially frame mugging each other. You never know. Tyler, what do you think?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I think it would be interesting if it's also, you know, at a higher level than just the supply chain. Cause like last week, there was all the news about uh, C A I S I, right? Doing the new uh, AI regulation, right? Like what's gonna happen? Like, what, what, are we gonna? You, you do much test before the models come out. It seems like they're kind of moving away from that, like less kind of safety focused.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  China should be like, send us Mythos 2, give us unfettered access. Ideally, like enough to distill it really quickly. And then we will also say whether or not it can be released in China.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, why not, why stop there? Why not just send the weights?

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, just send the weights. That's a, that's actually way more.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll inspect it.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, way more efficient. We'll inspect it and we'll make sure that it's okay for the Chinese population.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you know, like the, we, we've talked about this a little bit.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Actually, send, send all the GPUs I need to run it to.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Uh, like, we've talked about this a little bit, but like, there are people in China who are actually worried about like this, that, you know, very like safety pill.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Um, but it seems like people going over there like Tim Cook.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a Chinese Joe Weisenthal.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  These people are not gonna be arguing in favor of like, uh, safety. So, I, it'd be very interesting to see if, if.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, we have, we, we've seen the Chinese Joe Weisenthal. There might be a Chinese Ilya Zerudikowski. We must find him and surface him, who knows? Um, but no, I mean, of course, uh, some, like, like international collaboration there seems very, very important in the long term. Everyone agrees on this.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right. Before we get to our first guest.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Run through it.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, Palmer brings up an important point. It's time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the FCC. Emails are hea- heavily regulated by the CAN Spam Act of 2003. Junk mail is the majority of mail, 100 million trees per year. Enough. It really is way too much.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  This is very interesting. I haven't, I, I, I thought, I put all of the, all of the, the blame, or I, I guess the credit, I gave all the credit to Google. With the fact that like, I don't get spam emails. I get emails if I buy something online and I forget to uncheck the box and that's kind of on me. Or if I'm. Subscribe to a newsletter and it gets boring and I'm like, ah, this is junk. I'll need to deal with that. But like, very rarely do I just get a true spam email. Just like truly slop, junk, like just complete nonsense. It's pretty, pretty rare. Uh, and I think some of that's the filtering, but also the can spam apps seems to be somewhat effective.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  I wind up getting a lot more spam phone calls and a lot more spam text messages these days than spam emails in terms of like cold outreach that's completely undirected. Um, and so yeah, maybe they need to expand the span, the can spam act. Shouldn't it be the can't spam act? I don't know why they call it can, but, uh, it has been successful at least in email. But I agree with this. This is good. Uh, Palmer says, it's insane that America has given a monopoly on letter delivery to a quasi governmental agency that then uses to flood our homes with useless garbage against our will. America would never allow FedEx, UPS, DHL, or anyone else to force this on us.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Even ignoring the wasted taxpayer money, insane moral hazards and ecological impact, the lost time and productivity is inexcusable. I agree. If the average American spends only 30 seconds sorting their mostly spam mail each day, looking for the real stuff. That's over a billion dollars. Well, earth class mail, Palmer, I think you need a P O box that scans the emails or scans the physical mail and delivers it to an email inbox. Throw open claw in front of it and have it decide what's, what, what makes it through. But you definitely don't want-

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Have open claw devour the slop for you.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, there's actually a button in earth class mail and many of the other virtual mailbox services. You can send it to the shredder. You can say that is shreddable and you could automate that potentially. Um, but, uh, yeah. People are sharing that there are ways to unsubscribe from junk mail, uh, opt out pre-screen.com, DMA choice.org. And Palmer says, he's already done it. I still get pounds of junk mail every single day. Pounds every day is a lot. I feel like he's high up on the, on the junk mail delivery. I feel like I get a few pieces a day. Probably not pounds.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  I get so many. It's, it's-

• 32:37John Coogan?

  But pounds? You think you get pounds? We need to weigh your junk mail, my junk mail, your junk mail. You get junk mail?

• 32:43Speaker 04

  I don't know. Maybe I get one mail, piece of junk mail like a week. I don't really check my mailbox.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Just say you're low LTV, bro.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm getting like, I'm like a quarter.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. He definitely is not in the market for, you know.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Random.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  For a $79 per month. What is this? Dealer mandated vehicles for immediate.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm kind of, I'm kind of telling on myself here.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Someone's advertising a Ford F-150 here. You're not in the market, I guess. Uh, anyway. Uh, what else is going on in the timeline before we move to our first guest?

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Uh, new service for SF retailers and home buyers. I will show up to your open houses wearing OpenAI or Anthropic merch. I charge a 5% commission just to, just to fully pump up the price. Uh, it's called.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  Will that, will that actually help though? Because I think some people would be, would be afraid. Just be like, I'm not even gonna bid.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  But I think some, some people at the open house tour might see, oh, there's an OpenAI or Anthropic person. Uh, I, I, I should make my offer particularly strong if I want this, even if there, even if there isn't that much, uh, that much demand. I love the founder of railway. It's great. Um, what else is going on here? Uh, new, before ChatGPT was released, before Microsoft's $1 billion bet and long before plans for an IPO.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Over here.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  There was the University of Michigan putting 20 million.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Go Blue. Pull up Tyler. Pull up Tyler.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  What, what happened here? Like, how did this actually happen? There we go.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  There you go. Nailed it.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, your homework?

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Learn how to get that more dialed because I hit that pretty often for you. And every, I know. Well, I need to, you know, every time you go the wrong direction.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it's reversed. It's reversed on the camera.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  So, so there's something to work on. That's just some constructive feedback. I believe that you can be better at this, at this task.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  This, this feels like the University of Michigan was considering donating and then at some point it just became, they just became aware of like, oh, well, like you could also participate in the for-profit and they're like, oh, that sounds better, maybe. Let's, let's put this in. Um, a tiny SpaceX rival has rallied $6,000 and it's powered by a mob of zealots and a stock guru known as the Kook. Do you know who this is?

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  The Kook.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Capital LLC. I don't know. Uh, I think this is. It has to be ASTS, right? SpaceX rival, tiny SpaceX rival. Um, anyway, uh, very, very funny. What else is going on? Oh, you gotta play this next Instagram. This one is so funny. Yeah, I don't think you've seen this, Jordy. Did I send this to you or no? Okay, play this Instagram. The title of it is, "My mom is so bad with technology. She literally tried to search up info about energy drinks and accidentally set our house up as a business."

• 35:46John Coogan?

  What is in energy drinks? Could you imagine? Like, starting with a Google search and ending up like creating a business on Google Maps for your exact address under the name "What is in energy drinks?" And people think AI will diffuse quickly. Debatable, debatable. Kathy Wood is posting about SpaceX AI, the new company. Thanks to its deal with Anthropic AI, now SpaceX AI is pivoting from massive losses at Colossus to significant profitability as NeoCloud on an estimated five to six billion in annual revenues. Brilliant SpaceX move, Elon Musk. And Gwyneth Paltrow, didn't know she was involved. I'm familiar with Gwen Shotwell,

• 36:28John Coogan?

  but I guess Gwyneth Paltrow also got an early check-in. You know, she is an investor. It's totally possible that she has SpaceX allocation at this point, but I think it was a mistag. Anyway, we have our first guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Ferdinand from Augustus National Bank. How are you doing, Ferdinand? Good to see you again. Hello, welcome back.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 36:52Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Great to be back.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Big day. You've been on the show before, but remind everyone about yourself, what you do, and then give us the news.

• 37:00Ferdinand Dabitz?

  So I'm Ferdinand. We have been chartering a bank called Augustus, and today we've announced conditional approval for that bank. I can give the brief intro and the brief spiel on the company.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Please.

• 37:12Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Of course, when I come on the show, I have to bring a prop. And our guy Peter Thiel, of course, always said, when you have a fintech company, you have to like bring the hundred dollar bill.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Ooh, there we go.

• 37:23Ferdinand Dabitz?

  I think we can do the same thing where...

• 37:27Ferdinand Dabitz?

  We always have this joke where we bring the hundred dollar bill and then we ask, what is the problem with this? Right, but it's a trick question. And in our opinion, there is no problem with this and the dollar is the best product in the history of the world.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, insane PMF.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Insane PMF.

• 37:41Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Insane PMF. Like sometimes there's smart, smart people that tell me like water, what about water? But no, no, I think like the dollar is the best product in the history of the world and there's quasi-infinite global demand for it, especially outside of the United States, right? And I think there are all kinds of like qualitative ways to think about it. Europe and the US, they contributed forty percent to global GDP, but they contribute eighty percent to global reserve holdings and global money movement. There are also like qualitative ways to think about it. I think like the existence and frankly, commercial success of the stablecoin stack, right? The global dollar count is like, frankly, might be a pure expression of this thesis where this is the best product in the history of the world and there's infinite global demand. Okay, so you're, oh yeah, but. But, and it's a big but for us, distribution is broken, right?

• 38:26Ferdinand Dabitz?

  And we think distribution breaks at the clearing bank layer, right? And then what is a clearing bank? A clearing bank is the bank that has the charter and actually has the account at the Federal Reserve or any other central bank to actually move and hold the money, right? And we think these clearing banks are made of paper, right? We think they're slow, so if you wanna move money through them, it takes a day, maybe it takes two days. They're closed on the weekends and they're closed after 5pm and they're closed on Christmas because humans run them. And we think they're kind of like, they come from a different time. And we think with Augustus, the thesis is there's an opportunity to rethink that for the era and then build that from scratch in a full stack way. Okay.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  What is the news today?

• 39:05Ferdinand Dabitz?

  The, yeah, approval. We got a bank.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Ferdinand Dabitz?

  We have conditional approval from the OCC to charter Augustus as a US full-service national bank. Yeah.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  All right, so my first question, when did you know that you wanted to name your bank after Augustus De Rico?

• 39:21Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Yeah, I've already had someone message me and I think like if it all falls down, he can buy the domain for less wrong price or something like that.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  So, so you're bullish on the dollar. I was just watching Ray Dalio, Ray Dalio on Ross Douthat. He's extremely bearish on America, bearish on the dollar. Have you heard any of the popular super cycle theories? America is doomed, the ultimate black pills on the dollar and how do you push back?

• 39:54Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I've heard of them. I think you can disagree with some, you can disagree with the other, but I think it's also like it's a question of mission, right? Like what's the future you want to build? And I think that what are the alternatives, right? And I think in a way, the mission for this company would be much less clear 10 or 20 years ago, where it was only the euro and the dollar and nothing else mattered. And there was, there was no competition on the global stage, right? But today there is, right? You've got adversaries, you've got like China building the digital yen and like shipping it all into Africa and distributing it pretty nicely. You've got Russia pitching their bricks pay thing every other day and like, yeah, like we're gonna get off the dollar and have our own little clearing thing here. And so it's about mission. It's about the question, how can we secure and advance Western currency dominance, right? And I think like one, one instrument

• 40:38Ferdinand Dabitz?

  here is to build better clearing banks to remove friction from the distribution of this amazing product, because the pro market fit is still there, right? If you talk to people outside the US, in many cases, this is the golden standard is what the people want most. It's just like incredibly hard to get.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Last question. Who's the customer? How do you acquire them?

• 40:57Ferdinand Dabitz?

  So customers are global financial institutions.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  So not companies, not startups, you're not going to individuals or anything like that, at least not yet?

• 41:06Ferdinand Dabitz?

  Exactly. Nothing of that. We go to global FIs. So, so a bank in South America, bank in Southeast Asia, a financial institution in the global south or anywhere else and we acquire them, right? And so we've launched Euro Clearing, it came like a while ago and sold that to many of the largest financial institutions, right? So we do, hands making for companies like Kraton, for example, and process billions of euros for them today. And so now the hope is of course that can we, that we can be much more useful to these customers with the dollar as we plug that into the platform as well today.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on OCC approval and thanks for stopping by the show.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for fighting the fight.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  For our dollar.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Keep the dollar strong.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Welcome back. Spencer Rascoff from Match Group. Welcome to the show.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic entrance. Very quick. Sometimes I have to do a whole ramble.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Very sneaky.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  But for those who don't know you, please introduce yourself a bit. I'd love to go back a little bit about your career and then I want to see where Match Group is going.

• 42:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, great to be here and thanks for what you do for technology and also for the LA tech community.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  It was great.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  Very long LA of us to do this here.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  I appreciate it. I grew up here and I've been, you know, I moved back here about 10 years ago and have been all about promoting the LA tech community. I started a company called Dot LA, which is a media company to promote LA tech.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  You started that?

• 42:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. So yeah, quickly about my background. I did some time on Wall Street and then broke free from that.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Thank you for your service. Not enough people.

• 42:39Speaker 06

  Wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. My first startup was Hotwire.com, which we sold to Expedia.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 06

  Then I was at Expedia briefly and then I left to start Zillow. I was the CEO and co-founder of Zillow, ran it for 15, 16 years.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 06

  And then retired for a couple of years. Angel invested in new startups, incubated new startups, mostly with former Zillow folks.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  And then stepped in as CEO of Match Group about a year and a half ago.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  What does that recruiting process look like? Like, you know, it's like, they could have gone with someone who was actively a CEO. They tried to pull you off the beach in some ways. Like, what's that conversation like? Why you, I mean, you're clearly capable and...

• 43:14Speaker 06

  Well, I was on, I was on the board and I'd been on the board for about a year.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 43:17Speaker 06

  And when the opportunity presented itself, the board turned to me and said, you know, what do you think? And I immediately jumped at it. So I had been watching the company for more than a year from the boardroom. It's an incredible company doing really important work. I actually, I feel very personally motivated by the mission of the company. There is a loneliness epidemic. It is a real global problem. It's existential.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  And it impacts longevity and mental health and like everything about how society works. And Match Group is one of the very few companies as the leading dating app company that can do something about it. And so that's why...

• 43:52John Coogan?

  So you're on the board, you're watching. When you choose to step into the CEO role, are you, do you have a 90-day... Plan. Do you have a big transformation plan? Like, what were you going into? Because it's

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, presumably a lot of your

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Tablearaza here.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of your best ideas. Hopefully you had been

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you've been like, hey, I told you guys to, you know, acquire this company or, you know, change this or whatever.

