LIVE FROM CONFIG: Jeremy Hindle, Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, Andrew Reed, Elliot Jay Stocks, John LePore, Marty Ringlein

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBP and today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. We are live from the dojo of design, the gridiron of grid layouts and the Valhalla of vibe coding. It is Figma Config 2025. We are here in San Francisco in a pod. We are podding in the pod.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  We're very excited about it.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Very excited to be here. Did you expect the scale of this event?

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  No, the sheer magnitude.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  I mean, I met Dylan camping years ago. He's not the most boisterous of CEOs. He doesn't walk around with a swagger of someone who takes over San Francisco with something that is absolutely massive. I don't know if we can go to that camera and show just the scale of everyone walking around, but he was on stage. I mean, it felt like there were, it was the Super Bowl of design.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  It did. The Woodstock of generative AI. Many people have been saying this.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  The gladiatorial games. It feels like a Roman Coliseum moment. Like something you see in Gladiator, but for designers and vibe coders.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. It's amazing. There's so many, so many different builders, designers, agencies, other SaaS companies. And yeah, I wish we could honestly be out watching a lot of the keynotes, but we're going to be in here talking with some of the people doing keynotes and we have somewhat of a live audience here. We're in a fishbowl.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're here at Config, just come by. Say hello. Wave. But we're very excited to be here and we have a stacked lineup of guests for the day.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we're going to run through some designers, some venture capitalists, some friends of the show, all sorts of people, some people we just met a few minutes ago who stopped by, took some pictures and we said, hey, come on the show. So we're going to be doing some interviews over the next few hours, hanging out, talking about Figma, talking about what they are launching today. Should we kick it off with what they launched? And then maybe we can go back and do some history on Figma. You found some interesting data points to share. I thought it'd be interesting to take people through since that's the business side. This is not a business conference. They're not pitching the company. They're pitching the product, but we focus on the business and technology side. And so I thought it'd be interesting to go through some of that.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I can talk briefly about the new products that are launching today. Absolutely massive. And then we get into, we should really run through the backstory of the company, early years of Dylan Field. There's some crazy. Dylan feel lore.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  The lore is amazing.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Break down, but the things that are launching today. So the big one, I already posted about this Figma sites.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like what it is.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  I've wanted this feature since the very first day that I ever used Figma.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  College. So if you've ever designed a website in Figma, you usually hit this point where you're like, great, we have a beautiful website. Now we want to turn it into a functional website that anybody can visit. And at that point, you would have to go off platform and build your own site or host it elsewhere. Now you can effectively design a site and publish it all within Figma.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  And it's basically taking the time from design to live site down to effectively zero.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Just publishing in the platform. So that's one of the ones I'm most excited about.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  And there's always like a tension point there with the designers and the engineers where

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  The designers want a pixel perfect design. They export, you know, this amazing PNG usually. And then the front end engineers like, well, I got close enough. Yeah, they have to completely rebuild it.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this is a game changer.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  It gives more and more control to the person that's actually designing the website.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  And enables them, yeah, effectively to go, allows the designer and the user in Figma to ship, even if you're not a designer.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not a classically trained designer. I basically learned design through using Figma.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Back in the day. And this just is so effectively just empowering, right?

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  So I don't, I don't have to make something myself and then wait, wait for somebody to, to dev it out. So.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  How do you think about this product positioned in terms of like enterprise versus prosumer? I could imagine this is all part of a funnel to get individuals like yourself who are doing work in design. And then they publish their site and then as they scale, they stay on Figma until they're massive. Or do you think this is something that will be vended into enterprises for even huge sites?

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Because you imagine at a certain point, there's going to still be, you know, that fine grain control that comes from building something from scratch, but even for front end landing pages, marketing pages, all these things, it was always better to have something that was a little bit more whizzy wig, right?

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I think, I think you just look at the journey of a company, right?

• 4:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  If this is something that you can use, if you just have an idea for a company. Something is simple or you're creating an event, you want to get something out there. This allows you to go in Figma, design something in a few seconds.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Publish it and get it live. And so that can be the starting point for a company and you can, I imagine, grow on it. You know, the access for Figma sites will be rolling out after today. So, you know, I haven't been able to use it directly yet, but it's, it's very kind of like everything else with Figma. I imagine it'll be super intuitive.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, over time, you know, companies of all sizes from, you know, one person freelance operations to, you know, companies with thousands and thousands of, of people, I'm sure will be using this product.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  And you have to imagine it's amazing for agencies that want to just share a link with the client and say, hey, here, like we're, here's our iteration. We built, we built you a design in Figma, but you can actually just go play with it at this URL as opposed to needing to go into Figma. And there's all these different tools. And even if you're in the view only mode, you're still kind of as a client saying like, well, I'm in a design software. This doesn't feel like the final product. It allows an agency. So, yeah, we should talk some agency

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  folks. The big thing, I mean, the, the amazing part of where design is going, where generative AI is going is that it takes the, it takes the time from ID, rough idea in your head to real product, you know, in this case, in the form of website. It's just compressing that, right? So the second product that they're announcing is Figma Make.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Allows you to turn natural language prompts or imported designs into working prototypes or apps with AI. So this is what you're alluding to on the sort of like vibe coding side.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  You can go in and effectively prompt your way to, you know, working products and prototypes. And again, this idea of taking, effectively compressing the time from that initial spark of an idea to something that you can actually use, right?

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  And we've talked, we talked with Kari from Linear on the show a week ago, a couple of weeks ago about this idea that with, with engineering costs dropping dramatically, everybody's expectation is let's not just.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, let's not spend, you know, hundreds of hours planning and, and, you know, iterating, you know, spending all this time iterating if we can get, you know, basically get to something that's maybe even 60, 70% as good as what the final product will be.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  So that we can feel it, use it, and really evaluate it from there. The third product, Figma Buzz.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  This allows you to create visual assets at scale without compromising brand consistency with built-in AI. This is an obvious one. Oftentimes, historically.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  I've built sort of like brand, brand books, brand identity guides in Figma.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  And then, you know, any number of people on the team are going to go in there and sort of distort it and.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Turn it into different assets.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Even for us, like, we post like a silly meme or some like, we want to overlay the TBN logo on a paparazzi photo, for example.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's different every time.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  And it's different every time.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  I'm actually, I use like a different app on my phone for that and then don't have version control if our, as our logos evolved.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  They're still using the old logo and stuff, so yeah.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the idea with Figma Buzz is any, any person in an organization can come in and generate assets for a variety of needs, whether you need to generate an email for retention marketing, an ad for.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Meta, if you need to generate, you know, temp, you know, design for some type of event.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  You can do that all within Figma.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  I do wonder how much that becomes just a true consumer product because you can imagine something that.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Is designed for these brand assets can also be used to make, you know, a invitation to a wedding or something like that.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  And a lot of those like, you know, consumer products that you want to go in and not just have a blank canvas.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  But you want to be able to build off a template, make something look nice, then export it, like, you, you, you could imagine that this allows them to go even further, I guess, down market into the, the consumer.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some way.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Who might wind up making a design software choice in the future.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I mean, the, the line between consumer and prosumer and. B two B enterprise is just like blurring.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a story of like Gmail, right? Like you get everyone a Gmail account. Eventually they're going to walk into the enterprise and say, hey, I want to use Gmail at work. And then all of a sudden Google Workspace becomes a huge business.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I expect this to be big in, you know, the enterprise specifically.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  If you have, you know, hundreds, thousands of people.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  At your company, you want to keep assets consistent.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  If you are a creative director, VP of design or CMO.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing more frustrating than watching people sort of take the brand and just kind of do their own thing with it. And so this provides guardrails.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  And also like uniquely empowered by generative AI, like the example that they have is this national park kind of invitation, and then they're able to publish this template and then have a different design for every animal that you could find in the national park. Kind of like what Ryan Peterson did with those Chat GPT images and Chat GPT. He made a poster for every single Flexport location and was able to.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Oh, Flexport Sydney, and it has this beautiful like Sydney background. And so you can imagine that that's normally so much grunt work, even just to go find the the stock image that fits with that. But all of a sudden you have a, you know, you're creating a template that can then have the Eastern Grey Wolf and the alpaca and all the different.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Elements that you'd want to actually have a flow of assets as opposed to just like, okay, I made one. Now it's just as much work to make the second one.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Just as much work to make the third one. Instead, you're thinking of this like higher level abstraction. And so you're getting way more leverage out of whoever's on that project, right?

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Hundred percent.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  The last product, Figma Draw. This is a product that allows you to express yourself with enhanced vector editing and illustration tools right in Figma Design. So this is a product people have wanted forever, much like the others. And historically, people would have to go outside of Figma to do this sort of like more complex illustration work. And so now you can do that in-house. And so again, Figma is a company that historically wants to spend, you know, the necessary time to make truly great products. And so again, the full suite here are things that, again, the users and the people that are here at Config have been asking for for years.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  And so it's really making a statement to come out and launch these, you know, four massive products. So we should talk about some of the early history. Should we dive in there?

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just want to make sure that John Lepore is ready because we could maybe bring him in, do that if there's a gap later in the show. But if he's ready to go, let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Grab some headphones. Good to see you, good to meet you in person.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yes. Great to meet you. What's happening, fellas? How's it going?

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Not too much. Having a great time.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Welcome to the pod. We're podding in the pod. Welcome to config, man.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  This is wild, right?

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is this your first one?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  This is my first time coming here. I knew it was a big deal.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  My face was melted when I got here.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  The street was shut down.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  The block was taken over. It's a block party.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you kind of expect it with Apple because they've been doing these big releases for decades now. But it's not every year that we see a company graduate to this scale. And so it's really shocking in that way. And then, of course, I was talking to Jordy about this, like Dylan is not the type to be like, "Oh, it's all about me. I gotta throw this massive thing." It just kind of clearly happened because there was demand and there's partners and there's lots of people.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  It's a community here, too.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Like, it's an epic-scale community.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So can you give us a little bit of background? Introduce yourself for the stream for those who might not know.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Sure. So my name is John Lepore. I'm the co-founder of a practice called Black Box Infinite.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  So I'm here at Figma to present in about an hour upstairs on the mezzanine stage. And I'm going to be talking about my weird little corner of the world, which is this bizarre journey that I took towards working in tech and product design, which actually started through working in film.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  And I had this background of making the fake gadgets and technologies that you would see in science fiction and superhero movies and things.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Is that specifically like FUI, like futuristic UI? Or product design that would be done by the art department?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  So for me, it started as FUI, which was typically implemented into the film as a visual effect after the fact, but also started evolving into like really rich world-building and creating deep technology concepts that might affect the plot of the story and help to move the narrative along in any of these films. And I love that space. I thought it was a really fascinating world to work in. And then I got really excited because at a certain point, pretty early on, real-world tech brands started popping up and saying, "Hey, can you help us close the gap between these aspirational visions of technology that we see in film that sometimes are just..."

• 13:31Speaker 02

  They're just sort of, you know, beautiful images on screen or stuff that like doesn't make sense if you know anything about tech. Like, real tech doesn't say "access denied" from one side of the screen to another.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  The system is being hacked. There's a hacker and all the code is spewing out. "Oh, they're in my computer."

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yep, but you get to do these other fun things where you're like, you find yourself prototyping different concepts that are a little more applicable to the real world. And so, uh, two years ago, I started my practice because we had hit this inflection point where it felt like the real world technology was not just like catching up to science fiction, but in some ways, it's fully surpassing it, right? And science fiction is still just showing us the same glowing blue, bleepy bloops. And there's this whole other world of things that you can get into. And so, what I'm going to be talking about is this concept of what it takes to design a positive future

• 14:29Speaker 02

  and how you do everything that you can to not get too caught up in the science fiction of it all.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I've talked, I mean, if you want to change the future, one of the best ways would be to travel back, you know, maybe to the 50s and make a bunch of, you know, really positive science fiction.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Like, solar punk over cyberpunk. It doesn't always have to be, you know, these dark, you know, glows. Uh, sometimes it can be a more, I don't know, grounded in nature vibe, even for the future.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  I mean, we know that the near term is going to be pretty disruptive on a technological perspective or landscape, but we also have been seeing nothing but the future portrayed as like mega dystopia.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Always.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Right? Like, it's the darkest shit imaginable all the time.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  I refuse to watch the new Black Mirror.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm just not going to put it in my brain.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  And it's, you know, and I mean, it's, and it's, I, I still love that stuff. Like, I, I enjoy it and I appreciate cyberpunk aesthetics and whatnot.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  I mean, we got some cyberpunk going on here.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  But we shouldn't be making our real products, our real experiences, you know, they shouldn't be influenced or driven by that. Because it's like, "Yeah, yeah, that would look perfect after the apocalypse." You know, it's like, "Well, in order to get there, we have to live through the apocalypse."

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I'm interested to know, back on the FUI thing, what was the typical software stack back then? Was it a lot of like After Effects? And like, were you getting into like Cinema 4D and Houdini? I went to CGraph a couple of years ago, and there was a ton of cool like FUI projects. But, and then I want to know like, how has that evolved as we get into more generative projects? And there's just so many more things you can do. Even robust tools are more accessible, just because you can search for what you want to do easier.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So you nailed it. When I started out with this stuff, it was After Effects, it was Cinema 4D, it's Houdini and Blender and Blender and, you know, a lot of these traditional platforms. And even, even when not working in film, our team finds ourselves using some of those tools and those approaches, just to kind of like pre-prototype certain concepts or ideas. But also, I'm seeing now, there's a lot more new tools and approaches. And of course, there's all the generative stuff. There's, you know, designing things, but designing things while you're in VR or in Apple Vision Pro or whatnot, so that you have this sense of scale.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  And you get this very different way. Like, I've been obsessed with Vision Pro since that came out, just as this thing where...

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many hours a week have you used it since launch?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Um, so, I know where you're going with this.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm legitimately interested. I'm not trying to do a gotcha, but I'm genuinely curious around, you know, is it, is it an hour here or there sporadically?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  It is, it is at times, like, it's a very intentional choice to be like...

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Like a sprint. You pull that tool out of the tool chest.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get it out of the drawer.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Blow a little bit of the dust off of it, you know, put it on and go in.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  But I also find, particularly being creative.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  In that space.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  It for me, it reminds me of like the first time that I ever started using 3D tools or learning how to design on a computer because like it's almost like I've got a the world's fastest 3D printer in front of me that can just like, you know, I was designing swag for our company and making, you know, a design that goes on a hoodie and then viewing the hoodie at human scale and immediately being like, oh, well, now that I see it like in my space, like as if it's hanging on a hanger in front of me, I'm going to change this, I'm going to tweak this, I'm going to

• 18:17John Coogan?

  There's something about being in that virtual world that just makes the blank canvas more accessible. Like I remember I had, this was before Apple Vision Pro, I think I had a Quest and went into one of the modeling softwares that you could kind of just 3D draw whatever you wanted, exported that as OBJ, brought it into Houdini and then it was so much easier to kind of tinker with and add like all the details on top as opposed to having to start fresh with just like a blank canvas.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  And to me, so much of the excitement that I have around specifically Gen AI is taking the timeline from that high level idea down to genuinely feeling what the end product could be like. Maybe it's not 100% what it will be, but yeah, it's just, it's, once you can see something and interact with it, whether it's a digital product or, you know, even again, like some type of 3D render in VR.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And coming from a background in animation, the process would be, you know, you set your keyframes, you set everything up and then you hit the render button.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  And then you wait.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And then, and then you're like, I'm gonna play the render now. And then you watch it and you're either excited or you're like, there's 15 things I gotta change right now, but it's gonna be even better, you know? And it's a real, it's really interesting that sort of feedback loop that you get and now that feedback loop is getting the almost a media and having things be more, you know, the notion of spatial computing, it makes things a bit more intuitive or just natural at a certain point.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Our practice got on everybody's radar early last year because we put together this prototype for what it would be like to watch a Formula One race.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Wait, you did that?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Oh, that went super viral. I saw that. It was amazing. I had no idea that was you.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  It went unbelievably viral for us.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  That was incredible, yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  It was a wonderful experience for us.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  But it also, it inspired a lot of people that are working in this space.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  And there was a few different groups of developers who jumped in.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  And started making their own prototypes based on that initial concept.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  So that was basically spec work for you. You weren't paid by F1 for that, but that's incredible.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  It was totally speculative project, just because we were really passionate about this $3,500 array of sensors and amazing tech. And we were super disappointed that like when we saw the first demos of it, it was like, cool. Put on this insane hallucination machine and use it to view bounded rectangles.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  A 2D screen.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Exploding in space.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Your inbox with 2,000 unread emails.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Look at that PDF, you know? And we just thought like, oh, there's so much more that you could do with this. And so like that experience, and if you're a racing fan, there's a fully functioning beta of it today.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  That's amazing. And it changes the way that you experience this stuff. And you put it on and you do like feel like Iron Man.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  But you also feel like, oh, this is like, this is so obvious. Like, of course, this is the way that we interact with things like this. So I'm just stoked that there's all these different things that are happening with these paradigms where we're still in the like Apple Newton days of all of these things, whether it's spatial, whether it's AI. And it's gonna enable some amazing things that we can't even accurately predict until these, until we've been living with these things for a while.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the reception of AI in Hollywood and the film industry? Like, we were talking about how it takes data render. I remember when Redshift came out, we started rendering things on the GPU instead of the CPU. That was like a 10x increase in speed. Everyone loved it. Now we've, now we're like, oh, we're almost going too fast because it renders instantly. And obviously, there's like job displacement issues. But in general, is, are there pockets of cautious optimism?

