Meta Taps Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross for AI Push, Starship Rocket Explodes | Mike Knoop, David Cahn, Walden Yan, Eoghan McCabe, Jeff Weinstein, Garrett Lord, Tanay Tandon

(04:10) - Meta Eyes Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross for AI Push (37:47) - Lakers Sold to Mark Walter (43:39) - Surge Hits $1B+ in Capital Without Outside Revenue (56:20) - Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and CEO of Ndea, discusses the evolving landscape of AI reasoning models, highlighting the trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency among leading systems like OpenAI's o3 and DeepSeek's R1. He emphasizes the importance of considering both cost and performance when evaluating AI models, noting that no single model currently dominates across all metrics. Knoop also underscores the need for innovative approaches, such as program synthesis, to advance toward artificial general intelligence. (01:20:23) - David Cahn, a Partner at Sequoia Capital, previously served as General Partner and COO of Venture at Coatue Management, where he led investments in companies like Hugging Face and Runway. In the transcript, he discusses the substantial investments in AI talent by major tech companies, emphasizing the human dynamics and strategic decisions driving these developments. He also explores the competitive landscape, the significance of data centers, and the economic implications of AI advancements. (01:37:55) - Walden Yan, Chief Product Officer and co-founder, discusses the integration of AI models in product development, emphasizing the importance of balancing model intelligence with user experience. He highlights the challenges of managing trade-offs between model responsiveness and accuracy, advocating for systems that abstract model complexity to enhance usability. Yan also addresses the evolving role of AI in software engineering, noting the potential for AI to autonomously perform tasks like coding and debugging, thereby transforming traditional workflows. (01:57:41) - Eoghan McCabe, co-founder and CEO of Intercom, discusses revitalizing his 15-year-old SaaS business by returning to core fundamentals like customer-centric pricing and simplifying the sales process, leading to a tenfold increase in growth over eight quarters. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining high energy and passion from leadership to prevent stagnation, noting that AI innovations have reinvigorated both him and the company. McCabe also highlights the challenges of scaling a company, stressing the need for agility and the willingness to embrace chaos by empowering young, dynamic individuals in leadership roles. (02:16:00) - Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, discusses the company's initiatives to integrate AI into commerce, emphasizing the development of agentic commerce where AI agents facilitate seamless transactions. He highlights collaborations with companies like Perplexity and IP Camp to enhance e-commerce experiences and mentions the introduction of Stripe's order intents API, enabling agents to execute purchases on behalf of users. Weinstein also addresses the evolving role of payment methods, including stablecoins, in agentic commerce and underscores the importance of permissioned, secure transactions in this new landscape. (02:32:00) - Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, discusses the company's evolution from addressing his personal challenges in securing internships at Michigan Tech to becoming the leading early-career network in the U. S., connecting 18 million students and young professionals with a million employers. He highlights Handshake's role in supplying experts to frontier AI labs, emphasizing the demand for specialized data from PhDs and master's students to enhance AI models. Lord also outlines plans to leverage AI in automating recruiting processes and envisions a future where participants can showcase their skills through contributions to AI development, thereby enhancing their professional profiles. (02:44:44) - Tanay Tandon, CEO of Commure, discusses the merger of Athelas and Commure, highlighting their combined efforts to transform healthcare through AI-powered solutions. He emphasizes the importance of automating administrative tasks to improve efficiency and patient care, and outlines the company's strategy to expand its product offerings and customer base. Tandon also shares his vision for the future of healthcare, aiming to eliminate inefficiencies and enhance the overall patient experience. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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 TBPN. Today is Thursday, June 19th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. There's some breaking news that's dropping right now. I think we got to go to the printer cam.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Because we have an update from friend of the show. Let's see if this works.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  Do I need this?

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Uh, no, it's, it, we need a moment of silence, Gong. Um, but because it's about the Elon Musk news out of SpaceX. But we got an update from friend of the show, Ashley Vance, coming in here hot. He says, I happened to be at Neuralink last night when Starship went boom. And so was Elon Musk until well past midnight Pacific time. He was in three hour plus, he was in a three hour plus long meeting when the explosion happened. Meeting ended. I assume that's when he learned about it and then he went back to work. Wow.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  What a grinder.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Video was absolutely insane.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  It was.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we will cover it in a little bit.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  You had shared a transcript from it.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is crazy.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Earlier this morning. I had seen the, the video of it going boom.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you shared this transcript where one of the engineers is saying, hey, really quick, Sawyer, we just observed a couple of, uh, vents coming from the common dome in between, uh, LOX tank and a methane tank. And from this angle, it almost looks like the methane tank is gone. Then he actually says, question mark, is that normal?

• 1:36John Coogan?

  He says, he says the words question mark. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm seeing some venting. Uh, is that, is that unusual? Is that normal? And the guy goes, yeah, it's probably normal. And then they literally say famous.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  I have just. You have the video? I, I just sent the video to the team.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's play it.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  I have no idea if this is actually related. We'll have to get someone on the show to dig into like exactly what happened. I'm sure there'll be a post, uh, uh, like a postmortem on the explosion.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  They did say famous last words and then shortly afterwards.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  It exploded.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  The entire.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  It is a crazy, crazy video.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  I know really quick, Sawyer, we.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Let's see if we can pull this up. Um, in the meantime. Let's tell you about Ramp, Ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to Ramp.com to get started, of course. The other two major news stories we want to cover today. $10 billion, the price to buy the Los Angeles Lakers. $15 billion, the price to buy Meta and AI leadership team. Fantastic post by Alex Conrad.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I've just observed a couple of events coming from the common dome in between the LOX tank and the methane tank. And from this angle, it almost looks like the methane tank is gone? Question mark? Is that normal?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Jack, is that normal?

• 2:55John Coogan?

  And then I actually edited it out.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  I'm seeing some venting coming from in between the methane tank and the LOX tank. Is that usual? Is that normal? Yeah, it's probably normal. Keyword, probably. Famous last words.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, weasel words.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Famous last weasel words.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  These guys are just throwing out on a live stream, watching, watching like a static firing test. This is not a launch. They're not gonna, they're not trying to launch the rocket. They're just, they're just putting on the, on the test stand, firing it up to make sure that everything works. And it just completely exploded. We'll go deeper into that and some of the reaction and the news in a little bit. But in the meantime, let's talk about the other piece of breaking news that came out of the printer just after we got off the stream yesterday.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  This is news from The Information. Meta is in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to join AI efforts.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And partially buy out their venture fund.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Yes. So there's a ton of details here. So let's read through the information article, and then we'll go to some of the reactions. So Meta Platforms is in advanced talks, not just talks, advanced talks. Has that been defined, quantified? What does that mean? Like, like, are we past coffee meeting? Is this a 30 minute? Is this a two hour conversation? How long are the talks until they become advanced?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  I must know.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  You know, exact numbers are being thrown around.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Very possible.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Yep. So they they're thinking about bringing in Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross to help lead AI efforts. Part of those talks, Meta is in discussion about partially buying out Friedman and Gross's venture capital firm, NFDG, which holds stakes in top AI startups and is worth billions of dollars on paper. If the talks are successful, Gross would leave Safe Superintelligence, which he co-founded with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever last year. At Meta, Gross is expected to work mostly on AI products, while Friedman's remit is expected to be broader. Both Gross and Friedman are expected to work closely with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, who's hiring by Meta was finalized last week in a $14.3 billion deal.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Big numbers.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Big numbers being thrown around.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  I think this is gong worthy, even though we're just in advanced talks. We gotta hit the gong.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  We try not to hit the gong for advanced talks, but scoops are scoops.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  It's such a big number.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  We had the strong hit.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  As part of the talks.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess some, you know, immediately, a couple of things I was thinking about when I saw the headline. One, I don't know if this is common knowledge, but my understanding was that some of the money from NFDG was Zuck's, right? So they were already investing on behalf of Zuck to some degree. So this shouldn't be a huge surprise. And then I think the bigger thing is what does this say about SSI, right? If DG is willing to leave SSI despite it being, you know, such a young company and already valued,

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  I imagine DG's stake is in the billions of dollars there. So to leave that and go to Meta says something. I don't know exactly what it says.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  I think it could potentially say a few things. One is that maybe artificial intelligence is more of a sustaining innovation than a disruptive innovation. And so that just by training a fantastic model, you're not immediately going to be able to overcome the network effect at Meta. And so Meta is maybe potentially a better place to go. You know, really reap the rewards of artificial intelligence.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  That's kind of a signal because, you know, no one at Google was really thinking about joining Yahoo. Right? There wasn't a lot of flow that direction.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  It was like, we're on to something. We are going to disrupt. You know, same thing with with Amazon. I'm sure Bezos wasn't losing people to Barnes and Noble. Right?

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  I think this is the analogy. Threw out a couple of max contracts.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Mercenaries. But yeah, I mean, if you're.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  You know, if this was truly disruptive, you would think that you would say, well, I don't, I definitely don't want to be with the incumbent. I don't want to be in the legacy player because they, there's nothing that they can do to capitalize on the new wave of technology. And so there's been this question about AI, clearly an incredible technology, clearly, you know, like the greatest inventions. And it's up there with electricity and fire. Like, it's, it's really, really cool. The computers talk now. It's incredible. At the same time, what, what is the market dynamic that drives how this technology will accrue value in various places? Who will the winners be? A whole bunch of startups? Will there be a monopoly player around? It comes from a startup? Will there be a monopoly player and then sustaining innovation in every other mag seven?

• 7:44John Coogan?

  And this is the question that everyone has been talking about for years, for a couple of years now. This is what Ben Thompson writes about with, what we talk about all the time.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  And I think people are gradually waking up to the idea that like, it's possible that a lot of the value creation at the foundation model layer will happen at OpenAI because of their consumer products.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  And this aligns with, with Sam's piece from last week, the gentle singularity.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  It's basically saying like, we created intelligence and it's less weird than we thought.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Which is a step back from, from how things were, were talked about and is a stark difference than, than maybe AI 2027, which is, you know, super extremely AGI pilled and just saying, you know, we're going to continue accelerating and.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think it's right to kind of read into this and it's two things can be possible. It's possible that Ilya will create a very important lab with SSI, but it's also possible that they might never grow into a $30 billion valuation.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Is that where they are now?

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  They're currently priced at $30 billion. So for DG to leave as a co-founder of that company, sure, I'm sure he's getting, you know, he'll get a 10-figure package if he goes to Meta.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  If this goes through, but he's also leaving, I would imagine, billions of dollars of, you know, shares.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. This seems like very rumor mill at this point. Like this could go a bunch of different ways. It could just be talks and maybe they just come on as like advisors or something, or they join the board. Like Meta has a board that includes people that don't work at that company and they add a lot of value there. So that could happen. It could also be that Meta winds up acquiring SSI. That would be a wildly different take on this, or it could be that they leave. The information seems like somewhat confident about this, but it's only a couple sources.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  SSI, multiple co-founders, it's very possible that as even since the company was started, certain members of the co-founding team like Ilya, you know, want to build what they see as super intelligence. And it's possible other members of the team are like, yep, this is like more software. We're going to vend this out in a bunch of different places.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  And ultimately, you know, it just, I don't know. You don't typically see people get off rocket ships.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  I agree. Yep.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Especially co-founders unless there was an extreme rift.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  There's another side to this, which is there's a question about what structure.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Even if the goal still is superintelligence, what is the corporate structure and the capital formation structure that delivers superintelligence? Because we saw this with OpenAI when it was a nonprofit. There was simply no way to marshal a $10 billion donation to a nonprofit for a large GPT 4.5, GPT 5 level training run. Yeah. There was no way to marshal that type of capital. Like, the biggest, the richest people in the world had already donated $100 million, and there was not really a lot of appetite for, yeah, next year I'm 10x-ing my donation. Yeah.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  And so, and so, they had to become a for-profit. Yeah. Then you look at, at the flywheel of what it takes to continue to develop and continue to do these training runs and continue to invest in reinforcement learning. And it feels like you need a data feedback loop, and you also need a financial feedback loop to be able to justify more and more investments. And so, so if we're, and we're going to talk to Mike at ArcAGI, and there's this interesting thing that we heard, which was that the reason that the foundation models are not able to one-shot ArcAGI right now is because they're all just like doing a nice thing and not reinforcement learning on it.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  But if they actually were, did like some fine tuning around it, and they were like, hey, we want to knock this model off, they could. And, and what that tells me is that for any really well-defined problem, like chess, or Dota 2, or Go, or League of Legends, like, you can go and say, hey, we're doing a specific training run for this one problem, and it's going to get really good at it. The, the weird thing is, is that the economy and the, like, the global value creation chain from humanity is potentially extremely long-tailed. There's potentially not just like five skills, like, oh, yes, you know IMO-level math, and you're good and you generalize. You, you might need to go and dig into all these different, different pieces of value.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  And and having a feedback loop or an economic model like what OpenAI has with their app that generates a ton of revenue. Or like what Meta has where they can deploy these products in all sorts of different ways and get billions of people using them very quickly. That actually might be a a more like it might be the only way forward. You might not just be able to go into monk mode, come up with the perfect algorithm and then train it on some like medium sized cluster. You might actually need to just scale energy, scale data center capacity and scale users smoothly for decades to get there. So I don't know that this is this is updating my like probability of super intelligence ever happening.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Is how many different labs that are losing billions of dollars a year can the capital markets support and for how long?

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  You have XAI, thinking machines, safe super intelligence.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  You know, Anthropic is is kind of in in OpenAI or in their own categories and that they are generating a lot of revenue.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yep. It's also hard because it's not like biotech where if you come up with a machine learning algorithm or you come up with, you know, the transformer. You patent it and then you just make money off of it forever. Like, that's not the way these these innovations. Yeah, but that's not the. Like, if that was the case, I would actually be maybe more bullish on SSI because I would say, well, Ilya is clearly like an incredible researcher. If he goes into, you know, his team and comes up with the next great training paradigm. And then patents that and is able to license that to Google and OpenAI, that could be extremely valuable. But that's just not the way the structure of the market is is.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Not like drug development.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. Anyway, it's a fascinating story. There's been a ton of reaction to this. Nick says, this is somewhat related. Karpathy literally said Meta's Llama ecosystem is becoming the Linux of AI and you're blackpilling? And so this was kind of like a narrative violation.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  We should get a little bit more into the article because it does does give some important color. So Friedman has been involved in Meta AI's efforts for at least the past year in May 2024. He joined in. Advisory group to consult with Meta's leaders about the company's AI technology and products. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg asked Friedman to lead Meta's AI efforts altogether. The person familiar with the discussion said Friedman declined, but helped brainstorm other candidates, including Wang. While Zuckerberg was skeptical Wang would leave scale, Friedman convinced him a deal was possible. Said a second person with knowledge of the discussions. As the Wang hiring came together, Zuckerberg approached Friedman again. This time Friedman agreed to a deal of his own.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  He is currently expected to report to Wang, who is roughly 20 years his junior. Both men will be a part of a small group of Meta leaders that Zuckerberg refers to as his management team or M team. For Gross, the talks with Meta put him in an awkward position with SSI. A startup forum with the goal of building a leading AI company insulated from short-term commercial pressures. So again, SSI's strategy from the beginning is saying, we're not going to release anything until we create super intelligence.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  I just think it might be the nature of the economy and the nature of artificial intelligence and the structure of the market. That might mean it is impossible to insulate yourself from short-term commercial pressures.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is, you have billions of dollars on your balance sheet. And you hypothetically could just do AI research forever, just off of the interest yield alone.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Except for the fact that if you want to compete from a scaling standpoint, you have to spend billions of dollars on GPUs. And you know, data centers and training runs and things like that. So.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  It'll see, there's a very real tension there that will have to be resolved somehow. The startup SSI hasn't yet launched a product or described in detail what it planned to build. Gross's departure for Meta would damage an important investment for some top venture capital firms. In April, SSI raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation from investors such as Green Oaks, Andreessen Horowitz, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as it also raised money from Sequoia Capital. They basically got everybody. They got the whole crew together. Together, Friedman and Gross have invested in some of the buzziest AI startups, including search startup Perplexity and robotics startup, The Bot Company.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  That's Kyle Vogts' company.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  The firm had more than 2 billion of assets under management as of the last year, though that figure is likely higher now with the increase in value of some of their startups. So

• 17:07John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Anyways. This feels crazy, but

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Nat Friedman independently going to work at Meta is not that crazy.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  I feel like the craziest part is, you know, is someone like DG going from SSI to Meta, but at the same time, you know, it's very possible that SSI and Meta could work out some type of relationship and maybe that's not getting reported yet.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  What's interesting is that both of these guys, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, were both at one time thought to be like future, really, really significant leaders in mag seven companies. So Daniel Gross, he started an artificial intelligence company, I believe, went through YC and then, or maybe he went to YC after, but he sold it to Apple. And at Apple, everyone was kind of like, wow, now that he's in there leading AI at Apple, he's going to be kind of like this young, incredible talent. Maybe he'll be like the next Steve Jobs, maybe he'll like take over the company one day.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  And people were kind of like waiting for that, but it didn't seem like Apple was really set up for this.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  DG was accepted into YC in 2010, he was the youngest founder ever accepted.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he went back as a partner shortly after because he left Apple. But there, there is a different like fork in the road where Daniel Gross is like next in line to run Apple after Tim Cook. If they were set up to empower someone young, which I don't think any of these big companies really are necessarily, maybe except for Meta. And then Nat Friedman has the same thing where he's, he's CEO of GitHub. He goes into Microsoft, you know, it was always a possibility that, you know, GitHub's really important. It's for this $500 million business, it's growing, it's code gen. Like he's set up in the tech industry, like he could have potentially taken over for Sasha at some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just co-pilot. And so, so there was a world where you could see them at the ranks, but we don't, we don't think about it this way because most of the succession plans

• 18:59John Coogan?

  in, in manager mode, big tech companies are more managers. We don't tend to acquire founders and let them take the helm. But Zuck, it's not like he's stepping aside by any means, but he's very much leaning into this idea of like, there is something special about these founders, these people who have built companies, these people who are at the heart of the technology, really, really in the midst of things. Get them on my side at any cost. And I love it. I think it's amazing.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Nat and Daniel both want to make a dent in the world.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  Especially in the context of AI, right?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  So they're not going to want to go to Meta and just cruise and

• 19:38John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  make ads 10% better, you know, that kind of thing. Make it easier to generate.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  You do this deal and then you just go and rest in rest. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I can't. I can't see it.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  It'll be interesting too. I wonder, you know, would they continue to be able to invest, you know, independently? Or would they just, you know, or would there be kind of structure that says like, no, you have to, you actually have to just go all in on this. If I was Zuck, I would, I would hope and expect for that, but who knows?