• 44:17Speaker 06

  I have this, uh, this kind of mantra and I, I write it on the board. I put it up, uh, there are stickers around the company of it, posters, etc. It's great people, properly motivated and properly organized, build great products that are informed by user research that then when properly marketed, generate a lot of audience and revenue and profit and then shareholder value. So

• 44:39John Coogan?

  It's like the entire business.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  So it starts with people. It starts with people and motivation and organization. So that's where I started. That was the beginning of, of the 90 day plan. Who's here? Why are they here? How are they organized? And so for example, I immediately started by breaking down silos.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:53Speaker 06

  Match Group was basically a roll up.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask you about. It feels like the ultimate siloed organization.

• 44:59Speaker 06

  It was. It was. It was basically a holding company and I've transitioned it to being an operating company. So Barry Diller's IAC bought the cat, you know, but a lot of the companies of the category started with match.com in Dallas, then, uh, plenty of fish in Vancouver, OkCupid in New York, Tinder in LA, Hinge in, in New York, Pairs in, um, uh, in Tokyo, Metic in France and on and on. And there are 25 brands that have been assembled and then it spun out to IAC shareholders about six or seven years ago. And a lot of the hard work around integration was never done. So that was where I first focused my attention was on people, organization, motivation, employee engagement. And then we moved on to product. And at that point, I took on the role of running Tinder myself.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  Because Tinder, it, well, obviously with a, with a great team, but being essentially CEO of Tinder. Tinder's the number one dating app.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  I got this.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  With the team, right? So it's the number one app in 166 countries.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Writing marketing copy.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  I haven't gone, I haven't gone that far. I, I, that's, uh, that's where, you know, I, we still have a, a great team, but uh, look, it's, it's, uh, it's almost 2 billion of our three and a half billion of revenue and it's by far the largest dating app worldwide. Yet it had sort of lost its way in terms of innovation. It hadn't been founder-led for a long time. It hadn't prioritized user outcomes. It hadn't had an innovative product roadmap. And so we recast all of that about six months ago. And we've made enormous progress in just six months. And I shared a lot of the metrics last week on earnings. We are turning around Tinder and it feels great.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  That's amazing. How do you think about de-siloing? Because I guess my big question is like, how important are the individual brands? Because I imagine that's the last thing you de-silo is like, oh, if you're a Match.com user, like now, surprise, you're just, it's the Tinder brand. Because you could do that. Like, it's totally possible to acquire a company, change the name, maintain most of the user base. But that feels like the last thing that you would do. But why?

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, what we've started by doing is integrating a lot of the backend.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  I'm sure, like finance, legal, HR, and then also databases.

• 47:04Speaker 06

  But even the back end of the product.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  So, for example, BLK, our app for Black Daters, and Chispa, our app for Hispanic Daters, and Match.com. Like, all of these now have an integrated backend.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  So we launched a new feature and it goes out across a dozen or so different.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  So like one cloud platform, one set of SREs and engineers.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  What we haven't done yet is some of the liquidity sharing that I think maybe you're getting at. Which is, you know, should we show a Tinder user to an OkCupid user? Or a Plenty of Fish user to a BLK user? We've done a little bit of cross-sell.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  And that's been very effective. So you'd be on one of our apps and you'll get a message that says, hey, you've been invited to join the league. Tap here and now your profile is kind of ported over into the league.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 47:52Speaker 06

  And now you're searching in league. That's driven a lot of audience growth and revenue cross-sell. But that's kind of where we started.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  What is the dynamic of being this roll-up? Because is there some sort of adverse selection or some weird market dynamic where there are founders or entrepreneurs out there who basically say, oh, if I start a dating site and I get anything going, I'm going to be able to sell to these guys because they want everything? Is that something that happens?

• 48:19Speaker 06

  Yes, it does. And I mean, I guess I would describe it this way. Every eighteen-

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone, has anyone sold multiple companies?

• 48:26Speaker 06

  To us? Uh, no. No, not that I'm aware of.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  There's no Nikita Beer of-

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Cause there's a couple, there's a couple of these serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that do this type of thing. I mean, you'll see it in like cybersecurity or enterprise software where it's like, oh, he sold three companies to Google that do basically the same thing.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. And we haven't had any repeat, repeat sellers. But look at Zillow Group. We bought seventeen companies during my time as CEO of Zillow Group. So far, we've bought kind of one and a half in my year and a half here. So we bought Her, which was the leading lesbian or sapphic app. And then we invested last week a hundred million dollars in Sniffies, which is the number two app for non-heterosexual men.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  With the right to buy the rest of that company. So we made those two moves so far. But, um, you know, there are a lot of startups in this space. There always have been, there always will be because every fifteen to twenty-two-year-old starts dating and they think, oh, these dating apps are not great. I can build a better one. And it's easier than ever to build a new app or website, obviously. So I think the competition will keep coming. The challenge, of course, is this is a network effects business and people tend not to want to use a new network because there's a cold start problem. So even if a new app has great functionality-

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  There's a network effect very clearly, but at the same time, is there also some advantage that new platforms have?

• 49:41Speaker 06

  It can be sort of a nightclub, uh, you know, kind of a-

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  You're the first one there. You're the first one there, you know, big fish in a earth-

• 49:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, once, once you start solving the cold start problem, then I think new brands can take on some momentum, but it's very difficult at the very beginning.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 06

  This is of course, you know, the, the kind of, uh, the put and the take with a brand like Tinder, which is an older brand, has massive brand awareness. Everybody knows Tinder. Everyone also has an opinion about Tinder. And so now we have to work really hard to change the products. Improve the marketing to try to regain resonance with Tinder. So, features like Double Date, which are doing amazing, about a quarter of Gen Z users on Tinder now use Double Date, where two friends kind of join up, create a joint account, and then link their profiles. Now they're swiping on pairs and then they're in a four-way chat.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  There was a YC company, Gruber, that was doing something similar to that with three and three.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  And I don't know where that wound up, but.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  So, so.

• 50:34Speaker 06

  We didn't buy it.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Fascinating idea.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Every, every company you've mentioned so far seems very demographic focused. How are you thinking about new technology? I feel like there's a bunch of people that have, are thinking about how to use AI to create dating app experiences. I imagine you guys are already using a bunch of AI.

• 50:53Speaker 06

  We use AI constantly in the product. There are a lot of startups that are creating AI-only products, and we actually incubated one with Justin MacLeod, the founder of Hinge, and then spun it out. So, we're the largest owner of a company called Overtone, which hasn't launched yet, but the founder of Hinge is the founder there, and we're the biggest shareholder. That's building an AI-specific product.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  You're like, let's spin it out, we'll buy you back in a few years.

• 51:14Speaker 06

  So, there may be, that might be the first repeat seller.

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why?

• 51:18John Coogan?

  What does AI-only mean? It means you're dating AIs?

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Uh, no, no, no, no, no. We, we don't support that. It, it means that your experience is one where, um, kind of it's AI-guided. So, rather than you reviewing lots of people, AI's kind of holding your hand along the way. We use AI in all of our products in so many different ways.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Of course, even just to sort the stack of matches on Tinder.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Yes, the recommendation algorithm is.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Recommendation, that's been AI since day one.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  And ML-powered, but.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 51:44Speaker 06

  We use AI for profile creation. It can be very daunting to look at kind of a blank.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  Tell us about yourself, and so we use AI to tease out information about your profile.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  Have you gotten pretty good at detecting deepfakes?

• 51:54Speaker 06

  Yes. So, that was one of the first things that I focused on, is something called Face Check, where you have to record like a video selfie of yourself, and that's reduced interactions with fake accounts or deepfakes by about 60%. So, we've rolled that out in almost every country globally across most of our brands.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw a fascinating video of how people are trying to get around it by having nine fake images, deepfaked images of some person, and then. The real person who's operating the account will like, style transfer their face to look like like a Renaissance painting and you will just assume that it's like, oh, this hot person that looks exactly like, you know, it's nine AI photos. It's like, oh, they like painting and they happen to paint some random guy. But then that's the person that IDs the paycheck. So I imagine it's a cat and mouse.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a cat and mouse game. The bad guys are pretty good, but we're better. And, you know, we have to stay a step ahead. We've made a lot of progress and.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  How valuable is like, community feedback in that loop? Because I imagine that like, if somebody, if there's a, if there's a system that you build, someone's always going to try and find some edge around. But like, I've been surprised that like, the community notes system on X has been pretty robust. And it's been like, you can always just ask like, the LLM, like, is this real? But the community notes often surface things in interesting ways.

• 53:08Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So user reports, behavior of fake accounts, that's an important signal for us. And now we have a system that actually, it kind of cross bans. So if we detect a fake account on one app, we take it off of all the accounts, all the apps. So that also improves trust and safety across the whole map portfolio.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  I have a buddy, startup founder, probably eight years ago, thought he'd be cute and try to market the startup that he was working on, on one, one of the match group services, got banned, and then got banned from basically everything. And so he's like, I guess I'm destined to be alone in this cold world.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Sorry about that. We don't, we don't do kindly to promotional or fake accounts.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. What, have there been companies that have been trying to sell services on top of your platforms, like auto swipers and stuff like that?

• 54:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are some startups that try to do that.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  I wouldn't even necessarily call them startups. They're like, you know, I guess sometimes they might be, but they might just be like, operation.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are. We don't allow kind of automated, like, you know, scrapers or auto, you know, auto swipers or those types of things. So when we find out about those, we take them, we take them out.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the AI boom has hurt LA's prospects as a startup hub?

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Oh, boy. Yeah, it's, I mean, we do.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Because like we were sitting around prior to starting the show.

• 54:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  We're sitting here like we're we work in tech.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  But we don't want to leave LA.

• 54:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  What possible business could we start in LA? It's not hard tech.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  We had this idea, media.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  Media, no, this is this is kind of this is what makes LA LA. I mean, a couple of years ago, when creator economy was booming, even even crypto was was, you know, LA had a crypto moment, NFT moment. And then also when direct to consumer and like celebrity food and beverage brands, those types of things. When D to C was was hotter, I think LA was booming even more. And clearly, we've lost a little bit of market share and mind share to the Bay Area as this boom has happened. So it's a bit of a bummer for those of us in LA. But, you know, we're we're.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, the gravity of LA, which is like entertainment, the consumer media, hard tech, right? Just like sort of continues and it's very hard to but it but I think, you know, the the long LA contingent deserves credit in some part for El Segundo.

• 55:40Speaker 06

  Totally. A SpaceX or Anduril IPO will be massive. Service Titan was a was a nice moment. Obviously, the Honey exit was a nice moment.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 06

  But, you know, once SpaceX gets public, I think that will be pretty amazing for the ecosystem here. Obviously, much of some of it's moved to Texas, but there's a lot of of pent up wealth, which will become recycled into angel investments.

• 56:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Into the rest of the LA tech ecosystem.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you look through or you imagine looking through like all the KPIs that you look at over a quarter or a year, are there any metrics that have shown the clear like pre AI, post AI, like kink in the graph? Like, we were looking at the number of books published on amazon.com and it's gone from 100,000 a month to 400,000 a month. Clear AI effect, you can see it just grow. Now, is that good or bad? It's probably fine because they have recommendation algorithms that can filter that stuff out. But I'm just wondering if there's any like, OK, we can I imagine you can like see COVID in your charts, right?

• 56:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, you saw COVID and then you saw kind of the the COVID hangover.

• 56:40John Coogan?

  So so COVID was a. Spike for you because everyone was

• 56:43Speaker 06

  Sitting at home, they're on their couch, looking at their phones and then lonely and want a connection.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  And then people went back to work and kind of dating apps fell out of favor. Well, one internal metric is just poll requests now that we're doing so much internal AI coding. Poll requests are up, they were up forty percent year over year, a couple of months ago, now they're up sixty percent year over year. So basically the amount of code that our employees are writing is growing exponentially.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  The question that I have for all the CEOs that are seeing incredible gains with like AI agents and coding agents, like the PRs don't pay the bills, you know, like they don't like, and I'm always wondering like, you know, Meta was spending like billions of dollars token maxing and I think it's great, but when I open up Instagram, I'm like, is it better? Like I haven't seen a new button.

• 57:29Speaker 06

  It's a great question.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  And so, so I imagine as a CEO, you have to sort of grapple with this. I'm super optimistic, obviously, but.

• 57:34Speaker 06

  We're all, we're all going through this right now. So, so our approach to it is we have to pay for these AI tools somehow. It's, you know, for us, it's five to 10 million bucks a year that we're spending on AI tools from basically nothing.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's new OpEx.

• 57:47Speaker 06

  So we're slowing down hiring somewhat and that's how we're choosing to fund it.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:52Speaker 06

  But in terms of when do we start to see the actual benefit, you know, CEOs and CFOs are starting to ask that question more and more. I'm asking it more and more. I, I, I think we're benefiting from it. It's hard to, it's hard to feel it.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like the, the optimistic cases that in a few quarters, we're seeing case studies like, okay, yeah, we had an engineer run a bunch of A B tests automated, running overnight. And we found out that like the pricing on this page was better this way and it actually created a lift in revenue or something like that.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or, or a SaaS company says, hey, we added this product that was originally going to be, we were going to build it in three years. We built it now and it's ramping revenue and paying for all of this token.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  Our, our best example would be the first week of January, we decided to, to, as part of the Tinder turnaround, to focus on in real life events. We know that young people in particular really want to meet people in person. They want to get off their phones, get off the apps. And so first week of January, we made that decision. March 12th, we had a product event here in LA that demoed all these new changes to Tinder. And between the first week of January and March 12th, so in just a couple of months, we went from a standing start because of AI to shipping in-app, in-real-life events in LA. And we never could have pulled that off without AI. It was an AI sprint that made a product launch in two or three months, which would have taken six or 12.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Is that productivity improvement changing your, or potentially changing your thoughts around incubating new properties? I'm imagining you could go much more niche. You mentioned a few of the niches, but there's famously farmers-only, which I don't know if you own.

• 59:26Speaker 06

  We don't own that one.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  You don't own that one, but that's an example of a much more niche community, that the maintenance and the OpEx associated with running it at Match Group is probably too high. But if you drop that by 10x with AI, then maybe you can go after Hollywood media executive dating site.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, Upward is an example of this. So Upward is our Christian brand, but also kind of traditional values, which is something that obviously has a huge addressable market, but it's not 100% of the population mainstream. Hinge, for example, which we own, goes after all of the time.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Was that homegrown?