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the only other context that I would add there is I think an interesting thing has been happening where historic, you know, good renders have always been Expensive, truly great renders have always been extremely expensive in context. And I think there was this idea, maybe, you know, starting a couple of years ago, of what's going to happen to the sort of craft of generating these types of assets. And the thing that I've seen happen is the, okay, you know, okay, renders are now available almost at a push of a button. They're not actually 3D assets. But the people that I know that are, you know, truly, you know, elite at the craft

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  are actually busier than ever now because companies need to, in some ways, different, separate themselves again from, from the sort of average. But I'm curious what you're seeing.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I want to be as cautiously optimistic as possible. But there are, there's also a tremendous amount of stress across particularly the visual effects and animation community, a little less so than in digital product design. But I feel like there's a point at which that will start to catch up here as well. For me, these tools, there is something sad about this idea of like, this tool is going to do the craft for you, for the people that...

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Because the craft is sometimes what's enjoyable.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  I mean, any of the people here love that aspect of it. And they, they like the vision and creating, you know, following through on that vision to create a, an amazing end result. But so much of that comes from the craft and applying yourself to that. And there's not, you know, there's not a lot of this work where people are just like, oh, I wish, you know, someone else could do all of this stuff for me. There is still, you know, significant portions of this that people just love and enjoy. So I think that's interesting now. I'm really curious about some of the models and some of the processes for figuring out how... The creatives can have a little more control and a little more realtime manipulation and basically,

• 24:17Speaker 02

  you know, are just closing up that feedback loop. And the other thing that's amazing to me is as soon as even in, you know, 2022, first gen mid-journey stuff, the only people that could make really good stuff with it were professional creative directors.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Whose jobs it was to give clear, in, you know, very articulate direction.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  To achieve their goals and had, you know, the vocabulary and wisdom and now you know.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  It was like you should study art history if you want to be great at.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, like you find these like cheat sheets of like, hey, these are all the different.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  One S graph and it just does it.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Throw in there and whatnot. So it's, it's wild and it's interesting, you know, I'm, I'm excited because things will, you know, we'll, we'll get to the endpoint just faster and faster and everybody becomes a production studio of, of sorts and it, and it does reinforce, you know, the need for a clear and articulate vision, but yeah, you know, I just want to make sure people can still hold on to the craft.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you excited about any of the kind of other product unlocks downstream? Like I was, I was with my son, I, he made like this like little Lego thing. I was able to take it, studio giblet and then, but, but like just showing the image was one thing, but when we printed it out, it was like, oh, this is something you could hang on the wall. And I feel like, like you kind of reinject that creativity once 3D printing gets really good or, or some sort of manufacturing. And I know you've, you've done like product design in many ways. Is there, are there things that you're excited about bringing, you know, yes, this one aspect of the work is collapsed, but then there's other ways to instantiate the, the vision?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 3D printing is really, really epic, really exciting. I mean, at some point it's also just going to be like, oh, and your humanoid robot will let itself out of the box and will craft whatever you instructed it to build.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the next Figma conference.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Or whatnot.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  That's 2026.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Big humanoid.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Humanoid.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  So I, I bring that up partially because we've been doing some stuff with some of the leaders in the humanoid robotics space around like, how do you create like a face?

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  For these things, which is.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Some of them are so dystopian.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  It's very bizarre.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  I don't want to name names, but some of them are bizarre.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Really, really wild space and it's just.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  What can you share at a high level around what, what you think the? Inevitable face form factor is for humanoids. What's your optimistic vision?

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like uncanny valley.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  I always think about.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Photo reel or like the Asimo, just like cute little happy face.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  So I think about the example of, you know, you get up, you know, uh, let's say you get up at 4:30 a.m. You have an early day, you walk out to your kitchen and your, your, you know, humanoid is, you know, doing some dishes or something like that.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  And what's the face that's, that's not gonna, you know, I think over time.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  It can be jarred.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Anything, but what's, what's gonna be pleasant versus jarred?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  So I, I even have a tough time imagining what's the ideal future because I've been so obsessed with, well, what should it be today? Because they're already here. And I, I feel really strongly that today it should not have eyes and a mouth. It shouldn't be this thing that's developed to like approach you and be like, tell me, why do humans cry? You know, like it should, it should just, it should be very crystal clear. I'm a tool, I'm a really expensive like forklift or piece of industrial equipment. And just, you know, tell me what to do. You don't have to say please and thank.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Should it even have a head?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, should it even have a head? I mean, either's, you know, and I could go on forever about like, like why, why even humanoid? You know, why, why work to those limitations of the human body and, and whatnot. But it's a, it's a fascinating space. There's a ton of things that you have to unpack. And even just right now, the priorities are just like safety.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Making sure that, you know, nobody gets hurt or people could predict what a humanoid robot is going to do.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the video that came out of China a couple of days ago where the humanoid just goes AWOL?

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Well, that was in China. I saw the, I saw the crazy, kind of like something wrong with the code.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily, it didn't seem like.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably wasn't trying to attack, but did you see this?

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty violent.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely terrifying. It's like, it's like having, yeah, it looks like it's throwing a fit.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't look happy.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  And now I can, all I can imagine is like, that's the, that's the, the scariest Black Mirror episode. It's the thing that was like loading the dishwasher. It didn't even mean to kill you. It just was like, I can't stop swinging my arm at 90 miles per hour.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  It's wild. Anything else you're excited to check out while you're here? Any other partners you're talking to?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Oh, man. You know, there's many amazing people. There's a ton of wild talks that I want to check out. I've been spending a lot of time bumping into some friends that are in the automotive industry. I've done a ton of work in that space as well, which is like probably the digital experience that needs the most un-fucking.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Most people just plug in their phone and then they get this very basic like, Apple hasn't really refreshed CarPlay in years.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  The positive is that manufacturers are realizing that people love analog buttons.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Like analog.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  The problem is they're realizing that today, which means that products will be available in about seven years. That's how long it takes to go from sketch to show.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  There's some manufacturers that are putting, they figured out how to put buttons on top of the touchscreens. Have you seen this? That's kind of a funny like hack because they're like, we just really want to do one big touchscreen, but somebody wanted a volume button. So we'll just glue that on and it'll be capacitive. So it just acts like a thing.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's got like a little like sausage inside of it so that it activates the touchscreen.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Such a funny thing. Well, anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Good luck with the rest of your config.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Good luck with your talk. You nervous?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  I'm stoked. I'm excited. I love doing that stuff.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  I'm nervous about walking around because there's just so many goddamn super cool people everywhere and that.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Not enough time. That gets me into my turn to shell.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  We were at a conference last week and one of our friends said, he shook so many his hand, so many hands, his, his hand got bruised. Crazy. So stay healthy.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Thank you. Enjoy. Have a blast while you're here. All right.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  All right. Take care.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's fascinating. We have our next guest coming into the studio.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  I love the motion design DNA moving from film and television into the real world. We're finally able to instantiate some of the stuff. And you do see it pop up in real world devices, but it feels like Hollywood is always the best at defining some kind of new UI paradigm and then actually bringing it.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Hey, what's going on? Great to meet.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Nice to meet you.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. I'm John.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Excited to have you.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Feel free to throw on those headphones if you want. You'll be able to hear your own voice. But let's kick it off with a little introduction of yourself, who you are, what you do, why you're here, how you're enjoying the day, for those who don't know you.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah, I'm Elliot, and I am a designer and author. I'm here, I'm speaking tomorrow, so I can relax today. I just like to enjoy it. I've just seen one of my very old friends do a fantastic presentation on stage.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  His name's Dylan Field?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Well, Tim Van Damme.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just announced some amazing stuff, and it's great to be here.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  So what's your talk about tomorrow?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  It's about typography, typography in design systems.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Give us the full backstory. I mean, I'll go out on a limb and say you're the godfather of type. That's a little bit dramatic, but certainly have had a massive influence on type online. So, yeah, I would love to kind of hear the full journey.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Cool. That's kind of you to say. Thank you, man, appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I've been super lucky to kind of work in the typing industry for many years. I did a bunch of stuff with Adobe fonts. I'm now actually doing some more stuff with Adobe fonts and Google fonts as well. And I like to kind of balance things like writing about typography and about design with actually being handled in the tools as well. And, yeah, it's been great to just get to chat with everyone.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  What is the structure of the industry? I imagine that there's the big players, Adobe, Google, like you mentioned, who are buying lots of fonts, but then there's also companies that need whole fonts for their own brand systems and their design systems, I'm sure. So... Is that kind of the shape of the industry? Or is there another player that's really important? How would you break it down?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  It's the independent firms that make some of the fonts that you use and interact with on a daily basis, even some of the fonts that I'm sure we use at TBN. But would love to understand the market.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those indie foundries that you mentioned are kind of, you know, the backbone of the industry, really, because even you've got folks like Adobe, for instance, they, that library is made up of a bunch of different foundry partners. And so they are not owned by companies like Adobe. They are independent practitioners. A lot of the time, they are like one-person bands a lot of the time. You know, SuperIndie. Obviously, you've got folks like Monotype as well, who do own large libraries and they have, they have their IP. But the, the type industry is really just made up of a huge number of independent foundries who are, then use those distribution channels like Adobe fonts, et cetera, to get stuff on there. Monotype have Myfonts as well, which is also another big channel.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  And the differentiated, I suppose, is like Google fonts, they are open source.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  And so they tend to not exist elsewhere, although Adobe fonts does pull in those as well.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  One second, we're going to pull in Gary Tan. He's just stopping by.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Gary, it's great to see you.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  I know you got to get out of here quickly. Good to see you.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Busy man. It's great to see you.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  How's your Figma config been?

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's been sick.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  All I wanted to say was keep mugging, guys.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Keep mugging. All right. Always be mugging.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  We'll see you, Gary.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, you know, you, do you familiar with Gary?

• 34:21Speaker 03

  I have not encountered Gary.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  He's the president of Y Combinator, also quite an accomplished designer, a bunch of the logos of some of the biggest companies. But anyways, good friends.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  So I want to know more about the, the business model of working with Adobe. Is it like Spotify, where like you put your stuff up and then the more it gets used, the more you get paid? Or is it more of like a one-off deal? Is it like selling a book?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  The, the, yeah, usage is, is.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  Big piece of it?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Shared to, yes, of the successful fonts that get more usage.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  They, they get more money. Yeah.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Or is it at the level where people are trying to, you know, pay influencers to use their fonts to promote them, go trend?

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, so from my perspective.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  How mature is the industry?

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  From my perspective, I mean, you can see this sort of hype cycle with individual fonts where. You know, one, you know, oftentimes, you know, one designer will leverage a font in a really unique way. And then three months later.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Everyone has to use it.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Sort of an explosion of sites using that.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, we've even had, we've had people that have been maybe a little bit too inspired by what we're doing at TBPN. Actually, you know, find the font that we use for our logo and sort of use that for their logo.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's all, you know, mostly fair game on the internet.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I mean, you can never predict how that stuff takes off as well. There is, foundries obviously try and look at trends and see what's doing well and sometimes try to replicate that. But sometimes if something blows up and there's no real reason, it comes from maybe someone using it or whatever. And some foundries have done very well out there. I know some type designers who've struggled for many years and slogged away. And they've released one thing and it blows up and they can go and buy a house.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a hits business.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  It's just like music. It is like Spotify.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Are there specific eras of font design, typography design that you think of? As you tell the story of how typography has evolved over the last, like, I don't know, fifty, hundred years or something?

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it's driven by technology a lot when you think of like the move from metal type, wood type, photo type setting, early digital type. When you look at like, sort of what we know of as fonts these days.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  You know, you've got the eighties, sorry, the nineties when folks like Font Shop really pioneered that originally making it available on, you know, actual physical discs. And then obviously online and that would really radically change things. And you had web fonts come along in around sort of, what, sort of twenty, two thousand nine, two thousand ten? Which before that you couldn't use anything on your websites other than, you know, Georgia, Arial, Darna, Times New Roman. You know, and people forget that that was, you know, a pretty huge thing for web design. And I was, I was a web designer exclusively at that time. And it was a kind of a wild time to be working on the web and with all this sort of new stuff that we had to play with, so.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  How, how is the industry reacting and responding to generative AI? I mean, I haven't played around with any tools around type myself, but I imagine we're not far away from somebody kind of saying, hey, I like these three fonts, generate me something net new.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is kind of odd that ChatGPT, when they generate images, they can now do text pretty effectively, but they're not using an actual font. You know, libraries.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Like a source.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, source is kind of just creating its own on the fly.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like everything with AI, it's it's just changing day to day.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  And there are definitely some experiments going on. There are some like entirely AI-generated fonts, font generators which have mixed results.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  But yeah, there are some tools, you know, which will generate images and as part of that, as text is part of that. There is some recent huge leaps been made in that, like the designer Jessica Hish has been posting a bunch of stuff, there's some experiments she's been doing with ChatGPT where she, you know, she's a very accomplished lettering artist. But looking, she's looking at what ChatGPT can actually put out and it's actually, you know, the the progress is incredible. It's now its ability to to actually do some half decent lettering is is, you know, it's it's super interesting. Where you look at a few months ago and you'd be lucky if you even have like the right words spelled correctly. You know, or the.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  No, that that was always, that was the the most quick way to identify if something was AI-generated was just how badly all the text was botched.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly, yeah, it's.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  It's getting uncanny. We're pushing past the uncanny valley now. It's it's getting harder.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the, what do you, how do you expect kind of the business models of the industry to evolve? I imagine I I can see it going, you know, the the way of of fashion to some degree where, you know, maybe in the future you can get kind of a factory, a factory font that was just generated. But but there's something about, you know, typography that's almost soulful, you know, and you you discover, you know, something you can just see, you can feel, you know, the the attention that was put into it. Do you, where do you expect the kind of, how do you expect kind of the industry to evolve and and kind of the business models to evolve? As as, you know, assuming, I think we can safely assume that.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Generative AI will be, you know, twice as good at type in a year, right? Maybe more.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, totally AI-generated fonts are coming for sure. Like, it's gonna be a thing. And it is interesting for the business because, at least in the US, you can't copyright a design. You can trademark a name. So, you know, things like Helvetica are always gonna be trademarked and owned by Monotype. But you can't copyright the outlines. So, you know, it's interesting. Models can learn from all of the type that's out there. Also, type by its very nature is very systems-based. There are, there's plenty of like maths in there and metrics and things which are, in a sense, easy to replicate.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  I mean, my hope personally, as a creative person and a great supporter of all type designers out there, I hope that there will always be a market for people who want to make type and have something very bespoke and something that we've got a lot of feeling and love put into it. But for sure, AI fonts are coming. And I think it's gonna massively disrupt the industry in the same way that all those previous technological advances also changed the font industry.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Give us some spice. Most overrated font, most underrated font. Take some shots. I wanna hear.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  You can go way back.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Let's see. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I have some very good connections.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Maybe meta-commentary. What does the community typically say is overrated?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  I mean, the community tends to, people like free stuff, right? So, a lot of people use stuff from places like Google Fonts that provide fonts for free. And it's great, there was some superb quality stuff. And they've done a lot of work recently to really improve the technical quality of their library. But it's important to remember that when you're using something for free, obviously, lots of other people are also using it for free. So, to get that differentiation, still the kinda easy hack is to effectively to pay for a font, whether that's through a subscription service like Adobe Fonts or just buying the font outright from the foundry. So, that's always a good way to get something that's super unique.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Amazing.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much. I think we have our next guest ready to come in.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for stopping by.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Good luck with your talk tomorrow.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Thanks so much. Hope you get to you.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you on the internet.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  All right, see you then. Thanks, guys. Cheers.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  This is great. And we have Andrew Reed coming into the studio next.

• 41:59Andrew Reed?

  Absolute dog.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Second time appearance. I'm sure he is doing deals out there, writing term sheets on napkins, finding the next Figma.

• 42:10Andrew Reed?

  There he is.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  How you doing Andrew?

• 42:11Andrew Reed?

  What's going on?

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Welcome. Yeah, you're live. You can throw on the headphones, talking to the microphone. How are you doing? Good to meet you in person.

• 42:18Andrew Reed?

  There we go. Thank you guys for having me.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Is this too loud? You might be able to adjust it, but you should be good.

• 42:23Andrew Reed?

  No, it's perfect.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Okay, great. Yeah, how's it been? Is this your first config or have you been coming for a long time?

• 42:29Andrew Reed?

  This is my fifth.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, very, very bad investor if he's just like, oh, I guess now that Figma's a big deal, you know, I guess I'll show up.

• 42:38Andrew Reed?

  I remember back when we got standing ovation for the font picker. You know, the first, the first of two standing ovations for the font picker.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 42:46Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, today, today feels monumental, just, just given the scale of the event, but, but also the launches, the people that were standing, you know, you know, doing a standing ovation for the font picker. I'm sure they're here today seeing, you know, the four massive launches.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's massive.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what was the precursor to config? Were there like little user group meetups? You hear about that with like the, the story of Instagram where like Kevin would like go running with the early group, which there were only 100 people on the service, but he still was doing that customer development. Do you remember kind of the, the arc of how we got here?