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Whatever they're working on, I'm sure they'll be using Linear over there. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. And they got Linear for agents, folks. Dylan Patel is doing a little meme on this. Zuck Founder Mode Master Plan. Don't pay the Pi Torch and LLM people enough. Lose 20% of the Torch people to Thinky, Thinking Machines. Hire Alex Wang, Nat Friedman for $10-plus billion to help you recruit talent. Inflection back the Torch people at 10x their previous total comp. And so Dylan's obviously saying like, you should have just bet on the same people earlier and kept them. I'm unclear how much of it was, you know, really about pay. But clearly, that is not a gating issue anymore. The floodgates have opened.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  The, the, the, this was something that, that was identified earlier. We covered a timeline post about this where it was like, like, what, how, how will Apple compete in a world where like, they can't, they can't justify paying anyone $10 million a year. Like, if that's the new normal, or that's like the value of some of these people that are going to do some of this research, you're going to be kind of hamstrung. And, and it's not because you, you're not spending $10 million on an organization. It's because you're not spending $10 million on a person.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  It's a crazy new thing.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Sam Altman was, was taking shots at Meta.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's on the cover of the Phoenix Times today. I got it right here.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  And basically, so. Yes, Sam came out and said, Meta started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team, like $100 million signing bonuses and more than that comp per year.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, the meta game in here is like wild. It's so good.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  3D chess.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  None of our best people. He's just getting into getting into Zuck's head.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody had a good breakdown of that.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  He says, the strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission. I don't think that's going to set up a great culture. Altman added. I mean, the only thing here is like, tell that to the world of like Wall Street and like hedge funds, where like if somebody's just really good at making money, you'll just offer them like a maxed out contract to come over to your team and it's entirely, you know, like motivated by.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  The value that they're creating, but it's very trackable and it's a lot harder in tax.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  In this case.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  But still, you know, it's clearly up there if you're moving the market cap, like you could kind of tell. Spore says, is Ilya SSI already DOA if its co-founder is potentially about to be poached? Good question. Swix says, these guys are already sent to millionaires. So we're not talking about $100 million signing bonus anymore. It's the first $1 billion signing bonus in history. This is going to cost. Zuck clearly is in spend mode. If you think about 100 million bonuses are high. This is a guy who lost $14 billion in 2022, $16 billion in 2023, $18 billion in 2024, and $20 billion in 2025 to invest in VR. All he has to do is cut VR spend for 2025 and he has more money than Anthropic has raised in its entire lifetime. Wow, I didn't put it in that terms.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Never bet against Zuck long term, but I think we're in for another costly period of investment and we know what happened last time he went so hard on a thing. We do not have the balls or imaginations to do what he is about to do. Yeah.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine being Tim Cook, running Apple, a $3 trillion company, making a paltry $74.6 million in 2024? Just looking after just going through the most brutal year of his time at Apple, you know, like.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  Pulling the company back from, you know, back from the brink of this like trade war.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's executing fantastically.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  He's checking his pay subs, being like.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Like.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm making.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Scale who doesn't even work there, just got paid out bigger than me.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  When you put it into context that some 24-year-old.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  AI researcher who's cracked.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  And like deserves a great role at a great company with great pay, making more than the CEO of Apple.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  This is absolutely brutal. So we still need to organize this protest, hit the streets for Tim Cook.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  We do, we do.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Head over to Cupertino.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do. We should design some posters and Figma for it. Go to Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  While all these companies are duking it out, Figma is powering the design teams of all of them.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  So, so it's kind of like.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  It's a one hand washes the other scenario. We'd love to see it. Nathan says.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Switzerland for design.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  And Friedman to lead AI for tens of billions of dollars was not on my bingo card. Yeah, I don't think many people predicted anything like this happening. I think everyone was kind of saying like, there, there's probably going to be like some sort of V2 of the llama strategy, but being so talent focused, I, I think was not on the table. It was more like, okay, maybe they do an acquisition of a foundation model lab, or maybe they would just build an even bigger data center since they have abilities there.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  And it's, and it's been a very different.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  We don't, we don't know much about sports, but there's probably, I was trying to think is, is like Luca, Don, Doncic or whatever, going from, from Dallas to the Lakers. That was a big surprise.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  It was a surprise.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  SSI co-founder going to Meta.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the Luke of, of tech.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  For people who know what reinforcement learning is.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Luke Metrow chimes in, dog, how much is Zuck paying? He's, he's over at Anderall right now. The meme has been, do you want to just sell ads or do you want to build something important like at Anderall? Well, with these pay packages, I think you're going to get some Anderall engineers being like, I'm willing to sell ads. I'm willing to optimize ads.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I see a lot of ads throughout my day. I've always been kind of fascinated by them.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  You know, protecting the world and ensuring like, you know, Western-led peace, creating world peace is like noble, but like at a certain dollar value, ads are cool too.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane. Well, I'm excited to see this unfold. The way, I mean,

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Some of, it's interesting the way that this reporting is written. It feels at times like it's already happened, but it's clearly not confirmed. So.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could kind of go either way. But I mean, we heard the leaks about Scale AI like, like a few days and, and there was some speculation about what was going on there and it became very real. And so, you know, who knows? Maybe it does become real, but we'll be tracking it here.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Near Cyan says, ladies and gentlemen, Mid Journey has done it. It's a new AI image to video model. Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz mentioned this yesterday, but the posts have been going out on the timeline. We have our intern Tyler Cosgrove in the studio today, playing with Mid Journey video. How's it going so far? Can you give us a little review?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Uh, good. It's been a lot of fun so far.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  So you're in the Mid Journey Discord right now?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  I've actually made, I've made four videos so far.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  If we can pull those up.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's see. I'm excited to see these.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  He's in the Discord.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  He's in the Discord.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  Live from the Discord.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  He's in the trenches. Uh, how is the, how is the interface been? You just upload an image? Does it do the same thing that you get with a Mid Journey image where you type a prompt and then you get four images and you get to pick one?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Okay, so you get four video results?

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Four videos.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  And then you up, and then you up-res the one that you like, basically?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think when you export it, it basically does that.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Got it. Oh, okay. Here, you kicked it off with, with an image of us, uh, reading the paper.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's see.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  So this was, uh, you know, kind of bear domestication, right?

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so did you include a prompt alongside the image?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  You add an image and then you prompt it.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Oh, and then you add a prompt? Okay, cool, cool. It knows us too well.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Okay, that was the first one.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Okay, let's see the second one.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Bear domestication is in our future.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Okay, this is us on our phones. And what is this?

• 28:26Speaker 03

  We have a kind of an angel flying over.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Ooh, a very, very bizarre. I thought, I was thinking Pegasus.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's kind of a bit of a demon vibe.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  Who's the angel?

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Uh, in the back that, uh...

• 28:38John Coogan?

  What was the prompt for this one?

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Let's see, that one...

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Angel wings or something?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Angel flies up behind two men as they look back and smile.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  The actual, the actual video on us, okay, what's this one? What's this one here?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Uh-oh.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  This is us in the studio.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, this one. A little meta.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Oh, that's extremely demonic.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Aliens come and steal the gong.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  This is super creepy. I don't like this. Boo.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Bring the horses.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Bring the air horn back.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Oh, that's weird. They steal the gong. Wow, they really did steal the gong.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And then I think there's one more.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play the last one. What you got? What's this one? That last one was bizarre, very, very...

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yes, so the physics, um, are pretty solid. Sometimes you, you see a bit of the, the same thing with VO3 where like, if a car is driving, right, you'll see the back of the car.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  Okay, we got us standing at the pool. Let's take a look at this. Okay, this one's cool. Okay, we're back. The lighting on that's incredible. Okay, finish strong. 10 out of 10 for mid-journey.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Play it again. There we go.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  I love this. This is great. That is cool. It looks really good, too. Yeah, always bring your F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into, uh, the John and the Club pool.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Was that a Tomcat? Was that a...?

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Something like that. I don't know.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  But, okay, that was cool. I, I, I like that one a lot. Yeah, a lot less demonic when you're doing them.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Took us on a bit of a roller coaster there.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  I did not like that angel.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  That was weird.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  That was...

• 29:59John Coogan?

  That was very weird.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  A little bit creepy.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  The aliens were very bizarre, but you redeemed it all. You want it all back. Uh, fantastic. Uh, give us a review of the, uh, like overview of the actual experience. Uh, how long does it take to generate these? Are you hitting rate limits? How much does it cost? Give us like the breakdown of like, you know, the consumer experience.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it's really good. I mean, I, I think so. I'm on the $30 a month plan.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Which is kind of the mid-tier one.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  But it's very fast. I mean, it takes probably 10 seconds, 12 seconds. It's really fast.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Okay, VO3 is like 2 minutes.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you can iterate like super quick.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool, okay.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Um, but it's very easy to use. I mean, I, I haven't used, I, so I'm actually not on the Discord. I'm on the website.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Um, but it's very easy to use, yeah.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Okay, very cool, very cool.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  And you can run them concurrently, so I could do multiple.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Uh, at the same time.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  But yeah, really great.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, very fun. We'll be tracking it more, asking people how it's benchmarking, how it's working. We'll have to have some fun with those. I had a lot of fun with the VO3 ones. We were doing the crashing through the Hollywood sign, a few too many bottles of Dom Perignon on the back of Ferrari.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't like how there weren't guardrails. There seemingly weren't guardrails.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  That's an AI safety issue.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's an AI safety.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  I shouldn't just be able to prompt you to-

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't be able to visualize yourself with like-

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Drunk driving. It's ridiculous.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Bottles of champagne flying out of the car.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  The quality was remarkable. Anyway, Mid Journey is having fun on X. They say, "Introducing our V1 video model. It's fun, easy, and beautiful. Available at $10 a month. It's the first video model for everyone and it's available now."

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  How many prompts do you get for $10 a month?

• 31:33John Coogan?

  I don't know. You want to look it up?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually unlimited, but it just takes longer.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Takes longer. Okay. Oh, that's cool.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  But I'll verify that.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  That's insane when you put it into the context of those outputs are in many ways better or on par, at least like from an entertainment value standpoint as VO.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  And VO is $500 a month.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  $500 a month.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  And you're still gated on-

• 31:55John Coogan?

  I could only do three per day. I have to come back. They take two minutes a pop. Yeah, speed of iteration is really, really key. I mean, that's the whole Discord model is like, is like get people iterating, sharing ideas, like to explore the space and figure out what works. Like even just from seeing those four, I feel very confident about its ability to render aircraft. And so I'm probably not going to go and prompt a bunch more alien videos, but I'll definitely be prompting a bunch more F35 videos because it seems to do that really, really well. And so the more people you have making more stuff, the more you learn the guardrails, learn how to use it creatively and can actually make a better product. But Mid Journey was having some fun. Devin Fan from XAI says, "I know

• 32:40John Coogan?

  what I'll be doing this weekend." And Mid Journey says, "What weekend?"

• 32:45John Coogan?

  And Will Depew says LMAO. Blake Robbins says mid-journey video is breaking my brain. And everyone's having a good reaction to this. So always fun to have a new AI tool. And we'll be, we're talking to a couple of AI folks on the show today. So we'll be running through that, getting their reactions and talking more stuff. Elon Musk posted the, the very sad, what is this? The Pepe or something? It's the green frog. He's smoking a cigarette. He's not happy, probably because RIP to ship 36.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  We, Ashley Vance, we should.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think a picture of Elon, you know, smoking a heater after one of his rockets blow up, blew up would be, become a timeless meme.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  That would be.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  It would be worth kind of his comms team kind of working on putting that together. Maybe working with Ashley, Ashley Vance to get that shot.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  It could live.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  So girls say, I can't believe he didn't cry at the Titanic. Do men even have feelings? Boys crying at the sight of ship 36 exploding. Very, very sad. And then Elon says, just a scratch. The entire thing blew up.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Just a flesh wound.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  It was intense watching it. I mean, the, the ball of fire here is immense. So the starship exploded during a test in Texas. A setback for Mars is Mars, for Musk's Mars ambitions. Now, the Mars transfer window is very, very tight. Like you can only get from the earth to Mars, like once every 18 months or something, or maybe even more. It's really hard because like if the planets are on the opposite side of the solar system, like you just can't, like even though you have a rocket, you just can't get over there. So you have to wait until they're lined up and then you can do it.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  But realistically, skill issue.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Realistically, true. Skill issue. If you built an even faster rocket, you could get there no matter what. You just pilot, steer it around like it's a GT3RS around the Nürburgring. No problem. So the explosion occurred during a static fire test. No injuries were reported. Thank goodness. We love autonomy. Very, very happy to hear that no one was injured during this because it looked horrific and it looked like in any other scenario, there would be a bunch of technicians there, but fortunately they were able to do everything remotely, which is great. And then Starship Faches pressure to meet deadlines for NASA's moon mission and Mars exploration. So there's a big NASA moon contract that's very important, very material to the business. Obviously SpaceX has a lot of other business lines, but this one's very,

• 35:24John Coogan?

  very important too. And it's, and we hope that they can get back on track. SpaceX is making an enormous bet on Starship, which stands roughly 400 feet tall at liftoff as it tries to break ground with new reusable rockets. And the paradigm of Starship, it's not just a big rocket, it is way more reusable. Like you look at the thing, it comes down, gets caught by those arms, can instantly be refueled and sent back up. You're talking about potentially like multiple flights per day. And so the problem here is not can you build a big rocket? Humanity has done that before. Humanity's built a rocket that's roughly on par. We've gotten to the moon before. The challenge now is not can we get to the moon? It's the same thing with like, the challenge is not can we build a flying car?

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Or can we build, we have helicopters, can we build one humanoid robot or one self-driving car in San Francisco? It's like, can we actually scale these systems to the point that it is safe to go to the moon and back on the drop of a hat for 200 bucks? Like, that's the challenge. It's more of an economic and industrial might challenge. And that's a completely different challenge from just can we get one rocket to the moon, an exquisite system? We're looking for reusable, scalable, you know, engineering system. So, so good luck to Elon rebuilding and the entire SpaceX team. I'm sure it's a huge challenge right

• 36:43John Coogan?

  now. But if, let's do some ads to tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. attio.com.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  attio.com.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Wait, what is that? What is that sound at the end? Is that attached to that soundboard?

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Guys, I think you botched the action movie sound effect.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Oh no, it has the, okay. In other news, the Los Angeles Lakers has been sold for 10 billion in richest deal in sports history. Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter, who also owns MLB's The Dodgers, is acquiring the storied NBA team in a move that makes it the world's most valuable sports franchise. And it's so funny because the Wall Street Journal's framing this is like, this is the biggest deal ever. No one's ever done a deal like this. And we're like, wait, so you're talking about like a series A for like a foundation model company, like as a tech person? I'm just like, yeah, like 10 billion dollars.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  10 billion dollars.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  I mean, we should ring the gong, but it's not exactly like the first time, it's not even the first time this show, we've heard a deck of corn. Congratulations to, to the Lakers.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Mark Walter and the whole team.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's fantastic. Major premium to the Boston Celtics, who sold for 6.1 billion. And now the Lakers is the most valuable sports franchise. But they just don't do enough volume. There's only a couple of games, you know? They're not 24/7. Like Instagram, does that ever go offline? No. There's always entertainment. Lakers, they're still doing seasons. They need to have 24 hour basketball. They want to really get there.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Around the clock, it's like endurance, endurance basketball. It's just a week long game, you know? You gotta always have five players on the court.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Just constantly.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  Running up.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  It's the only option. Jeanie Buss and her family, who have owned the Los Angeles Lakers since Jerry Buss bought the team in 1979, wow, on Wednesday, agreed to sell majority control of the storied team to Mark Walter, the sports investor. And I, and I looked at the, the, the return on investment of owning the Lakers for that 40 years, slightly under S and P 500.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Like it was a really, really good deal and it was a really great company that grew a lot, but it didn't outperform the stock market. Just diversification, bros, DCA, bros, undefeated again.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Well, if you're trying to DCA, do it on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, they're trusted by millions, folks. Anyway, Walter, who is part of the ownership group that owns the Dodgers, has been part of the Lakers since 2021, when he purchased a 27% minority stake in the franchise. He's also a co-owner of Chelsea in the English Premier League, the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, and the newly-formed Cadillac Formula One team. Let's hear for Cadillac. Let's go.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Can't hear you at all.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  John front-run the Cadillac F1 team and got a Cadillac for himself over there. You can see the black one.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  It's great to have an American F1 team in the business now.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've fallen off, but we're coming back.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  You're not going to be able to get one of these in the whole country.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  I don't think so.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  After the F1 team gets out on the track.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  The sale marks the end of nearly a century of Lakers' control by a family that has become synonymous with Los Angeles sports and the glitz of professional basketball. The deal also comes at a time of skyrocketing valuations in professional basketball, which haven't come back to earth since the league announced a media rights deal last year worth 77 billion, when the Celtics sold in March. The $6.1 billion valuation exceeded the previous record valuation set for a sports team by the $6.05 billion sale of the NFL's Washington Commanders in 2023.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  He purchased the Lakers for $67 million in 1979. The team transformed from franchise uprooted from Minnesota into one of the winningest and most valuable sports properties.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  I had no idea that they were founded in Minnesota.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  That's where the Lake name comes from. Minnesota is the land of a thousand lakes. They were the Lakers because there's a lot of lakes in Minnesota and then they just put them to, they just brought them to LA and kept the name. But that's what Lakers means. Yeah.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  Bus, the Bus family oversaw the creation of Showtime and presided over the NBA's last three-peat. A-listers like Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio have become fixtures at the games. And when they sell merch, they need to pay sales tax. They should get on numeralhq.com, numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  They've won 11 championships since 1980. Their rosters have boasted many of basketball's brightest stars. Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, and LeBron James, and LeBron James's son have all worn the Lakers purple and gold.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  I love it. It's such a cool, yeah, the father-son duo. I mean, I feel like that should have been a bigger, like, national news story. It's such a cool thing. I think it's like not, like, if they were, like, winning championships together immediately, that might be a different story, but it's just so insane that you could be playing professional basketball with your son.

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  Just because you could have earned a better return by DC'ing into the, into the, into the stock market.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  That's not why people own these assets, though.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Owning the Lakers for a number of decades, I imagine, was absolutely priceless. So, great investment.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  You get the owner's box.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Great run.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. All the perks, you have to add those in. What, do you get perks from DC'ing into the S and B?

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  I like how Lakers legend Magic Johnson hit the timeline, said, "Just like I thought when the Celtics sold for 6B, I knew the Lakers were worth 10B."

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Let's go. The confidence of Magic Johnson. Great investor, too. He's got a bunch of, a bunch of good stuff in the portfolio. Anyway, more news on the Scale AI transaction. So, it's closed. I believe that Alex Wong has a badge at Meta and shows up to work at, in Palo Alto and clocks in at Meta HQ now. Scale AI is still an ongoing concern, is still a company, but every competitor is out for blood and they want to take as much of the business as they can, since obviously the perception is that Scale AI will primarily be working with Meta and that other foundation model labs might not want to do business with with Scale AI anymore.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Unclear if they can separate out the businesses, if they can separate them out fully over time and and sell the position to other investors, create like a diversified, I mean, even they could even take the company public, at which point I imagine that it would be a lot less a lot less of a conflict of interest or like a fear. But there's been news that that OpenAI said, hey, we're not training, we're not using Scale AI for data anymore because it's too aligned with our competitor, Llama, maybe. But everyone's trying to.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of this was very predictable.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Right? I don't think Meta and Scale's teams looked at and said, hey, if we sell right now to Meta, which is competing in open source AI, we're totally going to retain all of our customers, right? Like, people aren't just going to immediately turn off.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  And no, they were smart enough to know what would happen. And there was an article, I think, yesterday about OpenAI, you know, ending their relationship with Scale, but from what we knew, like, they hadn't been doing much.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  For a while.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  That's part of the reason why Merckor had been.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  And they also brought a big function in in-house. Because for some of the more complex tasks, it makes sense to generate the reinforcement learning data yourself. And there's just so many others, there's so many other services, having like a single point of failure never makes sense for a business of that size, but we'll see. So the the information has an article here about a little-known startup that has surged, hint, hint, past Scale AI without any investors. This is interesting. After Meta Platforms' Scale AI deal, data labeling is looking like Silicon Valley's hottest new interest. That's an enormous opportunity for Edwin Chen's Surge AI. For years, data labeling existed in a tucked-away corner of Silicon Valley, a critical but unglamorous area of AI where companies like Google and OpenAI hire outside firms to improve their

• 45:23John Coogan?

  models by laboriously grading the quality of what they produce. Now, a spotlight has unexpectedly fallen onto the field in the wake of Meta Platforms' decision to pay 14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI, the best-known data labeling firm. But. It's not the largest such firm, nor perhaps the most impressive. That title belongs to Surge AI, founded by Edwin Chen. This is fascinating. I didn't know this. One billion in sales last year. Bigger than Scale. Yeah. So Chen startup has won customers like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  It's such a testament to the idea that like, sure, you can bootstrap, but you it's it's so incredibly hard to have any hype around your business if you bootstrap because you're not having your investors aren't hitting the timeline for you on a daily basis. And also, you have, if you're not trying to raise capital, you have less need to go and be loud and go on podcasts and talk to the press and all this stuff because you're just making a lot of money. And, and you know, sometimes it can be beneficial for to for people to not know about you.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  So this is, I mean, this is crazy, crazy stats. So Chen is 37. He has no investors and has bootstrapped a five-year-old startup entirely by himself, which has 110 employees in offices in New York and San Francisco. The company generated more than $1 billion in revenue last year. Surge has told employees a previously reported figure that exceeds the $870 million scale generated in revenue during the same time period. And unlike Scale, Surge was profitable and has been from the beginning, Chen said. Moreover, Surge could see its sales get even larger if other companies copy OpenAI's decision to stop hiring Scale. A choice made over concerns about Scale's relationship with Meta to shift business to Surge. Other key financial metrics couldn't be learned, like how much revenue Surge keeps after paying

• 47:15John Coogan?

  its workforce of mostly contractors. So there is a question about like the margins, since this is somewhat of a marketplace business. This could be a situation where, you know, a $1,000 contract comes in and $800 of that contract goes to the actual contractor who's doing the work of the data labeling. But at the same time, even if it's 200 million and like, you know, like net revenue, that's still a huge business. I it's hard to imagine Surge not being a fantastic business. They haven't had to raise money. They have 110 employees and they're used by Google and all these major foundation model labs. So it seems like a fantastic business. But if Serge could earn a valuation from investors similar to the one Scale received from Meta, such a price would make Chen a billionaire many times over, at least on

• 48:00John Coogan?

  paper, and quietly one of the wealthiest people in tech. Interesting. I'm very interested to see what he did before this company. Edwin Chen, I feel like I've heard that name before, but I don't know. As AI models transform from toys into real business tools, data labeling is becoming more and more essential. Contractors hired by companies like Serge grade the responses from AI models and write thousands of questions and answers in fields like programming, math, and law to feed those AI models. And so, you know, if you're, I wonder if this is going to go the route of, you know, you are Deloitte or McKinsey and you're going to have your team, but then also a company like Serge create a ton of training data around a specific workflow that is costing

• 48:44John Coogan?

  your business, you know, 20 or 50 or 100 million dollars every year. And then, so it's like, instead of like the AI BDR that's like kind of generically writing emails based on like the average of the entire internet, it's like, no, this is a fine tune for your business, perfectly trained, perfectly, and it really, it really distills what you do excellently. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if it'll go that way. I'm interested to talk to people about it. As AI models, so Serge's subsidiary, Data Annotation Tech says workers get paid to train AI on your own schedule with wages starting at 20 dollars an hour. Chen has distinguished Serge by making it the high-end shop, charging premium rates,

• 49:27John Coogan?

  often two to five times what Scale might bill. Serge justifies the prices with its reputation for industry-leading work. Indeed, one former Scale employee said Serge often performed better than scaling customer audits of labeling quality. And competitor Garrett Lord, who's coming on the show today, who runs Kleiner Perkins Back Handshake, readily acknowledged that Chen is the number one player. So I'm excited to talk to Garrett Lord today about this exact topic. Should be very interesting. You wouldn't know that from the, from the coverage of Meta's blockbuster deal to quasi-acquire scale AI. Its CEO, Alexander Wong, who is now joining Meta in a senior AI role, was widely regarded as leader of the data labeling field and had become a Silicon Valley celebrity, blanketing podcasts

• 50:09John Coogan?

  and conferences with his presence and posting heavily on X. It also raised 1.5 billion in venture capital, putting scale on a very short list of companies that have raised that much, and he hired upwards of a thousand people. Wong had made time to exit perfectly, given the traction of Surge, which had grown larger than scale without outside capital and with a tiny fraction of scale's workforce. Scale also missed the goal to hit a billion dollars in revenue last year, but scale, scale spokesperson.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Scale wasn't profitable?

