Dimon’s Take on Apple Card, Trump’s Greenland Play, VC Winter Deepens | Josh Wolfe, Delian Asparouhov, Arun Gupta, Julie Bush, Winston Weinberg, Yotam Segev

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:37) - Dimon’s Take on Apple Card (23:11) - VC Winter Deepens (27:47) - Trump’s Greenland Play (41:07) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:51) - Anthropic Raises $10B (01:02:44) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:27:31) - Delian Asparouhov, a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the K-shaped distribution in venture capital, where a significant portion of funding is concentrated in a few large companies, leading to fewer deals and companies staying private longer. He highlights the increasing use of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) by venture firms to participate in large funding rounds without traditional fee structures, enhancing relationships with high-profile companies. Additionally, Asparouhov notes the growing role of private companies in defense and space sectors, emphasizing the need for innovation and efficiency in these industries. (01:56:54) - Arun Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Hapiko, has a background in building products that connect people and spark creativity, including founding Grailed, a global fashion marketplace. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of Stickerbox, an AI-powered voice-to-sticker printer designed to bring children's imaginations to life by allowing them to create and print stickers from their spoken ideas. He emphasizes the importance of creating technology that empowers kids to dream bigger and create freely, highlighting Stickerbox's role in fostering hands-on, screen-free play. (02:25:54) - Julie Bush, co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises, discusses her company's innovative approach to the defense and national security sector. Valinor operates as an operational holding company, focusing on addressing overlooked yet critical areas within the defense market by centralizing operations and decentralizing engineering across its subsidiaries. This model enables rapid development and deployment of products, such as power systems for unmanned autonomous systems and combat casualty care solutions, aiming to provide sustainable and enduring solutions in a market often dominated by large-scale projects. (02:38:24) - Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, a legal AI company, discusses the evolution of Harvey from serving large law firms to also assisting corporations and mid-market clients by providing an operating system that enables lawyers to deliver services more efficiently and cost-effectively. He highlights the challenges in legal billing, noting that while certain tasks may become less expensive due to automation, the overall legal bill might remain unchanged as lawyers focus more on high-value work. Weinberg also emphasizes the importance of integrating AI into legal processes to enhance reasoning capabilities and streamline workflows, ultimately aiming to transform the legal profession by allowing lawyers to concentrate on complex, high-leverage tasks. (02:51:52) - Yotam Segev, co-founder and CEO of Cyera, a data security company, discusses his background in Israeli Military Intelligence's Unit 8200, where he met his co-founder, Tamar Bar-Ilan, and their shared experience in cybersecurity. He emphasizes the importance of listening to customers to understand their needs and engineering solutions that address complex problems in large enterprises. Segev also highlights concerns about the rapid adoption of AI in enterprises, noting the pressure on security teams and the insufficient security measures from AI providers, which could lead to significant exposures in the coming years. (02:58:24) - Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, announced the firm's successful raise of a $1.5 billion fund, marking a significant milestone from their initial $100 million fund over two decades ago. He discussed the current venture capital landscape, noting a bifurcation where smaller funds face extinction while larger firms consider going public, and emphasized Lux Capital's focus on sectors like aerospace, defense, biotech, and AI, highlighting investments in companies such as Anduril and Applied Intuition. Wolfe also expressed optimism about upcoming IPOs in defense tech and AI, underscoring the importance of American capital markets in fostering technological innovation. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Ramp. Time is money, say both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. I wrote about Chiching, the Apple Card. Minor news yesterday.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait, first, we have to, we have to ask, somebody sent us a bunch of weights.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  And this one is a 10. There's quite a few of these. Are you trying to say something? Is this, you think, you think the upper limit? But either way, whoever sent these, please let us know. There was no card, so we don't know who to thank.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Bumper plates. They're very nice. Nike bumper plates.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  A big sign of respect in our culture.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Anyway, there was a minor headline, breaking news, actually learned about it from the chat. We discussed it right after we talked to Pat and Ravi from Sequoia, that the Apple Card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. Nothing's really changing about the Apple Card yet. It's merely the bank backend that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. But it's, even though it's a minor headline, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions with the trade offs were. And I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about, would, how would he be down with credit cards? You're giving leverage to your customers, you're giving credit, you're

• 1:31John Coogan?

  in the debt business. It's a different business. How did he think about it and how did we get here? The headline is that the Apple Card program has millions of cards issued. There's $20 billion of debt that's accumulated across all the cards and the portfolio is not doing well. So normally, if you are to, if you have a co-branded credit card, like a JCPenney or Macy's credit card, and it's aligned with the brand, typically those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands. Companies will, other banks will typically say, I'm buying a $10 billion portfolio and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely I'm going to be able to recoup all of that from

• 2:14John Coogan?

  the creditors and also, you know, they're going to pay interest. So they're going to pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now, there will be some defaults, but in general, you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Not in this case. Goldman is like, we gotta get this off our balance sheet. They've already lost a billion dollars. Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost 3 billion. Like, they're not doing well over the last couple of years.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  So, is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue?

• 2:43John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of both. A lot of it is the actual repayment issue.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  And do you think this is potentially because Apple's made it more difficult to, to actually have Morgan Stanley like go after the clients? Like, is that, is that Apple making certain decisions? Because, I don't know, I, I have to imagine it's not like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card in that category.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  It wasn't wildly different, but I'll get into some of the, some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So, the, the, the $20 billion card balances, that's trading, JP Morgan's acquiring that at a $1 billion discount instead of an 8% premium. You would expect that they would pay 21.6. They're actually paying 19 for this. And then they're going to have to go and recoup some of it. It's not, you know, by any means a disaster, and Goldman's a large company, JP Morgan's a large company.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sorry, I said Morgan Stanley.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But, but it's, it's interesting to figure out the, the history here. Before we do, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. You can see, we have our consoles here branded on the laptops. Very fun. So, Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple, at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late 1990s. He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple card. So, but... The main problem, and I think the four, like, there's a lot of things where Apple

• 4:17John Coogan?

  has a particular brand. I want to talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like, how it fits into the consumer, credit card, consumer financial landscape. But the, the North Star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So, I tend to think of most high-end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity. You can't just buy an Hermes Birkin bag. You can't buy a Ferrari SB3 Daytona. You have to be invited. You need a relationship. You have to be, you have to get an allocation, right? Apple, for some reason, I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari. And yet, it is a wildly different experience.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a premium brand.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  It's a premium brand, but because of the design, and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I would put as like a premium thing. I, I've thought of them as luxury, and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's always felt like a luxury brand to me. Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in there. They don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, "Oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold, so who knows what the market price will be on those." They don't run that like that. But Jobs wanted Apple to be a no-rejection company. So, anyone can walk into an Apple Store, buy the most expensive

• 5:45John Coogan?

  iPhone that they make, as long as they have the money for it.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  People want to give us money, they can.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  They can, which is, you know, it's, it's a standard business practice, but not always in, in luxury goods.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And- Yeah, which is why I said it's premium, not luxury, even though Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Quickly, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Let me also tell you about the Linear run of show today, the Linear lineup. We got Dalian Asperuhoff-

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  -coming back on the show.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  We're going to dig into-

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Eighteen appearances last year.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, eighteen. And he's starting strong in the first week.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully 180 this year.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  I would love that. We're going to dig into sticker box, this viral kids toy that was tearing up the timeline. Very cool use of AI for, you know, a consumer product. Then we have Julie Bush at Valinor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital's coming on. So it should be a fun show. Anyway, continuing. So because because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have an approval process and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive losses. So it was surprising. So, so Apple, when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement

• 7:10John Coogan?

  fairly low. And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a holdover from the Jobs era. That Jobs philosophy of even though we're Apple, even though it feels it's going to have the patina of an Amex, it's going to have this premium look and feel, and we'll get into the design of the card in a minute. But it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you needed a credit score of around a 600, which is pretty accessible. And so that philosophy carried through even from the 90s. The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card was in 2004. And I will tell you about this after I tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look really good, feel real, and stay connected

• 7:54John Coogan?

  to how teams build, create, code back prototypes and apps fast. So they actually staffed this guy, Ken Siegel, who is the creative director on the Think Different campaigns, like one of the most iconic marketers in history and tech history, certainly. And they came up with a name. Jobs said, if we launch a credit card, it's going to be called the Apple Card. And they actually wound up using that name. But it had a weird twist. So most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's Diners Club. It's usually you get points and then you can spend those points on travel.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  And you've always been a huge points guy, right?

• 8:28John Coogan?

  I'm actually not a points guy at all. I have, I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them, because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing. And I just ask them, which one should I get? And then I just get that one. And then five years later, 10 years later, I still have it. And it's probably a bad deal then. Because it's always a great deal in the first couple of years, and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they like retain you. Anyway.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  So instead of airline miles or cash back, this proposed Apple card from 2004, you would get points and you could only spend the points at the iTunes Store to get free songs. What a funny like.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at that moment in time, that was pretty cool.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's kind of a cool idea. At the same time.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I was a child at that time, so 99 cents was somewhat of a considered purchase. I'd be playing, sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm good with the 30 seconds. For sure. This is enough.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Rocking out.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  This is enough.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Play it again.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  But it is somewhat genius because there's sort of zero marginal cost on music, certainly on the distribution of music. Now, they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built in margin there. So that 99 cents, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember, they take 30%. So they're, so they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value. You go and spend a hundred dollars, you get, you get a hundred points. One point is one cent. You buy the 99 cent song, but they are taking home another 30% on top of that. So the economics would have been really, really good, but it is sort of gimmicky because people want to spend points on a lot of things.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I'm happy to get free flights and hotels.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  I think there's something psychological about having, you know, a credit card that you spend money on for a couple of years. You get a whole bunch of points and then you're like, wow, I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had. And as opposed to, okay, yeah, I, I, I bought a bunch of my favorite music and then four years later Spotify came out. And actually my iTunes library is basically useless, right?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Tyler. I was just gonna say, it's like the same thing because it's like instead of a trip, it's like, oh, I bought this Chief Keef album off my Apple card. I'll always remember that. And now my life is a movie.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  I hate being sober. Um, the, uh, we gotta watch that, that clip. Uh, I need to pull that up. So, um, it, it, uh, they were gonna use, uh, they called them iPoints and you'd be able to redeem them at the iTunes Store. Uh, seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later, 2008. So if they'd actually done this in 2004, launched the iPoints program.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  When did Apple Music actually launch?

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Oh, mu- much later, much later. It, it, I, I want to say like 2016 or something.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  2015.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  2015. Boom. Got it. Gusto. The unified platform for payroll benefits and HR. Built to evolve with modern, small and medium bit sized businesses. Um, so.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  The other key feature that Apple always wanted, and this went back to Steve Jobs, that they always wanted with the Apple Card, which you don't often think about with credit cards, but is amazing customer service. And so, most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrated with the wallet, but mostly, they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. When you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the Genius Bar, there's someone who's friendly, they are very good about getting you in at the right time.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  Imagine one of the people at the Genius Bar breaking your kneecaps.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  (laughing)

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  They have a room where they're just like, "Okay, we're very customer friendly here, but you haven't paid, and we have to break your kneecaps, we're gonna take you back." You know how Apple, they have like, the back of house, it's like, almost invisible, right? It's like, built into a wall. Just get taken back there, and they're just like, nicely, just like...

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Pay your Apple Card bill. Well, I mean, that was another thing, they wanted to be so customer friendly, they didn't have any late fees, no application fees, and no international fees, no fees at all, that was the whole pitch, no fees. Which sounds really nice, sounds really delightful to just be like, "Okay, I don't even have to think about fees," or whatever, but the fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time, because not only does the interest start occurring, but when you pay late, if you're not paying the balance, the minimum balance, to maintain the card, then you get a late fee, which increases also the yield on the debt, but it also just attracts like a lower quality customer, who's maybe just on their fifth credit card, and is just like,

• 12:57John Coogan?

  "Oh, this one doesn't have fees, and I need an extra 500 bucks this month, I'll just grab this one." And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life. So, the customer service thing was really an issue, because with Apple, they have years and years, I mean, since, I don't know, probably the 80s, like, the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks, or Mac computers, and they built up, built up, built up. And so, they have a whole workflow for, how do we hire a lot of people around the Christmas time, how do we staff the Genius Bar, how do we educate people, how do we pay them? They're in the tier-one cities, so they can have great people working there, it's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores. So, the whole model works, and they've built it up very slowly.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking. Like, the default consumer customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman banker, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your M and A team ready. Or, I need to go public, potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Whether you use Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, whoever's lead left, make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange. But seriously, Goldman, like, it's a trading show. It's the highest finance, it's the most premier, it's the most elite. And so, when you call them and you're like, yeah, I got billed for $25 and it should have been $23, can you fix this?

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Well, they need a new team for that, and they need to build up that team. And that's not, that's not rocket science. Like, I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out. But Apple also wanted another consumer-friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month, every month. And normally, credit cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, your bill comes on the 10th, Tyler's comes on the 15th, mine comes on the 20th, we don't really care, we don't really know. And so, if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement, and you're like, wait a minute, that's not the right charge, I gotta call and sort this out. You're calling on the 10th, Tyler's calling on the 15th, I'm calling on the 20th.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they do it intentionally.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they do it intentionally. Because if they have a customer service organization...

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  I always assume, I stupidly assume that it was just sloppy and annoying.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  No.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, oh, you're just...

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Genius. Trust the process.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Trust the process.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Trust the process, never lose faith. So, so, Apple insisted, hey, everyone's gotta get their statement right on the first, that's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need, like, 10,000 people ready at the phones, because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do this. Like, Apple customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high. And so, you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month, and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple store in December and say, hey, we're gonna hire you from November 1st to January 15th, you're gonna deal with some of the

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Turns, it's a three month gig. People will sign up for that. No one's saying, yeah, I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs. On the first of every month and the first week of every month, and then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three and four of the month. That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there, obviously more cost and all of this was just making the, the, the, the actual program less profitable for Goldman. Uh, less, more, more of a problem. Um, and we talked a little bit about the, the, the fees of any kind. Now, there was an opportunity, Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to, uh, to work with Apple and they kind of bent over backwards because. Apple had tried this with, they went to a whole bunch of other banks, remember going back to Capital One.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  And every bank had said like, now, are you crazy? You can't do this. Like, you can't give everyone in the world a no free credit card with great customer service. Like, you're gonna lose money, Apple. And Apple.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  They're like, no, we want to give everyone a free lunch.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, um, what Goldman should have done with the customer service, they should have got to fin.ai. Except it didn't exist in 2019, but does now. And Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Maybe Goldman should become a client. Maybe JP Morgan should become a client. They might already be. Um, but, so the Goldman, um, uh, they were making a push into consumer. They built Marcus internally.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't know. The, the name, like people names can either be so good.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  Or so bad.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know. I, I have a, I have a childhood friend.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  A family friend.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  His name Marcus? Yeah.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a great name. He's a great dude. Um, do I want to trust him with all my money? I don't know.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Funny. Like you might, it might be like, yeah, my, my smartest friend is Marcus. I, I love this brand. Or it's like.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I, I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  And so I, I, he, uh, is in a meeting, but he fired off, uh, some notes. He's, I asked him like, uh, why, why did, like, how did this happen? Basically, he says, GS effed up the plan. DJ D Soul was told to shut down Marcus and consumer or get.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Or get out of the job. So he cut all of Marcus except for savings. Then GS had a multi-year process to find a bank that Apple would approve, right? They're not just going to say like.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  We're out.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Some. Some, you know, smaller, not, not systemically important bank, et cetera.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  GS, uh, effed up because it's a transactional org, not a longitudinal org.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  And really thought they were, they were smarter, uh, but never focused on the fundamentals of running the business.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  So, um.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  So the question's like, what happens next? Uh, JP Morgan obviously has way more, way, way more consistency here. Uh, the, the other hard part for, for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer facing brand. So they wanted the Goldman name in more places and the Apple card would have been a great co-branding thing. They were fighting to get like the front of the card, which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple Goldman would have been really cool. They didn't. They got relegated to the back.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  And the card looks awesome. Um, I was reflecting on it like, I don't know if you actually seen it and maybe we can pull up a picture, but, um, the, the, I, I don't know if it's still the case, but, uh, originally it was, uh, it, it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy. Like the same way they make these MacBooks, they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers, laminated layers. I don't know if you have a, a Chase Sapphire Reserve, but those things kind of like fall apart after a couple of years because there is a metal piece and the metal card is typically, uh, more prestigious. But they add laminate on either side. Uh, the Apple card went a different direction and it had, and I think they delivered on the branding side.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  They just didn't quite deliver on the, on the, on the financial design.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever have one?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Apple card? No.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's so, so interesting because I think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple card, you were like every high value credit card customer. In America, not every, but the vast, vast, maybe 99% has an iPhone.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Apple's gonna put this everywhere.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  And it just, it's been interesting to see, you know, this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way. Even though, even though, how many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another, right?

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe you open up the wallet.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  And still, I'm just like, I have, you know, I have a credit card. I don't, I don't need another, right?

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Well, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well, that, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple, but some opportunity. I do think that there, that there was, there was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol. More of something that you pull out and it says something about you, has some badge value, but that would have been sort of antithetical to the Apple.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  In a lot of circles, an iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, it's too generic. Yeah.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not like.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  And then also, there's just the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore. They, Apple pay for everything.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  I do, yeah, I really wonder how the, how people know, people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards, right? When you're just like, I'm gonna just pay this bill at this restaurant, just go like this.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  The true points maxers do care about using the right card for the right time because some cards will be better for dining, others will travel, others. Like the Apple card gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff. And then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay, using the Apple card in Apple Pay, like you open up Apple Pay and you select the Apple card, you get 2% back. And there was 1% on everything else. If you pull out the card and you just pay for gas at the gas station. But then there's like the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco and the Amazon card that gets you better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the points maxers and the card maxers will get the specific card and they're like, when I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card. I never got that.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, this is a project for Billy McFarland to lead. Remember he had, he had like a members.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  I, I saw his Magnesis, I saw his, his latest like Instagram reel or something. He was just walking down the street, talking about doing some event. He's still doing it. New festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other news, uh, US venture capital fundraising falls 35% as firms stay private longer. Uh, of course, uh, Josh Wolfe is not letting himself be a statistic. He's, uh, coming on later today to talk about.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  The massive fundraiser, the biggest one ever.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  One and a half billion in, uh, new, uh, funds for Lux Capital.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but Kate Clark in the Journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  And before we read this, let me tell you about vibe.co. Where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fundraising for US venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025, the most anemic stretch in at least six years with money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66 billion raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups have been flushed with venture funding. Uh, startups that have been flushed with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny. A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors is now complicating efforts to raise new capital. Uh, and there's a graphic here, uh, that we can pull up. Uh, you can see the chart. Uh, the fundraising climate is challenging, said Beezer Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  I invited her on the show. We gotta get her at some point. She's great.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Focused on investments in venture funds.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Investors are concentrating capital in the most trusted VCs.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Wah, wah. Look at this chart. Wah, wah.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Hate to see it. It is, it is funny that, uh, over the last 18 months, two years, it felt like, uh, I feel like a lot of people were looking around and being like, wow, our industry can exist in a high rate environment.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  And then you look at this chart.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  I don't know that that's actually what's going on. I mean, it does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. Um, I, I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market. The fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive, uh, like NAV, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are. An allocator, an LP, and you've put a bunch of money in a fund and you're like, yeah, I'm ready to double down as soon as you give me the money back, I'll give it back to you. But like, let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it until, you know, oh, okay, you got 10 billion over there, like, show me the money and then I'll.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  And this is the year, the IPO window is open.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of names.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  That we're expecting to go out.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  If it starts to close.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  You and I will do our best.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  We're gonna hold it open.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  Hold it.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, back to back. I'll push one door.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, back to back.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Well, it's gonna be an exciting year for anyone on public.com, investing for those to take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, back to the article, as a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than nine billion across the fund in December. In one, that was an organic soundboard. Uh, in one of the year's largest raises, while PT's founders fund closed 4.6 billion in April. New fund managers by contrast are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital. Such as the deep pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices, family offices and hedge funds. Collectively, the venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing, Clarkson said of the largest AI rounds. It must be coming from other sources as well.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and kind of left out the hyperscalers.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Two, uh, out of this.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Which have been a key player in some of these later rounds.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, funding for US AI startups reached a record 20, uh, 222 billion in 2025, more than double 2024 levels. So we have, uh, 66 billion in new funds raised. 222 billion actually going into startups and of course, a lot of that again is, is non, uh, venture capital, uh, firms.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Still seems like, still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Always a good time, always a good time. Uh, should we talk about?