• 1:00:04Speaker 06

  And Upward was an incubation, but now because of AI, we're able to put more resources into it and accomplish a lot with 5, 10, 15 people, which...

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  And then it just becomes an audience acquisition problem, which you have solved because basically everyone...

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  Yes, we can cross-sell people into it, but we also can have a pretty innovative roadmap with a small team because of AI.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you can actually roll out all the...

• 1:00:25Speaker 06

  Is Instagram Hinge's biggest competitor? No, I think, well, if by Instagram you mean people meeting each other on Instagram, no. If by Instagram you mean people sitting on their couch and doom-scrolling and choosing not to get out there and date, yes. So, I mean, our biggest competitor at Match Group is just inertia. It's just people's... Loneliness and, you know, sort of doom scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or other social media, even Netflix or YouTube. We need people to put their phone down and put themselves out there and go try to meet new people. That to us is, you know, would be a flip of a headwind into a tailwind. And generationally, that's a little difficult.

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  A lot of Gen Z is, is pretty nervous about meeting new people or isn't sure it's worth the return on their time or, or maybe in some cases didn't develop the social skills because the pandemic caused them to miss a couple of critical years and so it doesn't come as naturally. So this is starting to change and the double date is an important part of this. In real life events are an important part of it. That's why they've been so central to the Tinder turnaround.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought about making products in the wedding category at all? Would you ever do wedding registries, prenups?

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  We have a pipeline.

• 1:01:40Speaker 06

  Well, so.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Divorces, it's like, welcome back.

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  A new member of our board of directors is Raina Moskowitz, who's the CEO of The Not Worldwide.

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  So, no, Match Group isn't doing it, but we're very lucky to have Raina's expertise as the leading.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you reactivate an account on any of the platforms after 10 years, divorce support.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Add on, what about advertising? I mean, I know many of the platforms have pro plans or paid plans, but what is unique about, you have a lot of attention, you have a lot of eyeballs. What's the story been with ads?

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  We have a pretty, relatively speaking, small advertising business, considering how big our audience is. We make less than $100 million on advertising out of our almost $4 billion of revenue.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  We love advertising here.

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  I mean, the way we make most of our money, almost all of our money is subscription revenue where users pay for extra features, extra powers. You know, some of our competitors have really leaned into advertising and I think advertising... Can improve the user experience, but sometimes it cannot.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  So there's two classic takes on ad monetization. Like, one is that, you know, like Twitter never got good at ads because people aren't in that like lean back shopping mentality. And then the other take is like, it's an engineering problem. And if they just had the meta engineers building that matching algorithm, do you see one of those being more important than the other?

• 1:03:10Speaker 06

  I mean, I think from my Zillow experience, when we, we had a pretty big ad business at Zillow. And when we had endemic advertisers, the, you know, the, the, the moving companies, the mortgage companies, the title insurance companies tightly integrated into the product, that was, you know, that was ads as product, ads as improving user experience. In this category, we also have done some of that. And the ads, for example, on Tinder are integrated in. So you right swipe on an ad, you left swipe on an app, the same way you would right swipe or left swipe on a user. So it, because it's endemic in that way, and it's, it's pretty tightly integrated, the ads perform very well. But we're much more focused on driving user outcomes and getting people out on dates. And so the subscription revenue is more aligned with user outcomes.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever invest or do anything around the housing problem we have in this country? Given that you're at Zillow?

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Quickly, can you solve the housing crisis for us?

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I mean, I would like, I would like you to take a run at that at some point. You know how much demand there is.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  You know, it's, there's a, obviously an affordability crisis. There's mortgage rate lock-in. If we could find a way to make mortgages transferable, that would be massive. And tons of people are kind of stuck in their homes at two to 3% mortgages. They're not in the right home that's right for them anymore, but they can't afford to fit it to a 5 or 6%.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  If you bring the mortgage with you?

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  I mean, it's, you basically can't do it. You have to, there are some startups that have tried. I looked at incubating some startups to do it, but you, all the stars have to align. The buyer has to match your credit. It can't be done essentially in the current regulatory environment. That would be a massive unlock. More real estate development. So just more builder friendly legislation would be very important. That's something that some other states, not California, have done a better job of. California has been a laggard in that way. You know, I have incubated and invested in a lot of startups that help real estate agents use AI to be more productive. I do think that's a bit of a limiter as well. There's one called House Whisper, which I started with several former Zillow people, which makes an AI assistant basically for real estate agents and gives them incredible AI

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  superpowers. So that's a part of the unlock as well. But, you know, we don't have a demand issue. We have a supply issue in the US. So we need more supply. We need more houses built. We're missing about a million homes that basically weren't built after the financial crisis. This goes all the way back to 2008. Builders were building a million homes a year and they went down to 200 or 300,000 for four or five years. So there are a million homes missing.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's rough. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on the show.

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

  Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks.

• 1:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Eric Olson from Consensus back on the show with an exciting fundraising announcement. He's in the waiting room. So we'll bring him in to the TVP on UltraDome. Eric, how are you doing? What's going on?

• 1:06:05Speaker 07

  Fantastic, guys. How are you guys doing?

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Please reintroduce yourself in the company for the listeners and then we can go into the news today.

• 1:06:15Speaker 07

  So I'm Eric, the co-founder of Consensus. We're building AI for academic and scientific researchers. To date, the product's been very search focused, focused on the literature view use case, people finding preferences for whatever work they're doing. And we are announcing a $30 million Series B today, led by Great Point Ventures.

• 1:06:41Speaker 07

  Take the product beyond search, move into more of a workspace for researchers.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  How has the actual go to market been? Obviously, you're raising more money, so I imagine there's been traction. What's the response been like? What's the customer acquisition strategy?

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, that has been far and away the best part of this entire process is the amazing work we get to see our users doing. I mean, these are people who are genuinely changing the world with the research.

• 1:07:09Speaker 07

  Like most AI products, and we've gone mostly straight to consumer. There's so much on the ground demand for tools like this that we're really growing mostly organically. You know, we're in the business where so many people are doing work in a lab or at a university. There's tons of networks effect sharing. So we've leaned into that above all else. And then more and more recently, over the last year, we now work with over 100 universities. Where we sell usually directly to the library and then they'll distribute the product to students themselves.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. Where are the models or the existing tools sort of falling down? Because it feels like anything that has a very, very short reinforcement, you know, reinforcement loop. Like research or coding can be automated like very quickly. You can get really great results, but stuff like fill up that test tube, throw in the centrifuge. Even if that just takes a few minutes, it's harder to actually close the loop there quickly. And so that's always been my thesis for why we're seeing such, you know, rapid advancement in cybersecurity. Because you can run it in simulation, video games, but stuff in the offline world, anything that needs, you know, I R L feedback is slowed. Do you have an opinion about where all this goes?

• 1:08:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there are people who are going after full autonomous scientists. And you push a button, discoveries come out. We're kind of betting against that. You know, I think, like you said, there are many parts of a research process that can be automated. We want to focus on those parts, but there are many things that happen outside of that that are very uniquely human. And it isn't just the putting the atoms together, putting the thing in the test tube. There's lots of. You know, taking things from different domains, understanding the connections between them, talking to people, working through ideas and coming up with these new ideas. That is the essence of science. It isn't just what's in the test tube. And, you know, despite how good these models have gotten, it's still not great at drawing connections between things and coming up with a new idea.

• 1:09:09Speaker 07

  So we want to focus on the things that are actually automatable, like searching for papers and running many iterative searches and finding the right materials. And let humans and scientists focus on the things that are still core to science in that collaboration, in that agree, in that discussion.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is the bar being raised on college campuses? Like are our students and researchers, now that they have AI, just expected to do two, three times as much work in a given period?

• 1:09:40Speaker 07

  I mean, to some degree, absolutely. At the same time, you also will see lots of professors that will put up lots of, you know, blockers to people using AI and forcing them to do, you know, Procter tests and making sure that they're doing things that are not AI-enabled. So I think that there are certain parts of it that are sped up immensely, but then there's other parts of it where professors are putting lots of safeguards up to ensure that everything is being done in the classroom exactly the way that they want. So I think it's kind of a little bit of a mix of both.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  How do you think about harnesses, wrappers, just SaaS that can accelerate different pieces of the research puzzle to sort of create that operating system? Like, are you drawing from the analogy of like the IDE, the coding agent? You know, Silicon Valley's moved really aggressively towards like coding agents are all you need, but Cursor's still doing really well. And so, you know, a lot of code review will still happen, even in a world where AI is writing a lot of the code. So walk me through sort of how you're thinking about the future of research where there's a huge AI portion, but the researcher still remains in the cockpit.

• 1:10:50Speaker 07

  I think ID is a really great corollary because you want there to be these things where you have this harness where it can do these iterative loops. You can give it feedback to say, no, go down that path or that path and pull in the things you're looking for. I think the one difference between us and maybe a coding use case is there are very discreet steps that happen sequentially. So maybe you're in a search use case, but typically then you're moving to like, oh, now I'm writing this paper. Now I'm deeply analyzing this data. So it's kind of like two actually different surfaces than just one ID. So you want to be able to build a workspace that makes it a really easy transition from I'm in this search. I'm in this learn discovery mode, but now I need to transition to this new task. That same thing is still present. You want to be able to iterate with a model and say, hey, take me down this path.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  I want to explore this idea. I want to write this. I want to edit it. Okay. But now I want to go back to search because I just wrote this paragraph. And now I need to find references that support that paragraph. Maybe you're taking that paper and then you're going to the next step, which could be you're running some real life experiment. Maybe you're getting off of your service you're in. So like, I think it is, each sequence is very similar. I think the difference between us and a lot of other use cases is that there are these very distinct surfaces you need to build for each part of a research process.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about integration with lab notebooks? Is that going to be important at some point? Is it already important? I've been, uh, there's been a big push for like cursor for bio, but I've always had struggle. And I've always struggled to understand that pitch because there is no VS code for bio. All of the electronic lab notebooks, the ELN market is closed source typically. And so, but I imagine that with the right API integration, the right partnership, you can still partner with those. Is that in the roadmap? Is that in the sweet spot or something maybe down the road?

• 1:12:33Speaker 07

  Absolutely. But I think you're bringing up another great point that even in each one of those like broad buckets. So now if you're moving to like some sort of writing note taking use case, there are different surfaces for different types of research.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:44Speaker 07

  Like your benchlings for biotech. And then there's, you know, just word in Google docs if you're a graduate researcher or something. You want to both create APIs that integrate with those and you can do it directly in those services. We also think we can build our own dedicated services to.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  What about for, uh, what about for scientists that use sort of like hosted iPython notebooks? They might be on like Google Collab or something like that, some light hosted. Do you want to build that stack so you can sort of provide that or do you want to partner with the existing tools?

• 1:13:17Speaker 07

  Why not both?

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  Why not both? Okay. Well, you have the money to do both. So good luck and congratulations. And thank you for stopping by the show.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Great to get that update, Eric. Good to see you.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Our next guest is Matt from Giga Energy. He made news recently because Giga Energy has scaled to $350 million in revenue vertically integrating AI infrastructure while raising just $3.4 million of equity funding. It's an amazing, amazing story of what's possible in the AI era, in hard tech. People say it's hard. Maybe it's not so hard. I don't know. Matt will tell us. How you doing?

• 1:13:56Speaker 08

  Howdy. How you doing?

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to jump on the show. I heard the story, heard a little bit of the news, but I'd love to go back and start with your, your origin story, how you got into this business, and then walk us through the shape of the business today. So where'd you get started?

• 1:14:13Speaker 08

  Yeah. So I started this business back at Texas A&M with a couple buddies from college almost seven years ago. Business kind of started around flaring natural gas, Bitcoin mining, and quickly evolved into supply chain constraints.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  And was your, your team, where was the back, were you guys studying engineering? Or were you just interested in crypto? Like, what was the business? I don't know. What was the background?

• 1:14:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, I was just super interested in Bitcoin, like trying to find any way to get into it. I was like out of desperation, large oil and gas college. My co-founder's third generation oil and gas. The impetus was, hey, can you find us a well and can we mine Bitcoin on it? And then from there, we just kind of went on YouTube and little by little learned through phase power.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  No way. So yeah, what was the first thing you built?

• 1:14:56Speaker 08

  So the first thing we ever built was a 50 kilowatt modular data center in Southeast Texas that mined, yeah, just like, I don't know, maybe quarter Bitcoin a month or something.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what does that actually look like? So there's a, there's a deposit of natural gas in the ground and it's being flared and it, and some of it would be wasted, but then you're converting it. Like, how much did you have to buy? What, what, what's the scale? Am I looking at something that's like a shipping container size or like building size or like washing machine size?

• 1:15:24Speaker 08

  Like 20 foot ship container, like tiny, like nothing, nothing massive at scale. And then, yeah, you have natural gas generator on site, you're pulling from the wellhead.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:32Speaker 08

  Uh, stuff's going down, breaking all the time. And basically in terms of scaling that business, the rate limiter was the infrastructure. So very quickly, we said, how can we build our own Bitcoin boxes?

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 08

  And then Bitcoin 85% drawback, next thing you know, we're selling more Bitcoin boxes and picks and shovels than we were mining the Bitcoin.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Interesting. And then these Bitcoin boxes, are they GPUs, are they ASICs for Bitcoins? Like where were we in the story of like Bitcoin mining at that point?

• 1:15:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, so you're 2019, you're still at like 14 nanometer chips with ASICs at the time. So very rudimentary in the field, like flies and dust everywhere.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. But they, but they aren't repurposable because they're Bitcoin ASICs. So you wind up selling a lot of those as the market deteriorates. Uh, when do you start thinking about AI?

• 1:16:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I ended up selling about 1.2 gigawatts of those modular data centers uh, over like a four year tenure. Then little by little, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Wait, so, yeah, wait, really quickly, like you're selling 1.2 gigawatts of these modular data centers, like what is your supply chain like? How vertically integrated are you versus uh, more of like a systems integrator that then is delivering that to a buyer?

• 1:16:36Speaker 08

  Man, it was incremental. It was everything from like building it at Home Depot to now, you know, reshoring manufacturing back in the US and then just like little by little over a seven year period, bringing it back.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and what's the typical, what was the typical buyer back in that era?