• 50:34John Coogan?

  It was not profitable.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Which?

• 50:36John Coogan?

  But wasn't burning a ton of money. Like, I think they had like, they raised 1.5 billion and they still had like almost a billion in cash. So they weren't, they weren't in like trouble or anything, but at the same time, it was like, like not, not a wildly profitable, not a wildly lean business, but I don't know.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what a... It's absolutely fascinating to comp these two businesses.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  It's a wild industry. Something that like, yeah, I mean, just, it feels like there's such an edge just to even identifying this opportunity years and years ago. I mean, I guess Surge started four or five years ago, but it was certainly like pre-chat GPT that all these companies got started. And then they realized like, some of them got started in self-driving car annotation, all sorts of stuff like that. But Chen studied linguistics and math at MIT, came to the idea for his startup after leaving college and witnessing firsthand how big companies struggle with data. Before starting Surge, Chen worked as machine learning engineer at Facebook, Dropbox, Google, and Twitter. He worked in four different tech companies. Just like going from one to the next. It's insane. He was developing recommendation and search algorithms and helping gather the

• 51:41John Coogan?

  data needed to train them. Despite the hefty resources of those companies, Chen encountered a lot of problems. At Facebook, for instance, Chen was tasked with helping build a Yelp competitor. His team needed to train a model that could correctly classify businesses, telling the difference between restaurants and grocery stores, for instance. To do so, they needed a dataset containing 50,000 accurately labeled businesses, which he found out would take six months for an outside firm to assemble. We had no solution other than waiting. We simply waited. When the data came back, Chen Blanchard, in some instances, it had labeled restaurants as coffee shops and coffee shops as hospitals. The data was complete junk. He wouldn't say which vendors Facebook had used. In 2020, in 2020, he left Twitter to found Surge and picked up some of his first

• 52:26John Coogan?

  customers, executives from Airbnb's and Niva, a once promising AI search engine startup, as only, as only a founder in San Francisco might, bumping into them at rock climbing gyms in the city's Dogpatch neighborhood and the Mission District, talking up his startup. To get Surge going, Chen recruited data labeling contractors he knew from his previous roles and funded the startup using his savings. He wouldn't say how much he put in. Fortuitously, Chen focused on language modeling. Scale, by contrast, started out using more visual data for autonomous vehicles, which we talked about.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Just as those types of models began to grow in importance. Less than a year later, OpenAI had hired Surge to fine tune its models by teaching them how to avoid producing harmful responses, like racially biased language, biased, based on research paper the company published together in, by 2022, Anthropic had become a Surge customer.

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. They're putting out research papers.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  With OpenAI and still managed to stay this under the radar.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah. So, look at this, the label largesse. Data labeling has proved to be a lucrative niche in AI. Surge, founded in 2020, has over a billion in revenue, zero funding. Scale, founded in 2016, has 100, 870 million in 2024, raised, oh, the, this says funding raised, but this is clearly valuation or something, because it says 17.4 billion, which is not what they raised. Turing has 300 million annualized, raised 225 million. Invisible.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Turing, too, initially was like a marketplace to just hire developers, and I think they pivoted into.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Data labeling.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Data labeling.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Interesting. It's the same thing when I work with a cloud provider. The enterprise tech customer said, "I don't know the internal expectations for why their services work so well. I push a button and I'm glad." For the internal work to make that happen. Data labeling companies typically use various techniques to make sure contractors aren't just dialing it in or phoning it in, I guess, when answering questions. For instance, companies randomly insert questions that have no correct answers or make sure labelers agree on the right answer to a question. So obviously you scaffold up these, these, these, these like responses so that everything's like double checked and then you can kind of see if people are messing around. But wow, what, what a beast of a business. No idea how big this thing is. Amazing. How'd you sleep last night? I'm on a comeback.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  I got an 89. Go to aidsleep.com.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Get an Aidsleep.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  I know what I got.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Five-year warranty, 30-night risk retrial, free returns, free shipping. What'd you get? You got 100? 88? Let's go. Soundboard. I demand a soundboard. Ashton Hall. Let's go.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  John did it. They said he would never beat me after a good run.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  I had a terrible night. I also took a nap after I got home. It was fantastic. We have our next guest coming into the studio. Mike from Arc AGI, breaking down how all the different models are doing.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Last time he was supposed to come on, Elon and Trump decided to get in a massive timeline war.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  It was brutal.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  John wanted to power through it. I said, John, the people in the YouTube chat are

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Demanding this.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Are demand that we do a timeline turmoil segment.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  If we don't do it, they will put up attack ads against us. They will buy billboards against us. They will go to adquick.com and put up attack ads on TBPN if we don't cover the Trump Elon dust-up. So we did. And now we're getting those folks back on the show today and later. But if you want to take out an attack ad on us, buy a billboard at Adquick. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches about out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  We should do some timeline. I want to do this blank street story, but we can do that later. Let's dig through some what's in the timeline while we while we wait for Mike to join. Oh, we have Mike in the studio now. Welcome to the show, Mike. Good to see you. How you doing?

• 56:22Mike Knoop?

  Good afternoon.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for.

• 56:25Mike Knoop?

  I'm glad there wasn't a major breaking drama story today. It was actually a little show up.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  You, I don't know if you watched that show at all, but like I was just sitting here. John was so locked in, wanted to just keep doing the show and I'm like messaging him like, no, we like actually have to.

• 56:42Mike Knoop?

  That was a terrible day to launch anything new. And we like launched something. I saw several startups launch stuff. Like regrets to everyone who tried to get anything out that day.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Actually, I remember them. It was Rahul and.

• 56:54Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, that's right. Julius had a launch.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  And what's the voice cloning company? Eleven Labs, I think, they launched something.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then I think Lulu said something. She was like, if you have bad news today would be a good day to drop it. And then OpenAI actually flagged like, hey, we had this like massive, you know.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this this dust up with the government, right? Where the government was like, you have to give us your.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  All chats ever, even if they're private.

• 57:19Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, I mean, I was like, serious. Like, I mean, that got, we're still looking at actually, you know, the results of that. But that went really deep into the world, I feel like, much more than, you know, kind of maybe even got reported on. Like every single chat thread I was a part of was basically like, hmm, should I like stop using ChatGPT as much?

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, was it, was that unique to ChatGPT? Because it feels like Anthropic has a similar policy. It seems like Google might have a similar policy. Like there was that story a year ago about a man who was using a Google phone with a Google Fi cellular connection and had all of his data stored in Google, Google Drive and Gmail. And he took a picture of his of his child to send to a doctor. And it was kind of like a nude photo of the kid to inspect the child for like a physical medical problem. And it got flagged as child abuse material by an automatic system. And the automatic system basically deplatformed. Formed him from everything Google and so he lost his email, his phone number, his all of his drive stuff.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  And it was like a false positive, but it was really hard for him to get back through there. And so I guess my question is like, like it seems bad when we hear the story in isolation. But maybe the problem is not the individual company and it's instead like the government policy. And this applies to all the different companies, but I don't know.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  Two, two things can be true. One is that it can be a massive overreach by that court to say, you know, basically you need to eliminate privacy on your platform.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  And you can simultaneously have questions around, maybe I should use this product in a different way.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it's the inflammatory nature of it is that people use chat GPT as like a confidant that.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 59:02Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  And tell it things that they wouldn't tell anyone. They wouldn't tell anyone in their life and they're, and they're having those conversations.

• 59:08Mike Knoop?

  And I think that's why it struck such a chord because like that's true. I just saw some reporting from, uh, uh, Coati this week that like chat GPT minutes per day or like 30 minutes a day now in usage. And like, it's not, it's like closing the gap with like Instagram, which is just sort of nuts to think that like, I mean, who would have thought a productivity tool would ever like be on par with like a social like media app, right? In terms of daily usage.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  It's so fun.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  But the interesting thing is it's filling a similar void, you know, it, it's like, it, it's delivering, uh, digital companionship in maybe the way that social media products historically did, without any social element to it at all. Just like this one, one to one is interesting to think like, you know, we went from like, you know, what your friends are doing is like the most interesting thing to like, what the Kardashians are doing is like the most interesting thing to like, actually maybe the most interesting thing is like this person that knows everything about you and is always on and always willing to talk and, you know, you know, who knows?

• 1:00:10Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, I think the consumer habits are something being born around the stuff today.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I find myself all the time, like, instead of scrolling YouTube, looking for an inf- like, an interesting video essay to explain how, I don't know, like, global shipping lanes work, or something like that, just going to chat GPT and saying, hey, like, break this down for me, and then I can just ask a follow-up and dive exactly to the layer that I want. And so, yeah, I'm definitely in that camp of using chat GPT just as like an exploration and entertainment education tool, an infotainment tool, much more than Instagram right now, at least for me. But enough about that. What is new in your world? How should we, how should we frame kind of the, the current horse race between all the foundation labs?

• 1:00:54Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, okay, so I'm gonna share a link. I don't know if this is something y'all can pull up or I can share.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we can pull it up.

• 1:00:59Mike Knoop?

  So this is a post that we published a little over a week ago. So, you know, I think there's been this really big, like, what's the frontier right now in sort of AI progress, right? The, the massive shift in the last six to nine months has been moving from this regime of like scaling up pre-training with more and more labeled data into these like test time compute, test time compute, test time adaptation regime. People call these data reasoning models, right? We're getting these models to attempt to think aloud additional data. Every major lab now, pretty much at this point, I guess, except for Meta,

• 1:01:34Mike Knoop?

  has one of these systems that we've been able to test and report results on. And I think there's some really, really interesting stuff we're starting to see. I, I think the most notable thing is that, like, there's not an absolute clear winner across the sort of like landscape right now. There's basically a sort of preto frontier that's emerged. One of the most important things, if, if listeners are like, listening here, I think you should take away, is that like, any Any anybody who gives you a benchmark score on an AI system that is a single number is is is is just marketing to you. Because the reality is now with these AI reasoning systems, you have to report score on like a two dimensional act. You have to consider cost and efficiency alongside the accuracy.

• 1:02:18Mike Knoop?

  And all these different lab providers have come out with different AR reasoning systems that sort of score differently. They're trading off cost per accuracy at a different point. So like if you want, just like the absolute highest horse, you know, highest gross horsepower, sort of cost and time is no option. Oh, three high is going to be your like clear winner today for that. But if you're somebody who's saying like, you know, hey, I want to plug in an AR reasoning system into an existing product I have where I want like faster answers. And I'm willing to sacrifice some raw horsepower for generality for like quicker response times, lower lower cost. You might look at something like Brock or Gemini two point four, two point five for thinking. There's not like a single like best best answer, which which I think is pretty interesting. And we haven't seen like this sort of frontier is I think what all the labs are really working to to try and figure out.

• 1:02:59Mike Knoop?

  Okay, how can we get accuracy as high as we can, but also we got to try and keep costs as low as we can down in the human efficiency realms.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've noticed that more recently with the kind of my default usage in chat GPT. Four oh seems super fast, but I always am thinking like, oh, I should maybe put this in oh, three pro. But do I want to wait 10 minutes? And and I'm making that kind of like economic calculus there, even though

• 1:03:25Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  because I'm on the on the plan. It's not an economic cost, not a direct, I'm hitting a five dollars.

• 1:03:31Mike Knoop?

  It's time. Thirteen minutes.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so I'm kind of like doing a four oh thing over here and then switching back and forth. It's very, it's very odd paradigm that I we never really had to deal with in computing necessarily before. I mean, I guess like if you were downloading like the 4K illegal Blu-ray versus the

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  which we of course, we never did purely hypothetically, but if you're on a torrent site, there was a time trade off between watching a screener.

• 1:03:55Mike Knoop?

  Well, I think this is actually one of the reasons these AR reasoning systems, I would assert, and I don't have inside baseball in the data. But like from the outside looking, I think there are some interesting. suspicions that would suggest that these like AR reasoning systems, at least today, in their current form, have like relatively weaker product market fit compared to the like non reasoning based systems, right? The pure language model based based things.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. That's a huge violation of the like the deep seek narrative that I felt like was really bubbling up was deep seek came out with like the first just like open access reasoning model, like reasoning had been tucked behind the open AI paywall. And so the pro users were familiar with what reasoning models could do. Everyone was very excited about them in tech or in the early adopter crowd. But but deep seek, when that app came out and you could just install it and instantly see the reasoning chain, it felt like everyone's like, oh, everyone's going to be addicted to this forever. And this is going to be the new paradigm. But it seems like that might not necessarily be happening. Jordan, do you have something or I wanted to talk about like spiky intelligence and how that plays into this? We had this, someone came on and

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  said, like, I think it might have been Cholto actually talking about Arc AGI, just saying like, hey, all the foundation labs kind of have like a truce that we won't reinforcement learn specifically against Arc. I don't know how real that is from your perspective, but it feels like increasingly, we might see like very task dependent RL runs kind of chipping away at specific things like like IMO level math is something that clearly like there's a ton of work to be done on, but we don't have as many verifiable rewards for for poetry or comedy writing. And so that'll be a little bit messier and later down the road, maybe. But at the same time, there's probably other verifiable rewards that are just smaller pockets of value here and

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  there for these little micro tasks. And so I'm wondering if we will ever see like the marketing language around these models evolve like Grok kind of did this with like, we are the anti woke one, but that was more just in the overall like temperature, the vibe of the model. But I'm wondering if there if there'll be an idea of like, This one's really good at math. This one's really good at research. This one's really good at that. Or if they're all kind of going down the same path with what they're trying to solve.

• 1:06:12Mike Knoop?

  I do think you probably are going to see some domain specialization. I think my guess over the next 12 to 24 months is that you'd see some domain specialization. Benchmark scores emerge because of how the labs are starting to do the next evolution of training, which is they're using RL environments to generate synthetic COT traces, doing their sort of model trainings on that data. And they're trying to go get it on a lot of just different domains. You know, the 03, the original 03 paper, you know, I think was interesting on benchmark results where, you know, on this new sort of COT reasoning system, they had relatively high scores on math encoding. But the gap, or I should say the step function increase in those scores was much higher than the increase in like legal reasoning,

• 1:06:54Mike Knoop?

  which you would sort of maybe intuitively guess that or think or expect that like legal reasoning would probably be one of the best like general domains. If you trained a reasoning model that was really good on math encoding, like it should be like, and it's a language model that like that would directly transfer into like the legal domain. Because like, okay, it's symbolic reasoning that's like self-consistent. And that wasn't the case. So I think that's, I suspect that's what we'll see there. You know, there's obviously the big scale news. The thing that I'm seeing now is there's probably like, I don't know, a handful that I know, these new startups that have come up in the last several months, but all getting founded to basically go build RL environments to generate synthetic or semi-synthetic data and like selling them to sort of the major labs, which are the major frontier folks building these next gen systems.

• 1:07:39Mike Knoop?

  I think we're going to see more of that. I expect that's kind of where it's going to drive a lot of areas.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What do you, what do you even, what does the data labeling market look like today? We are covering surge AI, which a lot of people weren't familiar with. I, I'm sure I'd seen it at some point, but I was certainly not familiar with it until we covered it today. What do you think the label labeling market looks like in, in five years? Do you think that scale was getting out kind of at the perfect time? You know, I'm curious.

• 1:08:09Mike Knoop?

  I think the timing was pretty good. I mean, like, look, the macro change here is is from a regime where like we're pre or scaling a pre-training. We want as much text, as much high-quality label text as we can get our hands on to to scale these these foundational models into one where we're trying to turn process models or, you know, make the foundation models really good for process thinking and COT generation. That is a complete shift in how you want to generate that data. You want an RL environment that you can generate lots and lots of COT traces, really very long traces of our long-running tasks as well. And you can feed all that right back in and then take advantage of the scaling laws. We already know about language models and how they how they work and how the performance increases is you can get more examples of the data there. So, you know, my like, I guess like macro bet would be, you know, sort of the trend is heading down towards like the pre-training scaleable stuff.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:52Mike Knoop?

  Significantly higher on RL environments.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so when you when you say RL environments, what you're talking about is moving from a paradigm of I go to a data labeling company and they hire a ton of contractors to generate new text or verify the responses or grade the responses from these models to I am now hiring top machine learning engineers, AI scientists, and having them design an environment that the that the reinforcement learning can happen like autonomously within the system, right? Or effectively, like, these new startups that you mentioned, they are taking the massive, like, hundreds of thousands of contractors, like, out of the loop for the

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  next runs. Is that correct?

• 1:09:41Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, it's synthetic or semi-synthetic in some cases. They're like example companies here like Mechanized Work is one that got started recently. It's doing this stuff. Morph, I think, is doing this stuff. Habitat's another world environment that's sort of doing similar stuff.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:55Mike Knoop?

  There's just a lot. And it's like very emerging. All these many of these got founded in the last, like, couple of months.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:00Mike Knoop?

  And I think that's a function of the demand and the pull from a lot of the frontier research groups that are wanting this data to sort of do their all training stuff.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  So, so do you do you imagine companies like Surge and other players would try to pivot into this if if they're expecting less growth?

• 1:10:16Mike Knoop?

  I would expect that founder-led companies like that would recognize this is growing part of this and have bets in it if they don't already.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was always wondering, like, the whole story of scale was kind of a series of, like, various booms in training data. Like, the first one was data labeling for autonomous vehicles, and it seemed like that grew very, very quickly. And then the training paradigm around Waymos kind of shifted away from, hey, we need more and more labeled training data to something else, and just having the cars on the road and generating real-world data from that. Then there was like the second era of like the pre-training, generating the data for RLHF and the big boom there, OpenAI and Meta, both big customers throughout that cycle. And then there was kind of a question of like, what's the third act for

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  all this? And I was wondering if the, is it possible that there is a third act, but it's just something like humanoid robots or something like that? Like, put a bunch of people in mocap suits and generate a ton of training data for what it means to pick up a soda 25 times in a row? It'd be a very different, like, training data product, but at the same time, like, we have mocap suits, and maybe that's relevant, or maybe that's ridiculous to think. I don't know. What do you think about that?

• 1:11:33Mike Knoop?