• 43:23Andrew Reed?

  Well, for me, so, yes. Well, I remember predating our investment in Figma. We were involved with GitHub, GitHub Universe, which was like kind of the same sort of vibe and actually very similar venues.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Andrew Reed?

  It was the open source developer ecosystem.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:41Andrew Reed?

  And I remember sitting through some of those universes back in the mid 2010s and thinking like, I'm never gonna be involved with a company that can do something like this. You know, just having like the true vibrant community, like people actually want to show up.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:53Andrew Reed?

  I was like, that was a cool thing to be involved with. And then like I go to the first config and it was in a room that's, you know, like the size of the maker studio thing now. And, you know, it was just like buzzing.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Andrew Reed?

  And I remember. Whenever I come to config, like I really feel like I'm cosplaying, you know?

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Andrew Reed?

  Like, I like making websites, but like, you know, some say I apply like a design-like creativity to my Excel sheets.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was about to say.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  An artist.

• 44:19Andrew Reed?

  Let's say I'm an artist in Excel.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Andrew Reed?

  It's funny, I'm so used to.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  ECF.

• 44:25Andrew Reed?

  I go to these events with my daughters, like for school and stuff, and there, you know, there's always like a long line of people for face painting. And there's plenty of face painting supplies, but there's only like two or three people who can actually do the face painting.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I see where you're going.

• 44:40Andrew Reed?

  I always walk around here like, man, like, everybody here could be the most amazing face painter, you know? It's like, you know, I could just bring my kids and the face paint and have it sold.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the talent, the talent density is wild.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. On, on the topic of like these annual releases, Brian Chesky recently said like part of Founder Mode is like, even if you're a company that can do non-waterfall, more agile development, more iterative releases, it helps to get on an annual cadence. Not talking about Figma specifically, but is that something that you think is correct advice for big companies, small companies? Is it going to become increasingly popular? Because the, the Airbnb, Brian, like the Chesky memo kind of shook Silicon Valley. I know Ryan Peterson at Flexport was like, we're doing that too.

• 45:35Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  At the same time, people have been looking at Apple and saying, hey, AI is moving too fast, Apple. You can't wait to launch your next thing for a full year.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  Works well with iPhones.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  You should be dropping software updates every single month and just telling us, okay, you improved it. So there's a little bit of like a balancing act there, but what, like, what do you think of the overall trend of these annual kind of agenda-setting events versus something that's like you could kind of blend the two?

• 46:01Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I think.

• 46:04Andrew Reed?

  I think as software and technology has gotten easier to create, it has just gotten so much harder and as there's more companies that have gotten started and there's more venture capital.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:12Andrew Reed?

  And like, I remember back when you could, you know, you get a TechCrunch article written about your product launch and it would,

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Andrew Reed?

  you know, you drive all this signups and it was like this amazing thing. And it's just so much harder to stand out now. Like, there are so many companies launching amazing stuff.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Andrew Reed?

  Constantly.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Andrew Reed?

  And just as a, you know, like the Red Queen dynamic, like just to stay in place, you have to be doing, you know, usability improvements, AI upgrades, et cetera, to your product every single week. Just to like, like kind of maintain.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  Not fall behind.

• 46:39Andrew Reed?

  Exactly.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Andrew Reed?

  Then I think as it relates to like genuine product launches, um, you know, I think, and you know, even for the stuff that's launched today, there's an alpha, there's a beta, right? So there's, um, you kind of have to do the user testing in sync with this. But yeah, it's pretty freaking cool to show everybody the things that you spent a year working on.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Andrew Reed?

  And rally your team around a deadline, you know?

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Andrew Reed?

  Like knowing the, the Figma team, like this date has kind of been in the back of everyone's heads for a very long time.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, and it's such a, it's such a, you know, we, we can kind of be understated, but, but Dylan and the Figma team are making a huge statement coming in with, you know, sites, make, buzz, like these are, you know, they can come out with a V1 now, but the, the, you know, my, my expectation is they become, you know, very, very significant pretty quickly.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, obviously you're here to support Dylan, but, uh, has Figma grown into the type of ecosystem where there are other potential power loss startups building in on around? Because you see that with a lot of companies, uh, I mean, Zuck was just talking about it with like Facebook ultimately becoming a platform at a certain point. It's been a lot of companies that have built from top.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Shopify, obvious.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. Um, is there, is there a story around like the broader design ecosystem that's taking hold? Or is the venture capital community still just kind of like, um, like laser focused on Figma by itself?

• 48:06Andrew Reed?

  I think Figma has supported and enabled a broad network of plugin developers for a long time. And I think a lot of the power of Figma, you know, comes from what Figma enables, but also comes from the ecosystem around it. And that applies to things like templates, right?

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Andrew Reed?

  Like, um, and to these plugins.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Andrew Reed?

  So I think Figma.

• 48:26Andrew Reed?

  From an architecture standpoint, Figma was a platform before it became the platform, right? And I do think it is the center of a community and a center of a community of products. And I love the mission of trying to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Andrew Reed?

  You know, these are not just face painters, right? They're like the most creative people in the world who also love technology.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Andrew Reed?

  And I think for people with minds like that, allowing them to seduce so much more, that's like one of the coolest things a company can do, so.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  How do you think about design trends in the decks that you get pitched? I mean, Figma launched a deck designer, obviously, just design is becoming more accessible, it's becoming more affordable. And also, I feel like there's a little bit of just a meme in Silicon Valley that, hey, like, if you're going out for a Series A, it's not unreasonable to spend 10K, 50K on design for your deck. At the same time, that can totally be like Band-Aid on a bullet wound if you're not actually building a great business. So I imagine as an investor, there's a little bit of like, don't fall for the pretty design. But we've seen trends where, I mean, for a while, there were like a ton of direct-to-consumer companies that were just getting funded. And it was like, oh, you went to the exact same brand thing that the Warby Parker guys

• 49:47John Coogan?

  went to or whatever.

• 49:48Andrew Reed?

  No, it's funny, I remember, this is gonna definitely date me. You know, we used to print out all these decks, right? You would like, you know, get the deck and you just hit print. And I remember.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  It started being black.

• 50:00Andrew Reed?

  No, and then for the first.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Black backgrounds.

• 50:03Andrew Reed?

  For the first, I'm gonna send this clip to Joe at Loom, Joe and Vinay from Loom. For the first board meeting for Loom, they did like a 130-page deck in like dark mode, squared, right? It was like the level of dark gray versus modesty less dark gray in these stacked bar charts was impossible. And I came into the board meeting with this printout, and it looked just like, basically like a bunch of black pages. We've already lost like $400 on this investment because.

• 50:31Andrew Reed?

  We have to burn through our entire printer ink and I can't figure out what the hell's going on in our business. So anyway, we switched that one to light mode. But I do think like, um, presentation, you know, it's like, anything in business, you know, at its core is the Don Valentine thing is storytelling, right? And, um, visual storytelling is imperative to fundraising, it's imperative to sales. And I think having the right set of assets to tell your story, it really matters. I actually do think like spending the money to create a presentation that really captures your idea, your ethos to what you're trying to build is like totally worth it.

• 51:10Andrew Reed?

  And you know, there's also the flip side that, you know, you can do it in the Times New Roman, you know, you know, the, the Sprezzatura presentation, you know, or like, um, so you can go that path, like look how little we tried. Or you can do the really good.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Every once in a while, you see a deck from someone who's like coming out of an enterprise and has like deep, deep institutional knowledge and they're probably going to build something really cool, but they just don't understand design or even how to speak Silicon Valley's language at all. And you're like, okay, I gotta like, you know, actually read through the, read between the lines.

• 51:42Andrew Reed?

  No, the worst is when you get the ones that are, um, and as a, you know, I worked, used to work at Goldman Sachs. You know, as a former banker, I, I love my investment banker friends.

• 51:51Andrew Reed?

  When you get the, all of a sudden it's a series B company and they hire the, you know, head of finance and operations from Goldman. And then you get the, you know, 98 years of combined industry experience, like highly seasoned management teams. They were not doing this.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  John and I have, you know, 20 years of combined experience in technology media.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 52:10Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I've never met a management team that's not highly seasoned.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  I mean, Dylan was brand new.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm curious, do you think there's, uh, you know, the, the lore around Figma is that, you know, Dylan and it's Evan, right?

• 52:24Andrew Reed?

  Yep.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  Dylan and Evan, you know, spend years, uh, you know, basically in obscurity, building this like, you know, product, you know, Today, if a founder was building a SaaS tool and they were three years in and didn't have like a product that they were letting people actively use, I think most investors would write it off. I almost feel like it almost ended up being an anti lesson, you know, that sort of four year period of obscurity. Because they were using, they were pioneering the use of Web GL for, you know, browser collaboration. And have you ever found yourself kind of like pushing back on founders that are like, well, Dylan and Evan spent, you know, four years getting their products.

• 53:10Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. So I think it's a little bit like, you know, for Dex, you can either do the, we really didn't try at all, or we made it look beautiful. I think with companies similarly, you can do the, we're going to iterate constantly in the market and find our way to product market fit. Or you can do the, we have a concrete vision and we're going to build what we want to build. And when we launch it, it's going to work. I think the in-between area where you're just like slowly maneuvering off of your initial course, like that's, I think, the really unhappy path.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Andrew Reed?

  And I think, I mean, we've done so many retrospectives on, and like analyses on what are the commonalities between the big outlier, big outlier companies. And the reality is, if you look at most of Silicon Valley history, the length of time it took you to get from nothing to a million dollars of revenue is basically uncorrelated with how fast your company grows. But the, how fast you go from one to 10 is highly correlated. So basically, it's like, you know, you're trying to coil a spring, you know? And most of the companies that really make it go very fast out the gate, but take a variety of times to get into the gate.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I think the most, the most recent example, probably OpenAI, literally a nonprofit for a decade, and then all of a sudden a billion in like a couple of months. Do you think that there's?

• 54:35Andrew Reed?

  Well, actually, one more Figma lore story that I've never been, I just, so this is a Doug Leoni story. So I think, you know, of course, it's time to give Doug his shine. So when we were doing our Figma investment, it was, this was January 2019, and I was an associate, so I was like, doing my best to position ourselves. And I thought, you know, we're totally going to do this investment, you know, like Dylan, Dylan loves us. And, but just in case I'm gonna bring Doug in to like, you know.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  Bringing the big dog.

• 55:09Andrew Reed?

  And so Dylan and Evan are coming down to our office in Menlo Park. We'd already given them a term sheet. And we're just, you know, trying to show them how much we love them.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Is that the term sheet in that photo?

• 55:19Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, the one that got like, you know, someone did the CIA analysis to figure out all the terms. That was my bad to our comms team.

• 55:30Andrew Reed?

  And we're about to, you know, about to do the meeting and Dylan and Evan both into Brown and Brown's one of our LPs. And we have all of our conference rooms at Sequoia named after our LPs. And, you know, we were gonna do this meeting in the MIT conference room. And then, you know, I was just like, yeah, it's a much nicer conference room than the Brown conference room. The Doug was like, no, we're doing this in the Brown conference room. And like 10 minutes before the meeting, he moves the meeting to Brown and then he goes into our system and shows, he prints out a page with like all of the amount that Brown had invested in our various funds over the years and how much we had to turn back to Brown.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 56:08Andrew Reed?

  And sits down, you know, we talk about Sequoia and all the stuff that we're doing and he puts this, you know, piece of paper out. And, you know, Brown is where Dylan and Evan met. It's where a lot of the early work at Figma kind of began.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:19Andrew Reed?

  And I was like, this guy freaking rocks.

• 56:22Andrew Reed?

  I was about to be just like hanging in the MIT conference room with no plan. So anyway.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that attention to detail is crazy to actually go that extra step.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Did you have fun at Brown? Well, we played a part.

• 56:33Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 56:35Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit, are you surprised at how Gen AI seemingly came for image creation before product design in some ways? Like, yes, you can use Gen AI to generate, you know, screens of various products, but you would think that that would be, a lot of the product designers I know are still, you know, doing this sort of handcrafted work to design, you know, flows and features and things like that. And meanwhile, if you want to generate an image of the three of us sitting in a podcast studio, you can do that instantly.

• 57:12Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I've been, I'd say I've been generally surprised at.

• 57:17Andrew Reed?

  The order of things that have come out of this generative AI ecosystem in general, right? Like, I remember, I remember back when people were, you know, self-driving truck wave and it was all this concern about blue collar jobs, you know, and everyone should learn how to code and you fast forward five years and it's like, well, that was a very seemingly poor take, you know, in hindsight.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Same thing with radiologists.

• 57:40Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  They almost all have their jobs still.

• 57:43Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  And who was it? Was it Hinton? Or I forget, it was someone, big machine learning foundational researcher was saying, like, stop training them.

• 57:51Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, it's the, the, yeah, the, you know, how stuff, and I think ultimately, it's kind of like I was saying about creativity earlier. I genuinely think it's not because of a difficulty of the problem or some underlying architectural thing. I think it's just like, you know, like, look at the image editing models that came out of amazing diffusion work, right? And that just happened at a point in time because of the creativity of a group of people.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Andrew Reed?

  And it's amazing, right? And I think that same sort of thing, you know, bottoms up creativity, creating massive technology innovation. Like, that's has been the story for this whole wave. I think that will continue to be the story. And I think predictions from people, you know, who are the spreadsheet types are going to consistently be proven wrong.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that there's a Dylan Field out there right now, kind of grinding in silence for four years? And then we'll come out with something disruptive? Or does that, does that pattern not even work in the age of the internet?

• 58:46Andrew Reed?

  Well, Sequoia is.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  Probably already got check in.

• 58:49Andrew Reed?

  Well, the thing with Dylan is interesting, it's like, haven't you guys known Dylan for a long time?

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Andrew Reed?

  You know, like, Figma was grinding for a long time.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Andrew Reed?

  But it's not like they were grinding in true silence, right? Like Dylan and Evan were in, Evan, you know, absolute genius. Dylan. Very engaged in ecosystem, it's a Thiel fellow.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Yep. We were wondering about those early rounds because it seems like going back to 2014, 2015, like doing a $20 million series, even a $4 million seed round, like that's not easy, even if you're a hot company.

• 59:26Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I don't know.

• 59:28Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, they were, and they were, you know, they were engaging, actually like interestingly, so many of the people who I've run into already today were people who were like the early users of Figma when it was still a developing product.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:41Andrew Reed?

  And those people, you know, they didn't hear about it and want to try it and, you know, sign up, like those are, that's customer development, right? Like Dylan was like one of these true grassroots growth people in addition to the, you know, like, the, the kind of product.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Product mind.

• 1:00:00Andrew Reed?

  Visionary, exactly. And like, building this community, you know, it's like everything that is magical in the, what's that John Colson, you know, the John Colson tweet around, like it's a museum of passion projects, right? Like, you know, like this community doesn't just happen, right? Like it starts with a spark, and I think that spark really is Dylan. Like, I remember, there's a guy named Solio Cuervo, who's the first product designer at Facebook.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Andrew Reed?

  He now does some investing, he's an amazing, amazing guy.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Andrew Reed?

  And I remember he told me about Dylan, you know, back when Figma wasn't even around yet, and he was just like, this guy's gonna be amazing. And it's funny, he's interested in like four people, and one was Dylan, and then one was Guillermo from Brussel.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:44Andrew Reed?

  So like, it's an, like, no more opt-in, you know what I mean? If you got somebody, send it my way.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday.

• 1:00:49Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  On, on the note of, you, you said Dylan kind of creating this spark of community, I think that when people, when startup founders talk about community, it's almost, it's almost like a meme, because usually the first context that they're using it in is like, oh, we should have a dinner. And it's like, to me, like, a community is not like getting a room at a nice restaurant and just like getting people to show up and eat free food. Like, this is a community of people that have traveled from, you know, basically every, you know, A bunch of different contents all the way here, taking time out just to be immersed with this group. And it just feels like community is ultimately created at the product level to some degree.

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Like you can kind of like.

• 1:01:36Andrew Reed?

  Well, that's, I completely agree with this. And to me, like, I was thinking about this this morning. I wish everyone could have seen the keynote. Like, it was so awesome.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like watching a rock star.

• 1:01:47Andrew Reed?

  Like, the room, the room was, it's so big. There's like so many people in that room.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  It's massive.

• 1:01:54Andrew Reed?

  Like, I didn't.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  And it was standing room only at the back.

• 1:01:55Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable. But then you're like, it's like 9,000 people, right?

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Andrew Reed?

  Like, you know, imagine seeing a slide with, you know, 9,000 monthly active users, right? Like, nothing, you know?

• 1:02:08Andrew Reed?

  But 9,000 people is a lot of people, right? And to me, it's the, like, your users aren't just numbers. Your users are people.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Andrew Reed?

  Right? And the nucleus of this community are people who travel from Southeast Asia to be here. Travel from Europe to be here.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Andrew Reed?

  Travel from Africa to be here.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Andrew Reed?

  And that core 9,000 Mao has such a loud voice and the ability to, like, really propel a company forward. And if you put those 9,000 Mao into a room, it looks like that, right? Like, it's enormous.

• 1:02:43Andrew Reed?

  And finding the ability to get that level of nucleus, I think, is, like, it's a product thing, right?

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Andrew Reed?