• 1:16:52Speaker 08

  Everyone, I mean, we captured, I would kind of had a nice niche, like lower market, middle market, public markets, you name it, we're selling to them. We were the guys with the Bitcoin boxes.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so, so one of these companies that wants to, they, they, they purely see it as like a economic opportunity, they're putting dollars in and getting Bitcoin out and they think that the ROI will go up as they, they have a Bitcoin price target, they come to you, buy it, and then they also have to go and get the land that has the access to the natural gas line, basically?

• 1:17:18Speaker 08

  Yep, yeah, and also on grid utility. Uh, and so yeah, kind of like, basically we got a really good mousetrap, we're selling it, making great margin, then we realized everyone we're selling them to, why can't we do what they're doing if we got, you know, great margins?

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:30Speaker 08

  So started going down the pipeline, figuring out how do we get powered land? How do we get cheap power?

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:35Speaker 08

  Uh, in the same vein, started introducing new product lines, so transformers and switch gear in 24, we introduced.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 08

  Uh, started selling that and, and at Mazium and then.

• 1:17:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, mid 24, we built a go-to-market function around CNI renewables, electrical, and just started selling the non-Bitcoin miners, realizing that our electrical equipment was fungible.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Interesting. And so what was the scale of the company in 24 when you start doing that? I mean, do you have like hundreds of employees?

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, and when did you, when did you raise that few million bucks?

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Through the fundraising.

• 1:18:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, so that, the funny thing, that 3.4 million didn't really go to any of our growth. They just like kind of kept us alive for a couple of year period figuring out, you know, our product market fit. So we raised like a million bucks in 2021, and we raised the remaining amount in March of 22.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Wow. And then just, and then just sales come in?

• 1:18:25Speaker 08

  It's a profitable business. Yeah.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  Was there, was, were there any, like?

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Did you get thrown out of any VC office for being profitable at any point?

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  It sounds like it wasn't in them. Sounds like you didn't even stop by. But in, in terms of the cash conversion cycle, did you ever have to use debt or payment terms? Because I imagine if somebody comes to you and says like, I want a Bitcoin box, you still have to go make it. There's like supply chain, like, like your, your, your, your, your working capital could explode if you're not careful.

• 1:18:54Speaker 08

  It was all payment terms. So we, we were able to convince customers to do 30, 40, 50% down and match our payment milestones relative to cash out the door.

• 1:19:04Speaker 08

  And, and just kind of continue rolling it forward. So yeah, our customers financed the whole business.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Okay. So then take me through like the growth of the actual workforce, like how much is in-house? How, how big is the, the team at various points? Like, how did you scale the workforce?

• 1:19:20Speaker 08

  Yeah. So we had about 90 employees and last year approximately maybe 100, we're up to about 200 now, this year by the end of the quarter, really kind of continuing to, continuing to scale it throughout 24. We got into renewables, CNI, electrical division, selling to churches, prisons, hospitals, transformers, switchgear systems, and then ended up getting a massive bar of queue with an AI data center. And that's like, just kind of led us back to the watering hole in terms of, you know, how, how big the opportunity was. And next thing you know, we're selling transformers, switchgear, everyone in the AI space.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Where do you want this to go? Are you going to raise money at some point? Or do you want us to continue to grow it profitably?

• 1:20:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, so Giga has now, again, we went through the cycle of like, we're selling the picks and shovels. Yeah. Wait, the guys who were selling the picks and shovels to are making a ton of money. Why can't we do that? Same thing's happening on the AI side. We got the powered land, we have massive pipeline, multi-gigawatts in terms of our capacity. We have, we have healthy margins and so Giga today really exists around rapid data center deployment. Okay. We build all the, we manufacture all the long lead time equipment items to build a data center. And we build the data center with our own picks and shovels. Okay.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  What kind of, what, what kind of challenges are you facing on, on the ground? Specifically with like local community opposition?

• 1:20:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, there's a lot of that. Yeah, we got town hall meetings all the time, talking to people, kind of walking them through, you know, hey, this is going to use less water than, than your golf course does within the area. There's a lot of noise concerns. So a lot of this is just kind of sitting down with the residents, walking them through, what does this practically look like in your backyard?

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  On the noise front? What's, what do you believe, what do you believe is the solution there? I think there's, every single day there's videos on X circulating where you could, you know, people posting like, you know, this is what it sounds like if you're living in this, you know, suburb and it's like a low hum from the generators.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  You've been continuously making new hardware, you know, innovations and products. Do you think there's a hardware solution to noise or is it just put them farther away from people?

• 1:21:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, the unfortunate thing is like, almost all the setups are in compliant with local laws. All right, they're probably going to be below that 65 decibel threshold, but that kind of low hum is still very irritating. The extent that, you know, you can kind of continue to innovate around the products and get lower decibels, put up sound walls, dirt mounds further away, but also, I mean, in my opinion, it's a bit of a easy thing to latch on to when just, you know, opposing the general concept of an AI data center in your backyard.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Oh, sure. So it's sort of like a straw man, like it's not what people actually care about. They care about the bigger picture, bigger question.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Why don't they dig, putting them underground? Is that a, is that a solution? I've, I've seen a bunch of people posting like very creative ideas around these things. It sounds like a lot of work to dig a big enough hole in the ground, but maybe it's.

• 1:22:25Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, on top of trying to build a data center nine months, putting one in the ground is, is not on, on the highest priority, I would say.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, just too, too fast. Well, what about energy for local, like local energy prices? There's been the ratepayer production pledge signed by a lot of hyperscalers. Like, how, how real is that? How are you working through those, those, those talking points when they come up at a town hall meeting?

• 1:22:50Speaker 08

  Yeah. Right. Every utility or electrical tariff relative to municipality can be different. Even within Arcot, you have different center point or encore, right? Two different systems, two different ways of calculating that method. There is the ability to ensure that consumers don't receive increased pricing relative to that. And there's a lot of education terms around what soft load or firm load looks like. You get backup diesel gen sets on, on site. But also at the end of the day, you gotta be pulling, you know, four, four or five nines of uptime. So the LMP pricing or local marginal pricing of these sites probably will go up a marginal amount unless the hyperscalers are willing to step in.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  How far do you want to go up the stack? You're building actual data centers now. Are you going to be the one racking the GPUs or are you going to partner with Neo clouds? Are you going to be, you know, networking everything together and offering an API for a particular LLM? Like you could go very, very deep in the integration if you wanted to, but what's on the near term goal set?

• 1:23:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think near term, right? Gaze is very much a ground up company. Right? Manufacturing the stuff from the ground up with our own CAD file sets. Moving the dirt, putting up the building and energizing the facility. We stop at the rack level currently and that's really what we're excellent. Very much the top down approach of heavy financial systems or, you know, whatnot. We view our bottom up approach very novel.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  So, I mean, do you, is there, is there a different financial, like, underwriting procedure or thought process around actually acquiring GPUs and racking them? Because it sounds like you would have a tenant that brings in their own equipment and runs whatever they want. Yeah.

• 1:24:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So for us, the value proposition is, hey, you need to burn these chips. We can get you 50, 100 megawatts of IT online in nine months.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and we've seen that from Satya Nadella at Microsoft. He says, we actually have the chips. We just don't have enough powered shells. That's why you're in the powered shell business. That makes a lot of sense. Fascinating. What else, what else goes into delivering a data center in nine months? It feels like, is there a secret to not getting hung up in permitting? Is it the fact that you have a more fluid workforce that can travel across the country? We've heard stories of like plumbers going on private jets. I don't know. What else you can tell me about like bringing your 200 person employee base to bear in a particular region that might not be right next to your headquarters?

• 1:25:31Speaker 08

  Yeah. So our mantra is building in the factory, not in the field.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:36Speaker 08

  And we did this kind of implicitly in the Bitcoin mining world. We were able to turn on Bitcoin sites in almost 60 days. From bare piece of dirt to energized racks. And the AI space, nine months is done because we do majority of the commissioning and the integration at the factory in a controlled environment. About a 95% reduction in the need for onsite labor at these data centers because of our modular design and the prefabrication going in. And that's really much the focus upfront.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  Tents versus buildings. We heard that Meta recently shifted to tents to speed up the time to deploy their data centers. Do you have an opinion on the structure that should hold the, the GPUs, the racks?

• 1:26:18Speaker 08

  The whole industry should be focused on time to token, right? What gets us online as fast as possible? Whether that's a tent, whether that's a pre-engineered metal building on site. If all, you know, 15 different companies could be aligned on time to token, that's really where we're what we need right now.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what city has been the most welcoming to data centers in America that that you've come across yet? Like, any, anybody standing up the whole town, just, just saying?

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  Standing ovation.

• 1:26:51Speaker 08

  You know, I mean, uh, I, it's hard to make everyone happy, I would say. Um, the, I, I, I couldn't name a particular place that, uh, I would say is a hundred percent on board.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Are you worried about any of the potential, uh, regulatory or political shifts in the next 12 months?

• 1:27:11Speaker 08

  I mean, I have to imagine at some point this becomes a federal issue.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Speaker 08

  Like where, you know, sign, sign an order, you know, saying, you know, like, there's no reason like we should have random municipalities blocking like AI inference coming online. It's just like not practical in any way, shape or form in terms of what we're trying to march forward. So I think that's gotta come at some point. How soon? I don't know.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you thinking about space? It feels like Giga has been very adaptable to date around different trends. Could we see you guys building satellites in the future? Data centers onboard?

• 1:27:43Speaker 08

  You know, we're, we're focused on the dirt. We're focused on, uh, we're, we're not the most high tech. Uh, we're not the largest. We're very much focused on, on speed. Uh, and at the end of the day, I think, uh, that, that is, is the difference.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

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

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you finally.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team on the progress.

• 1:28:02Speaker 08

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:28:03Speaker 08

  Take care.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jay from N of One, who is the founder. This is his first appearance, uh, building trading agents that may be the next AI interface.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  What's going on, guys? Welcome to the show, Jay. How are you doing? I'm great. How are you guys? Good. Uh, first time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit.

• 1:28:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, so my name is Jay. I'm the founder of NF1. We're an AI research lab focused on financial markets. So we're taking a big bet on markets as the next environment that leads to training models that are, you know, better at trading and better at domains that require like adaptive intelligence.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  What's your background? How'd you get into this?

• 1:28:57Speaker 09

  I have, I've kind of gone back and forth between public market investing and software, building software companies. So it's kind of like bringing together the two sides of my experience.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Sure. Do you think Renaissance Technologies secretly discovered the transformer back in the 90s? This is a conspiracy theory.

• 1:29:18Speaker 09

  I don't, I don't think so. We actually just hired someone from Renaissance. And yeah, I don't think so.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  It seems unlikely, given their compute bill over the years. I think we would know.

• 1:29:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, there'd be signs.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  There would be signs. There would be signs. But what is working in terms of financial performance in the AI world? There's two weird dichotomies, which is like, a lot of the best and most profitable financial firms have been using machine learning for decades or years.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or the other side, you could say Jane Street is an AI lab.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they've invested in custom hardware and, you know, computer infrastructure for a very long time. They wrote their own programming language. Okay, well, like, they've been investing in this for a long time. And then on the flip side, you have the best frontier models when someone gives them a benchmark of like, try and trade this portfolio. We haven't seen good results. So where is the delta in your opinion?

• 1:30:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, it really depends on what your goals are.

• 1:30:22Speaker 09

  I think, you know, Jane Street is, their goal is to make money, to make as much money per quarter or year as possible. Our goal is to train models that can generalize across markets and eventually eclipse, you know, the best human traders and algorithmic trading systems in the world over a very long time horizon. And for the first, but for the first part of our goal, it's to make trading agents a thing. And that's mostly an infrastructure. They're honestly kind of like coding agents for markets. So we're building a consumer-facing platform, not a hedge fund. And so our goals are pretty different.

• 1:31:04Speaker 09

  We, we kind of see hedge funds as having a more short-term goal of making money and us having a much more long-term goal of, you know, trying to use markets as a learning environment for AI in general. Which leads to totally, building a totally different type of company, hiring a totally different type of people. Yeah, there's not many hedge funds that we know of that are trying to train models where their goal is generalization versus just, you know, making as much money as possible.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, talk about the consumer experience. Someone signs up, they deposit funds, your models start trading it. Is that, is that roughly what you're aiming for?

• 1:31:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so to take a short step back, basically our view is that trading agents are about to go through the same sort of adoption curve as coding agents. From basically no one using them today to basically everybody using them in the next couple of years. So like two or three years from now, we believe that trading without a trading agent will be like coding without a coding agent or a cursor. Or feel like. You could do it, but you know, why, why would you? And yeah, so that's like the sort of inflection that we see coming. It's like the next big platform shift in investing that we see. And you know, people have lots of ideas today

• 1:32:32Speaker 09

  around trading strategies or, you know, low resolution DCs they might have. We're executing that is kind of hard. So whether it's a systematic trading strategy or like some more complex discretionary one, you might have an idea, but you know, it's just impractical to put it on unless you're good at coding and have a bunch of data and other things. So yeah, basically you'll be able to come onto this platform, you'll be able to describe a thesis or an idea in natural language. And then the models that we that we are developing will be able to get you from that natural language to a fully deployed trading agent that expresses or embodies your viewpoint.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  I think there's someone in the chat who knows you. Do you know Moon from Stable Diffusion? You and Pedro kicked off his career. I don't know. He's excited that you're here.

• 1:33:21Speaker 09

  I have no idea who that is. Sorry.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Tell me about what the important pieces to build are for, because you can, in theory, use OpenClaw or an AI agent to interact with like an interactive broker's API, sort of set up a trading strategy, work through that. How, like, what are the pieces of the scaffold that you need to build to like give a great customer experience?