  I mean, so, you could, one definition of intelligence is the information conversion ratio from the amount of information you have to an action policy decision. There's, the intuition here is you can make a perfect decision, given a set of data or information that you have. And oftentimes, the right thing to do is go collect new data. And so, once we actually start, like, peaking out on, like, intelligence capabilities, you know, either plateaued because of research, or like plateaued because we've actually got, like, AI that's close to AGI, the limiting factor then becomes like the ability to acquire new information, new data. And so in synthetic, like, or on the internet, that's going to be a function of like, you know, in sort of software bits world, and then the one beyond that is going to be, well, how do you literally go make contact with, like, reality, the universe? And that's your, that's your feedback mechanism to get new information into the system. So you can, like, increase your overall intelligence.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What do you, what do you think, we had George Hots on the show a few days ago, and he was talking about this efficiency problem, where like, if you took all of the, if you took all of the conversations that I had ever had, and you transcribed them, it would be like a few megabytes of data. And I'm able to generate some level of intelligence, you know, based on that and

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  A golden retriever's level.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a golden, the level of intelligence of a golden retriever. Yet an LLM needs, you know, effectively like, you know, terabytes of data.

• 1:12:48Mike Knoop?

  Sure, the sample efficiency is very low. I mean, this is a true statement about just the parameter learning compared to program synthesis is the bet that that we're making at India. India program synthesis is a regime that's much more sample efficient, ordinary models that can just, that can generalize out of distribution. But I think it's a completely statement. It's like, it's a very damning statement that like, we've got AI today that's trained on some colossus of like, all of humanity's knowledge and text. Right over the last like 5,000 years, it's on the internet. And like, what have, what new ideas have, have they produced? And, you know, maybe I could point to like Alpha evolve, which I think is very, very impressive frontier AI system. You know, and it's legitimately finding new knowledge. It's creating new ideas, you know, verifiably. But, but they're very small and they're on the margins of things that we kind of like already have been doing, right?

• 1:13:30Mike Knoop?

  Well, matrix multiplications, things like this are in kind of in the regime of things that we could kind of know about and can define and spec out for these systems. Whereas like, if I took either of you guys and I gave you somehow the superhuman capability to have like all of humanity's knowledge in your head at the same time. Like, I think you'd probably be able to produce at least one idea, like connect to random, you know, divergent domains. You're like, oh, hey, this kind of looks like this shit. What, what is a new thought, right?

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:13:54Mike Knoop?

  That still feels like something that I think, I mean, it's very exciting to go towards. I think so we all want, right? That is, that is like AGI, it's capable of invention, invention, discovery. That, that will actually increase the rate of like scientific frontier innovation, but we don't have that yet.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit, five years from now, do you think the average American will pay for an LLM subscription?

• 1:14:23Mike Knoop?

  I think that.

• 1:14:26Mike Knoop?

  The, I think the cost is probably going to go down far enough where that just gets built into the subsidy of whatever the product is and the revenue stream is attached somewhere else. I haven't thought deeply about it, but that's like my off the top of my head thinking.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we, we were talking offline this morning about just this dynamic of like, the average American will actually churn from HBO Max because at that moment in time, like they, and it's $20 a month or some, whatever the fee is at that moment of time, there's not a show that they really love. So like, yes, there's a lot of like value there, but like they're just like, yeah, I'm just, yeah, I'm about like, I, I don't.

• 1:15:00Mike Knoop?

  I mean, I still know so many people that don't even have subs that are like, like my, my, my, uh, my wife, like she's catchy all the time, but she's still on the free plan. Yeah. And that's like enough to get a lot of value for what, for what she does. I, I sort of respect that. You know, yes, there are going to be, there are going to be power users and those are going to be the folks who really are doing like amazing powerful things and stuff. I suspect the base rate is going to go down enough where, you know, it's going to be more embedded across like almost all the products and experience you have as opposed to being like, you know, a dedicated thing or paying a lot of like one-off cash for.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Mike Knoop?

  Now, you might buy products that need it, like robotics or, you know, things where intelligence built into, I think you're going to be product categories that emerge. And like people will go by those, but like paying a subscription itself, I'm not as confident on.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing that stood out to me today specifically was mid journey came out with their new video model. It's very good. It's $10 a month for effectively unlimited prompts. And you comp that to Google's VO3, which is $500 a month and you're still heavily gated.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  And it just seems obvious that, that.

• 1:15:55Mike Knoop?

  Five years may not be the right timeline for that prediction, by the way. It might be longer than that.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 1:15:59Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. Like there, there's so much use case diffusion, like one of the things we're seeing with Zapier AI, which is growing, growing quite, quite strongly right now. It's on an exponential growth path for the AI usage and AI, AI's apps. I, I, I've looked at this and I've been wondering, is this a function of the technology getting better or the use case diffusion? And I, I've looked at the usage and most of the majority of the usage is still on like oral or cheaper or worse models right now with people bringing system, like AI, putting AI into the middle of automation.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:16:27Mike Knoop?

  And so I, I, I'm pretty confident that a lot of this like agentic automation, and I was actually not being driven as a result of like technology progress from AI, AGI, but more about, the market is just starting to learn, finally learn, okay, here's what we can use it for and can't use it for, who's good at, not good at. And it's, it's very similar to the off curve we saw in early Zapier where. Once you learn what the tool can do, you carry a tool forward with you in time. And then you encounter a new situation or circumstance that you can apply your tool to it. And so you like, we create use cases over time. So I think we're still very, very early.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Mike Knoop?

  You know, but there's, I suspect that a lot of the usage increase, 30 minutes a day even on chat GPT as a function of just use case diffusion, less tech progress.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where do you think XAI will eventually need to generate a lot of revenue? Where do you think it'll come from?

• 1:17:19Mike Knoop?

  I mean, if they make progress towards AGI, it's probably going to be enabling all the other services they have around like Elon's ecosystem.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Mike Knoop?

  That'd be my guess, less, less selling it as a direct product itself and going head to head.

• 1:17:34Mike Knoop?

  You know, on cars, rockets, robotics, like there's so many places where I think you would want to use and have the like product shape where you can use higher degrees of intelligence. You're not bound by just like, you know, a fastest consumer experience you could deliver. I suspect that might be actually where most of it is, at least in the near term. Who knows over the long term, like the shape of all this proxy.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, that was in many ways, my, my long-term thesis around the Lama project and the super intelligence team at Meta is that there's just so much work to do at Meta broadly that's enabled by AI that if you can avoid the long-term OpenAI bill, like that's probably worth billions and billions of dollars because of where, how AI is going to infuse into every single corner of their entire ecosystem. And it's all at such massive scale that the cost of, of using other vendors might be in the billions. And so just looking at the savings there might make sense. I don't know.

• 1:18:32Mike Knoop?

  I mean, I think the most important takeaway, I think I shared this last time I was on with you guys. It's still true today is that we are idea constrained to get to AGI. This is what Arc's V1 data shows, this is what V2's data shows. V2 is completely unsaturated. We're not even talking about efficiency, just nothing can do it. And V2 looks very similar to V1, even on like hyper-specific solutions on Kaggle, the R price 2025 contest. Progress has been slower this year than it was last year. We are very much still like, the thing I can state most confidently and assert most confidently is like, we need new ideas. There's some major breakthroughs we have not, we have not figured out or found yet.

• 1:19:04Jordi Hays?

  Does it worry you that that could take? Years and years and years and what happens to

• 1:19:09Mike Knoop?

  One of the reasons I found the prize last year, I wanted to like correct the market narrative here. I like I've spent a lot of time with students, a lot of young researchers and like at the beginning of last year, there was a serious vibe of like, oh, it's all figured out. I'm not going to go do AGI research. I'm just going to go work at the application layer and LM stuff and make a quick buck before AGI gets here.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:24Mike Knoop?

  And that is a boy, you know, look, if you want to live in a world of AGI for yourself, for your kids, like I think you, what we should be trying to encourage is to design the like strongest global innovation environment possible. And that's one where there's a lot of diversity of approach, a lot of different ideas being taken, a lot of sharing. Um, you know, kind of what AI looked like in the 2010 to 2020 era. Right. Very open approaches. How we got the transformer to GPT one and GPT two and so on for for today. You know, I'm optimistic. I think the last six months have have looked a lot better than the previous two, three years. I think the AI industry is maturing actually quite, quite a bit on, on this front, this topic as well. More being more tolerant and kind of recognizing, okay, I would have it all figured out. There's, there's more ideas we need.

• 1:20:06Mike Knoop?

  That's been encouraging and I think it's seeping down at the low levels too. But yeah, my, my sort of broad view is any, any capable human has new ideas to work on AGI. I should like, that's the most important thing you could be doing at this point in time.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by. This is always fantastic.

• 1:20:20Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, great catch up guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, next up we have David Han from Sequoia Capital coming in, David Khan.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  First time.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  First time on the show.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Setting.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Coming in, uh, wrote a fantastic piece. I want him to break it down. Uh, would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?

• 1:20:38Speaker 05

  Hey guys, good to see you. Yeah, I'm one of the partners. My name is David Khan, one of the partners at Sequoia. Uh, excited to chat with you guys.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. Uh, kick us off with the new blog post. What was the thesis? What inspired it? And then I'm sure we'll tie it to a bunch of news.

• 1:20:52Speaker 05

  So the new blog post was about AI companies or AI labs being more like sports teams. And of course, we all probably saw, you know, seeing the news around scale AI acquisition, some inspiration coming from that. And then these rumors that we'd been starting to hear over the last few weeks and finally now bubbled out over the last couple of days into the public conversation around hundred million dollar signing bonuses, huge amounts of money being spent on top AI talent.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  And for me, I mean, I write these pieces as I think about and learn about AI and what an exciting time that we're living through. And I'm, I'm pretty fascinated by kind of the human dynamics of it all. There's like seven to 10 people at the top of these big tech companies. They control, you know, the big magnificent seven are now a third of public market cap. They're extremely powerful and important. And I think there's sort of sometimes in AI, this notion that AI is super abstract, or these things are inevitable. But actually, it's, it's, it's human dynamics. It's sort of this game of 3D chess that's being played by these really fascinating individuals. And so as, you know, an observer on the sidelines, we all get to watch and see how this stuff plays out. And I like to write about it as I, as I think about it.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  I posted on February 2nd, companies should do NBA style trade deals. I want to see OpenAI traded COO and CFO to Anthropic in exchange for their CMO, a cracked PM, and a couple of Waterloo class of 2026 new grads.

• 1:22:16Speaker 05

  Well, there is kind of this new draft dynamic, right? Like every year, there's kind of this new draft. And as people see these big packages, probably all the Stanford kids these days want to be AI researchers. And so there is this notion of it getting refreshed.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Is, is, what is driving this? Is it, is it true AGI pilling at the top of these organizations where they think that, you know, it's going to be winner take all, or it's going to be a $10 trillion market? And so there's no amount of money that you can over invest? Or is it just, hey, it's a more competitive dynamic? And sure, we're, we're a trillion dollar company. So yeah, spending $10 billion to move our market cap 1% is totally rational economically. Like, what do you think's driving this? And I want to get into the different cultures of the different mag seven, because some of them don't seem to be doing this yet.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Meta Platforms had 63 billion of net income last year. So it's like, is spending a quarter of that to like, you know, be a major player in the next wave worth it?

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  They could have bought the Lakers six times over off net income. Anyway, well, yeah. What is your take on like, on like, the, the ethos that's driving these bigger packages?

• 1:23:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think about this. And when I write these posts, my frame of mind is I almost like put myself in the shoes of these people. And I try to imagine what would I do? How would I think about it? What's the game theory of it? And I think there's two things, right? I think one thing is kind of the revealed preference seems to be that they're AGI pilled. Like, people can tell you a lot of things. I think you learn a lot more by watching the decisions people make. And I think the evidence suggests that they believe AGI is coming. It's extremely important for these companies. It's sort of must win. And I think for Meta with these decisions, it's almost all in. We have to make, we have to win. Then I think there's a second dynamic, which is you can believe these things, but you know, we're all humans. And I'm again fascinated by these kind of human dynamics.

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  And you can get caught up in an arms race, right? And as it is humans, we sort of, we look at evidence and we see evidence through a lens that we already have. And oftentimes we we over emphasize reinforcing evidence and we underestimate evidence that disagrees with our point of view. So you can imagine that three years in now to this sort of AI moment that started with chat GPT. You can imagine that people are really caught up in this. And I think the arms race dynamics are something I wrote about in the piece. And I've commented in the past with AI 600 billion dollar question on the compute arms race dynamic. And I guess it's now interesting to see two arms races. First, there was a compute arms race. Everyone kind of got a lot of arms, right? Everyone has a lot of GPTs now.

• 1:24:44Speaker 05

  And now there's the talent arms race and everyone does not have equal talent, right? And so now you're going to see this arms race and talent and everyone's talking about it, but I think we're still probably like inning two of this talent arms race because in any arms race, when I up the ante, you have to respond. And I think it would be, it would be a fiction to assume that nobody's going to respond to this.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Who can, who can respond at least on a, from a dollar standpoint?

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  I, I want to talk about Apple because it seems like Apple has the money, but they seem like the least AGI pilled of any organization.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Their poor CEO barely makes, he doesn't even crack 75 million a year. That's not, you could make more.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Become a AI researcher and go to Meta.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  It is funny that you say that because I, you know, I think people, these numbers are so big that they're kind of hard to grapple with. And so I was actually, after publishing the piece, I was like, hmm, I wonder how much like Fortune 100 CEOs make. And I think, you know, an AI researcher is going to make four times the amount like the CEO of Coca-Cola makes. And it is kind of wild when you think about the economic.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  This is a totally new phenomenon in the scale of business.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it kind of begs the question like the the numbers are huge, but the market caps of the companies are huge. And so the question is maybe not should the AI researchers be paid less? It's like, should should Apple be set up to pay Tim Cook a billion dollars a year? So that he can confidently go out and hire a couple of people at 100 million or 50 million or 200 million? And not feel like he's like the like the organization is like flipped from like a perimidal standpoint. Like you're still at the top. There's always a weird, there's always a weird dynamic with, you know, a founder CEO who's taking a low salary and wants to hire a big shot. And like, can you really have a reporting to dynamic if you're making half as much as your direct report?

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  Well, the question is, what's the marginal, you know, I think with any salary, if you just think about in pure economic terms, right? Like, what is the marginal benefit that you get from hiring this person? On a sports team with a pivotal position, you very clearly actually can understand kind of the economic rationale. You understand sports licensing and the way that you the way that these businesses make money. Hiring a star player actually does make economic sense for some of these franchises. And then the other element is sports teams are owned by mega rich individuals for whom ownership of the sports team is more than an economic investment, right? Maybe they really care about the city. Maybe, you know, it's cool to to own a sports team. And so I wonder if some of those actual sports like dynamics play out here where? Question one, and I don't think we know this yet is what is the marginal benefit of an AI researcher?

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  And again, the revealed preferences these organizations are telling us is if you're one of the 50 AI researcher who's going to get us to AGI, the marginal benefit is incredibly high, right? So that's the revealed preference. And then second, if you have a team of all stars, what does that do for your company? What does that do for your market cap? What does that do for the innovation inside of your company? So I don't think we know yet the economics of it. I think you can make the argument in favor and say, hey, it actually is economically rational. This is the only thing that's going to matter if you increase the probability that we get to AGI by X percent. That that is impactful. Also, you could make the counterargument and say, hey, everyone just wants to have the team of all-stars. It's not actually economically rational. CEO pay, by the way, is linked, you know, there's a lot of criticism of CEO pay historically, right? But CEO pay is functionally, what is the replacement cost of this individual?

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  What is the marginal benefit to the corporation? And there's a lot of brain damage that's gone into comp committees on public companies and how much they should have paid, right? They're not arbitrary numbers. And this is more out of thin air, right? This is more a new experiment. And so we're going to see if it is economically rational or not. But regardless of whether it's economically rational, it is self-perpetuating. If one company is offering everybody this amount of money, and you're in an arms race, everybody's gonna have to respond.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you have you or anyone on the team comped this to what's happening in high-frequency trading or on Wall Street? Because there's an interesting dynamic there where if a if a, you know, high-frequency trader comes in and sets up some trading strategy that could produce $100 million in profit, basically in perpetuity, but then if they leave, they can't take that code or strategy with them. And there's intense scrutiny on whether or not they are trying to exfiltrate that strategy. With AGI research, it feels like even if I go develop a transformer at Google, like, it's open source immediately with the paper. And then even the secrets about reinforcement learning with human feedback's important, like, that just kind of leaks out immediately and deep-seek and clone it.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Like, it just feels like a much more porous environment over in tech. And I don't know if that's just the legacy of like, the open source community. But can you walk us through kind of the the comp between the two organizations?

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  It is such an interesting dynamic. We just had Mike on from the ARC Prize. And he was saying, we need new ideas. The issue is if you pay somebody $100 million signing bonus, they come into your organization and generate a new idea that gets us, you know, one step closer to what superintelligence or whatever, you know, you want to define as like, what what people are aiming for. And then immediately, it's like, it's actually not really IP. And it just sort of like leaks out. You can't patent it. And then everybody benefits, right? So.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  But yeah, what's your take?

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  It does seem pretty porous. I mean, people are moving back and forth. I don't think this was true. I mean, when you think back four or five years ago in AI, people were kind of very loyal to these institutions. It does seem like that's changing. I mean, it is really hard to say no to these type of big numbers. And so I totally understand why people are saying, hey, this is a life-changing amount of money for my family. Of course, I'm going to do it. And then I think to your point, the question is, in the high-frequency trading world, there's non-competes. I mean, extremely complex kind of contracts when they when they sign people, garden leave, all this stuff to prevent the secrets from leaking out. What we've seen in AI now is with people moving fluidly between these organizations, it's basically impossible to keep anything within one organization. I roughly like to think of the AI ecosystem as an ecosystem, like all of these players are kind of contributing to this body of ideas.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  There's no proprietary IP. Maybe you're going to have compute scale and there maybe there are moats there, but it's unclear actually how that evolves and what you can keep in-house. I do think maybe one dynamic at play here is, remember reading in the Steve Jobs bio, there's a story of Steve Jobs recruiting 50 people. He had 50 people working with him on the sort of groundbreaking product that was going to make Apple, and it actually worked. And then you read about Elon and the 50 people working on Tesla Autopilot. There's sort of this magic number 50. I don't know where it comes from, but it does seem to repeat throughout tech history of 50 people is kind of the largest organization that you can get where everybody is talking to everybody and you're achieving incredible results. And so that if that is an art, imagine if you take that as an artificial constraint. And I think that is what's happening with this lab that Meta is organizing.

• 1:31:15Speaker 05

  At least I read in Bloomberg, it's going to be about 50 people. You know, if you impose that constraint, then suddenly all of the math also changes because you're like, okay, well, 50 times 100, it's actually only $5 billion.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:25Speaker 05

  You spend $5 billion on talent, yes, if you believe that you're going to get to AGI. So I also think that the artificial constraint matters and

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  There's some rationality to that artificial constraint. What we've seen is these research organizations get bigger and bigger is you're not producing more results as you get as you get more headcount. There's a sort of a Pareto, the top 20% of people produce 80% of the results.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  We need a new coinage for that, like the two pizza team is well-defined. This is like the 10 pizza team. This is called con, people call it con's law. Oh, yes. Okay.

• 1:31:52Speaker 05

  I'll take that.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Con's, a con-sized team. One con team.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  A con, it's just a con.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  It's just a con, yes.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Jordi, you have anything else?

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  I was interested if you had a reaction to the gentle singularity. It's published on Sam's blog, which means that it's not directly content marketing. It's not directly from OpenAI, but, but obviously you should read into it in multiple ways. Did you, did you have any specific reactions to that?

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, the question about that is always like disruptive innovation or sustaining innovation. And that ties to meta strategy, but I'd love to know.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, like it feels like, you know, my, my question I've been asking today is how many, how many unprofitable AI, you know, multi-billion dollar AI labs can the capital markets support over the long run, over a five-year period? If, if, if we, if we stall out for, for a few years in terms of, you know, really meaningful progress, which, you know, Mike has said people aren't making, at least against the ARC prize, there's not a lot of progress happening right now. OpenAI is actually in a great position. They have a subscription business. They have a consumer tech company that has a lot of revenue. Anthropic is in, is in a good position. But there's this tension between the labs where you have billions of dollars on your balance sheet.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  You, you, you, in theory, have a lot of runway, but at the same time to make progress, you have to spend a lot of money, both on talent and, you know, different, you know, training runs and data centers, et cetera. So I just have this question around kind of like the next three years as like a very kind of interesting period.

• 1:33:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's two pieces to that. I mean, one is, and I think about this a lot, is like the long run in AI. What does that actually mean? And I think that we, you know, there are all these essays being published last year, right? Like AGI is coming in 2026. It is interesting how the narrative has changed in the last 12 months, right? A year ago, you had all these people saying, hey, I'm one of the 100 people who knows, I really am resistant to these type of arguments. I find that to be frustrating. But, you know, I'm one of the 100 people who's in the social circle where all my friends are building AGI and AGI is coming next year and you guys are all. Crazy if you don't see it and just just be aware, you know, it's like life is going to change dramatically. And then now we're at the gentle singularity, right? Like it's sort of interesting this contrast.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. It's a huge contrast. That's very convenient if you have a consumer tech. If you have a consumer app that billions of people are going to use in the next few years and there's a bunch of different ways to monetize that.