  You don't just bottom down.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  I know you can't talk about public companies too much, but I'd love to know if you have any interpretation of what's going on with the Mag7 right now on, as far as like an opportunity for startups, like today. What was the news with Google? They traded down based on Apple might launch something.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Apple's VP of Services basically came out and said that, for the first time, searches in Safari, like, shrank month over month.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  It just seems like there's general chaos in big tech, whether it's Google potentially splitting up or, you know, the pressure on Facebook for Instagram. It just feels like that could be fertile ground for startups.

• 1:03:30Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  At the same time, a lot of people have been saying, you know, artificial intelligence, it just reads as a sustaining innovation, not necessarily a disruptive innovation. But, but what are you, like, what is the level of optimism around the next generation of founders right now, given what's going on with these, like? Very well-run companies that are often in founder mode or have amazing management teams and fortress balance sheets.

• 1:03:52Andrew Reed?

  I think, I forget whose law it is that you as a company ship your org chart.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I know that one.

• 1:04:00Andrew Reed?

  I'll look it up afterwards.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Reed's Law now.

• 1:04:03Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, Reed's Law too. The, I think the idea that AI will be a sustaining innovation, I think it's probably, it's probably like far enough along now to call that like mostly wrong so far. And I think it comes from that grassroots creativity combined, you know, small number of people, especially with AI, can do so much. I think that's one of the things that I was thinking about listening to the Figma keynote is like, you know, if the origin of Figma were, was specific, you know, verticals inside

• 1:04:44Andrew Reed?

  of companies, designers, developers, marketers, content people, legal, you know, coming together and collaborating to move this like very complicated process from idea through to deployment. Now, any one of those people can basically do all of those jobs. And I think that's like, that's something that we are like definitely seeing. And so smaller people can do so much more and you aren't encumbered by shipping your org chart because you are the org chart, right? Like it's, and you can just put out amazing experiences. And I think some of these big companies, what you see is, you know, they'll have amazing models or products or ideas, but they just don't even let you find them. You know, it's like the, the Notebook LM thing, right?

• 1:05:28Andrew Reed?

  Like, oh my gosh, that was sick, right? And like, now what?

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  The fact that we're using past tense for a breakthrough Google product is so crazy.

• 1:05:36Andrew Reed?

  It was six months ago.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  I know. We shouldn't be using past tense. We should be like, yeah, it's still great.

• 1:05:40Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. All of a sudden, you guys are in trouble.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  There's probably some app in the App Store that's just Notebook LM.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Oh, there's 10 of those.

• 1:05:49Jordi Hays?

  That's like doing 10 million of ARR.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I has we were talking about this idea that like, you know, there's the rapper, the chat GPT rapper meme, and then the the recent news of OpenAI acquiring Windsurf. I was debating this with Jordy, like, is it kind of game on for rapper M and A? Maybe that doesn't affect how you're underwriting investments at Sequoia. But do you think that there are other venture firms that see a multi-billion dollar outcome as something that changes how they underwrite? Like, if the M and A markets at that level are open, does that change the risk on nature of early-stage venture, maybe in like the mid-market? Or or do you think it should just be business as usual?

• 1:06:33Andrew Reed?

  I got a lot of questions that were similar to this after we mutually called off the Figma deal with Adobe. And some of that, you know, how does this change your underwriting of an investment?

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Andrew Reed?

  It's like, I don't know what this administration is going to do, let alone the next one. Right? Like, and the gestation period for these companies is sufficiently long that like, what's going on today? I don't think really we'll be able to change your investment criteria today.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Andrew Reed?

  Now, what you do with your companies might change, right? Whether it's, you know, you're looking to buy smaller companies, you have things that you're going to end up selling to bigger companies. That relates to the actual like investment criteria. At least for Sequoia, you know, we are looking for the big outlier companies, one of ones, you know, the future aircraft carriers.

• 1:07:18Andrew Reed?

  But obviously, you know, you pay attention to the news, and obviously, you pay attention to what the administration is going to do.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was thinking about it more just from this this idea that if like foundation model companies aren't necessarily going to steamroll the application layer, even regardless of the administration, just this idea that foundation model companies, it feels like they need dance partners in a lot of different areas. We saw this with the X and XAI merger, social, who are we talking about? Like, should Anthropic buy Snap? And I'm just wondering if there's more.

• 1:07:50Andrew Reed?

  Are you guys having, you guys are having Sonya on, I think, on Friday?

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, on Friday.

• 1:07:54Andrew Reed?

  You should talk to Sonya about this.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll talk to her about that.

• 1:07:55Andrew Reed?

  And that present, she gave a presentation on this exact topic.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Okay, great.

• 1:07:58Andrew Reed?

  And I could, you know. Try to copy what you said and do a poor job.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What were the other takeaways from, I assume you went to AI sent?

• 1:08:05Andrew Reed?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Uh, what were the takeaways other than we found out that Jensen Wong's jacket is Ferragamo?

• 1:08:11Andrew Reed?

  Oh, we did find that out. I know, I know.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  It's leaked.

• 1:08:13Andrew Reed?

  It's leaked.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  From us.

• 1:08:15Andrew Reed?

  It's sold out everywhere.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  It's sold out everywhere.

• 1:08:17Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, shout out Alfred. That was a great trade.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. He did the jersey swap.

• 1:08:20Andrew Reed?

  Jersey swap.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Well, you're up next.

• 1:08:21Andrew Reed?

  Legendary, legendary jersey swap.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  It was legendary.

• 1:08:24Andrew Reed?

  Man, that's. Hang it, hang it in the halls.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Andrew Reed?

  I would just leave at that point.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  You had to frame that.

• 1:08:28Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, frame it. I would like also find it somehow, put it on a, you know.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:08:32Andrew Reed?

  Um, yeah, I think, I think Alfred's jacket was.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the state of the Sequoia merch team? Have you guys explored anything as unique as a jacket?

• 1:08:40Andrew Reed?

  Hmm. Well, I was thinking for this one, you know, we, this is all of a sudden we can, we can somehow turn it into a statue and then

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Andrew Reed?

  just, that's like an operating, but we can sell that for.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:48Andrew Reed?

  You know that.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  You don't see a lot of Sequoia merch floating out there. You guys are pretty, hold it close to the chest.

• 1:08:53Andrew Reed?

  Very subtle. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Subtle. Okay. Uh, but anyway, other takeaways from AI sent, uh, who's interesting?

• 1:08:59Andrew Reed?

  I think it was vibe wise, it was, you know, so much, so much smaller than this room.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:05Andrew Reed?

  But I think vibe wise, it was really amazing. We held it for a few years now.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:09Andrew Reed?

  Predating, I think, GPT three.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:11Andrew Reed?

  And it's been, you know, a lot of the same sort of people, right? Like the people who started working on this early, really passionately are still the ones who are kind of at the bleeding edge.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Is there more focus on like energy, scale, data center build out or like new algorithms? Because a lot of people are scale pilled, scale's all you need, that are less than Rich Sutton. And then on the flip side, there's some folks that are saying like, hey, maybe we're actually topping out. That seems like a really foundational question.

• 1:09:35Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, we had a little bit of both. We had a little bit of both. Um, and I think, I think the practical reality is the answer is just yes, like both.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Just both. Yeah, of course. Why not better algorithms at higher scale?

• 1:09:46Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, and it's, it's going to be both. Yeah.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, something that I've been trying to dig into more is like, when are we going to see other models scale up to the size of like the big transformer from the GPT models?

• 1:09:58Andrew Reed?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  Like, we, it feels like we're getting there with diffusion, certainly not there with robotics, even though some of the robotics companies are now saying like, hey, we have the end to end models, we have. You know, big, big data sets and but they're not yet talking about, hey, we're building the massive data center. We're doing the 100 K H 100s or anything. That seems like a really critical like discussion point, especially for like where, where, where the next applications go, because it does seem somewhat specific. It doesn't feel like I was talking to one, the founder of Etched, and he was saying like, he was saying like, no, I actually think like you will just be able to train a robot to walk by having it read every book on walking. I was like, I don't know about that.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I read the book on walking.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  I read every book, but there is something there where it's like, yeah, if you're training a humanoid robot, like, why not just feed it all the data possible, including all the images and all the videos and everything, just the more it knows, the better. And that just builds like the stronger world model.

• 1:10:53Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I'm trying this with, you know, with my kids, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, just walk, you know? And it works. It just works. So there's a way to do it, you know?

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anything else before we move on?

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, this fantastic.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have Son Yon.

• 1:11:07Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, great. And I will tune in later today.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolutely. We'll see you.

• 1:11:12Andrew Reed?

  Bye.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming. Bye. Always a fun time with Andrew Reed from Sequoia. Legendary investor, one of the greatest to ever do it. And we have our next guest.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  And still cooking.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Still cooking.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Excited for the next 40 years.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm bummed we couldn't make the AI sent thing. It would have been very good, but we had a lot of, a lot of travel going on.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  A lot of birthday.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  A lot of birthday. Anyway.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of event, but.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming. Welcome to the stream. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for those who might not know you? What's your name? What's your company?

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  And your camera, by the way, is over there, but you can just chat with us here.

• 1:11:51Speaker 05

  Marty Ringlein, CEO, co-founder of Agree.com.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Great. And what is Agree.com?

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  It's a better DocuSign. The best part is it's totally free, free e-signature for everyone. But what makes it really special is we've combined invoicing and payment. At the end of most signatures, somebody has to pay someone. We just brought it all together.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Okay, when I hear, when I hear free, I think, am I the product? What's going on? Are you selling my documents to foreign countries or something?

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  So we operate like a fintech, right? We monetize on the payments.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  On the payment side.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  Yep, so operates a lot like Stripe.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure. I can't tell you how many times I've, I feel like it's mostly with home services where I'm paying like for pest control and I'm like signing, I'm.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm, you know, I'm like signing something and then I'm like, okay, like I'm ready, you know, again, I'm ready to pay. And then it's like, oh, like, Zell, you know, Zell me or whatever. I'm just like, really like this should be, this should be built into one. What, I'm curious, what, what markets have you guys really focused on initially?

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  We're at Figma, designers, agencies, freelancers, solopreneurs are obvious ones. But the B2B SaaS sales, especially in tech startups, they're just moving so fast. The growth trajectory is there. And then I think you pointed out something that's really interesting where if I say you have net 45 to pay, I think most of us think, oh, I'll pay on the 46th day. I'll stretch it out as long as I can. But usually, we want what's on the other side of that transaction so bad. We want to pay quicker. I want my pest control done. I want my roof fixed. I want my contractor started. I want my SOC 2 compliance quicker. So like delaying the invoice just doesn't make any sense, right? I want to go from execution of agreement. I want to pay quickly. Like, don't stop that. That's such a manual process right now. Everyone takes executed agreement, they send it over

• 1:13:40Speaker 05

  to finance. Somebody in finance manually creates an invoice, manually sends it over. It's just, it's kind of weird in 2025.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I gotta ask, how did you get the domain?

• 1:13:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it was always agree. We knew that that was, that was the word. But one day we're pitching and my co-founder says to me at the end of the pitch, the investor mis-said. He said, agree.com. It's like, oh, that could be a problem.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Got a nice ring to it.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  He's like, hey, did you ever go to agree.com? I was like, no. What if it's a porn site? So we go. It's clear that it hasn't had love in a number of years.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  But I see, I know there's a privacy policy and a privacy policy is going to be a legal entity. I track it down. I find the owner of that legal entity. And then it was four months of pestering and wooing. Because he's a high net worth individual. He didn't, he didn't need to let it go for the money that we paid.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Did he make you, give you some equity?

• 1:14:28Speaker 05

  No, no, we did all cash. But we did, I did have to eventually sell him on the vision, the dream.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  Be a part of the story.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it'll be used for good.

• 1:14:36Speaker 05

  And I will never not do one of these interviews where that question won't come up. He will be like, yeah, I was at the beginning of this.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. Probably early dot com guy, I imagine, just sat on a bunch of domains.

• 1:14:46Speaker 05

  Big domainer. He picked it up a few years ago for like 75K at an auction.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Cool. Yeah. Wow. What's the go to market been like? I imagine that there's some sort of like, almost like viral loop where somebody sends something and then they get a chance to sign up and then you kind of grow from there. Is there like a positive viral coefficient with this?

• 1:15:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's one where I pitched it just like that in the pre-seed. Didn't realize how fast it would kick in and then like how substantial that would be to us. So we launched the product September 4th. In a month, there was a thousand users.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  Hey, not bad.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 05

  Thirty days later, 10,000 users. It's like, okay, that's impressive. And then seven weeks after that, it doubled to 20,000. But when I looked at those users, a third of them, they came to us. Their origin story is someone sent them to Doc to sign on the platform.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  So they signed, they're like, oh, let me give this thing a shot. So that's kicked in. That's been awesome. So we'll always talk about our customer, but then our customer's customer is vitally important to us. And then now, yeah, the go to market, it's just, we see the same thing on the invoicing side. So it's just more, the customer base itself is the biggest distribution engine.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  How big is the company? I imagine it's like several thousand. Are you in tens of thousands of yet in terms of just employees?

• 1:15:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, no, we're baby.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  To run one of these businesses, typically it's five figures of employees typically?

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone likes to remind that at DocuSign, 7,000 people.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  That's how many it is?

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  I, I, I chat GPT it. It would take four Titanic's to fit all the employees at DocuSign. But we're, we're a team of eight and I think this is what you're.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Eight people?

• 1:16:15Speaker 05

  Well, that's what you're seeing.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Not 8,000?

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Doing the impossible.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Doing the impossible.

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  Better, better technology.

• 1:16:20Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign execs look at you guys and they're like, we don't know how they do it.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  We don't know how they do it.

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Payments too? We, we, we need to double it.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Unfathomable.

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, everyone always wonders, what is, what are they all doing over there?

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you actually, do you actually have a, I'm curious if you have a read. I was always surprised that after, you know, Twitter was able to lay off, you know, such a huge amount of the workforce, I wasn't surprised that didn't inspire other similarly drastic cuts. Have you been? Are you surprised in general at some of these more scaled enterprise companies that that they that they haven't tried taking a leaner approach yet?

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  I think the one of the secrets behind some of the B two B staffs in Silicon Valley is that there are an enormous amount of humans that power what we think is technology. And there's some companies where you can tell between like December 21st and January 1st. The servers have gone down or something's not working. Oh, no, the humans are gone. Right. They're out of the office.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  This is a service as a software.

• 1:17:27Speaker 05

  That's right. That's right. And so I think for some of these organizations, you need a huge customer service staff, a huge support staff to make it all work because they're pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes. And so they the tech deck is just so enormous that they they can't scale back even though they know they need to. And I think this is what we're seeing with AI. We know smaller teams can do more. They can do it faster. Now, how do they start automating their workflows with agentic AI or whatever tools they might be putting into place?

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  So you so you're here specifically pitching designers and studios. Who who is the current customer avatar that you're going after at Config?

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

  So at eight, we got to do everything and anything to build the brand. So I'm

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  I saw some flyers that were just hanging out here.

• 1:18:13Speaker 05

  I've got a stack of them out there.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  I saw a stack of flyers. I was like, oh, he's doing.

• 1:18:15Speaker 05

  I've got.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  He's an official partner.

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  I've got a coffee cart out front that I push and I make cold brew coffee.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:18:22Speaker 05

  Me, my co-founder Will.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 05

  But this conference is going on, right?

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Speaker 05

  Thousands of people here.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:18:29Speaker 05

  May 6th through 8th at Moscone West.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Speaker 05

  Turns out Stripe Sessions is right across the street. The same dates within the same block radius. And my ICP is here. Why would I not be here? So what I do? Yeah, I'm here handing out cards, knocking on doors, giving out free coffee, whatever it takes, but just build that brand, get them to know what it is. Because for us, it's a lampification. The big announcement just went out about our seed round.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  And so now we're doing interviews like this and just want people being like, oh, agrees everywhere. It's not everywhere. It's just everywhere that I know you're looking and you're listening and you're reading.

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Break down the round for us. How did it come together? Who's in?

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it was exciting because we.

• 1:19:04Jordi Hays?

  That was yesterday.

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  That was yesterday. Yeah, yeah. So this is perfect timing. We had closed 3 million pre-seed in March of last year. We launched in September. And then, once those viral loops started hitting, and there was some interesting traction. And so, we had a number of investors start reaching out to us towards the end of the year, expressing interest. We were going to go to market with around, either right before the summer, or right after the summer, but then a few folks asked to preempt. And just say, hey, let's just do it now.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do it now.

• 1:19:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, we thought, let's formally go to market on January 6th, and then it closed in two weeks, which was wild.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:19:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it was beyond our own expectations, and then we just made the big announcement yesterday.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  It's great to get it out.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, with some of the early pushback from investors, there's always pushback, even if people are generally bullish, just like, why hasn't anyone done this before? Doesn't this already?

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  This feels pretty counter positioned against DocuSign, right? Because like, it would be a massive upending to their business model.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  It cannibalizes their pricing model.

• 1:20:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I know it's highly disruptive, but, you know, if you look back, somewhere around two years ago, it felt like a lot of traditional SaaS, and we were like, out of new traditional fintech and SaaS ideas. But, the thing that became obvious is if you just, you know, brought a new approach, or a disruptive, you know, pricing model.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Took a simple idea deadly seriously.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:20:34Speaker 05

  So, the biggest pushback was, this is too obvious.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Speaker 05

  Why doesn't this exist?