• 26:43John Coogan?

  There's some, there's some interesting, uh, concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the, the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Um, obviously we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of, it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of, of a hundred million dollars or more accounted for about 70% of venture funding. So, uh, you have this bifurcated market.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals while the broader VC ecosystem, emerging managers, seed funds, series A specialists are getting crushed. It's the best time for tech ever is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive. They say Trump admin moles payments to sway Greenlanders to join the US. Greenland says they're not for sale. Uh, European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen. But Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days. US officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland. Stimmy time.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Stimmy time.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  To Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, US officials, including White House aides have discussed figures ranging from 10,000 to a hundred thousand dollars per person. Doing the math, even at a hundred thousand dollars a person, Greenland only has like 57,000 residents. So we're talking about basically a seed round, five, 5.7 billion to.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Feudal.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  That's an AI, that's, that's actually like, it's like three AI researchers.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Three AI researchers in Greenland, for all Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of, a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder what, I wonder how much like this would actually sway them because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to like either vote and then they get the payment because we promise, or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote, you know.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  I think just start planes with cash, you know, just dropping it out of the air.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Because then wouldn't they, wouldn't the game theories be just that they hold strong? There's gonna be another plane. We want the second drop.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Here's my thing, here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland, a resident, I'm sitting there being like, you're, okay, we know they're willing to, we, we have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around six billion. We think we're worth 60. Let's let them keep, you know, the Paramount Skydance, the Allison's, they'll just bid and then say, ah, well, it's not our best and final offer. And then what does Warner Brothers do? They, of course, again, they, they rejected another bid or recommended against it, so.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Greenland's Prime Minister Jens Fredrik Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Facebook, let's go.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Okay, they are really a decade behind over there. He says enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. He's not a fan. You gotta get on reels, buddy. You gotta do a front-facing video. Use some AI. Get some vibriol of music in there. You gotta communicate.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get the, get this, the Sigma male, you know, grindset sound going.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. And it just cuts to like the Joker and stuff.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to Greenland, their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain, disdain, particularly given that the US and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement. On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  So this is.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you, if you, if you alone, on your own, decide to come over and hang out with us, we got some cash for you, apparently. It's wild. Let me tell you about Graphite Code Review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  See, average.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Trump has long argued that the US needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's aides, in, since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatch and grab operation, not an invasion, apparently, according to sources familiar with internal deliberations. One source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other longstanding geopolitical goals. It feels

• 31:58John Coogan?

  like wildly different scenarios, though. Like, they're not going to go and send in Delta Force. I don't know. Maybe they will.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark isn't going to be able to do it.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Their average gross income in Greenland is forty to forty-five thousand USD. So people could be looking at that hundred K saying, I'm gonna retire a couple of years early.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Hundred K is big. Yeah, I don't know. Among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a Compact Free Association, Compact of Free Association, COFA. The precise details, which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. Palau, interesting. Very, depending on the signatory, but the US government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection and Amazon Prime from us. What else can we offer you? In exchange, the US military operates freely in COFA countries and trade with the US is largely duty-free. No tariffs.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce Greenlanders to vote for their independence or to sign on to a COFA after such a vote. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the Free Press.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Read it, Tyler.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  It's pretty long, I don't want to read the whole thing.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, then sing it.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  He's anti... He doesn't want us to actually like buy it, right? It's like bad, you need to convince them to come over. But he does like, I think he wants Greenland to become in possession. Or the US to become in possession of Greenland, right? Maybe like a Puerto Rico situation. So it's like a little bit...

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Above Palau.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's above Palau, it's not a state though, it's not like, you know, and we're not sending the military in.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were pitching, so...

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  It's such a, I mean, it's such a, it is a tough sell. As much as I love this great country.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  You mean to live in Greenland?

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the US with binoculars.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  I want that crazy stuff over here.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just massive, massive infighting. Governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly, right?

• 34:45John Coogan?

  It is interesting, the US is like one of the most entertaining... Countries, it feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics, or our state level politics, or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So, I don't know, maybe they get it on it. I have another idea for Greenland.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to get in the

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Get in the arena, yeah. Get in the box, get in the label box. Deliver you, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the label box. So Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income, so a lot of people go there.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  And when, and this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90 million, he's actually fighting for

• 35:34John Coogan?

  I didn't think about that.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Basically that number.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  He's a resident. He has one of the few jobs that you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train in boxing.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, a team that you build yourself. So, yeah, he, his

• 35:47John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Just from boxing.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  Probably fairly quickly, simply because he's gonna do a handful more fights, I imagine. Then he needs about a 2X from there and he'll be able to go.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Because he's like keeping, you know, 97%

• 36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Of every dollar.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100 million, is that to the winner? Who?

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  No, in the Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua fight, I think Jake got 90 something and Anthony Joshua got just under that.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Okay, around the same.

• 36:18Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, I think Jake was

• 36:20John Coogan?

  A bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie, almost. So

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  You know, your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that, that, I mean, obviously be very dedicated to the sport, but it just crazes me that you could, you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one night event and draw that much economic opportunity. And that many ads and that many pay-per-view sales. That's a lot of money. That's remarkable. Anyway, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate, Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate. Why would anyone go?

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  You have to be grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico, the 3%.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, for a long time you could just go, but now I think it's closed.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  You needed to be there, and I think they closed it. I'm still, I'm sure it's still solid, but not what it was.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  But Puerto Rico, famously, people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold and now you have high taxes.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, but a lot of people want, desperately want to raise taxes.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  Basically, I mean, I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100%.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  And so if you could create-

• 37:40John Coogan?

  You go there, you zero yourself, and then you grind.

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  If you're in favor of ultra-high taxes, you could go to Greenland.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  That's a good idea.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Get zeroed out immediately.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  I like this idea.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  You just land in the country-

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  And then you-

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Lose all your money.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Connect all your accounts with Plaid-

• 37:55John Coogan?

  And everyone knows you're-

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  Transfer out everything and then you're zeroed out.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  And then Tyler, you had a different proposal? What was it?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Well, so the bull case for just 97 is that like, it's like flex, right?

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  I can live in Greenland. I'm so, I make so much money that-

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I only have 3% left and I'm still balling.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  It is hard.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  I can still afford it.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like, who's really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay, that guy's actually really rich.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then-

• 38:26John Coogan?

  They really made it.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  But then if you're not-

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  It's the new Lamborghini Urin.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you're not uber-uber wealthy, it still makes sense if you basically just have the 97% tax rate the first year.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  The first year.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  So then maybe it's, if you look at it in 10-year increments, right? So first year, you're basically zeroed out.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  But then you got, then you got a super-low tax rate, then you just grind.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Zero for five years, so you lock in.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  It's almost like a, you get dropped on an island and you gotta fight your way out.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of Lord of the Flies situation in Greenland.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you see, uh, Jensen came out yesterday-

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  And said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  Sick.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Is it? I don't know.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  It's tough.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  He's just, he's a little bro-ing David Sack.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  He's a little bro-ing everyone. It's funny.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California breaking from a cadre of ultra-wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first-of-its-kind proposal. "We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it." He's, this is, this is, I'm gonna say it, it's kind of a pick-me behavior for, for, for a beaner.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  He says, "I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once." Um, I guess, I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish on Nvidia? They're going to 40 trillion?

• 39:34John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the ballot initiative-

• 39:36John Coogan?

  He's like, actually, actually, definitely pay, definitely do this right now and then stop. I got another 10x in the bag. I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate now.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's head into the comment section and put a hazmat suit.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  It's not really relevant what he thinks, according to Jeff. It's a question of what the policy effect impact is. If all the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year, or whatever nuts that thing the state cooks up, the state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government, employees, etc. So Huang can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country, but that doesn't make it a wise policy. I agree.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  You see Larry dumped his place in SF?

• 40:30John Coogan?

  He did. He's moving out.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't know if he's getting out entirely.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  45 million. Definitely making, making moves.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  He still has plenty of homes in Malibu.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  In a somewhat related story, there's now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently, this is from President Trump. He said that, what was the actual, what was the actual quote from Trump? Cause Palmer had a, Palmer had a clip.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Truth Social.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  I think, I think you actually do. He said, I've been informed by the slowest, he's talking about, um, he's talking, okay. So also if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks, where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together. Our country comes first. And can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what, 5 million per year per executive at a defense company? He also said that, he said, "I have determined for the good of our country, especially for the, in these very troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should be not, should not be $1 trillion, but rather $1.5 trillion."

• 41:43John Coogan?

  That is a huge increase, 50% increase. But obviously, there's a question of where that money comes from.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Okay, yes, so the.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Oh, I have the quote here, yes.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Okay, well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable, so they should be limited to 5 million or less.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Okay, limited to 5 million or less. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Lucky on Bloomberg The Close, digging into this. This is clip.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  They were at the Consumer Electronics Show.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he was there for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  So my motivation is to try and build in the biggest thing possible. I will say, people have fairly critiqued and said, but Palmer, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment, given you're competing with these companies? I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plans, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is, it's always tricky. When you want to, I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems, right? It's actually the same thing with like Mod Retro in the gaming space. Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this like catch 22, like, if you're outside of it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  We also have posts that President Trump is thinking more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow next year.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  He's not anti-defense or anti-defense company. That's for sure.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  What's interesting is your company is, dare I say it, considering going public.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Would your CEO, do you think the CEO that leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's going to be an issue?

• 43:34Speaker 03

  I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. And you're not asking whether it should be, like, do you? If I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the, when you are working on taxpayer dime, there

• 44:15Speaker 03

  is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base, but in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good, maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say, this is the way it's going to be forever. You say, this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager, your parents say, you're grounded until X, Y, and Z. Bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking to ground you for life. It's so funny. And I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not necessarily a lifetime.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective, right? Especially, especially if it's, especially if it's temporary. You know, you can see this, you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could, over time, be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But, you know, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the prime had gotten like a multi hundred million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they were.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  That they had signed up and were getting paid to make.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  They're being lazy bones.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  Lazy bones.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Lazy bones behavior.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, in that situation, in that situation, if you have a management team that is just like printing, regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  And I think Palmer is sort of wrestling with libertarian ideas, how much should private companies be able to do? And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company, if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with government than who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people, it's the democracy. And so that's what's happening.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And Palmer, in another clip, was talking, they asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make a hundred thousand dollars a year, right? That's my comp package. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company. Now, the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works for the government, cannot make more than five million dollars, and you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like, we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make ten million dollars a year over here, and we can only pay them five million dollars.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  The AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening, but it would be very tricky if Anduril could not compete against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, if they need a super talented AI researcher. And maybe they're not paying them a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah, like, the market rate for this role is fifteen mil. And like, we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing. And that would be a little bit tricky. Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream, and then we'll go to Tyler. One livestream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, you can already see this phenomenon, you know, in some ways, you know, Tim Cook.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  He, it's not a salary cap, right?

• 47:45John Coogan?

  It feels like there's a cap.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  It feels like something's going on.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  He should be paying, paid way more.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does he make, 75?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Barely scraping it.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Imagine if he was only five, I mean, what?

• 47:57John Coogan?

  It'd be terrible, he would have no incentive to ship any updates.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think, instead of a $5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it'd be much better to do a team-based salary cap, because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like, instead of 5 million per executive, how about 20 million for the entire executive team? So then, you have the idea of team construction, where do you have cap room? Okay, we got an all-star, we're bringing in Brian Shimpf as the CEO, he's the CEO of Anduril right now, we're poaching him, we're getting him 18, but, his team is gonna be mostly interns. Or, you go and you get, okay, we got four people, they're all making five, they're all decent operators, but, you create much more of a sports-like dynamic.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  We can't, we can't get Brian Shimpf, but we can recreate him in the aggregate.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  In the aggregate, exactly.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Dodd, Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promised is to choose another vendor. I agree, you could fix a lot of this at the contract level, if you sign a contract with somebody and then a year in, year, two years, three years, etc., they're not delivering, like, making it so that the government can like, more easily reallocate those funds, and actually, you know, make these companies have some accountability.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, near.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Before we move on, just, I think this whole thing is very interesting, because you have this dynamic where, very clearly, it feels like Hegseth went and gave Trump some sort of update, and then he just like, posted on Truth Social and like, kinda crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? This is not, it's not even an executive order at this point. It's just like, we're, we're, there's an entire news cycle around the new defense budget. This is all just Truth Social posts, just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically. But this stuff does actually have an impact on the economy.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  I know, it is funny that you see a big, you see a long Truth Social post and you just assume it's an executive order.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay, this is law, but it's not. But, but it does have an impact and brings people to the table. And we saw this play out with Intel where he was saying like, Liputan's gotta go. And he's basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel. And then, and then a few days later, he's like, Liputan's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually gonna invest. I own 10% of the company now. And now the stock's, you know, all this.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  That's my boy, my absolute boy.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  And so, uh, these things are like aggressive, but it's this whole like taco chickening out, but that's part of the plan, art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very, it's a very weird, interesting, new dynamic. And I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration, but, uh, we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app servers and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Uh, sorry. Neer says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You just need to find one good, one founder good enough to carry your entire career.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  That is fantastic.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a banger and it's, it's, it's, it's a banger because it's so true. Like when I, when I look at across, you know, 60, 70 different investments at this point, if you take out like two or three of these founders.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Power law game.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, okay.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  Much like beating on Rust with a, with an absolute killer.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  With your absolute boy.

• 51:19John Coogan?

  360 no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work. But you're getting carried. You're like, we won.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  2v2 on Rust and you're just in a corner and the game's over.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Cause.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  You, you load into Counter-Strike on Dust 2 and you, one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. You're carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of, of how I got my Overwatch account carried to like the absolute top? My account was like ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very interesting. It was me.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  Who was?

• 51:48John Coogan?

  So, so I, I played the first season of, I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack, some sort of leak from another, maybe like, you know, some other company had my password leaked it and I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because like, what are you gonna do? You're just gonna like, my credit card information isn't there, you can't do anything with it, you can just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something, and so if you were hacking, you didn't want to buy $60 every time you got banned. So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up

• 52:30John Coogan?

  and was like a sniper, I think he played Hanzo main and was like really, really good. And then years later, I got back in with my friends and I'm like, "Oh, let's play some Overwatch." And we queue up.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, John, what are you even up to?

• 52:41John Coogan?

  And I'm like, "Oh, I need to do placement matches." And so I do the placement matches and I'm just like losing because I'm playing with all these like incredible, like, you know, the top tier. And everyone's like, "Why are you guys, like, we know you're good, why are you, why are you sandbagging? Like, why are you trying to de-rank your account?" And I'm like, "I'm not, I'm playing as hard as I can, I'm doing my best." And they're, and they're like, "No, we can see that you're like one of the greatest Hanzo players ever. Like, you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch, we've seen your account history, you're amazing, why are you playing poorly?" And I was like, "I don't know." And then I finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings and then, and then the game like remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  So finally, I had to make up a lie because whenever I'd, whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, "You're terrible and you're supposed to be good." And I'd have to say, "Ah, like I broke my hand, so I just, I'm not as good as I used to be, like, please go easy on me, like, I'm relearning everything, give me a break." Anyway, before we move on, app loving. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jordy.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one more thing that was funny about this truth social saga from yesterday. So, uh, he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps. Uh, Lockheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff, uh, Raytheon, et cetera. I think this was, uh, was right after the close.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  After hours, uh, but then immediately after that, uh, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the one and a half trillion dollar announcement came after talking down on them. So then, uh, very, uh, just a little bit later, Trump said, after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries and other political representatives, I've determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the 1 trillion, but rather one and a half trillion. This will allow us to build, this will allow us to build the quote, um, dream military that we have long been entitled to, and more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. Uh, and so anyways, you can imagine what happened to, um, prices after that.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  If it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, and then keeps ranting, uh, talks about sleepy Joe. I think we, I think it's time to retire sleepy Joe. Just let him, let him be retired.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Just Joe.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Just Joe. Uh, anyways, uh, over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest 108.4 billion dollar hostile bid and remain committed.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  I called it.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  Loyal.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is gonna run away with it, but we'll see.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so in the journal, Paramount defends its hostile bid for Warner.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  How high can they go? Can they go to 200 billion?

• 55:37John Coogan?

  It seems like Paramount has

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  They're holding out for the one trillion.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Endless, endless coffers. I don't know, but.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  Paramount continued pushing its 77.9 billion dollar bid for Warner Brothers Thursday, a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. The photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  On the lot.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're, they're, they're ready to partner up. They're, they're adding a new, a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're, they're having fun and I, and it feels like, like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something, it feels like it's in the bag.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month. So.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff, still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic raising 10 billion at 350 billion. We talked about this a little bit yesterday.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Get into it more. GIC, Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund, and Co2 plan to lead.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  Spencer, you absolute dog.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Spencer, get in the Ultra Dome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the, the third mega deal in the past year follows a 13 billion investment in September that valued the company at 183 billion. So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. The round's expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the Axon.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  We're still warming up this new mallet.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  Kind of splintered.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you've noticed this.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, you know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around it like the baseball bat.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  Gloves, too.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Batting gloves? I do, I would like an even longer mallet, like a full baseball.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Like a staff.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  There's something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe, maybe bigger mallet, maybe some, maybe some athletic tape on there, wrapping it like, it's a, like it's a baseball bat that's hit a thousand home runs.

• 58:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you think they, do you think they end up doing another round before the IPO? Like, it's hard, it's hard to imagine this is actually the

• 58:22John Coogan?

  The final pre-IPO?