• 1:34:25Speaker 05

  And for me, I would tie it back. I mean, I did this math last year, the $600 billion question. It was initially a $200 billion question, but it was basically like, hey, if you look at Nvidia revenue, you can use that as a proxy for total data center spending. We're spending $300 billion in data centers. We need to make $600 billion of revenue off of those data centers to get a 50% gross margin. And so I had done this math and then I basically said, hey, you know, total revenue in the AI ecosystem. At the time, OpenAI had about $3 billion of revenue and I I did some rounding and said, okay, give everyone else a ton of credit. And maybe there's 50 billion of revenue, but we're like 10% there, right? In terms of actually generating the revenue the ecosystem needs. And now 12 months later, you know, OpenAI is at 10 billion, the coding AI ecosystem is at 3 billion. But we're we're still dramatically under monetizing this technology.

• 1:35:10Speaker 05

  And to your point, in the long run, the question becomes, how long does that sustain? And I have this sort of mental model now of AI as it's sort of being carried by its own momentum. I think of it almost like this slingshot you're swinging around and it's like it's sustaining itself by its own momentum. And there's this arms race and there's this sort of microeconomic game theory of how each player is reacting to each other. But at the end of the day, it's momentum that's carrying it. And at some point, maybe we get this AGI thing and then it's like all worth it. And and in the long run, I am very confident it's all going to be worth it when I'm 80 years old, AI is going to be everywhere. But what do you do in the medium term? And I think nobody's talking about this right now, which is this sort of about face or this U-turn from the one year ago.

• 1:35:51Speaker 05

  You guys were all crazy. If you don't see AGI coming immediately to now, I was listening to to the podcast that with $100 million signing bonuses. And it's like, well, you know, AI actually hasn't changed people's lives that much. It's going to change people's lives later. And just think it's interesting and these narratives change quietly, right? People don't talk about them and then they sort of quietly change.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  There there are big labs that directly benefit from the narrative that AGI is a year away. And then there are labs that will benefit greatly from a gentle singularity in that their competitors will struggle to raise additional capital in the long run, struggle to compete, struggle to retain talent. Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  Also, I mean, you know, and I don't think this is one company. This is the whole ecosystem has to deal with this, but there are a lot of promises made a year ago.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  And I think a lot of people would like to ignore those. What's gonna happen when we pass all these deadlines where we've been told like that's AGI? I just think that's interesting and clearly if nothing, we're not, that's not changing. Like we're upping the ante right now. It's like millions of people. But I guess this is part of why I think you take things to such extremes is everyone believes the prize is so big. And now you have to up the ante. So I think we're just gonna keep seeing until for a while, we're just gonna keep being in this phase of everyone upping the ante. To say, okay, we're not there yet, but we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. What does that look like?

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  Well, this was fantastic conversation. I want to have you back on as soon as possible to go way deeper into what this means for the early stage and mid-stage markets. Because I'm sure you have a lot of visibility there, but we'll let you go and get back to the rest of your day. But thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad we coined a new term. A con is a group, is a talented group of 50 people. No more than 50.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Building the future.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  One con. Get your con team together. Get yourself a con and make it happen. Thank you so much.

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  Awesome. Thanks for joining.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Uh, next up, we have Walden from Cognition coming in, keeping the AI chat going. Talking to him about everything that's going on in the AI ecosystem. Walden, are you there? Welcome to the stream.

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  Yes, it is great to be on here. How are you guys doing?

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  I'm doing great. Uh, thanks so much for stopping by. Uh, would you mind introducing yourself in the context of cognition? We've obviously had Scott on the show multiple times and people are probably familiar with Devin and cognition. But I'd love to know a little bit more about your story, how you wound up there and what you're working on kind of day to day.

• 1:38:23Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Um, I was a good friend of Scott before we started cognition. We did some same competition series growing up. And I was kind of also working on just various ways of working with these new programming agents. I was really waking up every day trying to figure this out. When I caught up with Scott, we figured out that, hey, we were both very interested in the similar thing. We had a group of people that were all, you know, ready to jump at this opportunity and that's how we got it together. So today here, I'm Chief Product Officer and co-founder. A lot of the time, honestly, I think. Many times people think of product as just like the interface or the UI or the integrations.

• 1:39:03Speaker 06

  I really do think the intelligence and brain behind Devon is so fundamental to how you think about the product. That we we build our product team so that individual people are, you know, tuning the ways of the models, but they're also the ones talking to the customers. And so in terms of the role I have, it's pretty broad. And I I like to, you know, spend some week, you know, really deep into how do we make Devon more responsive? How do we make it smarter? And then other times, you know, really, you know, going and talking to customers, working on the UI, things like that.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Cool, I want to dive right into that, that question about trade offs in models from a product perspective. My, my question is, we talked to Mike from Arc AGI about the Pareto Frontier. I'm feeling it personally, I'm feeling the AGI, but I'm also feeling the, the delay of the AGI. When I open up ChatGPT and I have to decide between 4.0 and 0.3 Pro. Am I going to wait 12 minutes for the really good response? Or do I want something now that might hallucinate and I don't know if it's right? And, and I'm, I'm doing that work. It feels like OpenAI is, is starting to tuck those features under UI. And already it's kind of, it feels like it's learning when I want to use 0.3 Pro

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  and making these buttons easier to access and they're tucking models under UI layers. Talk to me about in the context of Devon, how are you, how are you using different models? And, and when do you leave that up to the developer versus, versus something that, that you as a product can make a, an even better decision than the human?

• 1:40:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, it's so funny, the AI is coming so fast, but it feels like it can never come fast enough.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:46Speaker 06

  There is really this time, I, I think it's probably around two years ago, I was taking a bet with a friend. At the point, these models were not even that good at math. And he said, oh, you know, I think they're going to get like a gold medal at like the International Math Olympiad in just a year. I thought he was crazy. I took a bet against him and I absolutely lost that bet. And I've learned to kind of adjust my expectations upward. I think what you're pointing out is that as these things get smarter. They don't uniformly get smarter at everything and you'll find that sometimes there'll be a model that'll take fifteen minutes to figure out how to respond to hi. And then there are, you know, there are models that, you know, do respond super fast, but are not nearly as intelligent. I think one thing that we do as a product in in Devon that is a bit different from other people is we kind of black box the models away.

• 1:41:28Speaker 06

  And part of that is out of, you know, we can then test and use a bunch of different models under the hood and kind of hide that, you know, all that complexity. And the users, you know, when you buy a chip, like, sure, you'll look at like, or when you buy a computer, you're sure you'll look at like, oh, like, has this much RAM, has this much CPU, if you're into computers. But you're not like looking into all the individual specs of the exact chip and model and and things like that. I think that's where the space is going to move is people want systems that are just going to work. And, you know, we can put in the months to, you know, in human years of effort. It takes to evaluate models and figure out what is this actually good at so that an individual user who's just paying twenty dollars a month doesn't have to figure that out.

• 1:42:12Speaker 06

  It it's going to be one of these things that I I think the models are coming on so fast that it only becomes harder and harder to keep up with with all of this. And so eventually, I think people are just going to get to the point where they just want things to work and and that's kind of where where we're starting off.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Uh, talk to me more about AI winning an IMO gold medal in twenty twenty five. Polly market has it down at like an eleven percent chance. It was up at seventy percent. Uh, I don't know if that's a, if if that's an aberration because of when this actual test will be run, but it sounded like you were very confident.

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember when Scott was on.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  He was like, it's definitely going to happen, uh, but the Polly market's been down.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Might be that all the people that would go through the effort of trying to do it are too busy working on coding.

• 1:42:56Speaker 06

  I I think, um, so, yeah, when I, when I basically said, I I think I lost that bet is because we were only one point away from like a gold medal last year.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:02Speaker 06

  And that was already much farther than than we had expected. Yeah, when you look at the problem, that's a very interesting way to put it. I think part of it is people have considered that already completed and so perhaps the researchers aren't.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  They're not working on it.

• 1:43:13Speaker 06

  Into it like, who does it, they'll actually come out with a new release because maybe in Google's mind, for instance, if they. Come out with a gold medal on the IMO, everyone's not gonna even care because people just accepted that is gonna happen, so.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Oh, I think it would be, I think it would be the biggest news of the day. I, I, I think we gotta get Google comms and on this, they gotta do this. I, I, I think it's an easy, easy thousand-like banger on X.

• 1:43:35Speaker 06

  But you are absolutely right.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Speaker 06

  It seems like top of mind for everyone, the labs, product developers, is really getting coding agents.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  And part of that is because there's this belief that if you get these coding agents to work really well, then that'll just solve the rest of the research problem for you.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

  We have this joke internally that the only code we have to get Devin to be good at writing is Devin's own code.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Speaker 06

  And that it can solve, solve the rest of this.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  Reinforces. Makes sense. Um, on that question of like, the, the spiky intelligence, narrow reinforcement learning on specific tasks, uh, maybe we think we're good enough at IMO level math, and so we're not gonna go for that last point. Um, where, where are we still early in the RLing around specific coding challenges? I've heard that, uh, distributed systems can be really difficult because you have to spin up all these different, uh, pieces of the system, and that just takes longer. And so you can't simulate as fast as just like a small Python block of code that you can run in simulation in a millisecond. Um, or if we're talking about like, I know Devin's useful for like replatforming from, you know,

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  .net to Python or something, or, you know, even go back to Fortran. It'd be great to just not have any of that code, the legacy code sitting around. Um, but is there enough training data around those older programming languages or less used programming languages? Or are you, are you optimistic about new training runs? Maybe we don't get something that's like, oh, it feels way better, the vibe's way better, the IQ went up by a ton, but it's way better at something that's really relevant to you. Is that, is that important right now?

• 1:45:11Speaker 06

  My mental model of these systems is their IQ is so much higher than any individual person I know. But what makes them still bad at specific things, it's like, you know, someone who has the potential to be a really great engineer but hasn't got to trade school yet to actually practice that. So nowadays, I actually think about how smart these models are, less in terms of how much training data are they being fed? What language are they being fed? But actually, more so in terms of the environments that they're being RL'd in. And so, one example I have of this is sometimes you can actually feel the reward function.

• 1:45:51Speaker 06

  Back a few months ago, when Anthropic released their, there's like Sonnet 3.7 model. One of the top complaints of people was, hey, like, it seems like this model is like super great now, like finding all the files it needs to change, coming up with the strategy. But it's really over eager. It just changes a lot of different things. And I think a lot, some people suspect that it's because when Anthropic was training the model, they told it, hey, we're gonna give you points on how many of like the correct things did you do? And maybe they forgot to dock points for, for doing things that were kind of outside of that zone. They fixed this from now on, but you get these little leaks of, hey, like, you can kind of feel the reward function underneath these things.

• 1:46:32Speaker 06

  So when you, when we talk about, hey, can, can these things not do distributed programming? Actually, one, I, I, my opinion, the biggest thing that these models aren't great at yet is actually debugging live code. So I, I think part of the reason is it's actually really hard to create and rerun environments that in, that interact with live systems, right? And so if, if your task depends on, you know, working against a live customer or working against a live stream of events, these are things that they, it's gonna be hard to replicate in our own environments. And so you still find the models are bad today. The good news is this, these aren't like fundamental limits. I think these are all engineering challenges. They're less like theoretical challenges. But it takes work to, to buil- build up to that point.

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Can you explain reward hacking at a high level? And then kind of give me some examples of, of, of how that interfaces with AI agent and coding agent specifically?

• 1:47:28Speaker 06

  Absolutely. The, the way to, to think about these systems is they are just trying to maximize a, a number. So if you tell it, hey, we'll give you like, um, we'll give you a point for every time that you do X, Y, Z, you'll find that, hey, that model would just keep, keep on doing X, Y, Z, keep on doing X, Y, Z. I think the classic example of this is, uh, the, like paperclip generating machine. So like, you know, if you give it points for generating paperclips, but don't account anything else in, in the world that is important for humanity, you know, then the system might do really bad things just to keep, keep on generating paperclips. In the context of code, one example

• 1:48:10Speaker 06

  we've seen of this is, hey, if your thing is just guess, get all the tests to pass, you might find that the system will just learn to delete the tests or make, make the test just like say, okay, I pass, um, rather than actually fixing the code. So a lot of times you just

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Which no software, no real software engineer would ever do that, right?

• 1:48:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  No, no human has ever done that. Comment out the test. Okay. It's working enough, well enough.

• 1:48:33Speaker 06

  Absolutely. It's

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  It's almost too human.

• 1:48:37Speaker 06

  It, it's great. And I, I think there, um, there are also like, it reminds me of these systems that are like, were trained on Slack, uh, responses. And when you would ask the system, hey, can you do this for me? It'd say, oh, like I'll, I'll get back to you on Monday. Um, yeah, what you, what you try to get the model better at really, really matters. You have to be very thoughtful about it.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that with, uh, with the, with some of the whisper transcripts. If you don't feed it enough text, it'll just say, uh, uh, please like and subscribe. And it's like, uh, okay. I know exactly where your training data came from. Like that's its default phrase because it's just like what it's, what it's hearing. Uh, Jordi, you have an addition?

• 1:49:15Jordi Hays?

  What, what, uh, how, how are you guys approaching talent acquisition as a firm? You know, the headlines from this week are, are these talent wars. You guys have raised a lot of money, but I certainly imagine you're not making, you know, nine, nine figure offers or, or even trying to compete, um, there. But what's been the approach? Uh, does it mean you're, you know, keeping team sizes smaller or, or, you know, kind of dig into that for us?

• 1:49:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, the fundamental bet of the product we're building is it revolves around this idea that individual people will just be able to be way more levered up because they'll be able to work with agents and they will be able to work with all these tools to make themselves better. So at a minimum, we can't be hiring people who their whole aspiration in life is to just, you know, write code at the level which Devon will be able to do in like, you know, a year or two years from now. In many ways, I think we're kind of figuring out how do you build up an org from scratch that is AI native. And one thing that this already means is we actually kind of just delete some teams. A lot of companies at our stage, they have like a internal tools team to maintain all the different services that engineers

• 1:50:24Speaker 06

  internally use. We found that internal tools are one of these things that AIs are just really good at. And we can just staff that team with the Devens and then basically have engineers just sending requests to those Devens for how to do that work. And that doesn't just save us headcount. I think fundamentally, the the structure for how how do you how does management work and how do tasks get passed down look very different, especially in a lot of large companies you'll see today. The way it works is an engineer will get a task assigned to them. And then they'll go work on a task and when they're done, they'll be like, hey, what's my next task? And then, you know, you'll kind of like go down the list of tasks you have. But here, every engineer is like constantly

• 1:51:06Speaker 06

  juggling like three or four tasks, partly because, you know, we're not trying to hire super fast, but also because you can juggle many tasks when you have these minions that can go and, you know, work on working your things for you. So it it means that I think we are very aggressive for people who we think that can fit these roles and become very well good generalists. And as we build up this company, make sure that we're building it in a way that works in a world where AI can can do so many different roles for you. And I think there will be kind of like a moment for larger companies as well when they realize, oh, shoot, all these structures and and and patterns of management that we've had in place are actually slowing us down from adopting AI. What will happen at

• 1:51:49Speaker 06

  that point? I'm I'm very interested in in seeing, but it's very clear from us and from our smaller customers that the the earlier you bring it in, just the the lot a lot easier it is to, you know, kind of pick things up.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  Are you tracking, I mean, there's been this like, in the agent discourse, there's been this discussion of like, we've gotten 10-minute AGI. Yes, these large models, 4.5, like, they're incredibly intelligent, extremely high IQ, extremely knowledgeable. They've compressed all of humanity's knowledge, but they're only good for a minute. Now it feels like maybe 10 minutes with deep research. That's how most people interface with them. Have you been tracking kind of the longest agentic run of a Devon process? Is that a key metric? Is there anything that you can share with us on like, have you been able, is there an example that I could give where

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  there's a lot of work to be done, but it's all in Devon's wheelhouse? So it just needs to go and grind for a couple hours and it does it without kind of getting lost like we know happens with a lot of these agents?

• 1:52:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people in the space have expressed this feeling now that they are feeling more and more like the bottleneck in these systems.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:53:06Speaker 06

  And the way this applies here is we have seen people get really, really long tasks to work, but sometimes it actually takes a lot of effort on your part upfront to be able to get that to work. I was talking with a customer yesterday where he said, I just rewrote our entire testing system so that the error messages are a lot more clear and the tests actually guide you through solving them one by one. And but once he did that upfront work, he kind of just gave it to Devon. And we were actually reading the product, started sending him warnings that, hey, your session's going on for really long. Are you sure this is actually working? And he's like, no, no, it actually is because I did all this upfront work to get that to happen. I do think that this kind of 10-minute AGI, 20-minute AGI, 40-minute

• 1:53:50Speaker 06

  AGI will just keep progressing and people will be able to be more hands off. But people will also find that you can kind of always extend that duration by being a better manager in some ways and giving, you know, more clarity upfront for exactly what you want.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just like real life. That makes a ton of sense. Jordan, do you have another question?

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side, I'm curious if, you know, what kind of learnings you're having around agentic interface design. It feels like this sort of, the default when you think about agentic software is just something that can effectively sub in for a team member on any different software tool, whether it's Slack or Linear.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  You see this with deep research where you hit, you ask it a question and then it asks you a bunch of clarifying questions, kind of trying to build that test suite to get you to give it to more stuff so that it actually has something to run with.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so is messaging going to be like, you know, the dominant interface? Is there something else? Like, what are you, what are you kind of seeing or experimenting with on that side?

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  You know, it's funny, I saw someone post about this idea that a lot of these products now will like, make you respond to, hey, does this look like a good plan? Do you have questions before I start? And some people find that annoying. And I think this fundamentally comes down to as these things become more like coworkers, you know, some people just have certain working styles that they like. Some kind of coworkers, you know, work well together and others don't. And it's funny, as you build a product, we find that some people just love the way Devin interacts. And then other people are like, Devin's too needy in these ways. Other people are saying like, Devin doesn't ask me enough questions. And so there are toggles and controls that you need to have here. Kothi recently gave a talk

• 1:55:40Speaker 06

  on how a lot of AI tools, not AI agents, but AI tools, kind of implicitly have ways you can use them where you have more control and then ways you can use them where you have less control. But when your interface is just chat, now the model actually has to become more intelligent and detect, hey, this seems like someone who just wants me to go off and do work and get back when they're done. Or this seems like someone who's very curious and wants to hear more about the system.

• 1:56:07Speaker 06

  This is actually going to be, I think, work that we'll have to see people make on the intelligence of the agent's side, not so that they get better at coding, but so that they know how to-

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Get better at working with people. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That's an interesting- I mean, the good thing is you can have some type of quick conversation, you know, with the user around their preferences and how they like to work and then layer on the sort of real-time feedback and learning and, and, and understand a lot more about-

• 1:56:37Speaker 06

  You got that right.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Roughly, how big is the team now?

• 1:56:41Speaker 06

  Oh, on, on the engineering side, we're, we're probably just over 20 or so engineers and then we also, the, the entire company as a whole is around 40 people now.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Almost 50. This is the magic number. You get stuff done. We were just talking to the previous guest about how, how the Steve Jobs set up a 50-person team to develop the first Apple product and the Tesla autopilot team was right around 50. There seems to be some magic number there. So, seems like, it seems like it's a fantastic time for the business where-

• 1:57:11Speaker 06

  It's a very special size.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  You have scale product, but it's special size. Yeah, so you have, there's like two pizza teams here, but everyone kind of knows each other's name, basically. You're still, you're still a tight-knit group. Anyway, anything else, Jordy?

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Awesome stuff.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by, Walden.

• 1:57:24Speaker 06

  Thanks for joining. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Have a great day. See ya.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com and we have our next guest, Owen McCabe, coming into the studio to tell us the story of Intercom. How you doing?

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:57:44Eoghan McCabe?

  Doing good. I did just sprint three and a half blocks, summer blocks.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry. You can always just text-

• 1:57:52Eoghan McCabe?

  I look okay.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  If you're running late, it's all good. We'll just do more ads, you know, the fans love it.

• 1:57:57Eoghan McCabe?

  Can you? Well, if you do more ads, does that mean ads for Intercom? Are we officially-

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Pretty soon, pretty soon.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  I think you're breaking the news.

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  You're breaking the news.

• 1:58:05Eoghan McCabe?

  Damn it.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  No, it's good.

• 1:58:07Eoghan McCabe?

  You know the way it works with the pharma companies where they kind of own the news networks? Is that a similar thing?