• 1:33:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a lot. The first hardest, you know, the hardest part in many ways is the data. You need to have really good live data coming in from basically every market anyone wants to trade. So we spent a lot of time really hammering out all the different providers and cleaning and preparing and getting it ready to be consumed by agents. So that's a huge piece of it. Like, if you don't have all the necessary data, it's hard to build a real trading strategy. The second piece is like the guardrails, you know, LLMs, a big part of our point and why we launched Alpha Arena, as maybe you guys saw, is to prove that LLMs aren't quite there yet when

• 1:34:29Speaker 09

  it comes to trading, that the models aren't very good at autonomous trading tasks, basically. So we developed like a harness and put a lot of our energy into developing like a world-class harness for trading and deep research queries for markets. So you get all of that on our platform and then all the DevOps and server management and basically all the infrastructure that you need to do that well, even on something like OpenClaw, we take care of that as well. But yeah, it's, it's, there's a lot. And then the execution and then if you want to do paper trading or simulate out possible ideas or, you know, kind of, you know, go through a lot of iteration and refining your strategy. It's, it's, it's not, it's not super easy to do, to do all this stuff. Well, um, yeah, that's.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever, would you ever partner with the publics or the Robin Hoods of the world and, and integrate this into their platform where they can effectively create some type of tab where they can type, you can type in a thesis and then execute it within your existing brokerage? Or do you want to own, own, own the end customer?

• 1:35:32Speaker 09

  Yeah. Um, as of right now, we're integrating with all the brokerages. So you'll be able to connect to whatever brokerage you used, or if you don't have a brokerage, you can just onboard through one that we set up for you, like Alpaca or IBKR. Um, but yeah, we're, we're, right now, we're just a layer on, on top of all the brokerages.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Cool.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:35:56Jordi Hays?

  You have some news. You have some news. You raised some money.

• 1:35:58Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah. We just raised a $15 million round.

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  Thank you, Jordy.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Almost forgot. Almost forgot.

• 1:36:07Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Congratulations.

• 1:36:11Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:36:13Speaker 09

  See ya.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Uh, we have Amir from Astrocade coming in in just a few minutes, but we have to talk about Laurel Supply. This is, you, you were-

• 1:36:23Jordi Hays?

  This is important.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Everyone out there was, if you were complaining that Arowan was too cheap, you're going to love Laurel Supply because they made an expensive version of Arowan. Uh, this is from Andrea.

• 1:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Some people are, some people are saying that it's, uh, yeah, more of like a TikTok studio.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Grocery store.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Okay. I want to know about the flow of like how the, what the go-to-market works, looks like because the thing went mega high.

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Tyler going there.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  We should have gone.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  It's close. I think I drive by it every day.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Okay, but let, let, let's set the table and try and understand what's actually going on here. So Laurel Supply.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Before we, before we dive in, probably two, one, one and a half years ago.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:59Jordi Hays?

  Point, John is saying like, okay, well, obviously, you know, Arowan's is hit.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:04Jordi Hays?

  But obviously the opportunity.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  You introduced me to Erawan.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Jordi Hays?

  Cause I would come in every day.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Cause you were you were such a diva, you would insist on only eating Erawan. And I was like, can we just throw in McDonald's once? Maybe a Jack in the Box? Maybe a Taco Bell, maybe a Del Taco.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  You said that a couple of times.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Maybe a Chick-fil-A.

• 1:37:22Jordi Hays?

  And then you piped down.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did eventually.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  You piped down.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you but you you brought me the gospel of Erawan. I became a convert.

• 1:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Make remake Erawan, but make it two to three times more expensive.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  And no one would think that. Everyone, everyone would come into it and say, what if Erawan but cheaper?

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Tyler says, I called this before John.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  I have a tweet from January of 2025. I say, there's definitely a market for ultra high end.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  You probably heard that on.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  I think you heard that on the show. Wait, what is this? Can we pull up Tyler's tweet? Where is this? Uh, we need to put this in here. Okay, so Tyler says, there's definitely a market for an for an high ultra end?

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Or an ultra high end.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Or an ultra high end grocery store that doesn't use plastic anywhere and tests the products for tons of stuff. Erawan meets plastic.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sorry, Tyler. You took, you overheard John.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  This tweet probably and then took it.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Well, I don't know.

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  I don't know when you said it.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think I riffed it. I was, this was right around the time that I was riffing it on the show. So like.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  Well, maybe so.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Totally possible.

• 1:38:23Speaker 04

  This was a reaction to Nat Friedman, I think.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:26Speaker 04

  Under the plastic.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  No, no, I I.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  So maybe.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  I might have to give you this one. I don't know. January 6.

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  I don't think this is a very original idea.

• 1:38:34Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway, anyway.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  What is cool is like a lot of the products they're selling.

• 1:38:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, clearly they're just like packaging them on site.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, so they have flowers here. They have a whole bunch of like nuts and spices and all sorts of things, but they are sold in individual jars, very aesthetic, like the view. There's just so much less chaos.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  They should call it Whole Foods.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  So this is the beauty.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  The tree inside is nice.

• 1:39:02Jordi Hays?

  This is the beauty. This is the beauty of capitalism.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  But, but the, which is that every great idea eventually can be usurped by doing the exact same thing, but just doing it slightly.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  At 3x the price. Is it actually 3x the price?

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't, I don't.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  We gotta go and understand. So Michael Meierflor has a post here. He says, important to note that this is on Holloway Drive, on the same street as Holloway House or Soho House Holloway, whatever the official name is now. And it's right next to Barnes and Bynum. This corridor is going to become one of the cool person destinations. Completely insufferable. Must visit if from out of town influencer destinations in LA. Another pink wall, if you will. Interesting. I remember the pink wall. Did you ever take a photo at the pink wall?

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  I drove by it a couple of times. I saw people taking photos. I never stopped. I knew that AI would be able to make a pink wall behind me if I wanted one on demand. The street is also a staging site of sorts for delivery robots. So yeah, lots happening. Interesting. Okay. So inside Laurel Supply, the new grocery store, luxury grocery store that just opened in West Hollywood. There is a video. Should we watch this or do you have another take, Jordy? What do you want to, what do you want to break down?

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  There's a video inside the store?

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  There's a one minute and 33 second

• 1:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's play it.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  video from Mike. Make LA great again. Inside Laurel Supply and we can play this, this video. It looks like it's a download of a TikTok. First look Laurel Supply. And it's a popular new American restaurant, Laurel Hardware. There's a couple of others. It's so overpriced, says Shant. Erawan down the street is so much better. It's making Erawan look cheap. Okay, let's play this.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Turn this up.

• 1:40:48Speaker 10

  All the fruits and vegetables are 100% organic and meticulously taste. You'll find an organic smoothie, juice, coffee and matcha bar with plenty of indoor seating, or you can just enjoy them while you shop. Immediately to the left, you'll find the health and beauty section. And this is a little

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Erawan doesn't have that.

• 1:41:05Speaker 10

  grocery store.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  They should have a full bodybuilder gym in there.

• 1:41:08Speaker 10

  Products from all around the world. This runway product caught my eye because you know, Devil Wears Prada. But one of the most unique things about Laurel Supply is this stone mill. It was imported from Ukraine and it allows them to control the production of their in-store goods. You know how you can go to Europe and eat all the baked goods like a heifer and not gain any pounds? A lot of people say it comes down to those specific ingredients like flour, so that's what they're trying to mimic.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  They make the flour on site?

• 1:41:32Speaker 10

  Opening. I don't have a lot of images of the prepared food, but it's

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  They're just like reinventing a farm.

• 1:41:37Speaker 10

  If you have a sweet tooth, you've been warned because there's a wide selection of gelato. Other food options such as sushi and they have an organic butcher. You'll immediately know all the attention to detail such as this live olive tree that they have inside and how they incorporate natural light. That was one of the big things I noticed immediately when you walk in. I was also told they offer valet for shoppers. So those that were concerned about the parking situation, that should help alleviate it. At the time of this posting, they should be officially open. Let me know what you think when you go check it out and follow me for valet updates that actually matter.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say personally, valet for

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  Grocery?

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Places that you go to a lot is a bug, not a feature.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just like parking my own car. I don't want random, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't need, I don't need or want random people

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  Driving the car?

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Driving my car all the time. Especially for, I'm saying for a grocery store or a gym.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, but I, I do think it's funny. So they're like, okay, so we're, we're, we're blatantly cloning Arwan. Let's just all admit that. Let's just all admit that. We're blatantly cloning Arwan, but we gotta do something different.

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  They rack their brains.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  What do they do?

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  For hours. We're gonna mill the flour in-house.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  Is that the only thing? Yeah. I, I, there was a lot of stuff there that seemed like Arwan.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  That's the only thing I know. No, I think, so, so it looks, it looks fantastic.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  I like the logo. It's cool. Uh, I will, I will happily shop here.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Will you? Or will you just be like, ah, it's not the same. I'm an Arwan diehard. You're gonna switch up on your day ones?

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh,

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  You're gonna switch up on Arwan?

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  It totally depends on location.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  You'd be driving to Arwan and be like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go the other

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  I am a reserve member at Arwan.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  I don't even know what that means, but it sounds expensive. That's hilarious. So funny. Well, what else is in the timeline? So Will and I just had an absolute banger today to the tune of 12,000 likes.

• 1:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, last thing, because Dylan, our very own Scotto, texted.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  What did he say?

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Very smart. He said, he said they should open in the Bay or New York, not where Air One already is.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:43:37Jordi Hays?

  Very, very smart. So, so Air One has been some, has had so much opportunity to expand within LA. They've done a very good job. You can't really drive 15 minutes without running into one, which is a great feature if you want to just pop in for lunch or whatever. But they've been.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Ben says they should do a points match. Like when you're leaving like American Airlines or United, they'll, they'll, they'll status match you. If Laurel Supply status matches you on day one, they might win you over.

• 1:44:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. No, but this is smart. They've been relatively slow to expand. There's a new, there's a store, I don't know, on the name in New York that beat them to, at least beat Laurel Supply to cloning in New York. But, but yeah, the thing about Laurel Supply is, is it looks incredibly well done and I'm sure the experience will be great. I will happily go check it out. But it doesn't add anything new to grocery in LA, really at all. I don't really.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  Unless they do what we were talking about, which is the whole brand is you go in here and there is no plastic in the store whatsoever. Like that was the original pitch that we were talking about was not, not, oh, it's organic.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, the other part, the other part of the pitch was ditch the old like brown grocery bags and do like.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  Solid gold bags.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Effectively turn the bag into like a Hermes Birkin bag. And so an influencer can take a photo of it. Somebody who gets the bags can take them at, at home, take a photo and everyone knows, oh, you got the fancy groceries. I gotta have those fancy groceries. That's the, that's the hack. I still think launching in LA is good for like go to market in terms of like the influencer economy, getting, you don't think so? You think New York and SF?

• 1:45:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Dylan said Marin. Marin would crush.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  Marin maybe, but I still think the total amount of views will be higher in Los Angeles than Marin. I think there are some.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's a starting point.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  But there's way more celebrities and whatnot. Like there's.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  But congratulations to the Laurel Supply team on the launch. Welcome on the show. We love talking grocery.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  I would love to have the CEO on the show. Anyway, we have our next guest. We've been keeping waiting in the waiting room, but here he is in the TVP and L T on the near from Astrocade. How are you doing?

• 1:45:40Speaker 11

  Hey guys, thank you for having me.

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Welcome to the show.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the progress. Introduce the product, then we can talk about the fundraising. But how are you describing what you're building right now?

• 1:45:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, AstroKid basically is a social entertainment platform where anyone, and I mean anyone, can create games via just natural language.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Speaker 11

  Very similar to how you problem chat GPT, you can make games. And for example, you can say a car racing that is happening under the water and the driver is an elephant or a candy crush that instead of popping the balls with color, you can form basically words, something like that. And then with a few clicks, you can just publish it to our feed and then there are millions of players that right now that play your games.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:27Speaker 11

  And I think the part that I'm the most excited is our mission, which is sharing fun with the world. I think what we are building is pretty cool for people to use and be happy.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  This seems, I don't know, like almost obvious. I don't want to degrade it, but it feels like there's been this vibe coding boom. I see a ton of really fun games. We've made like simulators and whatnot. We always buy a domain name and then the question is like, how do you drive traffic to it? You can't really go viral. So then you wind up making a viral video about the game and you try and get people to go to the dot com.

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the thing. So the games that we've been creating are only funny to like a very, and fun, like a very small group of people, right?

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  But they're not really fun to play, right? And so what I wonder, what I wonder is like, is the opera, is like reskinning a bigger opportunity than like generating entirely new games? Because there's certain game mechanics that are just sort of tried.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  I would argue that that's how, that's how Instagram started. Like the original Instagram was like, share your picture of your run with your close friends. That's what we're doing with the simulators that we build, but eventually people made Instagram.

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  There's no game mechanic at all.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  No, no, no. What I'm just saying is like, in terms of the actual application, like, like we, we, like, we are doing the, we are doing the, you know, the, the Instagram post that's just like, hey, I ran a marathon and 10 friends like it. We are not creating the viral Instagram. That will be like loved by everyone. We're not Professor Sendy making wombos.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  What I'm saying is like the the social aspect, the sharing aspect is very cool. But if I'm making a first person shooter, there's probably some like out of the box mechanics. That'll be great and reskinning like putting the team.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  I I think there's a lot. There's I think there's probably a lot of harness like, yeah, tell us about how people are actually using it.

• 1:48:11Speaker 11

  You guys are actually making all the good points. First of all, you mentioned is actually obvious. When we started three years ago, we also I was like convinced that such a thing should happen.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 11

  Right. It's very hard to also predict the future, but if you look at the past, the past 20 years, right? 20 years ago, when Twitter launched, basically, what happened is they made creation tool of text accessible to everyone with the keyboard, all these things, right? Again, and and almost everyone is the writer now on Twitter. They do a lot of rage baiting on a day to day basis or. But everyone is right. And the pattern what we see here is, um, once the creation tool becomes accessible to everyone. Great generational companies appear, right? Same thing. Four years after Twitter, Instagram, when the camera iPhone four launched with a good camera, everyone became a photographer. And it's great, but also like, thanks to my wife, I don't have any more privacy. And I think you guys would do that too.

• 1:49:07Speaker 11

  TikTok, same thing. And like with the videos, all you see the pattern basically is a creation tool became accessible. And what you guys pointed out is like creators from diverse backgrounds started creating this content, first person shooter.

• 1:49:23Speaker 11

  A lot of people remix new games, but also the beauty of large numbers is, um, a lot of people actually invent new kind of mechanics. It's like one of the interesting genres for us that we saw that got super viral is you have to wash, wash things. So you have something, you go wash Mona Lisa's painting, then you go wash a car, you have to clean it. And like, it's actually pretty addicting when you play. It's so shocking.

• 1:49:48John Coogan?