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  The actual pre-IPO round, just because there's so much incentive to just raise again in a few months.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  I, I saw a couple of people doing polls on, would you rather own OpenAI at 1 trillion? Or Anthropic at 350? Or XAI at 220? Or whatever, whatever the valuations were. And at least a lot of the, a lot of the small polls that I saw, people were very excited about Anthropic's valuation relative to the magic that's happening in Claude Code and, and all the, all the glazing that's happening. Finally, we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans instead of vice versa. It's a triple glaze. But Cursor is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's bearish on Cursor, says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  We'll have to, we'll have to talk to Michael Truell about whether he is, set the record straight on how AGI-pilled he is. But this is from Bree Wolfson on dialectic with Jackson, Jackson Doll. Context Shaquille says is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Cursor. And much of, much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about Cursor's culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. All of this is very interesting and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working, worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capability will mean for the future of work.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Bree. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy, total disruption story. And Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi? And just be like, look, it's just autocomplete and it makes money and we sell tokens profitably. Or should you be like, it's gonna cure cancer? Or should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all gonna die. Like, there's so many different narratives that you can tug on. And a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently and sometimes that can work, sometimes I can't. I, I, I'm kind of down with Cursor. I like this.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  I, I like that Michael is just like, he's a builder and, and he tells, he tells a good story about that. And like, there are other AI leaders that are telling the doom story or telling the fast takeoff story. I don't think that Cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story. But Shaquille disagrees, but we'll have to dig into this more. What, what do you think, Tyler?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because Anthropic, they make such an emphasis on, on coding. They're like, of the, of the big labs, people think of them.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Probably as like the most AGI pilled. But it's like Cursor is, I mean, all they do is coding and, and there's a very different like. People see them very differently.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's much more of a centaur adoption and much more of a co-pilot. Much less of this drop in replacement for labor.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. But I mean, you've definitely seen a lot of the recent Cursor features are getting more and more agentic.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Like the actual product isn't like so completely different, at least like ideologically, right?

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  No, no, I know. I, I agree. I agree.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something. Cursor has an advantage, which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product. And so they have, they have a data source on a lot of this that. You know, people that are just kind of speculating and on X and and reading like science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. It's like there's something to just like playing, playing the game as you see it on the field. And I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could look, you know, it's, it's, it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what's what the world's going to be like in one years, two years, five years, etc. But at the same time, if you're building and your business is accelerating

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  and customers are using your product more and more and more, like that doesn't, it's hard to just say, oh, I bearish on this company because they're not, they're not of this one, you know, podcast interview.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs, the makers of our theme song. So, Rehard Jark says, you can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. Three months ago, it was at 12.9%. 12 months ago is at 5.7%. And I remember the a year ago, when it launched, it felt like, it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including generative AI snippets

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  in Google search, or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers. And it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app really daily, driving it. It was more demo, more testing. Well, this similar web data seems to show that Gemini has been growing and taking share.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also worth noting that this is just like site visits. And so. Not every visit is created equally.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Somebody can land quickly.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  On a site, that's very different from them.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, being in the app.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times a day. So this is not looking at app traffic at all.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  That's what I love about the semi-analysis chart that shows that you have, you know, users or accounts that are signed up, then you have the, the, the active users and then you have, um, how many interactions those users have, like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day? And then also, how many interactions, how long are they spending time? And so ultimately, the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site, you know, attention at the end of the day. And so there is a little bit of a gap there where, uh, when they ran, when semi-analysis at least ran the, ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt like while there were

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUs or MMS, uh, in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths, uh, OpenAI was really, really dominant. Uh, and so, you know, ma- maybe the narrative's over, overstated, but, uh, it's still some interesting data and it does show that, uh, the code read is real and it shows that, uh, Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously and they've gotten more traffic, which is good.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Near is back.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  LLM Arena has raised an evaluation of 1.7 billion, coming in with a Michael Burry shot. Uh, we're gonna have, we're gonna have the founder of LLM Arena on.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, hopefully in the next, uh, 24 hours.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  We'll have to respond to this viral, a thousand likes on this. Why do people not like LLM Arena? It seems like it's a fantastic business. I don't know.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I, I, you know, how much revenue are they doing?

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  What, what kind of products are they releasing?

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Like, can they get, uh, if you're.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  I'll tell you this right now. You, you, you build up a huge reputation, the sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible, can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the best arena, the best LLM award. Forward to the highest bidder and

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  For a billion dollars.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  For for ten billion dollars and you return all the money to shareholders after you do that. And you can you give them good vibes for one week and then you burn your entire credibility.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Priceless.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  No, no, clearly there's some like model routing, some infrastructural level. We I think we've talked about this before, but the increasingly the I think the bull case is not just deciding which which model is the best in an LM arena. It's it's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process. How do they evaluate? How do they bring in those models? And then how do they measure uptime? How do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision? And if you can take a take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know, but we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do you do you have any take on LM arena?

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fan?

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  I don't have a take on like the business side, but as a product, it's very useful. It's it's always cool to look at. I mean, because they always get the new models before, so you can always see like like whenever a new image model comes out, it's always there first. So you can kind of see what are the vibes, but yeah, it's a good. I enjoy the the product a lot.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  In the vibe economy, it's potentially dramatically undervalued at in the leaderboard economy.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the vibes, I think over the past few months, you've definitely started to see like, okay, this Exonon is like likely being paid by a lab. I think you've starting to see that.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely happens.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, they probably, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind?

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Uh, did you have you heard about the Tailwind drama, this whole thing? Tailwind laid off seventy five percent of their team.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  I read the Post.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Pretty rough, yeah, the Post. The reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents. Seventy five million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings, resulting in a forty percent drop and in traffic and an eighty percent revenue loss. And people are really, really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like they need to pivot aggressively and figure out some other way to integrate.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  The founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for thirty minutes. I listened. Half of it this morning. Sad story. They have a small, super talented team. He had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners of the business plus one, one other engineer. There's four of them now trying to maintain it. He's optimistic, but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month, which means that it was a greater and greater percentage of revenue. And so he was like, we're just gonna be dead in less than a year.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Cause a lot of what they did, I think, I think their paid offerings were like selling components pre-assembled code. And all of the chat, all of the L L Ms can just one-shot a component. If you need a pop-up or a modal or, or a button, you don't need to pay.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  The logic was saying it'd be great if, if like a big lab just said like, hey, these are a talented team.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, join an anthropic.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know much about the founder, but it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented. And I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front-end transformation of a massive surface area.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or going to a place like lovable or Figma.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  That would be great too. But, but even, even just going inside of like, you know, a Salesforce or some sort of like, you know, some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it, but you have this new team that comes in and they.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm sure they want to keep building.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. So, so maybe.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the saying lays off 75% of their team is dramatic. They did lay off, they laid off three people out of a four-person team that were the not, not owners of the business.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so sort of law of small numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but still I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was, it was, the founder was upset. Apparently people were just like commenting.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, people were really mean to him.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Mean to him, being like, being like, hey, I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying. And they're like, you're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source. He's like.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source AI. Like the open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these like incredible technologies that people can build on. But people also like freebies and they get very mad when you take them away and they get mad when they don't, when they don't get them. Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch and everyone loves plaid. Because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Dylan.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, really quickly. Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is?

• 1:10:42Jordi Hays?

  I do not.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Well, guess what?

• 1:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait, he works for X?

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  He's on X?

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  No, no, he joined the platform, but he does.

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  I read that recently.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  He's an incredible military hero. He has fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. And he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions, but he's wearing like what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a starched white button down with a pocket protector. And he has these big glasses.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  He's walking out of the Black Hawk.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So he's not wearing the normal like military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to clean up. It's crazy. So he's a, yeah, he's a, he's a personal hero of mine.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  All time Ora Farmer.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  All time Ora Farmer. That is for sure true. Would love to have him on the show. He's, he's done other shows, so it would be very interesting to hear from him.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  This company, Flip, said, Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product growth, ops, designers, interns, and roles that do not yet have names. And then 24 hours later, they quoted their own post. They said, you've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the lucky company?

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  Of course. Uh, I, I actually.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I think it, I think it, the product, what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Oh, it's that, it's that meme. I've seen, I've seen people joke about that. And then I saw, there's this, uh, poster that does these.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Gambling into credit cards.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I, I, I saw a poster who.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Bringing gambling into debt.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  There's someone who like vibe codes different UX mockups for funny concepts. Uh, there's that famous one by Aiden of like the, uh, the Google Maps with a, with a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these and one of them is like the, the double or nothing on your checkout, uh, which is a crazy idea. I don't know. Um, on the topic of luck, at one point, very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called Five Hour Luck. And the whole concept would be like, it'd be a five hour energy shot, but the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky. It would make, it would increase your luck. Just because people, you know, energy is a stat, why not increase luck?

• 1:13:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Uh, and I was going to formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. Uh, was not thinking about the gambling application.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  The placebo element. Yeah. I mean, that, that product would crush in Vegas.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Imagine just taking it and being like, okay, I, I, I'm, I have the stat boost. I'm lucky. I'm feeling good.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Snake oil in it.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Well, but Brian Johnson, he, he sells a product. It's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. Uh, it's sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind. With best in class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So, moving on to Citrini, uh, asking someone, asking someone, asking someone long.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Long memory.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Oh, who's long memory. If they got any new ideas for 2026. It's already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Bubble Boy on, uh, over on Axe had, had some pretty, uh, great calls late last year. I'm gonna try to pull.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  Pull one up.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Well, you do. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We can also pull up, I want to watch this, this intro from This Week in Startups. Can we move on to this?

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  Pull it up.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  Pull up the video of Jason Calacanis finally answering the question we all had. What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on This Week in Startups. Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase, and I clicked instantly. This is on This Week in Startups. His co-host asks him. And the best part about the show is that I was expecting it to be like, they tease it in an intro, and then they make you listen to, and then they, they cut just short of him saying, oh, the one thing I want to buy is, and then boom, the start of the show, and then 20 minutes later, he gives you, no, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly. Tell the people

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  what you, even Jason Calacanis, will not break out the checkbook for.

• 1:15:26Speaker 05

  It's definitely private aviation. I've been trying to hold off doing this for a long time.

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  He deserves it.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  The great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere, or $100,000 on a round trip. That seemed absurd to spend that. The other one, I would say, that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  Do it.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  He loves Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. Get a ZR1.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  Which is like a big, open, fancy barn. That's kind of like a man cave, but Texas style. Do I buy this ZRX1 for $250,000? Do it.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 05

  Do it, Jake How. $50,000 Corvette.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  A lot of these things become cognitive load. This Week in Startups is brought to you by.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to their sponsors for making it possible. I love that. I love that he's a Corvette guy.

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

  Jake How deserves it.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it. Been in the media business for. Decades. Uh, my welcome to Silicon Valley.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Was doing TVN, was doing TVN like in the early 2000s.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  You know who his first guest was ever? David Sacks. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting. Uh, and my, my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I, I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival, his, uh, his conference, heard a bunch of tech people talk, uh, met a bunch of Y C founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley, went to the, uh, some bar in, on Silicon Valley and in Palo Alto next to Stanford. Uh, it, it was a lot of fun. He was very nice.

• 1:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Also in that era, uh, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  About this.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  We gotta watch that.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull this clip up?

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Oh, do you, do you have it ready to go?

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's on charlyrose.com.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  It is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I, I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose. And I was like, we gotta dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So do you have it?

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's pull this up.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Where is it?

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  I put it in the team chat.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, while we, while we pull that up, let's look for what's next. Um, unintended, may I close? Do, do, do, um, I can do another ad read. While we do that, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Um.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  How we doing?

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Also pulling it up. Uh, Nikita Beer finally met.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh no, Charlie Rose, the video actually does not load.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Oh, it doesn't load? Oh no. Uh, well, well, you know what we can do? We can export it and we can play it, uh, tomorrow on the show. Uh, let's make a note to do that. Uh, let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor. Out from Dell.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Big.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  And I love this. So, Michael Dell said, "Big news, the world's first 52-inch 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you." Jordi, did you ever have one of these elite multi-monitor setups? Or were you always like a sort of do the business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy. Have you ever been?

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  I've got a, I've got an Apple monitor.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  You have one.

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  At home. I, I, I find it hard. I mean, as like, a guy who has been building companies.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  And investing, you're basically an email guy.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Phone, email, Zooms. It's not, it's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations. You're, you're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations, is what you're saying.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  But I do enjoy, I, I have an Apple monitor at home. I enjoy it, but it's nothing like this.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  This is incredible. So, it's much bigger than the Apple Pro Display XDR.

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it curved?

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  It is curved. It has to be curved at that size, because you're basically sitting right, your face is right up against a TV. Uh, 52 inches, and, uh, and it's a very, it's funny in, in many, many ways, because, uh, let's, uh, so, so first, let's play the clip from Rob Moore, uh, where he says Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode. After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm for new products has not dulled.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Coming out of PS, the thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  It's awesome. It's awesome. So, let's play this.

• 1:19:47Speaker 06

  That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office, and you were showing me one of your new unreleased, uh, products that we can't film or photograph. But you were like, I was like, this is, this is like a kid on Christmas. Like, you're still so-

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Super cool product. Yeah, I'm very excited.

• 1:20:02Speaker 06

  I told you I'll buy one. I think it's cool too. I'm gonna buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling. That obsession has not dulled.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Heartwarming.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  And, uh, what, what's really, what's really, really funny is that, so, there's, there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it, uh, and says, "It's out here. You can just buy it." Uh, and then this, this, uh, this poster, Ben Badgerin, uh, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, uh, says, "This monitor from Dell is amazing, and I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used, and even at 120 Hz, still capable to game on." So- It's like, when did this thing release? Like, it doesn't have the fanfare of like a normal product release cycle where there's like pre-orders, but it's very fun and it's been very hyped. And I, I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly,

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  and it's not very aesthetic, and you have the opportunity to, to simplify. You can actually display four different full computers, I think in fairly high res, just tiled on one screen, so you can run four different displays separately.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  It's $2,900.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway. Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  We have a major white pill.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  Oh, we do?

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Drew Tuma is reporting, "For the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the US drought monitor. The rain is back." Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought. So, we are incredibly, incredibly back.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Yes. We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TBPN exposé in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to vanityfair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun...

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of work for us. We got to hang out with Julia.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Getting interviewed, hanging out with her. And, I mean, it was, we, we had to go dress up and get our photo taken.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  We did have to dress up. It was, it was definitely the most, by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Two cameras, medium format, medium format film.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just, I just mean more like the, the team that actually went into it, right? There was so many different people working on, it was extremely professional, as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the Technology Brothers. She's not, she's not fully buying the rebrand.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Not letting it die.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  Keeping it alive.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, they call us the J-Team. John Coogan and Jordi Haze had a off-mic moment.

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of funny moments in here.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, what'd you like?

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  I like the, she said... They're no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have drawn-

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Not, not just any nicotine. What kind of, what kind of nicotine is it?

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  Company.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  It's addictive nicotine.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  That I personally am addicted to.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  I think all nicotine is addicted to.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air. They try to avoid vulgarity and they don't promote alcohol or drug use, mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's, it's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use, even though in the early days, the doubling, you know?

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were doing the Dom episode.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, but it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it made the show worse.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  It was funny, but, uh, uh, I, I remember I'd be, I, I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a, it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11 a.m.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, not looking forward to it. Uh, and then Julia says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never going to promote Burning Man.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  You can't, I, I can't believe you said that. It, it's-

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, it's factually true.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  It really is so funny when, when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes, were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. And so some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you, you throw out.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm just riffing, I'm just doing bits.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  And, and then it gets written down and it looks way different in that context, but it's good. It, it's real. It's the actual, it's the actual belief.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  There was a funny moment. So we were, uh, we were getting breakfast with Julia, uh, at our usual spot and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an ex post. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. Uh, and, uh, Julia says, as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were, there were over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine, imagine if it flopped, it'd be in here, it'd be like, he, he said, he predicted it would- 10,000 and only got 200.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but wow.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  So lucky day, lucky day.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Banger. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think, I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're gonna figure it out and we're not going anywhere over the next decades.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix You in the studio that morning, which is, which is a, which is a, is a fantastic song.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  It's a great song. Also, at that, at that lunch, uh, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it, you just kept shaking the salt shaker. And I was like, this is gonna go in the piece.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  I've never noticed that you.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  I love salt. I have this amazing story. My, my grandpa was making, uh, my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, uh, like my grandma was away at the time. So it was just us hanging out with grandpa and he's like, I'm gonna make the kids hot chocolate.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  He, uh, makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it. He, he gives us a couple of cups and we're like, oh, grandpa, this, this is really, this is really rough. Uh, uh, are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, turns out he's, all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salts, but his taste buds were so cooked that to him, it just, he was just drinking like salt, pure salt, hot chocolate.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  Sugar, you notice immediately.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I am, uh, I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  But it's very, it's, it's a very funny, uh, story. They also did this little video interview with us and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. And, uh, one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, oh, we love blue skies. Like it's a nice day, no clouds. It, most of the days are blue skies in California. And they had to clarify like, no, like blue sky, like the app. And we're like, oh, yeah, we don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X, but, uh, it, it really does give you a little bit of flavor of, uh, of how we think about the business and whatnot. So it was.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Also the, uh, the outfits, of course, uh, unfortunately were not ours. They dressed us, uh.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but you, you gotta get that suit.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  I do.

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  That suit is, is.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  You gotta get yours too.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  The, the, the 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback. And it feels like a return to the early brand, uh, very much what we were doing. It, it feels like it, it, it captured, it might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into, you know, whatever we're doing next. Uh, anyway, we have Delian Asparouhov from Founders Fund and Varda in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and UltraDum. Delian, how are you doing?

• 1:27:39Delian Asparouhov?

  Hello, brothers.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  First, first appearance. You did eighteen last year. We're hoping to ten X this year. We gotta keep on adventure trajectory. So one hundred and eighty hits this year.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. I hope your twenty twenty six is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta commentary about New Year's resolutions?

• 1:28:02Delian Asparouhov?

  My, you know, goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year. And you just lean into my new stylist's recommendations on, you know, just looking like a wizened venture capitalist that is, you know, ready to go ring a bunch of Nasdaq bells this year since

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  There we go, or New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:28:19Delian Asparouhov?

  The rain, baby.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, that TB green is looking fantastic. Good, uh, props to your stylist.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, first question, we were reading in the Wall Street Journal today that you're cooked, that venture capital is cooked. Venture capital fundraising declined thirty five percent in twenty twenty five. Are you cooked? Is it over? Are you going to be, uh, leaving the industry after disaster has struck, according to the Journal? What's your reaction?

• 1:28:47Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, you're getting this, um, like, you know, sort of case shaped, um, you know, nature to venture, you know, sort of right now, which has been happening for, you know, sort of a couple of years, but it's happening both on

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  This VC is doing ketamine?

• 1:28:57Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, we were just K-holing and it's happening to me to like, you know, really focusing on one company, just like

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Hey, we just told Vanity Fair, we don't promote drugs.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't promoting it.

• 1:29:06Delian Asparouhov?

  Sorry. Uh, we take ketamine and, uh, we go to horses. That's for our horses that we own.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  But the, this bifurcation that's been happening, do you have the riding jacket on? Oh, that's a good one. This is, this is a good merch, rare, rare founders fund merch.

• 1:29:23Delian Asparouhov?

  Anyways, uh, we only, you know, use that stuff for our horses.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:29:28Delian Asparouhov?

  Riding the horses.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  But yes, so, so, so where did the K-shaped split come from? Is this interest rate driven or just LPs are realizing that it's better to pile into the big winners? Give me more of the dynamics of the K shape.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  You have, uh, a big fund raised in twenty twenty five, but it could have been way bigger, uh, oversubscribed. Part of the issue is PT's hogging all, hogging the whole fund. Uh, but, uh, but, but there's instances where there's like way more demand for a specific fund.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  And there is actual, you know, allocations available and then other cases more on the, the emerging manager side where they just can't even get going.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. What are you seeing, darling?