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  That's the goal here for Enterprise SaaS.

• 1:58:13Eoghan McCabe?

  So what favors do I get? Can you do a hit piece on Brett Taylor?

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, shots fired. Shots fired.

• 1:58:20Eoghan McCabe?

  I'm just, no, he's a, he's a great guy. We'd just like some hit pieces on our competitors, please.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're lucky to not be in the hit piece business.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  We're not.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll review.

• 1:58:30Eoghan McCabe?

  We're sponsoring the wrong show.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's rough.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think just buy like a hundred thousand subscriptions to the information.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  And then start putting pressure on them. Say, hey, you might want to look into this company.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  I, I would be down to do a, a hit piece about technological stagnation.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  I hate stagnation. And so I would, I would want to take down that as a concept.

• 1:58:52Eoghan McCabe?

  Really slur that whole.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  Or, or, or closed IPO windows. Be prepared for a terrible hit piece on closed.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Or, or hit pieces on.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  We like them open.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  On just CEOs that take their foot off the gas.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  You obviously, you know, have not, the foot's been.

• 1:59:08Eoghan McCabe?

  I've got two feet on the gas. I think that's possible. It's a bit irresponsible, but.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Walk us through the story of, uh, that, that you posted, how you rebooted 15 year old decelerating business. I want to hear this, uh, from, it kind of set the table for us and then we'll walk through the story because I think it's fascinating.

• 1:59:27Eoghan McCabe?

  Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, it's a 15 year old business. It's a successful SaaS business. We're in the service game. But at the end of our kind of first chapter, things slowed a little. We were unfocused, bad commercial decisions. This happens to successful companies that become a victim of their own success and comfort creeps in. Definitely 2020, 2021 were some comfortable culture times. And I got sick. I had to leave. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big, long story that ultimately comes down to the fact that we lost our way a little bit. And we had like five quarters of decelerating revenue. I came in midway the fifth and it was looking kind of, uh, gloomy.

• 2:00:09Eoghan McCabe?

  And the two things we changed were we went to back to good old fashioned SaaS fundamentals, pricing that people liked.

• 2:00:18Eoghan McCabe?

  Selling the product in a way that people like, they used to have to like talk to sales for everything. And it's just those simple things becoming super customer first. And started to really accelerate the previous SaaS business in the last eight quarters. The growth rate of the SaaS business has decreased by 10x, which is really remarkable. Um, but then, of course, we jumped on AI. And we were kind of OG AI guys. We had dabbled, not dabbled, we had developed, you know, real AI products before, but they were baby AI compared to what we all have today. Um, but as soon as GPT three point five came out, we all just jumped on that. And we saw that there was opportunities for this whole new category where you could create

• 2:00:57Eoghan McCabe?

  what we call now customer agents, doing all of the things, customer success and service and sales and marketing that, you know, humans used to do and hate. Um, and that just propelled the business even further. Um, Finn, our customer agent is now, you know, the best performing in that category in our benchmarks. We win every bake off against our head, our, our chief, our primary competitors. We have the most customers, most A R R. So we're kind of this very weird story that I don't know any comparisons to where we're previous generation SaaS that's actually winning in the category in AI. It, it, you know, I think it's hard. It's really, really difficult for the previous generation, the slower, older cultures

• 2:01:42Eoghan McCabe?

  that work in the age of AI, it requires a lot of agility and dynamism. I often mess up that word, but everybody does.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Talk to me about like the, the different breakpoints for growing a company. I feel like mentally, I think about it as like just the founders, maybe the first 10. Then we were talking to previous guests about this breakpoint at like 50 people. Like there's something about, there's a magic of a 50 person team. Everyone knows their, and everyone knows each other's name. Then maybe there's other breakpoints.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Group has 47 senior engineers and researchers right in that 50 person tweet spot.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  But, but I feel like. I feel like there are like in the story of startups, we often map them to funding rounds, seed rounds, series A, series B, and sometimes the headcount grows in line with those, but some, but I feel like headcount growth might be more of a factor in like cultural drift. And I want to go through some of the key moments where you feel like, like, you know, it was only one foot on the gas or the, or the foot came off the gas or what are the upstream drivers of that? What are the things culturally that you think startups need to get right at various scales as they grow? Because I feel like there's always these, these different moments when you're, when you're scaling up and you have a whole bunch of decisions to set the

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  culture and you have a pretty limited time and you're focused on product and revenue and growth and all these other things, but culturally, there's some very, very important decisions that get made at every, I don't know if it's every order of magnitude, but there's these key milestones and what, tell me the story of the milestones in your mind. Maybe it's shifting offices or fundraising or headcount milestones, but, but what changes and what advice would you have for founders at every stage?

• 2:03:36Eoghan McCabe?

  That was a five minute question. Outstanding. Sorry, I've given you a hard time. I, um, look, there's a kind of an intellectual set of answers to this that you can kind of break down and break it into tips. There's a kind of a more abstract thing, which is both, you know, in, in good instances, self aggrandizing for someone in my position, but then also bad news in other instances. And the answer is that it all comes from the top. And the early days, the founder typically, certainly founders that, you know, have any degree of success at the start. In the early days, the founders bring a phenomenal amount of energy, conviction, whether it's founded or not.

• 2:04:19Eoghan McCabe?

  You know, just, just, just belief, obsession, intellectual curiosity, excitement, passion, you know, a lot of intangible things and that really drives great people. All of us want to make great money in this industry and that's. That's awesome. And I really think it should be celebrated. People are too shy to talk about that. But they also want to be part of something meaningful and exciting. And they want to work with people that inspire them and make them want to push themselves. And so the reason a lot of these older generation companies lose a lot of steam is that just for very obvious human reasons. The person on top is not pushing in that same way. When you have fifteen years of SaaS, how exciting is every day going to remain?

• 2:05:04Eoghan McCabe?

  Like honestly, like the first year, you're like, cool, SaaS, churn, huh? Wow. Okay, I get the math. And then in year two, you're like, okay, churn, get it. Cool. Raise some money. Year three, roadmaps. Year fifteen of SaaS? You're done. You're not bouncing to the office every day. And and people will pick up on that all around you. Of course that they will. And then you don't push yourself in the same way. You don't really pitch the opportunity to new employees. You settle a little bit because life is hard. You've got other priorities. Maybe you've drifted a little bit. You've got side projects. Some people end up with families, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends. Like, life gets way more complicated than it is for a twenty-six-year-old kid

• 2:05:48Eoghan McCabe?

  who just moved to San Francisco and has one of those buzz cuts and the curly hair on top. Like, life just gets more complicated. And that's that's what happens. And so part of our secret is that AI reinvigorated us. Yeah. Like, I would not still be doing this if we were just doing SaaS. SaaS is not only kind of easy, but super boring to me now. That's okay. Hopefully, AI and whatnot will get boring too, and there'll be something new. And so, again, we could break it down and get all mechanical and try and pull out some like tips and tricks and advice here. But really, it just comes down to energy. And so for anyone who would want to reinvigorate their company, it's the question is how can you reinvigorate yourself?

• 2:06:29Eoghan McCabe?

  And I see a lot of founders of late-stage companies, many of them public. You kind of haven't heard from them for years. Their stock price has gone sideways for five, maybe seven, eight years. And I'm like, what are they still doing? And I wonder, are they able to admit to themselves that like, they don't want to do this anymore? And if you don't want to do it anymore, make a change, like kind of move on. And so I think a lot of people, just they struggle with that. Moving on and making that decision because their whole identity and sense of purpose and validity in the world comes from I'm CEO of whatever.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Eoghan McCabe?

  So it's like this deep, human, squishy, spiritual challenge rather than an MBA type challenge.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  What about bringing in young people to kind of keep that reinvigoration process going? I'm just thinking about, you know, Zuck is paying so much to bring in Alexander Wong from Scale AI. At the same time, you know, like the level of energy that Alex is going to bring to that organization is potentially worth a lot, you know?

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the same time, Zuck is super high energy.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but there's another world where you surround yourself with-

• 2:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Low energy people hire low energy people.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I guess what I'm getting into the trap of is like you can be the high energy founder as your business becomes more serious. People keep telling you like, bring in the seasoned executives, bring in the, bring in the gray hairs, the people who will, will keep the, you know, steady hand on the tiller. And, and that can lead to a less dynamic, less lower dynamism in your organization. Is there, is there a hack to just hiring crazy young people and empowering them to be in the C suite, whether or not they really like deserve it by traditional standards?

• 2:08:20Eoghan McCabe?

  Yeah, like the challenge is super obvious, which is these young, crazy, energetic, optimistic, wide-eyed people are super messy, super sloppy. They get in fights, they get upset, they hung over late, like they don't know how to do larger company professional things.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:41Eoghan McCabe?

  And so part of the problem is that larger companies to scale and get more efficient and become global organizations across many offices and time zones, that they like introduce a lot of like, uh, uh, uh, regularity and they're like ironing out the chaos. So part of it is you have to be willing to entertain chaos. You have to be willing to put younger people in positions of influence and let the chips fall where they may. It's possible to give them roles where they don't have to engage with the entire organization. Like we've definitely got roles in Intercom where you can have to collaborate across two time zones, sorry, across eight time zones and two different teams. But then we've got other positions where you've got one super smart guy.

• 2:09:22Eoghan McCabe?

  He's thirty, which is ten plus years older than the execs. But you give him like one thing he can do on his own and he'll crush it. So part of it is knowing how to like work with these people. But also like it is a special type of X Factor young person who knows what they don't know. And yeah, the degree to which this is a talent game and that people are not fungible is not recognized at all. People imagine like, oh, you lost one person, you get a backfill. Entire organizations just flip and change completely when you change out the individuals involved. So yeah, it's not easy.

• 2:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you think venture should take, uh, they should take almost like turnarounds more seriously? Like in some ways you were your own turnaround CEO. But one of the, I think the issues of the venture industry is, let's say a company becomes a unicorn, has a hundred million dollars plus of ARR. And then the sort of growth starts slowing. Maybe the CEO like gets bored or whatever. They start partying or they go start going to Europe.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  And the VCs kind of write it off and they're like, I made my return or at least I'll get my money back. But at the same time, I mean, private equity is built like, you know, there's been, empire has been built around like the turnaround. And in some ways, think about, you know, a talented founder, maybe they took their first company through Y C and had a nice exit. A lot of those people could go to a company that has like a hundred million of revenue and like a big customer base. And like actually make more money and start on, you know, second or third base. And take, you know, you, you can make quite a lot of money taking a business from a hundred million to hundreds of millions of revenue. And that, that can sometimes be easier than taking it from zero to ten. Totally. Yeah. What do you think?

• 2:11:11Eoghan McCabe?

  I think theoretically, I think, you know. VCs are best are pattern matchers and turnarounds don't fit the pattern. You know, think of all of the most successful and exciting heroes of technology over the last 20 years. They invented a thing, something, something, something. It's worth 10 billion. Like, it's kind of that. It's like, yes, sometimes it takes a little bit longer. There's a slightly circuitous route. But it's not the company was totally failing and they had to reinvent themselves and then they became the biggest thing ever. So, you know, for VC, I just think it's really, really hard that it's, it's just hard for them to get it like the underlying narrative and the underlying story.

• 2:11:53Eoghan McCabe?

  This is where PE comes into play, but PE has all of its own problems too. And these guys want deals and they won't be exciting to a, a, a lot of people who started venture backed companies. It's, it's straight up difficult. And to my point previously, the idea that, you know, talent isn't that fungible. You know, it's like any given company, if you replace the founder with even another highly competent founder, they're probably not, the, the chance that they're right for that opportunity and idea, like, look, there's so many people, you know, so much more accomplished than I am, but I'm pretty accomplished. I know how to run and build and reaccelerate businesses, but I'd be a probably a shady CEO for 99% of other companies just because,

• 2:12:36Eoghan McCabe?

  you know, that's not what I do and I don't have any experience there, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't even know the people there. So I think people should be bearish on turnarounds. You know, I can turn around, it don't really work.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:47Eoghan McCabe?

  They're like generally like a, it's a failed thing.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, somebody will figure it out. Maybe it's Jeremy Giffon. Maybe he'll do it.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, that's even a different strategy, but, but yeah, I think this idea of like, you need to kind of reinvent.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  I like the idea of bringing in a, a, like a crack founder into a company. That's, it's a.

• 2:13:04Eoghan McCabe?

  But the crack founder wants to do their own thing. They want to start from scratch. They want all the equity themselves.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:09Eoghan McCabe?

  Like the recap alone that it would take just won't be palatable to existing investors. Fail companies are just generally doomed to fail.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Eoghan McCabe?

  When there are so many opportunities out there as an investor, you know, you gotta just like not try anything novel.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but and in your case, it's like a little bit of luck, the timing of like you going back in.

• 2:13:28Eoghan McCabe?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:28Jordi Hays?

  GPT three, five, you know, seeing the opportunity for a new product, all this stuff. But you also had to make the choice to risk your own ego to go back in. And if revenue had decelerated for another five quarters, you'd be sitting there being like, yeah, maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was, you know, and you.

• 2:13:45Eoghan McCabe?

  It's totally true, but I I got to cheat a little bit because when I was out, I was like sick. I had been beaten up in the press. I was like, just my confidence was pretty low. And I didn't really have a lot to lose and I felt like I was without purpose. I always wanted to be independently wealthy and free and I finally got it. It was in many ways magical and then completely boring. And so when I had this opportunity to go back, have purpose and I had nothing to lose, I took it. So like, it's easy now to tell this maverick story. You're so brave. Look what you did. You took a big risk. Now, when you have nothing to lose, you'll just go for it.

• 2:14:27Eoghan McCabe?

  And I think part of the secret is if people can separate themselves from their egos a little or work on their egos or learn to love their egos and not be ruined by their egos, great things are possible. Most bad decisions are made just out of fear and the fear is driven by just fear of public failure and embarrassing yourself. I found myself unafraid to embarrass myself. Look at how I'm speaking to you now.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I love it.

• 2:14:56Eoghan McCabe?

  It's not fully true. The ego is still there in present.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:14:59Eoghan McCabe?

  But the the the smaller and weaker it gets, the more freedom you have.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  We could yap like this for hours.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like I feel like people are gonna listen to this as like a little founder therapy.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  A hundred percent. I was like.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  We can do a little therapy corner.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Yeah.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Once a month, you come on.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Pump up speech.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Pump up speech.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

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

• 2:15:21Eoghan McCabe?

  Meditation if you're interested.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  That'll be the next one.

• 2:15:24Eoghan McCabe?

  Thank you, Jets. Hey, this is Cheezy. I want to give shout out to my friend Stuart. That's it. I promise I do it.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Stuart. Air horn for Stuart.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Do we need to ring the gong for Stuart?

• 2:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  What's Stuart do? We gotta ring the gong for Stuart? Okay, ring the gong.

• 2:15:38Eoghan McCabe?

  He's had a big year.

• 2:15:39John Coogan?

  He's had a big year. Congratulations to Stuart. Stuart. Let's go, Stuart. Congratulations. We will see you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:15:50Eoghan McCabe?

  Talk to you. Peace.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  Up next, we're staying in the Irish hour. We're going over to Stripe.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Stripe.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Luck of the Irish intercom. We'll check in on how the luck of the Irish is treating Stripe. We got Jeff.

• 2:16:03Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  From Stripe. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  The moment we've been waiting for. We're so sorry.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  For a week.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  For a couple of weeks ago.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  It wasn't our fault. It wasn't our fault.

• 2:16:15Jeff Weinstein?

  Geopolitics is currently outside of each of your controls.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, that wasn't even geopolitics.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  That was domestic politics.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  That was South African attacking an American on the timeline.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  A reality TV star.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, former reality TV star.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:30Jeff Weinstein?

  Jordy, I have to say it's really awesome to see you in this format because you and I have been zooming for, I think, almost a decade now. And now it's live in front of all these, this great audience. It's really great to see what y'all are up to.

• 2:16:41Jordi Hays?

  It's a bummer. We've never met in person, but I've had so many zooms with you in this exact room. I have a theory that you'd never leave this room.

• 2:16:51Jeff Weinstein?

  But we're busy.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're busy.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is the major update? We wanted to have you on to talk through it. Can you break it down for us?

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think it's more of a conversation. Jeff's evolved his role over the last year. Was running point on Atlas, made it a platform that a meaningful percentage of C corps think are started on Atlas today.

• 2:17:13Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, about one in six now are C corps on Atlas. But about halfway through last year, we looked at what was happening in AI and started to get really serious at Stripe about not just the application of it inside of our business for preventing fraud and running our own payments foundation model, but also to help developers and businesses and consumers get ready for when AI starts to come to commerce. I'm still a little surprised that we got self-driving cars before ubiquitous online commerce is mediated by agents, but you can really start to feel that. AI is now coming very close to commerce and will be part of buying decisions, discovery,

• 2:17:56Jeff Weinstein?

  execution of transactions and new ways that businesses can find their audiences online. I mean, I'm really quite impressed to see the rate at which discovery has changed. And it feels like around the corner commerce and AI is going to be very closely mediated.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Talk about maybe some, some early product experiment, what you, what you guys are experimenting on? What do you guys have already rolled out, all that stuff?

• 2:18:21Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, we've been trying to work with the fastest growing companies as they push the frontier of agentic commerce. So one of the first we worked with was perplexity where they have this buy with pro package inside of perplexity where they show great e-commerce search results. And then when you go to buy, you're not going to the merchants tab and dealing with the merchants webpage, you are actually just clicking buy and in the background, a Stripe virtual card is spun up and given to an agent or any other automation process so that you can just have a completely seamless experience of buying in situ to where you're doing discovery. And we're starting to see that in more and more places. So recently hip camp, which is, you know, cool kid way to book camping online sort of

• 2:19:06Jeff Weinstein?

  Airbnb for places, they started to partner with Stripe to make national parks and state park inventory available to a wider audience because so many of those checkout pages are hard to use, that inventory is not nationally online, but these are amazing places for people to be able to camp, but there was just a huge amount of friction.

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  I remember as a kid, there was a, there was a place my family used to always go camping and my dad would like wake up at 5am and just be refreshing this like terrible site when like the, the campsite would be released. So ready for the age of agentic commerce. And then it was like very unreliable like payments. So it was like, it was the equivalent of like a streetwear drop, but like the, you know, like, you know, some state park was like managing it.

• 2:19:52Jeff Weinstein?

  I think we're going to see this more and more where the, the inventory of the world is getting closer and closer to intent and agents are way to. Bring that bring them together and then it opens up really interesting questions that Stripe is trying to help answer developers. What is the developer experience for being able to execute those purchases? We have this new order intense API that we're trialing where you can just give a product URL. And one of our agents will go buy it on your behalf. We have, we have new ways for businesses to be able to start to expose their inventory to agents in a safe and permissioned way. And then as a consumer, you know, you should feel.

• 2:20:29Jeff Weinstein?

  It, it is reasonable to think actually that agentic processes is the last place you'd want when it comes to money. You actually want that to be incredibly permissioned, safe, deterministic. You know what's going to happen. And so you can expect that the Stripe APIs are going to evolve for a new type of user in the world, which is an agent that can safely be delegated with your permission to buy on your behalf.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Can you talk about Stripe link and how that product might fit into a product like perplexity? It feels like it's great if it's one of those classic things in AI and tech is like, okay, okay, great. It, you know, it surfaced the right product for me. Now I want it to buy it for me even faster. Now I don't even want to go through the checkout process at all. Like there's like, as soon as I get the, the, the, the current thing, I want the next thing. So how, how, how do we see that playing out with just making that commerce experience even more seamless or happening entirely inside of a chat interface or an agentic interface?

• 2:21:33Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, we, you know.

• 2:21:37Jeff Weinstein?

  The borders of the internet are starting to blur. And so you will soon be able to experience, if you chat, if you, if you search for something on chat GPT, they already have these cute little shopping cards that link you out. If you're sitting in cursor and you need access to a database, cursor can recommend super base and even start to accomplish your homework for you right in the editor. But there is this like missing moment here, right? Where, okay, now I know about these products. What am I supposed to do? Go to a new tab, do an offline kind of feeling search, go through a bunch of blue links, find the website, go to the website, make an account. Deal with the password problem, get a bunch of weird emails to confirm my password,

• 2:22:19Jeff Weinstein?

  find the settings page where I can get the billing information, pick my billing thing, put in my payment credential, get my API key, walk it all the way back. It's like, you know, I think we will start to see this as this loop that we've all been operating under for the past 20 years of the internet as very arcane, very quickly. Whereas you just want to delegate your payment credentials to a safe, trusted place. And Stripe Link is this payment wallet we've made over the last few years, which is a cross-internet payment wallet that works with cards and bank accounts and future other payment methods, where if you log in once to Link, then you will be able to delegate safely your permissioned credentials with a virtual, with a virtualized token such

• 2:23:03Jeff Weinstein?

  that you can safely hand it off to a good robot to bind on your behalf. And so we see this as a new borderless way that commerce can happen in a very permissioned, safe fashion.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about agentic commerce and stablecoins? A lot of, you know, there's a lot of commentary around stables and how they can be applied here. Oftentimes, the people that just sort of default assume that agents and agentic software will use tokens, you know, whether they're stables or other tokens. They usually have crypto, you know, funds or crypto companies, right? So I've had maybe a more middle-of-the-road view where I can imagine agentic commerce experiences leveraging stablecoins. I can also imagine them leveraging cards and ACH and a bunch of other sort of forms of payments.