  That's funny. And and on Instagram, you'll see viral videos of people power washing old rugs that are so dirty. There's a whole genre of this time lapse of people cleaning rugs and then it's very satisfying because. You're you're watching something get cleaned, which I think is satisfying, but then also it's revealed to you what is the what the rug looks like and it's very satisfying.

• 1:50:07Speaker 11

  Exactly. When you see things happen, you're like, oh, oh, it's so so obvious. But then like, you know, you need people to create these things. And I think that's what's exciting. The biggest, I think the biggest advantage of AstroKid, which I really love, is the core of the experience. So number one, first of all, like our platform compared to other platforms is it's engaging. You play things rather than consume them. Majority of the social platforms right now are consumption. Engagement engagement is just so much better. It's like hearing a story versus experiencing a story, right? Number two, which is kind of also our mission is just, it's more fun. You know, we are living in a world of a lot of the brain rot happening.

• 1:50:51Speaker 11

  And I think this is just more creative. You come out of it super happy when you play AstroKid. And like you use actually your brain. So that's very, very important for us. And I think the reason I believe AstroKid has a possibility to become a generational company is games are so innate to humans. I have a two year old and he just always playing. He's learning to to play, right? They were like, what? I think the latest stats I read was the 3.4, 3.5 billion people playing video games right now, just almost half of half of humans, right?

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  That's not this second, right? That's like day to day, generally, 3.4.

• 1:51:28Speaker 11

  Overall, I think that no, it's not.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Because I'd be pretty worried.

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Speak for yourself. I'm gaming right now.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Half of humanity is is live playing first person shooters right now.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  But brain rot's not going to be an issue. Don't worry about that.

• 1:51:40Jordi Hays?

  Is there, there must be, is there a crazy power law with the games? Like on YouTube, the power law would be like most videos.

• 1:51:46John Coogan?

  Gangnam Style has like a billion views, but the average YouTube video gets, or the median YouTube video is like 10 views.

• 1:51:53Speaker 11

  It hundred percent is always. I think all these creation platforms, there is a power law. A lot of like, like some portion of creators, like one, two percent of the creators get a lot of plays and like they get per viral and then there are other creators that get, they don't get viral, but they get at least thousands of plays on their games. We actually like, we launched the platform like publicly around seven, eight months ago. The numbers are actually crazy, guys. The stats is, our MEU is like 5 million right now.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:29Speaker 11

  Hundreds of thousands of creators are now creating games, hundreds of thousands. Obviously, like you guys are for the, you guys are happy. We, we, we actually process trillions of tokens.

• 1:52:47Speaker 11

  To make this happen, like it's completely free. People.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, free, free.

• 1:52:53Jordi Hays?

  Free.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  That doesn't sound like it's gonna make any money. How, how will you make money? Ads or subscriptions or both?

• 1:53:00Speaker 11

  Potentially, we wanna do ads. Right now, our creators are like, yeah, it's completely free. Between all these, like, all the vibe coding platforms, we are, we are the only one that is completely free.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, as you, yeah, won't, won't you want to make, uh, allow creators to turn on monetization at some point? Like, I, I feel like you're gonna have people that are like nine years old that create some hit game and, and, you know.

• 1:53:26John Coogan?

  It's the, it's the Alex Zoo from Musically philosophy of like, uh, social networks are two-sided marketplaces. You have to create liquidity and like, the faster you can start paying people to post, you get more professional creators. And I'm sure you're thinking about that, but.

• 1:53:41Speaker 11

  Yeah, we're, we're, exactly. Like, I think we get inspired a lot by YouTube also. Like, almost of the, almost all these social platforms are doing that, right? They don't monetize necessarily their creators. They actually build tools for their creators to monetize their games.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:54Speaker 11

  Um, and we are gonna do something similar. We still haven't, uh, started monetization. We are focusing on the user growth.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 11

  Um, but we are gonna build, uh, tools that kind of like companies can do ads on Astrocade, but also creators do microtransaction and the regular type of business model that gaming has doing. I've been doing all these years. I think that gaming is just, generally is a good business, is very profitable. It's one of the largest, um, like segments of entertainment, larger than movies and all these things combined, right?

• 1:54:25Speaker 11

  So I'm not so worried about monetization. We just wanna make a great experience for everyone.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. People, people, people prompt the, uh, the video game industry to the, to Hollywood or the movie industry. And, uh, and it does dwarf it. But I wonder what the actual revenue split between like passively consumed content is versus actively played games? Because I think if you take YouTube and Netflix and Spotify and TikTok and Instagram, that's probably a bigger pot. To be clear, massive, massive market, massive opportunity. Very bullish on this. This makes a ton of sense. But it is interesting that there is some, there is some sort of dynamic where like, yes, three billion people are playing games, but probably more people are still watching passive things.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  There's probably more watch hours on passive content. But that doesn't make, you know, playing games any less important. People enjoy them a lot.

• 1:55:20Speaker 11

  You're, you're right.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:22Speaker 11

  There is, so, so that's why I always not, I don't say normally games, we call it playable content. Because there's actually like very diverse set of content. They're not only games.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:33Speaker 11

  You know, it's like playable experiences.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 11

  I think from the content point of view is we are heavily towards actually ultra, we call it ultra casual, not even hyper casual.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 11

  Ultra casual, when you go to ultra.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what's the average like playtime? Cause like Final Fantasy might be like a hundred hours, GTA might be five, a hundred hours. And then some, you know, small game might be a couple hours, but I imagine this is like on the order of minutes?

• 1:55:59Speaker 11

  Exactly. And it's exactly on the order of minutes.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:02Speaker 11

  So it's shorter form. Actually, my wife only, my wife is one of the hardest critics. She only plays Astrogate games and like she does it when she's watching a movie, she also is playing the games. It's just so like, it's, it's still like engaging and attractive, but you don't need to also necessarily to focus full on. Versus a lot of cheap games, you have to do that. And I think that's going to happen with the gaming industry. There is going to be still bigger studios, like triple L studios, like basically Hollywood and there is going to be.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, in the same year, we got Oppenheimer and Barbie. We also got like a 12 other Mr. Beast videos and a bunch of TikToks.

• 1:56:39Speaker 11

  We are in Palo Alto, actually.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  I looked at that, that building is so ugly, I thought it was.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  They recreated Los Angeles up north. It's crazy. Talk about the technical side of things. I imagine this is heavily powered by like WebGL and Web Assembly, but like all of this is delivered in an app. And so I'm wondering like where you're bumping into like Apple's rules of the road, because there's so many cool functionalities like haptics and gyro and cameras. And like, when I think about what a really robust mobile game does, it's usually using a lot of the different APIs. And some of those are probably available. Are they all available? What's that been like?

• 1:57:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we are completely right now web-based.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:24Speaker 11

  And the games are HTML games.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:26Speaker 11

  Super lightweight, it's super fast to load those games.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:30Speaker 11

  Technologically wise, I think we had multiple like challenges across the way. We knew this is possible, but it's actually very hard to build such a platform, just generally. Platforms are very hard to build. The first biggest challenge which we overcome and is still ongoing is just creation tool.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 11

  How do you build this agentic system that can make everyone a game creator?

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 11

  Remove all this skill, because these games are being like, one of the games I was showing to experts and they were saying this is a million dollar budget for a month of a team.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  No, of course.

• 1:58:00Speaker 11

  On our platform, it's like $20, $10. So that was one thing and it's all going. And we call it like, is it like, Asterix is a platform where we, our AI is learning how to generate fun.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:13Speaker 11

  It's a big thing. AI learning fun is a big thing in the AI community.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's not a very, seemingly at least, a very deterministic problem, right? Because you have these games like, you know, I don't know, why would a, why would a window, window washing game be fun? And yet, if the mechanics.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Say you've ever washed a window. You say you've never yearned for the mines. Why would, why would Minecraft be fun?

• 1:58:41Speaker 11

  You go to the flow state. Yeah. When you start washing the window, you get to the flow state.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  So, I mean, does that mean that there's going to be some sort of like, you know, crazy deal to be done between you and Apple at some point? Because I imagine that your consumers, you as a company, will want access to the full iOS API suite. And Apple's going to say, this is an app that makes other apps. We're not really cool with it. And you're going to have to discuss that. Like, what, how does that play out? Because I want, I feel like everyone wants this to be a thing, but Apple's just sort of operating from a place of 15 years ago in terms of like, what the technology was capable of.

• 1:59:19Speaker 11

  We haven't, we haven't got there yet. We haven't launched that, by the way.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

• 1:59:23Speaker 11

  It's fully on the web.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:25Speaker 11

  We have to see how, when we grow. No, I think this is actually pretty good for Apple too.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  It should be.

• 1:59:30Speaker 11

  Massive distribution also. Like, they, they provide the distribution.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  But they make a lot of money on games right now. And if you're saying that we're just going to do ad-supported and it's all going to be in our platform. And all of a sudden, it's like, well, we were making $2 off of the window washing game every time someone clicked the in-app purchase. And now you have a different business model. That could be an issue. So.

• 1:59:49Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm sure you'll solve it.

• 1:59:52Speaker 11

  Not right. This is not our biggest problem right now.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:55Speaker 11

  The things that we are focusing right now on the technology side is like, another thing, by the way, is very hard problem. And it's harder, honestly, than some of our AI problems, is the recommendation system.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Interesting. I was wondering if that was off the shelf. Is it not?

• 2:00:08Speaker 11

  No, it's actually pretty challenging. I don't think anybody has built such a large scale recommendation system for this type of content.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:15Speaker 11

  Right? We have a kind of recommendation system for videos. We have recommendations for images.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:21Speaker 11

  Games, first of all, are, a lot of them are open-ended. So you don't know exactly like video, you know, I watched the whole 50%. Games is like a lot of other features of features of extracting features from the videos.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could be satisfying because you were able to finish it in 10 seconds as opposed to, if you're watching a 10-minute YouTube video and you click out of it in 10 seconds, you didn't win the goal. So you have to bake that into the weights as well. Like, this person was able to. Destroy this game, but they enjoyed it. And then they might not always give you the thumbs up, thumbs down signal. So interesting.

• 2:00:51Speaker 11

  Exactly, exactly. That's been one of the hardest problems, by the way, we're trying to solve. The recommendation system. And then platform, like, how do you manage the platforms so players are happy, the creators are happy? This is the first time that like this large scale, like in few months, we've got more than 75,000 games on our platform created. How do you distribute these games to millions of people from diverse backgrounds and skills, right? So there's a lot of like technical challenges. Serving is another, the infrastructure you need to build to basically efficiently serve these games.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  I'm doing some back of the envelope, trying to pull data out of you. You said like $10 to $20 per game inference, 75,000 games. That's like 1.5 million in inference. Like, are you, are you actively looking at like what pieces of the puzzle you can move to cheaper models really quickly?

• 2:01:43Speaker 11

  We do that. We do that, actually. We, for some tasks, we do cheaper models. For more complicated tasks, we do. They say, like, it's the thing is, the cost of intelligence is coming down, right? But the cost of these tokens are not, because you always want to go with the best.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  And the value of networks is gonna keep going up.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Feature, feature request. I want to be able to go on astrocade.com and navigate based on like popularity of different games by year. So like, I want to find all the games that were popular when I was like five years old, like 2000, like 2005, right? I remember some of these like web-based games that were like, what was that game where you're on a little bike in these?

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Line Rider.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Rider, you know?

• 2:02:23Speaker 11

  We have that. We actually have something similar to that.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, to the point about the recommendation algorithm, like, is the user trained to search for that? And then is your search algorithm gonna match with that? If it's an abstract representation and the user didn't put the keyword line rider in their description or something? Interesting challenge, interesting challenge.

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  For the rest of the show today, I'll be playing Line Rider. So if you want to keep, if you keep watching after you leave, you'll see I'm completely distracted.

• 2:02:50Speaker 11

  It's actually, it's pretty calming also. It like puts you in the flow state and.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  You know what else is calming?

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  The flashbang's not calming. That's extremely disorienting.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  It's very calming to me.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Just say you want to play COD. Just tell them remake COD.

• 2:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Very calming to me. Amir, it's an honor to have you on the show. I'm excited to play Astrocade and at this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on very, very soon.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:03:22Speaker 11

  Say hi to Nick for me.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  I will.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  You will.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Our next guest is coming in in a few minutes, I believe. So we will click over to this very odd viral post from Will Monitis. So apparently, fiber optics on the battlefield, we've talked about this before, drones in the war in Ukraine will be hardwired via thin fiber optic cables so that there's no chance of jamming them or disrupting any sort of radio signal. So this has been a popular technique on the battlefield for years now, I believe. But apparently, it's extremely pricey now.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  This is so insane. Apparently, the price used to be for 50 kilometers spool was $300. So that seemed, that's way, I used to always wonder about the economics of, just because you're assuming, okay, this drone's taking off, it's flying miles and miles and miles. How could that make sense? But it's clearly very cheap.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  300 bucks.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  You have a drone that's, you know.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  And they started with like DJI drones that were like Mavic 4s, UZs, that were maybe like a couple hundred dollars. And there were actually some people that would buy these drones like on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace in America or somewhere else and then fly to Ukraine, take them and resell them at a profit. But still, the average cost of the drone was like in the thousands of dollars. Well, now, 50 kilometers of fiber optics is $2,500. So a massive increase in price. And Will Monitis says, AI data centers skyrocketing fiber prices, leading to Ukraine, Russia being priced out of using drones to do lively atrocities as a scale of marketplace solution. That's, that's schizophrenic.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  On the outset, but it is a bizarre, obviously, he's sort of playing around with the concept, but it is a bizarre second order of fact of fiber demand in America, if that's actually what's going on here, who knows, who knows? Well, David Sacks shared some back of the envelope numbers for a one gigawatt data center. We talked to Giga Energy about.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna quickly jump in. I think this is napkin math.

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  Oh, you don't think he went, you don't think he bought out the envelope for this?

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  This screams napkin math.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  You don't think, you don't think he used an envelope for this?

• 2:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think he was writing 50.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  20, 25 to 30.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  And wait, so when he says all in capex, that's the amount of money that you spend sponsoring the all in podcast? What is that? What is all in capex? Cause he says.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, they spent, I mean, hey, the number one tech podcast in the world.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  50 billion is a small price to pay.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  One gigawatt data center.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  No, of course, he's talking about the total amount of capex, but he did use his brand name there. All in capex 50 billion, enterprise revenue generated 25 to 30 billion a year, electricity cost one to $2 billion a year, two year payback, the boom is real. Grok fact checked it. What did Grok have to say? Mostly accurate. You know what Grok called it? Didn't call it napkin math. It called it back of the envelope.