• 1:30:09Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's a couple of different like forces at play here. A part of it is like, if you actually even just study the like old days of like, you know, sort of PE. For example, when you go from like the, you know, barbarians at the gate days to today. PE kind of went through like a similar dynamic at super cycle where you had like, you know, cottage industry to start, then got super, you know, sort of scaled and there were a ton of different players. And then steadily, there was, you know, a bunch of aggregation, basically over time. Um, that, you know, led to, you know, some, you know, sort of mega mega funds like the K K Rs, et cetera of the world. Um, I think you're basically seeing, you know, basically venture go through the same thing. And I think you started to see basically like that K shape really accelerate in 2021. And then it's only basically continued since then. And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things, right?

• 1:30:51Delian Asparouhov?

  I think we've talked about this before, but like, um, you know, if you look at it on like a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021 in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe that I think basically like north of $5 million. It's like just strictly going, you know, sort of down in terms of number of companies, basically, you know, sort of per, per year that are looking like that. Um, so company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default, you basically have obviously, you know, sort of fewer logos that you can chase. Um, and so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company, you know, basically side of things. At the same time, you're seeing, you know, um, you know, companies stay private for much longer. And so like, like the liquidity in the public markets is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies.

• 1:31:35Delian Asparouhov?

  Cause like, there's just a small set that are the mega ones that are raising these like, you know, sort of huge, huge rounds, right? I think it was something like, if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, um, Anthropic and XAI. Basically, I think if you added up basically those four companies, it was something on the order of like 60% of like the total, like, you know, dollars deployed by VCs in that year were scooped up basically by those like, you know, sort of four or five companies. And so I think that's like the dynamic that's been flowing through on like the VC, you know, basically side of things where. If you're one of those companies and you need to now raise like, you know, ten billion dollars. Are you really trying to go out and do that with like a bunch of ten billion dollar checks? It's like, no, like you prefer to like, you know, find capital riders that can actually give you, you know, billion dollar checks at a time. So you just like have fewer, you know, sort of mouths around the table you need to manage.

• 1:32:18Delian Asparouhov?

  Some of this regulatory, right? Like I think you can't have more than like, I think it's like sixty five hundred like, you know, institutions on your cap table before you're public. And so you literally like have to make sure that these, you know, sort of things, you know, aggregate. Um, and then there's a part of it that is like, yeah, just the like power law of venture and tech only continues to be like more and more true. Like, you know, you're dominated by the big. It's like, yeah, there's this like, um, I'm, I'm probably gonna butcher it a little bit. Like, you know, Peters had this, you know, sort of like, you know, thing that he said. For sure privately, I'm pretty sure publicly too, so I don't think he'll mind me, you know, sort of saying it, but he like, his like biggest error, you know, that he says of like his twenty, you know, sort of tens. Was, you know, his impression was just like, you know, there's not gonna be that many like, you know, you know, a hundred billion, let alone like trillion dollar companies. But it turns out basically like each individual ten X is actually like easier than the last one.

• 1:33:03Delian Asparouhov?

  Basically like, once you're a, you're sort of, you know, trillion dollar, you know, once you're a hundred billion dollar company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from like ten to a hundred. It's actually much easier to go to ten to a hundred than it is from one to ten. And it's much easier to go from like one billion to ten billion than it is to go from a hundred million to one billion, et cetera. So, um, yeah, that's, you know, in some ways that like momentum, but getting momentum is just like making it so that these like, you know, companies get bigger faster. They're scooping up capital faster and the venture firms are getting bigger faster. I think the thing where this stuff starts to break is like, I don't think that, um, the current default fee structure is going to be like where the industry is at. You know, sort of, you know, ten years from today. I won't like name names, but like there is definitely a decent number of, uh, these multi-stage mega funds.

• 1:33:44Delian Asparouhov?

  That, um, you know, are doing, you know, some of their super late-stage investing through both like feeless and carryless, you know, basically SPVs. And so at some point, if you're doing like a feeless and carryless SPV where you're investing into a late-stage startup. You basically just work as IR at the startup, right? Like, you know, you're like, you're not making money.

• 1:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, walk me through. I mean, SPVs are just notoriously like they're incredible when they hit because it's deal by deal. And if you have one true banger, it's your, the, the GPs that are a part of that are retired. So like, in theory, they're amazing. In practice, like actually trying to go and convince a lot of people. And you're basically staking your reputation on that deal because you don't have the aggregate deals that typically go into funds. You're saying like, if, you know, you, you kind of have to say like, this is going to work and do my other SPVs. So at least like you're, you're, you're diversified to some degree, but it's a ton of work. There's a ton of pressure. You have to promise the company that you're going to, or, or promise, or, or imply that you can achieve some investment amount and then you have to go do all this heavy lifting.

• 1:34:46Jordi Hays?

  So why is a, why is a multi-stage fund incentivized to do that? Is it just to gain favor with the company? Like, what's the, what's the incentive?

• 1:34:55Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I think the probably like hidden secret of Silicon Valley is like that there's just like a much higher percentage of capital that is deployed via like SPVs and co-invest vehicles than is probably like publicly acknowledged or discussed. Like there are very top tier, tier one, you know, sort of companies, including some of the ones that I listed in those like top five that have had rounds come together based off of a significant chunk of the round basically being done by an SPV. Why do you do it as a company? Well, at the end of the day, if you're like the CEO of a company, you're.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I'm not saying, I'm not saying why do it as a company. I'm saying, why do a feeless, carryless SPV as.

• 1:35:32Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, as a, you know, sort of venture investor.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Just pure love, pure love of the game. I just love deploying capital. I don't need, I don't need to make money from it. It's a, it's volunteer work.

• 1:35:43Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, a lot of funds, the way that they end up like, you know, sort of growing in AUM is, you know, they start off with an initial like fixed fund structure and then like, you know, for their best performing companies, you co-invest vehicles, you know, or like opportunity funds to build that up and then eventually become, you know, sort of, you know, multi-stage and can actually like handle basically a growth fund once they've shown that some of those growth SPVs work. So in some ways it's sort of like a

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I guess in some ways, part of it is, is maybe they promised LPs, like if you back my fund in a big way, I will give you direct access.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, or it's value add. Like if you have, if you have a stake in a company and you just want that company to succeed, you're like, look, it's value add. I'm just going to go work, get them more money on their balance sheet. Yeah, I'm not making more money off of that piece of the investment, but my original investment is getting marked up and the company's more likely to succeed. Makes sense.

• 1:36:33Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I'll pretend like this is, you know, hypothetical, even if it's not hypothetical, but like imagine you're a company like OpenAI, you need to go raise like, you know, sort of billions of dollars, right?

• 1:36:43Delian Asparouhov?

  You as the CEO have a lot of things on your plate, right? You need to like manage the government, you have customers, you have your internal team, et cetera. Like, can you really afford to like literally fully, fully, fully only be focused on fundraising? Like, no, it's like really hard to do that basically as the CEO when you're operating the company. Versus if somebody comes to you and is like, hey, let me do like a like, you know, basically like feeless, carryless, you know, basically SPV that, you know, lets me go out and raise. It's effectively like in some ways like outsourced, you know, IR. It's somebody that's working, you know, on this basically entirely full time and there's sort of a win-win on both sides. As the CEO, you don't need to like, you know, you know, do all the, you know, sort of fundraising with the long tail of like sovereign wealth funds, this, that and the other. They can go do the first sets of like, you know, sort of meetings, then bring you in basically for the final close. For like the venture investor, it basically ends up being a way where like you now have a really

• 1:37:27Delian Asparouhov?

  great reputation, you know, basically with this company because you're basically like, you know, helping them, you know, sort of pull together like a mega fundraise. For your sets of like, you know, LPs and for future fixed fund vehicles that you're doing, you now get this reputation of like, hey, I'm close to this like, you know, sort of super hot, you know, sort of company.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the optics, yeah, the optics to a non-equity partner in the X chat says a lot of GPs want to lead around but don't have the AUM. So just getting the optics of being like, I'm a size Chad, you know, leading, leading this massive round. It's like, and maybe they wouldn't have been able to put it together with a, with a more aggressive fee structure. It's just interesting because you, on the other side, you see some of these, you know, really, really, some of the bad actors in the SPV space are like, you know, layered SPV, 10% upfront.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, super high fees. Yeah.

• 1:38:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Not beer, by the way, not beer.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you? Or are you kind of licking your wounds?

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Hey, they're American. It's so good that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook, you know, seeded by Founders Fund. And now going around and acquiring great companies like Manus, right?

• 1:38:41Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, it's funny, I had like probably like 30 people text me being like, when are you going to tweet about it? What are you going to say about it? I just like, sitting there, I was just like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like, I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father. You know what I mean? Where it's just like, you know, I just can't believe that this is like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well, I, you know, my favorite meme about it was like, um, you know, there was somebody that like, had like a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang. And Zuckerberg going like, hey, can you go buy Manus for me? And then Alex is like, sir, yes, sir. Zuckerberg goes, okay, cool. Thank you. Did you get me like, you know, the like freemium or like the premium one? And Alex is like, no, I bought Manus for you.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what do you think about, uh, the, the mega? I don't even know, mega corns going out at a trillion? Is that going to result in more recycling of LP dollars? Is it possible that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, a couple of other names get out? And LPs feel like, I'm going to go back and reallocate into venture. And this time around, I'm going to try, you know, smaller managers again. Or do you think it'll have a different dynamic? How, how does that play out in a, in a post-successful IPO year?

• 1:39:51Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, you know, my sort of one liner, I forget if we joked about this in person when we were in LA or if I've done this on TVP online before, but it's like, it would be incredible if like, the thing that props up the 2026, you know, equity market is the spite IPO. It's just like, you know, Elon's just like, oh, like, um, Sam needs liquidity. Like, you know, what if I just go IPO?

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  He needs like a couple hundred billion.

• 1:40:12Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, yeah, he needs like a lot of liquidity. Like, what if I just go IPO and I scoop up all the liquidity in the market? And make sure that I do it like faster than he does. But that's the thing that like props up the public markets because all of a sudden like the S and P 500 has like a, you know, trillion and a half added to it by like a single X D. So yeah, I mean, like these, you know, yeah, there was, you know, kind of my joke at the beginning of the show, but it's like, you know, I do think that this, you know, upcoming year is poised to be at least right now. And it feels like there's like the perfect market conditions for it where it's like. Relatively stable economy, inflation's, you know, sort of relatively under control. You know, it doesn't seem like China's gonna be invading Taiwan over the course of the next year. Like, yes, things are like, you know, sort of geopolitically heated, but like, it doesn't seem like, you know, I mean, you know, like, we just captured the president of Venezuela, and, you know, nobody seems to, you know, sort of blink. And, you know, if anything, the markets are up on the news.

• 1:40:53Delian Asparouhov?

  And so it feels like you have this, you know, sort of stable and growing economy that is poised to now basically absorb, you know, probably the largest, you know, sets of entry points into like the, you know, public market and IPO market than it's like ever seen before. And then, then obviously, you know, sort of feeding into like, you know, sort of liquidity into like the entire Silicon Valley, you know, sort of ecosystem. Um, what is that going to do? I think it's only gonna amplify some of these trends where it's like, I think that, you know, it's going to be now more typical for companies, you know, right now it feels odd that there's a handful of companies that stay private past a hundred billion. I think now it's gonna be the default that, you know, companies stay private basically past a hundred billion. And like the size of these funds is going to like, you know, increase significantly.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Delian Asparouhov?

  Because, yeah, your ability to deploy a ten billion dollar fund, much more viable when like, you know, your average entry point is at like two hundred billion post.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and you're, you know, expected to still be able to make like a three to five X basically on, you know, top that. Cause there's more, you know, sort of regular, you know, sort of paths like that.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's any, do you think there's any, uh, risk or potential for regulation as, as people realize that the returns, uh, you know, from the private, you know, a- as, as these companies are staying private longer? If you're like excited about Anthropic and you can't invest until it's worth, you know, who knows what it goes out at? Like, at some point, I could imagine someone on the left saying like, we need to ban companies from staying private this long because you're just letting the, the wealthy kind of like suck up all the returns. And, uh, I even saw Vlad from, from Robinhood posting earlier saying like, we can't, you know, basically coming out in defense of, uh, retail and saying like, we can't, you know, these companies can't just stay private forever.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  And obviously he has very, very incentive, all the incentives to like get these companies out so people can start, uh,

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Jordi Hays?

  you know, uh, doing whatever they wanna do.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  It's interesting.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but I, I could see something like that happening, especially given that, um,

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  It will be very interesting as like a chapter, just, uh, I, I know someone who, who runs like a pure play AI fund, but they're not in XAI, OpenAI, or Anthropic. And so they're in some great names, they're, they, they, they, they got the trend right early, but they didn't like, Brand themselves and even some funds that don't have like major positions in one of them. At least they've aligned with one of them, built a position, played the game and like participated in that. And I think once they all go out, everyone will see sort of the S1s and sort of know a little bit more about, you know, where the really elite firms landed in the AI boom. I don't know.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Part of the SpaceX S1 potentially going out before some of these other names than also having, you know, if you, if there's a world where XAI gets rolled in and then it's like you have a lab that, and a space company and a data center company that, you know, historically has been profitable. Maybe, obviously not on the XAI side, but it's, it's gonna, you know, maybe get people to even be more aggressive in tearing apart some of these other S1s.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  We should do, we should do Jared Isaacman and, and the space update. But first, I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami?

• 1:43:59Delian Asparouhov?

  There is something a little surreal about like, there's sets of people right now tweeting about Miami. We're like the people probably like most strongly critiquing it in 2021. I'd say there's something surreal about being like, huh, like maybe I was like, you know, like right idea, slightly wrong time, just needed to wait for like California, not just to get hit with COVID, but become like, you know, communistic basically and start seizing property. And that's gonna be the thing that convinces people.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  On the Miami thing, what do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sand Hill Road to Miami? Like all the big GPs will be domiciled there. And yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco. A lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors, the academic institutions, like the, you're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as an important tech hub.

• 1:44:56Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think if there's like something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed to Miami the most, you know, call it 21 through 24.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:02Delian Asparouhov?

  I do think that it established itself as like a fundraising destination, absolutely. Between like everybody from like, you know, Dan Senheim at D1, Ken Griffin from Citadel, you know, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, et cetera. Like, you know, has now very much so become a destination where, yeah, if you're raising a later-stage round, or you're even like, you know, not Peter-level GP, but like, you know, up-and-coming.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  I mean, also, also you have Keith, Catherine, Sax, like, there were, there were, it wasn't just FF that, like, there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly. You know, obviously, that evolved.

• 1:45:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think it's just like it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of, where like now the other, like, you know, sort of second wind that's happening because it's like California, you know, sort of regulation. I think it's like clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself in it, and I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways, right? Like, you know, Francis Suarez would always say, like, look, ultimately what we're best at is like the capital of capital.

• 1:45:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:57Delian Asparouhov?

  And I think that is like, you know, you know.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  That's one of our taglines, if you refer to.

• 1:46:03Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, yeah, right, I forgot.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  But he can use it, it's fine. Give us the update on Jared Isaacman. Take us through how you process the news and what you're excited for in 2026.

• 1:46:14Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, he's obviously, you know, early on, I think it's been like, you know, sort of two weeks since, you know, sort of confirmation. There hasn't been any like super broad policy announcement yet, yet. But the place where he started to drop some news actually just been like via his Twitter profile, which has been a fun place to, you know, sort of follow along.

• 1:46:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, or X profile.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Delian Asparouhov?

  Probably my favorite one is, there's a program called Dragonfly that NASA's been working on for a while, which is basically this, so the first time that we ever flew a helicopter on a, you know, non-Earth planet, was on Mars with Ingenuity, I believe it was called, which is this helicopter that we got on Mars. Sort of related to that, it's, you know, a different program, but it's a program called Dragonfly, where it's roughly like a small car-sized vehicle that is meant to fly on Titan. Titan is one of the, oh god, and I should not mess it up, but it's one of the, what's it called? Moons of Saturn, either Saturn or Jupiter. You know, I'm a big enough space geek that I should know. But what's cool about it is Titan both has four times the density of atmosphere as Earth does,

• 1:47:17Delian Asparouhov?

  but also basically seven times less gravity. And so with the combination of the two, you basically make it like thirty times easier to fly. And so you and I could literally just like be on the surface of Titan and literally basically just like wear some wings. And like if you just ran like relatively quickly, like you don't have to even be Usain Bolt, like even at our level of fitness. Basically just go and flap our wings and like we would basically start flying. And with like a little bit of like exoskeleton or anything like that, you could a hundred percent like fly as much as you want. And so Dragonflies is like small car sized, like flying car basically with like a nuclear battery onboard. The program had been like, you know, definitely a little bit behind schedule, behind budget, et cetera. But like, you know, Jared basically came out very publicly on Twitter being like, this is one of my favorite programs. This is the type of like bleeding edge science that like NASA should be doing.

• 1:48:00Delian Asparouhov?

  And so I do love that he's kind of leaning into like, you know, I don't know, you know, my dream job would absolutely like the one thing that would make me like upend my entire life and quit everything would be like, if I was offered NASA administrator, I think I would do that immediately. And if that was, you know, if I was in the job right now, like, yeah, I think the thing that we should be doing is like NASA should be doing just like the crazy bleeding edge like, stuff that just like no private company is gonna do, like a fucking like flying car on Titan is just like, objectively like insane, but like there's a world where they're gonna be able to basically like live stream and you know, or like stream basically like video of this like car going around Titan and like, you know, flying through dunes and stuff like that. It's like so, so, you know, sort of cool. And then on the flip side, you know, you know, they've like figured out how to just like, you know, really focus on the commercial private market for like the things that are much more near term and what the commercial industry is capable of.

• 1:48:46Delian Asparouhov?

  So I don't know if you guys saw, but I tweeted this that, you know, basically this year, we're gonna have four separate totally net new commercial lunar landers, basically land on the moon this year. It's intuitive machines has one, Astrobotic has one, Blue Origin has one. And the fourth one, no, it's not SpaceX, they don't actually have a plan for this year. Firefly, duh.

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, Firefly.

• 1:49:12Delian Asparouhov?

  And you know, for its worth, the like Blue Origin, you know, Mark One lander is like the size of like, it's like a two story house. It's like, it's gonna be the biggest manmade object that we've like ever landed on the moon. And I will say like, You know, until a quarter ago, I was probably a little more skeptical that like, you know, Blue Origin was actually gonna like land this thing. Now it's like, you know, you see that the new Glenn is actually like launching, landing. It's like, man, they maybe have like really turned a corner on like, you know, their engineering is in systems. But the, the cool thing is like, even if Blue Origin F's it up, there's also like three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it or getting like paid basically like commercial revenues to go do this. And to me, it's just like this like breakout year that I still think is like, I don't know, underpaid attention to and under discussed like, you know, this is the analogy that I tried to provide is like,

• 1:49:53Delian Asparouhov?

  this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just like, you have like the, you know, basically a year before where it's like, I don't know if you know, but in February, uh, we're gonna be sending, uh, humans basically back to the moon for the first time. Not on the surface, but to like orbit the moon. So like that's going to the moon, four different landers basically on the moon. It's like all in preparation for, if that all goes well. There's like a really, you know, decent likelihood that like next year, we both have like boots on the moon and like, 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that, which is just like, I don't know, 15 year old Dalian would just be like, so, yeah, so excited.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  We gotta sponsor the biggest moon landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They gotta go up there. We gotta just put them on the moon, uh, settle it once and for all. Uh, Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on. He thinks that it's not gonna happen.