• 2:23:58Jordi Hays?

  So I'm assuming you've spent a lot of time thinking about this and you guys have obviously been acquisitive recently with Bridge and Privy as well.

• 2:24:07Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, this is one of the areas in which Stripe is very problem solving oriented and not technology or particular technique religious.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:19Jeff Weinstein?

  We think that humans are going to have a variety of ways that they want to pay and hold money. Stablecoins is a phenomenal way for many people in the world to to hold funds and for businesses to move it across borders. And so we expect that stablecoins will be a very popular way for consumers and businesses to just interact with themselves. Then you have businesses who are also going to have, you know, they're they're going to have a long adoption curve when it comes to accepting and holding crypto assets. And then in some purchases, stablecoins might make sense between two parties that natively know how to interact in stablecoin, but often it might be the case that Jordy has an Amex card and the seller is expecting an ACH transaction.

• 2:25:03Jeff Weinstein?

  And we're sort of missing a universal way for all these types of currencies and rails to work together. Visa also announced a new way of of being able to to hash your card and give it to an agent with this Visa Agentic token. We're Stripe is one of the first partners to implement it. And I think we're just going to see this new proliferation of new ways that money can can transact between parties and we're going to need some type of sort of Babbel Fish translation service across all of them, because if you're going to pick one route, then you're going to likely exclude many of the agent humans and businesses in the world.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How are you guys thinking of not not to go too broad, but the business model of the internet agents, you know, change things? The internet today is heavily reliant on ad, you know, advertising and if you have a bot, you know, just crawling a website, you know, you're or or even when you look at other. Other services and so we've talked, Ben Thompson had some good writing around just like what the future business model of the internet could look like and potentially micropayments. But I think the takeaway from that, our takeaway is like, there's so many different stakeholders that would need to find some type of alignment. It's, it's hard to see like the obvious path forward here.

• 2:26:21Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, I, I think the universal want from businesses is just more channels to reach their customers and be able to do so in more direct kinds of ways. And so if you go to, you know, a, a SaaS software provider and you said, hi, you know, I sort of two choices for you. You can have this very cool, large budget for a 101 billboard and kind of hope that at 85 miles an hour developers like see your ad and then remember to implement it later. Or would you like them in situ as they're working to have agents mediate the purchase, recommend it and be able to like integrate and accomplish your thing in five seconds right, right inside their editor. Like, okay, yes, well, first of all, I'll do both.

• 2:27:05Jeff Weinstein?

  But also the second one sounds very nice because I will be able to directly attribute where it came from and be able to have a great CAC for that. And you know, the LTV should even higher because the robot even integrated it directly. And so I think that we're going to see new channels emerge for monetization, both usage based through MCP or other ways that businesses are going to expose their APIs to agents, but also for transaction based referral fees, which, which will supplement affiliate. And then I think it'll be a new way for businesses to make sure that their agents can read their docs, can read their product SKUs, can have access to that information in a new permissioned way. I really liked the Carpathia talk that got posted last night where he basically said

• 2:27:50Jeff Weinstein?

  that if your docs involve a click. Not good because agents want to act and not click and just only read. They want to start acting. And so that's why Stripe is, you know, if you go to the Stripe docs, we really push like, hey, here's our MCP where you can just, just talk to the primary best way of integrating Stripe and it can do it on your behalf rather than, you know, just reading or reading something from a three-year-old corpus.

• 2:28:13John Coogan?

  Interesting. Last question for me. We want to move on, let you get back to your day. Stripe was famous early on for having this crazy kind of open culture around emails that anyone from the entire organization could read. That seems like incredible foresight to the moment today because you don't have all this private information that, oh, well, do we train on that or not? You could very easily fine tune a model or do some sort of, you know, embedding on the emails that are already deemed to be worthy of the entire organization, reading them. Is that still part of the culture? Is there a tool, if

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  you join Stripe where you can get up to speed without needing to read every email, but you can kind of get the Stripe way of doing X, Y, or Z? Talk to me about Stripe's culture.

• 2:29:08Jeff Weinstein?

  Stripes, you know, has a, has a very serious writing culture where any decision I've been a part of for the last seven years, I can really point to some Google Doc that has the pros, the cons, and the decisions, as well as the, the, the, sort of the email culture you mentioned where we just, it's very commonplace at Stripe where if you write, you spoke to a customer or even after going on TVBN, hi, went on TVBN, you just CC a notes list and now it's available for anyone who wants to subscribe to notes list. But one of the major subscribers to notes list now is agents. And so if I'm in Slack,

• 2:29:44Jeff Weinstein?

  We have this really awesome bot called Trailbot that has read the trail of everything, all the paper trail of everything that we've done, that's permissioned to it. And I can just say @trailbot in any Slack room, and it has the context both of the team Slack room I'm in, but also the full corpus of Stripe and all of our permissioned wikis and documentation and internal tools. And it is, it takes the first line defense of most questions immediately, and we actually have it to the point where it knows to jump in automatically without you even asking it. And so I find that most of the time, we're able to just @trailbot and answer a lot of questions. And then increasingly, these agent tools, which I think are going to apply to commerce soon quickly too, they're not just read only, they're going to start taking write actions and purchase actions.

• 2:30:27Jeff Weinstein?

  And for Stripe internally, write actions might be to rollback that deploy, or to, you know, auto communicate to that customer because of an MPS score under 10, which we do often, hopefully not too often. But then in the real world, if you want to make some of these actions, you're going to need to prove who you are, pay for it, make sure the merchant was able to accept that money, get the entitlement, and move on.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, even something as simple as like, you show up to a new company, "Hey, there's this system over here that we're using and I don't have access." You might go to a wiki and ask, "How do I get access?" Now, you just ask and it just does it for you.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  It's so interesting to think about, if there's like some type of user flow where if somebody sends a Slack message, there's like a tiny delay built in and it gives like a bot an opportunity to like actually throw around the question because it's like every message is going to waste like, you know, 10 minutes of time.

• 2:31:19Jeff Weinstein?

  It's like a new version of shadow banned where you first get your question answered and then finally go back to it.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you really want to ask this question because it was answered here, here, here, here, here? And like, here's our recommended action.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  It's like pro autocomplete, it's amazing.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  It'd be interesting, yeah, Slack's just become completely silent because everybody's like doing things and just immediately getting at.

• 2:31:37Jeff Weinstein?

  Those of us who have nerdily taken notes and made docs over years, it is somewhat of a, okay, it was worth it, yeah.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Amazing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Made fun of by some people for a long time, but it all came back. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:31:50Jordi Hays?

  This was great, Jeff, always welcome.

• 2:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have you back soon, we can talk more.

• 2:31:54Jeff Weinstein?

  Great to see y'all.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  It's great, talk to you soon, bye.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Jeff.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Garrett from Handshake coming in. He was mentioned in the information. We've been mentioned in the information. It's a bunch of information boys hanging out on the chat.

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  We love the information.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  We love, we love the information. Thanks so much for joining.

• 2:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Garrett Lord, the nominative determinism is insane.

• 2:32:18Speaker 09

  I think we love something also in common, saunying. I'm a big, big sauna guy.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  No way. There we go. Yeah, yeah, the sauna is important.

• 2:32:25Jordi Hays?

  You'll be devastated to hear that when we moved into this new studio, we don't have a good.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  We don't have a good sauna setup, but we'll figure it out eventually.

• 2:32:32Speaker 09

  A cold plunge can be, can fit nearby though. I mean, that's, there's still opportunities.

• 2:32:36John Coogan?

  Good. Yeah. Maybe we gotta get in the cold plunge game. Anyway.

• 2:32:40Jordi Hays?

  In a full suit.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, kick us off with a little introduction on the business. Obviously it's in the news today. We covered a little bit about it earlier, but I'd love to get you to explain the business, a little bit of the history and the positioning of the company.

• 2:32:53Speaker 09

  Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the business started way back when I was in college. I started Handshake out of a personal pain that I faced in breaking into find my first internship and first job. I went to a no name school in the middle of nowhere called Michigan Tech. It's awesome if you love to ski or love the cold, but if you wanted to break into Silicon Valley, nobody had really recruited there before. Fast forward to today, Handshake is the number one place that young people in America start, jumpstart, or restart their career. We're like kind of an 18 to 30 early career network. There's a million employers that use Handshake. So it's where the vast majority of employers recruit undergrads and interns and people after school. And then there's 18 million students and young professionals use the network.

• 2:33:36Speaker 09

  And we also power about 1,600 universities in the country. And the background, I think, that's important for right now in this very moment is about 18 months ago, many of the Frontier Labs, as well as the large annotation engine companies started reaching out to us with, basically asking us, beating down the door, saying like, do you have access to PhDs? Do you have access to master's students? And for us, that was incredible. I mean, we have 500,000 PhDs in the network. We have 3 million master students on the network. There's tens of millions of undergrads in the network. And we started serving these players with experts, really, as the world has evolved from training frontier models.

• 2:34:18Speaker 09

  It's moved from generalists, like drawing kind of boundary boxes around stop signs.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:23Speaker 09

  To today, experts, and experts are in law, finance, medicine, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. These labs really are hungry for reasoning data to help improve with human in the loop. The actual frontier of what their models are capable of delivering. Get alone in the future, and you talk about like tool use or trajectories. So they started reaching out to us and saying, do you have access to these PhDs and master students? And we started providing, we were the leading provider of all this talent. And we really started to realize is that people weren't getting paid on time. They were really confused. They would go through training and kind of get dropped out of a leaky bucket. We heard from students that were successful on it, that they loved the money.

• 2:35:08Speaker 09

  They love learning more about some of this AI tooling. They wanted to use AI tools in the classroom. They wanted to use it in their research. And so, given that we have this huge supply and zero customer acquisition costs, we started building a human data business. And really, in the construct of building that business, the focus is really around like, how can you also think about evolving and automating a lot of the recruiting practices? Recruiting is still, you know, it's sourcing, it's screening, it's scheduling. There's a lot that AI can bring to bear on that. And so, we now, fast forward to today, in the last six months, have been working now with six of the Frontier Labs. We provide them tens of thousands of computer.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  It's a lot of them. I didn't even know there were six. I thought there were only five. The big six.

• 2:35:52Speaker 09

  Count them up.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  You got them all.

• 2:35:54Speaker 09

  And we provide them with experts to help make their models more effective.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:36:01John Coogan?

  Talk to me about like what the, how are the frontier labs thinking about human data annotation and answer generation? It feels like we might be at the end of that story soon, or maybe we're shifting into more of a focus on the areas that are less verifiable, less like write the answer to an IMO level math problem and more in the biology and legal context where the models are falling behind. Like where are the pockets of value? Where's the most demand within the human data generation industry? And where do you see it going over the next couple of years?

• 2:36:40Speaker 09

  Yeah. So maybe I'll go like from the latter part of the question, the first like where we say going up the next couple of years, it's definitely going to evolve into audio. It's definitely going to evolve into tool use. It's definitely going to evolve into trajectories. Experts will be needed to provide data. Imagine almost like recording your screen as you're conducting a task. Maybe you're building a slide deck and doing it. You know, if you're an investor construct, like doing a DCF and doing competitive research, they want more data to be able to help improve these models, especially if you think about like agents, right? And step by step problem solving. As where the puck is right now and where the puck will continue to be. If you talk to a lot of the frontier researchers is they need expert data.

• 2:37:21Speaker 09

  And expert data is in basically every esoteric area of human knowledge. They want to, you know, the, the models have already kind of sucked up the entirety of books and YouTube and, you know, human knowledge. And what they really need is they need special data to be able to make and understand the step by step reasoning that's required in order to be able to kind of fuel the future. And so if you think about academia, these PhDs, like what is the definition of getting a PhD? The definition of getting a PhD is like pushing forward an area of research that nobody else has done before as peer reviewed by your peers. That's how you get your doctorate. And so this kind of perpetually reoccurring stream of PhD students and master students are really valuable in this very moment.

• 2:38:05Speaker 09

  And it's also to zoom out to their experience, like you can make, I don't remember when you were in school, but you can make like 23 bucks an hour being a teacher assistant, you know, you could dive, you could drive DoorDash. We're paying these students like 60, 70, 80, 100 plus dollars an hour. And they're also, we can connect it to actually getting jobs. So we envision a world where like you get badges on your profile and there's like leaderboards by school. And we're actually, I mean, what better way to articulate your skill than actually proving it by being able to break the model or by being able to provide the model feedback. And so we believe that we can help you get more jobs with a million employers in the network, help you build your professional reputation and articulate your skills all the while, while, while making like a hundred dollars an hour.

• 2:38:49Speaker 09

  When you want to, I mean, it's, it's a gig job.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you think about financing handshake going forward? I'm sure you're making, generating a lot of revenue. You're clearly paying a bunch of your, your network out quite a lot.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  We were just learning about Surge AI earlier and what they were able to do while bootstrapped. I imagine even in the last week, you've had investors reach out trying to, you know, say, hey, scale's out of the game. You wanna, you want a hundred million, you wanna dance. But how, how are you thinking about the business going forward?

• 2:39:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, one of the, the ways we think about this market is like, you know, if you don't have an audience, there's no mode. What our competitors are doing is they're, at some of these companies, they'll have hundreds of people who are recruiters, sitting on top of platforms, sending messages on companies like Handshake, or spending tens of millions of dollars a month doing performance advertising, trying to acquire experts on Instagram. Can imagine if you're like a physics PhD and you get an ad on Instagram for a company you've never heard of before, claiming they could pay you a hundred dollars an hour. It's kind of a jarring experience. And so because we built a decade of trust in, in adding a ton of value to these users' lives, we have no customer acquisition costs. And what that means is that we can pass along all those savings by paying contributors. We call them fellows. It's the Move Fellowship Program.

• 2:40:08Speaker 09

  We can actually pay you more than any other vendor in the market. We can also pass along those savings to the Frontier Labs. So as you think about our overall P and L, like our gross margin and ability to scale this business. Considering, you know, the moat is the network that we built, we sit in an amazing position to, you know, to grow extraordinarily quickly. And that's what we've been seeing. I mean, in the last, you know, month, we've grown by over three X and, you know,

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  it seems like there's a lot of demand continue to be out there. I can imagine. I had no idea it was that big, though. Let's go.

• 2:40:45John Coogan?

  Let's go. Three hits.

• 2:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Three hits for a three X.

• 2:40:48John Coogan?

  That's incredible. Are there any, last question, we'll let you go. Are there any like weird areas that you think will see this type of human data generation pop up? I'm imagining like AI seems to be at like 150 IQ, it can write code and yet it can't like book me a flight. Do we need to take like flight, like travel, what are they, travel agents and have them go through the workflow so that they don't get hung up on, should I sign up for the credit card? Or do I want, you know, insurance on this flight? So that we have a whole bunch of data specifically about that task. I'm just interested in this concept of like these economically valuable but highly niche tasks that don't seem to be, we don't

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  seem to be getting closer and closer and closer to like one-shotting them with the current models. And I'm wondering if we're going to see this long tail of different hyper-specific business use cases, like what we saw in SaaS where there would be Hip Monk, just help you book flights better. Is there going to be a flow where there's a new startup that's doing AI agents for flight booking? And then they're coming to you for a ton of data generation around how to actually book the correct flight because it learns whether or not you're okay with, with a layover, or how price sensitive you are. All the things that you would get from the interaction with a human flight, travel agent. Is that something that you think we'll see? Or is that kind of just completely tangential?

• 2:42:14Speaker 09

  No, I think that's totally something we'll see. What you just described is like a trajectory called a browser trajectory.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:42:21Speaker 09

  And it's basically like you have a goal in mind.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:24Speaker 09

  And you, you, you know, you have like a step by step.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:27Speaker 09

  Kind of thoughts in your mind around how you accomplish that. And you navigate tools, you navigate the browser. You stitch together your own intuition to be able to accomplish that task.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  You might look at your own calendar. When do I get off work? How, look up how long it takes to get to the airport. Takes me a different amount of time to get to Burbank than LAX. What's the parking like? Like there's so, it, it, it's such a simple task. Cause you think about like, anyone can do that job for you. And yet to do it well is actually really hard.

• 2:42:53Speaker 09

  Totally. And you talk about just being able to talk to a model, right?

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:42:56Speaker 09

  You don't even need to log in, right? So you're going to need audio data, you're going to need trajectory data, you're going to be able to interact with APIs. Humans, experts will be needed for the next several years to, to be able to make that data happen.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:43:08Speaker 09

  Nor to be able to power the frontier of where you want to see it going.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  Well, that's exciting. I want to book a flight with an AI. It still hasn't happened. That's my own personal touring test. Hopefully you can make it happen. But thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic.

• 2:43:19Speaker 09

  You sure time.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Thanks Garrett. Great to meet you. Cheers.

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  Coming in next, we have Tonic coming into the studio to the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 2:43:29Jordi Hays?

  A massive round.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, we're going to hit the gong again.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna let you hit it.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  The 10th time of the show. Always a good time.

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Welcome.

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  You got news for us? Hit us with an introduction. Hit us with the news. What's going on in your world?

• 2:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Think we might be muted. Tanay.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Are you there? Can you hear us?

• 2:43:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you there?

• 2:43:49John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm itching to hit the gong for you. I hear there's gong worthy news.

• 2:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Are you there?

• 2:43:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to send him an email.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  You are live.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Live on TVPN. Okay.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  We'll pull him off for a second.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  In the meantime, I will tell you about Wander. Find your happy place.

• 2:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  I can hit you with the gong. Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. We told you about

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  If you don't realize

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  We told you about patio. We told you about polymarket. We told you about linear. Did we do Vanta? Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Let's hear it for vanta.com.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for Vanta.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  And if we got an extra minute, is he here?

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Are we back?

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:44:44Jordi Hays?

  We made it.

• 2:44:45John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:44:45Jordi Hays?

  We made it.

• 2:44:46Speaker 10

  How you doing?

• 2:44:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:44:47Speaker 10

  Sorry for the

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  We had some audio issues. Oh, no, it was a pleasure. We got to do extra ads. So, you know, you're making my day.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a dream. It's a dream.

• 2:44:52John Coogan?

  You're making my day.

• 2:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's going on? Quick intro. You've had a big day. What's, what's happening?

• 2:44:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, thanks for having me. We, we, uh, we announced a $200 million round.

• 2:45:02John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:45:03Speaker 10

  We generally

• 2:45:04John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Bury the lead, Jerry.

• 2:45:10Speaker 10

  You guys gotta start selling those. I feel like we need one in our office. Um, but, uh, yeah, no, we're super excited.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:45:18Speaker 10

  Obviously works in healthcare. Uh, you know, we, we power AI workflows, everything from ambient to revenue cycle payments in, uh, in large hospitals.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Give us, give us a quick history of the company.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Because it's not often I see a, a 200 on six something billion. I haven't, I hadn't heard of the company before, but I had, um, Josh Browder connected us last night.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  And, um, so I'd love to hear your quick story.

• 2:45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Kind of how you got here.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  History of the company. I want to hear about the first customer, too.

• 2:45:50Speaker 10

  For sure. So, I mean, Josh is great. I've known him since we were at Sanford together same year. Um, and the, you know, the story behind Camer is interesting because Premier started as an incubation inside General Catalyst. The best analogy I have is it is Haemon's palantir, very focused on healthcare. I started a company while I was at Stanford called Ethelis, which was focused on applying language models and computer vision in healthcare. We started as a blood diagnostics company and then eventually grew into this mid-market SMB OS for physicians. We merged the two companies about a year and a half ago, or almost two years ago now.

• 2:46:34Speaker 10

  And then I took over as CEO with our management team. And so it's really, you know, it's sort of a coming together of these two businesses. And yeah, I mean, the company powers large hospitals, about 250,000 physicians and nurses. We power the, you know, private practices here in California. That was our first first customer. It was someone that my co-founder Deepika literally walked up to and, you know, cold knocked on their door and then got them to use one of our first devices and remote monitoring solutions. Amazing. And yeah, that's the quick, quick story.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  I got a bunch of questions.