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  So, and that was a great question, because I'm like, glad you asked.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:44Speaker 05

  What I'll always say in the pitch at that point is, this is the last time we'll ever actually talk about DocuSign, because this is about payments, and this is about fintechs, this is about AR automation.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:20:52Speaker 05

  And, it becomes very clear that the second question they shouldn't ask me is like, what if DocuSign did this? DocuSign can't become a payments company. The real question I'd have is, what happens if Stripe across the street decides they want to do e-signature?

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:21:03Speaker 05

  That would be disruptive.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 05

  That's really interesting to me. What if they decided? That owning the contract as a source of truth to revenue was really impactful to financial and CFOs like that would be really interesting.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully they're not listening.

• 1:21:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the problem is you still have to be really good at talking to the industry.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  They have their conference right now, we're live.

• 1:21:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're busy, so they can't be listening.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  They're watching backstage.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  We know John and Patrick are on stage, they can't be watching this right now. That's great. What was your background before this?

• 1:21:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a long time entrepreneur, had a startup back in 2007 that got acquired by Twitter in 2012.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:21:35Speaker 05

  Had a few exits, a few other startups in between, but most pertinent to this one is me and two of the folks that worked with me even at that first company, we started up a fintech that got acquired by Brex.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:21:45Speaker 05

  And Brex brought us in to build out expense management.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:48Speaker 05

  Specifically invoicing bill pay.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  And this is like right before we all meet our friend ChatGPT, but before the GPT-3 beta goes out, and the best technology we have at the time to scan and parse invoices is called OCR, Optical Character Recognition. Brex's position was spare no expense, use the best technology, it's Google, it's 87% accurate and reliable, like it's just not great for financial services. It means we still need human in the loop, there are human beings pulling levers, pushing buttons.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:16Speaker 05

  But that June, when we get access to the GPT, the whole world's freaking out, Gen AI, Gen AI.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  Turns out, you put generative AI on top of OCR, it closed that 13% error gap almost instantly.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  So we knew that, oh, legal documents, huge, because the generative nature of generative AI, right, it's context aware.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  So it can read the document and start to infer and imply things and fill in those gaps, that was huge unlock for us.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Were you at Twitter post-acquisition for a little bit?

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was at, no, no, I was only at Twitter pre-IPO.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  And I was only there, I did my, my year.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Your year. What was it like working there?

• 1:22:50Speaker 05

  It was awesome, but I always talk about it as equal parts frustrating and fascinating.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Speaker 05

  Because the site's still going down, there's still fail well.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  But it was fun for us, it's 140 characters, it's still no photos, no videos, they, they just acquired Tweety 2, so they didn't even have their own apps yet.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  They just got Tweet Duck and Tweety 2, so they're starting to get their own app, but this was the mantra of Let's be mobile first.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  Right, so we're watching them for the first time, figure out what happens.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:23:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, because that famous photo of when the plane lands in the Hudson. People forget, that's a tweet pic.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Sully, right?

• 1:23:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that's not Twitter, that's tweet pic on Twitter. It's a separate, because Twitter doesn't have photos.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Wow, separate service, right, yeah.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very decentralized back then. Now, you can't even link out to anything.

• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  It's completely different.

• 1:23:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, now it's like, no.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Do a product for everything.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Do not put agree.com in a post.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:23:34Speaker 05

  I know, it hurts us, it hurts us.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Are you finding any luck with, like, the world of venture capital and startups sending safe notes around on Agree?

• 1:23:49Speaker 05

  This one made it easy on the pitch.

• 1:23:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  I didn't have to explain the pain.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Speaker 05

  All VCs are like, yeah, this is a miserable experience.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  I hate moving money with my bank.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:58Speaker 05

  I don't like working with DocuSign.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:00Speaker 05

  DocuSign's not a bad company, but people get a visceral reaction. It's like Microsoft Teams or Jira, and nobody likes DocuSign.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, when we told them that the way you invest in startups, it'll be, your workflows will be better.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Speaker 05

  It's like, oh, that's an immediate aha moment.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Is that a different product on the fintech side? Because it's more of like an investment wire than just a payment?

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  It's different in that to monetize the way, just to benchmark against Stripe invoicing and billing.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:27Speaker 05

  They take 0.6% blended, 0.4 or 0.7%.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you don't want to take 0.6% on like a VC investment.

• 1:24:32Speaker 05

  The psychological moment for people is $50,000.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:36Speaker 05

  If it's a $30,000 SaaS charge and you take 0.6, nobody really even notices.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:24:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. 50,000, but on our 7.2 million, I'm not paying point anything of that. But there is a place in fintech where people take a 0.6.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 05

  Because what do I do with the 7.2? I don't spend it right away. I put it into a bank, and then it goes, a ROB bank, if I can plug that. But no, it goes, they've just been so great to us. But it goes into a treasury account. And I make, you know, greater than 4% interest on it.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  You know what the ROB's, Mercury Brex's, take?

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  0.6%.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  So the Agree Act 2, what's coming out this October, the Agree account by default will be a treasury.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  So we want founders doing their safes on the platform. We want all the money flowing through it. And then... It would just make sense just to leave it and agree. Don't move it to another bank. Because I didn't have a treasury. I had to go to Row and I had the checking, but then I had to create a treasury account on top of that.

• 1:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  That makes no sense. Well, our next guest is here, miking up. Anything else you want to share with the stream?

• 1:25:32Speaker 05

  Just love having you guys in. Hey, today, we always say is the last day you'll ever pay for DocuSign.

• 1:25:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go. What a pitch.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  I feel like you're going to get a cease and desist at some point. I feel like there's...

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  I can't wait to tweet that cease and desist.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't want to give him a cease and desist. You know he's going to market it.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  They're very hesitant about, even if they are building a direct competitor or something, they're usually pretty hesitant about saying it out loud for a variety of reasons. Just inviting competition, I guess.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  He's bold, he's brave.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Bold, brash.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  They'll take all 7,000. It's...

• 1:25:59Speaker 05

  When you guys... While you guys are in town, though, if you happen to hit the blue bottle on Second Street, there's a billboard that's going up right as we speak.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  And all it says is, "Today's the last day you'll ever pay for DocuSign."

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Very nice.

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  Just one block from the HQ.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Wow, they're putting...

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Putting the heat on them.

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  I'm poking the bear. We're going to see what happens.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Poke the bear.

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Good luck out there.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on...

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Thank you, thank you.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Good to meet you. That is bold. Well, hopefully, he's buying billboards on adquick.com. We are, of course, sponsored by Adquick.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Well, we should tell you about all our sponsors.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. I feel like it's... The treasury functionalities, I feel like it makes sense potentially for... If you're like an SMB.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  But if you're a startup that raises through like a DocuSign-like product, are you going to leave?

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Money in that corporate treasury? You'll probably want to pay your employees, do all sorts of stuff.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, very bullish on the product overall.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  You too, hi.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Hi. You can throw on headphones if you want to hear yourself.

• 1:26:58Speaker 06

  Are you twins?

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Are we twins?

• 1:26:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  We're brothers.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  No, we're not related, actually.

• 1:27:02Jordi Hays?

  We're not actually related.

• 1:27:03Speaker 05

  Wow, you guys look so much alike.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  It'll be easier. You can adjust.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  But we are live. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do for the stream?

• 1:27:12Speaker 06

  Jeremy Hindle, production designer. Designed Severance, Top Gun Maverick, Zero Dark Thirty, a couple of things.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  Just a couple of things.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Just a couple.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you go say a few more? Just because the first few were so impressive.

• 1:27:25Speaker 06

  It's a and a few thousand commercials.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:27Speaker 06

  And Detroit, a few other movies. And I have a new Catherine Bigelow movie coming out.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:27:31Speaker 06

  Uh, in the fall on Netflix.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:27:32Speaker 06

  So we're just finishing that up now.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Where, uh, where are you based normally?

• 1:27:36Speaker 06

  Los Angeles.

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Nice. So are we.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Talk me through this.

• 1:27:38Speaker 06

  I never worked there. I moved, I moved from Toronto nineteen years ago.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:42Speaker 06

  To work in L.A.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  And then you're going to Toronto.

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  I've only done one film in California.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Why even when you moved, it was already?

• 1:27:49Speaker 06

  It's just so, there's so much shooting abroad. I mean, it's good for like, certain projects like Zerdok thirty, you need to.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  You're always gonna need to travel. It's just now that there's just, you know, other than.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  But Severance feels like something you could film in L.A.

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  So, no, so we shoot out in New York because Ben Stiller lives in New York.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  Which is awesome.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  So we're not going too far.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 06

  Which is nice. And it's nice, it's great to be in New York.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Speaker 06

  A lot of the cast live there and the crew are amazing.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Do you agree with the criticism that Los Angeles and Hollywood have, should have done more to prevent?

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 06

  It's been bleeding for years.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the interesting thing that, the, the tariffs on foreign films news came out Sunday. And I forget the guy's name who was kind of spearheading that.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Was it John Voight?

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Saying like, these other countries, you know, it was like, the, the local state and county leadership in L.A. Have to take some responsibility for creating an environment where, you know, it's just like economically unfeasible.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Do you think that was just hubris by the elected officials in Los Angeles and Hollywood to say, oh, we don't need to compete with Atlanta because we're Hollywood?

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  Honestly, I don't know why they, I mean, I think honestly, the tech, a lot of tech moved into Califor, into Los Angeles.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:28:57Speaker 06

  And I kind of think that might have distracted them.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:29:00Speaker 06

  I'm not sure they were paying attention.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Tax revenues are coming in.

• 1:29:01Speaker 06

  You know, and they saw that and I don't know, but if, if like the studio system, but all, and all the prop houses, they've been closing for the last five years. All the best ones are gone. They went bankrupt. A lot of them through COVID.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:12Speaker 06

  And then a lot of them hung on till the last year, but they're all closing because no one's shooting in California. It's, it's, the stage is, I think it's, I've heard forty percent empty.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  I mean, we, we're.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  No, we've been looking for a new, so we've been looking for, uh, like effectively a soundstage, new studio space. And we, we found a space that we like, but.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Everything's empty.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  But, but, uh, it was shocking negotiating, we would, we would tour a space. Be completely empty, then we'd start the negotiation process and they would have these, even the spaces, you know, maybe the way that the management or however they're capitalized, but they would start throwing out numbers and I'm just like, you realize I've been in this space and I know that there's no one there.

• 1:29:48Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, you're kind of, who's your, who's, who's your backup offer?

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then of course, like, everyone who's ever been involved in the building, management, ownership, they're all of a sudden flying in to see you for just touring one little stage and you're like, okay, this is a big deal for you.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  No, there's something wrong, for sure. I think it's just, you know, most countries, it's so, like, I did a movie in Australia, it's so incentivized.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:30:15Speaker 06

  It's not, because what a lot of these countries are giving is above the line. All the money's the above the line, it's actors, directors, that's the big money. And the places like California don't do that. New Jersey's starting to do that now.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Is that just tax incentives or actually?

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  Well, it's a tax incentive for crews and shooting and post-production, but not always, a lot of places don't cover the cost, you know, if an actor's $25 million, they don't cover that part. But now, New Jersey's covering that part for Netflix. Like, certain people have their own deals.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  The state of New Jersey.

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  That's where the real money is.

• 1:30:44Jordi Hays?

  The state of New Jersey.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Is giving a tax write-off for that?

• 1:30:47Speaker 06

  Like, a certain part of above the line, yeah. Yeah, and a bigger, because a lot of them are capped at like, half a million. It doesn't save you much when someone's getting 30 million on a movie. And, see, you have two or three of those people. That's the big chunk of money that, it's, it's a lot. And, I mean, crew-wise, for most people I know, everyone's making the same money they made 10, 15 years ago. It hasn't changed much, so, it's just how...

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Even if, even if you've progressed a lot in your career in terms of doing...

• 1:31:13Speaker 06

  You know, I still think, what I make, I still probably make the same, as Rick Carter would have made 20 years ago. The same number, and the currency's not even close. But it's a good number, I'm not complaining, but it's not what people, it's, it's the same number.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:31:27Speaker 06

  It's interesting, and they still go, that's, you know, it's, but it hasn't caught up in a lot of ways, and I'm not asking, I have a nice life. It's more, I just like to be home sometimes.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Well, take me through the production design workflow on a project that we might be familiar with, start with... Like is there location scouting involved, photographs, are you sketching things, are you in a particular software, like what is your process?

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  I mean, basically Severance is, you know, it was, when Ben sent it to me, it was two scripts. There was only two scripts for the first 10 episodes.

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  And tonally, it was, it was really nothing there. It was very funny.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:01Speaker 06

  And it was a great concept, like this, people will want to be Severance, it kind of scares me.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 06

  I could go, well, you know, half of my friends want this.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Speaker 06

  If they could get it. And, but it didn't have a look to it.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:12Speaker 06

  So it wasn't, it read like The Office, it was budgeted exactly like The Office, shoot in a location, great cast, Adam was already attached to it, you know, it could have been Parks and Rec, it was the same sort of tone, like that feel. And I was like, Ben, I don't really, it's not my thing, I want to do cinema, I want to do something really visual.

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 06

  He said, well, what do you want to do? And I'm like, give me a couple of days and I'll put a lookbook together. I didn't know him. I just put a lookbook of what I thought it would look like. I'm like, if you want to do this, I'll, I love this. I had an idea that I really fell in love with, and he loved it. You know, and it was sort of, conceptually, like, the outside was always going to be, I was like, it should always be winter, it should always be really sad outside.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Speaker 06

  We have to kind of accentuate it. It was, and then when we go underground, it has to be, you know, very, particularly designed, and also all the technology should be, all the tropes that I, as a kid grew up with, that if you came out in the outside world now and told somebody you worked at this CRTC screen, with a trackball, you, no one, it wouldn't make any sense.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Speaker 06

  It had to be things that made no sense to anyone outside the world, especially young people. They'd never even seen, my son doesn't even know what, didn't even know what it was.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Speaker 06

  He's 20, he's like, he still doesn't know what a trackball is really.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 06

  So it was trying to like, that's, the initial part is really, conceptually, what does the world look like?

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  And then I, I really always started everything with a researcher. Her and I, we just banked stuff out for a while, and then I start with research, with a concept artist.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  How much of moving from a look that's similar to The Office, which is very docu-style, to something that's cinema, where you wound up, is driven by actual budgetary choices versus just?

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Picking the right tools out of the same tools.

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  We didn't have any on service. We just abandoned that thought.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:52Speaker 06

  Like the cinematographer Jess and Ben and I, we were like, what do we want to make?

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 06

  And we just made it.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:57Speaker 06

  The budget exploded. It really did.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  But they were really.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  And what drives that? Because you, you, you, people think about like, oh, we're filming with Cooke lenses or R A Alexa and it gets expensive. But on the production side, uh, you know, not to degrade, but it does feel like it's desk. How, how expensive can it be?

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  Well, it's, it's, it's my, it's five stages a set.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:15Speaker 06

  It's a lot, it's a lot, it's a volume.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:17Speaker 06

  Like it, a lot of shows, like say Parks and Rec, it's one set.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  For the entire show.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:21Speaker 06

  The entire, every season.

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of a lot of sets.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  The rehearsal, that's a lot of sets.

• 1:34:27Speaker 06

  A lot. It's a, yeah.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's every new scene is like.

• 1:34:31Speaker 06

  Like the amount of sets and then the amount of actors that come in and the amount of time it takes to shoot all those sets.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 06

  Pre-laid and camera tests, it all just.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  And the lighting probably gets more expensive as you're going for a more cinematic look.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  Right? As opposed to just.

• 1:34:41Speaker 06

  Cause we have sets that, you know, the birthing cabin in season two.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 06

  We built it. It's only in one scene.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 1:34:47Speaker 06

  But it's a particular scene. It's, that's, it's destroyed. Well, never, it doesn't exist anymore.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:34:51Speaker 06

  So you start to, you have to offset like how, but a lot of shows are, you know, like Law and Order is designed to, the sets are standing sets. It's a courthouse. It has, and then the only sets are, the only other ones are locations.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Ours are whatever we want. And also all the locations, like they have to be places that we've never seen before. Like we go to, we shoot in Utica. We shot in Newfoundland. We're, we're all over the place because I can't, I can't have somebody know that train station.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Speaker 06

  Can't know it. And then we alter so much of it later.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Take a location that's unique and maybe hasn't been, you know, popularized before and build on top of it.

• 1:35:27Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And then we do a lot of visual effects after. We augment and alter it. Cause it's really about creating a world that everyone doesn't know, they don't know where it is.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Speaker 06

  Like we're always, I always say, we're in Poland for all I know.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  Nobody knows.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 06

  And I don't want people to know we're in upstate New York. There's nothing identifiable really that people could pick.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 06

  And it's not, it's, the intention is really just for people to go down that rabbit hole. It's not to really trick them. It's just, it makes it believable that. They can't go, well, I hike there all the time.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 06

  It's just.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Can you talk about pre-vis or is generative AI playing a role? Is everything, do you interface with storyboard artists? What does that look like as you're trying to go from just this idea on the page, which you said was very blank, to something that you need to get to the point where you're like, this is exactly what we're building.