• 1:50:37Jordi Hays?

  What kind of evidence would, would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally determine that it's real?

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  Finally believe it.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding. Uh, I put on the, I put on the, I put on the tinfoil hat for another thing. Uh, uh, uh, Trump's been going pretty hard on Fentanyl, trying to stop it from coming into the country. At the same time, you've seen an explosion of Chinese peptides. Do you have any concern that this is a, this is all just a big psy op and we're trying to get a generation of people in the United States to just inject themselves with like?

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Maybe they're putting tinfoil in the peptides.

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, random research chemicals. People don't realize, you were saying you've lost a bunch of weight just by being a Chad, no peptides needed. I get a little concerned because every, it feels like in the last two weeks, you have, everybody's like, oh, I guess I've gotta be doing peptides. And it's like, this, like the, the source and the purity of these things matters so much. You're injecting these things into your blood. This is not something that you just wanna mess around and find some random Chinese website and just hope that they're, the test results that they have on the site are, are actually real.

• 1:51:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I will say, um, you know, I, uh, you know, regret taking the, you know, sort of, uh, you know, co-vaccine and not sure that like, you know, for my, um, you know, age and health, um, it was the, you know, right risk reward. I am definitely, you know, not yet ready to start injecting my body into a bunch of peptides. Who knows? You know, they've got some nano markers on there where the Chinese release a virus. It's like specific to those peptides and they've designed it. The, um, yeah, I'll, I'll provide kind of like an example of this about how paranoid the Chinese are. So the tinfoil for like Xi Jinping, he had this meeting in, uh, two thousand and twenty-three with Biden in San Francisco. If you guys remember when like they came and like cleaned everything up for like the Xi Jinping visit and there's a bunch of like memes around that. Um, after a like sit down meeting that they had, like, I think it was like down in like Monterey or

• 1:52:23Delian Asparouhov?

  something like that, a like Chinese official after the meeting came by and sprayed basically, uh, uh, everything that like Xi Jinping had touched, um, everything that like, you know, he'd put his lips on to like, you know, sort of drink. Um, and, uh, the like, you know, US official basically asked him like, hey, like, you know, what is the thing that you just use or sprayed? Reasonable question asked. And it was a basically like a DNA degrader, uh, because they were so worried about the idea of like somebody in America having Xi Jinping's DNA and then potentially optimizing a virus that is like super specific and optimized for him. And so the Chinese are thinking about like, you know, DNA specific viruses. Makes you think like, you know, they might be designing DNA or like peptides, basically, you know, viruses that are targeting, you know, sort of individuals or groups. So, um, anyways, yeah.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy. I was thinking, I was thinking he was worried about us cloning Xi Jinping and then he's fighting himself, a younger version of himself. And he's, oh no, the new US president. I hate him, but he's my own question blood.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Negotiation. It's just Xi, Trump.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  And then the younger Xi Jinping. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of Xi Jinping's just storming the beaches.

• 1:53:28Jordi Hays?

  How did you process, uh, the, uh, the, the true social posts about the potential salary cap?

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  Salary cap.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and the budgets?

• 1:53:37Delian Asparouhov?

  Just, you know, incredible to have him as the, you know, sort of commander in chief, somebody that's like a actually willing to like, you know, crack the whip on this stuff where it's just like, yeah, like, why should these companies be optimized for like shareholder returns and like executive salaries rather than like making sure that they're delivering for the warfighter? And it's crazy to me that it's not like, you know, he like did the broad industry thing and then like, I don't know if you saw, but he like specifically then started calling out Wraith Yon where he's just like, they are not like responding to feedback, they're not delivering enough and like, you know, went down to the individual logo and so, um, yeah, I think it's like, you know, sort of, you know, yeah, uh, incredible piece of, you know, sort of policy and like, you know, bold commander in chief and like, um, you know,

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think right now it's an incredible post.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  It should get into policy, right?

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but that's the nature of these things. Like we saw this with Intel.

• 1:54:17Delian Asparouhov?

  Well, it doesn't have to be like some direction policy. It can just be like, you know, you know, subtle acquisition policy where it's just like, I mean, you know, Secretary Hagseth could go implement, you know, who he wants to buy from without asking Congress permission, so.

• 1:54:28John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, okay. So even if it's just directional, it doesn't need to be new law. It doesn't need to be an executive order to have an effect, to have an effect on the stock price. But of course, the defense tech stocks actually mooned because the, because the defense budget is potentially going up by 50%. Do you have a read on this? How big this will be for the industry? Is this a boon for startups in defense tech? Or do you think that, you know, the, the, the big primes of the world will just like quickly get their act together and then go Hoover up a lot of that new budget?

• 1:54:58Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there are going to be a set, you know, that are like leaning in, like, um, you know, one of the examples, I think, uh, I think it's like BAE has like, you know, done a whole set of like startup collaborations where like, I think they have like a collaboration with like Applied Intuition on one of their ground vehicles, like, you know, they have like, uh, something with Merlin, I want to say on like one of their like, you know, basically like airplanes that they build, I don't know if they go back and look, but I remember like reading through one of their like, you know, quarterly earnings calls or like, you know, maybe there's like a tectonic, like the, you know, defense newsletter articulated like all the various partnerships they had. And it's like, yeah, they clearly are recognizing like they have things that they're good at. They're make, they're good at like making the ground vehicle and the frame around that and the wheels that are, they just like have a whole manufacturing line, et cetera. They're not as good at like, like the avionics, the software, the automation, et cetera. And so like they're leaning in on startups. There's clearly primes like that that I think are like

• 1:55:40Delian Asparouhov?

  really leaning in and very forward. And then you have ones that like clearly seem to think like, oh, this is just like a total fad. Like, you know, the like, you know, Trump administration isn't going to really push on this. And so, yeah, I think it's like a huge opportunity for both the primes that are leaning in and appreciating that they need to like actually be much more aggressive, you know, invest more in R and D, partner more with startups. I think it's great for like, obviously like the neo-primes. And it's just, there's a huge opportunity where it's like, I think if you add up basically like SpaceX, Enroll, everybody, all the neo-primes basically found in the last, you know, basically like, you know, 15 years, they still represent basically like less than like 1% of the total, you know, basically DOW budget. And so there's still a ton of upside from some of the big guys basically stumbling. Um, so, yeah, yeah, I think, uh, you know, the ratings of the world are definitely not reacting as well, but it's time to say that

• 1:56:23Delian Asparouhov?

  like every prime is getting caught totally flat footed. Like some are definitely, you know, reacting to this new environment.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, it's one PM. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  This was great.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time as always.

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Only 179 appearances to go.

• 1:56:37Delian Asparouhov?

  179 more to go, baby. 99 years on the wall.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Let's go. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Happy 2026. See you. Up next, we have Arun Gupta, the founder and CEO at Stickerbox Happy Co. The Creativity First AI product went viral over the break and I'm excited to talk to him. He is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPM Ultra down in Maroon. How are you doing?

• 1:57:03Speaker 08

  Good to have you here. Great to be here.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  Uh, could you please kick us off? This is the first time on the show with an introduction on yourself and the company and just some of the background here?

• 1:57:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Arun. I'm the co-founder of Happy Go along with my good friend, Bob Whitney. Um, previously I was in Y Combinator back in 2009, uh, same batch of Stripe.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Wow. Amazing.

• 1:57:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, I actually dropped out of Yale, um, in the middle of my junior year. Um, and six months later was lucky enough to get in, talk to Paul Graham, um, a weekly basis. It was amazing.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Okay, let's let, let's actually just dig in there since we have some time. What were you building in 2009? What was the mood on the ground at YC in 2020, uh, in 2009?

• 1:57:49Speaker 08

  So we were actually one of the very first hardware startups. A lot of it was, you know, Reddit had just happened, Airbnb match right before us.

• 1:57:58Speaker 08

  You know, there are a lot of B2B stuff, a lot of consumer things. We built a personal sleep tracker. So it was a wristband that you wore while you slept. And it used sleep science called actigraphy to track your sleep cycles and wake you up at the right time in the morning. So back when Fitbit and Jawbone were like doing their whole thing.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you were so early.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  You were so early.

• 1:58:18Jordi Hays?

  So early. I mean, it must be, had been painful to see Aura and Whoop and basically have like the right, have the right idea and, and what?

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the blocker? Was it supply chain or distribution? Like, I mean, I went through YC in 2012, first company, first idea, same thing, where a lot of it like wound up getting built by someone else years later. But what was your experience like if you were to do the postmortem?

• 1:58:46Speaker 08

  Honestly, for us, it was big data. So back in 2009, everybody who worked on big data worked in biotech or worked on Wall Street. So you couldn't really hire them away unless you had a ton of money. And all the money is in data analysis, right? So like Whoop or Aura, they're analyzing tons and tons of data points and giving you all this information about how you can live better, eat better, be more healthy. And we just didn't have that. So the business really flies when you have a subscription that works. But without big data analysis, it's really hard to build a subscription that works.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy. I remember 2009 was like the dawn of Hadoop and like distributed systems that you had to orchestrate. It was like, it was like doing a multi-training LLM AI infrastructure. Like you couldn't just be like, put all the data in one database and like Google handles it or AWS handles it or MongoDB handles it. Like you.

• 1:59:34Speaker 08

  And like non-relational databases became a thing.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. All these, we take them so much for granted now, but back then it was such a pain to orchestrate anything. You're, you're, you're running like true infrastructure just to do like basic stuff by now, by, by today's terms. Fascinating. Yeah. So, so, so what led you to start this company? When did you start this company? What were you doing in the interim?

• 1:59:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, so after my YC company gracefully shut down, I started another company called Grail.com. And Grail was basically a fashion-

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  You started Grail?

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  With the fashion company?

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  That's so, that's so cool.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Okay, this is amazing. Wow.

• 2:00:14Jordi Hays?

  We do a lot of guests. We don't always have time to do, we don't always have time to do research. But on your printout, Grail didn't make it in. I've used Grail for a decade now.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:00:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, I started Grail in 2013 in my bedroom in San Francisco.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:00:33Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Were you a collector of like fashion items? Yeah?

• 2:00:38Speaker 08

  Big time, big time.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  What were you into back then? What was the first product?

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever wear Chrome Hearts to an investor pitch?

• 2:00:47Speaker 08

  No, I never wore it to an investor pitch. When I went to see the investors, I was wearing more Laura Piana.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:00:55Speaker 08

  Right? You know, that's the vibe.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  And that's still like quite five years before Chamath starts introducing it to the valley via the All In Podcast. That's fantastic.

• 2:01:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. No, back in the day, it was really about like workwear and like raw denim. And then it became really big through collabs. So there was like an H and M Balman collab that was really big. There was the Yeezys that dropped. There was all the Nikes that dropped. And then Supreme obviously had their massive moment. But no, I was really into like all the OG Raf Simmons stuff. Actually, if you remember ASAP Rocky did a video, I forget what the song was called, like, "Please don't touch my raft." And in that video, he's wearing, there's like three of my personal collection pieces in that video.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  That's crazy. What was, so what, what was the, what was the like the customer acquisition funnel at that time? And I'm interested to hear how, I've heard a lot of founders talk about, you know, if they got started years ago, they were maybe doing like Minecraft bots. A lot of people were doing like sniping for sneaker drops, sneaker bots. Did that play a role? Was there an automated portion or was it mostly organic? Like walk me through some of the trends that were happening at the time.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Time with Grail. And then I promise we will get to sticker box. That's why I want to talk to you, but this is

• 2:02:12Speaker 08

  It's the most exciting. Sticker box is the most exciting part. But yeah, Grail, um, really, it was all about community. Honestly, from day one, it was a community and all the way through until the end. Um, cause we were like very heavily focused on men's versus women. So it was about 70, 30 men's versus women's. And at the time in 2013, people were like, do men even wear clothes? And I'm like, yes, they're people. Obviously they're right. They wear clothes. Uh, but men's fashion was like not a thing at all. Um, so we were able to sort of like ride that wave. Um, and see sort of like

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Basically riding the Instagram

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Wave in some, in some ways, like that had to be, be the biggest catalyst.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, I talked, I used to talk a lot about how people, when you were like, hey, what are you into? People will be like, oh, I'm into like Nirvana or like Radiohead. And then when you're like, what are you into there? I'm like, I'm into Noah or like Supreme or like Jill Son, something like that. Right? So it's like your personal aesthetic became more defined by the clothes you wore because we became such a visual society through Instagram rather than the music you listen to, uh, which was more maybe of like a MySpace, um, you know, OG, uh, type thing.

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  And there, and, and you guys had, uh, people building real businesses on the platform. I, I have, uh, my, my, uh, oldest friend, uh, teamed up with a college buddy of mine, unrelated to me, and started selling on Grail, ended up building, uh, their own brand called No Maintenance that, uh, that, that's now, you know, thriving. Uh, but they got their start just reselling. That's how they made, generated the revenue that they needed to actually do their own inventory run. So, uh,

• 2:03:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, made their own boutique. A lot of fashion designers too. Uh, I think Reese Cooper probably, uh, you know, started out on, building out.

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  There's a, there's a viewer in the chat that says, I bought my first pair of Rick Owens dunks from Grail. This is so cool. Salute.

• 2:03:55Speaker 08

  That's awesome.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh,

• 2:03:58Speaker 08

  Now they're like 70 grand.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 2:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hopefully still holding them.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  So then, yeah, take me through the, the idea to get back in the arena for the third time. Uh, when did you start the company? Was this post chat GPT moment? I mean, I, I, I feel like we've talked about this on the show, like there is such an opportunity for interesting businesses here in the Age of AI, but doing

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  And I was always saying, everybody wanted to build these AI hardware devices for adults.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm like, I have a phone. It is an AI hardware device.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  They don't market it that way, but I mean, Apple kind of does. But I was like, I don't need another device that like helps me order DoorDash, right?

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  But my kid, I don't want my kids to have, I don't want my have, my kids to have an iPad.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  But creating a product, I always thought like, if you made a product that let, just let kids ask questions.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  Well, the Rabbit R1, the Rabbit R1 came out and they used teenage engineering. It's this beautiful orange package, very cool. But a lot of the reviewers who were adults were like,

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Were just comparing it to their phone.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  Comparing it to my iPhone. And, and, and, and I never got around to actually buying one and giving it to my four-year-old. But I was thinking that like, it feels like a great kid's toy. And then there is still the narrative of like, great technology, start as toys. So I always thought it was a great market to go after. But what was your inspiration?

• 2:05:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I can take zero credit for creating the sticker box. It was all my co-founder, Robert Whitney. He is the original inventor, along with his son, who helped him basically co-develop the device. And basically, the story is pretty classic. You know, son was like, hey, I want a coloring book of tigers eating ice cream. And he was like, oh, I don't have that, but I can just print it off, you know, in an image generator and then you can color it. And then he's like, okay, great. I'm going to print that and then color it. And then he's like, now I want lizards riding skateboards. And then he prints lizards riding skateboards. And then you see this magic moment go off in the kid's head and they're like, wait, I can say anything? And like, for us, like, we're a little bit more jaded, I think, you know, we're like, oh, yeah, AI, LLMs, it all works.

• 2:05:54Speaker 08

  For a kid, they're like, I just came up with this idea and not only do I see it, now I can hold it in my hand and color it.

• 2:06:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was with my three-year-old yesterday using an image model. And he said, in his words, he was like, it's like magic.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, and and and I think the physical aspect is is just it's so important. When I I I use image generators with my son and I have air print and I will print the photo even though I'm running out of ink left and right. Because the, you know, full page color photo, it just goes out really quickly. But it's amazing and it's way different than just being like, oh, here's a Ghibli of your toys. To be like, here's the thing that you can put on your wall. You can enjoy.

• 2:06:38Speaker 08

  Physical representation is huge.

• 2:06:39John Coogan?

  Or or color it in. Like, it's a coloring book now. Like, there's so many cool things you can do.

• 2:06:43Speaker 08

  Put it on your notebook, on your water bottle. But I think that's what my co-founder Bob really understood is that this physical representation, these physical stickers are just what's so powerful for children. And it really is such an imagination accelerant. You know, it's like, these ideas, they they're in my head, but then once they come out of my head onto paper, he was like, wow, this really transforms what they're able to do.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  And there's two, there's two sides to this. There's like the cynical, be a good parent, no screen time, like print stuff out. That's better from like fighting the iPad cake thing. And that's true. There's a lot of evidence of that. That's a good thing. But if come, you come to it with like a negativity of like, I'm avoiding a bad outcome. So I feel like I'm taking my vegetables. But I just think that like there, there are, there's like a Lindy, like a beautiful thing about texture and physical things.

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have, we have like an old, like, it's not a Polaroid camera, but it's this really bad digital camera that then will print out kind of pictures on it. So I, one thing I like about sticker boxes, it's not like these kind of products haven't existed. It's just like integrating.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, putting it all together.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  New technology into it and it's a form factor.

• 2:07:48Speaker 08

  And that's the G, right? My co-founder brought the product to my house. He had already built it. He had it in a cardboard box. It looked awesome. And I look at it in one second and I'm like, it's all about how you put this together, right? It's like, not like these things didn't exist. It's all about your product sense. And basically like how you intuitively were like, this is the right kind of product for a kid. Autonomous, self, you know, serve stickers, lasting, physical pieces. Pretty magical stuff. But we like to say that the, it's an AI product. And like you said, AI for kids and AI hardware for kids is amazing, more magical. But we like to say that the AI itself disappears behind the magic of the device.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:08:29Speaker 08

  Because it's really not about the AI. It's about the idea. Like, the idea is the hero, the sticker is the hero. It's not the device or the screen that are the hero. It's the kid's imagination that becomes the hero of the story.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  So talk about the prototype. It sounds like your co-founder did all the hard work. He's the workhorse, you're the show pony, apparently. We'll give him all the credit in the world.

• 2:08:49Speaker 08

  That's a good fact.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  But it, but it, but it, it seems like he was a tinkerer, hacker, was able to whip something up pretty quickly. I imagine like, are, are, are, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, like, are there wires everywhere?

• 2:08:58Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  And then, and then, do you go to a co-packer or a manufacturer? Uh, is this something that's like pretty turnkey and there's a solid ecosystem around? Or was it a long, uh, multi-year process to actually get the first one made with high quality?

• 2:09:12Speaker 08

  It was difficult, you know, because like, these things are thermal printers, right? So he came with like the idea fully formed and like a lot of it already baked. But to turn from a prototype to a production product that, you know, our Christmas load was insane, you know, just the amount of kids unboxing on Christmas and then hitting the servers, like, he was stressed. I'm like, you know, rightly so. Um, but to get there, it's, it's difficult because when you think about it, this thermal printer, it's meant to print receipts. It's meant to print text on receipts. It's not meant to print images. And if you look at the fidelity of the images that's being happening, it's like, think something like 300 DPI, like on the image, it looks beautiful. You know, and like, that is sort of like a little bit of our secret sauce is, hey, we're able to make these images look really great through a combination of many different things.