• 2:47:11Speaker 10

  Hit us, hit us.

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  I want to kind of like contextualize this around the broader General Catalyst discussion because there was news, I think just today, that Ohio authorities approved the first ever purchase of a US hospital by a venture capital firm. That's General Catalyst's bid to acquire Suma Health, a hospital system in Akron with over 20 facilities. And I'd love for you to, I'm sure you've studied this. What is going on there? And then is that, is there any sort of synergy across the portfolio? Venture, General Catalyst has had like a very differentiated strategy there, but I haven't had the chance to dig into it. So I'd love to get you to contextualize it and then we can go into how this links to your business again.

• 2:47:54Speaker 10

  So the Suma transaction is super interesting. It is a venture capital firm buying a health system, transforming it. And Comer is obviously a big part of that. We're serving as the office of the CTO. So our engineers are forward deployed. We work hand in hand with the Suma IT teams. We've been working with the revenue cycle leaders, the clinical leaders. And it's a really special system. I mean, it's in Akron. If I'm not wrong, it's where LeBron James was born. Literally the hospital itself. And

• 2:48:26Jordi Hays?

  Many people have been calling you the LeBron James of healthcare AI.

• 2:48:32Speaker 10

  Yeah, we got to put that out there.

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I maybe have been the first person to say it.

• 2:48:37John Coogan?

  I might have coined it here, but many people. I'll say it right now. You're the LeBron James of healthcare AI. Now many people are saying, not just one.

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  Two is many in our book.

• 2:48:46Speaker 10

  We're just going to make that a thing now.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:48:49Speaker 10

  It's remarkable because running a health system is super hard. It is a one to three percent operating margin business. Most of them go out of business. And I think what General Catalyst believes in is language models and technology can transform the operating margin and also lead to better care. So it's not a PE, you know, cut and juice play. It really is an investment.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Talk about Comer's overall product strategy. You guys have a number of different products. It seems like a very different, you know, we've talked with founders and covered companies that come on and just want to own one, you know, one key area. But healthcare feels like somewhere where if you can get embedded with the set of customers, you can, you know, more, you know, rapidly kind of add products to the platform. So I'd love to understand the product strategy.

• 2:49:48Speaker 10

  We really look up to businesses like Rippling and Ramp.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 2:49:53Speaker 10

  Where, you know, there's this concept of you, you enter with a wedge and in our case, that wedge is either ambient AI, which is a tool that helps a physician document and really automate the revenue cycle of their appointment, generates the claim automatically. And then the back office, which is all, I mean, when you walk, when you walk into a hospital, there are tens of thousands of people at large health systems whose sole job is fill out claims, call up insurance companies, fight denials, fill out new forms. All of that's going away with LLMs. And our belief is that if you do that as a point solution, as like a single, you know, little part of the, part of the solution, you might get some initial usage, but eventually the EMRs like Epic or companies such as ourselves will just eat you.

• 2:50:37Speaker 10

  And you have to be that compound startup from the get go. And I think payments is a really interesting vector to deploy software. Ramp has shown it where if you get into the transaction suite and then you build a whole bunch of tools for the CFO's office. We're trying to do the same for a health systems CIO and CFO.

• 2:50:56John Coogan?

  Can you tell me a little bit of the, the history of the healthcare industry broadly? And how, I, I, I know that there was like this kind of catalyst around Obamacare. I remember talking to Jonathan Bush, the founder of Athena Health about electronic health records mandates. And there's been a number of changes kind of at the federal level that have kind of opened up different pockets of opportunity. Like, what is the story that you tell about the recent history of healthcare in America?

• 2:51:25Speaker 10

  I think it's, it's fascinating. The nineties physicians had amazing lives. I mean, they, they drove Porsches, they had work-life balance, they had personal relationships with their.

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Porsches. We'd love to hear that. Let's get back to Porsches. Great car.

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  We need a return.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  We need a return.

• 2:51:44Speaker 10

  And you know, all in all, physicians got great experiences too, because because of that personal relationship. And then, you know, the admin work tax just increased. Everything from insurance to filling out an EMR. Digitization came in the 2010s with Obamacare and meaningful use. And really, EMRs proliferated. And Jonathan Bush and Judy and, you know, all these people are legends in the industry because they built Athena, a $20 billion company, Epic, probably a $100 billion company now, on the backs of that, very quietly and under the radar from from most of tech. I think the theme in the story of today is labor is turning into software. And where is most white collar labor in America? It's in healthcare. Where like where were the

• 2:52:28Speaker 10

  majority of administrators sitting behind a computer clicking on forms? It's in healthcare. And we believe that the EMR will be transformed. We also believe that the labor stack of healthcare will be transformed, and it'll create more operating cash flow for hospital owners.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  Is that narrative of the like, the administrative ratio, the administrative load increasing? Is that similar to what happened in in academia? Because I remember seeing these charts of like, the ratio of professor, everyone loves the idea of like, a high functioning university with a lot of professors teaching students and a great ratio there. Everyone's a little bit more skeptical about like, wait, why do we have five times as many people to admin? Is that the same thing that's going on in healthcare? And kind of what was the underlying driver of that? Was it just regulation or or lack of tools? Where'd it come from?

• 2:53:16Speaker 10

  I think it's very similar. What I will say is, I think in healthcare, it bred more out of necessity. And in academia, it just kind of happened. In in healthcare, there's this game of attrition between the insurance company and the provider. And you're they're making it a little harder every month, every year to get an approval on a claim. And as a result, the health system needs to add a couple more people in order to fight those claims. And then it just kind of built up into this arms race. And I think the insurers kind of carried the power after Obamacare. Like, when you look at UnitedHealth's market cap, I mean, the it's like, what is it like a 12x since Obamacare got passed? It's it's quite shocking. And the power dynamic, I think, will shift again back in the favor

• 2:54:01Speaker 10

  of physicians and hospitals because of LLMs and because of what you can now automate.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was kind of just like the game theoretic Nash equilibrium was like hire a lot of admin staff.

• 2:54:14Speaker 10

  There was no other option.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your personal ambition and the team's ambition. You're a $6 billion company now. Seems like, you know, it's cliche, but the way you're talking, it feels like you're just getting started.

• 2:54:30John Coogan?

  Is the job finished?

• 2:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it sounds like the job's not finished. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

• 2:54:35Speaker 10

  Job's not finished. We're, look, I think when you walk into a healthcare practice, the inefficiency is shocking. And it's, and the positive intent from the physicians and the nurses and the caregivers themselves is all there. And I think all it takes is for a company like ourselves to come in and try to nuke that work tax. So our ambition is, look, we're going to come after the EMRs, we're going to come after the payers or revenue cycle businesses. This is a $4 trillion industry. You can build for a very long time. But what done looks like is when you walk into a physician's practice, scheduling, intake, insurance, like all handled, there's no filling out a little clipboard of the same information again and again.

• 2:55:20Speaker 10

  The appointment happens and instantly the doctor is paid out. There's no reason we can't have instant adjudication instead of, you know, waiting 30, 45 days. But it's going to require a system overhaul and like new payment rails to go do that. And that's really what's at the heart of what Camer's building.

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, this is super exciting. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing and you are new, you're our new healthcare expert and correspondent. So expect a call.

• 2:55:46Speaker 10

  And LeBron James.

• 2:55:47John Coogan?

  And LeBron James.

• 2:55:49Jordi Hays?

  LeBron James of EMRs.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  According to Kobe, of course.

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the milestone. Hope to have you on again soon.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:55:59John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Should we do some timeline?

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Fun show, fun show. Yeah, we definitely should. We gotta talk about Sam Lessin's Oracle versus Salesforce. He's getting in, he's getting in hot water.

• 2:56:11Jordi Hays?

  You got in hot water.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  The timeline's in turmoil. We love Sam Lessin on this show. He posted a screenshot. He says,

• 2:56:18Jordi Hays?

  I will defend big tech. I will defend.

• 2:56:20John Coogan?

  Sam Lessin. Oracle is 2X Salesforce, but Ellison is worth 25X Benioff. What this sale says about the limitations of the SaaS business model. He said, he had a fun riff yesterday with the slow partners on this. Oracle is obviously crushing it. But if you take a today snapshot, basically the market cap of Oracle is 2X Salesforce. 500 billion versus 250 billion. Meanwhile, according to previously directional invest data, Benioff's net worth is 1/25th. That of Larry Ellison's 10 billion versus 250 billion. What do you learn from that? What lessons do you draw? I like this, the revealed preference.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  For founders and companies, the old licensing model is better than SaaS. That's interesting.

• 2:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Imagine having 10 billion and just getting lil broed by Larry.

• 2:57:07Jordi Hays?

  He has a sort of lil, lil bro-ing effect on most people.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  There's an amazing story about a lil bro, a famous lil bro-ing where Phil Knight of Nike was worth something like 10, on the order of like 10 billion dollars. And he was in like maybe Sun Valley or something going to a movie. And he runs into Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who are just going out to a movie. And they're, they're both worth 10 times him. And he's just like, yeah, I had this weird awkward moment where I was like nervous to meet them for the first time in a long time, because typically he's like the most successful businessman he runs into all day, right? But he was just like, yeah. He, in his book, Shoe Dog, it's a fantastic book.

• 2:57:44Jordi Hays?

  It's healthy to get lil broed.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  Shoe Dog is a great, is a great book, great book. And he talks about like all the weird effects of like having immense wealth. How like his wife would like hoard immense amounts of like paper towels. Just because they're like, money's no object, like what should we do with this?

• 2:58:02Jordi Hays?

  King of the castle.

• 2:58:03John Coogan?

  Got a lot of paper towels. And they had to like figure out, okay, this is like some weird psychological thing that's going on in my brain. Like, I don't actually need all these paper towels. The fact that money's no issue doesn't really matter.

• 2:58:12Jordi Hays?

  People like to talk about, you know, you're the, you're the, you're the whatever, the, the average of your five friends. And it's like, yeah, well, if you want, there, there should be some similar law of like, like your growth rate is like, should be, is like tied to how often you're lil broed.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, yeah, never get little bro'd.

• 2:58:31Jordi Hays?

  No, no, you want to be getting little bro'd.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yes, you can be on the upward swing. That's right. If you're not getting little bro'd enough, you're not on an upwards upward trajectory. This is good. Yeah, yeah, this is good. I've been in that situation before.

• 2:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we could cover what Sam said, but I think we can just skip to.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  We're also gonna have him back on the show.

• 2:58:50Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have him back on the show. He's a regular. We're gonna skip to Miles. He says, "Wrong take. Ellison is much richer because he didn't sell shares and instead he's been buying back 2% of the company every year for 30 years. He's increased his ownership from 17% to 40%." "Such an incredible story. Founders complain about dilution."

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:09Jordi Hays?

  "Oh, you got diluted?"

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  "Oh, I'm sorry. Why don't you just buy back shares every single year for decades?"

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  "If Ellison, you know, keeps doing this, he could very well own 150% of his company."

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  That's the future for OpenAI. OpenAI just becomes the agentic organization. It just, it just buys back so many shares that it eventually owns itself.

• 2:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  That's the real, that's the real goal.

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Miles says, "Meanwhile, CRM, aka Salesforce, made a lot of dilutive acquisitions, and Benioff said he sells his shares yearly. He doesn't sell them yearly. He sells them daily."

• 2:59:46John Coogan?

  Daily, 2 million, daily.

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people say, "Oh, liquidity events, you know, they're, they're few and far between."

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  Not happening every day. Not for Benioff. Daily liquidity. It's pretty good.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  You know, the real, you know, another, how much does he pay Matthew McConaughey to just hang out?

• 3:00:04John Coogan?

  That's gotta be pricey.

• 3:00:06Jordi Hays?

  I think it's only like 10 million a year. So it's like.

• 3:00:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Couple of Super Bowl ads. Not bad. So Sam responds to the hate. He says, "Since a lot of folks are making the same comment about buybacks versus sale strategies, that is at best the noob answer. If you're smart, you understand why they have different paths. And the answer is path dependency from business model quality. Take a 201 level class." And then Bucha Capital blow quote tweets that and says, it's a timeline in turmoil. "Wrong again. CRM has executed poorly. They've diluted shareholders with bad acquisitions. They have 75,000 employees who they give excessive stock-based compensation to. They let hubs scale up in their face, HubSpot. They've diluted versus shrunk their share count versus the other companies, Adobe,

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  that eat shares. Investors don't trust him." If Benioff held and cared about shareholders, it would be a closer call. He doesn't care. It's not about the business model. Well, you'll love to see some timeline in turmoil. Very, very fun. In other news, Shiel Monat has the story about Telegram's founder Pavel Durov. Consistent feature on the Tech Bro Drip account.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Everybody says they're pronatalists until you ask, how many children have you fathered through sperm donation?

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  Apparently, he has fathered over 100 kids via sperm donation, and he is worth $14 billion. And he says he'll leave his fortune to all of them with no difference between his six kids conceived naturally

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  compared to the 100 via sperm donation. So every one of them is going to get $140 million. Just to kick off fundraising, to start investing that. You got your family office on day one if you're one of Pavel Durov's kids. Pretty remarkable.

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, single LP. It's kind of a good dynamic.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder how he's going to get liquidity for Telegram at some point. Because you get a bunch of Telegram shares. It's kind of like this difficult beast to wrangle. But I guess you take it public at some point and get liquidity out of that. I don't know. I mean, it also just prints money. So even if it's like 14 billion, you could just get a stake in the distributions because it's making money.

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  I think he kind of figured out life and wanted to make his life basically 100 times more complicated.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, having this type of dynamic, not just with his many children that he helped conceive directly versus the 100 others. So had to one up Elon, had to little bro Elon.

• 3:02:47John Coogan?

  And Elon's commented on this, too. He was like, oh, I got rookie numbers. Genghis Khan over there is really taking over the world.

• 3:02:53Jordi Hays?

  The Genghis Khan of encrypted messaging.

• 3:02:56John Coogan?

  Yep, it's very, very odd. Only CFO says, finance department outdrinks sales. Feels like sales is inviting finance to the party so they can stick them with the belt.

• 3:03:06Jordi Hays?

  This is the data you can only get from Ramp.

• 3:03:08John Coogan?

  Ramp.com/data. Apparently, apparently, finance, marketing, sales teams lead in alcohol spend. Alcohol as a share of business meal spend.

• 3:03:17Jordi Hays?

  Not in that order. So, marketing is absolutely dominating.

• 3:03:20John Coogan?

  Dominating, 20%.

• 3:03:21Jordi Hays?

  They're taking up 20, 19% of all spend on alcohol.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  No, no, it's 19% of business meals are alcohol. So, if they go out and they're getting $80 worth of food, they're adding on $19 or something. $81 of food, $19 of drinks. That's the idea. Alcohol share. Finance, they're getting, you know, $84 of food, $16 of booze.

• 3:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Marketing is drinking sales under the table.

• 3:03:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation.

• 3:03:53John Coogan?

  IT, in the, in the, in the tail end there, 9.7%. Many Huberman devotees in the IT department, apparently.

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not a, not a power lunch, power lunch, you know, category.

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  No, but the three martini lunch will make it back for the, for the tech teams. Should we go to this story about the vibe coder who sold his business to Wix for $80 million? It's only a six-month-old company and there's no external funding. $189, $198,000, $189,000 in profit in May. Bryce Roberts is just the beginning. There's going to be more stuff like this. I think this is pretty cool. Base 44 only employs six people, hasn't raised any, any external funding. The 31-year-old built a viral AI app maker as a side project. So, you go in there, you design an app, obviously, plays very well with Wix, which is in the website building business.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  But he flipped it for $80 million and he's post-economic now. Congratulations.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I saw this headline, I was, I was confused. I was like, okay, so he just vibe-coded some, something and sold it. But it is a tool to do vibe coding.

• 3:05:03John Coogan?

  Built a vibe coding tool.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Trusted by over 250,000 builders worldwide and nice, quick flip.

• 3:05:11John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:05:14Jordi Hays?

  He's basically getting a similar.

• 3:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Similar outcome to, you know, a founder that sells their company for a billion dollars, but, you know, goes through a bunch of different financing.

• 3:05:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, or kind of like a mid-tier AI researcher these days.

• 3:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, starting, you know, like signing.

• 3:05:30John Coogan?

  Starting out, yes, signing, starting out. In other news, John Carmack is absolutely jacked. This is fantastic news. Yaxine has the news. He's looking, he's looking very built, but John Carmack chimes in. He says, "A chunk of this is just his wife dressing me in tighter shirts, but I did put on several pounds of muscle this year after switching my random grab bag of vitamins and supplements over to Brian Johnson's blueprint system." Let's hear it for Brian Johnson, really making a difference in the technology world. "I was probably not getting enough protein to take advantage of the exercise I was doing. I have always been roughly upper quintile for fitness." Let's go. "Regular exercise, but not at the level of serious athletes that most offices tend to have a few of." And now he's looking built.

• 3:06:15John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky chimed in. It's a great, great day on the timeline. Let's check in with Tyler, close out the show.

• 3:06:21Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna check in with this Polly Market, Polly Market. Will Chamath launch a SPAC in 2025?

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I was posting about this.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  It is up to 70%.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  It's up to 70%. It was 33% when I posted it this morning. Wow, that's big news. Amazing.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  It was partially because he came out and he said, what did he say? He said, 58, he, he asked yesterday, "Should I launch a SPAC?" 58,000 people voted, 71% said no. He said, "I hope everyone that voted no feels seen now onto business. I got calls from many Wall Street and crypto titans yesterday. They all want in and their vote matters a lot to me, so I will probably do it. Maybe this time it will go better. Who knows? The risks are clear, though. The last time wasn't a success by any means. I will include this poll and the community note in every SEC filing possible.

• 3:07:14John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 3:07:15Jordi Hays?

  It will make an excellent disclosure about the risks and is not short of irony. So what kind of company do you guys want? No crying in the casino."

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Let's go, Chamath.

• 3:07:24Jordi Hays?

  People are absolutely fuming at him.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  The comments, I'm sure.

• 3:07:29Jordi Hays?

  But honestly.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Get after it.

• 3:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Pretty fair.

• 3:07:34John Coogan?

  Everyone knows what's up. He's gonna play by the rules, you know?

• 3:07:37Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think at the end of the day, it's, it's very like, I, I look at the next Chamath's back is like, it, it totally, like, it probably will pop. It'll probably, it'll get a lot of attention. It might turn into a meme stock, right? Um, I, uh, I will be interested to see what kind of target he.

• 3:07:59John Coogan?

  I'm 100% excited to follow the story. It's gonna be fascinating. Anyway, let's check in with Tyler and then close out the show. Tyler, I have a question for you. Can you guess a number between 1 and 50?

• 3:08:12Speaker 03

  Like a random number?

• 3:08:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, random number between 1 and 50.

• 3:08:15Speaker 03

  Uh, 27.

• 3:08:17John Coogan?

  27. Are you an LLM? Did you see this? Every single model, they all guessed 27 when you asked them between a number between 1 and 50. Uh, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Meta, they all guessed 27.

• 3:08:31Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get a world, we gotta get a world coin or bin here to be able to prove that Tyler's not in fact.

• 3:08:35John Coogan?

  Yes, we do. We, we, he might just be a deep egg. Uh, final review, what, uh, what did you get done this show? Uh, did you keep playing with mid journey? Were you doing something else? What's been going on the last couple of hours?

• 3:08:47Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I think I, I just sent, uh, another video.

• 3:08:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 3:08:51Speaker 03

  Uh, I've been pretty productive. You can watch this.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  Let's see. I like the thing gorilla crosses behind.

• 3:08:58Jordi Hays?

  What's he doing? Did he just, oh, he just took my spot.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Oh, he took your spot.

• 3:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Wow, I see how it is.

• 3:09:05John Coogan?

  Oh, he comes in with a paper, breaking news. That's the breaking news gorilla.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  The breaking news gorilla.

• 3:09:09John Coogan?

  We need to get you a, a, a, a breaking news gorilla outfit. And, and if he has breaking news, he can print it out, come sit down, take our seat. That'd be amazing.

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  That's good. That's good.

• 3:09:19John Coogan?

  Uh, are there any others or we're closing it out?

• 3:09:21Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I think that's it.

• 3:09:22Jordi Hays?

  That's it. That's it. Well, good work. Good work today, Tyler.

• 3:09:25John Coogan?

  I feel like the production team is laughing like they have some other ones back there.

• 3:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Another productive day.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  That are too scary for, for our audience.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  I saw, I, I saw one get sent in the chat and it, and it just was really scary and bad looking.

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Well, we will be back tomorrow. Uh, we have a great show for you folks. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify and thank you for watching.

• 3:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for being here with us.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic show.

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:09:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Love you.