• 1:36:15Speaker 06

  Basically, what I do is I concept everything.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:18Speaker 06

  And you do iterations, like sometimes probably 50 times to get to the way we like the set looks, the way we all think it should shoot.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:23Speaker 06

  Like Jess, the DP, and now she's one of the directors on Severance.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  And Ben, it's really the three of us that just run with it when we're in shoot mode.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Speaker 06

  And it's really, they both storyboard like crazy together. Like, we're really tight and very opinionated. We ride each other like crazy, we argue all the time.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Speaker 06

  But in a really passionate collaborative way, we have, like, there's zero egos. None of us have an ego about it. It's just passionately, what is the best thing? Like, if it's not perfect, we don't shoot it.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 06

  Ever.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you ever feel like the materials that you're working with to build a particular piece of furniture, for example, actually matter beyond just how they read on camera? Is there something about a heavy desk that actually brings out a better performance?

• 1:37:08Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Even though you could just make everything out of balsa wood or something?

• 1:37:11Speaker 06

  Well, it's like the desk, the main desk, like, you know, it was just, it just, the script said four desks, one large room.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:17Speaker 06

  And I was like, I mean, this, it has to be, this is like, I kind of treat it like a spaceship.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  It's like the control room of Star Trek, right? You know, it's like, you need one thing to set the tone. If everyone buys off on that set, they'll believe anything after.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Speaker 06

  So I'm like, the desk has to be, let's build this desk that's very interactive. They're like five-year-olds. We treat them like, once they're birthed into the Audi on the boardroom table, which Dan calls the womb

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 06

  of the office, that's the birthplace.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 06

  You go to this work and you're really five years old, you don't know anything.

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 06

  Start to work at this computer, I'm like, let's make it really playful, like, let's treat it like, kinda like a playground.

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 06

  And, but I want them to be able to jump on it. Like, I want Zach to be able to jump on it. I want, it has to be structurally insanely strong.

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  And we just think of everything so that, that way, there's, they're not impeded by anything. Whatever they wanna do, safety first, go do it. It's just amazing.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Did you, I'm assuming you made the, you created the activation, where was it, in New York? It was in the middle of?

• 1:38:16Speaker 06

  That's so, marketing for Apple is amazing. That's all market, that's all.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, interesting.

• 1:38:20Speaker 06

  They are amazing. And that, the one in Grand Central was-

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Based on, based on?

• 1:38:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's all based on what we do, and then they, but they're really interesting how they take it to the next level. That one worked out really well, well, not in a good way, but the fires, so the premiere was canceled because of the fires in LA.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 06

  So that was happening at the same time, and all the actors were gonna be, we were all gonna be at the premiere. They all just jumped on a plane and went to the event. So it would've just been like, you know, people cast to be there, but they all showed up. That's amazing. Unknown to everyone. I didn't, I wasn't there, I didn't know they were going.

• 1:38:50Jordi Hays?

  Is, I feel like, I feel like the, just the imagery, there's so many different images from Severance that have become iconic and, and in some ways, just got outsized attention on the internet, just because they were so-

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  Have you been to the Apple website?

• 1:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Is it still?

• 1:39:10Speaker 06

  If you, yeah, you click on it, it's the first computer they saw. I don't know if they still have it.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:16Speaker 06

  Where IKEA started making the desk. Like, in Austria, they issued it first.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 06

  It's on the cover of IKEA.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but, is that, is it the work that you're most proud of in your career? Or, or is there, is there something else that maybe didn't get the same level of attention that, that you?

• 1:39:31Speaker 06

  I mean, I love, the process is the best part.

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Speaker 06

  I mean, Top Gun was hilariously fun. Seradoc 30 was amazing, challenge, like, they're all, it's about, for me, it's the experience of, it's a year or two of my life.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  The people I'm with, like, I'm so particular who I work with. It's like, you better, they better be interesting, 'cause why are you gonna spend your time with them? That's really, for me, what it is. What it goes out into the world, what people make it is, I mean, this is exciting to watch. But not unlike Top Gun was.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, I, you must appreciate, you know, product design is, is really hard, right? There's, there's no doubt about that, but-

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Somebody can have an idea for a product and, you know, within maybe call it 10 minutes to an hour, they can have something that looks somewhat like the end state with, you must not have a lot of sympathy for that, given that when you're like, oh, we need to design this like, you know, entire scene and we're gonna need to import, you know, wood from, you know, this, this region and that. It's just a very different.

• 1:40:26Speaker 06

  Well, it's also, AI is a funny one, because we don't use any AI. Nothing. But, well, no, because I, I mean, my biggest problem is I don't need ideas. I just need money to make stuff. I have some, my ideas just fall out of me, like, and the older I get, the more I have.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  You want humanoid robots that can, you know, assemble.

• 1:40:42Speaker 06

  I really just want, you know, support. You know, really, we just want artists that we can, we're making art. Yeah. Which is amazing. And it's, it's not, actually, a robot wouldn't work for me. I need the person who has an opinion. Like, I have this amazing sculptor who does all the sculptures. He's full-time. I've never had a full-time sculptor. I could go Panko, make, let's make this, let's make a bus, let's make this piece of art. Yeah. He makes it in a day. And it's, and it's all in his head. It's creative. It has that human touch. And it has like, yeah, and it has his heart and it has, I love that. And it's not necessarily what I wanted. It's, I want what they want, too. Sure, sure, sure. Put that inspiration.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  There's so much doom and gloom in the movie industry. No, not the world. I actually, the world is.

• 1:41:25Speaker 06

  It's great.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  No, but specifically in entertainment, you know, filmmaking.

• 1:41:31Speaker 06

  It is pretty gloomy these days.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  It is gloomy, but clearly, there's amazing work being made. There's all these new tools that people are gonna have access to or already have access to that, that, that make variety, you know, different parts of the process easier. Where are the bright spots to you? What, what gets, you know, you excited?

• 1:41:49Speaker 06

  I miss the John Hughes movies. I miss scripts. I'm so tired of seeing guns. I really am. If I was seeing the poster with a gun on it, I just, I find it really sad. And I really, I miss John Hughes. Like, I, my kids know them all and most people know them, but there's nothing to really take. Like adolescence is is an interesting thing for young kids to watch because it's about real life, but it would be nice to also give them something to look forward to that's like how to fall in love for the first time.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 06

  The things that I find young generations are not getting, they're literally getting, I love John Wick, it's fun, but they can't all be John Wick.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  We do have a lot of John Wick.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  No, we were talking earlier, the need for positive science fiction, right? You can still have a you can still have a dramatic storyline.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Futuristic, but not dystopian, not cyberpunk necessarily, maybe solar punk.

• 1:42:36Speaker 06

  Like ours, I think ours is funny because it's really still a love story.

• 1:42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Speaker 06

  He loves her outside and he fell in love inside. It's just about love.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Speaker 06

  And that's really all we all want, and it's the hardest thing to figure out how to have.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Speaker 06

  And how to let you be vulnerable. It's not something that's being allowed these days.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Can you talk about production design in the context of a film where there's going to be a lot of shots on location? Like, I mean, I imagine that the nature of an aircraft carrier plays into the design, production design, even when you're on a soundstage.

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  And there's less things that you have full control over, but how did you think about that in the context of Top Gun or Zero Dark Thirty, similar, where, you know, there's a certain grounding in the real world that you need to pull into the rest with the lighting design, but also the production design?

• 1:43:21Speaker 06

  I mean, honestly, I I think we can do anything.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:43:24Speaker 06

  We built the Somme Ben Laden compound. It's the size of this whole area. It's massive.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:43:29Speaker 06

  I'm like, why wouldn't we build it?

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 06

  It was 300 people laying bricks for six weeks, just non, it was just, it was a factory line. It was amazing, all these Egyptian.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:43:39Speaker 06

  Bricklayers, it was incredible. Like, I, we built the jet on Top Gun, like, if.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Speaker 06

  I just don't think you can't do it.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45Speaker 06

  I have zero understanding of no or why not. Like, I always go, why not? And they go, why? And I'm like, I said, why not?

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  They're doing it. Showbiz.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  What about, what about CGI, like, set extensions as a tool?

• 1:43:58Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  Are you reaching for that more? And then how does that change your process?

• 1:44:01Speaker 06

  We use it a lot in Severance, we use it a lot. I use it on everything.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Speaker 06

  It is, and I do a lot of cleanup now.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:06Speaker 06

  Because you're shooting so much faster, you're prepping so much faster. It's a great tool that doesn't allow you to waste your time stressing over it, that I can't do this in three weeks.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:16Speaker 06

  But I can do this, and I'll do the rest after.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 06

  It's more economical and it's way less stressful, but it, the hardest part is The production, the studio producers, it's hard because that bag of money hasn't been put aside. Until people are just starting to like, I'm like, put it away.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Speaker 06

  Let's commit to this amount of money and leave that money, but.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  How much of, how much of your process is a dance with the, you know, whoever's funding the project? Where, where you're just trying to understand, you're like dancing with a bull, right? You know, or you're like, you know, trying to figure out if I, if I push the budget, you know, 15%, maybe they'll be fine. But if I take it, you know, 20, 2%.

• 1:44:53Speaker 06

  You know, you kind of can read a room like anybody, like, you know, and, and I love to, I'm, I'm just like, let's just talk to them. Let's, can I just, how about I just pitch, let them see it? And then if they say no, they say no, you get a no's a lot and you have to adapt, but you have to keep pushing. It's, it's just a battle, like filmmaking really is a war and it's a war till the end and every, it's just how it works. Because, and I understand, I respect their job, like, we can't all go rogue, you have to be responsible. But you have to, they do hire me to trust my instincts. And if you don't do that, you don't make good art.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  You can't.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  How confident are you, film is, you know, television, it's a hits business. How confident are you, you know, mid, during your process around what, what the, you know, commercial, you know, commercial or just reception of a project will be?

• 1:45:48Speaker 06

  I have no, I, I honestly have, for a long time I did commercials because I couldn't pick a movie because I was terrified. Is this gonna be good?

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:45:55Speaker 06

  And then I had a friend of mine who's done a million movies.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  You have to just kind of.

• 1:45:58Speaker 06

  He said, just let go, you have to let go, just pick the people you love to work with and forget about it.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  Because, you know, he did, you know, Silence with Marty and, you know, that movie didn't do well. It's a great movie though, but you don't know why. And you can't bleed over it for the rest of your life, you've got to do another one and another one. And you just can't predict what people are gonna like. And honestly, you just, you have to not care, I couldn't care less.

• 1:46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:21Speaker 06

  You'd love to care, like, wouldn't we all love to care to make everyone happy? But I don't know why people like anything. And I think once you just give up on that and just, look. They want what you want. If you are a visualist, they mostly want what you want.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  I have a conspiracy theory I want to run by you. Someone was posting, this is just a random person on the internet, but they said that Apple is preparing people for a world where we're using virtual avatars in the Apple Vision Pro by using a more high-key lighting style in shows like Severance and Ted Lasso. Do you think there's anything to that?

• 1:47:02Speaker 06

  No. I don't think I've ever, none of us have ever even heard of it.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, it does seem like it would be odd that it would bleed over, but.

• 1:47:08Speaker 06

  Our, our goal is really, we are, we, when I, like Justin Bennett and I really wanted to make a movie.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 06

  A 10-hour movie.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 06

  And another 10-hour movie.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:47:16Speaker 06

  Because everyone has a huge, like I have a 140-inch screen at home.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 06

  I'm like, I have a projector now. And you can buy one for 500 bucks, project it on your wall. It's still amazing.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Speaker 06

  I think most people have the, you know, a lot of people have the potential to see it bigger than watching it on their phone, which a lot of people, producers say, yeah, but everyone's watching it on their phone. I'm like, I don't agree.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 06

  And I think some of these shows could be shown in theaters.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Speaker 06

  I think it could go back the other way. We just screened Severance, episode 10, at the Dulby Theater a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:41Speaker 06

  For 3,000 people and it was like the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  3,000 people in one.

• 1:47:46Jordi Hays?

  How would you?

• 1:47:47Speaker 06

  At the Dulby Theater.

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  Wow, that's.

• 1:47:48Speaker 06

  Amazing, incredible.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  How would you fix the theater industrial complex because the, the sort of 100% tariffs on foreign films, plan involved governments, basically subsidies to help theaters like fix their bathrooms, or at least that was what was put out there. And I was like, I'm gonna go out on a limb and I, and I don't think the reason our theaters are, are suffering is because they haven't had a new toilet in, you know, 20 years.

• 1:48:11Speaker 06

  I honestly, I don't, I don't, I think everybody just wants, like, companies want this guarantee they're gonna make money. They gotta take a risk.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:17Speaker 06

  You know, so you fail. I'm sorry. I fail all the time.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 06

  It's what we do. Humans are, failures works and sometimes it doesn't. It's like. So you have, like, their odds are still gonna be good.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  Like, look at what people will watch. And if there are, like, I couldn't believe how many people came dressed up as characters. Like, they could screen on a weekend, all ten episodes, and I guarantee you, the dome, if the Arc Lake was still open,

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:41Speaker 06

  would be packed.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 06

  It would be sold out. You could sell it out for weeks.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Speaker 06

  Like, I do believe that, because I see what these kids wanna see, and I have a twenty-five-year-old daughter. She had, every Friday night, she had Severance Dinner Night with their friends.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  Everybody was doing it. It's like, that's what Rocky Horror Picture Show was like when I was a guy. That's, there was, we had those experiences.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:00Speaker 06

  People want them, and they wanna walk out and talk about them.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Speaker 06

  They don't wanna watch at home, and then look to the left and to the right, and then go back on Instagram.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  There can only be so much laundry TV, right?

• 1:49:10Speaker 06

  Like, it's fun to communally watch something, and then talk about it, and

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Speaker 06

  hang out on the street, like, and

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. On that note, do you have a take on?

• 1:49:18Speaker 06

  You guys have to get it back. That's the thing, is you have to, you have to demand it.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, John organizes movie nights.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually organize movie nights with all my friends, and I just text

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  He just gets twenty tickets.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Everyone in Los Angeles, I get twenty tickets. I text everyone in my phone who's in town, say, "Hey, do you wanna come?" And then if people don't show, I just refund the tickets. It's great.

• 1:49:36Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  And, and just put together a huge movie night. It's just an activity to go out, better than going to the bar with your guy friends. I'm not really that into sports, I've always been more into movies.

• 1:49:43Speaker 06

  But I think that's the thing, is I don't think that they're, like, baby boomers have obviously lived too long. They're still controlling how we live. Then there's, you know, my age.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Speaker 06

  And there's not a lot of, like, there needs to be a lot more control for, at your age, that's really controlling a lot of this.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 06

  And demanding that this is what you guys want. They still think they know.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Speaker 06

  The sixty-five, seventy-year-old guys, they still think they have the answers. Like, nobody wants to go out. No, you don't wanna go out. You're seventy. You wanna sit at home, you loved COVID.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  It's like, twenty-five-year-olds don't wanna sit at home. They wanna, you go to Paris, the movie houses are packed.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 06

  Every little theater's jammed all the time.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:20Speaker 06

  You will go if they're available.

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  I've actually been surprised, I mean, we're a technology and business-focused show, but I've been surprised to not see more attempts at, you know, I'm surprised there isn't, like, a sweet green of theaters, right?

• 1:50:34Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Something that's, like,

• 1:50:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Jordi Hays?

  well-designed, and has healthy snacks and food, and it's like

• 1:50:40Speaker 06

  I'm so tired of the food, isn't it awful?

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, that, that's a big part of it, it's like, I haven't eaten movie theater.

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, Arc Lake was done a little bit in LA, and, and

• 1:50:46Jordi Hays?

  But there's still But a lot of them, a lot of them, they, they end up focusing too much on avant-garde film and all that. You just wanna, you know, if they were just playing

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do feel like yeah, mixing in the hits and creating these like big re-release moments can be good for kind of getting people back in.

• 1:51:03Speaker 06

  Like, look at Top Gun. People saw it five, six times.

• 1:51:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 1:51:06Speaker 06

  It was amazing. It was exactly how I grew up.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  You had to see it.

• 1:51:08Speaker 06

  And I loved it. And it's like, I...

• 1:51:10Jordi Hays?

  There's also...

• 1:51:11Speaker 06

  Why can't there be more of those?

• 1:51:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, so here's another funny, the concept of scarcity could be interesting to implement. It's like, you figure out a way to say, "We're gonna pull this film off the internet everywhere for a year, off all the streaming platforms."

• 1:51:23John Coogan?

  I mean, that was the way it was.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  And then we're gonna...

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  It used to be...

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  No, but then we'll...

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  You see it, and then nine months you have to wait. Now it's on demand the next week.

• 1:51:28Jordi Hays?

  But now you can do it. Take a movie, pull it off everywhere for a year.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Bring it back.

• 1:51:33Speaker 06

  Honestly, if you guys want to... I would... I hope someone starts an app, and I'll give it away for free. Do one that doesn't track you or focus to you. You have to be... It's like going to Blockbuster, walk around and find it.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

  You just get sent the same stuff. It's awful.

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 06

  There's so many good... Like, go to... Join the Criterion Collection, which not a lot of people do.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:54Speaker 06

  There's a billion amazing films on there.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Speaker 06

  And start watching them. They're available. You just have to get off some of the, you know?

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta get him the Criterion Collection. He hasn't seen any movies. I've seen everything.