• 2:09:55Speaker 08

  Uh, but that's something that he was able to do really, really well. Uh, and something that we had to work with, uh, custom, honestly, with the factories, um, to try to get them to, to make it happen. So.

• 2:10:05Jordi Hays?

  And you're sold out. You're sold out. I, I just bought one while you were, uh, uh, here with us. Thank, thank, uh, thanks to Shopify, it makes it really easy to check out. But, uh, it's going to get delivered in February. It's been selling like crazy. You guys are just trying to keep this thing in, in stock?

• 2:10:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we had a ton of units available for Christmas shipping. Those went in like two weeks or less. And then we just kept selling. Like, we had the December 28th ship date, those sold out in like a few days. January 6th ship date, sold out in a few days. Then we had a February 17th ship date, and I was like, February 17th, it's like not even, it's like a month and a half away. Those all sold out. Now we're in February 24th. So can't keep this thing in stock. But we're ramping up manufacturing, and we're gonna do our best so everybody can get one.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  So is the 2026 strategy really get solid on the supply chain so you can scale a ton? And then are you focused on like ruthless ramping of digital ads? Or are you more likely to go, let's get Walmart, let's get Target? Because I can imagine it's selling really well on both, but you probably don't want to do both as an early-stage startup at the same time. You want to be, really have your ducks in a row, right?

• 2:11:19Speaker 08

  Yeah. It's sort of a classic trap that startups get into where Target is like, yeah, we'll buy a million units, we'll buy 2,000 units. And then they spit on the shelves because you don't have the marketing to support them. So you kind of have to ramp up appropriately. So for us right now, really, it's like, we've got this core image to sticker generation loop down cold. Where do we go from there? You know, kids are making characters. Like, some kids have this like Stickman and Cappy Barrett character, and they go on adventures over and over again. So like, let's let them name that character and then reuse it. Let's let them send that character to their friend's box. Let's let them upload their own likeness into the box and say, hey, let me do me and my mom on a picnic in the moon, or like me riding a dinosaur, or what have you. And like, basically what these kids are doing

• 2:12:03Speaker 08

  is, what we feel like is we're basically enabling the next generation of storytellers, right? So the next Spielberg, the next Ryan Coole, or the next Miyazaki, they're growing up with the sticker boxes, they're like imagination accelerant, and it's letting them tell these like little graphic novels or little stories where they're reusing these characters and they're basically developing their own IP. So leaning more into that and creating more features for them. And honestly, I think the other thing that we are just so happy about is How it brings families together because it's for kids, obviously, but like it's really fun to use, you know? And like the nice thing is is like when it's like I'm like at the thing at the table, you know? And like the dad is like in the background and like hovering and then he's like, you know, let me do one. And then like, you know, the uncle or the mom or the cousin are like all coming together.

• 2:12:48Speaker 08

  And they're like, oh, you did that? Let me try to remix your dragon and make it like a metal dragon. Let me make your metal dragon breathe fire. Let me make it breathe fire in a volcano. Uh, so it really brings everybody together. So I think focusing more on these sort of like whole family experiences as well as the single player sort of like experience with the individual kid as well. Is something that we're, uh, my co-founder is really focused on. Um, it's something he really believes passionately in is, uh, using it to bring people together. And as a really positive activity for parents and kids, uh, to do.

• 2:13:18Jordi Hays?

  What have you guys done on the, on the pay like on, on the actual material side? I know, you know, people are, uh, very afraid of receipts. I don't, I personally don't.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  You can put out a post about.

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't touch receipts. I saw you guys have avoided, uh, like BPA and BPS. But maybe talk about some of the decision making there.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:39Speaker 08

  This was another thing that was really difficult. Um, so BPA and BPS are, uh, obviously a hot button topic. But if you produce paper, thermal paper, uh, and you test it, often there are trace amounts of BPA and BPS in the paper. Uh, and for us, that wasn't good enough, you know? I was like, just because it's below the California proposition 65 limit doesn't mean that it's, you know, BPA or BPA completely free.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, limits are not safety.

• 2:14:05Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. And for us, it's like, it's a kid's product. It's safety from the ground up, everything from the images that are generated to everything that happens with the device. So you can touch all these stickers. There is no BPA, no BPS. We tested in batches from the factory. It was really difficult to do. It actually delayed our launch by a full. Four or five weeks. We could have launched four or five weeks earlier if we were willing to accept sort of like this trace element of BPA, uh, BPS in the paper. But we were like, no, we like refused to release this.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  That's gonna be a good, that's gonna be a good angle because I imagine you guys are already getting copied by a bunch of different manufacturers.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  There'll be so many knockoffs, I'm sure.

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, yeah, you can use the knockoffs, but are, you know, the kids.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Do you know there's a guarantee? Uh, talk about safety with regard to image generation. Obviously, some of these images.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna try to jailbreak it, just fair warning.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Put that dragon in a bikini. Uh, let's not have that happen. Uh, we want the dragon breathing fire. I want to know about what models you like, how model agnostic you are, because I imagine that if you, even if you just change the model to something better, even if the style looks better, you're like, well, that doesn't look like the dragon I'm used to generating. So there's some sort of like lock in there. At the same time, you might be optimizing for cost. How are you thinking about the software side?

• 2:15:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. Um, and for us, it's like, it's really a product for kids, right? And I think chat GPT, when you do image generation, it wants to make everything look sexy. Um, that's kind of the bias, right? You even upload your own photo. It's like, it wants to make you look super buff, like you're a superhero.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Well, that's because I put that in my, in my prompt by default. It has to, or else it's, uh, it's a, but yes, it looks very like polished, refined, smooth skin. It looks, it's a glow up filter. There's something going on there. Uh, and, and those, those system prompts matter.

• 2:15:50Speaker 08

  Safety is number one, you know, so it's, uh, it's basically a multi-factor system. So we have a patent, uh, for the sticker box device itself, but we're actually also working on a patent right now for safety in the sticker box system. And it goes all the way through from the text, all the way through to after the image is generated. So when you say the text, we analyze the text for safety. We remove bad words, uh, analyze the prompt for, you know, how likely it is to generate something safe or unsafe. Then we go through an enhancement process where the sticker is steered towards being something geared for a child. So it's actually rewritten in some different ways.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:24Speaker 08

  Uh, in order to do that, then we generate the image and I'm oversimplifying a little bit here. And then even after we generate the image, then there's post-image generation checks and those post-image generation checks are on. I don't even know how many variables, right? There's, you know, all the sorts of bad things like hate speech and nudity and silence and, you know, all sorts of different things. And we basically have all these confidence intervals and scores that go into it. But it's this huge system, like you think about airplanes, right? And airplanes are like this complicated system of like many, many, many checks overlapping with each other. And that's what creates like the robust safety system. Uh, it's a similar system here, right? Where we have many, many, many checks at basically every area of the process because the last thing we want um is for a kid to get something that's unsafe or for a parent to question it.

• 2:17:09Speaker 08

  Like for us, our big mission is what if AI were built for kids? And I think that the boogeyman in our heads is that social media was not built for kids. Social media was built for adults. Grok was not built for kids. Grok was not built for kids. I mean, chat, AI is not built for kids. It's built for businesses, right? It's built for adults and it's built for businesses. But for us, we're like, what if we could just reimagine AI completely and just say, okay, what if this was built for kids? And that's why we didn't put a chat bot and a teddy bear. That's why we made a sticker image generator, right? It was a completely different direction.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  So talk about latency with all those checks. Uh, I imagine none of this is happening on the device. You're going to the wifi, to the cloud, to your servers, uh, hydrating the text with an LLM. That's not super fast. Then generating an image isn't super fast. Then sending that back down to the box and printing it, that's not super fast. Uh, how fast do you think you can get this? Do you want to do it on device at some point? Um, do you, how, and then what user experience sort of tricks are you using to make the latency and the lag tolerable?

• 2:18:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, so great questions. Um, it's actually really fast, um, mostly because of the work that my co-founder Bob and his great engineering team have done. Wait, you have Bob?

• 2:18:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, Bob is.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Bob Whitney?

• 2:18:31Speaker 08

  Bob Whitney, yeah.

• 2:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Bob the Builder? Let's go. Incredible, incredible nominative determinism.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  I wonder where you're going with that.

• 2:18:38Speaker 08

  I mean, there's not a better moniker, honestly.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  That's a great, great omen.

• 2:18:42Speaker 08

  I think I'm the sticker. I might be, I might be off by a couple of seconds here too, but I think time to sticker is like six to eight seconds.

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, so pretty quick.

• 2:18:49Speaker 08

  You get the sticker in like six to eight seconds and that's with all of the content moderation.

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Speaker 08

  Everything you do there. But one of the nice tricks that you mentioned, right?

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. And because you're not doing like ChatGPT level HD 4K, it's probably faster to actually generate the image.

• 2:19:04Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:06Speaker 08

  But I think the other thing that you said that's really interesting is, once you say it, right? You say it and then it hears it and then it displays your text on the screen. And that's a nice moment. That's an intermediary moment that makes it feel not as slow, right? Or it makes it feel faster because you're like, I just said this thing. Whoa, there it is on the screen. I'm reading it back.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Seeing the words and then you're probably seeing the image.

• 2:19:27Speaker 08

  Yeah. And then there's a pregnant pause, basically, and then the image comes in. But that moment between saying what you have, seeing it on the screen and that like, like just slight delay to when the image comes out, because it appears on the screen and then prints basically at the same time.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Speaker 08

  It's like a lot of suspense.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44Speaker 08

  And it's basically like relief that happens kind of in your head, right? Like, it's like when a joke lands, you know? It's like you have something happening, happening, happening, and then there's the punchline.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:53Speaker 08

  So there's this sort of tension that's built up like in the process. Um, and then it lands and it's just, it feels really good because you're like, oh my God, I said that and now it's real.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:20:03Speaker 08

  So, yeah.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you have a background at Grailed. Can we expect any sticker box fashion partnerships? I want the Bottega weave version of the sticker box. I want the Chrome hearts. I want, you know, full, full.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  That'd be really good.

• 2:20:17Jordi Hays?

  I want something I can, you know, leave on, on the table and.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I am interested, like, do you, do you see yourself more, uh, expanding vertically or horizontally? Do you think you might be like a multi-product toy company? Or more of like a camera and printer company that maybe, uh, winds up making a device that's delightful for an analog photographer who goes on photography trips and wants to print things quickly. Uh, do you see yourself focusing on a particular demographic over time or expanding one way or the other?

• 2:20:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think right now we're really focused on AI for kids. So like, what does that look? And in terms of like multi-devices, we obviously have tons of ideas, you know, um, a really fun space to be in. But I think that there's just so much gold inside of this creation machine.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:04Speaker 08

  Right? So it's like, kids maybe not, might not be the best illustrators. They may not be able to be animators, right? They might be able to use Photoshop or whatever super well, but they can still bring their ideas to life with the AI. They can still print them. So I think focusing more on creativity and investing more in the sticker box is definitely where we're going for the time being.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Imagine a 3D printer.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Do a, do a, do a $2 billion, do a $2 billion training run for your own model.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29Speaker 08

  It's not gonna cost that much.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  I've heard enough. Give him $2 billion.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Do you think you'll wind up fine tuning and running a custom model or some open source, uh, like fine tuned on some optimized hardware? Or, or is the cost just doesn't matter?

• 2:21:44Speaker 08

  Definitely this year, my, uh, my co-founder Bob is very interested in creating our own model. So definitely from the ground up on our own model with our own training data. Because when you talk about safety, that is the number one holy grail, you know, not to put a pun on it. Um, like you want the training data to be completely safe and that way the model can't generate anything that's.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:22:02Speaker 08

  And that's what really matters.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  And then in terms of, in terms of like the business model, obviously it feels like razor and blade model because you're buying the box, but then you're also buying ink and paper and that's how you make money. Or do you have a subscription as well?

• 2:22:14Speaker 08

  Yeah. So there's no ink. It's all thermal printing. So it's all just black and white. Um, so there aren't the paper refills. Um, but we want people to use the device. So we're kind of just pushing as much paper at people as possible. It's a very, very cheap, um, or like, you know, we're not, we're not trying to make a lot of money off of it right now. We want people to use the device. Um, so you get, uh, let's see, 200 stickers for $6, um, which is pretty good. Um, and free shipping on all of those stickers for everybody who's watching. So if you buy stickers off our site, it ships for free and you can buy as many as you want. Um, and then, yeah, we're trying to put more features in. So like, let's say like you have a box and I have a box, I send you my tiger character, my tiger astronaut, and you use my tiger astronaut in your box and maybe we make a story together.

• 2:22:59Speaker 08

  And my tiger astronaut and your wizard go into the castle and then we go underwater or we do these things. So like basically creating more features for people to create together, for them to create more with each other and just do more sort of like. More ideas and more, um, more, more intellectual property and more content, basically creation.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Ken, Ken in the X chat says, what about licensing deals? Would, would you ever do?

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  We're joking about Supreme and Chrome Hearts, but Disney and stuff, that seems cool.

• 2:23:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, email me.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  Email you, okay.

• 2:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one year exclusive.

• 2:23:32Speaker 08

  ARUN at half a go.com.

• 2:23:34John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:23:34Speaker 08

  ARUN stickerbox.com.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, uh, the, uh, what's it called? The, the Yodo player has a bunch of, uh, cards that you can buy that have specific stories, licensed, uh, music, licensed, uh, uh, short stories that are read aloud. And I could see some sort of partnership there being super lucrative where you can buy this pack and then be able to generate this type of character. That sounds amazing.

• 2:23:57Speaker 08

  That's exactly what we're thinking. Sticker packs, parent companion app. You unlock Teen Ninja Turtles, you unlock Hello Kitty, you unlock whatever you want. Um, and then honestly, let kids create their own stuff, right? If kids create their own dinosaur superhero, let them sell that sticker pack, right? And then their kids can download it as well.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 2:24:16Speaker 08

  But yeah, licensing would be a huge play because it's super fun.

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  I want to see sticker box millionaires. Eight year, eight year olds that just have.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  I mean, Grail had this ecosystem too. Uh, give us the fundraising news. I want to hit the gong. Give us the fundraising news.

• 2:24:29Speaker 08

  Oh yeah. So we raised $7 million. Hit that gong.

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  For the kids, for the kids.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  I'm so glad. I'm so glad this is funded.

• 2:24:39Speaker 08

  We do it for the kids. But yeah, $7 million. Uh, Maveron, who is behind Love Every, which is another Montessori kids product. Uh, they were our lead investor. Uh, and then Beth Ferrera, uh, sorry, we got, we had Jerry Lou from Maveron, um, and Jason Silver. And then we got Beth Ferrera from Serena Ventures, uh, Serena Williams, her fund also put in a significant amount of money into our round. Uh,

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you have kids yet or is Bob carrying all the weight there?

• 2:25:04Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah, Bob, for now, Bob is, but give me six months.

• 2:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Six months. Let's go.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Breaking news here.

• 2:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:25:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, seriously, my wife, I'm sure my wife is watching.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for.

• 2:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so great to meet you. I'm excited. I can't wait to get mine.

• 2:25:21John Coogan?

  What a white pill.

• 2:25:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  And, uh, and good luck with this year. It sounds like it's gonna be a massive one. And, uh, please come back on the show when there's more news. We'd love to chat.

• 2:25:29Speaker 08

  I really appreciate that. We're trying to be a positive force for good. Uh, you know, there's a lot of negativity around AI. And I think for good reasons in a lot of cases, but for us, it's really, um.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Use as much, use as much water in the data center as you want. I'm happy with my electricity bill going up because of this one.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  For this, my electricity bill can go up. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day and have a nice 2026. Goodbye. Our next guest is Julie Bush, the co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises. They recently closed a massive series A. Julie, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:26:06Speaker 09

  Hey, guys. It's so great to be here. I feel like you've had a thousand of my friends on and it's good to finally make the show.

• 2:26:13John Coogan?

  Well, we've literally had some of your friends on. We've had the, we've had Colin from Friends and Family on the show.

• 2:26:18Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  The Friends.

• 2:26:19Speaker 09

  You had Colin.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:21Speaker 09

  Founders Fund is one of our.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  Dylan was on earlier today.

• 2:26:24Speaker 09

  I, I spent a decade at Palantir, so I've.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  Lots of Palantir pals.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:31Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:26:31John Coogan?

  We got all of them. Uh, but for those, since it is your first time on the show, uh, please give us an introduction on yourself and Valinor.

• 2:26:37Speaker 09

  Yeah. So Julie Bush, co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises, and, uh, we're bringing a new business model to defense and national security. You guys know as well as I do that the barriers to entry in this market are so high. And so we've built something really unique. We're an operational holding company to service the long tail problems, the, the unsexy things that nobody is able to go after because the barriers of entry are, are so high. So you're really incentivized to go after the moonshots, like the next generation fighter jets and the golden domes. But there's basically 80% of the, the market that's just untapped.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  So, uh, walk me through operational holding company. Uh, what are you adding to? What are you holding? How old are these companies? How big are they? Uh, what can I compare it to in other pieces, other holding companies that I'd be familiar with?

• 2:27:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, we're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech. Right, and so for us, we're holding product companies. And that's usually software, software to find hardware. We started a little over a year ago, and today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the works, so we're actively working on three more and we likely will add two more before the end of 2026. So we're moving pretty quickly here and we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned autonomous systems to combat casualty care.

• 2:28:07Speaker 09

  So think about parts of the market that are really, really critical, but again, like, there hasn't been innovation there in decades. Yeah.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  So this is an example of a company, like a company that maybe at scale, like, could only ever be a $50 million revenue business if they get every key customer. And so it's hard to, like, raise a lot of money for an opportunity like that and build out some crazy go-to-market team. And so they can partner with you to get that distribution and basically get this platform to make it easier to sell into the government. Am I saying that right? Where am I wrong?

• 2:28:46Speaker 09

  Yes, exactly. Like, we can both build and buy companies. We hold them, we're the majority owners of them. We run, we centralize all the go-to-market and all the operations. And that allows us to move really, really quickly. And then we decentralize engineering and we basically run them like product lines, but they're their own subsidiaries. So we have a ton of flexibility. We're their capital allocator. So, you know, I know you guys also were following defense tech hype, but we're able to get great outcomes for our DMs and the engineering teams in these subsidiaries. Because, you know, they're not out there fundraising, like, they're focused on building a great product and we're basically doing everything else.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine part of the thesis here is you have like hundreds of new defense tech companies and government contractors created. A lot of them will build great products, but maybe not get to the scale where they can, you know, IPO or anything like that. And you can come in and actually provide like an outcome and then the opportunity to actually continue to scale that business. And so maybe like a year or two years from now, there'll be even more opportunities on the buy side.

• 2:29:54Speaker 09

  That's right. That's right. I mean, I, when I think about the market, like, I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say, like, we want to be the most sustainable company in this market, or platform of companies in this market. And, yeah, I think earlier you said, so, um, what about, like, is this, like, are we looking at, like, a $50 million TAM here for this product? I mean, I like to think a lot of what we're working on there, like, hundreds of millions of dollars TAMS behind them. Um, they just don't have to be 10 billion, right? Like, they don't need to be Andorol. They don't need to be Palantir. And right now, everyone's getting pitched to be like, like, I'm the Andorol of X.

• 2:30:39Speaker 09

  I'm the Palantir of Y. And there's really only going to be a handful of those companies.