• 2:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, I'm gonna have to fact check Grok.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Grok, is this more back of the envelope calculation or not napkin math? Fact check from Grok says capex is 50 billion per gigawatt of lines with Nvidia's estimate revenue. It matches high end infrastructure as a service, cloud leasing, energy is roughly correct, two year payback is realistic. There were some other folks that were pushing back, saying that there's a lot more that goes into it, but it seems directionally correct and.

• 2:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is like, don't open it, doesn't OpenAI and Anthropic have access to like somewhere in the range of two and a half to three billion, or sorry, two and a half to three gigawatts of compute?

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Right? And they certainly don't have. 150 billion.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Each. So, yeah, so that I feel like the numbers seem incredibly optimistic.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  It's more like forward looking.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, looking at looking at CoreWeave. This is not at all what we're seeing with with CoreWeave.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened with CoreWeave?

• 2:07:24Jordi Hays?

  But we will. We will see.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  There's a breakdown here of CoreWeave.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  31 billion of in-service PP&E as of March 31st, 2026, they leased their data centers. 1.4 billion of operating lease expense for this year, active data centers. Let's assume the leasing market is 10% cap rate, so cost equivalent to lessors 14 billion. If they had 45 billion of all-in CapEx generating revenue of 1 gigawatt active power, it's close to Saks numbers. Let's be very generous and assume they need to put no additional CapEx in service to hit the revenue guide. The assumption is wrong. The revenue guidance is 12 to 13 billion. So CoreWeave's all-in CapEx to revenue is 3.6x. Saks back of the envelope, CapEx revenue is 1.8 at midpoint. So either CoreWeave really sucks at this, or these numbers are 50% off before we even get to margins.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Interesting. Hmm. Well, there's more pitches for beautiful data centers. Doesn't seem like it's on the roadmap for many data center builders. But Melton Demiroirs says, you said make data centers beautiful. There are some good ideas in this post. Which one do you think is the most beautiful, Jordy, of these beautiful data centers?

• 2:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's see. I personally think that the actual image of the data center they use is beautiful, but only in a.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  The big mound, the mirror one.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I'm saying that at the top of the Substack.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Once you click in.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Like the actual data center, it looks kind of.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, job sort of finished there. Why, why, why change something that's that looks like a, like a blank, black cube? It's good enough. Let's see. Kevin O'Leary is proposing to build a data center in Utah that will require nine gigawatts of energy to function when fully built.

• 2:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one is getting insane levels of.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Now we're putting energy use in atomic bombs units.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  It will dump around 23 atomic bombs worth of thermal load on the environment every day.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  The 23 atomic bombs talking point is complete BS. By the same math, the sunlight that hits the 40 acre property this data center will be built on already produces over 50 atomic bombs worth of heat energy daily. This is a misinformation campaign we are walking, we are watching in full time. Interesting, interesting. People are, continue to be upset about the data center stuff and putting it in ever more complex comparisons.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, we should have our next guest, Alex from Long Lake. He recently bought a business that you very well know and likely have used at one point or another.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Bring him in.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Oh, you see it?

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Is he here?

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  We got him all over in the colors. Oh, we do.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  We got him.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Alex, how are you doing?

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:10:25Speaker 12

  Welcome to the show. Hey guys, how are you?

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Great to see you.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Thank you and congratulations. But since it is your first time on the show, why don't you give us a little bit of the news? What happened?

• 2:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Intro first, intro first.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:39Speaker 12

  Thank you guys for having me. A big fan of the show. Excited to be here for the first time. So on Monday of last week, Long Lake announced that we intend to acquire American Express Global Business Travel for $6.3 billion.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:10:55Speaker 12

  Long Lake is an acquisitive company that's bringing applied AI to services sectors globally. Prior to this, we'd acquired 30 businesses across various sectors of the services economy. And we've built a world-class applied AI team, operations team and an M and A team to help kind of bring AI to the real economy.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  And yeah, there's 30 deals. Like, what was the shape of them? Because this feels bigger than anything you've looked at previously, but is that roughly correct? Are we, is this an order of magnitude bigger, two orders of magnitude bigger?

• 2:11:27Speaker 12

  Yeah, this is definitely our largest deal so far. We have pretty big ambitions and we see our target market as really the entire services TAM, which is over 20 trillion in the US alone and and much larger globally, so.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that slide in, in the deck, by the way.

• 2:11:46Speaker 12

  We, well, you know, it's a great fit for us, this particular transaction. So it is our largest deal so far, but it's also probably, you know, we've, every deal we've done has been high conviction, but this is very high conviction as to what we can do in terms of adding value for the customers, for the suppliers, for the entire ecosystem.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think makes the business special and durable? Obviously you're optimistic about the future of AI, but not so optimistic that people will just be prompting a self-hosted LLM to do everything in their business travel, I imagine.

• 2:12:21Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's right. So our vision is, and we talked about this in the press release, we basically want to give all the team members of MXGPT superpowers and particularly the travel counselors who are interfacing with the clients. We basically have seen this in the 30 acquisitions we've done to date, but AI really does make, it does make sort of our human team members, you know, able to service customers better, able to provide faster response time, more, better accuracy, more products and services to the clients. And, you know, we think that is going to drive better retention, better customer experience and better growth.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  30 acquisitions. How many months have you guys been in business?

• 2:13:03Speaker 12

  Months? Let's see. I guess we started talking about the company, you know, roughly 28 months ago.

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Started talking about the company.

• 2:13:15Speaker 12

  I know. I guess we incorporated the company 28 months ago. We started talking about it maybe, maybe a few months before that. But yeah, we're roughly coming up on our two and a half year anniversary here soon.

• 2:13:23Jordi Hays?

  And, and obviously, you know, you've built out an incredible team with a lot of experience, but talk about, I guess, like building that muscle and that capability. I'm assuming you weren't, were you buying one company a month roughly right away or have you ramped up? What does that look like?

• 2:13:42Speaker 12

  Yeah, so we tend to cluster in service verticals. So we started in residential services with HOA management, which we've talked about publicly. We made a lot of acquisitions in that space in partnership with our partners there, our operating leadership there. And we do tend to, you know, once we've sort of helped, you know, take, we have our Nexus Applied AI platform, which is our proprietary platform that we've been investing in heavily for the last two and a half years. And once we sort of do the work to deploy Nexus into an industry, we find that each incremental acquisition, you know, makes that much more sense, right? We can basically integrate them more quickly into that platform, you know, help our team members become more

• 2:14:24Speaker 12

  productive quickly, improve the customer experience right away. And so we then tend to sort of pick up a pretty good cadence of acquisitions. So I think roughly one a month is the number, looking back. And, you know, I would expect that to accelerate as we enter into, you know, additional service lines, I would think. Now, some businesses obviously are more fragmented than others, and there's more acquisition activity in some industries than others. But we do expect, you know, over time, to sort of be increasing our rate of acquisition.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  How do you think about financial engineering in these deals? Is this sort of like the classic leveraged buyout playbook? Or are you taking a different strategy or approach? How do you think about structuring all of these deals?

• 2:15:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, we've traditionally been under levered. So our existing businesses, you know, have very little debt, almost no debt. We will be using, you know, financing as part of this acquisition. As in the press release, you can see JP Morgan and others. But typically, we can afford to be, you know, we're more growth oriented than traditional PE. We're investing in the products and services pretty heavily, especially in the early years, as we sort of, we want every business, you know, that partners with us to have world-class customer experience and technology. And that requires, you know, a multi-year horizon. That's why we're set up as a permanent capital operating company and not as a fund. We see this as a long-term You know, a long-term strategy that requires upfront investment of time and energy and

• 2:15:53Speaker 12

  capital. So being under-leveraged relative to some of our private equity peers is a big advantage, allows us to move faster. But over time, you know, this is a capital-intensive strategy. So driving down our cost of capital, you know, this is when we start to think out in the future several years, we think hopefully Long Lake will go public, that will help our cost of equity and potentially help our cost of debt as well as we become a, you know, a public debt issuer.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  So on the equity side, how is it, I think you've partnered with a number of venture capital firms, they have particular, they have a non-permanent capital time horizon. How are you communicating with them, how they can participate while still benefiting their LPs? Is there overlap with VC's LPs? Like, how do you think about the timeline?

• 2:16:40Speaker 12

  Well, going public would be helpful there.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I suppose. But is there anything that, like, I guess, like, this, it feels like an incredibly exciting business, very cool. I completely buy the pitch, but there's a little bit of like, oh, this might be in, like, not every LP agreement, or there might have had to be an extra conversation. I'm wondering if you can just give me more color around that conversation.

• 2:17:02Speaker 12

  Well, you know, VCs tend to have longer hold periods in general. I mean, VC is a power law business, and when you have great companies, you obviously want to keep compounding with them for a long time. So I think our partners, you know, and then there's a list of them in the press release, we have extraordinary partners, and their investors in turn, they really, you know, they kind of see the vision here, and I think they do, they want to be partnered with us for the long term. I think many of their, you know, investments take 10-plus years to play out, and that's obviously very different than the traditional three-to-five-year private equity roadmap.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:35Speaker 12

  So I think in general, your starting point is much longer term in nature. And as you know, you know, the public markets may solve this and providing everybody liquidity for our shareholder base over time, but even the private markets now have become very liquid, and, you know, there's a lot more sort of liquidity to be had even as a private company.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  If I didn't, if I didn't know the label, like, service-oriented business, like, what financial KPI would I look to to understand if a company fits in that bucket?

• 2:18:07Speaker 12

  Uh, fits for, for Long Lake?

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  For Long Lake or just like a service oriented business broadly? Is that like particularly like low CapEx or low revenue per employee? So it's high, highly leveraged to the, to the operating expenses? Like, like what, what, what metrics are typically like, like popping out at the businesses you look at relative to, you know, some super like ARM, like super clean. Like, like I imagine that ARM is the exact opposite, right?

• 2:18:37Speaker 12

  Well, look, first of all, this is like government, US is a services economy. So it's kind of like 80% of the businesses would fall in this category. But second of all, you know, what we look for really is business quality. That's kind of our orientation at Long Lake. So within the services sector, we're looking for businesses that have many decades of established customer trust and I customer retention. You know, we typically on our businesses see a hundred percent plus net dollar retention. Um, and these are 10, 15, 20 plus your customer relationships typically across our portfolio. And, you know, obviously MXGBT is over 111 year old business at this point founded in 1915. Uh, to help American Express travelers, checked customers get out of Europe.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20Speaker 12

  Uh, during World War I. And actually they bought a business, uh, called CWT, Carlson Wagonle, which is actually over 150 years old. So these are, these are very, you know, we were joking about this, but in terms of managing tech transformations, uh, MXGBT literally was created before the invention of the airline, uh, or around the time of the invention of the airline.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  So there's this new platform. We think it's going to be big. It's like they're, they're like birds, but you can, you can fly in them as a human.

• 2:19:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly. So in terms of managing tech transformations, you know, these businesses have already managed, you know, many of them. And, but yeah, so coming back to your question, I think what you typically see is even though these are really extraordinary businesses with incredible customer trust and decades or century plus of, of operating history. Um, you know, the margin structures in these services businesses traditionally have been, you know, have been lower than Software and I think what we're seeing is a convergence basically of services and software characteristics over time where if you can make your team 20, 30, 40% more productive, which is what we're seeing in our existing 30 businesses. Then that actually allows you to deliver more customer value, deliver more goods and services, different products and services to the customers.

• 2:20:36Speaker 12

  Which allows you to sort of grow your revenue per employee over time. And then you can grow much more easily and you can and delivering, you know, more operating leverage as you scale, which is historically been what's more associated with software companies. And that's why software companies historically were so highly valued. And we see that trend as starting to, you know, now in the, in the services market in the next five to 10 years, we think will start to play out there as well.

• 2:21:01Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think about your advantage of starting the business 28 months ago? Like you said, I, I imagine a lot of the other groups and firms that would be in the running to buy the same kind of companies that you are or trying to lean in and benefit from AI. They're dealing with these big portfolios full of companies that they bought without thinking about what would happen if the cost of producing software.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  You're talking about older companies.

• 2:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  I'm thinking about younger ones too. It's like a sweet spot story.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's, it is incredible sweet spot where if you're, if you're, I won't name any names. Let's say you were buying SaaS companies for billions and billions of dollars. You know, over the last 20 years, you're now sitting there and you've got a bunch, you can't, you want to think about the future, but you're like, how do we, how do we exit all of these positions or in some cases, you know, turn them back to

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  Turn the cruise ship.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Private credit.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  It's tough.

• 2:21:55Speaker 12

  Well, I think it is a big advantage to be purpose built. We have, our entire focus is on our, you know, partner companies in our existing business. We, we didn't, didn't have any legacy portfolio to have to focus on. So being purpose built, that's one advantage. But the other big advantage is I think it's actually quite hard to do this. You really need to bring together world-class team across applied AI engineering, which Long Lake was founded with. And our founding team actually was primarily applied AI engineers and, and our co-founder and CTO Rasmus.

• 2:22:26Speaker 12

  Who's world-class and has built our whole team from the beginning for this purpose. And then on top of that, you need sort of a really core function in change management and growth, which we've also built out. And then, of course, M and A, world-class M and A. And we've got folks that have joined us, you know, just to give you a flavor, folks from Palantir, Ramp, Glean, you know, Robinhood, et cetera. Many, many of our tech folks actually were founders before. And, you know, it turns out it's pretty hard to sell software into these industries. And we have a dynamic of if you actually want to go and change these industries, it's easier to do it from, from the inside and actually, you know, partner with the companies themselves, the way that we do here.

• 2:23:06Speaker 12

  And then on the finance side, folks, you know, from Blackstone, TPG, GTCR, HIG, some of the very best firms. And, you know, I think part of what we've been able to do along like is by focusing on this core mission from day one. It's a pretty exciting mission, which is basically bring AI to the real world and help drive the mythical AI GDP growth. You know, that's what's been able to attract.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  No, no, it's accurate. Last question.

• 2:23:34Jordi Hays?