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  It's so cheap, dude. Is it 10 bucks a month?

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  I know, yeah.

• 1:52:08Speaker 06

  I love... It's like the same price of a coffee with a tip.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gotta get him through that. So, we're actually going into a production design session, building a new studio. What are the common pitfalls where we could get stuck in quagmire? We've been looking at big news desks. We're thinking about putting some TVs behind us for, you know, graphics and displays. It'll be a pretty basic set, but we do want it to have... To be more opinionated than just one newsroom, please. We want something that speaks to a more modern brand, but we have a little bit of this, like, you know, we wear suits even though we're tech people, and there's a little bit of that. But where would we get stuck? Where are the people... Who are the people that we need to be talking to to really nail this project?

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 'cause I don't think it's whoever did CNN's...

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  Those sets are so old. I mean, honestly, this is a fun set. Do this, do this at large.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:52:58Speaker 06

  I mean, I think the cool thing is to make it really what it's real. Those sets are, they're just designed for, they're, all they care about is their logo. It's so boring. Like, make something, like, I remember Letterman, Letterman was hilarious. When he'd throw that card through the window that didn't exist, and you heard the sound effect, like, just make it, just make it fun.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  Like, an interactive, cheap, doesn't have to be expensive, no one cares. Just make it fun.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Fun is, fun is key. Back at our home studio, we have a range of exotic sound effects that really bring the show to life.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  We're building the soundboard, but we also have props. We have a tinfoil hat for when we're talking about conspiracies. We have a crystal ball that we pull out. We have bottles of champagne and books and we've kind of built this whole, like, library.

• 1:53:40Jordi Hays?

  Come back and, come back and hang with us in the new studio.

• 1:53:43Speaker 06

  I live in Studio City.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic, yeah.

• 1:53:45Speaker 06

  Just go to CBS Radford, it's the best.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  CBS Radford, what's that?

• 1:53:48Speaker 06

  It's where they shot, it's Laurel and Ventura.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, maybe we should check that out.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, this other CBS-

• 1:53:54Speaker 06

  It's where they shot Parks at Rex, where they shot Gilligan's Island. I mean, everybody, everything shot there.

• 1:54:00Jordi Hays?

  The other CBS is a place we were looking at.

• 1:54:01John Coogan?

  We were looking at Television City.

• 1:54:03Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't know that.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  It's another CBS lot. Bill Maher films there.

• 1:54:06Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  But we were touring it and it was pretty empty. But it was very cool, I mean, it was, it was the real deal.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  You just dox Bill Maher?

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  I think that's probably.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  No one wants to go there anymore.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, there's like seven layers of security to get in that building. I think it's, it's a live studio audience, people go in all the time.

• 1:54:23Jordi Hays?

  Right, right.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, are there any, are there any new trends that you're tracking in, in production design? Or, or kind of advice for up and coming folks who want to get into the industry? Is it, like, what is the path? Because I imagine you don't just call up a studio and ask for your first job. You, you need to build a resume of some kind, but it's kind of hard in the TikTok age to do anything related to that.

• 1:54:49Speaker 06

  You know what's funny? I tell all my kids, like, all their friends, you just have, you have to do what we did, you have to knock on doors.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Knock on doors.

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  Like, my son's graduating from LMU right now. He's interviewing for these jobs that have five positions, 8,000 applicants.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:55:02Jordi Hays?

  What's he want to do?

• 1:55:03Speaker 06

  He's in marketing and wants, you know, marketing for somebody like, event planning.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:55:07Speaker 06

  Or film promotion, or, he was, he was interviewing-

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Connect us.

• 1:55:12Speaker 06

  Agencies.

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Connect us. We're hiring.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're hiring.

• 1:55:15Speaker 06

  No, it's really, it's amazing, but that's what they're up, and the other thing is- They're all having to do these stupid Zoom interviews. You can't.

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's really rough.

• 1:55:23Speaker 06

  You can't not. I tell Sam, don't take one. You need to know if you like them too. And you'll know their chemistry. If you, I find Zoom interview is a waste. It's like, I don't know, I can't get a vibe from them. But the second I sit with you guys, I'm like, I get their vibe.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:38Speaker 06

  And you want to hang out.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:55:39Speaker 06

  And you know who you don't want to hang out with.

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 06

  And that's what's being lost. That's the art of, I think that whole thing is just chaotic bullshit.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Is there?

• 1:55:46Speaker 06

  And really lazy since COVID, a lot of young people.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I go super quick.

• 1:55:50Speaker 06

  It's very lazy.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Typically, one call, 10 minutes.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Come hang out.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's meet up in person.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, and meet up at a coffee shop.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:55:56Speaker 06

  You can just tell their, like, there's a million things. Their style, does, do they look at you? Do they shake? I don't know, I feel like the etiquette of a human, you need to meet.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there any particularly underrated films from a production design perspective? That you go back and you think?

• 1:56:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, Playtime.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Playtime?

• 1:56:13Speaker 06

  It's the one I reference all the time, Jacques Tettis, Playtime. It's a, Franz Coppola still talks about it. It's, it's what, you know, Metropolis is going to be another one.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 06

  Because they're bombs, like Playtime is a masterpiece.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:56:25Speaker 06

  It's my biggest reference for Severance was, was.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm starting to see this.

• 1:56:28Speaker 06

  Like, there's cardboard cutouts, there's people in the back. Wait till you see the airplane.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:32Speaker 06

  I, it's up, just wait till you see it.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Okay, awesome.

• 1:56:34Speaker 06

  And it's, it's, he, it was all his own money.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:37Speaker 06

  He went bankrupt.

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:56:39Speaker 06

  And nobody watched it. And it's like now, there's books, it's a, it's one of the greatest films ever made. And sometimes that takes 50 years.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 06

  Sadly, he's not, you know, he doesn't see it.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Who doesn't see it?

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so when does, when does Metropolis actually release?

• 1:56:52Speaker 06

  It's out.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  It's out? And it bombed, right?

• 1:56:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it bombed. It was long.

• 1:56:56Speaker 06

  I could watch it.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Will it be, will it be appreciated in the fullness of time? Or, or just?

• 1:57:01Speaker 06

  You know, I think sometimes it takes 20 years for people to want to watch. Maybe it's too close to us. It's about us. And we don't really like watching about ourselves, right? It's, we don't like what we're doing to the world. So I think in 20 years. The people will, the young, your kids will be like, ah, you guys didn't watch this?

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  People like, but in a weird way, people, people like White Lotus because it's, it's like watching their own family vacation.

• 1:57:27Speaker 06

  Isn't amazing?

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  But that's different, different.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, White Lotus feels like being at a luxury resort and just eavesdropping on everyone and their lives are falling apart, but you're doing great.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  More than eavesdropping.

• 1:57:37Speaker 06

  I know, you're sitting there all the time going, God, I'm so lucky.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:57:41Speaker 06

  I'm here, I'm eating the same food, but look at these freaks.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, look at these freaks, that's great. Yeah, anything else you're, you're tracking or watching these days? Have you seen the studio?

• 1:57:50Speaker 06

  I did, yeah.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:51Speaker 06

  I don't, I don't.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Do you think it rung true? Because for me, as an outsider, it felt like it was this great introduction. It felt honestly like the world of Silicon Valley and venture capital with, with like, episode two, he, he, he is giving notes that he shouldn't.

• 1:58:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  And then episode three is, he has to give a note, but can't bring himself to it. And, and it showed that, you know, it's not just a, there's not just a blanket rule. Studio exec never gives notes. No, sometimes they do have to. And that, that kind of, uh, back and forth was really.

• 1:58:19Speaker 06

  I mean, I think it has to be true because they're all Seth's experiences. He's regurgitating.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:58:24Speaker 06

  And I have a friends who, you know, pitched me, like, I don't do, I don't have that sort of relationship with studios.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:29Speaker 06

  So, but a lot of my director friends who pitched and pitched and they, and they laughed, they know, they're like, oh my God, that's that guy.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:35Speaker 06

  That's, it's based on real people.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:37Speaker 06

  I think it's hilarious. Um, I don't know if other people get it, I don't know, because it feels very filmy.

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Speaker 06

  I mean, sometimes he's doing Woody Allen, that cracks me up. Like, the one, episode four, I felt like Manhattan murder mystery.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 1:58:49Speaker 06

  You know, he's, I get what he's doing, he's just trying to be fun.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  Which is cool.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, what's like the most expensive item you've ever had to procure during a production build? Has, has there ever been any moment where it's been like, this is really high stakes?

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, the jet, the jet for Top Gun.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  The jet for Top Gun.

• 1:59:07Speaker 06

  It took me a lot of time.

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  How, how did that work?

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  But you built it, right?

• 1:59:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, and everyone kept saying, no, no, it's gonna.

• 1:59:12John Coogan?

  But you built it out of.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Now you get, now you get why the F-35 is a trillion dollars.

• 1:59:17Speaker 06

  You know, it was only, I think it was about three million all in to build, but it's only, it's not, it obviously doesn't fly, but to build a prop, that's a lot of money for a prop.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and does it go on some sort of like robotic arm or?

• 1:59:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, but we also built it to be real, real at, um, China Lake. And Tom, see, I wanted Tom to be able to touch it.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Speaker 06

  See it, interact with it.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:35Speaker 06

  He gets in it, we tow it out, all the way till it takes off is all real.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:39Speaker 06

  And I'm like, I'm just a believer, everything should be real and. You know, there's some feedback was like, well, we can do, we can, you're just gonna change it and post later. I'm like, I, we're not gonna change it. We love it.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49Speaker 06

  If we make it, that's it.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 1:59:52Speaker 06

  And it's, you have to find certain directors that can commit to that, too. A lot of directors want to change, so producers are like, we're not gonna pay for this, it's gonna change anyways. We didn't change anything.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  And there's a unique dynamic with Tom Cruise specifically, correct? Because he, I've heard like he even has his own insurance, so he can do stunts. But can you unpack like what it's like to work with him?

• 2:00:09Speaker 06

  So when we did the cockpit, like we built, you basically, you know, when you do something like that, especially with Tom, or you have to build plywood versions, so you build it to make sure, because Tom's an amazing pilot. So we built it this wooden cockpit and with the wooden windows and a template. And he's like, it's not comfortable, guys. We gotta make it comfortable. Like, yeah, we know, it's a plywood's. But he's really, he's really adamant, he's gonna be in there a lot, it's gonna be really comfortable.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:31Speaker 06

  And Ron, who was the aircraft designer I was working with, he's done about five movies with Tom. He got, he got it all. But Tom is very specific where he likes buttons, like he moves things to where they want, that where he is, if he was a pilot, that's where, he is a pilot.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, he is.

• 2:00:44Speaker 06

  Oh, no, I want it, I would put it there. So it, so it's all, so when he's in that mode, he's perfect, because it's so custom to him. And it, and the inside cockpit, we did it with Skunk Works, we had a whole deal with Skunk Works.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:00:57Speaker 06

  I was out there, Joe and I were there all the time, we co-designed the cockpit with them. There are components, there's buttons in there that are two, three million dollars that are from prototypes.

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:06Speaker 06

  That only ten people know what they are. And, and they're nods to those people, they're not, they're not for us, they're, but they would bring them into us in these little boxes, and we'd put them in, and then, you know, and it's just, that part's amazing.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  It's such a little touch, but you know it just goes a little bit further. And it's like that finishing, that last one percent, it takes ninety percent of the time.

• 2:01:25Speaker 06

  What is, and for me, it's, it's, you know, in Severance, a lot of the actors say it to me, it's like, they look around the room and like, there's so much we won't see. And I'm like, but you're seeing it.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  And they're using it, and they're, and it's, it's not just for the audience to see it all. They feel, if they walk into this bonker set and it's all feels real and there's things to do, they just get lost like you naturally would.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:45Speaker 06

  So it's just the way you have to design, a lot of people say, we won't see that, it's like, I don't even know what that, I just don't, I ignore it.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Creating a world.

• 2:01:54Speaker 06

  And it's hard as a lot of designers, they will cut it out, they'll be like, oh yeah, they won't see it. It's like, you don't know, and every director, like Catherine Bigelow, everything's a three sixty. You don't give her a half set.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:04Speaker 06

  It's like, because if she, if you do, she will shoot that out there half. And it'll be in the movie.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  It'll be wrong, you gotta do the whole thing.

• 2:02:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, but you just have to be.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  She wants to be immersed.

• 2:02:13Speaker 06

  Our job is to create a world that actors feel real in.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:02:17Speaker 06

  And then when you watch it, you believe it.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should there be an Academy Award for production design?

• 2:02:23Speaker 06

  There is.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  There is?

• 2:02:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  But it doesn't happen during the main event? It does?

• 2:02:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, my friend Patrice won for Dune last year. I don't know who won this.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:32Speaker 06

  I can't remember. Yeah, it's a big award.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  I thought there was, there's one category that I.

• 2:02:36Jordi Hays?

  I have to imagine you're gonna be.

• 2:02:38Speaker 06

  This'll be an Emmy.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Emmy.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, I hate to cut this interview short.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  This is really fun.

• 2:02:44Speaker 06

  No, I love it. It's amazing. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. I'll happily do it again with you guys.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, this will be great.

• 2:02:48Speaker 06

  You'll be in my home. I'll drive my Vespa down the busy guys.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 2:02:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. You can drive it on, drive it onto the set. Do a burnout on the set.

• 2:02:54Speaker 06

  Don't go west side. It's too damn.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  We're, we're going to Hollywood.

• 2:02:59Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  We're bringing media to Hollywood.

• 2:03:00Speaker 06

  Come to Hollywood.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 06

  All right.

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  We're getting media back to Hollywood.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, thank you so much.

• 2:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Great hanging.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  That was great. I gotta watch Playtime. Um, 1967 comedy drama. Never seen it.

• 2:03:11Speaker 06

  Bye, guys.

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  Bye. Um, yeah, what a delightful conversation. Not someone that we normally have on the stream, but we need to do more Hollywood. We should do a whole Hollywood day. Welcome.

• 2:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 2:03:20Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

• 2:03:23Speaker 07

  Great to be here.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Really, really chill day, I'm sure.

• 2:03:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's quiet.

• 2:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, super relaxing.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Super relaxed. Plenty of time to just come hang out on a podcast.

• 2:03:30Speaker 07

  It's quiet.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  And let's adjust that microphone so it's, it's towards your face. You can just adjust the mic, I think, will be.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  There we go. That's good. Um, would you mind introducing yourself for the stream? Tell us who you are, what you do.

• 2:03:43Speaker 07

  Sure. Hi, I'm Nairi Hourdajian. I'm the Chief Communications Officer at Figma, which basically means I'm lucky to work with this amazing design community on events and how we engage them all around the world, including Config.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  How have the comms been different this year than in years past?

• 2:04:02Speaker 07

  Um, you know, I think that the launches really set the tone for how we bring the community together at Config every year. And, you know, we were just so excited about the launch slate this year. Four new products, taking us from four to eight.

• 2:04:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  We had, we had Andrew Reed on from.

• 2:04:21Speaker 07

  Oh, good.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  From Sequoia earlier, and he said that a few years ago. They were giving Dylan a standing ovation for

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Font picker.

• 2:04:29Jordi Hays?

  And team for a font picker.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  And now it's for new products entirely.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  And to see this year, it's make, site, buzz.

• 2:04:36Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. I remember in 2022, it was a dark mode.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  Dark mode.

• 2:04:43Speaker 07

  Similar. Like, oh, my God.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  Everyone's so excited, but now it's like whole.

• 2:04:46Speaker 07

  And it's just been really amazing to see the response so far already. And we're excited to see them, the community, play with the product, get feedback and keep iterating.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Do you think about who you're communicating with as specific customer avatars or cohorts, or is it all just kind of one big happy Figma family? And yeah, if you put on the headphones, you'll just be able to hear yourself a little bit better.

• 2:05:07Speaker 07

  Better.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  More authentic podcast mode.

• 2:05:10Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  But yeah, in terms of, in terms of the types of communities that are here, obviously, there's, there's consumers who might use Figma just to design, you know, a wedding invitation or birthday card. And then there's all the way up to an enterprise that has, you know, probably hundreds of seats, if not more. Who, do you think about communicating to different groups in different ways? Or is it kind of just a big celebration of the broader Figma community?

• 2:05:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, Figma can be really good for figuring out your wedding seating. So I don't want to discount that use case. But in general, we're really serving people who are making software.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:43Speaker 07

  So going from idea to product and all the tools that they need to be able to do that. And, you know, obviously, the product design community is a huge part of that. But over the past several years, the way people are building has changed.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:56Speaker 07

  The entire process has become more blended interdisciplinary. Today, you heard from an engineer, a product manager, designers, and they're all just working together to build, to go from idea to product. And AI is changing that. And so we really think of serving that entire development cycle.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  No, it's crazy. The entire org chart can now make things.

• 2:06:16Speaker 07

  It's totally, you know?

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Which is insane. Like, the idea that, that someone in legal could create a marketing asset or, or, you know, some type of material for hire, you know, it's pretty unheard of.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, even, even just like a one-off internal tool could be built.

• 2:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about kind of the pressure?