• 2:30:43John Coogan?

  Speaking of Andorol, are you Adam Porter Price's worst nightmare? Are you guys going up against each other to try and buy companies? Or do you target different market segments so you don't actually run into each other, uh, in back-to-back board meetings when a company is choosing to sell?

• 2:31:00Speaker 09

  No, I mean, I actually see him as a great partner for us. Stekman, you know, sends me lists, things they need, right? So, they could be buyers of our, of our assets. Just like I think the primes could be, like, the other large primes, they need more innovation than Andorol does. Right? Um, just so having APP is, like, brilliant, uh, M and A for Andorol, right? And so, uh, I actually look to him as someone who is, is really important to us. Um, and-

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  So have you guys sold any, any of the businesses yet, or is that a, is that a future?

• 2:31:37Speaker 09

  No, I would say we're, we're a little early for that, right? Um, but I do think, you know, it could be interesting in the next 18 months to see what happens. And, of course, like, each one of these is, is their own individual strategy. And, like, we can hold them, too. And we want to hold them. We, we want, I, I think we can make a lot of these companies profitable really quickly, because we can drive down their operating costs.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you processing sort of the defense tech hype waves? You know, Ukraine happens, everyone wants to talk counter UAS. Uh, Taiwan heats up, everyone wants to talk about, uh, surface vehicles and rebuilding the Navy. And, and those are important projects, but you can get sort of whiplash. Is there, are there, is there, are there real pockets of value when there's a lot of energy and maybe a lot of- Executive orders and Truth Social posts about a category? Or do you want to sort of zoom out and be looking for more opportunities that might become big narrative arcs in the next five years or something like that? How do you think about these defense waves?

• 2:32:39Speaker 09

  I love this question. I, you know, I've been in this market 20 years. I was at Palantir 10 years, built out most of the government business there. I think when there is a crisis or there is a, you know, we, the pandemic was a great example of this, like it does create a different level of action within the government. I think this is part of why, you know, right now at Department of War, it's, it's great to see them putting like sticks and carrots out there because it's creating action without a crisis. I don't think we want to wait till there's a crisis for, you know, us to be in a bad position. But I do think the hype comes in waves and, you know, you can seize it. I think Palantir does a really good job of seizing that. That's something I've really learned there.

• 2:33:23Speaker 09

  And for us, you know, we are looking at things that are timely. There are things we are not going to build or buy right now, just because we know where this administration's priorities are for the next three years. But I do think you want to be ahead of the curve. So we have a product called Dispatch, for example, which is essentially an autonomous power station for unmanned systems. You know, the drone market is like proliferating and drone dominance is a huge program in Department of War, but you can't extend autonomy if you still have personnel in the way that are powering your systems. And so this is like a docking station, just like you would like charge your iPhone for anything on the Blue UAS list. And like, that's a little bit early, but I think like we're going to seize on that because it can be a first mover in that space.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about dual-use technologies? When I look at the legacy primes, almost all of them have wound up, at least with some sort of commercial business. Palantir, obviously famous. Anduril, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around, maybe with a camera on it.

• 2:34:26Jordi Hays?

  They have General Dynamics, they have Gulfstream.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  And it's sort of just, sometimes it just happens over time. Sometimes it feels deliberate and you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the company says, hey, we're going to do this military thing, but then eventually there's this obvious add-on in commercial or oil and gas or something else. Do you think the dual-use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How are you processing the dual-use nature of some of these technologies?

• 2:34:56Speaker 09

  I love this question. I think it's a distraction, honestly. Like, for Palantir, it was critical. And like, really, when you think about Foundry and those platforms, those are meant to be for like, any use case in the world. Like, you know, so the fact that it is dual-use makes sense for them. But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual-use because that means your TAM is so much greater. And again, this is why I think 80% of the government market is like, being left untapped. Because most of the use cases are single-use. And like, honestly, that's really critical, too. And I think if you, your products over time can become dual-use,

• 2:35:39Speaker 09

  even if you are thinking that they have a single-use focus initially. And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual-use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's incredibly difficult. You know, when you think about compliance, you have to like, re-architect your entire platform for it to become Fed Rampai or to meet impact level accreditation status. So I'd much rather see our products, if they, like, they don't have to become dual-use. They can be single-use. And I think the government needs single-use products. But many of them are already dual-use. You know, some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers. And like, that's valuable,

• 2:36:21Speaker 09

  too, because it establishes commerciality. But it has to be focused. Like, your first customers have to be in government in our ecosystem. And I just think dual-use is way overhyped.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  Talk about the fundraising strategy to date.

• 2:36:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, so my seed round was myself, Trey Stevens at Founders Fund, Paul Kwan at General Catalyst, and Grant Verstandig at Redcell Partners, all of which I like deeply trusted, or I never would have done this. Like, I'm a little bit of a unique founder, mom of two. You don't see a lot of defense tech women founders. But, uh, ooh, I like that. Founder. But you know, Trey and Paul and Grant were people I deeply trusted when we started this process, and they've been incredibly supportive of this journey. And I think they recognize the need for a new model in this space. And so, as we've continued our kind of fundraising strategy, it was important to me at the A that we brought in Colin and

• 2:37:23Speaker 09

  kind of Friends and Family Capital, you know, he's OG Palantir CFO, seen what it's like to build a generational defense tech company from the inside, someone I deeply trust. We were executives there together. And I also think they're brilliant capital allocators. And at the end of the day, we fund our companies. We are a capital allocation machine. And so, they've been an awesome partner.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all of the progress.

• 2:37:47Jordi Hays?

  We got a gong. We got a hit for you.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

• 2:37:55Speaker 09

  Thank you, thank you. I'll be back.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you soon.

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on again soon. I'm sure there'll be plenty of news to discuss.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  Sounds great.

• 2:38:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Julie.

• 2:38:04Speaker 09

  Awesome. Thanks, guys.

• 2:38:05John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Next up, we have our Lambda Lightning Round. We got Winston Weinberg, CEO, co-founder of Harvey. Look at this thing.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Oh, I like the sound effect.

• 2:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  Good job.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, we have Yo Tom from Syerra, and then we have Josh Wolfe to cap it off, so.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Winston Weinberg, the CEO and co-founder of Harvey from the Restream Waiting Room, into the TV panel. Winston, good to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:38:34Speaker 10

  Good. I like that cloud.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:38:36Speaker 10

  It's crazy.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  It's powerful.

• 2:38:37Speaker 10

  I want one of those.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  It's powerful.

• 2:38:39Speaker 10

  It's like Thor coming in.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I mean, you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough.

• 2:38:45Jordi Hays?

  No thunder, no lightning.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  No horse or dog.

• 2:38:48Jordi Hays?

  We have a cloud guy.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:50Speaker 10

  This is a huge problem. Yeah, if you guys could hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd be great.

• 2:38:53John Coogan?

  We can.

• 2:38:54Speaker 10

  Thanks. And a blimp guy.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Yes, it's pulsating right now. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  So this was really well timed because we just got our December legal bill. And I love, I love our, I genuinely, our lawyer is like very good friend of mine. I love, love him.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  But he handwrites everything?

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  No, not quite. Not quite. He's being as efficient as he can, but, but, you know, every company has a lot of work. And interestingly, I just, I just feel like legal bills, because they are variable and the work is important. But I just feel like it's always a surprise. The number's always bigger than you expect it to be. And I'm excited to head, head into a world where that bill can be smaller for a lot of companies and get better work.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  So hopefully, I know the work that you're doing is.

• 2:39:46John Coogan?

  But yeah, kick us off with the state of the union. Where is Harvey today?

• 2:39:50Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I started three and a half years ago. So, I mean, God, it's, I think it's felt like every day it either feels like it was yesterday or it was like 50 years, something like that probably. And just kind of oscillating back and forth. Started selling to kind of like very large law firms. Now we've expanded to selling to large corporations as well in mid-market. And what we're really trying to do is kind of have like a operating system that's in between. So it's for all lawyers and it helps them basically provide those services, you know, more cheaply and can do the work faster. I think, to be honest, to your legal bill, and I'm a little laggy. I don't know if that's on me or you.

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  I think that's just the, you're watching the show, so.

• 2:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, I don't, you seem like you're in real time.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look fine to us.

• 2:40:39Speaker 10

  Perfect, I'll take it. I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's gonna not be as expensive, but there will be other type of legal work that you're gonna need done.

• 2:40:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:52Speaker 10

  And so your overall legal bill will probably be the same, but the line items will look different, is my guess of how this goes.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, more, more, more hours spent on the actual high leverage work versus, you know, just generating a documentary there. What changed last year with Hart? Like, what were the big inflection points for the business last year? Because I just noticed this, you know, having friends that were lawyers, I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. Just like they had, they, they, they were kind of like one-shotted by Harvey at some point during the year, which is like, that is what you're, if you're building an AI company, you want to build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like, whoa, okay, I really believe now.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  And you also want to start building it when it's a little rough around the edges and then let the models get better and then, and then that moment hits and you're ready.

• 2:41:44Speaker 10

  There's, yeah, there's, you basically like, there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better, and then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better, right? So I think of this as honestly like, there's three type of employees or like folks that you work with, like colleagues. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context and every single piece of information to do the job and then they can do it. The second is you say, hey man, the same way that we did XYZ last week, could you do it again? And then they do it. And then the third is, folks just do it without even any of the context. And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is, how do you make sure that for a specific task, all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform?

• 2:42:27Speaker 10

  And then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output, right? And it's actually like a very hard problem at scale, because if you think of what you're doing, you're kind of building like a... Like a legal brain or like a partner brain. This is what they do. They get a task from, you know, one of you guys and they break that task down into all these like 10 subtasks and then they, you know, give that to other associates, et cetera. It's a really hard thing to build.

• 2:42:50John Coogan?

  Uh, ChatGPT launched ChatGPT Health yesterday. How, how do you think the consumer, prosumer, legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to LLMs, consumer LLMs today.

• 2:43:06Jordi Hays?

  They're definitely going.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  And just ask, hey, write this, write this thing.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that an area that like you guys?

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't have any?

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  In-house counsel?

• 2:43:14Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Product or something?

• 2:43:16Speaker 10

  So in-house counsel, we definitely do. So we serve a lot of Fortune 500s. Um, and that's, that's actually, that's growing. I think last quarter.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for all of Fortune 500.

• 2:43:27Speaker 10

  Thanks. Give it up for them. Yeah.

• 2:43:30Speaker 10

  I think last quarter it was like 41% or something like that was actually corporates. Um, so that's, that's, there we go. Yeah. Give me one more though. That and the cloud. If you, could you combine the cloud with that? That'd be great.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  And the sad thing.

• 2:43:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, to be honest, I thought you said 41% of the, I, I thought you were saying 41% of Fortune 500, but that'll be soon. I'm sure.

• 2:43:52Speaker 10

  Here, here, I'll come back on when that happens hopefully soon and we can do like a blimp cloud and that sound. I'll combine it with some like Thor lightning strikes. Um, uh, so we are interested in this and like helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is actually if you're a citizen of Singapore, um, and you were filing a claim below 20,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim. And then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. And one of the, yeah, and one of the things that we're.

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Like Spider-Man meme.

• 2:44:24Speaker 10

  Well, so what we're actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages, both parties can decide, they have to both consent to this, but they say, hey, I'm going to submit these facts and Harvey is going to help me draft it. Right? Cause it's hard for the consumer to like know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the, the complaint and things like that. But both of us will agree that we're going to submit this into Harvey, and then the outcome is going to be binding. And that's like eventually would be actually incredible because a huge problem in Singapore is, and it's an even bigger problem in the United States, is just access to justice in general, right? Where people actually can't get any of their claims met.

• 2:45:06Speaker 10

  One, because the average price of a lawyer is $353 an hour in the US, which is astronomically too high, right? And then the second reason is the courts are just like absolutely overburdened, right? And so any of those systems that you can do to help that really moves this along. And so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. And I think eventually we'll look into this, but it's not on our roadmap right now.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  What are your big predictions for 2026, just in terms of AI progress? Are you building the business that expects another jump in capabilities? It feels like a lot of people were talking about Claude Code being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that, or is it sort of just business as usual?

• 2:46:01Speaker 10

  No, I mean, you have to build everything, assuming that it's going to get better. And what you do is you actually just try to create a culture of trying to build really complex things. And we have a lot of, how we do this is we have a lot of like design partners. And so work with like private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build like a really extreme use case. A lot of the times it fails, and that's actually okay. Because it fails and then we realize, oh, if the models improve XYZ, then it would actually probably work. And then we bucket that and we wait and then we try it with a new model. And eventually that stuff starts to work, right? So a lot of it is like, how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks?

• 2:46:44Speaker 10

  Get the feedback of what needs to improve to actually complete that? And then you have that set and ready to go as a use case.

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much, how much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? Any, anybody that has had any, you know, experienced a lawsuit will understand that like, you know, something that, that really should be a decision that hypothetically, if you got a few, the right people in a room and everybody was like mature, you could just kind of like figure it out and, and obviously people try to do that with settlements. But then you end up getting like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out. Hypothetically, if, you know, two different parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can, you can basically theoretically kind of like decide something almost instantaneously. Then in theory, you could then appeal it and Harvey and like basically run, run it again and then appeal it again.

• 2:47:35Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:47:35Jordi Hays?

  And so it just feels like there's going to be, uh, you're kind of like fighting hundreds of years of like precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways, like even if we have the technology, maybe lawsuits are still these, uh, and any type of like legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases.

• 2:47:54Speaker 10

  Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to like facilitate this. Like I guess maybe a better way to think about this is like, there's three categories. One is like the process and the system, right? And hopefully you move that along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks and then it has to change. The second is like all of the context that's relevant. So can you like collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just like the underlying technology, right? Like you need all three of those. I think there's going to be a lag. I think exactly right. Um, but there are a lot of, you know, we just talked about what we, we do in Singapore and there are a lot of kind of forward looking folks that are looking at this.

• 2:48:35Speaker 10

  Um, the other thing I'd say too is like, we see more movement on the transactional side because at that point it really is just up to the principles, right? So both sides of the deal want to do something, you can do it, right? And honestly, like a lot of the best lawyers on earth, they're deal makers. Like that's what they're doing, right? They're actually like, oh, the reviewing of the documents, yeah, that's kind of just like table stakes. It's actually, they give massively really valuable business judgment advice, right? And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually do good advice.

• 2:49:12Jordi Hays?

  The greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company, you know, they sell their company once or they start another company, they sell it again, but that's nothing compared to the. The lawyer that's been through 200, you know, transactions.

• 2:49:26Speaker 10

  Yep. Tons and they're in the room and that's, that's happening more and more. The lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are actually increasingly, right? And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is going to change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services. I also think that's really good for lawyers because the reality is like people will go to law school because they see TV shows like Suits and they want to be like the lawyer on that TV show, right? Or the Lincoln Lawyer or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. I love Matthew McConaughey. And so they, they want to be a lawyer like it is on TV, right? And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, the, your career is going to look closer to that. It's going to look closer to like working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals.

• 2:50:11Speaker 10

  So that's why I'm really excited about it. And we work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is going to look like.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's happening like law school applications are, is that like local, like a local top, tons of people are deciding to go to law school. Some people are concerned by that because people are going to saddle themselves with, with debt or spend a lot of money and, and they, I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How, how have you been processing that or some of these law schools? Like I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe you have relationships with them.

• 2:50:44Speaker 10

  So we, we work with a lot of law schools. And so we announced our like program last year and at this point, I'd have to give you the stats, but I think we're at like 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're, we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you. I would also, one, one thing I want to say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually like a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school. I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer, you can make a change in the world. I, I genuinely believe that and you can. And I think actually what happens is when you're in like tumultuous times, a lot of people say, hey, I actually want to change this, especially, you know, when you're applying to law school, you're younger, right? You're in a younger generation. And I think that's

• 2:51:29Speaker 10

  actually a lot of the reason why, you know, these applications increase over time.

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

• 2:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very cool.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  We could talk for so much longer, but I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year.

• 2:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team on all the progress.

• 2:51:43John Coogan?

  And thank you for hopefully reducing our legal bills. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:51:48Jordi Hays?

  We're shifting around the budget.

• 2:51:49Speaker 10

  All right, thanks, guys. We're shifting around the budget.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon. Our next guest is Yo Tom from Syera with some fantastic news. He is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Ultra Dome. Yo Tom, how are you doing?

• 2:52:03Speaker 11

  How are you guys?

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. Since this is your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:52:11Speaker 11

  Gladly. I'm Yo Tom Segev. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Syera based in New York City. Syera is in the data and AI security business. We make sure that all of the data that goes into these AI systems remains private, remains secure, and we enable enterprises to adopt AI.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  That's amazing. How'd you start the company?

• 2:52:30Speaker 11

  I started the company out of a friendship and a partnership. My co-founder, our CTO, and I go back 16 years at this point. We were standing in the same line to, standing in the same line to enlist when we were 18. And I had the pleasure of working side by side with him in the military service. And I knew that I always want to work with him. So the moment he said, let's start a company, I said, okay, I'll go with you.

• 2:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What did you guys do first?

• 2:53:01Speaker 11

  What do you mean? We did cybersecurity in the IDF, in the Israeli military.

• 2:53:06Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so this is your first, this is your first company?

• 2:53:11Speaker 11

  This is our first and last.

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:53:12Jordi Hays?

  First and last.

• 2:53:13John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Love that. One shot it.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Well, what's the key to getting large enterprises on board as a first time entrepreneur? It seems like that's like, you know, a lot of people vibe code something, get some ground up adoption. It seems like you've gone to the top of the market. What's, what informed that strategy? What's been the key to success?

• 2:53:31Speaker 11

  I think for us, it's been a combination of listening.

• 2:53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:35Speaker 11

  Using our two ears.

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:37Speaker 11

  To really, really, really listen to the customers and understand that they know very well what they need to fix, why things are not working, what hurts, why things failed in the past. Combined with the ability to engineer a super, super high velocity and really solve complex problems in super complex ecosystems. I think that the combination of these two things together has been our secret to success with the larger enterprise.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what scares you the most about how AI is being adopted in the enterprise today? Like, when, when are you talking with a customer and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa?

• 2:54:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good question.

• 2:54:17Speaker 11

  Well, where do I start? I think that there's so much pressure being put on the security risk and compliance teams to get out of the way and let AI be rolled out. I think that the level of security capabilities that's being bundled with the AI from the AI providers themselves is very, very insufficient. And I think that in many, many regards with the gap, the exposure that is being created is quite meaningful. And, and we're going to see the, the results of that in the coming years.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  What's the, uh, what's the key to creating differentiation in the cybersecurity category? It feels like there's a lot of companies that are established, they're not asleep at the wheel, and yet you've grown very quickly, gotten very big. How, how are you positioning and creating, uh, white space?

• 2:55:13Speaker 11

  Yeah. So the first thing that is really unique about cybersecurity is that in most of what we do in our lives, we get measured on how well we do on average.

• 2:55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:22Speaker 11

  In cybersecurity, we get measured on our weakest link.

• 2:55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:25Speaker 11

  Doesn't matter if you're an eight on average, if you still have a two or a three. Something bad is coming your way.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:32Speaker 11

  And because it's, you know, we're not defending a static target, we're defending a very dynamic target. The threat vectors are changing, the IT landscape is changing, the regulatory landscape is changing. There's always going to be exposures, there's always going to be soft spots. I think for us, our focus on data, the ability to understand and differentiate between the 1% of data that really matters to an organization. If that data was leaked, breached, exposed, that will create a bad year for them, not just a bad weekend.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:04Speaker 11

  Right? And the 99% of data that matters, that clutters, which is so much of the data they have. Based on the ability to do that across the enterprise, at the enterprise scale, we've really been able to build our holistic data security and AI security platform that helps the organization achieve so many outcomes.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Uh, give us the latest fundraising news. We gotta hit the gong for you.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Is this like a friends, friends and family round?

• 2:56:32Speaker 11

  Yeah, I, I, I happen to have friends with $400 million.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Good, good friends to have. Uh, yeah, great, uh, vote of confidence.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  Blackstone's in, it's Series F. You're gonna run out of letters soon. So hopefully we'll see you at the New York Stock Exchange soon. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And up next, the moment you've been waiting for, Jock Wolf, the co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital. He'll be joining us in just a second. Uh, we will go back to the timeline in the meantime while we wait for him to join. Did you know that the founders of Home Depot were 49 and 36? And they both, each of them had three children each. When they started the company and they'd both just been fired from their jobs when they started Home Depot.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Where were they fired from? Same, same company?

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  I'll read from this. Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with $2 million raised from 40 friends. They had to put the ultimate friends and family round together, none of whom were wealthy by your standards. The average investment was $50,000. After Bernie, age 49, and Arthur, age 36, had been fired from their previous jobs and with three children each, no health insurance. That's a nightmare. No savings, heavily mortgaged homes. They were effectively broke. The rest is history. From nothing, Home Depot has grown into an empire with an enterprise market capitalization of over $250 billion

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  that employs, that provides employment to more than 400,000 workers, thousands of whom became millionaires investing in the company's stock. While, while the founders have given away in excess of $1 billion in charitable donations and still counting. Wow. What a run for the Home Depot founders.

• 2:58:29Jordi Hays?

  What a run for Josh Wolfe.

• 2:58:30John Coogan?

  The moment you've been waiting for. We have Josh Wolfe in the restream waiting room and here he is in the TVP in Ultra. Josh, how are you doing? Look at this setup.

• 2:58:37Josh Wolfe?

  Look guys, looking good.

• 2:58:39John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. How you doing? Did you have a good break? Are you off to a good new year?

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Seems like it.

• 2:58:44Josh Wolfe?

  It's a great new year. I'm excited.

• 2:58:46John Coogan?

  And what's the news? It seems like you're kicking off 2026 with the bang.

• 2:58:51Josh Wolfe?

  We, we raised a new fund. We, uh, we're excited. Yeah.

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:58:57Josh Wolfe?

  We raised a billion five and, uh, oh, we get the gong.

• 2:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:59:04Josh Wolfe?

  You know, it's crazy. I remember 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago, we raised our first fund and it was 100 million and I struggled to hit it. We got 92.1. I'll tell you, to this day, I remember literally every single person that said yes or no.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Every single person.

• 2:59:18Josh Wolfe?

  Everybody.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  How many of them are still along for the ride? Do you go back to them?

• 2:59:23Josh Wolfe?

  I think we have 12 people who are OG Lux investors that are like part of our family that I love.

• 2:59:28John Coogan?

  They must be at this point. That's fantastic.

• 2:59:29Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:59:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, there's been, uh, we, we cover.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  Narrative violation. The Wall Street Journal today is saying that you're cooked. They're saying US venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. Uh, how did you get it done? What are the markets like? Uh, is this?

• 2:59:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are, what are the big LPs?

• 2:59:48John Coogan?

  When you see a headline like this, 35% down, and yet you're doing well, what's the secret to success?

• 2:59:54Josh Wolfe?

  I think, I think it's right. I think the headline is right. Um, you know, we all spoke, I want to say back at, um.

• 3:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Hill and Valley.

• 3:00:01John Coogan?

  Hill and Valley, yeah.

• 3:00:02Josh Wolfe?

  And we were talking about the minnows and the megas, and I had made this thing that maybe it was like a sort of prediction, but in anticipation that basically you were going to have this bifurcation where you had to have a long tail of the small funds that were getting basically disappear. And I know you guys hit on that earlier, but I was with one of my large LPs and I was like, I think you're going to see 30 to 50% extinction rate, sort of involuntary, uh, exit. And this LP laughed.

• 3:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's that idea of like, a lot of people are on their last fund. They just don't know it yet.

• 3:00:26Josh Wolfe?

  People have never been through a cycle. They have inadequate reserves. They haven't invested in succession planning. They're in the wrong sectors. They are in sectors that have too much capital. They don't have enough. And they were basically in a market where everything was going up and to the right, and they looked really smart and they're not idiots, but, um, you know, usually in up markets, people look smarter than they are. In down markets, they look dumber than they are. And in this particular case, uh, the prophecy was like 30 to 50% would end up disappearing and going extinct. And this LP laughed at me and he was like, Josh, it's going to be 90%. So he was even more aggressive and I, and I think that's going to happen. Um, some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed and you're seeing that. Um, GC bought, you know, a group out of Europe and you'll see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms.

• 3:01:05Josh Wolfe?

  Those are the minnows. At the other end, you got the megas and the megas, you know, there's probably five or six firms that are basically like eight to 100 billion AUM today and growing. And I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs. Probably from Andreessen, GC, GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi-asset platforms and they're amazing investors, they're great people, but it's just changing the game. So you've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers, a few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered and grew. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think, to go public. So it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms, you know, in the middle that are like between $1 and $3 billion that can do like early 100K checks and late 150 to 200 million dollar checks. And I think for the next few years, that's going to be the place to be.

• 3:01:49Jordi Hays?

  More positively, how excited are you for this moment to have this amount of capital to deploy? I've read your letters as long as I've been in the industry and it feels like Lux as a fund, it was really built for this moment. Everything from, you know, hardware to bio to AI, all these things that you've been writing about forever feel like they're having, you know, such a moment.

• 3:02:15Josh Wolfe?

  It is. And I got to be honest, as much as the team is out on the edge scouting it, it's really about the founders that we back. So you look at, you know, Brian and Palmer and Trey and Matt at Anduril, like they have just absolutely crushed it. You know, this was at a time when nobody wanted to fund Defense seven years ago. Being able to be founding investors in Anduril, seeing the success that they're having, the success that I anticipate from here is just incredible. You look at Casser and Applied Intuition, I got to say amongst 350, 400 companies that we've funded over the past 20 years, it is one of our only cash flow positive businesses and they're just also crushing it.

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Casser.

• 3:02:47Josh Wolfe?

  They will get a gong, you know.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, many times, many times.

• 3:02:50Josh Wolfe?

  You know, cognition and hugging face and we've got an amazing team. I mean, you know, Brandon Reeves and Grace Isford and Peter Abair and Shaheen Farshy and Lanjeng and Dina Shaker, like Shaq Veda, like they're just all out crushing it. And I'm very grateful. I feel like we've got the best team on the field and more importantly, I feel like we've got the best founders. Eric at Modal and the team at Ramp and I just feel extremely fortunate that we get to partner with these guys. And it's like the gift that keeps on giving. So my biggest thing to my team right now is don't screw it up. Don't, you know, we've got a good thing going. Be humble. You are only as good as your last deal and serve our entrepreneurs and make them successful and they will make us successful. And I feel very grateful.

• 3:03:33Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about this year? What are you focused on and most excited about personally from an investing standpoint?

• 3:03:41Josh Wolfe?

  Most important investment that we've made as a firm internally has been our young team that is just like, again, kicking ass now. But in terms of sectors, I'd say generally about a third of what we do is aerospace and defense. So we're doing that globally. You know, we're air, land, sea, space, cyber, and beyond, and now subsea and subterranean, which is wild. That was something that Palmer himself was talking about years ago, and I thought it was crazy. But of course, we've seen that in everything from the southern border to Gaza and Israel. It's a real thing. And so we're now in the US, we're in the UK, we're in Israel, we're in Bulgaria, us and Delian.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, Enduro set, right?

• 3:04:16Josh Wolfe?

  Exactly. We're in Japan. Don't they have some cash flow? I thought Enduro had some cash flow.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's cash flow, but just like remarkable economics.

• 3:04:23Josh Wolfe?

  It is a great founder, great business.

• 3:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:26Josh Wolfe?

  I'd love to do something in India in defense, and I'm very bullish, as you know, you may have heard about this IMEC corridor between India, Mideast, and Saudi and UAE, and Israel and Jordan, Mediterranean, and Europe. And so I just think that whole thing in the aerospace and defense segment, US and allies, is going to be a big deal. You see Trump putting out, you know, a billion, a trillion five on the defense budget, an enormous amount of spend. You had the clip from Palmer earlier today, which was awesome, and the incentive alignment so that the bloated bureaucratic Beltway bandits are starting to realize like, it's not just about hyping your pipeline as a defense company, but actually delivering real material and weapon systems to the warfighters. So that's pretty critical. So that's one sector. Biotech, you know, has been in the doldrums for the past, I

• 3:05:09Josh Wolfe?

  don't know, two years. XBI is up 50% in the past six months, and I think you're going to see an enormous resurgence in cutting-edge biotech, particularly at the intersection between AI. You know, we were founding investors in this company evolutionary scale that we took out of Meta, and then CZI ironically ended up buying them just a few weeks ago. So I think you're going to see more and more of that. And then everything in embodied intelligence, you know, the next wave of AI and compute infrastructure is not just going to be two-dimensional AI, it's going to be 3D. So some of that is bio, some of that is robotics, some of that is automation industrial. But I think that you're going to see some huge deals, some really big dollar deals. Around this idea of embodied intelligence, where physical intelligence and Lockheed Groom and the team are just incredible, but you'll probably see two or three other things

• 3:05:54Josh Wolfe?

  that are adjacent areas, not specifically robotics, of how do you take some of the great inspirations of our low-powered brains and embody that so that we're not having hundreds of thousands of GPUs and Nvidia clusters, but instead doing both edge inference and really interesting biological-inspired ways of having AI into the 3D world, which is gonna be wild. So, excited about all that.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start, to become a venture capitalist. We are seeing this K-shaped dynamic, a lot of small funds watching down.

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, not necessarily a bad time to be, maybe not the best time to start your own fund.

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  But I want, but I want some advice for someone who is, who can't be talked down from it, maybe the person who's going out.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Join a great fund.

• 3:06:37John Coogan?

  Join a great fund? Is that your advice? Or what if someone says, "I wanna start a fund"?

• 3:06:43Josh Wolfe?

  When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the dot-com boom-bust. And I was like, "Let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing." They're gonna be brilliant people. I mean, I gotta be honest, like, you know, whether personally, some of the partners or the firm in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are gonna be launching funds, and they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell, you know, you have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they're out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs, and I would never count those people out. Now, they're gonna need capital over time, and there'll be people that we partner with, but over time, they will go from a small fund to a big mega-fund. So, I'm actually, I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund. It is one of the great entrepreneurial things to do.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Totally. But yeah, if you go back to 2021, where the numbers that we're referencing and that the journal's referencing, it's like, if you knew founders, people would be like, "Well, here's 20 mil." You know, and it's like, "I don't think we need that many more funds like that." It's like, you want the, you want the life's work. Uh, allocator who has a differentiated view.

• 3:07:42John Coogan?

  Code for your firm.

• 3:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Network, etc.

• 3:07:44Josh Wolfe?

  Look, if, if somebody was saying in 2023, four, five, that you're going to start a media business that is going to become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to a younger generation and be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like, what? But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche. You've got a vibe. You're, you're just, it's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do that venture? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture, as long as they're thinking about, how do I do this in a really distinguished, differentiated way? And I can be so good that they can't ignore me.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, uh, what are your LPs thinking about the IPO window this year, next year? It feels like there might be trillions of liquidity coming to the tech industry. Is that going to have an effect on the, at the early stage, the next scale, the next stage of scale ups? Uh, will that affect VC dynamics? Or is that kind of just a, you know, a foregone conclusion at this point?

• 3:08:39Josh Wolfe?

  No, I think that you're going to have a big set of IPOs. I mean, everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue, but probably six to 10 companies, I think this year have such high demand. They've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think, when you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir and Alex and the team are amazing. But to me, it is less about Palantir and more about huge amount of pent up demand for next generation defense tech. I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Anduril, no idea on the timing, size, all that kind of stuff, but the demand is going to be really high, you know? And you see it in the private markets now, just as a proxy, we used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies, even sort of at last round

• 3:09:23Josh Wolfe?

  price or maybe at a discount to NAV, you know, to the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly the ones that could be or will be going public are at premiums. And so I think the demand is really high. It will usher in a next generation of companies and it will happen in AI, compute. You'll see it in some of the big foundation labs. You'll see it in biotech. I think you're going to see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs. And it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation. And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense. This arc from Google having its employees protest. You know, working on Project Maven, to seeing the rise of Anduril, to seeing Trump's, you know, lashing the existing bureaucratic primes.

• 3:10:05Josh Wolfe?

  And then you see mega IPOs and these next-gen companies that didn't exist 10 years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes. I think it is going to be a bellwether for the industry. And it is great to be American. It is great to have American capital markets. Capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well-treated, and it is here. So, super bullish.

• 3:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Well said. What does an object need to... what qualifies an object to get on your shelf here?

• 3:10:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:10:33Josh Wolfe?

  You've got to be part totem of my nostalgic childhood, you know? I've got, I don't know, you know, this is the Cyclone, which is the scariest rollercoaster in...

• 3:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:10:45Josh Wolfe?

  That's where I grew up, in Coney Island, Brooklyn. I will never forget my scrappy roots.

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  It's a wooden rollercoaster, right?

• 3:10:50Josh Wolfe?

  It is a wooden rollercoaster. I'll tell you, it is the scariest rollercoaster in the world, not by virtue of speed or descent, but it is so old, your ride may be the last. And the thrill of that is like, you know, mind-blowing. I've got my first Game Boy, you know, if you had Palmer, that's still, you know, rocking the new mod Retro. I've got my first Nintendo Donkey Kong.

• 3:11:13John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:11:14Josh Wolfe?

  You know, it's like when I was... So, this is my childhood, you know? And it's the things that inspired me.

• 3:11:20Jordi Hays?

  We're all just big kids.

• 3:11:21Josh Wolfe?

  From science fiction to science fact, it's what... it's all the little totems that have made me.

• 3:11:27John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 3:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you for giving us the update. I'm sure you'll be back on many more times this year. It's going to be a massive year, and I look forward to it.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:35Josh Wolfe?

  Guys, congrats on what you've built.

• 3:11:36John Coogan?

  Thank you for being a part of it.

• 3:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to your whole team.

• 3:11:38John Coogan?

  Multiple times last year, we got to hang out, and it was really, really fun. So, thank you so much.

• 3:11:43Jordi Hays?

  I'll have to look forward to it.

• 3:11:44Josh Wolfe?

  Peace.

• 3:11:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. The last thing I want to talk about is this new Fujifilm camera. It has a very interesting feature that allows you to take photos from any period in time. So instead of baking in filters or lenses or anything that you could change, you can, you hold it like an old Fujifilm camera, but there is a dial on the side that will let you select a decade. So you can say, I want the photo, I want this particular photo, the next photo that I take, I want it to look like it was taken in the 1930s. I want it to look like it was taken in the 1970s.

• 3:12:28John Coogan?

  I want it to look like it was taken in 2010. And it will emulate that directly on the device, bake that into the file that it gives you.

• 3:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Is it film only, or does it actually give you a digital?

• 3:12:40John Coogan?

  I believe it's digital. Let's read from this. It says, "At the Fujifilm New Product Experience Event, I tried out the Generation Chekki InstaMax Mini Evoque Cinema that can shoot, oh, it can also shoot videos. A design that evokes 8mm film cameras. It comes equipped with a dial called the Jedi Dial that lets you enjoy effects inspired by the 1930s and 1920s. Of course, it offers the fun of Chekki, and it's a model that also lets you enjoy that analog-like operation feel." So I believe it's a video camera that will spit out an MP4 on a memory card that you can upload to whatever you want. Maybe we should get one around the studio.

• 3:13:23John Coogan?

  We should get one that's connected over HDMI into the stream and we can use that like we've used the VHS camera in the past that you may have seen here on TBPN. Anyway, anything else we should cover today?

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Trump just ordered the US government to buy 200 billion in mortgage bonds to drive mortgage rates down. Says he's bringing back the American dream.

• 3:13:45John Coogan?

  Hmm, more debt for the American taxpayer.

• 3:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 3:13:50Jordi Hays?

  More debt for the, for America to, to bring down the rates for Americans.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  That could be good, I guess.

• 3:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Could work.

• 3:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:59Jordi Hays?

  We will see.

• 3:13:59John Coogan?

  Uh, there's also a new Hyundai Waymo, uh, and

• 3:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, yeah, this is

• 3:14:04John Coogan?

  Uh, CES, it's estimated to cost $42,000, which if true is like a 10x decrease in the price of the Waymos. Um, a political reality being a little bit spicy here says this is the end of the cyber cab before it's even born. The, and the ability to adapt the Waymo sensor tech to almost any vehicle means Waymo can pick and choose vehicles based on grade, market fit and other variables. So you could be in a rougher environment with a lot of potholes. You, you, you, you build a Waymo out of a G-Wagon, I suppose.

• 3:14:33Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  If you're, if you're on, uh, clean streets, you go with some

• 3:14:38Jordi Hays?

  And what's up with this, uh, Will I Am has a

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, this is

• 3:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Car, it's a three-wheel

• 3:14:44John Coogan?

  Also, we just, uh, really quickly, I need to clarify this because we have to issue a correction. Uh, this is completely fake news because there's a, uh, apparently there's a, uh, a community note on this that says, this is actually a different company's Hyundai Ioniq 5 self-taxi, so RoboTaxi, it's not Waymos. So, uh, we will see where this all

• 3:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Completely fake news.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway.

• 3:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but apparently Will I Am has a new micro mobility EV. It's three wheels. This thing looks absolutely insane. Greg, Greg Brockman was, was, uh, fired up on it. Looks straight out of Tron.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:15:16Jordi Hays?

  I, I like the look and, uh, we should get Will I Am on the show to talk about Trinity.

• 3:15:20John Coogan?

  That would be great.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's gonna be, they're selling this on Kickstarter?

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  That's wild. I wonder, yeah, it, it's sort of a motorcycle that doesn't require as much balance. I wonder where this would be the most popular. It certainly looks cool. It seems like a fun thing to go for a drive-in. I wonder if it's more experiential or supposed to be something that, uh, you would actually commute in. Uh, driving through Los Angeles and that feels a little treacherous to me. I don't know that I would actually choose to do that, but, uh, maybe, maybe it was a replacement for the golf cart.

• 3:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Very, yeah, very curious on price point as well on where this will land, but, uh, we'll work on getting Will I Am on the show to talk about it.

• 3:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're fun.

• 3:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you for tuning in today. Super fun show. So many great guests. Uh, billions, billions of dollars in, uh, fundraises. And, uh, I can't wait for tomorrow.

• 3:16:11John Coogan?

  I can't wait for tomorrow either. Uh, and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to TBPN's newsletter at tbpn.com. We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:16:21Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks.

• 3:16:22John Coogan?

  Good night.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Have a great afternoon.