  The prophecy, fulfill the prophecy.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  The prophecy, truly.

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  We're relying on.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Satya Nadella's prophecy of 10% GDP growth. Show me the numbers. Last question for me. Do you, are you surprised that we haven't seen SaaS companies that are getting sort of beaten up, make a services acquisition? Or do you expect that that would change? Not that there, I want more competition in your sector, but it feels like there, there might be a thesis there. Is that misformed? Do we not expect that to happen for some structural reason? Or do you think it will maybe happen at some point?

• 2:24:08Speaker 12

  You know, it's interesting. I wouldn't be surprised. I do think there's a convergence happening and, and whether it's services, companies buying software or software, you know, buying services. It wouldn't surprise me, but I do think there's a distinct advantage in being, you know, having a singular focus and being purpose-built for our strategy. You know, I think if you're an existing software company, you have your own set of vested interests around your existing customer base. And are you then competing with your customers? I think it could get a little tricky. Some people I'm sure will navigate that and find, find great acquisitions to do. But I think we have a, a strong advantage in our, in our focus.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to finally have you on the show.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  And let's make it a thing every time you maybe announce a new...

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  It'll be a deal.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, you like to announce...

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Well, once a month, then.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, once a month. But, no, I'm assuming you like to announce that you've been in a category after you're already done with said category. But you can just come on here to take victory laps, so.

• 2:25:06Speaker 12

  Well, thank you, guys. It's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Have a great day. We'll talk to you later.

• 2:25:11Speaker 12

  You, too. Bye, guys.

• 2:25:11John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Quaid from Bezzle. You know him, you love him. He was one of the first TVPN sponsors. Good friend of ours, and here he is to break down the big news. How you doing, Quaid?

• 2:25:24Quaid Walker?

  How guys doing?

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  Wait, okay, quick question. Are you... Do you have the same name as your father, grandfather, and great-grandfather?

• 2:25:35Quaid Walker?

  Do I have the same name? No.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  The same first name? Because some Quaids are the fourth. So oftentimes, if you're... If you have the same name as your father, you'll be known as Junior. And then if you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, you'll be known as a Trip. So if you've ever met somebody who's like, "Oh, my name's Trip," sometimes their name might be like John III. And some Quaids, apparently, are the fourth John. Like, I'm John IV, but I go by Quaid. Anyway, that was a dumb question. Tell us about AP.

• 2:26:06Quaid Walker?

  Yeah, it's an interesting week right now. Obviously, I think anyone in the watch world or the watch world adjacent has heard about the collab with Swatch, and everyone's sitting around speculating and using AI to render examples of what they think it's going to be. And so we're all sitting waiting until, I believe, the 16th to learn what the deal is.

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what is your prediction right now? Do you think it's going to be a plastic Royal Oak? Do you think it... There's a wild card scenario where it's something entirely...

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  So we watched a reveal video that it looked like CGI of some gears coming together, but I guess that video didn't actually show us what the design is, correct? So all of the colored Royal Oaks that I'm seeing that look like they're plastic, that's fake and AI, is that right?

• 2:26:53Quaid Walker?

  Exactly. So I think the clues that we have are they use the Royal Oak font. And like, so indicating that it's going to be something derivative of a Royal Oak. There's been the Swatch Pop, which is referenced in Swatch Pop historically as a model that is both a watch, but could also be popped into a lanyard of sorts. So, and then you saw a rendering from Swatch of a lanyard, like a little clip of some colored lanyard. So I think that's like indicating that that's the direction they're moving. And then you saw some of the packaging in the boxes and then you saw the System 51 movement. And so what that indicates is just that it's going to be an automatic movement. The System 51 movement is Swatch's movement. It's what's in the Blancpain collaboration.

• 2:27:37Quaid Walker?

  And the cool part about the movement is that it's theoretically like a fully disposable movement. In the sense that it's completely 3D rendered and 3D printed. And so like they don't do repairs on it, for example, like they just, it's like more efficient for them to replace the entire movement. So it's a mechanical movement, 90, 90 hour power reserve, like it has some impressive stats, but it's like very much Swatch's movement. And so what it looks like happening is there's going to be some flavor of a Royal Oak in some watch slash lanyard device with an automatic movement. It's kind of all we know today. And then there's several colorways that are starting to come out.

• 2:28:18John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah. Can you quickly reset on the terminology? Because you just said, you know, movement, automatic, is there a battery, is it quartz? Like, do a little bit of terminology for everyone.

• 2:28:31Quaid Walker?

  Yeah, so quartz would mean like it has a battery that runs an automatic movement would mean like it's a set of gears that are powering the watch typically like in high horology these days, an automatic movement is indicative of like a, you know, a traditional wristwatch the way that you would think about it. There are a few quartz watches that trade really well on the secondary market like a, you know, Jour and Elegance for example, but largely like people are out here lusting for the automatic movements. That's why it's interesting. They did that with the collab with Blancpain. They went with the automatic movement and it's like moving a bit up market in that sense. And so they're in that snapshot, they're basically saying like, we're doing the same thing here.

• 2:29:14John Coogan?

  Yep. We were talking about cost. People have been speculating three hundred to fifty to five hundred dollars. And we were sort of going back and forth on like, if it is an automatic movement, even if it's 3D printed, it seems like that's not a dollar. Like, do you have any sort of benchmark for like, what something like this would even cost the two companies to make? Obviously, the margins are great across all specters of the watch economy.

• 2:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cost and then price estimate. And we're going to come back to this on Monday. So you better be, you better nail it.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:49Quaid Walker?

  I'm certainly not the guy to give you the breakdown there, but I will say, if you look at this, the Moonswatch launched, I think it was the $285 retail, that's a quartz example.

• 2:30:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:01Quaid Walker?

  Blancpain, I think they launched that in the 400s. And that's theoretically the same movement that would be powering this. And so I think the speculation is somewhere in the 400s. The only interesting like morsel here that's nuanced is obviously the two high horology brands they collabed with previously are like part of the Swatch Group.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:30:20Quaid Walker?

  And this is the only one that's external to the Swatch Group. And obviously, like AP is in a bit of a different level from a like a rarefied air perspective. So I don't know how much like using that brand factors into the profit sharing. But it's super interesting. I don't know. It's like, I think a lot of people are torn.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:39Quaid Walker?

  Because in many ways, it's a fun, accessible moment to engage with a brand that's otherwise like the, you know. You know, to get a base model Royal Oak today, I think is like $30,000 at retail and certainly more in the secondary market.

• 2:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, it's it's strategic because they're they are dealing with fakes. There's no desirable, the fake, there's a fake problem. And then there's the fact that there's not a super desirable AP in my view, under 30 grand, right? Because nobody that's like, I don't know any, I don't know any like, you know, I don't have any friends that are like, oh, I'm just really saving up for code 1159. Like, I gotta, I gotta have it. Whereas I do know a lot of people that are like, very excited that, you know, to get an AP at some point.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  With Patek, like, some people are like, yeah, I'll start with a dress watch, a Calatrava. Like, I'm not that upset about that because it has a lineage, it has a story, and it's probably three to five X cheaper than a Nautilus. And if it gets me on that track, I'm okay. But AP hasn't had that, sorry.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so to me, I don't, by doing this, there, in, in, in some ways, like, I feel like counteracting the flood of fakes because there's a lot of people out there that'd be like, well, I, you know, I'm not going to get the Royal Oak yet, but I'll get, I'll get one of these AP Swatches if it does end up being a wristwatch. And I think, I think that could be cool and it, and it provides an entry point into the brand. I don't think there's people out there that are like, well, I was going to get, you know, a stainless steel Royal Oak, but now I'm just going to get the, the Swatch AP, right? Like, it doesn't, I don't think it cannibalizes them at all. In fact, like, a lot of people that already have a Royal Oak, a real one, will be like, well, I'll get one of these to wear to the beach because like, I maybe would, would have worn a G-Shock or something, something like that. So I think it's pretty smart.

• 2:32:29Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  But what do you think, Wade?

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  That's it. I did text you this morning and say.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 2:32:36Quaid Walker?

  I think it'll come down to how much. You know, it devalues the ownership of the $30,000 plus Royal Oak, right? I think like the pro side argument is that, to your point, Jordy, it's an interesting entry point. It allows people to kind of aspirationally engage with the product before they can buy the product. I think the con is if you see a bunch of people wearing a $400 example of the watch that you spent $30,000 for, is it in some way detract from the ownership that you have? There's a lot of these arguments on the internet of like, you don't see Ferrari out here collaborating with Toyota to make a can. There's a lot of those commentaries.

• 2:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but another, another, I guess something I go to is like if a Porsche owner pulls up to grab a coffee on a Sunday morning in a GT3 RS and they see someone with a Carrera T, they're not sitting there like, oh, that Carrera T is devaluing my GT3 RS. They're thinking.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Mogged.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 2:33:38Quaid Walker?

  That's the equivalent of like, you know, someone pulling up with, you know, an open work ceramic Royal Oak. And then someone's walking in with a 15 450 37 millimeter starter Royal Oak, right? Like, I think you're still in that same realm. This would be like, you know, if you show up in your GT3 Touring and someone else pulls up with the Toyota collab.

• 2:34:01Jordi Hays?

  With the badge, no, just a Camry with the badge.

• 2:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the badge.

• 2:34:05Quaid Walker?

  Yeah, exactly. So I don't know.

• 2:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Even the chat says they should, Toyota makes a good car. I agree, I agree. I want the Porsche badge BYD.

• 2:34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, the real, the real move is down badging. Get the Carrera GT, throw the Boxer on the back.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  See if anyone, anyone notices. Are you noticing any movement on bezel yet? Any early signs of weakness in the traditional AP or Royal Oak market? Or just an increase in listings even?

• 2:34:37Quaid Walker?

  It's an interesting time because I haven't seen a response to this yet, other than like a lot of people asking us questions and a lot of people like want access to that. I think the same thing happened when the moon swatch came out, like we had everything from like, you know, professional athletes to regular people asking for like big boxes of these moon swatches and we don't traditionally sell them.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  Oh sure.

• 2:34:57Quaid Walker?

  Uh, we did some interesting concierge stuff there. Uh, it was an interesting time though where I think there's a funny thing happening in the Royal Oak market right generally right now where there's a lot of like really cool discontinued examples that are available that are trending kind of at retail or less than retail. And so, you know, if you look back on the Royal, on the Royal Oak catalog, there's like, you know, you can get a 15 300 or it's a 39 millimeter, oftentimes argued better size for in the low 30s, right about where retail is. You can get a 15 400 and 15 500 and you know, then now you're at the 15 510, like those examples trade above retail. There's a lot of them that are trading at retail or around and like synthetically they are kind of,

• 2:35:41Quaid Walker?

  you know, you're getting a Royal Oak out of that offer. Um, and so we're seeing a lot of people buy Royal Oaks and getting great deals on them right now in market. And so it'll be really interesting to see if this release like generally just elevates all Royal Oaks and it's just hype in the market and everyone wants them, or if it does the inverse where you start to realize like, oh, maybe I don't need to wait on this waitlist for this thing that I'm lusting for. I'll buy the swatch and now it opens my mind to like, you know, maybe I'll buy the older example for $28,000 versus waiting for the new one for, you know, 33 or whatever that is.

• 2:36:15John Coogan?

  Hmm. Well, what else is new in the watch world? What's the next event on the calendar that everyone's, uh, has their eyes towards?

• 2:36:24Quaid Walker?

  I think the next big one is, uh, Geneva Watch Days is in, is in, uh, September. Um, so that's a big fun one, but I think everyone's still reeling from Watches and Wonders.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:35Quaid Walker?

  Uh, that, that still happened quite recently.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Who won?

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:36:40Quaid Walker?

  I don't know if anyone won. I think there's a lot of great examples.

• 2:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Come on.

• 2:36:43Quaid Walker?

  The

• 2:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Come on, the salmon, the salmon ultra thin overseas.

• 2:36:48Quaid Walker?

  Hmm. Yeah. I would say big fan of the overseas and salmon. I'm a sucker for a salmon dial. Big fan of the kind of 38 millimeter Nautilus. Um, but I think there's been sneaky winners. Like I, I think the UN super freak was incredible and like being there in person and checking all of it out was really awesome. Um, lot of cool releases, um, and it was super fun being there. So, you know, just another, nothing like, wow, I didn't expect this, but just a lot of like really great stuff that makes me excited to buy Intel launches.

• 2:37:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:37:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Uh, thank you for the, for the Intel.

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  Always a good time.

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Excited to see the launch. Are you going to be camping out at the, any Swatch stores this weekend or you got better things to do?

• 2:37:30Quaid Walker?

  I, I will not be doing that unfortunately, but I look forward to, to getting the coverage of it and, and see, I'm sure we'll, I'm sure we will be placing some examples into some clients' hands as soon as it, it pops up. It'll, it'll probably be very desirable in the beginning for sure.

• 2:37:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Have a great week.

• 2:37:46Jordi Hays?

  See you, Craig.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:37:47Quaid Walker?

  Awesome. Thanks guys.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Uh, we can pull up this post from simplifying stocks. We got another chart, maybe a chart crime. We'll decide. We'll put Tyler on the case. Uh, people are constantly trying to map this boom to the dot com boom. Does it look exactly like it? Simplifying stocks certainly seems like it does match up perfectly. It feels like 1999. Yes, it does. They took the 2026 stock market over related. It looks perfect. It looks like we're due for a crazy, crazy breakout. What will happen? I don't think anybody knows, but we'll let you decide if you benchmark and fit the graph and change the Y axis and the X axis perfectly.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  You got the perfect pattern. The, the, uh, the chartologists in the chat are going wild. Uh, anyway, we'll have to.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  We're going to find out where we are exactly.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  From here, I do, I do think, I, I, I would predict that the market's, it's either going to go up or down over the next couple of years, like it, like one of those two outcomes for sure.

• 2:38:50Jordi Hays?

  I think 50%.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Fifty, fifty up?

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  It goes up.

• 2:38:53John Coogan?

  Fifty up, fifty down?

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to be too, you know.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  You know.

• 2:38:56Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to, I don't.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Historically, it's gone up more than it's gone down. So you should actually be like 51% up or 52% up. If you want to be, you know, historically accurate. Uh, anyway, thank you for tuning in. Have a great day. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, twpn.com. Goodbye.