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, around Figma, a lot of companies say they have a community, but they really just have, you know, an audience or a customer base. But, you know, something that feels very obvious here and even online is that Figma's community is a real community, right? You have people coming in from Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, like all descending here, and you don't get that without, you know, people. And these aren't, you know, some people are coming on behalf of a company. Other people are like a one-person studio that's just like, I'm spending my own money to get here because I need to be there. Can you talk about how you've approached, you know, comms specifically at Figma, knowing

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  that when you send an email, people are going to open it and they're going to care a lot about what they're hearing? And I just feel like that's very different than even some big, important companies where they're just sort of this monolithic organization and, you know, people are going to buy their stuff, you know, whether, regardless of how they feel about, you know, the company.

• 2:07:37Speaker 07

  Totally. Well, you know, a lot of that goes back to the very earliest days. And, you know, I think because Figma was in the browser and suddenly made Design Collaborative, it completely changed how designers worked, completely. Like radical change in their day-to-day. And so that, we always try to bring it back to the product solution that we're offering. But, you know, we think of Config as being an event for the community, by the community. It always has been that way since the first one back in 2020, right before the pandemic. That predates my time at Figma. But the talks are by the members of our community, the activations, even some of

• 2:08:21Speaker 07

  the other events that are being sponsored and put on by people who are just here gathering. And so for us, the way we think about it is just to maintain authentic relationships with people. We ask for a lot of feedback, sure, on the event, but also on product. And so we're just trying to have a really open and Engage dialogue with folks. You know, we're happy that they tell us when they like things. We're also glad when they tell us what they don't like.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:45Speaker 07

  Last year, we had a lot of overcrowding at config.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 2:08:48Speaker 07

  On the one hand, that was like, you know,

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 2:08:51Speaker 07

  An interesting problem to have.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Shoulder to shoulder. It's like a more of a Coachella. Yeah.

• 2:08:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was, it was not easy for folks to get in and around. And so we heard that, and I think it feels like much more roomy and spacious this year. And so just trying to make the experience always feel as authentic and connected as it can.

• 2:09:07John Coogan?

  Although the keynote was still standing room only, I noticed, but you know.

• 2:09:10Speaker 07

  We maxed out the number of chairs we could put in there, I think.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. Can you talk about the trade offs between batching these four product releases into one big event versus splitting it up? You could imagine like quarterly releases, there's obviously trade offs there. In the age of the internet, there's a lot of demand on companies to just, hey, as soon as it's done, give it to me, I want it now, even if it's rough around the edges, let's iterate, we get that. At the same time, you're becoming more of like the Apple-like annual release. And there's something beneficial from a commerce perspective about concentrating all the energy and attention to really break through with one big day of the year. Because you can't really dominate the internet every day, even if you're the best in the business.

• 2:09:50Speaker 07

  That's true.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  But yeah, how do you think about it? Was it ever a trade off? Or do you just love the annual release cycle?

• 2:09:55Speaker 07

  Honestly, we really look at the roadmap and let the roadmap kind of dictate what will end up at config and what ends up outside of config. We're not necessarily on a big annual release a year. Obviously, config is a catalyst for a bunch of stuff. We've never launched four products in one launch, ever. And going from four to eight. So for us, it's not set. We really, we believe in the philosophy that you just said of like, get product into users' hands fast, even if it's not, you know, like, even if it's early.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 07

  And learn and keep iterating faster from there. Because, you know, our philosophy is that design is always, and product development are always iterative, always living, and so you're constantly going to be tuning it. And the faster you can get it to users, the better. Dylan always tells the story of the early days of Figma, where, you know, they didn't ship. For a few years, he talks about that as being something he would do differently. If he could go back again and advise to other founders.

• 2:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were talking about this with Andrew too. It's just so much part of the lore of, you know, just basically, you know, building in relative obscurity and then just coming out and how most, I do think that that's, that made sense in the context of building novel functionality in the browser and the super complex product. But now that there's a platform, taking that kind of iterative approach, it makes a lot of sense.

• 2:11:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, you learn faster, the more people get their hands on it.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through some of the other, like, comms best practices from amplifying an event like this? Like, obviously, we're here having fun, kind of in the new media, streaming, very different world, but I imagine that there's like a series of press releases that go out and how do you work on getting coverage across, like, what is the, what is the market map of like getting attention at Figma's level?

• 2:11:45Speaker 07

  Well, because this is an event for and by our community, a lot of what we do is really about that direct and owned communication and the owned channels across social especially. And then, of course, like, the other events that are, you know, the constellation around config, like, we had a day zero block party outside on Howard Street yesterday called Config Commons that was so much fun, like, great music, great vibes, people really warmed up, but...

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure people joined not knowing what it was, tried to join, not knowing what it was for, just being like, looks like a fun party.

• 2:12:20Speaker 07

  Exactly. But, you know, one of the things that we like to do is just have fun with how our brand shows up. Yes, Figma is a B2B SaaS company, but we have a consumer patina to our brand and we get to lean into that, which is so much fun and unique, I think, within enterprise software. And so... You know, we changed our social handles to be called Config Crave, which I don't know if you all follow Pop Crave.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:48Speaker 07

  But you know, the demois, the Pop Craves, and all of these Stan accounts that sort of get to feature celebrities.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  There was, even this morning, there was a bunch of really funny posts.

• 2:12:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:12:58John Coogan?

  I always saw that.

• 2:12:58Speaker 07

  Celebrities here are our community, right? So we wanted to feature them and we just are always looking for ways to do that authentically and have a little fun. You saw the, I think we talked about the auto.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:11Speaker 07

  The Figpal CGI video.

• 2:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's this like Godzilla auto. It's amazing.

• 2:13:17Speaker 07

  We like to have fun and bring that vibe while also like sharing clear factual information. What's launching? When can you get your hands on it? So it's really a balance to do it all.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the hardest thing, clarity while trying to get max attention.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 2:13:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, it's your first config. Tell me what you all think.

• 2:13:36Jordi Hays?

  No, it's insane. It feels like being at Coachella.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really does.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  It feels like being at a music festival.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's massive.

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:13:42Speaker 07

  It's so fun to have you here.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  And it's so great that the diversity of different types of creatives that we've had on the show just today is so fascinating. The last one was like production sort of.

• 2:13:54Speaker 07

  Isn't he awesome?

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 2:13:56Speaker 07

  He's so fun.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly eloquent.

• 2:13:58Speaker 07

  He's gonna do a great talk later today.

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm very excited for that. We didn't even get to like, how does he use Figma at all?

• 2:14:04Speaker 07

  Oh, he doesn't.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  But he's just speaking about design broadly.

• 2:14:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, we just think, you know, someone in our community tweeted at us. You know who I want to hear from at config?

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:14:13Speaker 07

  The production designer from Severance. And we were like, we've got you.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  No, but you can just tell like the dedication to the craft and the process that everybody, even if you have nothing to do with production set design, it's like, I want to apply a lot from our conversation, not just to our set, but how we do the show.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:32Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of it just resonated. Personally, I'm just excited to go make my first Figma site, so.

• 2:14:39Speaker 07

  What are you gonna make?

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I have so many different. I have so many different ideas at both at TBPN of just like what it enables, just that like speed of iteration. I think that the most frustrating thing for me was always hitting a wall on no-code, like low-code software, like web development tools where I don't have an engineering background and it would just be so frustrating to like make something in Figma and then get to the point where I'm like, okay, now I have to wait.

• 2:15:11Speaker 07

  Who do I give it to?

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've got to find like the right developer and they're like, okay, I can get to it in like a week and then you're like, can you do it in two days? And then it's like, you really want it like that day?

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  There's so many of these ideas that are effectively like memes, like they're one-off webpages that don't, do not merit any sort of real budget or weeks of engineering time. Like, we wanted to do venture capital radio, VC radio, and so when you go to a specific VC firm's webpage, it plays a song that identifies with that fund and so.

• 2:15:43Speaker 07

  That's a really good idea.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  You know, you go to Andreessen Horowitz, American Dynamism is going to play like Free Bird or something.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. But there's this idea of...

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  And it's like, that's not something that you would want to actually spend some developer's time on, but you just buy it.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but like ephemeral apps, websites, this idea of apps as meme, as like memes, right, of like, how many times?

• 2:16:03John Coogan?

  The internet used to be like this. Back when it was just an HTML page, you would just kind of hack something together and then stumble upon would drive some traffic. And then we kind of went into the social era and everything has to be either an image, text, or video. But, you know, my hope is that something will break through and people will be able to build more interactive stuff.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked about this. I want to enable, you know, we have a bunch of brand assets at TBPN and people will remix them and use them in different ways. And sometimes I look at an image, I'm like, oh, this is like hilarious. I, you know, I want to reshare it, but like the logo is not...

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  It's not quite right, yeah.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  So, maybe figuring out a way to make buzz.

• 2:16:38Speaker 07

  I was going to say, you can use buzz for that too, and then see what people make for you.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  That would be fun.

• 2:16:44Speaker 07

  Me. Meme you guys.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be great.

• 2:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Gotta be getting memed.

• 2:16:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:16:47Jordi Hays?

  All the time.

• 2:16:48Speaker 07

  Rise of memes, I love it.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  How are you feeling for, you guys are headed to, uh...

• 2:16:53Speaker 07

  London.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  London.

• 2:16:54Speaker 07

  We are. Last year, right after Config SF, we took Config to Singapore.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:59Speaker 07

  This year, it's London. We're excited. Um, we have...

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Is it a lot of the same, like, set effectively, or is it a separate set out there?

• 2:17:07Speaker 07

  We are bringing the inflatables.

• 2:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:17:10Speaker 07

  Those are easy to...

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, pack up.

• 2:17:11Speaker 07

  Collapse, pack and ship. The synth, the synth can't come. It's too expensive to ship, unfortunately.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 2:17:18Speaker 07

  But, um, it's a, you know, in general, in another, like, raw space where we can bring our own scenic and make it feel like Figma.

• 2:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Speaker 07

  It's a smaller venue. It's about, you know, for a couple thousand people.

• 2:17:30John Coogan?

  Is Config, like, a full-time job now for Figma? Like, does the planning for 2026 start next week, basically?

• 2:17:38Speaker 07

  It already has.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  It already has? Wow.

• 2:17:40Speaker 07

  It already has. We have to walk and chew gum always.

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Our configs are measured in centuries.

• 2:17:45Speaker 07

  But it's fun. You know, I think there are great moments in companies' lives that, like, rally everybody together, and they differ for every company.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Speaker 07

  And for us, this is one of them on an annual basis. Everyone on the product team, on the sales team, on the marketing team, and we have a lot of fun with it. And for, you know, it's just really important for us to show up and be present with our users and our community and make sure that they know how much we appreciate their feedback and how much we're working to ship for them.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  We need your help at some point finding, apparently Dylan was in a Windows XP commercial when he was a kid.

• 2:18:25Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you have, do you have that?

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:28Speaker 07

  I think I, well, there's that.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:30Speaker 07

  There's Dylan on the Today Show after he became a teal fellow with his mom.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:18:35Speaker 07

  Another good one.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  That's amazing. We gotta get these.

• 2:18:38Speaker 07

  The third best is in the early days of Figma, when it was really small, they were trying to recruit this intern to come work at Figma. She was really into K-pop. So Dylan and the early team... Filmed a K-pop music video for her. That's like really hardcore recruiting for an intern. It must not have been very good. She declined the internship.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:18:58Speaker 07

  Those are some good videos from the early days I can share with you.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  She will, I'm sure, always regret that decision.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:19:05Speaker 07

  We wish her well. We wish her well. But that video was so good. We showed it at our tenure.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  That's like the equivalent for like an intern is like when the like the NBA general commissioner, like team, team coach goes to like the parents and sits them down and says like, hey, we want them to join the, join the team or something, or like college recruiting.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Even more than that.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, even more.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:19:26Speaker 07

  But yeah, Dylan did a lot of child acting.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  There's so, there's so much good lore around that. Like Eric Lyman has that video of him speaking fluent Chinese on some game show. I don't know if you've seen this. Oh, it's fantastic. At Ramp.

• 2:19:37Speaker 07

  Is he a fluent speaker?

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so he's, he was over in China for, I don't know, a semester, maybe a couple of years or something, went on a game show, is telling all these jokes and like getting a uproarious applause from everyone. It's remarkable. And then, of course, Scott Wu at Cognition has that video of him doing like the most complex math imaginable as like a child.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  In his head.

• 2:19:58Speaker 07

  What are, what about, what do you all have in your?

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. We need to dig those up. That's tough.

• 2:20:04Speaker 07

  That's something. Then meme those.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:20:07Speaker 07

  For 2025.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  I'm trying to think if I, when, when was my, there's probably a video interview from like my first company years ago, but I don't think it was too embarrassing.

• 2:20:15Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 2:20:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't have anything embarrassing. The, um, one, I, my mom was a, was a graphic designer.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:23Speaker 07

  Oh, cool.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  So my earliest memories doing design in a business context were working with her. These were like the Photoshop years and I have like pictures. So I had a skateboard company when I was 12 and I have pictures of me like holding up, you know, the finished product. But the like, I, I, it was so funny because at the time I, I actually really remember how. Like, single-player the product was. It was like, you know, files and like, versions and whatever, so. Anyways.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  I, I, I remember some of my friends in high school made like, a student film. And I was tall. I'm still tall, but they made me play the dad, which is hilarious. And I was a terrible actor.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he had to wear a suit?

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I did actually wear a suit. It was very, very embarrassing. Anyway.

• 2:21:10Speaker 07

  I do feel a little underdressed compared to you two.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, we're overdressed. Look at the community. This is not, this is not exactly the Goldman Sachs, uh, technology media and telecom conference.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  We were in LA. We had a meeting Monday and we, we showed up to Milken, not for the event, but meeting somebody there. And we didn't have our suits on.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  I had a suit on. I didn't have a jacket, but.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, jacket doesn't count.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  And then we were at Hill and Valley in DC.

• 2:21:35Speaker 07

  Well, you felt right at home there.

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Right at home, everyone. That was all of us Silicon Valley people putting on suits for the first time in years.

• 2:21:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. And all the DC people already in suits.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  But here, here we kind of stick out. But, uh, fortunately, everyone's been very nice and I think they're, they're having fun.

• 2:21:47Speaker 07

  I don't miss the bad suits from Washington. It's not my favorite.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  No, the joke is that you know you're at Hill and Valley when everyone has their business cards in their suits from the last time they were there. Because they only go to DC once a year for Hill and Valley. Uh, anyway, we're, we're, we're getting a hard stop, so we're, we're gonna wrap up.

• 2:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Hard stop in four minutes.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. But thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:22:06Speaker 07

  Guys, thanks for being here.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, I think we're getting booted from, like, for some reason. Otherwise, we'd keep podcasting.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we got another four hours in us.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  We got at least another four hours. Honestly, we're not used to being on couches.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  It is a little bit different.

• 2:22:20Speaker 07

  Comfy? You could go longer?

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  I think we can, I think, I think we can easily put up another 12 hours.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  Easily, easily. But anyway, thanks for making this happen. This has been fantastic.

• 2:22:28Speaker 07

  Why don't you meet us in London next week?

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  The international travel. We have yet to take the show on the road internationally. We've done Miami, we've done DC, San Francisco now.

• 2:22:38Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  So, check in the boxes. We'll get, we'll get out. We'll get out there.

• 2:22:41Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for having us.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Do you know where the next, next config is? Or is that not released?

• 2:22:47Speaker 07

  I'll have to come back.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Okay, let us know.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  Come back with breaking news on the show.

• 2:22:50Speaker 07

  Love to.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know, where, Saint-Tropez?

• 2:22:55Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  John just wants it to align with 2026 summer plans.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:23:01Speaker 07

  Sorry, sorry, John.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Lake Como, maybe?

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm on Geary, for a more intimate setting.

• 2:23:07Speaker 07

  I think we may not be the right, you know, company conference for those locations, but...

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  I mean, Singapore is very nice. London's great.

• 2:23:14Speaker 07

  Singapore was fantastic. You know, you should, maybe Kim Lyon needs to have TVP on.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 2:23:19Speaker 07

  That's what you need.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kim Lyon would be great. That'd be fantastic.

• 2:23:22Speaker 07

  I feel that for you.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in.

• 2:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having us. Talk soon. We'll see you after the show.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Anyway, this has been a fantastic stream. Thank you for watching. We really had a lot of fun being here at Figma Config 2025. Had a lot of interesting conversations. Really took us on a world tour. Having a Sequoia partner and the designer of Severance. Not every day that you see a technology and business show do both, but we are men of many talents.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  So, how many guests do we have tomorrow, by the way?

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  I think we have like six. We can give everyone a kind of a run through.

• 2:23:58Jordi Hays?

  I think it's gonna be closer to seven.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  Seven.

• 2:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Do we wanna leak it? I think it might.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  I don't think we should leak it yet, but we have...

• 2:24:03Jordi Hays?

  I don't wanna go...

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  But we are hoping to get some great people from the government as well as our first post-game of a major public company earnings call. Post-earnings. Post-earnings, which we're very excited about. And so, we're gonna be digging into that, kind of cutting our teeth in the post-earnings game, which we wanna get more into. And so, stick with us. It's absolutely stacked.

• 2:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow's absolutely stacked.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  It's stacked. We have to get back to LA, actually, right now, because we have to prep, because we're going wall-to-wall tomorrow.

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  It's by far the most stacked show.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  I'm excited. It's gonna be a big growth moment for the show. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye.